Saturday, September 03, 2011

The Turkish government, not the PKK, is losing

Mumtazer Turkone must be auditioning to be the new Thomas Friedman, nothing else could explain the stupidity. Today he pens "The PKK has lost the war" (Today's Zaman). The 'win,' he idiotically insists, is due to the fact that Iran, Turkey and the KRG are against the PKK.

There are so many of levels of stupidity to his column that it's difficult to know where to start. Since August 17th, Turkey's been bombing northern Iraq in the latest wave of bombings that have been going on for years (with the US assisting by providing 'intel' since at least 2007). The backlash to the warplanes terrorizing innocent civilians and, yes, killing innocent civilians including children has led to more boasts from a bunch of stupid, stupid idiots.

Before we get into anything complex, let's just note two things. First, Iran's not bombing the PKK. How stupid is that man? How insane is he? Will people in Turkey reading his crap think he's telling the truth? Iran's targeting a different part of northern Iraq. And they are shelling the PJAK. Though both are Kurdish groups, PJAK is not PKK. What a stupid moron and how the hell did Today's Zaman allow that error into print?

The world has few saints but it abounds in dumb asses. And you have to be a real dumb ass to think that the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) will be able to publicly support Turkey over the PKK if "support" means anything other than a bunch of words. The KRG is majority Kurdish. It's made up of Kurds who know how the Kurds have been treated historically. They may or may not approve of violence (their feelings on it are probably as complicated as any other group of people) but they know that the PKK is fighting for an ultimate goal that they themselves agree with.

It takes a real idiot willing to be blind to assert, as Turkone does, that the KRG is against the PKK. And it's that blindness, that inability to see reality, that has pulled to Turkey to the point that it is now.

No "war" is being won today or tomorrow. A "battle" may or may not be won in the immediate future.

The Turkish better start facing some realities and stop listening to ass kissers like Mumtazer Turkone. He's an idiot who does know the first thing he's writing about.

Tomorrow, the Turkish military could kill every Kurd in Turkey, every Kurd in Iraq, every Kurd in Iran, every Kurd in the world. They could include those who were half or quarter Kurds and those who married Kurds. They could wipe out every connection to a Kurd and they still wouldn't win.

That's the lesson of history. And you can be a dumb ass or you can grasp reality.

If every Kurd was killed, there would still be people (non-Kurds) who remembered what went down (prior to the mass killings) and they'd take up the cause.

The Turkish government created the PKK by demonizing Kurds in Turkey. They refused to treat them in an equal manner. A few years back the government was supposed to be making a big shift. That ended up being token measures and even they weren't followed.

Until the Turkish government can realize that the PKK is a response to the treatment, they're never going to 'win.'

They could win a battle if the PKK over-reached or were implicated in an over-reach (such as civilians killed in either Turkey or Iraq and it blamed on the PKK). Even that would be a short term win.

Peace will not come and Turkey will not be safe as a country until it can reconcile itself with what it nees to do which is to provide full equality to all of its citizens. It's not a controversial concept and if the European Union (which Turkey wants to join) was smart, it would demand that the Turkish government show major steps towards that before letting it into the EU.

The PKK is not going away.

Brutal and repressive tacts in Turkey created the PKK. The only thing that ends the PKK is full rights for the Kurds in Turkey. Want to ease the tensions immediately? Announce some measures -- some meaningful ones -- to improve the lives of Kurds in Turkey. You will not "win" any other way.

And what's written about Turkey is true of Israel as well. And many other places around the world. Demography means you will address discrimination or you will be the discriminated against at some point as those you oppress move from a minority population to a majority one.

Even more importantly, the world's weary. Governments may (and many do -- including the US) support countries oppressing their own people but the world population doesn't. And there may come a time in the future (I'm sure I'd be dead by then) when governments oppressing a population are taken before a world court and punished. Again, the world is weary. We're sick of the bickering and the refusal of those in power -- who by the very nature of being in power have the ability to change things -- resorting to violence (which only inspires more violence) instead of utilizing democratic tools.

We close with this from Robert Kennedy's "Is the US Government Spying on Americans?" (Information Clearing House):

The rise of government surveillance is a troublesome legacy of the September 11 attacks. Today, video cameras are visible everywhere in public places, recording people’s every move. But what about spying that can’t be spotted?
Ten years after 9/11, new questions are being raised about what the US government is secretly doing on the internet and through satellites, using the Patriot Act and other national security law as justification.
Two American senators with access to top-secret intelligence raised the alarm in May, suggesting that the invasion of law-abiding Americans’ privacy was being carried out clandestinely - and that people would be shocked if they knew the extent.
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon,” Senator Ron Wyden said on May 26 during a Senate debate. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
Exactly what activities US agencies are carrying out remains unclear. Senator Wyden and Senator Mark Udall - also on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - have been unable to elaborate on their accusations because of official secrecy law.
However, observers surmise that ordinary people may be caught up in an electronic dragnet searching for terrorists. Civil liberties advocates suggest that intelligence and law-enforcement agencies may be reading and cataloguing people’s e-mails in databases, as well as tracking their mobile phone locations.





The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.








































at