Where are the strong voices calling for Due Process in NATO Turkey?

Where are the strong voices from Western capitals calling for restraint and moderation in Turkey? Where are the major literary figures and actors denouncing what look very like gross violations of the rule of law and due process, threatening free expression? Why isn’t opposing repression in Turkey a fashionable cause?  It’s not that far away, and a lot of us know it quite well.

What is happening there is distressing and frightening, and not permissible in any nation considered to be part of the civilised world.  How is it possible, so soon after a failed putsch (conducted, I might add, with amazing incompetence), for the authorities to possess and act on such long lists of suspects?  

 

Whatever the Saturday coup was, fake or real or a mixture of the two, what we are seeing now is a genuine seizure of absolute power.

 

What protections do these suspects have? Where are the ‘Human Rights’ we are always making such a  fuss about in other places whose governments we are not so scared of? People even talk as if it is true that ‘democracy’ and ‘the ‘rule of law’ have been *saved* in Turkey by the defeat of the putsch. Have they? Neither looks very healthy to me just now. How long before a snap election, its polling stations patrolled by chanting angry Islamist mobs, and its campaign reported on by a slavish pro-Erdogan media, gives Mr Erdogan the super-majority he needs to become Executive President, the post he has always longed for?

I  am appalled when I see the TV scenes of alleged coup plotters being rounded up in Turkey. Cowering and obviously terrified, grown men , with their hands bound , forced to bow their heads, stripped of their clothes, are publicly humiliated and chased about by stone-faced goons. Many of them are helpless teenage conscript soldiers caught between two grindstones, utterly unaware of the forces which are crushing them, or of why they are now facing years of misery.  None of these people has been tried or convicted of anything. It is a favourite method of oppressors to make their captives hurry pointlessly between long spells of misery confined in dungeons,  when hurry is the last thing they need to do in the ghastly lives that now lie ahead of them, where there will be plenty of time, far too much time.

This treatment is to emphasise their powerlessness to them. Worse is to come. We are confidently assured that those now in prison will soon implicate many more, and somehow I do not doubt this. I am sure they will have their memories jogged by their interrogators. I think Turkey’s President Erdogan means what he says when he speaks of imposing the death penalty on his foes.  

 

Readers here will know that I support the death penalty for murder after due process. But I am , perhaps because of this, utterly appalled by its use as a political weapon in a country where the phrase ‘independent judiciary’ is now a sick joke. But the ones who are not executed may come to envy the ones who have been, if I have the measure of Mr Erdogan’s ruthless, angry, militant heart.

Possibly not since the crushing of the Hungarian rising in 1956, with its tortures and betrayals and dreadful prisons, has real totalitarian repression come so close to civilised Europe.  These things are happening in a NATO country, our supposed good friend  and ally in the cause of freedom, until recently a candidate for EU membership, wooed by Western leaders a favourite holiday destination for many Europeans.

And yet these horrors  (and this, I stress, is only what we are allowed and meant to see)  go on as a sort of background noise, as Europe and the USA get on with their normal summers. Worse, there is a sort of acceptance, in much of the media and among many politicians,  of the official version of events. I shall come to that.

I think we should be far more alarmed. And I think we should say more. I think we should have said more long ago, and I tried to ring the alarm bell in my own writing, protesting at the complacency of so much of the Western media and political establishment about Mr Erdogan (see the previous posting in which my despatches from Turkey in 2005 and 2010 are reproduced) . We might have given heart to the democratic and lawful opposition in Turkey which could have prevented his rise, and to Turkey’s once-free media, now flattened by state pressure into compliance and servile behaviour. But we called him ‘mildly Islamist’ and praised his economic policies and generally ignored his increasingly intolerant and repressive behaviour, and his obvious ambitions to become an autocrat. Instead we tipped bile over Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a more convenient target but not in the Erdogan league for intolerance.

Those who know a little European history might be tempted to think of two events – the Reichstag Fire in Berlin in 1933 and the murder of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad in 1934.

Both of these were classic pretexts for repression, in which a crisis (in one case a real one, in the other probably not) was put to very good use by autocrats determined to cement and strengthen their positions. The Reichstag Fire, it is now generally thought,  was a genuine event, the work of a lone madman, seized on as a reason for the crushing of the remaining independent political forces in Germany. Kirov’s death was probably arranged by Joseph Stalin, who feared Kirov’s popularity in the USSR’s second city, and so got rid of a rival while using his death as the excuse for a terrible purge of all whom he feared or disliked.

We can only guess about the Turkish coup attempt. It is remarkably convenient for Mr Erdogan.  As I wrote some years ago, Mr Erdogan more or less invented a previous plot against himself, the supposed ‘Ergenekon’ conspiracy, for which there was never any real evidence but which landed many of his enemies in prison.

 

But then again the remaining Kemalists in Turkey, guardians of the secular deep state, have used the military coup as a weapon in the past, and the main strongholds of Kemalists are still in the military. Secular Kemalists and Islamist Gulenists (who are very much involved in the round-up)  have little in common save a distrust of Mr Erdogan, so collaboration between the two is questionable and would have been hard to achieve.   Speculation is interesting but fruitless.

We shall probably never know, as Turkey lacks much in the way of a truly free press nowadays. But a coup which seizes the bridges over the Bosphorus, a sort of 19^th-century action (they might as well have seized the post office, the telegraph bureau, and the railway stations) , but fails to get full control of airspace and airwaves, and the internet,  is a very poorly-prepared seizure of power.

It is the dumbest coup since the drunken putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in August 1991, for which I was present and which I have long suspected of not having been quite all it seemed to be (but whose culprits mostly escaped without serious penalties).

 

Yes, people died in the course of last weekend’s attempted Turkish takeover, and this is a terrible thing. But one needs to know far more about how they died and who gave the relevant orders before dragging thousands of people into prison cells in a frenzy of vengeance.

‘Due Process’ isn’t a catchy slogan. But it is a fine and important thing, and we all ought to be calling for it, as well as warning against dangerous concentrations of unseparated powers in one pair of hands.

 

Turkey Part One - what I have said in the past

Turkey part one. Here is a reminder of what I have written in the past, as a preliminary to some thoughts about the events of this week :

In the summer of 2005 I read a brilliant, thoughtful, illuminating and potent despatch from Turkey (in the FT’s excellent Saturday magazine)  by the Financial Times’s then correspondent in Istanbul, Vincent Boland. I realised as I read it that Turkey was one of the great developing crises of our time, and that Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a person about whom the world should know more.

I prefer cold northern landscapes to sunny ones. At that time the closest I had ever been to Turkey was when I attended my late brother's wedding in Cyprus, and slipped across for a day into the (then very beautiful) Turkish-occupied and governed North of Cyprus in the early 1980s, an unresolved crisis about which I have always had very mixed feelings. In those days you could cross for a few short hours through a strange no-man’s-land in Nicosia, part of which had remained utterly untouched by human hand since the war in 1974. I believe things are easier now.

I contacted Mr Boland and threw myself on his mercy. He gave me some valuable advice on how to proceed, and I went (for the first time in my life) to Turkey:

This October 2005 dispatch was the result:

‘Imagine Britain had a direct land frontier with Iran, Iraq and Syria – razor wire, watchtowers and all. Now stop imagining and start worrying.

If our political elite have their way, this is exactly what will happen within the next 20 years.

They plan a vast, borderless European Union stretching from the Atlantic to the Caucasus Mountains, crucially including both Turkey and us. If this is a good idea, it is hard to see why.

Unofficial accounts say that 2,000 illegal immigrants slip through this frontier each night even now. If it were a direct route to European prosperity, with Afghanistan not far over the Eastern horizon, these numbers might increase. And what use is a fence? Spain's bloody struggles to keep migrants out of its enclaves in Morocco are a warning that wire is a poor barrier against the desperate.

And then there is the question of just how much we want to share with Turkey. Trade? Why not? But political power and economic decision-making, not to mention nationality and rights of residence? These are more tricky questions.

Now, Turkey is a fine and impressive country, despite having a military coup every ten years and an economic catastrophe roughly every three years since 1950. If you compare her with her neighbours, she is an island of progress, prosperity, order and peace in a region of lawless squalor and menace.

One prime minister, Turgut Ozal, once described his fatherland as 'the only bastion of stability between the Adriatic and the Great Wall of China'. Not long afterwards a far from stable nationalist extremist tried to assassinate the portly Ozal, but luckily managed only to shoot him in the thumb.

It is impossible not to be impressed with the heroic creation of a modern, serious nation here by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose martial spirit continues to rule this country from beyond the grave, a method of post-funeral government shared only by North Korea and Azerbaijan – but done rather better here.

Ataturk died in 1938, but his colossal, Stalinesque tomb dominates the capital, Ankara, and his wry, clever, whisky-drinker's face looks down from every wall. Schoolchildren hymn his praises each morning in a semireligious rite held before his graven image. Though dead, he remains the most important person in the country, and why not?

He is the only man in modern times to have overpowered Islam in a Muslim nation by lawful methods, and it is thanks to him that his country is even being considered for EU membership. Turks could be Muslims, he decided, but they could not be governed from the mosque.

But he went further. He worked out how Europe and America had come to dominate the world, and copied everything he could. The recipe succeeded.

Women were emancipated, European legal codes and school systems adopted, the Western alphabet introduced. A unique hybrid state resulted that is neither Western nor Eastern, nor a bridge between the two.

But it functions, in a way its Muslim and Arab neighbours would envy if they had the sense.

The secret masters of Turkey's mysterious state, the generals and admirals, act in his spirit when from time to time they send the tanks into the streets and hang a few politicians, usually to the joy and relief of the people, sick of corruption, thriftlessness and irresponsibility.

They have not done this for a while, preferring a so-called 'post-modern coup' the last time they overthrew an Islamist government in 1997. This involved hardly any tanks but a lot of power. But it would not be wise to assume they will never do it again. I suspect many Turks are secretly glad this is possible.

Which is why although Turkey currently has another Islamist government, it is one that does not dare to do what everyone suspects it would really like to do, and abolish the important symbolic laws that stop women wearing the veil in schools, universities and state buildings.

Nor can it abolish laws that discourage the young from attending Islamic schools.

Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a fervent Muslim who once went to jail for reciting a militant poem including the lines 'our minarets are our bayonets'. He also gave up a promising football career because he refused to remove an Islamic beard, as required by the clean-shaven team.

But since winning an election in 2002, the now beardless Erdogan rules with cunning and luck and continues to steer Turkey towards an apparently Western destiny, with the enthusiastic support of George W.Bush, who seems to think Turkish membership of the EU will persuade the world's Muslims that the West does not despise them.

Erdogan's wife always wears a headscarf and is not allowed to enter the president's residence in Ankara, but she has been welcomed in the White House in Washington, home of the 'War Against Terror' which otherwise views militant Islam pretty much as a plot against America.

If you want paradoxes, Turkey has plenty more of them. Enver Basyurt is a modern young man who writes sympathetically about Islam in several publications, including one called Aksiyon which he edits from super-cool modern offices near Istanbul airport.

When we meet, he is fasting because it is Ramadan. He has not eaten since 5.30am and cannot touch so much as a glass of water until 6.30 that same evening. Millions of other Turks, outwardly Western in habits and appearance, are doing exactly the same and the whole country, very movingly, sighs with relief when the moment comes to break the fast at sunset.

