Efforts to Remove PKK From Terrorist List

US might unilaterally decide to remove PKK from the list without taking to Turkey

Basnews  |  Hemin Salih

02.12.2014  17:41

PKK guerrillas on Mount Qandil in northern Iraq

ERBIL

During the latest meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), members discussed the possibility of removing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the US terrorist list. The US has already expressed an intention to do it, but political analysts believe disarmament of the group will be a precondition to its removal, at Turkey’s insistence.

In the 60th meeting of NATO in Den Hag in the Netherlands, members discussed a variety of issues, including the role of Kurds in the fight against Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria.

Austrian MP Peter Pilz suggested that it is necessary for the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran and Syria to have autonomy.

He asked NATO to consider removing the PKK from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations, as a result of its role fighting  the extremist group in northern Iraq and Syria.

US media reports have talked about the US’s intention to remove the PKK from the list. However, Turkey has expressed concerns about this development and claims the US wants to intervene in the peace process between the Turkish government and the PKK and Turkey’s internal affairs.

Turkish political analysts believe that Turkey does not want the US to remove PKK from the list without disarming them first.

Deputy Chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey, Mehmet Ali Shahin pointed out that the US continuously interferes in the domestic issues of Turkey and wants to take a role in the peace process between the PKK and the Turkish government.

Currently Ankara and PKK are observing a fragile ceasefire, and they have begun negotiations to end the conflict permanently. Thousands of people from both sides have been killed in 30 years of fighting .

Since the AKP party came to power in Turkey a decade ago, the Kurdish situation in the country has improved to some extent, although AKP officials still harshly talk about the PKK and recently Turkish President Reccep Tayip Erdogan claimed, “IS and the PKK are the same”.

“Certainly, Turkey is pressuring the US to force the PKK to lay down their arms, as a pre-condition to remove the group from the terrorist list, but how the US will do it is another question,”  analyst Ziryan Rojhalati said to BasNews.

He continued, “If Washington agrees to the Turkish request, it’s seems unacceptable. It is obvious for all the world that the PKK is a national political party, created due to the harsh policies of Turkey and to gain Kurdish rights; it’s not a terrorist party.”

Rojhalati noted that it is true that the disarmament of the PKK has been mentioned in the peace process, but Turkey and Washington must not interconnect these two cases together as the only way of removing PKK from the list.

Former chairman of the PKK politcal wing, Fayeq Gulpi spoke to BasNews and said the PKK has never done any harm to the US in the region.

“The PKK has never harmed the US or killed any US soldiers. The reason that the US has the PKK on a terrorist list is due to a Turkish request to the US administration.”

He also mentioned that the US viewed Turkey as an ally in the past, however changes in recent years have affected this alliance.

He believes this change happened in 2003, when Turkey didn’t allow the US to attack Iraq from the Turkish border and later on secret negotiations between Iran and Turkey were revealed. This year the US and Turkey have had a difference of opinion on how to tackle Islamic State causing further tensions between Ankara and Washington.

“This has effected US views on the PKK, when they see the group in Syria; the Democratic Union party (PYD) and and its armed wing the People’s Protection Unit (YPG) are all fighting on front lines against IS with the cooperation of US allies. Therefore, it’s a real possibility that the US might not take Turkey’s request into consideration when removing the PKK from the list. Perhaps the US will unilaterally decide to drop the PKK from the terrorist list’, concluded Gulpi.

Kobani and the Future of Turkish Democracy

Why the Military May Get the Upper Hand

By Halil KaraveliOCTOBER 8, 2014

Turkish soldiers watch over the Syrian town of Kobani, October 4, 2014. 

(Murad Sezer / Courtesy Reuters)

Τurkey has anticipated Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s downfall ever since protests first broke out in Syria in 2011. It has been disappointed at every turn, though, and now it is not only Assad who is in trouble but Turkey as well. The way in which Ankara has responded to the violence across its border has upended its own political balance and re-empowered its military. It has also brought the peace process that Turkey started with the Kurdish movement to the brink of collapse.

On October 2, the Turkish parliament voted to allow Turkey to send troops across its southern borders into Syria to deal with “risks and threats against our national security along Turkey’s southern land borders.” The decision was widely interpreted as signaling that Turkey would be going to war with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the terrorist group that has overrun much of Iraq and Syria. Yet the preamble of the troop authorization neglects to mention ISIS and, instead, refers to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the militant group that has fought against the Turkish state since 1984. On October 4, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defended the authorization by stating that “ISIS and PKK are the same” and rhetorically asking why the world is not as enraged about PKK activities as it is about ISIS. In one fell swoop then, he raised serious doubts about his government’s intentions of taking the necessary steps to accommodate the Kurds and the PKK as part of ongoing negotiations 

Kurds in Turkey and Syria even believe that Ankara is still offering covert aid to ISIS in its efforts to cleanse the Kurdish population of Syria from areas adjacent to Turkey’s borders. Such accusations first arose in 2012, when Rojava -- the Kurdish region in Syria -- declared autonomy. In response, the Turkish government retorted that “We are not going to allow any fait accompli in Syria” and then sent support to Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate that attacked the Kurds. And now, as ISIS has laid siege to the Kurdish town of Kobani, which is held by a PKK-affiliated party, Turkey has come to face new accusations of complicity for failing to intervene. Last week, Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the PKK, warned that the fall of Kobani would end the peace process in Turkey. Cemil Bayik, the co-leader of the PKK’s civilian arm, said that if Ankara were to look the other way as Kobani fell, the war would restart in Turkey. He remarked that a “buffer zone (which Turkey plans to establish) would be targeting us. We cannot pursue [peace] with a power that crushes what has been achieved in Rojava.”

