The last striking example of the consequences of
‘alliance’ with the United States is undoubtedly the plight of the Syrian Kurds. Much ink has been shed about the American betrayal in the entire world’s mass media. Why does the US destroy the self-confidence of its allies giving rise to serious doubts? Nothing is strange: Washington pursues the policy considered appropriate in each case and moment in time. In this regard, Washington has increasingly abandoned its allies as soon as its goals are achieved. This is the spirit of US policy.

Take for example the treatment afforded by the United States to Japan, its main Asian ally. Washington has persistently been engaged in Tokyo’s arms twisting, projecting the threat from China and North Korea. Thus forcing Japan to follow Washington’s quest for supremacy in East Asia. In this case, the US refer to the bilateral treaty on mutual cooperation and the 1960 security guarantees, according to which they have the right to station armed forces and establish military bases on Japanese territory. However, as Bloomberg recently reported, the White House is seriously considering withdrawing from the Treaty, leaving Tokyo alone to worry about Japan’s security.

Is the Treaty signed by the United States and Greece during Pompeo’s recent visit to Athens, not of a similar nature? The transfer of American troops to Greek territory continues in full swing.

The White House employs the same scenario in the development of relations with the countries of the Persian Gulf: the looming ‘threat’ in the Gulf scenario is Iran. Furthermore, in the case of the Baltic and Eastern European states, Russia is the projected ‘threat’. It is not a far-fetched scenario the leadership of these countries wakes up one day and find themselves in the position the Syrian Kurds are today: that is to say a bargaining chip in American foreign and domestic policy.

The US ‘friendship’ with Armenia, one of Cyprus’ main partners, is also indicative. The government of Armenia, which has made a bet on the development of relations with the West, is likely to be abandoned by its American patrons by direct analogy to the Kurdish case. It is possible that the Armenian friends of George Soros, who consistently put the fate of Armenia in the hands of the OSCE Minsk Group and NATO officials, will face a very sad fate. If the Armenians are led to believe that the United States are the guarantor of Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence, they are seriously mistaken.

Oil Interests Guide US Foreign Policy

Last week Washington threw off its mask openly stating the true purpose of stationing US troops in Syria: oil! The war on terrorism on the territory of this unfortunate country was only
a smokescreen. Washington cares only about Syrian oil. The United States in order to maintain control over the oil fields in northeastern Syria, will apparently, stop at nothing.

The US administration estimates revenues from Syrian oil smuggling to the tune of $45 million per month. At the same time, the Syrians will not have any profit at all from the production of their own oil by the Americans. What else than an outright robbery of Syria by the United States? Part of the money from oil is returned to Syria exclusively in the form of new armed terrorists, while, in fact, all this oil belongs to the Syrian people and no one else.

Moreover, the White House recently expressed interest in a deal with oil giant ExxonMobil to ‘use’ Syrian oil assets. Yes, it is ExxonMobil, on which so many hopes are pinned by the Cypriot government. We wonder how our government and public will react to the potential participation of this company in the plunder of the natural resources of a sovereign state. Silence and indifference have always been the easiest way out of difficult situations. But then all our reproaches of Ankara with illegal activities in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Cyprus would pale.

It is not easy to choose allies and partners. Even worse when “chosen” as ally, the US pursue their narrowly defined national interest. We can continue to pretend that nothing is happening, to entertain illusions and hopes about a happy future in the American embrace. However, common sense suggests that now it is necessary to wake up and seriously think about whether we are on the right path. A range of countries, including seemingly powerful blocs such as the European Union, are increasingly realizing how they have been used by the Americans and hastily trying to get rid of this dependence. Doing so whilst the neck is in the loop is not so easy. It is much easier not to get to this point at all …

The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued statements in which it points to the Americans as being excessively emotional. Moreover, it has accused US of supporting terrorism while pointing out the unwillingness of Obama’s administration to fulfill its part of the deal. Such a deal was achieved with great difficulty; it required great efforts exercised from different quarters.

In Moscow it was quickly noticed that after reaching the Geneva agreement on the ceasefire in Syria different approaches for cooperation with Russia from the part of the US State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA have been identified.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that Washington was considering various options for action with regard to Moscow in case of failure of the agreements on Syria, including sanctions. The Washington Post reported that the White House in early October held a meeting with representatives of the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces. The meeting discussed the issue of air strikes on positions of the Syrian Government Forces. According to the paper, the meeting proposed to conduct the operation in secret, in order to circumvent White House objections. Obviously, President Obama reaching the very end of his term in office does not want to get involved in such a risky operation without the approval of the UN Security Council.