Basyurt rejects what he sees as Western excuses for keeping Turkey out of the EU. 'The real reason is that some of the people of Europe think Turkey is a Muslim country and culturally different,' he says.

When I suggest there is some truth in this, and that Islam everywhere is becoming more vigorous and assertive, he makes light of the headscarf issue, saying that few Turks want Sharia law or an Islamic republic. And he attributes the apparent rise in Muslim fervour in Turkey's cities to the recent arrival of migrants from the remote, pious villages of Anatolia.

This is true enough. Istanbul, Turkey's mega-city on the Bosporus, may be physically modern with clogged freeways, cashpoint machines that cough up three currencies, concrete architecture and the other signs of the 21st Century. But it contains suburbs where the Muslim Middle Ages still continue.

In these hardcore headscarf precincts, many women are shrouded in the black robes of Arabia. In the Umraniye district, a recent survey revealed that 44 per cent of women needed the permission of a male relative to leave their homes in daylight, and 96 per cent needed that permission to go out after dark.

The horrible practice of ' honour killings' of women who offend their families was until recently treated leniently by the law. A recent case highlights the problems Turkey has in handling the contest between law and attitudes. A young woman, Guldunya Toren, escaped from her home in the far south-east after she was caught having an extramarital affair.

Her brothers pursued her to Istanbul and shot her. When they learned from the television news that she was not dead, they shouldered their way into her hospital ward and finished her off as she lay in bed. One of the brothers has been imprisoned for life and another given a long jail term. But in the area they come from, 38 per cent still believe these killings are right.

The fear is many such murders will still be passed off as 'accidents’ or 'suicides' and escape the law.

Wherever this is in time or space, it is not in modern Europe, nor is there any reason to think it is moving in that direction. While people such as Enver Basyurt rightly deny Turkey is turning into Iran, I am far from convinced it is becoming some sort of secular Islamic Germany either.

Those who think it is are currently having to cope with the prosecution of the much admired novelist Orhan Pamuk for daring to say what everybody knows, that there was an official massacre of Armenians by the Turkish state during the First World War. Pamuk, who favours EU membership, is embarrassed that the move against him has damaged a cause he approves of, and nervously declined to talk to me about it.

But the respected columnist Fehmi Koru, who writes for the influential New Dawn daily newspaper, was optimistic. A few years ago he was unsuccessfully prosecuted under Turkey's restrictive speech laws, in a curious but typical court case. He had argued Muslims had a right to explain the 1999 earthquake as Allah's wrath against a sinful Turkey. 'I was acquitted. I believe Pamuk will be acquitted too.' Several people told me that Pamuk's prosecution was obviously embarrassing for the government- but this proved only that the prosecutors were truly independent of the state.

I thought this was a good try, but missed the point that there should not be laws on the books that allowed people to be arrested for their opinions. Mind you, I felt nervous making this case.

As a citizen of the Blair state, I do not have much to boast about. Perhaps Britain is converging with Turkey rather than the other way round. There was some evidence of convergence when I stopped off in the small village of Bugduz on the way to Ankara. Many of the picturesque older houses were crumbling, the outhouses were still of grey mud brick, the few womenfolk in evidence were in traditional dress that must have been unchanged for centuries.

At the teahouse, deserted because of Ramadan, owner Recai Yurek spoke of the recent foundation of a new Koranic school – just the sort of thing the secular state dreads. Yet the village also contained a smart new state school, several expensive new concrete buildings and a costly, well maintained mosque of some size.

Not far away, new industrial estates rear out of the dry, brown landscape of central Anatolia. On the approaches to Ankara itself, I had been warned to expect large shanty towns on either side of the motorway at a place called Yeshil Tepe. But they were gone. Perhaps stung by Press jeers that such sights will not speed EU entry, the government has just bought out the residents and the crammed, insanitary Turkish Soweto has been flattened, leaving acres of rubble and glass and a derelict mosque.

There is almost always a mosque nearby, staffed by a government paid Imam who does what he is told. The Istanbul suburbs are packed with them, in case anyone was in any doubt this is not a European city. But in Ataturk's Ankara they have been almost completely banished from the city centre, where you can look out of a high window across the concrete and imagine yourself in one of the duller towns of Germany, perhaps one rather thoroughly replanned by the RAF.

Nowadays, the domes and the minarets are quietly creeping closer and the call to prayer can be heard clearly at Ataturk's Mausoleum, where the deceased Great Leader can hardly be pleased at the resurgence of Islam as he slumbers in his marble sarcophagus.

I would guess he is also far from pleased about the idea of EU membership. When he rallied his beaten nation after the First World War it was sovereignty he wanted most of all. And if Turkey bends the knee to the Brussels power, it will become a vassal state like all the rest of us. Yet there are hardly any Euro-sceptics here.

One of the very few is Professor Hasan Unal of Bilkent University, an international relations expert. 'I am a Euro-sceptic. I don't see the Turkish membership proposal as practical. It will probably take 20 years of protracted and acrimonious negotiations, and in the end what we will get is membership that is no longer beneficial anyway.' He points out that the EU honeypot is empty. The new East European members have already found this out. The great handouts given to Spain, Italy and Portugal are over. The vaunted foreign investment, which advocates always claim as a benefit, is nowadays heading to China, where the returns are far better than under the EU's tiresome regulations.

In any case, he thinks the EU does not want a huge new nation of 90million – Turkey's likely population by the time she joins. When talks first started in 1963, incredibly, Turkey had only 27million people. No other European nation is growing like this, and Germany and France don't need a rival this big.

'I think the EU should say it's not on soon, instead of coming up with all these unconvincing excuses,' says the professor. His scepticism gets him into trouble here, a sort of trouble that seems strangely familiar. 'There's an "EU terror" in the Turkish media,' he says. 'If you say this sort of thing you are labelled as "anti-European". Yet my lifestyle is European and I am married to a Greek Orthodox Christian.' If Turkey's establishment has any sense, it will listen to the lone Euro-sceptic professor. And so will we. There are many reasons to be wary of the sprawling superstate that would make us neighbours with a political earthquake zone.

Turkey has little to gain by being the remotest and poorest bastion of the prosperous world.

And with cold east winds starting to blow from China, it is hard to see why any nation will be safer and warmer in some bureaucratic club than it will be on its own. It is those with energy, initiative, adaptability and a strong sense of their uniqueness that may well have the best chance of survival and happiness. That counts for Turkey as well as for us. It is not unfriendly to say so.

In August 2010 I returned and wrote this despatch

The disturbing picture of growing repression at the heart of 'Eurabia'

 Down a glum, dark back alley in Istanbul, I found a sinister sight. In a workshop two stern and bearded men were bent over sheets and patches of very black cloth, their sewing-machines whirring urgently.

I was plainly unwelcome and they objected to the very idea of being photographed. I quickly saw why. They were making dark robes and masks for women to wear. They looked to me as if they longed for the day when every woman in sight was clad in their workmanship.

They knew the women would wear them, because one day, not far off, they would have to. These robes would be, literally, a 'must-have' for the women of Turkey.

Those who think of Turkey as a relaxed holiday destination, or as a Westernised Nato member more or less 'on our side' need to revise their view.

And that very much includes our Prime Minister, David Cameron, who last week joined in the fashionable chorus urging Turkish membership of the European Union. Mr Cameron plainly hasn't been properly briefed.

Leave aside the fact that such a step would allow millions of Turks to live and work in Britain, and give us - as EU members - a common border with Syria and Iraq. Mr Cameron really ought to realise that the new Islamist Turkey he so ignorantly praises is much more interested in making friends with Iran than it is in joining the EU. And it is becoming less free and less democratic by the day.

I would say there is a strong chance that we will soon lose Turkey to the Islamic world, much as we lost Iran to the ayatollahs 30 years ago. And there is not much we can do about it - least of all the daft scheme to include this nation in the EU.

Panic-mongering? Well, perhaps. But I would rather monger a bit of panic now than ignore what I saw.

I will come in a moment to the bizarre alleged plot against the Turkish state, which has swept dozens of government opponents into prison in dawn raids.

But first let us take a stroll round the Istanbul district of Fatih. It is noon, and the rival calls to prayer of two mosques are wavering in the baking, humid air.

Not far away is a gigantic Palestinian flag draped over the side of a building. Nearly opposite, a group of pale, intense men in turbans loiter on a street corner whispering into their mobile phones. Where am I? The flag suggests Gaza. The whispering men bring to mind Peshawar or some other Taliban zone.

Or am I in Saudi Arabia? For round the corner comes a phalanx of veiled women, under the vigilant eyes of a bossy man in a prayer cap. There are several grades of these women. First there are the wholly shrouded, their downcast eyes glimpsed through a slot, imprisoned in shapelessness. Most disturbing for me - because I have been to Iran - are those in chadors exactly like those commanded by the ayatollahs in Tehran. There is something particularly harsh about the inverted triangle through which their pale and sombre faces peer.

With them come the women they call 'Tight-heads' - 'Sikmabash' in Turkish. These are a new feature of Istanbul since I was last here a few years ago, in evidence all over this enormous city.

They are mostly young and often attractive. But they have swathed their heads tightly in voluminous, brightly coloured scarves. Their lower limbs are covered by long dresses or trousers, and over this, in the oppressive heat, they wear thin raincoats. Such outfits are available in a successful chain of shops called Tekbir, which means 'God is great'.

Covering up the female sex is big business here now. The owner of an independent Islamic clothes shop complains to me that trade isn't as good as it used to be because he now faces so much competition. He notes that more and more of his clients are young women, rather than conservative rural grandmas.

The Tight-heads are startlingly similar to their Iranian sisters a few hundred miles to the east, who wear a near-identical uniform. Like them, they look as if they are making a point. But there is one crucial difference. The point they are making is the opposite one. The Iranian women mock the headscarf as they wear it, pushed as far back as possible on the head, revealing as much bleached-blonde, teased hair as the piety police will allow.

Their message is: 'The law can make me wear this, but it cannot make me look as if I want to.' The young Turks, by contrast, are saying: 'This is how I want to look, even if the law says I cannot.' For the scarf is banned by law in many universities and in government offices, and they view this ban as a challenge they must defy.

There is no simpler way of making the point that, while Iran is a secular country with a Muslim government, Turkey is a Muslim country with a secular government.

Or so it was. Now Turkey is in the midst of a revolution. In a fashionable waterfront cafe looking across the Bosphorus towards Asia, I spotted two young women sharing milkshakes  -  one veiled, the other displaying her curly hair and attired in barely-there T-shirt and jeans. I asked them if they didn't find each other's garb awkward. No, they didn't. The swathed one explained that she had decided, from religious devotion, to wear a scarf aged 15. Now 19, she had to go to university in North Cyprus, because most mainland universities banned the veil.

Her companion said she thought it quite possible that, in a few years, she too would be covered from head to toe. My guess is that she will be  -  the growing numbers of covered women across the Middle East place pressure on others to do the same.

