By Patrick Comerford,
Foreign Desk Editor
The Greek Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, says the EU needs “an efficient, common foreign and defence policy capable of safeguarding the external borders, the independence and the security of the Union”.
The institutions of the EU must be based on “institutional equality and unity, without discriminations or differentiations,” he said.
In an interview with The Irish Times before the Dublin summit, Mr Pangalos also described EU membership for Cyprus as “a priority issue for Greek foreign policy”.
However, he said “it should made clear” to Ankara that Turkey has no veto over Cypriot membership, and said the EU and Cyprus should not be “hostages” to Turkey.
“Greece wants good relations with our neighbour Turkey,” he said. “Turkey, however, pursues an offensive policy in the Aegean that endangers stability and security in the region.”
Mr Pangalos said Turkey continues to violate the terms of its Customs Union agreement with the EU and is questioning the territorial integrity of the EU by challenging “Greek territorial integrity over the Imia islets … and the sovereignty of an indefinite number of islands or islets in the Aegean”.
Calling for a “new security architecture” for the European continent, he said acts by a third country against a member state and disrespect for human rights should influence EU policy on an applicant state. “European integration should be built upon the principles of democracy, solidarity, cohesion and social justice,” he said.
“We do not wish to impede in any way the relations of Turkey with the European Union, provided that Turkey abides by the obvious conditions of respect of … international law and human rights,” Mr Pangalos said.
“I do not see how any European could have a different opinion,” he said, asking: “Is there anyone that believes that relations with this country should develop while citizens, journalists and even children or sexually abused by the police, as has been recently reported by Amnesty International.”
Greece will be “in the second group of countries” to take part in the planned single currency, the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, said yesterday in The Hague.
This interview was first published in The Irish Times on 13 December 1996
COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
13 December 1996
09 November 1996
Cyprus problem
looks increasingly
for EU solution
World View
Patrick Comerford
THE Irish Ambassador, Mr Liam Rigney, is in Cyprus this weekend for talks in advance of a visit to Cyprus later in the month by Mr Kester Heaslip, the Irish diplomat who is the EU’s special envoy charged with trying to negotiate a settlement to the island's divisions.
The past few months have seen tension heightened, with five people killed on the “Green Line” since June and a respected Turkish Cypriot journalist murdered in the occupied area.
Tensions were activated once again this week when the Turkish Cypriot authorities sealed off the sole crossing point on the divided island to 500 mostly elderly Greek Cypriots known as the “enclaved” and a handful of Maronites 187 in all living in the north. On the other side of the buffer zone, in the face of opposition from the government and from the UN peace keeping forces, a right wing Greek Cypriot deputy, Marios Matsakis, has been protesting at the Ledra Palace crossing point in Nicosia, trying to dissuade tourists from crossing to the north.
The provocative action by Mr Matsakis has continued each day despite personal pleas from the Cypriot Foreign Minister, Mr Alecos Michaelides, and the Justice Minister, Mr Alecos Evangelou, and the Turkish Cypriots are threatening to resume their action on Monday.
The Cypriot government’s anxiety about the recent escalation in tension on the island is understandable under any circumstances. But that anxiety has another agenda too:
Cyprus has been promised that negotiations on its application for full membership of the European Union will open six months after the Inter Governmental Conference ends. That date was promised to Malta too, but the recent Maltese election has seen a Labour government returned to power on the promise of withdrawing Malta's application to join the EU. The Cypriot government is anxious to ensure that no excuses should get away from speeding up the process of negotiations with Cyprus.
Cyprus qualifies for EU membership according to many criteria. According to the Commission opinion on the application for membership, the geographical position of Cyprus and deep lying bonds have for 2,000 years “located the island at the very fount of European culture an civilisation”.
The island has witnessed an economic miracle since Cyprus began to recover from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Annual per capita income now stands at $15,470, higher than some EU member states. With an annual growth rate at 6 per cent over the past seven years, inflation at 2.6 per cent, virtually no unemployment, and a budget deficit at 1.3 per cent of the GDP, Cyprus compares more than favourably with many of its prospective EU partners.
This economic success story is mainly due to tourism. In addition, agricultural output has returned to the pre-invasion levels, although 37 per cent of the island is still Turkish occupied. Shipping too has played a large part in the economic miracle, and the island has the world’s fourth largest registered shipping fleet.
Prof Christopher Pissarides, of the London School of Economics, points out that among Mediterranean countries only France and Italy are richer, and the per capita income equals that in Spain. At a recent conference organised by the LSE and the Hellenic Centre in London, the Minister of Finance, Mr Christos Chrstodolou, pointed out that Cyprus meets the Maastricht criteria for economic and monetary union.
The same economic boom has not been enjoyed in the north. According to Mr Michalis Attalides, the Permanent Delegate of Cyprus to the EU, GDP per capita in the north is three or four times lower, and inflation is running at about 60 per cent. According to Mr Attalides there are no insurmountable obstacles" to membership.
The large off-shore sector, which has come to play an important part in the economy in recent years, may prove a difficult one for Cyprus to abandon as the price for accession, although Mr Christodolou points out that Ireland too benefits from a large offshore sector. However, as Dr Pissarides put it bluntly at the conference, “beggars can't be choosers”.
Security and the continued division of the island remain the major political concerns for EU negotiators. In recent weeks, the Cypriot government has been trying to send out signals that is willing to take account of feelings and anxieties in northern Cyprus as the accession negotiations proceed. Mr Michaelides, who has personally appealed to Mr Matsakis to end his provocative protests, told the conference at the LSE: “You cannot change geography. We have to talk to our neighbours, and try to make friends.”
The European Commission official charged with negotiations with Cyprus, Malta and Turkey, Mr Serge Andre Abou, believes that as the negotiations open it will be important to provide assurances for the Turkish Cypriots that accession will not reinforce their feelings of isolation.
Cypriots fear that by refusing to take part in negotiations on the island, the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey will be able to exercise an effective veto on Cyprus joining the EU, knowing Britain and other states will oppose Cyprus joining without an agreement on a bizonal, bicommunal, federal republic.
Mr Yannos Kranidiotis, the Greek representative at the IGC, is anxious to point out to Turkish Cypriots that through EU membership for the whole island they would gain economically and see an end to their isolation, the Cyprus problem poisons relations between Turkey and Greece, he says, and he hints that with a Turkish contribution to a settlement Athens could facilitate closer relations with the EU that would benefit Ankara.
But he sees a great injustice if Turkish intransigence now prevents Cypriot accession: “Cyprus should not be penalised a second time for Turkish intervention.”
Next Friday, the Turkish Cypriots mark the 13th anniversary of their unilateral declaration of independence, but their breakaway “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” is recognised only by Ankara, and survives only with the presence of 30,000 Turkish mainland forces. Whether this anniversary continues to be marked, or whether northern Cyprus ends its international pariah status may depend not so much on the intensity of protests at the Ledra Palace, but on the intensity of diplomatic efforts by Mr Heaslip and other international negotiators.
This ‘World View’ opinion column was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 9 November 1996
Patrick Comerford
THE Irish Ambassador, Mr Liam Rigney, is in Cyprus this weekend for talks in advance of a visit to Cyprus later in the month by Mr Kester Heaslip, the Irish diplomat who is the EU’s special envoy charged with trying to negotiate a settlement to the island's divisions.
The past few months have seen tension heightened, with five people killed on the “Green Line” since June and a respected Turkish Cypriot journalist murdered in the occupied area.
Tensions were activated once again this week when the Turkish Cypriot authorities sealed off the sole crossing point on the divided island to 500 mostly elderly Greek Cypriots known as the “enclaved” and a handful of Maronites 187 in all living in the north. On the other side of the buffer zone, in the face of opposition from the government and from the UN peace keeping forces, a right wing Greek Cypriot deputy, Marios Matsakis, has been protesting at the Ledra Palace crossing point in Nicosia, trying to dissuade tourists from crossing to the north.
The provocative action by Mr Matsakis has continued each day despite personal pleas from the Cypriot Foreign Minister, Mr Alecos Michaelides, and the Justice Minister, Mr Alecos Evangelou, and the Turkish Cypriots are threatening to resume their action on Monday.
The Cypriot government’s anxiety about the recent escalation in tension on the island is understandable under any circumstances. But that anxiety has another agenda too:
Cyprus has been promised that negotiations on its application for full membership of the European Union will open six months after the Inter Governmental Conference ends. That date was promised to Malta too, but the recent Maltese election has seen a Labour government returned to power on the promise of withdrawing Malta's application to join the EU. The Cypriot government is anxious to ensure that no excuses should get away from speeding up the process of negotiations with Cyprus.
Cyprus qualifies for EU membership according to many criteria. According to the Commission opinion on the application for membership, the geographical position of Cyprus and deep lying bonds have for 2,000 years “located the island at the very fount of European culture an civilisation”.
The island has witnessed an economic miracle since Cyprus began to recover from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Annual per capita income now stands at $15,470, higher than some EU member states. With an annual growth rate at 6 per cent over the past seven years, inflation at 2.6 per cent, virtually no unemployment, and a budget deficit at 1.3 per cent of the GDP, Cyprus compares more than favourably with many of its prospective EU partners.
This economic success story is mainly due to tourism. In addition, agricultural output has returned to the pre-invasion levels, although 37 per cent of the island is still Turkish occupied. Shipping too has played a large part in the economic miracle, and the island has the world’s fourth largest registered shipping fleet.
Prof Christopher Pissarides, of the London School of Economics, points out that among Mediterranean countries only France and Italy are richer, and the per capita income equals that in Spain. At a recent conference organised by the LSE and the Hellenic Centre in London, the Minister of Finance, Mr Christos Chrstodolou, pointed out that Cyprus meets the Maastricht criteria for economic and monetary union.
The same economic boom has not been enjoyed in the north. According to Mr Michalis Attalides, the Permanent Delegate of Cyprus to the EU, GDP per capita in the north is three or four times lower, and inflation is running at about 60 per cent. According to Mr Attalides there are no insurmountable obstacles" to membership.
The large off-shore sector, which has come to play an important part in the economy in recent years, may prove a difficult one for Cyprus to abandon as the price for accession, although Mr Christodolou points out that Ireland too benefits from a large offshore sector. However, as Dr Pissarides put it bluntly at the conference, “beggars can't be choosers”.
Security and the continued division of the island remain the major political concerns for EU negotiators. In recent weeks, the Cypriot government has been trying to send out signals that is willing to take account of feelings and anxieties in northern Cyprus as the accession negotiations proceed. Mr Michaelides, who has personally appealed to Mr Matsakis to end his provocative protests, told the conference at the LSE: “You cannot change geography. We have to talk to our neighbours, and try to make friends.”
The European Commission official charged with negotiations with Cyprus, Malta and Turkey, Mr Serge Andre Abou, believes that as the negotiations open it will be important to provide assurances for the Turkish Cypriots that accession will not reinforce their feelings of isolation.
Cypriots fear that by refusing to take part in negotiations on the island, the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey will be able to exercise an effective veto on Cyprus joining the EU, knowing Britain and other states will oppose Cyprus joining without an agreement on a bizonal, bicommunal, federal republic.
Mr Yannos Kranidiotis, the Greek representative at the IGC, is anxious to point out to Turkish Cypriots that through EU membership for the whole island they would gain economically and see an end to their isolation, the Cyprus problem poisons relations between Turkey and Greece, he says, and he hints that with a Turkish contribution to a settlement Athens could facilitate closer relations with the EU that would benefit Ankara.
But he sees a great injustice if Turkish intransigence now prevents Cypriot accession: “Cyprus should not be penalised a second time for Turkish intervention.”
Next Friday, the Turkish Cypriots mark the 13th anniversary of their unilateral declaration of independence, but their breakaway “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” is recognised only by Ankara, and survives only with the presence of 30,000 Turkish mainland forces. Whether this anniversary continues to be marked, or whether northern Cyprus ends its international pariah status may depend not so much on the intensity of protests at the Ledra Palace, but on the intensity of diplomatic efforts by Mr Heaslip and other international negotiators.
This ‘World View’ opinion column was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 9 November 1996
28 October 1996
Elections to exorcise ghosts of the Ceausescu era
Patrick Comerford
Every morning in Bucharest, the tourists queue up to inspect the Casa Poporului, the House of the People, the world’s third largest building, the greatest monument to modern megalomania.
Each face of the gigantic folly on top of Spirei Hill is 270 metres long and 86 metres high. The 12 storey building with its four underground levels, was built to survive nuclear war and earthquakes; with 1,100 rooms, 4,500 chandeliers, marble walls, gold leafed ceilings, and silk covered walls, it is a most extravagant display of kitsch and bad taste, and a living reminder of the brutality of the Ceausescus, Nicolae and Elena.
In ‘the Paris of the East’, a quarter of the city’s historic centre, covering 5 sq km, was levelled to make way for the Casa Poporului, the surrounding Centru Civic, and Europe’s largest boulevard: the Bulvardul Unirii, at a length of 4 km and a width of 120 metres marginally outstrips the Champs Elysees.
In the vandalism and demolition, 40,000 people were forcibly removed to the outskirts of the Romanian capital, and ancient homes and churches were destroyed.
The resulting outcry ensured the survival of a handful of ancient churches, including the mid-17th century Patriarchal Cathedral, with its Brancoveanu campanile and its vivid frescoes of the last judgment and Satan receiving the souls of the damned in hell. The cathedral on Dealul Mitropoliei attracts a few tourists; but after a personal guided tour of the Casa Poporului, it is easy to understand why the tourist who wanted to see the bowels of hell and the works of the devil might first chose to visit Ceausescu’s folly on Spirei Hill.
Today, the Casa Poporului is used for art exhibitions, international conferences and fashion shows. After next month’s parliamentary elections, the Chamber of Deputies will move in, although the senate is reluctant to leave its premises in the city centre.
The senate occupies the former headquarters of the Communist Party Central Committee, with its famous balcony where Ceausescu delivered his last speech to a heckling crowd of 80,000, and later scrambled to the roof to be airlifted away in a helicopter – three days later he was executed in Tirgoviste on Christmas Day, 1989.
The election on November 3rd is a genuine effort by all parties to exorcise the ghosts of the Ceausescu years, and to prove Romania's European credentials. Thousands of candidates are standing for parliament, and President Ion Iliescu, who won two previous elections in 1990 and 1992, is seeking a new four year term.
Mr Iliescu faces 15 challengers, and opinion polls show he has a tight battle against his two main rivals, Mr Emil Constantinescu of the Democratic Convention (CDR) and the former Prime Minister, Mr Petre Roman of the Social Democratic Union (SDU).
According to a poll this week by the IMAS institute, Mr Iliescu stands at 31.9 per cent, with Mr Constantinescu at 27.2 per cent, and Mr Roman at 21.9 per cent. The other candidates hold less than 5 per cent each. The election will go to a second round if no contender wins the 50 per cent needed for an outright first round win.
In the general election, the CDR leads with 31.2 per cent, followed by Mr Iliescu’s ruling Social Democratic Party (PDSR) at 28.5 per cent, with the SDU in third place at 19.7 per cent.
Mr Iliescu was dropped from the central committee after 19 years by Ceausescu and sidelined into the state Technical Publishing House. Although never a dissident, he became the natural leader of the reformers in the Communist Party who formed the National Salvation Front (FSN) after the revolution. Mr Roman became his first prime minister, but after a split in the FSN Mr Iliescu's faction became the PDSR and Mr Roman formed the Democratic Party (FSN), now part of the SDU.
The new rising star in the PDSR is Mr Roman's former Foreign Minister, Mr Adrian Nastase, who has been tipped to succeed Mr Iliescu as the party’s presidential choice in four years’ time.
A charismatic professor of international law at Bucharest University, Mr Nastase (46) is now President of the Chamber of Deputies, and the most powerful political figure in Romania after Mr Iliescu. He admits to approaches from other parties to run for president in 1992, but has remained loyal to Mr Iliescu and has been leading his party's campaign in the capital and in the country side.
All parties are offering the same promises: economic reform, getting tough on corruption and energetic efforts to join NATO and the EU. But the economy is a major problem for Mr Iliescu and his supporters after almost seven years in office since the revolution. Inflation is up once again and running at 45 per cent, the leu remains artificially high at around 3,500 to the dollar, and the powerful state owned banks still dominate the economic sector.
