Category: Authors

Armenia Helps Coordinate Worldwide Genocide Centennial Activities

Two important conferences took place in Yerevan last week in preparation for next year’s Armenian Genocide Centennial.

Participating in the first meeting, held on May 26, were representatives of Centennial Committees from 40 countries who reported on their plans for April 24, 2015. On this occasion, the emblem and motto for the Centennial were unveiled — “I remember and demand….” The conference was a unique opportunity for the attendees to exchange contact information and discuss collaborative joint efforts.

The second meeting, held on May 27, brought together State Centennial Committee members, with representatives of the regional committees, and dozens of Armenian diplomats and high-ranking clergy from around the world. The State Committee consists of the leadership of Armenia and Artsakh (Karabagh), and heads of major Armenian organizations worldwide.

In a daring move, Pres. Sargsyan announced that he had invited the President of Turkey to visit Yerevan on April 24, 2015, in order to face the truth of the Armenian Genocide. Caught by surprise, Turkish officials have yet to respond to this challenging invitation. The Armenian President also informed the conference participants that he had invited several other heads of state to Yerevan on that date. French President Francois Hollande has already confirmed that he plans to be in Yerevan on the Genocide’s Centennial.

After presentations by State Committee members, representatives from Argentina, France, Lebanon, Russia, and the United States were given the opportunity to address the conference. I was also asked to speak in my capacity as Co-Chair of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of the Western United States.

I began by explaining that Armenians around the world should not be obsessed with the expectation that Pres. Obama would include the word genocide in his ‘memorial’ statement of April 24, 2015. Contrary to popular misconception, the United States government has repeatedly recognized the Armenian Genocide, starting in 1951 with an official document submitted to the World Court; House of Representatives resolutions in 1975 and 1984; and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Proclamation of April 22, 1981. Consequently, there is no crucial need to insist that Pres. Obama also acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, save for the purpose of fulfilling his promise and sustaining his integrity.

In my talk I also suggested that since the Armenian Genocide lasted from 1915 to 1923, the planned Centennial activities should extend from 2015 to 2023. This would be a true nightmare for the Turkish government, having to confront not one, but eight years of Centennial events.

Since the Centennial is a historic milestone, I urged Armenian communities around the world to organize unique events which have a mass appeal and the potential of generating nationwide or worldwide publicity for Armenians’ just demands from Turkey. The same old annual events should not be repeated on the occasion of the Centennial. However, before initiating any project, it is incumbent on all Armenian communities to first agree on the objectives to be accomplished and decide whether the planned activities meet those goals.

I proceeded to read to the conference participants the mission statement of the Armenian Genocide Centennial Committee of Western United States:

“The 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide signifies a global demand for justice by Armenians worldwide and all people of good will.
The Centennial marks one of the 20th century’s greatest crimes against humanity. In 1915, the Turkish Government began a premeditated and systematic campaign to uproot the Armenian population from its ancestral homeland and slaughter 1.5 million defenseless men, women and children.
Turkey must finally acknowledge its responsibility for the Genocide and make appropriate moral, financial, and territorial restitution, as mandated by the fundamental norms of international law and civilized society.”

I concluded my remarks by suggesting that Armenians worldwide coordinate their Centennial activities so that the same message is delivered to friend and foe alike. I also proposed that the motto chosen by the State Committee be modified from “I remember and demand” to “We remember and demand justice!”

While this gathering should have been held much earlier, it was most useful in terms of coordinating the planned Centennial activities. Not surprisingly, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced last week that his government was closely monitoring the Centennial Committee’s Yerevan meetings. Fortunately, the organizers in Armenia were cautious not to make public the Centennial plans to keep Turkish officials in the dark, giving them as little time as possible to counter the Armenian initiatives!

