26 July 2004

1. "'Peace and Fraternity Feast' in Manisa", Freedom for Ocalan has been cried in the 'Peace and Fraternity' feast organized by DEHAP Manisa Branch.

2. "Gas deal, airport spat and PKK top agenda for Erdogan visit to Iran", Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to visit Tehran this week to discuss gas sales, a dispute over an airport contract and operations against Kurdish rebels, Iran's foreign ministry said Sunday.

3. "The Chirac Doctrine", France gives the nod to Turkish membership in the European Union. What is Paris up to?.

4. "The Turkey Paradox", joining Europe means becoming more Islamist.

5. "Warlords dash Kurds' hopes for unity", Kurdistan is due to hold elections for its regional assembly in January, at the same time as Iraq's national elections. They will be the first parliamentary vote for 12 years. But as long as the two big parties rule their areas like fiefdoms, Kurds fear that the peshmerga will act as intimidators during the forthcoming campaign.

6. "Amnesty Urges Syria to Free Detainees", Human rights group Amnesty International has called on Syria to unconditionally free five "prisoners of conscience" who face trial in the next two days.

1. - DIHA - "'Peace and Fraternity Feast' in Manisa":

MANISA / 26 July 2004

Freedom for Ocalan has been cried in the 'Peace and Fraternity' feast organized by DEHAP Manisa Branch.

Near 4000 persons attended the feast held at Ataturk Stadium of Manisa. The feast took start with one-minute stand to respect. A big placard reading "Women hand in hand for a democratic society, free togetherness" was hanged over the field. Participants to the feast often chanted, "Freedom for Ocalan, Peace for the world", "Long live leader Apo", "Thousands Greetings to Imrali", "No life without the leader" and Martyrs never die".

Dengbej Zaharo took the stage first and gave a concert of traditional Kurdish songs. In his speech following Zaharo, DEHAP Manisa Chairman Ilhan Karakurt pointed the heat of developments in the Middle East was felt more and more fiercely day by day.

"Heat of the Middle East burns us more every new day. We will stubbornly continue to be on the side of peace against war."

After Kurt, executive Ferah Diba Ergul recalled the recent developments in the region and pointed to the necessity of working hard for a democratic country. Following the speeches Kurdish singer Brader gave a concert.

2. - AFP - "Gas deal, airport spat and PKK top agenda for Erdogan visit to Iran":

TEHRAN / 25 July 2004

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to visit Tehran this week to discuss gas sales, a dispute over an airport contract and operations against Kurdish rebels, Iran's foreign ministry said Sunday.

"The Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) and Iran's gas exports to Turkey are of interest to both sides and will be discussed," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.

Asefi said he hoped the visit, which Ankara has said would take place on Wednesday and Thursday, would "boost the existing good bilateral relations" between the two Muslim neighbours.

The visit will come in the wake of a major internal dispute here following the awarding of an operating contract for Tehran's new international airport to a Turkish-led consortium.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards shut down the sprawling capital's new showpiece airport on May 8 after just one flight landed.

The Guards argued that the contract with Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV), an Austrian-Turkish consortium, endangered the Islamic republic's security because the operators also had business dealings with arch-enemy Israel.

But President Mohammad Khatami said in mid-July that the dispute had been resolved and the airport could now reopen.

Tehran and Ankara have also been at odds over a 1996 deal over the sale of natural gas to Turkey. Turkey halted imports, complaining of poor quality and asking Iran to reduce the price.

But there have also been recent signs that the two, which have large ethnic Kurdish minorities, have been cooperating in fighting rebels from the former Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), now known as Kongra-Gel.

Earlier this month press reports here said Iranian troops killed two of the Turkish Kurdish rebels in clashes close to the Iraqi border.

Turkey and Iran have in recent years intensified cooperation on security matters, including against the former PKK, after a chilly period during which the two sides accused each other of sheltering their respective dissidents.

Iran has a large Kurdish minority of its own and shares Turkey's determination to stamp out any moves by the community towards greater autonomy. Asefi confirmed that the "security issue" would also be discussed during Erdogan's visit.

3. - Newsweek International - "The Chirac Doctrine":

France gives the nod to Turkish membership in the European Union. What is Paris up to?

