Clark, Bruce 1958-

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Clark, Bruce 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born September 30, 1958, in England.

CAREER:

Journalist and writer. Economist, foreign affairs correspondent; previously Financial Times, diplomatic correspondent; the Times, London, England, Moscow correspondent; Reuters, Athens correspondent.

WRITINGS:

An Empire's New Clothes: The End of Russia's Liberal Dream, Vinatge (London, England), 1995.

Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bruce Clark is a longtime journalist who has written about foreign affairs for several periodicals. In his book Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, the author writes about a forced deportation of approximately two million people that took place during the 1920s in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Belinda Cooper, writing in the New York Times Book Review noted: "Like so many state actions we now condemn, ethnic cleansing was viewed not so long ago as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. In the early part of the 20th century, forced population shifts were not uncommon, as multicultural empires crumbled and nationalism drove the formation of new, ethnically homogenous countries."

The story Clark tells began after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I and the signing of the Lausanne Treaty. The treaty resulted in Orthodox Christians being deported from Turkey to Greece and Muslims being deported from Greece to Turkey. The goal of both the Turkish and Greek governments was twofold. First, they sought to solve a problem of minorities who did not assimilate easily within the respective countries. Secondly, they ultimately sought to develop a society that had a single culture. "For Clark, the Lausanne Treaty does not stand out as a landmark in European history solely because it became a stepping-stone for subsequent piecemeal solutions for many nation states across the globe, but rather due to the consequences that it bore," wrote Spyros Themelis on the A World to Win Web site. Themelis went on to write that the author "is concerned with the deportations that followed and the effects the Treaty had on the lives of nearly two million Greeks and Turks who were dispossessed because they were ‘of the wrong religion,’ as well as on the lives of those who received these refugees in Turkey and Greece."

For his examination of this attempt at ethnic reengineering, Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece and on numerous interviews with survivors of the relocation. The author looks at the enormous human suffering that resulted from the relocations and explores how both sides ultimately came to terms with their new countries and identities. In addition, Clark examines how the exchange affected relations between Turkey and Greece. Natalie Hoare, writing in Geographical, noted that the "personal accounts of the victims make the book a compellingly educational, yet shocking read." Referring to the book as "marvellous" in a review in the Spectator, Christopher Hitchens went on to comment that the author "writes in that almost invisibly good and clear English that I thought had begun to die out of our journalism."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July, 2007, R.A. Miller, review of Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, p. 1961.

Contemporary Review, September 22, 2006, review of Twice a Stranger, p. 408.

Foreign Affairs, January 1, 2007, L. Carl Brown, review of Twice a Stranger, p. 174.

Geographical, April, 2006, Natalie Hoare, review of Twice a Stranger, p. 84.

Maclean's, May 29, 2006, Michael Petrou, "Divided under God: A New Book Looks at the Ethical Implications of Ethnic Resettlement," review of Twice a Stranger, p. 27.

New York Times Book Review, September 17, 2006, Belinda Cooper, "Trading Places," review of Twice a Stranger.

Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2006, review of Twice a Stranger, p. 50.

Spectator, April 8, 2006, Christopher Hitchens, "Relocation with a Vengeance," review of Twice a Stranger, p. 43.

Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 2006, Andrew Mango, "Still Unsettled," review of Twice a Stranger, p. 26.