21 June 2004

1. "Five Kurdish rebels killed, Turkish soldier wounded in clash", five Kurdish rebels were killed and a Turkish soldier wounded in an armed clash in the eastern province of Tunceli, security officials said here Monday.

2. "Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq", thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

3. "Turkey Accepts Iraqi Kurd Self-Rule: Kurdish Leader", Ankara has long been concerned that self-rule for the Kurds of northern Iraq could reignite secessionist violence among its own Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey. More than 30,000 people died in separatist violence there in the 1980s and 1990s.

4. "Turkey will take Europe to edge", where Europe ends – and with it, presumably, the European Union – has long been a vexed question. Just how vexed will be demonstrated over the next six months as the EU grapples with a critical decision: whether to begin negotiations leading to Turkish membership.

5. "Israelis 'using Kurds to build power base'", Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

6. "EU welcomes Turkish reforms, warns more needed", European Union leaders pledged Friday to keep their promise to open long-awaited accession talks with Turkey in six months if the country implements promised reforms, raising Ankara's hopes it can eventually join the 25-nation bloc.

1. - AFP - "Five Kurdish rebels killed, Turkish soldier wounded in clash":

DIYARBAKIR / 21 June 2004

Five Kurdish rebels were killed and a Turkish soldier wounded in an armed clash in the eastern province of Tunceli, security officials said here Monday.

Troops launched a manhunt after militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), recently renamed Kongra-Gel, attacked a military outpost in the rural Mazgirt area.

The Kurdish rebel group called off a five-year-old unilateral ceasefire on June 1, and there has since been to a sharp rise in the number of clashes with Turkish troops.

The truce had been proposed after the arrest of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan who is now serving life in prison.

The Marxist group, which in 1984 launched an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdish state in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, is seen by Turkey and several Western countries, including the United States, as a terrorist organization.

About 37,000 people have died in unrest since Kurdish rebels took up arms 20 years ago.

2. - The New York Times - "Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq":

20 June 2004 / by Dexter Filkins

Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.

The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.

In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.

But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.

The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.

American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.

"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don't own anything here anymore.' "

Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to.

The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas.

The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government.

American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. "There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns," said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability."

But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds' crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested.

And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds.

The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980's.

To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.

"The Kurds are pushing, pushing," said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. "We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes."

To treat the burgeoning crisis, American officials last month approved spending $180 million to compensate Arab families thrown out of their homes; earlier they set up a similar program, with similar financing, for the Kurds.

The Americans have distributed handbills in Arab and Kurdish camps calling on Iraqis to file claims and produce ownership documents.

But some Iraqi and American officials say those claims could take months or even years to sort out, and will provide little immediate help to the families, Arab and Kurdish, languishing in the camps.

Some people said American officials waited too long — more than a year — to set up a mechanism to resettle displaced Iraqis. By then, they said, the Kurds, tired of waiting, took matters into their own hands.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.

"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable."

Kurdish leaders say they are merely taking back land that was stolen from them over four decades. Publicly, the Kurdish leaders say that they are committed to working within the Iraqi state as long as their federal rights are assured, and that no Arabs have been forced from their homes.

But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.

"We made sure there wasn't a single Arab left here who came as part of the Arabization program," said Abdul Rehman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, a large area in northern Iraq that was emptied of Arabs and is now being resettled by Kurds.

Mr. Belaf is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish political parties active on the other side of the Green Line; virtually all of Makhmur's officials belong to the party, too.

"We haven't stopped yet," he said. "We have more land to take back."

Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein's campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.

Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein's army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.

But some Arab families, like those who settled around Makhmur long ago, have largely been left alone.

"Saddam's people asked me to take Kurdish lands in 1987, and I said no," said Salim Sadoon al-Sabawi, a 60-year-old Arab farmer in the village where his family has lived for generations. "When the Kurds returned, they left me alone. There was no violence. We are like brothers."

Asked what the Kurds did to the Arabs who migrated into the area recently, Mr. Sabawi paused, and his son, Arkan, broke in. "They threatened people with death," Arkan said. "They told them to get out."

"Let's be honest," Mr. Sabawi told his son. "The Arabs who left all came here as part of the Arabization program. They kicked out the Kurds. It wasn't their land to begin with."

