threat Archives

The Guardian BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince

March 24, 2017 By administrator

Spectre of ‘another 7/7’ led Tony Blair to block bribes inquiry, high court told.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced “another 7/7” and the loss of “British lives on British streets” if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

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He was accused in yesterday’s high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have “rolled over” after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was “just as if a gun had been held to the head” of the government.

The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals.

Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.

The judge said he was surprised the government had not tried to persuade the Saudis to withdraw their threats. He said: “If that happened in our jurisdiction [the UK], they would have been guilty of a criminal offence”. Counsel for the claimants said it would amount to perverting the course of justice.

Wardle told the court in a witness statement: “The idea of discontinuing the investigation went against my every instinct as a prosecutor. I wanted to see where the evidence led.”

But a paper trail set out in court showed that days after Bandar flew to London to lobby the government, Blair had written to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and the SFO was pressed to halt its investigation.

The case officer on the inquiry, Matthew Cowie, was described by the judge as “a complete hero” for standing up to pressure from BAE’s lawyers, who went behind his back and tried to secretly lobby the attorney general to step in at an early stage and halt the investigations.

The campaigners argued yesterday that when BAE failed at its first attempt to stop the case, it changed tactics. Having argued it should not be investigated in order to promote arms sales, it then recruited ministers and their Saudi associates to make the case that “national security” demanded the case be covered up.

Moses said that after BAE’s commercial arguments failed, “Lo and behold, the next thing there is a threat to national security!” Dinah Rose, counsel for the Corner House and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, said: “Yes, they start to think of a different way of putting it.” Moses responded: “That’s very unkind!”

Documents seen yesterday also show the SFO warned the attorney general that if he dropped the case, it was likely it would be taken up by the Swiss and the US. These predictions proved accurate.

Bandar’s payments were published in the Guardian and Switzerland subsequently launched a money-laundering inquiry into the Saudi arms deal. The US department of justice has launched its own investigation under the foreign corrupt practices act into the British money received in the US by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington.

Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided. The group alleges that BAE made £1bn of “illegal bribe payments” to Bandar while claiming to be a “highly ethical, law-abiding corporation”.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade?CMP=share_btn_tw

Islamic State GodFather “Erdogan” threatens to open borders for migrants into Europe

November 25, 2016 By administrator

untitled-1-740 President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened Friday, November 25 to open Turkey‘s borders to allow migrants to reach the EU, in a move that would tear up a landmark deal that has reduced the flow, AFP reports.

Erdogan’s comments, some of his toughest in recent times against the European Union, prompted an immediate warning from Germany which helped broker the deal that such “threats” were unhelpful.

The threat came a day after the European Parliament angered Ankara by backing a freeze in EU accession talks, already hit by alarm over its crackdown in the wake of the July 15 failed coup.

“Listen to me. If you go any further, then the frontiers will be opened, bear that in mind,” Erdogan told the EU during a speech in Istanbul.

He said Brussels had cried out for help in 2015 as tens of thousands of migrants massed at Turkey’s border crossing with EU member Bulgaria.

“You began to ask us ‘what will we do if Turkey opens its borders’?” he asked.

On March 18, Ankara and Brussels forged a deal for Turkey to halt the flow of migrants to Europe — an accord that has largely been successful in reducing numbers crossing the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.

Hundreds of migrants have drowned in the Aegean en route from Turkey to EU member Greece on unseaworthy boats.

They included three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi, with the images of his lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach spurring the international community into action.

Turkey agreed to step up maritime and land border controls in exchange for incentives on its long-stalled membership bid, including visa-free travel for its citizens and an acceleration of accession talks.

However with an October target passing, no apparent progress on the visa issue and the accession talks stalled, Ankara has accused Brussels of failing to keep its side of the bargain.

In response to Erdogan’s remarks, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said the deal was in the interest “of all parties” and that “threats on either side are not helpful”.

“Where there are difficulties, we need to resolve them,” she added.

Erdogan said while Turkey itself was looking after three million refugees — mainly 2.7 million Syrians from the civil war, but also Iraqis — but “you (the EU) did not fulfil your promises”.

“You never acted honourably, you did not act right,” he told the bloc.

