10
June 2003
2. "Tolerance thrives amid Syria's repression", Syria is seen merely as an unofficial adjunct to the "axis of evil," ripe for reform if not outright invasion.
3. "Kurds Seeking Justice for Longtime Tormentor", witnesses gather evidence of killings and rapes they say were ordered by provincial governor, a feared Baathist who walks free.
4. "Give the Kurds a state", the most obvious route toward a less repressive political culture in Iraq would be to accept the right of the Kurds in the north to self-determination.
5. "Cyprus Signs MoU With British Military", the Republic of Cyprus has agreed to maintain the large British military presence on the divided island.
6. "Turkey: Fashion show revives veil controversy", in Turkey, a mainly Muslim but secular country, the controversy over Islamic headscarves has reared its head again -- this time because of a fashion show.
1. - Turkish Daily News - "Pro-Kurdish DEHAP demands general amnesty":
ANKARA / June 09, 2003
Tuncer Bakirhan was elected leader to DEHAP at the party convention, while party members launched a petition demanding a general amnesty.
Pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party (DEHAP) held its second convention over the weekend, selecting Tuncer Bakirhan as the new party leader.
Some 655 delegates voted at the party convention held in Ankara on Sunday. Being the single candidate for the leadership post, Bakirhan received the total 639 valid votes.
Addressing the convention before the elections, Bakirhan said that the solution of Kurdish problems in all countries would accelerate the democratic transformation in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Claiming that the Turkish Republic was founded on a multi-identity and multi-cultural social structure, Bakirhan said that the ongoing problems would be solved with the restructuring of the republic in line with its foundation principle.
"Mustafa Kemal made an alliance with the Kurds as soon as he stepped into Anatolia and pointed to the necessity for the Kurds and Turks to live on the basis of equal rights," Bakirhan added.
Bakirhan said that the basic fact which led to the current economic, political and social instability in Turkey was the "Kurdish problem", believing that denial of the Kurdish presence would also mean giving up the foundation principle of the republic.
The new leader of DEHAP claimed that people were tried for giving Kurdish names to their children and arrested for addressing Abdullah Ocalan, the inmate leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), as, "Mr. Ocalan."
Bakirhan demanded that real and deep legal arrangements should be made on education and broadcasting in mother tongue issues, stressing that the Kurds should be accepted as one of the main founder elements of the republic.
Touching on the repentance law, Bakirhan said that this law would not provide any contribution to the solution of the problems but suggested that a political general amnesty should be declared for the armed forces of the PKK/KADEK and all other inmates convicted of political crimes.
A petition was also launched at the party convention demanding the
government to declare a general amnesty named "General Amnesty
for Social Peace." 
2. - The International Herald Tribune - "Tolerance thrives amid Syria's repression":
A Middle Eastern paradox
LONDON / June 10, 2003
by William Dalrymple
The United States has probably never been more engaged in the Middle East than now. Yet the Bush administration has virtually ignored Syria, which physically links Iraq and Israel, except to single it out as a target of occasional bellicose threats. There has been no question of constructive engagement with Iraq's most powerful Arab neighbor. Instead Syria is seen merely as an unofficial adjunct to the "axis of evil," ripe for reform if not outright invasion.
That's unfortunate, because Syria, despite its many justifiably condemned policies, stands out in the Middle East in one respect that American policymakers should take into consideration. This aspect is most starkly on display at the Monastery of Our Lady at Saidnaya, north of Damascus.
The ancient Orthodox monastery sits on a great crag of rock overlooking the olive groves of the Damascene plain, more like a Crusader castle than a place of worship. But what is most striking about Saidnaya is that on any given night, Muslim pilgrims far outnumber Christian ones. As you walk into its ancient church, you find that the congregation consists largely of heavily bearded Muslim men and their shrouded wives.
As the priest circles the altar, filling the sanctuary with clouds of incense, the men bob up and down on their prayer mats. A few of the women approach the icons. They kiss them, then light a candle. Ordinary Muslims in Syria, it seems, have not forgotten the line in the Koran about not disputing with the people of the book - that is, Jews and Christians - "save in the most courteous manner … and say we believe in what has been sent down to us and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is one."
