The Armenian Archbishop Aram Atesyan Turkey, Vicar General of the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey, has warned treading the red carpet for religious leaders on arrival at Yerevan Zvartnots airport, it should be welcomed by demonstrators. The controversial message addressed to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the vote of 2 June the Bundestag recognizing the Armenian Genocide, has not in fact helped to make it popular among armenian.
Erdogan ‘Kissing the Hand He Tried to Break’ in Secret Syria Talks to Destroy Kurd
gagrulenet illustration
Relations between Ankara and Damascus have improved in recent secret talks, as both sides are showing willingness for dialogue, Turkish mediator Ismail Hakki Pekin told Sputnik Turkey.
The governments of Syria and Turkey are engaging in dialogue and both sides are showing a willingness to negotiate their differences, the Turkish military’s former intelligence chief Ismail Hakki Pekin told Sputnik Turkey.
According to a recent report by Algerian newspaper Al Watan, there has been contact between the two governments mediated by the Algerian government.
Pekin is the leader of a delegation from Turkey’s Vatan party, whose members regularly visit Syria. He said that he has also been mediating between the two governments, and noticed a change in both sides after his most recent visit.
“We have been systematically working to normalize relations between Turkey and Syria for a long time, and came up with an initiative to provide the necessary basis for dialogue between the Turkish and Syrian leadership,” he explained.
“In my last trip, I noticed a softening from the Syrian side, and a similar tendency in representatives of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, when I told them about the outcome of our delegation’s visit. The Foreign Ministry as a whole received my information favorably. They used to reject everything out of hand.”
Pekin said the most pressing issue on the agenda during talks is improvement in the region’s security situation, which requires compromise from both sides.
“Security is of prime importance, the issue of ensuring the integrity of Syria and, related to that, the question of closing the Turkish border.”
“Turkey wants the Syrian leadership not to give support to the Democratic Union Party (PYD, a Kurdish opposition party in northern Syria) and prevent the strengthening of the Syrian Kurdish position in the region. But for that, Turkey has to help Syria,” Pekin explained.
“Turkey has to close the border, stop supporting opposition groups. Just that on its own would create the preconditions for a huge breakthrough in relations.”
According to Pekin, the governments have started to soften their positions because of the region’s changing geopolitical situation, and Ankara’s belated realization that stability is key.
“The integrity of Syria means the integrity of Turkey. If the US were to succeed in its project to split up Syria into pieces, the situation in Turkey would be much more unstable than today. The amount of terrorist attacks would increase significantly.”
“However, the US has been defeated in the region, and in these circumstances relations with Assad inevitably improve. Tayyip Erdogan will kiss the hand he tried to break.”
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Turkey: Local intel police officer warned of Dink murder ‘10 months in advance’
REUTERS photo
A former intelligence police officer on trial for negligence in the murder of slain journalistHrant Dink said in his defense on June 20 that he had notified the state of Dink’s imminent murder “10 months before the incident,” during the fifth hearing of a court trying some 35 suspected state officials.
A public prosecutor demanded a life sentence for Muhittin Zenit, an officer at the provincial bureau of intelligence in the Black Sea province of Trabzon at the time of Dink’s murder, for “voluntary manslaughter” by withholding intelligence information that could have prevented the assassination.In his defense in the fifth hearing of the trial, Zenit denied the allegations and said he “performed his intelligence duties in the best possible way” while he was on duty in Trabzon.
“I prepared reports stating that Yasin Hayal had a big grudge against Armenians and that he would kill Dink no matter what,” Zenit said, referring to the instigator of Dink’s murderer, Ogün Samast.
Hayal was also responsible for a 2004 bomb attack targeting a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon for selling food during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, accompanied by his collaborator, Erhan Tuncel, who turned out to be a “deputy intelligence officer.”
In his testimony, Zenit also referred to a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling, suggesting that Trabzon police notified Istanbul police that Hayal was capable of murdering Dink but the latter failed to take action with regards to the information.
