31 January 2007

1. "Taming Turkish Nationalism a Challenge in Accused Killer's Hometown", the murder last week of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink continues to make waves in Turkey, with the country’s powerful Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association joining in national and international calls for the immediate scrapping of a law that makes it a crime "to belittle Turkishness."

2. "ECHR: "Turkey's 10 pct vote threshold is not a breach", the European Court of Human Rights has found Turkey right about the 10 pct vote threshold. The Court has recognized Turkey's right by five votes against two Turkish nationals who claimed that the threshold was intended to keep Kurdish party DEHAP (Democratic People's Party) out of parliament.

3. "Political scientist Oran: We already see 301's effects in atmosphere praising violence", a controversial academic, apparently out of favor with state institutions since he advocated further rights for non-Muslim minorities in a state-ordered report, yesterday said no good can come from Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 301.

4. "Turkey Warns Lebanon, Egypt Against Oil Exploration Deal With Cyprus", Turkey warned Lebanon and Egypt against an crude oil and natural gas exploration deal signed with Cyprus, saying Turkey and Turkish Cypriots also had rights in the region.

5. "Turkey-US move to combat Kurdish rebels", a US envoy who will co-ordinate the fight against the PKK Kurdish rebels is holding talks in Turkey.

6. "Turkey rejects talking to Kurds in north", Turkey has turned down please by the central government to deal directly with regional Kurdish government in northern Iraq in matters related to fuel imports.

1. - Eurasianet - "Taming Turkish Nationalism a Challenge in Accused Killer's Hometown":

26 January 2007 / by Nicholas Birch*

The murder last week of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink continues to make waves in Turkey, with the country’s powerful Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association joining in national and international calls for the immediate scrapping of a law that makes it a crime "to belittle Turkishness." But the increasingly aggressive nationalism that characterizes Trabzon, the port city that is home to Dink’s suspected killer, suggests that the campaign to overturn the law could face an uphill struggle.

Article 301, as the law is called, "laid the groundwork for the assassination," said Mustafa Koç, a member of the Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (TUSIAD) and the chairman of the board of Koç Holding, Turkey’s largest and most influential business group. Those who support the law, he added, speaking at the January 25 annual meeting of the TUSIAD high council, "are trying to block transition . . . resist renewal . . . surrender themselves to the current authoritarian atmosphere."

Taken to court by the same ultra-nationalists who targeted Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Dink, the editor-in-chief of Agos newspaper, received a six-month suspended prison sentence under the law in October 2005. In the last article he ever published, the editor described the trial as a turning point in his life, writing that the law had prompted "a significant segment of the population . . . [to] view [me] as someone ‘insulting Turkishness.’"

Police have now detained five people in connection with Dink’s January 19 murder, including 17-year-old suspected gunman Ogun Samast, and an ultra-nationalist university student thought to be the mastermind behind the attack. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive].

All five detainees are from Trabzon, a fact that has convinced many inhabitants that this port town, seen as the unofficial capital of Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coastal region, is part of a sinister plot.

For those locals less inclined to conspiracy theories, it is the continuation of a nightmare that began in May 2005, when four young left-wing students narrowly avoided being beaten to death in central Trabzon by a lynch mob.

Like two smaller lynching attempts that followed it, that incident hit Turkish headlines. Then, in February 2006, Trabzon gained international notoriety after a 16-year old local boy shot and killed the Italian priest who ran the local Catholic church.

"What has happened to Trabzon?" asked the headline in the Turkish daily Radikal on January 22, a day after police, tipped off by relatives, arrested gunman Ogun Samast on a bus that would have taken him to Georgia.

Turkey was a nationalist country long before groups opposed to its European Union accession process began pumping up xenophobia. Radical nationalism of the sort that appears to have influenced Dink’s murderers has traditionally been strongest in the towns south of the 3,500-meter peaks dividing Trabzon from the bleak Anatolian interior. But it’s only recently that Trabzon has become a center for such thinking, and locals say the phenomenon is spiraling out of control.

