17 February 2004

1. "Ocalan supporters clash with Police", many protesters around the country clash with police on the fifth anniversary of the capture of Kurdish leader Ocalan

2. "Turkey rejects 'special status' plan", Turkey has strongly rejected calls to give it “privileged status” with the EU instead of full membership.

3. "UN envoy sees "real chance" of reunified Cyprus by May 1", There is a "real chance" that Cyprus will be reunified in time for its May 1 entry into the European Union, UN special envoy for Cyprus Alvaro de Soto said Monday.

4. "Cypriots look to a rosier future", Yiltan Tasci’s daily cross-town commute is no ordinary one. For the past five months, the Turkish Cypriot teacher has been crossing the ceasefire line that slices across Cyprus to reach his school on the Greek Cypriot south of Nicosia, passing the barbed-wire barrier that has divided the island for 30 years.

5. "Mass Migration Redraws Northern Iraq Map", in a quiet mass migration, Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq (news - web sites) and Kurds are moving back in, reversing Saddam Hussein's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and effectively redrawing the demographic map.

6. "Fields of Jihad", the capture of a top terrorist in the Kurdish highlands may have exposed al-Qaeda's aspirations in Iraq—and has fired up the hunt for the group's regional commander.

1. - Turkish Daily News - "Ocalan supporters clash with Police":

Many protesters around the country clash with police on the fifth anniversary of the capture of Kurdish leader Ocalan

ANKARA / 17 February 2004

Protesters, carrying stones, sticks, chains and Molotov cocktails, in Istanbul, demanding the release of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK-KADEK-KONGRAGEL) leader Abdullah Ocalan, clashed with police on the fifth anniversary of his capture in Kenya by Turkish Special Forces, burnt an armored personnel carrier, a public bus and caused damage to local shops.

A group gathered at Kurtulus, Istanbul attacked local shops and a public bus. They dispersed before security forces appeared on the scene. Some of them threw a Molotov cocktail at an armoured police vehicle following the group. Officers chased some demonstrators down the streets and 21 protesters were taken into custody by Police Special Forces, when they tried to flee towards Taksim. Later, three more were arrested in Sisli.

Another group, which gathered on Istiklal Caddesi, Beyoglu, protested against the closure of Medya TV and the capture of Ocalan. The group dispersed peacefully after laying a wreath in front of the French Embassy in Istanbul.

Meanwhile in Diyarbakir, 17 people were taken into custody, after several small groups tried to hold illegal rallies in and around the city. Police dispersed the groups and took into custody some of those involved in the incidents.

Ocalan is serving a life sentence for leading a 15-year fight for Kurdish independence that left 37,000 people dead. His rebel group is banned in Turkey and is on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations.

Most of the fighting between the rebels and the military subsided in 1999 after Ocalan's capture, but sporadic clashes continue.

According to Turkish intelligence sources, an estimated 4,500 Kurdish rebels are holed up in neighboring northern Iraq. A few hundred reportedly operate in southeastern Turkey. Turkey is pressing its ally, the United States, to wipeout the rebel bases in northern Iraq.

2. - EUpolitix - "Turkey rejects 'special status' plan":

17 February 2004

Turkey has strongly rejected calls to give it “privileged status” with the EU instead of full membership.

Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has thrown out suggestions by German Christian Democrat (CDU) chief Angela Merkel that Ankara should only have a special partnership with Brussels.

Following a meeting with Merkel on Monday, Erdogan told reporters that such a plan was “out of the question.”

“Such a thing is definitely not on the agenda,” he said.

The CDU’s belief that Turkey does not fit within the EU culturally or economically is likely to dominate this year’s European election campaign.

Merkel’s proposal has already sparked a furious response from Turkish German leader Hakki Keskin who slammed the idea of a privileged status as “scandalous.”

Following Turkey’s 40 year association with the EU why should it “accept anything other than becoming an EU member,” Keskin told the Hannover-based Neuen Presse.

The European Commission will decide in October whether to recommend that EU leaders open formal membership talks with Ankara by the end of 2004.

Turkey is currently pushing through a raft of hefty economic and legal reforms, as well as trying to improve it’s human rights record.

Human rights organisation Amnesty International said on Monday that while progress had been made in this area, “there is still a difference between the policies professed by the government…and the realities on the ground.”

