GREECE UNCONQUERED: KATINA AMONG THE RUINS

 

Among the many narratives to emerge from the tumult of the Second World War, few possess the quiet intensity and symbolic magnitude of Roald Dahl’s Katina. First published in March 1944 in Ladies’ Home Journal, while the world still reeled from conflict, the story was inspired by Dahl’s experiences as a Royal Air Force pilot stationed in Greece during the spring of 1941. It was a moment of profound despair and dislocation. The German invasion had shattered Greek resistance, the government had fled into exile, and British and Commonwealth forces were in chaotic retreat. Out of this landscape of devastation Dahl forged a story that transcends military history. At its centre stands a child, a little orphaned girl named Katina, whose raised fist towards the heavens amidst the ruins encapsulates the unbroken soul of an entire people.

Dahl’s fiction is often celebrated for its mordant humour, its dark ironies and its playfulness, yet Katina belongs to another register entirely. It is a serious, elegiac work, suffused with an admiration that is both personal and profound. Its origins lie deep within Dahl’s wartime service. In the spring of 1941 he flew with No. 80 Squadron RAF in embattled Greece, taking part in air operations that culminated in the Battle of Athens on 20 April. He witnessed the catastrophic bombing of Piraeus, the swift collapse of Greek defences and the desperate withdrawal that followed. During this time he encountered the people of Greece less as remote and subordinate allies than as valiant comrades enduring a shared ordeal. It was this encounter that inspired Katina, a fictionalised narrative that seeks to capture the essence of a people who, though overrun and bereft, refused to incline their heads before their conquerors.

The plot appears deceptively simple. A squadron of RAF pilots stationed at a forward base in Greece encounters a very young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, wandering alone near their encampment. She is barefoot, ragged and dazed. Her village has been bombed, her family annihilated, and she has no one left in the world. The men, stirred by compassion, take her in. They feed her, clothe her and offer her shelter. They attempt, in their halting and awkward way, to provide comfort and protection. Katina speaks only a few words, enough to communicate simple thoughts, but it is her presence rather than her speech that binds them to her. She follows them around the base, observes their labours and listens intently to their conversations. Gradually she becomes their constant companion and, more importantly, the moral centre of their world.

The pivotal moment of the story arrives during a German air raid. As bombs descend and the men rush to their stations, Katina steps out into the open air, diminutive and unarmed, and raises her fist skyward. She shouts, though the words themselves are unimportant. What matters is the raw, physical defiance of the gesture. It is the act of a child who has lost everything and yet refuses to surrender. It proclaims that the enemy may possess overwhelming might, yet the will of those they seek to subjugate remains forever beyond their reach.

At this instant Katina ceases to function merely as a character and assumes the dimensions of a symbol. Dahl’s prose makes this transformation luminous. The pilots, with all their training and technology, are powerless to halt the enemy’s advance. They cannot prevent the fall of Greece. They cannot even assure their own survival. Their gestures of protection, though sincere, are ultimately inconsequential. Here Dahl enacts a striking reversal of imperial narrative. These men are representatives of a global empire that governs vast territories and presumes to shape the destinies of other peoples. Yet on this desolate Greek airfield their power counts for nothing. They are stripped of agency, unable to defend the land they have come to aid or even to secure their own safety. The imperial mission collapses into impotence before the ferocity of fascist assault and, more significantly, before the unwavering resolve of those they believed themselves destined to save.

It is Katina, dispossessed and powerless in every material sense, who embodies the only form of power that endures: the power of refusal. Her raised fist reorders the entire moral landscape of the story. The imperial force that once claimed to protect becomes an impotent spectator, while the colonised subject rises from the rubble as the bearer of history. Through this inversion Dahl anticipates the death of imperial paternalism, revealing that the true agents of historical change are the so-called “little people” those who endure, resist and refuse annihilation even when abandoned by the machinery of empire.

Critics have long noted the recurrent use of the female child as a narrative device in literature that deals with war. She is frequently portrayed as the embodiment of innocence violated by conflict, a figure designed to evoke pity and serve as a mirror for masculine heroism. Katina overturns this tradition. Katina is neither a helpless victim nor a symbol of lost purity. She is a force of nature, the vessel of a collective will to endure. She does not require rescue because she represents a people who refuse annihilation. In her small frame and defiant gesture Dahl distils the essence of a civilisation that has survived invasion, enslavement and catastrophe over millennia.

This reading acquires deeper resonance when placed within the wider continuum of Greek history. Time and again Greece has stood against overwhelming odds: during the Persian invasions of antiquity, throughout the long centuries of Ottoman domination, in the ashes of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and in the midst of famine and terror during the Axis occupation. In each case the material power of the aggressor was beyond question. Yet the Hellenic response was consistently characterised by endurance, stubbornness and an unwavering refusal to submit. Katina’s clenched fist is the continuation of the same impulse that inspired the defenders of Missolonghi, the insurgents of Souli and the partisans of EAM ELAS. Dahl, perhaps unconsciously, captures this historical continuum in a single, unforgettable image.

