1
April 2003
2. "Powell heads to Turkey for military talks", secretary of State Colin L. Powell flies to Turkey today amid signs that the United States may agree to Turkish troop movements in northern Iraq — but only if Ankara's security is threatened and it works in full coordination with U.S.-led coalition forces.
3. "Iraqi Kurds say they have ‘no friends but the mountains’", treachery and betrayal are a recurring nightmare. Dreams of autonomy have been repeatedly snuffed out by constant feuding between rival factions and the machinations of world powers.
4. "Kurds grow impatient at slow pace of US build-up in north", Kurdish officials in the north of Iraq are showing signs of irritation about the slow pace of the US build-up and the role assigned to Kurdish forces.
5. "Cyprus Insists Peace Talks Remain within UN Framework", Cyprus' government spokesman Kypros Chrisostomides said Monday that the Cypriot government will insist that the Cyprus peace talks remain within the framework of the United Nations.
6. "Turkey named in US human rights report", Turkey was just one of Washington’s allies that was criticised in the report by the U.S. State Department.
1. - The International Herald Tribune - "For Turkey, uncertainty over which road to take":
ANKARA / 1 April 2003 / by Frank Bruni
Almost immediately after his party's overwhelming victory in Turkish
Parliamentary elections last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan hit the road.
A prime minister in waiting, Erdogan traveled to European capitals,
announcing Turkey's desire and intent to join the European Union.
He visited Washington, pledging friendship and future cooperation with the United States. There was suspicion aplenty, inside and outside Turkey, about his commitment to Turkey's European and American alliances, given his statements questioning them and his roots in Islamist politics. But he seemed intent on allaying those anxieties and affirming that Turkey's gaze, and its course, remained steadfastly westward. Now, just four months later, the anxieties are again in full bloom, and a series of events, many of them tied to the war in Iraq, have combined to isolate Turkey and raise important questions about its geopolitical destiny.
Western diplomats, Turkish political analysts and other experts say that Turkey has come to a crossroads: at odds with Europe, in disfavor with the United States and in desperate need of mending fences, lest they become taller and more permanent. Whether it can and will accomplish that is impossible to predict, those experts say. "Turkey has endangered the whole westward edifice of its policies," said Morton Abramowitz, a former American ambassador to Turkey. "It has taken positions that have left it, at least momentarily, without the strong support of major western allies." Abramowitz was referring primarily to the Turkish government's failure to deliver on its promise to permit the movement of American ground troops through southeastern Turkey and into northern Iraq. That was a profound military setback for the United States. It left Bush administration officials and American politicians furious and cost Turkey an aid package of at least $6 billion that the country's reeling economy badly needed. But Abramowitz was also alluding to Turkey's persistent problems with the European Union, including Turkey's inability, before the war, to reach a settlement that would have united the Turkish and Greek sectors of Cyprus. As a result, Greek Cyprus will soon sign an accession treaty to join the union; Turkish Cyprus will be left out. Many union leaders have said that until Turkish officials allow the reunification of the island, Turkey will not be given membership in the club.
The implications are serious. As the United States stirs new levels of resentment in the Muslim world, it sorely needs the fidelity and friendship of Turkey, the only predominantly Muslim member of NATO and a relatively stable democracy in a volatile region.
At the same time, the new strains in Turkey's alliances with the West could force the country to turn inward and stoke nationalist sentiments that flickered in last year's elections.
A few analysts said that Turkey could even begin to identify more closely with Arab states in the region, and there has been ample commentary in Turkish publications from journalists opposed to, and alarmed by, that prospect.
But most analysts said that was unlikely, because Turkey had too long a secular tradition, rigidly enforced by its powerful military, and too little cooperation with Arab states.
There are also indications - convincing to some Western diplomats, unconvincing to others - that Turkish government officials want to patch up their frayed relationship with the United States.
In interviews and private conversations, officials with Erdogan's Justice and Development Party reveal something of an obsession with the degree to which that partnership, a source of vital economic support, has been hurt.
According to Turkish government officials and analysts, the dynamic in the Parliament when it rejected U.S. ground troops did not include a desire to please European powers like France and Germany, both opposed to the war, at the expense of the United States.
In fact, by denying the United States full military cooperation, Turkey may have increased the odds that it will further alienate Europe.
