19 May 2004

1. "Two killed, four injured in suspected Kurdish attack on police", two people have been killed and four injured when unidentified assailants, thought to be Kurdish rebels, opened fire on a police station in southeast Turkey, local security officials said Wednesday.

2. "Saturday Mothers Demand Justice", 523 people went missing in Turkey under detention. The Saturday Mothers, who had their weekly vigil in front of the Galatasaray High School for four years want to know what happened to the missing and demand that those responsible are tried.

3. "EU praises reforms but calls for implementation", the Commissioner responsible for the EU’s expansion process, Günter Verheugen, praised the legislative reforms passed by Ankara but warned that there deficiencies in implementing them. According to Verheugen, among the issues that still were troubling the EU were broadcasting in mother tongues, combating torture, freedom of expression and the continued imprisonment of four pro-Kurdish parliamentary deputies.

4. "Turkey’s Justice and Development Party Clashes with Pro-Secular Establishment", Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, led by former Islamists, is clashing with the country's pro-secular establishment as it tries to institute a series of reforms.

5. "DEHAP Annuls Itself Rather Than Waiting for Constitutional Court Decision", the Democratic Public Party (DEHAP) has decided to annul itself instead of waiting for a decision on its abolishment case currently in progress at the Constitutional Court.

6. "Cyprus: saying no to the future", in April 76% of Greek Cypriots voted against the United Nations reunification plan and 65% of Turkish Cypriots voted in favour, rejecting Turkish nationalism. This Greek chauvinism means the island stays divided, though its entry to Europe would have helped reunification.

1. - AFP - "Two killed, four injured in suspected Kurdish attack on police":

DIYARBAKIR / 19 May 2004

Two people have been killed and four injured when unidentified assailants, thought to be Kurdish rebels, opened fire on a police station in southeast Turkey, local security officials said Wednesday.

The victims included a policeman and a prison guard who had come to see friends at the police station at the entrance of the town of Pervari, in the province of Siirt.

The four wounded in the attack, which took place late Tuesday, were all police officers. The attack was thought to be carried out by militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody 15-year campaign for self-rule in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.

Security forces in the area have launched an operation to hunt down the assailants, the sources said.

PKK violence has notably abated since September 1999 when the group said it would lay down its arms in favor of a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Since then, the group has several times changed names and is now known as KONGRA-GEL. Its reincarnations have also been put on the list of terrorist organizations by both the United States and the European Union.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed about 37,000 lives.

2. - Bianet.org - "Saturday Mothers Demand Justice":

523 people went missing in Turkey under detention. The Saturday Mothers, who had their weekly vigil in front of the Galatasaray High School for four years want to know what happened to the missing and demand that those responsible are tried.

ISTANBUL / 18 May 2004

The Saturday mothers/Saturday People, are asking about their beloved who went missing under detention, and calling on the government to take legal action against those responsible.

"If you want to act in line with rule of law, you should explain what happened to the hundreds of people who went missing under detention and try those responsible," said Hurriyet Sener, Istanbul chair of the Human Rights Association (IHD), in his call to the government.

Relatives of those who went missing, including Hanim Tosun, Emine Ocak and Hasan Karakoc, and human rights activists, gathered in front of the Galatasaray High School on Istiklal Street at 1 p.m. on May 17, Day for Struggling against disappearances. The crowd demanded a world without disappearances under detention.

Missing Hasan Ocak was found dead

The Saturday Mothers/People used to sit in front of Galatasaray High School every Saturday at 12 p.m between 1995 and 1999.

They demanded that there are no more missing people, wanted to know what happened to those missing, and asked that those responsible are tried.

During the last seven months of their weekly vigils in 1998 and 1999, security forces intimidated and attacked the protestors. They had to spend at least Saturday nights under detention.

The Saturday protests began when Emine Ocak’s son Hasan Ocak was detained on March 21, 1995 and was found dead at a cemetery 55 days later. He was killed as a result of torture.

