Letters to the Editor. Response to Mango

Citation

Teimourian, H. (2000), "Letters to the Editor. Response to Mango", European Business Review, Vol. 12 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2000.05412dab.010

Letters to the Editor. Response to Mango

Letters to the Editor

Response to MangoFrom Hazhir Teimourian, May 3, 2000

If Turkey gets in ...

Sir, Andrew Mango's response to my article on Turkey's candidacy (Vol. 12 No. 2) is long on love for the ruling élite in Ankara and short on concern for the future of his fellow Europeans. I find it nauseating that he can bring himself to describe the regime in Turkey as a "democracy".

As I write these lines, there is a photograph on my notice-board of a blind, mild-mannered, middle-aged and sick Turkish lawyer and award-winning playwright, Esber Yagmurdereli, who is due to languish in Cankiri prison until November 2020, for wanting, among other rights for his fellow citizens, liberation from those same "Crimes of Thought" in Turkish law that Mango denies exist. (The photograph is from Istanbul's Turkish Daily News, August 6, 1999.)

Also, in that "democracy", millions of Kurds are forced daily to refer to themselves as "Turks of Kurdish origin", the statistics for unsolved murders of reformist journalists are higher than in Iran and Iraq combined (Amnesty International), and a mention of the Armenian holocaust of 1915 ensures imprisonment for years.

These facts Mango calls my "fantasies" and worse. I got them mainly out of such anti-Turkish publications as the Economist Year Book for 2000, and Europe In Figures, again published by the Economist.

I could go on forever. The driver to get Turkey inside the Union is driven mostly by the fat cats in our society who are motivated only by the glint of immediate profit regardless of the misery they cause in the future: the people who are busy giving us the "underclass".

Yours sincerelyHazhir TeimourianLondon, SW1