What renders Katina so singular is its conscious avoidance of the orientalist tropes that disfigure much Western writing about Greece and the Balkans. There is no trace of patronising exoticism, no suggestion of a backward land requiring British guidance. Greece is not a backdrop for imperial heroism but the true protagonist of the narrative. The British pilots are secondary figures, witnesses to a drama whose depth they can only partially comprehend. They cannot save Greece, and they cannot save themselves. Their presence, once emblematic of imperial assurance, is rendered irrelevant by the magnitude of events and by the elemental resilience of the people they came to defend.

This inversion allows Dahl to enact a subtle but profound act of narrative justice. The child, and through her, Greece, is never infantilised. She is not depicted as a helpless object awaiting deliverance. Rather, she embodies agency and resistance, while imperial power is shown to be hollow, stripped of the illusions of control and destiny that once underpinned it. The image of Katina shaking her fist at the bombers is more potent than any weapon the RAF can deploy. It represents the one force the enemy cannot obliterate: the spirit of defiance.

The story’s conclusion is deliberately unresolved. As German forces close in, the RAF squadron is ordered to evacuate. They are unable to take Katina with them. She chooses to remain behind in her homeland, and the men, devastated and powerless, depart without her. Dahl offers no sentimental epilogue, no assurances of safety or contentment. Yet the absence of closure magnifies the story’s power. The point is not the fate of Katina but what she represents. Her raised fist lingers in the reader’s imagination long after the final page, a symbol of a spirit that cannot be extinguished by bombs or armies.

In the decades that followed, Katina slipped from public consciousness, overshadowed by Dahl’s later and more famous works for children. Yet it remains one of the most profound literary tributes to the Greek wartime experience ever penned in English. It is a testament to the enduring power of narrative to articulate truths that official histories often overlook. Further, it is also a reminder that the most potent symbols of defiance sometimes emerge not from generals or statesmen but from the smallest and most vulnerable among us.

Katina’s defiance is therefore more than a story from a vanished war. It is a summons. It calls us to vigilance, to endurance, to the defence of what is precious in ourselves and in the world. It insists that even amid ruin and despair, humanity can still rise and speak its own name. And it leaves us with the final, indelible truth: Greece, battered and bloodied, remains unconquered, and so too does the human will to be free.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

first published in NKEE on Saturday 11 October 2025

TRADITION AND SOUL: ARETI KETIME IN MELBOURNE

 

On 5 October, as part of the Third Zeibekiko Festival of Australia, an initiative of Sofia Ventouri, Melbourne witnessed one of its most memorable cultural events of recent years. Ivanhoe Grammar School hosted a remarkable concert by renowned vocalist Areti Ketime, whose rare ability to bridge the past with the present has established her as one of the most significant interpreters of Greek music today. Accompanied by accomplished violinist Dimitris Stefopoulos, she presented a rich and thoughtful program that combined historical memory with contemporary artistic expression, holding the audience spellbound from the first note to the last.

Ketime’s repertoire drew deeply from the Smyrnaic and rebetiko traditions, musical forms that remain foundational to modern Greek identity. With careful curation and interpretive sensitivity, she reintroduced the audience to the emotional depth and cultural power of these genres. Her performance of “Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki” was particularly powerful, blending restraint with intensity and creating a shared sense of collective emotion that swept through the auditorium. The response from the diverse audience, spanning generations and backgrounds, was enthusiastic and heartfelt, demonstrating the enduring resonance of this music.

Ketime’s stage presence was magnetic without being ostentatious. Warmth, authenticity and humility shaped her connection with the audience, while her vocal technique revealed an extraordinary range and precision. Moving seamlessly from soft, whispered phrases to moments of dramatic intensity, she infused each song with narrative force. Her performances transformed each piece into a story, carrying with it fragments of memory and shared cultural heritage.

The concert was also a celebration of collaboration and community. Ketime chose to share the stage with several leading figures from Melbourne’s vibrant Greek music scene, including Iakovos Papadopoulos, Sifis Tsompanopoulos, Wayne Simmons, Paddy Montgomery and Maria Antara-Dalamanga. Their joint performances illustrated that the Greek musical tradition in Melbourne is not a distant echo of the homeland but a living, evolving art form. That two of the musicians who sang in Greek were not of Greek background further highlighted how this tradition has transcended its ethnic roots to become a universal language.

The educational aspect of the evening was equally significant. Students from the Nestoras Greek School Band joined Ketime on stage, earning warm applause and demonstrating how tradition can inspire and be renewed through younger generations. Meanwhile, the dance groups of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, “Aristotelis” and “Pegasus,” offered dynamic interpretations of traditional dances throughout the evening, blending movement and music into a unified expression of cultural identity.

More than a concert, the event became a multifaceted celebration of heritage and creativity. Ketime’s artistry reminded the audience that tradition is so much more than a relic to be preserved in isolation. It is a living force that can adapt, evolve and speak to the present. Through music, dance and collaboration, the evening affirmed the vitality of Greek culture in Australia and its capacity to inspire pride, continuity and shared belonging. Events of such artistic depth and cultural resonance are rare in Australia, and this one left a lasting impression, a testament to both the enduring power of Greek music to unite, move and empower but also to the vibrancy of our own community.

