We Resume Our Regular Programming

It has been a while since I was able to post something new.

The main reason was the fact that my desktop computer died rather unexpectedly and it took me a long time to rescue my data and rebuild a new desktop.

Intermittent travelling didn't help either.

Anyway, I am back with some new perspective on my dual claims about the Kurds and the Palestinians and changes in the Middle East.

Stay tuned.

Is Afghanistan A Country Stuck in the 13th Century?

Mohammad Qayoumi, an Afghan-American Professor who is the President of San Jose State University, recently wrote about the common perception of his home land:

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a 1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages.   

He said that the country in which he grew up was nothing like that. And provided some pictures from that era. You can see all of them in the article to which I linked (or if you don't want to subscribe to Foreign Policy, here is an alternate Web site).

As I found them fascinating, let me show you a small sample.

Pencil skirts and record stores in Kabul.

Student nurses at Maternity Hospital.

Biology Class at Kabul University

City playground

A modern Textile factory

Sarobi hydro-electric dam

Kabul at night

Store windows

These pictures are certainly very different from what we normally see, namely this:

I sometimes wonder if Charlie Wilson's war was worth it.

Hamas Fatah Unity Talks

My tiny but well-informed readership is quite aware of my healthy obsession with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas. For almost a year now, I have been claiming that he was steering Hamas towards a peace process with Israel.

A couple of days ago, Meshaal gave an interview to the BBC to announce reconciliation talks with Fatah (the political formation behind the Palestinian Authority). He said that "they were forging ahead with reconciliation" and preparing the groundwork for presidential and legislative elections. The interview gave the impression that what the goal was the formation of a national unity government:

"We are consulting about forming a government of national accord. Preparations for presidential, parliamentary and executive council elections are under way. We are reinvigorating the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and organising its meetings until new national council and executive committee are elected."

Perhaps more telling about the interview was the way Meshaal approached the subject of Hamas' two patrons in the region, Syria and Iran.

If you read my earlier posts on the subject, you might remember that, last year, Meshaal moved his offices from Damascus to Qatar and distanced himself from Bashar al-Assad. The Prime Minister of Hamas in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, on the other hand stayed close to both Syria and Iran.

This is what Meshaal said to the BBC:

In relation to Syria - a long-time ally of Hamas - Mr Meshaal said the party had been forced out of Damascus because it disagreed with how President Bashar al-Assad was dealing with the conflict.

"There is no doubt that we have disagreed with the Syrian regime on the manner with which they managed the crisis, and their resorting to the security-military option," he said.

"The massacre taking place in Syria pains us very much. We were forced to leave Damascus even though the regime used to support us. We also had differences with Iran on what goes on in Syria." [my emphasis]

This is a very clear statement about Hamas' future. 

If Meshaal remains in power, Hamas will align with the Sunni axis in the region. As you know, that axis is led by Turkey as the ascending regional power and financed by Qatar (and, of course, by Saudi Arabia). 

The reconciliation talks are interesting from another perspective. It is as if Palestinians are mirroring the post-election situation in Israel. In one, Netanyahu is trying to form a large and representative unity government to (according to me) relaunch the peace process. In the other, Meshaal is trying to form a national unity government to face the new Israeli administration in these talks.

In that process, Meshaal the politician, is in a good place. 

In the past, Meshaal indicated that he would be willing to work under Mahmoud Abbas' leadership if that is what it takes to achieve unity. And I think these talks will yield such a formula: A united PLO (encompassing Hamas) led by Abbas, negotiating with Israel. 

If these talks are successful (as I believe they will have to be), Meshaal will become a selfless hero and possibly the man to replace Mahmoud Abbas shortly after the new Palestinian state becomes a reality. 

If, they fail, Meshaal will become the undisputed leaders of Palestinians, as the failure of the peace process will prove to them that Abbas' moderate approach is simply futile. 

As you know, I consider this latter outcome quite unlikely. 

Do You Know Who John Kerry Called on His First Day at the Office?

He called five people.

He called Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Palestinian Authority.

He called Shimon Peres. (Not Netanyahu.)

He called Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs.

He called John Baird, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada, America's closest ally, its northern neighbor and a member of NAFTA.

He called Jose Antonio Meade, Mexico's Minister of Foreign Affairs, America's southern neighbor and a member of NAFTA.

No UK, no EU.

Canada and Mexico are given.

But what does the rest of the list tell you?

Is Turkey Drifting Towards Asia?

Last week, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan appeared on a local TV program. One of the journalists asked him about the stalled Turkey-European Union (EU) relations.

Erdoğan joked that Russian President Vladimir Putin once poked fun of him by asking, “What business does Turkey have in the EU?”

“I responded to him, saying, ‘Accept us into the Shanghai Five, and we’ll forget about the EU,’” said Erdoğan.

