Author: Aylin D. Miller

  • Ergenekon agent spent time in northern New Jersey prior to 9/11

    Ergenekon agent spent time in northern New Jersey prior to 9/11

    By Wayne Madsen
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    Dec 10, 2008, 00:22

    (WMR) — Tuncay Guney, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) agent who was a key player in the right-wing “Deep State” Ergenekon movement that attempted to overthrow the Turkish government, spent time in North Jersey in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, according to a reliable source who spoke to WMR.

    Guney now claims to be a rabbi but his status as a rabbi has been rejected as a falsehood by Turkey’s Jewish community leaders. Guney is listed as a rabbi at Jacob House (“B’nai Yakov”) Jewish Community Center in Toronto but the Toronto Board of Rabbis and the Turkish Jewish Congregation have no records of a Rabbi Tuncay Guney or “Daniel Levi,” an alias used by Guney. It is believed that “Jacob House” is a front for intelligence operations and not an actual synagogue. Jacob House shares an address with the New York Institute, which also maintains an address in New Jersey.

    Guney was arrested by Istanbul’s Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime Department on March 8, 2001, after a police search of his home turned up two guns, fake license plates, a number of Turkish identity cards, over a hundred fake diplomas, and other Ergenekon evidence. The head of the Istanbul police unit, Adil Serdar Saçan, suspected Guney was a key player in Ergenekon. However, Sacan was, himself, later arrested and charged with being a member of Ergenekon. However, WMR has learned from its Turkish sources that Sacan is honest and was set up in an attempt to tarnish his image after he discovered an Israeli connection to the powerful Ergenekon movement.

    As a member of the Turkish police JITEM unit, Guney reportedly spied, under cover as a journalist, on Iraqi Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Talabani is now the President of Iraq.

    After Guney’s release on bail on March 9, 2001, Şenkal Atasagun, MIT’s undersecretary, asked the CIA to exfiltrate Guney to the United States. Guney was flown on Turkish Airlines to New York. Guney eventually ended up, according to our sources, living in North Jersey and making a living pumping gas.

    Guney lived in the “973” area code zone, an area that encompasses East Rutherford and Fairlawn, towns that were centers of activity for Israeli Mossad Urban Moving System operatives who were spotted celebrating the 9/11 attacks from at least two locations — Liberty State Park in Jersey City and an apartment complex on the Jersey Palisades above Weehawken, the headquarters of Urban Moving Systems. The FBI and CIA later identified Dominick Suter, the manager of Urban Moving Systems, as a Mossad intelligence officer. Five Urban Moving Systems employees were arrested in their van in East Rutherford during the afternoon of September 11, 2001, after they were seen traveling toward the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan. Their Urban Moving Systems van tested positive for the presence of explosives. Suter fled the United States and the five Israelis, some of whom were identified as Mossad in an FBI/CIA database, were released after a few months in jail after heavy pressure was applied on the U.S. government by Israel.

    Guney is also suspected of acting as an agent for Mossad, as well as the CIA. His presence in North Jersey, a “hot zone” for Israeli intelligence before and during the 9/11 attacks, points to a possible Turkish connection to the attacks.

    On August 7, 2005, WMR reported on details of the apprehension of the Israelis for their false flag actions: “Jersey City was a major base of operations for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The Ryder van used in that attack was rented from a Jersey City rental agency . . . there was a call placed to the Jersey City Police Department that claimed ‘Palestinians’ in Arab clothes were seen celebrating the attacks. Although the Jersey City Police discovered their 911 system tapes on September 11, 2001 disappeared from their servers and achives after ISI [of Mount Laurel, NJ] took over the contract, some tapes implicating “Arabs” found their way into the hands of WNBC-TV in New York in June 2002. WNBC played transcripts of 911 calls from the Jersey City Police:

    Dispatcher: Jersey City police.
    Caller: Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building.
    Caller: There’s a minivan heading toward the Holland tunnel, I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniform.
    Dispatcher: He has what?
    Caller: He’s dressed like an Arab.

