27 April 2007

1. "Islam and the Presidency in Turkey", in Turkey, the choosing of a President is rarely the dramatic affair that it is in the United States. Turkey's President isn't even directly elected by the voters — he or she is chosen by the elected parliament — and the office carries limited powers.

2. "Dispute overshadows Turkish presidential poll", Turkey's fractious parliament will make its first attempt on Friday to elect a new president, but a procedural row and a boycott of the event by opposition MPs could yet see the process ending up in the courts.

3. "How Will Turkey's Next Leader Impact Iraq?", by nominating Abdullah Gul for Turkey's presidency, the ruling AK party is bowing to pressure from secularists and the military. How will this impact the country's volatile border with Iraq?

4. "Turkey-Kurdish Conflict Threatens Stability of Iraq, Region", sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites continues to dominate headlines, but the latest threat to stability in Iraq -- and perhaps the whole region -- appears to be mounting tension between the Turkish government and Iraq's Kurds, both of whom are now reported to be massing troops on the Iraq-Turkey border.

5. "2 soldiers killed by landmines", Gendarmerie Commando Pvt. Ramazan Avci died of his injuries in Sirnak Military Hospital on Tuesday, April 24, after stepping on a mine laid by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

6. "U.N. criticizes Kurdish authorities", the United Nations has rebuked Kurdish authorities over their treatment of journalists and detainees in a rare critical assessment of the human rights situation in the oil-rich northern autonomous region that has been hailed as a success story in Iraq.

1. - Time Magazin - "Islam and the Presidency in Turkey":

25 April 2007 / by Andrew Purvis

In Turkey, the choosing of a President is rarely the dramatic affair that it is in the United States. Turkey's President isn't even directly elected by the voters — he or she is chosen by the elected parliament — and the office carries limited powers. Still, the President does have the power to veto legislation, and is also considered an important symbol of the Turkish state. That's why the nomination for President this week by Turkey's ruling party of the country's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, has reopened fierce debates about the place of Islam in the ferociously secular Turkish state.

Gul, 54, is an affable moderate and one of friendliest faces of the political party that has dominated Turkey's parliament for the past five years. But like most senior officials of his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, his roots are in an Islamic grouping that was banned in Turkey in the 1990s. His Arabic is better than his English, as secular Turks like to point out. And his wife wears a traditional Islamic headscarf. (In fact, she petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to declare unconstitutional Turkey's law banning headscarves in public buildings, although she later dropped the case.) If her husband is confirmed, Mrs. Gul would be the only Turkish First Lady ever to cover her hair in this way. By contrast, the incumbent, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former judge and staunch secularist, has routinely wielded his veto to block AKP initiatives he deemed too Islamist.

Gul's election — parliament is to vote for a President in the coming weeks — would also give the ruling AKP control of Turkey's three top political posts: the Presidency, the Prime Minister's office and the Speaker of the Parliament. (In parliamentary elections later this year , the AKP is expected to be returned to power, albeit with a reduced mandate). The election to all three top positions of officials who "come from the same Islamic-rooted tree," writes columnist Metin Munir in the leading secularist daily Milliyet, augurs "the end of Turkey as we know it. "Turkey, he warned, is about to enter "a period of Islamicizing and conservatism: It is hard to tell where it will end."

Such fears may be exaggerated, however, since Turkey's institutions have potent safeguards against the introduction of political Islam. And the powerful Turkish military, self-appointed guardians of the secularist state, stands ready to intervene should those safeguards be breached. (It did so a decade ago by removing Gul's former party from government.) The AKP has so far been reluctant to introduce any changes that might provoke the wrath of the generals. At a rare press conference prior to this week's nomination of Gul, the hawkish army chief Yasar Buyukanit warned that a Turkish President must have secular values, "not only in words, but in essence."

The secularist backlash has already made itself felt: Gul is his party's second choice for President; for several months it has been assumed that the AKP's nomination would go to current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist roots are more pronounced than Gul's, and who is widely distrusted by the Turkish military and secular establishment. At a huge secularist rally last weekend in Ankara, at least 300,000 people turned out to oppose Erdogan's candidacy, some saying they would prefer military rule to him being President. The AKP appears to have noted the warning.

