Daily Archives: June 16, 2014

                              THIS CITY IS OURS!

So read the provocative banner on Copacabana beach amongst the tens of thousands of manic Argentinian supporters who infiltrated Rio de Janeiro in the days leading up to their nation’s opening World Cup match against Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As easily identified by their ear-piercing horns as the famous light blue and white strip of their football team, the mob became so uncontrollable at one point that local policia had to use pepper spray to stop some from crowding onto the Avenida Atlantica.

Argentina might temporarily have hold of Rio de Janiero, but will Lionel Messi and Argentina take hold of the World Cup next month?

The result was a 2-1 victory over a brave Bosnia at a heaving Maracana, Brazil’s answer to the Colosseum that had also been hijacked by its bitter South American rival, for this night at least.

But just as everything Brazil does is seen through the prism of Neymar right now, so it is with Messi.

“The Maracaná was impressive,” he said. “I had no doubt that it would be like this. It was incredible how the people cheered for us. We know it will be like this in Belo Horizonte and Porte Alegre. We have to keep looking for our dream.”

After Neymar’s two-goal, man-of-the-match performance in the tournament opener against Croatia, this was his Barcelona teammate’s opportunity to respond.

Bosnia-Herzegovina conceded an own goal after three minutes, from a Messi free-kick, but from then on the first half was more strangulation than an expected exhibition from one of the teams widely tipped to be in this stadium again for the final on July 13.

No player felt the suffocation more than Messi, with two or three defenders pouncing on him each time he had a sniff of the ball.

Midway through the second half, the Argie fans were also starting to feel the choke. Maybe the city wasn’t theirs.

Cutaway shots were shown on the big screen of some supporters. It was breaking news: they were mute.

Then the ubiquitous siren call across the football globe – Ole! Ole! Ole! Ole! – went up, and right on cue, Messi delivered.

The move started from near halfway, and by the time Messi was on the edge of the box, he wrong footed two defenders before his left-foot bullet found the post and Argentina had its second.

As mesmeric as it was, the goal was only his second at a World Cup, and it’s for that reason that experts insist he is shouldering as much pressure as Neymar here in Brazil.

The comparisons to Maradona, who effectively won the World Cup single-handed for Argentina in 1986, are becoming tiresome but are unavoidable.

He has been crowned World Player of the Year no less than four times, but Messi himself has made it clear there is only one title that matters.

“It is hard not to feel honoured when important people compare you with Maradona – he’s the best there’s ever been,” Messi has said. “My message, though, is please don’t compare me with him yet. He won a World Cup for our nation, and until I’ve managed to do the same the comparisons are not something I welcome or accept.”

Intriguingly, Messi wasn’t the brightest star on display on Sunday night.

The other one was the Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho, and she was also making her first appearance of the tournament.

Close to 200,000 fans packed into the Maracana for the final in 1950, when Brazil’s unexpected defeat to Uruguay sent the country into mourning for, well, decades if you believe what some say.

A crowd of 74,739 converged on the stadium for this match, and their presence drowned out a protest march of about 200 who tried to storm the stadium before police silenced them with tear gas and stun grenades.

You would need stronger ammo than tear-gas or pepper spray to silence the Messi worshippers.

When it was all over, the Argentinian fans were as loud leaving the Maracana as they had been on Copacabana in the days before.

Messi was rightly named man of the match, just as Neymar had been in Sao Paulo four days earlier.

It would be a dream for all concerned if the pair meets in this same mythological place in a month.

Messi will be chasing history, instead of Maradona’s shadow, but he is not thinking of himself.

“I promise the fans to play better,” he said. “And bring the win for them.”

source: smh.com.au

“It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organised and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide.”

Dr Israel Charney

At the close of the First World War, Greece was a nation being torn apart at the seams. Sundered politically and socially through the ‘National Schism’ between the Royalists, who wanted to stay out of the war and were only forced to enter the war after the Allies blockaded Piraeus, and the Venizelists, who, with a view to territorial expansion, set up their own rival government in Thessaloniki, from there to prosecute the war, across the Aegean, terrible stories were being told of a mass genocide of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the West, which was largely innocent of the holocaust while it was being carried out, Greece was well aware of the crime being perpetrated against her own people. King Constantine himself accused the German Kaiser, his brother-in-law, of Germany’s complicity in the genocide, a claim the Kaiser denied, though enough evidence now exists to suggest that the organised removal of Greeks from coastal regions such as Gallipoli and the forced death marches of the population were suggested to the Ottomans by German military advisers. Nonetheless, as Manus Midlarsky states in his book: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, the Greek genocide was nuanced and calculated to take place without attracting too much western opprobrium: “Given these political and cultural ties, wholesale attacks on the Ottoman Greeks would have profoundly angered not only the Entente Powers, but Germany and Austria-Hungary as well, the allies upon whom the Ottomans were deeply dependent. Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman Greeks simply was not a viable option. (…) Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other ‘sensitive’ regions.”

