8 March 2004

1. "Bolkestein says Turkey should stay outside EU", as Turkey waits to be told in December that it can start EU membership talks, Dutch Commissioner Frits

2. "Turks protest decentralisation plan, fear job cuts, cronyism", tens of thousands of people flooded into the streets of the Turkish capital on Saturday to protest government decentralisation plans they fear could lead to job cuts and cronyism.

3. "Iraq's Turkmen leader worried about Kurdish dominance in north", Northern Iraq, where ethnic Kurds have ruled for over a decade in semi-autonomy, is in danger of a total "Kurdization" as the country splits along ethnic lines, the leader of Iraq's Turkmen political party said.

4. "Kurds hold tight to own militia", the Kurdish peshmerga militia in northern Iraq has no intention of disbanding or joining a national force as called for by authorities in Baghdad.

5. "Ethnic divide deepens in new Iraq", despite Kurd-Shiite tensions, Governing Council is expected to ink interim constitution Monday.

6. "Denktash threat to quit talks", after a ninth meeting yesterday with President Tassos Papadopoulos failed to bring the Cyprus peace talks any closer to a breakthrough, Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash threatened to quit as negotiator if his basic demands are not met.

1. - EUobserver - "Bolkestein says Turkey should stay outside EU":

As Turkey waits to be told in December that it can start EU membership talks, Dutch Commissioner Frits

8 March 2004

Bolkestein said the country should stay outside, the Financial Times reports.

The Internal Market Commissioner also holds the view that "Ukraine is more European than Turkey".

In his new book ‘The Limits of Europe’, Mr Bolkestein says that Turkey should act as a "buffer" protecting Europe from Syria, Iran and Iraq.

A similar cushion between the EU and Russia could be formed by the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine, which should also remain outside the EU.

"In the east, there is a geo-political need for a buffer zone between the EU and Russia, which might be formed by the countries that do not belong to either bloc", Mr Bolkestein wrote.

Without mentioning Turkey directly, he also says that a similar buffer would also be advantageous "in order to cushion the Union against Syria, Iran and Iraq".

The European Commission will recommend in October whether accession negotiations with Ankara should begin.

The decision will be taken by EU heads of state in December this year.

However, the outspoken Commissioner is not the first to express reservations about Turkey’s EU membership.

Germany’s Christian Democrats are against Turkey joining the EU, while Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the man who chaired the Convention on the Future of Europe, said that Turkish membership would mark "the end of the European Union".

2. - AFP - "Turks protest decentralisation plan, fear job cuts, cronyism":

ANKARA / 6 March 2004

Tens of thousands of people flooded into the streets of the Turkish capital on Saturday to protest government decentralisation plans they fear could lead to job cuts and cronyism.

About 80,000 civil servants gathered in driving snow in the heart of the city and waved flags and banners to show their opposition to the bill, which provides for sweeping changes in the administrative make-up of the country.

Unions fear the bill, if passed by parliament, will cause thousands of job losses right across the country and allow local leaders to select their own staff, thereby taking the selection process out of the hands of a central body based in Ankara.

Another major concern among secular groups is that decentralisation will encourage a drift towards greater influence of Islamists in the country, as local leaders would have considerable autonomy to select staff with similar religious backgrounds.

Members of Turkey's main opposition group, the center-left Republican People's Party, also took part in the protest. Turkey is a mainly Muslim country but is strictly secular.

The bill was introduced by the Turkish government of Recep Erdogan, which is viewed with suspicion for its Islamist roots. It is due to become law at the end of March.

3. - AFP - "Iraq's Turkmen leader worried about Kurdish dominance in north":

BERLIN / 5 March 2004

Northern Iraq, where ethnic Kurds have ruled for over a decade in semi-autonomy, is in danger of a total "Kurdization" as the country splits along ethnic lines, the leader of Iraq's Turkmen political party said.

"For a certain time now, parallel to a strong Arabization of Iraq, we have been witnessing a 'Kurdization' of the north, which threatens to lead to political problems," Iraqi Turkmen Front leader Faruk Abdullah Abdurrahman told journalists in Berlin.

