28 November 2003

1. "Turkey tastes bitter fruit of Kurdish conflict", by 1998, the government's embarrassment at Hizbollah's brutality and the realisation that it needed to negotiate a solution to the Kurdish conflict if Turkey was ever to join the European Union, led to the army being ordered to quash Hizbollah.

2. "Turkey's Islamist monster", in July, 1993, the Turkish Hezbollah authored one of the most tragic chapters in the history of modern terrorism in Turkey. Hezbollah militants attacked a hotel in Sivas, in eastern Anatolia, where the Alevis, a moderate sect that has always supported secularism, were holding a public meeting. The attackers blocked all exits in the hotel and then set it on fire. Some 40 people were burned alive while the local police, under the control of the Rifah Party municipality, beat up those who tried to escape.

3. "A grim city nurtured Turkey's bombers", Turkey One of the men believed to be behind the Istanbul bombings in the past two weeks was a toddler when his father was killed in political violence here. According to acquaintances, the boy grew up with a hurt and a confusion that never went away.

4. "Council of Europe to resume talks on Cyprus compensation next week", the Council of Europe will resume talks next week on a lapsed ultimatum it issued to Turkey to pay long-delayed compensation for depriving a Greek Cypriot woman of her property, a council spokesman said Thursday.

1. - The Financial Times - "Turkey tastes bitter fruit of Kurdish conflict":

BINGOL / 27 November 2003 / by Mark Huband in Bingöl

Guns are all the rage at the Merkezi Internet Café on the main street through Bingöl.

Teenagers playing computer games blast away at cyber-foes on the screens that are the only brightness in an otherwise dreary room. Egging them on are youngsters who play with toy pistols, awaiting their turn on the computers.

Two weeks ago, the café's manager, Gokhan Elaltuntas, disappeared. He was next heard of when his identity card was found in the ruined truck police say he exploded - along with himself - outside a synagogue in Istanbul on November 15.

Elaltuntas' father co-owned the internet café with the brother of Azad Ekinci. Ekinci's identity card was found last Thursday in the wreckage of a car bomb investigators say he detonated outside the Istanbul headquarters of HSBC bank.

Elaltuntas and Ekinci had travelled to Istanbul with Mesut Cabuk, another friend from Bingöl, and a fourth man, Feridun Ugurlu, from Eskisehir. Cabuk's remains were found outside a second devastated synagogue, while police believe Ugurlu detonated the suicide car bomb that destroyed the British consulate in the city.

The eastern Turkish town of Bingöl is now trying to banish the belief that an Islamic terrorist cell with ties to al-Qaeda had formed on its main street.

"It's just by chance that they came from Bingöl," said Fikret Zaman, deputy provincial governor. "The citizens are very sorry that they came from here, and we haven't found that there's an organisation here that is behind this."

Police, government officials, business people and political activists were yesterday offering their greetings to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan. But the celebrations have been muted, as the bitter political rivalries between Turkey's establishment and the region's Kurdish population have been pronounced by the bombings.

"You can't just look at this issue as a bombing. You have to understand the cause in the past in order to see where it will go from here," says Ridvan Kizgin, president of the local Human Rights Association.

Extremism in eastern Turkey began when the Turkish army fighting the Kurdish separatist PKK encouraged the Kurdish Islamic group Hizbollah - unconnected to similarly-named groups in the Middle East - to lead brutal attacks on the PKK and its supporters in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Kizgin said. His view is widely shared.

"Turkish Hizbollah became a practitioner of state-sponsored terrorism," says a senior western diplomat. Its stronghold was in the town of Batman, near to Bingöl.

By 1998, the government's embarrassment at Hizbollah's brutality and the realisation that it needed to negotiate a solution to the Kurdish conflict if Turkey was ever to join the European Union, led to the army being ordered to quash Hizbollah. Arrests and killings followed, and some followers fled to join al-Qaeda.

Ekinci and Elaltuntas were probably members of Hizbollah in the early 1990s, according to officials and family friends in Bingöl, and Turkish newspaper reports. Cabuk, who formed an unofficial Islamic circle in Bingöl, also spent two years with Ekinci in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, from where they returned with heightened religious fervour.

