25 January 2005

2. "Turkish Kurd leader detained in Germany", The German authorities have detained a senior member of a rebel Kurdish organization, triggering protests by Kurdish exiles in Europe, a Kurdish news agency reported Monday.

3. "Syrian Kurdish poet goes on hunger-strike", Syrian poet Marwan Othman has gone on hunger-strike in Germany to protest against the persecution and oppression of Kurds in his country

4. "Kirkuk preachers enter election fray", Religious leaders in disputed city step up efforts to mobilise the faithful.

5. "An Arab Party Based In Kirkuk To Boycott Elections", An Iraqi Arab party based in Kirkuk said on Monday it was boycotting Jan. 30 polls because thousands of Kurdish refugees would be allowed to vote, reigniting a row over the election in the northern city.

6. "Don’t take Kurds for granted, Iraq’s deputy PM warns", Kurdish nationalist Barham Saleh, a thin man, with an affable smile, sits in the Iraqi government’s halls of power.

---

1. - Flash bulletin - "Former Kurdish MP Dr. Remzi Kartal to be extradited to Turkey":

With Germany¹s support, Turkey continues with the criminalisation of Kurdish politicians living in exile.

BRUSSELS / 24 January 2005 / Kurdistan National Congress (KNK)

Remzi Kartal, a founding member of the Kurdistan National Congress and former DEP MP, was arrested at the request of Turkey on January 22 2005 in Nuremberg.

Remzi Kartal is a Kurdish politician who has been active politically on a completely legal basis and has worked exclusively for a democratic and peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. He is known internationally for his struggle for democracy, as are his colleagues from the DEP, Hatip Dicle, Leyla Zana, Orhan Dogan and Selim Sadak. Now he is to be deported to Turkey.

Former DEP MP Leyla Zana was awarded the European Parliament¹s Sakharov Prize for her struggle for a democratic solution for the Kurdish question. For the same commitment Remzi Kartal has been arrested with the claim that he is guilty of "terrorism".

Since 1994 he has lived in exile, because after that time it was no longer possible to carry out legal political work in Turkey. Since then he has carried out his struggle for democracy within various organisations in Europe such as the Association for Solidarity with DEP, the Kurdish Parliament in Exile, the Kurdish National Congress, and most recently the People¹s Congress of Kurdistan (KONGRA-GEL).

As with the other Kurdish former MPs, Remzi Kartal has become well-known through his diplomatic work and because of his Kurdish identity. KONGRA-GEL, of which Remzi Kartal is vice-president, has dedicated itself to the pursuit of a just and peaceful solution to the Kurdish question and has worked for this since it was founded.

By taking the step of arresting Remzi Kartal, the Federal Republic of Germany is making it harder to achieve a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. At the same time, Germany is damaging the efforts to democratise Turkey, and encouraging the continued use of torture and the commission of human rights violations, as well as Turkey¹s policy of assimilation, denial and annihilation towards the Kurds. This is why we categorise the anti-Kurdish alliance of Turkey and Germany, the latest result of which is the arrest of Remzi Kartal, as an attack on the democratic and legal struggle of all the Kurds.

We therefore call on the Kurdish people and the democratic public of Europe, as well as all friends of the Kurdish people, to protest against Remzi Kartal¹s arrest and to work for his release.

KNK Executive Council
24 January 2005

Translated by SP

---

2. AFP - "Turkish Kurd leader detained in Germany"

ANKARA / 24 January 2005

The German authorities have detained a senior member of a rebel Kurdish organization, triggering protests by Kurdish exiles in Europe, a Kurdish news agency reported Monday.

Remzi Kartal, a deputy chairman of KONGRA-GEL, the new name of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has been engaged in a bloody war for self-rule in southeast Turkey, was detained in Nuremberg on Saturday, the Germany-based MHA news agency, which is close to the PKK, said on its website.

Reports from Berlin said the Nuremberg prosecutor's office Monday confirmed the arrest on an international warrant of "a Turkish national," but gave no other details.

The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the EU and the United States, as well as Turkey.

Kartal, wanted by Ankara, was a member of the Turkish parliament in the early 1990s.

An association of Kurdish dissidents in exile in Europe condemned the arrest, saying it was part of a recent "arbitrary" anti-Kurdish campaign in Germany.

"Those who caught Remzi Kartal... like a criminal see all Kurds as a danger," the Confederation of Kurdish Associations in Europe said in a statement, describing Kartal as "a Kurdish politician whose long-standing work is well known to the public."

"We reject such an approach and will wage a legal struggle against it," said the statement, carried by MHA.

