American Hellenic Media Project - Published Submissions

Please find below:

(1) The shorter version of two letters forwarded by the American Hellenic Media Project (AHMP) to the following periodicals in response to articles published on the Ocalan extradition issue:

Aberdeen American News, The Akron Beacon Journal, The Arizona Republic, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, The Charlotte Observer, The Chicago Tribune, The China Daily, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbian, The Commercial Appeal, Contra Costa Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Dallas Morning News, The Economist, The Financial Times, Greensboro News The Record, The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Seattle Times, The South China Morning Post, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, The StarTribune, The Tampa Tribune, Time, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Wichita Eagle.

(2) The version of AHMP's letter published in The Tampa Tribune on December 6th;

(3) Two letters in response to AHMP's letter published in The Tampa Tribune;

(4) The version of AHMP's letter published in The Christian Science Monitor on December 1st;

(5) An article on the Ocalan extradition issue by AHMP's Executive Director. A version of this article was published in The National Herald (41-17 Crescent Street, Astoria, NY, 11101 national.herald@internetmci.com). The article was forwarded in letter form to the publications listed in (1) above; and was further submitted for publication to Oggi-America, The Italic Way, Ambassador Magazine (of the National Italian American Foundation), Italia Oggi, and Dall'Italia; and

(6) An excerpt from an article published in The Turkish Times addressing AHMP's letter to The Christian Science Monitor.

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(1)

American Hellenic Media Project
P.O. Box 1150
New York, N.Y. 10028-0008
ahmp@hri.org
http://www.ahmp.org

Via fax & e-mail: (605) 229-3954

(the shorter of two responses)

November 28, 1998

RE: Turkey’s true colors

To the Editor of Aberdeen American News:

Your brief coverage of the crisis arising from Italy’s decision to uphold its own constitution by not extraditing PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to Turkey, a country that would most likely execute him, overlooks an important consideration ("Kurdish Rebel Leader Arrested in Italy", 11/14): that Turkey reacted far more like a militant Mideast backwater than a NATO ally.

Turkey fomented an assault against Italian interests last week which was unprecedented in E.U. history, potentially costing Italy billions of dollars. A boycott was launched targeting everything from Italian weapons, clothes, and farming equipment to tires for city buses, electrical household contracts and alcoholic beverages. Even Turkey’s association of travel agents announced that Turkish tour operators had canceled their tours to Italy.

Turkey’s anti-Italian hysteria peaked into a frenzy this week with protests taking place in several parts of the country as tens of thousands chanted "Italy terrorist" and burned Italian flags and shoes. A mob even trampled Italian food for sale in a market, prompting Italy’s Foreign Ministry to advise its nationals not to travel to Turkey. Last Saturday, Turkish PM Mesut Yilmaz attacked the Italian government in front of 10,000 of his party supporters during a major congress of his Motherland Party who chanted "Damn Italy."

Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini denounced the hysteria as "an aggression against all of Europe." Yet the Italian imbroglio is just the latest swell in a rising tide of Turkish anti-European hostility following Turkey’s rejection from E.U. admission last year. In an unprecedented move Turkey recently refused a European Court of Human Rights ruling which ordered Turkey to pay damages to a Greek-Cypriot woman for damages arising from Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus.

Perhaps the gesture most illustrative of the widening gap between the pluralistic democracy Italy represents, and the militaristic pariah Turkey continues to be, came from Benetton’s Turkish partner, Bogazici Hazir Giyim. Mocking the Italian clothing company’s "united colors" campaign, which encourages multicultural tolerance, Bogazici painted all of its 171 shops’ windows black. Thus Europe has not only discovered that Turkey is "giving up on colors", as Bogazici declared—Europe has discovered Turkey’s true colors.

Very truly yours,

P. D. Spyropoulos, Esq.
Executive Director

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The American Hellenic Media Project is a non-profit organization created to address bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible journalism.

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(2)

TAMPA TRIBUNE

REGARDING TURKEY'S ASSAULT AGAINST ITALIAN INTERESTS AND THE LATEST SWELL IN A RISING TIDE OF HOSTILITY

Sunday, December 6, 1998
Section: COMMENTARY
Page: 7
Memo: LETTERS

Your brief coverage of the crisis "Italian court releases Kurdish rebel leader" (Nation/World, Nov. 21) - arising from Italy's decision to uphold its own constitution by not extraditing PKK (Kurdish rebel group) leader Abdullah Ocalan to Turkey, a country that would most likely execute him - overlooks an important consideration: that Turkey reacted far more like a militant Mideast backwater than a NATO ally.

