The Turkish Pogrom of 1955 and the Elimination of the Greek Minority of

With an official statement, issued on 7 family 1955, the Menderes government uttered its deepest sorrow for the losses suffered by Greek minority in Istanbul. The Turkish Prime Minister blamed the riots on communists, underlining its commitment to the exemplary penalty of the perpetrators (Xristidis 2000). The interpretation of the pogrom as a conspiracy of international communism was repeat during the extraordinary meeting of the Grand National Assembly, which took place on family line 12, 1955. However, under the force of circumstances, Adnan Menderes admitted that the government knew about the demonstration on September 6th, in advance. Also, the Turkish Prime Minister argued that, the riot was a unbidden expression of national sentiment of the Turkish people who was stimulated by the news about the imminent massacre of Turkish Cypriots on 28 August. Moreover, he stated that the hysteria that gripped the crowd was so strong that immobilized the constabulary forces, which fou nd themselves between their quest to restore order and their commitment to the homeland, consequently leaving full freedom of movement to the protesters. The claim of the Turkish government that the country suffered a severe blow because of the Communists was met with scepticism by irrelevant observers (Guven 2006). First of all, the number of Communists in Turkey was humble and secondly, their activities were under the sleepless eyes of the Turkish Intelligence Services (MIT). It seems that, only a small percentage of people who were arrested immediately after the episodes were communists. The arrest of those who had communist beliefs, such as the well-known Turkish writer Aziz Nessin, was totally unjustified, since there was no evidence for their participation i... ...itly the Christian Orthodox and Jews, which were the largest minority groups from Turkey. In addition, fit to nationalist elites, these minorities were assimilable thus, were not capable of becoming part of th e Turkish nation. Also, they stated that, the Non-Muslim minorities, mainly the Greek, were not composed of loyal citizens but realizable traitors to the Turkish state (Guven 2006). Adnan Menderes believed that was national and extremely important responsibility of either Turk to implement the Turkification, in an attempt to establish an independent Turkish state. A corollary of this concept was the effort of assimilation of the Greek minority by force, exercising a policy of discrimination and restrictions against it. In this context, the language, culture and desires of Non-Muslim minorities had to be machine-accessible with the history and dignity of Turks.