Search Results for: our two thugs

The master of false-Flag operation Davutoglu Accuse Armenian Diaspora work with Gulen movements

February 12, 2015 By administrator

Davutoglu, are you NATO member or ISIS?

Armenian diaspora in US denies Davutoglu fabricated claims on cooperation with Gülen Movement. Fact it was him davutoglu when he was FM said we opened embassies all over the world to serve Gulen movement.

Read Claire Berlinskiour Article our two thugs Erdogan and Fethullah Gülen

Edvin Minassian, who is among the executives of the US-based Armenian Bar Association, told the weekly that the fact that the many members of the Armenian diaspora in the US work for the closure of charter schools run by Turkish people affiliated with the movement is a clear sign that the two groups are at odds with each other.

The director of the US-based Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Aram Hamparian, was also quoted by Agos as saying that members of the movement in the US openly and actively works against the policies of Armenian community in the US. He argued that members of the movement supports efforts by the Turkish government to “prevent a just and truth-based solution to the Armenian genocide issue” and siding with Baku in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

Harut Sassounian, the publisher of The California Courier, an English-Language Armenian weekly based in Glendale, California, also termed Davutoğlu’s statements that members of the Gülen movement support the Armenian community in the US as “one of lies of Davutoğlu and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”

CYPRUS: A NATION BETRAYED, The Trial of Henry Kissinger

May 27, 2023 By administrator

In his explosive new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens argues that the former US secretary of state should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Here, in our second exclusive extract, he explains why Kissinger should be held responsible for the bloody invasion of Cyprus

Christopher Hitchens

Mon 26 Feb 2001 08.40 EST

In Years of Upheaval, the second volume of his trilogy of memoirs, Henry Kissinger found the subject of the 1974 Cyprus catastrophe so awkward that he decided to postpone consideration of it: “I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today.”

In most of his writing about himself, Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, ill- prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him some self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

Kissinger now argues, in the long-delayed third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, that he was prevented and distracted, by Watergate and the meltdown of the Nixon presidency, from taking an interest in the crucial triangle of force between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. This is a bizarre disclaimer: the proximity of Cyprus to the Middle East was a factor never absent from US strategic thinking, and there was no reason of domestic policy to prevent the region from engaging his attention. Furthermore, the very implosion of Nixonian authority, cited as a reason for Kissinger’s absence of mind, in fact bestowed extraordinary powers upon him.

When he became secretary of state in 1973, Kissinger took care to retain his post as special assistant to the president for national security affairs, or national security adviser. This made him the first and only secretary of state to hold the chairmanship of the elite and secretive Forty Committee, which considered and approved covert actions by the CIA. Mean while, as chairman of the National Security Council, he held a position where every important intelligence plan passed across his desk. His former NSC aide, Roger Morris, was not exaggerating by much, if at all, when he said that Kissinger’s dual position, plus Nixon’s eroded status, made him “no less than acting chief of state for national security”.

Kissinger gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of Renewal. In the former, he says plainly: “I had always taken it for granted that the next intercommunal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention.” That is, it would at least risk the prospect of a war within Nato between Greece and Turkey, and would certainly involve the partition of the island. That this was common knowledge may not be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter volume, Kissinger repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so burdened with Watergate) would have sought “a crisis in the eastern Mediterranean between two Nato allies”.

These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third, which appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described without adornment as “the proximate cause of most of Cyprus’s tensions”. Makarios was the democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic. His rule was challenged, and the independence of Cyprus was threatened, by a military dictatorship in Athens and a highly militarised government in Turkey, both of which sponsored rightwing gangster organisations on the island, and both of which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part of it. Several attempts had been made on Makarios’s life. To describe him as “the proximate cause” of the tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.

This same judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of Kissinger’s presentation. If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox community) is the “proximate cause” of the tensions, then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them. If one can demonstrate that there was such a removal plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis – as he self-pityingly asks us to disbelieve – but for a solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for the region, does not change the equation. It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the “solution” depended, was in practice a failure. But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

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It is, from Kissinger’s own record, as well as from the record of the subsequent official inquiry, easy to demonstrate that he did have advance knowledge of the plan to depose Makarios. He admits as much himself, by noting that the Greek dictator Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the secret police, was determined to mount a coup in Cyprus and bring the island under the control of Athens. This was one of the better-known facts of the situation, as was the more embarrassing fact that Brigadier Ioannides was dependent on US military aid and political sympathy. His police state had been expelled from the Council of Europe and blocked from joining the EEC, and it was largely the advantage conferred by his agreement to “home port” the US Sixth Fleet, and host a string of US air and intelligence bases, that kept him in power. This policy was highly controversial in Congress and in the American press, and the argument over it was part of Kissinger’s daily bread long before Watergate.

Thus it was understood in general that the Greek dictatorship, a US client, wished to see Makarios overthrown and had already tried to have him killed. (Overthrow and assassination, incidentally, are effectively coterminous in this account; there was no possibility of leaving such a charismatic leader alive, and those who sought his removal invariably intended his death.) This was also understood in particular . The most salient proof is this. In May 1974, two months before the coup in Nicosia, which Kissinger later claimed was a shock, he received a memorandum from the head of his state department Cyprus desk, Thomas Boyatt. Boyatt summarised the reasons for believing that a Greek junta attack on Cyprus was imminent. He further argued that, in the absence of a US representation to Athens, warning the dictators to desist, it might be assumed that the United States was indifferent to this. And he added what everybody knew – that such a coup, if it went forward, would beyond doubt trigger a Turkish invasion.

Prescient memos are a dime a dozen in Washington after a crisis; they are often then read for the first time, or leaked to the press or Congress. But Kissinger now admits that he saw this document in real time, while engaged in his shuttle between Syria and Israel (both of them within half an hour’s flying time of Cyprus). Yet no démarche bearing his name or carrying his authority was issued to the Greek junta.

A short while afterwards, Kissinger received a call from Senator J William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. Senator Fulbright had been briefed about the impending coup by a senior Greek dissident journalist in Washington named Elias P Demetracopoulos. He told Kissinger that steps should be taken to avert the planned Greek action, and he gave three reasons. The first was that it would repair some of the moral damage done by the US governments indulgence of the junta. The second was that it would head off a confrontation between Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean. The third was that it would enhance US prestige on the island. Kissinger declined to take the recommended steps, on the bizarre grounds that he could not intervene in Greek “internal affairs” at a time when the Nixon administration was resisting pressure from Senator Henry Jackson to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry. However odd this line of argument, it still makes it impossible for Kissinger to claim, as he still does, that he had had no warn ing.

So there was still no high-level US concern registered with Athens. The difficulty is sometimes presented as one of protocol or etiquette, as if Kissinger’s regular custom was to whisper and tread lightly. But again I remind you that Henry Kissinger, in addition to his formal diplomatic eminence, was also head of the Forty Committee, and supervisor of covert action, and was dealing in private with an Athens regime that had long-standing CIA ties. Boyatt’s memoranda, warning of what was to happen, were classified as secret and have still never been released. Asked to testify to a Congressional hearing, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to appear. He was only finally permitted to do so in order that he might avoid a citation for contempt. His evidence was taken in “executive session”, with the hearing room cleared of staff, reporters and visitors.

Events continued to gather pace. On July 1 1974, three senior officials of the Greek foreign ministry, all known for their moderate views on the Cyprus question, publicly tendered their resignations. On July 3, President Makarios made public an open letter to the Greek junta, which made the direct accusation of foreign interference and subversion. He called for the withdrawal from Cyprus of the officers responsible.

Some days after the coup, which eventually occurred on July 15 1974, when challenged at a press conference about his apparent failure to foresee or avert it, Kissinger replied that “the information was not lying around in the streets”. Actually, it almost was in the streets. But more importantly, it had been available to him round the clock, in both his diplomatic and his intelligence capacities. His decision to do nothing was therefore a direct decision to do something, or to let something be done.

To the rest of the world, two things were obvious about the coup. The first was that it had been instigated from Athens and carried out with the help of regular Greek forces, and was thus a direct intervention in the internal affairs of one country by another. The second was that it violated all the existing treaties governing the status of Cyprus. The obvious and unsavoury illegality was luridly emphasised by the junta itself, which chose a notorious chauvinist gunman named Nicos Sampson to be its proxy “president”. Sampson must have been well known to the chairman of the Forty Committee as a long-standing recipient of financial support from the CIA; he also received money for his fanatical Nicosia newspaper Makhi (Combat) from a pro-junta CIA proxy in Athens, Savvas Constantopoulos, the publisher of the pro-junta organ Eleftheros Kosmos (Free World). No European government treated Sampson as anything but a pariah, for the brief nine days in which he held power and launched a campaign of murder against his democratic Greek opponents. But Kissinger told the US envoy in Nicosia to receive Sampson’s “foreign minister” as foreign minister, thus making the United States the first and only government to extend de facto recognition. (At this point, it might be emphasised, the whereabouts of Makarios were unknown. His palace had been shelled and his death announced on the junta’s radio. He had in fact made his escape, and was able to broadcast the fact a few days afterwards – to the irritation of certain well-placed persons.) In his 1986 memoir The Truth, published in Athens in 1986, the then head of the Greek armed forces, General Grigorios Bonanos, records that the junta’s attack on Cyprus brought a message of approval and support, delivered to its intelligence service by no less a man than Thomas A Pappas – the chosen intermediary between the junta and the Nixon-Kissinger administration.

