Kenneth Zammit Tabona: ...When a waiter drops a turkey
What happens when a waiter drops a turkey? The Downfall of Turkey, the Spreading of Greece, the Breaking of China and the Leaving of Hungary! Such was the rather droll method of remembering historical facts employed in the schoolroom a century or so ago.
Since the downfall of Turkey, read The Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Mediterranean Basin have been in a constant state of flux. There was something about the Ottoman Empire which since its inception in 1453 kept and contained the vicissitudes of its far-flung territories strictly within its borders.
The Turkish menace waned slowly and painfully after Lepanto, stifled in its own reactionary stance until a very imperialist and expansionist Western Europe along with Russia decided that Turkey was The Sick Man of Europe (please note "Europe" not "Asia") and fought over it in the Crimean War. It was in fact a scenario rather similar to that of the Eastern bloc in our own lifetimes before the Wall fell and the USSR was dismembered.
We were, in the days of Tito's Yugoslavia, blissfully unaware of situations like that between Serbs and Bosnians. We were brought up to view a globe where any country beyond the Iron Curtain was impenetrable. Very little news was allowed to be filtered through and many of us were surprised at the avalanche that took place after the liberalisation of Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro etc; incidentally all of which were countries that till the 19th century were part of the Ottoman Empire.
Therefore the uncanny similarity in policy between the Ottoman and Soviet empires kept the ethnic and religious conflicts and situations in the countries in question very much under wraps. Today the situation is vastly different. Europe itself has doubled in size and the EU is poised to take in many other countries that formerly lay within the bloc. Strangely enough it is not these countries that are causing controversy but Turkey.
It all started when the present Pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger and pronounced himself as being against Turkey's entry into the EU because Turkey, he said, has always been different; a very debatable point. He added that the Turks had laid siege to Vienna, twice, if you please, and other irrelevant historical facts that could have been easily ascribed to Spain or his own homeland Germany, while conveniently and inexplicably leaving out the two worst blots on the Turkish escutcheon; the Armenian and Kurdish genocides.
Next month Benedict XVI is off to Turkey. Very few people realise how controversial and significant this visit is. Apart from the Ratzinger pronouncements, one must contend with the ill-advised and to me still inexplicable remarks that caused such a furore in Regensburg last month and also the stormy relations the papacy has always had with Islamic Istanbul and previously Christian Constantinople for 1,000 years and more!...
We cannot ignore the situation that has developed in the world between what used to be conveniently called the struggle between the Cross and Crescent. Although what is happening today is a direct derivation of that same struggle we must realise that not since the death of Suleiman the Magnificent has the Crescent been such a threat to our own Western civilisation and way of life.
Today's Islamic states with their oil and riches hold the world to ransom. Allowing Turkey to join the EU and encouraging it to adopt many of our own mores while abandoning their own outdated ones will in the long run benefit both and will symbolise the beginning of a rapprochement that will, with a bit of luck and goodwill, enable the Cross and the Crescent to co-exist in future and bring what may be called "Peace in Our Time".