27 January 2004

1. "Jailed Kurdish politician urges EU to open its doors to Turkey", prominent Kurdish politician Leyla Zana, jailed in Turkey since 1994, has urged the European Union to start membership talks with Ankara to keep the country on the path of reform.

2. "Military Leads Bid to Bolster Relations", just six months ago, as relations between Turkey and the United States scraped toward their lowest point in decades, Washington offered Ankara a bit of quiet advice: Keep your distance from Syria and Iran.

3. "Turkish prime minister faces balancing act on visit to US", a secular Islamist whose country defied the US in the run-up to the war with Iraq - not the best of calling cards in today's White House.

4. "Prime Ministry to publish monthly human rights report from 2004 onwards", the Prime Ministry Human Rights Authority will publish a monthly "Human Rights Report" from Feb. 2004 onwards, according to Zaman daily. The Human Rights Authority will supervise the implementation of human rights reforms of the EU harmonization package and issue a monthly report on human rights violations in Turkey.

5. "Beware the Islamist backwaters", according to reputable Turkish journalists and opposition figures, the four had strong connections to a Kurdish Islamic terrorist organization called Hizbullah (with no connection to the Lebanese group of the same name). For years, the Ankara government has been unable to shake free from claims that Turkish intelligence supported Hizbullah as a counterweight to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

6. "Greece declines to match Turkish offer on Cyprus", Greece declined on Monday to match Turkey’s offer to let UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan bridge any final gaps in a peace plan to reunite Cyprus.

1. - AFP - "Jailed Kurdish politician urges EU to open its doors to Turkey":

ANKARA / 27 January 2004

Prominent Kurdish politician Leyla Zana, jailed in Turkey since 1994, has urged the European Union to start membership talks with Ankara to keep the country on the path of reform.

In a letter to European Parliament speaker Pat Cox, Zana said that delaying EU accession talks would play into the hands of anti-European forces in Turkey and hamper democratization efforts.

EU leaders are to decide in December whether Turkey, the laggard among the membership aspirants, has fulfilled the required democracy criteria to win a seat at the negotiating table.

"A definite date for the beginning of accession negotiations to be given to Turkey at the end of the year... will break the resistance of EU opponents," Zana said in the letter, dated January 26 and faxed to AFP on Tuesday.

"Continued uncertainty or the delay of the negotiations perspective will drag Turkey, and therefore the region, into chaos," she warned.

Zana and three other former Kurdish legislators were imprisoned in 1994 on a much-criticized 15-year sentence for aiding armed Kurdish rebels.

The European Parliament awarded Zana its Sakharov freedom of thought prize while she was in prison in 1995.

"I would like to emphasize that I would prefer to be a captive in a Turkey which has started membership talks with the EU to being free in a Turkey to which the EU has closed its doors or a Turkey which is distancing itself from EU values," Zana wrote.

Eager to advance its bid to join the EU, Turkey has granted its Kurdish minority a measure of cultural freedom as part of reforms to improve its troubled human rights record.

Zana's letter was a response to a message from Cox, who had invited her to attend this year's Sakharov award ceremony, hoping that the Turkish court which is currently reviewing the sentences of the four Kurdish activists would grant them a conditional release.

But at the 10th hearing in the case earlier this month, the court once again rejected an appeal for the release of the defendants.

Their retrial started last March thanks to EU-inspired reforms enabling convicts to ask for a review of their sentences.

The process, however, has come under severe criticism both at home and abroad for being a copycat of the first trial.

2. - U.S.-Turkish Ties Coming Full Circle - "Military Leads Bid to Bolster Relations":

ANKARA / 27 January 2004 / by Karl Vick

Just six months ago, as relations between Turkey and the United States scraped toward their lowest point in decades, Washington offered Ankara a bit of quiet advice: Keep your distance from Syria and Iran.

