3 February 2004

1. "Turkey back on side with the US", in the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq last March, world opposition to the proposed military action was vociferous and widespread, with protests taking place all across the globe.

2. "A Hole in the Heart of Kurdistan", politically, however, the Kurds are probably better able to weather the losses than other Iraqi victims of similar attacks. During the 12 years in which some four million Kurds have administered northern Iraq as a de facto independent state, they have developed institutions that provide for continuity.

3. "Turkey's Kurds condemn Arbil carnage, join Iraqi cousins in mourning", Turkey's Kurds condemned Monday the deadly bomb attacks on Kurdish targets in the Iraqi city of Arbil and cancelled celebrations for the Eid al-Adha feast out of respect for the mourners.

4. "As Kurds Mourn, Resolve Hardens", Kurds generally reacted stoically to the tragedy, some citing the strife that has dominated recent Iraqi Kurdish history.

5. "Cyprus at last", after thirty years of armed partition, the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus will probably enter the European Union as a reunited, bi-communal republic next May. Only days before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited President George W. Bush in Washington, the Turkish army finally ended its long opposition to a settlement that eliminates the illegal Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

6. "Cypriots meet as pressure builds", under increasing international pressure for a new round of peace talks on Cyprus, Cypriot political leaders met in Nicosia yesterday to discuss the latest developments, including a new missive from US President George Bush to President Tassos Papadopoulos.

1. - Asia Times - "Turkey back on side with the US":

3 February 2004 / by Erich Marquardt*

In the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq last March, world opposition to the proposed military action was vociferous and widespread, with protests taking place all across the globe. The opposition to Washington both at home and abroad cast doubt on whether the administration of President George W Bush would make the fateful decision to send troops across the borders of Iraq.

Many world leaders hoped that the war could be averted, which was the stance in Ankara. With 90 percent of the Turkish population firmly against Washington's Iraq plans, in addition to the possible instability that such an attack could bring to the region, the parliament in Ankara narrowly rejected calls to support the proposed US-led intervention.

Despite Ankara's opposition, Washington invaded Iraq anyway, and instead of relying on Turkish troops for securing the northern part of the country, it relied on Kurdish troops. This decision gave new impetus to Kurdish nationalism, and is now working against Turkey's national interests. This avoidable circumstance was forecast before the March invasion when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey's majority Justice and Development Party, warned: "If one is left out of the equation at the start of the operation, it may not be possible to be in a position to control developments at the end of the operation. Turkey's long-term interests and even security could be in jeopardy."

By failing to heed Erdogan's warning, Ankara now finds its long-term interests and security in jeopardy because of its failure to place itself in a position to control political developments in northern Iraq. If Ankara had participated in the US-led invasion and allowed its troops to be used in tangent with American soldiers, it could have secured Turkish influence in northern Iraq, influence that could now be used to prevent Kurdish factions from gaining power and political control.

Before the invasion, Washington offered Turkey this lucrative opportunity. Even though the various Kurdish factions were against Washington's proposition to Turkey, there was little they could do. Faced with threats from Ankara in the north and Baghdad in the south, Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq were dependent on US support, demonstrated through the "no fly zones" that Washington established shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.

Because of Turkish refusal to assist the US-led invasion, Kurdish leaders received an unexpected boon to their interests and a major boost to their power. Shortly after the invasion, Kurdish troops swarmed into the oil-rich cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, re-establishing their control. In the months that followed, Kurdish leaders forcefully retook areas that they once held before Saddam Hussein had relocated and cleansed them during the 1980s. They are also expanding their political infrastructure in the region, laying claim to a future of either a federal Kurdish state partially governed by Baghdad or a completely independent state of Kurdistan.

While these actions are certain to evoke political controversy in the region, there is little that can be done immediately to prevent Kurdish aspirations, since Washington relies on the Kurds for keeping northern Iraq stable and controlled. Indeed, facing violence and a growing insurgency in central Iraq, Washington's primary concern was, and still is, to prevent other areas of Iraq from falling into chaos, hence its support of Kurdish leaders and its willingness to compromise with Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has the power to create violence and turmoil in southern Iraq.

To highlight just how precarious this situation is, over the weekend northern Iraq suffered from a series of attacks: suicide bombers simultaneously attacked the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Irbil, killing more than 60 people and bringing the instability further north.

