Millionaires of all countries, unite
Since we are talking about Turkey
October 6, 2005
****http://www.lefigaro.fr/europe/20051003.FIG0072.html
Small murders within the family in southeastern Anatolia
Thierry Oberlé – Le Figaro
October 3, 2005
Pinar was shot dead by Mehmet, her 14-year-old younger brother. Her only fault was losing her virginity before marriage. Saïme, a 16-year-old teenager, died for going to the cinema with her boyfriend without permission. Leyla, a married woman, was shot dead for having spoken to a man on the phone on several occasions. The list of crimes committed in southeastern Turkey in the name of honor is endless.
The region of the country most affected by a practice that persists in the Middle East and Asia, the Kurdish mountains remain a land where men too often kill women in the name of tradition. Here, executions are carried out for adultery, refusal of an arranged marriage, or to wash away the shame of rape. “She was dirty, so I cleaned her up,” the murderers claim once their deed is done.
“The rules women must respect are taught from a very young age, and the criteria differ from one family to another,” explains Haime Kardas, a representative of Kamer, a women’s association in Diyarbakir waging war against small murders within the family.
In some cases, young girls suffer a double penalty, like Sevide, 16, threatened with death by her father and older brothers for having been raped. The teenager was picking cotton in a field when she was kidnapped, raped, and held captive for ten days by a classmate. After escaping, she managed to evade the vengeance of her relatives by taking refuge in Kamer’s premises.
“Since our center opened three years ago, 85 women in mortal danger have contacted us. We have always found solutions to prevent these extrajudicial executions by initiating dialogue between our emergency intervention teams and the relatives, or by arranging safe housing for the person,” recounts Haime Kardas. The association’s preventive role is made possible by the modalities of honor crimes: a period of several months can indeed separate the family council that pronounces the death sentence from the punishment. This delay is used to organize a murder often disguised as an accident or suicide, or to push the condemned woman to take her own life. Informed of an irrevocable fate, the future victims are placed in quarantine, humiliated, and underfed. Some find the strength to leave, but many break down.
According to official statistics, nineteen honor crimes have been committed in the region over five years. But the dark figure is unknown. According to a survey by Professor Aytekin Sir, a psychiatrist at Diyarbakir University Hospital, women commit suicide twice as often as men in the province. “We observe a striking peak in suicides between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, the age of forced marriages, as well as an unusual use of firearms and poisoning via agricultural pesticides or rat poison,” notes Aytekin Sir. “The link between the suicide rate and honor crimes is proven in our region.” Zülal Erdogan, a lawyer in the city, confirms that “women are driven to suicide by their entourage. Lacking evidence, it is difficult to establish the truth against a family that closes ranks, or forces a twelve-year-old child to claim he killed his mother by accident.”
For a long time, when they appeared before courts, perpetrators of honor crimes benefited from mitigating circumstances and served a maximum of three years in prison. This era is, in principle, over. Entering into force on June 1, the new Penal Code promises heavy sentences for killers of women. It provides for judging not only the assassin, but all participants. “We need to see how the law will be applied. Changing the texts is one thing; changing mindsets is another,” comments Zülal Erdogan.
The case of the tragic lovers of Mardin, a Kurdish city near the Syrian border, awakened consciences. It erupted two years ago, after the stoning of Semsiye Allak, a young girl pregnant out of wedlock, and her lover, Halil Açil. The Allak clan could not bear that the girl had become pregnant outside of marriage. A few months later, the two families reconciled at Semsiye’s expense during a banquet organized by the notables of Mardin. The murderers apologized profusely, explaining that they had killed Halil by accident. The local incident then turned into a national scandal. And the public authorities declared “zero tolerance.”
“Honor crime is a mechanism of control and destruction of women who rebel against the system in force within families closed in on themselves. We must be ruthless with these practices from another age,” states Ilhan Diken, deputy mayor of Diyarbakir. However, mobilization has its limits. Shopkeepers in the ancient city enclosed by its basalt walls refuse to post Kamer’s posters in their shops, which call on people “not to turn a blind eye to murders in the name of honor.” “They claim it disturbs customers,” notes Haime Kardas.
