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Pushing the limits of Turkish martyrdom
Speaking with a group of Turks in southwest Turkey recently about the Kurdish issue, I was told bluntly by a 30-year-old partner in a successful real estate business: “I hate Kurds.”
The man subsequently amended his statement such that the object of hatred became “terrorists” rather than a full 20 percent of the Turkish population. The lexical overlap of the two terms was however underscored when he reverted to a discussion of “Kurdish” insistence on making martyrs out of Turkish soldiers.
The Turkish word for martyr, şehit, is the subject of a national rhyme—“Şehitler ölmez vatan bölünmez”—according to which martyrs never die and the homeland will never be divided. Shouted at patriotic rallies and emblazoned on Turkish hillsides, the slogan wards off any secessionist aspirations harbored by members of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority—who, it bears reiterating, were formerly promised autonomy by none other than the iconic founder of said indivisible homeland: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Turkey blocks blogspot
When I first noticed earlier this month that I was unable to access my blog here in Turkey, I assumed that I had unintentionally offended Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, whose sanctity has caused Turkish courts to block YouTube access for extended periods of time.
It quickly became clear, however, that the crime was not mine and that blogspot.com had simply been blocked at the order of a court in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır, following complaints by the Digiturk satellite network that its exclusive football broadcasting rights had been violated somewhere on the site.
U.S. confused by lack of press freedom in Turkey
Last week Turkey arrested four journalists suspected of links to the ultranationalist Ergenekon organization, which is accused of plotting to force a military coup against the ruling AK Party.
U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone responded to the arrests by stressing the importance of freedom of the press:
Journalists are being detained on the one hand, while addresses about freedom of the speech are given on the other. We do not understand this.”
In the interest of adding to the ambassador’s confusion, I am submitting the following two recent news excerpts on the subject of press freedom. The first is from an article in The Guardian about the possible true identity of “Raymond Davis,” the American contractor who murdered between two and three people in Pakistan at the end of last month. The second is from the introduction to a Democracy Now! interview with American journalist Brandon Jourdan.
1. “A number of US media outlets learned about Davis’s CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration. A Colorado television station, 9NEWS, made a connection after speaking to Davis’s wife. She referred its inquiries to a number in Washington which turned out to be the CIA. The station removed the CIA reference from its website at the request of the US government.”
Erdoğan Reminds Mubarak that Presidents Die Too
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has finally weighed in on the situation in Egypt, issuing the latest in a sequence of recommendations to preferred U.S. allies in the region.
Last year’s post-flotilla advice to the Israeli regime consisted of an excerpt from the Ten Commandments, delivered in both English and Hebrew: “Thou shalt not kill”.
This year’s advice to Mubarak covers the same themes of religion and death. Reminding the Egyptian leader of the plot in the ground that is inevitably awaiting him, Erdoğan has instructed Mubarak to listen to the wishes of the Egyptian citizenry, given the irrelevance of political rank when “the only thing that will come with you when you die is your burial shroud”.
Valley of the Anti-Semites?
The Turkish film “Kurtlar Vadisi: Filistin”—“Valley of the Wolves—Palestine”— opened yesterday in Turkey. Based on the immensely popular television series “Valley of the Wolves”, the film is a response to the May 2010 Israeli attack on the Turkish-led humanitarian aid flotilla en route to Gaza, which resulted in the murder of nine Turkish activists.
The New York Times points out that the TV series “has portrayed Israelis as baby-killers and human organ thieves. Israel has criticized the series as viciously anti-Semitic fiction”. Perhaps Israel should direct similar criticism at the Times for publishing articles with titles like “Gazan Mother and 4 Children Killed” and “Israeli Shells Kill 40 at Gaza U.N. School”, and for describing Israel as a “nexus” of global organ trafficking.
I watched “Valley of the Wolves—Palestine” at a crowded cinema in a town in southwest Turkey last night. It is an action film and the plot is straightforward: three Turkish agents, led by Polat Alemdar, travel to Israel to pursue the demise of Moshe Ben Eliezer, the fictional Israeli commander who masterminded the flotilla raid.
Learning from Israel
Israeli sunbathers felt so threatened by the impending arrival of aid to Gaza in May 2010 that they organized a 16-boat protest against the flotilla, complete with banner depicting the Turkish prime minister (Photo: Reuters)
With the release of the first part of the report from its investigation into the May 2010 attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla en route to Gaza—in which nine Turkish activists were murdered by IDF commandos—the Israeli Turkel Commission has underscored Israel’s capacity for democratic introspection.
