My Greek Odyssey

Battle Over History

The Divisons of Cyprus by Perry Anderson

To bring the island to heel, London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as his word. The standard repertoire of repression was applied. Makarios was deported. Demonstrations were banned, schools closed, trade-unions outlawed. Communists were locked up, EOKA suspects hanged. Curfews, raids, beatings, executions were the background against which, a year later, Cyprus supplied the air-deck for the Suez expedition. As one kind of national resistance was being hunted in cellars and hills, another was attacked round the clock from bases a few miles away, British and French aircraft taking off and landing at the rate of one a minute, dropping bombs and paratroops on Egypt. Failure to repossess the canal had no immediate impact on London’s determination to hold onto Cyprus. But with Eden’s departure, British policies began to assume more definitive shape.

From the beginning, colonial rule had used the Turkish minority as a mild counterweight to the Greek majority, without giving it any particular advantages or paying overmuch attention to it. But once demands for Enosis could no longer be ignored, London began to fix its attention on the uses to which the community could be put. It was not large, less than a fifth of the population, but nor was it negligible. Poorer and less educated than the Greek majority, it was also less active. But forty miles across the water lay Turkey itself, not only much larger than Greece, but more unimpeachably conservative, without even a defeated left in prison or exile. No sooner was the referendum of 1950 on Enosis underway – at the very outset of the troubles in Cyprus – than the British ambassador in Ankara advised the Labour regime in London: ‘The Turkish card is a tricky one, but useful in the pass to which we have come.’ It would be played, with steadily less scruple or limit, to the end.

Initially, Ankara was slow to respond to British solicitations that it make itself felt on the future of Cyprus. ‘Even when Britain did start to press the Cyprus button with the Turks, the effect was not at first to trigger the instantaneous reactions that were hoped for: “curiously vacillating” and “curiously equivocal” were remarks typical of the puzzlement felt on this score in London,’ records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains . . . a notable fact that it was the British who, in the first instance, had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round.’ When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch from the forms it took. Within a month of EOKA’s appearance in Cyprus, Eden was already minuting that any offer made to tamp down local unrest must have the prior approval of Turkey, which – as the Colonial Office would put it – had to be given ‘a fair crack of the whip’.

When the whip was cracked, it came steel-tipped. ‘A few riots in Ankara would do us nicely,’ an official in the Foreign Office had noted. In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed at a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal Ataturk was born in Salonica. At the signal of this ‘Greek provocation’, mobs swarmed through Istanbul looting Greek businesses, burning Orthodox churches, and attacking Greek residents. Although no one in official circles in London doubted that the pogrom was unleashed by the Turkish government, Macmillan – in charge of the talks – pointedly did not complain.

Internal developments lent a hand to this external lever. Ready enough to kill Communists, Grivas had given EOKA strict instructions not to attack Turks, whom he had no wish to antagonise, but to target Greek collaborators with the British, above all in the police. Under EOKA pressure, their number rapidly dwindled. To replace them, Harding recruited Turks, and added a Police Mobile Reserve, dipping for the purpose into the lumpen element in the Turkish community, let loose for savagery when the occasion required. In due course, as Holland notes, the whole security machine came to depend on Turkish auxiliaries. The result was to create a gulf between the two communities that had never existed before. It widened still further when Ankara, now fully engaged in remote control of the minority, riposted to EOKA by setting up its own armed organisation on the island, the TNT – soon killing leftists on its own side, to which the British turned a blind eye.

After Suez, London started to edge towards another way of playing its chosen card, in a larger game. Hints began to be dropped that some kind of partition of Cyprus might be a solution. Menderes, the Turkish premier, who had already been promised that Turkey could station troops on the island if Britain were ever forced to concede self-determination, snapped up the suggestion, telling Alan Lennox-Boyd, the colonial secretary, in December 1956 that ‘we have done this sort of thing before – you will see it is not as bad as all that’: words to make any Greek with a memory of 1922-23 tremble. Harding disliked the idea, regarding it as underhand, and even within the Foreign Office a fear was eventually expressed that this might arouse ‘unhappy memories of the Sudetenland’. Nor were US officials at all pleased when the scheme was intimated to Washington, where it was condemned as a ‘forcible vivisection’ of the island. If the objective in London was to keep control of Cyprus by splitting it in two under British suzerainty, the American fear was that this would arouse such anger in Greece that it risked toppling a loyal regime, handing power to the subversive forces still lurking in the country. In Britain, such concerns counted for less. Our man in Ankara, urging the need to ‘cut the Gordian knot and reach a decision now for partition’, had greater weight.

