Context: Turkey’s conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – recognised as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU – continues in south-eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. In northern Syria, Ankara and the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Forces (YPG), remain pitted against each other. On the home front, Turkey is pursuing its crackdown on the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
Nearly a million civilians, 81 per cnet of them women and children, have been displaced from their homes in 90 days in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, amid a brutal military campaign by Syria’s Assad regime, Russia and Iran-backed militias.
Some Fundamentals
Many Community Policing articles, books, manuals and training sessions will, somewhere at their beginning, make reference to the origins of Community Policing dating back to Sir Robert Peel and the formation of the London Metropolitan police in 1829. While Peel’s nine Principles apply to democratic policing today as much as they did in 1829, this can have the effect of unintentionally and unconsciously, setting the scene that Community-Based Policing is a concept, brand and philosophy “invented” and exported from in the “West.” This can be reinforced and compounded by, what have been termed as, “One shoe fits all” and “Off the shelf” packages, un-boxed and then delivered with minimal consideration for “will this work here”? While there is nothing wrong with covering what can be presented as, the origins of contemporary community policing, the authors argue that it can dictate how technical assistance in this field is introduced and pursued.
“We’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, letting convicted, known, radicalised jihadi criminals walk about our streets”. — Chris Phillips, former head of the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office, The Guardian, December 1, 2019.
If the current crisis facing Turkey is entirely of Mr Erdogan’s own making, that has not prevented the Turkish president from trying to deflect attention away from his own mishandling of the conflict by seeking to provoke a new migrant crisis in Europe.
Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union…. Erdoğan would most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.
“People have seen their properties destroyed, their sheep and goats have been slaughtered, their homes broken into. A few years back, when there were 5,000 migrants on the island, things seemed bad enough. Now there’s a sense that the situation has really got out of hand.” — Nikos Trakellis, community leader in Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos.
In the last decade of the 20th century, Western Europe threw open its doors to those fleeing the collapse of Yugoslavia. Today, Denmark says integration has failed and is pursuing a worrying experiment in dismantling immigrant ‘ghettos’.
“The problem is when, in the name of a religion, some people want to separate themselves from the Republic and therefore not respect its laws.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, February 18, 2020.
According to a new investigation by Swiss media, a cell of jihadists based in Geneva plotted to bomb cisterns full of oil near the city’s airport in a major terror attack.