Events in Georgia are a historical moment for the whole world, especially for Azerbaijan, said chief executive of the American Jewish Community David Harris by results of his visit to Azerbaijan.
He said Azerbaijan has now a chance to show the US how it can help its friends in critical moments. (more…)
Few Americans know about Azerbaijan’s role in the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and in combat with international terror, said chief executive of the American Jewish Committee David Harris.
He said that people in America do not know that Azerbaijan is an island of tolerance, maintaining good cooperation with Israel. (more…)
Turkey is more and more often lending expertise and instruction in combating illegal drug trafficking, sharing with other nations what it has learned in the course of its successful campaign against such illegal activities.
The Turkish Police Academy for Combating International Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime (TADOC) has provided courses to nearly 2,000 people from 58 countries on how to tackle drug-related crime.
A TADOC report says they trained 270 police from 26 countries in 2004; 280 police from 23 countries in 2005; and 446 police from 32 countries in 2007. In addition, over 400 foreign police officers attended TADOC training courses in the first half of 2008. Police officers who are trained in Turkey in turn go on to become trainers for officers in their countries.
TADOC courses have trained 121 Kosovars, 56 Afghans, 23 Azerbaijanis and many others, including participants from Germany, China, Guinea, Holland, Pakistan, Mongolia, Malta, Syria and Sudan.
Police departments from Asia, Africa, Europe and America send participants to TADOC courses, which are supported by the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) and other economic cooperation organizations. Upon Turkey’s success in tackling drug dealers of the Golden Triangle — centered in Afghanistan and where the largest amount and highest quality opium is produced and distributed — the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and NATO requested that Turkey organize another training program in 2008.
Turkey also organized four training programs for Afghan officers in cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in order to strengthen the capabilities of official Afghan bodies in combating drug trafficking. Later, Pakistani police officers were also trained in the programs. Police officers from another key part of the Golden Triangle, Tajikistan, have also received training in Turkey.
Courses on HIV/AIDS and officer exchanges
TADOC also organizes courses on HIV/AIDS, training representatives from Balkan countries such as Romania, Serbia and Macedonia.
In a capacity-building program in the western Balkans and Mediterranean region through the targeted drug law enforcement exchange (Lex-Pro), which was organized under the leadership of UNODC, police officers from countries like France, Belgium, Holland and Egypt came to Turkey for training programs. TADOC officers also traveled to those countries to take courses on drug trafficking.
In a recent report released by the Turkish Security General Directorate, Turkey was listed as the second most successful country, after China, in exposing illegal drug trade. Last year alone, the total volume of illegal drugs seized in Turkey exceeded the volume seized in all European countries.
The report states that in 444 operations conducted in 2007, 4,842 drug smugglers were caught while 2,067 kilograms of marijuana, 63 kilograms of heroin, 141 kilograms of opium, 11 kilograms of cocaine, 3,444 Captagon pills and 627,591 Ecstasy pills were found. The report also showed that the number of drug smugglers increased by 48 percent compared to statistics from 2006.
16 August 2008, Saturday
ERCAN YAVUZ ANKARA
Source: Today’s Zaman, 16 August 2008
By Emrullah Uslu
Friday, August 15, 2008
Two important political events have deeply influenced General Basbug’s political outlook. The first occurred from September 5 to 7, 1955, when a rumor that Ataturk’s home had been bombed in Greece led to violent demonstrations, which later tuned into a campaign against Turkish citizens of Greek and Armenian origin and their shops in Istanbul. After three days of chaos, one Turkish Armenian and 16 Turkish Greek citizens had been killed; and thousands of Turkish citizens of Greek origin, including Basbug’s neighbors in Kuzguncuk, were forced to flee from Turkey (Tempo, May 8).
The second event was the 1960 military coup. The events of 1960s left graduates of the Turkish Military Academy, including Basbug, unsympathetic toward military coups (Tempo, May 8). Perhaps because of the traumatic events of the 1960s, Basbug adopted a “survival-strategy” within the military bureaucracy, but this has by no means made him a naïve commander. He is very outspoken about the developments in northern Iraq and particularly the problem of Kirkuk. In June 2004 Basbug told reporters that “political attempts to change the demographics of Kirkuk in favor of one ethnic group [Kurds] have been continuing.” Such attempts to alter Kirkuk’s demographics would endanger the unity of Iraq and create a serious security problem for Turkey (www.tsk.mil.tr, July 8, 2004). The following November, General Basbug stated, “If the Kurds control the oil fields, it would lead to a civil war in Iraq.” In his inaugural speech as Commander of the Land Forces on August 25, 2006, Basbug hardened his tone: “given the fact that some states [the United States] and groups [the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq] do not take effective measures against the PKK terror before finding a solution for the Kirkuk problem, we should develop strategies to force them” to do so (www.tsk.mil.tr, August 25, 2006). Basbug thinks that the developments in northern Iraq, including the Kirkuk problem, are more dangerous for Turkey’s security than the PKK threat (Hurriyet, September 27, 2007).
