29 March 2007

1. "Kurdish Nationalists in Iraq, Turkey Seek Land of Their Own", as violent instability convulses much of Iraq, the country's neighbors are keeping a watchful eye. In recent weeks, Turkey has warned Kurds in northern Iraq not to make any moves to declare themselves independent from Baghdad. Turkey has a large Kurdish population of its own, and the government in Ankara is worried by the violence in Iraq, fearing that it threatens the country's territorial integrity.

2. "Gates: Rhetoric harms Turkey, U.S. relations", Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday said Turkish anger over proposed U.S. congressional resolutions could have a negative effect on that country’s support for the U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

3. "Top general blasts France, Iraqi Kurds", Gen. Saygun accuses Turk-Kurd politician Zana of inviting Iraqi Kurdish intervention into Turkey.

4. "ROUNDUP: EU partially reopens membership negotiations with Turkey", the European Union is set partially to reopen membership negotiations with Turkey this week, giving an unexpected boost to Ankara's flagging bid to join the 27-nation bloc.

5. "Roma Students Organize For Rights", university students of Roma background are organizing for their rights. Co-founder of the Romankara association, Karadeniz explains how Roma people are discriminated against in Tukey and how they came to realize thay have rights to fight for.

6. "EU helps Turkey's child workers back to school", the scheme is one of many EU aid projects in Turkey and elsewhere, but comes as public support in Turkey for membership of the bloc has dwindled over the last year amid a perception existing members do not really want Ankara to join.

1. - VOA - "Kurdish Nationalists in Iraq, Turkey Seek Land of Their Own":

DIYARBAKIR / 17 March 2007 / by Simon Marks

As violent instability convulses much of Iraq, the country's neighbors are keeping a watchful eye. In recent weeks, Turkey has warned Kurds in northern Iraq not to make any moves to declare themselves independent from Baghdad. Turkey has a large Kurdish population of its own, and the government in Ankara is worried by the violence in Iraq, fearing that it threatens the country's territorial integrity.

You see the trucks long before you see Turkey's border with Iraq. For several miles they line the roadside, loaded with steel, cement and food.

It can take several days to secure permission to cross into Iraqi territory. Yet every day 4,000 truckloads of Turkish goods cross the border into northern Iraq and Iraqi oil crosses the border going out.

Many of these drivers are Turkish Kurds from the southeast of the country, and they have a unique opportunity to see life on both sides of the border. Some of them, like driver Ethem Ozer, believe that a single independent Kurdish state would better support Kurdish families in both Turkey and Iraq.

"We want to unite,” he says. “Why do we want to unite? There shouldn't be any problems between us. If there is no business here, maybe they have some business, so we go and work there. And if there's no work there, they could come and work here. We have rights, and so do they, and that's why we want to unite."

But that kind of talk terrifies Turkey's government. It vigorously opposes the idea of a Kurdish state based on Turkish or Iraqi territory. Rebels trying to achieve that goal are now based in the mountains of northern Iraq. The Turkish government says fighters with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party -- the PKK – are being given safe haven in U.S.-occupied Iraq, even though the U.S. government brands the PKK a terrorist organization.

Abdullah Gul is Turkey's Foreign Minister. He says, "We can't understand this, you see. If an enemy regime gives this opportunity to them, we understand this, you see. That is an enemy regime, you see. But this is a friendly country. The country we are helping. The country that is controlled by our allies, and we are helping them. This is the problem, you see?"

The U.S. government says it is taking action against the PKK, in partnership with the Turkish government. But the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, concedes there are other problems in Iraq that are taking precedence.

"U.S. forces are rather busy. They face a number of terrorist problems, a number of insurgent problems,” the ambassador says. “They have focused their primary energies on those insurgent issues that directly challenge the center of gravity in Baghdad and that challenge our forces.”

In the ancient backstreets of Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey, the PKK does not appear to be winning the battle for hearts and minds. This city was originally settled more than 5,000 years ago.

Today it is home to Kurds who are struggling to make a living, a fact that carpenter Sherif Uraki believes the PKK doesn't fully understand. "What the PKK is doing, or what the government is doing is not important to us. We are just trying to earn enough money to buy bread,” he says. “And from the early hours of the morning we are working here. We are just trying to take bread to our homes, and I don't think either the PKK or the government has any idea of the conditions under which we are living. We're just trying to survive."

Ongoing instability could lead the Turkish army to take up positions on Iraqi territory in a bid to overcome the PKK.

Retired General Edit Baser is the Turkish government's special representative on counterterrorism. "You cannot just sit and watch when your neighbor's house is on fire, OK? You got to do something about it,” he explains. “Because that fire may come into your house, your yard. So you have to take some measures to avoid it, and to help your neighbor if you can.”

