Sunday, December 25, 2005

ŞEMZÎN BOMBING SOLVED


"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security." ~ The US Declaration of Independence.


The Ankara regime has determined the guilty parties in the Şemzîn bombing, as reported by Zaman:


Surveillance Cameras to Monitor SE Turkey
By Fatih Atik
Published: Saturday, December 24, 2005

The Interior Ministry and Security General Directorate tightened up the measures against security concerns in Southeastern Anatolia after the events in Semdinli and Yuksekova towns of Hakkari.

A camera system will be set up in Sirnak and Hakkari to prevent provocations and activities of Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK). A similar system, which is applied with great success in Istanbul and Ankara, will be established in the city and town centers of Hakkari and Sirnak. Five cameras will be placed in Sirnak city center, and seven in Hakkari after feasibility studies are completed.

The camera- control system, which is applied successfully in New York and London, became operant in Istanbul just recently.

The possibility of provocation was discussed in the Semdinli case, where the committers of the bombing are unknown. As the statements of the noncommissioned officers and the statements of the eyewitnesses contradict, Security teams took action.

Sirnak Police Department offered setting up a camera system in the city to provide efficient information flow and to make it easier to provide security in the city.

The feasibility studies were launched after the Sirnak Police Department's offer. The companies which established the surveillance system in Istanbul went to Sirnak and its vicinities to conducted estimation studies.

The spots to place the cameras were determined after a thorough technical investigation by the experts. The cameras will be mounted in crowded centers and nearby public buildings. Five cameras will be placed in the city center of Sirnak, seven cameras to Silopi and five cameras to Cizre in the first step.


Ankara wants us to believe that their own terrorists, who bombed the bookstore in Şemzîn, are unknown to them. In this case, as always, the eyewitnesses, being Kurds, are not reliable in the eyes of the regime. Therefore they are to be ignored and stricter repression should be enforced against them, this time in the form of security cameras. And, lest anyone suffer from ignorance of Newspeak, let's be perfectly clear that the security provided by these cameras will not benefit the populace that is being spied upon. The cameras, consistent with Kemalism and its glorification of totalitarianism, will serve only to protect the state.

Again, consistent with the Kemalist regime that slaughtered almost 40,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 90s, the blame for another of its crimes is passed off as a "provocation" of PKK.

Does Ankara realize how stupid it looks? After 25 years of military operations and the presence of hundreds of thousands of security forces, it is still too incompetent to bomb a tiny bookstore in a town made miserable and impoverished by its own policies of repression.

As one example, consider the words of Adnan Hatipoglu:


"All the doors have been shut in our face and hopes have been dashed. We are effectively being told: ‘Don‘t trade officially, smuggle instead.‘ [. . . .] Europe is focused on investing in the west but they should do more for this region. People are suffering here. [. . . .] Life in the region has become unbearable. Unemployment has reached 70 percent, livestock farming has been decimated and villages emptied."



A similar report, from the Financial Times, can be found at KurdishMedia.com.

Instead of transparency, as was promised in the days following the bombing, a heavy curtain falls over the event at Şemzîn. It's time for another round of mass protests in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uhhhhh...how did they get around the little map and list of Kurdish names found in the pocket of the Turkish soldiers?

Nice to hear that, if a suspect in Turkey contradicts the version of eyewitnesses, then HE GOES FREE. What an idealistic, liberal justice system! Good thing every suspect who is truly guilty provides a candid and prompt confession, or their whole system wd become a laughing stock.

Mizgîn said...

If people can disappear, so can evidence.

Not only were the eyewitnesses disregarded, they are now being punished.

I have come to the conclusion that the fuss over Roj TV was manufactured specifically to take attention from the events in Şemzîn and the protests, because everyone was watching and the regime found itself being pinched between how its behavior would appear to the EU and how it should respond to the protests.

This is why I think the thing to do is hold mass protests again, to protest the injustice of letting the state's criminals go as well as to protest the cameras.

And this time, there should be no letup until concrete steps have been taken by the regime.