MASSACRES, ELECTIONS, AND BUSINESSMEN

"Hatip Dicle, chairman of the Human Rights Association of Diyarbakir, gave a number of examples including the massacre of 27 women and children in the village of Gere, near Sirnak, on June 10, on a visit to London16. Dicle pointed out that he was liable to prosecution under the new Anti-Terror Law for mentioning these crimes."
~ Eric Lord Avebury, "Turkey's Kurdish Policy in the Nineties".

Check out the bold-faced hypocrisy coming from Abdullah Gul, courtesy TDN:

Gül calls world for action against Israel’s ‘massacre’
Friday, November 10, 2006

ANKARA - Turkish Daily News

Describing Israeli attacks on Palestinians as massacre, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül in strongly worded remarks has called on Israel to immediately halt its "disproportionate and inexcusable" operations while also calling on the international community to take action against the massacre.

Gül's remarks came on Thursday in Parliament during a General Assembly meeting in response to Süleyman Gündüz of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), who said: The world is deaf and dumb. … Israel's goal is to destroy the people living in Gaza. The name of this is not war. You give it a name. This is destruction of a society, systematically and deliberately.

I wonder what name the Islamist Foreign Minister would give to Şirnex? Let's take a little trip down memory lane, shall we?

In Turkey, it is always difficult to establish whether events in the southeast are the result of political decisions by the government, or whether they are the product of local decisions by the military. In this case, it appears that the confrontation had been ordained by President Ozal himself. In late January 1992 he had declared that "the Armed Forces with super power will go to the region next term. This will be an extraordinary power. These forces will not let the bandits live there....".

In Cizre, the security forces opened fire on unarmed revellers singing and dancing in the streets, killing an estimated 12 people and injuring many more. In Sirnak also, the military fired on civilian crowds and individuals, killing 22 and again injuring dozens more. The governor of Sirnak, Mustafa Malay, told a visiting delegation on April 19, 1992, that it was said that between 500 and 1,500 armed guerrillas had entered the town on March 21, but he conceded that 'the security forces did not establish their targets properly and caused great damage to civilian houses'26. The delegation, of which the author was a member, concluded that 'violence was used by the armed forces and the police against unarmed demonstrators in Sirnak and Cizre on March 21, 1992, resulting in many deaths and serious injuries.... In Sirnak, the armed forces and police went on the rampage over a period of some 22 hours from March 21 to 22, bombarding houses, shops and offices, and causing civilian casualties'.27

The Newroz festivities left at least 91 people dead in three towns of the southeast, Cizre, Sirnak and Nusaybin, and 9 others elsewhere in the region28, and according to Helsinki Watch, 'all or nearly all of the casualties resulted from unprovoked, unnecessary and unjustified attacks by Turkish security forces against peaceful Kurdish civilian demonstrators'.29 The author can extend that conclusion to Sirnak as well, except that some of the seriously injured victims there had been hit in their own homes, and one, 16 year old Ms Biseng Anik, was murdered in custody.

[ . . . ]

Where investigations have been undertaken, it is clear that the great preponderance of terrorist acts against the civilian population have been perpetrated by the security forces themselves. These are no mere incidental breaches of discipline at lower echelons, but systematic military operations involving large forces, sanctioned at the highest levels of government. One such operation, the effects of which were seen by the author, was the destruction of the town of Sirnak in a 41-hour blitz from the evening of August 18, 1992, to midday on August 20.

According to Interior Minister Ismet Sezgin, the PKK had attacked Sirnak and bombed the city for two days, calling it the resistance of the people to state forces36. He said that 1,500 terrorists were reported to have been involved in the assault, the objective of which was to capture the town and hold it for a short time. In one foreign account of this incident, it was claimed that '700 militants.... held the town for around 40 hours..... This .....naturally attracted a full-scale counterattack by the army..'37 In reality, the bombardment was entirely unprovoked, as was shown by the fact that not a single dead terrorist was produced at the end of the 41 hours, nor were there any spent cartridge cases belonging to the militants. Minister Sezgin explained this by saying that the PKK carried their dead away, but it was not credible that evidence of their presence could have been totally erased by the survivors. The authorities claimed that three soldiers and a police officer were killed, all on the evening of August 18, and none during the two days of shooting and shelling that followed, in which 17 civilians were killed, and widespread damage was caused to private property, though not to government buildings38.

