Dear Mr. Tsavousoglou,
With all due respect to your office, you will allow me to submit to you some queries that not only every average Greek has but also every elementary educated Turkish, English, Russian or American.
In Greece we still keep in our daily lives, a phrase Alexander the Great said to his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle: ” Teacher you taught law, but you do not uphold the law “.
Since your actions in relation to your various statements seem to me to be strongly reminiscent of the above phrase, let me ask a few questions:
On February 18, 2020, you sent a message to Twitter against the President of the Hellenic Republic by writing: ” The President of a country that is said to be the cradle of democracy, he called the Muslim Turkish minority a Greek Muslim minority. Despite so many rulings by the European Court of Human Rights. Whatever you say, the Turkish minority in Western Thrace has been Turkish for centuries and will remain Turkish . ”
Almost simultaneously, your party’s spokesman, Omer Celik, accused Greece of “racism” because it called Thrace Muslims Greek.
On February 15, 2020, there was a deliberate and utterly unjustified preaching of hatred by a “man of your own”, Mayor Iasmou Rodopi Inter Mumin, who spoke in Bursa of “great victory”, of “eternity and death”. And many other, heavily propagandistic nonsense.
The questions that can reasonably arise in any educated person are:
- Weren’t you insistent that in the negotiations for the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, you should be described as “Muslims” and not “Turks” who remained in Greek Thrace?
- Did you not demand religious and not ethnic designation out of fear for the millions of Kurds living in Turkey?
- Are you ignorant of dozens of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights concerning Kurds (such as Selahettin Demirtas who remains a prisoner despite the ECHR’s decision to release him) or many Cypriot citizens from your activities in the occupied territories of the Republic of Cyprus?
- Don’t you even ignore judgments of your own courts when you do not like them, as in the case of Osman Kavala, who you have held without cause for 842 days?
So how do you ask us to respect decisions that you neither respect nor enforce?
Wasn’t the President of the Turkish Republic, Jemal Gürsel (1899-1960) the one calling on the citizens to “spit in the face of anyone who calls them Kurds”?
Wasn’t your government rushing to oust just a few dozen elected Mayors just last year just because they were Kurds?
If a Kurdish mayor came to Greece and made an inflammatory speech analogous to that made by the mayor of Iasmus in Turkey, would he dare to go back?
If he came back, would you not immediately imprison him as a terrorist and dangerous to Turkey’s public security?
So why are you putting your “people” to systematically dynamize the excellent climate that has existed for decades among Greek citizens – Muslims and Christians?
Wouldn’t it be more correct to remember what treatment you reserved for the tens of thousands of Greeks in Constantinople, Imbros and Tenedos before accusing Greece?
- Were you not aware that when the Germans entered Greece in 1941, you hastened to recruit non-Muslim youths to exterminate them physically?
- Weren’t you imposing in 1942, from the security of your neutral position during World War II, selectively only on wealthy Christians and Jews the exterminating estate tax to take possession of immense wealth of Greek, Armenian and Jewish people?
- Where you not, with the perfect coordination of your official government and the ruling party’s paratroopers, in 1955 organizing the pogrom of murder against the Greeks of Constantinople with devastating consequences for their survival in the land where their ancestors lived Do your ancestors appear in the same area?
- Were you not expelled by summary proceedings, tens of thousands of Greeks in Istanbul with the inhumane deportations of 1964 ?
- Weren’t you sending all the Turkish bailiffs to Imbros in 1964 in an open prison in order to expel 92% of the total population of the Imbros and Tenedos Islands under the Greek Eritme Program ?
- Did you wonder how much the Greek population of the islands of Imbros and Tenedos is today? Just 1%!
- Aren’t you the one who has unnecessarily silenced, since 1971, the Halki Theological School that served a religious institution rooted for seventeen whole centuries in the city of Constantine to strangle him?
So, don’t you think that all you have done and are still doing is racism and even extreme and repulsive crime against humanity?
So how do you accuse Greeks of being racist towards Greek citizens, Muslims or religion, when you display extreme, repugnant racism against millions of people inside and outside Turkey – even when they are Muslims?
But do not rush to rely on the usual excuses of “national security” and “terrorism” for what you are doing in Turkey, in Greece and many other countries!
So, do you find it reasonable to take care of your own ‘national security issues’ as you think, but intervene in other countries when they deal with exactly the same issues, as they think they are?
Aren’t you supposed to show elemental respect for the huge burden on the ten million European Greeks with the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that Turkey of eighty million has systematically sent to us?
Do you consider yourself right to characterize, a century after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, a “Turk” of every Muslim living in Greece, whether Pomak, Roma or simply Muslim?
By the same token do you intend shortly to demand to be called “Turks” and the thousands of Afghans, Persians, Somalis, Egyptians, Algerians, Iraqis, Syrians and many other Muslims you send to us daily – lately and along with them?
Don’t you think that the pretext of the “brothers in need of protection” that you used to invade the Republic of Cyprus goes back to other times of Ottoman expansion and is outdated?
Why should you “protect your brothers” who do not even need any protection if we are judged by the typical example of Cypriot Muslims and others are obliged to watch the genuine extermination of their own “brothers” by you?
As a man who was born in Turkey, he was unjustly expelled from his birthplace at the age of 15 and has lived in Greece since then, I do not think there is any real reason to prevent the peoples of Greece and Turkey from living peacefully as good neighbors.
But I believe that unfortunately they are deliberately cause divisions by the outdated ideologies who dream the rebuilding the Ottoman Empire in the twenty-first century, consciously leading the two peoples to unwanted adventures. Those who deny the unrealistic dreams of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire are systematically imprisoned.
I wholeheartedly wish I was wrong and what I perceive is not in fact true.
I am sure, however, that all my questions will remain unanswered because they simply concern the core of the ideologies from which all Turkish politicians who take power are necessarily inspired.
But even unanswered, please be aware that these questions will remain historically unchanging and persistent!
Leonidas Koumakis