So far, at least, Erdogan and the Kurdish movement are still implicitly allied. Indirect Kurdish support has been, in many ways, crucial for Erdogan. The relative peace since the PKK agreed to a unilateral cease fire last year has benefited his regime. And it mattered that the Kurdish movement remained neutral, with a pro-government tilt, during the Gezi protests 2013. If the Kurds had also joined in, Erdogan would have faced a much more difficult challenge. 

Kurds in Turkey and Syria even believe that Ankara is still offering covert aid to ISIS in its efforts to cleanse the Kurdish population of Syria from areas adjacent to Turkey’s borders.

Öcalan hopes that accommodating Erdogan will pay off -- that the Kurds will get what they covet, namely some form of autonomy for the Kurdish-dominated parts of Turkey and that he himself will be released from jail. Yet that logic was always flawed. After all, it makes little sense that Erdogan would be prepared to (or could somehow be induced to) devolve power to the Kurds while he is otherwise concentrating all power into his own hands. The Kurdish leaders must know that Diyarbakir, the Turkish Kurds’ unofficial capital, will not get more democracy while Ankara gets less; however, they have had no choice but to put their faith in Erdogan.

Erdogan, for his part, has a continued interest in stringing the Kurds along. But the turmoil in Syria is forcing both sides’ hands. The Kurds have had to deal with growing anger among their younger generation, who are incensed at what they see as Turkish complicity in the assault on Syrian Kurds. That pushes the Kurdish leadership into a more radical stance. Meanwhile, the growing insecurity on Turkey’s southern borders is pushing Erdogan to be more attentive to the views and recommendations of the military.

On August 30 this year, the Turkish military high command went public with its displeasure with the peace process. Necdet Özel, the Chief of the General Staff, expressed dissatisfaction at not having been consulted by the government. He reminded the country that the military’s red lines -- the unity and the territorial integrity of the nation -- remain unchanged. He vowed that the armed forces will “act accordingly” if those red lines were to be crossed. Özel’s thinly-veiled message to the government was that Kurdish self-rule would not be tolerated.

Before the Turkish parliament voted to allow troops to intervene in Syria and Iraq, Özel and the army and air force commanders held a briefing -- the first of its kind in years -- for the government. The generals requested that the government move quickly to establish buffer zones at four points in Syria -- one of them including the Kurdish town of Kobani -- in order to preserve Turkey’s security interests. They said that this should be done even if the United States disapproves. The details of the briefing were reported in the main pro-government daily Yeni Safak, which observed that “The presidency, the military and the government nowadays speak with one voice.”

The last time the Turkish military was in a similar position to shape the policies of a civilian government was during the 1990s, when the war between the PKK and the Turkish state escalated. It is now set to wield power once more as security threats mount. The AKP had supposedly domesticated the military by jailing hundreds of officers and by asserting the authority of the elected government in the National Security Council, which used to be dominated by army generals. But the officers were freed earlier this year after the country’s constitutional court ruled that the officers’ rights had been violated. Perhaps in trying to make lemonade out of lemons as the military grows stronger, Erdogan has come to see military support as crucial to help him root out supporters of his erstwhile ally turned enemy, the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, within the state bureaucracy. 

And, at any rate, Erdogan is a rightist, so it is not a terribly big step for him to embrace the generals’ views on the Kurdish issue. Historically, democratically elected rightist governments have been just as prone as the military to curtail freedoms and liberties. In this light, the anti-Kurdish alliance of Erdogan and the generals is but the latest affirmation of the nationalist–conservative identity at the core of the Turkish republic; civilian rightist governments and the military alike have subscribed to it.

But the effects of the Syrian turmoil could also be a catalyst for a political realignment that would put Turkey on a different, more democratic trajectory. For the Kurds, restarting hostilities is a dead end: They simply cannot defeat Turkey. The alternative for the Kurdish movement is thus to explore the possibility of an alliance with the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP). A de facto alliance did in fact emerge during the vote to authorize the military incursion into Syria and Iraq. Against the pro-war camp -- which included the AKP and the anti-Kurdish Nationalist Action Party -- stood an anti-war coalition composed of the CHP and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). 

The CHP and HDP share a common social democratic ideology, but they are also divided by nationalism. CHP has become more consistently social democratic under the leadership of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, but the party still has a vocal, Turkish nationalist wing that would not be comfortable with a broad Turkish–Kurdish social democratic coalition. Still, the strong showing of HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas during the recent presidential election might change some minds. Although the pro-Kurdish party does not usually attract more than six percent of the votes nationwide, Demirtas received nearly ten percent. He did so by highlighting liberal and leftist themes that resonated with urban liberals and Turkish and Kurdish social democratic constituencies.

The HDP and CHP are in the process of exploring the possibility of some form of cooperation in the upcoming parliamentary elections slated for 2015. For that to happen, though, both parties would have to undergo significant changes and distance themselves from their respective nationalist strains That is, in all probability, a long shot, especially in the case of the CHP. But if Turkish and Kurdish social democrats were to present a united front, Turkey would get what it has lacked since the 1970s, a strong social democratic alternative to the dominant, authoritarian right. 

Unfortunately, given Turkey’s history, it is more likely that growing insecurity and heightened conflict is going to further entrench authoritarianism.

Given Turkey’s history, it is more likely that growing insecurity and heightened conflict is going to further entrench authoritarianism.

Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq: The Prize and Peril of Kirkuk

Geopolitical Weekly TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2014   

By Reva BhallaIn June 1919, aboard an Allied warship en route to Paris, sat Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of a crumbling Ottoman Empire. The elderly statesman, donning an iconic red fez and boasting an impeccably groomed mustache, held in his hands a memorandum that he was to present to the Allied powers at the Quai d'Orsay. The negotiations on postwar reparations started five months earlier, but the Ottoman delegation was prepared to make the most of its tardy invitation to the talks. As he journeyed across the Mediterranean that summer toward the French shore, Damat Ferid mentally rehearsed the list of demands he would make to the Allied powers during his last-ditch effort to hold the empire together.

ARTICLE AUTHOR

Reva Bhalla

Reva Bhalla is a leading expert on Middle Eastern, South Asian and Latin American affairs and plays an integral role in applying a forward-looking, strategic lens to Stratfor's coverage of global events. She oversees country assessments, monitors major geopolitical trends and ensures that all Stratfor content fits within the established analytical framework.

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He began with a message, not of reproach, but of inculpability: "Gentlemen, I should not be bold enough to come before this High Assembly if I thought that the Ottoman people had incurred any responsibility in the war that has ravaged Europe and Asia with fire and sword." His speech was followed by an even more defiant memorandum, denouncing any attempt to redistribute Ottoman land to the Kurds, Greeks and Armenians, asserting: "In Asia, the Turkish lands are bounded on the south by the provinces of Mosul and Diyarbakir, as well as a part of Aleppo as far as the Mediterranean." When Damat Ferid's demands were presented in Paris, the Allies were in awe of the gall displayed by the Ottoman delegation. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George regarded the presentation as a "good joke," while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson said he had never seen anything more "stupid." They flatly rejected Damat Ferid's apparently misguided appeal -- declaring that the Turks were unfit to rule over other races, regardless of their common Muslim identity -- and told him and his delegation to leave. The Western powers then proceeded, through their own bickering, to divide the post-Ottoman spoils.

Under far different circumstances today, Ankara is again boldly appealing to the West to follow its lead in shaping policy in Turkey's volatile Muslim backyard. And again, Western powers are looking at Turkey with incredulity, waiting for Ankara to assume responsibility for the region by tackling the immediate threat of the Islamic State with whatever resources necessary, rather than pursuing a seemingly reckless strategy of toppling the Syrian government. Turkey's behavior can be perplexing and frustrating to Western leaders, but the country's combination of reticence in action and audacity in rhetoric can be traced back to many of the same issues that confronted Istanbul in 1919, beginning with the struggle over the territory of Mosul.

The Turkish Fight for Mosul

Under the Ottoman Empire, the Mosul vilayet stretched from Zakho in southeastern Anatolia down along the Tigris River through Dohuk, Arbil, Alqosh, Kirkuk, Tuz Khormato and Sulaimaniyah before butting up against the western slopes of the Zagros Mountains, which shape the border with Iran. This stretch of land, bridging the dry Arab steppes and the fertile mountain valleys in Iraqi Kurdistan, has been a locus of violence long before the Islamic State arrived. The area has been home to an evolving mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyro-Chaldeans and Jews, while Turkish and Persian factions and the occasional Western power, whether operating under a flag or a corporate logo, continue to work in vain to eke out a demographic makeup that suits their interests.
At the time of the British negotiation with the Ottomans over the fate of the Mosul region, British officers touring the area wrote extensively about the ubiquity of the Turkish language, noting that "Turkish is spoken all along the high road in all localities of any importance." This fact formed part of Turkey's argument that the land should remain under Turkish sovereignty. Even after the 1923 signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, in which Turkey renounced its rights to Ottoman lands, the Turkish government still held out a claim to the Mosul region, fearful that the Brits would use Kurdish separatism to further weaken the Turkish state. Invoking the popular Wilsonian principle of self-determination, the Turkish government asserted to the League of Nations that most of the Kurds and Arabs inhabiting the area preferred to be part of Turkey anyway. The British countered by asserting that their interviews with locals revealed a prevailing preference to become part of the new British-ruled Kingdom of Iraq.The Turks, in no shape to bargain with London and mired in a deep internal debate over whether Turkey should forego these lands and focus instead on the benefits of a downsized republic, lost the argument and were forced to renounce their claims to the Mosul territory in 1925. As far as the Brits and the French were concerned, the largely Kurdish territory would serve as a vital buffer space to prevent the Turks from eventually extending their reach from Asia Minor to territories in Mesopotamia, Syria and Armenia. But the fear of Turkish expansion was not the only factor informing the European strategy to keep northern Iraq out of Turkish hands.

The Oil Factor

Since the days of Herodotus and Nebuchadnezzar, there have been stories of eternal flames arising from the earth of Baba Gurgur near the town of Kirkuk. German explorer and cartographer Carsten Niebuhr wrote in the 18th century: "A place called Baba Gurgur is above all remarkable because the earth is so hot that eggs and meat can be boiled here." The flames were in fact produced by the natural gas and naphtha seeping through cracks in the rocks, betraying the vast quantities of crude oil lying beneath the surface. London wasted little time in calling on geologists from Venezuela, Mexico, Romania and Indochina to study the land and recommend sites for drilling. On Oct. 14, 1927, the fate of Kirkuk was sealed: A gusher rising 43 meters (around 140 feet) erupted from the earth, dousing the surrounding land with some 95,000 barrels of crude oil for 10 days before the well could be capped. With oil now part of the equation, the political situation in Kirkuk became all the more flammable.