3. - AFP - "UN envoy sees "real chance" of reunified Cyprus by May 1":

16 February 2004

There is a "real chance" that Cyprus will be reunified in time for its May 1 entry into the European Union, UN special envoy for Cyprus Alvaro de Soto said Monday.

"We have a real chance now. I think the political momentum is considerable," de Soto told reporters in Dublin after talks with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose nation holds the rotating EU presidency.

De Soto, who will see top EU officials Tuesday in Brussels, briefed Ahern on talks at UN headquarters in New York last week where Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders agreed to restart negotiations on reunifying the island after 40 years.

He said the two sides, plus Greece and Turkey, had come to an agreement on a "deadlock-breaking mechanism" which should lead to a text in late March or early April that could then be put to a referendum before May 1.

Without a resolution of the reunification question, only the southern, Greek half of Cyprus will join the European Union. The northern half is recognised as a sovereign state only by Turkey.

De Soto will be meeting EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen on Tuesday, before Verheugen goes to Nicosia for a resumption of talks Thursday between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders.

4. - The Scotsman - "Cypriots look to a rosier future":

NICOSIA / 17 February 2004 / by Michael Thedoulou

Yiltan Tasci’s daily cross-town commute is no ordinary one. For the past five months, the Turkish Cypriot teacher has been crossing the ceasefire line that slices across Cyprus to reach his school on the Greek Cypriot south of Nicosia, passing the barbed-wire barrier that has divided the island for 30 years.

"The arrow has left the bow," said Mr Tasci as he walked into his classroom in Nicosia's English School. "We have blended in each other’s lives so much that it is too late now to reverse things."

Decisive negotiations between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders begin in Nicosia on Thursday in a last-ditch attempt to reunite the island before it joins the European Union on 1 May.

Never have the prospects been so good to resolve one of the world’s longest-running problems. For the first time the two sides have agreed to a procedure that cannot collapse. They have accepted that Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, can rule on any disputes they cannot settle before a final agreement is put to separate referendums in April.

For some Greek and Turkish Cypriots, however, the barriers are already down.

Until last April a generation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots had grown up as strangers. It was easier for them to meet on holiday in London, home to as many Cypriots as Nicosia, than on their own island.

Then unexpectedly, Rauf Denktas, the hardline Turkish Cypriot leader, eased access across the dividing "green line" for the first time in three decades. It was viewed as an attempt to appease his people, many of whom were dismayed when weeks earlier he rejected a UN plan drawn up by Mr Annan to re-unite Cyprus under a federal system. Huge numbers of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, brimming with goodwill, have crossed the divide in the past ten months. Mr Tasci, who was 17 when the island was sundered in 1974, was among those who rushed to see what the other side looked like. He now teaches at the 100-year-old English School which seized on the opening to re-establish its old bi-communal character, taking in six Turkish Cypriot students this year.

People displaced by the Turkish invasion have flocked to see their old homes. Friendships have been resumed and new ones formed. People from both communities have been inviting each other to weddings and mourning together at funerals.

There have been countless touching stories in the local media. One Greek Cypriot woman was handed back heirlooms she had buried under a fig tree, including a pendant of the Virgin Mary and 200-year-old earrings that had been passed down the family.

Such scenes of reconciliation discredited claims by those such as Mr Denktas that the two communities would be unable to get along.

"Greek and Turkish Cypriots can not only live together, they can fall in love, get married and have children and they are looking forward to a prosperous, united Cyprus. So am I," George Lanitis, a veteran Greek Cypriot diarist, wrote this week.

Mr Denktas and Tassos Papadopoulos, the Greek Cypriot president, now have just weeks to secure a deal that has eluded the international community for decades. But the dynamics of European Union expansion have broken the stalemate.

Turkey has cajoled Mr Denktas back to the table to negotiate the Annan plan which the octogenarian Turkish Cypriot leader, who favours a two-state solution, had insisted was "dead", arguing it would lead to domination by the larger and wealthier Greek Cypriot community. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has declared EU accession his country’s "most important" foreign policy objective. And European leaders have warned repeatedly that the island’s division is a major obstacle to Ankara’s hopes of joining the EU.

