Author: Aylin D. Miller

  • Cash Transfers To Armenia Jump To New High

    Cash Transfers To Armenia Jump To New High

     

     

     

     

     

    By Emil Danielyan

    Cash remittances sent home by Armenians working abroad jumped by 57.5 percent to $668.6 million in the first half of this year, helping Armenia to sustain robust economic growth and finance its massive trade deficit.

    The figure released to RFE/RL by the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA) on Tuesday is equivalent to 15 percent of the country’s first-half Gross Domestic Product. It measures only the amount of remittances processed by Armenian commercial banks. Comparable sums are believed to enter the country through non-bank transfer systems.

    The bank transfers, most of them coming from Russia and the United States, already rose by 37 percent to a record-high level of $1.32 billion last year. The latest CBA data put them on course to set a new record in 2008.

    The multimillion-dollar remittances have been a key source of revenue for a considerable part of Armenia’s population ever since the economic collapse of the early 1990s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to go abroad, mainly to Russia, in search of employment. Economists agree that they have also been a major factor behind Armenia’s economic growth, significantly boosting domestic consumer demand and the booming construction and services sectors. According to official statistics, the Armenian economy expanded by 10.3 percent in the first half of 2008 and is thus on track to register a double-digit growth rate for the seventh consecutive years.

    The remittances have also been the main source of financing for the country’s widening current-account trade deficits. Official figures for the first half show the trade imbalance skyrocketing by 66 percent to $1.39 billion on the back of a 40 percent surge in imports. Armenian exports, by contrast, fell by about one percent to $520 million.

    The rising amounts of money sent by migrant Armenian workers to their relatives are also thought to have been instrumental in the more than 90 percent nominal appreciation of the Armenian national currency, the dram, against the U.S. dollar registered in the past five years. The dram’s strengthening stopped late last year, possibly due to the start of Armenia’s dramatic presidential race and the resulting political turmoil. The process resumed in May, with the dram gaining more than 2 percent in additional value against both the dollar and the euro since then.

  • The Sultan’s Nose – Caricatures from Turkey

    The Sultan’s Nose – Caricatures from Turkey

    Exhibition at the Museum der Weltkulturen Frankfurt
    August 9, 2008 to November 16, 2008
    
    Organizer:
    DiYALOG in cooperation with the Museum der Weltkulturen and
    Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation
    
    Museum of World Cultures, Schaumainkai 37, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
    
    On August 8, on the occasion of the Book Fair, the Museum of World
    Cultures in Frankfurt will open the exhibition "The Sultan's Nose -
    Caricatures from Turkey."
    
    This exhibition has been initiated and organized by the Turkish Cultural
    Initiative DIYALOG in cooperation with the Museum of World Cultures, the
    Turkish branch of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, and with support from
    the Organizing Committee of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008.
    
    Since the debate on the Muhammad caricatures that were published in
    Denmark, Europeans have been engaged with the question of caricature and
    humour in the Muslim world. Presenting a selection of old and new examples
    of Turkish caricatures, the exhibition aims to show the central role
    satire has played as a form of socio-political argument since the time of
    the Ottoman sultans in Turkey.
    
    The exhibition includes work by caricaturists who are regarded as
    classics in Turkey, first during the late Ottoman period and moving
    forward to the 1950s with work by graphic artists like Turhan Selçuk
    and Tan Oral. Simultaneously, the exhibition shows for the first time
    in Germany a selection of works by today's generation of Turkish
    caricaturists. Works come from saucy and/or satirical political daily
    newspapers and magazines such as "LeMan," "Penguen" and "Uykusuz."
    
    The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on the history of
    Turkish caricatures. The book is published by Istanbul University Press
    and the Berlin publisher Dagyeli in a bilingual German-Turkish edition.
    
    Full publication information:
    
    "Die Nase des Sultans - Karikaturen aus der Türkei"
    Istanbul Bilgi University Press and Dagyeli Publishers, Berlin
    ISBN 978-3-935597-68-5
    Price: 28 Euros
  • Has China got a terrorist problem?

