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Confront Turkey’s ethnic cleansing and stop indulging it

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by Michael Rubin,

Every April, Turkish diplomats and members of the Congressional Turkey Caucus scramble to avert a resolution recognizing as genocide the World War I-era Ottoman massacres of Armenians. Turkish officials oppose any resolution holding Turkey responsible both because the Republic of Turkey was not formally declared until 1923 and because they hold that what happened was not deliberate but rather occurred in the fog of war. Other Turkish historians and politicians hold that the evidence upon which genocide historians rely is exaggerated if not fraudulent.

Lost in the debate about what transpired more than a century ago is what is happening now: Turkey has undertaken and continues to undertake campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and it systematically destroys cemeteries and cultural artifacts in areas where the Turkish army deploys in order to retroactively “Turkify” each region’s history.

Consider Cyprus: Turkish forces invaded Cyprus in 1974 to prevent the island’s annexation by Greece. The nationalist Greek junta that staged a coup in Cyprus and planned the annexation of the island nation, however, collapsed shortly after, and Greece embraced democracy. Whatever reason Turkey had to occupy 1,300 square miles of Cypriot territory evaporated.

But Turkish forces did not leave. They forced ethnic Greeks and Christians from the zone they occupied and, according to the Cypriot Foreign Ministry, “More than 550 Greek Orthodox churches, chapels and monasteries located in towns and villages of the occupied areas, have been pillaged, deliberately vandalized and, in some cases, demolished.” Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut chronicled more, as did Greek journalist Nick Kampouris.

Then, there is Afrin, the district in Syria that Turkey invaded 11 months ago and has been systematically cleansing of both Kurds and Kurdish heritage ever since.

Turkish warplanes reportedly destroyed the tomb of St. Maron and the fourth-century Julianos Church, a UNESCO site. Turkish forces also pulled down a statue of Kawa the blacksmith, a legendary hero of the Kurdish New Year, when they seized the center of Afrin. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage is a violation for which those giving the order can be prosecuted.

Local civilians have also videotaped systematic destruction of cemeteries in the region. The motivation for this is simple: The Erdogan regime and the Turkish media it controls repeat the line that the Kurds and Christians in Afrin were recent transplants, basically interlopers on Arab land. Cemeteries dating back decades or centuries belie that line. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not alone in the systematic destruction of cemeteries. When Muammar Qadhafi seized power in Libya in 1969, he ordered all Jewish cemeteries destroyed and the bodies of Europeans exhumed. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein likewise destroyed the graves of both Kurds and Shiites. For Erdogan to be in such company should embarrass Turks and other NATO members alike.

Within Turkey as well, cultural heritage is being erased. The Ilisu dam, which opened earlier this year, has begun to flood the ancient city of Hasankeyf, which archaeologists believe to have been continually inhabited for 10,000 years. Unfortunately for archaeologists and Kurds, the town has been in Turkish crosshairs since it has been predominantly Kurdish for the last several centuries. Erdogan is playing other games in the region. While he complains about the strain Syria’s refugee crisis causes Turkey, he has also offered Syrian Sunnis citizenship if they settle in traditionally Alevi villages in Hatay or Kurdish towns in southeastern Anatolia. In effect, changing demography and denying and erasing history have become guiding principles of Erdogan’s Turkey.

What does this mean for U.S. policymakers? It is all well and good and important to debate Armenian genocide, but it is equally important for members of the Congressional Turkey Caucus who provide cover for Turkey to understand just for what they are providing cover. The pattern of ongoing ethnic cleansing by Turkey of Kurds and Christians in Syria is clear, and it threatens now to get worse.

What is necessary to do is to recognize Turkey’s actions and hold the Turks perpetrating the destruction of Greek, Kurdish, and Christian heritage accountable. In the case of Cyprus, it is time to recognize that any compromise recognizing a federal role for the Turkish Cypriot government would effectively bless the ethnic cleansing it has committed and continues to commit. With regard to Syria, it is long past time to understand that Erdogan is motivated not by counterterrorism, but rather by racism and religious hatred. As such, it is crucial to recognize that Erdogan is far less a partner than a 21st-century Slobodan Milosevic.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.