RECOGNISING STATEHOOD: GREECE AND PALESTINE

 

The birth of a state is rarely the work of armed struggle alone. Insurgents may raise banners, proclaim constitutions, and shed blood, but without recognition sovereignty remains suspended between aspiration and reality. Recognition is both juridical and performative: it does not simply acknowledge existence but contributes to its creation. To recognise is to render visible, to inscribe a community into the language of international law, and to situate it within the order of nations.

The Greek Revolution of 1821 illustrates this aptly. For the rebels, independence was proclaimed with conviction, conceived as destiny after centuries of subjugation. However, proclamations remained fragile without acknowledgment from others. Recognition by foreign powers, whether symbolic solidarity or diplomatic and military intervention, proved decisive in transforming insurgency into sovereignty. Two centuries later, Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state echoes that earlier story, reminding us that sovereignty is never merely declared; it is conferred and sustained by those who acknowledge it, typically powers stronger than the community whose aspirations they affirm.

The position of the Greek insurgents in the 1820s was tenuous when measured against the criteria of early modern jurists such as Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, who laid foundational principles for international law. Grotius introduced the idea that sovereign states have rights and duties grounded in natural law, including just war and respect for sovereignty. Vattel emphasized that a state must have defined territory, effective government, and the capacity for diplomatic relations to qualify as sovereign, and that states are juridical equals deserving noninterference. Against these standards, the Greeks lacked stable territory and cohesive governance. Nevertheless, recognition arrived, demonstrating the performative power of sovereignty.

In 1822, Haiti, newly sovereign but fragile, extended solidarity, its president Jean Pierre Boyer addressing revolutionaries groping toward coherence rather than a central government. Recognition was thus afforded to a movement, not a state, acknowledging a political subject that did not yet meet the standard conditions of sovereignty. It was an anticipatory act, projecting into existence a future state.

The implications for Palestine are immediate. Its sovereignty remains fractured by occupation, borders contested, and institutions split between Gaza and the West Bank. By the Montevideo Convention’s 1933 formula—people, territory, government, and capacity for relations—it would appear deficient. Yet recognitions such as Australia’s evoke precisely that Haitian gesture to the Greeks. Palestinians are treated as participants in the international order, acknowledged as subjects of international law even before material consolidation. Recognition in this anticipatory mode creates rather than merely confirms sovereignty.

Haiti’s act, however moving, was too distant to shape realities in Greece. More tangible was the intervention of British finance. In 1824 and 1825, agreements in London furnished loans to the revolutionaries, tacitly underwritten by government approval. Douglas Dakin called these loans “premature recognition,” presuming an authority able to borrow on behalf of a sovereign community. Much of the capital was dissipated by incapacity, corruption, and factionalism. Still, the act of borrowing itself was transformative: contracting debt signalled Greece existed as a subject of law.

Karl Marx’s observation that the world market mediates political existence appears vividly here. Greece was admitted into finance before diplomacy. However, admission came at a price. Heavy borrowing guaranteed that sovereignty would be tied to external creditors and their interests. For Palestine, the warning is stark. States recognised through finance and aid often find themselves bound to donor preferences. Palestine’s reliance on subsidies and external goodwill foreshadows the same paradox the Greeks experienced, setting them up for bankruptcy.

Diplomatic recognition by the great powers followed later and under duress. London, Paris, and St Petersburg hesitated. The Vienna settlement of 1815 had sought to preserve Ottoman integrity as part of the balance of power. To grant Greek independence risked provoking Poles, Italians, and Hungarians in their nationalist aspirations. Nonetheless, sentiment in Europe, compounded by strategic interest, eroded resistance. Russia advanced itself as defender of Orthodoxy; Britain recalculated to protect Mediterranean routes; France refused to be excluded. Recognition thus became strategic, not simply philhellenic.

The Treaty of London in 1827 marked the turning point. By placing the Greeks on equal footing with the Sultan as parties to mediation, the powers elevated them into international diplomacy. The Sultan’s refusal escalated matters to Navarino, where the Ottoman Egyptian fleet was destroyed. By 1830, through the second Treaty of London, Greece was declared sovereign. Recognition here created sovereignty: the state existed because the great powers willed it, not because material or legal criteria had been fulfilled.

This recognition carried costs. The Bavarian prince Otto was imposed as monarch, a ruler chosen abroad rather than within Greece. Loans that had protected the insurgents became enduring burdens, tying the new polity to European financiers. Independence was real but conditioned, sovereignty shadowed by supervision. Hegel’s dialectic of recognition, that autonomy requires acknowledgment by another, was realised here, but so too was Koskenniemi’s claim that international law is a vocabulary of power. Sovereignty was defined by others, framed within interests not the Greeks’ own.

Recognition was not the only Western import. Nationalism itself was a European construct, born of Enlightenment rationality and Romantic imagination, projected onto peoples who had long lived under imperial and communal frameworks. For Greece, adopting nationalism promised liberation but also tethered the new state to the irredentist dream of the Great Idea. Nationalism demanded borders be expanded to encompass all Greeks, leading to recurrent wars against the Ottomans and Bulgarians and culminating in the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922. Freedom thus came entwined with destruction and sacrifice. Equally, the borders of what is to be a Palestinian state remain unclear. Just as the world powers once failed to endow Greece with frontiers corresponding to where its people actually lived, condemning it to cycles of conflict until as late as 1975, so too Palestine faces the peril that imposed or ambiguous boundaries may sow discord long after recognition. Their nakba came at the very beginning, dispossession the founding fact of their history. The question remains how far the Western model of recognition, with its rigid nation state template, can be reconciled with Arab traditions of governance that emphasised looser confederations, tribal and religious leadership, and negotiated communal autonomy. To impose a Western grammar of nationalism risks repeating Greece’s pattern: sovereignty modelled on Europe’s terms, demanding borders alien to Arab realities, and possibly precipitating new cycles of conflict.

