21
November 2002
2. "New Leader Tries to Sell Turkey (and Himself) to Europeans", Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will do almost anything to get Turkey into the exclusive 15-member club known as the European Union.
3. "Turkey's new interior minister vows to combat rights violations", Turkey's new Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu pledged on Thursday to fight against human rights violations, one of the main stumbling blocks to the country's bid to join the European Union.
4. "As war looms, the voice of Kurds is heard in Syria", 250,000 Kurds in Syria are struggling for legal rights and recognition.
5. "HRW: A law against torture is the way into the EU", influential international human rights institution, Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed, "If Turkey's new leaders want to send a clear message of separation from past human rights abuses, there could be no better first step than quickly to pass the anti-torture law already in draft form. It would signal to Turkish society, the EU and the international community the government's firm commitment to the human rights of all Turkish citizens."
6. "Turkey to Air Limited Kurd Programs", Turkey's broadcasting authority on Wednesday authorized state radio and television to air limited programs in the once-banned Kurdish language, a step toward meeting EU membership requirements.
1. - The Guardian - "Turkey in EU 'would bridge cultures'":
21 November 2002 / by Owen Bowcott
Admitting Turkey to the European Union would send a positive signal
to the Islamic world and prevent a future clash of civilisations, the
leader of the country's newly elected governing party told an audience
in London yesterday. Following meetings with Tony Blair and the foreign
secretary, Jack Straw, Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the EU to demonstrate
that it was not an exclusively "Christian club" but willing
to include predominantly Muslim states in its ranks.
Mr Erdogan's explicit challenge to rightwing prejudices came as he embarked on an intensive lobbying of European capitals ahead of next month's meeting of the EU Copenhagen summit which will consider Turkey's candidature.
Ankara is pressing to be given a firm date for entry as has been given to the 12 other applicant states - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus, Malta, Romania and Bulgaria - which are due to join in 2004 and 2007.
Britain is a strong supporter of Turkey's cause, but this month the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing caused uproar by demanding that Turkey never be allowed to join the EU. In an interview with Le Monde, he described Turkey as "a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life".
In his speech at the Savoy hotel in London yesterday, Mr Erdogan said Turkey was better prepared for EU entry than some other candidate states and he challenged fears of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west.
"Turkey is far more ready to enter the EU than some other countries," said Mr Erdogan, whose Justice and Development party won a landslide victory three weeks ago.
"The majority of the Turkish people are Muslims. Turkey's entrance to the EU will influence and affect how the other Muslim nations of the world view the EU in a very positive way. It will be the best example of how Islam and democracy can function together. Turkey will bring a harmony of cultures rather than a clash of civilisations.
"The Copenhagen summit will be a test because we do not see the EU as a Christian club. [Turkey's accession] will help the countries of the Black sea and Caspian sea perceive the EU in a positive way. The EU will gain a lot and become a major force in the world."
Downing Street said yesterday it hoped "progress"
would be made on Turkey's application at the summit. A spokeswoman for
the Foreign Office said Britain was "a long-standing supporter
of Turkey's desire to join the EU", and praised "the impressive
reforms under way in the country". 
2. - The New York Times - "New Leader Tries to Sell Turkey (and Himself) to Europeans":
BRUSSELS / 21 November 2002 / by Elaine Sciolino
Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will do almost anything to get Turkey
into the exclusive 15-member club known as the European Union.
As leader of Turkey's new governing party and probably the most popular politician in the country, Mr. Erdogan has promised to change laws and amend the Constitution, to root out graft and to make concessions on Cyprus.
Starting last week, he took his campaign westward, selling himself as much as his cause on a tour of seven member states of the European Union. Today, he knocked on the doors of the organization headquarters here, warning it not to discriminate against a country whose people are overwhelmingly Muslim.
"Turkey has been waiting at the gates of the E.U. for 40 years, but countries that applied only 10 years ago are almost becoming members," he complained at a news conference in a hotel. "We think we have to go beyond that and not look at the E.U. as a Christian club."
On his first trip abroad after the stunning victory of his Islamist party this month, he urged European Union leaders to agree at their summit meeting next month in Copenhagen to give Turkey a fixed date for the start of formal talks on when and how it can join.
"If the results are negative," Mr. Erdogan said, "it will create the provocative thought of the E.U. as a club of Christian countries."
The summit leaders are set to invite formally 10 countries to join in 2004 — Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Turkey has a long way to go before the European Union embraces it. In 1999, the organization accepted Turkey as a "candidate" for membership, issuing a warm statement saying it was "destined to join the union." There has been a cooling since then.
Turkey has been praised for laws adopted in August to abolish the death penalty in peacetime, permit greater freedom of expression and increase the rights of ethnic Kurds. But some members of the European Union have resisted setting a date in Copenhagen for talks, saying Turkey first has to prove it is improving its human rights record and carrying out other reforms.
