Sweden: swapping Kurds for NATO

by Evgeny Glebov

NATO has a lot to gain from Sweden's entry into the transatlantic military bloc. Sweden is one of the few Western countries that has maintained it own strong industrial manufacturing sector and its own military industry. Swedish weapons are modern and effective and are listed on the world market.
    Geography is also important: Sweden's accession would turn the Baltic and North Seas into NATO lakes. Russia still has small areas along the Baltic coast of the Kaliningrad enclave and the St Petersburg region. But even without conflict Swedish accession to NATO would still pose problems to Russian shipping. In fact the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian press, for example, are already openly discussing how to cause economic damage to Russian shipping in peacetime.
    And it's very easily done. Why do the Swedes and Finns need to raise their navies to NATO standards? The answer is to conduct coordination and general naval exercises with the Western alliance. Why?
    Well large sections of the sea will inevitably be closed for these exercises, and commercial vessels will have to bypass these sections, get stuck in straits, stand in line for pilotage, etc, etc. And note – all of this without any formal hostile activity.
    Covert hostile reconnaissance and sabotage penetration, including underwater, will also be facilitated.
    It is also important to note that the Swedes, who have been neutral for more than two centuries, are not simply abandoning it. They are going to immediately join the most aggressive military bloc on the planet. It is a very sad signal for the countries not only of the Non-Aligned Movement, but also for the "multi-vector" states in general.And what prevents such a pleasant prospect for NATO? The Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
    It stretches back to the Middle Ages. The story is long and complex, and even the presentation of that part of it that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century is a topic for several dissertations. So many troubles and claims have accumulated between the Turks and the Kurds that the end of this conflict is still not in sight. Both sides committed many atrocities in the struggle, all still bitterly recalled across the generations.
    Sweden’s involvement is through its long-standing Kurdish community. Kurdish refugees have been settling there since the 1960s, and now they have become an economically strong and politically influential part of Swedish society. Many ethnic Kurds are citizens of Sweden. They have their deputies in parliament. They enjoy authority and influence. And they willingly help their compatriots in Turkey and other countries. Money (and weapons, too), goods, shelter and propaganda.
    Of course, seeing the prospect of Sweden joining NATO, and the dependence of the final decision on Turkey's vote, the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not fail to take advantage of the opportunity.
    He set a condition – the Swedes must stop all activities of the Kurds hostile to the Turks in their country. It is clear, to begin with, that he overstated Turkey’s requirements as much as possible for bargaining purposes. But Erdoğan will be quite satisfied with simply reducing the political and economic role of the Kurdish community in Sweden, depriving it of representation in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, and deporting those who are listed as terrorists in Turkey (that is, all members of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) and the Kurdistan National Liberation Front). Many of them are Swedish citizens, by the way.
    That will however mean that the Swedes will have to restrict democracy, violate the rights of their citizens and hand over at least several hundred people to the tender mercies of the Turkish state.
    The Swedes will have to choose between the economic, military and geopolitical benefits of NATO or the demands of democracy and humanism. What will they do?
    You don't have to be Nostradamus to guess the answer. The Swedish government will, of course, try to soften the blow. It will “let” the Kurdish deputies lose their seats in the next election. It will adopt laws solely for the sake of “democracy” and “competition” to deprive the Kurdish community and the Kurdish refugees of the special advantages they current enjoy in Sweden.
    The most odious militants in Turkish eyes and those who were publicly proud of fighting the Turks will be expelled. Turkey will get all sorts of preferences and advantages in trade both with Sweden and with other NATO countries. And Greta Thunberg will be left to grieve about the Kurds…

