10 December 2004

1. "Borrell And Turkey", responding to criticism of his faux pas of saying ‘Kurdistan,’ Borrell said, ‘The Kurdish nation lacks national unity.’

2. "Real reform slog still ahead for Turkey", Turkey seems to be nearing the finishing-line in a marathon race that has transformed its legal and political system, but the real slog to join the European Union has barely started.

3. "France urges alternative to Turkish EU entry", EU says it can solve Cyprus issue for talks.

4. "Cyprus warns it could veto Turkey's EU talks", Cyprus has upped the ante in its demands for recognition from Turkey, warning its European Union partners it may otherwise veto the start of accession talks with Ankara, local newspapers reported.

5. "Leader warns Kurds must be allowed to re-establish majority in Kirkuk", the head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, long one of the staunchest advocates for going forward with Iraq's January elections, said Thursday that he would be forced to reconsider his position if Kurds were not allowed to re-establish their ethnic majority in the strategic city of Kirkuk.

6. "Syrian Security Forces Prevent Damascus Sit-In", Syrian security forces Thursday prevented human rights activists from holding a sit-in in central Damascus to protest against the continued detention of political prisoners.

1. - Milliyet - "Borrell And Turkey":

9 December 2004 / by Dery Sazak

Turkey is on the European Parliament’s agenda. Before next week’s pivotal European Union summit, we’re seeing far more diplomatic traffic and lobbying by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Brussels than in Ankara and Istanbul. I recently attended a two-day international conference on ‘Turkey and the EU: Reasons for a Historic Choice” in Brussels along with hundreds of scholars, journalists and politicians. Many of us discussed the draft statement prepared by EU Term President the Netherlands for the Dec. 17 summit. In spite of some domestic pessimism, the EP expects that Turkey’s membership talks will begin in the second half of 2005. The conference’s closing session offered clear messages. EP President Josep Borrell, European Socialist group head Johannes Swoboda and Greens group head Daniel Cohn-Bendit all said that they were in favor of giving Turkey a date for talks. It’s understood that an agreement has been reached for the 2005 timetable, excepting the EP’s Christian Democrats. However, if a new document based on new conditions is issued before the summit, it’s uncertain if the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would accept a formula of open-ended talks. It’s unclear how Ankara would present the decision to the public and how the public would react. European politicians also know this.

Borrell spoke of his impressions of Turkey, saying, ‘The EP will accept starting membership talks with Turkey. Ankara should know that when we say yes, no is simply out of the question. Even if it requires a long and difficult negotiations process, our decisions will be yes.’ Responding to criticism of his faux pas of saying ‘Kurdistan,’ Borrell said, ‘The Kurdish nation lacks national unity.’ For Borrell, EU membership constitutes a foundation for democracy, freedom and welfare. After Spain underwent a similar process in the 1970s, it was able to move forward under the EU.

2. - Reuters - "Real reform slog still ahead for Turkey":

Turkey seems to be nearing the finishing-line in a marathon race that has transformed its legal and political system, but the real slog to join the European Union has barely started.

ANKARA / 9 December 2004 / by Gareth Jones

Turkey, which has been knocking on Europe’s door for 40 years, has enacted swathes of reforms, including abolition of the death penalty and cultural rights for its Kurdish minority.

But as EU leaders prepare to decide at a summit next week whether the large Muslim country is finally ready for entry talks, attention is shifting to the mountains of work ahead.

"Technically, the challenge we now face is much greater than meeting the Copenhagen criteria," said one Turkish diplomat, referring to the EU’s basic standards on human rights and political freedoms which Turkey has to meet before talks start.

"We have to rebuild our whole economic structure and public administration, and this will take a lot of time and money."

If the 25 EU leaders give Ankara the go-ahead at their December 17 summit, an inter-governmental conference (IGC) is expected to formally launch the negotiation process some time in 2005.

But even Turkey concedes it could take as much as a decade for it to work through the 31 chapters or policy areas where it must align its laws and regulations with those of the EU.

"The Turks will find that the EU is not just a club based on shared identity, but also a huge set of rules and regulations," said Heather Grabbe of the London-based Centre for European Reform in a recent study of the challenges facing Turkey.

