10 October 2005

1. "Kurdish rebels kidnap policeman amid clashes in Turkey", the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) announced Monday that it kidnapped a police officer, a pro-Kurdish news agency reported, while three PKK rebels were killed and two soldiers wounded in separate incidents in southeastern Turkey.

2. "Turkish troops kill 3 in drive against PKK rebels", Turkish troops killed three Kurdish rebels in a large operation in the east of Turkey today, military officials said.

3. "European Mission Unearths Torture Claims in Turkey", a European parliament delegation visiting Turkey to check on its progress in human rights has found "shocking" reports of murders and mutilations, a British MEP said yesterday.

4. "Turkey not fit for membership", last Monday at a ministerial conference in Luxembourg, the foreign ministers of the European Union agreed to begin membership talks with Turkey. The decision to open "adhesion negotiations" - taken after overcoming an Austrian counter-proposal for a "privileged partnership" - is a blow to the democratic goals of a unified Europe.

5. "Turkey: Trampling On Free Speech Continues", novelist Orhan Pamuk faces jail terms.

6. "Turkey plays down author's trial", Turkey's foreign minister says he is confident a court will dismiss charges against a best-selling Turkish writer who faces prison for his views on the massacres of Armenians 90 years ago.

1. - AFP - "Kurdish rebels kidnap policeman amid clashes in Turkey":

DIYARBAKIR / 10 October 2005

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) announced Monday that it kidnapped a police officer, a pro-Kurdish news agency reported, while three PKK rebels were killed and two soldiers wounded in separate incidents in southeastern Turkey.
"Police officer Hakan Acil has been taken prisoner by PKK rebels" who stopped his vehicle overnight near a small village in Sirnak province bordering Syria and Iraq, the MHA agency said on its Internet site, quoting PKK sources.

The rebels would make a detailed statement later, it added.

Acil was returning to the town of Cizre, where he is stationed, after holidaying with his fiancee when his car and several other vehicles were stopped by PKK rebels, the Anatolia news agency reported.

A security operation was underway to find the officer, the report said.

Earlier this year, PKK rebels kidnapped a Turkish soldier on furlough and the mayor of a small town in eastern Turkey. Both were later released unharmed.

The latest abduction came against a backdrop of continuing violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast and east of Turkey.

Three armed militants were killed in a shootout with security forces in the eastern province of Tunceli, the local governor's office said Monday.

It was not clear which underground group the militants were affiliated to, but rebels from both the PKK and an extreme-left Maoist group are active in the area.

Two soldiers were injured in the neighbouring province of Bingol on Monday when their vehicle ran over a landmine believed to have been laid by PKK rebels, local security sources said.

The PKK has waged a bloody separatist campaign in southeastern and eastern Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed some 37,000 lives since.

Unrest in the region escalated this year after the PKK called off a five-year unilateral ceasefire in June 2004.

Most recently, the PKK proclaimed a six-week ceasefire until October 3.

Both ceasefires were brushed aside by the Turkish army and clashes in the region continue.

2. - Reuters - "Turkish troops kill 3 in drive against PKK rebels":

TUNCELI / 10 October 2005

Turkish troops killed three Kurdish rebels in a large operation in the east of Turkey today, military officials said.

The clashes occurred just days after the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended a six-week unilateral ceasefire that appeared intended to put pressure on Turkey in the run-up to the start of its entry talks with the European Union.

About 5,000 Turkish soldiers, backed by helicopters, began an operation in the mountainous province of Tunceli overnight.

Tunceli, one of Turkey's poorest provinces, is covered in steep forested mountains riddled with caves. Kurdish rebels have long held out in Tunceli, enduring many such operations.

Elsewhere in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, a landmine wounded two soldiers in the province of Bingol and PKK rebels kidnapped a policeman near the town of Cizre, close to the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

More than 30,000 people have been killed, most of them Kurds, since the PKK took up arms to fight for Kurdish self-rule in 1984.

The PKK called a ceasefire in the run-up to the start of Turkey's EU entry talks on October 3. After the EU agreed to start negotiations with Turkey, the rebels said they would resume their fight but said it was now a problem for the whole EU.

Turkey's government and armed forces have ignored all PKK calls for ceasefires and military operations against the rebels have continued unabated.

3. - The Guardian - "European Mission Unearths Torture Claims in Turkey":

ATHENS / 10 October 2005 / by Helena Smith

A European parliament delegation visiting Turkey to check on its progress in human rights has found "shocking" reports of murders and mutilations, a British MEP said yesterday. The findings, which come a week after Brussels launched membership talks with Turkey, highlight the scale of progress the predominantly Muslim country needs to make in its quest to join the European Union.

