The 100th anniversary of the Lausanne Treaties of 1923 and the subsequent founding of the Republic of Turkey, as well as current events in the Middle East, provide an opportunity to reflect on fundamental principles. Does the ethnic, religious and cultural unity of a state really offer security and stability? What are the consequences of segregation, i.e. the so-called segregation of previously multi-ethnic societies? What methods have been and are being used? As we must realise, this is not a purely historical issue. What was illegal under international law back then is still illegal today. This lecture provides an overview of the most serious violations of international, minority and human rights law in the wake of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.
After the Kemalist army captured the cities of Smyrna and Constantinople in autumn 1922, the Mudanya ceasefire agreement was signed on 11 October 1922, followed by the start of the Lausanne Peace Conference.
With the bilateral convention on population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which included an asymmetrical and forced population “exchange” of religious minorities, Turkey realised a plan it had already made ten years earlier, but which it had not yet been able to conclude with Greece. The two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 form the background, which the German military historian and expert on expulsions, Michael Schwartz, sees as the birth of a broad-based “ethnic” war with massive flight and expulsion processes. Such large-scale expulsions were previously unknown in Europe. According to Schwartz, the expulsion of unwanted ethnic groups served as a pre-planned main objective in the Balkan wars1.
After the Turkish-Greek war of 1919-1922, the idea of population “exchange” gained currency on a large scale. The idea of moving huge numbers of people across the Aegean with the approval of the world community was supported almost equally by the exiled former Greek head of government and chief negotiator in Lausanne, Eleftherios Venizelos, as well as by Mustafa Kemal and his military commander Ismet Inönü, by the British Foreign Secretary George Curzon and by the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen. Nansen was the originator of the principle that refugee aid is an obligation for the entire international community2. As High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, Nansen actively mediated between Venizelos and the Kemalist leadership and obtained Mustafa Kemal’s consent to negotiations on an exchange agreement on 22 October 1922. Kemal made it clear that there would be no room for Greeks or non-Muslim minorities in the future Turkish nation state.
This was also confirmed by reports published in the Greek newspaper Dimokratia (Istanbul) on 10 May 1924. They describe the persecution in the district of Akdağmadeni in the former Ottoman province of Ankara:
“Hunger continues to decimate the remaining unfortunate Greeks. After the recent looting of Christian property, the Greeks have nothing left to sell. Women and girls are being dishonoured on the streets. Recently, four Greeks were murdered in Kara Pir and three more in Karaja Viran. Michalis Eftichidis, out of charity, took in two hundred starving orphans and offered them shelter; he also employed two teachers to look after them. But two months later, the Turkish government closed his orphanage and left the orphans to their fate. Several of those affected then turned to the Greek government. (Department of the League of Nations, 15 November). A reply to this request was received on the above-mentioned date, stating that the Hellenic chargé d’affaires in Ankara had taken appropriate measures. However, there has been no improvement, nor is any improvement possible. Only the immediate realisation of the exchange will save these tragic remnants of Anatolian Hellenism from the rabid cannibals of Kemal.” This was the conclusion in “Dimokratia”.
With their bilateral agreement of January 1923, Turkey and Greece decided on the mutual forced expulsion and revocation of citizenship for their ethnic-religious minorities, which was already illegal under international law at the time. The agreed mutual exchange of religious minorities affected 1.6 to two million people. Of these, at least 1.2 million were Greek Orthodox Christians of Ottoman nationality and 400,000 Muslims from Greece, excluding the Muslims in Western Thrace (around 105,000-120,000) and the Muslim Chamen Albanians, as well as the approximately 110,000 Greeks of Constantinople and Istanbul at the time and the Greek Orthodox population of the Aegean islands of Imbros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Most of the Greeks left Tenedos, but returned after a few years. In the 1950s, the majority of the Greek population was expelled again. In 1992 the status of Imbros as a military zone was cancelled and in 1993 the special visa for the island was abolished. On Tenedos, however, the situation eased after the Council of Europe issued its Resolution 1625 in 2008, which set out measures to improve and also to make amends for the damage caused to the island’s Greek heritage. Many emigrated islanders renovated their properties and spent at least their summers on Tenedos. In 2012, the first Greek school since 1965 was opened in Zeytinliköy / Áyii Theódori.
