27 headless bodies

[Gavur]

12/07/2005 The Associated Press
ANKARA / 9 July 2005 - Two sisters of a slain Kurdish guerrilla urged authorities yesterday to conduct tests on what they said were two mass graves containing headless bodies discovered in southeastern Turkey to determine whether their brother’s body is among the remains.

Human-rights groups are also demanding an investigation into the possibility that the remains belong to guerrillas who may have been caught alive and later shot in the head and beheaded to hide evidence of executions.

27 headless bodies

Villagers discovered two mass graves in Bitlis province holding the 27 headless bodies a year ago after coming across soiled clothing, human-rights groups said yesterday.

A third grave with 11 bodies was also discovered near the town of Kulp in Diyarbakir last year. The graves are believed to have been dug in the mid-1990s, at the height of the brutal conflict between the military and Kurdish guerrillas.

Legislators rushed to the region last year to investigate the grave near Kulp, conceding the remains appeared to be those of missing villagers.

Gen. Ilker Basbug, deputy head of the military, denied any military involvement in the Kulp deaths, saying claims against security forces in the southeast were attempts to get compensation through the European court or win support for the rebels.

Human-rights activists say nothing has been done since and have threatened to take the sisters’ case to the Strasbourg, France-based European Court of Human Rights.

"It has almost been a year and nothing has been done," said Nazime Avras, sister of Mehmet Sabri Avras, a missing militant. "We just want a proper grave, we’re not asking for much."

The family was told Mehmet Sabri Avras, a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was killed in fighting between the rebels and the military in Bitlis in 1995. His body was never handed over to the family, the sisters said.

Human-rights groups say remains from the graves were handed over to prosecutors shortly after they were found but no autopsies or DNA tests have been conducted, said Nedim Tas, the head of THY-DER, an organization that supports families of prisoners.

Decapitated to hide shootings

The graves also contained bodies with no heads, leading to suspicion that the militants were executed with a gunshot to the head and later decapitated to hide the shootings, said Kazim Genc, head of the human-rights organization Pir Sultan Abdal.

The Associated Press, Sat, July 9, 2005

[Gavur]

How Assyrians were forced to abandon their towns and villages in Turkey?

How Assyrians were forced to abandon their towns and villages in Turkey?


Torment of the Assyrians of Turkey after world war one by the Turks and the "Kurdish Labor Party"- PKK"

By Shamaoun Danho * Sweden Founder of "Sargon Publishing House" in Sweden


The persecution of the Assyrians in southeast Turkey (mountains of Hakari, Tur-Abdin Nassibin, Amad, Mardin and Urfa) did not end after the massacres of World War One. Not even after Kamal Ataturk replaced the Kurdish "Aghas with the so-called "Kurdish Democratic, Parties" in 1924.


Turkey has never acknowledged its massacres of the Assyrian or has distanced itself from them. It did not even mention the Assyrians as a minority in turkey in its constitution. Instead it changed the Assyrians names of the towns and villages where they had lived for as long as history could remember in an attempt to undermine their history and heritage in Southeast region. It also prohibited the teaching or speaking of the ancient Syriac (the Assyrian language). It formed Kurdish militia called "the Village Guards" modeled after the Hamidite troops created by the Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1890 who were used to massacre the Assyrians and the Armenians. Turkey's objectives by establishing "the Village Guards" were twofold; to sow dissension among the Kurds and to expel the remaining Assyrian population out of the region.


When the Kurdish Labors Party (PKK) gained power in 1984 it rebelled against the central government, and it threatened the Assyrian and Kurdish villages forcing them to provide money, refuge, food and clothing for its fighters. When Assyrians complied because of fear of vengeance the Turkish troops and tanks arrived to destroy their villages, and burn their crop to punish them. This was done to the villages of Hassana, Midon, Dayro do Slibo, Deir Qouba and others during the 1990s. The PKK also terrorized the Assyrians for the slightest of excuses. In the village of Bnaybeel PKK excecuted four villager whom its accused of having helped the Turkish government but that was not true. The four had advised the villager not to abandon their homes in Tur-Abdin despite such oppressions. The PKK tactics were intended to terrorize the Assyrians forcing them to leave their homeland where they had lived since time immemorial.


The "Kurdish Hezbollah" also engaged in cruel murder of the Assyrians because of religious fanaticism targeting first the educated, and then the ordinary people including children. The Continued killing and terror ultimately succeeded in forcing some 150 thousand Assyrians from their villages in the Tur-Abdin Mountains. This was in addition to the tens of thousands who were driven out of "Al-Ruha" (Urfa) and other Turkey's cities by the Kurds employed by the Turkish government in 1924. Those who had escaped the tyranny of the Kurds and the Turkish oppression settled in Aleppo Syria in a Christian neighborhood which is still known as "Hay Al-Surian" (The Assyrian Quarters).


From Syria and Turkey tens of thousands of Assyrians migrated to Europe and took with them the memories of their past suffering in their historic homeland. In recent decades they brought to the attention of the European parliaments of Sweden, Germany and Netherlands the oppression which they had suffered at the hand of the Turks and the Kurds.


In 2002 a petition was presented to the Swiss parliament asking it to acknowledge and condemn Turkey's racial cleansing of the Assyrians in collaboration with the Kurds but the resolution failed to pass short of two votes. During the last few years Assyrian organizations in Europe have worked hard to prevent Turkey from joining the European Union unless it acknowledges the horrible racial cleansing it committed against the Assyrians and provide greater rights to the Turkey's national and religious minorities.