Richard Howitt, part of the mission by the parliament's seven-member human rights subcommittee, told the Guardian: "What we heard was shocking. There were accounts of soldiers cutting off people's ears and tearing out their eyes if they were thought to be Kurdish separatist sympathisers ... You can't hear these things without being emotionally affected."

The MEP, Labour's European foreign affairs spokesman and a champion of Turkey's EU accession, said the abuses had been corroborated by human rights organisations. A trip by the group to Turkey's Kurdish-dominated south-east had also confirmed allegations that security forces were reverting to tactics from "the bad old days", although statistics showed that instances of torture had fallen by around 13% since last year. Indiscriminate shootings, widespread extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and instances of masked men raiding homes in the night were reported to have made a comeback.

"Our sources were very credible and the evidence was corroborated by all the different groups we spoke to," said the MEP. "They left me in no doubt of the veracity of the claims."

But Turkey's foreign ministry spokesman, Namik Tan, called the claims "silly stories". "They are purely fictitious. They have nothing to do with the truth. You won't find anyone who is credible in Turkey saying such things."

Mr Howitt said that in September alone 95 people had been arbitrarily arrested in Van, a town near Iran. Among them was Yusuf Hasar, a 19-year-old suspected Kurdish rebel sympathiser whose body was found last week after being arrested by police the previous day. The violations have coincided with an upsurge of violence in Turkey's troubled south-east. Armed clashes have intensified since rebels lifted a unilateral ceasefire in June last year.

The delegation, whose findings will form the basis of a report that will feed into Turkey's membership negotiations, was equally appalled by reports of violence against women and allegations of body organs being removed by security forces. Mazumber, a group representing the relatives of torture victims, told the MEPs that vital organs were routinely removed from the bodies of ethnic Kurds, presumably as part of the illicit trade in people trafficking.

Mr Howitt said it was essential the abuses be confronted before Ankara got into the nitty-gritty of the talks.

Since assuming power in 2002, Ankara's modernising Islamist government has won plaudits for overhauling the penal code, abolishing the death penalty, dismantling once-dreaded state security prisons and increasing cultural rights for ethnic minorities. But Turkish human rights defenders still speak of a pervasive "culture of violence" in the country's police, security and judicial forces.

4. - The Texas International Law Journal - "Turkey not fit for membership":

10 October 2005 / by Matthew Nickson*

Last Monday at a ministerial conference in Luxembourg, the foreign ministers of the European Union agreed to begin membership talks with Turkey. The decision to open "adhesion negotiations" - taken after overcoming an Austrian counter-proposal for a "privileged partnership" - is a blow to the democratic goals of a unified Europe.

Since joining the European Economic Community as an associate member in 1963, Turkey has consistently professed its reformist credentials, eager to counter the world community's outdated image of a thinly veiled military dictatorship. But time and again - despite progress in certain areas outlined in the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria for EU expansion - the Turkish government has shown it is either unwilling or unable to fully democratize and modernize. In its own country, Turkey continues to systematically restrict freedom of expression and oppress its minority Kurdish population. Abroad, Turkey maintains an ever belligerent posture toward its neighbors, particularly Armenia and Cyprus.

The latest example of Turkish repression came last Friday, when a Turkish administrative court convicted an Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, of insulting the "Turkish identity" by writing about the Armenian genocide. During World War I, the Ottoman Army and its guerilla auxiliaries massacred more than one million Armenians who refused to convert from Christianity to Islam. To this day, the Turkish government illegalizes practically any admission of Turkish guilt and threatens or imprisons individuals who speak out. Nationalist officials trivialize the massacres as tragic but inevitable consequences of war, or dismiss the Armenians as pro-Russian traitors. Although Armenia is a small, underdeveloped country, Turkey continues to blockade it by land, cutting off road and rail traffic.

Ironically - and in a sign of the Turkish court system's perversity - Dink was tried and convicted for writing that Armenians should rid themselves of anti-Turkish anger. The court implied from his admonition that Dink - who received a suspended six month sentence - was somehow deriding the Turkish blood.

The fact is, unlike many former European colonizers, Turkey has made few if any efforts to atone for its imperialist past. The Turks have been unable, notwithstanding decades of co-membership in NATO, to arrive at a truly permanent peace with Greece. As late as 1996, the two countries nearly fought a war over the Imia islands in the Aegean Sea. Furthermore, the Turkish government adamantly refuses to recognize the independence of the Greek portion of Cyprus and the sovereignty of the government in Nicosia. Although Turkey signed a July 29 protocol extending its customs union with the European Union to the 10 members admitted in 2004 - among them the Republic of Cyprus - Turkey obstinately refuses to open its ports and airports to Cypriot commerce.

