10 January 2007

1. "Conference in Turkey's capital to address Kurdish problem", the country's intelligentsia will come together in the capital next weekend to discuss the state of the Kurdish problem.

2. "Turkey works to stop 'honor' killings", the government, under pressure from feminists and the European Union, responds at a level unheard of in the Islamic world.

3. "'Editor' Pamuk pens for freedom", newspaper gives Nobel Prize in literature winner editorship for the day.

4. "ECHR rules for ethnic Greek school in Turkey", this was the first ruling by the European Court of Human Rights condemning Turkey on matters concerning public benefit and charitable foundations of religious minorities in that country.

5. "Turkey: Article 301 for Internet", a bill has been recently approved in Turkey as a countermeasure against indecent broadcasting and online gambling. This measure will give the national Information technology Security Agency the authority to block any broadcast that is believed to threaten state security, as stated in Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

6. "Armenian Genocide Resolution in US Congress Could Pass Before April 24", the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), one of the two most influential Armenian lobbying organizations in the USA (the second is the Armenian Assembly of America) said it believes that the recent changes in the U.S. Congress where now Democrats hold the majority, has brought about the best opportunity in years to defeat Turkey's Armenian Genocide denial campaign.

1. - The New Anatolian - "Conference in Turkey's capital to address Kurdish problem":

ANKARA / 9 January 2007

The country's intelligentsia will come together in the capital next weekend to discuss the state of the Kurdish problem.

The two-day conference will particularly be fired by the recent remarks of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, according to reports yesterday, claimed that the problem in the southeast has been overcome thanks to intense investment in the region.

The conference, held under the auspices of the Democratic Peace Initiative, a group strongly advocating the existence of a Kurdish problem, will bring together almost 50 speakers, including renowned author Yasar Kemal, who once fanned the flames when asserting the existence of a Kurdish problem at a time when the expression was unofficially banned by the state.

President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Prime Minister Erdogan and Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc have also been invited to express both personal and official views in sessions, which are to concentrate on the resolution of the Kurdish conflict through peaceful means and necessary legal, political and economic measures to do so.

Famous Kurdish author Mehmet Uzun, who has recently regained his health after a long struggle with cancer, will deliver the closing speech at the conference.

The primary aim of the gathering was described by the organizers as an intellectual effort to contribute to a peaceful and democratic solution for the Kurdish problem, and the denouncement of any kind of act of violence as means of a solution.

Among the audience, made up of several Kurdish and Turkish academics and media correspondents, are also expected to be several labor union and political party heads and representatives.

The conference is also expected to underline the role of the media for peaceful solution.

2. - Los Angeles Times - "Turkey works to stop 'honor' killings":

The government, under pressure from feminists and the European Union, responds at a level unheard of in the Islamic world.

DIYARBAKIR / 9 January 2006 / by Tracy Wilkinson

Desperately unhappy, 21-year-old Sahe Fidan left the husband she despised and sought refuge in her parents' home. They refused to take her in. A married woman can leave her husband only in a coffin, they told her.

Fidan returned to the husband, and she left him in a coffin. A few weeks ago, she was found hanged in the bathroom, her infant son strapped to her back with a sheet.

Her corpse was discovered when the baby, unharmed, began to cry. Fidan had committed suicide.

Or had she?

After her death in a village in southeastern Turkey, another version circulated. Some activists and officials suspect that Fidan may have joined the ranks of Turkish women forced to kill themselves, or whose slayings are disguised to look self-inflicted.

The killing of women and girls by male relatives who think the females have brought shame to the family's honor is an atrocity that has plagued Turkey and other Islamic countries for generations. Thousands of women have died, been attacked or compelled to commit suicide in so-called honor killings.

In Turkey, the government has finally taken action. Under pressure from an invigorated women's movement and eager to win approval from the European Union, the government has launched a major campaign against honor killings, at a level and with a breadth virtually unheard of in the Islamic world.

Turkish imams have joined pop music stars and soccer celebrities to produce TV spots and billboard ads condemning all forms of violence against women. Broaching a topic that remains largely taboo in many conservative societies, the nation's top Islamic authority has declared honor killing a sin.