    “It is clear that the Jersey City Police Department’s 911 call tapes were manipulated to delete any calls that might implicate the Israelis. The one call provided to WNBC was clearly an attempt at a ‘false flag” operation implicating ‘Palestinians’ wearing ‘sheik uniforms’ as the culprits in at least one of the white vans driven by Israeli ‘movers’ on the morning of September 11. After the van was traced to the Israeli moving company, the BOLO [Be On Look Out for message] went out for the arrest of the vehicle’s driver and passengers. An East Rutherford policeman directing traffic away from the closed Lincoln Tunnel on Route 3 East noticed the van was driving slowly on the service road towards the tunnel. The tag of the vehicle was only off by one letter from what was contained in the BOLO (JRJ 13Y) and the front New Jersey plate had been removed. It is very possible that to confuse the police, the Israelis were using NJ plate JRJ 13Y as the rear tag on two white vans – the one sighted in Liberty State Park and the other in Maria’s apartment building parking lot. In fact, local police reported a number of white van sightings during September 11, with a number of them phoned into the police. Maria told ABC News she phoned tag number JRJ 13Y to the Jersey City Police after seeing the Israelis driving in a white van celebrating the first plane’s impact, while Liberty State Park witnesses said the same tag number — JRJ 13Y — had been passed to the police and FBI after a white van with ‘celebrating Arabs’ had been chased from the park by the park’s chief ranger after the first plane impact.[11] It was clear that officials of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton, which has authority over the state’s parks, ordered Liberty State Park officials not to talk to the media about September 11 and the Israeli van.

    The man who then New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey placed in charge of his liaison to New Jersey’s security and law enforcement agencies, Golan Cipel, later was allegedly identified by U.S. intelligence as a gay “honey trap” Mossad officer tasked with entrapping and blackmailing McGreevey. McGreevey resigned as governor after details of the homosexual affair became public.

    Ergenekon has been accused of carrying out terrorist attacks and assassinations in Turkey as “false flag” operations to discredit, undermine, and eventually overthrow Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Former FBI Turkish and Persian translator Sibel Edmonds told the Sunday Times of London earlier this year that her translations of wiretaps of Turkish, Iranian, Israeli, and American individuals pointed to Turkish training for the 9/11 hijack ring. Edmonds said that an “Al Qaeda” leader, a Syrian named Louai al-Sakka, had trained 9/11 hijackers at a military base in Turkey, under the watchful eyes of the Turkish military, which we now know was riddled with Ergenekon agents up and down the chain-of-command, four star generals to non-commissioned officers. Al-Sakka was convicted in 2007 for his role in a series of 2003 bombings in Istanbul that targeted the British Consulate, two HSBC bank branches, and two synagogues and his now serving a life prison sentence. The Turkish ring may have been involved or known about several beheadings of Western prisoners in Iraq that were blamed on “Al Qaeda.”

    Philip Giraldi, a former CIA station chief in Istanbul, wrote the following in the Dallas Morning News: “Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation.”

    Coupling the Turkish official investigation of Ergenekon with Edmonds’ information, there is more than a smoking gun pointing to 9/11 as a “false flag” operation involving Turkish, Israeli, and U.S. intelligence operatives. The Saudi and Pakistani financial connection to the 9/11 hijackers and the “false flag” operation has already been well-documented.

    It is time for the incoming Obama administration to seriously consider appointing a new 9/11 commission, sans enablers and possible conspirators in the 9/11 false flag attack on the United States. Thousands of pages of documents are now available in Turkey, the United States, Britain, India, France, and other countries that will prove that 9/11 involved a network much larger than a former CIA asset hiding in an Afghan cave, Osama Bin Laden, and 19 ne’er-do-well “hijackers,” some of whom were more interested in going to strip joints and bars in the days before they decided to take express flights to “heaven” to spend eternity with Allah.

    Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

    Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

    Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

    Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
    Email Online Journal Editor

    Source: onlinejournal.com, Dec 10, 2008

    [2]

    Mossad implicated in a coup plot in Turkey, a NATO country; CIA fingerprints also found on attempt

    By Wayne Madsen
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    Dec 4, 2008, 00:20

    (WMR) — Fresh from revelations, reported by WMR, that Israel’s Mossad and Chabad House-based criminal syndicates were targets in a criminal gangland retribution attack by a notorious Muslim gang in Mumbai, comes word that Mossad has, once again, been implicated in an intelligence and criminal network, this time in Turkey.

