18
August 2004
2. "'Non-functional' changes in Commission of Prison Observation", while non-democratic applications such as standard clothes for prisoners is in the agenda, Ministry of Justice prepared a bill including an increase in the number of commission's members and an elongation in the intervals of meeting to prevent disorganization of Commission of Prison Observation.
3. "In a first, civilian appointed head of Turk security council", Alpogan’s appointment in line with Ankara’s EU reforms.
4. "Turkey’s population heading towards 100 million", the US study said that the average life span for Turks were 69 years, 66 years for males and 71 for females.
5. "Kurds build own identity", others say Kurds are flirting with Zoroastrianism or atheism, as Islam is seen as the religion of their Turkish and Arab oppressors.
6. "Turkey’s security concerns in Iraq", Turkey, which shares a relatively long border with northern Iraq, has been casting a wary eye on developments in Iraq for the past five decades, ever since the deceased Iraqi Kurdish leader Molla Mostafa Barzani launched a resistance struggle against the central government.
1. - AP - "Al-Yawer to target Kurdish rebels":
18 August 2004
Iraq's interim president pledged that Baghdad's new government would crack down on Kurdish rebels waging attacks on Turkey from mountain bases in northern Iraq.
Kurdish rebels fighting for autonomy have stepped up attacks in Turkey, officials said, including bombings last week at two small hotels and at a liquefied petroleum gas plant in Istanbul that killed two people and wounded 11 others.
Turkey repeatedly has urged U.S. and Iraqi authorities to crack down on the rebels, and on Monday, Iraq's interim President Ghazi al-Yawer assured Turkey's president that Baghdad would take action.
"We cannot tolerate or allow any group or formation that is posing a threat to the security of our neighbors," al-Yawer said at a joint news conference with Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
In the past, Turkey's military - which has some 1,500 troops and tanks in Iraq - has made incursions into northern Iraq to wipe out rebel bases and has left open the possibility of a future incursion. There are some 5,000 Kurdish rebels holed up in the mountains of Iraq.
In an apparent attempt to avert a possible cross-border military campaign by Ankara, the Iraqi leader added that "good neighborly relations mean not mingling into the internal affairs of the other."
Al-Yawer was in Turkey for two days, mainly to discuss security and trade, a visit that came amid a surge of kidnappings of foreigners, including Turkish truck drivers taken hostage this week, in Iraq.
But Turkey has pressed the issue of the Kurdish rebels,
who have demanded autonomy for Turkey's 12 million Kurds during a decades-long
war that has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984. 
2. - DIHA - "'Non-functional' changes in Commission of Prison Observation":
ANKARA / 17 August 2004 / Sabiha Temizkan
While non-democratic applications such as standard clothes for prisoners is in the agenda, Ministry of Justice prepared a bill including an increase in the number of commission's members and an elongation in the intervals of meeting to prevent disorganization of Commission of Prison Observation.
Problems in prisons of Turkey are tried to be solved with "non- functional" changes. Execution Institutions failed in gaining functionality because public officials could not come together or because bureaucratic transactions created problems in the preparation of reports. For this reason, Ministry of Justice prepared a draft bill to make changes in the law on Executions Institutions and Prison Observation Associations.
The bill includes an increase in the number of associations' members. Before watch associations could not carry out their functions properly because some of their members are public officials or because these members left their responsibilities for a while with permission or with health reports and so they could not carry out their duties. As a result number of members increased from 5 to 8 (5 out of 8 members are original members, remaining 3 are auxiliary members.)
A report will be prepared per 4-month.
3. - AP - "In a first, civilian appointed head of Turk security council":
Alpogan’s appointment in line with Ankara’s EU reforms
ISTANBUL / 18 August 2004
Turkish leaders yesterday appointed the first civilian to oversee the country’s influential security council, part of efforts to stem the influence of the military.
The appointment of Mehmet Yigit Alpogan as secretary-general of Turkey’s powerful National Security Council was also in line with reforms necessary for joining the European Union.
The appointment of Alpogan, who has served as Turkey’s ambassador to Greece, went into effect yesterday after it was published in Turkey’s Official Gazette.
The appointment of a civilian to head the security council — which wields strong influence over national policy — had been widely anticipated and was endorsed by military leaders, the government and the president.
Last summer, Turkey’s Parliament passed a series of reforms aimed at curtailing the influence of the military in politics, including allowing the government to nominate the council’s secretary-general. However, the military appointed a general to the post, before President Ahmet Necdet Sezer had approved the reforms.
