26 January 2006

1. "Ocalans Lawyers meets with CPT", Hatice Korkut, lawyer of Kurdish Leader Abdullah Ocalan from Turkey and Rhaimer Ahues, lawyer of him from Germany, meets with the CPT (European Committee for the Prevention of Torture).

2. "Turkey, Denmark in row over Kurdish TV station", the expected presence of a journalist from the Kurdish Roj TV, which is claimed to have links to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party, PKK, led Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to show up at a scheduled press conference on 15 November, hosted by Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Copenhagen.

3. "The Novelist Walks: Why did Turkey drop the charges against Orhan Pamuk?", with the abrupt cancellation this week of the trial of Orhan Pamuk, the celebrated Turkish writer, Turkey has sidestepped months of international censure. It has also temporarily salvaged its precarious bid to join the European Union. But the decision does not resolve the country's anxiety toward Europe and toward its own past—issues for which Pamuk has become an uncanny symbol.

4. "Turkey feels Iran chill", Iran's supply of natural gas to Turkey was inexplicably slashed by 70% last Friday, in one of the coldest months of the year. On the same day, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul raised the tension between the two countries by calling for greater Iranian "transparency" over Tehran's nuclear program. In otherwise the Turkish press was agog at such goings-on. The respected Milliyet daily argued that Goss and National Intelligence Agency Undersecretary Emre Taner discussed the role played by Turkey in Iraq, as well as the controversial issue of the Kurdish rebel movement PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party).

5. "Turkey tries to seize initiative over Cyprus", mention of Cyprus – rather like Northern Ireland – tends to elicit a groan of irritation even from those who profess an interest in its historical and contemporary complexities.

6. "Austrian released in Kurdistan", an Austrian sentenced to 25 years in prison for libel in Iraqi Kurdistan has been released, the Austrian foreign ministry said Wednesday in a statement. The 48-year old lawyer of Kurdish origin was convicted on December 19 by a court in Arbil in the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan for "defamation against the Kurdish government."

1. - DIHA - "Ocalans Lawyers meets with CPT":

STRASBOURG / 25 January 2006

Hatice Korkut lawyer of Kurdish Leader Abdullah Ocalan from Turkey and Rhaimer Ahues lawyer of him from Germany, meets with the CPT (European Committee for the Prevention of Torture).

According to the knowledge, lawyers who make enterprises to make European Council to be an intervener for the 20 days cabin punishment, which was given to Ocalan, met with the CPT in Strasbourg.

Lawyers also continue their communication thereby interviewing with the countries of European Council and political delegations.

In the interviews, the cabin punishment and the isolation which became heavier had been discussed. Turkey is also the member of European Convention on Human Rights and because of this, lawyers want from European Council to be an intervener in this problem and to put Ocalan's situation on their agenda.

2. - EurActiv - "Turkey, Denmark in row over Kurdish TV station":

25 January 2006

The expected presence of a journalist from the Kurdish Roj TV, which is claimed to have links to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party, PKK, led Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to show up at a scheduled press conference on 15 November, hosted by Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Copenhagen.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry has now urged Denmark to clarify its attitude towards Roj TV, which is based in Copenhagen."Roj TV is an organisation which [...] is the voice of the PKK," said a foreign ministry spokesman. Roj TV has said it had no links with the PKK.

Citing principles on which he could not compromise, Rasmussen said that he had "no legal basis to exclude journalists from press conferences as long as they work within the law", adding that there are some things that we "see fundamentally different". He also said that "Turkey has to realise that there aresome very specific conditions that need to be fulfilled if Turkey wants to become an EU member one day."

The Turkish visit to Denmark already had a heated backdrop because of the Danish daily Jyllands Posten, which published a series ofsketched caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in September. Capitals of 11 Muslim countries sent a joint letter of protest to the Danish prime minister.

Erdogan said: "Freedom of speech is important, but what is holy to me is more important. I would never abuse my freedom of speech to attack things that are holy to Mr Rasmussen."

A recent opinion poll has shown that 55 % % of the Danes are against Turkish EU-membership.

3. - Slate - "The Novelist Walks: Why did Turkey drop the charges against Orhan Pamuk?":

24 January 2006 / by Hugh Eakin

With the abrupt cancellation this week of the trial of Orhan Pamuk, the celebrated Turkish writer, Turkey has sidestepped months of international censure. It has also temporarily salvaged its precarious bid to join the European Union. But the decision does not resolve the country's anxiety toward Europe and toward its own past—issues for which Pamuk has become an uncanny symbol.

