31 May 2006

1. "Five security personnel killed in SE Turkey clash", five members of Turkey's security forces have been killed in a clash with Kurdish guerrillas, officials said on Wednesday.

2. "Four killed in violence in southeast Turkey", two soldiers and two Kurdish rebels were killed Tuesday in fresh violence in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, local security officials said.

3. "Kurdish activists with Swedish citizenship risk jail in Turkey", two Kurdish activists with dual Turkish-Swedish citizenship risk up to three years in jail over a press statement denouncing the military build-up in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, judicial sources said Wednesday.

4. "The Kurds Have No Friends - except the mountains", unless Kurds in Turkey and Iraq take action against the PKK, the United States may be forced to make a choice between friends. And the Kurds, once again, could find themselves with no friends but the mountains.

5. "Why it is now ethical to visit Turkey?", after years of campaigning for a tourist boycott, Mark Campbell explains why he is now encouraging visitors to Turkey's Kurdish areas.

6. "A violent detour in Turkey", Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said last week that recent violence in Turkey did not presage a return to the "old days" of coups and military rule. We hope he is right.

1. - Reuters - "Five security personnel killed in SE Turkey clash":

DIYARBAKIR / 31 May 2006

Five members of Turkey's security forces have been killed in a clash with Kurdish guerrillas, officials said on Wednesday.

The dead men included two soldiers and three village guards. Five other village guards were injured in the clash, which happened on Tuesday evening in a mountainous district of Sirnak province near Turkey's southeastern border with Iraq.

The clash occurred during a big military offensive against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the region.

Village guards share responsibility for rural security and have often been targeted by the PKK during its 22-year armed struggle for an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey. More than 30,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

Violence has increased in the region since the PKK called off a unilateral ceasefire in 2004. Earlier this week, a soldier was killed and four security personnel wounded in a similar clash with the PKK.

Security forces are trying to stop PKK fighters based in mountainous and mainly Kurdish northern Iraq from crossing over the border into Turkey. Ankara has asked U.S. and Iraqi forces to crack down on PKK units based inside Iraq.

2. - AFP - "Four killed in violence in southeast Turkey":

DIYARBAKIR / 30 May 2006

Two soldiers and two Kurdish rebels were killed Tuesday in fresh violence in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, local security officials said.

One of the soldiers and the two rebels, members of theKurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), were killed in a clash in the Cudi mountains in Sirnak province, which borders Iraq and Syria, the sources said.

The second soldier died in the same area when he stepped on a landmine planted by suspected PKK militants.

Clashes between the army and the PKK in the countryside have significantly escalated this year and Kurdish militants have claimed a series of bomb attacks in urban centers.

The army has amassed troops in the southeast to step up security operations and stop what it says are increasing rebel infiltrations from neighboring northern Iraq, where the PKK found refuge after declaring a unilateral ceasefire in 1999. The truce was called off in June 2004.

The Kurdish conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984 when the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast.

3. - AFP - "Kurdish activists with Swedish citizenship risk jail in Turkey":

DIYARBAKIR / 31 May 2006

Two Kurdish activists with dual Turkish-Swedish citizenship risk up to three years in jail over a press statement denouncing the military build-up in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, judicial sources said Wednesday.

A prosecutor in Diyarbakir, the region's biggest city, accused Ibrahim Guclu and Zeynel Abidin Ozalp of "spreading propaganda" for the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in a May 2 press statement.

A third activist, a Turkish national, was also charged, the sources said.

The trial is expected to start next week.

Guclu and Ozalp were members of a Kurdish cultural association the authorities banned in April because its statutes called for the use of the Kurdish language in its activities, illegal under Turkish law.

The statement denounced army operations against the PKK and claimed that a recent military build-up in the southeast targeted the "entire Kurdish people."

Many Kurdish dissidents were granted political asylum in European countries in the 1990s, when the prosecution of activists and intellectuals opposed to the official stance on the Kurdish question was a common occurrence.

Some have returned to Turkey over the past few years after Ankara undertook a series of reforms to expand Kurdish cultural freedoms as part of efforts to boost its bid for membership in the EU.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast in 1984.