"The EU’s day-to-day business is not about values but about fire safety in shops and hygiene standards in dairies."

The 80,000 pages of EU law, known in Brussels jargon as the acquis communautaire, will reach into all aspects of Turkish life including how to slaughter animals, how to treat sewage and which foreign nationals will need visas to visit its shores.

COSTLY PROCESS

It will not be easy for Turkey, a proud nation with an imperial history and used to doing things its own way, to take orders from bureaucrats in distant Brussels.

And membership costs money. Grabbe said the central European countries that joined the EU this year put the cost of EU-linked spending at around 3-4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Despite booming economic growth, partly underpinned by expectations of EU talks starting, Turkey’s GDP per capita is little more than a quarter that of the old pre-enlargement EU.

Turkish industry will have to invest in new technologies and comply with strict health and safety rules. The government will have to phase out many subsidies and remove obstacles to trade, forcing many firms to the wall.

Turkey will qualify for EU funds to ease its transition, but will need to overhaul its public administration to tap into them. It will also need to forge a strategy for developing its very poor, mainly ethnic Kurdish southeast.

Diplomats say they anticipate special problems with the costly chapters on environment and justice and home affairs -- where Turkey will have to prove it can adequately police its mountainous borders with countries such as Iraq, Iran and Syria -- and also with agriculture and regional policy.

More than 30 percent of Turks still work on the land, a far higher proportion than in the present EU, but many of these are subsistence farmers unlikely to stay in business once restrictions on farm imports are removed.

"Turkey is equal in size to all 10 new members which joined in May put together, and the challenges are equally forbidding," said one Ankara-based EU diplomat.

3. - Reuters - "France urges alternative to Turkish EU entry":

EU says it can solve Cyprus issue for talks

PARIS / 10 December 2004

The European Union should be prepared to offer Turkey an alternative to membership of the 25-nation bloc if entry talks with Ankara fail, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said on Thursday.

“We do not think there should be an automatic link between entry, and entry negotiations,” Raffarin told a news conference.

“There could be a successful scenario leading to membership. There could be another scenario, one of difficulties, where Turkey could not meet the (entry) criteria. In that case, one would have to devise another form of link between Turkey and the European Union.”

Although President Jacques Chirac supports Turkish membership, his governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) broadly opposes Turkish entry. Many in the party fear that if EU leaders agree at a summit later this month to start entry talks with Ankara, Turkish membership of the European Union will become inevitable.

The opposition Socialist Party is divided on Turkey’s entry and opinion polls suggest a majority of French voters oppose Turkey joining the EU.

They show that voters fear that Turks will take French jobs if Turkey joins the Union and are concerned that admitting a big, mainly Muslim country could change the nature of the EU.

Cyprus issue: The European Union’s presidency said on Thursday it was sure it could resolve a dispute over Turkey’s refusal to recognise Cyprus before a Dec. 17 summit at which the EU will decide on opening entry talks with Ankara.

Cypriot media reported that Nicosia had raised the stakes on Wednesday by threatening to veto the start of accession talks unless it won full recognition before negotiations start. “We are discussing this with both Cyprus and Turkey and as the presidency we are trying to find a solution to this problem,” Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, whose country holds the EU presidency, said on arrival at a NATO meeting.

“I am absolutely sure the presidency ... will find a formula that will satisfy everyone,” he told reporters.

His comments came amid growing friction over the EU’s terms for starting talks, with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan due in Brussels for a crucial preparatory meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende later on Thursday. EU ambassadors were meeting for a second day to discuss a draft summit statement to which Turkey has objected because it requires tacit recognition of Cyprus, mentions torture and sets tougher conditions for Ankara than for past applicants.

4. - Manawatu Standard - "Cyprus warns it could veto Turkey's EU talks":

NICOSIA / 10 December 2004

Cyprus has upped the ante in its demands for recognition from Turkey, warning its European Union partners it may otherwise veto the start of accession talks with Ankara, local newspapers reported.