Shanghai Five is Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Its members are China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan (which are the original five) and Uzbekistan. Turkey is a "dialogue partner" in the SCO. Afghanistan, Pakistan and India have all expressed interest in joining SCO.

By the way, this is the second time Erdogan is using the same joke even though he made it sound he was referring to his most recent December meeting with Putin. He used it first six months ago.

Erdoğan, who was in Russia 10 days ago to meet with Putin, noted that the Russian prime minister joked with Turkish officials from time to time, saying the EU was no place for Turkey. “Why don’t you then allow Turkey into the Shanghai Five [the former name of the SCO]? Then we would be prepared to let go of the EU,” Erdoğan said he told Putin jokingly.

Clearly, this is partly a rebuke to the EU. But it is also indicative of a new reality.

Turkey became an Associate Member of the (then) European Communities (EC) in 1963. And it formally applied to accede to the European Union in 1987.

When the AKP government came to power in 2002, EU membership was their first priority, because EU membership would remove the risk of a coup d'etat. Moreover, they assumed that joining the EU would create a much more permissive environment for religious freedoms in Turkey than the prevailing secular legal code (burqa's for women or Islamic headgear for men were punishable with fines since the late 1920s, though the laws were rarely enforced).

They implemented institutional reforms, grudgingly removed discriminatory, sexist and archaic laws from the books and worked with EU institutions towards accession. But things moved slowly. In the meantime, EU accepted 10 new members.

It became clear that EU was reluctant to take Turkey in. But by then, the AKP government lost interest in EU as well. They won their fight against the army. They also won the domestic cultural war with the secularist forces. And the so called headscarf issue was no longer a problem.

In October 2012 AKP held its 4th Congress. Erdogan gave a long speech and for the first time in AKP history, he did not mention the EU in his speech. Not once. Not even bypassingly. Moreover, take a look at the foreign guest list:

President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi, President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev, Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama Nuceyfi, Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, Vice President of Iraq Tareq Hashimi, Pakistani Chief Minister of Punjab Mian Muhammad Shahbaz Sharif, Palestine’s Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and, last but not least, Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq.

Anyone from the West?

Representing the West was ex-Prime Minister of Germany Gerhard Schroeder, a personal friend of Erdoğan.

The presence of regional leaders is understandable given Turkey's ascending power status. But the presence of the President of Kyrgyzstan is unusual. Yet, when you think of SCO it makes a lot more sense.

Is Asia the Future for Turkey?

Perhaps the better question is, how important is Turkey for Eurasia?

On Holocaust Memorial Day We Still Don't Know Enough About the Holocaust

Last Sunday (27 January) was the Holocaust Memorial Day. 

Actually, it was the UN and EU sanctioned remembrance. Yom HaShoa, is observed on 27 April.

Normally, I would not comment on such a sad and somber day, but I came across a couple of news item that made me think of something specific about the Holocaust.

A short while ago, a friend of mine sent me the video clip of Alice Sommer-Herz (also referred to as Alice Summers). She is a Holocaust survivor and a wonderful human being. She must be 110 this year and apparently lives by herself in a small flat in London and plays the piano for two and a half hour every day.

This is a brief interview with her where she explains how she always chose to feel optimistic and how she enjoys every small thing in life.

You can click here to see the clip. I promise you it will be worth your while.

I shared this clip with a few friends and one of them came back with a startling reaction. He said that he was so tired of Jewish people bringing up the Holocaust all the time that he found Alice's perspective refreshing.

I am using the adjective "startling" because, in my experience, Jewish people almost never bring up the Holocaust. This is especially the case for people who had family members perish in the camps. I think the idea that one can be hated so much for just being who they are that they can be summarily and systematically pushed aside, tortured and killed is so painful that they would rather not talk about it. I know I wouldn't. Especially considering that, at the time, a vast majority of humanity refused to lift a finger to stop the atrocities.

Then I asked around and to my chagrin, I found out that many people were secretly thinking along the same lines. Some thought that the topic was just ever-present. Others felt that we just studied obsessively something that has a zero chance of happening again. And yet others downplayed the unique horror of the Holocaust by comparing it with the suffering of the Palestinians. (Just like the Lib-Dem MP who said four days ago:

"I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.")

I personally believe that, despite being a disproportionately horrendous event, the Holocaust is mentioned much less often than the 9/11 World Trade Center incident. Consequently, most young people have either a very vague idea about the Holocaust or they ignore it completely. For instance, a significant majority of French people have never heard of the Vel d'Hiv round up I mentioned a few months ago. A contemporaneous opinion poll found out that of the respondents who are younger than 35 years of age, up to 67 % had no clue about the round up.

Last week, I was reminded of that blissful ignorance once again, when I read an article about a survivor who had to suffer in four different camps. Henia Bryer, prisoner A26188 told the BBC that she was worried that young generations knew nothing about the Holocaust.

"I had an operation once and the anaesthetist comes and looks at [the tattoo on] my arm and he says, 'What is this?' And I said, 'That's from Auschwitz.' And he said, 'Auschwitz, what was that?' And that was a young man, a qualified doctor," she says.