Late last year, jail sentences for men and boys who commit the crime were stiffened, and new provisions in the penal code make it harder for a court to reduce sentences. (As recently as 10 months ago, in a typical case, the life sentence of a young man who had killed his sister was substantially reduced because the judges decided he had been "provoked." He had buried her up to her neck in rocks after she was impregnated in a rape.)

In cities and towns with the highest honor killing rates, officials working with advocacy groups are holding town hall meetings and setting up rescue teams and hotlines for endangered women and girls.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the head of a conservative, Islamist-rooted party, went before a gathering of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in November to argue for better treatment of women and to condemn honor killings as a scourge that must be eradicated from Islamic societies.

"We can say these murders are isolated incidents, yet we cannot turn a blind eye to such inhuman acts that are largely the product of ignorance," he said. "Discrimination against women is worse than racism. We must reject the treatment of women as second-class beings."

The challenge is enormous: fighting archaic customs based not so much on religion as on deep-seated tradition and feudal clan systems.

Many of the experts, social workers and officials involved speak of a new era of openness and willingness to confront the problem, but they caution that it will be a long time before attitudes are changed. There is no indication that the number of killings or forced suicides has dropped, though advocates say they feel they now have a better arsenal.

"On paper, we seem to have achieved a lot," Fatma Sahin, a lawmaker with the ruling party who oversaw the drafting of a 300-page report on honor killings, said in an interview in Ankara, the capital. "But when we go out into the field, we recognize that a lot more needs to be done."

A significant segment of the Turkish population defines all-important honor in terms of the chastity and obedience of each female member of a family. As "owners" of women, men must defend honor by safeguarding their bodies and sexuality.

In a United Nations poll conducted last year, 17% of Turkish men said they approved of honor killing. Many more approved of lesser punishments, one of the most common being the slicing off of a woman's nose.

Such attitudes persist in many segments of the Turkish population, especially in the Kurdish southeast. But local activism in behalf of women is also flourishing.

"This is a part of the country where it is not accepted that women work or travel, where they are not valued as individuals," said Canan Hancer Basturk, deputy governor of Diyarbakir. "But girls see the other side, modern Turkey, on TV or in the media, and with the rise in literacy, people's expectations are rising.

"So they want to break out of their shells, and that's where the clash comes between girls and their families, and for some boys too," she said. " 'Honor' is another way of clinging to values and resisting change."

Alarmed by the soaring number of women seeking help, the Diyarbakir government opened the region's first proper shelter for abused women in 2005.

Behind a metal gate on the forlorn northern outskirts of the city, the low-slung complex houses about 50 women. Its location is discreet and, theoretically at least, kept secret out of fear of attack by angry relatives. (The Times was given access on the condition that the women's names not be published.)

One resident was a tall, fair 16-year-old who said her father had ordered her to kill herself.

He had arranged for her marriage to a man she wanted nothing to do with, and she went along at first, long enough to become pregnant. Then she left her husband, hoping to join her true love. But he had married someone else. She returned to her parents' home.

Incensed, her father labeled her damaged goods and gave her a single option: suicide.

She fled to the police and was placed in the shelter, where she gave birth.

Many residents of the shelter were young, in their teens or early 20s, and had been raped; several were toting babies, the product of the rapes. A woman who is raped is often blamed for the crime and risks punishment, even death, at the hands of her relatives. Sometimes she is given the "option" of marrying her rapist, on the theory that no one else will want her and that the marriage wipes away the shame.

Only one of the rape victims interviewed said she thought she could go home again. "My parents know it wasn't my fault," she said. The woman was at the shelter under court order because the rapist was loose and considered a threat.

Sacide Akkaya, an official with KA-MER, the leading women's organization in southeastern Turkey, has seen a progression in the women she works with, from a resignation to violence as a part of their hard lives to a timid but growing willingness to challenge the status quo. It enables social workers to save more people, she said.

"I wouldn't say the volume of incidents has been reduced, but it is less secret now," Akkaya said. "The relatives of the women are often the ones who will tip off authorities, or maybe the neighbors will call. Even the men are starting to get it — many of the tipsters are men. That's what gives us so much hope."

Among the hundreds of honor killings in Turkey, it is impossible to quantify the forced suicides. A special U.N. rapporteur, Yakin Erturk, was dispatched to the country's south last year to investigate a rash of suicides. She concluded that some probably had been "instigated" and cited a host of contributing factors: forced and early marriages, denial of reproductive rights, poverty, migration and displacement, among others.

