4
September 2002
2. "Leftists ODP, EMEP, SHP and HADEP make alliance", Turkey's leftist parties seek to make an election alliance in order to surpass the 10 percent national election threshold to enter Parliament. Leftists Labor's Party (EMEP), Social Democrat People's Party (SHP), Freedom and Solidarity Party (ODP) and Turkey's only pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP) reached an agreement to run for the elections under a single party's roof.
3. "Turkey and Islam", by Tod Lindberg. He is a editor of Policy Review magazine and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
4. "Turkey's PM Asks European Union to Open Its Doors", Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit urged the European Union on Tuesday to "open its doors" to Turkey after Ankara fulfilled some political conditions to launch membership talks with the bloc.
5. "A Remedy in Iraq: Kurdish Autonomy", a division of the nation might send Saddam Hussein packing.
6. "Inheriting the sea: Caspian nations dream of oil wealth", by Steven Weinberg.
1. - Turkish Daily News - "Towards polls, HADEP prepares itself for possible ban":
4 September 2002
As Turkey goes for polls set for November 3, Turkey's only legal
Kurdish grouping, People's Democracy Party (HADEP) is preparing itself
for any decision that would be made by the Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional Court is now inclined to put on his agenda and bring to a conclusion when the judicial holiday ends on Sept. 5 the issue of whether [the pro-Kurdish] People's Democracy Party (HADEP) should be banned.
Top court's chief justice Mustafa Bumin said that it is likely for them to reach a conclusion before the polls.
There is an ongoing closure case against HADEP at the Constitutional Court and the party is charged with acting as a front for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
HADEP leader Murat Bozlak, earlier, called on the Constitutional Court to suspend the case against his party until the end of elections.
Bozlak said that such an important decision should not be made while Turkey was approaching towards the polls.
The court is expected to proceed with the case after ruling on HADEP's objections to the articles related to protecting the democratic order, independence and the principle of the country's unity, the ban on racism and forming new minorities.
The closure case has dragged on for more than three years, since former chief prosecutor Vural Savas filed the charges against HADEP in January 1999. Party officials reject the accusations.
European allies for failing to meet EU standards on democracy and human rights for membership in the 15-nation club. HADEP's predecessors, the HEP and the DEP, were previously closed down on similar charges.
Kurdish issue gains more importance
Kurdish issue is among the key issues that will closely effect the results of the polls. Majority of parties seeking for the votes of people supporting Turkey's membership to the EU. Some 70 percent of the Turkish people are praising Turkey's membership to the EU and believes Turkey's future is at the 15-member club. So, majority of political parties are after getting the lion share of this 70 percent.
Within this framework, parties, are seeking alliances with HADEP.
HADEP has a big vote potential in the Southeast region. If the Constitutional Court bans the party, which is not a slim possibility according to some political commentators, parties will compete to get a share from the vote capacity of HADEP by supporting the rights of the people of the region.
HADEP's plan is ready
According to Radikal newspaper, HADEP administration after seeing the signals that the Constitutional Court may make its decision before the polls, start considering the idea to continue its political life in DEHAP.
If the Constitutional Court clarifies a meeting date before
Sept. 11, the deadline for presenting deputy candidate lists to the
Supreme Elections Board, HADEP would continue to work under the DEHAP
flag and make an alliance with the Social Democratic Populist Party
(SHP), Freedom and Democracy Party (ODP) and Labor's Party (EMEP). 
2. - Turkish Daily News - "Leftists ODP, EMEP, SHP and HADEP make alliance":
4 September 2002
Turkey's leftist parties seek to make an election alliance in order
to surpass the 10 percent national election threshold to enter Parliament.
Leftists Labor's Party (EMEP), Social Democrat People's Party (SHP),
Freedom and Solidarity Party (ODP) and Turkey's only pro-Kurdish People's
Democracy Party (HADEP) reached an agreement to run for the elections
under a single party's roof.
Receiving Alawite-Bektashi Institutions Union Chairman Ali Dogan and a mission from the union in his office on Tuesday, ODP leader Ufuk Uras said that they would make an announcement about the partnership of these four parties within a couple of days.
Uras informed that they aimed to become a voice of the democratic and angry majority against the understanding that handed over Turkey to the IMF, saying that these four parties reached an agreement on many topics. He added that there were some technical details left to be resolved but that they could make an announcement within a couple of days.
