19 March 2002

1. "Fasting to Death", Turkey tries to improve human conditions in its prisons—and protesting inmates respond with a hunger strike that so far has claimed 47 lives.

2. "IMF tells Turkey to do homework, warns against straying from deal", the International Monetary Fund told Turkey Monday to fulfill its commitments to secure the release of some 1.1 billion dollars under a three-year stand-by deal and warned against deviating from the economic programme.

3. "Turkey's entry into EU seems far-fetched", in a country where anybody over 22 has lived through at least one military coup, a general's comments that Turkey could turn to Iran and Russia rather than embracing the European Union cannot be ignored.

4. "Turkish police clear Kurdish southeast of tyres", Turkish police swept the biggest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast collecting old tyres on Monday, in a bid to prevent their thick black smoke polluting a traditional festival.

5. "IHD protests F-type prisons and ongoing death fasts", Turkey's prominent human rights group, the Human Rights Association (IHD), on Monday staged a sit-down demonstration in Kizilay Square in order to protest the maximum security F-type prisons and ongoing death fasts.

6. "Like it or not, Turkey faces Iraq challenge", for the US, Turkey is a valued friend in a rough neighbourhood. Ankara for its part treasures the Pentagon's role as its lobbyist in what it regards as an otherwise less than sympathetic West.

7. "Iraqi Kurdish leader in Turkey for talks", a prominent leader of the Iraqi Kurds, who have been in control of northern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, arrived in Turkey Tuesday for talks with Turkish officials amid speculation that Iraq could soon become a target of a US military campaign.

8. "EU membership process is only a means", columnist Semih Idiz comments on Turkey's efforts to get its accession negotiations to the EU started.

1. - Newsweek International - "Fasting to Death":

Turkey tries to improve human conditions in its prisons—and protesting inmates respond with a hunger strike that so far has claimed 47 lives

By Owen Matthews / March 18 issue

Basak Otlu never goes anywhere alone. She walks stiffly down the steeply sloping streets behind Istanbul’s Taxim Square with her friend Mustafa, who has the same limping walk and the same haunted look in his eyes. Former political prisoners, they are on their way to a weekly appointment with Dr. Celal Calikusu, a psychiatrist who specializes in helping victims of police torture and imprisonment.

“WE STICK TOGETHER because no one else understands what we have been through,” says Basak, 27. Her nightmare began six years ago, in 1997, when she was arrested for participating in an illegal leftist demonstration for, ironically enough, prisoners’ rights. At the police station she was strip-searched; her male friends were hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten through the night. Mustafa, arrested at another demonstration, was beaten until he confessed to being a member of a similar group. After that, jail seemed a sanctuary of safety in numbers. Both Basak and Mustafa were assigned to standard dormitory-style cells containing as many as 60 other political prisoners, where warders rarely ventured.

Now Turkey is seeking to join the European Union and clean up its human-rights act—with police brutality, torture and prison conditions high on the list of reforms. For Basak and Mustafa, that meant a transfer two years ago to a more modern facility, closer to European standards. An improvement? Not as they saw it, for the new jail confined them in near-isolation, three people or fewer to a cell. That left them isolated and lonely, they say, and vulnerable to abuse from the warders. Basak likens it to being “buried alive.”

This poses an ironic conundrum. On the one hand, people like Basak and Mustafa are victims of a culture of brutality, spawned by decades of political violence. On the other hand, though their ordeal began with political torture, Basak and Mustafa now limp their way through Istanbul because of physical damage they inflicted on themselves. It is the result of a protest against something that, to the outside world, represents a step forward. For their response to Turkey’s decision to “Europeanize” its jails has been a hunger strike. Basak and Mustafa are two of approximately 230 leftist political prisoners who joined a notorious “death fast” that, since it began nearly a year ago, has claimed the lives of 47 people. (Another 36 have been killed during police raids, inside and outside jails, aimed at putting an end to the fasts.) And they have been terrible deaths, marked by dehydration, atrophication and the painful failure of internal organs, chiefly kidneys and livers. Sustained by a diet of sugar, vitamins and salt, their suffering lasts up to 300 days.

Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly fit Europe’s blueprint. Diplomats are flummoxed by the perversity of the situation. “As far as we can see, the new jails are more, not less humane,” says one senior EU representative in Istanbul. Rather than demanding a return to their jails and prison lifestyle of the past, he suggests, the strikers ought to be protesting the torture and restrictions on such basic rights as free speech that put them there in the first place. Despite the international attention, this diplomat says, “the death fasts are a sideshow.”

If so, what a needless tragedy it seems to be. To those involved, the fasts have become less a means to a goal than an end in themselves. Mustafa, for instance, can’t even recall the full list of the political demands for which he nearly died, before being released last June. As for Basak, who fasted for 90 days before being force-fed by prison doctors and let go, she claims to have shown that “you can win a war against the state in the struggle for democratic rights.” In fact, she has proved no such thing. There is no sign Turkey intends to bend an inch over the introduction of its new prisons, despite the mounting death toll. To the contrary, Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk said last month that the death-fast “problem” would be over in a year—because the protesters would all be dead.

Unlike 10 IRA hunger strikers who died in 1981 in a blaze of international publicity, the Turkish public scarcely seems aware of the protests. Media reports are rare, in part because laws forbid the “dissemination of terrorist propaganda”—code for anything smacking of political dissidence. The family of Lale Colak, a 26-year-old death-faster who died in January, showed NEWSWEEK the collected press clippings about her death—all two of them, both tiny.

In the end, it’s up to the likes of Calikusu to make sense of this quixotic and deadly puzzle. A physician at Istanbul’s Western-funded Human Rights Foundation, he has treated more than 500 prisoners, detainees and torture victims over the past year. Almost weirdly, most seem cheerful and outwardly well adjusted. The fasters’ dedication to their cause, fruitless as it may ultimately be, seems itself to be the coping mechanism that allows them to survive. Calikusu has seen patients who’ve experienced everything from hangings to mock executions and genital beatings. After that, no form of protest seems too extreme to the victim—regardless of whether the perpetrators, or anyone else, pay attention.

Fortunately, there are some signs of change. Last month a group of high-school students who were arrested and beaten by police in 1999 for writing slogans on a wall won a suit they brought against the Turkish state in the European Court of Human Rights. They received $200,000 damages, and two of the police involved were fined $5. More than a hundred similar cases are pending, which could make police brutality simply too expensive for the government to ignore. Meanwhile, a partial reform of Turkey’s more egregious anti-free-speech laws was approved by Parliament earlier this month, and authorities promise further measures, including harsher penalties for police officers who break the law—or their victims’ bones. None of this will help Basak, Mustafa and the prisoners still on hunger strike, of course. But when it comes to human rights, it often takes two sides to come to one’s senses.

2. - AFP - "IMF tells Turkey to do homework, warns against straying from deal":

ANKARA / March 18

The International Monetary Fund told Turkey Monday to fulfill its commitments to secure the release of some 1.1 billion dollars under a three-year stand-by deal and warned against deviating from the economic programme.

"There are still steps the government needs to take before the IMF board meeting" which is expected to take place in early April to discuss the release of the second tranche of the 16-billion-dollar stand-by credit, the Fund's Turkey desk chief, Juha Kahkonen, told a press conference here. Kahkonen listed those steps as the approval by parliament of a public debt management law and the identification of redundancies in state enterprises, as pledged by Turkey in its letter of intent.

"It is important to identify what the level of overstaffing is in various state enterprises and then the aim is to reduce this overstaffing during the year by two-thirds by October," he said. In its letter of intent, Turkey said that the problem of overstaffing would be resolved mostly "through voluntary retirement offers and layoffs only when necessary", but did not specify the number of workers to be made redundant. The IMF official praised Turkey for making a good start on its economic programme, adding that the government had kept to budgetary and monetary performance criteria and that chronic inflation was showing signs of coming down.

