Michalis Charalambidis
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)
However, this interest of the European powers in the political and national rights of the Sultan’s subjects was transformed into economic agreements and geopolitical shifts to the advantage of one or another European power. Let us cite the concession of Cyprus to England as an example.
When the European powers decided to break up the empire, it was ‘logic’, ‘justice’ and ‘state interests’ that prevailed, not the logic of peoples’ rights.
The culmination of the machinations of imperialist forces and reason of state was the Treaty of Lausanne, ‘the biggest market of the century’, which legalised the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by foreign colonialism.
Somewhat later, the situation is not much changed. The new social and state structure of the racist Turkish state differs little from that of the era of the Ottoman Empire of which it constitutes and claims continuity. The only legalisation of the new military bureaucracy, the new pashas, is racism, chauvinism and violence.
The claims of nations, of peoples, of classes clash with the historical alliance between the imperialist states of our time and the Turkish state .
The historical Kurdish people, or rather, the historical Kurdish nation, clashes with this historical alliance in its struggle to break the colonial chains that bind it to the ‘ragged’ Turkish homeland.
The same happens to the Armenian people and the other nationalities of Asia Minor, the Arabs among others, the Turkish people themselves, and our people in Greece and Cyprus.
Faced with the brutality of our days, some European governments, parties or political personalities, under pressure from their peoples, take initiatives, decisions within international institutions or the European Community, condemning the current violation of human rights and peoples’ rights by the Turkish state. However, all these protests remain a dead letter and worthless or are withdrawn following ‘the latest positive steps towards the democratisation of the regime’.
The logic of non-application of sanctions has its cause and continuity in the trade, economic, military agreements between the neo-colonialist governments and the Turkish state.
Human rights and the rights of the peoples of the area, as well as the rights of our own people, are subject to the logic of a ‘violent’ assimilation on an unequal basis of the eastern Mediterranean region into the European and international imperialist system.
Once again in the course of its history, our people are faced with two dimensions that impede its march towards liberation: European provocation and the actual Turkish threat.
If, under the political, ideological, and moral direction of the forces of the left, we do not distinguish ourselves as a historical nation in the eastern Mediterranean area, and if we do not change the alienating historical force of Turkish racism into a liberating force for nations, peoples, and classes, we will end up as a poor, narrow, and deformed appendage and a point of passage for new crusades and new Sultans.
Another starting point for a liberating solution is the contestation of the NATO and Common Market doctrine on the integrity of Turkey, which implies for us ‘a Greek-Turkish friendship within the framework of NATO’ and betrays our historical memory and prevents our political and cultural milieu from openly expressing its solidarity with the nations and peoples oppressed by Turkish sub-imperialism.
Our initiative must take place in fulfilling our patriotic duty to the Cypriot people, in defending their right to self-determination, in advocating in all international organisations for the right to self-determination of the Kurdish and Armenian peoples.
Charalambidis, Michalis
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 8 (October 1986)