Since winning a third term with a strong showing of 50 percent of the vote in the June 12 general election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government has taken increasing steps to abridge rights at home, Human Rights Watch said. It has restricted freedom of expression, association, and assembly with laws that allow authorities to jail its critics for many months or years while they stand trial for alleged terrorism offenses on the basis of flimsy evidence.

“The Turkish government’s jailing of journalists and non-violent political activists undermines its democratic credentials in the region,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, the Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The government needs to end the clampdown and reform its terrorism laws.”

In its 676-page report, Human Rights Watch assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than 90 countries, including popular uprisings in the Arab world that few would have imagined. Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region, Human Rights Watch said in the report.

Human Rights Watch also highlighted the endemic violence against women in Turkey, police violence and use of force, moves to combat impunity for human rights violations, and international pressure on Turkey over its human rights record.

The government has pledged to rewrite the constitution to further human rights. But the intensified clampdown centering on officials of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), but also including other critics of the government, threatens that process, Human Rights Watch said.

Thousands of people ­– including party activists, elected serving mayors, lawyers, journalists, several human rights defenders, and an academic – are on trial. Many of them are in prolonged pre-trial detention. They are accused of links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) and the Kurdistan Communities Union (Koma Ciwakên Kurdistan, KCK), which the authorities claim is the PKK’s urban wing.

An increasing number of journalists and editors were arrested during 2011. On December 24, 36 journalists with the pro-Kurdish press were imprisoned on terrorism charges in the context of the broader clampdown on Kurdish political activity. In March, several other journalists including Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener were imprisoned on terrorism charges for alleged links with coup plots against the government. The evidence presented against Şık and Şener was writings that do not incite violence.

The conflict with the PKK in Turkey escalated during 2011, with a rising number of civilian casualties in the second half of the year. PKK-related attacks killed and injured civilians in several cities. On December 28, Turkish air force jets bombed and killed 34 Kurdish villagers, 19 of them children, in Şırnak province near the Iraq border. An investigation into the lethal airstrike is under way.

Human Rights Watch called for the full and impartial investigation into all civilian deaths and said that those responsible for unlawful killings should be brought to justice.

“Turkey seeks to play a role in advocating democratic reforms in the region, but it needs to accompany its regional outreach with democratic reform at home,” Sinclair-Webb said.

via Turkey: Credibility Depends on Rights at Home | Human Rights Watch.

Turks young and old, waving their country’s red flag, or wrapped in it, marched to the Senate, where the bill will be debated Monday after passage in December in the lower house.

They carried banners reading “No to Sarkozy Shame Law,” ”History for Historians, Politics for Politicians” or other slogans denouncing an alleged bid by President Nicolas Sarkozy to “fish for votes” among French Armenians before the two-round presidential elections in April and May.

Critics claim the real aim of the bill is to ensure votes for PresidentNicolas Sarkozy from French Armenians in the two-round presidential elections in April and May. An estimated 500,000 Armenians live in France.

The measure would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by Ottoman Turks constitute genocide. It sets a punishment of up to one year in prison and a fine of €45,000 ($59,000) for those who deny or “outrageously minimize” the killings — putting such action on par with denial of the Holocaust.

France formally recognized the 1915 killings as genocide in 2001, but provided no penalty for anyone refuting that.

Despite the passing of nearly 100 years since the killings, the issue remains a deeply emotional one for Armenians who lost loved ones and for Turks who see a challenge to their national honor.

An irate Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador to France and suspended military, economic and political ties.

“Politicians who haven’t read an article on this say there was a genocide,” said Beyhan Yildirim, 35, a demonstrator from Berlin. He was among those bused into Paris from Germany and elsewhere for Saturday’s march.

Scores of buses from France, Germany and elsewhere lined the streets of southern Paris where the march began.

Armenians plan a demonstration near the Senate on Monday before the debate and vote.

It was unclear whether the measure would get the easy ride it did in the National Assembly, the lower but more powerful house.

The Senate is controlled by the rival Socialists who had earlier backed the bill. However, the Senate Commission on Laws voted against its passage last week, saying the measure risks violating constitutional protections including freedom of speech. The question is whether the Socialists will heed the recommendations if only because the issue is becoming an electoral hot potato.

Compromising freedom of expression in France, considered the cradle of human rights, has been a key argument of the Turkish government against the measure.

It is unclear whether lawmakers in the National Assembly had an inkling in advance that their vote giving the green light to the bill would trigger a diplomatic dispute. There appeared to be less than 100 lawmakers present for the Dec. 22 vote — out of 577.