Now, because of these political developments, Turkey has been excluded from shaping post-Saddam Iraq, a situation that is putting its interests at stake. With the Kurds in northern Iraq keeping the area relatively stable, Washington no longer has any real need for Turkish troops; in fact, their introduction in any significant scale would be certain to destabilize northern Iraq, since Turkish and Kurdish troops would probably engage each other.

Erdogan reiterated his concern last week during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. He said: "There is a demand to establish a federation in the north of Iraq. We approve of neither an ethnic nor religious-based federation. These developments will cause a difficult situation for Iraq in the future."

In light of this, Ankara is desperately trying to improve its relations with the United States. It has now offered to help the US in Iraq, offering access to Turkish bases for US military operations in the country. Ankara's attempts have helped to moderate Washington's tone, with L Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, announcing last week that the US-led coalition considers the Kurdistan Workers' Party to be a terrorist organization.

A broader timeline is useful to discover what the likely conclusion of this clash of interests between the Turks and Kurds will be. Washington's strategic support for the Kurds is a short-term interest, since it is only concerned with preventing northern Iraq from falling into violence. Washington's strategic support for Turkey, however, is a long-term interest, since Turkey straddles Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. Washington will not swap its relations with Ankara, a longtime US strategic ally, for Kurdish aspirations of statehood.

* Published with permission of the Power and Interest News Report, an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com.

2. - New York Times - "A Hole in the Heart of Kurdistan":

IRBIL / 3 February 2004 / by Peter Galbraith*

On Saturday, the day before he died, Sami Abdul Rahman and I sat in the living room of my elegant government guest house here and discussed American negotiating techniques. We had become friends when we fled together from his hometown, Dihok, as the 1991 Kurdish uprising collapsed. Sami became deputy prime minister of the Kurdish regional government and, since last year, one of its negotiators in discussions on Iraq's interim constitution. As such, he was fully familiar with one American technique: papering over differences with nice-sounding language. As he took his leave, he said he would be looking hard at a new American proposal to see if cosmetic changes in language masked a loss of actual authority for his government.

Sami Abdul Rahman was one of six senior Kurdish government officials who, along with at least 60 others, was killed here on Sunday in suicide bombings at the offices of the two principal Kurdish parties. I visited one of the bomb sites on Monday, and even with the bodies removed, the scale of the destruction was evident in the mangled furniture, collapsed walls, scorch marks and pools of bright blood. The Kurdish leaders are a tightknit group, many related by blood or marriage, who have worked together for decades and across generations. Seeing so many die so suddenly and so horribly has left them in shock.

Politically, however, the Kurds are probably better able to weather the losses than other Iraqi victims of similar attacks. During the 12 years in which some four million Kurds have administered northern Iraq as a de facto independent state, they have developed institutions that provide for continuity. At Erbil's main mosque today, leaders from both major parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, stood for hours as the people of the city streamed in to offer prayers for the dead. No one was discussing the political fallout of the attacks, but there is sure to be some.

Public pressure will increase on both parties to end the division of the region between the Kurdistan Democratic Party government here in the north and the Patriotic Union government in Sulaimaniya to the south. Indeed, the parties have already agreed on the terms for a unified government.

Until Sunday, the Kurdish lands had been largely free of the terrorism and chaos that has plagued the rest of the country. In April, they protested American demands to dismantle the controls on the border separating them from the rest of newly freed Iraq. They argued that it would let terrorists in. When the Americans relented months later as chaos grew in the south, many Kurds felt it was too late. The bombings on Sunday will reinforce widely shared doubts about a closer association with Baghdad.

L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, is pressing the Kurds to give up some of the powers they now exercise. The Kurds want to retain control over oil in their region, continue to have exclusive taxation powers and keep the new Iraqi Army out. The Americans, prodded by Turkey, see these demands as setting the stage for secession. For the Kurds, however, the issue is not sovereignty but security.

The Kurds see control of oil and taxation as further insurance against future Baghdad regimes treating them as those of Iraq's first 80 years did. And they are also skeptical of Mr. Bremer's request that they rely on a unified Iraqi Army and a reformed internal security organization — the two institutions responsible for decades of repression, culminating in Saddam Hussein's genocidal assaults of the 1980's. The Kurds would rather maintain their own military, called the peshmerga, and want a clause in the transitional constitution requiring regional approval for any entry of Iraqi armed forces into Kurdish areas.

The Sunday bombings deprived the Kurds of one of their shrewdest negotiators, Mr. Abdul Rahman. And it will probably harden their diplomatic positions as the Kurdish public comes increasingly to feel it must rely on its own institutions — the peshmerga, the local police and security services — to protect it against a danger that most see as coming from the south.

