9 March 2004

1. "EP: Cyprus is political test for Turkey's EU bid", a report that is to be discussed at the European Parliament says a settlement on Cyprus has become a political test for Turkey's EU aspirations.

2. "Turkey seeks negotiations on Cyprus with new Greek govt", Turkey said on Monday it was looking forward to working with the conservative winner of the general elections in Greece, especially on reunifying the divided island of Cyprus.

3. "Turks Breach Wall of Silence on Armenians", that is a radical step when one considers that Turkey has threatened to sever relations with countries over this single word. In 2000, for example, Ankara derailed an American congressional resolution calling the 1915 killings "genocide" by threatening to cut access to military bases in the country.

4. "EU pledges accession talks with Turkey if reforms completed", EU accession talks with Turkey could start immediately if the lagging membership candidate completes and fully implements required democracy reforms, the European Union's Irish presidency said on Monday.

5. "Angry Turkey says Iraq's interim law is recipe for more instability", the Turkish government said Monday it was unhappy with the new interim constitution of Iraq and warned it would pave the way for more instability in the neighboring country, Anatolia news agency reported.

6. "Anti-torture group to visit F-type prisons", the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) will visit several F-type prisons in Turkey this March, stated the Anatolia news agency on Monday 2004. (...) "IHD: violence against women must stop", the Human Rights Association (IHD) issued a press release on International Women's Day protesting against the discrimination, violence and honor killings committed against women in Turkey. (...)

1. - Turkish Daily News - "EP: Cyprus is political test for Turkey's EU bid":

A report that is to be discussed at the European Parliament says a settlement on Cyprus has become a political test for Turkey's EU aspirations

ANKARA / 9 March 2004

European Parliament is to discuss a report this Wednesday which includes a statement noting that solution of the Cyprus problem has become a political test for Ankara.

The European Parliament will discuss the report prepared by Elmar Brok, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defense Policy in the European Parliament on situations of ten countries to join the European Union in May.

In Cyprus section of the report, it is noted that Turkey's EU membership is closely related with achieving a solution on Cyprus, though it is not a political criterion.

"A no-solution to Cyprus dispute could constitute a serious obstacle before Turkey's EU aspirations...Though Cyprus is not a condition for Turkey's EU membership, it has become a political test for Turkey's desire to become European."

The EU, prior to resumption of Cyprus talks in Feb. has continuously noted that a solution on Cyprus was not a political criterion as the Copenhagen criteria to enter the bloc, but strictly stressed that achieving a solution was a fact of life.

The report said some circles in Turkey have begun criticizing attitude of Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktas being in efforts for a solution on Cyprus. However, majority of Turkish Cypriots did not share these criticisms and they favored a reunited Cyprus becoming a part of the EU, noted the report.

"Turkey has to get use of this chance and display all of its efforts for a solution on Cyprus prior to its EU membership."

The report also emphasizes that if a solution is to be reached on Cyprus, the EU will lead an international conference to provide financial aid to the island and it will give additional financial support of more than Euro300 million to a re-united Cyprus.

2. - HiPakistan - "Turkey seeks negotiations on Cyprus with new Greek govt":

ANKARA / 9 March 2004

Turkey said on Monday it was looking forward to working with the conservative winner of the general elections in Greece, especially on reunifying the divided island of Cyprus.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Ankara that he did not expect ties between Ankara and Athens to be affected negatively by Sunday’s vote, which ousted the ruling Socialist Party of George Papandreou and brought to power the conservative New Democracy Party of Costas Karamanlis.

"We had positive relations with both the government and the opposition prior to the elections and I do not think these relations will be affected negatively after the elections," the prime minister said. He added that he was planning to pay an official visit to Greece after local elections in Turkey scheduled for March 28.

Erdogan expressed hope that Karamanlis’ victory would help push forward UN-brokered negotiations between the rival Greek and Turkish Cypriot parties to end the Island’s division.

Under a tight UN timetable, the two Cypriot sides have until March 22 to negotiate on a peace plan drawn up by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. "God willing, I would like to see the new Greek government and our government finish this business without leaving any blanks in the plan or the negotiations," Erdogan said.

Also yesterday, the EU’s presidency said full implementation of newly adopted democratic reforms and the settlement of the Cyprus conflict would boost Turkey’s chances of starting accession talks with the pan-European bloc.

"We reiterate our strong assurance that if the European Council decides in December that Turkey fulfils the Copenhagen political criteria, the European Union is committed to open accession negotiations (with Turkey) without delay," Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen told reporters.

