Another Crusade? = ... damn the locals

Submitted by Kali Simpson (Australia), Feb 10, 2012 at 09:40

Kastelorizo regularly comes up as a possible bargaining chip between Athens and Ankara when discussing the future of Cyprus. The future of Kastelorizo has never been certain for thousands of years. The recent developments are not the late breaking news that Daniel Pipe's "Kastelorizo – Mediterranean Flashpoint" would have the world believe. It's been in the offing for some time now. ...

Similar strategic thinking in the past to redraw boundry lines in the wake of the decline of the Ottoman Empire come to mind. Kastelorizo has been occupied and depopulated repeatedly over thousands of years. It is undeniably Greek and is the last and easternmost remaining bastion of Byzantium. That said, the locals have never benefitted whenever outside interests from other nations have interferred. History shows that Europe could care less about either ethnic Greeks nor Turks in this part of the world. It has always been a distant land where people are expedient when it comes to the strategic interests of the rest of the world. Things seldom work out well for people in this part of the world. Examples include the mass relocations of millions of ethnic Turks from Greece and the same fate of millions of ethnic Greeks from Anatolia in the 1920's as a result of international interferrence.

More recently one only needs to look at the ill advised misadventure in Cyprus. In both of these cases the Greek government was duped into going to war with a larger and more powerful country in hopes of reclaiming a "Greater Greece". They were abandoned by the West in Smyrna (Izmir) and also once again in Cyprus. Now that Greece is once again economically on the ropes there are those who would carpet bag her and try to take advantage of the situation for reasons that are not in the best interests of Kastelorizo nor the rest of Greece.

Ironically, the people on the island co-exist peacfully with their neighbors. As a part-time resident of Kastelorizo I have my doubts that those who rattle sabres in other parts of the world will rush to come to the aid of the people of Kastelorizo after these same outside influences have continued to antagonize the Turkish government into more serious military incursions into Dodecanese airspace and waters.

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