He has also accused Brussels of failing to fulfil a promise to deliver some six billion euros ($6.3 billion) in aid for refugees. The EU says the money is to be transferred gradually for individual projects and not in a single payment.

On Thursday, two people died and two others were badly burnt when a fire broke out on the Greek island of Lesbos, where many migrants who crossed from Turkey are housed.

Lenta.ru: Эрдоган пригрозил запустить беженцев в Европу

Does Turkey See Its Armenian Minority As A Security Threat?

May 2, 2016 By administrator

gagrulenet illustration

By EurasiaNet

Does Turkey See Its Armenian Minority As A Security Threat? by Dorian Jones, EurasiaNet

Members of the small ethnic Armenian community in Turkey are feeling increasingly uneasy. Their wariness is an outgrowth of recent claims by senior officials in Ankara that Kurdish rebels collaborate with Turkish Armenians, as well as the government’s move to expropriate several Armenian churches.

The words and actions come amid heavy fighting between Turkish security forces and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels in towns and cities across southeastern Turkey. In these areas, graffiti with expletives calling ethnic Armenians traitors and accusing them of working with the rebels is commonplace.

“Everybody is afraid, there is fear everywhere,” said one ethnic Armenian resident of Diyarbak?r, Turkey’s main Kurdish population center, a city of roughly a million inhabitants. “If the fighting gets worse, the fire will burn us, too. … We are not the direct target. But if this fire grows, it will definitely swallow us, too.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apparently sees links beyond just the PKK.

During his visit to the United States earlier this month, Erdogan claimed that angry protests in Washington, DC, over Turkey’s fight against the PKK are part of a national and international conspiracy. He described the Kurdish American protesters, gathered outside the Brookings Institution, where he was scheduled to speak, as “representatives of the PKK terrorists’ organization, the YPG [Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units], Asala, and the parallel state [a reference to the movement led by self-exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen], who previously fled Turkey and currently live in the United States, standing side by side and live in each other’s pockets.”

Asala was an Armenian terrorist group that assassinated dozens of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 1980s. A flare-up in fighting in early April between Armenia and Turkey’s closest Eurasian ally, Azerbaijan, that erupted during Erdogan’s trip no doubt further fueled the government’s anxiety.

But even earlier, in a February 27 speech attacking Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also played the Armenian card. The prime minister in the speech accused Turkish-Armenian activists of helping the HDP establish political contacts with Russian leaders. Such contacts at this particular time are guaranteed to raise Ankara’s ire, given the high-level of enmity in Turkish-Russian relations. Bilateral ties have been in a nosedive since November, when Turkish fighters shot down a Russian military jet.

The hostile comments made by top Turkish leaders have alarmed members of Turkey’s ethnic Armenian minority, a group of uncertain size that generally stays in the shadows.

“The expressions of the president and the prime minister are supporting this phenomenon and encouraging those targeting the Armenians,” Garo Paylan, a Turkish-Armenian member of parliament from the HDP, told the Bianet.org news website. “We have seen in the writings on walls in cities under barricades that the word ‘Armenian’ still is being used as a swearword in Turkey.”

Historically, Turkish nationalists have always portrayed Turkey’s predominantly Christian Armenian minority as an untrustworthy fifth column, sympathetic to traditional enemy Russia. Until recently, schools echoed that claim. The prejudice extends to an unwritten rule that prevents ethnic minority members from becoming police officers, army officers or judges.

For some ethnic Armenians, the suggestion that they are collaborating with PKK rebels brings to mind World War I suspicions that their community supported Russian interests – a notion that helped fuel the mass slaughter of ethnic Armenians in 1915.

Years ago, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party had presented itself as free from such prejudices. It attempted a diplomatic reconciliation with neighboring Armenia, and allowed the reopening and refurbishing of some Armenian churches in the southeast. It also took steps to return some previously expropriated Armenian properties.

Yet this month, the state expropriated St. Giragos in Diyarbak?r, the largest Armenian church in the region. St. Giragos recently underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation, paid for primarily by contributions from members of the Armenian Diaspora and the pro-Kurdish city government. The expropriation was part of an eminent domain action, under which the Turkish government adopted legislation that gave it possession of 90 percent of the city’s historic Sur quarter.