This is because honor crime is the most extreme aspect of a host of patriarchal traditions. It goes hand in hand with customs such as forced marriages of minors to often elderly men, or unions celebrated before an imam and not at the town hall. “Here, one is first one’s husband’s wife or one’s father’s daughter,” observes Zülal Erdogan. For her, there is no doubt: “Honor murders will exist as long as women are considered second-class citizens.”
Source
Small murders within the family in southeastern Anatolia
Thierry Oberlé – Le Figaro
October 3, 2005
Pinar was shot dead by Mehmet, her 14-year-old younger brother. Her only fault was losing her virginity before marriage. Saïme, a 16-year-old teenager, died for going to the cinema with her boyfriend without permission. Leyla, a married woman, was shot dead for having spoken to a man on the phone on several occasions. The list of crimes committed in southeastern Turkey in the name of honor is endless.
The region of the country most affected by a practice that persists in the Middle East and Asia, the Kurdish mountains remain a land where men too often kill women in the name of tradition. Here, executions are carried out for adultery, refusal of an arranged marriage, or to wash away the shame of rape. “She was dirty, so I cleaned her up,” the murderers claim once their deed is done.
“The rules women must respect are taught from a very young age, and the criteria differ from one family to another,” explains Haime Kardas, a representative of Kamer, a women’s association in Diyarbakir waging war against small murders within the family.
In some cases, young girls suffer a double penalty, like Sevide, 16, threatened with death by her father and older brothers for having been raped. The teenager was picking cotton in a field when she was kidnapped, raped, and held captive for ten days by a classmate. After escaping, she managed to evade the vengeance of her relatives by taking refuge in Kamer’s premises.
“Since our center opened three years ago, 85 women in mortal danger have contacted us. We have always found solutions to prevent these extrajudicial executions by initiating dialogue between our emergency intervention teams and the relatives, or by arranging safe housing for the person,” recounts Haime Kardas. The association’s preventive role is made possible by the modalities of honor crimes: a period of several months can indeed separate the family council that pronounces the death sentence from the punishment. This delay is used to organize a murder often disguised as an accident or suicide, or to push the condemned woman to take her own life. Informed of an irrevocable fate, the future victims are placed in quarantine, humiliated, and underfed. Some find the strength to leave, but many break down.
According to official statistics, nineteen honor crimes have been committed in the region over five years. But the dark figure is unknown. According to a survey by Professor Aytekin Sir, a psychiatrist at Diyarbakir University Hospital, women commit suicide twice as often as men in the province. “We observe a striking peak in suicides between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, the age of forced marriages, as well as an unusual use of firearms and poisoning via agricultural pesticides or rat poison,” notes Aytekin Sir. “The link between the suicide rate and honor crimes is proven in our region.” Zülal Erdogan, a lawyer in the city, confirms that “women are driven to suicide by their entourage. Lacking evidence, it is difficult to establish the truth against a family that closes ranks, or forces a twelve-year-old child to claim he killed his mother by accident.”
For a long time, when they appeared before courts, perpetrators of honor crimes benefited from mitigating circumstances and served a maximum of three years in prison. This era is, in principle, over. Entering into force on June 1, the new Penal Code promises heavy sentences for killers of women. It provides for judging not only the assassin, but all participants. “We need to see how the law will be applied. Changing the texts is one thing; changing mindsets is another,” comments Zülal Erdogan.
The case of the tragic lovers of Mardin, a Kurdish city near the Syrian border, awakened consciences. It erupted two years ago, after the stoning of Semsiye Allak, a young girl pregnant out of wedlock, and her lover, Halil Açil. The Allak clan could not bear that the girl had become pregnant outside of marriage. A few months later, the two families reconciled at Semsiye’s expense during a banquet organized by the notables of Mardin. The murderers apologized profusely, explaining that they had killed Halil by accident. The local incident then turned into a national scandal. And the public authorities declared “zero tolerance.”
“Honor crime is a mechanism of control and destruction of women who rebel against the system in force within families closed in on themselves. We must be ruthless with these practices from another age,” states Ilhan Diken, deputy mayor of Diyarbakir. However, mobilization has its limits. Shopkeepers in the ancient city enclosed by its basalt walls refuse to post Kamer’s posters in their shops, which call on people “not to turn a blind eye to murders in the name of honor.” “They claim it disturbs customers,” notes Haime Kardas.