At the factory gates and at village meetings, Mr Nastase has been promising reforms in the agriculture sector and state aid to help young families build houses, but knows he cannot promise higher wages or an immediate improvement in living standards. At campaign meetings he blames Romania's economic woes on Mr Roman’s policies as prime minister. In interviews with the foreign media, he concentrates on foreign policy issues, praising Romania’s improved relations with Hungary, proclaiming Romania’s good intentions towards the west, and describing NATO membership in the first wave of expansion as his ‘first priority’ followed later by entry into the EU.
The Foreign Minister, Mr Teodor Melescanu, has led a campaign of visits and lobbying across Europe and North America, travelling to Britain, Canada, France and the US to press Romania's NATO application.
Mr Nastase concedes that Mr Iliescu may have to go to a second wound and that the opposition has run ‘a very dynamic campaign’.
A well-read man of letters with a vast private art collection and a comfortable lifestyle, he claims: ‘I still consider politics as a hobby.’ But he does not hide his own hopes to run for president in the year 2000. ‘It’s very difficult to predict the future,’ he told me. ‘But I'm ready to do what’s needed.’ Whatever the results on November 3rd, he believes he can gain further valuable experience either continuing as President of the Chamber of Deputies or cast in a new role as leader of the opposition. ‘I still need time to learn,’ he says.
No matter how Mr Iliescu and his party fare, Mr Nastase is poised to become the principal leader of the generation of politicians to succeed the contemporaries of Nicolae Ceausescu.
This news feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 28 October 1996
Every morning in Bucharest, the tourists queue up to inspect the Casa Poporului, the House of the People, the world’s third largest building, the greatest monument to modern megalomania.
Each face of the gigantic folly on top of Spirei Hill is 270 metres long and 86 metres high. The 12 storey building with its four underground levels, was built to survive nuclear war and earthquakes; with 1,100 rooms, 4,500 chandeliers, marble walls, gold leafed ceilings, and silk covered walls, it is a most extravagant display of kitsch and bad taste, and a living reminder of the brutality of the Ceausescus, Nicolae and Elena.
In ‘the Paris of the East’, a quarter of the city’s historic centre, covering 5 sq km, was levelled to make way for the Casa Poporului, the surrounding Centru Civic, and Europe’s largest boulevard: the Bulvardul Unirii, at a length of 4 km and a width of 120 metres marginally outstrips the Champs Elysees.
In the vandalism and demolition, 40,000 people were forcibly removed to the outskirts of the Romanian capital, and ancient homes and churches were destroyed.
The resulting outcry ensured the survival of a handful of ancient churches, including the mid-17th century Patriarchal Cathedral, with its Brancoveanu campanile and its vivid frescoes of the last judgment and Satan receiving the souls of the damned in hell. The cathedral on Dealul Mitropoliei attracts a few tourists; but after a personal guided tour of the Casa Poporului, it is easy to understand why the tourist who wanted to see the bowels of hell and the works of the devil might first chose to visit Ceausescu’s folly on Spirei Hill.
Today, the Casa Poporului is used for art exhibitions, international conferences and fashion shows. After next month’s parliamentary elections, the Chamber of Deputies will move in, although the senate is reluctant to leave its premises in the city centre.
The senate occupies the former headquarters of the Communist Party Central Committee, with its famous balcony where Ceausescu delivered his last speech to a heckling crowd of 80,000, and later scrambled to the roof to be airlifted away in a helicopter – three days later he was executed in Tirgoviste on Christmas Day, 1989.
The election on November 3rd is a genuine effort by all parties to exorcise the ghosts of the Ceausescu years, and to prove Romania's European credentials. Thousands of candidates are standing for parliament, and President Ion Iliescu, who won two previous elections in 1990 and 1992, is seeking a new four year term.
Mr Iliescu faces 15 challengers, and opinion polls show he has a tight battle against his two main rivals, Mr Emil Constantinescu of the Democratic Convention (CDR) and the former Prime Minister, Mr Petre Roman of the Social Democratic Union (SDU).
According to a poll this week by the IMAS institute, Mr Iliescu stands at 31.9 per cent, with Mr Constantinescu at 27.2 per cent, and Mr Roman at 21.9 per cent. The other candidates hold less than 5 per cent each. The election will go to a second round if no contender wins the 50 per cent needed for an outright first round win.
In the general election, the CDR leads with 31.2 per cent, followed by Mr Iliescu’s ruling Social Democratic Party (PDSR) at 28.5 per cent, with the SDU in third place at 19.7 per cent.
Mr Iliescu was dropped from the central committee after 19 years by Ceausescu and sidelined into the state Technical Publishing House. Although never a dissident, he became the natural leader of the reformers in the Communist Party who formed the National Salvation Front (FSN) after the revolution. Mr Roman became his first prime minister, but after a split in the FSN Mr Iliescu's faction became the PDSR and Mr Roman formed the Democratic Party (FSN), now part of the SDU.
The new rising star in the PDSR is Mr Roman's former Foreign Minister, Mr Adrian Nastase, who has been tipped to succeed Mr Iliescu as the party’s presidential choice in four years’ time.
A charismatic professor of international law at Bucharest University, Mr Nastase (46) is now President of the Chamber of Deputies, and the most powerful political figure in Romania after Mr Iliescu. He admits to approaches from other parties to run for president in 1992, but has remained loyal to Mr Iliescu and has been leading his party's campaign in the capital and in the country side.
All parties are offering the same promises: economic reform, getting tough on corruption and energetic efforts to join NATO and the EU. But the economy is a major problem for Mr Iliescu and his supporters after almost seven years in office since the revolution. Inflation is up once again and running at 45 per cent, the leu remains artificially high at around 3,500 to the dollar, and the powerful state owned banks still dominate the economic sector.
At the factory gates and at village meetings, Mr Nastase has been promising reforms in the agriculture sector and state aid to help young families build houses, but knows he cannot promise higher wages or an immediate improvement in living standards. At campaign meetings he blames Romania's economic woes on Mr Roman’s policies as prime minister. In interviews with the foreign media, he concentrates on foreign policy issues, praising Romania’s improved relations with Hungary, proclaiming Romania’s good intentions towards the west, and describing NATO membership in the first wave of expansion as his ‘first priority’ followed later by entry into the EU.
The Foreign Minister, Mr Teodor Melescanu, has led a campaign of visits and lobbying across Europe and North America, travelling to Britain, Canada, France and the US to press Romania's NATO application.
Mr Nastase concedes that Mr Iliescu may have to go to a second wound and that the opposition has run ‘a very dynamic campaign’.
A well-read man of letters with a vast private art collection and a comfortable lifestyle, he claims: ‘I still consider politics as a hobby.’ But he does not hide his own hopes to run for president in the year 2000. ‘It’s very difficult to predict the future,’ he told me. ‘But I'm ready to do what’s needed.’ Whatever the results on November 3rd, he believes he can gain further valuable experience either continuing as President of the Chamber of Deputies or cast in a new role as leader of the opposition. ‘I still need time to learn,’ he says.
No matter how Mr Iliescu and his party fare, Mr Nastase is poised to become the principal leader of the generation of politicians to succeed the contemporaries of Nicolae Ceausescu.
This news feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 28 October 1996
02 September 1996
Wexford Hurling:
An Irishman’s Diary
Patrick Comerford
AS A BOY growing up in the 1950s, I was in awe of the Wexford hurlers, the Rackard brothers, and those epic teams in what Nicky Furlong describes as “the Greatest Hurling Decade”.
Those memories have been hallowed in Billy Roche’s play, Poor Beast in the Rain, and were brought to life again with yesterday’s All Ireland Hurling Final against Limerick.
There is nothing to stir Wexford pride like watching the men in Purple and Gold or hearing the band strike up The Boys of Wexford and Boolavogue, and it is no coincidence that the associations between Wexford’s sporting achievements and the memories of 1798 should be recorded by the same local historian.
Nicky Furlong is the author of The Greatest Hurling Decade. But it is in his biography of Father John Murphy that he recalls the origins of a persistent tradition invoked by Wexford supporters against Kilkenny in inter-county hurling matches.
A dejected Father Murphy and his exhausted supporters had trekked as far as north Kilkenny, and were betrayed as they slept on the hills of Kilcumney, duped into believing that they were being protected by the local colliers.
Watery Kilkenny Men
During the night, the colliers deserted the Wexford rebels, every man of them from the “camp”. According to Nicky Furlong, the colliers took every gun and pike with all the gunpowder they could carry away with them from the camp. “What gunpowder they could not take with them, they pissed on”.
In all, Wexford have played 26 Leinster hurling finals against Kilkenny. And yet, the greatest abuse was reserved not for the Kilkenny supporters, but for Cork. And this was so because the memory of “Tom the Devil” was alive in Wexford a century after the rising.
Thomas Honam, a sergeant with the North Cork militia earned his reputation as “Tom the Devil” for his expertise in torture and his perfection of the pitchcap. Old men who had their heads sheared and had been pitch capped as croppies were still to be seen in Co Wexford in the 1860s, and respect for them and the memory of “Tom the Devil” fired Wexford people in, the decade leading up to the first centenary of the rising.
In 1890, Castlebridge won the county hurling championship and so became the first Wexford team to play in an All Ireland Hurling Final. The 1890 final was played at Clonturk on November 16th, and Cork was represented by Augabullogue. Wexford were behind in the match but looked like drawing level with the prowess of two of their fiercest players, Tom Murphy and Will Neville. The Wexford supporters were emphatic when they accused the Cork supporters of being descendants of the North Cork Militia. As a ballad of the time puts it:
Tom Murphy and Will Neville
Began to lay them level,
When they thought of Tom the Devil,
With his pitch cap and his shears.
The Cork team were forced off the pitch by the Wexford jeers. But at that stage the scoreline stood at 1-6 to 2-2 against Wexford, and the unfinished match was awarded to Cork.
Wexford returned to Clonturk again for the 1891 final, played on February 28th, 1892. This time Crossabeg represented the county, and the team included Tom Murphy and Will Neville once again. But Kerry’s Ballyduff won 2-3 to 1-5 after a half hour’s extra play.
Wexford’s first All Ireland Hurling title was not won until 1910, when Castlebridge beat Limerick’s Castleconnel at Jones’s Road 7-0 to 6-2. Once again, the memory of 1798 must have been high in the minds of the Wexford supporters. Big Jem Mythen of Monawilling, who scored the winning goal against Limerick that year, has a special place in ’98 lore according to local historian Brian Cleary. And that place is recorded in Brian Cleary's account of the Battle of Oulart in The Past, the journal of the Ui Cinsealaigh Historical Society.
Where Murphy Stood
As part of the 1948 commemorations for the 150th anniversary of the 1798 Rising, Jim Mythen, along with Paddy Sutton, Phil Quirke, Bud Farl and Ned Ryan, erected a monument in a corner of a field between Monawilling and Oulart, close to the place where tradition says Father John Murphy stood during the Battle of Oulart on Sunday, May 27th, 1798.
The monument stands close to Father Murphy’s Well, and, according to Brian Cleary, the monument, the well and the entire battle area at Oulart are being included in the Sli Charman, the long walk planned across Co Wexford.
After their 1910 victory over Limerick, the Wexford hurlers had to wait until 1918 to return to an All-Ireland hurling final.
Once again, they faced Limerick, but the Wexford selection was trounced 9-5 to 1-3 by Newcastle West.
Defeat was sweetened that year by Wexford’s sixth successive appearance in an All-Ireland Senior Football final and the fourth successive football title won for the county by the Blues and Whites of Wexford town: having been defeated by Kerry in 1913 and 1914, Wexford won four times in a row from 1915.
With these record-breaking exploits, hurling took second place to football throughout the 1920s, the 1930s and well into the 1940s. In 1948, the Wexford final with a team that included Nicky Rackard. But Wexford’s greatest triumph that year was to see a football tournament organised to coincide with the 150th anniversary commemorations of 1798. By coincidence, Wexford reached the final, which was not played until 1949, when the team, with Martin Comerford in goal, was defeated in front of 36,000 by three points by mighty Meath.
Few could have foreseen the great revival in Wexford hurling that year too. The dual football and hurling heroes of the county included Nicky Rackard, Mick Hanlon, Padge Kehoe, Bobby Donovan, and Sam “Wilkie” Thorpe from Vinegar Hill.
The Three Rackards
The hurlers of the 1950s reached the All Ireland final in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, with three Rackard brothers playing on each occasion and Wexford returning victorious in 1955, when Galway were defeated, and in 1956, when Cork were the losers. And there were Leinster senior titles too in 1951, 1954, 1955, and 1956.
Hurling fever swept the whole county in the early 1950s. Even Wexford town, until then a football stronghold, saw the founding of its first hurling team at Faythe Harriers. Nicky Furlong recalls how he even togged out as centre forward in the blue and black of Wexford Wanderers Rugby Football Club for an unofficial match against Young Irelands at Park Lane.
There were All Ireland hurling victories again in 1960 and 1968 against Tipperary. But there was no glory for the county like the stunning records of the 1910s and the 1950s.
Now, wouldn’t another Wexford victory in 1998 be a good way to mark the 200th anniversary of 1798?
This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 2 September 1996
AS A BOY growing up in the 1950s, I was in awe of the Wexford hurlers, the Rackard brothers, and those epic teams in what Nicky Furlong describes as “the Greatest Hurling Decade”.
Those memories have been hallowed in Billy Roche’s play, Poor Beast in the Rain, and were brought to life again with yesterday’s All Ireland Hurling Final against Limerick.
There is nothing to stir Wexford pride like watching the men in Purple and Gold or hearing the band strike up The Boys of Wexford and Boolavogue, and it is no coincidence that the associations between Wexford’s sporting achievements and the memories of 1798 should be recorded by the same local historian.
Nicky Furlong is the author of The Greatest Hurling Decade. But it is in his biography of Father John Murphy that he recalls the origins of a persistent tradition invoked by Wexford supporters against Kilkenny in inter-county hurling matches.
A dejected Father Murphy and his exhausted supporters had trekked as far as north Kilkenny, and were betrayed as they slept on the hills of Kilcumney, duped into believing that they were being protected by the local colliers.
Watery Kilkenny Men
During the night, the colliers deserted the Wexford rebels, every man of them from the “camp”. According to Nicky Furlong, the colliers took every gun and pike with all the gunpowder they could carry away with them from the camp. “What gunpowder they could not take with them, they pissed on”.
In all, Wexford have played 26 Leinster hurling finals against Kilkenny. And yet, the greatest abuse was reserved not for the Kilkenny supporters, but for Cork. And this was so because the memory of “Tom the Devil” was alive in Wexford a century after the rising.
Thomas Honam, a sergeant with the North Cork militia earned his reputation as “Tom the Devil” for his expertise in torture and his perfection of the pitchcap. Old men who had their heads sheared and had been pitch capped as croppies were still to be seen in Co Wexford in the 1860s, and respect for them and the memory of “Tom the Devil” fired Wexford people in, the decade leading up to the first centenary of the rising.
In 1890, Castlebridge won the county hurling championship and so became the first Wexford team to play in an All Ireland Hurling Final. The 1890 final was played at Clonturk on November 16th, and Cork was represented by Augabullogue. Wexford were behind in the match but looked like drawing level with the prowess of two of their fiercest players, Tom Murphy and Will Neville. The Wexford supporters were emphatic when they accused the Cork supporters of being descendants of the North Cork Militia. As a ballad of the time puts it:
Tom Murphy and Will Neville
Began to lay them level,
When they thought of Tom the Devil,
With his pitch cap and his shears.
The Cork team were forced off the pitch by the Wexford jeers. But at that stage the scoreline stood at 1-6 to 2-2 against Wexford, and the unfinished match was awarded to Cork.
Wexford returned to Clonturk again for the 1891 final, played on February 28th, 1892. This time Crossabeg represented the county, and the team included Tom Murphy and Will Neville once again. But Kerry’s Ballyduff won 2-3 to 1-5 after a half hour’s extra play.
Wexford’s first All Ireland Hurling title was not won until 1910, when Castlebridge beat Limerick’s Castleconnel at Jones’s Road 7-0 to 6-2. Once again, the memory of 1798 must have been high in the minds of the Wexford supporters. Big Jem Mythen of Monawilling, who scored the winning goal against Limerick that year, has a special place in ’98 lore according to local historian Brian Cleary. And that place is recorded in Brian Cleary's account of the Battle of Oulart in The Past, the journal of the Ui Cinsealaigh Historical Society.
