Turkish Ultranationalist Group on the “Hunt for Armenians” in France
vice.com
vice.com
It is the long arm of Ankara and if they were Russians or North Koreans, they would have been proscribed by the German authorities a long time ago. Unfortunately, their dangerousness was not recognized early enough, so they were allowed to expand. What to do with this cancer now, that is the question.
> "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
I am sure Germany has to be very careful in dealings with Erdogan, since Germany has such a large amount of Turkish migrants and thus they could quite easily destabilise the country.
A few years ago in The Netherlands the Turkish people started large scale protests due to a Turkish minister being denied entry. The Turkish people clearly identified themselves as Turks first and foremost, since they were carrying the Turkish flags during their protests [1].
Turkey maintains a strong kind of grip on its Turkish citizens abroad using state-funded Diyanet mosques [2] and allowing dual citizenship [3] - children born from Turkish countries living in a foreign country receive the Turkish citizenship by default.
---
[0]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/-the-minarets-are-our-ba...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Dutch–Turkish_diplomatic_...
[2]: https://www.dw.com/en/erdogan-in-germany-what-you-need-to-kn...
[3]: https://www.government.nl/topics/dutch-nationality/question-...
Of course the left doesn't like this as apparently being cannon fodder for one government while being a citizen of another is cool so...
You can do the exercise (I did) of going through every muslim country on the map, from Morocco to Indonesia, and lookup the recent political history of that country on wikipedia. In every single of these countries, no exception, either:
- the Islamists are in power or one of the largest political parties (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Marocco, Turkey, Pakistan, etc)
- the Islamists were one of the largest political forces but have been banned (doesn't mean they are not present) (Jordan, Algeria, etc)
- the Islamists are one of main the parties to a civil war (Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc)
I don't know what can be done in the west. I see this as a kind of repeat of communism. It's an idea which time has come. You don't get people to change their mind by force. They need to experience why it sucks before turning against the idea (in that respect Iran is probably leading the way, where the islamists seem to increasingly lose support of the population). And it doesn't mean it's a homogenous block (neither was communism).
For one, we could stop aiding islamists to overthrow non-islamist governments, as we did for example in Libya.
> - the Islamists are in power or one of the largest political parties
Do you consider Central Asian countries muslim ones? (At least until very recently) these countries (especially, Uzb.) brutally supressed any Islamic attempt at gaining any sort of power. I read elsewhere Uzb. now is trying to "liberalize" its politics with respect to "religious freedom" among others.
Gray Wolves and ultranationalists predate Erdoğan and his own movement. The two have been at odds with one another but - being the clever politician that he is - he has allowed himself recently with those ultranationalists.
For a while Erdoğan brought in reforms for Turkey's Kurdish population, far beyond what any previous Turkish government, including the ultrasecular ones, had done. Of course he turned his back on them in the end and went back to what comes natural in Turkey, which is to vilify Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and pretty much everyone else.
> allowing dual citizenship
Problem solved then. Troublemakers get a one way ticket to their superior home country, and get their local citizenship revoked.
Belgium did this for Fouad Belkacem.
Whoever wins, it usually results of abusing their position for political and financial gains and we learn about what happened after the institution changes hands(For example, only after the battle between Erdogan and the Gulenists, evidence came into light of the police involvement of the assassination of an Armenian Journalist, probably intended as a political manipulation).
Germany should be very careful, having loyalty to an external charismatic leader and acting as an organisation within an organisation is unfortunately commonplace among Turks. They are not majority but tend to be the more passionate ones.
I can't think of anything good to say about this at all from any perspective.
EDIT: after the comments below, Turkey is the second largest nation, after Russia. Still impossible to construe Turks as a minority group.
They may not be a minority on certain French suburbs, maybe on the place where this happened? They are obviously not a minority on the very street where the described "hunt" is taking place.
Along the nested hierarchy of subsets of Europe that are in question, "France" may be the sole level at which they can be bona-fide called a minority.
"Russia is a country in Europe" is similarly weird, even though ~25% of the land (including their two major cities, and ~75% of the population iirc) is in Europe and historically, Russia was much more involved in Europe than Turkey.
> And if history is important, the Ottoman empire has a history very much involved with the rest of Europe.
As an adversary/attacker, yes. But that's not a reasonable foundation for declaring membership.
Right now, Turkey is at war with almost all its neighbors, it's crazy that we are still turning a blind eye to it
Like it or not, people were literally burning their neighbors alive in Cyprus and entire west was watching. They've been in peace for 40 years now because of Turkish intervention. Cyprus war ended 46 years ago. Turkey isn't fighting Armenia at all. Iraq and Syria doesn't exist, they are broken beyond repair thanks to US and EU and Russia. It's the people that matters and there is a reson why we have 10 million Syrian refugees.
