Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

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The Ottoman Legacy of the Connected Histories

of Demographic Engineering: The Case of the
Ottoman Greeks of Western Anatolia

Emre Erol

To cite this article: Emre Erol (30 Jan 2024): The Ottoman Legacy of the Connected Histories
of Demographic Engineering: The Case of the Ottoman Greeks of Western Anatolia, Journal of
Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2024.2310913

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JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2024.2310913

The Ottoman Legacy of the Connected Histories of

Demographic Engineering: The Case of the Ottoman Greeks
of Western Anatolia
Emre Erol
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Tuzla, Turkey

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Is there any relationship between the seemingly separate histories Demographic Engineering;
of demographic engineering that affected millions of Ottoman Nationalisms; nation-state
peoples of Albanian, Arab, Bulgarian, Circassian, Georgian, Greek, building; Ottoman Empire;
Republic of Turkey; the Great
Jewish or Kurdish origin and the Muslim refugees from the Balkans
War
and Russian territories during the late-Ottoman period? Does this
historical legacy play a role in the nation-state building processes of
the Republic of Turkey and other post-Ottoman nation-states?
What may sound like simple and rhetorical questions, taken at
their face value, provide a scholarly framework for a more con­
nected and holistic history of demographic engineering. Focusing
on the personal micro-histories of the victims and perpetrators of
demographic engineering clearly demonstrates how such histories
are entangled with each other, and their role in the creation of the
post-Ottoman world. The article argues that, unique as it may seem,
a segment in the life of a Unionist-appointed and Muslim nationalist
Ottoman civil servant; Ferid Bey, who was both a victim and
a culprit of ethnic violence, points out to a pattern that connects
histories of demographic engineering designed primarily by com­
peting nationalists in the late Ottoman Empire. It underlines the
impact of this legacy on the nation-state building processes of the
post-Ottoman world.

The 5-year period, from the year following the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913 until the
end of the Great War for the Ottomans in 1918, marks one of the most dramatic chapters
of demographic engineering1 in the modern era. It left a lasting mark, a legacy, that is still
visible in the geopolitics, economy, and human cultures of the Southeast Europe and the
Middle East. The Ottoman imperial structure was already undergoing some serious
transformations by that time, but those 5 years stand out as a period of truly radical
demographic change where the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, or the
Unionists, refashioned the Ottoman geography through the prism of their Muslim
nationalism. This was a period that arguably transformed the Ottoman reality from an
imperial, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious one to a more homogeneous
and ‘national’ one. These 5 years affected all peoples of the empire. The Ottoman non-
Muslims, among them the Christian populations and in particular the Armenian

CONTACT Emre Erol [email protected]

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. EROL

communities, suffered the most between 1913 and 1918. Overall, millions of Ottoman
peoples of Albanian, Arab, Bulgarian, Circassian, Georgian, Greek, Jewish or Kurdish
origin and the Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Russian territories were subjected
to the demographic engineering policies of the Unionists in one way or another.2 The
Republic of Turkey, and many other post-Ottoman nation-states in the region, are
overwhelmingly products of the dynamics set in motion during this period. These 5
years were not only unique because of the outcomes or because they affected all peoples
of the empire in different degrees. A very wide range of demographic engineering
policies3 from arbitrary to systematic and from subtle to extremely violent were adopted
in a fashion unlike other periods and by a single close-knit political network: The
Unionists. Later, after 1923, many prominent members of the same network played
central roles in the making of modern Turkey.
Today, scholars often compartmentalize the Unionist demographic engineering poli­
cies by focusing on instances or affected groups and study them separately. This is
understandable and necessary given the very complex and intertwined nature of the
chain of events behind any particular chapter of relocation, ousting or massacres between
1913 and 1918. In the perpetrators’ minds, however, the period between their consolida­
tion of power with a coup and the collapse of their government at the end of the Great
War was a single history of ‘nationalist struggle for survival’. This was by no means
teleological, inevitable, or predetermined. The Unionists’ decisions and reactions evolved
very rapidly with every existential crisis of the Empire that they thought they were
destined to save. For them, this struggle was embedded in the history of their lives, the
constitutionalist struggle of the Young Turks, the rise of nationalisms in the empire and
the struggle against increasing encroachment of the European Great Powers. For the
Unionists, their struggles, policies and ‘sacrifices’ were their ‘national duties’ aiming the
preservation of what was perceived by many at the time as the ‘last independent Muslim
state’. Many considered this duty a matter of ‘self-defense’ and employed Weber’s value
rationality that turned them into perpetrators dehumanizing the other for their supposed
higher national values and goals.4 Many, like Mahmut Celâl Bayar, who was a central
figure in the demographic engineering policies of the Unionists in Western Anatolia,5
later found themselves among the highest architects of the new Republic of Turkey.
Like all nationalisms, the Unionist Muslim nationalism was also ethnocentric, and as
such, it defined the Muslim Turkish element in the Ottoman society as the saviour, leader
and the harbinger of the desired modern transformations.6 Although the Unionists
constantly employed a strong rhetoric of popular sovereignty, equal citizenship and
law and order, their decisions, actions and legislation were increasingly more ethno­
centric between 1913 and 1918. Unlike most of our compartmentalized scholarly studies
that deal with the issues of the late-Ottoman period separately, the Unionists perceived
all their problems as a part of a larger struggle. A worldview coloured by reactionism,
a combination of ideologies among which nationalism was the most significant, and their
formative experiences jointly formed a lens through which the peoples and the perceived
problems of the empire were understood. Their vision was not primordial or static. There
were cliques and differences of opinion among the Unionists, and ‘roads not taken’
during moments of crises. Nevertheless, the cult of the party that was built on a cult of
struggle solidified after 1913 and swiftly radicalized thereafter. A few prominent
Unionists and their vision consistently shaped almost all decisions. Economic, cultural
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 3

and demographic policies were simultaneously employed, affecting millions of Ottoman

citizens. What often constitutes ‘histories’ in scholarly studies always constituted ‘a
history’ in their minds.
Therefore, the study of the ousting of Ottoman Greeks in 1914 or the infamous labour
battalions during the Great War, the first of its kind compulsory population exchange
between Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire in 1913, the systematic massacres
and destruction of Armenian communities in 1915 and thereafter or the settlement
policies regarding Muslims of various ethnicities during 1913–1918 should all be better
analysed if they were to be approached more holistically as a single radicalizing history of
demographic engineering. This is not merely because the perpetrators saw them as such,
and this would then help us better analyse their ideology and mentality. A holistic
approach, as I would like to argue in here, is a must if we simply want to have a better
understanding of the actual chain of events themselves, their causes and consequences.
Furthermore, this approach will allow us to see this as ‘a history of Ottoman peoples’,
dynamic and reshaped after each crisis, instead of seeing it as ‘inevitable pre-histories’ of
contemporary post-Ottoman nations built on static grand designs or a linear history.
One must note that this is not an attempt to simplify and collapse all forms of demo­
graphic engineering into a single category or label. This is an attempt to connect with
nuance and limits for a better analysis.
The Unionist demographic engineering projects of 1913–1918 constitute a single
continuous, radicalizing and entangled history that affected millions of Ottoman citizens.
The consequences, the level of radicalism and finally the extent to which each demo­
graphic engineering policy in those 5 years was organized and/or included elements of
spontaneity are different. The systematic violence against the Ottoman Armenians stands
out as the final and most radical chapter of this history, whereas the policies affecting
Ottoman Bulgarians, Ottoman Greeks and Muslim refugees from the Balkans immedi­
ately after the Balkan Wars constitute a ground zero. External and internal variables and
factors such as wars, geography, political constellations, the perceived level of existential
threat, the popular reception of or participation in these policies at a given time, did
change the outcomes of the Unionist policies for the affected Muslim and non-Muslim
peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, one thing remained a constant: the role of
the Unionists as perpetrators.
A closer look at the peculiar personal history of an Ottoman civil servant Ferid Bey,
who played a significant role in multiple demographic engineering policies of the
Unionists, will substantiate the point about a holistic historiography by exposing the
connections between the Unionist demographic engineering policies between 1913 and
1918 and how that helps to understand better.

