Turkey strike kills 35, Kurds decry "massacre" Hindustan Times
Reuters
Diyarbakir, December 29, 2011
First Published: 20:02 IST(29/12/2011)
Last Updated: 20:03 IST(29/12/2011)
Turkish warplanes launched air strikes against suspected Kurdish militants in northern Iraq near the Turkish border overnight, the military said on Thursday, but local officials said the attack killed 35 smugglers who were mistaken for guerrillas.
The Turkish military confirmed it had launched the strikes after unmanned drones spotted suspected rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), but said there were no civilians in the area and it was investigating the incident.
The attack, which Turkey's largest pro-Kurdish party called a "crime against humanity", sparked clashes between hundreds of stone-throwing protesters and police in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's restive mainly Kurdish southeast.
Police responded by firing water cannon and tear gas at the demonstrators. Seven people were detained. One police officer was hurt after being hit by a stone, witnesses said.
"We have 30 corpses, all of them are burned. The state knew that these people were smuggling in the region. This kind of incident is unacceptable. They were hit from the air," said Fehmi Yaman, mayor of Uludere in Sirnak province.
The Sirnak governor's office said 35 people had been killed and one wounded during an operation near the border with Uludere district.
The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) said party leaders were heading for the area and that it would hold demonstrations in Istanbul and elsewhere to protest the deaths.
"This is a massacre," BDP Deputy Chairwoman Gultan Kisanak told a news conference in Diyarbakir.
"This country's warplanes bombed a group of 50 of its citizens to destroy them. This is a war crime and a crime against humanity," she said.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/RestOfAsia/Turkey-strike-kills-35-Kurds-decry-massacre/Article1-788820.aspx
Sirnak Massacre, December 29 2011 (Kurdish American Society)
In an attack on Wednesday December 29 2011, in the Kurdish area between Turkey and Iraq, Turkish airplanes killed 35 Kurdish villagers near Uludere in Sirnak province. Once again, with the pretext of “fighting the PKK terrorists,” Kurdish civilians have lost their lives. This latest assault on Kurdish civilians by the Turkish air force is yet another example of the Turkish government’s misguided policy. The Kurdish question cannot be solved through military means. The only means of solving the Kurdish question in Turkey is a democratic approach. Grant the Kurds their national rights.
We extend our condolences and sympathy to the families of the victims of this latest attack.
We hope that the year 2012 brings a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question in Turkey so that both Turks and Kurds no longer have to shed tears.
Posted on 2011-12-29 16:47:24
http://www.usakurds.org/index.php?sid=16&location=main
CDK strongly condemns Sirnak Massacre (The Kurdish Observer)
Thursday, 29 December 2011 16:49
KIRKUK, South Kurdistan, -- Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK) declared in a statement that Turkish government and AKP have decided to massacre Kurdish people and for the last few years they have been working hard to achieve this decision violating all kinds of moral and ethic principles using chemical and prohibited weapons.
The leading council of PCDK has announced within the statement that although massacres of the Kurdish people is pursued every minute on a daily basis, the international communities, institutions and so-called democratic states have been silent in the face of it.
PCDK strongly condemned such an inhuman conduct of the Turkish and AKP government and called upon every humanist individual and patriotic to raise their objection to such a massacre.
“By adaptation of national and democratic position we should uncover these conspiracies and massacre and with the resonance of our national demanding, reawaken the passive and asleep consciousness, because these offensives are against the whole Kurdish nation,” PCDK stated.
At the end of the statement PCDK calls upon all the institutions and circles particularly the Peshmerge Forces of Kurdistan Regional Government to accomplish their national duty and spread their hands to the Kurds in North Kurdistan.
http://www.rojhelat.info/english/component/content/article/1930-pcdk-strongly-condemns-sirnak-massacre
What the Sirnak Massacre Reveals
Rudaw
04/01/2012 03:47:00By SARDAR AZIZ
The number of those who lost their lives while crossing the border from south of Kurdistan to the north is varied -- 35, according to official statements, 50, according to the Kurds.
As the information indicates, they were all young in their twenties, were not carrying any weapons and did not have the slightest intention of terrorizing anyone.
They were doing the impossible -- crossing the border at night, amid minefields -- to earn money for their families. One doesn't have to use their imagination to realize how much this says about the unbearable life in the north of Kurdistan.
They were carrying petrol, or cigarettes according to the BBC. The price differential for these goods between the two sides of the border is huge.
According to media reports, they were initially spotted by an unmanned plane and later bombed by F16 jets. Both are from the United State of America.
So far, the military is insisting on their story that the people who were killed were PKK members. The Turkish government regards what happened as an “error.”
The Turkish media are suspicious of provocation, and the Kurdish political parties are describing it as a massacre. The truth is somewhere among these two.
Setting aside all of these descriptions, justifications and condemnations, is the sober question of what this reveals. What happened to this group of people at that place and at that time of the year reveals a great deal about nature of life, circumstances, political situations, military rule and being a Kurd in Turkey.
Why are these young people risking their life to cross the border in this dangerous zone? This is the question asked by Turkish nationalists, but alas answered wrongly.
For Turkish nationalist supporters, the question is rather rhetorical. However, when the same question is asked from the Kurdish perspective, the answer is clear.
