The Turkish-Greek Population Exchange and International Law

Abstract

The Turkish-Greek exchange of populations was the first compulsory exchange of populations that was bilaterally negotiated under the auspices of the Great Powers and agreed at a diplomatic table in pursuit of settling the terms of peace between two states, Greece, already a sovereign nation-state, on one side, and Turkey, an emerging state on its way to becoming a sovereign nation-state, on the other. Following the Mudanya Armistice that officially ended the war between Greece and the emerging Turkish state, the representatives of the two sides were summoned by the Great Powers to meet for negotiations at Lausanne on 22 November 1922. The signing of the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations on 30 January 1923 marked the end of the first phase of the Lausanne Peace Conference which was to conclude on 23 July 1923. With this convention the governments on two sides agreed to the displacement of their respective minorities within their newly drawn borders with the exception of two enclaves, namely, Constantinople and Western Thrace. While the conference continued to discuss a fully loaded package of unsettled issues of international law (e.g., borders, capitulations, minorities, etc.) related with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the two governments launched the implementation of the exchange convention that would affect the fate of the nearly one million Greeks who had already fled from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace to Greece during the Greco-Turkish War, approximately three hundred thousand Greeks scattered across Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, some hundred fifty thousand Greeks of Constantinople, and around half a million Muslims living in various parts of Greece including the islands in the Aegean (excluding those under Italian occupation) and lastly about two hundred thousand Muslims in the western part of Thrace (Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, cited under Monographs and Collected Volumes). The convention also included in its scope the Greek and Muslim refugees displaced since the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) by granting them the same rights with those affected by the Greco-Turkish War. Although the Greeks of Constantinople and the Muslims of Western Thrace were exempted from the convention, their minority status was confirmed during the bilateral talks at Lausanne. At the time of the signature of the Greek-Turkish convention, the implementation of formerly signed agreement for a voluntary exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria at Neuilly-sur-Seine (27 November 1919) was still underway and the institutions such as the Mixed Commission established by this treaty were still operating in the field. Both Greece and Bulgaria were involved with hot-heated debates over the interpretation of the agreement’s provisions especially regarding the property-related issues, the definition of the persons who had been displaced prior, the bases of the property appraisals, and the manner of payments. So Neuilly had already created the legal mechanisms, procedures, and principles required for the exchange of populations. The Lausanne Convention came to adapt them to a mandatory situation and integrated them permanently into the diplomatic parlance as well as the framework of the international law, a novelty that makes it one of the most crucial documents of the international law in the twentieth century.