Top Marks

Martyred ca. 303AD during the same Diocletianic persecution in which SS George and Vitus also died, St Philoterius was a Roman of noble birth from Nicomedia (Izmit). Besides being his feast-day, 19 May in Turkey is officially the Commemoration of Atatürk, often called Youth and Sports Day. 

In 1980 the run-up to this holiday in the northern city of Çorum was marked by fierce public denunciations of allegedly un-Islamic attire worn in rehearsals by female Alevi[1] students. In reality, locally powerful MHP (fascist) functionaries and their Grey Wolves attack dogs were deliberately stoking sectarian tensions, in league with certain shadowy figures who emerged at intervals from the US embassy in Ankara. Just before these happenings, Çorum’s police chief Hasan Uyar was removed along with nearly 40 fellow officers, as well as school administrators and teachers; Uyar’s replacement was parachuted in from Tunceli, more than 400 kms away.[2] Conforming to a pattern seen elsewhere in Turkey over the previous few years, the dirty tricks culminated in a pogrom, known as the Çorum Massacre, which claimed the lives of 57 mostly Alevi civilians between the end of May and July. This turmoil furnished the military with a pretext to stage another anti-democratic putsch, on 12 September 1980. During the interval of a performance of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, US President Jimmy Carter received news of this coup de théâtre by means of a note which read: 

“Our boys have done it!”[3]

[1] Alevism is a large minority Shia sect (comprising perhaps as much as 15% or more of the population) with Kurdish as well as ethnically Turkish adherents. Alevis however are distinct not only from the Sunni Muslims who predominate in Turkey, but also from the ethnically Arab Alawites with populations in the far south and in Syria. 

[2] Parliamentary Research Commission Report, published by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, November 2012, p.860 

This finds clear echoes in the way senior police officers were reshuffled immediately prior to last year's notorious poisoning incident in Salisbury. Mike Veale, Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police, was prematurely shunted from his position as per an announcement on 24 January. His replacement, Assistant Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, took up his new role on Monday 5th March – one day after the elaborately staged chemical attack on the Skripals, on Sunday 4th March. And on 9th January it was announced that Sir Mark Rowley, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Britain’s lead counter terrorism officer, would be “retiring” on 21 March, though in some quarters this was reported as a resignation. Rowley’s exact age isn’t easy to pin down, but he started his degree in 1983, making it unlikely he was even within five years of 60, the compulsory retirement age for police. Moreover, if he’d been due to retire, why did he apply for the job of Met Commissioner in 2017? Theoretically he could actually be younger than HMG's 'superman' Sir Mark Sedwill, who’s hardly likely to be drawing his pension any time soon. An “alumnus of MI6” (according to the Skripal book written by BBC Newsnight's diplomatic editor Mark Urban), Sedwill currently combines three roles – Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Civil Service and National Security Advisor – which until 2014 were the work of three separate very senior Whitehall mandarins. Meanwhile the announcement of Neil Basu’s appointment as Rowley’s successor was also made on 5th March, the day after Salisbury. Mark Rowley didn’t formally begin to enjoy the benefits of whatever golden handshake he was offered until 21 March; but then it wasn’t until several weeks after that, that there was any indication the Skripals would emerge miraculously unharmed from the "military grade nerve agent attack" they'd been targeted by. 

[3] See e.g. Ece Temelkuran, 'Yet again, Turkey's children have awoken to darkness at dawn', The Guardian, 17-07-2016
Fehmi Koru, ‘Never miss an opportunity to show your sympathy’, Today’s Zaman, 10-01-2008