The British mostly imported Sunni Arab tribesmen to work the oil fields, gradually reducing the Kurdish majority and weakening the influence of the Turkmen minority in the area. The Arabization project was given new energy when the Arab Baath Socialist Party came to power through a military coup in 1968. Arabic names were given to businesses, neighborhoods, schools and streets, while laws were adjusted to pressure Kurds to leave Kirkuk and transfer ownership of their homes and lands to Arabs. Eviction tactics turned ghastly in 1988 under Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign, during which chemical weapons were employed against the Kurdish population. The Iraqi government continued with heavy-handed tactics to Arabize the territory until the collapse of the Baathist regime in 2003. Naturally, revenge was a primary goal as Kurdish factions worked quickly to repopulate the region with Kurds and drive the Arabs out.

Click to Enlarge

Even as Kirkuk, its oil-rich fields and a belt of disputed territories stretching between Diyala and Nineveh provinces have remained officially under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi central government in Baghdad, the Kurdish leadership has sought to redraw the boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan. After the Iraqi Kurdish region gained de facto autonomy with the creation of a no-fly zone in 1991 and then formally coalesced into the Kurdistan Regional Government after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish influence gradually expanded in the disputed areas. Kurdish representation increased through multi-ethnic political councils, facilitated by the security protection these communities received from the Kurdish peshmerga and by the promise of energy revenues, while Baghdad remained mired in its own problems. Formally annexing Kirkuk and parts of Nineveh and Diyala, part of the larger Kurdish strategy, would come in due time. Indeed, the expectation that legalities of the annexation process would soon be completed convinced a handful of foreign energy firms to sign contracts with the Kurdish authorities -- as opposed to Baghdad -- enabling the disputed territories to finally begin realizing the region's energy potential.

Then the unexpected happened: In June, the collapse of the Iraqi army in the north under the duress of the Islamic State left the Kirkuk fields wide open, allowing the Kurdish peshmerga to finally and fully occupy them. Though the Kurds now sit nervously on the prize, Baghdad, Iran, local Arabs and Turkmen and the Islamic State are eyeing these fields with a predatory gaze. At the same time, a motley force of Iran-backed Shiite militias, Kurdish militants and Sunni tribesmen are trying to flush the Islamic State out of the region in order to return to settling the question of where to draw the line on Kurdish autonomy. The Sunnis will undoubtedly demand a stake in the oil fields that the Kurds now control as repayment for turning on the Islamic State, guaranteeing a Kurdish-Sunni confrontation that Baghdad will surely exploit.

The Turkish Dilemma

The modern Turkish government is looking at Iraq and Syria in a way similar to how Damat Ferid did almost a century ago when he sought in Paris to maintain Turkish sovereignty over the region. From Ankara's point of view, the extension of a Turkish sphere of influence into neighboring Muslim lands is the antidote to weakening Iraqi and Syrian states. Even if Turkey no longer has direct control over these lands, it hopes to at least indirectly re-establish its will through select partners, whether a group of moderate Islamist forces in Syria or, in northern Iraq, a combination of Turkmen and Sunni factions, along with a Kurdish faction such as Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. The United States may currently be focused on the Islamic State, but Turkey is looking years ahead at the mess that will likely remain. This is why Turkey is placing conditions on its involvement in the battle against the Islamic State: It is trying to convince the United States and its Sunni Arab coalition partners that it will inevitably be the power administering this region. Therefore, according to Ankara, all players must conform to its priorities, beginning with replacing Syria's Iran-backed Alawite government with a Sunni administration that will look first to Ankara for guidance.

However, the Turkish vision of the region simply does not fit the current reality and is earning Ankara more rebuke than respect from its neighbors and the West. The Kurds, in particular, will continue to form the Achilles' heel of Turkish policymaking.

In Syria, where the Islamic State is closing in on the city of Kobani on Turkey's border, Ankara is faced with the unsavory possibility that it will be drawn into a ground fight with a well-equipped insurgent force. Moreover, Turkey would be fighting on the same side as a variety of Kurdish separatists, including members of Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party, which Ankara has every interest in neutralizing.

Turkey faces the same dilemma in Iraq, where it may unwittingly back Kurdish separatists in its fight against the Islamic State. Just as critical, Turkey cannot be comfortable with the idea that Kirkuk is in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds unless Ankara is assured exclusive rights over that energy and the ability to extinguish any oil-fueled ambitions of Kurdish independence. But Turkey has competition. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is not willing to make itself beholden to Turkey, as did Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, while financial pressures continue to climb. Instead, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is staying close to Iran and showing a preference to work with Baghdad. Meanwhile, local Arab and Turkmen resistance to Kurdish rule is rising, a factor that Baghdad and Iran will surely exploit as they work to dilute Kurdish authority by courting local officials in Kirkuk and Nineveh with promises of energy rights and autonomy.

This is the crowded battleground that Turkey knows well. A long and elaborate game of "keep away" will be played to prevent the Kurds from consolidating control over oil-rich territory in the Kurdish-Arab borderland, while the competition between Turkey and Iran will emerge into full view. For Turkey to compete effectively in this space, it will need to come to terms with the reality that Ankara will not defy its history by resolving the Kurdish conundrum, nor will it be able to hide within its borders and avoid foreign entanglements. 

Editor's Note: Writing in George Friedman's stead this week is Reva Bhalla, vice president of Global Analysis.

