1. "Members of Rights Board call it quits", IHDK chairman and three other members of the presidential board have resigned from their posts, alleging they were rendered incapable of continuing their work.

2. "If Kurds are not free, Tayyip Erdogan will not be free either…", opinion by By Ahmet Altan.

3. "Iraq Still Clouds Turkey Ties Despite Rice Trip", tensions between the United States and Muslim ally Turkey persist, especially over Iraq's future, despite Turks' delight that Condoleezza Rice included Ankara on her first foreign trip as the new Secretary of State.

4. "Kurds and finding the way", the people of Turkey are now worried that the outcome of the elections in Iraq could prompt their Iraqi neighbors to redraw their country’s map.

5. "Non-Kurds Allege Vote Fraud in North", Kurds are declaring victory after elections in Iraq's northern oil-rich city, Kirkuk, but other groups in the multi-ethnic city are not ready to concede. Some allege massive voter fraud.

6. "Turkey must recognise Cyprus before starting talks with EU Document Actions", Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said Monday that Turkey should recognise Cyprus before Ankara starts accession talks to join the European Union.

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1. - Turkish Daily news - "Members of Rights Board call it quits":

IHDK chairman and three other members of the presidential board have resigned from their posts, alleging they were rendered incapable of continuing their work

ANKARA / 8 February 2005

The Prime Ministry Human Rights Advisory Board (IHDK) chairman Prof. Ibrahim Kaboglu and three of the top members of the board resigned on Monday, noting that they were incapable of continuing with their work, because the government had no intention of listening to them.

He said: “We weren't pushed out for neglecting our work, we were pushed out for performing our work properly. Some circles reacted negatively when we made a certain decision or became angry when we proposed something they did not like.”

The government announced on Feb. 3 the term of office had ended for 14 members of the 78-member Board including Chairman Ibrahim Kaboglu, reported CNN-Turk television on its Web site.

Speaking at the press conference, Kaboglu said his attorney had filed a lawsuit against the government for terminating the terms of 14 members.

The IHDK is an autonomous committee that was established by the Prime Ministry on Feb. 26, 2003 to draft reports and make recommendations on ways to improve human rights standards in Turkey. However, they became the focus of significant debate when a report on minorities and charges were filed against some of the board members.

The board had suggested a reinterpretation of the definition of minority, which some claimed violated the constitution.

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2. - Gazetem.net - "If Kurds are not free, Tayyip Erdogan will not be free either…":

7 February 2005 / By Ahmet Altan* /
translated ve posted by Kurdish Media

It seems as if it is very difficult for Turks to understand that they are not the only race on the face of the earth and that they do not hold the divine power to decide how life evolves.

Since they are not interested in their own recent past, they are not aware of where this chain of “unreasonable decisions” is dragging this country.

If they just read what was being said here before the Balkan war, maybe they could better understand what the curse of empty words can do to a society.

Just when it had started to look like things were improving a bit for Turkey, we faced the Kirkuk problem.

Led by the prime minister, there were such storms that even Zeus behaved more modestly compared to our guys when ruling the world from the Olympus Mountain.

Apparently, we do not want the establishment of a Kurdish state there.

Why exactly don’t we want that?

They give many reasons.

We are apparently protecting the rights of our ”kin” the Turkmen there.

Do our leaders ever question themselves?

Are we a society based on kinship? If that is the case, we are a nation built on the bond of blood. And anyone who is not a Turk cannot become our citizen.

But if we are to take our constitution seriously then we have to concede that what is important is not “kinship” but instead “citizenship”. If citizenship is important, how does one explain our exclusionary stance taken towards millions of our Kurdish citizens and their “kin” in Northern Iraq?

Wouldn’t taking the side of the “kin” of Turkish citizens, against the “kin” of Kurdish citizens, openly divide our society while trying to give some sort of an order to Northern Iraq?

Another claim that will go down as the strangest in history is that Kurds will take control of Kirkuk and become rich with the oil there.

Apparently, them becoming rich will make our “poor” Kurds want to join them.

If a Kurdish state established there can offer our citizens a richer and happier life than a country that is the inheritor of an empire of six hundred years and the owner of an eighty year old republic, then there is nothing you can do, Kurds will go there.

If you want to prevent this, the way to do it is not to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from becoming rich but to take precautions so that your own Kurdish citizens in the Southeast can live as well as your citizens in Istanbul.