He also added that the year-end target of three percent economic growth -- after suffering an estimated contraction of minus 8.5 percent in 2001 -- remained "feasible". But Kahkonen underlined that Turkey should not stray from the programme. "It would be a mistake to change the course of policies to take short-term measures that would undermine the sound principles that underlie the programme," Kahkonen said. The Fund agreed to give Turkey fresh funds in early February in return for Ankara's pledge to implement strengthened economic reforms to battle the economic fallout from the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The aid was the third IMF rescue of Turkey in less than two years, during a period in which the country was struck by two severe financial crises and subsequently plunged into one of its worst recessions in decades. But heightened fears over possible punitive strikes by the United States on Iraq have led to deep concern in Turkey on the grounds that such military

action would harm its economic recovery efforst. Kahkonen said Monday that the best strategy of the Turkish government in such an eventuality would be to inject confidence into markets by expressing its determination to stick to stick to the refoms.

Under the new programme, Turkey has pledged to pull down chronic inflation, achieve sustainable positive growth, decrease the state's debt burden and restructure its weak banking system, the underlying reason of the country's economic woes.

3. - Reuters - "Turkey's entry into EU seems far-fetched":

ANKARA / By Claudia Parsons / 19 March

In a country where anybody over 22 has lived through at least one military coup, a general's comments that Turkey could turn to Iran and Russia rather than embracing the European Union cannot be ignored.

Opinion polls regularly show around 70 per cent of the population in Muslim Turkey want to join the EU and the government says it wants a date set by the end of this year for the start of membership negotiations.

But a chorus of dissent is growing, led by the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), part of Turkey's coalition government. The "EU question" is taking its toll on government unity.

Conservatives in the MHP, and some in the military, say Turkey is being pushed into making too many concessions that will serve only to promote separatism among the Kurdish population and blunt the state's ability to fight terrorism.

More surprising were comments from General Tuncer Kilinc that the EU had done nothing for Turkey and that Turkey might turn to Iran and Russia. They stirred a hornets' nest here. While the powerful army may not be "anti-European", it has its concerns.

"This is a message to the EU - the message that Turkey is not about to say yes to every demand with no objections," commentator Fikret Bila wrote in the newspaper Milliyet.

"Turkey expects flexibility, understanding and support from the EU. This is an approach to make the EU ponder about Turkey and consider that it also has its bargaining chips."

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit himself has said that EU membership was "Turkey's undeniable and indispensable right". Many are convinced the EU would gain as much as if not more than Turkey if the marriage ever came to fruition.

DOES THE EU REALLY WANT TURKEY?: Professor Hasan Unal of Ankara's Bilkent University, however, says it is clear the EU has no intention of letting Turkey join and is just stringing it along for its own benefit. "Europe wants to get things like Cyprus out of Turkey in return for hopes of accession one day," Unal said.

Peace talks under way on the divided island of Cyprus have been given added urgency by the rapidly approaching prospect of EU membership for the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus in the southern, Greek Cypriot, half of the island.

Cyprus is expected to be among the first wave of new members as soon as 2004 and Europe wants to avoid what one EU diplomat said would be the "cataclysmic" consequences of doing so without an agreement to reunite the island.

Turkey, which has threatened to annex northern Cyprus if EU accession goes ahead, would find itself with 30,000 troops stationed in an EU member. A major breach would be unavoidable and Turkey's own EU ambitions would be scuppered.

"Whatever we are supposed to do, whatever we can achieve within a year, or two or five or 10 years, Europe is not ready for Turkish accession," Unal said.

He cites three reasons: size - a population of 65 million and growing would make Turkey among the largest member states; geography - Turkey borders Syria, Iraq and Iran, countries the EU may be reluctant to have as neighbours; and religion - Christian Europeans don't really want Muslims in the club.