Fadime Ertugrul-Tastan, deputy mayor of small Normandy town of Herouville, was among those demonstrating against the bill on Saturday, wearing the blue, white and red sash of French officials.

She said her family hailed from Kars, near the Armenian border, and her grandparents were killed by Armenians.

“I am here to honor their memory,” she said, adding, “There was no genocide because we were in a period of war.”

The Associated Press

PARIS — A Senate panel says it would be unconstitutional for France to make it illegal to deny that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago constituted genocide.

Relations between France and Turkey have soured since the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament, passed such a bill last month and sent it to the Senate.

The Senate’s Commission of Laws voted Wednesday that such a law, if passed, would violate constitutional protections, notably freedom of speech. The vote was 23 Senators for and 9 against, with 8 abstentions.

The panel vote — a nonbinding recommendation — was the first legislative setback for the controversial bill. The measure goes to the full Senate for debate on Monday.

by Elliott Abrams

In the past year, Turkey has often been held up as a democratic model for Arab countries that have thrown off long-serving dictators. The problem is that with each passing month Turkey is a less democratic country itself.

First there is the diminishing freedom of the press. As The Economist has said, Turkey “is a dangerous place to be a journalist.” In the “Reporters Without Borders” index, Turkey ranks 138 out of 178 countries, just a whisker above Russia.

Then this week, the Turkish government—or is it now more accurate to say the Erdogan regime?—has moved to prosecute the leader of the only powerful opposition party.

The facts are that Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, visited two of the party’s elected members of parliament in prison. They are Mustafa Balbay, a journalist, and Mehmet Haberal, a surgeon and former university rector, and each has now been imprisoned for over one thousand days. Mr. Kilicdaroglu called their imprisonment unjust. So, prosecutors are seeking to try him for the crimes of “seeking to influence a fair trial” and “insulting a public official.”

Freedom in Turkey is under threat, and the widely admired Mr. Erdogan seems intent on copying not only Ottoman foreign policy but Ottoman respect for human rights. Mr. Erdogan is widely quoted as having said “Democracy is a train where you can get off once you reach the destination.” In the end only the people of Turkey can prevent him from “getting off” and taking Turkey with him. But we must at the very least be honest about what is happening, and treat Turkey not as a full or an aspiring democracy but as a nation whose government is seeking to curtail the freedoms its people have recently enjoyed. That is a poor model for Arab nations seeking to leave such regimes behind them.

via Pressure Points » Human Rights in Turkey: the Decline Continues.

BRUSSELS

Demonstrators protest the arrest of journalists. Lengthy detention periods are a significant problem despite measures taken to prevent them, a draft EU report says. DAILY NEWS photo, Emrah GÜREL

The European Union has prepared to release a judiciary report on Turkey this week criticizing the justice system, particularly the unreasonable periods of detention.

The EU Council’s report was prepared upon the visit of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg to Turkey in October.

“There are some functional problems that have continued for a long time and have affected the system negatively,” said the report, according to daily Hürriyet. The report also cites the problem of presumption of innocence not being used in court decisions when arresting suspects.

Problems in independence of judges and prosecutors

There are also problems in impartiality and independence of judges and prosecutors, said the report, which also criticized the prolonged periods of detentions and prosecutions. The report urged officials to use “release on bail” as an option instead of detention.

The European Court of Human Rights has made over 2,200 decisions against Turkey between 1995 and 2010.

Almost 700 of these decisions were about violating the right to a fair trial. More than 500 of the cases were about freedom and security of the people. The judicial reform strategy that started in 2009 to adjust the laws within the EU norms should be put into action, the report said.

Lengthy detention periods were still a significant problem despite measures taken to prevent them. The lack of compensation for the duration of detention or lack of access to a mechanism to fasten the prosecution also increases the judiciary problem, the report said.

via POLITICS – European Union to pressure Turkey on its judicial system.

"Occupy" is 2011's word of the year, winning a runoff vote by a whopping majority.

(CNN) – The linguists have spoken and they have decided — “Occupy” is 2011′s word of the year.

Members of the American Dialect Society came out in record numbers to vote Friday night at the organization’s annual conference, held this year in Portland, Oregon.

“Occupy” won a runoff vote by a whopping majority, earning more votes than “FOMO” (an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out,” describing anxiety over being inundated by the information on social media) and “the 99%,” (those held to be at a financial or political disadvantage to the top moneymakers, the one-percenters).

Occupy joins previous year’s winners, “app,” “tweet,” and “bailout.”

“It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement,” Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, said in a statement.

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in September in Lower Manhattan, before spreading to communities around the country and the world as a call to action against unequal distribution of wealth and other issues.

