20 March 2007

1. "Pro-Kurdish Party Condemns Legal Pressure", Hasip Kaplan of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party condemned the recent chain od prosecutions aimed at party administrators. With a letter to government and jurisprudence officials, "Such practices jeopardize our freedom of expression" Kaplan said.

2. "Kurdish Mayor Sentenced To Seven Years Prison", the Kurdish mayor of the south-eastern Turkey town of Hakkari was on Monday sentenced to seven years and one month imprisonment for having said that the illegal Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) is not a 'terrorist organization'.

3. "Robert Fisk : The truth should be proclaimed loudly", when has any publisher ever tried to avoid publicity for his book?

4. "Campaign for Gender Equality in Politics", association for Supporting and Educating Women Candidates begins its campaign to increase women representation in politics before upcoming elections later this year. Only 5 percent of the MP's in the National Assembly are women.

5. "Young Women find Peace as Guerrillas", Kurds are scattered across northern Iraq, Iran and Turkey. They have been a minority everywhere, and struggled to search for rights. Only in Iraq have they found Kurdistan, an autonomous region for themselves since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

6. "Turkey and the US: The tail wagging the dog", there is hardly a day going by when Turkish officials don’t find something to get mad about and the reason usually centers around the Kurds, not just their own captive Kurds, twenty million in all, but Kurds anywhere in the world.

1. - Bianet - "Pro-Kurdish Party Condemns Legal Pressure":

Hasip Kaplan of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party condemned the recent chain od prosecutions aimed at party administrators. With a letter to government and jurisprudence officials, "Such practices jeopardize our freedom of expression" Kaplan said.

ANKARA / 19 March 2007

Chair of the Commission of Law at the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), lawyer Hasip Kaplan revealed a letter they've sent to the government and jurisprudence officials which claimed that "the party members are under pressure which scrutinize their freedom of expression".

Referring to recent prosecutions and arrests directed at DTP members and administrators, Kaplan urged state officials to intervene and secure the constitutional rights of their adherents.

"Such practices come at a point where the demands for a peaceful and democratic resolution to the Kurdish issue are rising. The judiciary and the politicians don't have the right to remain silent faced with this situation".

Kaplan has sent the letter to the Prime Minister, to the head of Supreme Court of Appeals, chief public prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Turkish Bar Association as well as Ministers of Justice and Interior and political party leaders.

Some ascertainments featured on the letter are as follows:

* Some expression of thoughts are considered as "appraisal of crime and/or criminals" or "promoting the public to crime" by the judiciary.

* Public prosecutors issue "search/tracking warrants" for party administrators who can be easily invited for testifying.

* Houses of administrators are raided; personal rights of family members are violated. Party offices are raided by security forces. All such practices are conducted by hundreds of police officers, with the use of excessive force; unlawful arrests are made regarding prosecutions, which foresee less than a year of imprisonment if convicted.

* DTP branches are under siege following the decision to enter the elections with independent candidates during the first party congress.

2. - DPA - "Kurdish Mayor Sentenced To Seven Years Prison":

19 March 2007

The Kurdish mayor of the south-eastern Turkey town of Hakkari was on Monday sentenced to seven years and one month imprisonment for having said that the illegal Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) is not a 'terrorist organization'.

Metin Tekce, who is believed to be outside of Turkey, was found guilty of being a member of a terrorist organization and to have propagated organization propaganda, by a court in the eastern Turkey town of Agri.

Tekce is the latest member of the Democratic Social Party (DTP) to have been convicted and sentenced to prison in recent months. In the past month DTP leader Ahmet Turk has received two jail sentences, for distributing political pamphlets in the Kurdish language and for using the honourific "Mr" when describing PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

DTP officials have complained that the recent spate of court cases and jail sentences are aimed at disrupting the party ahead of parliamentary elections due later this year.

3. - Nouvelles d'Arménie - "Robert Fisk : The truth should be proclaimed loudly":

When has any publisher ever tried to avoid publicity for his book?

17 March 2007

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust", which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London.

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, from their message to my London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English.

"We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007... Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is] ... held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations."

Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) - even Turkey’s bid to join the EU, for heaven’s sake - is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book ? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akcam’s magnificent A Shameful Act : The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish - it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact - the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey - and without a single book review.

Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink’s foul murder, I’m in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to the racism that killed Dink. While I’m sipping my morning coffee on the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former capital of the Ottoman empire. But there’s a problem nonetheless.

Some months earlier, my Turkish publishers said that their lawyers thought that the notorious Law 301 would be brought against them - it is used to punish writers for being "unTurkish" - in which case they wanted to know if I, as a foreigner (who cannot be charged under 301), would apply to the court to stand trial with them. I wrote that I would be honoured to stand in a Turkish court and talk about the genocide. Now, it seems, my Turkish publishers want to bring my book out like illicit pornography - but still have me standing with them in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under 301 !

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not want to have to take political sides in the "nonsensical collision between nationalists and neo-liberals", but I fear that the roots of this problem go deeper than this. The sinister photograph of the Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink’s alleged murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet still our own Western reporters won’t come clean about the Ottoman empire’s foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon - where Dink’s supposed killer lived - he quoted the city’s governor as saying that Dink’s murder was related to "social problems linked to fast urbanisation". A "strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people" might be to blame.

Ho hum. I wonder why Reuters didn’t mention a much more direct and terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women and children on to boats, set off into the Black Sea - the details are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akcam - "and thrown off to drown". Historians may like to know that the man in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt he had a "fiery character".

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selcan Hacaoglu, repeated the same old mantra about there being a "bitter dispute" between Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey "vehemently denies that the killings were genocide". When will the Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its reports ? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally real and horrific murder of six million European Jews that right-wing Holocaust negationists "vehemently deny" that there was a genocide ? No, they would not.

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the skulls and bones of around 40 people - almost certainly the remains of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on 14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing books "quietly" will not save us.

4. - Bianet - "Campaign for Gender Equality in Politics":

Association for Supporting and Educating Women Candidates begins its campaign to increase women representation in politics before upcoming elections later this year. Only 5 percent of the MP's in the National Assembly are women.

ISTANBUL / 16 March 2007 / by Ayca Orer

Association for Supporting and Educating Women Candidates (KADER) launched its campaign concerning women representation in politics with regard to the upcoming general and local elections this year.

Supported by known women from business and arts and culture circles, the campaign aims at creating public awareness on the issue by asking the question "Is it obligatory to be a man to enter the National Assembly?".

"Let's elect women candidates", it says.

In the first phrase of the campaign, open air displays, bills and posters will be distributed all around the country. Businesswoman Ümit Boyner as well as actress Meltem Cumbul, Lale Mansur and writer Meral Okay features on the flyers.

The second phase of the campaign will aim at creating consciousness. Educational seminars and supportive action will be directed to women candidates. Lastly, the association will make a call to all political parties to increase the number of woman candidates on their electoral lists.

KADER chair Seyhan Eksioglu lists their demands as follows:

* Political parties must encourage women to step forward as candidates for the elections.

* At least a third of the electoral lists must be of women candidates.

* Political parties represented in the National Assembly must give places to women in their executive committees.

The campaign underlines the fact that never in the history of the Turkish Republic the ratio of women MP's in the National Assembly surpassed 4.4 percent.

This is one of the lowest around the world. The problem worsens considering the local administarations as only 1 percent of the municipalities are run by women.

5. - IPS - "Young Women find Peace as Guerrillas":

QUANDIL MOUNTAINS / 19 March 2007 / by Mohammed A. Salih

Saria, 20, is a bright and lovely young lady, and she has found peace in her life as a guerrilla.

In this mountain range spanning Iraq, Iran and Turkey, she has found protection too, "from the oppression of a male society."

Saria, whose name means a female horse-rider, joined the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) when she was 14. She has in these years been engaged in several battles with Iranian and Turkish troops.

Kurds are scattered across northern Iraq, Iran and Turkey. They have been a minority everywhere, and struggled to search for rights. Only in Iraq have they found Kurdistan, an autonomous region for themselves since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The PKK, declared a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, has been engaged in a long guerrilla war to secure rights for Kurds, particularly in Turkey.

They have based themselves in the Qandil mountains. A visit to one of their camps showed that the Kurd fighters are not what one might have expected them to be.

In the fragile tranquility of these mountains, young boys and girls sit and chat and share their "life activities on an equal basis." They say they feel free.

Saria does not miss the comforts that city life can offer. "In our society women are suppressed...what is very important for a woman is to be the owner of herself and her personality...our party provides this atmosphere for us," Saria told IPS.

She comes from a poor area of the Kurdish-dominated southeast Turkey. Oppression of Kurds led her and many like her to take up arms.

"When there is all this cultural and economic pressure on you, and you cannot even freely speak your language, then it is better not to live," says Saria, who looks tougher than most girls her age.

An old Kurdish saying goes, "Mountains are the Kurds' best friends." For PKK fighters it is still true.

The PKK has bases right across these mountains that stretch from Iraq's border with Turkey in the north to the Iraq-Iran borders in the east.

The PKK launched an armed struggle in 1982 in Turkey to set up an independent Kurdish state. But it has now cut its political rhetoric, and demands only a democratic Turkish republic with cultural and minority rights for Kurds.

Many Kurds, particularly the intelligentsia, have seen this as a climbdown.

Despite the wide perception of the PKK as a terrorist organisation, its recruits are not just Kurds. Its revolutionary leftist ideology has attracted scores of non-Kurds, including Turks, Arabs, Persians and also a few Europeans.

All recruits go through a three to five month course of ideological and military training to ready them for guerrilla warfare.

"This is a freedom and humanitarian movement in which everyone can find his freedom regardless of race or religion," says Yaser, a 30-year-old Kurd who joined the PKK 15 years ago. He says he is not there to fight "because we like war and bloodshed, but this is a situation imposed on us."

Across the Middle East, Iraq has the highest rate of women representation in parliament and local councils, at places up to 25 percent. But in PKK it goes higher.

"Men and women are equal in PKK," says PKK spokesman Heval Asad. Eighty percent of the party's leadership council is selected equally from both men and women, so women will always constitute at least 40 percent of the PKK leaders.

The remaining 20 percent are elected through vote, and women also make up a considerable percentage through such election.

Guerrillas in Qandil do not marry. They say that as long as they are fighting in the mountains the time is not ripe for marriage. They believe marriage and raising children are practical obstacles on their way to "continuing the revolution."

"However, here we don't think in terms of brothers and sisters. We think of each other as friends with different personalities," says Asad.

The harsh mountainous conditions and the occasional fighting have not killed the guerrillas' desire to look good. Many of the young women put on make-up and varnish their nails. The young men have their hair neatly cut and their faces well shaven.

But they know they have a fight on their hands. "What's important for us is to die if necessary for the cause we believe in," says Saria.

Saria wants to become a journalist "once Kurdistan is free and the revolution succeeds," she says. "But as long as the revolution goes on we continue fighting."

6. - Kurdish Media - "Turkey and the US: The tail wagging the dog":

18 March 2007 / by Dr Rashid Karadaghi

There is hardly a day going by when Turkish officials don’t find something to get mad about and the reason usually centers around the Kurds, not just their own captive Kurds, twenty million in all, but Kurds anywhere in the world – even in Argentina! Any statement by a Kurd or about the Kurds and their occupied homeland that doesn’t fit in the Turkish mindset is enough to set Turkish officials in an attack mode against any target, including their benefactors.

When Secretary of State Rice pronounced the forbidden “K” word at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on February 27 in a reference to “the border between Turkey and Kurdistan,” not, most certainly, and unfortunately, out of a belief in “Kurdistan” but because of a slip of the tongue, she immediately became the target of criticism and condemnation by official Turkey as well as the Turkish media.

Knowing Turkish paranoia about all things Kurdish and Kurdistani, no one was really surprised by the Turkish reaction, but what is shocking is how quick the State Department was to oblige when Turkey demanded an explanation of why and how Secretary Rice has “dared” to utter the word that is taboo in the Turkish lexicon. Instead of telling the Turks where to go -- because US foreign policy is made in Washington and not in Ankara -- the State Department was quick to reassure the Turks that they had nothing to worry about, for Secretary Rice was simply referring to “a geographic region” and nothing more! How embarrassing for the most important Department of the US government, the Department that should reflect America’s great ideals and principles in its conduct, to behave in such a sheepish and demeaning manner!

Perhaps that is why when her predecessor, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, visited the memorial for the victims of Saddam’s 1988 poison gas attack in Halabja in September 2003, the words “Kurds” or “Kurdistan” didn’t part his lips even once. How odd! You attend a memorial for the victims of one of the most horrible crimes in human history and you don’t even mention the victims’ identity? Had the victims of Saddam’s barbaric crime been of any other nationality or ethnic group but Kurds, Powell would have had no problem mentioning their ethnicity by name, but because these five thousand victims were Kurds, they had to remain nameless for fear of upsetting the Turks, never mind if Turkey turns her back on America when America needs her most, as it did during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, thereby costing many American lives, by American military experts’ own admission. Hasn’t the time come for Washington to reassess its blind Cold War era faith in this “loyal and democratic” ally?

What most people don’t realize is that a statement like that of Secretary Rice’s by a Kurdish traveler crossing the same border that she was referring to would have landed him / her in real trouble with Turkish border guards because mentioning the “K” word is a big taboo in Turkey. It is like holding up a red cloth before a bull. What also may come as a surprise to people in the civilized world is that, while crossing the same border, if a traveler has a book with the word “Kurdistan” on its cover, in any language, the book gets torn to pieces and thrown away, or, at a minimum, if the guard is “tolerant” enough, the cover gets torn off of the book then the coverless book is given back to the person with a few choice insults for daring to carry such an item. At the same border, when a Kurdish traveler is asked by the Turkish guards, “Where are you going?” OR “Where are you coming from?” if he replies, “Kurdistan,” he runs the risk of being beaten up or humiliated by the guards.

When some Kurdish émigrés who had the word “Kurdistan” written in their passports as their place of birth went back through Turkey to visit their families in South (Iraqi-occupied) Kurdistan, they were detained at the Istanbul airport, prevented from continuing their trip, and put on the next plane back to where they had come from simply because they had dared to state that they were born in Kurdistan! Such is the behavior of this US “democratic” ally and candidate for EU membership!

It is time the State Department cared more about the legitimate human and national rights of forty million downtrodden Kurds held captive against their will by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, than the imperialistic and racist attitudes of a state that is guilty of state terrorism and of cultural and linguistic genocide against an entire people, a state guilty of eradicating the very name of a nation, of what makes a human being a human being and a people a people.

Instead of apologizing to the Turks for some innocuous remark by Secretary Rice, the State Department should be actively implementing president Bush’s and America’s vision of a democratic and free Middle East by telling Turkey to free its captive Kurds and stop meddling in South Kurdistan’s affairs, for the Ottoman Empire is no more!