    Has China got a terrorist problem?

    From
    August 5, 2008

    The Uighur attack in the northwest was shocking but not a precursor to a bigger outrage

    The Olympics will open on Friday inside a triple ring of steel. Anti-terrorism precautions have been an unavoidable feature of the Games since the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, but China has taken things to extremes.

    It has mobilised 110,000 police and other security forces in Beijing itself, plus 1.4 million security “volunteers” with Red Guard-style armbands and no fewer than 300,000 spy cameras. The security bill for Beijing alone exceeds £3 billion. Outside the capital, cities hosting Olympic events will be patrolled by 34,000 troops, surface-to-air missiles guard key sites, and 74 military aircraft, 48 helicopters and 33 naval vessels have been placed on high alert. While insisting that none of this will dampen the “festive atmosphere”, the Chinese official in charge dourly insists that “safety is the main symbol for success of the Games”.

    Not a rat will scurry Chinese streets undetected – and that, charge those few dissidents who have not already been arrested or shipped out of town, is the real purpose. The Communist Party is obsessed, they say, not by terrorists, but by fear that demonstrations by law-abiding citizens will mar the image of China’s “harmonious society”. “One world, one dream” is the slogan, and woe betide anyone whose dreams deviate from the party line. Far from redeeming its pledge that to be awarded the Olympics would improve respect for human rights, China has seized the excuse for a crackdown. By po-facedly lumping together as “terrorist threats” not just separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, but the nonviolent though eccentric “Falun Gong evil cult” and “common citizens who are discontented”, Chinese officialdom reinforced the cynics’ case.

    It would carry cynicism too far to say that this week’s brutal attack, almost certainly by Uighur militants, on a border police garrison in the far northwestern frontier city of Kashgar was nicely timed to still such criticism. Killing 16 police, it has badly shaken the nation and compels fresh examination of China’s assertion that it has a serious terrorist problem in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and that Uighur separatists have the Olympics in their sights. The attack is also a big embarrassment, given the massive security clampdown that China has mounted in recent months across this, its largest province.

    But it does not, however shocking, prove Beijing’s point. The fact that this was the deadliest terrorist incident on Chinese soil for a decade and that the attackers were arrested indicates, to the contrary, that violence in Xinjiang is ill-organised. Nor does it prove, contrary to Chinese assertions since 9/11, that the Uighurs are a fount of Islamist terrorism, inspired by if not linked to al-Qaeda. The truer analogy is between Xinjiang and Tibet.

    Both these vast terrains are officially classed as “autonomous regions”. To walk the streets of Kashgar or Khotan, the scene of demonstrations earlier this year, is to sense immediately how much more they have in common with Kabul than with China proper. In both, that autonomy is mocked by heavy-handed Han Chinese domination of government and economic life: not for nothing does Xinjiang, only sporadically under Chinese control until it was conquered by the Qing dynasty in the 16th century, mean “New Dominion”.

    The Uighurs have been at odds with the Chinese for centuries. Like the Tibetans, they fear becoming a minority in their own land, where officially encouraged Chinese migration under the slogan “Go West”, accelerating over the past decade with the aggressive development of Xinjiang’s rich oil and mineral resources, has lifted the Han Chinese from 5 per cent to 40 per cent of the population. Like the Tibetans, the 8.5 million Uighurs of Xinjiang are treated as second-class citizens; a US congressional committee records that in 2006, the Xinjiang Communist Party reserved 800 out of 840 Civil Service job openings for Han Chinese – using the excuse that “the cultural level of the people here is quite low”. Their mosques are closed or razed at will; their traditional homes are being demolished in the name of modernisation; and they fear, with some reason, that their language and culture are being reduced to the level of tourist attractions.