    What makes this latest example of Israel’s failure to stem the criminal activities of its intelligence service and criminal syndicates worse is that Turkey, unlike Israel, is a NATO ally of the United States and, therefore, the United States is bound by treaty to protect NATO allies from aggression by non-NATO states, including Israel.

    The Turkish and other Middle East media are reporting that the Mossad has been fingered in connection with a right-wing Turkish criminal and intelligence gang, known as Ergenekon, that stands accused of attempting to overthrow Turkey’s democratically-elected Justice and Development (AKP) Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. Several Turkish papers have named a Turkish rabbi, Tuncay Guney, aka Daniel T. Guney and Daniel Levi and code-named “Ipek” or “Silk,” as having served as a double agent for the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) tasked with infiltrating the shadowy but powerful “state within a state” group Ergenekon. Guney had been arrested by Turkish authorities in 2001 for distributing fake drivers’ licenses and phony license plates for luxury cars. A document recently uncovered by the Turkish press revealed that Guney had also infiltrated a police intelligence unit (JITEM) working with Ergenekon to destabilize Turkey. Guney was exfiltrated to the United States and he now heads up the B’nai Yaakov Synagogue and Community Center in Toronto, Canada. Guney has denied that he has been an agent for Israel, Turkey or the United States but the MIT has confirmed the document identifying Guney as an agent for MIT is authentic.

    The Turkish daily Hurriyet has reported that Guney served in MIT’s Counter-terrorism Unit (CTU) and in the MIT unit that monitors Iran. Hurriyet also reported that Guney had developed a contact at the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Muhsin Karger, the consulate’s political affairs undersecretary.

    Guney also has claimed to be a journalist and it is also alleged that he was a member of the PKK. Silvyo Ovaydo, the leader of the Turkish Jewish community, called Guney a fraudulent rabbi and said he was not even registered as a rabbi at the B’nai Yaakov synagogue in Toronto. Guney is said to have once worked for Islamist media organizations in Turkey but suddenly converted to Judaism and became an “instant rabbi” in Toronto.

    At the heart of the Ergenekon story lies Mossad and its reported attempts to turn Turkey into another Lebanon or West Bank/Gaza, a country wracked by internal strife and constant warfare that would usher into power a strong right-wing military dictatorship. In the trial of one of the accused murderers of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the lawyer for one of the accused murderers asked another accused murderer, Erhan Tuncel, a one-time police informer like Guney, if he had an Israeli girlfriend. Tuncel refused to answer the question, citing an invasion of his privacy. However, it was clear that what the lawyer was driving at was a Mossad connection to the murder of Dink, a murder that was being pinned on Turkish anti-Armenian nationalists by the corporate and heavyily Israeli Lobby-influenced media in the West.

    When 89 suspects were named in a 2,455-page indictment by a criminal court in Istanbul last July, many retired Turkish army officers, the neocon network, especially in Washington, which is their major citadel, along with Jerusalem and London, began to throw cold water and the term “conspiracy theory” around charges in the Turkish indictment that Ergenekon played a major role in the formation of several Turkish terrorist groups to disrupt Turkish politics, including the illegal Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Turkish Hizbollah (Party of God), the Marxist-Leninist People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C), and the little-known Islamic Great East Raiders Front (IBDA-C). The neocon Jamestown Foundation in Washington called the indictment’s links between Turkish military elements and radical terrorists a “conspiracy theory.” Organizations like Jamestown have no other choice. If it were also proven, as it was in Turkey, that various terrorist groups like “Al Qaeda,” “Deccan Mujaheddin,” and others exist courtesy of the nurturing and support by American, Israeli, and other Western military-intelligence structures, groups like Jamestown would lose their reasons for existence — to make propaganda and receive funding in order to keep the terrorist bogeymen, the actual “Emmanuel Godsteins,” alive.

    Guney is reported to be the 86th suspect in the indictment of Ergenekon. Guney is believed to have revealed the initial detailed information on the existence of Ergenekon in order to avoid being charged in the case.

    The involvement of extreme right-wing Turkish military and intelligence officials and Turkish organized crime networks, with Mossad and, possibly, CIA agents acting in concert with a suspected CIA-funded Turkish Islamic charismatic madrassa and Islamic centers’ chief named Fethullah Gulen — whose activities parallel pan-Turkic/Eurasianist (re: George Soros) goals of Ergenekon — is similar to the scenario now playing out in India where a little known group called “Deccan Mujaheddin” may have been created as a ruse by Indian right-wing military and intelligence officers, allied with Mossad and CIA agents, to sow discord in India and bring about a right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena Hindu government.