Aug. 2 issue / by Christopher Dickey*

When French presidents invoke "the national interest," often as not it means they've cut a deal they'd really rather not explain. But when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came courting President Jacques Chirac in Paris last week, hoping the ever-reluctant French would back Turkey's bid to join the European Union, the cash-and-carry policymaking was right out front.

As one senior Turkish official told NEWSWEEK, the intention was to "spread a package of economic benefits" before Chirac that "France could not reject." Sure enough, Turkish Airlines announced it would purchase 36 Airbus planes worth more than $1.5 billion. Erdogan also hinted he might be in the market for France's big-ticket nuclear technology. And just as surely, after years of implicit opposition and fence-straddling, Chirac suddenly decided that support for Turkey's candidacy suits "the national interests" of France.

No, it wasn't a pretty picture. But, then again, it wasn't the whole picture. As Europe has expanded its frontiers, the eternal French game for power and influence inside the Union has moved to the countries just outside. Relations with Turkey, Israel, Iraq—indeed, the whole of the Middle East and North Africa—are in play. Entering the waning years of his career, Chirac unsurprisingly places new emphasis on his prerogatives as the maker of French foreign policy, and thus on his legacy as statesman. Against the odds, he seeks to create a tight-knit new Europe, one that will be an alternate (if not opposite) pole of power to the United States. Simultaneously he looks to limit, if not thwart, American influence in Europe's Muslim backyard. And opportunist that he is, of course, he hopes to do all this while remaining popular with French voters.

It's a delicate balancing act, this Chirac Doctrine. His latest stand on Turkey is emblematic. It may be cynical, or statesmanly, or both. Certainly it's not popular. Some 60 percent of French voters say they oppose Turkish EU membership; for many on the French right, including Chirac's own coalition party, the notion is anathema. Chirac himself has always been a champion of a tightly integrated Europe—with France in the driver's seat. The admission of a populous, nationalistic, Muslim Turkey (with the most votes in the Union) would certainly dilute Paris's influence. And although France and Germany make a show of their cozy cooperation these days, their inherent rivalry remains. The Turks' vast economic, emigrant and historical ties to Germany probably would tip Europe's core balance of power even further toward Berlin.

If Chirac's goal really is to bring the Turks onboard—and emphasize that "if"—then as a practical political matter the timing could hardly be worse. The French public already is grumbling about the last round of EU enlargement. French workers hear the sucking sound of their jobs moving toward the low-wage East, and under the new European constitution France won't have the veto it once did, which allowed Paris to demand exceptional protections. Chirac meanwhile has decided he'll hold a referendum on the constitution late next year, which wouldn't be an easy win under any circumstances. Mixing in the issue of Turkish accession will make it even harder.

But Chirac's looking over his shoulder at the United States right now. If he could, he'd probably declare a sort of Monroe Doctrine a la Francaise, warning Washington away from Europe's backyard just the way Washington once warned Europe to stay out of Latin America. But he can't. And with the occupation of Iraq, the United States has been big-footing in the region as never before. That's why Chirac was so testy when President George W. Bush had the temerity to say at the Istanbul summit that Washington was in favor of Turkey's joining the European Union. "This is a European issue," snapped Chirac. Sweeter revenge would be to wean Turkey away from the American sphere and into Europe's—at the same time replacing Germany as the one to tip the scales in Ankara's favor.

Erdogan seemed more than happy to play along last week. (To gauge the new balance of power, count the planes Turkish Airlines bought last week: 15 Boeings from the United States, and more than twice as many from Europe.) Indeed, the Turkish press was ecstatic. But the Turks may be rejoicing too soon. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier was quick to note that even if Brussels begins formal negotiations with Turkey after this December's EU summit, accession is not automatic. "It is not tomorrow that Turkey will be entering the EU," said Barnier. "The road ahead is still long."

If Chirac is sincere, he's going to have to fend off a serious challenge in his own party from the media-savvy Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is slowly but surely gathering momentum to take the chairmanship. Sarkozy, with his fine nose for public opinion, firmly opposes Turkish accession. But is Chirac sincere? "There's a great EU tradition of saying you're in favor of something while working to ensure that someone else vetoes it," says Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament. The byzantine rules of EU due process provide ample scope for France to say yes to Erdogan's face, while hoping (or encouraging) Turkophobes like the Austrians to say no down the road.