The mentality, which says, “I do not possess the talents to make my own citizens have quality lives, therefore I cannot allow anyone around me to be successful” is against the course of history and cannot achieve results.

If you had the power to prevent prosperity around you, then your own citizens would already have quality lives.

But the real cursed question are not these, the real cursed question is this:

If you, through Northern Iraq, attempt to reorder the Middle East on your own and give the impression that you are tying to take control of the oil in Kirkuk, what will the Western world and the countries of the Middle East say?

Will they allow it?

If they don’t allow it, do you have the power to fight and the power to come out victorious?

How will such a fight affect your economy and political stability?

I do not believe that there is a potential for victory for Turkey if it attempts intervene in Northern Iraq and against Kurds.

As far as I can see, the real aim of those who make a big thing out of the Kirkuk issue is not directly related to developments in Northern Iraq. Their real aim is for Turkey, through such an ill-advised move, to lose its bonds with the world and subsequently with the West.

Turkey will again turn inwards and diverge from the path of democracy, allowing developments to emerge so civil authorities can once more be replaced with “interim regimes”.

It is easy to understand that those whose aim is to establish an inward-looking fascist government here scratch the Kirkuk and Kurdish scabs.

This is in line with their aims.

In fact, tomorrow they could go to America and secretly agree, saying, “let us take over the power and we can forget Northern Iraq.”

What is difficult to understand is Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s eagerness, through bizarre statements, to assist those who want to end his administration, in fact his political existence. Turkey’s insistence on, “I will not allow Kurds to live free and prosperous lives”, will in the end change Turkey not Northern Iraq.

We will experience events worse than you can imagine.
It will be amusing to see the Prime Minister helping those who want to topple him by exaggerating the Kirkuk issue.

But if something like this takes place, there won’t be anyone left to laugh at these events.

Translated from Turkish by Welat Lezgin for KurdishMedia.com. The above article by Ahmet Altan was published on the popular Turkish political commentary website Gazetem.net. on the 7th of February.

*Ahmet Altan is a journalist, political commentator and one of Turkey’s best-selling novelists.

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3. - Reuters - "Iraq Still Clouds Turkey Ties Despite Rice Trip":

ANKARA / 7 February 2005 / by Gareth Jones

Tensions between the United States and Muslim ally Turkey persist, especially over Iraq's future, despite Turks' delight that Condoleezza Rice included Ankara on her first foreign trip as the new Secretary of State.

Turks also welcomed Rice's message the United States, like Turkey, was opposed to any breakup of Iraq, where Turks fear the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on their border.

"It was very candid, very positive," a Turkish diplomat said of Sunday's talks between Rice and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. "There was good personal chemistry."

But political analysts said the old problems remain.

"It is pure wishful thinking to say things have been patched up with Rice's visit. It will take more than a few visits to get this relationship back on track," said Suat Kinikligolu of the Ankara Center for Turkish Policy Studies.

Washington was outraged in 2003 when Turkey's parliament refused to let U.S. troops invade north Iraq from Turkish soil.

For Turkey, the heart of the problem is its conviction the Americans are ignoring efforts by Kurds in northern Iraq to take control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as part of a wider drive to carve out an independent Kurdish state.

Ankara fears this would reignite separatism among the Kurds of southeast Turkey and destabilize the wider region.

Both before and after Iraq's Jan. 30 elections, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan criticized the United States for failing to rein in the Iraqi Kurds. He said Washington had also failed to clamp down on Turkish Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, despite promises to do so.

Gul, usually restrained in his public comments, said Ankara could not stand by if Kurds seized Kirkuk, raising the prospect of a Turkish military intervention. Few take such a threat literally, but the rhetoric jacked up tensions further.

Putting a brave face on things, Rice said after meeting Gul that Washington and Ankara were old friends and allies whose strong relationship allowed them sometimes to disagree.

Turkish diplomats said they believed the second Bush administration would be more sensitive to Turkish concerns. But they conceded that nothing has changed on the ground.

CONTESTED KIRKUK

Kirkuk looks set to remain a flashpoint, with Iraq's Kurds saying it is historically theirs, a view contested by both the Arabs and by the Turkic-speaking Turkmen minority whom Turkey feels it has a special duty to protect.

Rice effectively sidestepped the issue of Kirkuk, saying it was for all Iraqis to agree on the city's final status.

Equally discouraging for Turkey, U.S. forces, stretched by the insurgency in central Iraq, are no more likely to march into the relatively peaceful Kurdish north to hunt down an estimated 5,000 Turkish Kurdish rebels than they were before Rice's visit.

