8
August 2002
2. "US ups pressure for Turkish accession to EU", Europeans are coming under increasing pressure from Washington to offer Turkey, a US ally, a date for starting accession negotiations with the European Union instead of setting new conditions or obstructing progress.
3. "Syria's Kurds ask Assad to give them back citizenship", Syria's minority Kurds on Monday demanded President Bashar al-Assad restore citizenship to almost 200,000 of their people left stateless four decades ago. In an open letter to Assad, the Kurdish Democratic Alliance (KDA), slammed a 1962 census which stripped some 100,000 Syrian Kurds, mostly in the northeastern Hasakeh governorate, of citizenship and left them stateless.
4. "Double Talk on Democracy", the Bush administration likes to say that the establishment of a democratic government in Iraq could be a model for political reform in the Islamic world. (...) Last month, under pressure from the military, Turkey's highest electoral authority banned Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the country's most popular political party, from running in this fall's parliamentary election. At a political rally five years ago, when Mr. Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul, he recited a combative poem that advocated the advancement of the Islamic faith in Turkish society.
5. "IHD: Human rights violations in Southeast decrease", Turkey's leading human rights advocate, the Human Rights Association (IHD) Diyarbakir Branch Office announced that there is an important decrease in the number of human rights violations in the Southeast region of Turkey.
6. "Carrying the Flame", after centuries in the shadows of the Sunni majority, Turkey's Alevi community finds its voice in Europe.
1. - AFP - "Turkey's top prosecutor seeks to disqualify Kurdish party from polls":
ANKARA / 7 October 2002
Turkey's chief prosecutor on Monday asked electoral authorities
to reassess the eligibility of the sole Kurdish party registered to
run in November's general elections, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Prosecutor Sabih Kanadoglu said in a written statement that the need
to reassess the eligibility of the pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party
(DEHAP) arose following recent media reports that the party did not
have a sufficient number of provincial offices to stand in the November
3 elections.
Under Turkish law, a political party needs to have opened offices in at least half of Turkey's 81 provinces, at least six months before the poll, to be able to field candidates. Kanadoglu said he had collected information and documents on DEHAP's rural organization from relevant authorities, and has asked the electoral board to re-evaluate whether it was allowed to stand in the elections. In its evaluation last month, the board barred two DEHAP candidates from running because of past convictions, but said there was no reason to bar the party from the poll.
DEHAP is the only pro-Kurdish party to run in the election
after the country's main Kurdish party, the People's Democracy Party
(HADEP), withdrew from the race on fears it might be banned for alleged
links with Kurdish rebels. Under a deal between the parties, HADEP has
teamed up with DEHAP, its sister organization set up in 1997, and two
other minor left-wing groups, to run in the November poll. 
2. - The Financial Times / AFP - "US ups pressure for Turkish accession to EU":
BRUSSELS / 7 October 2002 / by Judy Dempsey
Europeans are coming under increasing pressure from Washington to
offer Turkey, a US ally, a date for starting accession negotiations
with the European Union instead of setting new conditions or obstructing
progress.
"Hardly a week goes by without Washington telling the European Commission and member states to offer Turkey the perspective of eventual EU membership," said a European diplomat.
Brussels briefing
The US is exerting maximum pressure now, partly because of Turkey's strategic and geographic importance if Washington decides to launch military strikes against Iraq.
"We do not hesitate in discussing our views of the eastern Mediterranean with all our allies and friends," said Tom Weston, Washington's special envoy to Cyprus. "We have made our views very strongly, very forcefully with our friends and allies," he told the FT.
Washington is also concerned that, once the EU expands from 15 to 25 members by mid-2004, Brussels will be reluctant to take on another enlargement for some time afterwards. "Yet the Europeans should recognise that a stable, prosperous, democratic Turkey anchored to the EU is to their benefit too," said a US diplomat.
Turkey was given EU candidate status in 1999 after Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state, exerted immense pressure on member states attending the Helsinki summit. This pressure will be stepped up between Wednesday - when the Commission publishes its annual progress reports on the 13 candidate countries, including Turkey - and the EU's December summit in Copenhagen.
The Commission will conclude that 10 countries, mostly former communists, will be ready to complete accession negotiations by Copenhagen. Turkey, however, will not be offered a date. The Commission said it did not intend to do so, since that was up to member stater, and in any case Turkey had yet to meet the "Copenhagen criteria" - preconditions, such as respect for human rights, the rule of law and ending torture, for starting negotiations.
