SUICIDE BOMBER, SYRIA, AND HPG

"The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief."
~ Jacques Ellul.

Turkish Press Shields the Military's Deadlock with Lies


1. Recently in Turkish media there was news of the organization's internal conflicts and disagreements. Could you please give an explanation of this issue?


Our leadership is not allowed to meet with his family and his lawyers for three weeks, military operations are becoming prevalent everywhere. In this kind of situation, news sourced from the Turkish military (such as a suicide bomber) in the Medya Defence Zones is very attractive news. While the meetings of our leadership are blocked, operations are ongoing, people are treated in extremely undemocratic ways--these kinds of agendas and lies aim to worry and demoralize our people. The Turkish press is like the military's press; it wants to create an atmosphere that implies PKK has been finished, by news such as escapes from the organization, or that the military is capturing many guerrillas, etc. However, the situation is not the way that it shows. Our guerrillas, who are currently in an active legitimate defensive position, have sufficient experience to frustrate the military's operations. In order to contribute to the democratic solution, the organization did not have any operations within the election period; thus it showed its willing attitude toward the solution.

Although there have been various positive steps taken and progress made, the military is implementing a psychological war. News like "they fight with each other; they shoot at each other," or "there are escapes everyday; there are various numbers of captures," aims to distort reality, to worry and demoralize people, and to cause tension among them. Earlier, the Turkish general staff had mentioned that very intensive psychological warfare methods must be enhanced, and that they were engaging in this kind of warfare. This recent fake news shows their goals and intentions. Attacks against our administration fall within this framework. Our people must not give credit to these kinds of lies.


2. As a second question . . . Recently there has been an arabization policy implemented in Southwest Kurdistan (Northern Syria) near the border. Would you mind commenting on this?


Recently, in Southwest Kurdistan, there is an arabization policy toward our people in that region, through which Syria plans to arabize the Derik and Dirbesiye regions near the border. Within this plan, Syria wants to change the demographic structure and pacify our people living there. We think that this plan, and its implementation, is the work of certain people in the regime. These factions are the ones who deepen the denial and anihilation of the Kurds. These kinds of plans, in addition to destabilizing Syria, will also lead to infighting between the peoples.

Naturally, our people in Southwest Kurdistan will not accept this policy. The Turkish army has massed its troops since spring and has attempted to create a no-man's land along the Iraq border. It is remarkable that Syria brings up this arabization policy simultaneously. Syria must not take as its example, the approach of the Turkish government toward its own Kurdish question.


HPG Headquarters Commander

Dr. Bahoz Erdal

US SPECIAL FORCES TO FIGHT KURDS

"The real terrorist threats are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs."
~ Sandra Bernhard.

The US wants a piece of what the TSK has been getting from PKK for the last two decades. According to the WaPo, the US is going to assist the fascist Ankara regime with boots on the ground:

While detailed operational plans are necessarily concealed, the broad outlines have been presented to select members of Congress as required by law. U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish army to suppress the Kurds' guerrilla campaign. The Bush administration is trying to prevent another front from opening in Iraq, which would have disastrous consequences. But this gamble risks major exposure and failure.

Oh, yeah. Failure, as in big time failure. Does the US think Iraq is a quagmire? Guess what the Kurdish mountains have been for the Turks since 1984? Quagmire. Failure. Flag-draped coffins.

Apparently this clandestine operation was briefed in secret to Congress last week by former ambassador to the Ankara regime, Eric Edelman. Edelman now serves in Paul Wolfowitz's old job--Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Another former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy--Douglas Feith--was described by General Tommy Franks as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." We can now characterize Edelman as the second fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.

Edelman, a Foreign Service officer who once was U.S. ambassador to Turkey, revealed to lawmakers plans for a covert operation of U.S. Special Forces to help the Turks neutralize the PKK. They would behead the guerrilla organization by helping Turkey get rid of PKK leaders that they have targeted for years.

It's a rather Freudian description there--about beheading--because that's exactly how US special operations types taught the Turks to handle their Kurdish "problem":

Culemêrg (Hakkari) district, April 1995.

More photos and context here.

As Congressman Bob Filner stated in Congress in 1997:

Today Turkish special Comandos actually collect rewards for the severed heads of Kurdish guerrillas and others, casually referring to their victims as Armenians, leaving no doubt as to what is in store for the Kurds and their national aspirations.

Turkish commandos collect rewards for severed Kurdish heads because the US military taught them to do it. Where do you think Islamic extremists learned it? The US trained and supported them in Afghanistan and from there, the training spread. Who, then, are the real terrorists?

More on beheading as the American way of covert warfare:

What were these incredible capabilities of the Turkish commandos sharpened as they were by the members of the SEAL teams that according to the Washington Post may still be training these Turkish soldiers? A while back, the European newspaper, ran some of their photographed work in its front page, with a warning: pictures that will shock the world. Members of the same Turkish Mountain Commandos had posed for camera with the decapitated heads of the Kurdish guerrillas they had hunted in their war against the Kurds.

More from the second fucking stupidest man on the face of the earth:

Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded that he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied. Even if all this is true, some of the briefed lawmakers left wondering whether this was a wise policy for handling the beleaguered Kurds, who had been betrayed so often by the U.S. government in years past.

Is this the fruit of Deep State planning at the Hudson Institute?

If anything happens to "PKK leaders," we will all know who did it. End the cooperation.

MERCENARIES, RACISTS, AND SOUR GRAPES

I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
~ Langston Hughes.

Does anyone remember the kidnapping of Crescent Security Group's mercenaries last November? I always thought it was interesting the way a wall of silence fell over the incident, but now--lo and behold--today there's an article about the kidnapping and Crescent Security at the WaPo. What do all of these mercenary firms have in common? Love of money. Check it out:

Most of Crescent's employees were military and law enforcement veterans willing to accept extreme risk in exchange for fast money and adventure. Crescent handed out monthly pay in envelopes stuffed with Kuwaiti dinars. The guards took the money to currency exchange houses, which transferred the funds into their bank accounts.

"All you're thinking about is the money," said Chris Jackson, 28, a former Marine from Salem, N.H. "You have $50,000 in the bank, and all you're thinking about is, 'Another month and I'll have $57,000, another month and I'll have $64,000.' " By the end of last year, Jackson said, he had saved $55,000, even after splurging on Las Vegas vacations and a $5,000 Panerai watch.

"I hate to say it, but I am so thankful for this war," he said. "I only came over here for the money, and I didn't even know I could do this job until two years ago. I didn't know it was available to me."

Crescent's Iraqi employees were recruited by word of mouth; most lived around the southern city of Basra, a hotbed of Shiite militias, and were largely unknown to the company. Crescent used a two-tiered pay scale. Guards from the United States, Britain and other Western countries earned $7,000 a month or more. Iraqi guards earned $600 -- roughly $20 a day -- but performed the most dangerous work, including the manning of belt-fed machine guns while exposed in the back of the Avalanches.

Picco said the system was not ideal but was necessary to hold down costs. "To put 12 white people on a team, it's not economically viable," he said.

This "economically viable" system led to a deterioration of relations between the Western mercenaries and Iraqi mercenaries--no doubt because of the old-timey colonialist, white-man's-burden attitude at the heart of the mercenary business. Shortly after relations deteriorated, a lot of military equipment used by Crescent "disappeared."

Gee, I wonder where it went?

Read the whole thing. It's an incredible scandal. But don't think Crescent is alone in its quest for lucre; Blackwater USA is guilty of the same and body count be damned.

Hevallo has something on Turkish machinations to keep Sebahat Tuncel, parliamentarian-elect from Istanbul, in prison. Turkish "lawmakers," who specialize in changing laws to maintain a racist regime, are now claiming that Sebahat cannot enjoy parliamentary immunity because she was accused of separatism. If it were true that those accused of "crimes against the unity of the state" cannot be granted immunity then why did they free her from prison a few days ago? If the law were already in place and the interpretation of the law against the accused prohibited immunity, then why did they release Sebahat when they knew she would not be able to claim parliamentary immunity?

The answer is because Turkish "lawmakers" have only now come up with this brand-spanking-new interpretation in order to keep Kurds out of parliament and cut them off from the political process. This is consistent with the racist nature of the regime.

Another point: Turkey defended its right to host the HAMAS leader last year in Ankara, even though HAMAS is widely recognized as a terrorist organization by the US and EU, because it's on the same List as PKK. But Turkey defended the right of HAMAS leader Khaled Mashaal to sit down with Abdullah Gül for talks in Ankara. Gül defended the visit thusly:

Gul said that since Hamas won a democratic election, from now on it must act in a democratic way.

Yet Gül's--and AKPs--support for Sebahat Tuncel, who won her parliamentary position in a "democratic election," appears to be non-existent. Additionally, she is merely accused of membership in a "terrorist" organization whereas Khaled Mashaal is the acknowledged leader of a "terrorist" organization. Why is AKP not as eager to settle the problems its predecessors created in its own backyard, but it has to travel the world over to rescue others under repression?

Well, again this is consistent with the racist nature of the Turkish regime.

And, from the Who Cares Department, the Paşas are planning to stage a walk-out when all the new deputies are sworn in, in order to protest the presence of DTP in the parliament. It seems they don't like the idea of the support given by DTP constituents for the Kurdish freedom movement and Abdullah Öcalan.

It's pathetic to be so out-of-touch with reality. Either the Paşas are suffering from a collective case of dementia or the taste of sour grapes has given them a bad case of indigestion. Either way, too bad.

There's one more thing I've been meaning to draw attention to, and that's the recent encounter between Western archaeologist and JITEM in Sêrt (Siirt) at Samarkeolog:

It should be borne in mind at all times that this is only what visiting Westerners are subjected to; the plight of those who live there is immeasurably worse. Unfortunately, there are a range of sources that simplify the situation to the point that they hinder the struggle for human rights and democracy of all of the communities in Turkey, but particularly the Kurds.

[ . . . ]

This is an inordinately long post, for which I can only apologise; I'll try to make a summary of it, but I felt it was important to have as full an account as possible, to help other researchers and people concerned with northern Kurdistan/south-eastern Turkey understand the realities of the situation there (and to show the people there that some foreigners are trying to help).

These notes were largely written during those days and those immediately afterwards, but because of the conditions during the visit and the lack of time and the continuing search for information afterwards, some of them were written more recently.

I ought to make clear, now, that they are summaries of prolonged, stressful encounters, the conversations held almost exclusively in Turkish: some of the conversations were hours-long; sometimes, afterwards, I was still under surveillance, or the threat of it, so I couldn't make notes; my fieldwork diary was repeatedly read by the intelligence services, so I didn't want to make notes.

The conversations presented were written down, albeit sometimes a long time afterwards; they are summaries of the conversations, but the sentences and exchanges included are accurate translations, give or take the difficulty of translating Turkish to English semantically.

If you don't know anything about the situation, believe me, this post will be an eye-opener. In a perverse sort of way, I'm relieved to know that someone besides Kurds sees just how troublesome these JITEM vermin are.

SCATHING 2

"Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis."
~ Brad Holland.

From American comedian George Carlin, here in its entirety, from good old Mother Jones [paragraph breaks and emphasis by Mizgîn]:

"There's a reason education sucks and will never, ever, ever be fixed. Never get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got. Because the owners of this country don't want that--the real owners, the big, wealthy business interests that make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have OWNERS. They own you. They own everything. They own the land. They own all the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Congress, the Senate. They have all the judges in their back pockets. They own all the big media companies. So they control all the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. We know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart sitting around the kitchen table talking about a system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago.

What do they want? They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work and just dumb enough to accept jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you collect it. Now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f***ing retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know that they'll get it. Cause they own this f***in' place.

It's a big club. It's the same big club they beat you over the head all day when they tell you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. Nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people continue to elect these rich c*ck s**kers who don't give a f**k about you at all. At all. At all. At all."

OUCH!! Truth can be so painful.

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.

VINEYARDSAKER'S INTERVIEW, WITH COMMENTS

"The official view in Turkey is that the Kemalist movement led the first anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist national liberation struggle, lighting the way for all oppressed nations. This ideological proposition, however, is refuted by the fact that the states formed in the region collaborated with French and British imperialism in dividing and subjugating the Kurds. Why do Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria have their separate Kurdistans today?"
~ Ismail Beşikçi.

Below I am reposting the interview conducted by Vineyardsaker at his blog, The Vineyard of the Saker, because there are a number of comments from others which help to round out the interview and give it more depth. The Kurdish situation, in the details of its history, is very complex or somewhat resembles a fractal, I suppose. There are any number of points which could serve as tangents for hundreds of other aspects of Kurdish history, so this interview is by no means an exhaustive piece on the matter, but both Vineyardsaker and I consider it a pretty good intro to some of the current issues surrounding the Kurdish people.

***************************

Today I am publishing an interview which truly gives me great pleasure: my Q&A email exchange with Mizgîn, a Kurd who has studied in the West and who generally supports the PKK. That is all I can say about her as in fact that is all I know about her. And that is how it should be. On my blog, names do not matter, not even self-evidently nonsensical ones (like, say, "vineyardsaker"). Only ideas are important here, and Mizgîn has a lot of very interesting things to say, things which are almost never heard in the West or, as far as I know, anywhere else in the world. This is, in fact, how I "met" Mizgîn: she posted some rather interesting replies on Scott Horton's blog and I decided to contact her and to request an interview. To say that I was not disappointed would be an understatement: I was delighted.

Mizgîn is the kind of person which I most enjoy listening to: passionate, strongly committed to her values, and willing to take the time to explain them to those who, like myself, know very little about her reality. In a time when Neocon propaganda is maskarading as "objective reporting" it is truly refreshing to hear a voice which concerns itself not with (pseudo-)"objectivity", but with the truth as she sees it.

I would encourage those who are interested in the topic of the Kurdish people to use the comments section to post questions for Mizgîn. You can also email me the questions and I will forward them to her.

Mizgîn preceded her answers with the following disclaimer:

"I have written PKK as "PKK" in the replies, because PKK does not exist as a party anymore. It is an ideological school. Neither is it or PJAK synonymous with KONGRA-GEL. KONGRA-GEL is an organization under the overall umbrella of KCK (Koma Civakên Kurdistan--roughly, Confederation of Kurdistan Societies), under which everything else falls, including HPG, the armed wing which is the successor of PKK's ARGK. If you see statements from the leadership at Qendil, you will see that it's coming from KCK. So the leadership at Qendil is in charge of more than just HPG or PJAK (including its armed wing, the HAK)".

------

Very little is published in the Western media about the developments in Turkish-controlled Kurdistan. Recently, Dahr Jamal has claimed that since the beginning of the year over 70 Turkish soldiers have been killed there by Kurdish fighters coming from Iraqi Kurdistan and that, in response, the Turks have deployed about 100'000 soldiers right on the border and that they are ready to invade Iraqi Kurdistan. According to him, only Washington's opposition has prevented this, but the risks of the Turks actually going ahead with this invasion are very real. Is this information correct and what is the current situation in Turkish-controlled and Iraqi-controlled Kurdistan? Do the Kurds fear an invasion and do you think they are ready to deal with one?

Very little about Turkish-occupied Kurdistan is published in the West because the West has to protect the genocidal regime it has supported for decades, and continues to support today.

It's very easy to find out how many Turkish soldiers have been killed. HPG publishes a monthly body count on its website. They have just published year-to-date totals and are showing 446 enemy forces killed, with a yearly total of 96 HPG martyrs.

How does Dahr Jamail know if the guerrillas are conducting operations from Iraqi Kurdistan? Has Dahr Jamail, or anyone else, taken out a map to actually look at the region to get an idea of what it takes to walk from Iraqi Kurdistan, specifically Qendil, to the places where clashes with the Turkish army have taken place? Bear in mind the topography of the region; mountain peaks reach approximately 12,000 feet (3700 m). Bear in mind the nature of guerrilla warfare; guerrillas move on their feet. Not in trucks, not in helicopters, not in armored personnel carriers, but they move on their feet. So it will take two to three weeks to walk from Qendil to, say, Dersim (Tunceli) province, Çewlik (Bingöl) province, Erzirom (Erzurum), Mûş (Muş), or Gümüşhane.

On top of the two to three week walk, they have to stop at times, make camp, do reconaissance and other patrols, and set up posts and machine gun defenses. By the very nature of guerrilla warfare, HPG's guerrillas are constantly on the move within Turkey itself, because it's not effective to spend the time walking to one operation in, say Dersim, and then walk back to Qendil. Such a thing would be sheer stupidity and, apparently, it's the kind of thing that Western media regularly expects us to believe. The majority of guerrillas are not at Qendil and have not been for some time. Even the Turkish regime is aware of this fact, as indicated by Erdoğan's statement in mid-June:


"Has the struggle against 5,000 terrorists inside Turkey come to a close, so that we can now start dealing with the 500 in northern Iraq?"


If the Turkish regime decides to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, it will be for some other reason and not because of "PKK." They may decide to do it to gain control over the oil at Mûsil and Kerkuk, or to secure their many business interests, or for both reasons. In the last 80 years, Turkey has engaged in a continuing genocide against the Kurdish people because the ideological foundations of the regime is based on denial of the existence of the Kurdish people, so there is also the problem that Kurds in South Kurdistan and in the Baghdad government are not holding true to Turkey's idea of Kurds as "Mountain Turks," as savages who are inherently incapable of the slightest degree of sophistication or ability, particularly as regards politics. As a result, it's also possible that Turkey invades for the purpose of saving its own ideological roots which are the very foundations of the current regime.

Has Washington's opposition prevented a Turkish invasion to this point? Well, that's a very simplistic view. First of all, every act of aggression carried out by the Turkish regime has had the approval of Washington, as well as the rest of the international community.

At the end of April 2006, just after the Turkish regime murdered a number of Kurds, including children, in the wake of the series of protests throughout Turkish-occupied Kurdistan known as the Amed Serhildan (uprising), Condoleezza Rice made a visit to Ankara. This was at the time that the Turkish army began massing hundreds of thousands of its troops in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and began shelling Iraqi Kurdistan. Her presence in Ankara while there were ongoing TSK operations is proof that the US encourages Turkey in its aggression against the Kurdish people.