US Secretary of State John Kerry explained the US problem during a meeting with the Syrian opposition. He said: “Our international law experts tell us that we have no grounds for sending troops, unless the UN Security Council adopts a resolution. Such a resolution can be interposed by Russian or Chinese veto. We cannot do it if those people do not attack us or if we are not invited to Syria. Russia was invited by the legal regime.”

Legally Moscow is Syria’s ally and actually is a party to the conflict. But the United States and its allies in the framework of the international coalition, formed to combat ISIS, operate in Syria without a mandate of the Security Council or an invitation by Damascus. Clearly, by the yardstick of international law, the international coalition members are the aggressors. Turkey belongs to the same aggressors’ category: Ankara, without prior consultations with the Syrian Government sent in troops to Northern Syria in August.

But Washington, being too long at the receiving end of diplomatic defeats in the Middle East, seeks to shift all the blame on Moscow, accusing her that she is allegedly already militarily present in Syria, refuses diplomacy, and ‘seeks to achieve its goals through military means’.

The US went as far as blocking the Security Council resolution drafted to condemn the mortar shelling of the Russian Embassy in Damascus. The US attitude demonstrates flagrant disregard for the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. When similar crimes were committed earlier against the diplomatic missions of Western countries, Russia had always unreservedly lent its support to the Security Council condemnation of these acts.

Recently Tehran decided to publicize Washington’s attempts to sway her to their side in the Syrian conflict. In the last few months, the Americans tried to persuade the Islamic Republic of Iran or even sought to force Tehran to accept in a diplomatic way, that Bashar Assad should not play any role in the political future of Syria. However, Ayatollah Khamenei has forbidden to conduct parallel negotiations with the US on regional and Syrian issues, because the history has proven that the American officials do not deserve their confidence at all.

On the other hand, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticizes Americans as well: “we see the United States have been carrying out a duplicitous policy in Syria – one part of the US leadership works with terrorists, while another part is pursuing a policy that supports the self-defense forces of the Syrian Kurds”.

All of this means that Washington has completely exhausted its diplomatic resources. The US leadership feels that the consequences of its military and diplomatic failures in the Middle East region are to be expected. Rushing from the table of negotiations to the military maps and vice versa, trying to change the impending future, the United States only narrows the space to maneuver.

We shall not engage with the English syntax and grammar mistakes (of which there are plenty) that Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, committed in the above statement while in Turkey. However, we ought to address the substance of his words, uttered a day before the date the whole world set – not least the European Union of which Tusk is the prime speaker – to commemorate the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which Ankara never admitted. If anything, the Turkish government criminalized reference to this atrocious war crime, which it conveniently terms as ‘forced population movements’.

It is very ironic that the President of the European Council chose this particular day to pay a visit and praise Turkey unequivocally for its ‘best record in treating refugees’. Let us remind Mr. Tusk that the European Parliament a year earlier on the anniversary of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide noted in its relevant resolution, inter alia, the following:

1. 2015 marks the centennial of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire;
2. An increasing number of Member States and national parliaments recognize the Armenian Genocide perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire;
3. One of the main motivations for the European unification movement is the will to prevent the recurrence of wars and crimes against humanity in Europe;
4. Turkey and Armenia have embarked on a process of diplomatic normalisation, signing protocols in 2009 in Zurich on establishing and developing relations;
5. The importance of keeping alive the memories of the past is paramount, since there can be no reconciliation without truth and remembrance;

“The EP pays tribute, on the eve of the centenary, to the memory of the one-and-a-half million innocent Armenian victims who perished in the Ottoman Empire; joins the commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in a spirit of European solidarity and justice; calls on the Commission and the Council to join in the commemoration.”

Ankara has not as yet normalized diplomatic relations with Armenia neither has it recognized the genocide, despite the importance of doing so being clearly marked by the most democratic of institutions in the European Union.

To the contrary, Turkey has dedicated the time, that lapsed since the signing of the Zurich protocol of 2009, not in promoting good neighbourly relations but in destabilizing its neighbours Syria and Iraq, which she invaded several times. Both Damascus and Baghdad denounced Turkish aggressive actions multiple times referring Ankara’s interventionist policy and creeping invasion to the UN Security Council.

Moreover, Tusk’s statement is an affront to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian victims as well as the tens of thousands of Turkish and Syrian Kurdish victims that the five year old Turkish interference and expansionism has created in the region. The Turkish Armed Forces pound inhabited areas in the southeast of the country nonstop, killing innocent Kurds, citizens of the Republic of Turkey. Turkey’s Kurds cry out every single day: “This is genocide”.

