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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Sat Oct 19, 2013 9:37 am

PM strictly rules out education in Kurdish
October/10/2012

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Oct. 9 clearly ruled out the possibility of public education in languages other than Turkish, including such “mother tongues” as Kurdish.

“Education in the mother tongue. There is no such thing. Our country’s official language is Turkish,” Erdoğan said, addressing the parliamentary group of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Education in mother tongues is one of the demands the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is exploiting in its campaign of separatist terrorism, Erdoğan said. The government has fulfilled its duty by granting students the right to study Kurdish as an elective course, which was introduced this school year, he said. Some European countries have also been exploiting the issue of education in mother tongues, although Turkish is not being taught as a mother tongue in those countries, Erdoğan said.

Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş swiftly responded to Erdoğan’s comments about European countries’ attitude on the issue.

“He [Erdoğan] cites [Europe as] an example, saying ‘Is there education in mother tongues [Turkish] in Germany and France?’ Look, there is not a Turkey in Germany; there is not a Turkey in France. But there is a Kurdistan in Turkey. That’s why Kurds have the right to education in their mother tongue from birth. You cannot eliminate this reality just because you don’t understand it,” Demirtaş said.

October/10/2012
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/pm-str ... sCatID=338
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Re: About Turkey

Postby Flying Horse » Sat Oct 19, 2013 10:10 am

I'm currently watching a series about the Ottomans on BBC2. I should imagine it can be found on iPlayer.

What seems more apparent as the episodes go on, is that the Turks of today could seriously learn some big lessons from their successful leaders of the very distant past.

Suliman the magnificent created a tolerant society(apparently) sure the empire spread wildfire throughout the region, but at that time the Ottomans weren't particularly religious. His famed mosque builder was of a CHRISTIAN background! Yes that's right some of the most famous mosques of Constantinople were designed by a christian.
He (Suleiman)
created laws that over ruled Sharia, and because of the lack of devotion ottomans were banned from doing pilgrimage to Mecca! For not being Muslim enough.

The reason for their success was tolerance. A society not based on religion.A lesson which must be seriously forgotten in modern Turkey. The EU certainly wouldn't want the Turks repeating their march through Europe, it was hard enough keeping them out of Austria the first time. I doubt they will ever get in without learning tolerance of the people they are supposed to serve. Especially as this time it has it battles with seriously damaging religious forcing leaders.
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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Sat Oct 19, 2013 10:44 am

Flying Horse wrote:I'm currently watching a series about the Ottomans on BBC2...
What seems more apparent as the episodes go on, is that the Turks of today could seriously learn some big lessons from their successful leaders of the very distant past.
I doubt they will ever get in without learning tolerance.....


This can not happen. Because the modern Turkish state and the "Turkish identity" were built on INTOLERANCE and ethnic cleansing and they are maintained by intolerance otherwise they will collapse overnight:

Alevi Kurds’ double oppression and the myths of Turkey’s official history
December 14, 2012
Interview with Mehmet Bayrak:

……………I’ve always said that the main source of the problems in today’s Turkey originated from the Union and Progress Party’s (Ittihat ve Terraki) period. That’s the period of ethno-religious cleansing, homogenization and a policy of Islamisation that was initiated by the Turks...

………At the beginning, the constitutional monarch movement sought to solve these problems and ensure liberty. The motto was ‘freedom, equality, fraternity’ which excited the masses. The intellectuals of different ethnic groups voiced their support for the movement. However, when the people of Balkan and Caucasian ethnicity took over the management of the UP in 1912 – I do not mind saying this – the situation changed dramatically. From then, the converts and Devshirme[1] (Devshirme was the practice by which the Ottoman Empire took boys from Christian families who were then forcibly converted to Islam), such as the Balkan and Caucasian intellectuals and cadres, became in charge of the entire Turkish politics.