When the crunch comes, the Turkish question could split the union between Euroskeptics like Britain and Scandinavia, which tend to support enlargement in general and Ankara in particular, and Euro-integrationists like the French, who want a union that's more compact, unified and dominated by the Franco-German axis. Some observers think that's actually what Chirac wants: to make the expanded "New" Europe so unwieldy that the "Old" Europe can shed the skeptics and pull together into a tighter, more decisive union at Europe's core.

Maybe. Such big-think is a whole lot easier to conceive than execute. But for now, Chirac's played it pretty smart. He can take the Airbus money and run—in the national interest, of course.

* With Owen Matthews in Istanbul and Tracy McNicoll in Paris

4. - The Weekly Standard - "The Turkey Paradox":

Joining Europe means becoming more Islamist.

ISTANBUL / 26 July 2004 / by Christopher Caldwell*

THERE WERE PLENTY of flashy cocktail dresses at the NATO summit reception hosted by Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gül last month. There were plenty of headscarves, too--and the most conservative of these belonged to Gül's wife. Hers was a festive, modern, maroon version of what the Turks call a turban, tucked tight under the chin and bisecting the forehead to hide all hair. The cocktail-dress women were joking and cavorting with the wimple women. Mrs. Gül posed cheerily for photos with European and American friends.

There are few societies in which the veil and the cocktail dress coexist for long. One usually drives the other out. It was modern clothing that supplanted traditional Islamic garb--by force of law--when Kemal Atatürk took over the Turkish state in 1923, and launched a ruthless program of modernization and secularization on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. So the juxtaposition of head coverings and Western coiffure is something new. The wife of a Turkish cabinet minister would not have been seen in a headscarf 50--or 10--years ago. But Turkey's brand-new AK party, heir to two banned religious parties, took power in November 2002 and has spent the last two years trying to carve out a place for Islam in Turkish public life. And that it is doing so while trying to deepen Turkey's ties to Europe is not so paradoxical as it might seem.

The world's most rigorously secular state for the past 80 years, Turkey was an early member of NATO. It has sought membership in the European Union since 1963, when the E.U. was the European Economic Community and had just six members. In the intervening decades, the E.U. has turned into a world-government-in-embryo and has admitted 19 new members, including most of Eastern Europe, parts of ex-Yugoslavia, and three states of the former Soviet Union. Even such economic and political laggards as Romania and Bulgaria are slated to join in 2007. Evidently it doesn't take much to get into the E.U., yet Turkey has persistently been shut out. Europeans have always found reasons to refuse to start a normal multiyear accession process: that only 5 percent of the Turkish landmass lies in Europe, for instance, while the remainder is in Asia Minor; or that Turkey's per capita income is only 20 percent of the European average.

The most frequent grounds for rejection was that the Kemalist state, erected as a bulwark against political Islam, was undemocratic. And this is true. It forbade the Islamic veil in schools and among government functionaries (and the tasseled fez everywhere). It tightly controlled religious exercise, and the centralized department of religious doctrine (the Diyanet) composed and distributed the sermons that local imams gave every Friday. What's more, the Kemalist state gave the army a formal role in government. This meant a free hand to shut down Islamist parties and quash guerrilla uprisings in Kurdish areas along Turkey's borders with Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Nor was the government fastidious about whether captured rebels were tortured or locked up without due process. Army officers, naturally, were monitored closely for religious enthusiasm, and purged from the ranks if evidence emerged of Islamist sentiment or undue mosque attendance. And this army, for all the help it had given to NATO, could be a headache abroad, too, as when it occupied and partitioned the Greek-controlled island of Cyprus in 1974.

But Turks never thought this was the real reason for their exclusion from Europe. Former Turkish prime minister Mesut Yilmaz accused Helmut Kohl in 1997 of wanting to keep any Muslim state out of Europe's "Christian club." While Turkey has long been a secular state, it has never been a secular society along the lines of the one that has developed in Europe since World War II. In fact, it is quite devout even among Muslim societies, and over the past decade has shared the experience of most Islamic places (and of the United States) in seeing a renewed interest in the religious life and a deepening devotion among its middle classes. Yilmaz's view was at least partly correct. Surely it matters that Turkey is Islamic and Europe is not.