Yazidi Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Jews Genocide by the Ottoman Turkish Empire!

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Turkish crime flag

photo gagrulenet

By Dana Berzinjy | Special to Ekurd.net,

The Turkish regime is well known by the World for committing brutal crimes and abusing human rights against many nationalities such as, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jewish, Greeks, and the other minority groups. Millions of people massacred and genocide by the Turkish dictator Kemal Ataturk in 1915. Then, since all the Turkish states in the past and even the current ones shamelessly tried to commit the same action of crime against the Kurds and the other nationalities in Anatolia.

At that time the Ottoman Empire was declared jihad against unbelievers and even in some places asked them to become Muslim like ISIS does today. The Ottoman Empire took advantage from 1915 to 1918 of the conditions of the World War. The origins of the genocide lie in the breakdown and collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The dead Turkish Empire organised to genocide the minority groups in Turkey. Throughout a few years the sick Ottoman Empire entirely murdered the native peoples of Turkey, for instance, Yazidi Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Today the world is aware of many truths and details of these atrocities that were committed by Turkish authorities, which came from the power of the sick empire.

Turkish authorities firmly deny this genocide. At the result of these terrible atrocities Yazidi Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews and even the Turks suffered and blood flew in every direction. However, among the nations that never was mentioned which destroyed by Turks, Yeminis, which a unique and native nation in Middle East and it was part of the Ottoman Empire’s territory.

Temporarily, even unfinished list of settlements of Yezdi region in south of Kurdistan (Iraqi Kurdistan), where Turkish criminals massacred Yazidis, is pretty inspiring, areas like, Sinjar, Gobal, Gali Ali Bage, Dhok, Zorava, and Bare, Siba, Tlizer, Tlzafe, Grzark, Rmbousi, Tlkazar, Kocho, Khotmi, Mosoul, and Amadia. In this genocide more than 200,000 Yazidis were slaughtered in these bloody settlements.

The massacred of the Kurds had never stopped during Kamal Ata Turk. He continued in his crime and hate against the Yazidis. He begun to genocide and deport them even in other regions in a big Kurdistan.

The Yazidis are originally entirely ethnic Kurds. Turkish soldiers on the region of Western Armenia devastated them. The Yazidis were living there in peace with Armenians for so long. Below is the tragic list where the victims genocide: Van region 100,000, Moush region more than 60,000 victims, Erzroum region 7,500, Kars 5,000, Sourmalu 10,000 Yazidi victims. The above tragic list of the victims were slaughtered and deported by the Turkish government by force. The Turkish dictator compulsorily turned Yazidis, into Islam the people who confessed that their original religion connected with worship of the Sun.

The Turkish historiographer Katib Tchelebi stated that in 1915-1918 nearly 300,000 Yazidis were slaughtered on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. However, according to the source, before the start of the World War l, more than 750,000 Yazidis lived on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, and Turks murdered over 500,000 of them. But the rest, which is 250,000 people, were forcibly exiled. The genocide of the minorities continued after the collapse of the sick Ottoman Empire.

The empire’s ruler was a religious ruler of the Islam. Christian Armenians were allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal structures, but there were conditional and they had to pay more taxes. The Armenians concentrated mostly in eastern Anatolia. I could say the Armenians at that time were more advanced than the Turks. The Armenians were historians, industrialists and so on. But the Turkish occupations were mostly farmers, and soldiers. The population of the Armenians during World War I were over two millions.

But unfortunately, after the genocide the Armenians population by 1922, were decline rapidly to 400,000. The rest was 1.5 million people were massacred in that genocide. David Fromkin described the genocide and said, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed.”