Its decision could prolong the war while diminishing Turkey's influence over what happens in northern Iraq, where Turkish officials fear the emergence of an independent Kurdish state.
Those possibilities have only heightened the temptation for Turkish troops to enter the area and deepened European suspicions that they will do so. Already, many European Union leaders have warned Turkey that its membership bid would be irrevocably poisoned if troops go in.
For now, Turkey seems to be frozen in a confusing place, uncertain of its next steps.
"This one is really, really difficult," said
Can Baydarol, a Turkish professor of international relations, referring
to Turkey's current situation. "It's hard to see what, for us,
will happen after the war." 
2. - The Washington Times - "Powell heads to Turkey for military talks":
1 April 2003 / by Nicholas Kralev 
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell flies to Turkey today amid signs
that the United States may agree to Turkish troop movements in northern
Iraq — but only if Ankara's security is threatened and it works
in full coordination with U.S.-led coalition forces.
During the two-day trip, scheduled on short notice Sunday, Mr. Powell also will visit Brussels for talks with officials at NATO and the European Union on how to stabilize and rebuild Iraq after the war, the State Department said yesterday.
"It's time ... to start talking in somewhat more detail with some of our friends and allies about the post-conflict engagement," spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
He repeated Washington's objection to any Turkish incursion or other uncoordinated activity in northern Iraq. Mr. Powell will discuss with officials in Ankara how to avoid any humanitarian disaster that would result in refugee flows or instability in Turkey, he said.
But U.S. and Turkish officials indicated yesterday that they were coming to an understanding about when Turkish troops could cross into Iraq.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had no plans to act unilaterally against the interests of U.S. forces and Kurdish groups, but that it had to defend itself against any terrorist infiltration.
Small detachments of Turkish forces in northern Iraq have been fighting guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for several years. Ankara fears the PKK could use the chaos of a refugee crisis to infiltrate Turkey and revive a separatist campaign that claimed some 30,000 lives in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Turkey's military presence in northern Iraq is envisaged with full cooperation and coordination with the U.S., as well as with the Kurdish groups in the region," Mr. Erdogan wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said after meetings in Ankara yesterday that the United States understood the threats Turkey might face, hinting at flexibility in Washington's position.
"We both agreed that Turkish forces going into northern Iraq is
not an end in itself for Turkey," he said. "Turkey has legitimate
concerns and interests. We recognize that and understand that we will
do everything we can with cooperation with Turkey and also the [Kurdish]
locals."
Asked why Mr. Powell was going to Ankara now and not when the two countries were negotiating a deal that would have allowed U.S. forces to open a northern front against Saddam Hussein's regime, Mr. Boucher said the secretary had a full schedule at the time.
The Turkish parliament's rejection last month of a $6 billion U.S. offer in exchange for basing troops on its territory strained the relationship, even though Washington later was granted overflight rights.
Despite the problems, the Bush administration asked last week that Congress appropriate $1 billion to compensate Turkey for any economic difficulty it might suffer as a result of the war next door.
Yesterday, two leading members of the House International Relations Committee proposed reducing the aid package and including performance standards relating to Turkey's economic policies and its role as an ally.
Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican and chairman of the committee, and Rep. Tom Lantos, California Democrat, wrote in a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young, Florida Republican, that they wanted to reshape the White House proposal with a "modest reduction" in the funding and to release it in installments.
Mr. Erdogan, in his op-ed piece, rejected accusations that Turkey had been "bargaining for dollars" during the long and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations on deployment of U.S. troops.
"On the contrary, we have maintained the understanding
that in bad days the two allies need to act shoulder-to-shoulder,"
he wrote.
3. - The Daily Star (Lebanon) - "Iraqi Kurds say they have ‘no friends but the mountains’":
Treachery and betrayal are a recurring nightmare. Dreams of autonomy have been repeatedly snuffed out by constant feuding between rival factions and the machinations of world powers.
BEIRUT / 1 April 2002 / by Ed Blanche
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
in northern Iraq and George W. Bush’s putative ally against Saddam
Hussein, was asked recently why the Kurds were willing to trust the
Americans now since Bush’s father left them hanging out to dry
when they rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime after the 1991
Gulf War and again in 1995.
