3 April 2006

1. "Kurdish politician arrested in Turkey", a Turkish court on Monday ordered the arrest of a Kurdish politician for having allegedly praised Kurdish rebels fighting the government in a public speech, court officials said.

2. "DTP leader calls Kurdish leaders to unite for elections", Kurdish politicians standing at different points of political spectrum gathered in Ankara over the weekend where Democratic Society Party (DTP) leader Ahmet Turk called upon Kurdish political leaders to make a pre-election alliance to enter Parliament steppipng over the crushing 10 percent national election threshold.

3. "Seeds of Turkish nationalism sown at school", political rows with the European Union, which Ankara hopes to join, have also fanned nationalism -- especially in an election year -- but many experts say the seeds are first sown at school.

4. "For Turkey and the EU, another bend in the road", last week, the EU said it would open a second chapter of accession talks with Turkey, injecting new momentum into a process that has been stalled over Cyprus and other issues.

5. "Turkey: Lawyers to Swap Legal Robes For Kung Fu Belts", faced with a a growing number of threats, both verbal and physical, outside and inside the halls of justice, lawyers in Turkey have started taking up courses in martial arts such as Wing Chun to protect themselves. It all began when the Bar Association in the Aegean city of Izmir, exasperated by the failure of the police to respond to numerous complaints of abuse lodged by its members, decided to take action.

6. "The Systematic Genocide of the Kurds and the Unethical International Scheme", the former staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Peter W. Galbraith’s words also could have been useful evidence against both former Iraqi defendants and their western advocate’s involvement in the Anfal genocide.

1. - AFP - "Kurdish politician arrested in Turkey":

DIYARBAKIR / 2 April 2007

A Turkish court on Monday ordered the arrest of a Kurdish politician for having allegedly praised Kurdish rebels fighting the government in a public speech, court officials said.

Aydin Budak, mayor of the town of Cizre and member of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), the main Kurdish political movement in Turkey, was remanded in custody pending trial for a speech he made on March 21 during Newroz, the Kurdish new year.

DTP members have increasingly become the target of judicial action in recent weeks on charges of supporting the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast since 1984.

Budak was charged with praising an illegal organisation and making its propaganda, and of inciting hatred among the population, the sources said.

Prosecutors now have to draw up a detailed indictment for the trial to start.

In his Newroz speech, Budak sent greetings to PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been serving a life sentence for separatism since 1999, and insisted that millions of Kurds see him as their leader.

Prosecutors have also launched a preliminary investigation against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on charges that he praised Ocalan by calling him "sayin" -- a word meaning esteemed or honorable, but which also doubles for "mister" -- in a radio interview in 2000.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since the PKK took up arms in 1984.

2. - The New Anatolian - "DTP leader calls Kurdish leaders to unite for elections":

ANKARA / 2 April 2007

Kurdish politicians standing at different points of political spectrum gathered in Ankara over the weekend where Democratic Society Party (DTP) leader Ahmet Turk called upon Kurdish political leaders to make a pre-election alliance to enter Parliament steppipng over the crushing 10 percent national election threshold.

Leaders of the Party for Rights and Freedoms (HAK-PAR) and the Participatory Democracy Party (KADEP) were also among the attendants at the dinner meeting organized by the Ankara Kurdish Culture Solidarity and Mutual-Aid Association (Kurd-Der).

Turk claimed that if Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq's regional Kurdish administration have failed to come to terms with each other facing the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Iraqi Kurds wouldn't be at this point now.

Delivering his speech in Kurdish, KADEP honorary leader Serafettin Elci stated that the political principles of a 800-year-dream of Kurds' coming together is forming.

While Kurd-Der Head Ihsan Guler referred the rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan as "Mr.," singers taking floor sang folk songs praising Ocalan.

3. - Reuters - "Seeds of Turkish nationalism sown at school":

ISTANBUL / 1 April 2007 / by Emma Ross-Thomas

"Happy is he who says he is a Turk," pipe hundreds of uniformed children in unison, lined up in the playground before a golden statue of Turkey's revered father Ataturk, for a daily pledge of hard work and sacrifice.

The enthusiastic chanting ends and the children file into school, past an inscription saying their first duty is to defend Turkey and another of the national anthem -- texts which appear again on the classroom walls and preface all their textbooks.

