SETTLING FOR FANTASIES?

“Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy” ~ Anonymous.

I have never been too much of a fiction reader, although there were those works of fiction that I have enjoyed and returned to several times, such as Albert Camus' The Plague or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I also recall a bizarre little work by American existentialist Paul Bowles, called The Sheltering Sky, but I only read that one once because it was, well, bizarre. The characters in that one were not at all easy to warm up to, but I found that I had become hooked by the story and had to continue to see how everything would turn out. It was the kind of book that left one feeling empty at the end, sort of a triumph of the absurd, I suppose and, therefore, the whole point of the story.

Just the other day, I read a very short work of fiction by Onder Aytac and Emre Uslu, and published by The New Anatolian. A librarian might classify it as fiction, sub-genre "fantasy." It's titled, The PKK, Kurds, and the EU".

They begin with a description of the "massive military deployment along Turkey's border with Iraq," and they stress that the TSK has not crossed into "Northern Iraq" even though they claim that PKK has bases there. What a sly way to put it! But TSK's artillery did cross into "Northern Iraq," striking a Christian village and, more recently, wounding a Kurdish shepherd and killing seven of his sheep. So this "massive military deployment" of the TSK has committed aggression against Kurds, and we might take this as a clear example of what the Ankara regime considers to be "PKK terrorists"--Kurdish Christians and shepherds. . . as well as Kurdish sheep.

Following this lie, Onder and Emre want to know if PKK "attacks" are helping Kurds or helping the Turkish fascists, and they claim that the rise in Turkish fascism is directly attributable to these PKK "attacks."

WRONG.

Turkish fascism began to rise in March, 2003, when the US sphere of influence expanded itself into Iraq, a piece of real estate that Turkey considers its own. The defining moment in this sudden rise in Turkish fascism took place on July 3, 2003, in the city of Silêmanî, when US Marines bagged, literally, one of the great and glorious Turkish Special Teams as it was on its way to assassinate the Kurdish governor of Kerkuk. This little incident was the huge embarrassment of the mighty TC, something akin to parading around with your fly down in public, but on a national level. Imagine, a Special Team given the special treatment normally reserved for "war detainees" and by lesser mortals who commonly refer to each other as "Jarhead."

Here we have an international incident in which the murderers, rapists, and ethnic-cleansers--activities of the Ozel Timler that in no way differ from the activities of their brother Serbs in Bosnia--risked being exposed for the scum that Kurds know they always have been.

But it hurt Turkey's feelings!

Let's think now, what was PKK doing in 2003? Oh, yeah, they were busy engaging in a unilateral ceasefire. In other words, there were no PKK "attacks" to get the bozkurtlar frothing at the mouth.

Imagine the perturbance of the pashas--the only power in the TC--who, for years, had become accustomed to monitoring and controlling American military activity on American bases in Turkey, and now, just a short, four-hour drive from Amed, it was possible to enter territory in which US power was free-wheeling as it never had before in the Middle East. The pashas had become irrelevant in their own backyard. There would be no more nixing USAF sorties (sorties heading for some very deserving Iraqi targets under the aegis of Operation Northern Watch) just so some Turkish pilots could get in a little bombing practice on Southern Kurdish villages under the pretext of crushing PKK. What's more, the burlap bag would soon become the internationally recognized symbol of the TSK.

And this is the cause of the rise of Turkish fascism. Hell, they even made a movie about it!

Fast forward to 2005, since Onder and Emre are doing their level best to avoid the truth, and instead let's watch them lay the blame for everything that happened that year on PKK. What we have is an exercise in denial about the emergence of TAK, and an exercise in denial about the fact that there are other groups in Turkey who have their own vendettas against the Ankara regime But the greatest denial of all is the denial of black operations reinitiated by the state against the Kurdish people. Example? They mention that four "incidents" were carried out in November, 2005, "incidents" which they blame on PKK.

However, the only "incidents" that occurred during the month of November took place in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and bear a remarkable resemblance to the Deep State activity which characterized Susurluk, Turkish Hezbollah and the recent Council of State attack. The most significant of these events was the Semdinli bombing, an event which was carried out by JITEM, or perhaps JIT, operatives, with the approval of Yasar Buyukanit, in broad daylight. The biggest mistake of Buyukanit's boys was that they had the misfortune of being witnessed and apprehended by Kurds just moments after the attack. The second biggest mistake of Buyukanit's boys was leaving so much evidence in their vehicle, a vehicle which happened to be registered to JIT.

