The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-04-21
LETTERS TO EDITOR
TURKISH PERSECUTION OF CREEKS

To the Editor of The Age-Herald:
 Kindly allow space in your valuable paper to express my thanks in behalf of hundreds cf Greeks in this city for your timely editorial of this date relative to the massacre of Chris tians on the Black sea coast of Asia Minor.
 What Greece needs today, and should have had at the recent peace conference at Paris, was the services and advice of that great diplo- matic genius, M. Venizelos, and the power of his persuasive personality. It is impossible to get away from the fact that Europe is pledged to the hilt to relieve the subject races of Asia Minor from the Ottoman tyranny which they have suffered for centuries. Nevertheless there is great community of Creeks in Pontus, long stretch of territory on the southern shores of the Black sea, who, under the treaty of Sevres receive no such relief although there is dire need for it. Care fully compiled statistics show that during the last seven years the number of Greeks exter- minated in the region amounts to more than 300,000 of the population, in round num- bers, about one-ffth of the total number of Christians in Asia Minor, who have been ex- terminated during that period.
 The methods by which this ruthless work has been carried out vary somewhat in different districts of Pontus, but taken as whole they follow the procedure with which we have be- come familiar wherever Young Turks or Kemal- ists have put their savage policy into practice. We have, therefore, in Pontus the deporta- tions of all able-bodied men in different com munities, the wholesale violation of young women and girls, many of them left afterwards to perish of hunger and disease, while others have suffered the more dreadful fate of being burned alive. As in other parts of Asia Minor, so in Pontus, death by fire has been one of the means of torture very commonly employed. Again and again it has happened that where the people, especially the old folk and chil- dren, have taken refuge in the churches, they have been burned to death together in hideous holocaust, without regard to either age or sex.
 Were it known to Great Britain or France that even 20 people-men, women and chill dren-were about to be burned, or, not in- frequently happens at the hands of the Turks, roasted alive, the country would be swept with a storm of indignation. And yet, when detailed information comes of these horrors perpetrated in Asia Minor; when, for instance, we read of a town of 1900 houses weer burned after all exits had been barricaded and the wretcheo victims hemmed in, how much attention is given by the press and by public opinion to such awful tragedies? Some people seem to have been under the impression that these and other forms of atrocities ceased with the armistice. The very reverse is unhappily the The bloody work has been continued during the last three years Is it any longer to be tolerated. Far from curtailing the scope of the treaty of Sevres, surely it ought on every principle of justice and policy, and having regard to their supreme obligations to the civilized com munities in the east, to be extended by the powers of Europe as to rescue these un- fortunate people in Pontus once and for all from their thraldom and from suffering so far beyond the limits of human endurance.
 JOHN HARMON
 Savoy Apartments.
 Birmiuphan April 19 1922.