Read more: Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq: The Prize and Peril of Kirkuk | Stratfor
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The heroes of Kobani - the Kurds fighting ISIS

By Daren Butler and Mariam Karouny
Kurds Vow To Fight To The Last As Islamic State Tightens Grip On Syrian Town

Smoke rises from the Syrian town of Kobani, seen from near the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border in the southeastern town of Suruc, Oct. 3, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Murad Sezer)

(Reuters) - Outgunned Kurdish fighters vowed on Monday not to abandon their increasingly desperate efforts to defend the Syrian border town of Kobani from Islamic State militants pressing in from three sides and pounding them with heavy artillery.

The radical Al Qaeda offshoot has been battling for more than two weeks to seize the predominantly Kurdish town, driving 180,000 people into neighboring Turkey.

Air strikes by American and Gulf state warplanes have failed to halt the advance of the Islamists, who moved to the outskirts of the town over the weekend and were battling to secure a strategic hilltop in the face of fierce resistance.

Despite the heavy fighting, which has seen mortars rain down on residential areas in Kobani and stray fire hit Turkish territory, a Reuters reporter saw around 30 people cross over from Turkey, apparently to help with defense of the town.

"Fighting continues, they are also firing mortars at the heart of the town. We have light weapons only," Esmat al-Sheikh, head of the Kobani Defence Authority, said by telephone.

"If they enter Kobani, it will be a graveyard for us and for them. We will not let them enter Kobani as long as we live. We either win or die. We will resist to the end," Sheikh said as heavy and light weapons fire echoed from the eastern side of town.

Ismail Eskin, a journalist in the town, said morale was still high "because the people are protecting their own soil".

"They will not allow (Islamic State) to occupy Kobani," he said.



VILLAGES EMPTIED

Islamic State wants to take Kobani to consolidate a dramatic sweep across northern Iraq and Syria, in the name of an absolutist version of Sunni Islam, that has sent shock waves through the Middle East.

Beheadings, mass killings and torture have spread fear of the group across the region, with villages emptying at the approach of pick-up trucks flying Islamic State's black flag.

One female Kurdish fighter near Kobani blew herself up on Sunday after running out of ammunition, rather than be captured by IS, a monitoring group and local sources said.

"They have ammunition, but it is so little," said Pawer Mohammed Ali, a translator for the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) inside Kobani. "The PYD are just appealing to foreign forces for ammunition because (Islamic State) is using heavy weapons, tanks and mortars."

On Sunday, Islamic State released a video apparently showing its fighters in control of radio masts on top of Mistanour hill, which looks out over the town and would offer valuable high ground. Reuters was not able to independently verify the contents of the video.

Ali said fighting for control of Mistanour hill was continuing, and denied reports that IS fighters were in the streets of Kobani. He said Kurdish forces were holding them back but the situation in the town, where water and power had been cut off, was increasingly desperate.

Turkish hospitals have been treating a steady stream of wounded Kurdish fighters being brought across the frontier. Witnesses who had fled Kobani said that old women were being given grenades to throw, and young women with no fighting experience were being armed and sent into battle.



LITTLE HELP

Kobani's Kurds have so far received little help from elsewhere. Turkey has given shelter to the bulk of the area's refugees, and its doctors have treated the wounded, but it has given no suggestion that it could join the fight against Islamic State, beyond gestures of self-defense.

Over the weekend, President Tayyip Erdogan vowed to retaliate if Islamic State attacked Turkish forces, and on Monday Turkish tanks deployed along the border for the second time in a week, some with guns pointing towards Syria, apparently in response to stray fire crossing the frontier.

Still, Islamic State's release last month of 46 Turkish hostages, and a parliamentary motion last week renewing a mandate allowing Turkish troops to cross into Syria and Iraq, have raised expectations that Ankara may be planning a more active role.

Its calculations are complex, however.

For three decades, Ankara has fought an armed insurgency by its own Kurdish PKK militants demanding greater autonomy in Turkey's southeast.

Analysts say it is now wary of helping Syrian Kurdish forces near Kobani as they have strong links with the PKK and have maintained ambiguous relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to whom Turkey is implacably opposed.

Against that are warnings from the leaders of Turkey's Kurds that allowing Syria's Kurds to be driven from Kobani would spell the end of Erdogan's delicately poised drive to negotiate an end to his own Kurdish insurgency and permanently disarm the PKK.

Turkey's Geographical Ambition

STRATFOR - Geopolitical Weekly TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2014 

By Robert D. Kaplan and Reva Bhalla

At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable.

Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.

The story begins after World War I.

Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means "Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland. Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.

Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.

Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s Russia. For decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod, whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.

The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.

Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment, in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able to get away with being so Islamic.

Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the 1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a Pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in Ozal's last years in power.

Ozal died suddenly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002. Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.

Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.

Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities. Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position. In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus, which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.

The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.

Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds, who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region's complexities.

Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.

Read more: Turkey's Geographical Ambition | Stratfor
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Obama's Erdogan predicament

Those paying close attention to Turkey in Washington must be confounded. What are they to understand from a White House statement and a letter written by 84 people, some of them world-renowned, to President Barack Obama about Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey?

Those reading these two texts on the same topic may have problems about how are they to read and interpret them. Not only those living in Washington, but those who are interested in the United States and Turkey and read the two texts via the Internet will also have problems reaching conclusions.

Obama spoke by telephone with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan late Wednesday. Normally, that would be considered routine, because the Turkish prime minister long enjoyed the reputation of being the foremost leader that Obama spent time with on the telephone. That was, until the Istanbul Gezi Park events erupted in the summer of 2013. Only two weeks before the Gezi events, Erdogan was received with the highest protocol in Washington. However, after Gezi all that became history. A chilly encounter followed at the G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg on Sept. 5-6, 2013, and a brief phone conversation, once.

