TURKPULSE No:137..........MARCH 15th, 2005
MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS – TURKEY/USA
The United States seems to be sincere in its utter surprise and annoyance about the surge of anti-American feelings among the Turkish people, and paradoxically the Turks are equally sincere in their failure to understand why. The latest example of these mutual misunderstandings was again a press-release from the American Embassy in Ankara last week and again the uncontrollable remark in surprise and annoyance of the Turkish people: “Again the same ambassador with the same bullying by the guilty.” The article below is an attempt to explain the Turkish side’s outlook and feelings in this tragic chain of misunderstandings between the two great nations with the hope that they will eventually come round to the point of speaking mutually understandable languages before it is too late.
Reputable Turkish daily Milliyet (9th) headlines in an inner page over four large columns: “Grave accusation from the United States – The American Embassy accuses the daily Yeni Safak of being in league with pro-Al Qaeda internet systems because it claimed that chemical weapons have been used in Iraq.”
How true is the American claim and how wise is stirring up war tragedies?
The dispatch reports that the Embassy issued a written statement a day before to rebut the claims of the Americans using chemical weapons and to draw attention to the point that this news in Yeni Safak of 6 March was only put forward worldwide by President Hugo Chaves of Venezuela, the Cuban news agency and Turkey along with China and Iran. The press release also categorically rebuts the claim that the American forces had used mustard gas, nerve gas or chemical weapons in Felluce and stresses that the Al Qaeda webpage, “Islammemo.cc” is the source of this news. The Embassy press release goes on:
“The news in question was later used by the pro-Jihad website ‘Jihad Unspun’, notorious for disseminating wrong and misleading news. This fabricated claim was later quoted by the Cuban news service ‘Prensa Latina’, as well as the newspapers in Turkey, China and Iran. All this chain of events shows how fabricated news can turn out to be of worldwide interest due to uncertainties.”
Whether or not the Americans used chemical weapons in Felluce or elsewhere in Iraq is hardly interesting for a journalist who is apparently not an expert of these gases used by the police at times and those described as chemical weapons. It is certain, however, that the Americans in Iraq did not use the same poisonous gases in Felluce as Saddam used in Halepje two decades ago, but will a journalist not quote an eyewitness if he hears from him that some harmful gases were used in a certain trouble spot? Only a few days ago, the western media was full of exaggerated news of the Turkish police using harmful gases against women in Istanbul just because a couple of Turkish policemen most probably bought off by certain agents pretended to be kicking someone fallen on the ground during an illegal demonstration? Close scrutiny of the relevant films shows that the policeman in question was pretending to kick the woman on the ground in passing rather than delivering a vicious kick to hurt her.
It was not only Yeni Safak and other anti-Americans named by the Embassy press release that denounced the American troops for the Felluce massacre, but also the western media and the American and British peoples themselves. It was Milliyet that first put forward the claim of poisonous gas utilization in Iraq in the upsurge of excitement of the Turkish people over the horrible tragedies of the Felluce events. Here are some quotes from Can Dundar’s article in Milliyet back on 25 November 2004:
“A prominent member of the Nazzal tribe, who owns half of Felluje, told me over the phone about the latest situation in the town that 1500 resistance fighters defended Felluce for three weeks against 15,000 fully equipped American soldiers… Nazzal said, ‘Now Felluce is like an earthquake disaster zone; 6000 buildings have been flattened to the ground; nearly 5000 civilians were killed; Mass Destruction Weapons were used. They fired chemical weapons, phosphorus bombs, nerve gases. They mostly killed women and children, they bombed our hospital. In tears a friend of mine buried, in the yard of his house, his child who died after a week of starvation. Human history has not seen such a massacre. They make announcements over loud speakers in the town to distribute food, and then they take hostage the people who turn up by shoving them into tanks. They attack the resistance forces by using them as shields…”
Furthermore, it was the western media that reported about the American forces using cluster bombs and other horrible weapons in Iraq. In the first year of the Iraq war, Turkish security authorities received a short e-mail saying that in the first hours of the morning the CNN and/or BBC World had reported from Baghdad that the depleted uranium shells used by the American forces in Iraq had begun to be telling on the American soldiers themselves. Hundreds of American soldiers were now suffering from cancer because all the Iraqi tanks and war materials had been diffusing radiation. The writer of the e-mail (who happens to be the writer of this article, Vedat Uras,) remarked, “I was very pleased to read in the press that we were getting scrapped war materials from Iraq for our defence industry as they refuse to supply the special steel needed for it. But I now worry if these people are secretly poisoning us with radiation from these scrapped tanks.”
Turkish security authorities do not acknowledge or answer the e-mail messages they receive from citizens who are not in their pay; so you cannot know what the result was. In this case, however, the result was not late arriving because Turkey did not only ban scrapped war material importation from Iraq but also dates and other goods. Hurriyet of 3 October 2003 reads:
“It is suspected that the dates imported very cheaply from Arab countries as the real Baghdad dates may contain uranium radiation. Oktay Demirkan, Secretary of the East Mediterranean Environment Associations, said that during the Iraq war the United States used depleted uranium shells and that the American authorities have confirmed it. Demirkan said, ‘Uranium shells have been used to pierce the armour of tanks and vehicles with severe heat. That is why these radioactive radiations have been dispersed throughout Iraq.’ Demirkan also said that they were suspecting the dates recently sold very cheaply in the market as Baghdad dates. ‘Date consumption has gone up due to Ramadan. The most sold dates in Turkey are those called Baghdad dates. We must make analyses of these dates,’ he said,” ends the Hurriyet dispatch 18 months ago.