The bombers' probable past ties to Hizbollah are now a challenge to the government, as it shows the army's role in what has since evolved. It may also be embarrassing to the Islamic conservatives of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

"Leading religious personalities in Turkey don't want to accept that there is al-Qaeda and that it is in Turkey and that these attacks were done by al-Qaeda," says Ruçen Çakir, a writer on Turkey's Islamic movement.

Kurds in Bingöl see the bombings as the legacy of past state violence against them - and believe their rights are best served by Turkey joining the EU. The government is seeking to accelerate this process. "Please write that Bingöl is a quiet place and wants to forget what has happened and look to the future," requests a senior Bingöl official.

But instead of unity there is tension. Former supporters of Turkish Hizbollah are hunting people who blame them for the bombings, while the bombers' families have been told by the authorities to say nothing.

In the Merkezi Internet Café, youths hold toy pistols to each others' heads. Others pretend they never knew the man who worked there every day as the manager. Nine hundred miles from the deaths they caused in Istanbul, the bombers of Bingöl have helped create tension and enmity. All are part of al-Qaeda's emerging strategy of stirring friction across the Islamic world.

2. - National Post - "Turkey's Islamist monster":

27 November 2003 / by Amir Taheri*

No, this was not the way that Recep Tayyip Erdogan imagined the first anniversary of his party's historic electoral victory. Earlier this year, at a meeting with a group of journalists in Switzerland, the Turkish Prime Minister spoke of his hopes for "a year of positive change" in a country thirsting for reform.

The idea, he explained, was to "speed up the process of restoring the armed forces to their proper role" and taking "the last big steps" towards Turkey's membership in the European Union while the economy, in the doldrums for a decade, would start showing signs of a turnaround.

What Erdogan had not counted on was a wave of terrorist attacks that could expose the basic weaknesses of his political strategy.

This month's attacks in Istanbul have already cast doubt on Erdogan's ability to press on with his plan to recast the Turkish republic by excluding the military leadership from politics. Many Turks, including some in Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), believe that with terrorism threatening the nation, this is no time to pick a fight with the armed forces. The attacks have already translated into an increase in popular support for the secularist parties that wish to keep the army at the centre of Turkish political life.

The terrorist attacks also undermine Erdogan's hopes of a real economic recovery. To be sure, the Turkish economy has been showing some positive signs in the past few months, partly thanks to an enlarged budget deficit. But there are already signs that the terrorist attacks are having a dampening effect on the Turkish mood as a whole. Tourism, the nation's third largest source of foreign currency, is hit in a big way while the effects on medium- and long-term investments remain to be gauged.

The third plank of Erdogan's strategy, Turkey's fast-track into the EU, is also threatened. The prospect of Turkey turning into a new battlefield for Islamist terrorism is unlikely to mobilize greater support for the Turkish aspirations within the EU.

As might have been expected, the Istanbul attacks have been conveniently attributed to al-Qaeda. The attribution suits Erdogan well.

The very mention of al-Qaeda is guaranteed to attract the attention, and hopefully the support, of Washington. Also, by pretending that the terrorists were "foreign elements," the Prime Minister can foster the illusion that the Turks are victims of an external enemy.

The truth, however, is that the terrorist attacks that have hit Istanbul are, in part at least, a result of almost a quarter of a century of attempts to " Islamicize" Turkish politics -- attempts in which Erdogan's party, and its four predecessors, played a leading part.

Turkey today is experiencing what Iran and several Arab states have experienced since the 1960s: an Islamist monster created by the establishment that ends up turning against it.

The first person to think of creating an Islamist force, at the time against the left, was prime minister Adnan Menderes, who was overthrown in a military coup and hanged in 1960.

The Islamist groups that he had encouraged, and partly financed through public funds, did not lift a finger to help him in his hour of need.

This was because, in the words of the Bektashi chiefs who had enjoyed his patronage, Menderes was not "Islamic enough."

Fast forward to the 1970s and we have Suleyman Demirel, a political heir to Menderes, playing the Islamic card. Demirel benefited tactically and managed to become prime minister on two occasions. In time, however, he, too, was ditched by his Islamist allies, who found him to be not Islamic enough.