"What you have here is a headless monster, a nursery for potential assassins," said Omer Faruk Altuntas, a lawyer and the local head of the small, left-leaning Freedom and Democracy Party.

"You may not like its policies, but at least the MHP [Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi – Nationalist Movement Party] controls its followers," agreed town councilor Mehmet Akcelep, referring to Turkey’s biggest extremist nationalist party. "But Samast and hundreds of others like him aren’t party people. They’re free operators. In part, Trabzon’s problems are Turkey’s problems. In the space of little more than a decade, the port city’s population has swollen from 150,000 to around 400,000 as farmers flee the economic deprivation of the countryside. In Pelitli, the Trabzon suburb which was home to Ogun Samast, youth unemployment is high, with only two Internet cafes in which idle youngsters can wile the time away."

Local media also play a role. When General Hilmi Ozkok, then commander-in-chief of Turkey’s armed forces, termed two Kurdish teenagers arrested for trying to burn the Turkish flag "so-called citizens," the town’s media outlets readily took up the accusation. When leftist students began distributing leaflets about prison conditions, two television stations told viewers they were separatists. Within minutes, hundreds of shopkeepers were on the street. The result was the May 2005 attempted lynching.

"Three or four times, [the local media has] pretty much invited people to take out their guns and start shooting", said Gultekin Yucesan, head of Trabzon’s Human Rights Association (IHD).

In most Anatolian towns, where people often only read local newspapers for the used car advertisements, that wouldn’t matter. But Trabzon’s ten papers and television stations are influential, for the simple reason that this is a city built around soccer.

Trabzonspor is the only non-Istanbul club ever to have won the Turkish League. Its blue and purple colors drape the city. And while everybody here supports it, some say its influence on the city is increasingly negative.

"Trabzon football has become a semi-official conduit for nationalism," said retired teacher Nuri Topal.

Locals say it’s no surprise that Ogun Samast and Yasin Hayal, the man believed to have given the teenager the gun that killed Dink, played amateur soccer for Pelitlispor.

Rumors have long circulated about the club’s links with a local mafia that got rich controlling this crucial staging post in Black Sea human trafficking networks. Just last year, the club’s best player was banned for conniving with match-fixing mafiosi.

IHD head Gultekin Yucesan describes an incident he saw at a Trabzonspor match two days after Dink’s murder.

After a couple of bad decisions by the referee, he said, one supporter shouted "Do that again and I’ll put a white hat on and blow your head off." Samast was wearing a white hat when he shot Hrant Dink.

"Trabzon must learn its lesson," proclaimed a headline in one local paper on January 22. Though for now, it is far from clear that it has.

Mehmet Samast, a distant relative of the teenager suspected of killing Dink, tells a reporter how much he regrets what has happened, how ashamed he feels. He appears to be sincere. But then, echoing the rhetoric of several nationalist parties, he goes on to say that Ogun Samast was the victim of an international plot.

"Trabzon is vital strategically," he explained. "This murder was the work of the Americans, or the Armenian Diaspora. They didn’t like [Dink] either, you know."

Writing on January 22 in the local newspaper Ilkhaber, columnist Temel Korkmaz was blunter. Since Europeans insist on calling the Kurdish separatists who kill Turkish soldiers "guerrillas," he wrote, "I’ll call the man who killed Dink a guerrilla, too."

In her January 26 column, Ece Temelkuran, a liberal columnist who writes for the national daily Milliyet, was pessimistic about Turkey’s future. Readers were evenly divided in their reactions to her earlier comments on Hrant Dink’s death, she wrote, with 50 percent supportive, 50 percent warning her to watch what she said.

But people who want to see a more open, more democratic Turkey "are not 50 percent of this country," Temelkuran wrote. "We are in a tiny minority. . . More than 200,000 people marched for Hrant Dink’s funeral. That’s good. But don’t forget that number is barely 1 percent of Istanbul’s population."

* Editor’s Note: Nicholas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.

