19 January 2006

1. "Court frees Turkish soldier accused of killing Kurdish protester", a court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered the temporary release of a soldier accused of killing a demonstrator and injuring five others during riots in a Kurdish region in November, the Anatolia news agency reported.

2. "Council of Europe to Discuss Kurdish Issue in Paris", the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) is to discuss the situation of the Kurdish communities in Iraq, Syria and Iran in a meeting to be held in Paris on Wednesday.

3. "Is it the Bird Flu or Turk State Repression that kills the Kurds?", it is a known fact that the artificial state of the so called Turkey ‘imposed after WWI on various non-Turk indigenous populations of Anatolia’ has been protecting the interests of the ethic Turks along nationalistic lines of chauvinist nature and with obvious bias, while undermining identities and rights of other ethnicities with most violent and unscrupulous means.

4. "EU presses Turkey to implement customs deal with Cyprus", Austrian Chancellor and new EU leader Wolfgang Schuessel stressed on Wednesday the need for Turkey to fully implement a customs deal with the EU, including letting Cyprus use its ports and airports.

5. "'Agca's Release is a Wrong Decision'", Turkish Minister of Justice Cemil Cicek petitioned the Supreme Court of Appeals to appeal the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, the killer of renowned Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci and the would-be-assassin of Pope John Paul II.

6. "Syrian Kurds, a potential danger for Assad", marginalized and the target of repression for more than 40 years, the 2.5 million Kurds living in Syria are a potential resource for the U.S. in its struggle against the Assad regime.

1. - AFP - "Court frees Turkish soldier accused of killing Kurdish protester":

ANKARA / 18 January 2006

A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered the temporary release of a soldier accused of killing a demonstrator and injuring five others during riots in a Kurdish region in November, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The court in southeast Turkey said Sergeant Tanju Cavus would remain free until the end of the trial.

Several thousand people had gathered after a bomb attack on a bookshop, killing one and injuring six, in the town of Semdinli, near the border with Iran and Iraq.

The crowd, which believed the attack was organised by members of the security forces, tried to lynch three men who ran away from the site of the blast, before clashing with police.

Cavus was arrested and imprisoned shortly after the incident.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984 when the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) took up arms for self-rule in the predominantly Kurdish southeast.

2. - Cihan News Agency - "Council of Europe to Discuss Kurdish Issue in Paris":

18 January 2006

The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) is to discuss the situation of the Kurdish communities in Iraq, Syria and Iran in a meeting to be held in Paris on Wednesday.

The meeting, organized by the Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Assembly, had originally been planned for last autumn.

However, the meeting was postponed after Murat Mercan, head of the Turkish Delegation to PACE, objected to the meeting claiming that the majority of the speakers at the meeting had been selected from supporters of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).

3. - Kurdish Media - "Is it the Bird Flu or Turk State Repression that kills the Kurds?":

19 January 2006 / by Khasraw Saleh Koyi

It is a known fact that the artificial state of the so called Turkey ‘imposed after WWI on various non-Turk indigenous populations of Anatolia’ has been protecting the interests of the ethic Turks along nationalistic lines of chauvinist nature and with obvious bias, while undermining identities and rights of other ethnicities with most violent and unscrupulous means.

Violent, as in state-sponsored crimes of mass-killings, torture, rape, looting, imprisonment, and devastation of property and other means of subsistence; unscrupulous, as in all the predetermined state political, administrative, and economic policies and practices that are perfected to continue where violent means fails to achieve due to lack of state resources and/or fear of certain international backlashes.

There is no doubt that like any other ethnicity, the Turks are spread along the spectrum of human conscience and civilized behavior. Besides the nationalist Turks who find and express their self-satisfaction, pride and dignity in their arrogance and impulse for violent expressions of racial superiority, there are morally refined Turks who express their self-worth in a dignifying manner which encompasses much of the civilized expectations. And in between, there are the majority of the Turks who are either victims of state’s relentless misguidance or who have decided not to have an effective role in anything to do with the reputation, as well as the fate of their nation. It is therefore, when the overwhelming majority of any nation decides to play along the ills of the state and remain passive in the face of the twisted realities of the status quo, change for the better does not come about soon, if at all.