    A decade ago these discontents spasmodically erupted in attacks by separatists, chief among them the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). A few Uighurs did train with al-Qaeda – 22 ended up in Guantanamo. But their purchase in Xinjiang was marginal even then, and the Chinese security presence has, by most expert reckoning, reduced ETIM to fewer than 100 fighters. The Uighurs are a disgruntled lot, but they are not by and large Islamists and they are realistic enough to recognise independence as a pipedream.

    China does not have a terrorist problem, in Xinjiang or anywhere else. It might not even have a nationalist problem in Xinjiang if it gave Uighurs a fairer deal. Beijing needs to wake up, smell the kebabs, and acknowledge the Uighurs’ right to be themselves. The threat to the Olympics is minimal.

  • Democracy’s Close Call in Turkey

    Democracy’s Close Call in Turkey

    Turkey narrowly averted an incalculable disaster last week. The Constitutional Court turned back a state prosecutor’s request to dissolve the ruling Justice and Development Party and ban 71 of its leading figures from politics for five years, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. The court ruling is a victory for Turkey, for democracy and for the politics of moderation in the volatile Near and Middle East. That makes it a victory for the United States as well. Had it gone the other way, Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union would have been demolished and the clearly expressed will of Turkish voters outrageously thwarted. Worst of all, an alarming message would have been sent to religious-minded voters throughout the Muslim world that scrupulous adherence to the ground rules of democratic politics was no guarantee of equal political rights and representation.

    New York Times Article

  • U.S. military indiscriminately killed civilians in the Korean War

    U.S. military indiscriminately killed civilians in the Korean War

     

     

    By CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, Associated Press Writers 1 hour, 26 minutes ago

    SEOUL, South Korea – South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War. military

    A half-century later, the Seoul government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens’ petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.

    Concluding its first investigations, the 2 1/2-year-old commission is urging the government to seek U.S. compensation for victims.

    “Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation. It’s the U.S. military’s fault,” said survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, who says he lost four family members among hundreds of refugees suffocated, burned and shot to death in a U.S. Air Force napalm attack on their cave shelter south of Seoul in 1951.

    Commission researchers have unearthed evidence of indiscriminate killings in the declassified U.S. archive, including a report by U.S. inspectors-general that pilots couldn’t distinguish their South Korean civilian allies from North Korean enemy soldiers.

    South Korean legislators have asked a U.S. Senate committee to join them in investigating another long-classified document, one saying American ground commanders, fearing enemy infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting approaching refugees.

    The Associated Press has found that wartime pilots and declassified documents at the U.S. National Archives both confirm that refugees were deliberately targeted by U.S. forces.

    The U.S. government has been largely silent on the commission’s work. The U.S. Embassy here says it has not yet been approached by the Seoul government about compensation. Spokesman Aaron Tarver also told the AP that the embassy is not monitoring commission findings.

    The commission’s president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, said the U.S. Army helped defend South Korea in the 1950-53 war, but also “victimized” South Korean civilians. “We feel detailed investigation should be done by the U.S. government itself,” he said.

    The citizen petitions have accumulated since 1999, when the AP, after tracing Army veterans who were there, confirmed the 1950 refugee killings at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 died at American hands, mostly women and children.

    In newly democratized South Korea, after decades of enforced silence under right-wing dictatorships, that report opened floodgates of memory, as families spoke out about other wartime mass killings.

    “The No Gun Ri incident became one of the milestones, to take on this kind of incident in the future,” said Park Myung-lim of Seoul, a Korean War historian and adviser to the truth commission.‘s Yonsei University

    The National Assembly established the 15-member panel in December 2005 to investigate not only long-hidden Korean War incidents, including the southern regime’s summary executions of thousands of suspected leftists, but also human rights violations by the Seoul government during the authoritarian postwar period.

    Findings are meant to “reconcile the past for the sake of national unity,” says its legislative charter.

    The panel cannot compel testimony, prosecute or award compensation. Since the commission may shut down as early as 2010, the six investigators devoted to alleged cases of “civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers” are unlikely to examine all 215 cases fully.

