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The Grand Turk
Jailed Istanbul mayor says his lawyer has been arrested UPDATE: along with more lawyers and journalists
2025-03-29
[IsraelTimes] Istanbul’s jailed mayor Ekrem Imamoglu says in a social media post that his lawyer has been detained and demands his immediate release.

“My lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan was detained on fictitious grounds,” Imamoglu says in a post on X published via his legal team. “As if the coup against democracy was not enough, they cannot tolerate the victims defending themselves,” he writes, adding: “Release my lawyer immediately.”


More journalists detained by Turkey after covering anti-government protests

[IsraelTimes] Nobel-winning author says events represent ‘Erdogan’s strong-fisted, autocratic rule at a level we have not seen before’

Two journalists were detained in dawn raids in Istanbul early Friday as part of a crackdown on media workers covering The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
’s largest protests in more than a decade, their outlets reported.

Elif Bayburt, who works for the Etkin News Agency, and Nisa Suda Demirel, from the Evrensel news website, were the latest to be arrested in early morning sweeps that have targeted political activists and trade unionists as well as journalists.

"Our news hound, Nisa Sude Demirel, was detained by the police who came to her house at around 6 a.m. this morning," Evrensel said in a statement. "Demirel, who was following the (Istanbul City Hall) protests and the boycotts at the universities, was taken to the Istanbul Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism Branch office."

The demonstrations began last week following the arrest of Istanbul’s opposition Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a key rival to President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really more important...
. Imamoglu was tossed in the slammer
Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try!
 pending trial on corruption charges that many see as politically motivated. The government insists the judiciary is independent and free of political interference.

Reporters Without Borders condemned the journalists’ arrests. "There is no end to the detentions of journalists," its Turkey representative Erol Onderoglu said.

The Ottoman Turkish Journalists’ Union called for the news media to be allowed to do their work and for an "end to these unlawful detentions."

Earlier this week, 11 journalists were detained in morning raids. Although initially tossed in the slammer
Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try!
 pending trial, they were freed Thursday but still face charges of "taking part in illegal rallies and marches."

Turkey’s broadcasting authority issued a 10-day airwave ban on Sozcu TV on Thursday, as well as fines and program suspensions to other opposition channels. A news hound from the UK’s BBC was also deported Thursday.

The editor-in-chief of Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC said Friday that its news hound had gone missing. Joakim Medin has not been heard from since he wrote that he was being taken for questioning after arriving in Istanbul on Thursday to cover the protests, Andreas Gustavsson wrote on the paper’s website.

’CHILDREN BEING TREATED LIKE TERRORISTS’
Courthouses across Turkey are dealing with a spike in cases as a result of the protests. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Thursday that nearly 1,900 people had been arrested since March 19.

Anxious families have been gathering outside court buildings to await the fate of their loved ones, whom police can hold for four days.

"The youth we call Generation Z are more likely to participate in these protests. They sense that something is wrong," Savas Ozbek, whose daughter was detained Sunday, told ANKA News Agency outside Ankara Courthouse late Thursday.

Zeynep Ulger, who was waiting for news of her friend, said they were protesting for a "free, democratic country," adding: "The only thing we have achieved in the face of this is being beaten by the police on the streets and being detained."

Istanbul-based lawyer Arif Anil Ozturk, who represents many detained protesters, gave his insight into court proceedings.

"It is an unlawful process from beginning to end," he told the Cumhuriyet newspaper. "There is no evidence, no footage. Children... are being treated like terrorists."

Nightly Istanbul rallies organized by Imamoglu’s Republican People’s Party, or CHP, ended Tuesday. In other cities, and in Istanbul since the end of the CHP gatherings, largely peaceful protests have been more organic.

Police, however, have used tear gas, water cannon and plastic pellets to suppress demonstrations that have been banned in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

LAWYERS DETAINED
At the Middle East Technical University campus on the outskirts of the capital Ankara, nine students were detained early Friday, opposition politicians who visited the site said.

