27 March 2006

1. "Turkish Troops Kill 14 Kurdish Guerillas", Turkish troops killed 14 Kurdish guerrillas in a clash in southeastern Turkey, military authorities said Saturday.

2. "US Tells Turkey Time Not Ripe For Military Action Against Kurdish Rebels", the top US military officer on Friday ruled out any action against separatist Turkish Kurd rebels in northern Iraq before Iraqi authorities are able to bring the security sitation in their country under control and set up a strong government.

3. "EU-bound Turkey has to confront its demons", say what you like about the US State Department's mastery of foreign affairs, its annual report on human rights practice remains a beacon of precise, honest and clear thinking.

4. "Turkey's emerging fear: Iranian influence", it was one of those revealing slips of the tongue that laid bare the true state of geopolitical affairs in the Middle East as seen from Ankara. Speaking to his Czech counterpart, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul recently confessed that he feared the spread of Iranian influence from southern Iraq to his own country.

5. "Iraqi Kurds Aren't Feeling Arabs' Pain", Iraq Like most young Kurds in the northern city of Suleimaniyah Asad Ali does not speak Arabic. He has heard about the rising wave of sectarian killings down in Baghdad, but it seems a world away from the quiet rhythms of daily life here in Kurdistan.

6. "Free Press Stumbles in Kurdistan", an Iraqi-born Kurd who wrote a series critical of a leading family is sentenced to 18 months in prison -- a reduction from 30 years.

1. - AP - "Turkish Troops Kill 14 Kurdish Guerillas":

25 March 2006

Turkish troops killed 14 Kurdish guerrillas in a clash in southeastern Turkey, military authorities said Saturday.

The fighting occurred Friday and Saturday near the hamlet of Senyayla, authorities said. Turkish soldiers found the bodies of 14 guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party on Saturday, officials said.

Meanwhile, a bomb blast at a restaurant in the southeastern city of Tunceli injured a waitress, authorities said.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion fell on Kurdish guerrillas in the area, according to the authorities.

Tensions have been running high in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, where autonomy-seeking guerrillas recently have escalated attacks.

The fight for autonomy has claimed the lives of more than 37,000 people since 1984.

The guerrillas are mainly based in northern Iraq and Turkey.

2. - AFP - "US Tells Turkey Time Not Ripe For Military Action Against Kurdish Rebels":

ANKARA / 24 March 2006

The top US military officer on Friday ruled out any action against separatist Turkish Kurd rebels in northern Iraq before Iraqi authorities are able to bring the security sitation in their country under control and set up a strong government.

"Any kind of attack against the PKK inside northern Iraq will have to wait until we are able to get the security situation throughout Iraq to a level at which the Iraqi government can function," Peter Pace, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said in an interview with the NTV news channel.

He added that possible action against rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, would also require an Iraqi government that can "stand up".

"We should understand that the best way to deal with the PKK is from a position of strength," said Pace, who was in Turkey to attend a conference on global terrorism.

"Your country is strong... We need to strengthen Iraq so it too can deal with (the PKK) from a position of strength," Pace added.

Turkey has long been frustrated by Washington's reluctance to act against PKK rebels who have found refuge in northern Iraq after declaring a unilateral ceasefire in 1999.

3. - The Jordan Times - "EU-bound Turkey has to confront its demons":

24 March 2006 / by Jonathan Power

Say what you like about the US State Department's mastery of foreign affairs, its annual report on human rights practice remains a beacon of precise, honest and clear thinking.

Published two weeks ago, it rightly chided China for going backwards after years of progress. And in Turkey, its sharp critique has been well covered in the press, giving the country a chance to see itself in the round.

Despite phenomenal progress in improving the parameters of free speech and beginning to confront the legitimate demands of the Kurds and other minorities in recent years, Turkey still has not faced up to its two outstanding historical questions — what has it done with all its Jews and Christians — a very big question since Istanbul was the seat for centuries of the Byzantine Church and the Ottoman Empire was the principal place of refuge for the Jews after they were driven out of Christian Spain in the fifteenth century. And when will it have an honest discussion about the disappearance of the Christian Armenians which, some say, was an act of genocide?

