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Turkish leader Erdogan ups rhetoric on Greece

9 Comments
By ZEYNEP BILGINSOY

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9 Comments
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Greece should not mess with Turkey. They have many weapons and active war experience.

-6 ( +1 / -7 )

A little bit of the forgotten history. Mustafa Kemal conducted a years long campaign from 1919 to 1922 purging Christians, the Greeks and Armenians, from Turkey in his "Turkey for Turks" campaign, culminating the the great Fire of Smyrna, present day Izmir. This campaign also involved the wholesale suppression of Kurdish culture and many battles with them in a slow motion genocide that continues to this day.

The other victors in WWI sat on their hands and watched or maybe filed polite diplomatic protests while millions of Christians were uprooted and died. With Smyrna the last predominantly holdout and arguably at the time one of the wealthiest cities in what was the Ottoman Empire, Kemal's forces burned it and its inhabitants to the ground.

When Kemal rejected Allied pleas for permission to evacuate the Smyrna refugees on 18 September 1922, the British protested his decision was “tantamount to condemnation of a quarter of a million people to death.” Seeing he had gone too far, Kemal relented and reversed his decision the next day. Bristol, the US Admiral representing the US diplomatically to Ankara, quickly changed his tune to match Kemal’s decision, notifying the Department of State that same day that he had decided to “direct our destroyers to assist in every way possible” with the evacuation.

However Mustafa Kemal had conditions. Kemal would only allow women and children to depart. All adult male Ottoman Christians would still be sent on marches to the interior to die or serve as slave laborers until they died. Also, Kemal only gave the Allies little more than a week, until the end of the month, to facilitate his ethnic cleansing.

I think it is time for the EU and the US to remind the Turks what they did was tantamount to genocide, just as what they have been doing to the Kurds is tantamount to genocide. It's also time for the west to cut ties to Turkey, reduce diplomatic representation and trade, and demand they leave NATO.

4 ( +6 / -2 )

Looks like someone is pulling out the autocrats cookbook. When facing domestic problems, unify the population by picking a bs fight with an external party.

Uncle Vlad would be proud.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

So, Turkey has decided that it has the same privileges as Israe

-5 ( +0 / -5 )

Big Yen, It is nothing short of perverse throwing in the massacre of one and a half million completely innocent Armenians by Turkey as an afterthought, the way you do above. Also, if, as you admit, those "Greek" islands were belonging to Greece before the Ottoman Empire, then, obviously they were "Greek" islands and Greece had every right to take them back. Empire builders such as Turkey, Britain, China and Russia have crude ways of justifying their's and, at times each others empire-lust. Its a certain "empire mentality." Desert Tortoise (above) is Spot-On 100% correct, balanced and informed on Ottoman-Turkey (that Neo-Fascist Erdogan is attempting to revise).

4 ( +4 / -0 )

The basis of the dispute is there is oil and gas in the Aegean Sea that both Turkey and Greece want to exploit, combined with disputes over maritime boundaries in places where Turkish and Greek EEZs and even territorial limits overlap. Many of the islands in question lie very close to the Turkish coast. Yes, there was an agreement to not place military outposts on these islands but the Greek view is that Turkey abrogated that agreement when it invaded and occupied Northern Cyprus. Now the Greeks do not want to leave any of their islands undefended fearing the Turks might take them too.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

It seems to me that this Erdogan guy is very deviously taking NATO for a ride. He is using NATO's muscle and also using the Ukraine crisis smokescreen to get up to mischief, firstly with the Kurds and now in Greece. NATO should not associate themselves with such a manipulative individual. I wonder is this part of the deal he did with Finland and Sweeden, to agree to them joining NATO. Did they agree to turn a blind-eye from such acvtivities?

2 ( +2 / -0 )

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