It has never been possible for Europe to say this, but in the 1990s it became incorrect even to think it. So a decade ago, the E.U. guiltily established its so-called "Copenhagen criteria," which made explicit just what Turkey was doing wrong as an aspiring candidate--concerning democracy, human rights, justice, religion, and Cyprus. Nobody worried when, in 1995, Turkey got its first Islamist-led government, and nobody worried when that government was pressured by the army into giving up power. Turks were even given broader trading privileges as a way of making life outside the E.U. more tolerable. When the country became an official candidate for the E.U. in 1999, Turkey had started to lurch between Kemalism and Islamism. But by then, matters looked satisfactorily deadlocked. Turkey could not enter Europe without meeting the Copenhagen criteria. And no Turkish government could meet the Copenhagen criteria without risking social and political collapse.

This October, the European Commission will issue a report in Brussels on Turkey's compliance with the Copenhagen criteria. At a summit in Amsterdam two months later, Europe's 25 countries will decide whether to "give a date" (as the E.U. jargon has it) for full Turkish accession. No candidate that has "gotten a date" has ever been rejected, not even the corruption-plagued slackers of southeastern Europe. The E.U. must now ask itself whether Turkey is a rare hybrid society, possessed of the "moderate Islam" that statesmen the world over have a duty to reward when they find it, or whether it is yet another secular state in the Islamic world that is about to tip back into theocracy.

And there has been a complication. Fourteen months after September 11, Turkey brought to power the AK party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incorruptible and efficient former mayor of Istanbul. A charismatic orator with a voice such as politicians had before microphones were invented, Erdogan had risen through the apparatus of two religious parties, the Welfare party and the Virtue party, both eventually banned. Erdogan himself had been removed from his post as mayor and jailed for four months in 1998 after reading a poem about minarets and bayonets at a rally. For several months after the AK party's November 2002 accession to power, Gül had to serve as interim prime minister, until parliament could amend the constitution to restore Erdogan's eligibility for political office.

If Erdogan was devout (his wife, like Gül's, wears the headscarf), he was never a religious monomaniac. He was a gifted coalition-builder. A business school graduate himself, he has guarded his relations with Turkey's business classes, and many describe his party as being what the German Christian Democrats were when the churches were still a religious force in German life. And to the extreme discomfiture of European leaders, he has found a democratic instrument for bringing about the Islamization of Turkish life that the AK party seeks. That instrument is the Copenhagen criteria.

EUROPE'S LEADERS and Europe's public don't see eye to eye on Turkey. Germany's foreign minister Joschka Fischer is now finishing a brief for Turkish E.U. membership, in which he will argue that globalization will foster jihad unless moderate alternatives can be found. Turkish admission has become one of the rare issues on which French president Jacques Chirac is unwilling to compromise: He wants Turkey in. And Tony Blair wants Turkey in, too, largely for reasons of human rights and ecumenism (although Blair's continental foes smell an English plan to dilute the E.U.'s cultural pretensions). Washington has been slow, even after Turkey's dramatic refusal to host the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in the run-up to the Iraq war, to accept just how deeply Turkish public opinion has turned against the United States since the Cold War. (Opposition to the Iraq war ran well over 90 percent.) At the Istanbul summit, George W. Bush even goaded the Europeans to admit Turkey--prompting Chirac to tell him to butt out. Among Western politicians, only two have taken an unambiguous stand against membership: former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Germany's Christian Democrat leader Angela Merkel, who made her case forcefully during a week-long tour of Turkey in February.

Majorities of the public in all E.U. states oppose Turkish entry into the union. Their reasons are numerous and considerably more specific than those of Europe's political leaders. There are four main ones:

First are various population issues. Since passing its guest-worker laws in the early 1960s, Germany has acquired several million Turkish residents. More through Germany's fault than Turkey's, these newcomers have proved extremely endogamous and hard to assimilate. Turkey has 69 million people, and its population is growing at developing-world rates. Should it get admitted, it will by that time be considerably larger than any of Europe's other countries. This means the possible influx of tens of millions of Turks into a Europe saddled with structural unemployment--and a voting bloc in the European parliament so enormous that no one could do anything to stop it.