Cowen also said the EU was eager to see an end to the division of the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus.

On the other hand, conservative leader Costas Karamanlis began piecing together a new government on Monday after his party won elections that ended a decade of Socialist rule as the country prepares for the negotiations with Turkey on reunifying Cyprus.

3. - The New York Times - "Turks Breach Wall of Silence on Armenians":

MINNEAPOLIS / 6 March 2004 / by Belinda Cooper

Taner Akcam doesn't seem like either a hero or a traitor, though he's been called both. A slight, soft-spoken man who chooses his words with care, Mr. Akcam, a Turkish sociologist and historian currently teaching at the University of Minnesota, writes about events that happened nearly a century ago in an empire that no longer exists: the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But in a world where history and identity are closely intertwined, where the past infects today's politics, his work, along with that of like-minded Turkish scholars, is breaking new ground.

Mr. Akcam, 50, is one of a handful of scholars who are challenging their homeland's insistent declarations that the organized slaughter of Armenians did not occur; and he is the first Turkish specialist to use the word "genocide" publicly in this context.

That is a radical step when one considers that Turkey has threatened to sever relations with countries over this single word. In 2000, for example, Ankara derailed an American congressional resolution calling the 1915 killings "genocide" by threatening to cut access to military bases in the country."We accept that tragic events occurred at the time involving all the subjects of the Ottoman Empire," said Tuluy Tanc, minister counselor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, "but it is the firm Turkish belief that there was no genocide but self-defense of the Ottoman Empire."

Scholars like Mr. Akcam call this a misrepresentation that must be confronted. "We have to deal with history, like the Germans after the war," said Fikret Adanir, a Turkish historian who has lived in Germany for many years. "It's important for the health of the democracy, for civil society."

Most scholars outside Turkey agree that the killings are among the first 20th-century instances of "genocide," defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

During World War I the government of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, fearing Armenian nationalist activity, organized mass deportations of Armenians from its eastern territories.

In what some consider the model for the Holocaust, men, women and children were sent into the desert to starve, herded into barns and churches that were set afire, tortured to death or drowned. The numbers who died are disputed: the Armenians give a figure of 1.5 million, the Turks several hundred thousand.

In the official Turkish story the Armenians were casualties of civil conflict they instigated by allying themselves with Russian forces working to break up the Ottoman Empire. In any case atrocities were documented in contemporary press reports, survivor testimony and dispatches by European diplomats, missionaries and military officers. Abortive trials of Ottoman leaders after World War I left an extensive record and some confessions of responsibility.

A legal analysis commissioned last year by the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York concluded that sufficient evidence existed to term the killings a "genocide" under international law.

Yet unlike Germany in the decades since the Holocaust, Turkey has consistently denied that the killings were intended or that the government at the time had any moral or legal responsibility. In the years since its founding in 1923 the Turkish Republic has drawn what the Turkish historian Halil Berktay calls a "curtain of silence" around this history at home and used its influence as a cold war ally to pressure foreign governments to suppress opposing views.

Mr. Akcam is among the most outspoken of the Turkish scholars who have defied this silence. A student leader of the leftist opposition to Turkey's repressive government in the 1970's, Mr. Akcam spent a year in prison for "spreading communist propaganda" before escaping to Germany. There, influenced in part by Germany's continuing struggle to understand its history, he began to confront his own country's past. While researching the post-World War I trials of Turkish leaders, he began working with Vahakn Dadrian, a pre-eminent Armenian historian of the killings. Their unlikely friendship became the subject of a 1997 Dutch film, "The Wall of Silence."

Turks fear to acknowledge the crimes of the past, Mr. Akcam says, because admitting that the founders of modern Turkey, revered today as heroes, were complicit in evil calls into question the country's very legitimacy. "If you start questioning, you have to question the foundations of the republic," he said, speaking intensely over glasses of Turkish tea in the book-lined living room of his Minneapolis home, as his 12-year-old daughter worked on her homework in the next room. In a study nearby transcriptions of Turkish newspapers from the 1920's were neatly piled.

He and others like him insist that coming to terms with the past serves Turkey's best interests. Their view echoes the experience of countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa that have struggled with similar questions as they emerge from periods of repressive rule or violent conflict. Reflecting a widespread belief that nations can ensure a democratic future only through acknowledging past wrongs, these countries have opened archives, held trials and created truth commissions.

