|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Doug Henwood
|| <http://www.indexonline.org/news/20020109_turkey.shtml>
||
|| Turkey: Book of lectures attacked
|| Chomsky to attend
|| publisher's trial
||
|| Veteran critic of US foreign policy Noam Chomsky is the focus of a
|| court case brought by a top Turkish anti-terrorism prosecutor, citing
|| a Turkish translation of a collection of his essays. Publisher Fatih
|| TaÞ faces a year in jail. Chomsky will travel to Turkey to attend his
|| trial.
|| (...)
Well the Great Man is sure to make a big hit here. I know that the head of the linguistics dept. where I got my BA and who was Chomsky's student will go gaga. I'm sure the judge will find a way to keep the publisher out of jail after all the publicity the trial is bound to get. Most high-profile book trials end happily nowadays.
Still, this is the 3rd post on this subject. What's the big deal? If you write or publish anything about Kurds in Turkey, you go on trial, it's simple. Just as most U.S. folk would like to see the orange people in Guantanamo swing, most Turks would like to see Ocalan at the end of a rope, and the PKK reduced to a bloody mash. I forget the exact number of conscripts who got killed in the war but it's more than 10K. Turks want revenge for that. That's one reason why they're rooting for the fascist MHP party, which has stuffed the entire state apparatus full of its militants and cadres over the years. They are a gift of the PKK to Turkey. The fact that Chomsky's publisher is on trial is part of that gift. The fact that there are restrictions on Kurdish language and culture is due in no small degree to the PKK.
Maybe an anecdote will illustrate what the army's Kurdish policy is like: When I was doing my service just before the war started (as a buck private), our Kurdish non-coms would get together at the canteen, take out their saz and sing Kurdish songs. They would speak Zaza with each other when officers weren't around. I don't think they can do that anymore nowadays. In contrast, there were Jews in my battalion and although they speak French or a Spanish dialect with each other in private, you never heard them speaking anything but Turkish.
An interview with Taner Akcam, a leader of the Turkish RevolutionaryYouth (Dev Genc) group was published recently where he recounts what a nut Ocalan is and the stalinist purges and bloodletting that went on in the PKK. I'm amazed at the number of people that get taken by this second-rate Kim Il Sung clone.
Luckily, despite the 15-year war, here has been no "ethnic cleansing" of Kurds as Chomsky erroneously defends. At least 1/2 million Kurds have been forced to relocate from the conflict zones for military reasons. It's illegal, brutal, and there were deaths but it's no ethnic cleansing. Those displaced Kurds are being allowed very gradually to return now. You don't have that if there's ethnic cleansing. There's no ethnic hatred against Kurds, who mostly live in the western parts of the country anyway (not in "Kurdistan"). That said, the police, who are fascist thugs and crooks (courtesy CIA and PKK), will prey on Kurds to a certain degree - to a heavy degree in the war zone. But police harassment isn't ethnic cleansing either. Armenians and Greeks have been ethnically cleansed in Turkey, not Kurds.
Hakki