SPIES, RED HERRINGS AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

"The three rules of journalism: make it juicy, make it brief, make it up." ~ Anonymous

The New Anatolian has a few interesting pieces up and running that I'd like to point out.

The funniest one is titled "Spies in tourists' clothing", in which TNA describes how the parliamentary Semdinli commission is finding "spies" going around as tourists in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Apparently, the "spies" were using the cover of studying folklore research in Hekarî. A likely story.

One of these "spies" was allegedly French and the other Greek, but I'm sure the parliamentary Semdinli commission knows the real truth, that these "spies" must be JEWS. The PKK is so powerful that it controls the World Zionist Conspiracy®, which means the PKK controls all the world media, all financial institutions, all the arms industry, all governments, and it is through these means that PKK will come to dominate the entire world. The goal of all of this is, of course, to violate the territorial integrity of the sacred Turkish state and tear it into a thousand little pieces. Unless the spirit of Ataturk descends immediately, the entire globe will be lost in a vortex of evil!

Seriously, these people are paranoid, but I guess that is to be expected of fascists. I predict that it will soon be nearly impossible to visit Turkish-occupied Kurdistan with a tourist visa, and this particular article that I mock is the second indicator of my prediction. The first was the human rights worker who was to be deported last week. Jonathan Sugden is a long-time human rights worker for Human Rights Watch, working in Turkey, and he has always done this work on a tourist visa. If the Turkish government is deporting him, along with academics who are also using a tourist visa, I believe this is a trend that will continue. I suspect it will also extend to journalists soon as well.

By restricting access to Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, the Turkish government will create a total blackout of news and information coming from the area, a tactic that was used during the Armenian genocide, during the Dersim rebellion and during the 1990's Dirty War. It will permit the Turkish government to act with its usual cruel impunity against the Kurdish people.

You will notice in the last paragraph of the article, that there is a reference to drug-trafficking. Funny thing, I have been doing some background research on drug-trafficking in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan and the thing that I have noticed is that this industry flourishes with massive cooperation from the state. All one has to do is google "Susurluk," to get an idea of how important drug-trafficking is to the Turkish state. Then there was the example of Huseyin Baybasin, who gave TV interviews on Turkish television and blabbed about his great connections within the state. Tansu Çiller made a big show of cracking down on Kurdish traffickers back when she was pretending that she was running the show. The thing about Çiller was that she cracked down on Kurdish traffickers to open the market more completely to Turkish traffickers.

Now that the Central Asian states are no longer under Soviet control and Afghanistan is no longer under Taliban control, well, it makes things a lot smoother. Don't count Iran out of the equation either. Iran has a serious drug problem and they are pushing the goods among their own population as well as to the outside. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the recent cosy relationship between Turkey and Iran have facilitated trafficking. Both are also looking to become nuclear powers. . . but just for energy, right?

Another item of interest is a piece, again from our ever watchful Semdinli parliamentary commission, which probes PKK's weapons sources. For a commission that was established to "get to the bottom" of the bombing of a bookstore, which was witnessed by the populace, whose perpetrators were captured by the populace, the Semdinli commission has wasted a lot of time fishing for red herrings, and this article is another one of those.

No surprise from this one, at least if you have a brain, since the Semdinli commission concluded that PKK has weapons from all over the place and they can't figure out exactly where PKK got the weapons. However, this article should serve some propaganda value for the clueless. Let's bury this smelly red herring and move on.

They're still tooting the new anti-terror law horn like they've been doing for the last two weeks or so. This is definitely something to watch for, but for the moment, there was one funny line from the Interior Minister:

Asked whether the law would put any restrictions on basic rights and freedom in Turkey, Aksu replied that the fight against terrorism won't harm democracy.

Of course the new anti-terror law won't harm democracy because there is no democracy in Turkey to harm. Aksu is also reported to have said that the new anti-terror law will "strengthen the hands of security forces." What the hell? This is what the Turkish constitution is for, why bother with another law?

The last article on my agenda is related to my previous post on Rastî. It is a little report on Turkey's good friend, Jalal Talabanî, and how the PUK has finally taken it's first major action against "a PKK-affiliated group in the region." When they write "the region," they mean South Kurdistan, but they have to use a euphemism because for them to actually write or say "Kurdistan" would choke them to death.

This business about a "first major action" is, naturally, a lie. PUK most recently attacked and harassed PKK itself back in the year 2000. I have a link in my previous post to that information. As this article further notes, the PÇDK did run in the recent Iraqi elections and did not gain a large number of votes, so how big a threat is PÇDK to the PUK? Maybe a better question is, why does PUK have so much fear about another party, even a small one like PÇDK? Why does Turkey fear PÇDK?

I guess the old adage is true; politics really do make strange bedfellows.