“The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name”
~ Mark Twain.
~ Mark Twain.
The big news is that a DTP politician has been arrested and imprisoned for speaking the truth, which in Turkey is referred to as "inciting hatred."
Let me digress for a moment and point out that inciting hatred in Turkey means doing things like broadcasting songs by hateful dissidents like Ahmet Kaya, something which gets you banned in Turkey if you're a radio station. On the other hand, if you have a TV program that glorifies the Deep State mafia and Turkish racism, and has some 30 million viewers, you can broadcast for years . . . Or at least until the Deep State murders an outspoken Armenian newspaper editor and the entire world shines the spotlight on your own incitement to hatred.
When that happens, and the state cancels the TV program in question, reactions include the following:
Professor Melda Şimşek, from the Marmara University Faculty of Communications, is one of those who are against the cancellation of the show. "It is of course censorship to cancel a show that reflects real things," the professor said.
The question today is this: Is it also censorship to arrest and imprison a Kurdish politician for making statements that reflect real things? This is what happened to Hilmi Aydogdu:
A Kurdish politician was charged Friday with inciting hatred and threatening public safety after suggesting that Kurds would rise against the state and fight if Turkey ever attacked their Kurdish brethren across the border in Iraq.
Police detained Hilmi Aydogdu, leader of the Democratic Society Party's branch in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, as he left a conference and questioned him over the remarks, said Nazmi Gur, a party spokesman.
Prosecutors later formally arrested Aydogdu and charged him with threatening public safety by inciting racial enmity and hatred — a charge that carries a maximum three-year prison sentence.
[ . . . ]
"The two sides in this war would be Turkey and the Kurds in Iraq. There are some 20 million Kurds in Turkey, and the 20 million Kurds would regard such a war as an attack against them," newspapers quoted Aydogdu as saying.
"Any attack on Kirkuk would be considered an attack on Diyarbakir," the politician was also quoted as saying.
The deeper analogy at work in a comparison of Kerkuk to Amed (Diyarbakir) is that a Turkish attack against a city that is historically important to the Kurds of South Kurdistan is considered as an attack against the capital city of all Kurds. A Turkish attack against a portion of the Kurdish people is an attack against the Kurdish people as a whole. This idea is not new and it is not shocking, except to certain leaders. After all, PKK has volunteered to fight alongside Başûrî pêsmerge for Kerkuk because PKK doesn't just fight for itself.
Ozgur Gundem reports that some 500 people protested the arrest in Amed (Diyarbakir) yesterday, in front of the Diyarbakir court. Among those present in protest were Osman Baydemir, Zulkuf Karatekin, Yurdusev Ozsokmenler, Abdullah Demirbas, and Amed's DTP provinicial vice-chairman, Musa Farisoglu. Some twenty persons are reported arrested in Wan (Van), among them DTP officials Ibrahim Sunkur and Abdulvahap Turhan. According to ANF, they have been incarcerated in the Van F-type prison.
Hilmi Aydogdu's statements to the effect that Northern Kurds would rise to fight against Turkey in the case of an invasion of South Kurdistan is a fact that is well-known among the Kurdish people; hence Aydogdu is merely stating publicly what everyone else says privately. This is the nightmare that the Turkish general staff has created for all of Turkey, and it has created the nightmare in order to maintain its own position as the true ruling elite of the country. The Turkish general staff has fostered dependency on the part of civilian society--which in any true democracy is supposed to have the upper hand--by creating a permanent climate of fear of "separatism" and encouraging the belief that every other country or ethnicity on the planet is determined to tear Turkey to pieces.
In short, the Turkish general staff lives in a time warp, perpetually in the year 1920, so that it can continue to hold the reins of power with a death grip. To this date, the death grip has insured the strangulation of not only 20 million Kurdish people in "The Southeast" but of Turkish society as a whole. All of this is knowingly aided and abetted by the so-called democratic West, solely for the economic benefit of Western elites, especially the American war industry and the economic club euphemistically referred to as the European Union. The Turkish general staff also benefits financially from this arrangement and is proof positive that corporatism is alive and well in the 21st century.
The corporatism of the Turkish general staff has its cheerleaders, among them the uber-fascist, uber-racist Ilnur Cevik. He calls the Bakûrî "our Kurds," indicating ownership of the Kurdish people, much in the same vein as American slavehholders of the antebellum South spoke of "our niggers" and claimed to be the only ones who really understood them. Cevik takes the lie to the next level by asserting that he and his kind "feel affection" for their niggers--the Bakûrî--as their very own brothers and sisters. What kind of a family is it when your "brothers and sisters" destroy your villages, destroy your lands, ethnically cleanse you, commit the most atrocious human rights abuses against you with impunity, and work diligently to destroy your culture for decades?
What kind of family is that?
