5
May 2003
2. "Iraqi Kurds want Syrian backing for stable Iraq", a leading Iraqi Kurdish group said Sunday it had briefed the Syrian government on its role in efforts to form a national government following the ousting of President Saddam Hussein.
3. "Cyprus gov’t pins hopes on Erdogan", the Cypriot government expressed its hope that a visit to the occupied north by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 9 will help the resumption of negotiations for the reunification of the island.
4. "Eastern Kurds at risk in South and North Kurdistan", UN agency and Turkish government withhold resettlement and protection
5. "Kurdish Areas show difficulties of forming new Iraq", twelve-year-old Soran Taha Ahmed may be the future of Iraq, but he doesn't speak much Arabic and has never traveled outside of the Kurdish-run enclave where he has lived his entire life.
6. "Will Turkish politics be free from military's effect?", the recent National Security Council (MGK) meeting enabled Turkey, which follows the agenda out of its borders, to turn into its own borders.
1. - Cape Times (South Africa) - "Quake exposed an 'avalanche of abuses'":
Celtiksuyu, Turkey / May 05, 2003
The search for survivors of Turkey's latest earthquake ended on Sunday when rescue workers pulled the bodies of two 14 year-old boys from the debris of a boarding school buried in the tremor.
The final official toll in Thursday's quake stood at 167 dead and 520 injured, Bingol provincial governor Avni Cos told Anatolia news agency.
The earthquake, measuring 6,4 on the Richter scale, completely destroyed 82 homes and damaged 1 100 others in the mainly Kurdish region.
At the school in Celtiksuyu, where 198 pupils were asleep in dormitories when the earthquake struck, 84 children and one teacher died and 114 survived, said the governor.
'Political reasons share responsibility for this'
The discovery of the bodies of the boys, Alican Celik and Cihat Avci,
meant an end to the desperate search.
Bulldozers began clearing the tangled concrete and steel wreckage of the four-storey building.
Bulent Arinc, speaker of Turkey's parliament in Ankara, wept as he witnessed the devastation.
"Political reasons share responsibility for this murder," he said in a reference to corruption that has allowed builders to skirt safety regulations.
The newspaper Vatan Sunday quoted a report by the architects and engineers' association in Celtiksuyu slamming the poor quality of construction in the village.
The dormitory, the most fragile of the school's three buildings, was found to be in breach of building regulations: the walls' iron reinforcements were only loosely linked together and the load bearing columns did not conform to construction guidelines.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who travelled to Bingol following the disaster, has pledged permanent new housing by winter for all who lost their homes.
Erdogan said the earthquake had exposed an "avalanche of abuses", and vowed to punish those responsible.
A tearful crowd applauded the rescue teams as they left the school site.
About 1 000 minor aftershocks have shaken the country. The latest
at 2pm on Sunday in western Turkey measured 4,4 on the Richter scale.
- Sapa-
2.
- Reuters - "Iraqi Kurds want Syrian backing for stable Iraq":
DAMASCUS / 05 May 2003
A leading Iraqi Kurdish group said Sunday it had briefed the Syrian government on its role in efforts to form a national government following the ousting of President Saddam Hussein.
"We stressed that we are aspiring for the support of our brethren in Syria to back stability and security in Iraq," Barham Saleh, prime minister of one of the two Kurdish factions controlling the Kurd-majority enclave in northern Iraq.
"We informed them of our visions and discussed with them the techniques that will be followed to form an independent [Iraqi] national government," he told a news conference.
Saleh, from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, did not elaborate but said: "Syria certainly has an important and unique political weighting."
Earlier he met Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam and deputy secretary general of Syria's ruling Socialist Arab Baath Party, Abdullah al-Ahmar.
"We agreed to keep the Syrian leadership in the picture of developments," he said.
Saleh reiterated Iraq's Kurds had no separatist ambitions.
"There were those who said that Kurds will seize the opportunity of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime to announce an independent Kurdish state...but the Kurdish leadership did not," he said.
Turkey, Iran and Syria have had fears that U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds, who have controlled the northern enclave since 1991, could try to solidify their autonomy into an independent state.
They fear that, in turn, could fuel separatism among their own Kurdish minorities.
Pacifying Turkish concern over Kurdish militias, Saleh said the militias would merge into a unified Iraqi army "that seeks to protect Iraq instead of oppressing Iraqis."
U.S.-led forces started to disarm Kurdish factions in April, answering
calls from Ankara, which keeps a few thousand troops in the Kurdish-run
north.
3. - Kathimerini - "Cyprus gov’t pins hopes on Erdogan":
Turkish force reduction?