It doesn't matter if one calls it "war" or not, ethnic cleansing is uncivil and barbaric, no matter where it takes place. It's true that Ethnically cleansed areas become much more peaceful, is the argument that we should have more of it?
"in peace" about as much as the Korean peninsula is at peace. Turkey is illegally occupying Northern Cyprus, and that's it. It's not at war with the actual Cyprus, but you can't pretend everything is even remotely fine.
Turks were brutally removed from most of the lands they brutally installed and settled themselves on. Population exchanges like after the Greco-Turkish war should have been done with all neighbors to avoid such nastiness in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/world/middleeast/turkey-a...
Cyprus, Syria, Lybia, sometimes in Iraq (they claim to be fighting kurds, invade, do their thing, and retreat), Greek waters
Turkey is also seemly helping Azerbaijan attack Armenia
They also are pissing off Egypt, France, Russia, orthodox christians worldwide and some other countries.
The only reason why they are not "at war" is because they are member of NATO, so everyone is waiting Turkey to declare war first, since they don't want USA into their ass.
It is also worth pointing out that the grey wolves have strong history of working with rightwing/fascist groups in Europe, which makes sense as they themselves are essentially fascists.
However the reality is that immigrants are disproportionately more subjects of police brutality and arbitrary harassment, and there is plenty of evidence. All recent scandals of police ties to political groups have been associations with far-right groups. Just look at the recent scandals in Germanyab nazi chat groups inside the police, connections of police to nazi groups and leaking of hidden addresses of immigration lawyers to right wing groups.
Obviously not in Rotherham, where the opposite is well documented over decades. You're trying to rewrite history, it seems.
They aren't "anecdotal", they are well documented and large-scale. Please stop doing that.
source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/27/security-gua...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Guerrilla
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Casson
Event writing about this is on online forums is kind if scary. Suspected members of this organisation are linked to country's troublesome political history.
There have been incidents in the US as well, like multiple cases of arson on Armenian churches in San Francisco.
It's #20 now but you can always tell when a post is doomed to oblivion by comparing the upvotes-to-time ratio to other posts on the front page. Unless the mods save it, this should be gone in a few minutes.
I don't like the ideas in most of these comments so far, but I still don't want to suppress this discussion. Let people show themselves for who they really are and what they really think, for good or bad, because we're never going to make any progress unless a discussion can actually happen.
Unfortunately, many events which in reality exist with or without politics (like race-based hatred) are tagged with the political label. This also makes these events harder to discuss in an objective manner because an element of partisan thinking enters the fray: "does my party support this or not?" vs "do I believe this is right or not".
EDIT: There have been many front page posts about the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China. Is that considered political as well?
"Everything is political" should not surprise you, it's not a new concept.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I'm glad that we had this process of coming to terms with our past here in Germany [2]. While not everything is rosy for sure, we are basically aware of our past while not being overly affected by it anymore in the sense that old grudges or unsolved conflicts would still exist. It must have been not easy for earlier generations here at all and it is still a recurring topic in history classes in german schools but I think we are in a good place in this regard now.
Must suck to never have dealt with the past (think: Armenian Genocide [3], look for "Turkey denies that the word genocide is an accurate term for these crimes") and have that stuck in your society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Wolves
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergangenheitsbew%C3%A4ltigung
Yes. They are also quite sizable in Germany where they are officially organized and about 20.000 members strong. To get an idea for the size: German far right extremists are estimated at about 30.000.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization)#Ger...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Agency_for_Civic_Educa...
However, there are far too many individuals/groups (Equivalent to Mafia in Turkey, ultranationalist gangs in Europe) that sympathize/share views with said organization. And those guys are definitely not "mostly harmless".
- Turkey spent like decades denying any harm done to Armenians in general. Then for ~no reason at all, and not even in a place where Armenians are especially visible, a group of Turks decide to hunt some in the streets ? absurd squared
- That's yet another barbaric racist movement coming back from the past. Neo Nazis rallies in the US were a sad surprise after 45th PUSA election but now Turks ? .. if this is a social fever thermometer, it seems the fever is there.
So Nagorno-Nakahbath:
It been Armenian for THOUSANDS of years, there are structures there that are Armenian and 2000+ years old, also the place is full of the earliest christian churches (that were also armenian).
People that say Armenians must leave there because it is not theirs, are either ignorant of how the place became part of Azerbaijan (URSS gave it to Azerbaijan to appease Turkey) or are just anti-Armenian.
