7 April 2003

1. "Kurds caught in undertow of progress", Dam would flood town in Turkey that was home to 4 ancient civilizations.

2. "A time for friends", betrayed by the West, slaughtered by Saddam ... now let the oppressed Kurds find a home at last.

3. "U.K.: 'Chemical Ali' Found Dead in Basra", Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.

4. "AKP tries to join European Conservative Group", Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is seeking to join the circle of major European conservative parties. But its road to European integration is likely to be bumpy, because not all the European parties support AKP's aim to take Turkey into the European Union as soon as possible.

5. "Turkey hopes for 5.2 billion dollars in World Bank, IMF credits by 2004", Turkey is expecting to receive credit lines totalling 5.2 billion dollars (4.85 billion euros) from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank between now and 2004, Turkish economy minister Ali Babacan said on Sunday.

6. "Kofi Annan Sounds Off on Cyprus Talks", U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a report released Saturday blamed Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash and Turkey for the failure of his plan to reunify this war-divided island.

1. - The Baltimore Sun - "Kurds caught in undertow of progress":

Dam would flood town in Turkey that was home to 4 ancient civilizations

HASANKEYF / 7 April 2003 / by Douglas Birch

Here in the stony mountains of southeastern Turkey, in a region where Noah's ark is supposed to have landed, sits an ancient city waiting for another epic flood.

Downstream from this town of cave dwellings and ruined castles, the Turkish government hopes to build a mammoth dam on the broad and murky Tigris River, which slips southwest through a maze of narrow valleys toward the plains of northern Iraq.

If and when the Ilisu Dam is built, many of Hasankeyf's monuments will gradually be covered by the Tigris' captured waters. A city overlaid with the history of the Assyrian, Sumerian, Roman and Byzantine cultures will vanish. And thousands of ethnic Kurds in the region will face displacement.

Two-thirds of Hasankeyf's people have left their doomed city in the past decade. Some of the 3,500 who remain, whose ancestors have lived here for thousands of years, say the dam threatens to rob them of their past as well as their future.

"We are fully against the dam project," said Hikmet Ayhan, 43, an accountant for the city government. "We were born here. We grew up here. Our children were born here. We mourned and danced here. We do not want to leave our lands."

100 sites in peril

As planned, the dam's waters would cover 200 square miles of agricultural bottomland and more than 100 villages along the Upper Tigris. Much of the region is populated by ethnic Kurds, who endured a 15-year civil war in which they were squeezed between separatist guerillas and Turkish army forces.

Hasankeyf is far from the only site threatened. The Ilisu Dam would flood scores of settlements, including archaeologically important sites at places such as Kenan Tepe, which has been the home of successive human settlements for 6,500 years.

The dam would also drown the ancient village of Boztepe, one of thousands of Kurdish settlements burned and bulldozed by Turkish troops as part of their war against Kurdish separatists, which ended in a truce in 1999.

The Ilisu is just one of 22 dams the government hopes to build in southeast Turkey at a total cost of $32 billion. Supporters say the projects will bring electricity and irrigation to one of the nation's poorest regions. Foes say the dams will drown the heritage of four civilizations and eventually drive as many as 72,000 Turkish Kurds from their homes.

Dams have flooded villages here that once greeted caravans and battled conquerors. Zeugma, an old Roman Silk Road garrison town, is submerged. Archaeologists found 14 priceless mosaics there, then reburied them to protect them from being washed away by the rising waters.

Forty years ago, visiting government officials found most of the city's people living in the caves that honeycomb the cliffs above town. Archaeologists say Hasankeyf's residents began excavating them 2,600 years ago.

Caves were considered an embarrassment to a modern, westernizing nation.

Authorities said they threatened Hasankeyf's archaeological riches. So boxy concrete homes and apartment blocks were built along the river bank.

Gradually, most of the families were persuaded to move out of their traditional homes. Ayhan's parents moved from a cave into a house in 1974.

Not long after the homes were built, the government unveiled plans for the Ilisu Dam, which will flood all of Hasankeyf's new homes and many of the thousands of caves. All further construction in the city was banned.

Hasankeyf is built in a bend of the Tigris, where the river cuts into a cliff face several hundred feet high. Atop the cliff sits a crumbling Roman-era castle, Fortress Cephe - or Fortress Rock - that sits on top of the cliff, accessible from below only by a series of staircases and paths carved out of rock.

