Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Sept 8 2013
A Sept. 6-7 story: ‘You were so involved with that Greek girl’
by Alin Ozinian*
I was supposed to meet up with Hülya, a high school literature teacher
and the youngest daughter of an old Istanbul family; the plan was to
talk about “the image of non-Muslim women in Turkish novels.”
She was also going to suggest that I read the article by Herkül
Millas. And then what happened to minorities on Sept. 6-7, about the
possessions tossed out the windows of a Greek home in Tarlabaþý, where
she lived, about how their much-beloved and trusted butcher Hussein
was in fact among the looters and about the departure of her dear
friend Eleni, with whom her various fortunes as well as misfortunes
were intertwined… I don’t know whether she had decided in advance to
tell me her own story. But at our first meeting together, many years
ago, she told me what had happened to her. She talked, cried, talked
some more and we both cried. That day, I learned that there can be
dark corners of the past for everyone…
Though they are now rooted in a textbook history by most, the
“incidents” of Sept. 6-7 that live on in our collective consciousness
were a string of events that were triggered by the Cyprus situation
and took place in 1955 in areas of Istanbul such as Taksim and
Istiklal Caddesi. Photographs from that time show “uncontrollable”
crowds in Pera attacking and damaging shops belonging to “wealthy”
people whose “foreign” names — Greek, Armenian, Jewish — were
apparent from the signs that hung above them. These photographs have
been vital in terms of helping form general impressions of what
occurred during this period. In the end, the police were not able to
intervene in these lootings, and the crowds, provoked into fury, could
not be contained….
Of course, the reality of events on those two days was quite
different. At 1 p.m. on Sept. 6, state radio broadcast news that there
had been a bomb attack on Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki. This
news was printed that day, accompanied by exaggerated writings and
abundant photographs in the second edition of the pro-government
Istanbul Express newspaper. Later in the day, various student groups
(which had prepared themselves in previous days) and the “Cyprus is
Turkish Organization” (formed, some say, purely for the purpose of
looting and pillaging), arrived in Taksim Square in response to a
general call to organize protests. After the protests were over, the
go-ahead was given to the looters and pillagers, some of whom had come
in specially from eastern parts of the city for the acts which were
about to unfold.
But who had marked the doors of the non-Muslims so many days in
advance? How was it that thousands were able to pour into the streets
all at once? Why did the police not intervene in these events?
The state tried to push the blame onto the Democrat Party (DP) of the
time. The elected government tried to wiggle out of responsibility by
pointing to the leftists. During the Yassýada trials, which took place
following the May 27 coup, it was alleged that the events of Sept. 6-7
were the result of provocation by the DP government’s prime minister,
Adnan Menderes. In the end, though, it was concluded that it was a
deep state operation run by the “Special War Department,” and, if not
directly approved of by the government, at least something which the
government had been informed of in advance. In fact, General Sabri
Yirmibeþoðlu confessed all of this, while praising the events as an
“incredible organization” carried out by the “Special War Department,”
also known as the “Turkish Gladio.”
At this time, after it became clear that events were manufactured by
the Turkish intelligence forces, Oktay Engin (a member of the
intelligence forces who was also studying on a state loan at the
Thessaloniki Legal Faculty) and Hasan Uçar (who worked at the Turkish
Embassy in Thessaloniki) were arrested. Protected from trial by virtue
of their official status, Uçar and Engin were released shortly after
their arrests. Engin was given Greek citizenship following a decision
by the Greek state and was then protected by a number of different
loopholes. One more piece of evidence to prove that this was not
merely government provocation, but involved the deep state, was that
Engin became deputy police chief during the March 16, 1978 Beyazýt
massacres, was the head of the Police General Directorate Planning
department and later still rose all the way to governor of Nevþehir in
1992.
Since the formation of the Turkish Republic, minorities have always
been marked with a “dangerous” stamp in the books of the deep state.
An ethnically homogenous Anatolia was seen by the Kemalist elites as
an indispensable condition for success in creating a true nation
state, and despite promises made by the newly formed state to
guarantee the rights of Christian minorities, the various elected
governments explicitly carried out assimilation policies aiming to
force them out. The optimum result was to see the “enemies” expelled
while their abandoned capital and possessions were “Turkicized.” And
this too was done successfully. Campaigns such as “Citizen Speak
Turkish,” the “Wealth Tax” and “20 Kura Askerlik,” the military
conscription of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey during World War II,
were all carried out with the aim of seeing Armenian, Greek and Jewish
citizens grow weary and fearful, finishing their economic strength.
One of the most crucial operations to this end was that of Sept. 6-7,
which was a legacy left to the DP from the CHP. Minority citizens who
voted for the DP out of antipathy for the CHP, which refused to
liberalize when it came to minorities, were devastated. Thus the
events of Sept. 6-7 killed quite a few birds with one stone.