The EU should not support Turkey’s creeping invasion in Syrian and Iraq, neither should it condone the genocidal war within Turkey against its own Kurdish population. One should ask the real questions: What did the EU do for promoting the peace process in Syria? What did the EU do to curb Turkey’s daily attacks on its own civilian population?

To put things into perspective, the number of obliterated Kurdish communities in Turkey proper is twenty times bigger than the number of Greek communities (around 150) erased from Cyprus’ ethnic distribution map as a result of the brutal Turkish invasion of 1974. The ongoing death toll of ethnic Kurds stands, as of today, at eight times the number of Greek Cypriots killed (military and civilian) as a result of the 1974 two phased Attila operation. Moreover, the size of the Kurdish population seeking autonomy, civil and political rights in Turkey exceeds 12 million. Clearly, the magnitude of the Kurdish problem for Ankara is simply immense. The thirty years old heavy-handed approach of successive Turkish governments to this purely political problem, no doubt constitutes an ongoing war crime – possibly bordering genocide – for which Ankara should be held accountable by the international community.

Yet the approach of major European powers to Erdogan is one imbued by appeasement rather than indictment for the numerous war crimes committed diachronically by the Turkish leaderships against Armenians, Greeks and Kurds alike. This is certainly the case with Germany.

More and more analysts are convinced that hundreds of years of close relations between Germany and Turkey dictate today’s approach of Berlin to Ankara with reference to the Kurdish, possibly, the Cyprus issue as well as the unprecedented refugee crisis caused to a great extent by Ankara’s interventionist policy in Syria.

Let’s take a brief historical review of German-Turkish relations in order to establish the background to current approaches. At the high tide of Ottoman ascendance (16^th, 17^th & 18^th c.)  German states in the old continent adopted a friendly approach to the Sultan while the rest of Europe was teaming up against the Ottomans. In 1761 a peace and friendship pact was signed by Ferdinand II of Prussia and the Sultan. Consequently, the two parties exchanged ambassadors. Confirming the lasting nature of the close bilateral relations, the Prusso-Ottoman Treaty was renewed in 1790.

The following 19^th century saw an unprecedented flourishing of German-Ottoman bilateral relations:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent visits to the neo-Sultan (mocked at in the recent German state broadcaster music video that provoked Erdogan’s wrath) seem to be a continuation of the path set out by the Kaiser who decided to come to the rescue of the Sultan at a time when his Ottoman Empire all but collapsed.

Having supplied Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) with a German military mission under Marshal von der Goltz, Bismarck followed up his Turkophile move with a much-advertised visit to the Sultan-Khalifa.

Subsequently, Abdul Hamid II turned to Germany for aid to fight the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-78 – which he badly lost: the Sultan was forced to sign up to the San Stefano armistice, just outside the walls of Constantinople, to save his skin from the advancing Russians. He drew German loans to wage this ill-fated war against the Russians while he struck a deal with Deutsche Bank for financing the Baghdad – Constantinople railway. German investments in end of 19^th century collapsing Ottoman Empire take an upward turn sideling French controlled Ottoman Bank. The closeness of German-Ottoman relations is testified once more by the three visits of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Constantinople (1889-1917).

German schools mushroomed in the Bosporus. The German Military mission helped to train the Young Turk officers who under Kemal’s leadership set out to eradicate the ‘infidel Armenians and Greeks’ thereby Turkifying Asia Minor once and for all. German military advisers no doubt inspired the young and ambitious Mustafa Kemal to go for the ‘final settlement’ of the thriving Christian minorities question in Turkey. It is interesting to observe that the elimination of the progressive Greek and Armenian communities in Anatolia took place twenty years earlier acting as a precursor of the results of the (in)famous Nazi Wannsee Conference (Berlin suburb, 20 Jan 1942) that took the decision on the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ in the European space deemed vital by Nazi Germany.

In WWI the two countries were close allies. General Otto Liman von Sanders (1855–1929) served as the leading military adviser and commander in the Ottoman Empire. Already in 1914 the Germans ‘advised’ the Young Turks on the expulsion on Greeks from Eastern Thrace and Anatolia. In 1918, General von Sanders commanded an Ottoman Army during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign.

Early in WWII, Turkey and Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact (1941). Turkey’s pro-Nazi Germany policy is well documented in a unique and fascinating account produced by Frank G. Weber entitled The Evasive Neutral (University of Missouri Press, Columbia & London, 1979). Turkish duplicity was laid bare only when German defeat was more than obvious: on 23 February 1945 Ankara declared war on Berlin.

In our next article, we shall continue our analysis on German-Turkish ties by looking into more interesting aspects of their recent close cooperation.

On the other hand the situation in the eastern provinces of the country is dreadful. Tens of thousands of repressed ethnic Kurds are forced to flee their ancestral homes in search for relative safety. The modus operandi, the goals, and the results of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) operations in Turkey’s Southeast targeted against the courageous Kurdish population are reminiscent of the Turkish ‘Peace Operation’ in Cyprus in July-August 1974. Code-named Attila, a two-phase operation in violation of a relevant Security Council ceasefire resolution (22 July 1974) achieved ‘remarkable’, from the Turkish rulers point of view, results: displacement of 165,000 Greeks of Cyprus from their 3000 years old ancestral homes, rape of Greek women by members of the TAF that remain unpunished to this date. The Greek population incurred also 5,000 deaths and 1500 missing persons, the large majority of which remain unaccounted for, 42 years after the Turkish ‘peace operation’. Numbers are round figure estimates: however, according to UNFICYP estimates 2 in 5, or 40% of the Greek Cypriots became internally displaced persons (IDPs). Turkey, so far, has got away with the above outlined war crimes. The northern part occupied by the TAF, 36 per cent of the total area of the island, became ethnically cleansed from a three millennia long historical Greek presence. In 1974, Greeks constituted 80% of the population of what is coined in recent years as Northern Cyprus. Moreover, through the years of ‘peaceful’ occupation, Ankara implanted no less than 120,000 of backward Muslim settlers from Anatolia, a critical mass at least equal in numbers to the Turkish Cypriot indigenous population and importantly of completely different outlook and mentality to the Cypriot Turks.

The far reaching consequences of the 1974 Attila operation are visible today in the self-styled TRNC, Ankara’s puppet state. A historical Greek civilization heartland for thousands of years has been turned into a Muslim chaos: 500 Greek Orthodox churches have disappeared (looted, pillaged, demolished, turned-into-stables and the like) whereas mosques are mushrooming in an effort to forcibly Islamize the predominantly secular Turkish Cypriot society.

Ironically, the Cyprus Turkification operation was ordered by a left-of-centre Turkish Prime Minister, the late Bulent Ecevit. In other respects, Ecevit was a socialist and a secular poet. Unlike Erdogan, Ecevit had not ever cited Koran verses in public. However, his decision to order the execution of the Attila operation, laid the solid foundation for a long term plan: the chauvinist Turkish expansion to the strategically located island of Cyprus. A generation later, Erdogan builds on the Ecevit-organized military occupation of northern Cyprus, turning it into a creeping Islamization. Continuity or change in the top echelon of Turkish polity, left or right, secular or religious, the policy aim is the same: displacement of the different, of the other.

A close look at events in Southeast Turkey today reveal remarkable similarities: the TAF launching a massive operation that terrorizes the other population out of their ancestral homes. The perpetrator is the same: the powerful Neo-Sultan, the victim is the same: the weak side that forms an obstacle to the grandiose plans of a Neo-Ottoman empire; in this case in real time the poor Kurds.

As confirmed by a most recent European Parliament fact finding mission: 50,000 Kurds fled Nusaybin, Mardin Province, near the Syrian border, 50,000 run away from Sirnak Province, while another 40,000 departed from Yuksekova, Hakari Province in search of safe heavens in western parts of the country. The fleeing civilian Kurds are desperately seeking to protect themselves from becoming human shields. The TAF indiscriminately bombard densely Kurdish populated urban areas. Their numbers are roughly equal, their fate is identical: Greek Cypriot IDPs in 1974, Turkey’s Kurdish IDPs in 2016: Ecevit-Erdogan policy draws a dreadful analogy!

Indeed, those who closely follow the politics of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ascertain that this is his ‘absolutism dream’: to celebrate the centennial of the Republic of Turkey as the supreme ruler, the neo-Sultan, whose ‘wisdom’ in governance is challenged by no one let alone the unruly ‘mountainous Turks’: a Turkish government’s official jargon term for the Kurds. Yet, common sense, let alone sophisticated political analysis, tells that the endless bloodshed that Turkey experiences in recent months are a direct consequence of the Turkish President’s relentless and authoritarian rule. In other words, Erdogan’s dream is everybody else’s in the country nightmare!

Today, Turkey lives a daily nightmare: from the continuous massacre of Kurdish freedom fighters in the southeast and the genocide conducted against the civilian Kurdish population of this vast region, to the terrorist attacks and the bloodbath caused by the week in week out clashes of pro-Kurdish and pro-democracy demonstrators with the police in Ankara and Istanbul.

