Turkse Militairen

Turkse militairen die trots poseren met de afgehakte hoofden van Koerden.

In de jaren tachtig en negentig bezocht ik gebieden waar het Turkse leger met veel terreur de Turkse bevolking onderdrukte. Ik trok ook door zuid-oost Turkije waar een guerilla van het Koerdisch verzet gaande was. Overal zag ik de grootschalige terreur van het Turkse NAVO-leger. Ik schreef erover in tijdschriften en mijn reisboek Overal Ziet Men Zichzelf en maakte voor de VPRO een radioprogramma daarover. In totaal werden in de jaren negentig door de Turkse strijdkrachten 3400 Koerdische dorpen verwoest, werden meer dan 3 miljoen Koerden van hun geboortegrond verdreven en werden 37.000 mannen, vrouwen en kinderen vermoord, de meerderheid van hen Koerden. Het verbaast mij dan ook dat de commerciele massamedia zonder enige terughoudendheid in termen spreken van Turkse militairen die de seculiere democratie verdedigen tegen het zogeheten moslim fundamentalisme. Alsof Turkse burgers niet het recht hebben om op een democratisch wijze op een moslimpartij te stemmen, omdat het Westen dat niet wil. Leest u dit artikel van een van de best geinformeerde deskundigen.

´Unholy Alliance.

Commentary: How secularists and generals tried to take down Turkish democracy.
By Dilip Hiro
article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Recently Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. In late April, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country's top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting "secularism." When the minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the poll for president, the Constitutional Court, powerfully influenced by the military's threat, invalidated the parliament's vote for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a two-thirds quorum -- something that had never been an issue before.
This demonstrated vividly that secularists are not invariably the good guys engaged in a struggle with the irredeemably bad guys from the Islamic camp. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi or AKP) called the Court's verdict "a bullet fired at the heart of democracy." Other critics pointed out that earlier Presidents had been elected without the presence of two-thirds of the 550-member Parliament.
Here was an example of the complex interplay between secularism and Islam in a Muslim country. The Turkish secular elite, fearing a further loss of power, raised the cry of "Secularism in danger!" and got their way -- for now -- even though a recent poll showed that only 22% of Turks agreed with this assessment.
During its nearly five years in office, the AKP government, led by the charismatic, incorruptible Erdogan, has kept religion separate from its politics -- the sort of behavior the American Constitutional system used to emphasize -- while expanding democratic, human, and minority (that is, Kurdish) rights through the most thorough overhaul of Turkish laws in recent memory. The AKP has also been vigorously pursuing Turkey's full membership of the European Union (EU).
"The primary reason behind the intervention of the secular establishment was not the fear that Turkey would become Islamic," noted Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the German Marshall Find of the United States' Ankara Office, in an International Herald Tribune op-ed. "Their fear was that the democratization drive, led in part by hopes of entering the European Union, will erode their power."´

Lees verder http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/hiro_turkey.html?src=email&hed_20070514_ts1_unholyalliance