GOOD NEIGHBOURS

One of the marks of civilisation and peace is the policy of being a good neighbour. The nearer the neighbour is the more difficult this co-existence can be. At a domestic level we all know the irritation a noisy neighbour can be. A friend was plagued by a neighbour practising his bagpipes most evenings, another had a professional pianist endlessly rehearsing while we commonly experience the neighbour careless of dustbins or whose garden shrubs encroach upon your sacred soil. With a little mutual goodwill (an often elusive attribute) these difficulties can be brushed aside.

On an international level, matters are often less easily resolved with long and turbulent history sustaining distrust. For example, Britain has a currently open land border with the Irish Republic. Only since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 has this been possible as prior to that the Republic claimed Northern Ireland as part of a mythical United Ireland. British sovereignty in Ulster was denied. This enmity was sustained throughout the Troubles (1968-98) with Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey involved in gun-running to the IRA, long before Libya’s Gaddafi. You do not need to be very old to remember the mayhem caused by Sinn Fein and the IRA (Jeremy Corbyn’s friends); the murder of the British Ambassador in Dublin, the Harrods bomb, the Birmingham pub bombs, the Hyde Park bomb, the Brighton attack on the Tory conference, the murder of Lord Mountbatten, Crossmaglen, attacks on the City and hundreds of tit-for-tat atrocities in Belfast as the Loyalists understandably retaliated, Enniskillen and Omagh. We hope Ireland has turned a new page but it is not easy for Britons to forgive and forget.

IRA murder 21 civilians and injure180 in Birmingham in 1974

                              

A current example of the necessity of tip-toeing on eggshells is the furore over proposed increased political power for the Polish government over judicial appointments. The EU in Brussels, no doubt prompted by her President, ex-Polish Premier Donald Tusk, claim that these proposals are contrary to EU values and should be vetoed. Yet the Polish judiciary, unreformed since the fall of communism in 1990 is said to be slow and corrupt. It probably urgently needs a shake-up, and political involvement in judicial appointments is common enough in some other EU countries and of course in the USA. EU interference, championed by grand-standing President Macron of France, will be sharply resisted by the present Polish strongman, wily Jaroslaw Kaczynski. A clash will damage the EU and can Brussels rally neighbour Angela Merkel to this cause, given the delicate relations between Poland and her ancestral enemy Germany? Probably better for the EU to make its point and then politely to withdraw.

Need the EU make an enemy of Jaroslaw Kaczynski?

 

My second homeland, Greece, has a neighbour problem to an acute degree. She has four land borders; with Albania which claims Epirus: with FYROM which claims Macedonia: with Bulgaria which claims Western Thrace: and with Turkey which also claims Western Thrace and many Aegean islands. Of these claimants, much the most menacing is Turkey, falling daily ever more under the thumb of wannabee Sultan and despot Recep Erdogan.

Autocratic menace Recep Erdogan of Turkey

The problem is not so much with Erdogan personally, fanatic though he is. The trouble is that the Turks have “form” in matters relating to nationality and minority rights. It was the Turks who invaded Cyprus in 1974 to protect the Turkish minority in maybe justified response to a Greek-inspired coup. They were not justified in greatly extending their occupation of Cyprus a month later, after the military Greek government had fallen. They have zero justification for remaining in Cyprus in full force 43 years later. Although there was much to admire in the modernisation of Turkey forced through by dictator Kemal Ataturk in the inter-war years, the process was far from bloodless. The former Sultan, Mehmed VI, died comfortably in his bed in San Remo in 1926 but less lucky was our Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather, accomplished Ali Kemal, lynched by an anti-Sultan mob in 1922.

Minorities were treated with extreme brutality. Over 1m Orthodox Greeks living in Asia Minor for millennia were, if not killed, uprooted and shipped to the struggling Kingdom of Greece, the proud Pontic Greek community was displaced and mainly eradicated. Worst of all the entire Christian Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire (at least 1.5m souls) were burnt out from their villages, murdered by irregulars or driven by forced marches to death in the desert. This was the world’s first genocide.

Armenian girls crucified by the Turks c.1915

People get impatient by the hostility of Greek for Turk but history must be faced (the Turks simply deny genocide). Turkey has a long way to go before it can be considered a civilised nation and its neighbours meanwhile rightly sup with her with the longest possible spoon.

SMD

27.07.17

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2017