    Gulen owns a number of media and business interests in Turkey and runs Islamic centers throughout central Asia and even in Russia.

    In polls, some one-third of the Turkish public believe Islamist Nurcu sect charismatic leader Grand Hodja Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, is part of a movement that aims to seize control of the Turkish state and a little over a third believe that Gulen is funded by “international powers.” After he was acquitted in Turkey of attempting to overthrow the secular state with his religious organization, Gulen was first denied a Permanent Resident Card or “Green Card” to remain in the United States by the U.S. Distrrict Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania but then an appeals court granted Gulen a Green Card. In October of this year, a federal appellate court found that U.S. immigration authorities improperly rejected Gulen’s request for a Green Card. The appeals court ruled that Gulen was “an alien of extraordinary ability,” a decision that saw approval of Gulen’s residency status. Observers of the case suspect the CIA intervened with the court on Gulen’s behalf. Gulen’s support for the AKP government may be an insurance policy by the CIA to maintain a close relationship with the “Islamist tendency” AKP government in Ankara. The Bush administration, after seven years of trying to deport Gulen to Turkey, suddenly dropped its opposition to his permanent residency status.

    The public prosecutor in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) case against Gulen’s permanent residency status argued in filed documents that Gulen’s movement was financially supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Turkish government, and the “Central Intelligence Agency.” The deposition stated that some Ankara businessmen donated up to 70 percent of their income to Gulen’s movement.

    If Gulen’s operations are funded by the CIA that means the “Agency” may be linked to Ergenekon. With the U.S. having a mutual defense treaty with Turkey’s recognized government that puts the CIA potentially in violation of U.S. law. And Israel’s connections with Ergenekon means that the United States is bound by treaty to protect its ally Turkey from Israeli covert or overt aggression.

    There is an element of “McCarthyism” in the Ergenekon case. Some well-meaning officials have been subjected to being tainted by the broad brush of being associated with Ergenekon. One is Asil Serdar Sacan, the former head of the Istanbul organized crime department, who was the first to confiscate documents on Ergenekon in 2001 and broadened his investigation to include both Ergenekon and the Gulen organization. Sacan, who investigated the murder of Turkey’s “King of Casinos” Omer Lutfu Topol, successfully beat attempts to smear him, being acquitted of 36 criminal charges brought against him and being reinstated six times to his police position. Sacan is currently in jail as an Ergenekon suspect but his only “crime” appears to have exposed Guney as a possible triple agent for the MIT, Mossad, and CIA. In 2001, Guney was spirited out of Turkey thanks to an agreement between MIT’s undersecretary Senkal Atasagun and the CIA. Guney was given a 10-year U.S. visa thanks to the CIA’s intervention.

    In fact, Ergenekon and its “deep state” players in Turkey and Shiv Sena and its extremist Hindu “deep state” allies in India, backed by elements of Mossad and the CIA, appears to be a replay of the CIA’s secret “Gladio” network in Europe that placed weapons caches in the hands of fascists and neo-Nazis groups to take up arms in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

    The use of “false flag” terrorist attacks in Western Europe by Gladio units were blamed on Communists in an effort to forestall Communist-Socialist coalition governments in Western Europe, particularly in Italy and France.

    Similarly, Ergenekon stands accused of inciting conflicts between Turks and Kurds to create anarchy in the country with the aim of having Ergenekon seizing control of the Turkish government and re-cementing close ties with the United States and Israel.

    In 2004, Ergenekon attempted three military coups against the AKP government. They were code-named Eldiven (The Glove”), Sarikiz (“The Blond Girl”), and Ayisigi (“Moonlight’).

    Ergenekon has been cagily kept off the newspaper pages and TV news screens in the United States. To investigate Ergenekon and Gulen in Turkey is to peel away at an onion that could expose some other “unpleasantness” for certain quarters.

