The Baseness in Tribal Societies
Primeval emotions seem to surface whenever people - unschooled in the enlightened belief that they have a moral, social obligation to one another to behave in a civil manner - feel free to launch violent action against one another, untrammelled by conscience. Intra- and inter-tribal violence, blood feuds, resentments, aggravations, struggles for ascendancy, competition for finite resources, land claims, all are central to aggrieved tensions leading to violence.
Kurdish populations in Turkey, Iraq and Iran have long agitated for a piece of their own geography. Like any other large, dispersed ethnic group they feel themselves entitled by virtue of their numbers, history and traditions to ownership of a national geography. Unsurprisingly, given humankind's perpetual struggle in the aggregate to take ownership of land mass, and unrelentingly retain that ownership, neither Iran, Iraq nor Turkey is interested in ceding land to the Kurds.
In Turkey the government has seen fit to arm members of clans in rural Turkey in the southeastern portion largely Kurd-populated, with assault rifles and grenades, enlisting them in their struggle to suppress Kurdish nationalism. Each village appears to have their 'village guard' contingent, men of the village enlisted and empowered by the government to carry arms and assist the government in countering Kurdish separatists.
As a result, power struggles take place between factions, and the armed thugs clearly have the upper hand, being accused, in a feudal-style clan system, of incidents of murder, rape and property-theft. In the village of Bilge, with a population of several hundred, an atrocity has just taken place, with sixteen women, six children, a cleric and a number of men, totalling forty-four in all, massacred. This represented the outcome of a vendetta between members of the same clan.
This was a wedding celebration. One part of the Celebi family was resentful that a marriage choice for groom was negated in favour of a groom from another family in another village. Masked gunmen with assault rifles and grenades "broke into the house and started spraying the place with bullets, hitting both men and women" according to a female eye witness. The attack took 15 minutes; both bride and groom left dead, among the other 42.
Experts on blood feuds and vendettas explain that in rural Turkey disputes over land or matters of family honour are passed down from generation to generation, resulting in dozens of deaths on an annual basis. Turkey finds itself now with a conundrum; how to undo what it has done in arming 60,000 state-sponsored village guards fighting alongside security forces against Kurdish rebels.
"There are entire villages in the southeast where being a village guard is the only way of subsistence. The economy of entire villages is dependent on these forces, so it's a serious social-economic problem as well", according to one expert. Tribal loyalties are conflicted through this system of state patronage, serving at the same time to encourage brutal lawlessness in the very villages the perpetrators and the victims both stem from.
"No kind of tradition can justify this killing, no conscience can justify this kind of pain", said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. Are we then to take it that his government is now prepared to talk peace and cede land to the Kurdistan Workers Party?
Kurdish populations in Turkey, Iraq and Iran have long agitated for a piece of their own geography. Like any other large, dispersed ethnic group they feel themselves entitled by virtue of their numbers, history and traditions to ownership of a national geography. Unsurprisingly, given humankind's perpetual struggle in the aggregate to take ownership of land mass, and unrelentingly retain that ownership, neither Iran, Iraq nor Turkey is interested in ceding land to the Kurds.
In Turkey the government has seen fit to arm members of clans in rural Turkey in the southeastern portion largely Kurd-populated, with assault rifles and grenades, enlisting them in their struggle to suppress Kurdish nationalism. Each village appears to have their 'village guard' contingent, men of the village enlisted and empowered by the government to carry arms and assist the government in countering Kurdish separatists.
As a result, power struggles take place between factions, and the armed thugs clearly have the upper hand, being accused, in a feudal-style clan system, of incidents of murder, rape and property-theft. In the village of Bilge, with a population of several hundred, an atrocity has just taken place, with sixteen women, six children, a cleric and a number of men, totalling forty-four in all, massacred. This represented the outcome of a vendetta between members of the same clan.
This was a wedding celebration. One part of the Celebi family was resentful that a marriage choice for groom was negated in favour of a groom from another family in another village. Masked gunmen with assault rifles and grenades "broke into the house and started spraying the place with bullets, hitting both men and women" according to a female eye witness. The attack took 15 minutes; both bride and groom left dead, among the other 42.
Experts on blood feuds and vendettas explain that in rural Turkey disputes over land or matters of family honour are passed down from generation to generation, resulting in dozens of deaths on an annual basis. Turkey finds itself now with a conundrum; how to undo what it has done in arming 60,000 state-sponsored village guards fighting alongside security forces against Kurdish rebels.
"There are entire villages in the southeast where being a village guard is the only way of subsistence. The economy of entire villages is dependent on these forces, so it's a serious social-economic problem as well", according to one expert. Tribal loyalties are conflicted through this system of state patronage, serving at the same time to encourage brutal lawlessness in the very villages the perpetrators and the victims both stem from.
"No kind of tradition can justify this killing, no conscience can justify this kind of pain", said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. Are we then to take it that his government is now prepared to talk peace and cede land to the Kurdistan Workers Party?
Labels: Racism, Terrorism, Traditions, World News
posted by Pieface | 7:44 PM
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