EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS, LACK OF EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE

"The patriotic people of Kurdistan, be it women, children, young or old must demonstrate awareness and compassion towards maintaining a national-democratic line of unity throughout this period. Furthermore, they must stand firm against all attitudes attempting to frustrate this."
~ KCK Statement, 30 November, 2007.

Well, well, well . . . Zaman is spewing a lot of gû today. The most amusing spew has to do with alleged rivalries within the leadership of KCK, and Zaman seems to be specifically conjuring up an imaginary "ethnic" rivalry between Rojavayî and Bakûrî--"Syrian" Kurds and "Turkish" Kurds.

First of all, I suppose I need someone out there to explain to me how there can be "ethnic" rivalry among a group of people, the majority of whom are Kurds. No matter which part of Kurdistan a gerîla comes from, that gerîla is still a Kurd because Kurdistan is still Kurdistan. Just because racist regimes have divided Kurdistan or have supported the division of Kurdistan, a Kurd is still a Kurd.

Note that Zaman doesn't mention the fact that there are non-Kurdish gerîlas. Or perhaps I should clarify that by saying that there are gerîlas who were not born in Kurdistan or of Kurdish parents. Zaman doesn't mention that there are ethnic Britons Russians, Germans, Greeks, Iranians, and Arabs in HPG. Zaman doesn't mention that there is at least one ethnic Swiss in HPG. Neither does Zaman mention that there have always been ethnic Turks in, first PKK, and, now, in HPG.

Of course, these people are like Heval Tolhildan in that they do not speak of the Kurdish people, but of "our people." They have become Kurds.

Zaman claims that there is a rivalry between Bahoz Erdal, on one hand, and Cemil Bayık and Murat Karayılan on the other. All three men are in command of specific, necessary components of KCK which means that there is no need for rivalry. Just as there is no rivalry among different parts of the body, for each has its specific function, so there is no rivalry among these three leaders. Since Zaman makes the claim, it must provide the evidence; and extraordinary claims, like this one, require extraordinary evidence.

Zaman presents no evidence for its claim of Karayılan and Bayık's "discomfort at Abdullah Öcalan’s inclusion of Kurds of Syrian decent into the senior leadership of the PKK’s armed wing, the People’s Defense Units (HPG)." Zaman presents no evidence for it's claim of "[n]ames known to be close to Hüseyin [Bahoz Erdal] have either been killed or sacked from the significant positions they held inside the PKK." Zaman presents no evidence for its claim of accusations of "passivity" or of the US using Heval Bahoz for its own purposes in Syria. Nor is there evidence presented for the claims of PKK being fractured, of difficulty in finding new recruits, of gerîlas trying to get to Armenia (no mention of PKK's wholesale move to a new residence in Karabakh--another recent wild rumor of the oh, so reliable Turkish media), or of those long-standing bogeymen of the Turkish psyche--"International Forces"--manipulating everything.

In Hersh-ian fashion, Zaman appears to rely on Turkish intelligence reports to lend an aura of credibility to its absurd claims. But such reports must come from a Turkish version of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans--you remember, the ones who manufactured "intelligence" evidence of Iraq's WMDs and wrote the script for the Bush administration's performance at the UN, complete with Colin Powell's "anthrax" vial.

Zaman must have relied on the American neocon pattern of fantasy manufacture because it must not have been able to dig up any ex-PKK "confessors," with exotic-sounding code names, to lend a luster of credibility to the article.

All of this is not to say that Zaman lacks a sense of humor, at least on the darker side. Zaman includes a claim of Bahoz Erdal's "command" of TAK and of the "ethnic" rivalries erupting to the point of committing the Beytuşşebap massacre or of the killing of at least 12 Turkish soldiers at Dağlıca, in the same battle that yielded 8 Turkish POWs. These are laughable because TAK always operated in Western Turkey and the Turkish state itself committed the Beytuşşebap massacre, Guçlukonak style.

Read the whole thing here.

Over at Hevallo's place, he's got a post on the confessions of old Turkish generals, also from Zaman. When you read that one, ask yourself "Why?" Are these just a bunch of old secularists who now worried about getting into paradise, or is there something else behind their admissions of guilt?

Inquiring minds wanna know.