Turkish Forum

Category: Turkey

  • The 12 people who ruined Turkey

    The 12 people who ruined Turkey

    The Dirty Dozen

    The 12 people who ruined Turkey

    From a 15th-century sultan to a 21st-century autocrat.

    By Melik Kaylan

    At first glance, Turkey’s election results suggested a triumph of democracy over the stifling dirigisme of one-party AKP rule. But with the country combusting from terror attacks, those cheers have turned out to be premature. Even before a government could be formed — and the dubious benefits of coalition rule could accrue — the social contract began to fall apart. In the interregnum, the regional and national pressures bearing on Turkey have been distinctly aggravated by President Erdoğan’s ruthless drive to retain power. Unquestionably, he inherited instabilities deeply rooted in the country’s history. But just as certainly, it was Erdoğan who revived Turkey’s recurrent political vices, and since he still sits in the preposterous presidential palace he built to direct his party in Parliament, there’s a real danger that the downward trajectory will continue.

    Sultan Selim the Stern

    Though remembered as one of the Ottoman Empire’s most vigorous and effective leaders, Selim I made a fateful strategic choice 500 years ago that haunts Turkey to this day. He opted to conquer Arab lands all the way to North Africa and bring the Caliphate to Istanbul. From then on, with the Sultan-Caliphs acting as official protectors of Islam’s holy places, the Turks got irrevocably embroiled in the Middle East’s endless tribal and sectarian feuds. For some decades in the 20th century the Kemalist doctrine kept Turkey aligned on a Western axis. But under Erdoğan, a swampy yearning for Empire has resurfaced, bringing back notions of religious identity and Turkish hegemony that threaten to undo a century of relative stability in the “Turkosphere.”

    Enver Pasha

    Very few mourned when the Young Turks ousted the paranoid and ineffectual Sultan Abdulhamid ll in 1909. Enver Pasha led the new administration, one that promised to reverse two centuries of decline. Instead, Enver took the Empire into World War I in alliance with the Kaiser. He also intensified the purging of religious minorities initiated by Abdulhamid, notably the entire Armenian population of the strategic borderlands threatened by Russia. That legacy remains a thorn in Turkey’s side a century later, not just because of the genocide question, but because the Kurds (who did much of the purging) now largely populate those eastern provinces en bloc and grow more restive by the day.

    Süleyman Demirel

    Presiding over what was, arguably, the longest extended low point of the post-war era, Demirel served as prime minister five times between 1965 and 1993. His garrulously incompetent sway over numberless coalitions was interrupted by two coups in which the army had to re-cohere a country falling apart at the seams. Those interminable Demirel years demonstrated amply that he excelled at internal politicking and nothing else, while thousands died in the cities from leftist-rightist violence and double-digit inflation became the norm. Recurrent power blackouts, demonstrations, shuttered schools and colleges, fuel shortages and “no-go areas” in many towns spread a sense of doom across the country. It was chiefly because of Demirel’s paralyzing endurance that the public began to view the military as less corrupt, more efficient and, yes, more democratic than elected politicians.

    General Kenan Evren

    As the army general in charge of the 1980 military coup, Kenan Evren was a popular figure at first, even a kind of savior. The Turkish military, after all, had a reputation for restoring the country to democracy fairly quickly and in better shape than the politicians left it. So it was with Evren’s junta, which inherited a country on the brink of civil war. The ensuing draconian measures seemed fitting and necessary: a new Constitution, a National Security Council dominating government, curfews, mass arrests, news blackouts and the muzzling of free expression. Evren’s popularity soared. Even after the coup ended in 1983, Evren served as elected president for seven years. But the nation’s mood changed as details of his rule leaked out years later: 650,000 people (mostly leftists) arrested, 49 executed, hit squads committing extrajudicial killings, and routine torture in prisons. Under Erdoğan, he was subsequently tried and convicted for the coup but died of old age. Ironically, it was his Constitution that gave Erdoğan the legal instruments with which to persecute his political foes.