His comments are at the end of the spectrum of opinion in Turkey but there is widespread mistrust of Europe's motives, and even EU diplomats admit privately that taking in Turkey would be a challenge not all member states want to take on.

A quip among the more jaded in Brussels plays on a workers' joke in the old communist Soviet Union that "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". "They pretend to be striving for membership," runs their version, "and we pretend to want them."

MUTUAL BENEFITS FOR TURKEY AND EU: Yet at the other end of the spectrum in Turkey, there is widespread understanding of the benefits both economic and political that EU membership could bring.

Turkey, which has just seen a year of financial turmoil and where GDP per capita is less than a third of the EU average, has watched EU members Spain and Portugal surge ahead economically over the past 20 years after starting from a low level.

A customs union with the EU has already allowed Turkish exporters to take advantage of a huge market for products such as textiles and white goods, and business groups are firmly in favour of EU membership which they say would help stability.

"What lies at the basis of Turkey's decision to join the EU is the fact that the EU is one of the world's most important economic blocs," said Meral Gezgin Eris, chairwoman of Turkey's Economic Development Fund (IKV). "There may be differing views which should be respected, but Turkey's fundamental choice is very obviously integration with the EU," she said.

Spanish Ambassador to Ankara Manuel de la Camara said bringing Turkey into the EU would help stability in a volatile region of crucial interest to the bloc as well as opening up a huge market for European businesses. But in order to join, Turkey needs to improve its human rights record and meet the EU's democratic standards.

The EU wants the death penalty abolished. It wants Turkey to loosen curbs on minority cultural rights, an issue particularly poignant among its 12 million Kurds. And it wants the military to loosen its grip on civilian politics.

"It's a question of whether you share with Europeans the values and the vision, or not," said de la Camara, whose country currently holds the EU presidency. "If you share these views, if you're convinced this is the way you want to move, then you can do it. But if you do not share the same views, the same vision, then you will never do it," he said. "It's very clear, it's black or white, yes or no."

"I don't think anybody in Turkey is against joining the EU but what many of them think is they can get into the EU on their own terms," he added. "But this is not going to be possible."

Turkey's government is a coalition of Ecevit's Democratic Left Party (DSP), Devlet Bahceli's nationalist MHP, and the pro-European Motherland Party led by Mesut Yilmaz. A deep gulf divides Bahceli and Yilmaz on Europe.

Yilmaz is trying to push through the reforms needed to start negotiations and is using as a spur the first anniversary of Turkey's National Programme - a document laying out the government's plans to put its house in order for the EU.

That anniversary on Tuesday (March 19) will provide an occasion for all sides in Turkey's most fateful debate to take stock and for the EU itself to send its own signals to Ankara.

4. - Reuters - "Turkish police clear Kurdish southeast of tyres":

DIYARBAKIR / March 18

Turkish police swept the biggest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast collecting old tyres on Monday, in a bid to prevent their thick black smoke polluting a traditional festival.

Kurds in Turkey celebrate spring's arrival with a festival in which young men beat drums and leap over large bonfires. The ancient rite is also marked in Iran and Central Asia.

But Turkish officials this year are threatening fines of up to 714 million Turkish lira ($530) for those who burn tyres and spread heavy black smoke over the city.

"People want to celebrate in peace, not through burning tyres," one local official said.

The build-up to the festival has been marked by traditional sparring over its name -- known to the Kurds as "Newroz" and "Nevruz" in Turkish.

The People's Democracy Party (HADEP), which runs the Diyarbakir municipality, said on Monday it had refiled its application to hold the festivities on March 21, removing the Kurdish spelling, after a request from police.

"We re-applied in the form the police asked," a HADEP official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Turkish has no letter W and does not recognise Kurdish as a language of officialdom.

The festival has long been a focus of Kurdish nationalist aspirations.