“Who said we trust them?” Barzani replied. “Everyone is pursuing their own interests and at this time ours and those of America coincide.”
That remains to be seen. The Iraqi Kurds Barzani’s KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal Talabani, his longtime rival and sometime ally say they are not looking to establish an independent homeland in northern Iraq, based on the Kurdish-controlled zone in the northeast that has been protected by allied air power since the Gulf War. The have established a rough-and-ready kind of democracy there, but their precarious freedom could become a casualty of the current conflict.
The Kurds see getting rid of Saddam Hussein as a stepping
stone toward an independent state. That appalls Turkey, Iran and Syria,
who fear it would trigger renewed separatist campaigns by their troublesome
Kurdish minorities. Both Kurds and Turks eye Iraq’s northern oil
fields around Kirkuk.
Ankara, although a member of the NATO, refused to allow US troops to
be deployed in Turkey for Bush’s invasion, and has threatened to
send troops into northern Iraq to protect its interests ostensibly
to prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees but undoubtedly to seize the
oilfields and prevent them falling into Kurdish hands. Northern Iraq
has become a serious problem for the Americans, and either the Turks
or the Iraqi Kurds are going to end up with the short end of the stick.
The rebellious Kurds lament that they have “no friends but the mountains,” and in truth they have been shabbily treated by their neighbors and other powers, including the Americans and Israelis. Now, they are preparing for what they hope will be the final assault against the hated Baghdad regime they have fought for half a century.
For many of these bleak and bloody years, they were led by Barzani’s late father, the legendary warrior Mullah Mustafa Barzani. The Kurds, some 10 million of them spread out across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, are the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent homeland although their ancestors have lived on the land they inhabit for 4,000 years.
In many ways, they have been their own worst enemy, constantly feuding among themselves. Over the years, they have been the victims too of the rivalries between outside powers. They have been courted by the Americans, Israel, Iran and other regional heavyweights when it suited their purposes, but in the end, the hapless Kurds were always abandoned and betrayed when alliances or policies changed.
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson spoke of a Kurdish homeland that would arise from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, but it never happened. The nearest they ever got was at the end of World War II when Mullah Barzani and others established, with Soviet help, a Kurdish republic centered on Mahabad in northwestern Iran in 1946. It survived for only a few months. Once Soviet forces withdrew in 1947, the Iranians overran it. Barzani led several hundred of his hard-core Peshmerga in an epic fighting retreat into the Soviet Union, inflicting several defeats on their Iranians.
It would be 13 years before Barzani was able to launch a new uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan against Baghdad’s rule and endure more betrayals. In March 1970, the Baath regime reached an agreement with Barzani that promised autonomy by 1974. This was largely the work of Saddam Hussein, then emerging as a powerful figure, who boldly went into the Kurds’ mountain stronghold to negotiate. But it soon became clear that Baghdad had no intention of honoring the deal. Attempts were made to assassinate Barzani and his chieftains. In April 1972, Moscow signed a treaty of friendship with Iraq, abandoning the Kurds and pushing them into ill-fated alliances with the West.
Israel, adept at exploiting dissident forces in the Arab
world to weaken its enemies, established contact with Iraq’s rebellious
Kurds early on, but its support increased dramatically after the 1967
war. Mullah Mustafa visited Israel in September that year and presented
Moshe Dayan with a curved Kurdish dagger. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
was still on the throne in those days, an Israeli ally who was at odds
with Iraq. Israeli military advisers with the Kurds often wore Iranian
Army uniforms.
After Baghdad signed the friendship treaty with Moscow in 1972, the
shah, constantly seeking to weaken Iran’s historical rival from
within, secretly arranged with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for
hefty US aid for the Kurds to pin down the Iraqi Army. The Israelis
acted as the conduit for Central Intelligence Agency funds some
$16 million in three years, a sizeable amount in those days and
Zvi Zamir, the Mossad’s chief at the time, visited Barzani in his
mountain stronghold. Massive quantities of Soviet weaponry captured
by Israel in the 1967 war were shipped to the Kurds.
The US connection was described as a “coldly calculated arrangement” in the 1976 report to Congress on US intelligence activities by a select committee headed by New York Congressman Otis Pike. “The president, Kissinger and the foreign head of state (the shah) hoped our clients (the Kurds) would not prevail,” it said. “They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country (Iraq). This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise.”