The intimidation of non-Muslims that was used during the ongoing
Cyprus talks in those days was also used as an opportunity to take
care of the non-Muslims in Ýstanbul and Izmir. At the same time, these
events were presented to the outside world as “communist provocations”
while presaging a trial of the DP government in the wake of the 1960
coup.
One high school teacher, Hülya, was just 17 years old in 1955. She was
engaged to a medical student named Metin. She recalled: “We had just
come back from the summer home that belonged to Eleni’s family. It was
on Büyükada, and the summer had been wonderful. We were meant to head
to Beyoðlu in the morning to do some window shopping. My father had
told us the night before not to go though. He said stay at home, in
fact he said, ‘Tell Eleni’s family to come too, we’ll all stay at
home, your mother would love that.’ She didn’t think anything bad of
it at the time, but it was only days later that she understood what
had really happened, saying that she never forgave her father for what
he knew but did not share. ‘We didn’t go, we listened to my father, we
sat around at home with Eli’s family, and at around six in the
evening, the looting and attacks began, people that we didn’t know at
all, people we had never seen in the neighborhood. My mother brought a
couple of our Armenian neighbors to our apartment; the doorman went
outside and told the attackers that “there are no non-Muslims here.”
Later we heard that other neighbors had also hidden people, like we
did… In the meantime, everything all around us was destroyed,
ruined, looted. When things got calmer my father said Eli is in the
shop, I’m going to go and see if anything is damaged there… My mother
did not let us go, so we escaped from home, we headed straight for
Pera, I didn’t want to leave Eli alone…” Two streets down, they caught
up with Eli and Hülya. Hülya yelled, “We are Turkish,” but they didn’t
believe her. Hülya was sure they would be beaten, and was scared… But
they didn’t get beaten… Hülya describes how on that day, the police
shouted, “We are not police, but Turks!” Everyone was desperate. She
said Eli and she could no longer even look at one another’s faces. Not
long afterwards, Eli’s family migrated from Turkey. The only hope
Hülya had left was her fiancé, Metin. But as she describes it: “He
gave back my engagement ring, saying it was no longer possible for him
to marry me. You were so involved with that Greek girl, my mother was
always very uncomfortable with that… After that day, I felt not
hostility towards the men who did such bad things, but rather my
parents, who had known that that day was coming… I was mostly hostile
to those who had protected some while joining in the looting masses
later, splitting up me and Eli.”
It is thought that on the night of Sept. 6, around 400 women were
raped. There are 60 cases of rape that were officially recorded. But
many believe that the numbers are this low only because many women
were too embarrassed to tell the truth. In the incidents that broke
out in Beyoðlu, Kurtuluþ, Þiþli, Niþantaþý, Eminönü, Fatih, Eyüp,
Bakýrköy, Yeþilköy, Ortaköy, Arnavutköy, Bebek, Moda, Kadýköy,
Kuzguncuk, Çengelköy and the Prince’s Islands, official records show
that 4,214 homes, 1,004 businesses, 73 churches, one synagogue, two
monasteries, 26 schools and many cemeteries and various shops were
attacked and damaged in various degrees. These events cause the deaths
of 12 people, while another 300 were injured, along with such horrific
events as the looting of graves and the forced circumcision of
religious men recorded, among other incidents. In short, these events
went far beyond the dimensions that were admitted by the DP later,
saying, “We thought that a couple of windows would be broken.”
And so these events, which constituted the largest “pogrom” to take
place in the history of the Turkish Republic, cannot be dismissed
lightly. It was not simply the reaction of citizens infuriated by
“disrespect shown towards Atatürk,” nor the result of “an uprising by
Turkish leftists against capitalism.” With the Wealth Tax having
taken away most of their possessions already, the minorities of
Istanbul were struck a final blow by the events of Sept. 6-7. They
were left no other option than to leave the country.
What followed that September was not only the elimination of Greeks,
Armenians and Jews from the country’s economic, social and cultural
life, but an underscoring of the idea that they were not accepted by
the masses as Turkish citizens, as well as a confirmation in their
minds that no matter which party was in power in Turkey, this “order”
would not change.
While the hostility towards Armenians, Greeks and Jews that was
injected into the population did not prevent some from protecting and
shielding their neighbors, it succeeded in laying one of the most
important cornerstones of the mentality that still sees “foreigners
and non-Muslims” as enemies even today. As Hülya describes it, when
neighbors were busy hiding other neighbors, they were thinking not
about “hiding a Greek or an Armenian, but rather someone named Stavro
or Ohannes.”
Despite the fact that some 60 years have passed since these events,
they are not seen as an operation of the “deep state” that nested
itself in state institutions, or as the kind of social engineering
aimed at creating a homogenous Turkish state. What’s more, the events
of that autumn long ago are traced in black letters forever in the
memories of not only some non-Muslim peoples of this country, but also
in the minds of those Turkish people who would not reject the dream of
being able to live together and in peace.
*A writer-researcher who lives in Armenia
From: A. Papazian
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-325776-a-sept-6-7-story-you-were-so-involved-with-that-greek-girlby-alin-ozinian-.html