This is because honor crime is the most extreme aspect of a host of patriarchal traditions. It goes hand in hand with customs such as forced marriages of minors to often elderly men, or unions celebrated before an imam and not at the town hall. “Here, one is first one’s husband’s wife or one’s father’s daughter,” observes Zülal Erdogan. For her, there is no doubt: “Honor murders will exist as long as women are considered second-class citizens.”
Source
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Within the European Union, discussions are taking place regarding the appropriateness of Turkey’s entry into Europe. My readers ask me to express my position on this issue.
I think this issue is analogous to that of the European Constitution, which was approved by the political classes of the various European countries but rejected when the issue was put to a referendum. I believe that if the question of welcoming Turkey into Europe were also put to a referendum, the popular response would likewise be negative.
The political classes are increasingly disconnected from the masses they are supposed to lead and administer. A reader wrote to me, “They didn’t understand the movie.” The misunderstanding is so great that in France, when the NO vote sanctioned the error of judgment made by almost all politicians and journalists, they concluded that... the French had made a mistake and, if things had turned out this way, it was “because they hadn’t been explained things well enough.” In fact, this European Constitution, like the admission of Turkey into Europe, serves the interests of wild liberalism and profit structures. If this question were put to a referendum, the answer, in my opinion negative, would be unequivocal. Turks represent a mass of workers who will accept, without complaint, social benefits much lower than those we enjoy. If the “Bolkestein directive” had been adopted, you know that any worker from country A working in country B would have been subject to the regime of their country of origin.
If Turkey enters Europe, Turks will come to work massively in France and other European countries, accepting the lowest wages. One can estimate, for example, that they will completely take over the construction sector, which cannot be “totally offshored,” except for the manufacture of prefabricated components. Thanks to this, the profits of capitalists (that is the appropriate word. Capitalists, from caput, head, are people who concentrate capital and means of production in their heads, in their hands) will see their profit rates increase, while the social conditions of employees collapse more and more.
Let us add that Turkey is a Muslim country. The Quran is a “mobile,” “blurred” message. The Arabic language allows its translation to lend itself to a whole palette of interpretations, often very far apart. If you take the Bible, which I think I know quite well, you can refer to different translations. But at no point will you come across a passage where two translations lead to diametrically opposed meanings. This is not the case for the Quran, where the word “jihad” has, according to one interpretation, the meaning of an “inner struggle,” and for others, an infinitely more violent meaning.
We live in France under a secular regime. The separation of Church and State was pronounced a long time ago and is now part of our culture. This separation makes no sense in an “Islamic republic.” Yet any state where the Muslim religion is established is liable to undergo an integrist drift (in France, we live on a powder keg). This was the case for Iran, which before the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, in terms of customs, took inspiration from its Western neighbors. Pre-Khomeini Iran had, having said that, all the flaws of Western regimes. Nevertheless, the country ended up tipping into this integralism and into the takeover of the country by a power of religious inspiration.
What is also staggering is that when Ayatollah Rafsanjani lost the elections, it was learned that, despite his apparently modest attire, he represented one of the largest fortunes in the country. This man, under his hobo-like appearances, lived with chests full of gold. It was this discovery that made him lose the elections.
This shift towards Islamism nearly occurred in the 1990s in a “socialist Algeria,” born from a war of independence ending with the departure of French colonialists. The country then fell prey to negligence and corruption. I will dedicate a file to these events, to this era called “The Years of Lead,” which resulted in 150,000 deaths from attacks and repressive actions. In Algeria, as today in Indonesia, Islamist movements attempted to establish Sharia and a Quranic regime by systematically using terror striking the population itself. Inhabitants of entire villages were slaughtered by the hundreds at a time during operations carried out by the GIA (Armed Islamic Group).
Television broadcasts show, for example, that in Istanbul, women can teach the Quran in mosques, although they are not authorized to share these places at the same time as men. Fantastic progress! I personally have no confidence in these unstable regimes (history, past and contemporary, shows how unstable these regimes where the dominant religion is Islam are).