But these are just symptoms. A deeper change is under way. Deliberately unremarked by Western commentators for some years, Turkey has a fiercely Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even now, Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, still bleats about how Turkey should be allowed to join the EU. And establishment commentators, encouraged by liberal Turkish intellectuals, absurdly continue to insist that Erdogan is in some way 'moderate'.

How odd. Back in the Nineties, this supposed moderate was railing that: 'The Muslim world is waiting for Turkey to rise up. We will rise up! With Allah's permission, the rebellion will start.' Erdogan was even imprisoned for quoting a fervent Islamist poem that declared: 'The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...'

Now he is Prime Minister, he has not stopped thinking this. He simply knows better than to blurt it out.

Fashionable liberals in the West prefer to worry about the sinister Deep State, or Derin Devlet, which they claim really governs Turkey through a combination of military power and thuggery. And they have a point, though not as much of one as they used to.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the dictatorial-founder of modern Turkey, was almost as ruthless as Stalin, using military and police power in the Twenties to sweep away the fez, the turban and the veil, impose Western script and emancipate women. His inheritors are the Turkish army, who have emerged from their barracks four times since the Second World War to stage a putsch, hang a few politicians and drive the mullahs back into their mosques. Even further out of sight, and based on a Cold War organisation designed to perform acts of resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover, are profoundly secret networks of government agents committed to safeguard Ataturk's secular order.

They have made some unsavoury allies. Their existence gives credence to the genuinely creepy Ergenekon trials, aimed at a misty and possibly non-existent secret network of conspirators. The plotters are supposed to have sought to foment a fifth military coup. Personally, I think it a swirling tub of fantasy. In a brilliant demolition job (Ergenekon: Between Fact And Fiction: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation), Turkish expert Gareth Jenkins has gone through more than 4,000 pages of indictments. And he accepts some wrongdoing has been uncovered.

But he concludes: 'The majority of the accused...appear to be guilty of nothing more than holding strong secularist and ultranationalist views.'

As the case wears on, Turkey slips decisively towards the more alarming end of the Islamic spectrum. Sudan's sinister president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been an honoured guest  -  despite being indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Erdogan defended the visit by saying: 'It's not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide.'

Equally welcome has been the unlovely Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tainted by the repression of democratic protesters and by his simpering Holocaust denial. No wonder he is welcome. Iranian gas heats the homes in Turkey's eastern provinces.

And the real significance of the recent clashes off the Israeli coast was missed in the West. Gaza and its problems were not the point. Turkey's new Islamic ruling class was glad of the pretext to downgrade its alliance with Israel. This link, dating back to Cold War days, got in the way of Erdogan's plans to snuggle up to Syria, Israel's bitterest enemy.

Were Turkey only shifting her foreign policy from West to East, that would be startling enough. Remember Turkey is a long-standing Nato member with a huge American airbase on its territory. Thanks to its position, its religion, its military strength, its language and its former imperial rule over this region, it has a powerful influence in the Middle East and in the new oil and gas states of Central Asia. Remember, too, that Turkey's attitude will be crucial to the future of post-war Iraq, with which it has a border.

But things are changing, and growing darker, at home as well. And this is thanks to the Ergenekon affair. Foes of the Islamist government are arrested in surprise dawn raids. One of those scooped up in the arrest net was a 73-year-old woman, head of an educational charity, in the final stages of cancer. Many of the 200-odd accused have been held for years on vague charges. But their arrests fuel the government's claim that it is threatened by a vast alleged conspiracy to bring it down. This supposedly implicates everyone from army officers to journalists.

Above all, the charges are aimed at the army, the force that has kept the mullahs in check, and incidentally kept the women unveiled, in Turkey for the past 90 years.

The supposed plot has now become so enormous that a special courthouse has been built in the suburbs of Istanbul to handle the hearings.

***** Professor of *** at *** University, Istanbul, says: 'Erdogan has authoritarian proclivities. He will take journalists to court if he does not like what they write about him. He scolds them for writing critical things. He asks editors, "Why don't you come and tell us about the problem in private before printing it?" He's a potential autocrat who likes to engage in acts of personal generosity, like an old-fashioned monarch.'

But such personal government cuts in more than one direction. If Erdogan disagrees with members of the public he can treat them harshly too. Prof ***  says: 'A farmer came to him about some grievance and said, "My mother is weeping." Erdogan replied, "Take your mother and get out of here!" '

Under Turkey's proportional representation voting system, Erdogan can - and does - choose all his candidates. Critics and opponents can be easily got rid of. His power is about to increase if he wins a planned constitutional referendum set for September 12. If voters want increased 'human rights' they will also have to increase Erdogan's power to appoint judges and other key officials.

Not everyone agrees with the professor. On the far, Asian side of the Bosphorus, I get a different point of view from Ahmet Altan, a columnist and breaker of stories on the dissident newspaper Taraf (the name translates roughly as Partisan). I have to pass through elaborate security to find his paper's office. Altan is without doubt a brave journalist, who has got into trouble by challenging the orthodoxy of oldfashioned nationalism.

And he believes there is a profound, reactionary plot against Turkish democracy, and that the Deep State is out of control.

'Ergenekon is a most serious conspiracy,' he says. 'Their objective is chaos, to keep the Kurdish war going, to topple the government and keep the way open for a coup d'etat, to keep the army in politics and to keep the civilian government weak.'

He is also icily critical of European snobbery towards his country, saying: 'Europeans are mistaken about Turkey. They tried to keep Turkey always at the door, but did not let Turkey in.'

But, in a blast of worrying prophecy, he mocks the weakness of modern Europe, compared with China and America, and predicts that one day Europe will need the Middle East. This is a curious echo of warnings from European conservatives that a new continent called 'Eurabia' is taking shape around the shores of the Mediterranean, which will in the end mean the Islamisation of northern Europe.

He says nobody can really understand-Turkey until he has seen the new Anatolia, the bustling economic miracle, based on a new Islamic middle class, which is the powerbase of Erdogan's AK (Justice and Development) Party. And he warns me against Westernised Istanbul intellectuals who, he says, will mislead me with scare stories.

Perhaps so. One such intellectual is so nervous about Erdogan's thin skin that he asks me not to name him. Some of his allegations against the government - of corruption and Judophobia  -  are so alarming that I can only hint at them here.

And he flatly contradicts Ahmet Altan about Ergenekon, saying: 'All the government is trying to do is to humiliate and intimidate the army, and make sure it is powerless to interfere in politics in future. This coup attempt is supposed to have been hatched years ago, and never took place  -  because it had no support in the army. Among all these dozens of people in the dock there is not one who has the power or the prestige to lead a putsch. They're just nonentities. The documents in the case come from nowhere. '

Even more emphatic is an impressive retired general, ***** , a quiet professional who certainly can't be dismissed as a Westernised intellectual. He told me: 'Ergenekon is a tool to intimidate democratic opponents. I cannot call Erdogan a democratic leader. He has no interest at all in progressive Turkish democracy.

'They have shown no interest in finding a middle way. Ergenekon is a huge pot into which they throw anybody associated with any kind of opposition - the military, the universities, the media. There are people still in prison after three years, with no convictions. Many friends of mine have been arrested. I have no doubt that the majority of the suspects didn't commit any crime.'

Wasn't the general afraid? No. 'They can't intimidate everybody. I am not afraid of them. That is exactly what they want.'

But he is contemptuous of Western politicians who fail to see the direction Turkey is taking. 'I, and many like me, are angry with those in the United States and Europe who have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to attacks on democracy here.'

Nobody is sure what will happen next. The constitutional referendum next month will test Erdogan's strength. A general election is likely to follow. The secular opposition, useless for years, has just been reinvigorated by a timely sex scandal.

Deniz Baykal, its leader, has been overthrown after a video emerged of him apparently in bed with his mistress. He has now been replaced by a new more competent leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu - who is a famous foe of corruption. Opponents of the Islamist takeover see him as their last best hope.

But this has probably come too late. Erdogan remains popular with the new middle class, Muslim, prosperous and numerous, happy to be Middle Eastern.

We in Western Europe have long assumed that the world that was created in 1945 would last for ever. But we have not paid enough attention to the rising new nations to our East, or to the new powers, fat with oil and gas, heedless of the old laws of liberty, which are gathering strength as America weakens.

Now we may have to pay attention. Among the bayonet-like minarets and helmet-like domes of ancient Istanbul an East wind is blowing, which I think will chill us all.

Here's the entire EU debate in 9 words: Do you want to be a servant of Brussels?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don’t care what the Queen thinks about British membership of the European Union. Her opinion on the subject, just like everyone else’s, is her affair. And it wouldn’t influence me one bit.

But if she’s as against it as some claim, then it’s odd that she allowed herself to become an EU citizen, a status which means she can’t legally be our Sovereign any more.

Her neutrality is a myth, though we have to wonder whether her Ministers press her to make contentious statements from time to time.

In this populist era, the monarch must either fight and face probable removal, or do as he or she is told.

Nobody really doubts that she sought to influence the Scottish independence referendum last year. And in 1998 she went out of her way to endorse the Blair Government’s surrender to the IRA.

In her 2004 festive broadcast she proclaimed ‘diversity is indeed a strength’ – a Royal endorsement of political correctness that a lot of us could have done without.

Last Christmas, five years after heaping praise on the timeless beauties of the King James Bible, she quoted scripture from an ugly, modern translation.

This odd record doesn’t suggest to me that she is hiding a fervent desire to return to the days of national independence.

I don’t think, when it comes to it, that many people do have such a desire. I have had it, for years. It is almost painful in its intensity, a choking, sometimes overpowering sense of loss.

But I have been struck by the normal response to the subject – shrugs and yawns. I am frankly baffled by the arrival in the ‘leave’ camp of so many people in politics and the media who never showed any sign of caring until the day before yesterday.

So no wonder their arguments are so uninspiring. David Cameron is dead right that people like me are prepared to pay a pretty stiff economic price, if necessary, for national liberation.

As a great Polish patriotic poet once said: ‘Your nation is like your health – only after you have lost it do you really appreciate its worth.’

I couldn’t care less what the CBI or the TUC or the Bank of England or the British Chambers of Commerce think about the EU. This isn’t a business transaction. You might as well go to the MCC or the British Federation of Lepidopterists, or a convention of stamp collectors, and ask them how to vote.

It isn’t about money or about jobs. It’s an instinct and an intuition. It is about that priceless thing, governing yourself, going out if necessary, into the biting cold – rather than staying warm and comfortable by being someone else’s servant or subject.

Each of us must decide this for himself or herself. If you need to know what anyone else thinks, then you don’t care enough and you’d be better off remaining the obedient citizen of a subject province that pretends to be an independent kingdom. No wonder this is such a dull campaign.

A THREAT FAR BIGGER THAN PUTIN

The noisy promoters of a ‘New Cold War’ rage and shriek at the wrongdoings of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, even though Russia has no designs on us and poses less of a threat to this country’s freedom and autonomy than Jean-Claude Juncker or Angela Merkel.

How odd that these people seldom if ever say anything about Turkey’s swollen and increasingly dangerous despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

President Erdogan, who rules his spectacularly corrupt country from a gigantic new palace, kills his own people by thuggishly suppressing peaceful demonstrations. He hates criticism. His political opponents are arrested at dawn and tried on absurd charges.