Mr. Belaf, the Kurdish mayor, said that before the war, the area around Makhmur was 80 percent Arab. A year later, he said, it is 80 percent Kurdish, as it used to be.

As hard as life is for Arabs in refugee camps, it seems to be hardly better for the Kurds displacing them.

Adnan Karim, 34, said his home was burned by the Iraqi Army in 1987. He began a life on the run after that, fighting Mr. Hussein as a pesh merga, marrying, having children and moving from one place to another. Last year he returned to an old military camp near Kirkuk, Qara Hanjir, hoping the new government would set aside some land for returnees like him. Nearly a year later, he is still waiting in a camp.

Mr. Karim said he was trying to provide for his wife and three children with a $40-a-month pesh merga pension and money from odd jobs. But much of his money is spent buying water from a truck.

Watching his children play in the dirt around him, Mr. Karim, a bedraggled man, gave in to despair.

"I have spent my whole life this way," he said, "just as you see me."

3. - Reuters - "Turkey Accepts Iraqi Kurd Self-Rule: Kurdish Leader":

19 June 2004

Ankara has long been concerned that self-rule for the Kurds of northern Iraq could reignite secessionist violence among its own Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey. More than 30,000 people died in separatist violence there in the 1980s and 1990s.

But Masoud Barzani, leader of one of the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties, said a visiting delegation of high-level Turkish officials had recently signaled a more relaxed attitude toward the issue of Kurdish autonomy.

"(They) told us Turkey was not opposed to the granting of federal status to Iraqi Kurdistan within the structure of a unified Iraq," NTV television quoted Barzani as saying.

Turkish officials were not immediately available for comment on the report.

Barzani said Turkey and Iraq's other neighbors with their own Kurdish population, Iran and Syria, had to accept that his people had a right to self-determination.

"These countries have to realize the Kurds are a people with certain rights... They must respond with understanding toward these rights and demonstrate a civilized, democratic approach. Thus their own national unity can be strengthened," he said.

"If these rights are disregarded and if the Kurds are not treated in a civilized manner, the problems will increase."

Kurds have campaigned hard to win guarantees that Iraq's new interim government will not take away the autonomy in the north they have enjoyed since the 1991 Gulf War.

Kurdish leaders recently threatened to quit the government because a U.N. resolution endorsing the transfer of power from U.S. occupying forces on June 30 failed to mention a provisional constitution that provides for Kurdish self-rule.

But a reference to federalism in the resolution helped alleviate their fears and U.N. officials say they are now confident that Iraq's Kurds and majority Shi'ite Arabs will reach agreement on the issue of minority rights.

For its part, Turkey has been enacting cultural rights for its estimated 12 million-strong Kurdish population as part of efforts to persuade the European Union to open entry talks.

But at the same time, Turkish security forces have seen increased clashes with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) after the organization called off a six-year unilateral cease-fire. The security forces say around 2,000 fighters have crossed into Turkey from hideouts in mountainous northern Iraq.

4. - The Australian - "Turkey will take Europe to edge":

21 June 2004 / By Roger Cohen

WHERE Europe ends – and with it, presumably, the European Union – has long been a vexed question. Just how vexed will be demonstrated over the next six months as the EU grapples with a critical decision: whether to begin negotiations leading to Turkish membership.

The EU has just admitted 10 new members without being sure how it will run itself as a 25-member club. So the notion of opening the way for Turkey appears far-fetched.

This is a country of almost 70 million people, the vast majority of them Muslims, bordering Iraq, Syria and Iran. Few Europeans associate such dangerous borders with their continent.

But Turkey amounts to a special case. Its links with the EU go back to 1963, when Ankara entered into economic agreements. Ever since, the prospect of possible membership has been dangled with growing specificity before this diverse and determinedly secular state.

Now the EU Commission is completing a report on Turkey that will form the basis for a decision by European leaders in December.

The looming verdict will provoke sharp divisions. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed strong support for Turkish membership, saying it will bring a "new dimension" to the EU.

The German Government also appears favourable.

But France's Alain Jupp, the leader of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party, said in April that his party opposed opening negotiations with Turkey. Chirac himself has been more evasive, saying Turkey has a "European vocation". Make of that Delphic phrase what you will.

Scrutiny of the EU's next move is intense in the US, in the Islamic world and in Turkey itself.

