The Turkish Culture Wars

Nice piece by Andrew Finkel in the NY Times, from Istanbul

“By dint of their imagination, humor and self-possession, [the young] are proving themselves to be just the kind of people who should make up the “new” Turkey that Erdogan’s party promised to create when it came to power in 2002. When Erdogan says he hasn’t got an inkling what the children of Taksim want, that may be all too true, but it’s his confusion not theirs.

One poster on the square, since cleared away by the police, subverted Erdogan’s exhortation that Turkish women have at least three children: “Do you really want two more like me?” Yes, please.”

 

And don’t forget the demonstrations have not just been in the capital city:

According to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey around 640,000 people had participated in the demonstrations as of 5 June.[149] Protests took place in 78 of Turkey’s 81 provinces.[150]

Human Rights Foundation Daily Report

(06/032) Actions against the interventions of the government to the fundamental rights and freedoms and the right to the city…

The protests that had spread all over Turkey went on 7-8-9 June 2013 especially in İstanbul and Ankara Provinces.

Police teams severely attack on the protest in Gazi Quarter of Sultangazi Distrrict of İstanbul Province. It is claimed that 300 people were wounded in Gazi Quarter since the beginning of the protests. On 8 June 2013 Murat Çetinkaya (19) was seriously wounded with the hit of the gas bomb canister.

Police teams severely attack on the protest in Ankara Province on 8-9 June 2013 and arrested 12 people.

On 9 June 2013 14 people were arrested in synchronised home raids on the grounds that they had shared information on the protests using twitter.com on charges of “helping and harbouring an illegal organisation” under Article 220/7.

(06/033) Extra-judicial killing allegation in Şanlıurfa Province…

Hasan Kaya (14) was killed and Ömer Dağ (16) was wounded in the accident that took place after the stop warning of the police team to the two juveniles riding a bike in Şanlıurfa Province on 6 June 2013. The authorities has been coercing the families not to talk to media. Ömer Dağ claimed that the police officer had kicked the bike and caused the accident.

Turkey:The Woman in Red

Turkey Woman in Red ” In her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing teargas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.

Endlessly shared on social media and replicated as a cartoon on posters and stickers, the image of the woman in red has become the leitmotif for female protesters during days of violent anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul.

“That photo encapsulates the essence of this protest,” says maths student Esra at Besiktas, near the Bosphorus strait and one of the centres of this week’s protests. “The violence of the police against peaceful protesters, people just trying to protect themselves and what they value.” Times of India

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In the NY Times, Seyla Benhabib, who was a child in Istanbul and is now a professor of philosophy at Yale, neatly summarizes the issues and their intersections.

The real problem … is Mr. Erdogan’s “culture war” against the country’s secular classes and the illiberal form of democracy that he is advancing. I’ve heard many Turks, both devout and non-observant, say: “If consuming alcohol is a sin, let me reckon with my own maker. The government cannot force us not to sin.”

Mr. Erdogan’s attempt to forge a Muslim moral majority is evident also in his government’s stance on abortion, which, until recently, had prompted no theological or political controversies. Islam, like Judaism, gives priority to the mother’s life and health over that of the fetus, but Mr. Erdogan, borrowing a page from America’s Christian right, has introduced legislation to curb the availability of abortion through Turkey’s national health insurance system. And he has compounded such measures, which would hurt poor women more than the wealthy, with nationalistic calls to increase the population of the great Turkish nation by recommending that all women have at least three children.

This moral micromanagement of people’s private lives comes amid an increasingly strident government assault on political and civil liberties. Turkey’s record on journalistic and artistic freedoms is abysmal; rights of assembly and protest are also increasingly restricted.

The more you spray the bigger we get.

The more you spray the bigger we get.

Anti Authoritarians Rise in Turkey

The news of civil unrest is not diminishing.

Violent protests against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan engulfed Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, on Saturday and spread to other cities, including the capital, Ankara, as tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in a second day of civil unrest and faced the tear gas and water cannons of a harsh police crackdown.

 …the protesters presented a long list of grievances against Mr. Erdogan, including opposition to his policy of supporting Syria’s rebels against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, his crackdown on dissent and intimidation of the news media, and unchecked development in Istanbul.

As we all know, nothing is certain once a well ordered train leaves the rails.  As the article points out, the demonstrations have been spontaneous, with nothing like an organizing force emerging.  Energies will certainly drain from the exuberation of the first manifestations; repression may rise or, if the government is as smart as it has been up to now, co-option will begin.  Promises to stop the development at Taksim Square would be an obvious first step.