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In Washington, Kissinger’s press spokesman Robert Anderson flatly denied that the coup – later described by Makarios from the podium of the United Nations as “an invasion” – constituted foreign intervention. “No,” he replied to a direct question on this point. “In our view there has been no outside intervention.” This surreal position was not contradicted by Kissinger when he met with the ambassador of Cyprus and failed to offer the customary condolences on the reported death of his president – the “proximate cause”, we now learn from him, of all the unpleasantness. When asked if he still recognised the elected Makarios government as the legal one, Kissinger doggedly and astonishingly refused to answer. When asked if the United States was moving towards recognition of the Sampson regime, his spokesman declined to deny it. When Makarios came to Washington on July 22, the state department was asked whether he would be received by Kissinger “as a private citizen, as Archbishop, or as President of Cyprus?” The answer? “He [Kissinger] is meeting with Archbishop Makarios on Monday.” Every other government in the world, save the collapsing Greek dictatorship, recognised Makarios as the legitimate head of the Cyprus republic. Kissinger’s unilateralism on the point is without diplomatic precedent, and argues strongly for his collusion and sympathy with the armed handful of thugs who felt the same way.

It is worth emphasising that Makarios was invited to Washington in the first place, as elected and legal president of Cyprus, by Senator J William Fulbright of the Senate foreign relations committee, and by his counterpart Congressman Thomas Morgan, chairman of the house foreign affairs committee. Credit for this invitation belongs to Elias Demetracopoulos, the Washington-based dissident journalist, who had long warned of the coup. He it was who conveyed the invitation to Makarios, who was then in London meeting the British foreign secretary. This initiative crowned a series of anti-junta activities by this journalist, who had already profoundly irritated Kissinger and become a special object of his spite. At the very last moment, and with very poor grace, Kissinger was compelled to announce that he was receiving Makarios in his presidential and not his episcopal capacity.

Since Kissinger himself tells us that he had always known or assumed that another outbreak of violence in Cyprus would trigger a Turkish military intervention, we can assume in our turn that he was not surprised when such an intervention came. Nor does he seem to have been very much disconcerted. While the Greek junta remained in power, his efforts were principally directed to shielding it from retaliation. He was opposed to the return of Makarios to the island, and strongly opposed to Turkish or British use of force (Britain being a guarantor power with a treaty obligation and troops in place on Cyprus) to undo the Greek coup. This same counsel of inertia or inaction – amply testified to in his own memoirs – translated later into strict and repeated admonitions against any measures to block a Turkish invasion. Sir Tom McNally, then the chief political adviser to Britain’s then foreign secretary and future prime minister, James Callaghan, has since disclosed that Kissinger “vetoed” at least one British military action to pre-empt a Turkish landing.

This may seem paradoxical, but the long-standing sympathy for a partition of Cyprus, repeatedly expressed by the state and defence departments, makes it seem much less so. The demographic composition of the island (82% Greek to 18% Turkish) made it more logical for the partition to be imposed by Greece. But a second-best was to have it imposed by Turkey. And, once Turkey had conducted two brutal invasions and occupied almost 40% of Cypriot territory, Kissinger exerted himself very strongly to protect Ankara from any congressional reprisal for this outright violation of international law, and promiscuous and illegal misuse of US weaponry. He became so pro-Turkish, indeed, that it was as if he had never heard of the Greek colonels. (Though his expressed dislike of the returned Greek democratic leaders supplied an occasional reminder.)

Not all the elements of this partitionist policy can be charged to Kissinger personally; he inherited the Greek junta and the official dislike of Makarios. However, even in the dank obfuscatory prose of his own memoirs, he does admit what can otherwise be concluded from independent sources. Using covert channels, and short-circuiting the democratic process in his own country, he made himself an accomplice in a plan of political assassination which, when it went awry, led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, the violent uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees, and the creation of an unjust and unstable amputation of Cyprus which constitutes a serious threat to peace a full quarter-century later. On July 10 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights adopted a report, prepared by 18 distinguished jurists and chaired by Professor JES Fawcett, resulting from a year’s research into the consequences of the Turkish invasion. It found that the Turkish army had engaged in the deliberate killing of civilians, in the execution of prisoners, in the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, in the arbitrary punishment and detention of civilians, and in systematic acts of rape, torture, and looting. A large number of “disappeared” persons, both prisoners of war and civilians, are still “missing” from this period. They include a dozen holders of US passports, which is evidence in itself of an indiscriminate strategy, when conducted by an army dependent on US aid and matériel.

Perhaps it was a reluctance to accept his responsibility for these outrages, as well as his responsibility for the original coup, that led Kissinger to tell a bizarre sequence of lies to his new friends the Chinese. On October 2 1974, he held a high-level meeting in New York with Qiao Guanhua, vice-foreign minister of the People’s Republic. It was the first substantive Sino-American meeting since the visit of Deng Xiaoping, and the first order of business was Cyprus. The memorandum, which is headed “Top secret/sensitive/exclusively eyes only”, has Kissinger first rejecting China’s public claim that he had helped engineer the removal of Makarios. “We did not. We did not oppose Makarios.” (This claim is directly belied by his own memoirs.) He says: “When the coup occurred I was in Moscow”, which he was not. He says: “My people did not take these intelligence reports [concerning an impending coup] seriously,” even though they had. He says that neither did Makarios take them seriously, even though Makarios had publicly denounced the Athens junta for its coup plans. Kissinger then makes the amazing claim: “We knew the Soviets had told the Turks to invade”, which would make this the first Soviet-instigated invasion to be conducted by a Nato army and paid for with US aid.

A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. So perhaps some of this hysterical lying is explained by its context – by the need to enlist China’s anti-Soviet instincts. But the total of falsity is so impressive that it suggests something additional, something more like denial or delusion, or even a confession by other means.

Extracted from The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, to be published by Verso, price £15, in May. © Christopher Hitchens.

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/26/extract.features11?CMP=share_btn_tw

Why are foreign mobsters, and drug gangs attracted to Turkey?

February 2, 2023 By administrator

By Fehim Tastekin,

A wave of foreign mobster violence in Turkey has raised the alarm that the country has become a safe haven for criminal kingpins from the region and beyond.

Bloody score-settlings and shootouts between foreign thugs have been on the rise in Turkey, stoking criticism that lax legislation and inadequate action on the ground have made the country a safe haven for crime bosses from the region and beyond.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu maintains the Turkish police have been highly successful against mafia rings, including in thwarting attempts by Balkan and Caucasian gangs to base themselves in Turkey. From 2016 to 2022, the security forces broke up 550 mafia-style criminal groups, among them 16 regional ones, Soylu said this week. Skeptics, however, believe that those groups are mostly “small fish,” given that the presence of big-time foreign criminals in the country often comes to light as a result of gang wars rather than police pursuits.

In one of the highest-profile murders, Jovan Vukotic, the leader of Montenegro’s notorious Skaljari drug gang, was gunned down in his car in central Istanbul in September by two hitmen on a motorbike. Members of a rival clan, Kavac, and their Turkish collaborators stand accused of the murder.

The feud between the Skaljari and Kavac clans is believed to have claimed at least 50 lives across the Balkans since 2015, prompting Vukotic to move from Montenegro to Turkey. Vukotic had been arrested in Turkey’s Mediterranean city of Antalya in 2018 before being deported to Serbia and then to Montenegro, where he spent a stint behind bars. Soylu had bragged about the nabbing of Vukotic but, as it turns out, he was able to return to Turkey in October 2021 and obtain a residence permit, using a forged passport.

The investigation into his murder resulted in the arrest of four alleged members of the Kavac clan in Istanbul, among them two high-ranking figures. One of them, Radoje Zivkovic, had been deported to Serbia in 2018, but used a forged passport to reenter Turkey. His cellphone reportedly turned up pictures of a Skaljari member who was allegedly tortured to death after being abducted in Istanbul in 2020. The body is believed to have been buried in the garden of a posh villa in Istanbul but removed before the Turkish police launched the probe. The resident of the villa turned out to be wanted Serbian drug trafficker Zeljko Bojanic, who was arrested in November after entering Turkey in 2019 with a forged Macedonian passport. Bojanic is reportedly an associate of Darko Saric, dubbed the Balkan cocaine king, and had moved to Istanbul to escape gang wars.

For Timur Soykan, an investigative Turkish journalist who has authored a book on underworld vendettas, the events show that “Kavac leaders felt safe” in Istanbul. “The fact that they did not leave Turkey before the murder [of Vukotic] indicates that they were confident they would not be caught,” he wrote in a recent article.

In mid-January, an alleged Georgian crime boss, Revaz Lordkipanidze, was gunned down in the Black Sea province of Trabzon in what the media described as score-settling between Georgian and Bulgarian mobsters. Two Russians using a car with a Bulgarian license plate were arrested over the murder.

Cengiz Erdinc, a Turkish journalist who closely follows the issue, told Al-Monitor that upscale restaurants in Istanbul and Antalya have become meeting points of the Russian-speaking mafia, involving Russian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and other gangs, not only to discuss important decisions but also for rituals to “coronate” senior mobsters as “vor v zakone” or “thief-in-law” — a status of authority over lower-ranking members. Lordkipanidze had held such rituals in Trabzon for six years.

According to Erdinc, an ongoing vendetta between once allied Caucasian gangs is traced back to a dispute about leadership positions at a 2003 meeting in Istanbul. He lists at least four Azerbaijani mobsters slain in tit-for-tat killings in Turkey since then, including high-ranking figures such as Rovshan Janiyev, who was gunned down in Istanbul in 2016, and Nadir Salifov, who was shot dead by his own bodyguard while dining in an Antalya hotel in 2020. An associate of Janiyev was killed in Istanbul in late October.

Foreign gangsters pulled guns on each other in two separate incidents in crowded shopping malls in Istanbul in September and October. Earlier this month, New Zealand-born bike gang boss Duax Hohepa Ngakuru, wanted for drug trafficking and money laundering, was arrested in Turkey, where he had been reportedly living for some time.

Ahmet Sik, a lawmaker for the Workers Party of Turkey, submitted written parliamentary questions to the interior and justice ministers last week, urging them to explain how so many foreign mobsters are able to harbor in Turkey. “Do the Interior Ministry and prosecutors investigate [them] only when score-settling murders occur and only within the scope of those murders?” he asked.

