9 April 2007

1. "Turkey: Kurdish Party Experiences Crackdown, Mulls Tactical Changes Ahead of Election", with parliamentary elections approaching later this year, Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish political party is finding itself at a crossroads, beset by increasing pressure from both within and without.

2. "Seven pro-Turkish fighters killed in clashes with Kurdish rebels", six Turkish soldiers and one pro-Turkish militia member were killed in clashes with Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey, a local security source said on Sunday.

3. "Eight Kurdish activists imprisoned", Turkey sentenced eight Kurdish political activists to three years and nine months imprisonment on Friday.

4. "Turkey's PM Gets Support for Presidency Vote", a group of Turkish deputies from the ruling AK Party called on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to run for president in elections next month.

5. "Kurdish leader warns Turkey not to intervene in Kirkuk", Turkey must not interfere in the Kurds' bid to attach Iraq's oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish semiautonomous zone, the top official in Iraqi Kurdistan said in remarks broadcast Saturday.

6. "Report warns of high violence against women in Iraq's Kurdistan", Kurdistan’s Human Rights Ministry on Wednesday said women aged 13-18 in rural areas and aged 15 onward in cities within Iraq's Kurdistan region are exposed to different kinds of violence, leading the ministry to prepare a project aiming to stop violence against women in Kurdistan.

1. - Eurasianet - "Turkey: Kurdish Party Experiences Crackdown, Mulls Tactical Changes Ahead of Election":

ISTANBUL / 9 April 2007 / by Yigal Schleifer

With parliamentary elections approaching later this year, Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish political party is finding itself at a crossroads, beset by increasing pressure from both within and without.

In recent weeks, the Democratic Society Party (DTP) has endured a crackdown, with dozens of its top leaders arrested or jailed and several of its offices raided by the police. An Ankara court in February sentenced party co-chairs Aysel Tugluk and Ahmet Turk to 1 1/2 years in prison after DTP workers distributed political pamphlets in the Kurdish language, violating Turkish law. Soon after, Turk was sentenced by another court to an additional six months for "praising" Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the guerrilla Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), by referring to him in a speech as "sayin Ocalan," the equivalent of "Mr. Ocalan" in Turkish. Tugluk and Turk are free pending an appeal.

Local DTP have also been caught up in the crackdown. For example, Metin Tekce, the DTP mayor of the city of Hakkari in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, was sentenced by a court on March 19 to seven years in jail after he said in a press conference that the PKK was not a terrorist group and that he was proud to be Kurdish. "The state is giving us a lot of trouble. They are coming after us systematically," says Osman Keser, the DTP mayor of Yakapinar, a municipal district of Adana, a large city near Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

"Anything we say now gets us in trouble," adds the mayor, who is among 56 other DTP mayors currently facing charges for having written an open letter in support of Roj TV, a Kurdish-language satellite network broadcasting out of Denmark. The Turkish government is trying to shut the channel down.

Although not currently in parliament, the DTP remains a powerful force in Turkish politics, particularly in the southeast region, where the party enjoys strong popular support and holds most of the mayoral offices. In recent years, as part of its on-going European Union membership drive, Turkey has relaxed many of its previously stringent laws governing Kurdish political life. But observers believe that the country’s hard-line military and judiciary, which have not been supportive of many of the government’s EU-related reforms, still see the DTP as a threat.

"The crackdown is a process of intimidation and judicial harassment of the party," says Reyhan Yalcindag, vice president of the Human Rights Association, a Turkish watchdog group. "As human rights defenders, we are very concerned."

Meanwhile, the party is facing a growing internal debate about how to best approach the upcoming parliamentary elections in November. The DTP is built on the remains of several outlawed pro-Kurdish political parties, which have not had representation in the Turkish parliament since the early 1990’s. Despite their traditionally strong showing in the southeast, the Kurdish parties have been stymied by Turkey’s high election threshold – the highest in Europe – that requires that a party receive at least 10 percent of the national vote to gain representation. In Turkey’s last election, in 2002, DTP’s predecessor received 6 percent of the vote, sweeping most of the voting districts in the southeast.

Turkey introduced the threshold as a way of keeping small parties out of parliament, which often led to the country being governed by fractious and unstable coalitions. But Kurdish politicians claim that the high threshold – the European average is closer to 5 percent – is meant specifically to keep a Kurdish political party out of parliament. For example, during the 2002 election, DTP’s predecessor, the Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP), won 56 percent of votes in the southeastern Diyarbakir Region, which meant it would have gained seven of the 10 seats reserved for area. But since only the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) passed the national threshold, the AKP got 8 of the seats with only 16 percent of the local vote, and the CHP got two with 6 percent. (A January ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, while noting that the threshold law results in unfair representation, concluded the law did not deprive voters of their rights).

