The Monk Seal Conspiracy
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,
for without having done anything wrong
he was arrested one fine morning.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Preface
In January 1979, my house on the eastern Aegean island of Samos was raided by the Greek counter-intelligence service YPEA. Almost four years later, I was expelled to Turkey as a ‘persona non grata’, even though I am of British nationality. Rumour has it that I have been banned from Greece forever. And yet after all these years, the crimes that I am suspected of are unknown to anyone except the commanders of YPEA, and high officials of the Ministry of Defence, since the charges against me are conveniently classified as ‘top secret’.
But the heart of my story is not simply a personal battle with a nightmarish bureaucracy: it is why the Greek government and international conservation organizations are allowing one of the world’s most endangered species to slip silently into extinction. It is the story of how I discovered the Monk Seal Conspiracy, and how the Greek intelligence services did everything in their power to silence me.
For three years I was head of an international project to save the monk seal by creating a network of sanctuaries in the eastern Aegean. The malignancy of urban growth, industrial poisons, mass tourism and human greed in overfishing the sea have all taken their toll on this shy and reclusive animal. The dwindling colonies that now remain have already reached the brink of extinction, and by 1995 they may well have disappeared forever.
The monk seal, of course, is not alone in meeting an eternal death. Thousands upon thousands of other species are also being bulldozed into the graveyards of an unseen holocaust. It has been said that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, and perhaps this is the curse that has befallen 20th-century homo sapiens. How else can we explain our conformism to a Reality that is suicidal enough to countenance such crimes against Nature?
I confess that sometimes I have the fleeting impression that I am writing about the tragedies of Earth for the inhabitants of some other fragile and far-flung planet. This is not because I have become a stranger to my own species, but because I suddenly find myself appealing not to human intellect and pragmatism but to the reflection of Earth’s soul within us, often just as remote, just as vulnerable. Perhaps it is merely the realization that with every dying animal and plant, every dying forest, river and lake, a part of our humanity is also dying.
The Earth, once the living god of our ancestors, is being thrashed towards its own crucifixion, its own Calvary. By the year 2000, up to one-third of all life on this small blue planet may have been obliterated, including the extinction of up to a million species of plant and animal. Today, even as I write these pages between dawn and dusk, another species will have been lost forever, and by the turn of the century, one species each hour will be meeting oblivion, never to return again. The war rages on, largely unseen because in human consciousness it is fragmented into a multitude of smaller, unrelated and therefore less significant parts. Divorced from the spiritual and holistic guidance of mother Nature, we are left with the seething confusion of an irrational and schizophrenic Reality. In its own separate compartment, even ecology is often deemed to have no relation to peace, human rights, poverty, the Third World, the population explosion, or even animal welfare. The same Reality allows us to regard the planet Earth as inanimate, paving the way for a relentless exploitation of her ‘inert’ body. And yet in the Earth’s watery gaze, in the trembling of the stones beneath our feet, in the swirling patterns of the clouds, in the way the myriad processes of life strive for perfection and harmony – are these, after all, not the unmistakable features of a living being?
If it is the eleventh hour for Earth, then it is one minute to midnight for the monk seal. The fate of this species, like any other casualty in this monumental war, is intimately entwined with the fate of the entire Earth, and not only because the creature is part of a greater planetary soul. The monk seal’s looming extinction is also a lucid ecological prophecy of the death of the Mediterranean sea, a microcosm of its poisoned waters, its concreted wetlands, its spreading deserts, its urban cancer.
I shall never forget my first meeting with a monk seal in a dark and dismal cave on the island of Piperi. Hardly older than a pup, the seal startled us by raising his smooth round head into the narrow beam of our flashlights. His large and sleepy brown eyes were uncannily like a child’s in their sudden confusion, innocence and fright. He then lunged frantically towards the sea in a desperate panic to escape us. It was heart-rending to perceive the terror which we had inspired in this creature, knowing that the species had once been protected by the gods and called ‘the people of the sea’, renowned for their tameness and friendliness towards humans. But that was long, long ago, and we, the two-legged beasts who came as intruders into this sad and fragile refuge, represented nothing more and nothing less than the genocide of this race, these people of the sea.
The monk seal, like many other species on Earth, has known with dreadful intimacy the cruelty of homo sapiens. In 1979, fishermen threw sticks of dynamite into a seal cave on the Greek island of Nera: seven seals were killed, including mothers and pups. In 1982, on Naxos, fishermen captured a seal pup from its grief-stricken mother and in the village square, to howls of laughter, they began to torment the creature, dragging it along by its flippers. Finally growing tired of the game, the pup was kicked and beaten to death. In 1985, another 20 seals were killed with dynamite on the small island of Chalki, west of Rhodes. But there are other ways of killing seals. As a sympathetic fisherman on Alonissos told us, ‘Needles are put in the gullet of a fish which is then thrown to the seal to eat – they die in terrible pain.’
Yet it is not the animosity of fishermen, nor the effects of tourism and pollution, which are making it impossible to save the monk seal. The species is being condemned to a tragic and entirely needless death by a high-level political conspiracy. Recently classified as one of the twelve most endangered animals in the world, the monk seal has found its last refuge in the militarily sensitive eastern Aegean islands of Greece and the Turkish Anatolian coast. There is a long history of acrimonious relations between the two NATO countries, and these border areas have been in an almost constant state of alert since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. To make matters worse, Greece and Turkey are also engaged in a heated dispute over territorial rights in the eastern Aegean. The narrow continental shelf is rich in oil and mineral deposits, and the bitter feud over exploiting these natural resources has not only led to countless border incidents; in the name of ‘national security’ it has also signed the death warrant of the monk seal.