By the way, notice the time frame of the massive deployment. It wasn't just recently that "100,000"--or whatever number the current propaganda quotes--Turkish troops deployed. They have been there since April of last year. This is similar to the Western media's other propaganda which said that "PKK" had suddenly called a ceasefire in mid-June, when the fact is that "PKK's" ceasefire went into effect on 1 October 2006. The American media warmongers were all over that. Plus there was some garbage that DebkaFILE picked up from its Kemalist friends at Cihan News Agency, stating that there had been a massive invasion of South Kurdistan.

On the other hand, no one, absolutely no one, in the Western media wrote so much as a syllable about Iran shipping weapons to Syria with the help of Turkey--and it was HPG that derailed the train. Yaşar Büyükanıt, the chief of the Turkish general staff, permitted this information to penetrate Turkish media for a brief period before it was finally censored.

Now another Kurdish blogger has speculated that the Turkish military is cooperating with Washington, acting as Washington's tool to threaten all of Iraq, including South Kurdistan, over rapacious oil laws that would permit an equitable distribution of oil revenue among Iraq's ethnicities after Western Big Oil takes its 75% cut of the profits.

So, is Washington the only thing preventing an invasion of South Kurdistan? Insofar as Washington itself is the lapdog of Big Oil, yes. Is it coincidence that the Turkish regime begins a new round of shelling of South Kurdistan as Iraqis--across the board--dig in their heels in opposition to the oil laws? I don't think it's a coincidence.

When I was in South Kurdistan two years ago, friends told me then that if Turkey invaded, everyone in South Kurdistan would take up arms against the invaders. Since then, the situation has evolved to the point where Kurds under Turkish-occupation would also rise up against an invasion of Southern Kurds, and a Kurdish DTP politician, Hilmi Aydoğdu, recently got himself in trouble with the regime for speaking this fact of life:


"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."


Everyone knows this. Everyone. And when it is spoken out loud in public, the one who says it goes to prison. But prison does not negate truth. If anyone wants to engage in guerrilla warfare with 20 million Kurdish guerrillas in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and 5 million Kurdish guerrillas in South Kurdistan, then let's get on with it.

Are Kurds afraid of an invasion? No. This would not be the first Turkish invasion anyway. The Turkish regime has invaded several times in the recent past, even during the so-called "safe haven" in which the British and Americans permitted Turkey to bomb Kurdish civilians in the South--the very people the UK and US claimed to be "protecting." What did Turkey get from these invasions? "PKK" is still there. "PKK" is still fighting. Southern Kurds, ordinary people, are willing to fight the invader, too. Kurdistan will become Turkey's graveyard once again.


A basic background question: What are the differences between the KDP and PUK and what is their relationship to the PKK? Is this just a conflict between Barzani and Talabani or are there deeper, ideological, political differences between these to parties? Whom, if any, did Ocalan support?


The KDP is more conservative, more tribal or "feudal." The PUK is more progressive and oligarchic. The PUK was created from the KDP when there was a split among them back in the 1960s. The PUK was the first Kurdish group to side with Saddam against another Kurdish group, the KDP. They have been at each others' throats since then and they would still be if not for the fact that the heat is on and they are going to have to make South Kurdistan work.

The "PKK" and Öcalan have supported neither of these parties against the other, except during one, specific event. In 1997, the KDP brought in Saddam Hussein's army to help them recapture Hewlêr (Irbil) and the surrounding area, which had been under PUK control. The "PKK" went in to set up defensive positions in the Soran areas (PUK heartland) to help contain the KDP. The KDP had also captured Hero Talabanî, the wife of Iraq's current president, Celal. They were using her in anti-PUK propaganda which showed Celal as the "honorless fleeing husband." Celal Talabanî had, in fact, fled to Iran, leaving his wife behind. Ocalan called for her release and threatened to become actively involved in the fighting if KDP did not comply.

That was the only time that "PKK" sided with either group.

"PKK" has had its focus elsewhere, mainly in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and now there is a sister organization under the KCK which focuses on Iranian-occupied Kurdistan, both politically and militarily. "PKK" has always had guerrilla members from all parts of Kurdistan, as well as Europeans and guerrillas from other parts of the world. It is the same today. "PKK" is always open to anyone who wishes to fight with them, both politically and militarily, for the cause of freedom.

As for ideological differences, both KDP and PUK are far more conservative than "PKK." "PKK's" outlook is socialist/green and it is far more progressive than either KDP or PUK. A core value of "PKK" is gender equality which can easily be seen by the women's guerrilla army, YJA-STAR, and the training they give other women's rights activists in the Kurdistan region.

The general goals of the "PKK" are outlined pretty well in their Declaration for the Democratic Resolution of the Kurdish Question, which was propsed to the Turkish regime in August of last year.


From the outside, the capture of Ocalan by the Turkish MIT seemed to have crippled the PKK. First, where can one get somebody get good information about the details of his capture? Second, what has the effect of his capture been on the PKK? Is he still considered the PKK's leader and, if not, who has replaced him and how did that succession happen? Does the PKK consider Ocalan's call for a truce genuine, or has it been coerced out of him or outright faked?

Turkish MIT did not capture Öcalan. Öcalan was the first victim of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program and after his capture was arranged by the US--some say with the help of MOSSAD--he was handed over to Turkish MIT. In fact, the MIT undersecretary who was involved with the CIA in the capture is now a "consultant" for a Turkish mercenary company, Black Hawk Security, Inc. This company is based in Maryland, has a training facility in Silopî (at the Habur border crossing), and they are now serving as mercenaries in Iraq, including Kerkuk.

Ocalan wanted to change many policies when he arrived in Europe after being forced out of Syria and he, as well as the Kurdish people, hoped that his arrival in Europe would be the first step in a peaceful solution of the Kurdish situation. Both the US and Turkey applied pressure on the governments of Europe to prevent Öcalan from staying in Europe and to prevent a wider international discussion of the gross human rights abuses and atrocities that Turkey, with full American backing, had inflicted on the Kurdish people since the US-backed coup of September 12.

As an aside to this, the fact that US special operations types trained Turkish special teams is widely known and has been documented by Desmond Fernandes, Ertuğrul Kürkçü, Serdar Çelik, and Kendal Nezan, among others. Late last year, Desmond Fernandes published the results of his most recent research into US-backing of Turkey in the so-called "War on Terror."

It was a shock to see Europe behave with such arrogance and ignorance when Öcalan arrived in Europe. The policy changes that Öcalan wished to implement were stalled as the political side of the Kurdish freedom movement fought for Öcalan to be taken seriously by European governments. Some policy changes did go into effect, such as Öcalan's call for a unilateral ceasefire in 1998. Since this ceasefire was proclaimed when Öcalan was free in Italy, then why wouldn't "PKK" take it seriously? Or how does that prove that "PKK" was crippled? I mean, if "PKK" is crippled, why are there some hundred thousand Turkish soldiers deployed against "PKK" at this very moment?

While Öcalan fought to bring the Kurdish case to the attention of Europe, it was in the interest of the Kurdish people to uphold and support the ceasefire, so this is not coercion nor is it fake. The same goes for the current ceasefire.

It should be pointed out that those of the time who were calling for retaliation were the very same people who had ignored Öcalan when he came to Europe to solve the Kurdish situation by peaceful, political means. These people did not have Kurdish interests at heart but rather acted as agent provocateurs for the American and Turkish regimes. These were the political Left of Europe, the same ones who stand behind the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel. These agents, the non-Kurdish leftist grassroots apparat in Europe and North America, cut all ties with the Kurdish freedom movement as soon as they saw there was no retaliation forthcoming, calling "PKK" "defeatist" and "Kemalist," and accused the Kurdish freedom movement of having "betrayed" the cause of the "proletariat" for not fighting for their "socialist revolutionary war."

Kurdish hope in Europe as a bastion of democracy and justice was destroyed with the international conspiracy against Öcalan and the Kurdish cause, and the response to the capture was intense, furious, and personal. Greek embassies were targeted because they were initially seen to blame. Many set fire to themselves in protest. Israeli embassy personnel in Berlin murdered four young Kurds protesting Israel's hand in the capture.

Öcalan is still considered the leader of the "PKK," but there is also an executive council of the KCK which also makes decisions for the movement. One has to consider the love that the Kurdish people have for Öcalan and the politicization of the people that has come about as a direct result of the "PKK." Whatever minor concessions the Ankara egime has granted came about only as a result of the blood of "PKK's" martyrs. The "PKK's" political wing has enlightened the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation and this enlightenment can be seen today throughout the region, in the efforts of the DTP in overcoming obstacles to the political process in Turkey, or in organizations such as the Peace Mothers. In this respect, the Kurds under Turkish occupation are much better off than Kurds in South Kurdistan, because they are much more politically aware and act on their awareness. As an example of that, all one has to do is follow the activity of the DTP mayors. This is the result of the blood of "PKK" martyrs.


It has been reported in the Western media that the "Kurdish Peshmerga" had offered the Iraqi government to eliminate the Sunni militia in Baghdad (according to some reports they wanted to do this with the support of Shia militias) but that that offer was rejected. Is this information correct? More generally, would it be correct to say that the Kurds are closer to the Shias than the Sunnis because the Shias are less set on opposing an largely autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan and because the Sunni militias have a lot of former Baathists in them?


KDP has been closer to the Sunnis historically, and PUK has been closer to the Shi'a. Only the Western media and its consumers would be stupid enough to circulate rumors--no doubt started in Arab media--that Kurdish pêşmerge would "offer" to eliminate Sunni militias in Baghdad. If anyone would have wanted someone else to eliminate Sunni militias, it would have been the US, and they would have had to make the "offer" to Kurds because it's obvious that the US can't do anything about any militia in all of Iraq.

If anyone at all can hold Iraq together, it's Kurds because they have tried to work with both Sunni and Shi'a, even though 98% of the Kurdish people in South Kurdistan don't want to be part of Iraq at all. Of course, democracy requires a complete disregard of the wishes of the demos.

According to definition of the word "pêşmerge," and according to popular view, pêşmerge are not aggressors. The word "pêşmerge" is the name of a defending warrior, someone who stands before death. If you're an aggressor, you don't stand before death, you are death. Those who stand against you, to defend themselves, are pêşmerge, or those who stand before death.

Those Kurds who make up the majority of the Iraqi army are no longer pêşmerge because their loyalty is to Iraq, not Kurdistan, and they're no longer serving in a Kurdish army.

Additionally, Kurds are not interested in invading anyone else. There are enough problems to deal with inside Kurdistan itself without having to look for more problems in someone else's house.


What do you make of Ahmed Chalabi? It is often written that he began his career as a Kurdish politician but that he also has close ties to Shia factions. Where are his loyalties? Does he matter in the Kurdish political life? There also is the persistent rumor that Chalabi was an Iranian agent who acted as an "agent provocateur" for Tehran who wanted the USA to get rid of Saddam Hussein and bogged down in Iraq. According to this thesis, the Iranian actually used the clueless US Neocons to get them to push the USA into a war which would serve Tehran's interests? Does this thesis make sense to you? What is written about all this in the Kurdish media?

How can Ahmed Chalabi get his start as a Kurdish politician when he's not a Kurd? I don't know of anyone who likes Ahmed Chalabi, and the KDP never liked him. He might have had closer ties to the PUK, but I'm not certain about that because I never see anything about Chalabi in Kurdish media. So he's meaningless as far as Kurdish political life goes.

As far as the clueless neocons getting conned by Chalabi, in my opinion it was a mutual con. Michael Ledeen is one of the neocons who's well-known for his close associations with Iranians and their con men. Maybe somebody should ask Ledeen about Chalabi.


General Joseph Ralston, former Vice Chairman of the JCS, has been appointed by Bush as the US "special envoy" to "coordinate" the PKK for Turkey. What does this appointment mean? What is the current US policy towards Kurds and what are their objectives for Turkish-controlled and Iraqi Kurdistan? What will Ralston true role be?

The appointment of Joseph Ralston as the "special envoy" to "coordinate" the PKK for Turkey means that the US and Turkey intend to continue the genocide that they've inflicted for decades on the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation.

Joseph Ralston is not merely the former NATO commander and vice-chairman of the US JCS, he's also a member of the board of directors for Lockheed Martin. He's also a vice-chairman of William Cohen's The Cohen Group, which is a lobby firm among whose clients is Lockheed Martin. In the months before he was appointed, he was listed with the US Senate as a lobbyist for The Cohen Group for the purpose of exporting tactical fighter aircraft. That listing fell under the Lobby Disclosure Act and two of the required documents have been posted online. Within two months of his appointment, he managed to swing $13 billion worth of tactical fighter exports to Turkey as a result of his "coordination of the PKK." The aircraft involved in the deal were F-16s and the new F-35.

He is also a member of the advisory board of the American Turkish Council. Lockheed Martin is also a Golden Horn member of the ATC, something which costs $11,000 per year--chump change for Lockheed Martin.

Out of sheer frustration with getting this conflict of interest presented in the American media, I wrote something on it last October and published on KurdishInfo, with a follow-up on the F-35 deal. Slowly, a friend and I got a few independent journalists interested, including Kevin McKiernan, Chris Deliso, and Ken Silverstein. Luke Ryland, a blogger who has done a lot of research on the Sibel Edmonds case, picked up the Ralston conflict of interest, and from there, Sibel herself picked up the information and added it to hers.

The appointment of Ralston is highly cynical and only serves the interests of the American corporatocracy. Ralston, along with Yaşar Büyükanıt, rejected the PKK ceasefire out of hand and further rejected any political settlement on the IRA model, while the international community obeys its American masters, as with everything. These people do not want peace; they want to continue the genocide. That's the American policy toward Kurds and its objectives for Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and South Kurdistan--Genocide. Kurds are a very inconvenient problem when they exist in a region rich in energy resources.


What is the situation of the Kurds in Iranian Kurdistan and what is the connection of the PDKI and the PJAK to the KDP, UDP, PKK? What has been the role of Iran in regards to the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq and what are, in your opinion, Iran's objectives concerning the Kurds and their future?

The situation of Kurds in Iranian-occupied Kurdistan does not differ very much from the situation in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Kurds there are also repressed by a genocidal regime that denies Kurds as Kurds, prohibits Kurdish language and other forms of cultural expression, imprisons, tortures, and executes Kurds who are politically active or Kurdish journalists who don't reproduce the mullahs' propaganda in their writing, and economically strangles the people to death. If it were not for the limited liberation in South Kurdistan, Kurds in the East would be much worse off than they are right now.

Iran shares Turkey's goal of genocide of the Kurdish people.

PDKI has no relationship with PJAK and as far as I know, it's not even located in Iranian-occupied Kurdistan. I have no idea what its relationship with KDP or PUK is.

PJAK is part of "PKK" and gets all its support from "PKK." Cemil Bayık said as much last November.

In the last few years there has been some cooperation between "PKK" and KDP. At least, there have been no hostilities such as there were in the 1990s, when the KDP fought alongside the Ankara regime against the Kurds of the "PKK."

There was an item in Turkey's Akşam, in which the Turkish general staff claims that their intelligence says that some 1,000 guerrillas will join KDP's special forces and be deployed along the border with Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. We'll have to see how true that turns out to be, but KDP's special forces were founded by a former "PKK" guerrilla and such a turn of events would be the Ankara regime's worst nightmare come true.

The relationship with the PUK may be a bit more stand-offish, especially since Qubad Talabanî, Celal Talabanî's son and PUK's representative in Washington, was recently involved in a scandal at the Hudson Institute, with the Americans and a representative of the Turkish general staff. Among other things, they discussed assassinations of Kemalist members of the judiciary, suicide bombing of shopping areas, and the capture of "PKK's" leadership at Qendil, sort of a sequel to Öcalan's extraordinary rendition.

This was a huge scandal in the Turkish press, and the Islamist Zaman carried two articles in English, "Terrifying scenarios discussed at US think tank," and "More details revealed on scandalous meeting." Given that we know the Turkish regime, with US support, regularly engages in black operations against the Kurdish people and in Western Turkey in order for the Turkish military to keep a death grip on the reins of power. The scenarios discussed at the Hudson Institute are very similar to recent events or are very similar to incidents in the past. Since everyone knows that these things are possible, and that the Deep State carries out such operations, no one was laughing about this scandal.

Of course, Qubad Talabanî's presence at such a planning session is absolutely unacceptable from any honorable Kurdish perspective.

But you read about all of this in the US media, right?


For many years it has been reported that Israelis have been involved in the Kurdish issue and that they have been covertly arming and training the various Kurdish militias. At the same time, the Israelis are also allied with Ankara. What is the current Israeli policy towards Kurds in Turkey and Iraq and what are their objectives in these areas?

Why is it that no one bitched about the Israeli presence in South Kurdistan during Mala Mustafa Barzanî's time? Yes, there's a long history between the Barzanîs and Israel, and apparently there were some Israeli contractors, former military types, training pêşmerge in counter-terrorism tactics a few years ago. As for the details of the current relationship, I don't know.

Yes, Israel is an ally of Ankara, just as the US is, and for that reason, the only policy that Israel could have toward Kurds under Turkish occupation is the same as the US and Turkey--Genocide. I have never come across any stated Israeli policy toward the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation, although Israel's cheerleaders in the US appear to have sudden bleeding hearts for Southern Kurds, Kurds in Iranian-occupied Kurdistan and Kurds in Syrian-occupied Kurdistan.

Now isn't that a curiosity in itself? The enemies of Israel are guilty, according to Israeli cheerleaders, of severe repressions of Kurds but there is a total lack of concern for Kurds suffering the severe repression at the hands of Israel's good ally, Turkey. What does that tell you? Sure the Israelis engage in tit-for-tat when it suits them, like suggesting that they sit down and talk to Öcalan since Turkey invited the HAMAS leader to Ankara. But they don't mean it and, as far as I can tell, Israel has no interest in justice for the Kurdish people. They ignore Turkey's atrocities and they've ignored Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi atrocities until they think they can use it for their own cause.

But then, like the US, Israel doesn't recognize the Armenian Genocide either.