Where Murphy Stood
As part of the 1948 commemorations for the 150th anniversary of the 1798 Rising, Jim Mythen, along with Paddy Sutton, Phil Quirke, Bud Farl and Ned Ryan, erected a monument in a corner of a field between Monawilling and Oulart, close to the place where tradition says Father John Murphy stood during the Battle of Oulart on Sunday, May 27th, 1798.
The monument stands close to Father Murphy’s Well, and, according to Brian Cleary, the monument, the well and the entire battle area at Oulart are being included in the Sli Charman, the long walk planned across Co Wexford.
After their 1910 victory over Limerick, the Wexford hurlers had to wait until 1918 to return to an All-Ireland hurling final.
Once again, they faced Limerick, but the Wexford selection was trounced 9-5 to 1-3 by Newcastle West.
Defeat was sweetened that year by Wexford’s sixth successive appearance in an All-Ireland Senior Football final and the fourth successive football title won for the county by the Blues and Whites of Wexford town: having been defeated by Kerry in 1913 and 1914, Wexford won four times in a row from 1915.
With these record-breaking exploits, hurling took second place to football throughout the 1920s, the 1930s and well into the 1940s. In 1948, the Wexford final with a team that included Nicky Rackard. But Wexford’s greatest triumph that year was to see a football tournament organised to coincide with the 150th anniversary commemorations of 1798. By coincidence, Wexford reached the final, which was not played until 1949, when the team, with Martin Comerford in goal, was defeated in front of 36,000 by three points by mighty Meath.
Few could have foreseen the great revival in Wexford hurling that year too. The dual football and hurling heroes of the county included Nicky Rackard, Mick Hanlon, Padge Kehoe, Bobby Donovan, and Sam “Wilkie” Thorpe from Vinegar Hill.
The Three Rackards
The hurlers of the 1950s reached the All Ireland final in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, with three Rackard brothers playing on each occasion and Wexford returning victorious in 1955, when Galway were defeated, and in 1956, when Cork were the losers. And there were Leinster senior titles too in 1951, 1954, 1955, and 1956.
Hurling fever swept the whole county in the early 1950s. Even Wexford town, until then a football stronghold, saw the founding of its first hurling team at Faythe Harriers. Nicky Furlong recalls how he even togged out as centre forward in the blue and black of Wexford Wanderers Rugby Football Club for an unofficial match against Young Irelands at Park Lane.
There were All Ireland hurling victories again in 1960 and 1968 against Tipperary. But there was no glory for the county like the stunning records of the 1910s and the 1950s.
Now, wouldn’t another Wexford victory in 1998 be a good way to mark the 200th anniversary of 1798?
This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Monday 2 September 1996
20 July 1996
An Irishman’s Diary: CP Cavafy
An Irishman’s Diary
Patrick Comerford
CP Cavafy ... a portrait by David Hockney
IT IS HARD to imagine that modern Egypt dates from 1799, when Napoleon drove out the Turks. It is even harder to imagine that until this century, the port city of Alexandria was one of the major centres of Greek culture and civilisation.
In a heated conversation late one night or early some morning in a taverna in Crete, I was told pointedly by a Greek whose grandparents came from the city that “there were Greeks living in Alexandria when Moses was a boy.”
The city, of course, takes its name from Alexander the Great. But it is well to remember that Cleopatra was not an Egyptian but a Greek, and that in classical times Alexandria was as purely Hellenic as Ptolemy, the founder of the dynasty of Greek monarchs which ruled the city for generations. This first Ptolemy was determined to make his capital the world centre of culture, the “Glory of the Ptolemies”:
The mentor city, the Hel-
lenic world’s acme, wisest in all the arts, in all:
philosophy.
In the mid 19th century, Greeks controlled the commercial life of Cairo, Khartoum and Alexandria, and in 1900, there were still 20,000 Greeks in Alexandria.
It is no accident, therefore, that Constantine Cavafy, hailed by Kimon Friar as “the undisputed founder of modern Greek poetry”, was born in Alexandria in 1863 and lived there for most for of his life, living in declining grandeur as a civil servant until his death in 1933. When his relatives, scandalised by the neighbourhood, implored him to leave his flat at 19 Rue Lepius, he went to the window drew back the curtain and asked. Where else could I be better situated than here, amidst these three centres of existence, a brothel, a church which forgives, and a hospital where you?
Craved recognition
During his life, Cavafy craved public recognition. He was introduced to English readers early in the century by F.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee, and he is the genius loci in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. But his own sister forbade her daughter to read, her Uncle Constantine's, disreputable verses, scandalised by his homosexuality, decadence and rejection of the Orthodox Church.
Cavafy went unrecognised and without appreciation from the Athenian literati until some time after the publication of his first collected edition in 1935, two years after his death.
Today, he is read in every Greek school, and schoolchildren easily recite poems such as Ithaka, Waiting for the Barbarians, The City, and The god abandons Anthony. He has been popularised among English language readers with translations by Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, John Mavrogordato, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, among others, and major studies by Friar, Sherrard, Christopher Robinson of Christ Church, Oxford, and Peter Bien of Dartmouth. His popularity was confirmed when poems by Cavafy were read at the funeral of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Yet little attention has been given to a translation of 33 of Cavafy’s poems by the Irish poet, Desmond O’Grady. O’Grady, who was born in Ireland in 1935, later travelled as a student and teacher throughout Europe, America and Egypt, where he taught at the American, University of Cairo and the University of Alexandria.
In recent years, with a grant from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, he was able to accept an invitation from the Greek poet Kostis Moskof to go back to Alexandria.
Through the tireless efforts of Moskof, the Hellenic Foundation and other admirers of Cavafy’s poetry, and his cultural legacy, Cavafy’s house at 10 Rue Lepsius (now Sharm elSheykli) has been restored to what it looked like when the poet lived there and has been turned into a museum and library in his memory.
Returning to Egypt and the English Department of the American University in Cairo, O’Grady completed his translation of a selection of Cavafy’s poems, and Alternative Manners, his version of 33 Cavafy poems, was published in 1993 by the Hellenic Society, Athens Alexandria. Unfortunately, much to his regret, the proofs were never properly corrected. And so the book was never put on the market commercially and has never been reviewed in newspapers.
Readers, forgive
He feels Alternative Manners “reads like Greek ruins” and asks readers now to “please forgive, and overlook, and correct.” But, he concedes modestly, the collection has its admirers. “Greek people who know their Cavafy and who have read it found my Hiberno English very suited to Cavafy’s Alexandrian Greek, and closer to the text of Cavafy’s language than standard British and American translations.”
A reading of two of Cavafy’s best known poems illustrates the particular insights and turn of phrase which an Irish translator can bring to his work.
His translation of Ithaka loses the references by Friar and Keeley and Sherrard to Laistrygonians and Cyclops; instead, they become “cannibal bogeymen met in half light” and “those with one eye, open for their main chance.” The “Phoenician trading stations” or “market places” of the other translators become “ports you’ve not dreamed of” and “every city”.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherrard and Keeley have the city fathers “assembled in the forum” and Friar has them mustered in the forum but O’Grady has them “waiting, here in the square.” Instead of the barbarians being dazzled, they are not impressed by “bamboozle”. And, instead of rhetoric and public speaking or “eloquence and public speeches”, O’Grady speaks of boring baloney.
Secretary to Pound
For some years, Desmond O’Grady was secretary to the American poet Ezra Pound in his exile in Italy. Now he lives in Kinsale, but regards Greece as his second home. His work as a poet has, of course, been recognised at home, where he is a member of Aosdana, and where he has been back for the opening of “Waves of the Sea”, the new writers’ and translators’ centre.
His earlier frustration with the printers handling of Alternative Manners could be rectified if an Irish publisher found an interest in the book. But in the meantime, he can take comfort from the theme in Cavafy’s Ithaka: the journey, not the destination, is what constitutes our true reward.
This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 July 1996
Patrick Comerford
IT IS HARD to imagine that modern Egypt dates from 1799, when Napoleon drove out the Turks. It is even harder to imagine that until this century, the port city of Alexandria was one of the major centres of Greek culture and civilisation.
In a heated conversation late one night or early some morning in a taverna in Crete, I was told pointedly by a Greek whose grandparents came from the city that “there were Greeks living in Alexandria when Moses was a boy.”
The city, of course, takes its name from Alexander the Great. But it is well to remember that Cleopatra was not an Egyptian but a Greek, and that in classical times Alexandria was as purely Hellenic as Ptolemy, the founder of the dynasty of Greek monarchs which ruled the city for generations. This first Ptolemy was determined to make his capital the world centre of culture, the “Glory of the Ptolemies”:
The mentor city, the Hel-
lenic world’s acme, wisest in all the arts, in all:
philosophy.
In the mid 19th century, Greeks controlled the commercial life of Cairo, Khartoum and Alexandria, and in 1900, there were still 20,000 Greeks in Alexandria.
It is no accident, therefore, that Constantine Cavafy, hailed by Kimon Friar as “the undisputed founder of modern Greek poetry”, was born in Alexandria in 1863 and lived there for most for of his life, living in declining grandeur as a civil servant until his death in 1933. When his relatives, scandalised by the neighbourhood, implored him to leave his flat at 19 Rue Lepius, he went to the window drew back the curtain and asked. Where else could I be better situated than here, amidst these three centres of existence, a brothel, a church which forgives, and a hospital where you?
Craved recognition
During his life, Cavafy craved public recognition. He was introduced to English readers early in the century by F.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee, and he is the genius loci in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. But his own sister forbade her daughter to read, her Uncle Constantine's, disreputable verses, scandalised by his homosexuality, decadence and rejection of the Orthodox Church.
Cavafy went unrecognised and without appreciation from the Athenian literati until some time after the publication of his first collected edition in 1935, two years after his death.
Today, he is read in every Greek school, and schoolchildren easily recite poems such as Ithaka, Waiting for the Barbarians, The City, and The god abandons Anthony. He has been popularised among English language readers with translations by Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, John Mavrogordato, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, among others, and major studies by Friar, Sherrard, Christopher Robinson of Christ Church, Oxford, and Peter Bien of Dartmouth. His popularity was confirmed when poems by Cavafy were read at the funeral of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Yet little attention has been given to a translation of 33 of Cavafy’s poems by the Irish poet, Desmond O’Grady. O’Grady, who was born in Ireland in 1935, later travelled as a student and teacher throughout Europe, America and Egypt, where he taught at the American, University of Cairo and the University of Alexandria.
In recent years, with a grant from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, he was able to accept an invitation from the Greek poet Kostis Moskof to go back to Alexandria.
Through the tireless efforts of Moskof, the Hellenic Foundation and other admirers of Cavafy’s poetry, and his cultural legacy, Cavafy’s house at 10 Rue Lepsius (now Sharm elSheykli) has been restored to what it looked like when the poet lived there and has been turned into a museum and library in his memory.
Returning to Egypt and the English Department of the American University in Cairo, O’Grady completed his translation of a selection of Cavafy’s poems, and Alternative Manners, his version of 33 Cavafy poems, was published in 1993 by the Hellenic Society, Athens Alexandria. Unfortunately, much to his regret, the proofs were never properly corrected. And so the book was never put on the market commercially and has never been reviewed in newspapers.
Readers, forgive
He feels Alternative Manners “reads like Greek ruins” and asks readers now to “please forgive, and overlook, and correct.” But, he concedes modestly, the collection has its admirers. “Greek people who know their Cavafy and who have read it found my Hiberno English very suited to Cavafy’s Alexandrian Greek, and closer to the text of Cavafy’s language than standard British and American translations.”
A reading of two of Cavafy’s best known poems illustrates the particular insights and turn of phrase which an Irish translator can bring to his work.
His translation of Ithaka loses the references by Friar and Keeley and Sherrard to Laistrygonians and Cyclops; instead, they become “cannibal bogeymen met in half light” and “those with one eye, open for their main chance.” The “Phoenician trading stations” or “market places” of the other translators become “ports you’ve not dreamed of” and “every city”.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, Sherrard and Keeley have the city fathers “assembled in the forum” and Friar has them mustered in the forum but O’Grady has them “waiting, here in the square.” Instead of the barbarians being dazzled, they are not impressed by “bamboozle”. And, instead of rhetoric and public speaking or “eloquence and public speeches”, O’Grady speaks of boring baloney.
Secretary to Pound
For some years, Desmond O’Grady was secretary to the American poet Ezra Pound in his exile in Italy. Now he lives in Kinsale, but regards Greece as his second home. His work as a poet has, of course, been recognised at home, where he is a member of Aosdana, and where he has been back for the opening of “Waves of the Sea”, the new writers’ and translators’ centre.
His earlier frustration with the printers handling of Alternative Manners could be rectified if an Irish publisher found an interest in the book. But in the meantime, he can take comfort from the theme in Cavafy’s Ithaka: the journey, not the destination, is what constitutes our true reward.
This ‘Irishman’s Diary’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 20 July 1996
06 July 1996
Dropping Ankara in Rhodes
By Patrick Comerford
Early summer is the time to go island hopping in the Aegean. The harbours of Greek islands such as Rhodes, Kos and Kalimnos are lined with small ferries, fishing boats and caiques offering day trips to neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese, and to Greece's nearest neighbour, Turkey.
From Agathonissi in the north to Kastellorizo in the far south east, the Dodecanese is a chain of over 1,000 islands, islets and rocky outcrops at the end of the eastern Mediterranean, strung out like a necklace along the west and south-west coast of Asia Minor.
These are islands dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where St John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalimnos, Leros and Simi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossus once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.
The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in this part of Greece. But it’s a freedom that comes with a price, and a freedom valued by the local Greeks. At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of St John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of the second World War was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state in 1947.
Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.
The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and from many islands you can feel it’s almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.
The fishermen and ferry operators supplement their income during these months with day trips from Rhodes to Marmaris, from Simi to Data, and from Kos to Bodrum, site of the ancient world’s Hallicarnassus and its Mausoleum.
On Saturdays and Sundays, the NV Nissos offers day trips to Turkey, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But as a small group of not more than two dozen journalists boarded the Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan, we were reminded of the ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, five kilometres across the stretch of water: local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come”, not “if”.
With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bother to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalimnos, Kalolimnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading “Turkey” as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolimnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.
The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested and summoned the Greek ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.
It was no idle warning – two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.
For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until last December.
But as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla. Tension began to escalate and on January 27th Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.
Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. The two countries were on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.
The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis; his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos; and the Pasok government in Athens. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.
As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.
Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: “Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.”
Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Psenmos, Kalolimnos, Leros and Kalimnos, through the straits separating Kalimnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalimnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.
As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.
The rocky island of Kalimnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the “Kalyndian Islands” taking part in the Trojan wars. Today, war remains an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.
The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic coastguard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Timnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its medieval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.
Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. “For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.”
This feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 6 July 1996
Early summer is the time to go island hopping in the Aegean. The harbours of Greek islands such as Rhodes, Kos and Kalimnos are lined with small ferries, fishing boats and caiques offering day trips to neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese, and to Greece's nearest neighbour, Turkey.
From Agathonissi in the north to Kastellorizo in the far south east, the Dodecanese is a chain of over 1,000 islands, islets and rocky outcrops at the end of the eastern Mediterranean, strung out like a necklace along the west and south-west coast of Asia Minor.
These are islands dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where St John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalimnos, Leros and Simi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossus once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.
The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in this part of Greece. But it’s a freedom that comes with a price, and a freedom valued by the local Greeks. At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of St John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of the second World War was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state in 1947.
Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.
The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and from many islands you can feel it’s almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.
The fishermen and ferry operators supplement their income during these months with day trips from Rhodes to Marmaris, from Simi to Data, and from Kos to Bodrum, site of the ancient world’s Hallicarnassus and its Mausoleum.
On Saturdays and Sundays, the NV Nissos offers day trips to Turkey, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But as a small group of not more than two dozen journalists boarded the Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan, we were reminded of the ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, five kilometres across the stretch of water: local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come”, not “if”.
With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bother to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalimnos, Kalolimnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading “Turkey” as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolimnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.
The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested and summoned the Greek ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.
It was no idle warning – two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.
For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until last December.
But as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla. Tension began to escalate and on January 27th Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.
Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. The two countries were on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.
The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis; his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos; and the Pasok government in Athens. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.
As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.
Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: “Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.”
Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Psenmos, Kalolimnos, Leros and Kalimnos, through the straits separating Kalimnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalimnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.
