Fridtjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Crisis, 1922–1924 by Harry J. Psomiades (review)

In November, 1922 the so-called Great Powers convened a conference at Lausanne to rewrite the Sèvres peace treaty with Turkey and to resolve issues arising from the recent Greek-Turkish war. As a result of the katastrophi (the military defeat by Turkish forces) of 1922, the future of the remaining Hellenic population of Anatolia had become tenuous at best. The solution adopted at Lausanne was the forcible, rather than voluntary, exchange of ethnic populations between Greece and Turkey, with the intention of resolving issues of minority rights simply by removing the minorities. Such a solution had never previously been attempted. The result was a vast uprooting of long-established populations, who were being shifted to lands they were unfamiliar with. This led to a vast humanitarian problem, not unlike many previous humanitarian crises that had arisen unexpectedly, usually in the course of war. This one, however, was negotiated and consciously implemented by the international community and the two directly involved countries themselves.

To deal with the humanitarian crisis the principals looked to the renowned Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had already established his reputation in this field when overseeing the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of released prisoners of war in the wake of the First World War. Nansen was best known for his polar exploits, but he was also one of the most effective diplomats of the nascent Norwegian kingdom, which had achieved independence only in 1906. He was a figure of international prominence, and his accomplishments had already earned him widespread respect. In international relations he is best remembered today for the invention of the “Nansen passport,” which provided, under League of Nations auspices, a generally accepted travel document for the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in postwar Europe.

In this book by Henry Psomiades there are two key dramatis personae: Nansen and the Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos. Venizelos had been unceremoniously voted from office after the elections of 1920 and had gone into self-imposed exile. But he was well respected by the wartime Allied powers, and Greece now turned to Venizelos to save what he could from the wreckage of defeat. He served as Greece’s chief delegate at the Lausanne negotiations.

The story has many facets, some with enduring significance. Nansen became involved in his role as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Russian Refugees, a major issue in the wake of both the war and the Russian revolution. Many of these refugees had found sanctuary in Allied-occupied Constantinople, where Nansen’s organization had an office. When the Greek refugee crisis became critical with the events at Smyrna in 1922, Nansen used his position at the league, both as a high commissioner and also as one of Norway’s delegates to the league, to raise their plight, and as a result his office was charged with providing assistance. Accordingly, the temporary role of dealing with the Russian refugees became one of dealing with refugees generally, and its heir today is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

This account makes clear that while the decision to adopt the solution of an exchange of populations happened within the context of the immediate humanitarian crisis and the looming peace talks at Lausanne, both Venizelos and Nansen actively promoted and laid the functional groundwork for such an exchange. Both played key roles at Lausanne in arranging the details of the exchange, which would see 180,000 Greeks and 355,000 Muslims exchanged under the auspices of the League of Nations. These figures, of course, do not take account those who had already fled, but rather represent the last phase of this demographic upheaval. In the negotiations, it had been finally agreed that the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace would be exempted from compulsory transfer. Nansen and his organization would play...