5 August 2004

1. "Policeman killed, another wounded in attack in eastern Turkey", unidentified assailants opened fire on Wednesday on a police vehicle in the eastern Turkish province of Agri, killing one officer and wounding another, local officials said.

2. "Tribal Turkey versus EU aspirant", a recent incident in eastern Turkey and its aftermath were in sharp contrast to what Turkey’s leaders claim Turkey is.

3. "Austria cool on Turkey’s EU bid", the Austrian President has said the time is not right for Turkey to enter the already expanded bloc.

4. "In the language of Jesus", Turkey's Christian revival has a message for Iraq's own communities.

5. "Dangerously quiet in Kurdistan", amid all the violence and crime that have stricken much of central and southern Iraq in recent months, the northern region of Kurdistan has remained relatively quiet.

6. "Kurdish Politicians Meet With Assad", two members of the leadership of the Kurdistan Democratic Party met with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus on Monday. The meeting follows violent clashes earlier this year between Syrian security forces and Syrian Kurds.

1. - AFP - "Policeman killed, another wounded in attack in eastern Turkey":

ANKARA / 4 August 2004

Unidentified assailants opened fire on Wednesday on a police vehicle in the eastern Turkish province of Agri, killing one officer and wounding another, local officials said.

The gunmen managed to escape after the attack in the town of Patnos, Agri Governor Huseyin Yavuz Demir told Anatolia news agency. Security forces in the town launched an operation to hunt the assailants, he said.

There was no immediate word on who was behind the attack.

Kurdish rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have been active in the region for years and have often carried out similar attacks on government targets.

The group, now also known as KONGRA-GEL, ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with the government on June 1, raising tensions in the country's predominantly Kurdish eastern and southeastern regions.

Some 37,000 people have been killed since the PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the region in 1984.

2. - Kathimerini - "Tribal Turkey versus EU aspirant":

4 August 2004 / by Burak Bekdil

“If Turkey is not European, what other country can be?” exclaimed a lady bigwig from Brussels, sipping her wine at a fancy restaurant by the Bosporus about a month ago. The trouble is, Turkey is not what exactly the enthusiastic visitor sees by the beautiful Bosporus.

Admitting Turkey into the EU will mean admitting a perfectly European country together with several other countries ranging from “less European” to “much less European,” and even to “tribally Middle Eastern.” Turkey is like a special offer: Buy one, get five others free!

A recent incident in eastern Turkey and its aftermath were in sharp contrast to what Turkey’s leaders claim Turkey is.

Mustafa Bayram is leader of a 100,000-strong Kurdish tribe in Van, an impoverished province bordering Iran. The man is a former lawmaker with quite an impressive crime record: murder and drug-trafficking being among them. On July 7, Mr Bayram’s son, Hamit, was arrested by the police while he was trying to sell to drug squad officers disguised as dealers 40 kilograms of pure heroin. What happened afterward has, once again, unveiled another face of Turkey, a face quite different than what one sees by the Bosporus.

While the younger Mr Bayram was being held in temporary custody at a traffic police station, some 30 heavily armed men from the “tribe” showed up and, according to the official account, after a fight but no shooting, managed to make off with their leader’s son. The son has been on the wanted list since then.

But according to an anonymous e-mail message, presumably from one of the police officers on duty that night, the armed group fired on the police officers and wounded eight of them, who are now secretly undergoing treatment at a hospital in Van. The wounded officers have been offered money to keep silent. “Instead of investigating how such an incident could have taken place, our police chiefs have launched a probe to find out who leaked this story,” the letter says. “This is the horrible face of a triangle of money, drugs and politics.”

According to this account, after the arrest, the elder Mr Bayram storms into the office of the police chief and curses him, using unmentionable language. How dare anyone arrest his son? He also rings up the interior minister and the education minister, both of them Kurds (the latter an MP from Van), and threatens them. Both ministers have admitted to having talked to Mr Bayram over the phone, but say they refused his request for assistance.

After wide media coverage of the incident, the “state” had to arrest Mr Bayram, the father — whom it released shortly afterward on a small bail of $20,000. But there is more.