When they move up to high school, they will take a weekly class from army officers about the military's exploits. Their school books will tell them European powers have their sights set on Anatolia and Turkey's geography makes it vulnerable "to all kinds of internal and external threats."

Textbooks are peppered with the sayings of Kemal Ataturk, who founded modern Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. "Homeland ... we are all a sacrifice for you!" comes particularly recommended by one textbook's authors.

These are just some of the features of Turkey's education system that reformist teachers and activists want changed. They say it encourages blind nationalism -- something Turkey is looking at more seriously since the ultranationalist-inspired murder in January of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

MILITARISM

Political rows with the European Union, which Ankara hopes to join, have also fanned nationalism -- especially in an election year -- but many experts say the seeds are first sown at school.

"In newly founded nation states like ours education is an effective political lever to train and transform people ... but in recent decades this concept, which needs to be loosened, continues," Ziya Selcuk, university professor and former head of the government's Training and Education Board, told Reuters.

This government has reformed the curriculum in a way teachers say makes students more active and reduces traditional rote learning, but the emphasis on nationalism remains.

"There's still some emphasis on militarism, the importance of being martyred, the importance of going to war, dying in war and so on," said Batuhan Aydagul, deputy coordinator of the Education Reform Initiative.

Teachers also say they feel pressure not to stray from the official line or curriculum in class.

"If you present some arguments which are the opposite of the established arguments ... you might get reaction, absolutely, from students, from other teachers, from directors -- negative reactions of course," said one teacher who declined to be named.

His colleague, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, laughed at the idea of criticizing Ataturk in a history lesson, saying to do so would spark investigation by prosecutors.

"They think ... if you do such a thing you confuse their minds and confusion is not good for young people," the first teacher said.

But the textbooks could be confusing for some: while foreign historians say Ottoman forces massacred Armenians in 1915, high school history books here say it was the other way around.

"It must not be forgotten that in eastern Anatolia the Armenians carried out genocide," one 2005-dated book reads.

In its latest progress report the EU also criticized the portrayal of minorities such as Armenians, saying further work was needed to remove discriminatory language from textbooks.

LOW SCORES

Nationalism is not the only problem with schools in Turkey, which, hemmed in by the budget restraints of an International Monetary Fund accord, spends little on education.

With a population of 74 million, Turkey already struggles to find jobs for its ever-growing army of young people.

But in terms of spending per head as a proportion of the economy, Turkey spends least among OECD countries.

Primary school teacher Ayse Panus said parents at her public school -- where there are 21 teachers for 680 pupils -- make contributions of about 50 lira ($35) a year to keep it going.

Turkey is also around the bottom of the OECD league in terms of years spent at school, the proportion of the population with tertiary education and the maths ability of 15-year-olds.

Teachers are low-paid and spend the first years of their career in a state-assigned posting.

This government has increased spending, but experts say more is needed to narrow the gap in Turkey's two-tier system between high quality selective academies and regular schools.

Enrolment has also improved, especially for girls -- helped by a high-profile government and UNICEF-backed campaign to persuade conservative rural parents to send their daughters to school.

Citing such progress, the EU says Turkey is well prepared for accession when it comes to education, but many disagree.

"On the one hand they want to be in Europe, and on the other ... they are encouraging the feeling that there are enemies all around," said Panus.

4. - Southeast European Times - "For Turkey and the EU, another bend in the road":

2 April 2007

Last week, the EU said it would open a second chapter of accession talks with Turkey, injecting new momentum into a process that has been stalled over Cyprus and other issues.

Nearly 18 months after the official launch of Turkey's membership negotiations, the EU agreed Wednesday (28 March) to open talks with Ankara on enterprise and industrial policy, the second out of 35 chapters a candidate country must complete to join the 27-nation union.

Turkey's chief negotiator with the EU, Ali Babacan, told reporters that the move is an "important indicator that Turkey's EU process is on track". The negotiations, which ran aground in December because of the dispute involving Cyprus, have "restarted in an appropriate way", Babacan said.

So far, Ankara and Brussels have completed talks on one chapter – science and research. Under an EU decision taken in December 2006, eight other chapters -- free movement of goods, right of establishment and freedom to provide services, financial services, agriculture and rural development, fisheries, transport policy, customs union, and external relations – remain frozen. The decision allows the remaining chapters to be opened, but none can be provisionally closed.

