30
July 2003
2. "Decision by Kurds to keep militia deals blow to coalition", Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said his Kurdistan Democratic party had no plans to dissolve its armed militia, the peshmerga, which he said was purely a defensive force, it was confirmed on Monday.
3. "Turkey fails to implement adopted reforms to join EU, says report", A new report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) says Turkey has failed to implement in practice the recently adopted legal reforms in its bid to join the EU.
4. "A ‘crowning act’ for Cyprus", Cyprus ratified the treaty for its accession to the European Union yesterday and asked the EU to take action against the increasing influx of Turkish settlers into the island’s occupied north.
5. "Turkish Parliament Approves Amnesty for Kurdish Rebels", Turkey's parliament has approved an amnesty bill for thousands of separatist Kurdish rebels in a bid to encourage them to surrender.
6. "After Gul’s Visit To Washington", Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul’s visit to Washington ended successfully. The door of hope has opened on reviving our relations with the US.
1. - Bloomberg - "Turkish Parliament to Approve Laws Boosting EU Bid":
July 30, 2003
Turkey's parliament may this week adopt laws boosting government control of military spending and curbing torture by police, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan steps up his bid for European Union entry.
Since lifting the death penalty a year ago, the Ankara parliament, where the government holds a two-thirds majority, has made more than 100 legal changes to persuade the EU to open membership talks. Army opposition has stalled some measures. Court delays are hampering others, slowing efforts to meet EU criteria and hurting the economy, analysts say.
Turkey has received $31 billion in International Monetary Fund loans since 1999. It attracted about $6 billion in foreign investment in that period, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says, while Poland, set to join the EU next year and with half the population, has drawn $26 billion.
``The EU accession process is 10 times as important as any IMF program,'' said Serhan Cevik, an economist at Morgan Stanley in London. ``As you have a better macro-economic outlook, you will get some foreigners actually building factories.''
The performance of Turkey's $180 billion economy has kept investors away. While last year's inflation rate of 30 percent was the lowest in two decades, it is 15 times the pace of price growth in the dozen countries sharing the euro. The undeclared economy may be as large as the official one, former Central Bank Governor Gazi Ercel has said, making government figures unreliable.
Human Rights
Before addressing the Turkish economy, the EU is focusing on institutional changes and human rights legislation. The 15-member bloc will issue a report on Turkey's candidacy in October. Next year, after accepting as many as 10 new members -- mainly from eastern Europe -- it will decide whether the country is ready to open membership talks.
The measures parliament is scheduled to start debating today will curb the powers of the National Security Council, which groups top generals and ministers and takes key policy decisions. If the law is passed, the council will meet less frequently and elected officials will play a bigger role.
Other steps will allow political scrutiny of the military budget and speed legal action against police accused of torturing suspects. The government has said there won't be any more laws aimed at meeting EU requirements until the bloc acknowledges Turkey's progress.
``Turkey has made progress, and now it's got this far, the EU will need a good reason if it wants to backtrack,'' said Bart van der Made, who helps manage $3.5 billion, including Turkish debt, at ING Investment Management in The Hague.
Seeking Proof
While the EU may approve the legal changes, it also will seek proof they are being implemented. Human rights groups say Turkey needs to improve its record on allowing freedom of expression and is still prosecuting writers and political dissidents.
``At least once a week, I'm in some court or other to follow a freedom of expression case,'' said Sanar Yurdatapan, a human rights activist. ``The government is at least trying to make some things better, but it's meeting resistance in every corner'' from the military, judiciary and other officials who fear losing influence, he said.
Turkey may fall short of EU requirements because each time it drafts a package of laws the government ``has to concede some very key points to the military and other conservative circles,'' said Cengiz Aktar, a lecturer in politics at Galatasaray University. ``Will the government be able to change the real power of the military? They are pretty alone in this endeavor.''
Military Opposition
Turkey's Chief of General Staff Hilmi Ozkok yesterday outlined military objections to the draft law in a meeting with Erdogan, the daily Hurriyet reported today.