What kind of family is it where the only concern is for Turkish sensitivities and never a consideration is given to Kurdish sensitivities? But that's where the idea of privileged understanding of "our niggers" comes into focus for slaveholders like Cevik. The Turkish slaveholder understands that "our niggers" must be tortured, must be driven from their only livelihoods, must endure economic strangulation and stagnation, must have their backward, uncivilized culture completely rooted out in order to substitute superior Turkish culture, thus bringing a minimum level of civilization to mountain-dwelling half-wits.
What kind of family is that?
As for the alleged deep Turkish "sensitivity" for Kerkuk, where was that when Saddam was arabizing Kerkuk? Where were Turkish protests and expressions of "sensitivity" then? Why were Saddam's actions in Kerkuk never understood as belittling or insulting Turkish "sensitivities?" The answer is very simple: Turkey never thought it could ever get away with occupation of a Kurdish city while it's ally, Saddam, was in power. Turkey knew that Saddam would never allow Turkish exploitation of Kerkuk's oil. This is also the reason that Turkey said nothing when Saddam slaughtered Turkmen, along with everyone else who might be a potential threat.
Now that Kerkuk stands a chance of being recognized as a Kurdish city, and Kurds enjoy a measure of autonomy in South Kurdistan, it galls the racist Turkish regime to have to deal with Kurds as equals in the international arena, just as it galled white racists in America's South to have to deal with African Americans as equal citizens when the issue was forced as a result of the civil rights movement. "Our niggers" were "our niggers," no more.
We want to believe that the Kurds of Turkey are Turkey's Kurds. They are not the spokesman for the Iraqi Kurds or their allies. Or are we mistaken? We know we aren't.
Cevik, and all other slaveholders, are horribly mistaken in their beliefs; that is why Aydogdu is imprisoned. Cevik and his friends on the Turkish general staff are beginning to realize their worst nightmare: the spectre of a major Kurdish uprising in the rear areas of the TSK in the case of a Turkish invasion of South Kurdistan and the strengthening of guerrilla warfare in "The Southeast" coupled with guerrilla warfare in the zones of Turkish occupation in South Kurdistan. This is the point at which the policies of the military dictatorship in Ankara has brought us. For this reason, it is time for the rule of the Pashas to end once and for all.
Unfortunately, the Islamist AKP's desires of establishing a new Ottoman empire work hand-in-glove with the aims of the Pashas over the matter of Kerkuk, while the ghosts of the Mosul Vilayet look on.
In the meantime, HRK, the armed wing of PJAK has brought down another Iranian helicopter, as reported by Ozgur Gundem. The news has been picked up by Reuters:
An Iranian military helicopter crashed near the border with Turkey and Iraq on Saturday, killing at least one Revolutionary Guards commander, Iranian news agencies said.
Eight other people were on board the aircraft when it came down, the semi-official Mehr agency said, but it was not immediately clear whether those eight were killed or injured in the crash.
[ . . . ]
An Iranian Kurdish rebel group said it had shot down the aircraft, the Brussels-based Kurdish news agency Firat said.
It said the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an Iranian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which is fighting Turkey, shot down the helicopter with a shoulder-held missile, killing eight soldiers and capturing one.
Dead pasdarans is always good news. Bijî HRK!
3 comments:
there are alot of contradicting figures coming from iran and pjak. the latest casualties indicate that 13 soldier, including 2 commandrs were killed. this latest figure is according to a semiofficial news agency based in iran. in my opinion the more unofficial it is the more accurate the information. he mullahs have every reason to project an image of strength to the outside world and if that means muffling casualty numbers and their causes than so be it.
in this case the cause of the crash, according to official sources, was bad weather. it is also worth mentioning that the same sources claim that 18 pjak fighter were killed. it went in to explain that the operation was launched to gain control of the border region which implies that the mullahs don't have or are losing control of the area.
Yes, Anonymous, I agree, there are conflicting reports. In fact, Today's Zaman is reporting claims of 20 dead. I also saw the claim of "bad weather."
Well, Iran's not going to want to admit that something like this has happened. It's very similar to Turkey in this way, in that Turkishb`1 media doesn't report accurately what's happened in "The Southeast," and hasn't done so for a long time.
The same thing happens in the US. Perhaps the US can't "fudge" the numbers on soldiers killed, but have you heard how many "military contractors" have been killed? Whatever happened to those guys from Crescent Security that were kidnapped?
By the way, I did mention some of the updates on this news in the post above.
We know that the mullahs do not have control over Iranian-occupied Kurdistan; there has been far too much unrest there in the last couple of years to show that. I suspect that much of that is due to the political work of the Rojhelatî groups, including PJAK.
The armed groups such as HPG and HRK are relatively small given the respective and dominant political organizations to which they belong. PKK has always been primarily political, and PJAK is the same way.
Just look at the political influence in "The Southeast" today. It is heavily influenced by PKK's politics. Of course, it was through ARGK and now HPG that the level of politicization has been reached.
But all of us have gotten where we are because the political road has been paved with the bones of the şehîds--both the armed şehîds and the political şehîds.
It seems to be going the same way in Rojhelat.
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