If we're all going to be forced to make the clash of civilisations the principal item on the geopolitical agenda, as the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement appears to suggest, then those who oppose such polarisation need to face up to why this modern, liberal Muslim state par excellence has not come to terms with its terrible past. Ironically, this law-abiding state, the creation of the pro-European, Westernising Attatürk, has a worse record on these matters than its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. It is rarely acknowledged in the West that Islam, particularly under the Ottomans, has a much better historical record than Christianity in its tolerance of the other religions of “the people of the book”.

For 700 years Jerusalem was under Muslim rule. The churches were open. The Jews were given funds to rebuild their synagogues. Likewise, from the fifteenth century on, when the majority of Arabs lived under Ottoman rule, Christians and Jews were recognised and protected.

Historically, there has never been a sustained, continuous, clash between these great civilisations. Undoubtedly, there have been particular clashes, and until the fall of the Ottoman Empire the Muslim world won most of them. Yet in victory, the Muslims invariably showed greater magnanimity and tolerance than the Christian powers when they triumphed.

So why is it that the dying Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey have such a poor record? Some Turks would say, in their defence, that it is because since the great war of 1914-18 and the break up of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious British and French, the West has inflicted one grievous blow after another on the Muslim world. This has pushed Turkey — and much of the Muslim world in this region — into an uncharacteristic degree of defensiveness and intolerance.

Caroline Finkel, the author of the big new study on the Ottomans much praised by Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who was recently prosecuted for speaking in favour of honesty about the Armenians, argues that maybe it can't be legitimately termed “genocide” when 80,000 Armenians have continued to live unmolested all these years since in Istanbul. Nevertheless, as she told this writer in her home in Istanbul, “terrible massacres did take place on both sides. That's not in doubt. But the devil is in the detail. No `smoking gun' has been found in the Ottoman archives”, although she added that some documents could have been lost “perfectly innocently or removed”.

Finkel, whilst unsparing of the savagery of Ottoman forces in killing off so many Armenians, reminds her audience that more Muslim Turks than Armenians were killed in the war and that the fifth column activities of the Armenians made inevitable their relocation to Syria and Iraq, well away from the Ottoman-Russian front line.

An open reckoning of the evidence by an independent panel of distinguished historians should now be commissioned by the EU and paid for by the Turkish government. The longer the Armenian issue is left to stew, manipulated by the ignorant, the more damage to the EU digestive tract, as the EU entry negotiations proceed, it is going to cause. Likewise, a separate inquiry into what happened to the Jewish and Christian minorities and why even today the continued existence of a major Orthodox seminary near Istanbul remains under threat need to be undertaken.

The past weighs too heavily upon modern Turkey, even though its media and intellectuals can be very forthright about these issues.

The Turkish government still needs to open up. Denial is no substitute for the whole truth. And if Turkey truly wants to enter the EU, it must get on with it, sooner rather than later.

4. - The Daily Star - "Turkey's emerging fear: Iranian influence":

24 March 2006 / by Iason Athanasiadis*

It was one of those revealing slips of the tongue that laid bare the true state of geopolitical affairs in the Middle East as seen from Ankara. Speaking to his Czech counterpart, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul recently confessed that he feared the spread of Iranian influence from southern Iraq to his own country.

Although Gul later denied having made this statement, his comment was a valuable insight into Turkey's true concerns over political developments on its southern flank. There, the Bush administration has subjected three countries to concerted political pressure in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. After five years of such pressure, Iran and Syria are turning into increasingly isolated international pariahs. The same policy, when applied by Washington to Iraq, culminated in the country's invasion and the growing fragmentation of its society along sectarian lines. Both Iran and Syria include similar ethnic mosaics, so the prospect of persistent instability could prompt them to dangerously realign along racial, tribal or sectarian fronts.