    Bedrettin Dalan

    As the first elected mayor in 1984 of Greater Istanbul, a newly delineated municipal authority, Dalan oversaw a number of highly popular urban rehabilitation projects, not least the clean-up of the Golden Horn. He built parks and sewage systems. But soon enough his unilateral approach to urban planning produced a series of unwanted and irreversible transformations of Istanbul’s ancient fabric. He built the coastal north-south road along the European Bosphorus that trapped rows of historic wooden “yalis” inside roaring traffic. The road led to a juggernaut of residential construction for which forests going back thousands of years had to be decimated. He grew so rich during his tenure that he endowed colleges and charitable foundations like a mafia don. He remains a fugitive from justice, in exile in Germany.

    Tansu Çiller

    Turkey’s first female Prime Minister took office in 1993, but Çiller did more to ruin the country in a short spell than anyone since the Ottoman era. For a former professor of economics she was singularly inept at her métier, presiding over the near-collapse of the lira and foreign reserves. All the while she amassed a personal fortune for which she was prosecuted for corruption by Parliament. She avoided punishment through political deal-making and technicalities. Worst of all, she directed a secret “dirty war,” mostly in the Kurdish areas, using far-right nationalist gangsters and paramilitaries while doing nothing politically to alleviate the situation. She did manage to get the PKK listed as a terrorist organization abroad. She never paid any heed to women’s issues.

    Necmettin Erbakan

    The godfather of the kind of fundamentalist tendency that now pretzelizes Turkish politics, Erbakan can be blamed for inventing, during the troubled 1970s, the blend of Islamic demagogy and fiscal corruption served up daily by Erdoğan’s party. Indeed, Erbakan was a political mentor of Erdoğan in the 1990s. Banned from politics repeatedly, he returned time and time again to set up parties under different names until he was ultimately forced out of power in 1997 by the military for infusing national affairs with religious bias. He and his fellow party members were successfully prosecuted for embezzling a million dollars after they lost parliamentary immunity. Erbakan introduced the formula of cronyism and political corruption as a form of Islamic governance in which welfarism laced with piety substituted for such “Western” principles of transparency and non-sectarian impartiality.

    Abdullah Öcalan

    A dinosaur from the left-wing guerrilla phase of liberation movements, “Apo” Öcalan now sits moldering in a Turkish prison, sometimes still directing negotiations and policies for parts of the Kurdish movement. There’s no question that the Turkish state has repeatedly missed opportunities to forge political solutions to the Kurdish question, but Öcalan’s PKK and its early horrific acts gave cover for a purely military response by the Turkish state. The PKK’s rape and murder of female teachers assigned to Kurdish areas, the videotaped torture and execution of kidnapped state employees — such horrors preceded ISIS by decades and made reconciliation infinitely harder. To get a real sense of how far the Kurdish mainstream has come since “Apo,” one only has to hear the civilized idealism of Selahattin Demirtas who led the Kurdish HDP party to such success in the recent election. Conversely, to measure how quickly it can all relapse to Öcalan-era brutality, one only has to peruse the headlines today.

    The EU

    The European Union missed numerous opportunities to solve a host of problems by accepting Turkey’s membership early on. Once part of the EU, Turkey and Erdoğan could scarcely have acted with such impunity as a conduit for ISIL recruits who return to threaten their European communities. Turkey itself would have benefited from further Westernization these last two decades while furnishing the EU’s Muslim population with a model for a more secular and democratized Islam. Instead, Turkey’s civic freedoms, unanchored to higher EU standards, have sharply deteriorated under Erdoğan; and its brand of Islam has moved closer to the Gulf’s, an impending disaster for Europe.

