DISINGENUOUS OR JUST PLAIN STUPID?

"Everyone must become aware of the reality of the Turkish regime and understand it well; the war that is waged against us is multi-dimensional and complex – it is not restricted to weapons and includes psychological, economic, media and cultural wars."
~ Heval Ahmed Deniz, foreign relations spokesman, PKK.

Hey, does anyone remember the Crescent Security contractors who were kidnapped in Iraq in November 2006? Their fingers turned up in Baghdad today:

U.S. authorities in Baghdad have received five severed fingers belonging to four Americans and an Austrian who were taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The FBI is investigating the grisly development, and the families of the five kidnapped contractors have been notified, American officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Naturally this news didn't break in the US media, but in the Austrian media. I wonder which body parts will turn up next.

Pro-terrorist website, The Jamestown Foundation, isn't fooled by Erdoğan's bogus "investment" package for Turkish-occupied Kurdistan either. Here's some of what they have to say about Sabrina Tavernise's propaganda piece in yesterday's NYTimes:

It is unclear whether, in his interview with the New York Times, Erdogan was being disingenuous in presenting the promised $12 billion as a new initiative or whether the reporters were unaware of the project’s background and thus assumed it was a new initiative. In fact, the dams, water canals, and roads form part of what is known as the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP), which was first formulated in the 1970s and began to be implemented in the early 1980s.

[ . . . ]

One only has to fly over the region to see the effect of GAP on agriculture in the Tigris and Euphrates basins, transforming large tracts of what was previously semi-arid land into cultivated fields. In areas such as the Harran plain, annual yields of cotton, wheat, barley, and lentils have tripled. However, GAP has had a greater impact on agricultural productivity than on employment. Even though it has undoubtedly created jobs in local service industries, GAP’s overall impact on employment in southeast Turkey has been minor.

As well as being the poorest region in Turkey, the southeast also has the highest rate of population increase. Even in some of the richest areas in the GAP region, the pace of job creation has lagged behind the growth in available workforce. In most of the cities of southeast Turkey the unemployment rate is double or triple the 9.9% average in the country as a whole. Among young people in the cities of southeastern Turkey, unemployment often reaches 50-60%. There is no reason to suppose that, even if they can be completed, the Ilisu and Silvan dams and their associated irrigation systems will have a major impact on employment in the region.

[ . . . ]

It is also difficult to see how the completion of a project that was originally formulated in the 1970s will be interpreted as demonstrating the AKP’s commitment to the region. Perhaps more significant, although it is impossible to be sure of the precise impact of the two-thirds of GAP that has been completed to date on recruitment to the PKK, what is certain is that it has not prevented it. Whatever else the PKK and other militant organizations in southeast Turkey – which is also the main recruiting ground for violent Islamist groups – may be short of, it is not recruits.

Bingo! GAP has done nothing for The Southeast and there is no shortage of recruits.

A better reason for the Ankara regime's insistence on persuing the GAP follies is because it knows that, one day, water will be worth much more to the Middle East than oil is right now, and the regime is setting itself up to control all of the water. That's also the reason greedy Western investors are backing the project.

Make sure to stop by Hevallo's place to check out a recent article on the PKK by Asharq Al-Awsat. A teaser:

[Heval Ahmed] Deniz stressed that the political, military and media circles in Turkey are currently witnessing controversial debates over the benefits and results of the recent battles and over the reasons and motives that necessitated all these enormous human and material losses. He added that when one of the Turkish army commanders told the media that 240 of the 370 Kurdish guerillas in al Zab were killed, he was severely mocked by a reporter who asked, 'Well, why didn't you bring back the bodies with you? And why didn't you advance to Qandil and settle there if you had indeed obliterated all the fighters in al Zab?"'

Go read.