7 April 2005

1. "Europe's human rights court to rule on Ocalan this month", Europe's top human rights court said Wednesday it will deliver a final verdict in the case of imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan later this month.

2. "Leading Kurdish activist calls on Ankara for rebel amnesty", leading Kurdish activist Leyla Zana urged the Turkish government Wednesday to grant general amnesty to thousands of armed Kurdish rebels as a key step towards ending the Kurdish conflict in the country.

3. "PKK is rising from the grave", recent statements by Turkish Ground Forces Commander Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, which warned of rising numbers in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), are becoming a reality.

4. "EP Turkey rapporteur slam Ankara process", Eurlings said that it was time the European Commission issued a strong warning to Turkey.

5. "Jalal Talabani: From rebel to president", Jalal Talabani has spent a lifetime fighting for Kurdish rights, first forming a secret student association at the age of 13 and later taking up arms against the Iraqi government.

6. "Ethnic tensions in Kirkuk dangerously high", U.S. military officials are concerned that ethnic tensions could turn into widespread violence and, perhaps, civil war in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, setting a dangerous pattern for rest of the country.

1. - AP - "Europe's human rights court to rule on Ocalan this month":

STRASBOURG / 7 April 2005

Europe's top human rights court said Wednesday it will deliver a final verdict in the case of imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan later this month.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will rule on an appeal by Ocalan's lawyers, court spokesman Roderick Liddel said. Ocalan wants a ruling by the court's lower chamber overturned after it maintained his detention was neither illegal nor inhumane, despite finding his Turkish trial was not fair.

"We want the European Court of Human Rights to grant Ocalan the right to a new trial and also change other parts of the earlier verdict," said Kerim Yildiz, one of Ocalan's lawyers.

"However, we're worried that (Turkey) may refuse that, even if he's unequivocally granted a new trial. Or they can try him at Imrali prison, which wouldn't be a fair trial because the public has no access there," the London-based lawyer said in a telephone interview.

The European court's rulings are binding on all 46 members of the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog.

The case has been problematic for the Turkish government, which wants to live up to European human rights standards while dealing with Kurdish issue.

The case is being watched closely by the European Union, which is to open membership negotiations with Turkey in October.

Ocalan took his human rights case to Strasbourg in 1999 after he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2002 when Turkey abolished capital punishment.

2. - AFP - "Leading Kurdish activist calls on Ankara for rebel amnesty":

ANKARA / 6 April 2005

Leading Kurdish activist Leyla Zana urged the Turkish government Wednesday to grant general amnesty to thousands of armed Kurdish rebels as a key step towards ending the Kurdish conflict in the country.

"Disarming the youths in the mountains and ridding them of violence will create great synergy on the way to democracy," Zana said in a statement.

"What should be done is to embrace our people and integrate them into social and political life through democratic legislation," she said. "Such a practical step will eradicate the ground for violence and bring relief to our country."

Militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) waged a bloody campaign for self-rule in Turkey's southeast between 1984 and 1999 in a conflict that claimed some 36,500 lives.

The PKK ended a five-year unilateral truce with Ankara in June, raising tensions in the region.

Zana, a former parliamentarian and a winner of the European Parliament's human rights award, was last June released from a decade in jail for allegedly collaborating with the Kurdish rebellion.

She and three other Kurdish activists are now being retried.

Ankara has in the past amnestied rebels, but the measures produced disappointing results, mainly because they contained conditions demanding the militants to repent and provide information about underground PKK activities.

Only about 250 rebels turned themselves in under the latest amnesty in 2003.

The PKK is believed to have about 5,000 militants in Turkey and in the mountains of neighboring northern Iraq.

3. - The New Anatolian - "PKK is rising from the grave":

ANKARA / 6 April 2005

Recent statements by Turkish Ground Forces Commander Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, which warned of rising numbers in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), are becoming a reality. After several years under a self-imposed armistice, the PKK has begun anew its activities in southeast Turkey. In a spate of attacks over the past four days, PKK insurgents have killed a village guard and a master sergeant, while three soldiers and one village guard were wounded.

Gen. Buyukanit's charge that the Turkish government did not have an Iraq policy sent shockwaves through the government and Turkish society. But the general also made important warnings about the recent activities of the PKK. Buyukanit said that the number of PKK fighters in Turkey had risen to levels similar to the time of their leader Abdullah Ocalan's capture in 1999, saying, "This is not good." Buyukanit said that Kurdish rebels in Iraq were approaching Turkey's border. There were 5,000 rebels on Turkish territory in 1999. Following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, most of these rebels fled to Iraq to fight, reducing their numbers in Turkey to 1,500.

4. - NTV/MSNBC - "EP Turkey rapporteur slam Ankara process":

Eurlings said that it was time the European Commission issued a strong warning to Turkey.

7 April 2005

Turkey was heading in the wrong direction in its bid to gain full membership of the European Union, European Parliament Turkey rapporteur, Dutch parliamentarian Camiel Eurlings said Wednesday.