He throws journalists into prison and seizes control of newspapers that attack him. He has been one of the keenest promoters of the disastrous Syrian war, which has turned millions into refugees and hundreds of thousands into corpses.

He is an intolerant religious fanatic, and curiously unwilling to deploy his large armed forces against Islamic State. And now he seeks to blackmail Western Europe into allowing his country into the EU and dropping visa restrictions on Turks, not to mention demanding trainloads of money.

If we do not give him these things, then he will continue to do little or nothing about the multitudes of migrants who use Turkey as a bridge into the prosperous West.

And yet for years he has been falsely described as a ‘moderate’ by Western media flatterers, and his country has been allowed to remain in Nato, supposedly an alliance of free democracies.

He is a direct threat to us. Yet the anti-Putin chorus never mention him. Is it because they cannot pronounce his name?

Or is it because they have a silly phobia about Russia, left over from the real Cold War, and aren’t paying attention to what’s really going on?

A year ago we were all fascinated by the horrible crash of a Germanwings A320 jet, brought about by its suicidal pilot.

But now that the likely explanation has come out, there’s almost total silence. Could this be because that pilot, Andreas Lubitz, turns out to have been taking a gigantic dose of ‘antidepressant’ pills, among whose known side effects are terrifying dreams, suicidal behaviour and ‘severe thoughts of suicide’?

Just as nobody pays any attention to the presence of benzodiazepines and amphetamines in the flat of the San Bernardino mass murderers, or the use of ‘antidepressants’ by at least one of the Columbine school killers (the other shooter’s medical records, absurdly, are sealed), nobody wants to know about this either. Time we did.

Carol’, the anonymous accuser of the late Bishop George Bell, alleges this once-revered man sexually abused her nearly 70 years ago. Last week the same ‘Carol’ took to the airwaves to accuse Archbishop George Carey of ignoring a complaint of abuse from her, which she claimed to have sent him while he was in office (1991-2002).

This highly damaging charge followed Lord Carey’s attack, in The Mail on Sunday, on the way the Church has handled the case. Now ‘Carol’ has apologised personally to Lord Carey. It turns out that she had got the wrong archbishop, and was thinking of someone else.

Hurrah for the MPs who halted the nasty plan to make Sunday even more commercial. People need a common day of rest, when families can gather. Germany, which seems to have a far more successful economy than we do, still maintains a near-total ban on Sunday shopping. People somehow manage.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

David Cameron's Rush to War CAN be Halted ....if we try

I really don’t think anyone has any business being more pessimistic than I am. And while I’m grateful to, and cheered by, those of you have heeded my call to write to your MPs urging them to oppose British bombing of Syria, I am exasperated by those who have said (and many have)

 

‘It’s a foregone conclusion, and acting against it is a waste of time.’

 

 I even gather that some MPs who oppose the bombing have replied in this defeatist tone to letters from constituents.

 

May I remind those who say this that I was told exactly the same thing in 2013 when I also tried to mobilise opinion against Mr Cameron’s last attempt to go to war(on the opposite side) in Syria?

 

And then the votes were counted and lo! , Mr Cameron had lost his vote .

 

I believe he has been peeved about this ever since. Whenever he struts about at any international conference, he feels the other leaders are whispering ‘That’s David Cameron, the man whose Parliament won’t allow him to use his air force’, and sneering.

 

I believe he thinks this makes him a second-class statesman, that he’s not a proper leader unless he can order bombers to pound foreign places whenever he feels like it.  He clearly felt that Ed Miliband had wrongly robbed him of an opportunity to bomb, and he clearly resents it, as he shows every time he speaks about it.

 

I do wonder how that picture of him strolling past an RAF Typhoon jet at Northolt (where Typhoons are not normally based) on his return from Paris came to be taken.  As far as I know, Typhoons, are more or less useless type of air superiority fighter built at great expense some years too late for World War Three, in which they would supposedly have tangled with Soviet Mig-29s and Su-27s over Germany in ultra-modern dogfights.  They certainly have no current role to play in bombing ISIS. I gather they’re now to be modified for some other purpose, utterly unsuited to their design and capabilities, but that’s another story.

 

As well as Churchill syndrome, he seems also be suffering from a galloping case of Blair’s disorder, a desire to be seen alongside and among fighting men.

 

But since then things haven’t gone entirely to plan. People have noticed that the Defence Review was mainly notable for trying to undo stupid mistakes made by the Cameron-led Coalition a few years ago (the worst being the crazy scrapping of Nimrod maritime patrol planes, now to be replaced by expensive American equivalents) – but also for seeking to conceal the bad mess we have got into over Trident replacement, now badly delayed (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country) and overrunning its costs (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country). Not to mention trying to find something to do with Gordon Brown’s vast and unusable aircraft carriers (HMS White Elephant I, and HMS White Elephant II) which are as suited to the shrunken coastal defence force now known as the Royal Navy as a ten-gallon Texan hat would be to the actor Toby Jones.

 

They also fail to conceal the pitifully small Army which limps on after the dreadful cuts Mr Cameron himself imposed upon it.

 

Our national defence, truth to tell, is in a dreadful mess, hopelessly unbalanced by the ludicrous machismo of the unusable Trident, which frightens nobody and which we don’t even control, and poorly placed to respond quickly to the sudden dangers which are the main concern of any serious defence planner.

 

And in the midst of this Mr  Cameron wants to get us into another war. People have asked why our involvement in Syria is worth opposing, since it is likely to be politically and militarily ineffectual - see Patrick Cockburn’s superb article in today’s  (25/11/2015)‘Independent’ for a discussion of the uselessness of the plan here

 

http://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-independent/20151125/281522224998772/TextView

 

 

It is mainly because these interventions are often the beginning of something much bigger and longer-lasting ( as those of us who can recall British troops being welcomed to Londonderry in 1969 by Roman Catholic Irish families can recall) .

 

There is also grave danger of unintended consequences, as the Turkish destruction of a Russian jet on Wednesday showed. Which sides are we really on in this five-sided war of almost everyone against almost everyone?

Turkey and Russia are both ostensibly attacking Islamic State. Yet Turkey has shot down a Russian plane, and Turkish-backed militias claim (appallingly) to have killed the pilots as they parachuted to earth. Since neither Russia nor Turkey seems to have been wholly frank about their intentions, can we be sure Mr Cameron (whose selective loathing of President Assad is great and unassuaged) is being wholly frank about his aims? Has anyone really asked him what they are, in a place where he has to answer? I hope they do.

 

And to encourage those who have yet to write to their MPs asking them to vote against this adventure, I reproduce below the Monday article in which I explained the strong case against war :

 

Please Act Now to Oppose Irrational Intervention in Syria

Right. I have decided what to do about the Paris atrocities and ISIS, assuming (as everyone does, though evidence for this is so far scanty) that they are directly connected.

 

I would like to do something else, but I can’t. My influence on British foreign policy is non-existent, so that arguing for co-operation with Russia, Iran, Bashar Assad and the Kurds, and for serious action to bring about a peaceful settlement in Syria,  will make no difference.

 

So instead I have decided to concentrate on the urgent task of trying to prevent David Cameron getting a majority for British military involvement in Syria. This would undoubtedly make matters worse, has no good reasoning behind it, and may well contain long-term dangers we can barely conceive.

 

So I must ask all my readers in the United Kingdom to write or e-mail their MPs, as soon as possible, politely, concisely and cogently,  urging them to vote against any such intervention. This may conceivably affect events. I believe similar action may have done so the last time David Cameron wanted to go to war in Syria (apparently for the opposite reason for which the seeks to do the same now, but this is not wholly clear) , in September 2013.

 

I offer the arguments below, in case they wish to link to them in their e-mails, as a summary of the case against.

 

Why Change our Minds Now?

Emotion is a poor guide to strategy. Recent events in France, Sinai and elsewhere have rightly angered and distressed civilised people. But our emotions don’t excuse is from thinking. Some of the worst decisions in history have been taken on the basis of emotion. What is for certain is that there is no good reason for Parliament to change its mind on the subject.

 

Indeed, action was opposed by a recent (2nd November 2015) report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the only up-to-date dispassionate examination of the matter in this country. You may read it here

 

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmfaff/457/45702.htm

 

 

The Committee argued only a few weeks ago that such an intervention would be legally questionable, militarily marginal, politically unpredictable, diplomatically complex and perhaps incoherent.

 

Some may argue that last week’s UN Security Council resolution changes this to some extent. However, the resolution was vague, not operational, and did not authorise military force.

 

As the New York Times pointed out here….

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/world/europe/un-security-council-approves-resolution-urging-countries-to-combat-islamic-state.html?_r=0

 

…..the resolution offers ‘no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force.’

 

 

Downing Street briefings have not directly contradicted this, but have somehow managed to give a rather different impression, suggesting that the new resolution changes the legal position when in fact it does not. This, er, confusion about the legality of action and the meaning of UN resolutions gives me a strange sense of déjà vu. Perhaps someone should ask Lord Goldsmith about it.

 

The full text of the resolution may be found here (scroll down to reach it) :

 http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12132.doc.htm

 

Those who genuinely think that British participation in the bombing of Syria would instantly change the balance are living in a world of fantasy. Our forces are small, and will make little difference ( assuming they share the same aim) to the efforts of the US and France already under way.

 

See paragraphs 22  and 23 of the Foreign Affairs Committee report:

 

‘In military terms, we noted that although our witnesses believed that a decision to extend airstrikes into Syria would be welcomed by Coalition allies, some said that it would not have anything other than a marginal effect. The experts told us that it would not be likely to involve extra aircraft but would simply re-focus existing assets; that the UK was already contributing valuable surveillance in Syria; and that the ability to conduct airstrikes as well would not have a decisive effect. Sir Simon Mayall concurred, adding:

 

“There are not that many of them, actually. This is not an air campaign anything remotely like the scale of 1991 or 2003. We need to be very clear about this. This is not a war-winning air campaign, by any stretch of the imagination.”

 

‘23.As a result, several witnesses concluded that there was little reason for the UK to change its policy. Julien Barnes-Dacey was strongly against the proposal and told us that the airstrikes make the threat from ISIS worse (my emphasis, PH) because they “feed a sense of radicalisation”:

 

“Sunnis say, ‘Look, the West is not helping us against Assad, but they are fighting ISIS.’ […] We become direct parties, all the while contributing nothing meaningful, in terms of military numbers or capability. I really fail to see how air strikes against ISIS will not do more harm than good.”

 

In paragraph 33, the reasoning of the select committee is quite clear: ‘…we believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is still incoherent.’

 

In paragraph 35 it seeks the answer to several important questions, which I think the government will have some difficulty in answering if there is any sort of coherent questioning and debate in the Commons.

 

Enabling the House to reach a decision

 

35.The Government should explain the following points before asking the House of Commons to approve a substantive motion authorising military action:

 

a)On an international strategy:

 

i)How the proposal would improve the chances of success of the international coalition’s campaign against ISIL;

 

ii)How the proposed action would contribute to the formation and agreement of a transition plan for Syria;

 

iii)In the absence of a UN Security Council Resolution, how the Government would address the political, legal, and military risks arising from not having such a resolution;

 

iv)Whether the proposed action has the agreement of the key regional players (Turkey; Iran; Saudi Arabia; Iraq); if not, whether the Government will seek this before any intervention;

 

v)Which ground forces will take, hold, and administer territories captured from ISIL in Syria.