During those days, Hasan Karakoc’s brother Ridvan Karakoc disappeared and was found dead. He had been tortured too.

The longest civilian disobedience

Saturday mothers/people had staged what was the longest civilian disobedience in Turkey and had made the local and international community aware of the problem of going missing under detention.

The Saturday protests won awards and musicians made songs for these protests, which got support from many other countries. According to the date from the IHD, as a result of the Saturday protests, the number of incidents where a detained person when missing decreased. Such incidents eventually ended.

"If we had not staged these protests, more people would probably go missing and get killed," said Hasan Karakoc.

According to the date provided by Sener, these are the numbers of those who went missing under detention:

4 people disappeared under detention in 1991, 8 people in 1992, 36 in 1993, and 229 in 1994. After May 27, 1995, when the Saturday protests began, the number of those who went missing under detention started to decrease.

The impact of "Saturdays"

121 people went missing under detention in 1995, 68 in 1996, 45 in 1997 and 9 in 1998. Only two detainees went missing in 2001 and one in 2002.

Hanim Tosun’s husband Fehmi Tosun was pushed into a car and kidnapped in front of his house in Avcilar in October 1995.

"Now is the time for our legal fight," said Hanim Tosun. "Most of us have won our cases at the European Court of Human Rights. But we want the government to find those responsible and hold them accountable in front the court".

Sener reminded the words of "confessor - Jitem" Abdulkadir Aygan, which were published by the daily "Gundem" (Agenda) newspaper.

"Legal circles are still insensitive to the issue," said Sener.

3. NTV / MSNBC - "EU praises reforms but calls for implementation":

BRUSSELS/ 19 May 2004

Turkey’s progress in meeting the requirements for membership of the European Union were assessed Tuesday at a meeting of the EU-Turkey Partnership Council in Brussels.

The Commissioner responsible for the EU’s expansion process, Günter Verheugen, praised the legislative reforms passed by Ankara but warned that there deficiencies in implementing them. According to Verheugen, among the issues that still were troubling the EU were broadcasting in mother tongues, combating torture, freedom of expression and the continued imprisonment of four pro-Kurdish parliamentary deputies.

Verheugen said that the report that would detail Ankara’s process would be issued in the first week of October.

Speaking at a press conference following the meeting, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül said that recently passed constitutional changes were historic for Turkey. He underlined that the package of amendments introduced accountability to the parliament of the defence budget and the ending of capital punishment, both seen as sweeping measures in Turkey.

Gül stressed that that Ankara had done its best regarding the Cyprus question by seeking reconciliation between the two states on the island. He said that Cyprus was not Ankara’s problem anymore.

The crucial issue of Turkey’s starting the membership negotiations will depend on the October report by the EU on the progress made in Ankara.

4. - VOA News - "Turkey’s Justice and Development Party Clashes with Pro-Secular Establishment":

ANKARA / 18 May 2004 / by Amberin Zaman

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, led by former Islamists, is clashing with the country's pro-secular establishment as it tries to institute a series of reforms. The party says the reforms are about equality and justice, but the opposition says some of them are designed to increase the role of Islam in Turkey's avowedly secular society. The latest dispute centers around an education reform bill passed by the parliament last week and now awaiting action by the president.
Seyma, is a 15-year-old high school student who says she wants to become a cosmetic surgeon one day.

Seyma said that she believes that demand for cosmetic surgery is likely to grow in this predominantly Muslim country of 70 million, as the free market economy launched in the 1980s expands. Listening to Seyma elaborate on her business plans it is hard to picture her as an Islamic fundamentalist.

However, according to members of Turkey's pro-secular elite, Seyma is a potential threat to the determinedly pro-western policies introduced 80 years ago by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk.

That is because Seyma attends a clerical training school, one of a group of such institutions known as the Imam Hatip schools. Established in the early 1950s to train imams and preachers, the schools soon began to attract students like Seyma, who, in addition to regular subjects such as math and literature, wanted to learn more about the Islamic faith.