“I notified my state of the [imminent] murder [of Dink] 10 months in advance,” Zenit said.
“In which other way could I have stated in my reports that Dink was to be murdered?” he added, before apologizing to Dink’s wife Rakel Dink for failing to protect her slain husband.
“Hrant Dink was not a person who harmed this country, that’s why he was targeted. He was chosen as a target due to something he said and he was brought to death step by step,” Zenit told the court, saying he owed an apology to only one person – Rakel Dink.
Meanwhile, a group of Hrant Dink’s colleagues and rights activists named “Hrant’s Friends” once again gathered in front of the courthouse in Istanbul’s Çağlayan neighborhood and criticized as “hardly believable” the testimony of former Trabzon Police Chief Reşat Altay during the previous hearing of the trial. Trabzon’s police chief at the time of Dink’s assassination in 2007, Altay, denied the charges against him for “negligence in public duty” and demanded his acquittal during the fourth hearing of the trial on May 26, claiming that important information was withheld from him on purpose by other members of the police organization.
Altay claimed important information was withheld from him on purpose, blaming the purported “parallel state” for allegedly keeping him in the dark.
“We demanded nine years for the trial of the public official who had a responsibility in the murder,” journalist Pınar Öğünç said, speaking on behalf of Hrant’s Friends, adding they did not consider Altay’s testimony “believable.”
Öğünç reiterated their determination to continue a legal battle against negligent state officials.
Relatives and followers of the case have claimed government officials, police, military personnel and members of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT) played a role in Dink’s murder by neglecting their duty to protect the journalist.
Turkey’s top court in July 2014 ruled that the investigation into the killing had been flawed, paving the way for the trial of the police officials.
All the names of the suspects implicated in the investigation were reported to have been on duty in police departments in Istanbul, Ankara and Trabzon at the time of Dink’s murder.
Dink, 52, was shot dead with two bullets to the head in broad daylight outside the offices of Agos in central Istanbul on January 19, 2007.
Samast, then a 17-year-old jobless high-school dropout, confessed to the murder and he was sentenced to almost 23 years in jail in 2011.
But the case grew into a wider scandal after it emerged that the security forces had been aware of a plot to kill Dink but failed to act.
June/20/2016
Source: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/#panel-7
Turkey: Human rights activist sent to court for arrest for supporting press freedom campaign
A human rights activist was sent to court on June 20 for arrest after supporting a campaign in solidarity with Turkish daily Özgür Gündem, which was started on World Press Freedom Day, news portal Bianet has reported.
Turkey Human Rights Foundation (THIV) head Prof. Şebnem Korur Fincancı was sent to court for arrest on charges of making terror propaganda when she served as the editor-in-chief of Özgür Gündem for one day on May 29 as a part of the “Editor-in-chief on Duty” campaign.
Financı called the decision “an effort to break solidarity.”
“This is an expected situation. It is also disturbing to send people to court for arrest by hand-picking [them],” Financı told Bianet.
Meanwhile, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Turkey representative Erol Önderoğlu and journalist Ahmet Nesin also testified to the terror and organized crimes prosecutor for taking part in the campaign.
A total of 44 prominent journalists, including Hasan Cemal, Şeyhmus Diken, Tuğrul Eryılmaz and Ayşe Düzkan served as one-day editors-in-chief during the campaign, while 37 of them were probed for their support.
Özgür Gündem started the campaign on May 3 to provide solidarity and defend press freedom against a number of investigations it faced.
Turkish border guards kill 9 Syrian refugees
Syrian refugees are seen at the Bab al-Salama refugee camp, near A’zaz, Syria, next to the Turkish crossing gate, February 6, 2016. ©AFP
(Presstv) Turkish border guards have killed nine members of a Syrian family, who were trying to cross the frontier and take refuge in the neighboring country.
