[A-List] Turkish Speaker Nullifies U.S. Troop Vote

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Sabri:
>
> The pictures are impressive and inspiring.  But as I
understand,
> they are celebrations after the vote, not demonstrations to
> oppose the vote.

Then your understanding is wrong. These are demonstrations to
oppose the vote. And these demonstrations are just tip of the
iceberg. For months, many small and big demonstrations have been
going on all around Turkey, despite the pressure of one of the
most repressive states of the world. All sorts of activities from
writing e-mails and sending cell-phone messages to the MPs, to
concerts and exhibitions, to book fairs to what have you have
been organized. There have been concerted efforts by the labor
and public employee unions, chambers of engineers and doctors,
lawyers guild and many left political parties. March 1 was
organized by DISK (Revolutionary Workers Union), KESK (Public
Employees Union), TMMOB (Turkish Union of the Chambers of
Engineering and Architecture), TTB (Turkish Doctors Union), ODP
(Freedom and Solidarity Party), TKP (Communist Party of Turkey),
TDP (Don't know, must be some party), EMEP (Party of Labor) and
DEHAP (Democratic Peoples Party whose skeleton is the Kurdish
HADEP) but they were not all. There were anarchists, gays and
lesbians, artists, musicians, actors and actresses, professors,
small business owners, Islamists what have you.

They were not there to celebrate. They were there to stop the
war. One of the slogans was: "This people will stop this war".
They took a vote of the motion, a people's vote, before it was
voted at the National Assembly and unanimously said NO.

Anyway.

Since you do not know Turkish, it is only natural that you did
not understand what was reported at the Istanbul Indymedia site.
I am no different: I have no clue about neither Chinese nor
China.

Best,

Sabri

PS: One of the hotly debated topics among the participants of the
antiwar movement (coincidentally, most of them are also
"antiglobalizationists") is the Kurdish question. There has not
been much progress on that but at least those who were afraid of
debating this issue are now talking about it. This is some
progress in my book as well.