Following the footsteps of an Ottoman civil servant: Ferid Bey

Ferid Bey7 was born in Ottoman Crete, in Kandiye (Heraklion), in 18728 as the son of
a civil servant who was the head of the Resmo (Rethymno) court in the first instance.
Ferid was a true product of the modern educational institutions of the empire at the time.
He enrolled to Mekteb-i Mülkiye-i Şahane, the most prestigious tertiary educational
institution in the empire for civil servants, after successfully finishing his high school
in modern rüştiye and iptidai schools. He was multilingual and knew all the major
4 E. EROL

languages of the western parts of the empire where he served most of his life. He knew
how to read, write and speak fluently in French, Greek and Turkish. He also had a basic
understanding of Bulgarian. He was successful and well respected by his superiors, which
caused him to be promoted relatively quickly. At one point, a prominent political figure
in the empire, then the governor general of Aydın province Kamil Paşa vouched for his
promotion. He worked as a clerk for about 12 years, as an acting governor for around 2
years and as a governor for 159 years. At one point in his career, Ferid also served as an
honorary clerk in the settlement commission of Muslim refugees10 in İzmir in 1899. This
administrative body was responsible for the settlement of the Muslim refugees most likely
from Crete, his native land, which became independent in 1898.11 It is reasonable to
assume that his family in Kandiye also became refugees under increasing nationalist
pressures in the process that led to an independent Crete. Ferid Bey served in 17 different
locations throughout his tenure in total. Six of them were in the Balkans, eight of them in
Western Anatolia, two in the Black Sea region and the last one in Northwestern
Anatolia.12
Ferid Bey’s tenure as governor of the Ottoman county of Foçateyn and then of
Karamürsel, the former administered under the province of Aydın in Western Anatolia
and the latter administered as a part of the Izmid mutasarrifate in Northwestern
Anatolia, clearly exposes why connecting histories expands our understanding of the
period. Sizeable non-Muslim populations lived in both of these locations and during
Ferid Bey’s tenure Unionist demographic engineering policies caused the displacement of
these communities in both cases. A closer inspection of the events, the chronology and
the nature of Ferid’s appointment to the governorship of these places suggest the
existence of a pattern.
Ferid Bey was appointed as the governor of the county of Foçateyn on the 13th of
April 1914. This was after the Unionist’s seizure of power in 1913 and the end of the
Balkan Wars. Ferid’s appointment followed the fact-finding missions of two prominent
Unionists in Western Anatolia: Dr Mehmed Reşid Şahingiray and Eşref Kuşçubaşı. The
mission aimed to make assessments on the ‘dangers’ presented by the non-Muslim
communities in the region in the face of a potential war with the Kingdom of Greece,
one of the victors of the recently ended Balkan Wars. According to Eşref, the results of
their findings were discussed and a decision to act was taken in a series of meetings
organized by then minister of interior Talât Paşa in Istanbul in March 1914.13 The timing
of Ferid’s appointment to Foçateyn in April seems to indicate that it was a direct result of
the decisions taken in that meeting. Ferid stayed in that post until Talât Paşa removed
him from duty on the 22nd of June 1914. The previous governor of Foçateyn before Ferid
was an Orthodox Christian named Emanuel Efendi. Ferid was appointed to Foçateyn,
a county with an Orthodox Christian majority, at a time when the Ottoman-Greek
negotiation for a population exchange was deadlocked and the ousting of Orthodox
Christians was taking place in Thrace. He stayed in his post for about 2 months, but it was
more than enough to change the history of the county of Foçateyn.
The county of Foçateyn became the most drastic scene of the ousting of Ottoman
Greeks in what I refer to as the spring of organized chaos in Western Anatolia in 1914
during governor Ferid’s tenure. At the beginning of Ferid’s tenure, Foçateyn had
a population of about 23.687 people, and 15.670 of these were Ottoman Greeks.
During Ferid’s tenure, on the 11th of June 1914, the county was surrounded and
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 5

ransacked by Muslim bandits in a matter of days. Thousands of fleeing Ottoman Greeks

finally made it to the centre of the county, the port-town of Eski Foça, where Ferid was
located. Ferid did not use the available gendarmerie at his disposal to stop the bandits. On
the contrary, according to eyewitness accounts, some locals and even some gendarmerie
joined the bandits in pillage and violence. Some accused him of orchestrating the ousting.
The Ottoman Greek residents of the county were forced to flee at gunpoint by the bandits
and a limited number of those who resisted were killed. The ousting lasted about a week
and order was finally restored on the 18th of June 1914. The result was catastrophic: not
even a single Ottoman Greek was left in the county after the events. Bandits were let go
carrying their loot and marching proudly in Eski Foça’s promenade. Soon enough,
following the ousting, Muslim refugees from the Balkans were settled in the houses of
the Ottoman Greeks in Foçateyn.
What happened in Foçateyn was very unexpected, sudden and dramatic. The news of
violence and ousting soon spread domestically and internationally. Talât Paşa, who had
already been on a journey around the Western Anatolian seaboard supposedly to tamp
down similar tensions in the region, caused by an already ongoing anti-Christian boycott
movement and similar cases of ousting, came to Foçateyn during the last days of the
ousting on the 16th of June. He condemned Ferid due to his inability to act and ordered
his removal as the governor 6 days after his visit on the 22nd of June.
Barely 6 months later, on the 9th of January 1915, Ferid Bey of Foçateyn was again
appointed as governor, this time as ruler of the county of Karamürsel. At the time of
Ferid’s appointment, based on an earlier 1914 census, Karamürsel had a population of
about 23.547 people,14 and 6.047 and 2.635 of them were Ottoman Greeks and
Armenians, respectively. We do not know if the Ottoman Greeks of Karamürsel were
still there at the time of Ferid’s appointment but there is no document suggesting
otherwise. After all, Karamürsel was not a priority for the Unionists yet during the
ousting of 1914. Ottoman Greeks in that part of Marmara were relatively immune during
the exodus of spring 1914. What we know is that at some point after the Balkan Wars,
Muslim refugees from the Balkans (in this case Albanians) were settled in Karamürsel.
The fact that Ferid was reappointed to another county with sizable non-Muslim com­
munities and an intake of disenfranchised Muslim refugees (muhacirs) with potential
resentments against Christians is in itself a sign of the Unionist mentality. Ferid, who
previously failed to protect his fellow Christian Ottoman compatriots’ lives and property
(most likely on purpose as evidence suggests), was again appointed as a governor to
a county were approximately 35% of the population were Christians by the same minister
of internal affairs who had removed him as a result of his earlier misdeed. What
happened in Karamürsel within a couple of months after Ferid’s appointment resembles
his tenure in Foçateyn and offers an explanation for his re-appointment by the same
Unionist government.
On the 3rd of September 1915, Papaz Nişan of the Armenian community from the
New Village (Cedid Karye) of Karamürsel wrote the following line to the ministry of
interior: ‘Today we are destitute and ruinous in all possible ways since we left our land by
leaving all our possessions behind . . . ’ Later, in the same letter, Nişan begged for the
settlement of his community in Konya probably in fear of further displacement and
persecution.15 The same governor Ferid, who was found ‘incapable’ of stopping the
Ottoman Greek ousting of Foçateyn, seems to have caused or at least failed to stop the
6 E. EROL

