RUTHFULLY YOURS

Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

According to the agreement, 80 million Turkish citizens will have visa-free access to the European Union.

The nightmare scenario for a desperate EU is that no matter how much it bows to extortionist demands from Turkey, the migrant crisis will continue to grow. Even if Turkey closes down all migrant routes from Turkey into Europe, refugees could take new routes through North Africa or the Caucasus.

Meanwhile, 800,000 migrants are currently on Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves le Drian.

“We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses … So how will you deal with refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees?” This was the question Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan, in true mafia style, asked European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on November 16, 2015 in a closed meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where the three met after the G20 summit.

While Tusk and Juncker have both declined to comment on whether the meeting took place, Erdogan has since then boasted that he is proud of the leaked minutes of the meeting, where he boldly blackmails EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan (left) has boasted that he is proud of blackmailing EU leaders, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right), into paying him protection money.

Finally, feeding into the denial/ignorance of the European elites, who were at that time reeling from the Paris terror attacks that had occurred just three days earlier, Erdogan — who himself has hosted and supported terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah to ISIS — told his European colleagues, “The attacks in Paris is [sic] all about poverty and exclusion. These people… will continue to be terrorists in Europe”.

The leaked minutes furthermore showed Tusk and Juncker pleading with Erdogan, almost begging him to see reason, pathetically telling him that the EU has been treating him “as a prince in Brussels.”

“Like a prince?” Erdogan retorted, “Of course. I’m not representing a third world country.” He also told Juncker, who is the former prime minister of Luxembourg, not to compare Luxembourg to Turkey: “Luxembourg is just like a town in Turkey.”

According to a report by the Turkish Journalists Association, 500 journalists were fired in Turkey in 2015; 70 others were subjected to physical violence. Thirty journalists remain in prison, mostly on charges of “terrorism.” There are also many journalists among the 1,845 Turks who have been investigated or prosecuted for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he was elected in August 2014.

After the secular daily newspaper Cumhuriyet published evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria, President Erdogan himself filed a criminal complaint against Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, and the Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul.

At a March 25 hearing, the Istanbul court ruled for the whole trial to be held in secret.

“We came here today to defend journalism…We said we would defend the people’s right to access information. We defended that and we were arrested.” — Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet.

The trial clearly exhibits how Erdogan’s authoritarian rule diverges from Western democratic culture.

“Turkey is where many journalists may have to spend more time at their attorneys’ offices or in courtrooms than in the newsrooms, where they should be,” a Western diplomat joked bitterly. “Don’t quote me on that. I don’t want to be declared persona non grata,” he added with a smile.

India’s Supreme Court is considering petitions that challenge Muslim laws governing marriage on the grounds that they discriminate against women, a charged issue that risks angering the country’s orthodox Muslims.

A panel headed by the chief justice that is hearing the petitions directed the government this week to release an official 2015 report that looks at the impact of some of India’s religion-specific laws on women’s rights and recommends legal reform.

Among the petitioners calling for change is Shayara Bano, a Muslim woman whose husband, after 13 years of marriage, divorced her by triple talaq, a practice that allows Muslim men in India to leave their wives unilaterally and often instantaneously by saying “talaq,” meaning divorce, three times. Other similar petitions were put together by the court and are being heard at the same time.The next hearing in the case is expected in May.

The Indian constitution protects gender equality, but on issues of marriage, divorce and inheritance, different religious communities are governed by their own so-called personal laws. Whether a person is subject to those laws is usually determined by their religion at birth.
Muslim clerics and scholars have rebuffed demands for unifying personal laws into a common civil code for all Indian citizens—advocated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party—rejecting what they call attempts to interfere with their religious practices in Hindu-majority India. There are more than 170 million Muslims in the country out of a 1.2 billion population.

Muslim women’s rights groups argue that the practice of triple talaq misinterprets the Quran and is protected by orthodox Muslim men to perpetuate patriarchy. In her petition, Ms. Bano asks the court to declare it illegal as it “practically treats women like chattel,” infringes their “basic right to live with dignity” and violates their fundamental rights to equality and life guaranteed under the constitution.

“Muslim women have their hands tied while the guillotine of divorce dangles, perpetually ready to drop at the whims of their husbands who enjoy undisputed power,” the petition reads, alleging that women have been divorced over Skype, Facebook and through text messages.

“There is no protection against such arbitrary divorce,” it adds. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Given the risks to the outlook, I consider it appropriate for the [Federal Open Market] Committee to proceed cautiously in adjusting policy,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen told the Economic Club of New York Tuesday, citing slower growth in the US and China and weak commodity prices. Her opposite number at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, knows better: on March 10 he announced that the ECB would buy corporate bonds to continue quantitative easing, the first time a major central bank has put large amounts credit risk on its balance sheet in living memory.