Turkey fomented an assault against Italian interests that was unprecedented in European Union history, potentially costing Italy billions of dollars. A boycott was launched targeting everything from Italian weapons, clothes and farming equipment to tires for city buses, electrical household contracts and alcoholic beverages. Even Turkey's association of travel agents announced that Turkish tour operators had canceled their tours to Italy.

Turkey's anti-Italian hysteria peaked into a frenzy this week with protests taking place in several parts of the country as tens of thousands chanted "Italy terrorist" and burned Italian flags and shoes. A mob even trampled Italian food for sale in a market, prompting Italy's Foreign Ministry to advise its nationals not to travel to Turkey.

Last Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz attacked the Italian government in front of 10,000 of his party supporters during a major congress of his Motherland Party who chanted "Damn Italy." Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini denounced the hysteria as "an aggression against all of Europe." Yet the Italian imbroglio is just the latest swell in a rising tide of Turkish anti-European hostility following Turkey's rejection from EU admission last year.

In an unprecedented move Turkey recently refused a European Court of Human Rights ruling that ordered Turkey to pay damages to a Greek-Cypriot woman for damages arising from Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus. Perhaps the gesture most illustrative of the widening gap between the pluralistic democracy Italy represents, and the militaristic pariah Turkey continues to be, came from Benetton's Turkish partner, Bogazici Hazir Giyim. Mocking the Italian clothing company's "united colors" campaign, which encourages multicultural tolerance, Bogazici painted all of its 171 shops' windows black. Thus Europe has not only discovered that Turkey is "giving up on colors," as Bogazici declared - Europe has discovered Turkey's true colors.

- P. D. SPYROPOULOS
New York, N.Y.

The writer is executive director of The American Hellenic Media Project, a nonprofit organization created "to address bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible journalism."

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(3)

TAMPA TRIBUNE

Tuesday, December 8, 1998
Section: NATION/WORLD
Page: 14
Memo: LETTERS

Identify possible bias

This comment is in reference to the letter of Dec. 6 "Regarding Turkey's assault against Italian interests and the latest swell in a rising tide of hostility." Your descriptive blurb identifying the author's organization was misleading. That blurb was: "The writer is executive director of The American Hellenic Media Project, a nonprofit organization created "to address bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible journalism.' "

A significant number of your readers will not know that Hellenic means Greek. It should also be explained to your readers that Greece and Turkey have long been bitter enemies. If a Greek media organization needs to take sides in this disagreement between Italy and Turkey, then they should be clearly identified as such and readers should be alerted to possible bias.

- RONAN HEFFERNAN
Wesley Chapel

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TAMPA TRIBUNE

Friday, January 15, 1999
Section: NATION/WORLD
Page: 16
Memo: LETTERS
Turkey holding its territory

In response to P.D. Spyropoulos' letter regarding Italy's release of Abdullah Ocalan (Dec. 6), recognized internationally as the leader of terrorist organization PKK (Kurdish rebel group) and determined to establish an independent Kurdistan in Eastern Turkey:

The conflict arises because of Turkey's position not to relinquish a third of her territory to terrorists' demands. What country would assume another position?

Ocalan has been responsible for numerous terrorist acts, most of which were committed on Turkish soil, killing thousands. Turkey has every conceivable right and duty to demand the extradition of Ocalan to Turkey for trial. The Turkish citizens have every right to boycott Italian goods.

To equate the human rights issue of a Greek-Cypriot woman to the multiple atrocities ordered by Ocalan is just short of lunacy. I'm positive that not all Greek-Cypriots are innocent in the human rights treatment of Turkish-Cypriots.

The underlying cause of Spyropoulos' most biased letter boils down to the Cyprus issue. Until the Cyprus problem is resolved, there will always be mistrust between these two great countries, their governments and citizens.

There are many Turkish and Turkish-American citizens in the Tampa Bay area who are disgusted with the letter written by Spyropoulos, a Greek lobbyist headquartered in New York.

- R.T. MONTEITH
Tampa

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(4)

The Christian Science Monitor

December 01, 1998

Letters

Page: OPINION/ESSAYS, READERS WRITE, Page 8

One view of the Turkey-Italy extradition scuffle

Regarding "Kurds Take Their Case to Europe" (Nov. 19): Your coverage of the crisis arising from Italy's decision to uphold its own Constitution by not extraditing Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan to Turkey, where he'd most likely be executed, overlooks an important consideration. Turkey has reacted far more like a militant Mideast backwater than a NATO ally.