Mr Weston, who will visit Brussels on Wednesday, said he hoped the Commission would acknowledge the radical reforms Turkey introduced in August when it abolished the death penalty.
"Turkey has made stupendous progress with those reforms. It was progress that surprised all of us," said Mr Weston. "It is an effort to meet the Copenhagen criteria. It [Turkey] should be recognised for it. I trust the Commission will present an objective and fair analysis on Turkey."
The Commission and most member states, however, have serious reservations over giving Turkey, a secular Muslim country, a date for starting negotiations, regardless of reforms.
"Brussels snubs Turkey over date for EU talks"
BRUSSELS / 7 October 2002 / by Michael Thurston
The European Commission remained silent Monday on a start date for
Turkish EU entry talks, welcoming reforms but urging "considerable"
further efforts after upcoming elections. In a draft report, the EU
executive arm at the same time offered to double EU financial aid to
Turkey to help its preparations to join the 15-member bloc.
"Overall Turkey has made considerable progress ... in particular in the course of the last year," said the final draft of a report to be published on Wednesday by the EU's executive body. "Nonetheless, considerable further efforts are needed," it said. Turkey, alone among the 13 candidate states, has not yet started EU negotiations, and will not be given a start date for talks with Brussels this year, according to EU sources. The latest commission report, the last before an EU summit in Copenhagen in December expected to give the green light to 10 new members, makes no mention of a start date for EU talks for Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel said at the weekend that ties between his country and the European Union would suffer if his country this year refused a date for the opening of accession talks. "The disappointment of the Turkish people will be so great that it will inevitably influence other aspects of relations between Turkey and the European Union," Gurel said Saturday. An official said the commission was aware of the politically sensitive nature of the issue, ahead of Turkish legislative elections on November 3.
"We are being very careful not to complicate the task" facing Turkish political parties in next month's elections, he said. But the report also put Turkey under pressure, notably over the ethnically divided island of Cyprus. The Brussels report recommended that Cyprus should be in the next wave of EU enlargement with or without a resolution of its 28-year-old division between the Turkish north and the Greek south. "The Commission hopes to see a reunited Cyprus acceding to the European Union on the basis of a comprehensive settlement, as the best outcome for all concerned," it said.
But if there was no settlement the commission said Cyprus -- of which the only internationally recognized part is the Greek south -- should join anyway. Brussels urged Turkey to help resolve the long-standing dispute. "The Commission...urges all parties concerned, and in particular Turkey, to lend full support to efforts to reach a comprehensive settlement this year," the draft said. The Turkish government, which is battling for re-election, pushed through a number of reforms this year including extending rights for ethnic Kurds.
But the European Commission said the measures did not go far enough. "The reforms contain a number of significant limitations .. on the full enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms," it said. Restrictions remain in a list of areas including freedom of expression and freedom of religion, it said. In addition a number of important issues, including torture, "have yet to be adequately addressed, it said.
The commission, while likely to disappoint Turkey, meanwhile
proposed a large boost in financial aid for Ankara. "The Commission
recommends that the EU should enhance its support for Turkey's pre-accession
preparations and should provide significant additional resources for
this purpose," it said. The assistance, estimated at 177 million
euros (173 million dollars) annually, could be doubled by 2006, the
report said.
3. - AFP - "Syria's Kurds ask Assad to give them back citizenship":
DAMASCUS / 7 October 2002
Syria's minority Kurds on Monday demanded President Bashar al-Assad
restore citizenship to almost 200,000 of their people left stateless
four decades ago. In an open letter to Assad, the Kurdish Democratic
Alliance (KDA), slammed a 1962 census which stripped some 100,000 Syrian
Kurds, mostly in the northeastern Hasakeh governorate, of citizenship
and left them stateless.
The government said the aim of the census was to discover how many people had illegally crossed the border from Turkish Kurdistan. Kurds had to prove they had lived in Syria at least since 1945 or lose their citizenship. However, the Kurds and human rights groups have charged the stripping of citizenship was part of a plan to Arabize the resources-rich northeast of Syria, an area with the largest concentration of non-Arabs in the country. They are denied the right to vote, own property, have marriages legally recognized, or be treated in public hospitals. They carry special red identity cards and are not allowed passports to travel outside of Syria.
