Kurds Massacred by Armenians

Jeremy Salt, "The Unmaking of the Middle East," Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2008, p. 67:

(Source: Maxime Gauin)

Bernard Lewis on the Armenian Question

Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century. Reflections of a Middle East Historian, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012, pp. 287-288:

“My point was that while the Armenians suffered appalling losses, the comparison with the Holocaust was misleading. The one arose from an armed rebellion, from what we would nowadays call a national liberation struggle. The Armenians, seizing the opportunity presented by World War I, overlords in alliance with Britain and Russia, the two powers with which Turkey was at war. The rebellions of the Armenians in the east and in Cilicia achieved some initial successes but were eventually suppressed, and the surviving Armenians from Cilicia were ordered to be exiled. During the struggle and the subsequent deportation, great numbers of Armenians were killed.

The slaughter of the Jews, first in Germany and then in German occupied Europe, was a different matter. There was no rebellion, armed or otherwise. On the contrary, the German Jews were intensely loyal to their country. The attack on them was defined wholly and solely by their alleged racial identity and included converted Jews and people of partly Jewish descent. It was not local or regional, but was extended to all the Jews under German rule or occupation, and its purpose was to achieve their total annihilation.

When the survivors of the Armenian deportation arrived at their destinations in Ottoman-ruled Iraq and Palestine they were welcomed and helped by the local Armenian communities. The German Jews deported to Poland by the Nazis received no such help, but joined their Polish coreligionists in a common fate.

The first difference was thus that some of the Armenians were involved in an armed rebellion; the Jews were not, but were attacked solely because of their identity. A second difference was that the persecution of Armenians was mostly confined to endangered areas, while the Armenian populations in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, notably in big cities, were left more or less unharmed. I say “more or less” because there were some attacks on individual Armenians accused of anti-Ottoman acts, but the Armenian populations in general were not persecuted.”

(Source: Maxime Gauin's blog)

The Armenians rejoiced and celebrated publicly when the Turks conquered Edessa

The Armenians broke away from the Byzantine church in 451,150 years after they accepted Christianity, leading to long centuries of Armenian-Byzantine clashes which went on until the Turks settled in Anatolia starting in the late 11th century, with the Byzantines working to wipe out the Armenians and eliminate the Armenian principalities in order to maintain Greek Orthodoxy throughout their dominions. Contemporary Armenian historians report in great detail how the Byzantines deported Armenians as well as using them against enemy forces in the vanguard of the Byzantine armies. As a result of this, when the Seljuk Turks started flooding into Anatolia starting in the late 11th century, they did not encounter any Armenian principalities; the only force remaining to resist them was that of Byzantium…

Contemporary Armenian historians interpret this Turkish conquest of Anatolia to have constituted their liberation from the long centuries of Byzantine misrule and oppression. The Armenian historian Asoghik thus reports that "Because of the Armenians' enmity toward Byzantium, they welcomed the Turkish entry into Anatolia and even helped them." The Armenian historian Mathias of Edessa likewise relates that the Armenians rejoiced and celebrated publicly when the Turks conquered his city, Edessa (today's Urfa).

Source: https://www.1915.gov.tr/images/uploads/documents/Ermeni_ingilizce_Soru_CevapKitapcigi.pdf

Soviet bombs still killing people in Afghanistan

Decades on, Soviet bombs still killing people in Afghanistan

AFP December 15, 2019

Gholam Mahaiuddin sighs softly as he thinks of his 14-year-old son, who was killed in the spring by a bomb dropped last century in the hills of Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan.

"We knew the mountain was dangerous," said Mahaiuddin, who found his son's remains after he didn't come home one day.

"We were aware of mines but we could not find them. They were buried in the soft sand after the rain."

Forty years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan -- and three decades since the conflict ended -- the war's legacy continues to claim lives across the country.

Mahaiuddin's son, Moujtaba, was killed along with two friends, aged 12 and 14, on May 17 when they went looking for berries in this idyllic landscape where chocolate-coloured mountains are topped with snow.

When none of them had returned the next day, Mahaiuddin and other residents from his tiny village, called Ahangaran, started searching.

"I found my son with just his chest and head left," Mahaiuddin recalled.

Moujtaba and his friends had been killed by what is known as an AO-2.5 RTM submunition.

The cluster bombs were used extensively by Soviet forces, who dropped them like deadly rain across Afghanistan in the years following their December 1979 invasion.

Mahaiuddin, 44, remembers the war well. He said he used to bring tea to mujahedeen fighters who would hide in the mountains and launch ambushes against Soviet patrols.

More recently, the cluster weapons have been used in Syria, according to a 2016 Human Rights Watch report.

