Lausanne Population Engineering
Compulsory exchange as post-partition genocide-attempt demographic engineering
The 1923 Lausanne Convention imposed a compulsory population exchange that uprooted roughly 1.5 million people on religious lines. Greece and the British-chaired Allied settlement treated Turkish Muslims of Greece and Orthodox populations of Anatolia as interchangeable cargo—legalizing prior genocide-attempt expulsions as peace technology.
Damage
Compulsory population exchange completed a genocide-attempt expulsion of Turkish Muslims from Greece and Orthodox communities from Anatolia by treaty design.
Lives lost
Exchange mortality and prior war deaths in the hundreds of thousands (order-of-magnitude)
Value lost
Abandoned property and destroyed communal capital on both shores
Record Points
- About 350,000-400,000 Muslims were expelled from Greece to Turkey under the compulsory exchange clauses.
- Orthodox Christians of Anatolia were likewise uprooted, completing a bilateral ethnic engineering project.
- Exceptions for Western Thrace and Istanbul still left both communities under permanent minority insecurity.
- British and Allied diplomacy framed the exchange as a peace technology that legitimized prior expulsions.
- Property seizures and refugee destitution followed as states refused full restitution.