Published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi Newspaper on
5- 5- 2002 - Issue No. 3960

[Gavur]

Confessions of an Honest Kurd

Confessions of an Honest Kurd;
The Assyrian & Armenian Genocide;
Past and present

by Haydar Isik I

April 17, 2005
Translated from the German Language. wm.warda

I am an Alevi Kurd! Where we lived there were no mosques. In my childhood I admired the ruins of the Armenian churches in the area. Though their walls had crumbled the domes supported by the columns still stood. The marvelous pictures painted on them could still be seen. My birth city was called "Kizilkilise" or 'Red Church' in the Kurdish language . [it probably had a Syriac or Armenian name before] But later like other Kurdish names the Kizilkilise was changed to 'Nazimiye' by the Turkish government.

My childhood was affected by two important historical events. One was the Dersim massacre of the Kurds in 1937/38 , when 70,000 of them were killed by the Turkish army which still is very fresh and sorrowful in my mind. The other was the Armenian Genocide, of 1915-16 by the Turks which exterminated one and half million Armenians and a half million Assyrians. During the winter months I often heard about the sorrowful fate of our Armenian neighbors and it made me cry.

To achieve racial supremacy in Anatolia, the Turkish regime wiped out first the Armenians and Assyrians and then the Kurds. General Kazim Karabekir, who had participated in the killing of the Armenians and Assyrians once had said: "le yandan zo zo lari, doenuence de lo lo larin isini bitirecegiz." 'We will exterminate the Armenians with an invasion to the east, on our way back we will do the same with the Kurds.'

It was always the strategy of the Turks to kill or drive out the country first the Christian Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks to turn the country into an islamic nation, then to carry out similar genocide and ethnocide against the Kurds. To accomplish this Turkish rulers promoted hatred and incited one people against the other.. The Kurdish feudal chieftains became instrumental in carrying out these Turkish policies.

The Turkish regime used sunni tribes in Northern Kurdistan who lived side by side with the Armenians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia to implement its policies. The Aschirets (tribe) which lived in Van, Urfa, Agri; Mus and Bingöl were known as Hasenen, Cibran, Zirkan, Sipkan, Zilan, Milan etc.. These Aschirets were a minority of the Kurds. The Aleviti Kurds, the yezidis and the rest of the sunni Kurds provided no assistance to the Turks.

A minority of Kurds was used to kill Christians to prove their loyalty to Turkey and Islam. Today's Kurds see the massacre of the Armenians [and Assyrians] as a shame on Kurds. I am ashamed that Kurds were involved in killing their neighbors in such barbarous manners.

In the shadow of the 1ST world war, during the rule of Pascha Enver Talat and Cemal, Turks organized the Christian pogrom in Anatolia and Mesopotamia with the approval and knowledge of Germany. It was the first genocide in human history that was carefully planned and carried out. However one needs to see the other side of the coin also. The rag-tag brigades, recruited by Turkey out of 36 Kurdish tribes, which were used to massacre the Christian were also incited against the Alevi and the yezidie (moslem) Kurds.

The regiments were formed exclusively out of the sunni tribes in Northern kurdistan which means, the young Turkish regime (Ittihat Terakki) intentions were to incite one section of the Kurds against the other according to the principle of "divide and conquer". Consequently animosities between Sunni and Alevi Kurds continues to this day.

The Hamidiyeh regiments was also used against the Kurds to undermine the Kurdish aspirations for independence. Their Attacks against the Armenians, Assyrians or Kurds remain a blemish in the history of the Kurds. Nothing holds back the Kurdish descent bandits who attacked Armenian villages yesterday and killed countless people from killing their own. One has to ask is it just for anyone to kill other human beings because someone orders them to do so?

Yes, the story of the humanity is full of such events. About 50 years ago the German fascism massacred the Jews in industrial fashion. They believed that their victims deserved to die! Hitler has been quoted as having said that the Kemali Turks were masters of the Armenian and Assyrian Genocide. "The world watched as the Kamalist Turks massacred the Armenians. Who will object if I massacre the Jews?"
This is why the two largest Genocide of the twentieth century happened.

Now Turkey is using Kurds to fight their compatriots. Like the Hamidiyeh brigades of the past which Killed 100.000 of their own people, Kurdish gangs have been equipped to fight against the Kurdish liberation movement, which fights for liberty and well-being being of the Kurds living in the mountains.

The same mentality which massacred the Armenians and the Assyrians yesterday , is responsible for the killing of the Kurds today. The Kurds in Dersim provided protection for their Armenian neighbors despite pressure from the Turks, however such kindness cost them dearly when Turks massacred them in 1937/38 partly for that reason.

Turkey is a country of various people, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and other minorities. Although Turkey has signed almost all the international treaties including: The 'General Declaration of the Human Rights', the 'European Convention of Human Rights', the 'CSCE treaty' , which promises Equal Rights, Self-determination, and rights of minorities to teach their mother tongue, Turkey has denied such liberties to its none Turk citizens, yet it wants to join the European union.