Two weeks ago, Syria's president paid a state visit to Turkey. A week later, Turkey's foreign minister was in Iran. Yet Turkey's relations with the United States appear to have improved.

On Wednesday, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be received at the White House, officially signaling the rehabilitation of an alliance that has come almost full circle in barely a year.

"That's a symbol in itself that things are back on track," said a Western diplomat here in the Turkish capital. "If they weren't, he wouldn't be going."

Turkey, a Muslim country that has been a NATO ally for half a century and a democracy for three decades longer, fell out of favor last March after its parliament effectively blocked the Pentagon's plans for a northern invasion of Iraq. On the Fourth of July the strain turned to rancor when U.S. soldiers detained Turkish special forces troops in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah. The Turkish public was outraged to learn that U.S. paratroops had pulled bags over the heads of Turkish officers accused of ferrying arms for use against ethnic Kurds.

"Yes, hurt feelings on both sides," said Mehmet Dulger, a leading ruling party lawmaker.

Yet Turkey devoted the second half of the year reestablishing its reputation as a reliable military ally of the United States. In October, the same parliament voted to authorize the dispatch to Iraq of 10,000 Turkish troops at Washington's signal.

Iraqis protested the proposed deployment, and that U.S. signal did not come. Then, when the Pentagon faced a bottleneck this winter in rotating its entire Iraq occupation force, Turkey opened its air base at Incirlik for the transit of tens of thousands of American troops, despite widespread opposition in the Turkish heartland, where anti-American sentiments still run high.

"Turkey is starting to see the light," said M. Faruk Demir, chairman of the Center for Advanced Strategy in Ankara, a pro-American research group. "Now, they understand what it means to be with the U.S. versus not with the U.S. It's a new picture."

But it is not yet a complete picture. The rapprochement was led by Turkey's general staff, which has a long history of military cooperation with Washington. Senior officers have exchanged visits between Ankara and the Pentagon, rebuilding trust damaged by the Sulaymaniyah detentions and the March 1 parliamentary rebuff.

Turkey's civilian government has been comparatively less attentive. "Somehow they are very sensitive, very tentative," said Demir, an observation also offered by other analysts. Some said the military's relative eagerness to win favor with Washington suggested a desire to isolate Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, known here as AKP.

In addition to being Turkey's preeminent military institution, the general staff also wields considerable political power. As protectors of Turkey's secular tradition, the generals are wary of AKP, which grew out of an openly religious party that in the late 1990s tried to steer Turkish foreign policy toward the Islamic world. That history figured in the U.S. warnings last year to give Syria and Iran a wide berth.

Turkish officials acknowledge that while the vote denying U.S. access to its bases elevated Turkey's standing with other Muslim countries, AKP leaders have pleased U.S. officials by using their enhanced status to advocate democratic reform. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, who privately lobbied against the base access, was praised by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell for issuing a public challenge to embrace democracy at an Islamic convention in Tehran last spring.

And Erdogan last week dismissed the concept of an "Islamic common market" at a meeting of Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia. "Whatever happens, we will not base relations on ethnic or religious roots or geography," he said. "Polarization will begin if we start to form institutions like that."

Those appeals, along with the demonstrated appetite for reengagement with Washington, took the edge off this month's meetings with Syria and Iran.

Turkey's past relations with both neighbors could hardly be called close. Iran's theocracy stands in stark contrast to the image of Turkey's secular state. And Turkey threatened war with Syria in the late 1990s over its harboring of a Turkish Kurd separatist leader.

But concerns over Kurdish separatism are drawing Turkey's neighbors closer. An estimated 26 million Kurds live in regions of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. For 12 years, Iraq's Kurds have essentially ruled themselves in a northern enclave that was protected by U.S. and British warplanes enforcing a "no-fly" zone against the forces of the now-deposed president, Saddam Hussein. And as U.S. occupation officials prepare for a transfer of political power to Iraqis, Iraqi Kurds are pressing for a constitutional structure that would preserve much of their autonomy.