Hypocrites.

On the Kurdish side, the Kurds are the only nation that does not want to annihilate the Jewish people or Israel, and this is consistent across the political spectrum. Kurds don't support the annihilation of the Arab or Turkish people,for that matter. And Israel knows this, which makes its position that much more hypocritical. On the other hand, the vast majority of the Turkish people hate Israel and Jews, and subscribe to every anti-Jewish conspiracy theory that comes along. When I was in Turkey two years ago, what was the bestseller? Mein Kampf. It was everywhere, from the shiny, new modern grocery store in Amed (Diyarbakır)--which was built to serve the local military families--and in upscale bookshops near the Sultanahmet in Istanbul.

What should Israel do, in contrast? Here are the Kurds, a nation trying to rise from the ashes of brutal repression, a nation willing to see others as their equal and never act as an aggressor toward its neighbors. What should be the Israeli policy toward such a people?


According to Wikipedia, various religions are present among the Kurdish people. While most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, others are Shia, Christian and even Yazdani. What role, if any, does religion play in the Kurdish political processes?

Except for the Kurdistan Islamic Union in South Kurdistan, there is no religion in the Kurdish political process. Kurds are overwhelmingly secular.


Insurgencies and political parties need money and support. How do the PKK/KDP/PUK/PDKI/PJAK finance themselves? What are their sources of income? Where do they get their weapons? Who trains them? Most successful insurgencies have outside supporters, does anyone support these groups and, if yes, who? How much money do Kurdish exiles in Europe and elsewhere send to these groups?

The KDP and PUK are part of the Kurdistan Regional Government, a recognized political entity. As such, they are financed like any other government--taxes, loans, interest, trade. I suspect PDKI gets at least some of its funding from PUK, but I will leave that open to question.

PJAK is part of "PKK," so it gets its support from "PKK." Now, even if I knew the details of "PKK's" funding, I would not discuss it because I view it as a matter of national security. However, historically, "PKK" gets its funding from the Kurdish people themselves, mainly by the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe. Europe has historically been the biggest source of funding. "PKK" has taxed smugglers moving through its territory, regardless of what's being smuggled--and "PKK" has neither cared what is smuggled nor has it wanted to know.

"PKK" has trained itself for decades now. It doesn't need anyone else. Besides, who's going to teach Kurds how to conduct a guerrilla war in the mountains? Everyone else is a rank amateur when it comes to this.

I assume that "PKK" gets its weapons in the same way that anyone else would get weapons--from international arms dealers. "PKK" has money; arms dealers have weapons.


The PKK used to have a formidable underground organization in Europe which in the eighties even succeeded in perfectly coordinated attacks on several Turkish embassies in different European countries. What happened to this network? Has it been destroyed by European police/counter-intelligence agencies or is it still out there?

The "PKK" has never had an underground organization in Europe. The "PKK's" organization in Europe is the Kurdish people in diaspora. More aggressive actions have been carried out there by young Kurds who have the will, and are militant and professional enough to carry them out. Even the political wing of the old "PKK" (the ERNK) had offices in Europe,and underground organizations rarely have offices.

There are millions of Kurds in diaspora that support the Kurdish freedom movement--and remember, Istanbul, Ankara, and other Turkish cities are diaspora. Although Turkey is constantly engaged in psychological operations against the Kurdish people and their freedom movement, the people know the justice of their own cause, even while fighting for legitimacy in the "civilized" world. It is the shame of Europe that it has remained silent for so long about the massive, systematic, state-sponsored human rights abuses carried out against the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation. Given US-backing of the same abuses, it is also a shame against the US as well, particularly when activists like Noam Chomsky, John Tirman, or Kevin McKiernan have documented and publicized the US role in Turkey's atrocities, and human rights groups in the US have documented American sales and subsidies of weapons to Turkey, which were used to murder some 40,000 (official figure, therefore most likely on the low side) Kurdish civilians, utterly destroy some 4,000 villages (about the same as Saddam Hussein destroyed in South Kurdistan), and displace some 3 million more.

The information on all of this is widely available on the Internet, so there's no excuse for not knowing about it.

Whoever wants to get rid of the "PKK" must murder the 20 million Turkish Kurds at the very least. That applies to the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe, so if European police/state terrorism agencies want to do that, I guess they can refurbish the ovens they used in their last genocide and put them back in service.


In conclusion, in which country is the current situation of Kurdish people the most likely to result in some kind of peace? How do you see the future of Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran?

Ironically, the country in which the Kurdish people will find some kind of peace will be Turkey. Turkey's elites are going to try to drag the rest of the country into the EU, so even though support for EU accession is at a low point, they will probably continue with it because they are too far along in the process.

There have been those in the Turkish elites who have made remarks here and there that indicate they realize very well that Turkey's future viability lies in full equality and freedom for the Kurdish people. Unfortunately, it has been these very same people who have created a monster of the majority Turkish population through a media and system that are dedicated to perpetuating ultra-nationalistic propaganda. I think it will take a few generations, if they start to undo the damage now, to turn the Turkish people into democrats. But that means they have to end the ultra-nationalist propaganda and change the system now.

There are certain groups within Turkey that are willing to work peacefully with Kurds. Most of these are among the intellectuals or are on the Turkish Left. Also, Kurds under Turkish occupation are not as isolated as those in other parts of Kurdistan.

Finally, the efforts of DTP in the recent election campaign have been Herculean and heroic. If this leadership can continue to grow in experience and maintain its determination--something that I do not doubt--then I,for one, feel great hope. Certainly I think DTP has made mistakes in the very recent past but, on the other hand, they are on the political frontlines and deal with the situation in and up-close and personal way every day, yet they continue to push the boundaries.

As bad as the situation in Turkey has been and can be, including with the recent declaration of a new OHAL (State of Emergency), I feel the most hope for this part of Kurdistan.

In Iraq, the greatest problem is the extreme corruption of the two main parties, the failure to provide basic services to the people, the repression of free speech, and a perverse refusal to invest in self-subsistence. Food is entirely imported, and that's a serious problem for a population that has always been predominately agricultural without going in to the danger of relying on surrounding, hostile regimes for a food supply.

Syria and Iran, the two allies, have the Kurdish regions they occupy virtually cut off from the rest of the world and are ruled by repressive, racist regimes.

The key is the Kurdish population of Turkey, the largest population of Kurds on earth. Equality and freedom for us, within the Turkish state, will transform the entire Middle East for the better.

Serkeftin! (Victory)

Posted by VINEYARDSAKER:


Comments:

Sebastians said...

Bravo.

GREETINGS from Poland.
July 23, 2007 11:22 AM

VINEYARDSAKER: said...

thanks!
July 23, 2007 12:10 PM

Hevallo said...

Mizgin leads the online world struggle against the psychological labelling of the Kurdish struggle as 'terrorist'. If we had just 10 or 20 more like her we would have 'Serkeftin' much sooner!

She is Mamosta! (Teacher)
July 23, 2007 2:19 PM

SebastianS said...

Some links are dead, for ex:” They may decide to do it to gain control over the oil at Mûsil and Kerkuk, or to secure their many +++business+++ interests"

I will ask about some things later.
July 23, 2007 2:19 PM

anticapitalista said...

An excellent interview especially seeing how the US/UK have been using the Kurds in Iraq to justify their imperialist occupation.

A couple of points I'd like to add about Greece's role in the 'capture' of Ocalan. The then PASOK ('socialist') government basically handed over Ocalan to the Turkish MIT in Kenya. This caused absolute outrage amongst ordinary Greeks, who have a good history of supporting the Kurds (unlike the Greek government(s) that were busy deporting Kurds back to Turkey, Iran and Iraq.) Huge demonstrations followed in Athens and Thessaloniki in support of Ocalan and the PKK. I remember going to a solidarity concert held in Aristotle square in Thessaloniki and at least 50,000 were there and on the demonstration earlier about 20,000. It was very clear to the Greek Left that the PKK were freedom fighters not terrorists, just as much as the ANC in South Africa and the PLO in Palestine fighting for their freedom.
At the same time I got to know some young "Turkish" Kurds (they were from Istanbul) who were studying at the University of Thessaloniki and they were very critical of the PKK, but from a Marxist/Trotskyist perspective. They argued that the PKK had basically considered ALL Turks as the enemy and the main aim of the PKK was an independent Kurdistan, whereas these young guys argued the main aim should be unity with Turkish workers against the Turkish state and for equal rights for all those that lived within the border s of Turkey. ie the class question was more important than the national question.

Anyhow, the oppression of the Kurds in Turkey still continues despite the so-called "European path" taken by the present Turkish government, and the "intervention' of the European Union. Until Kurds get their rights, they will, quite rightly, continue to resist.
July 23, 2007 3:00 PM

lukery said...

superb work. Thanks to both of you.
July 23, 2007 10:45 PM

Anonymous said...

I've been reading Hevala Mizgin's comments for a long time, and admire her accuracy, ferocity, and dedication. I'm glad you initiated this exchange with her, and I hope more people will better understand the murky relationships and political betrayals, commitments, and connections she outlines.

The only comment I would raise is about Mizgin's response that the overwhelming majority of Kurds are secular. Having spent several years among Kurds in Amed and elsewhere, I think the relationship between Kurds and religion, particularly Islam (altho' the Yezidi question is salient in S. Kurdistan, as witnessed by recent events between those communities) is much more complicated. Many, many Kurds are deeply pious and committed to an Islamic tradition, even as many, if not most, of those same people also support a Kurdish independence struggle.

Sure, within the 'PKK' and its various political/military entities an explicitly socialist orientation mitigates against religious identification, but I'd say the majority of ordinary civilian Kurds, in Turkey at least, are fairly committed to their faith as well.

I say this only because I think it complicates the picture in an important way. Kurdish friends of mine who embrace a socialist politics have continued to express concern at what they perceive as a growing Islamic movement within the Kurdish community of Amed and the region, a movement aimed at emphasizing religious connections over ethnic divisions within Turkey. There is evidence of a growing Islamic movement in places like Amed that is specifically aimed at Kurds.

And for what it's worth- I have encountered the same anti-semitic, paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda from Kurds in Turkey as I found among Turks. It makes sense - they are products of a shared ideological system in many ways, for all that Kurds have the crucially different experience of subjugation under an oppressive regime - but it serves to qualify Mizgin's assertion that Kurds don't share Turkish prejudices in this regard. It used to infuriate me, that Kurds, victims of genocidal politics and oppression, would spout the same twisted racist ideologies about another people. The distinction between 'a people' and 'a regime' crucial to maintain - difficult as it is to do sometimes. Otherwise we're not too much better than the others.

That's all for now - mostly I wanted to say Thanks, and Biji Hevala Mizgin!
July 24, 2007 6:10 AM

Anonymous said...

Hey VS, congratulations on all your interviews.

The other day you were asking for Scott's show from Monday. Here’s the show but it’s incomplete. I got the last 70 minutes.

http://www.mediafire.com/?cz2u1jy3xmo
July 25, 2007 4:24 PM

VINEYARDSAKER: said...

Hey - you are a champ! Thanks a lot. Cheers!

VS
July 25, 2007 4:38 PM

VINEYARDSAKER: said...

And thanks for pointing our mediafire.com to me - that is *exactly* what I needed for my blog.
July 25, 2007 4:47 PM

berxwedan said...

Excellent interview!

To "anonymous" that commented on the secular issue:

Secularism doesn't mean atheism. Many Kurds in northern Kurdistan are devout muslims, but they would think twice before involving religion into the Kurdish political process. The devout Kurds voting for the Turkish Islamic AKP party does so because they're not interested in the Kurdish political process, so the Kurdish secularism is safe.
July 25, 2007 5:27 PM

Mizgîn said...

First I would like to publicly thank the Saker for giving space to a Kurdish voice, especially one in support of the Kurdish freedom movement. There are not many who are willing to listen. Perhaps if the Saker had been appointed as "special envoy" to "coordinate the PKK," there would be hope for a political solution within the territorial integrity of Turkey at this moment.

Anticapitalista, I have no doubt the Greek people were outraged, as you describe, by their government's collaboration in the extraordinary rendition of Öcalan. It should be noted that the Russian Duma voted to grant asylum to Öcalan, but was overridden by the same enemies of the people. This is the problem of "democracies." People labor under the illusion that their will and their vote makes any difference.

The Istanbul Kurds must not have known much about the founding of "PKK." There were ethnic Turks among the founders and there are ethnic Turks in the mountains fighting for the Kurdish cause today. These ethnic Turks recognize the idea that "if one person ain't free, ain't anybody free," and that by fighting the cause of the most oppressed in Turkey, they are fighting for true freedom for Turks as well.

At the time of the founding of "PKK," the Turkish Left was more concerned with the revolution and felt that once it was achieved, they could then turn their sights toward the Kurdish people. The founders of "PKK" could not accept this, particularly after the 12 September coup. The atrocities of Diyarbakır Military Prison provided the moment of clarity necessary to shape many future lives. When those who survived were released in 1982, they joined "PKK" and were trained and ready to launch their first operations against the regime on 15 August 1984.

"PKK" formed an alliance with DHKP-C in the late 1990s (more on that kind of thing here and today there are socialist groups within Turkey who support the Kurdish people and Kurdish freedom movement. I have never heard that "PKK" had rejected any of this kind of support.

From the beginning, then, to say that "PKK" considers all Turks as the enemy is not correct. However, it's very possible that the Istanbul Kurds were completely unaware of the founding of "PKK." If it's difficult to find correct information in the West, imagine how much more difficult it is to find such information in a society that is completely saturated with the regime's fascist propaganda.

Anonymous, thanks for your comments and your points are well-taken. However I was responding to a question in a political context. I think that Berxwedan has given a good explanation of the position I was coming from in the interview.

Except for the KIU, I do not know of any other religiously-based party. I think there was some talk of another such party starting up in South Kurdistan a few months ago, but I really haven't seen much on that, so I don't want to count it.

On the other hand, when people vote for KDP, PUK, or DTP, I don't think they're doing it from a strictly religious position. There's an awareness of separation of religion and state, so that more religiously-minded people still feel that they can vote for these parties (or the "Kurdish List" as during the Iraq elections) without compromising their personal or social values that stem from religion.

Having spent time in Amed with religious families, the talk in the home centers much of the time on politics. Who do they support? "PKK." Why? Because "PKK" fights for the people. Back in the early 1990s, "PKK" eased it's position on religion because it realized it had to in order to be successful. This change was not disregarded by Kurdish imams, and they are able to accept it because they know "PKK" is concerned with the state and not with religion.

On the other hand, the movements and ideas that you mention that have infected segments of the Kurdish population with anti-semitism or aiming "at emphasizing religious connections over ethnic divisions within Turkey," are not genuine Kurdish ideas or movements. These ideas come from the Turkish-Islamists, especially from Fethullah Gülen. AKP is Gülen's party.

Turkish-Islamic synthesis was the agreement in the 1980s between Gülen's gang (Turgut Özel was a Gülen disciple), which led to the regime's founding and sponsorship of Turkish Hezbollah specifically to combat Kurdish nationalism and "PKK". We all know what Turkish Hezbollah did (and Kurdish imams in Turkey know, too). Turkish Hezbollah slaughtered Kurds, including moderately religious Kurds.

And now we have Gülen's propaganda institutes (i.e. schools) popping up all over South Kurdistan in order to turn Southern Kurds into good Turkish Islamists. Why does KRG allow this? Incredible!

Then there was the presence of Ansar al-Islam in and around Helebçe, which is a very conservative, very religious population. Yet even here, the people despised Ansar, especially after it beheaded pêşmerge of the progressive PUK inside a mosque. Ansar is no different than Turkish Hezbollah.

So the people are able to make the distinction between extremism and normal religion, as well as see the dangers that religion-in-politics brings. Therefore in their voting habits and in their civic ideas, I still think they are overwhelmingly secular. When they vote for DTP, or for the "Kurdish List" during the Iraqi elections, I don't think they were thinking too much of religion or were doing so from a religious position per se.

However, you are correct that in social life there are many people who are religious and that many of them do support the struggle. Therefore I don't think that we have any inherent disagreement on the state of the situation.

Hevallo, Lukery, and Berxwedan--Gelek sipas û Serkeftin!
July 25, 2007 8:55 PM

WANTED: A WELL-ARMED LAMB

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
~ Benjamin Franklin.

On Monday Özgür Gündem published a list of the Thousand Hopes (DTP) candidates and the list contained 23 names.

Now, it should only contain 22 names. Here's what happened:

In Turkey, there are 14 customs, or border, stations in which people, mainly guest workers from European countries, can vote. In this recent election, 226,784 valid votes came in from in these customs stations representing 14 different parties with the following percentages:

ATP 0.60 %,
BTP 0.36%,
SP 2.99%,
İP 0.49%,
CHP 17.75%,
HYP 0.35%,
ÖDP 0.46%,
GP 2.29%,
DP 2.73%,
LDP0.08%,
MHP 14.74 %,
AK Parti 56.75%,
EMEP 0.23%,
TKP 0.18 %.

The Higher Election Board (YSK) declared it would divide the customs votes by some kind of mystery math known only to itself --because it's not clearly explained anywhere--and apply the votes throughout the country.

In Culemêrg (Hakkari) AKP got 29.000 votes and independent candidates got 43.000. According to these results Hakkari should have two independent and one AKP parliamentarian. The Thousand Hopes (DTP) independent candidate Sebahattin Suğvacı recieved 14,677 votes and passed the AKP candidate Özbek by 45 votes. Hence the 23-member independent list that ÖG posted on Monday.

However, by means of mystery math and the customs votes, the YSK applied 232 votes to AKP’s Culemêrg (Hakkari) district, so that AKP wins one more seat from Hakkari, unseating Sebahattin Suğvacı.

This means that voters not from Culemêrg effectively voted in and for Culemêrg.

It was AKP that insisted that everyone vote in their hometown in a political move designed by AKP to screw CHP out of votes but now, in a move designed to screw DTP out of votes, YSK applies non-resident AKP votes to Culemêrg, thus undercutting the residents of Culemêrg and their political will.

