AFTER 50 YEARS, IT IS TIME TO TALK NOW

Review of the book “Behind the curtain” by İbrahim Aziz, published by Peri Lihnon Afas, Nicosia, June 2011, 238 pages, with texts in Greek and Turkish.

The date was 29 July 2003, when my Greek Cypriot friend Christos Chattalos visited the office of the Avrupa newspaper, together with his journalist daughter from Berlin. I knew Christos from the days of my study in the German Democratic Republic, end of the 1970’s. It was a good chance to meet him after all those years and talk about the hot developments, during which the anti-Denktash movement was gaining strength.

Chattalos told me on that day for the first time that he knew personally the two Turkish Cypriot advocates, Ahmet Gürkan (38) and Ayhan Hikmet (35), who were having, through his mediation, contact with Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu, the Turkish Cypriot functionary of the AKEL. The contact was started before the publication of the “Cumhuriyet” (Republic) weekly newspaper on the Independence Day of the Republic of Cyprus, 16 August 1960 and it lasted until the murder of the two advocates by the Turkish Cypriot underground organization TMT on the night of 23 April 1962, when the newspaper declared that they would demask the person, who ordered the bombing of the Bayraktar Mosque, in order to undermine the friendship and the cooperation between the two founder communities of the Republic. The bombing and the murders were done according to the partition plans of the foreign powers.

I learned another important detail from Chattalos’s conversation with me that Gürkan and Hikmet were about to become members of the AKEL in a short time, if they were not murdered brutally. I had close friendship with the brothers of both of these advocates, Haşmet Gürkan and Hizber Hikmet and they did not say anything about their AKEL membership and this was a new information for me. Therefore I decided to ask my Turkish Cypriot friend İbrahim Aziz to make a detailed interview with our common friend Christos Chattalos. This was how the ball started to roll and it took Ibrahim eight years until he brought this book out, together with another short interview with one of Kavazoğlu’s friends, Leonidas Paphidis. He wrote an introductory part about Dervish Ali Kavazoğlu, which I shall refer to later on.  The book ends up with some interesting excerpts from the interrogations made by the Investigation Commission for the Bombing of the Bayraktar Mosque.

We have already read from the memoirs of Christakis Vanezos (Turkish edition, published in 2009), related with the two advocates that Vanezos coordinated a meeting between Kavazoğlu and the advocates Ahmet Gürkan and Ayhan Hikmet in the autumn of 1961 (p.18 of the Turkish edition). Now Christos Chattalos gives us more information about these meetings. For those, who are interested in the cooperation of the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot anti-imperialist progressive forces, there are a lot of information in this book, which came into light for the first time with Chattalos’s revelations. We are very thankful to him.

As far as I know, there had been some references to the AKEL membership of the two advocates previously. The first one was  by the Secretary-General of the AKEL, late Ezekias Papaioannou during the party’s 14th Congress in May 1978. The second reference was made by a Turkish Cypriot delegate to the AKEL Congress in 1986, who gave the names of Ahmet Sadi, Fazıl Önder, Ahmet Yahya, Ayhan Hikmet, Ahmet Muzaffer Gürkan and Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu as Turkish Cypriot AKEL members. Apart from these, there was no other written or oral evidence that the two advocates were working illegally within the Turkish Cypriot community as AKEL members.

In the narrative of Chattalos, we read the development of relations between Kavazoğlu and the two advocates, but it is not clear whether they became AKEL members after the approval of Kavazoğlu’s proposal by the party. Maybe their cooperation for the publication of the weekly newspaper “Cumhuriyet” and the foundation of the “Cyprus Turkish People’s Party” paved the way for their membership and maybe it could not be realized, because of their assassination on 23 April 1962. We need to have more official evidence from the AKEL, because even their relatives are not aware of such a membership.    

Gürkan, Hikmet and Kavazoğlu were true believers in the new Republic and they paid the cost of this with their lives. The lesson we took from the political experiences of these pioneers shows us that unless the Cypriot working class will not be able to establish a common internationalist front against the partitionist forces in and out of Cyprus, there will be no lasting solution to the ethnic-national question on our island.