Turkey's other big concern is that the Bush administration's clumsy redrawing of the regional geopolitical map has brought about a potentially unstoppable rise in Iranian influence. And while Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accepted his country's secularism, he also heads one of the more overtly Muslim governments in the history of the Turkish republic. Erdogan appears to sympathize with the concerns of the Arab world's Sunni regimes that a rise in Iranian influence would upset the Sunni status quo in the region and threaten Ankara's position.

At a March 3 briefing in Istanbul, Turkish diplomats warned a group of leading foreign-policy columnists that the escalation of conflict in Iraq could turn the country into a "new Lebanon." Recently, a group of retired generals and ambassadors diagnosed the development of "theocratic nationalism" in Iran and warned of the danger it posed to Turkey.

These are the motives refocusing Turkish policy on Iraq. Iraq was once a province of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey still views it as a strategic backyard in which it often deploys its army and Special Forces units. In the aftermath of Washington's Iraq invasion, the Americans further alienated Ankara when they arrested 11 Turkish commandos inside Iraq. The incident inspired a blockbuster Turkish film that tapped into the wave of popular anti-Americanism sweeping through Turkish society.

But never since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire prompted a retreat from Middle Eastern politics, has Turkey deployed its foreign policy supremos across the region's thorniest conflicts. The incoming Turkish ambassador to Iran, Gurcan Turkoglu, is Gul's top foreign policy adviser. Ankara recently announced its willingness to act as an intermediary with Tehran for a resolution to the dispute over its nuclear program.

It also held controversial meetings with embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, after the Islamist movement won the recent Palestinian elections. Ankara's re-engagement in the region is worrying Israel (whose only openly Muslim ally until now was Turkey), even as the Turks offer Washington an additional channel through which to promote its Middle East initiatives and exert pressure.

Turkish concerns - shared by the United States - are fuelling a growing rapprochement between the U.S. and Turkey. And in the event diplomacy fails, Turkey is one of Washington's more reliable allies in Iran's vicinity that can help force the latter's hand. A Turkish diplomat recently told me that Ankara had learned from its previous falling-out with Washington, and would think twice about opposing an American strike against Iran.

For the moment, the big policy issue facing Turkey is whether Iraq will descend into civil war. This would set into motion a perilous train of events as Iraq's Kurds increasingly drift toward a unilateral declaration of independence. Even more worrying for Ankara would be the unchecked spread of Iranian influence across oil-rich southern Iraq. While a Kurdish state might prompt renewed but ultimately containable Kurdish separatist spasms in southern Turkey, the transformation of Iraq's most economically viable part into an Iranian zone of influence would turn Iran into a powerful regional actor threatening both Turkey and Israel.

Such calculations are forcing Turkey to refocus its foreign policy emphasis in Iraq away from cultivating ethnic allies such as the small and politically weak Turkmen community and toward more realistic options such as dealing with Iraq's powerful Shiite bloc. Following the dictum that my enemy's enemy is my friend, Erdogan received Jaafari last month, angering the Kurdish leadership.

The Turkmen, realizing that Turkey's support is waning, have panicked. This was evident in an interview given by the chairman of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, Sadettin Ergec to the Turkish New Anatolian newspaper. "If Turkmens are killed in Iraq, there will probably be repercussions in Turkey," he said. "It's Ankara's natural right to intervene as it neighbors Iraq, another Muslim country, and especially because Turks and Turkmens have the same roots. Turkish intervention in Iraq to protect the Turkmens would be natural in such a case," he added, stressing that his community was one of the few in Iraq without a militia to protect them.

But ethnic symmetries may not be enough to entice Erdogan to throw the brunt of his diplomatic support behind the small group at a time when Jaafari reportedly dangled the promise of expelling the 5,000 members of the Kurdish Workers' Party from Iraq, if they continued to mount cross-border attacks against Turkey. Furthermore, there is a natural alliance between Jaafari and Ankara over the disputed city of Kirkuk, from where a considerable number of Shiites and Turkmens are likely to be displaced in the event of a Kurdish takeover.