"Young people have set up tents inside (the campus). Officious administrators have evaluated this situation as a ’threat’ and invited the police to the university to conduct an operation," CHP Provincial Chairperson Umit Erkol said on social media.

Aylin Yaman, a CHP member of parliament, said students were sitting on the grass and singing when police stormed the area at 2 a.m. "We object to the police entering here as if it were a dawn operation and creating an atmosphere of fear," she said.

The Istanbul Bar Association announced that three lawyers had been among some 100 people arrested at a Thursday demonstration in the city’s Sisli district. Lawyers also said they had been kept waiting for hours outside police headquarters to gain access to detainees.

Following the overnight arrest of Imamoglu’s lawyer Mehmet Pehlivan, it was revealed Friday that he is accused of money laundering. Imamoglu, in a social media post, said Pehlivan had been "detained on fictitious grounds." He was later released on condition of judicial control.

RUBIO: "WE ARE CONCERNED"
Turkey’s Nobel-winning author Orhan Pamuk, writing in several European newspapers, said events over the past 10 days represented "Erdogan’s strong-fisted, autocratic rule (at) a level we have not seen before."

Following a meeting with Turkey’s foreign minister earlier in the week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration...
 described events in Turkey as "disturbing." Speaking on a return flight from Suriname late Thursday, he said: "We are concerned. We don’t like to see the direction that’s going... Anytime you have instability on the ground you don’t like to see it."

A group of European politicians arrived in Istanbul to show support for Imamoglu and meet opposition figures. Led by former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, the delegation from the Party of European Socialists also included European Parliament Vice President Katarina Barley.

"This is not just about one person. This is about democracy, and we are here to stand up for democratic values," Lofven said. "These politically motivated accusations are a threat to democracy in Turkey."

In a TV interview Friday, the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party appeared to offer qualified support for the protests. "We are not the CHP’s activist group. We support them, but we will not take to the streets for this," Tuncer Bakirhan said.

Commentators have suggested that the recent peace initiative offered to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a bid by Erdogan to lure the DEM Party, which is the third-largest in parliament, into supporting an extension of his presidency beyond his current term.

Imamoglu faces charges stemming from two investigations into the opposition-controlled Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality — a corruption case and one alleging support for terrorism.

The mayor has been confirmed as the CHP’s presidential candidate in an election currently scheduled for 2028 but which is likely to take place earlier. He has performed well in recent polls against Erdogan, and his election as mayor of Turkey’s largest city in 2019 was a major blow to the president.
Link


The Grand Turk
Hrant Dink murder was deliberately permitted, says former police intelligence branch head
2017-01-18
[Hurriyet Daily News] Ali Fuat Yilmazer, the former head of The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
’s police intelligence branch, has given his testimony in the 31st hearing into the 2007 killing of Armenian-origin Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, saying the killing was "deliberately not prevented" and security authorities in Istanbul and Trabzon were responsible.

"This murder was made possible on purpose and Dink was the victim of the killing. The police are guilty of misconduct on duty. The state did not carry out its duty," said Yilmazer.

"In terms of numbers, there is an organizational connection behind this murder. Most importantly it has coordination within the state. The mechanisms within the state did not move to protect Dink," he added.
Yilmazer also said the earlier investigation into the killing "were closer to justice" and those placed in durance vile
Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages!
 had been "silenced."

Noting that the killing was planned in the Black Sea province of Trabzon before being committed in Istanbul, Yilmazer said Dink was murdered due to lack of measures that should have been taken in Istanbul. He said officials in Istanbul had a duty to take Dink under protection like Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who was given security protection and who was tried under the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code against "insulting Turkishness." Dink was also convicted of the offense before his death.

In his testimony, Yilmazer denied claims that he was the instigator of the murder, saying he had "no connection" with the Trabzon authorities and in fact he had never even been to the Black Sea province. He also alleged that Engin Dinc, former Trabzon police intelligence branch chief, had such connections as he had spoken with the gendarmerie on the issue.