The Armenians were exterminated by the policy of Turkey in Anatolia. We, the Kurds would like to live peacefully together with our neighbors, Armenians, Assyrians and Turks in a country, where the sound of the church-bells and the call of the Muezzin can be heard side by side. We are not any more the Kurds who were used as tool by Turkey to exterminate their Christian neighbors. We are ashamed and would like to make amend and do well.

https://www.haydar-isik.com

[Gavur]

Scuffles mar trial over killing of Kurdish boy, father

21/07/2005 AFP
ANKARA, July 20 (AFP) - 13h58 - Several people were injured Wednesday when Kurdish demonstrators and right-wing extremists clashed outside a courthouse where four policemen were appearing charged with the killing of a 12-year-old Kurdish boy and his father, media reports said.

Fighting erupted when a group of far-right militants wielding sticks attacked about 200 people demonstrating in front of the courthouse in Eskisehir, west of Ankara, before the hearing began, the NTV news channel said.

Footage showed a young man with blood running down his head being violently kicked on the ground before a police officer intervened.

The Anatolia news agency said several people were hurt, while NTV said one person sustained serious injuries.

The Kurdish demonstrators were in Eskisehir for the trial of four policemen for the shooting on November 21 last year of Ahmet Kaymaz and his 12-year-old son Ugur outside their house in Kiziltepe, in the mainly Kurdish southeastern province of Mardin.

Police said the pair were gunned down in an operation against armed Kurdish rebels, but local rights activists and neighbors said the two were unarmed civilians.

A parliamentary investigation accused police of "heavy negligence" and concluded that Kaymaz and his son could have been captured unharmed.

If found guilty, the policemen could be jailed for two to six years.

The trial that began in February in Mardin was moved to Eskisehir at the request of defence lawyers who said they feared for their clients’ security.

The trial is seen as a further test of Turkey’s commitment to democracy and human rights as it seeks to join the European Union.

[Gavur]

Non-Muslim foundations in Turkey on European court's agenda

Friday, July 22, 2005

DIPLOMACY

The Strasbourg-based body finds a complaint filed by the Yedikule
Surp Pirgic Armenian Hospital Foundation to be worthy of consideration

ANKARA - Turkish Daily News

The European Court of Human Rights has decided to consider a
complaint against Turkey over the violation of property rights and
discrimination.

The decision is considered to be important since it is expected
to yield critical results vis-a-vis the situation of non-Muslim
foundations in Turkey.

The court decided to deliberate on substantive grounds a petition
filed by the Yedikule Surp Pirgic Armenian Hospital Foundation,
which was established in 1832, reported NTV yesterday.

The foundation argues in its complaint that current legislation
governing foundations' right to possess property in Turkey contradict
the European Convention on Human Rights protocols that are concerned
with discrimination and property rights.

The Treasury in 1992 had invalidated two title deeds of as many
buildings in Istanbul that were donated to the foundation in 1943
and 1967.

Property acquired after 1936 either through purchase, gift or
inheritance is considered an illegal transaction and must be returned
to the former owners. If the former owner of the property cannot be
ascertained, the property shall then fall to the state.

Foundations say legislation revision not sufficient:

The Turkish government informed the Strasbourg-based court last May
on the revision of legislation on non-Muslim foundations carried
out in 2002 and 2003, saying that 116 community foundations have
applied to the General Directorate for Foundations for registration
of 2,234 properties. The directorate has so far accepted 434 of those
applications, the government said.

The foundation, on the other hand, said the post-2002 legislative
revision did not foresee returning properties possessed between 1936
and 1974 and that the General Directorate of Foundations refused to
register properties held after 1936.

The issue of non-Muslim foundations is a critical issue in talks
between Turkey, the European Union and the Council of Europe. The
European Commission and the European Parliament consider the issue a
vital indication of whether Turkey has fully implemented human rights.

-----------
Copyright 2005, Turkish Daily News. This article is redistributed with
permission for personal use of Groong readers. No part of this article
may be reproduced, further distributed or archived without the prior
permission of the publisher. Contact Turkish Daily News Online at
http://www.TurkishDailyNews.com for details.

[Gavur]

'THE SCORPION' OF FAMOUS TURKISH PLAYWRIGHT, POLITICAL PRISONER ECBER YAGMURDERELI TO BE STAGE IN ARMENIA

Azg/arm
22 July 05

Eminent Turkish playwright and writer Ecber Yagmurdereli has arrived
in Yerevan.

Jailed in 1976, he spent 18 years in Turkish prisons never giving
up the fight for human rights, democracy and minority rights from
the pages of Jumhuriet. This brave intellectual and humanitarian,
who lost his eyesight in childhood, always wished to see his play
"The Scorpion", which was translated into many languages and being
screened these days, staged in Armenia.

The play targets the "heroes" of bloody coup on September 22 of
1980 the head of military junta Kenan Evren and his adherents. The
revolution threw many Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian, Greek
and Arab freedom fighters into Turkish jails of this horrible tyranny.

Ecber Yagmurdereli and his companions met with the head of Gabriel
Sundikian State Academic Theatre, Vahe Shahverdian, who promised
to stage "The Scorpion" in near future. Asked whether the Turkish
government will not oppose staging this important political play in
Armenia, the Turkish playwright said, "The thaw in Armenian-Turkish
relations of recent times is obvious. Under the pressure of
international powers, Turkish opposition and Armenian authorities
the European Union will bring these relations to a desirable point.

The intelligentsia and art workers have a great role in improving
Armenian-Turkish relations and in establishing democracy. Days of
youth and dreams of those like me passed in the terrible prisons of
military junta of 1980. I have wonderful Armenian friends in Istanbul
where I live now. I know the invaluable contribution they made both
in the Ottoman Empire and nowadays in the spheres of art, literature,
theatre and economy. I am charmed with your capital, which I consider
truly European city in the Caucasus".