From Smyrna to Lausanne and beyond: “segregation”
The provisions of the Lausanne Treaties are based on the principle of “segregation”; ethnic-religious segregation was considered a prerequisite for domestic political stability at the time.
After the destruction and pillaging of the Christian neighbourhoods of the Ionian capital and port city of Smyrna by Kemalist units in mid-September 1922, no one on the international stage was prepared to fight for the right to exist of the remaining Greek Orthodox or other Christians in Asia Minor. Just two months after the “Holocaust of Smyrna3“, the Turkish National Assembly in Ankara passed a resolution on 1 November 1922 to expel the entire remaining Christian population from Asia Minor, which the US aid organisation Near East Relief estimated at around half a million people at the time4. At the end of 1922, Fridtjof Nansen came to the conclusion that the remaining Greeks of Asia Minor were doomed if they were not evacuated or if the population of the Ottoman Empire was not “unmixed”.
However, even among those Ottoman Christians who had already escaped to Greece or other countries during and after the First World War, the mortality rate was high, as the various hardships to which the refugees or the Ottoman Greeks who had been “exchanged” from 1923 onwards were exposed were enormous. Nansen himself had to admit this. In his statement to the Council of the League of Nations, he informed this body that from September 1922 to July 1923 alone, “up to 70,000 [refugees] died of disease and weakness due to malnutrition. “5 In the last months of 1923, the mortality rate among the refugee population was 45 per cent; 70 per cent of deaths were due to malaria, 25 per cent to typhoid, paratyphoid and dysentery and five per cent to other diseases6.
The Lausanne Peace Conference ended after two rounds of negotiations – from 20.11.1922 to 4.2.1923 and from 23.4. to 24.07.1923. Thanks to the lifting of the Ottoman capitulations, the outcome was extremely favourable for Turkey. These trade capitulations had given European trade in the Ottoman Empire considerable advantages over local merchants, particularly with regard to customs duties.
The Armenian state, including Ottoman territories, which was still envisaged in the Sèvr Peace Treaty (1920) – which was not ratified by Turkey – could now also be rejected. Although the Subcommittee for National Affairs of the Lausanne Conference had dealt with the Armenian demand for a homeland for the surviving Armenians from 12 to 14 December 1922, and on 6 January 1923, the Allies had agreed to the Armenian demand. On 6 January 1923, the Allied delegates had voted in favour of an extremely modest “Armenian homeland” (Foyer arménien) under Turkish sovereignty, but the self-confident Turkish delegation leadership under Ismet Inönü and the ultra-nationalist historian Rıza Nur also took this compromise as an opportunity to interrupt the session and leave in protest7. At the meeting on 7 July 1923, there was finally no longer any talk of the right to self-determination or to a homeland, but only of “Armenian refugees”. The solution to this problem was entrusted to the League of Nations.
In the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), Greece was also granted the majority of Eastern Thrace, with the exception of Constantinople and the demilitarised straits of the Bosporus. The Treaty of Lausanne revoked this arrangement in favour of Turkey, which once again came into possession of all of Thrace east of the Maritsa.
On 13 August 1923, Mustafa Kemal gave a long speech to the Grand National Assembly in which he stated with relief and joy: “At last we have uprooted the Greeks from Pontos. “8 In Istanbul, however, the Kemalists only succeeded in uprooting the Greeks after several attempts.
In 1946, the social democratic Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party; CHP), founded by Mustafa Kemal, issued its “Minority Report” (Azinliklar Raporu), in which the CHP formulated the following goals for the Greeks remaining in Turkey:
“The number of Greeks in Anatolia is insignificant. There will be no threat [from them] anywhere in the future. Therefore, our attention must be focussed on the Greeks [Rumlar] in Istanbul. Because of their proximity to Greece and because of their high percentage of the population, effective precautions must be taken seriously. In this case, one can only say that Istanbul must be cleared of all Greeks by the 500th anniversary of its conquest. “9 The CHP was in personal and ideological continuity with the Young Turks (officially: Committee for Unity and Progress, KEF).
The Greek Orthodox Christians who remained in Turkey after 1923 were discriminated against in the following decades with various measures and forced to emigrate, often in connection with the Cyprus crises. Whenever diplomatic developments on the “Cyprus front” were perceived as unfavourable for Turkish interests or as a threat to the Turkish Cypriot community, the Greek Orthodox (Rum Orthodox) community in the Republic of Turkey became the target of reprisals.