The commission’s findings include that the commandos in question acted in self-defense and that the Israeli blockade of Gaza is not in contravention of international law. According to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the report proves that Israel is “a law-abiding country”.
I’ve made a short list of ideas for possible commissions in other countries interested in attaining a similar status:
1. The United States.
Commission to investigate inordinate number of civilian casualties of U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan.
Possible conclusion: Drones were acting in self-defense.
Erdoğan’s Report Card
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited the town of Fethiye on the southwestern coast of Turkey this afternoon for the mass inauguration ceremony of 34 new regional institutions, ranging from elementary schools to health facilities. The ceremony took place at Republic Square in the center of Fethiye, home to the town’s primary Atatürk statue. An estimated 20,000 people were in attendance, including myself.
Attendees were relieved of pens, loose change, fruit, and other dual-use items by police on the way into the square. I am including a photograph below of one of the piles of spoils in case the Israeli Foreign Ministry would like to add the image to its Flickr photo series “Weapons found on Mavi Marmara”—published following the 31 May 2010 attack by IDF commandos on the humanitarian aid flotilla en route to Gaza. (The attack resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish activists, who obviously deserved to die given that they were hoarding weapons such as kitchen knives, a bucket, and a Palestinian scarf; as Flickr specifies that the Foreign Ministry’s photos were taken between 7 February 2006 and 7 June 2010, I doubt the ministry would deem 15 January 2011 to be out of range.)
The NATO weapons repository, aka the Republic of Turkey
Find the Mavi Marmara. (DAILY NEWS graphic, Emine YILMAZ; SOURCE: Daily News research)
News from Turkey on this first day of 2011: Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has characterized NATO plans for a missile defense system as being in the interest of Turkish national security.
Today’s issue of Today’s Zaman provides a summary of negotiations leading up to the Turkish declaration of support for the project:
Turkey formally backed the planned system during a summit of NATO leaders in Lisbon in November. The summit came after months of discussions between Turkey and mainly the US over some aspects of the planned shield, most notably whether countries such as Turkey’s neighbors Iran and Syria will be named as potential threats. Ankara insisted that the proposed system should provide protection for all territories of member states and that reference to any country would undermine the defensive nature of the planned shield by antagonizing the country or countries singled out as a threat. Turkish insistence paid off in the end as the NATO summit endorsed the missile defense system plans without naming any country as a potential threat.”
Facebook joins Israeli arsenal
Hint to Israelis seeking to avoid military service: Don't update your profile on the Sabbath.
Following this year’s Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara transporting humanitarian aid to Gaza, I wrote the following in an article:
[The incident] may provide inspiration for the scriptwriters of the popular Turkish television series ‘Kurtlar Vadisi’, which prompted a diplomatic skirmish with Israel in January [2010] by portraying Israeli intelligence agents in a negative light. Following the portrayal, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister [Danny] Ayalon subjected the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Oğuz Çelikkol, to humiliating treatment such as being seated in a chair at the Foreign Ministry that was lower to the ground than those sat upon by his Israeli interlocutors. Israel was subsequently forced to apologize for its behavior.
Depending on how the current diplomatic crisis plays out, we may either see more Israeli apologies or new seating arrangements for Çelikkol at the Foreign Ministry, such as a hole in the ground.”
Sure enough, the Turkish film Kurtlar Vadisi: Filistin—”Valley of the Wolves: Palestine“—is slated for release in January 2011. To my knowledge, no holes have yet been dug in Jerusalem to accommodate Turkish diplomatic personnel, although Israel has once again made Turkish news by denying a visa to Turkish citizen Vahap Fırat, reportedly because he is friends on Facebook with the wife of the film’s screenwriter.
Sarah Palin refudiates 5-minaret plan for New York
Given her penchant for proliferating nonexistent threats and non-English vocabulary, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the Nov. 5 release of the Turkish film “New York’ta Beş Minare”—“Five Minarets in New York”—has not prompted any warnings on Twitter by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin about how five minarets cause even more unnecessary heart-stabbing pain throughout the heartland than does a Ground Zero mosque that is neither a mosque nor located at Ground Zero.
The action film features Turkish pop star Mustafa Sandal and American actor Danny Glover, among others, and according to its website “underlines America’s paranoia with the Islamic world after 9/11”. As for relevant history that might prove useful in Palin’s Twitter lectures to Muslims, Sandal released an album in 1994 entitled Suç Bende—It’s My Fault.
Belén Fernández 