News from Hypocristan
by Gordon Taylor | 10/17/2009 03:41:00 AM
As we were saying...

What is there to think about stories like the one below? Ahmet Davutoglu, the Foreign Minister of Turkey, stands up before a microphone and says something so totally, so stupidly, so demonstrably untrue that one can only gape and wonder if he will be Oscar-nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role.



Here's the background. A Turkish dramatic series presented on a state-run television channel shows Israeli troops deliberately shooting at and killing Palestinian children. Israel cries foul. Ahmet Bey says, "But Turkey does not censor." This of course is false. A quick look at the comments following the linked article will show the American reader just a few of the many media outlets that have been banned by the Turkish authorities, from YouTube to the works of Richard Dawkins. But the real question is, Why does the Turkish government continue to act this way? Why do they blandly tell these lies? Why do they promote their police state to the world as a "vibrant democracy"? Having just gone through the Bush II Administration, and faced with the ever-burgeoning popularity of such beings as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, Americans are in no position to give themselves a pass on this. (Think of how many times George W. Bush claimed he didn't say something that he was quite plainly videotaped saying.) But there's something so Turkish about the blandness with which Turkish government officials put out these statements about their own uprightness and morality. Contrast this with the American style. Tad Friend, writing about Hollywood in 12 October 2009 edition of The New Yorker, says,
"Hollywood's leaders work with the understanding that facts are not fixed pillars but trial balloons that you inflate with the gas of vehement assertion."
The gas of vehement assertion. How I wish that I had written that phrase. How I wish that I could buy some of that and put it in my car. It could run forever.
Davutoğlu: Turkey is not a country that censors

ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires Friday, October 16, 2009

 Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoğlu on Friday responded to complaints from Israel about the depiction of Israeli armed forces in a Turkish television series on a state-run channel. “There is no censorship in Turkey,” Davutoğlu said in a press conference Friday before he departed for Bosnia, according to broadcaster CNNTürk. “TRT [Turkish Radio and Television Corporation] is an autonomous institution. The television series’ producers are also an independent company. It is not in the ministry’s mandate to advise them.”

He criticized Israel as the actual source of tension, referring to the country’s attack on Gaza last year. “Turkey has been working toward creating peace in the region, and it was Israel that put our chances of creating peace at risk by attacking Gaza.” He cited women and children suffering the most from the incidents. He recalled that Turkey was mediating between Israel and Syria last year, but said, “We will not be silent about what happened in Gaza,” according to the Anatolia news agency. The Israeli ambassador to Turkey was expected to visit the Foreign Ministry later Friday to express his government’s concerns about the television series.
The final stroke, the smack to the forehead, comes in the Comment form at the end of the article. Note:
"Submitted comments must be approved by Daily News staff to ensure they are in accordance with Turkish law. Comments that violate Turkish law will not be published."
And Orwell laughs again.

[Cross-posted at The Pasha & the Gypsy]

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Meetings in Autumn
by Gordon Taylor | 10/11/2009 03:17:00 AM
Lalish circa 1850.


The headlines tell the tale: Armenia and Turkey, at last, have made a kind of peace. At a meeting in Zurich on 10 October 2009, protocols were signed which, if approved by each country’s parliament, will lead to a normalization of relations. After a long flirtation chaperoned by the Swiss, a history-making visit by Turkey’s President to a football match in Yerevan, and a ceremony that stalled for over three hours at the last minute, it took the combined ministers and ministrations of France, Switzerland, Germany, NATO, Russia, the EU, and the US (kudos esp. to Hillary Clinton), all of them smiling through clenched teeth and, no doubt, rolling their eyes, to hammer together this union between a rusty nail and an ironwood plank. Next step: a football match in Turkey, to be attended by Serge Sarkisian, President of Armenia. If, as seems likely, the Turkish police can keep order at the match (my guess: one out of every three attendees will be a plainclothes officer), expect a ponderous, lurching march thereafter toward the goal of rapprochement. Sworn enemies on both sides will continue to make trouble (a recent tour by Sarkisian of Armenian settlements in Europe, the US, and Russia was accompanied by cries of “Traitor!”); still, observers are cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, another newspaper article reminds us of a far less famous event. As I write this, the Yezidis’ Feast of the Assembly is nearing its climax. Every October 6-12, when not kept away by war and violence, Yezidis from around the world make their annual pilgrimage to Lalish, a.k.a. Sheikh Adi, a tiny complex of temples, shrines, and tombs in the hills north of Mosul. From F&T:
The classic description of Sheikh Adi comes from Henry Layard, who in the fall of 1846 took time off from his dig at Nineveh to attend the Feast of the Assembly, the annual gathering of the Yezidi clans. Layard, himself not a clergyman and with no official need to pass judgment on “devil-worshippers,” simply recorded what he saw: a festival abundant with beauty and devoid of debauchery, with oil lamps sparkling among the olive groves by night; dancing maidens; the music of flutes and tambourines and the chanting of priests; crowds of white-robed Yezidis; giggling maidens with their black hair plaited in glass beads and gold.
And who are the Yezidis? Definitely not “devil-worshippers,” as they have been labeled for centuries. Those who know about Turkey and Kurdistan, especially those who have read a certain book by me, will need no introduction. The Yezidis speak Kurdish, and yet, after years of strife with their Kurdish neighbors, they do not really consider themselves Kurds. In recent years their villages have suffered greatly from terrorist truck bombs, probably set by Sunni Arab jihadists, and they still live in fear. But they too, have shown their own violent side, as when two years ago a Yezidi girl was caught on video being stoned to death by her Yezidi relatives. (Her crime? Wearing jeans, being seen with a Sunni Arab boy.) In recent decades much more has been learned about their religion, a mixture of angel worship, Zoroastrianism, and other elements. Still, no one can really say where their religion comes from, and as to the origin of their name, whether Yezidi, Ezidi, and Yazidi, the multiplicity of theories leads one to believe that, in all likelihood, none of them are correct.

Cross-posted at The Pasha and The Gypsy.

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A State of Injustice
by Gordon Taylor | 10/01/2009 01:34:00 AM

The following article was written by Mizgin Yilmaz, proprietor of Rasti. Mizgin virtually always writes in a state of high dudgeon, and she is virtually always justified in doing so. Such is the case this time. Note: be sure to check out the links she has posted. They are highly instructive. Again, this is a state which expects to be part of the European Union.

[TSK is the Turkish Armed Forces. OHAL refers to the emergency martial-law regime in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey.]

Cross-posted at The Pasha and The Gypsy and Progressive Historians.

THE STATE OF INJUSTICE

"A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts."
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca.


Picture this: A seventeen-year-old guy picks up his seventeen-year-old girlfriend after school and takes her to his family's large home. The guy kills the girl, decapitates her with a saw and chops up her body, stuffs the body parts into a suitcase and guitar case, gets a driver to take him to a dumpster on the other side of town and disposes of the body.

The guy's father is picked up by the police on charges of abetting the crime and the mother flees the country.

Six months after the murder, the guy turns himself in to the police.

What do you think should happen to a guy like this? Would it make any difference if you knew that the murderer was a member of one of the richest families in the country?

If this story plays out in Turkey, which it did, the murderer will be charged in juvenile court--because he's only seventeen--instead of being tried as an adult.

More on the murder at Zaman and another at Bianet. Note that the first of those articles claims the father of the murdered girl is quoted as thanking the police and government for helping to capture the murderer. However, that's not at all the same guy who was on NTV on the day of the surrender, yelling to know what kind of deal had been made between the government and the very rich kid's family.

On the other hand, if you're a ten-year-old kid growing up in another part of the country, in a family that was probably forcibly displaced from their home back in the 1990s, and you're a Kurd, you're going to get very different treatment from the state:


In Adana alone, some 155 children are facing trial, 67 have been convicted and five have begun to serve their sentences, says Ethem Acikalin, head of the local branch of Turkey’s Human Rights Association. All were charged under article 220/6 of the penal code, which criminalises “acting on behalf of a terrorist organisation”. The cases are tried in adult courts.


Or then there was Cizre:


If Turkish prosecutors have their way, Yilmaz, a soft-spoken 16-year-old with a teenager’s pimply face, could spend up to seven years in jail for having joined a demonstration early last year in the town of Cizre, in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

Yilmaz (the name has been changed to protect his identity) has already spent 13 months in jail awaiting trial, although he was recently let out on bail. Although he joined a demonstration that took place after the funeral of a young boy who had been run over by a police armored vehicle during an earlier protest, prosecutors say the event was organized by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and are charging the boy with supporting a terrorist organization.

"In each appearance in court, we were telling the prosecutors that we are children, that they should let us go back to our lives," says Yilmaz.

Yilmaz is one of hundreds of minors, some as young as 13, who have been arrested and jailed in Turkey over the last few years under strict new anti-terrorism laws that allow for juveniles to be tried as adults. Some have even been accused of "committing crimes in the name of a terrorist organization" for participating in demonstrations that prosecutors charge have been organized the PKK.


If you're the police and you torture a Kurdish kid in broad daylight, in front of media cameras, then have no fear! Your case will be dropped.

Then there are the activities of the ironically-named "Children's Day" in Hakkari.

Or, as happened several days ago, if you're a fourteen-year-old Kurdish girl gathering feed for her sheep, you can just be blown to bits by TSK mortar fire. At least Ceylan's mother was able to pick
up the pieces of her daughter that were left so that they could be buried. The cover-up is already ongoing because no prosecutor arrived at the scene of the crime and he cites "security zone" (i.e. OHAL) as the reason for helping TSK to cover up its murder of this Kurdish child.

