Salih Avci is one of the chief trainers of the SEK (Spezialeinsatzkommandos, the special response units of the German state police forces), MEK, ZUZ (the SWAT unit of the German Customs Service, and GSG 9 (the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police) in Germany as well as various other special forces ranging from the American Rapid Response Teams to the special police of one of China’s biggest provinces.
He started training in Wing Tsun in 1980 in the European Wing Tsun Organization (EWTO). In 1986, he attained the 1st technician degree. In 1997, he left EWTO to found WTEO (Wing Tsun-Escrima Organization).
Avci is still the world chief trainer of the organization. Today, WTEO has more than 15000 students, excluding law enforcement forces. There are more than 70 schools of WTEO alone in Germany and several others in Holland, Turkey, France, Austria, Spain, Jordan, Italy, Sudan, Greece and La Reunion.
Salih Avci will be training FBI agents with his own techniques which is a mixed between Chinese origin ‘Wing Tsun’ and Philippians origin ‘Escrima’
Salih Avci’s unique approach to the combat art lies in the practical application of his techniques to disarm and arrest without the use of excessive force or weapons, even in life-threatening situations. Salih Avci does not focus solely on unarmed techniques. He has developed traditional short and long stick techniques to be used efficiently and practically without causing unnecessary harm to the person being arrested. A general-purpose tool for protection, disarming and arresting was the result of Salih Avci’s practical modification of the “tonfa”, which is used by the police.
Apart from the realistic application and professional use of self-defence and arresting techniques for civilians and officials, Salih Avci trains actors and fight choreographers for film and television.
Salih Avci married in 1993 and he and Mrs. Bilgi now have four sons and two daughters.
Sources: Amerikali Turk, Wikipedia and Contributed by Tolga Cakir
Iain Lobban the director of GCHQ (Reuters/UK Parliament via REUTERS TV)
The head of GCHQ, Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, will step down by year’s end, the Foreign Office said. Officials denied his departure was linked to public outrage over mass surveillance revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Iain Lobban, 53, has served as GCHQ’s director since June 2008. His departure was officially described as a long-considered move, but comes just a few weeks after he was summoned to answer MPs’ questions about surveillance operations in an unprecedented televised open session of the UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee, along with the heads of MI5 and MI6.
“Iain Lobban is doing an outstanding job as director of GCHQ,” a spokesperson said. “Today is simply about starting the process of ensuring we have a suitable successor in place before he moves on, planned at the end of the year.”
Officials dismissed suggestions his decision was influenced by revelations made by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, whose leaks revealed details of a massive global surveillance network run by the NSA and other members of the so-called Five Eyes alliance – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Despite accounting for the bulk of Britain’s three intelligence agencies’ combined budget of £2 billion, GCHQ had previously attracted far less public attention than MI5 or MI6.
It was damaging media revelations regarding wide-scale collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA that resulted in Lobban being called to appear before the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee alongside the heads of MI5 and MI6 in November.
At the hearing, Lobban accused Snowden’s disclosures of seriously damaging Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts, saying extremists had discussed changing their communication methods following the revelations.
Critics, however, have accused GCHQ of working hand-in-hand with the NSA in massively intruding on the private communications of millions of citizens.
In June, the Guardian reported the NSA had secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic, and, by 2010, was able to boast the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes alliance.
According to media reports, the NSA and GCHQ had a particularly close relationship, sharing troves of data in what Snowden called “the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”
Around 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance had access to the GCHQ databases, allowing them to view and analyze information garnered from such subtly titled programs as ‘Mastering the Internet (MTI)’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE).’
Lobban, who first joined GCHQ in 1983, insisted in November that GCHQ did not spend its time “listening to the telephone calls or reading the e-mails of the majority” of British citizens.
Sir Iain’s counterpart at the NSA, General Keith Alexander, alongside his deputy, John Inglis, are also stepping down later this year.
There is also an ongoing campaign pushing for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to resign for lying under oath by telling Congress the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.
Give young people a choice not to be indoctrinated
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Dear Friends,
California Assembly Bill (AB) 659 seeks to amend Section 51226.3 of the state Education Code to include the alleged “Armenian genocide” in the history-social science educational curricula. Sponsored by Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, AB 659 imposes the one-sided and legally unfounded allegation of a crime against humanity in our public education. Having passed through the Assembly committees on Education and Appropriations, under the influence of ethnic special interests, AB 659 is now up for a full Assembly vote on January 31st.As highlighted by the recent European Court of Human Rights decision in the Perinçek vs Switzerland case as well as by numerous American scholars of history, the Ottoman Armenian suffering cannot be described as ‘genocide’ – a well-defined legal term that applies only to the crimes against humanity tried in a court of law. Furthermore, the very term “Armenian genocide” excludes the massacres of over half a million Turks, Kurds, Azeris and other Muslims by the Armenian armed groups fighting alongside the Russian, Greek and French Armies in World War I.Join the Pax Turcica action campaign to urge your Assembly member to vote against AB 659 when it comes to the floor. The young generations should have a choice to not be subjected to educational malpractice based on the unfair and unethical legislation.
Please, send your action letters NOW, make sure to select your California Assembly member as a target, spread to your friends in California, and forward all responses received to
ATAA, representing over 60 local chapters and 500,000 Turkish Americans throughout the United States, serves locally and in Washington DC to empower the Turkish American community through civic engagement, and to support strong US-Turkish relations through education and advocacy. Established in 1979, ATAA is the largest, democratically elected Turkish American membership organization in the United States. As a non-faith based organization, ATAA is open to people of diverse backgrounds. The ATAA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization formed under the laws of the District of Columbia. To learn more about ATAA, please visit www.ataa.org.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was in Brussels last week seeking to repair relations with Europe, but the first place to look for a solution is within himself. Once hailed as the leader of a model Muslim democracy, he has created a political disaster at home, transforming Turkey into an authoritarian state that poses dangers not just for itself but for its allies in NATO, including the United States.
The latest turmoil has its roots in a political war between Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and his former close allies who follow Fethullah Gulen, a moderate Islamic scholar who lives in Pennsylvania. The tensions erupted into the open last month with a corruption probe that led to the resignation of four government ministers and threatened to ensnare Mr. Erdogan’s family. The prime minister called the probe a “coup attempt” and blamed a “secret organization” within the judiciary and police directed by the Gulen movement and serving “foreign powers” like the United States and Israel. The government has since purged hundreds of police officials and prosecutors and sought to assert control over the judiciary. It also drafted legislation expanding the government’s power to appoint judges and prosecutors, further breaching judicial independence, and has prevented journalists from reporting freely. All the while, Mr. Erdogan has spewed endless conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric, even hinting at American treachery and suggesting that the American ambassador might be expelled.
The probe and Mr. Erdogan’s reaction may well be politically motivated. There are important local elections in March. But Mr. Erdogan should be insisting that the probe be fair and transparent, not trying to derail it. His ruthless ways and his attempt to crush dissent are not new, as the crackdown against demonstrators during protests last June showed. Such actions trample on democratic reforms demanded by the European Union as part of Turkey’s bid for union membership, which may be more in peril than ever, and are increasingly at odds with the ground rules for NATO members.
Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was right when he said in Brussels that the Europeans must demand that Turkey return to the rule of law. The Obama administration also needs to send a strong message about the damaging course Mr. Erdogan is pursuing. Whether Turkey nurtures its hard-won democracy, which has contributed to its impressive economic growth, or turns authoritarian is as critical to regional stability and to its NATO allies as it is to Turks.
A VERSION OF THIS EDITORIAL APPEARS IN PRINT ON JANUARY 28, 2014, IN THE INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES.
By Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal, Updated: Thursday, January 23, 6:32 PM
Morton Abramowitz and Eric Edelman are former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey and co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Turkey Initiative. Blaise Misztal is acting director of foreign policy at the center.
Whatever his achievements over the past decade, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is destroying his country’s parlous democracy. That is a profound problem for Turks and Turkey’s Western allies. Staying silent, out of fear that speaking out would harm some short-term interests, risks Turkey’s longer-term stability.
Last month police arrested more than 50 people close to Erdogan’s government — including prominent business executives and sons of government ministers — on charges of corruption. While graft has long permeated Turkish governments, these allegations are unprecedented. They reach high levels of government and involve not just domestic transgressions but also sizable evasions of Iranian sanctions.
Rather than ensuring a meticulous examination of these charges, Erdogan is burying them. He has removed the case’s lead prosecutors and some 3,000 police officers nationwide, sought to increase government control over a weak judiciary,limited the ability of police to conduct independent investigations, prevented journalists from reporting on the case andmounted a media campaign to destroy his enemies — particularly the followers of powerful religious leader Fethullah Gulen, who were once his strongest allies. And, as he did when protests erupted against his government last summer, Erdogan portrays the events as a massive plot against him. He has also implicated other opposition parties and foreign powers and even threatened to expel the U.S. ambassador.
These are not the actions of a politician simply seeking to stave off scandal. Erdogan is exploiting the allegations to further stifle dissent and strengthen his grip on Turkey.
His tactics are not new. When challenged, Erdogan has sought to destroy his opponents rather than compromise. After effectively sidelining the military’s political influence , Erdogan went after other centers of power: media, business leaders and civil society; now, the Gulenists, a strong, politically effective community. The prime minister has exploited crises — whether real or manufactured — to undermine the rule of law.
The protests in Gezi Park last year and the present scandal are neither isolated domestic disturbances nor simple political infighting. Their occurrence and the government’s reaction are symptomatic of a struggle between an increasingly authoritarian government, which seeks to reduce resistance to its rule, and opposition movements ranging from secular liberals to conservative Gulenists.
That struggle has entered a new phase. Turkey has important local elections at the end of March, followed by presidential and parliamentary campaigns. Erdogan has not yet declared whether he will seek the presidency or reelection as prime minister, but he is intent on continuing to run Turkey. These allegations, and his subsequent actions, could lower his vote tallies; they have given the opposition parties new life.
Turkey’s democratic decline creates a pressing dilemma for the United States. Erdogan’s current course would take Turkey from an imperfect democracy to an autocracy. Such a fate for a close ally and NATO member would have profound implications for our partnership, the United States’ beleaguered credibility and the prospects for democracy in the region. It would also threaten Turkey’s economy.
Secretary of State John Kerry, with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in tow, recently made some modest, generalized public references to U.S. devotion to democracy and the rule of law while insisting that the United States would stay out of Turkish domestic politics and rhapsodizing on the bilateral relationship. Not surprisingly, Davutoglu agreed.
Erdogan’s denunciation of supposed U.S. meddling puts Washington in a difficult position: If the United States weighs in on the scandal, it might give his accusations merit and rally more supporters to his side.
Yet for much of Erdogan’s rule, the U.S. approach has been mostly public silence on unfavorable developments, with occasional private rebukes. As we argued in a recent Bipartisan Policy Center report, this strategy has not succeeded. It has not influenced important aspects of Erdogan’s foreign policy, which have often diverged from U.S. policy; moderated his confrontational rhetoric; or led to a less antagonistic domestic policy. Indeed, U.S. silence all these years might have encouraged Erdogan.
U.S. policymakers should lay aside their reluctance to confront the disastrous impact of Erdogan’s dictatorial tendencies and remind the Turkish leader of the importance the United States attaches to Turkey’s political stability and democratic vitality. Particularly as their influence is greater than it appears: While Turks do not trust the United States, neither do they like to be at odds with it.