Consequently, yesterday’s fresh bomb blast in the heart of the capital, Ankara, killing 34 and wounding more than hundred innocent citizens should come as no surprise. The moral responsibility for the country’s shameful drift to bloody chaos lies nowhere else than the brutal policies of Erdogan seconded by Prime Minister Davutoglu; policies that sadly target all well-intentioned detractors: be it the freedom-loving Kurds, the free press, the investigative journalists, the intellectuals, the Fethullah Gulen movement, the secularists and so on and so forth. Erdogan has created an endless list of enemies both inside and outside the country, locking himself up in an untenable position of brutal repression of dissent. In true terms, Erdogan is shooting himself in the foot, putting himself in the solitary confinement component of his country’s political landscape, from where he finds no escape. Sadly, all this happens at the dawn of the 21^st century! Erdogan’s foreign policy mistakes are equally horrible: endless meddling in Syria’s internal affairs, including underground support and personally benefitting from ISIS illegal oil sales, taking on Russia: downing its fighter plane September last in a futile gimmick to drag NATO into the conflict, using the Turkmen Syrian minority to secure future territorial gains at the expense of Syria, stifling engulfment of the dwindling Turkish Cypriot minority while implanting backward devout Muslim settlers and other dubious foreign elements in occupied Cyprus.

Concluding our short analysis with a view to end the massacre of both Turks and Kurds: as I pointed out to my well-meaning Turkish intellectuals, friends and colleagues, at Istanbul’s Pugwash Conference in 2013: there can be no military solution of the Kurds’ inalienable right to self-determination. The more high-armoured troops the ruthless Erdogan-Davutoglu duo sent to the southeast to brutally suppress the rebellion, the more Kurdish-inspired terrorist attacks we are bound to see in the Turkish political and financial capitals. And this is to the severe detriment of the peace-loving average Turk in the street.

In our next article, we shall substantiate our analysis by revisiting the historical precedents – of the not too distant past – to Erdogan’s ruthlessness against the country’s minorities. Precedents that almost exterminated Asia Minor’s culturally rich Greek Orthodox minority.

Indeed, the Italian Minister of Interior encapsulated the unfortunate, if not desperate, situation in which Greece unwillingly finds itself.  Angelino Alfano, in very eloquent terms, resembled the EU to a building where the residents quarrel non-stop and everybody blames the poor janitor, the powerless gate keeper to the EU, that is to say, Greece. How true!

On the other hand, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister shouts out: ‘why should I subject my country to the burden of unruly refugees when I did not have a hand in all this’?

But is it so? Are the European leaders absolutely clear of any responsibility of the horrors taking place in the Middle East North Africa region today? It is high time, the Europeans, reflected on the root causes of the current MENA region crisis. The root causes are no other than the unilateral policies of NATO aimed at regime change in an entire raft of countries of the region in order to serve US interests. We are now experiencing the long term consequences of non-stop US interventions in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and now in Syria to which the EU-NATO either unwisely subscribed or was unwillingly dragged into. Thirteen years into the US-led ‘Coalition of the willing’ intervention in Iraq, the country is still shattered by bomb blasts that kill hundreds week in, week out. Five years since the NATO bombing campaign that unseated and assassinated Muammar Qaddafi: Libya is in deep tribal civil war, ungovernable and a hot bed of jihadists.

What is new with US allies in the region? The Saudis, who have an abominable human rights record, yet have been for decades the US military-industrial complex best client building up a formidable war machine, have been for a couple of months now stitching up, a new Arab NATO-style alliance, purportedly to ‘fight terrorist organizations’. For once, Riyadh has been aiding and abetting extremist Sunni organizations for five years in Syria in effort to topple largely secular Assad and radicalize the Sunni population of the country. In this alliance, the House of Saud, relies on the support of Turkey, the arch state terrorist, of the region, who has been murdering its own Kurdish population on and off for over thirty years, with a revived vengeance as of late. Ankara is seeking to neutralize the YPG, the Syrian Kurds civil protection units that have achieved success in pushing away Islamic State terrorists with the help of Russian airstrikes on ISIS targets.

In conclusion, what the MENA region needs to pacify is not another NATO-style unilateralist organization but consolidation of the Syrian political process after the agreed ceasefire. For obvious reasons ISIS, being an extremist terrorist organization is excluded. The ISIS threat should be eradicated. Russia, invited by the Syrian government, seems to be the only power that achieves, through its air campaign, real results in that respect. Ironically, the EU blindly follows the US, in imposing sanctions on Russia, failing to see where the threat lies and who its real ally is in securing a prosperous European future.