Turkey fomented an assault against Italian interests last week that was unprecedented in European Union history, potentially costing Italy billions of dollars. A boycott was launched targeting everything from Italian weapons, clothes, and farming equipment to tires for city buses and electrical household contracts. Even Turkey's association of travel agents announced that Turkish tour operators had canceled their tours to Italy.

Turkey's anti-Italian hysteria reached a frenzy this week as tens of thousands of protesters chanted "Italy terrorist" and burned Italian flags and shoes.

A mob even trampled Italian food for sale in a market, prompting Italy's Foreign Ministry to advise its nationals not to travel to Turkey.

P. D. Spyropoulos
New York
Executive Director, American Hellenic Media Project

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(5)

December 1, 1998

TURKEY’S TRUE COLORS

By P. D. Spyropoulos*

After being pursued from Syria to Moscow, Abdullah Ocalan—leader of the PKK, the separatist guerrilla insurgency which seeks autonomy for Turkey’s large Kurdish minority—has fled to Italy. The Italian courts have ruled that Italy’s constitution prohibits Ocalan from being extradited to Turkey because he would most likely be subjected to the death penalty. The State Department and much of the American media have criticized Italy for upholding its constitution while overlooking a far more important consideration: that Turkey has reacted more like a militant Mideast backwater than a NATO ally.

Turkey commenced an assault against Italian interests in mid-November which was unprecedented in the history of the European Union. Turkish Defense Minister Ismet Sezgin warned, "we will carry out a review of our relations with Italy in all areas of the economy." A boycott was launched by the powerful Union of Chambers of Commerce and Industry and has been backed by numerous state-owned and private firms. Turkey’s first state bank, Ziraat Bankasi, declared that it would no longer grant loans for the purchase of tractors and other Italian farming equipment, and further eliminated the Italian company Olivetti from a $500,000 bid for photocopy machines.

Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, disqualified Pirelli from a $200,000 contract to provide tires for city buses. Eight million dollars worth of electrical household contracts with Italian firms were scrapped, and imports of alcoholic beverages from Italy were halted altogether. The Turkish government has blacked out Italian television, and the Turkish telephone company has suspended all commercial ties with Italian companies. Even Turkey’s association of travel agents, TURSAB, announced that Turkish tour operators had canceled their tours to Italy. Perhaps the best news coming from this boycott—at least for those critical of Turkey’s human rights record and its international military adventurism—is that Turkey has announced a ban on military imports from Italy worth up to three hundred million dollars.

Fomented by the inflammatory statements of Turkey’s leaders and its press, Turkish anti-Italian hysteria peaked into a frenzy in late November with protests taking place in several parts of the country. Italy’s Foreign Ministry advised its nationals not to travel to Turkey and to "exercise caution", avoiding places in Turkey that are venues for large demonstrations. Fearing for the safety of Italian players, the European football association decided to postpone a game between the Turin-based Juventus soccer team and a Turkish team until December. When the two teams finally did play in Istanbul, more than 20,000 policemen guarded the Italian players against potential violence by Turkish fans—the gag that circulated amongst Europe’s soccer fans: there were more policemen than fans.

Thousands have been protesting outside the Italian embassy in Ankara, shouting anti-Italian slogans, burning the Italian flag and torching an effigy of Ocalan hung from a scaffold. According to Anatolia news agency, nearly 130,000 demonstrators paraded along a three-mile street in the central city of Kayseri chanting "Italy terrorist" and burning Italian-made shoes and portraits of Ocalan. Other demonstrations were reported in Istanbul and Bursa, while in the Mediterranean town of Antalya the Italian honorary consul, Gaye Doganoglu, said she would quit her post. A mob had trampled Italian food for sale in a market and three Frenchmen and their interpreter, all members of a religious aid organization that were arrested when police sacked the headquarters of a pro-Kurdish party in Diyarbakir, were expelled.