They were forced to risk their life because of the harsh economic condition in the region, which is a direct result of the political situation for the Kurds in Turkey. This reality is the result of the decade-long political, economic and social discrimination from the state. There were many among those who were killed crossing borders to make enough money for their forthcoming exams; an adventure to be able to leave a life of deprivation.
Last summer when I traveled to Turkey I witnessed the harshness and humiliating situation for anybody who crosses the border legally, let alone illegally. I spent a whole night sleeping in a car in the middle of the border bridge waiting for the soldiers to let us in at the end of the bridge.
Let's examine calmly what the massacre reveals. First, and above all, it reveals the contemptibleness of Kurdish life in Turkey, especially from the military point of view. Secondly, it reveals the level of injustice and discrimination against the Kurdish people in Turkey. Thirdly, the war which is occurring in Kurdistan is not against the PKK alone; it is against the Kurds indiscriminately.
Despite the use of high technology and the best intelligence from the United State of America, what is going on is a dirty war by all standards.
The claim by the Turkish media that those who were killed were “Turkish citizens” is a smart language game to cover up their Kurdishness. It is at best misleading.
The massacre reveals that not much has changed throughout history. The number of deaths and the fact that the victims were villagers remind us of the “33 bullet” incident in 1943 when General Mustafa Muğlalı ordered the execution of 33 Kurdish villagers who smuggled some livestock out of the region in a barracks located in Van’s Özalp district. Has anything changed in the past 70 years? There is still a long way to go for Turkey to deal with its racist institutions.
* Sardar Aziz has a PhD in Middle Eastern studies from University College Cork, Ireland. He has taught orientalism at School of Asian Studies, University College Cork.
http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/4291.html
Blog: A Turkish Assad? New York Times (blog)
January 1, 2012, 9:38 PM
A Turkish Assad?
By GRAEME WOOD
ISTANBUL — Which is scarier: a government that hunts down and kills dozens in cold blood, or a government that hunts down and kills dozens by accident?
Left, Reuters; Jamal Nasrallah/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Left, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey; President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
On Thursday, Turkey admitted to being the second type of government, just as over the last few months Syria has demonstrated itself conclusively to be the first. Turkey’s mistake, which it acknowledged sheepishly, was to launch air-strikes on Wednesday against about 35 men hiking along unmarked trails between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish military says it thought the men were terrorist members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.). But evidence found near the corpses suggested a more benign activity: the men were smugglers evading onerous Turkish and Iraqi customs duties on diesel and tobacco at the official crossing point of Habur. They carried Kools, not Kalashnikovs.
In the past, Turkey’s Kurds have responded to incidents like this one by protesting in the streets and public squares, with a little bit of armed struggle from actual terrorists on the side. Last night in Istanbul, Kurds and their allies went to the streets. On Istliklal Avenue, in Beyoglu district in central Istanbul, at street corners normally reserved for upper-class shoppers in winter chic, riot police stood huffing into their hands to chase away the cold, waiting for violence that never came. But news agencies reported that in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, crowds threw stones and Molotov cocktails, and stores were shuttered for the day.
After violence in the southeast, recriminations and confrontations like these are common. But there’s a notable change of vocabulary this time. Whereas Kurds once looked to the West and patiently tried to master the human rights language of the European Union, now at least some of them are looking south, to the more urgent and concrete language of protest movements in the Arab world. And in adopting that rhetoric, the Kurdish leaders are making missteps.
“A leader who kills his own people has lost his legitimacy,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in September. Now Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish member of parliament who heads the Peace and Democracy Party, finds Erdogan’s words delicious. “Now I say the same thing back to him,” Demirtas said. “This was no accident: it was a massacre.” Demirtas, whose party is the sole legal political voice of the Kurds in Turkey these days, said he considered the killing caused by Wednesday’s air strike to be an Assad-level crime.
It’s a preposterous and self-discrediting comparison: Erdogan and Assad resemble each other in little more than their mustaches. The first people to acknowledge the differences between the two should be the Kurds themselves: Erdogan’s government has in many ways improved upon the nationalist Turkish governments of yesteryear, and the Kurds of Syria have always suffered far more grievously than the Kurds of Turkey. In the P.K.K. camps of northern Iraq, Syrian Kurds are overrepresented — the result of especially zealous oppression by the Assad regime.
It’s hard to begrudge a movement as aggrieved as the Kurds’ this moment of hyperbole. But let’s hope that the Kurds will reconsider their annexation of Arab Spring analogies. A movement that has spent the last couple of decades mastering the art of patience shouldn’t now sideline its own cause with a faulty comparison to a more desperate one.
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has lived and traveled in the Middle East for most of the last 10 years.
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/a-turkish-assad/
Civilian Massacre Uludere Sirnak / Turkish warplanes hit civilians
x.co Turkish Air Strikes Kill 35 Kurdish Villagers Turkish Air Strike Near Iraq Border 30 killed in Turkish air strike Turkish air raids 'kill 30 Kurdish villagers' Turkish air raids kill 23 Kurdish villagers - reports Turkey 'kills 35 smugglers' in strike against militants Sirnak Uludere Sivil Katliami / Savas Uçaklari Sivilleri Vurdu (Cenaze Görüntüleri) Civilian Massacre Uludere Sirnak / Turkish warplanes hit civilians
http://www.firstpost.com/topic/place/iraq-civilian-massacre-uludere-sirnak-turkish-warplanes-hit-civ-video-_fOZr1-8YA4-19-1.html
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