09. August 2002

1. "Kurd leader says Turks control northern Iraqi airport, but Turkey denies", a prominent Iraqi Kurdish leader said in a broadcast Friday that the Turkish army had controlled an airport in the Kurdish-held north of neighbouring Iraq for several years, but the general staff in Ankara promptly denied the claim.

2. "Turkish President Signs Reforms", Turkey's president signed a package of reforms Thursday designed to move his country closer to European social and legal norms and improve its chances for membership in the European Union.

3. "Turkish parliament adopts controversial bill boosting workers' rights", Turkish lawmakers voted Friday to adopt a controversial bill increasing workers' rights to bring them in line with European Union law, the Anatolia news agency reported.

4. "Human Rights Watch: Reforms for EU will not help jailed Kurdish MPs", the influential human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomed Turkey's significant new reforms, while expressing disappointment at important steps not taken.

5. "A Relationship With Bite", after so many betrayals, Kurds will be cautious about deals with the U.S.

6. "Very First Clue On August 30", about developments in Turkey’s EU membership bid after the passage of harmonization laws in the Parliament last week

Dear reader,

Due to the holiday time our "Flash Bulletin" will not be forwarded to email addresses from August 1, 2002 until August 25, 2002. It can be viewed, however, right here in the internet at www.flash-bulletin.de as usual.

the staff

1. - AFP - "Kurd leader says Turks control northern Iraqi airport, but Turkey denies":

ANKARA / August 09, 2002

A prominent Iraqi Kurdish leader said in a broadcast Friday that the Turkish army had controlled an airport in the Kurdish-held north of neighbouring Iraq for several years, but the general staff in Ankara promptly denied the claim.
The comments by Jalal Talabani, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), came amid growing concern of a strike by Washington, a key Turkish ally, to oust the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Talabani told the CNN-Turk news channel in a taped interview -- which was translated into Turkish -- that the small Bamerni airport had been repaired by US-led coalition forces after the 1991 Gulf War.
"But it has been under the control of Turkish forces for a long time, since 1995 or 1996," said Talabani, who left Turkey on Thursday for a meeting of the Iraqi opposition in Washington.
The PUK leader added that the airport -- located between the towns of Zakho and Dohuk in territory controlled by PUK's rival, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) -- was not currently in use.
"Planes are not landing or taking off from the airport. It has just a tarmac," he said.
Asked whether the facility could be used for military purposes, Talabani said: "I am not a military expert, but I believe helicopters can use it, but I do not think big modern warplanes could."
The Turkish army however denied it had control over the airport, a claim widely reported in the Turkish press for the past few days.
"These reports are incorrect and do not reflect the truth," said an army statement, adding that the airport had been extensively damaged during the Gulf War and rendered inoperational.
The Turkish army has often launched incursions into northern Iraq to hunt down Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels, who have waged a 15-year armed campaign for self-rule in Turkey's southeast.
The army is also widely believed to keep a military presence in the western-protected enclave, which has been outside Baghdad's control since the Gulf War, as part of its struggle against the PKK.
Turkey, which hosts a major US airbase, opposes any military moves against Baghdad, fearing economic and political fallout from a war in its southern neighbour.
It fears turmoil in Iraq could spawn an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, which could then fan separatism among its own Kurdish population and rekindle the recently subdued ethnic violence.

2. - Associated Press - "Turkish President Signs Reforms":

ANKARA / August 08, 2002

Turkey's president signed a package of reforms Thursday designed to move his country closer to European social and legal norms and improve its chances for membership in the European Union.
The measures ban capital punishment in peacetime, grant minority Kurds the right to teach and broadcast in Kurdish, and take steps toward easing restrictions on the press and freedom of expression.
The package passed Turkey's parliament Saturday, and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer gave the necessary endorsement Thursday. In a statement, Sezer said he hoped the EU would respond "with necessary care and sensitivity" and start negotiations soon.
A candidate to join the EU since 1999, Turkey has been pressured by the Europeans to improve its record on human rights as one condition.
But EU diplomats have cautioned that the country is decades away from fulfilling all requirements.
Among other things, they say, Turkey needs to strengthen its economy, curb the influence of the military, improve conditions in prisons and work toward a solution of the division of Cyprus. EU officials also say it could take years to implement the reforms adopted Thursday.