    News reports at the time hinted at such killings after North Korea invaded the south in June 1950. But the extent wasn’t known. Commission member Kim Dong-choon, in charge of investigating civilian mass killings, says there were large numbers of dead — between 50 and 400 — in many incidents.

    As at No Gun Ri, some involved U.S. ground troops, such as the reported killing of 82 civilians huddled in a village shrine outside the southern city of Masan in August 1950. But most were air attacks.

    In one of three initial findings, the commission held that a surprise U.S. air attack on east Wolmi island on Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the U.S. amphibious landing at nearby Incheon, was unjustified. Survivors estimate 100 or more South Korean civilians were killed.

    In clear weather from low altitude, “U.S. forces napalmed numerous small buildings, (and) strafed children, women and old people in the open area,” the commission said.

    Investigator Kang Eun-ji said high priority is being given to reviewing attacks earlier in 1950 on refugees gathered in fields west of the Naktong River, in North Korean-occupied areas of the far south, while U.S. forces were dug in east of the river. One U.S. air attack on 2,000 refugees assembled Aug. 20, 1950, at Haman, near Masan, killed almost 200, survivors reported.

    “There were many similar incidents — refugees gathered in certain places, and there were air strikes,” she said.

    The declassified record shows the Americans’ fear that enemy troops were disguising themselves as civilians led to indiscriminate attacks on “people in white,” the color worn by most Koreans, commission and AP research found.

    In the first case the commission confirmed, last November, its investigators found that an airborne Air Force observer had noted in the “Enemy” box of an after-mission report, “Many people in white in area.”

    The area was the village of Sanseong-dong, in an upland valley 100 miles southeast of Seoul, attacked on Jan. 19, 1951, by three waves of Navy and Air Force planes. Declassified documents show the U.S. X Corps had issued an order to destroy South Korean villages within 5 miles of a mountain position held by North Korean troops.

    “Everybody came out of their houses to see these low-flying planes, and everyone was hit,” farmer Ahn Shik-mo, 77, told AP reporters visiting the apple-growing village. “It appeared they were aiming at people.”

    At least 51 were killed, the commission found, including Ahn’s mother. Sixty-nine of 115 houses were destroyed in what the panel called “indiscriminate” bombing. “The U.S. Air Force regarded all people in white as possible enemy,” it concluded.

    “There never were any North Koreans in the village,” said villager Ahn Hee-duk, a 12-year-old boy at the time.

    The U.S. itself said there were no enemy casualties, an acknowledgment made Feb. 13, 1951, in a joint Army-Air Force report on the Sanseong-dong bombing, an unusual review undertaken because Korean authorities questioned the attack. military

    Classified for a half-century, that report included a candid admission: “Civilians in villages cannot normally be identified as either North Koreans, South Koreans, or guerrillas,” wrote the inspectors-general, two colonels.

    The Eighth Army commander, Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, held, nonetheless, that Sanseong-dong’s destruction was “amply justified,” the AP found in a declassified document. Today’s Korean commission held otherwise, recommending that the government negotiate for U.S. compensation.

    A U.S. airborne observer in that attack, traced by the AP, said it’s “very possible” the Sanseong-dong mission could be judged indiscriminate. George P. Wolf, 88, of Arlington, Texas, also said he remembered orders to strafe refugees.

    “I’m very, very sorry about hitting civilians,” said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who flew with the 6147th Tactical Control Squadron.

    The day after the Sanseong-dong attack, the cave shelter at Yeongchun, 120 miles southeast of Seoul, came under repeated napalm and strafing attacks from 11 U.S. warplanes.

    Hundreds of South Korean civilians, fearing their villages would be bombed, had jammed inside the 85-yard-long cave, with farm animals and household goods outside.

    Around 10 a.m., Cho Byung-woo, then 9, was deep in the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel when he heard screams up front, and saw choking fumes billowing inside. Air Force F-51 Mustangs dropped napalm firebombs at the cave’s entrance, a declassified mission report shows.

