16 February 2005

1. "Turkish Police, Kurds Clash on Eve of Ocalan Anniversary", violence mars Turkish Kurds' rallys.

2. "Police clash with pro-Ocalan protestors in Turkey", at least 18 people were injured and 70 others detained across Turkey Tuesday when police clashed with Kurdish activists at demonstrations marking the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan six years ago. Kurdish activists have long been calling for Ocalan's transfer to an ordinary jail, but their appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears in Ankara.

3. "Turkey not going far enough to uphold minorities' rights: Council of Europe", Turkey must step up human rights reform. A leading European human rights watchdog called Tuesday on Turkey to step up reforms to protect minorities, saying Kurds, Gypsies and other groups continued to suffer discrimination and mistreatment. (..) The body also called for action to resolve problems it said were facing the Kurds, especially those displaced within the country, as well as the Roma (Gypsies) and minority religious groups.

4. "Dozens of Minority Ethnic Groups Lack Citizenship Rights", similarly, many Kurds, who live mainly in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, have also been deprived of full citizenship rights in each of those countries from time to time, and as many as 300,000 still deprived of citizenship and banned from public-sector employment in Syria, while some four million Palestinians scattered throughout the Arab world are officially stateless.

5. "Turkey's homosexuals call for stronger EU support", homosexuals in Turkey believe the European Union has failed to lend them adequate support and expect Brussels to speak out in favor of their struggle for equal rights in the mainly Muslim nation, activists said Tuesday.

6. "Iraq: Kurdish Victory In Kirkuk Raises Ethnic Tensions", Iraqi Kurds have won a majority of seats on the provincial council for the northern region that includes the tense, ethnically diverse city of Kirkuk. Ankara has often said it is ready to intervene in northern Iraq to protect the rights of the Turkomans and to assure that Kirkuk does not become the Iraqi Kurds' capital. The threats reflect Ankara's fears that any measures that would give the Iraqi Kurds greater political or financial independence would only encourage Turkey's own Kurdish minority to seek similar rights. Ankara recently suppressed a 15-year rebellion over autonomy demands by the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

7. "Kurdish leader Talabani poised for Iraq presidency", Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader positioned to become the country's next president, crowned a lifelong struggle for Kurdish rights with huge success in the country's historic Jan. 30 election.

8. "Middle East, Syria jails 15 Kurds for 'separatism'", Syria’s state security court jailed 15 Syrian Kurds for up to three years on Tuesday on charges of seeking a breakaway state, lawyers said. Several banned Kurdish political groupings in Syria, whose Kurdish community is estimated at about 2 million people, demand the right to teach their language. They also demand citizenship which is required for state education and employment for about 200,000 Kurds classified as stateless based on a 1962 survey.

1. - VOA - "Turkish Police, Kurds Clash on Eve of Ocalan Anniversary":

15 February 2005

Turkish Kurdish protester runs away from riot police during a demonstration in Istanbul Kurdish protesters clashed with police in demonstrations across Turkey on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the capture of Kurdish rebel commander Abdullah Ocalan.

In the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, police used batons and tear gas to disperse several hundred protesters, who responded by throwing stones at police. Several police and protesters were injured, and at least 40 other people were detained.

In Istanbul, demonstrators placed a black wreath outside the Greek consulate to denounce that country's role in Ocalan's capture.

Protests were also reported in the cities of Mersin and Izmir.

Abdullah Ocalan led the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. He was captured in Nairobi, Kenya on February 16, 1999, after he was forced to leave the Greek embassy, where he had taken refuge. That June, a Turkish court sentenced him to death, but it was later commuted to life in prison.

2. - AFP - "Police clash with pro-Ocalan protestors in Turkey":

DIYARBAKIR / 15 February 2005 / by Mahmut Bozarslan

At least 18 people were injured and 70 others detained across Turkey Tuesday when police clashed with Kurdish activists at demonstrations marking the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan six years ago.

The most troubled protest was in Diyarbakir, the central city of the mainly Kurdish southeast, where 15 people were hurt and 55 others taken into custody.