Erdogan has exploited Turkey’s partnership with the United States and his close personal relationship with President Obama to burnish his legitimacy. U.S. condemnation of his recent actions — publicly and even more strongly in private — might temper his posturing. However significant U.S. interests with Turkey are, neither silence nor platitudes will help halt its political descent.
Erdogan is doing great harm to Turkey’s democracy. The United States should make clear, privately and publicly, that his extreme actions and demagoguery are subverting Turkey’s political institutions and values and endangering the U.S.-Turkey relationship.
Documents detailing abuse at schools for aboriginal children taken from their families were withheld, say victims.
Toronto, Canada – When Edmund Metatawabin was five years old, he was sent to a remote church-run school for aboriginal children in Canada where he, and hundreds of others, say they faced years of abuse and torture.
Metatawabin spent about 10 years at the school, beginning in the 1950s. One morning, he says, he was feeling ill and threw up while eating porridge. He says he was slapped and told to go upstairs. When he felt better – four days later – he went back to the dining hall and was forced to eat his own vomit.
Edmund Metatawabin (right) seeks documents on abuse at a church-run school [Kristina Jovanovski/Al Jazeera]
Metatawabin, 66, says at times he and his classmates were forced to sit in an electric chair – either as punishment or as entertainment for the staff at St Anne’s Indian Residential School, which operated from the early 1900s to 1976 in northern Ontario province. “I was given that porridge I got sick on and I had to eat that … And if you don’t eat, then you’re going to get beat up some more, and you’re going to get punished – and if you throw up again you’re going to have to eat that too, so what choice do you have?”
Residential school students at Fort George cemetery in November 1946 [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]Now, Metatawabin says, the government is hiding information about the school.
St Anne’s was part of a government-supported school system to “assimilate” aboriginal children. About 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families by the federal government for decades starting in the 1800s and put into church-run “residential schools”.
Many suffered physical and sexual abuse and squalid living conditions, and a Truth and Reconciliation Committee recently said at least 4,000 died children died – a number that could be much higher.
Not an isolated case
Dozens of former St Anne’s students are seeking documents they say will support their claims of abuse to present to private compensation hearings, in which victims tell their stories to an adjudicator.
Fay Brunning, a lawyer representing about 60 victims, says the Canadian government had been hiding evidence by withholding those documents, which include police files and transcripts from trials of alleged abusers.
There was such widespread abuse there I think they were afraid of how many claims they would get out of St Anne’s.
– Fay Brunning, lawyer
“There was such widespread abuse there I think they were afraid of how many claims they would get out of St Anne’s … they wanted to make sure they paid as few people as they could,” says Brunning.
In 1992, Metatawabin, who at the time was chief of the community where the school had been located, helped organise a conference of former students where they shared their stories.
An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police followed, leading to charges against seven former employees. According to the Canadian Press news agency, five of them were convicted, including for assault causing bodily harm, indecent assault and administering a noxious substance.
Brunning says many abusers escaped justice because they died before charges were brought. She says the government obtained a significant amount of police files and trial transcripts in 2003, but only admitted it had them in 2013. The government is legally obliged to provide all documents relating to abuse at residential schools, says Brunning.
She argues having these documents would greatly support a victim’s story during hearings for compensation because the adjudicator would know about convictions of those accused of abuse, the evidence that was provided in court at the time, as well as the allegations made during the police investigation.
‘Re-victimisation’
Brunning says former students are being re-victimised because they are being put into vulnerable positions to face powerful lawyers without all the evidence to support their claims. “There’s an overall recognition [that] what happened to them is wrong – but then it’s happening again. The actual knowledge of proven abuse, proven in criminal courts of law, [has] been covered up … and it’s extremely unfair.”
Neither the department of justice or department of aboriginal affairs would grant Al Jazeera interviews for this report.
However, the office of the aboriginal affairs minister emailed a statement, saying: “Our government takes our obligations under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement seriously and we continue to ensure that the government fulfills its obligations under the Agreement. In order to bring clarity to these issues, we are seeking direction from the Ontario Superior Court with respect to the Ontario Provincial Police documents. We look forward to receiving the court’s decision.”