Another issue that Basbug is passionate about is Cyprus. In 2007 he said, “I was a junior officer when the events of 1963-1964 and 1967 were taking place in Cyprus. I was a captain at the operation center in Ankara during the Turkish military’s Cyprus operation in 1974. We consider the Cyprus problem a national problem. Our goal is to maintain the development of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), its sovereignty, and its peoples’ prosperity” (Sabah January 23, 2007). Political efforts have increased on both sides of the island to find a solution (www.bianet.org, May 13), but an eventual agreement might not be to Basbug’s liking.
Basbug is now in a firm position to maintain the durability of the nation-state. He thinks that “without maintaining the structure of nation-state, it is not possible to maintain the unity of the state (www.tsk.mil.tr. August 25, 2006). Like his predecessors, Basbug also believes that the Turkish nation-state has two challenges. The first is the Kurdish question. On this issue, Basbug, like the rest of the security establishment, is deeply committed to eradicating the PKK through any means possible, including harsh military repression (Sabah, October 5, 2007). Unlike many of his colleagues, however, he is realistic enough to acknowledge the social and economic aspects of the problem and engage in criticism toward former policies that “failed to prevent people from joining the PKK” (Sabah, October 5, 2007). Basbug is, however, by no means sympathetic to the idea of providing political rights to the Kurds (Milliyet, October 28, 2006).
Basbug’s thinks that the second challenge to the foundations of the nation-state is Islamic reactionarism, irtica. In an opening address at a ceremony of the Turkish Military Academy in 2006, Basbug made the irtica debate public, stating that there was a threat of irtica against the state. Since then, Basbug has been the foremost advocate of this view.
With regard to irtica, domestic developments are against Basbug’s position. An overwhelming majority of Turks are sympathetic toward moderate Islamic government and social networks and do not consider the networks a threat to the state. In that area, Basbug has no public support. Basbug, who has a Western orientation, recently found himself in a political environment led by neo-nationalist movements unsympathetic to the West. Under the influence of these movements, Basbug went so far as to suggest that Turkey needed a “local bourgeoisie” that subscribed to protecting and maintaining the Turkish revolution (Milliyet, December 1, 2006)
Political circumstances and international developments are not on Basbug’s side. If he insists on an isolationist political perspective and tries to use his power to replace the new middle class political figures with neo-nationalist politicians, he is likely to face political confrontation at best or political chaos at worst.
From: Arch Getty <[email protected]>
Subject: separate and unequal
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008
Things look very different from here in Moscow,
almost as if one is observing things from another planet.
The other night I watched a story on Russia
Today, a semi-official Russian news channel. It
showed CNN footage purporting to come from the
apparent Russian “capture” of the Georgian town
of Gori. Actually, the film was (unattributed)
Russia Today footage of damage from the Georgian
attack days ago on Tskhinvali, the So. Ossetian capital.
But even aside from the difficulty of getting
anything resembling accurate news here, the
Russian point of view is, predictably, vastly
different from the knee-jerk Russophobia in the
U.S. press. And to many of us here, the Russian
point of view is at least as compelling as the
mainstream U.S. attitudes we hear about.
Russians have always been sensitive to western
views of them and are particularly alert for
attitudes that smack of inequality and
hypocrisy. The vast majority of people here are
amazed, sad, and confused at the way the western
media has transformed the Georgian side, which
started the war, into the victims. When Prime
Minister Putin decried the west’s cynical
“turning black into white” he spoke for large numbers of Russians.
People here were amazed and insulted when
President Bush bragged about his “stern” warnings
to Putin. Like Putin, they cannot imagine a
reason to pay any attention to such a person,
whose paternalistic but helpless schoolmarm
lectures are considered here to be “not serious.”
Russians wonder how, before Russian intervention,
something more than a thousand deaths including
the destruction of villages and shooting of
civilians by the Georgians escape western notice.
They wonder why Georgian attempts to suppress the
Ossetian alphabet were not cultural genocide and
Russian defense against Georgian attack is.
They wonder how prying Kossovo away from Serbia
was popular self-determination but So. Ossetian
independence from Georgia is not.
They wonder how President Bush, who for the sake
of regime change invaded Iraq far from his
shores, nevertheless managed to denounce Russian
use of force and complain that the days of regime change had passed.