    Melih Gökçek

    The mayor of the capital, Ankara, and a leading AK Party stalwart, Melih Gökçek sports the full array of toxic Erdoğanista flaws. Elected first in 1994 and re-elected five times, he never shies from twisting the democratic process to retain power. In the 2014 elections, which he apparently won by 1 percent of the vote, opposition districts suffered extended power cuts, lost ballot boxes, wrongly re-assigned votes and much else. His Ankara police brutalize protestors at every encounter, sometimes garnering an official EU rebuke. His love of construction over nature and community, especially opposition communities, creates follies at massive taxpayer expense such as the “Rainbow” leisure complex, which proved unreachable due to surrounding highways. His incompetent urban planning has repeatedly led to water shortages in Ankara. The solution: draw water from the polluted Kizilirmak river. He levied a fine on the university that detected the pollutants. He regularly intimidates critics in the media, naming and shaming them specifically. He is suing one for calling him an Armenian.

    Ahmet Davutoğlu

    Responsible for grandiose notions of neo-Ottomanist foreign policy when he was foreign minister, Davutoğlu became a place-holding Prime Minister subservient to Erdoğan’s machinations as President. The election took away his party’s majority and mandate to rule. He proved clueless in his former job, successfully alienating every single country in the region as he pursued his delusional “no problems with neighbors” policy. He was clueless, also, in his role as Medvedev to Erdoğan’s Putin. That role depended on the AKP’s popularity and the continuance of constitutional government. He now has neither — and none of the leverage to undo all the damage he did to Turkey’s place in the world.

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

    Until Erdoğan came along, military coup leaders were authoritarian and politicians were corrupt. Erdoğan succeeded in forging a combination of both vices. He has censored and corrupted the press. He has politicized law enforcement and the judiciary. He has created a whole new class of political prisoners. He has made it a norm for his police force to brutalize public protesters. He has funneled “black” money through the economy in unprecedented amounts to facilitate his policies. He has established a system of oligarchic patronage through favored pro-AKP businessmen. He has instituted a surveillance state with the help of his one-time allies, the Gulenists, whom he now persecutes for (absurdly) demanding democratic standards from him. He has deployed religion as a dangerously divisive instrument and stoked sectarian violence in Iraq and Syria by clandestinely supporting extreme Islamists. He has played every divisive card available, not least by reigniting the Kurdish tinderbox. He has neutralized the military at a time when he has made them more necessary than ever. He hasn’t just corrupted the state, he has corrupted large swaths of the population by making them complicit in his abuse of power. All this he has done knowing that he can’t afford to be replaced by a half-way clean administration. Hence his willingness to take the country to the brink. And this time the army is too cowed to act as anything but his instrument.

    Melik Kaylan is a columnist for Forbes and a regular commentator on arts and culture for The Wall Street Journal. He is the co-author of “The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership.”

    Authors:
    Melik Kaylan 
  • Turkish Embassy in London PRESS RELEASE

    Turkish Embassy in London PRESS RELEASE

    Disisleri Turkish Foregin Ministry

    PRESS RELEASE

    • Turkey has been facing threats and attacks emanating from Syria since the start of the conflict. So far, 158 Turkish citizens have lost their lives to the attacks originated from Syria.
    • The terrorist attack that took the lives of 32 Turkish citizens in Suruç on 20th July reaffirms that Turkey is under a clear and imminent threat of continuing attack from DEASH (Isis). Most recently, on 23rd July, DEASH attacked the border military post in Elbeyli and killed a Turkish soldier. It is apparent that the regime in Syria is neither capable of nor willing to prevent these threats.
    • Turkey has designated DEASH/ISIL as a terrorist organization since 2005, under its previous names and revised it by its new name the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ISIL on 10 October 2013.

    • Turkey is at the forefront of DEASH threat and our authorities exert every effort to counter it. It has to be born in mind that Turkey takes immediate action and precautions in all dimensions of countering terrorism, upon receiving concrete information and intelligence.