The general and many politicians back in Ankara fear Kurdish ambitions for a separate state making up northern Iraq and Kurdish areas in Turkey. They have already fought a 20-year war against the PKK and seem ready to fight another if necessary. The Kurds are caught in the middle and they wonder whether events will bring them stability and opportunity, or yet more uncertainty and distress.

2. - Marine Corps Times - "Gates: Rhetoric harms Turkey, U.S. relations":

28 March 2007 / by William H. McMichael

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday said Turkish anger over proposed U.S. congressional resolutions could have a negative effect on that country’s support for the U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Our two nations should oppose measures and rhetoric that needlessly and destructively antagonize each other,” Gates said in a speech before the American-Turkish Council in Washington, D.C. “That includes symbolic resolutions by the United States Congress, as well as the type of anti-American and extremist rhetoric that sometimes finds a home in Turkish political discourse.”

Two recently introduced bipartisan congressional resolutions condemn the 1915-1917 mass killings of 1.5 Armenians as “genocide” — something long acknowledged by historians but that Turkey denies.

Gates said that, partly as a result of that tension, the war in Iraq is “one of the most difficult matters we have had to work through as allies.”

Turkey, a NATO ally, would like to wipe out the Kurdish militant group popularly known by its old initials — PKK, for Kurdistan Workers’ Party — that is based in northern Iraq. More than 20 years of Turkish conflict with the separatist group has produced some 30,000 total casualties, according to the U.S. State Department.

The U.S. wants to maintain the relative stability that much of northern Iraq enjoys.

“We recognize that every Turkish citizen killed by the PKK is a setback for success in Iraq, and a setback in our relationship with Turkey,” Gates said. “As President Bush has underscored, the United States is committed to the stability and territorial integrity of Iraq, and opposes policies or groups that would undermine that integrity in any way.”

Gates said that the strategic relationship between the U.S. and Turkey “has undergone some turbulence in recent years,” later adding, “All relationships need work to remains strong.”

But ties remain strong, Gates said, noting that Turkey has provided access to Iraq from its Incirlik Air Base, has commanded two security force rotations in Afghanistan and is a partner in the Joint Strike Fighter project. Gates also said 16 U.S. Navy ships made port calls in Turkey last year.

Turkey, as well as other NATO members, has a vital interest in a successful outcome in Iraq, Gates said.

“Whatever disagreements we might have over how we got to this point in Iraq, the consequences of a failed state in Iraq, of chaos there, will adversely affect every member of the Atlantic alliance, and none more so than Turkey,” Gates said.

Yet while Turkey will continue to play a role in that effort, the U.S. needs other countries in the region to do their parts to help stabilize Iraq, Gates said.

“Iraq’s neighbors will have to play a constructive role going forward, even if they haven’t done so in the past,” Gates said. “Especially in encouraging political reconciliation and reduction of violence within Iraq. This is certainly the case with Syria and Iran, who have not been helpful.” Gates has voiced similar thoughts since becoming defense secretary.

Gates has previously called for greater dialogue with Iran. But in his speech, he seemed to express some pessimism over the efforts.

“In dealing with a regime like Iran’s, one has to be realistic,” Gates said. “The American search for elusive Iranian moderates is a recurring and mostly fruitless theme since the revolution in 1979.” But he said the recent regional talks in Baghdad “were a good start” and that the U.S. is open to higher-level exchanges.

“We should have no illusions about the nature of this regime,” Gates said of Iran. “Or about their designs for their nuclear program, their intentions for Iraq, or their ambitions in the Gulf region.”

3. - Turkish Daily News - "Top general blasts France, Iraqi Kurds":

Gen. Saygun accuses Turk-Kurd politician Zana of inviting Iraqi Kurdish intervention into Turkey

WASHINGTON / 28 March 2007 / by Umit Enginsoy

Deputy Chief of the Turkish General Staff Gen. Ergin Saygun on Monday strongly criticized France for signing a defense and military cooperation pact with the Greek Cypriot government, saying the move threatened regional stability.

Speaking at a conference on U.S.-Turkish relations here, he also accused Western European nations of failing to take adequate measures against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Iraqi Kurds of usurping the central Baghdad government's authority to set up an undeclared state in the country's north and supporting the PKK. The French-Greek Cypriot defense cooperation agreement "is a threat to stability, a flagrant violation of "international law" and encourages the Greek Cypriots against efforts for a solution to the conflict on the Eastern Mediterranean island, Saygun told the conference.

The annual meetings were held jointly by the American-Turkish Council, an organization of mainly U.S. companies doing business with Turkey, and theTurkish-U.S. Business Council. France and the Greek Cypriots signed the pact in Paris on March 1 and the agreement's contents are not clear. "Turkey won't withdraw any military units until a solution has been reached on Cyprus," Saygun said, adding that France and several other European nations were content with only "faint measures" against the PKK, briefly arresting and soon releasing the group's members. "There are four television stations, 13 radio channels and 10 news papers operated by the PKK in Europe," demonstrating the degree of freedom the group enjoys there, he said.