I would like here to point out some other thoughts of mine that I had, after reading this book:

1.  When the interviews were finished, I was told by İbrahim that he asked Aydın Hikmet to write a biography of his brother, Ayhan and İbrahim asked me to write Ahmet Gürkan’s biography. Aydın already published his brother’s biography in Afrika newspaper on 29 November 2008 and the slightly shortened version was put now in this book. I had prepared a research work of six full pages about his journalistic and political activities from 1946 up to his death in 1962, but I did not publish it somewhere. Now I am surprized to see in this book that my research work was shortened to 1/3 of the original length and was published without my name as a work of plagiarism by İbrahim Aziz. He also omitted to mention his references to my various books, where I compiled all the material from the Turkish Cypriot newspapers about the history of our working class movement. Furthermore, I had spent eight hours together with him for the editing of the Turkish text of the book.
2. I also found out that there are factual mistakes and wrong evaluations in the section under the title “Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu”, written again by İbrahim Aziz.

“Emekçi” newspaper was not closed by the British colonial regime, “in essence in order to stop the dissemination of the left movement among the T/C community.” The reason was a libel case, opened by the T/C leader and owner of the Halkın Sesi newspaper, Dr.Küçük (literally meaning “small” in Turkish). Emekçi published an advertisement, in which it was written that “A small dog is lost and is being searched for”! Emekçi newspaper lost the court case. The court ordered them to pay 150 pounds as a fine and they had to ask for apology from Dr.Kucuk in Emekci newspaper. Since the publishers did not have this amount of money, Emekci had to stop its publication.

3. It was not the newspaper “Haravgi”, but “Neos Democrates”, which was closed by the British Colonial Government in December 1955. 
4. There were no revolts in some villages in Turkey in 1965, when Kavazoğlu was murdered, so that he would take them as an example of armed rebellion in the style of Castro and Che Guevara. He confused the events of the 1970’s, when some youth leaders started a set of guerilla activities in Turkey.  
5. The author says: “Kavazoğlu and his friends, who were in the path of Marxist ideology and class struggle, were forced to struggle by taking refuge behind Ataturkism.” In fact, the two advocates were social democrats in their ideology and this could be seen in all their articles. In the second issue, the editorial of the Cumhuriyet was complaining that lately a T/C newspaper accused the T/C workers as  being communists and this was described as an hair-raising accusation! The 89 issues of the Cumhuriyet weekly newspaper did not propagate any Marxist ideology, but the rights of the workers and the villagers in line with the nationalist Ataturkist ideology. (see also “Our Path and Ideal”, 16 August 1960, No.1) The newspaper was very happy in supporting the military leaders of the Turkish junta of 27 May 1960.          
6. The author says that Kavazoğlu tried to direct/govern the Cumhuriyet newspaper from behind the scene. In my opinion, this is an exaggeration. It is clear that Kavazoğlu had  cooperated with the two advocates, as they cooperated with Dr. İhsan Ali as well. According to my knowledge, especially Ahmet Gürkan was not a personality, who would be guided from behind.    
7. The author writes that Kavazoğlu, who was the leader of the 1958 generation of T/C AKEL members, was spent out (by the AKEL) and that he would leave dealing with this matter in another research and analysis (see page 14-Turkish text). Later in the deep note No.9, he writes that Costas Mishaulis was given by the AKEL leaders as a companion to Kavazoğlu, when he drove to the place, where he was ambushed and killed.
8. He alleges that Kavazoğlu spent himself and the entire T/C left in his endeavour  of  forming a separate party, which would have brotherly relations with the AKEL, since the AKEL could not be, because of its support for enosis, the one and only common Marxist party of the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots (see page 25).         

Unless the AKEL publishes first-hand information about the activities of Kavazoğlu as the one and only Turkish Cypriot member of the Central Committee of the AKEL and about his  contradictions with the enosis policy of the AKEL, we shall not be able to judge the attitudes of each side. İbrahim Aziz should also write his own memoirs related with his own membership of AKEL and the insight of the policies of the AKEL for the Turkish Cypriots in detail. If there exists a continuation with the Turkish Cypriot Patriotic Union and the Republican Turkish Party as he alleges on page 160 of the Turkish text, then it will be very interesting to read all these details.

I would like to end with the questions put by Christakis Vanezos in his book on Derviş Ali Kavazoğlu:  “Were there negligence by the AKEL Central Committee?  Did this event happen as a result of the carelessness and negligence of the Party Administration? Did he enter this kind of endeavour without the consent of the party? Furthermore, did the policy of enosis, which was supported by the AKEL administration, drag him slowly slowly to an alianation with the party and was he led to base his activities on his personal relations? These questions are hanging in the air and they will stay for a long time like this. Only the Central Committee of the AKEL could answer these questions with full transparancy. This requires a real political virtue. Then Cypriots on both sides will learn the truth.”(p.41)

(The Greek translation of this review was published in the Greek-Cypriot daily “Politis” on 22nd August 2011)