The religious pluralism that the monastery represents was once not uncommon across the Levant. Throughout the region until very recently, villagers of all faiths would converge on the shrines of Christian saints to ask for children and good harvests. The Eastern Christians and the Muslims lived side by side for nearly one and a half millennia because of a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West.
From Bosnia to Egypt, Christians and Muslims as well as many other religious minorities managed to live together. If that coexistence was not always harmonious, it was at least - with a few notable exceptions - until the beginning of the 20th century, a kind of pluralist equilibrium.
Only in the last 100 years has that pluralism been replaced by a new hardening in attitudes. Across the former Ottoman dominions, the 20th century saw the bloody unraveling of that complex tapestry - most recently in Kosovo and Bosnia, but before that in Cyprus, Palestine, Greece and Turkey. In each of these places pluralism has been replaced by a savage polarization.
In dribs and drabs, and sometimes in great tragic exoduses, religious minorities have fled to places where they can be majorities, and those too few for that have fled the region altogether. Only in Syria has this process been firmly arrested: there alone, you still find five or six religious sects coexisting in villages across the country.
Since the coalition's victory in Iraq, Syria has frequently been given notice that it could well be the next target of American wrath. Yet the Middle East is not a place where simplistic notion of good guys and bad guys makes much sense. It is a place of murky moral gray, not black and white. Torture, repression of minorities, the imposition of martial law and the abuse of basic human rights happen every bit as frequently and as unpleasantly in states that are American allies as they do in states that are not.
Certainly most would agree that Syria has much to reform. It is a one-party state where political activists are suppressed and the secret police fill the prisons with political prisoners who will never come before a judge. Violent opposition to the regime is met with overwhelming force, most horribly in the case of the armed rising of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982. The city was sealed off and at least 10,000 people were killed.
Yet the balance sheet is not entirely one-sided, and with the Pentagon busy drawing up invasion plans even as Iraq still contends with postwar anarchy and the Taliban resurfaces in southern Afghanistan, it is well to consider carefully exactly what would be lost if Syria's president, Bashar Assad, were to be deposed. For if Syria is a one-party police state, it is a police state that tends to leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics. And if political freedoms have always been severely and often brutally restricted, Assad's regime does allow the Syrian people cultural and religious freedoms. Today, these give Syria's minorities a security and stability far greater than their counterparts anywhere else in the region. This is particularly true of Syria's ancient Christian communities.
Almost everywhere else in the Levant, because of discrimination and in some cases outright persecution, the Christians are leaving. Today in the Middle East they are a small minority of 14 million; in the last 20 years at least 2 million have left to make new lives for themselves in Europe, Australia and America. Only in Syria has this pattern been resisted. As the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim, told me on my last visit: "Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East. Other than Lebanon, this is the only country in the region where a Christian can really feel the equal of a Muslim."
He added: "If Syria were not here, we would be finished. It is a place of sanctuary, a haven for all the Christians: for the Nestorians driven out of Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox and the Armenians driven out of Turkey, even the Palestinian Christians driven out by the Israelis" in 1948.
The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can't help notice the minute you arrive in the country. This is particularly so if you arrive from eastern Turkey. There, until very recently, minority languages like the Aramaic spoken by Syrian Orthodox Christians were banned from the airwaves and from schools. For Christianity in eastern Turkey is a secretive affair, and the government has closed all the country's seminaries. But cross into Syria and you find a very different picture. Qamishli, the first town on the Syrian side of the frontier, is 75 percent Christian, and icons of Christ and the Virgin Mary fill shops and decorate every other car window - an extraordinary display after the furtiveness of Christianity in Turkey.
The reason for this is not hard to find. President Assad is Alawite, a Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims as heretical and disparagingly referred to as "little Christians." Indeed some scholars believe their liturgy to be partly Christian in origin. Assad's father, Hafez, who was president from 1971 until his death in 2000, kept himself in power by forming what was in effect a coalition of Syria's religious minorities through which he was able to counterbalance the Sunni majority. In the Assads' Syria, Christians have done particularly well: in his final years, five of Hafez's seven closest advisers were Christians. The Christians are openly fearful that if the Assad regime should fall, their last real haven in the Middle East will disappear and be replaced by yet another fundamentalist government, as may be the case in Iraq.