Founded in 1889, the American Dialect Society is made up of “academics, linguists, anyone involved in the specialization of language,” according to Grant Barrett, the society’s vice president.

Barrett, who also co-hosts “A Way with Words,” a public radio program about language, said the annual conference provides an opportunity for linguistics professionals and graduate students to share information and research.

But Barrett says the word of the year vote, now in its 22nd year is, “light-hearted and whimsical.”

Nominations for the word of the year are submitted by society members in attendance at the annual conference, but can also be submitted by the community at large.

“Occupy” may have taken top honors, but several other words and phrases received recognition.

“Mellencamp,” a woman who has aged out of being a “cougar” (after John Cougar Mellencamp), and “kardash,” a unit of measurement consisting of 72 days, after the short-lived marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, were both recognized in the “Most Creative” category.

Barrett said many of the nominated words that have significance now likely won’t stand the test of time.

For instance, “Tebowing” and “9-9-9″ were quite popular in 2011, but Barrett doubts they’ll last very long.

Some words are just outright unnecessary — like Charlie Sheen’s “bi-winning,” a term he used to describe himself pridefully, dismissing accusations of being bipolar, and “amazeballs,” a slang form of amazing.

In the most outrageous category, “deather” — one who doubts the official story of the killing of Osama bin Laden — was recognized.

While all in good fun and a chance for “good-natured intelligent people to let their hair down,” Barrett hopes the word of the year vote conveys two important messages to even the purist of linguists: “Language change is normal. Language change is interesting.”

cnn.com, anuary 8, 2012

In collaboration with the pro-government Interahamwe militias, Rwandan army officials are held to have been largely responsible for organizing the massacres perpetrated against the Tutsi civilian population and moderate Hutu from April to July 1994. The massacres are estimated to have claimed some 800,000 lives. They took place against the background of a civil war between Rwandan government forces and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF): a rebel force led by Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan president.

In light of France’s support for the Rwandan government of the time and the ambiguities of the allegedly “humanitarian” mission — dubbed “Operation Turquoise” — dispatched by France to Rwanda in June 1994, victims groups and critics of French African policy have long accused the French government of complicity in the genocide. Their efforts led to the formation in 2004 of a “Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry” on the French role in the Rwandan genocide.

One such critic was the late Jean-Paul Gouteux. In August 2005, he spoke with the alternative Canadian publication, The Dominion, about the origins of the Rwandan genocide, the French role in the Rwandan crisis, and what he describes as the “collusion” of the leading French media of the time in covering up the true nature and extent of the violence. World Politics Review here presents Vivien Jaboeuf’s interview with Jean-Paul Gouteux for the first time in English.

Initially, most of the French media described the Rwandan conflict of 1994 as the product of an age-old cultural antagonism between Hutu and Tutsi. From a religious or social or linguistic or historical point of view, can one say that Hutu and Tutsi are two distinct ethnic groups?

Hutu and Tutsi are social categories, which in the past were determined by their respective sorts of work activity: cattle raising in the case of the Tutsi and farming in that of the Hutu. They speak the same language and they have the same culture. Nowadays, this distinction between farmers and cattle breeders no longer makes any sense. But little by the little the “racializing” vision of the German and then Belgian colonial administrators — and, above all, of the Catholic Church — took hold. The categories were adopted and given a racial interpretation by the Belgian colonialists, who had them included on Rwandan identity cards. Mgr. Perraudin, the representative of the Vatican in Rwanda, spoke of Hutu and Tutsi “races.” He was one of the initiators of the ethnically-based “revolution” that would lead to the first massacres of Tutsi civilians in the early 1960s.

Historically, over the course of centuries, the wars that permitted the Kingdom of Rwanda to expand pitted the Rwandan army — including Tutsi, Hutu and Twa — against other armies from the different kingdoms in the region. The tradition of conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi, which has been frivolously presented as the explanation for the genocide, simply does not exist. It is part of the propaganda that has been used to foment such conflicts.

The supposed ethnic conflict was an ideological construct, then, which served the political purposes of the government of the time and extremist groups?

The act of designating a scapegoat — in this case, the Tutsi civilian population — is eminently political. It is an old recipe, which has been constantly used, to the point of being worn out, by European populist and fascist movements. The two successive Hutu republics — the first dominated by the Hutu of the center of the country and the second by the Hutu from the North — made ample use of this “weapon of mass manipulation.” With the advent of Hutu Power, a racist movement that transcended the political parties, this dangerous development took the form of a sort of “tropical Nazism” that led to the genocide of the Tutsi population in 1994.