Thus, in 1919, a politically fragmented Greece that was fraught with domestic strife, exhausted by continuous war since 1912 and almost bankrupt, had lost an extremely large portion of its eastern population to genocide, was granted occupation of most of Eastern Thrace, to a point forty kilometres from Constantinople. Prime Minister Venizelos, in the face of serious Allied (and Greek military) misgivings, asserted Greece’s capacity to occupy and police a zone around the city of Smyrna. Owing to the support of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Greek troops finally landed in Smyrna in 1919, to the consternation of the Turks.

The occupation and administration of Smyrna, which was supposed to be of five years’ duration, after which time, its inhabitants would hold a plebiscite to determine which country they would like to belong to, marks the departure point between the constituents of the Christian genocides. Unlike the Armenians and the Assyrians, who did not have a state at the time the Christian genocide was committed, the Greeks not only had such a state but also found themselves embroiled in a war against forces the like of which they had never before encountered.

While the vanquished Sultan in Entente-occupied Constantinople was cajoled into accepting the Greek occupation and the cession of Eastern Thrace, culminating in the Treaty of Sevres that formalised Greece’s gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, the occupation of parts of Turkey by erstwhile Ottoman subjects was something that could not be countenanced by nationalist Turkish forces. Coalescing around Kemal Ataturk, the hero of the defence of Gallipoli, they landed in Samsounta on 19 May 1919 and commenced a campaign to remove the last vestiges of the Greek presence in Anatolia.

According to Igor Diakonov in The Paths of History, in the context of the nationalist campaign, which was considered a battle for the survival of Turkey, “Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC”.

As a result of the Kemalist campaign, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified. As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force “resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples – Armenians and Greeks – to the fury of their persecutors by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished”.

Given the refusal of Turkish Nationalists to abide by the Treaty, and the constant harassing of the Greek forces by Turkish guerrillas, irregulars and nationalist forces, the already beleaguered Greek army had no choice but to cross over from the Smyrna zone into Turkey proper, in order to neutralise the aggression. While this is widely considered, especially by Turkish forces, to have been tantamount to an invasion, the strategic objective of these operations was to defeat the Turkish Nationalists and force Kemal Ataturk into peace negotiations. The advancing Greeks, still holding superiority in numbers and modern equipment at this point, had hoped for an early battle in which they were confident of breaking up ill-equipped Turkish forces. Yet they met with little resistance, as the Turks managed to retreat in an orderly fashion and avoid encirclement. Winston Churchill, who was sympathetic to Greek aspirations but was sceptical about their ability to fulfil these, said: “The Greek columns trailed along the country roads passing safely through many ugly defiles, and at their approach the Turks, under strong and sagacious leadership, vanished into the recesses of Anatolia”.

As the war continued, Turkish forces lured the Greek army further and further way from its supply lines, the Greek army advanced as far as the Sangarios River, near Ankara. Along the way, and during its retreat, the Greek army committed several instances of brutalities against the civilian Muslim population. These incidents are often referred to by Turks when the issue of recognising the genocide of the Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia is broached with them, and in fact there exist in Turkey various museums dedicated to exposing Greek army atrocities. As these atrocities are raised as a counterpoint to the genocide, or by way of excusing Turkey’s liability for it, they are certainly worth examining, no less because they feature hardly in the Greek discourse about the period. Not only do they provide a context for Turkey’s continued genocide denial, but also suggest that frameworks other than the political and the historical could be employed, in order to render the process by which Turkey and Turkish society can accept the historicity of the genocide, with the minimum of trauma and difficulty. Next week those facts will be examined in detail.
* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.

source: Neos Kosmos

Obstacles for recognition of genocide in Modern Turkey.

To date, other than the extremely brave Turkish scholars such as Taner Akcam, Selim Deringil and some journalists who lament the demise of a multicultural Turkey, there have been few efforts by Greece to actively engage Turkey in a rational discussion on the Genocide. However, popular opinion in Turkey is gradually shifting, especially with regard to the genocide against the Armenians. Recently, the grandson of Jemal Pasha, one of the three army officers who instigated the genocide, suggesting that “Turkey, as a state, should apologize to the Armenians.” Such public calls for recognition are becoming larger in number, with prominent businessman Ishak Alaton commenting that: “Apology is a sign of maturity and it is time for Turkey to grow up… There is little time left until 2015 when Turkey will face a huge campaign by the Armenian lobby, which claims it will be the 100th year of Armenian genocide.” There appears to be at least a tacit acknowledgment by sections of the Turkish media, that, despite their own interpretation of events, the Armenians have managed to convince the world of the righteousness of their cause.