In 1932, a Turkish parliamentary decree excluded Greek citizens from thirty commercial and other professions. Most of the property of Greeks already expelled from Turkey was confiscated by the Turkish government by classifying it as allegedly “abandoned” or “deserted” or after the owners had been categorised as “refugees” by court order.
The “Istanbul Kristallnacht” from 6 to 7 September 1955 (Greek “Septembriana”), which was mainly directed against the Greek Orthodox community, was the main factor driving the emigration of Christians. While 110,000 Greeks still lived in Turkey in 1923, there were only 2,500 left in 1992, according to an estimate by Human Rights Watch.
Forced resettlements and expulsions began in 1925 in the Sassun region on the southern edge of the Armenian Highlands under the term “Ikinci Ferman”, the second deportation order. They affected not only Kurds and Arabs, but also the remnants of the Armenian population who had survived the Young Turk genocide in the First World War. After 1925, entire Armenian villages were destroyed in Sassun and the entire population was forcibly resettled to western Anatolia in the course of the suppression of a Kurdish uprising (1925-1937). The authorities’ threat to send them to the Kütahya concentration camp prompted hundreds of Christian Sassun Armenians to change their faith.
But it was not only Sassun that was affected by renewed deportations. In a dispatch from Aleppo dated 14 November 1929, the British consul A. Monck-Mason reported that Armenian refugees had been arriving continuously from the regions of Kharput, Diyarbekir and Mardin over the previous six months. In his opinion, “it seems to be the declared policy of the Turkish government to get rid of all Christian elements in the distant Anatolian provinces by any means short of absolute massacres (…)”. Aleppo, he continues, was the place of refuge for the caravans of Armenians arriving daily. Entire families were sick, and almost all of them were completely destitute. The consul quoted an Armenian from Harput, today’s Elazığ, as saying: “In Turkey today, we have no livelihood; we are persecuted, robbed, abused, thrown into prison, sentenced and, if we are lucky, deported.” Bombs were thrown into churches and seven drunken soldiers murdered the Armenian bishop of Diyarbekir. It is estimated that 30,000 Armenians were expelled from the areas of Harput, Diyarbakır and Mardin during the deportations of 1929-30.
As these examples show, deportations and expulsions became a common instrument of nationality and minority policy in the young Republic of Turkey. The 1934 Deportation Law was intended as an assimilation tool to “spread Turkish culture”, especially in the areas designated by the Ministry of the Interior for the settlement of non-Turkish or heterodox Muslim deportees who were to be subsequently Turkicised, as was intended for “the areas in the west, especially the Mediterranean and Aegean, the Sea of Marmara and Thrace [Trakya]”10 . Other areas in the east and south-east of Anatolia and in the Armenian Highlands, including “Ağri [near Mount Ararat], Sason [Armenian: Sassun], Tunceli (formerly Dersim), Van, Kars, the south of Diyarbakır, Bitlis, Bingöl and Muş” were to be “depopulated” for “health, economic, cultural, military and security reasons”. No further settlement was to be permitted in these formerly Kurdish or Armenian-Christian areas. The result of the continued massive deportation and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people since the Balkan wars was a truly uprooted population.
Under the influence of Italian fascism and German National Socialism, the Turkish Republic became an openly fascist state in the 1930s, with Kemalism as its Turkish variant. After ten years of planning and preparation, this racist regime carried out a genocide against the Alevi majority population of the central Anatolian region of Dersim in 1937/38. At the time, they were labelled as Kizilbash, or red heads, and persecuted as heretics. This is the religious origin of the Dersim issue. During the so-called modernisation era, the pressure increased as Turkish nationalism grew in the course of the nation-building process. Similar to the Soviet Union, natural and tribal peoples were considered pre-modern or backward, from which Kemalist Turkey derived the justification for their violent “modernisation”.
The non-Muslim and non-Turkish identity as well as the tribal society of Dersim were not acceptable to the Islamists and the chauvinist rulers of Turkey. A third reason for the increasing non-acceptance and persecution was the fact that Dersim was a refuge for Armenians during the First World War, during the Ottoman genocide. Many Armenians managed to flee from Dersim behind the Russian front line. Those who were unable to do so assimilated into the Alevi population. Kemalist Turkey never forgave the Dersimis for this.