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Deep Waters: Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834 - 1852
by Gordon Taylor | 8/23/2009 02:11:00 AM
Lake Urmia: Six out of nine were buried here.

The piece that follows was written for the Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies. The readers of that journal, small as it is, would know immediately the name of Justin Perkins. Justin Perkins, D.D., was a pioneer American missionary in Iran, then still known as Persia. For the Nestorian Christians (now called Assyrians) of Urmia and the mountains of Hakkari, in Turkey (the snow-flecked mountains in the above photograph), he made a revolution, working with native helpers to create a written version of their modern Syriac dialect, and translating into that new written language the ancient Aramaic texts which they used in their church services but could not understand. Besides the New and Old Testaments in modern Syriac, Perkins translated numerous religious tracts, as well as texts for the mission school in geography, natural science, and history. In English he wrote several accounts of his mission years in Persia, the most useful of which is Eight Years in Persia (1841).



Deep Waters
Life and Death in the Perkins Family, 1834-1852

Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face…
--Fitzgerald: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

In a letter dated 29 January 1849, Justin Perkins, senior missionary at the American Mission in Urmia, made one of his regular reports to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston.[1] Among other things, he discussed the recent conquest of Hakkari, central Kurdistan, by Ottoman Turkish forces. Perkins exulted in the Turks’ defeat of Nurullah, the last independent Kurdish Mir of Hakkari. Calling Nurullah a “monster, ” Perkins said of his downfall, “The right hand of the Most High has at length put a ‘hook’ in the nose of this modern ‘Assyrian.’” Besides this interesting choice of label, Perkins’s 29 January letter contained news of a more personal nature. His youngest child, Fidelia, he revealed, had died only six days earlier. This meant one more heartbreak for Perkins and his wife, Charlotte. Fidelia, aged eleven months at her death, was the fifth child that they had buried in Persia. Charlotte’s previous child, Jonathan, born just three years earlier, had lasted only two months. The remaining Perkins children, Henry, age five, and Judith, soon to be nine, continued to thrive. But the fact was, these were only two out of seven.[2]

For Justin and Charlotte Perkins, trouble began at the dock before their missionary careers had even started. Perkins, deathly ill and having almost missed his embarkation, had to be carried aboard in a litter on the day, 21 September 1833, that their ship sailed from Boston. To add further insult, immediately out of port the ship was hit by storms. Still, after a rapid passage and a winter in Istanbul, by June 1834 Justin and Charlotte Perkins (aged 29 and 25 respectively) were aboard caravan horses riding from Trebizond to Tabriz, by way of Erzurum.[3]

News of murders by the Jelali Kurds, raiding along the caravan route west of Ararat, led to a detour into Russian-held Georgia and Armenia. This detour, projected to last six days, stretched to four weeks as Russian officials did everything they could to harass, rob, and delay the unfortunate newlyweds. Charlotte spent her twenty-sixth birthday (Aug. 2) in quarantine with her husband, listening to travellers being flogged by the Russian police just a few feet from their tent. For the rest of his life Justin Perkins would contrast the behavior of this “Christian” power with that of the Turks, whose kindness and hospitality he always appreciated.[4]

August 14 found the two stranded again, without passports and in a new quarantine, by the banks of the river Aras (Araxes). Two hundred feet of rapidly moving water separated them from Persian territory. Daytime temperatures reached 110 degrees F. outside their flea-ridden tent. In desperation Perkins wrote an appeal to the British Ambassador, in residence with the Persian Court at Tabriz, and gave it to a Persian courier who was crossing the river. That night, to their surprise, the Russians returned their passports. By the end of the next day they had been ferried across the Araxes, and soon help came in the form of a letter from Sir John Campbell, H.M. Ambassador to Persia. They had travelled but a short distance when the Embassy’s physican, Dr. William Riach, arrived on horseback to assist them. By August 23 the Perkinses were ensconced in the British Embassy, Tabriz, where Campbell told the Americans, “My house is open to you.”

Charlotte Perkins, however, had by then fallen gravely ill. Only three days later, without any previous hints (e.g., ‘expectant,’ ‘delicate condition’) from Perkins to alert the reader, he announces (in Eight Years in Persia) that she was delivered of a baby daughter. Prostrate with convulsions, vomiting, and fever, Charlotte was not aware that she had given birth until three days later. Thus was born their first Persian child, Charlotte Nisbet Perkins.[5]

Baby Charlotte died within months, and she was buried in Tabriz. According to Justin Perkins, his wife never really recovered from the accompanying sickness. By 14 April 1836, when Charlotte Perkins gave birth to her first son (named William Riach, after the physician who rode to their rescue on the Araxes), the missionaries had set up permanent quarters in Urmia, on the western shore of the lake. Dr. Asahel Grant and his wife Judith arrived in 1835, and they were followed by William Stocking, Albert Holladay, and their wives.

Here began the great labors, and here too came the unending bouts of illness. Accounts by Perkins and Dr. Grant make it clear that, during those first years, the Americans were never truly in good health. In January 1839, Judith Grant, wife of the good doctor, became the first to succumb. She left behind three children. On July 23 of the same year, Charlotte Perkins’ second son, Justin Humphrey, eleven months, expired as well. The year 1840 began with the Children’s Holocaust. First, one after the other, went the twin daughters of Judith and Asahel Grant, seventeen months old; then, on January 31, Charles Stocking, eighteen months; on February 2, Catharine Holladay, nineteen months; and finally, on February 7, William Riach Perkins, aged three years ten months, went to his grave.

Faced by this loss the mission lay “desolate,” as Perkins wrote, and once again Charlotte Perkins found herself childless. But she was also pregnant, and on 8 August 1840 she gave birth yet again, to a daughter named Judith Grant Perkins, named not only after Dr. Grant’s wife but also after her maternal grandmother. By this time, however, the body and spirit of Charlottle Perkins had begun to crumble. In early 1840, Justin Perkins wrote to the American Board informing them of his wife’s condition:

“Probably few, if any, have left America with health and constitutions more perfect than Mrs. P. possessed when we came to this country. And few, you are aware, have been subjected to exposures and trials to surpass hers, particularly in the early part of our missionary experience. The result is that her originally fine constitution is broken down, and an alarming disease seems to be settling upon her. You may recollect the sufferings which Mrs. P. encountered on our way to Persia, and the very severe sickness she experienced immediately after our arrival at Tabreez. Recovery from that sickness seemed entirely beyond the reach of hope for some time; nor did she ever fully recover from the effects of it. Though she has since enjoyed tolerable health much of the time, still, to one previously acquainted with her, it has always been obvious that her constitution was irreparably injured by her sickness at Tabreez. The climate of Oroomia has affected her seriously. Often has she suffered severe attacks of fever; and she has been so much afflicted with ophthalmy, during a considerable part of our residence here, as to be unable to read and write. Mrs. P.’s repeated bereavements, in the death of our three children, have also borne heavily upon her already impaired constitution. Each has been more severe than the previous, in proportion to the increased age of the loved object removed, and has given to her system a correspondingly more serious shock.”

Perkins now goes on to deliver the most alarming news of all:
“The result of these sicknesses and trials is that for the last two years and a half, Mrs. P. has had symptoms of epilepsy, and within the last two months she has had two severe attacks of that disease. The last occurred a few days ago, since the death of William, our only child. The symptoms have appeared when her system has become febrile, which is very often the case with us all, in this climate.”[6]

In this context “epilepsy” probably means “fits” and little else. It’s hard to know what to think of this diagnosis, which must have been made by Asahel Grant. Grant was an early nineteenth-century physician, which is to say that he basically knew nothing. Grant himself suffered from almost daily vomiting caused by an overdose of calomel (mercurous chloride) which he had taken while stricken with cholera.[7] Another clue is the word “febrile,” which refers to the malaria that was endemic to Urmia, and which affected all the missionaries. Severe malaria can produce effects beyond fever, including delirium, coma, convulsions, and, of course, death. On the other hand, it may not have been malaria at all. Perkins may have found a medical word, epilepsy, to disguise reality; namely, that under the hammer blows of disease, birth, and bereavement his wife was simply going mad.

In any case, Perkins knew that he had to get Charlotte out of the country if he was going to save her life. Dr. Grant, feeling the same way about his only remaining child, a son, left the mission on 7 May 1840 to carry the boy to safety in America. For neither man was it an easy decision. Justin Perkins, as senior missionary and chief of of the Biblical translation effort, felt keenly the pangs of guilt. When he left America, he declared, he had intended never to return, barring a “calamity.” On 17 November 1840 the other members of the mission wrote to relieve him of his guilt. In a jointly signed letter the four ordained missionaries plus Edward Breath, their newly-arrived printer, urged him to take “our dear afflicted sister” back to America “by the first safe opportunity.” That opportunity did not come until 5 July 1841.