4. - Weekly Standard - "The Kurds Have No Friends - except the mountains":

31 May 2006 / by Peter Church

SO GOES AN OLD KURDISH ADAGE. On a recent visit to Turkey's southeastern city of Van, a Kurdish businessman told me that, "America has just one friend in the Middle East and that is the Kurds. Kurdish people like America because of protecting Kurds in north Iraq. But if America fights Kurds, it will lose Kurdish friends."

From 1984 to 1999 Turkey was embroiled in a persistent and bloody domestic conflict with the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), a group of militant Kurdish insurgents. Some 37,000 were killed; 1.5 million were displaced. Turkish authorities now believe that the Kurds in northern Iraq are providing sanctuary to some 5,000 PKK guerillas. This is of more than historical interest because the PKK has recently emerged from hibernation and unleash a new wave of violence against Turkey: In 2006 dozens were killed and hundreds injured and arrested. The Turkish military has responded by deploying 50,000 additional troops to it's southeast border, adding to the already 200,000-strong force in the region.

Iraqi Kurds are reluctant to act against the PKK and the United States is reluctant to disrupt Iraq's most stable region by pursuing them, even though it recognizes the PKK as a terrorist organization. Turkey sees U.S. inaction in Iraq's Kurdish north as tacit protection of terrorists, which puts America in a bind: Show too much deference to Kurds in Iraq, and you alienate Ankara. Support Ankara, and you lose vital Kurdish support in northern Iraq.

Turkey has long considered Kurdish nationalism a threat to its territorial integrity. This perception has increased as Kurds have carved out more autonomy across the border in Iraq. The fact that an Islamic party currently rules Turkey complicates the picture, as NATO-member Turkey has entered into bilateral agreements with Iran and Syria to support one another against a Kurdish threat. Whereas Iran once supported the PKK's terrorist activities, it has seized on its new common bond with Turkey as an opportunity to turn Turkish public opinion in its favor.

THERE ARE 25 MILLION Kurds today, concentrated in the region where Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria meet. Turkey is home to half of these Kurds, their historical homeland in the southeast, and a number of important Kurdish cultural centers, such as Diyarbakir, Mardin, and Van. Turkey and the Kurds share a complex history.

The 1920 Treaty of Sevres established an autonomous Kurdish administration in Turkey's southeastern region. The Kurds of northern Iraq's Mosul province were to be allowed to join, if they chose. But due to a combination of Attaturk's vigorous objections and domestic British political maneuverings, the dream of Kurdish independence was short-lived--it was snatched away by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Kurdish rebellions in 1925 and 1937 were brutally suppressed.

Under both Attaturk and the Turkish nationalists (following the 1980 military coup), Kurds had their language and ethnicity denied in Turkey. Rather than "Kurds," they were called "Mountain Turks" and speaking Kurdish became a crime. In the 1970s there was a revival of the Kurdish rebel movement under Abdullah Ocalan, who eventually formed the PKK. The group took up arms in earnest in 1984 and continued their fight until Ocalan's arrest in 1998.

The Turkish response to the Kurdish rebels was harsh, crippling the southeast, where today unemployment tops 50 percent. But the PKK were no angels. They targeted teachers throughout the southeast (who they considered "agents of the state") and are known to have killed entire Kurdish villages for not cooperating. Yet, despite its classification as a terrorist organization, the PKK continues to enjoy broad Kurdish support in Turkey. In Van a man told me that without the PKK, Kurds would be unable to speak their own language today--which conveniently ignores the fact that Turkey's pro-Kurd reforms were enacted only after violence ceased following Ocalan's arrest.

But the violence has returned. Last March, in the mountains near the town of Mus, a clash with Turkish forces left 14 PKK guerillas dead. The funeral for the guerillas sparked days of rioting in cities throughout the region. Seven people were killed, dozens were arrested, and hundreds were injured in riots in Diyarbakir, a city of 1.2 million.