"When you have a fire in your neighborhood, the other neighbors will be consulted as well," said Dulger, chairman of the Turkish parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. "Because the United States will not stay there, but we will be here eternally."

Turkey, which is home to about half of the region's Kurds and fought a protracted civil war in the 1990s against Kurdish separatists, remains the most vocal opponent of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. Erdogan reportedly warned Kurds last week against "playing with fire," referring to Kurdish demands to include the oil-rich, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk in their section of a federated Iraq. And a senior Turkish general publicly warned that an Iraqi federation constituted along "ethnic lines" would make the future "difficult and bloody."

A year ago, however, Turkish officials said that any federation in Iraq would justify a Turkish invasion. The softening of that stance, officials and diplomats say, demonstrates that Turkey has learned the hard way that the way to get Washington's ear is by staying close. "After a fairly quick war, they found themselves on the outside looking in," a Western diplomat said.

The Pentagon was embittered by the vote that prevented the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division from invading northern Iraq through Turkey. Ironically, that refusal led the relatively small U.S. force that made it into northern Iraq to work closely with Kurdish militias there.

As a result, many Turks still view the American forces in Iraq as siding with the Kurds.

"If ethnic hostilities break out in Kirkuk, the Americans are to be blamed; not the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Turkmen or the Kurds," said Sedat Ergin, a columnist for Turkey's largest newspaper, Hurriyet. "They paved the way for maximalist Kurdish demands."

Erdogan is expected to broach the topic with President Bush on Wednesday. He may also renew Turkey's request that U.S. forces move against the several thousand guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, who have taken refuge in mountaintop redoubts in Iraq after being driven from Turkey.

But more broadly, he appears intent on restoring faith with Washington. "Erdogan wants to be the most welcome Islamic leader recognized by the West," Demir said.

3. - Financial Times - "Turkish prime minister faces balancing act on visit to US":

27 January 2004 / by Vincent Boland

A secular Islamist whose country defied the US in the run-up to the war with Iraq - not the best of calling cards in today's White House.

But when Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives in Washington tomorrow to meet George W. Bush, the Turkish prime minister can expect a cordial welcome. The press in Turkey has noted that the two men are even expected to take a walk in the White House rose garden, an honour not given to every visitor.

For Mr Erdogan, the visit - his first to the US since his election last year - comes at a key moment. As well as addressing his country's relationship with the US, his agenda is also dominated by the reunification of Cyprus, the future of Iraq and Turkey's entry to the European Union.

Together these issues underscore Mr Erdogan's delicate balancing act. He is seeking to cement Turkey's ties with the US and become a fully fledged European power; he also wants to resolve the immediate geo-strategic issues of the divided island of Cyprus and security on Turkey's south-eastern border.

Mr Erdogan has already had some successes. Economic and political reforms at home have stimulated expectations that the EU will have to set a date at its December summit for talks on Turkish membership.

He has also persuaded the country's armed forces - often seen as the final arbiters of major policy decisions - to support the resumption of United Nations-sponsored talks on ending the 30-year division of Cyprus.

Armed with these victories, which coincide with US and EU policy, Mr Erdogan can expect backing from the White House.

He hopes to capitalise on this and mend fences with the US.

Relations between the two countries, rooted historically in Turkey's membership of Nato, were damaged by sharp disagreements over the war in Iraq.

Saban Disli, a senior leader of Mr Erdogan's moderate Islamist AK party, says: "However you categorise them, relations with the US are very important for Turkey."

Mr Erdogan is keen to win White House support for the appointment of a US envoy to broker the delicate Cyprus negotiations.

He also seeks reassurance that Turkey's concerns about the fate of northern Iraq, where some Kurdish leaders are demanding autonomy within a federation based on ethnic lines, will be taken into account as the US struggles to set a timetable for Iraqi elections.

The US is keen to assuage those concerns.

