Kurds In Syria, And The EU

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The news is all about how Turkey is attacking the Kurds in Syria. It is probably true because the Kurdish independence movement in Turkey is a banned terrorist organisation. It’s banned because the Kurds would like to hive off a part of Turkey and Syria and declare it their homeland and a new state.

But the news is missing something. Turkey has been complaining for months that the EU is not paying the contribution it promised Turkey for playing host to the Syrian refugees in Turkey – currently about 3.6 million of them. So Turkey has invaded Syria to create a safe zone it can tip the refugees into, and to be able to turn to the world and tell them it’s their problem.

Turkey is trying to solve two problems at once – remove the refugees and under the guise of that to neutralise the Kurds.

The news also missed that Greece has been complaining to the EU about the same thing – that the EU is not paying what it promised for the upkeep of the refugees.

There is a question also as to whether some or perhaps most of the refugees are in fact economic migrants who see the opportunity to create a better life in Europe. It’s clear that the refugees or economic migrants, if that is what they are, do not want to stay in Turkey: They want to come to Europe.

The whole reason that the EU agreed to pay towards the upkeep in the first place was because Turkey threatened to open its northern borders and just let the refugees/migrants through if the EU didn’t see it as an international problem.

Another snippet of news is that EU representatives were in Turkey last week trying to hammer something out. They were also in Greece because Greece has the same refugee problem on a smaller scale. There were riots on the island of Lesbos last week. Greece’s refugee problem won’t be on a smaller scale if Turkey opens its borders.

The next step along the way from Turkey to Europe is via Greece. Then it is a short hop across the Aegean to Italy, or a long walk via Bulgaria, Romania, and then to Hungary. But Hungary with its hard Right Government bent on repulsing the refugees / economic migrants, means that Italy is the soft spot on the route north.

Is the EU paying its share

In 2016 the EU struck a deal with Turkey under which the EU could start sending illegal immigrants back to Turkey and Turkey would play host to those immigrants / economic migrants / refugees sent back and to the ones that were within its borders. In return, the EU would look at relaxing visa requirements for Turkish citizens wanting to get into Europe; would speed up negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership. and it would pay for the upkeep of the immigrants / economic migrants / refugees in Turkey.

Amnesty UK tweeted then that it was ‘a dark day for the refugee convention, a dark day for Europe and a dark day for humanity.’

Three years down the line and the EU complains that Turkey has not implemented the EU’s requirements on human rights upon which the negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership depended.

Turkey, for its part, complains that the EU has not paid what it owes.

Would Turkey ever be allowed into the EU? I seem to recall that one of the arguments for Britain withdrawing from the EU was that ‘hordes’ of Turks would ‘invade’ Europe. Is the immigrant / economic migrant / refugee deal just a stop gap, a way of kicking the can down the road while other means of stopping them are developed?

What are those other means? To make their home countries safe again? How is that working out?

So where are we?

Turkey wants rid of Kurdish statehood ambitions, but it also wants rid of its 3.6 million Syrian refugees / asylum seekers / economic migrants / (choose your epithet according to your understanding) – and the EU hasn’t (according to Turkey) been paying what it promised under the 2016 agreement whereby Turkey would host the Syrian refugees rather than allow them onwards into Europe.

Under that 2016 agreement, Turkey would even take in those who has already made it to the EU and which the EU could now send back to Turkey.

The EU was also supposed to fast-track Turkey’s accession to the EU and meanwhile relax visa requirements for Turks. Turkey’s human rights record is going the ‘wrong’ way, so the EU is upset (and is secretly happy to continue to be upset because many EU countries would veto Turkey’s accession under any scenario).

So this way, Turkey sets up a buffer zone in northern Syria and will send the Syrian refugees there and under the guise of that it will ‘alleviate’ its Kurdish independence problem. It’s a messy world, and the EU will get its way without having to pay any more to Syria.

Where Is The Kurds Homeland

Kurdistan is a high plateau and mountainous region covering a large part of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran and smaller areas in the north of Syria and Armenia.

Iran recognises the province of Kurdistan within its country’s borders and Iraq recognises the Kurdish autonomous region within its country’s borders. No one recognises Kurdistan as an independent country.

map of Kurdistan showing how it covers a large part of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran and smaller areas in the north of Syria and Armenia.

The Peasants’ Revolt 1371 – Contemporary Records

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The following is an extract from a contemporary record of events leading to the Peasants’ Revolt, as described in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 edited by RB (Barrie) Dobson.

Then the bishop of Lincoln sent notice throughout his whole diocese giving general power to all priests, both regulars and seculars, to hear confessions and give absolution with full episcopal authority to all persons, except only in case of debt.

In such a case, the debtor was to pay the debt, if he were able, while he lived, or others were to be appointed to do so from his goods after his death.

