‘Do it with your own f**king money': Christopher Hitchens on Turkey and Cyprus

In 2009, Hitchens believed Obama was soft on Turkey, Congress should deduct the cost of the occupation of Cyprus from military aid, and Turkey should be cast out of NATO for its shenanigans

I was one of the last people to interview essayist and journalist Christopher Hitchens in April 2009.

He had come to visit the grave of his mother, but principally to celebrate the completion of the new Acropolis Museum, inaugurated two months later, which, he said, disarmed the British of their last argument for not returning the Parthenon Marbles.

By December 2011 he was dead from esophageal cancer. Here for the first time is both the article I ran in the Athens News at the time, focusing on the Parthenon Marbles, and the transcript of his comments on Cyprus and Turkey, which foreshadow Turkey’s hardening attitude towards reunification on Cyprus and towards its neighbours, and its growing exceptionalism within NATO.

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made America’s toleration of Turkey’s occupation of a sovereign country an embarrassment to its stated principles and those of NATO, Hitchens pointed out the fundamental clash of principles between Turkey’s stance and the legal world order.

Hitchens believed Turkey should have been regularly reminded of the Armenian genocide, and ousted from NATO for its combative behaviour and lack of shared values; that Congress should have deducted from its annual military aid the cost of Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus; and that Turkey should have been made to recognise the Republic of Cyprus as a precondition to further negotiations on the island’s reunification.