Washington has also taken an unprecedented interest in Cyprus, which is smaller than the state of Connecticut, because it wants Europe to embrace Turkey, a key strategic ally.

Little wonder then that the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders came under such strong international pressure in New York last week to agree to Mr Annan’s terms for a negotiating process that cannot grind to a halt. "Both will board an express train without emergency exits - the doors and windows have been tightly sealed - calling at specific stations according to a fixed timetable," the Cyprus Mail said approvingly.

The UN blueprint envisages re-uniting Cyprus under a loose federal system with broad autonomy for the two communities.

The Turkish Cypriots - 18 per cent of the population in 1974 - would see the territory they control reduced from 37 per cent to about 28.5 per cent, enabling many Greek Cypriot refugees to go home.

News of last week’s breakthrough was greeted with a mixture of delight and scepticism on the island.

Incomes in northern Cyprus are a quarter of those in the Dozens of jubilant Turkish Cypriots took to the streets in convoys of cars on Friday night, blaring their horns and chanting, "Peace cannot be prevented in Cyprus."

There is more caution among Greek Cypriots. "There have been so many false hopes in the past I wouldn’t like to make predictions. I hope it will be solved," Mr Papadopoulos, said.

5. - Asssociated Press - "Mass Migration Redraws Northern Iraq Map":

SANGOOR / 16 February 2004 / by Schehrezade

In a quiet mass migration, Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq (news - web sites) and Kurds are moving back in, reversing Saddam Hussein's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and effectively redrawing the demographic map.

At the same time, politicians in Baghdad are trying to negotiate a formula for the future of Iraq, ahead of the July 1 planned transfer of power to Iraqis and the end to the U.S.-led occupation.

The United States and some Iraqi leaders are pushing for a federal system they hope will maintain the country's unity while satisfying Kurds, who want to preserve the autonomy they have held for years in the north.

That would mean eventually defining the frontiers of a Kurdish federation. And with more Kurds moving back into their ancestral lands, Kurdish leaders' claim over a larger area in a future federal division is strengthened — raising tensions with Arabs.

Amid the bitterness and suspicion, even the concept of federalism is poorly understood in a country accustomed to centralized rule from Baghdad. Many Arabs see it as code for Kurdish aspirations to split from Iraq.

With Saddam's regime crumbling in April, Mohammed Abu Khomra, an Arab, fled his home in the village of Daqouq fearing Kurdish revenge.

"Federalism amounts to ethnic cleansing," said Abu Khomra, 29, who now lives in Tuz Khurmatu, 20 miles south of Daqouq. "Kurds are now staying in our house and say they will not leave."

Like Abu Khomra, thousands of Arabs are moving out of formerly Kurdish villages in which they were settled in a campaign by Saddam to "Arab-ize" Kurdish regions.

Saddam's military destroyed more than 4,000 villages in a 1987-1988 campaign to crush Kurdish rebels. The operation included the bombing of some of the Kurdish areas with chemical weapons.

Saddam's forces killed some 182,000 Kurds, by human rights groups' estimates, and tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes. Since then, the regime moved Arabs into Kurdish villages. Abu Khomra, for example, was given a furnished house when he moved into Daqouq in 1997.

Now, as Arabs pull out, Kurds are moving back to the towns and hamlets they fled over the past decades, bringing the ethnic makeup closer to what it was before Saddam's campaigns.

Soon after Saddam's fall, Mohammed Abdullah Salehi, a Kurd, returned to his home village of Sangoor. He and his family now stay in a house first owned by a Kurd but then occupied by an Arab family that fled in April.

Salehi said he wasn't interested in settling scores. All he wanted was to farm his land and tend his goats. "Now I am at peace. I've come back to my home," he said.

Kurds are insisting on retaining — or expanding — the system of self-rule they enjoyed under U.S. protection after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, fought alongside U.S. soldiers last year and now expect a political payoff for that support.

Creating a federal system in Iraq will be messy. Some officials have spoken of using the 18 existing provinces as the basis for federal regions.

Those political boundaries don't match up with the ethnic lines, however — particularly in the complicated case of the Kirkuk region.

Kurds consider oil-rich Kirkuk the heartland of a Kurdistan but it also has Arab and Turkoman populations and is not in the Kurdish autonomous region.