* Peter W. Galbraith is a former United States Ambassador to Croatia.

3. - AFP - "Turkey's Kurds condemn Arbil carnage, join Iraqi cousins in mourning":

DIYARBAKIR / 2 February 2004

Turkey's Kurds condemned Monday the deadly bomb attacks on Kurdish targets in the Iraqi city of Arbil and cancelled celebrations for the Eid al-Adha feast out of respect for the mourners.

"I see this grave incident as part of a campaign against the Kurds' struggle for freedom and democracy," Tuncer Bakirhan, the head of the country's main pro-Kurdish party, the Democratic People's Party (DEHAP), said in a statement.

"I condemn it with hatred and invite everybody to prudence," he added.

In Diyarbakir, the central city of Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, as well as in several other cities in the region, DEHAP cancelled celebrations to mark Eid al-Adha, one of Islam's most important holidays, party officials said.

"The attacks in Arbil plunged us into great sadness. We see these as attacks on Kurdish freedom," the head of the DEHAP branch in Diyarbakir, Mustafa Karahan, told AFP.

"We have declared a three-day mourning and hung a black cloth on our building," he said.

Near-simultaneous blasts at the Arbil offices of the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- killed at least 65 people and left hundreds injured Sunday in one of the deadliest incidents in postwar Iraq.

The attacks came at a time when the Iraqi Kurds, who backed the US invasion of Iraq, were pushing a bid to expand their autonomy in northern Iraq as part of a proposal to establish a federal system in the country.

4. - The Washington Post - "As Kurds Mourn, Resolve Hardens":

Many Determined To Keep Autonomy In Northern Iraq

IRBIL / 3 February 2004 / by Daniel Williams

A city long accustomed to mourning the losses of war was draped in black Monday for victims of dual suicide bombings that shocked and frightened its ethnic Kurdish inhabitants and hardened their determination to obtain autonomy in postwar Iraq.

The death toll from Sunday's blasts, which devastated the local headquarters of two major Kurdish parties, climbed to 67. Officials said they believed the true number was higher because some victims were buried immediately rather than taken to city morgues. It was Iraq's deadliest terrorist bombing since August, when more than 100 people, including a Shiite Muslim cleric, were killed in Najaf.

Mosques throughout Irbil held funerals for individual victims, and a memorial service for all the dead took place at the massive Sawaf mosque. Thousands of mourners filed silently between ranks of relatives. Some carried pictures of the victims, among them high-ranking officials of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). A preacher called for prayers for the souls of the dead and railed against "betrayers, those hated by God."

Black banners bearing names of the dead hung from mosques and public buildings. Black ribbons flew from car radio antennas. Townspeople canceled feasts for Eid al-Adha, the four-day Muslim holiday that began Sunday.

Kurds generally reacted stoically to the tragedy, some citing the strife that has dominated recent Iraqi Kurdish history.

"This is a first for us only in style," said Abdul Rahman Emin Gomashani, the PUK commissioner for social affairs in Irbil. "Irbil is full of people lost in war with Saddam Hussein and, it must be said, with other Kurds. Thousands and thousands of people. This is our history, and we are not sure the tragedy is coming to an end."

The KDP and PUK, historical rivals, govern two halves of an autonomous zone that was established in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. British and U.S. warplanes guarded the region against incursions by Iraqi forces until Hussein's fall from the presidency last year. Irbil, which Kurds consider the world's oldest city, lies in the KDP area of control.

The two parties have joined forces to press for geographic and political expansion of their autonomous area within a federal system. Iraqi Arab groups and Iraq's neighbors Turkey, Iran and Syria all oppose the aspirations of the Kurds, who make up between 15 percent and 20 percent of Iraq's population.

Officially, the KDP and PUK want Iraq's future central government to oversee only national defense, foreign policy and finance. But several Kurds said in interviews Monday that, for them, autonomy under a federal system means establishing a comfortable distance from Iraq. In effect, the Kurds are asking for a confederation of separate entities more in the style of Serbia and Montenegro than the United States or Germany.

The bombings only confirmed the rightness of this approach in the eyes of some Kurds. "We cannot surrender now. We have had so many troubles under so many governments. We need to be separate," said Adel Hamed Ali, a PUK activist who was wounded on the forehead by glass shards in the bombing at PUK headquarters.

The Kurds say they want their region to include the oil city of Kirkuk, which lies outside the existing Kurdish zone. The United States opposes its inclusion, however, and Kurdish officials and the U.S.-appointed administrator for Iraq have been negotiating the issue.