"End the isolation," read banners held by a crowd of some 300 activists, referring to Ocalan's solitary confinement on a prison island in northwestern Turkey since his capture in Kenya on February 15, 1999.

Kurdish activists have long been calling for Ocalan's transfer to an ordinary jail, but their appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears in Ankara.

Police moved on the demonstrators, using truncheons and tear gas, when they refused to disperse after reading out a press statement and demanded to also stage a march and a sit-in.

The injured included policemen hurt by stones hurled by the crowd.

In Istanbul, riot police sprayed pepper gas on a crowd of several hundred people who attempted to march to the Greek consulate to denounce Greece's role in Ocalan's capture.

The protestors responded by throwing stones which they had ripped out of the pavement, breaking also the windows of several buildings nearby.

Turkish agents nabbed Ocalan in Nairobi after he was forced to leave the Greek embassy there, where he had been offered refuge for several days while on the run.

Police allowed a small group to lay a black wreath outside the consulate.

In the western city of Izmir, protestors armed with stones and molotov cocktails and chanting pro-Ocalan slogans also clashed with the police, leaving three people injured and one in custody, Anatolia news agency reported.

In Mersin, on Turkey's southern coast, riot police, backed by an armored vehicle, disrupted a demonstration in which the protestors set bonfires in the streets, television footage showed.

Fourteen people were detained, the NTV news channel reported.

Hundreds of Kurds also took to the streets in the southern French city of Marseille to call for Ocalan's release.

Appeals ignored

Kurdish activists have long been calling for Ocalan's transfer to an ordinary jail, but their appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears in Ankara.

Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), was condemned to death in June 1999, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2001 following Turkey's abolition of capital punishment as part of reforms to embrace European Union norms.

The PKK waged a bloody armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in southeast Turkey between 1984 and 1999, with the conflict claiming some 37,000 lives.

The rebels ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with Ankara last June.

3. - AFP - "Turkey not going far enough to uphold minorities' rights: Council of Europe":

Turkey must step up human rights reform

STRASBOURG / 15 February 2005

A leading European human rights watchdog called Tuesday on Turkey to step up reforms to protect minorities, saying Kurds, Gypsies and other groups continued to suffer discrimination and mistreatment.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) said that, despite reforms already implemented by the Turkish government, "there are still some gaps" in legislation.

The organisation, an independent human rights monitoring body formed by the 46-nation Council of Europe, urged Turkey to strengthen constitutional, civil, criminal and administrative safeguards to combat racism and discrimination.

One of its recommendations was the creation of a national agency to combat racism, partly to monitor what was being done and what was needed and partly to raise awareness of the problem.

In other recommendations, ECRI highlighted a "need to reinforce respect for the rights of immigrants, irrespective of their legal status, asylum seekers, refugees and victims of trafficking in human beings."

The body also called for action to resolve problems it said were facing the Kurds, especially those displaced within the country, as well as the Roma (Gypsies) and minority religious groups.

"Major constitutional and legislative reforms have been introduced, aimed at reinforcing fundamental rights and freedoms and combating racism and racial discrimination more effectively," ECRI said.

"There has been some progress as regards freedom of expression, particularly in languages other than Turkish, freedom of assembly and freedom of association for members of ethnic and religious minority groups."

However, it went on to list areas where there were still flaws.

Religious freedom should be improved, notably by removing the reference to religion on identity cards and abolishing compulsory religious education in schools, it urged.

"Although progress has been made in the fight against torture and impunity, some members of minority groups, in particular Kurds and immigrants, are allegedly subjected to ill-treatment by law-enforcement officials," it went on.

"No sanctions have been taken against intolerant expressions and acts directed at minority groups by sections of the media and members of the public. There is still no national specialised body to combat racism and intolerance."

4. - IPS - "Dozens of Minority Ethnic Groups Lack Citizenship Rights":

WASHINGTON / 15 February 2005 / by Jim Lobe

At least 11 million people worldwide are "international orphans" -- people without citizenship or nationality -- who suffer discrimination, exploitation, and, in some cases, forced displacement, according to a new report by Refugees International (RI).