2. - Sabah - "ECHR: "Turkey's 10 pct vote threshold is not a breach":

30 January 2007

The European Court of Human Rights has found Turkey right about the 10 pct vote threshold. The Court has recognized Turkey's right by five votes against two Turkish nationals who claimed that the threshold was intended to keep Kurdish party DEHAP (Democratic People's Party) out of parliament.

ECHR said that the 10 pct vote threshold is a must in Turkey to avoid excessive parliamentary fragmentation and to reinforce stability. The court has based its decision on the period of instability which Turkey had been through in the 70's.

In 2002 general elections, the two claimants, who stood for DEHAP had won % 46 of the votes in the mainly Kurdish Sirnak province, but failed to get 10 percent of the vote nationally, and therefore obtained no seats in parliament. However, the court indicated that the threshold rule had been introduced well before the 2002 election, therefore it can not be said that this threshold was applied intentionally to stop Kurdish Party members enter the parliament.

On the other hand, the court added that the threshold seemed to be the highest among all European countries' electoral system and said it was desirable for it to be lowered to allow a broad spectrum of representation.

3. - The New Anatolian - "Political scientist Oran: We already see 301's effects in atmosphere praising violence":

ANKARA / 30 January 2007

A controversial academic, apparently out of favor with state institutions since he advocated further rights for non-Muslim minorities in a state-ordered report, yesterday said no good can come from Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 301.

"The article should be completely annulled because the problem isn't the article itself but its implementation," said Ankara University political scientist Baskin Oran, using the words of those defending the article, but reaching an opposite conclusion.

Apart from several politicians arguing that the article sets up a wall against insults aimed at the Turkish state and its institutions, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek laid the blame on the judiciary, saying that judges should adopt new insights into the article's interpretation and implementation.

Cicek on Sunday also responded to accusations that the government lacks the will to change the article, but is mentioning it to satisfy the European Union, which has been pushing Turkey to annul or at least change the article to achieve a fair and transparent penal code.

Cicek said that the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party government has made changes to the article twice and added that if another change is necessary the government will not shrink from its responsibility.

He also reiterated his view that several EU member countries also have similar articles. "Society has split in three over the article," said Cicek, adding, "One group says the article should be annulled altogether, one says it should be kept with a couple of changes, and the other even goes as far as saying that the penalties should be increased."

He said he received 12 advisory offers for change so far, adding that the government has no bias on the change.

However Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a press conference prior to his departure for Sudan on Sunday, said that there is no way that the article can be annulled, but that the government is open to any suggestions for change.

"I call upon the academics who want to see the article annulled to reconsider their views, their suggestions are not viable. There are several countries with articles similar to our 301," said Erdogan.

He also criticized civil groups for the current wide disagreements between them. "I personally held meetings with several civil groups over the article but I saw that they even cannot come to terms with each other," the premier said.

Baskin applies to prosecutor over threats

Oran, after applying to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office regarding a threatening letter, said that he has been receiving such letters since his report about minority groups' rights, which sparked tense debates.

"There's no need to wait to see the implementation of the article under such an atmosphere praising violence. We are experiencing its practices on a daily basis," Oran added. He also stood trial on charges of spreading discriminatory propaganda and provoking hatred along with another academic, but the charges were dropped.

Oran, accompanied by officials and members of several human rights groups, told reporters that he applied to the prosecutor's office late in 2004 over two threats but his complaint was dropped.

He also handed out copies of letters he was sent. He said that he asked Public Prosecutor Hasan Dursun to prosecute the senders of the letters and emails but added that the prosecutor had asked if he could reach a compromise with those threatening him.

Oran is the third public figure to apply to the prosecutor over threats or make public threatening messages after Armenian-origin Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was killed.

Dink was gunned down by a teenager who reportedly wanted to punish the journalist for his views.

Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author, said he has also been receiving threats. He was given state protection after Dink's murder. Both stood trial under Article 301 on charges of "insulting Turkishness."

Pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) Kars office head Mahmut Alinak also revealed over the weekend that he has been receiving threats.