    On January 10, 2007, WMR reported: “According to Federal law enforcement sources, two influential businessmen — Turkish Sunni Muslim Fetullahci charismatic leader Fetullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania after being acquitted in Turkey in 2006 of plotting against the secular republic, and Saudi BMI Islamic investment chief investor Yasin Qadi, a major investor in Turkey who was named in October 2001 by President Bush as a Special Designated Global Terrorist — were both involved with the CIA in the late 1990s in funneling weapons and other support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Albanian terrorist group operating in the former Yugoslavia. The KLA was allied with the Clinton administration and supported by leading neocons such as Richard Perle, whose lobbying firm, International Advisers, Inc., counts Turkey as its major client. Gulen’s books have been translated into Albanian. BMI’s founder, Soliman Biheiri, also helped to start PTech, a Braintree, Massachusetts-based firm that had active software contracts with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Pentagon on 9/11. PTech’s offices were raided by federal authorities in December 2002 after it came under suspicion for terrorist financing. Qadi is suspected of using a series of northern Virginia-based businesses and charities to fund ‘Al Qaeda’ activities in Bosnia. Osama Bin Laden was granted a special passport by the Bosnian government in 1993. Qadi was reportedly a business partner of Turkish businessman Cuneyd Zapsu, an adviser to the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Reconciliation Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP).”

    The dramatic revelations about Ergenekon coming out of Turkey also points to the reasons why the neocons in Washington were keen to stymie the work of FBI Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the CIA’s non-official cover agent Valerie Plame Wilson, both of whom had smuggling and other activities in Turkey high on their priority lists. On January 18, 2008, WMR reported: “WMR has learned that former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose covert status was leaked by the Bush White House, and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who was focused on a major covert network involving Turkish, Israeli, and key members of the Bush administration and Republican Party and weapons and drug smuggling, were essentially looking at the same network. The nexus of Turkey with both the covert CIA Brewster Jennings and Associates operations and the Turkish-Israeli network of influence active within the Defense and State Departments, is the key factor in understanding the complicated counter-espionage operation conducted by both the FBI and CIA.” It now appears that the Washington-connected criminal network being looked at by Edmonds and Plame was, in fact, closely linked to the Ergenekon network in Turkey.

    WMR’s January 18, 2008 report continued: “Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was also, according to our sources, well aware of the massive conspiracy to cover-up the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction components from former Soviet Central Asian states, as well as Ukraine, Moldova, and Ukraine, to the international weapons bazaar. The Abdul Qadeer Khan (A Q Khan) network based in Pakistan was a major beneficiary of the weapons smuggling operation that used Turkey as a pass-through. Rather than expand his investigation, Fitzgerald demurred on looking at the activities of the American Turkish Council, Turkey’s influential lobbying group in Washington, and its parallel symbiotic organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Turkey and Israel are close military and intelligence partners.”

    Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has called on President-elect Barack Obama to reappoint Fitzgerald as U.S. Attorney for Northern Ilinois. If Obama does so, it means that the network being investigated by Edmonds and Plame, one that stretches to Ergenekon and the Gulen network in Turkey, has its hooks deep into the future Obama administration.

    Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

    Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

    Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

    Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
    Email Online Journal Editor

    Source: onlinejournal.com, Dec 4, 2008

  • Feature: Women in politics

    Feature: Women in politics

    Saturday, 13, Dec 2008 12:01

    On this day in 1918, women voted in a British general election for the first time.

    Ninety years later and things still aren’t rosy. Until 20 years ago women never made up more than five per cent of MPs in parliament. Now they’re 20 per cent. It’s an improvement, but it’s not exactly half-and-half.

    The UK has fewer female MPs than Cambodia. It comes 15th for representation in national parliaments compared to the other 27 EU member states. In a country that’s otherwise so progressive, why do we still have so few women MPs?

    “It’s not harder for women,” says Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat equality spokesperson. “It’s just harder for carers.”

    “The division of family duties in society is still very unequal. This is what we find all the time. Women get involved in politics in their twenties and then in their thirties they say ‘I’ll take time out’. But men don’t take that time out.”

    Ann Cryer, the Labour MP who dedicated herself to a campaign against forced marriage, agrees. “By its nature it’s difficult, because parliament is usually two or four hundred miles from where people live. That’s a problem for women with young children. It’s also a problem for men with young children but I think women have a stronger emotional attachment to their children than men have. That’s not to deride men, but you’re not going to get rid of that emotional attachment just like that.”