Palestinian aspirations today confront this paradox. Recognition abounds: in 2012 the UN General Assembly accorded them non member observer state status, and over 140 states recognise Palestinian sovereignty. Still, effective independence remains elusive. Territory is fragmented, governance divided, and decisive powers withhold endorsement or condition its legitimacy. Palestine occupies what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception: acknowledged in law but denied fulfilment in fact.

Australia’s act of 2025 added to their legitimacy. It cannot redraw borders or impose peace, but its affirmation matters. Like Haiti’s gesture to Greece, it sustains inclusion in a moral and legal discourse where exclusion would be devastating. Recognition affirms identity, strengthens claims, and binds aspirations into legitimacy. Yet Greece’s example shows recognition is rarely unconditional. Symbolism may open the door, but recognition through finance, military patronage, or diplomatic partnership imposes obligations that endure. Palestine must reckon with the likelihood independence may arrive hedged with conditions and tethered to external interests.

The Greek example warns that recognition can deliver a state not fully its own. Debt, monarchy chosen abroad, and strategic alignment dictated by patrons defined its early reality. Independence became entangled with manipulation by powers more concerned with balance than self determination. Palestine risks a comparable fate. If sovereignty is finalised by international fiat, borders drawn externally and institutions dependent on donors, the paradox of conditional independence will recur. The peril is that sovereignty may secure only the symbols of statehood while compromising its substance, leaving Palestine subject to oversight, aid, and conditions that dilute genuine autonomy.

For jurists, Carl Schmitt’s dictum that sovereignty lies in deciding on the exception is unsettled here. Palestine demonstrates such a decision, unless validated externally, remains void. Agamben’s description of suspension captures their condition: recognised in law, unrealised in practice. Greece too inhabited this liminality, neither Ottoman province nor sovereign until Europe declared it. Incremental recognitions accumulated, but sovereignty crystallised only when others pronounced it.

The lesson is that recognition can constitute rather than follow fact. However, what is granted is never free. Greece entered existence as a creature of European tutelage. Palestine may likewise attain sovereignty only as a state conditioned by others. Recognition is not benign; it binds as much as it liberates.

To recognise is to legislate the future. International law does not mirror reality; it shapes it. Affirming sovereignty not yet achieved legislates a world to come. The crucial question is whose terms determine that order. Greece shows recognition bestowed by patrons creates a state interlaced with dependency. For Palestine, jubilation must be tempered with caution. Independence may mask subordination if imposed from abroad. A flag may rise and an anthem be sung, but if borders are determined elsewhere and autonomy constrained, the result may only approximate sovereignty.

Recognition embodies both promise and peril. It grants visibility and legitimacy, yet also enables external power to intrude, shaping a state not wholly by its own will but by others’ designs. For Palestine, as for Greece, the question is not just whether sovereignty will come, but how deeply it may be compromised when it does.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE On Saturday, 4 October 2025

REVIEWING MULTICULTURALISM: STATE AND STASIS

 

The recently released Victoria Multicultural Review – Final Report presents itself as a decisive blueprint for an inclusive and harmonious state. It invokes the rhetoric of trust, cohesion, and the elevation of multicultural affairs to the highest echelons of government. Yet, on closer examination, it discloses more about the anxieties and blind spots of an Anglo-centric polity than it does about the aspirations of the communities it claims to represent. While its pages are filled with exhortations and symbolic gestures, ultimately, it falls short of articulating the kind of structural vision that could weave disparate identities into a shared narrative of belonging. What emerges is less a roadmap for integration than a reaffirmation of a hegemonic class still uncertain about how to move beyond spectacle towards genuine partnership.

The Review situates its narrative in Victoria’s long history of diversity. We are reminded of the forty Aboriginal languages once spoken across the state, of the Chinese miners of the goldfields, of John Joseph the African-American rebel at Eureka. These references are marshalled as evidence of an enduring tradition of inclusion, yet they remain disconnected fragments, curated more as exhibits than as histories with contemporary resonance. Rather than interrogating the ongoing exclusions that mark Victoria’s past and present, the narrative reassures the majority that tolerance has always been the state’s hallmark. Postcolonial theory draws our attention to this manoeuvre: the coloniser selects which fragments of the colonised past to display, curating them into a story that comforts the centre while obscuring the silences and dislocations at the margins.

The means by which the ruling class prefers to acknowledge cultural difference is evidently through performance. The Review recommends funding between twenty and thirty large multicultural events and up to sixty smaller ones annually, while also elevating the beleaguered, largely isolated and limited in scope Immigration Museum as a “cultural icon.” These initiatives invite communities to display their identity through costumes, food, music and ritual, in forms that can be consumed by the mainstream. Such gestures are not without merit, but they relegate multiculturalism to the realm of ornament rather than structure. Communities are celebrated for their difference so long as that difference entertains or educates. They are rarely situated as co-authors of policy or as interlocutors in shaping civic culture. The result is what Bhabha terms mimicry: migrants permitted to reproduce their heritage in ways sanctioned by the dominant culture, while genuine parity of voice is withheld.

