Turkey Joining the EU - what does it mean for the Kurds?

by Michael Hennigan - Finfacts.com Fri Sep 10, 2004 23:43

I had a positive view about Turkey's application to join the EU but the bullshit proposal to criminalise adultery has made me think again.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, says the bill will help protect women from deception. However, women's groups and liberal commentators in Turkey have condemned the bill, saying it would be used against women and pushes the secular Muslim state closer to an Islamic legal model.

"I cannot understand how a measure like this could be considered at such a time," EU Commissioner Günther Verheugen said while on a visit to Turkey. "It can only be a joke. It would be a mistake to try to restore it (adultery) to the criminal code."

by jacko Mon Sep 13, 2004 12:38

Would they arrest Bertie Ahern under this law if he was visiting? (a la Pinochet).

by iosaf Mon Sep 13, 2004 20:56

Pinochet was arrested under an international extradition order which had been compiled by Baltazar Garzón the Spanish State prosecutor. He's a really good lawyer, like *really good*, so if you had a chat with him maybe he could get Ahern somewhere & sometime, but it's a little detail that's sort of important to remember-
The British only detained Pinochet, because a third party lawyer had done all his homework and made it impossible for them not to act on his order, to detain another third party.

And as for adultery-
Adultery laws are based as the word suggests, on the competing claims to inheritance by legitimate and illegitimate offspring. Sharia law is quite clear that adoption is immoral. No child may be raised in an Islamic community without knowledge of his or her real parents. Accordingly the notion of "legitimacy" is different in those societies to ours. As is the concept of adultery. Turkey will not be returning that law to the statute books, but it is one example of how the same word conjours different "additional" effects in different cultures. It is something which has been all but forgotten by european legislators who would happily seperate muslim parents on the grounds of being "non-nationals" from their "national" children. In the eyes of Islam the seperation is one of the greatest sins, especially if the "national" child, is thereafter raised by an institution (such as a state orphanage) without knowledge of his or her "real" parents. Something small which is storing up a lot of hurt and pain for the future.

by iosaf Tue Sep 14, 2004 20:20

told you so.
now you remember you need anything sorted out, you just give a recognised international distress signal, and myself and the crew will be in latex and playing on your behalf before you can say "semi-automated weapons are not covered in the amendment in to the constitution and the ease of their sale and distribution is an undoubted threat to homeland security and good neighbourly relations buba".

by - Tue Feb 15, 2005 19:24

is a nation without state.
It is has a nation which has been most cruely oppressed in most recent time, so recent that it may not be considered history by the regimes of Turkey and Iraq.

Iraq is felt to be moving towards liberty and democracy because it recently celebrated an election after an interim ruling council of which the Kurds resident in that state held 8% of the council won over 23 seats in the new Iraqi government.
Those seats welcomed by the community of civilised nations went to a joint Kurdish list of PKK and DKK candidates.

Turkey has long oppressed the Kurds who reside in its state. Their language has been banned, their political leadership "dissappeared", tortured, their press closed, their books burnt, their culture systematically undermined. Both parties the PKK and DKK who are welcomed as "democratic" in occupied Iraq, are considered "terrorist" in Turkey.

Turkey had in its EU entry bid, tried its best to convince the nations of Europe that its appaling past human rights record was at last being improved.

Turkey thus in recent years ended the death penalty. But summary executions by military forces still are reported.

It is completely natural that young Kurds who consider that their nation stradles the geography of several other states express in these times their indentity and rightful and legitimate wish for self determination and recognition of their struggle.

It is completely natural and understandable that they take to the street on the sixth anniversary of the capture of the rebel Kurdish chief Ocalan, (a man considered to be a terrorist by the Turks as he led the PKK and paramilitary resistance to the wanton Turkish state's oppression of the Kurdish people).

The suspension of the death sentance passed by a Turkish court on Ocalan helped the entry negotiations with Europe.

Many in Europe are mindful of the need to balance the ethnicity and religious bias of certain societies in the Central and Eastern part of our continent by the speedy acceptance of the Turkish application to become "one of us".