Mr. Akcam says some headway is being made, particularly since the election of a moderate government in 2002 and continuing Turkish efforts to join the European Union. After all, he says, in the past dissent could mean imprisonment or even death. "With the Armenian genocide issue, no one is going to kill you," he said. "The restrictions are in our minds."

Mr. Akcam is convinced the state's resistance to historical dialogue is "not the position of the majority of people in Turkey," he said. He cites a recent survey conducted by scholars that appeared in a Turkish newspaper showing that 61 percent of Turks believe it is time for public discussion of what the survey called the "accusations of genocide."

Ronald Grigor Suny, an Armenian-American professor of political science at the University of Chicago, was invited to lecture at a Turkish university in 1998. "My mother said, `Don't go, you can't trust these people,' " he remembered. "I was worried there might be danger." Instead, to his surprise, though he openly called the killings of Armenians "genocide," he encountered more curiosity than hostility.

Still, Mr. Akcam's views and those of like-minded scholars remain anathema to the nationalist forces that still exercise influence in Turkey. Threats by a nationalist organization recently prevented the showing there of "Ararat," by the Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, a movie that examines ways in which the Armenian diaspora deals with its history.

Mr. Akcam's own attempt to resettle in Turkey in the 1990's failed when several universities, fearing government harassment, refused to hire him. And when Mr. Berktay disputed the official version of the Armenian killings in a 2000 interview with a mainstream Turkish newspaper, he became the target of a hate-mail campaign. Even so, he says, the mail was far outweighed by supportive messages from Turks at home and abroad. "They congratulated me for daring to speak up," he recalled.

Scholarly discussion can also turn into a minefield among the large numbers of Armenians in the United States and Europe. Attempts to discuss the killings in a wider context raise suspicions. "Many people in the diaspora feel that if you try to understand why the Turks did it," Mr. Suny explained, "you have justified or legitimized it in some way."

Like their Turkish colleagues, a younger generation of Armenian academics in the United States and elsewhere has grown frustrated with the intellectual impasse. In 2000 Mr. Suny and Fatma Muge Gocek, a Turkish-born sociology professor at the University of Michigan, organized a conference that they hoped would move scholarship beyond what Mr. Suny called "the sterile debates on whether there was a genocide or not." Despite some disagreements between Turkish and Armenian participants, the group they brought together has continued to meet and grow.

Mr. Akcam had been building bridges even before that meeting. At a genocide conference in Armenia in 1995, he met Greg Sarkissian, the founder of the Zoryan Institute in Toronto, a research center devoted to Armenian history. In what both describe as an emotional encounter, the two lighted candles together in an Armenian church for Mr. Sarkissian's murdered relatives and for Haji Halil, a Turkish man who rescued Mr. Sarkissian's grandmother and her children.

Mr. Akcam and Mr. Sarkissian say Halil, the "righteous Turk," symbolizes the possibility of a more constructive relationship between the two peoples. But like most Armenians, Mr. Sarkissian says Turkey must acknowledge historical responsibility before reconciliation is possible. "If they do," he said, "it will start the healing process, and then Armenians won't talk about genocide anymore. We will talk about Haji Halil."

4. - AFP - "EU pledges accession talks with Turkey if reforms completed":

8 March 2004

EU accession talks with Turkey could start immediately if the lagging membership candidate completes and fully implements required democracy reforms, the European Union's Irish presidency said on Monday.

Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen also said that a settlement of the Cyprus conflict would bring the Muslim nation, the sole candidate that has so far failed to open membership negotiations, closer to the pan-European bloc.

"We reiterate our strong assurance that if the European Council decides in December that Turkey fulfills the Copenhagen political criteria, the European Union is committed to open accession negotiations (with Turkey) without delay," Cowen, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters.

He was speaking after an EU delegation, also comprising Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, held talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

Cowen welcomed a series of legislative reforms that Turkey had passed since last year, but underlined the "crucial importance of moving ahead with the practical implementation of reforms... throughout the country."

EU leaders will assess in December Turkey's progress in embracing the Union's basic democracy principles and decide whether to start membership talks with the mainly Muslim nation.

The decision will be based on a report by the Union's executive arm the European Commission.

"The Commission will fulill its mandate without prejudice. We will prepare the report on the basis of facts... in a fair and objective manner," Verheugen pledged.

Many Turks believe that the EU is biased against their nation because of its predominantly Muslim faith and a sizeable population of some 70 million -- it would become the second largest EU member after Germany.

Cowen said the EU is also eager to see an end to the decades-old division of the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus before the Mediterranean island joins the Union on May 1, along with nine other newcomers.

"The clear preference of the EU is for the accession of a united Cyprus," he stressed.

The reunification of the island in time for its EU entry "is also in the interest of the development of ever closer relations between the European Union and Turkey," he said.

The two Cypriot sides started 11th-hour peace talks under UN sponsorship last month.

Turkey has occupied the Turkish Cypriot north of the island since 1974 when it intervened in response to an Athens-engineered Greek Cypriot military coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece.

Gul urged the EU to find a solution to how it will accomodate an eventual Cyprus settlement.

Ankara worries that EU principles concerning the free movement of people could one day erode fundamental arrangements in a Cyprus settlement that would be based on the separation of the island's Turkish minority and Greek majority bound in a loose federation.

"We have so far failed to reach a common view on this issue," said a Turkish diplomat who took part in the talks.

Verheugen said the Union "fully agree(s) with the Turkish position that we must find a solution that is so to speak legally waterproof" and pledged that the EU would find a way out of the legal minefield.

5. - AFP - "Angry Turkey says Iraq's interim law is recipe for more instability":

ANKARA / 8 March 2004

The Turkish government said Monday it was unhappy with the new interim constitution of Iraq and warned it would pave the way for more instability in the neighboring country, Anatolia news agency reported.

"The interim law does not satisfy us, it increases our concerns," Anatolia quoted the government's spokesman, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, as saying. "We see it as an arrangement that will not help the establishment of permanent peace in Iraq and one that will allow for the continuation for a long time of unrest and instability there," he said.

Cicek did not specify which provisions of the interim constitution, which was signed in Baghdad earlier Monday, irked Turkey. Ankara has repeatedly warned against moves in postwar Iraq that could help the Iraqi Kurds enhance their self-rule in the north of the country.

It fears that increased political influence for the Iraqi Kurds could set an example for their restive cousins in adjoining southeast Turkey, where a bloody Kurdish rebellion has only recently subdued. Under the interim constitution, Iraqi Kurdistan will retain its federal status and the rest of Iraq will be given the right to prepare to form states.

The document also recognizes Arabic and Kurdish as the two official languages of Iraq. Turkey also worries that a post-war system based on ethnic differences in Iraq could one day lead to the breakup of the country and plunge the region into instability.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters Monday he had written to US Secretary of State Colin Powell to convey Ankara's views on the future of Iraq. Powell telephoned Gul earlier in the day "to give information" about the interim constitution and said a representative from the US administration in Iraq would soon travel to Ankara to take up Turkish concerns, Gul said.

"We hope Iraq will preserve its stability. We hope that durable peace will be achieved within the framework of Iraq's territorial and political unity. "We have made all contributions for that and we will continue to make contributions," he said.

A senior Turkish diplomat said on the condition of anonymity that Powell assured Gul that "there is no room for concern" regarding the interim law and that the concerns of neighboring countries would be taken into account in the drawing of Iraq's permanent constitution.

Eager to gain a say in the shaping of post-war Iraq, Turkey was intending to send peacekeeping troops to the country, but was forced to give up the plan last November in the face of harsh opposition by the Iraqi leadership, particularly the Kurds.

6. - Turkish Daily News - "Anti-torture group to visit F-type prisons":

ANKARA / 9 March 2004

The Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) will visit several F-type prisons in Turkey this March, stated the Anatolia news agency on Monday 2004.

The CPT has already obtained permission from the Justice Ministry and will visit different sections of F-type prisons observing whether the prisons are in compliance with human rights standards.

Currently there are 11 F-type prisons located in Adana, Ankara, Izmir, Bolu, Tekirdag, Izmit, and Edirne.

"IHD: violence against women must stop"

The Human Rights Association (IHD) issued a press release on International Women's Day protesting against the discrimination, violence and honor killings committed against women in Turkey.

According to the IHD' s press release, the list of abuses against women in Turkey in 2003 is long and troubling: three women were found dead after they disappeared, 61 women committed suicide (20 of them were under age of 18), 40 women were the victims of honor killings, 37 women were killed as a result of violence and abuse in the family and 10 women were raped and then killed outside of their family home.

The IHD called on the state to revoke discriminatory articles against women in Turkish law, and to stop abuse and violence taking place against women within family and the society. The IHD is also asking the government to punish the perpetrators of honor killings.