"In the north of Iraq, the situation is difficult. The Turkmens want peace and would like certain ethnicities to stop exerting pressure on them," he said, adding that he was referring mainly to Kurds.

He was speaking two days after the offices of his party in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk were ransacked by several dozen Iraqi Kurds, the second attack in four days.

Abdurrahman denounced the failure of the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council to recognize Turkmens as an official Iraqi ethnicity and to mention them in the country's draft interim constitution.

"The Kurds try to minimize the importance of the Turkmen", he said, even though the ethnic group has been in the region for "a thousand years".

The Turkmen claim they make up about 13 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million, or slightly more than three million people, making them the third-largest ethnic group after Arabs and Kurds.

According to the last Iraqi census conducted in 1977, their people, who live almost exclusively in and around Kirkuk, account for no more than two percent of the population.

They frequently oppose northern Iraq's majority Kurds, who led the region after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) while under US and British military protection, and suspect them of pushing for an independent Kurdish state.

4. - The Miami Herald - "Kurds hold tight to own militia":

The Kurdish peshmerga militia in northern Iraq has no intention of disbanding or joining a national force as called for by authorities in Baghdad.

TAKYA / 6 March 2004 / by Hannah Allam

A flame from a kerosene heater flickered in the mountain breeze and illuminated the hardened faces of Kurdish militiamen who are the only security force for this northern Iraqi village.

Huddling together for warmth in a stark outpost last week, these members of the peshmerga couldn't imagine why their quiet existence in a remote village is causing so much fuss in Baghdad, more than 250 miles south. The men fought bloody battles against Saddam Hussein's former regime, were the only indigenous force helping the U.S.-led coalition during the war and are heroes to the besieged Kurds whom they protected.

Now they're fighting against pressure from Baghdad to disband or come under outside control if they're to remain the faces of law and order in an autonomous Kurdish state.

''We don't need extra military forces. We have enough men to protect all of Kurdistan and even further if we need to,'' said Ahmed Abdullah, 32, a fighter attached to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political factions in northern Iraq.

''We can't even consider disbanding,'' he said. ``The peshmerga will stay.''

CAN KEEP WEAPONS

The U.S.-led coalition and its handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, however, have other ideas. American administrators in Baghdad repeatedly have said paramilitary forces have no place in the new Iraq. After contentious debate, the council this week decided to allow peshmerga to keep their weapons -- but only as part of a National Guard-style force.

The compromise, part of an interim constitution, didn't sit well with longtime peshmerga. One concern is that other, far less U.S.-friendly militias will demand to remain intact. Last week, militia members attached to a controversial Shiite Muslim cleric marched through Kirkuk in what many considered a warning to the mostly Kurdish town 180 miles north of Baghdad.

''We have made clear in discussions with the Kurdish leaders and other political leaders that we believe there's no place in an independent, stable Iraq for armed forces that are not under the control of the command structure of the central government,'' L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. envoy in Iraq, told journalists Feb. 19. ``Kurdish leaders have understood and agreed with that.''

But Kurdish leaders continued to push the issue, which helped stall the drafting of an interim constitution. Other Kurdish questions also weighed heavily in sessions that stretched past midnight Sunday as council members debated whether Kurdish should be an official language of Iraq, what level of autonomy Kurds should retain and how the peshmerga will be integrated into a national security force that reports to the central government.

Mahmoud Othman, a council member and leader of the Kurdish National Struggle, said he considers the peshmerga a freestanding army, not a militia.

''Almost half of them have been killed, and those remaining have always helped the coalition,'' Othman said. 'You can't tell them, `Go away, that's it, your job is done.' How could the coalition so quickly forget them?''

Peshmerga translates as ''those who face death,'' a label taken seriously by Kurdish fighters whose stories of armed struggle date back more than 50 years. Today, about 60,000 peshmerga remain, funded by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

FUELED DEMANDS

Suicide attacks on both parties' offices Feb. 1 in the Kurdish city of Irbil killed more than 100 people and only fueled demands to preserve the peshmerga. In large, cosmopolitan northern cities, many fighters have traded their traditional baggy pants and Kalashnikovs for police uniforms and AK-47 assault rifles.