Regarding this admission of “the Turkish brother into Europe,” what motivates European leaders, coming from bourgeois or hyper-privileged classes, is the lure of gain, plus petty politics, and nothing else. A short-sighted selfish greed or the destruction of social achievements is presented by complete fools as a race towards more modernity. I believe no one imagines what seduction the system of wild capitalism exerts on the “newcomers” within this club, in countries where some become, at astonishing speeds and scales, “new billionaires.” No one imagines the hallucinatory profits that oligarchies can reap on the backs of employees, increasingly deprived and soon miserable. On the backs of employees or in a simply speculative, economically sterile manner. Add to this the grip and monopolization of natural resources, such as oil, mines, and even agriculture in “banana republics.” There are pure and simple embezzlements of “public funds,” such as that carried out by the “Yeltsin family,” whether it concerns the significant credits allocated to the renovation of the Kremlin, embezzled through overbilling, or the outright takeover of aid from abroad (about which one says “we don’t know where the money went.” Translate: “into whose pockets”). You may know that all this allowed Putin to successively obtain two terms as President of Russia. A simple digression. In this country as elsewhere, to be elected, television must build an image for you (remember the other fool, with his black pullover, his rose, and his “quiet strength”). Yeltsin was elected in this way, playing the bon vivant on TV, dancing to the sound of balalaikas and raising his elbow here and there. He did so much that, a severe cardiac patient, his vascular system eaten away by alcohol, he nearly died during his election campaign, to the point that it ended with the broadcast of archive footage, while doctors were stuffing straw into this old bullfighting horse (authentic). The underpinnings of history sometimes have staggering sides.
The Prosecutor General of Russia, warned by his Swiss counterpart, the country through which the embezzled sums passed, undertook to campaign against this corruption affecting some one hundred thousand people. People he wanted to put in prison. He had said so loud and clear. Yeltsin’s “family” counterattacked by producing, thanks to the ex-KGB, a film showing this gentleman having sex with three prostitutes, a film widely broadcast on television. It was then that Putin entered the scene, affirming that the document was authentic. Out with the Russian Saint-Just. Long live the little blond, obscure lackey of Russian secret services, elected thanks to the occult but powerful help of the members of the “Yeltsin family,” aka the Russian mafia. But this gang had underestimated the phenomenal ambition of this little man, who skillfully exploited a deadly attack in Moscow and a rise in Chechen integralism, attempting to establish an Islamic republic in the Caucasus. Putin reacted ferociously, sending his tanks into the heart of the country and massacring indiscriminately, turning a revolt (dangerous in the long run, moreover) into an all-out war, driving the Chechens to the only possible response of the weak and the losers: terrorism. We will never know who were the authors of the deadly attack in Moscow. The idea that it was committed (or “triggered”) by the ex-KGB itself is not to be excluded. You see the parallel.
A “good war” is extremely effective in uniting a people. Putin, declaring on television: “We will eliminate the terrorists, even if we have to shoot them in the toilets (authentic),” was a hit in the polls and won easily. Yeltsin, half-dead, bloated, publicly designated him as his successor, against the secret commitment that he himself and the members of his family would not be prosecuted, particularly his daughter and son-in-law. Strange parallel between the historical evolutions of the USA and Russia. I know that Islamist integralists are not saints. But one thing is certain: on both sides, this was exploited to the fullest. Possibly giving a nudge here and there. And there are a thousand ways to do it. On both sides, the country veers towards a kind of state fascism. Putin is young. The Russian constitution does not allow him to run for a third term. But the man will do anything to keep in hand the reins of a power that has completely gone to his head. To be continued.
In Russia, the clean-up has not been done, far from it. Some businessmen, linked to the “family,” who naively believed that Putin would be “their straw man,” had to flee precipitously abroad to avoid seeing the jaws of the terrible little blond snap shut on their necks. Thus Russia is populated by “new billionaires,” while completely destitute people try to survive by living like hobos, and young people, perfectly desperate, drug themselves and prostitute themselves in the middle of Moscow’s train station, which has become the crossroads of all trafficking.