Nothing yet had come easily to Justin and Charlotte Perkins, and the journey back to the United States proved as troublesome as anything they had so far endured. Stolen horses; rough roads; fleas and vermin; the return of Mrs. P.’s illness as they crossed the Black Sea mountains; all these were bad enough: but the voyage from Smyrna in the brig Magoun laden with 15,000 drums of figs set new records for futility. A passage estimated at sixty-five days maximum by their captain, twice the normal eastbound speed, stretched out to one-hundred and nine days before they reached New York, as storm after storm barred their way west. At last, on 11 January 1842, Justin and Charlotte Perkins, their bouncing toddler Judith, and Mar Yohannan of Gavalan, Perkins’ great friend and associate, arrived at dockside in New York and “sallied forth into Broadway.”[8]

By 21 December 1844, when her third son, Henry Martyn Perkins, was born, Charlotte Perkins had lived more than four years without giving birth or seeing the death of a child. It was the longest such period in eleven years of married life. By then the Perkins family had returned to Urmia, where the myriad tasks of mission administration, translation, and preaching once more took over Justin Perkins’s life. But this time their situation was different.

After Judith Grant’s death in 1839, in the face of continuing deaths and disease, the Americans determined to build a ‘health retreat’ somewhere near Urmia. They chose Seir, a low mountain just west of the city. Seir had what they needed: proximity, altitude, and separation from the alleged ‘miasma’ below. A Kurdish village existed nearby, as did a powerful spring of clear water. (The latter, though they didn’t know it, was surely the healthiest thing about the place.) In the first months of 1841, before their departure for America, Justin Perkins spent nearly every day supervising the construction of the mission buildings at Seir. As one who had spent the first eighteen years of his life on a farm in Massachusetts, he knew how to work, and he knew how to build. The result—missionary residences plus a boys’ seminary for the training of native preachers—would be home for himself and his family during their remaining years in Persia.[9]

These were years that saw an explosion of activity at the mission. Edward Breath and his press had begun operations, eventually turning out not only religious tracts but books on mathematics, geography, and natural sciences, translated into Syriac. Fidelia Fisk arrived, and with her the expansion of girls’ education. Perkins’s Biblical translations were published, the New Testament in 1846 and the Old Testament in 1852, and David Tappan Stoddard brought out his Grammar of the Syrian Language (1855). At regular intervals religious fervor gripped the schools, while from 1844-45 the family of Mar Shimun (Auraham XVII), seeing their power threatened, began a campaign of threats and violence against the missionaries and their supporters.

Through all this, in accounts of the mission’s work, Charlotte Perkins remained invisible, which is to be expected. We have already seen, in Eight Years, the extreme reticence with which Justin Perkins treated his wife’s existence, particularly regarding the baby which miraculously emerged when they reached Tabriz. And Charlotte was, after all, a nineteenth-century missionary wife, little given to notoriety. But Charlotte is still there in the grim statistics of child mortality, giving birth and watching as more of her progeny find an early grave: Jonathan Edwards Perkins, 22 January 1846 to 14 March 1846; Fidelia Fisk Perkins, 8 February 1848 to 23 January 1849. Which brings us once again to that grim statistic: five out of seven.

But two of her children, Judith and Henry, continued to prosper and defy the odds. Judith, who turned ten in 1850, was the special light of her parents’ eyes. This was the little girl who had learned to walk on the deck of the fig-laden Magoun, as the brig fought its way westward in the autumn of 1841. To her, at the end of Eight Years in Persia, her father devoted an entire paragraph, the only one of his children to receive the honor.[10] She was, he said, “contented and happy to the last” on the ship, skipping about even in gales. Now growing up rapidly, the model of youthful good looks, intelligence, and politeness, she was becoming the child they had always dreamed of, and simply because I have singled her out for attention the reader will know that she is doomed.

Her story is told in The Persian Flower: A Memoir of Judith Grant Perkins, written and compiled by Joseph G. Cochran (the first of that distinguished family to serve in Persia) and published in Boston in 1853. Modern readers find the book a hard slog, as long accounts of someone’s goodness and perfection, overladen with Victorian religiosity and a style which belabors the obvious, do not make for lively reading. Yet beneath its surface lies a story that deserves retelling. And Judith’s story is, without doubt, the climactic event of the Perkins family tragedy.

In early September 1852, immediately after the events related in The Persian Flower, Justin Perkins sat down and wrote a letter to the American Board.[11] Across the top, in a hand which appears to be that of Perkins, someone has written “Job 19:21.” The word ‘Job’ is not a good omen, and indeed the verse cited reads, “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.” What follows is surely one of the most painful letters that any parent has been forced to write.

Judith Perkins, aged twelve in August, embraced the summer of 1852 with all the enthusiasm a child can summon. A new teacher, Miss Martha Ann Harris,[12] had come out from the United States to establish a school for the mission children. These now numbered seventeen, eleven of whom were old enough to go to school. So excited was Judith at news of her teacher’s arrival that she was allowed to ride to Khoi, several days away, with a welcoming party to escort her into Urmia. To Judith’s delight, for seven weeks thereafter she enjoyed the privilege of attending school with a real professional teacher. In the middle of August the Perkins family received distinguished foreign visitors, members of a military commission sent to determine the true line of the Persian-Ottoman border. These included Col. Fenwick Williams, R.A., who only a few years later, during the Crimean War, would earn fame as Williams Pasha, commander of Turkish forces during the Siege of Kars.[13]

Toward the end of August word came that three members of the mission, returning from America, had arrived in Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea and would be making their way toward Persia. It was customary for the Americans to send a party to meet their associates along the caravan route, and since no one else was available Justin Perkins agreed to undertake the journey. He was reluctant, having ridden the same “weary” route so many times before, and being then in the midst of printing the Old Testament in the dual-column Peshitta-Syriac translation. Also, cholera had been present that summer in Urmia, and he felt misgivings about leaving the health retreat at Seir. He agreed to go on condition that he could take his family, “for the benefit of Mrs. Perkins’s health.” Judith, of course, was ecstatic at the prospect of an adventure.

Leaving Seir on 30 August 1852, the Perkins family proceeded northward in short stages. By September 2 they were camped outside the city walls of Khoi, where, despite news that there was cholera present, they sent an attendant inside to replenish their supplies of water. I write “despite the news” because now, of course, we know that cholera resides in impure water. In 1852 they knew no such thing. (Robert Koch, future discoverer of the cholera bacterium, was then only nine years old.) Instead, they saw pestilence in “the slight haze of the cholera atmosphere,” in the phrase of Fidelia Fisk.[14] At sunrise the next morning, the family moved on.

The ascent from Khoi was some ten miles long, and very gradual. Justin Perkins had already described the pass in Eight Years in Persia, when in 1841 he, Charlotte, and the baby Judith had ridden up the mountain while enroute to America. The route taken by the Perkins family is now a forgotten track through an area where the peaks rise over 3000 meters. A newer motor road lies somewhat to the east. In the present political climate no one would venture where the Perkins family rode unless he planned to cross the mountains illegally into Turkey. In 1852, however, it was the standard way from Urmia to the main Trebizond-Tabriz caravan route, which it joined south of Mt. Ararat.

All was happiness as the four Americans made the gentle ascent of the pass. Just before the summit, Perkins reported meeting two French leech merchants, entering Persia in search of that commodity, by then hunted to near-extinction in Europe. In his account of the journey Justin Perkins remembers everything—meals, food, scenery, villages, people, and above all Judith’s reactions to all she experienced. At the summit there was a view to the north, where Judith was overjoyed at the sight of Ararat in the glow of a rising sun. Some two hours after that, on the rocky downhill ride, the ordeal began.

Several miles after a mid-morning stop for refreshment, Judith, gone deathly pale, announced that she felt ill. Within seconds she had jumped from her pony and doubled over with vomiting. The spasms, repeated over and over, left the girl barely able to stand. Justin and Charlotte, frightened, managed to get Judith back on her horse, and soon they were in pursuit of their muleteers, who were some 3-4 miles ahead at the village of Zurabad (which they called “Zorava”) with the group’s tent and supplies. After an anxious ride, Perkins carried his daughter into the hastily-pitched tent and set to work.

Justin Perkins was a literate, observant man, and probably no better account exists of Asian cholera, experienced in all its nineteenth-century horrors. By then the disease had only been known for a few decades, having spread from its home in northeast India through the opening of trade routes and increased pilgrimage. Cholera spread its particular terror because of the power of its symptoms and the swiftness with which they overcame the victim. Vomiting and watery diarrhea, so severe that over a pint of fluid per hour may be lost, take hold of the patient and squeeze him dry. Unless the fluids are replaced, the patient soon goes into shock and dies of dehydration.

Zurabad lies on the banks of the Aq Chai, a stream flowing from nearby mountains which mark the Turkish frontier. There, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, Perkins attempted to treat his daughter. At his command were potions no better than a peddler’s snake oil, yet sanctified by the fact that physicians used them regularly. He gave Judith laudanum, then camphor, and she continued to purge. Calomel, a purgative—surely the last thing needed—came next. Diarrhea, which Perkins called “evacuations,” shook her repeatedly. By this time Justin knew that the disease must be cholera, yet Charlotte continued in denial. At one point, in his frenzy Perkins dropped the vial of laudanum. Frantic searching ensued, but it was lost in the jumble and turmoil of the tent. Perkins gave her paregoric (camphor and tincture of opium) instead. Most helpfully, he gave her as much soda water as she could take, but the convulsions continued. “The disease,” he wrote, “moved on like a giant, with irresistible force.” Holding up a cross, Perkins directed his daughter to fix her eyes on it. “Yes, Poppa, I will try,” she told him in a hoarse, raw voice.