The warning that Nicosia may "have no other option" but to use its veto at a December 16-17 summit of EU heads of state was issued at a meeting of the EU ambassadors of the bloc's 25 member countries in Brussels on Wednesday.

Cyprus' EU representative warned that Nicosia "may be pushed down a path it does not want to take" if Ankara refused to recognise it, the Cyprus Mail newspaper reported from Brussels. Other dailies carried similar reports.

Turkey is resisting calls to recognise Cyprus before the summit, which will decide whether to launch EU entry talks with Ankara.

Turkey recognises only the Turkish Cypriot enclave in north Cyprus, while the rest of the world views the Greek Cypriot government in the south, which joined the EU in May, as the sole legitimate representative of the whole island.

The Cypriot government has demanded full recognition before Turkey's talks start. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 in reaction to an Greek-inspired coup in Nicosia and has kept 35,000 troops on the divided island ever since.

Many in the EU are wary of admitting Turkey, a large, relatively poor, Muslim country of 70 million people because of concerns of social and labour upheaval.

In Brussels yesterday, the Dutch presidency of the EU said it was sure it could resolve the question of Ankara's refusal to recognise Cyprus before this month's summit.

AdvertisementAdvertisement"We are discussing this with both Cyprus and Turkey...I am absolutely sure the presidency...will find a formula that will satisfy everyone," Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters.

The Dutch presidency last week suggested a compromise under which Turkey would tacitly recognise the Greek Cypriot government by extending an existing association agreement it has with the EU. Ankara and Nicosia have so far rejected this idea.

5. - Chicago Tribune - "Leader warns Kurds must be allowed to re-establish majority in Kirkuk":

IRBIL / 9 December 2004 / by Kirsten Scharnberg

The head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, long one of the staunchest advocates for going forward with Iraq's January elections, said Thursday that he would be forced to reconsider his position if Kurds were not allowed to re-establish their ethnic majority in the strategic city of Kirkuk.

The Kurds, an estimated 4 million people, would be the second of the countries' three major ethnic groups to raise objections to the elections. Minority Sunni Muslims already have threatened a boycott, arguing that continued violence in key Sunni cities like Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra will prevent their voters from going to the polls.

Massoud Barzani, the populist leader of the semi-independent territory known as Kurdistan, delivered the warning to American military commanders during a lunch at his sprawling compound in the rugged foothills overlooking Irbil. "We will defend the rights of our people," Barzani said.

Slowly and deliberately, Barzani laid out his position: Residents of Kirkuk would vote only in a national election. Scheduled elections to determine leaders of the city and surrounding province would have to be put on hold until Saddam Hussein's "Arabization" of the region was reversed, restoring Kirkuk to a Kurdish majority and ousting the tens of thousands of Arabs who were brought to resettle the region in the 1970s and `80s.

"If this is not done," he said, "that might oblige the Kurds to take a different position regarding the election."

Barzani did not explain what re-evaluating the Kurdish position on elections might entail. But the options are myriad, and most are troubling for the new Iraqi government and the United States, both of which want elections held as scheduled on Jan. 30. Kurds in Kirkuk could boycott the elections; Kurds in Kirkuk could vote for only national leaders and not provincial ones; Kurds nationwide could refuse to participate in the election because of the issue.

Speaking through an interpreter, Barzani told the American commanders, "We are ready to take great risks. We will risk everything we have in Kurdistan. But we will not accept the Arabization of Kirkuk."

Thursday's meeting had begun with the customary niceties - hugs and handshakes, small talk and declarations of friendship - after two American helicopters crested the Kurdish mountaintops and touched down on Barzani's private twin helipads. But within 20 minutes, Barzani's statements indicated possible road bumps ahead.

Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad and about 60 miles south of Irbil, is at the heart of Kurdish national identity. The city and province were once predominantly Kurdish until Saddam's regime recognized the potential of the region's oil fields and farmlands. Over two decades, the regime razed thousands of Kurdish villages in the province, the rubble of which can still be seen from the air today.

On Thursday afternoon, Col. Lloyd Miles, the top American commander in charge of Kirkuk province, reminded Barzani that all decisions about the elections must come from the interim government in Baghdad. U.S. officials and military commanders could not influence the situation, Miles insisted.