"The US has reiterated its intention to make sure that a new Iraq is neither a supporter of, nor a safe haven for, terrorists," a US official said. "We know [Turkey has] a knowledge of the region that is useful and beneficial. We have listened to [its] advice and views throughout this process."

But it is in pursuing EU membership that Mr Erdogan has invested the most political capital, including focusing on issues that previous governments refused to address, such as Cyprus. Having done so much to meet the criteria set out by the EU, Ankara expects that Turkey can no longer be denied by Europe.

These high expectations worry some diplomats and analysts who fear that Mr Erdogan does not have a fall-back plan in the event of rejection or of a fudged "yes, but" decision.

As Romano Prodi, European Commission president, told the Turkish parliament this month, some EU citizens regard Ankara's entry with trepidation, based on its size, location and religion.

His message appeared to be that, regardless of the goodwill generated by reforms and action on Cyprus, Turkey's candidacy was ultimately bound up with the prejudices that often shape western European views of the country.

"Seventy-five per cent of Turks want to join the EU, but 80 per cent of the EU doesn't want the Turks. That figure is never quoted in Turkey," says Hasan Unal, an associate professor and prominent Eurosceptic at Bilkent University. "The government's expectations about joining the EU are not realistic, and [Mr] Prodi explained why."

Mr Erdogan's EU vision may be vulnerable in other ways. A Cyprus settlement may not be agreed by May 1, when the island - either all of it or only the Greek section - will become an EU member state.

Events at home could also derail his ambitions. A scandal involving the alleged bribery of judges, in which some prominent businessmen have been arrested, is casting a cloud over a judicial system that is considered not to meet EU standards. .

Mr Disli says the prime minister is aware of the pitfalls inherent in his busy diplomatic agenda. At the same time, Ankara remains committed to its balancing act. "America or Europe? That is not a choice for us," Mr Disli says.

4. - Cihan News Agency - "Prime Ministry to publish monthly human rights report from 2004 onwards":

ANKARA / 27 January 2004

The Prime Ministry Human Rights Authority will publish a monthly "Human Rights Report" from Feb. 2004 onwards, according to Zaman daily. The Human Rights Authority will supervise the implementation of human rights reforms of the EU harmonization package and issue a monthly report on human rights violations in Turkey.

The Turkish government has been increasing its efforts to meet the European Union (EU) Copenhagen criteria in order to receive a timetable for the beginning of EU accession talks in Dec. 2004. Turkey passed seven reform packages through Parliament in order to harmonize with the EU regulations in 2002 and 2003.

The monthly Human Rights report will be sent to public institutions in Turkey, nongovernmental organizations and international institutions. The reports will be prepared monthly and be the basis for the compilation of an annual human rights report at the end of each year. The report will collate data provided by human rights boards in 81 cities and 849 districts.

Public institutions and ministries will investigate human rights violations and complaints cited in the report within their bodies and afterwards present the results of their investigations to the Prime Ministry.

The Prime Ministry Human Rights Authority will pay particular attention to the human rights reports from the Human Rights Association (IHD), the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (TIHV) and the Organization for Human Rights and Solidarity with Oppressed Peoples (MAZLUM-DER).

5. - The Daily Star - "Beware the Islamist backwaters":

27 January 2004 / by Michael Scott Doran*

What are the primary causes of Al-Qaeda’s global jihad? The bombings last year in Istanbul and Riyadh point us toward the answer. Secular Turkey and theocratic Saudi Arabia could hardly have less in common, yet the attacks exposed striking similarities. In both cases, Al-Qaeda took root among disaffected provincials with links to the state security apparatus. Not surprisingly, both governments are working to cover up the radical Islamist skeletons in their closets.