    “I ran forward and all I could hear were people coughing and screaming, and some were probably already dead,” Cho recalled, revisiting the cave with AP reporters. His father flung the boy out the entrance, his hair singed. Outside, Cho saw more planes strafe people fleeing into surrounding fields.

    He and other survivors said surveillance planes had flown over for days beforehand. “There was no excuse,” Cho said. “How could they not tell — the cows, the pieces of furniture?”

    Survivors said the villagers had tried days earlier to flee south, but were turned back at gunpoint at a U.S. Army roadblock, an account supported by a declassified 7th Infantry Division journal.

    Villagers believe 360 people were killed at the cave. In its May 20 finding, the commission estimated the dead numbered “well over 200.” It found the U.S. had carried out an unnecessary, indiscriminate attack and had failed — with the roadblock — to meet its responsibility to safeguard refugees.

    The commission also pointed out that Ridgway — in a Jan. 3, 1951, order uncovered by AP archival research — had given units authority to fire at civilians to stop their movement.

    Five months earlier, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea confidentially informed Washington that the U.S. Army, fearing infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting South Korean refugees who approached its lines despite warnings. Ambassador John J. Muccio’s letter was dated July 26, 1950, the day U.S. troops began shooting refugees at No Gun Ri.

    American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of the declassified Muccio letter in his 2006 book “Collateral Damage.” But the Army had learned of the letter earlier, during its 1999-2001 No Gun Ri investigation, and had not disclosed its existence.

    The Army now asserts it omitted the letter from its 2001 No Gun Ri report because it discussed “a proposed policy,” not an approved one. But the document unambiguously described the policy as among “decisions made” — not a proposal — at a high-level U.S.-South Korean meeting, and AP research found declassified documents in which U.S. commanders in subsequent weeks repeatedly ordered troops to fire on refugees.

    In a May 15 letter to Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the then-vice speaker of Seoul‘s National Assembly, Lee Yong-hee, called on Congress to investigate whether the Army intentionally suppressed the Muccio letter in its inquiry.

    Since targeting noncombatants is a war crime, “this is a matter of deep concern to the Korean people,” wrote Lee, whose district includes No Gun Ri.

    Lee, who has since lost his leadership position as a result of elections, suggested a joint U.S.-Korean congressional probe. Frank Jannuzi, the Senate committee’s senior East Asia specialist, said its staff would seek Pentagon and State Department briefings on the matter.

    In 2001, the U.S. government rejected the No Gun Ri survivors’ demand for an apology and compensation, and the Army’s report claimed the No Gun Ri killings were “not deliberate.”

    But at a Seoul on May 15 with survivors of No Gun Ri and other incidents, their U.S.-based lawyers pointed out that powerful contrary evidence has long been available. news conference

    “The killings of Korean civilians were extensive, intentional and indiscriminate,” lawyers Michael Choi and Robert Swift said in a statement.

    In its 2001 report, the Army said it had learned of other civilian killings by U.S. forces, but it indicated they would not be investigated.

    ___

    Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

  • `Ice warrior’ poised to repel rise of Islamic rule in Turkey …. Jon Swain

    `Ice warrior’ poised to repel rise of Islamic rule in Turkey …. Jon Swain

     
    From The Sunday Times, August 3, 2008

    As a result, Turks know the commander of the armed forces has the
    fate of their nation in his hands every bit as much as any elected
    prime minister.

    So the appointment of a new chief of the general staff is always a
    closely monitored event. Seldom have Turks watched more closely than
    at this moment.

    The next chief of the armed forces is being chosen this weekend at
    the end of a tumultuous week. Two terrorist bombs exploded last
    Sunday night in Istanbul, killing 17 people, including five children
    whose bodies were riddled with shrapnel.

    Erdogan makes unity plea after bombings

    Turkey managed to step back from the brink of political chaos last
    Wednesday after the country’s highest court rejected an application
    to close the governing party on the grounds that it was seeking to
    introduce Islamic laws in violation of the secular constitution. Even
    so, a majority of the judges found the party guilty of eroding
    secularism.