In our endeavours to create sanctuaries for the seals in the eastern Aegean, we were subjected to almost constant harassment by military intelligence. This resulted in a bizarre tug of war between the ‘civilian’ ministries in Athens who supported the project, and the intelligence agencies YPEA and KYP who were determined to sabotage it at all costs. When threats and intimidation fell on stony ground, they resorted to a war of nerves, character assassination and other sordid tactics which bear the cryptic yet indelible hallmarks of the secret police. The effects can only be likened to some parasitic disease which gradually poisons and cripples its host. What possible remedy or defence can there be against persistent and venomous innuendoes which have been crafted with a meticulous precision to destroy one’s credibility? How can secret allegations ever be challenged or disproved? The rumour-mongering machine can churn out lie after lie with impunity, since its only motivating force is to honour the unquestionable infallibility of ‘national security’. Guilt or innocence is entirely irrelevant.
When duty calls, the Jekyll and Hyde functionaries who inhabit this drab world of suspicion and intrigue will become deaf and dumb to the most fundamental human rights. There is no recourse to a higher authority since there is none loftier or more intimidating than ‘national security’. Despite all the comforting myths of the ‘free world’, they are not only above the law, but a law unto themselves since they are both the guardians and dispensers of official secrets. National security is their awesome and ever-faithful alibi. Their strategy is systematic and pitiless, in spite of its often Kafkaesque absurdity. Their first priority is to break the victim by hounding him into submission. They will then endeavour to isolate and discredit him, even among his family, friends and colleagues. With an insidious ingenuity, they will push and provoke him until he embodies the role that they themselves have cast for him, a ‘radical’ and ‘fanatic’ who will, step by step, discredit himself into oblivion. This persecution knows no bounds. If need be, ‘national security’ will also become a licence for murder, quaintly known as ‘de-activation’. In a grotesque game of cat and mouse, they may even stampede their victim into his own nervous collapse, illness and death. It may be the ultimate punishment for someone foolish enough to challenge the tyranny of the secret police.
Out on the Greek-Turkish borders, at the height of an unnerving game of brinkmanship over the survival of the monk seal, we were gullible enough to believe that we had the unequivocal support of the conservation movement. Only later did we realize how alone we really were, when the hierarchy of our own organization felt unable to assure the government that we were not spies for some foreign power, and proceeded to compile their own secret files against us. After this backing down under military pressure, Europe’s most endangered mammal was suddenly regarded as ‘expendable’, ‘beyond hope’, ‘unsaveable’, and sacrificed to the tin-pot god of Realism.
But tilting at windmills with a quixotic naively, I believed there to be one fatal flaw in the armour of the intelligence services. This is the rigid yet brittle iron it is constructed from – secrecy. There is, after all, not one crime or fraud in the entire world that can survive without this armour. Secrecy is their sole vulnerability, candour their only predator. And so in these words I strive for an honesty which is in itself disarming.
There was no bravery in my persistence to seek out the truth. By the time the Conspiracy had dawned upon me I had already suffered the worst of the humiliation and contempt. Blacklisted as a pariah and haunted by the stigma of secret files and rumours, it is the price one must be prepared to pay for daring to unmask hostile and embarrassing truths. Even the borders to Greece had become forbidden walls, taunting my hesitation and, if I dare say it, my homesickness. I realize the profound irony of it all, as I find myself speaking now with the bitter-sweet nostalgia of an exile; as I recall the years I lived in that enchanting land, and as her iridescent images trace across my mind, her luminous sky, her wild herb-scented mountains, her sun-drenched shores, her scattering of islands. To lose a mediocre reputation to a mediocre infamy meant nothing at all compared to this. Again I say that it had little to do with courage, and in the deepest sense I was not even the victim of this affair, merely its scapegoat. As the battle smouldered in the eastern Aegean, there may have been stubbornness, naively and even defiance on my part. But most of all there was unquenchable curiosity because, for all their heavy handed methods, I had no idea what they were so earnestly trying to conceal from my prying eyes.
Only later did the threads of those fleeting years weave themselves into a lucid tapestry of pictures and events, linked by cause and effect. Even the outlandishness of it all has not diminished. Out in the deep blue Aegean, sown with its planet-like islands, I now see myself unwittingly prising open a Pandora’s box of state secrets, intrigues and blunders. It never occurred to me that the mandarins of national security would be able to sign, with impunity, the death warrant of one of the Earth’s most endangered species. Neither could I believe the saturating dread and servility which the secret police were able to inspire in the world’s most influential conservation organizations. It never crossed my mind that in the name of diplomacy these self-professed saviours of the Earth would tacitly endorse the monk seal’s extinction with a pact of silence and secrecy. In a sad and devastating irony, both share the same pathological fear of scandal and both must find a way of burying or disguising the corpse.
Even now, several years later, the powers that be refuse to divulge their allegations against me, knowing all too well that the corpse refuses to stay buried. There are only the stale rumours linking me to the CIA and Turkish military intelligence, my name inscribed in the ‘black book’ of undesirable aliens at passport controls around Greece. True to their policy of austere and implacable silence, the YPEA hierarchy will not even tell me when, if ever, I shall be permitted to return to the Aegean, realizing as I do that this affair will only end with the monk seal’s extinction.
This in itself would be an ugly twist to any story, but I believe it conveys something even more poignant and far-reaching than the betrayal of the monk seal. I believe that the events of those years reveal, with utter clarity, why the conservation movement is failing us, and why we are losing our sacred and beloved Earth.
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