29
October 2001
2. "TRUE FRIENDS: The Turkish Model", America's ally is poised to lead the Muslim world.
3. "Turkey has different conception than U.S. on Iraq", the United States and Turkey are clearly allies. But Ankara and Washington have very different perceptions of Iraq.
4. "Shabby car in a dangerous turn", columnist Taha Akyol writes on the report prepared by Alain Lamassoure and accepted by the European Parliament on Turkey.
5. "Turkey reports progress in talks on European defence plans", a second round of talks between Turkey, the United States and Britain over the European Union's defence initiatives and planned rapid reaction force ended on Thursday in progress, a Turkish diplomat said.
6. "Petition for Ocalan", committee for Rights of Minorities which is an semi-official instutition in Armenia decided to approve the petition for PKK President Abdullah Ocalan and to send it to European Human Right Court.
1. - Turkish Daily News - "Turks want solution on Cyprus":
Annan states, 'Neither side can speak for the other'
and this seen as enough to resume talks 
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's remarks, "Each
party speaks for itself and not for the other," have been seen
as sufficient to start a UN process aimed at a solution on he island,
the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. Diplomatic sources in Washington
said these remarks would be enough to resolve the deadlock and that
there were no problems involving getting both the Turkish and Greek
Cypriot parties together. Annan's remarks had first received reaction
from the Greek Cypriots, who threatened to withdraw from the talks.
While it is being maintained in diplomatic circles that a solution is
required for both parties, it is also being stated that Turkey is working
the hardest for a solution.
Diplomatic sources noted that Turkey intends to use the following couple of years to find a solution on Cyprus, that it supports the taking of a decision on a solution by both parties but that it does not look kindly upon foreign impositions.
Observers in Washington state there are two major factors
to any solution: one of them is the American idea of "any solution,
just as long as there is a solution," which changes all the balances
and puts the Greek Cypriots in a corner. The second is the European
Union position, "We are going to make Cyprus a full member but
if there is no solution it could cause problems." Both viewpoints
are said to be helping efforts towards a solution. 
2. - Wallstreet Journal - "TRUE FRIENDS: The Turkish Model":
America's ally is poised to lead the Muslim world.
BY MELIK KAYLAN
As American eyes scan eastward across a troubled Islamic horizon
of equivocal friends and outright enemies, they should rest their gaze
on Turkey, an unfaltering ally, and take heart. Turkey's decades-long
fortitude in the service of Western interests and a Pax Americana has
garnered meager applause from its allies--and a ton of trouble from
its regional rivals. Yet it remains our most dependable resource in
the Islamic world, and, as the world's most successful secular Muslim
democracy, is set to play perhaps the most critical role of all our
allies. We should dance a jig of gratitude for what Turkey has endured
for our side up to now, because it points the way to what it could do
for us henceforward.
The Turks have outfaced and outlasted all of the last century's devouring political upheavals. Consider how their neighbors--from the Balkans, the Soviet bloc, and in the Middle East--succumbed to the various temptations of fascism, communism, nonalignment, and Islamic fundamentalism, when Turkey did not. The country has not always presented a pretty face during its self-protective exertions, especially in the area of human rights. Encircled by the likes of Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria, Turkey has perforce maintained a kind of "Bunker Democracy."
How else, one might ask, could Turkey have stayed the course while permitting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to station anti-Soviet ICBMs within its borders, making it a prime nuclear first-strike target, and letting the U.S. use its airbases against Iraq, once a valuable trading partner? The same grim self-discipline kept the Turks from recent foreign adventures in defense of their ethnic cousins who were enduring slaughter in Bosnia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya.
But now it's time for the Turks, with Western support and encouragement, to come out of their bunker and exert themselves in shaping history outside their borders. That they were among the first allies to volunteer unconditional support for the U.S., offering everything from bases to soldiers, shows that they are willing. Their record shows that they are able. What remains is for the West to help Turkey mobilize its potential.
Turkey offers pivotal strategic and cultural salients in the fight against Islamic terrorism. For the immediate purposes of a possible ground war in Afghanistan, the battle-readiness of Turkish troops among allied forces will prove invaluable. Turkey has NATO's largest standing army in Europe, and has just fought a fierce internal war against Kurdish Marxists in terrain and conditions not unlike Afghanistan. Politically, the troops' very presence in their midst furnishes the allies with an early propaganda victory. This is not a West-vs.-Islam crusade, because nonfundamentalist Muslims such as Turks will fight for the Western side.
Moreover, the Turks already have a regional interest in Afghan affairs: Their Turkic cousins, the Uzbeks, have a sizable minority living in Afghanistan that supports the Northern Alliance. Leaders of the Afghan-Uzbek militia such as Gen. Rashid Dostum have, over the years, spent time in Turkey. And like the Turks, both the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and their fellow ethnic Uzbeks who live in Afghanistan have adhered to a secular form of Islam for almost a century.
