HASHISH AND THE MARDIN MASSACRE

"What are they trying to hide?"
~ Ahmet Türk.

Some of you may remember Akin Birdal before he became one of DTP's Diyarbakır parliamentarians. If so, you will recall that he was the IHD president whom the state attempted to assassinate in 1998. Birdal has also been imprisoned for publicly urging a peaceful solution to the Kurdish situation in Turkey. In other words, there are very few others in Turkey who are as qualified to investigate human rights violations or state assassinations than Akin Birdal.

According to Akşam, the TBMM's Human Rights Commission has formed a sub-commission of five parliamentarians (out of the nine parliamentarians on the Human Rights Investigation Commission) to investigate the Mardin massacre and Akin Birdal, who is one of the nine members of the TBMM's Human Rights Commission, has been refused a place on the sub-commission.

My first thought about stuff like this is: "What are they trying to hide?" I'm not the only one who thinks that way. So does Ahmet Türk (Source: http://www.firatnews.com/index.php?rupel=nuce&nuceID=7451):

"To this date, we have always been excluded. However the behavior of the Human Rights Commission is quite thought-provoking. The idea of creating a parliamentary investigation commission for the violence in Mardin came from our friend Akin Birdal. But although he is a member of the commission, he is not included in the sub-commission for Mardin. Whereas the sub-commission consists of five members. Despite this fact, our party, which has a group in the parliament, is excluded from the sub-commission's investigation. This contradicts justice and equality principle. Why are we being excluded? We are not going to be silent about this."

[ . . . ]

"What are they trying to hide? We are not going to be silent about the behavior that excludes our party. Although there wasn't any member from MHP at the commission's meeting, the chairman calls him and tells him to come. However, he [the commission's AKP chairman] excludes our friend, who is already present at the meeting. In the past, I was also the Human Rights chairman. From all the political parties which have groups in the parliament, the subcommission gets members. There is a logic of exclusion in this case. We came here [to parliament] to represent our people, not to be excluded. The chairman of the parliament must intervene immediately [in this case of injustice].

Maybe they're trying to hide that business about the hashish in Bilge village (Source: http://www.firatnews.com/index.php?rupel=nuce&nuceID=7430):

Hashish fight over 40 thousand donums [Note: a donum is a unit of area equal to 1,000 square meters]

After the Assyrians and Armenians emigrated from their Bilge village land, the land became state property. However, the right to own that land divided the Çelebi family in two. The planting of hashish in almost 40 thousand donums in Bilge village caused the fight between village guards over shares.

Last month when there was a study for land registry, the debate over sharing of the land, which is marked as state property, was revealed Two weeks ago, the same debate heated up between nephew and uncle families [the Çelebis]. After the debate over the land--whose real owners were Assyrians and Armenians--was revealed, the Çelebi nephew family decided in favor of the massacre and the date for the massacre was chosen consciously. According to them, the wedding celebration was the most suitable time when everyone from the other family would be together. Thus they could massacre all of them without any witness.

Scapegoat PKK by not leaving any witness

The Çelebi nephew family wanted to massacre the members of the family of the [Çelebi] uncle without leaving any living witness, thus they would be able to blame PKK for this massacre.

In the massacre, where 44 people died, if there weren't any witnesses, the incident would have been blamed on PKK because, at the very beginning hours of the incident, several news agencies and TV news channels stated that village guards had fired back against "terrorists" who succeeded in escaping due to a dust storm.

However, the three wounded witnesses who survived the massacre and gave the village guard perpetrators' names, turned their plan upsidedown.

The Sultan village garrison is two kilometers away from Bilge village, however the troops arrived at the village where the incident took place two hours later.

All of this is despite the fact that, as I mentioned previously, right after the massacre began, one of the victims managed to escape and go to the military garrison to warn a village guard relative of what was happening. The village guard at the garrison warned the military commanders, saying "they have left no one in our village; we should go." The response of the military commanders was "If you want, you can go, but we are not going now."

How typical is all of this? A fight over illegal drugs, a massacre, attempt to blame the Kurdish freedom movement, and the state's authorities in the region showing up well after any danger is passed . . . kind of like state authorities acted at Güngören.

Also, as I mentioned previously, the survivors screwed the whole thing up.

For more on the Mardin massacre, check Children of the Sun for a discussion from İsmail Beşikçi on the purpose of village guards.

Zerkesorg has a discussion of the massacre, too, with a translated opinion piece on what the massacre is called and what it would be called under other conditions. Very interesting, particularly since the Ankara regime's propaganda about the massacre has saturated English-language media to such an extent that even bat-shit crazy, ultra-rightwing, neo-nazi, pro-terrorist, anti-Muslim fascist extremists, like this one, are advertising, for free, the spin of the Islamist regime in Turkey . . . And they're calling it "honor killing," but only because that's also a racist site.

It reminds me of the old adage that says that the biggest mistake intelligent people make is to refuse to believe that people are a stupid as they really are.

Hevallo's recent post mentions a subject that I'll be working on soon, and that will be the translation of Hasan Cemal's interview series at Milliyet with Murat Karayılan. Lots of speculation is flying around about this, especially since Abdullah Gül said that he wanted to see Hasan Cemal, along with certain other politicos such as the new foreign minister, Davutoğlu, and Cemil "Chicken Little" Çiçek.

Regarding the interview with Karayılan, we need to remember that nothing he's said in the interview is new to us. Karayılan has been saying the very same things that PKK has been saying for years now, especially since PKK issued its statement on a democratic solution to the Kurdish question back in 2006--three years ago! Because the information is censored by Google, you'll have to copy-and-paste http://www.kurdish-info.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3467 to read the three-year-old declaration.

At this point, I see Hasan Cemal's interview as introducing PKK's long-standing offer of a democratic solution, which has been ignored or denied by the Ankara regime and its worldwide publicists, to the Turkish public for the first time. Hevallo is absolutely correct in warning about provocations because we all know what happened the last time a Turkish president seriously considered a peaceful solution. Things are not much different now; there are still a lot of Deep State types who are making a lot of money from the status quo.

It may turn out to be a very interesting summer after all.