According to economy writer Bahadir Ozgur, Turkey has become attractive to crime bosses because it is relatively easy for them to enter the country and obtain residence permits, foster ties with people in the bureaucracy, the police and politics at low costs and set up companies with local partners to launder money. He recalled that Turkey offers citizenship to foreigners who would invest just $400,000 in real estate, pointing also to a law introduced several years ago that facilitated the entry of money of unknown origin to Turkey.

“The character of the government makes things easier,” Ozgur told Al-Monitor, adding that Turkey lacks agreements on the extradition of criminals with many countries and often implements arbitrarily existing ones.

“The Russian-speaking mafia, in particular, sees Turkey as a safe haven,” Ozgur said, noting that an intensified crackdown on drug traffickers in Europe and toughened penalties in Russia were driving crime bosses to Turkey. “They take a base here but do not carry out their activities here, which is why they [generally] remain untouched. And their score-settlings are not with the Turkish mafia,” he explained.

Criminals from the Balkans have been able to enter Turkey with forged Macedonian passports even after North Macedonia busted a passport-forging ring involving policemen in 2021, Ozgur said.

For Erdinc, the mobsters are not “migrating” but rather “fleeing” to Turkey, mainly because of Russia’s introduction of heavier penalties against organized crime in 2019 and the gang wars that erupted in the Balkans in 2015 in the wake of Balkan Warrior, an international police operation that dealt a heavy blow on Balkan networks smuggling cocaine to Western Europe. They usually lay low in Turkey to escape the radar of the police, he said.

Turkey’s “lax” regulations on illicit money is a factor that draws foreign criminals to the country, but it is not the sole one, Erdinc argued. He noted that pressure on mobsters in Europe turned up in recent years after the authorities cracked or dismantled encrypted communication platforms such as Encrochat and Sky ECC, which were widely used by the underworld. “As a result, some fled to Turkey. They have a relatively relaxed environment here because the findings are not shared with Turkey,” he said. “They are in exile here, but this is not a migration — they are here only for a while. So, they run their operations from Turkey and, naturally, clash here.”

If Sweden won’t stand up to Turkey, the US should

November 10, 2022 By administrator

by Michael Rubin,

There’s a Turkish joke about a political prisoner who goes into his prison’s library and gives the librarian a list of books he’d like to check out. The librarian looks at his list and then responds apologetically, “I’m sorry. We don’t have these books. We only have their authors.”

Turkey has already humiliated Sweden by successfully extorting concessions in the hope that the Swedish government could get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lift his consensus-busting veto on Sweden’s NATO accession. The Swedish foreign minister has already said that Sweden will distance itself from the Kurdish militias in Syria who liberated captured Yezidis and fought the Islamic State at a time when Erdogan supported the militant group.

Erdogan is now demanding more. He has already given Stockholm a list of dissidents and activists he wants Sweden to extradite. Because of Erdogan’s intolerance of dissent, he has launched a multidecade crackdown on the Turkish press at home. Turkey now ranks below Qatar and China-controlled Hong Kong in Reporters Without Borders press freedom rankings, and is barely above Russia. Now, he seeks to leverage his NATO veto to export his purge.

Today, the best journalism about Turkey occurs outside its borders. Many top-tier journalists live in Stockholm. This has always frustrated Erdogan. Two years ago, Abdullah Bozkurt survived an attack in Sweden apparently perpetrated by thugs under Erdogan’s command. State-run Turkish press have also published photographs of dissident journalist Bulent Kenes in Stockholm. That Turkey would disseminate their home addresses also puts them in the crosshairs of Turkish extremists who act out of adulation of Erdogan and without regard for the law of the countries in which they now live.

Erdogan hates the fact that websites such as Nordic Monitor and Ahval continue to publish hard-hitting (but carefully researched) news stories about events in Turkey and the corruption of Erdogan and his ruling circle. Accordingly, he now demands that Sweden detain and extradite Bozkurt, Kenes, and others where he can punish them like he has so many other reporters who refused to transform into court journalists or be silent. Should Sweden oblige, they will bring shame upon themselves and invite further extortion. In effect, Erdogan hopes to transform Sweden into a Scandinavian Azerbaijan, that is, a proxy state that has forfeited its sovereignty for the sake of short-term favor.

Swedish leaders should have been smarter. Blackmailers and bullies always make new demands when victims cave in to their initial ones. A far better strategy would be for existing NATO members to play hardball and to give Erdogan a choice between dropping his objections or exacerbating his already dire economy. Leverage can go both ways.

At the same time, the Biden administration could unravel Erdogan’s blackmail attempt by both offering Turkish journalists asylum and encouraging U.S.-funded grant-giving organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy or United States Institute of Peace to underwrite the journalism that Erdogan, like so many other autocrats, fears.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/if-sweden-wont-stand-up-to-turkey-the-us-should

Black January: Armenian Massacres in Baku – 1990

January 13, 2022 By administrator

This chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book – Black and Green; Karabakh Diary

Russian language and literature teacher, Nelly Ghukasyan had moved from Baku to Armenia in November of 1988, when the massacres of Armenians and the ethnic cleansing of Gyanja and other locations in Azerbaijan were under way. She settles in a hotel in Etchmiadzin and sometime later, at the ‘great appeal’ of Vezirov, together with tens of other families, returns to Azerbaijan.

However, a short time later, Ghukasyan is forced to once again abandon her city. In January 1990, the Armenian neighborhoods of Baku become a new theatre for massacres of Armenians. Unlike the other highly Armenian-populated regions in Azerbaijan, thousands of Armenians still remained in Baku. Over the previous two years, they could have exchanged their apartments or simply saved their lives, but up until the end they believed in Baku’s internationalism.

“I was secretly peeping out of my window and watching what was happening in the streets. They were lighting bonfires and looting vehicles carrying the property of Armenians. Alla Khachanyan lived on the second floor of our building. When they started to break down her door with an axe, she [Alla] threw herself out of the window on to the street; they were throwing people and furniture out of the windows of high-rises. It was a horrific picture. When we requested assistance from the soldiers, we were told that they did not have any such orders. Azerbaijani refugees from Yerevan hid us in their apartment when the Popular Front assailants were breaking down the apartment doors of Armenians. With the assistance of our Russian daughter-in-law, my husband and I reached the port in Baku, and from there, Krasnovodsk (present-day Turkmenbashi)”, recalls Ghukasyan with horror.

The media of the time recorded: “The Soviet Georgia ferryboat approaches the port of Krasnovodsk and tired and exhausted people step down the ship’s gangplank. ‘In the first few days it was horrible to see barefoot, beaten, beleaguered people. Two individuals, a man of 85 and a woman of 90 who had been beaten, had died on board from their wounds. We sent some of them to the local hospital,’ said one of the heads of the Krasnovodsk police, Karmazin. The secretary of the city committee, Muravyova said, ‘We received more than ten thousand refugees. We sent almost all of them to Yerevan by helicopter. It was a terrible sight.’

Just as in Sumgait, the actions of the attackers were particularly striking in their viciousness. They were throwing people off their balconies in high-rise buildings; the mob was attacking with iron rods and knives, killing Armenians and appropriating their apartments and property. It is impossible to say exactly how many Armenians were killed during the massacres in Baku; the Armenians talk about 150 – including those who were injured and died several days later in Turkmenistan and other places. Azerbaijani researcher Arif Yumusov mentions 86.

In December of 1989 they were already dismissing those Armenians remaining in Baku from their places of work. The names of those more disobedient or slow directors who wittingly or unwittingly were not fulfilling that demand, were posted on special notice boards on Lieutenant Schmidt Street, in front of the residence of the Popular Front. The names of hundreds of other Armenians who were still working in Azerbaijan’s Communist Party and within the KGB structure of Azerbaijan where also posted on those boards. In addition, similar announcements were posted on the old columns of a former synagogue, which had been pronounced Rashid Beybutov’s Theater of Song, several years earlier.

The Komsomolskaya Pravda Moscow newspaper wrote: “On the eve of June 13^th, about 50 thousand people, on leaving the rally in Lenin Square, separated into groups, massacred, caused destruction, lit fires, tortured and killed. There were no citizen of Baku in those arrested; they were all from Armenia, NK and Nakhijevan: ‘Yerevani Azeris’.”

In June 1990, one of the leaders of the Popular Front, Etibar Mamedov said, “I myself witnessed them killing two Armenians near to the railway station. The mob assembled and poured petrol on them and set them alight. The Nasim area police station was two hundred meters away; there were 400 to 500 soldiers there, who passed by just 20 meters from the charred bodies and did nothing to disperse the mob.” After describing this horrific scene, Mamedov vindicates the Popular Front. “It was our activists who surrounded the area and demanded that the police disperse the mob.”

The massacres of Armenians in Baku were taking place at a time when the Popular Front was striving for power in Azerbaijan. On the one hand, the leadership of the Azerbaijan communist party, in order to maintain its authority, was expecting Moscow’s assistance against the Popular Front and on the other hand was cooperating with it.

“Coverage of a meeting between a factory worker and the First Secretary was broadcast on December 11^th 1989. The worker asked Vezirov what was to become of the Karabakh issue. Vizirov replied excitedly, ‘Everything is going to be fine. You will see soon. The Communist party and the Popular Front are uniting for the sake of Karabakh.’ What did Vezirov mean by saying, uniting efforts? At one time, he refused our proposal of cooperation with the restructuring-supporting Popular Front and now he is prepared to unite with the slaughtering, trouble-making Popular Front. Was he aware that there was a massacre being prepared? That he was to be removed and a coup d’états was being planned? Or was he so removed from reality that he could not see the obvious? Or was he aware of everything and was pushing forward with Moscow’s gambit to destroy the Popular Front?” asks Zardusht Alizadeh.

