11
May 2007
1. "Turkish MPs pass amendment seen as curbing Kurdish votes", Turkish legislators on Thursday approved a constitutional amendment widely seen as an effort to make it more difficult for Kurdish politicians from non-mainstream political parties to enter parliament in the July 22 elections.
2. "Turkey's army and the west's hypocrisy", there is a nauseating hypocrisy to the way liberals in the west have applauded the army's intervention in Turkey. This is the same army that the left has criticised for decades for its policies towards the Kurds; the same army it has condemned for its unwillingness to admit to the Armenian genocide or permit it to be discussed.
3. "Pragmatism Towards Turkey's Military", in the past month, worries about foreign minister Abdullah Gul of the AK Party being nominated to the position of President came to a head with over a million marching in Istanbul for secularism preceded by a thinly veiled threat by the general staff of the Turkish army to intervene.
4. "Turkey condemned over filmmaker biography at Europe court", a Turkish publisher who had been fined for publishing a biography of Kurdish filmmaker Yilmaz Guney won his case against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights Thursday.
5. "301 Makes No Discrimination...", publisher Sirri Öztürk and writer Tiftikçi are on trial for a critical study on the Turkish army. Public Prosecutor Turhan faces charges for saying, "I do not trust the judiciary". Alinak of the DTP party has been sentenced to ten months imprisonment.
6. "Police Pressure After Critical Article", editor of the local Emirdag newspaper, Koyuncu has been arrested following an article in which he criticized the local police. Several officers complained against him and Koyuncu will face trial on May 24. He quoted claims of abuse by the police.
1. - AFP - "Turkish MPs pass amendment seen as curbing Kurdish votes":
ANKARA / 10 May 2007
Turkish legislators on Thursday approved a constitutional amendment widely seen as an effort to make it more difficult for Kurdish politicians from non-mainstream political parties to enter parliament in the July 22 elections.
A total of 429 MPs in the 550-seat house voted in favour of the measure while 12 opposed it, parliament speaker Bulent Arinc said.
Under the bill, the names of independent candidates will figure on the same ballot paper as all the parties in the running, contrary to current practice under which their names appear on separate voting slips.
The new procedure is widely seen as a bid to obstruct voters in the mainly Kurdish southeast, where many are illiterate or do not speak Turkish, and are likely to have trouble picking their candidate's name from the long list of parties and other independents.
The amendment needs presidential approval to come into force.
Turkey's main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), said it will field independents rather than run as a party in the July 22 election to bypass the 10-percent national threshold that allows parties access to parliament.
Once they are voted in as independents, the Kurdish deputies can regroup under the DTP banner.
Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as members of mainstream parties, but pro-Kurdish movements failed to overcome the 10-percent national threshold despite usually dominating the Kurdish vote in the southeast, where they routinely win the local elections.
Kurdish parties are routinely accused of being instruments
of the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Partry, the PKK, which has led a insurgency
in the southeast since 1984. 
2. - New Statesman - "Turkey's army and the west's hypocrisy":
14 May 2007 / by Rageh Omaar
A spontaneous demonstration in favour of secularism in Turkey was hailed as a beacon of hope but the reality is much more complicated.
It was, without doubt, an impressive demonstration of people power, in a country on the edge of Europe that seeks to become a part of it. Almost a million Turks marched in Istanbul to show support for their secular republic. In an age when many in liberal, secular democracies in the west fear what they perceive as the relentless rise of militant political Islam, the sight of a spontaneous and authentic demonstration in a Muslim country was hailed as a beacon of hope. If only things were so simple. It would make a great script for a Hollywood movie.
The reality is more complicated. The demonstration was not in response to the imminent election of an Islamist government sworn to enact conservative religious laws. It was in response to the last-minute nomination of a venerated politician, Abdullah Gül, to the largely ceremonial role of president. The protest forced him to step down. Gül, who had been the country's foreign minister and played a significant role in Turkey's negotiations over membership of the European Union, had always had his eyes set on being prime minister. But the incumbent prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, put Gü's name forward as a presidential candidate.
What was so wrong with that? Gül belongs to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a Muslim democratic party, but it is a million miles from what we would normally understand as "Islamist": guided by clerics, aiming to enact and enforce religious laws. This is not what the AKP is about, and certainly not a reflection of Gü's career. Analysts in Turkey and the EU have praised the government of which he was a senior member for enacting the most liberal reforms Turkey has experienced, in both the economic and the social spheres. However, Turkey is a country with shifting identities; Muslim and European, part of the Middle East yet one of Israel's strongest military allies, Kurdish and Turkish, democratic yet beholden to the military. These contradictory voices cannot project fully in a monolithic system where there is one identity - secularism - and one arbiter of political power - the army.
