Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

Interesting article from Al-Jazeera on Turkey's underground semi-state laicist groups. I'd be curious to hear Orphan Pamuk's comments on these groups, especially after reading his novel Snow recently in which he certainly does not paint a favorable picture of either the Islamists or the secularists.

Many ethnic Kurds and Turks hope that an ongoing investigation into an undercover organisation may help explain hundreds of unsolved murders, disappearances and bombings which rocked Turkey in the early 1990s.

State prosecutors allege that a highly-secretive group - 'Ergenekon' - was responsible for many unsolved, high-profile killings in Turkey in recent years.

These include the murders of leading journalists, such as Hrant Dink, assassinated in January 2007, and Ugur Mumcu, killed in 1993.

Prosecutors also allege that the group was behind plans to destabilise Turkey and pave the way for a military coup to unseat the current government. Some 86 people have so far been detained in the case, including media, political and retired military figures.

"The Ergenekon case is very, very important," Hasan Fendoglu, an advisor to Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the former prime minister, told Al Jazeera.

"It is the first case of its kind in the Republic of Turkey in 40 years. If we can solve this case, we will have made some major progress in human rights," Fendoglu, who also heads the Human Rights Presidency, the official human rights body, added.

But there are fears that political pressures may derail what many are calling the most important Turkish criminal investigation in years.

Troubled southeast

While many of the high-profile assassinations happened in Istanbul and Ankara, most of Turkey's unsolved murders and disappearances of the last two decades have centred in the country's troubled southeast.

This region has an ethnic Kurdish majority and has been the scene of continuing conflict between Turkish security forces and fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), who have led a violent campaign for independence. More than 30,000 people have been killed in this conflict so far.

Interest in Ergenekon is therefore high in the southeast and in Diyarbakir, its regional capital. Many are hoping that the case will help solve decades-old murders and disappearances.

One such unsolved disappearance concerns Mecit Gundem, a farmer from the ethnic Kurdish village of Hazro.

He has not seen his father since 1991.

"The jandarma [paramilitary rural police gendarme force] came to our village at 4am," he told Al Jazeera.

"They came to our house and took away my father, Ibrahim, right in front of many witnesses. But when we went to the jandarma station later that morning and asked for him, they told us he wasn’t there."

Since that day, no one has heard anything of Ibrahim. "We kept asking, but they just told us they didn’t know anything about him, or whether he was dead or alive," Mecit said.

Death squads

Dink was gunned down in front of his office in January 2007 [AFP]

But the Ergenekon case may have offered a fresh clue.

"One day a few weeks ago, there was an article in a newspaper that caught my eye," he says.

"It said that according to a file that had come to light because of the Ergenekon investigation, there was a death squad operating in my region back in the 1990s."

"The file said that this squad had operated on the instructions of a secret group within the state, which ordered it to kill anyone they suspected of involvement with the PKK. It said too that this group killed a man from Hazro the same day my father disappeared, along with many others from other places."

Mecit is now pushing local human rights lawyers to take up the case again.

One such lawyer is Muharrem Erbey, chair of the Diyarbakir branch of Turkey’s Human Rights Association (IHD).

"Ergenekon is extremely important for Kurdish society," he says.

"Why?" He points to a row of five portraits on the wall of his office.

"They are all human rights activists killed by Ergenekon. We have lost many, many people over the years to them."

The IHD in Diyarbakir also has files on some 1,285 people who were allegedly arrested by the police, the jandarma, the army and other security forces since 1991 – and were never seen or heard from again.

"The state used groups like Ergenekon to kill Kurdish activists, intellectuals and businessmen," he says. "The group became very strong as the conflict intensified. Ergenekon grew out of the Kurdish issue."

The "deep state"

Some analysts see Ergenekon as just one part of the 'deep state' – a shadowy network of groups responsible for many killings and disappearances over the years.

"The heyday of the deep state was the 1990s, when it was vastly powerful," says Gareth Jenkins, Turkey analyst with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

"The deep state was never a single, structured organization, but a web of groups and networks, some of which were autonomous, others of which sometimes cooperated with each other. The unifying factor was not central control but shared immunity from prosecution."

Others dispute any official culpability though. "Our police stations and security services have all been doing their work properly here," Cemal Husnu Kansiz, the deputy governor of Diyarbakir, told Al Jazeera.

"If there are any specific cases of disappearances or killings then they always follow them up. In this instance, there are no specific human rights problems in Diyarbakir."