The American view is straightforward. Europe says it wants good relations with Muslims. That being the case, it cannot slam the door on Turkey.

"If the Muslim world is not an enemy, they have to go through with this," said one American official. The American idea, of course, is that Turkey's natural role is as a bridge between the West and the Islamic world at a time when suspicion and anger are growing over Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To open talks leading to EU membership would sweep away suspicions of religious and cultural prejudice that have grown as Turkey has waited on the sidelines for four decades. It would show that a Muslim country that is also a secular democracy has its place at the same European table as France, Britain and Germany.

Support for EU membership is strong in Turkey. Saban Disli, the vice-chairman of the governing Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said that negotiations should begin in the first half of next year with a view to bringing Turkey into the EU by 2008, or 2010 at the latest.

"If Turkey is left out, close to 1.5billion Muslims around the world will feel as bad as I will feel," he said recently. "The clash between Islam and the West will be sharpened."

Erdogan, who leads a party with Islamic roots that some now refer to as "Muslim Democrats" (an echo of Europe's right-of-centre Christian Democrats), has worked hard to persuade European leaders that Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, is now ready.

In general, the army has lost its once dominant behind-the-scenes role; the often trampled rights of Turkey's minority Kurdish population have been bolstered.

Erdogan has also pushed hard to reunite the divided island of Cyprus through support for a UN peace plan that was rejected last month by Greek Cypriots.

In all this, he has shown himself responsive to European and American prodding.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote to the Turkish Government in February, urging it to do more for judicial transparency. This month, he called Turkey a "very, very secular democracy" (after causing ire earlier by mistakenly labelling it an "Islamic republic").

But resistance to Turkey in Europe remains strong. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and overseer of efforts to draft an EU constitution, declared in 2002 that Turkey's entry would mean "the end of Europe".

Such views are widely shared, if seldom expressed so directly.

Turkey resides somewhere deep and ambivalent in the European psyche. It was against the westward-pushing forces of the Ottoman empire and Islam that Europe long fought.

The Continent was marked by the image of the Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna and the centuries-long battle to end the Turkish presence in Europe.

The mingled minarets and church steeples of Bosnia are only the most obvious imprint of the Turkish presence.

Today, that presence is felt most immediately in the large number of Turkish immigrants in the EU, particularly in Germany. The spectre of hordes of young Turks moving west troubles many people.

Europe remains uncertain about how to integrate its growing Muslim population. The notion of the EU as some sort of Christian club has not been entirely lost. In such a club, of course, Turkey does not fit.

So many Turks are sceptical. "Turkey is a big thing to swallow," says Lerzan Ozkale, a Turkish university professor. "I think the EU prefers us co-operating on the outside."

Up to now, it is true, the EU has done well by tantalising Turkey without admitting it. But that game now looks exhausted. Turkey is impatient. The country has much to offer the EU: its understanding of the Islamic world, its vitality, its large army, its geographic bridge.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who represents France's Green Party in the European parliament, spoke this month of the EU as a land of "miracles".

The first two were Franco-German reconciliation and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The third, he suggested, could be Europe's rapprochement with the Muslim world through Turkish membership.

He had a point. To close the EU to Turkey would be to look backwards at a time when a troubling future must be confronted.

Roger Cohen is European affairs columnist at the International Herald Tribune and international writer-at-large at The New York Times.

5. - The Guardian - "Israelis 'using Kurds to build power base'":

NEW YORK / 21 June 2004 / by Gary Younge

Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced primarily to unnamed former and current intelligence officials in Israel, the United States and Turkey.

Israel's aims, according to Hersh, are to build up the Kurdish military strength in order to offset the strength of the Shia militias and to create a base in Iran from which they can spy on Iran's suspected nuclear-making facilities.

"Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way - a balance against Saddam," one former Israeli intelligence officer told the New Yorker. "It's Realpolitik. By aligning with the Kurds Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The critical question is 'What will the behaviour of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel? Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier on its border."

By supporting Kurdish separatists, Israel also risks alienating its Turkish ally and undermining attempts to create a stable Iraq. "If you end up with a divided Iraq it will bring more blood, tears and pain to the Middle East and you will be blamed," a senior Turkish official told Mr Hersh.

Intel Brief, an intelligence newsletter produced by former CIA chiefs, noted early this month that the Israeli actions are placing increasing stress on their relationship with Turkey, which was already strained over the war. "The Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state."

