Turkish Army Attacks Iraqi Kurd Rebels:

[grandpa]

Turkey fires on Kurd rebels in Iraq - Europe - MSNBC.com

ANKARA, Turkey - The Turkish military said Saturday it attacked 50 to 60 Kurdish rebels inside Iraqi territory, inflicting “significant losses” a day after the Turkish cabinet authorized a cross-border operation. There were conflicting reports on whether Turkish troops had crossed into Iraq for the attack.

My letter to the editor of the local paper is timely:

Wake up world
To the editor:

The Gazette recently discussed Turkey’s Armenian genocide, calling Nancy Pelosi’s campaign to recognize the genocide “daft.” They dismissed the Armenian genocide as “past unpleasantness” that should have no bearing on today.

By such standards of denial, we might as well all go to the local library and start shredding and burning all the history books, because anything a now “moderate” allied government has done mustn’t matter much today.

This is offensive enough, but one needn’t focus solely on the Armenian genocide to dislike the Turkish state. It isn’t “completely bonkers” to believe that Turkey, like every other state, is authoritarian and deserves to be recognized as such.

In reality, Turkey isn’t “moderate” today. For example, it has been vicious to Kurds regarding human rights—demolishing homes, forcing people out of the country, and banning the Kurdish language until 1991 (in fact, Mehmed Uzun, a Kurdish novelist, was once prosecuted for criticizing Turkey’s ban on the Kurdish language and for calling for Kurds to be educated in Kurdish).

Should that be ignored because Turkey is supposedly now a moderate, “sovereign” and “democratic” nation that has a right to pursue whatever agenda it wants? Despite some reforms, Turkey is still forcing assimilation, and some Iraqi Kurds have conducted ambushes against Turkey from Iraq. Both peaceful and violent Kurdish rebellions are predictable because, between 1984 and 1999, an estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Turkey were virtually wiped from the map, displacing more than 378,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch.

There is no good reason to support the Turkish state’s actions; any more than there is to support Kurdish incursions into Turkey (or the U.S. military bases in Iraq, or former U.S. support for Saddam Hussein).

As I write this, Turkey is poised at Iraq’s borders, undoubtedly ready to pounce at Iraqi Kurds in the glorious tradition of “national security.”

Turkish war hawks are trying to make the best of the Iraq invasion, revamping military alliances with the U.S. and Israel, forming a complicated and contradictory patchwork of policy, even amidst certain “anti-American” attitudes growing in Turkey itself. In defending Turkey, one is ultimately defending a tyrannical state still engaging in some group punishments of a “minority” population.

That’s not “past unpleasantness.” Rather than being a cheerleader for state power, we should be “daft” and acknowledge the realities of state power, the fraud of nationalism and the tyranny of forced assimilation.