The racializing vision of the colonizers ended up being adopted in its entirety by Rwandan intellectuals — though certainly much less so by ordinary people. If the political leadership was able periodically to organize anti-Tutsi pogroms by exacerbating ethnic hatreds, it is because numerous Hutu intellectuals accepted this and found in it a means of upholding their own convictions in all good conscience. In effect, it was these intellectuals that benefited from the exclusion of Tutsi from the competition for administrative posts. There is thus a complicated interplay between, on the one hand, the manipulation of racist sentiment by those in power — which allows social problems to be obscured through the designation of a scapegoat — and, on the other, the interests of those who derive small privileges from this process and thus accept it and or even push it still further.

Rwandan victims of the genocide have even filed a criminal complaint “against x” [i.e. against persons unnamed] in the French courts. Do you really think that French political or military leaders could some day face trial and that France could some day make a public apology to the victims of the genocide?

It is my profound conviction that the truth about a genocide cannot be entirely hidden. The phenomenon of genocide is too grave a matter and it appeals to the conscience of humanity as a whole. There are those who think that the consequences of their political turpitude will never be known, because they played themselves out in the “black hole” that is Africa: the “heart of darkness,” as Joseph Conrad put it. But they are mistaken.

The complaint filed by the Rwandan victims is thus of fundamental importance. From how it is handled, we will see the state of the information available in France and also the state of people’s consciences: both of the judges and of the broader public. But there will be other suits filed, as there will be other revelations: still more embarrassing ones for the French state.

THE ROLE OF THE FRENCH MEDIA . . .

A decade after the genocide and after so many years of militating by victims and associations, the seriousness of French complicity is only starting to come out. Has the media had much to do with the length of time it has taken to sensitize the public and politicians to the issue?

As far as Africa is concerned, there is a journalistic tradition [in France] that consists in limiting information to ethnic cliches, without any analysis worthy of the name, and above all of transmitting the terms of French African policy without any criticism. The French media are never interested in any background questions concerning Africa. The image that they cultivate is one of ethnicity and tribalism: that is to say that they only speak of the form and the means of this sort of political manipulation, but not of the manipulation itself. In France, the media are obedient to authority and public opinion is always controlled. That could change.

European public opinion has to liberate itself from French expertise concerning Africa. One can envisage two possibilities: Either Europe refuses the hegemony of the French elites over African policy and it thus becomes the motor of a change in French public opinion; or our specialists, the diplomats and their networks, are able to control African policy. This would be a catastrophe for which Africa would pay a heavy price.

Back in 1994, we were enveloped by this sort of insidious disinformation. Looking back in light of the horror of what occurred and the enormity of the tragedy that played itself out over the course of three months in Rwanda, it is shocking to re-read the French press from this period. The coverage was minimal. Of course, this means that the press bore responsibility in the matter. There were two ways to prevent the tragedy from happening. The first would have been to reveal its extent starting in April 1994 and thus to have induced public opinion to demand that the intolerable crimes be stopped. The second was to reveal the involvement of French authorities, who would have then been forced to control their genocidal allies. Neither was done. The press and the other French media were above it all and remained true to their usual habits as concerns Africa.

In your book Le Monde, un contre-pouvoir? ["Le Monde, a Check on Power?"], you severely criticize the methods of disinformation and manipulation used with regard to the Rwandan genocide and, in particular, the dishonest attitude of newspaper correspondents. Among other things, you say: “[The newspaper] Le Monde, inasmuch as a docile instrument [of French policy in Rwanda], shares responsibility for the lack of comprehension of the French and their passivity in face of the horror that was occurring.” The conclusions of the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry qualify such accusations. The commission report says: “Most correspondents did their job and reported the facts . . . they did not hide the responsibility of France from 1990 onwards.” And then it continues: “Nonetheless, some correspondents and editorial writers and Parisian editorial boards tended to transmit a discourse demonizing the RPF . . .” Do you agree with this analysis?

Not exactly. In the first place, I don’t think there was a “responsibility of France” as such. It is a matter rather of the responsibility of various French political and military leaders, who were involved in a close collaboration with a pre-genocidal and then outright genocidal state. If we speak simply of “France” as such, we avoid having to identify them and we avoid having to analyze their individual responsibilities. The use of this global expression clearly reveals the limits of the commission or rather the intentions of some of its members: notably those who worked on the section on the media. But happily the facts are there and they have the last word.

