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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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.
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.'
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.