    • Individual and collective self defence is our inherent right under international law, as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter. On this basis, Turkey has initiated necessary and proportionate military actions against DEASH in Syria, including in coordination with individual members of the Global Coalition.
    • In the wake of increased security threats following the attacks against our security and law-enforcement forces in provinces of Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa and Kilis, in particular the terrorist attack in Suruç on 20 July 2015, all necessary measures are being taken and in this context, operations are also being carried out by the Turkish Armed Forces.
    • In this framework, we have informed the UN Security Council, and continue to inform international organizations. Our initiatives before other international institutions of which Turkey is a member, are ongoing.
    • Upon these recent attacks and threats directed against our national security, North Atlantic Council has been called for a meeting by Turkey under Article 4 of the Washington Treaty with a view to informing our Allies about the measures we are taking and the operations we are conducting against terrorism, as well as to holding consultations with them. The meeting chaired by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg took place today (28th July).
    • Turkey strongly encourages its partners, to enhance efforts to counter DEASH’s terrorism financing by destroying and interrupting activities at their source, mainly in Syria and Iraq. International efforts should also be focusing on destruction of recruiting and facilitation networks that operate throughout the source countries and prevent dissemination of extremist propaganda.
  • She’s an imam in LA and doesn’t have patience for a strict interpretation of Islam

    She’s an imam in LA and doesn’t have patience for a strict interpretation of Islam

    Ani Zonneveld is an imam, and yes, also a woman. She qualifies that she is “an imam with a small “i” — though her reluctance to go with a capital “I” says more about her democratic approach to worship than any deference to Islamic tradition, one that has been and still is very male-dominated. She has no patience for that Islam.

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    Instead she founded a Muslim community — Muslims for Progressive Values — that embraces gender equality, gay rights and interfaith marriage. And although it is based in Los Angeles, it has spread — often quietly — across the world.

    Zonneveld was meant to be a diplomat. That at least was her father’s plan for her. He was an ambassador and she was raised in several countries, including Germany, Egypt and India. But she found her way to Los Angeles and became instead a singer and Grammy award-winning songwriter. (She wrote songs for Keb’ Mo’.)

    Then, after the events of 9/11, she looked at the religion she was raised in and decided to study it and to “surrender” to the process. She ultimately re-embraced Islam, and made it her mission to fight back against Saudi-exported Wahhabism, the strict interpretation of the faith that she holds responsible for inspiring extremist groups from al-Qaeda to ISIS.

    Earlier this year she wrote an open letter to the king of Saudi Arabia to chastise him, and to call on him to do more to combat the rise in global extremism. She has called on other governments to divest from Saudi Arabia, citing Sweden as a good example.

    Zonneveld is not shy of challenging the rules of her religion, most of which she insists are cultural accretions. She happily takes turns with others in her L.A.-based community to lead Friday prayers. She also sings during worship — anathema to the traditionalists — and she created Muslims for Progressive Values as an alternative model of community.

    “It was a way for us to bring together Muslims of like minds that is gender parity, human rights for everyone, freedom of expression, freedom of and from religion, separation of religion and state, all (those) good values that have been side-lined and instead have been replaced by blind ritual and orthodoxy that is very stiff and very harsh in its interpretation,” she says.

    Her group has spread beyond America, and counts more than 10,000 members, though many have joined or sympathize in secret. Her open embrace of LGBTQ rights, now so culturally acceptable in America, is radical in Islamic terms.

    “It is radically going back to tradition,” she insists, “because Prophet Muhammad didn’t prosecute anyone for being a homosexual, there is no punishment in the Quran for being a homosexual, period.”

    There is certainly punishment in much of the Muslim world today, including hanging in Iran. So, the interpretation of Islamic law — or Sharia — in many countries is in Zonneveld’s sights.

    She has created a campaign called #ImamsForShe to educate imams about cultural practices such as child marriage, which she insists is un-Islamic. And she has started a program at the United Nations.

    She is giving diplomats lessons in the Quran hoping that it will embolden them to challenge countries like Iran on their interpretation of Islamic Law. The daughter who was meant to be a diplomat is now training them instead.