The 52-page report, which examines in detail the problems of stateless minorities in three countries, Bangladesh, Estonia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), argues that the issue touches every region in the world and, in some cases, threatens international stability.

For example, as many as 400,000 Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis whose forbears moved to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) several centuries ago, do not enjoy citizenship. Efforts by various forces in the DRC over the last six years to depict them as agents of Rwanda have contributed to communal violence in South Kivu province over that period that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.

Similarly, many Kurds, who live mainly in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, have also been deprived of full citizenship rights in each of those countries from time to time, and as many as 300,000 still deprived of citizenship and banned from public-sector employment in Syria, while some four million Palestinians scattered throughout the Arab world are officially stateless.

According to the report, the situation for stateless people has actually deteriorated since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon, with many governments citing the threat of terrorism to justify draconian policies against stateless minorities.

Despite several U.N. conventions that require member-states to try to resolve the plight of stateless individuals, very little has been done. Indeed, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has allocated only two staff positions to deal with the issue despite the magnitude of the problem, according to the report, "Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness".

As a result, stateless people often fall through the cracks of the international relief and protection systems. While they probably constitute less than one-tenth of the world's 175 million so-called "non-citizens," who include refugees, economic and non-economic migrants, and temporary residents, such as students, and undocumented immigrants, stateless individuals not only are ignored or denied minimum rights by their host governments, but they also find it difficult to draw international attention to their plight.

The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines them as people "who (are not considered) as a national by any state under the operation of its law." The UNCHR defines a stateless person as someone who is "not recognised by any country as a citizen."

A 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness calls on all countries to cooperate in providing citizenship to those who have none. That convention, however, has been ratified by only 29 countries, none of which has large number of stateless people. The United States has not ratified either Convention, although it has ratified the Universal Declaration of Rights, which guarantees every person the right to a nationality.

In addition to the Banymulenge, the Kurds and the Palestinians, the groups that suffer the highest rates of statelessness include individuals from the former Soviet bloc, some of Thailand's Hill Tribes, the Bhutanese in Nepal, Muslim minorities in Burma and Sri Lanka, Europe's Roma people, the Bidoon in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the Batwa "Pygmy" in the DRC, the Bihari and Rohingya in Bangladesh, some Meskhetian Turks, and Zimbabweans of Indian descent or with links to Malawi and Mozambique.

In Bangladesh, RI representatives visited 11 of the 55 camps where more than 250,000 Biharis, Urdu-speaking Muslims in Bihar who fled to East Pakistan at the time of partition and were then stranded after Bangladesh's independence in 1971, have been living under harsh and "severely overcrowded" conditions. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh have rejected appeals to grant them citizenship.

Not only are the conditions of life unusually severe, but health care and access to clean water are very limited, according to the report. Little employment is available inside or outside the camps, while "(f)or Bihari children, the right to education has become a luxury." Often, the only way out of the camps is for residents to marry local Bangladeshis, according to the report.

While the material circumstances of the approximately 160,000 Russian-speaking minority residents in Estonia are much better, they also suffer discrimination based on language and the identification of Russians with the Soviet occupation, according to the report.

To acquire citizenship, applicants must pass Estonian language and constitution exams, but, given the social segregation that exists between the two groups, it is very difficult for Russians to develop adequate skills.

The Estonian government has taken some steps over the past decade to provide citizenship to long-term Russian residents, particularly to children born after 1992, but the government has dragged its feet over signing the 1954 and 1961 Conventions that facilitate the process.

In the UAE, about 100,000 Bidoon, which means persons without nationality, consist primarily of two groups -- Arabs from neighbouring countries and non-Arabs, including people whose ancestors settled in the Gulf generations ago as merchants or workers.

While the Bidoon are not subject to deportation, they face discrimination in employment, education, and medical care. As a result, most live in poverty in urban shantytowns waiting for their status to be resolved. "We are like a boat without a port," one Bidoon told RI.