The EU wants Turkey to open its ports and airports to Cyprus, a member of the bloc. Before its accession talks started, in October 2006, the Turkish authorities signed a protocol extending the country's 1963 customs union agreement with the EU to all its new members, including Cyprus.

However, it also issued a declaration stating that this did not amount to recognition of the Greek Cypriot administration, with which it has no diplomatic relations. Since then, it has declined to provide Greek Cypriot vessels and planes access to its ports and airports, insisting that the EU must first make good on a pledge it made in 2004 to end the economic isolation of Turkish Cypriots in the north of the divided island.

The bloc's foreign ministers have since reiterated that pledge, and member states agreed in January to work towards opening direct trade links with the Turkish Cypriot community, whose breakaway republic is recognized only by Ankara.

The dispute over ports is not the only issue that has dogged Turkey's accession process so far. Another sticking point is a controversial penal code article that has opened the door for prosecutions of journalists and writers. Article 301 of the code makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness", and has been used to target scores of intellectuals, including Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian editor. On January 19th of this year, Dink was assassinated by a young ultranationalist.

The next 24 months will be devoted to discussions on a date for Turkey's entry into the bloc, Turkey's chief negotiator with the EU Ali Babacan said.

"The prosecutions and convictions for the expression of non-violent opinion under certain provisions of the new penal code are a cause for serious concern and may contribute to create a climate of self-censorship in the country," the European Commission (EC) wrote in its latest report on Turkey's accession progress, issued in November 2006.

"This is particularly the case for Article 301 which penalises insulting Turkishness, the republic as well as the organs and institutions of the state. Although this article includes a provision that expression of thought intended to criticise should not constitute a crime, it has repeatedly been used to prosecute non violent opinions expressed by journalists, writers, publishers, academics and human rights activists," the EC said.

Turkey has indicated its readiness to amend the controversial legislation, rather than abolish it altogether as rights groups and officials in Brussels have suggested it should do. Since the country is in an election season – with a presidential vote in May and a general election in November – the climate may not be right for a substantial change in the law, political analysts warn.

The Article 301 controversy is one of several human rights issues about which the EU has raised concerns. Others include the treatment of minorities, particularly Kurds. Although Ankara has passed a number of sweeping reforms aimed at meeting the EU's political criteria for membership, critics say that implementation has been lagging and that onerous restrictions remain in force.

Despite the hurdles that have come up, officials in both Turkey and the EU continue to voice optimism about the accession process. Even as Brussels moved in December to partially freeze the talks, Turkish and EU officials sought to contain the impact.

"There has been no train crash -- the train is still firmly on track," British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, whose country is one of the strongest supporters of Turkey's EU membership bid, said after the December meeting. "Eight chapters have been suspended -- 27 out of 35 are not frozen, and there is every prospect that things will work steadily and effectively to make Turkey, in the fullness of time, a member of the EU."

Ankara, meanwhile, has stressed that is determined to continue down the path of reform. After the partial suspension, Turkish officials drew up their own reform plan, broken down into the 35 negotiating chapters, and based on the country's own priorities.

"If the goal is to reach European standards, then we will do it ourselves without the EU asking for it," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said at the time.

The programme, covering the period 2007-2013, is to be implemented before 2012. The last 24 months will be devoted to discussions on a date for Turkey's entry into the bloc, Babacan said during a European tour in March.

Turkey was officially recognised as an EU candidate country in 1999 -- 40 years after it first applied for associate membership of the European Economic Community, established in 1957 by six of today's 27 EU members. It was given a starting date for its accession talks in December 2004.

Prior to the start of the process, some member nations, such as Germany, suggested that Turkey should not be offered full membership, but only a "privileged partnership". Some nine months after the launch of the negotiations in October 2005, the first chapter in the talks was opened and provisionally closed in June of last year.

Turkey is now hoping to open three more chapters before the end of Germany's six-month presidency of the Union, which expires on June 30th.

5. - AKI - "Turkey: Lawyers to Swap Legal Robes For Kung Fu Belts":

ISTANBUL / 2 April 2007

Faced with a a growing number of threats, both verbal and physical, outside and inside the halls of justice, lawyers in Turkey have started taking up courses in martial arts such as Wing Chun to protect themselves. It all began when the Bar Association in the Aegean city of Izmir, exasperated by the failure of the police to respond to numerous complaints of abuse lodged by its members, decided to take action.

It scrapped a series of poorly attended photography courses which it had organised for its members, replacing them with Wing Chun classes.