Since children of these Kurds are also not granted citizenship, their number has grown to almost 200,000, according to the KDA. "These statistics are proof of an injust act, against international and Syrian law, and aim to undermine the political, economic, cultural and social evolution of the (Syrian) Kurds," it said. The group complained that the restrictions also "seriously undermine the national interests of Syria," and said "Syria's Kurds are not isolationist, consider Syrian causes as their own and place themselves first in line to defend Syria."
"We ask the Syrian president to intervene, 40 years
after this unjust census, to end the suffering and end the segregation
and special laws" against the country's largest non-Arab minority.
The KDA, based in the northern city of Kamechli, 680 kilometres (410
miles) from Damascus, groups five Kurdish political groups. Kurds are
estimated to number two million in Syria, in the absence of official
figures.
4. - The New York Times - "Double Talk on Democracy":
6 October 2002
The Bush administration likes to say that the establishment of a democratic government in Iraq could be a model for political reform in the Islamic world. That is no doubt true, and a desirable objective. Unfortunately, while the United States is preparing to fight a war in Iraq in part to achieve that goal, it is doing little to address undemocratic practices nearly everywhere else in the region.
Washington's democracy agenda must not begin and end with Iraq, where political life has been stunted by dictators for decades. Other predominantly Muslim countries, like Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt, offer more fertile ground, with important elements of democratic culture and politics already in place.
Turkey, Iraq's northern neighbor, is the most striking example of Washington's hypocrisy. With a little help from the United States, Turkey could be the shining example that the White House imagines Iraq can become if Saddam Hussein exits. In many respects, Turkey already resembles a Western democracy, with regular elections, a secular constitution, civil rights for women and a lively independent press. But its democratic institutions remain warped by the influence of a meddling, authoritarian military leadership.
The United States, Turkey's most influential ally, could easily help shift the country's political balance toward civilian rule, but declines to do so. The reason is no secret. Turkey's armed forces have long provided Washington with valuable military bases. During the cold war, Turkey offered proximity to the Soviet Union. Today, it provides air access to northern Iraq. Washington regularly sides with Turkey's generals over its democrats, especially when the generals claim to be defending secularism against elected Islamic politicians.
Last month, under pressure from the military, Turkey's highest electoral authority banned Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the country's most popular political party, from running in this fall's parliamentary election. At a political rally five years ago, when Mr. Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul, he recited a combative poem that advocated the advancement of the Islamic faith in Turkish society. The verse was ruled a crime, inciting religious hatred, and Mr. Erdogan was convicted and stripped of his political rights.
Although Mr. Erdogan's party had been leading by a wide margin in the polls, he is now ineligible to serve as Turkey's next prime minister, even if his party comes in first. It is hard to see how excluding the leader of a party favored by nearly a quarter of the voters strengthens democracy. Yet Washington failed to deliver a suitably strong protest.
Five years ago, the Turkish military similarly forced the ouster of another democratic Islamic politician, Necmettin Erbakan, as prime minister. It has also pressured civilian governments to support harshly repressive policies against Turkey's large Kurdish minority, measures that have led to the jailing of elected leaders and journalists.
If the Bush administration is truly interested in promoting democracy, it will also tell Pakistan's military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, that it will no longer wink at his constitutional manipulations and fraudulent electoral exercises. It should increase its pressure on Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, to free Saad Eddin Ibrahim and other democracy advocates, end his intimidation of independent news media and permit genuinely free elections.
The events of last Sept. 11 underscored for Americans
the dangers of embracing pro-Western autocrats in the Islamic world
without regard for how they rule at home. If the Bush administration
is prepared to send Americans into combat to advance the cause of democracy
in Iraq, surely it can press harder for reform in countries where democracy
can be promoted in far less costly ways.
5. - Turkish Daily News - "IHD: Human rights violations in Southeast decrease":
8 October 2002
Turkey's leading human rights advocate, the Human Rights Association
(IHD) Diyarbakir Branch Office announced that there is an important
decrease in the number of human rights violations in the Southeast region
of Turkey.
IHD Diyarbakir Branch Chairman Selahattin Demirtas said that there were massive human rights violations in the regions in the past but in recent months an important improvement was observed.
Demirtas said that the number of complaints made to their branch office decreased 300 percent when compared to August and September of 2001.