The significance of the last event was that it was the first time since the graft scandal erupted. Reuters reported that they discussed regional issues but also stressed the importance of Turkey’s democratic stability.

A White House statement said the following: “[Obama] noted the importance of sound policies rooted in the rule of law to reassure the financial markets, nurture a predictable investment environment, strengthen bilateral ties and benefit the future of Turkey.”

On Thursday, before the pundits had time yet to analyze and digest the content of the White House statement on the Obama-Erdogan telephone conversation, a bipartisan letter signed by 84 prominent and former US lawmakers, government officials and national security experts as well as Turkey specialists was delivered to Obama urging him “to make it clear, privately and publicly, that Prime Minister Erdogan’s autocratic actions and demagoguery are subverting Turkey’s political institutions and values and endangering the US-Turkey relationship.”

In a news exclusive, The Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin said of the letter: “According to the experts and former officials, Obama has been turning a blind eye to Erdogan’s descent into autocracy. In their opinion, this alarming trend in Turkey has accelerated since last summer, when Turkish authorities used a heavy hand to disperse street protests and Erdogan denounced the protesters as 'looters' while blaming foreign conspirators for the unrest.”

Addressed to “The Honorable Barack Obama,” the letter starts with “Dear Mr. President,” and the following introductory paragraph sums up the rest of the three paragraphs:

“Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is increasingly undermining a central pillar of the decades-long, strategic US-Turkish partnership: Turkey’s growing democracy. We are writing because of our deep dismay at this development and to urge you to make clear to the Turkish public America’s concern about Turkey’s current path. Silence will only encourage Prime Minister Erdogan to diminish the rule of law in the country even further.”

Eighty-four signatures under the letter are important. Among them are well-known names in Washington’s media and intellectual circles, such as famous neocons Elliott Abrams, William Kristol, Reuel Marc Gerecht, John Bolton, Mort Zuckerman, Martin Peretz, Leon Wieseltier; also, Tom Dine, Joshua Muravchik, John Podhoretz and Danielle Pletka, as well as influential names such as Dennis Ross, Dov Zakheim, Paul Bremer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Paula Dobriansky, Dan Senor, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and, most importantly, former Sen. Joseph Lieberman — who all have served in the US government. Add to them two former US ambassadors to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz and Eric Edelman, and people whose democratic credentials cannot be disputed, such as Carl Gershman, who runs the National Endowment for Democracy; David Kramer, who leads the Freedom House; and, Turkey expert Michael Werz of the Center for American Progress, which is identified as Obama’s think tank.

While these “inside the Beltway” personalities ask Obama to take a stand against Erdogan’s “drifting to autocracy,” the White House in response to the critical tone of the signatories can say that Obama in his conversation with Erdogan had emphasized “the importance of sound policies rooted in the rule of law.”

One can easily claim that the words “importance of sound policies rooted in the rule of law to reassure the financial markets, nurture a predictable investment environment” were selected very meticulously, and if read from the end, Obama was not conveying a wish but sending a veiled threat to Erdogan.

What I understand from the surprise phone conversation is that such letters as the one signed by 84 prominent Americans don’t have much influence on the White House. The mood about Turkey in Washington is already negative and dialogue is at a minimum. Nevertheless, decision-makers in Washington, no matter how upset they may be with Turkey, still have to work with it, given its weight in the region. Erdogan’s associates will comfortably refer to the last telephone conversation as “relations with Washington are normal. Business is as usual.”

But as a veteran observer of Turkish-US relations I must underline that the above-mentioned letter is of an unprecedented nature between two allies and in bilateral relations. The last time “Washington circles” resorted to such a move was about Iraq and targeting Saddam Hussein.

That is why the Obama-Erdogan phone conversation and the letter delivered to Obama the next day must be recorded as a major step in US-Turkey relations — because it is unprecedented.

Surely, on the day the White House announced the receipt of the letter to Obama, they must have read the following title in The Wall Street Journal that in a way confirmed the contents of the letter: “Turkey Moves to Broaden Agency Powers.” The first sentence of the news report was: “Turkey’s government submitted a draft law designed to give sweeping additional powers to its intelligence services, its latest move to expand executive control over key institutions ahead of pivotal elections.”

The move’s repercussions in Turkey itself may irritate Obama or anyone in Washington who might insist in turning a blind eye toward Erdogan’s drift to authoritarianism in Turkey. Erdogan’s critics in Turkey interpreted the move in quasi-consensus as a step forward in “establishing a mukhabarat state in Turkey reminiscent of the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad” next door in Syria.

Whether this is an aberration or not, it is not clear yet. What is quite clear is that Erdogan is becoming a liability more and more for Obama to have on board as a strong and reliable friend and ally.

Cengiz Çandar

Columnist 

Cengiz Candar is a columnist for Al-Monitor's Turkey Pulse. A journalist since 1976, he is the author of seven books in the Turkish language, mainly on Middle East issues, including the best-seller Mesopotamia Express: A Journey in History.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/02/officials-urge-obama-speak-out-erdogan-anti-democratic.html##ixzz2wWiRGrRp
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/02/officials-urge-obama-speak-out-erdogan-anti-democratic.html##ixzz2wWiEp7jo

Gaza, Israel, Turkey, and We

from: THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY

http://www.hairenikweekly.com/
Η Γάζα, το Ισραήλ, η Τουρκία κι εμείς
Γκαρέν Γιεγκπαριάν
Garen Yegparian

http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/06/09/yegparian-gaza-israel-turkey-and-we/

Israel screwed up in its response to the ships attempting to break its blockade of Gaza. Anything it might have gained by preventing the entry of material it chooses to exclude from Gaza is far outweighed by the international opprobrium it has garnered. But this is not at issue except by extreme spinners of pro-Israel policy. What’s more interesting for Armenians is Turkey’s role and position in all of this, and what doors are open to us as a result.