June 3, 2014
THE BEAST

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and as such a war, against every man. (13/8)

To this war of every man against every man […] nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no justice. (13/13)

The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Defined by its own horror, The Beast defiles the living and the dead. Lies! Cheating! Stealing! Killing! Its toxic mouth spews division, hate and felonious encouragement. It has no interests except its own and those are all-consuming. It rules in a Hobbesian world, where every person is at war with every person and The Beast is at war with all. Consumption, greed, violence and wealth are the supreme virtues. The Beast’s police are everywhere with its deadly violence. The streets are bloody with death. The Beast has strangled justice. It rules by rules, not laws. The Beast has many backs. Media, corporations, opposition politicians, the brain-washed, the brain-dead, the needy greedy, the destructive tycoons that assassinate mountains, rivers, streams, valleys, virgin forests, farmland, the air, the sea. The Beast divides all, rages against all, slaughters all opposed to its rules. It reigns supreme in triumphant arrogance. If it pleases, even the corpses of its enemies are consumed, not by some purifying fire, but as a vengeful hate-weapon to threaten and increase its power. War is perpetual. Fear of violent death rages like a plague. The arts are destroyed. All representations, and imagination itself, are threats to The Beast. All nature, all living and inert things are raped to satisfy its brutish appetites. Bigger, better, taller, deeper, faster, more, more, more… Society has become a vast wasted land. There is no political community. Public gatherings are attacked. Life is poor, fear-filled, nasty and brutish. Death always comes suddenly in this land called Shame. And The Beast is always pleased with its beastly work.

301 coalminers died suddenly and violently in Soma while feeding The Beast. The Beast was not embarrassed, not at all. No one believes The Beast’s death toll. But there is another number, a horrific number that can indeed be trusted. The Beast’s mass murder left 432 children fatherless. And then The Beast came to the grieving town. It beat and gassed the mourning families. It defiled their children. It proclaimed that its own violent mass murder was really quite comfortingly beautiful and, in beastly “truth”, inevitable and, in beastly “fact,” irrelevant. It’s to be expected, said The Beast. For what is life but death? And having finished The Beast hid from its grieving subjects in a supermarket, looking quite pleased with its beastly self.

The other day a handful of people protested the Soma tragedy in an Istanbul section called Okmeydanı. The 15-year-old Gezi murder victim, Berkin Elvan, was memorialized. It’s an Alevite neighborhood and the Alevites are open-minded and sensible people. Of course, The Beast despises Alevites. The Beast tries to do in Turkey what it failed to do in Syria—exterminate them. So The Beast’s Police developed yet another diversionary incident. They opened fire in the street, both gas and bullets. The cops heaved a few Molotov cocktails to make it look like an attack on themselves, pure self-provocation. But it’s now an old trick—they did the same provocative deadly nonsense during Gezi Park. Predictably, chaos ensued. Gunfire filled the air. Two innocent men attending a funeral died, one in the street, one in the Cemevi, the Alevite worship house. The Beast called the protesters “ruthless.” As for the dead boy from Gezi? “He died and it’s over,” said The Beast, adding that these “terrorists see themselves as the saviors of the world.” Such biting, irreverent sarcasm. Such malice. And again The Beast seemed pleased with itself. The Beast feeds on slander, violence and provocation.

Such name-calling! Looters, plunderers, terrorists, atheists, anarchists, Marxist-Leninist communists, screams The Beast. They may be even Maoists! The Beast does not care how stupid it sounds. We, the opposed, are all of these and more, and proudly so. Its snarling face, its hard, black stares, its hooded eyes baggy and black… what made such a…thing? “You are the sperm of Israel,” shouts The Beast. What fuels The Beast’s incomparable fury? Could it be hell itself? Or something even worse?

The Beasts’s mind rages with conspiracies. When caught in a deceit, it spews hate to create war. Its so-called police and its so-called civil police and its so-called bodyguards are just deputized street thugs, some tricked out in uniforms, all of them goons on the order of Hitler’s brownshirt street gangs. All of them praised by The Beast as heroes, saving the nation from…what? Democracy? Life itself?

