KERKUK AND CONVENIENT INSTABILITY

"Some officials believed that the Turkish security remained incapable of eliminating the PKK supporters as long as [the security forces] functioned within legal means. Thus, they arrived at the conclusion that the PKK could have been fought only through extra-legal methods."
~ Hanefi Avci, deputy intelligence department chief of Turkish Security, in testimony before the TBMM.

Bianet reports on this year's Press Freedom Day in Turkey. They have a Press Freedom Day? That's hilarious! I guess, though, that you would expect a fascist state to have something called "Press Freedom Day." Totally Orwellian.

Naturally, Press Freedom Day in Turkey followed the indiscriminate beatings of journalists during the May Day events in Istanbul last week. That'll teach them to go out an attempt to report on stuff that actually happens, instead of sitting around in their offices and rewriting the bullshit the state gives them for publication. Does anyone think that this would give American journalists a clue?

Goran from Zanetî has a great article on Kerkuk which got picked up by ZNet. The article does an excellent job of summing up the situation of Kerkuk, including mentions of arabization, the recent efforts to de-arabize the city, and the influence of foreign provocateurs who have increasingly exerted themselves to make life in the city as unbearable as life in Baghdad:

Until now, violence in Kirkuk has been blamed primarily on Sunni and Shiite insurgents. Several Shiite armed groups such as the Mehdi Army, loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, began moving into the Kirkuk province mid-last year. U.S. officials declared such Shiite armed groups, reportedly backed by Iran, as the deadliest threats to the security in the region. Local residents say their presence is marked by bomb explosions and murders.

However much the threat of these armed groups as well as Iran’s alleged influence in the region, Iraqi officials recently claimed to have found links between the ongoing violence in Kirkuk and other foreign forces. Recently, an Iraqi Kurdish official in Kirkuk, Nejat Hassan, asserted that Iraqi Security Forces obtained enough evidence to prove that Turkey’s Intelligence Agency has been carefully conducting much of the terrorist activity in Kirkuk, targeting both Iraqi government officials as well as civilians.

Goran also notes the unilateral nature of Kurdish attempts to discuss Kerkuk with the Turkish state, with Turkey's rejection-by-silence. Is this a reflection of Turkey's unstated official policy toward the Kurdish people? I think so, especially in light of the Ankara regime's rejection of a democratic solution to the untenable situation of the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation in North Kurdistan, which was offered by PKK last August, as well as the regime's rejection of PKK's fifth unilateral ceasefire from the beginning of last October.

While "[M]any Kurds feel uncomfortable with the Americans’ silent stance on this issue and believe their reasons are in order to avoid embarrassment with their Turkish ally," this may simply be a matter of vastly misplaced politeness (aka diplomacy) on the part of the KRG. The fact is that the US war industry makes a lot of money for their executives and members of their boards of directors, such as Lockheed Martin's Joseph Ralston who, coincidentally or not, is the American "special envoy" to "coordinate" the PKK for the Ankara regime. On behalf of the Washington regime, Ralston has rejected PKK's ceasefire, has completely ignored PKK's democratic solution, and has lied to Congress about the nature of Kurdish refugees from Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. There most recent long-term residence has been the Maxmur refugee camp, just outside and to the west of Hewlêr Governorate.

It's not in the interests of the US to see a stable Turkey in the region, just as it may not be in the interests of the US to see a stable Iraq. As long as the Washington and Ankara regimes collaborate in the maintenance of a low-intensity conflict in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, their Deep Staters will continue to maintain control of the region and its highly coveted energy resources, as well as to turn a few billion bucks through Deep State corporations . . . like Lockheed Martin.

The Washington/Ankara collaboration would appear to be working, given the instability that began with the November, 2005, Semdinli bombing; the provocations that led to the Amed Serhildan; the Amed bombing of September 12 (a significant date since it is the anniversary of the 1980 coup as well as the day of the first arrival in Ankara of the US "special envoy"); the persecution of Turkey's only Kurdish party, DTP; and the poisoning, and recent severe isolation punishment, of the Kurdish people's leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

The instability has also severely affected other ethnic or religious minority groups within Turkey, such as was highlighted with the Ankara regime's murder of Armenian activist and editor, Hrant Dink, and the recent murders of Christians in Trabzon and Malatya.

Then, too, we have the fact of Turkish mercenaries, based in the US, and operating in Kerkuk. Funny thing . . . that mercenary company is run by people who were involved with the 2003 assassination plot of the Kerkuk governor.

It's a small world, isn't it?