Emphasizing that the 'locomotive power' consisted of ODP, HADEP, EMEP and SHP determined the common ideas and rhetoric; Uras stated that they made a great progress although there was not much time left to the elections.
As former state minister and the architect of the economic program, Kemal Dervis joined the center-left Republican People's Party (CHP) after severing his links with Ismail Cem's New Turkey Party (YTP), YTP sought to make an election alliance with Murat Karayalcin's SHP. Karayalcin flashed the green light for running on a YTP ticket but he stressed that the alliance should cover HADEP and ODP. However Cem refused HADEP, saying that alliance with HADEP was a somewhat problematic issue.
Deserting premier Bulent Ecevit's Democratic Left Party
(DSP) this summer, YTP members, on the other hand, are currently carrying
out alliance talks with center-right Democratic Turkey Party (DTP).
3. - Insight on the News - "Turkey and Islam":
ANTALYA / by Tod Lindberg / issue 23, September 2002
Wherever Turks dwell, from the Europeanized behemoth city of Istanbul
in the north to the stunningly beautiful Anatolian coastal region below,
where hazy mountains rising steeply from the deep blue Mediterranean
unmistakably evoke arrival in Asia Minor, the two ubiquitous sights
rising above the streets are the minarets of the mosques and the innumerable
national flags, the bright white crescent and star on a brilliant vermilion
field.
Over the past year in the United States, we have had a chance to grow used to seeing the American flag in every size and material all over the place. The flag replaced the yellow ribbon of the 1970s, 80s and 90s as a symbol of unity in adversity, a reassertion of pride of place of the nation in the lives of Americans.
It's impossible to look at all those flags flying in Turkey and see anything but a similarly robust social sense of national pride. Put it this way: No government out to create a massive display of tribute to itself could ever be as successful in dotting the flag all over the landscape than a people who decide to put flags up for themselves.
This is doubly consequential in light of the minarets. Turkey is Islamic and secular, an Islamic country on a long, deliberate and at times bumpy road to modernization via the separation of mosque from state.
I say Turkey is Islamic and secular, not that it is Islamic "but" secular. The reason is that the project of the modern Turkish state is to show that the interaction of Islam and the modern world need not always be a collision. On the success of this project, obviously, much depends.
Turkey is a country in which one may choose Islam. But then again, one may choose otherwise, from the secular life in toto to some blend of the two that affirms the authority of the Prophet while denying that it is properly a coercive political authority.
The choices have consequences, of course. The depth of the government's (and in particular, the military's) commitment to secularism lends itself to disapproval of those who seek simultaneously to choose Islamist life and public life, on the grounds that this public Islamism seeks to deny people the choice of a secular life.
Modern Turkey is thus a work in progress. When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took power in 1923, bringing a formal end to the decaying Ottoman Empire, he did so in the conviction that only by eliminating the caliphate and Islamic law from public life could Turkey modernize and join "universal civilization," as he called it. The results are imperfect but impressive. Turkey is poor by the standards of Europe, but its people have more opportunity and are better off (discounting the oil wealth of sultans, princes and playboys) than those in many countries where Islam and government remained conjoined. Turkey's is still a transitional democracy — but again, far more democratic than any Islamic country whose rulers eschewed Ataturk's choice or, worse, who believe that the purpose of democracy is one final election installing a coercive Islamic government.
Above all, there is the social fabric of Turkey, in which Turks themselves remain committed to the secular path they are on. Only this, I think, can account for all those flags. The Turkish national project is a commitment to choices, including Islam, but understands true choice in the context of politics to mean not the freedom to choose once and for all, but now and forever the freedom to choose.
This is very profound stuff. If Islam is a matter of choice, the freedom to choose is the individual's alone. If Islam is a legitimate choice, other choices are likewise legitimate. For those who believe that Islam is a necessity, they are free to do so, but they are not free to impose Islam as a necessity.
The implication of the success of this vision is that Islam would occupy in the Islamic world the same position that religion (here, one may speak generically) does in the Western world of today — the "universal civilization" of which Ataturk spoke, a phrase George W. Bush has not spoken but whose spirit he frequently evokes. Believers are free to believe as fervently as they wish, but they may not coerce others. No more crusades — and no more jihad.
If there is a shorthand expression of the true endpoint of our current difficulties, it can be read in the meaning of Turkey's skylines of flags and minarets: free to choose Islam.