All this does not excuse the repressive policies of the Assad regime. But in a region where repression is the rule rather than the exception, it is important to remember that the political rights and wrongs are rather more complex than the neoconservatives and Pentagon hawks are prepared to acknowledge - or perhaps even know.
William Dalrymple is author of "From the Holy Mountain: Travels
Among the Christians of the Middle East" and "White Mughals:
Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India."
3. - The Los Angeles Times - "Kurds Seeking Justice for Longtime Tormentor":
Witnesses gather evidence of killings and rapes they say were ordered by provincial governor, a feared Baathist who walks free.
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq / June 8, 2003
By Carol J. Williams
rom a crowded cell several blocks from the execution grounds here, Sadika Qadir heard the staccato reports of the firing squad and knew that her son was dead.
For the crime of having raised a critic of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, she too paid dearly. With her six remaining children, she was first imprisoned for three years in cells crammed with consumptive mothers and wailing infants, then exiled to an arid village on the plains north of Baghdad.
Her husband, Faiq Faris Aziz, escaped the regime's clutches but not its torture. It fell to him, as the only family member still free, though in hiding, to rescue his son's corpse from the mass grave where his body and those of other executed students had had been dumped. Alone in the predawn darkness, he carried the lifeless remains on his shoulders a quarter mile to rebury him in this Kurdish city's Cemetery of the Martyrs.
But what torments the parents of Hiwa Faiq now, more than the loss of their son or memories of the nocturnal grave robbing, is that the provincial governor who ordered the public execution still walks free and faces no immediate threat of justice.
Sheik Jaafar Abdulkarim, the feared Baath Party potentate accused by Kurds of dozens, if not hundreds, of political killings from 1980 to 1989, didn't make the U.S.-compiled most-wanted list of former Iraqi officials.
That is an oversight the victims' families are bent on correcting. In Kurdistan, the ethnic Kurd region of northern Iraq, a campaign is on to find, arrest and prosecute the sheik, thought to be living an hour's drive west of here in the U.S.-patrolled, oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
"The U.S. military must not shelter people who have committed crimes," said Barhim Salih, prime minister of eastern Kurdistan, who has passed on documentation of Abdulkarim's alleged atrocities to U.S. troops in Kirkuk.
Intimating that he soon expects the former governor's arrest and extradition to Kurdish-held territory, Salih said he assured U.S. forces that Abdulkarim would be granted a fair trial and provided an attorney.
"This has to do with justice and healing," said Salih, explaining that a regional war crimes tribunal is being assembled here in anticipation of a national or international forum for bringing to light the worst abuses committed by the deposed Baath Party regime.
Grieving relatives of those allegedly slain on Abdulkarim's orders are eager to see him in the public dock.
"He took inhuman pleasure in what he did," Sadika Qadir said of the man venomously referred to by Kurds as Sheik Jaafar. "He led the crowd in applause afterward, then went to shake the hands of those who shot our sons."
Lawyers and judges putting together the tribunal and collecting affidavits from victims insist on swift action to prevent the wanted parties from slipping away. While Iraq is already coming to grips with the legacy of Baath Party rule, a formal effort to expose the regime's crimes is likely years down the road.
"It's not a matter of revenge. It's a right of the public to see justice done. This was done with the Nazis at Nuremberg and with war criminals from Yugoslavia," said Hamid Bilbas, head of the Jurists Assn. of Kurdistan, about plans to prosecute those who abused power. "The public has a right to confront these people."
Abdulkarim is accused by regional authorities of ordering summary executions, gang rapes, destruction of Kurdish homes and mass detentions of anyone suspected of supporting the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a then-outlawed opposition party. He is also accused of jailing whole families, including infants, as a terror tactic.
Bilbas said that many of the 7 million Iraqis who belonged to the Baath Party were professionals with little association to the regime. Many joined because affiliation was essential to their advancement, he said. It is only those who willfully applied Hussein's repressive policies who should be brought before the tribunal, he said.