The proposed reforms to the Victorian Multicultural Commission illustrate this dynamic. Once envisaged as a conduit between government and community, the Commission is now deemed too ceremonial, too focused on celebration, and insufficiently strategic. The Review proposes replacing it with “Multicultural Victoria,” a statutory authority led by three commissioners and advised by an appointed Multicultural Community Advisory Group. Yet these changes do not redistribute authority. Commissioners remain government appointees, advisory groups remain advisory, and oversight remains firmly within the Premier’s office. This is not empowerment, but consolidation. What is presented as reform is in fact the reinforcement of a hierarchy in which multiculturalism continues to be administered from above rather than shaped in dialogue.

The rhetoric of trust in the document is particularly telling. Communities are said to have lost faith in government institutions, to feel unsafe, unheard, and marginalised. Yet the onus is subtly redirected back onto them: they are invited to participate more actively, to consult, to pledge allegiance to social cohesion. The implication is that trust is mutual, eroded equally on both sides, to be rebuilt together. What is not acknowledged is that trust was first broken by a state that has long instrumentalised migrant loyalty while disregarding migrant exclusion. It is the government, not the communities, that must do the greater work of rebuilding. To suggest otherwise is to indulge a false equivalence that masks the asymmetry of power.

Throughout the Review there are gestures towards deeper engagement. Multicultural communities are quoted as insisting that they do not wish merely to apply for programs but also to shape them, that they are not vulnerable but visionary, that policy without them cannot serve them. These voices are acknowledged but not embedded in the recommendations. Instead, the familiar machinery of committees, frameworks, grants, and reports proliferates. The structures multiply, but the central narrative of who leads and who follows remains unchanged.

Consider the recommendation that all Cabinet submissions include a multicultural impact statement. On the surface progressive, it positions multiculturalism as an afterthought, to be appended once decisions have already been conceived within Anglo-centric frameworks. Similarly, the requirement that government boards reflect community demographics, though laudable, depends upon appointment processes that remain firmly in government hands. Diversity here is managed, not re-imagined.

The “social cohesion pledge” illustrates the same logic. To access government funding, multicultural organisations must first commit themselves to upholding laws and promoting harmony. While framed as neutral, this requirement subjects them to a moral test not imposed on mainstream organisations. It implies that they are potential risks to cohesion, requiring additional scrutiny. In effect, multicultural organisations are placed in a perpetual state of probation, compelled to perform loyalty more conspicuously than others. Postcolonial critique reminds us that the subaltern is admitted to the polity only when compliance with dominant norms has been demonstrated.

Youth initiatives are treated in much the same way. The establishment of a multicultural youth worker program, the expansion of support groups, and the creation of youth-led grants do respond to genuine needs. However, they appear to situate multicultural youth as a distinct cohort to be managed, rather than as citizens integral to the mainstream youth policy framework. Separation is thus maintained even as inclusion is promised.

Language services are similarly framed. The Review rightly calls for declaring interpreting and translation an “essential service” and for ensuring that only credentialed interpreters are used. Nonetheless, language is treated as a technical barrier to be managed, rather than a positive cultural resource capable of transforming public discourse. The multiplicity of languages spoken in Victoria is cast as an obstacle requiring service provision, not as an opportunity to reconceive civic identity on equal terms.

This trajectory is familiar to scholars of multicultural theory. The Australian model, formalised in the 1970s, rested upon three pillars: cultural identity, social justice, and economic efficiency (Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975). Over time, the balance has shifted. Cultural identity has been reduced to spectacle, social justice diluted, economic participation commodified. The Review reproduces this pattern. It cites numbers of languages spoken and festivals funded, but articulates no vision of how these elements are to be integrated into the civic centre. Difference may be acknowledged but this not woven into the political fabric.

The Review’s approach to racism underscores this limitation. It acknowledges the rise of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Asian sentiment, praises the Anti-Racism Strategy, and recommends expanded data collection and education campaigns. This notwithstanding, racism is depicted as an external problem, imported from global conflicts or amplified by social media, to be countered through management. There is no sustained recognition of racism as structurally embedded within institutions, the dominant culture or within the narratives of statehood itself. Communities are asked to combat racism, but not invited to interrogate the Anglo-centric frameworks that perpetuate exclusion and give rise to systemic racism.

Taken together, the recommendations serve to increase governmental control while appearing to empower communities. Advisory groups proliferate, but remain advisory. Grants increase, but reinforce dependency. Data is collected, but interpretation remains with bureaucrats. Communities are urged to participate, but only within structures they did not design. This is multiculturalism as management, not as shared authorship.

What the Review does not offer is a narrative of integration that transcends performance. A society does not cohere merely by staging festivals or erecting heritage museums. It coheres when institutions mirror the diversity of the people, when decision-making power is genuinely shared, and when cultural difference becomes an integral component of civic identity. Achieving this requires more than bureaucratic adjustment. It requires a transformation of imagination: away from Anglo-centrism as the invisible norm, and towards a polity in which multiple heritages constitute the centre.