Israel substantially increased its aid to the Kurds in
the summer of 1972 and in August there was new upheaval in Kurdistan.
Around this time, the links with the Kurds were handled in Tehran by
Uri Lubrani, who was appointed the Israeli ambassador in 1973 and oversaw
the gradual withdrawal of backing for the Kurds starting in 1974 and
ending with the shah’s peace treaty with Iraq in March 1975, in
which he agreed to halt support for Barzani in exchange for a settlement
on the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
In January 1979, the shah was overthrown and 18 months later Saddam
Hussein invaded Iran. In the eight-year war that ensued, the Kurds once
again aided the Iranians and were subjected the Saddam’s genocidal
Anfal campaign in which tens of thousands perished, many from chemical
weapons. Lubrani was one of Israel’s toughest diplomatic troubleshooters.
Unlike most diplomats in Tehran, he foresaw the collapse of the Iranian
monarchy more than a year before it happened. He later became Israel’s
coordinator in Lebanon following the 1982 invasion, playing a key role
in occupation and the subsequent conflict in south Lebanon.
With the collapse of the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq in 1975, Barzani appealed to Nixon and Kissinger for help. His pleas were ignored. The CIA chief at the time, William Colby, urged Kissinger to reconsider and was told bluntly that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
The Americans left the Kurds in the lurch again after the Gulf War when George Bush exhorted Iraq’s downtrodden masses to rise up against Saddam. The Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south did just that, and were crushed when Saddam Hussein hurled his elite Republican Guard divisions at them. The Americans, and their allies, did nothing. By April 1991, the uprisings had been crushed.
Then in 1995-96, the Americans let the Kurds down again, for the third time. Even as they encouraged the Kurds to work together to bring down Saddam, the Clinton administration refused to back a rebel offensive against Saddam’s forces in 1995. The attack collapsed and the Republican Guard punched into the Kurdish-held, and allied-protected, zone, rounding up thousands linked to the CIA. Hundreds were executed. The CIA teams fled to Turkey, taking with them some 4,000 Kurds who had aided them.
This time around, the Americans insist they will not allow
Iraq to fragment into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish zones. That will not
suit the Kurds, but will assuage the Turks although the Americans
have little to thank Ankara for since it refused to allow US troops
to attack Saddam from Turkey, impeding the US campaign. If the Americans
make Iraq the new center of their military gameplan for the region,
as many suspect they will, Turkey’s importance to them could diminish,
along with the interests of Iran and Syria.
In circumstances like those, the Kurds might just find themselves with
a chance finally. But with their luck, they fear another betrayal
lies ahead.
“History is about to record another Kurdish disaster,”
Bakhtiar Zahedi, a member of Talabani’s PUK, wrote recently. “The
new plan is intended to betray the Kurds yet again. The Kissinger school
of fraud and deception is alive and well. George W. Bush is invoking
the victims of Halabja in order to win the support of public opinion.
But he is not committing himself to protect the citizens of Kurdistan
as though the Kurdish people and the Iraqi people did not suffer
enough in the episode of the first George Bush.”
4. - The Financial Times - "Kurds grow impatient at slow pace of US build-up in north":
ARBIL / SULEIMANIYA / 1 April 2003 / by Harvey Morris
and Gareth Smith
Kurdish officials in the north of Iraq are showing signs of irritation
about the slow pace of the US build-up and the role assigned to Kurdish
forces.
US aircraft have been transporting equipment into the Kurdish autonomous
zone since last week when about 1,000 173 Brigade paratroopers were
dropped at Harir air strip north of here.
There are few signs yet, however, that about 5,000 men expected to follow have arrived. US military vehicles were moving along the roads near Harir yesterday and four transport helicopters were parked on the air strip.
Hoshyar Zebari, a leader and spokesman of the Kurdistan Democratic party, said yesterday that a sizeable US force was already in place, although he declined to be precise on the number of soldiers there, and that more would arrive in the coming days. He said, however, that the Kurdish leadership had received "mixed signals about opening a northern front".
Some Kurdish officials believe that, with US air cover and the aid of some US special forces, the 60,000-strong combined forces of the KDP and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) could take the government-held cities of Kirkuk and Mosul on their own in a few days.