The guests visited the Opera House and listened to Istanbul-born Arto
Tunj-Boyajian at the Jazz Club.

By Hamo Moskofian

[Gavur]

Turkey to amend anti-terror law to enhance struggle against PKK 21.7.2005


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------





ANKARA, July 21 (AFP) - 11h03 - Turkey is planning to amend its anti-terror law in a bid to strengthen its hand against Kurdish rebels who have stepped up anti-government violence, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said in a newspaper interview published Thursday.

"The preparations are in the final stage," Cicek told the daily Vatan. "We will send the draft to parliament as soon as it reconvenes" on Octgober 1 after the summer recess.

Ankara is alarmed at mounting unrest in the country's mainly Kurdish southeast where the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, has intensified its attacks on the army after calling off a five-year unilateral ceasefire in June 2004.

Kurdish militants have also targeted civilians: earlier this month they blew up a train, killing five, and bombed a seaside resort, leaving 20 people injured.

At another resort, five people including two foreign tourists were killed Saturday in a bomb attack in which Kurdish militants are the primary suspect although the PKK denied involvement.

The new measures, Cicek said, will not curb the expanded individual freedoms and human rights introduced over the past several years as part of Turkey's efforts to meet the democracy norms of the EU, which it is seeking to join.

Turkey's anti-terror law was only recently purged from infamous restrictions on the press and the freedom of speech as part of the EU-inspired reforms.

Cicek told Vatan that EU countries themselves were reviewing their anti-terror legislation.

"We are examining the new measures taken up in Spain and Britain in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks there," he said. "We will also introduce some measures in that framework."

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed late Wednesday that Ankara was also planning to set up a government agency specializing in terrorism-related issues.

The army has called for a new institution, attached to Erdogan, that would determine strategies and coordinate the combat against terrorism.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast.

At least 105 soldiers and 37 civilians have died in PKK-related violence over the past year, according to army figures released Tuesday, which did not give the PKK death toll.

Turkey has also been the target of local extremists linked with the al-Qaeda network. Two twin suicide bombings in Istanbul in 2003 killed 63 people and injured about 750 others.

Armed extreme-left groups have also attacked government targets.

[Gavur]

Turkey’s regressive policy spells strife

Turkey’s regressive policy spells strife

09 August 2005
KurdishMedia.com - By Azad Zakhoi
Turkey has noticeably been pursuing a regressive policy over the past few months - a policy that threatens peace and stability in the region and which may compromise her international relations.

Under the administration of the AK Party with the support of the democratic world, Turkey embarked upon a period of change and took steps that were cause for hope but, as far as can be understood, the real ‘deep’ state and the Turkish military began to intervene in the process and matters started to go backwards taking a turn for the worse.

Turkish society has been shaped by nationalist extremism and official ideology over the past eighty years and, once again, this has begun to be expertly and very easily manipulated.

The intervention in the Middle East and the programme of democratic reform spearheaded by the US, and the vital things that Turkey did not do for years, has come to spell out the end to her fantasy of becoming the leading nation in the Middle East.

The real ‘deep’ state and the military, unsettled by this, soon displayed an aggressive face on the issues of the federation of Kurdistan and the status of Kirkuk and Turkey began to impose a series of red lines on the process insisting that they be heeded. However, these red lines of Turkey’s were not being laid down with regard to external sensitivities but rather more with a view to fomenting a new wave of nationalism and agreement within. At the same time, they aimed to strike a blow at and hold back the AK Party. If AK Party’s administration should hereafter fail to overcome this ploy, it will find itself face to face with a spiralling wave of nationalism rather than a democratic surge forward just as happened under Tansu Ciller’s administration.

With this end in mind, efforts are afoot to stir up feeling at home against the US and Iraqi Kurdistan by exaggerating the threat of the PKK and also muddying the waters so far as Turkey’s EU membership bid is concerned by playing upon sensitivities using Cyprus. Hyping up such tensions at the same time Turkey throws into the shadows her deepening relations - mostly of a military nature - with Iran and Syria.

Markers on the path to further destabilisation

In the past six months several conspicuous developments can be noted, including the way in which the True Path Party (DYP) has gone on the attack under the leadership of former Police Chief, Mehmet Agar, and the latest revival of Motherland Party (ANAP) with the resignations of several AK Party MPs through the thrusting to the fore of such matters as the populist attacks and clashes in provinces like Mersin and Trabzon over the flag incident etc. and the old, retired generals and Strategic Research Centre fanning the flames of nationalism and anti-Americanism. In the same period, what Turkey has lost in the Middle East she has not omitted to look for in the Caucasus. Worthy of note in this regard are the efforts being made by former General and Special War Office figurehead, Veli Kucuk, to establish a contra army in Azerbaijan against the Armenians and the intervention from Baku in Northern Cyprus.

Turkey and the Kurds

It would not be wrong to say that the Kurdish Question is the fundamental cause of instability in Turkey. Failing to take a positive step forwards to solve the problem, Turkey tries instead to rouse the outside world by playing on the threat posed by the PKK, although the latest decision by the PKK to go to war and the intensification of the armed conflict has been undertaken with the full knowledge of the ‘deep’ state. The only side not to be in the know on this matter has been the AK Party.

