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In this mailing:
Turkey and the Kurds
by Uzay Bulut
• November 28, 2014 at 5:00 am
For
decades Turkey's official policy was: There are no Kurds -- so there is no
problem.
"They
wanted to send us a message through a beheading, a throat-cutting. This was
an organized attack against our party. The [Turkish] state wanted to behead
our party administrator in our party building. Behind this attack was the
state itself." — Selahattin Demirtas, co-Chairman of the pro-Kurdish
People's Democratic Party (HDP).
Turkey: A Laboratory of Various Methods of Oppressing the Kurds
In Turkey, the approximately 20 million Kurds do not have any national
rights, autonomy, or even primary schools where they can be educated in the
Kurdish language.
The real population of Kurds in Turkey is not known; the Turkish state
has not carried out a census of Kurds.
That policy may be deliberate: the Turkish regime seems to prefer to
deny everything that is related to Kurdish existence. Turkey's state
authorities, before the AKP came to power in 2002, said that when the Turkish
republic was established, there were no Kurds – just "mountain
Turks," and that Kurdish is not a "real" language. Since then,
however, thanks to pro-Kurdish parties, the Turkish government can no longer
refer to them that way. The problem remains, however, that the government
still does not officially recognize the Kurds and still keeps denying them
the autonomy they feel is their right.
Political Landslides Shake Europe
by Peter Martino
• November 28, 2014 at 4:00 am
All along
the Mediterranean and to the north, parties opposing the EU-mandated
austerity policies are growing spectacularly.
The rise
of tax-and-spend parties (or rather tax-other-countries-and-spend parties)
reinforces the rise of parties such as UKIP in the north.
In the
Netherlands, the anti-establishment Party for Freedom (PVV), of Geert Wilders,
is currently the biggest party in the polls. Wilders has consistently opposed
the bailing out of countries such as Greece and Spain with Dutch taxpayers'
money.
Last week, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won a landmark
victory in the Rochester & Strood by-election. With this win, UKIP
secured its second Member of Parliament. The UKIP candidate, Mark Reckless,
won 42.1% of the votes, thrashing the Conservatives (34.8%), Labour (16.8%)
and the Liberal Democrats (0.9%). It was the first time ever that UKIP stood
in Rochester & Strood. The party won votes from all the major parties.
The Conservatives lost 14.4% of the votes, Labour 11.7% and the Liberal
Democrats a whopping 15.5%.
UKIP is expected to do very well in the British general elections next
May. Last month, a poll predicted the party could win up to 25% of the vote
in these elections. In the 2010 general elections, the party had only 3.1%.
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