For your information, I advise you to get hold of a yachting magazine published in... Russian.
The “Bye Bye Lenin” sailing off the Côte d’Azur.
Do you know where I got this magazine, for 6 euros? At the press stand of the Aix-en-Provence TGV station, where it sits alongside other magazines of this kind. I doubt it is a magazine intended for layout artists or collectors. In these pages, you will not discover reports on exceptional units belonging to some oil king, but series models whose wiring and price will drop your jaw.
These units cruise in all seas. In the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Black Sea, the Bahamas. The sea is vast. Behind the unit above, which represents the standard of this magazine (...) are ordinary boats. Some of these sailboats, visible in the background, cost one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand euros. But this yacht, how much? For this size is by no means the exception. It is “the class of fifty meters long,” manufactured in series, sold by catalog, like at La Redoute, but on a completely different scale. One must believe there is an international clientele for these luxury vessels, a “promising market.”
As one of my readers points out to me, due to the shadows, this view may be a montage. Indeed, it is hard to see how a unit with such a deep draft could fit into a marina designed to receive such modest boats. This may be the case. Nevertheless, the scales are respected. The upper deck is indeed at the height of the fourth floor of a building.
In terms of money, one has never been taken for a ride as much as in this beginning of the third millennium. We are trying “to emerge from a global economic crisis.” But this crisis is visibly not for everyone. The fact that this magazine is published in Russian shows that in the former USSR, there are now customers for this kind of “hyper-luxury tourism.” In fact, the Earth is populating with “New Billionaires.” There are new Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Chinese billionaires. Turkey’s accession to Europe would allow a new class of “new Turkish billionaires” to emerge and develop. And our foolish journalists would dedicate a program to this new “social phenomenon.”
The emergence of this powerful class of owners goes hand in hand with the increased grip of money powers on the political class. Our democracies are nothing more than facades. You are probably wondering about the price of these sea monsters. How much is a fifty-meter yacht worth today? Well, you have to count, all taxes included, around...
Advertised in the Russian magazine, the same one. Model “Thunder B”
Yes, you read correctly. Twenty-three million five hundred thousand euros. More than fifteen billion one hundred million centimes. When I did the calculation, I thought I had made a mistake by a factor of ten. But for a billion and a half centimes, you know, nowadays, you know, you practically have nothing left. And this is not the biggest, nor the most luxurious, nor the fastest (speed of this one, propelled by its eleven thousand horsepower: more than sixty kilometers per hour!). Afterwards, they will talk to you about energy savings, oil shortages, pollution, restrictions, the hole in social security, crushing charges of this and that. In fact, since the Marxist-Leninist ideals, to which Arlette Laguiller is certainly the last to cling, have fizzled out, there is no longer any counter-ideology (except for Islamist integralism and its terrible and elusive armed arm: its suicide commandos). China is a fantastic country. A “socialist” country where, as the British newspaper “The Guardian” recently reported, the flesh of the ten thousand or so death row inmates executed each year in the country is reused to extract collagen included in “beauty products.”! You will soon see Chinese people buying toys of this kind. For, in human beings, there is no measure. After me, the deluge. In Dubai, Chinese labor brokers bring poor peasants who only speak the language of their country of origin. They are housed in groups of five hundred, on the ground, in barracks that evoke concentration camps to a striking degree. They wash in single toilets, which might almost seem luxurious compared to those of Treblinka or Auschwitz. There, it was cold. Here, it is heat. In the hot season, these people work 14 hours a day, in full sun, at temperatures that sometimes exceed 50° (see the recent report by Envoyé Spécial). The “Emiratis know nothing about it.” They subcontract everything and are only interested in figures, dividends. They remain owners of... everything, in all sectors. For each ethnic group (95% of the population of the Emirates consists of immigrant workers), their ruthless kapos. Indians exploit Indians (who are probably not of the same ethnic group or caste). In this community, there is a suicide and a death from a workplace accident per week, in the construction sector. The passports of these people are confiscated upon arrival. Deceived by unscrupulous brokers, they have sunk all their meager family wealth, which often sold its land, to reach this Eldorado carrying their last hope. Young people, unable to bear their living conditions in the country, prefer to hang themselves rather than return to their village admitting they have failed, facing a family that has pledged all its assets to send them there.
