captured by the Greeks at Bandırma and Gönen in
July 1920.//
A Lieutenant’s Statement
The amount of cruelties, torture and atrocities inflicted on
both prisoners
and the populace by the Greeks from the time they occupied
Bandırma on
21 July 1920 to its liberation is too great to quantify, because
there was no
limit to the indescribable cruelties the barbarous Greeks
perpetrated
against the human spirit and in violation of the laws of
civilization. I
now rise to boldly assert a portion of these
horrific crimes that I witnessed
being inflicted against myself and against the
populace.
During the time that the Greeks occupied Bandırma I was
under treatment
and in no position to walk or move. On the first night of the occupation, I
was
captured as an augmentary company of the 8th ?Mazragi? Division
inflicted
unbearable tortures. I was faced
with all kinds of inhumane
threats. On the one hand, my illness was worsening and,
on the other, the
number of cruelties increased, as all my money and property
were all taken
away from me and I was thrown in a prison fit for
murderers. They
brought us – farm
workers, civilians and soldiers – as a group of war
prisoners to the place of
imprisonment. With various threats of
torture,
beatings and bayonets, they took everyone’s clothes and shoes. The
stipped everyone naked. They killed with bayonet and rifle butt blows
that crushed brains, bit off the ears of a soldier named Mehmed from
Bandırma’s
Ömer village and cut up his mouth with a ‘kasatura’ bayonet.
I saw many innocents who were killed by
cutting off their toes.
The railroad tracks mentioned can be seen above in black-white
checkered lines.
There were many witnesses to all of this, including myself
and prisoners
Major Rıza, the Biga Gendarmerie Commander, and Ziya of Edincik,
along with some others whose names I can’t recall. There are no
Bandırma railway workers who
don’t know about the six soldiers whose
heads were cut off with ‘kasatura’
bayonets and put in a sack at the mouth
of the tunnel near the station and then
thrown, along with their bodies,
into the sea near a warehouse next to the
station, because they all saw it
with their own eyes. There is no doubt in my mind that I would
have
suffered the same fate if it had not been for my illness, because they
continually threatened that they would have cut me into pieces if I was
able-bodied.
I am able to confirm all of this along with my fellow
prisoners. Everyone witnessed the cruelties inflicted on
boys, teenagers,
men and women. They
gathered up young bride-aged girls from Mihalic
and surrounding villages,
hustled them into automobiles, raped them and
drowned them in the sea and
burned them alive – there was no limit to
these atrocities.
In summary, the Greeks perpetrated many
cruelties and abominations on
both the populace and soldiers. There is no way to calculate the number
of
them. I hereby make this statement to
the concerned authorities
knowing that it is my sacred duty to make known to
the entire civilized
world just what kind of creatures the Greeks are.
Lieutenant Nafız bin Mustafa, Heavy Artillary Regiment 5317,
Company 58
Bursa
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What a Prisoner Officer Said:
I
was taken prisoner along with 11 other officers of my regiment in the
vicinity
of Gönen on 30 July 1920. The Greeks
transported me and my
friends along the way to Bandırma under the most hellish
conditions of
torture. In Bandırma, they
made us wait for hours in the burning July
sun in a place covered with
filth. After we were subjected to the
degradation of the Christian populace, we were boarded onto a ship and
transported to Izmir’s Urla Island (a.k.a. Klazomen), where we remained
for about 35 days under
the horrific supervision of bloody killers who
were volunteers and members of
Armenian and Greek gangs.
I was then
transported to the Greek capital, along with the other prisoner
officers at
Urla. While we were at Urla we received
nothing in the way
of clothing and we were subjected to all sorts of
mistreatment by our
guards. There were
also hundreds of soldiers and civilians held on this
island. These individuals moaned under the constant
torture and
ill-treatment inflicted on them by the medic guards. After we stayed
confined to rooms for a few
days in Athens, we were transported to
Corfu Island in a small ship with only a third of the
capacity necessary
to accommodate we 85 officers.
Urla-Klazomen island was a quarantine station, just
off the coast in Urla, west of Izmir.
On Corfu Island we were settled into a
military hospital in the fortress,
although we were not under bayonet
supervision. We got nothing in the
way
of food or clothing. All we got were 440
Greek drahmas, the
monthly stipend for a lieutenant. This amount was equal to what
7 Ottoman liras
were worth 2 years ago. With this amount
of money we
had to obtain not just food and clothing, but all of our required
needs.
We got this salary sometimes once
every three months and sometimes
once every four months.
Every minute of every day we were subjected to degradation
for no
reason by the soldiers and officers in the hospital. And for the most part
egged on by the
officers, the hospital soldiers would inflict degradation
on our fellows and
sometimes some of the officer beat my friend to
within an inch of their
lives. Every so often, we would complain
about
this ill treatment to Greek generals who came to inspect, but our
complaints fell on deaf ears.
Corfu Island is at upper left.
While at the same hospital, a Greek captain, one of the
guards, subjected
our most senior member in the camp, Artillery Colonel İsmail
Hakkı, to
inhumane treatment for no reason whatsoever and imprisoned him in the
cellar. Even though we complained to all
the Greek commanders about
this captain’s illegal and unjust treatment, we were
unsuccessful in
liberating our most senior member from this damp dungeon with a
concrete floor and dripping ceiling. İsmail
Hakkı was finally taken out
of this horrific prison after about 15 days by the
Greeks but no action was
taken against the Greek captain.
Another time at this hospital I had to lie down because of a stomach
ailment. At
this time I saw two civilian Turks come to the hospital from
the dungeons. I learned that they were near death so I ran
to their sides.
I saw how pale their
faces were and I was so affected by the condition of
my co-religionists that I nearly fainted. It was impossible to speak with
them verbally
so I tried very hard to communicate with them with signs.
It turned out that these poor fellows were
from Ezine and had been
forceably taken from their homes there for no reason by
the Greeks and
jailed. Finally, they
were transported to Greece’s Midilli Island, where
there were thousands of
Turkish civilian and military prisoners, hundreds
of whom died each day from
lack of food and from being forced to drink
sea water. They were imprisoned on Midilli for a few
months and then
transported to Corfu.
During the voyage they drank sea water and their
stomachs swelled so
they were put in the hospital for treatment.
I then
saw that these two poor fellows, left for two days without any
care or
attention, died one day apart.
The other prisoner officers imprisoned
with me in the hospital were also
aware of these same events.
The civilian POWs the writer encountered on Corfu Island had
been taken prisoner in Ezine, south of Çanakkale, and first
imprisoned on Midilli Island.
We learned that of the thousands of civilian and military
prisoners in the
dungeon prisons on Corfu, more than 20 of them died each day from just
from hunger. Although we appealed to the Greeks to give
our co-
religionists and fellow citizens enough food to live on, all of our
appeals
went for nought.
Second Lieutenant Ahmed Şekri of the former 61st Division,
189th
Regiment, who has returned from captivity in Greece.
//END of PART VII//
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