TWO OLD MURDERS AND THREE NEW ONES

"When asked whether the Turkish system is effective in preventing radicalization, the imam of the Ülkealan Mosque in Ankara, Mustafa Matur, said, 'Certainly! Diyanet does a great job of inspecting the mosques and the imams, and they always urge the imams to adopt a positive tone when they are giving their sermons.'"
~ quoted by Soner Cagaptay, Turkish state propagandist at WINEP.

Let's see . . . first of all, there's a new Kurdish blog coming at you from the US, at Zanetî so have a look and visit often. I mean, the more you visit, the more you will encourage this guy to write, which is something that I always like to see. At the very least it's another Kurdish voice online, and that's always a good thing. A link is already up under the blog list in the right margin.

There's a really good rip on the Riza-Wolfowitz affair at TruthDig. I didn't know that Wolfowitz was a philanderer nor did I know that his first wife of 30 years dumped him amid rumors of his philandering. Ah, the tortured lives of the rich and powerful. Don't it just make you want to cry a freakin' river?

I know everyone, particularly those from Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, will remember when Turkish state security forces murdered Ahmet Kaymaz and his twelve-year-old son in cold blood back in November, 2004. After a change of venue and much judicial footdragging--Surprise! Surprise!--the state's murderers go free, as reported by Turkish NTV:

Four Turkish police officers charged with the killing of a father and son mistakenly believed to be members of a terrorist group have been acquitted by a court in Eskisehir Wednesday.

The four officers, Salih Ayaz, Mehmet Karaca, Yasafettin Acikgoz and Seydi Ahmet Dongel, were accused of wrongfully killing Ahmet Kaymaz and his 12 year old son Ugur in the south eastern Turkish town of Kiziltepe in the province of Mardin in 2004.

The reason that the "justification for the not guilty verdict" doesn't really have to be made public because we all know what the reason is: The victims were Kurds and the murderers were official Turkish state assassins, also known as state security forces. Sounds to me like a little extrajudicial Kurdish-style justice ought to be applied to the murderers named above. More on the issue is available from the AP on Kurdish Aspect. Backgrounder on the murders is available from the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at the New York University, School of Law.

So much for Europe's test case. You know, the only reason any minor changes have been made in Turkey toward anything vaguely resembling an excruciatingly primitive form of democracy has come about through armed resistance. The EU isn't going to do anything to change Turkey because the EU doesn't want Turkey changed. At this moment the Europeans are busily rubbing their greedy hands together with glee over their expected exploitation and destruction of Kurdistan--never mind that the "farmers" mentioned are not farmers in the real sense of the word. They are feudal landlords who haven't stepped foot in Kurdistan for decades. They are assimilated, traitorous Kurds living in the West.

As far as these Europeans and their Kurdish collaborators go, the only thing I can say is, "Good luck, TAK!"

Oh, yeah . . . before I forget . . . the Deep State has once again unleashed one of its monsters on another group of "The Other" in Turkey. The victims are publishers of Christian bibles. Some are suggesting that Turkish Hezbollah is behind this latest atrocity and, as we all know, Turkish Hezbollah was created by the Deep Staters and Paşas in order to fight PKK, in a blast from the past from Le Monde Diplomatique, circa 1997:

The army had, in fact, already set the stage at the time of its September 1980 coup. Anxious to combat the left, the military encouraged Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party (forerunner to Refah) by making religious courses obligatory in schools and creating special Koranic schools which were to become seedbeds of Islamism. The army also embarked on the even more radical strategy of introducing an "Turkish-Islamist synthesis", through which the officers sought to water down what they saw as the more "revolutionary" aspects of Kemalism. Not only would Islamic values enhance the conservative elements of society - both Turkish and Kurdish - but the "Turkish" component of the synthesis would discourage the seeds of Kurdish nationalism. As a result, they went about co-opting Islamists and neo-fascists - long-established within the state bureaucracy under Alpaslan Turkes’s National Action Party (MHP) with its Grey Wolves militia - into the security forces and other parts of the state apparatus in return for their suspending their own independent activities (5).