What is common to all three groups is an "ongoing sense of abandonment by the international community, lack of equal employment opportunities and related socio-economic hardship, violation of human rights that included access to basic education, freedom of movement, access to political processes, and the need for rapid resolution to each situation, possibly to be achieved with international pressure," according to the report.

"In each case, many years, even generations, have passed since lives were put on hold," said RI, which called for the UNCHR, as well as the countries involved, to move the issue closer to the top of the international agenda.

5. - Turkish Press - "Turkey's homosexuals call for stronger EU support":

ANKARA / 15 February 2005

Homosexuals in Turkey believe the European Union has failed to lend them adequate support and expect Brussels to speak out in favor of their struggle for equal rights in the mainly Muslim nation, activists said Tuesday.

Ali Erol, a member of one of Turkey's leading gay and lesbian groups, KAOS GL, told a conference that the EU, which Ankara is seeking to join, has failed to react to discrimination against homosexuals as strongly as it does to other human rights abuses in the country.

"When it concerns homosexuals, the issues are passed over in silence, maybe because there is no penalty" for homosexuality in Turkish law, Erol said.

He gave as an example a penal code reform last autumn. The government dropped from the draft a provision that would have made discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation" a jailable offence.

"While everything is being questioned in the EU, no one bothered to ask where the (article on) sexual orientation vaporized," he said.

Even though the homosexual movement in Turkey is still in its fledgling stages, gays and lesbians have become increasingly outspoken in recent years.

Tuesday's conference marked the completion of a KAOS GL project, sponsored by the British embassy here, which provided training for human rights activists on how to incorporate the long-neglected issue of homosexual rights into their campaigns.

Activists agree Turkey is far ahead of other Muslim nations when it comes to tolerance for homosexuals.

Most Muslim countries punish homosexuality -- some with death -- whereas in Turkey same-sex relationships have never been criminalized and homosexuals today figure among the country's top celebrities.

Still, prejudice is strong in daily life.

Activists say most of them risk their jobs if they disclose their sexual identity, with no laws to protect them. Police are notoriously harsh with transsexuals and transvestites.

Kursad Kahramanoglu, the Turkish co-head of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), expressed hope that Turkey's EU accession process would strengthen efforts to stamp out discrimination.

"I would hate to see things happening in Turkey because the EU is forcing its hand, but we have to use this opportunity," he told the conference.

6. - Radion Free Europe - "Iraq: Kurdish Victory In Kirkuk Raises Ethnic Tensions":

Iraqi Kurds have won a majority of seats on the provincial council for the northern region that includes the tense, ethnically diverse city of Kirkuk. The oil-rich area is home to Kurds, to Turkomans, and to several hundred thousand Arabs settled in the north of Iraq by Saddam Hussein. In the runup to the local vote, the rival ethnic groups fought bitterly over whether displaced Kurds returning to Kirkuk would be allowed to cast their ballots, and all sides threatened boycotts to press their points. Now, as the dust settles, can Kirkuk's different groups put their disputes behind them?

PRAGUE / 15 February 2005 / by Charles Recknagel

Kurdish residents of Kirkuk have been in a celebratory mood ever since the results for the provincial council election were announced on 13 February.

Hundreds of Kurds took to the streets of the city as the news came in that their candidates had taken control of some 60 percent of the council seats. The news coincided with word from the Iraqi Independent Election Commission that a Kurdish coalition had also won some 26 percent of the vote for the new National Assembly in Baghdad.

But if Kurds were pleased, their rivals in the local poll were not.

"We denounce the results," Farouq Abdullah, head of the Iraqi Turkoman Front, told Reuters on 13 February. "We have already informed the election commission of our objections to the irregularities the Kurds committed in Kirkuk."

Arab and Christian parties in the city also expressed dissatisfaction.

The local election was hard fought in Kirkuk because it sought to divide the different ethnic groups' representation on the provincial council according to a popular vote. Prior to the poll, the council seats had been divided equally among Kirkuk's population groups, including Kurds, Turkomans, Sunni Arabs, and the much smaller Assyrian Christian community.