Kartal was among a group of Kurdish members of parliament who fled Turkey in 1994 after the authorities cracked down on their Democracy Party on charges that it was collaborating with the PKK rebellion.

Four others, including human rights award winner Leyla Zana, ended up in prison and were released only last June, pending a review of their sentences.

Kartal, who was based in Brussels, was in Germany to attend a cultural function when he was detained at a Nuremberg train station, MHA said.

The PKK took up arms for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast in 1984, with the conflict claiming some 37,000 lives since then.

The group called off a five-year unilateral truce with Ankara on June 1.

---

3. - AFP - "Syrian Kurdish poet goes on hunger-strike"

BERLIN / 24 January 2005

Syrian poet Marwan Othman has gone on hunger-strike in Germany to protest against the persecution and oppression of Kurds in his country, according to a statement on Monday.

"Political prisoners are tortured and brutally abused," said Othman, who is living in exile, adding that recently "at least five prisoners have died as a result of torture."

"Many have left prison still carrying the physical and psychological effects," he said. He began his hunger-strike in Hanover, northern Germany on January 18.

Othman is one of the leaders of Yekiti, the second most influential political party among Syrian Kurds. He has spent almost four years in prison for his beliefs and wants to alert people to their plight.

Syria is home to some 1.5 million Kurds, around nine percent of the population. They are fighting to have their language, culture and political rights recognised.

---

4. - IWRP / Kurdish Media -"Kirkuk preachers enter election fray"

Religious leaders in disputed city step up efforts to mobilise the faithful.

KIRKUK / 24 January 2005 / IWPR trainees in Kirkuk

Muslim leaders in this ethnically-divided city are trying to convert religious zeal into results at the ballot box on January 30. Arab and Kurdish clerics are vying for voters, but it looks like the former will have the upper hand when it comes to rallying the faithful.

Mullah Sirwan Ahmad, the preacher of the Iskan Mosque, is urging Kurds to go to the polls, saying anyone who does not go is a “traitor, ex-Baathist and the enemy of the Kurds”.

“We must elect our real representatives. Our representatives are Kurds and an Arab never represents us,” he said. “If Arabs have ever represented Kurds, they would not have killed them and kicked them out from Hawija [a town south of Kirkuk].”

Mullah Teib Abdullah, a preacher at the Omer Ibn al-Khatab Mosque, is also urging his Sunni Arab believers to vote.

“Whoever doesn’t go to vote will be cursed by God on Judgment Day,” said Abdullah.

This high-stakes political preaching is no surprise in the disputed city of Kirkuk. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein sought to change the ethnic makeup of the oil-rich regional centre in the mid-Seventies by forcibly removing Kurds and Turkoman and replacing them with Arabs from southern Iraq and Baathist officials.

Many Kurds view Kirkuk as a future capital and economic heart of an independent Kurdish state. Since the fall of Saddam, tens of thousands of Kurds have returned to the city to try to reclaim their homes and register to vote.

Sabah Fatah, a Kurd from Kirkuk, said while it is good to hear clerics speaking out about the elections, it is unlikely to change the way Kurds vote.

Fatah said the Kurdish people in Iraq do not follow a central religious figure or group as some Arabs do. Instead, Kurdish clerics are more likely to follow the lead of the Kurdish political parties.

The efforts in Kirkuk are part of a larger campaign in mosques throughout Iraq to get believers to turn out at the polls.

The most prominent election fatwa in Iraq is the one issued by top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who described voting as a religious duty.

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars responded with a fatwa of its own, calling for a boycott of the elections, describing them as illegal and held under foreign occupation. The leading Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, withdrew its candidate list in December as part of the boycott.

Some believe that it was the Americans that gave clerics a leading role in Iraq’s political system.

“Prior to the Operation Iraqi Freedom, Sistani didn’t have any role in Iraq, but the Americans made him like you see now,” said Azad Jalal, a philosophy graduate.

“Now the people of the south of Iraq can [be mobilised] only by a fatwa from Sistani. This war of fatwas is very dangerous to the future of Iraq.”

This story has not been bylined because of concerns for the security of IWPR reporters.

---

5. - Reuters / KurdistanObserver.com - "An Arab Party Based In Kirkuk To Boycott Elections"

KIRKUK / 24 January 2005

An Iraqi Arab party based in Kirkuk said on Monday it was boycotting Jan. 30 polls because thousands of Kurdish refugees would be allowed to vote, reigniting a row over the election in the northern city.

The United Arab Front said it would not participate in the national polls and Kirkuk provincial elections scheduled on the same day because around 70,000 Iraqi Kurds who have returned to the area in recent months were being allowed to vote in Kirkuk.