The deadly incident took place near the village of Kherbet Eljoz in Syria’s Idlib Province on Saturday night as the Turkish forces opened fire on the refugees, leaving eight more Syrians injured.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source told The New Arab news website that the victims were among several families displaced from the city of Jarablus in Syria’s Aleppo Province.
“Turkish border guards opened fire on them indiscriminately, killing nine people and wounding eight others,” the source said, adding that the dead were “all from one family – three children, four women and a man,” who fled Jarablus due to fighting.
It was not the first time that the Turkish border guards employed force against Syrians uprooted from their homes, with activists saying that at least 50 asylum seekers have been killed on the Turkish border in the past few months.
Back in May, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report that in March and April 2016, five people, including a child, were killed and 14 others were seriously injured as a result of Turkish soldiers’ shootings and beatings.
Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher at the New York-based rights organization, said the Turkish soldiers are “killing and beating” refugees.
“Firing at traumatized men, women, and children fleeing fighting and indiscriminate warfare is truly appalling,” he added.
Turkey, however, rejected the accusation, claiming that it is welcoming Syrian refugees.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Damascus regards a number of countries as the main supporters of the militants fighting the government forces in the Arab country.
Turkey, which is hosting 2.7 million Syrian refugees, closed its borders to the asylum seekers around a year ago, but permitted entry for critical medical cases and humanitarian organizations.
Ankara and the European Union sealed a contentious agreement in March in a bid to tackle Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Under the deal, the 28-nation bloc will take in thousands of Syrian refugees directly from the country and in return will reward Ankara with money, visa exemption and progress in its EU membership negotiations.
Ankara is known as a staunch supporter of the terrorist groups operating to topple the Syrian government.
Turkey: Erdogan last mischief
The cowardice of Europe to the Turkish president is unbearable. Captives that we are of the Agreement on migrants, arranged on our behalf by Merkel.
It happened near the village of Sirnak, there is less than a week. In this part of Turkey, which form a wedge between the Iraqi border in the east and the Syrian border to the west. In a region claimed by Kurdish separatists. At night, the residents of a refugee camp witnessed the arrival of military trucks, some carrying bulldozers. In a few minutes, seven pits were dug and bodies were buried hastily and covered. With just large stones without inscription to mark their location. How many were there? Refugees who have shown the graves to a Times reporter did not know, because they were hiding while taking place this macabre operation. They still have to realize that there were children in this mass grave.
Since the cease-fire with the PKK, the Kurdish separatist movement, has been broken, there are two years, swordsmen Erdogan hastily baptized indiscriminate terrorist civilians. Which, incidentally, is sometimes true, as the PKK continues to commit attacks against the Turks, including the heart of power in large cities like Ankara or Istanbul. arbitrary arrest
The problem is that Turkish President has given full powers to the army to fight the separatists and the latter in used and abused with the full approval of power. Arbitrary arrests, liquidations multiply, supposedly to fight terrorists. Neither opinion, which fears the power nor the press, increasingly muzzled, really protesting.
But the worst is the embarrassed silence and therefore complicit in Europe. Erdogan pretext justify his evil deeds in the fight against terrorism, European leaders leave the nearly. Forgetting that those Turkish President massacred brethren are these which peshmerga, Syria or Iraq, are central to the fight against the Islamic State alongside the Western coalition. Their fighting spirit is not for nothing in military setbacks suffered by jihadis on the ground.
The truth is that we attack of cowardice before the Turkish satrap. When we accept the forced resignation of the EU Ambassador in Ankara on the grounds that the diplomat criticized the way Erdogan made fun of human rights. When the Germans agreed to prosecute a comedian because he lampooned the Turkish President. When Angela Merkel feebly protested against the anathemas launched by Erdogan against members of the Bundestag with Turkish ancestry who voted a text on the Armenian genocide conviction. When we do not block the process of Turkish accession to Europe while the Turkish power checks of journalists and silenced media permanently.
read more…
Sunday, June 19, 2016,
Stéphane © armenews.com
Stéphane © armenews.com
Turkey British rock band Radiohead slams Islamist attack on fans in Istanbul
British rock band Radiohead condemned an attack on customers at an Istanbul record store attending their album release party. Islamists said they were angry with the event coinciding with their holy month, Ramadan.
