TURKEY: GUARANTEEING HUMAN RIGHTS GLOBALLY

"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
~ Thomas Jefferson.

From the No Shit Department:

Kenneth Roth, administrator of the Human Rights Watch (HRW), described Cemil Çiçek, minister in charge of the issues related to human rights, with whom he met about their reports about the police violence in Turkey and not punishing those responsible for it, as sarcastic and too defensive.

[ . . . ]

According to Roth, Çiçek denies even the existence of the problem and when reminded of the police violence cases, describes this as an outcome of the psychology of the police officer up against terrorism.

Emphasizing that Çiçek offered excuses about every matter they brought up in regards to the human rights violations, Roth said, "When we mentioned the Constitutional Reform, the freedom of expression and the police violence he brought up the constitutional process in the European Union (EU), the EU’s attitude towards Turkey and the violence used by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), respectively."

"It is ironic that Çiçek is the minister in charge of the human rights. It made me think that if Çiçek was a minister for improving the human rights or one for violating them. Let alone the implementation of the recommendations in the report, he did not even want to discuss the matter."

Welcome to our world, Mr. Roth! Have a glass of tea and stay a while.

Everyone can read the bloviations--or should I say "flatulations"?--that this worthless little human turd, Çiçek, has to say about Turkey's efforts for "human rights" at Hürriyet (English version, since I refuse to waste my precious time translating the turd's lies). Oh, I'm certain that Turkey will be the vanguard of securing human rights throughout the entire world--especially the Muslim world--because of it's temporary position on the UN security council. Yes, boys and girls, that would be the same UN that has never, in its entire history, so much as passed gas in Turkey's direction for the Ankara regime's genocide against the Kurdish people. After all, image is everything!

Yes, Turkey will be the ultimate vanguard of human rights everywhere, everywhere but right in its own internal colony of Turkish-occupied Kurdistan.

Let's see . . . we had the events of Newroz, with the AKP government beating Kurdish women with nightsticks and dislocating the arms of Kurdish youths in front of the news media, and the AKP police did that in front of the news media because they knew without any doubt that they would not be prosecuted for it. And they haven't been. That, boys and girls, is what is known as a culture of impunity and it is deeply entrenched within the Ankara regime.

Almost two years have passed since the Ankara regime murdered Hrant Dink and they are still screwing around with their bullshit prosecutions. From today's Bianet English page alone, there's an article about alleged charges against the Trabzon jandarma officials who arranged Dink's murder. Another article discusses the fact the fact that one of the so-called "witnesses" has changed his statement, probably for the umpteenth time. In addition to arranging and carrying out the murder of the most prominent Armenian journalist in Turkey, police officials are also under investigation for harassing a journalist from the daily Birgün.

I mean, sometimes I have to check to see if I'm actually reading Bianet or if I've mistakenly accessed the homepage of some human rights organization because it's constantly something involving serious abuses of human rights or violations of free expression that I see there.

Even Europe, the continent with the most hopelessly population, has begun to wonder what has happened with their wonder boy, Katil Erdoğan. From Der Spiegel:

Amid corruption scandals and stagnating reform, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, praised in Europe as a modernizer, is seeking refuge in nationalist rhetoric, adopting a tougher stance on the Kurds and moving closer to the country's military leaders.

The public prosecutor in Adana, a city in southern Turkey, has clear ideas on how the state ought to treat teenagers who protest by throwing stones. In his view, they should be arrested and locked away, preferably for life.

Last week the prosecutor demanded up to 58 years in prison for six young Kurds between the ages of 13 and 16. During a demonstration in October, the students threw stones at police officers, shouted illegal slogans and unfurled posters touting the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

[ . . . ]

Long praised in the West as a peacemaker and reformer, a man who has made great strides in bringing his country closer to Europe, Erdogan is now revealing reactionary tendencies.