As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.
The rocky island of Kalimnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the “Kalyndian Islands” taking part in the Trojan wars. Today, war remains an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.
The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic coastguard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Timnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its medieval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.
Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. “For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.”
This feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 6 July 1996
Athens seeks EU interest in bringing peace to the Aegean
World View
Patrick Comerford
When the Tanaiste Mr Spring meets the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, next Friday, his main efforts are likely to be directed at encouraging the Greeks to lift their veto on Meda, the Mediterranean Economic Development Aid programme being blocked by Athens because of proposals to include Turkey.
Meda involves 13 Mediterranean countries, but Greece is try ding to devise a formula so that all of them, except Turkey, receive the funds.
The two Greek priorities are the continuing territorial claims being made in the Aegean by Ankara, and Greek hopes that the Irish presidency will see a new initiative on Cyprus. The Cypriots have been promised that talks on the accession of Cyprus will open when the IGC concludes. They hope to become full members, along with Malta, by 1999 or 2000. There is intense speculation now that an Irish diplomat will be appointed as the EU's special negotiator on Cyprus.
Cyprus is still the key to Greek relations with Turkey, according to Professor Yannis Valinakis of the University of Athens, who said recently. “Progress in Cyprus would greatly facilitate Greek Turkish relations and contribute to the relaxation of regional tensions.” In recent days, the tension between Greece and Turkey has eased in the Aegean, with both sides agreeing to suspend naval manoeuvres this summer to avoid any clashes.
Mr Pangalos says Athens wants to suspend manoeuvres to avoid any incident with Turkey, and the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ms Tansu Ciller, says. “Our government believes that measures like this create an atmosphere conducive to solving the problems between Turkey and Greece.”
But Greek Turkish relations are at their lowest ebb since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and Athens and Ankara recognise the tension could be damaging to tourism in both Greece and Turkey.
In Athens, Mr Spring will be meeting a more confident Mr Pangalos, whose position has been firmly consolidated since the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, won a tough internal party battle to become president of the ruling Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).
The prime minister’s two key allies in the party battle were Mr Pangalos and the Development Minister, Dr Vasso Papandreou, who can now expect promotion in a cabinet shuffle, possibly ahead of Mr Spring’s arrival. Both are experienced negotiators when it comes to European affairs: Ms Papandreou is a former social affairs commissioner, and Mr Pangalos was a tough negotiator as European affairs minister.
In recent weeks, Mr Pangalos has taken a tough stand against the multiplying Turkish claims. The Aegean neighbours came to the brink of open hostilities in January after a Turkish landing party took possession of the tiny islet of Imia. The claims have persisted since, with the Greeks demanding Ankara go to the International Court and the Turks demanding that Athens should agree to negotiations on the Turkish claims.
The Turks added to their claims at the beginning of the summer, when Ankara indicated it regarded the small island of Gavdos off the south coast of Crete and 400 km south-west of the Turkish coast as disputed territory or a “grey area”.
Last month, the Turkish daily Millyet identified three more “orphan islands” in the Dodecanese to join the growing list of islands regarded by the Turkish government as grey areas, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi.
The report said the Turkish Foreign Ministry would openly question Greek sovereignty on the islands if Greece exercised its right under the Law of the Sea Treaty to extend its territorial waters from six to 12 miles.
It is the view of Mr Simitis that Turkey openly disputes all legal documents and international treaties concerning Greek titles in the Aegean islands. This creates another source of for the region's stability. He beleives Turkey is openly disputing the Lausanne Treaty which settled the borders between Turkey and Greece in 1922.
At a Pasok party meeting in Patras, Mr Pangalos, known for his colourful turn of phrase, accused Turkey of Nazi like tactics in the Aegean and compared Turkey’s claims to the islands with Hitler’s claims to Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Gavdos has been part of the modern Greek state since Crete was incorporated into it in 1913. Any question mark over the status of Gavdos raises the spectre of Turkish claims to all Ottoman possessions prior to the outbreak of the first World War claims that could be devastating throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. But Turkey's claims to Imia and its attitude to the status of the Dodecanese islands of Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are equally absurd.
The Dodecanese were taken by Italy in 1912. Under the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, the Dodecanese were ceded to Greece along with Smyrna and part of the Anatolian hinterland, but the treaty was never ratified, and with the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 the islands were placed under Italian sovereignty.
The Italian administration attempted a forcible Latinisation of the people, and spoken Greek and Greek Orthodox observances were banned in public from 1920. But the Italians were in no doubt that the islands were part of Greece.
In 1932, Italy and Turkey signed two agreements on the delimitation of the maritime frontier between the Dodecanese and the Turkish coast.
The first agreement, on January 4th, sets down the exact maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the island of Kastellorizo in the south east Dodecanese. The second agreement, on December 28th, 1932, marked the maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the rest of the Dodecanese. Both sides immediately implemented the agreements and abided by their provisions.
The Germans troops who surrendered to the Greeks on the island of Symi on May 8th, 1945, were the last Germans to lay down their arms. As one commentator noted, in their surrender, even the Nazis recognised the Dodecanese as Greek. Under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, the islands were formally transferred to Greek sovereignty.
Official maps of the Italian government in 1936, the official Turkish air and maritime navigation maps in 1953, and more recently maps from the US air force in 1994, the US Defence Mapping Agency, the Russian navy, the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the Turkish Geographical Service, and the EU’s Corine environmental programme all show Turkey’s acceptance of the 1932 agreements under which Imia, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are marked clearly as Italian, and later Greek, territory.
Athens has been disappointed with the EU’s failure to support Greece against the Turkish claims. Mr Pangalos has argued that the release of EU aid to Turkey would encourage Turkish “expansionism”. Mr Simitis points out that Greece is the only European country facing an open threat against its territory not only in the Aegean but its entire borderline.
With the future of Ms Ciller’s coalition pact with Mr Necmettin Erbakan and his Islamic Welfare Party now precarious and dependent on the far-right ultra nationalist Grand Unity Party, she is in no position as foreign minister to climb down in the Aegean.
Despite her concessions on manoeuvres this week, we could, in the words of Mr Pangalos last month, be facing a long hot summer in the Aegean, and Mr Spring may make no progress on changing minds in Athens about Meda.
This news analysis feature was first published in The Irish Times on 6 July 1996
Patrick Comerford
When the Tanaiste Mr Spring meets the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, next Friday, his main efforts are likely to be directed at encouraging the Greeks to lift their veto on Meda, the Mediterranean Economic Development Aid programme being blocked by Athens because of proposals to include Turkey.
Meda involves 13 Mediterranean countries, but Greece is try ding to devise a formula so that all of them, except Turkey, receive the funds.
The two Greek priorities are the continuing territorial claims being made in the Aegean by Ankara, and Greek hopes that the Irish presidency will see a new initiative on Cyprus. The Cypriots have been promised that talks on the accession of Cyprus will open when the IGC concludes. They hope to become full members, along with Malta, by 1999 or 2000. There is intense speculation now that an Irish diplomat will be appointed as the EU's special negotiator on Cyprus.
Cyprus is still the key to Greek relations with Turkey, according to Professor Yannis Valinakis of the University of Athens, who said recently. “Progress in Cyprus would greatly facilitate Greek Turkish relations and contribute to the relaxation of regional tensions.” In recent days, the tension between Greece and Turkey has eased in the Aegean, with both sides agreeing to suspend naval manoeuvres this summer to avoid any clashes.
Mr Pangalos says Athens wants to suspend manoeuvres to avoid any incident with Turkey, and the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ms Tansu Ciller, says. “Our government believes that measures like this create an atmosphere conducive to solving the problems between Turkey and Greece.”
But Greek Turkish relations are at their lowest ebb since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and Athens and Ankara recognise the tension could be damaging to tourism in both Greece and Turkey.
In Athens, Mr Spring will be meeting a more confident Mr Pangalos, whose position has been firmly consolidated since the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, won a tough internal party battle to become president of the ruling Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).
The prime minister’s two key allies in the party battle were Mr Pangalos and the Development Minister, Dr Vasso Papandreou, who can now expect promotion in a cabinet shuffle, possibly ahead of Mr Spring’s arrival. Both are experienced negotiators when it comes to European affairs: Ms Papandreou is a former social affairs commissioner, and Mr Pangalos was a tough negotiator as European affairs minister.
In recent weeks, Mr Pangalos has taken a tough stand against the multiplying Turkish claims. The Aegean neighbours came to the brink of open hostilities in January after a Turkish landing party took possession of the tiny islet of Imia. The claims have persisted since, with the Greeks demanding Ankara go to the International Court and the Turks demanding that Athens should agree to negotiations on the Turkish claims.
The Turks added to their claims at the beginning of the summer, when Ankara indicated it regarded the small island of Gavdos off the south coast of Crete and 400 km south-west of the Turkish coast as disputed territory or a “grey area”.
Last month, the Turkish daily Millyet identified three more “orphan islands” in the Dodecanese to join the growing list of islands regarded by the Turkish government as grey areas, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi.
The report said the Turkish Foreign Ministry would openly question Greek sovereignty on the islands if Greece exercised its right under the Law of the Sea Treaty to extend its territorial waters from six to 12 miles.
It is the view of Mr Simitis that Turkey openly disputes all legal documents and international treaties concerning Greek titles in the Aegean islands. This creates another source of for the region's stability. He beleives Turkey is openly disputing the Lausanne Treaty which settled the borders between Turkey and Greece in 1922.
At a Pasok party meeting in Patras, Mr Pangalos, known for his colourful turn of phrase, accused Turkey of Nazi like tactics in the Aegean and compared Turkey’s claims to the islands with Hitler’s claims to Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Gavdos has been part of the modern Greek state since Crete was incorporated into it in 1913. Any question mark over the status of Gavdos raises the spectre of Turkish claims to all Ottoman possessions prior to the outbreak of the first World War claims that could be devastating throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. But Turkey's claims to Imia and its attitude to the status of the Dodecanese islands of Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are equally absurd.
The Dodecanese were taken by Italy in 1912. Under the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, the Dodecanese were ceded to Greece along with Smyrna and part of the Anatolian hinterland, but the treaty was never ratified, and with the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 the islands were placed under Italian sovereignty.
The Italian administration attempted a forcible Latinisation of the people, and spoken Greek and Greek Orthodox observances were banned in public from 1920. But the Italians were in no doubt that the islands were part of Greece.
In 1932, Italy and Turkey signed two agreements on the delimitation of the maritime frontier between the Dodecanese and the Turkish coast.
The first agreement, on January 4th, sets down the exact maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the island of Kastellorizo in the south east Dodecanese. The second agreement, on December 28th, 1932, marked the maritime frontier between the Turkish coast and the rest of the Dodecanese. Both sides immediately implemented the agreements and abided by their provisions.
The Germans troops who surrendered to the Greeks on the island of Symi on May 8th, 1945, were the last Germans to lay down their arms. As one commentator noted, in their surrender, even the Nazis recognised the Dodecanese as Greek. Under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, the islands were formally transferred to Greek sovereignty.
Official maps of the Italian government in 1936, the official Turkish air and maritime navigation maps in 1953, and more recently maps from the US air force in 1994, the US Defence Mapping Agency, the Russian navy, the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the Turkish Geographical Service, and the EU’s Corine environmental programme all show Turkey’s acceptance of the 1932 agreements under which Imia, Farmakonisi, Kalolimnos and Agathonisi are marked clearly as Italian, and later Greek, territory.
Athens has been disappointed with the EU’s failure to support Greece against the Turkish claims. Mr Pangalos has argued that the release of EU aid to Turkey would encourage Turkish “expansionism”. Mr Simitis points out that Greece is the only European country facing an open threat against its territory not only in the Aegean but its entire borderline.
With the future of Ms Ciller’s coalition pact with Mr Necmettin Erbakan and his Islamic Welfare Party now precarious and dependent on the far-right ultra nationalist Grand Unity Party, she is in no position as foreign minister to climb down in the Aegean.
Despite her concessions on manoeuvres this week, we could, in the words of Mr Pangalos last month, be facing a long hot summer in the Aegean, and Mr Spring may make no progress on changing minds in Athens about Meda.
This news analysis feature was first published in The Irish Times on 6 July 1996
24 June 1996
Strongman of the left
who returned from
exile to recast
Greek democracy
By Patrick Comerford
Greece’s most colourful politician since the second World War, Andreas George Papandreou, was born on the Greek island of Chios – the birthplace of Homer – on February 5th, 1919. His father, George Papandreou, became prime minister in the 1960s.
As a law student at Athens University, the young Andreas Papandreou became involved in radical, left wing politics, and was jailed and tortured under the pre war Metaxas dictatorship. He left for the US in 1940, and completed a PhD at Harvard before joining the US navy and becoming a US citizen. After the war, he taught economics at Harvard, became a professor at Minnesota and later at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the US, he came under the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith and was closely associated with Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic Party, and there he met and married Margaret Chant. Their four children include the present Education Minister, George Papandreou.
After almost 20 years in exile he returned to Greece on a Fulbright scholarship in 1959 and in 1961 became director of the newly founded Centre for Economic Research and an adviser to the Bank of Greece.
He was first elected as a deputy for his father's Centre Union in February, 1964, and was appointed Minister to the Prime Minister. But he was soon accused of plotting a coup with left wing army officers. The allegations coincided with the withdrawal of the future conservative prime minister, Constantine Mitsotakis, and others from Centre Union – Papandreou later described Mitsotakis as ‘my own arch enemy, the tall, ruthless Cretan who had sown the seeds of our destruction.’
The crisis brought the colonels to power in 1967, and Papandreou was jailed from April to December 1967. Mitsotakis was released after promising to quit politics for life, but Papandreou was detained and tortured until influential Democrats persuaded Lyndon Johnson to intervene. Johnson told a White House reception: ‘I just told those Greek bastards to lay off that commie son of a bitch, whatever his name is.’
He went into exile in Sweden, where he briefly held a professor ship at Stockholm University before moving to Canada, and for five years he was Professor of Economics at York University. In exile he founded the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), later the nucleus for his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).
With the fall of the colonels he returned to Greece in 1974 and founded Pasok. In the first election, the new party garnered only 12 per cent of the vote and 12 seats, but Papandreou set to work on building a web of party activists in every town, village and island. In 1977, Pasok doubled its vote, and Papandreou became official leader of the opposition. In 1981, campaigning on the slogan Allaghi (Change), it was swept to power. Papandreou became the country's first socialist prime minister, breaking the right's post war grip on power and becoming an enduring hero to the left. Four years later, Papandreou and Pasok comfortably won a second term.
Between 1981 and 1989, he embraced Third World radicals such as Libya's Col Gadafy, antagonised the US and castigated his EU partners. His radical domestic reforms included civil marriage, a lower voting age, greater rights for women and the abolition of the death penalty. And yet he was strongly nationalist at all times, taking tough stands on Macedonia, Cyprus, and Turkish claims in the Aegean, and demanding the removal of US military bases. However, the government was marred by allegations of scandals corruption, and financial embezzlements, revelations about his private life, and his ill health. Papandreou was absent for two months in 1988 when he went to London for triple bypass open heart surgery performed by Sir Magdi Yacoub. In London as he fought for his life, an Olympic Airways hostess half his age, Dimitri Liani, kept vigil by his hospital bedside.
The pair shocked the nation when they publicly flaunted their affair. Shortly after his election defeat at the hands of Constantine Mitsotakis and his New Democracy in June 1989, Mr Papandreou divorced Margaret, his American wife of 38 years, and married Ms Liani, by then popularly known as Mimi and deeply unpopular within the ranks of Pasok and throughout Greece.
But even in his worst days in opposition, during three election defeats in 1989 and 1990, he could still pull 40 per cent of the popular vote. In 1992 he was cleared of charges relating to a $200 million bank embezzlement and at the same time, Ms Liani (temporarily) gave up her flashy clothes and carefree ways. But it seemed a career that began with promise and privilege had come to an end.
And yet he defied all the pundits when returned to power in 1993 with a landslide victory over his old rival Mitsotakis - the two had been lampooned in the Greek press as battling septuagenarian dinosaurs. But he was frail and unable to put in a full day's work. He antagonised many long-time supporters and soon found himself under fire from dissenters within Pasok when he appointed his wife as chief of staff, his son as junior foreign minister, his wife's cousin as junior culture minister and his personal physician, Dimitris Kremastinos, as health minister.
