"Dear Prime Minister", said the letter, I am appalled to hear about what happened to the 12 year old Done Talun. The ill treatment to this child and many other children in your country is not acceptable in our country and many other countries. This unfortunate young girl was tortured and abused by your police force. Please would you look carefully into these cases. Now that you have heard my point of view, I hope you will make the changes in the law so that the police force will not have so much power. This will make your country a safer place for everyone. Yours sincerely ..." [followed by the name of an 11 year old girl from Sandford National School].
What precocious 11 year old, one might think, writing 50 confidently and with such apparent knowledge about Turkey. But, in fact, Sandford National School is apparently full of such pupils, all of them alleging every kind of general violence and abuse by the Turkish police. And not just the pupils from Sandford School, but schools all over the country have been sending such letters to the Turkish ambassador.
But such letters reflect not the opinions of the children, who probably do not know where Turkey is but their teachers, who have in turn have been encouraged by Amnesty International to get their pupils to write letters on matters the little dears know nothing about. The only absolutely certain outcome of such letters is that their childish authors come to learn to dislike Turks, who to their young and impressionable minds must be a cruel and brutal people indeed.
Prompted By Teachers
And that, it seems, is Turkey's fate. There seems to be no other country about which such broad generalisations can be made, and which can provoke such high minded responses from the young and ignorant, at the promptings of their teachers. The case which is cited is always the one involving the young gypsy girl who was picked up on a charge of theft. Whatever happened to her in the prison cell was clearly unacceptable, and was equally clearly against the Turkish criminal code; but, on the other hand, it was not an example of a systematic abuse of children (if it had been, the numerous Irish letter writers, or rather their not so numerous teachers, would have cited other examples).
Yet not merely is this write in campaign directed at the Turkish government, it is also directed at our own Government, to the point that Peadar Carpenter, Private Secretary to the Minister of State for European Affairs, Gay Mitchell, was prompted by a letter about the Done Talun affair from the Brigidine School in Co Laois to write to the Turkish ambassador here, N. Murat Ersavci, asking the Turkish government to take every step to protect children from abuse and requesting his views on the matter.
This is idiocy. What would be the response of our Government if schoolchildren in Izmir wrote to the Turkish foreign minister about allegations of cruelty to children in Ireland citing the conditions of travellers - and, certainly, I have not seen such child beggary anywhere in Turkey as I have seen in Dublin - and the Irish ambassador was asked to comment on these allegations? Would our ambassador get a little, well, apoplectic?
Probably. No adult likes being lectured about their country's domestic problems by foreign children - especially if, as is the case of Done Talun, at the very worst it represents a violation of Turkish law by Turkish policemen rather than its implementation - unacceptable, of course, as abuse in any police station is anywhere.
Deeper Cultural Factor
There is a deeper cultural factor at work here. It is this. There would not have been such an absurd letter writing campaign orchestrated by Amnesty if the country involved was any other but Turkey. Beggar children are arrested by Italian, Spanish and French police the whole time; yet their embassies are untroubled by the chorus of infantile abuse from Ireland. Why? Is it because the Turks are judged by different rules?
Turkey has an old and sophisticated and immensely tolerant culture, contrary to what the children of Ireland have been brainwashed into declaring. The Ottoman Empire was a miracle of tolerance, a tradition which modern Turkey inherited. The appalling Armenian massacres in 1915 were a departure - a genocidal departure - from that norm. Armenians today understandably feel aggrieved at those events; but modern Turkey cannot be held answerable for events of 80 years ago, though no doubt the Turkish government might go further in its expressions of regret than it has.
Intractable Hostility
In addition to traditions of tolerance, modern Turkey has also inherited legacies from its imperial predecessors which we should be grateful we have not inherited. Yes, Turkey has a military which intrudes too much in civil affairs - not least because it wishes to safeguard the secular state against Muslim fundamentalists. And Turkey has an endless and immensely intractable war with certain secessionist Kurds and an equally intractable hostility from Greece. These are all complex problems, and no doubt the Turks welcome comment on them from unknowing outsiders in precisely the same way that we would welcome self righteous observations on how to solve the relatively minor impasse of Northern Ireland from Syrians, Laplanders, Swedes - or even Turks - who might not know where Belfast is.
Why do so many people apply different standards to Turkey? Is it because Turkey is a mainly Muslim country (and the most tolerant in the world)? Last month, Europe's Christian Democrat parties - to which group our own Fine Gael party belongs - declared that Turkey could not become a member of the European Union because of its different culture and religion. No doubt Arkan's Tigers said something similar when they cleansed Bosnia of other European Muslims. No doubt when German neo Nazis petrol bomb a Turkish home they will do so in the name of a Christian Europe. Will Irish schools then send letters to the German ambassador complaining about fascists who burn Turkish children alive? Probably not. Why not?