Fortress Cephe, which is crumbling into the river below, once defended Roman trade routes from the attacks by the Persian empire. Later, it served as the capital for the Kurdish Ayyubid kings, who ruled over an independent nation until the Ottomans overwhelmed them about six centuries ago.

Tourism a key

Hasankeyf has long been a center for the weavers of carpets, especially the intricately designed kilims, produced by the region's Kurdish tribes. But in recent times, tourism has become a key part of the economy.

Ayhan's oldest son, Udur, a seventh-grader, earns money guiding visitors up the steep, twisting paths cut into the mountain rock.

Turkey's economic crisis threatens to accomplish what international protests could not: the halt of the dam project. But the government seems determined to build the dams.

"The government tells us nothing about the final situation, what they have decided," Ayham said. "This brings uncertainty. There is no investment. No one cares for the town."

2. - The Observer - "A time for friends":

Betrayed by the West, slaughtered by Saddam ... now let the oppressed Kurds find a home at last

6 April 2003 / by Nick Cohen

In a memo to the League of Nations in 1930, an astonished Foreign Office official said that the idea the great powers should be made to keep their promises was 'a conception which is almost fantastic'. The Kurds appeared to have been promised their own state in the Treaty of Sèvres after the First World War. But there was a catch. Buried in the small print was the requirement that the League must be convinced that they were 'capable' of independence.

Our men at the FO implied that the Kurds were Kipling's 'White Man's Burden' - 'fluttered folk and wild/Your new-caught sullen peoples/Half devil and half child'. It was preposterous to think that they might be capable of governing themselves.

'Although they admittedly possess many sterling qualities, the Kurds of Iraq are entirely lacking in those characteristics of political cohesion which are essential to self-government. Their organisation and outlook are essentially tribal. They are without traditions of self-government or self-governing institutions. Their mode of life is primitive, and for the most part they are illiterate and untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in any sense of discipline or responsibility. [In these circumstances] it would be unkind to the Kurds themselves to do anything which would lend encouragement to the sterile idea of Kurdish independence.'

Being cruel to be kind to Kurds has become a habit since. They are the largest people on earth without a state of their own. Spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey - and oppressed in all four countries - their fate in the twentieth century was to be played with and persecuted.

In the early 1970s, the Iraqi Baathist regime was getting too close to the Soviet Union for America's liking and threatening the Shah of Iran, a US client. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to revolt. Saddam Hussein responded to the pressure and came to terms with Washington. American, Israeli and Iranian advisers pulled out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Saddam sealed the borders and slaughtered. The standards of the Cold War were lax, but America's betrayal of an ally was still shocking. The Congressional select committee on intelligence said that 'the President, Dr Kissinger and the Shah hoped that [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of [Iraq]. The policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue to fight. Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical exercise.'

In 1988 Saddam killed somewhere around 100,000 Kurds in the 'Anzal' campaign to Arabise northern Iraq. The scale of the killing was such that no one knows the precise death toll, but for once, the overused word 'genocidal' was an accurate description of his policy. After the 1991 Gulf war, the Kurds along with the rest of Iraq took George Bush senior at his word and rose up when he called on the 'Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands'. They were massacred again. In 1996, they fought among themselves. Kurds being wiped out was a staple of international relations. The truth of the Kurdish proverb, 'we've no friends but the mountains', was indisputable.

The change in the Iraqi Kurds' fortunes since 1996 has been remarkable. It's foolish to make predictions in such fluid times, but it does look as if history is at last being kind to the Kurds. Consider their position. Despite the enmity of Turkey, Saddam, Iran and Islamic fundamentalists, they managed to build a reasonably decent autonomous government in the no-fly zone of northern Iraq.

At the start of the war, it looked as if the Turks would occupy their mini-state to stop its own Kurds getting the idea in their heads that they might govern themselves. But because Ankara refused to cut a deal with Washington, the threat has receded and American troops have become the Kurds' protectors. The clever Kurdish leadership has put its guerrillas under US control to emphasise that the Kurds at least are an ally America can rely on. Fear that they will be attacked with poison gas again is receding as the Iraqi regime weakens. Every day last week, there were small reports of the Kurds retaking villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Saddam.

It's as if the Palestinians were to wake up and find that the world's only superpower was on their side and land they thought they had lost forever was back in their possession. The comparison isn't meant frivolously. What Baathism has created in northern Iraq is a West Bank, and even friends of the Kurds are worried about what will happen when the regime falls and the ethnically cleansed go home.

