Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  * * *

  ON THE DAY of the Greek junta, the writer Neni Panourgia was a child. She remembers walking outside and seeing only military trucks instead of cars. Military music played on the radio, but the world otherwise felt hushed. In the next weeks, thousands of people were arrested. Books and rock albums were banned, press freedoms curtailed, prisoners tortured. The Greek military establishment, which was close to the Pentagon, had been worried about the rebellious rule of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, whom they accused of installing left-wing generals in the military in order to foment revolution. His son, Andreas, was also an outspoken critic of the United States. On April 21, 1967, Greek colonels launched an anti-Communist military coup. Some of the colonels had been educated at the War College in the United States, and some had been torturers in the Greek internment camps.

  Many Greeks at the time wondered about the so-called American Factor. In her book Dangerous Citizens, Panourgia recounts the experience of two Greek prisoners in a cell on the very first night of the dictatorship. One man, Tzavalas Karousos, hears someone saying, “This smells like Indonesia. American stuff.” He was referring to the coup of 1965 against Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a nationalist who sympathized with his country’s Communist Party. What followed was a campaign of lawless violence, in which the military incited militias of ordinary men to behead, shoot, and stab anyone Communist or accused of being Communist. Between five hundred thousand and one million people were killed. Today, thanks to the 2001 U.S. State Department publication Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, it is known that CIA officers and embassy officials supplied the army with a target list.

  Tzavalas Karousos didn’t know the details of the U.S. role in Indonesia, but there was a kind of shared consciousness among the citizens of the non-American world, acquired mostly through news reports, images, and intuition. Did Karousos also think of Arbenz in Guatemala? Did he think of Mossadegh in Iran? Did he think of Lumumba in the Congo? Was there an archipelago of shared memory—experiences strung together with news from across the world? Those men in the Greek jail already had a sense of forces larger than them; a feeling of helplessness. “The unknown weighed heavily on us,” Karousos says. “This is the result of the modern disease, anticommunism.” After the junta, a statue of Truman in Athens would be repeatedly knocked down and defaced.

  The years that followed in Greece were not as bloody as Indonesia, but no less damaging to the unity of the nation. That year of the coup, James Becket, an American lawyer for Amnesty International, arrived in Greece to investigate allegations of torture by the new regime. He had been hoping that the Greek victims might appeal for assistance from the American government, but State Department officials were defensive. As he investigated further, interviewing torture victims and their relatives, he discovered that the United States’ “involvement in torture went beyond simply moral support.” In his book Barbarism in Greece, he writes, “If American support is obvious to the Greeks, it is vital to the torturers”:

  The torturers themselves not only use American equipment in their military and police work, but they rely on the fact that the U.S. supports them. Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: “You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can’t fight us, we are Americans.” [italics mine]

  Contrary to Truman’s hopes to rescue a people from the pressures or occupation of an armed Communist minority, Becket writes, “The Greeks, a free people, would be subjugated by a minority armed by the United States, and the outside pressures would be American.”

  Panourgia draws a line from the Greek case to the usage of illegal detentions and torture in the Americans’ twenty-first-century war on terror, which she argues “has a history that reaches back to a space and place used as a laboratory for neo-colonialism at the outset of the imperial expansion of US power after the Second World War: namely, Greece after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.” Like the Greek man in his jail cell thinking of Indonesia, Panourgia also draws on a constellation of shared experiences to make sense of her world.

  “Polytechnic,” it turned out, was the night that Greek college students rose up and eventually brought down the Greek dictatorship, in 1974. In the years that followed, Socialist parties redressed the wrongs of the civil war and the dictatorship by offering financial restitution to civil war fighters, as well as generous social and economic policies to their constituents, which over time grew into bloated and unnecessary patronage for votes. This restitution of the left and others, went the story, was the foundation of Greece’s dysfunctional policies that helped lead to the financial crisis of 2009. The reason all the Greeks I met still talked about the civil war, and the American intervention, was that there was no way otherwise to explain what had happened next.

  George Papandreou, the prime minister in Greece I was writing about in 2010, the one charged with saving the economy by implementing austerity measures imposed on him by the West, was the grandson of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, who had been deposed by a U.S.-supported military coup. The current Prime Minister Papandreou was also the son of the outspoken American critic Andreas Papandreou. I had interviewed his son, Nick, the one who rode the Metro, with none of this knowledge. To write about Greece in 2010 as a basket case of its own making was an abnegation of responsibility and even accuracy; to pronounce the ways in which it was “behind” was to parrot the language of modernization theory, and to belittle it as such without awareness of the political intervention and military coup my own country instigated, and which arguably, if anything, set the country “back,” was to be disrespectfully disconnected from the historical experience of my own subjects and indeed from my own country. Greece always seemed a pleasant European country to my American sensibility. Now I knew, well into a twenty-first century in which the word “counterinsurgency” rolls off all American tongues, that Greece was where my country’s concept of “counterterror” found its first violent home. I left beautiful Athens haunted by the palliative effects of my own ignorance.

  Anatol Lieven writes that Americans have viewed their own “unpleasantness” during the Cold War as necessary evils foisted upon innocent souls desperate to defeat a truly evil foe. The state of innocence Americans constantly return to—this little sand berm on an ocean of misdeeds—exists because Americans say it does, but when you actually read the history of foreign interventions, you do begin to wonder where it ever came from. In Guatemala, a country whose democratically elected president we overthrew in one of the foundational American military coups of the post-1945 era, the vicious military would become known for smashing babies’ heads against walls, punching pregnant women until they miscarried, and burying people alive.

  Was I not actively endorsing the American way—of committing acts and forgetting them, of living in this denial—if I wrote about a foreign country without first understanding the American relationship with it, a relationship that transformed that country’s development and produced my way of looking at the world? This was where objectivity as an ideal was undemanding; objectivity for Americans would require first a full reckoning with history, the sort of truth and reconciliation commission of the soul that William Appleman Williams advocated for as early as the 1950s. This utter distortion of reality, in which an American journalist could be killed by people who considered themselves “Americans” and his death blamed on Greek Communists, makes even terrorist acts seem rather like an insistence of reality, as when the Athens Hilton hotel—whose enormous building spanned countless city blocks and ruined the view from th
e Acropolis—was bombed by Greek leftist rebels in 1969, a terrorist act that was also the beginning of a slow clawing toward anything that resembles truth.

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  ONCE, A SHOPKEEPER whom I saw almost every day in my Istanbul neighborhood—I bought my milk and soda water from him—asked me whether I was ever returning to the United States. I replied that I was, in fact, traveling to New York that month, but would come back to Turkey in a few weeks. “You know”—I grimaced theatrically—“New York is a difficult place.” I always said such things, more as a tribute to Istanbul, because I knew some Turks—usually upper-class Turks, or anyone who still dreamed of the West as a salvation—also found it surprising to hear that I loved Istanbul more than New York City.

  My shopkeeper was not an upper-class White Turk; he was Kurdish. He looked at me sympathetically: “Ya, your country really has exploited the world, hasn’t it?”

  The verb he used, sömürmek, has many meanings, which out of curiosity I looked up when I got home. The online dictionary most young Turks used for English usually proffered an array of colorful English translations. For sömürmek, it said:

  exploit

  to suck all the nourishment from

  to eat up (everything in sight)

  to exploit, use (someone, something) wrongfully for one’s own ends

  to exploit, to presume on; to gobble

  trade on

  to suck (a liquid) (into one’s mouth)

  sweat

  milk

  put upon

  use

  presume on

  presume upon

  make capital out of

  It was because of the Communist crisis in Greece that the Americans included its neighbor Turkey in the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. After helping the Americans fight the Koreans in 1950, the Turks had welcomed admission to NATO; some of them, like I had, even viewed the Truman Doctrine as a rescue operation. By the mid-1950s, the United States had erected its own army, navy, air force, and intelligence stations all over Turkey; Incirlik Air Base, near the southern Turkish city of Adana, was to be America’s Middle Eastern outpost, and the place where America kept many of its nuclear weapons.

  Within a decade, some thirty thousand Americans, mostly military personnel, came to live on Turkish soil. NATO flooded the country with pro-American propaganda—it was in fact a condition of the Marshall Plan that it be allowed to do so—and strengthened ties “between Turkish labor and anti-communist international labor federations.” The intent, the academic Amy Austin Holmes writes, was to make Turkish labor unions “economic rather than political,” or, in other words, pro-American rather than Communist. The union most directly influenced by the Americans in those years was Türk-İş, the union that had failed to protect the miners of Soma.

  In response, Turkish leftists began to believe that NATO membership did not guarantee security as much as ensure that Turkey would remain a capitalist country. The Turkish people became uneasy about the strange social mores of their new American neighbors. Although the Americans were stationed in Turkey ostensibly to protect the Turks from the Soviets, Turks feared that they were being saved from one threat only to be savaged by another. The novelist Yaşar Kemal, whom a CIA officer once tried to convince to leave the Workers’ Party because he would sell more books in America that way, wrote a letter to American newspapers in an attempt to spare them “from the disgust of other nations,” and accused Americans of “entering our hearts like a traitor’s dagger”:

  “You have created slaves and compradors in Turkey … Your soldiers can bring into the streets tens of thousands of Turks by being disrespectful to Turkish women. Your soldiers constantly tear down and trample Turkish flags. They run over people in the streets and are not even tried in Turkish courts.”

  The first democratically elected prime minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, a champion of the United States, had by then been in power for almost ten years. The long period of power corrupted him; he also had begun to wreck the Turkish economy, displeasing his American patrons as well as the Kemalist generals. In 1960, Turkish military officers staged Turkey’s first of many military coups, and Menderes was hanged on the island of Imralı. In response to Menderes’s authoritarianism, the generals drafted a new constitution intended to strengthen civil society. When Baldwin arrived in Turkey in the early sixties, he landed in a country in which newspapers, writers, playwrights—and, in effect, leftist movements—had been newly set free.

  The turning point in American and Turkish relations was a crisis that broke out between the Greek and Turkish peoples on the island of Cyprus in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened by threatening both the Greeks and Turks with a loss of U.S. weapons and aid, which effectively paralyzed the Turkish military and prevented a war. To the Greeks, Johnson said: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution … We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long…” To the Turks, Johnson wrote a letter saying pretty much the same thing. For Turks, men and women, children of Atatürk who believed themselves the liberators and guarantors of their nation and resented the direct intervention of any foreign country, the Johnson letter was the ultimate shame.

  In 1968, demonstrations across the country broke out against the U.S. naval brigade that patrolled the Mediterranean. A leftist student declared: “Istanbul is not the brothel of the Sixth Fleet. We will continue our fight against imperialism.” The following January, the U.S. ambassador Robert Komer came to Turkey from South Vietnam, where he had been serving in Johnson’s war as its “chief of pacification,” the overseer of the “hearts and minds” department of Operation Phoenix, which targeted Vietcong agents and caused the deaths of twenty thousand Vietnamese. When Komer arrived to give a talk at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, in January 1969, a group of students who belonged to the Marxist-Leninist movement Dev-Genç set his car on fire. The violence in Turkey against American targets escalated: unlike the warm welcome given to the USS Missouri in 1946, thirty thousand people protested the arrival of the Sixth Fleet to Istanbul. Riot police killed two people and injured hundreds (it was called Bloody Sunday). Bombs went off at a military installation in Ankara, assailants shot security guards outside the American embassy, and a radical group kidnapped four U.S. Air Force personnel and demanded four hundred thousand dollars in ransom, inciting a nationwide manhunt.

  A young American woman named Maureen Freely—her father, John Freely, a professor at Boğaziçi University, was a friend of James Baldwin—was living with her family in Istanbul at the time. She spent her childhood gazing dreamily out the window at military ships passing through the Bosphorus, and attended Robert College with children whose parents were spies. Gritty, unfashionable Istanbul in the 1960s exuded an atmosphere of skulduggery and suspicion. Freely, who would write a series of novels about the Cold War, never seemed to shake the terror of the time, or her own complicity in Turkey’s fate. “It was widely believed that the military, the prime minister, and everyone beneath him were US puppets,” Freely wrote later in her novel Enlightenment. “In the popular imagination, it was CIA pulling their strings.”

  For three decades after the USS Missouri docked in Istanbul, Turks fought their version of the Cold War on city streets. Labor unions and leftist parties faced off against neo-Fascists and Islamists, all sides seemingly backed by foreign powers no one could see. These were not petty street fights. An average of twenty people died every day, often from leftist violence, but more so by mysterious right-wing-perpetrated murders and assassinations that would never be solved, forever making Turks “paranoid,” or “conspiracy theorists,” or skeptics, like Emre, like the Greeks, like the Guatemalans, the Indonesians. Right-wing paramilitary violence, as had been used in Greece and Latin America, however, wouldn’t quell the Cold War crisis in Turkey. There, the Americans would become so terrified of the rise
of communism that they would soon encourage the Turkish government to use an unlikely force against it: Islam.

  5.

  MONEY AND MILITARY COUPS: THE ARAB WORLD AND TURKEY

  What the hell do the Americans want, ignorant people?

  —SAID ABURISH

  SOME YEARS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, I visited Cairo as a tourist, taking the requisite camel ride to the pyramids, trying on Bedouin dresses in the souk, getting lost among the mummies in the antiquities museum. It was a short, superficial, and sensual trip, about which most of my memories are visual, including the shock of seeing blond American girl tourists in tight short shorts outside a mosque, which filled me with shame. The week before, I had flooded my downstairs neighbors by absentmindedly pulling at one of the haphazard pipes that lived on the outside of the apartment’s nineteenth-century walls, drenching the Turkish rugs that lined the stone floors, eliciting screams from below. I had no idea how to stop the water, so clueless was I to the phenomenon of central water controls in apartment buildings. I had no friends in the building to call on, and all my efforts to learn the language yielded few intelligible words as I screamed from my front door. I was dressed in my pajamas, a tank top and shorts, and terrified of running out and exposing myself that way, so I stood for a while before the pipe, trying to hold it together with my hands as the water belted me like a hose. I was lonely and clumsy, wreaking havoc on things I knew nothing about. There was no worse feeling in a foreign country; it was easy for such small, manifestly human events to take on heavy symbolic significance. Random things said to me on a touristic visit seemed weighted with significance, too, as when, one evening in Cairo, a young activist told me he admired the Turks because “they built their Metro themselves.”