At the Sulaymaniyah House of Justice, investigating Judge Omar Ahmed said accusations have been brought against several former Iraqi officials who were in power before a 1991 Kurdish uprising that compelled most senior Baath Party figures to take refuge for a short time in Baghdad or nearby Kirkuk.
"Most of the complaints have to do with Sheik Jaafar. He is accused of killing people without cause and without judicial proceedings," said Ahmed. "Victims were brought to the place of execution and crowds assembled to applaud once the firing squads had done their work."
Abdulkarim left Sulaymaniyah for Kirkuk in 1989 after he was promoted to head a governing council for all of northern Iraq, said Kurdish police Maj. Mohammed Tahir, whose precinct has taken testimony from three families seeking the arrest and prosecution of the former governor.
They claim that Abdulkarim had his own brother-in-law killed so he could abandon his wife without fear of retribution by the woman's male relatives, who would have defended her honor.
Television announcements that aired in April alerted victims to the tribunal's work. Hiwa Faiq's parents were among the first to respond to the Kurdistan government appeal for testimony against Abdulkarim. Dozens of others followed suit.
Gathering evidence of killings, rapes and beatings inflicted as long ago as two decades has been painful for the families. But witnesses such as Nazira Mustafa Ali, whose 17-year-old son, Sardar Osman Faraj, was executed alongside Faiq on Dec. 17, 1985, say they are determined to see the sheik face justice.
"I have no more fear now. From the moment Iraq was liberated I felt as though my two sons had been brought back to me," said Faraj's mother. Unknown assassins killed a second son, Rebwer, in 1992. She has had a carpet woven with the images of the young men, which hangs in her living room.
"They were martyrs for our freedom; their father as well, as he died from the grief and hardship we suffered at the hands of Sheik Jaafar," said the 60-year-old widow. The only salve for her losses, she said, would be seeing Abdulkarim face trial.
While memories of the former governor burn fiercely among Kurds throughout this region, U.S. officers searching for senior Baathist fugitives contend they know nothing of Abdulkarim. The civil affairs chief for the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division in the Kirkuk region, Maj. Jeff Cantor, said he is unaware of any Kurdish request for Abdulkarim's arrest or extradition.
"We don't know what criteria the Americans used to create their list. They didn't ask us, as we would certainly have added the name of Sheik Jaafar," said Talar Latif, a young lawyer helping to form the tribunal. "The Americans' list shifts the light away from so many other criminals."
Faiq's brother, Hemin, a successful engineer who rebuilt his parents' ruined home, argues that bringing Abdulkarim to trial would make good on prewar promises of building a law-abiding and democratic Iraq.
"We are seeking justice for our brother, not revenge," he said. "If it were otherwise, we would take the tribal path and take matters into our own hands."
Like the Faiq and Faraj families, Mohammed Qadir and his wife, Nusrat, say they can better endure dredging up the painful memories than seeing the alleged tormentor go unpunished.
Their 20-year-old son, Howreh, was executed in April 1986 after another roundup of suspected opponents of the Baathist regime. They lost a second son to psychological disorders in 1993, and buried him next to Howreh.
"We were forbidden even to have a funeral. Sheik Jaafar's men told us our house would be destroyed if even one relative came to console us," said Qadir, whose spare living room is adorned with a photo of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "The security men came anyway and smashed our furniture and dishes."
"I say to Nusrat that at least we know where our son is buried and can go to see him now," said the 72-year-old Qadir. "Our tears are for those parents who never learned what happened to their children."
Mohammed Rawf, a Kurdish police lieutenant who takes affidavits from victims, contends that Abdulkarim also was involved in the 1988 attack on Kurds in Halabja, which included chemical weapons.
Abdulkarim "is the one who reported the peshmergas in Halabja," Rawf said, referring to the Kurdish fighters who rose up against the regime. "He was the one who went house to house in search of peshmergas and blew up the houses of Kurds."
What made Abdulkarim's actions more galling for victims was that he is also a Kurd. Kurds had come to expect discrimination from the Arab leadership in Baghdad, but not such mistreatment from a Kurd.