 

b)On the military imperative:

 

i)What the overall objective is of the military campaign; whether it expects that it will be a “war-winning” campaign; if so, who would provide war-winning capabilities for the forces; and what the Government expects will be the result of extending airstrikes to Syria.

 

ii)What extra capacity the UK would contribute to the Coalition’s actions in Syria.

 

36.We are persuaded that it is not yet possible for the Government to give a satisfactory explanation on the points listed above. Until it is possible for the Government to address these points we recommend that it does not bring to the House a motion seeking the extension of British military action to Syria.’

 

Whether your MP is Tory, Labour or SNP, she or he really ought to be aware of these arguments, and able to explain why she or he plans to ignore them if she or intends to support the new rush to war.

 

There is no excuse, if you write to your MP, for any of these politicians to claim afterwards that they were unaware of opposition to the plan, or misunderstood the effect of the UN resolution, or were unaware of the severe political and military drawbacks listed so recently by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

 

The recent atrocities have not in fact changed the material position. So why would a responsible, informed or thoughtful MP, whose decisions can in the end lead to the dropping of bombs, the drawing of this country into yet another endless and insoluble foreign conflict in which its aims are, to put it kindly, unclear, suddenly switch to supporting intervention? Bullying by the government whips or a desire to please Mr Rupert Murdoch and his media should play no part in such matters of life and death.

 

Please act now. For all the government’s claims that it is still pondering the matter, I believe there is a strong chance that it will ambush the Commons with a vote soon before it rises for Christmas on 17th December. That gives those who oppose this hasty and ill-considered action only a very little time to mobilise the forces of truth and reason against those of emotionalism, bombast and irrational panic.

 

I note that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill are already being invoked, a clear sign that Munich Syndrome is raging in Whitehall, and especially fiercely in Downing Street itself. This is the delusional and historically illiterate belief that all crises are identical to the Czech crisis of 1938,  that all this country’s enemies are identical to Hitler,  that the sufferer is Winston Churchill reincarnated (he tends to growl in the later stages of the complaint) and that anyone who criticises him is Neville Chamberlain resurrected.

 

There is no known cure, but lying down in a darkened room with a cold compress on the brow and an umbrella to hand can relieve the symptoms.  

Some Immediate Thoughts on the New Crisis in Syria

Just who is fighting whom in Syria? I should have thought this was the thing we most need to know before getting involved. Some years ago, before this war was a cause, I began receiving private letters from a worried British woman married to a Syrian Sunni Muslim, then living in Latakia.  Her main motivation was fear about the danger to the quiet, contented life which she and her family were then living and now are not. They are now, like so many others, refugees. I think she hoped that some discussion of this in the media might avoid such an outcome. I only wish it had been so.

 

After some checks, I believe them to have been authentic. She described the worrying appearance in that country of armed, heavily-bearded militiamen speaking Arabic in a way quite different from that in Syria.

 

I was an unlikely choice for Syrian state propaganda. I had for some years been writing rude and disobliging articles, when the opportunity arose, about Syria’s habit of massacring rebels, its discrimination against Jews, its harbouring of the Nazi refugee Alois Brunner, a  mass-murder of children,  its undoubted involvement in the attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jet at Heathrow and its probable (in my view ) involvement in the Lockerbie bomb, strangely attributed to Libya. I thought the cosying up to Syria which followed its support for the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 was absurd. I thought the West’s use of Syrian torturers to interrogate suspects, taken there on rendition flights after September 11^th 2001, was disgraceful. My main motive for these articles had been Zionist. I am a strong supporter of Israel’s continued existence, and had long regarded Syria as one of the main threats to that.

 

So when a certain Tory MP (whose career has since exploded amid farcical revelations about his private life) accused me of being some sort of Syrian patsy, I was actually astonished, and sought (but did not get) a retraction.

 

My interest in this issue was motivated by puzzlement  - and also by a pained sympathy for the lady who wrote to me from Latakia. I have also found it all too easy to imagine myself becoming a refugee, driven from my home by war. It has happened in my lifetime to far too many people who thought themselves quite safe, as we do, and as you probably do. You are not. Some fool may even now be devising the plan that will eventually force you out on to the road with a few belongings, leaving your house in ruins or in the hands of strangers. It makes me angry that people behave in such a way that this sort of thing happens.

 

It seemed clear to me that there was a strong lobby for ‘democracy’ in Syria, with powerful supporters in Washington DC. This had been pressing for worsened relations between the USA and Damascus for some time before the protests began. I have learned to be suspicious of such lobbies for two reasons. One, they are generally selective about their desire for democracy (the lovers of democracy in Syria seem pretty unmoved by its total absence from Saudi Arabia, its suppression in Bahrain and its defeat and erasure in Egypt), and therefore must have other real motives. I have since heard that French diplomacy underwent a similar convulsion, with Paris demanding a strong anti-Assad line against the doubts of some of its experienced diplomats. I strongly suspect that something similar has happened in London. It is possible to guess that the reason for this is the strong alliance, based upon oil and arms sales, between some Gulf states and those three countries.  Those states are Sunni Muslim, whereas Syria was broadly secular and on good terms with Shia Iran.

 

 

Two, their allies are unconvincing.  I have no doubt that the various factions which formed the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups have genuine grievances against the Assad state. Almost everyone in Syria does, It is a cruel, and presumably corrupt, despotism with little to be said for it save that it had until recently been internally peaceful, and that it maintained unusual levels of mutual tolerance among its varied peoples.

 

But I have huge doubts as to what sort of state they would create, were they to overthrow Assad. We are repeatedly assured that they are quite distinct from Islamic State, a body to which we attribute almost supernatural powers of horror and intolerance. They need to do this, or people might notice its very strong similarity to the current government of Saudi Arabia, also given to ferocious religious intolerance, beheadings and so forth (and currently engaged in a pretty appalling aggression against Yemen) , though less inclined to publicise them on YouTube.

 

But I am not wholly convinced by these assurances that these people are our friends and allies. I do not think that Christian and Shia people in Syria are convinced by them either. They back Assad not because they love him but because the alternative is a Sunni theocracy in which their lives would be enormously worse. Quite a few Sunni Muslims, the famous moderate Muslims of whom we hear so much, seem to have taken the same view, since they continue to play such a large part in Assad’s Army. He would have fallen long ago, were this not so.

 

To me it seems absurd to imagine that defeat for Assad would not pretty much immediately mean that the Islamic State extended its power to Damascus and Aleppo. The supposedly non-extremist fighters against Assad are certainly not pro-Western, and the divisions between them and ISIS seem to me to be slight.

 

Of course, a compromise peace would be good. Like all conservatives I believe very much in such arrangements. But the main obstacle to such a peace has been the absolute refusal of the rebels to contemplate any deal that left Assad in power. Every conference which has attempted to bring about a deal has foundered on this point. As I have many times pointed out our righteous modern insistence on trying and imprisoning (and sometimes hanging) overthrown tyrants, has made them  understandably reluctant to step down, so losing the sovereign immunity that keeps them safe from being hustled into a cell. The shocking and barbaric murder of Colonel Gadaffi in a Libyan drainpipe (an event which launched new horrors in that country) might also encourage any embattled head of state to battle on rather than show any weakness. Those who genuinely wanted peaceful amelioration of Syria would see this, make a deal and get all the concessions they could pocket while allowing Assad to stay.

 

But his foes, and the supposedly wise and responsible great powers of the West, have pursued a policy of all or nothing. They have got nothing, except unending and terrible war.

 

And now Russia has joined it, attacking Assad’s enemies, not necessarily ISIS. My heart sank when I heard this news, as I cannot see it ending well. I had hoped an agreement was still possible. Now I fear a limitless conflict, with ghastly implications for our peace and prosperity.  Russian exasperation is understandable. But unilateral action of this kind is just wrong, and destroys any prestige Vladimir Putin had gained from his behaviour at the UN.

 

It sank even further when I heard the American response, full of machismo and entirely lacking in caution or subtlety. I immediately contrasted the American reaction to Turkey’s supposed decision, some months ago to join the war against ISIS. This was naively welcomed by western politicians and media. In fact Turkey has barely attacked ISIS at all, but has instead launched repeated attacks on the Kurdish forces who have been inflicting serious reverses on ISIS in Kobane and elsewhere. This is all to do with Turkey’s dismal internal politics, often discussed on this blog, and nothing to do with the safety of the Middle East from murderous fanaticism. Yet the hostility and scepticism which greeted Russia’s attacks on people whose victory would help ISIS were quite absent when Turkey launched attacks on people whose defeat would help ISIS. Why?

 

Here’s a question to ponder. If (and I think this is the actual choice) you had to choose between Syria being run by Assad or by the opposition to Assad; and if the victory of the opposition was highly likely to benefit ISIS; who would you then want to win? And if the answer is ‘the opposition’, how can those who seek that end claim in reality to be opposed to ISIS, which will benefit so much if their wish comes true.

 

Russia may have thought this through more carefully than the USA. But the Kremlin has still made a terrible mistake. The USA is no longer run (as Russia still is) by disillusioned cynics seeking the least worst outcome. It is in the hands of Utopian idealists and there is no limit to the horrors they can unleash upon the earth in the names of freedom and democracy. Ask anyone in Baghdad. Meanwhile the British government is in the hands of political teenagers whose combat experience –if they have any at all – was gained at the dinners of the Bullingdon Club.

What's really criminal? The way our 'leaders' let thugs walk free

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The crevasse between people and politicians is matched by a bottomless chasm between official figures and the truth about life in modern Britain.

Like all ruling castes in the grip of dogma, the Government responds to trouble by pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s an economic boom that leaves most people feeling poorer, and lots of new jobs that turn out to be empty self-employment.

There’s a massacre of unborn babies that conceals the utter collapse of sexual restraint and responsibility. Even the dwindling marriage figures are artificially boosted by people faking wedlock to get citizenship.

There are schools whose victims walk away dazed after 11 years in full-time ‘education’, barely able to read or count the sheaves of alleged qualifications with which they have been issued.

Some of them are then persuaded to go deep into debt to attend grandiose ‘universities’ which will at least keep them out of the jobless figures for another three years.

And then there’s crime. The simplest way to reduce this is to decide that lots of crimes aren’t crimes any more, so the police stop trying to prevent them and they become normal.Then, you fiddle the figures – until the fiddles are exposed.

Now, a new form of deception is being employed. It is called ‘Out Of Court Disposal’, and it’s just a way of magically making crime disappear by not doing anything to the people who commit it.

In some police areas almost half of crimes are dealt with in this way. The lowest figure is 26 per cent – a minimum of a quarter of all reported crime, swept under the carpet and unpunished, throughout the country.

Generally that means the transgressor gets a ‘caution’ or some other vacuous non-penalty. More than 7,000 of the offences written off in this offhand way last year involved violence. There were 82 robberies and 20 rapes.

Even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, a body so decayed in mind and force that it recently listened with rapt attention to the ‘evidence’ on drugs of the supposed comedian Russell Brand, recognises that 30 per cent of these outcomes are ‘inappropriate’, that is to say, utterly inadequate for the crime involved.