In the post-Soviet era, Afghanistan's Uzbek militias have received their war materiel from Russia, which has meant that many other Afghan Muslims and nationalists have viewed them with suspicion. This has set back the cause of secular Muslims in Afghanistan. But it has suited Russian strategy perfectly well. Russia has used the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to retain a post-Soviet colonial hold on its former Central Asian client states, the "stans," such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, several of which abut the Afghan border. Several are also hugely rich in natural resources, enough to shift the world's dependence on Mid-east oil.
Although most of these states are ethnically Turkic, Turkey has stayed out of the fray. But important shifts have begun to unfold in the region's alignments. Uzbekistan has allowed the U.S. to use its military bases in early contravention of Russian directives. Indeed, American and British special forces are already said to be operating from those Uzbek bases.
Now is the time for Turkey, as a Western proxy, to replace Russia's influence in the area. This will have several salutary strategic effects. It will deprive the region's militant Islamists of an important legitimizing anticolonial role. It will invalidate the invocation of "jihad" among those who wish to export fundamentalism against the Turkic states, since a war fought against other Muslims--aligned with Turkey, not Russia--is no jihad. It will create a secular Turkic continuum, or bloc of states, to counteract both the Iranian and Pakistan-Afghan fundamentalism abroad in the region. Ultimately, it will also help free up strategic reserves of oil and gas, currently under Russian veto, possessed by ex-Soviet republics. Alleviating the region's poverty is perhaps the most obvious counter to the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.
And yet, the infusion of wealth has not exactly countered it in Saudi Arabia. Which is where Turkey's cultural role in the region also becomes paramount. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire presided over Muslim doctrine and much of Islam's geography. Its subjects lived under a precise and codified system of multiethnic religious tolerance. One might say, with hindsight, that the Ottomans conferred a sanity on the Middle East that has not existed since their departure. These days, Turkey endures as the most prominent secular Muslim society in the world; indeed as one of Islam's few functioning democracies, Turkey and its Kemalist system can furnish other Muslim countries with an alternative model to the fundamentalism of Saudi-built mosques and maddrassas.
The U.S., and the British before them, championed the
Gulf states and Saudi Arabia for decades. The result is evident for
all to see: Saudi cultural influence has grown out of all proportion,
allowing them to export their primitive home-grown form of jihadist
Wahhabism throughout the world. The time is long overdue for the West
to help effect an equivalent but countervailing dissemination of the
Turkish model through the Islamic geosphere.
There is no reason why Indonesia or Malaysia, so far from the Mideast,
should opt for an Arabian approach to religion except that it was the
only one on offer. Several non-Arab Muslim countries have elected women
prime ministers. For these cultures, the Kemalist system with its liberation
of women to dress, work, travel and study in relative freedom, is surely
more sympathetic than the Saudi variety. Turkey can be to Islam what
Hong Kong was to China, an example that ultimately prevails because
it advertises a manifestly better life gained through a freer pursuit
of happiness.
However, the West must foster and abet Turkey's elevation into the role of paradigm, as it did successfully with Hong Kong and so disastrously with the Saudis. The throw-weight of the Turkish message depends on the success of Turkey's economy, the expansion and export of its secular education system, the optimism of its pro-Western youth culture.
Turks have already done much of the work for us. Istanbul today is one of the most entrancing and dynamic cities on earth, certainly in the Islamic world. Like Hong Kong was to China, Istanbul too stands in colorful contrast to the dour circumspection that prevails in most Islamic capitals. Many a hypocritical fundamentalist repairs there to savor its douceur de vivre along with a good many refugees from the Muslim world's myriad self-strangling economies.
However unwittingly, the Turks have already crafted a cultural product much in demand. For our own sakes, it's time the West helped package it and export it to the Muslim world.
Mr. Kaylan, a New York writer, is finishing a history
of Istanbul.
3. - Middle East Newsline - "Turkey has different conception than U.S. on Iraq":
ANKARA 
The United States and Turkey are clearly allies. But Ankara and
Washington have very different perceptions of Iraq.
The Bush administration sees Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as the biggest enemy after Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden. Many in the administration suspect a link between Saddam and Bin Laden in the Sept. 11 Islamic suicide attacks on New York and Washington.
The result is that President George Bush and senior Pentagon officials are exploring the prospect of an attack on Baghdad. Washington has discussed this prospect with Turkey.
But this is the last thing Ankara needs. Turkish officials don't like Saddam but they see his overthrow as a recipe for chaos in the region and the emergence of an unstable and threatening Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
On Tuesday, Turkish security forces were reported to have killed four Kurdish insurgents in southeastern Turkey.
Officials said Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has relayed this concern to the White House. Ecevit is willing to help the United States keep the Saddam regime weak, but he is opposed to an attack that would overthrow the Iraqi ruler and end up dividing the country.