On March 31 the splinter-group TAK (Kurdistan Freedom Falcons) took responsibility for detonating a bomb in Istanbul that killed 1 and injured 13. A TAK-issued statement declared, "From now on, every attack against our people will be met immediately by even more violent acts. We will start to harm not just property but lives too. With our actions we will turn Turkey into hell." On April 5, the TAK detonated another bomb at the Istanbul headquarters for Prime Minister Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

IN THE MIDST of Van's chaotic bazaar I found the headquarters for the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party and asked to speak with the leadership. I was ushered into the "Minister's" office.

An older man with thick-framed glasses, Ibrahim Sunkur is the DTP's Van provincial party minister. He spoke largely in platitudes, saying that, "The Kurdish people want human rights in Turkey instead of dangers for Kurdish people" and that, "The DTP wants maximum democracy." Then he said, curiously: "The Turkish government says that PKK is a terrorist group. But since 1923 the Turkish government has never let Kurds have any rights. "

It is no secret in Turkey that Ocalan helped orchestrate the formation of the DTP as a political face to the PKK. Publicly, the relationship between the DTP and PKK has been somewhat akin to that between Sinn Fein and the IRA: They are known to be linked, but while the DTP does not publicly endorse the PKK, it doesn't disavow it either.

So I asked, "Is the government correct to call the PKK a terrorist group?" Sunkur's response was evasive: "DTP works for all Turkish people," he said. "PKK works only for Kurds."

I asked what the DTP is trying to achieve for the broader Turkish people. Sunkur replied, "Kurdish language rights and the right to practice Kurdish culture, human rights for Kurds, and an economic plan that includes Kurds."

"Is that everything?" I asked.

"And amnesty for PKK," Sunkur added. "The Turkish government must stop attacking PKK and let them enter politics at the negotiating table."

The exchange was instructive. Rather than being a program "for all Turkish people," Sunkur's list of political goals was Kurd-specific. And including amnesty for the PKK in the party platform seems, on the face of it, unrealistic, if not outright antagonistic to the Turkish government. On the other hand, the DTP's reluctance to distance itself from the PKK likely does have broad support amongst its constituents.

"If PKK is fighting after Kurds are given rights to practice their culture, then we will say they are terrorists," said another man I spoke to in Van. "But for now PKK is trying to do something Kurds support."

AN ALREADY PRECARIOUS SITUATION became more so when Iranian and Turkish forces both recently attacked PKK positions inside Iraqi territory. Iran used to support the PKK as another proxy by which to agitate the West. But now, with an Islamic-based party controlling Turkish parliament, Iran may see the PKK "problem" as an opportunity to build bridges with Turkey. "The Iranians are very smart and they know an opportunity when they see one," says Soner Cagaptay, of the Washington Institute. "The Iranians want to portray an image that says, 'Americans talk the talk on PKK, but Iran walks the walk.' They know that the quickest way to the Turkish heart is to deal with the PKK problem with force. They want to show that they share concerns with Turkey."

The United States is certainly in no position to take Middle Eastern friends for granted. Turkey is Washington's closest ally in the Muslim world. The Kurds in northern Iraq are Washington's closest ally in Iraq. But the Kurdish issue is creating a rift between Washington and Ankara while at the same time facilitating a bond between Ankara and Tehran. The United States may find it increasingly difficult to play both sides of the fence.

Unless Kurds in Turkey and Iraq take action against the PKK, the United States may be forced to make a choice between friends. And the Kurds, once again, could find themselves with no friends but the mountains.

* Peter Church is a writer who covers travel and international politics.

5. - The Guardian - "Why it is now ethical to visit Turkey?":

31 May 2006 / by Mark Campbell*

After years of campaigning for a tourist boycott, Mark Campbell explains why he is now encouraging visitors to Turkey's Kurdish areas.

Before I went to the Kurdish region of Turkey in 1993, I was like most people on the liberal left. I would of happily have gone and sat on a Turkish beach thinking I was enjoying a cultural holiday and learning a little of the language.

Nobody at that time really knew what was happening in "the emergency area" as the Kurdish region was known. But the 10 days that I spent there, as part of a trade union human rights delegation, changed my life forever.

We visited the Kurdish town of Lice (the first delegation to do so) on November 22 1993, one month after it had been systematically destroyed and razed by the Turkish army. We were taken into "protective custody' by Turkish Special Forces at Agilli village, one day after it had been torched by the Turkish army. We watched as Kurdish women picked out burnt kettles from the still-burning ruins of their houses before beginning a journey to restart their lives as refugees. We took testimony from villagers who had been dragged by their hair into the village square and urinated on, and heard that all the men had been taken in "custody", later hearing that some had died under torture. I saw all this and much more.

When I came back, I felt I had been an eyewitness to war crimes nobody seemed to be talking about. Worse, I would see adverts for "Turkey, Paradise Preserved" on the sides of buses and wondered why our government or the press did not speak out about this "secret war" against the Kurdish population.

Looking back, perhaps I should have just moved on. But I was paralysed. And so for over 10 years I set to campaigning. I began a "Boycott Tourism to Turkey Campaign", gaining the support of several trade unions. Harold Pinter was my "character witness" at a trial when I sat down in front of Turkish generals coming to buy assault rifles from the UK government.

So why, now, am I against a tourism boycott?

Many years on, the situation has changed dramatically. The forced depopulation policy has stopped, there is an uneasy ceasefire between the Kurdish and Turkish sides and moves are being made to address the "Kurdish question". Turkey's talks to join the EU officially began on October 3 2005, and right at the top of the Union's demands for democratisation is a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish question.

There is still racism and discrimination against Kurdish people in Turkey, particularly in national politics. But the Kurdish parties have been working furiously for the last 10 years to gain control of town halls in the Kurdish region. Tired of the inaction of the government, they are working hard to improve services to the Kurdish people themselves.

One such place is Dogubayazit. Mukaddes Kubilay was the first Kurdish woman to be elected as mayor and is now in her seventh year of office. Together with the council, Mukaddes has dedicated herself to improving the Kurdish town that lies under Mount Ararat on the border with Armenia and Iran. Building a sewage system for the first time. Improving the roads, health services and environment, among other things. And not least, leading a revolution in attitudes to women. She is also trying to open up the incredible opportunities for tourism so as to benefit the people of the town.

And what opportunities there are! Mount Ararat and Dogubayazit offer natural and historical wonders and the people of the town embody a cultural experience you're unlikely to forget. In my view, ethical tourism to Turkey is tourism to the Kurdish areas. These areas have been closed off for many years but as a brand new Turkish traveller's book on eastern Turkey says in the forward, "For the true traveller, Eastern Turkey is the more interesting half of the country. The landscapes are gorgeous. Historical monuments are abundant, unfamiliar and often of surpassing beauty ..." I believe that the world is about to discover the beauties of Kurdish Turkey, but hope that it will be developed in a way that is responsible and of benefit to the people of the region.

* Mark Campbell is the founder of the recently launched Noah's Ark Holidays

6. - The New York Times - "A violent detour in Turkey":

30 May 2006

Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said last week that recent violence in Turkey did not presage a return to the "old days" of coups and military rule. We hope he is right.

In recent years, there has been much debate in Turkey over the conflicts between its secular constitution and many Turks' conservative Muslim impulses. Lately those confrontations have taken some troubling turns.

This month, a gunman shot five judges in a courthouse, killing one and wounding the others. Initial reports indicated that the assailant was enraged about a decision by the judges that strictly upheld Turkey's ban on wearing head scarves in public buildings. The news further polarized the debate over the role of religion in public life, and the judge's funeral turned into a mass demonstration in support of staunch secularism.

The outcry was seen as a setback for Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party, in power since 2002, which supports a greater public role for religious expression. Since the funeral of the judge, however, the motive behind the attack has become increasingly unclear, and sorting out the facts will take time.

But the overriding question is: Are the bad old days coming back?

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a conservative Muslim, but he also has overseen the pro-Western reforms that qualified Turkey to open membership talks with the European Union. During the reform process, he stressed that more democracy was the best way to resolve Turkey's polarizing issues. He was right, and now is the time for him to reassert that view forcefully.

The United States can help promote Turkish democracy by using its longstanding ties with Turkey's generals to communicate zero tolerance for military meddling.

Turkey borders Iran, Iraq and Syria and is an ally of Israel, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a candidate for the European Union. The world can ill afford for it to become less democratic.