The truth is that, if the police and courts tried to enforce the laws of England as they stand, we would need about a million police officers, hundreds of new courts and a Gulag-sized penal colony in which to house the resulting prisoners.

The whole thing has been out of control for years. The poorer you are, the more you will know this. The closer you are to the political elite, the less you will know it. It is only when the drug-addled robbers begin hammering on the front doors of the elite that they will stop pretending this is a ‘moral panic’ and recognise that there is something wrong.

Well done in China William - now go and shake hands with Vladimir Putin

Prince William, quite rightly, has been consorting with the bloodstained tyrants of China, still up to their unapologetic armpits in gore from the Tiananmen Square massacre, and still cramming critics into an enormous unjust empire of prison camps, the Laogai.

We have to deal with these people because that is what the world is like.

Similarly, we maintain our alliance in Nato with Turkey. That wildly corrupt country’s increasingly erratic President Erdogan persecutes and imprisons his opponents, and has just moved into a megalomaniac 1,000-room palace in Ankara, costing £400 million and 30 times the size of the White House.

It contains a special laboratory in which five experts analyse President Erdogan’s meals for suspicious substances, a 21st-Century version of the food-tasters of ancient times.

In light of this, how can we get so hoity-toity about President Putin of Russia? His crimes are undoubted, but our faked-up moral outrage is as absurd as Mr Erdogan’s palace.

Alliances, royal visits and trade missions for some despots, sanctions and sermons for Mr Putin. It makes no sense.

You’re being fooled, as you were over Iraq 12 years ago. Please don’t be.

Yet another attack on your pension pot

Gordon Brown was rightly loathed for his state-sponsored raid on the pension savings of Britain’s thrifty classes.

Well, who would you like to blame for the latest version of the same thing – six years of state-imposed flat interest rates that have cost the country’s savers £130 billion?

This vast theft of cash from the careful and responsible will mean a pinched old age for many of its victims, who foolishly thought they lived under a government that supported and protected people like them.

Don't fall for Cameron's school con

Gove and Cameron have both turned their backs on having academically selective schools in every town

How strangely our attitudes change.

When Anthony Blair got his sons into an exceptional, elite state school, much of the world howled in derision.

He pretended to support comprehensive schooling, which he knew in his heart was a failure. And then he pretended he wasn’t pretending.

Now, by some strange alchemy, Tory politicians are doing the same thing, and are being praised for it.

David Cameron and Michael Gove have both turned their backs on the one reform of state schools that would put good education back in the reach of the poor – academically selective grammar schools in every town.

Yet both have sent children to a school that selects instead through the public embrace of faith.

Yet is it Christian for rich professionals to fight with sharp elbows for sought-after places in rare good state schools?

Grey Coat Hospital is a comprehensive only in the sense that Number 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house.

Is it so wonderfully egalitarian, to send your child to a school whose uniform must be bought from a Chelsea department store, and where fewer than one in six pupils qualifies for free school meals

I found out a few months ago that Nick Clegg is astonishingly ignorant about the drug laws in this country.

He really believes that the police cruelly persecute drug users (if only they did).

Ignorance of this kind is wilful. The truth is readily available. He remains ignorant because he does not want to know. Why?

As evidence piles up that cannabis is a dangerous drug, those like Mr Clegg and the businessman Richard Branson should be incessantly asked what their interest is in backing the risky cause of decriminalisation. It is certainly not in the interest of the young people of this country.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

An Article in the Spectator on the Russia-Ukraine crisis

The London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives, in coverage of the Ukraine crisis (or as Mr Jaremko prefers: 'London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives in coverage of Ukraine crisis').

 

 

http://bit.ly/1EigWry

 

 

 

What Do We Know About the Paris Outrages?

I thought I would try to tot up what we know about the Paris murderers. We know what they did. We presume  we know why they did it. But are we right to treat Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as a co-ordinated unit? And if not, what did motivate them?

 

I would stress that I do not claim to know. What follows is simply interested speculation, informed by my own known views on this subject. I offer it for discussion and examination, not as a solution. Our knowledge is imperfect, and may always remain so, since the main actors in this horror are dead.

 

Their own various claims seem to me to mean little. Why should such people be assumed to be telling the truth about themselves, in the middle of a crime?  Claims of membership made either by them or by various organisations are uncheckable and could easily be empty boasting.

 

And are we right to treat them as highly-organised and trained jihadis? And what about Hayat Boumedienne, wife of Coulibaly, niqab-clad crossbow-wielder etc? She is now reported to have been in Turkey, presumed to be on her way to Syria, before the outrage took place.  Reuters have reported :’The suspected female accomplice of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on January 8th, [Turkish]Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.’

 

Those dates would put Boumedienne in Turkey before the violence in Paris began, leaving for Syria while the attackers were still on the loose.

 

 

In the first days of any event such as this, reporters struggle to get hard information, rumours and unconfirmed reports rush through the air. It is very difficult to get reliable facts. I understand this.  The first proper acccounts of the Septeebr 11th 2001 massacre did not emerge for a long time after the event. Much is still secret or 'redacted, nearly 14 years later.

 

But there’s also, it seems to me,  a bit of a desire to find a pattern, one which makes the events fit the idea (common in governments, security services and newsrooms) that we face a co-ordinated Islamist conspiracy against our ‘way of life’, wich can be countered by increased surveillance, restrictions on liberty, and greater so-called 'security'. 

 

The alternative, that most European capitals now contain an underclass of chaotic mentally unstable drifters, drug abusers and petty criminals, sometimes employed in dead-end jobs such as pizza delivery, sometimes not, whose empty lives can, alas, be given meaning by Islamic utopianism, is less explored.  It’s less exciting.  It gives much less support to lobbies for ‘tough’ laws, ‘crackdowns’ and surveillance. I think it should be considered. Careful, attentive  policing of these parts of society might yield more than any amount of crackdowns and surveillance on the rest of us.

 

This, by the way is *not* precisely the same argument which I apply to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks of Woolwich, Sydney and Ottawa. 

 

The Paris murderers can more properly be referred to as ‘terrorists’, though Coulibaly less so than the others, because his initial crime – the random shooting of a jogger at Fontenay-aux-Roses - was so utterly wanton.  His later murders of hostages were likewise acts of utter stupid cruelty, not even explicable by the fanatics’ own perverted code. (Note to would-be twisters and misrepresentation merchants: I am not, by saying this, excusing or condoning more politically purposeful murders. I am simply making a distinction between different types of despicable, indefensible crime, because I think that distinction may one day help us prevent similar outrages).

 

When Coulibaly murdered a policewoman at Montrouge, which might in his twisted mind have had a political or religious purpose, he also shot a roadsweeper in the face, leaving him critically injured (I have been unable to learn more details of his fate) . That action (like the shooting of the jogger, linked to Coulibaly by bullet casings found at the scene (though the victim says his assailant wasn’t Coulibaly) is inexplicable by any political or religious creed, and cannot have been connected to or ‘synchronised with’ the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor done in response to alleged ‘orders’ by any supposed terrorist High Command.  

 

It is just random, moronic, inexcusable,cruel violence. Given the unending possibility of my being misrepresented by my critics,  I must point out once more, quite explicitly,  that my selection of these crimes for special mention is not aimed at in any way excusing or lessening the condemnation of the more obviously political crimes against journalists or Jews.

 

I mention them because , like the Kouachis’ initial attempt to enter the wrong building in their attack on Charlie Hebdo, and their shooting of a maintenance worker when they first entered the building, and their failure (for which we must be grateful) to kill all those they found in the editorial office, they suggest that we are dealing with not-especially-competent or well-trained killers, who have not properly planned their crime  or prepared their escape.

 

We must also be pleased that one of the brothers was so incompetent at terrorist crime that he actually left his identity card in the car they abandoned.  What sort of terrorist ‘training’ would leave someone able to do this, I am not sure. It cannot be very thorough. I do not know how much longer the French authorities would have taken to track them down without this clue. One expects that fingerprints, or CCTV images, or purchase records will eventually allow police to track culprits down. But an actual identity card in the getaway car! This discovery may have saved days. 

 

It is quite clear from the reports that both Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had been in contact with Islamist preachers of various kinds, and one or both Kouachis travelled at least once to the Yemen though there is less information about what exactly they got up to there.

 

I do get a bit exasperated with all this talk of terrorist ‘training camps’.  Once you’ve mastered the use of a gun (and a distressing number of modern petty criminals have done this quite easily), no particular ‘training’ is required to murder defenceless journalists, or indeed to kill unprepared police officers taken by surprise. Training would be required to confront professional soldiers. But almost any fool can kill a defenceless human being, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, which terrorists almost always do.  

 

You have to be in some kind of abnormal circumstance, eitehr externally imposed or internally driven, to kill a stranger in cold blood. This isn’t at all to excuse such acts. People still know such killings are evil, and that they shouldn’t do them. The question is, how they persuade themselves that, in this particular case, it’s justified. If they’re drug abusers (again, no excuse, this is a voluntary act with known consequences) , their senses may be so dulled and their minds so clouded with hallucinations, persecution mania and phantom voices that they do not fully grasp the horror of what they are doing.

 

Evidence now suggests that this was the case with Michael Adebowale, one of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby . I have noted before that we know for certain that Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor. A psychiatrist found him 'paranoid and incoherent', and said his symptoms were worsened by 'heavy use of cannabis'.

 

This may have been the case with other terrorist killers in recent incidents, and also with some non-terrorist killers whose crimes, though non-political, were similarly horrific. But a general lack of interest in this aspect, in the police and the media, means that we do not have enough information to say. Hence, in my view, the need for more curiosity about this problem. (Note for Ben Goldacre: by ‘curiosity’ I mean that police and media should routinely inquire into the drug habits of suspects and culprits in cases of violence, terrorist and non-terrorist. And no more).

 

Fanaticism can certainly do this, especially one which allows the killer to think that his victims are not fully human, But some other source of unreason is more than likely. The combination of fanaticism and drug abuse is plainly particularly dangerous. But, given the layers of society, in Britain and France, from which terrorist killers are drawn, fanaticism will in many cases be allied with drug abuse.

 

I have found no reports of previous blatantly irrational or unhinged  behaviour by any of the killers, though some of Coulibaly’s criminal record and his actions during his final murders seem to me to suggest a person not wholly in charge of his own actions.  Again, note that this is not an excuse. His previous life, a very wicked one, had led him to this point and he had chosen that course.

 

Of Cherif Kouachi we know that he was arrested in 2005 on the way to Iraq via Syria.  His lawyer insists that he did not  actually want to go and was glad to be caught. In prison  (where, on the Continental system, he spent more time in pre-trial detention than he did serving his sentence) he met Coulibaly, though no doubt he also met plenty of other people and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the meeting was particularly significant.

 

The ‘radical preacher’ under whose influence he allegedly fell, Farid Benyettou, discouraged him from attacks on Jews saying that France was ‘not a land of jihad’.

 

Court records show Cherif Kouachi said he didn't consider himself a good enough Muslim, and said he had only been to the mosque two or three times before he met Benyettou, and he had been smoking cannabis.