Morning gave way to afternoon and then to evening. Their attendants and muleteers grew restless. Cholera carried a powerful curse, with which no one wanted to be associated. In Zurabad news of the sickness had spread, and panicked villagers, refusing to sell them either food or fodder, ordered the travelers to move on. At one point Perkins found a villager willing to take a message to Urmia, but the others in Zurabad, fearing any association with the diseased girl, refused to let him go.[15]

As light lengthened on the peaks, Perkins remained “almost crushed with anxiety,” yet he worked on. Judith’s system had gone into shock. The purgings came less often, as there was little left to purge. Eight-year-old Henry had remained outside, frightened and alone, during the worst of the crisis. When he came inside the tent a wrenching scene ensued, as the boy found it hard to accept his older sister’s possible death and wished, as did all of them, that the trip had never happened. Other such scenes marked the coming hours: weeping; professions of faith; further attempts to revive and comfort Judith; a spreading numbness in her limbs; admonitions to goodness and faithfulness; farewells; prayers for miracles and forgiveness; even a terrifying symbolism, as night fell and a wild beast (a bear or wild boar: they never knew which) prowled the darkness just outside their tent.

At three A.M. Saturday, 4 September 1852, Judith Perkins took her last breath. It had been seventeen hours since the onset of symptoms. Justin and Charlotte, sobbing and exhausted, fell asleep beside the wreckage of their daughter.

At daylight Charlotte rose to wash Judith’s body and dress her for burial. Late in the night, Judith, in a whispered request, had asked to be interred beside her little sister Fidelia. Despite the distance—and the summer heat—her parents never considered anywhere else but Seir. So Judith returned home on the back of a mule, wrapped inside a thick felt shepherd’s cloak that was lashed tight with willow whips. An extortionate muleteer had to be paid off, and a mob of villagers, threatening to stone them, had to be kept at bay; but at last, about ten o’clock, the procession set out for Urmia.

Not until the morning of the sixth did Austen Wright, the mission doctor, receive the note. “We are in deep waters,” Perkins had written. “Our precious Judith is just gone of the cholera.” Consternation erupted, but the missionaries, riding quickly to meet them, held out hope. A longer note confirming the girl’s death arrived as they made their way northward. The terrible caravan arrived in Urmia the next morning. On Tuesday afternoon, September 7, Judith was laid in her grave on the slopes of Mt. Seir.

The aftermath can only be imagined. “My pen refuses to tell the desolation of our home,” Perkins wrote to Boston in his letter. It was the ultimate blow. He added, “Arrived at such an age, she had become as our right hand, as well as the joy of our hearts.” He at least would have duties to busy himself, as the Old Testament translation was still making its way through the printer. With Charlotte it was different. Out of seven children she had one left. She was forty-four years old, and would never have another. Five years later, which seems an eternity under the circumstances, she left Persia “enfeebled” by bad health, her missionary life finished at last. Henry accompanied her. Justin followed in 1858.

But for Justin Perkins, missionary life was not finished. After an interlude in America, and a round-trip by steamer to England, during which he lectured at Oxford, he set out again for Persia in 1862. Not until 1 June 1869 did he leave Urmia for the last time. He left Persia as he had left America in 1833: very ill and not knowing if he would live or die. But this time the transport was different. After the overland trip to Trebizond, it was steam all the way: to Istanbul, Smyrna, and Marseilles; by train to Paris and the Channel; and finally, by steamship from Liverpool to New York. And when he arrived in Brooklyn, by now deathly ill, who should be there to nurse him but his wife, Charlotte. With Charlotte at his side, Justin Perkins died in Chicopee, Massachusetts, on 8 December 1869.[16]

The last chapter in the life of Charlotte Perkins seems almost impossible. But it is there on page 113 of the Missionary Herald, March 1898 (Vol. XCIV, No. III). Under “Deaths” it reads: “December 15, 1897, at Woolwich, Maine, Mrs. Charlotte Bass Perkins, widow of the Rev. Justin Perkins, D.D.” Born in 1808 in Stowe, Vermont, residing with her son, Rev. Henry Martyn Perkins and his family, in Woolwich, Maine, “in the ninetieth year of her age, she passed to the heavenly home.” Charlotte had outlasted them all. Despite a torrent of sorrow and disease, born during the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson and died in that of William McKinley, she had almost spanned the century. And it is not too much to hope—indeed, it seems likely—that during her final days she was blessed with the presence of Henry’s oldest child, an eighteen-year-old girl named Judith Grant Perkins.[17]

_________
1. Missionary Herald, June 1849. Vol. XLV, No. 6.
2. List of graves at Seir cemetery by George Moradkhan of Urmia, 1957. Letter to author by Mary Cochran Moulton, 14 February 2003.
3. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia. Andover, 1843.
4. Eight Years, p. 108; pp. 111-112; p. 122.
5. Named not only for her mother but for Charlotte Nisbet, wife of an English army officer, who cared for the baby during her mother’s long convalescence.
6. Eight Years, p. 461-2.
7. See Gordon Taylor, Fever and Thirst, p. 79-80
8. Eight Years, p. 491.
9. Eight Years, p. 421. Entry for June 21.
10. Eight Years, p. 491.
11. Papers of the ABCFM (microfilm). Research Publications: Woodbridge, Conn., 1982-85. Reel 555, Item no. 199.
12. Martha Harris latter married Rev. Samuel Audley Rhea, d. 1865. In 1856, in the company of her husband, she became the first Western female to visit the Assyrian ashirets of Hakkari. (Not even the great English travelers Isabella Bird, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark, went this far into the high mountain districts of Kurdistan.) She is buried in Memikan, Gawar (near Yuksekova), where she died in 1857.
13. See, among many sources: Humphry Sandwith, M.D. A Narrative of the Siege of Kars. London, 1856.
14. Persian Flower, p. 117.
15. In the end he did leave the following morning.
16. Henry Martyn Perkins. The Life of Justin Perkins, D.D., Pioneer Missionary to Persia. Chicago, 1887.
17. The Missionary Herald for the year cited now available online at Googlebooks. Judith Grant Perkins, Henry’s firstborn child, is first seen in the Census of 1880, when her father was a preacher in Illinois.

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24 April 2009
by Gordon Taylor | 4/25/2009 01:23:00 AM


220 Armenian Intellectuals Exiled in 1915 Commemorated




Bawer ÇAKIR
Bianet.org
24 April 2009

On 24 April 1915, over 200 Armenian intellectuals were exiled and then killed. The Human Rights Association commemorated this loss to Armenian, Ottoman and Turkish society.

The Human Rights Association’s (İHD) Committee against Racism and Discrimination commemorated 24 April 1915, the day that Armenians worldwide recognise as the beginning of the forced exile of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire, with an event in the Tobacco Depot in Istanbul.

On that day, 139 Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Istanbul and forcibly taken to Çankırı and Ayaş in central Anatolia. They were then killed.

A loss for all of society, then and today

Lawyer Eren Keskin spoke at the event entitled “24 April 1915 and Armenian Intellectuals: They were arrested, they were evicted, they did not even get a grave stone.”

She said that the death of these intellectuals represented a loss not only for the Armenian language, culture, thought and science world, but also for the Ottoman society of the time and for “the world of all of us today.”

An exhibition displayed stories and pictures from a book entitled “Memory of 11 April”, written by Teotig in 1919 and dealing with the deaths of the intellectuals.

Music eliminating borders

The commemorative event started with a concert of the Kardeş Türküler folk group which performed songs in Armenian, Kurdish, Suryani, Arabic and Turkish.

The group members said that they had fulfilled a wish of murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in December, when they had organised a tour in Armenia together with the Turkey-based Armenian choir Sayat Nova.

“We saw that the Ararat mountain embraces Yerevan just as much as it does Ağrı province.”

Keskin said, “We, who believed what we were told, and who stayed quiet even if we did not believe it…we are all guilty.”

Stories of lives cut short

Publisher Ragıp Zarakol and members of the Bosphorus Performance Arts Society (BGST) theatre department read life stories and poems of and by Rupen Sevag, Siamanto (Atom Yerjeyan), Taniel Varujan, Teotig (Teotoros Lapçinyan) and Krikor Zohrab, all of them killed in 1915.

Around 100 people attended the event, among them Hrant Dink’s widow Rakel Dink and his brother Orhan Dink, journalist Sarkis Saropyan, academic Ayşe Gül Altınay and lawyer and IHD branch head Gülseren Yoleri.

After Zarakol recounted the life of Armenian musician Gomidas, Keskin ended the commemoration with a quote from the musician:

“It was spring, but here it was snowing.”

Istanbul - BİA News Center

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Turkey: Confessions of a "Dirty War"
by Gordon Taylor | 4/21/2009 01:22:00 AM
Abdulkadir Aygan is a man with no life and no future, and his youth was spent as an assistant in Hell. He only stays alive, it seems, in order to bear witness. The first of two articles below comes from Le Monde, and I bear responsibility for the translation and its inadequacies. The second appeared first in Taraf, a Turkish newspaper, and it subsequently appeared in English translation at Bianet.org. Welcome to the world of JITEM and the people it employs.


Turkey: the ghosts of a "dirty war."

Guillaume Perrier & Olivier Truc, Le Monde, 13 April 2009

A recluse in a village "somewhere in the south of Sweden," Abdulkadir Aygan lives under the protection of the Swedish secret services. And for good reason: this refugee makes Turkey tremble with each of his revelations. Formerly a member of the Kurdish PKK rebels, he was "turned" by the Turkish Army in the 1990s. He then collaborated with JITEM, a secret unit of the gendarmerie [Turkey's rural military police force -ed.] charged with carrying on the anti-terrorist struggle. For six years he took part in crimes perpetrated in the southeast of Turkey, at the height of the "dirty war" conducted by the army against Kurdish rebels and a population accused of supporting them. Abdulkadir Aygan left Turkey in 2003. Today, he speaks.