It's hardto see the war as a 'war on Islam', and not only because Saddam has dedicated his career to killing Muslims. Baathism drew its inspiration from the worst of Europe: fascism and communism. Saddam's fondness for Stalin is well known, but he also has a thoroughly fascist obsession with racial purity. The city of Kirkuk, with its rich oil fields, has been 'Arabised' for decades. The purges increased after the last Gulf war and Kurds, Turks and Assyrians have become rarities in what was once their city. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch interviewed the victims. Their stories could have come from Milosevic's Yugoslavia. There's the same pattern of demands for bribes, followed by threats, followed by expulsion, followed by the erasing of evidence that the impure ever existed.

Asad Karim Salah, a Kurd, who was expelled from Kirkuk last year, described how it worked. First Baath party officials and secret policemen put pressure on him to abandon his identity and pretend to be an Arab. One of his two sons was instructed to spy on fellow students. When he refused he was thrown out of his university. Then the family was told that both boys must go into the army. One fled north to the Kurdish safe haven. The authorities who wanted him as a sol dier demanded that he return or else. When he didn't comply the family was stripped of its possessions and forced into exile.

Human Rights Watch and the Kurdish authorities estimate that 120,000 people have been driven from the Kirkuk area since 1991. The government confiscated documents proving the ownership of property. As far as the paperwork is concerned they never lived in Kirkuk and have no rights. It seems a matter of basic justice to allow the exiles to return, but their houses have been taken by Arab families, some of whom have been in Kirkuk for two or three generations and know no other home.

As the fighting neared Kirkuk last week, it appeared that the regime was as keen to use the threat of execution to keep Arab families in the city as to keep conscripts from deserting from the army. There were reports, which were impossible to confirm, of Arabs who had fled from the city being forced to go back. Kirkuk will fall soon, it may even have fallen by the time you read this, but there have been no preparations by the Americans and British to manage the aftermath.

In March Iraqi opposition leaders and the Turks discussed setting up a commission to ensure the return of displaced people and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Ten days ago, Human Rights Watch warned that nothing had been done and Kirkuk was 'a disaster waiting to happen'. If 'a plan for the gradual and orderly return of these displaced civilians is not drawn up soon and implemented before the ground offensive begins, there is a real possibility that the city will erupt into inter-ethnic violence'.

I spoke to Hania Mufti, the organisation's officer in Kurdistan, last week. She said the warning had had no effect whatsoever. The leaders of the Kurdish parties have tried to placate the Turks by promising that their forces won't annex Kirkuk and include it and its oil wells in the Kurdish zone.

But, reasonably enough, they said there was little they could do to stop families going back to their houses and confronting the people who had 'stolen' their property.

The 'untutored' Kurds are no different from anyone else. If you found someone else in your home, you would demand they left and become aggressive, possibly violent, if they refused because they had nowhere else to go. The Kurds may have got lucky for the first time since the First World War, but they're not out of the woods yet.

3. - AP - "U.K.: 'Chemical Ali' Found Dead in Basra":

BASRA / by Tini Tran

Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.

Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who was President Saddam Hussein's first cousin and one of the most brutal members of his inner circle.

Al-Majid apparently was killed on Saturday when two coalition aircraft used laser-guided munitions to attack his house in Basra. Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.

Saddam had entrusted al-Majid with defense of southern Iraq against invading coalition forces.

Jackson said the discovery of al-Majid's body was one of the reasons the British decided to move infantry into the southern Iraqi city because they hoped with the top Iraqi leadership gone there, resistance might fall apart.

Believed to be in his fifties, al-Majid led a 1988 campaign against rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in which whole villages were wiped out. An estimated 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed.

He also has been linked to the bloody crackdown on Shiites in southern Iraq following a 1991 uprising following the Gulf War. He served as governor of Kuwait during Iraq's seven-month occupation of the emirate in 1990-1991.

Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces in the Gulf, said the death of Chemical Ali would show the people of southern Iraq "that the regime is finished. It is over, and liberation is here."

"Obviously it is an indication that the leadership is now gone in southern Iraq," he said. While coalition troops knew that command and control has been demolished, the death of Ali "shows that that last vestige of terror that existed in southern iraq is probably gone as well."

Human rights groups had called for al-Majid's arrest on war crimes charges when he toured Arab capitals last January seeking to rally support against mounting U.S. pressure on Saddam's regime.

"Al-Majid is Saddam Hussein's hatchet man," Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, said at the time. "He has been involved in some of Iraq's worst crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity."

Hazem al-Youssefi, Cairo representative of the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, described al-Majid as a standout in a regime of criminals.