deportation of the Armenian Christians of Karamürsel. There is no clear information on

the exact date and the nature of the deportation. There is also no information about the
fate of the Armenian community who had to leave Karamürsel. Judging from the letter of
Papaz Nişan, the deportations in Karamürsel must have taken place before
September 1915, which corresponds with the climax of the period of violence and
deportation against the Armenian communities of the empire in general. On the 14th
of November 1915, after the deportation of the Armenian community, a new governor
was appointed to Karamürsel. After this point, Ferid Bey disappears from the Ottoman
archives, and it appears that he was not appointed to any other post later on.
Ferid Bey, who seems to have been a rather successful and well-educated civil servant
with quite an impressive track record of appointments and promotions, ended up
becoming a perpetrator of violent demographic engineering policies in the last 2 years
of his tenure. This is especially interesting given the fact that the last three places where
he was a governor—Milas,16 Foçateyn and Karamürsel—were all subjected to drastic
effects of the Unionists demographic engineering policies. Events in the last two hap­
pened during his rule. Furthermore, all of these appointments came after his years of
service in the Ottoman Balkans. Ferid served continuously in the region for about 6 years
between 1904 and 1910 before the Balkan Wars. He quit his post in 1910 and returned
again on the 18th of March 1912 to Tikveş (Tikveš) in the province of Selânik
(Thessaloniki). The period during two of his posts in the province of Selânik, in
Cuma-i Bâlâ (Blagoevgrad) and in Razlık (Razlog), was exceptional. Ferid had to respond
to tens of different cases of encounters with predominantly Bulgarian bandits between
December 1904 and October 1908 as the governor of these places. Each year of his tenure
in each place during this period had at least a handful of very violent cases of bandit
attacks and/or counter-insurgency operations.17 Banditry and nationalist agitation were
still a part of his life after 1908 in Yenice Vardar (Giannitsa), İskeçe (Xanthi) and
Sultanyeri (Momchilgrad) albeit with considerably much lower frequency. This is under­
standable given the relative euphoria and peace created by the July 1908 Revolution after
his time in Razlık and the mirror opposite of that previously due to the post-Ilinden
Uprising in the region. His years in Cuma-i Bâlâ and in Razlık must have already been
serious formative experiences, but the effects of his last post in Tikveş were certainly
more traumatic.
Serbian forces captured Tikveş at the beginning of November 191218 during the First
Balkan War. Ferid was still the governor at that point, though it looks as if he wanted to
resign by the very end of October 1912. He got his full salaries until mid-December 1914,
and he got half-pay thereafter until he was appointed to Milas in June 1913. What
happened in Tikveş during its capture is reported in a publication by the Society for
Publication of Documents on Balkan Atrocities in 1913. The society was founded
towards the end of 1912, purely by civilian initiatives,19 with the explicit purpose of
informing the domestic and international public about the atrocities suffered by the
Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans during the war. This society and its publications clearly
aimed to bolster morale and mobilize people with nationalist feelings of resentment at the
home front and gain international visibility for the Ottoman cause through atrocity
propaganda. It used European and Ottoman sources, as well as accounts of journalists,
consuls, statesman and civilians. The chronology it presents for Tikveş is corroborated
with other sources. The third volume of the society’s Les Atrocite ́s des Coalise ́s
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 7

Balkaniques describes the massacre of civilians in Tikveş at the hands of the Serbian
officers who entered the town causing 180 deaths. There were various violent attacks
against civilians and 2 days of pillaging ensued. The account ends by stating that the
governor of Tikveş was also reported to have been tortured in the process.20 It appears
that the soon-to-be governor of places with predominantly non-Muslim populations in
Western Anatolia witnessed and was subjected to violence by non-Muslim nationalists in
the Balkans.
Ferid’s resignation file was finally sent to İzmir, yet he became a governor again in
Milas in 1913, a few months after the coup, establishing a strong Unionist government
following the disastrous Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War. Ferid’s experiences in
the Balkans exposed him to banditry, nationalist violence and competition, counter-
insurgency operations, displacement, war and torture that were widespread in the
Ottoman Balkans at the time. We do not know if he was ever a member of the
Committee of Union and Progress, but he must have been appreciated by the Unionist
network as he seems to have served in locations that were deemed very important by the
Unionists. He remained a governor in the province of Selânik, one of the most important
locations for the Unionist network, after the July Revolution of 1908 and the counter-
revolution of 1909. One of the three most influential Unionists of the period, and
arguably the most powerful among them after 1914,21 Talât Paşa, ordered Ferid’s last
three appointments in person. Judging from his time in the Balkans, and the events
surrounding the places he served, he must have had the similar formative experiences
and mindset like the Unionists of his time.
How, then, does this biographical detail about an Ottoman civil servant relate to the
argument for the more holistic treatment of the demographic engineering policies of the
Unionists between 1913 and 1918? The answer to that could be found in the larger
historical context of the period in question and the frameworks presented by the scholar­
ship to understand the era.

Situating Ferid Bey’s tenure within the larger historical context

If one zooms out of the personal history of Ferid Bey and considers the possible reasons
behind his appointment as a governor to Foçateyn and Karamürsel, the histories of two
prominent Unionists immediately come into the picture: Dr Mehmed Reşid Şahingiray
and Talât Paşa. As mentioned above, fact-finding missions had an alarming tone about
Western Anatolia’s Ottoman non-Muslims, such as the one delivered by Reşid, and they
portrayed them as internal enemies. This was followed by Talât’s appointment of Ferid
Bey to Foçateyn. Just like the history of Ferid, the histories of Reşid and Talât also attest to
the main argument here.
Dr Mehmed Reşid Şahingiray was one of the original founders of the constitutionalist
opposition during the Hamidian Era of the Ottoman Empire. A branch of this constitu­
tionalist Young Turk movement later evolved into the Community of Union and
Progress. He was born to a Circassian family in 1873 in Caucasia. He claimed that his
family were decedents of the Bezedog tribe and considered themselves Ottoman.22
Originally a medical doctor by training and like Ferid educated in modern institutions,
Mehmed Reşid decided to quit being a doctor and became a civil servant after the Young
Turk revolution of 1908 in order ‘to better serve the nation’. He was appointed to many
8 E. EROL

critical bureaucratic positions, conducted fact-finding missions, and became governor