The Social Democrats in the opposition sent a delegation to Van to investigate the “Bayram affair” and subsequently filed a parliamentary motion for a wider probe. That angered one of the tribal leaders.

“Take your hands off Mr Bayram, or you’ll regret it,” Mikail Ilcin told a press conference in Van, in a manner reminiscent of a “capo di tutti i capi.” Mr Ilcin, a member of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, warned Deniz Baykal, leader of the Social Democrats, never to humiliate Mr Bayram. “Or you’ll suffer the consequences. This is a warning,” Mr Ilcin said.

Mr Ilcin is an eccentric Kurd. Before the Iraq war, he sent letters to Mr Erdogan, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and to General Hilmi Ozkok, Turkey’s top general, asking for support for a Kurdish state in Iraq. He argued that if Turkey was to fight the Iraqi Kurds, it should not send land forces but should rather bomb the Kurds with its fighter jets.

“That way, at least, the Kurds in Iraq and the Kurds in the Turkish army would not have to fight each other,” he reasoned. “I think something like Halabja [site of a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein in 1988] would be much nicer.”

Well, it’s hard to believe Mr Ilcin has perfectly balanced thinking. You don’t always come across a Kurdish patriot who advocates a massacre of Kurds with chemical weapons to avoid fighting between Turkish Kurds and Iraqi Kurds.

No matter what weird ideas Mr Ilcin may have, the way he got into the picture in Van tells much about “the other Turkey.”

The Van incident is no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of Turkish affairs. What is surprising is that it somehow surfaced. Most tribal affairs are open secrets in eastern and southeastern Turkey. One knows they happen without actually seeing them happen.

Perhaps next time the lady bigwig from Brussels comes over she should visit Van or any one of the provinces in Turkey’s eastern half to see whether her exclamation checks out or not.

3. - NTV/MSNBC - "Austria cool on Turkey’s EU bid":

The Austrian President has said the time is not right for Turkey to enter the already expanded bloc.

4 August 2004

Austrian leaders have flagged their opposition to Turkey being given a firm date to open accession talks with the European Union, saying that Ankara still has a long way to go before it will be ready to join the bloc.

Austrian Prime Minister Wolfgan Schussel on Tuesday said that it was unlikely Turkey would be given a date to start membership negotiations at the EU’s December summit.

“Turkey has a lot of conflicts standing before it on her way to EU membership.” He told the German magazine Capital in an interview.

One of the problems Schussel cited was the high number of farmers in Turkey, with more people employed on the land than in all of the other EU states combined.

“Austria will not give green light to Turkey as long as the existing problems persist,” he said, adding that Vienna favoured Turkey being given a privileged partnership status rather than full membership.

Austrian President Heinz Fischer, prior to his coming to office on July 8, had told a Turkish newspaper that he did not believe the EU was ready to accept Turkey as it needed to complete the assimilation of its newly joined members. Ten mainly central and eastern European countries entered the EU on June 1.

4. - The Guardian - "In the language of Jesus":

Turkey's Christian revival has a message for Iraq's own communities

4 August 2004 / by Martin Wainwright

This week's attacks on churches in Iraq are a reminder of a small community that has lived for years with the term "beleaguered", but has the potential to re-establish a more tolerant way of life in the Middle East.

It might easily be assumed that Iraqi Christians are a colonial implant that any self-respecting nationalist would view with suspicion.

But in fact they are among the oldest religious communities in the world.

Protected for most of their long history by Islam's tradition of tolerance, they are honoured for their own great gift to mutual understanding:

Syriac, a version of Jesus's native language, Aramaic. This was the vital bridge in the transmission of Greek, Roman and Jewish thought into Arabic, from which Aristotle, Plato and company eventually returned in the Renaissance to Europe.

Its greatest stronghold is just outside Iraq, in Turkey's Tur Abdin, the "Mountains of the Servants of God", where an intriguing shift is taking place.

Pilgrims, students, and tourists of all faiths and none, are returning to nearby monasteries, which were 700 years old when the first stones were laid at Fountains or Rievaulx. Four-and-a-half centuries after the English abbeys were dissolved by Henry VIII, the cloisters still ring with Syriac chants.