Hiwa Osman, a regional expert and journalist working in northern Iraq with the London-based Institute of War and Peace Reporting, told RFE/RL that the equal-share formula -- instituted during the former U.S.-civil administration of Iraq -- had satisfied no one.

"Every population group in Kirkuk thought that they were the majority and the others were the minority," he said. "Nobody was satisfied with [having a] share equal to the others. That's why, because nobody was satisfied with the actual rate of representation, everybody was seeing it as just a [public relations] exercise and not as a problem-solving council."

How Will The Losers React?

But the debate over the election results raises the question of how well the losers will accept the Kurds' new control of the body.

In the run-up to the poll, the Kurds threatened to boycott the election unless election officials gave voting rights to some 100,000 formerly displaced Kurds of voting age who have returned to the city. The Kurds were displaced under Saddam to make room for Sunni Arabs as part of his efforts to forcibly alter the region's ethnic balance amid conflicts with Kurdish leaders.

The Independent Election Commission accepted the Kurds' demand but over the objections of the other communities. Turkoman and Sunni Arab groups charged the Kurdish leaders with trying to alter the city's population balance as part of their hopes for one day bringing it into the Kurdish-administered area of northern Iraq. Kurdish leaders refer to the oil-rich city as the natural capital of their region in a future federal Iraq.

It remains unclear how many Turkoman and Arab voters stayed home on 30 January in protest of the election commission's decision. The picture may only become clearer as the commission now examines the many complaints of irregularities received from all sides.

The toughest challenges before the new provincial council will be how to settle the thousands of property disputes between formerly displaced Kurds and the mostly Sunni Arabs who were brought in to replace them.

Many of the homes that once belonged to the returning Kurds are now occupied by Arab families. Those families say they now have no means or desire to begin a new life elsewhere.

Osman says the former U.S. civil administration set up a commission to collect property claims and begin the process of resolving them, but that it made little progress.

"The key problem today in Kirkuk is property claims," Osman said. "The Americans tried to set up the Iraqi Property Claims Commission, and it was a complete failure because they only took cases and they did not adjudicate anything."

Tens of thousands of Kurd returnees are now living on the outskirts of the city in makeshift camps after spending a decade or more of taking refuge from Saddam in the Kurdish-administered area. Their presence puts enormous pressure on authorities to resolve the property claims urgently in order to avoid violence.

Charting The Future

The other key problem in Kirkuk is how to chart a future for the city amid competing pressure both within Iraq and from neighboring countries over its fate.

"Every neighbor of Iraq and even other political groups within Iraq think that they should have a finger in the pie of Kirkuk," Osman said.

Just as Iraqi Kurds regard Kirkuk as their historical capital, so do the large number of Turkomans living there consider it their home. The Turkomans trace their arrival in the region from Central Asia to the 11th century and share close linguistic ties with Turkey.

Ankara has often said it is ready to intervene in northern Iraq to protect the rights of the Turkomans and to assure that Kirkuk does not become the Iraqi Kurds' capital.

The threats reflect Ankara's fears that any measures that would give the Iraqi Kurds greater political or financial independence would only encourage Turkey's own Kurdish minority to seek similar rights. Ankara recently suppressed a 15-year rebellion over autonomy demands by the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

7. - Reuters - "Kurdish leader Talabani poised for Iraq presidency":

ARBIL / 15 February / by Seb Walker

Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader positioned to become the country's next president, crowned a lifelong struggle for Kurdish rights with huge success in the country's historic Jan. 30 election.

Polling 25 percent of the national vote, his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and its election partner, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), are Iraq's new power brokers and Talabani is confident his wish to be president will be granted.

"We are not playing a role of siding with one bloc against another," he told Reuters after the final tally on Sunday, in an assurance the Kurds will seek a constructive post-ballot role.

"But without reaching agreement there is some kind of understanding, yes. The Shi'ites are insisting on having the post of prime minister and they are supporting Kurds to have the post of president."