Until such a vision emerges, the trust the government seeks to invoke will remain elusive. Trust is not rebuilt through proclamations but through deeds. Ethnic communities have long demonstrated their trust in the state through their labour, resilience and creativity. It is the state that must now demonstrate itself worthy of theirs. Without that, the multicultural project will remain what this Review inadvertently discloses: a spectacle of difference, presided over by a dominant class still uncertain how to move from performance to partnership, from tokenism to transformation, from Anglo dominance to genuine plurality.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 27 September 2025

CONSTANTINOPLE 1955 POGROM: THE CASE FOR GENOCIDE

 

The memory of the Greeks of Constantinople stirs the heartstrings of our people. It evokes an ever absent presence, a community whose voices, though long silenced, continue to haunt the boulevards of Pera, the shores of the Bosporus, the sokaks of Fanari. Their absence is palpable, for they remain everywhere in memory while scarcely present in fact. The calamity that befell them in September of 1955 is often called by us a διωγμός, a violent expulsion, one in a series of many. At times it is even described as a pogrom, a word that hints at mob violence yet conceals the deeper design behind the catastrophe. Increasingly, however, legal and genocide scholars argue that what took place in Constantinople over the course of those harrowing September days constitutes a form genocide, orchestrated with intent to destroy a people whose roots in the City stretched back to its very founding.

International jurisprudence and critical theory alike remind us that memory is never static. It is contested, framed, and given form through power. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, far from being an inert legal document, functions as a living instrument of moral judgment. Article 2 does not measure crimes against humanity through the number of corpses or through the erection of exterminatory camps. Instead, it identifies the essence of genocide as intent, the demonstrable will to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

It is precisely here that the 1955 Constantinople pogrom becomes relevant. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, jurist and scholar of international law, has argued persuasively in his The Genocide against the Armenians 1915–1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention that the destruction of minorities in Turkey, including the events of 1955, satisfies the criteria set forth by the Convention. The orchestrated nature of the pogrom, conceived within the apparatus of the Menderes government, is a matter of record. The systematic targeting of Greek property was no spontaneous eruption of popular anger. It was state-sponsored devastation designed to terrorise a community into flight, and to erase its historical presence in the Queen of Cities.

The framework of genocide that emerges from the scholarship of Raphael Lemkin, William Schabas, Leo Kuper, Helen Fein, and Jacques Semelin illuminates the meaning of the September catastrophe. Lemkin, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), who gave the world the very term genocide, insisted that cultural annihilation was as central to the crime as physical extermination. In Constantinople, churches were desecrated, cemeteries such as that at Valoukli defiled, and schools attacked, acts intended to sever the continuity of a community. The pogrom therefore exemplifies precisely the kind of cultural and spiritual destruction that Lemkin feared and sought to define.

Later jurists such as William Schabas, in Genocide in International Law (2000, 2009), have demonstrated that numbers cannot serve as the decisive criterion in defining genocide. What matters is intent, the demonstrable aim to extinguish a community’s existence. The Greek deaths in 1955 may have been limited in number, yet the terror unleashed, the displacement that followed, and the creation of conditions that made continued residence impossible align exactly with the principles Schabas identifies. By this measure, the pogrom speaks unmistakably of genocidal purpose.

The orchestrated nature of the pogrom also reflects Leo Kuper’s observation in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (1981) that genocide often conceals itself under the mask of public disorder while being directed from above. The provision of vehicles to carry looters, the preparation of lists of Greek owned shops, and the studied paralysis of the police reveal an operation coordinated by the state itself. Far from being the product of mob frenzy, the pogrom demonstrates Kuper’s insight that the state frequently operates through the guise of popular tumult in order to achieve its destructive ends. Critical theorists of violence, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, agree, having demonstrated that the power of the state often manifests itself through the creation of zones of exception, in which law is suspended in order to annihilate the other.

Helen Fein’s characterisation of genocide as the destruction of a collectivity, articulated in Accounting for Genocide (1979) and later in Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (1993), captures the longer trajectory of Hellenism in Constantinople. Already weakened by the confiscatory wealth tax of 1942 and continuing restrictions on property and professional life, the Greek community faced in 1955 a blow that destroyed the foundations of its social viability. The demolition of homes, businesses, and sacred institutions ensured that communal life could no longer be sustained, forcing thousands into exile and leaving only fragments of a once flourishing presence in the city.

Finally, Jacques Semelin, in his Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (2007), has emphasised the symbolic dimension of genocidal violence, where the annihilation of cultural and religious symbols becomes a means of erasing the identity of a group. The profanation of Orthodox altars, the desecration of holy icons, and the violation of tombs during the pogrom cannot be dismissed as vandalism. They were ritualised gestures of destruction, calculated to declare that the Greek community was to be erased both physically and spiritually.