Much of the southeast region is covered by an emergency rule administration with powers to limit public gatherings.

The authority was set up in response to an armed Kurdish separatist insurgency that has cost more than 30,000 lives since 1984. Fighting has died down in recent years and the separatist rebels say they now prefer politics to the gun.

Turkey has eased restrictions on the spring festival in recent years.

5. - Turkish Daily News - "IHD protests F-type prisons and ongoing death fasts":

ANKARA / 19 March

Turkey's prominent human rights group, the Human Rights Association (IHD), on Monday staged a sit-down demonstration in Kizilay Square in order to protest the maximum security F-type prisons and ongoing death fasts.

Carrying banners such as "Respect the right to live, how many more should die," the IHD members assembled in Kizilay square on Monday.

The isolation in F-type prisons and death fasts to protest the isolation continues, the group said, and called on politicians to take swift action to end the isolation.

Turkey's new maximum security prisons have one or three person cells, a system which is frequently accused of causing the isolation of inmates.

A number of human rights groups have proposed a plan to open the doors of three cells in order to end the isolation, which has also been named as a type of torture by some groups.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the death fast protests of prison conditions reached 38 when Dogan Tokmak died of starvation last Saturday after 290 days on a death fast.

Tokmak was the sixth hunger striker to die this year, and the 48th to die of starvation since the protests began. Another hunger striker killed himself last September by setting himself on fire.

Hundreds of leftist prisoners and a few of their supporters started the hunger strikes more than a year ago in protest of plans to introduce new prisons with small cells for one to three inmates. The protesters say the small cells isolate prisoners and leave them vulnerable to abuse by prison wardens.

Accusations of torture are common in police stations in Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership.

The government says the new prisons meet European standards and argues the old-style dormitory wards were controlled by political and criminal gangs.

Ankara says the hunger strikers are controlled by leftist "terrorists" of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) and has refused to negotiate with them.

Security forces raided prisons across the country in December 2000 in a bid to end the hunger strikes and enforce transfers to the new prisons, but the protests have continued. Thirty inmates and two soldiers died in the raids.

The hunger strikers have prolonged their protest by drinking sugared and salted water and taking vitamins to keep them alive.

6. - Reuters - "Like it or not, Turkey faces Iraq challenge":

For the US, Turkey is a valued friend in a rough neighbourhood. Ankara for its part treasures the Pentagon's role as its lobbyist in what it regards as an otherwise less than sympathetic West.

Ankara feels it was left alone to handle fallout from the 1991 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Turkey is still haunted by memories of a traumatic clash in 1991 between then president Turgut Ozal and the military over how far Turkey should go in backing Washington in the Gulf War.

By Ralph Boulton / 19 March

A U.S. attack on Baghdad could shake Turkey's frail economy and confront its powerful generals with tough decisions, but as a country with 'one foot in Iraq' Turkey could scarcely escape being drawn into the imbroglio.

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, speaking ahead of Tuesday's visit by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, said Iraq posed no threat to its neighbours. Making it the next target in a "war on terrorism" might only deepen conflict in the Middle East.

Cheney will seek to convince Ecevit that, on the contrary, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and that NATO ally Turkey, a beneficiary of U.S. support through its financial crisis, should back U.S. action.

Ozdem Sanberk, head of the TESEV institute in Istanbul and the country's top diplomat in the 1990s, acknowledges U.S. pressure will be great. But the knife, he says, cuts both ways.

"They can use Iraq's southern borders (Kuwait) to launch an attack but a sustainable operation needs Turkey's cooperation.

"Turkey has a strong hand, but can it play it?"

Turkey may seek firm assurances of financial help and a clear vision of a short, sharp operation -- if an operation there must be -- to ensure a stable succession to Saddam.

For the U.S. Turkey is a valued friend in a rough neighbourhood. Ankara for its part treasures the Pentagon's role as its lobbyist in what it regards as an otherwise less than sympathetic West.