Victims say they've been ordered by relatives to kill themselves, locked in rooms with a gun or rope, watched over while they were expected to slit their wrists. The infraction can be as slight as a desire to work or the wearing of jeans, the sentence often decided in a family council.

Handan Coskun, a former journalist, started a women's center in Diyarbakir in response to suicides she began investigating several years ago, when the rate in southeastern Turkey was two to three times the national rate. There were dozens of cases, many not related to honor issues. One consistency was that far more females committed or attempted suicide than males, which is the opposite of the worldwide pattern.

Women typically feel isolation or alienation more acutely than men, Coskun said, especially if the family has been transplanted from its rural village to a city. Tens of thousands of families, primarily Kurds, were forced to move into southeastern cities during the Turkish army's fight against Kurdish guerrillas in the 1980s and '90s.

At not quite 5 feet tall, Coskun has had to shout down angry fathers as she rescued women and girls, or gone toe-to-toe with 17 armed clansmen who invaded her office looking for their female relative. She believes she and her team have prevented 17 killings in the last year.

"When we intervene with a family that seems likely to kill a daughter, we have to be very tough to show the same toughness that the family shows," she said.

Turkey's failure to improve the status of women has long been one of the impediments to its integration into Europe. Outsiders are watching to see whether the latest steps will bring real change.

"There is no evidence yet that we are changing the mentality," said Meltem Agduk, a Turkish expert on honor killings who works with the U.N. "The important thing is that people are not so quiet about the issue. And because of that, change will be more rapid than it has in the past."

3. - Times of India - "'Editor' Pamuk pens for freedom":

Newspaper gives Nobel Prize in literature winner editorship for the day

ISTANBUL / 9 January 2007

Novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk devoted the front page of a major Turkish newspaper on Sunday to the oppression of artists in his native country, fulfilling an old dream of becoming a professional journalist, if only for a day.

Pamuk, whose trial last year for the crime of "insulting Turkishness" received international condemnation, has a degree in journalism but had never practised the profession.

He was given editorial privileges for the Sunday edition of the newspaper Radikal. Pamuk's cover story criticised the Turkish press and the state for the suppression of free expression in Turkey.

His banner headline quoted a 1951 article about the Turkish intellectual Nazim Hikmet, an acclaimed poet and denounced communist who spent many years in prison in Turkey for his leftist affiliations and later died in exile in Moscow.

The 1951 article had featured Hikmet's photograph along with an encouragement for the Turkish public to recognise him and "spit in his face."

"This expression, which was used beside Nazim Hikmet's picture, summarises the unchanging position of writers and artists in the eyes of the state and the press," Pamuk's cover story said.

Pamuk was one of dozens of authors, journalists, publishers and scholars who have been charged with insulting Turkey, its officials or "Turkishness" under an infamous article of the penal code.

In the corner of the front page, Pamuk addressed writers directly in a friendly, self-effacing column under the headline, "I was a journalist for Radikal yesterday!"

He said the editorship for a day was a way to realise years of unfulfilled professional dreams, but that he lost all confidence on the way to work at the newspaper's offices.

Pamuk's front page also featured an article about a ceremony for Orthodox Christmas in Istanbul.Other articles on his front page dealt with reactions to the publication of video footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein.

4. - Athens News Agency - "ECHR rules for ethnic Greek school in Turkey":

9 January 2007

The European Court of Human Rights, by virtue of a ruling, has ordered the Turkish state to return to the Megali tou Genous Scholi (Great School of the Nation) in Istanbul property seized in 1974, the board of directors of the charitable ethnic Greek foundation that runs the school said on Tuesday.

The ruling, which was officially announced to the foundation's board the same day, orders the Turkish state to return the property within three months or pay it compensation of 900,000 euros. Failure to comply with the ruling within the three-month deadline means that penalty interest rates will apply to the sum of the indemnity for every day of delay.

The foundation's board met on Tuesday to be briefed on the landmark ECHR ruling and to decide its next steps, stressing that it was imperative to maintain the foundation's right and ability to manage its assets unobstructed.

Board members and legal experts also noted that whatever deficiencies in new legislation being prepared by the Turkish government can now be remedied via the justice system.