The talkativeness of Turkey's diplomats has continued beyond Gul's comment regarding Iran. Not long ago, Turkey's special envoy to Iraq, Oguz Celikkol, was reported as promising Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani that his country would be ready to recognize any and all Iraqi federative areas following implementation of the Constitution. While Ankara later firmly denied it was effecting such a massive policy shift, its diplomats' chattiness is furnishing clearer insights into how Turkey views the Middle East.

* Iason Athanasiadis is a specialist in Middle East politics who often visits Iran.

5. - Mathaba.Net - "Iraqi Kurds Aren't Feeling Arabs' Pain":

24 March 2006

Iraq Like most young Kurds in the northern city of Suleimaniyah Asad Ali does not speak Arabic. He has heard about the rising wave of sectarian killings down in Baghdad, but it seems a world away from the quiet rhythms of daily life here in Kurdistan.

So when a discussion broke out near an outdoor book market about whether there would be civil war between Shiite and Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Ali, a 24-year- old who wears rimless glasses and blue jeans, did not hesitate to give his opinion.

"It is beautiful that our enemies are killing each other," he said with a grim chuckle.

It is not an unusual view here. Kurdistan may be part of Iraq in the legal sense, but most Kurds view the Arabs, whether Sunni or Shiite, as foreign oppressors. The fact that the Arabs are now fighting among themselves evokes little sympathy.

For many Kurds, the main danger of a civil war is that it might spread northward, threatening the relative stability they have enjoyed since the American- led invasion in 2003. Although Kurdistan is virtually an ethnic monolith, the major cities on its borders, Kirkuk and Mosul, have substantial Arab populations and are far more violent.

So the prospect of a civil war makes many Kurds yearn all the morefor separate national status. Some even say such a war might help them make their case.

"I think the violence down in Baghdad will lead Kurdistan to independence," said Muhsin Khidir, 30, who was taking a cigarette break near the booksellers. "We don't want that kind of fighting here. If civil war breaks out in Iraq, I'm sure we will have the support of the international community, and we'll just declare ourselves independent."

Older Kurds, who came of age before Kurdistan became an autonomous region in 1991, tend to be more worried about the violence in central Iraq, and more hopeful that their own political leaders can play a mediating role. But they too wonder whether a broader conflict might have accidental benefits.

"I don't like to get my rights in the tragedy of others," said Asos Hardi, 43, a journalist who helped found Hawlati, Kurdistan's main independent newspaper. "But if it will happen and Iraq will become a second Afghanistan, why should we continue with them? It is a logical question."

Kurdistan had its own civil war in the 1990s, when its two main political parties fought for control. Many Kurds do not want to become involved in another war. They are also deeply resentful of Iraqi Arabs, who carried out brutal attacks on Kurdish villages during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

Evidence of that animosity can be found almost anywhere. At the outdoor book market, which sits under a vast mural of Sheik Mahmoud al-Hafeed, the rebel leader who is considered the father of modern Kurdistan, one of the most popular titles is a paperback called "The Bloody History of the Arabs: A Summary." On its cover is a lurid color illustration of a hooded skeleton strangling a beautiful young woman.

But separating from Iraq would be difficult, if not impossible.

Apart from any objections the Arabs might raise, Turkey has at least 12 million Kurds within its borders, and has made clear that it would not tolerate an independent Kurdistan. Iran and Syria have Kurdish populations, too, and would also probably object.

At the book market, those facts prompted a brief debate about which group was the Kurds' worst enemy.

"Who's the worst? It's clear that it's the Arabs," said Hiwa Muhammad, a 21- year-old English major.

"I disagree, I think the Turks are the worst," interjected Luqman Saleh, 32, a store clerk. "So many Kurds were killed by the Turks."

"No, the main enemy of the Kurds is the Persians," said Jamil, a 50-year-old engineer. "I can prove it: they are against our religion, because we are Sunnis. And they are against our national identity as Kurds."

For a brief moment last year, it seemed that the friendless Kurds had found an ally in the Iraqi Shiites. Both groups suffered atrocities under Saddam, and after emerging from the January 2005 elections as the two largest blocs, they agreed to form a governing coalition.