As is common knowledge, the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, is detained on the Imrali Island under the control of the General Staff. During the PKK/Kongra Gel’s Second Conference - at a time when there was neither ground nor cause for it - and despite opponents coming out against it, Kongra Gel took the decision to go to war in June 2004 on an order brought from Imrali Island by Abdullah Ocalan’s lawyers. The order was made during the lawyer’s visit to Imrali with military personnel on duty. In other words, the Turkish military was aware of the decision to go to war and provoked it. In any event, one conspicuous after-effect of this decision was the breaking away from the PKK of most of its compos mentis political activists today comprising the PWD (Democratic Patriotic Party of Kurdistan). So, now, then, let’s lay out the position clearly:

Firstly, the PKK’s renewed spiral of violence and the interception of those militants entering Turkey with C4 explosive - in almost every case before it is detonated, is no coincidence and is being carried out with the full complicity of the Turkish army. Abdullah Ocalan and the General Staff are orchestrating this scheme.

Secondly, in falling for the ploy that has also led to the AK Party adopting a harsher tone and drawing closer to the General Staff, the PKK has committed a very serious error.

Thirdly, so far as the political struggle in the legal arena is concerned, the DTH, headed by Leyla Zana and Hatip Dicle’s group, has been stillborn and its lack of success lies in equal measure to it having failed to take a stand against this policy and towards the PKK.

Fourthly, instead of seeking any resolution of the Kurdish problem, through these kinds of ploys the Turkish state has taken an axe to the positive developments.

Fifthly, when the Turkish state wanted the PKK to abandon its weapons, when refusing to work with the democratic Kurdish opposition and the PWD as a side that had abandoned its weapons, she continued to pursue her essential policy as before.

Finally, the US and the democratic world has unfortunately thus far indirectly helped Turkey in the development of this retrogressive policy by not taking the PWD seriously and entering relations with the party despite it being the force with the greatest chance to positively influence the PKK’s support base. The PWD’s efforts to develop relations with the US and with Israel are known.

Despite the PKK/Kongra-Gel having declared their intention to annihilate the group, no one bothered to take any notice and Sipan Rojhilat, Kemale Sor and Hikmet Fidan, HADEP’s former assistant general secretary, were murdered. Although the Turkish intellectual lobby and well-known names in the Turkish press spoke out, still the Turkish state remained silent.

In short, Turkey won’t take a step towards resolving her own internal problems or develop the necessary policies to do so but is criticising the outside world because of the tensions these problems have led to.

If it were to be said that Turkey has developed a new strategic concept so as to achieve a rather different plan, this would be correct in my view, and this can be seen from Turkey’s behaviour in:
1. Without provoking outcry from the outside world, establishing secret relations with Iran and Syria.

2. Gaining a base in the Caucasus for the future through secret, but deep and lasting, relations.

3. While failing to resolve the Kurdish question, negatively exploiting the democratic world’s sensitivities on terrorism.

4. Preparing the ground to make sure, or at least make it difficult, for the US to succeed in Iraq and the Middle East.

5. Carrying out intelligence and contra activities to destroy the developments in south Kurdistan and exclude Kirkuk as part of the geographical sphere of Kurdistan. Exploiting the Turkmen to this end.
6. Using Cyprus as a blind alley against the AK Party’s efforts towards the EU.

What action needs to be taken?

Turkey’s current stand in seeking to block the positive changes being wrought in the Middle East needs to be overcome. The following needs to happen if this is to be achieved:

1. The encouragement given to Turkey must continue, but from now on this state’s excessively provocative policies must be roundly condemned.

2. The Kurdish opposition in Turkey who favour democracy and reject violence must be supported.

3. Instead of attacking the PKK, policies must be developed so that the organisation can be dissolved and abandon its weapons. One model that may be advanced is that of the step taken by the IRA and the approach of the British government.

4. A serious stand must be taken over Turkey’s human rights abuses, torture and murders carried out by unknown perpetrators.

5. Pressure must be mounted to bring about a General Amnesty.

It must not be forgotten that it is easy to devise a policy against those who mount a struggle from the side, but where it concerns one who is viewed as an ally and who yet works so hard to derail democratic developments, unless she be impeded now she may come to be even more difficult. Such is the situation that Turkey is in now.
If any further example needs to be given, then one only has to look at the anti-Americanism in Turkey that has recently become even more rife than that by any Arab government. But, it is not the public that is behind it, it is the state itself and those institutions referred to above.

[Gavur]

Turkey's Forgotten Islamist Pogrom

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 24, 2005

For 50 years, historians, diplomats and state department officials have touted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a great secular leader in a predominantly Muslim region, whose policies modernized and democratized Turkey, shaping it into a Western-style state. But Ataturk was western only insofar as he implemented the Turkification of Gobineau, wherein he substituted the Turks for the Aryans, whose ideology had terrible results in the rise of European Nazism. Regardless, in 1955, barely 17 years after the dictator's death, a little-known pogrom, driven primarily by Islamic fanaticism, targeted the Greek population of Istanbul, with the intent of driving non-Muslims from Turkey.


From 1950 to 1960 Turkey experienced a profound reawakening of Islam, which the government and Demokrat Parti (DP) of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes both exploited and encouraged. Today, the policies Turkey set in motion in that pogrom remain in sway.