Impressive as the demonstration in Istanbul was, it was the voice of the country's urban and middle-class elite.
Gü's party represents a dying political trend in Muslim countries worldwide. Like similar parties in Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt, the AKP is capitalising on disaffection with political systems that have monopolised power, whether it is the army in Turkey and Pakistan, or family dynasties such as the Assads in Syria and the Mubaraks in Egypt. The emergence of these political parties that appeal to professional and democratic Muslims has been perceived as a threat to stability, and they have been prevented repeatedly from competing fairly in elections - through vote-rigging, military intervention, imprisonment and intimidation.
The annulment of the polls that brought the Islamic Salvation Front to power in Algeria in the mid-1990s by the intervention of the army is a warning of what happens when moderate, democratically elected Muslim parties are prevented from taking office. By the most conservative estimates, the ensuing decade-long civil war left at least 60,000 people dead.
There is a nauseating hypocrisy to the way liberals in
the west have applauded the army's intervention in Turkey. This is the
same army that the left has criticised for decades for its policies
towards the Kurds; the same army it has condemned for its unwillingness
to admit to the Armenian genocide or permit it to be discussed. The
west may be reassured by the army's actions, but divisions within Turkey
will deepen, and with this crackdown, another country joins the list
of those where moderate Muslims have no voice.
3. - Publius Pundt - "Pragmatism Towards Turkey's Military":
11 May 2007
In the past month, worries about foreign minister Abdullah Gul of the AK Party being nominated to the position of President came to a head with over a million marching in Istanbul for secularism preceded by a thinly veiled threat by the general staff of the Turkish army to intervene. The Western medias response was positive towards a Middle Eastern and predominately Muslim nation having large public shows of support for secularism but tempered by the possibility of another military coup to defend this position, leading the Economist to declare ‘If Turks have to choose, democracy is more important than secularism’. The majority of the reasoning led towards a questioning of the Turkish military’s role, a role that seems foreign to industrialized nations where the military is typically subordinate to civil governments.
While this speaks to an ideal of a coexistence of democracy and secularism, the reality is that there is popular support for the AK Party that outnumbers the secular opposition – if elections are to be held in July, they will most likely be dominated by the AK. While this shouldn’t be declared as an Islamist majority or secular minority, the ambitions of the AK Party are unclear in regards to their Islamist roots (to be fair, the majority of their rule has respected secularism and presided over a period of sustained economic development).
In this predicament, the military shouldn’t be discounted as the self-appointed defender of Ataturk’s secular legacy. The West’s difficulty with its position is obvious: in a global memory bereft of military juntas that turned countries into prisons, the capability of a military to interfere in politics in a positive, progressive manner seems negligible. But the reality is the military has acted as an institution maintaining Western values in a country that is a member of NATO and seeking future membership in the European Union.
While the Turkish system may not be the best of all worlds,
in a region where Hamas in Palestine, Lieberman in Israel, and Ahmadinejad
in Iran all attained power democratically, the short falls of an unchecked
democracy should be apparent. More importantly, the Turkish military
has acted as an arbiter of power and primarily maintained a stable political
system while countries around it have welted into Islamic regimes and
authoritarian police states. Given the climate of perpetual conflict
and chaos in the Middle East, there needs to be a pragmatic approach
towards the forces of secularism and modernization, including the Turkish
military.
4. - AFP - "Turkey condemned over filmmaker biography at Europe court":
STRASBOURG / 10 May 2007
A Turkish publisher who had been fined for publishing a biography of Kurdish filmmaker Yilmaz Guney won his case against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights Thursday.
Saim Ustun, 40, from Istanbul, was the owner of a small publishing company which reprinted in 2000 a biography of the late filmmaker, whose movie "Yol" (Road) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 1982 but was banned in Turkey for 15 years.
The film examines various forms of social and political oppression in Turkish society and deals with Kurdish nationalism.
Although the first edition of the book in 1992 encountered no problems, the publisher was accused on its reprint of disseminating separatist propaganda and in 2003 sentenced to pay a 1,700-euro fine.
The conviction was nullified several months later and the fine reimbursed.
However, the Strasbourg-based court ruled that the publisher's freedom of expression had been violated because of unjustified interference by the state in the publication.
The European court said the book did "not encourage violence, armed resistance or insurrection" and did not constitute hate speech, even if its tone was hostile and the book politicised.
