The Greek Minority’s Fate in the Former Ottoman Empire as a Human Rights Crisis

The genocide in Pontos and in other parts of Anatolia, as well as in Thrace, is not merely as part of history but a window into a contemporary human rights crisis. The destruction continues in a somewhat less violent form in our time as the culture, language, and religious rites of the Ottoman Greeks are being lost due to massacres, forcible exile, and expropriations of sacred sites. This chapter introduces relevant human rights norms and argues that measures implemented by the international community after other genocides could be a model for restitution and guarantees of non-recurrence in Pontos and other parts of Turkey. It is a chapter preprint from The Genocide of the Christian Populations in the Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath (1908-1923) (Taner Akçam, Theodosios Kyriakides, and Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis eds., Routledge 2024)