A group of about 20 men violently attacked customers and employees at the Velvet IndieGround music store in Istanbul’s Cihangir district, a liberal neighborhood in close proximity to Taksim Square and Gezi Park. They said they were angered by people drinking alcohol and listening to music during the Muslim holy month.
One of the attackers was heard as shouting “If you dare to drink here one more time we will come burn you.”
The Velvet IndieGround record shop was among hundreds of shops around the world marking the release of Radiohead’s first album in five years. The attackers managed to cause considerable damage, trashing the store while hurling insults at release party of the band’s new studio album “A Moon Shaped Pool”.
One person was seen bleeding with head injuries after being hit with a bottle.
Banning gay pride
The attack coincided with the announcement of a ban on Istanbul’s annual gay pride march, which was set to take place later in June. The city’s governor banned the event, citing security concerns. Islamists and far-right extremists had threatened the march, as it would also coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The gay pride march was broken up by police last year. Many have blamed a growing atmosphere of intolerance in general and homophobia in the country in particular.
Similar attacks like those on the Velvet IndieGround record store and altercations during gay pride events have taken part also at art galleries in the area in the past. Critics say that Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government under the leadership of the AK Party (Justice and Development Party) has been undermining the country’s secular tradition, culminating in the Gezi Park protests in the summer of 2013, which resulted in 22 deaths without leading to any change.
ss/jm (AFP, dpa)
Turkey returns EU progress report over Armenian Genocide reference
Permanent Delegation of Turkey to the European Union returned Friday, June 17 the European Parliament’s (EP) 2015 Turkey progress report over the mention of theArmenian Genocide, Daily Sabah says.
Diplomatic sources said that the report, which the EP passed in April by 375 votes in favor and 133 against, was rejected without even being opened due its request to recognize 1915 mass killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
Turkey also returned a previous report in spring 2015 for the same reason.
“Turkey will reject the European Parliament Progress Report on Turkey if it includes any mention of an Armenian Genocide,” Turkey’s then-EU Minister Volkan Bozkir said.
Photo. The Independent
The Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.
Present-day Turkey denies the fact of the Armenian Genocide, justifying the atrocities as “deportation to secure Armenians”. Only a few Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and scholar Taner Akcam, speak openly about the necessity to recognize this crime against humanity.
The Armenian Genocide was recognized by Uruguay, Russia, France, Lithuania, the Italian Chamber of Deputies, majority of U.S. states, parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Belgium and Wales, National Council of Switzerland, Chamber of Commons of Canada, Polish Sejm, Vatican, European Parliament and the World Council of Churches.
Turkey: So gays, too, should go to lab to check their Turkishness?
By: BURAK BEKDİL
burak.bekdil@hurriyet.com.tr
The laboratories that can perform blood tests to check a human being’s Turkishness are becoming a niche market. That is a business imperative in a country where tens of millions of people are accused of being traitors and terrorists. Naturally, they are not Turks, given the scientific fact that a Turk cannot be a traitor or a terrorist.
No doubt, a new market is emerging after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the Turkish German MPs who voted in favor of the Armenian genocide resolution in the Bundestag “should go to a lab and check the Turkishness of their blood.”
After the recent jihadist’s attack at a gay club in Orlando, a Turkish Islamist daily newspaper announced the massacre in a headline that said “50 perverts killed in a bar in the U.S.” A better headline could have been “Muslim hero kills 50 perverts.”
On Wednesday, the Alperen Hearths, an ultranationalist youth organization, threatened the LGBT Pride March set to take place on June 26 in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The Alperens’ threat came shortly after a similar threat made by an Islamist youth group, the Anatolia Muslim Youth Association, which said it would “stop the perversion.”