Turkey also has a bad track record with its Middle Eastern neighbors. The country has consistently been accused by Syria and Iraq of siphoning an inordinate amount of water from the Euphrates River, which Turkey has diverted for a massive - and environmentally risky - development project involving the construction of 22 dams and 19 power plants.

The Southeast Anatolia Development Project has been touted as an economic boon for Turkey's minority Kurdish population. Yet Turkey has engaged in a long-standing policy of political and cultural warfare against the Kurds who live in southeastern Turkey, near the Iraqi border by imprisoning Kurdish political figures and limiting classroom instruction in Kurdish. As recently as the early 1990s, Turkey conducted a Central American-style scorched earth campaign against Kurdish villages suspected of harboring separatist guerillas, killing as many as 30,000 people.

All the foregoing is not to deny that Turkey has enacted reforms in its quest for EU membership. The country has abolished the death penalty and retreated from its once total censure of Kurdish culture. In the economic realm, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repealed subsidies favoring the textile industry. If admitted to the EU, Turkey holds out the promise of revitalizing laggard European economies with its growing consumer market, cheap labor (an augury of massive emigration) and increased trade.

But Turkey's reforms are too little, and Turkish society has evolved insufficiently since 1963. Treacherous fault lines still haunt the political landscape, with Islamic fundamentalists on one extreme and a military clique on the other, ever ready to intervene to defend the ideological vision of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The bottom line is that Turkey absolutely does not deserve an EU seat alongside progressive, democratic nations like France, Great Britain, Germany and Spain.

* Nickson is a third year law student and executive editor of The Texas International Law Journal.

5. - wsws.org - "Turkey: Trampling On Free Speech Continues":

Novelist Orhan Pamuk faces jail terms

8 October 2005 / by Kerem Kaya

The prominent Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk will be tried on December 16 and faces up to four years imprisonment on charges of “public denigration” of Turkish identity for publicly speaking out about the Armenian genocide. It is estimated that more than one million Armenian were killed between 1915-1918 during World War I when the Ottoman Empire—the precursor of the Republic of Turkey—was crumbling.

In an interview with the Swiss daily Tagesanzeiger published on February 6, Pamuk was quoted as saying, “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that.” This was the evidence of his “crime.”

On February 18, after filing charges at the Kayseri state prosecutor’s office, Kayseri Bar Association attorney Orhan Pekmezci said, “Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. I think he should be punished for violating Article 159 and 312 of the Turkish Penal Code.”

Despite having made the statements in February, Orhan Pamuk is expected to be tried under the new Turkish Penal Code Article 301/1 passed only last June. According to this article, a person who “insults ... the Republic” can be jailed for between six months to three years. If “the insult” was executed abroad, as Pamuk has done, then Article 301/3 imposes a one-third increase in the length of sentence.

The new Turkish Penal Code was passed by the parliament after a two-month delay due to widespread opposition. It includes harsh jail terms not only for journalists (as in the old code) but also for all members of the media deemed to have insulted the state and/or any of its institutions, such as parliament, the army, etc. It also introduces a new clause that equates any member of these institutions with the institution itself, should they be individually insulted. A clear definition of insult is not included in the law—the only escape clause being Article 301/4, which declares that any “critical opinion” does not constitute a crime.

The actions taken against Pamuk come amidst a wave of nationalistic sentiment whipped up by the Turkish establishment (See “Turkey: military’s nationalist campaign conceals rapprochement with US”). The Turkish press was full of attacks on Pamuk in recent months, which resulted in his receiving death threats.

The killing of Armenians between 1915-1918 is not disputed by the Turkish state, but the number of the dead and the definition of genocide are. Successive Turkish governments, Britain and the United States, have never acknowledged genocide. In the recent discussions of Turkey’s possible entry into the European Union, France and other countries demanded that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide as a pre-condition for entry.

The victimization of Pamuk throws light on Turkey’s rejection of even the limited demands of the EU to improve its record on democratic rights. In fact the opposite is the case. It is the EU that has made the concessions regarding democratic rights during the negotiations and allowed the recent penal code to pass without opposition. Human right abuses in Turkey are hardly news in the Western media unless they are extremely dramatic, such as the beating of women at the Women’s Day celebrations this year, or unless they represent a timely bargaining chip in the EU negotiations for France or other countries that view Turkey as too close to Washington.

In Britain, a close ally of Washington and therefore a backer of Turkey’s bid for EU membership, the press has reacted nervously to the charges against Pamuk. The Sunday Times wrote that “Pamuk’s case has been an embarrassment for the Turkish government.” The Independent was concerned that Turkey is giving excuses to her enemies.

The last thing on the minds of Europe’s ruling elites is Pamuk’s right to free speech.