According to Mr Hersh, Israel decided to step up its role in Kurdistan last summer after it was clear that the United States incursion into Iraq was failing, principally because it feared the chaos would strengthen Iran. The Israelis are particularly concerned that Iran may be developing a nuclear capability.

Iran said on Saturday it would reconsider its suspension of some uranium enrichment activities after the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a resolution deploring Iran's limited cooperation with the agency.

In the autumn the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak told the US vice president, Dick Cheney, that America had lost in Iraq. Israel "had learned that there's no way to win an occupation," he told Mr Cheney, and the only issue was "choosing the size of your humiliation".

>From July last year, argues Mr Hersh, the Israeli government started what one former Israeli intelligence official called "Plan B" in order to protect itself from the fallout of the chaos prompted by America's failure ahead of June 30. If the June 30 transfer of sovereignty does not go well, "there is no fallback, nothing," a former National Security Council member tells Hersh. "The neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Iraq," a former intelligence official says. "What's the plan? They say, 'We don't need it. Democracy is strong enough. We'll work it out.'"

Israel has a longstanding relationship with the Kurds, whom they regard as one of the few non-Arab allies in the area. The Iraqi Kurds, who played a key role in providing the United States with intelligence ahead of the war, have been angered by the United Nations resolution on Iraq earlier this month. The resolution did not affirm the interim constitution that granted them minority veto power in a permanent constitution and so could potentially leave them sidelined.

One Turkish official told Mr Hersh that Kurdish independence would be calamitous for the region. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it. Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."

6. - AFP - "EU welcomes Turkish reforms, warns more needed":

BRUSSELS / 18 June 2004

European Union leaders pledged Friday to keep their promise to open long-awaited accession talks with Turkey in six months if the country implements promised reforms, raising Ankara's hopes it can eventually join the 25-nation bloc.

"Most probably we will start negotiations after the December summit and we are hoping, that's our expectation, to start negotiations (in March) 2005," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters here.

In conclusions at a two-day summit in Brussels, the EU said it "welcomes the significant progress made to date by Turkey in the reform process, including the important and wide-ranging constitutional amendments adopted in May".

Last month, Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer signed into law a number of constitutional amendments aimed at bringing his country closer to EU standards of democracy.

In a move long-demanded by the EU, an appeals court in Turkey last week also ordered the release from jail of four Kurdish politicians from jail, including human rights award winner Leyla Zana.

The changes were welcomed by the EU, which will assess Turkey's reform process in December, based on a report to be presented by the European Commission, and decide whether it should start accession talks.

If Brussels gives the green light and leaders agree, "the EU will open accession negotiations with Turkey without delay", the statement added. Turkey has been officially an EU membership candidate since 1999 but alone among a clutch of countries, has yet to start accession talks.

The run-up to the December decision has been marked by a fierce debate among EU members on whether the vast and relatively poor country, with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, has a place in Europe.

Friday's summit conclusions were essentially "a reiteration of what was agreed at a summit in Copenhagen in 2002", a European source said. He said a move by Austria to water down the Copenhagen text was rejected.

Ireland's European affairs minister, Dick Roche, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, on Thursday ruled out any delays on an EU response to Turkey.

"This is the commitment we made to Turkey in the Copenhagen European Council and that is a promise the EU is intending to keep," he said.

The EU leaders Friday emphasised "the importance of concluding the remaining legislative work and of accelerating efforts to ensure decisive progress in the full and timely implementation of reforms at all levels of administration and throughout the country".

The text highlighted several areas in which Turkey still needed to make changes including strengthening judicial independence, protecting fundamental freedoms and cultural rights, and getting the military out of politics. It added that Ankara must still demonstrate its commitment to economic and financial stabilisation.

Erdogan said his government was working hard to fulfill the EU's exacting criteria for opening accession talks. "We are very close to our targets. We think we are ready to start negotiations and we will take the necessary steps in terms of implementation," he said.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen also listed several areas where Turkey could step up its efforts, such as freedom of religion and women's rights.

And he warned that if the EU does decides to launch membership talks, "accession is not a formality and not for tomorrow. The negotiations will take time."

He refused to speculate on what the commission's October report would contain, but promised it would be "fair and transparent."