“Let us end this war at last. War is torture for me. It is for the Turkish State to spare me this torture by responding to our gesture of good will. We do not intend to separate from Turkey on the first occasion. We are in favour of living together in a fraternal relationship on the basis of political and military equality. If this be guaranteed by virtue of a new constitution, we are prepared to transfer our struggle to a political plane.”
~ Abdullah Ocalan, 1993.
~ Abdullah Ocalan, 1993.
Lockheed Martin's "special envoy" to coordinate the PKK for Turkey, Joseph Ralston, has officially ruled out any kind of political settlement of the Kurdish issue in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Speaking to the Deep State representatives of the Eurasian Strategic Research Center (ASAM), in Istanbul last Friday, Ralston admitted that the US has helped Turkey more in its dirty war against the Kurdish people than any other country, from TNA:
Challenging the widespread rhetoric that the U.S. is not doing anything against the PKK, Ralston underlined that the U.S. considers the PKK a terrorist group, and officially and legally designated the PKK as a foreign terrorist group in 1997. "The U.S. has done more to assist Turkey in its fight against the PKK than any other country. In full coordination with the Turkish government, we have used our diplomatic, military, and intelligence resources to combat PKK operations, logistics, and fundraising. This cooperation continues today, and has saved Turkish lives."
Maybe US cooperation has saved Turkish lives, but not many Turkish lives have been lost in the dirty war. On the other hand, the US has deliberately assisted Turkey in it's attempts to genocide Kurds. The US is as guilty of the 40,000 Kurds murdered by the Ankara regime, from the Washington Post, 1998:
In Turkey, repression against Kurdish villagers has raised opposition in Congress and the State Department to the sale of attack helicopters to the military. In 1996, the State Department documented the use of U.S.-supplied equipment to kill and force the evacuation of civilians in disputed areas of southeastern Turkey, where a conflict with Kurdish Workers Party guerrillas has claimed 22,000 lives.
However, the U.S. European Command's special operations branch last year conducted its first training exercise with the Turkish Mountain Commandos, a unit whose chief function is to fight Kurdish guerrillas. The purpose of the exercises, according to a U.S. after-action report, was "to ascertain the future training needs of the Turks and to establish the groundwork" for future bilateral exercises with the unit. The document advised American participants in future such missions to "be prepared to get no [tactical] training value from the exercise."
Bilateral exercises between US special operations forces and their proteges, Turkish special operations forces (Ozel Timler). Who taught whom to behead and otherwise mutilate?
Guess who it was who authorized the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET)? None other than the founder and CEO of The Cohen Group, William S. Cohen, then Secretary of Defense:
Cohen, a former U.S. senator whose keen interest in special operations dates back two decades, signs deployment orders for most JCETs. However, he declined requests for an interview repeated over several weeks. Instead, he issued a one-paragraph statement through his staff.
"JCETs are the backbone of training for Special Operations Forces, preparing them to operate throughout the world," Cohen's statement said. "In those areas where our forces conduct JCETs, they encourage democratic values and regional stability. In the future, we can expect our forces to confront threats posed by an increasingly diverse set of actors, placing a premium on the skills our forces developed in JCETs."
The article goes on to question the lack of oversight of the JCET program and the lack of accountability for the dispersal of funds in connection with the program. Click on the link to the second part of the series and see how many parallels can be drawn between similar US operations in Latin America and those in Turkey.
Let's remember, too, that William S. Cohen is old Joe Ralston's boss at The Cohen Group. In their capacities at The Cohen Group, both work for Lockheed Martin, and it looks like both would like to see not only a Turkish purchase of the Lockheed Martin F-35 JSF, but perhaps they would like to continue those JCET's. After all, to continue with those "backbone[s] of training" is to insure a steady flow of money into the coffers of political whores like Cohen and Ralston (to name only two), as well as to the defense industry, especially Lockheed Martin. To set the stage for that, Ralston stated the following last Friday at the ASAM conference (see the TNA link):
Asked whether the U.S. intends to use the IRA model in dealing with the PKK, Ralston underlined that these two were totally different problems.
"You are comparing two very different situations, and mixing apples with oranges," the U.S. envoy said. "In the case of the PKK, our objective is to enhance cooperation with the Turkish and Iraqi governments to fight the PKK. We are also working with European governments to cut the PKK's financial and logistics lifeline. We will use all of the tools at our disposal: law enforcement, intelligence, diplomacy, financial pressure. And we have not taken any other option off the table."
The only way that the situation of a political settlement with the PKK and Kurds is different from the IRA model, is that Lockheed Martin and The Cohen Group don't have as big a client in the UK as they do in Turkey. There's a media problem with that too. It's much easier to get the media into Northern Ireland (or even the Basque Country, in the case of an ETA model) than it is to get media into the heart of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Besides, can you imagine the outcry if the British government used F-16's to obliterate Irish villages? Another bonus for Lockheed Martin is having a fascist regime in place in Ankara. This ensures that if anyone does try to enter Kurdistan to see what is going on, they can be swiftly removed. So much for Turkish "democracy."
There was also the work of the US in the capture of Serok Apo, from Aram Publishing House, via Znet:
The Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit was trembling with emotion as he read out a statement on 16 February 1999 announcing that Öcalan “was caught following our silent but intense efforts that lasted 12 days in different countries and different continents.” Ecevit’s boastful statement is not only contradicted by Mr Öcalan’s own account, but by other evidence as well. It was in autumn, 2001, that the former special advisor to Bill Clinton, Mr Tony Blinken, described in an interview he gave to CNN how the United States of America had assisted Turkey “from the beginning”, in that the “countries” which “harboured” Mr Öcalan were “encouraged” to ensure that he be “brought to justice”. But even during his trial before the Turkish State Security Court in summer, 1999, where Öcalan was sentenced to death, Turkish newspapers blurted out that Öcalan’s capture was a present to Turkey from the CIA. On 20 January, 2002, the former President Süleyman Demirel confirmed on CNN that “everybody knows that the USA played a big part in bringing Öcalan to Turkey”.
Turkey could not capture Serok Apo by itself; it had to have Uncle Sugar do the work for it, just as it has to have Uncle Sugar--and Lockheed Martin--continue the dirty war now. Ask yourself again, what is it, exactly, that Joe Ralston is coordinating? Obviously, as long as the defense industry shapes foreign policy, and controls the US government, all talk of democracy from the US should be dismissed as the false advertising that it is.
There will be no political settlement to the suffering of the Kurdish people any time soon. It just doesn't pay.
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