The trouble began last February, when Pamuk told the Swiss news magazine Das Magazin that "one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and no one but me dares talk about it." For this statement, Pamuk received death threats from Turkish nationalists and was eventually charged under a new Turkish law with "insulting" the Turkish Republic. When he went on trial in December, he faced up to three years in prison.

The charges were dropped this week only because the government refused to weigh in on the case. The court did not repudiate the law under which Pamuk was charged—a new law that was, ironically, slipped into an EU reform package—or even admit that the charges were wrong. More disturbingly, numerous other writers and journalists still have cases pending under similar charges. As Pamuk's December court appearance made clear, many Turks supported his indictment. On the day the trial began, onlookers pelted the writer's car with eggs and chanted, "Traitor! Traitor!" It all seemed to play directly into the hands of the country's critics, who have adopted Pamuk as a cause célèbre against Turkey's candidacy for membership in the European Union.

In fact, Pamuk's cult status in Europe may be precisely the issue. Turkey is dead serious when it comes to defending Turkishness, and the writer's international success has made him all too European for the conservative establishment at home. His recent novel, Snow, draws on all the latest Western literary techniques to show how backward and un-European that establishment is. While increasingly controversial in Turkey, Pamuk is being translated into some 40 languages and has received numerous European accolades, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair Prize. In contrast, he has rejected Turkey's own laurels, including a government offer a few years ago to make him an official "state artist."

Pamuk's emergence as an outspoken public intellectual couldn't come at a more sensitive time for Turkey. Since the moderate Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, Turkey has made many democratic reforms. But Turkey's powerful military bureaucracy, which has formed the country's true power center for decades, still wields enormous influence. And the Turkish government's effort to adapt to stringent European human rights standards has been marred by its refusal to address concerns about the longstanding oppression of Kurdish separatists and its continued denial of the Armenian genocide in 1915. So Pamuk's recent comments have struck a nerve.

According to one popular view in Turkey, Pamuk's statements to Das Magazin were simply a ploy to gain dissident status in the West. As a prominent Turkish lawyer put it last fall, "[He] demeans the Turkish people, Turkish values as well as the Turkish military as a short cut to receiving the Nobel and similar prizes." To be sure, Pamuk, who is 53, is a complicated figure, whose recent devastating (and dead-on) pronouncements about Turkish society appear at odds with his enthusiasm for Turkish EU membership. In his own defense, he has long maintained that he is not interested in politics and his previous novels have not dealt with current affairs. But Snow is a deeply political novel. Pamuk describes Kars, a bleak town in eastern Turkey, as a place in which civil society has long since given way to rival factions of secular militants, state informants, radical Islamists, and Kurdish rebels. His protagonist is a Europeanized poet named Ka who has returned after years of political exile in Frankfurt, Germany. As the narrative unfolds, Ka turns out to be as alienated from Europe as he is from the down-and-out citizens of Kars.

Pamuk's dark story found particular resonance in Germany, which has Europe's largest Turkish minority, composed mostly of Muslim workers from the same Anatolian hinterland that Pamuk writes about in Snow. A large majority of Germans see Turkey as a society of headscarves and honor killings and have little sense of the country's own secular elite. The admission of Turkey to the European Union, some fear, would transform Germany's Muslim minority into an uncontrolled "parallel society." When Pamuk made his controversial statements to the Swiss news magazine, German conservatives saw him as an intellectual ally. Along with the new Christian Democrat chancellor, Angela Merkel, many Germans favor a "special partnership" between Turkey and the European Union, rather than full membership

But Pamuk never saw the tensions between Turkey and Europe as a simple opposition between the West and Islam. Far more to the point, as Snow so penetratingly shows, are the tensions within Turkish society between religion and secularism, militarism and democracy, and the failure of the ruling class in Ankara and Istanbul to convince rural Turks that Europe was anything more than a land of godless intellectuals that happens to have jobs for poor workers. For Pamuk, there is no better way than EU membership to overcome these problems.

Notwithstanding the trial, the conservative German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has expressed disappointment that Pamuk hasn't lived up to his billing as a dissident. Last summer, a critic for the paper asked, "Just what exactly does he really stand for?" More recently, a series of articles suggested that Pamuk might be "backing down" from his earlier comments about the Armenian genocide. (In fact, Pamuk merely pointed out well-known historical facts about casualties; he never used the word "genocide.")

So in the end, Turkey's greatest writer has offended both Turkish hard-liners and German conservatives for failing to make his allegiances clear. But it is arguably Pamuk's mixed message—that Turkey desperately wants and needs Europe even as it thumbs its nose at fundamental European notions of justice and truth—that will prove most accurate in hindsight. Under the current regime, Turkey has become both more democratic and more comfortable with its Muslim heritage; during Ramadan last fall, the major public debate was about whether Muslims could break the fast with sex.

