An exclusive interview with Endy Zemenides, Executive Director of HALC.

New York.- By Vicki James Yiannias

“Part of the reason HALC formed was to immediately respond to events and developments, and to mobilize right away,” said Endy Zemenides, Executive Director of HALC, the Hellenic American Leadership Council, a day after Turkey’s latest provocation the sending of warships to Cyprus’ EEZ. Grabbing some time for a telephone interview from HALC headquarters in Chicago, Mr. Zemenides “paints a picture of a day in the life of HALC”.

GN: In really few words, what is the substance of Turkey’s action of the last 36 hours?

EZ: Turkey made claims on Cypriot territory. They pre-announced that they are going to claim Cypriot territory on October 20. The Turks said: We are coming into Cypriot territorial waters on October 20, and we’re going to stay there for 3 months. They’re saying that they are claiming this area and if anybody tries to stop them, they are under the protection of the Turkish navy.

GN: HALC is on top of the information feed!

EZ: Part of the reason we remain so informed is to be able to immediately respond to things and to mobilize right away. Yesterday, when we all woke up at 6:00 AM with the news of Turkey’s latest provocation in the EEZ, we immediately jumped into the action. We were on the phone with Congressional staff and with Congressmen and with letters and reports going back and forth, and by 10:00 AM we had memos circulating; we had arranged briefing calls for members of Congress and with the American Jewish Committee; we were tweeting and using social media to put pressure on the State Department to make stronger statements.

GN: That can give impetus to the whole community.

EZ: Yes. There is no one group that can solve everything by itself… now this allows other groups and individuals who might have a relationship with a Congressman to say, “Look–there are so many people who care about this”. It also shows that with the network we build we can “walk and chew gum at the same time”, as the saying goes, because this news yesterday happened to break on a day that HALC had pre-scheduled a National Day of Action for our Return of Churches Bill. Here we were, having two issues in one day.

This is when I feel particularly satisfied with the outreach we’ve done and the network we’ve built. And this isn’t just the work that we at HALC do. There are a lot of individuals, Greek Americans and a lot of Greeks in the Diaspora, who really care about these issues, and we’ve never really asked them to take part, so here we were at a staff level and at a leadership level working on the crisis or the emergency at the same time we had the grassroots network talking to Congress on the Return of Churches issue because the news yesterday happened to break on our pre-scheduled National Day of Action for our Return of Churches Bill. I was getting reports throughout the day. I had someone talking to the leadership office–we targeted Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives in particular for phone calls–and the feedback I got is that the phones did not stop ringing! Both of these situations showed our reach and our partnerships. We’re reaching out to more people.

GN: With whom have you worked?

EZ: On the EEZ issue we worked closely with our Jewish allies, The American Jewish Committee [AJC], with the Hellenic Caucus, and the Hellenic Israel Caucus; and on the Return of Churches issue we were working with the Armenian National Committee of America. I remember that in my first interview with you one of the things I told you was that our goal was to reach out and get more people involved that ever before in a more impactful way than ever before; and they’re doing it… they’re making a difference. They’re seeing results.

GN: Can I give a number to the people who have joined the effort in that way?

EZ: Our active e-mail list is 50,000. I can say that 88% of our list has done some advocacy action. 88% of our list has actually done multiple advocacy actions. Of course, some are on our e-mail list to get news and all the rest but 88% has written letters to Congress, written letters to the editor, signed petitions… our list covers 385 of the 435 Congressional Districts. It covers every state. Every senator in the United States Senate has been contacted by our list. About 90% of the United Sates Congress has been contacted by our list, and directly by constituents, so for example you can contact NY’s Senator Schumer, but you can’t contact Illinois’ Senator Durbin, and vice versa for me. I think it makes the communication even more powerful… it’s not someone in New York telling a Senator in Tennessee: “I care about this… “

GN: Does HALC’s direct approach benefit other organizations?

EZ: It complements other organizations, other groups. I regularly share this info with the Coordinated Effort of Hellenes especially. For example, we’ll be working jointly on a piece of legislation and I’ll say, “Okay, guys, you’re meeting with this Congressman, let him know that 11 people from his District sent letters, and here are copies of those letters”.

GN: What are some other issues or events you’ve worked on recently?