How selective memory can be when you spend most of your time barking at the moon. They bother to mention certain PKK kidnappings from 2005, but fail to mention that all the kidnapees were returned safely, without so much as one hair on their heads being out of place. If PKK were anything like the TC, we'd hear Murat Karayilan making press statements, demanding compensation for having hosted their guests, in a way similar to what the TC is going to do to Greece for having the nerve to fly into Greek airspace last month. But we don't hear Murat demanding compensation like some anal errand boy of the Turkish government. After all, Murat is a Kurd, and Kurds know how to show their guests a good time, even if they are Turkish commandos.

Another short-term memory issue for Onder and Emre is the Amed serhildan. Well, maybe they were on vacation that week and didn't bother to read their email, but you would think that they had heard something about it, anything about it, by this time. But, no such luck. Better to skip over this event than to venture into a domain that includes provocation, murder, and torture on the part of Turkish security forces and sounds something like this:

Between March 28 and April 5, police detained 551 people, 199 of them minors. On April 4, lawyer Cengiz Analay, chief of the Diyarbakır Bar Children’s Rights Centre, said that 95 percent of the children they had represented during those days had made allegations of torture or ill-treatment, including being made to sing the national anthem while being beaten, being stripped of their clothes, hosed with cold water, and deprived of food and then offered bread that had been spat on.

The Diyarbakır branch of the Human Rights Association interviewed A.T., a fourteen-year old boy, on April 3, 2006. He said: “I was detained on March 29. About fifteen police beat me with truncheons. My right arm was broken, but they dragged me in that condition for about 100 metres, and then took me to the sports hall of the Security Directorate... They beat me with truncheons, refused permission for me to use the toilet, and made me constantly stand and sit... In the morning at 3:00 am they made me go to sleep, and then woke me up at 5:00 and beat me with truncheons again.” F.K., a forty-six year old woman, gave the following account on April 5, 2006: “On March 28 I went to collect my daughter from school. While going to the Koşuyolu district, police stopped me, insisting that I had been throwing stones. Giving me no opportunity to respond, they beat me and detained me. They first took me to the sports hall at the Security Directorate, and then to the Anti-Terror Branch. They constantly beat, cursed and insulted me ... They hit me, struck me with truncheons on every part of my body (my back, my arm, my legs, but especially my head). I felt constantly nauseous from the blows I received... they gave me one meal in three days but I could not eat it... a policewoman pulled my hair.” She also described perfunctory medical examinations at which police insisted on being present.

The physical abuse of demonstrators detained in Diyarbakır at the time of the disturbances flagrantly violated international and Turkish law and was completely at odds with your government’s declared policy of zero tolerance of torture.

And yet, in their own little work of fiction, Onder and Emre insist that "Turkey's EU accession process is the best option for the Kurds in Turkey and would help them gain their cultural rights." That quote is a lie, and these two fantasy writers, who ignore all the TC's atrocities against Kurds, exepect us to believe that the EU is going to ensure Kurdish cultural rights?

For one thing, cultural rights are not enough, and never will be enough. For another, since the Amed serhildan, it has been crystal clear that the EU has no intention whatsoever of guaranteeing Kurdish cultural, or any other, rights. It has fully supported the government's position since the serhildan and has done nothing to act as a negotiator between the government and the political representatives of the Kurdish people. Cemil Bayik best described the entire Kurdish situation vis-a-vis the EU.

When was the last time anyone heard of the EU doing anything substantial about Turkish atrocities against Kurds? When was the last time anyone heard, for example, that the EU was going to partner with the UN to send peacekeepers to "The Region?" Something like that would really be putting the family jewels on the line, wouldn't it? And it would certainly get Ankara's attention. Instead of substance, Kurds get clowns like Joost Lagendijk and Cem Ozdemir, the pashas' errand boys in the EU parliament.

Every Kurd should question the value of EU accession after reading the desperation and the thinly-veiled threat between the lines of Onder and Emre's nonsense. Why are they so desperate to press for accession, unless it serves only to benefit their kind?

Every Kurd should remember what happened the last time some desperate Turk came begging for help. That Turk is known as Ataturk today, and he was desperate for Kurdish help to establish a state in which Turks and Kurds would be equal citizens. Every Kurd should remember that the Amed serhildan is only the most recent in a long line of abuses and atrocities Ataturk's government has inflicted on the equal citizens of the Kurdish sub-identity.

The last 83 years are the thanks the Kurds have received for helping desperate Turks, a fact of history of which the Greek Cypriots, at least, may be well aware.