But the changes have happened too quickly, and under too much pressure from Brussels, for Turkish society to be really at ease with it all. And the most painful part of that transition, as postwar Europe itself has shown, may be coming to terms with history. There is surely some irony in that fact that you can now be prosecuted in Europe for denying a genocide and prosecuted in Turkey for asserting that a genocide took place. For a country that has long created fictions out of its own past, it is all the more fitting then, that it is a novelist who starts the dialogue about what really happened.

* Hugh Eakin is special projects editor at the New York Review of Books.

4. - Asia Times - "Turkey feels Iran chill":

TEHRAN / 23 January 2006 / by Iason Athanasiadis*

Iran's supply of natural gas to Turkey was inexplicably slashed by 70% last Friday, in one of the coldest months of the year. On the same day, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul raised the tension between the two countries by calling for greater Iranian "transparency" over Tehran's nuclear program.

"There should not be an armament race in the region," he said. "We follow a policy to clean the entire Middle East [of] WMD [weapons of mass destruction]."

While ordinary Turks braced for shortages and chilly weeks ahead, analysts speculated that the cut was a calculated move by Tehran aimed at warning Ankara not to become involved in its escalating row with the West.

Until recently, Ankara had remained largely silent on the view it takes of Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear energy program. But despite publicly supporting Iran's quest for nuclear energy, Turkish officials have privately spoken of their fears at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Last month Turkey's ambassador to the US, Faruk Logoglu, broke his country's silence, telling the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies that "Iran's nuclear weapons would be a serious threat to security in the Middle East. The European Union's effort is unlikely to succeed. Direct US-Iran talks are needed."

When Iran broke the seals of some of its most sensitive nuclear processing equipment last week, it set itself on a collision course with the West. As a key US ally, a historical adversary of Iran and the most significant regional military partner for Israel (the country is seen as most likely to head an attack on Iran), Turkey appears increasingly concerned over how it will manage to continue the balancing role it has played so far in the region.

With an estimated 64 million and 70 million people respectively, Turkey and Iran are the two most populous countries in the region and natural rivals.

Now, news that the incoming Turkish ambassador to Tehran is none other than Gurcan Turkoglu, Gul's top foreign-policy adviser, is a strong indication of just how much importance Ankara is giving its Iran file.

In a sign of the increasing tension, Ankara issued a statement on Saturday calling on Tehran to enter "full and transparent cooperation with the EU … and the IAEA" (International Atomic Energy Agency).

"We don't want a new nuclear power in the region," a Turkish diplomat in Tehran told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, "and we don't want another crisis in the region either."
With tension between Iran and the West peaking, the question of how Iran's most influential neighbor, Turkey, will react to the unfolding crisis becomes increasingly prominent. A key US ally in the Middle East, Turkey has managed to steer a remarkably uncontroversial course in recent years, which has seen it maintain cordial relations with Tehran, even as it remained the only Muslim country with a high-profile military cooperation with Iran's arch-rival, Israel.

But analysts fear that the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran would almost inevitably prompt a nuclear escalation, as regional powers Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Egypt move to develop a nuclear deterrent.

Turkey has sought to hammer home the point in two recent high-level meetings with Iranian politicians that the nuclear crisis should be defused in Vienna, within the context of the IAEA. In New York in October, on the sidelines of the United Nations meeting in which Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad delivered an inflammatory speech, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan advised the Iranian leader not to escalate the crisis.

A month later, Gul was telling Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki that his country must remain well within the red lines laid down by Iran's European negotiating partners. The advice was not heeded, as is clear by Iran's recent actions.

"The new regime does not care, they seem to be playing for isolation," the Turkish diplomat said. "We can't offer them anything because we're not a nuclear power," he added, alluding to ongoing talks between Moscow and Tehran. Russia is the primary sponsor of the Iranian nuclear program. An Iranian delegation was due in Moscow on Monday for talks on the issue.

But as a Muslim (albeit strictly secular), non-Arab country, Turkey can offer Tehran advice in a way that the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) can no longer lay claim to. In the event that talks fail, Turkey is the only country in Iran's vicinity on which the US has prepositioned tactical nuclear weapons (an estimated 90) that it could deploy against Iranian facilities.

The veritable who's who of US and Israeli officials who processed through Turkey in recent weeks for consultations may be a reflection of this.

First came US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, followed by Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Robert Mueller. Porter Goss, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, also visited, just days before the arrival of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general, Jaap De Hoop Scheffer.

