The following is an impelling commentary by Noam Chomsky (forwarded to me via email from a dear friend in Dublin) which you may find of value:
Noam Chomsky on a Recent Tour in the Turkish Misruled Kurdistan
His Address and Q. and A. in Amed March 31, 2002< p>If I can open with just a personal remark of my own, it is a very moving experience for me to be here. I have followed as best I can the noble and tragic history of the Kurds in Turkey in past years from everything I can find, particularly in last ten years. But it is quite different to see the actual faces of the people who are resisting and who continue to struggle for freedom and justice.
I have been asked repeatedly to express my opinion about the rights of people to use their mother tongue. As a linguist I have no opinion about the matter.
As a human being there is nothing to discuss. It is too obvious. The right to use one's mother tongue freely in every way that one wants -- in literature, in public meetings, in any other form -- that is a primary essential human right. There is nothing further to say about it.
The campaign of the past weeks of the students, mothers, fathers to petition for the right to have elective courses in one's own language is again simply affirming an elementary human right that should not even be under discussion. One can only admire the courage of people who are pressing this campaign in the face of repression and adversity.
Beyond the matter of cultural rights, which are beyond discussion, obvious rights, there lies the world of difficult, intricate questions of political rights.
These issues are arising all over the world.
One of the healthy developments now taking place in Europe is the erosion of the nation-state system with increasing regionalization. In areas from Catalonia to Scotland, there is a revival of traditional languages, cultures, customs and a degree of political autonomy leading towards what may become -- and I think should become -- an arrangement of regional areas that are essentially autonomous within a federal framework. In fact something like the old Ottoman empire. There was a lot wrong with the Ottoman empire, but some things about it were basically correct: mainly, the fact that it left a high degree of regional autonomy and independence within a framework, which unfortunately was autocratic and corrupt and brutal, but we can eliminate that part, and the positive aspects of the Ottoman empire probably ought to be reconstructed in some fashion.
And within that kind of framework, which I hope will be evolving, one can, I think, look forward to an autonomous Kurdistan, which can bring together the Kurds of the region, the tens of millions of Kurds of the region, into a self-governing, autonomous, culturally independent, politically active region, as part of a broader federation of -- one hopes - friendly and cooperating national and ethnic and cultural groups.
The next question that arises has to do with the methods of struggle to achieve such ends. Here the primary question is whether these methods should be violent or non-violent. Here we have to distinguish two kinds of questions: moral questions and tactical questions. With regard to the moral questions, my own personal view is that a very heavy burden of proof is required for anyone who advocates or undertakes the use of violence. In my view that burden of proof can very rarely be met.
Non-violent protest is more appropriate morally, and tactically as well.
However, there is a fundamental principle of non- violence: "you do not preach non-violence unless you are willing to standalong side to the people who are suffering the repression." Otherwise, you can't give that advice. I'm not in a position to stand next to the people who are suffering repression, so I can only express my opinion, but not give advice.
It's a characteristic of history for oppression to lead to resistance and for resistance often to turn to violent resistance. If it does, that resistance is invariably called terrorism.
That's is true for everyone, even the world's worst mass murderers. So the Nazis for example described what they were doing in Europe as defending the population against the terrorism of the partisans. In their eyes, they were defending the legitimate government of France against the terrorist partisans who were directed from abroad. The same with Japanese in Manchuria. They were defending the population from the terrorism of Chinese bandits. Propaganda, no matter how vulgar, always has to have some element of truth in it, if it is to be credible at all. And even in the case of the worst mass murderers like the Nazis or Japanese invaders there was an element of truth to their claims. In some perverse sense their claims were legitimate, and the same can be said about the claims made by others: the United States, Turkey and other countries, who claim to be defending the population against terrorism.
With regard to the concept of terrorism there are really two notions: one is the notion "terror," another is the notion "counter-terror." If you look in, for example, US Army manuals, they define "terror" and they define "counter-terror." And the interesting thing about the definitions is they are virtually identical.
Terrorism turns out to be about the same as counter-terrorism. The main difference is who is the agent of the terrorist violence. If it's someone we don't like, it is terrorism. If it's someone we do like, including ourselves, it is counter-terrorism.
But apart from that the definitions of the actions are about the same.
Another important difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism is that what is called "counter-terrorism" is usually carried out by states. It's the terrorism carried out by states. And states have resources that enable them to be far more violent and destructive than private terrorists. So the end result is that the terrorism of states far outweighs that of any other entity in the world. We constantly read that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. That is totally false, the exact opposite of truth.