Dersim was repeatedly the victim of punitive expeditions. In his report, Turkish General Ömer Halis Bıyıktay admitted that “the Dersimis had suffered at least 40 massacres by 1930.” Shortly after the Turkish military’s punitive expedition of 1937/38 against an alleged Kurdish uprising in Dersim, the Turkish journalist Latif Erenel wrote in his newspaper Tan: “According to what I learnt in Dersim, 108 military operations took place against the Munzur Mountains. But in none of these campaigns was the army able to penetrate far into the country.”
According to Şükrü Kaya, administrator of the concentration camps for Armenian deportees in Syria in 1915 and Minister of the Interior from 1927 to 1938, “eleven punitive military expeditions took place against Dersim between 1876 and 1935.” According to the reports of the First Inspector General Dr İbrahim Tali Öngören, which were written between 1928 and 1933, there was not a single tribe in Dersim that had not been “punished” in the last 20 to 30 years, i.e. between 1895 and 1933.
The very fact that none of the Turkish ceasefire offers or even promises of amnesty or compensation were honoured speaks for the determination for complete annihilation. The elderly tribal leader Pir Sey(it; Seyid) Riza (*1862 in Derê Arí, Lirtik/Ovacık district; †1937), who was quickly denounced as the leader of an alleged “uprising”, was also deceived by such deceptive promises.
At the onset of winter, he arrived in Erzincan with 50 followers, but was promptly arrested and hanged in Elazığ on 16 November 1937 together with eleven others sentenced to death, including his son Resik Hüseyin. Ihsan Sabri Çaglayangi, who had organised the summary trial against Sey Riza and his co-defendants as a young civil servant and later rose to become Turkey’s foreign minister, recorded Sey Riza’s last words in his memoirs before he put the noose around his own neck: “We are the sons of Karbala. We are innocent. It is shameful. It is cruel. It is murder!”
The campaign of the Turkish military ended in the last week of August 1938. The then head of government Celal Bayar confessed in his memoirs that during the bloodiest phase, i.e. between 23 and 31 August 1938, he himself, Mustafa, and the Turkish army were the first to be killed. Between 23 and 31 August 1938, he, Mustafa Kemal and the commander-in-chief, Marshal Fevzi Çakmak, jointly led the military operations in Dersim and that it was Mustafa Kemal, the founding father of the Republic and “father of all Turks”, who gave the order to kill. Audio recordings of a report from 1986 with contemporary witness Ihsan Sabri Çağlayangil prove the use of poison gas by the army. It says verbatim: “They had taken refuge in caves. The army used poison gas. Through the entrance of the cave. They poisoned them like mice. They slaughtered these Dersim Kurds (aged seven to seventy). It became a bloody operation.”
Air strikes played a decisive role in this. They were flown by Mustafa Kemal’s adopted daughter Sabiha Gökçen, the world’s first female fighter pilot. Kemal had adopted Gökçen, who was born in Bursa in 1913, at the age of twelve. When the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink revealed in 2004 that Gökçen was of Armenian descent and an orphan of the genocide, this caused a storm of indignation in Turkey. Regardless of Gökçen’s ethnic origin, the Kemalist genocide in Dersim proved to be a continuation of the genocide of the Young Turks. The same methods were used in both cases.
In 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that, according to official documents, 13,806 people were killed and 11,683 people were forcibly relocated to western Turkey in the years 1937-1938. According to research by Nezahat and Kazim Gündoğan, however, the number of people murdered is two to three times higher than officially stated, and the number of deportees is around 20,000.
The descendants of the Alevi victims in Dersim commemorate the genocide of 1937/38 on 4 May (1938) as the “day the world ended” (Tertelê).
After the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, parts of the up-and-coming elite in neighbouring Turkey showed increasing sympathy for the Nazis. On 12 November 1942, an additional tax was introduced on the basis of Law 4305, which was levied exclusively on non-Muslims. This law affected 4 to 5 thousand out of an estimated 28,000 Armenians, Greeks, Jews and even Dönme (Jews or Christians who converted to Islam), with Armenians paying the highest taxes. Those who could not pay were exiled or sentenced to forced labour in the “Siberia of Turkey”, namely in the quarries of Aşkale near Erzurum. 21 forced labourers died there. According to the Turkish head of government at the time, Şükrü Saracoğlu, the tax was not intended to finance the costs of the war, but to Turkify the economy, as only 8,000 of the 19,000 companies registered in Istanbul belonged to Turkish Muslims. The “property tax” was abolished on 15 March 1944 after the country had collected more than six billion current Turkish pounds.