Gul's selection removes a key institutional check on his party's agenda, which is likely to increase friction with the military. The choice also represents a broader shift in political power away from the secularist elite in Turkey's coastal cities and towards the conservative Islamic heartland. Gul himself hails from Central Anatolia, the Turkish equivalent of America's Bible Belt. His party's ascendance over the past five years poses a clear challenge not only to the military, but to Turkey's old secular establishment. It's a challenge based on a democratic mandate from the electorate. But in a country where the military retains an implicit veto over the actions of the democratically elected politicians, it remains to be seen how far the balance will be tipped.

2. - Financial Times - "Dispute overshadows Turkish presidential poll":

ANKARA / 26 April 2007 / by Vincent Boland

Turkey's fractious parliament will make its first attempt on Friday to elect a new president, but a procedural row and a boycott of the event by opposition MPs could yet see the process ending up in the courts.

Abdullah Gul, Turkey's foreign minister, is the main contender for the post as the candidate of the ruling, neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP). But, despite its majority of 196 MPs in the 550-seat chamber, the AKP is several votes short of the two-thirds of members required to secure election at the first ballot.

This means his formal confirmation in the post – which is certain so long as the process is not derailed by a court judgment – may not be achieved until a third round of voting on May 9, when a simple majority of MPs is required.

Mr Gul is seeking to persuade some opposition lawmakers to back him, but with little success. Some opposition MPs have no objection in principle to his elevation. But his nomination by the AKP on Tuesday has led to a political stand-off between the government and the opposition over electoral procedures and the exact number of MPs who need to be present for the presidential vote to be valid.

The main opposition People's Republican party (CHP), the second biggest in parliament, is boycotting Friday's vote. It is also threatening to appeal to the constitutional court, Turkey's highest judicial body, to have the entire process annulled if 367 MPs – two-thirds of the total – are not present at the vote.

The party's argument is without legal merit, according to constitutional scholars. Zafer Uskul, a law professor at Bosporus University, published a detailed rebuttal of the CHP case in a newspaper on Thursday. But if the court were to find in the party's favour, it would amount to a "coup by court decree", several commentators said on Thursday in warning of the dangers of derailing a legitimate process.

The dispute, and the poisonous atmosphere that has suddenly overtaken the political arena after the relative calm that surrounded Mr Gul's nomination, are starting to unnerve the financial markets. Stocks and the lira were slightly weaker on Thursday.

Some political leaders have called for an early general election so that a new parliament can be in place to confirm Mr Gul in office and avoid further political polarisation over the issue.

3. - Newsweek - "How Will Turkey's Next Leader Impact Iraq?":

By nominating Abdullah Gul for Turkey's presidency, the ruling AK party is bowing to pressure from secularists and the military. How will this impact the country's volatile border with Iraq?

25 April 2007 / by Owen Matthews

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey's most talented and most popular politician. But he's apparently not talented or popular enough to break through a secularist glass ceiling to the job of president. On Tuesday, Erdogan, bowed to political pressure and nominated Abdullah Gul, currently foreign minister, as the ruling AK Party's choice for president when the Parliament begins its vote Friday.

In theory, the job was Erdogan's for the taking. The president is elected by Parliament, where Erdogan commands a healthy majority. But the military remains politically powerful, and all year rumblings of discontent have served as a warning for Erdogan not to take the job. The reason? Erdogan is seen by many in the traditionally secular nation as dangerously Islamic. It's not that he's done much while in office to give that impression. He's made his career in a series of mildly Islamist political parties, and in 1999 he served a four-month prison term for "sedition" after he quoted a famous Turkish poem describing "the mosques are our helmets, the minarets our spears." Although Erdogan has been extremely careful to avoid actually introducing any overtly religious legislation since coming to power in a landslide election victory in 2002, he's still deeply distrusted by the secularists. They want the presidency, currently held by a militantly secular former judge, to be a check on Erdogan's power, not the crowning point of his political career. Army leaders aren't the only ones who are suspicious; earlier this month a million marchers turned out in Ankara to protest his running for the top office.

Enter Abdullah Gul, Erdogan's right hand man and Turkey's quiet and able foreign minister. Although Gul is a devout Muslim, he's seen as more of a moderate than Erdogan. The reasons for that perception are historical—they date to the political Islamic movements of the 1990s, when Gul led a moderate rebellion against Erdogan's one-time patron, Necmettin Erbakan, the devout prime minister ousted by the Army in 1997. In the actual tenure of the AKP in office since 2002, though, there has been little difference between Gul and Erdogan. Most importantly, Gul hasn't been in jail for sedition. (Before the AKP introduced new laws in 2003 to allow Erdogan to become prime minister, a conviction on sedition was enough to ban a person from running for political office for life.)