If AKP were consistent in its policies, it would have insisted that the customs votes be applied to the hometowns of the customs voters.

This means that there are officially only 22 DTP parliamentarians-elect and who knows how many others AKP will try to unseat before the final official results are announced on 27 July.

Ah, well . . . yet another milestone in the long democratic march of the Turkish Republic.

What Berxwedan said:

I’m not an optimist. I’m a Kurd. I believe that the Kurdish independent MP’s will do everything in their power to raise hell in the parliament, and I believe that they will fight for every oppressed voice in Turkey. Will the Turkish ruling AKP party take a brave step to solve the Kurdish question? Well, didn’t Erdogan “try” that in Amed (Diyarbakir?) He did, and we saw increased Turkish military operations where Kurdish guerrillas were killed by chemical weapons and people protesting against this, were gunned down indiscriminately.

Amen, brother. They're already off to a bad start.

Many thanks to the heval who poured through all the Turkish media reports to help clarify this situation as much as possible.

FREEDOM FOR SEBAHAT

Thousand Hopes (DTP) parliamentary deputy-elect for Istanbul, Sebahat Tuncel, is released from prison. Photo at Özgür Gündem.

More on Sebahat Tuncel at Bianet.

There are a total of eight women among the Thousand Hopes (DTP) parliamentarians-elect:










On another subject, in connection with a post from a few days ago about the Turkish lobby, Luke Ryland's made a Sibel connection. Among other things, he has this to say:

I do hope that Crowley writes another article and looks at Turkish lobbying in general - because then he'd be right in the middle of the Sibel Edmonds case. Crowley would have to take a closer look at some of Turkey's other lobbyists - past and present - and he'd find that Douglas Feith and Richard Perle used to lobby for Turkey (although he'd be hard-pressed to identify exactly what they did for their money.) And he'd find that The Cohen Group (former Defense Secretary William Cohen, General Joe Ralston, former State Dept #3 Marc Grossman) is currently lobbying for Turkey, as is Ret. General Brent Scowcroft.

Crowley would probably find that most of these lobbyists are very close to the American Turkish Council (ATC), "a front for criminal activity," according to Sibel. And Crowley would probably find that although these lobbyists purport to be working for the Republic of Turkey, that might not actually be true. Ex-CIA agent Phil Giraldi says:

"The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government, and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing. Contracts in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars provide considerable fat for those well placed to benefit."

If Crowley takes a closer look at the ATC, home to all these lobbyists, he'll notice that the FBI has been running a counter-intelligence operation against them since the mid-Nineties. And he'd notice that Sibel's case, in part, is about the nuclear black market.

I hope Crowley does some investigation of the Turkish lobby, in particular the ATC, and then writes about it, too. Who knows where it might lead?

POST-ELECTION NOTES

"I dislike death, however, there are some things I dislike more than death. Therefore, there are times when I will not avoid danger."
~ Mencius

First of all, there's a finalized list of the Thousand Hopes (DTP) candidates at Özgür Gündem:

1- Diyarbakır: GÜLTAN KIŞANAK
2- Diyarbakır: AKIN BİRDAL
3- Diyarbakır: AYSEL TUĞLUK
4- Diyarbakır: SELAHATTİN DEMİRTAŞ
5- Batman: AYLA AKAT ATA
6- Batman: BENGİ YILDIZ
7- Mardin: AHMET TÜRK
8- Mardin: EMİNE AYNA
9- Şırnak: SEVAHİR BAYINDIR
10- Şırnak: HASİP KAPLAN
11- İstanbul 1. Bölge MEHMET UFUK URAS
12- İstanbul 3. Bölge SEBAHAT TUNCEL
13- Hakkari: HAMİT GEYLANİ
14- Hakkari: SABAHATTİN SUĞVACI
15- Muş: SIRRI SAKİK
16- Muş: M.NURİ YAMAN
17- Van: FATMA KURTULAN
18- Van: ÖZDAL ÜÇER
19- Dersim: ŞERAFETTİN HALİS
20- Bitlis: MEHMET NEZİR KARABAŞ
21- Siirt: OSMAN ÖZÇELİK
22- Urfa: İBRAHİM BİNİCİ
23- Iğdır: PERVİN BULDAN

It looks like we are still waiting to see what happens with the candidate from Adana, but for the time being some 13,000 votes are missing, as in not accounted for in the voting records. This is most likely the result of corruption.

Official results are supposed to be broadcast on 27 July.

There was a good summary of the elections on a map at Turkish NTV/MSNBC.

Shiraz Socialist has a well-balanced post on the elections. I don’t find too many that look at it in a more equitable way. Most on the extreme right-wing, fascist end of the spectrum in the US are hand-wringing over the Islamist thing. They trotted out Soner Çağaptay (of the neocon WINEP and ME Forum) today, on NPR, and he was trying to explain that there was a split in Turkey between Islamists vs Secularists, but it’s more than a split; it’s a crevasse of epic proportions.

One of the more interesting of Çağaptay's flights of fantasies was the suggestion that DTP renounce violence. I'm still trying to figure out how DTP can renounce what it has never engaged in.

I would point out that the ability of DTP to “beat off its previous excluded status”--to quote Voltaire at Shiraz Socialist--is incredible and is a measure of the determination of everyone involved with the campaigning. AKP has not communicated with DTP since the Amed Serhildan in March 2006. DTP politicians have suffered death threats and constant “legal” harassment, have been subjected to the state’s black operations–as has the entire Kurdish population–and finally, has had to function under conditions of “State of Emergency” or OHAL in three Kurdish areas.

If you recall the dirty war of the 1990s, you will know that OHAL, Turkey’s special version of martial law for the Kurdish people, was the period in which the most brutal human rights abuses took place. OHAL was finally lifted in 2002, but now it’s back.

As far as I’m concerned, DTP’s achievement in this election was nothing less than heroic.

Speaking of OHAL, we shouldn't forget that Turkey is planning to increase the number of special commandos to fight the PKK, and these were the same ones who were responsible for most of the atrocities against the Kurdish people in the 1990s. The possibility exists that this will happen again.

I'm not the only one concerned about the future, in spite of the achievement of DTP. Berxwedan at DozaMe has his concerns, too.

Finally, the Vineyard Saker blog has posted an interview with me in order to introduce some of his readers to the Kurdish situation and to help counter the recent propaganda aimed against the Kurdish people and their freedom movement by people like, you know, Soner Çağaptay.

THE KURDS ARE GOING TO ANKARA

It looks like some of the election returns are coming in and the Kurdish people will have 22 deputies to represent them in the Turkish parliament, for the first time since Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Selim Sadak, and Orhan Doğan were elected in 1991.

I am so happy, I am crying.

From Zaman:

Independent candidates supported by the Democratic Society Party (DTP), a strongly Kurdish-affiliated party, have won at least 22 parliamentary seats and will be able to form a group in Turkey’s legislature.

One of these new deputies, Sabahat Tuncel, will go to Parliament from prison. She had been incarcerated on claims of being a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

[ . . . ]

As Today’s Zaman was going to print it was almost clear that of those independent candidates supported by the DTP, the following will have a parliamentary seat:

From Hakkari, Sabahattin Suğracı and Hetem İlke;

From Mardin, the chairman of the DTP Ahmet Türk and Emine Ayna;

From Muş, Sırrı Sakık;

From İstanbul’s third district, Sebahat Tuncel;

From Şanlıurfa, İbrahim Binici;

From Van, Fatma Kurtulan;

From Şırnak, Hasip Kaplan and Sevahir Bayındır;

From Bitlis, Mehmet Nezir Karabaş;

From Diyarbakır, former Chairman of the Human Rights Association (İHD) Akın Birdal, Aysel Tuğluk, Gültan Kışanak and Selahattin Demirtaş;

From Siirt, Osman Özçelik;

From Tunceli, Şerafettin Halis;

From Batman, Ayla Akat Ata and Bengi Yıldız;

From Iğdır, Pervin Buldan.

The chairman of the Freedom and Solidarity Party, (ÖDP) Ufuk Uras, also supported by the DTP, won a seat. It is expected that he will join the DTP parliamentary group.

[ . . . ]

The election office of independent candidate Fatma Kurtulan was filled with her supporters as the preliminary results came in. A huge television screen was installed outside her office to follow the results. Similar euphoric scenes were seen in other eastern and southeastern cities.

In the meantime, Bloomberg is reporting that AKP was in the lead overall by 46.5% and is projected to have some 342 seats out of a total of 550 in the parliament. This isn't too much of a surprise, but at least we can be fairly certain that the more fascistic parties have not gained the upper hand.

In other news, Leyla Zana faces an investigation for her call for administrative states within Turkey, remarks that she made last Friday. Her remarks are not too different from the remarks of others, or their actions. Osman Baydemir has called for local control of local resources and Abdullah Demirbaş was removed from his position as mayor by the Council of State, and the Sur Municipality dissolved, for having provided city services in other languages besides just Turkish.

The Demirbaş/Sur case was, of course, another historic milestone for democracy.

With a minimum of 22 seats filled with pro-Kurdish parliamentarians, we shall see what happens next.

Hand me a tissue, would you?

THE PIMPS OF K STREET

"But the kingpin of Turkish advocacy is Bob Livingston, whose lobbying firm, the Livingston Group, has hauled in roughly $13 million in Turkish lucre since 2000."
~ Michael Crowley.

In comments the other day, someone dropped off a link to a great video produced by the Armenian National Committee of America. I wished that the video were available through YouTube so that I could embed it here. Today, I received an email which contained a link to the video on YouTube, so I am carrying the video here.

Along with the video was a link to an article from The New Republic by Micheal Crowley which discusses Washington's illustrious red-light district, known in "polite" society as "K Street." That's K Street, as in the center of power for the American lobby industry,and Crowley's article looks at the lobby industry through the lens of the Armenian Genocide. As an intro to the video, let's look at a part of that article, a part which deals with the rat you will see in the video:

With Rogan's [Jim, R-CA] seat on the line in 2000, a first-ever vote on a genocide resolution seemed a sure thing--that is, until the Turkish government mobilized its lobbying team, led by former Republican House Speaker Bob Livingston, its $700,000 man in the field. In a state of affairs one furious Republican described to Roll Call as "ridiculous," Livingston found himself battling a measure meant to protect the very House majority he had briefly presided over just two years earlier. A Turkish threat to cancel military contracts, including a $4.5 billion helicopter deal with a Fort Worth-based company, ensured the opposition of powerful Texas Republicans like Tom DeLay. Hastert was cornered. But he found cover in Bill Clinton, who warned that Turkey might shut down its American-run Incirlik air base, from which the United States patrolled the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Citing Clinton's objections, Hastert pulled the bill. Rogan tried to accuse Clinton of playing politics, and someone sent out a last-minute mailer featuring Schiff next to a Turkish flag. But it wasn't enough, and Schiff beat Rogan by nine percentage points.

The "Fort Worth-based" helicopter company would be Bell Helicopter Textron, whose employees helped to murder Kurdish civilians throughout the 1990s. And let's not forget that Bill Clinton (whose wife is now campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for the US presidency courtesy of Turkish Deep State campaign funds) provided more weapons, including illegal weapons transfers, to Turkey than any other administration in US history.

Turkey, in turn, used those American weapons to commit gross human rights abuses and violations of the laws of warfare against its Kurdish population. Along with that is the fact that US and UK sorties leaving Incirlik to protect the Kurdish people of South Kurdistan, ostensibly, were always called off by the Turkish general staff when they wanted to conduct their own sorties against the very same Kurdish people the US and UK were supposed to be protecting. Aircraft supplied courtesy of Bill Clinton and Lockheed Martin and paid for, in most part, by the US taxpayer.

In other words, the Clintons and their administration lackeys are guilty of the crime of genocide.

And speaking of Clinton lackeys, the article at TNR brings up the subject of Dick Gephardt, former "Young Turk"--his own label--and supporter of the Armenian Genocide Resolution back in the year 2000, who's become a pimp for Turkey in the same mold as Livingston:

A RISING St. Louis politician in the mid-1970s, Richard Gephardt was among a dynamic group of aldermen dubbed "The Young Turks." So perhaps it's not surprising that, 30 years later, the former Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives has aged into an Old Turk. This spring, Gephardt has been busy promoting his new favorite cause--not universal health care or Iraq, but the Republic of Turkey, which now pays his lobbying firm, DLA Piper, $100,000 per month for his services. Thus far, Gephardt's achievements have included arranging high-level meetings for Turkish dignitaries, among them one between members of the Turkish parliament and House Democratic leaders James Clyburn and Rahm Emanuel; helping Turkey's U.S. ambassador win an audience with a skeptical Nancy Pelosi; and, finally, circulating a slim paperback volume, titled "An Appeal to Reason," that denies the existence of the Armenian genocide of 1915.

[ . . . ]

Even more striking than the historic Turkish-Armenian hatred festering in the halls of Congress, however, is the way Washington's political elites are cashing in on it. Take Gephardt. While the Turks and Armenians have a long historical memory, Gephardt has an exceedingly short one. A few years ago, he was a working-class populist who cast himself as a tribune of the underdog--including the Armenians. Back in 1998, Gephardt attended a memorial event hosted by the Armenian National Committee of America at which, according to a spokeswoman for the group, "he spoke about the importance of recognizing the genocide." Two years later, Gephardt was one of three House Democrats who co-signed a letter to then House Speaker Dennis Hastert urging Hastert to schedule an immediate vote on a genocide resolution. "We implore you," the letter read, arguing that Armenian-Americans "have waited long enough for Congress to recognize the horrible genocide." Today, few people are doing more than Gephardt to ensure that the genocide bill goes nowhere.

It's Gephardt's DLA Piper connection that links him to some of the worst monsters of the Clinton bureaucracy because DLA Piper is the legal partner of The Cohen Group. The Cohen Group was founded by Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, while two other former Clinton bureaucratic lapdogs help run the show--former NATO chief and current Lockheed Martin PKK Coordinator Joseph Ralston and former ambassador to Turkey, the slimy Marc Grossman.

You can read the entire The New Republic article here.

Now, on to the show. By the way, did you know that Livingston had to resign his place in the House of Representatives for adultery? Well, now you do know.

AKP AND THE IMF

There's a pretty good analysis of the AKP's policies during it's tenure as the ruling party in Turkey, and it's available at the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Take a look at the following:

Many AKP voters share [this] hostility to the IMF. While Prime Minister Erdogan has said little publicly about the IMF, the AKP’s grassroots activists employ radical anti-IMF rhetoric to take advantage of this widespread sentiment. In fact, the country’s recent economic expansion has chiefly been based on IMF loans, speculative inflows, the growth of debt and current account deficits and, above all, the increased exploitation of the working class.

The fact is that during its period of government, the AKP turned into a loyal disciple of the IMF and its austerity programme. The government rushed through the massive and swift privatisation of public assets, passed a labour law based on the employer’s needs for a “flexible” work force, and launched major attacks on working people in the field of social security. At the same time, the agricultural policies of the AKP have prompted angry protests by farmers.

[ . . . ]

The AKP government has so far resisted pressure from the armed forces, as well its nationalist civilian supporters—the so-called “unarmed forces”—for a parliamentary vote on a cross-border military operation into neighboring Iraq. The AKP is well aware of the fact that such a move could jeopardise its electoral fortunes as well as “investor confidence.”

In the event of any international crisis, the fast-paced, yet fragile, economic growth in Turkey will end as it did in 1994, 1999 and 2001. Nevertheless, the government has emphasised the temporary economic recovery, and its propaganda has been taken up by much of the Turkish media, as well as the trade unions.

The reality is that this growth is not creating enough new jobs and has only stabilised the level of unemployment at 10 percent (this is the official rate for unemployment; the real rate is presumed to be higher). Some economists refer to this as jobless growth, and poverty still is prevalent. It is mainly bourgeois and upper middle-class layers who have benefited from the very fast economic growth. Nevertheless, many AKP voters still regard the present situation as preferable to the many economic crises and rampant inflation of the past.

The Islamist AKP is also able to rely on its own nationwide system of social support networks. While the central government carries out the dictates of the banks, which require painful cuts to the country’s welfare provision, AKP activists intervene at a grassroots level to offer some relief by providing charitable contributions to those who are worst hit. This is a typical feature of Islamists in different parts of the world. Privatisation, market reforms, the weakening of a public school system, etc., create more and more space for such Islamist social support work.

The AKP will most likely take the majority vote, especially in the central Anatolian region. With AKP as the ruling party once again, it will have to do what it can to reduce the threat the Turkish regime poses to its neighbors in order to comply with the requirements of the globalists, with whom it is in bed.

IMF meddling has the potential to utterly destroy the Turkish economy, exactly as happened in Argentina a few years ago, and there's more on Argentina's economic meltdown in an article that orginally appeared in the WaPo.

That globalization encourages the expansion of "Islamist social support work," is no problem for the vultures who force globalization under the guise of "democracy'; they are the same vultures who found it convenient to overlook the brutal religious fundamentalism of the Taliban in order to secure control of energy pipelines through Afghanistan.

PREPARING FOR SUNDAY

"Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals."
~ Lucy Parsons.

The elections take place this Sunday, and for that reason, consider this post as a homework assignment to prepare yourself even if you're not voting. After all, you'll have to unwind the spin that's bound to come from the media on Monday. And, yes, it does have a test, as a matter of fact.

Do you know where you stand on the political spectrum? If not, take the test at The Political Compass. You'll find out whether you're right or left, fascist/authoritarian or anarchist/libertarian. You'll find out if you're standing on the spectrum next to Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, or George W. Bush. Then you can check out the reading list to learn more about your position on the compass.

Then go over to KHRP and check out their briefing for the Turkish elections--thanks to Hevallo for the head's up on that. The briefing is in .pdf on KHRP's homepage. It's a backgrounder in a nutshell:

The means deployed to prevent the Kurds in the Southeast from electing a pro-Kurdish representative for the national parliament distorts Turkey’s proportional electoral system and denies the Kurdish population the right to have their free will expressed and heard.

Obviously, there's no democracy here.