Wing Chun or "spring chant", is an ancient Chinese self defence technique based on Kung Fu short-range combat.

“The aim in this course is that to learn how to defend yourself with using the force of your opponent”, Murat Aktas, a Wing Chun instructor told the daily Aksam.

Elcin Ari, a woman lawyer in Izmir says she attends the course regularly.

"Our job is very risky. Everyday we face threats. Once in a sequestration case (the confiscation of property due to debt default), I was nearly thrown down from the 4th floor of a building” she told Aksam.

Ismail Kavak, another lawyer attending the course says his self-confidence has increased since starting and is trying to get his colleagues to join.

6. - OpEdNews.com - "The Systematic Genocide of the Kurds and the Unethical International Scheme":

1 April 2007 / by Aram

During his 35-year tenure, Saddam Hussein and his regime turned Kurdistan, Iraq, and the region into hell. Imposing two unjustifiable wars on neighboring Iran and Kuwait, Saddam and his regime took the country through numerous catastrophes, atrocities and murdering of countless Iraqis. However, world experts believe the gravest and the best documented crimes of the defunct Iraqi regime were those conducted during the Anfal genocide against the Kurdish people. The Iraqi military campaign code name “Anfal” (spoilers of war) in 1988 was the gratuitous and obvious systematic genocide by all means but there was no international recognition. The Iraqi state recorded and kept detailed documents and videotapes of their crimes, which included executions, torture sessions, mass killing and forcibly relocating the Kurdish people, some dating back to1970s.

Right after the collapse of the Kurdish revolution led by then Kurdistan Democrat Party leader Mustafa Barzani in the mid-1970s, a systematic wave of Anfal operation was planed: forceful evacuation of some quarter of a million Kurds from Iraq's borders with Iran and Turkey. Then, the regime destroyed all of the evacuated villages to create barrier sanitary along these ‘sensitive frontiers’ where the Kurdish resistances have had always taken arms against their oppressors. Most of the displaced Kurds from these areas were transferred into compulsory camps and crude new settlements located on the main highways, surrounded by army, monitored and controlled by Iraqi secret agencies. Similar producers, or even worst were expected in the years ahead.

However, renewed Kurdish arms resistance in late 1970s and the Iraq-Iran war in early 1980s, interrupted the Ba’ath Party’s Anfal plans, at least for several years. Yet the defunct Iraqi regime attempted to resume the Anfal diagram in 1983, when Iraqi troops surrounded one of the complexes where thousands of the Barzani clan families were resettled, and within hours kidnapped 8000 males from the camp aged twelve to seventy! Their fates for the public were known only as “despaired Barzanis.”

In the mid-1970s and the early1980s the procedures used against the Kurdish border villagers and Barzanis, were the techniques that would be used on a grander scale for continuing the Anfal campaign. Undoubtedly, the absence of international objections encouraged Saddam’s regime to believe that they could get away with an even larger method without any hostile response. Actually, in this respect the Iraqi regime seemed to have been accurate in its computation and judgment of the international functioning, which was a green light for Saddam to go ahead with the Anfal preparation!

Therefore, the Anfal Genocide’s full scale was a concerted series of nine military operations which began on February 26, 1988, conducted in several distinctive Kurdish geographic areas, and by September 6, 1988, reached its climax. By then, the now defunct Iraqi regime had shattered 4500 of some 5000 Kurdish villages, and evidently used chemical weapons to attack at least 250 villages and towns, the worst of which was the gassing of March 16, 1988, on Halabja, a town where more than 5,500 civilians died and some 11,000 others injured.

These chemical attacks paved the way for the Iraqi army to replace an estimated two million of villagers in 1988. Hundreds of thousands of these civilians were gather at first stage camps, and then driven away in convoys of sealed military vehicles to southern Iraq. But eventually more than180, 000 of them were massacred by the Iraqi secret firing squads, who were waiting for the victims to arrive at the edge of pre-dug mass graves. The ones that escaped the death squads were buried alive and any information about the victims’ destinies to their relatives or to the public was denied for years.

However, during the 1991 Kurdish up rising which followed the first Gulf War, the Kurds captured millions of paper records and videotapes which were produced by security, secret intelligence, military, Baath party and other Iraq state official agencies. 18 tons of these evidences were eventually relocated to the US National Archives for ‘safe keeping.’ As a result of the second Gulf War, further documents and evidences about the Anfal Genocide was discovered. According to the NIDS, its organization holds approximately 2.4 million pages of official Iraqi documents most of which relates to the Anfal atrocities.