But Barzani dismissed such protests. He reminded the colonel that the Kurds' loyalty to America dated to 1991, when Kurds rose up against Saddam after the Persian Gulf war. Since then, Kurdistan has been largely autonomous, with American and British air patrols protecting the territory.

In the last war, Kurds provided key intelligence to American military commanders on the ground.

"It has been the Kurds who fought side by side with you. It has been the Kurds who died with you. It has been the Kurds whose blood flowed with yours," Barzani said, suggesting that he believed the United States could use some of its influence to help a longtime ally.

But Miles, speaking outside Thursday's meeting, said his orders are to ensure that U.S. troops do not appear to be influencing the election in any way. He has spent an increasing amount of time in recent weeks focusing on training Iraqi National Guard battalions and the Kirkuk police so that local forces will be the ones to secure polling places.

"There is nothing that would be worse than to have American soldiers standing outside polling sites," he said.

Miles, who commands the 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division, has been in Kirkuk for nearly a year. In that time, he has come to see the disparate perspectives of all the citizens of Kirkuk, a city that now is nearly equal parts Kurdish, Arab and Turkomen, with a healthy population of Assyrian Christians as well.

"None of it is as simple as the Kurds would like it to be," Miles said. "To kick out the Arabs and send them back to where they came from some 30 years ago is going to create yet another chain of displaced persons. To redraw borders in this province means to redraw the borders of the surrounding provinces.

"It is very complex, but I truly believe that if we can somehow get this right in Kirkuk we can get it right in all of Iraq," he concluded. "The city is a microcosm of the nation as a whole."

Clouding the Kirkuk situation is the interim constitution that was implemented in March to guide the interim government until elections could be held. Article 58 states that the transitional government "shall act expeditiously to take measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime's practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk."

Article 58 goes on to assert that residents displaced by practices like Arabization will either be given back their homes and property or compensated for them; that individuals who were moved to new regions under Saddam should be resettled back in their original homes, and that the new government should seek to restore altered provincial borders.

"The unfortunate thing is that the TAL (interim constitution) did not give us a timeline," Miles told Barzani on Thursday.

Tense moments aside, Barzani, a jovial man dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes, patted Miles on the arm and motioned for him to eat lunch at the end of their conversation. It was an elaborate feast of lamb, chicken and fish, Kurdish salads and soups, rice and breads.

As they began to make their way to the dining room, Miles told his host, "The Kurds have been very good friends to us."

Not missing a beat, Barzani looked at his guest with a smile.

"In that case, sir, don't let your friends down," he said.

6. - AFP - "Syrian Security Forces Prevent Damascus Sit-In":

DAMASCUS / 10 December 2004

Syrian security forces Thursday prevented human rights activists from holding a sit-in in central Damascus to protest against the continued detention of political prisoners.

Dozens of law and order officers fanned out an hour before the sit-in was scheduled to begin to prevent dozens of demonstrators from gathering in the central Shahbandar square, AFP correspondents saw.

Nine demonstrators, most of them Kurds and including the head of the banned Yakiti party, Hassan Saleh, were "briefly questioned," said a Kurdish leader, Mustafa Jumaa.

Lawyer and prominent rights activist Anwar al-Bunni said police had sealed off the area in the early morning and accused law enforcement officers of "beating demonstrators and breaking their placards."

"We wanted to demonstrate peacefully to mark (Friday's) World Human Rights Day and to express our solidarity with political prisoners," Hassan Abdel-Azim, head of five banned Syrian parties, said.

On Nov. 18, Bunni and four former detainees launched an unprecedented public appeal for the release of all 600 or so political prisoners held in Syria.

Eleven rights groups and opposition parties also issued a joint statement calling on the Syrian authorities to lift the emergency law in place since 1963, abolish special courts and release political prisoners.

They slammed the "security service harassment, particularly arrests that seek to disseminate terror and prevent people from participating" in politics.

"Corruption, lack of freedom, political arrests are more dangerous [than U.S. pressure] because they can lead to loss of hope," said the statement.