Contemporary genocide scholars such as Dominik Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer have located the crime within broader structural processes of state formation and ethnic homogenisation. In Late Ottoman Genocides (2009), Schaller examines the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek cases as interrelated strategies of the late Ottoman and early Republican elite, aimed at dissolving pluralism and producing a homogeneous nation. Zimmerer, in Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust (2008), likewise interprets genocide as a recurring instrument of statecraft, used to eliminate perceived obstacles to national or imperial projects. Within this framework, the 1955 pogrom in Constantinople cannot be read as an isolated episode. It represents the continuation of policies of ethnic cleansing that had begun with the destruction of Armenians in 1915 and extended through the expulsions of Greeks from Asia Minor. The September catastrophe emerges as part of a continuum of state-directed attempts to forge a culturally uniform polity through the elimination of minorities, rather than as an aberration of mob violence. It is, a genocide.

Accepting the events of 1955 as genocide carries significant implications for international law. Such a recognition would confirm that astronomical body counts or the infrastructure of extermination camps are not required for the crime of genocide to be established. In the case of Akayesu, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda affirmed that rape and forced displacement, when carried out with the intent to destroy a community, fall within the definition of genocide. In its judgments on Srebrenica, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia underscored that the destruction of even a part of a group within a geographically confined space could constitute genocide. Precedents of this kind demonstrate that the pogrom of Constantinople belongs squarely within established jurisprudence, where intent carries decisive weight and the method of destruction is legally secondary.

The recognition of the pogrom also sharpens the kinds of questions that must be asked about conflicts in our own time. When communities are uprooted en masse, when their cultural symbols are deliberately obliterated, and when language is deployed to dehumanise them or to call for their disappearance, does this not raise the same legal and moral concerns? Ongoing debates over whether the violence in Ukraine or in Gaza should be framed in terms of genocide, together with similar questions arising from conflicts elsewhere in the world, illustrate how contested and fraught such determinations remain. The case of Constantinople demonstrates that genocide can take the form of devastation directed at homes, churches, and livelihoods as readily as it can manifest through mass killing. Recognition strengthens the principle that international law must guard against every form of annihilation, regardless of scale or method.

The legacy of 1955 also invites reflection on the broader Hellenic experience. The invasion of Cyprus in 1974 brought mass displacement, the destruction of cultural heritage, and the long-term severance of communities from ancestral homes. Can such events be understood through a similar lens? Scholarship has rarely addressed this question within the framework of genocide studies, yet the echoes are undeniable. Raising the question does not collapse distinct histories into one. Instead it underscores the importance of applying legal categories consistently and confronting difficult truths about intent, destruction, and accountability. This is particularly pertinent considering that in 2020, the Turkish Parliamentary Speaker’s Office rejected a draft bill seeking to have the pogrom recognised as a national day of mourning. Parliamentary Speaker Mustafa Şentop noted that he found the wording used in the draft bill as “rough and hurtful.”

Calling the Constantinople pogrom a genocide is an act that demands coherence and integrity in international law. Such a step would affirm that smaller-scale yet decisive campaigns of eradication fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. It would confirm that the destruction of a group, whether achieved through displacement, humiliation, or cultural annihilation, is no less grievous than the destruction of life itself. In an age when international bodies hesitate to apply the word genocide for fear of political repercussions, Constantinople offers a touchstone: an insistence that international law must speak clearly against any intent to destroy a people.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 September 2025

NOT QUITE RECOGNITION

 

Sections of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities across the globe have greeted Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent acknowledgment of the genocides of their peoples with jubilation. His words, spoken during an interview with Patrick Bet-David, were invested by sections of the Greek media especially, with the aura of long-sought vindication. After decades of silence, here was an Israeli prime minister affirming aloud what entire diasporas have struggled to bring into the realm of international recognition. Yet the rejoicing, while understandable, is perhaps premature. For all their symbolic force, Netanyahu’s impromptu comments remain a personal gesture. They do not constitute a change in Israel’s official policy, which remains cautious and unresolved.

The context of the remarks matter. They were delivered in response to an unexpected question, without the solemnity of a formal declaration, and without the authority of a parliamentary resolution. There was no cabinet deliberation, no act of legislation, and no motion before the Knesset. The distinction between individual speech and institutional recognition is profound, for genocide recognition is not a private matter. It is a public act of state that affirms history, acknowledges victims, and defines collective memory. Until the institutions of government have spoken, the recognition of which Netanyahu spoke retains the force of nothing more than personal opinion.

This distinction between person and office, or person and state is a pertinent one, with the Australian experience offers useful parallels. Bob Carr, as premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr as premier of New South Wales, led his government to a unanimous recognition of the Armenian Genocide in 1997. As foreign minister of the Commonwealth, however, he refrained from doing so, stating: “As a Government we don’t take a stand on this historic dispute.” Scott Morrison, as Opposition Leader, was equally forthright in acknowledgment. In 2011, he called for Federal recognition of the Genocide and acknowledged the outpouring of Australian support for victims of the Armenian Genocide as the country’s first international humanitarian relief effort, going as far as referring to it as “one of the greatest crimes in modern history.”  Yet as prime minister, he fell silent, preferring to maintain ambiguity. Similarly, in May 2022, just prior to becoming Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese called upon the Ottoman Empire’s successor state to “come to terms with its history.” Three years later no recognition has been forthcoming. In each case, the convictions of the individual were no doubt sincere. Ultimately though, they were tempered by the perceived responsibilities of the office. Netanyahu’s statement belongs in the same category. It reflects the voice of a man, not the policy of a state.