One man who thought he had played the Islamist card to the full was Necmettin Erbakan, known to his followers as "Khojah" which means "master."

In 1996, the " Khoja" managed to turn a small Islamist party, known as Rifah (Welfare) into a senior partner in a coalition with several right-wing parties. Although the Erbakan government lasted just over a year, it managed to strengthen the Islamist groups in a number of ways, especially through government subsidies. But Erbakan, too, experienced the fate of his predecessors who had played with Islam as a political ideology against the left and liberal forces. By 1998, with his party disbanded, his career was at an end.

Out of national politics, Turkey's various Islamist-leaning parties have a 25-year history of exercising power at the municipal level. And it is at that level that they did the most damage to Turkey's political traditions.

From the mid-1980s, the Turkish Islamists forged a strange alliance with the security forces against what they regarded as "common enemies." At the time, the army saw the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a communist secessionist movement, and its other Marxist allies, as the nation's principal enemies.

Sharing that enmity, the Islamic parties joined forces with the worst elements of the army and the security services to set up a number of death squads against the PKK and other leftist and liberal groups.

The most notorious of these death squads went under the label of Hezbollah, an outfit originally created by the mullahs of Tehran but later infiltrated by Turkey's secret service (MIT).

In July, 1993, the Turkish Hezbollah authored one of the most tragic chapters in the history of modern terrorism in Turkey. Hezbollah militants attacked a hotel in Sivas, in eastern Anatolia, where the Alevis, a moderate sect that has always supported secularism, were holding a public meeting. The attackers blocked all exits in the hotel and then set it on fire. Some 40 people were burned alive while the local police, under the control of the Rifah Party municipality, beat up those who tried to escape.

By 1997, so infiltrated was the Turkish Hezbollah that Tehran decided to break ties with it and set up a new group known as Islamic Faction.

In the meantime, another Islamist terror group had come into being under the name of Grand Orient's Combatants Front. Ostensibly set up to recruit " holy warriors" to fight the Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh and the Russians in Chechnya and Daghestan, the "front" soon found it easier to kill people in Turkey itself.

Between 1985 and 2000, more than 800 people died in various acts of violence carried out by Islamist groups. And that does not include the victims of clashes between the security forces and various ethnic and religious terror groups. Those assassinated by Islamist terrorists include judges, journalists, academics, politicians, medical doctors and even housewives.

A pattern has been established over the past quarter of a century. Each time Turkish politics has taken an Islamist turn, the broader Islamist movement has become more radical and violent.

Erdogan has made the mistake that Menderes, Demirel and Erbakan made before him: assuming that the Islamist ideology could be exercised in moderation.

What they did not realize is that even if you are Islamist yourself, there will always be someone to pretend he is more Islamist than you.

In Iran, the Khomeinists who had seized power in the name of Islamism were the first victims of their own ideology. Between 1979 and 1983, more than 400 Khomeinist mullahs and politicians were murdered by Islamist militants who regarded them as not being quite Islamist enough. And in Algeria, for example, even Abbasi Madani and Ali Benhadj, the two leaders of the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) ended up top of the hit list of the GIA (The Islamic Armed Group) that regards them both as "pagans who must be put to death."

The terrorist attacks that have hit Turkey have little to do with Iraq or even rising hatred for the United States. Both Iraq and hatred for the United States are used as pretext by Islamist groups who wish to destroy Erdogan's government because they believe it is not " Islamic enough."

The only way to deal with the threat is to form a broad popular front dedicated to the values and traditions of Turkish democracy. Erdogan can take the lead in that direction. But before he does, he must realize that anyone who mixes politics and religion risks having that mix explode in his face.

*Amir Taheri is an Iranian author of 10 books on the Middle East and Islam.

3. - The New York Times - "A grim city nurtured Turkey's bombers":

BINGOL / 27 Novemeber 2003 / by Frank Bruni

Turkey One of the men believed to be behind the Istanbul bombings in the past two weeks was a toddler when his father was killed in political violence here. According to acquaintances, the boy grew up with a hurt and a confusion that never went away.

