by Dr. Mordechai Kedar
The return of the Empire
One hundred years after its collapse, the Ottoman Empire has come back to life. Turkey is again conquering part of the Arab world - this
time it’s Syria. Using the vain excuse of the “war on terror”, within the past two
weeks Turkey has conquered a strip of land in Syria along the shared
border between those two states in order to disrupt the Kurds’ territorial continuity.
Turkey intends to extend this “security zone” in the area of
Syria to the entire length of the shared border, which is 818 kilometers, and
to widen it 30 kilometers into Syrian territory. If Turkey succeeds in this
task, this “security zone” will be more than twenty four thousand square
kilometers, larger than the entire State of Israel. According to the Turkish
plan, this entire area will be totally cleared of its residents.
There is only one
name for the Turkish plan: “ethnic cleansing”. This would mean that twenty
thousand residents of villages and towns who have been living in this area for
hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years would have to flee in all directions, simply because Erdogan does not want a Kurdish entity, whether independent or
not, south of the Turkish border.
But the surprising thing regarding the Turks behavior is the world’s silence. The Security Council has not been convened to discuss
the new conquest and has not said one word of condemnation. Neither have there been demonstrations in the streets, not in the Arab world, not in Europe and not
in North Africa. It is as quiet as a morgue.
For those with a short memory: Turkey conquered 37% of
Cyprus in 1974,establishing a state in that area that no state in the
world has recognized de jure, except – of course – Turkey. This is
called occupation in any language, but who in the world knows about it? Who in
the world condemns Turkey for occupying more than a third of Cyprus? Does
anyone think about boycotting Turkey, or sanctions or divesting from Turkey
(BDS) for the way it has been conducting itself for 44 years in Cyprus? And
now comes the Turkish occupation of the Kurdish territory of Syria. Will the
world wake up now and see what Turkey is doing? Will they demonstrate? Or issue
condemnations? Or start a boycott? Will they act at all?
But this is not only a problem of occupation, because the
problematic Turkish behavior did not begin in 1974. Anyone who has an active
conscience knows and remembers what happened to the Christian Armenians in Turkey, who were subjected to two different
genocidal events, one between 1894 and 1896 and the other during World War I between 1915 to 1918. Millions of Armenians and other Christians were cruelly
murdered by the Turkish Muslims, and the world’s silence regarding these genocidal
incidents led Hitler to the conclusion in 1941 that the world would do nothing if he perpetrated something similar on the Jews.
The world is cynical and acts from its own interests, and
the West – the U.S. and Europe – is afraid that if anyone says something to
annoy the impulsive and irritable Erdogan, he might throw them out of their air
base in Incirlik,
which is a foundation stone for every Western operational plan in the Middle
East and Central Asia, including Iran.
The question that arises is what will the Kurds in Syria do about the
looming ethnic cleansing that Turkey intends for them: will they sit quietly
and wait for death or will they fight back against the Turkish army. Another, less obvious
question is what will the Kurds in Turkey do in light of
what might befall their brothers in Syria. A reminder to the readers: there
is a Kurdish neighborhood in every Turkish city, and if the Kurds wish to do it, they
can sow destruction in every area of Turkey. There would be a high price to pay and they know this quite well.
The question of how the Kurds will react inside Turkey is not at all
simple, and we have recently seen – in the Turkish area of Iraq – that there is
not much solidarity among the Kurds and in fact, they are split into various factions, often are in conflict
with each other and even fight each other on occasion. It may very well be that
Erdogan is aware of the factionalism among the Kurds and that he allows himself
to act brutally against the Kurds in Syria because he assumes that the Kurds in Turkey
will not go out of their way to support their brothers in Syria.
But here is a new piece of data: volunteers from many
countries come to help the Kurds. They come from France, the U.S., Britain,
Algeria, Japan and other countries. They are mobilized over the Internet,
similar to the way volunteers are mobilized to join ISIS. They come to Syria via the
mountain paths from Iraqi Kurdistan. Some have taken Kurdish names and have
learned the Kurdish language. If this phenomenon expands and there are
fatalities among the foreign volunteers, the Turks might find themselves in a
difficult international situation.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Source: https://tinyurl.com/ybr9vzg7
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment