7 June 2006

1. "Kurdish Fighters Kill Two Turkish Soldiers, Wound Four Others", Kurdish guerrillas have killed two Turkish soldiers and wounded four others in two separate incidents Tuesday.

2. "Diyarbakir blues", Turkey faces increasing ethnic conflict and the thwarting of its European ambitions if it does not deal with its 'Kurdish problem'.

3. "IHD Calls For End to F-Type Prisons", Human Rights Association says 7 people are still on death strike in Turkey protesting prison conditions while 128 have already died on hunger strikes as conditions left hundreds crippled. Calls for all prisons to be open to monitoring by civilians.

4. "EU report critical of Turkey’s pace of reform", Turkey's quest to join the European Union could come to a halt this year because of concerns over Ankara's human rights record and tensions with Cyprus, an internal EU document makes clear.

5. "Turkey feels pressure of plunging lira", it is easy, in Turkey, to make a crisis out of a drama. As Turks watched the lira, the country’s currency, sink by around 20 per cent in value over the past few weeks, memories of the devastating financial and political crises of 2000-01 cannot have been far from their minds.

6. "Turkish business elites lose patience with Erdogan government", Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen's Association Tüsiad have accused the Erdogan government of lagging on reforms and paying too much attention to religious topics. The recent slide of the Turkish lira adds to Ankara's worries.

1. - VOA - "Kurdish Fighters Kill Two Turkish Soldiers, Wound Four Others":

6 June 2006

Kurdish guerrillas have killed two Turkish soldiers and wounded four others in two separate incidents Tuesday.

Security officials say two Turkish soldiers died when Kurdish guerrillas attacked a military convoy near Semdinli in southeastern Turkey. Two other soldiers were wounded in the attack.

In another incident in the region, a roadside bomb wounded two Turkish soldiers in Tunceli province.

Clashes between autonomy-seeking Kurdish guerrillas and Turkish troops have intensified recently. The clashes usually occur in southeastern Turkey near the border with Iraq. Kurdish guerrillas, based in northern Iraq, cross into Turkey to attack the soldiers.

Late Sunday, Kurdish rebels killed one Turkish soldier and wounded eight more in an ambush near the city of Bingol.

The Kurdish conflict has left more than 37,000 people dead since guerrillas from the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party took up arms in 1984.

2. - The Guardian - "Diyarbakir blues":

Turkey faces increasing ethnic conflict and the thwarting of its European ambitions if it does not deal with its 'Kurdish problem'.

DIYARBAKIR / 6 June 2006 / by Ian Traynor

Turkey's road to Europe, a former Turkish prime minister once famously said, passes through this ancient, dusty city in the Middle East.

Diyarbakir may have more in common with Amman, Damascus, or Irbil, not places ordinarily seen on a map of Europe. But it is not difficult to see what Mesut Yilmaz meant when linking Turkey's European destiny to this city of around one million Kurds in south-eastern Turkey.

For without some committed attempt to settle Turkey's age-old Kurdish conflict, the country's ambitions of being the first Muslim state to join the EU look to remain just that - an ambition perennially denied.

The mood in Diyarbakir - where I am posting from - is one of sullen, pent-up frustration. The population is almost entirely Kurdish. The only ethnic Turks are likely to be policemen, spies, military or civil servants.

Since the end of March when the city's youth went on the rampage and were met by Turkish gunfire, tear gas, and truncheons that left 10 dead, hundreds injured, and hundreds arrested and beaten, the city has been on edge, waiting for the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party or PKK to ignite the next explosion. Just a matter of time, after the worst outbreak of violence here in more than a decade.

The gloom and anxiety is a far cry from the optimism of recent years when two factors fed the notion that after more than 20 years of conflict, Turkey's modernisation and "Europeanisation" could hold the key to a settlement.

The two factors were the Turkish transformation signalled by the arrival in power in late 2002 of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party (AKP) and the country's progress in heading for EU accession.

Erdogan, a former successful mayor of Istanbul, seemed a different type of Turkish politician - genuine, sincere, modest, and hugely popular.

More importantly, his conservative administration of pragmatic Islamists betokened a clean break with the republic's tradition of fiercely secularist and authoritarian leaders, an addled elite whose early reformist westernising zeal has slowly ossified into nationalist, reactionary paralysis, turning parts of the Ankara ruling class into a feather-bedded nomenklatura of bureaucrats, military officers, and judges determined to defend their privileges.

With Erdogan came a positive jolt to Turkey's European prospects and a blizzard of reforms aimed at facilitating integration.

"The process of Turkey's integration with the EU created opportunities here up until last year," said Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and aide to the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir.

"We want a 100% that Turkey joins the EU," said Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent Diyarbakir lawyer and a Kurd. The EU would bring greater rights, greater autonomy, a "democratic republic".

The air of promise was boosted last August when Erdogan came to Diyarbakir and delivered an unusual message for a Turkish leader. He admitted, to the annoyance of much of the establishment in Ankara, that Turkey had a "Kurdish problem" and said the solution lay in greater democracy, greater rights, greater social and economic development - in short in Turkey's "Europeanisation".

But since then, very little has happened on the plus side while plenty has occurred on the minus side to indicate that both Turkish hardliners in the security services and among the hard men of the PKK have a vested interest in wrecking any chance of a settlement. Perhaps they have too much to lose from the peace.

Last November in the south-eastern town of Semdinli, maverick Turkish gendarmes exploded a bomb in a Kurdish bookshop, a provocation that was to be blamed on the rebels aimed at fomenting trouble. Turkish nationalists sued the novelist Orhan Pamuk for "denigrating Turkishness" by talking about the Kurdish conflict, resulting in an own goal for the Erdogan government with the international attention focused on Turkey's curbs on freedom of expression when it put its best-known living writer on trial.

Since then there have clashes between the army and the PKK almost on a daily basis, while Ankara has dispatched tens of thousands of military reinforcements to the region and to the border with Kurd-controlled northern Iraq where the PKK leadership meets and where it runs training camps.

The only concession to Kurdish demands for greater rights has been to authorise the broadcasting in Kurdish of censored television for 45 minutes a day. No cartoons or children's programmes, Kurdish officials point out, since Kurdish children in the region have to grow up learning Turkish.

Many Kurds in the region voted for Erdogan in 2002 and many still credit him with good intentions being stymied by powerful elements in the Turkish establishment whose principal bugbears are "sharia and separatism" and who see Erdogan as the stealthy mastermind of a process that will end with Turkey under Islamic law and the state being broken up.

But Kurdish leaders and liberal Turks are deeply disappointed that Erdogan has not followed through on the promise he showed in Diyarbakir last year.

"He can't deliver. He doesn't have a policy," said Soli Ozel, an Istanbul political scientist. "And the PKK suffocates all the others. We've created a monolithic Kurdish political bloc and the government doesn't really know how to handle it."

Another incident illustrates how the Erdogan government has backed away from initial attempts to engage on the Kurdish issue.

Back in 2004, Ibrahim Kaboglu, an Istanbul law professor, was commissioned by the prime minister's office to write a report on minority rights in Turkey. He proposed greater language and cultural freedoms for "Muslim non-Turks", code for the Kurds.

"That was when the doomsday started," he said. His report was shredded, he was forced to resign, and put on trial on charges of inciting hatred. After a six-month trial he was acquitted last month.

"This government is not interested in human rights," he said bitterly. "And things are getting worse."

Cengiz Aktar, director of EU research at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, agrees that the Erdogan government has "no genuine Kurdish policy", a deficit directly feeding into the country's worsening EU prospects.

One troubling aspect of the Kurdish conflict concerns how it has changed since the "dirty war" of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then the conflict was essentially a battle between Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish state. Community relations between Kurds and ethnic Turks were seldom affected.

But the war of the 1990s resulted in 1.5 million Kurds in the south-eat being uprooted and dispersed across the country. Many of them headed to the cities of western Turkey where life is better and job prospects rosier. There are now estimated to be some 3 million Kurds in Istanbul alone.