Yet even Gul knows that he needs to grovel to break the ceiling. On Tuesday he told Parliament that "Turkey needs a secular president" and promised to uphold the ideals of Turkey's radically secular founder, Kemal Atatürk. Gul is also expected to be discreet about his wife, Hayrunisa, who wears an Islamic headscarf. A law dating from Atatürk's time (and still in force) bans headscarves from Parliament, universities, schools and all state workplaces and official functions. Erdogan sent his two daughters to U.S. colleges to get around the ban. Gul will almost certainly not move into Çankaya palace, the official presidential residence, and will keep his wife away from official functions.

So much for the AKP being firebrand Islamists. This week has shown that they're actually willing to bow to the establishment when they need to. They're also going along with a growing nationalism in Turkey. A drop in support Turkey's EU bid from 70 percent in 2005 to just 30 recently, has put the pro-European AKP on the defensive. Their challenge is to stop the Army, the ultranationalists and the secular establishment from filling the vacuum.
Erdogan and Gul's answer has been to try to be more nationalist than the nationalists, threatening restive Kurds in Turkey's southeast with terrible retaliation after a spate of attacks on Turkish security forces earlier this year. More worryingly, they've also backed calls from the military for an incursion into northern Iraq this spring. Gul complained last month that the Kurdish rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) had used "remote-controlled explosives and weapons obtained in Iraq, including from the Iraqi Army" against Turkish troops. "We cannot tolerate this," he threatened. "If the Iraqi government cannot stop it, we will have to take action."

There are also indications that preparations are already underway on the ground. According to press reports, mine-clearing operations are underway along the border, while Turkish special forces reportedly have penetrated up to 25 miles inside northern Iraq to prepare the advance and seal off PKK escape routes. As many as 200,000 Turkish soldiers were brought up to the border last month. Turkey has been resupplying Army divisions along the Iraq border and has cancelled all leave for these formations for the next three months.

Turkey has been saber rattling on Iraq border for years, but last month, for the first time, Turkey's top general, Chief of the General Staff Ya?ar Büyükan?t, publicly called on the AKP government for a green light for action. Whether or not to grant it will be a crucial test for Gul and Erdogan. PKK rebels have stepped up their spring campaign in Turkey, killing nearly a dozen troops and police over recent weeks. Doing nothing could mark the AKP as soft on terror and damage its chances in November's parliamentary elections. The Army, at the same time, can cast itself as the true guarantor of Turkey's national security in calling for action. Yet if they agree, Ankara risks all-out confrontation with Washington and the Kurds of northern Iraq, as well as unrest among their own 14 million strong Kurdish population.

Turkey's new president will face an enormous foreign-policy challenge. Caving in to the military would win him political points at home, at the cost of sparking a dangerous and uncertain conflict on Turkey's most volatile border.

4. - World Politics Watch - "Turkey-Kurdish Conflict Threatens Stability of Iraq, Region":

26 April 2007 / by Ben Lando*

Sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites continues to dominate headlines, but the latest threat to stability in Iraq -- and perhaps the whole region -- appears to be mounting tension between the Turkish government and Iraq's Kurds, both of whom are now reported to be massing troops on the Iraq-Turkey border.

While regional experts say the breakout of violence along the border likely is not imminent, recent developments indicate the United States is taking the threat seriously, as the consequences of a conflagration could be dire for the fragile Iraqi occupation.

Turkey insists its grievance is with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a U.S.-designated terrorist group. The PKK is based in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq, and Turkish leaders cite a lack of help from the United States and Iraq in preventing and responding to attacks believed to have been carried out by the PKK inside Turkey.

Some 13 million of the region's approximately 37 million Kurds live in Turkey, with about 5 million in northern Iraq. There are also significant Kurdish populations in Syria and Iran, and leaders in Turkey, Syria and Iran have expressed concern that if Iraq were to break apart entirely, an expanded Iraqi Kurdistan would embolden their own Kurdish populations to seek autonomy.

More than 46 PKK fighters and 11 Turkish soldiers have died in clashes in Turkey this month alone, as the snow melts and each side engages in spring offensives, the Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reported last week. In the past, such skirmishes found Turkish forces chasing the PKK into Iraq. While that has not happened in the years since U.S.-led forces reached Baghdad in 2003, senior officials in the Turkish military are expressing a desire to again operate inside northern Iraq.

