the pot accuses the kettle that he is covered with soot

The pot accuses the kettle that he is covered with soot

By David Verveer

This ancient expression, (meaning that you have to examine yourself before you blame somebody else) is precisely suitable for the political argument that took place between the Turkey's and Israeli leaders, at the Davos meeting last night. The following news item could be read in the International Press:
Turkey’s prime minister has stormed out of the Davos economic summit swearing he will never return. It followed a fiery 25-minute defense of Israel’s attack on Gaza by Israel’s president Shimon Peres. Recip Tayyip Erdogan felt he was not given the time to reply by the debate’s moderator, and criticized him in a hurriedly-organized press conference. The fallout from the argument, during which Erdogan says he was also annoyed by Peres’s manner, could harm relations between the two Middle East allies. At one point he said to Peres, “You kill people.”
Peres repeatedly asked Erodgan and fellow panelists like the Arab league’s Amr Moussa what they would do if they came under rocket fire, raising his voice and jabbing his finger. “The moderator gave the Israeli president a 25-minute speech, and said nothing when he raised his voice directly to me, and said nothing when the president took an attitude against discussion rules we are used to here in Davos,” said Erodgan to the press. He also said Peres had phoned him to apologize. On arriving back in Istanbul the word had got out and Erdogan was met by a crowd cheering him as a hero. It is not known how this could affect Turkey’s role in bringing Israel and Syria together for talks.
Turkey and Israel are allies and cooperate in many fields, including military, strategically, economically, and tourism. The countries started to drift away from each other when the Islamic Party of Erdogan gained power, and since than, Turkey blamed Israel acting cruelly with the Palestinians.
But who are the Turks to talk, we will not start again the argument that the Turks killed more than one and an half million of Armenians, that is old stuff, and forgotten (but not forgiven). The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, the Great Calamity refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one-and-a-half million.
But what are they doing to the Kurds now? Turkish policies of repression against the Kurds are one of the strongest and most lasting arguments against admitting Turkey to membership in the European Union. Turkey's application to the European Union is still pending and is soon to be reviewed again.
Support for a United States invasion of Iraq may bring the Turks billions in aid, but it may also give them the much costlier choice between losing any chance for membership in the European Union and tolerating a secessionist movement in the Turkish parts of Kurdistan, which could endanger the very existence of Turkey in its present form.
The Kurds are divided among four states. Of course, deciding "who is a people" in the contemporary world is a political question rather than a legal process, as exactly Dr. Khalid Salih suggests. In comparison to the dominating nationalities in the Middle East, the minorities are denied of every single right, the Kurds for example, and have been considered as second-class citizens since the creation of the “modern states” of the region in 1920s.
The Turks denied the existence of the Kurds for decades and called “mountain Turks,” and until recently, the Kurds were not allowed to speak in Kurdish in the “democratic Turkish state.” In Iran, the Iranian regime considers us as a branch of the Persian ethnicity. In Syria, a lot of Kurds lack citizenship and are deprived of attending schools. In Iraq, however, the Ba’athists granted a “self-rule” to the Kurds, while the promises were set of empty words, and destroyed us with chemical weapons. In short, all the mentioned four states have equally suppressed the Kurds in different ways.
Turkey's cross-border military incursion into the Iraqi Kurdistan to attack bases and militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) began on 21 February 2008. This is the Turkish army's largest ground offensive into northern Iraq for over eleven years. It came as a surprise, given the unfavorable weather conditions that still prevail in the mountainous region. Thus, the scale and the timing alike signal Turkey's determination to continue to pursue and damage its PKK enemy.
The latest incursion, which by 25 February 2008 is estimated to have cost the lives of 153 PKK operatives and nineteen Turkish soldiers, is part of Turkey's response to the gradual, year-on-year escalation of attacks by the PKK since June 2004. The latter culminated in October 2007 with the killing of some fifty Turkish soldiers and civilians, and were in turn followed in December by an intense Turkish aerial bombardment of suspected PKK hideouts in the rugged, snow-covered mountains of northern Iraq.
Of course it is not my task to defend or blame the Turkey's actions against the Kurds, (nice people, whom I met and visited when working in Iran, and who were funny anough strong supporters of the Israeli cause, even though, belonging to the same religion as our opponents, The Palestinians).
I don't know if the official recognition of the Kurdish PKK party is similar to that of the Hamas Organization, who, by the entire world are proclaimed terrorists, but Mr. Erdogan, do you kill in a more human manner, and by the way, does your air force warn the civil population to get out, before a planned bombardment, like the Israelis? But don't worry Mr. Turkey, nobody cares that you kill your fellow Muslims, as you are not a Jew or Zionist, your actions are considered only an internal affairs, but our defense against 8 year long bombardment with missiles, from a strip of land taken over in a bloody coup by a group of terrorists, who uses the civilian population as shields, is called by you a genocide, and most of those stupid (excuse me for saying it) talkbacks in the British, American, Dutch and Belgium Internet papers, only blame Israel, and don't have a tiny bid of common sense and knowledge to see that they are being used by the Islam propaganda in their fight to take over the world.
The question asked by Shimeon Peres (Noble prize Laureate), what is your country is going to do, if they are bombed by your neighbors didn't and doesn't get answered, I wonder why?