The article also mentions the role of the notorious Gulen gangster, Turgut Ozal. More on the whole Turkish-Islamist Synthesis thing at MERIA. I guess the Deep State wants to put Turkish Hezbollah back to work in order to get rid of all the undesirables while, at the same time, focusing attention elsewhere than on the usual suspects . . . like Veli Kucuk or DYP frontrunner, Mehmet Agar.

What can I say? This is the Model of a Muslim and Secular Democracy for the entire Middle East. Just ask the Bush Administration.

As always, Turkish politicians cut to the heart of the matter, from Zaman:

Justice and Development Party (AK Party) deputy Ali Osman Başkurt expressed his view that such an incident occurring in Malatya after the killing of an Italian pastor in Trabzon merited concern. “This is tantamount to isolating Turkey from the world. There are those who would like to cut foreign investment and drag Turkey into misery. There are circles working to axe Turkey’s efforts.”

While Hrant Dink's murder was a worry because it damaged Turkey's image, the murders of bible publishers is a worry because it will ruin the economy. Then we have the comments of religious fanatics:

TİMAV [Turkey İmam-Hatip Alumni Foundation] President Ahmet Ağırbaşlı said in a written statement: “We vehemently condemn this attack. Such an incident can be accepted neither by Islam nor by humanity. Every member of every religion is at the same time a missionary of his religion. There is nothing more natural than one wanting to explain and promote his religion. Every member of every religion has the right to work to promote his religion.”

Ağırbaşlı said he hoped the assailants would soon be captured and punished as prescribed by law.

Now, that last line is highly ironic in a country in which criminals--like murderers--are routinely given amnesty after a couple of years, while political prisoners languish in isolation for decades.

In other words, the idea of "punishment as prescribed by law" is utterly meaningless.

MORE FROM HOUZAN ON KURDISH WOMEN AND SECULARISM

"Throughout December the verbal attacks continued from the mosques throughout Halabja, Erbil and Kirkuk. Then three of Kurdistan's Islamic parties, the United Islamic Party, the Islamic Kurdish League and the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, joined the debate. By which I mean they bellowed for him [Mariwan Halabjayi] to be punished."
~ Mark Thomas.

Toward the end of March I provided a link to a petition against Shari'a as a major source of law for South Kurdistan, and mentione Houzan Mahmoud as one of the driving forces behind the petition. On Friday, an article written by Houzan appeared in the Guardian's Comment Is Free:

It is clear to the world that in those countries where sharia law is practised - or simply where groups of Islamic militias operate - freedom of expression, speech and association is under threat, if not totally absent. The rights of non-Islamic religious minorities are invariably violated and women suffer disproportionately.

Mmm . . . sounds like that great and secular Model of Democracy, Turkey, doesn't it?

The implementation of sharia law in Kurdistan would be the start of new bloody chapter in the Islamists' history of inhuman violence against the people, of oppression sanctioned by religious law.

In truth, sharia law contains explicit legal prescriptions that justify the violation of women's rights, specifically when it comes to family matters such as inheritance, marriage, divorce and custody of children.

Violent acts against women are already practised in Kurdistan. For decades, Kurdish women have been denied rights and have been oppressed due to patriarchal and religious cultures. Women in Kurdistan are still caught between the "values" of Islamic teaching and the desire for liberation. Thousands of women have been murdered in so-called honour killings, and the slaughter goes on to this day.

Women "self-burning", being forced into marriage and being denied the right to choose a partner are widespread. According to the Kurdistan human rights ministry, more than 533 women are reported to have committed suicide over the past year alone.

Well, if it isn't a damned shame to know that "more than 533 women" have committed suicide within the span of a year in South Kurdistan alone, then I don't know what a damned shame is. To think that patriarchal society places such restrictive, unjust pressure on the Middle East's most courageous, intelligent, and beautiful women is a filthy, stinking shame and a scandal of the worst proportions. Those Kurdish men--and Kurdish women--who continue to support a patriarchal system that brutally represses half of the Kurdish people, should be taken out and publicly horse-whipped within an inch of their lives as an example to everyone else.

I travelled back to Kurdistan in order to meet with two other members of our campaign, Sozan Shehab, member of the Kurdistan parliament, and Stivan Shamzinani, a journalist, to present our petition calling for removal of article seven to the Kurdistan parliament.

