| Summary/Abstract |
In January 1923, a treaty between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey authorized by the League of Nations empowered the two states to denaturalize and expel over one and a half million residents of their nations in what became known as the Greco-Turkish population exchange. Hundreds of thousands of Greek and Turkish residents deemed ethnic minorities—Greeks in Turkey and Turks in Greece—were stripped of their citizenship and forced out of their homes on the promise that citizenship, along with housing and welfare, would await them in their new home country. While the Greek and Turkish governments oversaw the eviction and expulsion of their counterparts’ newly made citizens, the actual movement of these refugees took place largely under the official protection of the U.S. Navy, with the transportation out of Turkey under the auspices of an American humanitarian organization, Near East Relief (NER). NER’s role in the exchange represented a radical break from years of work in the region focused on nurturing a generation of American educated Christian minorities to “reconstruct” the Middle East.
|