The real problem is the US Disinformation Mechanism, nothing else
Last week’s American Embassy press release is a tangible example of the fact that Washington is now regarding Turkey, led by the ultra conservative Tayyip Erdogan Government, as bad as and as anti-American as President Hugo Chaves’s Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and China. And the Turkish people are rightly or wrongly blaming Ambassador Edelman for the deterioration of mutual relations. Only the other day Hurriyet columnist Yalcin Dogan was saying that no matter where Ambassador Edelman went he stirred up trouble like this, and that the Yeni Safak newspaper writers in question were not even journalists.
Actually the problem in Turkish-American relations goes much deeper than Ambassador Edelman and concerns a few decades of mistakes in American diplomacy’s main instrument in foreign policy management, the Disinformation Mechanism and its byproducts in Turkey.
To cut a long story short, the subject of the latest American Embassy press release Yeni Safak reporters, columnists and some other newspaper journalists whom Yalcin Dogan says “They are not journalists” are certainly late comers to journalism. One of them, Serdar Kuru, recently delivered one of his usual broadsides on the United States and remarked just in passing that “The American Pharoah Bush” had used chemical weapons in Iraq, namely Felluje.
Disregarding this too colloquial, even blunt style of writing which is quite common in Anglo-American tabloid journalism, Serdar Kuru and his friends are indeed fulfilling a superb service in Turkish journalism as perfect researchers of “open intelligence”.
Most probably there is a hidden hand of the Turkish Counter Disinformation Service that makes Yalcin Dogan say, “They are not journalists,” but they are certainly filling a big vacuum in the Turkish media with amazingly accurate background information carefully picked among the “open intelligence sources”, and at least 95% of intelligence is open today anyway. If the Turkish press is not making the most of this correct background information, some of which has not been heard by most people, the fault is not with Kuru and his friends, but with the terrible clutches of the American Disinformation Mechanism of the Turkish media.
For the last three decades or so Pulse has been campaigning against disinformation, a hideous invention of the CIA, and it is most gratifying to observe now that these strenuous efforts within Pulse’s modest resources are coming to fruition. Even though the target of these efforts is never to harm Turkish-American relations, it is certainly delivering considerable blows to mutual relations, to the point that Washington has seriously begun to examine the reasons for this upsurge of anti-Americanism in Turkey now.
The Turkey part of the latest world human rights report of the State Department and certain indications such as the above press release are proof of the fact that Washington is not being properly briefed or ‘fed” with correct assessments from their Embassy in Ankara, but some more serious American sources, such as a long NY Times dispatch dated 13 December 2004, show that they are making more realistic and accurate assessments of the harm caused by American disinformation activities in Turkey and elsewhere.
Internet journalism taught to Turkey by American Intelligence
Counter disinformation activities started in self-defence in Turkey when a bombardment of revelations about MIT, the Turkish Intelligence Organisation, began to be showered from Washington. It concerned the retirement of a former MIT chief, Mehmet Eymur with an American wife, a few years ago during the service period of Under Secretary of MIT, Atasagun. Actually Eymur was first pensioned off in 1987 when his top secret report full of gossip about Turkish political leaders leaked to the press, but he was reinstated to his position in 1994 shortly after Tansu Ciller became prime minister with rumours that she also had CIA links. After his second retirement, Mehmet Eymur went to the United States and has since been disseminating secret information about Turkey and MIT, allegedly along with the heavily distorted ones in his webpage, “Atin”, with generous advertisements from American companies.
Mehmet Barlas, a well known journalist accused to be a prominent member of the American Disinformation Mechanism, wrote in his column in Yeni Safak on 20 June 2001, “It was Mehmet Eymur who opened the vast vistas of internet journalism or internet news dissemination in Turkey. Thus a genuine ‘alternative media’ appeared. People began to read from ‘atin.org” the news not carried, but censored by the cartel or monopoly media. Turkey’s journalists who wanted to remain independent or free rushed into the path opened by Mehmet Eymur. Now there is a genuine diversity in this field.”
This is a short background behind the publications which the American Embassy was complaining about last week. Naturally this “open intelligence” is proving to be telling on American interests in Turkey, not because it carries the lies of Al Qaeda terrorists as the American press release attempts to claim, but because of the open intelligence knife which used to cut only the Turkish side until recently and has now become a double edged knife hurting also the Americans as soon as the cartel journalism is added with alternatives.
Previously, there was only the tiny Pulse newsprint bulletin in this field, persistently reporting the truth about Turkey and Turkish-American relations against the enormous loud speakers of the US dominated “cartel journalism” and today there is a younger generation reflecting the truth with a more colloquial style. The sooner the more sober American sources appreciate these realities and do something about their disinformation in Turkey the better for mutual relations. Otherwise, reputable American media such as the New York Times, the Washington Times and the others will continue to complain that “The old ally Turkey has recently won a gold medal in the global anti-Americanism race”, a quote from Washington Times reporter Arnaud de Borchgrave, who unrealistically draws a parallel between Usame Bin Laden and the Serdar Kuru team’s “open intelligence” products. As for Pulse, is it too much of an optimism to dissociate itself from all that with its 42 years of background under the eyes of the foreign community of Turkey with its modest, indeed tiny, resources as it has doggedly rejected to be in anyone’s pay in its journalistic career? uras@ada.net.tr – March 15th, 2005