As attendance began to swell in the Imam Hatip schools so too did fears among pro-secular Turks that graduates from the schools would go on to assume positions of influence in the bureaucracy and might try to implement policies that would steer the country toward a more Islamic path.

Such concerns grew when Turkey's first Islamist-led government took power in 1996.

Responding to such fears Turkey's rigidly pro-secular military eased that government out of power only a year later. Prodded by the military, the pro-secular parties that took charge began implementing a series of measures aimed at reducing the role of Islam in politics, among them a grading system that made it virtually impossible for religious school graduates to attend secular universities.

Government officials say last week's bill is a matter of fairness. They say it is simply aimed at allowing Imam Hatip graduates, as well as thousands of students from vocational training schools, to compete on an equal footing with graduates of secular high schools for university places.

Turkey's powerful military leaders disagree and in a strongly-worded statement earlier this month, they warned of the potential dangers facing the secular system if the president signs the bill into law.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an Imam Hatip school graduate. In an interview with VOA, he dismissed claims that his government is seeking to increase the role of religion in public life.

Mr. Erdogan argued that all he is trying to do is correct an injustice.

Mr. Erdogan also pointed out that all four of his children attended Imam Hatip schools, and scored very high points on university entrance exams, but because of what he terms the unfair grading system, none of them were able to attend university in Turkey. They are now studying in the United States.

Turkish Education Minister Huseyin Celik said that the main reason there is such opposition to the bill is that it drastically alters the way universities are run under a law that was drawn up by the military after its third and last direct intervention in government in 1980.

Mr. Celik added that the educational reform bill is just one of a series of democratic reforms adopted by the government in recent months to move the country forward and help its effort to join the European Union. He said that the reforms are opposed by university administrators and their backers in the military who believe they will lose influence if the reforms are implemented.

Analysts say Turkey's staunchly pro-secular president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, is likely to veto the bill and send it back to the parliament where the ruling Justice and Development party has a firm majority. Under the constitution, if the parliament approves the bill again without any changes, the president can no longer veto it. However, he can apply for its annulment by the constitutional court, a process that could block its implementation well beyond the next academic year.

5. - Zaman - "DEHAP Annuls Itself Rather Than Waiting for Constitutional Court Decision":

ANAKARA / 19 May 2004 / by Habib Guler

The Democratic Public Party (DEHAP) has decided to annul itself instead of waiting for a decision on its abolishment case currently in progress at the Constitutional Court.

The DEHAP administration says it is certain that the court decision is of the opinion that even though is not abolished by law, the Party has already completed its political life.

The administration has agreed that closed parties can reinvent themselves as a new movement and used the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as an example since it came out of the National View tradition.

Therefore, they have also decided to annul the Free Party with the DEHAP and establish a new party named the Democratic Society Party (DTP) on its behalf.

'A new composition' decision as made at the DEHAP after it was unsuccessful in the March 28th elections despite its alliance with the Socialist People's Party (SHP).elections.

While the DEHAP, whose closure was being prosecuted, will share the same fate as other ethnic parties, in the context of its experiences, it is understood that a new discourse has to be developed.

According to sources, it was understood in the meetings that the majority of the problems declared by ethnic parties have already been resolved by the democratization process in Turkey.

The new party process started with a series of meetings held in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey. In addition to self-criticism in under the supervision of party administers, voters were also asked what kind of party they wanted.

There are indications that names such as Ahmet Turk and Murat Bozlak, people who parted paths with the Party in the past, will return to the front row in the new composition.

The DEHAP, established in 1997, was prosecuted last year on April 13th when the HADEP (People's Democratic Party) was closed.

The anticipation is that if DEHAP is closed, many of its administrative staff will be banned from politics.

Former leader of the DEHAP, Mehmet Abbasoglu, and four other administrators have already been sent to Hayman Prison for `forging documents` before the November 3rd, 2002 elections.

