It aptly describes the escalating conflict being incited by Turkey’s would-be new Sultan, Recep Erdoğan, provoking Russia again and again. Only, in a paraphrase of the famous line by Karl Marx describing France of the time of Napoleon III, “History repeats itself; first as tragedy, second as farce.” This third time, it is Erdoğan, not as Napoleon III, but as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The quote was originally used by Marx to describe the absurd rule of Napoleon III, the overly romantic nephew of Napoleon I, who made a coup d’etat, imposed a dictatorship in France and, along with the intriguing British, provoked the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I to go to war against Russia in Crimea. The Crimean War of 1853 has gone down in the history of conflicts as one of the most absurd wars of modern times, though of course most every war is absurd. And now Erdoğan seems intent on a remake, as a “B-grade” Hollywood war, in Russia’s Crimea on the Black Sea.
Erdoğan meets the Tatars
As if it weren’t enough to satisfy his macho by shooting down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet in Syrian airspace, an act of war by a NATO country, and murdering the Russian pilot, using his Turkish Grey Wolves terrorists, in violation of every precept of civilized nations, now the hot-headed Erdoğan is openly stirring conflict in the Russian region of Crimea.
According to reports in both official Turkish media, Ukrainian QHA News Service, and Russian Sputnik News, on December 19, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan met with two organizers of the recent blockade actions against food and electricity that have been launched against the citizens of Russian Crimea. The Turkish Anadolu Agency reported that Erdoğan personally met in a hotel in Konya with Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, said to be two of the key organizers of the so-called ‘food’ and ‘electricity’ blockades of Crimea. Dzhemilev is a Kiev lawmaker and a leader of the Mejlis Movement which claims they represent the true Tatar Muslim Crimean minority. Ukraine’s QHA reported that Refat Chubarov and the Ukrainian politicians held a working meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, Erdoğan’s right-hand man. According to QHA,
the men spoke about an emerging “strategic partnership” between Turkey and Ukraine, prospects of a free trade area, questions surrounding the “civil blockade of Crimea,” and “the formation of a military unit in the Kherson region.”
Earlier on August 4, 2015 Erdoğan had also met Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, as Ankara hosted the Second World Congress of the Crimean Tatars, an exile anti-Russian Tatar organization most of whose members live in Turkey. There Erdoğan told the Tatar terrorist leaders that Turkey would never recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Erdoğan meeting with Crimean Tatar Muslim terrorist leader Mustafa Dzhemilev in Konya in late December
Andrei Manoilo, an expert on “color revolution” CIA regime change, and member of the Russian Security Council, told Russia’s Svobodnaya Pressa that Dzhemilev’s Crimean Tartars are “closely linked with Turkish intelligence…who provide them with significant funding for their provocations. The so-called Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people…has evolved from a political group into a diversionary force, operating under the auspices of Turkish secret services.”
This view was also underscored in a recent Radio Sputnik interview by Andranik Migranyan, a professor at the Moscow State University Institute of International Relations. Migranyan stated that, “some of the leadership of the Crimean Tatars –including Mustafa Dzhemilev, have long been living off Turkish money. They are supported by a variety of Turkish organizations, including Turkey’s intelligence services and nationalist organizations. It is also no secret that on all the maps of Turkish nationalists, Crimea is seen as a part of a new Turkish Empire, and the idea is that with time, it must become part of a single Turkic state.”
Throw in Some Grey Wolves…
Now reports are that Erdoğan is sending of the ultra-right-wing Turkish nationalist terrorist Grey Wolves into Ukraine to team up with Dzhemilev’s Ankara-backed Crimean Muslim Tatar terrorists. In early December, after the Turkish shooting down of the Russian SU-24 jet in Syria, Lenur Islyamov, a Tatar nationalist and a main organizers of Dzhemilev’s Crimean food and energy blockade, posted a photo of himself with members of the Grey Wolves, the ‘militant arm’ of Turkey’s extreme-right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, on his Facebook page. He wrote as caption, “Turkish patriots from the Bozkurtkar, Turk ulkuculeri – known among the people as simply the Grey Wolves, visiting us at the blockade. The ring around the blockade is tightening!”
Alparslan Celik, the so-called ‘Turkmen commander’ who boasted he killed the pilot of the Russian Su-24 downed over Syria by the Turkish Air Force, is a Turkish national and also member of the Grey Wolves fighting alongside DAESH in Syria against Assad’s forces.
The Grey Wolves were founded in the late 1960s as the youth wing of the Nationalist Movement Party. Their goal is to unite all Turkic peoples in one state, the so-called Great Turan, even though the ethnic origins of the Turan is disputed, some claiming it has Persian heritage. The founder of the Grey Wolves and their Nationalist Movement Party, Colonel Alparslan Türkeş, was an open admirer of the ideas of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He was also the founder, together with the CIA, of the Turkish Gladio anti-communist sabotage network during the Cold War. His Grey Wolves went on to murder thousands of Turkish Kurds. Mehmet Ali Ağca, the person in 1981 who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II, was a member of the same Grey Wolves.
Today, the Grey Wolves are collaborating with the terrorist underground in China’s northwest autonomous territory of Xinjiang, considering the region part of the ‘Great Turan’ or the idea of a single state for all the Turkic people. From there they are recruiting young Muslim Ughyurs to come first to Istanbul to study, then they are trained and converted into radical DAESH terrorists against the “infidel” SAssad in Syria. The Grey Wolves call China’s mostly Uyghur Muslim Xinjiang, “East Turkestan.” In August 2015, the Grey Wolves staged a bomb attack in Bangkok, killing 19 and injuring 123, over the Thai government’s decision to deport Uyghur terrorist suspects back to China instead of allowing them to travel to Turkey where asylum awaited them. In Europe, Grey Wolves have been involved in political killings of Kurds, have defiled Armenian monuments, and beat up Chinese tourists. Most recently they have been caught recruiting DAESH fighters for the war in Syria.
Circles around Erdoğan claim a ‘Great Turan’ (red) of allegedly Turkmen populations going from Ankara into China’s Xinjiang Province
As the map of Great Turan above shows, Erdoğan’s ambitions are not modest. If he is mad enough to persist, as he seems so far to be, backed by Saudi and Qatari billions and his mad obsession with creating a new Ottoman Sultanate, he could detonate a new world war. That is, unless the more civilized world finally tires of his Monty Python-esque megalomania.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
