DO YOU SAY THAT MR. JOSEPH SHOULD BE JUSTIFIED AFTER 64 YEARS?

 

DO YOU SAY THAT MR. JOSEPH SHOULD BE JUSTIFIED AFTER 64 YEARS?

Written by Konstantinos Konstantinidis Amphiktyon

 When I was serving at the NATO Headquarters in Izmir in Turkey between 1961-64, before finding a home, I was hosted in the guesthouse of Mrs. Evanthia, a Greek woman from Izmir married to a French-Levantine Mr. Joseph. He was elderly at the time and had experienced all the transformations of Turkey from Ottoman to nominally a Republic, and he told me the following wise words, which I have retained until now and I consider them timely and perhaps prophetic. « Turkey is not a compact country but has 52 or more ethnicities. From a cultural point of view, there are two Turkeys: a/ The one you see in Izmir, in Constantinople and on the Aegean coast, old Byzantine remains that were Turkified due to a change of religion and B./ The Turkey of the interior and the East (or Anatolia) which has no relation to the coastal Turkey. It is a different, primitive, backward, backward, uneducated Islamic country. [And indeed I got to know it with a business trip to Erzurum (ancient Theodosius) in 1962 where the 4th Turkish Army was subordinate to NATO and from the few I saw from the E/W to the Headquarters they were worse than what Mr. Joseph described to me. Erzurum is the Kurdish city of "Erzirom". Since then, the Kurdish areas have been in turmoil and anarchy and these areas were militarized and remained underdeveloped. ] These two Turkeys, Mr. Joseph told me, who have nothing in common except that they are called Turks without being in the majority, will one day find themselves in a civil war. The populations around the Aegean and in Constantinople of a higher cultural status will rebel and form a separate state, and this because they cannot keep up either economically, socially, educationally, culturally, or even politically with the others. And I am amazed that he told me that this revolution has not yet happened. " Could the current dramatic events in Turkey with the imprisonment of Mayor Konst/leos Mr. Ekrem Imamoglu and the overthrow of the even-and-without-a-leaf dictatorship, do structural changes in the neighboring country portend? Because this coincides with the Kurdish people's revolution for independence. If the demonstrations and clashes of the people with the police forces continue, if they are confronted with the forces controlled by Mr. Erdogan and if the first blood is shed, then the situation in Turkey will become dramatic. Its weakened and inflation-ridden economy will suffer a serious downturn from the withdrawal of foreign and local capital and the lack of new investments. Many ask me which of the two should we support? Mr. Erdogan talks a lot about "Blue Homeland" etc. but has done nothing in practice. On the contrary, Mr. Kemalists Imamoglu are equally nationalists as Erdogan and are responsible for the Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus and Asia Minor as well as the invasion of Attila in 1974 in Cyprus. Turkey's strategy, whichever faction prevails, is fixed, nationalist, Islamofascist, expansionist and anti-Greek A danger for our country if things develop to the extreme is the migratory flows that may arise from Turkish citizens, either persecuted or those seeking safe haven, coming to our country either for permanent settlement or passing through to other countries. Let's hope that the situation in the neighboring country will not develop to this point. However, at best, the regime of its neighbor will suffer shock and destabilization, and at worst, civil war. (24/3/25)

 * Amphiktyon Major General (retd) Konstantinos Konstantinidis Author,

Member of the Society of Greek Writers amphiktyon@gmail.com http://amphiktyon.blogspot.com/ http://amphiktyon.org