multiple times. He took extensive roles in shaping and conducting the Unionist policies
of nation-state building after the movement’s consolidation of power in 1913. Later, in
the Republican Era, his family was awarded for his ‘services to the nation’ and his legacy
was valorized in the early Republican period. He took active roles both in convincing the
Unionists for the homogenization of the Western Anatolian seaboard after his fact-
finding missions in 1913 and in the systematic deportations and massacre of Armenians
as the infamous governor of Diyarbakır in 1915 and after. Just like the story of Ferid Bey,
his history also connects the histories of different demographic engineering policies.
Much research has been done on Mehmed Reşid’s life and his involvement with the
Armenian deportations and massacres as the governor of Diyarbakır. Therefore, I will
focus more on his role in the ousting operations in 1914 before the Great War. This will
undoubtedly make a case for the connection between the two demographic engineering
policies regarding Ottoman Greeks and Ottoman Armenians.
On the 29th of July 1913, few months after the Unionist seizure of power earlier in the
same year, Mehmed Reşid embarked on a tour to inspect some of the counties of Balıkesir
on the northwestern tip of the western Anatolian shoreline. His inspection notes were
brief but detailed. The report aimed at making suggestions for improvements in order to
avoid the dangers awaiting the ‘nation’. These suggestions were sometimes logistical or
technical, but there were also political ones. Mehmed Reşid made suggestions concerning
the development of transport and communication for almost every place he visited. More
importantly, he wrote detailed reports on the situation of the local Ottoman Greeks,
whom he identified as threats to the nation. He constantly made assessments about
various peoples’ and communities’ trustworthiness, economic strength and demographic
size. For instance, when Mehmed Reşid first arrived in Edremit, a prominent county in
the northwestern Aegean with a central town named after the county, he complained
about the Ottoman Greeks who ‘kept their identities and culture intact’. What concerned
him was probably not seeing his version of Ottomanism succeed as the strongest marker
of identity. Commerce was also ‘unfortunately’ under the control of the Ottoman Greeks,
and he wrote that the members of the CUP of Edremit were too spoilt and over-confident
to be trusted. He suggested that an intervention be made because they would be obstacles
for the government’s policies.
The places Mehmed Reşid visited and about which he wrote critically, such as
Edremit, Burhaniye, Balıkesir and the villages surrounding Ayvalık, were subjected to
ousting by Muslim bandits just like Ferid’s Foçateyn during the spring of 1914. In his
own words, published in his Mülâhazât, he attempts to defend himself against the
accusation of systematic murder of Ottoman Armenians during his governorship in
Diyarbakır by pointing out his ‘success’ during the displacement of Ottoman Greeks in
northwestern Anatolia in 1914. He claims that his region’s (Karesi) ousting took place
without a ‘single nose bleeding’ while in İzmir there was much misconduct. He openly
takes credit for the ousting of Ottoman Greeks and considers his knowledge of the lay of
the land and its people, clearly based on his previous fact-finding mission, as a source of
his perceived success.23
These kinds of fact-finding missions were considered to be very typical of the
Unionists. Similar reports were written about Armenians or Kurds as well. There are
two reasons for this: ideological and practical. The level of ethnocentrism of the
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 9

Unionists’ Muslim nationalism increased significantly after the Balkan Wars, and they
were dedicated to refashioning the empire with a Muslim majority, with the Turkish
element remaining the strongest. In addition to this, from a practical point, the majority
of the Unionist leaders, as refugees from the then lost Balkan territories of the Empire,
not Anatolia, had to ‘discover’ Anatolia since they were relatively ‘alien’ to it and had little
experience with its’ people, networks and demographic distribution.24
I would argue that Mehmed Reşid, just like Ferid Bey, was appointed to an important
position in 1915 not despite his past actions in 1914, which he later confessed in this
Mülâhazât, but actually because of them. By 1915, Mehdmed Reşid had a reputation as
a man of resolve and action among the Unionists, which made him the executioner of
many demographic policies:

[Mehmed Reşid] was sent to particularly difficult places, beginning with the Aegean region
in 1913, where at the end of the same year, a secret policy of expelling Christians was
established for the first time. Important offices in the Eastern Provinces followed, where
since the spring of 1915 a policy to remove the Armenians completely was applied. In
autumn 1916, this enormous goal had been more or less achieved.25

One of the three major leaders of the Unionist movement and the person who appointed
both Mehmed Reşid and Ferid Bey was none other than Talât Paşa, the minister of
interior at the time. Talât’s story connects that of Ferid and Mehmed Reşid as well as the
demographic engineering policies between 1913 and 1918 with the two previous exam­
ples. Talât was a well-educated Ottoman civil servant, a man of action and the architect of
most of the crucial Unionist policies. He was born into a middle-class family in 1874 in
Edirne. His father was a state employee who was born in Kırcaali, which was lost to
Bulgaria in 1878.26 Needless to say, the refugee experience, or being a muhacir, was also
a formative experience in Talât’s life much like other Unionists of his generation. Talât
Paşa served as the minister of interior between January 1913 and February 1917. He was
a core member of the Committee of Union and Progress since the early days of the
movement in Selânik. He took responsibilities as the minister of finance between 1914
and 1917, and finally also as the Grand Vizier between February 1917 and October 1918.
He was one of the three major paşas of the Unionist dictatorship after 1913. All of these
positions, within the state and the party, gave him great influence over the Ottoman
Empire. He was one of the principal architects of all of the Unionist projects between
1913 and 1918 and a natural central figure in the decision-making process of the above-
mentioned demographic policies. Consequently, his perception of the world around him
and his assessment of the Ottoman Empire’s situation mattered significantly. There is
also an abundance of research about the life and the mindset of Talât Paşa. I will focus on
a very relevant instance from his life reflecting on his thinking about the period in
question in this chapter.
An Ottoman parliament session in 1914 about the ousting of Ottoman Greeks
perfectly encapsulates the way Talât Paşa perceived that mass exodus. On the 1st of
July 1914, a group of Ottoman Greek members of the Ottoman Parliament, headed by
Emmanuelidi Efendi, the M.P. of Aydın, made a motion to hold a session following Talât
Paşa’s return from the province of Aydın. The session aimed at discussing the recent
ousting of Ottoman Greeks in Western Anatolia and the anti-Christian boycott move­
ment. Emmanuelidi asked many questions about the events, condemned them as
10 E. EROL

disgraceful acts, demanded to be informed by the minister of interior Talât Paşa and also
criticized the then dominant discourse that associated all Ottoman Greeks with Greek
nationalism to legitimize atrocities.
In his response Talât Paşa initially highlighted the atrocities conducted by the Balkan
nations against Muslims, and he stressed that those atrocities, just like what Emmanuelidi
claimed about the flight of Christians, were a disgrace in the history of mankind. He argued
that once muhacirs flooded the Western Anatolian areas of the empire, it was impossible to
stop conflicts and rivalry. He was trying to legitimize the forceful displacement of Ottoman
Greeks by pointing to the displacement of Muslims from the Balkans. In reality, though,
these two phenomena were not related. Muhacirs did not forcefully displace Ottoman
Greeks in Western Anatolia; they were settled in their place only after the Ottoman Greeks
were ousted. In essence, they were instrumentalized as demographic and economic assets.
Talât Paşa often referred to the sufferings of the muhacirs whenever the issue of mis­
conduct against the Christians came up. It seems that he saw this de-facto exchange as
a policy of reciprocity vis-à-vis the plight of Balkan Muslims for which the CUP has had no
chance to retaliate because the Ottomans had lost the war. His brutally realist thinking was
all too convenient for the Unionist political aims that essentially perceived displacement of
people and property as legitimate tools. This mentality is also abundantly evident in the
Unionist perception of demographic engineering policies affecting all peoples of the
empire. The level of violence brought about by such policies became increasingly brutal
as the level of perceived existential threat increased from 1913 to 1918.
In the same parliamentary session, Talât Paşa argued that there was no other option
but to place those muhacirs in populated areas (initially in Muslim and later in Christian
settlements as well), since to establish new settlements for them, as Emmanuelidi
suggested during the session, would place a substantial burden on the state budget
(which was already shrinking and under the pressure of war). If, Talât said, they were
to send muhacirs to the less inhabited parts of the Empire, ‘between Üsküdar and Basra’,
they would have perished in the desert. Talât sent Ottoman Armenians to ‘perish’ in the
same area in 1915. Talât’s lengthy conversations with foreign representatives on his
policies during the period of systematic violence against the empire’s Armenians, his
orders concerning demographic engineering policies (against many peoples of the
empire) during the Great War, the way he organized his little ‘black book’27 where he
aims to calculate all of the outcomes of all the demographic engineering policies and his
employment of his trusted entourage for his policies all but point to an evolving,
radicalizing nation-state building policy.28
The mere connected histories of the three civil servants—Ferid, Mehmed Reşid and
Talât—who all had roles in the demographic engineering policies between 1913 and 1918
at three different levels of the Ottoman state bureaucracy, clearly present a pattern. The
personal histories of the Unionists as perpetrators, in other words their agency, link the
demographic engineering policies between 1913 and 1918 that essentially affected mil­
lions of Ottoman subjects.