Dink, 52, was rubbed out with two bullets to the head in broad daylight outside the offices of the Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos in central Istanbul.

Trabzon-based Ogun Samast, then a 17-year-old jobless high-school dropout, confessed to the murder and was sentenced to almost 23 years in jail in 2011.

But the case grew into a wider scandal after it emerged that security forces had been aware of a plot to kill Dink but failed to act.

Relatives and followers of the case have long claimed government officials, police, military personnel and members of the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) played a role in Dink’s murder by neglecting their duty to protect the journalist.
Link


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Arrests in Turkey over plot to kill Nobel laureate Pamuk: report
2008-03-21
A Turkish nationalist party leader, a veteran journalist and an academic have been arrested over an alleged plan to kill author Orhan Pamuk, the country's first Nobel laureate, media reported Friday.
Some people just can't stand success ...
Dogu Perincek, the leader of the Workers' Party, senior journalist Ilhan Selcuk and Kemal Alemdaroglu, the former rector of Istanbul University, are in detention and are to appear before a public prosecutor, the Anatolia news agency said.

The news agency did not specify any charges against them but said they had been detained for their alleged role in an ultra-nationalist plot to kill Pamuk and senior Kurdish figures. Police also seized documents and software at a television station partly owned by Perincek's party, according to the IP news agency. Thirteen other people, including a general and a retired colonel, have been arrested over the supposed plot.

According to Turkish media reports, the suspects wanted to assassinate Pamuk, pro-Islamist journalist Fehmi Koru and Kurdish political figures Leyla Zana, Osman Baydemir and Ahmet Turk.

Despite his international fame, Pamuk's vocal criticism of issues that have long been national taboos has tagged him as renegade and a traitor, including the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, and the ongoing Kurdish conflict in the southeast. The media reports said the plans were allegedly hatched by an "ultra-nationalist" group thought to be linked to the security forces.
Link


Europe
Turkey says amendment to free speech law still on its agenda
2008-03-12
The Turkish government assured on Tuesday that Turkey plans to amend a law curbing free speech that has been used to prosecute intellectuals including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Critics have accused the government of delaying the proposed amendment to Article 301 of the penal code, which makes denigrating Turkish identity or insulting the country's institutions a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin insisted, however, that the reform was "still on the table."

He did not say when Parliament would consider the amendment - a key condition for Turkey's progress in membership talks with the European Union.
Link


Europe
Turk gang plotted to kill Pamuk, stage coup
2008-01-25
A group of ultra-nationalists detained this week had been plotting to kill Nobel Literature Laureate Orhan Pamuk, Turkish newspapers said on Thursday. The group, known as Ergenekon and led by a retired brigadier, was also planning a series of bomb attacks and assassinations aimed at fomenting chaos before mounting a coup against the Turkish government in 2009, the papers said. Police have so far arrested 35 people, including former army officers and lawyers known for their far-right views, following the seizure of explosives and weapons at a house in Istanbul last year. Officials have declined to comment on the accusations against the group, but newspapers have carried extensive and detailed claims suggesting the nationalists may have been behind a number of past bomb attacks and assassinations. “The gang was seeking 2 million lira ($1.67 million) and a Glock gun to assassinate Orhan Pamuk,” the Milliyet daily said. Pamuk, known for novels such as “My Name is Red” and “Snow”, is loathed by Turkish nationalists for saying Turkey was responsible for the deaths of more than a million Armenians during World War One and of 30,000 Kurds in recent decades.
Link


Europe
EU: Turkish premier urges clear membership rules
2007-11-09
(AKI) - EU candidate country Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyp Erdogan on Thursday called for "objective rules for our entry process to the European Union."
I'd say the rules should start with being in Europe, not Asia Minor.
And not necessarily all parts of Europe, given today's Macedonia story ...
"The rules of the game were made in advance and the goalposts cannot then be moved," Erdogan told the Italy-Turkey Business Council in Rome on the second of a two day visit to the Italian capital. Turkey's EU membership bid must go ahead, he stressed. "Even if there have been several problems, the Turkish government is continuing to drive this bid forward with the same determination."