There was no time to explain: "I was unconscious the next minute!"

Bryer's memories of the camps and the scenes she witnessed, remain - and she is determined that what happened should never be forgotten.

People's impressions notwithstanding, I also know that we have not studied the Holocaust enough.

A day after I read the BBC piece, a friend of mine sent me a book review, The book was about the widespread and systematic rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women during the Holocaust.

The rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women in the Holocaust has been a subject that is so taboo that it has taken 65 years for the first English language book on the subject to make its way to the public.

This is partly because of the circumstances.

Many sexually abused women were raped and then simply killed.

Author Moinka J. Faschka of Kent State University in Ohio, one of the contributors to the book, cites survivor Harry Koltun, who said in an interview: "[T]he Gestapo SS came in and took out a few Jewish girls, they took them into a forest and they never came back. They did what they had to do sexually, and they killed them. Nice, nice looking girls."

There was also an almost universal unwillingness to talk about these case.

At a presentation at the Anne Frank Center USA in New York, the book's authors said that previously the barriers to telling the stories of sexual abuse have been tremendous. Some Holocaust scholars believed that segmenting out rape stories–and even women's stories unrelated to sexual violence--would sever women from the community by focusing on one group when all Jews, regardless of gender, were targeted for persecution. Rape was not included in the Nuremberg Trials when Nazi officials were charged with war crimes.

In other cases, women feared they would be considered "impure" or be ostracized by their families.

I am reasonably knowledgeable about World War II and the atrocities committed in most places and against most people. I read about the Holocaust and the social history of the period rather extensively. I have been to Yad Vashem.

If I never heard of these terrible stories that means that we haven't talked about the Holocaust and we haven't studied these terrible events nearly enough.

And as Rwanda and Srebrenica showed us, we need to do both if we don't want something like this ever to happen again.

Latest Developments on Syrian Conflict

There are signs that things are coming to a head in the next month or two.

1) Evacuation of Russian citizens from Syria.

Russia quietly evacuated 77 of its citizens from Syria. And when prompted about this, Sergey Lavrov downplayed its significance. He also divulged inadvertently that the families of Russian diplomats in Syrian have been sent home a while ago.

What is also interesting is that Russia sent a large warship in December to Syria and the New York Times reported at the time that its mission was the evacuation of Russian citizens in Syria at the first sign of conflict.

Clearly, they know something we don't.

2) Deployment of Patriot Missiles

I speculated recently that things might heat up once the Patriot missiles are in place. It appears that they will become operational sometimes next week:

More than 1,000 American, German and Dutch troops are to be based in Turkey to operate the six Patriot batteries. 

The Americans will be based at Gaziantep, 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the Syrian border. The Germans will be based at Kahramanmaras, 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the Syrian border and the Dutch at Adana, 100 kilometers (66 miles) west of the border.

It is true that these are essentially defensive missiles. But their presence will make Syrian army operations rather risky in the border area. That is because, it seems clear to me that any casus belli will be used  by Turkey to launch targeted attacks on key army units and Syrian air force.

Since a Turkish war plane was previously downed by Syria with no warning, a smallest provocation can be justifiably used to do some serious damage to Syrian forces without committing ground troops. The hope would be that such a push would be enough for the FSA to take the upper hand.

3) Turkey's Kurdish peace initiative might yield tangible results soon.

In the aftermath of the murder of 3 PKK activists in Paris, both the Turkish government and the PKK sources were unusually subdued in their reaction. One side mentioned organizational infighting without naming names and the other pointed the finger to a shadowy "deep state" without explicitly implicating the government.

Since then, government representatives went back to Ocalan to negotiate some form of truce and a larger peace place with him. There are also signs that the US is pushing the Turkish government to enlarge the scope and to talk with BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), a pro-Kurdish party with a decent parliamentary presence. It is also well respected not just by ordinary Kurds but by members of the PKK.

Davutoglu, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs went to Davos (a) to slam the world's inaction on Syria, (b) to suggest that PYD's support for Assad could become problematic for them, and (c) to mention that Erbil (i.e. Barzani and Iraqi Kurdistan) is supportive of Turkey's effort to make peace with Kurds. For good measure, he even added:

“As I’ve said before, the U.N. secretary-general will be apologizing to the people in Aleppo in 10 years, the way Ban Ki-moon apologized for Srebrenica.” 

4) Elections in Israel.

They created a much better legislative arithmetic than the bleak vision provided by Naftali Bennett. As I expressed my optimism about the likelihood of a large, national unity coalition a few days ago, Israeli voters thankfully obliged and elected a new Knesset that is likely to produce a government of peace.

If that happens, as I hoped, events in Syria will have much fewer repercussions for Israel's security (though, as with Turkey, they will have to negotiate in earnest).

We certainly live in interesting times.