This month, former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of France, who is overseeing plans for the future of Europe, said bluntly that Turkey was "not a European country" and that inviting it to join the union would mean "the end of Europe."
Afterward, Mr. Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, stayed cool, dismissing the remarks as "inopportune" and "emotional."
The waters were muddied again last Thursday, when Pope John Paul II gave his advice to the European Union as it prepared to expand eastward. He called on the group to remember that its "common European house" was built with "the cement of that extraordinary religious, cultural and spiritual heritage that has made Europe great down the centuries."
The effect of the remarks, whether intended or not, was to reinforce the perception of Turkey as an outsider.
Mr. Erdogan was received today by the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, and the European Union commissioner for enlargement. Günter Verheugen.
Mr. Giscard d'Estaing was in Vienna for a birthday party, his spokesman said. Chris Patten, the European Union commissioner for external relations, kept long-scheduled plans to be in Paris. Javier Solana, its foreign policy chief, who was en route to the NATO summit meeting in Prague, went to Ankara last week to meet Mr. Erdogan.
Mr. Erdogan took with him 12 Turkish business and civic leaders to prove his good faith. Turkey is desperate to accelerate its bid for membership in hopes of attracting foreign investment, as it tries to recover from its worst recession since World War II.
Much to the annoyance of members, the United States has pressed hard for Turkey, the sole Muslim member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a much-needed ally in any military campaign against Iraq, eventually to become a member. On Monday, President Bush telephoned the current president of the union, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark, and urged him to advance Turkey's candidacy.
Mr. Erdogan today praised his country as a model of coexistence between Islam and democracy.
"The Turkish population is Muslim," he said, "and we are trying to have a positive impact on the way the Muslim world looks at the European Union. We want Turkey to be proof of how we can live side by side."
With Turkey as a member, he added, "the European Union will be able to expand to the Caucasus, to Asia."
"It will be a gate," Mr. Erdogan said.
That is exactly what many Europeans fear, although they are reluctant to say so out loud. A concern is that if Turkey joined the union, it could become a "gate" for a flood of terrorists and immigrants from eastern neighbors like Iran and Iraq.
Mr. Erdogan sought to portray himself as a model of moderation. Convicted in 1998 of inciting hatred on religious grounds after he recited a well-known poem comparing minarets to bayonets, he has been barred from becoming prime minister until Parliament revises laws that bar him from politics.
He told reporters that a solution to the 28-year division of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey has to be examined as part of Turkey's effort to join the European Union and that a fair solution would require compromises on both sides.
Asked whether he had a secret agenda to turn Turkey into an Islamic state, Mr. Erdogan said:
"Everything is open, clear, transparent. There is
no chance of a fundamentalist party's getting power in Turkey, because
our population has chosen the middle way, and not the extremes. This
is how we got our people's votes."
3. - AFP - "Turkey's new interior minister vows to combat rights violations":
ANKARA / 21 November 2002
Turkey's new Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu pledged on Thursday
to fight against human rights violations, one of the main stumbling
blocks to the country's bid to join the European Union.
"We will effectively combat human rights violations unacceptable in a state of law such as torture, disappearance and death in police custody, and unresolved murder cases," Aksu said in message, carried by the Anatolia news agency.
"Everyone will be made to feel under the guarantee of the democratic regime," he added. Aksu also pledged to implement a series of far-reaching democracy reforms adopted by the parliament in summer to bring Turkey in line with EU norms. The reforms included the abolishment of the death penalty in peace time, greater cultural rights for the Kurds, improved detention conditions and the lifting of certain restrictions on demonstrations.
Turkey, the laggard among 13 EU-hopeful states, comes under frequent fire from human rights organizations and its western allies for alleged widespread and sytematic rights violations. The new government -- set up by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a conservative movement with Islamist roots -- has vowed to lift all restrictions on basic rigths and liberties in the run-up to next month's key EU summit on enlargment.
Turkey wants EU leaders at the Copenhagen summit in December
to set a firm date for the start of accession talks next year. The union,
which is poised to formally invite 10 countries to become members at
the Copenhagen summit, has so far snubbed Ankara's demand, saying more
reforms were needed to bring the country up to European standards.
4. - The Christian Sience Monitor - "As war looms, the voice of Kurds is heard in Syria":
250,000 Kurds in Syria are struggling for legal rights and recognition.
QAMISHLY / 20 November 2002 / by Nicholas Blanford
A yellowing scrap of paper wrapped in Scotch tape, along with a
faded black and white photograph, is the only document proving that
Massoud Omar exists.
