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Turkey Can't Have It Both Ways On Democracy

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  • Turkey Can't Have It Both Ways On Democracy

    TURKEY CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS ON DEMOCRACY

    Assyrian International News Agency AINA
    Oct 18 2012

    Despite claiming to be a democratic model for the Islamic world --
    and being held up by the US as the exemplary Israel-friendly Muslim
    state which the "Arab Winter" countries should emulate -- Turkey has
    a bleak history with its ethnic minorities.

    In the 20th century it committed massacres against the Armenians,
    killing a million people, and the Assyrians, whose civilization had
    survived for more than two thousand years in Mardin, Kilis, Nuseybin
    and Antep. They were expelled or murdered, and hundreds of thousands
    were forced to flee to Syria and Lebanon. There are still elderly
    Assyrians living in Canada today who can give credible eyewitness
    accounts of the horrors inflicted on the areas of southern Turkey
    they used to inhabit.

    As the Turkish government sees it, any voice or activity that
    diverts attention away from Syria must be stifled, because breaking
    Syria's back is the key to assuming leadership of the region. Today,
    it is the Kurdish Question which most continues to irk extreme
    Turkish nationalists. Constituting between 20 and 25 percent of the
    population of Turkey, the Kurds are too numerous to be treated as an
    alien minority and eliminated as the Armenians and Assyrians were. But
    "democratic" Turkey's attitude towards them, especially in the east
    of the country, differs little from "democratic" Israel's attitude
    to the Palestinians in the 1948 areas and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    The Erdogan government's neglect of the Kurdish Question has two
    principal causes.

    The first is historic. The ruling authorities in Ankara, of whatever
    stripe, have treated the Kurds with high-handedness and a sense of
    racial superiority ever since the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This
    was the case in secularist Kemalist days (Ataturk insisted the Kurds
    did not exist, but were "Mountain Turks") and it remained so under
    the generals, and after the rise of today's "Islamic centrists" who
    treat Kurdish activism as terrorism which threatens national security,
    and respond to it with military crackdowns.

    The second reason for neglecting the Kurdish Question is that it
    weakens Turkey's prestige while the country is trying to lead the
    region towards a "moderate peace" in line with US global policy. In
    Erdogan's view, this is not the time for the Kurds to be stirring --
    not that he or any Turkish leader before him ever thought there was
    a right time for the Kurds to stir.

    As the Turkish government sees it, any voice or activity that diverts
    attention away from Syria must be stifled, because breaking Syria's
    back is the key to assuming leadership of the region. Ankara has
    been active in broader international media and diplomatic efforts
    to suppress or forestall problems elsewhere in the world that could
    reduce the focus on Syria, interceding with a variety of other
    governments to that ends (for example, urging Israel to temporarily
    ease its repression and persecution of the Palestinians, or trying
    to reconcile North and South Sudan).

    With Syria taking up most of the Ankara government's time, it was
    bound to portray any domestic troubles inside Turkey, especially
    relating to the Kurds, as being linked to Syria. But that is a myth.

    The fact is that there is an organic link between Turkey's treatment
    of its Kurds, and its ability to continue serving as a model of an
    Islamic democracy with a rising economy. It is the Kurdish time-bomb
    that threatens Turkey's future. The Syrian factor can be controlled
    merely by ceasing to interfere in Syrian affairs.

    The areas of Syria adjoining Turkey gained much from the rapprochement
    between the two countries in recent years. But now they have been
    economically paralysed, and turned into a gathering-ground for fighters
    from around the world, including extremist groups like al-Qaeda and
    others, exploited by Turkish Islamist extremists. More than 100,000
    gunmen have crossed into Syria, while concentrations of Syrian refugees
    have built up in the border areas.

    There is an organic link between Turkey's treatment of its Kurds, and
    its ability to continue serving as a model of an Islamic democracy
    with a rising economy. The Kurdish Question has been a fact of life
    for over a century in Turkey, as in the other states of the region
    between which the Kurds are distributed. The Turkish government cannot
    continue ignoring the domestic ethnic and sectarian factors at play
    within its own territory, and act as though the Turkish Republic is
    a mono-sectarian and mono-ethnic country.

    Yet until today, under a false cloak of democracy, repression has
    the upper hand in Turkey. The Turkish army invades Kurdish districts,
    blows up houses and kills hundreds of people, and conquers adjoining
    border areas in Iraq and Syria -- with barely a passing mention made
    by the international media, whose ethics prompt them only to espouse
    those causes that serve neo-liberal hegemony.

    In Istanbul, journalists, writers, and dissidents are arrested for
    writing articles about the Kurds or Armenians. Even Nobel laureate
    Orhan Pamuk fled the country after an article on the massacres of
    Armenians. One publisher was jailed for two years for printing a
    translated book that referred to the slaughter of Kurds in the 1990s
    with the blessing of the Clinton administration. Every Turk -- Kurdish
    or otherwise -- who is aware of what is happening in the Kurdish areas
    advises you to watch the films of the Kurdish director Yilmaz Gunay,
    who is exiled in Europe. They depict daily sufferings in southeastern
    Turkey similar to those experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank
    and Gaza Strip.

    A self-professed champion of the Palestinian cause cannot also be
    Israel's chief ally in the region, and an avowed supporter of the
    "Arab Spring" ought to treat people fairly within its own borders and
    allow them to exercise their rights and liberties. The Kurdish people
    are a nation with an ancient civilization, language and culture,
    and a right to freedom and self-determination.

    By Kamal Dib http://english.al-akhbar.com

    Kamal Dib is a Lebanese-Canadian author and economist.

    http://www.aina.org/news/20121018182039.htm

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