War, war, war…it’s always war with The Beast. It has many backs but The Beast rides on the backs of even bigger, master beasts. These are the master killers from beyond the sea, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, killers and displacers of millions. Obama even won the Nobel Peace Prize! Such beastly, hypocritically evil behavior. It’s their nature. So get used to it.

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
29 May 2014

http://www.brighteningglance.org/

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security. [….] In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit therefore is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (13/9)

Reference: Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Oxford University Press, 2008.

May 29, 2014
Why Turks were Able to Exterminate Armenians, but not Jews

(Part II)

This is the second and final part of a column I wrote last month, analyzing why the Young Turks were able to exterminate the Armenians, but could not carry out their simultaneous plan to eliminate the Jewish settlers of Palestine.

On May 9, 1917, Reuters disseminated the following news report by settler Aaron Aaronsohn: “an order was given to deport all Jews from Tel Aviv, including citizens of the Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary], within 48 hours. A week before, 300 Jews were expelled from Jerusalem. Jamal Pasha declared that their fate would be that of the Armenians. The 8,000 deportees from Tel Aviv were not allowed to take any provisions with them, and after the expulsion their houses were looted by Bedouin mobs.”

Shortly thereafter, Oskar Cohen, a Jewish socialist member of the German Parliament, asked the Chancellor to press the Turkish government “to vigorously prevent the recurrence in Palestine of atrocities” against Jews similar to the ones committed against the Armenians.

On June 8, Aaronsohn wrote in his diary: “The cry we raised was effective. The Turks and the Germans were quick to realize that one cannot get away with slaughtering the Jews like the Armenians. German financing of the war might have suffered because of the Jews. Therefore they ceased the new deportations.”

Palestine, the official journal of the British Zionist movement, described the significant difference between the lobbying capabilities of Jews and Armenians: “The German government knows that the Jews do not compare to the Armenians in terms of their world power, and that the weight of the Jews in Germany is therefore different from that of the Armenians.”

Mordecai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, a prominent chronicler of Jewish history in Palestine, wrote in his diary of March 30, 1917: “the Turkish government has been stained in the eyes of the whole country because of its crime against the Armenians, and perhaps the government will reconsider its thoughts of doing thus to the Jews as well….”

Moshe Smilansky, a leader of the Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine, after relating reports of the terrible massacres of Armenians, concluded: “The testimony of the eye witnesses aroused fear and panic in the Jewish audience. Who knows what would have been our fate were it not for Morgenthau, the American representative in Constantinople, and the fear of the world press which is ‘controlled’ by the Jews.”

Yair Auron reported in his book that Meir Dizengoff, a leader of the Jewish refugees in Palestine throughout World War I, “worked in close cooperation with the Zionist delegation in Constantinople, which was pro-German and pro-Turkish. According to Dizengoff, there were also excellent relations with the German consul in Palestine…. The consul served as a conduit for transferring funds to the Yishuv [Jewish community], on orders from the German Ambassador in Constantinople.” Dizengoff also stated that the Germans were the ones who assisted and saved the Yishuv. “The fact that Jamal Pasha became more sympathetic to the Jews was due to Germany.” Dizengoff recalled Jamal and Enver Pashas’ threats to the Jews: “Zionists beware! If you oppose us, we will do to you what we have done to the Armenians.”