EZ: Aside from the “day in the life of HALC” I just gave you, we are, of course always working on the traditional issues. Cyprus is at the very top of the list. Cyprus is at the top of the list not only because it’s a front-burner policy issue for the U.S., but because since that time we spoke, when HALC started, it’s in a much different context: energy has changed things and how well the new Anastasiades government is viewed by the U.S. has changed things.

And Turkey’s turn away from the West has changed things… even from the time we started, it’s a completely different forum we’re dealing with. But we spend a lot of time on that because we’re being engaged at the highest level at the U.S. government; Israel’s interested; the EU… and there’s some movement. Of course there’s also this crisis right now. Typically, we Greeks move quite stridently in moments of crisis.

GN: And religious freedom?

EZ: Religious freedom is still a front-burner issue. There has been nowhere near the progress that we had reason to believe in, or were promised. I think we kind of deluded ourselves as a community for a while thinking: “Okay, it’s coming… it’s right around the corner”.

GN: Georgia Logothetis Managing Director of HALC, wrote about the Holy Theological School of Halki last year.

EZ: Georgia Logothetis’ piece talked about how many times in the last decade Halki was almost opened. The Halki issue is very important, and I think that this issue, too, has taken a much different dimension, because when you and I first spoke we were talking about the religious freedom of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, an issue that some people considered to be forty-years old… as old as the Cyprus issue. But right now it has a whole new look to it; it’s part and parcel of the attack on Christianity in the Middle East.

When you consider that we thought we had reason for hope because Erdogan was of a more religious bent as opposed to the Kemalists, who were secular and very against religion. Well, now it turns out that Erdogan has a religious bent but wants to be the father of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. His tolerance for religion is for his own religion not for Christian minorities. With ISIS we’ve been watching that Christians are literally being slaughtered. The Egyptian Coptic Christians were the first people attacked by the Muslim Brotherhood–which Erdogan backed in Egypt–as soon as they came to power.

So even when we talk about religious freedom now it’s a bigger issue than the freedom of the Orthodox Church. The religious freedom of the Orthodox Church has turned out to be “the canary in the coal mine”: people didn’t pay attention to what was happening to the Ecumenical Patriarchate; now it’s happening to everybody.

GN: HALC has worked for the return of the Parthenon sculptures.

EZ: That’s another one of the things we’ve been working on that I think is very important. As you know, the return of the marbles has been a cause for generations of Hellenes. We’ve heard excuse after excuse against their return. Probably the only somewhat legitimate excuse was the inadequacy of the old museum. Well, the old museum is not there anymore, and the new Acropolis Museum, as you know, has been ranked one of the top museums in the world by the International Council of Museums… ranking ahead of the British Museum, in fact. This has been a case of cultural integrity. I don’t believe in the danger of setting a precedent for the return of antiquities. The Parthenon is still there. There is a great museum now, and it’s constructed in a way that can show the sculptures as they are meant to be seen. HALC concentrates a lot on public education about history, so we’re doing advocacy efforts on the Parthenon sculptures. We’ve done petitions; we’ve shared graphics; we’ve done social media; we’re penning an open letter to George Clooney’s wife, Amal Alamuddin, who’s going to Greece to talk about this. UNESCO is now taking on the case, so we’re going to do another petition to UNESCO. There’s an opening, and we have to jump on it.

GN: What is HALC’s other educational focus?

EZ: The issue of genocide education. We hear about the Armenian genocide, and rightfully so, but there was genocide against Greeks at exactly time, in exactly the same way. Unfortunately, we’re not even telling ourselves that story… most of our kids don’t know that story. So, again, we’re launching another education effort that’s going to be half education and half advocacy. We’re going to work with the Armenians on their Armenian Genocide Remembrance and they’re going to help promote the story of the fact that genocide was committed against the Greeks.

GN: Is HALC’s communication with the Armenian community regarding the genocides new?

EZ: We’ve been working with them for the Armenian National Committee for a couple of years and we’re going to accelerate that. Our goal in the next year is that our cooperation and partnership with them is as prominent as our partnership with the American Jewish Committee.

When we talk about the genocides, I like to tell people that once somebody hasn’t owned up to what they did in the past, they’re going to do it again. They may not be putting people on death marches, but they are dealing a slow death march on Christians in Turkey. The numbers bear it out: you don’t go from two million a hundred years ago to 2,500. You don’t go from 250,000 in our parents’ lifetime to 2,500. That’s genocide. If they don’t want to own up to invasion, that’s why they do what they did yesterday.