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Police detain Sebahat Tuncel, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions Party last week
By Dr Jan Best de Vries:
When in Turkey half of the population, Turks and Kurds alike, is arrested and fired by the regime in power with the consent of the other half, the actual situation is that of a civil war. When an army is to be formed to restore democracy in this country, it should comprise all ethnic and religious groups living today in the Anatolian peninsula: Sunnite Turks, Turkmen, Shiite Alevites, Sunnite and Christian Kurds, Christian Armenians, Aramaeans, Chaldaeans and the few Jews who still didn’t emigrate to the USA and Israel. Because it is no use to deny a former Armenian genocide and the Kurdish genocide today in Bakur by respectively both Ottoman and Young Turks and their political successors with a racist and salafist monopoly of suppressive rule of a century over a diverse ethnic and religious population living for generations in Anatolia, it is now the right moment for ‘The Times They Are A-Changing” by an army with a comparable composition of its members to that of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Rojava nowadays. Of course, this army would not be led by democratic Kurdish democrats like in Rojava, but by Turkish democrats. And if Kurds, alleged terrorists but in reality freedom fighters from the PKK, would decide to enlist in it, they should henceforward strictly have to obey the orders of their Turkish command and not those of the ethnically restricted PKK.
Let us pray, Muslims, Christians and Jews alike, that the present civil war in Turkey may last less years than the already five years during which the Americans and Russians wage their petty war in Syria.
Dr. Jan Best de Vries is an archaeologist and historian, decipherer of the so-called Byblos Script from Aleppo and Alalakh (‘How to Decipher the Byblos Script’, Aspekt Publishers 2014, ISBN978-946-153-420-0)