As the battle lines are being redrawn, tensions are increasing in western cities, leading some to predict a new form of internecine conflict.

"My fear is that Kurdish nationalists and Turkish nationalists are now interested in communal strife. This is a new situation. It's very seriously grim indeed," said Ozel.

The Turkish newspapers in recent weeks have reported a series of local incidents, with Kurdish settlers being pushed out of big western cities like Izmir on the Aegean. The southern port city of Mersin, for example, saw an influx of tens of thousands of Kurds in the 1990s as a result of the Turkish army's depopulation campaign in the east. The result in Mersin is that slowly the Kurds are taking over local government and administration, triggering friction with the host community.

And the dispersal of the Kurds to the west has also resulted in the establishment of a breakaway militant organisation, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, urban guerrillas concentrating on the cities and the holiday resorts of the west, albeit linked to the highland PKK rebels of the south-east.

While the gunmen of the PKK escalate their campaign, the main Kurdish nationalist political party, the DTP or Democratic Society party, is deliberately kept out of the parliament in Ankara by an election system that requires 10% of the national vote to qualify for the assembly. This skewed system means there are only two parties in the national parliament, Erdogan's AKP and its main secularist opposition, the CHP or Republican People's party.

The DTP, though, succeeds locally and is running dozens of town halls across south-eastern Turkey. The party, in turn, is regarded as close to the PKK. One Istanbul liberal involved in meetings with Kurdish activists says that when DTP officials show up at meetings they are invariably escorted by PKK minders.

In Diyarbakir, Ozsoy now says that for the Kurds of Turkey, Erdogan's reforms were merely "cosmetic" and that the dream of EU integration has turned out to be a hollow fantasy.

Tanrikulu, the Kurdish lawyer who regularly condemns PKK violence - a risky proposition in a city where many families have relatives in the PKK - is angry and disappointed with the prime minister.

"I distinguish Erdogan from the other politicians. He seemed to be genuine and different. But I wish he had not come here and used the words he did. Because he's not determined enough. And in the end, if you don't have a programme, all the words are meaningless. Any politician who dealt with the Kurdish problem in this country has only lost."

With elections due in Turkey next year, Erdogan is not interested in losing and is unlikely to risk any further concessions to the Kurds for fear of forfeiting votes and angering powerful elements in the security establishment.

That suggests the situation can only get worse, and with it Turkey's European prospects.

3. - Bianet - "IHD Calls For End to F-Type Prisons":

Human Rights Association says 7 people are still on death strike in Turkey protesting prison conditions while 128 have already died on hunger strikes as conditions left hundreds crippled. Calls for all prisons to be open to monitoring by civilians.

ISTANBUL / 6 June 2006

The Istanbul Branch of Turkey's Human Rights Association (IHD) has disclosed that 128 prisoners have died since October 20, 2000 in hunger strikes protesting F-type prison conditions and that hundreds of captives have been left crippled with no hope of returning to their previous health.

The Association called for an end to F-type prisons and for independent boards representing civilian society organisations to be allowed to regularly monitor all detention and prison compounds.

A statement issued by the IHD quoted the Solidarity Association of Prisoners' Families (TAYAD) saying that seven people were currently on a hunger strike to death in Turkey in protest of these prisons and the conditions in them.

Those on hunger strike were identified as "lawyer Behic Asci at home in Istanbul, prisoner relative Gulcan Goruroglu at home in Adana, Kamil Karatas at the Sincan F Type prison, Sevgi Saymaz at the Usak F-Type prison, Mustafa Tosun at the Tekirdag F-type prison, Serpil Cabadan at the Gebze M Type Prison (Hospitalized on May 30) and Fahri Tirpan at the Kiriklar F type prison."

IHD stressed that the right to life was the most fundamental right of a human being and that the Association regarded hunger strikes or death strikes as a type of action that possibly violated this right.

It said that although the Association itself was against such actions, it was deemed a human duty to care for the wellbeing of hunger strikers, their healths and their demands.