Some have said that the current "State of Emergency" in Sêrt, Culemêrg, and Şirnex is not really an OHAL as in the 1990s, but it is a de facto OHAL and that's the conclusion that KHRP has reached:

The security situation has deteriorated and the military has declared the south-eastern areas of Siirt, Hakkâri and Şırnak a High Security Zone since 9 June.

[ . . . ]

At the same time, KHRP has received reports of security forces intimidating villagers in the area which has been declared a High Security Zone, in order to make them abstain from voting for independent candidates. These reports must be taken very seriously as intimidation by security forces constitutes a flagrant violation of the principle that the people through elections should be able to freely express their will.

[ . . . ]

Targeted security cautions in the form of roadblocks and identity checks by armed officials frustrate the efforts of pro-Kurdish parties like the DTP to function freely. While Prime Minister Erdoğan has denied that the declaration of a High Security Zone in the provinces of Siirt, Hakkâri and Şırnak meant that the so called Emergency Rule Region (OHAL) was in place again, in practice access to the area by civilians has been heavily restricted. Reports of security forces intimidating voters in the region add to the concern that voters in the area will be prevented from expressing their will freely in the elections.

There you have it--a virtual OHAL--and it's only a matter of time before atrocities similar to those committed against the Kurdish people in the 1990s are widespread again. It's interesting to note that no one from the EU has condemned Turkey for the de facto OHAL, especially since it went into effect during the campaign period.

In addition to a description of the 10% threshold, the threat the main Turkish parties feel from the independent candidates, and the regime's response to that perceived threat, there's also a short discussion of the language issue with regard to campaigning:

According to Article 58 of the Law on Basic Provisions on Elections and Voter Registers it is strictly forbidden to use any other language than Turkish in “electioneering”. As part of its reform process, prohibitions on the use of other languages than Turkish have been loosened up, and in August 2002 laws were changed to allow limited broadcasting and education in languages other than Turkish. However, the prohibition on the use of any other language than Turkish in electioneering remains in force. Before the 2002 elections, several candidates and supporters in the Southeast had cases filed against them or were detained for speaking Kurdish at rallies or for playing Kurdish music.

If anyone still believes that things have changed since 2002 or before, with regard to the use of Kurdish language in politics, read about some of the recent incidents to the contrary, from the hevals at KurdishInfo.

With KHRP's short description of the facts on the ground regarding the language issue and campaigning, and with the list of abuses at KurdishInfo, take a look at this piece of information from The Economist:

In the Kurds' unofficial capital, Diyarbakir, Kurdish women were recently ululating appreciatively as Mehdi Eker, the farm minister, reeled off the government's achievements and goals: average annual growth of 7.3% (nearly four times the EU figure), a record $20 billion in foreign direct investment, $40 billion in tourism earnings by 2013. “We gave your children free textbooks, brought the internet to their schools, and water to all your villages,” said Mr Eker. He was speaking the most common Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji. Until the AK Party passed a raft of constitutional and judicial changes, he might have been jailed on separatism charges for doing so.

Sayın Eker failed to mention that AKP gave the green light for TSK to murder Kurdish children during the Amed Serhildan in March 2006, or to torture them in the aftermath. Naturally The Economist is lying about constitutional or judicial changes that allow the honorable Sayın Eker to speak Kurmancî while campaigning. The reason for the lack of jailing on "separatism charges" in the case of Mehdi Eker is that he is not one of the DTP candidates. This is the same kind of reality that convicts Ahmed Türk and Aysel Tüğlük for referring to Öcalan as "Sayın" but lets Erdoğan get away unpunished for doing the same thing.

Or compare the situation of DTP's Selahattin Demirtaş to that of Mehdi Eker:

"The fact that we were forced to stand as independents is in itself a manifestation of undemocratic practice," said Selahattin Demirtas, one of about 20 to 30 Kurds expected to make it into the 550-seat parliament.

His woes do not end there: Demirtas cannot address his electorate in Kurdish because Turkish is the only legal language of the election campaign.

"It is so hard to have a real dialogue with the people. Sometimes I feel I fail to get my message through," he said as he toured impoverished villages near Diyarbakir.

The 34-year-old lawyer still greets the villagers in Kurdish before switching to Turkish for his speech.

But the questions come in Kurdish: one man asks Demirtas whether he would help the jobless relatives of a local party activist if elected. One woman complains that their only source of water is the fountain on the village square.

Demirtas answers patiently -- in Turkish.

To compensate where his message may fail, a Kurdish-speaking imam steps in.

Read on and see what the Kurdish imam has to say about Islamist AKP.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued its own press release and backgrounder on the Paşas' meddling in the months before Sunday's elections and the civilian Ankara regime's total failure to maintain momentum on human rights reforms--no problem there, actually, since the reforms are all cosmetic anyway. The HRW report contains more detail than KHRP's briefing, but the examples given are more of the same and it makes for very good pre-election reading.

Just so everyone can remember what is what and who is really who within the Model of Democracy.

On Sunday, vote the pomegranate to help guarantee the fulfilment of a thousand hopes for millions of the oppressed.

PAYING FOR POLICY

"The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day."
~ Michael Deaver.

Well, well, well . . . it looks like Hevallo wrote something he shouldn't have written--something like the truth.

Earlier today, Hevallo wrote a post in which he put forth the proposition that ExxonMobil may be paying the AEI to change foreign policy vis-a-vis Iraq. Naturally, such a foreign policy change would also be directed against South Kurdistan. To support his proposition, he includes a link to a new screed from the virulent anti-Kurdish AEI resident scholar, Michael Rubin. By the way, this new screed was presented as testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Don't remember Rubin? Rubin's the guy who pretends to have no clue as to the bloody repression the Ankara regime has inflicted on Kurds since 1923.

Hevallo points out that it was just at the beginning of this year that ExxonMobil was found to have paid a number of ideology factories to lie to the public about the state of global warming. Prominent among those ideology factories was Michael Rubin's AEI. See Hevallo's post for the link.

It's not out of the ordinary for big corporations to pay to have propaganda deposited in the American mainstream media. Philip Morris, the huge tobacco corporation, gave $100,000 to the AEI in 1997 and it was in the same year that the Washington Post published a report on how Philip Morris had tried to "systematically woo[ed] scientists who might help the company counter the growing consensus on the health risks of secondhand tobacco smoke and 'keep the controversy alive.'" According to the WaPo, Philip Morris was up to this particular propaganda trick way back in 1988.

Basically, ExxonMobil attempted the same thing with AEI over climate change. Since AEI accepted the bribe, we might as well conclude that it's been in the business of propagandizing for the corporate world for some time.

Is this a case of mere coincidence, synchronicity, or of the best laid plans?

It's also a fact that Rubin was one of the neoconservative apparatchiks who worked closely with the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, alongside such luminaries as Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and, of course, Donald Rumsfeld. And as Hevallo correctly points out, the disgraced Wolfowitz is back at the AEI, after being forced to leave the World Bank for having the nerve to ice his cupcake (Shaha Ali Riza)--as I heard Greg Palast once put it--while lecturing the rest of the world about corruption.

Further illuminating information about the nature of Rubin-as-apparatchik can be gleaned from a 2002 report in the UK's Guardian. According to the research, Rubin was a busy little bee in the run-up to the Iraq war:

Michael Rubin, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently arrived from yet another thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assists Mr Perle and Mr Wurmser at AEI. Mr Rubin also belongs to the Middle East Forum.

[ . . . ]

The Washington Institute, for example, takes the credit for placing up to 90 articles written by its members - mainly "op-ed" pieces - in newspapers during the last year.

Fourteen of those appeared in the Los Angeles Times, nine in New Republic, eight in the Wall Street Journal, eight in the Jerusalem Post, seven in the National Review Online, six in the Daily Telegraph, six in the Washington Post, four in the New York Times and four in the Baltimore Sun. Of the total, 50 were written by Michael Rubin.

Anyone who has tried offering op-ed articles to a major newspaper will appreciate the scale of this achievement.

I can feel the pain, man.

If anyone thinks that this kind of thing is unusual, an aberration, think again. It's not just that big corporations donate to ideology factories; they also hire PR firms, or lobby firms, to plant biased information in the media. This is done in order to gain public support for foreign policy shifts that the corporatocracy is paying organizations like AEI to swing for them in Congress. To get that side of the story, read the teaser from Harper's Ken Silverstein on his undercover investigative work on the subject, or the hypocritical criticism he received from the media lapdogs who so eagerly publish the corporatocracy's propaganda. Alternatively, you can listen to an interview with him in which he describes how the lobby firms he scammed admitted that they had planted stories in the American media many times.

But the point about Hevallo's post is that US foreign policy is being encouraged in the direction of Turkey against the Kurds, and that Rubin has a heavy hand in the business, very possibly all bought and paid for by ExxonMobil. Rubin, the AEI, and ExxonMobil must have been laying these plans for some time because last November a small item was carried in Hürriyet which pretty much outlined Rubin's pimping of the establishment's foreign policy that he's pitching to Congress now. The Hürriyet article was brought to us by the hevals at KurdishInfo:

In his fax to me, Rubin explained that he had given this interview by email. He said: "I never said such things. In fact, I said the complete opposite. Here is precisely what I said concerning Turkey and Iraq's other neighboring countries: Whenever I go to Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds tell me that they are our best allies, and that this friendship needs to be reciprocal. I am sorry, but this is wrong on many levels.

[ . . . ]

The Iraqi Kurds can believe what they want about Turkey, but the fact remains that for as long as Iraqi Kurdistan is a home to terrorists, Washington will always be on the side of Ankara, and not Erbil or Suleymaniye.

The fact remains that the US, and particularly the neoconservative faction, has supported the real terrorists in Turkey for decades and has supplied them with billions of dollars in weapons, which the terrorist regime used on Kurdish civilians, murdering tens of thousands and forcibly displacing millions.

There's more on Rubin, Kurds, and the plague of neoconservatism from March. As Rubin once said in a rebuttal to a Vanity Fair press release on an article about neocon whitewashing of their role in forming the failing policy of the Iraq war:

I absolutely stand by what I said. Too many people in Washington treat foreign policy as a game.

I'm sure he means it too, along with the implication that he, himself, does not treat foreign policy as a game. For Rubin, and those like him, foreign policy is a business for sale to the highest bidder.

Hevallo's been making the point, too, that the US is using TSK as a means of forcing an unjust and rapacious oil law down the throats of Iraqis--Kurds included. Now with Hevallo's post on ExxonMobil's purchase of propaganda from the AEI, and AEI's Rubin providing biased testimony to the US Congress on the situation in Iraq, I think it's very clear that Hevallo is on the right track.

In fact, I think ExxonMobil thinks so, too, and that's why their lawyers are perusing Hevallo's blog, much in the same way that Lockheed Martin had it's propaganda firm, Public Strategies, Inc., peruse Rastî. I'm waiting to hear that the Genelkurmay Başkanlığı has gotten around to take a gander at Hevallo's work. When that happens, it'll be time for a congratulatory drink or two. After all, there are bastards and then there are bastards.

Know what I mean?

In the meantime, Hevallo should be given a round of applause for having garnered the attention of the first category of bastards.

Dest xweş, Heval!

WE SHALL OVERCOME

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome some day.
~ Pete Seeger.

This coming Sunday will be election day in Turkey. Many remember that the Ankara regime, and both the AKP and CHP in particular, has done what it can since the Amed Serhildan to marginalize the pro-Kurdish DTP. The regime has refused to engage in a dialog with DTP politicians. It has sent army officers to register soldiers to vote in "The Southeast." It continues to support the racist 10% threshold. It's even attempted to prevent illiterate Kurds from voting for the independent candidates--and all of DTP's candidates are running as independents--by changing the ballot at the last minute:

As regards independent candidates, on the other hand, no one can defend that either the ruling AKP or the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) performed in any manner compatible with democracy when they legislated in haste to include names on independents in the joint ballot sheets rather than letting them run on separate voting papers. They did that hoping that the practice will lead to confusion among the mostly illiterate voters of the southeast "where many pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) people are running as independent candidates" and thus the number of "unwanted DTP people" in Parliament would be limited.

And that's aside from the fact that no one seems to be asking why a regime which has expressed a desire to enter the EU has not invested in a part of its own territory, a part which it treats as an internal colony and not as an equal region of the nation. There is no discussion of why the Ankara regime maintains its internal Kurdish colony in extreme poverty, why it destroyed what little economy existed there after the destruction it wrought in the days following the founding of the modern state, why there is no investment in jobs, infrastructure, services, housing, or education. Things, you know, that are taken for granted in civilized nations.

But DTP has been working to overcome the obstacles placed in its path by those in power who keep Kurds out of the political process. Specifically, it's been educating its voter base on the new ballots and how to find DTP candidates on the ballots. This is no small task given that Amed"s (Diyarbakır) ballot is some two meters long. DTP has hit upon the idea of creating and passing out templates for the ballots, that have a hole in the place where the independent DTP candidate's name is located. Another plan is to use pieces of string to measure the distance to the independent's name. Failing these helps, DTP is encouraging voters to take underage children with them, who can read the ballot for them, a rule that is applied throughout Turkey.

All of these methods have been designed to help the illiterate voter find the DTP candidate on the ballot. It's important to remember that not only is this a racial issue, but it's also a women's issue, because many poor women in "The Southeast" are illiterate. More can be read about DTP's efforts at voter education at TDN.

In order to see what I mean, check out this video from Youtube, prepared for Şirnax's independent DTP candidate, Hasip Kaplan:

Another video on the matter, showing templates and strings can be seen at CNN Türk. Although it's all in Turkish, you can still see what DTP's election activists have been up to.

Özgür Gündem has a list of the parliamentary candidates running under the banner of One Thousand Hopes. Check the homepage and the pink box in the right-hand margin, labeled "Seçim Gündemi." Do not be alarmed if you see a black page come up at first at the link. Özgür Gündem was shut down by the Ankara regime last Thursday (12 July) for a period of 15 days, in another attempt to keep election news from ÖG's readers, and the physical papers were confiscated. Hevallo has more.

The website is still up and running and you will be redirected to the ÖG homepage or, if you're the impatient type, click on the link at the bottom of the black page.

DozaMe has a great music video posted.

Finally, one of the MHP candidates has decided to emigrate from Turkey because he refuses to sit under the same roof with DTP.

Good riddance, pal.

Finally, Akşam reports on a secret agreement between PKK and the KDP, in which 1,000 PKK gerîlas may become part of the KRG's pêşmerge forces under Aziz Weysî. Weysî, at one time a PKK gerîla himself, established the KDP's special forces. According to intelligence information obtained by the Turkish general staff, the PKK forces which join the KDP's special forces will be deployed to protect the border between South Kurdistan and Turkish-occupied Kurdistan.

Last May, Cemil Bayık stated, "If the Kurds go to war with the Arabs over Kirkuk we will help them. We don’t just fight for ourselves."

One thing is for certain: If true, this secret agreement is just the beginning of the Paşas' worst nightmare.

SERKEFTIN!

DECONSTRUCTING DISINFORMATION, PART 2

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
~ Edward Bernays.

We left off yesterday by demonstrating that PKK is clearly not Maoist nor has ever been, and that it is the Deep State and its supporters who created and continue to perpetuate this lie, we can move on to the rest of the Deep State's propaganda at Another Day in the Empire (ADITE).

First of all, in the transcript of the German ARD TV report, the very first paragraph contains a huge lie. It says that there's a "secret" war going on that is unnoticed by the world's public. The fact is that the war in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan is far from secret. Millions of words have been written on it since the 1990s with many of those words typed out by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, or journalistic organizations such as Reporters Without Borders or the International PEN organizations. Millions of other words documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the Ankara regime, with the full backing of the US, the EU, and the rest of the international community can be found in the evidence, trial transcripts,and judgements against Turkey by the European Court of Human Rights. Academics and journalists have written millions more words in further documentation of atrocities committed against the Kurdish people. In English alone the story of the genocide of Kurds under Turkish occupation can be read by such writers as Noam Chomsky, John Tirman, Kevin McKiernan, Jonathan Randal, David McDowall, and Paul White.

How then can anyone claim in all seriousness that there is a "secret" war going on? Unless, of course, they are the lapdogs of fascism as practiced by the Ankara regime? Who benefits from such a claim? The US government, whose foreign policy is formulated by Lockheed Martin? The Paşas, who run a business empire and a so-called democratic, civil government?

Just as a month ago the propagandists of the Deep State wanted to make us believe a ceasefire had been called by PKK in the middle of June when PKK's ceasefire had gone into effect on 1 October 2006. What's notable about the ceasefire is that it may be the first ceasefire in history that was rejected days before it went into effect, and that rejection came from the Washington and Ankara regimes just as the American "PKK coordinator," Joseph Ralston--who also happens to be a registered lobbyist with The Cohen Group in order to export tactical fighter aircraft, as well as having served in 2006 as a member of the advisory board of the ATC, as well as serving on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin . . . well, you see how it goes--was wrapping up Turkey's $13 billion purchase of Lockheed product.

So tell me, who are the real terrorists here?

The rest of the German transcript contains nothing that we don't already know. Cemil Bayık confirmed as much last November. At the end of June a small news item appeared in Kurdish-language media about the very same ARD report and it's most likely the source of the pro-mullah PressTV report. According to both reports, the American generals give a pretty good impression of CYA; they have to "overlook" PJAK's activities because there isn't a damned thing they can do about them, short of sending a bunch of grunts humping up and down those 12,000 foot peaks--on foot, mind you--to play hide-and-seek with the gerîlas. Ditto for PKK's gerîlas.

And while we're on that subject, let's make it crystal clear for the umpteenth time (just like Heval Cuma did): PJAK, and HAK, its armed wing, fall under the umbrella of KCK, which is the real organization that "outsiders" always refer to as "PKK." PKK itself no longer exists as a party, but as an ideological school. But this is what Cuma quite openly said to Western media last November, that anyone who wants to have anything to do with PJAK or HAK must go through KCK (or as those out-of-the-know keep saying, "PKK"). There is no "cover" here; PJAK/HAK are members of KCK and all of their support comes from the Kurdish people through KCK.