The seizures are part of government plans to redevelop Sur, parts of which were devastated by recent fighting with the PKK. In a government video illustrating future plans for the area, numerous images of mosques are included, but no churches, even though the quarter contains seven churches. In addition to the expropriation of St. Giragos, two other churches with Armenian ties were taken over by the government, along with a Protestant and an Assyrian houses of worship.

Local civic activists fear that the government’s redevelopment plan will drastically alter the city’s flavor. “We are talking about a city where 33 civilizations existed. It means something to us and it means something else to the Turkish state,” said Merthan An?k, former head of the Diyarbak?r chamber of architects. “When the prime minister came to Diyarbak?r [on April 1] he made a speech emphasizing only the Ottoman and Seljuk architecture and culture.”

Muhammed Akar, head of Diyarbak?r’s branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party, downplayed such concerns. “This expropriation matter is misunderstood,” Akar said.

Much uncertainty remains concerning the plans for the Sur neighborhood. The official claim that the expropriation measure is being misinterpreted is not reassuring members of the local Armenian community. “We are not unfamiliar with this. We have anxiety, fear because we don’t know” what will happen, said Gaffur Türkay, a board member of the Giragos Foundation, a non-profit group which works to maintain St. Giragos.

A bomb threat incident from Islamic State terrorists during the Easter holiday already had heightened the sense of vulnerability, commented political scientist Cengiz Aktar of Istanbul’s Süleyman ?ah University. The threat turned out to be a hoax, but the Armenian community remains wary. “All in all, they [Turkish Armenians] are not as confident as a few years ago,” Aktar said.

As the government shifts to an increasingly nationalist narrative, that discomfort is not likely to dissipate soon.

Editor’s note: Dorian Jones is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.

Turkey Erdoğan views PYD as threat, prefers ISIL control in northern Syria

June 15, 2015 By administrator

Kurdish People’s Protection Units fighters gather at the eastern entrances of the town of Tel Abyad,
(Photo: Reuters)

Rattled by new flux of refugees fleeing the raging war between the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the northern Syrian city of Tel Abyad near the border, Turkey’s leader expressed concern over the YPG takeover of the town, implying that he would rather prefer ISIL control over the strategic border city.

The ISIL and YPG, the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), are vying for control over Tel Abyad in an episode in the long struggle for supremacy in northern Syria. Backed by air forces from the global anti-ISIL coalition, the YPG recently made swift gains and pushed back radical militants after a withering months-long siege of the Kurdish city of Kobani, which proved to be a turn in the tide against ISIL. Turkey had to absorb more than 150,000 civilians during ferocious battles in and around Kobani in late 2014. Report Zaman

A similar fierce showdown is in the air, this time in Tel Abyad, a key border town just opposite of Akçakale, a Turkish border town in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa. Barbed fences and a wall divide the two towns.

The YPG advance toward Tel Abyad prompted a new mass exodus of refugees, sparking a humanitarian crisis across the border. The town is of strategic importance to the militant group, which regards as its only gateway and supply line through the border with Turkey.

Losing Tel Abyad, some 80 kilometers north of the ISIL stronghold of Raqqa, would deprive the group of a direct route to bring in new foreign militants or supplies. The Kurdish advance, coming under the cover of intense US-led coalition airstrikes in the area, also would link their two fronts and put even more pressure on Raqqa as Iraqi forces struggle to contain the group in their country. Reports on Monday suggested that the YPG totally encircled the town.

A Today’s Zaman reporter in Akçakale said the ISIL militants began to withdraw to Raqqa to prepare for the next round of the battle, which will probably take place in or around Raqqa, the provincial capital of ISIL. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict, said there were only around 150 Islamic State fighters in Tel Abyad.

Already battered by endless waves of refugees, Turkey allowed more than 3,000 refugees who were fleeing the fighting in Tel Abyad to enter the country, reversing its earlier decision of closing its borders to new refugees.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a reflection of the widely-held opinion of Justice and Development Party (AK Party) senior figures, views the looming battle from a different angle. Ankara sees the YPG as the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an outlawed militia that has fought a 30-year insurgency against the Turkish state to establish regional autonomy in southeast Turkey. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the US, Turkey and EU.

