Noam in Turkey

Hakki Alacakaptan nucleus at superonline.com
Sat Jan 26 07:18:45 PST 2002


Chris Doss wrote:

|| I'd also like to point out that, despite what you may have been lead to

|| believe, there is no "genocidal campaign" or "war of terror" against

|| Chechens in Russia. The abuses of the Russian Army, which are

|| legion, are

|| not the result of some Kremlin order. They are because the army

|| is broke.

To expand on that, let's take the flattening of Grozni. This is a result of Soviet military doctrine which has always favored massive artillery bombardment and trained/equipped itself accordingly. Added to that is the terrible shape the troops are in. The Soviet generals had no "targeted killing" capability like Israel's death squads so they only had the choice between sending in their untrained men to get slaughtered or blowing everything up.

Similarly, Turkish army counterinsurgency tactics gradually led up to the evacuation of the entire Kurdish rural population. The Turkish army's doctrine is traditionally based on numerical superiority and the Moslem willingness to become a casualty. For a time, officers fighting the PKK would send their men on one-way missions to the beyond, haranguing them about duty and bravery. When the casualties proved politically unacceptable, it seems the army had a brief flirtration with Vietnam-style "free-fire zones" - this is what I make of conversations with vets, where they would say that entire villages would be taken out with napalm or rockets if a single fleeing ARGK guerilla was suspected of hiding there. Finally, the army decided to empty the war zone of civilians, not only because they were killing too many civilians but also because the civlians were supplying manpower and food to the ARGK.

Interestingly, Milliyet columnist Derya Sazak[1] interviewed HADEP[2] veep Ahmet Turk[3] who said most Kurds who were forced to migrate were now unwilling to go back even with government help because they preferred to live in cities.

[1] a reformed fascist who's become a very credible pro-democracy conservative [2] HADEP is to the PKK what Sinn Fein is to the IRA [3] The man's last name is Turk. Ocalan doen't even speak Kurdish; the lazy bum never learned. Just shows how much the ethnic angle is overstated.



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