In the event, it was Turkey that took the first practical steps. In June 1958, repeating the operation in Salonica, its intelligence agents set off an explosion in the Turkish Information Office in Nicosia. Once again, a fabricated outrage – no one was actually hurt – was the signal for orchestrated mob violence against Greeks. Security forces stood by as houses were set on fire and people killed, in the first major communal clashes since the Emergency was declared. The upshot, clearly planned in advance, was the eviction of Greeks from Turkish areas in Nicosia and other cities, and the seizure of municipal facilities, to create self-contained Turkish enclaves: piecemeal partition, on the ground. Its organisers could be sure of British complaisance. The day before the rampage – Harding was now out of it – the new governor, Labour’s future Lord Caradon, had assured its leaders that the Turkish community would enjoy ‘a specially favoured and specially protected state’ under future British arrangements. A few months later, the colonial secretary was publicly referring to Cyprus as ‘an offshore Turkish island’.

Read the whole thing here.

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GRIGORIS BITHIKOTSIS-RAINING IN THE SLUM

Refreshing Turkish Memories

The very foundation of a civilization which is the heritage of centuries, the property of all mankind, has been gravely attacked. The sacred things of our religion have been defiled, seventy of our churches and houses of worship destroyed and most of them set on fire. Our sacred objects of religion were desecrated, floundered and plundered. The graves of our dead, including those of the Patriarchs were broken open. Newly buried corpses were torn to pieces, the bones of the dead removed from their resting places, scattered around and set on fire. Our clergy men were everywhere persecuted. When found they were manhandled, threatened with killing, and one of them was actually put to death. The immunity of private dwellings was violated, virgins were ravished, and even the sick, old and children were maltreated. All of us, without any defence, spent moments of agony, and in vain sought and waited for protection from those responsible for order and tranquillity.  From a letter to Adnan Menderes from Patriarch Athenagoras November 15, 1955

For the Greeks of Constantinople, September is a time of remembrance. It marks the sad anniversary of the 1955 pogrom, an event that my family and I lived through and which changed our lives forever. Things would never be the same. For the few remaining Greeks still living in Turkey, most of them elderly and those of us who now live elsewhere, this month, in particular is a portent of a future in which the more things change, the more they remain the same.

In modern day Turkey, the chilling reminders of past atrocities, designed to send an unmistakable message, pass without a whimper from the local press or government officials. On the anniversary of events which saw the the wonton desecration of churches and cemeteries. we are forced to relive those events by being silent witnesses to the desecration of our cemeteries by a new wave of hate. Once again Christians are identified and marked for elimination as they were in 1955 when Greek businesses and homes were painted with a red cross in the dead of night. 

The events of 1955 are of course, another piece of history that has been expunged from Turkish history books. Even the exhibition of police photos saved by a government prosecutor caused an uproar when they were shown in 2005. Recently a much touted Turkish film, Güz Sancısı, or The Pain of Autumn made its debut. It's claim to fame is that it is the first time that the entire subject has been served up to a mass Turkish audience. It was intriguing to think of such a film finally seeing the light of day. Until I saw it. 

The film revolves around a love story between a Turkish man and Greek woman, with the events surrounding the pogrom serving as a backdrop. While it does at least try to touch upon what happened, it does so in such a manner so as not to reveal the full extent of what actually happened. There is no attempt made to show the full extent of the atrocities that occurred. It perpetuates the falsehood that the entire thing was planned and executed by right wing nationalist members of the deep state. In actuality the pogrom was centrally organized, many of the rioters recruited in Istanbul and in the provinces by the party of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. They were transported by train, trucks, and some 4,000 taxis, with specific targets and instructions. They were given axes, crowbars, acetylene torches, gas, dynamite, and large amounts of rocks in carts. The Turkish military planned and directed the entire operation. The Army and Police intentionally refrained from protecting the lives and properties of the Greek victims, their primary mission being to preserve Turkish property and protect it from being destroyed. Interestingly, Menderes was later hung from the Galata bridge for the crime of "abuse of discretionary funds."  Subsequent governments have named an international airport, a University and two high schools in his honor, ignoring his infamous crimes against the Greek minority, which after all, was business as usual in Turkey and a job well done.