In times of international crises in Turkey – such as regularly in connection with Cyprus, Greece and, since 1991, the Republic of Armenia – the Armenian minority in Turkey has been and continues to be the target of acts of violence that are tolerated or even caused by the state. In the so-called “Kristallnacht” in Istanbul on 6 September 1955, a mob armed with shovels and axes attacked Greek and Armenian neighbourhoods, looting shops and killing three people. The riots led to the looting of 4,000 Greek, Armenian and Jewish shops, the arson, looting and desecration of 24 Greek and four Armenian churches, the desecration of numerous cemeteries, the destruction of 32 Greek and eight Armenian schools and over 300 injuries. The total damage amounted to between 270 and 360 million dollars. The riots were triggered by the deliberate dissemination of a false report by the Turkish secret police about an alleged attack by Greeks on the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk” in Thessaloniki.
Conclusion
Mustafa Kemal was highly satisfied with the results of the Lausanne Peace Conference and its final document, as these were clearly a gain for him personally and for the Turkish nation state: “This treaty is the document of the failure of a great attack that had been prepared for centuries against the Turkish nation and which was believed to have been completed with the Treaty of Sèvres. This is a political victory that has no equal in the history of the Ottoman Empire. “11 Ismet Inönü, the Turkish chief negotiator in Lausanne, announced: “We have won a victory because we have buried the Kurdistan question and the Armenian question in history – thanks to England and France. “12
However, any human rights-based assessment of the treaty must come to an extremely negative conclusion. The Swiss Turkologist Hans-Lukas Kieser states that the Lausanne Peace Treaty of 24 July 1923 retroactively “(…) the expulsion and liquidation of millions of people in favour of a breakneck ‘national renewal’ pursued by a dominant elite at the expense of minorities. (…) There was no more talk of the return of Armenian refugees and the establishment of justice. The treaty also provided for a Greek-Turkish population transfer, the first of its kind on a large scale, which legalised an ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had already largely taken place. Referring to the talks on Kurdish, Armenian and Greek minorities in his country, Rıza Nur, the secretary general [and deputy head] of the Turkish conference delegation, noted that ‘these foreign elements were a plague and microbes’ and that the Kurds had to be ‘cleansed of the foreign language and race by means of an assimilation programme’. “13
Despite its considerable shortcomings, however, the treaty was regarded by other contemporaries as a positive example of successful ethnic segregation and served as a model for further “segregations” after the Second World War, which were directed against the homeland rights of almost eight million East Germans and one and a half million Poles from Galicia and what is now western Ukraine. The same Winston Churchill, who in 1920 clearly described the “massacre of countless thousands of defenceless Armenians” on their deportations as an administrative holocaust, declared long before the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945 that the East Germans to be resettled should only be given a short period of time “to take what they need and go. This proved its worth years ago in Turkey and will prove its worth again now. “14 As we can see, the organised mass violence and arbitrariness that was subsequently “legalised” by an international treaty and used by the Young Turk regime during the First World War and subsequently by the Kemalist nationalists to carry out ethno-religious “segregation” has set a precedent.
The Lausanne Treaty guarantees the collective and individual rights of non-Muslim minorities in its third section, Articles 37 to 40, which contain detailed regulations on the protection of the respective religion or denomination and the associated liturgical languages, which were, however, systematically violated by all subsequent Turkish governments. For example, the Varlik Vergisi property tax violates Articles 39 and 40 of the Lausanne Treaty.
Another blatant violation or systematic undermining of the minority rights guaranteed by the treaty was the decades-long interference with the activities of religious Christian institutions, namely the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople – which is officially only allowed to call itself the “Rum Orthodox Patriarchate” – and the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul and their respective educational institutions. Instead of enforceable rights, acts of grace were granted in times without conflict. Unfortunately, this statement by an Istanbul Armenian woman from the summer of 2002 is still characteristic: “We are hostages in their hands. Of course, they allow us to pray in our churches. And we are also allowed to pay for our schools. But that’s all. They do what they want with us. “15
None of Turkey’s former Lausanne Treaty partners has ever addressed the violations of the minority protection provisions of the Lausanne Treaty and forced Turkey to comply with the Lausanne Treaty. So far, it is not clear whether Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plans to revise the Lausanne Treaty are also directed against its articles on the protection of minorities. Erdoğan had already called for changes to the bilateral Greek-Turkish agreement in 2017.16 However, regardless of the scope of such plans, any change to an effectively concluded treaty requires certain conditions and procedures. The Lausanne Treaty does not provide for a fixed period of validity.
