Denying Human Rights and Ethnic Identity: The Greeks of Turkey (review)

Abstract

Reviews 145 noted that, by contrast with Stalinist Albania, Turkey is a signatory to these human rights documents. No improvement has taken place regarding human rights, and the author rightfully emphasizes the particular tragedy of the missing Cypriots. While this volume—in particular the presentation by Christos Rozakis— is informative for one who has no familiarity with the position of human rights in international law or for one who has no idea of conditions in occupied Cyprus or in Albania during the Stalinist era, it contributes little that is new. It would have been more significant if the authors had ventured into suggestions regarding what actions could be taken to protect human rights more effectively in general, in Cyprus in particular, and in struggling post-communist Albania. Such suggestions, however, would have taken the authors beyond their self-imposed legal parameters. Adamantia Pollis New School for Social Research Helsinki Watch, Denying Human Rights and Ethnic Identity: The Greeh of Turkey. New York. 1992. Pp. 54. This booklet was prepared by Lois Whitman, deputy director of Helsinki Watch, the well-known and respected human rights organization, following an investigatory mission in Greece and Turkey. In plain, unemotional, and succinct language, the text documents through statistics, texts, and testimony, including the responses of both governments, the devastation and deracination of the Greek communities in Istanbul and in Imbros-Tenedos between 1923 and the present. Certain numbers tell their own story: Istanbul Greek population (including Greek and Turkish nationals) in 1923 110,000, now 2,500; school population in 1923 15,000, now 410. In the 1955 anti-Greek riots connected to the Cyprus dispute and following the bombing of the Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki, admittedly staged by the Turks, 4,000 Greek shops were sacked, 2,000 homes were vandalized and robbed, 73 churches were burned down or seriously damaged, and 52 schools were ransacked. Added to the thousands of ethnic Greeks who left in 1955 were all the remaining Greek citizens (about 12,000) and another 30,000 who were expelled in 1964. At various times many of these people were not allowed to sell their properties, to withdraw money from their bank accounts, or to export their valuables. The book gives us chapter and verse of the anti-Greek legislation and also describes the administrative measures—especially police and tax action, governmental censorship, removal and replacement of the authorities in hospitals, schools, and foundations, prohibition of gifts to them—as well as the paramilitary terror tactics used to demoralize and expel. Greek language and history were, and remain, virtually 146 Reviews taboo subjects. Even the Patriarchate is under constant pressure, with its Halki Theological School closed and with interference in the very selection of the Patriarch. It is beyond doubt that these practices, which remain largely unabated, violate not only the Treaty of Lausanne, which contains detailed and extensive protection of minority rights, but also the Turkish Constitution, the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the various charters of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which are included in the appendices of the book. Unless the practices are stopped and some redress provided, Turkey's admission to the European Union will be jeopardized. Incidentally, these practices are of such severity that they appear to outweigh by far the alleged mistreatment of the Moslem minority in Western Thrace, whose numbers have increased over the comparable period . The sorrow one feels reading this book is magnified by the realization that even today minorities continue to be oppressed and victimized as a result of conflicts and civil wars, especially in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Africa. P. John Kozyris The Ohio State University Suzanne Aulin and Peter Vejleskov, Χασικλίδικα ϕεμπÎ-τικα: ανθολογία- ανάλυσις-σχόλια. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. 1991. Pp. 154. dKr 168 (about $22). This carefully prepared anthology of χασικλίδικα ϕεμπÎ-τικα put together by Suzanne Aulin and Peter Vejleskov, two graduate students at the University of Copenhagen, is a modest, cautious book, but it will be an indispensable addition to the library of anyone interested in rebétika. The project began as an exercise in transcription. Aulin and Vejleskov participated in a seminar on rebétika given by Ole Smith in the...