In the aftermath of toppling of Saddam’s regime in 2003, Kurdish authorities sent special teams to search for potential Anfal victims’ mass graves, especially the Barzanis in South Iraq. According to these teams, the vast majority of the Kurdish victims’ remains were recovered in three mass grave sites around Iraq’s Rumadi, Hather and Samawa cities where 1400 of the Barzanis’ remains were relocated, but due to security concerns the remains could not be returned to Kurdistan.

The teams’ searches were based on the defunct regime’s documents, local civilians’ information; and the only five men and a twelve- year- old boy who escaped and survived the mass killings. These survivors’ testimony at the Anfal genocide trail was significant evidence against the defendants.

The former Iraqi regime members did not deny the Anfal Operations in their public and medium announcements and during the trail of those were responsible for the genocide. In one of his recorded video speeches dated September 1983, Saddam gave the clearest hint regarding the fate of the abducted Barzani men. “Those so-called Barzanis, betrayed the country and betrayed the covenants, and we meted out a stern punishment to them and we sent them to hell,” he said. During the Anfal trial, evidences of defendants’ crimes piled against them. “Chemical Ali” also repeatedly told the court trying him for genocide, he had ordered Kurdish villages cleared in the 1988 "Anfal" campaign which cost tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men lives. No doubt, this couldn’t have been achieved without regional and western bureaucrats’ support.

Even though Saddam got the justice he so deserved, yet if his trial for genocide against the Kurdish people had continued, it would have assured to shed light on a deeply unethical period in both Islamic-world and western policies where the major countries, including the United States, keep silent during the Anfal crimes for strategic and economic interests. According to some former Iraqi regime members, Saddam apparently wished-for making an issue of western support during his trial, but his premature execution left no time for such testimony. The former dictator’s trial could also have revealed further concrete evidence of western involvement in the Anfal Genocide.

The former staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Peter W. Galbraith’s words also could have been useful evidence against both former Iraqi defendants and their western advocate’s involvement in the Anfal genocide. He visited Kurdistan at the time and in the aftermath of the Anfal genocide against the Kurdish people. Here is an example of what he has experienced. ..I stumbled across it beginning in September 1987... I got permission to visit Kurdistan. When Haywood Rankin from the US embassy in Baghdad and I crossed from Arab to Kurdish territory, we were amazed that places shown on our maps no longer existed. Later, we came across deserted towns with bulldozers parked next to partially destroyed houses and realized what was happening.

Mr. Galbraith also admits the US government’s significant role in the defunct Iraqi regime’s crimes during the Anfal campaign: While serving in the Reagan or Bush administrations, some of the principals of the current war -- including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell -- played down the significance of Iraq's use of poison gas, including, in the case of Powell, against the Kurds. And months after the 1988 gas attacks on the Kurds, the current president's father -- with the apparent support of his defense secretary, Richard Cheney -- doubled US financial assistance to Iraq. However, despite of all these best documented crimes during the defunct Baath regime’s military campaigns against the Kurds; the Anfal has neither internationally nor regionally been recognized as genocide! Whereas, the International convention (260A) of September 1948 regarding the prevention and punishment of those who commit genocide, clearly indicates that the Anfal must be accounted as genocide.
In regards to the similar atrocities, only two nations have been persecuted more than the Kurds in modern history--the Armenians by the Kemalist Turks and the Jews by Nazi Germans, but with their political powers, Jewish genocide is internationally recognized and the Armenians are struggling for international genocide recognition. Yet the Kurdish case has been dismissed!

Now, 19 years later, the horrible images of Anfal campaign are still vivid in the memories of the family members of the victims or survivors, with no much hope for the their case to be officially recognized as genocide; especially after Saddam’s premature execution. Even though Saddam got the justice he so deserved, yet an international recognition for the Anfal genocide, and an official apology from the current Iraqi government could have been achieved if the trial of the deposed dictator had continued! His premature execution is evidence that there was fear of revealing foreign involvements in the Anfal crimes, which was a systematic genocide of the Kurdish people that the Baath party prepared from the mid-1970s but reach its peak in 1988 when the Iraq regime massacred and gassed more than 200, 000 innocent civilians. This has been a bloodstained period for the Kurdish people.