Tod Lindberg is editor of Policy Review magazine and
a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His column appears Tuesdays.
4. - Theran Times - "Turkey's PM Asks European Union to Open Its Doors":
ISTANBUL / 4 September 2002
Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit urged the European Union on Tuesday
to "open its doors" to Turkey after Ankara fulfilled some
political conditions to launch membership talks with the bloc.
Distant EU candidate Turkey is pressing Brussels to agree to begin accession negotiations after Ankara passed a set of sweeping human rights reforms, including abolishing the death penalty for peacetime offences and expanding language rights for its large Kurdish minority.
"We've come to the stage when the EU should open its doors to our full membership. No one should have any doubts," Ecevit said at a news conference.
"There are no obstacles in front of Turkey on the road to uniting with the EU... Turkey has done and will do what it has to on this issue. In this situation the EU's doors will be fully open, not just slightly ajar," he said.
The EU has applauded Turkey's reform effort but says it must see proof the new laws are being implemented before it will set a date for negotiations.
European diplomats have also said Turkey's chances of moving closer to joining the bloc would be improved if progress were made on reuniting Cyprus, divided along ethnic lines since a 1974 Turkish invasion in response to an Athens-backed coup.
Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders have failed to make any tangible progress since beginning UN-backed peace talks in January, and Ankara has indicated it could annex the northern third of the island, where it keeps 30,000 troops, if the EU admits the Greek Cypriot side as a member as early as 2004.
"The Cyprus issue is a question between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. We cannot accept being dragged into the Cyprus issue. It's a separate issue between two groups," Ecevit said.
Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel was in Strasbourg on Tuesday to lobby European officials to agree a date for the start of talks, reported Reuters.
Launching accession talks could attract desperately needed
foreign investment to help Turkey emerge from its worst recession since
1945.
5. - Los Angeles Times - "A Remedy in Iraq: Kurdish Autonomy":
A division of the nation might send Saddam Hussein packing.
3 September 2002 / by DAVID D. PERLMUTTER
Saddam Hussein, unlike most megalomaniacs, has spells of sober self-appraisal.
In the midst of one, he told colleagues that when he died the people
of Iraq would "tear me into 500 pieces." Occasionally, then,
he appreciates that despite innumerable "spontaneous popular demonstrations"
of love for him and most of the content of Iraqi print, radio and television
praising his greatness, he is, in fact, the most hated man in Iraq.
Yet he survives--through terror, of course, but also because many Iraqis believe that Hussein, despite his disastrous helmsmanship of the state, is its only anchor of territorial solidity. When he goes, the thinking is, the nation falls apart.
The United States should use this to its advantage.
As it finds itself in a coalition of one to topple Hussein's regime by outright war, it should consider instead the expedient of robbing the Iraqi president of his last fragile justification for power: Washington should assist in the breakup of Iraq by recognizing the millenniums-old national aspirations of the Kurdish people. Then Hussein's situation would become like that of Slobodan Milosevic, who was ousted from power only when he failed to preserve Serb domination of the sacred land of Kosovo.
On the face of it, the moral sanction for an independent Kurdish state is unambiguous. The Kurds have existed as an independent people since ancient times. Unlike more prominent local aspirants for nationhood--the Palestinians--the Kurds have a separate language, culture, ethnic heritage and a continuous political precedent of seeking statehood. Indeed, legally, there should be an independent Kurdistan. The Treaty of Sevres, which delineated the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, recognized that the Kurds deserved their own state.
Of course, the devil's details for an independent Kurdistan in what is now the "no-fly" zone of northern Iraq are great.
Most regional powers, such as Turkey, Syria and Iran, oppose a Kurdish state because they believe that it would encourage hopes--and uprisings--for autonomy by their own Kurdish minorities. For example, Turkey--our must-have ally for any war on Iraq--has been fighting a decades-long insurgency war with Kurdish separatists. Other Arab states oppose Kurdish liberation because they fear the precedent of breaking up Iraq.
Such opposition could be overcome or dismissed on a case-by-case basis.
The Kurds (and the United States) could provide treaties and assurances that Kurdistan's borders with its neighbors would be fixed and extraterritorial Kurdish ambitions suppressed. Another "carrot" could be that rebellious Kurds in border nations could emigrate to the new Kurdish state. Turkey, in particular, would be happy to siphon off all its Kurdish militants.