Indian slaves, Filipino slaves, Chinese slaves, slave traders of the Emirates, Qatar, and other places. All this makes one want to vomit. And all this so that “this luxury industry” may develop, which has never been in better shape. America has its J.R. Ewings; China and many other countries have high-level bandits. Yeltsin and his family (a “generic” term meaning “the Russian mafia”) were among them. By comparison, we only produce petty crooks, amateurs. A small embezzlement here, a fictitious salary, an inflated invoice, a small official residence there. One has his castle and his cerebral hemorrhage, the other his apartment in Place des Vosges.
(Incidentally, we could read in the newspapers that, recovered from his cerebral hemorrhage, President Chirac was once again “authorized to fly.”)
In this magazine, you will find quite a few fifty-meter yachts flying the English flag. The English gentry has always been well-placed in terms of income. They alone own a quarter of the apartments in central London. Not stupid, the lords or their equivalents invested their savings in real estate very early on.
What to do in the face of such aberration? One no longer knows which saint to turn to. I learned these past few days that the politician who first committed France to possessing nuclear weapons, in the 1950s, was... Pierre Mendès France, this “saint” of the French left. I was stunned.
Is there nothing left but despair, since revolt can only lead to another bloodbath? In any case, former slaves are often the wealthy and exploiters of tomorrow. Go see what has become of yesterday’s leftists.
I persist in believing that if the world is arranged this way, it is... because we want it to be. The power of these people appears to me as a house of cards, resting only on our ignorance of their turpitudes and their abuses. They maintain themselves only because we believe in their power and their... competence.
It is lies, concealment, that is the keystone of this system.
The mechanism is perverse. The Arte channel, for example, imposes itself on the viewer’s eyes as the most “courageous, uncompromising” information vector. We thus know everything about the CIA’s wars, about how the Burmese military are finishing getting rid of the Karen ethnic groups. By dazzling the viewer with “so much clarity,” it allows dark veils to be drawn over perfectly monstrous facts and to render them blind to the rest. I believe this channel holds the blue ribbon for lying with two films dedicated to the events of September 11. One, released in April 2004, is this hallucinatory program titled “September 11 Did Not Happen.” It was produced by the French side of Arte. The German journalists did not want to be outdone and released the second. In this second documentary, they went to interview the designers of the Twin Towers, who explained why they collapsed so quickly. The builder of the Twins publicly makes his mea culpa. I will have to present in my columns an analysis of these two programs, practically shot by shot. Regarding this second program, one could point out that if the Twin Towers collapsed “because of a very special construction method that made them a priori very vulnerable, without this having been anticipated,” one could ask why building number seven, located behind, which suffered no impact and was the site of a barely visible fire, collapsed in exactly the same way, whereas its construction method was totally different. All this will be shown, analyzed, and dissected technically.
The last images of this document broadcast by Arte show slow-motion images with music that is the kind played in crematoriums or in the reception rooms of funeral homes, to the sound of violins. We see the short sequence, also shown in "Painful Deception", where one of the planes hits one of the giants. Under its belly, still perfectly visible, the “pod,” the enormous container never seen attached under a passenger plane. If you don’t see it, you are blind. The sequence is actually composed of a small number of images. Seven or eight, perhaps. At the moment the plane is about to crash into the tower, we saw a very bright flash appear on the facade. The Americans of Jimmy Walter’s group showed us that this flash was present in four video documents, filming the scene from four different angles. In the sequence broadcast by Arte, this flash has simply... disappeared. One of the collaborators is currently working to be able to put online, side by side, the two sequences, the one from Arte having obviously been subject to clumsy censorship.
The world is not under tranquilizers, it is under sleeping pills. We live in the world of Matrix. Who holds the keys to this dream? Who pulls the strings of this nightmare? Will men wake up in time? We can only hope so, otherwise, atrocious dramas await us, whose unconscious authors are those same people who stroll like fools on these fifty-meter-long yachts, which other fools build for them while rubbing their hands together.
I dream that this world of lies is like a set of dominoes. If this is the case, the first one is called
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