In an April 12 press conference in Ankara, Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish General Staff, said Turkish forces should attack PKK posts in Iraq, although he said such a move would be a political, not military, decision.
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Turkey is also threatening economic sanctions, including shutting down the Habur border crossing. That would hurt Turkey's economy as well, so it is looking to route commerce through its border with Syria, the Turkish Daily News reported April 12. Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan are major trading partners; the Iraqi north gets much of its needed electricity and fuels from Turkey.

In the background of the border tension is the issue of the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, which Iraq's Kurds appear eager to envelop into their own autonomous territory. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told the Al-Arabiya news channel April 7 that Iraqi Kurds would retaliate if Turkey invades and would interfere in Kurdish Turkey if Ankara meddles in Kirkuk.

The United States realizes the seriousness of the situation. Recently, it sent David Satterfield, the Bush administration's Iraq coordinator, to Ankara to meet with Turkey's top foreign ministry and military leaders to press Ankara not to push forward with military incursions into northern Iraq.

After the meeting, Satterfield said PKK violence should be a bigger priority for Iraqi Kurds. On April 21, he told Al-Arabiya: "The Kurdish leadership must do more to address this problem of terror and terrorism."

Troops Massing on the Border

There are reports that more than 200,000 Turkish troops are massed at the border with Iraq. According to an April 12 piece by Andrew McGregor in the Terrorism Monitor, published by Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, the troops recently cleared mines laid by the PKK, and Turkish special forces penetrated up to 40 kilometers inside Iraq "to prepare the advance and seal off PKK escape routes."

The Iraqi television network Alsumaria TV, meanwhile, reported April 16 that Barzani has called for Iraqi Kurdish troops to mass at the border with Turkey. While Barzani has denied ordering the troop movements, other reports cite witnesses who have seen Peshmerga units redeploy to the border from Mosul.

McGregor, who estimates nearly 4,000 PKK guerillas are in the Qandil Mountains, recently penned a separate article for for the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Focus asserting that the political environment is ripe for Turkey to launch an invasion. "Anti-American public opinion is on the rise in Turkey at the same time that the country heads toward a presidential election in May and parliamentary elections in November," he wrote.

But other experts say the stakes may be too high. "Notwithstanding Turkey's unhappiness, Turkey will think long and hard before it actually takes this consequential step," said Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"This is something that would be opposed by the U.S., the EU, no doubt by all the Arab countries, no doubt the Iraqi government would immediately condemn it," Aliriza said, adding it would also end any chance at diplomacy with Iraqi Kurds and create conflict with Kurds in the region.

"All the factors that have inhibited Turkey from acting as it threatened to are still operational," he said. "The question is whether at some stage, not withstanding all these factors, the Turks may go ahead and do it."

Yasar Yakis, Turkey's former foreign minister and a founding member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, agrees that an incursion is not imminent. "Nothing can be ruled out indefinitely, of course, because Turkey's security and stability is at stake," said Yakis, who was in Washington in mid-April and serves as the chairman of the Turkish Parliament's European Union committee.

"[The] military solution has to be regarded always as the last resort," said Yakis. "We would like to see America on our side in our fight against terrorism in northern Iraq," he added. "If America for one reason or another cannot give priority to intervene with its own army to find a solution to the presence of the terrorist group in Iraq in Qandil Mountains, then America should demonstrate comprehension to Turkey's right to defend itself."

Qubad Talabani, the Kurdish Regional Government's (KRG) representative to Washington and the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, couches Turkish talk as election-time posturing.

"We are neighbors, brothers even," he wrote in an email interview, "but we can only have a good working relationship if we have a strategic dialogue."

Talabani said a stable, successful and prosperous Kurdistan region is a boon to Turkey, "a buffer between the instability of the rest of Iraq."

He added that Turkish investment in the Iraqi Kurdish economy would be threatened if Ankara backs an invasion, and that Iraqi Kurds would have no choice but to respond. "It is our responsibility, and those of Kurdistan's defense forces, to protect our people," he said, "and we will do so if they are threatened in any way."

At a U.S. State Department press briefing last week, spokesman Sean McCormack called for diplomacy.

"The best way to address that threat is for Turkey and Iraq to cooperate so that you don't get to the point where parties are considering cross-border actions," McCormack said.

Kirkuk in the Background

Enter Kirkuk, which Aliriza called "an absolute powder keg." The historically majority Kurdish city sits just outside the official KRG region, and on top of an estimated 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves.

Prior to being toppled, Saddam Hussein pushed a policy of "Arabization" in Kirkuk, forcibly removing Kurdish families from the city and replacing them with Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq. During the years since the U.S.-led invasion, Kirkuk has undergone something of a "de-Arabization" process, with returning Kurdish families and community leaders forcing out the Arabs.

