END OF WEEK BITS AND PIECES

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting."
~ Tom Stoppard.

I want to do a little bit of a wrap up of interesting odds and ends. These are things I've come across during the week that need to be noticed by Kurds.

First off, Dr. Kristiina in Finland offers her congratulations to the new Kurdish parliamentarians and expresses her happiness on their achievement. She has written something in Finnish for Finland's biggest daily paper and promises she will post some comments on the elections in English on Monday, 30 July. It will certainly be something to watch for.

Hevallo keeps hammering away at ExxonMobil. Apparently the corporation that racked up the greatest annual profits of any corporation in history (last year) has suffered some loss of profit. Give me thirty minutes and I'll see if I can squeeze out a tear for them--but don't hold your breath.

Stress is carrying an interview on Antiwar Radio with Joshua Frank, who talks about the danger of Deep State-funded Hillary Clinton becoming president. Some of the points in the interview include an acknowledgement of Hillary's meddling in foreign affairs and wars while she was merely First Lady. This may be an indication that she will be far more war-mongering and bloodthirsty than her philandering husband.

That's no small matter because Bill Clinton provided more weapons to Turkey toward the end of his administration than the US provided to Turkey during all the combined previous years of the Cold War, and he managed to have the American taxpayer foot the bill for most of it. Check a report by the Federation of American Scientists and an earlier report by HRW which documents how American weapons were routinely used against the civilian Kurdish population of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan.

Now if Hillary gives indications of being more bloodthirsty than her husband, do you think that's a good thing for Kurds?

What may be even more alarming is the fact that there has been talk of appointing mass-murderer Richard Holbrooke as Secretary of State in a possible Hillary administration. Since the guy had been to Maxmur earlier this year, and since the guy is tight with Turkish business interests, namely the Sabancı gang, this doesn't look good for Kurds either.

Why? Well, check out an excellent article by Edward S. Herman (co-author with Noam Chomsky on Manufacturing Consent) earlier this year titled "Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power, and the 'Worthy-Genocide' Establishment":

It follows that a man like Richard Holbrooke, who has been a part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment for over 40 years, is likely to have been a participant in the genocides that have taken place during that period. Thus, while Holbrooke regularly speaks and gets a warm welcome from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and from Human Rights Watch, [2] we should recall that he was an official of the U.S. government during the Vietnam war era, from 1962 through 1969; he was the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in charge of Indonesian relations during the Carter administration, and during the worst and most genocidal phase of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor in 1977-1978. He was also an official of the Clinton administration, and eventually the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in the years when the United States was enforcing the “sanctions of mass destruction” on Iraq.

If we measure “genocide” by the numbers deliberately and intentionally killed and the threat these actions pose to the survival of the target population, all three of these episodes in which Holbrooke was involved qualify for inclusion.

This means that a possible future Hillary administration could be dubbed "The Genocide Gang 2."

There's a good commentary at Harper's about the American Enterprise Institute:

To hear President Bush tell it, all he does is sit back and patiently take the advice of his generals in the field and in the Pentagon. But every field commander to return from Iraq and put on his civvies has told a different tale: the White House hammers ridiculous strategies down their throats, doesn’t listen to a word they say, and instead takes direction from a group of juveniles in their fifties over at Neocon Central Command, the American Enterprise Institute.

Read the rest.


Finally, Özgür Gündem has a couple of articles (here and here) about more election corruption in Culemêrg (Hakkari). Apparently, people voted in Culemêrg who were out of town on election day for various reasons--like they were in the military in other parts of Turkey, or they were teachers off to spend the summer with relatives--and voting was held in the graveyard . . . by dead people. Not only did the military cast votes in Culemêrg, even though the military is not permitted to vote by Turkish law, but the military also forced 317 villagers to vote openly. In other words, the military violated their right to a secret ballot.

In Riha (Urfa), seventeen ballot boxes are missing and no one seems to know where they are, when they went missing, or what happened to them. YSK will have to make a determination on the matter of the missing election boxes, but even if they are eventually recovered there will still have to be another vote because the boxes have been out of any official chain of custody. This means that the contents of the boxes are tainted and should no longer be legitimate. Or at least that's the way it should work in a democracy.

But I guess that's a bit of a stretch.