On Iraq, Saygun said the Kurds now had an undeclared state with its own flag, setting their eyes on capturing control of the oil-rich and multi-ethniccity of Kirkuk. Under the disguise of reversal of an Arabization campaign during former leader Saddam Hussein's term, a Kurdish exodus into Kirkuk is under way, he said. Probably 120,000 Kurds were expelled, he said, "but 450,000 Kurds returned."

Saygun called for the disbanding of all militias in Iraq, including the Kurdish peshmerga and the strengthening of the central Baghdad government and he reiterated the military's accusations that the PKK has been receiving weapons, explosives, shelter and logistics from northern Iraqi Kurds. Saygun also chided Leyla Zana, a prominent Turkish Kurdish politician who had spent several years in jail for PKK membership, for recently saying that "the Kurds' leaders are Talabani, Barzani and Öcalan" in reference to Iraq's ethnic Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, leader of the Iraqi Kurdish regionalgovernment Massoud Barzani and PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. "Such statements are inviting Iraqi Kurds to intervene in Turkey," Saygun told the Turkish Daily News on the sidelines of the conference. "I think these arevery serious and dangerous statements and I believe state prosecutors are probing these remarks."

He said that at a time when Armenian genocide resolutions are pending in the U.S. Congress, Armenia has territorial ambitions toward Turkey. "Armenia's declaration of independence calls eastern Turkey western Armenia," he said.

4. - DPA - "ROUNDUP: EU partially reopens membership negotiations with Turkey":

BRUSSELS / 28 March / by Shada Islam

The European Union is set partially to reopen membership negotiations with Turkey this week, giving an unexpected boost to Ankara's flagging bid to join the 27-nation bloc.

EU officials said the talks will open in Brussels on Thursday and centre on enterprise and industrial policy, one of 35 chapters where Turkey must bring its domestic laws into line with European regulations.

Negotiations could also open in the coming weeks on three other policy areas, including economic and monetary affairs, the compilation of statistics and financial control.

The move to restart discussions comes after EU governments took the unprecedented step last December of partially freezing Turkey's membership negotiations in eight chapters after Ankara refused to establish transport links with Cyprus.

Talks were put on ice in areas such as trade, transport, external relations and agriculture.

The dispute stems for Turkey's refusal to recognize the Republic of Cyprus which entered the EU as a divided island in 2004. As such Ankara does not allow Greek Cypriot ships and aircraft access to Turkish territory.

Turkey has argued that it will comply with EU demands on normalizing ties with Nicosia if in turn, the EU lifts its economic boycott of northern Turkish Cyprus, which is not recognized by the international community.

While suspending talks in eight areas, EU officials last year insisted that negotiations with Turkey would continue in sectors not directly linked to Cyprus.

"We are confident we can achieve this goal," an EU official told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, referring to the expected start this summer of talks on three new chapters.

"What is important is EU support for Turkish reform efforts," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But while "technical negotiations" are partially back on track, the EU remains concerned about the pace of political reform in Turkey.

Upcoming elections in Turkey mean the government is finding it difficult to carry out unpopular policy measures. However, EU enlargement chief Olli Rehn has warned that Ankara must not take a "sabbatical on reform."

"Turkey needs to get very serious on political reform, especially in areas of democracy and the rule of law," said the EU official.

The EU agreed to open membership negotiations with Turkey in October 2005 despite continuing wariness in several EU states over bringing the largely Muslim nation in to the bloc.

If it does get through EU doors Turkey, with a population of 70 million, would be the first Muslim country to join the EU.

However, even if negotiations pick up pace over the coming months, Turkey's EU admission is not expected before 2020.

5. - Bianet - "Roma Students Organize For Rights":

University students of Roma background are organizing for their rights. Co-founder of the Romankara association, Karadeniz explains how Roma people are discriminated against in Tukey and how they came to realize thay have rights to fight for.

ISTANBUL / 27 March 2007 / by Tolga Korkut

17 university students of Roma background have opened a centre which would work to promote and support the rights of Roma people in Turkey.

Their association is named Romankara. "Our first goal is to work in the areas of human rights and democracy. Furthermore, we'd like to establish links and cooperate with Roma institutions in Europe" said Selçuk Karadeniz, one of the founders of the association, talking to bianet.

The association was initiated by five Roma students on February 14. They recently took part in a joint project on the promotion of the rights of Roma people in Turkey.

"Then we decided to go on. First we reached 14, then it became 17 individuals. That's how Romankara was born".

