A COUPLE of anecdotes spring to mind when meeting Sener Levent, editor of Turkish Cypriot opposition paper Afrika. One is about a house that is painted completely red.
Inside the house, there is one little room, also painted red, where all the furniture is red, the door is red, the curtains are red, even the sockets in the walls are red. In the middle of this red room, there is a red stool, and on the red stool sits a gnome. The gnome’s clothes are green. His trousers are green, his jacket is green, his shoes are green, even his socks are green. The gnome looks around himself in surprise, and says: ‘Gosh, I don’t fit into this fairy tale’.
Levent starts laughing.
“It’s a good one,” he says in a fluent Russian, which he learnt during his years of study and work in Moscow. We are sitting in a flat he rents about two minutes’ walk from the Ledra Palace. The apartment is next door to Afrika’s office, so going to work for Levent just means crossing the corridor.
The night is warm, and we are drinking Metaxa that Levent received from friends at Greek Cypriot newspaper Politis and talking about Raskolnikov from Dostoievski’s Crime and Punishment.
The whole setting brings to mind the kind of place where the Polish Solidarity movement of the early 80s would meet. The people who thought of using shoe polish as ink for printing the first underground press in Warsaw, would have no problem joining in on the conversation.
But who cares about Bulghakov’s Master and Margarita, Hugo’s Les Misιrables or Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward in 21st century Nicosia? Who really cares about God, Immanuel Kant or Leon Trotsky?
“I don’t believe in God,” admits Levent. “I don’t need him. I have nothing to say to him, nothing to ask him about. The only questions I have are addressed to the living. And there are a lot of them.”
He translates into Russian the title of the front-page article from the latest issue of his paper: About the Man who Sold his Soul to the Devil.
“It’s about Rauf Denktash,” he explains. “There was an interview with him in Kibris on Friday in which he repeated his earlier accusations that I was a spy, and that he was shown some papers that proved my treachery but, unfortunately, could not afford to buy them because the Greek agent wanted £25,000. So I am asking him why he could not pay the money – it’s not that much, after all – the price of a Mercedes. And I am telling him that he is a bad man. He is 80 years old and he still has not learnt how to be good. He never will.”
It seems that Levent’s relationship with Denkatsh — or Rauf Bey as he addresses him in the article — is quite personal. Before becoming editor in chief of Avrupa, Afrika as his newspaper is called now, Levent worked in various other Turkish Cypriot publications and interviewed Denktash on several occasions. He even has a picture of himself standing next to the man he fights against.
“Denktash holds answers to many of my questions,” he says. “The most important one is about the killing of two Turkish Cypriot lawyers Ayhan Hikmet and Ahmet Gurkan in 1962. I was a very young boy then and this murder had a huge impact on me. I heard my older brothers and other people talking about it and this is how I realised what was going on. This was the beginning of my position against Denktash. The murders and the realisation of the fact that the Turkish Cypriots were killing their own people just because they were in favour of the Cyprus Republic. There have been a lot of killings like that in our past and nobody talks about them. We live in the part of the world where these things happen, but nobody wants to explain them. And I do.”
Levent shows some other pictures a family standing in front of a big house.
“This is a story that Afrika ran recently,” explains Levent. “This family owned a big piece of land and one of the brothers sold his part to a rich man who built some villas there. The villas are for sale now but this is not the main problem. The main problem is that the man built the villas not only on the piece of land he had bought but also annexed some of the land that still belonged to the family, cut down their trees without permission, and got away with it because he is rich and powerful and they aren’t. So the people came to us and asked us to write about it, and we did because somebody had to.
“For me, journalism is not about making money or just giving information,” he continues. “It is a medicine. It’s not about cheap sensations. When I read a paper, I am really interested in the stories on human rights. And there are not too many of them around.
“Afrika is not supposed to be a normal paper. We are independent, we make our money on sales, we don’t depend on ads. I have my own theory of the independence of the press and believe that as long as I don’t take money from anybody, I can say whatever I want. This is what I want to continue to do in the future.”
Levent shows invitations to cocktail parties south of the Green Line and shrugs his shoulders. “I used to go these functions but I don’t any more. They don’t bring anything new. And who am I going to meet there? Some of my colleagues with whom I have nothing to talk about? Thank you very much, I’d rather stay at home.”
And this brings to mind the second anecdote of the evening, one that perhaps best sums up Levent. It’s about a crow that contradicted the other animals in the forest. It did it so often that the others had enough. They summoned the crow and threatened to pluck out all its feathers if it did not stop. The crow went back on its tree. A day passed and it was silent. Another day passed and it was silent. On the third day, the bored animals sent a rabbit to the crow with a message it was all right to talk. The rabbit tried to make the crow open its beak to no avail. Finally, the crow looked at the rabbit and said: ‘You know, rabbit, I have been sitting here and thinking and here is my conclusion — what do I need these stupid feathers for?’
What others say about him
‘Obviously, Levent is a man of principle, in favour of restoring Cyprus as a unified state. He is a strong supporter of EU accession and the Annan plan, which makes him a lonely voice in the north since the irony is that not all the opposition in the occupied areas supports the UN plan.
I have high regard for what he is doing. Producing an independent paper is not a joke. He does not have any support from anybody, except some individuals, and he stands up against such giants as big companies and the Denktash regimen who quite clearly have shown what they can do to him by sending him to jail or taking his passport away. He is a simple man, with strong opinions, very cultured. When he speaks, he does not looking behind his back to see who listens. It requires a lot of courage.’
Masis der Partogh
Publisher and editor of Financial Mirror
‘I don’t know him. I have never met him. You can say we have to admire his struggle. He was one of the first journalists who reacted so strongly against the regime in the occupied areas. His voice made Greek Cypriots realise that there were Turkish Cypriots who fought against Denktash. But his latest articles in the Greek press give me an impression that by wanting to go back to the democracy of the 60s he sets his sights too high. The idea is impossible and it does not help in realising Annan’s plan. We can’t work in the imaginary spectrum. This radical idea coming from him gives me an impression of someone who reacts sometimes emotionally rather than politically. This is my criticism of him.’
Takis Hadjigeorgiou
AKEL deputy, director of Astra Radio
‘Le
vent is a brave voice for the other community but a brave voice is not always a true voice. He is a bad-to-mediocre analyst of the Cyprus problem. He has been turned into some kind of a hero here because it suits various politicians to take advantage of his analyses to prove their own point.
‘Levent’s analysis of Cyprus history is not different from Denktash’s at all. It is the same analysis that all the Turks make, which is that the Turkish Cypriots are victims of Greek aggression. The only difference between his analysis and Denktash’s is that they come to a different conclusion. Levent sees a united Cyprus that rejects both national identities, the Turkish Cypriot and the Greek Cypriot. In my opinion, this is very disrespectful to both communities. He wants to create a new Cypriot identity similar to what the British tried to do. They wanted to create a nation without a strong national identity and, in this way, to counteract the strong national identity of the Greek Cypriots.’
Vassos Ptohopoulos
Editor of Enosis