Speaking to the Dutch ANP news agency Eurlings said that Ankara would face major problems in its efforts to join the EU unless it acted quickly.

“If Turkey does not take successful steps in a short period, there can be great obstacles formed before negotiations that should be started on October 3,” Eurlings said.

Turkey has started conducting more interrogations of human rights activists over the past few months and putting forward new conditions in order to not recognise the Greek Cypriot administration, Eurlings said.

The EU rapporteur also stressed that difficulties could arise due to the deferring of the implementation of the new Turkish Penal Code. The revised Penal Code was one of the requirements of the EU for the opening of accession talks.

“Ahead of the full membership talks Turkey has slowed down the reform wors to a significant degree,” Eurlings said.

5. - AP - "Jalal Talabani: From rebel to president":

BAGHDAD / 6 April 2005 / by Traci Carl

Jalal Talabani has spent a lifetime fighting for Kurdish rights, first forming a secret student association at the age of 13 and later taking up arms against the Iraqi government.

Now, as the new president of Iraq, he takes his battle from the green, rolling hills of the Kurdish north to the heavily fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, where he will fight to ensure that Iraq’s new constitution protects Kurdish rights.

One of his biggest challenges will be Kirkuk, an oil-rich city 180 miles north of Baghdad that the Kurds want to incorporate into their self-governing region. The future of the disputed city is expected to be decided as lawmakers draft a final constitution by Aug. 15.

In the coming weeks, Talabani will also be overseeing the return of Kurds displaced by ousted leader Saddam Hussein.

After his election Wednesday, he promised to govern not just for the Kurds, but for all Iraqis "freed from the most horrific dictatorship."

He was greeted by a standing ovation, and he threw his hands in the air and clenched his fists together in a sign of unity.

Born in 1933 in the village of Kelkan, Talabani began his lifetime of resistance to Arab domination as a teenager, joining the Kurdish Democratic Party. He began studying law but had to go into hiding in 1956 to escape arrest for his political activities as founder and secretary general of the Kurdistan Student Union.

He eventually returned to law school and began work as an editor of two Kurdish publications. After graduating in 1959, he was called to military duty in the Iraqi army, serving as commander of a tank unit.

When the Kurdish north took up arms against the government in 1961, he led battles at home in Iraq - as well as diplomatic missions to Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to seek support for the Kurds.

With the collapse of the Kurdish revolt in 1975, he founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an effort to redefine the political movement. He then led an armed resistance against Saddam until 1988, when the Iraqi leader expelled Kurds from strategic areas in the north and gassed Kurdish towns near the Iranian border, killing tens of thousands of people.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurdish regions - protected by U.S. planes that enforced a no-fly zone - enjoyed autonomy from the government in Baghdad. But Talabani and Kurdish Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani began fighting over control of the north. A U.S.-sponsored truce was signed in 1998, and both formed a Kurdish alliance for the historic, Jan. 30 elections, winning 75 seats in the 275-member parliament.

6. - Knight Ridder Newspapers - "Ethnic tensions in Kirkuk dangerously high":

KIRKUK / 6 April 2005 / by Tom Lasseter

U.S. military officials are concerned that ethnic tensions could turn into widespread violence and, perhaps, civil war in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, setting a dangerous pattern for rest of the country.

Kirkuk oil fields hold at least 6 percent of the world's oil reserves and Kurdish talk of secession is at a fever pitch.

A bloc of Kurdish-led politicians received the majority of seats on the provincial council after January elections and is now threatening to fill most key positions with Kurds. Arab and Turkmen (also known as Turkomen) politicians protested with a series of walkouts and now refuse to show up at council meetings, where Kurdish leaders insist on speaking in their mother language.

The Kurds are also accelerating efforts to bring back families pushed out of Kirkuk and the surrounding province by former dictator Saddam Hussein during his massive resettlement campaigns aimed at weakening Kurdish opposition. The Kurds hope the influx will help make Kirkuk a part of the Iraqi region of Kurdistan and possibly provide an economic engine for an independent Kurdish nation. Breaking away from Iraq, though, would be difficult for the Kurds because of pressure from neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey, which oppose an independent Kurdistan.

"We're worried about the domino effect of the Kurds getting the senior leadership positions and the Arabs and Turkomen going back to their constituencies and saying the Kurds have taken over, and the Turkomen and, to a greater extent, the Arabs rise up," said Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, the U.S. Army's liaison to the Kirkuk council.

"Worst-case scenario is a civil war," he said. "The threat is out there. There are armed Arab groups, Turkomen groups that say they need to arm themselves, and the Kurds say, `We know how to keep the peace, we'll deploy the Peshmerga,'" a militia that numbers in the tens of thousands.

Wickham is worried not only about potential havoc in Kirkuk, but also about the destabilizing effect it would have across ethnically divided Iraq as it makes its way toward democracy.