Yet it is only 20 years since the pocket-sized congregations lived in terror, with bombs going off outside their walls. Almost everyone with the money to do so had fled to the west.

Like their co-religionists in Iraq today, the Christians were caught up in a civil insurgency that saw fundamentalist hatreds let loose.

As in Iraq, the quarrel was not of their making. The issue was Kurdish separatism and the Turkish army's iron-fisted response.

Anyone "different" was potentially a target for both sides; and old resentments resurfaced that Christians were better-educated and had a rich diaspora in the United States.

It was the thinnest of times; but the churches not only survived but are now enjoying a revival that could in due course help their Iraqi counterparts.

With armed Kurdish insurgency defeated, the Turkish government two years ago began to move towards greater regionalism.

Its need to reach first base for membership of the European Union has been a key factor. Most encouragingly of all, the region's Muslim communities are lending a hand.

The process is best seen in Sanliurfa, an important Islamic shrine. Abraham - Ibrahim to Muslims - is said to have lived here and his cave attracts permanent devout queues.

But the city is also crucial in Christian history. As pre-Byzantine Edessa it was the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as the official religion, more than 500 years before St Augustine landed in Kent.

Jesus legendarily corresponded with its king, as the local council goes out of its way to acknowledge.

Sanliurfa is now promoting what it calls "belief tourism", inviting Muslims, Jews and Christians to come together and share the ancient sites.

The process is an eastern version of Spain's work in Toledo and Cordoba to create "three faith" centres where divisive myths can be dismantled and real divisions understood.

And what lessons there are to be learned: how Christians, Jews and Muslims lived as neighbours for centuries under the Caliphate and the extraordinarily cosmopolitan Ottoman empire.

How Saladdin's strongest allies against the tolerance-wrecking Crusaders were the Eastern Orthodox Christians and the Egyptian Copts.

This may seem far off and fanciful to the now embattled Christians of Iraq. But it is a stone's throw from their border; it honours the noblest traditions of Islam; and it has deeper and longer-term potential for countering al-Qaida than guns.

5. - Asia Times - "Dangerously quiet in Kurdistan":

WASHINGTON / 4 August 2004 / by Jim Lobe

Amid all the violence and crime that have stricken much of central and southern Iraq in recent months, the northern region of Kurdistan has remained relatively quiet.

But beneath that calm, according to a new report released on Tuesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW), lie simmering tensions over conflicting land claims by Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs living in the region that could burst into armed conflict at any time due to the failure thus far for the authorities - either the former US-led Coalition Provisional Authority or the new government headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi - to begin resolving those disputes.

Patience on all sides is running out, according to the 78-page report, "Claims in Conflict: Reversing Ethnic Cleansing in Northern Iraq", as tens of thousands of Kurds, as well as Turkomans and Assyrians, who were forced out of their homes during the three decades that preceded last year's US-led invasion, remain camped out, often in dire conditions, waiting to reclaim the homes they lost in the Ba'athist regime's "Arabization" program.

At the same time, thousands of Arabs who were forced to leave their homes as Kurdish militias, or peshmarga, advanced into southern Kurdistan and into the oil center of Kirkuk, which Iraqi Kurds regard as their spiritual capital, during the first months of the US occupation, are also living out in temporary camps, waiting for their fates to be resolved and with nowhere else to go.

"If these property disputes are not addressed as a matter of urgency, rising tensions between returning Kurds and Arab settlers could soon explode into open violence," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division. "Justice must be done for the victims of what was effectively an ethnic-cleansing campaign to permanently alter the ethnic makeup of northern Iraq," she added. Iraq experts have warned that the failure to settle the claims, particularly in Kirkuk, could be one of the flash points for conflict that could tear the country apart.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, "Arabization" on a massive scale began in earnest after the creation by the Ba'athist government of an autonomous zone in parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. Efforts were made by the central government in Baghdad to move Arabs, centered primarily in the middle and southern parts of the country, northward into regions dominated by Kurds, Turkomans and Assyrians. During that period, some 250,000 Kurds and other non-Arabs were expelled from a huge swath of northern Iraq, ranging from Khanaqin along the Iranian border to Sinjar on the Syrian-Turkish border. Land titles held by non-Arabs were invalidated, and landless Arabs and their families from the nearby al-Jaseera desert were brought in to occupy and lease what was declared government land.