6. - Le Monde diplomatique - "Cyprus: saying no to the future":

In April 76% of Greek Cypriots voted against the United Nations reunification plan and 65% of Turkish Cypriots voted in favour, rejecting Turkish nationalism. This Greek chauvinism means the island stays divided, though its entry to Europe would have helped reunification.

May 2004 / by Niels Kadritzke

THERE was a lump in President Tassos Papadopoulos’s throat as he addressed Greek Cypriots on television on the evening of 7 April: "I call on you to reject the [United Nations] Annan plan. I call on you to say a resounding no on 24 April. I call upon you to defend your dignity, your history and what is right. I urge you to defend the Republic of Cyprus, saying no to its abolition."

The Greek Cypriot president then removed his spectacles to make sure everyone could see his tears and wished his compatriots a happy Easter. The melodrama was designed to make Greek Cypriots see the UN plan as a dangerous trap. Papadopoulos spent 55 minutes outlining its flaws and barely five seconds on its advantages. The state television station RYK then split its screen - on one side a nationalist crowd noisily saluted its hero in front of the presidential palace; on the other, party representatives debated the pros and cons of the deal. Then, in a telephone poll, 81.2% of viewers declared they would give Papadopoulos his hoped-for resounding oxi (1).

But media management (2) alone does not explain why the majority of Greek Cypriots rejected the Annan plan in Cyprus’s April referendum. It is true that Papadopoulos made great play with Greek Cypriots’ memories of the struggle against British colonial power in the 1950s and against the Turkish invasion of 1974. But rejection of the Annan plan is entrenched in the republic’s mind because of the need for security and a fear of all political risk, as well as a perception of Turkish Cypriots as competitors rather than as partners in the shared wellbeing of a re-unified island.

These factors predisposed Greek Cypriots to underestimate the advantages of a UN plan that makes everyone a winner. To Turkish Cypriots the plan offers a recognised state within a federation, independent of Ankara, with good prospects for economic development within the European market. To their Greek compatriots it offers the opportunity for two-thirds of those who fled their land in 1974 to return to it; and either take back and cultivate one-third of the property they lost or receive indemnity payments.

After joining the European Union, a united republic would gradually enjoy EU standards in human rights and social policy. Far from rubber-stamping Cyprus’s current shortcomings in meeting EU regulations, Brussels representatives have made sure that the EU will have a continued role, for as long as Turkey wants to join, in supporting harmonious development in line with its rules.

Papadopoulos failed to mention the part played by the EU in the negotiations, as one might expect from an old-school Greek nationalist stuck in the past, by no means a committed European. That he feels this way is unsurprising: he is the only surviving active politician from the generation that launched guerrilla warfare against the British in the 1950s. The stated aim of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (Eoka) was not independ ence for Cyprus, but enosis (union) with Greece. After independence in 1963, it started a bloody civil war for this purpose. Papadopoulos played a decisive part in the secret Akritas plan to obtain arms imports from the head of the Greek secret service, George Papadopoulos, who led the military putsch in Athens on 21 April 1967.

These schemers had their counterpart among the Turkish Cypriots: Rauf Denktash. The Turkish Cypriot leader and his Ankara masters wanted the island divided, but its 1960 constitution had ruled out both division and enosis. So they welcomed the outbreak of civil war in 1963, when Greek attacks on Turkish areas allowed them to relocate Turks from the south of the island. By 1964, 60% of Turkish Cypriots lived in enclaves controlled by Turkish officers.

Separation came in 1974: when a junta of enosis supporters overthrew Archbishop Makarios’s government, Ankara took advantage of the situation and invaded the north. Northern Greek Cypriots then fled south, while the remaining Turkish Cypriots in the south went north. This completed the ethnic remodelling begun in 1963-64 and was orchestrated by the same politicians who now head the no camp on each side.