The other problem I had with this film is the way that it depicts Greeks. The heroine is a prostitute who is sold to the highest bidder by her Greek grandmother who sees the Turkish boyfriend as a threat not because he is Turkish but because she might lose her meal ticket. The Greek victims of the pogrom are mostly an invisible group in this film. Nothing about churches or cemeteries being desecrated or even the extent of what happened. Anyone without an inkling about what really happened, i.e. most Turks, would wonder what the fuss was all about. The only sympathetic characters beside the two lovers are all the Turks who stand heroically in front of apartment buildings marked as containing Greeks (but where they also happen to live) and a rather troublesome journalist who meets a grisely fate at the hands of some villainous deep state goons. If this is an example of a Turkish attempt at honesty or even progress, in the hopes of expiating their genocidal sins, I am not impressed. 

The Pogrom of 1955, imposed on innocent Turkish citizens of Greek origin by their own government must be seen in the light of a religiously driven program of genocide and ethnic cleansing executed by successive Turkish governments.  It was designed to put the finishing touches on an ethnically pure Turkey however, it was only one of many pogroms before, during, and after the First World War, which included the elimination of the Greek communities of the Pontos and Asia Minor numbering in the millions. It must always be viewed in that historical context.  Unfortunately, there are always new enemies to expunge as the Greeks of Cyprus and the Kurds of Turkey have discovered.

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Turkish Friendship

I am always surprised that MGO is visited and read by a significant number of Turkish readers who either live in Turkey or elsewhere. At times, they outnumber my readers who live in Greece.  Occasionally, they leave comments and although they are uniformly polite and most embrace some sort of Greek-Turkish friendship, they often espouse views that I think are indicative of the deep divide between Greeks and Turks. Almost two years ago I wrote a post which still seems to engender the periodic comment.  Hande recently made the following comment which is typical of the feedback I receive:

"History, history, history...Keeps repeating all the time. I dont really understand what is the importance to keep bring up this subject and be stuck on the past? And pointing in one way or another who did what, who is guilty?  Where is this going to lead anyway?........Turks don't hate Greeks! Like Greeks have been thinking all these years about Turks. But ironically its actually more the Greeks who still hate the Turks because of history/politics. Greece and Cyprus don't even come close to seeking a peace with Turkey because they are not willing to let go of the past and to get rid of this hate.  As long as the hate and the hostility remain inside it will be impossible to find the peace and the future can't get better. It's really, really sad why it just can't be like in the old times, when we lived side by side as friends with peace."

As someone who was born in Turkey, I grew up listening to the funny stories of Nasrudin Hoca.  He was a 13th century philosopher and wise man who lived in Anatolia, and is remembered throughout the Islamic world for his stories and anecdotes. Nasrudin's stories can be described as a repository of folk wisdom both illogical yet logical, bizarre yet normal, foolish yet brilliant, and simple yet profound, very much akin to Aesop's fables. Even more unique was how he gets his unconventional message across. My mother, in particular, always had a Nasrudin anecdote which magically appeared whenever she wanted to drive some lesson home to her wayward son.

As I write this I have no intention to embarass nor do I hold any malice toward Hande, who I believe sincerely wants to see better relations between Greeks and Turks. I welcome a dialogue on the subject and I will respond by first quoting a Nasrudin anecdote:

 Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite  side:

    "Hey! how do I get to the other side?"

    "You are on the other side!" Nasrudin shouted back.

Greeks and Turks have a great deal of shared history. I personally am a great proponent of its study. It explains a great deal and if we avoid the all too customary attempts to rewrite it to our liking, we might learn enough from it to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the past. Most Greeks and Turks see history a little differently because they have been taught different versions of it. I think however, that if we can agree on one thing it is that for a very long time the relationship between Turk and Greek was very unequal, i.e. conqueror and conquered. It was a tenuous relationship, a Turk could be a friend one day and signing your death warrant the next.