Prior to the massacres in Baku, negotiations were being conducted between, on the one hand Vezirov and his deputy Polyanchiko, the leader of the NK’s Organizational Committee, and on the other side, the Popular Front triad, Etibar Mamedov, Neymet Panahov and Rahim Ghaziev. An agreement is reached to create a National defense council [NDC] with the aim of organizing the mass deportation of NK Armenians. The announcement of the creation of the NDC presided over by Abulfaz Aliyev (Elchibey) was made on June 13 in Azadliq (previously Lenin) Square. The other members of the council were: Mamedov, Panahov, Ghaziev and Khalig Bahadr (an unknown journalist and radical nationalist). The rally passed with a spirit of patriotism, with anti-Armenian slogans. During the rally the speakers announced that some Armenian had axed an Azerbaijani to death. The rally ended with the call ‘Death to Armenians’ and the crowd dispersed. Sensible people hurried home but the thugs scattered throughout the city, as they already had names and addresses.

“At night, the day before the massacres, the other hero of the nation appeared with his entourage on the television screen: Panahov, who had only six or eight years of education. Hatred and evil; these were familiar and common. What was new and unexpected was his reasoning concerning Vezirov: that he should be respected as a leader, that those calling him Veziryan(Armenian second names end with yan) were traitors to the nation. This belated alliance did not help Vezirov against those whom he had considered whelps seeking power. A few days later he [Vezirov] became a refugee, just like the hated Armenians had been for him,” writes Irina Mosesova in her eye-witness memoirs.

The role that Polyanichko played during the days of the Baku bloodshed is conflicting. Logic, and the position he held, led to the assumption that Polyanichko would not cooperate with the anti-Russian Popular Front, moreover, with the extreme wing of this party: which he was in fact doing. Further, not only was he keeping close contact with the leaders of the Popular Front, but he was offering them important advice. He insisted that the Popular Front should be developed as a national and Islamic movement, otherwise the nation would not believe in it. On his advice, the colors green and blue were added to the flag.

“The Koran was Polyanichko’s favorite book. Whenever he was welcoming anyone, the Koran, its pages well dog-eared, would be on the table,” Leyla Yunusova, one of the former leaders of the Popular Front has said. Polyanichko’s habit of keeping the Koran close by him has also been noted by the USSR ambassador in Afghanistan, Nikolai Yegorichev. He called it “Building socialism with Lenin in one hand and the Koran in the other.”

Gorbachev declares on Soviet central television that the events in Baku have become tragic, “slaughter, killings, they were evicting innocent people from their homes and deporting them”. The first and last president of the Soviet Union, as in the case of Sumgait, avoided calling a spade, a spade. As in Sumgait, so also in Baku, the army are called in only after the slaughter of the Armenians has ended. It seems the army might not have been called in at all if Soviet authority had not been at risk.

“In Azerbaijan, the activities of the extreme groups were increasingly taking on an anti-state, anti-constitution and anti-democratic nature. In some areas the legal bodies of authority were dismissed, government structures were destroyed. The technical-engineering structures along hundreds of kilometers of state border were destroyed. In practice, the issue of seizing authority by brute force was not concealed. Things could not go on like that,” said Gorbachev.

On January 10^th, Alakram Gummatov contacts Etibar Mamedov from the town of Lenkoran which is in the south-east of Azerbaijan and populated predominantly by Farsi-speaking Talish, to inform him that the Popular Front is preparing to seize power. Towards the end of 1989 the Popular Front had seized power in an attack on Jalilabad (also in the south-east, close to the Iranian border). That could be considered the first time in the 70-year history of the USSR that a Soviet authority was overthrown. Panahov who was in the front line of those who seized power at Jalilabad, rushes to Nakhijevan so that he can participate on December 31^st in the destruction of barbed wire and watch towers on that section of the Soviet-Iranian border.

One of the leaders of the Nakhijevan division of the Popular Front, Arif Rahimoghlu later recounted how people, full of exuberance and anger, were destroying the barbed wire. Previously the Popular Front had decided to clear the border of barbed wire in the first ten days of December, but Elchibey instructed the destruction of the borders on December 31^st. The KGB of the USSR avoids putting up any resistance. In its one-year of power, the Popular Front proclaimed December 31, World Azerbaijani Solidarity day.

On January 15, while the slaughter of the Armenians was continuing in Baku, the USSR’s Supreme Council passed the ‘State of Emergency in NK and several other regions’ decree. A State of Emergency was imposed in NK, and neighboring districts of Aghdam, Lachin, Mirbashir, Kelbajar, Jebrayil, Fizuli and Ghubatlu, and later, Shahumyan. A stage of emergency was announced in Baku only on January 19^th when, in reality, the slaughter of the Armenians had ceased and there were no Armenians left in Baku.

Moscow, using the Armenian massacres as a pretext, sent troops into Baku to destroy the authority-seeking Popular Front. The Soviet troops, led by the colonel Alexander Lebed, commander of the Parachute division of the Airborne Troops of the USSR reached the capital of Azerbaijan on January 19^th. The operations were coordinated by defense Minister Dmitri Yazov. Several days later he admitted that troops had been sent into Baku “with the aim of preventing the Popular Front from seizing power from the Communists.”

Over a hundred demonstrators and assailants were killed, some of whom had taken part in the slaughter of Armenians in Baku. Several dozens of civilians were crushed under the tracks of soviet tanks and also hundreds were injured. Over twenty soviet soldiers were also killed during the clashes, which mean that battles took place in the city.

“If we are talking about the truth, then the activities of the extremists were of a widespread violent nature. The violence expressed itself in that both Armenians and Azerbaijanis had been arming themselves for a long time. Not just small divisions, but military defenses, regional military commissariats and Ministry of Internal Affairs bodies were being looted. The state border had been destroyed by violence,” Yazov said.

After a long period of silence, Heydar Aliyev once again enters the arena. After his expulsion from the Politburo, he had continued to live in Moscow. When forces entered Baku, Aliyev criticized that step in the Azerbaijan representation in Moscow and sometime later, returned to his place of birth, Nakhijevan.

During an interview with Russian journalist Andrei Karaulov in September 1990, Aliyev touched upon the January events, saying that there had been no need to declare a state of emergency and send troops in to Baku. “All conflict between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis had ceased a few days before that tragic evening and no Armenians were left in the city. The question arises: Who were the forces protecting and against what?”

Aliyev says only this about the Armenian massacres, which in their size, duration, violence and number of people killed, were unprecedented even in totalitarian Soviet Union, “a conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.” Instead he focuses only on January 20^th, which he considers “an act of violence against the people of Azerbaijan.”

During the meeting with the American journalist Thomas Goltz Aliyev spoke about the perpetrators of the events Black January. “It was the KGB. It was the Moscow KGB and the Azerbaijan KGB. And the entire leadership of Azerbaijan. They were all involved in the attacks on the Armenians in Baku on January 12, 13, and 14 and then again on January 20^th, when Azerbaijan was attacked by the Soviet army. It was all in accordance with the plan prepared by Moscow with the complicity of the Azeri leadership – Vezirov and Mutalibov.”

Only one month later does the Armenian communist leadership refer to the Armenian slaughter in Baku. On February 13^th the supreme council condemned “the massacres of Armenians in Baku and other regions”, deeming them “the continuation of the genocide of the Armenian nation”.

16 years after the tragic events in Baku, Gorbachev has admitted that the troops entered Azerbaijan on his orders. “The situation in Baku had become ungovernable. The Supreme Council and the Communist party were paralyzed, two hundred kilometers of state boundaries had been destroyed, and attacks against local bodies were taking place. I urgently sent Yevgeni Primakov and Andrei Girenko to Baku, and they proposed declaring a state of emergency and sending in troops. Today, I still consider that by doing so, even more bloodshed was averted.”

Elchibey and the Popular Front succeeded in overthrowing Vezirov with great bloodshed, after which the issue of evading the blame came to the fore. Etibar Mamedov urgently left for Georgia, then Moscow and met Aliyev for the first time in the Azerbaijan permanent representation. The Moscow OMON prevented an attempted press conference by arresting Mamedov. Instead, “KGB general Aliyev held the press conference and condemned the killing of innocent people in Baku by the soviet leadership.”

The other hero of the bloody instigation, Neymet Panahov, after a few days of skulking in Baku, went to Iran where he spent a few months and, if we are to believe his words, the Iranian intelligence service arrested him. He allegedly managed to escape the Iranian prison and cross over to Turkey. Later, returning to Baku, Panahov was no longer in the front ranks of events and merely executed trivial tasks set by Heydar Aliyev.

Rahim Ghaziev was arrested and detained in Lefortovo [Moscow prison], near Mamedov. While still on trial, they are elected deputies to the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan. Gummatov, who had ‘overthrown’ the soviet authorities in the south, hides at first in the Talish mountains and then leaves for Georgia, returns to Azerbaijan and is arrested in the Popular Front offices. He is tried, receives a symbolic sentence and returns to Lenkoran.

Those killed by the soviet troops in the events of January 20-22 are buried in the martyrs’ cemetery Martyrs’ Avenue.

Later, those killed during the Karabakh war were also buried here. January 20^th became the day of mourning for already-independent Azerbaijan. Every year different events take place on that day and Martyrs’ Avenue has entered the protocol of the country. Presidents on official visits go there and place wreaths.

The Sultan and King Bibi

May 20, 2021 By administrator

Erdoğan and Netanyahu are both right-wing populists who crushed secular movements – and are remaking their countries

William Eichler William Eichler is a writer based in the U.K. His work focuses mostly on the history and politics of Turkey and Israel/Palestine

Before the conversion of Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia from museum to mosque last year, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, stressed the historic nature of the moment. “This is Hagia Sophia breaking away from its chains of captivity,” he declared. “It was the greatest dream of our youth. It was the yearning of our people, and it has been accomplished.” For Erdoğan and his conservative Sunni followers, the decision by Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, to transform the mosque into a museum was an attack on the country’s Islamic and Ottoman heritage. Like many of the reforms introduced by the secularist Ataturk, it has now been reversed by Erdoğan in what is best described as a triumph of ethno-religious nationalism.