Straightforward and honest ideologies and policies are attributes of civilized and decent nations who have no abhorred and shameful designs to conceal with lies and superficial expressions. Disgracefully, the Turkish state since its conception has chosen to take the path of a fallacious entity with violent abuse as the most popular weapon in her possession to punish everyone who dares to reveal her lies. So far, scores and scores of decent and courageous writers, journalists and other intellectuals have been punished in most inhuman ways for revealing the truth about the Turkish state. Sadly, their counterparts in the civilized nations have often failed to rally behind them in a determined and effective manner. Added to that is the choice of real politics by the effective democratic states and governments which translates to the choice of looking the other way than interfering for the good of the others and the world at large. If anything such international attitude has emboldened Turk dark forces to carry on with impunity.

It wasn’t mainly because Saddam Hussein and his Baathist thugs were proven cold blooded murderers that US and British Governments decided to rid of. The bulk of the reason was the degree of short and long term threats that Saddam’s whimsical and unpredictable regime may generate to negatively impact the flow of oil from the Greater Middle East to the West, which its livelihood is greatly dependent on such a vital commodity. If eliminating of brutality and repression in favor of freedom and democracy was the only motive for US military intervention in the Middle East, then without any doubt, the Turkish nationalist establishment should have been one of the top targets on the list of the real terrorist states.

For the wrong reasons, often people pay worthwhile attention to physical crimes, explicit acts of injustice, and tragedies, while ignore their causes and contributing factors. If a person dies of a sudden disease, the focus is directed on the intensity of the injury or the role of the deadly virus. Not much thought is given to the fact that the impact of same the king of symptoms varies on patients depending on their health status and immunities, as well as their educated reactions to deal with the causes and symptoms in a prompt manner. It is much more likely that a person from a poor and uneducated family is in a much more disadvantageous position to survive a potential health threat than one who is from an educated middle class or rich family. This is especially true in underdeveloped countries, especially in a racist founded state such as Turkey where two systems exist: One for the Turks to reward and the other for the Kurds to punish.

Those who see the miserable condition that the vast majority of the Kurd live in Turkey’s part of Kurdistan, as well as that of the deported Kurds who live in slums on the outskirts of Istanbul and other cities, in an instant, they realize the degree of negligence the Kurds have been subjected to due to the determined will of Turk nationalist “also known as Kemalist” forces who have succeeded ‘since the conception of the Turkish state and up to this day’ to dictate their racist policies against the Kurds with the aim to neutralize them and force them into abandoning their language, identity and culture in favor of the Turkish ones. For generations, the Turks have used all the available state resources to develop the parts of Turkey where ethnic Turks constitute a majority, while the same resources have been used at greater incentive to suppress the Kurds both culturally and economically.

Independent journalists who recently visited Van province in Turkish occupied Kurdistan to get first hand news about the avian flu that has afflicted the Kurds with tragic consequences, have withheld no doubt about the abject economical conditions the suppressed Kurds are subjected to by the Turkish state. The way some of them narrate the sufferings of the parents and relatives of flu’s dead victims, one can’t miss the deep impact on their human conscience. As much as their journalistic guidelines may prevent them from explicit condemnation of the Turkish state repression of the Kurds, they have relayed the intended message by virtue of underlining the symptoms and effects of such a repression. There is no doubt that such an experience will revise their moral standards to impact their future evaluations to the events surrounding the Kurds in Turkey. Courageous and honest journalism makes it much harder for the fascist Turks to sell their real malicious intent packaged in deceiving textures woven with faked civilized slogans.

