Once again, faced with the trauma of that dreadful July, I find myself rereading these days the book published ten years ago by the colleague Anna Andreou, Rendezvous with the Generals — a devastating testimony to the hollow inner world of the man who murders fellow human beings indiscriminately and feels no remorse, no guilt, no sense that he has done anything wrong, because he was simply… “following orders”, honouring his patriotic “duty”.
As the author noted, referring to the interviews she conducted with around ten Turkish officers who took part in the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, “during the interviews I heard the phrase ‘we did our duty’ many times”.
Mesut Günsev, then a lieutenant, told her that “in battle, at the front, what comes first is the duty you have been assigned. And because you have been trained professionally, you will do what must be done, you will follow the order you have been given.” More or less, this was the line taken by all the other protagonists of the invasion who, of course, did not admit to committing any crimes and claimed they “had not done anything serious enough to feel guilty about”.
They were speaking about a military operation that brought about ethnic cleansing and turned tens of thousands of people into refugees. About a military machine that bombed en masse and murdered civilians indiscriminately, subjecting thousands of prisoners and enclaved people to endless ordeals, including the savage rape of hundreds of women and underage girls.
As Captain Neşet İkiz told Anna Andreou, “as fate would have it, I took part in the first wave of the ‘peace operation’ in Cyprus, assuming great responsibilities. The greatest satisfaction is to serve your homeland with a clean conscience.” The author asked Major General Ersel Kayan, then a lieutenant in the invading Turkish army, whether he felt any remorse after 40 years. “We are,” he told her, “servants of our conscience, and we tried to carry out the duties assigned to us.”
I could not help thinking of the… courtroom speech of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust and organiser of the transportation and mass extermination of Jews in the concentration camps, as described by the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote of the “banality of evil”: the perpetration of horrific crimes by “good”, “ordinary people from next door”, embodied in this ordinary German… patriot.
Eichmann argued passionately at his trial, speaking from inside his bulletproof glass cage in Jerusalem in 1962, before the Israelis sentenced him to death by hanging, that he was a good man and that during the war he had simply… done his duty to his country, obeying orders and following the rules.