Wasfi al-Asi, head of the party, said the Kurdish refugees were not Kirkuk residents and should not vote there.

The question of who should be allowed to vote in Kirkuk, a strategic oil city with an uneasy ethnic mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, has caused bitter arguments ahead of the polls.

Many Kurds regard the city as part of their territory in northern Iraq. But during his rule Saddam Hussein pursued an "Arabisation" policy in the city, displacing Kurds and moving thousands of Arabs there from other parts of Iraq.

Kurdish parties had initially threatened to boycott the polls unless returning Kurdish refugees were allowed to vote in Kirkuk. They later said they would take part in the elections after receiving assurances that Kurds could vote there, but that has angered the city's large Arab and Turkmen communities.

Over the past 18 months, Kirkuk has been the scene of frequent outbreaks of ethnic violence as Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen have fought to show their dominance in a city that is roughly divided among the three communities.

Turkmen parties in Kirkuk said they too were now considering boycotting the polls.

---

6 - AFP - "Don’t take Kurds for granted, Iraq’s deputy PM warns"

BAGHDAD / 24 JANUARY 2005

Kurdish nationalist Barham Saleh, a thin man, with an affable smile, sits in the Iraqi government’s halls of power.

That a Kurd who champions his ethnicity serves as Iraq’s deputy prime minister would have been unthinkable under jailed dictator Saddam Hussein.

"We are talking about a new political and social contract in Iraq. We cannot afford another eight decades of ethnic discrimination and ethnic cleansing in Iraq," Saleh of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) tells AFP, explaining his role in the national government.

But mindful of Saddam’s past campaign to gas and raze Kurdish villages, men like Saleh have vowed ’never again’ and want to make loud and clear they are not formally bound to Iraq’s Arab majority.

"If they want us to be Iraqis we have to be treated as full citizens of the state and not second-class citizens. Those days are over," Saleh says.

He advocates a federal system for Iraq, a principle already enshrined in the country’s transitional constitution.

The deputy prime minister embodies Iraq’s messy experiment in democracy, brought on with the US invasion in 2003 that shattered the old order of Saddam Hussein and left the country’s mosaic of Kurds and Shiites and Sunni Arabs to hammer out a new power structure.

He is both conciliatory and wary of the new co-habitation in Baghdad. On a busy day, in his spacious office decorated with couches and flowers, he huddles with Iraq’s national security advisor Dr. Qassem al-Daoud, and Ambassador James Jeffrey, the number two from the US embassy.

"If Iraq were to turn back towards dictatorship and apartheid and ethnic cleansing I think most Kurds would not feel safe in a country like that," he says.

Again and again Saleh and other Kurdish leaders have aggressively pushed their case in Baghdad, playing brinkmanship politics to guarantee their new stature in Iraq where for decades they were the enemy.

The Kurds played hardball in December and January over the issue of the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk which the Kurds want to claim for their northern self-rule enclave.

Saleh and other leading lights of the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) threatened an election boycott over the Iraqi government’s failure to award the vote to those thousands of Kurds expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam.

But faced with growing Kurdish anger, the Iraqi government finally buckled and allowed an estimated 100,00 displaced Kurds from Kirkuk to vote in the city, effectively handing power in the community to the Kurds.

"We believe Kirkuk is an integral part of the Kurdistan region. We have an abundance of historical and demographic documents and data that proves this point. "

The Kurds believed their victory was long overdue and say it presages plans to reclaim land across Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Nineveh province, which were lost under Saddam’s policy of expulsion.

Saleh wants to see lost territory taken back in the coming years and reincorporated into northern Kurdistan via legal means.

"Saddam has imposed that (frontier) line and pursued the most vile and violent ethnic cleansing campaign to affect the demographic characteristics of those territories. The Kurdish leadership has rightly accepted the legal process by which ethnic cleansing would be reversed."

Kurds hold the ministries of foreign affairs, displacement and migration, human rights and public works, and the post of minister of state for women and vice president. PUK officials warn they want a seat on Iraq’s three- person presidency in the next government.

Last summer, Kurdish officials bolted Baghdad until Saleh and others were reassured they would have heft in the interim government.

The Kurds are expected to play a power broker role in the next parliament, serving as a bridge between religious Shiite legislators and secular Arabs.

A tribal society, long nurturing the dream of a Kurdish homeland stretching across the frontiers of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, the last decade, after the 1991 Gulf War, gave these tough mountain people a first taste of the independence denied them for centuries.

Led by Massud Barzani, head of the KDP, and Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, the Kurds have put aside years of quarrels and internal rivalries as they navigate their way through post-Saddam Iraq.