Like any other weapon, terrorism is used much more effectively by the strong, and in particular by more powerful states which are the leaders in terrorism throughout the world, except that they call it "counter-terrorism." Now we hear every day that there is a "war on terrorism" that has been declared by the most powerful states. In fact that war is re-declared. It was declared in 1981, twenty years ago. When Reagan administration came into office, it declared that the focus of US foreign policy would be state- sponsored international terrorism, the plague of the modern age; they declared that they would drive the evil out of the world. The war has been re-declared with the same rhetoric, and mostly by the same people. Among the leaders of the first "war against terror" twenty years ago are the ones who are directing the current "war against terror," with the same rhetoric and very likely with the same consequences.
The focus of the first war on terrorism was Central America and the Middle East. And both of those regions were scenes of massive terrorism in the 1980s, the major part of it, by far, conducted by the US and its clients and allies, on a scale with few recent precedents in those regions. There is no time to go through the details, but in the Middle East for example, the most extreme terrorist act by far was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon - supported, armed, backed by the United States -- which killed about 20,000 people for political ends. There wasn't any pretence. It was openly recognized in Israel to be a war to promote the US- Israeli policy of assuring effective control over the Israeli-occupied territories. And that's only one example of the terrorism in the region that was either carried out directly or decisively supported by the US, exceeding other cases by a substantial margin.
In Central America, the Reagan administration at first attempted to follow the model of John F. Kennedy in South Vietnam, which would have meant attacking Central America directly, using chemical warfare and napalm, bombing with B52s, and invading with American troops. But they had to draw back from that intention, because the population of the US had become considerably more civilised in the twenty years that intervened, through activism, protest, and organization. Therefore the Reagan administration had to withdraw from direct outright aggression as in South Vietnam, and instead turned to international terrorism.
They created the most extraordinary international terrorist network that the world had ever seen. When a country like Libya wants to conduct a terrorist act, they hire an individual like Carlos the Jackal. When a big powerful state like the US wants to carry out international terrorism, it hires terrorist states: Taiwan, Israel, Argentina under the neo-Nazi generals, Britain, Saudi Arabia. Other terrorist states carry out most of the work, along with local agents. The US supplies the funding and the training and the overall direction.
The effects were horrendous: hundreds of thousands of people killed, every imaginable kind of torture, everything you know about from Southeastern Turkey in the past ten years. And it finally succeeded in crushing popular resistance. There was also a kind of "clash of civilizations" involved, to borrow a currently- fashionable phrase: the US was fighting against the Catholic Church. The Church had made a grave error: it had adopted "preferential option for the poor," a commitment to work for the benefit of poor people, the vast majority. That was unacceptable. The war was to a large extent directed against the Church. The terrible decade opened with the murder of an archbishop.
The decade ended with the murder of six leading Jesuit intellectuals. In between, many priests, nuns and layworkers were killed and of course tens of thousands of peasants and workers, women and children, the usual victims.
The terrorism was so extreme that it even led to a condemnation of the US by the World Court for international terrorism, and an order to terminate the crime and pay reparations. There was also a supporting resolution of the Security Council of the United Nations, calling on all states to observe international law, directed to the US, as everyone understood. The World Court decision was simply dismissed with contempt and the war was immediately escalated. The Security Council resolution calling all states to observe international law was vetoed.
All of this is gone from history. It is history, but it is not the history that we hear. Since the same war was re- declared on September 11 -- by many of the same people, with the same rhetoric - there have been endless reams of paper devoted to the new "war on terrorism," but you will have to search very hard to find any reference to what happened during the first "war on terrorism" that the same people carried out.
That's gone, and it's gone for very simple reasons: Terrorism is restricted to what they do to us. What we do to them, even it is a thousand times more horrible, doesn't count and it disappears.
That's the law of history as long as history is written by the powerful and transmitted by educated classes who choose to be servants of power.
Let me turn to the Middle East. The British of course ran the Middle East for a long time.
They were the dominant power, and they had a framework for controlling the region. At first it was controlled by direct armed force. But after World War I, Britain was weakened, and it was no longer in a position to rule the area by direct force. So it turned to other techniques. The military technique it turned to was the use of air power to attack civilians. Air power had just become available, so Britain began bombing civilians with aircraft. Also it turned to poison gas, primarily under the influence of Winston Churchill, who was a really savage monster. Churchill, as colonial Secretary, ordered the use of poison gas against what he called "uncivilised tribes": that's Kurds and Afghans. He ordered the use of poison gas against these "uncivilised tribes" because, he said, it will cause a "lively terror" and will save British lives. That's the military side. It's worth remembering that poison gas was the ultimate atrocity after World War I.
The details of this we are not going to learn. The reason is that ten years ago the British government declared