Considered a remnant of a 1980 coup, the council groups together top generals and civilian leaders. It has often been used by the military to impose its will on the government.
Yesterday’s appointment comes as Turkey struggles to implement wide-ranging democratic reforms, hoping EU leaders — who have been pressuring Turkey to curb the military’s influence — will agree later this year to open EU accession negotiations with Turkey.
The military, self-appointed guarantor of Turkey’s
secular regime, has staged three coups in the last four decades. In
1997, the military also pressured a pro-Islamic government out of power.
It is also suspicious of the Islamic-rooted governing party of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has made Turkey’s EU bid his
government’s top priority. The outgoing secretary-general, General
Sukru Sariisik, has been assigned to head an army post on Turkey’s
Aegean coast as part of a routine shuffle in top military positions.
4. - NTV/MSNBC - "Turkey’s population heading
towards 100 million":
The US study said that the average life span for Turks were 69 years,
66 years for males and 71 for females.
18 August 2004
A study conducted by the USA Population Reference Bureau says that Turkey’s population will be close to 100 million by the year 2050.
According to the study, Turkey’s population will hit 97.3 million in 46 years, up from the present population of 71.3 million.
The study also revealed that Turkey’s infant mortality rate was much higher than that of western countries, standing at 39 per thousand live births.
While report basing on information that was received from Executions Institutions and Prison Observation Association will be prepared per 4 months, the intervals of Observation Commissions' meetings are lengthened from 2 to 3 months. Duties of commissions are determined as follows:
"Four-month reports will be sent to Ministry of Justice, to Chief Public Prosecutor, to execution judge if it necessary, to Human Right Inquiry Commission of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM )."
Ministry of Justice will prepare comparative reports
Ministry of Justice will be able to inform the public with comparative reports that will include the number or subjects of reports of former year's observations of commission's. Observation group will come together with auxiliary members according to their rank in case of absence in original member. Reports will be passed by a simple majority.
It was founded before November 19
Executions Institutions and Prison Observation Commissions
were founded in 2001 to inquire observe and get information about executions
institutions and prisons. Commissions that captured attentions because
of its foundation date (19 November after the operations to prisons.)
have 650 chiefs and members.
5. - The Washingthon Times - "Kurds build own identity":
ERBIL / 18 August 2004 / by Julia Duin
Americans may be vilified in much of Iraq, but in the 15,000 square miles encompassing Iraqi Kurdistan, wedding parties pose with U.S. soldiers, American flags are posted proudly on dashboards and officials beg visiting Americans to tell Washington to establish a permanent military base here.
"That would send a message to everyone not to do anything to the Kurds," said a visiting professor at the 14,000-student Salahaddin University in this sprawling north-central city.
Thirty years of political oppression, poison gas attacks and outright genocide by the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad have led northeastern Iraq's 4.5 million Kurds to rethink all their alliances.
Some even suggest contacting the Israelis for advice. Although most Kurdish Muslims instinctively distrust Jews, some say Israelis would be eager to help bolster a Kurdish democracy in the Middle East. Jews inhabited Kurdistan starting with the Babylonian exile in 597 B.C. and ending in the 1950s, when many returned to Israel.
Others say Kurds are flirting with Zoroastrianism or atheism, as Islam is seen as the religion of their Turkish and Arab oppressors. Evangelical Protestant missionaries who are quietly planting churches in the major Kurdish cities report flickers of interest. Copies of the New Testament, or at least portions of it, are available in both Kurdish dialects, and Campus Crusade's "Jesus Film" has been on Kurdish television several times.
The evangelistic Dallas-based Daystar Television Network can be seen in any Kurdish home with a satellite dish.
The Amman, Jordan-based Manara Ministries, a Christian agency that conducts relief work in northern Iraq, estimates 200 Kurds have converted to Christianity in 20 years and that Erbil has at least one Christian bookstore. Other Christian agencies in the region agree numbers remain in the low hundreds, but thousands have received evangelistic literature and have had some contact with Christians.
Kurds have substituted their own red, yellow, green and white flag in place of the national Iraqi flag on flagpoles everywhere. In the few places the Iraqi flag is displayed, it is the de-Islamicized pre-1991 version before Saddam Hussein added "God is Great" in Arabic to the red, white, black and green banner.
"Some people are blaming Islam for what's happening to us," one college professor mused. "But I think the fault is with the British who divided our land after World War I. We have tolerated this bitter reality, but we have never accepted it."