Finally, Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz held discussions with the head of the Turkish military, General Hilmi Ozkok, and Turkish President Ahmed Necdet Sezer. The leading left-nationalist daily, the Cumhuriyet, reported that talks centered on how to deal with Iran.

The Turkish Weekly journal claimed further revelations. In a December 27 article it said Halutz had asked permission for training Israeli commandos in Turkey's Bolu and Hakkari mountains. The magazine speculated that the Israeli request had to do with preparations for operations in northwestern Iran's mountainous territory.

In November, Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper revealed that private Israeli security firms had sent experts to Iraq's northern Kurdish region to give Kurdish security forces covert training. The newspaper said the teams had originally entered northern Iraq from Turkey, but had to abandon their mission after receiving a credible warning of an impending al-Qaeda attack on their camp.

The Turkish press was agog at such goings-on. The respected Milliyet daily argued that Goss and National Intelligence Agency Undersecretary Emre Taner discussed the role played by Turkey in Iraq, as well as the controversial issue of the Kurdish rebel movement PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party).

Goss reportedly asked for Turkey's support against Iran's nuclear program and warned Ankara that a US air operation against Iran might be in the offing. According to German news agency DDP, Goss assured his Turkish counterparts that they would have a few hours advance warning of an air strike against Iran. He is also said to have given the green light for the Turkish army to strike PKK camps in Iran on the day of the attack.

"The Americans use various arguments that are not necessarily rooted in fact," an EU diplomat based in Tehran said. "If they [the Iranians] want to export the Shi'ite revolution, they won't do it in Turkey, a totally Sunni Muslim country, and they'll employ Qom [Iran's religious capital] and religious proselytizing, rather than a nuclear bomb, in doing so."

But US attempts to intimidate Turkey into cooperating against Iran could yield results. Ankara may decide that it has learned from the punishment inflicted on it by Washington after its parliament's decision to ban US troops from opening a northern front against Iraq from Incirlik, during the 2003 invasion, and offer logistic support.

On the other hand, Turkey will not want to jeopardize its advantageous trade links with Iran. Bilateral trade jumped in 2005 to an estimated US$4 billion, up from $1 billion in 2000. Turkish intelligence has also established a good rapport with its Iranian counterparts on the Kurdish issue since 2003.

Now, a working group meets twice a year to discuss how to deal with Kurdish insurgency, while border meetings are arranged on a monthly basis between the governors of Turkish and Iranian provinces that contain Kurdish populations. Turkey is painfully aware that a change of regime in Iran and ensuing Iraq-like instability would almost inevitably lead to the creation of an independent Kurdistan.

"The Turks know that long after the dust has cleared and the Americans have disappeared over the horizon again, they will be paying for this [collusion in action against Iran] for many years," an EU diplomat said. "Erdogan is a conservative politician and he will not endanger his country."

A former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and regional specialist agreed that it is "unlikely that Turkey would give the Israelis clearance to overfly their territory in order to attach an Iranian target. And if they flew without clearance, their nice relationship with Turkey would end."

Should Turkey decide to veto support for any punitive strikes on its Persian neighbor, the best alternative might be Iraqi Kurdistan. No longer at the mercy of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Kurdish leadership has been more open about its collaboration with Israel since the 2003 invasion.

Now, Iran-watchers are arguing that launching a US or Israeli strike from Iraqi Kurdistan would have several advantages. The aircraft would not need midair refueling, as would be the case if the raid were launched from Tel Aviv. Sulaymaniyyah and Irbil airports are in the process of receiving full international licensing, which implies nighttime instrument capability and the potential for receiving and servicing large transport aircraft. And the Kurdish leadership is far more sympathetic toward Israel than its Arab neighbors.

"Iraqi Kurdistan cannot be used by Israeli special forces … because the Kurdistan region remains part of Iraq and the US continues to control Iraq airspace," Nijyar Shemdin, the representative of the Kurdistan region to the US, told Asia Times Online. "All flights into and out of Iraqi airspace obtain permission from the US military in Qatar. For Israeli operations against Iraq to occur, it would require the support of the Iraqi federal government, the US government and the Kurdish regional government. It is utterly impossible."

Analysts point out that Israel's 1981 strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor in Osirak could only have been carried out with US cooperation. Israeli aircraft crossed Jordanian and Saudi Arabian airspace without being detected by US-supplied Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) radars overflying Saudi airspace.

Wayne White, a former deputy director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, pointed out that he doubted whether "the issue of violating a country's airspace would be a major consideration with respect to Jordan, Saudi Arabia or perhaps even Turkey if the Israelis decided to go forward with such a strike".

"If one is doing something that bold, controversial, outrageous, the issue of violating airspace would be very much secondary to other considerations," he said.

* Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.