05 May 2003
As the traffic between the two sides of Cyprus continued unabated yesterday, the Cypriot government expressed its hope that a visit to the occupied north by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 9 will help the resumption of negotiations for the reunification of the island.
Government spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides told Greek state TV channel NET yesterday that Greek and Turkish Cypriots have proven, beyond any doubt, that they can coexist without the troubles of the years leading up to the Turkish invasion in 1974.
The free mingling of the two communities, Chrysostomides said, also affects several aspects of the peace plan presented by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
The Annan proposals, rejected earlier this year as a basis for negotiation by Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, contained provisions that would bar the majority of Greek Cypriots who had fled their homes in the north from settling back there in the coming years. A cap on internal migration was provided for in the Annan plan in order to satisfy the fears of the Turkish-Cypriot minority about a violent Greek-Cypriot takeover.
That memories run deep on the island was illustrated yesterday by a serious incident in the village of Aghia Irini, near Kyrenia in the north. Greek Cypriot Andreas Constantinou, visiting Turkish-occupied Aghia Irini, was accused by an old woman of killing Turkish Cypriots during the Turkish invasion, and was nearly lynched by angry Turkish Cypriots. He was saved by another group of Turkish Cypriots and safely returned to the Ledra Palace checkpoint in Nicosia.
Sources said yesterday Erdogan, during his upcoming visit, would call for a reduction in the 40,000-strong Turkish occupying force. Erdogan has often made conciliatory statements on the Cyprus issue, sometimes berating Denktash for his intransigence.
Chrysostomides said Cyprus would welcome an Erdogan announcement
for the handover of the occupied town of Famagusta to UN or Greek-Cypriot
control. Denktash yesterday said this would happen only if its port
was used to export goods from the north.
4.
- KurdishMedia - "Eastern Kurds at risk in South and North
Kurdistan":
UN agency and Turkish government withhold resettlement and protection
4 May 2003
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warehoused more than 5,000 Kurdish Iranian refugees indefinitely in Northern Iraq and Turkey within arm¹s reach of their persecutors, Iranian Refugees¹ Alliance said in a new report released today. UNHCR, the governments of Turkey and Iraq and the international community are failing to protect Iranian Kurdish refugees in these two countries, and should arrange their prompt resettlement to third countries. At the time of release, post-Saddam Iraq occupied by the US and UK forces is a scene of severe humanitarian crisis and great uncertainty. For the moment and even after regime change, third country resettlement for Iranian refugees is likely to remain their only reliable protection and durable solution.
"Iran-backed assassins are persecuting & killing members of this vulnerable group of refugees in Northern Iraq for years, but when the refugees flee to find safety in Turkey UNHCR denies them support and protection by calling them ’irregular movers’ and strikes them from the public record," said Iranian Refugees¹ Alliance¹s director, Deljou Abadi. "UNHCR¹s policies are not just harming these people but also isolating them from international concern."
In recent years, Iranian refugees have paid dearly for UNHCR¹s so-called irregular mover policy. In June 1998 "irregular mover" Karim Tujali was arrested by Turkish police and handed over to the Iranian authorities. After imprisonment and torture Karim Tujali was executed by hanging on January 20, 2002.
The 50-page report, entitled Off the radar screen: UNHCR/Government neglect imperils thousands of Iranian Kurdish refugees in Turkey and Northern Iraq, documents the plight of four thousand people still trapped in Northern Iraq and more than one thousand refugees who have fled from Northern Iraq to Turkey since early 2001.
The report presents public documents and interviews with Iranian refugees to show how Iranian dissidents forced to shelter in the unstable Kurdish autonomous zone are exposed to the Iranian government¹s escalating campaign of violence and intimidation. UNHCR concedes that these refugees¹ only hope of permanent safety is resettlement, but it has suspended all resettlement since 1999.
Left with no alternative, some refugees have moved to Turkey, where they hope they will finally reach permanent safety via resettlement. They report that UNHCR/Northern Iraq staff encouraged them to move.
Unfortunately, now that they are in Turkey, the refugees¹ position is still precarious. UNHCR/Turkey labels them as "irregular movers" (refugees who leave their country of first asylum where they have obtained "effective protection" for non-compelling reasons) and refuses to assist them. Since February 2002 the agency has also refused to register the refugees. They are therefore condemned to live in a shadow-world, struck from the public record. They receive no financial help or access to health-care, and are not permitted to work, though some do find employment on the illegal labor market. The Turkish authorities are at best uncooperative. At worst they detain the refugees and return them to Northern Iraq or even Iran.