Three years before Hagia Sophia’s conversion, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, welcomed President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital in equally effusive terms. “The Jewish people designated Jerusalem as its capital 3,000 years ago,” he told attendees at an international conference. “Here our forefathers walked, here our kings ruled, here our prophets preached, here are our roots.” Zionists across the political spectrum dream of Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided” capital, although they disagree about how that should happen. The Israeli right, however, a broad movement that encompasses secular Likudniks and religious settlers, are determined to make the dream a reality, and Netanyahu has adopted that view.

Over the last decade, a crop of right-wing populists has sprouted across the world. The ousting of Trump was a win for liberals, but the soil from which he grew remains fertile, and many other demagogues — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — still thrive. These so-called strongmen, who often blend religious and ethnic motifs, represent a reaction against globalization and the liberal elites who they argue are its sole beneficiaries. Netanyahu and Erdoğan — despite their frequent and vehement public disagreements with each other — belong in this company. Like their reactionary confrères, the leaders of Israel and Turkey claim to speak for silent majorities, the good citizens whose beliefs were scorned by the secular nationalists of the past and the haughty liberals of the present.

Two biographies, Anshell Pfeffer’s “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu” and Soner Cagaptay’s “The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey,” capture the similar political journeys of Netanyahu and Erdoğan. “Bibi” and “The New Sultan” provide portraits of two right-wing populists who have become their countries’ longest-serving leaders by skillfully placing themselves at the head of long-brewing ethno-religious, nationalist movements.

The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 by former Ottoman general Mustafa Kemal, who later became known as Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”). Ataturk was determined to build a modern, Western country — two things seen as synonymous at the time. The state, controlled as it was by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated the country’s economy as it attempted to “catch up” with the industrialized nations of the period. The CHP also cut Turkey’s ties with what the secular nationalist ideology of the new ruling elite — Kemalism — cast as a backward, Oriental past. The caliphate was abolished, the call to prayer was changed to Turkish, and the Swiss legal code was introduced. The fez, too, was outlawed. Ataturk believed a cultural revolution, a complete transformation of his people, was required to secure Turkey’s place in the West.

Zionism drew on the same secular, nationalist zeitgeist. After Israel’s establishment in 1948, David Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionist movement sought to forge a modern country with socialist characteristics. Dominated by European Jews (Ashkenazim), Israel’s ruling elite wished to carve out an extension of Europe in what they viewed as the backward Levant. Aided by state control of the economy, this nation-building project also attempted to mold the polyglot community of immigrants into “New Jews” — modern, Hebrew-speaking Israelis who were firmly rooted in their homeland. Just as Kemalists hoped to join Europe, Zionists believed that the establishment of Israel would mean Jews would be embraced by the West and anti-Semitism would dissipate. Self-determination was assimilation from a safe distance.

The modernizing aspirations of Kemalism and Labor Zionism were founded on particular ethno-religious identities: Sunni Turkish and Jewish, respectively. However, despite building on old foundations, Ataturk and Ben-Gurion aspired to create something modern. This aspiration would prove devastating for those deemed outsiders to the national project — Palestinians in Israel and Kurds and minorities in Turkey — who would resist the suppression of their collective identities. It would also provoke a reaction from those the modernizers wished to liberate.

In 2013, while I was working as an English teacher in the Turkish city of Izmit, I was approached by a colleague at Kocaeli University. A quiet man, he inquired as to what drew me to Turkey. “I wanted to live in a Muslim country,” I responded vaguely. He smiled and recommended “Orientalism” by Edward Said, a “good Muslim” who understood the Islamic world. Eager to ensure I didn’t get led astray, he also cautioned that the teachers at the university were biased when it came to Islam. He was referring to the fact that many were Kemalists. Sensing my colleague’s Islamist leanings and not being in the mood for a debate, I rather petulantly pointed out that Said was no Muslim, good or otherwise, and made my excuses.

My colleague was echoing a familiar narrative that was first voiced by Adnan Menderes, the leader of the center-right Democrat Party (DP). Elected in 1950 in Turkey’s first free election, Menderes was a landowner from the Aegean province of Aydin who rose to power by denouncing — in Cagaptay’s words — “High Kemalism’s elitist and secularist agenda.” Despite being a part of the establishment himself, Menderes mobilized small manufacturers, villagers, and provincial landowners — the “backbone of the center-right,” according to Cagaptay — using anti-establishment rhetoric. “Enough! It is the nation’s turn to speak!” he would tell voters. He promised economic and political liberalization to those tired of the heavy hand of the Kemalist state, and he relaxed Ankara’s antipathy toward Islam. Under the DP, the call to prayer would once again be heard in Arabic.

In a familiar pattern, Menderes’ populism morphed into demagoguery. Confident that “the People” were behind him, he went after civil servants and judges and anyone who could be branded a Kemalist. After a decade of DP rule, the military, which saw itself as the defender of Ataturk’s revolution, toppled the government and executed Menderes. The ousted prime minister would become a martyr for generations of right-wing activists, including those in today’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) who Cagaptay says owe the DP a “political debt.” “The torch of democracy that Menderes and his friends lit,” Erdoğan proclaimed in 2010, “has been passed from hand to hand and carried to (our party) today.”

The first electoral challenge to Israel’s secular establishment arrived two decades after Menderes’ execution. In 1977, the veteran right-wing activist Menachem Begin was elected prime minister, a shock result that saw the left go into opposition for the first time. Begin was a follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who founded the Revisionist movement in the 1920s. Vehemently opposed to socialism, Jabotinsky’s supporters had an uncompromising desire to build “Greater Israel” and believed negotiation with the Palestinians to be futile. Israel, Jabotinsky said, could only be built by force, behind an “iron wall of Jewish bayonets.”

Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, became a committed Revisionist in the 1930s, which meant, according to Pfeffer, “spending the next half-century as an outsider to mainstream Zionism” due to the dominance of Labor Zionism. However, in the 1970s, cracks began to appear in the Labor edifice, and Begin, who had led the right-wing paramilitary organization Irgun during the British Mandate, returned to politics. Founding the center-right Likud, Begin ran for election casting himself as an opponent of the left wing, secular, Ashkenazi elite and offering a package of economic liberalization and social conservatism. His message appealed to religious nationalists and to Jews of Middle Eastern descent (Mizrahim) who were tired of being treated like second-class citizens by the Ashkenazi. His efforts were rewarded in the 1977 poll. Likud’s election marked the beginning of the Israeli right’s ascent. It also prepared the ground for Netanyahu’s rise.

It is hard to ignore the parallels between Begin and Menderes when reading “Bibi” and “The New Sultan.” Both were right-wing populists who challenged the secular elites of their countries. Both supported economic liberalization and were not shy about using religious rhetoric. However, they were conservatives rather than radicals. Despite challenging the Kemalist elite, it was Menderes who, Cagaptay tells us, “institutionalized the deification of Ataturk” and finished the construction of Anitkabir, the founding father’s tomb. Begin also proved to be a cautious leader in certain respects. In a telling anecdote in “Bibi,” he explains to a surprised left-wing civil servant whom he wanted to keep on, “We have no intention of plundering power. There has to be continuity.”

Neither Begin nor Menderes was a revolutionary of the right. The more radical challenge to the ruling elites of Turkey and Israel would emerge in the 1970s as, across the globe, secular ideologies and state-managed economies began the long retreat in the face of religion and the market.

During the 1970s, activists of the Marxist left and nationalist right violently clashed as they fought the Cold War on Turkey’s streets. Thousands were killed in this undeclared civil war. Away from the violence, another ideology, whose advocates claimed to be following a path that was neither socialist nor capitalist, emerged during this period: Islamism. At this time in Turkey, political Islam was represented by the National Outlook Movement, which was founded in 1969 by Necmettin Erbakan. A former spokesperson for Anatolian businesses, Erbakan promised his followers a new politics that drew not on the “snake oil” of Western ideologies — as Marxism and Kemalism did — but on native sources, specifically Islam. The National Outlook Movement, Cagaptay tells us, was the milieu that would shape the young, working-class Istanbullu, Erdoğan

In September 1980, nervous of the spiraling violence between left and right, the Turkish military orchestrated a coup that would give an unintended boost to Erbakan’s Islamists. Under the subsequent autocratic rule of Gen. Kenan Evren, hundreds of thousands of people, particularly leftists, were arrested and some murdered. After this crackdown, in an attempt to bind the country together, the military propagated a blend of Turkish nationalism and Islam, known as the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. If they thought a dose of ethno-religious nationalism would stave off any radical challenges to the state, they were mistaken. By legitimizing Islamic politics, the military created fertile terrain for Islamists to flourish. “Formally secular Turkey,” Cagaptay writes, “gradually became informally Sunni Islamic under the generals.”

After three years, the military returned to their barracks and Erbakan founded the Welfare Party, which went from strength to strength. Islamist activists, like the young Erdoğan, made inroads into working-class communities and also appealed to the more pious entrepreneurs in the Anatolian heartland. Erbakan built up a committed following during this period. “Other parties have members,” he would say, “we have believers.” This soon translated into political success. By the mid-90s, Erdoğan, who had become chairman of the Welfare Party’s Istanbul branch, was elected the city’s mayor. Shortly afterward, Erbakan was prime minister.