The first step…

The Istanbul peace talks may not be the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine. But it may perhaps, as Churchill put it be “the end of the beginning”. The Zelensky regime has at last accepted the key Russian demand for permanent neutrality but they are still refusing to recognise the independence of the Donbas republics, Crimea’s decision to join the Russian Federation or equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.
    While the Western propaganda machine conjures up phantom victories for the Ukrainian army the reality on the field tells another story. The Ukrainians have lost control of the skies and their own coastline. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country to escape thje fighting. Their cities are besieged and their army and their fascist legions that they say do not exist have been unable to prevent the Russians from extending their control over vast amounts of Ukrainian territory.
    Dreams of direct NATO intervention and imperialist “no-fly” zones have faded along with hopes that the Western sanctions regime would provoke the Russian oligarchs into launching an anti-Putin coup. Sooner or later the Ukrainian oligarchs who put Zelensky into office will realise the hopelessness of their position. Then their only way out will be to accept what’s on the table.
    Talk of 15 years of negotiations and a new ‘relationship’ between the Donbas and Ukraine are too little too late. The Zelinsky clique and the fascist gangs sabotaged the Minsk agreements that could have ended the crisis peacefully. They believed that the imperialists would bail them out whatever happened. That they’ve certainly been proved wrong.
    Zelensky doesn’t know Putin’s war aims. Neither does Biden or anyone else in the West. But, if nothing else, the events of the past few weeks show that Putin isn’t bluffing.
    So we can safely assume that what Russia wants are simply what Russia stated when it sent in the troops to defend the Donbas republics in the first place. A denazified and permanently neutral Ukraine; recognition of Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation, the independence of the Donbas republics and equal rights for Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population.
    In Britain bourgeois politicians of all hues shed crocodile tears over Ukrainians fleeing the conflict while doing little to speed up their applications to seek refuge in this country. They deny the existence of the fascist militias in Ukraine and egg on the Ukrainians from the safety of their homes in the beautiful South to justify the anti-Russian sanctions regime that the Johnson government is only following to curry favour with the Biden administration.
    They can count, as always, on the support of Blairites and the fake lefters in and out of the Labour Party who pose as socialists but essentially argue that peace is only attainable on imperialist terms.
    This is the time for all communists to stand by the people of the Donbas in their fight for freedom. Now we should stand firm with all the anti-fascist forces of Ukraine fighting for an end to the Azov brigade and the other fascist gangs and a genuinely democratic Ukraine for all its peoples and at peace with all its neighbours.

Murder Most Foul

By Andy Brooks

Murder in Istanbul: Jamal Khashoggi, Donald Trump & Saudi Arabia by Owen Wilson (2019). Gibson Square Books Ltd, London.

Paperback: 288pp; rrp £9.99, or £7.19 via Amazon; ISBN-10: 1783341653; ISBN-13: 978-1783341658.

Kindle: 288pp; £6.47; ASIN: B07WNSKHYM.

Last year a prominent Saudi journalist was murdered at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul by hitmen acting on orders from the Crown Prince of the oil-rich Arabian kingdom. According to the Turkish media Jamal Khashoggi was killed, chopped up in to 15 bits and packed into five suitcases for disposal and the consulate swept clean of evidence on 2^nd October 2018.

The gruesome record of Jamal Khashoggi’s last moments selectively supplied by Turkish intelligence has spun around the world shedding light on the true nature of the House of Saud that Khashoggi had served for over 30 years. But it left many questions unanswered. This isn’t a whodunit. Everyone knows who did it. The mystery is why?

This book goes some way to answering them. Written by Owen Wilson, a former Financial Times journalist who has now made a name for himself as a crime writer, Murder in Istanbul, draws on Turkish and Arab sources to give a blow by blow account of the events leading up to Khashoggi’s death last year.

Jamal Khashoggi was the most unlikely dissident. He was of Turkish descent. His grand-father, like many others, went to the desert kingdom to seek his fortune as a doctor in the service of the House of Saud in the 1920s. His uncle was the flamboyant Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. His cousin was Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in a car crash in 1997.

Jamal led a more modest life as a successful Saudi journalist who had close ties with the royal family and Saudi intelligence. He was a devout Muslim who supported the House of Saud and its long-standing alliance with US imperialism. But he fell out of favour when he publicly started to criticise foreign policies associated with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Donald Trump, and went into voluntary exile in the USA in 2017.

There he earned the wrath of the Saudi authorities by writing articles for the Washington Post that criticised the Crown Prince and called for reforms in the feudal Arab kingdom that went far beyond the cosmetic measures of allowing women to drive or go to sports stadiums that the kingdom had taken to appease liberal opinion in the West.