The European judges also questioned why the Turkish authorities had only taken action against the publisher for the reprint and not the first edition, something the authorities failed to explain.
The court granted Ustun 2,000 euros (2,700 US dollars) in damages.
Guney, a leftist writer, actor and filmmaker, was stripped
of his citizenship in 1983 and died in exile in France a year later.
5. - Bianet - "301 Makes No Discrimination...":
Publisher Sirri Öztürk and writer Tiftikçi are on trial for a critical study on the Turkish army. Public Prosecutor Turhan faces charges for saying, "I do not trust the judiciary". Alinak of the DTP party has been sentenced to ten months imprisonment.
ISTANBUL / 9 May 2007 / by Erol Onderoglu
The reform of article 301, the controversial law which has landed Turkish writers and academics with court cases for "denigrating Turkishness", is not being tackled by the government in this election year. Thus, it continues to target people from varied backgrounds, in this case a journalist, a prosecutor and a politician.
The trial of Osman Tiftikçi, writer of "The Evolution of the Army from the Ottoman Empire to Today", and its publisher at Sorun Publications, Sirri Öztürk, has been postponed after a decision to summon Tiftikçi, who lives abroad.
Öztürk: Government Slackening on 301
Publisher Öztürk claims that the government has lost its drive to reform article 301, and in an evaluation for bianet said that "Just as the government has slackened on 301, so a change of 301 is not on the public agenda anymore".
When on duty in the Hazro district of Diyarbakir nine years ago, state prosecutor Mustafa Turhan was tried because a Kalashnikoff gun in safekeeping of the court was found in his home. He too is appearing in court to be tried under article 301.
Mahmut Alinak, the Kars Province President of the Kurdish interest DTP (Democratic Society Party), has been sentenced to ten months in prison for a speech made at the opening of the DTP Ardahan Province headquarters. In his speech he referred to events in Semdinli (province of Hakkari) in November 2005, when a bookshop was bombed. The bombing brought to light the involvement of the army's secret military intelligence unit (JITEM) in illegal partisan activities.
Court Waiting for Tiftikçi, Öztürk Waiting for Justice
The prosecution of writer Tiftikçi and publisher Öztürk for "degrading the army" in accordance with article 301 paragraph 2 was continued today (8 May) at the Istanbul 2nd Criminal Court.
After a change of lawyers for the publisher was announced, the case will be continued on 4 July 2007, 9:30 am.
Publisher Öztürk argues that the judiciary makes decisions according to the political situation and says that "as long as we criticize the legislation, [these kind of court cases are] a reality. Without a consistent democracy and efforts from the government these kinds of court cases will always turn against us. The sound of fascism's footsteps can be heard".
Tried for Saying: "I have Never Trusted Justice"
Mustafa Turhan, who was sentenced to four years imprisonment when state prosecutor in Eruzrum and who was barred from his profession by the Board of Judges and Prosecutors, is also being tried under article 301, paragraph 2. He is on trial for saying "I have never trusted Justice" last year, and possibly faces between six months and two years in prison.
10 Months for DTP Politician Alinak
DTP politician Alinak has been punished for claiming that "Semdinli was bombed by the government's counter-guerrilla gunmen". It is argued that he "insulted the military forces and the Turkish parliament". According to news agency DIHA, Alinak, who was sentenced at Ardahan Criminal Court, will contest the sentence.
Alinak's claim that "that gunman was a government
counter-guerrilla gunman, of course the regime will protect him. In
the end, they have protected him and set him free".
6. - Bianet - "Police Pressure After Critical Article":
Editor of the local Emirdag newspaper, Koyuncu has been arrested following an article in which he criticized the local police. Several officers complained against him and Koyuncu will face trial on May 24. He quoted claims of abuse by the police.
AFYONKARAHISAR / 10 May 2007 / by Erol Onderoglu
Editor-in-chief of the local Emirdag daily, Mustafa Koyuncu is on trial with regard to claims of "insulting a public officer" in an article.
He criticized police officers on duty at the local station with an article titled "Should we enter the EU like that? They misuse their authority", that appeared on the issue of March 12, 2007.
Following its publication, the journalist had been arrested during a random traffic control and he stayed in prison for a week.
He denoted the incident as follows: "The traffic control stopped our vehicle and the officer told me to 'vanish for 180 days'".
Koyuncu quoted the incident at his newspaper, adding other claims of abuse and bad treatment at the local police station
Several police officers complained against Koyuncu and
he will face the court on May 24.