“The Islamists were at the gates,” writes Cagaptay. This was how the military saw the rise of the Welfare Party. Horrified, the generals threatened yet another coup and the government collapsed. During the protests that followed, Erdoğan, in a moment that hinted at his later populist fire, read an incendiary poem: “Our minarets are our bayonets, / Our domes are our helmets, / Our mosques are our barracks.” He was arrested. The militancy expressed in this poem may not have been apparent during the early years of Erdoğan’s rule, but by the 2010s there was no question that he was out to conquer Turkey.

The 1970s also marked Israel’s shift to the right. Military success in the Six-Day War amplified religious and ethnic nationalism within the Jewish state, which had tripled in size overnight. Israelis across the political spectrum rushed to worship at the Kotel, the Western Wall of the Second Jewish Temple, and build homes in “Judea and Samaria,” the West Bank. After the traumatic near defeat of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, this messianic fervor intensified with the founding of groups such as Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”). Combining Orthodox Judaism and nationalism, the activists of this radical organization preached the importance of settling occupied land and — as they saw it — taking back religiously important locations such as Hebron, the home of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. The rights of Jews over 1 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories did not count for much in the face of Israeli irredentism.

This wave of religious Zionism dovetailed with Likud’s secular, nationalist dreams of “Greater Israel.” In his first speech after the 1977 election, Begin stressed the organic link between the Jewish people and the entirety of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. “The Jewish people,” he stated, “have an eternal historic right to the Land of Israel.” While not observant, Begin openly embraced Jewish tradition and courted the more traditional Mizrahim, ultra-Orthodox parties, and the Hasidic movement. Along with his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, Begin played a crucial role in propagating a communitarian identity that stressed the primacy of Judaism and Israel. He was building a Jewish state rather than a state for Jews. As Pfeffer puts it, “Israel’s politics had truly shifted.”

It was against this background that the U.S.-educated Netanyahu rose to prominence. During the 1980s, Netanyahu proved himself a master of public relations as Israel’s representative to the United Nations. “Netanyahu was achieving a degree of prominence that few foreign diplomats ever had,” Pfeffer tells us. This talent for hasbara, the Hebrew term for propaganda in the service of the state, abroad helped at home. A committed Revisionist, Netanyahu returned to Israel with his sights on leading Likud to power. With an impressive military career behind him, it did not take long before Netanyahu earned the respect of Likud’s rank and file, many of whom had grown impatient with the party’s more cautious old guard. He was elected party leader in 1993 to chants of “Bibi, king of Israel.”

The ambitious Netanyahu was in sight of the throne at a historic moment. In 1993, Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Yasser Arafat. As far as the right was concerned, Rabin was giving away Holy Land to “terrorists.” Netanyahu vehemently denounced the peace process in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset: “This is the most estranged government ever from the (Jewish) heritage of Israel,” he told Rabin (the brackets are Pfeffer’s). “The government’s alienation from the heritage is the real reason for its policies and why Hebron is to them an Arab city, Judea and Samaria, the ‘west bank,’ the Golan, Arab land.” Ultra-nationalist protests against the Oslo Accords erupted across Israel, creating fertile terrain for violence. In 1994, a Jewish extremist massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron. The following year, Rabin was assassinated.

Mirroring the rise of religious nationalism in Israel, only under military occupation, Hamas became more active. The Palestinian Islamist group also opposed the idea of dividing the Holy Land and initiated a suicide bombing campaign in response to the Hebron massacre. Such violence provided the Israeli right with the ammunition they needed to attack the left on the issue of security. Netanyahu capitalized on the fear and confusion by reluctantly accepting the peace process as a strategic move to gain votes from the center, but also by emphasizing the importance of Jabotinsky’s “iron wall.” The move worked, and he won the 1996 election with the slogan “Netanyahu — Making a secure peace.” While he was only on the throne for one term, “King Bibi” would return.

“The New Sultan” and “Bibi” are indispensable guides to the historical backgrounds of the ethno-religious, nationalist movements that have propelled Erdoğan and Netanyahu to power. They also provide valuable insight into the nature of their rule once they came to power.

The AKP was elected in 2002 on the promise of making a fresh start after years of coalition governments and economic crises. Distancing himself from his radical Islamist origins, Erdoğan spoke of democracy and freedom and of curtailing the power of the military. He was also credited with Turkey’s economic revival. Netanyahu, meanwhile, served a stint as the minister of finance under Ariel Sharon in the early 2000s before returning to the leadership of Likud. He was elected prime minister again in 2009. Just as Erdoğan played down his radical past, so too, did Netanyahu. The Revisionist who once denounced Labor’s compromises with the PLO formed a coalition with Labor. As the decade progressed, however, and the liberal order struggled with the rise of nationalism on the global stage, the radical side of both leaders came to the fore.

Between 2008 and 2011, Erdoğan and his allies in the ubiquitous Gülen movement — a dark star in the constellation of Turkish Islamism — neutered the military in a series of show trials orchestrated to stave off the threat of a coup.

After that, the new Sultan was free to rule as he wished. (The Gülenists later turned on him in an alleged coup attempt in 2016.) With populist appeals to those he called the “real owners of the nation’s sovereignty” — conservative Sunni Turks — Erdoğan stamped his authority on all institutions of the state, from the police to the military to the civil service and the education system. Just as this has enabled him to convert Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque, he has also been able to remake Ataturk’s republic into a more religiously conservative state.

Today, Erdoğan’s support might be waning due to the pandemic and Turkey’s economic difficulties. However, with the country’s centenary around the corner, he may well be able to retain his position with some bold populist offering. The promise of constitutional reform — announced earlier in the year — may well serve this purpose. But regardless of his personal fate, much of his mission has been accomplished. As Cagaptay, who throughout “The New Sultan” steers clear of hyperbole, concludes, “The AKP has carried out its own revolution. It has eliminated the legacy of Kemalism and secularism.”

Netanyahu’s time in power bears comparison to that of Turkey’s president. In the early 2000s, the failure of the peace process and the rise of Hamas led to the collapse of the Israeli left and the achievement of a near-hegemonic position by the ethno-religious, nationalist right.

Against this background and under Netanyahu’s leadership, Likud has overseen Israel’s march toward becoming an explicitly ethno-religious state. The passing of the Jewish nation-state law in 2018 was an important milestone on this journey. Netanyahu, the prime minister who has talked about Arabs voting “in droves” and attacked the “leftist fake news media,” has encouraged this shift to the right. The rise of the extremist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir and the attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel by far-right thugs are the result of four decades of right-wing activism. But they are also the result of Netanyahu’s tenure in power.

After failing to form a government in the recent election, it looked like Netanyahu was about to be dethroned. War with Hamas may well revive his political fortunes. As with Erdoğan, however, whatever happens to him personally, the evidence suggests that the ethno-religious, nationalist wave he has ridden his whole career is far from ready to break.

Source: https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-sultan-and-king-bibi/

Opinion Jill Jacobs: American Jews, Stop Funding Jewish Terrorism

May 2, 2021 By administrator

By Jill Jacobs

The far-right Jewish extremists rampaging violently against Palestinians are backed by a complex network of funding sources in both Israel and the United States. It’s our moral duty to defund them

Many of us watched in horror as right-wing Jewish youth marched from Zion Square to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah two weeks ago, chanting “Death to Arabs” and assaulting Palestinian residents, in an event organized by Lehava, a violent Jewish extremist organization.

This violence was planned, in part, on WhatsApp groups whose administrators include newly elected Member of Knesset Itamar Ben Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit political party connected to Lehava.

In one widely-circulated video, Palestinian children cry in fear as Jewish rioters threw stones at their home. In another, a young Jewish woman explains to an interviewer that she, personally, does not call explicitly for burning [Arab] villages, but “I say ‘you will leave and we will come to live there.'”

In the course of one violent night, more than 100 Palestinianswere injured, with close to two dozen hospitalized.

These events followed weeks of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, including attacks by Palestinians on Jews in Jerusalem and Jaffa and nightly clashes between Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem and police after the unexplained closing of the stairs near the Damascus Gate, a longtime gathering place for Palestinian teens and young adults during Ramadan (the police barriers were eventually removed after two weeks of closure).

There is no excuse for assaults on Jews or any other civilians. At the same time, we must distinguish between the actions of individuals and those of organized groups with representation in the Knesset and a complex network of funding sources in both Israel and the United States.

On social media, American Jewish organizations have rushed to condemn the Jewish extremists. Avi Meyer, the Israel-based Director of Global Communications for the American Jewish Committee wrote, “I am ashamed and repulsed by the hate-fueled violence taking place a mile and a half from my home in Jerusalem. The individuals perpetrating it are as foreign to me and my Judaism as are skinheads, white supremacists, and other racists around the world. They have no place here.”

The ADL tweeted, “Violence & hate are never the answer and do nothing to ease an already fraught and tense situation. We are disturbed extremist voices like Lehava are filling the vacuum. Both Israeli and Arab leaders need to forcefully condemn these actions and stop fanning the flames of hate.”

But casting the right-wing Jewish rioters as marginalized outsiders erases the roles of both the Israeli government and American Jewish funders in enabling and encouraging such violence.

Over the past several years, T’ruah, the organization I direct, has made several complaints to the IRS about US tax-exempt foundations that funnel money to Lehava. These complaints are based on the fact that Lehava is the successor to the Kach movement, founded by the American-Israeli terrorist and former Knesset member Meir Kahane in the 1980s.

Kach was banned by Israel as a terrorist organization in 1988. In the 1990s, the State Department classified both Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

While Lehava does not have its own tax status in Israel, investigations by the Israel Religious Action Center and the Democratic Bloc have demonstrated that the group receives money from other registered Israeli non-profits.

These groups, in turn, are funded by American foundations and individuals including American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi (‘Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea’), whose partner organization the State Department explicitly lists, by its English name, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and Charity of Light Fund, named in tribute to Kahane.