Fears come at worst time for economy

Ankara feels it was left alone to handle fallout from the 1991 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Some 500,000 refugees flowed in, billions of dollars in Iraqi trade were lost in sanctions.

Uncertainty over Iraq already weighs on financial markets at a time when Turkey faces its worst recession since 1945 and must lower interest rates quickly to ease a heavy debt burden.

A long military buildup in the Gulf while U.S. plans remain unclear would scare off not just the tourists it needs so badly.

"If you're an investor interested in Turkish assets, you have that sort of risk, you can't do anything," Haluk Akdogan, emerging market analyst at Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, says.

Domestic harmony is key to a multibillion dollar IMF rescue plan. Anti-American mass protests, however, seem unlikely.

Turkey is still haunted by memories of a traumatic clash in 1991 between then president Turgut Ozal and the military over how far Turkey should go in backing Washington in the Gulf War.

The Chief of Armed Forces General Staff, a figure Turkish politicians trifle with at their peril, resigned in protest over Ozal's eagerness to commit Turkish troops to the campaign.

The generals at the time viewed deployment outside Turkish frontiers warily. The General Staff was also preoccupied with domestic threats from Kurdish insurrection in the southeast.

"The military was bypassed...They couldn't accept that," Cengiz Candar, a columnist close to Ozal at the time, says.

Ozal drew back from sending troops, though he deployed some 250,000 near the Iraqi border and put bases at U.S. disposal.

Much has changed in 10 years. Turkish troops have served abroad in peacekeeping forces from Somalia to Afghanistan.

"In (1991)...they trembled at the notion of setting foot in Iraq. Now, it's an open secret -- they're there," Candar says.

Turkish troops entered northern Iraq after the Gulf War when the area was deemed a Kurdish protected zone beyond Baghdad's control. Soldiers pursue Kurdish rebels fighting for a Kurdish state in eastern Turkey. Fighting at home has died down.

The Turkish military in northern Iraq

Ankara admits only to occasional incursions of troops, but diplomats say a Turkish presence is sustained. If war came, the army there might be expected at the very least to help with camps to halt refugees before the frontier.

"Possibly, the defence strategy has been modified. Now they can foresee defence of territory beyond borders," Sanberk says.

While far from content with the status quo in Iraq, Ankara sends business groups and nurtures diplomatic ties. Baghdad protests at Turkish army incursions but entertains Ankara's approaches.

If a U.S. land invasion comes, be it this year or next, few believe U.S. troops will pour in from Turkey. Iraqi's southern flank with Kuwait provides the more obvious conduit.

"I think (Turkish troops) would police the border," says Toby Dodge of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. "I can't see Turkish and Iraqi troops fighting."

Nor is the United States likely to want that.

Fears of a Kurdish state

Dodge says any U.S. campaign may take the form of bombing intended to spur a coup. Iraqi troops would mass around Baghdad. The U.S. would certainly seek use of Turkish bases as in 1991.

Bombardment could be accompanied by covert infiltration from the south, north, even west. It would be logical in such a case for Baghdad to shore up its northern defences if it can.

The outcome of an all-out invasion might be hard to predict and here lies the rub for Turkish political and military chiefs.

Candar dismisses fears an Iraqi war may produce a Kurdish state in the north -- something Ecevit is sure to raise with Cheney as a threat to Turkey's unity. "I don't see any danger... (from involvement), except economic losses for the duration. After Saddam goes there would be new prospects for Turkey."

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz issued thinly veiled advice in praising the late President Ozal's "bravery".

"When Ozal was asked why he decided to get involved in these important...and to some extent risky measures (in 1991), he is said to have answered: 'we wanted to be at the peace conference...on the guest list, not on the menu'."

7. - AFP - "Iraqi Kurdish leader in Turkey for talks":

ANKARA / March 19

A prominent leader of the Iraqi Kurds, who have been in control of northern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, arrived in Turkey

Tuesday for talks with Turkish officials amid speculation that Iraq could soon become a target of a US military campaign.