Turkish nationalists believe it is time for Ankara to get tough with Washington over what they see as its "bad faith."

"As long as this situation continues, with the Kurds winning the upper hand in Kirkuk and pushing for an independent Kurdistan, it will hurt Turkey more and more ... We cannot go on like this," said Hasan Unal of Ankara's Bilkent University.

He said Turkey should consider suspending all logistical support for the Americans in Iraq and threaten to pull its peacekeeping troops out of Afghanistan. It should also deny U.S. forces use of Turkey's Incirlik airbase, he said.

The nationalists point to opinion polls which show Turkey has become one of the most anti-American countries, saying no democratic government can ignore such trends.

The key to the situation remains Erdogan himself.

Many analysts say Erdogan's anti-American outbursts are not just cheap populism calculated to curry favor with his Islamist voters. He actually means it, they say, but stress he is also too pragmatic to turn his back completely on Washington.

"Turkey cannot afford to alienate too much the United States because they are too active in this region," said Kiniklioglu.

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4. - Haaretz - "Kurds and finding the way":

4 February 2005 / by Zvi Bar`el

The people of Turkey are now worried that the outcome of the elections in Iraq could prompt their Iraqi neighbors to redraw their country’s map.

The Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, realized rather quickly that his slip of tongue could create a diplomatic incident. "I never threatened that Turkey would intervene in Iraq," he hastened to say. He claimed that his remarks after the elections in Iraq had been taken out of context. "I said that Turkey could not remain indifferent, and that the government of any democratic country must consider the feelings and wishes of its citizens."

The people of Turkey, in whose name Gul spoke, are now worried that the outcome of the elections could prompt their Iraqi neighbors to redraw their country’s map. At least that is what the Turkish foreign ministry seems to imply in its statement that "when making this assessment [of the poll results], the implications of the attempts to alter the demographic structure in northern Iraq will also be taken into consideration." Translation: If the Kurds try to establish facts on the ground by annexing the city of Kirkuk, or possibly parts of Mosul, Turkey will be forced to respond. With all Turkey’s respect for the democratic process set in motion, the Iraqi elections could be bad news for Turkey.

The final results of the elections will only be known in about a week or 10 days from now, but the Turks, who are familiar with the structure of Iraqi coalitions, know what to fear. A political alliance has been forged between the two major Kurdish factions, Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the movement headed by the current prime minister, Ayad Allawi. They have worked out an agreement whereby the Kurds will support Allawi for prime minister, Allawi’s party will support Talabani for president, and Barzani will be president of the Kurdish province. The assumption is that the Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the population and participated fully in the elections, will win at least 50 seats in the Iraqi parliament, and possibly as many as 70, out of a total of 275. That is a tremendous amount of power. Together with Allawi’s party, which is not the country’s largest (the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shi’ite factions that enjoys the backing of an important Islamic scholar, Ali al-Sistani, is larger), it will be able to neutralize the United Iraqi Alliance.

The alliance, which understands how much power the Kurds have, will do its best to curry favor with them so that it will be called upon to form the next government. Two key figures in the alliance - Ibrahim al-Jafari (leader of the Al-Dawa movement), No. 2 on the list, and Adel Abd al-Mahdi (the current finance minister, a former Maoist who now enthusiastically supports a free economy) - are serious contenders for prime minister. Both have already taken the necessary steps to avoid a clash with the U.S. administration, declaring that an early pullout of American forces from Iraq could create chaos, and hence no date need be set. Now all they have to do is promise the Kurds something. That "something" is a kind of federal state, which is what the Kurds want, and what Turkey, Iran and Syria are so afraid of.

Sunni inclusion

This political coalition is not the only possible scenario. All the large factions know that they will have to include the Sunnis in some way, although most of them boycotted the elections. This is not just a matter of political philanthropy, but an imperative arising from the temporary constitution, which states that if a two-thirds majority of the electorate in three provinces vetoes the new constitution, it will not be adopted. This fuzzy clause was introduced last year as a gesture to the Kurds, who feared that Iraq would become a country governed by Islamic law or a united Arab republic, while they see themselves as neither Arabs nor supporters of a religious state. To push the temporary constitution through and enable a temporary government to be established, the Kurds were granted the right of veto in advance. But this clause can also be exploited by the Sunnis to keep the permanent constitution from being approved in the national referendum scheduled for October.