''In the last four or five years, we have strongly been acting to keep the militia out of the towns,'' said Kasim Jemal, deputy director of the KDP office in Sulaimaniyah. ``But they remain important to people in the countryside. Some deal has to be made for those people who put their lives on the line for Kurdistan.''

On a dusty road filled with fruit stands and donkey carts, Takya villagers said they would resist any attempts to change the peshmerga. Women and children waved to the gun-toting men who walked the streets of the village market.

''Sure, there are probably stronger and better forces out there -- but not for Kurdistan,'' said Osmin Osmin, a 38-year-old shop owner. ``We are living in a jungle, so we need a lion. For us, the peshmerga are the lion. Without them, the wolves will come back.''

5. - The Christian Science Monitor - "Ethnic divide deepens in new Iraq":

Despite Kurd-Shiite tensions, Governing Council is expected to ink interim constitution Monday

KIRKUK / 8 March 2004 / by Nicholas Blanford

Once united in opposition to Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression against them, Iraq's Shiites and Kurds appear increasingly divided over how to share the spoils of the new Iraq.

Nowhere is that tension more evident than in this oil-rich city in northern Iraq, which many residents fear is about to explode into violence between Kurds and the mainly Shiite Turkmen.

"We are sitting on a barrel of TNT and it will take only one small flame to blow up the whole place," says Yehyia Abdullah, whose shop was looted by a Kurdish mob last week.

The long-simmering friction between Kurds and Turkmens here is taking a sectarian turn, with thousands of Shiite militiamen recently arriving to protect the Turkmens and Arab coreligionists against Kurdish hopes to incorporate Kirkuk into their sphere of influence in the north.

Shiite-Kurdish tensions also lay behind the refusal by five key Shiite members of Iraq's Governing Council to sign an interim constitution on Friday. The document was hammered out in a series of marathon sessions a week ago and is due to last until a permanent charter is created.

The Shiites, prompted by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, opposed a clause that the Kurds had managed to include that calls for a referendum to approve a permanent constitution next year. The clause says that the referendum would fail if two-thirds of the population of three provinces votes against the constitution. That effectively gave the Kurds, who control three provinces in northern Iraq, a veto over the permanent charter.

Shiite council members conferred with Sistani in Najaf over the weekend apparently and were apparently successful in changing the cleric's mind so the signing ceremony can proceed Monday. Any further delay could jeopardize US plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

"The news is very good and tomorrow everything will be clear," Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite council member said after meeting with Sistani. "We are glad that the grand ayatollah understood our position."

In Kirkuk, the unexpected split in the Governing Council has merely exacerbated the deepening distrust between Kurds and the mainly Shiite Turkmens.

"The Shiites have no right to deny us our rights. My father was killed by Saddam and we reject living under another tyranny. Even if there's a sea of blood, we won't give up Kirkuk," says Najat Jumaa, a shopkeeper in the city's Kurdish district of Tebeh.
More people, more control

At the root of Kirkuk's problems is the question of who is in the majority, and, therefore, who has the right to control the city - and its massive oil wealth. Kirkuk sits on the largest oil field in northern Iraq, with 10 billion barrels in proven oil reserves.

The true demographic composition of this city vanished long ago in a Baathist legacy of manipulated census figures, deportations, mass resettlement programs, and forced identity changes.

Still, that reality fails to stop Kurdish and Turkmen officials from reeling off conflicting statistics and historical claims to back their respective claims to be the largest. "The Kurds used to represent two-thirds of the population here and the other third was composed of Turkmens, Assyrians, Jews, and Arabs," says Jalal Jawhar, the head of the Kirkuk branch of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two leading Kurdish political organizations.

Of Kirkuk's estimated population of a little more than 700,000, according to the last census under the Baathist regime in 1997, Kurds make up 43 percent, he says.