Second are related economic questions. Turkey's per capita GNP is growing, but is still only $3,400. A banking collapse in early 2001 was contained, thanks to the largest IMF loan ever, but gigantic payments will soon come due. The AK party has been rigorous in following the IMF plan, and inflation has fallen close to single digits for the first time in decades. (The Turkish lira, which 20 years ago was in the same logarithmic neighborhood as the dollar, is now worth 1/13,000th of a cent.) And Turkish accession will not be cheap. Europe's leaders argue that in a global economy, it is unrealistic for Turkey to expect the billions in "development funds" that eased the accession of new members--even turning Ireland and Spain into developed economies. Turkey's leaders say they understand. But such assurances mean nothing. Once Turkey enters the E.U., the continent's voters will be offered a stark choice between paying for economic opportunity in Anatolia and welcoming a large fraction of the Turkish labor market into their cities. Wisely or not, they will probably choose the former. They will probably get both.

Third is the question of security in its various guises: The al Qaeda bombings in Istanbul last November were sobering to Europeans, who may flinch from belonging to a political union that borders on Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Europeans might also ask how they will treat the Kurdish aspiration for independence, once it becomes a domestic problem. A geostrategist might weigh these liabilities against an asset: Turkey has a vast conventional military capability that the other European states lack, including a larger battle-ready army than any on the continent. But this is not the way European publics like to think. A related problem is that, once Turkey gets into the E.U., no logic remains against admitting countries from all over Africa and Asia. The E.U. would thus either expand into empire or dilute into a trading bloc, depending how you look at it. The American-educated president of former- Soviet Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, took many aback at the NATO summit when he suggested that it was long past time that his own country be admitted: "Every country that has European culture and transatlantic aspirations," he said, "will join the Western community."

There is, finally, the question of Islam. Turkish Islam is indeed in many ways the moderate construction that people say it is. Not until the 1980s did a Turkish president--Turgut Özal--make the hajj to Mecca (although after Erdogan the hajj may become a requirement for national politicians). Only about one of every 30 Turkish Muslims supports a radical agenda (sharia law, Koranic punishment, and so on), according to the Istanbul think tank TESEV, and even extremely conservative politicians will shake hands with female foreign correspondents. Matters are made more confusing by the fact that one of the most dangerous Islamist groups--Turkish Hezbollah--was consolidated by the secularist state as a paramilitary force useful against the Kurdish nationalist PKK movement. Sunni Islam is the official creed of the national religious authorities, but Turkey's Islam is also marked by "alevi" currents of Central Asian shamanism and by the so-called fethullahci. Their modern, communitarian Islam, with its emphasis on education and citizenship, is present in the AK party's stated goal that it seeks "not an Islamic state but a state run by Islamic people," or Erdogan's avowal, "In the office I'm a democrat; at home I'm a Muslim."

For all that, polling done by the European Values Survey and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds yawning differences between Europe's basic values and Turkey's. Eighteen percent of Europeans (39 percent in Eastern Europe) agree that "politicians who do not believe in God are unfit to hold political office," a view held by 62 percent of Turks. To the question whether they would mind having a homosexual as a neighbor, 19 percent of Europeans say yes, versus 90 percent of Turks. As for Jews, 8.3 percent of Western Europeans would mind having one as a neighbor, as would 62 percent of Turks. Fifty-nine percent of Turks think women should wear the headscarf.

THE AK PARTY is dedicated to giving the Turk in the street what he wants, and he--like his American counterpart and unlike his European one--wants more religion in public life. Turkey's secularism, laiklik, is modeled on French laïcité, rather than on Anglo-Saxon notions of the separation of church and state. In the context of the "half-military regime" that Atatürk installed in the 1920s, this makes it very hard to distinguish between left and right. Article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code long made it a crime to criticize the government, ministers, the military, or the police. So the same forces that repress imams have been used to repress Communists, journalists, Kurds, and some guy who wanted to start a company that might compete with a state cement factory. The consensus that Turkey suffers from an "excess of secularism" thus extends far beyond the ranks of the religious.