Erdoğan spoke to reporters from pro-government media outlets during his return from Azerbaijan and addressed the steep challenges Turkey faces across the Turkish-Syrian border.

Offering a bleak assessment of the security situation in northern Syria, the president, however, appeared uneasy about the ascendant YPG, which has systematically rooted out ISIL groups from towns and villages as part of a steady campaign since January when it defeated the militant group in Kobani.

Erdoğan portrayed the YPG’s ascendancy on the battleground as a threat to Turkish national interests, accusing the Kurdish militia of deliberately targeting the indigenous Arab and Turkmen population in northern Syria.

The Turkish president said the US-led coalition fighting ISIL militants in Syria was bombing Arabs and Turkmens near Turkey’s border.

“On our border, in Tel Abyad, the West, which is conducting aerial bombings against Arabs and Turkmens, is unfortunately putting terrorist members of the PYD and PKK in their place,” Erdogan said.

Last week, he accused the West of backing “Kurdish terrorists” in northern Syria. The YPG has emerged as the main military partner for the US-led campaign against ISIL in Syria. Erdoğan’s views reflect a concern over the revival of probable separatist sentiment among Turkey’s Kurdish community, which closely follows YPG movements in Syria.

Erdoğan’s refusal to help the besieged Kurds in Kobani fight ISIL touched off nationwide protests in Turkey on Oct. 6-7, 2014, leading to the death of more than 40 people in street clashes. The AK Party government, sources close to the party say, does not want to see a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria that could control Turkey’s border and thus transport routes to Arab Syria.

The president’s comments came at a time when the Cumhuriyet and the Birgün newspapers ran news stories involving video and photo footage that appeared to be evidence of the AK Party government’s links to ISIL in northern Syria. In one incident, the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), transported ISIL militants on buses through the Akçakale border gate as reinforcements in the fight against Kurdish forces.

Rebels accuse Kurds of deliberately displacing Arabs

More than a dozen Syrian rebel groups on Monday accused the country’s main Kurdish militia of deliberately displacing thousands of Arabs and Turkmens as it pushes deeper into ISIL strongholds in northern Syria.

The Kurdish advance has caused the displacement of 18,000 people who fled to Turkey in the past two weeks. On Monday, up to 3,000 more refugees arrived at the Akçakale border crossing, according to the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT). An Associated Press photographer saw large numbers of people at the border and thick smoke billowing across as US-led coalition aircraft targeted ISIL militants in Tel Abyad.

The accusation, which was not backed by evidence of ethnic- or sectarian-related killings, threatened to escalate tensions between ethnic Arabs and Kurds as the Kurdish fighters conquer more territory in northern Syria.

Since the beginning of the year, the YPG have wrested back more than 500 mostly Kurdish and Christian towns in northeastern Syria, as well as strategic mountains seized earlier by ISIL. They have recently pushed into Raqqa province, an ISIL stronghold where Tel Abyad is located.

“YPG forces … have implemented a new sectarian and ethnic cleansing campaign against Sunni Arabs and Turkmen under the cover of coalition airstrikes which have included bombardment, terrorizing civilians and forcing them to flee their villages,” the statement issued by rebel and militant groups said. The YPG, however, denies these claims.

Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the people who had fled into Turkey were escaping fighting and there was no systematic effort to force people out.

He said also said there were no Turkmen in the area, stating, “There are violations [referring to acts of abuse] by individuals from the YPG, but not in a systematic way.”

Turkey: A Permanent Threat to Armenia

March 13, 2015 By administrator

By David Boyajian

photo, Christian
Science Monitor

If Turkey were to open its border with Armenia, and the two established diplomatic and trade relations, Turkey would still be a threat to Armenia.
Turkey would be a threat even if it were to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, pay reparations, and return stolen Armenian property. And the threat to Armenia would remain even if it someday regains its homeland which now lies in eastern Turkey.
Why? Because Turkey’s belligerent policies towards Armenians, its pan-Turkic goals in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and its neo-Ottoman ambitions pose essentially the same dangers today as at the time of the genocide. And they show no sign of ever changing.
Aside from a general awareness of the genocide and present-day Turkish hostility, however, many Armenians and others are unfamiliar with key details of past and present Turkish policies. Consequently, they underestimate the dangers that Armenia faces.

