Me too, and so also in the case of Kurds.Originally Posted by Azor
And I can't forget that the Kurds were promised their own state - exactly in same fashion like Arabs and Jews, by the very same people, at almost the very same opportunity (back in 1917) - and then dropped like a hot rock.
Problem with Kurds ever since are of multiple nature: outwardly, one of primary issues is their lack of unity. One of reasons for the latest failure of negotiations with Turkey is that Kurds couldn't agree - between themselves - what would be their official language: they've got some 40 (plus), but have to use Turkish to communicate with each other.
The last few years, a mass of Kurds inside Turkey voted pro AKP - and indeed pro Erdogan's referendum.
Should anybody here wonder why: the PKK is scoring big points in the West by emphasising its secular side, which Turks actually have as well (which is a much-ignored fact). However, majority of Kurds in Turkey live in rural areas, and are as religious (actually, in this regards Kurds are even slightly more religious and bigotic than average Turks), as backwards, as dogmatic, and as patriarchal as their Turkish neighbours.
...this goes so far, that most of the girlies that are members of the JPJ actually fled their families that tried to get them married - through selling them to their future grooms...
And even if all of such elections and referendums were forged, and only half of what I wrote above would be truth (like I'm sure any decent PKK-activist here in Europe would insist): the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq - the KRG - maintain cordial relations not only to the USA, but to Turkey too, which is why the PKK is repeatedly attacking them.
The PKK is attacking even the Yazidis: while these appear to be so very much important to most of 'true Western Christians', why nobody cares about that?
...and I'll not even go into discussion about 14 political parties of Kurds from northern Syria (all were anti-Assad, and some were KRG-allies) all of which were de-facto destroyed by the PKK in order for this to establish itself in power.
...nor the PJAK or few other, similar Kurdish terrorist gangs.
Kurds were never united. That's the principal reason why they still don't have their own nation-state.
Hm... I'm amazed. So, the Turkish military regime of the 1970s and 1980s was 'OK', because it was securing Turkey's pro-USA/NATO position at the times of the Cold War. Similarly, the PKK was declared a terrorist organization because it is a Marxist organization supported by Moscow and Damascus that was assassinating Turkish politicians, military officers - and mass murdering Turkish civilians.Yet Turkey is far and away the second-worst offender over that period, amassing a bodycount of Kurdish civilians more than three times the number of the Iranian revolutionaries. If the PKK is autocratic and fights dirty, what then of the Turkish state?
But, 20 years later Turkish democratically-elected Islamist government is 'not OK' when it fights the PKK - while this is still supported by Moscow and Damascus...?
Not exactly. Firstly, the Armenian genocide was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians. The same government was removed by Atatrk a few years later. The topic was subsequently ignored - especially so after Turkey became one of funding members of the NATO - because Armenia was gulped by the USSR, and it was inopportune to blame its ally for any kind of misdeeds from the past. Of course, Turkish governments didn't mind that.This is the same Turkish state that denies the Turkish mass murder and cleansing of Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and Kurds in the 1910s and 1920s...
Nowadays, a government as staunchly Islamist and as nationalist as that of Erdogan simply can't 'admit' such a misdeed for obvious reason, but also not because doing so would expose it to all sorts of demands for reparations.
This is quite a widely acceptable practice in plenty of other cases, actually - and then for a host of opportunistic, political- as well as practical reasons. Just for example, some say the Czarist Russia murdered more Jews in pogroms of the 19th Century, than Nazis did during the Holocaust (and, BTW, the Holocaust became 'possible' because so many Jews fled from Russia to Europe, due to pogroms). How many native Indians were murdered in genocide and ethnic cleansing by colonists in what later became the USA remains unknown and hapily avoided topic until today. George Armstrong Custer - a character that, for all practical purposes, was a hijacker and mass murderer or women and children - is considered a national hero in the USA. Not to mention what various European colonial powers were doing to native people of Africa, Asia etc. over the last six centuries...Similarly, nobody can say how many Arabs were killed by Jews and various of their Western allies since the Westerners helped Jews impose their rule over the Palestina.
...and so on, and on... that list is very, very long...indeed, so long that singling Turkey out makes very little sense in the World full of such stories, just insistently inconsequent in sorting them out.
...which is actually little surprising considering precisely those who act as if they would be in a position to teach everybody else how to deal with such history, have a history based on ethnic cleansing and mass murder, i.e. genocides.
Wrong. The experience from what happened in northern Iraq is a brilliant illustration for the fact that Turkey is very much ready to accept Kurdish-ruled areas - if these do not support the PKK.However, just as the Turks will fight to prevent the establishment of a de facto independent Kurdish state on their southern border...
And overall, I simply do not understand why everybody's interests are OK, just Turkish interests are - exactly like those of majority of Syrian people - 'not OK'? Assadists interests are respected; Iranian interests in Syria are respected, Russian interests in Syria are respected (no matter how much non-existing), PKK's interests in Turkey and Syria are even supported... but Turkey is not even granted the right to be more concerned about the PKK and Kurdish nationalism than about the Daesh...?
Sure, Daesh is a gang of beasty idiots, and a major concern for the West, but the PKK is also a recognized terrorist organization. Turkey is, or at least sees itself as, a nation-state based on Turkish nationalism. Does it really take that big a leap of thinking to realize that Turkey would see as an existential threat a competing nationalist ideology that has an interest in territory within the borders of Turkey...?
If you don't understand that, think about it: how about the USA being so kind to 'return' Texas - perhaps California too - to Austria and/or Spain, just because some foreign government would find such an act being 'of its highest national interests'?
You think that's absurd? I doubt you know why.
And Erdogan... if you replace 'Islam' with 'Christianity' in his rhetoric, he sounds not a bit different from most of Republican governmental figures in the USA.
Yet, he's 'not OK', and his politics towards the PKK even less so...?
...'not unlike'...? The United Front/Northern Coalition was no terrorist organization, but a movement widely supported by the local population; Taliban were a Pakistani creation financed by the Saudis; and - as 'thanks' for creating all the brawl in Afghanistan, I guess - Pakistan was then declared a 'most important non-NATO ally' by the USA... Get serious, please....this is not unlike how the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance was a useful ally against the Pashtun Taliban in 2001.
...oh see there... and, why is the USA then not supporting the Free Syrian Army...?The only actor possibly capable of that is the Free Syrian Army.
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