The stakes are high, of course, with Syria imploding next door, and sectarian religious violence beginning to heat all over the area.

On Turkey

On Sectarian Violence

Religious Youth Push Back Against Buddhist Extremism in Myanmar

A bit of fresh air reported today from Myanmar:

A group of youth activists began distributing t-shirts and stickers promoting religious harmony in Rangoon and Mandalay on Friday, as part of a grassroots campaign to counter the growing threat of Buddhist extremism in Burma.

MyanMar flyers

Dozens of activists travelled through several townships in the former capital planting stickers on cars, shops and windows in response to the growing anti-Muslim “969” movement – led by the notorious Islamophobic monk Wirathu — which calls for Buddhists to shun the Muslim community.

Democratic Voice of Burma

 

The bad news is that Buddhists and Muslims, mutually seeking to escape the violence in Indonesia have gone at each other, with deaths resulting:

Fighting between Buddhist and Muslim asylum seekers from Myanmar at a detention centre on Indonesia’s Sumatra island left eight people dead Friday, police said.

The fighting broke out at around 2:00 am (1900 GMT Thursday) at the Belawan Port immigration detention centre in North Sumatra province, said local police spokesman Heru Raden Prakoso.

“We don’t know how many of the dead are Buddhists and how many are Muslims, or how the clash broke out. But our preliminary findings suggest they were beaten to death with wooden objects,” Prakoso said.

Sayadaw Wirathu

Sayadaw Wirathu

And here is the center of the storm himself:

 Buddhist Monk Saydaw Wirathu, the self-styled “Burmese bin Laden”, has called for a national boycott of Muslim businesses in Myanmar in a controversial video that emerged on YouTube.

Wirathu, who has led numerous vocal campaigns against Muslims in Burma and was arrested in 2003 for distributing anti-Muslim literature, urges Burmese people “to join the 969 Buddhist nationalist campaign” and “do business or interact with only our kind: same race and same faith”.

“Your purchases spent in ‘their’ (Muslim) shops will benefit the Enemy,” says Wirathu. “So, do business with only shops with 969 signs on their facets”.

The numerology of 969 is derived from the Buddhist tradition in which 9 stands for the special attributes of Buddha; 6 for the special attributes of his teaching or Dhamma and 9 for the special attributes of the Sangha or Buddhist order.

Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar Military

myanmar_span-articleLargeIt was with somewhat of a shock yesterday that we saw pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myamnmar’s apostle of nonviolent resistance, sitting on the reviewing stand of an Armed Forces Day parade, amongst those who certainly had a voice in keeping her under house-arrest for 15 years, unable to leave even to be with her dying husband in England.

On the other hand, those who are thrust into such positions have to learn to play the long game.  She cannot afford to act out of personal resentment.  If Myanmar is ever to escape the yoke of the past 50 years the army must come along too.   [NY Times: Fuller]

I thought as I watched The Lady the other night, Luc Besson’s bio-pic of her years under arrest, that he missed showing us a major part of her character and charismatic power:  until the very last moment there was no suggestion of how she dealt with the soldiers she saw daily for all those years.

It’s for sure certain, unless resistance to dictatorship can make inroads into the rank and file of the armed forces, making it hard to impossible to carry out orders to kill their fellow citizens, no toppling of the generals will ever happen.  Even in the case of full fledged, armed civil war, disaffection,  desertion and refusal to join play large parts in who comes out with ability to govern.

In any event, I am always suspicious of arm chair pundits opining on what others should do.  The only tough question is of ourselves: what would I do?  Indeed, what do I do in the difficulties of my own, less exalted, life?

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The US is right of course to be concerned with the military and the ongoing communal violence in Myanmar.

“We do remain deeply concerned about the communal unrest in central Burma,” State Department acting deputy spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters, using the country’s former name.

“We are urging Burmese authorities… to restore order and maintain peace in a manner that respects human rights and due processes of law… So that’s really the appropriate role for the military.”

Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for letting her voice grow silent about the murder of Myanmar Muslims.  The army has been faulted for standing by, even for abetting the nationalist-Buddhism on the rise, especially given its well known intrusion with fire and blood on the civil unrest of just a few years ago.  Much to be done in little time.