That, in itself, wouldn’t warrant death, even by the sordid standards of Saudi Arabia. There must have been a much more powerful reason to silence him. Perhaps he simply knew too much about the private lives of the princes. Or, as this book suggests, he was privy to Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions. His links with the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar – both loathed and feared by the Saudis – may have also sealed his fate.

Although Khashoggi knew he was at risk entering the consulate to get documents needed for his forthcoming marriage, in some way he believed he was safe from harm. Maybe the rumours that he was a CIA asset were true. Perhaps it was just his friendship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But if he believed he was protected he was clearly much mistaken.

You must judge for yourself. The author raises all these issues in an immensely readable book that goes far beyond the usual ‘true crime’ genre. It is essential reading for all students of contemporary Turkish and Arab politics, and it’s on sale at your local bookshop now.

Never Trust Imperialism

We’re told that Lord Palmerston was the first to say that the Britain had no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. Whether the famed Victorian imperialist was really the first to say it only concerns historians these days. It certainly reflects the thinking of the Renaissance princes that Machiavelli so admired and it probably goes back to Roman days. The days of the British Empire that spanned the world are long gone but Palmerston’s doctrine lives on in Washington, the beating heart of US imperialism.

The Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, once said that “you can never trust imperialism, not even for the least thing, absolutely nothing”. That was back in 1964. Sadly many leaders of the liberation movements that broke the chains of colonialism fell for the false promises of American ‘assistance’ and Western ‘aid’ that simply exchanged one form of colonial rule with another.

Some sold out to serve imperialism and line their own pockets at the same time. Those who refused to bend the knee were deposed like Sukarno of Indonesia or assassinated like Lumumba in the Congo. Genuine assistance came only from the Soviet Union, People’s China and the other people’s democracies, which has enabled some of the non-aligned forces that continue to rely on the masses for support to maintain their independence and socialist alignment.

This is a lesson that some people never seem to understand. Look at the Kurdish nationalist leaders who time and time again have put their trust in imperialism and their local lackeys, and refused to join hands with the progressive Arab movements in Iraq and Syria.

The Syrian popular-front government in Damascus accepted Kurdish autonomy in the north in 2012 whilst retaining control of the border crossings. Although relations with the central government began well, the Kurdish administration soon gravitated towards US imperialism. Their leaders foolishly believed that the Americans were their ‘only allies’ when Washington sent arms and military advisors to join them in the battle to drive ISIS out.

They decisively assisted the Americans in defeating ISIS. But now that they’ve served their purpose the Americans are moving out to make way for the Turks, who want to make northern Syria a buffer zone for their own auxiliaries.

The Turkish army originally moved into Syria to support the terror gangs fighting to overthrow the Assad government. Its secondary role was to create puppet militias of their own to contain the Syrian Kurdish drive for autonomy which, they feared, would provide a safe-haven for their compatriots fighting a guerrilla war in eastern Turkey.

Although the Turks and their lackeys proved powerless to halt the Syrian Arab Army that has driven the terrorists out of most of the country, they did succeed in driving a wedge between the eastern and western parts of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Syria. Now, faced with renewed armed resistance in Turkish Kurdistan, they want complete control of Syria’s border lands to crush the Kurds’ ‘Rojova’ zone and any dreams of autonomy or independence.

Once again those on the pseudo-left who loudly proclaimed their support for the Kurdish struggle when it seemed to assist the broader aims of US imperialism in Syria are predictably silent in the face of Turkish aggression that has clearly been okayed in Washington.

Communists must stand by all the Syrian Arabs and Kurds fighting Turkish aggression. Most of all we defend the legitimacy of the elected popular front government of Bashar al Assad and its right to seek assistance from its friends, such as Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. That assistance has helped the Syrian army’s victorious drive to crush the terrorists and restore democracy in Syria. And a Syria rid of terrorism will allow the people to again choose their own government and their own path in the future.

Professor Stone’s Turkish delight

by New Worker literature correspondent

Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone (first published 2010). Thames and Hudson: London, pp192. ISBN 10: 0500251754 ISBN 13: 9780500251751

The Ottoman Empire effectively lasted from the capture of Constantinople in 1453 until the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The same period in English history would have begun during the Wars of the Roses and ended almost with the first Labour Government; in other words, from Henry VI to Arthur Henderson. The book gives a number of reasons why the empire lasted this long.