In October 1917, when the Turkish authorities uncovered the Jewish Nili spy ring, a new threat loomed over the Jewish settlers in Palestine, giving yet another excuse for the Turks to oppress them. They feared that such anti-Turkish efforts would result in harsh counter-measures as practiced against Armenians. The Turkish Governor of Haifa met with Jewish leaders of the village of Zichron Yaakov on October 4, 1917, and threatened that unless they cooperated with his demands, he would do to them what he did to Armenians. He told them that he “barehandedly killed several Armenians, and his soldiers killed thousands of them.” Chaim Margalit-Kalvarisky, the representative of the Jewish Colonization Association in Galilee, wrote the following note in his diary: “I received word from a fairly dependable source that the [Turkish] high command was very angry at the Jewish settlement, and they were consulting about the possibility of a general deportation of all the Jews of Palestine to the furthest provinces of the Empire [Eastern Anatolia].” Kalvarisky recorded Jamal Pasha’s ominous words after a heated exchange with him: “Heaven help the people whose sons are those cursed spies. We taught the Armenian people a lesson about such deeds, and we will not hesitate to take the same steps in this case.”

Having witnessed the brutality of the Turks against Armenians who were accused of insubordination and rebellion, the Jewish settlers decided to be completely submissive and not challenge the Turkish authorities. Prof. Auron observed that “there was not a single attack by a Jewish settler on a Turkish soldier.” What ultimately saved the Jews was the occupation of Palestine by the British forces, precluding further brutalities and massacres by the Turkish authorities.

At the end, 1.5 million Armenians were wiped out, whereas the Jewish settlers of Palestine suffered relatively minor losses. During the war years, the Jewish population of Palestine was reduced from 86,000 to 55,000. Despite the fact that Armenians had also their advocates in Europe and the United States, the Jewish settlers enjoyed the double protection of powerful countries on both sides of the war: the Western countries, including the United States, and Germany, Turkey’s military ally. Vahakn Dadrian, in his book, “The History of the Armenian Genocide,” relates that Hans Wangenheim, the German Ambassador to Turkey, told US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau: “I will help the Zionists… but I shall do nothing for the Armenians.”

While Germany saved the Jewish settlers of Palestine, it assisted the Young Turk regime to exterminate the Armenians.

May 27, 2014
Turkey Becomes a Rogue State By Rejecting European Court’s Verdict

The European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) issued on May 12 its largest judgment ever against any country, ruling that Turkey had to pay $123 million as compensation to relatives of missing Greek Cypriots and residents of a Greek enclave in Northern Cyprus.

The Cyprus vs. Turkey lawsuit was filed in 1999, twenty five years after the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus. In 2001, after ruling that the Turkish government had violated numerous articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR postponed making a determination of the penalty to be assessed to Turkey.

That decision came earlier this month, when the 17 judges of ECHR’s Grand Chamber issued their final judgment. By a vote of 16 to 1 (the Armenian and Cypriot judges voted with the majority, while the Turkish judge was the lone dissenter), ECHR ruled that the intervening 13 years had not invalidated the court’s 2001 judgment, as claimed by Turkey. By a vote of 15 to 2, ECHR held that the Turkish government had to pay $41 million, plus any tax and interest (if not paid within three months) for 1,456 Greek Cypriots missing as a result of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974. By another 15 to 2 votes, ECHR judges decided that Turkey had to pay an additional $82 million plus any tax and interest (if not paid within three months) for damages suffered by residents of the Greek Cypriot enclave of Karpas peninsula in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus.

Right before the court’s judgment, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made a vain attempt to derail ECHR’s anticipated negative decision by warning that a ruling against Turkey would undermine the ongoing negotiations to reach a settlement on the Cyprus conflict. The court rightfully ignored Davutoglu’s threat and went on to issue its firm judgment in favor of Cyprus.

Having failed to bully the judges, Davutoglu disdainfully declared that Turkey rejects the verdict of Europe’s top human rights court and boasted that his country will refuse to pay the $123 million in damages.

Davutoglu should be reminded that ECHR’s “Grand Chamber judgments are final” — not subject to appeal — and “all final judgments are transmitted to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for supervision of their execution,” according to the court’s records.