Understanding and historicizing the agency of the Unionists as perpetrators

From a chronological point of view, the very first major demographic engineering policy
of the Unionist government after their seizure of power in 1913 was the Ottoman-
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 11

Bulgarian population exchange. This rather understudied phenomenon of compulsory

population exchange constituted a ‘success story’ for the like-minded Bulgarian and
Ottoman nationalists at the time. The exchange was ratified on the 29th of
September 1913 and aimed at the voluntary resettlement of Ottoman Bulgarians in the
Kingdom of Bulgaria and the now Bulgarian Muslims after the Balkan Wars in the
Ottoman Empire. Although designed to be a voluntary procedure, it turned out to be a de
facto forced relocation. The treaty also included clauses about the transfer of the proper­
ties of the displaced on both sides within 15 km of the new border, but this turned into 20
km, as the voluntary design of the agreement turned into the reality of forced
migration.29 This treaty mostly recognized the facts on the ground. This is because
most of the Bulgarians and the Muslims in the areas affected by the war had already
been driven out of their homelands. The reason for their forceful resettlement on both
sides of the new border was identical: securing and legitimizing the new borders by
means of nationalist homogenization.
Both the Ottoman and the Bulgarian decision-makers at the time welcomed this
reciprocal recognition of displacement and acceptance of demographically homogenized
borders. The uniqueness of this treaty comes from its recognition of a ‘nationalist’
solution to the problem of extra-territorial influence of states. What was still considered
an exception, or undesirable, in the time of the treaty of Berlin in 1878, that is the
emergence of demographically homogeneous Balkan nation states amidst imperial
structures of Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire, was now becoming
the new norm after the Balkan Wars. The Unionists did not think of this as damaging to
their previous constitutionalist rhetoric of harmony and coexistence of different peoples
within an imperial structure in 1908; they welcomed it. This was a sign of a changing
mind sent not in words but in action.
Bulgaria was not the only Balkan nation state where Muslims were subjected to
sporadic or systematic violence that resulted in massacres and displacement in the war.
As a matter of fact, the expansion of the Kingdom of Greece during the war caused the
largest displacement of Muslims in the Balkans. Thousands of refugees kept fleeing to the
Ottoman territories even after the peace treaties in 1913 as a result of the government’s
demographic policies. Studies of the ego documents and political publications of the
Unionists, the majority of whom became refugees themselves after the Balkan Wars,
reveal that the Unionists saw these Balkan states’ policies as ‘success stories of small
states’ against their larger empire that should have out-powered them during the Balkan
Wars. In their minds, the Unionists were convinced of the importance of ‘nationalizing’
their own borders and people, at all costs, in order to achieve the ‘spirit’ of these small
Balkan States. This ‘spirit’ gave them zeal and success and the source of it was
nationalism.30 They deemed the military mobilization of nation-states as superior com­
pared to the realities of conscription in their multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-
religious empire.31
However, much like the case with the contemporary land-based empires around them,
for instance like the Russian Empire,32 the Unionists were confronted with the realities of
a diverse empire for which increasingly ethnocentric nationalism created a dilemma. The
empire was in a purgatory where it was neither a ‘classic’ nation-state despite its
constitutionalist reforms, centralization and search for the formulations for the embodi­
ment of popular sovereignty, nor the ‘classic’ imperial structure that it used to be based
12 E. EROL

on much rigid and visible difference between duties, privileges and clear hierarchies of
the peoples of the empire. At times, the Unionists’ policies could both be interpreted like
clear nation-state building efforts or preservation of a multi-national empire with
a certain superior element supported by ethnocentric nationalist discourse and policy.
The Ottomanism of the Young Ottomans or the Ottomanism of the Young Turks in early
stages represented the forms of imperial nationalism and therefore ethnocentric as all
nationalisms are33 to a certain extent. However, the tone and the emphasis of that
ethnocentrism evolved during the Unionists’ rule between 1913 and 1918.
The possibility of what might have been a constitutionalist imperial order sustained by
a ‘union of elements’ where Muslim Turks were primus inter pares ruling over others
with institutionalized privileges quickly shifted to a ‘Herrenvolk democracy’34 where the
level of ethnocentrism was considerably higher, and the Muslim Turkish element was
now considered the ‘real backbone of the nation’ subordinating others under a new form
of collective identity and state. This ‘imperfect democratization or liberalization’35
became the context under which especially non-Muslim and non-Turkish peoples of
the empire would be seen as threats and undesirable elements by the Unionists.
This ‘grey area’ of transition, from resembling an imperial structure to an emerging
nation-state, usually sparks a debate in the scholarship about the nature and the true
intentions behind the Unionists policies, and the exact timing of the coming of the
transition from empire to nation-states which only became obvious with the Kemalist
Republic of Turkey in the 1920s. Irrespective of that valuable scholarly debate, the
Unionists’ demographic policies between 1913 and 1918 increasingly and clearly trans­
formed the ‘imperial’ reality into something more akin to ‘nation-states’ on the ground.
In other words, the vector of change caused by these policies tilted the pendulum not
towards preservation of imperial diversity as it used to be but towards a new reality that
made it easier to imagine, design and legitimize an ethnocentric nation-state.
After the population exchange with Bulgaria, the Unionists soon approached the other
major victor of the Balkan Wars, the Kingdom of Greece, to address the ensuing refugee
crisis. They proposed a similar solution, a population exchange, and received a positive
response from the Venizelos administration. The plan was to design a compulsory
population exchange that would resettle forcefully displaced Muslims of the new Greek
territories with the Ottoman Greeks of Western Anatolia who were not actually related to
the Balkan Wars. The logic was the same again: securing and legitimizing the new
borders by means of nationalist homogenization. Galip Kemali Bey (Söylemezoğlu),
the Ottoman ambassador in Athens, became the principal Ottoman negotiator but the
negotiations were interrupted in 1914. They would be resumed back and realized (albeit
with a greater scale) only at Lausanne peace negotiations in 1923. The two major reasons
behind the interruption were the imminence of a Greco-Ottoman war in late 1913–early
1914 and the mass exodus of the Ottoman Greeks who lived on the Western Anatolian
seaboard whilst the negotiations were proceeding.
The fear of an imminent war with Greece provided a pretext in which the Unionists
decided to initiate their first major demographic project in Western Anatolia. In a way,
they wanted to change the facts on the ground while at the same time being at the
negotiating table with the Kingdom of Greece for a potential agreement like the one they
had with the Kingdom of Bulgaria. The result was the ousting of some 160,000 Ottoman
Greeks during the spring of 1914 and a major economic blow to Christian-owned
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 13

businesses with the simultaneous anti-Christian (mostly anti-Greek) Boycott Movement.