As a result, it has occurred to many people that you could make life freer and more modern for everyone in the country by allowing Islam more breathing room in the Kemalist state. Islamists were the top party in municipal elections in 1994, when Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul. But when Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare party took over the national government the same year, it immediately went overboard--launching an Islamist foreign policy through visits to Libya and Iran, reintroducing the Koran in public schools, and banning alcohol in many public places. When the Iranian ambassador issued his call to jihad at a Welfare party festival in 1997, the army sent out tanks in a show of force, and Erbakan felt compelled to submit to a number of explicit renunciations that eroded his prestige.

Kemal Atatürk's cult of personality survives--his photograph appears on the walls of all rooms in all public buildings and in most private offices--but ritual is beginning to crowd out faith, and Kemalism is getting a bad name. The last real coup was mounted in 1980 and brought executions, political repression, and a Kurdish uprising in its train. The "postmodern coup" of 1997 brought corruption and Turkey's biggest-ever banking collapse. And if that last coup in defense of Kemalism was not a real one, it may be because, as the army discovered, political Islam had grown considerably more powerful since 1980. "Kemalism" has come to play the same role in Turkish politics as "the legacy of Jim Crow" did in America, say, 30 years ago. It is useful as a bogeyman, but is too weak and encrusted to represent anything genuinely dangerous.

It is Erdogan's AK party, with a parliamentary majority so big it can alter the constitution if it wishes, that has turned into the most powerful force in Turkish politics. Erdogan's approach to forming a kind of popular front against the Kemalist state has been less obvious, more modern, and considerably more brilliant than Erbakan's. Rather than democratizing the state by Islamicizing the country, he seeks to Islamicize the country by democratizing the state.

AK is an acronym for Justice and Development, but it is also a Turkish word for "white" or, more to the point, "clean." A "state run by Muslim people" is likely to be a state run by upright people, and after the corruption of the 1990s, and the debacle of 2001, AK was able to run as an anti-establishment and reformist party of clean government. "The AK party," a secular opposition politician admitted in Istanbul a few weeks ago, "is the cream of the Islamic people." But AK leaders like Ibrahim Ozal, nephew of the former prime minister, don't like being described as belonging to a "new Islamic party," preferring the Christian-Democrat analogy. The AK party's quick success in righting the economy, its transparency (it posts its accounts on the Internet), and its commitment to the reforms required by the E.U. quickly made it the sounding board for every possible discontent with the state. Its plurality in the popular vote rose from 35 percent to 42 percent in recent municipal elections. And most of the legislation of recent years has had as its aim bringing Turkey into conformity with Europe's Copenhagen criteria. Basically the E.U. is warning Erdogan that he will have to get the army out of public life. And Erdogan is saying, "Oh, don't throw me in that briar patch!"

ERDOGAN RECENTLY REORGANIZED Turkey's National Security Council, the MGK, so that the military reports directly to the prime minister. This allowed him to cancel billions of dollars in military spending, an unprecedented act of defiance which can variously be seen as fiscal prudence, democratic accountability, or an attempt to weaken the bulwark of the country's secularism. His government's openness to Kurdish cultural rights--including broadcasts in the Kurdish language--can be seen either as democratic progress or as an attempt to weaken the prestige of the army in its main sphere of duty over the past two decades.

In some ways Turkey is pursuing its traditional foreign policy. "If we didn't have NATO today," Erdogan said at the NATO summit, "we would be establishing it now, and it would be our key task to establish it now." But in other ways, Turkey is shifting its foreign-policy priorities radically. Erdogan backed a U.N. referendum on the reunification of Cyprus held this spring--against the wishes of the army. When Turkish Cypriots stunned the world by voting yes, and Greek Cypriots did the same by voting no, much of the stigma of Turkey's three-decade-long occupation was lifted, and another obstacle on the road to Europe was removed.

Turkey has also tried to close the issue of sovereignty over Turkish Kurdistan, while reopening a window on Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey views oil-rich Kirkuk, over which it lost sovereignty in the 1920s, as a Turkic (specifically Turkmen) city. Unsurprisingly, Iraqis urged the United States to give a polite "No" to Turkey's offer to send 15,000 troops to the region in 2003. Israel is growing increasingly unpopular in Turkey, and the AK party has been quick to pick fights with it. After Israeli security forces assassinated the Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Yassin, Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv for consultations, and Erdogan accused Israel of "state terrorism." When some noted that this was language of unusual harshness coming from Turkey (which has seldom condemned Israeli actions of any kind), Erdogan said, "Our attitude is in line with the E.U.'s."