Turkish Foreign Minister’s arrogant declaration will certainly come back to haunt his government in the not too distant future. All members of the Council of Europe, without exception, are obligated to comply with ECHR’s rulings. The court’s judgments are binding on all member states. During the past several decades, Turkey has lost hundreds of judgments in the European Court and has paid, whether it liked it or not, countless millions of dollars in penalties. Turkey has no other choice, if it wants to remain a member of the Council of Europe. There have been some ECHR cases where Turkish officials had initially vowed that they would not pay the assessed penalties, but eventually fully paid the required compensation plus interest.

If the Turkish government sticks with Davutoglu’s boastful rejection, not only Turkey could be stripped of its membership in the Council of Europe, but also forfeit its slim chance of joining the European Union!

Member states of the Council of Europe do not have the right to decide whether they are willing to abide by ECHR’s judgments. Otherwise, why would 47 European countries collectively spend almost $100 million a year to maintain a court if its judgments are meaningless or subject to voluntary compliance?

Recently, Turkish leaders have gone on a rampage flaunting domestic and international laws, by jailing a record number of journalists, firing on peaceful demonstrators in Gezi Park, beating family members of a mine explosion victims, making anti-Semitic statements, threatening to expel the US Ambassador, and waving a finger at Pres. Obama in the White House!

The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers should not tolerate a rogue member state which is a major violator of human rights. The Council should put Turkey on notice that unless it makes immediate arrangements to pay the $123 million penalty, it would be expelled from the Council of Europe and have its assets in third countries seized to enforce the court’s judgment.

Europe should take a firm stand on this judgment, as there will be many more such verdicts against Turkey on Cyprus and possibly someday on Armenian restitutional and territorial demands….

May 24, 2014
Ozymandias in Turkey

The big question in Turkey at the moment is whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will run for president in August.

There is every indication he will. At a meeting of the Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) Central Decision and Administration Board (MKYK), it was decided to maintain the party’s rule that a deputy should serve for a maximum of three terms, which rules out the prime minister’s leadership after the 2015 elections. Unless Erdoğan intends to twiddle his thumbs, which is unlikely, his only option is take over from President Abdullah Gül. Provided he is elected.

At the beginning of April, Prime Minister Erdoğan indicated that the new president would not just be a protocol president but would exercise the executive powers provided to him by the Constitution. As he put it, he would be “a sweating, running, ordering president.” Article 104 of the Constitution entitles the president to preside over the Council of Ministers or to call the Council of Ministers to meet under his chairmanship, and it is undoubtedly this provision that Erdoğan intends to use since the failure of the constitutional commission to transform the presidency into an executive one.

President Gül has ruled out a Putin-Medvedev switch, and it is believed a deputy prime minister will function as caretaker until Gül can stand for Parliament in the 2015 elections and himself become prime minister. One of the Turkish president’s duties is to defend the Constitution and, if necessary, either to return laws to the Turkish Parliament to be reconsidered or refer them to the Constitutional Court for annulment, either in part or in whole.

This is undoubtedly why Gül has chosen to soft-pedal his presidency and sign the controversial Internet, Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) and National Intelligence Organization (MİT) laws, so as not to ruffle the feathers of his prospective supporters in the AK Party. Despite international protests, in January without demur President Gül signed a bill criminalizing emergency medical care and penalizing doctors with imprisonment for up to three years and fines of nearly $1 million.

A total of 255 protesters are now being tried for participating in the Gezi Park demonstrations last May and June, some of whom took refuge in the Dolmabahçe mosque to escape police tear gas. Two doctors who rendered emergency aid to the victims are also being charged for “praising a criminal, insulting religious values and damaging a mosque.” As they explained, if they hadn’t helped, many people would have died or lost limbs.

Constitutional Court

Therefore, it must have been embarrassing for Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Gül together with other members of the AK Party government to be lectured by the president of the Constitutional Court, Haşim Kılıç, on rule of law in his speech to celebrate the 52nd anniversary of the founding of the court.

Defining the role of the judiciary as “the conscience of the state,” Kılıç rejected the use of the judiciary as logistical support for political ideas and ideologies and for revenge against adversaries. Furthermore, he called for documentation and evidence of Erdogan’s claim of a “parallel state” and a “gang” inside the judiciary and accused the government of “corruption of conscience.”

Kılıç likewise dismissed the claim that the Constitutional Court (in its partial annulment of the HSYK law and lifting of the Twitter ban) had acted for political purposes and against the interests of the nation as “shallow.”

In a clear reference to the AK Party government’s attempts to limit or even ban the use of information technology, the chief judge quoted Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s remark that in the age of globalization, one cannot issue visas to antennas.

It is the duty of Turkey’s president to appoint members of the Constitutional Court, and if Erdoğan accedes to the presidency, what will happen is a foregone conclusion, as only 10 months remain of Haşim Kılıç’s term of office. Regulatory boards and other institutions have already been stacked with AK Party appointees, and now 110 AK Party-affiliated judges with no previous experience have been appointed to high criminal courts.

Corruption

After an unruly debate in Parliament, an AK Party-dominated commission has been established to investigate charges of corruption against four ex-ministers, which will undoubtedly lead to their acquittal. In the meantime, a newly appointed İstanbul public prosecutor has dismissed charges concerning illegal construction permits against 60 suspects, including the son of the former environment and urban planning minister and a construction tycoon.

At the recent Financial Times Turkey Summit 2014 in İstanbul, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek defended the AK Party government’s purge of several thousand police officers, hundreds of public prosecutors and judges as well as senior functionaries as “extraordinary measures” to deal with what the prime minister has called “a judicial coup.” However, he assured participants that the government’s source of inspiration was still the EU in terms of cementing the rule of law and advancing towards a better democracy. “This is our fundamental point of reference.”

This is at odds with the contention of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s economic adviser, Yiğit Bulut, who said that “we no longer need Europe and its material and moral affiliates which may become a burden on us.” Bulut is believed to have convinced Erdoğan to delay raising interest rates to defend the lira, and last summer he claimed that dark forces were plotting to kill the prime minister with telekinesis.

The EU’s enlargement commissioner, Stefan Füle, has admitted that events in the last few months have cast doubt on Turkey’s commitment to European values and standards. Germany’s president, Joachim Gauck, has openly declared that “the current developments in Turkey horrify me,” and Jean-Claude Juncker, who is running for president of the European Commission, has called for an “enlargement pause.”

Şimşek has admitted that Turkey is corrupt, although he said there has been progress in the last decade. But at a meeting of the World Forum on Governance in Prague, President of the Italian Senate and former anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso remarked that the way to get rid of corruption cannot be to get rid of those who fight against corruption.

Ali Yurttagül, who for more than 25 years was adviser to the Greens in the European Parliament, also believes that Turkey is not producing laws compatible with EU norms anymore and is suspending the rule of law.

Nevertheless, Turkey’s EU Affairs Ministry has after a meeting of the Reform Monitoring Group (comprising Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and the newly appointed ministers for EU affairs, the interior and justice) put out a statement, declaring, “It is not understandable for some EU member states and EU officials to make statements […] about the democratization package, basic rights and freedoms, including the freedoms of expression, the press and the freedom to organize, which are improving every day with the [government’s] reforms.”

Parallel universe

The AK Party government has defended itself against serious charges of corruption with a counterclaim that the graft probe that went public on Dec. 17 was an attempted coup instigated by a “parallel state” controlled by a cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who lives in Pennsylvania. One could also argue that the same government is living in a parallel universe controlled by the dyad of Davutoğlu and Erdoğan.

Foreign Minister Davutoğlu, both as Prime Minister Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy adviser and later as foreign minister, has clearly inspired Erdoğan with his grandiose vision of Turkey’s role in the world. Davutoğlu has formulated a policy of “strategic depth” based on engagement with countries with which Turkey shares a common past and geography, and envisages Turkey not only as the epicenter of the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus but also as the center of Eurasia.

