1. "Minority Phobia' Haunts Turkey", any attempt to revise existing norms revives memories of the non-ratified Sevres Treaty of 1920, forced through by the World War I victors that would have divided Anatolia.

2. "Kurdish identity key to Turkey’s EU entry: Roth", the co-chairwoman of the German Greens Claudia Roth made her comments while visiting south eastern Turkey.

3. "Dutch court forbids extradition of Kurdish leader to Turkey", a Dutch court ruled Monday that the Netherlands cannot extradite Nuriye Kesbir, a senior member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) wanted for attacks on military targets, to Turkey, ANP news agency reported.

4. "Kurds deny German tanks used against civilians in PKK rebellion", Kurdish officials in Turkey on Friday refuted allegations that German tanks had been used against civilians in the southeast of the country during a 15-year rebellion by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

5. "Violent clashes between police and students at demos in Turkey", demonstrations against state control of universities in Turkey degenerated into street violence Saturday as police used tear gas and dogs against hundreds of students armed with Molotov cocktails and stones.

6. "Along border, Kurds Say, Iran Gives Boost To Uprising", the apparent Iranian ties to mujahedeen groups operating inside Iraq only continues this long Machiavellian tradition, the Kurdish officials said.

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1. - Turkish Daily News - "Minority Phobia' Haunts Turkey":

Any attempt to revise existing norms revives memories of the non-ratified Sevres Treaty of 1920, forced through by the World War I victors that would have divided Anatolia

ANKARA / 7 November 2004 / by Fatma Demirelli and Emine Kart

In 1923 the newly born Turkish Republic defined its minorities and their rights in the historic Lausanne Treaty that was signed by Western powers who failed to prevent the establishment of the independent Turkish state. 81 years after Lausanne, the minority issue is at the heart of a boiling debate and is under pressure from outside and within.

The main outside player is the European Union, whose executive arm the European Commission called on Turkey to expand its cultural rights to Kurds without explicitly calling them a minority, and complained that Alawis were not recognized as a Muslim minority.

That immediately sparked fury in Ankara, but complaints were whispered and criticism was restrained and care was taken not to spoil the positive atmosphere in the wake of the commission's historic recommendation.

At the heart of the unrest layed the fact that neither Alawis nor Kurds were among the communities recognized as minorities under the Lausanne Treaty, widely acclaimed as the basis of the independence and unitary structure of the Turkish state. Thus, the commission's suggestions for rights for Kurds and Alawis were perceived as potential threats to the unitary structure of the state.

The roots of sensitivities regarding minority issues are strongly grounded in the experiences during the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic after World War I. During Ottoman rule, Christian, Armenian and other religious communities enjoyed autonomy in their religious activities and education.

But both the Turkish establishment and Turkish public share a widespread belief that the Christian West then used the stick of religion and nationalism in Eastern Europe to break up the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. Any attempt to revise existing norms revives memories of the non-ratified Sevres Treaty of 1920, forced through by the World War I victors that would have divided Anatolia with outright independence for the Armenians and autonomy for the Kurds, leading to their independence.

The EU moved to calm the fears by saying the rights enjoyed by the people were what mattered and not the "terminology," and made it clear Turkey would need to revise its thinking on the matter in the light of changing international practices.

"It looks somehow not necessarily compatible with the existing international instruments that the only minorities that Turkey recognizes as minorities in Turkey should be non-Muslim religious minorities and that any other minority would by definition not exist in Turkey," EU Commission's representative in Ankara Ambassador Hansjoerg Kretschmer told the Turkish Daily News in an interview.

That unrest in the state apparatus was initially kept low but Kurds, and Alawis were quick to respond in a forceful way that rather shocked the authors of the commission's report and prompted Kretschmer to admit, "I was somehow surprised by statements that are made by representatives of Alawis and also of Kurds that they are not a minority."

Meaning entirely different things, representatives of both communities agreed in rejecting the "minority" label designed for them by the EU Commission. Alawis, citing their strong loyalty to the secular republic and to its founder Kemal Ataturk, denounced the "minority" description, something they felt was questioning their firm loyalty to the state.

For Kurds, on the other hand, recognition as a minority fell short of what they appeared to be wishing for, namely, acknowledgment of their status as a "constituent element" of Turkey.

"We are not a minority," Leyla Zana, a former deputy of the now defunct People's Democracy Party (DEHAP) told the European Parliament in a speech upon receiving the prestigious Sakharov Prize. "Kurds are a constituent element of the Turkish Republic," she said.

Other Kurdish politicians emphasized that Kurds were too big a community to be labelled as a minority, and their centuries-long presence in Anatolia made it psychologically difficult for them to accept minority status.

"We are talking about 20 million people who have been living in this land for centuries. This huge number in itself and their presence for centuries prevents them feeling like a minority group," Hamit Geylani, a lawyer for the pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party (DEHAP), told the TDN.

"Calling for equal rights for all would not promote the disintegration of the state; this fear is groundless. What leads to clashes is the policy of denial," he said.

"Provided that the state can satisfy its citizens, no one would like to quit their own state and join another one, no matter how geographically or ethnically close it would be. Switzerland is a very good example," said Serafettin Elci, former leader of the banned Democratic Mass Party (DKP).

