Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that an external
military intervention which would be made in the the Middle East would
bring "more chaos" to the region.
The change in the Middle East was a necessity and it should be
evaluated within the scope of natural course of the history, added
Davutoglu, who assessed the recent incidents began in Tunisia and
continued in Egypt and Libya, to Turkish state-run TRT's Arabian channel
on Wednesday.
____
From the Hurriyet Daily Bugle: 20 people detained in investigation into Tatlises shooting.
A proposal submitted by the Republican People's Party (CHP) to allow
potential draftees to pay a specified amount of money in lieu of
performing compulsory military service as a one-time only opportunity
has created conflict between CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with the latter accusing the former of
playing with young people's hopes.
The CHP is promising to reduce the duration of compulsory military
service from the current 18 months to six months. Kılıçdaroğlu has also
said the CHP will seek to pass legislation that would allow men
attending university to serve in the military during the summers and in
segments so that they can get this legal responsibility out of the way
by the time they graduate.
The Turkish daily was picked by WikiLeaks because it is “the bravest
newspaper in Turkey,” as described by the site’s founder, Julian
Assange.
Taraf will begin publishing Thursday the 11,000 documents it has received regarding Turkey from the era between 2000 and 2010.
____
Bahrain
Here's an interesting piece from al-Jazeera on the recent arrival in Bahrain of more than 1000 Saudi troops.
Monday's arrival of more than 1000 Saudi and hundreds of Emirati
security forces with a mandate from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
to support King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa's regime in Sunni- ruled,
Shia-majority Bahrain only stokes sectarian conflict and fuels the
regional power politics between US-Saudi hegemony and an increasingly
influential Shia-led Iran, analysts argue.
It is heartbreaking to see a renegade country like Libya shoot
pro-democracy protesters. But it’s even more wrenching to watch
America’s ally, Bahrain, pull a Qaddafi and use American tanks, guns and
tear gas as well as foreign mercenaries to crush a pro-democracy
movement — as we stay mostly silent.
In Bahrain in recent weeks, I’ve seen corpses of protesters who were
shot at close range, seen a teenage girl writhing in pain after being
clubbed, seen ambulance workers beaten for trying to rescue protesters —
and in the last few days it has gotten much worse. Saudi Arabia, in a
slap at American efforts to defuse the crisis, dispatched troops to
Bahrain to help crush the protesters. The result is five more deaths, by
the count of The Associated Press.
“They broke everything, they shot at kids, there was no humanity, no
respect,” said Hassan Ali Ibrahim, 35, a gardener, who had spent the
night in the plaza, known as Pearl Square, a protest tent camp over the
past month like Tahrir Square in Cairo. “When we saw the tanks and the
cars, about a hundred of us went towards them, and started chanting,
‘Peacefully! Peacefully!’ This is when they started shooting, from the
ground and from the bridge, from everywhere.”
The crackdown placed the United States in an awkward bind. The United
States, which bases its Fifth Fleet here, has struggled to balance its
strategic interest in placating Bahrain and its ally, Saudi Arabia, its
fears that Iran is exploiting the anger of Bahrain’s majority Shiite
protesters, and American democratic principles. American officials have
held off backing the protesters while urging Bahrain’s leaders to
exercise restraint. That advice was ignored.
Azerbaijan has threatened to shoot down civilian planes flying to
Nagorno-Karabakh if the sole civilian airport in the disputed region
reopens as planned.
The Karabakh Armenian leadership dismissed
the threat, saying that the first commercial flights between the
territory and Armenia in two decades would start as planned in May.
Nagorno Karabakh has been the subject of a dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the late 1980s
____
Perhaps most
ironically, while Kadyrov has been the Kremlin's ally in stamping out religious
extremists, his rule in Chechnya has seen a creeping Islamization, unknown
elsewhere in the North Caucasus.
Polygyny (illegal
under Russian law) is now approved in unofficial ceremonies by mullahs, sale of
alcohol has been restricted to a two-hour time window each day, and the muftiat
has issued strict advisories on women's attire that have been enforced, it
appears, by informal militia.
Last June, Kheda (not
her real name), a 30-year-old Chechen woman, was walking down Putin Avenue with
two female friends. None had tied on the headscarves that most but not all
women favor here, and all wore skirts that grazed the knee. Suddenly two cars
with tinted windows jolted to a halt beside the pavement.
The windows were
rolled down, Kheda told me when we met last week, and she had time to notice a
man in a camouflage uniform in the second car. As someone shouted, "Cover your
hair, harlots!" the man in camo aimed a weapon at her, and Kheda felt something
hit her stomach and her thigh. She looked down to see her skirt splattered with
pink paint. Her friends had been shot, too, with a blue substance. The men —
who had shot the women with paintball guns — laughed and sped away.
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