"I was hired as an antiterrorist functionary in September 1991, registry number J27299," he says, in his Swedish home. With compelling detail, he reviews the torture sessions and summary executions of militants, suspected of supporting the Kurdish cause, of which he was a witness. Hundreds of unexplained murders and abductions were committed in southeast Turkey between 1987 and 2001. "There are close to 1500 known people who disappeared," estimates Sezgin Tanrikulu, a human-rights lawyer in Diyarbakir, "5000 including unexplained murders."

In Turkey, the testimony of Abdulkadir Aygan has revived the inquiry concerning these disappearances, and has raised hope among the victims' families. The body of Murat Aslan, a young man of 25 who vanished in 1994, was recovered ten years later, burned and buried beside a road. "We arrested him at a cafe, after someone denounced him to us, and led him to the local office of JITEM," Aygan remembers. "A corporal who was an expert in torture hung him from the ceiling by his hands, with weights on his feet. He beat him. He was kept three or four days without food. Me, I evaluated the information he gave." According to Abdulkadir Aygan, Murat Aslan was finally sent to Silopi [a town on the Iraqi border], then led to the banks of the Tigris. "He was blindfolded and handcuffed. The junior officer, Yuksel Ugur, shot him, and Cindi Saluci doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. It was thanks to my testimony that his body could be recovered for his family and identified through a DNA test."

The repentant gendarmerie officer also describes "death wells," as they've been called by the Turkish press: pits on the property of Botas, the state petroleum pipeline company, in which seven bodies were thrown in 1994 after having been dissolved in acid or burned. He also states that three trade unionists, arrested the same year and taken by agents to Abdukerim Kirca, the director of JITEM in Diyarbakir, were taken to Silvan [a town north of Diyarbakir] and killed by the latter official with a bullet to the head. "We take what he says very seriously," explains Nuseviran Elci, an activist in Silopi [and president of the Silopi Bar Association]. "After verification, everything that Aygan says turns out to be correct."

The ex-member of JITEM is far from having given up all his secrets. He says that he fears for his life, in Sweden, where he has received threats: Turkey is demanding his extradition to be tried for the murder of Kurdish writer Musa Anter in 1992. "I'm ready to be judged wherever or whenever, but not in Turkey," he responds. "That demand is made in order to silence me."

Since March 9, investigation into the disappearances has taken on a new dimension. On the request of attorneys who base their demands on Aygan's statements, Turkish justice has finally ordered excavations around Silopi, the last town before the Iraqi frontier, and in the region of Diyarbakir. The "death wells," situated close to the principal military barracks of Silopi, and on the property of Botas, have been explored. Like graveyards in many villages, here tens of bone fragments, a green glove, knotted cords, fragments of clothing, a human skull have been discovered.

The trauma, still living, from the crimes committed in the region has resurfaced as a result of the excavations. "People here have known about these crimes for years," says Elci the attorney. From the kebab seller in the central square to the local chief of the AKP, party of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, all have lost a close relative. Even in Silopi, population 15,000, at least 300 people have been taken away and disappeared.

Ahmet vanished one morning in 1998 after leaving his home. "He was a photographer, married, and father of three children. We never saw him again," says his father, Enver, with tears in his eyes. After the disappearance, the old man remembers having been interrogated by an official of JITEM. "I've thought of nothing else for six years," he says. "Bring back the body of my son." A while ago, having seen television pictures of men digging in the earth for evidence, Enver pushed open the door of the local Human Rights Association: "I thought that, with this Ergenekon affair that is so prominent now, they might have new information."

Tongues have been loosened since the launch, in 2007, of an inquiry into the Ergenekon network, a shadowy military-nationalist power planted within the Turkish state and suspected of having fomented coups and assassinations. Since October 2008, 86 persons - military officers, academicians, journalists, politicians, and mafiosi - have been charged before a special tribunal in Istanbul, with having formed a plot, presumably against the government. Since July, 56 other suspects have been hauled into court. Tens of others could follow.

The existence of the Ergenekon network is not a surprise: Turks have spoken for years about the "Deep State" to describe this ultranationalist network. Dismembered by waves of arrests, the network could pierce the mystery surrounding some of the darkest affairs of recent Turkish history, such as the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink...or the toll taken by JITEM in the Southeast. "The founders of Ergenekon were also members of JITEM," Abdulkadir Aygan emphasizes. "Sometimes Ergenekon also used mafia chiefs to carry out its missions. For example, against business owners who they were told to assassinate. One part of the victims in the Southeast was killed by JITEM, but also by other services of the police, the gendarmerie, or the army, and even by the MHP, the far-right nationalist party."

"More than 80 families of the disappeared have broken the silence since December," estimates Nusirevan Elci, who, each week, sees new dossiers arrive. "The Ergenekon investigation has made new witnesses come forth, and it should be concentrated in the southeast: it would recover many actors in this history." To the surprise of inhabitants, numerous high-ranking military officers who were posted in the region during the disappearances, between 1987 and 2001, have been arrested these last weeks: Major Arif Dogan, called "the angel of death," or former general Levent Ersoz, famed for his cruelty.

On March 23, it was Colonel Cemal Temizoz who was questioned. The former chief of JITEM in Cizre, he has been named by suspects as the commander of many abductions. His name brings chills to attorney Elci: "People turned from their path to avoid having to face him." No one dares any longer to take the path which traverses the little roadside village of Kustepe. Empty of its inhabitants and surveyed by three "village guardians," Kurdish militia members supplied by the army, it could be equally shelter or charnel house. The investigators discovered here a large number of bones. "Horse bones, nothing more," grunts one of the village guards, armed with a Kalashnikov and drawing a zero in the air.

"At that time, fear kept us from talking. We risked being killed in our turn," explains Salih Teybogan, a peasant of Silopi. His brother, who worked at the frontier post, was taken while entering his house, and his car was found burned, "two hundred meters from Botas." Several months later, three bodies were retrieved from a well, under an old restaurant, now derelict. "We are going to do DNA tests," says Salih Teybogan. "Things are changing. When I understand that they are going to open the graves, I am coming to reclaim my rights."

The "death wells" affair perhaps sounds the end of impunity for these crimes, perpetrated until very recently. In Istanbul and Diyarbakir, the Saturday Mothers - the Turkish equivalent of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires - have resumed their weekly demonstrations demanding the return of their disappeared children. "Now, we have to have a real truth and reconciliation commission," believes the lawyer Sezgin Tanrikulu. "The problem is, the old members of JITEM are still there, in the bosom of the army."

Colonel Abdulkerim Kirca, named by Abdulkadir Aygan as killer of at least a dozen Kurds during the 1990s, was found with a bullet in his head in January, before he could be interrogated. Officially, it was a suicide. At his funeral, all the upper crust of the headquarters staff was in attendance.

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

A Chilling Account of JITEM Murders

Abdülkadir Aygan, a former PKK member who then worked for the clandestine JITEM gendarmerie organisation for nine years, now lives in Sweden. Taraf reporter Neşe Düzel talked to him there.

ND: How many years did you stay with the PKK?

AA: I was with the PKK from 1975 to 1985. My connection to the PKK started when I was a high school student in Adana and continued when I left school in 1977.

Did you go up the mountains?

In Turkey I did not, but I stayed in all the PKK camps in Northern Iraq, what is called Southern Kurdistan. I was working as a messenger and guide. I carried important messages from and to a PKK leader called Duran Kalkan and the leaders of other camps. I also took provisions to the camps from villages and guided groups from one camp to another. I guided the group that came to Turkey from the Mahzun Korkmaz camp and carried out the attack in Şemdinli Eruh in 1984, I brought them to the Turkish border. They entered Turkey and attacked.

This was the PKK’s first attack. How did you then join JITEM (Gendarmerie Anti-Terrorism Intelligence)?

I left the PKK in 1985 because I had had enough of the executions within the organisation. The last drop for me was an attack on a hamlet. No one was going to be left alive. I had done the reconnaissance for the attack. One day before the attack I fled from the PKK and told the villagers about the plan. When the villagers saw me with my guerrilla clothes and gun, they called the gendarmerie (security force attached to the army which polices rural areas). They came to the village with a military helicopter and took me.

I will ask you later why you left the PKK. You said that you were fed up with the executions. Did the PKK not look for you later, did they not try to punish you? You informed on them.

I informed on them. I was questioned for 50 days in Siirt, and I wrote a 17-page statement. The superiors in Ankara said, “He has been in the organisation for such a long time, he has got a past. 17 pages is not enough.” The questioning officer told me to write more, so I wrote around 130 pages. In 1977, I was responsible for the military wing of the PKK in Nizip…

At that time you allegedly killed six young nationalists. Did you write about those murders?

No. I did not write about the murders I committed against those we called fascists in Nizip. I wrote about the PKK camps I had stayed at abroad and about the PKK militants I knew. I did not write about any villagers who gave us food. During questioning, they showed me the written statement of Sabri Ok, a high-ranking leader they had caught previously. He had explained everything anyway. Later, Sabri Ok became PKK officer for prisons. They claimed that he had carried out a self-criticism later. But what he wrote in his statement was no different from what an informant would write. The difference to me was that he did not apply for informant status. I did, and I benefited from the Remorse Law. I was taken to Diyarbakır prison.