    You can see the truth of that by the culture of parliament as well as its composition. The old adage was that it had a shooting range, but no creche. No-one seems to know if that shooting range is still there, but there’s certainly no creche. Even today, the atmosphere in the House, and to a lesser extent in the halls and corridors of Westminster, retain an unmistakably male character.

    Swinson cites the response to Nick Clegg’s performance during this week’s prime minister’s questions as an example. Clegg got up to ask about a single mother who came to his surgery as an example of lower-income groups facing criminal penalties for being unable to pay back money given to them mistakenly in tax credits. He probably wasn’t thinking about the interview he gave to Piers Morgan nearly a year ago in which he admitted sleeping with about 30 women. MPs were. He only managed to say: “This week a single mother came to my surgery in Sheffield…” before someone on the other benches shouted: “Thirty-one”. MPs laughed for a good long time.

    “I was appalled they started laughing and applauding,” says Swinson. “I know he made those ill-judged comments a year ago, but you hear the phrase single mother and the first thing you think is sex? And then I thought – if this room wasn’t 80 per cent male would it be the same reaction? It was puerile. And puerile comes from the Latin word for ‘boy’.”

    Some observers also find something a little masculine about the way parliament is set out. Call it over-analysing, but there are a few people who think that represents a masculine way of doing things; a politics based on conflict rather than consensus.

    “I think it’s significant,” says Katherine Rike, director of women’s rights group The Fawcett Society. “Most new administrations [such as Scotland or Wales] have chosen not to construct their parliament in that way – they’re circular. We’re trying to fit women into an institutional design which is very masculine and there are limits to how much can change within that complex.”

    “It’s adversarial,” Cryers agrees. “And I think it’s more difficult for women to cope with that adversarial nature. It took me a year or two to feel sufficiently confident to stand up and speak without notes and just talk. I did find it hard at first because I’m a naturally quiet person and when you’re speaking in the Commons people will just shout at you.”

    It’s tempting to draw a conclusion about the link between our old building and our shoddy ranking in the international league table of women’s representation, but things are rarely that simple. Whatever the reasons, women are still facing a mountain when they decide to go into politics.

    “I’ve been on the Council of Europe where you sit down in a semi-circle with a proper desk and water and a microphone. It’s a more civilised way of doing things,” Cryer says.

    “But I’m not going to knock our parliament. It’s the best job in the world. I hope women will still feel they have a place in it. It’s so important women feel they can get in there.

    “My grandmother worked with the Suffragettes. She gave a great chunk of her life up for that and I think what she did is just now coming to fruition. So whoever’s reading this please do try for parliament. Don’t lose sight of it. It’s important.”

    Ian Dunt

    Source: www.politics.co.uk, 13 Dec 2008


  • Europe: Rights watchdog wants more protection for women

    Europe: Rights watchdog wants more protection for women

    Strasbourg, 25 Nov. (AKI) – Europe’s top human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe on Tuesday urged national legislatures to pass laws to protect women from domestic violence. The watchdog’s parliamentary assembly (PACE) issued a statement to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

    “Too many women in Europe are battered and killed by their partners or former partners, simply because they are women,” PACE President Lluis Maria de Puig said in the statement.

    “No Council of Europe member state is immune. It is time to put a stop to this repeated, widespread violation of human rights. National parliaments must pass the requisite laws.

    “At European level, there is an urgent need to strengthen protection for victims, prosecute those who perpetrate violence and take measures to prevent it,” he added.

    De Puig urged the Council of Europe to draft a convention to combat the most serious and widespread forms of violence against women, in particular domestic violence and forced marriages.

    The United Nations General Assembly in 1999 designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and invited governments, international organizations and NGOs to organise activities to raise public awareness of the problem on that day.

    Women’s activists have marked the day against violence since 1981. It was created after the brutal assassination in 1960, of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists in the Dominican Republic, on the orders of Dominican ruler Rafael Trujillo.

    PACE is made up of elected members of parliament from Council of Europe member states, as well as from their opposition parties.

    It only has the power to investigate, recommend and advise but its recommendations on issues such as human rights have significant weight with European Union institutions including the European Parliament.