Given your dislike of history and its stubborn facts, let's put it aside and fast forward to the present.

-The Greek minority in Istanbul, Tenedos and Imvros, a protected minority, is hovering around 2000,  down  from well over 200,000 in 1922. The Greeks whose property was destroyed or confiscated in the Pogrom of 1955 have never been compensated nor have they ever received an official apology.

-Turkish warplanes constantly violate Greek airspace, often directly flying over populated Greek islands in the Aegean.

-The Turkish Army illegally occupies almost half of the island of Cyprus which it cleansed of its original inhabitants. The Turkish authorities are currently selling Greek owned properties to the highest bidder while systematically destroying every vestige of the Greek cultural and religious heritage of the occupied territory.

-The Muslim minority which consists of Pomaks (Muslim Slavs), Roma and Turks in Thrace, also a protected minority, has grown from 85000 in 1922 to 100,000, and is the target of Turkish attempts to claim Turkish identity for is disparate groups.

-The Orthodox Patriarch, who must by law be a Turkish citizens, is not allowed to reopen the Halki seminary thus in effect condemning the Patriarchate to eventual extinction.

These are hardly manifestations of Turkish "friendship."   I suggest to you that even if we set aside the historical context of our two peoples, we cannot as easily set aside these current and divisive issues.  Recently hundreds of pilgrims from Russia and Greece traveled to the Monastery of Panagia Soumela in Trabzon.  Many of them were descendants of the Pontic Greeks who lived along the Black Sea coast for thousands of years before the arrival of the Turks. Over half a million were killed and the rest were forcibly evicted from their lands and homes, well before the exchange of populations decreed by the Treaty of Lausanne. This small group of tourists had the audacity to attempt to hold a small prayer service outside the monastery, an Orthodox religious site that is over a thousand years old and still sacred to Orthodox Christians.  The Turkish government has converted it to a museum for tourists. The prayer service took place on the occasion of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The service was interrupted by the Director of the Trabzon Museum, Nilgun Yilmazer, who tried to stop the prayer saying, "Sumela is not a place open to prayer." The incident was captured on video and reported in the Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet, which by the way, incorrectly states that the monastery was "abandoned."  The monks who occupied it were either killed or were focrcibly evicted by the Turkish military, they hardly left of their own accord.

Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey on a strict principle of secularism. In Turkey, secularism does not mean the separation of state and religion, but rather the control of religion by the state. For Muslims it means women are not allowed to wear a head scarf  while attending a university, for Christians it means something completely different. It means in many cases that they are not allowed to freely practice their religion in a country that professes freedom of religion for all.  There is an ongoing power struggle for Turkey's soul between the secular Kemalists and the Islamists. Neither group is dedicated to protecting individual freedoms and rights and both groups subscribe to the ultra-nationalist thinking that breeds an environment in which Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is a bestseller, the Armenian and Pontic genocides are denied, minorities are persecuted and dreams of a new Ottoman Empire are revived. Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor, was murdered by such a nationalist. It is this mix of virulent nationalism and predatory Islam in Turkey that poses such a challenge for many well meaning and peace loving Turks who want their country to change for the better.

As Nasrudin cleverly points out, Hande, the problem is not on the other side of the river, it is on your side.

Turkey: Regional Hegemon

President Obama during his recent visit to Turkey avoided using the dreaded "genocide" word. Sometimes Presidents on state visits are more constrained about the words they use than Senators trolling for votes. In 1915, another American, the US Ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau was not so circumspect in describing the indiscriminate slaughter of Armenians, documented in numerous consular dispatches, with a much more apt term: "race murder."  A touchy issue, one that that successive Turkish governments have made every effort to discredit and expunge from the historical record.   In Turkey, public comment about the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during and after World War I is not only a taboo subject, it is illegal and capable of resulting in an extended vacation in a Turkish prison.

Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, adopted in June 2005, states that:

"Public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years."

"Public denigration of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security matters shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years."