………Although they were not Turkish in origin, they embraced Turkishness. They were not Muslim in origin, but they converted to Islam. They considered themselves Turkish and they went so far as to become Turkish racists in the Ottoman Empire. I have already given more details in my past works. They were of Balkan and Caucasus origin. Meantime, those who were in conflict with the Russian Czar, tried to dedicate themselves to Turkishness and Islam before moving to Ottoman territory. These were some famous figures such as Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), Enver Pasha, Talat and Cemal Pasha who were also from the Balkans……

…… Of course it is in line with the official ideology in Turkey to control all branches of scientific research. How can there be anything good, if the state doesn’t have good politics? There was the booklet prepared in the 1930s by the state that outlined Turkish racist history. Everything was said to originate from the Turkish race and culture, even all the languages in the world. It is extremely racist writing used to teach people. That’s why the historical research on the role of Armenians, Kurds and other people was always denied.

http://kurdistantribune.com/2012/alevi- ... l-history/
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Re: About Turkey

Postby Flying Horse » Sat Oct 19, 2013 11:02 am

kimon07 wrote:
Flying Horse wrote:I'm currently watching a series about the Ottomans on BBC2...
What seems more apparent as the episodes go on, is that the Turks of today could seriously learn some big lessons from their successful leaders of the very distant past.
I doubt they will ever get in without learning tolerance.....


This can not happen. Because the modern Turkish state and the "Turkish identity" were built on INTOLERANCE and ethnic cleansing and they are maintained by intolerance otherwise they will collapse overnight:



It is inevitable a pressure cooker can only keep the lid on its contents for so long before they explode and escape :wink:
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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Sat Oct 19, 2013 1:24 pm

Flying Horse wrote:
kimon07 wrote:
Flying Horse wrote:I'm currently watching a series about the Ottomans on BBC2...
What seems more apparent as the episodes go on, is that the Turks of today could seriously learn some big lessons from their successful leaders of the very distant past.
I doubt they will ever get in without learning tolerance.....


This can not happen. Because the modern Turkish state and the "Turkish identity" were built on INTOLERANCE and ethnic cleansing and they are maintained by intolerance otherwise they will collapse overnight:



It is inevitable a pressure cooker can only keep the lid on its contents for so long before they explode and.....


.....break it to pieces. :wink:
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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Mon Oct 21, 2013 7:08 am

Michael Coren Attacks Turkish Hypocrisy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGnwn3s4J94
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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Mon Oct 21, 2013 7:19 am

Taner Akçam - The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf5igXFiRDA

The Book:

The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
TANER AKÇAM
Series: Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity
Publication Date: April 2012, Pages: 528
Published by: Princeton University Press
eISBN: 978-1-4008-4184-4
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rt86

Book Description

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam's most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a "crime against humanity and civilization," the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's "official history" rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.
The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.
By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.
You are viewing the summary page.

Chapters:

3. NEOTTOMAN SOURCES AND THE QUESTION OF THEIR BEING PURGED
Pages: 1-28
One of the issues at the center of the debates about 1915 concerns which documents are available and to what degree they can be trusted. Among these sources, the official papers belonging to the Ottoman government of that time, which are found in the Ottoman Archive of the General Directorate of the Prime Ministerial State Archive of the Turkish Republic (T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü Osmanlı Arşivi; hereafter Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive), hold a special place, and various views have been proposed on their value. Powerful evidence that the documents in this archive have been “cleansed” in a deliberate...

4. THE PLAN FOR THE HOMOGENIZATION OF ANATOLIAPages: 29-62

Although the Ottoman Empire possessed a lengthy history of devising and implementing population and resettlement policies, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was forced to contend with a totally new problem.¹ Large numbers of Muslims—migrants from recently lost Ottoman territories as well as expellees from other countries—began to flood into the shrinking Ottoman state, many continuing well into the imperial hinterlands. The 1912–13 Balkan Wars represented the peak of this migration and an important turning point.
Up to this time, the Ottoman authorities had always solved the problem of immigration and resettlement on a...