According to Speros Vryonis Jr.'s landmark new study, The Mechanism of Catastrophe, the September 1955 government-orchestrated pogrom against the Greek Orthodox community “included the systematic destruction of the majority of its churches,” monasteries and cemeteries. Published this month by Greekworks.com, the work subtitled The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul shows that riots which destroyed 4,500 Greek homes, 3,500 businesses, 90 religious institutions and 36 schools in 45 distinct communities, resulted not only from “fervid chauvinism, or even [from] the economic resentment of many impoverished rioters, but [from] the profound religious fanaticism in many segments of Turkish society.”



American, British and Greek diplomats all agreed that the violence was “indicative of religious fanaticism,” a fact with which even some Turkish commentators concurred.



A towering intellect and scholar of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, as well as modern Turkey, Vryonis witnessed reactions to the pogrom in 1955, after beginning his dissertation work at Harvard's Byzantine center at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. Newspapers reported violence targeting the Greek community of Istanbul and suggested the state department was pleased at “how the Turkish government had taken it in hand very quickly and restored order,” Vryonis recalled at a recent New York City lecture to introduce the book. He recoiled at the table talk of British and American scholars at Dumbarton Oaks, expressing the view that the Greeks had gotten what they deserved.



Vryonis questioned how riots could erupt so suddenly and violently as to destroy a whole community. Furthermore, at nearby St. Sophia Cathedral, the Greek archbishop described tens of thousands of people with no homes, no clothes and no food. The diametrically opposite perspectives concerned one and the same event. Vryonis, however, trained in chemistry, physics and Greek and Latin classics, “put it aside. I was not ready. [Studying this] demanded a knowledge of Turkish. It demanded a good knowledge of Islam, it demanded a familiarization with modern Greek history.” Fifty years later, at 76, he has written the definitive work on the events. The work has the power to alter official U.S. positions on Turkey, if only policymakers will read it.



Actually, the discrimination against the Greek, Jewish and Armenian populations of Turkey had begun much earlier, during the First World War. “The attitude towards the minorities was not something new in 1955,” Vryonis says today. “It had a long tradition that was inherited from the Young Turks [who] took over as the Ottoman Empire was faltering, lost the Balkan wars, got in the losing side in the First World War, [perpetrated] the genocide of the Armenians and [moved] the Greeks ... from the area of the Dardanelles at the urging of the German general Otto Liman von Sanders....” who unsuccessfully assumed the Ottomans' defense and ordered the Greeks to be swept away from the Sea of Marmara.



In the 1930s, Ataturk developed racist theories that all history and languages flow from Turkish history and language. Ever since, the Turkish state has “believed that there should be one language, one nation, one culture, one religion,” says Vryonis.



Kemalism effectively established the "Turkification of Gobineau's theory of the racial, and therefore civilizational, superiority of the Aryans."[1] These ideas included the Turkish Historical Thesis (Turk Tarih Tezi) and the Sun Theory of Languages (Gunes Dil Teorisi). The former holds that the history of Turkey as known today doesn't consist merely of Ottoman history, but is much older and in fact dispersed culture to all nations, including the Greek classical nation, the Hittites, the Chinese, the Romans and all European nations. The latter holds that Turkish was the first language ever spoken by humans, and is the foundation for all other languages, be they classical Greek and Latin, Romance languages or even Anglo-Saxon tongues. (What is more astounding are those historians, including Bernard Lewis, who apologize for this supremacist line.) [2]

Although Turkish scholars like Taner Akcam and Fatma Muge Gocek reject these racist theories—still taught in Turkish schools—they founded the basis for discriminatory laws passed against Greeks and other non-Muslims during the 1930s and later. In 1932, for example, law 2007 barred entry to a large number of professions of Greek citizens of Istanbul (etablis).



Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which provided boundaries for modern Turkey and arranged population transfers between Greece and Turkey, the Greek “settlers” were allowed to stay in Istanbul without prejudice. Nine years later, Turkey violated the treaty with impunity, imposing a series of 31 crippling laws to reduce Greek political, legal, economic and cultural strength. Some 10,000 Greek citizens were deprived of their livelihoods as tailors, merchants, photographers, carpenters, doormen, lawyers, doctors and realtors and forced to emigrate, penniless, to Greece.



In 1941 and under Turkish Prime Minister Sukriu Saracoglu in 1942, the Turkish government and minister of foreign affairs, figuring that the Germans would emerge victorious from World War II, began the mass deportation of minority men aged 18 to 38. The forced labor battalions of the so-called 20 generations of Jews, Greeks and Armenians were meant never again to see the light of day.



Modern Turkey also inherited the religious discrimination against non-Muslims from the Ottoman empire. Thus in 1942, Saracoglu's government established the varlik vergesi, a capital tax so onerous as to impose financial ruin on the community.



“Taxpayers who do not settle their debts within one month from the date of posting of notice will be compelled to labor until they have completely settled their debt, in any part of the country in public services of an unmilitary character or in municipal services, according to their physical ability,” the law required, according to a 1943 report in the New York Times by C. L. Sulzberger. [3]



“Not long after Varlik was applied small numbers of defaulters were arrested and after a few days' detention sent by train to Ashkale in Eastern Anatolia [the Turkish “Siberia”] to work on the roads,” Sulzberger's report continued.



The first groups were those assessed more than 100,000 lira who had paid little or nothing of their indebtedness. The government's position was that no one was taxed more than he could afford to pay, that failure to do so was evidence of unwillingness to pay and that the full penalties of the law must therefore be enforced.



