Turks Haters: Read and Leran: Norman Stone Defends Turkey Against Harold Pinter



http://www.ataa.org/ataa/ref/pkk/news/norman.html



PKK & TERRORISM

Norman Stone Defends Turkey Against Harold Pinter
March 9, 1999


[Selected excerpts] "So far the tenor of British comment on matters
Kurdish and Turkish has been a statesmanlike, 'Yes, Ocalan is a
terrorist, he kills children' and so forth; 'but on the other hand ...
' That fatal British 'on the other hand', which you know is going to
offer you a poison pill. Harold Pinter tells us that the Kurds are
oppressed. They do not have the right to use their own language ...
There has even been 'ethnic cleansing claims' Le Monde in an
editorial... The Turks are getting quite angry with this sort of
thing. Ocalan is a very nasty piece of work and the PKK, far from
being a movement for national liberation, is actually a Maoist affair,
rather similar to Sendero Luminoso. Its specialties included drug-
running ... and it massacred entire families, tiny children and all,
in order to intimidate the many Kurds who took the side of the Turkish
state.

.... Yet we are told by the Pinters that the Kurds are a people
fighting Braveheart-fashion for their freedom ...

Two points need to be made. First, two- thirds of the Kurds now live
in western and central Anatolia and they do not vote for the political
party, HADEP, which claims to speak for Kurds ... [Second,] The Kurds
are not Kosovo. Leaving aside the legal argument, that Kosovo is a
constitutional entity, there has been almost no intermarriage between
Serbs and Albanians, whereas intermarriage between Turks and Kurds
(though not, for some reason, between Kurds and Arabs) is frequent.
Ocalan himself was saying after his capture that his mother was a
Turk. Besides, there is an all- important question: Kosovo speaks
Albanian, but in 'Kurdistan' there are several languages, which are
not mutually intelligible. This is why 'Kurdish culture' is a concept
very difficult to translate into reality.

The word from Mr. Pinter is that Kurdish culture is suppressed, that
in the end Ocalan stands for something worthier than himself. But just
look at the demonstrators. They read a Turkish newspaper, called "Free
Agenda." Interviewed on CNN from Germany, they speak Turkish. Their
own foreign-based television station uses mainly Turkish, and, where
not, Iranian or Arabic. British viewers might be slightly puzzled to
see the demonstrators, in their trainers, doing that rum line- dance:
It is an Anatolian and Balkan one, and yet it is now supposed to
represent Kurdish culture. So is the funny Geronimo ululation that
they stage. Have you seen the fat ladies with beaded head-coverings
going on hunger strike? You can bet that, cameras removed, they light
up: I have not heard of a single one carrying on the hunger strike for
more than a few hours. Kurds do not have a unified culture: they are
pre-national. One authority claims that there are 28 different
languages masquerading as a unified Kurdish tongue. If a Kurdistan
were created, the main language, North Kirmanci, would have to be
imposed by force..."

(Norman Stone, "Midnight Excess: Norman Stone Defends Turkey Against
Harold Pinter (and Many others)," The Spectator, 27 February-6 March
1999)

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