He said Italy's support was crucial to this dynamic and described it as "the country that has best understood Turkey's potential contribution to Europe."

The reforms Turkey must implement to qualify for EU membership "do not just serve to meet the EU's requirements for membership but also to improve our quality of life as citizens," he said.

Turkey's justice minister Mehmet Ali Sahin on Tuesday announced that a new bill would in the next few days be tabled in the Turkish parliament modifying Article 301 of the Turkish penal code which criminalises "insulting Turkishness."

Article 301 has often been invoked by nationalists against those who argue that the Ottoman empire committed genocide against Armenians around the time of World War I. Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and murdered Turkish-Armenian writer Hrant Dink were both prosecuted under the law for their comments on the mass killings of Armenians.
Link


Europe
Protestant missionaries face nine years for insult to Islam
2006-12-04
Suna Erdem, Istanbul
When Hakan Tastan wanted to amend the religion on his Turkish identity card, his enthusiastic championing of Christianity exasperated the official barring his way. Eventually, the official gave up trying to oppose the controversial change. “Change this heathen’s religion and make him go away,” the devout Muslim told his clerks.
More than ten years later, the missionary zeal of Mr Tastan and his fellow Christian convert, Turan Topal, has led to much graver things than being called names.

They face up to nine years’ jail after going on trial last week for “insulting Turkishness” during their religious work, under the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. It is the same law that put Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel literature laureate, in the dock, and which the European Union wants amended.

The case against two members of the tiny Turkish Protestant community has attracted criticism from the EUand cast a shadow over Pope Benedict XVI’s visit this week.

Mr Topal and Mr Tastan, who are charged with illegally gathering information on people and “insulting Islam”, have faced public anger in Turkey, where a mistrust of Christians has been growing, fuelled by the Iraq war, the EU’s critical attitude, the Pope’s comments linking Islam with violence and the Danish cartoons row.

At last week’s hearing, a friend was punched and bystanders told them to leave the country if they didn’t like it.

“Where are we supposed to go? We are Turkish. I am a patriot. I hang out the Turkish flag on national days and have a picture of Atatürk (the founder of modern Turkey) in my office,” says Mr Tastan, 37.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding about us here,” said Mr Topal, 45. “They think that missionary work is part of a foreign-financed effort to split the country.”

Turkey is home to about 100,000 Christians, most from ethnic communities such as Greek Orthodox, Armenians and Syriac Christians, whose status is legally defined.

For Turkish Protestants, a community of about 4,000, that came into existence 20 years ago, there is no recognisable role. Mr Topal was one of the first converts 17 years ago. Mr Tastan, the son of an atheist and grandson of an Alevi Muslim, said that he read the Koran and then was given the Bible by a friend.

He converted during his mandatory military service. The pair and their lawyer, Haydar Polat, think that their indictment is part of a plot.

The three plaintiffs, young men aged 16, 17 and 23, contacted them through a friend saying that they wanted to find out more about Christianity. After two meetings, charges were filed.

The two missionaries were accused of calling Islam a backward religion and claiming that Turks would never become civilised unless they converted. They were also accused of trying to sell women and of possessing guns.

“I don’t mind going on trial for my religion. We expected to be accused and imprisoned for that — the Bible says so,” Mr Topal said, adding that Saint Paul was stoned for preaching in the Roman city of Ephesus, where the Pope held a Mass on Wednesday.

“But some of those accusations are so revolting it’s upsetting — it just shows the mentality behind the case. They have this idea that we are rich and get a lot of money from abroad,” Among the accusing lawyers is Kemal Kerincsiz, an ultra- nationalist campaigner behind many of the high-profile 301 trials that have embarrassed the Turkish Government.

Mr Topal and Mr Tastan have forgiven their accusers. “We have a woman in our group who puts up with so much from her husband who is a Muslim. But even she has to love him because the Bible says so,” Mr Tastan says.
Link


Europe
Christian Converts on Trial in Turkey
2006-11-24
Two men who converted to Christianity went on trial Thursday for allegedly insulting "Turkishness" and inciting religious hatred against Islam, the Anatolia news agency reported. The trial opened just days before a visit to Turkey by Pope Benedict XVI. During his visit, the pontiff is expected to discuss improved religious rights for the country's tiny Christian minority who complain of discrimination.

Prosecutors accuse the two of allegedly telling possible converts that Islam was "a primitive and fabricated" religion and that Turks would remain "barbarians" as long they continued practicing Islam, Anatolia reported.
Hakan Tastan, 37, and Turan Topal, 46, are accused of making the insults and of inciting hate while allegedly trying to convert other Turks to Christianity. If convicted, the two Turkish men could face up to nine years in prison. The men were charged under Turkey's Article 301, which has been used to bring charges against dozens of intellectuals - including Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. The law has widely been condemned for severely limiting free expression and European officials have demanded Turkey change it as part of reforms to join the EU. They also are charged under a law against inciting hatred based on religion.

Prosecutors accuse the two of allegedly telling possible converts that Islam was "a primitive and fabricated" religion and that Turks would remain "barbarians" as long they continued practicing Islam, Anatolia reported. The prosecutors also accused them of speaking out against the country's compulsory military service, and compiling databases on possible converts.

Tastan and Topal denied the accusations in court. "I am a Turk, I am a Turkish citizen. I don't accept the accusations of insulting 'Turkishness,'" Anatolia quoted Tastan as telling the court. "I am a Christian, that's true. I explain the Bible ... to people who want to learn. I am innocent."
Link


Europe
Turkey court clears archaeologist
2006-11-02
A court in the Turkish city of Istanbul has acquitted a 92-year-old academic of charges of insulting Muslim women and inciting religious hatred.
She linked the wearing of headscarves with ancient Sumerian sexual rites.
Archaeologist Muazzez Ilmiye Cig was prosecuted over a book in which she linked the wearing of headscarves with ancient Sumerian sexual rites.

The judge ruled at the first hearing of her trial that her actions did not constitute a crime. Dr Cig's publisher was also cleared in a trial lasting less than half an hour. The archaeologist was applauded by supporters as she left the courtroom.

This trial is the latest in a series of prosecutions of Turkish intellectuals, including 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and novelist Elif Shafak.
Charges were brought against her by a Turkish lawyer who took offence at her 2005 book "My Reactions as a Citizen". In the book Dr Cig said that headscarves were first worn more than 5,000 years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex.
Charges were brought against her by a Turkish lawyer who took offence at her 2005 book "My Reactions as a Citizen". In the book Dr Cig said that headscarves were first worn more than 5,000 years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex.

Dr Cig is an expert in the ancient Sumerian civilisation which emerged in Mesopotamia in the third millennia BC. The issue of headscarves has polarised Turkey in recent years. Although predominantly Muslim, Turkey is a secular state and headscarves are banned in government offices and universities. The ruling Justice and Development Party, which has roots in political Islam, has unsuccessfully tried to lift the headscarf ban.
Link