ERDOGAN is the most modern politician in Turkey. He has his strength in the cities, not the countryside. But the distinction between the two is eroding. As in Mexico City, the mayor of Istanbul is a national leader. Istanbul has sextupled in size since the 1960s, to a population of 11 million, and peasants have reconstituted their village life (while sitting around TVs) in high-rise apartment blocks and shantytowns. Even the wealthy subdivisions popping up around Istanbul--places with names like Bahcesehir (Garden City) and houses that sell for $150,000--have gigantic mosques in the middle of them. Erdogan's party is full of businessmen from the Anatolian center of the country who have made their millions in high-tech capitalism without losing their religious beliefs.

Turkey for now has more in common with the United States, a capitalist democracy where religion is woven into upper-middle-class life, than with Europe, which has an increasingly hard time making sense of belief. Erdogan's big battle of this spring involved improving the standing of imam-hatip schools, public schools that offer Koranic and Arabic instruction. He withdrew his proposed legislation but has promised to bring it back. Notoriously, he told a reporter a decade ago that he thought of democracy as a streetcar: "You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off." His Turkish opponents warn that he has a "hidden agenda," but that's not exactly true. His agenda remains consistent--both Islamization and democratization--and as long as Europe keeps insisting that Turkey reform itself into something less European, he has nothing to hide.

* Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.

5. - The Guardian - "Warlords dash Kurds' hopes for unity":

LONDON / 24 July 2004 / by Jonathan Steele

Short of leaving Iraq altogether, the only chance of escaping Baghdad's overwhelming heat and the constant risk of suicide bombs is to drive to Kurdistan.

Little more than three hours from the capital there is a land of lakes and mountains, where you can venture outdoors in the afternoon without having to dash to the nearest spot of shade.

Groves of slender date-palm, now starting to brim with clumps of fruit, give a certain dignity to the flatlands of Mesopotamia, but there comes a time when you long for some undulation in the landscape, a grassy knoll perhaps, or even a respectable hill.

Go east, south, or west and there is no chance of finding it. Travel north and you will. So it is no surprise that increasing numbers of better-off Iraqis who can afford a short holiday plump for the Kurdish area.

For 12 years, it was effectively separate from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Baghdadis had little idea what was going on behind the curtain. Many are stunned to discover a region which is not just different scenically but has a thriving economy, minimal unemployment, and no serious security problems.

The word has gone out that cities like Sulaimaniya are enjoying a boom in house-building. As a result, workers from the Arab south are also coming up in droves to take construction jobs.

Nothing is quite what it seems, and beyond the attractive landscape and the security calm, the Kurdish region has serious unsolved problems. Its leaders try to project a united front in Baghdad and abroad, but few Kurds in the north or Arabs in the south have forgotten that the region's two dynasties spent four of their Saddam-free years fighting a civil war.

Indeed one of them, Massoud Barzani, the head of the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP), based in Irbil, even committed the ultimate sin of inviting Saddam's tanks to come up and help him push back the forces of Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which had advanced from Sulaimaniya.

US mediation produced a truce in 1998, and last year the armies - known as peshmerga (those who face death) - helped their US protectors to bring down Saddam. They reject the label militias and see themselves as liberators.

Many Kurds hoped victory would produce unity. They looked to a plan agreed with the US occupation authorities in June, under which all Iraqi militias were supposed to disband and become part of Iraq's national army.

Barzani and Talabani accepted the deal but, as Iraq gradually becomes sovereign, they show no sign of implementing the so-called "peshmerger". "There are meetings and discussions and, of course, it would be good to have united Kurdish forces in the north. But there is no plan for a merger," said Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the PUK's peshmerga.

Kurdistan is due to hold elections for its regional assembly in January, at the same time as Iraq's national elections. They will be the first parliamentary vote for 12 years. But as long as the two big parties rule their areas like fiefdoms, Kurds fear that the peshmerga will act as intimidators during the forthcoming campaign.

The KDP and the PUK have taken tentative steps to unite the ministries they control in each half of the region. Education, health, and justice have merged, but the more sensitive portfolios of economic planning and police, as well as the peshmerga, remain separate.