But Turkush Oglu, an official with the Iraqi Turkmen Front, disagrees. "I don't want to exaggerate, but the Turkmens in Kirkuk are about 60 to 65 percent of the population." Mr. Oglu adds that there are some 3.5 million Turkmen in Iraq - a figure disputed by many who put the true number closer to 600,000.

Adding to the murky demographic picture is the deportation under Hussein's regime of thousands of Kurds and Turkmens from Kirkuk and their replacement by Sunni and Shiite Arabs from the south. Entire city districts and surrounding villages were cleansed of their Kurdish and Turkmen population as part of Hussein's attempts to Arabize the city. In addition, many Kurds and Turkmen were compelled to adopt Arab identity so they could purchase property and improve their employment opportunities.

With the removal of the Baathist regime, thousands of Kurds and Turkmens are returning to Kirkuk to lay claim to their former homes, deepening the city's already complex demographics.
Militias on the march

A proposed census in the coming months may put to rest the population dispute, but relations are likely to remain cold until then. And concern that those tensions will spill over into violence has grown with the arrival of several Shiite militias here in recent weeks.

They include the Army of the Mahdi, the militia of the firebrand cleric Muqtada Sadr; the Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Iraqi Hizbullah; and the Dawa Party.

At the start of the month some 2,000 militiamen and -women from the Army of the Mahdi staged a march through Kirkuk.

Kurds viewed the march as a provocative demonstration of Shiite force. The next day, some 100 Kurds ransacked the headquarters of the Iraqi Turkmen Front and looted shops owned by Turkmens and Arabs.

"It's a bad sign and makes us uncomfortable," says the PUK's Mr. Jawhar, referring to the march. "We are trying to build a new Iraqi Army so why do we have to have this Army of the Mahdi. It creates worries for everyone."

However, Shiite officials say they have no intention of clashing with the Kurds. "We are Muslims and we have an army, and armies must march to show their strength. But we didn't make the march against the Kurds," says Sayyed Abdel-Fatah Al-Mussawi, the representative in Kirkuk for Sadr.

Wearing the black turban of the Sayyed, the term given to a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, Mussawi says that the Army of the Mahdi includes Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen Shiites and its numbers are growing.

"The march was only the first," he says. "There will be more marches as more people join us." Jassem Mohammed, a Shiite Turkmen who owns a cigarette stall, says that he joined the Army of the Mahdi out of loyalty to Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, father of Muqtada who was killed by Hussein's regime in 1999 and is widely revered by Iraqi Shiites.

"We have always lived peacefully with Arabs and Kurds in Kirkuk," he says. "But the outsiders are the ones making trouble now." Outsiders? "The Kurds," he mutters, looking over his shoulder.

Some Kurdish officials say that Iran is backing the Shiite presence in Kirkuk as a bulwark against Kurdish attempts to control the city. Iraq's neighbors - Iran, Syria and Turkey - oppose Kurdish autonomy, fearing it will inflame their own sizable Kurdish populations.

6. - Kathimerini (Greece) - "Denktash threat to quit talks":

ATHENS / 8 March 2004

After a ninth meeting yesterday with President Tassos Papadopoulos failed to bring the Cyprus peace talks any closer to a breakthrough, Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash threatened to quit as negotiator if his basic demands are not met.

«If we cannot include our sine qua nons in the agreement, the Turkish Cypriots will be destroyed,» Denktash told supporters in Ankara yesterday, where he was to have urgent talks with top Turkish officials.

«Then I will quit and tell our people not to accept such an agreement.»

Denktash also insisted that hopes of having a deal sealed by May 1, when Cyprus is to enter the European Union, were no more than «a fantasy.»

Earlier yesterday, Denktash rejected Greek-Cypriot proposals on the return of Turkish-occupied land, during a meeting with Papadopoulos.

Meanwhile, Nicosia expressed deep annoyance with Wednesday's remarks by Britain's foreign secretary on the consequences of a «no» vote during the April 21 referendum on the UN peace blueprint.