In Turkey yesterday, an ethnic Armenian journalist was gunned down, apparently by a teenager, outside his office in Istanbul. Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was considered a traitor by many in Turkey for daring to call the killing of Armenians by the Turks from 1915 to 1917 a “genocide”. He had faced trial several times for `violating laws against insulting the Turkish state and Turkish identity by referring to ethnic purity and genocide’.
No doubt this ugly incident will be used as further ammunition by those who would oppose Turkey’s accession to the EU for human rights reasons. Certainly, Turkey has an atrocious human rights record. No country whose body of law includes the following:
1) A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.
2) A person who publicly denigrates the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security organizations shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.
could possibly be called `progressive’, `democratic’ or – if you are inclined to use the word – `civilised’. Indeed, Hrant Dink had himself been tried and convicted under the above law (Article 301), serving a six month sentence.
Another high-profile case of civil rights abuse in Turkey is that of Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist (and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006) who faced trial in 2005 for the crime of “insulting Turkishness”. The charges were dropped after an international outcry, but similar cases continue today.
In 1991, Leyla Zana, a Kurdish-Turkish politician, dared to speak Kurdish in the Turkish Parliament. At her inauguration, she took the oath of loyalty in Turkish, as required, and then added in Kurdish:
“I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish peoples may live together in a democratic framework.”
The nationalists were outraged, but she was protected by parliamentary immunity for three years, until she joined the Democracy Party in 1994. The party was then banned by the authorities and she was charged with and put on trial for treason, later reduced to membership in the illegal Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). She was convicted in what Amnesty International called a “flagrantly unfair trial” based on testimonies from “witnesses who themselves faced prosecution or who later retracted their statements, which they said were extracted under torture”. She was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, and was only released in 2004.
According to Amnesty International, “[t]orture and ill-treatment by law enforcement officials continued to be reported” in 2006, with “detainees allegedly being beaten; stripped naked and threatened with death; deprived of food, water and sleep during detention; and beaten during arrest or in places of unofficial detention.”
There can be no real dispute, then, about the state of Turkey’s human rights record. However, to attempt to deny Turkey membership in the EU on this basis is hypocritical in the extreme. Turkey’s use of torture has, for example, been a major stumbling block in its application. But only yesterday, British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett admitted the UK had knowledge of the United States’ global network of secret CIA “black sites” prior to President Bush’s official acknowledgement of their existence last September. According to Amnesty International, “[r]enditions involve multiple layers of human rights violations”:
“Most victims of rendition were arrested and detained illegally in the first place: some were abducted; others were denied access to any legal process, including the ability to challenge the decision to transfer them because of the risk of torture. There is also a close link between renditions and enforced disappearances. Many of those who have been illegally detained in one country and illegally transported to another have subsequently “disappeared”, including dozens who have “disappeared” in US custody. Every one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has described incidents of torture and other ill-treatment.”
Amnesty reports that “[t]here is little doubt that transfers are intended to facilitate…abusive interrogation”, and quotes the former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Centre, Vincent Cannistraro, who described the “interrogation” of one detainee who was “renditioned” to Egypt:
“They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things”.
The UK government actively hindered attempts by MPs and activists to gain information about the rendition flights and Britain’s role in them, cooperated (.pdf) in the CIA abduction of two British citizens by providing false intelligence about them and permitted American planes used for rendition to refuel at British airports. In December 2006, a draft European Parliament report “deplore[d] the way the British government…cooperated” with investigations into European collusion with rendition.
In other words, Britain is complicit in torture. Yet, strangely, there are no calls to expel the UK from the EU. In 2005, according to Amnesty International, the British government,
“continued to erode fundamental human rights, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, including by persisting with attempts to undermine the ban on torture at home and abroad, and by enacting and seeking to enact legislation inconsistent with domestic and international human rights law…Measures purporting to counter terrorism led to serious human rights violations, and concern was widespread about the impact of these measures on Muslims and other minority communities.”
In the same year, a court in Germany – another EU member – ruled that “evidence that could have been extracted under torture or ill-treatment was admissible in legal proceedings”, in “breach of the absolute ban on torture under international human rights law”. Also in 2005, Italy expelled more than 1,425 migrants to Libya, in “defiance of international refugee law”, whilst failing once again to make torture a specific crime within its penal code.
Many EU members, including Britain and France (which has its own unflattering history of torture), are guilty of human rights abuses committed in 1999, when NATO launched an illegal war on Serbia. According to Amnesty International (.pdf), NATO forces “failed to take necessary precautions to minimise civilian casualties”, committed “serious violations of the laws of war leading…to the unlawful killing of civilians” and, in the case of the bombing of Radio Television of Serbia network headquarters in Belgrade (which killed 16 civilians), perpetrated a “war crime”.
In 2003, many EU members participated in the illegal invasion of Iraq, including the UK, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Poland, Holland, Denmark, Bulgaria, Estonia, Romania and Slovakia. They are all complicit in numerous violations of human rights, for example the criminal assault on Fallujah, and are all guilty of waging a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime”.
And so on and so on. In the light of the above, can anyone seriously maintain that Turkey is not “civilised” enough to join the EU? The fact that many people do illustrates an important point: most people still view the EU (and the West generally) as somehow more “civilised”, “democratic” and “virtuous” than the rest of the world. Many in Western Europe share an underlying assumption that, fundamentally, countries like Britain, France, Spain and Germany are benign. The result of this deluded self-image is that when the governments of these countries try to persuade their people to support a war by citing “humanitarian” or “security” reasons (as with the wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, in the case of Britain and Spain, Iraq), the public is pre-disposed to believe them. The consequences of this can be counted in bodies.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander