…WHEN A WAITER DROPS A TURKEY
Kenneth Zammit Tabona
Times of Malta, Malta
Oct 17 2006
What happens when a waiter drops a turkey? The Downfall of Turkey,
the Spreading of Greece, the Breaking of China and the Leaving of
Hungary! Such was the rather droll method of remembering historical
facts employed in the schoolroom a century or so ago.
Since the downfall of Turkey, read The Ottoman Empire, the Middle
East and the Mediterranean Basin have been in a constant state of
flux. There was something about the Ottoman Empire which since its
inception in 1453 kept and contained the vicissitudes of its far-flung
territories strictly within its borders.
The Turkish menace waned slowly and painfully after Lepanto, stifled in
its own reactionary stance until a very imperialist and expansionist
Western Europe along with Russia decided that Turkey was The Sick Man
of Europe (please note "Europe" not "Asia") and fought over it in the
Crimean War. It was in fact a scenario rather similar to that of the
Eastern bloc in our own lifetimes before the Wall fell and the USSR
was dismembered.
We were, in the days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, blissfully unaware of
situations like that between Serbs and Bosnians. We were brought
up to view a globe where any country beyond the Iron Curtain was
impenetrable. Very little news was allowed to be filtered through
and many of us were surprised at the avalanche that took place after
the liberalisation of Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro etc;
incidentally all of which were countries that till the 19th century
were part of the Ottoman Empire.
Therefore the uncanny similarity in policy between the Ottoman and
Soviet empires kept the ethnic and religious conflicts and situations
in the countries in question very much under wraps. Today the situation
is vastly different. Europe itself has doubled in size and the EU is
poised to take in many other countries that formerly lay within the
bloc. Strangely enough it is not these countries that are causing
controversy but Turkey.
It all started when the present Pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger and
pronounced himself as being against Turkey’s entry into the EU because
Turkey, he said, has always been different; a very debatable point. He
added that the Turks had laid siege to Vienna, twice, if you please,
and other irrelevant historical facts that could have been easily
ascribed to Spain or his own homeland Germany, while conveniently and
inexplicably leaving out the two worst blots on the Turkish escutcheon;
the Armenian and Kurdish genocides.
Next month Benedict XVI is off to Turkey. Very few people realise how
controversial and significant this visit is. Apart from the Ratzinger
pronouncements, one must contend with the ill-advised and to me still
inexplicable remarks that caused such a furore in Regensburg last
month and also the stormy relations the papacy has always had with
Islamic Istanbul and previously Christian Constantinople for 1,000
years and more!
Let us not forget that it was a Turkish gunman who tried to assassinate
John Paul II. The visit will, I am sure, prove to be one of the great
watersheds of contemporary history. We will see which way the cat
will jump and pray that it will bring peace.
Recently French MPs approved an Armenian Genocide Bill by which
if it is ratified by the Senate will make it a crime to deny that
Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. This
has provoked anger in Turkey and has raised fresh doubts about its
EU ambitions. Denying the Armenian Genocide in France carries the
same penalties as denying the Jewish Holocaust.
The move has been identified as a vote-catching exercise for all
Armenians who live in France. However, as Turkey still officially
denies that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred during and after
WWI, when the empire was dismembered, the move is proving to be very
sensitive and controversial. It will also undermine the pro-EU movement
within Turkey itself and further strengthen the nationalists.
I do not profess to fully understand Turkey and the Turks. We in Malta
still hold, by and large, a warped impression, coloured by the Great
Siege mentality, which is completely unfocused.
Let me start by saying that, from the very beginning, the Ottomans
who conquered Constantinople in 1453 did not sack it as the Western
Christians did during the Fourth Crusade 200 years before under the
leadership of the unscrupulous blind doge, Enrico Dandolo. Mehmet II,
aptly called The Conqueror, merely let his troops wreak the minimum of
damage as allowed by convention and immediately set about reorganising
Byzantine bureaucracy in his own way.
Only a couple of days after the entry into the Rome of the East,
Mehmet conferred ecclesiastical concessions on the Oecumenical
Patriarch Gennadios, a move that drove the wedge between Eastern and
Western churches even deeper than ever before.
When one examines Mehmet’s portrait by Gentile Bellini, who lived
in Constantinople as the Sultan’s guest from 1479 to 1481, we see
a sensitive and pensive aristocratic face that belies his fierce
reputation as the Scourge of Europe.
Mehmet’s adoption of Byzantine policies and methods was so successful
that it did not take countries like France long to reap the advantages
and establish diplomatic relations with what came to be known as The
Sublime Porte. This policy existed with variations right up to 1924.
Just to give you an example of the friendly relations countries like
France and its allies like the Order of Malta under de Rohan enjoyed
in the 18th century, our own Antoine Favray spent time in Istanbul
painting the portraits of the French Ambassador to Turkey, the Comte
de Vergennes, and his wife in Ottoman dress. His paintings of harems
and zenanas grace many a wall in museums and private houses in Malta.
It goes further into the 19th century too.
The Most Noble Amodeo, Count Preziosi worked in Constantinople from
1842 to his death in 1876 while other artists like Thomas Allom and
Jean Etienne Liotard worked in both Turkey and Malta.
Turkey is a country of strong contrasts and contradictions. While it
professes to be a secular state, Islamic permutations have allowed
crimes like honour killings to proliferate, not only within its own
borders but also in the countries that have adopted millions of Turks
as cheap labour like Germany!
Freedom of speech is as curtailed as it is in other Islamic states
as can be attested by Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known contemporary
novelist, who has just won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. Mr
Pamuk faced trial for "insulting his country" earlier this year. This
coincided with the French parliamentary move to criminalise denying
the Armenian Genocide.
Mr Pamuk’s novels also criticise the mania, started by Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, to make Turkey more Turkish which because of the complexity
of the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire entailed ethnic cleansing to achieve.
Anyone who has read Louis de Berniere’s excellent and riveting
novel Birds Without Wings will be horrified by the displacements of
entire peoples from Greece to Turkey and vice versa for instance. The
Greco-Turkish problem in Cyprus is a direct consequence of this.
It is Mr Pamuk, however, who symbolises free thought and is held
by the West as one of the reasons that could make Turkey a valid
and contributing member of the EU family. The Turks themselves must
face the fact that they must be part of a homogenous whole and that
mediaeval mentalities have no place in it. In fact joining the EU
requires Turkey to make such a great leap forward (with apologies
to the late Chairman Mao) that I cannot see it happening for another
decade at least.
I have been told by many who follow my weekly scribbles that I am,
at times, a bit too historical to follow. To explain a situation like
this entails delving into the past to find out why and how things
developed the way they have. Events rarely happen in isolation.
I am sure there are scholars and historians far more well-informed
and accomplished than I on the subject next to whom I am mere acolyte.
We cannot ignore the situation that has developed in the world between
what used to be conveniently called the struggle between the Cross
and Crescent. Although what is happening today is a direct derivation
of that same struggle we must realise that not since the death of
Suleiman the Magnificent has the Crescent been such a threat to our
own Western civilisation and way of life.
Today’s Islamic states with their oil and riches hold the world to
ransom. Allowing Turkey to join the EU and encouraging it to adopt
many of our own mores while abandoning their own outdated ones will
in the long run benefit both and will symbolise the beginning of a
rapprochement that will, with a bit of luck and goodwill, enable the
Cross and the Crescent to co-exist in future and bring what may be
called "Peace in Our Time".
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