  • WHAT KIND OF “RECONCILIATION” IS THE HRANT-DINK FOUNDATION PROMOTING? – Maxime GAUIN

    WHAT KIND OF “RECONCILIATION” IS THE HRANT-DINK FOUNDATION PROMOTING? – Maxime GAUIN

    Maxime GAUIN

    Researcher, AVIM

     

    The Hrant-Dink Foundation (HDV) initiated some years ago a program to fund travels of Turkish citizens to Armenia, arguing that mutual understanding between people will facilitate peace. Presented as such, nobody can reasonably be against such a program. The problem is that, in practice, the program is far from achieving the claimed goals. I am taking here the example of a participant who recently spent three months in Yerevan thanks a grant of the HDV – not because of the importance of the author, who is not well-known, but because of what her conclusions say on the methods and practices of the HDV. The summary of these three months, published on an Armenian web site,[i] is more than surprising as a whole, but particularly surprising because of three key remarks.

     

    1) “I recalled the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA’s killing of Turkish diplomats around the world in the seventies. They did it to force discussion of the Armenian Genocide.”

     

    Except the use of the adjective “terrorist,” the presence of which is unusual for an Armenian website, these words are truly unbelievable. The less serious aspect is their inaccuracy. The attacks perpetrated by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) were not limited to the 1970s: the last one took place in Brussels, on June 23, 1997.[ii] In addition, as late as 2008-2009, the association of the veterans of ASALA in Yerevan silenced an Armenian Australian scholar, Armen Gakavian, who wanted to launch a petition denouncing Armenian terrorism and the war crimes perpetrated during the WWI by the Armenians of the Russian army against Muslim Ottoman civilians.[iii] Indeed, more than 500,000 Muslims were killed by Armenians and Cossacks in eastern Anatolia from 1914 to 1918,[iv] and more than 150,000 others in western Anatolia by the Greek armed forces, including Armenian volunteers units, from 1919 to 1922[v] – typically the kind of “historical details” the Hrant-Dink Foundation does not recall frequently.

     

    The majority of the Turkish diplomats assassinated by Armenian terrorists (1973-1984) were not killed by the ASALA, but by the Justice Commandos for the Armenian Genocide, a terrorist organization established and controlled by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the most powerful party of the Armenian diaspora, which also participated to the Armenian cabinet from 1998 to 2008.[vi] The ASALA is better known because of its bombing in public places, such as the Turkish Tourism Bureau of Rome (1980), the airports of Ankara-Esenboğa (1982) and Paris-Orly (1983), or the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul (1983). In fact, the majority (40 out of about 70) of the persons killed by Armenian terrorists during the 1970s and 1980s were not diplomats or members of their family.

     

    The worst aspect of these words is that their author purely and simply repeats the Armenian nationalist propaganda that justified -and still justifies today- Armenian terrorism. It is barely necessary to recall that the ASALA never wished any “discussion” on the events of 1915-16, instead they wished to impose their views on these events. These terrorists even tried to kill U.S. historian Stanford Jay Shaw, in 1977 and 1982, just because he presented arguments the Armenian fanatics did not like.[vii] Kaşo says nothing about the racism of the ASALA and JCAG, who killed Turks in public places for the sole and only crimes of being Turkish – or about the participation of the ASALA to the anti-Semitic bombing in rue Copernic, Paris, due to the extremely virulent hatred of Jews by most of the Armenian nationalists, particularly in the ASALA.[viii] She says nothing about the territorial claims which were the main topic exposed in the communiqués of both ASALA and JCAG during the 1970s and 1980s. However, she uses the words “Western Armenia,” typical of contemporary Armenian irredentism against Turkey. In fact, it is quite in conformity with the official, recurrent glorification of Armenian terrorism in contemporary Armenia.[ix]

     

    Certainly, the Hrant-Dink Foundation is not a monolithic group, and I have direct evidence for this; but it does not prevent the noticing of what this organization, as a whole, promotes. More than two weeks after the publication of the text commented here, the Foundation has still not distanced itself from the text’s whitewashing of Armenian terrorism. The question that needs to be answered is this: What words are needed to best describe the paradox of a Foundation that took the name a victim of a terrorist act, but nevertheless funded a trip that leads to excuses for terrorist assassinations? This is a question that is left to the reader to answer for their own.