We met the committee responsible for the writing of the constitution and we held a press conference in the parliament buildings. Our campaign and our unequivocal demand for secularism became big news in Kurdistan and we were featured in the national papers and on TV channels, radio and websites.

Bijî Houzan, and her comrades, for making the situation of Kurdish women and the question of secularization into the public forum. Certainly there needs to be much public scrutiny of this subject.

The media attention given to our campaign panicked the Islamists, and just few days after our visit to parliament they launched a counter-campaign. They have announced their intention to "campaign to retain the Islamic identity of the Kurdish people". They have started to propagate the nonsense claim, via their various media outlets, that we want to impose secularism and forcibly deny people any right to express their identity as Muslims. Of course, this is simply another cowardly lie from a group of reactionaries who have been put on the back foot by our campaign's successes.

Well, if you want to impose the Turkish flavor of secularism, then of course people will be forcibly denied the right to express any religious identity (as well as any distinct ethnic identity), but the Turkish model is severely flawed anyway. This may be a place where Diaspora Kurds can jump into the battle and explain how secularism in the West has guaranteed the freedom to practice one's religious identity, at least before the jackasses on the fascist Western right purposely began to fuse their ideas about "Islamofascism" (what I prefer to call "totalitarian political Islam") with Islam as a whole.

The same goes, naturally, for the question of ethnic identity. Go to the link to read all of the things Houzan has to say about the campaign for secularism in South Kurdistan.

Deutsche Welle has a little something on the recent verbal sparring between Hewlêr and Ankara. Apparently the EU is urging "restraint." Yeah, I guess they'd have egg on their faces if South Kurdistan turned into another Northern Cyprus-type project for the paşas. I mean, how bad for image would it be to allow Turkey to join the economic club if that happened? They'd have to put off EU accession for at least six months.

I want to point out the third picture in the DW article, particularly the caption. That photo is from the Amed Serhildan last year, and it shows Turkish security forces massacring Kurds in Amed. But the caption gives the impression that those magnificent defenders of Turkish democracy are battling "rebels," meaning HPG. If DW can't or won't put a proper caption on the photos, then don't use the damned photos.

Asia Times has an article on the battle between Hewlêr and Ankara, too. Written by a former Indian ambassador to Turkey, it seems to stress the fact that Ankara already has economic control over South Kurdistan. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, to allow free economic reign to Turkey in South Kurdistan is to simply create a very strong reason for Turkish invasion. Business interests are national and security interests--just look at the US example. Any threat to US business interests is considered a threat to national and security interests, and since Turkey is always looking around with that monkey-see-monkey-do attitude, it's going to use this as another excuse for invasion on top of the Kerkuk issue.

But that's old news. What was interesting about the Asia Times article was something on page 2:

There is an extraordinary passage in the recent book The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End by Peter Galbraith, adviser to the Kurdish regional government. Galbraith reveals how Kurdish leaders themselves are modest in their expectations of Kurdish autonomy but external actors significantly influence them.

Galbraith said, "I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking [circa 2003] in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent [Iraq's Kurdish deputy prime minister] Barham [Salih] and [Prime Minister of the KRG] Nechirvan [Barzani] in August, I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a bottom-up system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state' ...

"In a federal system, residual power lies with the federal unit (that is, state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement ...

"The constitution should state that the constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of the constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former. These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

In short, Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq sought Galbraith's help in 2003 for structuring Iraq's federal system of government, but instead he convinced them about a confederal system of government! Turkey ought to worry now that Galbraith might proceed to convince a hopelessly distracted Bush administration, too, that the Iraqi state was an aberration of history.

Now, I have never read specifically where Peter Galbraith has said that "the Iraqi state was an aberration of history," but I would not be surprised if he actually does believe the statement to be true, which it is. It was constructed with no regard whatsoever for the various ethnicities carved up, shoved together, and ruled by centralized strongmen for most, if not all, of its existence. This was done purely to control energy resources and that's the same reason the US has refused to consider a confederal system of government or to try to negotiate such a an arrangement.

Americans still largely have no clue about the ethnicities of the region. Example, this headline: "Turkey Attacks Iraqi Kurds", the body of which post goes on to describe the ongoing Turkish Terrorist Forces' operations in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, not in South Kurdistan. Turkey did send over a few artillery rounds last Sunday, as always blasting a civilian Başûrî village near Zaxo, but that fact was not addressed in the post.