Prior to reaching Turkey, avian flu already was arrived to Russia and some Eastern European countries. Thank goodness it has not yet claimed a fatality in those countries neither in the Turk part of Turkey. Leaving superstitious reasoning aside, the contributing reasons to have such a flu claim fatalities almost immediately after its arrival to the Kurdish area stems from the fact that the Turkish state has deliberately left the Kurds in primitive economical and educational conditions while the ethnic Turks and the European nations have received proper economic and educational state attentions.

Describing the tragedy of a Kurdish family afflicted by the Bird Flu, OAKLAND ROSS, a feature writer for The Toronto Star, in his article “A family destroyed by bird flu, published in the Toronto Star on Jan. 16, 2006” writes the following:

{If sorrow were a woman, she would go by the name Marifet.
She would dwell in a small grey stucco house without running water on a snow-covered bluff overlooking Mount Ararat, here in the lofty hinterland of eastern Turkey. She would have lost three of her children in one soul-piercing week. Zeki Kocyigit is in deepest mourning, too. But he is a proud Kurdish man, the product of an intensely masculine culture, and so he tries not to let his feelings show.

When catastrophe struck this impoverished family, it did so without warning and from a direction that no one in this region of vanilla snowfields and craggy mountain peaks could ever have imagined.
The avian flu virus, officially known as H5N1, has been around for several years and claimed its first human victims in December 2003, but until the past few weeks it had barely ventured beyond its redoubts in China and Southeast Asia.

Suddenly, out of the cold blue skies of winter, it began to infect and kill people in these mountainous highlands near the Turkish border with Iran.

The three children who died all belonged to Marifet and Zeki Kocyigit. They were: Fatma, 16; Mehmet Ali, 14; and Hulya, 12.}

This tragic event by itself underlines Turks long utilization of a potent tool in a slow and silent genocidal campaign implemented against the Kurds. Since after WWII, it has been much harder for the Turkish state to wipeout the Kurds via conventional ways of mass killings. Therefore, they have resorted to less visible ways such as economic deprivation. Malicious intent behind controlling the availability of proper food, medication, housing, education from a people is a criminal act. Such gross inhuman acts have devastating and lasting impact on the overall wellbeing and development of the victims. They become malnourished and more susceptible to diseases; their life expectancy reduces, their children don’t develop healthy and fit enough to compete with others in the more developed societies. It is obvious that this is the outcome that nationalist Turks have in mind for the Kurds as a way to exercise their sick and inhuman sense of racial superiority. This is their way to tell the world that the Kurds are less entitled than the Turks to have the same rights and choices in life.

In Europe and North America, leaders and officials who represent the citizens of their countries through their political and executive roles and authorities, have long managed to cleanse their thoughts and conducts from any known traces of racial superiority and justifications for ethnic repression. Their pluralistic culture to view all human beings as equals regardless of ethnicity, religion, and gender has long prevailed. For decades, they have been welcoming immigrants from all around the world to find freedom and a better life within their host societies. However, in Turkey, there is yet a single hopeful sign to point to such a benevolent transformation. Effectively, in accepting and exercising meaningful civilized thoughts and behavior, Turk nationalist political, executive, and military leaders lag behind their counterparts in the civilized world by many decades, if not centuries. They continue to romanticize with the historic concurring adventures of the Tarter and Mongol invaders such Hulagu and Gengiz Khan, as well as the reviled notions of racial superiority of the Fascist and Nazi leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.

4. - Middle East Times - "EU presses Turkey to implement customs deal with Cyprus":

STRASBOURG / 19 January 2006

Austrian Chancellor and new EU leader Wolfgang Schuessel stressed on Wednesday the need for Turkey to fully implement a customs deal with the EU, including letting Cyprus use its ports and airports.

"We have the customs union agreement which is a clear commitment by Turkey which has to come to life," he said, after laying out Austria's priorities for its just-started six-month European Union presidency to EU lawmakers.