Pamuk is a household name in Turkey and he has gained prominence in international literature over the last decade and a half, with his novels translated into 20 languages. When he won the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction in 1990 the New York Times confidently noted, “A new star has risen in the east.” He went on to win international literature’s most lucrative prize, the IMPAC Dublin Award, for his novel, Benim Adim Kirmizi (My Name Is Red), published in 2000.

Pamuk has consistently opposed right-wing forces in Turkey. He once wrote in an academy journal, “Turks gripped by romantic myths of nationalism are keen to establish that we come from Mongolia or central Asia.... scholars have come no closer to offering definitive or convincing evidence to link us with a particular time and place.” Against this right-wing theory of Turkish identity reaching back thousands of years, Pamuk, in his novel Kar (Snow), chose the venue of Kars—a formerly Armenian city—and made sympathetic references to Armenian culture.

In 1999, he refused to accept the highest cultural accolade awarded by the Turkish government—the title of state artist. He said, “For years I have been criticizing the state for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism, I don’t know why they tried to give me the prize.”

Turkey has never been a safe country for artists. Virtually every prominent writer who has something to say about the repression in the country has been targeted for persecution by the state. Nazim Hikmet, arguably the best poet the country has ever produced, was charged in 1925 as a secret (Communist) party member and sentenced to 15 years hard labor. His works were banned between 1938 and 1965, until two years after his death in exile in Moscow.

In 1939, Orhan Kemal, one of the most prominent Turkish writers of the last century, was sentenced to a five-year jail term for his political views. Having stayed in the same jail as Nazim Hikmet, Kemal was intensely influenced by him.

On 1 July 1993, the humorist Aziz Nesin barely escaped with his life from Madimak Hotel where he was staying with other artists attending the traditional Pir Sultan Abdal festival in Sivas. The hotel was set on fire by fundamentalist mobs, killing 36 artists and injuring 24. A 6,000-strong military brigade situated near the hotel did nothing for eight hours, until the mobs achieved their mission. A group of artists was finally rescued by the fire brigade, but when they realized that Aziz Nesin was amongst them the firemen and the police joined the mob attack—inflicting injuries to his head and body. Eventually the military moved in to stop the lynching. Nesin’s crime was to speak out publicly and consistently on behalf of secularism. He too was jailed several times as a result of his socialist views.

More recently, a local administrator in the city of Isparta, Mustafa Altinpinar, sent a circular to all libraries in the region demanding that Pamuk’s books be seized and burned. The government was negotiating at the time with the EU over membership. It was spared further embarrassment because none of the libraries in the region actually stocked Pamuk’s books.

Apart from these high-profile cases, literally thousands of journalists and writers have been prosecuted and jailed over the years. Only recently, a few days after the new laws were passed, journalist-writer Emin Karaca was charged with “condemning the execution of the three leaders of revolutionary youth”—referring to the executions of Deniz Gezmis, Yusuf Aslan and Hüseyin Inan, 30 years ago. PEN American Center, an organization that defends free expression, reported that, according to their records, there are today over 50 journalists, writers and publishers before the courts in Turkey.

6. - AFP - "Turkey plays down author's trial":

9 October 2005

Turkey's foreign minister says he is confident a court will dismiss charges against a best-selling Turkish writer who faces prison for his views on the massacres of Armenians 90 years ago.

Orhan Pamuk has been charged with insulting Turkish identity for supporting Armenian claims that they suffered a genocide under Ottoman Turks in 1915. He faces three years in jail if convicted.

Pamuk further upset the establishment and nationalists by saying Turkish forces shared responsibility for the deaths of more than 30,000 Kurds in southeast Turkey during separatist fighting there in the 1980s and 1990s.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul on Sunday sought to play down the controversy, telling Canal television that he expected the case to be dismissed because a court had thrown out similar charges against a different person.

Rights record

"The same trial has been held before, over the same phrases, the same words," Gul said.

"The judge ruled that everyone has the right to express their opinion. The same decision will be handed down, I have no doubt about this."

Pamuk's prosecution has highlighted concerns over whether Turkey's human-rights record is compatible with EU membership. About 60% of French voters say they do not want mainly Muslim Turkey to join the EU.

In a show of support, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn met Pamuk at the writer's Istanbul home on Saturday and urged Ankara to respect freedom of expression.

Pamuk, best known for historical novels such as My Name is Red and The White Castle, goes on trial on 16 December.

Archives opened

Gul said that despite the case, human rights had advanced by leaps and bounds in the past three years.

"We have a limited democracy in Turkey ... but thanks to the reforms of the past few years, its scope has widened enormously."

Turkey had offered to open its archives to international historians to resolve the Armenian massacre issue, which has complicated Ankara's bid to join the European Union.

The European Parliament last month passed a non-binding resolution saying Ankara must recognise the Armenian massacres as a genocide before joining the EU, and gave only grudging support to the start of entry talks with Turkey on 3 October.