This was one of the moments connecting the above-mentioned histories of Ferid,
Mehmed Reşid and Talât. Both ousting and boycotting were organized and initiated by
the Unionists, undertaken by Muslim bandits and mobs, and both found some willing
executioners among Muslim Ottoman subjects as well. They were legitimized on two
grounds: as ‘pre-emptive’ measures for securing the borders and as means to nationalize
the economy. The Unionists claimed that the exodus was a result of the resentment of
Muslim refugees (muhacirs) and the events were spontaneous but not organized. This is
a typical example of their double reality rhetoric that we also see in their other demo­
graphic engineering policies up to 1918. The Unionists were the ones who orchestrated
the ousting operations, and they talk about the necessity of such measures in their
internal correspondence and ego documents while presenting an entirely different
image to the outside world. The Unionists’ promotion of demographic engineering or
their wilful ignorance in the face of inter-communal tensions was masked by the
pretention of doing their best to uphold law and order. This ruse allowed them to
avoid providing a pretext for Great Power intervention or diplomatic isolation that
both constituted very real dangers to the Unionist government.
When we look at the actions of Ferid in Foçateyn and Karamürsel, Mehmed Reşid’s
words about the Ottoman Greeks of northwestern Anatolia in Mülâhazât36 or his actions
as a civil servant and then also look at Talât Paşa’s way of responding to the Ottoman
Greek exodus in 1914, all explained here, we see a certain mindset, a set of emotions or
affective disposition in the words of Ronald Suny. According to Suny:

The emotional world—or affective disposition—involves certain proclivities to belief, per­

ception, and behavior, the context in which certain actions are likely to occur and other
choices are not made. Conceptually affective disposition bridges the space between struc­
tural and environmental influences and human action. Rather than structures, environ­
mental conditions, or experience determining motivation for action, it is within the affective
disposition that particular meanings are created, and it is on the basis of those under­
standings that people are propelled to act on their feelings and convictions.37

The Unionist policies affecting Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims such as Assyrians,
Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Kurds, Turcoman or others, were shaped by
a radicalizing affective disposition that increasingly defined ‘the others’ of Muslim
nationalism as existential threats between 1913 and 1918. The policies of this period
shared a lot of similarities in terms of modus operandi as well. This was a natural result of
these demographic engineering policies being conducted by the same network of people
as demonstrated above with a limited example. Employing katib-i mesuls (party liaison
officers) for controlling the state apparatuses, conducting fact-finding missions and
calculating ‘desired demographic ratios’ for peoples of the empire, devising a double
reality rhetoric in order to dodge responsibility and avoid international pressures, use of
irregular forces (bandits and/or prisoners), transfer of property for the nationalization of
economy and a ‘very primitive’ accumulation of capital for a docile Muslim bourgeoisie,
instrumentalization of public resentment against Christians as means of nationalist
mobilization, encouragement of mob violence and utilization of Muslim refugees as
‘loyal’ demographic assets who would replace Christians present themselves as methods
observable across different demographic engineering policies of the Unionists.
14 E. EROL

The population exchange with Bulgaria and the Ottoman Greek deportations
before the Great War constitute a ‘ground-zero’ for the Unionist demographic
engineering projects. Their close examination clearly demonstrates that Unionist
decision-making and thinking were very similar during the period of violence
against the Ottoman Armenians as well. The period of the Great War and especially
1915 thereafter represents the most radical period of the Unionist demographic
engineering projects compared to earlier iterations of such policies before the war.
Not all demographic engineering policies were within the limited scope of this
chapter, but they are not by any means outside the revisionist narrative that
I propose. People from various ethnic backgrounds were subjected to similar
kinds of policies, with similar ideological concerns that were engineered by the
same close-knit network of Unionists. The level of violence and the extent of the
Unionist policies varied as a result of the threat perception about a given group in
the Empire.

Towards a more holistic approach: combining micro and macro history

Two important questions arise from the arguments presented here: are there other civil
servants and/or Unionists that connect the seemingly separate histories of demographic
engineering in the late Ottoman period? Secondly, if yes, then do their cases also connect
the history of the Unionist demographic engineering between 1913 and 1918 to histories
before 1913 and after 1918? In other words, are there more examples like Ferid and do we
need to see the Unionist period as organically and historically embedded in the Second
Constitutional era before it and the following years that led to the creation of the
Republic of Turkey? Did such people play significant roles in the formative years of the
new Republic of Turkey? If the answers are yes, and the recent scholarship increasingly
suggests that,38 then there is all the more reason to have an inclusive history of the
demographic engineering in the late Ottoman Empire.
If we ask ourselves the reasons behind the formation and radicalization of the Unionist
mindset and focus on the personal micro histories of people like Ferid, Mehmed Reşid or
Talât then the scope of our research has to extend beyond the Unionist demographic
engineering policies of the 5 years following 1913. If we ask ourselves if any of these
figures, or other Unionists like M. Abdülhalik Renda,39 Kazım Özalp or Şükrü Kaya
figured as important decision makers affecting multiple demographic policies after 1918,
then again, we have to extend our scope into the history of the early Republic of Turkey.
For instance, the personal histories of Ferid, Mehmed Reşid and Talât point out to the
significant events of the Second Constitutional Period,40 such as the counter-revolution
of 1909, the Balkan Wars or the European reform plan of 1914 as significant formative
experiences that shaped the affective disposition of the Unionists. If one looks at Ferid
Bey’s case for instance coming from a family of Muslim refugees, the role of his years in
the Balkans swarmed by banditry and tortured in the First Balkan War was clearly very
significant. Was this also the case to varying degrees for other Unionist appointed
governors of the period like Ferid as well? How many of the Unionists in key decision-
making positions became refugees themselves or suffered from displacement? It is known
in the scholarship that being refugees and having important formative experiences in the
Balkans were very common among prominent Unionists. One needs to focus on macro
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 15