4. - AP - "Turkey Warns Lebanon, Egypt Against Oil Exploration Deal With Cyprus":

ANKARA / 30 January 2007

Turkey warned Lebanon and Egypt against an crude oil and natural gas exploration deal signed with Cyprus, saying Turkey and Turkish Cypriots also had rights in the region.

Lebanon and Cyprus signed an agreement for the delineation of an undersea border on Jan. 17 to facilitate oil and gas exploration between the two east Mediterranean countries. A similar agreement was signed between Cyprus and Egypt last year.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that Turkey had "legitimate and legal rights and interests" in the eastern Mediterranean and said Turkey did not recognize the agreements. The ministry also said Turkey was determined to "protect its rights and interests in the eastern Mediterranean and will not allow attempts to erode them."

Turkey has asked Lebanon and Egypt not to put the agreements into force, the ministry statement said.

"We remind them to also take into consideration the will of the Turkish Cypriots and not to take any initiatives that may negatively affect the process of resolution of the Cyprus issue," the Foreign Ministry statement said.

The 120 mile-wide seabed separating Lebanon and Cyprus is believed to hold significant crude oil and natural gas deposits.

The exclusive zone agreement is designed to mark the underwater areas where each country can carry out exploration and production work once oil or gas is discovered.

The Norwegian energy consulting firm PGS recently began a 3-D seismic survey to determine the potential volume of commercially producible hydrocarbon reserves off the Lebanese coast.

5. - BBC - "Turkey-US move to combat Kurdish rebels":

ISTANBUL / 30 January 2007 / by Sarah Rainsford

A US envoy who will co-ordinate the fight against the PKK Kurdish rebels is holding talks in Turkey.

There is growing talk in Turkey of the need for cross-border raids into northern Iraq, where the Kurdish rebel group is based.

Turkey has a good deal to discuss with General Joseph Ralston.

From the Turkish prime minister down, politicians have been advocating sending troops across the border unless the US acts urgently against the PKK.

The retired general was appointed last year to co-ordinate the fight against the PKK, but there is increasing frustration here that several thousand PKK fighters are still based in Iraq and able to launch attacks into Turkey.

And then there is Kirkuk, where Ankara fears the Iraqi Kurds are vying for control and full independence.

Turkey worries that it would only encourage the PKK in its own "separatist" ambitions.

So everyone here is talking tough these days, openly discussing the military options, even convening a secret session of parliament.

Most analysts agree that much of the talk is meant for domestic consumption.

Elections are coming and the fight is on for the nationalist vote.

But the substance of Turkey's concerns is real enough, so many believe Turkey's intention is to pile the pressure on Washington.

The US argues it lacks the resources in Iraq to deal with the PKK.

Despite the risks, some believe Turkey could decide to act across the border on its own.

6. - Azzaman - "Turkey rejects talking to Kurds in north":

30 January 2007 / by Ibrahim Buazi

Turkey has turned down please by the central government to deal directly with regional Kurdish government in northern Iraq in matters related to fuel imports.

Turkey has suspended shipping fuel to Iraq which is currently suffering from acute fuel shortages.

Most of Turkish fuel export deals were administered by the regional Kurdish government but Ankara does not recognize the semi-independent authority the Kurds has step up in the north.

The Turks are particularly angry over a letter from SOMO, Iraq’s oil export arm, which asks the concerned authorities to coordinate with the Kurdish government.

Turkish Minister of State for Trade Affairs, Korshad Tuzman, said his country only recognized the central government in Baghdad.

The decision not to deal with the Kurds, according to Tuzman, was taken in order not to add ‘legitimacy’ to their regional government in the area.

Turkey’s ties with Iraqi Kurds have worsened recently following Kurdish attempts to annex the oil-rich city of Kirkuk where many Turkmen live.

Ankara has made it clear that it will not allow the Kurds to annex the city which it wants to be directly administered by Baghdad.

In the years since the U.S. invasion, Iraq has turned into a net importer of fuel despite its massive oil wealth. Fuel imports from Turkey are essential namely to the Kurds.