Al-Majid was a warrant officer and motorcycle messenger in the army before Saddam's Baath party led a coup in 1968. He was promoted to general and served as defense minister from 1991-95, as well as a regional party leader.

In 1988, as the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was winding down, he commanded a scorched-earth campaign called Anfal to wipe out a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. Later, he boasted about the attacks, including the March 16, 1988, poison gas strike on the village of Halabja, where an estimated 5,000 people died.

During April 1991 peace talks in Baghdad, the Kurdish delegation leader, Jalal Talabani, told al-Majid that more than 200,000 Kurds lost their lives in the Anfal campaign. Al-Majid replied that the figure was exaggerated and the dead were not more than 100,000, according to reports published in the Arab press.

After Iraq's 1991 Shiite Muslim uprising was crushed, Iraqi opposition groups released a video they said had been smuggled out of southern Iraq. In the video, which was shown on several Arab TV networks, al-Majdi was seen executing captured rebels with pistol shots to the head and kicking others in the face as they sat on the ground.

He was no less brutal with his own family.

His nephew and Saddam's son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, was in charge for many years of Iraq's clandestine weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan with his brother, Saddam Kamel, who was married to Saddam's other daughter.

Both brothers were lured back to Iraq in February 1996 and killed on their uncle's orders, together with several other family members.

Syria and Lebanon ignored international calls to arrest al-Majid when he visited in January. He dropped scheduled stops in Jordan and Egypt - both U.S. allies - and Egypt refused to receive him and the Jordanian government denied a visit was ever planned.

Saddam's inner circle was made up of relatives or clansmen like al-Majid, upon whose loyalty he could count.

4. - Eurasianet / RFE/RL - "AKP tries to join European Conservative Group":

6 April 2003 / by Breffni O'Rourke:

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is seeking to join the circle of major European conservative parties. But its road to European integration is likely to be bumpy, because not all the European parties support AKP's aim to take Turkey into the European Union as soon as possible.

The circle in question is the European Peoples' Party (EPP) group, an umbrella organization that brings together Christian-democratic parties and other conservatives in the European Parliament and the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently told EPP President Wilfried Martens that the AKP wants to join the politically powerful group. Martens quoted Erdogan as saying that his party is both conservative and democratic -- implying its suitability.

Martens, however, is quoted in a Brussels press interview ("European Voice," 12 March) as saying there would have to be talks about the "substance" of the application. That was taken as a reference to a potential clash of values between the AKP -- which has roots in Turkey's Islamic movement -- and the Christian-democratic parties.

Although now secular, the Christian-democratic parties still embrace Christian values. The same can also be said of the AKP in regard to Islamic values. Further, some of the Christian-democratic parties oppose Turkey's bid to join the European Union. One of them is the biggest party in the group, the German CDU/CSU.

The co-chairman of the European Parliament's delegation to Turkey, Joost Lagendijk, told RFE/RL: "The Christian democrats are the strongest opponents of Turkish entry into the EU. So it's -- how do you call it? -- a spicy decision for the AKP party, which is now the ruling party in Turkey, which is applying for closer cooperation and for the start of negotiations to join the political family that is, in fact, obstructing their entry into Europe."

Lagendijk, a member of the Greens party, noted the irony of the situation: "The funny thing is -- in a way an irony of history, as I call it -- that by joining this political family, they might also influence the viewpoints of the EPP on the particular question of Turkey joining the EU."

In fact, some would say that this is exactly Erdogan's intention -- namely, to neutralize opposition to Turkish entry into the EU. The Christian democrats would find their opposition much more difficult to sustain in logic if they admitted the AKP as one of their partner parties.

In Ankara, the director of Bilkent University's Foreign Policy Institute, Seyfi Tashan, said the European reluctance to embrace the AKP stems in part from fear of its Islamic leanings. "This party [AKP] has been considered by some people in Europe as being the Islamic party, and those who are opposing it are what you may call the supporters of the Christianity-versus-Islam idea," he said.

Tashan called this notion of a religious divide an outdated concept, in that all parties are now secular.

Be that as it may, things are not likely to advance quickly for the AKP. The chairman of the German CDU/CSU in the European Parliament, Hartmut Nassauer, goes to great lengths to point out his group's willingness to have good ties with Turkey and the AKP, but he sets limits to the relationship. Speaking about Erdogan's approach, he said: "We would be reluctant. We have not discussed it so far, and I don't see that it is very urgent to discuss it. We should organize good cooperation [with Turkey] on the level of the custom's union and all other considerations of privileged partnership. But there is, I think, no need to discuss membership."