The effect of operations of this kind, and smaller scale assaults on hundreds of villages, has been to provoke a mass movement of the population, to the shanty towns of the regional capital, Diyarbakir, to the western parts of Turkey, and to foreign countries, particularly Germany. 25,000 people fled Sirnak, and this was not a mere unintended by-product of the attempt to defeat the PKK militarily, but part of a strategy, articulated by President Ozal just afterwards when he said: 'Many problems would be solved much more easily if 500,000 people left here and settled in the west'39.

[ . . . ]

The government counters all criticism of human rights violations by attempts to deflect attention towards the attacks on non-combatants perpetrated by the PKK, which must be condemned, and by falsely and maliciously ascribing massacres committed by the security forces to the PKK. There is a residue of circumstantial evidence against the PKK in the case of some atrocities, notably against the families of village guards, informers, and in one case, of six teachers, but for most of this information, researchers have had to rely on the indirect testimony of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, because the Emergency Rule Governor would not allow meetings with witnesses103.

Who is the author here? Eric Lord Avebury, Chairman of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, and the paper was presented to the Middle East Studies Association in Washington, DC, in December, 1995.

(Lord Avebury also has his own blog, proving that you are never too old to do this kind of thing)

Lord Avebury is describing just a few events here, but the list of these kinds of atrocities, perpetrated by the Ankara regime against the Kurdish people, can fill volumes. Here we have the Turkish army massacring 12 unarmed Kurdish civilians and wounding more, on Newroz, 1992, in Cizîr. At the same time in Şirnex, the Turkish military and police went on a 22-hour "rampage," destroying much of the city, massacring 22 unarmed Kurdish civilians, and wounding dozens more. The bloodbath totaled 91 dead during that year's Newroz, all of whom were purposely targeted by the Ankara regime because they committed the crime of having been born Kurds.

What name do you give that, Mr. Gul?

In August, 1992, Lord Avebury witnessed for himself the effects of the Ankara regime's destruction of the Kurdish city of Şirnex, after Turkish security forces bombarded it for 41 hours--almost two days of completely unprovoked bombing. Where was the international community then? Turgut Ozal, the Islamist president at the time, admitted that these unprovoked, ruthless attacks against the Kurdish people were part of an ethnic cleansing plan, but where in the hell was the international community?

What name do you give that, Mr. Gul? How about the name of genocide?

The intention to genocide the Kurdish people continues as one of the goals of the Ankara regime, and that cue came from Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan during the Amed Serhildan, last March, when he promised that security forces would shoot all "terrorists" even if they were women and children. Of course, we all know that Erdogan is nothing more than Buyukanit's lapdog.

For his work on behalf of the Kurdish people, Lord Avebury was named persona non grata by the genocidal, US-backed Turkish regime. More by Lord Avebury here, on European reaction to beheaded Kurdish gerîlas and the blind eye the world has turned to the genocide of Kurds by the Ankara regime.

In other news, it looks like Brent Scowcroft and a compadre from the ATC have high-tailed it off to Istanbul in the wake of the American elections. Circle the wagons, boys! It looks like Pelosi means business when she says she's gonna pass an Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress, from Thursday, also in TDN:

"I have supported legislation ... that would properly acknowledge the Armenian genocide. It is imperative that the United States recognize this atrocity and move to renew our commitment to eliminate genocide whenever and wherever it exists. This effort enjoys strong bipartisan support in the House, and I will continue to support these efforts in the 110th Congress," Pelosi said in a recent message to a prominent U.S. Armenian publisher.

OUCH!!

I wonder how much the ATC figures it's gonna cost to buy Pelosi? Inquiring minds wanna know. There's also a funny line in that article about how Turkey never involves itself with American domestic politics, which is another example of big, fat Turkish lies. I have only one thing to say about that: tell it to Sibel Edmonds.

Hehehe . . . wouldn't you just love to have been a fly on the wall in that ATC meeting with the Turkish-American Business Association (TABA)? TABA president, Ugur Terzioglu, explained that TABA does more than just military stuff these days, and that the organization isn't at all political. They're just businessmen. Sure, just like Joseph Ralston is just a businessman for Lockheed Martin and doesn't do politics.

I know I believe them.

Speaking of the pashas favorite businessman, it looks like Ozgur Gundem has a nice report on Joseph Ralston's conflict of interest called, "Is it Weapons Coordination?" Check it out at Ozgur Gundem online , and many thanks to the friend who brought this to my attention.

Serkeftin!