By Tessa Hofmann
AGA-Series of events | 11.11.2023
https://virtual-genocide-memorial.de/
- Schwartz, Michael: Die Balkankriege 1912/13: Kriege und Vertreibungen in Südosteuropa., Militärgeschichte – Zeitschrift für historische Bildung“. 2008, Ausg. 2, S. 9
- Clark, Bruce: Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. London, 2006, S. 44
- Der Ausdruck wurde von dem neuseeländischen anglikanischen Militärpfarrer Charles Dobson geprägt, der als Augenzeuge in einem Londoner Verfahren über die Brandursachen aussagte. Vgl. auch Dobson, Charles: The Smyrna Holocaust. In: Bierstadt, Edward Hale: The Great Betrayal: Economic Imperialism & the Destruction of Christian Communities in Asia Minor. New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1924 (Reprint: Bloomingdale, Il.: The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago, 2008), S. 224-227
- Expulsion of Christians. – “The Times”, November 3, 1922, S. 13
- League of Nations, Official Journal, 4th Year, No. 8 (August 1923), Annex 534, “Greek Loan for Refugees”, S. za 1014
- League of Nations, Greek Refugee Settlement, Publications of the League of Nations, Geneva, 1926, S. 93
- Kieser, Hans-lukas: Rıza Nur – Arzt, Minister, Rassenhistoriker. „Armenisch-Deutsche Korrespondenz: Vierteljahreszeitschrift der Deutsch-Armenischen Gesellschaft. Jg. 2023, Nr. 199, Heft 2, S. 28
- Aus einem Bericht des französischen Oberst Mougin; hier zitiert nach: Tsirkinidis, Der Völkermord an den Griechen Kleinasiens (1914-1923), In: Hofmann, Tessa (Hg.): Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich 1912-1922. 2. Aufl. Münster: LIT, 2007, S. 173
- Zitiert nach: Bulut, Faik: Kürt Sorununa Çözüm Arayışları / Devlet ve Parti Raporları Yerli ve Yabancı Öneriler 1920-1997 [Suche nach einer Lösung für die Kurdische Frage]. Istanbul: Ozan Yayıncılık, 1998, S. 178; Akar, Ridvan: Bir Resmi Metinden Planli Türklestirme Dönemi [Die geplante Phase der Türkisierung, wie im offiziellen Dokument vorgesehen], “Birikim”, Sayi 110 (1998), S. 68-75
- Zitiert nach: Aslan, Fikret; Bozay, Kemal u.a.: Graue Wölfe heulen wieder: Türkische Faschisten und ihre Vernetzung in der BRD. 2., aktualisierte Aufl. (Münster 2000), S. 38
- Steinbach, Udo: Die Türkei im 20. Jahrhundert. Bergisch-Gladbach 1996, S. 137
- Paech, Norman: 100 Jahre Vertrag von Lausanne – was dann? „ANF News“, 13.11.2021, https://anfdeutsch.com/aktuelles/100-jahre-vertrag-von-lausanne-was-dann-29301
- Rıza Nur: Hayat ve Hatiratim, Bd. 2, Istanbul, 1992, S. 260; zitiert nach: Kieser, Hans-Lukas: Armeniermord: Von der Lästigkeit vertuschter Geschichte. „Traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte“, 2002, 2, S. 131-142; hier: S. 135
- Zitiert nach: Darnstädt, Thomas; Wiegrefe, Klaus: „Eine teuflische Lösung“: Spiegel-Serie über Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten. (III). „Der Spiegel“, Nr. 15, 8.4.02, S. 58
- “Armenian International Magazine”, Paris, August-September 1994, S. 61
- Erdogan stellt Abkommen mit Griechenland infrage. „Welt“, 7.12.2017, https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article171361243/Erdogan-stellt-Abkommen-mit-Griechenland-infrage.html; Gökmen, Murat: 100 Jahre Vertrag von Lausanne – und dann? „dtj-online“, 31.01.2023, https://dtj-online.de/100-jahre-vertrag-von-lausanne-und-dann/