Hurriyet journalist Mehmet Ali Birand, for example, observed the following in an article strangely entitled: “Now the Armenians are making us walk the Deportation March”: “Armenians are almost approaching the end in their genocide claims. They have made the world accept their claims by working continuously like industrious ants for 100 years. While they were explaining their pain and what they had to live through, we did not even discuss among ourselves what had happened. We buried our heads in the sand and have reached these days. We could not reply in a persuasive manner. We lost the case.”

While some sympathy exists for the Armenians among the Turkish intelligentsia, and while some Turkish journalists stress the need to tactically address the Armenian Genocide in order to enhance the global image of Turkey, this does not seem to extend to a consideration of the genocide against Greeks in Pontus and the rest of Asia Minor. Last year, when the Diatribe wrote about this Genocide, an incendiary letter was received from a Turkish nationalist, making accusations of racism and incitement of racial hatred. This is something echoed by many Turks I have spoken to over the years: that the victim’s (our) discourse about the genocide, (which usually involves exhibiting statistics of the death toll and reading contemporary newspaper articles that describe crimes of murder and torture in harrowing detail), is that it is a natural consequence of the actions of a race which is by its very nature, inhumane and barbaric. According to this view, the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks are using the Genocide to vilify the entire Turkish nation and deny its humanity.
I profoundly disagree with this point of view, which does not take into account (a) the inherited trauma of the brutality of genocide and (b) frustration at the continued Turkish denial of this crime. I believe that the enormity of the crime, as contained in newspaper accounts of the time is so horrific as to need no further embellishment. However, I concede that the disturbing gleefulness with which some Greek ultra-nationalists and for want of a better word “genocide-peddlers” take it upon themselves to present historical incidents of Turkish brutality against Christians, the gorier the better, sometimes does seem to be more than just reporting of facts and rather, calculated to a) enhance their own self importance and b) incite feelings of disgust and anger at the entire Turkish race, despite their vocal protestations to the contrary.

Jun 2014

Both in Greece and in Australia, the Genocide discourse is thus being played out, mostly for domestic consumption, with a schematic and highly narrow presentation of facts to the already converted, that focuses mainly on the mechanics of the slaughter. There is no consideration of the broader social, historical and political framework which enabled the Genocide to take place and certainly no dialogue with, or consideration of the discourse from the Turkish point of view, which is necessary, if we are to reach some type of recognition by them of the Genocide and an apology to the victims. Further, if our only contribution to the discussion is the internalised list of crimes, it is axiomatic that when faced with a perceived onslaught of racial denigration, that the immediate Turkish knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss all accusations put by us and wallow in rage, just as post-war Germans turned their heads away from the screen when forced by the Allies to watch footage of the Nazi extermination camps. At that stage, the time for listening or dialogue is past and any attempts to engage with Turks in order for them to appreciate the enormity of the crime of Genocide committed by their ancestors, are rendered futile.
Another major problem with unseasoned Genocide campaigners’ approaches, it their pseudo-legalism, where, in their quest to forensically ‘prove’ the genocide, they try to selectively fit the events of the genocide into the various legal definitions of genocide that exist, some of which have changed or are no longer as broad as they should be, or are too broad. For example, the UN definition is now extremely broad but does not cover all instances of cultural genocide or violence against women. As a result, the whole debate becomes a nit-picking exercise between would be-lawyers, obfuscating the main point – which is that a State took it upon itself to incite its subjects to commit horrible crimes against subject minorities, with a view to exterminating them, from within its borders and even worse, that the State in question, the Ottoman Empire and its successor, deny that it ever happened, despite a multitude of eyewitness and independent evidence verifying it. In this case, legally ‘proving’ what the world already knows is a useless exercise, especially since nation states can ‘opt out’ of being bound by international court decisions.

In his book With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide, Colin Tatz argues that Turkey denies the genocide so as not to jeopardize “its ninety-five-year-old dream of becoming the beacon of democracy in the Near East”. In the light of recent developments in the region, this argument seems unconvincing. On the other hand in their book Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Kevin White present a list of reasons explaining Turkey’s inability to admit the genocides committed by the Young Turks, being: a) a suppression of guilt and shame that a warrior nation, a ‘beacon of democracy’ as it saw itself in 1908 (and since), slaughtered several ethnic populations. Democracies, it is said, don’t commit genocide; ergo, Turkey couldn’t and didn’t do so. b) A cultural and social ethos of honour, a compelling and compulsive need to remove any blots on the national escutcheon. c) A chronic fear that admission will lead to massive claims for reparation and restitution. d) To overcome fears of social fragmentation in a society that is still very much a state in transition. e) A ‘logical’ belief that because the genocide was committed with impunity, so denial will also meet with neither opposition nor obloquy and f) An inner knowledge that the juggernaut denial industry has a momentum of its own and can’t be stopped even if they wanted it to stop.