They wonder why, in 1942 when attacked by Japan,
the U.S. did not follow its own advice about a
“measured response” and stop her counterattack on
Japan at Pearl Harbor. “Were the Japanese the
victims then, just like the Georgians?”
They wonder why, as one puzzled but sincere
friend put it, “you Americans hate us so much when we do what you do.”
But mostly they wonder why US leaders cannot come
up with a more sophisticated world view for the
21st century than surrounding Russia (which after
all has nuclear weapons and much of the world’s
oil) with verbal abuse, hostile alliances and
provocations. They don’t understand why US
leaders cannot see beyond or outgrow the cold
war. Another asked, “So Cheney and Rice, they
aren’t your most advanced global thinkers, right?”
J. Arch Getty
Moscow
[Professor of History, UCLA]
Johnson’s Russia List
2008-#150
15 August 2008
Washington Post
By Michael Dobbs ([email protected])
Michael Dobbs covered the collapse of the Soviet
Union for the Washington Post. His latest book is
“One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and
Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.”
It did not take long for the “Putin is Hitler”
analogies to start, following the eruption of the
ugly little war between Russia and Georgia over
the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia.
A neo-conservative commentator, Robert Kagan,
compared the Russian attack on Georgia with the
Nazi grab of the Sudetenland in 1938. President
Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the Russian leader
was following a course “that is horrifyingly
similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s.”
Others invoked the infamous Brezhnev doctrine of
limited sovereignty, under which Soviet leaders
claimed the right to intervene militarily in
Eastern Europe, in order to prop up their
crumbling imperium. “We’ve seen this movie before
in Prague and Budapest,” said presumptive
Republican nominee John McCain, referring to the
Soviet invasions of Czecholovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.
Actually, the events of the past week in Georgia
have little in common either with Hitler’s
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia on the eve of
World War II or Soviet policies in Eastern
Europe. They are better understood against the
background of the complicated ethnic politics of
the Caucasus, a part of the world where
historical grudges run deep, and the oppressed
can become oppressors in the bat of an eye.
Unlike most of the armchair generals now posing
as experts on the Caucasus, I have actually
visited Tskhinvali, a sleepy provincial town in
the shadow of the mountains that rise up along
Russia’s southern border. I was there in March
1991, shortly after the city was occupied by
Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of
Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia’s
first acts as Georgian president was to cancel
the political autonomy that had been granted to
the republic’s 90,000-strong Ossetian minority
under the Stalinist constitution.
After negotiating safe passage with Soviet
interior ministry troops who had stationed
themselves between the Georgians and the
Ossetians, I discovered the town had been
ransacked by Gamsakhurdia’s militia. The
Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national
theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian
poet, and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who
fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The
Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on
Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents
of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.
It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians
viewed Georgians much the same way Georgians view
Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking
away their independence. “We are much more
worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian
imperialism,” an Ossetian leader, Gerasim
Khugaev, told me. “It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time.”
When it comes to apportioning blame for the
latest flareup in the Caucasus, there is plenty
to go around. The Russians were clearly itching
for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian
president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic
and provocative. The United States may have
stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to
believe he enjoyed American protection, when the
West’s ability to impose its will in this part of
the world is actually quite limited.
Let us examine the role played by the three main parties one by one.
Georgia. Saakashvili’s image in the West, and
particularly in America, is that of the great
“democrat,” the leader of the “Rose revolution”
who spearheaded a popular uprising against former
American favorite Eduard Shevardnadze in November
2003. It is true that he has won two, reasonably
free, elections, but he has also displayed some
autocratic tendencies; he sent riot police to
crush an opposition protest in Tbilisi last
November and shuttered an opposition television station.
While the U.S. views Saakashvili as a pro-Western
modernizer, a large part of his political appeal
in Georgia has stemmed from his promise to
re-unify Georgia by bringing the secessionist
provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under
central control. He has presented himself as the
successor to the medieval Georgian king, David
the Builder, and promised that the country will
regain its lost territories by the time he leaves
office, by one means or another. American
commentators tend to overlook the fact that
Georgian democracy is inextricably intertwined with Georgian nationalism.
The restoration of Georgia’s traditional borders
is an understandable goal for a Georgian leader,
but is a much lower priority for the West,
particularly if it involves armed conflict with
Russia. Based on their previous experience with
Georgian rule, Ossetians and Abhazians have
perfectly valid reasons to be opposed to
reunification with Georgia, even if it means
throwing in their lot with the Russians.