In the same way the Pope gave plenary remission of all sins (once only) to all receiving absolution at the point of death, and granted that this power should last until Easter next following, and that every one might choose his own confessor at will. 

In the following autumn a reaper was not to be had for less than 8d, with his food, a mower for less than 12d, with food.

Therefore many crops rotted in the fields for lack of men to gather them. But in the year of the pestilence, as has been said above of other things, there was so great an abundance of all kinds of corn that virtually no one cared for it. 

My Thoughts On Reading The Above

What gets me is the reference to “give absolution with full episcopal authority to all persons, except only in case of debt”. What singles out debt that it cannot be absolved? And why the sticking point at the giving of absolution but “once only”. What is sacred about receiving one absolution only?

The Reluctant Gunslinger

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Oh pity the reluctant gunslinger, for he must fight another fight.

I call it gunslinger syndrome, the man who was a gunslinger and then saw the light and gave it up. Now he just wants to live like a normal person. But he is not a normal person; he is fast on the draw. So when the citizens need help, he is forced against his will to return to the thing he does best, and shoot down the oppressor for the sake of the citizens.

Except that while all of it can be true – from the point of view of us, the viewing audience – we want to see the fight. If there is no fight, we will feel robbed of our spectacle. There can be many other resolutions, but we want ‘our’ resolution. We want to see our man do his thing. We are the spectators and the gunfight is the Roman arena.

Our appetite for that finale is so strong that we want to see it again and again. Screenwriters have to invent whole scenarios that will make it credible and needed for that final gunfight to happen.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be guns. Japanese sword fights, boxing, martial arts, they can all work. But for a crescendo, a gunfight is hard to beat. There is space around the protagonists so that we can see the denouement and the reluctant gunslinger with perfect clarity.

James Coburn in Waterhole No. 3 violated the rule of the gunfight. Early on in the film he is called out to fight some nameless gunslinger. Coburn goes out to face the man standing way down Main Street. He is required by the law of gunfights to walk down the street to within revolver distance, and face off against his opponent.

Instead, he walks around behind his horse; pulls his rifle out of its scabbard, and uses the horse’s back as a support to shoot the other man down. What a dastardly deed! I forget what exact comment Coburn made, but it was to the effect that only a fool would stand within a few yards of another in the hope of being first on the draw.

The film Shane is the paradigm of the tale of the retired gunslinger blighted by his past. The rancher’s young son wants to be him; the rancher looks at his own life and wants the magic of being the gunslinger; and the rancher’s wife looks at Shane and wants him.

The gunslinger that Shane must face is dressed in black. He is needlessly cruel, and he is complacent in his triumph. How happy we will be when he is gunned down. How unhappy we would be if the gunfight were never to take place.

Train Your Populace

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The book, Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, is full of first-hand accounts by way of diary notes, reports, articles, and reported conversations of ordinary travellers in Germany in the 1930s.

The author describes how the NSDAP used every trick on the propaganda book to blind foreign visitors to what was going on and to get the populace on board. The Party used torchlight processions, mass parades, control of the media, etc. backed up by the essential fascist tool of violence as a first resort.

Violence and antisemitism were hidden from visitors and thrust in the face of the populace. As an example, during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, antisemitic posters and signs were taken down, and then put up again after the games had finished.

Yet looking back, I cannot help but think that many people look for any excuse to behave badly. Just give them a justification. Just give them an idea onto which they can latch. Give them reason why an idea is more important than a life.

That was then. What I see now is that people are being whipped up with new tools in the propaganda armoury.

Observers say that the danger of social media and online news commenting is that the commenters can be annonymous.

That is not the danger of social media; it is the beauty of it.

People’s anger is being whipped up. They are being taught, trained, to see things as though the differences between them and those who think otherwise are separated by an unbridgeable divide.

They are being taught, trained, that there is no space in between for compromise, for unity, for community, for talking, for getting together.

The reason they are being trained is so that they become trainable.

So I was reading the book this morning, and then I read the news. I read that last night, Mark Field MP, Minister of State for Asia and the Pacific, MP for Cities of London & Westminster, attacked a climate protester who gatecrashed a dinner where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, was speaking.

The BBC have a nice video of what happened, so there is no saying it was anything other than what it was. The MP attacked the protester, and it is clear that he did so because he thought it was OK to do so.

The protester was a woman, so he didn’t have to worry that a burly protester would floor him.

Field later apologised for ‘grabbing’ her (he didn’t grab her; he attacked her), and then made his situation worse by his patently untrue claim that he was worried the protester may have been armed.

What made his ‘instinctive grab’, his attack, on the woman seem to him to be OK and the thing to do?

I think one can make a good case for saying that thirty years ago, a little voice in his head would have restrained him. Not today. No one is immune from being trained, much less the people in the thick of it.