Ostensibly multilateral, NATO is often merely the framework for bilateral relations in which the United States is the commanding partner. Nowhere is this more the case than with Turkey, separated geographically from the other NATO allies by its main adversary, Greece, and heavily dependent on the US for military assistance. Yet Turkey has a second bilateral partner within NATO: the Federal Republic of Germany. The Bonn connection points to contradictory tendencies in Turkey’s NATO commitments.
When Nevzat Helvaci, president of the Turkish Human Rights Association, visited New York City in December 1988, he asked to visit a US prison. “There is no reason why these visits should be always one-sided, with foreign monitors visiting Turkish prisons,” he commented. “We also want to visit and observe their facilities.” Helvaci and Emil Galip Sandalci, head of the THRA’s Istanbul branch, came as guests of Human Rights Watch, to attend ceremonies held on the fortieth anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Herman Schwartz is a professor at the American University law school in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine. In late March he visited Turkey on behalf of Helsinki Watch to investigate prison conditions in that country. He has done similar missions to Poland, Cuba, Czechoslovakia and Brazil. Ömer Karasapan and Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in June 1989.
Your mission was to look specifically at prison conditions?
No one can say that the Turkish government does not know the importance of public relations. In Europe, where Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the Economic Community is hampered by the government’s poor human rights record, Ankara has hired the top-ranked British advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi — for a fee rumored to be nearly 1 million pounds sterling — to boost the country’s image.
In the United States, Turkey’s main concern is to sell itself to Congress, particularly to the committees that appropriate military aid. Ankara claims it needs at least $1 billion per year to hold up its end of the NATO alliance, but Congress has appropriated only 60 percent of that in recent years.
On May 20, 1989, a top-of-the-line Soviet MiG-29 fighter evaded pursuing Soviet interceptors and landed at Trabzon airport in northern Turkey. An apparent intelligence bonanza had literally landed in NATO’s lap. Though a regular exhibit at Western air shows and sold to India, Iraq, Yugoslavia and other countries, the MiG-29 had never been closely inspected by the US. Within 36 hours, however, the plane and its weaponry were on their way back to the Soviet Union, despite a personal entreaty from Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to General Necip Torumtay, his Turkish counterpart.
Visiting Ankara in early December 1981, at a time when the European Common Market countries had halted more than $600 million of aid to the new Turkish junta for its human rights abuses, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told General Kenan Evren that “we admire the way in which the order and law have been restored in Turkey.” The military government, he said, had “lived up to our expectations.”
Prop. W Not a Setback
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen Press, 1987)
Resistance Literature is a wide-ranging and impressive critical study of the literatures of contemporary “Third World” liberation movements as they confront and alter the literary and political categories of the “West.” It is not only an introduction to Third World literature, although that function is ably accomplished by Harlow’s text. Resistance Literature also argues for the crucial political significance of literary texts and, by extension, for the necessity of an informed political commentary on those texts.
It’s Possible, A Joint Exhibition of Palestinian and Israeli Art
“It’s Possible” is the theme of an exhibition by Palestinian and Israeli artists currently touring the United States. Twenty-four artists — 12 Palestinians and 12 Israelis — are displaying their works together in the first such effort outside Israel and the occupied territories. The exhibit curators are Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian artist and design editor of this magazine, and Yona Fischer, senior curator of the Israel Museum; New York-based Israeli sculptor Shulamith Koenig serves as the exhibition administrator.
Shadows Over the Future, A film by Wolfgang Bergmann. 1985. 92 mins, 16mm.
Last Exit: Berlin, A film by Marilyn Gaunt. 1988. 28 mins. video.
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Perhaps the saddest commentary on the situation in Iran is Amnesty International’s recent statement that “some former prisoners of conscience held during the 1970s when the late Shah was in power, for whose unconditional release [Amnesty] then worked, now figure among those with responsibility for the incarceration of prisoners of conscience and for other human rights violations in Iran. Others who were imprisoned in the 1970s for the non-violent expression of their conscientiously held beliefs are once more in prison, and many have been executed.”
These days the mainstream media in the US generally thinks twice before publishing crude slurs against entire ethnic or racial groups. But there remain those whom it is still apparently respectable to denigrate, foremost among them Arabs and Iranians.
My friend Jacques got as far as a screenplay when he died. He was Palestinian (Armenian) from Jerusalem, a photographer by trade, and after his family moved from occupation to Australia, Jacques made his way to the States on a tourist visa. Settling in New York, he found work in a series of custom photo labs where employers were more than willing to overlook his illegal alien status if he was willing to take the midnight shift. At the last job, there was a vague promise that something could be done to get him a green card; in the meantime, he lived his inverted life on the margins of the margins.
All revolutions require aesthetic means for representing changes in consciousness. The French Revolution saw itself as something new and universal, and generated a rich elaboration of aesthetic categories of the sublime (storms of nature, volcanoes, earthquakes), the beautiful (island of calm, meadow after a storm) and the grotesque (metamorphoses) as vehicles for thinking about social change and the future. Most revolutions since then have seen themselves in relation to predecessor revolutions, from which they borrow tactics, organizational forms, strategies, rhetoric, symbols and graphics.
During the summer of 1986,1 spent a month in the West Bank, keen to learn for myself about the effects of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian forms of expression, particularly in the visual arts and local crafts. A quick look at different cultural products indicated that traditional aesthetic values have for some time been rapidly eroding. Alternative aesthetic values were more often than not crudely colored by the reactive rhetoric intrinsic to the cultural ghetto created by the occupation. I set out to explore for myself the process that brings into being products which stir a sense of pride among Palestinians living under occupation, and to understand the components that endow these cultural products with their uniquely Palestinian character.
Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep
Sami Shalom Chetrit
1. Eight kids in an army jeep
Eight soldiers, one major:
eight kids and one minor
2. Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep [1]
3. And his son Ishmael was thirteen years old
at the cutting of his uncircumcised flesh.
4. And eight of his sons in the army jeep
and his son cries to the Lord but no one hears
5. And behold his father running:
Run, Muhammad, run,
your son’s spirit is coming towards you
6. Lord, Lord, where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
Ironically, the latest junkets featuring liberal Israelis and recently domesticated Palestinians threaten to finally collapse the intricate history of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East into two streamlined, easily recognizable blocs: enlightened, idealistic and well-intentioned Zionists (“wounded spirits” as the title of a symposium on Israeli culture in New York had it); and articulate, mild-mannered, well-dressed Palestinians ready to interpret the desires of their less articulate, less well-dressed, stone-wielding and still somehow overly Arab constituents in the occupied territories.
Fatna held up the knot of hair. It was a magic spell. “But what does it mean?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the neatly-tied brown square knot. “And whose hair is it?”
“Why do you think Khadija has been coming over every day? She wants me to marry her brother Muhammad. This is probably her mother’s hair. The mother’s hair is the most powerful.”
“You mean it's to make you fall in love with him?”
“Or to keep me from falling in love with anyone else.” Fatna took back the hair-knot and disappeared into the john, emerging a few minutes later smiling mysteriously. “I pissed on it," she told me.
Discotheques and taxicabs all over Egypt last January were playing the songs of a new pop star. No one knew exactly where “the Earthquake of ’88” (his biographer’s term) had come from, but everyone seemed to think Ali Hemida was a Bedouin. Some said he came from Sinai; others said Libya. His music was unusual, his dialect not Egyptian, and his lyrics ("wearing silk, she’s like a gazelle, henna-painted hands") evoked the life of desert Arabs.