How did you protect yourself from the PKK members in Diyarbakır prison?

I went to the informants’ cell. They held those who gave themselves up and turned informant in a different place, not among the PKK members. That’s why it was not dangerous inside. Outside is dangerous.

How did you join JITEM?

Because of the Remorse Law I stayed in prison a third of my 15-year sentence. In 1990, I was released. They immediately took me to the military, because I had deserted to Southern Cyprus during my military service in Cyprus. They sent me to Kars to complete my military service in a tank unit. One day a soldier in the battalion said, “Colonel Arif Doğan called on the phone for you. He will call again.”

Arif Doğan is one of the prime suspects in the Ergenekon trial, currently in detention, is he not? Bombs and guns were found at his home and office.

Yes. Up to then, I had never heard of Arif Doğan, and I still have never met him face to face. I only talked on the phone. He was the Diyarbakır JITEM head. He called me again. He told me that Cem Ersever was with him and had recommended me to him. I had met Major Cem Ersever at the Siirt Regiment when I was questioned. I had chatted to him. He was a person who knew a lot about the PKK.

How many years did you work for JITEM?

Nine years. It was 1990…They said, as if they were doing me a favour, “you are doing your military service in Kars, but your family is in Osmaniye. If you want, we can have you brought to Diyarbakır, closer to your family, and you can do your military service in the gendarmerie.” I agreed. At that time there was no mention of JITEM. […]

How did you interpret this special interest from a commander?

I thought that Cem Ersever wanted me in order to make use of my experience. First they took me from Kars to the Privates Education Regiment in Silvan, where they brought other informants too, Ali Ozansoy, Hüseyin Tilki, Ali Timurtaş, Hayrettin Toka…Then they sent us to JITEM in Diyarbakır, but we did not know it was JITEM. We thought we were going to do our military service under the command of the Diyarbakır Gendarmerie for Public Security. We were five, six people…We thought that we were supposed to wear civilian clothes because of our special status, our experience with the organisation, but…

At that time, who was Diyarbakır JITEM commander? Arif Doğan?

No, he had gone, and Cem Ersever had taken his place. His deputy was Aytekin Özen. It was Ersever who told us that we had come to JITEM. “This is JITEM. You will be under my command, wear plain clothes. When you collect intelligence and go on operations, you will wear arms for your own protection.” Just think, the other soldiers had G3 rifles, we were given guns.

How long did you work for JITEM?

It started when I was a soldier in 1990. When I finished my military service, I continued with JITEM as a civil servant until 1999. First they planned to employ us as terrorism experts, then as expert sergeants. But then they turned us into civil servants.

I don’t understand…

They applied Law No 657 on Civil Servants and really made us civil servants. We were officially intelligence officers. The same laws applied to us as to a post office employee, and we had been turned into civil servants working for the military. We had pay slips, taxes, and the right to compensation and a pension. We got a wage, just as a noncommissioned officer, or a JITEM commander got a wage. For instance, I had a look at the pension fund website on the Internet, under the name Aziz Turan…If I work another fifteen years, I can retire.

Your name was changed to Aziz Turan, and Abdülkadir Aygan was registered to have died in combat, is that right?

Yes. My criminal record was also cleaned.

How many activities did you take part in when you worked for JITEM?

They called them “operations. For instance, a criminal was identified. Normally what happens? The security forces catch this person on demand of the prosecution and the prosecution takes that person to court. The person, depending on the crime, goes to prison or not. But JITEM operations were not like that. There were local agents and informants among the people. They told JITEM about those providing the PKK with provisions or having contact with the organisation. Then JITEM did its job.

What does “do its job” mean in JITEM speak? Killing?

“Doing its job” means “illegally taking a person to JITEM, questioning them, killing them and getting rid of the bodies by burning or burying them.” The importance of the operation depended on the importance of the person to be killed. The JITEM commander sometimes informed the Gendarmerie Public Security Gendarmerie Command, and they sometimes informed the Emergency State Governor’s Office, and sometimes they were not informed.

During your time at JITEM, how many people did you take and kill like that? Did you commit unsolved murders?

If you ask me how many of these events I witnessed, around 30…Not all JITEM commanders were the same. Some ordered these kind of things, some did not. Some only asked for intelligence reports and the organisation of informant and agent networks. Also, I had a lot of duties in JITEM.

Such as?

I interpreted when our commanders met with Barzani and Talabani (then the Iraqi Kurdish leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Kurdistan Patriots’ Union). At one point I picked up the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmergas wounded in clashes with the PKK and brought them to the airport to be taken to Turkish military hospitals. I translated documents that came into the hands of JITEM into Turkish. I cracked codes. That is why I did not take part in all JITEM operations. But from what I have heard and seen, I would claim that 80 percent of the unsolved murders and crimes in the region were carried out by JITEM.

There is talk of 18-20 thousand murders without known assailant.

I think that is an exaggeration.

How many people do you think were killed by JITEM?

I can only guess in Diyarbakir, not in other provinces like Elazığ, Van, Mardin, Batman… They also had JITEM. During the ten years I was in Diyarbakır, there might have been 600 to 700…but this is a guess.

As a JITEM employee, did you kill anyone?

I do not want to answer this question.

During the time you worked for JITEM, there was a peak in murders without known assailants. How many murders did you witness?

Yes, this was the time with the most murders. They started in 1993 and continued until 1997, until the Susurluk event. Especially in those four years, there were many murders.

Who was Diyarbakır JITEM commander at that time?

JITEM commander was Abdülkerim Kırca, and Diyarbakır JITEM team commander was Zahit Engin. I personally witnessed around 30 operations during that time. But there are hundreds of operations and murders during that time that I did not take part in or witness. Our group carried out around 30 to 40. And then there were the ones that the Diyarbakir team did under the command of Zahit Engin.

Did all JITEM operations end in death?

They all did. I will tell you an interesting story. There was a young man called İhsan Haran, he was said to be a PKK member. His family had migrated to Diyarbakır from an emptied village in Lice. […] He was taken to JITEM and questioned. Then he was taken in the direction of Silvan, and he was left on a piece of land, with a bullet in his head. Later I heard from commander Abdülkerim Kırca that he did not die from that bullet. He walked to Batman and went to hospital. He then reported what had happened. The Batman team was informed, and they told the Diyarbakır team.

And?

They called Kırca on the phone and told him. He said, “Okay, take him to your team immediately, wait. We are coming.” Kırca told me this himself.

Why would a commander tell you this?

He was accusing the ones carrying out the first execution of having botched the job. He said, “The idiots did not kill him. The guy went to the city and to hospital. We went again and completed the job.” Abdülkerim Kırca took some staff with him to Batman, and they took the young man to the plot of land again and killed him. […]

Did you witness this young man’s killing?

I witnessed the first execution. Kemal Ümlük and expert sergeant Yüksel Uğur were there. They took him behind a heap of earth and killed him at night. I did not see who killed him. He was questioned at JITEM and then taken to the plot of land by car.

Why was he killed?

Because he was supposed to be a PKK member…In the Diyarbakır area JITEM generally got its information about the PKK from informer Serpil Toprak. She also worked for JITEM as a civil servant. For instance, it was she who made JITEM take a young man called Mehemt Salim Dönen and his uncle from Silvan. She saw them at a military hospital. The young man was undergoing his medical examination prior to starting his military service and had come with his ncle. Serpil told me that we should call the commander and tell him. Kırca was having dental treatment at Dicle University hospital. We called him. “Do the necessary and take him. I’m coming.” We went to the military hospital by car and took the young man and his uncle to JITEM. The commander came from the dentist’s and started the questioning.

How were they killed?

The uncle had no connections, but we also took him so that he could not report anything. Uncle and nephew were strangled at JITEM and thrown out on the Silvan road.

Did commander Abdülkerim Kırca strangle them?

No, he gave the command. Sometimes when there was questioning with torture, the commander stayed in the room, sometimes he went to his own room and had a drink. These murders were always carried out at night, and torture was carried out after work hours in the evening, when the regular soldiers had gone back to their ward. There were ordinary soldiers working as tea makers, post officers for JITEM during the day. […] There were other military units and institutions in the area. They were not supposed to hear the sound from the torture. […]

How many people from JITEM stayed behind for a night shift for torture and executions?

Depending on the job, four to five people.

How and by how many people were the victims strangled?

With a strangling wire or a cable, sometimes a strong TV cable. Either two or three people strangled them. Torture lasted one or two nights. They were not killed immediately. So that they would not die without making a statement, they were given a slice of bread.

The young man who was killed with his uncle, had he not left the PKK?

Seeing as he was going to the military, he had left the PKK, because a PKK member does not go to the army. Especially not someone who had a higher position…But even if they had left the PKK, they were killed by JITEM. For example, there was a young university student called Servet Aslan. He had a girlfriend called Fatma from Mersin. There was no accusation made about the girl, she was not involved. Following a statement by civil servant informant Serpil, these two university students were taken in after being found walking hand-in-hand in Diyarbakir city. The young man had never gone to the mountains, and he had his girlfriend with him.

What does that mean?

They were in love and they were leading a normal life. A PKK militant would never walk through Diyarbakır city hand-in-hand with a girlfriend. But although the young man cried and said he was not with the PKK…

They were also killed?