In a document submitted to the court, the government says the files are unlikely to be useful for claimants seeking compensation. The government has also argued there are privacy concerns in handing over documents detailing abuse.
I can’t for the life of me in 2013 understand why a government would choose to cover up the horrific abuse that happened at St Anne’s.
– Charlie Angus, MP
However, Brunning says the files would be kept confidential during the private hearings of victims.
New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus, whose constituency includes the community where St Anne’s was located, says there are means in place to keep a victim’s privacy and the government is using such concerns to protect itself.
“I can’t for the life of me in 2013 understand why a government would choose to cover up the horrific abuse that happened at St Anne’s, why they would side with the perpetrators rather than the victims,” Angus says.
Metatawabin says aboriginal elders encouraged victims to tell their stories, and the community has not raised concerns of privacy in the government handing over the files. “Did we ever say anything about privacy? The government says that and that’s an excuse, privacy is just an excuse … to hide everything.”
Ultimately though, once the issue was brought to court in mid-December, the government did not oppose handing over the police files and trial transcripts, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on residential schools, which also requested the documents.
Brunning says while this was a major victory for victims, trust in the system has now been lost. She is asking the court to order an affidavit from the government – listing all the documents in its possession relating to abuse at St Anne’s – and to set up a neutral body to monitor the process. She says there could be other files the government is hiding.
Abuse was not limited to St Anne’s. In December, the CBC reported that a former supervisor at another residential school was given three years in jail for sexually abusing boys, drawing criticism from victims that the punishment was too lenient. The prosecutor had asked for 11 years in prison.
‘Like little white children’
In 2007, thousands of lawsuits from former students across the country led to Canada’s largest class-action settlement. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was established to provide compensation to those abused. Between the 1860s and 1990s, 150,000 aboriginal children attended these schools, which were normally run by churches but funded by the government, according to a report by the TRC.
Residential school students in Wabasca, Alberta [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]
It states the widespread physical and sexual abuse – and loss of aboriginal culture – led to the traumatisation of generations of children, high mortality rates, low educational levels, and destruction of aboriginal families.
Metatawabin says the St Anne’s staff insulted his family and appearance to erode his identity. As was common in residential schools, he was banned from speaking his aboriginal language.
“We were supposed to come out of [a] residential school like little white children, speaking English and thinking like the way the English people think.”
All nine of his siblings attended the school, meaning his father had to send a child there every year for 10 years. Each sibling faced similar abuse.
The abuse at St Anne’s is considered among the worst that occurred within the residential school system.
“It represents the most extreme examples of abuse that certainly have come to my attention so far, short of murder. It’s obvious the children were tortured in horrific circumstances,”says Julian Falconer, a lawyer for the TRC.
It is not known when the court will hand down a decision, but Brunning says the judge knows the issue is urgent as some of the claimants are elderly. Time has run out for others, though. Of the 150,000 children sent to residential schools, the TRC estimates just 80,000 are still living.
As for Metatawabin, he is following the advice of aboriginal elders and sharing his story so that people can better understand the struggles of his people.
“Every time I do this, it’s not a threat anymore, and it doesn’t get me down anymore. I do it so that [people] will learn about what [we] went through … and that when you see a person on the street, you will know they were treated very badly as a child.”
Salih Avci is one of the chief trainers of the SEK (Spezialeinsatzkommandos, the special response units of the German state police forces), MEK, ZUZ (the SWAT unit of the German Customs Service, and GSG 9 (the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police) in Germany as well as various other special forces ranging from the American Rapid Response Teams to the special police of one of China’s biggest provinces.
![Residential school students at Fort George cemetery in November 1946 [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]](https://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Residential-school-students.jpg "Canada accused of hiding child abuse evidence 13")
By Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal, Updated: Thursday, January 23, 6:32 PM