Another watched his mother fall sick and die when he, too, was just a boy. He came to live with his aunt here, said a family friend, and remained with her even after his father remarried and had more children with a new wife. Those painful personal circumstances may help explain how the men ended up on the path they apparently chose.

But many local residents suggested that there was another, larger factor: Bingol itself. Devoutly Muslim, predominantly Kurdish and utterly remote in eastern Turkey, it is a desolate and desperate place where good jobs are almost nonexistent, money is scarce and a sense of oppression pervades.

At least two of the suicide bombers who struck Istanbul last week were from Bingol, Turkish law-enforcement officials said. They were Mesut Cabuk, 29, and Gokhan Elaltuntas, 22, who drove trucks that exploded outside two Istanbul synagogues. Cabuk was the motherless boy.

A third man from Bingol, Azad Ekinci, 27, has been accused of helping to plan those attacks and, some investigators said, may have been one of the suicide bombers who later struck British targets in Istanbul. He is the man who never knew his father.

Some local officials and investigators have said these men, identified by the authorities as Turks, spent time in Pakistan and had strong connections to Turkish Hezbollah, a militant Islamic group that thrived here a decade ago.

To the extent that the group still exists, most local residents at least publicly denounce it, and they also denounced the Istanbul bombings.

But some residents have also acknowledged that Bingol, with its economic hopelessness and history of factional violence, may be as potent a cradle for terrorists as any other.

"I was not surprised that they came from Bingol," said Ferhat Ozdaglar, an unemployed 24-year-old.

Isolated by mountains, Bingol has about 70,000 people, said Servet Beki, the mayor's secretary. Its crude concrete buildings look as if they could accommodate only half that many.

Unemployment fluctuates between 70 percent and 80 percent, local officials and residents said. Many people survive on summer jobs in Istanbul and money sent by relatives in Germany.

The Kurds here lived for decades under the iron grip of the Turkish military, which battled Kurdish militants and suppressed Kurdish culture. Many residents said the Turkish government, in the past, actually encouraged and aided Islamic extremists in the area, because they fought the Kurds.

There was also fighting between rightist Turkish nationalists and people with leftist beliefs. Beki said Ekinci's father was in the latter group.

In interviews this week, relatives of Elaltuntas insisted that he was not affiliated with any militant or radical groups, describing him as a conventionally devout, gentle man who must have been duped into whatever he did.

"When we would go hunting and shoot birds, he would hesitate to cut off their heads," said Ramaran Elaltuntas, a cousin. "He was that soft."

But on several instances Monday when those relatives ran into local police officers, they turned their backs, as if angry. Residents of Bingol with relatives who have been pulled into Islamic extremism often blame the government. The Muslims in Bingol are conservative. Mosques are jammed at prayer time. All but a few women wear head scarves, and many older women cover themselves in black from head to toe. The Ramadan fast is taken so seriously that residents cautioned one visitor not even to chew gum in public.

Residents say they abhor Islamic extremism, but it does exist here, and several residents said Ekinci embraced it.

Ahmet Kara, who knew him, said that in recent years, Ekinci had grown his beard long, donned a white religious robe and voiced anger at Israel and the United States. Kara described him as lonely and resentful.

"Children who lose their fathers early, in our society, feel oppressed, discriminated against," Kara said. "He was a walking bomb."

4. - AFP - "Council of Europe to resume talks on Cyprus compensation next week":

STRASBOURG / 27 November 2003

The Council of Europe will resume talks next week on a lapsed ultimatum it issued to Turkey to pay long-delayed compensation for depriving a Greek Cypriot woman of her property, a council spokesman said Thursday.

"Delegates reached no conclusion and suspended talks on this issue until next week," the spokesman said.

The Council of Europe on November 13 issued an ultimatum giving Turkey until November 19 to pay some 700,000 dollars the European Court of Human Rights awarded to Titina Loizidou in 1998 for depriving her of property rights in the Turkish-held north of divided Cyprus.

The ultimate sanction facing countries which refuse to obey the court's rulings is expulsion from the Council of Europe. Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops occupied the island's northern part in response to an Athens-engineered coup seeking union with Greece.