Yes, they were also killed…There was a Sergeant Major called Mehmet Çapur. Kırca gave the command. The young couple were taken in the direction of Sivas. They were killed and thrown at the roadside. They were questioned and tortured for two days before. Abdülkerim Kırca himself tortured that girl.

Where is the informant Serpil Toprak now?

She was transferred to Erzurum, where she continued as a civil servant and also completed her nursing education which she had interrupted before. JITEM organised her college registration. We heard that she married a lecturer there.

When you took people outside of the city to kill them, did you put them in the boot of the car?

Sometimes we took them in the backseat, between two members of staff. Sometimes we took them covered in a coat, as if they were ill.

How far out of the city did you go to kill them?

For example, İdris Yıldırım was taken from Silopi (a district in Şırnak) and taken to Elazığ, 150 km away. The reason was that the JITEM employee responsible for his capture lived in Silopi and feared suspicions. He was killed far away in order to protect a JITEM informant. His body was burnt so that no one would identify him.

Who did you work with at JITEM?

From 1990 I worked for Cem Ersever and his deputy Aytekin Özen for about two years. When they left, Cahit Aydin and his deputy Nurettin Ata took their places. Then Abdülkerim Kırca came. I worked with him the longest. Normally each commander stayed two years, but he stayed three, four years. I also worked with Ali Yıldız and Cemal Temizöz.

Did you only witness what Abdülkerim Kırca did? What did the others do?

The most murders happened during Kırca’s time. There were some during Cem Ersever’s time, but not so many. For example, the next commander, Ali Yıldız, acted politically. He never said in front of informants, “Take this person in.” He acted as if there was only normal intelligence reporting. But the Diyarbakır JITEM team led by Zahit Engin was under his command, and they constantly took people to JITEM, questioned them and killed them. We saw and heard about this. People were screaming in the cells and later disappeared. There was a waste container behind the building. We saw how Şehmuz Çavuş or others from the team took the clothes and personal belongings of people there and burnt them. (ND/EÜ)

* This interview was published in Taraf newspaper on 27 January 2009. The headline was changed by bianet.



Taraf newspaper - İstanbul

29 January 2009, Thursday


Neşe DÜZEL

Also Posted at The Pasha and the Gypsy.

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The Baby in the Iron Womb
by Gordon Taylor | 4/09/2009 03:34:00 AM


One treads carefully in the Turkish presence. Turkey is no joke.
--Jan Morris

It's a tough crowd, the Turkish parliament. Say the wrong thing and you'll quickly discover the disadvantages of growing a mustache. The above photograph was taken 21 December 2008 after a Kurdish deputy of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) got up and told his fellow MPs that it was high time for Turkey to face up to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. As a Kurd, of course, he had his motives for this deliberate provocation: he knew that until the Turks confronted the truth about 1915, they would never recognize reality about the Kurds. It was a gutsy move. He, his DTP party colleagues, and millions of other people are still waiting for something other than a fist in the face.

On April 6, in Ankara, Barack Obama faced the same uncertainties. You could see it on the videos: the tiniest dent in that iron assurance we have come to expect of him. Perhaps it was because Michelle, his partner in world conquest, had left him to be with their daughters back home. In any case, he seemed slightly hesitant as he spoke to the Turkish parliament. "Who are these people?" one can almost hear him thinking; or, perhaps he was mesmerized by the sight of all those mustaches. This was not an easy crowd, nothing like those cheerful Europeans in Prague and London, delirious at having found a U.S. President who actually seemed to have a brain in his head. Most of Obama's Ankara speech, said reports, was greeted with silence.


But, to begin with a generalization, it was as good a speech as one could expect, given the occasion. In it nuance, nonsense, diplomacy, and willful disregard of reality found equal expression. Someone from the military-industrial-diplomatic complex worked hard on this text, and it showed.

First, the nonsense. Those who take a jaundiced view of Turkish nationalism can find plenty of it in Obama's words. He began his speech with the usual--a homage to Ataturk, the Republic's founder--by referring to the morning's signal event, the requisite wreath-laying at Fred's tomb. Here his restraint was admirable. At no point did Obama point out the absurdity of a free and quasi-democratic people, a NATO member and EU-aspirant, bowing and scraping before a personality cult that rivals that of Kim il-Sung.

Obama then moved on to the main event: friendly persuasion and flattery. There were references to Turkey's democracy, a dubious concept, as well as to the friendship between our two peoples--which really is a lie, since I doubt that more than five Americans out of a hundred could find Turkey on a map. (Hell, they can't even find their own country!) Here the message was, Let's Cooperate. The two nations, he said, were working together for peace and prosperity, as was appropriate. Obama affirmed U.S. support for Turkey's EU candidacy. (Which he can do because he knows that France and Germany will have the guts to tell them No.) Cliches like Resolute Ally, Responsible Partner, and Bridges Over the Bosphorus were given the requisite airing. Two Turkish basketball players were duly noted. Obama praised the Turks for their progress (non-existent) on penal code reform, as well as for their establishment (scorned by most Kurds) of a TV station broadcasting in Kurdish. This is where it began to get interesting:
These achievements have created new laws that must be implemented, and a momentum that should be sustained. For democracies cannot be static: they must move forward.
In other words, We know that you've passed a few laws. But you have to make them work; otherwise it's just an empty form. (Which is the game, Turkey-watchers know, that the Turks have always played.)
Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.
Note: "a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state." This is the toughest sell of all, the idea that the freedoms Turkish officials fear so greatly could actually strengthen their beloved, all-important Turkish State. This is the heart of the matter. And the Halki Seminary? It's an interesting gambit, a reference to a long-closed seminary near Istanbul which the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate desperately needs to have reopened if it is going to sustain itself in its ancient home. If you really become a democracy, Obama is arguing, you become stronger. And upholding minority rights is the key.
I say this as the President of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation.
Note: "that enriches our countries"; using the language of inclusion to cajole the listeners into going along. Obama then moved on to admission of past American sins, like slavery, in order to slide into that most treacherous of quicksands, the Turkish treatment of Armenians.
Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.
No one, I submit, is ever going to make a more diplomatic, nuanced statement about this subject. With this Obama and his speechwriters have slipped through a narrow opening indeed. If the "full and frank exchange of views" of diplomatic doublespeak were taken literally, a visitor might have said, "Grow up, people, and stop being afraid. Yes, the murderers of a million Armenians were your ancestors, but the ordinary Turks who worked to save their Armenian neighbors were also your ancestors, as were the army units which refused to participate, and the Ottoman generals and officials who refused to go along. Ataturk himself called it a 'shameful act.' So what is your problem?" Obama would never have said such a thing, but for what he did say he deserves credit.

So for the Greek patriarchate and the Armenian Genocide, two touchy subjects, we can give Obama decent marks. He went on to make a statement which was, for America's tone-deaf news media, a big deal: "[T]he United States is not at war with Islam." And he made a pitch for Turkey's cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for Turkey's biggest problem, the Kurds, Obama was as silent as a Turk at Easter. True, he had declared himself in favor of "robust minority rights." But in a Turkey defined by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, "minority" does not apply to the Kurds. Unlike Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, 15 million Kurds do not have official "minority" status in Turkey. They are full-fledged citizens, indigenous residents of Anatolia for thousands of years, who have a culture and language that has never been recognized by the Turkish Republic.

In a short meeting with Ahmet Turk, vice-chairman of the DTP and the "grand old man" of Kurdish politics in Turkey, Obama expressed "sympathy" for the Kurds but said what he had to say, that violence was not a solution for the Kurdish problem. As he said this, Turkey's Kurdish provinces were still reeling from the latest outbreaks of police violence, which left two Kurds dead and a Kurdish female deputy of the DTP injured after being beaten by the state's "security forces." Despite these almost daily reports, it is still official U.S. policy that the PKK, which has made repeated offers of negotiation, is a "terrorist group"; and the Turkish government, which rarely sees a head that doesn't deserve beating or an F-16 that isn't worth buying, is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.

So nothing really has changed. Obama's speech made some intriguing gambits, and the symbolism of meeting with Kurdish MPs, a group that has been shunned up to now, will no doubt resonate; but without straight talk and an abandonment of the lavish armaments contracts that are the true core of Turkish-American relations, nothing ever will change. Like a baby in an iron womb, Turkish democracy has gestated for decades without hope of accouchement. Turkey's governance has always had one goal: to maintain the state and its power. And the pattern continues. For the sake of the all-important State, political parties have been closed, papers shut down, reporters imprisoned, YouTube prohibited, websites darkened, letters of the alphabet proscribed, and thought crimes punished. While murderers of liberals and ethnic minorities, caught red-handed, go unpunished, people who speak the simplest truths are arraigned and convicted within weeks. Inquiries into the most blatant thuggery drag on, without resolution, for years. Judges render verdicts that defy common sense, then retire to drink tea out of tulip-shaped glasses.

And so it goes.

Cross-posted at The Pasha and the Gypsy.