He has recently stopped calling for "cultural rights" for minorities, and is ignoring the human rights abuses being committed by Turkish police. Instead, he now prefers the language of the generals and nationalists. Turkey, Erdogan said excitedly in a recent speech to a Kurdish audience, is "one nation, one flag, one country." He added: "whoever doesn't like it can leave."

When Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, the Kurdish-born deputy chairman of Erdogan's conservative Islamic party, the AKP, resigned from his position, the premier replaced him with a hardliner who prefers military force over dialogue when it comes to the Kurdish question.

Oh, surprise, surprise, surprise.

None of this counts the bombing of Kurdish civilians, and the destruction of their property and livelihoods, in South Kurdistan--a part of the sovereign state of Iraq--by TSK, which has been ongoing for one year now. If it were the Israelis targeting Palestinian civilians like that, no one would hear the end of it.

But no. . . it's only Turkey, this year's global vanguard of human rights, and it's only the Kurds getting bombed. Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here. Move along.

But we all know why the Ankara regime maintains its internal colony Kurdistan and fears the local administration of resources, labeling such a suggestion--as made by Diyarbakır's wildly popular mayor, Osman Baydemir--as "separatism". Resources. High quality oil reserves, the curse of the region, for one. Water and coal, to name two others. For these reasons, resource-rich Kurdistan will continue bereft of liberty, a victim of Turkey's internal imperialism.

How about those Greeks, eh? From the very people who invented democracy--real democracy, not the crap peddled by the Western world, whose "democracy" is merely a euphemism for "unbridled, free-market capitalism", otherwise known as greed. Those Greeks are proving Thomas Jefferson's words: "When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

This is exactly what needs to happen in Turkey every time a Kurdish boy has his arm dislocated or broken by the fascist police, every time a Kurd is shot dead in Istanbul because some pig decided he just felt like murdering a Kurd, and every time some brain-dead Turkish nationalist decides to take a shotgun to supporters of the DTP, simply because the murderer he elected as prime minister told him it was just ducky to shoot supporters of the only opposition party in Turkey.

Every time these kinds of things happen, there should be riots throughout the country, without stop, until the regime and it's culture of racism and impunity fears the people more than it fears anything its worst nightmares can conjure.

Then, and only then, will you have liberty.

Happy Freakin' International Human Rights Day!

TERRORISM, GLOBALIZATION, AND CONSPIRACY

"Just as the power of the feudal aristocracy had to be broken in order for capitalism to emerge fully, so must imperialism and capitalism in Third World nations be overcome if a new system is to prevail."
~ Michael Parenti.

Here's an old video. from 2002, which I have just come across but which has a very good discussion of capitalism, globalism--a euphemism for that most advanced form of capitalism, imperialism--and the addiction of the elites.

The speaker is American political scientist, Michael Parenti. Run time one hour.

Enjoy.

WATER, ARMENIANS, KURDS

"Since we did not come to the terms with what Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians went through, the Kurdish problem, the May First celebrations, the Alevi problems persist as individual paranoids."
~ Erdoğan Aydın

It is widely known that North Kurdistan is an internal colony of the Ankara regime. It is also widely known that states hold on to colonies in order to exploit the resources of the colonies, resources that properly belong to the colonized.

With that in mind, here's another example of the Ankara regime's exploitation of North Kurdistan's resources, from AlterNet:

In March 2009 the Turkish government will host the fifth World Water Forum against a backdrop of what is probably the most sweeping water privatisation programme in the world. As well as privatizing water services, the government plans to sell of rivers and lakes. Turkish social movements, who hosted their own conference in Istanbul last month, suspect the Government is using the World Water Forum to push through this highly controversial agenda.

Previous sessions of the World Water Forum, held once every three years, have faced opposition from civil society groups who consider it an illegitimate, flawed platform for discussing solutions to the world's water problems. The Forum is controlled by the World Water Council, a private think-tank with close links to the World Bank and private water multinationals. This criticism is likely to become even more intense in the run-up to the March 2009 Forum, given the host government's radical privatisation push.