In Bonn, Hasan Denizkurdu, Turkey’s Minister of Justice, fumed that there would "no longer be relations" between Rome and Ankara unless Ocalan is handed over to Turkey, and warned that Turkey would consider Italy a "terrorist state" if it granted him political asylum. Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz further warned Italy that it is risking Turkey’s "eternal enmity" and threatened that Italy’s "mistake[s] will certainly have a very high price." On November 21st, Yilmaz attacked the Italian Government in front of 10,000 of his party supporters during a major congress of his Motherland Party. Yilmaz threatened that "the whole world should know that if Italy persists in this disgrace, Turkey will not leave it unanswered." Yilmaz’s speech was greeted with chants of "Damn Italy" and thunderous applause.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Massimo D’Alema, responded that he would not bow to "economic blackmail", and characterized Turkey’s acts as "illegal" and in violation of international conventions. Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini denounced the anti-Italian frenzy as "an aggression against all of Europe." What concerned many European leaders is that it may have been instigated to deflect attention from Yilmaz’s own domestic political woes; after a series of government scandals involving underworld connections and corruption charges, Yilmaz’s government fell on November 25th after losing a confidence vote in the Turkish Parliament.

Since Ocalan’s arrest, two Kurds have died in police custody and more than 3,000 people have been detained during a nationwide witch hunt of supporters of Turkey’s main legal Kurdish party, HADEP. Police raids on its offices began after relatives of prisoners on hunger strikes gathered at party centers nationwide to join the fast. Television pictures showed right-wing militants beating party members as they were being escorted into police detention, and a retired teacher and HADEP member died as a result of blows from extremists who seized him from police custody in the western town of Izmit. The Turkish Government has sent 30,000 troops to crack down on the Kurdish separatist group, the PKK, in the eastern Tunceli province, a region that is currently under the emergency rule of a Turkish military governor.

This is but the latest response in Turkey’s 70-year-old campaign to silence, assimilate or wipe out its sizable Kurdish minority in a reign of terror that has made Pinochet’s Chile look almost benign by comparison. According to a 1995 U.S. State Department human rights report, over 3,000 Kurdish villages have been torched or otherwise destroyed by Turkish security forces, displacing an estimated 1 to 3 million Kurds. Many believe that this is part of a campaign to not only crush the Kurdish separatist movement but to destroy Kurdish identity itself by ethnically cleansing the Kurds en mass from their ancestral homeland.

Human rights groups have long grieved that, in Turkey, journalists, writers, poets, students, businessmen, religious leaders, human rights activists and other dissidents sympathetic to the Kurdish cause are routinely subjected to torture, imprisonment and assassination. The International Pen disclosed that Turkey had more writers in jail than any nation on earth. In March of 1996, The New York Times cited Turkey as the country leading the world in imprisoned journalists ahead of China and Syria, prompting Amnesty International to call Turkey "one of the world’s most dangerous countries in which to pursue a career in journalism."

The claim currently being made by the Turkish Government that Ocalan and the PKK are responsible for 30,000 deaths becomes all the more preposterous given the bone chilling admissions leaked by the Turkish government earlier this year in order to discredit a prior administration. In January, the prime minister’s office revealed that Turkish officials spent $50 million on financing a shadow government of right-wing extremists, which included the infamous Gray Wolves and which perpetrated thousands of murders, kidnappings and bombings of Kurds and other dissidents. According to the Associated Press, the investigation concluded that "Turkish death squads carried out many of Turkey’s 14,000 unsolved murders".

It is this horrific record that led Danielle Mitterrand, president of the France-Freedom Foundation and widow of the late French president Francois Mitterand, to declare that "if you judge Ocalan as a terrorist, you should also judge and impose sanctions for state terrorism represented by [Turkey’ s] official army."

Yet the Italian imbroglio is just the latest swell in a rising tide of Turkish anti-European hostility following the rejection of Turkey’s application for E.U. membership last year. In a step unprecedented for a member of the Council of Europe, Turkey stated in August that it would refuse to comply with a European Court of Human Rights ruling—which ordered Turkey to pay substantial damages to a Greek-Cypriot woman forced to leave her home as a result of Turkey’s 1974 invasion and present occupation of northern Cyprus. No other member of the 40-nation Council of Europe has ever failed to comply with a compensation order from its human rights court, and such a breach of the underlying Human Rights Convention can result in the expulsion of the offending state.

Turkey has also rejected a resolution adopted by the Strasbourg-based European Union Parliament calling on Turkey’s President Suleyman Demirel to exonerate Akin Birdal, who was recently sentenced to one year in prison for his activism as president of the Turkish Association for Human Rights. In May, Birdal was shot repeatedly in the chest and legs by two extremists linked to the military but managed to survive the attack. The resolution, endorsed on Thursday, also demanded that the Turkish authorities allow Birdal to travel abroad for medical treatment and emphasized the need for reform in the Turkish judicial system.