Notwithstanding the above dealing with the genocide on a bilateral basis, the largest problem the Greek people face has to do with the nationalist hysteria referred to earlier and the fact that our history with Turkey is different to that of Armenians or the Assyrians. In striving to explain how we are the innocent victims of genocide, we shy away from exploring how it was that the Turks could be incited to commit genocide in the first place – a topic of vital importance if our intention is to ensure that genocide never takes place again, rather than achieve an ascendancy over the Turks.
We also airbrush out our own history in the region. In particular we ignore the role played by Turkish refugees from the Balkans, who, dispossessed and resentful, were easily manipulated into taking out their frustrations against the Greeks of Asia Minor. We also forget that the Greek army, assisted by native Greeks in Anatolia, during the Asia Minor campaign, also took part in massacres, though on an extremely smaller scale and in markedly different circumstances.

We are silent on these, though need to examine them and put them in perspective, for the Turkish response to our claims is always that we also committed massacres and or genocide, so that if they did perpetrate the genocide, we are no better than they and thus, all things are equal. Once we have examined our own role, and understand the motivation behind it, we can then condemn all acts of racial violence and brutality wherever these are committed, including our own, separating these and not linking them to the Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Christian of Asia Minor.

Next week, we will examine the massacres the Greek army committed in Asia Minor and consider how these impact upon Turkish views of the Greek Genocide.

* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.

source: Neos Kosmos

Here is a question for the gentle reader: How many countries around the world do not recognise FYROM as Macedonia?

Here is a question for the gentle reader: How many countries around the world do not recognise FYROM as Macedonia? The answer is a mere seventeen. On the other hand, some one hundred and thirty three countries do recognise FYROM as Macedonia with a good deal many deciding to take no part in the naming dispute. The reason for this statistic will become clear hopefully, as this diatribe progresses.

The former senator Bob Carr, when premier of New South Wales, personally recognised the Armenian genocide. He wrote several letters in which he referred to the genocide as a genocide and a crime against humanity and argued that Turkey must apologise. Last year, in the wake of the Parliament of New South Wales recognising the Armenian, Assyrian and Pontian genocide, in the guise foreign minister of Australia, Bob Carr, when asked, commented that Australia had no stance on the issue. And this from someone who was previously very vocal in his recognition. Similarly, Armenian-Australian activists in particular are dismayed at the Liberal government’s retreat from the unequivocal position held by many of its prominent members while in opposition.

These two ostensibly disparate fact bytes are in fact connected when it is considered that, up until now, campaigners of the recognition of the genocide of the Christian peoples of Anatolia are convinced that genocide recognition is linked to the domino effect – that is, that if enough Australian states recognise the genocide, then the Commonwealth of Australia will recognise the genocide and if the Commonwealth of Australia recognises the genocide then other countries inevitably shall follow suit. If the vast majority of countries around the world recognise the genocide, then the pressure on Turkey to do the same will be so inexorably great that it will have absolutely no other choice than to recognise the genocide, crushed as it will be, under the weight of global public opinion.

However, the Macedonian example above appears to indicate that in reality, the dynamic of lobbies and pressure groups are complex and calculations of domino effects are far from simple. To wit: Even if Greece is the last country left alone in the world, in refusing to allow FYROM to appropriate the term Macedonia, it will conceivably, not bow to world opinion and afford FYROM the recognition it seeks, both for domestic reasons and also as a matter of principle. As a corollary, it is reasonable to assume that even if the entire world recognises the genocide, Turkey will not, solely for fear of being isolated in the issue and in absence of other intervening considerations.
Given the above, though well meaning, committed and energetic, it is not unreasonable to suggest that if genocide campaigners are determined that Turkey should recognise the Genocide, (rather than just creating global public awareness, which is also intrinsically important ), then they are going about things in the wrong way, focusing their efforts at the broader base rather than at the top. After all, it is not as if the Western Powers were blissfully unaware of the Genocide while it was being carried out. Thousands of newspaper articles published in the Western world attest to its concern for the victims and outrage against the perpetrators of this heinous crime. Indeed, so moved were the Allies by the weight of western public opinion that they issued the Ottomans the following warning in 1915: “In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” The fact that these same western powers, with the exception of France now choose to resile from that recognition, should remind Genocide campaigners that other, more profane considerations than justice and historical proof are at play here. Consequently, it is logical to suppose that if Turkey recognises the genocide of its own accord then all the other countries would lose nothing in doing the same and finally, justice will be afforded to the innocent victims of intolerance.