The Sunni Arabs have a big problem with the Kurds, mainly having to do with the fact that the latter lay claim to Kirkuk. During the election campaign, for example, Abd al-Rahman al-Obeidi, an Arab Sunni leader, called upon the citizens of Kirkuk to vote for the Turkoman list in order to keep the Kurds from winning by a landslide. Suddenly the Sunnis are realizing that their closest ally is Turkey, which has set itself up as the patron of the Turkomans. Now they see that the Turkomans are the lifesaver that will keep Kirkuk, with its oil resources, from becoming an official Kurdish city.

But the Kurds are not planning to give up Kirkuk after years of being persecuted by Saddam Hussein, and after thousands of Kurdish families were driven out of the city and replaced by Arabs. To give up Kirkuk is too steep a price to pay for the Kurds, who are threatening to cut themselves off entirely from Iraq if need be. At the same time, the Kurds also understand that severing ties with Iraq and declaring independence could set them years back. They will be closed off from all sides, with no exit. Turkey could close its border, and Iran could do the same. The Kurds would indeed be independent, but without any chance for economic survival, not to mention all the economic achievements over the past decade that would go down the drain.

This political conundrum awaiting the winner of the elections joins two chronic problems plaguing Iraq since the war: military and economic development. The U.S. Army is training 150,000 Iraqi soldiers, but very few of them are commando-level fighters. The Iraqi army has no serious intelligence branch capable of dealing with the terrorist cells operating around the country. Neither individual soldiers nor military units are properly equipped. According to Pentagon assessments, it will take at least two years for the army to get on its feet. The development budget for security forces, including military units, a police force and fire-fighting brigades, currently stands at $5 billion, and it appears that obtaining more money will not pose any difficulty.

Army loyalties

The problem lies in the pace of training and the fear that the new Iraqi army will splinter into militias loyal to ethnic or tribal leaders, as soon as the U.S. Army decides to withdraw from Iraq. It is hard to assess how loyal an army is to the state and the government when sub-loyalties have not been eliminated and some political leaders - not only among the Kurds - can put together a private militia on the spot.

Without an Iraqi army subordinate to the government, and without a significant drop in terror, the elections in Iraq could turn out to be a fleeting ray of light that ends in a tidal wave of disappointment. Hopes for greater personal safety are intertwined with hopes for a better life. According to Iraqi government data and American reports, the unemployment rate is 28 percent. A more realistic assessment sets the figure closer to 35 percent. Per-capita annual income over the past year was $1,000, compared with $4,000 in 1980, before the Iran-Iraq war - and this at a time when the Iraqi government is the country’s major employer and some 110,000 Iraqis are employed by American firms operating in Iraq. The funding of these projects will come out of a budget of $18.4 billion (including the $5 billion for rehabilitating Iraqi security forces) approved by the U.S. Congress, but the money will be doled out carefully - and very slowly.

The reason for this is the U.S. Inspector General’s report that the transitional government in Iraq lost track of $9 billion budgeted for civilian projects. Of more than 8,000 Iraqis on the payroll, only 602 of them were formally registered. The Iraqi government’s ability to continue employing large numbers of workers and creating new jobs depends on its ability to sustain itself - i.e., its ability to produce and market Iraqi oil. At the moment, Iraq is far from maximizing its potential. It produces only 1.5 million barrels a day - a million barrels less than before the war. According to the estimates, Iraq should be earning $15 billion a year, but so far it is earning only 10 percent of that. Hence Iraq’s tremendous dependence on the U.S. administration and foreign investors, which could go on for a long time.

These investors will not set foot in Iraq without security guarantees, especially after 70 foreign contractors have been killed and 230 wounded over the past two years. Without them, the country will find it hard to keep its promises to its citizens, who are liable to discover, like Russia after perestroika, that democracy is an excellent product except for one thing: You can’t eat it.

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5. - Inter Press Service - "Non-Kurds Allege Vote Fraud in North":

KIRKUK / 8 February 2005 / by Aaron Glantz

Kurds are declaring victory after elections in Iraq's northern oil-rich city, Kirkuk, but other groups in the multi-ethnic city are not ready to concede. Some allege massive voter fraud.

"This election was done without any oversight from the United Nations," says Ali Mahdi, an officer in the Iraqi Turkmen Front, the largest party of ethnic Turks in Kirkuk. The Turkmen front alleges many of the 100,000 Kurdish refugees allowed to vote in Kirkuk's election were not forced out of the city by Saddam Hussein as they claimed. He says many of the refugees never actually lived in Kirkuk.