Mr. Omar is one of about 25,000 Kurds in Syria who are classified as maktoumeen - or "unregistered." It means that he cannot own any property, so his house and clothing shop are registered in other people's names. He cannot travel abroad. His marriage to his wife, Salaam, is illegal under Syrian law, and his four children simply do not exist officially at all.
Other Kurds do not fare much better. Other than the maktoumeen, another 225,000 out of about 1.7 million Kurds in Syria are categorized as "foreigners," holding only a red identity card for domestic travel. But the prospect of a war in neighboring Iraq appears to have spurred the Syrian authorities to reassess their 40-year suppression of Kurdish identity.
The Kurdish population of neighboring northern Iraq is expected to gain some form of autonomy in the wake of a US-led invasion to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. And Damascus fears that Syria's own Kurds may be inspired by the achievement of their brethren in Iraq to begin agitating for self-rule in their area of northeast Syria adjacent to the Iraqi and Turkish borders.
One Western diplomat in Damascus described the Kurdish question as a "time bomb." "I think the authorities are very concerned about the Kurdish issue," says Ibrahim Hamidi, who writes on Syrian affairs for the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper. "If the situation changes in northern Iraq, it will inspire the Kurds here, so I think that the authorities are going to start being nice to them."
The Syrian regime's concerns are reinforced by the fact that the Kurds populate the country's wealthiest province, source of most of Syria's oil and gas. The Kurds live in the flat fertile plain between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers - known locally as Al Jazeera or "The Island." The endlessly level skyline is broken only by small man-made hills and villages of single-story mud-plastered houses which seem to merge effortlessly with the natural landscape. Tractors and trucks laden with bulging sacks of soft white cotton clog the arrow-straight roads. The district is Syria's largest cotton-growing area.
Two months ago, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad paid a rare visit to Hasake, the principal town in the area, in an apparent attempt to appease the disenfranchised Kurds. "The message from the president is: 'Yes, we will look into your problems, but don't use this as a card to press for more,' " says a Damascus-based analyst. Most Kurds, however, say that their goal is citizenship and not autonomy.
"Our problem is very different from that of the Kurds in Iraq," says Ahmad Barakat of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party. "Their aim in Iraq is to get a state of their own. But in Syria, we just want our culture and freedom as Syrian nationals."
The repression of the Kurds began in 1962, with a controversial census undertaken by Syria's ruling Baath party in which some 120,000 Kurdish Syrian nationals were stripped of their citizenship overnight. Their offspring were also classified as foreigners or maktoumeen, swelling the population of dispossessed to around 250,000 today.
Damascus justified the measure as an attempt to differentiate between Syrian Kurds and illegal Kurdish immigrants who had crossed the border from neighboring Turkey. The Kurds say it was simple discrimination based on the Arabist ideology of the Baath Party. Thousands of Arabs were resettled in the early 1970s on confiscated Kurdish property in a narrow strip along Syria's border with Turkey. The Arab arrivals were given better state facilities, such as schools and clinics, fostering a climate of resentment among the local Kurds.
Ten miles east of Qamishly lies the tiny Kurdish village of Tannouriye, a typical collection of mud houses. A few hundred yards further down the road is Tannouriye Jdeideh, or "New Tannouriye," a substantially larger Arab village with a modern school.
The new village was built on property once owned by Kurds. Their land gone, many Kurds left their homes to find menial labor in Aleppo or Damascus. Others have tried to emigrate illegally to Europe.
The names of Kurdish villages and shops were changed into Arabic. Kurdish is banned from being taught in schools and it is illegal to publish in the language. Parents were pressured to give their children Arabic rather than Kurdish names.
"The authorities wanted to erase the Kurdish identity," says Fawaz Kano, a member of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party. "They wanted to make a physical barrier between the Kurds of Syria and the Kurds living in Turkey. So they took our land and dumped the Arabs along the border."
Some restrictions were eased in 1970 when Hafez al Assad, the former Syrian president, assumed power. Kurds can speak their language in public, receive school education, and watch Kurdish singers on Syrian television.
In the residential outskirts of Qamishly, there is little obvious indication of a tight security presence. Small children chase each other through the narrow dusty streets. Women, wearing the traditional robe and head scarf of the Kurds and sporting thick butter-gold bracelets and earrings, sit in the brilliant sunshine in front of their homes, chopping vegetables and chatting.
But despite the pastoral scene, residents say that security remains powerful in Qamishly as well as in other Kurdish-populated towns and villages. "We are afraid to speak to people, afraid to speak in the streets. We are always worried that someone is listening to us," Mr. Omar said. The small bookshelf in the Omar's sitting room is filled with Arabic-language books.
Mrs. Omar says that she and her husband keep their culture alive in secret. "We teach our children Kurdish at home and read Kurdish-language books that have been published in northern Iraq," she says.