The ethnic cleansing possessed and led by the Turkish young government during World War I. The Turkish rulers decided to murder every single Armenian in Turkey and else where. They did not care whether the Armenians were soldiers, businessmen, farmers, old men or women, young or a sick person, well known professors, or whatever a person was. That included over 2,000,000 people.

Unfortunately, the democide headed by the government at the fall of the Othman Empire at the end of World War I. The nationalist government declared its democide against the Greeks and remaining or returning Armenians. The bloodshed started from 1900 to 1923, by numerous of Turkish regimes. They murdered 3,500,000 to more than 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and more Christians.

The Assyrian Genocide, 1914 to 1923 and 1933.

After a group of young Turks couped in 1913 effectively. They formed army authoritarianism on the day before of World War I.

Assyrian people were slaughtered over and over in the last century.

They started a racist national plan just for the benefit of the Turks. This racist and brutal project was under the name of Turkey for the Turks.

The plan was just to establish a nation state for the Turks without any respect for the native nations that lived for thousands of years before the Turks occupied the region. The native people such as, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews.

The Turks homogenous state was planned to remove or genocide all the nations that exist in the area except the Turks. When the Ottoman Empire joined World War I in 1914. They cruelly began its genocide plan. In this genocide, they followed the same design of group devastation.

Slaughters, rapes, unhelpful, cultural violations, and enforced exiles were all widespread. More than 750,000 Assyrians murdered throughout this terrible genocide.

The sick Ottoman Empire had also massacred 1.5 million Greeks between 1914 and 1923 in Turkey along with the other nationalities. Genocide has an unbelievable impact on families of the victims, that’s why genocide should not be forgiven, and Turkey should be punished for the genocides and the crimes that were committed by the Turkey’s precursor.

Unfortunately for the genocide of the Kurds in Turkey it has not received recognition. But the Armenian massacre has been recognised by more than 20 countries. The Turkish government still denies the genocide that committed in 1914 up to 1923. But for example the German government recognised the Jewish genocide and the government paid more than $90 billion in compensation to the victims.

At the end I want to say that, I am surprised the Turkish government recently uses a language of peace when it comes to normalise its external matters with other countries, for instances its relationship with Israel and Russia, but on the other hand uses army and a language of threat within a State Terror of Turkey against the defenceless Turkish citizens and civilian population, as has been used always in the past against the Armenians and the Kurdish genocide in 1914 to 1933 and the other nationalities. Many times even a century ago Kurds had been gassed and in 1990 Kurds were genocide, and currently still is.

Even recently the power has been used against the Kurds in particular. The Turkish army ruined and knocked down most of the houses in some Kurdish cities in North Kurdistan (Kurdistan of Turkey), such as Sur, Nsebin, Cazira and hundreds of innocent Kurdish people got murdered by the men’s military.
We demand to the U. N. Security Council, Presidents of the USA. Russia, UK, France, the head of the European Union, presidents of the European states, President of Turkey and urge, to rebuild historical justice and condemn the genocide of Yazidi, Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians people which took place in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1918. In addition to that, the families of the victims should be compensated according to the International Law.

Bibliography

Source: Armenian genocide: Ekurd daily, The Unknown Turkish Genocide Of Kurdish Yazidis 10.3.2008
By John Kifner, Armenian Genocide of 1915: An Overview, The New Work Times.
By R.J. Rummel, 1997, Statistics of Democide, published by Rutgers University, Virginia/USA.
Newark College of Arts & Sciences and University College-Newark | 360 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Hill Hall 325 | Newark. The Assyrian Genocide, 1914 to 1923 and 1933 up to the present Dr. George Papadopoulos & Aris Tsilfidis, Comparing Genocide: Jews and Ottoman Greeks.

Dana Berzinjy, a freelance writer from Iraqi Kurdistan, living in Sydney/Australia, is a longtime contributing writer for Ekurd.net.

