Istanbul pogrom

The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or September events, are organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on September 6–7, 1955.

The riots are orchestrated by the Tactical Mobilization Group, the special operations unit of the Turkish Army,  the Counter-Guerrilla, and the National Security Service, the predecessor of today's National Intelligence Organization.

The events are triggered by the false news that the day before, Greeks had bombed the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881.

A bomb planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who is later arrested and confessei, incitei the events.

The Turkish press, conveying the news in Turkey, is silent about the arrest and instead insinuates that Greeks had set off the bomb.

A Turkish mob, most of whom had been trucked into the city in advance, assaults Istanbul's Greek community for nine hours.

Although the mob does not explicitly call for Greeks to be killed, over a dozen people die during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson.

Armenians and Jews are also harmed.

The police remain mostly ineffective, and the violence continues until the government declares martial law in İstanbul and calls in the army to put down the riots.

The pogrom greatly accelerates emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular.

The Greek population of Turkey declines from 119,822 in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978.

In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreases from 116,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.

The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry place the number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at 3,000–4,000; while according to the Human Rights Watch (2006) their number was estimated to be 2,500.

Some see the attacks as a continuation of a process of Turkification that started with the decline of the Ottoman Empire as roughly forty percent of the properties attacked belonged to other minorities.

The pogrom has been compared in some media to the Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany.

Historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas has written that in his view, despite the small number of deaths in the pogrom, the riots met the "intent to destroy in whole or in part" criterion of the Genocide Convention.

In 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said that the Turks have committed mistakes.

He said: "The minorities have been expelled from our country in the past. It was a result of fascist policy."

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