[Peace-discuss] For the N-G's circular file.

[Chuck Minne]

To the Editor, Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette
In your editorial lamenting NATO's division over support for Turkey, you say that Turkey "remains the model of stability and modernism in the Muslim Middle East." This "model" country recently arrested publisher Fatih Tas, on charges of terrorism, for publishing MIT professor Noam Chomsky's essay on Prospects for Peace in The Middle East. Here are excerpts from this essay that your ”model” country deemed terrorist: 

"In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the Southeast against the Kurdish population. And that continued. In fact it's still continuing. 

"In … 1997, US military aid to Turkey was greater than in the entire period of 1950 to 1983 when there were allegedly Cold War issues. The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of people killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3500 villages destroyed-about seven times Kosovo under NATO bombing, and there's nobody bombing in this case, except for the Turkish air forces … 

"Regularly there are further operations carried out both in southeastern Turkey and also across the border in Northern Iraq, attacking Kurds there. There the attacks, with plenty of atrocities, are taking place in what are called "no-fly zones" in which the Kurds are protected by the United States from the temporarily wrong oppressor."

Tens of thousands killed, millions made refugees, massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities, and the News-Gazette lauds this as a "model of stability and modernism." That figures.

Chuck Minne


See photos from the recent Anti-Iraq War Protest in Washington DC, including the “Fighting 4 Peace is like Fu%king for Virginity” poster -- At my website: http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/cmin/


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