     

    2) “Just as Turkey has racists, Armenia has its own.”

     

    No word less strong than “disinformation” can describe this sentence appropriately. The official ideology in Armenia today is an extremely racist one. The statement of principles of the Republican Party of Armenia, in power since 1998, cites only one person: G. Nzhdeh (Nejdeh).[x] Tributes are regularly paid to Nzhdeh in the main intellectual institutions of Armenia, such as the State University of Yerevan.[xi] There is a memorial for Nzhdeh in Yerevan, his name was given to a metro station of the capital city of Armenia and a new statue will be soon unveiled. The only controversy regarding this statue, last year, was about its location. The media and political consensus calls him a hero.[xii] But who was Nzhdeh? He described himself as racist, fascist and Nazi. Nejdeh, who exterminated Azeris in Armenia from 1918 to 1920, later said: “Today Germany and Italy are strong because as a nation they live and breathe in terms of race” (Hairenik Weekly, 10 April 1936). As early as 1933, his party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), gave him the responsibility to establish the youth organization in the U.S., and Nejdeh chosen as name “Tzeghagron,” which means: “the religion of race”. The group still exists, but changed its name into “Armenian Youth Federation” in 1943. At the beginning of the Second World War, Nzhdeh went to Germany, to wear the uniform of the Third Reich. He was a member of the Armenian National Council, established in December 1942 with the endorsement of Alfred Rosenberg, the minister of Hitler for the eastern conquered territories.[xiii]

     

    After having recalled such facts in the Hürriyet Daily News, I received a message of congratulation from Yerevan. I wish -from the deepest of my heart- that this comment was something like: “You wrote an interesting piece, but you have missed this and this article criticizing the glorification of Nzhdeh.” Yet, there was actually no such factual correction – not a single critique. And nobody else even tried to give a simple nuance to my findings.

     

    This racist ideology has very concrete consequences. From 1987 to 1989, all the remaining Azeris of Armenia were expelled.[xiv] In 1992, Armenia invaded Western Azerbaijan (the Nagorno-Karabakh as well as seven other districts, inhabited almost only by ethnic Azeris), exterminated thousands of Azeri civilians (especially in Khodjaly: at least 613, and more likely 763, were killed in one night in this city) and expelled all the others. The author has nothing to say about these racist crimes. Past President Khocharian justified these acts of ethnic cleansing by the “ethnic incompatibility” between the Armenians and the Azeris – a mere non-sense: In spite of the conflict, 30,000 ethnic Armenians with Azerbaijani citizenship are still in Azerbaijan today;[xv] in spite of the constitutional value of the territorial claims against Turkey (reaffirmed by the Constitutional Court of Armenia in 2010), this country accepts on its soil tens of thousands illegal Armenian immigrants and even allows them to send their children to Armenian schools in Istanbul.

     

    In addition, the Jewish community in Armenia has virtually disappeared after the independence, largely because of the exceptionally high level of anti-Semitism in this country,[xvi] and the only remaining minority, the Yezidis, is facing disappearance, because of emigration, itself due to the clear intolerance of a large section of the population.[xvii] Armenia is the only country of the region which is both independent and virtually mono-ethnic.

     

    3) “Public Information and Need of Knowledge (PINK), the LGBT rights advocate NGO for which I worked, was a temple of joy.”

     

    This is the beginning of a development that, once again, is disinformation. I have no evidence against the good faith of the activists promoting the LGBT rights in Armenia, and so no intention to deny it. The problem is that such persons are confronted to an extreme intolerance. PINK itself ordered a survey in 2011, and 72 percent of the 1,189 respondents (a significant number for a small country such as Armenia) explained that the state should take measures to “fight against homosexuals.” Even more strikingly, on May 8, 2012, a gay-friendly bar of Yerevan was targeted by a Molotov cocktail attack. The chairman of the ARF block in the Armenian National Assembly, Artsvik Minassian (Minasyan), paid to obtain the release of the perpetrators.[xviii] Five months later, a nationalist demonstration was organized in front of the German embassy of Yerevan, because Germany had funded the distribution of a Serbian film mentioning (more than dealing with) homosexuality. Describing the LGTB rights advocacy in Armenia without saying anything about the problems they face is a serious distortion of truth.