Saddam used savage military might to suppress ethnic and religious groups that opposed him. With him gone, many of those groups are sorting out long-simmering tensions.

Rizqar Ali Hamajan, a Kirkuk council member and a senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a political party, said his party estimates that Saddam pushed about 600,000 Kurds out of the Kirkuk area. Not only should those people be able to return to the province - which has an estimated population of 1.5 million - but they should be able to bring their families with them, Hamajan said.

The province is about 40 percent Arab and 35 percent Kurd, according to U.S. officials in the area. The return of even a small percentage of those 600,000 and their families to Kirkuk would give Kurds a decisive numerical advantage.

Many in Iraq consider Kirkuk key in the effort to keep ethnic differences from tearing the nation apart. Kirkuk, as elsewhere in Iraq, has seen its share of battles between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi forces, and, as ethnic tensions rise, the danger of individual attacks triggering wider violence has increased.

On March 19, for example, a yellow taxi pulled up in front of a police station and a passenger threw out a soda can. When an officer came out to inspect the can, it blew up, killing him. The next day, a roadside bomb at a traffic roundabout exploded near a truck full of police officers on their way to their comrade's funeral. Four officers were killed.

When police failed to find any leads, they returned to the traffic circle the following day and rounded up potential witnesses. Among them were two Turkmen vegetable vendors. While in custody, both vendors were beaten and tortured by a Kurdish officer who pushed lit cigarettes into their bodies, lashed them with cables and punched and kicked them in their faces, according to family accounts verified by U.S. military officials.

The two vendors were cousins of Tahsin Mohammed Kahya, a Turkmen who's the chair of the Kirkuk council and an immensely popular local politician.

His tribe called for massive protests and violence. The city stood on the brink.

"It could have been the spark," Wickham said.

Kahya asked his tribe to keep its guns away and to let the political process take its course. But he's far from certain that the peace will hold, especially given the provincial council's inability to appoint government leaders and the prospect of a Kurd-dominated government.

"If the decision-makers cannot agree, then it will go to the streets," he said. "If we fail, we will tell the people we have failed, and it's up to them to decide what they want to do - maybe then we would have a bad situation."

Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, who commands Task Force Liberty, the U.S. Army element stretching from just north of Baghdad to Kirkuk, also worries about the tensions. "As the politics goes down lower, I think the level of understanding (between ethnic groups) becomes less," and the result, he said, is bombs sometimes being placed on the road.

While U.S. officials used to intervene in local governmental affairs, choosing council members and making sure they all spoke with one another, they remained in the background after the Iraqi elections in January, letting Iraqis for the most part succeed or fail on their own accord.

The need for ethnic groups in Kirkuk to negotiate their differences is probably the most important issue facing Iraq today, Taluto said.

"What can Task Force Liberty do about that? Not a hell of a lot, frankly," he said.

Many Arabs and Turkomen say the Kurds are using force, when necessary, to push them out of Kirkuk. They accuse Kurds, who say they left the Peshmerga militia before joining the Iraqi army and police, of using their positions to intimidate people into leaving.

Hamajan, the Kurdish council member, denied there were any Peshmerga present in Kirkuk. He then added, smiling, that "the leader of the Peshmerga is about to become president of Iraq," referring to Jalal Talabani, a former Peshmerga commander who was elected president on Wednesday by the national assembly.

Outside Hamajan's office, Kurdish men in military fatigues holding AK-47s patrolled the gate.

U.S. officials confirmed that at least half the Iraqi army troops in Kirkuk are Kurds. Wickham said he knows of Arabs being taken from Kirkuk and put into a Kurd-controlled prison in nearby Sulaimaniyah, but he didn't know the specifics of who took them there or why.

Khalaf Farhan, a Sunni Arab and former army general in Saddam's army, said Iraqi soldiers raided his house last week. Just before he was blindfolded, Farhan said, he saw a large Kurdish-looking man who was speaking Kurdish.

Farhan, whose face was bruised and scratched and whose left eye was badly swollen days later, said he was beaten in the face with a rifle butt, punched and kicked.

When he was shoved into a vehicle outside, Farhan said, one of the soldiers leaned toward him and said, "OK, do you want to sell the house?"

In one area, at least 40,000 Kurds have returned to rebuild a series of small villages demolished by Saddam. Those families were given $1,000 each and building supplies by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan operating out of Sulaimaniyah, a neighboring province.

The resettlement of Kurds in Kirkuk is provided for by Iraq's transitional law, which also says that the decision about Kirkuk becoming a part of Kurdistan will "take into account the will of the people."

The Kurds interpret this to mean that a provincial referendum will decide the matter.

Many Arabs and Turkomen said the Kurds are pushing for resettlement not just out of a sense of historical justice, but to stack the chips in their favor for the referendum, and, ultimately, to break away from Iraq.

One of the few things that U.S. and Iraqi officials interviewed in Kirkuk agreed about was that if the Kurds went down that path, it would be a bloody one.