The Kurdish penchant for independent thinking begins with its "Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan" sign at the Iraqi-Turkish border — a calculated insult to Turkey, which has denied human rights to many of its 15 million to 20 million Kurds and whose border guards lecture travelers that "Kurdistan" does not exist.
Kurdistan is an unofficial nation-state encompassing at least 25 million people in the 74,000-square-mile mountainous region encompassing chunks of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It is the world's largest ethnic group without a country of its own.
Kurds were promised a country in the Aug. 10, 1920, Treaty of Sevres that divided the former Ottoman Empire among Britain, Turkey and others, and gave independence to Armenia.
However, the treaty drafted in Sevres, France, was ignored by Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, who did honor the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that established Turkey's present borders but partitioned Kurdistan into four parts.
Kurds generally were oppressed in all their host countries, resulting in the establishment of exile communities in Europe and the United States. Iraqi Kurdistan blossomed after the 1991 Gulf war, when overflights by British and American fighter jets generally kept Saddam's forces at bay.
Today, some Baghdad residents are moving their homes several hundred miles north to tranquil Kurdish cities such as Dohuk, where legions of peshmerga — Kurdish militia — patrol the city streets and man checkpoints on rural routes. The more American — or Western — a passenger appears to be, the more quickly one is waved on by the peshmerga. Cars sporting Baghdad license plates or holding Arab occupants are pulled over and searched.
One Assyrian Christian driver relates how, while conducting business in Mosul 40 miles south of Dohuk, he was threatened at gunpoint by insurgents. He managed to talk his way out of trouble.
Asked the reason for the AK-47 assault rifle in the front
seat?
"To shoot Arabs with," he said.
Although danger remains, others are enjoying their new lives.
"I'm 37 years old, but I feel like I am only 1 year old because
I feel freedom now," said the Rev. Mofid Toma Marcus, an Assyrian
Christian monk who oversees the Monastery of the Virgin Mary in Al Qosh,
a Christian village near the burial spot of the Old Testament prophet
Nahum. "America has given new life to Iraqi people."
In five years, he said, "Iraq will be better. Under Saddam, we had no cell phones, no Internet, no interviews with American journalists. America took 200 years to get to where it is today."
Al Qosh is one of seven Christian villages stretching
north from Mosul.
"We don't give permission for Muslim families to live in Christian
villages," Mr. Marcus said, explaining that Muslims would gradually
turn it into an Muslim-majority village, then institute Islamic law.
A half-mile down the road is Bozan, a village populated by Yezidi Kurds who worship a pre-Islamic peacock god linked to Zoroastrianism and Mithraism. The children play in the town square near a bombed-out school that the monastery is trying to refurbish.
They run to fetch Elias Khalaf, the headmaster, a dignified
man in a Kurdish-style gray suit with baggy pants, who begs for Americans
to come stay in some of the monastery's 200 rooms and help rebuild his
school. Missing are all the basics: paint, windows, water, doors, blackboards,
electricity, desks and toilets.
Thirty teachers toil with 1,100 students, sometimes as many as 60 per
class.
"We need teachers," he begs. "We need everything."
The Yezidis were forced out of their villages 30 years ago by Arab Iraqis, gaining them back only since the overthrow of Saddam. On their way out, the Arabs cut the electric lines and poisoned the wells.
Kurdish cities are filled with unemployed men of all ages idling in cafes to escape the 111-degree heat. Despite the scorching temperature, many of the Muslim women cloak themselves in heavy, long-sleeved jackets, ankle-length skirts and head scarves.
Sulaymania, a city about 80 miles west of the Iranian border surrounded by hot, rocky, barren hills, has a reputation for free thinking and slightly more liberal dress codes. It has become a center for experimental newspapers that operate on shoestring budgets. The London-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting has an office in Sulaymania, where it tries to instill journalistic standards into eager but inexperienced reporters.
One student-run paper is in a tiny third-floor office with no air conditioning. Cold sodas are brought for the guests, who are told that the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which controls the northwestern tier of Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the southeast, exercise Mafialike control over Kurds. Any newspaper that criticizes the parties, they say, finds itself banned from local newsstands.
A similar conversation the next day with an Islamic newspaper reveals how dissatisfaction with the slow pace of change is everywhere. At a quiet dinner with Kurdish businessmen in the touristy suburb of Sarchinar, the topic of conversation is the failure of Kurdish political leaders to encourage Western investment and the reluctance of American companies to take a chance on the Kurds.
