Put out more flags

In the dead heat of the Cypriot summer in 1996, a young Greek Cypriot, Tassos Isaac, was beaten to death by a group of ultranationalist Turks.

A few days later, in the aftermath of his funeral, one of the Greek Cypriot protesters, Solomos Solomou, broke off from his group and started to climb a flagpole in order to remove a Turkish flag from its mast in the United Nations Buffer Zone near Deryneia. Just before he reached the flag, he fell. He died after being shot in the neck. The scene had been taped by journalists, showing the 26-year-old Solomou with a cigarette in between his lips, trying to climb the mast, then being shot.

The man who pulled the trigger was a sharpshooter from the Turkish Special Forces. The sharpshooter had preferred not to prevent Solomou from removing the flag by shooting him in the foot or the hand, or by using a plastic bullet. Later, in a public statement the then-Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Çiller said: “Turks will break the hands of anyone who insults their flag.” It would have been much nicer if the sharpshooter took her words literally.  

More recently, a younger Kurdish man did what Solomou failed to do 18 years ago. Ironically, he was not in a U.N. Buffer Zone. He just sneaked into an Air Force base in Diyarbakir, climbed the mast, removed the Turkish flag and threw it on the ground surrounded by cheering Kurds.  

More ironically, as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s foreign policy doctrine pledges to wave the Turkish flag in all of the former Ottoman territories, a Turkish flag in Turkey had been thrown on the ground – shortly before the one at the Consulate in Mosul was put down by jihadists. And a new act in the Turkish political theater has opened: The new act is...