One often overlooked consideration that should be noted, is that to some extent, Turkey has already recognised the genocide. It did so in 1919, after the war, when Constantinople was occupied by the Allies and the Sultan’s administration was coerced to conduct War Crimes Trials, an eerie and ineffective precursor of the Nuremberg Trials. These trials focused extensively on the chain of command and the often harrowing testimonies of Ottoman military officers, suggesting that there truly was an organised plan to rid Anatolia of its Christian population. Furthermore, ample evidence exists of Ottoman Muslims, even army officers actively hiding their Christian neighbours, or refusing to carry out deportation and slaughter orders. If no massacres took place, what were these protected and privileged Muslims protecting their Christian friends from?
Nonetheless, the Trials were problematic. Being held under occupation, the judges were under the scrutiny of the occupying forces. Due process did not exist, and there were gross absences of legal rights. The Ottoman penal code did not acknowledge the right of cross-examination. The decision was taken by evidence submitted during the preparatory phase, the trial, and how the defendant presents his defence. Of great concern was the fact that none of the presented evidence was verified and validity of the evidence presented, such as letters and orders have been in study, with some of them proving to be forgeries. In some cases hearsay was an issue, though many officials did testify to receiving orders to carry out the Genocide. Nonetheless, during the trials, testimonies were not subjected to cross-examination, and some of the materials were presented as “anonymous court material.” So tainted by the absence of proper process were the Trials that John de Robeck, the Commander-in-Chief, of the Mediterranean forces stated that “its findings cannot be held of any account at all.”

It comes as no surprise that after the Ataturk regime assumed power, the Military Trials were hushed up, denied and referred to as victor’s justice. Events such as the ethnic cleansing of 15,000 native Greeks from the Gallipoli peninsula were also covered up and it is only in the context of the rediscovery of Australian contemporary accounts of massacres that such information is now re-entering the popular consciousness – a process that is being strenuously resisted by the Turkish state, which has even sought to punish local Australian politicians who are at the forefront of such endeavours.

The process of erasure seems to suggest that one cannot force an unwilling nation to admit something it doesn’t want to admit to, unless that force is sustained and tied to punishment, as was the case with Nazi Germany, where the Allies, learning from their mistakes in the Ottoman Trials, made a concerted effort in the Nuremberg Trials to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Failing the imposition of external sanctions, the perpetrator nation needs to mature and become ready to listen, before recognition of its deeds is possible, domestically or otherwise. As of today, that maturity has been late in coming, though the Turkish PM recently hazarded the oblique opinion that the events that took place at the expense of the Armenians were “our shared pain,” and that this “should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes towards one another.” Coming from the same person who stated: “We should all be ready and well-equipped so that the 1915 events can be dealt in an objective, scientific and realistic way. The Armenian diaspora is making its preparations to turn the events of 1915 into a political campaign by [distorting] the historical reality. In contrast to this political campaign, we will firmly stand against them by highlighting historical and scientific data,” we can question the motivation for the expression of such ostensibly moving sentiments. Next week we will examine some of the obstacles impeding Genocide recognition in modern Turkey.

*Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist

source: Neos Kosmos

More than 50,000 tickets have been sold in Australia for the World Cup. Photo: EPA/LINDSEY PARNABY.

The World Cup every four years has become a pilgrimage for many. Neos Kosmos talks to two Greek Australians that are currently in Brazil, and asks them what makes the World Cup so special.

Sitting in a World Cup stadium, seeing the world’s best fight for glory while fans around you get into a football frenzy is a once in a lifetime experience.

Every four years, new and old football fans around Australia made the pilgrimage to the World Cup, to experience the pinnacle of the sport and support their Socceroos.

For Greek Australian fans, the experience is doubled with two national teams fighting for a place in their hearts.

This time, the World Cup in Brazil has been a dream come true for the Greeks in Australia. Both national teams have qualified, and the host city is one of the most desired locations of the footballing community.

It’s a win-win.

Yet, many wanting to live the dream and make it to the World Cup from Australia know that the experience comes with a hefty price tag.

Already, accommodation and flights have sky-rocketed, and that’s if you can find any that haven’t been booked out in advance.

Game tickets are scarce, though theoretically you can still purchase tickets thanks to FIFA’s sensible behaviour.

The football governing body has held back 7 per cent of the 3.3 million tickets until it is sure the seats are actually installed.