There are an increasing number of Turks who have taken the risk of talking about the subject such as the best-selling Turkish novelists Elif Shafak and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish Publishers' Association reports that more than 60 writers and journalists have been charged under Article 301 with various forms of "insulting Turkishness," including the intellectual transgression of allegedly insulting Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. In 2007, a high-profile Turkish-Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, who had been convicted of insulting Turkey's identity, was shot and killed in Istanbul.

Unfortunately the American view of Turkey, exemplified by a string of Presidents and State Department bureaucrats reinforces its status as an "indispensable" ally and ignores such minor transgressions..  Thus, we overlook the crimes of Turkey's paranoid nationalist military overseers and the indiscretions of its current anti-Western Islamist government for elusive short-term political gains. Trifles like its nominal participation in Afghanistan (where there have been zero Turkish casualties), the use of Incirlik air base or its crumbling alliance with Israel. Now its emergence as a regional power has further dampened any outrage over Turkey's treatment of her minorities or its clear record of human rights violations bringing only the occasional gentle nudge or lukewarm encouragement to act like the European country it is not.  It is becoming increasingly clear to most Europeans that Turkey's entry into the EU which promises to give  Turkey a majority representation in the European parliament will permanently and irrevocably transform the European character of the continent. The Europeans were treated to a glimpse of what is in store for them at the NATO summit when Turks fought to derail the appointment of a great Dane, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as the new NATO secretary general because he supported the free speech rights of those Danes who dare to caricature the Prophet Mohammed.  Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan  demands included the closure of a Kurdish satellite television broadcaster based in Denmark; the establishment of contacts between NATO and Islamic countries; appointment of a Turk as an aide to Fogh Rasmussen and senior NATO command positions for Turkish generals.

At one time, Turkish strategists once sought refuge within the NATO camp for protection against the Soviet threat. Now they are unabashedly exercising more assertive security policies as they seek to take advantage of new opportunities and preserve Turkish interests in the face of an uncertain future. Turkey's strategic position places it in the center of three unstable regions, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Turkish conventional military capabilities are outstripping those of its neighbors including Iran and Russia, making it a formidable player in the region.  The Turkish defense modernization program laid out in the final years of the Cold War sought to develop a force capable of an integrated air-land battle as part of the NATO alliance. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rest of NATO downsized as Ankara continued to increase defense spending on major systems into the future. The growing unpredictability of Turkish security policy, coupled with Ankara’s increased military capability, contributes to increasing regional instability. Instability which Turkey is poised to take advantage of.

Turkey is not the benevolent secular democracy it is portrayed as by its many friends in Washington. The Turkish government is whipping up Islamic fundamentalism and is systematically dismantling the Kemalist secular state from within. It's goal is nothing less than the establishment of an Islamic state in its place and the only thing that is standing in the way is a corrupt but powerful military establishment.  Irregardless of ideology, Turkish nationalists have a long record of suppressing minorities, most recently the Kurds.  The Turks have used much of the time since the establishment of the modern Turkish state to consolidate their position such that Turks and only Turks reign supreme in their realm. The Armenians were finally expelled in the dying days of World War I. The Greeks and Assyrians were eliminated shortly thereafter. Religious freedom for the few remaining Christians that still live in Turkey is a sham maintained for outside consumption.  Aggressive and intimidating actions in Cyprus and continued Aegean overflights are not signs of a nation seeking peaceful co-existence with weaker neighbors. What Europeans and Americans alike fail to realize is that Turkey is not an impoverished Third World country but rather the heir to an Ottoman legacy. It was a German ally in World War I, Nazi-friendly in World War II, and raped Cyprus with impunity while we stood aside.

The Balkans and Caucasus, both former Ottoman provinces, are again available for exploitation.  Turkey is increasingly meddling in such places as Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Greek Thrace where it is increasingly seen as a protector of Muslim populations. Even the Arabs, who view Iran as a hostile power with a heretical religion and a revolutionary foreign policy calling for the overthrow of most of the Arab regimes, look to Turkey (notwithstanding its Ottoman past) as a trusted mediator and model. Turkey is now a free agent, no longer beholden or constrained by Americans or Europeans, with very few restrictions, but dabbling in events throughout its entire periphery. The portents for the future are not auspicious.