    The Council of Europe, created in 1948, has 47 member states with some 800 million citizens. It is not part of the European Union.

    Source:  www.adnkronos.com, 13 December 2008

  • Turkish universities to open Armenian language departments

    Turkish universities to open Armenian language departments

    Trakya and Nevşehir universities will accept a total of 40 students in the department.

    In a move to contribute to Turkish-Armenian ties, Turkey’s Higher Board of Education, or YÖK, will open Armenian language and literature departments at Turkish universities, the Anatolia News Agency reported Friday.

    Trakya and Nevşehir universities will accept a total of 40 students in the department. Boğaziçi University has been teaching Armenian language since last year.

  • Turkish Filmmakers Visited The Civilitas Foundation

    Turkish Filmmakers Visited The Civilitas Foundation

    A group of Turkish filmmakers visited The Civilitas foundation on December 4. Ten young filmmakers, visiting Armenia to participate in the Second Turkish- Armenian Workshop on “Cinema as Means of Cross-Border Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”.

    The workshop, initiated by the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, was a partnership between the Yerevan festival and the Anadolu Kültür Association of Turkey, as well as the Armenian Writers Union.

    The Turkish filmmakers and the organizers met with Civilitas founder Vartan Oskanian, and members of the Civilitas staff.

    Mr. Oskanian welcomed the initiative and spoke of the importance of such initiatives.
    He noted that the purpose of the workshop is to promote civil and cultural dialogue between Armenia and Turkey via means of cinema, encouraging cooperation and mutual recognition among Armenian and Turkish professionals.

    “There is a great deal of misunderstanding and mistrust between Turkey and Armenia. And if the governments of both countries are seriously thinking of normalization of relations, the civil societies in both countries should push the process forward.What better medium than cinema to bring people together,” Mr. Oskanian said.

    The Turkish filmmakers, many of whom already have working ties with their Armenian colleagues, said that one of their main goals of the cooperation is a possibility to work together on a joint project.
    “You, the filmmakers, should be able to explain to your government by means of cinema, that for the development of the region, for the normalization of the relations between the two people, opening the border is vital” Mr. Oskanian explained.

  • After five centuries, women finally step inside the Spanish Riding School

    After five centuries, women finally step inside the Spanish Riding School

    Sojurner Morell was named after a women’s rights campaigner. And, at 17, she has landed a blow of her own for equality after being accepted into Vienna’s famed equestrian centre. Tony Paterson met her

    Thursday, 11 December 2008

    Briton Sojurner Morell, left, and Austrian Hannah Zeitlhofer, right, are the first women to be admitted to the Spanish Riding School of Vienna

    Dressed up in the skintight breeches, knee-high leather boots, frock coat and 19th-century commissionaire-style cap worn by pupils at the world’s oldest riding school, Sojurner Morell, a 17-year-old British horsewoman, looks decidedly butch.

    Yet there are ancient and firmly entrenched reasons for the teenager’s masculine appearance. She and her 21-year-old Austrian colleague, Hannah Zeitlhofer have secured a sudden reputation for breaking one of Austria’s last and most enduring taboos. They have become the first women to be accepted to Vienna’s elite, internationally renowned and hitherto male-dominated Spanish Riding School – a 481-year-old institution as famous and peculiar to this Alpine nation as Mozart.

    But being the first women to enter one of the last men-only bastions in Europe has exacted its inevitable sartorial price: “I guess they haven’t got round to designing a uniform for women yet,” admitted Sojurner. “Let’s face it, it hasn’t exactly been an issue at the school for about four hundred years.”

    Sojurner, whose name derives from the black 19th-century American abolitionist and women’s rights campaigner Sojurner Truth, doesn’t come across as a militant feminist activist. She was besotted with horses as a child. She vividly remembers riding around on the back of ponies in the paddock behind the family home in Saratoga Springs, New York, aged two. Her father comes from Birmingham but the family moved to America when she was a child.

    “When you grow up with horses, you get to know about the Spanish Riding School almost automatically,” she said. “I can’t even remember how or when I first heard of it but for me it was always an ideal, the ultimate goal for anyone who loves horses.”

    She first visited the Riding School two years ago while on a tour of Europe with her mother. She was so taken by the place and its elaborate displays of dressage performed by the schools’ legendary Lipizzaner horses, that she sent a letter of application in September last year just to try her luck.