‘Buddhist’ Thugs Make Their Comeback

Having just returned from a week in Myanmar, the news from there is brighter to me than previously. Especially troubling is what we hear about on-going attack-and-burn raids on Muslims, reportedly led by Buddhist monks.    In an opinion piece in The Irawaddy Magazine from the founder, Aung Zaw:

“There is no doubt that the violent attacks on Muslims in Meiktila, a garrison city in central Burma, were politically motivated. It has been a gruesome spectacle. Muslims were beaten, dragged out into the streets, doused with petrol and burned alive.  Read more of this post

News in the Traveler’s Eye

Still getting my feet under me after five weeks in Southeast Asia — Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.  It’s strange once again, after 37 mornings of 6 a.m. wake-up calls and eating around hotel tables with traveling friends, to be  quiet with the morning NY Times and brief exchanges with the dear reader across from me.

As is usual, places that we’ve been leap out from the pages. Sadly, this morning, it is the rioting in Myanmar, and not just along the coast where it has occurred in recent month, but inland, at Meiktila– the scene, as it happens, of the last enormous battle between the Japanese and the Allies at the near-end of WW II.  If the reporting is right, the saddest of sad things is that the anti-Muslim rioting, and threats against reporters, are being lead by Buddhist monks with sharpened weapons.

23myanmar-cnd2-articleLarge

Having been with a guide in Burma who was not shy about voicing his quarrels with the government — as well as his hope– and having just seen Luc Besson’s fine movie, The Lady, about Aung San Suu Kyi and her fifteen year struggle it is strange indeed to see the red neckerchiefed police acting as police are supposed to act — stopping communal rioting and making space for cooler heads….

Rioting and arson attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through Muslim areas. Witnesses reached by phone said security forces did little to stop the violence.

“Mobs were destroying buildings and killing people in cold blood,” said U Nyan Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he described as massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police there.”

News services, which had reporters in the city, said that Buddhist homes had also been set on fire and that while thousands of Muslims had fled to a stadium for safety, at least some Buddhists were also taking shelter outside their homes, in shrines.

Images from Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of the rioting mobs.  NY Times

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In Thailand’s north west, which we didn’t get to, but heard of quite often,  Karen refugees have piled up in make-shift camps, fleeing from fighting between the Myanmar army and Karen separatists.  A fire broke out yesterday, killing 30.  Likely started from the slash-and-burn farming which takes place all over Southeast Asia and is much in evidence in the air almost everywhere, as we did experience.

NY Times

Burma Bleeding

Once upon a time, many centuries ago, we were all stateless beings. Under the shadow of the nearest biggest guy with horses and throwing or stabbing weapons to be sure, but stateless; no borders except those around the royal game preserves. Along the trading routes peoples of different hues and tongues mixed, changing hues and tongues as random encounters encouraged. Being stateless was not only not a crime, it was unknown. Not so today. If the state hasn’t entirely supplanted clan, ethnicity and religious feeling as the central sense of belonging in people, it has the structural, legal and military upper hand. ‘You may not feel your identity is with me, but you belong to me,’ the State Avatar might say.

Open Society We Are Rohinga

We Are Rohingya from Open Society

So, when a significant body of people are in fact stateless, serious consequences flow. As they are with the Rohingya Muslims, come from Bangladesh decades ago, fleeing turmoil there and seeking security and livelihood along the Burmese coasts.  Here is a very short history from The International Observatory on Statelessness:

The British annexed the region after an 1824-26 conflict and encouraged migration from India. Since independence in 1948, successive Burmese governments have considered these migration flows as illegal. Claiming that the Rohingya are in fact Bengalis, they have refused to recognize them as citizens. Shortly after General Ne Win and his Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) seized power in 1962, the military government began to dissolve Rohingya social and political organizations. The 1974 Emergency Immigration Act stripped Burmese nationality from the Rohingya. In 1977, Operation Nagamin (Dragon King) constituted a national effort to register citizens and screen out foreigners prior to a national census.

The resulting military campaign led to widespread killings, rape, and destruction of mosques and religious persecution. By 1978, more than 200,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh. The Burmese authorities claimed that their flight served as proof of the Rohingya’s illegal status in Burma.

Under the 1982 Citizenship Law, Rohingya were declared “non-national” or “foreign residents.” This law designated three categories of citizens: (1) full citizens, (2) associate citizens, and (3) naturalized citizens.