Europe
The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities
2005-12-28
It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian
Oboy! It's George Moonbat!
In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.
Turkey's the product of 500 years of Muslim culture preceded by most of 800 years of trying to fight them off. It's not going to overcome that heritage rapidly, even though Attaturk tried to slice the Gordian knot. The requirement of that slicing was an authoritarian state that would be willing to come down with both feet on the holy men when they tried to make their comeback, which accounts for the peculiar position of the army in Turkish life — a position the Euros demand it abrogate. Mr. Moonbat, of course, lacks any understanding of history that's not couched in dialectics of some sort, so he can't be expected to understand the implications. Turkey's refusal to own up to the slaughter of the Armenians is something they're going to have to work out, but I don't expect they'll be able to actually examine it anytime soon. And if they revert to being proper Islamists they never will.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
[Raises eyes to the heavens. Beats breast. Rends garment. Smears ashes on head.] Properly contrite, Mr. Moonbat continues...
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Between 1769 and 1901 there were eleven documented famines in India, of which the author is discussing one, presumably because it was marked by a particularly stupid British administration. But in the 1769 great famine of Bengal, 10,000,000 people, one third of the population, are reported to have died. The British weren't in control then, were they? In 1790-1792, the Doji Bara, or skull famine, killed people in such numbers that they couldn't be buried. It extended over the whole of Bombay into Hyderabad and affected the northern districts of Madras. In 1861 famine killed a million people in Bengal and Orissa, and three years later a famine in Rajputna killed a million and a half. The 1876-78 famine is reported to have killed five million — Mr. Moonbat lumps the death toll from several famines into one to tell a scarier story.

India is susceptible to famine due to its dependence on the monsoons. The monsoons don't come, crops don't grow. The thousand years prior to the arrival of the British saw famines lasting for years. The Durga Devi, in the late 1300s, lasted for 12 years.

Lord Lytton seems to have been an idiot, who didn't realize the extent of the problem and who fiddled with things like price controls that made matters worse. The Banglapedia describes him thus:
His years in India were eventful. A severe famine raged over most of south India including Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad and Mysore for two years from 1876-1878. In the second year the famine also struck parts of Central India and the Punjab, and a heavy toll of lives consequently perished. The relief measures cost over ten crores of rupees and due to the failure of crops there was great loss of revenue. Lord Lytton's government, therefore, appointed a famine Commission under Richard Strachey to enquire into the causes of the famine and relief measures taken to mitigate the sufferings of the people. On the basis of the commission report a famine code was drawn up which laid down certain regulations relating to famine measures in the future. The government efforts to save life proved inadequate yet the viceroy held a magnificent Darbar in Delhi in 1877, to celebrate the assumption of the title of the Empress of India by Queen Victoria
Lytton was also the fellow who brilliantly declared war on Afghanistan. He was dumped and kicked upstairs, dying in Paris in 1891 as ambassador to France. Contrary to Mr. Moonbat's implications, though, Lytton's policies weren't British government policies. Gladstone removed him, and his successor reversed his more onerous measures, while keeping the ones that made sense. So I don't buy it as a holocaust, despite the directions Mr. Moonbat would try to twist it.
Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.
I have a pretty hard time with anyone who objects to the lack of gentle treatment of the Mau Maus. Maybe that's because I read Robert Ruark novels when I was a young fellow, or maybe because they were vicious bastards who used to do terrible things to people, starting with each other. The war was the archetype for the anticolonialist revolutions in East Africa, and some (like Angola) in the west, complete with helpful commie advisors. The difference between the Kenyan experience and the others is that Jomo Kenyatta wasn't Bob Mugabe. This was back in the old days, when Euros, especially those who had settled in Africa, still fought back, and the tactics used against the Mau Mau were the same as the tactics the Mau Mau were trying to use against the settlers. They were not allowed to achieve victory in Kenya. Bewteen 1953 and 1957, when Dedan Kimathi was caught and hanged, they were pretty well exterminated. The official death toll was 11,503 Mau Maus. Britain then set about land reform and integrating the black Kenyans into the parliamentary system. Jomo was rehabilitated, much in the manner of Nelson Mandela, and Kenya remains the model for East African stability, despite its obvious faults.
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
Nope. Sorry, George. I'm not feeling any guilt palpitations. I suspect our Brit readers aren't, either. Man's inhumanity to man is an old story — ask any Amalekite — and neither the Brits nor the Americans are egregiously guilty.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".
Really galls you, doesn't it, George? You can look in all the corners and twist things every way you want, but somehow you can't quite come up with anything to match the most hideous crimes of the Europeans, much less those of the less civilized world. There aren't any pyramids of skulls. There aren't any people wiped from the face of the earth using fire and sword.
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ...
Could it be that a country that sees itself as benevolent tries to live up to the standard it sets for itself?
Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence".
The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. But if you use evil intent you've got a six-lane speedway.
This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
[George hang head. Wipes tear. Blows nose loudly into blue bandana. The rest of us — those who've managed to read this far, anyway — wait expectantly for the punchline.]
Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
Or perhaps Turkey should begin describing itself to itself as a benevolent nation that's learned from the mistakes of its past. Civilization, looked at from that angle, is all about self-image.
www.monbiot.com
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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Author Faces Up to Three Years For "Insulting Turkishness"
2005-12-14
EFL...another genocide that never happened...