    She was delighted when she received a reply inviting her to attend an interview. She had to compete against eight other candidates by demonstrating her riding skills to a board of examiners and she was astounded when she learnt the result. Only four candidates were accepted and she, along with Ms Zeitlhofer, who recently obtained a degree in equestrian science, were among them and women to boot.

    Horse riding is an activity in which women have been involved for centuries. Dressage, showjumping competitions and even village gymkhanas would be unthinkable with no female riders. Without them Black Beauty would doubtless never have been written. It seems extraordinary, therefore, that an institution like the Spanish Riding School has sustained a ban on women for so long.

    The cliches about the Teutonic world lagging behind the Anglo-Saxons sometimes ring true. Laws guaranteeing women equal rights only came into force in Germany in 1957 and it took until 1972 for the Swiss to give women the vote.

    Austria can hardly claim the status of most emancipated nation in the world either; Vienna’s Philharmonic Orchestra only hired a full-time female musician in 1997, after being subjected to massive public pressure to do so. And when it comes to horses, the nation is radically out of step with the English-speaking world. Austria is famous for its horsemeat sausages.

    Vienna’s Spanish Riding School embodied such conservatism for centuries. Founded back in 1527, its roots are in the military traditions dating as far back as Xenophon in ancient Greece and the horsemanship of the post-medieval age. Then, knights attempted to retain a battlefield role by shedding armour and learning to outwit their opponents through manoeuvrability and riding skill.

    The school is described as Spanish because of the Spanish horses that Austria’s ruling Hapsburg family imported in the 16th century. The horses gave rise to the famous Lipizzaner breed, a symbol of the country’s prowess during the Austro-Hungarian empire. The school specialises in training Lipizzaner stallions. It takes 15 years to become one of its chief riders and the skills required are easily as demanding as those needed to master a Stradivarious violin or helm an America’s Cup-winning yacht.

    The school is a magnet for tourists who flock to see its displays of classical dressage in the early 18th-century, pillared Winter Riding School building. Uniformed riders, clad in bicorne hats, period uniforms and immaculately polished boots salute in front of a portrait of the Austrian emperor, Charles VI, before performing on their white Lipizzaner stallions.

    It has taken a female manager to break the school’s male exclusivity. Early last year Elisabeth Gürtler, a Viennese society hostess and owner of the Sacher hotel next door, was appointed general director. An experienced businesswoman, she took over when the school was facing bankruptcy. Last January it had to cancel a tour to the US to cut spending. Part of Ms Gürtler’s remit has been to modernise the school and “make it more open”. She sees the decision to admit women as an entirely natural process. “Both men and women have to earn their keep and prove themselves nowadays, nobody is against this,” she says. Nobody ever ruled that women should never be admitted, “it just sort of ended up that way”.

    For Ms Morell and Ms Zeitlhofer, being the only women in the Riding School’s entourage of 21 riders has not been as problematic as expected. Their main difficulty is trying to mount a horse when its stirrups are set high. Both say their upper arms have not yet developed sufficient muscle to enable them to always complete the process alone. “We sometimes have to ask our male colleagues for a lift up,” says Ms Zeitlhofer, “That can be pretty annoying, because then everyone looks at you.”

    As first-year pupils or élèves, as the school calls them, both women are paid €700 (£610) a month and work a demanding eight-hour day that begins at 6 m. Riding lessons follow and students have to learn how to maintain perfect posture and lead with the reins. The rest of the working day is spent mucking out stables and grooming the horses. Both women say they encounter absolutely no resentment from the male riders and most are “totally nice”. Andreas Hausberger, 43, a chief rider, says he is thrilled to have women at the school: “Thank God we are not living in the Middle Ages any more.”

    Yet the school has still to sort out the dress issues. The difficulties for women presented by the masculine uniform of frock coat and peaked cap are nothing compared to those presented by the uniform worn by its troupe of still exclusively male chief riders. Their parade dress is a coffee-coloured riding coat buttoned up to the neck, knee-high boots and an 18th-century Captain Hornblower-style bicorne hat. “There are a couple of questions about that,” admitted Ms Gürtler, “But we have a few years to think about it.”

    Source:  www.independent.co.uk, 11 December 2008