This was the first ruling by the European Court of Human Rights condemning Turkey on matters concerning public benefit and charitable foundations of religious minorities in that country.

Up until now, the administrations of such foundations avoided seeking recourse to the courts, but instead placed their hopes for vindication in pressure applied by European governments on the Turkish government and Ankara's attempts to harmonise with the Union's acquis communautaire.

5. - Zone-H - "Turkey: Article 301 for Internet":

8 January 2007 / by Alberto Redi

A bill has been recently approved in Turkey as a countermeasure against indecent broadcasting and online gambling. This measure will give the national Information technology Security Agency the authority to block any broadcast that is believed to threaten state security, as stated in Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

As reported on January 4th by the Turkish web newspaper Yeni Safak, the approval of the bill has re-opened the debate about freedom of expression on the Internet in Turkey because according to the new draft , the IT Security Agency will work as a sort of “huge eyes” with the task of suing any violation of the controversial Article 301.

The Article 301 took effect in June 1st, 2005 as part of a package of penal-law reform that were introduced to bring Turkey up to EU standards. It basically makes it a crime to insult "Turkishness", as it states that:

1. A person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.

2. A person who publicly denigrates the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security organizations shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.

3. In cases where denigration of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third.

4.Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime.

Penalties for the transgressors have been summarized into 5 main points (Source: BBC Monitoring European):

1. Insulting the president according to Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code: between one and four years' imprisonment. If committed via the press then add one third.

2. Broadcasts made over the internet in contravention of Article 301 "Denigrating Turkishness, the republic, the institutions and organs of the state," which so many famous people have been tried under: between six months and three years in prison.

3. Crimes in Chapter 4 of the Turkish Penal Code headed "Crimes Against State Security" if committed via the internet can be punished by up to life imprisonment.

4. Crimes committed against the constitutional regime if committed via the internet will be punished according to Articles 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315 and 316 of the Turkish Penal Code and can include life imprisonment.

5. Publishing via the internet terrorist organization announcements and statements according to Article 6 of the Counter- Terrorism Law will incur between one and three years in prison.

Amnesty International considers that the attempt to draw a distinction between criticism and denigration is highly problematic...especially on the Internet, where people is used to express their opinion quite “freely” in forums, blogs and other digital spaces.
Turkish web surfers are now seriously threatened by constant intrusions in their private “digital life” and they could be persecuted for any action that in some way could be considered as against “Turkishness”.

We definitely hope that this will not happen, but considering that since this Article became law, charges have been brought in more than 60 cases, we feel quite pessimistic about it.

Among the cases opened under article 301 there are a number of journalists and publishers, and students such as Fatih Tas i a 26-year-old student of Communications and Journalism at Istanbul University and the owner of a publishing house.

Orhan Pamuk (prize winner novelist), is one of these cases.

6. - HULIQ - "Armenian Genocide Resolution in US Congress Could Pass Before April 24":

8 January 2007

The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), one of the two most influential Armenian lobbying organizations in the USA (the second is the Armenian Assembly of America) said it believes that the recent changes in the U.S. Congress where now Democrats hold the majority, has brought about the best opportunity in years to defeat Turkey's Armenian Genocide denial campaign.

ANCA said its Congressional friends will soon re-introduce the Armenian Genocide Resolution, setting the stage for a nation-wide, four-month grassroots drive to secure its adoption by April 24th.

As a background ANCA cited an Associated Press December 26th, quote of Congressman Adam Schiff as saying that "we have the best chance probably in a decade to get an Armenian Genocide Resolution passed."

It also quoted from The Turkish Daily News, which said on December 21st, that Armenian Americans "will aggressively seek Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide," noting that "the Armenian lobby has never been this strong, and they're aware of it."

ANCA said also speaking on the House floor on December 8. Congressman Pallone announced the re-introduction of the Armenian Genocide Resolution and urged his colleagues to cosponsor this genocide-prevention legislation.

In the last session of Congress, the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.316) had 160 bipartisan cosponsors and was overwhelmingly passed the House International Relations Committee.

Unfortunately, this legislation was blocked by former Speaker Dennis Hastert, who refused to bring this resolution to the House floor for a vote. This coming year, the Speaker is Nancy Pelosi, who has supported Armenian Genocide resolutions for over a decade and has already stated she will continue to support this legislation.