In his attempt to keep Kirkuk province firmly in Arab hands, Saddam detached four largely Kurdish districts — out of an original seven — and attached them to the neighboring Sunni Arab provinces of Salaheddin and Diyala.

Drawing the federal borders along current provincial lines would keep them out of the Kurdish-run areas. But the more Kurdish returnees come back to those districts, the stronger Kurdish leaders' claim to them will be.

Kurds regard the Hamreen Mountains as the natural borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. The range runs across the country from the Mosul area in the northwest to meet the Iranian border nearly as far south as Baghdad.

In Ya Tagh, a village some 75 miles south of Kirkuk, about a dozen Kurdish families have returned, finding most of the houses dismantled. Before fleeing, Arab occupants pulled down roofs, windows and other parts of their homes — apparently so they could rebuild elsewhere.

Joma Ahmed, 74, was delighted to have his land back, after living in the Samood camp as a refugee and having to pay for his goats to graze in nearby villages.

"We want Kirkuk," he said. "This is a Kurdish region."

He also said he would not live with the Sunni Arabs who dominated Saddam's regime. "After this, how can we live with them?" he said, waving an Arab newspaper with a photo of Saddam.

The mood is even less compromising in the Kurdish cities, where for many activists, federalism means the first step to full independence.

"Now is not the right time to call for independence," said Ferhad Pirbal, a writer and university professor in Irbil. But "federalism is the means to reaching that goal."

6. - Time Magazine - "Fields of Jihad":

The capture of a top terrorist in the Kurdish highlands may have exposed al-Qaeda's aspirations in Iraq—and has fired up the hunt for the group's regional commander

BAGHDAD / SULAIMANIYAH / 23 February 2004 /
by Brian Bennett and Vivienne Walt

The Kurds had laid out bait for their prey. In early January, Kurdish security officials spread word in the villages along Iraq's border with Iran that one stretch of the mountainous frontier was lightly guarded and thus safe for travelers who had reason to slip unnoticed in or out of the country. Then the Kurds waited. "It was like dropping seeds for a chicken, saying 'Come, come,' and then catching it," a Kurdish official involved in the sting told TIME. It was a crisp morning in mid-January when the chicken fell into the trap.

The tall man in an open-neck shirt, jacket and trousers looked like any of the traveling merchants who frequent the area. When he was stopped at a Kurdish checkpoint near Kalar, officials made an intriguing discovery in his travel bag: two CDs and a computer flash disc the size of a cigarette lighter. With a hunch who their catch was—the CIA had given them a heads-up that he might be in the area—the Kurdish officials snapped a digital mug shot of the traveler and e-mailed it to their American intelligence contacts. The confirmation came back quickly: the Kurds had nabbed Hassan Ghul, one of the key al-Qaeda operatives still on the run. "When Washington heard we had him," said a Kurdish official in Baghdad, "they were doing cartwheels."

The satchel was at least as important as the suspect. On one of Ghul's discs was a 17-page progress report and future plan of action in Iraq written to "You, noble brothers, leaders of Jihad." The author, U.S. military officials have concluded, was Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, whom U.S. intelligence believes is al-Qaeda's top operative in Iraq. If the memo is what Washington says it is, and if its author is not exaggerating, then al-Qaeda has played a greater role in the insurgency in Iraq than anyone has appreciated. The letter's author claims to have overseen 25 suicide attacks against various targets in Iraq, which would constitute almost all such assaults since the U.S. rolled into Iraq.

The report and other files captured with Ghul suggest a long-term strategy by an international terrorism organization to turn occupied Iraq into the front line of the global jihad. The memo, whose discovery was first reported by the New York Times, expresses frustration that the fight in Iraq has not been more successful as well as concern that it will soon fail. But, as a final strategy to upset U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq, the memo suggests provoking strife between the country's two main religious factions—the Sunnis and the Shi'ites—through attacks on Shi'ites, who would then presumably strike back at Sunnis. Shi'ite-Sunni discord is already problem enough for U.S. occupation authorities without al-Qaeda's stirring up more trouble.