In 1988, the Iraqi government launched the infamous Anfal campaign against the Kurds, killing some 100,000, destroying many of their villages, and leaving hundreds of thousands more Kurds homeless. Most were not allowed to return home, and their property rights were invalidated, while Arabs from the south were brought in to settle their lands. Through the 1990s and until the eve of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Kurds and other non-Arabs in Kirkuk faced constant harassment and were sometimes forced to choose between being expelled or joining the Ba'ath Party, changing their ethnic identity to Arab, and joining paramilitary forces in support of the regime. Approximately 120,000 people were expelled from Kirkuk and other areas during this time, while Arabs were encouraged to settle in their place through financial incentives. Overall, the United Nations counted a total of more than 800,000 displaced people, virtually all of whom had come from "Arabized" areas living in that part of northern Iraq that was protected by the US- and British-enforced no-fly zone on the eve of the US-led invasion, which drastically altered the situation, according to HRW. A large number of Arab settlers and their families left their homes in advance of the arrival of Kurdish and US forces, leaving entire Arabized villages empty. While many displaced Kurds hope to return to them, they have not yet done so, in large part because they are simply too poor to rebuild their homes and because the mechanism for determining claims to properties has not yet begun operating.

On the other hand, Kurds have tried to return to homes in Kirkuk and Mosul where Arabs have been reluctant to leave, steadily adding to tensions - both between Kurds and Arabs and Kurds and Turkomans - in those two urban areas. In some cases, Kurds and peshmarga have tried to expel Arabs through threats and intimidation, provoking inter-communal clashes, particularly in Kirkuk. "Kurds are flocking back to Kirkuk, but the city has little capacity to absorb them," said Whitson. "They are living in abandoned buildings and tent camps without running water or electricity supplies, and they face precarious security conditions."

At the same time, little effort has gone into finding solutions for the "Arabization Arabs" who themselves have no place to go, particularly with the national economy in such difficult straits. Many of the Arabs who have left or been forced to leave their homes have lived in the region for as much as three decades but now find themselves living in makeshift shelters without basic services waiting for property claims to be resolved or for new programs for their resettlement. The report notes that the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in essence failed to address any of these issues or to implement a strategy to resolve claims.

Although legislation to establish an Iraq Property Claims Commission was passed last January, orders for its operation were only finalized just before the handover to the interim government. Worse, the legislation failed to provide mechanisms to help Arabs who had lost or will lose their claims to property in the north, leaving them in a particularly uncertain state.

"The process of seeking redress for the displaced Kurds and others must not lead to new injustices against Arab settlers," said Whitson. Similarly, the Kurdish leadership has failed to put into place a coordinated and unified policy for dealing with the ongoing and anticipated influx of displaced Kurds and other non-Arabs and their families into Kirkuk and other areas or to provide for their humanitarian needs.

HRW said many of the Arab settlers interviewed for the report last year indicated that they recognized Kurdish claims to their properties and were willing to give up their homes in return for aid and help in finding new homes and livelihoods. But, with the passage of time, it appeared that all sides were becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in both resettlement and the provision of aid, contributing to a steady rise in tensions throughout the region.

6. - IsraelNationalNews.com - "Kurdish Politicians Meet With Assad":

4 August 2004

Two members of the leadership of the Kurdistan Democratic Party met with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus on Monday. The meeting follows violent clashes earlier this year between Syrian security forces and Syrian Kurds.

The KDP delegates and Assad discussed the situation in Iraq, with the Syrian leader emphasizing maintenance of the unity of Iraq, its independence, sovereignty and stability.

The KDP position is conciliatory towards local Arab states, as can be read on their website: "Preservation of unity and integrity of Iraq is an aim of the party. The full rights of the Kurds for self-determination can only be achieved through peaceful means in a democratic, pluralist and federal Iraq. It also believes that the rights of the Kurds in neighbouring countries can only be guaranteed through democratic and peaceful means within the boundaries of states in which the Kurds live. Furthermore, the KDP has always adopted the policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of neighbours."