This policy, dubbed neo-Ottomanism, also envisages Turkey playing an important role in setting the parameters of a new world order (“nizam-i âlem”) under Islam. Last year, in an address to the party faithful in Bursa, Professor Davutoğlu dismissed the last century as a parenthesis and stated that Turkey would once again unite Sarajevo with Damascus and Benghazi with Erzurum and Batumi.

This theme was echoed in a speech given by Prime Minister Erdoğan’s present chief adviser, Ibrahim Kalın, at the İstanbul Forum in October 2012, where he spoke of a new geopolitical framework and Turkey’s pivotal role. Moreover, the traditional foreign policy goal of advancing a state’s national interests would be replaced by “a value-based and principled” foreign policy.

The same obsession with a renaissance of Turkey’s Ottoman past is reflected in Erdoğan’s rhetoric. At the AK Party’s congress in September 2012 the prime minister declared that the government was following the path of Ottoman Sultans Mehmet II and Selim I, and it is no coincidence that the new bridge over the Bosporus has been named after Selim I, who was responsible for the expansion of the Ottoman empire.

After the AK Party’s victory in the 2011 elections, Erdoğan declared: “Today Sarajevo won as much as İstanbul, Beirut won as much as İzmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza won as much as Diyarbakır. Today the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Europe won as much as Turkey.”

Likewise, after his return from a trip to North Africa last June, Erdoğan sent greetings to İstanbul’s brother cities Sarajevo, Baku, Beirut, Skopje, Damascus, Gaza, Mecca and Medina, but there was no mention of Europe.

Primarily because of the Turkish government’s attempt to enforce regime change in Syria, Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been a disaster. Two years ago Davutoğlu proclaimed in Parliament: “A new Middle East is about to be born. We will be the owner, pioneer and servant of this new Middle East.”

Now Syria is ravaged by civil war, more than 9 million Syrians have left their homes, including over 2 million who have fled to neighboring countries Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Rather than exercising a strong, moderating influence, Turkey has become a party to the conflict, acting as a hub for support not only for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but also al-Qaeda-affiliated groups.

Consequently, President Gül has suggested that Turkey needs to recalibrate its foreign and security policies, taking into account the new realities that stem from the power vacuum in Syria. These include the declaration of three autonomous Kurdish administrations in northern Syria, which has now been put forward as a demand by Turkish Kurds for the predominantly Kurdish Southeast.

Ozymandias

Against this backdrop, a speech made by Foreign Minister Davutoğlu in Konya last month seems misplaced. According to the minister, the AK Party was not just a political party movement but a great historical movement that could not be stopped until doomsday. This is the same minister who in a brief on Turkish foreign policy two years ago stated, “… We formulate our policies through a solid and rational judgment of the long-term historical trends and an understanding of where we are situated in the greater trajectory of world history.”

In Konya, Davutoğlu swung himself up to similar rhetorical heights when he declared, “This movement, which began in Khorasan with seeds sown and a Selçuk heritage shaped in Konya, has with the Ottomans become a world government and with it the Turkish Republic has gained a future.”

At the Nuremberg Rally in 1934, Adolf Hitler declared: “It is our wish and will that this state and this Reich shall endure in the millenniums to come. We can be happy in the knowledge that this future belongs to us completely.” As we know, this wish was short-lived, but this is perhapsa fact that Professor Davutoğlu has ignored in his study of the greater trajectory of world history.

The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley put this succinctly in his poem “Ozymandias,” which tells of a traveler from an antique land who finds two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert. Nearby lies a shattered head with a “frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” and a pedestal, on which is written: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” As Shelley concludes: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.

May 18, 2014
KILLER KOAL

“Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.”

“Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes different people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can easily go through life without ever hearing about.”

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937

Soma, a small town near Manisa in western Turkey. By the Aegean Sea, a beautiful place, if you don’t have to be a coal miner or love one.