Recent polls have shown the DTP winning just over 5 percent of the vote in the upcoming election, which would mean that it again would be shut out of parliament. This led to discussions within the party about running a campaign made up of independent candidates, who are not subject to the threshold law.

Analysts believe the party could place between 15 and 20 candidates in parliament if it followed that strategy. But for now it appears that the DTP’s more dogmatic, PKK-affiliated wing has put the brakes on the plan. The chief concern is that the party might lose control over any independents who might get elected. "My feeling is that the real challenge in Kurdish politics within Turkey today is to find a sensible, moderate group of elites that are wiling to play the democratic game, which is to deliver services – either material or immaterial – to their constituency, in return for votes," says Ali Carkoglu, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Sabanci University and an expert on Turkish elections.

"So far, they are not allowed to do that, mostly because of pressure from the PKK, although some of that pressure is also coming from the security forces in the country [that] see a risk in having some representation of Kurds in the parliament," Carkoglu added.

Enhancing the DTP’s challenges is the fact that the ruling party, the liberal Islamist AKP, has been making inroads in the southeast. The region is one of Turkey’s more conservative areas, both socially and religiously, and the AKP has been able to present itself as a viable option to the Kurdish parties. Several of the party’s parliamentarians are Kurdish, most notably the minister of interior, Abdulkadir Aksu, which has helped the party make the claim that Kurds are part of the political system.

But critics say that the Kurds currently in parliament are little more than window dressing, unable to promote Kurdish interests once they get to Ankara. "The Kurds want to have a party that will bring their needs to the national agenda," says Dilek Kurban, a researcher with the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, an Istanbul-based think tank. "The current system allows those who get very few votes to go to Ankara and ‘represent’ the Kurds, and that only widens the gulf between Ankara and the Kurds."

Adds Kurban: "It has a cost for Turkey’s democratization and pluralism and it serves to alienate a large segment of the population."

* Editor’s Note: Yigal Schleifer is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul.

2. - AFP - "Seven pro-Turkish fighters killed in clashes with Kurdish rebels":

DIYARBAKIR / 8 April 2007

Six Turkish soldiers and one pro-Turkish militia member were killed in clashes with Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey, a local security source said on Sunday.

A previous toll on Sunday had set the number of dead soldiers at three.

Two soldiers and a "village guard", a Kurdish militia member armed by Ankara to fight Kurdish rebels, were killed overnight Saturday to Sunday in clashes with members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the mountainous Sirnak region that borders Iraq, according to the security source.

A third soldier died when a PKK mine exploded in the eastern Bitlis province, added the source, who asked not to be named.

Meanwhile, three soldiers were killed in fighting with PKK rebels in Yayladag in the eastern Bingol province on Saturday afternoon, the Anatolia news agency reported, adding that a large-scale operation was underway in the area.

Those deaths came after two Turkish soldiers and two Kurdish rebels were killed in clashes in Bitlis on Friday. Four troops were injured in that fighting.

With a total of nine deaths in the past two days, the pro-Turkish troops have suffered their heaviest casualties in months.

The rebels have recently been taking advantage of the end of winter to launch attacks in Turkish territory from their bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, where Ankara's troops cannot strike back at them.

More than 37,000 people have been killed since 1984 when the PKK took up arms for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

The PKK announced a ceasefire in October, but Turkish authorities rejected it. Violence related to the conflict has however since dwindled.

3. - Press TV - "Eight Kurdish activists imprisoned":

6 April 2007

Turkey sentenced eight Kurdish political activists to three years and nine months imprisonment on Friday.

Turkey's court official said they were sentenced for aiding armed Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey.

The eight were from the Democratic Society Party (DTP), the main Kurdish party in Turkey.

The try against them started after a militant from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) implicated them in his testimony.

Although they rejected the charges, the court found them guilty of "aiding and abetting a terrorist organization".

The sentence is to be appealed in the future for the PKK militant who accused them in the first place later retracted his testimony.

4. - Javno - "Turkey's PM Gets Support for Presidency Vote":

6 April 2007

A group of Turkish deputies from the ruling AK Party called on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to run for president in elections next month.

A group of Turkish deputies from the ruling AK Party called on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to run for president in elections next month, an important show of support as pressure grows on him to make up his mind. Some 30 parliamentarians held talks with Erdogan late on Thursday, the first in a series of meetings he will conduct with his deputies before deciding the party's candidate for a vote in parliament next month to decide who will become president.

Deputies who took part in the first meeting said they had all proposed Erdogan run for president and if not, then Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul should take up the post in his place.

Erdogan's party has a large majority in parliament so barring a major upset, its candidate should become president.

But there is powerful resistance to Erdogan becoming president from the main opposition party and the secularist establishment and the continued speculation has unsettled financial markets.