3. - AFP - "Turkish parliament adopts controversial bill boosting workers' rights":

ANKARA / August 09, 2002

Turkish lawmakers voted Friday to adopt a controversial bill increasing workers' rights to bring them in line with European Union law, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The new law, approved at the end of a tumultuous parliamentary session, will make it harder for employers to make redundancies after its entry into force in March 2003, introducing strict conditions to avoid arbitrary firings.
The bill has incurred the wrath of Turkey's business community, prompting the resignation Wednesday of Labour Minister Yasar Okuyan who lobbied heavily for the bill's adoption.
Okuyan's pro-business Motherland Party is a junior partner in the governing three-party coalition, already in crisis after a series of recent defections forced premier Bulent Ecevit to call early elections for November.
Although they introduce no new financial obligations for employers, the new measures require them to warn a worker's trade union at least one month before a possible redundancy.
Where a sacking is not justified adequately, a worker can also be awarded one year's salary under the bill, which is yet to be approved by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
Hundreds of thousands of Turks have lost their jobs since February 2001, when the country was hit by a serious economic crisis.
Turkey has been a candidate for EU membership since 1999, and is hoping for agreement on a start date for formal accession talks at December's EU summit
in Copenhagen.
Its parliament approved the abolition of the death penalty and new language rights for minority Kurds in a reform package adopted on August 3 and hailed by the Danish EU presidency as an "important step in the right direction".

4. - Turkish Daily News - "Human Rights Watch: Reforms for EU will not help jailed Kurdish MPs":

Death penalty, language restrictions abolished; Kurdish parliamentarians still jailed

ANKARA / August 09, 2002

by Bulent Kenes

The influential human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomed Turkey's significant new reforms, while expressing disappointment at important steps not taken.
Turkey's reforms aimed at securing EU membership will not affect the sentences of its longest-serving political prisoners, including the Kurdish MP Leyla Zana, HRW said.
Although the reforms mean the jailed separatist terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan will be spared the death penalty, further legal challenges by four Kurdish MPs jailed in 1994 have been prevented, Human Rights Watch said. The four - Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan and Selim Sadak - are serving 15-year sentences under "anti-terror" legislation.
"On August 2 the Turkish Parliament abolished the death penalty and lifted restrictions on minority language education and broadcasting, including in the Kurdish language. However, the reform deliberately foreclosed a legal challenge by Turkey's longest-serving political prisoners, Kurdish former parliamentary deputies Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan, and Selim Sadak, whose unfair trial has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights," HRW stated in New York.
"We warmly welcome the courageous and principled measures this law contains," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division, "But we regret that Parliament chose to seal the injustice inflicted on it s former members, Zana, Dicle, Dogan, and Sadak." The four have been serving fifteen-year sentences since 1994, when they were jailed under anti-terror legislation for legitimate political activity.
HRW continued to state that "The haste with which the Turkish government drew up and passed the draft reflects the urgency it feels to demonstrate progress before the December 2002 European Union (EU) summit. Turkey hopes the summit will yield a date for it to begin membership negotiations with the E.U. - the next step in the EU accession process. To gain membership in the EU, all applicant states must guarantee "democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities."
By summarizing the essence of the legislated new reform package which still awaits the approval of Turkish President Ahmed Necdet Sezer and which encountered with the challenge of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) that will apply to the Constitutional Court to annul the legislated reforms after approval of President Sezer, the HRW stated that "The new law abolishes the death penalty for all peacetime offenses, replacing it with life imprisonment. There have been no judicial executions in Turkey since 1984, but the abolition of the death penalty is nonetheless a major step forward. The military, influential in Turkish politics, carried out the majority of executions, following repeated coups since 1960. The removal of a punishment closely associated with the military's authoritarian hand suggests that the civilian government may be putting its relationship with the generals on a new footing."
Labeling the previous reforms as "cosmetic gestures' the HRW continued to say that "Much of what has passed as reform since the beginning of Turkey's candidacy for EU membership has been little more than cosmetic gestures," Andersen said, "but abolition of the death penalty is truly significant. Turkey has struck an important blow for the global effort to abolish the death penalty."
HRW also emphasized the fact that the Nationalist Movement Party - a government coalition partner - bitterly opposed the move, because among the eighty-three reprieved death row prisoners was Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), an armed illegal organization responsible for the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians during a fifteen-year conflict in Turkey's southeast.
The new law also explicitly permits broadcasting and education in minority languages. HRW cautioned that permission is, in both cases, hedged with qualifications that could be used to block effective implementation.
"We've seen reforms before that meant nothing in practice," Andersen said. "But this change reflects such a dramatic departure from previous policy that it could remove the taboo on minority languages and effect real change."
HRW continued to state that "The measure does not specifically provide for Kurdish courses in state education. The law will, however, make it difficult for the State Security Court prosecutors to maintain their persecution of those campaigning for Kurdish as an optional university course. Over the past year, hundreds of students, teachers, and parents seeking Kurdish language courses have been detained, tortured, or prosecuted. Prosecutors claimed the PKK was behind the campaign, indicted the defendants for "supporting an armed organization," and demanded heavy prison sentences. HRW also said that prosecutors should now drop those charges and promptly release all those under arrest.
"Granting the right to education and broadcast in minority languages is the best possible sign that the Turkish government could have given of a new-found respect for social and intellectual diversity," said Andersen.
HRW said the reforms betray a serious loss of nerve in one area. Under the new law, a Turkish citizen subject to a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights has found to contravene the Human Rights Convention can now force
HRW stated that "Turkish courts to review the original verdict. Unfortunately, a proviso denies this right to past applicants to the European Court of Human Rights. This deliberately closes off the remedy to Kurdish former parliamentary deputies Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan, and Selim Sadak. In July 2001 the European Court of Human Rights ruled their trial had been unfair. In January 2002 the Council of Europe called on Turkey to order a fresh trial, but Turkey has taken no action. The proviso also withholds the right to review for several politicians who were stripped of their political rights following conviction for freedom of expression offenses and subsequently complained to the European Court of Human Rights, including former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, former party leader Hasan Huseyin Ceylan, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a current party leader struggling to obtain his right to stand for election."
HRW continued its criticism and stated that "The reform package included small changes to Article 159 of the Turkish Criminal Code, which provides prison sentences for insulting the state authorities, the Law on Associations and the Law on Meetings and Demonstrations, highly restrictive statutes, which deserve a thorough overhaul. It did not address the right to conscientious objection, the scores of ongoing prosecutions for nonviolent expression, or the persistence of torture."

