Sir, - Kevin Myers plainly misreads the history of the Balkans and Middle East, in fact turns it on its head, when he blames the "massacres, ethnic cleansing and vast population transfers" of the area on "the Ottoman's lost stewardship of those imperial territories" (An Irishman's Diary, June 24th).
Myers fails to recognise that it is the institutionalised inhumanity and cultural regression of the Ottoman past that best explains why great civilizations such as those of the Byzantines, Arabs and Persians had suddenly been reduced to repressive backwaters after their Turkish conquest.
These survivors of the Ottoman holocaust took away more from their condition than just Turkish coffee. In addition to all the neuroses, fears and other dysfunctions that drive victims of serious abuse or cruelty to often emulate their perpetrators, the Ottoman's subject peoples also took away with them their masters' culture of brutality.
By denying this past, we run the risk of making all the same mistakes again. By obliging the Turks in their present imperial aspirations as regional hegemons, by encouraging their increased intervention in Balkan affairs, such as their instigation of Albanian and Bosnian Muslim militancy, and by facilitating their expansionism in Cyprus, Iraq, Syria and Greece, we run the risk of perpetuating the cycle of brutality and authoritarian rule that still plagues the former dominions of the Ottoman Empire. - Yours, etc., P. D. Spyropoulos,
Director, American Hellenic Media Project, New York, USA.