Perhaps the gesture most illustrative of the widening gap between the progressive, pluralistic European democracy that Italy represents, and the militaristic pariah Turkey continues to be, came from Benetton’s Turkish partner, Bogazici Hazir Giyim. Mocking the Italian clothing company’s "united colors" campaign, which encourages multicultural tolerance, Bogazici painted all of its 171 shops’ windows black. Thus Europe has not only discovered that Turkey is "giving up on colors", as Bogazici declared—Europe has also discovered Turkey’s true colors.

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* P. D. Spyropoulos is the founder and Executive Director of the American Hellenic Media Project, a non-profit think-tank created to foster accurate and ethical journalism and to address bias and misinformation in the media. AHMP’ letters, commentaries and articles have been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Irish Times, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Post, The Village Voice, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, El Nuevo Herald (Miami), The National Herald, Greek America, The Hellenic News of America, The GreekAmerican, and The Greek American Review. Mr. Spyropoulos has been interviewed on Reuter’s Television, Orthodox Christian Television, Antenna Satellite-FM, Aktina-FM, and other Television and radio programs throughout the country. Mr. Spyropoulos is an attorney and a former New York City Family Court prosecutor.

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(6)

The Turkish Times

A QUANDARY OF THE INEXPLICABLE KIND THE STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF TURKEY'S DETRACTORS

Mahmut Esat Ozan

" . . . In the meantime, the Armenian and Greek propaganda machines in the United States are cranking out unfavorable misinformation without batting an eye. A Harut Sassounian writes in the CALIFORNIA COURIER that there was no doubt in his mind that the Turkish government had forced four different religious leaders to make statements against their will. Previously, the newly elected Armenian Patriarch of Turkey, Archbishop Mesrob Mutafyan, the Greek Ecumenical Patriarch Bartolomeos, Israel's Chief Rabbi Arus Ratson, and Turkey's religious chief, Mehmet Muri Yilmaz had all criticized the actions of the Italian Communist government of Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema, for refusing to extradite Ocalan to Turkey, his birth place. One even pleaded with Pope John Paul II, asking him to intervene on behalf of the Turkish people, and said the terrorist Ocalan did not even know Kurdish, emphasizing his disconnect with the people of his own kind.

In another ridiculous letter written to the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, the Executive Director of the American Hellenic Media Project, Mr. P.D. Spyropoulos, referred to Turkey as a "militant Mideast backwater," called the reactions of the mothers of the Turkish martyrs "hysteria" and unabashedly described the Turkish people as "a mob." By the way, both "ethnic chetnicks" disowned their religious leaders, who sided with Turkey, as being '"traitors." [Note: it is unknown what the author is referring to here, these quotes or positions were never stated].

P.D. Spyropoulos is the same individual who had replied in one of his so- called rebuttals concerning the article, "Who Burned Izmir?" Following a slue of insults against Turks, he claimed that the liberating Turkish forces not only burned their own city, but that they had also butchered 200.000 Greeks and Armenians in the process, not knowing that the total Greek and Armenian population of Izmir at that time did not even reach one half of that ridiculous figure, proving him the champion PREVARICATOR of the century. [Note: During the 1922 holocaust tens of thousands of Greek refugees fleeing from Ataturk’s advancing troops flooded into the city of Smyrna, now renamed Izmir. When Ataturk’s troops reached Smyrna, they burned the city and massacred much of its population.]

Now back to the main problem Turkey has been afflicted with for almost two long decades.

THE OCALAN SYNDROME.

With the inauguration of the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization in Moscow in the late Seventies a new element was added to the list of sinister, vulture-like characters waiting in ambush, in the wings. They are now everywhere. They are present at all points of the compass: NORTH, EAST, WEST, and SOUTH. The first letter of the names of their geographical locations creates the word N.E.W.S., and the news they create remains associated with the belligerent behavior displayed vis-a-vis the Turks. The favorable attitude of the detractors of Turkey towards this terrorist organization has never been explained in a convincing fashion, even by the most astute political science experts alive today. As for myself, not being a schooled psychoanalyst, nor a trained behavioral psychologist, find myself completely helpless in passing judgement on this bizarre demeanor. Curiously, most observers I reviewed so far on this subject, be they Turkish or otherwise, seem to be as baffled about this phenomenon as I am. I have to admit I'm lost for words confronting this abnormality of conduct. I call it, "A QUANDARY OF THE INEXPLICABLE KIND."

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