But to balance the intolerant and those who disregard ethnic difference in our Union by accepting a state which seems ready to return to the unacceptable and unwarrented persecution of Kurdish youth...

"just aint happening".

So how would we civilised Europeans treat upon such ethnic or political questions in our own back garden?
Would we be Turkish?
or would we be occupying yankee?

kurdish kids fighting turkish police

by iosaf - (not the "watching you red princes & dragons of white smoke boy") (no now its FREE KURDISTAN! again) Wed Apr 06, 2005 14:12 nothing if not consistent in an infuriarating dyslexic mad sort of way.

by the assembly of black thumbs.
this is curious.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4415459.stm

He leads a coalition of two parties that in Turkey are considered "terrorist" and in Iraq are considered "democratic". Interestingly he leads an ethnic faction of Iraq that in an informal poll returned 11 to 1 in favour of independence.

read up on the Kurdiiis and iraqi elections:-
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68110

meanwhile, Europe is now favoured according to another poll over the USA for meddling in your local affairs, and the favourite is France. according to a poll PIPA globescan 77% of people would see french meddling as a positive thing, whereas only 34% would like to be meddled with by the Turks. On a super-state/ super-union basis the majority want to be meddled with by us! and not by the yankee dixies or even the russians or chinese.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4413913.stm

by pierre Wed Apr 06, 2005 18:54

The French are just wannabe meddlers, they like to think they run the EU, they like to think they have a few client states in Africa (not caring who they are as long as they're with them - Bokassa etc), and they're always chasing the US for meddling opportunities.

by lazy boy Sun Jul 17, 2005 13:26

A minibus exploded Saturday on the way to a beach in an Aegean Sea resort town, killing at least four people. A doctor said three of the victims were foreign tourists.

The Turkish television station NTV said a woman blew herself up on the bus but Gov. Ali Baris of the resort town of Kusadasi said he could not confirm the blast was a suicide bombing.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Kurdish rebels have recently carried out bomb attacks in Aegean resort towns. They also have a record of using female suicide bombers.

Baris said the blast killed at least four people and injured 14, including several who were in critical condition.

Three foreign tourists were among the dead and five foreign tourists were critically injured in the explosion, a doctor at Kusadasi State Hospital said. The doctor, who declined to be identified, said the five injured tourists were transferred to Izmir, a port city 45 miles northwest of Kusadasi.

The Anatolia news agency, reporting from Izmir, said the five wounded were British tourists and they included a 16-year-old boy.

The blast gutted the minibus, scattering body parts on the ground around it. The charred body of a man could seen hanging over the twisted remains of a seat.

Bystanders helped remove the passengers from the burning wreckage.

Earlier this month, a bomb hidden in a soda can wounded 21 people, including three foreign tourists, in the Aegean coastal town of Cesme. On April 30, a bomb in a cassette player killed a police officer and wounded four others in Kusadasi.

A Kurdish guerrilla group that called itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons Organization claimed reponsibility for both of those attacks and vowed more.

Kurdish rebels have carried out several suicide bombings since the first one in 1996 killed six soldiers in the eastern city of Tunceli.

In 1999, two female suicide bombers carried out separate attacks injuring 27 people. The attacks, which targeted police stations, were to protest the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Since 1984, the Turkish military has been battling rebels of Ocalan’s autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Workers’ Party in the overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast, a conflict that has claimed some 37,000 lives.

Fighting in the region tapered off after a rebel truce in 1999, which followed Ocalan’s capture. But there has been a surge in violence since June 1, 2004, when the rebels declared an end to their cease-fire, saying Turkey had not responded in kind.
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Last week after the launch of the UN "alliance of civilisations" programme with the co-sponership of Turkey and Spain, the Turkish PM hit out at news agencies such as the BBC and Reuters for their continuing refusal not to term the whole PKK as a terrorist organisation and limit the "terror" label to the "TAK" denomination.
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5943727&cKey=1121356225000