To date not many more than a thousand persons are believed to have been subjected to this drastic penalty. Many of them are wealthy and prominent citizens. Almost entirely they come from the minority Christian and Jewish populations. Their labor on the roads can hardly have been much use, but some of them have managed to scrape up funds and pay and have then been released while the example of the remainder frightens the rest of the minority population as an inducement to pay at all costs. [4]



The tax was set at confiscatory rates—Greek Orthodox at 156 percent of annual income, Jewish at 179 percent, and Armenian at 232 percent—compared to the 4.96 percent annual income tax suffered by Muslim Turks, according to a Times editorial, and applied to everyone, including minority bell hopes and taxi drivers. At least one Turkish newspaper spoke of “liquidation” of the minority mentality and their populations, by inducing them to leave Turkey. [5]



Since these taxes were temporary, Vryonis sees no parallel with the punitive jizya (poll) and karaj (land) taxes on legions of earlier generations of non-Muslim dhimmis. To this observer, however, the laws, their intent and result strongly resemble the ruinous jizya and karaj taxes. Like them, the varlik vergesi effectively deprived the community of its wealth, imposing severe penalties if Greek and other non-Muslim citizens did not pay within fifteen days of its promulgation. In the end, massive numbers of minority property and businesses were transferred to Muslim hands, much as khalifs in earlier eras had expropriated them, forcing non-Muslims often to convert to Islam to survive.



Not surprisingly, between 1924 and 1934, Istanbul's Greek population fell by two thirds, from nearly 300,000 to 111,200, according to Vryonis. By 1955, the number of Greeks had dropped another 24 percent, to 85,000. “This is by way of background, by way of ideology, by way of the nature of the Turkish state, which we should add remained military and dictatorial,” he says.



In 1954, the matter of Cyprus became entwined with the fate of Istanbul's Greek minority. That year, Turkish foreign minister Mehmet Fuat Koprulu declared that his government had no interest whatever in the outcome of a Greek plea to the international community for Cypriot independence. But within a matter of months, at the prompting of the British government (which then controlled Cyprus), Prime Minister Menderes ousted Koprulu, installed foreign minister Fatin Rustu Zorlu in his place, and turned a 180 degree about-face on the issue. The armed campaign against Britain by the Greek National Organization of Cypriot Fighters elicited howls of indignation from the Turkish press, which joined the battle cry of the Cyprus is Turkish Association, known as KTC for its Turkish acronym.



Eventually, KTC and its press cohorts shifted public attention from the Greek Cypriots to the Greeks of Istanbul. But it was up to the DP and the government to organize the roughly 100,000 necessary students, labor unionists and other rioters and transport them to Istanbul to destroy, in a matter of nine hours, the homes and businesses of 85,000 Greeks scattered through 45 hilly square kilometers in areas hard to access from one another. The pogromists came equipped with lists of Greek addresses to target, though the Armenian and Jewish communities were also hit. Armenians lost 1,000 stores, 150 homes, three churches and four schools, while Jewish residents lost 500 shops, 25 homes, and suffered damage to one synagogue.



All the evidence is that the 1955 pogrom was well organized. “We have independent accounts of Turkish newspapers, of the Greek consulate official, and this is very important, of American[s], that there were [three] systematic waves of destroyers,” says Vryonis.



The first wave—identified by the Turkish newspaper Milliyet and confirmed by the foreign press and Greek officials—destroyed metal doors and barriers to all churches, houses and businesses. They smashed all obstacles to entry. The second wave commenced pilfering and the pillaging. Those who had foresight came with trucks so as to systematically loot and carry off their booty. “But the basic job of the second wave was to begin the destruction of the houses, the apartments, the church, the stores, and then to move on, just as the first wave moved on very quickly,” says Vryonis, as did the second. The third came some time later to finish off the marauding.



“Greek businesses were pilfered or destroyed,” says Vryonis. “Stealing of food stuffs and destruction of grocery stores and the food industry was rife, and thereafter produced a food shortage in Istanbul. The price of eggs rose 6 times, while tobacco rose 20 percent. Most bakeries were utterly destroyed. People had to wait in line even for a piece of bread. In the houses, food was looted or else destroyed by pouring gasoline. Houses were no longer habitable. People had nothing to eat and no where to sleep. Mattresses were literally cut into shreds.”



British and American officials, to the extent that they expressed opinions, generally attributed the pogrom to two factors: “simultaneous self-erupted nationalist and economic motivations.” Certainly, notes Vryonis, there were elements of nationalism, a force in Turkey since Ataturk. As to economic resentment, the living standard of Asia Minor peasants compared to that of Istanbul minorities like night to day. But pogromists came well-equipped with pickaxes, shovels, wooden timbers to serve as battering rams, acetylene torches, gasoline, dynamite and large trucks full of stones. How could a spontaneous eruption occur when security people, secret police, municipal police and the armed services were everywhere?



The third factor (unmentioned by officials), and the genuine underlying cause, Vryonis notes, was religious fanaticism. He continues:



The churches suffered massive destruction.... Most of the reports denied that there was any religious fanaticism. An interesting thing about the American ambassador's report, Mr. [Avra] Warren. It was made up of disjointed reports of several other diplomatic servants in Istanbul who saw what happened. [Warren was in Ankara.] In Ankara, there were a few demonstrations, but there were no Greeks there. He didn't see it. And he said there was no evidence of religious fanaticism—if you [except] 70 Greek churches that were destroyed.