Even the commonly held view that “in 1915 the Young Turk regime committed genocide against Armenians in Turkey” is dangerously misleading.

The genocide actually lasted through 1923, five years after Turkey’s defeat in WWI. Two regimes conducted the genocide: Ottoman Young Turk and Kemalist. The latter, of course, founded today’s allegedly “modern”
Turkey. And the genocide took place not only in “Turkey” but also, ominously, on what was and is today the territory of the Republic of Armenia.

Endless Genocide
Turkifying and Islamizing the remnants of its empire was a key reason that Turkey destroyed its indigenous Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians during WWI (1914-18). But Armenians and Armenian soil also lay just across the border, in the Caucasus region of the Russian empire, directly in the path of Turkey’s genocidal pan-Turkic jihad.
Turkey committed genocide against those Armenians too, and ripped large chunks of territory from the new Armenian Republic, which had just been reborn from Russian Armenia.

Azeris — Turkey’s blood brothers then and now — also conducted large-scale massacres of Armenians in the Caucasus in WWI and through 1920.
After Turkey’s defeat in 1918, Turkish forces under Kemal (known later as Atatürk) continued the genocide in the Armenian Republic through 1920 and in Turkey through 1923.
Like Turkish leaders today who lie and deceive, Kemal publicly professed peaceful intentions toward Armenia. Secretly, however, he told his commanders that it is “of the

tmost necessity that Armenia be both politically and physically eliminated.” Kemal, too, lopped off chunks of Armenia. Though it resisted heroically, only a Soviet takeover in December of 1920 saved Armenia from annihilation. These facts are relevant to the perils that Armenia faces today because of Turkey’s pan-Turkic and neo-Ottoman foreign policies.
Pan-Turkism
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey has established ongoing relationships with Azerbaijan and Central Asia’s new “Turkic-speaking” countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Turkey has invested billions of dollars and established Turkish schools and universities in these countries. Turkey’s President
Gül declared that “Kyrgyzstan is our ancestral homeland” while visiting that country’s International Atatürk-Alatoo University.Turkey hosts major gas and oil pipelines originating in Baku, co produces weapons with Azerbaijan, and trains Azeri troops. In Turkic solidarity with Azerbaijan, Turkey has injected itself into the Artsakh/Karabagh conflict by closing its border with Armenia for two decades. The Turkish-Azeri axis — termed “one nation, two states” — harks back to its assault on Armenia during the genocide. One hundred years has changed nothing. Turkey remains enamored of Turkic blood bonds.
In the former Armenian province of Nakhichevan — now part of Azerbaijan and emptied of its Armenians — Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan recently signed a treaty creating the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States.

Let’s be clear. Only Soviet control of the Caucasus and Central Asia from the 1920’s to 1991, and Russian and Chinese dominance since then, have thwarted Turkey’s pan-Turkic goals.

For several decades, of course, Russia and China have possessed nuclear weapons. Turkey has not. Imagine what an arrogant, genocidal Turkey would have perpetrated by now had it possessed nuclear weapons. Turkey
could still, unfortunately, acquire nuclear weapons or other WMDs.
Turkey’s dangerous imperial goals today also include “neo-Ottomanism.”
Neo-Ottomanism
Turkey regards itself as the leader of not only its former colonies in the Middle East and Balkans but also the entire Muslim world. Turkey is investing heavily in those regions.

Its Education Ministry recently released multi-media material that shows Armenia, Cyprus, and parts of Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Iraq, and Syria as being part of Turkey. Turkey claimed it was just a mistake.

“You are the grandchildren of the Ottomans. It will be the Ottomans who will make the world tremble again. If the Ottomans do not come back, the unbelievers will never be brought down to their knees.” A Turkish clergyman thundered those words to a frenzied Turkish rally in Belgium two decades ago.

In attendance were his admirers: Necmettin Erbakan, soon to be Turkey’s Prime Minister and the latter’s protégés, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gül, Turkey’s current Prime Minister and President.

