WHEN YOU ARE BROTHERS WITH THE GREEK
Once upon a time, a young Turk, working as a press attaché in the Turkish Embassy in London, began to feel homesick. Post-war 1947 London, still reeling after the bombings of the Second World War, was a drab, austere and cold place, very different from his vibrant home city of Constantinople, which emerged from the conflagration unscathed, owing to Turkey’s neutrality.
The dislocation from his homeland seems to have had a distinct effect upon the nostalgic young diplomat. In particular, it facilitated him finding common cause with other expatriates from neighbouring countries, sharing related cultures who shared the same pinings for home. A gifted poet, while looking at the leaden sky brooding low over exhausted London, he saw in its place, only the deep azure sky and sea of his motherland, realising that its majesty cannot be confined by borders. Taking up his pen, he wrote:
“You become aware when you feel homesick
That you are brothers with the Greek;
Just look at a child of Istanbul
Listening to a Greek epic.
We've sworn at each other
In the free manner of our language.
We've drawn knife on blood
Yet a love lies hidden in us
For days of peace like these.
What if in our veins
It were the same blood that flows?
From the same air in our hearts
A crazy wind blows.
So generous like this rain
And warm like the sun.
The armfuls of goodness of spring
That surge from within.
Our hostility is like a drink
Distilled from the fruit of the climate
As harmful and as tasteful as any drink.
From this water from this taste have we sinned.
A blue magic between us
And this warm sea
And two peoples on its shores
Equals in beauty.
The golden age of the Aegean
Will revive through us
As with the fire of the future
The hearth of the past comes alive.
First a merry laughter comes to your ear
Then some Turkish with a Greek accent.
Nostalgic about the Bosporus
And you remember the Raki.
It is when you are homesick
That you recall you are brothers with the Greek.”
The poet granted the poem the title: Türk-yunan Şiiri (“Turkish-Greek Poem”) and leaving London, he travelled to America, where as a guest journalist for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, he bravely decried the endemic racism of the 1950’s American South, castigating the so-called ‘democratic’ Americans for being:
“guilty of refusing to drink from the same fountain as the man who has fought on the same front for the same cause; guilty of refusing to travel on the same coach or seat as the man who has been working with equal ardour for a common community; guilty of refusing to pray to God side by side with the man who believes in the same prophet’s teaching.”
This man, possessed of such lofty and noble humanitarian ideals, inordinately cultured and utterly convinced of the brotherhood of all mankind, a radical who once opined: “Those wanting to improve democracy in their countries should not wait for permission,” was Bülent Ecevit. In 1974, as Prime Minister of Turkey, he ordered the Invasion of Cyprus.
Ever the humanitarian, he made the order, invoking Turkey’s right under the Treaty of Guarantee to protect the Turkish Cypriots and guarantee the independence of Cyprus. After all, it was the Greek Junta who had toppled the democratically elected government of Cyprus and sought to compromise its independence. Did not the ethnarch Archbishop and President Makarios, in his speech to the UN security council, describe the coup which replaced him as “an invasion of Cyprus by Greece?” Did he not state that there were “no prospects” of success in the talks aimed at resolving the situation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, as long as the leaders of the coup, sponsored and supported by Greece, were in power?
Ecevit must have taken Archbishop Makarios at his word and the West applauded him for it. In Resolution 573, the Council of Europe supported the legality of the first wave of the Turkish invasion that he ordered, as per Article 4 of the Guarantee Treaty of 1960, which allows Turkey, Greece, and the United Kingdom to unilaterally intervene militarily in failure of a multilateral response to crisis in Cyprus.
It must have been under the inspiration of his verses “We've drawn knife on blood/Yet a love lies hidden in us,” that Ecevit ordered the Second Invasion of Cyprus, which, in keeping with his high minded and morally principled world-view, he named his “Second Peace Operation.” It is in the furtherance of that hidden love for his fellow Greek that Ecevit’s army extended its occupation from merely the zone around Kyrenia, to thirty percent of the entire island.
It must have been while pondering the question he posed in his poem: “What if in our veins/ It were the same blood that flows?” that the poet ordered his army to ethnically cleanse the northern part of Cyprus, driving 160,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes, slaughtering and raping the innocent, looting, pillaging and destroying their cultural heritage and creating over two thousand missing persons, the vast majority of whom are still unaccounted for.
I wonder whether he recalled the verses of his poem: “The hearth of the past comes alive./ First a merry laughter comes to your ear,” when he allowed himself to be portrayed in propaganda posters as a benign figure, smiling approvingly as the soldiers under his command crush defenceless civilians under their jackboot.
Indeed, I wonder whether the poet remembered just how fervently he chastised the American imperialists when he presided over the setting up of a system where Turkish and Greek Cypriots could not drink from the same fountain, nor travel on the same coach or seat, could not pray to God side by side, with least fifty five churches having been converted into mosques and another fifty churches and monasteries into stables, stores, hostels, or demolished, along with their adjacent cemeteries and indeed, could not live next to each other. A regime which used rape systematically to "soften" resistance and clear civilian areas through fear, where even the Greek Cypriots left behind in Karpassia are still subject to harassment and intimidation half a century later. Was it for the poet’s passionately hoped for “days of peace like these,” that so many crimes were committed and so much heartbreak was caused?
By the time the European Commission of Human Rights issued its reports of 1976 and 1983, Ecevit was not longer Prime Minister, assassination attempts and a Turkish Military Coup having intervened. I wonder, though whether he reflected upon the: “blue magic between us/ And this warm sea” as he read the Commission’s finding on the crimes committed at his behest:
“Having found violations of a number of Articles of the Convention, the Commission notes that the acts violating the Convention were exclusively directed against members of one of two communities in Cyprus, namely the Greek Cypriot community. It concludes by eleven votes to three that Turkey has thus failed to secure the rights and freedoms set forth in these Articles without discrimination on the grounds of ethnic origin, race, religion as required by Article 14 of the Convention.”
Ecevit, Turkey’s only ever Socialist Prime Minister, harboured a great love for releasing doves of peace into the air during his election rallies and the dove is still the emblem of the Democratic Left Party which he founded. I wonder as he released those doves into the air and as he accepted the soubriquet Kıbrıs Fatihi "Conqueror of Cyprus,” whether he considered that it must have been a: “surge from within./ [A] hostility.. like a drink/ Distilled from the fruit of the climate/ As harmful and as tasteful as any drink,” that caused him to equate violence, brutality, apartheid and racial intolerance with peace. I wonder, as I re-read his poem time and time again, agreeing with him in his description of the Aegean: “two peoples on its shores/ Equals in beauty,” what hurts more: the pain of a crime that has been perpetuated for the past forty nine years, or that long before the time of his death in 2006, Ecevit was no longer homesick and thus unable to: “recall [that his people are] brothers with the Greek.”
DEAN KALIMNIOU
posted by PANEPIROTIC FEDERATION OF AUSTRALIA at Saturday, July 15, 2023
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