Hürriyet – Turkey
Jan 15 2010
Mood swings ahead of January 19
Friday, January 15, 2010
CENGÄ°Z AKTAR
`It’s been three years since the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant
Dink was murdered. But the perpetrators are free outside. A collective
‘official’ will is behind Hrant’s murder. Unless the ‘stately hand’
behind the killing is put before court, we know that our futures will
not be under guarantee,’ says the group called Hrant’s Friends. They
will once again gather in front of the Agos newspaper on Tuesday at
2:30 p.m. to claim justice.
The Hrant Dink murder is probably one of the unnamed stories that are
caused by the criminal `patriotic gangs.’ Hrant’s identity and
personality make the search for truth more compulsory than ever ` for
the sake of the country and society. If the justice cannot be served
in Turkey, then it is time to set-up a Dink Commission just like the
Hariri Commission and Bhutto Commission formed by the United Nations
in order to shed light on the assassinations of Rafiq Hariri and
Benazir Bhutto.
Lynching and racism
The xenophobia existing in every human community is blending with the
arrogance of a dominant ethnic element to evolve into sheer racism. We
hear lynching news almost every day. The most ironic of all is that
the crowd shouting: `Go home America. This land is ours’ was attacked
by those who are thinking alike in the northwestern province of
Edirne, on the impression that they were Kurds!
But this is how mass psychology works. No one can stand in front of
hatred and the sum of personal dissatisfactions. In the early 1990s,
Serbians were drinking `kavitsa’ with Bosnians and Croatians in the
morning but they were slaughtering each other at noon. Those in
Yugoslavia who grew with tales of socialist brotherhood couldn’t
believe the ferocity and burst of racist demons in the wars that took
place in Yugoslavia.
Drop in population growth
We all are familiar with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an’s
obsession that everyone should have at least three children. The
paranoia that some day the Kurdish population (whatever it means) will
outnumber the Turkish one is apparently behind the obsession. Don’t we
make mixed-marriages? Aren’t we flesh and bone? In any case, the
population growth rate is decreasing in Kurd-inhabited areas as well.
The education minister recently expressed concern about a drop in the
population growth rate while making assessments over an official
statistical report. Turkey can neither educate the youth nor employ
them. Young males are sent to military service and that’s basically
all. Following the military service, general education is provided
through the television. Again, according to official data, the
population below 50 is 88 percent of the total population. Present and
future prospects of this giant mass in terms of education and
employment are rather very dark. There is no room for pro-natalist
policies in Turkey’s present economic and social framework but there
is certainly one in future social implosions.
Just 18 years old and knows everything
`Don’t tell us about the European Union. We know the EU. The EU is the
reason for what Tekel workers have been going through, for depletion
of our people due to privatizations and for the French bomb showers
over the Ivory coasts (sic). EU killer, AKP its follower.’
These `views’ are shouted by the `youth’ gathered to listen to State
Minister for EU Affairs Egemen BaÄ?ıÅ? during a panel on EU developments
at BahçeÅ?ehir University last week. I do remember when the Romanian
dictator Nicola Ceausescu was executed, only in Turkey were protests
held. The nostalgic shouted, `Ceausescus never die.’ Present day
avatars and nostalgics of a Stalinist system that is politically dead
and morally corrupted have nothing to do with the youth’s hot blood.
These are young-looking old men who refuse to learn anything.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress