Australia 1 Jun 2012
Unless you are an apologist for Ottoman ethnic cleansing, the three
great genocides of the early twentieth century and prior to the
Holocaust, are generally held to be the Armenian, Assyrian, and what we
term Pontian genocides. The discontinuity in the titles of these
genocides is apparent from the outset. While the first two denote or
describe an entire people, the latter, defines not a nation but the
inhabitants of a geographic region, namely the Pontic region around the
Black Sea. By strict definition then, the Pontians could be anyone of
the Greek, Turkish, Laz, Armenian, or Kurdish traditional inhabitants of
the region, yet by convention, they are generally held to be those of
Greek origin.