 

Said Kouachi, Cherif’s elder brother,  was in Yemen in 2009, and there shared a flat with Abdulmutallab, attempted bomber of Northwest Flight 253, ‘for one or two weeks’. It is hard to tell whether this is significant.  ‘Intelligence officials’ quoted in various stories say he went to Yemen again in 2011 for terror training. The source is an unnamed US official quoting an unnamed French intelligence source. But the French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told Christiane Amanpour in an on-the-record TV interview that one brother travelled to Yemen in 2005. Oddly, she would not say which one.

 

Here are one or two interesting notes about the culprits.

 

 

‘Orphaned at a young age, they [The Kouachi brothers] drifted into a life of smoking drugs, petty offending and rap music ‘   , Cherif had a ‘minor criminal record’

 

 

Said Kouachi was ‘ …the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005.  Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.

 

 

On Amedy Coulibaly:

He had a criminal record   “The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.” This does not suggest a particularly organised or co-ordinated individual.

 

 

A lawyer, Damien Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”

 

Coulibaly served  another prison term for a drugs offence before training to be a television fitter, settling in Grigny, back in the south of Paris. (Times 10/01). He has a record of small drugs and theft offences. One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17 and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes

 

 

Coulibaly said at 3pm (to a radio station) that he had already killed four people in his attack on the supermarket - suggesting that the final assault by police was relatively successful. He also said that he had worked "in synchronisation” with the Charlie Hebdo killers. He claimed to be working for Isis. Kouachi said that he was "sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen".

Why does NATO still Exist? What does it stand for, exactly?

When I first published ‘The Cameron Delusion’, under its original title of ‘The Broken Compass’, the distinguished parodist Craig Brown tried to satirise my index in ‘Private Eye. Since the index itself is satirical (I love doing my own indexes now computers have made the job so simple) he didn’t do all that well, and , annoyingly, he didn’t mention the name of the book. But never mind.

 

One of my favourite entries was under ‘A’, and along the lines of  ‘Afghanistan, a very long way from North Atlantic’ (I’m in the middle of an internal office move and can’t lay hands on an actual copy). The point was simple. What was a body called ‘The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ doing intervening in a complex tribal struggle on the edge of the Himalayas? The location really couldn’t be further from the North Atlantic, either in miles or in nature.

 

It is odd that nobody (except, occasionally, me) really seeks the answer to this question. The reinvention of NATO is one of the strangest and most instructive changes of the post-Cold War world.  It sits in the middle of the diplomatic landscape, a great looming monolith. Why is this? What is it for? Whom or what is it against?

My explanation for the lack of curiosity is the usual one. People are, for the most part, willing propaganda-swallowers. Some of these such as Mr ‘P’, the Wiki Man, actually like the taste so much that they can’t easily be weaned off it.  I’ll pause for a moment to illustrate this, before continuing with the main topic of NATO.

 

Mr P’s struggle to avoid the truth about Ukraine has now become heroic. For instance, in a  recent contribution he wrote:

 

‘Aggression usually is, and in fact is defined as, an action detrimental to the aggressee and against the aggressee's will.’

 

But he still can’t somehow acknowledge that Ukraine’s change (following a violent foreign-sponsored mob putsch)  from being a non-aligned country to being a member of an anti-Russian economic and political alliance is not detrimental to the interests of Russia and against Russia’s (openly and repeatedly expressed) will.  

 

Mr ‘P’ also competes for the Obtuseness Olympics when he writes:  ‘In response to my point that tanks rolling over borders *is* aggression, Mr Hitchens, wafting this thought aside, merely opines, Humpty Dumpty-like, that aggression can mean many things, and in this case what Mr Hitchens wants it to mean.’

 

This is not what I say at all, and he knows it. I say that Russia’s actions are a defensive response to aggression, and that to pretend that the realignment of Ukraine through foreign intervention and the violent overthrow of its government is not aggression is to deceive yourself and (perhaps) others.

 

I’ll reproduce here part of Richard Pipes’s interesting summary of the traditional European Christian diplomacy (based on the Stoic concept of the Law of Nature ) which the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917 ( having themselves been put in power by a German-financed putsch, which could be described as ‘aggression’, and was certainly an act of war).

 

‘International relations are confined to contacts between governments: It is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population’.

 

We all know this in any case. How many times have I asked the following questions and received no answers to them from Mr ‘P’ or his allies. How would we in Britain react if EU politicians appeared among pro-independence crowds in Edinburgh or Glasgow, distributing biscuits to them and affirming their solidarity with them?

 

And how would the EU and NATO and the State Department react if Russian politicians appeared amidst Russian-speaking crowds in Riga or Tallinn, handing out biscuits and urging a new Association Agreement with the Eurasian Union?

 

They do not answer because they know that such behaviour would be greeted by all right-thinking persons with rage and protests, and rightly so. And that it is directly comparable to the behaviour described in these links, which actually took place:

 

 

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/04/EU-millions-paid-for-Ukrainian-groups-behind-Yanukovych-overthrow

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-turmoil-over-yanukovich/

 

 

http://eastbook.eu/en/2013/12/uncategorized-en/two-days-in-the-hottest-scene-catherine-ashton-visits-ukraine/

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10518859/John-McCain-in-Kiev-Ukraine-will-make-Europe-better.html

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/12/04/uk-ukraine-idUKBRE9B20BV20131204

 

 

Mr P also says ‘Mr Hitchens here concedes that Ukraine desires to join the EU, which is central to my overall point. ‘. I am not sure that I ‘concede’ any such thing.  Many Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs undoubtedly wish to join the EU, because they hope it will provide an unceasing pipeline of money from which they can, er, benefit.  The elites of many poor and bankrupt countries likewise believe, rightly or wrongly, that EU membership will lead them to prosperity.

 

I should have thought that Greece was a good example of the general dangers of this belief. As or the peoples of these countries, they are, alas, as ill-informed and as easily-manipulated as people generally are. Personally, I have always thought that the aim of the EU was political, not economic, and I have found that most informed continental people agree with me. It is only in Britain that we persist in seeing the EU as an economic project.  The adventures of the Euro seem to make this point quite well.

 

Whether the Ukrainian people are any better-informed about the meaning of EU membership for their lives than other populations rushed into the body by their elites, I do not presume to know. The word’ Ukraine’ is not in fact synonymous with ‘Government of Ukraine’. I have no doubt that the current government of Ukraine, installed following a violent unconstitutional putsch, favours the closest possible relations with the EU.  But, given that this putsch was backed by the EU, this is hardly a surprise.

 

Mr ‘P’ makes some silly remarks about Cuba, which is plainly in the USA’s sphere of influence, and whose problems for the past 50 years stem from Soviet meddling in the Caribbean.

 

This was comparable in provocative irresponsibility to current American meddling in central Europe. It is precisely because the USA regards Cuba as legitimately part of its sphere that it has invaded and then blockaded that island. Is this aggression, or legitimate response to provocation I should say the latter, while describing Soviet Russia’s behaviour in Cuba as aggressive, even before the installation of the famous missiles.

 

Russia’s current interests in Cuba are vestigial and, I suspect,  no more than mischievous retaliation for American meddling in the Caucasus. On my last visit to Cuba, Chinese involvement, and of course Venezuelan involvement, were miles more significant.

 

Also his reference to Humpty Dumpty is (as I have pointed out to him before, but he paid no attention) wrong. The point about Humpty Dumpty’s use of words was that he used them to mean whatever he liked, and for purposes wholly unrelated to their original use. Thus ‘There’s glory for you’ meant, in Humpty-speak ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument for you’.

 

My dispute with Mr ‘P’ is not a semantic one and certainly does not involve the total misuse of English. We agree about what aggression *is* in general.  Our difference concerns the question of whether there is any other form of aggression apart from the despatch of tanks and troops across a border.  Of course there is. But Mr ’P’ knows that his argument will collapse in ruins as soon as he acknowledges this, so he doesn’t acknowledge it. There is a word for this sort of behaviour, but I have forgotten what it is. Let’s just describe it as ‘self-serving anti-thinking’.

 

 

Mr ‘P’ offers Russia some good advice about its economy (I can’t imagine why they haven’t taken it, can you? Perhaps it isn’t as easy as it looks), thus : ‘producing goods people want to buy and opening up markets into which people want to sell. A step in that direction would be to rid the system of ex-KGB mafioso politics and oligarchical economics, get to allowing free expression throughout the media and in public discourse’ (actually speech in Russia is more free than he seems to imagine, the problem being much more that of access to major media platforms, much as it is here only more directly state-influenced).

 

Actually, this is advice that Britain could just as readily take to heart, since our indebted economy, with its miserable manufacturing base, its poor exports and its over-dependence on the City (plus its long insulation from reality by North Sea Oil)  is really not all that much more healthy than Russia’s, and couldn’t withstand the sort of attack on it now being made on Russia’s economy.

 

 

But his final paragraph enables me to slip back into the general discussion of NATO. Mr P’ writes  (first quoting me) : "The even deeper mystery is why anyone in Britain thinks that EU eastward expansion is something this country needs to or should support. What’s in it for us?"

 

 

Mr ‘P’ asks :’ What does one make of this? Is there something 'in it for us' if we don't support it? Russia won't attack us if we don't support it. Is that what's 'in it for us'? We'll get a good deal on gas prices. Is that it, or something like it? Is Mr Hitchens an appeasement-monkey?’

 

I respond that this is just a smear. Foreign policy is generally conducted for the benefit of the country involved.  Why then is Britain so keenly joining in on the side of Brussels against Moscow? I cannot myself see what direct interest Britain has in taking the EU’s side in its dispute with Russia. Britain buys very little gas from Russia, relying  far more on Norway, and has no strong commercial ties with Russia which would be affected by this conflict. I recommend, as I have always recommended, staying out of a quarrel that isn’t ours and discouraging dogmatic hotheads who seem to think it as a contest between the Shire and Mordor.

 

Mr ;P’ is one of these, it seems. He says :’ Why should we support it? Well for one thing we would be supporting the aspirations of the former and courageous Soviet satellites, understandably still nervous of the ghosts of politburos past, now rapidly becoming a very real apparition of Tsarisms past. ‘

 

People in this part of the world are indeed understandably nervous, but not just of politburos (vanished) and tsars (even more defunct). They have reason to be nervous of Germany and its ‘federative empire’  too, and if Mr ‘P’ had spent much time in that region he would know that the fear and the pressure are not always in one direction only.  

 

I am not sure what makes these former Soviet satellites, now EU satellites,  so ‘courageous’. What have they done that is so brave?  They and their people behaved just as we would behave in the same circumstances – sharing a bed with a hippo on one side and an elephant on the other - very carefully.

 

Having gained, briefly, actual independence from one empire, they have scuttled, almost as one, under the skirts of another. I should have thought it would have been braver to stay out of both. In any case, I fail to see what it matters to me, whether they look to Moscow or Brussels, as long as the conflict isn’t pushed to the extent of war.

 

But here we are again at NATO. Lord Ismay famously described its original purpose as keeping the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out …in all cases the preposition referred to Western Europe.

 

Implicit in NATO’s whole existence was that it accepted absolutely the Soviet domination of the continent from Marienborn eastwards. NATO ignored the 1953 crushing of the East Berlin workers’ rising, the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rising, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961,  the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring,  the crushing of Polish Solidarity in the 1980s.  