More than 80 per cent of tickets have been purchased by Brazilians, while Australians have bought more than 50,000 tickets since April, and are the fifth biggest national ticket holders in the world.

Conservative estimates on the overall cost, including flights (international and domestic whilst in Brazil), accommodation for the whole World Cup period and tickets, see Aussie fans looking at spending about $10,000.

The cost is something quite a number of Greek Australians have wrestled with, but all see that the payoff will be worth it.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind, I have to be in the World Cup in Brazil,” Greek Australian football fanatic, Peter Baxevanidis, tells Neos Kosmos of his decision to go.

“It’s perfect, Brazilians are soccer mad, it’s a big party over there, it feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Peter is one of quite a few Greeks making the pilgrimage to Brazil, and is spending thousands to make his dream come true.

For more than seven years working in sports statistics, Peter has made football not just a job but an obsession, and with Brazil as the host city, he knew he couldn’t miss it.

It’s been a seven month process for the 26-year-old, trying to find proper and safe accommodation, booking transport and tickets.

He’s seen the price-gouging fist hand when he was trying to book accommodation.

“We tried hotels and hostels. 28 bed dormitories were selling at a $100 a night, when they’re normally $10 a night,” he says.

For those wanting to find something at an affordable price, Peter says try the website airbnb.com, in which people put up their properties on the web privately.

To avoid the mad rush for tickets, Peter bought a five game stadium pass for US$1000 that will give him VIP access to four group games and one knock-out round match in Rio De Janeiro. That knock-out match might include Greece, he hopes.

He isn’t too annoyed that he most likely won’t be seeing the Socceroos or Greece live, as he will be enjoying it like thousands of other Greek Australians, at the bars in Rio.

In 2008, he was part of a group that studied in Greece and was joined by lots of South American Greeks that he will be meeting up with in Brazil.

“I expect it [Brazil] to be nuts. Crazy. From all reports, Rio is crazy a lot of the time, so if there’s going to be a World Cup on with their favourite sport, I expect it to be 100 times of what it is normally,” he says.

“Whenever there’s an event, like Carnival or whenever Brazil is playing soccer, everything just stops.”

Confining himself to just one city is saving Peter a lot of money on accommodation and flights, but means he won’t be able to choose the teams he gets to see.

Another Greek Australian travelling to Brazil is John Makris, who is going with the main purpose of showing his support to the Greek and Australian teams.

Spending a little bit more, and using the help of a travel agent, John is making a few trips to the other cities hosting matches. All in all, 12 cities around Brazil will be hosting games throughout the Cup.

Travelling with his Italian Australian friend, the duo will be filling their suitcases with lots of flags.

“We’ve got the Greek tops happening, the Australian ones as well, I won’t be wearing an Italian one” he told Neos Kosmos when he booked his flights in December.

They are budgeting for six games, mostly in the group stages which he thinks will have the best stadium atmosphere of the Cup.

“The quarterfinals, semi finals and finals aren’t that energetic as the group stages are because you’ve got more diehard fans at each game as opposed to corporate.”

John is an idealist and expects to see Greece not just through to the knock-out phase, but in the final.

“I’ll be putting $100 on Greece I reckon. They won the Euro Cup in 2004, so this is 2014 I think Greece might win it,” he says.

Peter on the other hand isn’t expecting Greece nor Australia to make it past the group stages.

He believes the host city has the best chance to take the cup.

“If it wasn’t Greece or Australia, because I’m in Brazil, I’ll probably go for Brazil,” he says.

“They have a very good chance, with the home support, I’d love them to win.”

Having to pick between Greece and Australia isn’t something either of the Greek Australians want to do.

source: Neos Kosmos

Coach Ange Postecoglou says he wants to see what the Socceroos can do against the best.

Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou says his side will have no fear against a rampant Netherlands on Thursday morning (AEST) after a promising showing against Chile in the World Cup.

Australia came away with plenty of plaudits but ultimately no points in a 3-1 loss to Chile on Saturday morning, shortly after the Dutch destroyed defending champions Spain 5-1 in a genuine title statement.

The Chile defeat also came at the cost of Ivan Franjic suffering a hamstring injury which has ruled him out for the rest of the tournament as Australia looks to shuffle its defensive backline set to take on the ruthless Netherlands forwards.

But Postecoglou says his charges are determined to stand up against the world’s number 15 side.

“It was a surprising result [Netherlands’ 5-1 win over Spain], with two very good sides,” Postecoglou told a media gathering at the Socceroos base in Vitoria.

“We watched the game and it was incredible. The first half was very evenly balanced. Spain could have been 2-0 up, van Persie scores an unbelievable goal and they ran away with it.