The hand-wringing of ADITE for the loss of filthy pasdarans blown to bits by HAK's remote-control bombs is, frankly, pretty damned hypocritical in light of the fact that you don't read anything there about any concern for the atrocities committed by the mullahs against the Kurds under Iranian occupation. But, since I'm aware of the atrocities and repression, I'm of the opinion that every time a pasdaran has his guts blasted all over a wall or a road in Iranian-occupied Kurdistan, it's a moment for a celebratory drink or two. And not only for that reason, but also for the continued health, well-being, and success of all "PKK's" gerîlas.

Naturally, I wonder, too, at the hypocrisy of quoting a journalist famous for his "unnamed" sources, Seymour Hersh, because I wonder why-- if Seymour Hersh is so concerned with Israeli involvement in South Kurdistan--did he never write anything about this during the heyday of Israeli involvement back in the 1960s and 70s? I mean, Hersh never even mentions the fact. Or why does neither Hersh nor ADITE mention the fact that PKK (back in the day when it really was PKK) received its initial training from the Palestinians in Lebanon? That's pretty ironic, given that the link to Hersh takes you to a Palestinian website. Maybe both Hersh and ADITE can start bitching about the Palestinians for helping the nascent PKK to get its military start. At least then they'd be consistent.

I'd also like to see some consistency from Hersh over the atrocities his pals in the Ankara regime have inflicted on the Kurdish people because he's one of those who's never contributed so much as a single word to all those millions of words written on the matter that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Don't hold your breath for that, though, because neither Hersh nor ADITE is concerned about things like justice or human rights; they're out to simply bash the American administration over the head a few times for the simple pleasure of bashing. Human rights and justice are not the concerns of the overwhelming majority of Americans. For them, "might makes right" is the main concern and if it guarantees a cool few hundreds of millions of dollars per annum for Lockheed Martin, then it's even better. What's a little blood money among friends anyway?

There's a glaring omission in the ADITE post, and that's the fact of a few hundred thousand Mehmetçiks swarming at the border like flies on stink. They've been there since the end of April 2006, when Condoleezza Rice made a visit to Ankara. They were bombing Kurdish villages as Condoleezza Rice was in Ankara. Her very presence in the Turkish capital while the good NATO ally was lobbing artillery fire into Kurdish villages and flocks was the green light. People are saying there will be no invasion before the 22 July elections in Turkey, but there may not be an invasion until after Iraq makes a decision on Washington's oil revenues laws. But you don't hear anything about that from ADITE or from Hersh as he prattles on and on about his so-called "Plan B."

Instead, it's very likely that Hevallo has nailed the matter once again. A Turkish invasion of South Kurdistan will be the US Plan B, if Baghdad does not agree to Big Oil's theft of Iraqi oil revenues.

For a little review of the rapacious plans of Big Oil, check out the following:

Future of Iraq; The spoils of war.

Blood and Oil.

Keeping Iraq's Oil In the Ground.

DECONTSTRUCTING DISINFORMATION, PART 1

"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution."
~ W. Lance Bennett.

Sometimes the spin is so bad that you just don't know where to begin.

I'm referring to a recent post about PJAK at the Another Day in the Empire blog. I guess it might be best to start at the beginning with the name-calling:

. . . German television reported the Maoist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK), has “killed over 200 Iranians,” a handful by way of IED . . .

In the old days, when the PKK was the PKK, it never claimed to be Maoist. It never espoused Maoist ideology. The reason for that is very simple: Öcalan was never affiliated with any Turkish left groups that defined themselves through Maoist ideology. Of course, in a day and age when no one can remember what happened six months ago, I realize it's a big stretch for me to expect anyone to remember the history of Turkish leftist groups of the 1970s, but if someone's going to come out and post such an asinine phrase as "the Maoist Kurdistan Workers' Party," they damned well better be able to back it up. But they can't because they wouldn't know that Kurds existed unless they were able to use Kurds for their own agendas and the so-called experts won't back up their name-calling because they're generally agents of the Ankara regime, either formally or informally.

But I'm digressing a bit here. To get on with it, there were a number of Turkish leftist groups in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. These became more radicalized after the military coup of 1971 which the Turkish left violently opposed. In 1971, as with all the hard coups, the Paşas declared a "state of emergeny," deprived the people of the right of free association and the right to strike, and arrested all kinds of "undesirables" like students, activists, intellectuals, and certain politicians--you know, the usual suspects.

At the time of the coup, Öcalan was in Ankara and had been attending the prestigious Ankara University Faculty of Political Science. He was aware of the various political groups around him and his sympathies were with Mahir Çayan and the THKP. This group, the THKP (Popular Liberation Party of Turkey), was influenced by the Marxist ideology of Latin America in general and of Che Guevara in particular. Mahir Çayan was killed by the state with a number of other leftists in 1972 in the Kızıldere massacre. Öcalan himself was arrested and imprisoned for seven months in Mamak prison for having attended a protest of the Kızıldere massacre. After his release from prison, Öcalan remained a sympathizer of THKP (by that time, THKP-C), and was elected to the management committee of an organization of THKP sympathizers.

Throughout this period, Öcalan was working on the formation of a Kurdish version of these leftist groups but there can be no doubt that there was an influence on Öcalan's political thinking by THKP, which looked to the ideology of Che Guevara for its inspiration and not to Maoist ideology.


For more on that, see Turkey's Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan, by Ali Kemal Özcan.

Much later, in the late 1990s,the PKK and DHKP-C formed an alliance and this alliance was an example of mutual ideological sympathies. Around the same time, the DHKP-C and THKP-C issued a statement reaffirming their ideologies. Both continued to hold to Mahir Çayan's interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, stating that "[s]ince the death of Mahir Çayan to the combat (on March 30, 1972), his comrades did not cease following this line."

Remember, it was Mahir Çayan who favored a Latin American version of Marxism-Leninism, particularly that of Che Guevara. While criticizing Soviet communism, DHKP-C also criticized Mao's communism as having made the same mistakes as Stalin:

It is also what Mao did. The theses of Mao over the transitional period shows the errors of Stalin and supplements his theses.

In this direction it is interesting to quote the theses of Mao:“The transition to Communism does not consist obviously of the inversion of a class by another. But that does not mean to say that there will be no social revolution, because the replacement of a type of yield of production by another is a qualitative jump, a revolution ".

They are the social forces and policies which refused the change of the relations of production and of the superstructure which brought to the capacity the revisionism in Soviet Union.

In contrast, in 1996, true to Mahir Çayan, THKP-C and DHKP-C still favored Che's ideology:

The revolutionary personality of Che offers the best example of proletarian internationalism to us: “I leave behind me here my creative dreams most naive, dreams which relate to those that I like and my people which adopted me as if I were one of his sons. That means for me to tear off a share of my heart. On the new ground of fight, I will take along with me the convictions that you gave me, the revolutionary spirit of my people and the certainty that there is no nobler task to achieve than to fight Imperialism, whatever the place where I am “.

It is in these words that Che took leave of Cuba, the people and the leader of this country for the release of which he had fought.

In spite of the obvious--including the fact that PKK never defined itself as Maoist--in spite of the sympathy of Öcalan for Mahir Çayan and Latin American Marxism, in spite of the fact that PKK made alliances with groups on the Turkish left who followed Mahir Çayan, in spite of the fact that neither PKK, nor THKP-C, nor DHKP-C, nor any affiliated groups espoused Maoism or linked up for any length of time with Turkish Maoist groups--such as Kaypakkaya's TKP/ML--certain "experts" still spread the "PKK is Maoist" lie.

Funny, but the Maoist lie centers around organizations affiliated with the Neoconservative-Deep State core in the US. A simple Google search of "PKK Maoist" reveals the following groups, among others:


1. Soner Cagaptay, resident neocon/Deep State propagandist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Soner disseminates his disinformation also through The Middle East Forum. He's also got a little something at WINEP, and it truly is very little. All his sources are administration lapdog American media, WINEP, or himself.

2. The Middle East Forum, promoting America's interests even when it means genocide. The propaganda organ here, The Middle East Quarterly, for which old Soner writes, happens to be edited by Michael Rubin, resident neocon/Deep State propagandist for the American Enterprise Institute. Also involved with promoting America's interests at The Middle East Forum is Ziad Abdelnour, a Wall Street thief who happens to be a co-founder and president of Lebanon's version of the ATC--the US Committee for a Free Lebanon. Among other propagandists at The Middle East Forum are Joseph Farah of World Net Daily, William Kriston of Lockheed Martin's The Weekly Standard, Daniel Pipes, and two Hudson freaks--Laurent Murawiec and Meyrav Wurmser.

3. The Jamestown Foundation is another source of disinformation and propaganda for the Deep State. It's headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Enough said.

4. The Foreign Policy Research Institute also tries to spin itself silly when it comes to the legitimate struggle of the Kurdish people against state-sponsored terror and genocide. But, what do you expect when a Nazi like Dov Zackheim is helping with the spin. Sieg Heil, Dov.


Of course, the question is where does the Another Day in the Empire blog fit in among all these fine, upstanding examples of humanity in the Deep State clique?

We'll try to find that answer tomorrow.

ANOTHER WARNING

"The potential of women, who make up half of the society, in the service of the revolution and their hidden and suppressed talents and intelligence in creating an entire society based on equality is the most humane and the most radical characteristic of our revolution."
~ PKK 5th Congress Resolution Concerning the Women's Army and the Free Women's Movement.

Earlier I had posted something about the likely effects of permanent military bases in South Kurdistan, part of which had to do with the possible effects on Kurdish women. It's likely that the effects would seriously impact the work of women's rights activists in a region where repression of women is still all too common.

In 2005, Amnesty International issued a report on the situation of women in Iraq and significant examples of abuse in South Kurdistan are included. The examples provide a snapshot of Kurdish women's situation in the recent past, including the sale of Kurdish young women and girls by the Saddam regime, incidents of honor murders, impunity of honor murders as a result of not vigorously applying the law against such murders, and mutilation as a punishment for "honor" crimes.

The report also mentions abuses of US forces against women detainees in Iraqi Arab prisons. These abuses include sexual torture, a fact which finally came out as a result of General Anthony Taguba's investigation of Abu Ghraib.

Now it appears that an American feminist is conducting research into military prostitution around US bases. According to the information she's pulled together already, the Green Zone is one huge kerxane:

Within the Green Zone, a few brothels have been opened (disguised as a women's shelter, hairdresser, or Chinese restaurant) but are usually closed by authorities after reports about their existence reach the media. The U.S. military claims that it officially forbids its troops to be involved in prostitution. But private contractors brag on sex websites that they have sometimes been able to find Iraqi or foreign women in Baghdad or around U.S. military bases. These highly paid security contractors have much disposable income, and are not held accountable to anyone but their companies.

One contractor employee living in the Green Zone reported in February 2007 that "it took me 4 months to get my connections. We have a PSD [Personal Security Detail] contact who brings us these Iraqi cuties." Western contractors' e-mails also suggest that some Chinese, Filipina, Iranian and Eastern European women may also be prostituted to Americans and other Westerners within Iraq. (Other reports indicate that Chinese women might also be prostituted in Afghanistan, Qatar, and other Muslim countries where it may be difficult for rings to find local women.)

I had previously questioned what impact these vermin called mercenaries would have on the situation. It's well known that these American mercenaries have been involved in sex trafficking in other places where they've operated, such as in Bosnia. In her piece, Debra McNutt clearly indicates that they are engaging in the same kind of trafficking in Iraq.

What's worse for Kurds, however, is that the US military and their dirty mercenaries, intend to turn South Kurdistan into a kerxane:

On leave from Iraq in 2005, Army Reservist Patrick Lackatt said that "For one dollar you can get a prostitute for one hour." But as the war has escalated in Baghdad and the other Arab regions of Iraq, it has become too dangerous for Westerners to move around outside of the military bases and the Green Zone. Contractors are now advising each other to do their "R & R" in the safer northern Kurdish region, or in the bars and hotels of Dubai, the UAE emirate that has become the most open center of prostitution in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, any prostitution rings in Iraq have to go deeper underground to hide from Iraqi militias.

With that, we come to the crucial question: What is the Kurdistan Regional Government prepared to do to immediately thwart the intentions of these barbarians? Or will it, for the right price, be content to play the role of Uncle Tom when it comes to the warmongering whoremongers of the US military?

If so, I hope YJA-STAR will deploy for operations in South Kurdistan as the only means to maintain the honor of Kurdistan. After all, they don't fight only for themselves.

14 TEMMUZ 1982

"What was the aim of Turkish fascism in creating the torture and concentration camp called Diyarbakir Military Prison? It simply was to stifle the democratic and national awakening of Kurdish people, to force its most brave and militant fighters to submission and to break their will to rebel."
~ Garbis Altınoğlu.

Graphic stolen from HPG Online.

On 14 July 1982 in Diyarbakır Military Prison, the hunger strike of Kemal Pir, Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, Akif Yılmaz, and Ali Çiçek began. Their hunger strike would end 66 days later when the last of them joined the ranks of Kurdistan's şehîds. Their selfless act of resistance provided the impetus to awaken the Kurdish people.

The legitimate armed struggle of the PKK against the racist regime in Ankara was born.

Kemal Pir, Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, Akif Yılmaz, Ali Çiçek . . . ŞEHÎD NAMIRIN!

ŞEHİTLER ÖLMEZ; KURDISTAN BÖLÜNMEZ!

THE RESURRECTION OF THE CONTRA-GUERRILLAS

"We struggle in Kurdistan not only for the rights of our people but also for the rights of ethnic Armenians, Assyrians, and Suryani-Chaldeans who also face a reign of terror. Yes, we have a problem of terrorism in our country, but it is Turkish state terrorism."
~ Abdullah Ocalan.

By now, most people should have heard that NATO's second largest army is going to end the use of conscripts to fight in Turkey's internal colony Kurdistan. The Paşas have decided to pollute Kurdistan with commandos instead of conscripts.

These commandos were established as part of the US program for psychological operations against the Kurdish people--a fact sold publicly as part of the Cold War's fight against Communist "aggression" in the region. But the reality was something else, as Desmond Fernandes has documented:

By 1969, moreover, Turkish "commandos, who had been trained by American specialists in counter-insurgency," were despatched into Kurdish regions "under the pretext of a general 'arms search'" to terrorise the population.39 These commando actions "rapidly became associated with arbitrary brutality and torture that had marked the suppression of Kurdistan four decades earlier."40

According to the journal Devrim, one commando report which focused upon its anti-Kurdish psychological warfare operations, ran along the following lines:

"Since the end of January, special military units have undertaken a land war in the (Kurdish) regions of Diyarbakir, Mardin, Siirt and Hakkari under the guise of hunting bandits. Every village is surrounded at a certain hour, its inhabitants rounded up. Troops assemble men and women separately, and demand the men to surrender their weapons. They beat those who deny possessing any or make other villagers jump on them. They strip men and women naked and violate the latter. Many have died in these operations, some have committed suicide. Naked men and women have cold water thrown over them, and they are whipped. Sometimes women are forced to tie a rope around the penis of their husband and then to lead him around the village. Women are likewise made to parade naked around the village. Troops demand villagers to provide women for their pleasure and the entire village is beaten if the request is met with refusal."41

As Fernandes goes on to show, this is the established pattern of the American Empire and the pattern is strictly adhered to by America's fascist client states, such as Turkey, and that similar atrocities were perpetrated by the Ankara regime even through the relatively "peaceful" 1970s. The murder after surrender of HPG şehîd Fatıh Ekmekçi is the most recent example of this same kind of atrocity, proving that the Ankara regime remains dedicated to the employment of terrorism against the Kurdish people.

According to an article in Zaman, the commandos will take over full duties for committing new atrocities against the Kurdish people in 2009 and this brings up a question: If commando operations will formally begin in 2009, how long will the current OHAL remain in place for the Sêrt, Culemêrg, and Şirnex regions? Will the OHAL continue until 2009 and beyond?

The author claims that "none can complain that the Eğirdir announcement did not constitute a positive step," but she's not counting the opinion of Kurds; in fact, if true to form and history, she's never bothered to ask Kurds what they think about the extended presence of more of these US-trained Turkish barbarians in "The Region". What she's really concerned about are Turks:

But the real question is how much longer Turkish people can live with the PKK terror problem and its impact on their daily existence instead of enjoying a more normal life.

No, the real question is how much longer the Kurdish people can live with the Ankara regime terror problem. Its brutality is something that has been well-documented by human rights organizations and the European Court of Human Rights. After all, nobody pays fines to the ECHR like the Ankara regime does. Yet there's an easy answer to end the trauma of the Turkish people which has been offered for many years and it's one that Ocalan proposed in 1994, as documented by Lord Avebury, the chairman of the UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group:

It should be noted that in March 1994, the PKK Leader Abdullah Ocalan said he would stop all armed activity if a basis was established for a political solution, based on dialogue within a democratic framework. He suggested a cease-fire under international supervision, and discussion of various alternatives, including federation. (He has given even more prominence to the concept of federation in subsequent pronouncements).

It should be noted, too, that Lord Avebury's paper documenting the atrocities and politics of the 1990s was presented in the US.

Ocalan's statement that all armed activity would stop if dialog toward a political solution within a democratic framework were established and a ceasefire were supervised by international observers. This is the very same offer that was made beginning last August with the proposal of a democratic solution by the PKK, a solution that was rejected not only by the Ankara regime, but by the corporatocracy which poses as a government in the US.

It's not enough that the author is concerned simply with Turks. What is worse is that the author is more concerned for any psychological problems that the commandos may suffer as a result of the atrocities they will commit against Kurdish civilians. What about the psychological effects on those Kurds who've lived through Ankara's Dirty War? Where are the battalions of psychiatrists to assist torture victims or those who've been forcibly displaced from their homes, or who've had loved ones "disappeared?"

On the other hand, it's appropriate indeed that the author's brought up the subject of Abu Ghraib:

A Western diplomat told me recently that Turkey has one of the best treatment centers -- the Ankara-based Gülhane Hospital -- for those injured in combat with the PKK. But he noted that what Turkey was really lacking was psychiatric care for those badly wounded in military operations.