UNHCR began to resettle Iranian refugees from Northern Iraq after the creation of the autonomous Kurdish zone in 1991, but it was always a grindingly slow and unpredictable process. UNHCR blames the Iraqi government for the 1999 resettlement suspension, saying that it refused to provide exit visas. Iraqi government officials reportedly blame UNHCR for the halt in resettlement.
UNHCR has not revealed the details behind the freeze, or explained why it has failed either to resolve the supposed exit-visa dispute, or get refugees out by other routes. However, the report shows that UNHCR/Turkey is not operating this policy in order to conserve precious and scarce opportunities for resettlement. According to its own statements, UNHCR fails to fill thousands of third government offers for resettlement places every year.
For brief periods (in 1995-1996 and in 2000) UNHCR completely reversed its policy. In 2000, it resettled 550 refugees in a few short months. "Right now, UNHCR is an immovable obstacle in the path of this group of people seeking safety, but for brief periods, when it decided to put refugees¹ interests first, it showed how effective it could be in moving them swiftly out of harm¹s way" said Abadi.
To read the report, off the radar screen: UNHCR/Government neglect
imperils thousands of Iranian Kurdish refugees in Turkey and Northern
Iraq, please see http://www.irainc.org/text/pub/NIreport2.pdf
5. - Associated Press - "Kurdish Areas show difficulties of forming new Iraq":
IRBIL, Iraq / 04 May 2003
by Louis Meixler
Twelve-year-old Soran Taha Ahmed may be the future of Iraq, but he doesn't speak much Arabic and has never traveled outside of the Kurdish-run enclave where he has lived his entire life.
As top U.S. and Iraqi opposition leaders met in Baghdad this week for talks on cobbling together a new Iraq from the country's different ethnic groups, the difficulties of the task were evident at the Citadel Elementary School, where Ahmed is a student.
The area where Ahmed lives has been autonomous for the past 12 years. Its self-rule separate schools, administration, militia, even currency would seem to challenge U.S. assumptions of Iraqi nationhood with a central authority ruling over Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and Turkomen.
Ahmed's school day begins with children, all wearing black pants and white shirts, gathering in the courtyard to chant ''Long Live Kurdistan.'' His classes are in Kurdish and, although he is learning Arabic and English, he says he is not very good at languages.
In the classrooms, pictures of Mullah Mustafa Barzani hang above the blackboard. Barzani was a legendary Kurdish leader and the father of Massoud Barzani, the head of Kurdistan Democratic Party, which rules about half the autonomous enclave.
''We have lived in almost total isolation from the center,'' said Shafiq Qazzaz, the Kurdish official in charge of humanitarian aid in the region.
Kurdish leaders have said they want to be part of a unified Iraq, but their vision of one country includes a strong locally ruled Kurdish enclave.
Iraq's neighbors Turkey, Syria and Iran have Kurdish minorities and are wary of Kurdish self-rule in neighboring Iraq, fearing it could inspire Kurdish nationalists on their territory. Many Kurds fear those countries could destabilize the Iraqi Kurdish-run enclave should it grow too powerful.
Forming a new national government ''is not going to be easy,'' said Fadhil Mirani, a top leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The KDP and the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan control separate parts of the enclave.
Many Kurds have said that they want an independent state but have agreed to limit their demands to self-rule to keep from antagonizing Iraq's neighbors.
''We are surrounded by hard geopolitics,'' Mirani said. ''We don't want to commit national suicide.''
Still, Kurdish demands are likely to be very high.
Mirani's assessment: Kurds will agree to be part of a single state. However, they will not only ask to control the largely autonomous area they run but will demand to expand it to include Kurdish-populated areas that were under Saddam Hussein's control, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. That city is already an ethnic tinderbox of Kurds, Arabs and Turks. All claim the right to run the city.
''A whole lot of areas have been liberated that we consider Kurdistan, starting with Kirkuk,'' said Qazzaz, the KDP official in charge of humanitarian aid. ''Kirkuk has always been part of Kurdistan and it must remain that.''
Kurdish militiamen patrol the city, which was seized by Kurdish fighters as Saddam's army collapsed. Turkey has warned of dispatching troops to northern Iraq to prevent Kurdish control of Kirkuk.
Kurds also are asking for an increased share of the country's oil wealth.
The Kurdish-run enclave has grown prosperous. The Kurds have several newspapers, hold elections and are allowed free access to the Internet. The Kurdish-run area also has its own militias and uses pre-1991 Iraqi currency not used in the rest of Iraq.
The area was formed in 1991 with the help of the United States and its allies after Saddam crushed a Kurdish revolt after the Gulf War.