"If you don't move quickly here," one computer technician said, "the Chinese and the Germans will fill your place."
The Iranians already have a consulate in Sulaymania, one is told, while the Americans only have plans for a consulate in Kirkuk, leaving most of northern Iraq with no official American presence.
Meanwhile, the Kurds already have a functioning airport in Erbil and plans are to open another one soon in Sulaymania. Iraq has been on hold for too many years, they say. Gas may be 3 cents a gallon here but passports are impossible to come by, reducing many Kurds to learning their English from BBC World telecasts. There is no postal service.
Plus, any Kurdish public figure working with Westerners knows his life could be snuffed out at any time. A drive to a lunch interview with Salahaddin University President Mohammed Sadik in Erbil begins when two armed bodyguards jump into the passenger seat of his car and perch on the back bumper.
Their caution stems from the Feb. 1 suicide bombings at the Erbil headquarters of the KDP and PUK during celebrations for an Islamic holiday. More than 56 Kurds, adults and children were killed.
The Kurds at this lunch are distraught over U.N. Resolution 1546, which they hoped would support Kurds' semi-independent status. But the resolution was vague, not even mentioning the regional government for which Kurds have long campaigned. Furious Kurds now refer to L. Paul Bremer, who served as the United States' Iraq administrator after the fall of Saddam, as "Lawrence of Arabia" for selling them short to Arab rulers who have little experience or taste for democracy.
"We feel Americans have bargained at the expense of the Kurds," Mr. Sadik said. "The worst person they brought here was Mr. Bremer, who didn't want to take any advice from the Kurds but who was willing to bargain with everyone else."
All the lunch guests scoffed at the notion of "a
new Iraq" touted by the Americans.
"We have nothing in common with the rest of Iraq," said Kirmanj
Gundi, a Tennessee State professor visiting his homeland. "Why
did Bremer always compromise on Kurdish interests in favor of the Shi'ites
and Sunnis who shoot at them?
"If America supports us, we'd be the most loyal friend
in the region."
Every Kurd in the room wanted independence. Why, they asked, was America
so quick to recognize Israel 56 years ago but today raises objection
after objection about Kurdish independence.
"When America decided to recognize Israel,"
one said, "America didn't care about how the 22 Arab countries
would react or how the 56 Islamic countries would react. So why should
the Kurds care what the Iraqi government thinks?"
6. - Theran Times - "Turkey’s security concerns in Iraq":
18 August 2004 / by Hassan Hanizadeh
Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, Iraq’s interim and unelected president, arrived in Ankara on Monday for talks with Turkish officials.
Al-Yawar discussed the latest developments in Iraq during meetings with Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Although the meetings are not of great importance since Iraq’s interim president will only remain in his post for about five more months, Turkey’s increasing concerns about the growing influence of the Iraqi Kurds on the neighboring Turkish nation has prompted al-Yawar to attempt to reassure the Turks through his recent visit to the country.
Turkey, which shares a relatively long border with northern Iraq, has been casting a wary eye on developments in Iraq for the past five decades, ever since the deceased Iraqi Kurdish leader Molla Mostafa Barzani launched a resistance struggle against the central government.
Recent developments in northern Iraq have spurred fear in Ankara that those events might influence southeastern Turkey. And Ankara has always tried to prevent any changes in the geographic and demographic structure of northern Iraq.
None of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, which have similar demographic structures, are as concerned as Turkey about northern Iraq. For example, in Iran there is almost no tension among ethnic minorities and all Iranians have equal rights according to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic and are judged according to their actions rather than their ethnicity.
On the other hand, none of the people settled on Iran’s northern, southern, and eastern borders have an external outlook. Rather, they consider themselves involved in the fate of their fellow Iranian citizens and this is the most beautiful and lasting quality of the Islamic-national unity of the Iranian nation.
Thus, when autonomy was established in northern Iraq after the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein, Turkey adopted a confrontational stance toward Iraq, to the extent that the Turkish army threatened military intervention if the Kurds tried to establish an independent government in that region.
Turkey’s concerns seem justified due to current conditions in the country, its demography, and the external outlook of some of Turkey’s ethnic groups.
However, since the four countries of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq have many geographic, demographic, religious, and cultural affinities, their high-ranking officials should hold four-way talks to discuss common issues.
Clearly, bilateral negotiations and decisions will not help resolve the current crisis in Iraq.
Iraqi leaders should adopt a realistic approach to resolve
the issues between Iraq and its neighbors and reject all forms of ethnic
prejudice.