Nassauer went on to say that although his party favors giving Turkey a "privileged partnership," he sees "no chance for the foreseeable future" that Turkey will become an EU member. And he said there are more pressing issues than the AKP's request. "We have a lot of problems with the actual [eastward] enlargement [of the EU]. This will demand the strength of the European Union for years, so I don't think we need a discussion on the membership of the AKP, Erdogan party, in the EPP," Nassauer said.

Turkey has for many years been an applicant for EU membership, but has not yet been granted negotiations with Brussels. However, EU leaders promised last December to open accession talks with Turkey if it meets the required political and economic criteria in a review set for December 2004.

To meet these criteria, Turkey will have to undertake wide-ranging reforms, including steps to eradicate torture, and to foster media freedom.

5. - AFP - "Turkey hopes for 5.2 billion dollars in World Bank, IMF credits by 2004":

ANKARA / 6 April 2003

Turkey is expecting to receive credit lines totalling 5.2 billion dollars (4.85 billion euros) from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank between now and 2004, Turkish economy minister Ali Babacan said on Sunday.

Anatolia news agency quoted Babacan as telling a news conference the government has reached agreement with the two institutions on a rescheduling programme for the credits, which aim to help Turkey's struggling economy out of recession.

He also said the government has signed a letter of intent addressed to the IMF which should end a six-month delay for handing Turkey a new tranche of credit from the 16-billion-dollar (15-billion-euro) stand-by-deal package signed with the institution last year.

This tranche was initially expected to be fixed at 1.6 billion dollars, but is now expected to be scaled back to 700 million dollars at a meeting of IMF directors scheduled for April 18. Seven other tranches of around 500 million dollars are also expected to be released from the package by December 2004.

Babacan said the government was also hoping the World Bank would release two credits totaling one billion dollars that the bank has held back in protest at Turkey's failure to make certain economic reforms.

"A new period has begun," said Babacan, adding that the government would continue to pursue the economic reform programme set out by the IMF under the terms of the stand-by deal.

The Turkish government had announced at the start of March a package of measures to bring in the equivalent of an extra nine billion dollars for the Turkish budget. The government expects growth this year to be five percent and the inflation rate to be 20 percent.

6. - AP - "Kofi Annan Sounds Off on Cyprus Talks":

NICOSIA / 5 April 2003 / Alex Efty

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a report released Saturday blamed Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash and Turkey for the failure of his plan to reunify this war-divided island.

Annan praised the Greek Cypriot contribution to the U.N.-sponsored talks, but said Denktash "bears prime responsibility" for the failure of the effort, which was launched in late 1999.

The talks between the two sides broke down last month.

"Except for a very few instances, Mr. Denktash by-and-large declined to engage in negotiations on the basis of give and take," Annan said in his 40-page report released to Cypriot leaders.

"This complicated my efforts to accommodate not only the legitimate concerns of principle, but also concrete and practical interests of the Turkish Cypriots," according to a copy of the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The island split between Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot sections since Turkey invaded in 1974 after an abortive coup by supporters of union with Greece.

The breakaway Turkish Cypriot state in the north is recognized only by Turkey, which keeps 40,000 troops there.

Denktash had no immediate comment, but Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in Cyprus that it was "a great injustice to accuse Mr. Denktash only."

Greek Cypriot government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides welcomed the report, telling reporters that Greek Cyprus was ready to "resume talks with the Turkish Cypriot side on the basis of the reunification plan."

Annan's report is expected to be discussed Monday by the U.N. Security Council.

Greek Cypriot leader Tassos Papadopoulos accepted Annan's plan, but Denktash and the Turkish government rejected it. The plan envisages Cyprus as a single state consisting of one Greek and one Turkish Cypriot "component state" linked by a weak central government.

Denktash and Turkey have insisted on a settlement based on the "reality" created by the Turkish invasion.

Denktash opposed Annan's plan primarily because it ruled out recognizing his breakaway Turkish Cypriot state while providing for Greek Cypriot refugees to return to Turkish Cypriot-controlled areas.

In his report, Annan said: "I was never able to convince Mr. Denktash that the 'realities' of the Cyprus problem are not only the realities on the ground, but the realities of international law and international politics."

Annan wanted his plan approved through separate referendums by late March, paving the way for the European Union to accept Cyprus' membership as a united country on April 16.