It’s now an ant swarm. It ebbs and flows around the human conveyor belt that runs from the endless rows of ambulances and the mouth of the lignite mine. Lignite is the poorest quality coal useful mostly for power generating plants. And the people in Soma are poor too, but in a different sense, a tragic sense. The stretchers bearing the living, the dead and the dying beat an endless track from the suffocating depths to the white ambulances. The bearers stack their loads in the back of the ambulances like well-cut logs. And off they go, back to the pit. And the ambulances crawl through the swarm to the hospital whose morgue is overflowing. It’s a simple, deadly rhythm now in its twentieth hour. Most of the women are covered. They weep alone in small groups.

A transformer blew up deep in the mine. The electricity failed. No elevators. A fire down below. No way out. No air, just carbon monoxide. The death count rises. It’s now at 205, but it’s more like 250. (In the interest of accuracy. as of 2:42 pm 14 May 2014 the “official” count is 232…now 238, now 240.) There are hundreds still buried hundreds of meters underground. The fire still burns. The deaths will be in the millions because every time one sees a stretcher with a limply swinging foot, or covered over, one dies a little. And there are more than 70 million of us living here, watching this absurd tragedy. They just brought out a 15 year-old boy, dead. Turkey’s, rather the Turkish government’s treatment of children is abysmal. One weeps thinking about all of this. And then, if one is human, one gets angry. How can all these poor people die at work? The record for coal mining deaths is 263 at Zonguldak in 1992. It seems in easy reach since so many are still unaccounted for and time inexorably wears on.

Not too many years ago, five or six, there was another mine disaster, small compared to Soma, “only” 130 died. The television channel ran some file film of a miner underground. And next to the miner what should appear but a canary in a cage. Jesus, I shouted, this stuff disappeared a hundred years ago! Well, it would be nice, but extremely naïve, to think so.

For this is Turkey. And here coal mining safety is a joke. One disaster after another comes to the mining families of this saddest of countries. And again neighborhoods are devastated by the massacre of its men. Except for China, Turkey has the worst coal mining safety record in the world. This industry like most others has been privatized by the government. That means cut costs to maximize profits. That means low wages. That means Soma Group, the mining company, operates uncontrolled and unregulated despite all the official blather. But why shouldn’t it? The Turkish government operates the same way and no one does anything about it.

So who is at fault? Easy. Soma Mining is owned by Alp Gürkan. In a 2012 interview, Gürkan said the company had managed to drop the cost of coal to $24 per ton from $130 before privatization. How grand! Yes, grand, indeed. How did he do it? Well, he hired subcontractors “for hard work with low salaries” thus undercutting union workers organized by Maden-İş. But his master stroke of “genius” seems to be Gürkan’s decision to have his company simply manufacture the electric transformers instead of importing them. And it was one of these “home-made” transformers that caused this human catastrophe, this mass industrial murder, this genocide of the working class. So it seems clear that prima facie evidence of criminal negligence points toward one Alp Gürkan, Chairman of the Board. The police can find him for purposes of preliminary investigation at: Soma Holding A.Ş, Lale Sokak No:5, Levent – İstanbul.

There is also another material witness and perhaps a co-conspirator. On 29 April Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party rejected a demand for a parliamentary investigation regarding safety in the Soma mines. Why was this petition refused? Does it have to do with the hoses he has everywhere? That refusal was just two weeks ago! Question him! Erdoğan can be found somewhere in Ankara. He has yet to appear at Soma. He, like Godot, may never come. It would be good.

As I write, the students in Ankara are protesting this horrific tragedy. Everything is normal, for Turkey. The police are gassing as usual, shooting canisters directly at them. The cops are chasing them through a beautiful pine forest. TOMA and helicopters are on the scene. Beatings will follow. Students of Ankara unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.

The air is as heavy as lead.

No more words…

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
14 May 2014

EXCEPT…

HUKUMET İSTİFA!

May 14, 2014