"A Kurd betraying Kurds is more treacherous than Arabs persecuting
Kurds," said Qadir. "I cannot imagine it. It would be like
cutting off parts of your own body."
4. - The Jerusalem Post - "Give the Kurds a state":
by Shlomo Avineri
June 8, 2003
The current difficulties faced by the United States and the United Kingdom in building representative structures in Iraq are obvious and could have been foreseen: Democracy cannot be easily exported, and the uneven success of democratization in post-Soviet Eastern Europe suggests that one has to take history and political tradition into account as the main ingredients of transition to democracy.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are success stories and Russia is a problematic case precisely because their histories and political cultures are so different.
The general lack of democratic and liberal traditions in the Arab world makes the hopes for an easy transition to democracy in Iraq even dimmer.
Where are the legitimate role models in Arab political culture past and present on which liberal democracy can be built in Iraq? Certainly not in a repressive fundamentalist Saudi Arabia or a semi-authoritarian Egypt (let alone Syria or Libya).
Yet Iraq may be an especially difficult case, given its own history
and ethnic and religious composition.
Perhaps the best way to restructure Iraq as a reasonably non-repressive
society is to admit that the stitching together in the 1920s by the
British of three erstwhile Ottoman provinces (Mosul, Baghdad and Basra)
into one body politic was bound to lead to it becoming even before
Saddam the most repressive regime in the Arab region.
With a coherent Kurdish region in the north and a majority Shi'ite population in the south, the Sunni elites of central Iraq found themselves thrown into an almost impossible task of ruling two large minorities reluctant to be ruled by a third one.
The history of Iraq in the 20th century has been one of constant repression and massacres of its Kurdish and Shi'ite minorities as well as of Christian Assyrians and Turcomans by the Sunni-ruled Baghdad central government.
Saddam's use of poison gas against his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja was only the latest of a long list of atrocities perpetrated by Sunni-dominated Iraqi regimes against the other ethnic and religious groups.
THE MOST obvious route toward a less repressive political culture in Iraq would be to accept the right of the Kurds in the north to self-determination. Just as the Palestinians have a right not to live under Israeli rule, so the Kurds in northern Iraq have a right not to live under Arab rule if they so wish.
There is nothing holy in the commitment to "preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq." Preserving the territorial integrity of a country makes sense only so long as the country itself remains a coherent entity. When this is no longer the case as turned out in the last decades with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia legitimacy disappears and other alternatives have to be sought.
The only thing that stands in the way of Kurdish self determination is realpolitik: Turkey, with its repressive policies toward its own Kurdish minority, would not tolerate a Kurdish state carved out of northern Iraq.
But just as Israeli claims cannot trump Palestinian rights to self-determination, so Turkish claims should not allowed to trump the rights of the Kurds of Northern Iraq to a polity of their own.
And after its ambivalent role in the Iraq war, Turkey carries much less weight with the US than before.
The Kurds are obviously a nation though, like many emergent nations, still in a process of national formation. The experience of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia even of Czechoslovakia has shown that where deep national rifts exist the attempt to force different nationalities into a procrustean bed causes friction, outbursts of violence and certainly is a hindrance toward democratic development.
While the atrocities of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia are a terrible blot on European history, there is no doubt today that Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia have a better chance of democratic development as independent states than if formulas were still being attempted to work out the kind of ethnic internal "balance" that led to the emergence of such autocratic nationalists as Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman.
And the future of democratic development in Kosovo depends ultimately on the province not being part of a Serbia in which Albanians would be a minority feared by the majority Serbs and themselves wishing to cut loose from the Serbian yoke.
This is not a universal formula for ethnic states. But in areas of violent ethnic clashes minorities have a right to create their own sovereign communities; and what is almost universally considered to be the right to the Palestinians should apply also to the Kurds in Iraq.
Arab public opinion, which has been universally supportive and rightly so of the Palestinian right of self-determination, will obviously see another American, if not outright Zionist, plot in any attempt to create a Kurdish state.
It may be difficult to exorcise such Arab demons, yet universal values
demand granting the Kurds a place in the sun. Paradoxically, the rest
of Arab Iraq may then also have a better chance for a non-repressive
future.