“But our players are looking forward to it, we want to measure ourselves against the best.

“If [the Netherlands] win against us, they’re through. They’ll be very determined to do that, but with that comes some pressure as well.

“Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to upset all the logic and all the odds.”

Asked on how he felt about the Socceroos’ valiant performance against Chile, Postecoglou said the team needs to balance the quality of its play against missed chances to level the match.

“I feel good about getting close, but I’d much rather be disappointed at missing the opportunity,” he said.

“Hopefully that fires them up for the next one.

“We just need to keep concentrating and focussing on what we need to do. The belief doesn’t change.

“I’ve said in the lead-up, without any false sense of bravado, we can make an impact at the tournament. We’ve still got two opportunities to make an impact.”

Source: ABC

Greece’s head coach Fernando Santos believes better results are on the cards. Photo: AP/Darko Bandic.

Although it was a bad start, Greece coach Fernando Santos is ready to show Greece’s potential in their next match against Japan.

A 3-0 defeat by Colombia on Saturday in Greece’s opening World Cup Group C game was a bad start to the tournament in Brazil but it is no drama, Greece coach Fernando Santos told reporters.

Santos said the Greeks, who have never managed to keep a clean sheet at a World Cup match, paid the price for a lack of focus at key moments in the game.

“We should not make a drama out of it,” Santos said. “We must analyse what was less positive and what was positive, balance things, and organise our ideas.”

The Greeks were outsmarted by the South Americans early in both halves and Colombia fired a stoppage-time third goal to confirm their status as group favourites.

“At the end of this type of match we have to congratulate our opponents because they were more efficient,” said the Portuguese.

“The first five, ten minutes we had some difficulties with our concentration, we were not focused enough. There were no surprises because we knew, I had told my players, what team we would play against. It was not different for their usual strategy,” he said.

The Greeks worked their way back into the game only to miss some good chances and hit the crossbar with a Fanis Gekas header but Santos said their conversion rate needed to improve for their second group game against Japan.

“We could have scored a goal and we can say the result is exaggerated compared to how the teams performed on the pitch. We had our chances, we controlled the game for long periods of time.”

Santos rued some of his players’ lack of concentration toward the end of the game when Colombia scored their third goal.

“Towards the end some of the players seemed to have forgotten what type of competition they were playing in. They were totally out of the game. Some of them, not all of them,” he said.

“But some of them thought it was over. During the rest of the match they fought well but one or two minutes they were not focused enough.”

“It was bad and became worse with the third goal and it happened because of us. We were guilty,” said Santos.

Greece face Japan on June 19 before taking on Ivory Coast in their final group game.

Source: Reuters.

Dr John Zakos, co-founder of Cognea

A.I startup Cognea was co-founded by Queenslander John Zakos.

IBM’s Watson group has announced it has acquired artificial intelligence company Cognea, co-founded by Greek Australian Dr John Zakos and Liesl Capper. Cognea was previously called MyCyberTwin.

Cognea developed a cognitive computing and conversational artificial intelligence platform. The startup offers virtual assistants that relate to people through personalities. On the company’s AngelList page, NASA, HP and Start Farm were mentioned as customers.

As IBM stated after the acquisition: “We believe this focus on creating depth of personality, when combined with an understanding of the users’ personalities, will create a new level of interaction that is far beyond today’s ‘talking’ smartphones. We welcome to IBM [Cognea’s] co-founders Liesl Capper and John Zakos, and the rest of the Cognea team.”

Watson is the artificially intelligent, question-answering supercomputer developed by IBM. The Watson Group aims to further develop, commercialise and expand Watson and other cognitive technologies.

When IBM launched Watson in January, it said it would invest $1 billion in the group to be used broadly for R&D and investments. The Watson Group has already backed Welltok, a maker of online healthcare management communities, and Fluid, which is building a cognitive shopping assistant.

IBM says Cognea’s technology will be brought into Watson, giving the system the ability to have more real conversations with users.

Before co-founding MyCyberTwin Dr Zakos worked for both mature and start-up IT companies at an international level. His experience spans both managing business development and leading technical teams in the development of emerging technologies in Asia-Pacific and the USA.

Dr Zakos was a key member of the founding management and engineering teams that built the Mooter platform. Mooter, a global leader in search and contextual advertising technology, has attracted international recognition from several authoritative sources, including the MIT Technology Review.

During his time at the IBM Research Lab in Japan, Dr Zakos’ work focused on the development of world-leading information retrieval and knowledge-mining technology. Previously at Ixla Limited, he was involved in the commercialization of award-winning digital photography and web publishing software.