Military officers argue that EU-mandated policies will encourage Kurdish separatism and force Turkey to soften its stance against Islamic groups. The army describes its role as the guardian of the country's secular traditions and has frequently clashed with Erdogan's government, which has religious roots.
Parliament yesterday passed a law reducing sentences for Kurdish rebels who lay down their weapons and cooperate with authorities. The measure is aimed at ending a conflict that has killed about 37,000 people since 1984.
Although it was named a candidate for membership in 1999, Turkey is still struggling to convince some in the EU that it belongs in the bloc. Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet reported this month that EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said the country should never become a ``full member'' of the union. He later denied the comments.
EU Reservations
Valery Giscard d'Estaing, a former French president who led a convention drafting a new European constitution, said in a November newspaper interview that allowing Turkey to join would be the end of the bloc.
Whether or not Turkey joins the EU, modernizing its laws may help to attract more investment, analysts said. That in turn would allow it to reduce its national debt, one of the goals of the IMF program, and ease repayments to the IMF that begin next year, said Altug Karamenderes, chief economist at Ata Invest.
That's one reason why the government ``has given its EU program higher priority than relations with the IMF,'' Karamenderes said.
Turkey's latest IMF program was aimed at reviving the economy after
the economy contracted 9.5 percent in 2001, the worst slump since
World War II.
2. - The Financial Times - "Decision by Kurds to keep militia deals blow to coalition":
Baghdad / July 29, 2003
By Charles Clover and Gareth Smyth
Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said his Kurdistan Democratic party had no plans to dissolve its armed militia, the peshmerga, which he said was purely a defensive force, it was confirmed on Monday.
Mr Barzani's announcement, reported in a local newspaper at the weekend, is a blow to the US-led coalition's plans to unite Iraqi Kurdistan with the rest of Iraq as part of the postwar political process, and comes as negotiations over a new constitution for Iraq are gaining momentum.
The coalition would like to see Kurdish militias eventually dissolved into a new Iraqi national army as part of a nation-building process. Mr Barzani's announcement signals that agreeing on a new constitutional framework for a united Iraq will be far from easy.
One former peshmerga, Nawsherwan Mustapha, has joined the many Kurdish leaders now in Baghdad. A senior member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), he has moved his base from Suleimaniya, the PUK-held city in northern Iraq, to the capital.
"There is a political vacuum with the fall of the Ba'ath party. The PUK wants to work with secular forces for a new Iraq. It is better to be in Baghdad than in Suleimaniya - or in a cave."
He is living and working in a former guest house of the former regime's mukhabarat (security police). He stayed in the same house in 1984 as part of a delegation that negotiated with Saddam Hussein.
Mr Mustapha had been a student at Baghdad university in the 1960s, but spent most of the 1970s and 1980s as a peshmerga guerrilla in the mountains of the Kurdish north.
Now he is back "for the foreseeable future".
The downfall of Saddam Hussein means the Kurds - 25 per cent of Iraq's 23m population but long repressed by Arab-dominated regimes in Baghdad - face their best chance since Iraq's creation in the 1920s to win a favourable political settlement.
Their goal is a federal system where Kurdish autonomy, de facto under western air cover since 1991, is enshrined in a new constitution. They want to work with the US-led Coalition Provisional Administration (CPA) and with Arab leaders to achieve it.
The PUK and the KDP have recently agreed to merge their rival administrations in northern Iraq - a step first promised in 1997, when the two parties ended a three-year civil war.
"This will put us in a stronger negotiating position with our Arab colleagues and the CPA," said Hoshyar Zebari, a senior KDP official. "There will be an election [in Kurdistan] to legitimise this, but it won't be a political competition. We [the KDP and PUK] may even present one list."
But the Kurds want a clearer political direction in Baghdad.
Despite the close alliance with the US in April's war, the two Kurdish leaders - Mr Barzani of the KDP and Jalal Talabani of the PUK - hesitated before agreeing to sit on the 25-strong governing council of leading Iraqis that met for the first time this month.