5. - Financial Times - "Turkey tries to seize initiative over Cyprus":

ISTANBUL / BRUSSELS / by Vincent Boland and Daniel Dombey

Mention of Cyprus – rather like Northern Ireland – tends to elicit a groan of irritation even from those who profess an interest in its historical and contemporary complexities.

The divisions between the Greek and Cypriot inhabitants of this beautiful Mediterranean island have stymied the best minds at the United Nations for decades, most recently in 2004 when a reunification plan that appeared to address every grievance was rejected in a referendum.

Now Turkey has stepped forward with proposals that may lead to a revival of the reunification plan. With its own hopes of joining the European Union entering a critical phase this year, Ankara has much to gain from getting the Cyprus issue out of the domestic arena and back to the UN. It has been selling its proposals, announced on Tuesday, with gusto to the US, the UK and Russia, three UN heavyweights with an interest in the Cyprus problem.

“There are only two options on Cyprus,” Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s foreign minister, said in an interview on Wednesday with the Financial Times.

“We can either leave the problem frozen as it is, which benefits nobody, or we can move forward. The Greek Cypriots are not doing anything to find a solution, so we have come forward with a plan that responds to the expectations of the European Union and the UN, and we have been receiving very good reactions to it so far.”

Turkey’s plan calls for all restrictions on trade and aid with all of Cyprus to be ended, and for all parties to the island’s future – Turkey, Greece, and the Greek and Turkish Cypriots – to hold talks under the auspices of the UN.

The success of this plan depends on two things: that the UN devotes fresh energy to an issue that, in a global context, is less than pressing, and that the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities be willing to talk to each other.

Cyprus can be an emotive and divisive issue in Turkey, which invaded the island in 1974 to quash a coup that would have seen it incorporated into Greece. By reactivating the UN role now, commentators say, Ankara hopes to neutralise Cyprus as a political issue.

In Brussels, Mr Gul’s initiative is seen as a sign that the penny has dropped in Ankara that Turkey’s problems with Cyprus could derail its EU accession process this year.

As a condition for beginning the formal accession process last year, the EU asked Turkey to extend its customs union with the EU to all 10 of the states that joined in 2004 – including Cyprus, which Turkey does not recognise diplomatically. Turkey still has not fully done so.

It does not allow Greek Cypriot boats access to its ports and Greek Cypriot officials have said that, unless Turkey complies with the EU request, they could block or veto progress on Turkey’s EU accession process.

Mr Gul insisted the customs union was “functioning” but added that it was not possible for Turkey to make a unilateral gesture on trade. Turkey’s allies are well aware that it is politically next to impossible for Ankara to give way while the Turkish Cypriot community in northern Cyprus remains in a diplomatic and economic no-man’s-land.

Hence the call in Tuesday’s plan for it to be, in effect, integrated economically into the EU. Mr Gul’s proposals will succeed only if there is the will at the UN, in Cyprus and in Brussels, commentators and diplomats say.

The immediate outlook does not look promising. Nicosia says there is no link between Turkey’s obligation to open up its ports and its own position on the European Commission proposals to reduce northern Cyprus’s isolation.

“It’s not an obligation for Cyprus to agree on something totally contrary to international law and EU law,” one Cypriot official said of the Commission’s proposal to allow direct trade between northern Cyprus and the rest of the EU.

Mr Gul said he had received a “good” response so far from the likes of the US and Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, who said he would study the proposals “carefully”.

Jack Straw, the UK foreign secretary, who visited Cyprus on Wednesday, also welcomed the initiative. Mr Gul said he was optimistic about the prospects for the initiative. “This time next year I hope things will be different [on the island],” he said.

6. - AFP - "Austrian released in Kurdistan":

VIENNA / 25 January 2006

An Austrian sentenced to 25 years in prison for libel in Iraqi Kurdistan has been released, the Austrian foreign ministry said Wednesday in a statement.
"After being held for more than two months, news of Dr. Kamal Sayid Qadir's release is a great relief and very good news for him and his family," Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said in the statement.

The 48-year old lawyer of Kurdish origin was convicted on December 19 by a court in Arbil in the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan for "defamation against the Kurdish government."

He had been arrested in October for writing articles criticising regional president Massud Barzani.

The human rights organization Reporters without Borders called for Qadir's release, saying "this incident bodes ill for freedom of expression in Iraq's Kurdish region."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari informed Austrian special envoy to Iraq Gudrun Harrer Wednesday of the lawyer's release.

"This shows that the decision to have Austrian representation in Baghdad was right," Plassnik said.

With Harrer's presence on the ground since January 1, "we can effectively protect the interests of Austria and Austrian citizens," she added.