This is not a widely-held view in the region, however. Tahir Elci, a local lawyer, recalls another case he was involved in, this time from 2001.

"Two local politicians in Silopi [a nearby town] from the pro-Kurdish party, HADEP, were called to the local jandarma station in the middle of the day," he says.

"They went there by car and were never seen again. We asked after them, and the jandarma said, 'yes, they came, then left, we don't know what happened'.

"We took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, who ruled in our favour – that Turkey had failed in its responsibilities towards the two men. We still haven't found them. The jandarma commander in the area at the time, Levent Ersoz, refused to testify."

Ersoz has also now been indicted by state prosecutors in the Ergenekon case, charged with being a key member of the group. A warrant for his arrest was issued on August 14, when his whereabouts were unknown.

The jandarma would not comment on any of these cases.

"On Ergenekon, we cannot comment on an ongoing case – we will just have to wait and see," Kansiz told Al Jazeera.

Politically motivated?

Police believe recent violence has also been the work of Ergenekon [AFP]

Many hope though that the Ergenekon case will reveal more connections to the disappeared of the southeast, as well as to cases in other parts of Turkey.

Yet there are also concerns that the Ergenekon file may be politically motivated and badly put together.

"All the people who have been accused so far are also known for their anti-government stance," says Onur Oymen, spokesman for the Republican People's Party, Turkey's main parliamentary opposition.

"In the indictment, sometimes you also find the same person mentioned as a member of Ergenekon and then later mentioned as someone Ergenekon wanted to kill."

At the same time, others worry about the ability of the judiciary to successfully investigate and prosecute such cases.

"One of the issues is how will the justice system deal with Ergenekon when there are major question marks over the judiciary and the pressure – political pressure – that can be brought to bear on it," says Emma Sinclair-Webb of the international group, Human Rights Watch.

Yet officials remain confident.

"It is impossible for political pressure to be brought to bear in this," says Fendoglu. "The courts are completely independent of the government."

Meanwhile, Mecit has a simple request.

"I just want to know what happened to my father. I want to know where and how he was killed. My whole family just wants to know."

Here's an opinion piece written by Al-Jazeera's political analyst examining recent comments made by Obama and McCain regarding evil at Saddleback Church.

When asked how they would deal with evil if they were elected president - would they ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it - Obama said he would "confront it" while McCain said unflinchingly that he would "defeat it".

Click here.


Calls for Obama to change his campaign strategy and actually start attacking McCain's many weaknesses.

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

Click here.


An interesting op-ed calling for the United States to reengage Russia as an equal, not as the humiliated fractured Russia emerging in 1991.

Rather, the conflict in Georgia showed how rational Russia’s concerns over American meddling in its traditional sphere of influence are, and that Washington had better start treating it like the great power it still is.

Click here.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.

His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.

I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn't bother to show up. Now I know why.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. "It means I'm saved and forgiven." Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we've all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?

Throughout the evening, McCain chose to recite portions of his stump speech as answers to the questions he was being asked. Why? He has lived 71 years. Surely he has some thoughts on what it all means that go beyond canned answers culled from the same speech he delivers every day.

He was asked "if evil exists." His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to "the gates of hell." That was it.

He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question -- his wife is worth a reported $100 million -- he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.

One after another, McCain's answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has -- virtually none.

Where are John McCain's writings exploring the vexing moral issues of our time? Where are his position papers setting forth his careful consideration of foreign policy, the welfare state, education, America's moral responsibility in the world, etc., etc., etc.?

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner -- short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

While I don't agree with everything in this commentary, I agree that it is time we have a sophisticated president who projects intelligence, confidence, and a nuanced understanding of the world. When one of the charges leveled against a presidential candidate (John Kerry) is that he is too snobby and out of touch with the American people, i.e. He speaks French and is extremely intelligent, we have a problem. It is time that mainstream America stops belittling public figures for their sophistication and intelligence.

Thus, I agree with Cafferty. We need a president who can think beyond black and white simplifications. Do we want a president who graduated in the last 5 percent of his class, or one who was a law professor and the first African American editor of a law journal at Harvard? It is an easy answer for me.

Reading the news about the recent conflict in Georgia primarily from a Western perspective (BBC, CNN), as well as from Al-Jazeera, it is important to recognize the counter-perspective given fairly passionately by former Russian President Gorbachev in today's Washington Post editorials.

