British woman dies in Syria

[StealthPolarBear]

she was only 26,fighting to make the world a better place

The Kurds are treated dreadfully whichever country they’re in. We really should be pressing for them to have their own homeland.

We? You want to give Kurds a part of the UK to have their own country on? That's big of you.

"Why are Turkey still denying the Armenian genocide?"

What do you know about that time in history?

AFAIK Turkey has opened Ottoman archives to historians to come and see what actually happened but there doesn't seem to be much interest in the actual events. People/politicians seem more interested in using it as a stick to beat Turkey with.

I was never much of a history fan so my understanding is somewhat superficial, but I do know that Turkey as a country did not exist back in 1915, and whatever decisions were taken at the time (during WWI) were taken by the Padishah who had to then escape the newly-founded republic.

Hounding Turkey for that period and bringing it up in every discussion (like on this thread) makes as much sense as goading Italy about how Christians were thrown to lions during the Roman Empire.

Why are Turkey still denying the Armenian genocide?

Same reason they deny any number of invasions and ethnic cleansing atrocities. They want to hold on to the lands they have acquired since Turkey was created less than 100 years ago on the territories of nations that existed there for thousands of years before 'Turks' arrived from the east.

Denial of Armenian Genocide by Turkey:

As a form of denialism, it can be compared to similar negationist historical revisionisms such as Holocaust denial and Nanking Massacre denial.
Wikipedia

but there doesn't seem to be much interest in the actual events.

No interest in Turkey's revisionist history, perhaps.

"They want to hold on to the lands they have acquired since Turkey was created less than 100 years ago on the territories of nations that existed there for thousands of years before 'Turks' arrived from the east."

You declare utter bullshit like that and dare pronounce the words "revisionist history"?

The Republic of Turkey was created in 1923, in the lands of what was the Ottoman Empire - another Turk-built country that existed in those lands for over 600 years. That was probably about 30 generations.

How many generations does a nation have to live on a land before you will accept that it is their home? I'm curious.

FYI "Turks arrived from the East" to what is present-day Turkey in 1071, when they defeated the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Manzikert. That is nearly 950 years ago. Who are those nations you believe that land belongs to and why exactly would their (frankly non-existent) claim to it survive for nearly a millennium after they have lost the war?

The Ottomans were an invading force. They had no legitimate rights to the lands they occupied just like Britain had no legitimate right to hang on to e.g. India after centuries of occupation. It rightfully hande dit back. However, the natives of Asia Minor and Anatolia were ethnically cleansed by the Ottomans to make way for Turkey, less than 100 years ago so it's justifiable to argue Turkey should be dismantled if it continues to expand its borders and continues ethnic cleansing of people as it appears to be doing now to the Kurds. .

BTW Cote, your feeble attempts at going back thousands of years, to Roman gladiators, early Christians and suchlike is a ridiculous attempt to try and justify today's ethnic cleansing by Turkey and their recent genocides of Armenians and Greeks.

You actually have no idea about any of this and are merely spewing prejudices and hearsay. Genocide of Greeks now? When did that happen then?

Read a history book or two and then let's talk about the interesting parts together when you are ready to let go of your whiny prejudices about the oh so mean Turks.

"The Ottomans were an invading force"

Every country was an invading force at some point. Do you think Roman Empire just asked people nicely for their lands when they were expanding? Did Greeks? Don't make me laugh.

"They had no legitimate rights to the lands they occupied just like Britain had no legitimate right to hang on to e.g. India "

UK's colonial ambitions, exploiting the people and wealth of a country on the other side of the world, has absolutely nothing to do with a nation settling in a land and making it their home for hundreds of generations.

You actually have no idea about any of this and are merely spewing prejudices and hearsay. Genocide of Greeks now? hmm When did that happen then?

Here's one recent one:

• "The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Asia Minor, central Anatolia, Pontus, and the former Russian Caucasus province of Kars Oblast during World War I and its aftermath (1914–23). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. It began at the same time as the Armenian Genocide and is considered by many scholars to have been part of the same genocidal policy."

And some sources:

Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Kevin White, Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, p. 82
It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide.
Dr. Israel Charney quote
Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC.
Igor M. Diakonov, Paths of History, p. 276 footnote 60
The period of transition from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic was characterized by a number of processes largely guided by a narrow elite that aimed to construct a modern, national state. One of these processes was the deliberate and planned elimination, indeed extermination, of the Christian (and certain other) minorities... Much less scholarly work has been done on the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Thrace.
Tessa Hoffman, Matthias Bjornlund, Vasileios Meichanetsidis, The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: Studies on the State-sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor, 1912-1922 and Its Aftermath : History, Law, Memory. Aristide D. Caratzas, 2011.

Cote, there you go again with comparing what people did thousands of years ago (Romans)with what Turkey has been doing for less than a century, in recent, living memory, with people alive today still affected.

Here's another example:

Turkey's Genocide in Cyprus
Turkey's analysis of conduct in terms of Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide makes it clear that Turkey committed a species of genocide as respects the Greek Cypriot community.
Turkey intended to destroy the Greek Cypriots as an ethnic and religious group in the occupied area by deliberately inflicting on it conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in part and its total and permanent displacement from the occupied part of Cyprus. Unfortunately no international judicial machinery is available to arraign Turkey as she has not recognised yet the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

Turkey's Violations of International Human Rights Law
Not only has Turkey flouted international law as codified in the Genocide Convention, but she has also disregarded the UN Charter, UN resolutions, the UN International Covenants on Human Rights, the Hague Regulations, the 1949 Geneva Conventions (setting minimum standards of treatment of soldiers and civilians in time of armed conflict and during occupation thereafter) and the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols.

In consequence the Commission, an impartial international judicial tribunal, having carefully evaluated evidence, has found Turkey guilty of grave violations of human rights in Cyprus from 1974 onwards. Accordingly, rather than categorising Turkey's many breaches of international human rights law under the numerous applicable Conventions, detailed analysis will concentrate on Turkey's breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sigh. I can't be bothered anymore. Turn off the internet and read a history book.

And for future reference: If you don't want the mean Turks to show up with their big scary army, don't take up arms & announce your intention to divide their country or start ethnic cleansing of the Turkish minority in yours.

And for future reference: If you don't want the mean Turks to show up with their big scary army, don't take up arms & announce your intention to divide their country or start ethnic cleansing of the Turkish minority in yours.
For your information, there was no such intention, declared or otherwise to divide anything. It was the Turks that set their minds on grabbing as many territories as they could (a pattern repeated many times) and as their leader, Denktash, categorically stated Turkey would have found SOME excuse to invade Cyprus whether there were any Turks already there or not. It was never to save anyone but to land-grab a geopolitically strong land base and use it as elbow power for a number of things (that have since come to light).

I suggest you stop reading Turkey's propaganda because it is endless - one of the biggest spenders!

"there was no such intention, declared or otherwise to divide anything."

There was, actually. PKK very clearly stated and still states its intention to take a chunk of Turkey's territory for their future Kurdistan. That is why Turkey has been fighting Kurdish guerillas all this time. Something you should consider before you go off on a rant about the mean Turks going into Syria to fight Kurds next time.

The Kurds were there long before the Turks. There are 20 million Kurds in what is now called eastern Turkey that are being kept stateless by Turkey's armies.

I think it's naive to expect 3 countries to carve out parts of their territory to create a Kurdistan. And foolish to romanticise the PKK, which the media does here. They are a terrorist group.

"The Kurds were there long before the Turks"

Nearly 1,000 years ago? Really. Who gives a flying fuck who lived there 50 generations ago?

The idea that countries should just give away huge chunks of their territory to groups of people who claim their ancestors from 1,000 used to herd goats there is so utterly ridiculous that I can hardly believe an adult can voice it.

Is any other country obliged to look back a millennium and offer parts of their land to people whose ancestors might have lived there? No. Why just Turkey, then?

Nearly 1,000 years ago? Really. Who gives a flying fuck who lived there 50 generations ago? hmm

No, Cote, to your above ignorant statement, some do care!

Let's not forget what this thread represents. A British woman fighting for the human rights of Kurds and ultimately being killed by Turkey.

Not only have the Kurds been there for far longer than 1000 years but the point you (and Turks) ignore is the FACT that they are still there, still fighting for freedom and to get their homeland back, develop self-determination and have some human rights that are denied to them by Turkey.

Again: Let's not forget what this thread represents. A British woman fighting for the human rights of Kurds and ultimately being killed by Turkey.