It is unclear how the simmering tensions between
Georgia and South Ossetia came to the boil last
week. The Georgians say they were provoked by the
shelling of Georgian villages from
Ossetian-controlled territory. While this may be
well be the case, the Georgian response was
disproportionate. On the night of Aug. 7-8,
Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against
Tskhinvali, and sent an armored column to occupy
the town. He apparently hoped that Western
support would protect Georgia from major Russian
retaliation, even though Russian “peacekeepers”
were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault.
It was a huge miscalculation. Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin (and let there be no
doubt that he is calling the shots in Moscow
despite handing over the presidency to his
protege, Dmitri Medvedev) now had the ideal
pretext for settling scores with the uppity
Georgians. Rather than simply restoring the
status quo ante, Russian troops moved into
Georgia proper, cutting the main east-west
highway at Gori and attacking various military bases.
Saakashvili’s decision to gamble everything on a
lightning grab for Tskhinvali brings to mind the
comment of the 19th century French statesman
Maurice de Talleyrand: “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”
Russia. Putin and Medvedev have defended their
incursion into Georgia as motivated by a desire
to stop the “genocide” of Ossetians by Georgians.
It is difficult to take their moral outrage very
seriously. There is a striking contrast between
Russian support for the right of Ossetian
self-determination in Georgia and the brutal
suppression of Chechens who were trying to
exercise that very same right within the boundaries of Russia.
Playing one ethnic group off against another in
the Caucasus has been standard Russian policy
ever since tzarist times. It is the ideal wedge
issue for the Kremlin, particularly in the case
of a state like Georgia, which is made up of
several different nationalities. It would be
virtually impossible for South Ossetia to survive
as an autonomous entity without Russian support.
Over the last few months, Putin’s government has
issued passports to Ossetians and secured the
appointment of Russians to key positions in Tskhinvali.
The Russian incursion into Georgia proper has
been even more “disproportionate” — in
President’s Bush phrase — than the Georgian
assault on Tskhinvali. The Russians have made no
secret of their wish to replace Saakashvili with
a more compliant leader. Targets for Russian
shelling included the Black Sea port of Poti —
more than 100 miles from South Ossetia.
The real goal of Kremlin strategy is to reassert
Russian influence in a part of the world that has
been regarded, by tzars and commissars alike, as
Russia’s backyard. Russian leaders bitterly
resented the eastward expansion of NATO to
include Poland and the Baltic states — with
Ukraine and Georgia next on the list — but were
unable to do very much about it as long as
America was strong and Russia was weak. Now the
tables are turning for the first time since the
collapse of Communism in 1991, and Putin is seizing the moment.
If Putin is smart, he will refrain from occupying
Georgia proper, a step that would further alarm
the West and unite Georgians against Russia. A
better tactic would be to wait for Georgians
themselves to turn against Saakashvili. The
precedent here is what happened to Gamsakhurdia,
who was overthrown by the same militia forces he
had sent into to South Ossetia a year later, in January 1992.
The United States. The Bush administration has
been sending mixed messages to its Georgian
clients. U.S. officials insist that they did not
give the green light to Saakashvili for his
attack on South Ossetia. At the same time,
however, the U.S. has championed NATO membership
for Georgia, sent military advisers to bolster
the Georgian army, and demanded the restoration
of Georgian territorial integrity. American
support might well have emboldened Saakashvili as
he was considering how to respond to the “provocations” from South Ossetia.
Now the United States has ended up in a situation
in the Caucasus where the Georgian tail is
wagging the NATO dog. We were unable to control
Saakashvili or to lend him effective assistance
when his country was invaded. One lesson is that
we need to be very careful in extending NATO
membership, or even the promise of membership, to
countries we have neither the will nor the ability to defend.
In the meantime, American leaders have paid
little attention to Russian diplomatic concerns,
both inside the former borders of the Soviet
Union and farther abroad. The Bush administration
unilaterally abrogated the 1972 anti-missile
defense treaty and ignored Putin when he objected
to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it
would set a dangerous precedent. It is difficult
to explain why Kosovo should have the right to
unilaterally declare its independence from
Serbia, while the same right should be denied to
places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The bottom line is that the United States is
overextended militarily, diplomatically, and
economically. Even hawks like Vice President
Cheney, who have been vociferously denouncing
Putin’s actions in Georgia, have no stomach for a
military conflict with Moscow. The United States
is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and needs
Russian support in the coming trial of strength
with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.
Instead of speaking softly and wielding a big
stick, as Teddy Roosevelt recommended, the
American policeman has been loudly lecturing the
rest of the world while waving an increasingly
unimpressive baton. The events of the past few
days serve as a reminder that our ideological
ambitions have greatly exceeded our military
reach, particularly in areas like the Caucasus,
which is of only peripheral importance to the
United States but is of vital interest to Russia.