To date, Israel’s reticence to recognise the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides has been consistent. The reasoning has been strategic rather than moral. Successive governments have concluded that recognition would compromise delicate relationships with Turkey and Azerbaijan, both of which are vital to Israel’s regional calculations. During the Cold War, Turkey was Israel’s sole Muslim-majority partner, providing both diplomatic recognition and military cooperation. Acknowledging the Armenian genocide would have placed this partnership in jeopardy, given that Ankara has long made denial of the genocide integral to its national identity. The pattern continued even after relations soured, for the prospect of alienating Azerbaijan became an additional constraint.

The Turkish dimension has long been the most sensitive. Turkey’s recognition of Israel in 1949 made it the first Muslim-majority state to do so. Over decades, the partnership deepened, culminating in extensive military and intelligence cooperation in the 1990s. The rise of the Justice and Development Party under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan transformed the relationship. Erdoğan cast himself as a defender of Palestinian causes and a sharp critic of Israeli policy. Relations grew increasingly bitter, reaching their nadir after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, when Turkish activists were killed in clashes with Israeli forces. Since then, the relationship has oscillated between hostility and tentative rapprochement, but the warmth of earlier decades has not returned. Netanyahu’s sudden reference to the genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks must be seen against this background. It carries the flavour less of moral awakening than of deliberate rebuke. Such instrumentalisation is troubling, for when recognition is deployed as a diplomatic weapon it risks being stripped of its moral gravity.

The Azerbaijani relationship adds another layer of complexity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel has cultivated a close partnership with Baku. Azerbaijan provides nearly forty percent of Israel’s oil, delivered through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. In exchange, Israel has become one of Azerbaijan’s most significant arms suppliers, delivering drones, missile systems, and other advanced weaponry. The proximity of Azerbaijan to Iran and its willingness to cooperate with Israel in intelligence matters have made this partnership invaluable. Yet recognition of the Armenian genocide would place Israel in direct conflict with Baku’s national narrative. For Azerbaijan, locked in a bitter conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, any acknowledgment of Armenian historical claims undermines its own sense of legitimacy. Netanyahu is acutely aware of this. To transform his words into binding policy would imperil a strategic relationship that Israel regards as vital for energy security and as a counterweight to Iran.

Theories of international relations help to illuminate the complexity of Israel’s position. Realist analysis suggests that states act above all to preserve their security, and from this perspective recognition of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides could imperil valuable partnerships. Constructivist approaches, however, remind us that national identity and historical memory influence policy no less than strategic interests. Turkey’s sense of self remains tied to denial, Armenia’s to remembrance, Azerbaijan’s to a counter-narrative of survival, while Israel’s identity is profoundly bound to the Shoah. For a state whose very being is shaped by the memory of atrocity, hesitation to extend recognition to other genocides creates a tension that is felt acutely. Netanyahu’s words may be read as a spontaneous expression of this tension. As the leader of a people marked by the Holocaust, he is drawn towards acknowledgment of what history and scholarship affirm. As the head of government, he must weigh this moral instinct against the imperatives of alliances and regional stability. His statement thus reflects less a contradiction than the inevitable strain of governing a state whose ethical commitments and strategic necessities are often in delicate balance.

For Jewish communities abroad, the matter resonates deeply. Denial of genocide strikes at the heart of their own historical experience. In Australia, Jewish leaders have consistently supported Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek campaigns for recognition, and scholars such as the late Colin Tatz, whose pioneering work on genocide studies placed Australia at the forefront of comparative research, have ensured that these histories are neither ignored nor diminished. Internationally, figures like Yehuda Bauer, one of the most authoritative historians of the Shoah, and Marc David Baer, whose work has revealed the intricate legacies of Ottoman and Turkish history, have contributed substantially to advancing awareness and understanding. The Holocaust Museum in Melbourne includes a display on the Armenian genocide, affirming that the memory of the Shoah compels solidarity with other victims of extermination. For Jewish communities, recognition is not an option but a moral and ethical imperative, and the support they have extended to the descendants of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in their campaigns for justice remains a source of profound gratitude.

The communities celebrating Netanyahu’s words must therefore take care not to mistake gesture for policy. Genocide recognition, if it is to be worthy of the name, must be enacted formally through the institutions of state. It requires deliberation by parliament, a vote, and an act that cannot be dismissed as rhetorical flourish. Until such a step is taken, words, however powerful, remain transient. They can be retracted by successors, ignored by ministries, and dismissed by foreign policy officials. Recognition delivered in parliament, by contrast, endures.

Thus while the rejoicing of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks at Netanyahu’s remarks is understandable, such acknowledgments remain fragile when spoken without institutional backing. Recognition of genocide cannot rest on improvisation. It requires the authority of Israel’s institutions and the solemnity of deliberate decision.

To legislate such recognition would affirm that truth is stronger than denial and that the defence of memory transcends the suffering of any one people. It would be a moment when political calculation yields to moral clarity, and Israel, in full possession of its history, affirms the indivisibility of justice. Until then, words remain provisional. When that act arrives, recognition will endure as a testament that remembrance unites peoples across time and redeems history through truth.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 September 2025