The Call of alarmist denouncing a Kurd ethnic cleansing in Turkey

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arton120362-480x347Corroborating the statements of the Turkish historian Ayse Hür, a young French woman living in Istanbul, urgently calls on the imminent danger of ethnic cleansing involving the Kurdish people, perpetrated on the orders of the Turkish authorities. In fact the only images broadcast by Haber TV sparingly, speak for themselves. While the eyes of the international community have turned to Syria and Iraq, Turkey proceeds methodically to silence Kurdish ambitions.

Here is the text addressed to the UN:

“Imagine a district of Lyon or Rennes reduced to ashes by the French army itself. Imagine, teachers receive a text message announcing the Ministry all schools in unlimited vacation and summoning you to leave your city, Nantes and Valencia, in preparation for a massacre by the army. Imagine that no relays these atrocities and that the vast majority of the country, lobotomized by state TV and intoxicated by nationalist hatred think it is a legitimate war against “terror” and welcomes the dead, “dirty terrorist” and less.

Well that is what is happening now in Turkey, in its eastern part, among the Kurds. That’s what state is the neighborhood of Sur in Diyarbakir (Turkey). Teachers Cizre were ordered to leave the premises, hospitals were sent indicating “be ready the equipment and personnel.” A massacre of State is preparing to general indifference. And all this policy is supported by the Western powers, our governments … “When I think that I was walking again in these streets a few months ago .. When I see what’s left … And it just beginning. Friends, I know that Kurdistan is far from being the only place or are happening such injustices but right now, battery hundred years after the Armenian Genocide, a real ethnic cleansing is preparing under the orders of President Erdoğan (supported by our own government in most of his actions!), in general indifference and impotence of many. Life in the cities of the West seems to continue as if nothing had happened, no news on most channels controlled by the state (the other censored) or even more absurd lies of the government. Here it seems that the people’s opinion has no weight but may be that in France you can make things happen .. disseminate, organize support visible movements etc .. to prevent further genocide in any country close to home, in 2015 “

One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, 2015

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By Christopher Atamian,

2015-01-05-ErzerumMassacres1896-thumbIt has been nearly one hundred years since April 24, 1915 — the infamous day when Armenian intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire were rounded up in the dead of night and sent to be executed in inland concentration camps in Ayash and Chankari. This event followed on nearly two decades of ethnic cleansing and pogroms against Armenians that included the murder of some 300,000 Armenians by Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1896 and 30,000 killed during the Adana Massacre in 1909. report huffingtonpost.com

The 1896 Erzerum Massacres of Armenians

In the ensuing decade, the entire Armenian Plateau and the rest of the Ottoman Empire was ethnically cleansed of 1.5 Million Armenians as well as 1.5 million Assyrian and Pontic Greeks–nearly the entire empire’s Christian population. Christians were rounded up and locked inside churches that were set on fire and burned alive or thrown into caves with sulfur thrown on top of them and cremated in primitive gas chambers. The Turks, aided and abetted by their ally the German Kaiser seized Christian properties and bank accounts, raped and enslaved women and children and forced thousands to convert to Islam under pain of death. The vast majority of the Armenian population was deported to concentration camps in Syria–a thousand-mile trek through the desert that few survived. Those that did often ended up dying of disease and malnutrition. The local Arab population recalls seeing the Armenian survivors straggle in emaciated and famished like wild animals, emerging from the desert sands like some frightening army of living dead. Many fell to their knees and broke down, invoking the name of all-powerful Allah to ask what could possibly have befallen these poor refugees.

One hundred years of official Turkish state denial have left Armenians alone and bitter, but all over the world, this Christian people known as the “Jews of the Caucasus” have rebuilt communities and prospered as they have in Soviet and now independent Armenia. The reasons behind the Armenian Genocide include a surreal mix of ethnic and financial jealousy–the Armenian Amira class for example ran everything from the state mint to the bread factories and most of the empire’s industry, while the Greeks and Levantines were the most successful diplomats and merchants as well.