Turkey's most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with "insulting Turkishness". The charges relate to a magazine interview in which Orhan Pamuk said 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were killed in Turkey and no-one dares talk about it. He could face up to three years in jail.

This high-profile prosecution has caused a stir in Brussels. A delegation of MEPs will travel to Istanbul to observe the trial alongside international human rights campaigners.

Orhan Pamuk fled the country after the interview was published amid what he calls a hate campaign. Now he is back, determined to use his time in court to defend his comments, and his right to make them. "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo," the writer explains, at an Istanbul cafe overlooking the waterfront. "But we have to be able to talk about the past."

Armenia insists its people were victims of a genocide nine decades ago; Ankara denies any such thing.

Turkey implemented wide-ranging legal reforms as part of its bid for EU membership. But the new penal code still contains tight restrictions on what you can write and say. Under Article 301 it is illegal to insult Turkishness, the Republic or most state institutions. It is left to the prosecutor to decide what exactly constitutes an insult.

There are currently more than 60 writers and publishers besides Orhan Pamuk on trial in Turkey for what EU officials call their non-violent expression of opinion.

The strict taboo on the fate of the Armenians was cracked last September when Bilgi University hosted a controversial academic conference. Nationalists and staunch conservative protesters gathered outside the gates to shout their anger, convinced the event was sponsored by Turkey's enemies abroad.

Friday's trial has thrust a reluctant Orhan Pamuk into the role of political symbol. Now in the international spotlight, he says he feels responsible for less well-known writers suffering the same fate. But the novelist admits he longs to return to his books more than anything. "I feel this political responsibility, a solidarity with all these people who are being harassed. I am with them," he says.
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Europe
Turk journalists charged in new test of free speech
2005-12-04
ANKARA - In a fresh test of Turkey’s human rights record and its bid to join the EU, a state prosecutor has filed charges against five journalists for comments they made on a conference about World War One massacres of Armenians.
How is that EU membership thing working out, anyway?
The five respected newspaper columnists face between six months and 10 years in jail if found guilty of the charges of ”trying to influence the judicial process” and “insulting state judicial organs”, Turkish media reported on Saturday.

Four of the five columnists are being charged under the controversial Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code -- the same used against the country’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, whose trial begins on Dec. 16, and many other journalists. The article makes it a crime to insult state institutions or “Turkishness”.
I don't see why the EU socialists would object to that, they'd all like to be able to use the same kind of law against their opponents ...
The trial of the columnists is scheduled to start on Feb. 7, 2006. Four of them work for the liberal Radikal newspaper and the fifth for the centrist Milliyet daily.

The journalists had all criticised efforts by prosecutors and nationalist lawyers to ban a September academic conference at two universities in Istanbul dedicated to the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces 90 years ago. Although a court blocked the conference at the prosecutors’ request -- much to the embarrassment of Turkey’s pro-EU government -- organisers circumvented the ban at the last minute by moving the venue to a third university in Istanbul.

In their columns, the five journalists had branded the court ruling an attack on academic freedom and a travesty of justice.
Busted for telling the truth? That's novel.
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