The parties' nepotism and lack of internal democracy also cause anger. Some feel that Barzani and Talabani failed to exploit their wartime alliance with the US to extract more concessions on autonomy. If the elections are free, they may show a surge for radical nationalist and pro-independence candidates.

"People are very pessimistic. Kurds felt they had friends abroad but now they don't. The US and the UK have their own interests, and we came out empty- handed," said Bassit Hamaghareeb, editor of Khak, a monthly magazine.

His magazine supported a drive for a Kurdish referendum on independence from Iraq, which the KDP and the PUK leadership rejected as destabilizing. "I criticize our leadership for not producing a united voice.

They meet behind closed doors and are to blame for the slowness of the whole process," he added. "There is a new generation outside the party sphere which has its own voice but is not included in decision-making".

Asos Hardi, who edits Hawlati, a political weekly, condemns "the false politics of our leaders who didn't tell people what was going on. They had powerful cards in negotiating with the coalition but didn't use them. They should have kept people informed and used pressure from the streets, like holding protest rallies in Baghdad."

The US plan for disbanding the peshmerga is based on a twin formula of cash and restructuring. Instead of the peshmerga being financed by the KDP and the PUK, the Iraqi ministry of defence will pay them, thereby cutting the party link.

They are to be cut by at least two-thirds from their current estimated number of 75,000, with some pensioned off or retrained for police or other civilian jobs. The rest will be divided between border troops, the national guard and a counter-terrorism force based in Kurdistan.

Kurdish troops, although nominally under the Iraqi army, will be deployed in the north under Kurdish command. "We will train, organize and control them ourselves," said Dizayee. Kurds will also have a veto on southern battalions coming into Kurdistan.

The danger is that, in spite of the rebadging and retraining, the new forces may reflect the geographical split of the old peshmerga. The eastern border guards and battalions would be under the PUK, the western ones under the KDP.

Iraqi Kurds have a grotesque history of repression and brutality under several southern regimes. Saddam's chemical warfare, aerial bombing and mass deportations were not the first persecutions they have suffered from Arabs, though they were the worst.

With Saddam gone, Kurdistan's leaders have decided to give Arab politicians another chance. They have thrown in their lot with Baghdad and have five ministers in the unelected, US-approved government. They are focused on getting as firm as possible guarantees of autonomy under the new Iraqi constitution, which will be drafted next year.

Compromising with the Arab majority is an understandable strategy but the ground needs to be better prepared. Unless they depoliticize their militias, accept open debate and cease to behave like warlords, the two big party leaders may end up producing a deal with Baghdad which their own people denounce. Yesterday's heroes can become tomorrow's traitors if they fail to change with the times.

6. - AFP - "Amnesty Urges Syria to Free Detainees":

24 July 2004

Human rights group Amnesty International has called on Syria to unconditionally free five "prisoners of conscience" who face trial in the next two days.

The London-based group, in a statement issued on Saturday, said four of the men were "detained for their peaceful and legitimate use of the Internet; one is detained for his work in defence of human rights."

Two brothers Muhannad and Haytham Qutaish, and Yahya al-Aws, arrested 18 months ago, face trial on Sunday before Syria's Supreme State Security Court (SSSC).

They were arrested reportedly for sending articles to an electronic newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, Amnesty said.

Student Masud Hamid, who was arrested in July 2003 reportedly for posting photographs onto Internet sites of a peaceful Kurdish demonstration in Damascus, also goes before the SSSC on Sunday.

On Monday, the security court is to try Aktham Naisa on charges relating to his work in defence of human rights, Amnesty International said.

Political prisoner

Naissa was a political prisoner between 1992 and 1998 before being detained again on 13 April in the northwestern coastal city of Lattakia. He heads the Committees for the Defence of Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms in Syria (CDHRDFS).

He faces several charges, including carrying out activities that run counter to the country's socialist system. Amnesty said the charges could carry a sentence of up to 15 years.

Naisa is being held in solitary confinement but has been allowed to meet his lawyers and briefly with his family, it said.

"Over the years, Amnesty International has documented evidence showing how trials held before the SSSC are grossly unfair," it said, adding that these trials are not subject to appeal or bound by rules of the Code of Criminal Procedures.