Irbil, the largest Kurdish city in the far north, is full of refugees expelled from Kurdish towns and hamlets to the south during Hussein's so-called Arabization campaigns. Few families have not been affected by the death of a relative during battles with central government forces or roundups by Hussein's police. Yet Sunday was unique in the city's history.

Kurdish television broadcast a videotape of the immediate aftermath of the explosion at PUK headquarters. Wounded men crawled out of the auditorium as civilians and PUK militia members rushed in to search for the dead and wounded among piles of bloodstained furniture and roofing materials. Distraught survivors climbed on chairs and yelled to the sky. As the camera scanned the scene, a bloodied white turban of the type worn by holy men and Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca appeared.

The bombing took place during festive receptions in honor of Eid al-Adha. Witnesses have told Kurdish officials they suspect that men dressed in religious garb carried the bombs into the halls. Ali Nasreddin Salem, another PUK member, recalled seeing a man in a clerical robe carry a small suitcase into the hall. Salem did not follow him and is unsure whether the man detonated the blast. "He spoke in Arabic, not Kurdish. I remember that," said Salem, who was wounded in the left side by pieces of glass and metal.

"We are investigating these reports," said Sami Feidy, a KDP spokesman. "We don't know if this is real or imaginary." A KDP source said that a man dressed as a cleric was shaking hands with Sami Abdul Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish north, when the blast occurred. Abdul Rahman died with his two sons.

Other top KDP officials killed were Shawkat Sheikh Ezzedin, minister for parliamentary relations; Saad Abdullah Othman, head of the KDP's Irbil branch; Akram Ahmed Manteq, governor of Irbil province; Ahmad Rozbayani, Irbil's mayor; and Rozbayani's deputy. The PUK's Irbil director, Shakhawan Abbas, and his deputy also were killed.

These deaths hit especially hard because they involved veteran activists who had made the journey from Kurdish towns and villages to the mountains for warfare and finally to civilian posts, as the Kurds gained autonomy and strove to cement it in the new Iraq.

Othman, for example, began as a student activist in Irbil, joined the party and led militia troops in numerous battles against the Iraqi army. During the 1980s, Iraqi troops pursued Kurdish forces deep into the northern mountains. Othman took refuge near the Iranian border and sent his family to Iran for a time.

When the Kurds rose up against Hussein in 1991, Othman led forces in villages to the south and held the town of Qorei against an army onslaught. When government forces assaulted Irbil, he went underground, refusing to leave the city, friends and relatives said.

During the 1990s, he was named KDP agriculture minister. Last month he became head of the KDP's Irbil operations.

His funeral Sunday attracted hundreds of his comrades, who sat silently in the main hall of an Irbil mosque as a preacher read verses from the Koran. Othman's relatives stood to receive condolences. "He was like many Kurds who fought and suffered," said Othman Rauf Othman, a cousin. "We had hoped such things were at an end."

5. - Monday Morning - "Cyprus at last":

2 February 2004 / by Gwynne Dyer

After thirty years of armed partition, the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus will probably enter the European Union as a reunited, bi-communal republic next May. Only days before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited President George W. Bush in Washington, the Turkish army finally ended its long opposition to a settlement that eliminates the illegal Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Exactly what bribes and threats were deployed is not yet clear, but the biggest issue was clearly the prospect of Turkish membership of the European Union.

For decades, joining Europe has been Turkey’s main foreign policy goal, and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party shares that goal despite its strong Islamic roots. It recognizes that the best protection for the rights of Muslim believers is a secular, democratic state with the firm rule of law, so it has been more active than any of its predecessors in rewriting Turkey’s laws to conform to EU norms on human rights and democracy. Nevertheless, Brussels told Ankara quite bluntly that Cyprus had to be reunited before Turkish membership could be seriously discussed.

Erdogan wanted to comply, but he couldn’t deliver because the Turkish army wouldn’t let him. It mistrusted him because of his Islamic roots, and it wouldn’t let Cyprus go because that had been its one undisputed military success in a very long time. Stubborn, truculent and stupid -- but then, those words describe the entire Cyprus situation.

Cyprus has had a Turkish minority (currently about 18 percent of the population) ever since it was part of the Ottoman Empire. After the island passed into British control in 1878 (in accordance with a decision reached by the major European powers at the Congress of Berlin, which also awarded Bosnia to Austria-Hungary), the Turks collaborated with the new imperial rulers -- which put them on the opposite side from the Greek majority, who eventually backed a guerilla war that drove Britain out of Cyprus in 1960. The deal at independence was that Greeks and Turks would share power in the new republic, but it only lasted 14 years.