5. - The Los Angeles Times - "A Relationship With Bite":

After so many betrayals, Kurds will be cautious about deals with the U.S.

August 08, 2002 / by Kevin McKiernan

Kevin McKiernan produced the PBS documentary "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds."

There's a Kurdish proverb that warns that someone who has been bitten by a snake will "always be careful of rope." That's good advice for the State Department to remember as it opens strategy sessions today in Washington with leaders of the Kurds and other Iraqi opposition groups.
The Kurds have been burned before and, of the groups invited to Washington this week, only they have a military presence inside Iraq. That fact is of considerable appeal to Pentagon planners hoping to duplicate the United States' success with indigenous fighters in Afghanistan.
Today, two rival factions, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, rule an area in northern Iraq roughly twice the size of Massachusetts. The region has been under Western protection since 1991. With a combined army of 80,000 lightly armed peshmerga ("those who face death"), the Kurdish troops might be recruited as a new "Northern Alliance" in a ground campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein.
But this is not the first time the U.S. has encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Baghdad, and many Kurds are wary of betrayal. "We are not 'soldiers on demand' or 'custom-made revolutionaries,' " Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani told me in a recent interview in northern Iraq. "We won't permit another sellout by the United States," he declared, referring bitterly to the uprising fomented in Iraq by the CIA in 1975 when it armed the Kurds through the shah of Iran.
As a favor to the shah, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly arranged for $16 million to bankroll a Kurdish uprising against the Iraqi government. But the funding was a ploy, according to a 1976 study by the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
In fact, the United States never wanted the Kurds to win, the once-secret report said. Funding continued only until Kissinger brokered a deal with Hussein to cut off support for the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi land concessions to the shah.
Iraq, knowing in advance that aid would be cut off, was able to launch a decisive search-and-destroy campaign against the unsuspecting Kurds only one day after the agreement was signed.
Had the United States not encouraged the Kurdish rebellion, the House report said, "The insurgents may have reached an accommodation with the central government, thus gaining at least a measure of autonomy while avoiding further bloodshed."
The Kurds, as another of their old sayings goes, had no friends but the mountains.
The Nixon administration refused to extend humanitarian assistance to the refugees it had helped to create, and Iran forcibly returned about 40,000 Kurds to Iraq.
Declassified State Department cables from the period reveal that U.S. agents protested the sudden abandonment of the Kurdish allies. Kissinger dismissed such concerns. According to the House report, he remarked to a staff member at the time, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
The leader of the abortive 1975 uprising was Massoud Barzani's father, Mulla Mustafa Barzani. When the elder Barzani died in exile in a Washington hospital four years later, Massoud was at his side. I asked the younger Barzani what advice his father had given him at the time. "The biggest shock of his life," the younger Barzani said, "was betrayal by the U.S. He told me to be cautious."
The Kurds bring to Washington bitter memories of what followed the CIA debacle.
In the 1980s, Hussein's army destroyed 4,000 Kurdish villages, killing or "disappearing" 200,000 Kurds.
There seemed to be no stopping Hussein. But even after he ordered the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Kurdish civilians in the city of Halabja, the White House refused to support trade sanctions against Iraq.
There is also the sad chapter in Kurdish history following the Gulf War in 1991, when the elder President Bush exhorted Iraqis to rise up against the dictator.
The Kurds took the cue, but they found themselves abandoned, their hasty rebellion crushed by Hussein without interference from the West. More than 1.5 million Kurds fled to the mountains of Iran and Turkey; thousands died.