Crimea is a similar situation, kinda. The land been historically Tatar, but Russia invaded and took it in 1700something, it since then been a major Russian military area, when URSS had a Ukranian president, he gave Crimea to Uktraine, again thinking it wouldn't make a difference, not thinking URSS wouldn't last forever.
It's also a bit absurd to take territory by force, and claim "ethnic cleansing" when others try to take it back.
Legally the place does belong to Azerbaijan, because URSS gave it to them to appease Turkey, but de-facto it was never Azeri land.
Note: I am talking about Nagorno-Nakbath proper, not the lands around it.
Following that, it's either Azeri, Ottoman or Russian control until 1919 - the end of WW1. Even the Armenian vilayets of the Ottomans don't include Karabakh: https://www.armenian-history.com/images/maps/Eastern_provinc...
That said, I'm not well informed about this topic and I'm just going off the maps I find. Although the source also has maps of Armenian genocide, so I don't expect them to have an anti-Armenian bias.
Also by force, I'm referencing the previous Karabakh war of 1993. You can't deny the existence of force there.
First, there were no "Armenain vilayets" in the Ottoman Empire. It was a term people in Europe and USA used to define the six vilayets where there were the most Armenians. It was not an official designation.
Second, Nagorno-Karabakh was not one of the "Armenian vilayets" because it wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire. It was part of the Russian Empire.
Finally, Armenians predate Azeris (and Turks) in all the areas we are speaking about and were the majority in many of them up until the Armenian Genocide. In a few, they are still the majority to this day. Nagorno-Karabakh is one of those.
A discussion on whether being a majority ethnicity gives Armenia the right for occupation would be quite complicated and unsuitable one for a tech forum.
Azerbaijan has never attacked a civilian settlement. But Armenia attacks civilians every day, as it did in the past.
Turks do not kill civilians in their ethics.
Karabag is an Azerbaijani territory and was occupied by Armenia in the ~ 1990s. They attacked the villages and killed them without children or women. Armenians swallowed the skin of the children, They was cutting off the belly of the pregnant woman and bet on whether the child to be born was a boy or a girl. Do you know?
For ~ 30 years, Azerbaijan defended its rightful case, demanded its land back, but Europe remained silent.
https://icdn.ensonhaber.com/resimler/galeri/15_4476.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khojaly_massacre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZHOlQtYO8
https://www.ensonhaber.com/galeri/hocali-katliami-uzerinden-...
That said, I entirely agree. The timing is suspect as well, with Erdogan ramping up propaganda.
And to some degree also the French community in various European countries.
No community should have to fear for their life in Europe, but that seems to be a pipe dream.
But it is still more likely to happen in France, just because there are more Armenians there.
"The marches followed violent clashes earlier Wednesday, when a group of pro-Armenian demonstrators blocked a motorway near Vienne, and clashed with members of the Turkish community. According to police, clashes with knives broke out, and four people were injured, including a 23-year-old man who was hit with a hammer."
Read before spreading your xenophobia against Turkish people.
Mutatis mutandis, somehow I don't see the German government sending drone attacks to Israel.
There hasn’t been any “hunt for Turks”, and the Armenian community has been overwhelmingly peaceful for the ~100 years it existed. Both Turks and Armenian have always been welcome in France. There is no climate of fear that can justify this sort of behaviour. This is purely a result of the heightened tensions around Armenia.
There also isn’t any Armenian organisation that’s comparable to the Grey Wolves. Turkish militants are much more of a threat to stability in Europe than Armenians (although they aren’t a major one either).
So the situation is not quite symmetrical. I can get that some nuances might be lost in the reporting but the two sides clearly are not as dangerous.
Also what does this protest have to do with a fascist group on an ethnic cleansing hunt?
Article from Vice itself is pure xenophobia.
>If I click that link I only see Turkish text, what am I supposed to read?
Read the Vice article at OP it says same. If you want translation here you go,
"Armenian activists, who blocked the A7 highway near Lyon, France, attacked a group of Turkish citizens going to work with a stick, ax and knife, causing serious injuries to 2 TURKS aged 17 and 22!"
>Also what does this protest have to do with a fascist group on an ethnic cleansing hunt?
Nobody ethnic cleansing anyone here, no point in dramatizing events.By doing so, you just empty the meanings of words.
The article is about xenophobia.
> Nobody ethnic cleansing anyone here, no point in dramatizing events.By doing so, you just empty the meanings of words.
Ah, I'm sorry I guess English is not your first language. The article says the following had happened:
"250 people marched through the city centre waving Turkish flags, yelling violent threats like: “We are going to kill the Armenians.”"
This is the literal definition of ethnic cleansing. If you disagree, do you mean that this did not happen? Or are they looking for specific Armenians that were part of the event you are talking about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Turkish_diplomats_assa...