    Adding to the crisis, two senior retired generals are in jail pending
    charges of involvement with a group dedicated to overthrowing the
    government.

    To choose a new armed forces supremo and make other senior military
    appointments, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is chairing a
    meeting of the supreme military board at army headquarters in Ankara,
    the capital.

    The meeting started on Friday and will last four days. The name of
    the general who is to be promoted to the top job will be announced
    when it ends tomorrow.

    He is widely expected to be General Ilker Basbug, commander of the
    army, who is called in military circles the “ice warrior” because he
    has a reputation for being calm and pragmatic.

    Sandhurst-trained Basbug, 65, will have the top job for the next two
    years. He is a formidable military figure and an ideological
    hardliner who will ensure that Erdogan’s government – which was
    elected last year with 47% of the vote but is mistrusted by the
    military, which sees itself as guardian of a secular society – walks
    a narrow political line.

    For these reasons Basbug is almost certainly not the general Erdogan
    would choose to promote. The outgoing chief of the general staff,
    General Mehmet Yasar Buyukanit, was also a hardliner but he was
    impulsive and could be outmanoeuvred by the prime minister.

    “Erdogan will find Basbug is a much more formidable opponent than his
    predecessor. He is a lot more subtle,” said a military source.

    The prime minister has the constitutional authority to oppose
    Basbug’s appointment – this authority has been invoked in the past
    but has almost always backfired – and Erdogan knows last week’s
    dramatic events have left him politically vulnerable.

    “Erdogan is wary of Basbug and would have preferred to have appointed
    someone else, but I’d be very surprised if he would be stupid enough
    to try to stop Basbug. This is no time to upset the armed forces’
    hierarchy,” said the military source.

    Last Wednesday Erdogan narrowly survived legal moves to ban him and
    the president Abdullah Gul from politics and to close his governing
    party on the grounds that they were steering the country towards
    Islamic rule.

    After three days of deliberations, the 11 judges of Turkey’s
    constitutional court decided against an indictment accusing the
    Justice and Development party (AKP) of pursuing an Islamic agenda and
    undermining Turkey’s secular constitution.

    The court punished Erdogan’s party for its Islamic tilt by cutting in
    half its public funding for next year, but a verdict against the AKP
    had been widely expected.

    The court had already overturned AKP efforts to lift a 1989 law that
    banned women from wearing Islamic headscarves in universities.

    Erdogan’s secularist opponents, who dominate the military and
    judiciary, claim his policies mask plans to make Turkey more like
    Iran or Saudi Arabia.

    In Turkey, the military has traditionally had multiple pressure
    points on the civilian government, through the chief of the general
    staff’s weekly meetings with the prime minister and president, and
    through the twice-monthly meetings of the national security council.

    Manipulating the civilian government, sometimes through thinly veiled
    threats
    , is a subtle art that Buyukanit was not good at.

    However, Basbug is expected to be more effective in influencing
    Erdogan’s government without giving the prime minister the excuse to
    complain he has come under undemocratic pressure. Basbug is known for
    well-crafted public statements that do not alienate the government.

    The decision of the constitutional court not to ban Erdogan and his
    party clears the way for the prime minister to pursue democratic
    reforms and his goal of European Union membership. As a prerequisite
    for membership, the EU has demanded a reduction in the military’s
    influence in Turkish politics.

    Erdogan is expected to start work on a new constitution, but the
    court’s verdict has served notice that it and the military will be
    watching his party closely for any signs of Islamic activity and he
    will have to be careful how he goes about constitutional reform.

    If he tries to go too far there is no doubt, regardless of the EU’s
    disapproval, that Basbug and the military will come down hard, just
    as the armed forces have in the past.

    Turkey calls itself a democracy but the military has always hovered
    in the wings. Military coups have removed elected governments from
    power three times in the past 50 years.