Hatay Province
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatay_Province
Erdogan semble préparer une deuxième édition du coup de 1938 mais cette fois la Turquie agit loin de la mer méditerranée.
Sovereignty over the province remains disputed with neighbouring Syria, which claims that the province was separated from itself against the stipulations of the French Mandate of Syria in the years following Syria’s independence from the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Although the two countries have remained generally peaceful in their dispute over the territory, Syria has never formally renounced its claims to it.
▻http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/223122
The War Nerd : Cleanse Thy Neighbor
▻https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cleanse-thy-neighbor
It’s hard for us now to remember how big, how scary the Germans were in those days, but remember, they took all of Western and Central Europe in 1940 and only lost 30,000 men doing it. That’s somebody worth being scared of.
And the French had had enough. Nobody in the Anglo world gives them much credit, but they’re the ones who held off the WW I era Germans and suffered 1.5 million dead in the process, out of a population of 40 million. They didn’t want to do it again and were desperate to make a deal.
And that’s where the Sanjak of Alexandretta, now known as Hatay Province, comes in. The French needed friends, and Turkey had proved itself a serious military power when it crushed the Greeks, who had the advantage in weapons and international support. Turks can fight; nobody ever argued about that.
And in WW I, they’d fought on the German side, wiping out a Commonwealth force at Gallipoli, where Ataturk made his bones with a motivational speech that went—seriously—like this: “Soldiers, I do not tell you to go out and fight; I tell you to go out and die.” And they did, along with a whole bunch of poor Kiwis and Aussies who believed that Kitchener poster.
The French wanted the Turks to stay out of whatever next big war with Germany was brewing on the horizon. They had to offer something, and that something was Alexandretta/Hatay. Turkey was still hungry for territory, still pissed off over losing the Ottoman lands, and here was this dangling bit of coastline in northern Syria, with a mixed population: mostly Alawite Arabs and Armenian Christians, but about one-third or one-quarter Turks.
Well, if you’re a French administrator sweating over Hitler, that’s an easy one: throw the Turks a bone, keep ’em happy. Nobody ever cared about the Armenians; nobody does even now, except the Israeli lobby that doesn’t want them talking about their genocide and ruining the total uniqueness of the Holocaust. And the Alawites, after all, had their little piece of land a little way down the coast; they could just move.
So the French and the Turks made a deal in 1937: there’d be an official plebiscite (those were big years for phony plebiscites; the word just reeks of the 30s) but the Turks were old hands at creating ethnic unity even where there wasn’t any.
And they did, using their usual methods: they marched into the Sanjak, expelled all the Alawites and all the Armenians and imported loyal Turks. When the Alawites and Armenians objected, the Turks pulled a classic move and blamed the rioting for the crackdown, a nice reversal-on-reality that still works.
By 1939—just two years after taking over—the official language of Hatay Province was Turkish. French, not Arabic, was the official second language. The Turks wanted to de-Arabize their new Hatay province at all costs, and kept shunting Turkish-speaking loyalists to Hatay to make sure they swamped the native Arab population. The city that used to be Alexandretta, a Franco-Latin name, was renamed “Iskander,” the Turkish version of “Alexander” (and the name of a damn good type of kebab, too).
Every single village, well, palm tree and stray dog in the province went through the same process, which is why there is now not one single Arabic name in the whole province, though it used to be Arab land.
Der türkische Nationalismus in neuer Blüte | Telepolis
▻https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-tuerkische-Nationalismus-in-neuer-Bluete-3972587.html?seite=all
19. Februar 2018 Elke Dangeleit
Politik hat nichts mit Moral zu tun, das ist eine bittere Wahrheit. Und so können wir nur staunend zuschauen, wie sich der amtierende Außenminister Gabriel mit der Freilassung von Deniz Yücel brüstet. Yücel hatte deutlich gemacht, dass er für Deals zu seiner Freilassung nicht zur Verfügung stände. Das ist politische Größe und zeigt Rückgrat. Aber er hat die Rechnung ohne die Bundesregierung gemacht.
Nicht nur die Türkei hat ihn als Geisel benutzt. Auch die Bundesregierung hat auf seine Kosten agiert. Was mussten sich Journalisten alles anhören? Nicht zu viel Protest, wir können es uns nicht verscherzen wegen der Verhandlungen zu Deniz Yücel etc.
In den letzten Wochen seit dem Angriff auf Afrin kommt zu Tage, was ein Preis für Yücels Freilassung war: Eine weitere Verschärfung der Kriminalisierung der kurdischen Bevölkerung in Deutschland, die mittlerweile nicht mehr nur die Fahnen von der YPG/YPJ auf Demonstrationen zeigen dürfen.
Dem kurdischen Dachverband Nav-Dem wurde im Zuge des Demonstrationsverbotes in Köln mitgeteilt, sie bräuchten überhaupt keine Demos mehr anmelden, denn diese würden sowieso verboten werden.
Auch die türkischen Militärangehörigen, die in Deutschland um Asyl gebeten hatten und anerkannt wurden, haben sich offensichtlich aus Angst, dass die deutsche Politik sie ausliefert, in ein europäisches Land außerhalb des Schengenraums aus dem Staub gemacht.
Zur Situation der kurdischen Bevölkerung in Afrin und in der Türkei schweigt die Bundesregierung bzw. gibt sich höchstens besorgt - und schaut dem herannahenden Genozid zu. Wie gesagt, Politik hat nichts mit Moral zu tun.