Clearly the road to the current troubles has been paved over time with the aggregate of animosity and the concrete of legal fiat.  Changing the direction of the road is going to take significant work — beginning with  rescinding the discriminatory laws, application of the highest moral appeal from Aung San Suu Kyi, and on the ground community organizing by tough international mediators — in all the affected communities — and calling on the best in the Buddhist and Muslim faiths to overcome the worst.

The new de-Gerneraled Myanmar state is in sorry shape, despite the exuberance of recent elections but it has no choice but to build itself into its best self right through the troubles at hand.

The news today is that some 20,000 have been displaced.  Time is slipping by.

 

Pollution: Chinese Riot; Americans Answer Opinion Polls

Copper and molybdenum are both naturally occurring elements on earth, and in our bodies.  In fact, too little of either can cause illness; as can too much.  When a giant factory comes to your town, the purpose of which is to grind, heat, combine, spin, stamp and otherwise manipulate thousands of tons of both items, you’d want to be much more than fairly certain everything was planned to a fare-thee-well.  One set of loose rivets, say, on an “air tight space” could release way more of the tiny 4 micron devils than the bodies of your children, friends and neighbors could tolerate. So the citizens of Shifang, in Sichuan province (just south of dead-center in the country) think.  We don’t know what was done prior to Tuesday, July 4, to get the facts, and be assured that facts were indeed facts, and not just corporate-government PR.  We assume frustration, uncertainty and fear reached a combustible mix not over-night but in the course of several weeks, if not months.

The Wall Street Journal, sure to be on the case where major capital is concerned, reports:

 Police in southwestern Sichuan province deployed tear gas against residents protesting a planned molybdenum copper plant in the latest case of environmental activism facing at times violent resistance from authorities.

… Details of the protest Monday in Shifang were murky. The search term “Shifang” quickly became the most-searched term on Sina’s popular Weibo microblogging service Monday afternoon, with users posting photos and videos they say were from the protest.

“Save our homes and environment for the next generation,” read one protest banner, according to a picture posted on Weibo.

According to one report:

Thousands of people — including high school students — concerned about pollution the plant would cause began to gather in front of the city government building and a public square Sunday night, and the protests turned bloody Monday afternoon after riot police moved in.

Public anger surged as Internet users circulated photos and videos of riot police using tear gas and batons to end the protests. Some Internet users said one protester had died.

“People are very upset. How could the police beat them?” said a 15-year-old middle school student surnamed Liu who did not join the protest.

While western media were reporting “cancellation” of the copper plant (Guardian, WaPo, AP) we who hold as an article of faith that human enterprise always pursues its own interests, think that cancel is too strong a word, not to say simply wrong; relocate where citizens are not so bold, buy off, pay off, give jobs, show studies, or simply wait it out all seem to be possible courses of action.

One connected fellow had this:

“It is the 4th of July — 236 years ago, America achieved independence and 236 years later, the Shifang people are fighting for their own rights and confronting the government,” said an unidentified microblogger who was quoted by Reuters on Wednesday.

“The government has repeatedly squandered the people’s patience. It is time for us to be independent.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, a recent poll shows Americans are less concerned about climate change than they were in 2007, down by about 50%.  Interestingly, while 18% called climate change their top concern, 29% say water and air pollution is number one.  Given that the EPA has been granted to leave to act on CO2 release as pollution maybe the fall off in concern isn’t THAT bad.  Bad enough, though.  Witness:

“I really don’t give it a thought,” said Wendy Stewart, a 46-year-old bookkeeper in New York. Although she thinks warmer winters and summers are signs of climate change, she has noticed that political leaders don’t bring up the subject. “I’ve never heard them speak on global warming,” she said. “I’ve never heard them elaborate on it.

While we can, and should shake up the concern of our fellows, the lack of leadership from those in elected office and have the resources to know better, is obviously an enormous problem.

Tibetans in India Not Letting Up During Hu Jintao Visit

In Delhi’s Tibetan districts, residents have been on “defacto house arrest,” Jim Yardley writes for The New York Times. More than 250 Tibetan activists have been jailed “under preventive custody,” he writes.

Police officials are stationed every few yards along the city’s arteries, keeping their eyes peeled for residents of Tibetan ethnicity, and detaining those who attempt to reach the hotel Hu Jintao was scheduled to stay in. Nonetheless, activists circulated text messages Thursday morning saying they planned a protest in front of the hotel where the summit will be held.  Sruthi Gottipati  NY Times blog in Dehli

A Tibetan woman was detained during a protest in New Delhi on Wednesday : Kevin Frayer/Associated Press