The Greek presidency of the EU at the beginning of 1994 should have been a personal triumph, but late that year the charismatic former European Affairs Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, resigned from the cabinet, and within weeks Pasok fared badly in local elections. However, the greatest personal setback may have been the death of the former culture minister, Ms Melina Mercouri.
By now he seldom chaired cabinet meetings, and was hardly ever seen in parliament. All access to the prime minister, even for cabinet ministers was controlled by Mimi and trusted members of her entourage, including her mother, her brother, an Orthodox priest, and her personal astrologer.
The astrologer predicted that the last 10 days of November would be crucial for Mr Papandreou's health, and at the end of November he was rushed to the top Athens Onassis Heart Centre; with pneumonia. For weeks he was kept alive on a respirator and a dialysis machine, and hundreds of supporters camped outside the hospital for days. He survived Christmas and into the New Year, but their best wishes were to no avail.
He resigned on January 15th and was replaced as prime minister by Mr Costas Simitis, although he retained the title of party president. Eventually he left hospital after four months, only four days before Greece's national day.
As he left, he told boisterous supporters: ‘With love, I'm leaving from this.’ He was escorted by Ms Liani, who smiled and said he was unable to say more. He waved feebly from the back seat, where he sat expressionless as he was driven away.
Ms Liani, who has accused her husband's children and ex-wife of orchestrating attacks against her, is expected to be exiled at the luxury pink villa she built for herself in the posh Athens suburb of Ekali at astronomical cost.
History may not judge Mr Papandreou on his last term in office. Certainly, he has transformed Greek politics radically and to the core.
Pasok, with 170 of the 300 seats in parliament, has a secure majority that will ensure it survives until, next year, when Mr Papandreou’s term was due to end. But Mr Papandreou leaves deep divisions within Pasok, and Mr Simitis has an uphill battle to take control of the party leadership over the next few weeks. The party faithful only hope that he can get party affairs back into shape in time to win the next election.
This obituary was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 24 June 1996
18 June 1996
Elgin Marbles may see the blue skies of Athens after 200 years
Letter from Athens
Patrick Comerford
Despite the heat, hundreds and thousands of tourists climb the steps up the Acropolis in Athens each day, to view the Parthenon and the other great classical buildings that are the crowning, glory of the Greek capital.
By day, the Parthenon can looks like an abandoned building site, surrounded by scaffolding and with large cranes inside the shell. But by night, viewed from below, it takes on a new beauty with the Sound and Light show that can be seen right across the city.
Archaeology and the great classical sites are a major reason for many tourists visiting Greece. But archaeology is also an emotive subject for Greeks.
Following concerted protests from Greek and German archaeologists and from the Athens Academy, building work on the Athens Metro came to a halt at the end of last month to allow geological tests to determine whether tunnelling was threatening the ancient Karameikos Cemetery close to the slopes of the Acropolis. And this month in Crete, staff at Knossos warned that immediate action is required to save the Minoan Palace.
But if the staff at Knossos fret about official indifference, the prospects for the Acropolis have improved in recent weeks, with a British television programme calling for the return of the so called Elgin Marbles to the Parthenon, and with President Kostis Stephanopoulos and the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Kostas Simitis, throwing their weight behind a campaign once identified closely with the late Culture Minister, Melina Mercouri.
The Acropolis has been a focus and nucleus during every phase in the development and growth of Athens, and became the heart of the first Greek city state. Under Pericles, the Parthenon took only 10 years to build with, in the words of Plutarch, “every architect striving to surpass the magnificence of the design with the elegance of the exterior.”
The elegant exterior survived for centuries, and the Parthenon has served as Greek and Roman temple, Byzantine church, Frankish cathedral and Turkish mosque.
By 1563 a minaret had been added, but a visiting Venetian diplomat found the building was still covered in sculptures and painted in bright colours. In 1687, the Venetians laying siege to the garrison on the Acropolis ignited a Turkish gunpowder magazine, blowing the roof off the Parthenon and giving the marbles their apricot tinged glow so admired by neo classicists of the 18th century.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a Scottish peer, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was British ambassador to the Porte. An Ottoman permit allowed him to erect scaffolding on the Acropolis, carry out excavations, and remove stones with inscriptions. But, by design or by cunning, he interpreted the Turkish concession liberally, and between 1801 and 1811 made off with almost all the bas-reliefs from the Parthenon's frieze, most of its pedimental structures, and a caryatid from the Erectheion. These he sold to the British Museum in London in 1816 for £35,000.
The English poet Byron was outraged by the vandalism, describing Elgin as “the last, the worst, dull spoiler” from Caledonia. The Greek poet Yannis Ritsos expressed the feelings of his nation when he wrote: “These stones cannot make do with less sky.” The campaign to return the marbles gained momentum when Melina Mercouri became Culture Minister. “I believe the time has come for these marbles to return to the blue sky of Attica,” she declared in 1982.
Now, a major television programme has revived the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles. The Without Walls programme was hosted by William Stewart, who argued for their return by 2001 – the 200th anniversary of Elgin’s looting of the Acropolis. But he hedged his demand with three stipulations:
• The marbles should return only when the new Acropolis Museum is ready to receive them;
• All costs for their return should be met by Greece; and
• Greece should bear no claim for the return of any other artefacts held in Britain.
Commenting on the stipulations, President Stephanopoulos said: “These are very reasonable preconditions that every Greek would readily accept. There is no reason why we should not accept this five-year agreement.”
Over 100,000 viewers phoned in after the first screening of the programme: 99,340 or 92.5 per cent supported the return of the marbles, with only 7,518 expressing opposition. Now 33 Labour MPs have given their support to calls for the return of the marbles to Greece.
Stewart pointed out that he is decidedly “not in favour of every work of art or ancient artefact being returned to its country of origin.” It was a point worth making at a time when the Turks are demanding the return of Priam’s Treasure, currently on show in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The gold of Troy was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and was smuggled out of Turkey to Athens in 1873.
Greece has made no official claim to the collection, but would find sympathetic ears in Moscow, despite competition from Turkey and Germany. Dr Yiannis Tzedakis and Prof Giorgios Korres of Athens University were invited to the exhibition’s opening, when Dr Irina Antovana, director of the Pushkin Museum, reaffirmed a promise she made when Melina Mercouri died: “From the moment the legal problems are solved, Greece will be the first country to exhibit the treasures.”
But whatever happens to Priam's Gold, Greek hopes for the return of the Parthenon Marbles have been boosted in the past few weeks. Melina Mercouri’s husband, the French film producer Jules Dassis, believes the repatriation of the marbles “is now much easier than when Melina campaigned.” He is heartened by the prospect of Labour winning the next British election: “If they return to power … then Greece has very good reason to hope.”
Now the Prime Minister, Mr Simitis, is relaunching her campaign. “It is of major concern to Greece to secure the return of the ‘Elgin Marbles’, especially now that 90 per cent of the British public appear to support the Greek case,” he said. It shows that the British people have a sensitivity and principles which their government must respect.”
This news feature was first publish in The Irish Times on 18 June 1996
Patrick Comerford
Despite the heat, hundreds and thousands of tourists climb the steps up the Acropolis in Athens each day, to view the Parthenon and the other great classical buildings that are the crowning, glory of the Greek capital.
By day, the Parthenon can looks like an abandoned building site, surrounded by scaffolding and with large cranes inside the shell. But by night, viewed from below, it takes on a new beauty with the Sound and Light show that can be seen right across the city.
Archaeology and the great classical sites are a major reason for many tourists visiting Greece. But archaeology is also an emotive subject for Greeks.
Following concerted protests from Greek and German archaeologists and from the Athens Academy, building work on the Athens Metro came to a halt at the end of last month to allow geological tests to determine whether tunnelling was threatening the ancient Karameikos Cemetery close to the slopes of the Acropolis. And this month in Crete, staff at Knossos warned that immediate action is required to save the Minoan Palace.
But if the staff at Knossos fret about official indifference, the prospects for the Acropolis have improved in recent weeks, with a British television programme calling for the return of the so called Elgin Marbles to the Parthenon, and with President Kostis Stephanopoulos and the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Kostas Simitis, throwing their weight behind a campaign once identified closely with the late Culture Minister, Melina Mercouri.
The Acropolis has been a focus and nucleus during every phase in the development and growth of Athens, and became the heart of the first Greek city state. Under Pericles, the Parthenon took only 10 years to build with, in the words of Plutarch, “every architect striving to surpass the magnificence of the design with the elegance of the exterior.”
The elegant exterior survived for centuries, and the Parthenon has served as Greek and Roman temple, Byzantine church, Frankish cathedral and Turkish mosque.
By 1563 a minaret had been added, but a visiting Venetian diplomat found the building was still covered in sculptures and painted in bright colours. In 1687, the Venetians laying siege to the garrison on the Acropolis ignited a Turkish gunpowder magazine, blowing the roof off the Parthenon and giving the marbles their apricot tinged glow so admired by neo classicists of the 18th century.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a Scottish peer, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was British ambassador to the Porte. An Ottoman permit allowed him to erect scaffolding on the Acropolis, carry out excavations, and remove stones with inscriptions. But, by design or by cunning, he interpreted the Turkish concession liberally, and between 1801 and 1811 made off with almost all the bas-reliefs from the Parthenon's frieze, most of its pedimental structures, and a caryatid from the Erectheion. These he sold to the British Museum in London in 1816 for £35,000.
The English poet Byron was outraged by the vandalism, describing Elgin as “the last, the worst, dull spoiler” from Caledonia. The Greek poet Yannis Ritsos expressed the feelings of his nation when he wrote: “These stones cannot make do with less sky.” The campaign to return the marbles gained momentum when Melina Mercouri became Culture Minister. “I believe the time has come for these marbles to return to the blue sky of Attica,” she declared in 1982.
Now, a major television programme has revived the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles. The Without Walls programme was hosted by William Stewart, who argued for their return by 2001 – the 200th anniversary of Elgin’s looting of the Acropolis. But he hedged his demand with three stipulations:
• The marbles should return only when the new Acropolis Museum is ready to receive them;
• All costs for their return should be met by Greece; and
• Greece should bear no claim for the return of any other artefacts held in Britain.
Commenting on the stipulations, President Stephanopoulos said: “These are very reasonable preconditions that every Greek would readily accept. There is no reason why we should not accept this five-year agreement.”
Over 100,000 viewers phoned in after the first screening of the programme: 99,340 or 92.5 per cent supported the return of the marbles, with only 7,518 expressing opposition. Now 33 Labour MPs have given their support to calls for the return of the marbles to Greece.
Stewart pointed out that he is decidedly “not in favour of every work of art or ancient artefact being returned to its country of origin.” It was a point worth making at a time when the Turks are demanding the return of Priam’s Treasure, currently on show in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. The gold of Troy was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and was smuggled out of Turkey to Athens in 1873.
Greece has made no official claim to the collection, but would find sympathetic ears in Moscow, despite competition from Turkey and Germany. Dr Yiannis Tzedakis and Prof Giorgios Korres of Athens University were invited to the exhibition’s opening, when Dr Irina Antovana, director of the Pushkin Museum, reaffirmed a promise she made when Melina Mercouri died: “From the moment the legal problems are solved, Greece will be the first country to exhibit the treasures.”
But whatever happens to Priam's Gold, Greek hopes for the return of the Parthenon Marbles have been boosted in the past few weeks. Melina Mercouri’s husband, the French film producer Jules Dassis, believes the repatriation of the marbles “is now much easier than when Melina campaigned.” He is heartened by the prospect of Labour winning the next British election: “If they return to power … then Greece has very good reason to hope.”
Now the Prime Minister, Mr Simitis, is relaunching her campaign. “It is of major concern to Greece to secure the return of the ‘Elgin Marbles’, especially now that 90 per cent of the British public appear to support the Greek case,” he said. It shows that the British people have a sensitivity and principles which their government must respect.”
This news feature was first publish in The Irish Times on 18 June 1996
An anthem confined to home
By Patrick Comerford
Yannis Ritsos, the great poet of the Greek left, was born on May Day 1909. And Epitaphios, the epic that became the stirring anthem of the Greek left, was written 60 years ago, in May 1936.
Some 60 years later, despite being set to music by Greece's two leading composers, Hadzidakis and Theodorakis, and performed throughout Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, Epitaphios still waits to be translated into English and is largely unknown outside the Hellenic world. Yet it has its own mystique and stirs the hearts of every Greek who hears it read or sung.
In May 1936, the northern town of Thessaloniki was paralysed by a widespread strike against wage controls. When workers in a tobacco factory took to the streets, the police were called in and opened fire on the unarmed strikers. Within minutes, 30 people were dead and 300 were wounded.
The next day, the Communist daily, Ritzospastis, published a front-page photograph of a mother dressed in black and weeping as she knelt over the body of her slain son in the street.
Moved by the photograph, Ritsos locked himself up in his attic and set to work immediately. In two days and two nights of intense creativity, his greatest poem, Epitaphios, was produced.
The Epitaphios Thrinos is the lament chanted in Greek Orthodox churches on the evening of Good Friday. But Ritsos's poem moves at the end from crucifixion to Resurrection, and an abiding hope that grave injustices can be conquered.
At first the bereft mother, like Mary with her crucified son, grieves inconsolably. She extols her son’s virtues and recalls his gifts. She cannot understand why he died, nor can she understand his political convictions. But she gradually changes and begins to apply his local struggle to the universal struggle for social justice. Her grief is sustained as she how her son pointed her to the beauties of nature and of all creation, she challenges the values of a society that can claim to be Christian, while killing those struggling for justice.
But darkness turns to light as the realisation unfolds that her son lives on in the lives of his comrades as they continue his struggles. At the end, her vision is of a future in which all shall be united in love, and in a stirring finale she vows to take up her, son's struggle and to join his company.
The poem first appeared as a work of 44 verses in Ritzosoastis: on May 12th, 1936, with a dedication to the workers of Thessaloniki. Soon after, a fuller version of 224 verses appeared in an edition: of 10,000 copies. Ritsos later told the newspaper To Vima that by the time he had sold 9,750 copies of Epitaphios, Kostis Palamas, the patriarch of Greek poetry, was selling only 300 copies of his works.
The strike in Thessaloniki was part of the unrest that led to the Metaxas dictatorship seizing power in the weeks that followed the publication of Epitaphios. The regime banned the poem and publicly burned the last 250 copies in front of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus in Athens.
Epitaphios was not seen again in print until the 1950s. In the intervening years, Greece suffered under German occupation and went through two civil wars, and Ritsos was held for four years in concentration camps and forced into internal exile.
The final, text was published in a second edition in 1956 and runs to 324 verses divided into 20 parts or cantos, each with 16 verses in eight couplets, except for the last two, which run to 15 verses in nine couplets.
Robert Frost has said a true poem memorises itself, and so it could be said a true lyric sings itself and harks after a melody. Epitaphios is lyrical and Ritsos achieved its lyricism by grafting his earlier elegiac mode and his political fervour on to the root stock of Greek folk song, the demotikti traghotidi. He 15 syllable lines and, rhymed couplets, reaching back into the racial; and mythical past of a people continually invaded, cheated and raped.
In 1958, Ritsos sent Epitaphios to the composer Theodorakis in Paris. Theodorakis set the epic to music, employing the quintessential instrument of the people, the bouzouki, and using rhythms drawn from the klephtic ballads, the songs of Epiros, the dirges of Mani, the songs and dances of the islands, and the rizitikas of Crete. At the time, the bouzouki was out of fashion among middle-class Greeks, who associated it with brothels and hashish dens.
Ritsos was apprehensive when he heard that Epitaphios, with its sacred allegories expressing ta Aghia ton Aghion (“The Holy of Holies”), was going to enter the music halls and night clubs of Greece. “I thought it would be a sacrilege … I was wrong.”
But the seeing by Theodorakis also, stirred intense debate in all sections of Greek society. Set to music, and recorded by artists such as Grigoris Bithikotsis and Yiannis Thomopoulos, the poem quickly acquired apolitical career of its own, becoming the anthem of the Greek left.
* * *
In 1963, once again in May, and once again in Thessaloniki, the young left wing deputy Grigorios Lambrakis lay dying in hospital after a murderous assault that provided Costa-Gavras with the drama for his movie Z. Hundreds of people kept vigil on the streets, and they were joined by Ritsos and Theodorakis as they sang Epitaphios in their martyr’s honour, vowing to ensure his struggle would live on. After the funeral in Athens, the dirge was sung once again by the crowds in the streets, and graffiti began appearing on the walls “Lambrakis Lives”.