The media’s obfuscation of the genocide was a very consensual process and it continued until 1998. The silence was broken by a series of articles published by [the journalist] Patrick de Saint-Exupery in Le Figaro at the start of 1998. Theses articles emancipated the press and led the French parliament immediately to form a commission of inquiry to stamp out the scandal. Obviously, there are distinctions to be made as concerns the responsibility of the press. To point out, as I have, the disinformation published in a newspaper like Le Monde, does not prevent one from recognizing that there are excellent journalists who work for the paper and that there are some very good articles that are written.

Do you think that the disinformation could also have its origins in a certain discordance between the points of view of journalists and editors? Or that maybe it’s a problem of the journalists being ignorant about the historical, social and political context of the events?

It is clear that a kind of journalistic collusion exists and that politicians and media people — that is to say, journalists, editors in chief, publishers and owners — maintain obscenely close relations. The collusion between Le Monde and the head of the French secret services, the DGSE, was even made public and admitted by a director of the DGSE himself, Claude Silberzahn. He has written that the director of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, and Colombani’s specialist in military affairs were “his friends” with whom he “plotted” some good campaigns in the media.

But there are also other journalists who avoid playing this sort of game with the agents of state power. In 1994, Corinne Lesnes, for example, wrote some very good articles for Le Monde, which undertook an analysis and furnished some elements that were indispensable for understanding the crisis. I should add — and I know this from a common friend — that her work was subjected to so much censorship on the part of the editors that she was brought to the point of tears.

The Frontier Telegraph

According to Mikael Danielyan, the chairman of the Helsinki Association, the bill banning the denial of genocides passed by the French parliament is a violation of the right to freedom of expression.

Political scientist Stepan Grigoryan, the director of the Analytical Center on Globalization and Regional Cooperation, expressed an opposite idea during a conversation with us, “I don’t think that it can be perceived as a violation of the right to freedom of expression. Provided the Holocaust is recognized around the world, almost in every country the denial of the Holocaust is criminalized. It means that not recognizing or denying the Holocaust is punishable. It has nothing to do with restraining the human rights. It is obvious that people who deny that must be held accountable both internationally and in their own country. The fact of the Armenian Genocide is recognized by around 20 countries, also by EU, various international organizations, therefore that fact is well-known.”

Let us mention that according to the Turkish Zaman newspaper, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan severely criticized the decision of the French Senate, “Unfortunately, all this was related to Sarkozy’s political ambitions. Now I ask is there a freedom of speech in France? And I answer no. They have destroyed the atmosphere of free debate.”

He is convinced that the bill will be finally ratified, “President Sarkozy will not use the right to veto, and that bill passed by the Senate will be ratified and will finally become a law. If Nicolas Sarkozy had been against, the government of France would have actively worked with the members of the Senate in order that it wasn’t passed. It is obvious that there has been no pressure on the MPs imposed by the government, so we have no doubt that this law will be finally ratified.”

In response to a question what impact would the passing of this bill have, S. Grigoryan said that Turkey’s first reaction would be painful, but eventually, that country would reconcile to the fact that France was a powerful country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and messing with such a country would have serious repercussions. According to him, the political fuss may be big, by calling back the ambassador, the relations may transfer to the level of the ambassador’s deputy, but S. Grigoryan doesn’t think that France will suffer big losses in the field of economics. On the contrary, it is not ruled out that showing such an attitude, Turkey may face problems herself.

Turkey has already stated about stopping military cooperation with France. As for imposing various sanctions by that country, the political scientist thinks that France doesn’t fear those steps, “Let us not forget that France is a powerful country herself. France is backed by EU. What is a sanction against France – e.g. if Turkey tries to impose some economic or commercial sanctions against France, she will automatically confront the European Union.”

In response to our question whether the step of passing the bill by France was not conditioned by the fact that the country tried to attract the attention of the Armenian community during the upcoming election and thereby win votes, the political scientist noted that it was not the main factor, “There are roughly half a million Armenians in France, they have nearly 200 thousand votes. It is not such a big influence, so that to make France oppose Turkey.” According to the political scientist, France had a few reasons for passing that bill, one of which, according to him, was related to restoring historical justice and the main reason was, “Turkey has shown big ambitions in the Arab, Muslim world recently. Turkey tries to become a leader in the region in regard to the Arab Spring and revolutions, including the countries of North Africa. It is obvious that France doesn’t like it.” Our interlocutor thinks that passing the bill is not the last step taken by France against Turkey. In his words, the period of rivalry has just started, “Turkey is becoming more powerful and clashing with the interests of other countries, first of all France and Italy and there will be new steps taken by those countries in the short-run.”

Lusine KHACHATRYAN

www.aravot.am, DECEMBER 22, 2011