In Turkey, DNA analysis helped identify four suicide bombers. All came from the same depressed Kurdish town in Eastern Anatolia. According to reputable Turkish journalists and opposition figures, the four had strong connections to a Kurdish Islamic terrorist organization called Hizbullah (with no connection to the Lebanese group of the same name). For years, the Ankara government has been unable to shake free from claims that Turkish intelligence supported Hizbullah as a counterweight to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). In the 1980s and 1990s, the PKK fought, in the name of Marxism and Kurdish nationalism, for an independent state in southeast Turkey. As the enemy of secular nationalism, Hizbullah assassinated hundreds of PKK supporters.

By the late 1990s, Hizbullah had itself become a threat to Turkish security. In early 2000, Ankara cracked down on the organization, but not before allegations surfaced concerning its connections to Turkish intelligence. All across the country the authorities discovered graves containing scores of Hizbullah’s victims.

It is becoming clear that Hizbullah was much larger than originally believed. According to Ali Bayramoglu, a respected political analyst, the Turkish security services recovered computer disks revealing the names of 20,000 members and sympathizers of the organization. Police arrested 14,000 of these. Following a general amnesty, however, only 400 remained in custody. Many activists reportedly melted into a new group called the Union of Imams, which sent men to Syria, Iran and Pakistan to receive military training. The police report that as many as 1,000 have made their way back to Turkey.

Given this background, the investigation into the Istanbul bombings proved to be a political burden for Ankara. Eager to deflect attention from the clandestine connection between Hizbullah and the Turkish state, the government attempted to simply blame Al-Qaeda for the bombings and be done with it.

Opposition groups, however, would not let the matter drop so easily. Deniz Baykal, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, said the authorities must stop “trying to make excuses for … Hizbullah. They have to name the name of the terror.”

This demand for truth was a jab at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He is struggling to make moderate political Islam respectable among Turkey’s secular elite. Not wanting to be tarred with the brush of Al-Qaeda’s radicalism, Erdogan refuses to use the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” in the same sentence. However, the mounting evidence of a connection between Al-Qaeda and Hizbullah forced him to cede ground, so that he defined the bombings as “religious terrorism.” In so doing, he tacitly acknowledged the domestic roots of the attacks.

If past support for religious radicalism is posing a problem for Turkey, it is driving Saudi Arabia into the most serious political crisis in its modern history. Few governments have done more than Riyadh to foster the spread of radical Islam, which is deeply encrusted in a number of state institutions.

The Saudi monarchy likes to depict itself as the target of Al-Qaeda, but the reality is messier. As in Turkey, the Saudi state has used radical Islamic groups as its proxy ­ against, in this instance, secular reformers and Shiites. Al-Qaeda enjoys a much higher profile in mainstream Saudi political life than did Hizbullah in Turkey, representing a clearly defined political platform that affirms independence from the West and staunch support for clerical domination of the state. It also calls for the suppression of feminists, secularists and Shiites.

On the simplest level, Al-Qaeda’s says: “Down with the West and the Muslims who imitate it!” This nativist appeal helps to explain why the group has a strong following in Asir, a depressed region in the kingdom’s south. Those who know modern Arabian history would never have predicted that Asir would embrace Wahhabism, a product of Najd, the home province of the Al-Saud. The south was one of the last areas to be conquered by the Al-Saud, and was dragged kicking and screaming into Saudi Arabia.

Four generations after the Saudi conquest, however, Asir has converted. All indications are that the extremist Wahhabism of Al-Qaeda now flourishes in the south. More than half of the Saudi hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks came from Asir, as did the mastermind of the bombings in Riyadh last May. Like Turkish Kurdistan, Asir is a backwater. However, the north-south divide in Saudi Arabia is not nearly as deep as the ethnic gulf separating Kurds and Turks. As Arabs and Sunni Muslims, the Asiris can participate in mainstream Saudi culture ­ at least in theory. In practice, the southerners are derisively referred to as “zero-sevens” (the area code for Asir), which translates very roughly as “rednecks.” They have almost no representation at the top levels of government. Asiri support for Al-Qaeda, therefore, is also a way to rebuke the royal family.