But the history of the Turks long pre-dates the final days of the Byzantine empire. They were part of a number of tribal, nomadic groups that originated in Central Asia and at times held sway over the vast area between western Europe and China. This area, across which lay the trade routes that linked the Eurasian land mass, was highly lucrative. Many of these nomadic groups, which included the Mongols, Tartars and of course the Turks, captured these areas, adapted themselves to the customs of the region as well as establishing their own empires. These included the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan, the empire of Tamerlane the Great, the Indian Moghul Empire, as well as the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, and may even go back as far as the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

According to Professor Stone, a conservative Oxbridge don who now heads the Department of International Relations at a private university in Turkey, the Ottoman system of rule was less repressive than European feudalism. This may on the one hand provide a clue as to why the Ottoman Empire lasted so long whilst on the other it may provide a reason for its ultimate weakness.

It did not see social upheavals on a par with Western Europe, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Peasants War in Germany, the English Revolution in the 1640s and the French Revolution of 1789. Events like these are engines of social change and take societies forward.

The Ottoman Empire was to a large extent a military empire. It had a standing army based on elite units called janissaries whilst other European states were using conscripts and mercenaries.

It was able to make full use of artillery, long before many contemporary societies. For instance, military historians often talk about the role of the long-bow in the English victory at Agincourt in 1415; around the same time the Ottoman army besieged Constantinople using cannon.

As a result, it was able to control at its height an area from the Atlantic Ocean to India and at various times threatening the borders of Hungary and Austria. The Ottoman advance in the 16^th and 17th centuries could also be attributed to both the schism in the Christian world at the time as well as rivalries between European nations. Elizabeth I was keen to strengthen ties between England and the Turks as a counter balance to her rival Spain.

Many European Protestants actually saw Islam as no worse than Catholicism and, in some circumstances, even preferable to the rule of Rome. Whether Shakespeare’s {Othello} really was intended to celebrate the friendship between Elizabethan England and the Ottoman empire is a matter for debate. But in mentioning these points, Stone further demolishes the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington at the end the Cold War.

In his book, Stone shows an understanding of linguistics when he explains the origins of certain Turkish words that have passed into English such as tulip, which is a derivation of the word turban.

Obviously Stone concentrates on Turkish, which he says has more in common with Chinese or even Japanese. Meanwhile he also points out that because of the complexities of the German language, Kant is taught in English to students in Berlin.

Stone plots the gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire through the 17th and 18th Centuries. Arguably it only lasted for so long as a means of preserving the power balance in the region. Russia wanted to eat away its territories from the north whilst Austria–Hungary coveted the Balkans.

Britain and France were concerned about the encroaching power of Russia, and wanted to protect the trade routes and keep Russia out of the Mediterranean. As a result, they were willing to prop up the Ottoman empire that by the 19^th century was openly being called the Sick Man of Europe.

The last three chapters of the book cover the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in the First World War and the establishment of the Turkish Republic; which was proclaimed by Kemal Ataturk on 28^th October 1923. Unfortunately, this is where Stone’s view of Turkish history becomes problematic. He can arguably be described as a Turcophile, if there is such a thing. For instance, controversially he claims that the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did not go unpunished and there were a number of massacres of Muslins around the same time.

Although there may be some truth in this I do take issue with his defence of the present Turkish regime, though this is perhaps not surprising given Stone’s past admiration of Margaret Thatcher.

Today’s government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a combination of reactionary Islam, neo-liberalism and fascism. From reading the book I was able to deduce that the present regime had its origins in the government policies of the 1980s; the military coup of 1980 saw the army increasingly look to the Muslim clergy for support, whilst at the same time the government of Turkut Ozal carried out policies of neo-liberalism supported by the USA.

 In a recent tour of UK cities, the Morning Star journalist Steve Sweeney described instances of Kurdish civilians in eastern Turkey being burned alive in underground car parks whilst attempting to call foreign news agencies. Meanwhile the vile ultra-Blairite MP John Woodcock has been denounced as an apologist for Turkish war-crimes after he defended the actions of the reactionary regime as part of a supposed “fight against extremism”.