AMED'S NEW CHAIN GANG

The powers that be
That force us to live like we do
Bring me to my knees
When I see what they’ve done to you

~ The Pretenders, Back on the Chain Gang

Amed's newest chain gang will be composed of Kurdish children. As Bianet points out, these Kurdish children got to spend their Children's Day (April 23), in the Diyarbakir E-type prison:

The children are being held in prison for approximately on a month facing possible life time imprisonment, indicted with "damaging the sovereignty of the state", "inciting and provoking the people to uprising, hatred and enmity" and "aiding and abetting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) organization".

Since there are no prison compounds for minors in Diyarbakir, all of the children are being held at an annex building of the E-type prison in the province.

[ . . . ]

Children aged 12 to 18 are being held at a building block generally referred to as "Annex Building" in the E-type prison compound of Diyarbakir in the lack of any correctional institution for children in the province. The Center has stated that youth aged 18 are being held in their own dormitory in the same building.

Information reaching the Centre reveals there are 55 more minors in addition to the 60 children arrested for the Diyarbakir incidents and bar officials regard the total of 115 minors being held in a single building as "a fearsome number".

According to the Bar Association, children held in the compound started their imprisonment injured through torture and mistreatment and that while law number 5395 on the Protection of Minors should have been imposed, authorities had preferred to place the children in prison.

That's a completely new take on Children's Day, especially in the country that makes a huge pretence of adoring children. Any children besides Kurdish children, that is. These Kurdish child prisoners had been tortured, and, according to Bianet's report, an ECHR case will be prepared if the children are not released. This whole situation begs the question: Where is the world's media on this?

Think about it. What if the Americans had done something like this to Iraqi children in Abu Ghraib? What if the Israelis were doing something like this to Palestinian children in some Israeli prison? You'd have every journalist on the planet, every human rights organization, every government tripping over themselves to make condemnations, to get the video on the evening news, and every blog on the Internet would be pounding the keyboards about it.

Where are all the do-gooders now? Where is the Lunatic Fringe on this? Where's the EU with all its stupid little Green Parties? Where are the hypocrites from the UN, who like to waste everyone's money writing a lot of fine-sounding, utterly meaningless words, even on children in prison.

Right, I forgot. . . these are Kurdish children, not Iraqi or Palestinian children. Kurdish children don't count. Besides, they are terrorists, and Erdogan has declared open season on them, so never mind that Kurds top the list of "at risk" groups in Turkish prisons.

By the way, there were children at Abu Ghraib and the media was all over it, so I'm right to call all of these hypocrites to account for ignoring what is happening to Kurds under Turkish occupation. They don't really care about any children; they only want to catch the Americans with their pants down.

TDN has an interesting viewpoint, interesting for what it doesn't say:

Three of the dead were children, one aged only three, while most of the injured were security forces, in the clashes officials blamed on the PKK, which has waged an armed battle against the central government since 1984.

The brunt of the violence was in the city of Diyarbakır, with lesser incidents shaking the nearby city of Batman.

Let's not forget Kiziltepe.

TDN completely avoided any mention of the rest of the Kurds murdered at the time, which Bianet first published back on 10 April. Instead of focusing on the dead, who don't matter because they are Kurds, TDN cries for injured security forces, the same courageous security forces who murder Kurdish children or detain them. TDN conveniently forgot about all of it in this article too, but they are using Erdogan's words to kill Kurdish women and children as a shield, in an attempt to justify the actions of the fascist Turkish state.

And they haven't even passed the new anti-terror law yet. Although I like the way KurdistanObserver puts it, calling it the Anti-Kurdish Law, because that's exactly what the old one was and that's exactly what the new one will be, sort of a Turkish version of the Nuremburg Laws or Jim Crow Laws.

With all this in mind, it's time to consider items #2, #3, #4, #7, and #12 from our list of the characteristics of a fascist state. I put that in a sidebar for your convenience. It seems like we're going to have to refer to that quite a bit.