 

It also had no interest in anything outside Western Europe. It had nothing important to say about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (other people began a long and dangerous process by seeking to oppose that) , nor about China’s crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests.

 

In some ways more interesting, it was pretty much of a spare part when two if its members almost came to blows over Cyprus in 1974. Turkey, then and now a member of NATO in good standing, invaded and seized North Cyprus.

 

This was a far more troubled event than Russia’s seizure of Crimea 40 years later, but it has some interesting parallels.   Like Russia’s action, it followed a violent foreign-backed putsch which installed a government in Nicosia that was as hostile to Turkey (and to Turkish concerns) as the post-putsch Kiev government was hostile to Russia and Russian concerns.

 

Its purpose was to turn Cyprus into a Greek island, rather than ( as it then was) an independent state carefully non-aligned between Greece and Turkey. Yet as far as I know, no Greek ships, planes, troops or tanks were directly involved. Was this therefore aggression?

 

Obviously it was, unless you are Mr ‘P’, who presumably attributes it to a desire by ‘Cyprus’  (the divisions in whose population he will not be able to acknowledge as real, if he applies to it the same lens he applies to Ukraine) to be aligned with Greece. But will he? I doubt it. For this was a putsch by the ‘right-wing’ .

 

At the time, Greece was of course a military dictatorship. Turkey was not, but the army stood behind the government in a pretty convincing way, and Turkish governments which annoyed the army tended not to last very long in those days.

 

Anyway, there were many atrocities during this affair, and large numbers of people were frightened or driven from beloved homes. An entire city, Famagusta, remains deserted to this day as a result. Nicosia remains divided, as does Cyprus itself.  Nobody ( apart from Turkey) recognizes the state of Northern Cyprus set up by Turkey.

 

But on the other hand, there are no sanctions against Turkey, and no attempts to destabilise the Turkish economy, just repeated patient attempts to reach a negotiated settlement. Greece and Cyprus have subsequently been allowed to join the EU (*in the original version of this post I wrongly stated that Turkey has been permitted to join the EU, which I knew perfectly well was not the case. I suspect this mistake just goes to show how the EU and NATO have become increasingly confused) , despite being in some ways party to this rather disgraceful running sore of a conflict.

 

Britain, which actually possesses large military bases next door, and was generally thought to have some lingering responsibility for an island it once ruled and had fought quite hard to hang on to, sat back and did nothing as the Turks parachuted down. Those who regarded the behaviour of the international community at the time as shameful were generally ignored. There was a great lack of blowhards demanding that we went on a war footing against Turkey.

 

Now, if our behaviour over Crimea and Ukraine is governed by any sort of universal law, advocates of the New Cold War and believers in the ‘Putin is the new Hitler’ theory will have to explain to me (once again) the lack of consistency in our approach here.

 

For it’s even more striking now. Some of you may have noticed the poorly-covered events in Turkey a few days ago, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30468199

 

There is nothing new in this behaviour by Mr Erdogan . Yet his wickedness is little-known in this country (the other day a presenter of Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, who really ought to be in touch with such things, was so unfamiliar with him that she did not know that the ‘g’ in ‘Erdogan’ is silent.

 

I wrote this introduction to a speech I didn’t in the end deliver to the Cambridge Union a few weeks ago (there wasn’t time , alas):

 

 ‘His regime has imprisoned 70 journalists, does sinister deals with Islamist terrorists, uses ultra-violence against rebel ethnic groups,  railroads its political opponents into jail on plainly invented charges, brutally gasses, clubs and even kills peaceful protestors. He is a crude demagogue, given to violent and intolerant language. He has moved from being a parliamentary prime minister to an all-powerful directly elected president. His media are cowed or compliant  His troops illegally occupy another country’s sovereign territory, where he maintains a puppet government.’

 

No, it’s not Vladimir Putin. It’s our NATO ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey. 

 

 

While he is in many ways similar to Mr Putin, he has for years been the poster-boy of the Economist magazine, the head of state of a NATO member - and his misdeeds are barely-known to the noisy moralizers of the British media.’

 

Regular readers here will know of my interest in this NATO head of state, for example:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/08/mr-erdogan-changes-trams-.html

 

and

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/08/the-disturbing-picture-of-growing-repression-at-the-heart-of-eurabia.html

 

Some of you will have noticed Mr Erdogan's odd behaviour towards Islamic State and Syria in recent months, not perhaps the action of a close ally of the ‘West’.

 

Well, all of this would make perfect sense if we still confronted a potent Soviet threat, Admiral Gorchkov’s huge Black Sea Fleet (now mostly razor blades) , the Soviet Army parked up against the borders of Turkey in Armenia and of Iran in Azerbaijan, and all these powers devoted to the cause of establishing Soviet power across the globe, directed by a Communist Politburo. Against such a power, you aren’t too choosy about whose help you accept.

 

But we don’t. We face a declining, shrinking Russia whose principal sin is to complain when we try to diminish it further, whereupon we accuse it of aggression’.

 

What is NATO for? Why wasn’t it wound up, as was its mirror image, the Warsaw Pact, when the Cold War ended? Do you keep a mower when you don’t have a garden? Why then have an anti-Soviet alliance when there isn’t a Soviet Union?

 

In the years of Boris Yeltsin, as I understood it, Russia was generally regarded as a friendly power. We happily stood by, even helped, when Yeltsin retained power in a rigged election, and when he bombarded his own parliament with tanks, and sent troops into the state TV headquarters. So against what threat did we extend its umbrella into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states?  

 

What does it stand for, if Turkey can remain a member in good standing? Democracy? Sort of, though Turkey isn’t much more democratic than Mr Putin’s Russia.  Liberty and the rule of law? Hardly. Mr Erdogan is not very good at that, and nor (whisper it quietly) are some of the other members. Rigid adherence to International Law? Again, not while Turkey continues to occupy North Cyprus. Absence of corruption? Ha ha. Freedom of the press? Not exactly. And so it goes on. And what on earth was NATO doing in Afghanistan? Who knows? Didn't work out, anyway. 

 

In considering these anomalies, you may just begin to see the outlines of what may be happening, You will certainly, if you allow yourself to think about these facts , be liberated from the propaganda of the new Cold War’ advocates, and the people who think that one lot of oligarchs in Ukraine are princes of peace, love and beauty, while an equally unlovely bunch of Oligarchs in Moscow are from the nether pit of hell.

 

But, as we so often find, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think. Doesn’t the old saying go something like that?

 

Abolish the Lords! And lose all the creeps and dodgy donors

This is Peter Hitchens Mail On Sunday column

Let’s abolish the House of Lords. I never thought I’d say that, but when the facts change, I change my mind. And they have changed.

Before the Blair revolution, the Lords was full of independent minds, who owed nobody anything and could not be pushed around by Downing Street. There was no logic to  it, as there often isn’t in this country, but it worked.

It was such a good idea that even revolutionaries used to envy it. Until 1913, the US Senate was modelled on it – and so was not elected. I can’t see any signs that America has been better run since they started electing Senators. And I can  see plenty of signs that Britain has been worse run since the Blairites took over her.

Now it seems you can only  get into our Upper House after crawling to the big parties,  or after giving them piles of cash, or both at once. It’s just  a coincidence, of course, that crawlers and donors get peerages, but it’s so.

As a result it is now a worthless and rather shameful  relic, stuffed to the rafters  with exactly the sort of people who should have nothing to do with power.

 I hate it because I can remember what it once was. I can also recall the derision and mockery I received for warning that change would make it worse, and for defending the old hereditary system.

I am pretty sure that the  next Government will sweep it away and replace it with an elected senate. Unless we combine to thwart them with  a better idea, this will not be  an improvement.

Because such a senate will  be picked by the big parties, and guess what sort of people will be at the top of their lists  – why, donors and crawlers,  of course.

Just as in the House of Commons, you’ll be presented with bland, obedient pre-chosen candidates and invited to approve them in elections decided by big money and big media, in which independent minds won’t stand a chance.

They will then do what the Government tells them to do, in return for salaries and expenses that most people could never dream of. This is what we in this country call ‘democracy’.

The best thing would be to get the old hereditaries back, but our media and political classes are too stupid and malevolent to allow that.

So how about an elected British senate, but one utterly unlike the servile House  of Commons?

Here are a few suggestions: Anyone who has belonged to  or given money to any party within the past five years, to be absolutely disqualified. Any senator who later joins or gives money to a party, or receives any kind of pay, favour, title  or post from the Government,  to be automatically and instantly unseated.

I’d urge a minimum age of 50 and special allocations of seats to full-time mothers, war veterans, crime victims and pensioners, all despised and ignored by our existing Establishment.

But above all, we must destroy the tyranny of the three Zombie Parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory,  who speak for nobody but themselves and have wrecked the country.

Who'd want to be on a stamp with this lot?

Very odd postage stamps have just been launched, featuring strangely smooth Soviet-style airbrushed portraits of a very peculiar selection of Prime Ministers.

If I were the Monarch,  I’d ask for my head to be taken off these scraps of sticky paper from now on.

Who’d want to keep such company?

And I’m really not sure what’s Royal, or even British, about a former institution which has been forced into hectic privatisation by  the EU.

By rights our  stamps should feature the heads of Jacques Delors, Herman Van Rompuy and Mr Cameron’s high-fiving friend Jean-Claude Juncker.

Everyone will find someone to dislike in the gallery of Premiers provided. I’d be nervous about the fate of any letter with a Thatcher stamp on it – and it’s interesting that, despite immortalising Maggie, they decided not to risk a Blair stamp.

It’s not true that you have to be dead to be on a British stamp – several living footballers were honoured  in this way in February.

But it may well be that  Mr Blair has now become  the most unpopular living person in Britain.

And yet I remember when you couldn’t breathe a word against him.

Which of today’s admired figures face a similar reversal of fortune?

Most of them, I hope.

Strong borders save the world

Of course Sir John Major is right that immigrants generally come here to better themselves.

I have always admired the courage and determination of people who travel thousands  of often dangerous miles in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

But so what? The case against mass migration has nothing to do with the personal qualities  of migrants. It has to do with our desire to preserve our own culture, laws and language.  It also has something to do with our wish not to have wages forced down by a huge pool of cheap, easily exploited labour.

It’s also worth considering that the countries from which these people come suffer from the loss of their bravest and most enterprising young men and women.

Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

Didn’t we once say we had brought democracy to Iraq? Yet this week we combined with the Islamic Republic of Iran to support a silent coup against Nouri al-Maliki, that country’s democratically elected premier. The ‘democratic West’ also backed the overthrow by a mob  putsch of Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych, and by a military coup (ssshh, we mustn’t call it that!) of Egypt’s elected President Morsi.

Meanwhile, Western media and politicians are full of praise for Turkey’s new and menacing President Erdogan, who is more repressive than Russia’s Putin and memorably once said: ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ I think he’s nearly there.

I also think our rulers don’t really care about democracy, there or here. They just say they do.

My thanks to those of you who responded so kindly to my request to write to the Iranian President seeking the release of my friend  Jason Rezaian and his wife, still alas held in secret detention in Tehran since July 22. I will let you know of any developments.

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