A Path to Peace in the Caucasus

By Mikhail Gorbachev
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; A13

MOSCOW -- The past week's events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia's territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force -- both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar -- it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.

Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.

Through all these years, Russia has continued to recognize Georgia's territorial integrity. Clearly, the only way to solve the South Ossetian problem on that basis is through peaceful means. Indeed, in a civilized world, there is no other way.

The Georgian leadership flouted this key principle.

What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.

Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia.

In other words, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it. Now that the Georgian military assault has been routed, both the Georgian government and its supporters should rethink their position.

Hostilities must cease as soon as possible, and urgent steps must be taken to help the victims -- the humanitarian catastrophe, regretfully, received very little coverage in Western media this weekend -- and to rebuild the devastated towns and villages. It is equally important to start thinking about ways to solve the underlying problem, which is among the most painful and challenging issues in the Caucasus -- a region that should be approached with the greatest care.

When the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia first flared up, I proposed that they be settled through a federation that would grant broad autonomy to the two republics. This idea was dismissed, particularly by the Georgians. Attitudes gradually shifted, but after last week, it will be much more difficult to strike a deal even on such a basis.

Old grievances are a heavy burden. Healing is a long process that requires patience and dialogue, with non-use of force an indispensable precondition. It took decades to bring to an end similar conflicts in Europe and elsewhere, and other long-standing issues are still smoldering. In addition to patience, this situation requires wisdom.

Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development. Nothing is more important than that.

The region's political leaders need to realize this. Instead of flexing military muscle, they should devote their efforts to building the groundwork for durable peace.

Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.

The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible. Building this type of system would be challenging and could only be accomplished with the cooperation of the region's countries themselves. Nations outside the region could perhaps help, too -- but only if they take a fair and objective stance. A lesson from recent events is that geopolitical games are dangerous anywhere, not just in the Caucasus.

The writer was the last president of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and is president of the Gorbachev Foundation, a Moscow think tank. A version of this article, in Russian, will be published in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper tomorrow.

Possibly sponsored by Microsoft.

The Bush administration seems less and less likely to launch a parting strike on Iran's nuclear installations -- but Israel isn't sounding nearly so tranquil. The talk from Jerusalem will almost certainly grow more strident as the competition to replace the country's scandal-plagued prime minister, Ehud Olmert, intensifies. Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz is running hard against the less hawkish Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to succeed Olmert as leader of the governing Kadima Party; he recently told Israel's dominant daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, that an attack on Iran was "unavoidable." And Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing opposition leader who might well beat either Livni or Mofaz in a general election, is also likely to think seriously about a preventive Israeli raid.

Meanwhile, prominent Israeli military analysts, officials and writers are insisting that Iran constitutes a mounting "existential threat." Take one of the country's most important historians, the erstwhile dove Benny Morris, who recently predicted in the New York Times that "Israel will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to seven months" -- roughly (and not inconveniently) the period between the U.S. presidential election and the departure of the Bush administration. Morris claimed that his view that Israel's existence was on the line is shared "across the political spectrum." In Israel today, anyone who resists such talk risks becoming an appeaser amid a chorus of Churchills.

Leave aside the possibility that the threat of an Israeli attack may be designed to give leverage to U.S. and European diplomats pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear efforts. Leave aside the question of whether, if you believed that such a strike was truly imminent, you'd predict it in a major newspaper. Leave aside the fact that no Israeli strike could happen without a U.S. green light and permission to fly over Iraq. And leave aside the perennial suspicions that Israel's military elite, which sees the Jewish state as the West's foremost strategic asset in the region, also tends to see the Middle East through the prism of the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Could Israeli threats be serious?

We hope not, because we don't buy the underlying premises. Here's the argument one hears almost daily in Israel: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a jihadist fanatic; he is bent on (as he put it) wiping Israel "off the map," and his insistence on denying the Holocaust shows that he may be vile enough to perpetrate another one; the Iranian regime is on the fast track to developing a nuclear weapon. So the West -- and if not the West, then Israel alone -- must treat Iran as though it were the national equivalent of a suicide bomber. It must strike now, without hesitation, before it's too late.

Moreover, the argument continues, even if a nuclear-armed Iran didn't attack Israel first, it would still spur an arms race that would turn the region into a nest of mutually assured destroyers that would include Egypt and Saudi Arabia. An Iranian bomb would also curtail Israel's freedom of action if it has to strike against the tens of thousands of missiles now in the hands of Hezbollah, Iran's fearsome proxy in southern Lebanon. So why should Israel not (we need George C. Scott here) just go for broke?