He then recalled the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal perpetrated by US soldiers, some of whom have been sentenced or are still awaiting trial for the brutal treatment -- including alleged torture, and even rape, in some cases -- of prisoners held there.

Those Abu Ghraib incidents took place despite the fact that US soldiers -- all professionals -- had received adequate training in the fight against insurgents and terrorists, as well as psychological training, the same diplomat stressed.

"Those professionals who are fighting against mainly irregular groups are, in other words, assassins. They kill people. This has a serious psychological impact on those soldiers. For example, when they get leave and see the world and are no longer killing people, they wonder what they were doing as assassins," said the diplomat.

Yeah, let's not worry about the "serious psychological impact" on the victims. Let's only worry about the guilty.

The author adds, in a brilliant stroke of deadpan:

I am sure, based on such experience, the TSK will consider a psychological training program for their professionals in the fight against terror.

Would there be any American soldiers in prison awaiting trial for their performance at Abu Ghraib if there had not been a huge scandal and outcry against it in the US and around the world? Does anyone honestly believe that there will be a similar scandal and outcry against the atrocities committed against the Kurdish people which the Ankara regime has enslaved for the last 84 years, either in Turkey or around the world?

Based on experience, I can guarantee you that there won't be, because there never has been any such outcry by anyone throughout the history of the Ankara regime's repression of the Kurdish people. There are no Mehmetçiks or other Turkish security forces sitting in prison awaiting trials for their crimes, and Amnesty International agrees with me. Not even the author of the Zaman piece bothered to mention the atrocities that the Kurdish people under Turkish occupation have suffered, much less did she raise a hue and cry about it.

The piece closes with references to the rule of law in Turkey and the need to "restore" it. What an absurdity! Which law should be "restored?" The law which permits anyone to murder Kurds without fear of punishment? The law which forbids the use of certain letters of the alphabet because they're "Kurdish" letters? The law which forbids Kurdish to be used for political purposes? The law which removed a Kurdish mayor and Kurdish municipality for supplying local services in other languages in addition to Turkish? The law which permitted state assassins to walk free after a show trial in a kangaroo court for murdering a Kurdish father and his son in cold blood? The law which cultivates impunity among state assassins? The law which allows prosecutors to be fired and disbarred for attempting to investigate the Chief of the Turkish General Staff for belonging to the armed gang that goes around throwing grenades into bookshops?

The rule of law does not need to be "restored" in Turkish occupied Kurdistan because it's already functioning there in the form of the new Turkish Penal Code, the new Anti-Terror Law, the Paşas' constitution, and the military law of the new OHAL.

And with all of this, who in the hell needs the rule of law?

In the meantime, check out a terrific article from The Nation on "The Other War" in Iraq. It's eleven pages long and definitely worth the read. In it, you will get an idea of the utter lawlessness of indiscriminate violence against civilians and even animals, and the desecration and mockery of the dead. Why?

Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served in Jalula, where there was a small prison camp at his base. He was with the 252nd Armor, First Infantry Division, for nine months beginning in March 2004. He recalled his supervisor telling his platoon point-blank, "The Geneva Conventions don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in writing if you want to see it."

I guess what's good for Guantanamo is good for Iraq, too.

And to prepare yourself for the next false flag operation in the US, brought to you by the corporatocracy that's turning the world into a fascist planet, check these links:


"West Needs More Terror to Save Doomed Foreign Policy"--from America's good neighbor, Canada.

"Praying for a Terrorist Strike"--America's politicians laying down the propaganda just so they can say, "We told you so."

"Chertoff Has 'Gut Feeling' about More Terror"--I'm relieved to know it's his "gut feeling" and not his Magic 8-Ball.

THIS IS NATO

This is NATO.

Not even animals behave like that.

There is no point in peace with NATO barbarians.

ROTINDA AND SERHADO

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes."
~ Bill Cosby.

The Original:

The New:

Which generation are you?

AIR POWER, RACISM, AND THE PKK

"Since the guerrilla units in the War of Resistance (and in all other revolutionary wars) generally grow out of nothing and expand from a small to a large force, they must preserve themselves and, moreover, they must expand."
~ Mao Tse Tung, Selected Works, Volume 2.

There's a really good article at Mother Jones today, by Tom Engelhardt, on American air power. After a brief history of the effects of air power in Indochina, the article recounts some of the recent "mistakes" suffered by Afghanis, thanks to the application of air power, which "have, in fact, become so commonplace that, in the news, they begin to blur into what looks, more and more, like a single, ongoing airborne slaughter of civilians." In case you missed the news on any of that, a partial list of some of the more recent "mistakes" is given, including some that have taken place in Iraq, along with a short rundown of the air wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The only problem with the article in all this counting and recounting is the absence of any mention of last December's American air war in Somalia. But in the case of Somalia, after thousands of civilians fled toward Kenya from the American-backed Ethiopian invasion, US Özel Timler were flown into the area with the orders, as reported at the link, "Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind."

American intelligence had said that somewhere in all the civilian carnage were three--count 'em, three--al-Qaeda types. I guess this is supposed to be an illustration of the saying, "Kill them all; Let god sort them out."

Finally, Englehardt, back at Mother Jones, comes to his conclusion:

This [civilian dead "including women and children"] is not an aberrant side effect of air war but its heart and soul. The airplane is a weapon of war, but it is also a weapon of terror -- and it is meant to be. From the beginning, it was used not to "win over" enemy populations -- after all, how could that be done from the distant skies? -- but to crush or terrorize them into submission. (It has seldom worked that way.)

[ . . . ]

We in the U.S. recognize butchery when we see it -- the atrocity of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck bomb, the beheading. These acts are obviously barbaric in nature. But our favored way of war -- war from a distance -- has, for us, been pre-cleansed of barbarism. Or rather its essential barbarism has been turned into a set of "errant incidents," of "accidents," of "mistakes" repeatedly made over more than six decades. Air power is, in the military itself, little short of a religion of force, impermeable to reason, to history, to examples of what it does (and what it is incapable of doing). It is in our interest not to see air war as a -- possibly the -- modern form of barbarism.

Let's not forget that there have been a number of "friendly fire" incidents as a result of the American use of air power in Iraq, including that of pêşmerge special forces and a British army convoy in 2003, and that of PUK pêşmerge earlier this year who were taken to be al-Qaeda by American pilots . . . even though the US military was well aware of the PUK checkpoint near Mûsil, where the slaughter took place.

As a dutiful lapdog, Turkey follows the US lead, including the use of air power. Everyone knows that American aircraft in the service of the Paşas was used to bomb South Kurdistani civilians ("including women and children") throughout the years of the very ironically named "safe haven." In fact, the Paşas were running the entire Operation Northern Watch show, and whenever they felt like bombing more Kurdish civilians ("including women and children"), British and American pilots obligingly followed orders to vacate air space for incoming Turkish missions.

The pretext for Turkey's slaughter of Kurds was its obsession with "crushing" PKK . . . as if such a thing could ever happen. But, as Engelhardt so correctly points out at Mother Jones, quoting a British officer who had served in Afghanistan, "Every civilian dead means five new Taliban." We might also say, "Every civilian dead means five new gerîlas," and we might begin to say so now that we have a new OHAL and new bombing. As reported in Zaman:

A soldier was killed in a mine attack by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists in Uludere district of Şırnak province -- in response fighter jets are aiding increased operations with aerial support.

[ . . . ]

Fighter jets from Second Tactical Air Command are supporting the operations from the air, bombing nonstop the points where the terrorists are thought to be located.

Are those really terrorists? Or are they civilians?

No doubt they are using the same kind of American aircraft that Lockheed Martin's PKK coordinator recently sold to Turkey. No doubt, too, in any invasion of South Kurdistan--in yet another vain attempt to "crush" the PKK--the Ankara regime will continue to behave like a good lapdog and follow the "American attitude towards air power" air war,yet again resulting in the slaughter of Kurdish civilians ("including women and children").

It might be argued by these "civilized" warmongers that they use the tools of "distant war" (aircraft, artillery, missiles, etc.) because they want to keep their own kind safe, thus reducing their casualties. However, I tend to think that Engelhardt hit the nail squarely on the head when he raises the issue of racism in connection with air war:

Since 1945, American air power has regularly been used to police the imperial borders of the planet. (Serbia in 1999 was the sole exception to this rule.) As Afghan President Karzai put the matter in response to recent reports of civilian casualties in his country: "We want to cooperate with the international community. It has, that is, been released against people of color, against what used to be called the Third World.We are thankful for their help to Afghanistan, but that does not mean that Afghan lives have no value. Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such." (His bitter comment eerily reflects another from the Vietnam era, more than thirty years gone. "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient" -- so said former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam General William Westmoreland in 1974.)

It may be that American administrations would have been no less willing to release their bombs and missiles on white noncombatant populations (as was the case with Germany in World War II); but it can at least be said that, for the last half-century-plus, air power has functionally acted as an armed form of racism, that the sense of "their lives" as cheaper, even if seldom spoken aloud, has made it easier to use the helicopter, the bomber, the Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone. The fact is that air war always cheapens human life. After all, from the heights, if seen at all, people must have something of the appearance of scurrying insects. It is the nature of such war, and an ingrained racism, seldom mentioned any more, only adds to it.

Certainly, the Ankara regime is well qualified to be called a racist regime. It has been official Turkish state racism that has attempted to deny and wipe out the existence of Kurds for the last 84 years. It was official Turkish state racism that prompted Erdoğan to state just a few years ago that he would oppose an independent Kurdistan even if it were in Argentina. It is official Turkish state racism that has refused to extend an official invitation to the president of Iraq--a Kurd. It is official Turkish state racism that fuels Ankara regime officials to refer to South Kurdistani leaders as "tribal chiefs."

And it is this same racism that the US, NATO, and the international community have actively supported for decades, with no chance of change in sight.

The real barbarians have not gotten it through their fat heads that the blood of Kurdish şehîds--including gerîla and civilian, including young and old, including women and children--is the seed of coming generations of Kurdish freedom fighters.

THE TROJAN HORSE GOES SOUTH

"But come now, change thy theme, and sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena's help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile, when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilium."
~ Homer, The Odyssey.

Still think talk of a Turkish invasion of South Kurdistan is all about PKK? Think again. If there will be any invasion, a good portion of the reasoning for invasion will have to do with the TSK protecting its own business interests in South Kurdistan, from Zaman:

While Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt repeatedly argues that a cross-border operation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) is necessary to severe its support from northern Iraq, the Armed Forces Pension Fund (OYAK) is gleaning ever-increasing profits from its businesses in and with Iraq.

Of the 1,200 Turkish firms participating in the reconstruction of Iraq, OYAK has had the biggest piece of the pie. The firm has been selling cement produced in its facilities in Mardin, Adana, Bolu and Ünye to Iraq and exporting iron bars there from its steel and iron plants in İskenderun and Ereğli (Erdemir).

According to the article, Turkish companies are working throughout South Kurdistan, but OYAK is working their through front companies "such as Bakra and Başkent Uluslararası Nakliyat and Dış Ticaret Ltd Şirketi, RE-BA Dış Ticaret Ltd. Şirketi, Nur Ticaret, Fefoğlu, Yüksel, Barkınlar, Saki İthalat and İhracat Gümrükleme Nakliyat Sınır Ticareti, etc. The transportation of materials exported by OYAK to northern Iraq is operated by Has Nakliyat. Construction materials sent by OYAK are stored in the UN storage depot, located near İbrahim Halil Highway, in Zaho."

Just as American companies such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton, KBR, or Fluor Corporation are linked to high-ranking people in the American regime, so too the Turkish General Staff is doing the same with OYAK, without even going into the mercenary business. And just as American companies are raking in the big bucks from their government contracts in Iraq, so the Paşas' OYAK is doing the same in South Kurdistan by raking in the lion's share of overall profits:

The history of Turkey’s exports to Iraq are as follows: $371.2 million in 2000; increasing to $839 million in 2001; dipping to $649 million in 2002 before the invasion; shooting back up again to $829 million in 2003, the year of the invasion; then $1.82 billion in 2004; $2.75 billion in 2005; and an impressive $3 billion in 2006.

The Zaman article echoes similar information that was published in TDN last year.

Compounding the problem are Fethullah Gülen's racist schools which are springing up in South Kurdistan like toadstools on manure. In fact, Gülen's schools may be a worse problem because with them comes the spread of Turkish racist ideology and an emphasis on Turkish language in South Kurdistan, a fact that threatens to severely undermine Kurdish culture and language in that one part of Kurdistan where Kurds are free to express Kurdish identity. Hîwa wrote something on that last year, too.

The incredible thing about both OYAK's business and Gülen's schools is that, when it comes to South Kurdistan, both are spreading and benefiting on a purely voluntary basis--nay, they've been invited--whereas in North Kurdistan they impose themselves by force.

It would appear that the Turks learned well from their experience with the Trojan Horse. Will South Kurdistan take a lesson from history before it's too late?

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND TURKEY'S CULTURE OF IMPUNITY

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed . were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."
~ Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz.

In the same week that saw HRW's release of a report on human rights abuses in South Kurdistan, Amnesty International released its report on the culture of torture and impunity in the TC.

It's ironic that AI dates the culture of impunity in Turkey from the September 12, 1980 coup but, while mentioning the failure of "harmonization" packages meant to redesign Turkish law so that it's compatible with the Copenhagen Criteria, fails to make the connection between the consitution and the culture of impunity. The Turkish constitution is a document drafted under the watchful eyes of the Paşas and written specifically to protect the state from the citizens. A document which places the state above the individual will ipso facto endorse violations of the human rights of individuals. Hence, an entrenched culture of impunity. "Harmonization" packages or other legal "reforms" can therefore be likened to applying lipstick to a pig.

The AI report contrasts AKP's alleged "zero tolerance for torture" policy with the continued state-sponsored toleration of impunity by Turkish law enforcement and security forces. One of the more outstanding examples of this contrast is the passage and application of the June 2006 new anti-terror law. Another is the "lack of progress in investigating fatal shootings by members of the security forces in circumstances which do not involve an armed clash, or where the evidence of an armed clash having taken place is in doubt."

In order to illustrate the "lack of progress" in such cases of extrajudicial murder, AI includes a detailed recap of the case of the state's murder of Ahmet and Uğur Kaymaz. For that case alone, the AI report is worth reading as it focuses on problems with the indictment of the murderers, the discrepancies in the evidence collected, the intimidation by the state of human rights defenders and journalists involved with the case, the conduct of the trial and the undue hardships a change of venue inflicted on the family of the victims, counter-charges and counter-investigations that were instigated by the state merely to smear the reputations of family members and their lawyers.

Another case highlighted by AI is the conduct of the state in the wake of the Amed Serhildan. Among the problems discussed in connection with the state's conduct in this case are the excessive use of force by Turkish security forces, leading to the murders of children and other onlookers of the demonstrations, the mass arrests of Kurds throughout The Region following the demonstrations, and the torture of those detained or arrested, including the torture of children. AI notes that no action has been taken against the criminal security forces:

Over one year later not a single prosecution had been initiated against any member of the security forces, either in relation to the allegations of torture or the fatal shootings that occurred during the demonstrations. Nor had there been any outcome from the administrative investigation.

Two other cases are highlighted as well, including the case of Birtan Altınbaş, a Turkish leftist who was tortured to death in 1991 while in detention. His murderers were not sentenced until 2006--15 years after the crime. The other example case is that of the torture of prisoners in Izmir's Kırklar F-type prisons Nos. 1 and 2.

AI lists eleven factors that contribute to the continuation of the culture of impunity in Turkey:

1. Intimidation and harassment of victims and witnesses, and "counter-charges."

2. Failure to document medical evidence of torture or other ill-treatment.

3. The inadmissibility of independent medical evidence and the monopoly of the Forensic Medical Institute.

4. Lack of independent evidence collection.

5. Ineffective and delayed investigation by prosecutors.

6. Public statements on cases by senior officials.

7. Charges against human rights groups for reporting preliminary concerns about cases.

8. Failure to suspend pending investigation and leniency towards police and gendarmerie defendants.

9. Unresponsiveness of judges to lawyers for victims and their families.

10. Delayed and protracted proceedings.

11. The statute of limitations for the crime of torture.

Remember, the eleven factors outlined above derive their strength from a constitution written by generals, in the wake of a military coup, the purpose of which is to protect the state from the people.

Of course, this AI report may be the real reason for the TC's freeze of AI's accounts.

Just as the AI report tells us nothing that we don't already know, so the HRW report on South Kurdistan told us nothing that we didn't already know. Even though certain elements in the KRG have denied the veracity of the HRW report, Kurdish activists in South Kurdistan can verify its truth, as in this article from IWPR:

Human rights advocates in northern Iraq say the findings of a new report accusing Kurdish security forces of systematic mistreatment of detainees come as no surprise, and express scepticism that international pressure will end such practices.

[ . . . ]

"We know that arrests have been made without warrants; torture has been carried out; and detention facilities operate with minimal human rights criteria," said Sarwar Ali, a lawyer and a human rights activist at Democracy and Human Rights Development in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

[ . . . ]

"The party security establishments function outside the law, and many people are detained for several years without charges," said Ali.

[ . . . ]

"The Kurdish authorities talk a lot about the principles of freedom and human rights, but this report and the US State Department's [human rights] report prove that democracy and human rights are no more than words in this region," said a lawyer, who asked not to be named because he works for the government.

[ . . . ]

Rebeen Ahmed Hardi, a prominent writer and critic in Sulaimaniyah, said the international community may be surprised by the report because the KDP and PUK have "painted a beautiful picture of Iraqi Kurdistan".

"It's too optimistic to think that the Kurdish parties will change their dictatorship-like behaviour immediately. It has become a part of their mindset," he said.

Hardi said international pressure would probably not change human rights policies in the region.

"Pressure needs to be mounted on the parties within Kurdistan," he said. "Newspapers, intellectuals and the public should talk about those violations and other issues constantly until the parties respond."