     

    Reconciliation cannot be based on the denial of the wrongdoings of the Armenian side and/or on the exaggeration of the wrongdoings of the Turkish side[xix] – and this selective indignation is unfortunately not new.[xx] Such denial and exaggeration does not promote reconciliation between Turks and Armenians, it instead promotes self-hatred amongst Turks.

     

    [i]

    [ii]

    [iii]

    [iv] Yusuf Sarınay, Ermeniler Tarafından Yapılan Katliam Belgeleri, Ankara, 2001, volume I, p. 377 and volume II, p. 1053. Those who find this figure surprisingly high should consider the conclusions of British Captain C. L. Wooley, who affirmed, after an investigation on place, that between 300,000 and 400,000 Muslims were butchered by Armenian nationalists in a part of eastern Anatolia only: Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: the Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995, p. 238, n. 75; Jeremy Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2008, p. 67.

    [v] In a report submitted to the Quai d’Orsay on July 27, 1922 (Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, microfilm P 1380), Elzéar Guiffray, the elected chief of the French community in Izmir, gave numerous and precise examples of burned villages, slaughters, assassinations, arbitrary arrests and inhuman conditions of detention, adding that “without exaggeration,” the number of Turks killed by the Greek forces (which included, at least in some cases, Armenian volunteers) since May 1919 is in excess of 150,000, “without counting the deported persons, estimated to be 300,000.” Writing in July, Guiffray could not describe the most violent period, namely the Greek withdrawal of August-September: Caleb Frank Gates, Not to Me Only, Princeton-London: Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 283; Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile…, pp. 279-284 and 292-306. On the Armenian participation to this last stage, see the report of C. Toureille in the same microfilm than the one of Guiffray.

    [vi] Michael M. Gunter, “Pursuing the Just Cause of their People.” A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism, Westport-New York-London: Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 55-56 and 68-69; Gaïdz Minassian, Guerre et terrorisme arméniens, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002, pp. 22-23, 28, 32-34 and 44-45.

    [vii] “Crude Bomb Explodes at UCLA Professor’s Home”, The Los Angeles Times, 4 October 1977, p. D1 ; “Armenian Terrorism: Near East Feud Rages in America”, The Washington Post, 17 May 1982, p. A1 ; “Press Clanger”, Times Higher Education, 1st April 1996,

    [viii] Nathalie Cettina, Terrorisme : l’histoire de sa mondialisation, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2001, pp. 45-46.

    [ix] For instance: https://www.rferl.org/a/1142396.html

    [x] Turgut Kerem Tuncel, Armenian Diaspora, Ankara: Terazi, 2014, pp. 309-311. Also see: http://www.hhk.am/en/rpa-library/

    [xi]

    [xii]

    [xiii] John Roy Carlson (Arthur Derounian), Under Cover. My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, New York: E. P. Dutton & C°, 1943, pp. 81-82; Yves Ternon, La Cause arménienne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, p. 132; Christopher Walker, Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, London-New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 357.

    [xiv] Ariel Kyrou and Maxime Mardoukhaïev, « Le Haut-Karabagh, vu du côté Azerbaïdjan », Hérodote, n° 54-55, 4e trimestre 1989, pp. 265-267.

    [xv] UNHCR, International Protection Considerations Regarding Azerbaijani Asylum-Seekers and Refugees, Geneva, 2003, p. 4.