Some of its prosperity came from a U.N. program that allowed Iraq to sell its oil and buy food and other supplies.
Mirani said Kurds want a new share of the oil wealth that would be expanded from the current 13 percent to include new areas that will come under Kurdish control.
''We want to be somewhat independent,'' said Fahmi Perdowid, who
owns a toy store in a market not far from the school. ''We have suffered
for a long time.''
6. - Turkish Daily News - "Will Turkish politics be free from military's effect?":
ANKARA / 05 May 2003
by Sedat Bozkurt
The recent National Security Council (MGK) meeting enabled Turkey, which follows the agenda out of its borders, to turn into its own borders. Actually, the first sign for Turkey to take up its own agenda once again was given during the April 23 reception. The Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal, known for his intelligence sources' diversity and reliability, boycotted the April 23 reception to engage in "politics." Of course, the boycott was not limited to CHP. Who decided first is not known, but the military and many nongovernmental organizations opposed something and they displayed their reactions during the April 23 occasion. The diversity at the boycott's front was demonstrated as appropriate to make politics. In fact, the lack of a group during the reception was enough to increase the boycott's effectiveness. This group was the military. However, they had no means to display their sensitivities concerning the boycott. Actually, they had, but they did not resort to this method as it was frequently used during the February 28 process. Instead, a political structure, which ensures what one says will only concern him, went into effect. Actually, sensitivities were not different. But, if the boycott had been conducted by only the political structure or maybe the nongovernmental organizations which back the structure, its effect would not be that much.
At the end, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government was let to perceive the system's sensitivities in a way. It was quite odd that this "system" was formed by the intervention of secondary actors besides the politics' principal actors because such kind of cooperations within the history of Turkish politics were not clearly made. Actually, Turkey, together with this, has been going through an interesting period to which it is accustomed, but it was not desired. In this period, the military's effect on the politics will be talked and discussed as usual. In fact, the debates started when Chief of Staff and commanders visited the CHP leader after their visit to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to wish "good luck." Because CHP leader Deniz Baykal's sensitivity about not engaging in politics by means of the military, including the February 28 process, was especially known by the military, even if this might be regarded strange. But, it seems that the visit made a change in this view. It might be disputable, but this time, the military engaged in politics with its own desire. Now, the system's "balance" setter is a political structure, CHP. But, it is not possible to say that it gained its strength, that is its "balance setting" power, from only the political arguments. But, CHP, which has gained power from a group that participated in the April 23 boycott for the Higher Education Board (YOK) law, eight-year education and the appointments which could be objected, will remind of his power from time to time to the AK Party government on the condition of remaining within the politics. As a matter of fact, the emphasis on the secularism principle, mentioned in the first article of the statement made after the MGK meeting, might be, in a way, the assurance of the things that will be used by CHP within the real politics.
If one looks from the military's front, it seems that Turkey has lost its red lines, willingly or unwillingly, one by one. Turkey has no concern regarding northern Iraq, actually it does, but it has nothing to do. The Cyprus issue is about to end. The European Union process functions without any delay. To put it more correctly, there is almost no issue to debate, which is to take place out of the country's borders.
Meanwhile, Turkey has a powerful ally. It is the United States. It does not seem possible that the U.S., which gives an impression of settling in Iraq for a long time, will not be too late to help Turkey, which can be attacked by any of its neighbors.
What is left is to "protect and defend" the system. That's,
it is the Republic's basic principles. But, is there a threat against
them? Or if there is, is it possible for politics to remove this?
It does not seem possible for Turkey, of which political tradition
is full of cuttings because the most important element of politics
within this geography is religion. Even if it is not directly used,
the relations established with the positions by means of religion
have been carried to the politics and even become a matter of bargaining.
What kind of drawbacks does it have? This question should actually
be responded with general lines, but let's take up this with a simple
example; "There are no absolute truths within politics, but discussions.
As for religion, the truths are absolute even if they are dogma, and
they cannot be discussed." The Turkish Republic perceived, at
its establishment stage, that one of the enemies, against which the
Republic will protect itself, is the state structure based on religion.
That is why, the state's reflexes concerning the issue were always
fresh. Although it was a secular state, much from budget was transferred
to the Religious Affairs in a bid to control the religion and enable
it to run on its own course. That is to say, one of the, at least,
most serious domestic threats apart from the foreign ones exists at
any time for those who claim to protect the system. The politics'
formation an infrastructure for this, ignorance or encouragement is
enough to activate the reflexes. To put it more correctly, Turkish
politics may be experiencing the most critical period of its history.
The accomplishment in this term might help the stones fit well in
Turkey or their unfitting for a long time.