Their arguments are similar. While Denktash denounces the federal model for its potential extermination of Turkish Cypriots, Tassos Papadopoulos sees it as the end of a Greek-dominated republic of Cyprus. For more than 20 years the two men have been rehashing the same statements in response to every possible political solution.

Papadopoulos owes his current position to one of the strangest coalitions in history. He is leader of the centre-right Democratic party (Diko), the third-largest political grouping with 15% of the vote. He came to power in February 2003 thanks to the former Communist party (Akel), the largest party in the republic, with 35% of the vote. Alliance with Akel offered Papadopoulos a majority over his predecessor, the liberal conservative Glafkos Klerides. But Akel’s leaders had promised their members that the new president would push for Cyprus to enter the EU as a reunified country.

This ideal crystallised in the UN plan, which Kofi Annan put forward in November 2002. The climate had never been more favourable:

In Brussels a consensus decided to make solving the Cypriot problem a condition for Turkey’s entry into the EU, something the United States strongly favoured because it would strengthen Turkey’s image as a model of successful democracy within a Muslim nation:

In Turkey Tayyip Erdogan’s moderate Islamist Party of Justice and Development (AKP), which had won the elections of 3 November 2002, had attacked the intransigence of the Kemalist establishment and the Turkish military over Cyprus;

Denktash was losing the support of the Turkish Cypriots, who had pinned hopes of an end to isolation and poverty on EU membership.

This was confirmed by the December 2003 elections in northern Cyprus. Opposition parties came out on top, though without a clear majority in parliament. The leader of the main opposition party and incoming prime minister, Mehmet Ali Talat, had to form a coalition with the party of Serdar Denktash, the president’s son. Nevertheless, the Denktash clan could still be neutralised with the help of Ankara. Erdogan has made it clear that the obstinate attitude of the army, the Kemalist nationalists and the opposition People’s Republican party (CHP) is blocking Turkey’s chances of entering Europe; yet this December Turkey must decide whether or not to restart negotiations for EU membership.

So on 26 January the AKP government ordered the reopening of talks on the UN plan, previously blocked by Denktash. If the Cypriot leaders proved unable to reach a compromise, Erdogan had suggested that Annan should simply override the disagreements and submit his plan to a referendum in both the north and the south. This was checkmate for Papadopoulos and Denktash. For as long as the Turkish Cypriot president made dialogue impossible, his Greek counterpart could happily accept the UN plan as a basis for negotiations. But when talks reopened in New York, he could no longer dodge the issue; the time for bluffing was over. Mr No and Mr Never, as Turkish Cypriot opposition leader Mustafa Akinici called the pair, had been clinging to questions of form to avoid dealing with substance. Getting them to sit down took the full weight of Greece and Turkey, under EU and US pressure, plus that of the UN deadline: if the talks failed, Annan would put his plan directly to Cypriot voters on 24 April.

For Papadopoulos to oppose this decision would have meant defying both the UN and the EU, which wanted a reunited Cyprus on 1 May. The 7 March change of government in Athens added to the pressure, with Kostas Karamanlis’s newly elected conservatives also pushing for a compromise. After weeks of dialogue in Nicosia the talks transferred to Bürgenstock, near Lucerne in Switzerland. Denktash, unwilling to sign any form of capitulation, had been replaced by Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat, who had agreed to the final Annan plan, as had Turkey. But no progress was made because Papadopoulos now showed his true colours (3). His systematic refusal to budge riled not just the UN representatives and the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, Günther Verheugen, but also the Athens delegation. Only Karamanlis stopped short of publicly breaking with the Cypriot president.

