Twice a Stranger

Bruce Clark tells the story of the Turkish-Greek population exchange which took place within the framework of the final peace settlement for Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The effect of this was to empty the new Turkish state of Orthodox Christians � save for those few remaining in Istanbul, together with their Patriarch � and Greece of its Muslim communities � except for that in western Thrace. No one else of the �wrong� religion had the right to stay in their respective homeland, whether they wished to or not. About 400,000 mainly Greek-speaking Muslims joined the Turkish republic, while a perhaps lesser number of Orthodox Christians, both Greek and Turkish-speaking, were added to those who had already fled or been deported over the previous decade, bringing the total to 1.2 million.

This transfer was seen by European statesmen like Lord Curzon as ending the problem of minorities in the former Ottoman Empire, the Arabs having founded their first nation-state and the Jews a homeland in Palestine. Of the remainder, the largest minority, the Armenians, had been slaughtered or driven out en masse, while the Kurds remained unrecognized as such. This left only the question of what to do with the Greeks.

This is a book for the general reader who wishes to understand not only the background to the deportations of 1923-1924, but what it reveals of the strategic relationship between Greece and Turkey, which depends above all on clarity of intention. Parcelling out Muslims and Christians and making them want to become Turks and Greeks was one way of achieving this (leaving aside the extremes of mental and physical suffering which it caused), and Lausanne has admittedly worked well in terms of avoiding the kind of territorial disputes which lead to wars. (Had Cyprus, annexed by Britain in 1914, been covered by the terms of Lausanne as a former Ottoman possession, there might have been no need to divide the island in 1974.) It is, of course, likely that the Greek-Turkish expulsions would have happened anyway and indeed were already happening by the time of Lausanne � at least on the Turkish side, following victory over the Greeks in 1922. The Treaty itself legalized an existing practice and no doubt saved many lives as a result. At the same time it established the premise that Christians and Muslims could not co-exist and were safer living in a monocultural and monoconfessional state.

Much of Bruce Clark�s book demonstrates the falsity of this �atavistic� premise still exploited by politicians in the Balkans and some areas of the Middle East. Of particular value are his illustrations � some based on personal interviews with former refugees � of the spectrum of relations between Turks and Greeks (on which point do you identify yourself, or shift from one point to the other?) and that subtle symbiosis which transcends both national religion and secular ideology. He explains its various manifestations, from the ties that still exist between the Muslims of Crete and the Christian refugees from Anatolia who eventually replaced them, to the ritual recognition of the former Christian community in Cappadocia and the challenge to Lausanne from the Black Sea Greeks over the right of their Black Sea (Pontic-speaking) Muslim cousins to emigrate � a calculated affront to nationalists on both sides.

Will the pressure of events associated with EU membership and its preconditions have a reverse effect on Lausanne? The book points to the increasing number of north Europeans who make second homes in Greece and the ethnically diverse labour force which builds them. If Turkey is also to become an EU member, it will have to recognize the right of other Europeans including Greeks to live and work there. As the author says, it will no longer be possible for the Turkish state to impose a single narrowly-defined model of Turkishness on all its citizens, any more than it has been possible for Greece to remain exclusively the home of the Greek Orthodox. Lausanne is now an anachronism for both sides as they adapt to the geopolitical realities of the globalized world. Having emerged from a multinational, theocratic empire into a unitary nation-state, Turkey may yet become a multinational democracy and a new model of co-existence between communities and faiths.