Holding a PhD in intelligent web technology, John Zakos has authored numerous publications and presented his work at international conferences and invited talks. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Information at Communication Technology at Griffith University, in Queensland and participates in collaborative research efforts with other academic institutions in Australia, in the USA and other countries.

The Greek Australian computer scientist is also well known in Greece and was one of the main speaker last month at TEDx Thessaloniki 2014.

source: Neos Kosmos

Bryan Banston, vice president of Emirates Australasia. Photo: Emirates.

In response to growing travel demand to Greece, Emirates is adding another daily service to Athens between 1 August and 25 October 2014.

The extra service – although temporary – will help ferry many Australian passengers to and from Greece after the initial June/July peak, Emirates vice president of Australasia Bryan Banston tells Neos Kosmos.

“The extra flight will cater to strong demand on the route during the close of the peak summer holiday dates and across the shoulder period, from 1 August to 25 October,” he says.

“It’s an especially important time for those with family members and friends in Greece who are often looking to travel at the end of or after the peak tourism season.”

Greece has seen a huge jump in tourism rates in the last few years and will welcome a record number of tourists this year.
Approximately 21.2 million foreign tourists are expected to make it to Greece this year, with Athens set to receive some 750,000 more visitors than last year.

Emirates has been monitoring demand on its flights from Dubai to Athens and is looking to eventually expand its services by utilising larger aircraft, if the numbers remain high.

“The Dubai-Athens route is considered one of Emirates’ strongest in Europe, and Australia is continually one of the strongest markets for the daily service,” Mr Banston says.

“Introducing aircraft with larger capacity is central to Emirates’ strategy of meeting growing passenger demand while supporting trade between Australia and Greece.

“We constantly review our services and customer demand and Athens continues to be a route we monitor.”

Emirates already offer 98 flights a week from Australia to Dubai together with Qantas and operates to 140 worldwide locations including Athens.
Emirates launched flights to Greece in 1996 and was the first airline to operate an A380 on the route.

The new second daily flight “will be serviced by an Airbus A330-200 – increasing seat capacity by 76 per cent and cargo capacity by 74 per cent,” Mr Banston says.

Greece has invested 24 billion in aiding the tourism industry and has recently committed to refurbishing and building new hotels to cater to demand.

The airline will be adding another daily flight to Athens in August to keep up with demand.

source: Neos Kosmos

Argentina star Lionel Messi admitted to nerves in his side’s victory over Bosnia-Hercegovina during their first game of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

The 26-year-old struggled to make an impact before a sublime effort put his side two up as they went on to win 2-1.

“It’s the first game, I was anxious, nervous,” said Messi.

“It was important to start with a win. We’ve got to improve certain things, but it was important to start with the three points.”

Argentina took the lead through a Sead Kolasinac own goal which came from a Messi left-wing free-kick, although Alejandro Sabella’s side stuttered through the first half.

But La Albiceleste captain Messi sparked his performance and that of his side to life when he played a one-two with Gonzalo Higuain, went past two defenders and drilled in a low shot.

It was his second goal in nine World Cup games, and first in 623 minutes since his effort against Serbia and Montenegro at the 2006 tournament.

“I wanted to release all the energy from other times when things didn’t go right [with the national team],” said Messi. “It’s always a pleasure to score with the national team.”

He added: “We had a great second half. We had the ball much more, created several opportunities and that’s what we have to continue to do.”

Sabella’s half-time switch in formation from 3-5-2 to 4-3-3 played a pivotal role in his side’s improvement.

“As strikers, we prefer that system as it gives us more attacking opportunities and if we don’t use that system we suffer a bit,” said Messi.

“I was often on my own and so was Kun [Sergio Aguero] and it was very difficult, so there are things to be improved on.”

Argentina, who are aiming to win a third World Cup, play Iran on 21 June in their next game.

“On balance I would give the performance against Bosnia-Hercegovina a six. We need to improve and part of that is in my hands – it is up to me,” said Sabella.

“The changes at half-time just produced this improvement. They were playing better together and there was more support around Messi.

“Once Messi received the ball there was better follow-up and better support.

“I think that, whatever happens in this World Cup, he is among the best players in the history of football.”

Bosnia were making their World Cup debut and coach Safet Susic believes his side coped well after letting in an early goal.

“We are realistic people, and our goal was to put as much resistance as possible to one of the favourites to win the title, and this is what we have done,” said Susic.

“I am satisfied with what I saw, especially after we had this misfortune to concede an own goal in the first couple of minutes.

“It is a huge satisfaction to take part for the first time in the World Cup and play against a great team and one of the best players in the world – and not only of today but of all time.”

source: bbc.com