Jalal Talabani, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), flew into Istanbul from Damascus and is expected to travel on to Ankara later in the day, the Anatolia news agency reported. Talabani is expected to meet the undersecretary of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Ugur Ziyal, on Wednesday. Talabani's visit, the second in less than two weeks, coincides with that of US Vice President Dick Cheney, who is expected in Ankara later Tuesday for talks on possible strikes against Iraq.

Washington wants to get rid of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and has threatened military action if Baghdad refuses to allow the resumption of UN weapons inspections. Talabani said during his previous visit to Ankara in early March that he

preferred a democratic change of regime in Iraq involving forces within the country instead of a military intervention from outside. "We are for fundamental democratic change in Iraq with Iraqi democratic and progressive forces," he said.

The PUK leader also stressed that his faction would not support any plan to overthrow Saddam without a sound alternative to replace him. Turkey, a key Muslim ally of the United States, is opposed to a strike against its southern neighbor Iraq, fearing that regional turmoil could result in the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in the northern Iraq.

Such a state could fan separatist tendencies among Turkey's Kurdish minoruty in its southeast. Ankara is also concerned that such an operation would derail its efforts to overhaul its crisis-hit economy with IMF aid.

8. - Star - "EU membership process is only a means":

Columnist Semih Idiz comments on Turkey's efforts to get its accession negotiations to the EU started. A summary of his column is as follows:

"We are completing the first year following the declaration of our National Programme. As those concerned with the issue are underlining, we cannot underestimate the steps taken by the government during the previous year. As we all know the dimensions of resistance to change in Turkey, we cannot underrate these steps.

However, no one can claim that the government deserves a gold medal in carrying out these steps. In hindsight, no matter how important these measures are, they still remain insufficient when assessed within the whole context of the issue. In short, Turkey has not been able to reach the target it set for March 19 in the National Programme. Our officials are now saying that such a deadline was never set. 'Europe did not set such a date, it was a psychological mark we put forth in order to encourage the public.'

It is true that we have shown the carrot and stick to ourselves. But this has helped only to a certain extent. The same officials are stating that the real deadline is in mid-April. As a country which could not reach the date it set for itself, we shall see if we will be able to accomplish the requirements of EU by this deadline. I am rather skeptical, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong. We must evaluate the situation in line with our own standards rather than those of the EU. This has nothing to do with the EU and concerns the reforms we must carry out for ourselves. Speaking optimistically we can say that during the last year some monolithic moulds began to crack.

For example, the issue of broadcasting in Kurdish, which could hardly be spoken of only two weeks ago is being debated. Not only that, we are discussing whether it should be aired through private channels or through state radio and TV channels. This must be regarded as a significant step forward, even though we still have not fulfilled the requirements of the EU Accession Partnership Document. We have indexed our reforms to the EU.

This is because some believe that we are not able to do certain things unless there is the pressure from abroad. Although this may be true in part, it is an approach which draws the anger of the resistance front in our country. In fact, this suits the purposes of those opposed to the EU. Resistance to foreign pressure is a stance which finds favor in Turkey, even though it may reach to nonsensical dimensions at times.

We must comprehend that the reforms which are far beyond the requirements of the National Programme should be fulfilled not for the EU but for ourselves. EU membership for Turkey after we fulfill the Copenhagen and Maastricht criteria may in fact be a limited development. As a country which has advanced both economically and democratically, membership in the EU may not be important for Turkey. In such a situation the EU countries will get in line to form relations with Turkey.

This is not a fantasy, but a consequence of realpolitik. The EU is not an institution for which me must change our culture, character or religion. It is a series of laws we will adopt. These laws concern the elevation of the standard of living of the citizens within the integrity of the state. The EU membership process is a train which will take us to a station we want to get to. It is only a means. We must be able to realize this."