After 40 years of waiting, the Kurds are reluctant to
pin too much hope on the possibility that their status will soon be
improved as a result of a possible war in Iraq. Some say they have faith
in the young reformist-minded Syrian president. Others say they expect
no change in the immediate future. "We have to build our lives
on reality, not on dreams," Mr. Barakat says.
5. - Turkish Daily News - "HRW: A law against torture is the way into the EU":
ANKARA / 21 November 2002
Influential international human rights institution, Human Rights
Watch (HRW) claimed, "If Turkey's new leaders want to send a clear
message of separation from past human rights abuses, there could be
no better first step than quickly to pass the anti-torture law already
in draft form. It would signal to Turkish society, the EU and the international
community the government's firm commitment to the human rights of all
Turkish citizens."
Stating, "Nov. 3 elections capped a year of remarkable human rights progress in Turkey, with more advances than any year since the 1980 military coup. These included repeal of the death penalty, removal of some significant restraints on Kurdish and other minority language education and broadcasting, and a new draft law to guard against torture." HRW's Turkish representative Jonathan Sugden said, "But more reforms are needed for Turkey to meet the European Union's "political criteria" for membership: the protection of human rights, rule of law and respect for minorities."
Sugden continued to say, "The election of a party whose president was stripped of his political rights is generally interpreted as the electorate's slap in the face for the state forces that manipulated the justice system to obtain his conviction and exclusion from the race."
"Some Turkish commentators warn that the AKP's support stems from strongly nationalist and religious elements with a poor record on the protection of human rights. They suggest that this new conservative government's interest in human rights will evaporate once it has amended the law under which Erdogan was convicted and stripped of his political rights, and lifted the headscarf ban which prevents many devout Muslim women from attending university," Sugden continued. "Both are indeed serious violations. But Turkey also faces a number of other human rights challenges, including restrictions on the press and free expression, unacceptable prison conditions and violations of the rights of the hundreds of thousands driven from their homes by security forces in their 15-year conflict with Kurdish separatists. Torture is still widespread," he said.
Sugden suggested, "If Turkey's new leaders want to send a clear message of separation from past human rights abuses, there could be no better first step than quickly to pass the anti-torture law already in draft form. It would signal to Turkish society, the EU and the international community the government's firm commitment to the human rights of all Turkish citizens. How quickly can the torture reform be passed? The raft of major rights legislation was passed in record time this summer, in less than a week. Moving swiftly to pass torture reform could even put Turkey's level of legal protection against torture ahead of several other European member states, giving the country some badly needed high ground as it pushes its candidacy for Europe. The EU will make the key decision on setting a date for Turkey to join at its summit in Copenhagen next month. So time is short."
Stating, "A law offers no protection unless it is
implemented. One month may not be sufficient time to show a convincing
statistical drop in torture allegations," Sugden said, "The
new government should ensure that during those four weeks lawyers can
visit their clients in police custody in all cases and in even the most
far-flung regions of the country. Thorough implementation in the first
days and weeks would help to establish a firm expectation of such access
in the minds of police and defense lawyers alike."
6. - Associated Press - "Turkey to Air Limited Kurd Programs":
ANKARA / 20 November 2002 / by Selcan Hacaoglu
Turkey's broadcasting authority on Wednesday authorized state radio and television to air limited programs in the once-banned Kurdish language, a step toward meeting EU membership requirements.
Turkey's parliament voted in August to allow TV and radio stations to broadcast in regional languages such as Kurdish. EU countries welcomed the reform but said they were waiting to see if it is properly implemented.
The changes could not be put into force until the broadcasting authority ruled on the details.
On Wednesday, Fatih Karacada, the head of the broadcasting authority, said only state television and radio - not private stations - could air the broadcasts.
He said radio broadcasts in Kurdish or other regional languages could not exceed 45 minutes per day and a total of four hours a week. Television broadcasts in Kurdish cannot exceed 30 minutes a day and a total of two hours a week.
It is not clear when the broadcasts will start.
The decision comes as Turkey lobbies for EU membership. Kurdish activists have criticized the regulations, saying the limits on the broadcasts were a violation of basic freedoms.
"This is not democratic, this is not freedom," said Naci Kutluay, deputy chairman of Turkey's pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party. "This will neither satisfy the Kurds, nor the EU."
The issue of broadcasting or teaching Kurdish is extremely sensitive in Turkey. Turkey does not regard its 12 million Kurds as a minority and sees any assertions of a separate Kurdish identity as an attempt to break up the country along ethnic lines.
Kurdish guerrillas fought a 15-year war in southeastern Turkey that left 37,000 people, mostly Kurds, dead. Turkish hard-liners say that granting language rights to Kurds rewards the guerrillas.
But the EU has demanded that Turkey grant increased minority rights, and has specifically pointed to limitations on the Kurdish language.