5. THE AFTERMATH OF THE BALKAN WARS AND THE “EMPTYING” OF EASTERN THRACE AND THE AEGEAN LITTORAL IN 1913–14Pages: 63-96

Throughout the years of 1913 and 1914 until its entry into the war, the Ottoman government carried out a basic ethnic-cleansing operation, particularly against the Greeks in Thrace and the Aegean littoral. They used a dual-track mechanism extensively. On one hand, they signed separate “population exchange” agreements with the governments of the Balkan states; on the other hand, they terrorized Ottoman Greek subjects, including with massacres, to force them to move to Greece. The number of Greeks who had to flee or had been forcefully expelled was roughly three hundred thousand. This wide-scale suppressive policy brought the Ottomans to the...

6. THE TRANSFORMATION OF OTTOMAN POLICIES TOWARD THE OTTOMAN GREEKS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Pages: 97-124
In studying the available documents from the Interior Ministry’s Cipher Office, one can observe that the policy followed against the Ottoman Greeks underwent an important change in November 1914, when the use of widespread violence against the Greeks and their forcible expulsion to Greece were halted. Policies concerning the Greeks during the war years were restricted henceforth to sending some of those living in coastal areas to interior provinces for military reasons. This procedure, connected with Russian military victories at the end of 1916 and throughout 1917, was carried out in a systematic manner, particularly in the Black Sea region....

7. THE INITIAL PHASE OF ANTI-ARMENIAN POLICY
Pages: 125-156
Extant Ottoman documents reveal that the Unionist government made clear distinctions in its wartime policies between the Armenians and the empire’s other Christian communities. The Greeks, as has been seen, were deported and expelled with brutality, but the Armenians were targeted for outright annihilation. In the decision to exterminate them, the Unionists’ overarching objective of homogenizing the population of Anatolia undoubtedly played an important role; however, it would be incorrect to infer a direct line of causation between the two. The available evidence does not indicate that the restructuring of the general population resulted automatically in the annihilation of a...

8. FINAL STEPS IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS
Pages: 157-202
The battle of Sarikamiş (January 1915) was a complete disaster for the Ottoman Army, which lost, by its own count, more than sixty thousand soldiers, most of whom froze to death in the snows of the Caucasus Mountains. Along with this great loss, many soldiers deserted from the army and, in order to survive, turned to brigandage.¹ Another setback, though perhaps not of the same magnitude, was experienced in Egypt, when Cemal Pasha’s Fourth Army was seriously defeated by the English in February 1915 in what became known as the First Canal Expedition. Meanwhile, the plan to get the Muslims...

9. INTERIOR MINISTRY DOCUMENTS AND THE INTENT TO ANNIHILATE
Pages: 203-226
Despite all attempts to sanitize the archival record, as discussed at the beginning of this study, the surviving documents in the Interior Ministry section of the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive are sufficient to show the distinctive character of Ottoman wartime measures against the Armenians: having been uprooted and deported from Anatolia, they were to be denied even rudimentary living conditions. As shown in chapter 6, the orders to annihilate the Armenian population did not reach the regional and district officials through the usual governmental channels but instead were hand-delivered by selected Unionist operatives. Although, for this reason, the original orders...

10. DEMOGRAPHIC POLICY AND THE ANNIHILATION OF THE ARMENIANS
Pages: 227-286
If the annihilation of the Armenians was the outcome of a sequence of decisions, each one triggering the next, questions arise as to the possible relationship between demographic policy and genocidal practice. Were they distinct responses to different needs? Or was genocide the ultimate fulfillment of a demographic vision? I will argue that there was such a causal relationship. Demographic anxieties shaped the Armenian deportations: the population ratios where Armenians were deported and where they remained were decisive, and the deportations were carried accordingly.
The course of the war and accompanying security fears powerfully shaped decisions about the annihilation of...

11. ASSIMILATION: THE CONVERSION AND FORCED MARRIAGE OF CHRISTIAN CHILDREN
Pages: 287-340
In his autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” recalled his struggle to persuade the United Nations to recognize “cultural genocide.” This concept, wrote Lemkin, “meant the destruction of the cultural pattern of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation.”¹
The original third article of what would become the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defined cultural genocide as any of the following: (a) the forcible transfer of children to another human group;...

