|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Chris Doss
||
||
|| Hakki, any comments?
||
|| BTW, the military just declared "final victory" in Chechnya.
||
|| Chris Doss
|| The Russia Journal
|| ---------------------------
||
||
|| The Times (UK)
|| JANUARY 10 2002
|| Turkey changes line on Chechen rebels (...)
The Turkish press hasn't reacted yet. The NTVMSNBC channel only released a short TASS wire report and one major paper had a 2-paragraph report from its Moscow correspondent containing the Russian govt press release. I may have missed something because Newstrove and Daypop came up empty and Google hasn't cached today's papers yet.
I would look at this within the broader prespective of Turkish fascists' and islamists' waking up from their dreams of a pan-Turkic central asian empire. The fascist party MHP is a partner in a 3-party centrist coalition and is slowly distancing itself from its mafia/death squad militant base in preparation for the next elections, where it intends to add the urban middle class to its largely rural constituency. The islamists have been largely subdued by the army.
Since the Soviet collapse, the MHP has worked hand-in-hand with its traditional allies, the police, the army, the intelligence service MIT, and the remnants of the Turkish Gladio, to link up ideologically with Turkic nationalists in ex-soviet republics. The islamists under Necmeddin Erbakan, who are the Muslim Brotherhood's Turkish representative, also concentrated on Chechnia and Uzbekistan. Erbakan partly financed the terrorists responsible for the 1997 bombing in Uzbekistan. He was forced to leave the govt by the army shortly afterwards (not implying a connection, I don't know).
The MHP was involved in the coup attempt in Azerbaijan. Both parties supported the Chechens. They started to have imperial dreams, when in actual fact the US was allowing them to play these pathetic games in exchange for disrupting Soviet influence. Moreover, the islamic terrorists in Uzbekistan were the pretext for the Centrasbat military alliance between the US, UK, and central asian republics, giving the US the base it used to fly in special forces to Jalalabad. The Chechens, needless to say, were part of the US plan to keep Russia out of the Caspian oil bonanza by shutting down their main pipeline.
What has changed now is not Turkey, which was merely a negligible US proxy (the main support for the Chechens being channeled through Qaeda by the Saudis), but US-Russian relations. The US has decided to let Putin in on the Great Game, and I would really love to know what the terms of the Bush-Putin deal really are. So over to you, Chris.
Hakki