Draghi feared a collapse of confidence in Italian banks, who in turn own 405 billion euros of Italian government debt, or more than a fifth of the total. The trouble is that the Italian banks probably are insolvent by a wide margin. Non-performing loans stood at about 18% of Italian banks’ total loans at the end of 2014 and the total probably has increased since then.

The Fed’s threat to raise US interest rates sent world stock markets into a tailspin during the first six weeks of the year. Markets snapped back after the US, European and Japanese central banks responded with monetary ease and the promise of more. The central banks are right to worry. The European banking crisis of 2012 was never resolved, just swept under the carpet. It threatened to erupt again in February.

Nonperforming assets are larger than shareholders’ equity in all the top four Italian banks. The basket case is Monte dei Paschi, the third-largest private commercial bank, with non-performing assets at more than 500% of equity. Depending on recovery value, Unicredito and Intesa San Paolo, the two largest banks, might be solvent, presuming that they aren’t lying about their non-performing assets. By contrast, Bank of America and Citigroup have non-performing assets valued at 3% to 4% of their equity.

Chinese banks–the subject of endless scrutiny by foreign analysts–reported nonperforming loans of just 1.6%, and the Hong Kong brokerage house Reorient Group estimated NPL’s at 4.2% of bank assetsin a recent report.

To be updated post verdict….rsk

“Presumed innocent until proven Serb”
–Balkans forum commenter

“The falseness of the entire situation here defies description.”
– Radovan Karadzic, Opening Defense Statement

Well, at least this Hague-held Serb didn’t turn up dead like six or so others.

Very little in or about the Balkans happens by accident. In 2008 Radovan Karadzic was arrested at a time that the U.S. and EU were desperately ramming through statehood for a criminal enclave named Kosovo. Conveniently, the arrest of Karadzic reinforced the image of Serb as war criminal just as they were looking to have fewer questions about officialdom’s obsession with this tiny place.

And it is again no accident that the date of the Karadzic verdict eight years later was “set for March 24th,” the infamous date in 1999 of America’s greatest international crime and shame, when a purportedly anti-war president took us to war against a Christian, European population that had been America’s historical ally. All for doing battle against domestic terror and the ambitions of Greater Islam which, having little experience with it at the time, Washington dubbed “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” As did Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

Payback is a bitch. Particularly when it’s self-orchestrated, as Europe and America are today reaping the karma and consequence of what they’ve sown, making Serbs of us all. As publisher Milo Yelesiyevich, who has translated Karadzic’s Opening Defense Statement, put it in a letter to me:

I hope the Europeans give Dr. K a second look, because they’re in for it now. In a few short decades, they’ve been cast in the role of “Serbs” in their own countries, yet they still refuse to acknowledge their complicity in their own downfall, which stems from having attacked Serbs and Serbia throughout the 1990s [on behalf of what would become the next nexus of jihad — Bosnia and Kosovo].

From the back cover of the hard-copy version of the opening statement, by Kirkus Reviews:

Karadžić’s defense itself is remarkable, by turns eloquent, historically provocative…. Karadžić claimed Serbs had long been champions of peace and compromise, but they met an intransigent Muslim faction that all but insisted on either war or submission. Moreover, he contended that the “forcible removal of Bosnian Muslims and Croats was never our plan.” In many ways, the full account of Karadžić’s defense does add valuable perspective, especially in pointing out that Muslim insurgents were themselves guilty of extraordinary war crimes and that they were often stubbornly unreasonable partners in political dialogue…. This translation remains an important contribution to the understanding of a historically significant war.

No doubt one U.S. presidential candidate in particular will seek to capitalize on the carefully timed verdict to burnish her credentials, for having urged her husband to wage that “successful” 1999 war and for the overall ’90s Balkans legacy that today culminates in this “important” conviction of yet another Serbian official.

A salient point from the book’s web page:

The U.S. and NATO used the Bosnian War as a laboratory to test weapons as well as new methods of perception management, which they deployed in a long series of wars. Americans who no longer believe the U.S. government’s selective presentation of its foreign policy will find much to consider in Dr. Karadžić’s Opening Defense Statement.

With that, a few relevant snippets. First, an October 2013 email from the American who first coined the term “ethnic cleansing” in the context of Bosnia while serving as a foreign service officer, George Kenney. (Kenney subsequently subscribed to a more balanced version of the war than the cartoon that Americans were fed.):

I am still mystified as to why, but last Friday I was invited to a lunch at a fancy restaurant on K Street for Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister. She was in town for a couple days, opening an office here. About a dozen people attended, including several former government types. After the meal, over coffee, about half a dozen of us lingered, swapping stories