When the colonels seized power in 1967, Ritsos was quickly arrested and sent into exile on Samos. The poetry of Ritsos and the music of Theodorakis were banned once again, but Epitaphios was soon being presented at readings and concerts throughout Europe as a rallying poem and anthem of opposition to the junta. The political force of Epitaphios had acquired a new dimension directly from its lyricism.
Surprisingly, Epitaphios has never been translated into English, although shorter poems by Ritsos have been translated by Nikos Stangos, Nikos Germanacos, Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, Kostas Myrsiades and Edmund Keeley. Last year, a bilingual (Greek English) commentary on the poem was published privately in Cambridge by Dr Nicholas Voliotis. But the fact that Epitaphios has still not been translated into English almost six years after the death of Ritsos leaves a major gap in the vast oeuvre of a major figure of the 20th century, Greek literary renaissance.
This feature was first published in the Arts pages of The Irish Times on 18 June 1996
Yannis Ritsos, the great poet of the Greek left, was born on May Day 1909. And Epitaphios, the epic that became the stirring anthem of the Greek left, was written 60 years ago, in May 1936.
Some 60 years later, despite being set to music by Greece's two leading composers, Hadzidakis and Theodorakis, and performed throughout Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, Epitaphios still waits to be translated into English and is largely unknown outside the Hellenic world. Yet it has its own mystique and stirs the hearts of every Greek who hears it read or sung.
In May 1936, the northern town of Thessaloniki was paralysed by a widespread strike against wage controls. When workers in a tobacco factory took to the streets, the police were called in and opened fire on the unarmed strikers. Within minutes, 30 people were dead and 300 were wounded.
The next day, the Communist daily, Ritzospastis, published a front-page photograph of a mother dressed in black and weeping as she knelt over the body of her slain son in the street.
Moved by the photograph, Ritsos locked himself up in his attic and set to work immediately. In two days and two nights of intense creativity, his greatest poem, Epitaphios, was produced.
The Epitaphios Thrinos is the lament chanted in Greek Orthodox churches on the evening of Good Friday. But Ritsos's poem moves at the end from crucifixion to Resurrection, and an abiding hope that grave injustices can be conquered.
At first the bereft mother, like Mary with her crucified son, grieves inconsolably. She extols her son’s virtues and recalls his gifts. She cannot understand why he died, nor can she understand his political convictions. But she gradually changes and begins to apply his local struggle to the universal struggle for social justice. Her grief is sustained as she how her son pointed her to the beauties of nature and of all creation, she challenges the values of a society that can claim to be Christian, while killing those struggling for justice.
But darkness turns to light as the realisation unfolds that her son lives on in the lives of his comrades as they continue his struggles. At the end, her vision is of a future in which all shall be united in love, and in a stirring finale she vows to take up her, son's struggle and to join his company.
The poem first appeared as a work of 44 verses in Ritzosoastis: on May 12th, 1936, with a dedication to the workers of Thessaloniki. Soon after, a fuller version of 224 verses appeared in an edition: of 10,000 copies. Ritsos later told the newspaper To Vima that by the time he had sold 9,750 copies of Epitaphios, Kostis Palamas, the patriarch of Greek poetry, was selling only 300 copies of his works.
The strike in Thessaloniki was part of the unrest that led to the Metaxas dictatorship seizing power in the weeks that followed the publication of Epitaphios. The regime banned the poem and publicly burned the last 250 copies in front of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus in Athens.
Epitaphios was not seen again in print until the 1950s. In the intervening years, Greece suffered under German occupation and went through two civil wars, and Ritsos was held for four years in concentration camps and forced into internal exile.
The final, text was published in a second edition in 1956 and runs to 324 verses divided into 20 parts or cantos, each with 16 verses in eight couplets, except for the last two, which run to 15 verses in nine couplets.
Robert Frost has said a true poem memorises itself, and so it could be said a true lyric sings itself and harks after a melody. Epitaphios is lyrical and Ritsos achieved its lyricism by grafting his earlier elegiac mode and his political fervour on to the root stock of Greek folk song, the demotikti traghotidi. He 15 syllable lines and, rhymed couplets, reaching back into the racial; and mythical past of a people continually invaded, cheated and raped.
In 1958, Ritsos sent Epitaphios to the composer Theodorakis in Paris. Theodorakis set the epic to music, employing the quintessential instrument of the people, the bouzouki, and using rhythms drawn from the klephtic ballads, the songs of Epiros, the dirges of Mani, the songs and dances of the islands, and the rizitikas of Crete. At the time, the bouzouki was out of fashion among middle-class Greeks, who associated it with brothels and hashish dens.
Ritsos was apprehensive when he heard that Epitaphios, with its sacred allegories expressing ta Aghia ton Aghion (“The Holy of Holies”), was going to enter the music halls and night clubs of Greece. “I thought it would be a sacrilege … I was wrong.”
But the seeing by Theodorakis also, stirred intense debate in all sections of Greek society. Set to music, and recorded by artists such as Grigoris Bithikotsis and Yiannis Thomopoulos, the poem quickly acquired apolitical career of its own, becoming the anthem of the Greek left.
* * *
In 1963, once again in May, and once again in Thessaloniki, the young left wing deputy Grigorios Lambrakis lay dying in hospital after a murderous assault that provided Costa-Gavras with the drama for his movie Z. Hundreds of people kept vigil on the streets, and they were joined by Ritsos and Theodorakis as they sang Epitaphios in their martyr’s honour, vowing to ensure his struggle would live on. After the funeral in Athens, the dirge was sung once again by the crowds in the streets, and graffiti began appearing on the walls “Lambrakis Lives”.
When the colonels seized power in 1967, Ritsos was quickly arrested and sent into exile on Samos. The poetry of Ritsos and the music of Theodorakis were banned once again, but Epitaphios was soon being presented at readings and concerts throughout Europe as a rallying poem and anthem of opposition to the junta. The political force of Epitaphios had acquired a new dimension directly from its lyricism.
Surprisingly, Epitaphios has never been translated into English, although shorter poems by Ritsos have been translated by Nikos Stangos, Nikos Germanacos, Peter Bien, Kimon Friar, Kostas Myrsiades and Edmund Keeley. Last year, a bilingual (Greek English) commentary on the poem was published privately in Cambridge by Dr Nicholas Voliotis. But the fact that Epitaphios has still not been translated into English almost six years after the death of Ritsos leaves a major gap in the vast oeuvre of a major figure of the 20th century, Greek literary renaissance.
This feature was first published in the Arts pages of The Irish Times on 18 June 1996
11 June 1996
Greek islanders tilt at Turks as EU promises them a windmill
Letter from Crete
Patrick Comerford
The tourist industry in Greece is suffering badly this year, with bookings from the main sources of tourism, Britain and Germany, down by 20 to 30 per cent so far.
The pinch is being felt throughout Greece, particularly in popular islands like Rhodes and Crete. But one island that sees few tourists, year in year out, is Gavdos, the southernmost island of Greece and of Europe.
Ironically, Gavdos may have been one of the first islands to attract tourists. According to tradition this island, off the south coast of Crete and lodged in the Libyan sea between Europe and North Africa, is Homer’s island of Ogygia, the home of the nymph Kalypso, who seduced Odysseus.
In classical times the island was known to Plutarch as Kavdos and to the Romans as Clauda. St Paul was blown past the island in the storm that carried him off from Crete to eventual shipwreck on Malta.
Under Byzantine rule, it was so heavily populated it was a diocese with its own bishop. The Venetians who occupied Crete for four centuries named the island Gozo di Candia, and feared it as the hideout of pirates. The Turks who captured Crete in 1669 knew Gavdos as Bougadoz under Ottoman rule; the now abandoned Pharos or lighthouse on the north-west tip was built by a French company in 1880.
In 1912 as part of the province of Sfakion, Gavdos was integrated along with the rest of Crete into the modern Greek state. But today it is still cut off from the rest of the world during extended periods in the winter; during the summer the weekly ferries from Paleohora and Hora Sfokion, as regularly as not, fail to make the three hour, 45 km journey due to strong winds. The expensive fares and unpredictable sailings deter any tourist who is ailing at heart or weak in pocket.
The problems facing the tourist in summer are a bitter taste of the perennial problems haunting, the residents in winter. Electricity only arrived with solar cells and generators in the 1980s, there are only 15 telephones and fewer cars.
Visitors are warned not to contaminate the limited fresh water supply with soap. The police station and school are dilapidated and forlorn, the need to preserve law and order and to provide education have long passed.
There are no package holidays to Gavdos. But for the few tourists – mainly Germans – who manage the three-hour trip from Paleohora, there are two tavernas and 19 rooms to rent, spread through the ‘capital’ Kastri, and the hamlets of Karabe, Sarakinikos and Korfos.
But the triangular island has fine cedar, pine, olive, carob and fig trees, crystal clear, sparkling turquoise waters and golden stretches of sand. The local honey is wonderful and the local wine comes with strong recommendations.
The island, home to 8,000 people in the Middle Ages, has fewer than 120 permanent residents today. The majority of houses in Kastri are crumbling away.
Only two families live in Ambelos, once famed for its vineyards. In Vatsiana, the southernmost settlement of Europe, isolation and irregular human contact have made the few inhabitants the most hospitable in Greece. At Cape Tripiti, the southernmost tip of Europe, the abandoned country houses of stone and cedarwood now shelter livestock. Beyond, there is only sea separating Greece from Libya, Europe from Africa.
On Thursday last, Gavdos had more visitors in a day than it might have had in the whole holiday season. The island was invaded by media eager to hear the islanders express their fears, not of mass tourism, but of a military invasion.
Earlier in the week, hours before his resignation, the Turkish prime minister, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, repeated his claim that there were “grey areas” – including Gavdos – in the Aegean that needed to be negotiated with Athens.
Last January, Turkey and Greece came close to war over the Dodecanese islets of Imia. Now for the first time, Ankara has staked a claim to a part of Greece abandoned by the Ottoman Empire in the last century and hundreds of miles from the Turkish coast.
“The Turkish claims are absolutely ridiculous," said Mr Michalis Pandelakis, the deputy chairman of Gavdos Community Council. "Someone has to put things in their right place.”
“If need be, we will give our answer with shotguns and pistols,” one angry resident told the daily Ethnos. “No Turk has ever set foot here. We want the international community to condemn the troublemakers.”
But the new focus on Gavdos has brought mixed blessings. The island looks like getting a new wind driven generator system courtesy of the European Union.
The island has long been demanding infrastructural investment and a regular ferry service with the south of Crete. Now the positive response of the Energy Commissioner, Mr Christos Papoutsis, a member Mr Simitis’s party, Pasok, and the four-day visit to Crete by the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, look like meeting some of the demands of Gavdos community council.
This news feature was first published in The Irish Times on 11 June 1996
Patrick Comerford
The tourist industry in Greece is suffering badly this year, with bookings from the main sources of tourism, Britain and Germany, down by 20 to 30 per cent so far.
The pinch is being felt throughout Greece, particularly in popular islands like Rhodes and Crete. But one island that sees few tourists, year in year out, is Gavdos, the southernmost island of Greece and of Europe.
Ironically, Gavdos may have been one of the first islands to attract tourists. According to tradition this island, off the south coast of Crete and lodged in the Libyan sea between Europe and North Africa, is Homer’s island of Ogygia, the home of the nymph Kalypso, who seduced Odysseus.
In classical times the island was known to Plutarch as Kavdos and to the Romans as Clauda. St Paul was blown past the island in the storm that carried him off from Crete to eventual shipwreck on Malta.
Under Byzantine rule, it was so heavily populated it was a diocese with its own bishop. The Venetians who occupied Crete for four centuries named the island Gozo di Candia, and feared it as the hideout of pirates. The Turks who captured Crete in 1669 knew Gavdos as Bougadoz under Ottoman rule; the now abandoned Pharos or lighthouse on the north-west tip was built by a French company in 1880.
In 1912 as part of the province of Sfakion, Gavdos was integrated along with the rest of Crete into the modern Greek state. But today it is still cut off from the rest of the world during extended periods in the winter; during the summer the weekly ferries from Paleohora and Hora Sfokion, as regularly as not, fail to make the three hour, 45 km journey due to strong winds. The expensive fares and unpredictable sailings deter any tourist who is ailing at heart or weak in pocket.
The problems facing the tourist in summer are a bitter taste of the perennial problems haunting, the residents in winter. Electricity only arrived with solar cells and generators in the 1980s, there are only 15 telephones and fewer cars.
Visitors are warned not to contaminate the limited fresh water supply with soap. The police station and school are dilapidated and forlorn, the need to preserve law and order and to provide education have long passed.
There are no package holidays to Gavdos. But for the few tourists – mainly Germans – who manage the three-hour trip from Paleohora, there are two tavernas and 19 rooms to rent, spread through the ‘capital’ Kastri, and the hamlets of Karabe, Sarakinikos and Korfos.
But the triangular island has fine cedar, pine, olive, carob and fig trees, crystal clear, sparkling turquoise waters and golden stretches of sand. The local honey is wonderful and the local wine comes with strong recommendations.
The island, home to 8,000 people in the Middle Ages, has fewer than 120 permanent residents today. The majority of houses in Kastri are crumbling away.
Only two families live in Ambelos, once famed for its vineyards. In Vatsiana, the southernmost settlement of Europe, isolation and irregular human contact have made the few inhabitants the most hospitable in Greece. At Cape Tripiti, the southernmost tip of Europe, the abandoned country houses of stone and cedarwood now shelter livestock. Beyond, there is only sea separating Greece from Libya, Europe from Africa.
On Thursday last, Gavdos had more visitors in a day than it might have had in the whole holiday season. The island was invaded by media eager to hear the islanders express their fears, not of mass tourism, but of a military invasion.
Earlier in the week, hours before his resignation, the Turkish prime minister, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, repeated his claim that there were “grey areas” – including Gavdos – in the Aegean that needed to be negotiated with Athens.
Last January, Turkey and Greece came close to war over the Dodecanese islets of Imia. Now for the first time, Ankara has staked a claim to a part of Greece abandoned by the Ottoman Empire in the last century and hundreds of miles from the Turkish coast.
“The Turkish claims are absolutely ridiculous," said Mr Michalis Pandelakis, the deputy chairman of Gavdos Community Council. "Someone has to put things in their right place.”
“If need be, we will give our answer with shotguns and pistols,” one angry resident told the daily Ethnos. “No Turk has ever set foot here. We want the international community to condemn the troublemakers.”
But the new focus on Gavdos has brought mixed blessings. The island looks like getting a new wind driven generator system courtesy of the European Union.
The island has long been demanding infrastructural investment and a regular ferry service with the south of Crete. Now the positive response of the Energy Commissioner, Mr Christos Papoutsis, a member Mr Simitis’s party, Pasok, and the four-day visit to Crete by the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, look like meeting some of the demands of Gavdos community council.
This news feature was first published in The Irish Times on 11 June 1996
01 June 1996
Greek leader faces tough battle to maintain control of his party
Patrick Comerford
Only four months after succeeding Mr Andreas Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, is facing a tough battle for control of his party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).
Mr Papandreou (77) has refused to step down as president of the party he welded together 22 years ago, and it appears increasingly likely that the main battle will come later this month in the party congress with elections to a newly created post of executive vice president.
The group of so called “lieutenants”, including two government ministers, Mr Haris Kastanidis and Mr Dimitris Reppas, have expressed their support for Mr Simitis. But they have been critical of those supporting the so called dual leadership, with Mr Papandreou as party president and Mr Simitis as Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister was initially uneasy about the proposals for electing a vice president, insisting Pasok needed “clear solutions” to its internal problems. “Clear solutions. Clear solutions are always the best,” he said after meeting Pasok’s secretary, Mr Kostas Skandalidis, who had talks with Mr Papandreou before a meeting of the party’s executive bureau.
Mr Simitis had a taste of victory this month when the parliamentary group elected three of his supporters to the party presidium. But the way is not clear yet, and observers believe the rift has grown wider between the Prime Minister and party members still loyal to Mr Papandreou and the unreformed wing of the party represented by the Interior Minister, Mr Akis Tsohatzsopoulos.