The Alperens, with 100 percent tested top quality Turkish blood, basically said:
– We will take all necessary risks and we will stop the march.
– We don’t want them to walk naked on the sacred soil of our country in the blessed month of Ramadan.
– This is not normal freedom. We are issuing a warning and we are not responsible for what will happen after this point.
– The Alperens will give a “very clear and harsh response” if the state did not intervene in the march.
The Alperen Hearths claim that they are the representatives of the people and their duties (such as attacking gays) were passed to them from their ancestors. In the Turkish ultra-nationalist jargon, “our ancestors” often refer to the glorious old times. The Alperens probably don’t know (or want to know) that there is a rich international literature showing how common pederasty was in the society. Some sources quote Halil İnalcık, a prominent professor of history, as saying that “homosexuality was a custom accepted by the society.”
Unsurprisingly, the Alperens stated that it is their religious duty to command good and forbid evil, by force if necessary. Sadly, the Pride March falls into this category: It must be forbidden, by force if necessary. If the state does not stop the perverts, the pure 100 percent-DNA Turks will do.
The Alperens are not the first group adding to an already too rich literature of incidents forcefully exhibiting two ugly asymmetries: 1- Pluralism and Islamist thinking are an oxymoron. 2- Islamists will typically advocate majoritarianism in lands where they are the majority (including majoritarian practices by force, if necessary) but defend minority rights in lands where they are in a minority (as in Europe, for example).
In the Alperens’ public statement, the key line was: “We don’t want them [the other] on the sacred soil of our country.” This is just like a European neo-Nazi saying: We don’t want Muslims on the sacred soil of our country. Right? Right. What would an Alperen say to that? Fascists, Islamophobes, uncivilized monsters!
Alperens and the likes of them will probably never be able to understand that a gay parade will not make them “perverts.” A church sitting at the heart of a Muslim city will not make its Muslims Christian. Really, could a laboratory run blood tests and find out why these people are so afraid of “conversion to perversion” just by the sight of “the other”?
June/17/2016
Turkey: the former football star Hakan Sükür tried for insulting Erdogan
The trial of the former star of Turkish football Hakan Sükür for “insulting” the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a controversial count for which he faces up to four years in prison, opened Thursday in Istanbul, reported news agency Dogan.
The prosecutor of the Istanbul Bakirkoy district claims against the author of the fastest goal in the history of the World Cup in 2002 in South Korea, one to four years in prison for “insulting” Mr. Erdogan in a series of tweets since erased, Dogan said, without specifying the content.
According to the daily Hürriyet, Hakan would Sükür refers to a corruption scandal in 2013 for the Erdogan’s entourage and launched without naming him: “Is this how you become a politician, impudent?” Absent when first hearing, the former player now lives in the US, according to his lawyer Ali Onur güncel quoted by Dogan. The trial was adjourned to give time to the defense to disclose the new address of the player to the court, the agency said.
Since his election to the presidency in August 2014, Erdogan accused by his critics of wanting stifle all dissent, has multiplied the proceedings for “insult” to both artists and journalists as individuals.
After a rich sports career, especially with the club Galatasaray Sükür had entered politics to Erdogan sides and had been elected in 2011 on a list of his Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002.
But hostile to Erdogan’s decision to launch a war on his former ally became his enemy number 1, the influential preacher Fethullah Gulen who lives in the United States which is deemed to be a follower, he had resigned from the AKP in 2013.
Hakan Sükür had denied it a few months ago have moved to the United States, ensuring that he went to “learn English”.
Aged 44, Hakan Sükür spent most of his career at Galatasaray Istanbul club with which he won 8 times the championship of Turkey and the UEFA Cup in 2000. In the national team he has 112 caps and scored 51 goals between 1992 and 2008 with a 3rd place at the 2002 World Cup.
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