Far from renouncing its bloody Ottoman past, such examples illustrate that Turkey embraces and wants to recreate it. Consequently, its threats against Armenia must never be taken lightly.

Turkish Threats
During the Artsakh/Karabagh war, Turkish President Turgut Özal repeatedly threatened Armenia. Armenians, he warned, “had not learned the lessons” of WWI — that is, the genocide.

According to Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, former Greek ambassador to Armenia, U.S. and French intelligence sources confirm that Turkey was poised to invade Armenia in 1993. Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen who was Speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and an opponent of Russian President Yeltsin, had secretly given Turkey the go-ahead to invade Armenia if he toppled Yelstin. Fortunately, Yelstin survived the challenge.

If not for the Armenian-Russian alliance of these past two decades, Turkey and Azerbaijan would have jointly attacked Armenia, with catastrophic consequences.
Despite Turkey’s hostile record, some Armenians have fallen victim to the constant drumbeat of propaganda that Turkey is “reforming.”

Turkish non-Reforms
Some even believe that acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide would be tantamount to Turkey’s having “reformed.” That’s absurd and a serious mistake.
An acknowledgment, which would almost certainly be incomplete, insincere, or reversible, could psychologically disarm Armenians into letting down their guard. By not owning up to the genocide, therefore, Turkey may unwittingly be doing Armenians a favor.
Turkey’s actual record is one of repression, followed by mass violence, interspersed with so-called “reforms.” In the 19th century, large-scale massacres of Armenians, particularly those of the 1890s, followed Ottoman “reforms” such as the Tanzimat (anti-discrimination decrees). The Young Turk “reform” revolution of 1908 — cheered in the beginning by Armenians, Greeks, and other national groups — was followed by the 1909 Adana massacres, the 1915-23 extermination, and genocidal attacks on Russian Armenia and the Republic of Armenia. Then along came the new “reformed, modern” Turkey of 1923. It confiscated Armenian property, destroyed Armenian churches, and
Turkified Armenian city and village names. In 1943, Turkey unleashed its malicious Capital Tax program against Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. Later came the devastating Istanbul riots of 1955. Did we mention Turkey’s massacre of Greek Cypriot civilians and ongoing occupation of northern Cyprus? The death squads and torture chambers? The repression, deportation, and massacre of Kurds and other minorities, and the jailing of dissidents and journalists? All the while, we are told that Turkey is “reforming.”

Turkish Syndrome
In addition to Turkey’s policies, its political leaders pose a danger because of what one may term Turkish Political Personality Syndrome. This syndrome is on full display today in “modern” Turkey’s constant threats, chest-beating, belligerence, malignant narcissism, hypocrisy, extortion, despotism, cruelty, crudeness, lies, broken pledges, and, of
course, the use of violence. One cannot think of even one positive Turkish political quality.
The countless victims of Turkish violence down through the centuries are proof of Turkish leaders’ disordered state of mind. There is little indication that either Turkey’s policies toward Armenians or their leaders’ disorder will ever change. Indeed, they may grow more threatening. Yet, Armenians still hope that Turkey will change. How to make them
aware that the Turkish threat is here to stay?

Education
Young people will, of course, become the adults who conduct the political, economic, cultural, and military affairs of Armenia. They must be equipped intellectually and psychologically to deal with Turkey.
From a young age, Armenian students must study — but not in Turkish schools — Turkish history, geo-politics, and language, and their application to present-day Armenian-Turkish relations.
The Turkish political personality and its violent and deceitful tendencies must be dissected and understood. This is not easy, for two reasons. First, Armenians are bombarded by
pro-Turkish and “reconciliation” propaganda from around the world and even by some Armenians. Second, we Armenians are unlike Turks and often have difficulty understanding their political culture.

Ultimately, future generations of Armenians will have to choose whom to believe. Will it be the allegedly “reformed, modern” Turkey? The international media that kowtows to Turkey? Countries that historically have betrayed Armenia?
Or will Armenians learn from the past and the hard-earned wisdom of their forebears? Their decision may determine whether Armenia lives or dies.

David Boyajian is a freelance journalist. Many of his articles are
archived on Armeniapedia:
http://armeniapedia.org/wiki/David_B._Boyajian

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