The White House continues to talk about Turkey not only as a regional ally but also as a model for reform in the Middle East. It has been several years, however, since Turkish reforms contributed to democracy.
The latest case in point is Turkish real estate reform. The Turkish government has announced new regulations. Here is the rub: While the government has removed onerous rules and regulations that made navigating Turkish real estate a nightmare, the government has in effect legislated its traditional hatreds.
Armenians, for example, need not apply. They are by law unable to own housing or businesses in Turkey. Greeks have it better. They are merely banned from purchasing houses or stores in Istanbul and coastal provinces. Such discrimination is rooted in Turkish historical animus. During World War I, Ottoman forces killed perhaps one million Armenians. Much of the world recognizes their death as a deliberate genocide, albeit one Turkish officials dispute to this day. Less well known was the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Christians from Istanbul and the Aegean provinces of Turkey although, to be fair, the transfer of populations went both ways.
The Turkish government explains its discrimination in reciprocity. That may be true when it comes to bans on North Koreans buying property, although North Koreans don’t exactly drive the beachfront property market with their disposable income. Rather, it seems that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s animus toward his Christian neighbors plays more of a role. According to Hürriyet Daily News:
Citizens of Greece are banned from acquiring property in 28 coastal provinces, including Istanbul, as well as the province of Edirne, which borders Greece. There is no such limitation in place for Turks in the Greek region of western Thrace in Greece.
“Greek citizens were not allowed to purchase property in the coastal band around Turkey according to the previous regulation. And if a Greek inherited property in the coastal band, that person was asked to liquidate it within one month, as they are not eligible to own any property there,” Atilla Lök, an Istanbul-based lawyer with expertise in property cases told the Hürriyet Daily News.
Welcome to the new Turkey, same as the old.
Michael, yes, the 1922 population exchange went both ways. However, the 1 1/2 to 2 million Greeks were driven out first along with the slaughter of Armenians in the 1922 Smyrna Affair. Then along came the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and persuaded Ataturk, for the sake of peace, to allow the Greeks to expel 400,000 Muslims/Turks from Western Thrace [this expulsion and the Smyrna Affair were described by Ernest Hemingway]. This was supposed to settle the accounts between Turks and Greek and maybe it did for a while. However, in 1955 Greeks were expelled from the city of Istanbul [once Constantinople] while both Greece and Turkey were parts of NATO.
There some hundreds of Armenians killed in Izmir in september 1922 because the city was burned by gangs of Armenians (and Greeks) arsonists. During its retreat of summer 1922, the Greek army and its Armenian volunteers destroyed everything in western Anatolia and killed everybody tried to prevent the destruction of the cities and villages, except when the western armies prevented the carnage (Bursa and Mudanya mostly).
With friends such as this, how is it that we have any decent friends? If we do, we are losing them.
What about the rest of the ME. Are there similar rules to these in say SA?
The very word "genocide" was coined to describe the Turkish atrocity against the Armenians.
The word “genocide” was coined by R. Lemkin in 1944 to describe the genocide of the Jews. That is true that, in some occasions, R. Lemkin called “genocide” the fate of the Ottoman Armenians, but Lemkin's definition of “genocide” was rejected by UN in 1948.
Coward. (Spit.)
while the world shrieks "apartheid" at Israel every 5 minutes, EVERY Islamic nation practices religious and gender Apartheid, persecution and killing of minorities-