The author is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
5. - Middle East Online - "Cyprus Signs MoU With British Military":
NICOSIA / 09 June 2003
The Republic of Cyprus has agreed to maintain the large British military presence on the divided island.
The republic signed a memorandum of understanding last week with Britain regarding its military presence on the island. Officials said the MoU lists the responsibility of each side regarding the soverign British military base areas.
Britain has maintained two large bases since Cypriot independence more than 40 years ago. They include an air force base at Akrotiri and another facility at Dhekelia. The air force is the largest British facility outside the country.
Cypriot Foreign Minister George Iacovou said the MoU provides for
the "clear distinguishing of authorities, obligations and abilities
between Cyprus and the United Kingdom." Iacovou said the MoU
will be attached to the protocol on the sovereign base area in Cyprus
and annexed to the Accession Treaty of Cyprus to the European Union.
6. - Monday Morning (Lebanon) - "Turkey: Fashion show revives veil controversy":
09 June 2003
In Turkey, a mainly Muslim but secular country, the controversy over
Islamic headscarves has reared its head again -- this time because
of a fashion show.
Models strolling down a catwalk in clothes fashioned to fit the precepts
of the Islamic dress code are not uncommon in the country, but plans
by a pro-Islamic charity to hold the show in a former palace closely
associated with the founder of the Turkish Republic proved to be a
step too far.
The pro-establishment press and secular parliamentarians immediately
criticized the show and the fact it was under the aegis of the veiled
wife of Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc, who belongs to the ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP), a conservative movement some
consider suspect because of its Islamist past.
The protests forced the parade to be moved from the palace, which
is now a government guesthouse, to a hotel.
Strongly defended by supporters who see wearing the scarf as a religious
duty, officials view it as a symbol of ‘political Islam’
and a bid to bring back Islamic rule, thereby a threat to the country’s
decades-old Western-orientation.
But a recent nationwide survey suggests most people do not agree with
the ruling secular elite’s perception of the Islamic-style headscarf.
According to the study, commissioned by the liberal Milliyet daily,
a full 70 percent of those questioned, both men and women, said they
did not see the headscarf as an anti-secular symbol.
“The headscarf is the state’s own problem”, said Ali
Carkoglu of the Sabanci University, whose 1999 research for an influential
think tank showed that a majority of Turks did not wish to replace
the civil code with the Sharia (Islamic religious law).
“There is no public alarm over people readying to take to the
streets to demand Sharia rules... It would be an exaggeration to see
the headscarf as a symbolic representation of those who want the Sharia”,
he said.
The Milliyet survey, polling 1,881 adults, suggested that an average
64.2 percent of women in Turkey covered their heads, but it added
that only 5.4 percent of veiled women questioned described their attire
as an Islamic-style headscarf, which covers all the hair.
The majority, 77.6 percent, described theirs as a purely traditional
garb, and did not shy from allowing a little hair to show.
“The results do not point to a section of society big enough
to be perceived as a problem”, Carkoglu said.
But for the secular state, a headscarf is a headscarf and such attire
is strictly banned in public offices and universities.
Every year, students donning the veil are systematically barred from
university campuses under a tightly-enforced ban, forcing some to
exchange headscarves for a hat or a wig just to be able to complete
their education.
According to statistics obtained from Mazlumder, the only Turkish
human rights group taking an active interest in the fate of veiled
students. Some 2,200 who refused to take off their headscarves were
unable to attend lectures last year.
One proponent of the ban is Professor Zekeriya Beyaz, dean of the
theological faculty at Marmara University, who was stabbed in 2001
by a pro-headscarf student.
“Social rules cannot be customed to individuals, they can only
be general.
“Unfortunately, the headscarf is an important symbol for some
who wear it. It divides the society into two, which is very dangerous”,
he said.
The headscarf issue, according to Mazlumder, is a blatant violation
of basic liberties.
“The problem is not a religious one of whether a woman should
cover her head or not. It stems from the attempts of the elite minority
to impose their own lifestyle on the public”, the association’s
deputy president, Ayhan Bilgen, said.