While the Washington regime presents a united front when the subject is the genocide of the Kurdish people (or the Armenian people, for that matter), it talks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to other areas of political instability, thereby helping to maintain instability. For instance, US propagandists from the State Department feign concern for the non-existent democratic process in Turkey while at the same time cultivate the deep and abiding "friendship" of the Deep State, controlled by the Turkish military. Witness the US response to the recent "e-coup" of the Paşas.

Other, non-official propagandists, such as Michael Rubin and the AEI, continue to deny that any US-backed atrocities have been inflicted on the Kurdish people by America's Ankara allies. American lies about the Turkish genocide of Kurds can be found most recently, and in such inocuous pieces of writing as book reviews, like Rubin's latest:

Such balance, however, does not extend to the Turkish Kurds. McKiernan's account oozes with antipathy toward Turkey. He wrongly calls Kurds "second class citizens" in Turkey, ignoring that presidents, foreign ministers, and scores of parliamentarians have been Kurdish. Lack of education and urban-rural divide better explain the social differences in Turkey than ethnicity. Too often McKiernan uncritically accepts the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) narrative, though many Kurds consider it a terrorist group.

Maybe "many Kurds" consider PKK a "terrorist group," but those "many" would not be found in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan; they would be found outside of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and, therefore, are not familiar with the real terrorist group of The Region--the TSK. It would also be more credible if an "expert" like Rubin would bother to provide statistics to help us define what he considers "many" to mean.

Rubin is clearly also pushing the lie that "presidents, foreign ministers, and scores of parliamentarians" have been Kurdish. Nothing could be further from the truth and the "presidents, foreign ministers, and scores of parliamentarians" would no doubt have Rubin detained and tortured, if not extrajudicially murdered, for suggesting that they were "Kurd," since those "Kurds" had long abandoned and denied any Kurdish roots they may have had. The only Kurdish parliamentarians that ever truly earned the title, were charged, prosecuted, and imprisoned for years for their temerity in having spoken their mother language inside the venerable halls of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Those parliamentarians were Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan and Selim Sadak.

There have been no other Kurdish parliamentarians in the history of the TC. None.

The "expert," Rubin, fails to explain how the "[L]ack of education and urban-rural divide" were forced, official policies of the Ankara regime that date back to the very foundation of the regime. It's also interesting to note that Rubin denies the second-class citizen status of the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation, even though this status has been proven and documented time and time again by such PKK-sponsored organizations as IHD, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Kurdish Human Rights Project, among others.

Then again, it is the Deep State which has pushed the lie that human rights organizations are PKK-sponsored, and that is one of the reasons why the Ankara regime began a campaign of hate against a former IHD head, Akin Birdal. Turkish media's collusion in that campaign very nearly cost Birdal his life, when a state assassin pumped six bullets into him while he was in the Istanbul IHD office in 1998. Remember, too, that a similar media hatred campaign was attempted last year against another former IHD head, Eren Keskin.

Too bad Rubin the "expert" is thoroughly unacquainted with the facts of the Kurdish struggle. Of course, the Kurdish struggle simply does not serve the script continually written by the US-Turkey-Israel war triangle of the neocon-Deep State playwrights like Rubin.

For more "analysis" on the Ankara regime's insistence on invasion of South Kurdistan for control of Kerkuk's oil, check out the Turkish propagandist at World Politics Watch. Notice how in the first couple of paragraphs we're supposed to feel sorry for the families of TSK terrorists that are killed by HPG gerîlas, but there's no mention whatsoever for families like the Kaymaz family, whose father and 12-year-old son were gunned down in cold blood by Ankara state terrorists in front of their home in November, 2004. The state murderers were acquitted by the regime last month.

That's business as usual in a state-sponsor of terror like Turkey, and I should be concerned with their dead? BOO-EFFING-HOOOOO.

You should also notice how the propagandist of that piece engages in the usual Turkish BS. Turkey just wants to "move on," maybe even "find closure," but the US won't go take care of PKK for Turkey, like it did with the help of its Israeli friends in Kenya. But that conspiracy didn't end PKK at all, did it? Yet that's what the Ankara regime thought back then.

For the Turkish propagandist, the Kurdish "problem" is all the fault of the Americans. The official policy is to blame everyone else, just like adolescents do. There is no acceptance by the Ankara regime for having pushed the Kurdish people into legitimate armed resistance against 80 years of atrocities and no acceptance of the fact that a military solution will never solve the situation.

Then again, I doubt whether the regime really wants to solve the situation. It would be so much more lucrative to simply invade South Kurdistan in order to control energy resources in Mûsil and Kerkuk.

Remember, it's better to die on your feet than to die on your knees.