As with many Arab groups, the Kurds want the council to exercise real rather than advisory powers. They also want a clear endorsement of a federal Iraq, with an autonomous Kurdish region, from the constitutional convention due to work in tandem with the council.
The Kurds have built bridges to Arab allies and have good relations with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), the main Shia Muslim group. But they are worried about militant Islamists, both Shia and Sunni.
"The PUK is a democratic, secular force," said Mr Talabani. "The PUK must be in Baghdad to help democrats, liberals, communists, socialists, [and] secular forces in the face of fundamentalism."
Many Kurds are mystified by events in the rest of Iraq. "We can't understand why they don't celebrate their freedom, as we did after 1991," said Sarhang Salar Hama-Saeed, a web designer.
Kurdish politicians believe Iraqi political groups, accustomed to exile politics, lost the initiative in the six weeks after the end of the war, when their disagreements led the Americans to abandon a plan for an early Iraqi government and instead declare themselves as occupiers in United Nations Security Council resolution 1483.
"As a word, 'occupation' is fine in international law, but it's hated here and in the wider region," said Mr Zebari.
Barham Salih, the prime minister in Suleimaniya, criticised formerly exiled Arab opposition groups for "too much focus on political authority", arguing that the Kurds had learned a more practical approach from running their own affairs for 12 years.
"[Political] power is not as important as electricity or currency stability," he said. "The real issue is responsibility, and responsibility is the way to power."
"The Ba'ath regime left a terrible legacy of dependency, yet I have yet to see an Iraqi politician on the television telling the people that we have to come to terms with the scale of the problem. Those who want power should start by cleaning the streets of Baghdad."
The Kurds feel an almost daily grief as relatives and friends await the exhumed bodies of loved ones left in mass graves by the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the late 1980s alone, about 180,000 Kurds "disappeared", and many Kurds still fear it could happen again.
When the Iraqi army collapsed in April, the KDP and the PUK took many of its tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons. Yet in June the two parties had agreed to disarm. But it is now clear the Kurds envisage keeping a security force of some kind.
"We've faced genocide in the past and we need guarantees," said Mr Zebari. "The real assurances are in having a say in how the country is run and how the new Iraqi army is structured."
"As long as the Americans and British are here, we don't need
heavy weapons," said Rushti Aziz, the PUK justice minister. "If
they left, it would be different."
3. - Euractiv (Brussels) - "Turkey fails to implement adopted reforms to join EU, says report":
BRUSSELS / 30 July 2003
A new report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
says Turkey has failed to implement in practice the recently adopted
legal reforms in its bid to join the EU.
The report, presented to the European Commission on 30 July, reveals
a "worrying failure of the Turkish government to implement in
practice the recently adopted legal reforms in its bid to join the
European Union and to meet the EU Copenhagen political criteria".
FIDH, which conducted an investigative mission in Turkey in May 2003,
asserts that "far from improving, the situation further deteriorated
in 2003" after the adoption of reforms. The report states that
serious human rights violations, such as torture, disappearances and
extra-judicial killings, continue to go unpunished. The report also
warns of "tremendous obstacles" to the return to their villages
of the many thousands internally displaced persons during the 15 years-long
conflict between the Turkish government and the 12 million ethnic
Kurds. Further, the report notes serious breaches to freedom of expression,
peaceful assembly and association. FIDH urges Turkey to ensure effective
implementation in practice of the recent legal reforms adopted since
October 2001 in the light of the pre-accession talks with the EU.
As the report was issued, the Turkish parliament approved another reform, granting partial amnesty to Kurdish militants.
The EU will decide whether it wants to start accession negotiations
with Turkey in December 2004. The practical implementation of adopted
reforms will play the key role in the EU's evaluation of Turkey.
4. - Kathimerini (Greece) - "A ‘crowning act’ for Cyprus":
NICOSIA / 29 July 2003
Cyprus ratified the treaty for its accession to the European Union yesterday and asked the EU to take action against the increasing influx of Turkish settlers into the island’s occupied north.