When Annan put forward his own plan (known as Annan V), backed by Turks and Turkish Cypriots, Papadopoulos had a spokesperson call it a "catastrophe" and claim the plan fulfilled almost all the Turks’ demands but hardly any of the Greeks’ conditions. Papadopoulos denied significant gains that had been made in the course of negotiations thanks to pressure from Brussels. This first, negative impression of the plan stuck. Things might have changed if Annan V’s supporters had gone on the offensive immediately, but both Akel and the opposition party Disy, both of whose leaderships broadly favoured a yes vote, postponed their decisions until conferences scheduled for shortly before the referendum. Therefore Papadopoulos made his televised speech to people who had heard only one side of the argument: the no camp. The Orthodox synod then further backed Papadopoulos’s position in its Easter message, warning the faithful against "our country climbing its own Golgotha" and facing humiliation (4).

The result was an almost irreversible negative climate of opinion. Realising that a third of its voters had been persuaded to vote no (5), a majority in the Akel party’s central committee withdrew its support for Annan V. Some dissenters even spoke of a split. The party leader, Dimitris Christofias, was so worried that he asked for the referendum to be postponed. Cyprus’s former communists deserted the fight against the division of Cyprus to avoid the risk of dividing their party.

As the party of workers, Akel always supported cooperation between Greeks and Turks against nationalist tendencies. Its support for Papa dopoulos had rankled with its partners in the Turkish Republican party in the north. The referendum on the Annan plan was the party’s last chance. But its leadership did not have the courage to campaign for a yes vote; indeed its newspaper Haravghi commented negatively about the UN plan. For want of courage and time, Akel abandoned the process to Papadopoulos.

And yet a few simple points would have been enough to explain to the population what it was voting for. No solution could have made everyone happy, especially not all the refugees. While the Annan plan cannot make up for the historic injustice, it does create better conditions for the future. No better plan is likely to emerge in the near future. And the UN plan is highly flexible. Even restrictions on the right of return on both sides could be softened or removed if a clear north-south major ity supported such a change. The future depends on the will of individuals on both sides to live together in peace.

It is important to ask just how the no camp intends to achieve what the Annan plan could have done. It complains that the plan stops short of enabling all refugees to return to their villages, but a no vote prevents 100,000 from going home. It rails against the presence of 950 Turkish soldiers but effectively allows 35,000 to stay on Cyprus. It criticises the decision to naturalise 45,000 Turkish settlers in the north, but rejecting the plan will lead to further emigration by Turkish Cypriots, countered by settlers from Turkey moving in (6).

Europe will have to get used to this topsy-turvy situation in which Turkish Cypriots can successfully bypass their old-school leadership (Denktash), while Papadopoulos still manages to convince Greek Cypriots to support his archaic position. By saying no to the Annan plan, 76% of Greek Cypriots have abandoned the solidarity with their Turkish compatriots that they so often used to invoke, which now rings hollow.

Meanwhile 65% of Turkish Cypriots in the north voted for a united future. They had taken great risks in demonstrating against Denktash and in favour of Europe, watched and harassed by a Turkish secret police still under military control. These are Cyprus’s true Europeans, who have been deprived of their future by their Greek compatriots. They did not deserve such punishment.

* Niels Kadritzke is a journalist based in Berlin

(1) For Greeks, the word oxi (no) evokes resistance to aggression. Dictator Yannis Metaxas roused his people to resist Mussolini’s invasion in October 1940 with oxi.

(2) According to the Mass Media Institute of the Nicosia Intercollege, both the RYK and the three private television channels described the Annan plan as a defeat for the Greek side. See Cyprus Mail, 10 February 2004.

(3) A detailed analysis of the Bürgenstock talks was published in the Athens daily Ta Nea on 9 April 2004. Papadopoulos had even refused to supply Kofi Annan’s representative, Alvaro de Soto, with a list of his essential demands for a resolution to the dispute.

(4) Cyprus Mail, 11 April 2004.

(5) According to a survey on 6 April 2004, 37% of Akel voters and 38% of Disy voters had already decided to vote no, Ta Nea, 9 April 2004.

(6) See Niels Kadritzke, "Cyprus, north and south", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2002, and "Turkey, price of alliance", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, March 2003.