Those fun-loving fascists at PajamasMedia have posted a little chat one of them had with Ankara's ambassador to the US and if you're so inclined, you can head over there to read Nabi Sensoy's lies. Man, there's nothing I'd rather do than sit and chat over coffee with a genocider and genocide-denier . . . except maybe develop rectal cancer.

On the other hand, Rock the Truth gets an "A" for effort, for recognizing that the Ankara regime has "massacre(d) their Kurds," and for noting that the majority of the almost-proverbial "37,000 people" murdered during the current Kurdish freedom struggle have been Kurds.

Very well done. Maybe there's hope, however dim.

RISING VIOLENCE IN INDIA AND THE KURDISH SITUATION

"I’ve always felt that it’s ironic that hunger strikes are used as a political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway."
~ Arundhati Roy.

Kurdish Aspect is carrying Serdar Sengul's remarks from the KNCNA conference last month. While I agree with him that the subject of education is a critical one for the Kurdish people, and that the history of the destruction of the Kurdish educational system by the Turkish state is a subject worthy of study, and that the creation of a new Kurdish educational system is absolutely necessary, what intrigued me was the fact that Heval Serdar's master's degree study was on "the changing perceptions of security in India in the post-Cold War Era."


The reason that this intrigued me was that last week, some nice person sent me a link to an interview with famed Indian writer Arundhati Roy, suggesting that her remarks might be fruitful for Kurds to reflect upon. Having read through the interview several times now, and keeping in mind the recent history of repression--at least from Semdinli, through the Amed Serhildan, to the Koma Komalên Kurdistan's offer of a democratic resolution and the rejected unilateral ceasefire, to the attacks against the Kurdish leadership in Europe in February, the poisoning of Ocalan, and the crackdown on DTP--I feel that Arundhati Roy's comments on the current situation in India are compelling for the Kurdish people as well as for the Indian people.

What does a people do, when playing the democracy "game" by the West's chameleon rules only results in more repression, more imprisonment, more torture, more offensive military operations? What does a people do, when faced with repeated, gross injustices and the hypocrisy of servile, corporate-controlled democracies?

The interview with Ms. Roy focuses on the rising violence in India, a subject about which not much is heard at all in the American media. There have been articles about the Maoist/government peace process in India, and the articles in the American media on that subject have had a bitter flavor to them, for two reasons I suspect: because "Maoists" have actually entered a dialog with a government and have worked out a solution and because peace means a loss of revenue for the American war industry. However, the rise of "Maoists" and other dissenters willing to use violence in India is completely off the mainstream American radar. Why is that?

Upon being asked about her reluctance to condemn violence, Ms. Roy replies:

What I feel is this: non-violent movements have knocked at the door of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The nba had a lot going for it — high-profile leadership, media coverage, more resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound to want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins to promote satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it’s time for us to sit up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within the structure of a democratic nation state? Is it possible in the age of disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media?

[ . . . ]

There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a series of judgments that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgment, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the requisite clearances, said in so many words that the questions of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the era of corporate globalization, corporate land-grab, in the era of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most powerful institution in this country. The judiciary, along with the corporate press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this, when people feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus non-violence. There are political parties that believe in armed struggle but only as one part of their overall political strategy. Political workers in these struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the violence of the Indian State. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colors fade to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

When asked if "rebels are only the flip side of the State:"

How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything. However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become SPOs (special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland.

[ . . . ]

But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous situations it creates.

When asked if the Maoists might also usher in an "exploitive, autocratic, violent" regime:

. . . the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I admire that. It may well be that when they come to power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, or even worse than the present government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too. And most likely someone like myself will be the first person they’ll string up from the nearest tree — but right now, it is important to acknowledge that they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us are in a position where we are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those who we know have no place for us in their religious or ideological imagination.

Ominous words, those last. How well do they apply to the Kurdish situation?

The entire interview is available at ZNet and it's worth at least one read; maybe more. Ms. Roy's comments on globalization are also compelling for Kurds under Turkish occupation, particularly as regards the Ilisu Dam exploitation project, as well as for South Kurdistan with its free-for-all investment law and the mad scramble for control of wider Iraqi oil resources by Western corporations.