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All the Instruments Agree
by Gordon Taylor | 1/19/2009 02:15:00 AM
Hrant Dink, d. 19 January 2007

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


--W.H.A., "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (d. January 1939)

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Pashas in Toyland
by Gordon Taylor | 11/24/2008 11:01:00 PM

After my recent post, "Obama and the Endless Quarrel," a reader wrote to inquire about the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), and specifically my assertion that with their acronymous companies, OYAK and TSKGV, they comprise the "third largest" capitalist entity in Turkey. He wanted to know more, an admirable desire in a world where Turkey is becoming an increasingly important nation. In fact, the TSK's "third largest" ranking is really an informed guess based on the assessments of other people. No one is quite sure of the exact rank of the two funds' holdings. Like the tides of finance, they ebb and flow, claiming new divisions while leaving others behind. Oyak Bank, for example, was recently sold to ING of the Netherlands, while they have made other moves with their steel operations. But there is little doubt, as the excerpt I am about to quote will make clear, that together they occupy a place in the very top echelon of Turkish corporations.

Any reader can find out more from this article in Fortune, or simply by Googling "OYAK Group" and scrolling through the vast hit list. OYAK (an acronym for Army Pension Institution) makes steel; it makes cars, roads, and buildings out of that steel; it makes portland cement for concrete, uses that concrete (and of course their own steel) to build hotels and businesses, runs the businesses themselves to make more money, uses their own banks to fund more businesses, builds golf courses, apartment blocks, and vacation villages for retired military officers, sells insurance to those businesses, builds and runs supermarkets, grows food for those markets, makes pesticides for the crops that it makes into food that it sells in its supermarkets--have you heard enough? They even own professional soccer and basketball teams. Oh, and all of their profits are tax-free.

Here, for example, is a snippet from the Istanbul daily Hurriyet, of September 13. "Oyak Cement Increases its Sales Revenue by 20%" reads the headline. Oyak sold, it reports, 2.9 million tons of cement domestically and 1.2 million tons abroad in the first quarter of 2008, giving them a 14-15% share of Turkey's cement production. "Abroad", remember, includes northern Iraq, where Oyak is a major player in the massive development activity now going on in Iraqi Kurdistan. ("In Iraq, OYAK is becoming a monopoly" reads a headline in one paper. Another, from Zaman says, "OYAK rides the gravy train in Northern Iraq." Thus we have the spectacle of the pashas' pension fund selling cement and construction services (hotels, airports, roads) to the Kurds of northern Iraq while, in the mountains, their F-16s are pounding the bejezus out of Kurdish villages and flocks--and the very rare PKK guerrilla.

TSKGV, the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, is a bit less of an octopus, though not by much. They concentrate on arms manufacturing, including joint ventures with foreign firms. The generals love new weapons, of course, so every two years TSKGV sponsors IDEF, an international defense industry fair. The next one, IDEF09, is coming in April. As with OYAK, TSKGV's profits are tax-free.

Here's Eric Rouleau, former French Ambassador to Turkey in the 1990s, to give us a more complete rundown. This is an excerpt from his article, "Turkey's Modern Pashas," published in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2000. See also this excerpt from another article by Rouleau, which is equally informative.

Power of the pashas

The constitution grants the armed forces a degree of autonomy that no
democratic state would tolerate. The chief of general staff takes
precedence over the ministry of defence and all the other members of the government. The prime minister comes first in order of protocol but wields less real authority in the most sensitive areas. Amongst other things, the chief of general staff decides appointments and promotions within the armed forces, supervises internal and external security, decides defence policy, and manages the production and purchase of arms, the cost of which does not appear in the state budget.

It was quite by chance, for instance, that we learnt from Defense Week of 14 February 2000 that modernisation of the armed forces would cost about $70bn over the next 15 years. Traditionally the budget for the army's running expenses (alluded to very briefly, despite the fact that it accounts for one third, or more, of state revenue) is approved without debate, by acclamation. The entire assembly [Turkish Parliament] then addresses its "congratulations" and "good wishes" to the head of general staff.

The constitution, and the corresponding laws, give the general staff direct or indirect control over higher education and most of the judiciary. Misdemeanours and crimes against the state are handled by the state security courts, with high-ranking military on the bench until recently. Legislators, university rectors, public prosecutors and judges are required to comply with the limited definition of freedom that appears in the preamble to the constitution: "no protection shall be afforded to thoughts or opinions contrary to Turkish national interests, [...] Turkish historical and moral values, [...] the principles, reforms and modernism of Atatürk."

Article 13 provides a more detailed definition of these values: "The
indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation, national sovereignty, the Republic, national security, public order, general peace, the public interest, public morals and public health". Article 14 goes one step further, "None of the rights and freedoms embodied in the Constitution shall be exercised with the aim of violating the indivisible integrity of the State with its territory and nation." The courts will not only punish acts, but also reprehensible "thoughts or opinions". Article 130 goes so far as to stipulate that "scientific research and publication" may be banned by university deans if contrary to the values quoted above. The electoral law, promulgated just after the 1982 constitution, and all the laws covering political parties, professional bodies and unions, contain restrictions that supposedly comply with Kemalist dogma.

The political power of the pashas would not be so deeply rooted if it did not also draw on substantial economic and financial resources. The army owns a vast holding, called Oyak, consisting of about 30 large companies involved in manufacturing, distribution and exports in sectors as varied as cars, cement, food, pesticides, oil, tourism, insurance, banking, property, supermarkets and high technology. These companies employ about 30,000 people directly, as well as giving work to partner companies. One of the group's star performers, Oyak-Renault, boasts an annual production capacity of 160,000 cars.

Oyak, which is one of the top three or four holdings in Turkey, is
generously funded. It takes a mandatory 10% of the salary of all members of the armed forces and reaps the profits from its own companies, reputed to be some of the most profitable in the country. This is hardly surprising for Oyak is exempted from all taxes and duties, a privilege that other organisations in the private sector no doubt view as unfair competition.

Major companies have, however, learnt to live with this arrangement, for Oyak has involved them in its activities, by interest and design. Taha Parla, a professor at Bosphorus University, has studied the subject and identified several powerful holdings among Oyak partners, including those belonging to the Koç and Sabanci families, known as the "emperors" of industry and trade, and the Taskent family, the "barons" of merchant banking. Private companies also give retired senior officers management jobs, as a reward for past services and a way of maintaining connections with officers in the regular army. In this way an tripartite alliance has been sealed between the military elite, big business (in Turkey and abroad) and state bureaucracy.

The TSKGV (Turkish Armed Forces Foundation), which also belongs to the
army, is Oyak's sister organisation. It comprises about 30 industrial
companies that enjoy the same privileges as Oyak. The foundation
concentrates exclusively on arms production, employs roughly 20,000 people and provides work for tens of thousands of other workers in subcontracting companies. Over 80% of revenue is paid into a fund thought to amount to several tens of billions of dollars. As Parla points out, this is an original way of accumulating (military) capital other than what is accrued by the (civilian) private sector.

The triumvirate formed by the army, big business and state bureaucracy is protected by a battery of constitutional and legal provisions. Its influence increases when the balance of political power leans in its favour, when opposition in society declines, or when - as has been the case in recent years - politicians are increasingly discredited. Under these circumstances the political parties, parliament, government and media merely acquiesce when the military disregard the rule of law.

They made no objection, for instance, when the pashas refused to show
parliament the texts of agreements with Israel. Nor did they react when
Turkish forces launched a massive incursion - without informing the
government - into northern Iraq to fight Kurdish nationalists belonging to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). [Note: This was in the '90s. -g.t.] Nothing was said when the pashas vetoed a postponement of the elections, despite the support of a majority of members of parliament. Similarly, the military met no opposition when they halted attempts to suppress articles in the penal code contrary to human rights or blocked enquiries into scandals (notably into particularly repugnant aspects of the fight against the Kurds) that might have tarnished the reputation of the armed forces. Appearances are saved, for these injunctions generally take the form of "views" or "wishes" expressed by a member of the general staff, which of course does not preclude less subtle forms of pressure behind the scenes.
Rouleau's entire article should be required reading for everyone in Washington. Note the opening sentence: "a degree of autonomy which no democratic state would tolerate." In fact, it's very hard to see why Turkey bothers to keep a Defense Minister. He has no power over the military: no power at all, really, other than the ability to shuffle people around within his own bureaucracy. Things have changed somewhat in recent years (see this article from Zaman); however, despite cosmetic changes made for the EU's benefit, the essentials remain. With this kind of arrangement obviously we are through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, and into Neverland. Turkey, as Rouleau describes it, is a dreamworld for tin soldiers; a paradise of "Mercantile Militarism," in the phrase of Prof. Taha Parla. It's also very obviously something else. I'm not a believer in the over-use of extreme labels; however, I fail to see that the essence of this situation is anything but capital-f Fascist.

Why is this important? Only because as human beings we are supposed to value truth. (OK, just a little bit, maybe?) Truth is not served by asserting, as does the U.S. Government, that Turkey is a "democracy" for other nations in the region to emulate. Nor is it helped by the bland hypocrisies of such as Faruk Logoglu (pron. Lo-oh-loo), former Turkish Ambassador to the United States, who, in a recent article in Hurriyet, gave advice to President-elect Obama and spoke of our two countries' "common values," such as, "Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, fundamental freedoms and market economy." No one, of course, with the slightest knowledge of modern Turkey gives any credence to such nonsense. (How many journalists can you throw in jail, how many people can you torture and kill before the world starts to take notice?) And truth is especially not served when Americans like Rahm Emmanuel give their unqualified support to Turkey's accession to the EU. As I wrote last May:
Turkey is not, cannot, will not be a truly viable candidate for membership in the EU as long as its government continues in its present form.
Unless the EU radically changes its Copenhagen criteria for entry, I see no reason why that assessment will change anytime soon. You might as well wait for the Blue Mosque to turn green.

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