"We want the United Nations to come here and investigate these allegations," he said. "Until then, we cannot say there has been a fair election here."

The Turkmens' allegations are echoed by Arab parties who boycotted the election in Kirkuk. "The result of the election was fixed before it even began," Sunni Arab Sheikh Hosbi al-Ubaidy, a leader of the united Arab slate told IPS. He was referring to the interim Iraqi government's decision to allow Kurdish refugees to vote in the election.

Sheik Hosbi al-Ubaidy also said that some Arab neighborhoods were staffed with Kurdish or Turkmen election workers who improperly registered their candidates' votes.

In addition, the movement of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Kirkuk alleged that people dressed as Iraqi policemen came to polling stations in Shia Arab-dominated areas and took ballots away before they could be counted.

The Iraqi Organization for Human Rights and Civilian Community in Haweijah, a primarily Arab neighborhood southwest of Kirkuk, says ballot boxes were taken from Arab areas around Kirkuk to Kurdish areas of the city to bolster Kurdish turnout.

None of these allegations could be confirmed, but because all independent election monitors were based in Jordan during the election rather than Iraq itself, it is also difficult to discard them. Either way, they demonstrate difficulties that lie ahead in governing this multi-ethnic city.

The Carter Center, run by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, refused to monitor elections in Iraq because it said the elections failed to conform to its standards of transparent and legitimate polling.

The United Nations itself has yet to weigh in on the legitimacy of the election. After meeting with leaders of Iraq's Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party in Baghdad, UN special envoy to Iraq Asraf Qazi told reporters in Baghdad: "It is the duty of United Nations mission to consult all the main political leaders to examine the latest developments." The Iraqi Islamic Party had boycotted the election and has been refusing to recognize the result.

A deeper issue on election day was that each party was contesting on the basis of sectarian or ethnic representation.

"It's not good when you have a list for Shia and a list for Sunni, and a list for Turkish and a list for Kurdish," said Sheik Ubaidy. "This was not an election. It was a census."

Kurds, meantime, are riding high on their victory. "The Iraqi Turkmen Front is finished and they're grasping at straws," argues Kurdish journalist Shuan Daoud. Daoud, like many in Northern Iraq, believes the Turkmen Front represents the interests of the Turkish government in Iraq rather than of the Turkmen people.

"As for the Sunni Arabs," he says, "many of them were officers in Saddam's military or intelligence service, so they oppose the coalition and they oppose the election. But there is no turning back for them. Kirkuk is a Kurdish city."

After the election is certified this week, Iraq's two main Kurdish parties believe they will hold two-thirds of the seats on Kirkuk's local council. They plan to begin resettling Arabs moved by Saddam's government from the south of Iraq to Kirkuk, replacing them with Kurdish refugees. Shuan Daoud notes the Kurdish leaders have made an agreement with the interim government of Iyad Allawi to resettle all Arabs moved north by Saddam within 11 months of the election.

But Hosvi al-Ubaidy, like most Arabs in Kirkuk, foresees difficult times ahead. "If the Kurds push too hard, we will be forced to adopt a new course as well."

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6. - AFP - "Turkey must recognise Cyprus before starting talks with EU Document Actions":

BUDAPEST / 7 February 2005

Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said Monday that Turkey should recognise Cyprus before Ankara starts accession talks to join the European Union.

"Hungary supports the common European approach that Turkey de facto recognise the Republic of Cyprus before starting accession negotiations with the EU in October," Gyurcsany told a press conference in Budapest after meeting Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos.

"We support the process of peaceful reunification of Cyprus," Gyurcsany added.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkey seized the north in response to an Athens-engineered coup in Nicosia aimed at uniting the island with Greece.

The longstanding division of Cyprus remains a major obstacle for Turkey's EU bid, with Ankara refusing to endorse the internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government of the island, which became an EU member on May 1 last year.

In December, the EU gave Turkey the green light for accession talks on October 3, 2005, on condition that it make a diplomatic gesture to the Greek Cypriots.

Turkey grudgingly promised to sign a protocol by the time accession talks begin to update an association agreement with the EU to cover the 10 new members which joined in May, but stressed that the move would not amount to a formal recognition of the Greek Cypriot government.

UN-brokered talks on reuniting the island shortly before last year's EU enlargement failed to secure agreement.

In a referendum last year, the Greek-run south rejected UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for unification.