The signing of the treaty “constitutes a crowning political act” that is the last step before Cyprus and the other nine candidates join the EU on May 1, 2004, President Tassos Papadopoulos said.
Noelle Lenoir, the French minister for European affairs who is on a two-day visit, hailed the signing as “an historical act” that will transform Cyprus into a bridge between the EU and the Middle East.
The treaty envisages the accession of the whole of Cyprus, but EU laws and benefits will not apply to the breakaway Turkish-Cypriot state until the island is reunified. Turkish Cypriots staged unprecedented massive demonstrations earlier this year demanding the resignation of Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash for rejecting a United Nations reunification plan that would enable a unified Cyprus to join the EU next May.
Turkish-Cypriot opposition parties saw the demonstrations as a sign they may defeat the hardliner Denktash in December’s presidential election. But they fear their victory may be blocked by the increasing influx into the north of thousands of impoverished settlers from the mainland who are granted citizenship and voting rights on arrival. They are also allocated homes and other properties abandoned by the Greek-Cypriot refugees, favors that may sway their vote for Denktash. Last week, the opposition parties appealed to the UN and the EU to ensure that only native Turkish Cypriots can vote.
Following a meeting with Cyprus Foreign Minister George Iacovou earlier
yesterday, Lenoir said the issue would be discussed by the EU.
5. - Voice of America - "Turkish Parliament Approves Amnesty for Kurdish Rebels":
Ankara / 29 Jul 2003 / by Amberin Zaman
Turkey's parliament has approved an amnesty bill for thousands of separatist Kurdish rebels in a bid to encourage them to surrender.
Three hundred 56 members of parliament approved the bill, with only 71 voting against it. Interior minister Abdul Kadir Aksu called the vote an historic step forward in restoring social peace in Turkey. The amnesty is the seventh such bill to have been passed since 1985.
Provisions in the latest bill include reducing sentences for rebels involved in a 15-year-long rebellion led by the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK. But top rebel leaders will not be pardoned under the bill.
PKK commanders based in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, where the bulk of the rebels are stationed, have rejected the amnesty offer. They are especially critical of a provision that calls on those who surrender to provide information on the identities and whereabouts of fellow fighters who have not surrendered.
More than 30,000 people died in the PKK's war against the Turkish army, which ended when the rebels declared a ceasefire in September 1999. They did so in response to orders from their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who was captured by Turkish special forces in Kenya the same year.
The ceasefire has been largely holding despite sporadic clashes in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeastern provinces.
Turkish officials say that some 2,500 Turkish troops who have been
dispatched to northern Iraq to hunt down the Kurdish rebels will withdraw
to Turkey once all PKK fighters surrender. The United States has pledged
to move militarily against the PKK, which it calls a terrorist group,
if the rebels do not move out of northern Iraq once the amnesty comes
into force.
6. - Turkiye - "After Gul’s Visit To Washington":
Developments since Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul’s visit to the United States last week
30 July 2003
“Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul’s visit to Washington ended successfully. The door of hope has opened on reviving our relations with the US. It’s clear that both sides are willing. However, our deputies still haven’t forgotten the negative feelings from the Sulaimaniya incident. You might find it excessive, but I believe many people are waiting for another parliamentary proposal to put the US in its place. The General Staff would be the most influential player, so the deputies and certain other circles could veer sharply away from emotionalism and enter the realm of realpolitik. If the chief of General Staff states that sending troops to Iraq would be in the nation’s best interests, hesitation on the issue would be allayed.
Clearly, those who support the status quo don’t look fondly on either the US or the European Union. They dislike both. They don’t want to open up. Consequently, Turkey will be deciding whether it will live under the thumb of those supporting the status quo or instead boldly enter international politics and take our place in the sun.
I wonder if it’s too difficult to embrace both the US and the
EU. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is working determinedly
for Turkey’s EU membership. The AKP seems to understand that
a Turkey enjoying friendly relations with the US will take its place
in Europe more quickly.”