Today, many see a "golden era" in Iraqi Kurdistan. The economy of the Kurdish region is good, people have jobs, the shops are full of imported products. There are Internet cafes, satellite TV stations and cellular telephones. There is a respectable court system alongside ministries of health, education and transportation. In short, the Kurds have far more at risk now than the Northern Alliance did before U.S. bombs started falling in Afghanistan.
The Kurds may be willing to partner with America again, but this time they are demanding a "transparent"--not covert--guarantee that they won't be left holding the bag.
They want protection against reprisals from Baghdad, which could include chemical attacks. They also need to believe that if Hussein is overthrown, he won't be replaced with an ex-general or some other autocrat.
Before the Kurds enlist in a new uprising, the U.S. will have to convince them they will play a genuine and significant role in a post-war Iraq.

6. - Cumhuriyet - "Very First Clue On August 30":

Developments in Turkey’s EU membership bid after the passage of harmonization laws in the Parliament last week

August 07, 2002 / by Hikmet Bila

No matter what anyone says, the passage of the EU harmonization laws is the work of Motherland Party (ANAP) leader Mesut Yilmaz. Surely, Yilmaz tackled a very difficult task in attracting the support of the majority of the assembly, and Parliament passed the most controversial laws when no one expected from it to do so. Yet, everything starts after that point. A commentary in the New York Times last weekend said that Turkey’s gaining EU membership would not be easy, adding that the bulk of the question hinged more on the EU’s sincerity and its member countries’ doubts about Turkey’s identity in the EU than on Turkey’s honesty about the harmonization laws. This comment proved to be spot on when European Parliament Foreign Affairs Commission Chairman Elmar Brok said that Turkey was still unable to meet the Copenhagen criteria. Moreover, a Belgian diplomat said that the passage of the harmonization laws gave rise to more anxiety than appreciation in the EU and that its 15 member countries will hardly be able to reach a consensus about Turkey’s membership in only four months. Furthermore, the Cyprus issue still persists unsolved. We are at the threshold of a period which will reveal the EU’s real attitude towards Turkey. The member countries’ foreign ministers will hold an unofficial meeting on Aug. 30-31 in Denmark which will give the very first clue about the general framework drawn for Turkey. On Sept. 18, the European Parliament rapporteur will prepare a draft report and on Oct. 16, Turkey’s Progress Report is going to be delivered. On Nov. 2 the EU Council will update its terrorist organization list and will reach a decision about whether to include KADEK, the PKK’s terrorist successor, on the list or not. On Dec. 13-14, the member countries’ presidents and prime ministers will gather in Copenhagen. Starting on Aug. 30, this busy schedule and the decisions taken during it will certainly affect the results of elections in Turkey.