However, these forces, which have been placed under US command, are under orders not to take any offensive action for the time being.
Despite a Turkish statement that it would only enter Iraq's Kurdish region in consultation with the Americans, the US may still fear that a Kurdish advance on the two cities would spark Turkey's intervention.
Washington has assured Turkey that the Kurds will not push forward any significant distance from their existing "front line".
Mr Zebari said the Kurdish leadership was not in a hurry, but "the opposition needs a role in order to speed up this war".
He said the northern front might provide the breakthrough in the war against the Saddam Hussein regime.
Grassroots Kurdish suspicion of the US is growing, too.
"History teaches us many things," said Mahmoud Mohammed Rafik, a 70-year-old photographer in Suleimaniya whose shop is adorned with old black-and-white pictures of famous Kurdish leaders as fresh-faced guerrillas in the mountains. "The US believes in divide and rule, and they have betrayed us before."
Othman Khaled, a Kurd displaced from Kirkuk, his native city, by Iraqi government forces 10 years ago, said: "It seems it takes one tyrant to remove another one."
A senior official of the PUK echoed the misgivings. He said: "We support the Americans until the overthrow of Saddam, and after that it will be a different discussion. What is going on in Palestine is nothing to do with Iraq.
"The liberation of Iraq is not just a military matter," the official said.
Nawsherwan Mustapha, a leading PUK member who spent 19 years as a peshmerga guerrilla in the mountains, said: "The liberation of Iraq is not just a military matter. Liberation is primarily a political matter."
Mr Zebari noted that there had been a marked increase in US air raids on Iraqi frontline positions in recent days, adding that 38 Ba'ath party officials and Iraqi paramilitaries had been killed in a single attack on Ein Sifna.
Yesterday Kurdish forces moved forward 3km on the Dohuk
front towards Mosul to occupy positions vacated by retreating Iraqi
forces, the third such Kurdish advance in recent days.
5. - The People's Daily (China) - "Cyprus Insists Peace Talks Remain within UN Framework":
1 April 2003
Cyprus' government spokesman Kypros Chrisostomides said Monday that
the Cypriot government will insist that the Cyprus peace talks remain
within the framework of the United Nations.
Chrisostomides was responding to the proposal by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for holding a peace conference on Cyprus to be attended by the three guarantor powers of Cyprus' independence (Turkey, Britain and Greece), the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides.
The Cypriot government believes that Erdogan's proposal was aimed at putting on an equal par the Turkish Cypriot regime with the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, he said.
Cyprus, an eastern Mediterranean island, has been divided into the Greek Cypriot-controlled south and Turkish Cypriot-controlled north since the Turkish invasion in 1974 in the wake of a short-lived coup seeking union with Greece.
Nine years after the division of the island, the Turkish Cypriotside established a breakaway state "the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", which is recognized only by Turkey.
The United Nations has been trying for years to find a comprehensive settlement to the protracted Cyprus problem, but so far no tangible results have been achieved.
The latest effort to secure a Cyprus solution collapsed earlier this month in The Hague, after Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktashrefused to agree to the peace plan put forward by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that proposed holding simultaneous referendums on the two sides.
Commenting on Denktash's idea for seeking a different solution outside the UN framework, Chrisostomides dismissed it as an attemptto "downgrade the presence of the Republic of Cyprus and upgrade his own regime."
"There is no possibility for something like that
to work becausethe Republic of Cyprus is there, is entering the European
Union andis signing the Accession Treaty on April 16, and after that
date efforts to solve the Cyprus problem will continue," he said.
6. - NTV/MSNBC - "Turkey named in US human rights
report":
Turkey was just one of Washington’s allies that was criticised
in the report by the U.S. State Department.
1 April 2003
The practice of torture and limitations on the media still occur
in Turkey, according to a report released by the US State Department
on Monday.
The report, which named many of the US’s allies for breaching human rights, especially slammed China, Iraq and Russia.
Concerning Turkey, the report made clear that Ankara had tightened legislation to ensure that human rights were protected. However, it said that abuses still took place.
Torture, although illegal, was still a serious problem
and restrictions on freedom of the press remained,” the State Department
report said of Turkey.