Both foundations are headed by Levi Chazan, a notorious Kahanist, who was convicted in a 1984 attack that wounded seven Palestinians on a bus. Other funding comes from the Florida-based Falic family, owners of Duty-Free Americas.

Central Fund of Israel, the largest by far of the U.S. foundations channeling funding to Israeli extremists, made close to $40 million in grants in the last year for which tax information is available.

Grantees include Hemla, one of the major pass-throughs for funding to CFI; Honenu, which defends Israelis arrested for terrorism and has also given direct cash to Israelis convicted of terrorism; Od Yosef Chai, a yeshiva infamous for violence against Palestinians, one of whose rabbis was recently convicted of incitement; the Israel Land Fund, which uses semi-legal or non-legal means to acquire Palestinian property; Mishmeret Yesha, which trains and outfits vigilantes in the West Bank; and Im Tirtzu, which incites against Israeli human rights leaders.

In 2016, following a T’ruah complaint about Central Fund of Israel’s support for Honenu, based on an Israeli television station’s exposé of the group’s direct cash payments to Israeli terrorists, the IRS investigated and temporarily restricted these payments. Honenu’s English-language website now indicates that US donations can only be directed to legal defense. We have not yet received a response to our other complaints against CFI or the other named foundations.

Most American Jews do not support, financially or otherwise, the foundations that make grants to extremist groups in Israel. However, some of the organizations considered mainstream play a role in channeling funds to Central Fund of Israel.

In 2018, the San Francisco Federation made a public commitment to end donor-advised grants to Central Fund of Israel, after one such grant became public. Yet in 2020, the Jewish Community Foundation of New York, which manages donor-advised funds, sent CFI more than $2 million. Jewish National Fund-USA, in their most recently-reported tax year, granted CFI $50,000.

The Merona Leadership Foundation, led by Adam and Gila Milstein — who are major donors to the Israeli-American Council, Zioness, and other groups that consider themselves pro-Israel — gave $167,000, and the Milstein Family Foundation contributed another $10,000. Past donors have included the Houston Jewish Federation, as well as secular donor-advised funds such as the Boston Foundation and Fidelity.

It is not enough to issue statements against the violence of the extremists, or to pretend that they represent a marginal perspective. Those of us committed to the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians also must insist that the institutions to which we are connected do not contribute to the groups that promote genocide and organize Jews to take part in violent rampages.

Some basic steps might include creating values statements that prohibit funding groups that promote violence or extremism, as the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation has; and insisting that individual donors such as Adam and Gila Milstein and the Falic Family, who actively invest in violent extremism, not be honored or given leadership positions in our community.

Cutting off funding to these extremist groups will not be sufficient to end the violence, which emerges in the context of more than five decades of occupation. Millions of additional private American dollars, from both Jews and Christians, flows to building settlements and supporting right-wing policy in Israel. The Israeli government is pursuing de facto annexation, inciting against Palestinian citizens and progressive activists, and coddling extremists.

Those of us committed to the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians must challenge all of these forces. Refusing to fund those who preach genocide, or to honor funders of these extremist movements, would be one powerful step toward demonstrating that the American Jewish community stands behind our verbal rejection of the recent violence.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the Executive Director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which organizes and trains more than 2000 rabbis and cantors to advance human rights in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories. Twitter: @rabbijilljacobs

Sanction the Axis of Mercenary and Terrorist Evil: Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia

February 27, 2021 By administrator

by GUEST BLOGGER,

Azerbaijan deployed thousands of mercenaries in last year’s 44-day war that it and Turkey waged against Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Armenia.

Azerbaijan thereby flagrantly violated the UN’s International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries (UNMERC) which it signed in 1997.

Forty-six countries have signed UNMERC including Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Poland.

These mercenaries are not clean-cut military men. They’re terrorists, thugs, jihadis, and fanatics.

The Evidence: They include former ISIS commander Sayf Balud, and members of the Hamza Division, Sultan Murad Brigade, Al-Amshat Militia, Free Syrian Army (FSA/SNA), and other factions.

Many were brought into Azerbaijan before the war began on September 27, 2020.

Unknown numbers remain there despite the November 9 armistice.

Armenian forces captured two mercenaries who came from Syria’s Hama and Idlib provinces.

The independent, UK-based, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Azerbaijan’s employing mercenaries.

In October, it numbered them at over 2,050 with 145 dead.

Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights has named the chief mercenary commanders, such as Fehim Isa of the Sultan Murad Brigade, and their organizations.

Video and audio recordings have identified many of the mercenaries.

Azeri soldiers have forced some of them into battle at gunpoint and lied about the combat conditions.

“Haji … don’t come,” warned one mercenary. “We have been deceived … this is a meat grinder.”

Earlier Mercenaries

Azerbaijan’s importing mercenaries/jihadis is nothing new. Nor is its involvement in terrorism.

In the 1990s, Azerbaijan hired Afghan Mujahedin, Chechens, Pakistanis, and Turkey’s terrorist Grey Wolves to fight Armenians.
Al-Qaeda cells in Baku facilitated the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Over 900 Azerbaijanis have joined ISIS.
Azerbaijan’s Silk Way Airlines has transported weapons to terrorist organizations.

Azerbaijan’s political and military cultures are clearly deranged, as are Turkey’s.

Turkey is a shameless, longtime ISIS supporter, which the U.S. Treasury Department just identified as a “logistical hub” for ISIS.

Turkey and Azerbaijan’s Guilt

Most of the mercenaries used by Azerbaijan were flown in by Turkey. They often came from the ranks of Turkey’s proxy jihadist organizations (named above) in Syria who had reportedly committed atrocities and war crimes there.

Tuğgeneral Adnan Tanrıverdi, Cumhurbaşkanlığı Başdanışmanı oldu - Son Dakika Flaş Haberler

Turkey typically recruits jihadis/mercenaries through SADAT, a quasi-official Turkish military contracting company.

Led by former Brigadier General Adnan Tanrıverdi and other Turkish officers, SADAT is loyal to Turkish President Erdogan. Turkey’s use of SADAT contravenes the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Turkey has also been sending terrorists and jihadis to fight in Libya’s civil war.

Azerbaijan may also have recruited mercenaries from elsewhere, such as Pakistan, according to some reports.

Regardless of the source of the mercenaries, Azerbaijan has brazenly violated UNMERC.

Charges against Turkey and Azerbaijan

A bi-partisan letter to the State and Defense Departments by one hundred U.S. House members has criticized “Turkish backed foreign mercenaries [in Azerbaijan], many alleged to have ties to internationally recognized terrorist groups.”

A European Parliament resolution has deplored “the transfer of foreign terrorist fighters by Turkey from Syria and elsewhere to Nagorno-Karabakh, as confirmed by international actors, including the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries.”

On November 6, 2020, the UN’s Working Group on the use of mercenaries and two Special Rapporteurs sent a strongly worded, eight-page letter to Turkey and Azerbaijan that detailed the charges against them.

The way “Syrian fighters are allegedly being recruited, transported and used in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict appears consistent with the definition of a mercenary, as set out by relevant international legal instruments.

Furthermore, their deployment appears to have contributed to the rapid escalation and intensification of hostilities, in turn resulting in civilian harm and suffering.”

Seventy-six days later — in a short, vacuous, and predictably arrogant reply — Turkey called the Working Group’s charges “fake news.” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has similarly denied using mercenaries.

UNMERC signatory Georgia is also culpable. It has knowingly permitted Turkey to use Georgian airspace to transport the terrorists to Azerbaijan.

Next Moves

Armenia has just filed war crimes lawsuits against Azerbaijan in the European Court of Human Rights.

Armenia, a member of the UN Human Rights Council, should also petition that organization to promptly sanction Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Georgia.

The case against the three countries could not be clearer. A lengthy investigation would be superfluous and counterproductive.

UNMERC signatories are especially obligated to hold the guilty parties accountable.

Human rights organizations worldwide must demand action, not mere words, from their respective governments and the UN.

The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of Greek City Times.

David Boyajian is an independent writer who focuses on commentary and investigative reports regarding the Caucasus. His work can be found at Armeniapedia.

Source: https://greekcitytimes.com/2021/02/26/axis-of-mercenary-turkey/

Why Azerbaijan is Unfit to Rule over the Armenians of Artsakh

January 22, 2021 By administrator

Corrupt, sadistic, and run by a hereditary dictatorship, Azerbaijan is unfit to rule over others, least of all the Armenian Christians of Artsakh.

Yet that iniquity could materialize due to the recent 44-day war by Azerbaijan, Turkey, and terrorist jihadis against the Artsakh Republic (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Armenia.

The November 9, 2020 armistice could force democratic, Armenian-governed Artsakh (pop. 150,000) into Azerbaijan’s (pop. 10 million) despotic grip.

Since the war began, mainstream media have rarely pointed out Azerbaijan’s depravity and long-standing abuse of Armenians.

In the 1920s, Stalin transferred the ancient Armenian provinces of Artsakh — 96% Armenian — and Nakhichevan to Turkey’s friend, Azerbaijan.

The delusional tyrant mistakenly believed that this would lure Turkey into the USSR’s web.

That injustice has brought Artsakh nothing but agony.

Even before the transfer, Azerbaijan had been massacring Armenians in Artsakh and Baku.

Unlike 3000-year-old Armenia, no country named Azerbaijan existed before 1918. Its inhabitants didn’t even call themselves Azeris until the 1930s.

Artsakh’s Long Nightmare

Artsakh was officially autonomous within Soviet Azerbaijan, but the latter held the real power.

Artsakh’s Armenians were persecuted due to raw Azeri fanaticism, not the Soviet system.