Here's why not: because Iran presents the West with a kind of real-life chess game, and the advocates of a preemptive Israeli attack only understand checkers. Intelligence experts insist that we examine both the intentions and the capabilities of an opponent. Let's do that.

The president of Iran is not the regime. Ahmadinejad has almost no control over Iran's nuclear program; that power rests in the hands of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei alone commands Iran's military and dictates its foreign policy. Through intermediaries such as Vice President Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, Khamenei has adopted a much softer tone than Ahmadinejad on nuclear negotiations with the West. As Rahim-Mashaei recently put it, according to Iranian news agencies, "Iran wants no war with any country, and today Iran is a friend of the United States and even Israel."

The Iranian regime is not a suicide bomber. The idea that one fine morning Iran will incinerate Tel Aviv is madness; Morris's description of the mullahs' "fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset," echoed by others, is a caricature. The Iranian regime knows full well that Israel has an arsenal widely thought to include as many as 200 nuclear warheads as well as missiles, submarines, strategic bombers and enough apocalyptic psyches to retaliate. Do Israelis seriously believe that Iranians hate them (on behalf of the Palestinians, who would be poisoned by the fallout) more than they love their children -- or, for that matter, the historic cities of Tehran, Qom and Esfahan?

The regime wants to survive. The mullahs, let us remember, have managed to remain in power for three decades, despite international isolation, a devastating eight-year war with Iraq and the loathing of the vast majority of the country's citizens. In times of economic frustration, they rely on anti-Israeli and anti-American gambits to distract attention from domestic hardship; we should view their nuclear program in this context. This is a country that sits atop the world's third-largest proven reserves of oil, according to the CIA, yet imports about 40 percent of its gasoline -- simply because it doesn't have the resources or the know-how to update its refineries to pump more. We have greater reason to assume that, in time, the mullahs will bow to internal pressure and open their country to global intellectual capital than to think that they will engage in an ecstasy of suicidal mass murder.

The Iranian nuclear program is daring but not crazy. Consider the view from Tehran. The United States overthrew Iran's government in 1953 to obtain Iranian oil, and the country is now surrounded by U.S. troops -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. This surely argues for prudence from Tehran. Besides, the regime has probably learned a valuable lesson from another member of the "axis of evil": Nuclear North Korea was never attacked; it was offered hundreds of millions of dollars to give up its bombs. Nuclear diplomacy, the mullahs have probably concluded, enhances the international prestige of what would otherwise be a Third World country.

An Iranian bomb need not precipitate a regional nuclear arms race. Israel's bomb -- developed by the Middle Eastern power most hated and feared by its neighbors -- hasn't.

Even if Tehran were determined to get the bomb, there's no guarantee that it could pull it off. Iran's nuclear program is far more modest than its leaders like to admit. As Undersecretary of State William Burns testified before Congress last month, "It is apparent that Iran has not yet perfected [uranium] enrichment, and as a direct result of U.N. sanctions, Iran's ability to procure technology or items of significance to its missile programs . . . is being impaired."

An Iranian bomb will not "degrade Israel's deterrence." Tens of thousands of conventional missiles in southern Lebanon, Syria, Gaza -- and Iran -- have already done that. Hezbollah knows that it can bombard Israel and survive, as it did during its summer 2006 war with Israel. If an Iranian bomb would provide cover for Hezbollah, Hamas and their state sponsors to launch these missiles at some indefinite point in the future, but a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran would make Iran's proxies launch them now (as Hezbollah did two years ago), how exactly does the logic of regaining Israeli "deterrence" work?

None of these points mean that Ahmadinejad will stop blustering; he is a two-bit politician playing to his base. Nor does it mean that the Western powers should stop planning a long-term strategy of containing Iran. But Western powers should now focus not only on their power to deter but on their power to attract; we should push for new collective-security agreements that would benefit everyone in the region. Israeli threats to attack Iran produce only paranoia and solidarity inside Iran. And after 40 years of Israeli occupation in Palestine, Israel's threats also have the handy effect of changing the subject.

Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of "The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last." Reza Aslan is the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam" and the forthcoming "How to Win a Cosmic War."

Interesting article examining some of the root causes of suicide missions separated from the usual simplified political and racist rhetoric.

Click here for the article from the NYT.