It would cap a life dedicated to the Kurdish cause that began at the age of 13 and, by the time of the 1958 Iraqi revolution, saw the lawyer-trained Sunni an inner member of the KDP.

Talabani, born near Arbil in 1933, became a lieutenant to Mullah Mustafa Barzani, patriarch of Iraqi Kurdish nationalism and founder of the KDP, now led by his son Massoud Barzani.

Regarding himself a modern, socialist and urban alternative to the tribal authority wielded by the elder Barzani, Talabani split from the group in 1974 following a crushed uprising against the Iraqi government.

The following year, Talabani formed the PUK in Damascus, fuelling his rivalry with the Barzanis and encouraging both to cooperate with regional powers Iran and Turkey, and even, at times, with Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's rule.

The regional powers were adamantly opposed to the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdistan but were eager to use Kurds on their neighbours' territory to pursue their own strategic aims.

Talabani's harshest lesson came in 1988 when Iraq gassed Kurdish towns near the Iranian border during an Iranian-PUK offensive in the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war.

Following their uprising against Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf war, Iraqi Kurds saw their first, perhaps best, shot at self-rule go up in smoke when Talabani and Barzani sparred over control of a provisional north Iraq government elected in 1992.

Bickering escalated into a civil war that saw the KDP enlist Baghdad's help against the Iranian-backed PUK. A U.S.-sponsored truce backed with the threat of a diplomatic embargo took hold in 1998, and the two factions now have parallel, cooperating administrations.

Ahead of the Jan. 30 election, the two rival parties struck a deal and ran together on one ticket, creating at least the image of Kurdish unity. Since the election, they have agreed Talabani should be the one to represent them in any government.

While the Kurds have often talked about independence for their estimated 20 million people spread over four countries, they know that neither their chief allies the Americans, nor the Turks, Syrians, Iranians or the rest of Iraq would tolerate a full-blown bid for statehood.

Their aim now is to secure as much power under a federal Iraq as possible and they will bargain hard for as much autonomy as they can get in the constitution due to be drafted by the newly elected National Assembly in the months ahead.

As well as the constitution, furious debate is expected over Kirkuk, the city north of Baghdad that is home to some of Iraq's richest oil reserves and which is claimed by Kurds, Turkish-speaking Turkmen and Arabs alike.

The Kurds, who did very well in local elections around Kirkuk, winning 60 percent of the vote, long to see Kirkuk as the capital of the Kurdish region, but that is unacceptable to Turkmen and Arabs, with whom tensions are rising.

8. - KeralaNext.com - "Middle East, Syria jails 15 Kurds for 'separatism'":

DAMASCUS / 15 February 2005

Syria’s state security court jailed 15 Syrian Kurds for up to three years on Tuesday on charges of seeking a breakaway state, lawyers said.

Four were sentenced to three years in jail for “seeking to instigate civil war” in addition to charges of belonging to separatist factions, attempting to split territory off from Syria, and fomenting ethnic strife, lawyer Faisal Bader said.

The rest were jailed for two years.

The 15 were initially sentenced to five years in prison but the court reduced the punishment, lawyers said.

“This ruling is illegal because it’s issued by an unconstitutional court ... I demand the release of the defendants,” Bader said. He charged that the trial was based on statements obtained through torture.

The state security court was created under a four-decade-old emergency law that activists say should be ended. They want the court to be abolished and its rulings overturned.

The 15 were arrested last March during a riot in Damascus when Syrian Kurds clashed with police. The riot was triggered by a soccer match brawl in the town of Kameshli.

Most of the hundreds of Kurds detained across the country after riots in which about 30 people were killed, were later freed.

Like neighbouring Turkey and Iran, Syria worries Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq could spark separatism within its borders.

In August the state security court sentenced two Kurdish activists to three years in jail on charges of belonging to a separatist group.

Several banned Kurdish political groupings in Syria, whose Kurdish community is estimated at about 2 million people, demand the right to teach their language. They also demand citizenship which is required for state education and employment for about 200,000 Kurds classified as stateless based on a 1962 survey.