His centre-right party is expected to name its candidate in mid-April ahead of the expiry of President Ahmet Necdet Sezer's seven-year tenure on May 16.

Erdogan is Turkey's most popular politician and would be in a strong position to win the vote.

But fears that his bid could hurt his party's prospects in parliamentary elections which are scheduled for November may discourage him from running for president.

Turkey's secular establishment, including army generals, are against the former Islamist becoming head of state. They fear he would try to undermine the division between state and religion and are also unhappy that his wife wears the Muslim headscarf.

5. - AP - "Kurdish leader warns Turkey not to intervene in Kirkuk":

BAGHDAD / 7 April 2007

Turkey must not interfere in the Kurds' bid to attach Iraq's oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish semiautonomous zone, the top official in Iraqi Kurdistan said in remarks broadcast Saturday.

Otherwise, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said, Iraq's Kurds will retaliate by intervening in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast, where insurgents have battled for decades to establish their own autonomy.

Barzani, president of the 15-year-old Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, issued the warning after last week's endorsement by the Iraqi government of a decision to relocate and compensate thousands of Arabs who moved to the city as part of Saddam Hussein's campaign to push out the Kurds.

The government's decision was a major step toward implementing a constitutional requirement to determine the status of the disputed city by the end of the year. The plan will likely turn Kirkuk and its vast oil reserves over to Kurdish control, a step rejected by many of Iraq's Arabs and Turkmen — ethnic Turk who are strongly backed by Turkey.

"We will not let the Turks intervene in Kirkuk," Barzani said in an interview with Al-Arabiyah television. "Kirkuk is an Iraqi city with a Kurdish identity, historically and geographically. All the facts prove that Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan."

Some in Turkey have hinted at military action to prevent the Kurds from gaining control of Kirkuk.

Turkish leaders are concerned that Iraq's Kurds want Kirkuk's oil revenues to fund a bid for outright independence, not just autonomy. The Turks fear that would encourage separatist Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey, who have been fighting for autonomy since 1984. The conflict has claimed the lives of 37,000 people.

"Turkey is not allowed to intervene in the Kirkuk issue and if it does, we will interfere in Diyarbakir's issues and other cities in Turkey," Barzani said. Diyarbakir is the largest city in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast.

Asked if he meant to threaten Turkey, Barzani responded that he was telling Ankara what would happen "if Turkey interferes." He said Turkey had military and diplomatic clout, but that the Kurds had survived through the Saddam Hussein regime and that what happened in Kirkuk was "none of their (Ankara's) business."

When asked about the Turkmen minority in Kirkuk and Turkey's concern for its ethnic brethren, Barzani shot back:

"There are 30 million Kurds in Turkey and we don't interfere there. If they (the Turks) interfere in Kirkuk over just thousands of Turkmen then we will take action for the 30 million Kurds in Turkey."

"I hope we don't reach this point, but if the Turks insist on intervening in Kirkuk matter I am ready to take responsible for our response," Barzani said.

The ancient city of Kirkuk has a large minority of Turkmen as well as Christians, Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians. Turkmen were a majority in the city during the Ottoman Empire.

Barzani said the independence and statehood for Kurds, who live in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq was a "legitimate and legal right."

"But I am against the use of violence to reach this goal," he continued.

6. - VOA - "Report warns of high violence against women in Iraq's Kurdistan":

ARBIL / 5 April 2007 / by Abdul-Hamid Zibari

Kurdistan’s Human Rights Ministry on Wednesday said women aged 13-18 in rural areas and aged 15 onward in cities within Iraq's Kurdistan region are exposed to different kinds of violence, leading the ministry to prepare a project aiming to stop violence against women in Kurdistan.

"Most women exposed to violence in Kurdistan region are aged 13-18 in rural areas and 15 years onward in cities. Violence practiced against women includes beating, sexual harassment, death threats, forced marriage, kidnapping and forced leaving of school," the ministry said in a report released on Wednesday.

To address the situation the ministry initiated a project, in collaboration with the British government, to stop violence against women in Iraq's Kurdistan region, an official at the Kurdistan Human Rights ministry said.

"The project, the first of its kind in Iraq, is meant to curb violence against women within the region," Ms. Tafkah Omar told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

As a start, Ms. Omar said, "we have conducted surveys in courts and in ministries of health and justice within the Kurdistan region on cases of violence against women, so as to identify its causes."

"We will also meet tomorrow with the British Consular in Kurdistan to work out a mechanism for carrying out the project," she said.

The project aims to address the causes and find solutions for violence against women, the official said.

Ms. Omar said "among the main causes of violence against women, as the surveys have shown, were the social and economic situation, traditions and the male-dominant culture of society."

In some cases, she pointed out, "women will commit suicide due to the violence practiced against them."