"It is the most dangerous, it is very sensitive to vibrations," said Bachir Ahmad, who heads a team of deminers from the Danish Demining Group (DDG).

- 1980s battlefield -

The humanitarian organisation has been working in several Afghan provinces since 1999 to clear explosives left from a war most of the country's current, young population never lived through.

The hills of Bamiyan, which is famous as the home of two giant 6th-century Buddha carvings that the Taliban blew up, have been extensively scoured for mines and other explosives.

Near the site of the blast that killed Moujtaba and his friends, DDG workers have painted white pathways showing which areas are clear of danger.

"This is the last battlefield we are cleaning in Bamiyan, it dates back to 1986," said Habib Noor, the DDG's head for the province.

Bamiyan, a region dominated by Shiite Hazaras and relatively unaffected by today's violence ravaging the rest of Afghanistan, will soon be the first of the 34 provinces in Afghanistan where all known contaminated areas have been cleared.

The DDG found 26 explosive devices just in the area around Ahangaran.

"We explored the area with information from the people, finding locals who had fought up there," Noor said.

- Tedious work -

At the site near Ahangaran visited by AFP, deminers worked under a bright blue sky, with a doctor and team leader always on hand.

The team of eight, wearing bright blue body armour, picked quietly at the ground, their silence broken only by the sound of crows crying and metal detectors buzzing.

Zarkha, 26, said she had found her first cluster bomb a few days earlier.

"I was very scared," she said, describing how her team had carefully dug around the sensitive device and then destroyed it in a controlled explosion.

Last year, mines and other "explosive remnants of war" (ERW) killed or wounded 1,391 Afghans, according to government statistics. More than half of the victims were children.

"The explosive is still operable after one hundred years. The metal and plastic will degrade but not the explosives," said Abdul Hakim Noorzai, DDG's chief of demining operations based in Kabul.

Ahmad, the demining team leader, said he was angry his country remained devastated by the Soviet war.

"They destroyed our lives. Because of them we have to do demining instead of being a doctor or engineer or teacher," he said, adding that he had been demining since 2003 and was bored with the tedious work.

While heading down the mountain, the team finds a gang of children playing outside the village's modest school.

Nahida, 11, smiles shyly under the little white scarf covering her hair.

She remembers Moujtaba well. "He was my cousin. I cried when I learned that he was dead," she said.

Asked if she knew anything about the war with the Soviets, she replied: "I don't know where the bombs came from."

The Algerian Genocide

The following is an excerpt from the following web site:

https://www.worldbulletin.net/filebox/algerian-genocide-the-setif-massacre-h139653.html

In an attempt to break down Algerian resistance and pro-independence support, French occupation forces placed the Algerians under military, political, religious, cultural and economic pressures.

Cultural pressure was applied with the intention of eliminating Muslim and Arab identities. Attempts were made to replace Arabic and Berber -the official languages of Algeria-with French. Religious pressure was applied with the intention of replacing Islam with Christianity via an increase in Christian missionary activities. Land belonging to tribes who were deemed ‘anti-occupation’, was confiscated in a bid to apply economic pressures and non-transferable properties belonging to foundations that were set up to serve the society were seized. Europeans migrants were also settled into colonial settlements in the country's most beautiful regions. In order to encourage such migration, land was seized from native tribes and distributed, without cost, to European migrants.

Algerian rebellion against political repression and massacre led to brutal suppression at the hands of the 400,000 French soldiers whom had been deployed to the country. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Following the genocidal massacre, France gained entire control of Algeria. Although this was only achieved in the 1900’s, from this point onwards, hundreds of thousands of French citizens settled in Algeria.

PKK and the Drug Trade

Source: EU Drug Markets Report 2019

http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/12078/20192630_TD0319332ENN_PDF.pdf

Ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorist groups are motivated by nationalism, ethnicity and/or religion. Separatist groups seek to carve out a state for themselves from a larger country or annex territory from one country to that of another. Left- or right-wing ideological elements are not uncommon in these types of groups. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and the Kurdish PKK fall into this category.

The PKK, a paramilitary group based in the Middle East — primarily in south-eastern Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq — has been reported to be involved in organised crime (Europol, 2019f; Roth and Sever, 2007), with few examples of its engagement in the drug trade in the EU (Basra, 2019)

Basra, R. (2019), A new high? Terrorists and drugs in Europe, background paper for this report, EMCDDA, Lisbon.

Europol (2019f), European Union terrorism situation and trend report (https://www.europol.europa.eu/tesat-report).

Roth, M. P. and Sever, M. (2007), ‘The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) as criminal syndicate: funding terrorism through organized crime, a case study’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30(10), pp. 901-920.

Toynbee on Changing the Alphabet

Source:  A Study of History: Abridgement of, Volumes 1-6.