"Ankara believes that Iraq can only protect its territorial
integrity with an authoritarian regime," former Turkish ambassador
Sukru Elekdag said, "and an operation which would result in overthrowing
Saddam will lead to a division of the counry in three parts and the
foundation of a Kurdish state in the north would be inevitable."
4. - Milliyet - "Shabby car in a dangerous turn":
Columnist Taha Akyol writes on the report prepared by Alain Lamassoure and accepted by the European Parliament on Turkey.
The European Parliament (EP) accepted two resolutions-one in 1986, the other last year- on the allegations regarding the so-called Armenian genocide. This year it has rejected a similar draft. French Democrat Deputy Alain Lamassoure's report which occasionally used moderate and positive expressions concerning Turkey was accepted by the EP.
It is reported that the 'Progress Report' which will be released on November 13 will be penned in a way which will not be unsettling for Turkey. These are believed to be indications of the care shown in Europe to refrain from a clash of civilizations while Afghan war and the Sept.11 syndrome are still very much in effect in addition to the significance of Turkey.
On the other hand, at the EU Summit held in Belgium on Oct. 19, signals were issued to the effect that Turkey will not be invited to the 'Convention for European Future'. Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz reacted to this approach by saying, 'Europe who excludes Turkey will proceed with firm steps towards the Dark Ages as a Christian Club.'
As Yilmaz is criticizing Europe by leading up to a clash among civilizations, he wants Turkey to use its potential function stemming from its location, history and living culture in order to establish harmony among civilizations. This is a correct approach. Foreign Minister Ismail Cem proposed that a meeting should be held between the Organization for the Islamic Conference and the European Union in Istanbul on the theme of 'establishing harmony between civilizations'.
This proposal was accepted. In an age of globalisation, cultures are becoming powers with political functions. However, this is not enough. Unless Turkey improves its economy and becomes an economic power in the region and unless it becomes a democratic state ruled by law envied by others in the region, it cannot enter the EU merely on the basis of its historic heritage or survive on foreign aid given for its geo-political importance.
The year 2002 is crucial... Turkey did not begin full membership negotiations with the EU and it is the only candidate country which has not done so. The Greek Cypriot Administration has completed 23 of the 29 criteria which are to be discussed. When the Greek Cypriot Administration becomes a full member, Turkey will meet with new obstacles on the way to the EU and it will be harder for the Cyprus problem to be solved as we prefer.
Therefore, there has to be a dynamic and influential government
in charge for the next crucial period of three or four years. This dangerous
turn cannot be taken by old coalition cars.
5. - AFP - "Turkey reports progress in talks on European defence plans":
ANKARA
A second round of talks between Turkey, the United States and Britain
over the European Union's defence initiatives and planned rapid reaction
force ended on Thursday in progress, a Turkish diplomat said.
"The talks were extremely positive and beneficial. We made progress on the European Security and Defence Plan," the Turkish foreign ministry's under-secretary Ugur Ziyal said after the meeting, the Anatolia news agency reported.
He did not elaborate what was achieved in the talks, but added that the three countries were planning to hold further talks "as soon as possible". The first round of talks was held in Istanbul in May. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952 and a candidate to join the European Union, has for months blocked an accord on EU access to NATO's sophisticated ability to plan big military operations, insisting such access be decided on a case-by-case basis and not "guaranteed and permanent" as the EU wants.
Access to NATO planning is considered vital to EU moves into the defense field, notably the setting up by 2003 of a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force that would take part in humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. Turkey says it will not automatically allow NATO equipment and soldiers to be used for the EU rapid reaction force unless it is allowed to take part in the decision-making process in EU-led operations that will use NATO assets.
The European Union, on the other hand, is offering to hold consultations with non-EU member states which are members of NATO -- such as Turkey -- on their common defence policy, but opposes including these countries in the decision-making process.
Ankara has expressed readiness to contribute to the EU
rapid reaction force, but Turkish officials have warned that Turkey's
contribution would be "in proportion to the fulfilment of our expectations"
on the defence plan.
6. - Kurdish Observer - "Petition for Ocalan":
Committee for Rights of Minorities which is an semi-official instutition in Armenia decided to approve the petition for PKK President Abdullah Ocalan and to send it to European Human Right Court.
ERIVAN
At the last week in a meeting which dealt with activities of the
Committee for Rights of Minorities and participated by Razmik Davoyan,
consultant of President Robert Kocheryan in charge of minorities' rights,
all activities for minorities were approved as a common view both of
representatives of minorities and the Armenian state.
Vlademir Ceteyev, General Chairman of the committee took part in the meeting in Erivan and spoke on the Kurdish problem.
Ceteyev proposed to send a petition to European Human Rights Court asking for the Ocalan case to be dealt with complying with the European law and to denounce the isolation of Ocalan although 40 million people see him as their national leader. The suggestion was accepted with applause.
The petition signed by representatives of Russian, Kurdish,
Georgian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarian, Syrian Christinian etc. will
be sent to EHRC.