Mr Tshatzsopoulos, who talks in terms of a collective party leadership, is likely to be Mr Simitis’s main rival at the party congress. He keeps a tight grip on the party machine and organisation, and his supporters also managed to take three of the presidium seats, with only one going to a supporter of the Defence Minister, Mr Gerasimos Arsenis, who gave Mr Simitis a tough run in the leadership race in January.
If Mr Simitis fails to win the support of the party congress, he is expected to resign and Pasok could split, with Mr Simitis taking key party figures with him, including the Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, and the Development Minister, Dr Vasso Papandreou. Together, the three were the main reformers who led the move to oust Mr Papandreou from the party leadership four months ago.
Either way, the outcome is likely to bring new elections in the autumn, with a congress victory encouraging Mr Simitis to seek his own mandate from the voters.
In his official residence, the Maximos Palace near Sindagma Square in central Athens, Mr Simitis appeared optimistic about next month’s congress, saying the type of change he proposes in Pasok “is not easy, but is necessary … Democratic practices must be learned.”
He said Greece's two main parties, Pasok and New Democracy, had been dominated for almost 30 years by chiefs, a reference to both Mr Papandreou and the former president, Mr Konstantinos Karamanlis. “We need no more chiefs of this type in Greece,” he added.
Mr Simitis gave the impression of wanting to put party divisions behind him in order to concentrate on the major foreign policy questions facing Greece, including relations with Turkey, tensions over the Aegean islands and the presence of Turkish occupying troops in northern Cyprus, playing a positive role in the Balkans, and working towards closer co-operation with the countries of the Middle East.
He expressed disappointment that no fellow member state of the European Union had expressed support for Greece when Turkey violated its borders last January and tried to occupy the small Dodecanese islets of Imia, off the coast of Kalilimnos. No European country had ever been asked to redraw its borders, he said, and “no other European country has seen soldiers of another country on its territory”.
Good Greek Turkish relations make sense, the Prime Minister insists, and he wants closer co-operation with his neighbour in many fields, including economic development and tourism. “Nationalism is out of time and place now,” he declares.
But Mr Simitis insists no EU member state has ever been asked to redraw its borders, and concedes he cannot understand Turkey’s demands in the Aegean: “I don’t know what Turkey wants exactly.”
However, despite an apparent lack of confidence in the six-month Italian presidency, Mr Simitis expressed his hopes for the forthcoming Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC). Greece had three hopes for the negotiations: a more federative model for the EU, more powers for the Commission and more democracy and an enhancement of common policy making.
Greece would find it difficult to meet the Maastricht requirements for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), he said, but he hoped the country would still try to meet those requirements.
Asked whether he expected Cyprus to become a full member of the EU by 2000, he said: “We are working for it and I hope we will achieve it.”
Looking outside the EU, Mr Simitis pointed out that Athens had good relations with its neighbours in the Balkans, while its differences with Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Fyrom) were close to being overcome.
However, Turkey’s claims in the Aegean were a problem relating directly to European foreign and security issues, and “they (EU member states) should help solve the problem”. Declaring Greece’s good intentions, he added forcefully: “This is not the age of nationalism any more. This is not the age of wars.”
This news analysis feature was first published in The Irish Times on 1 June 1996
Only four months after succeeding Mr Andreas Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, is facing a tough battle for control of his party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok).
Mr Papandreou (77) has refused to step down as president of the party he welded together 22 years ago, and it appears increasingly likely that the main battle will come later this month in the party congress with elections to a newly created post of executive vice president.
The group of so called “lieutenants”, including two government ministers, Mr Haris Kastanidis and Mr Dimitris Reppas, have expressed their support for Mr Simitis. But they have been critical of those supporting the so called dual leadership, with Mr Papandreou as party president and Mr Simitis as Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister was initially uneasy about the proposals for electing a vice president, insisting Pasok needed “clear solutions” to its internal problems. “Clear solutions. Clear solutions are always the best,” he said after meeting Pasok’s secretary, Mr Kostas Skandalidis, who had talks with Mr Papandreou before a meeting of the party’s executive bureau.
Mr Simitis had a taste of victory this month when the parliamentary group elected three of his supporters to the party presidium. But the way is not clear yet, and observers believe the rift has grown wider between the Prime Minister and party members still loyal to Mr Papandreou and the unreformed wing of the party represented by the Interior Minister, Mr Akis Tsohatzsopoulos.
Mr Tshatzsopoulos, who talks in terms of a collective party leadership, is likely to be Mr Simitis’s main rival at the party congress. He keeps a tight grip on the party machine and organisation, and his supporters also managed to take three of the presidium seats, with only one going to a supporter of the Defence Minister, Mr Gerasimos Arsenis, who gave Mr Simitis a tough run in the leadership race in January.
If Mr Simitis fails to win the support of the party congress, he is expected to resign and Pasok could split, with Mr Simitis taking key party figures with him, including the Foreign Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, and the Development Minister, Dr Vasso Papandreou. Together, the three were the main reformers who led the move to oust Mr Papandreou from the party leadership four months ago.
Either way, the outcome is likely to bring new elections in the autumn, with a congress victory encouraging Mr Simitis to seek his own mandate from the voters.
In his official residence, the Maximos Palace near Sindagma Square in central Athens, Mr Simitis appeared optimistic about next month’s congress, saying the type of change he proposes in Pasok “is not easy, but is necessary … Democratic practices must be learned.”
He said Greece's two main parties, Pasok and New Democracy, had been dominated for almost 30 years by chiefs, a reference to both Mr Papandreou and the former president, Mr Konstantinos Karamanlis. “We need no more chiefs of this type in Greece,” he added.
Mr Simitis gave the impression of wanting to put party divisions behind him in order to concentrate on the major foreign policy questions facing Greece, including relations with Turkey, tensions over the Aegean islands and the presence of Turkish occupying troops in northern Cyprus, playing a positive role in the Balkans, and working towards closer co-operation with the countries of the Middle East.
He expressed disappointment that no fellow member state of the European Union had expressed support for Greece when Turkey violated its borders last January and tried to occupy the small Dodecanese islets of Imia, off the coast of Kalilimnos. No European country had ever been asked to redraw its borders, he said, and “no other European country has seen soldiers of another country on its territory”.
Good Greek Turkish relations make sense, the Prime Minister insists, and he wants closer co-operation with his neighbour in many fields, including economic development and tourism. “Nationalism is out of time and place now,” he declares.
But Mr Simitis insists no EU member state has ever been asked to redraw its borders, and concedes he cannot understand Turkey’s demands in the Aegean: “I don’t know what Turkey wants exactly.”
However, despite an apparent lack of confidence in the six-month Italian presidency, Mr Simitis expressed his hopes for the forthcoming Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC). Greece had three hopes for the negotiations: a more federative model for the EU, more powers for the Commission and more democracy and an enhancement of common policy making.
Greece would find it difficult to meet the Maastricht requirements for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), he said, but he hoped the country would still try to meet those requirements.
Asked whether he expected Cyprus to become a full member of the EU by 2000, he said: “We are working for it and I hope we will achieve it.”
Looking outside the EU, Mr Simitis pointed out that Athens had good relations with its neighbours in the Balkans, while its differences with Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Fyrom) were close to being overcome.
However, Turkey’s claims in the Aegean were a problem relating directly to European foreign and security issues, and “they (EU member states) should help solve the problem”. Declaring Greece’s good intentions, he added forcefully: “This is not the age of nationalism any more. This is not the age of wars.”
This news analysis feature was first published in The Irish Times on 1 June 1996
13 April 1996
An Israeli warrior for peace
Yitzak Rabin: Soldier of Peace, The Jerusalem Report Staff, ed David Horovitz
Patrick Comerford
On the morning of Saturday, November 4th last, the Torah or scripture reading in synagogues was the portion preceding the episode in which God orders his servant Abraham to prove his faith by sacrificing his beloved son Isaac (in Hebrew, Yitzhak), the father of Jacob, who grows up to become Israel.
In a small Yemenite synagogue near Tel Aviv, those listening intently included a young man who believed he too had a command from God to kill another Isaac Yitzhak Rabin.
This book gives a chilling account of the rise of the ultra-right in Israel and the climate that bred an assassin like Yigael Amir. According to one of the contributors, Rabin was “a lion slaughtered like a sheep”, because he refused to take his marching orders from “those who worship land more than they worship life”. He bitterly castigated the Likud opposition leader Bibi Netanyahu, for failing to take a stand against right wing extremism, but continued to insist: “I don’t believe a Jew will kill a Jew.”
How wrong he was.
Yitzhak Rabin was the very antithesis of the right-wing Israeli settlers on the West Bank who combine political and religious zealotry without care or consideration for the views and beliefs of their neighbours. He was a Zionist and idealist from a previous generation, the son of refugees from the former Russian empire who had been imbued with socialism and secular values. His early life is also the story of those early socialist and secular Zionists, the Palmah and the Haganah, fighters like Yigael Allon and Moshe Dayan, and the early conflicts of a left wing activist with David Ben Gurion.
At the height of the Israeli political crisis in 1974 that brought about Golda Meir's resignation, Rabin half joked: “All my life I have been collecting ex’s. I am ex-Chief of Staff, ex-ambassador to the United States, and now an ex-potential Defence Minister.”
And he soon became the ex-Prime Minister when he was forced to resign over his wife’s American bank account in 1977. But while defeated in political battle, he had not yet lost the political war. He returned to government in 1984, and immediately presented proposals for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
Rabin underestimated his achievements. Although Dayan stole most of the credit, it was Rabin who drew up the battle plans for the Six Day War, who took the Sinai, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and who trebled the territory controlled by Israel. He democratised his own party. With his election victory in 1992 he won the support of his political colleagues and most Israelis for his plans for peace with the Palestinians in 1993 he shook hands, albeit reluctantly, with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, agreeing to autonomy for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And he worked until the end in the hope of reaching peace with Syria.
He was a soldier who despised war. As far back as 1967 he was ready to trade the newly conquered territory for peace. And when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem honoured him with a doctorate in 1967, he spoke with pathos of the enemy’s anguish and the terrible price of victory: “War is intrinsically harsh and cruel, bloody and tear stained.”
This book profiles Rabin in all his strengths, and in all his weaknesses too. He was the calm, calculated, proud voice of Israel, “a son of Israel and the father of its future”. But he was also harsh to the point of contemptuous rudeness, he held politicians and politics in disdain, he was painfully inept at small talk, an ambassador who was uncertain on the party circuit and the dance floor.
He could make bad political decisions in anger and in fury, such as the alleged order to troops in 1988 to break the bones of Palestinians in an effort to crush the intifada, or the expulsion of over 490 activists to the cold mountains of Lebanon in December 1992. He was cautious, pedantic and analytical, and only with great difficulty did he find the strength on his last night at a rally in Tel Aviv to join in singing a popular peace song:
So sing only a song for peace,
Do not whisper a prayer,
Better sing a song for peace
With a great shout.
But as Yigael Amir has shown, Israel does not need men with manners who regard themselves as saints. It has too many of them. It needs politicians and statesmen with the wisdom of a man like Rabin.
Had Rabin survived there is little doubt he would have led his Labour Party to victory in the current election campaign. His opponents in Likud still have to answer for their part in right wing rallies and protests that heard calls for Rabin’s death, at which Rabin was branded a traitor, and at which placards and posters regularly portrayed him in a Nazi uniform or with his features overlaid with the cross hairs of a rifle sight. Outside the Rabin apartment, demonstrators shouted at his wife Leah: “Next year we will string you up.”
Rabin had few friends. Ezer Weizman begrudged him his successes and achievements ever after the Six Day War, and made a dark promise to do everything to end his political career. The bitter personal enmity Rabin shared with Shimon Peres, lasting for three decades or more, was resolved only in the past few years. But his friends included one of the contributors to this book, Hirch Goodman of the Jerusalem Report, who knew Rabin for 28 years, having been assigned to him as a bodyguard during the Six Day War. In his prologue, Goodman admits Rabin “became my instant hero. He was Israel, that new generation of Jew, all that I aspired to be.”
Too many books suffer from being the collective work of too many writers. But this book is enriched by the experiences of its contributors, Israel’s leading journalists who have followed the career of a true “Soldier for Peace.” David Horovitz has done his colleagues on the Jerusalem Report – and the memory of Yitzhak Rabin – a service in the way this book has been edited.
This book review was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 April 1996.
01 March 1996
Athens defends its territorial integrity
Patrick Comerford talks to the Greek ambassador about outstanding differences between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and the Aegean Sea
By Patrick Comerford
The recent clash between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean caused a serious political crisis in Athens, with the new government of Mr Costas Simitis coming in for severe criticism from the opposition parties.
The government survived a confidence vote, but the chief of staff of the armed forces, Admiral Christos Lyberis, was replaced.
In the European Parliament, MEPs backed Greece’s claims to the uninhabited islet of Imia. The EU Foreign Ministers met in Brussels last Monday and called on Turkey to resolve its difficulties with Greece through the International Court of Justice.
The formulation was not sufficient to get the Greek government to lift its veto on a £300 million aid package for Turkey linked to the customs union agreement sealed last June.
There are major outstanding conflicts between the two Aegean neighbours, including the continuing Turkish military presence in northern Cyprus, the Cypriot application for EU membership, EU relations with Turkey, and oil drilling rights in the Aegean waters.
The Madrid summit last year agreed that full discussions on Cypriot membership would begin six months after the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC), and Ireland’s six-month presidency beginning in July is being watched anxiously in Athens as a crucial period ahead of those negotiations.
According to the Greek Ambassador in Dublin, Mr Hannibal Velliadis, the recent “visit by the Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring, is a sign that Ireland understands the need for a just solution in Cyprus”.
In an interview with The Irish Times, he said: “During the Irish presidency we look for the support for the application from Cyprus for full membership of the European Union” when negotiations begin. He referred to the long-standing presence of Irish peace-keeping units in Cyprus, and said: “We are looking forward to Irish assistance in promoting, the full membership of Cyprus.”
He pointed out that while the problem of Cyprus “does not constitute a Greek-Turkish problem, nevertheless it poisons our bilateral relations … The accession of Cyprus to the European Union will also improve the proposals of a peaceful and just solution,” he says.
The other major source of tension between Athens and Ankara is their rival claims in the Aegean Sea. Although Imia is uninhabited, it is close to the island of Kos and an integral part of the Dodecanese islands which were reintegrated in Greece after the second World War. Mr Velliadis, who once served as a diplomat in the port of Smyrna (Izmir), sees the claims and conflicts over Imia as part of a wider Turkish strategy.
He says it is a “permanent feature of Turkish policy to raise unilaterally claims and afterwards to ask the settlement of the ensuing problems in the framework of the relations of the two countries. Those claims affect the sovereign rights of Greece and her territorial integrity which are non-negotiable.”
On the other hand, he believes Greece’s interests in the region have a more peaceful intent, saying Greece has “a wise, moderate and realistic policy trying always to examine every possibility for the improvement of relations with her neighbour without concessions in her sovereign rights.”
He points out that diplomatic contacts have been initiated in the past for “tourism, economic matters, illegal immigration”, but says these came to an end after Turkey refused to continue the initiatives. “Actually, the only outstanding issue between the two countries is the issue of the continental shelf which Greece has proposed to raise to the International Court in The Hague.”
The recent debate about extending Greek territorial waters to 12 miles has brought threats from Ankara of a military response. But the ambassador says the extension is not a unilateral Greek claim but a right accorded by the new Law of the Sea Convention.
He claims the Turkish assembly recently approved a resolution empowering the government in Ankara “to take the necessary measures, including military steps” in case Greece implements its rights to a 12-mile limit.
This week, Mr Simitis restated Greece’s position that Athens has the right to extend its territorial waters in the Aegean to 12 miles from the present six, and “would do so when it sees fit”. Turkey has said such a move would be a cause for war.
Although Turkey is the only country that “has refused to ratify the International Convention on the Law of the Sea”, Mr Velliadis argues that according to the ethic of international law “even countries which do not ratify an international convention are obliged to comply with its contents”.
Asked whether Greece would welcome Turkey as a full member of the EU, Mr Velliadis says Greece favours the European orientation of Turkey, “but her European itinerary is linked with certain behaviour”. In particular, he argues Turkey must “abandon aggressive schemes, facilitate a solution of the Cyprus problem, improve relations with her neighbouring countries and particularly with Greece, respect human rights, and cease state terrorism, particularly against the Kurds”.
