Property and Human Rights in Cyprus: The European Court of Human Rights as a Platform of Political Struggle

It has become accepted that, during the Soviet period, Turkey ‘ignored the plight’ of the Crimean Tatars, who were brutally deported to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944. This narrative of Turkish indifference with respect to the Crimean Tatar ‘question’ overlooks a corpus of material that tells something of a different story. This corpus is literary. The Crimean Tatars figured centrally in Pan-Turkist poems and pulp fiction novels as protagonists whose victimization by the Communist regime was represented in order to provoke outrage and action, not silence and passivity. These literary texts seek to elicit in the reader what can be called ‘irredentist solidarity’, a convergence of fellow-feeling that involves a total identification of the Other as the same.