history and comparative studies on the relevance of the refugee experience or other
formative experiences that ought then to be related to micro history.
Michael Mann, in his seminal work Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing, states that ‘refugee nationalists will be overrepresented in almost all the
ethnic and political cleansing movements discussed’ in his book41 and thus points out
the significance of displacement’s influence on perpetrators. He sees this influence in
action in the cases of Germany, Serbia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Kashmir and the
Ottoman Empire for which he also underlines the need for further research. Ferid’s
case is a testament to the validity of that need. Cases studied by Mann across different
geographies and the cases of Ferid, Mehmed Reşid and Talât that are presented here
clearly show that the refugee experience mattered significantly. However, this clearly
was not the only experience that mattered in the formation of ‘the affective disposi­
tion of the perpetrators that compelled them to carry out massive uprooting and
murder of specifically targeted peoples and to believe that such actions were
justified.42’ The experience of violence cannot explain everything, but its overwhelm­
ing impact cannot be overlooked either.
Other major factors also contributed to the formation and radicalization of the
Unionist mindset besides the Balkan Wars and the refugee experience such as the
widespread appreciation of Social Darwinism, economic nationalism, or contingent
pressures of the Great War. Discussion of these factors was outside the scope of this
chapter, but a more holistic approach must bring together these macro explanations
together with the micro histories of the victims and perpetrators alike. Bulutgil in her
article that surveys the contemporary approaches on ethnic cleansing defines two
wider research focus as follows: studies that focus on the role of wars (as ‘strategic
environments’ where ‘. . . decisions are based on the ultimate aim of winning wars and
attaining territorial goals’ and as ‘transformative forces’ where social relations and
perceptions are altered) and the studies that focus pre-war/conflict conditions on the
domestic and the international realm that hinder or promote ethnic cleansing.43 For
instance, in the case of Ferid Bey’s micro history discussed above, the Balkan Wars
and the Great War, provide clear cases of war as both a ‘strategic’ and ‘transformative’
environment. Again, there is also room for future research that would employ the
focus on domestic and international conditions that affect ethnic cleansing in the case
of Ferid Bey where international norms, domestic nationalist narratives and socio-
economic cleavages between ethnic groups clearly influenced the outcome of the
aforementioned demographic engineering policies.
The claims about connectedness and the call for a holistic history that are put forth
here are perhaps statements of the obvious for experts of world history or the compara­
tive histories of demographic engineering or ethnic cleansing who appreciate this not
only as a phenomenon related to modern states or the Ottoman Empire but also as
a more global aspect of state societies. It is, however, a much-needed direction for future
research in the histories of the geographies and peoples that were once governed under
the Ottoman imperial framework. After decades of denial, methodological nationalism
and politicized scholarship, there is now hope and basis for a new form of scholarship
that can compare the Ottoman history of demographic engineering to other such
chapters in world history and connect it with the histories of the post-Ottoman states
including but not limited to the Republic of Turkey.
16 E. EROL

Notes
[1] The term ‘demographic engineering’ refers to a wide range of policies and strategies
such as population measurement, pronatalist policies, boundary changes, economic
pressures or rewards, population transfers, ethnic consolidation/dilution and ethnic
cleansing that essentially aim to alter demography for political power and legitimacy.
For a detailed discussion of the terminology see: Milica Z. Bookman, ‘Demographic
Engineering and The Struggle for Power’, Journal of International Affairs 56, (1),
2002, pp. 25–51. In this definition ethnic cleansing constitutes just one of the
policies or strategies of demographic engineering and often works hand in hand
with others. This was the case for the late Ottoman history as well and the limited
examples of deportations or killings mentioned here as parts of the demographic
engineering policies of 1913–1918 were simultaneously adopted with other economic,
cultural, or political strategies that aimed to alter demography. There are many types
of ethnic cleansing, from small scale deportations to large and systematic mass
killings. For a discussion on the use of the terminology see: Zeynep H. Bulutgil,
The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe, Cambridge University Press New York,
2016.
[2] Dündar’s two seminal books present us a more detailed study of the different groups and
present some general numbers about the Ottoman peoples who were affected by these
policies. His works also present one of the earliest and most thorough studies that analyse
the Unionist demographic policies from a holistic angle. Seminal as they are, these books
also show us that there is still a lot more research to be done for a better holistic history of
the Unionist demographic engineering policies. For a good summary of the overall picture,
see: Fuat Dündar, ‘The Settlement policy of the Committee of Union and Progress 1913–
1918’, in (ed) by Hans-Lukas Kieser, Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist
Identities, I.B. Tauris, London & New York, 2006, pp. 34–42. For his two seminal books, see:
Fuat Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası (1913–1918), İletişim
Yayınları, İstanbul, 2001 and Fuat Dündar, Modern Türkiye’nin Şifresi/İttihat ve Terakki’nin
Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918), İletişim Yayınları, İstanbul, 2008.
[3] For a brief and good conceptual discussion on the terminology of demographic engineering
and also for a short survey of demographic engineering in the Ottoman Empire see: Erik Jan
Zürcher, İmparatorluktan Cumhuriyete Türkiye’de Etnik Çatışma, İletişim Yayınları,
İstanbul, 2005, pp. 9–17 and Nesim Şeker, ‘Forced population movements in the Ottoman
Empire and the Early Turkish Republic: an attempt at reassessment through Demographic
Engineering’, European Journal of Turkish Studies 16, 2013, URL: http://ejts.revues.org/
4396.
[4] This is very well discussed in Mann’s work where he discusses nine motivations of
perpetrators in ethnic cleansing. See: Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy:
Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 27.
[5] For a detailed discussion of Celal Bayar’s role in the forced migration of Ottoman Greeks in
1914 see: Emre Erol, ‘Organized Chaos as Diplomatic Ruse and Demographic Weapon: The
Expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks (Rum) from Foça, 1914’, TSEG (The Low Countries
Journal of Social and Economic History), 4, 2013, pp. 66–96.
[6] The Muslim nationalism of the Unionists was by no means a static ideology. It glossed over
its ethnocentrism for a long time until the level of existential crisis perceived by the
Unionists increased following the defeat of the Balkan Wars. From then onwards, the
ethnocentrism (based on ‘the Turkish element’) of their nationalist discourse and practice
became more obvious. For the discussion of the Muslim nationalism terminology see: Erik
Jan Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building/From the Ottoman Empire to
Atatürk’s Turkey, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 2010, pp. 213–236.
[7] Some archival documents also mention his name as Ferid Ali Bey. There is no doubt that
these are the same people based on corroborating number of documents and registers.
[8] Hijri year mention in the register: 1288.
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 17