Greek-Turkish fighting in the early 1960s ended with the Turkish-Cypriots besieged in various enclaves and the arrival of a United Nations force. The Greek-Cypriot militia, secretly backed by the military dictatorship in Athens, carried out a bloody coup against its own government in 1974 with the intention of uniting the island to Greece -- and Turkey invaded to prevent that. By the end of the war, the Turkish army controlled almost two-fifths of the island and 200,000 Greek-Cypriots had become refugees. And that is where everything still sits today, 30 years later. Crazy.

Crazy because none of the major players wants Cyprus to stay like that. The European Union does not want one of its new members next May to be a country divided by barbed wire and minefields, with the Turkish army sitting on the northern 40 percent of it. Greece has promised Turkey not to block its EU membership if Ankara will only sort out the Cyprus nonsense. And the Greek-Cypriot government also wants a deal: last March, it accepted UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s peace plan that envisages a republic of two largely autonomous communities in which the Turkish-Cypriots would have to relinquish less than a third of their current territory.

A majority of Turkish-Cypriots wants the same deal: 52 percent of them voted for parties that backed it in last December’s election. The Turkish government supports the deal, because it wants to get into the EU -- and the United States backs it too, because it wants Turkey in the EU. So what’s the problem?

Apart from the Turkish army, the only problem is the president of the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Rauf Denktash. Now 80, Denktash has ruled the TRNC since partition, and he really cannot imagine living in a united Cyprus again. As younger Turkish-Cypriots dream of a peace settlement that will end what amounts to a Turkish military occupation and give them access to all the benefits of EU membership, Denktash only remembers the sieges and the atrocities of the ‘60s. Last spring, however, popular pressure forced him to open the border and allow Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots to visit the other side for the first time in a generation.

“Our problem is not like Bosnia or the Palestinian-Israeli troubles; both sides have reconciled already”, explains Mehmet Ali Talat, leader of Northern Cyprus’ biggest opposition party. “But this free movement [across the ‘Green Line’] is not a substitute for a solution, as Denktash would like. What we have to solve are the political issues”. In the December election Talat and his allies got only half the parliamentary seats (though they won a majority of the votes), but the coalition government he now leads is formally committed to getting an agreement by May.

Which left only the Turkish army blocking the door -- and on January 23 they stepped aside. After a four-hour meeting of the National Security Council in Ankara, the generals agreed that Cyprus should be reunited before it joins the EU on May 1, and that the UN peace plan was the right way to do it. What finally made the Turkish army move? Some arm-twisting from the United States, no doubt, but also probably some carrots, particularly in terms of a promise that the Kurds of Northern Iraq will not end up with an independent state.

Delivering on such a promise depends on the US keeping control of the chain of events it has unleashed in Iraq, which is far from certain. But the Kurds won’t seize their independence by this May, so the Cyprus problem will probably be settled.

6. - Kathimerini - "Cypriots meet as pressure builds":

3 February 2004

Under increasing international pressure for a new round of peace talks on Cyprus, Cypriot political leaders met in Nicosia yesterday to discuss the latest developments, including a new missive from US President George Bush to President Tassos Papadopoulos.

Government spokesman Kypros Chryssostomidis would divulge no details on the three-hour National Council meeting under Papadopoulos, who discussed the prospect of new talks last week with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and European Commission President Romano Prodi.

Later yesterday, Papadopoulos confirmed he had received a new letter from Bush, which he described as “most polite and constructive.” Reports in the Turkish and Cypriot press claimed Bush was leaning on Nicosia to follow Turkey’s “sincere efforts” to restart negotiations, in order to achieve a deal before Cyprus joins the EU on May 1.

Cyprus is expected to be on Bush’s agenda today, during a meeting in Washington with Annan that will focus on the possible dispatch of a UN team to occupied Iraq. Also present at the meeting will be US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who last Thursday offered his “good offices” on Cyprus, but not as a mediator — which Ankara reportedly wants.

Yesterday, Foreign Minister George Papandreou discussed Cyprus over the phone with Annan. According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Panos Beglitis, Papandreou said both parties should reach an agreement on “substantial issues” before there is any question of Annan filling in the blanks on secondary matters.

Meanwhile, reports from occupied northern Cyprus quoted Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan as denying that he said the Turkish Cypriots might offer land for peace.