He dismisses Turkish accusations that Greece provides political and military support for Kurdish rebels. “The Turkish side, despite numerous promises, was unable to sustain her accusations against Greece for assisting terrorist organisations,” he says.
Mr Velliadis, who came to Ireland from Jordan in 1991, was born in Piraeus, the port city of Athens. He is encouraged by the close relations between Greece and Ireland and the possibilities of increasing bilateral trade, saying “there is a close co-operation between the two small peripheral countries” in the EU.
"Cultural links are very important and in view of the extended classical studies in this country,” he says. “An increase of exchange of professors, scholarships, teaching of modern Greek, et al, constitute a solid basis for further improvement.”
This interview and news feature was first published in The Irish Times on 1 March 1996
By Patrick Comerford
The recent clash between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean caused a serious political crisis in Athens, with the new government of Mr Costas Simitis coming in for severe criticism from the opposition parties.
The government survived a confidence vote, but the chief of staff of the armed forces, Admiral Christos Lyberis, was replaced.
In the European Parliament, MEPs backed Greece’s claims to the uninhabited islet of Imia. The EU Foreign Ministers met in Brussels last Monday and called on Turkey to resolve its difficulties with Greece through the International Court of Justice.
The formulation was not sufficient to get the Greek government to lift its veto on a £300 million aid package for Turkey linked to the customs union agreement sealed last June.
There are major outstanding conflicts between the two Aegean neighbours, including the continuing Turkish military presence in northern Cyprus, the Cypriot application for EU membership, EU relations with Turkey, and oil drilling rights in the Aegean waters.
The Madrid summit last year agreed that full discussions on Cypriot membership would begin six months after the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC), and Ireland’s six-month presidency beginning in July is being watched anxiously in Athens as a crucial period ahead of those negotiations.
According to the Greek Ambassador in Dublin, Mr Hannibal Velliadis, the recent “visit by the Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring, is a sign that Ireland understands the need for a just solution in Cyprus”.
In an interview with The Irish Times, he said: “During the Irish presidency we look for the support for the application from Cyprus for full membership of the European Union” when negotiations begin. He referred to the long-standing presence of Irish peace-keeping units in Cyprus, and said: “We are looking forward to Irish assistance in promoting, the full membership of Cyprus.”
He pointed out that while the problem of Cyprus “does not constitute a Greek-Turkish problem, nevertheless it poisons our bilateral relations … The accession of Cyprus to the European Union will also improve the proposals of a peaceful and just solution,” he says.
The other major source of tension between Athens and Ankara is their rival claims in the Aegean Sea. Although Imia is uninhabited, it is close to the island of Kos and an integral part of the Dodecanese islands which were reintegrated in Greece after the second World War. Mr Velliadis, who once served as a diplomat in the port of Smyrna (Izmir), sees the claims and conflicts over Imia as part of a wider Turkish strategy.
He says it is a “permanent feature of Turkish policy to raise unilaterally claims and afterwards to ask the settlement of the ensuing problems in the framework of the relations of the two countries. Those claims affect the sovereign rights of Greece and her territorial integrity which are non-negotiable.”
On the other hand, he believes Greece’s interests in the region have a more peaceful intent, saying Greece has “a wise, moderate and realistic policy trying always to examine every possibility for the improvement of relations with her neighbour without concessions in her sovereign rights.”
He points out that diplomatic contacts have been initiated in the past for “tourism, economic matters, illegal immigration”, but says these came to an end after Turkey refused to continue the initiatives. “Actually, the only outstanding issue between the two countries is the issue of the continental shelf which Greece has proposed to raise to the International Court in The Hague.”
The recent debate about extending Greek territorial waters to 12 miles has brought threats from Ankara of a military response. But the ambassador says the extension is not a unilateral Greek claim but a right accorded by the new Law of the Sea Convention.
He claims the Turkish assembly recently approved a resolution empowering the government in Ankara “to take the necessary measures, including military steps” in case Greece implements its rights to a 12-mile limit.
This week, Mr Simitis restated Greece’s position that Athens has the right to extend its territorial waters in the Aegean to 12 miles from the present six, and “would do so when it sees fit”. Turkey has said such a move would be a cause for war.
Although Turkey is the only country that “has refused to ratify the International Convention on the Law of the Sea”, Mr Velliadis argues that according to the ethic of international law “even countries which do not ratify an international convention are obliged to comply with its contents”.
Asked whether Greece would welcome Turkey as a full member of the EU, Mr Velliadis says Greece favours the European orientation of Turkey, “but her European itinerary is linked with certain behaviour”. In particular, he argues Turkey must “abandon aggressive schemes, facilitate a solution of the Cyprus problem, improve relations with her neighbouring countries and particularly with Greece, respect human rights, and cease state terrorism, particularly against the Kurds”.
He dismisses Turkish accusations that Greece provides political and military support for Kurdish rebels. “The Turkish side, despite numerous promises, was unable to sustain her accusations against Greece for assisting terrorist organisations,” he says.
Mr Velliadis, who came to Ireland from Jordan in 1991, was born in Piraeus, the port city of Athens. He is encouraged by the close relations between Greece and Ireland and the possibilities of increasing bilateral trade, saying “there is a close co-operation between the two small peripheral countries” in the EU.
"Cultural links are very important and in view of the extended classical studies in this country,” he says. “An increase of exchange of professors, scholarships, teaching of modern Greek, et al, constitute a solid basis for further improvement.”
This interview and news feature was first published in The Irish Times on 1 March 1996
24 January 1996
Theodoros Pangalos
Theodoros Pangalos
By Patrick Comerford
Born 1938, the grandson of a famous Greek general educated at Athens University and the Sorbonne, Ph.D.
In the news because: One of the most striking changes in the Greek cabinet by Costas Simitis is the appointment of Pangalos to replace Karolos Papoulias as Foreign Minister.
Early activism: Founder member of the Grigoris Lambrakis Youth Movement, candidate for the left-wing EDA party in 1964, active in opposition to the colonels' regime, deprived of Greek citizenship 1968.
In exile: Lecturer and researcher in economic development and town planning at the Sorbonne.
Later career: Head of Economic Development Institute, 1969, 1978 law practice in Athens and legal adviser to trade unions active in environmental issues, author of several works on economics, sociology and philosophy.
Qualifications for the job: Fluent in French, English and German, one of Greece's best versed diplomats on EU affairs, Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1987 1988 and 1993 Minister of State for European Affairs, 1987 1988. Praised for hard work on expanding the EU to 15 members from 12 during the Greek presidency in 1994.
What’s he like? “Pangalos is outspoken but he’s also engaging, articulate and a good negotiator. When it comes to the EU, he knows his stuff,” one EU diplomat said. Others say he is a pragmatic, flexible negotiator, not rooted in Greek parochialism.
Opponents: Diplomatic sources say some EU states indicated they preferred someone else.
Why? Pangalos insulted both Germany and Italy when he was European Affairs Minister during the Greek presidency. He described Germany as “a giant with bestial force and a child’s brain”. He later apologised publicly, but ended Greece’s presidency by dodging a handshake with the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
He criticised EU partners for allowing Turkey to “drag its bloodied boots on European carpets”. He supports Cyprus joining the EU and expects to be involved directly in a US initiative on the Cypriot question.
Any critics at home? He was critical of Andreas Papandreou’s ability to govern and has enjoyed little support within the party. The right-wing opposition and press have attacked Simitis for appointing both Pangalos and the former European Commissioner, Vasso Papandreou, to his cabinet.
But? The pro-government Eleftherotypia said Simitis had shown himself “more daring” than he first appeared, and Pangalos would add new weight to Greek foreign policy, “a major test” for the government.
Last word to Thanos Veremis of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy: “He may surprise you. He is a realistic negotiator, and he’s willing to take responsibility for his decisions. He has a big mouth but everyone is hoping Simitis will be able to tranquillise him.”
This news feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 24 January 1996
By Patrick Comerford
Born 1938, the grandson of a famous Greek general educated at Athens University and the Sorbonne, Ph.D.
In the news because: One of the most striking changes in the Greek cabinet by Costas Simitis is the appointment of Pangalos to replace Karolos Papoulias as Foreign Minister.
Early activism: Founder member of the Grigoris Lambrakis Youth Movement, candidate for the left-wing EDA party in 1964, active in opposition to the colonels' regime, deprived of Greek citizenship 1968.
In exile: Lecturer and researcher in economic development and town planning at the Sorbonne.
Later career: Head of Economic Development Institute, 1969, 1978 law practice in Athens and legal adviser to trade unions active in environmental issues, author of several works on economics, sociology and philosophy.
Qualifications for the job: Fluent in French, English and German, one of Greece's best versed diplomats on EU affairs, Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1987 1988 and 1993 Minister of State for European Affairs, 1987 1988. Praised for hard work on expanding the EU to 15 members from 12 during the Greek presidency in 1994.
What’s he like? “Pangalos is outspoken but he’s also engaging, articulate and a good negotiator. When it comes to the EU, he knows his stuff,” one EU diplomat said. Others say he is a pragmatic, flexible negotiator, not rooted in Greek parochialism.
Opponents: Diplomatic sources say some EU states indicated they preferred someone else.
Why? Pangalos insulted both Germany and Italy when he was European Affairs Minister during the Greek presidency. He described Germany as “a giant with bestial force and a child’s brain”. He later apologised publicly, but ended Greece’s presidency by dodging a handshake with the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
He criticised EU partners for allowing Turkey to “drag its bloodied boots on European carpets”. He supports Cyprus joining the EU and expects to be involved directly in a US initiative on the Cypriot question.
Any critics at home? He was critical of Andreas Papandreou’s ability to govern and has enjoyed little support within the party. The right-wing opposition and press have attacked Simitis for appointing both Pangalos and the former European Commissioner, Vasso Papandreou, to his cabinet.
But? The pro-government Eleftherotypia said Simitis had shown himself “more daring” than he first appeared, and Pangalos would add new weight to Greek foreign policy, “a major test” for the government.
Last word to Thanos Veremis of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy: “He may surprise you. He is a realistic negotiator, and he’s willing to take responsibility for his decisions. He has a big mouth but everyone is hoping Simitis will be able to tranquillise him.”
This news feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 24 January 1996
19 January 1996
Reformer Simitis chosen to replace Papandreou
By Patrick Comerford
Greece's ruling Pasok party yesterday chose Mr Costas Simitis (59) as its new leader following the resignation as prime minister of Mr Andreas Papandreou, who remains in hospital under intensive care.
Mr Simitis was chosen in a run-off involving 167 deputies from the party. He won with 86 votes, against 75 for pro-Papandreou candidate and interim prime minister, Mr Akis Tsohatzopoulos (56).
The latter had been expected to carry the election with the help of deputies who had voted in the first round for the two other candidates, the Defence Minister, Mr Gerassimos Arsenis – another Papandreou supporter, who garnered 50 votes – and a former deputy prime minister, Mr Yannis Haralambopoulos, who won 11.
Mr Simitis was a founding member with Mr Papandreou of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok). He emerged as a challenger to his ailing mentor last year and in opinion polls over the past two months was the favourite to win the succession race. His toughest rival was thought to be Mr Arsenis (64).
In recent weeks those close to Mr Papandreou’s wife, Ms Dimitra Liani, were said to have approached Mr Simitis offering support in return for assurances for her future.
Although yesterday’s vote makes him the new leader of the parliamentary party, he is in effect prime minister. He will receive his mandate from President Costis Stephanopoulos before facing a confidence vote in parliament. With a large absolute majority in the 300 seat parliament, Pasok should be able to serve out its four year term, which ends in October 1997.
Mr Simitis is considered the leader of Pasok’s reform and pro-EU wing. He has often criticised Mr Papandreou for dragging Athens away from Brussels politically, and in recent months was to the fore in demanding Mr Papandreou’s resignation. He led the “Gang of Four” who rose to challenge Mr Papandreou’s leadership after he won a third term in October 1993. The other members of the gang were the former European Affairs Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, the former European Commissioner for Social Affairs, Dr Vasso Papandreou (no relation to the former prime minister) and Mr Paraskevas Avgerinos.
The Simitis-led government is likely to break with the past and move away from the populist politics of Mr Papandreou. The new prime minister also faces the challenge of ensuring Pasok survives the post Papandreou era and of rebuilding the party in time for next year’s elections. He is expected to oversee a major shake-up of the present administration.
Mr Simitis previously served as Agriculture. National Economy, Education and Industry Minister and has been a member of every Pasok cabinet since 1981, when Mr Papandreou first swept to power.
He is a Supreme Court lawyer with his own practice. He studied law and economics in Marburg and at the London School at Economics, and taught commercial law in Athens. In 1967, when the military junta took power, he escaped abroad and rallied against the colonels with Mr Papandreou until returning to Greece after the fall of the dictators in 1974. He was first elected to parliament in 1985, and was respected for the austerity programme he introduced in 1985-1987.
Mr Simitis was named Industry Minister in 1993 but resigned in anger when Mr Papandreou blamed him publicly for bungling a privatisation plan for a state shipyard. The row and his resignation made him the natural leader of the party reformers.
He is married and has two daughters.
Mr Papandreou’s resignation this week ended nearly two months of political paralysis and confusion in Greece since the 76-year-old leader was admitted to hospital on November 20th, suffering from pneumonia and other illnesses.
This news report was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 19 January 1996
Greece's ruling Pasok party yesterday chose Mr Costas Simitis (59) as its new leader following the resignation as prime minister of Mr Andreas Papandreou, who remains in hospital under intensive care.
Mr Simitis was chosen in a run-off involving 167 deputies from the party. He won with 86 votes, against 75 for pro-Papandreou candidate and interim prime minister, Mr Akis Tsohatzopoulos (56).
The latter had been expected to carry the election with the help of deputies who had voted in the first round for the two other candidates, the Defence Minister, Mr Gerassimos Arsenis – another Papandreou supporter, who garnered 50 votes – and a former deputy prime minister, Mr Yannis Haralambopoulos, who won 11.
Mr Simitis was a founding member with Mr Papandreou of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok). He emerged as a challenger to his ailing mentor last year and in opinion polls over the past two months was the favourite to win the succession race. His toughest rival was thought to be Mr Arsenis (64).
In recent weeks those close to Mr Papandreou’s wife, Ms Dimitra Liani, were said to have approached Mr Simitis offering support in return for assurances for her future.
Although yesterday’s vote makes him the new leader of the parliamentary party, he is in effect prime minister. He will receive his mandate from President Costis Stephanopoulos before facing a confidence vote in parliament. With a large absolute majority in the 300 seat parliament, Pasok should be able to serve out its four year term, which ends in October 1997.
Mr Simitis is considered the leader of Pasok’s reform and pro-EU wing. He has often criticised Mr Papandreou for dragging Athens away from Brussels politically, and in recent months was to the fore in demanding Mr Papandreou’s resignation. He led the “Gang of Four” who rose to challenge Mr Papandreou’s leadership after he won a third term in October 1993. The other members of the gang were the former European Affairs Minister, Mr Theodoros Pangalos, the former European Commissioner for Social Affairs, Dr Vasso Papandreou (no relation to the former prime minister) and Mr Paraskevas Avgerinos.
The Simitis-led government is likely to break with the past and move away from the populist politics of Mr Papandreou. The new prime minister also faces the challenge of ensuring Pasok survives the post Papandreou era and of rebuilding the party in time for next year’s elections. He is expected to oversee a major shake-up of the present administration.
Mr Simitis previously served as Agriculture. National Economy, Education and Industry Minister and has been a member of every Pasok cabinet since 1981, when Mr Papandreou first swept to power.
He is a Supreme Court lawyer with his own practice. He studied law and economics in Marburg and at the London School at Economics, and taught commercial law in Athens. In 1967, when the military junta took power, he escaped abroad and rallied against the colonels with Mr Papandreou until returning to Greece after the fall of the dictators in 1974. He was first elected to parliament in 1985, and was respected for the austerity programme he introduced in 1985-1987.
Mr Simitis was named Industry Minister in 1993 but resigned in anger when Mr Papandreou blamed him publicly for bungling a privatisation plan for a state shipyard. The row and his resignation made him the natural leader of the party reformers.
He is married and has two daughters.
Mr Papandreou’s resignation this week ended nearly two months of political paralysis and confusion in Greece since the 76-year-old leader was admitted to hospital on November 20th, suffering from pneumonia and other illnesses.
This news report was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 19 January 1996
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