Certainly, no one doubts that Turkey’s, and its ruling AK Party’s, involvement in all this is nothing but a cynical, Machiavellian, realpolitik ploy in its devilishly competent Foreign Minister’s bag of tricks to expand the genocidal state’s international stature, and particularly among the peoples and states of the Arab and Muslim worlds. The Turkish group cooperating with the efforts may also have connections to unsavory outfits, but more on this if and when I can get details. I’m told it was very well organized and funded, and delivered the biggest ship in the relief flotilla, which suggests the possibility of state involvement. It was also the ship on which the violence occurred.

Erdogan’s and Davutoglu’s statements have received wide coverage. Clearly, this is part of their neo-Ottomanist efforts to become a player in the Islamic world, much of which shuns Turkey for the brutality and misrule heaped upon fellow Muslims under Ottoman rule and Kemalism’s anti-Islamic bent. Official Ankara seems to be making the calculation that there’s more to be gained by clashing with Israel than further developing a decades-long positive relationship.

Among the fruits of the positive relationship has been help in the halls of U.S. power, fighting passage of the genocide resolution, and other anti-Armenian efforts emanating from Azerbaijan and Turkey. The question is, after the last few incidents, are those Jewish lobby elements in the U.S. that have worked against us (and even against their more right-minded and conscience-driven colleagues) ready to come around? Do they see yet that there’s no long-term benefit to supporting a genocide-denying state? Are they irate enough to downgrade or sever the relationship? It seems to me this is a very opportune moment for our efforts in the U.S. It’s time for some renewed outreach.

Simultaneously, our colleagues in the Middle East should be conveying to their governments how untrustworthy, back-stabbing, and cynical Turkey’s recent ploys demonstrate it to be. On the non-diaspora front, Armenia’s government should be playing up similar themes with their negotiating partners, whether the issue is economics, Artsakh, or actual relations with Turkey.

But this is all short-term gain. If Turkey’s efforts bear fruit, then we will have serious problems in the long term. Remember where Armenia is situated. If Turkey pulls Iran into its orbit, it’s a problem. If the Arab countries become enamored of Turkey’s pseudo-heroics, our communities in there may become constrained. They may even get some traction in Europe with their faux-humanitarianism. It is imperative and timely to publicize the irony (and the underlying temerity) of Turkish comments about occupation (think Armenia and Kurdistan) and human rights abuses (think coddling Darfur’s butcher, abuse of its own minorities, massacres, etc.).

We have to play very hard. For the last three centuries, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey has survived through very skillful diplomacy, playing off against one another powers far greater than it, using Asia Minor’s pivotal geography. They’re using our lands to our, and the world’s, detriment. Since we’ve been deprived of statehood for all but the last century or so (and a very shaky, mostly Soviet-subservient statehood at that) we don’t have the same depth of diplomatic/political history, experience, skills, and culture to draw on. But this is a perfect time to learn by doing and pushing to the edge. There’s not much to be lost, but tremendous potential for gain.

I hope we, the diaspora and Armenia’s government (especially after the protocols fiasco), are up to the challenge. Let’s expose Turkey for the fraud that it is.

Το Δαβουτόγλειο μπούμεραγκ : İsrail Yok!...όπως λέμε: Malta Yok!...*

"Davudoglu's boomerang: İsrail Yok!...as we say: Malta Yok!..."*

Το στρατηγικό εγχείρημα Νταβούτογλου πέτυχε τον πρώτο στόχο του. Το Ισραήλ απομονώθηκε, και οι Τουρκαλάδες υποκριτικά αναδεικνύονται οι χατζαροφόροι προστάτες των καταπιεσμένων Παλαιστινίων.
Τουρκία-Ισραήλ 1-0 λοιπόν. Ο λεβάντες φουσκώνει τα πανιά της Δαβουτόγλειας ναυαρχίδας.
Τα σπαθιά έχουν βγεί από τις ξιφοθήκες, καί στα τριακόσια εκκατομύρια των Αράβων προστίθενται τώρα τα εβδομήντα των Τούρκων. Η Αμερική τρέχει και δεν φτάνει να μαζέψει τα ασυμάζευτα των δύο στυλοβατών της στην περιοχή.
Ο θρίαμβος του Ερντογάν, πού έχει συσπειρώσει πίσω του τις λαϊκές μάζες του Ισλάμ, καί όχι μόνον, στην Τουρκία καί στην Μέση Ανατολή, και η αντίστοιχη ταπείνωση του Νετανιάχου που επιφέρει επάνω του την μήνιν του συνόλου του Ισραηλίτικου πολιτικού κόσμου, είναι σε απολύτως αντίστρόφη αναλογία.
Είναι όμως έτσι τα πράγματα; To 1-0 ΤΥουρκίας-Ισραήλ σίγουρα δεν θα κρατήσει γιά πολύ. Το Ισραήλ, ευτυχώς γιά την Ελλάδα καί την Κύπρο, δεν είναι Κιχωτικοί ανεμόμυλλοι γιά να κονταροχτυπιέται μαζί του, έτσι, γιά το Ισλαμικό θεαθείναι, ο κάθε Γιενί-Οσμανλί νταβατζής. Η Ισλαμοκρατική Τουρκία θα βρεί επί τέλους τον μάστορή της.
Τό τρομακτικής δύναμης και επιροής Εβραϊκό Λόμπυ στις ΗΠΑ έχει ήδη μπεί σε τροχειά κίνησης με την αξιοθαύμαστη εκγρήγορση και τον δυναμισμό που πάντα το διακρίνει.
Το παρακάτω άρθρο, γραμμένο από έναν ρεπουμπλικανό βουλευτή από το Ιλλινόϊς, συμφωνεί δεν συμφωνεί κανείς μαζί του (άλλο θέμα αυτό, και δευτερεύον άλλως τε στο θέμα μας) είναι πάντως ενδεικτικό της οργανωμένης δουλειάς που πέφτει καί του σκηνικού αντι-Τουρκικής προπαγάνδας που μεθοδικά στήνεται στις ΗΠΑ.