IHD criticised the isolation practices in prisons where it said inmates and convicts were not only prevented from interacting with each other but were restricted in seeing their families, friends, lawyers and doctor. It said many families visiting relatives at F-type prisons complained of harassment and the difficulties they were made to face.

The Association revealed a list of violations committed regularly at Turkey's special F-type prison compounds.

* Detainees and Convicts face restrictions on their communication rights and the right to receive news under the framework of isolation. Some newspapers and publications are arbitrarily banned.

* Isolation conditions and mistreatment are leading to psychological problems in detainees and convicts.

* Difficulties are imposed on the transfer of detainees and convicts to hospitals and decisions not to transfer those in need are being used as a method of punishment.

* Limitations and restrictions are imposed on meetings with lawyers for those remanded in custody during their trial. Attorney-defendant meetings are monitored by prison officials.

* Defendants are not able to examine their case file, notes taken by inmates during meetings with attorneys are being censored by prison staff.

* People on trial on the same case are not able to meet with an attorney related with the case at the same time.

* Many of those under arrest are held in prisons that are outside of the province where their trials are taking place.

4. - Financial Times - "EU report critical of Turkey’s pace of reform":

6 June 2006 / by Daniel Dombey

Turkey's quest to join the European Union could come to a halt this year because of concerns over Ankara's human rights record and tensions with Cyprus, an internal EU document makes clear.

A hard-hitting draft report for a key EU-Turkey meeting next week says Ankara has done too little to implement reforms and has failed to rein in the military or protect the freedoms of expression and religion.

"The pace of change has slowed in the last year," it says, "There is an urgent need to both implement legislation already in force and?.?.?.?to take further legislative initiatives.?Further efforts are needed to ensure full civilian control over the military, in line with practice in EU member states."

The draft voices its concern at "reports of torture and ill-treatment" and the "many cases pending against individual persons for non-violent expression of opinion". It says that "in the area of freedom of religion no concrete progress can be reported yet in terms of addressing the difficulties faced by non-Muslim religious minorities."

It adds that the situation has worsened in the south-east of the country, where government troops face the Kurdish rebels of the PKK.

Turkey's problems are all the greater, since Brussels has given Ankara an ultimatum to resolve a dispute with Cyprus this year, but prospects for a breakthrough appear as distant as they have ever been.

Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner, has warned that the deadlock over the divided island could lead to a "train crash" in negotiations over Turkey's membership this year. The EU is due to open the first of 35 negotiating "chapters" at its meeting with Turkey next Tuesday, but the Ankara-Nicosia tensions threaten to bedevil every part of the talks.

Cyprus has been an EU member since 2004, but has no diplomatic relations with Turkey, which invaded the island in 1974. Instead, Ankara maintains diplomatic ties with the Turkish Cypriot community in the north of the island.

With unease growing with-in EU member states about enlargement in general and Turkey's political direction in particular, the risk is that the impasse over Cyprus could bring the entire negotiating process to a halt.

5. - Financial Times - "Turkey feels pressure of plunging lira":

6 June 2006

It is easy, in Turkey, to make a crisis out of a drama. As Turks watched the lira, the country’s currency, sink by around 20 per cent in value over the past few weeks, memories of the devastating financial and political crises of 2000-01 cannot have been far from their minds.

There is a difference, however. Then, the lira was devalued by 40 per cent almost overnight, the economy was in freefall, and a debt default was only just avoided. Now, the economy is growing at 8 per cent a year, inflation is in single figures (just about), and a stable government is leading in the opinion polls.

As the Turkish central bank prepares to meet on Wednesday, almost certainly to raise interest rates for the first time in five years, any similarities between the summers of 2001 and 2006 were solely due to the weather. The past few weeks have hurt, analysts say, but there is unlikely to be permanent damage.

“What we are seeing in Turkey is pain for investors, not a crisis of the economy,” says Sonal Desai, an economist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Still, the extent of the sell-off in the lira, and the perception among some observers of Turkey that the central bank is behind the curve on inflation, increases the importance of whatever the bank decides to do today.

Estimates of the likely rise in rates vary from 50 to 100 basis points, but some economists are more aggressive.

