Op-ed: The uprooting of peoples and Evros

By Alexandra Fotaki

These days mark the anniversary of Turkey’s Attilla II military operation, Ankara’s second and decisive invasion of Cyprus in less than a month [when nearly 40 percent of the island’s territory was occupied, leaving 200,000 Greek Cypriots refugees in their own homeland].

The words of my grandfather always linger in my mind.

The betrayal. How they were forced to abandon our home. The hatred. How they left our home. What I lived through, which was reminiscent of the post [Greek] Civil War period, because those who betrayed us were our own people. Not foreigners. The savagery. The blood. The experience of being a refugee.

The centennial of Asia Minor Catastrophe (photo) is around the corner. There will be films and theatrical plays depicting the events.

So many have tried to describe the horror of those days. The responsibilities. The response of the “allies”. The drama of the “population exchange” [by agreement between the two governments all Greeks in Turkey save those in Istanbul and the islands of Imvros and Tenedos were forced to flee to Greece and all Turks in Greece save those in Western Thrace were forced to flee to Turkey].

Like an ever-present curse, the same story has been repeated again and again: 1922, 1955 [the state-organised pogrom against the Greeks in Istanbul which forced a very large percentage to flee from Turkey], and 1974 [the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus].

The refugees always arrived – with a deep, bitter sigh in their souls – in a new “homeland”, where all they found was essentially exile and pain. Even in the “mother country”.

This country has a history of uprootings. It has not only received refugees.

There have been major waves of emigration. From the start of the 20th century. After the civil war [political refugees]. In the 1960’s. Even in 2012. Even today.

They went to the US as unskilled labourers – some as legal migrants and some “illegal”. They were workers with “fixed-term contracts” – the equivalent of slaves in the 20th century – in the factories of Germany and the mines of Belgium. As people chased by the political regime.

They remained migrants until they grew old. And then these people would return to Greece and say, “It’s me. Don’t you recognise me?”

I still remember those embraces, with people I did not know but loved me. We learned from photographs that they were family members, with the scars of work having brought them to their knees.

The situation with refugees in the Evros region does not befit a country so accustomed to uprootings.

For a country that talks about the plight of refugees, for a child to die in Evros or be drowned in the Aegean is an enormous shame.

Yes, Turkey exploits the refugee and migrant issue to serve its ends.

Yet, it is impermissible for a country that has suffered so much uprooting to allow the EU to exploit it for its own purposes, to turn it into a fence of death.

This country does not have the right to forget that once upon a time its own children were in the position of the refugee child that died in Evros – back when its own mothers were dangling from ships and kneeling on the soil to cry and mourn their children.