    [xvi]

    [xvii] « Demandeurs d’asile : un long et douloureux parcours », Ouest France, 11 mars 2011 ; « Chalon — Expulsion : très inquiets pour David Tamoev et sa famille », Le Journal de Saône-et-Loire, 21 novembre 2014 ; « La Cimade défend l’asile d’un Kurde d’Arménie », Sud Ouest, 10 January 2015.

    [xviii]

    [xix] I am, of course, referring to the misuse of the word “genocide.” In this regard, see, to begin, Edward J. Erickson, Ottomans and Armenians. A Study in Counter-Insurgency, New York-London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013; Maxime Gauin, “Review Essay — ’Proving’ a ‘Crime against Humanity?’”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, volume 35, number 1, 2015, pp. 141-157; and Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005 (Turkish translation: 1915. Osmanlı Ermenilerine Ne Oldu?, Istanbul, Timaş, 2011).

    [xx]

     

  • Turkish Military and ISIS in Conflict, One Officer Dead

    Turkish Military and ISIS in Conflict, One Officer Dead

    Militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fired shots from across the border in Syria which struck and killed an officer and wounded five soldiers in Turkey’s southern Kilis province on Thursday.

    Local sources reported that Turkish soldiers and militants of ISIS are in an armed conflict at the Çobanbey town located across from the Elbeyli village connected to the Kilis province.

    It has been reported that first Turkish tanks took gunfire as light weapons were used in response to the attack. The Ayyaşe Turkmen village, which is located close to the border has been completely evacuated to nearby villages.

    Turkey retaliated immediately with 4 tanks within rules of engagement, hit opposing ISIS posts, Turkey’s Office of Public Diplomacy said in a statement.

    Turkish Air Force dispatched multiple F-16 fighter jets from Diyarbakır airbase to the conflict zone on the Turkey-Syria border, Turkey’s Ihlas News Agency reported.

    Security forces came under fire from Syria, Kilis Governor Süleyman Tapsız told Turkey’s official Anadolu Agency. Turkish forces responded by targeting positions across the border. Reports suggested one ISIS militant was killed.

    “Unfortunately, one of our officers, Yalçın Nane, has been martyred and two sergeants injured,” Tapsız said.

    The wounded sergeants, Fatih Kurt and Necef Çakmaktepe, have been taken to Kilis State Hospital and are in stable condition, he added.

    The incident came after the murder of two policemen by the outlawed PKK on Wednesday and a deadly suicide bombing in Suruç on Monday that killed 32 people. Both incidents took place in Turkey’s southeastern Şanlıurfa province, near the Syrian border.

     

     

  • Pope Francis: “Koran And Holy Bible Are The Same”

    Pope Francis: “Koran And Holy Bible Are The Same”

    washington post

    On Monday the Bishop Of Rome addressed Catholic followers regarding the dire importance of exhibiting religious tolerance. During his hour-long speech, a smiling Pope Francis was quoted telling the Vatican’s guests that the Koran, and the spiritual teachings contained therein, are just as valid as the Holy Bible.

    “Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world. For centuries, blood has been needlessly shed because of the desire to segregate our faiths. This, however, should be the very concept which unites us as people, as nations, and as a world bound by faith. Together, we can bring about an unprecedented age of peace, all we need to achieve such a state is respect each others beliefs, for we are all children of God regardless of the name we choose to address him by. We can accomplish miraculous things in the world by merging our faiths, and the time for such a movement is now. No longer shall we slaughter our neighbors over differences in reference to their God.”

    The pontiff drew harsh criticisms in December after photos of the 78-year-old Catholic leader was released depicting Pope Francis kissing a Koran. The Muslim Holy Book was given to Francis during a meeting with Muslim leaders after a lengthy Muslim prayer held at the Vatican.

     

    St. John Paul II has courted several controversies since being elected as Pope Benedicto XVI’s replacement in 2013. Francis has gone on record to say that homosexuals are not to be judged, Proselytism is nonsense and has endorsed the usage of contraceptive by Catholics.

    The Vatican will meet again with Muslim leaders in late February where they plan to talk about further steps that can be taken to spread understanding and awareness of the Islamic religion.