Turkey signed a protocol last July extending its customs accord with Brussels to the 10 newest members of the bloc, including Cyprus, but it said that its signature did not amount to recognition of the Cypriot government.

The Mediterranean island has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and seized its northern third in response to an Athens-engineered coup to unite it with Greece.

Turkey still refuses to open its ports and airports to traffic from Cypriot government-controlled territory and says that that will only happen if international restrictions imposed on the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is only recognized by Ankara, are lifted.

It has agreed to recognize Cyprus once a political settlement is found to the island's three-decade-long division.

But Cyprus has the power to veto Turkish accession to the European Union and insists that Ankara extend the customs protocol to all 25 EU member states.

Schuessel also reiterated the EU's backing for peace moves in Cyprus, led by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"We have to help support the UN to foster the peace process," he said.

The most recent UN peace plan for Cyprus was thwarted by a strong "no" by Greek Cypriots in an April 2004 referendum, while Turkish Cypriots gave it overwhelming support.

The outcome ensured that Turkish Cypriots have remained outside the bloc.

Turkey began EU membership talks in October, but only after frantic last-minute wrangling to overcome objections by Austria, which had argued for Ankara to be offered something less than full EU membership.

5. - Zaman - "'Agca's Release is a Wrong Decision'":

ANKARA / 18 January 2006 / by Murat Aydin

Turkish Minister of Justice Cemil Cicek petitioned the Supreme Court of Appeals to appeal the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, the killer of renowned Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci and the would-be-assassin of Pope John Paul II.

In the application sent to the Court of Appeals by the Office of the Attorney General, it was emphasized that the 20-year sentence Agca served in Italy for the Pope's assassination attempt should not count; he must be punished in Turkey for his domestic crime.

The application reiterates even if this period is accepted, the period Agca stayed imprisoned in Italy was not 20 years but 19 years and 1 month, therefore the 11 month-sentence is lacking.

Moreover, Agca must serve a sentence of at least 10 years for the murder of Ipekci, the early release is not satisfactory since he spent only six years of this condemnation in prison.

Since Agca benefited from amnesty laws his capital punishment was reduced to a 10-year imprisonment, for this reason he cannot benefit from other laws.

If the Appeal Court concludes in accord with the ministry's demand, Agca will be resent to prison and will remain there until 2017.

6. - Asia News - "Syrian Kurds, a potential danger for Assad":

Marginalized and the target of repression for more than 40 years, the 2.5 million Kurds living in Syria are a potential resource for the U.S. in its struggle against the Assad regime.

DAMASCUS / 18 January 2006 / by Bashdar Pusho Ismaeel

Marginalized for over 40 years, when not the actual target of violence and killings, by the Baathist regime of the Assad, father and son, to a great extent ignored by international public opinion, but now, in the wake of developments in northern Iraq, the 2.5 million Syrian Kurds could become an important wire for the U.S. to pull in its plans for the Middle East.

Syrian Kurds make up some 10% of the population, and many of them are considered stateless and have no access to ordinary state services; the areas in which they live have undergone a long process of impoverishment and have recently witnessed well-documented uprisings, ethnic violence and pro-U.S. demonstrations, which have garnered international media attention. Most notably, rioting broke out in Qamishli in March 2004 which left at least a dozen people dead, hundreds more arrested and mass looting, culminating in a tense atmosphere in the region, which has been further compounded by the murder of cleric Maashouq al-Haznawi, in Aleppo last June, which instigated further rioting and violence.

But still today, as a result of Law 93 of 1962, some 300,000 Kurds, classified as foreigners, still have no access to state health, education, and other services and are unable to travel. Ever fearful of cross border influence from Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Syria sought to create an “Arab Belt”, but failed given the newfound political power of Iraqi Kurds.

Now, under international pressure from the U.N. resolution for an international inquiry into the death of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafic Hariri, and the newfound unity of Syrian opposition groups, the Kurds could prove to be more useful to the U.S. than a great military arsenal in its quest to oust the current regime.