12. THE QUESTION OF CONFISCATED ARMENIAN PROPERTY
Pages: 341-372
The deportations left an enormous amount of abandoned Armenian property and possessions in their wake. This posed the question of what policy the government and local officials should take in regard to its preservation or liquidation. The ultimate answer of the Unionist government is highly instructive regarding the ultimate aims of their Armenian policy. On the basis of existing Interior Ministry Papers from the period, it can confidently be asserted that the goal of the CUP was not the resettlement of Anatolia’s Armenian population and their just compensation for the property and possessions that they were forced to leave behind....

13. SOME OFFICIAL DENIALIST ARGUMENTS OF THE TURKISH STATE AND DOCUMENTS FROM THE OTTOMAN INTERIOR MINISTRY
Pages: 373-448
There are certain theses in the discussions about the Armenian Genocide that people have not gotten sick of repeating to such a degree that they practically become memorized. These include the now-classic arguments that Armenian Catholics and Protestants, and the Armenians of Istanbul and İzmir, were not deported. Families of soldiers were not touched, and despite it being wartime, the government opened investigations against state officials who acted badly toward the Armenians during the deportations. It tried 1,397 people, issued long prison sentences, and even had some people executed. All possible aid was given to the Armenians on the roads...

14. TOWARD A CONCLUSION
Pages: 449-452
The Armenian Genocide—the first large-scale mass murder of the twentieth century—must be placed in a new context and understood within that context: the commencement of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states. Far from an isolated campaign against a single ethnoreligious group, the annihilation of the Armenians was part of an extremely comprehensive operation that was accomplished in order to save the empire. For this reason, it is not correct to interpret the Armenian Genocide along the lines of a clash between the empire’s Muslim groups (ethnic Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and others), more generally expressed by the...
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Re: About Turkey

Postby B25 » Mon Oct 21, 2013 8:30 am

Everyone should buy this book.
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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Sat Oct 26, 2013 10:28 pm

German Report: How Turkey Arms and Sends Wahhabi Jihadists into Syria

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Re: About Turkey

Postby kimon07 » Sat Oct 26, 2013 10:36 pm

kimon07 wrote:The Turkish military denied on Thursday it was using chemical weapons in its fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and said it did not even possess such arms.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/army-d ... sCatID=338


Two years after my above first post of this topic the issue of the use of chemicals by Turkey against the Kurds surfaces again:

German lawyers have accused Erdogan of war crimes
By Lenta.ru:

German lawyers from Hamburg Britta Eder (Britta Eder) and Heinz Jurgen Schneider (Heinz Juergen Schneider) filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office on the Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Minister of Defense of the same country Vecdi Gonul (Vecdi Goenuel), his predecessor Sabahattin Chakmakoglu (Sabahattin Cakmakoglu) and several high-ranking military officials. Lawyers accuse them of war crimes during the Turkish-Kurdish conflict since 2003, reports DAPD agency.

Hamburg attorneys represent the interests of the relatives Kurds killed in the confrontation with the Turks. In a statement, they list the ten cases of unlawful killings, killing of prisoners, torture, and the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels.

In particular, the materials submitted by lawyers to the Prosecutor’s Office describe the fate of the 12-year-old Uyfura (Uyfur) and his father Ahmet Kaymaza (Ahmet Kaymaz), who were shot dead by Turkish police Nov. 21, 2004. Neither of them were carrying weapons, thus they could not offer resistance. Uyfura’s younger brothers and sisters were present during the shooting. Police said at the time it was looking for an armed criminal. The incident caused a stir in Turkey, but Turkish courts found police were justified, considering that they claimed they used force in self-defense.

In addition, lawyers are reminded that the Turkish military used chemical weapons during the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, 8-15 September 2009. Then the victims of the application of chemicals were nine Kurdish rebels. The lawyers insist that it is a war crime, since Turkey is a member of the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has been in force since 1997.

According to German law, the charges of violation of the international law against the military leaders and politicians can be put forward on the facts that have taken place in any country of the world. Complain to the Prosecutor’s Office was filed during Erdogan’s visit to Germany in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the agreements on labor migrants between Germany and Turkey.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/10 ... ing-kurds/
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