Outside opposition, on the other hand, could be safely ignored. It is one of the great ironies of Middle East politics that many Arab leaders will blame European and Israeli colonialism for the region's problems, yet consider the fictional national borders drawn up by British and French cartographers to be inviolable from time immemorial.
In response, the United States can seize the moral mountaintop by supporting the principle of freedom for all peoples who want their own state. Or, put more practically, the price of an independent Kurdistan is an independent Palestine.
Europeans would join in recognizing a Kurdish state for that reason alone, but also because Washington could convince them that it would help avoid another Gulf War.
The regional consequences of Kurdistan are attractive as well. Certainly a shrunken Iraq would be of even less danger to its neighbors. Yet the U.S. would have to establish a strong military presence, much like in South Korea.
The Kurds would welcome permanent American bases and troop deployments. This shift of U.S. power and personnel would lessen our reliance on the increasingly hostile Saudi people and unreliable Saudi regime. In addition, Al Qaeda would lose its greatest recruiting slogan: that U.S. soldiers are trampling the holy sand of Arabia.
But the real unknown is the reaction of the Iraqi people. Would they, like the Serbs, rise up to replace their failed dictator? Hussein always has defied prophecies of his downfall. But the erection of a secure and antagonistic state in what was the northern fifth of Iraq would leave him clinging to power solely by fear.
The gains are many and the risks surmountable for creating Kurdistan. Recognizing the hopes and dreams of the Kurdish people would allow the United States to do the right thing in the eyes of the civilized world. It may also help it to dispose of its greatest enemy.
David D. Perlmutter, an associate professor at Louisiana
State University, is a military historian.
6. - Eurasianet - "Inheriting the sea: Caspian nations dream of oil wealth":
30 August 2002 / by Steven Weinberg
On August 29, a Turkish state-sponsored engineering firm announced
that it had finished studying the design of a proposed pipeline from
Baku, Azerbaijan to Turkey’s port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.
Former Soviet republics on the Caspian Sea have vied in recent years
to become independent energy exporters, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
pipeline (which would run through the capital of Georgia) represents
their fondest hopes. However, though the Turkish firm indicated that
it could soon submit a construction budget for the pipeline, nobody
has guaranteed that the pipeline will go into service. As Steven Weinberg’s
pictures show, Caspian countries are living in a present built by the
Soviets and struggling to build their own economic futures.
Social and political instability in these countries has marred business development, though, and corrupt business practices have muted foreign companies’ interest in the region. As these photos show, the Soviet Union established an infrastructure for oil and gas extraction on the Caspian that remains intact. The laws that governed the sea have become obsolete, though, and the republics have failed to work out a successor set of laws. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia (which does not border the sea but draws gas from it) rest most of their economic hopes in the Caspian bed. But the means they will use to draw riches from the Caspian remain murky.
To be sure, international investors have shown interest in the region. BP, the world’s second-largest energy conglomerate, is leading the development of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and has made other large capital investments in the region. Though the United States has vocally backed the so-called BTC project, which would create an oil source independent of Russia or the OPEC nations, construction on the pipeline has not begun and could face serious delays. Russia is leading another project, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, in which several multinational energy companies have taken stakes. This pipeline will run from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossisysk.
Russia, as these pictures indicate, still looms large over the Caspian. Its energy companies are more sophisticated and better funded than any of the former republics’ state-sponsored outfits, and its geopolitical weight exceeds the smaller countries’. Even if Washington goes out of its way to support BTC – which might siphon off transport business from Iran – it will not necessarily provide the aid or enforce the efficiency that would make these small countries competitive with Russia. And without a strong international backer, oil and gas development will probably remain erratic and corrupt for several years. [For more on corruption, see the Open Society Institute’s Caspian Revenue Watch].
Russian influence may be dissipating, as American soldiers advise Georgia and as Turkey, a NATO member, seeks a more prominent role. But as these pictures show, Caspian energy runs on deep-rooted systems and confusing trends. The cycle of exploration and production that the Soviets established will be hard to break; time will tell if the cycle of promises and projections the former republics have set in motion will prove as powerful.
Editor’s Note: Steve Weinberg is a freelance journalist
who has traveled extensively in the Caucasus. You can see more of his
photography at www.stevenweinbergphoto.com.