Photo by: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hello, Turkey?By AARON SCHOCK
06/06/2010


The Turkish foreign minister recently called the flotilla episode ‘Turkey’s 9-11.’

There are some vital points being overlooked in the international coverage of the Israeli response to the Gaza flotilla, and a mountain of hypocrisy that needs to be exposed. Egypt, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and every Arab foreign minister agreed that Hamas not be allowed to control the southern border crossing with Egypt after the terror group violently seized control of Gaza in 2007.

Yes, Egypt has blockaded Gaza under Hamas’s control as much as the Israelis have – and with the widespread support of Arab governments and the PA. Where’s the outrage?

Palestinians are supposedly experiencing a humanitarian crisis, and yet no Arab or Islamic government has demanded Egypt open its border with Gaza. Hello, Turkey?

When Israel pulled out completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it imposed no blockade. It was only after Hamas began a terror campaign with 10,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians that Israel and Egypt imposed this blockade – with PA and Arab support. No Arab government wanted a terror-prone Hamas to flourish in Gaza, let alone spread.

ONE NEEDS to ask: If the Kurds or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) across the Turkish border in Iraq rained 10,000 rockets on Turkish civilians, what would the Turks do? After all, the Kurds have legitimate disputes with the government of Turkey, and have been viciously repressed.

What if international NGOs decided to airlift humanitarian supplies to PKK refugees in Iraq, with those shipments containing civilian equipment that could easily be made into weapons?

Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish republic in Northern Cyprus. What would the Turkish military’s response be if organizations from nations that do not recognize the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus decided to break that military occupation?

Again, regarding Turkish hypocrisy, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, received the international pariah who leads Sudan – President Omar Bashir – a man who has committed genocide. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for him on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Not only has the Darfur region of Sudan experienced genocide directed by Bashir and his government, but other regions of southern Sudan have as well. During the visit in mid-August of last year, Erdogan said he did not believe Bashir was guilty of the war crimes for which he was indicted.

And here is how the Turkish prime minister justified that widely disputed contention: “It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide,” said Erdogan. He deems Bashir innocent. End of story.

THE TURKISH foreign minister recently called the flotilla episode, “Turkey’s 9-11.” Shame on you sir. No American should ever forget such an insult.

This brings me to the reason for the blockade of Gaza, including the Israeli naval blockade. Some of the items on the ships were dual-use, with both civilian and military uses. For instance, there was rebar for a small amount of cement.

Heaven knows Gaza needs a lot of rebuilding. This tiny amount is insignificant for construction, however, although it’s a nice supply of iron to be converted into weapons.

If the Israeli naval blockade ends does anyone really think Hamas won’t be importing a wide array of weapons? If the ships don’t have to go through checkpoints, arms shipments would resume without a doubt – and so would the rocket attacks.

What nation would sit back and allow arms to pour into a neighboring territory that will certainly be used in more attacks on its people? If the blockade ends, arms shipments into Gaza will resume, and rocket firings into will Israel resume. It’s that simple.

None of the United Nations peacekeeping organizations and observers has kept out the sophisticated weapons imported by Hizbullah into southern Lebanon – despite absolute UN assurances to do so. No similar observers are capable of standing in the way of Iranian arms shipments to Hamas either. Only Israeli and Egyptian checkpoints can do that.

Again, I ask, would Turkey allow similar organizations to ship uninspected cargo to the suffering PKK Kurds in Turkey and Iraq? Hamas needs to negotiate with its estranged brothers in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and commit themselves to peace and recognition of Israel. Then peace and prosperity will prevail.

Let’s get the facts straight and the hypocrisy exposed as this debate proceeds.



The writer, a Republican, represents Illinois’ 18th Congressional District. He is the youngest member of Congress.


*
..."And to say “Forgeddaboudit!” there is malta yok, an expression with an amusing history. In the year 1645, the story goes, the Ottoman sultan Ibrahim the Mad ordered his fleet to attack the Christian island of Malta in the western Mediterranean. Upon receiving the order, however, Ibrahim’s chief admiral, fearing such a move would end in disaster, placed a candle on his naval map, allowed the wax drippings to fall on the little island until they covered it, declared to his adjutants “Malta yok,” and sailed off to attack the Venetians in Crete. The siege of Crete lasted 24 years, in the third of which Ibrahim lost his head, and the Venetians finally surrendered in 1669...."
The Jewish daily FORWARD: "Pardon my Turkish"
http://www.forward.com/articles/6927/