Not everyone is convinced that the document found on Ghul was authored by al-Zarqawi. Mustafa Alani, a Middle East specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London, believes that the letter is from a group of religiously motivated militants working in Iraq who are seeking an alliance with al-Qaeda. "Al-Qaeda has never been in the habit of setting out its strategy on paper," he says. "It's three years since 9/11, and we still haven't found one single written document about it." U.S. officials acknowledge there is no hard evidence that al-Zarqawi wrote the intercepted memo, but they say they are confident in their conjecture, based on information in the letter and the circumstances of Ghul's arrest.

Apart from the documents in Ghul's satchel, U.S. military officials say they have other evidence that the resistance in Iraq is increasingly being fought and led by jihadists rather than Baathists. Since the capture of Saddam Hussein in December, officials say, supporters of the former regime have largely given up the fight. Their role as financiers and organizers of the diverse insurgency has been taken up by religiously motivated groups that are recruiting young foot soldiers to come to Iraq. It's unclear, says a U.S. intelligence official in Washington, "how many are, quote-unquote, al-Qaeda." But it's plain, says a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq, "this is the battleground. It is easy to get here and easy to get weapons."

Al-Zarqawi is a central figure in all this. French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard notes that last month an audio recording of al-Zarqawi turned up in extremist circles, in which he urged holy fighters from around the world to join the fight in Iraq under his leadership. Jacquard says Western intelligence agencies believe al-Zarqawi has called for 1,500 to 2,000 jihadists to leave Chechnya for Iraq.

A Jordanian, al-Zarqawi, 37, has a long record as a jihadist. As a young man, he joined other Arab volunteers to help the Afghan mujahedin defeat Soviet troops in the late 1980s. He is thought to have joined up with al-Qaeda leaders in the 1990s. Eventually, al-Zarqawi was given responsibility for rotating al-Qaeda troops between Chechnya and Afghanistan, through the mountains of northern Iraq. There, U.S. intelligence believes, he became the on-the-ground commander of the well-trained extremist group Ansar al-Islam. In defending the U.S. case for war against Iraq at the U.N. a year ago, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell asserted that Saddam's regime harbored a terrorist network headed by al-Zarqawi. That claim was partially based on intelligence that al-Zarqawi, after sustaining injuries in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, fled to Baghdad, where his leg was amputated and he was fitted with a prosthesis. More recently, Powell acknowledged that the U.S. has turned up no "smoking gun" connecting Saddam with al-Qaeda. The memo putatively written by al-Zarqawi disparages the Saddam regime.

Al-Zarqawi is the focus of a manhunt nearly on the scale of the searches for Saddam and his two sons. U.S. officials say they have no firm idea where he is, but they suspect that he is in the Sunni triangle. Al-Zarqawi operates so inconspicuously that U.S. intelligence is having trouble "tracking him through the traditional ways," says an official.

The information yielded by the capture of Ghul, whom the Kurds turned over to the Americans, may help al-Zarqawi's hunters. "The discs [Ghul carried] were jammed," says a Kurdish security official. "You could not fit one more single word on them." In a small, weathered blue notebook in Ghul's satchel were names and telephone numbers from around the world, including a few in Western countries, the source adds. Says a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq: "We've been busy."

So too have the insurgents. Last week two suicide bombings bearing the hallmarks of al-Qaeda together killed more than 100 people; the attacks were targeted at centers where applications for new Iraqi policeman and soldiers were being taken. In another assault, guerrillas shouting "God is great" besieged an Iraqi police station and security compound in Fallujah, freeing prisoners and killing at least 21 people. The letter found on Ghul identifies four general targets for attack: Americans; Kurds; "Iraqi troops, police and agents"; and Shi'ites.

The letter describes the plan to foment violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis as a last-ditch effort by the resistance. The author complains of various obstacles: that the U.S. won't leave Iraq "no matter how many wounds it sustains," that Iraqis offer hospitality but "will not allow you to make their homes a base for operations or a safe house," that "our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases." He laments, "By God, this is suffocation!" The writer argues that the resistance has only a limited time in which to act—until the U.S. confers sovereignty on a new Iraqi government, a turnover planned for June. "We are racing against time," he says. Once democracy is in place, "we will have no pretexts," he argues. "If, God forbid, the [new Iraqi] government is successful and takes control of the country, we will just have to pack up and go somewhere else again."