February 21, 2020

Dear Mr. Tsavousoglou,

With all due respect to the office you hold, kindly permit me to submit to you a few queries I have, of concern not just to the average Greek, but to anyone with a basic education, whether Turkish, English, Russian, or American.

There is an old proverb that we often use in our daily conversations in Greece that goes back to a sentence with which Alexander the Great once confronted his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle:

“Master, you lecture others, yet yourself refrain to follow what you decree.”

Because your actions seem to be in utter contrast to that which you proclaim, they strongly remind me of the above phrase; therefore, please allow me to express my restraints: 

On February 18, 2020, you tweeted an unfavorable message regarding the President of the Hellenic Republic by characteristically saying: “The President of a country that is considered the cradle of democracy has called the Muslim Turkish minority a Greek Muslim minority, despite numerous rulings by the European Court of Human Rights. Regardless of what you may say, the Turkish minority in Western Thrace has been Turkish for centuries, and will remain Turkish.”

Practically simultaneously, your party’s spokesman, Omer Celik, accused Greece of  “racism” for referring to the Muslims of Thrace as Greek.

Prior to this, on February 15, 2020, a deliberate and utterly unjustified sermon of hatred was launched by one of “your own people,”  the Mayor of Iasmus of the perfecture of Rodopi, Inter Mumin, who spoke of “a great victory” in Bursa, of “eternity gained through death,” in addition to much more dramatic propaganda nonsense.

It is only natural that any intelligent person whould ask the following questions:

• Was it not your own people who adamantly insisted during negotiations of the Treaty of Lausanne that those remaining on the Greek side of Thrace be called “Muslims” and not a “Turks”?
• Did you not insist that they be grouped by their religious affiliation and not by their ethnic origin, fearing the millions of Kurds living in Turkey?
• Have you not ignored dozens of rulings issued by the European Court of Human Rights regarding the Kurds (for example, Selahettin Demirtas, who remains imprisoned, despite the ECHR’s decision that you release him), in addition to rulings in favor of countless Cypriot citizens, against whom you have targeted your activities in the occupied Republic of Cyprus?
• Do you not consistently ignore the rulings of your very own courts, anytime you do not like them, as in the case of Osman Kavala, whom you have detained without a cause for 842 days to this day? 

How, therefore, do you expect us to respect any decisions, which you neither respect nor enforce yourself?

Did the President of the Turkish Republic, Jemal Gürsel (1899-1960) not call upon his citizens to “spit in the face of anyone who called them a Kurd”?

Did your government not hasten to oust dozens of elected Mayors just last year giving lame excuses, only because they were Kurds?

If a Kurdish mayor were to come to Greece and blast an inflammatory speech such as the one by the Mayor of Iasmus in Turkey, would he dare return to Turkey?

And if he would, would you not hasten to imprison him, labeling him a terrorist and a threat to Turkey’s public security?

Why, then, do you instigate “your people” to systematically sabotage the excellent climate that has existed for decades among Greek citizens – both Muslim and Christian?

Would it not be more appropriate to remind yourself of the treatment you have reserved for the tens of thousands of Greeks in Constantinople, Imbros, and Tenedos, before you start making accusations toward Greece?

• Did you not, upon the entry of the Germans in Greece in 1941, hurry to recruit non-Muslim youths, a sure-fire way to physically exterminate them?
• Did you not in 1942, from the security of your neutral position during World War II, impose an exterminating estate tax, selectively targeting only wealthy Christians and Jews, in order to procure the immense wealth of the Greek, Armenian and Jewish people?
• Was it not you, who, in 1955, in perfect cooperation between your official government and the ruling party’s underground groups, organized the killing pogrom of the Greeks of Constantinople with devastating consequences for their survival in the land, where their forefathers had put down roots – ten centuries before any of your ancestors ever appeared in this area?
• Was it not you, who expelled with brief proceedings tens of thousands of Greeks in Constantinople through the inhumane deportations of 1964? Was it not you, who in 1964 also moved every Turkish convict to the island of Imvros, thus creating an open prison, with the plan to expel 92% of the total population on the Greek islands of Imbros and Tenedos under the framework of your dissolution program named «Eritme Programi» (“Melting Pot” program)?
• Have you ever wondered what the size of the Greek population on the islands of Imbros and Tenedos is today? Barely 1%!
• And are you not responsible for silencing since 1971, without obvious reason, the Halki Theological School that served a religious institution, rooted in the city of Constantine the Great for seventeen entire centuries, with the sole aim of bringing it to a complete stillstand?

Has it occurred to you, that everything you have done so far and still continue to do is racism – in its most extreme and repulsive form?

So how is it that you accuse the Greeks of being racist towards their Greek citizens who are Muslims by religion, while you display extreme and repugnant racism against millions of people, both within and without Turkey – even Muslims, for that matter?

Please do not rush to invoke your usual excuses such as “national security” and “terrorism” for your actions in Turkey, because what you are attempting in Greece, including many other countries, are mainly matters involving “national security” and “terrorism” !

Does it therefore make any sense that you consider it appropriate to handle your personal “national security issues” in whatever way you deem right – yet you also blatantly intervene in the affairs of other countries which are dealing with the very same issues by trying to regulate their affairs in the best of their interest?

Why not show some fundamental respect for the enormous burden cast upon European Greece (with its population of ten million) as it faces the immense load of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who are systematically discharged upon us by Turkey (population eighty million)?

Is it fair or right that, a whole century after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, every Muslim living in Greece, whether Pomak, Roma, or just simply Muslim, is supposed to be called a “Turk”?

By the same token, do you next intend to demand that thousands of Afghans, Persians, Somalis, Egyptians, Algerians, Iraqis, Syrians, and other Muslims whom you daily ship to us – lately even in escort of Turkish patrol boats – also be called “Turks”?

Don’t you think that the pretext of your “brothers in need of protection,” which you invoked to justify your invasion of the Republic of Cyprus, belongs in another era and is now obsolete?

Why must you “protect your brothers” who are not in any need of protection, judging by the striking example of Cypriot Muslims and others alike, who are forced to apathetically follow the real extermination of their “brothers” by you?

As someone who was born in Turkey, was wrongly expelled from his birthplace at the age of 15 and has lived in Greece eversince,*  I do not believe that there is any justified reason to keep the people of Greece and Turkey from living peacefully as good neighbors.

What I do believe is that they are, unfortunately, kept divided deliberately by outdated ideologies and dreams of  re-establashing the Ottoman Empire in the twenty-first century,  consciously pushing the two peoples into adventures they do not want. Yet, any Turkish politician who dares to deny the unrealistic visions of  the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire is systematically imprisoned.

 I wholeheartedly hope that I am wrong and that the situation as I perceive it, does not mirror the real facts.

I am, however, convinced that all my questions will remain unanswered, simply because they lie at the heart of these ideologies from which every Turkish politician in power must mandatorily be inspired. 

But, even if unanswered, rest assured that these queries will remain timeless and relentless!

Leonidas Koumakis

* Turkish policy towards Hellenism is described in the timeless, autobiographical book “The Miracle – A True Story” which is available for free in both the 5th Greek Edition (2020) and the 3rd English Edition (2019), Library of the International Hellenic Association. The free online edition of 2020 includes updated bibliography of hundreds of sources in Greek, English, French and Turkish.