The amity did not last long. Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, accused Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite prime minister, of ignoring Kurdish demands. Last month, Talabani was furious after Jaafari went on a state visit to Turkey, the Kurds' historic nemesis, without informing him.

Jaafari was soon being portrayed in Kurdish newspapers as the latest in a long line of Kurd betrayers. The Kurdish leadership sent a letter to the Shiites saying they could not work with Jaafari, and demanding that he be replaced.

Since then, there has been speculation here that the Sunni Arabs might make better political allies than the Shiites. But with government talks in a stalemate and talk of a possible civil war in the air, many Kurds would rather not take sides.

6. - Los Angeles Times - "Free Press Stumbles in Kurdistan":

An Iraqi-born Kurd who wrote a series critical of a leading family is sentenced to 18 months in prison -- a reduction from 30 years.

SULAYMANIYA / 27 March 2006 / by Solomon Moore

A court in Irbil sentenced a writer to 18 months in prison Sunday for an accusatory article about Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, in a case that has raised doubts about the judiciary's independence here.

Kamal Karim Qadir, an Iraqi-born Kurd with Austrian citizenship, was arrested last fall and charged with threatening the national security of Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region of northern Iraq that is predominantly Kurdish. The charges came after he wrote a series of controversial articles in 2004 that were critical of the Barzanis, one of Kurdistan's most powerful families.

The articles accused Barzani, president of the Kurdish region and leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, of cooperating with the Iranian government against the interests of the Kurdish people. It said his son, Masrour Barzani, had used prostitutes to spy on Kurds in Europe.

After a one-hour trial in December, Qadir was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In Sunday's hearing in the regional capital, that sentence was reduced.

A high-ranking Kurdish official, Qubad Talabani, later told CNN that Barzani probably would go further and pardon Qadir.

"Maybe it's time to revise certain laws," Talabani said. "We are an emerging democracy … we need to improve our institutions."

The judge in the December proceeding, which was held in secret, had ties to the KDP's intelligence service, which is headed by Masrour Barzani, according to a Kurdish government source with knowledge of the judicial proceedings who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Massoud Barzani nominated the judge to a post in the region's supreme court, according to a local newspaper account that was confirmed by a Kurdish government official with knowledge of the case.

Kurdish authorities called the new sentence lenient and said that Qadir had been spared a longer prison term because of his background as an educator.

Irbil provincial Gov. Nawzad Hadi Mawlood said that Qadir's writings endangered the Kurdish region.

"Kamal wrote that we sold Kurdish land to Israel — that kind of talk is very dangerous to us," Mawlood said. "Our neighbors — Turkey, Iran, the Arabs — nobody would accept this, and the fact that a Kurd is writing these accusations makes them more credible. These writings could lead them to try to destroy us, to attack us."

But the writer protested his imprisonment at the hearing.

"I swear by God I am not guilty. I am not satisfied with this verdict. I am a victim," Qadir said, according to Reuters news agency.

Compared with the rest of Iraq, the Kurdish region has been a bastion of security. But the western and eastern parts of the region are split between two powerful political parties — the KDP, based in Irbil, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, based here, each of which cracks down on opponents from time to time.

In court testimony earlier this month, Qadir said he had been arrested by an extra-governmental KDP security force known as Asayish.

Qadir also claimed that he was held incommunicado for three days in solitary confinement without a toilet, food, water or light. On the third day, KDP officials forced him to sign a confession, he said.

Hadi Ali, the justice minister for western Kurdistan, has criticized the initial sentence and complained that many of his judges are beholden to KDP security and intelligence agencies.

Ali is a member of the Kurdish Islamic Union, a minority political party in Kurdistan that was attacked after it distanced itself from the main parties during the December election.

In an interview last week, Ali said the regional judiciary is open to abuse because there aren't adequate laws to guarantee civil liberties.

"Because of the problems between the two parties, the parliament has not been able to make laws to help justice work as it should," he said. "We canceled Saddam Hussein's revolutionary court, but in Kurdistan we are still using the old Iraqi judicial system that we used 80 years ago."