"The beautiful picture of Iraqi Kurdistan" whose "painting" has been assisted by the likes of Russo Marsh & Rogers should be considered in light of the US policy of globalization, as described by Noam Chomsky:

There is indeed a close relationship between human rights and American foreign policy. There is substantial evidence that American aid and diplomatic support increase as human rights violations increase, at least in the Third World. Extensive violations of human rights (torture, forced reduction of living standards for much of the population, police-sponsored death squads, destruction of representative institutions or of independent unions, etc.) are directly correlated with US government support. The linkage is not accidental; rather it is systematic. The reason is obvious enough. Client fascism often improves the business climate for American corporations, quite generally the guiding factor in foreign policy. It would be naïve indeed to think that this will change materially, given the realities of American social structure and the grip of the state ideological system.

And that's just another reason to be careful what you wish for, because the price of Western investment in South Kurdistan, the price of a "successful" corporate climate may be much more than what the Kurdish people themselves ought to bear, especially in light of the last hundred years of Kurdish history.

Perhaps Rebeen Ahmed Hardi is correct; international pressure alone will not change human rights policies in South Kurdistan, but continuing to speak out about violations, biting the ankles of those in power at every opportunity, both inside Kurdistan and in Diaspora, may shame the powerful enough to make them change their unjust attitudes and practices.

I intend to continue to be one of the ankle-biters.

UPDATE ON ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN BEYTÜŞŞEBAP

"During the four years that the HEP and DEP existed (1990-94), no fewer than 64 of their leaders and prominent members were assassinated. The police authorities never found their murderers who, at least in some cases, appear to have acted with the connivance, or worse, of the police or intelligence services."
~ Martin Van Bruinessen, "Turkey's Death Squads".

There's more on the assassination attempt against Beytüşşebap's DTP mayor, Faik Dursun, was published on Özgür Gündem.

As described in the IHD press release, a bomb was found close by Dursun's house on the road that he uses to go to work at the municipality building.

Someone called Dursun to notify him about a suspicious package on the road. Dursun called the special prosecutor to go to the scene. Several times the office was called but no one came to inspect the package. Finally, a couple of police came, went onto the roof of a nearby house and shot into the package with their guns. This caused the package to explode,which made a big crater in the ground and broke the windows of several nearby houses.

Dursun said it was an assassination attempt against him because of the location of the bomb:

"The police went on the roof of a house and shot at the package, and exploded the package, even though we had called the special prosecutor several times. No one came to the scene even though we had called the special prosecutor over and over. Not having safety measures, shooting the bomb from a roof, confuses us because the bomb has been left on the road on the way that I use every morning. I think this incident is an assassination attempt against me.

The governor of Şirnex said that the bomb explosive was made of a munition from an RPG-type weapon and that the package had been destroyed according to proper procedures. However it should be noted that shooting a bomb from a rooftop, without a secured area set up to keep civilians away during detonation, is not the proper procedure for disposing of explosives. The bottom line is that the police set up no security perimeter around the bomb, nor did any bomb experts come to disable it.

Basically, the governor is engaging in a bold-faced lie, something which is not unusual for Turkish governors in the predominately Kurdish "Southeast."

The incident took place around 0830 hours, before Dursun left to go to the municipality building.

Witnesses said that before the bomb was exploded, they saw long cables coming out of the package, which may be an indication of a remote-control bomb.

Normally the area has soldiers going back and forth on the road, but on the day the package was discovered, no soldiers were in the area. It's also pretty odd that the bomb was placed in front of a military building which is guarded by soldiers 24 hours a day. There is also a large public light pole in front of the military area. According to these facts, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for anyone but a soldier to approach the building without being noticed or challenged.

More election games are being played in Amed, as reported in--GASP!--Milliyet. In Turkey, people are supposed to vote in their place of residence, but some voters in Amed have had their residence addresses changed on the voter registration rolls, including people who have lived in Amed all their lives and have voted in previous elections in Amed. For example, Hanife Salman has lived in Amed all her life and has always voted there. For some reason, however, she is listed as a resident of Istanbul on her voter registration listing. 2,800 voters in one voting district of Amed are in the same situation and will not be permitted to vote in the upcoming elections.

First we had soldiers being registered by their officers in the Sirnak area. Then we had independent candidates listed individually on the ballots. Now we have the addresses of voters changed by some mysterious way which precludes them from voting. Note that all of this is happening in the predominately Kurdish "Southeast," DTP's heartland.

Let's remember that Erdoğan recently made the remark that a vote for independent candidates (Read: DTP) was like "money thrown in the street." What then should anyone say about a vote for AKP, given that when he went to Amed in August 2005, "Erdogan promised to handle Turkey's 'Kurdish question' with more 'democracy.'" But what has happened in reality? Therefore, to vote for AKP is worse than "money thrown in the street;" It's throwing away a thousand hopes.

The Turkish state must be very afraid, especially since it's games are now reintegrating the old game of the assassination of Kurdish politicians.

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AGAINST BEYTÜŞŞEBAP'S MAYOR

IHD has issued a press release on the bombing attempt against Beytüşşebap's DTP Mayor, Faik Dursun:

IHD Concerned About Recent Incidents in Sırnak Area

Press release by lawyer Reyhan Yalcindag, President of the Human Rights' Association (IHD):

Recent incidents and serious human rights violations in the provinces of Sirnak, Siirt and Hakkari, which have been declared by military bureaucracy as High Security Zone or de facto State of Emergency (OHAL), cause us more concern day by day.

There are a few sine qua non components of democracy regarding with elections. These components are; reflection of voters’ will freely in election, a democratic election process without interventions. On the other hand there are serious allegations against security forces. According to these allegations; in recent days security forces conduct often raids to villages particularly in Şırnak area. Moreover, security forces threaten people in the villages about not voting for independent candidates for the parliament. These are very serious allegations. Therefore, officials should make a statement about allegations without delay.

A bomb, which was put near to house and route of Beytüşşebap’s Mayor, has revealed a possible assassination attempt. If one of our citizens had not recognized the bomb mechanism, a violation of right to life could have been occurred. There are some questions, which should be answered without delay, as well as points that should be clarified. If the allegation, which argues that public prosecutor has not gone scene immediately, is true an investigation should be conducted for inconsideration of duty. Law rules and same principles should be valid in every part of a state governed by the rule of law. The uttermost point is that protection of all rights and freedoms, especially right to life, for everyone without exception is an essential mission.

As Human Rights Association (IHD) we are against any kind of attempts, which might harm social peace atmosphere and arouse violence and conflict circumstances. There have been serious human rights violations, especially right to life, that are identified as crime against humanity and will be never forgotten from our memory, in recent years. Darkness of the past has not been clarified yet and we are aware of that new chaotic scenarios will harm our people. We condemn assassination that seems to be against Mayor of Beytüşşebap, Mr. Faik Dursun, who has been elected via vote of people. We state that we will pursue of the process until those, who are responsible, will be tried in court. (IHD, July 3, 2007)

Turkish version here.

It should be remembered that Faik Dursun is among those 54 DTP Mayor's charged for signing a letter to Danish PM Rasmussen in support of RojTV. He is also one among many who signed a statement from 2004, which called for a new Turkish constitution, a general amnesty for the gerîlas, and the implementation of an economic program to rebuild the Kurdish region devastated by the Ankara regime's Dirty War.

This means that Dursun is another of those troublesome, bad boy, DTP politicians that the Ankara regime would just love to get rid of. Therefore, expect to find the usual state-sponsored suspects behind this assassination attempt.

How much does anyone want to bet that the Paşas boys would then try to blame this on PKK?

More soon.

In case you missed it the first time around and want to know what we're going back to, watch the video about the Musa Anter Peace Train which Hevallo has linked to in one of his posts.

HRW AND SOUTH KURDISTAN

"Human Rights Watch has long urged political leaders and officials of both the KDP and PUK administrations to allow criminal prosecution of law enforcement officials accused of abusing detainees. In practice, criminal prosecutions of this kind in the Kurdistan region have been the exception rather than the rule, and the absence of political will in this regard has encouraged a climate of impunity in which security forces are able to commit abuses without accountability."
~ Human Rights Watch, "Caught in the Whirlwind: Torture and Denial of Due Process by the Kurdistan Security Forces".

Good news. HRW has issued a report on torture, detention, and related issues in South Kurdistan. The summary of the report can be read here, or you can browse your way through the entire report.

Why is this good? Well, because HRW admits that the two main Kurdish parties and the KRG were cooperative, and as this kind of information is publicized, we can hope that the human rights situation will improve in South Kurdistan. HRW notes the cooperation of Kurdish authorities, in contrast to the cooperation, or lack thereof, of the Baghdad government as well as of the US and UK military forces in country:

The Kurdistan authorities from both the KDP and PUK gave Human Rights Watch access to all Asayish detention facilities and allowed unannounced visits at times of our own choosing. With the exception of detainees undergoing interrogation or held in solitary confinement, Human Rights Watch received the full assistance of prison officials to interview any of the other inmates held at these facilities in conditions that allowed for confidential interviews. The Kurdistan authorities also facilitated the organization’s access to Asayish officials, prison directors, legal advisers and other relevant actors. This cooperation was in stark contrast to the approach of the Iraqi Ministries of Interior and Defense, and to the US and United Kingdom (UK) military forces in Iraq, which since April 2003, have repeatedly denied Human Rights Watch’s requests for access to their detention facilities.

In spite of "severely overcrowded and unhygienic" conditions in Kurdish detention facilities, South Kurdistan would appear to remain a dumping ground for those detained by the Americans in other parts of Iraq. You would think the US could use it's worldwide network of rendition facilities to hold those they take into custody from Arab Iraq, instead of sending them to Kurdistan. Or perhaps they should consider building new detention facilities in the billion dollar permanent military facilities that the US is constructing in Iraq.

What appears to be problematic from the Kurdish side is the fact that, although Kurdish authorities indicate a certain level of cooperation, it seems that they are failing to follow through with corrections. In that case, it's obvious that more will have to be publicized about the situation in order to shame the leadership into actually cleaning up on the issues brought out by the report.

Now, I'll tell you what hacks me off about this report. There is no mention of what the situation is regarding political prisoners. If detention conditions so closely resemble those which characterized detention under the Saddam regime, or conditions which detainees and prisoners suffer in Turkish prisons, then the probability is high that political prisoners do exist in South Kurdistan. What is their number? For what reasons are they detained? Are they tortured? Do they simply "disappear"? Instead of including an investigation on this subject, the report appears to focus in its majority on Arab detainees.

Since the detention of Kamal Sayid Qadir, we know that there have been detentions of journalists and other dissenters or those critical of the situation in South Kurdistan. For that reason, HRW should have also investigated the question of political prisoners. If there is nothing negative to report on this subject, HRW could have verified the fact.

The publication of this report should also cause us to ask what HRW is doing, if anything, about documenting other abuses. What is HRW doing to investigate the situation of women and youth in South Kurdistan, or the very serious and widespread fact of political corruption? Are there other organizations that should be investigating these issues? Is someone going to document the scandal of the lack of basic services?

It is only when these kinds of problems become cases of public and international shame for the KDP and PUK that there is hope for the slightest improvement for the long-suffering people of South Kurdistan. It's time that HRW and other international organizations raised a ruckus about them. If not, these organizations run the risk of appearing to bash the American administration as an end in itself with no real concern for the Kurdish people. If that is the case, the credibility of organizations like HRW will fall like a GBU 28 falling toward its target through the clear blue sky.

Bombs away!

IN THE SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION AND UPRISING

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery."
~ Thomas Jefferson.

Something on the MIC for you to think about on the 4th. Remember, where there's the MIC, there's the Deep State.

When will the American people rise up against these vermin? They have taken honorable values like democracy, liberty, and truth, have trampled them in the mud and perverted them into Newspeak for the service of their own power and greed.

Remember, Thomas Jefferson also said that every generation needs a new revolution.

WHY WE FIGHT.

For more on the documentary Why We Fight, visit the website.

TURKEY, THE UNSC, AND DTP

"In spite of its substantial contributions to peace and security, Turkey has not been a member of the council for almost half a century. Therefore, we rightfully expect the support of the General Assembly for our candidacy."
~ Abdullah Gul.

Thanks to information from a heval in the UK, I have the dubious pleasure of announcing Turkey's campaign as a candidate for the United Nations Security Council in 2009-2010.

Don't believe me? Check out the website. There you can find out more information about Turkey's candidature, about how Turkey is such a humanitarian nation (except for the Kurds that it continues to brutally repress within the "territorial integrity" of the Turkish state). You can also find out about Turkey's foreign policy, if you read Turkish.

However, you will not find any information about Turkey's constitution, a document whose crafting was overseen by generals. You will not find any information about Turkey's history of gross human rights abuses. You will not find any information about the founding ideology of Turkey and its inspiration by Mussolini and Fascist Italy--an ideology that has not changed to this day. You will not find out any information about Turkey's repression of free expression rights for those who dissent from the party line. You won't find any information about how Turkey has never admitted to the UN that it has a "Kurdish problem"; according to Turkey, it only has a "terrorist" problem.

Okay, it does have a terrorist problem and the terrorists are in Ankara.

Anyway, I could go on and on and on, but you get the idea. You should ask yourself which Deep Staters are going to help Turkey in this little endeavor, because they can't do it on their own.

In the meantime, DTP has a campaign song in both Kurdish and Turkish. Both are below. Remember: Vote the Pomegranate!

Kurdish.

Turkish.

BLACK FLAGS, CHRISTIAN JIHADIS, NEOCONS

"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
~ Hannah Arendt.

Let's cover a few odds and ends today.

First of all, regarding alleged "terrorist" incidents in the UK in the last couple of days: shame on the UK government for leaving their car bombs just laying around like that. They're acting more and more like their old Gladio allies, the Turks, all the time.

Remember last year in August when they concocted some phony story about "terrorists" planning to turn airplane toilets into laboratories for some liquid explosive nonsense? The only thing to come of that was more harassment for air travelers via yet more repressive, fascist, and anal retentive rules about not being able to pack baby formula or lipstick in your carry-on. Ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is how long ordinary people will put up with this nonsense.

Just so you know, a website called Terrorism Research Center is owned by the high priest of American jihadis, Blackwater USA co-founder, Erik Prince. So when you read on the homepage that TRC "is an independent institute," you'll at least know that there's an American talibanized ideology behind it. In other words, it's all bullshit. More on Prince and Blackwater appeared in an article from last December by Chris Hedges:

One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass [Christian jihadi--Mizgîn] movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.

And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.

Don't think that this is strictly a Republican operation, though, because Blackwater got its start under the Clinton administration. Nor make the mistake that Chris Hedges is exagerating in suggesting that Blackwater may be the face of the future in the US, especially since these special ops bastards (Think: Özel Timler) have requested permission from the Pentagon to establish "domestic special operations mission, and the preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United States," in total violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Mmm . . . the US is looking more and more like it's democratic ally, the Ankara regime. For more on the connections between Blackwater and their new venture--privatized intelligence--check Iraq Slogger.

More bad news . . . apparently there's a new organization in the US called the America-Kurdistan Friendship League, which has some truly questionable people involved with it.

First there are some people associated with an organization so shadowy that not even Google can find much on it--the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI). One bit of information that Google does yield is the fact that the founder and president of the organiztion, Joseph Puder, who's only apparent claim to fame is as a propagandist for FrontPageMag.com. As Sourcewatch documents, FrontPageMag.com's "output ranges from old-fashioned red-baiting and neocon punditry, to pushing pro-Likud zionist propaganda."

That's exactly the kind of people we want to publicize the Kurdish cause in the US, right?

Listed as another member of the AKFL is Foster Friess, who might be considered a Christian jihadi ideologue not far removed in his ideas from Erik Prince. You can get an intro on Friess' ideology from a little promo he did for the documentary "Obsession" at Youtube. What Freiss will fail to tell you is that the US has consistently supported totalitarian political Islam or repressive Islamic regimes, both of which have contributed to blowback.

But that's exactly the kind of people we want to publicize the Kurdish cause in the US, right?

There's also the mention of a woman connected with Refugees International. What isn't mentioned is that Refugees International is run by a number of well-known humanitarians, including Richard Holbrooke, who helped facilitate genocide in Indonesia. Ironically, Holbrooke paid a visit to Maxmur Camp earlier this year. It might also be worth taking a look at an article Edward Herman did on Holbrooke and the idea of "worthy genocide."

That's exactly the kind of people we want to publicize the Kurdish cause in the US, right?

By far the most interesting character involved with the AKFL is Jack Wheeler, an enthusiastic self-promoter and "originator of the Reagan Doctrine". According to his "news" site, "CEOs of international corporations pay thousands of dollars to learn" what Jack Wheeler knows. And what Jack Wheeler knows is truly amazing. For example:

1. [H]e'll tell you about the plans the Chinese Underground Church Movement has to send 100,000 Chinese Christian missionaries to the Middle East to convert Moslem Arabs to Christianity.

2. All forms of leftism and liberalism are based on an atavistic belief in Black Magic. All are based on the primitive fear of the envious Evil Eye.

3. "Mohammed" is not a name, it is a title meaning The Praised One. His real name was Ubu'l Kassim and he did not come from Mecca. He was a bandit chieftain from what is now southern Jordan.

4. Russia is doomed as a culture due to its inheritance of Mongol concepts of justice and equality.

5. The only Americans who owe reparations to the descendants of slaves are the descendants of slave owners. These people are one and the same, i.e., American blacks are a racial mix of white slave owner and black slave. Blacks owe reparations to themselves.

6. The next insanity to come in the homosexual assault on the American Family will be PHM: Polygamous Homosexual Marriage. Pathologically promiscuous homosexuals will consider their "marriage" a legalism that will in no way prevent them from adultery en masse. To maintain the pretense of "marriage" however, they will have to quickly begin agitating for the legalization of group sodomization as "just another form of the married life-style".

Okay, obviously the guy is a nutcase, but there's more proof of that at his site. That's exactly the kind of people we want to publicize the Kurdish cause in the US, right?

Why is it that I get the impression that this whole AKFL deal has more to do with neoconservative plans for Iran than with friendship with or justice for the Kurdish people? Call me suspcious, but I really do smell neocon here.