Karadeniz's own story begins with the International Roma Symposium, second of which was organized last year in Istanbul. This changed his approach to the issue.

"As every other kid, I've been subjected to an education based to boost a 'national sentiment' but then I've familiarized with the concept of human rights. I realized how Roma people are discriminated against. They were without education, food or basic rights".

"But now I know we have rights and we can get them, we can force the state to give us our rights" he adds.

He explains the hardships Roma face in Turkey with examples from his own life. It's hard for a Roma kid to go to school, meet with others given his desperate life conditions. It results and feeds from the discrimination and labeling towards all Roma.

But as people get to know each other, their attitudes change, says Karadeniz. "They begin to overcome prejudices, premeditated thoughts about Gypsies and their way of life".

The key question is to render visible their existence. "We have to meld into the society, go out, make ourselves visible".

One of the biggest and immediate problems of Roma in Turkey are the practices brought by "urban transformation" projects.

Roma are forced out of their homes without a concrete proposal for the sustainability of their livelihood.

Lastly, he notes that although Roma are beginning to self organize for their rights, support and cooperation of other NGOs are crucial. "That's a very new concept for us and we make lots of mistakes on the way. We need the expertise and experience of others working on the field".

6. - Reuters - "EU helps Turkey's child workers back to school":

27 March 2007 / by Zerin Elci

Twelve-year-old Suna Kacar was until recently one of nearly 2 million Turkish child laborers who mostly work in the streets selling cheap goods or shining shoes to add a trickle to their family's income.

Her skin darkened from working long hours under the sun, the blonde, hazel-eyed girl is one of nearly 3,000 children in Turkey benefiting from a European Union project to eradicate the worst forms of child labor.

The 5.3-million-euro project aims to give working children like Suna, mostly from very poor families, the chance of a better life, sending many of them to school.

The scheme is one of many EU aid projects in Turkey and elsewhere, but comes as public support in Turkey for membership of the bloc has dwindled over the last year amid a perception existing members do not really want Ankara to join.

Since beginning accession talks in 2005, Turkey has come under fire from the EU over human rights issues and Cyprus, while nationalism is rising ahead of a presidential election in May and general polls scheduled for November.

"My mother wanted me to work and I didn't go to school in the past. I now see how good it is to go to school so I can have a profession when I grow up. I would like to become a nurse," said Suna.

The scheme in Cankiri province, 120 km (70 miles) northeast of the capital Ankara, is one of seven pilot projects across Turkey in operation to tackle child labor: 15-year-old Gani Gormez explained what it meant to him.

"I had been sent to work in the streets to earn pocket money and buy what the family needed. I understood when I started going to school how bad child labor is," he said.

While Turkey's economy has rebounded from a steep financial crisis in 2001 when many people lost their jobs, a quarter of all Turks live below the poverty line.

UNFAIR BURDEN

According to the UN International Labor Organization (ILO), nearly a quarter of Turkey's 74 million population is made up of children aged six to 17 years.

One in 10 -- 1.85 million children -- are seasonal agricultural workers, or work in small companies or on the street.

"They need to work in the streets because of the misfortune they had from birth or after. This an unfair burden, which they cannot carry. For our future it is very important to eradicate this burden," said Ali Haydar Oner, governor of Cankiri province.

Under the project, the child workers receive benefits varying from education kits to basic food packages, Oner said. They are also monitored to make sure they keep going to school and do not return to work again.

At the Cankiri center, Suna performed her own story for European Commission and media representatives as part of a drama lesson.

The play started with her selling cheap tissues in the street, then in her words "sisters" -- the project officials -- convinced her parents to grant her wish to go to school.

The show ended with a loud call: "No to child labor!"

PARENTS TARGETED

The project also targets the parents of children who work.

They learn to read and write and are encouraged to do vocational courses so that they can start to earn enough money to save their children from having to work.

"It is important not to leave parents out because the underlying cause is of course poverty ... It is important to create better employment opportunities for parents," said Holger Schroder, first secretary of the Commission delegation to Turkey on his visit to the Cankiri center.

Dilek Kekec, a 32 year-old woman and mother of a 14-year old boy who once carried heavy potato and onion sacks at the town's bazaar, welcomed the chance of making more money for her family.

"I would definitely love to pursue a career. I am a widow with four boys. I sometimes work as a house cleaner but the money I make is not enough," she said.

Child labor is also fueled by internal displacement, which is linked to poverty.

A study by the Hacettepe Institute of Population Studies shows nearly 50 percent of the population live in locations other than their place of birth.

Schroder said the EU planned to give more than 200 million euros to Turkey for human resource development projects such as creating new jobs and education improvement within three years.

"We hope at the end of this project child labor will be eradicated here in Cankiri, but we know that the fight against child labor will not be finished in Turkey," he said.