Taking advantage of Christian missionary zeal in the Empire, Armenians were also its most educated element. The Turks, who had lost the entire Western part of their empire during the Serbian and Greek Wars of Independence reacted to the cloak of opportunity presented by WWI when the West had other concerns, to launch a veritable full-scale jihad against the infidel dhimmi or non-Muslim minorities.

A century later we know that unfortunately genocide is not a Turkish specialty, though they carried theirs out with a sometime grotesque zeal, releasing prisoners and the insane from jails so that the Armenians and other Christians would be massacred with particular viciousness. The Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Bosnian cleansing by Serbs only twenty five years ago and most recently the Rwandan Genocide when brother tribes of Hutu set upon their Tutsi brothers, hacking people to death by the thousands with primitive machetes, lead us to the unfortunate conclusion that the genocidal instinct is deeply ingrained in human DNA. As the theorist Marc Nichanian has pointed out elsewhere, what was the Trojan War if not an example of early ethnic cleansing as the Greeks laid waste to Troy’s entire population, also of Hellenic ethnicity?

Today, Nicholas Kristof and other leading journalists bring us news of another frightening instance of ethnic cleansing — this time of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Reacting against the supposed fear of Muslim fundamentalism and population rates in Myanmar, the Rohingya have been rounded up and put in primitive camps without access to any medical treatment and insufficient food. They are often tortured. Women are dying in childbirth. To me, perhaps the most shocking aspect of this genocide-in-progress is that it is being carried out by Buddhists, led by the particularly controversial monk Wirathu, who heads the “969 Movement” and is quoted in a New York Times Op Doc as saying that the Muslim Rohingya minority “reproduce like fish (rabbits) and should all be killed.”

As someone who practices Buddhist meditation and who has always admired Buddhism for its emphasis on peace and non-violence, these stomach-turning events are particularly sickening. Where is the West during all this? Where is President Obama? Even more reprehensible is the silence of Nobel Laureate and famed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, who was jailed for years by that country’s military junta and that of the country’s current president Thein Sein who denies that the Rohingya are being persecuted. To date, the Rohingya have not yet been exterminated, but they will if we do not speak up. So please when you read these words, write your senators and representatives. Write Samantha Power at the U.N. and anyone else in your community who wields political and/or religious authority and tell them: STOP THE GENCOIDE OF THE ROHINGYA people. Speak up now or forever hold your peace. And rest assured, if you do not, one day you or your descendants or those of someone you may unfortunately find themselves in a similar situation — as history does indeed have the unfortunate habit or repeating itself.

Nicholas Kristof’s Op Doc on the Rohingya and 21st Century Concentration Camps:

For more Information on Twentieth Century Genocides, please consult Samantha Power’s contemporary classic A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and Raymond Kevorkian’s brilliant The Armenian Genocide: a Complete History

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity:

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The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire:

By, Taner Akçam, the first scholar of Turkish origin to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, holds the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. His many books include A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books).

http://www.amazon.com/Young-Turks-Against-Humanity-ebook/dp/B007BP3BIU

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam’s most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey’s “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.

The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia’s 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.

By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.

Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story!

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In this startling new memoir, Sibel Edmonds—the most classified woman in U.S. history—takes us on a surreal journey that begins with the secretive FBI and down the dark halls of a feckless Congress to a stonewalling judiciary and finally, to the national security whistleblowers movement she spearheaded. Having lived under Middle East dictatorships, Edmonds knows firsthand what can happen when government is allowed to operate in secret. Hers is a sobering perspective that combines painful experience with a rallying cry for the public’s right to know and to hold the lawbreakers accountable. With U.S. citizens increasingly stripped of their rights in a calibrated media blackout, Edmonds’ story is a wake-up call for all Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, traded liberty for illusive security in the wake of 9/11.

You can visit the Classified Woman website here: http://classifiedwoman.com