With violence in Kirkuk increased since the invasion -- though not as severely as in Baghdad -- the de-Arabization has been condemned by various religious and ethnic groups in the region, many of whom, like the Kurds, share historic ties to the city.

Iraqi Kurds agreed to Iraq's 2005 constitution because it included a key demand of theirs: that Kurds be brought back into Kirkuk as residents and have the right to vote in a referendum on whether the city would become a part of KRG territory, potentially as its capital. With the referendum now expected to take place by the end of the year, Turkey has come out in strong opposition to it.

However, according to McGregor's assessment in Terrorism Monitor, if Turkish forces were to launch an attack, they likely would favor airborne attacks on PKK fighters' bases in the Qandil Mountains over a ground-based occupation of the region, including Kirkuk. "There would be no attempt to hold territory except for a buffer zone along the border designed to prevent Kurdish infiltration into Turkey," he wrote.

Others note the potential consequences of the impending vote on the Kirkuk question. The Washington-based International Crisis Group (ICG) contends that if the vote goes forward by the end of this year, civil war is likely to break out in northern Iraq. If it is unilaterally postponed, the organization asserts, the Kurds could leave the central Iraqi government, quashing the new security plan and possibly the governing structure as a whole.

"With every day and each exploding bomb that kills schoolchildren or shoppers, hopes for peaceful resolution of the Kirkuk question recede," the latest ICG report on Kirkuk states. The report calls on all sides to reduce the intensity of their rhetoric, postpone the referendum, and agree on "a fair and acceptable process" for resolving the Kirkuk question.

The ICG report also urges the United States to act, since Iraq's further undoing, and relationships with two allies, the Kurds and Turkey, are at risk. "The studied bystander mode assumed by Washington, the Kurds' sole ally, has not been helpful," the report says. "Preoccupied with their attempt to save Iraq by implementing a new security plan in Baghdad, the Bush administration has left the looming Kirkuk crisis to the side. This neglect can cost the U.S. severely."

* Ben Lando is a correspondent for United Press International.

5. - Today's Zaman - "2 soldiers killed by landmines":

27 April 2007

Gendarmerie Commando Pvt. Ramazan Avci died of his injuries in Sirnak Military Hospital on Tuesday, April 24, after stepping on a mine laid by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Avci had been part of an operation carried out by security forces in Sirnak’s Bestler district, reported the Sirnak Governor’s Office. His body will be sent Dogan village in Hakkari for burial after a military ceremony to be held in Sirnak.

Also in Turkey’s Southeast, a noncommissioned officer was killed in the city of Bitlis after he stepped on a landmine. Earlier this week a second lieutenant was killed in action in Sirnak, and another private died in the hospital after he was seriously wounded in the city of Hatay during a conflict with PKK rebels.

6. - AP - "U.N. criticizes Kurdish authorities":

BAGHDAD / 26 April 2007 / by Kim Gamel

The United Nations has rebuked Kurdish authorities over their treatment of journalists and detainees in a rare critical assessment of the human rights situation in the oil-rich northern autonomous region that has been hailed as a success story in Iraq .

"Authorities continued to subject journalists to harassment, arrest and legal actions for their reporting on government corruption, poor public services or other issues of public interest," the report said.

Fouad Mohammad, the regional human rights minister, said the report exaggerated the violations and he complained that he was not contacted about the cases.

The mountainous Kurdish area has largely been spared the violence and sectarian tensions plaguing the rest of the country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad picked the area for his farewell tour, calling it a "shining example" of the way Iraq should be.

The report said most arrests of journalists were carried out by a unit that has jurisdiction over economic crimes such as smuggling, espionage and terrorism.

The report also expressed concern about the situation of detainees in the area, saying the majority had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in terrorism and other serious crimes, with many accused of being supporters of Islamist groups.

The Kurdish region has enjoyed self-rule since the 1991 Gulf War when the Kurds set up their autonomous region under the protection of U.S. and British warplanes.

Visitors traveling by road are stopped at three checkpoints before entering Kurdistan.

A prominent Kurdish politician acknowledged shortcomings and said efforts were being made to improve them.

He said journalists were allowed to criticize government officials but restrictions were aimed at preventing slander.

"There are some shortcomings in Kurdistan regarding freedom of expression, but the most important thing is to work to improve the situation and learn lessons on how to overcome these shortcomings," he added.