"Previously, almost all were complaining that their rights were violated during detention and a number of them claiming that they were tortured. But there is an important decrease in the number of such complaints in line with Turkey's democratization process," Demirtas said.
In August and September 112 people applied to the IHD Diyarbakir branch with complaints of human rights abuse.
"As human rights advocates, our demand is the end
of human rights violations but still this decrease is raising our hopes,"
Demirtas said.
6. - Time Magazine Europe - "Carrying the Flame":
After centuries in the shadows of the Sunni majority, Turkey's Alevi community finds its voice in Europe
BY STEVE ZWICK/BERLIN / 14 October 2002
On the top floor of a deconsecrated Evangelical church in Berlin's Kreuzberg area, Ismet Dertli puts the finishing touches on the curriculum for a new subject being offered in the city's public schools. It's a course that hasn't previously been taught in any government-sanctioned school, at least not for a few centuries: Turkish Alevism.
This mystic brand of Islam is practiced by 25% of the more than 2.5 million Turks in Germany and up to 30% of Turkey's 66 million people — though you won't find them in any census. That's because Turkey, mindful of its fractious past, forbids large minorities from formally identifying themselves as anything other than Turkish Muslim. "As a result," says Dertli, "most Europeans don't even know we exist."
The building is Berlin's Anatolian Alevi Culture Center, one of nearly 300 such facilities scattered across Europe. Delegates from 165 centers converged on Brussels this summer to form a pan-European Alevi Union, something unheard of back home. Turgut Öker, who heads the union, hopes the organization's existence will speed the process of reform and help bring Turkey into the European Union.
Non-Muslims enjoy religious freedom in Turkey, but the 98% of the population who are Muslims must study a Sunni-based Islamic curriculum designed by Turkey's Department of Religion. In Germany, however, public schools provide religious instruction in accordance with the country's "religious communities." That once meant Catholic or Protestant, but most German school districts have introduced Islamic studies as well. In Berlin, parents can choose from curricula offered by several recognized religious communities. Result: 10 schools with Alevi classes and 20 for Sunnis.
"The older generation get really choked up when they see these Alevi culture centers popping up all over the place, and the school thing is big news back in Turkey," says Iraz Karan, 27, a Berlin-born Alevi whose parents come from Turkey. "The traditions that became Turkish Alevism exist all over the Arab world and are very diverse." Alevis follow the Shi'ite path laid down by Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, but with a twist. "Orthodox Shi'ites say the entire Koran is the word of God," says Metin Küçük, director of the Berlin center. "But we differentiate between Muhammad's inspired verse and the rules he came up with later on, when he was an administrator and warrior."
That means no mosques, no five daily prayers, no separate worship for men and women, and no facing Mecca. Instead, Alevis pray in a circle, facing each other. In place of Islamic law, they have a 40-step process for achieving the mystical sense of oneness preached by Muhammad in the Koran's early verses. To create a single curriculum for Germany, the Alevis recruited a panel of people drawn from various parts of Turkey and began putting their oral traditions on paper. "The core of Alevism is simple and humanistic," Küçük says. "That means we don't bog down in matters of dogma concerning this verse or that one. So we've found it easier to become somewhat unified in Europe, as well as to integrate into European society." That humanism is personified in Haji Bektash, a 13th century Alevi holy man who, according to Alevi lore, encouraged people to turn the other cheek and love their neighbors. Alevis generally embraced Kemal Ataturk's separation of church and state in the 1930s, but their outsider status drew many to leftist politics.
The Alevis in Germany started organizing politically in July 1993, after a mob in the Turkish city of Sivas torched a hotel where satirist Aziz Nesin, known for lampooning religious extremism, was entertaining at an Alevi function. Thirty-seven people died, and images of the "Sivas Martyrs" quickly appeared on the walls of Alevi culture centers across Europe. Says Karan: "Those of us who were born in Germany began to wonder about our identity, and young parents began to realize they wanted to pass something on to their kids."
The Sivas incident remains a sore point in Germany, where a man convicted of instigating the attack has been granted political asylum and the applications of two others are pending. Alevi leaders are using their newfound political muscle to fight for the perpetrators' extradition to Turkey. But many of the younger Alevis have raised the question: What would Haji Bektash say?
"Many member states see the EU as a Christian club,"
said a Commission official. "The cost of admitting Turkey would
also be enormous."