Tolga Ediz, who covers Turkey for Lehman Brothers, says “shock therapy” may be required if the bank is to be seen to be decisive and willing to address the underlying problem of rising inflation.

The prospect of a rise in Turkish interest rates to reverse a sudden spike in inflation, and the threat it poses to economic growth, must be galling for the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, with a general election just 18 months away at the most.

The currency’s weakness has been exacerbated, some commentators say, by factors peculiar to Turkey that make addressing the current volatility as much a political challenge for the government as a technical challenge for the central bank.

Since the middle of April, Turkey’s internal climate has become more polarised than at any time since the government, which has its roots in political Islam, was elected in late 2002. The controversy over a new governor for the central bank, the politically motivated murder of a judge, and the apparent breakdown of the relationship between business leaders and the government due, in part, to the central bank fiasco, have all fed an atmosphere of mistrust as the country slips inexorably into election mood.

At the same time, the European Union is accusing Turkey of backsliding on reform pledges in areas such as civil and human rights. This claim irritates Mr Erdogan. He on Tuesday repeated his commitment to getting Turkey into the EU, and said the country would easily overcome “fluctuations” in the financial markets. Some commentators are not convinced – not only did the prime minister damage the credibility of the central bank by playing politics in the appointment of a new governor, his priorities appear to have shifted away from the EU and towards domestic political considerations ahead of next year’s polls, they say.

The EU accession process is a key reason why investors flooded into Turkish stocks and bonds in the past two years. Any weakening of its momentum would be a reason to exit. “Turkey’s financial markets are more vulnerable [to global sentiment] because the Turkey-EU anchor is slipping away,” says Cengiz Aktar, director of the EU programme at Bahcesehir University. “This [sell-off] is a wake-up call that Erdogan and his party need to hear.”

One issue that may have been clarified by recent events is Mr Erdogan’s determination to wait until late next year before calling an election. Serhan Cevik, an economist at Morgan Stanley, says he sees “no election risk whatsoever” in Turkey. Nor does he see any reason why the country’s political risk should be higher now than it was a year ago. This is despite a notable rise in tension between the government and Turkey’s secular powers, including the military, the judiciary and the president.

“The so-called establishment has never liked the AKP,” Mr Cevik says. “Why should we be surprised if there is now more tension between them?”

6. - EurActiv - "Turkish business elites lose patience with Erdogan government":

6 June 2006

In Short:

Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen's Association Tüsiad have accused the Erdogan government of lagging on reforms and paying too much attention to religious topics. The recent slide of the Turkish lira adds to Ankara's worries.

Background:

Ömer Sabanci and Mustafa Koç, two leading businessmen representing industry association Tüsiad, expressed their disappointment about their governments' recent performance during a meeting of the Tüsiad's High Advisory Council on Friday 2 June.

Issues:

The Tüsiad chiefs called on the Erdogan government to refocus on the necessary reforms and use less political rhetoric on religious issues. The Turkish business elites fear that in view of new elections in 2007 (or early elections in 2006), the Erdogan government is trying to score with its pro-islamic constituencies and therefore "polarising" on issues related to secularism.

The warning of the business leaders comes at a time when market confidence in Turkey seems to be waning as shown by the fall of the Turkish lira in recent weeks. Turkey's central bank will hold an emergency meeting on 7 June to try to halt the slide of the country's currency.

According to the Financial Times, an internal EU report written for a key EU-Turkey meeting on 12 June, will confirm that the process of reforms has slowed down and also hit out at several human rights violations.

The EU launched accession negotiations with Turkey on 3 October 2005. For an overview of the current state of these negotiations, read our special EU-Turkey negotiations LinksDossier.

Positions:

Speaking at a party meeting on Saturday 3 June, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul reacted indirectly to the business criticism, saying that his country has adopted lots of reforms and that "the process will continue". "Turkey has changed both in economic and democratic aspects", Mr Gul said. He hoped that the 12 June meeting in Luxembourg will be "a turning point in Turkey's relations with the EU".