Asiris are disproportionately represented in the security services, one of the only avenues southerners have for advancement. This provides the social context for a conspiracy theory ­ now circulating among Saudi opposition groups ­ that the November Riyadh attack was an inside job. Witnesses testified that a car belonging to one of the security services was involved in the operation. Ali al-Ahmed, the director of the Saudi Institute in Washington, states that the Asiri dimension adds another layer to the story. “Because it is often the southerners who do work such as guarding foreign compounds,” he explains, “it is easy for Saudis to imagine that somebody opened up the gates for the bombers.”

Riyadh is anxious to avoid deep examination of the Al-Qaeda phenomenon, which leads directly back to the unbridgeable social, political and religious chasms inside Saudi society. At the moment, the Saudi regime is betting it can rein in the violence by cracking down on the militants and enforcing nonviolent religious orthodoxy. This new, aggressive attitude toward the terrorists is welcome in Washington. The policy, however, is unlikely to solve Saudi Arabia’s long-term political problems. Both at home and abroad, pressure is mounting for widespread anti-Wahhabi reforms. Crown Prince Abdullah is, in fact, entertaining such ideas. His plans, however, are anathema to conservative religious groups ­ to say nothing of Al-Qaeda. The Al-Saud, therefore, have yet to face the greatest test of their legitimacy.

The radical Islamic worldview has been in gestation for a century. As the example of the Kurds and Asiris demonstrates, it is now extremely supple. In a manner similar to mid-century Marxism, radical Islam allows groups with highly localized political agendas to feel as if they are participating in a unified global struggle. On a more cynical level, these groups can associate themselves with Al-Qaeda’s trademark in order to transform their parochial conflicts into something that will attract the attention of an otherwise indifferent world.

US terrorist experts assert that, as a centralized organization, Al-Qaeda is breaking up. As both an idea and a role model, however, it lives on. The next stage of the war on terror, therefore, will witness the emergence of splinter organizations, as well as new groups mimicking Al-Qaeda and reproducing its ideology. The evidence from Saudi Arabia and Turkey supports this analysis.

It also serves as a cautionary tale. Turkish Kurdistan and Asir have their counterparts in every Muslim country. Al-Qaeda’s global jihad against America thus draws its power from a thousand dirty little civil wars ­ conflicts, that is to say, that have almost nothing to do with the United States. These are the deepest roots of anti-Western terror. They are also the hardest for Washington to address.

* Michael Scott Doran is an assistant professor in the department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is author, most recently, of The Saudi Paradox in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

6. - The News International - "Greece declines to match Turkish offer on Cyprus":

BRUSSELS / 27 January 2004

Greece declined on Monday to match Turkey’s offer to let UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan bridge any final gaps in a peace plan to reunite Cyprus.

Asked whether he was prepared to make the same commitment and recommend it to the Greek Cypriot government, Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou told a news conference: "Let’s begin negotiations and let’s see what blanks have to be filled in."

He said Turkey’s response to Annan’s efforts to revive Cyprus talks that failed last year appeared to fall outside and beyond the UN peace plan for the divided Island, and he criticised Ankara’s call for a new mediator, saying it would take several months to train up a new intermediary.

On the other hand, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash in Ankara said on Monday he was ready to return to the negotiating table to seek an end to Cyprus’s three-decade division but doubted a deal could be reached in time for EU accession in May. "Turkey is expending sincere efforts to establish (a sound peace) and we deem it a duty to help the motherland in its efforts," Denktash said a day after being cajoled by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a resumption of talks. "We will do whatever falls on our shoulders," the veteran Turkish Cypriot nationalist leader told reporters here.

The Turkish peace moves have been welcomed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan but have caught the internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government on the back foot. "We have some unofficial information from the UN (about the Turkish overtures) but we are waiting for clarifications and an official statement," Papadopoulos told reporters in Nicosia on Monday.