Gordon Taylor: Separatist Paranoia in Turkey
[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.]
The following article was published in Le Monde on December 27. It seemed to me, when I read it, that it needed to be seen by a lot more people, especially in the United States. Americans are famous for knowing little of the world, and our scattershot, drive-by media do nothing to correct the situation. Turkey, we are told, is a very important country, a great customer for our weapons merchants, and a "bridge between Europe and Asia." They are alleged to be a democracy, and Western in outlook. But I have yet to see an article in the American press which fully portrays the mad chauvinist police-state reality of modern Turkey. The following article by Guillaume Perrier begins to do that. Begins. Much more could be added, reams of material so damning to the Turkish state that the very rocks would cry out in despair. But the point which needs to be made is this: 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. And there is no power, domestic or foreign, that can change that government in any substantial way for the foreseeable future. Turkey is what it is: a place where the politicians pretend to govern and armed bullies pretend to let them, a land where the average liberal has more courage than a thousand Americans. Those like me who cherish their memories of this land need to start speaking out. The years of diplomacy and forbearance, of hope for democratic change, have left us with ruined villages, imprisoned journalists, and good people murdered while their killers are congratulated by the police. With that kind of record we may as well try truth.
[Following article translated by Gordon Taylor, who is responsible for all errors herein. All material in brackets [ ] added by the translator.]
Separatist Paranoia in Turkey
Guillaume Perrier
Le Monde
27 December 2007
“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” proclaims the national slogan, first enunciated by Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]. But in Turkey who really has access to this “happiness”?
Officially, it’s everybody in the land, without reference to race or creed. Yet in fact, members of religious minorities and certain ethnic categories remain second-class citizens. Remnants of Christian populations (Greeks, Armenians, or Syriacs), 15 million Kurds, and 10 million Muslim Alevis are regularly stigmatized. A part of the population continues to be perceived as a menace to national unity, eighty-four years after the foundation of the Republic. For in the collective mind, the “happiness of being a Turk” refers not to a territorial idea but to an ethnic definition based on race.
The repeated judicial harassment, the agression, indeed the murders committed against “internal enemies”, the “non-Turks”, bear witness to a climate of fear. [In 2007]First Italian priest Andrea Santoro, then Armenian journalist Hrant Dink were assassinated. In Malatya three evangelical Christian missionaries had their throats cut. More recently, on December 16, another Italian priest, Father Adriano Francini, was stabbed and critically wounded in Izmir. Furthermore, galvanized by the government’s anti-PKK campaign, groups of the extreme right have launched punitive expeditions targeting Kurds in Istanbul and Bursa. A series of racist crimes, by young indoctrinated ultranationalists, have been committed in the name of Turkish blood. And not for the first time in the country’s history. In 1955, for example, in the middle of the Cyprus crisis, rumor of an assault on the childhood home of Ataturk, in Thessaloniki, unleashed the “pogroms of September 6”. In Istanbul, businesses owned by Orthodox Greeks, also by Jews and Armenians, were sacked by the mob....
Read entire article at Progressive Historians (blog)
The following article was published in Le Monde on December 27. It seemed to me, when I read it, that it needed to be seen by a lot more people, especially in the United States. Americans are famous for knowing little of the world, and our scattershot, drive-by media do nothing to correct the situation. Turkey, we are told, is a very important country, a great customer for our weapons merchants, and a "bridge between Europe and Asia." They are alleged to be a democracy, and Western in outlook. But I have yet to see an article in the American press which fully portrays the mad chauvinist police-state reality of modern Turkey. The following article by Guillaume Perrier begins to do that. Begins. Much more could be added, reams of material so damning to the Turkish state that the very rocks would cry out in despair. But the point which needs to be made is this: 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. And there is no power, domestic or foreign, that can change that government in any substantial way for the foreseeable future. Turkey is what it is: a place where the politicians pretend to govern and armed bullies pretend to let them, a land where the average liberal has more courage than a thousand Americans. Those like me who cherish their memories of this land need to start speaking out. The years of diplomacy and forbearance, of hope for democratic change, have left us with ruined villages, imprisoned journalists, and good people murdered while their killers are congratulated by the police. With that kind of record we may as well try truth.
[Following article translated by Gordon Taylor, who is responsible for all errors herein. All material in brackets [ ] added by the translator.]
Separatist Paranoia in Turkey
Guillaume Perrier
Le Monde
27 December 2007
“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” proclaims the national slogan, first enunciated by Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]. But in Turkey who really has access to this “happiness”?
Officially, it’s everybody in the land, without reference to race or creed. Yet in fact, members of religious minorities and certain ethnic categories remain second-class citizens. Remnants of Christian populations (Greeks, Armenians, or Syriacs), 15 million Kurds, and 10 million Muslim Alevis are regularly stigmatized. A part of the population continues to be perceived as a menace to national unity, eighty-four years after the foundation of the Republic. For in the collective mind, the “happiness of being a Turk” refers not to a territorial idea but to an ethnic definition based on race.
The repeated judicial harassment, the agression, indeed the murders committed against “internal enemies”, the “non-Turks”, bear witness to a climate of fear. [In 2007]First Italian priest Andrea Santoro, then Armenian journalist Hrant Dink were assassinated. In Malatya three evangelical Christian missionaries had their throats cut. More recently, on December 16, another Italian priest, Father Adriano Francini, was stabbed and critically wounded in Izmir. Furthermore, galvanized by the government’s anti-PKK campaign, groups of the extreme right have launched punitive expeditions targeting Kurds in Istanbul and Bursa. A series of racist crimes, by young indoctrinated ultranationalists, have been committed in the name of Turkish blood. And not for the first time in the country’s history. In 1955, for example, in the middle of the Cyprus crisis, rumor of an assault on the childhood home of Ataturk, in Thessaloniki, unleashed the “pogroms of September 6”. In Istanbul, businesses owned by Orthodox Greeks, also by Jews and Armenians, were sacked by the mob....