[9] Ferid Bey’s last recorded position is as a governor in Karamüsel in 1915. It is not
clear if he served after that post. Therefore, he must have served about at least 15
years as governor of different places. BOA. BEO. 4331/324793 and BOA. İDH. 1512/
31.
[10] The original definition used for this post is: ‘muhacirin sevk komisyonu fahri katibi’.
[11] The last major wave of Muslim Cretan exodus took place between 1896–1898.
[12] Most of the information used here derives from Ferid Bey’s civil servant register (BOA.
DHSAİD. 92/50 and 180/55) and others are based on: Emre Erol, The Ottoman Crisis in
Western Anatolia: Turkey’s Belle Époque and the Transition to a Modern Nation State, I.B.
Tauris, London & New York, 2016, pp. 163–194.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. The
University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1985, p. 184.
[15] Modern Turkish transliteration of the line is as follows: ‘Bütün varımızı terk ederek
memleketimizden ayrıldığımız içün bugün her ma’nasıyla sefaletten canlar perişanıyız . . . ’
BOA. DH.EUM.2.Şb. 10/87.
[16] On Ottoman Greek exodus and the effects of the boycott: BOA. DH.ŞFR. 431/94 and BOA.
DH.ŞFR. 435/11.
[17] For some examples see: BOA. Y.MTV. 307/9, BOA. TFR.I.SL 175/17425, BOA. TFR.I.SL 62/
6140, BOA. TFR.I.SL 72/7141, BOA. TFR.I.SL 175/17446.
[18] Two very close dates are mentioned for the entry of the Serbian Army to Tikveş.
These dates are: 2nd and 5th of November 1912. For the sources in that order see:
Fevzi Çakmak, ‘Batı Rumeli’yi Nasıl Kaybettik? Garbî Rumeli’nin Sûret-i Ziyaı ve
Balkan Harbi’nde Garb Cephesi’, (ed) Ahmet Tetik, Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür
Yayınları, İstanbul, 2010, p. 307 and Le Comité de Publication D.A.C.B., Les
Atrocités des Coalisés Balkaniques Vol. 3, Journal Ifham, Constantinople, 1913,
pp. 14–15.
[19] For more on the society, its activities and publications see: Doğan Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity
propaganda and the nationalization of the masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan
Wars (1912–13)’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, 2014, pp. 759–778.
Hasan Taner Kerimoğlu, ‘Balkan Savaşları’nda Osmanlı Propagandası: Neşr-i Vesaik
Cemiyeti’, Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi, XXIX/2, 2014, pp. 539–561.
[20] Le Comité de Publication D.A.C.B., Les Atrocités des Coalisés Balkaniques Vol. 3, Journal
Ifham, Constantinople, 1913, pp. 14–15.
[21] For two recent contributions to the discussion on the nature of the ‘Unionist triumvirate’
and Talât’s role in it see: M. Talha Çiçek, ‘Myth of the Unionist Triumvirate: The formation
of the CUP Factions and Their Impact in Syria during the Great War’, (ed) M. Talha Çiçek,
Syria in World War I: Politics, Economy, and Society, Routledge, New York, 2016, pp. 9–36
and Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide,
Princeton University Press, Oxford & Princeton, 2018, pp. 157–165.
[22] Nejdet Bilgi, Dr. Mehmed Reşid Şahingiray: Hayatı ve Hâtıraları, Akademi Yayınaevi, İzmir,
1997, pp. 163–165.
[23] Ibid., pp. 112–113.
[24] See: Erik Jan Zürcher, ‘How Europeans Adopted Anatolia and created Turkey’, European
Review, Vol.13, No. 3, 2005, pp. 379–394. Also see: Doğan Gürpınar, ‘From the Bare and
Arid Hills to Anatolia, the Loveable and Beautiful: The Project of National Modernity in
Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 48, No. 6, (Oct.), 2012, pp. 903–926.
[25] Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘From “patriotism” to mass murder: Dr. Mehmed Reşid (1873–1919)’,
in (eds) Ronald Grigor Suny, Norman Naimark and Fatma Müge Göçek, A Question of
Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2011, p. 145.
[26] M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, ‘Talat Paşa’, İslam Ansiklopedisi. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/talat-
pasa (Accessed Ocotober 21, 2018.)
[27] Murat Bardakçı, Talât Paşa’nın Evrak-ı Metrûkesi, Everest Yayınları, İstanbul, 2008.
18 E. EROL

[28] Erik Jan Zürcher, ‘Young Turk Decision Making Patterns 1913–1915’, in (eds) Annette
Becker et al., Le génocide des Arméniens. Cent ans de recherché 1915–2015, Armand Colin,
Paris, 2015, pp. 15–32.
[29] See: Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, The
Macmillan Company, New York, 1932 and Serdar Sarısır’,1913 Türk-Bulgar Mübadele
Sözleşmesi’, Askeri Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi, 7/4, Şubat, 2006, pp. 55–60.
[30] Erik Jan Zürcher, ‘Macedonians in Anatolia: The Importance of the Macedonian Roots of
the Unionists for their Policies in Anatolia after 1914’, Middle Eastern Studies, 50/6, 2015,
pp. 960–975.
[31] Fikret Adanır, ‘Non-Muslims in the Ottoman army and the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan
War of 1912/13’, in (eds) Ronald Grigor Suny, Norman Naimark and Fatma Müge Göçek,
A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford
University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 113–125.
[32] For a relevant theoretical discussion on the use of ‘empire’ and ‘nation-state’ as definitions
of transforming and modernizing imperial structures with special focus on Russia see:
Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Russia’s Empires, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2017, pp. 75–89.
[33] As Smith argues ‘ . . . many nations and nationalisms spring up on the basis of pre-existing
ethnie and their ethnocentrisms, but that in order to forge a “nation” today, it is vital to
create and crystallize ethnic components, the lack of which is likely to constitute a serious
impediment to “nation-building”’. See: Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1988, p. 17. One must also recognize that all nationalisms make ‘identity
claims’ but such claims don’t have to be exclusively about ethnicity or ethnocentric, for
a discussion see: Umut Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction/Second
Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, pp. 205–217.
[34] Here the concept is used to designate types of regimes where there is the official claim of
equal access to political process and rights but in reality, mechanisms of subordination,
disenfranchisement and exclusion empower a majority group. For the discussion of this
framework see: Michael Mann, ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of
Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review 235, May–June, 1999, pp. 18–45. For its’
use as a framework in the study of the late Ottoman history see: Şükrü M. Hanioğlu,
‘Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889–1908’, in (ed) Hans-Lukas Kieser, Turkey Beyond
Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities, I.B. Tauris, London & New York: 2006,
pp. 3–20.
[35] Sinisa, Malesevic, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism, Palgrave
Macmillan, London, 2006, p. 208.
[36] In his ego-document Mülâhazât, Mehmed Reşid defends himself for ethnic cleansing
policies against Ottoman Armenians that he is responsible of by referring to the perceived
‘success’ of his previous ethnic cleansing policies against Ottoman Greeks. See: Nejdet Bilgi,
Dr. Mehmed Reşid Şahingiray: Hayatı ve Hâtıraları, Akademi Yayınaevi, İzmir, 1997, pp. ­
163–165.
Ibid., pp. 77–179.
[37] Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the
Armenian Genocide. Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford: 2015, p. 134.
[38] For a recent and comprehensive discussion of this issue in the historiography see: Barlow
Der Mugrdechian, Ümit Kurt and Ara Sarafian (eds), The State of the Art of the Early
Turkish Republic Period Historiography Sources and Future Directions, Press at California
State University Fresno, Frenso, 2022.
[39] A simple glance at the recently published memoirs of M. Abdülhalik Renda,
a prominent decision-maker, and a Unionist whose actions shaped demographic
policies, already points out to a similar pattern whereby the young M. A. Renda
also talks about his experiences in the ‘Ottoman Macedonia’ in his early career as
a civil servant. In the memoir, his encounter with bandits, the Albanian uprisings
and ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans seems to have been significant parts of his
 JOURNAL OF BALKAN AND NEAR EASTERN STUDIES 19

formative experiences before he was appointed to places like Bitlis (1914) and
Aleppo (1915) at which he had extensive roles in demographic engineering policies
that affected Ottoman Armenians. For some relevant parts of the ego-document see:
Aytaç Demirci and Sabri Sayarı, Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda: Hatırat, Yapı Kredi
Yayınları, İstanbul, 2018, pp. 85–86, 96–115 and 119–223.
[40] For an example of an approach that discusses some of the events mentioned here within the
interval of 1908–18 and as nation-building policies see: Erol Ülker, ‘Contextualising
“Turkification”: nation-building in the late Ottoman Empire, 1908–18’, Nations and
Nationalism, 11, 4, 2005, pp 613–636.
[41] Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 173.
[42] Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the
Armenian Genocide, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2015, p. 356.
[43] H. Zeynep Bulutgil, ‘The state of the field and debates on ethnic cleansing’, Nationalities
Papers, 46 (6), 2018, pp. 1136–1145.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Emre Erol http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3062-8635

A note on place names

The names of the places are generally used in the way they are used today. Sometimes the old
names are used, as they appeared in sources at the time, with current names following in brackets.
The use of one name or the other (in Greek, or in Ottoman Turkish; in its past or present form) is
context-bound and does not indicate or imply priority.