...I couldn't make heads or tales of that. So I decided that this was a scissors and paste report, because earlier he talks about the disgusting and beastly manner in which religious sanctuaries were desecrated. Desecrated is a purely religious term. It involves the violation of that which belongs to divinity, and pollution is a refinement of it. It means despoiling that which is sacred, and the soiling in this case was urination and defecation—defecation on the alters, urination in the communion cups..... [We] had several independent accounts of the destruction of the huge cemetery at Sisli, where they not only took the time to destroy it, but took the corpses out from mausoleums, and also desecrated them, and left in a very large number [of cases], defecation on each of these remains.



So if you look at the church cannons, ...you are violating God's property. Now what is God's property? ...That which has been consecrated by religious ceremony. You can have a building that is going to be a church, but until the liturgy is performed in it, until it is consecrated, it is not sacred. Before an icon is consecrated in any manner, it is just a picture, if you don't like it you can rip it up. The same with the sacred vestments, but once they enter into the liturgical ritual, these things are forbidden, they belong to God. And if you take in all these aspects, if you look at all the photographs, the piercing and removing of the eyes of Christ, the cutting and removing of His hands, by which He hangs on the crucifix which is a constant in the Constantinoplitan church, if you look at mockery, the mockery of putting priests' sacred garb on their donkeys, and the use of the metallic elements on their garbage collectors, the fanaticism is very important, and it coincides with the rise of Islam.

Of course, the government was involved, says Vryonis, as the 1960 and 1961 trials at Yassiada proved in their brief consideration of the matter. Contemporary newspaper and eyewitness reports (which the book provides) also describe government assistance given to pogromists during the riots as their organizers shouted “Cleanse the fatherland of the infidel!” and “We do not want infidels' merchandise in our country.” Official vehicles also transported the pogromists after they had finished their grisly work.

But while Menderes and several of his ministers were hung, they lost their lives for violating Turkey's constitution, not the destruction they wrought on its Greek and other non-Muslim citizens. For these crimes, not a single man was punished, according to Vryonis.

The Islamization set in motion via discriminatory laws and violence, before and during the pogrom, has continued ever since, with constant pressure on the non-Muslim communities. Having lost everything, the Greek community began to emigrate. In 1964, the Turkish junta forced a very large number to leave or turn over their businesses to Turks within a certain number of hours, says Vryonis. They were taxed, though they were leaving, and their accounts were blocked. Furthermore, intermarriage between Greek citizens and Turkish Greeks was taxed when all marital property was decreed to belong to the “settlers” —making it easier to confiscate.

[Gavur]

Turkey's Forgotten Islamist Pogrom 2

Today, the Greek residents of Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, number only about 1,800, according to Vryonis, and property rights continue to be so much a concern that the European Union is pressuring Turkey to implement legal changes. Of course, these are cosmetic at best.

“The society has already declared that the identity of Turkey is Islamic,” explains Vryonis. M. Hakan Yavuz discusses the situation in Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. The state apparatus tried to enforce Kemalism, limiting the power of Islam, albeit not insofar as minorities are concerned. “But the Turkish version of Islam is undergoing a revitalization which has successfully challenged [secularism],” says Vryonis. “Most of the provincial universities, for some time, have had major student organizations that are Islamic, that are not recognized by the authorities, but the authorities in the provinces are often Islamists.”

Indeed, the majority of Turks are believing Muslims, a factor that emerged after the 1994 elections, when the Islamist Welfare Party won landslides in the mayoral elections in Asia Minor. Vryonis questions how the military can continue to bar Islamists from entering the officer corps. “It may be that has already happened,” he adds, “the dam has already broken and we don't know. Once that happens the show is over.”

This matters, since the U.S. has armed Turkey so mightily. It has “the largest military establishment in the Middle East, Africa and Western and Northern Europe,” Vryonis says. “They have a big advantage when it comes to the buildup of tanks, jets, and this involves updating the armaments in Cyprus. The question is into what hands will all of this fall?”

The answer was perhaps previewed in 2003 when the Turkish government refused to allow the disembarkment of 62,000 American troops to open a front in northern Iraq. In Iran, Vryonis points out, U.S. weapons fell into the hands of the Khomeiniites when the Shah fell.

As to whether Kemalists are inherently all Muslims, Vryonis cannot assess the psychology of each person. “But if you look at the example in Iran, they executed the chiefs of Savak, and told the other ones to stay ...and watch what they were doing.” Within the Turkish government, he says, groups are said to have split, some working closely with Russia, others with China, and still others focusing on the European Union.

A final issue concerns the Islamic army itself, Vryonis says. “[It] is not a homogeneous entity. [Islamists] tend to win elections by attracting people who are dissatisfied with this or that or the other,” says Vryonis. Even Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “in order to survive, wears about 4 or 5 or 6 masks. One is for the European Union, one is for Greece, and that changes, another is over the Israeli Palestinian issue another is for the military.... The state department never solved these problems.” But clearly, Vryonis says, Islamists “want a powerful Turkey and they want it to be more powerful than it is now.”

The lesson to be taken from the 1955 pogrom is that little, if anything, has actually changed in Turkey.


NOTES

[1] Vryonis Jr., Speros, The Turkish State in History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf (1993 ed), p. 67.

[2] Vryonis Jr. Speros, The Turkish State in History, pp. 57-78.

[3] Sulzberger, C.L., “Ankara tax raises diplomatic issues,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1943, p. 46.

[4] Ibid.

[5] “The Turkish minorities,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1943. p. 20.