Armenians sank from 96% to 76% of Artsakh’s population by 1988, the result of repression, deportations, economic warfare, and murder by Azerbaijan.
Then-KGB Major General Heydar Aliyev (Azeri dictator Ilham Aliyev’s father) acknowledged importing Azeris into Artsakh to replace Armenians that he had exiled.
Azerbaijan maliciously closed many Armenian schools, orphanages, and libraries.
Armenian language inscriptions on ancient monuments were depicted as Azeri.
Museums were looted of artifacts that proved Artsakh to be an ancient Armenian province.
Even the name Artsakh was banned.
Large quantities of meat, dairy products, and wool were directed to Azerbaijan instead of to needy local Armenians.
Baku frequently imprisoned local Armenian leaders who protested, but gave Azeri gangs free rein.

Breaking Free

Artsakh voted to exit Azerbaijan in accordance with Soviet law in 1988 and international law in 1991 as the USSR dissolved. In response, Azerbaijan massacred Armenian civilians in Artsakh, Baku, Ganja, and Sumgait.

The ensuing war ended in 1994 in victory for Artsakh’s Armenians. Armenians fled the rest of Azerbaijan, and Azeris fled Armenia.

Artsakh became self-governing, reformist, and widely respected. It maintained representative offices in Washington D.C., Europe, and elsewhere.

Azerbaijan proceeded to gorge on revenue from its gas and oil fields. Yet it still mirrored its Soviet self: repressive, corrupt, violent, and anti-Armenian.

Artsakh became doubly determined to never again submit to Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan’s Post-Independence Horrors

The U.S. State Department says Azerbaijan has “significant human rights” problems, including: unlawful/arbitrary killing; torture; arbitrary detention; political prisoners; heavy restrictions on the press; incarceration of/violence against journalists; severe restrictions on political participation; systemic government corruption; torture of [LGBTQ] individuals; and the worst forms of child labor. Azerbaijan “did not prosecute or punish most officials who committed human rights abuses.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom cites Azerbaijan for “engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.”
Europe’s Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) named President Ilham Aliyev its 2012 “Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year.”
Azerbaijan is guilty of “arbitrary arrest and detention of opposition politicians, civil society activists, human rights defenders and critical journalists,” says the European Court of Human Rights.
Freedom House ranks Azerbaijan as “Not Free” — worse than the Congo and Cuba.
Reporters Without Borders rates Azerbaijan’s press freedom as 168^th out of 180 countries, — worse than Pakistan and Somalia.
International human rights organizations have rebuked Azerbaijan for repressing and forcibly assimilating its Lezgin and Talysh peoples.
Azeri Lieutenant Ramil Safarov was prosecuted and imprisoned for beheading Armenian Lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan at a 2004 NATO program in Hungary. Under questionable circumstances, Hungary later dispatched Safarov to Azerbaijan. He was hailed as a national hero, awarded a medal, and promoted.
Azerbaijan has perpetrated the utmost brutality since the earliest days of Artsakh’s struggle and during the recent war. Azeri troops have abused, mutilated, and beheaded Armenian civilians and soldiers. Armenian POWs have been summarily executed. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have decried these war crimes. Azerbaijan has still not released all POWs despite pledging to do so and continues its attacks in violation of the armistice.
In the 1990s, Azerbaijan imported Afghan Mujahedin, Chechens, Pakistanis, and terrorist Turkish Grey Wolves to fight Armenians. The recent war saw Azerbaijan and Turkey bring in thousands of jihadists and ISIS terrorists from Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. In so doing, Azerbaijan has violated the UN convention against using mercenaries. Draw the appropriate conclusion about a political culture that deploys terrorists and thugs.
Like Turkey, Azerbaijan has long desecrated and destroyed multitudes of Armenian churches and monuments. YouTube’s “The New Tears of Araxes” shows Azeri soldiers obliterating a large 9th century Armenian cemetery in Nakhichevan. UNESCO is being prevented from inspecting Armenian monuments Azerbaijan has just taken control of.
The Azerbaijani Laundromat was — and may still be — a multi-billion dollar money laundering racket run by Azeri kleptocrats and the Aliyev clan. German, Italian, Slovenian, and other European officials were bribed to whitewash Azerbaijan’s human rights record.
Azerbaijan covertly bankrolled a PR junket to Baku in 2013 for several Congresspersons and 32 staff from IL, NJ, NM, NY, OK, and TX. They were lavished with rugs and other gifts which the Office of Congressional Ethics ultimately made them surrender. Azerbaijan funded the junket through a Dallas-based organization affiliated with renegade Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen.
Human Rights Watch says Azerbaijan intentionally struck Artsakh’s “homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, the local water supply“ and Holy Savior Cathedral in the recent war.
‘‘Within the next 25 years, there will be no state of Armenia in the South Caucasus. These people … have no right to live in this region,” declared Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry spokesperson in 2004. A year later, Baku’s mayor told a German delegation, “Our goal is the complete elimination of Armenians. You Nazis already eliminated the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, right?”

“We [Azerbaijanis] must kill all Armenians — children, women, the elderly. [We] need to kill [them] without [making a] distinction.” After Azeri soccer manager Nurlan Ibrahimov posted that in October, the Union of European Football Associations banned him.

These kinds of venom have resulted in the horrors we see above.

Some Azeris have threatened to bomb Armenia’s nuclear power plant. Last year Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry formalized the threat.
In sheets of newly released Azerbaijani postage stamps, an Azeri in a hazmat suit is spraying Artsakh with chemicals, suggesting Armenians are vermin to be exterminated.
Azerbaijan’s territorial ambitions have included not just Artsakh but also Armenia. In December, Aliyev once again claimed parts of Armenia while beside him Turkish President Erdogan glorified Turkey’s 1914-23 genocide against millions of Armenians and Assyrian and Hellenic Christians. Azerbaijan and Turkey’s intentions are obvious.

Now You Know

Now you know why Artsakh’s Armenians have fought and died to live free from Azeri rule. In their place, you’d do the same.

Artsakh is at least as deserving as other states that since the 1990s have achieved self-determination through international support, such as East Timor, Montenegro, and South Sudan.

Regardless of the recent war’s outcome, if the international community cannot see the justice of Artsakh’s case and effectuate a remedy consistent with self-determination, then there is no justice.

David Boyajian is an independent writer whose efforts focus on commentary and investigative reports regarding the Caucasus. His work can be found at

Professor Armen Charchyan: The current authorities have completely overthrow the government of the country. Due to their dishonesty,

December 6, 2020 By administrator

The current authorities have completely overthrow the government of the country. Due to their dishonesty, today they associate the name “landlord” and “traitor” with their name ․ Professor Armen Charchyan

Yerjan M. Heratsi State Medical University, Head of the Department of Traumatology and Orthopedics, Executive Director of “Izmirlian” MC, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor Armen Charchyan, referring to the existing realities, made an extensive article. In the article, he notes that he has always been guided by the principle of abstaining from politics. “My profession and qualification have allowed me to be much higher and higher than any policy, political unit-process. “However, being completely out of politics, I have always had my preferences, I have always been able to analyze the historical moment, to give at least some predictions for the near future (which were mostly correct later), but I have never voiced them,” he said. The doctor mentions that the catastrophe in the country forces him to turn to people ․ “Today, seeing the impending catastrophe and the hopeless situation, I have to turn to you. The current authorities have completely overthrow the government in a multi-vector manner. I do not want to conclude that it was intentional (sorry), but it is, unfortunately, already a fact. In my opinion, the strategic reason for the failure was the low professionalism and incompetence of the governing system (including the leadership). If we add to this the fighting nature of the novice thugs (intolerance of dissent, hostility to dissidents, permissiveness, impunity due to political affiliation), the picture is complete. From 2018 until today, fighting ignorance has prevailed in the governing system of our country. In the spring and summer of 2018, the vast majority of our society welcomed the change of the ruling system to the new authorities. I welcomed only the change (because many vicious phenomena were really suffocating, the need to take drastic steps had long since matured), but not the new authorities. (I have always been a “Kyartu Ernts” and “Kyartu S.” In their face I saw a program – not professionalism. But it was my people’s choice, I accepted it, even if I did not agree with it internally. We are nationally to blame for the current situation. Each of us according to what we do or do not do. I confess my sin and repent. I admit that back in 2018, I had to talk, shout, shout, even threatening to be whipped. I admit that I had to act against the whirlwind of the crowd. And today I repent of what I did not do. Sin Lord. In 2018, the current authorities had a unique opportunity to write their names in golden letters in Armenian history textbooks. Their names have already been written, because, whether you like it or not, in 2018. After the April-May events, Armenian historians had to record the events and mention their authors. It was up to the new government to either gild the letters or cover them with dirt and mud. The government should have realized and accepted its capabilities and capabilities. One person could not be the best diplomat, the best economist, the best political scientist, the best doctor, the best agriculturist at the same time. best… earnings. The bread had to be given to the baker to bake. It was necessary to form a government of temporary professionals for 2-3 years, to change the Constitution, the Electoral Code, the Judicial system, to create a fair economic field, to organize and hold honest, transparent elections, handing over power to the truly elected, truly worthy people. In that case, it could be said that those present cleared the country of former Avgyan stables. Unfortunately, the authorities did not do it, got lost, “danced at a crazy party.” The government chose the second option – the worst. Due to their incompetence and incompetence, today they are associated with the name of the authorities as “landlords” and “traitors”. The tragedy of the moment lies in the fact that in a matter of two and a half years, a power-hungry, powerless, incompetent, incompetent, unqualified, professional government that has been able to erode the 100-year-old concept of “Armenian” identity, , a considerable part of the values of consciousness is still clinging to its chair. I չի my generation did not like to lose, we have always loved victory since childhood (to some extent we are the descendants of LeBlanc). But today I, a participant in the Artsakh War, awarded the Medal for the Liberation of Shushi, a high-quality vocational school with hundreds of students and teachers, about 25,000 surgeries, 200,000 conservative treatments, and a doctor who advised me, feel defeated, mentally distressed. and Stubborn. And it’s these scammers, political

Source: tert.am