Labour battalions (Turkey)

For more information on similar units, see labour battalion. For Turkish labour battalions during World War II, see The Twenty Classes.
Men of the labour battalions
Greek genocide
Background
Young Turk Revolution, Ottoman Greeks, Pontic Greeks, Ottoman Empire
The genocide
Labour Battalions, Death march, Pontic Greek genocide, Massacre of Phocaea, Evacuation of Ayvalik, İzmit massacres, 1914 Greek deportations, Samsun deportations, Amasya trials, Burning of Smyrna
Foreign aid and relief
Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor, American Committee for Relief in the Near East
Responsible parties
Young Turks or Committee of Union and Progress
Three Pashas: Talat, Enver, Djemal
Bahaeddin Şakir, Teskilati Mahsusa or Special Organization, Nureddin Pasha, Topal Osman, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
See also
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), Greeks in Turkey, Population Exchange, Greek refugees, Armenian genocide, Sayfo, Diyarbekir genocide, Istanbul trials of 1919–1920, Malta Tribunals

Ottoman labour battalions (Turkish: Amele Taburları, Armenian: Աշխատանքային գումարտակ, romanized: Ashkhatank’ayin gumartak, Greek: Τάγματα Εργασίας, romanized: Tagmata Ergasias[a]) was a form of unfree labour in the late Ottoman Empire. The term is associated with the disarmament and murder of Ottoman Armenian soldiers during World War I,[1][2] of Ottoman Greeks during the Greek genocide in the Ottoman Empire[3] and also during the Turkish War of Independence.[4][5][6]


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  1. ^ Foreign Office Memorandum by Mr. G.W. Rendel on Turkish Massacres and Persecutions of Minorities since the Armistice, March 20, 1922, Paragraph 35
  2. ^ "USA Congress, Concurrent Resolution, September 9, 1997". Archived from the original on June 23, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2006.
  3. ^ Morris, Benny; Ze'evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide. Harvard University Press. p. 387. ISBN 9780674240087. Many of the Greek deportations involved chiefly women and children as, by early 1915, most army-age Greek men had been mobilized in Ottoman labor battalions or had fled their homes to avoid conscription.
  4. ^ "Notes on the Genocides of Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire". www.genocidetext.net. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  5. ^ Morris, Benny; Ze'evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide. Harvard University Press. p. 404. ISBN 9780674240087. Early 1921 saw continued pressure for mass conscription of able-bodied Greeks. They were destined for labor battalions, which, 'in reality,' a missionary wrote, meant they would 'starve or freeze to death.'
  6. ^ Andrew R. Basso (2016). "Towards a Theory of Displacement Atrocities: The Cherokee Trail of Tears, The Herero Genocide, and The Pontic Greek Genocide". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 10 (1): 5–29. doi:10.5038/1911-9933.10.1.1297. The Pontic Greeks suffered similar gendered genocide (gendercidal) policy outcomes. The brutal amele taburları were organized and Pontian men were sent there to be slave labourers for the Ottoman Army. In this sense, the YT (Young Turks) and later Kemalist regimes solved two problems at once: they were able to move military materiel and were able to do so by killing Pontian men by indirect means (working them to death) which eliminated a significant portion of the population able to resist genocide.