The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or the September events (Greek: Σεπτεμβριανά, romanized: Septemvriana, lit. 'Events of September'; Turkish: 6–7 Eylül Olayları, lit. 'Events of 6–7 September'), also referred to as the Turkish Kristallnacht, were a series of state-sponsored anti-Greek mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul's Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The pogrom was orchestrated by the governing Democrat Party in Turkey with the cooperation of various security organizations (Tactical Mobilisation Group, Counter-Guerrilla and National Security Service). The events were triggered by a fake news story which stated that the day before, Greeks had bombed the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Greece, — the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born in 1881. A bomb which was planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press was silent about the arrest, instead, it insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.The pogrom is occasionally described as a genocide against Greeks, since, per Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, despite its relatively low number of deaths, it "satisfies the criteria of article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) because the ‘‘intent to destroy in whole or in part’’ the Greek minority in Istanbul was demonstrably present, the pogrom having been orchestrated by the government of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes" and "As a result of the pogrom, the Greek minority eventually emigrated from Turkey.".A Turkish mob, most of whose members were trucked into the city in advance, assaulted Istanbul's Greek community for nine hours. Although the mob did not explicitly call for the killing of Greeks, over a dozen people died during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson. Armenians and Jews were also harmed. The police were mostly ineffective, and the violence continued until the government declared martial law in Istanbul, called in the army and ordered it to put down the riots. The material damage was estimated at US$500 million, including the burning of churches and the devastation of shops and private homes.The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, in particular the Greeks of Istanbul. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek-speaking population decreased from 65,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry placed the number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at 3,000–4,000; while according to the Human Rights Watch (2006) their number was estimated to be 2,500.The attacks have been described as a continuation of a process of Turkification that started with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as roughly 40% of the properties attacked belonged to other minorities. The pogrom has been compared in some media to the Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany.In 2009, Turkish then-Prime Minister Erdogan said that Turkey has committed mistakes, and that: "Those minorities with different ethnic identities were expelled from our country in the past. It was result of fascist policy."
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