[ . . . ]

Tahir Ongur from the Istanbul branch of the Chamber of Geology Engineers (TMMOB) explained that the government not only wants to privatize drinking water supplies, but also the water resources themselves. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Hilmi Guler has announced that rivers and lakes will be sold to private companies, for periods of up to 49 years. The government believes that allowing private firms to build dams in rivers and lakes which they also own is the best way to overcome water shortages, both for drinking water and rural irrigation. As part of this unprecedented privatisation offensive, the government aims to rush through a constitutional reform before the March 2009 World Water Forum. The main target is Article 43 of the constitution, which limits private control of coastal lines, rivers, lakes, etc. and underlines that the public interest should take priority.

Diren Ozkan from Save Hasankeyf criticised the continued proliferation of destructive large scale dam projects in Turkey. A particularly shocking example is the Ilisu dam site on the Tigris River, which will drown the ancient town of Hasankeyf and many nearby villages, displacing 78,000 people, mainly Kurds. The dam will cause tremendous environmental destruction and flood hundreds of ancient sites.

Abdullah Aysu, President of the Peasants' Federation, spoke passionately against government policies for privatising agricultural irrigation. The plans to replace management by rural cooperatives with a system of concession rights sold to private firms would have disastrous consequences for subsistence farmers and their communities, who would lose their rights to local water resources. Groundwater in rural areas is seriously depleted due to uncontrolled drilling, but commercialization is not the answer. The only real solution to these problems, Aysu explained, is to shift to a more natural model of agriculture, which he described as "ecological democracy."

[ . . . ]

Water privatisation is not an entirely new phenomenon in Turkey. There are private water supply contracts in Arpacay and Corlu, as well as widespread outsourcing and subcontracting of the water supply across the country. In the city of Antalya, French water giant Suez pulled-out six years into a 10-year contract after the municipality rejected their demand for another price increase. The prices had already risen 130 percent and the company had failed to invest what was promised.

[ . . . ]

The Turkish government hopes to use the World Water Forum to advance its sweeping privatisation plans, described by one conference speaker as "market fascism." On this background, one can only wonder how the World Water Council, the think-tank controlling the Forum, made the decision to give the Turkish government the role of Forum host for March 2009. On their website, the organisers of the World Water Forum in Istanbul "call upon the international water community to make concrete proposals so that better management of the resource may contribute to achieving the entirety of the Millennium Development Goals." The deeply irresponsible water policies of the Turkish host government reveal the emptiness of the World Water Council's feel-good rhetoric.

Meanwhile, at Bilgi University in Istanbul, there was a debate on the Armenian Genocide, in particular the 24 April 1915 round-up of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. I would have liked to attend this debate just to hear Eren Keskin and Ragıp Zarakoğlu. From Bianet:

Giving the opening speech, the IHD branch president Gülseren Yoleri stated that the genocide claims were still neither discussed nor accepted and the same was the case regarding the Kurdish problem.

“They could not live in their own land, nor die in it. They made enemies out of Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, the neighbors.”

Stating “the mentality of the Committee of the Union and Progress continues”, [human rights lawyer and Kurdish activist Eren] Keskin added that “If we do not discuss the Committee of the Union and Progress, the Special Organization (Teşkilat-i Mahsusa), Şemdinli incident, 6-7 September pogrom of 1955 against Greeks in Turkey and the latest Ergenekon incident, we will not get very far.”

Saying “I think that there is a generation that represents an enlightened conscience, like the hundreds of thousands who walked behind Hrant”, [journalist and writer Erdoğan] Aydın likewise added that “Since we did not come to the terms with what Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians went through, the Kurdish problem, the May First celebrations, the Alevi problems persist as individual paranoids.”

Hevallo also has something in honor of the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, as well as a not-to-be-missed glimpse into the real life of Kurds in Turkey.

Seriously. Don't miss it.