'Sevres syndrome'

What marked a new stage in the debate over minorities was a report drafted by a sub-committee of the Human Rights Advisory Board, a government-sponsored body making recommendations to Prime Minister's Office.

With its sharp language criticizing the practice concerning cultural rights, the report said the minority definition in Turkey was restrictive, contradicting the modern-day trend that says nation states are not to be asked if there are minorities living in their territory and which accepts the presence of minorities in a state if there are communities in that state who are "ethnically, linguistically and religiously different" and feel this difference is an inseparable part of their identity.

It said even the most innocent demands for a distinct identity have been viewed with a "paranoid" suspicion that they are meant to divide the country and promote terrorism, which the report described as the "Sevres syndrome."

The report's blunt assessment created a storm even within the 78-member Human Rights Advisory Board, with some of its members calling the report a "document of betrayal." And it was that that broke the silence of the state as well. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, in a message marking the anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic, warned the unitary structure of the state was an untouchable issue and similar warnings from the influential military followed.

"The Turkish Armed Forces [TSK] cannot accept any debate over the unitary structure of the Turkish state, an untouchable provision of the Constitution," Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug told a press conference last week.

Unleashing criticism directed to the EU -- held back for weeks -- Basbug also said the EU Commission's report was not in compliance with the Lausanne Treaty.

"It is clear that the EU's approach goes beyond the framework drawn up by the Lausanne Treaty," Basbug said, complaining that some of the rights suggested for those communities in the EU report went beyond cultural rights and spilled over into the "political realm."

The ongoing debate is yet to finish and the rights and wrongs are yet to be set, but it has already exposed fears that have haunted Turkish minds for decades, perhaps even centuries.

But for Geylani, who is banned from politics for five years as a member of the now defunct People's Democracy Party (HADEP), this is a time to cherish. "The very fact that the issue is being debated 81 years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic is the most positive thing about the whole debate," he said.

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2. - NTV - "Kurdish identity key to Turkey’s EU entry: Roth":

The co-chairwoman of the German Greens Claudia Roth made her comments while visiting south eastern Turkey.

5 November 2004

Recognition of a Kurdish identity is crucial to Turkey in its bid to become a full member of the European Union, the co-chairperson of the German Greens Party said Friday.

“The recognition of the Kurdish identity is a key on the path leading to the European Union membership,” Claudia Roth said in the press conference on Friday.

Roth said that in the 18 years that she had been traveling to the region her present visit had shown her many changes and that the people had renewed hope.

The delegation of German Greens were on a visit to the region to assess the development of democratisation in south eastern Turkey.

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3. - AFP - "Dutch court forbids extradition of Kurdish leader to Turkey":

THE HAGUE / 8 November 2004

A Dutch court ruled Monday that the Netherlands cannot extradite Nuriye Kesbir, a senior member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) wanted for attacks on military targets, to Turkey, ANP news agency reported.

In September Dutch Foreign Minister Piet Hein Donner said he had agreed to a Turkish request to extradite Kesbir after a supreme court decision that she could be sent to Turkey to stand trial.

The case before the The Hague court was her last chance to stop extradition.

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4. - AFP - "Kurds deny German tanks used against civilians in PKK rebellion":

ANKARA / 5 November 2004

Kurdish officials in Turkey on Friday refuted allegations that German tanks had been used against civilians in the southeast of the country during a 15-year rebellion by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

They were speaking to members of a German parliamentary delegation made up of members of the Greens, part of the ruling coalition in Germany.

"The mayors of towns in the region told us that German tanks had not been used against (Kurdish) civilians," said a member of a delegation who did not wish to be named.

The lawmaker also said his delegation, which visited Sirnak, Cizre and Idil -- all near the frontier with Syria -- had found no evidence of the use of German tanks in the region.

The accusations had been made by a former East German military official who told a German television station that German tanks had been deployed by Turkish military police in the town of Sirnak during the PKK rebellion between 1984 and 1999.

The allegations were rejected by the Turkish government. The German government also said it had no information that the accusations were true.

Confirmation of the use of tanks in the southeast of Turkey would have contravened a 1994 treaty that authorised the delivery of German tanks to Turkey on condition they were not used in Kurdish areas of the country.

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5. - AFP - "Violent clashes between police and students at demos in Turkey":

ANKARA / 6 November 2006

Demonstrations against state control of universities in Turkey degenerated into street violence Saturday as police used tear gas and dogs against hundreds of students armed with Molotov cocktails and stones.

Some 1,000 people gathered in the capital Ankara to denounce the founding of the Higher Education Council (YOK), created 23 years ago by a military junta to put formerly autonomous universities under tight state control, media reports said.

The demonstration turned ugly when riot police stopped the protestors, mainly left-wing activists, from marching to the main Kizilay square, cutting off roads with armored vehicles.

The students -- many with bandanas covering their faces -- responded by pelting the security forces with Molotov cocktails and chunks of stone dismantled from pavements.

An activist with a gas mask over his mouth was seen raising his hands in the V-sign after the petrol bomb he hurled hit an armored vehicle.

Television footage showed small blazes dotting the streets and passers-by running away in panic and shielding their children.

About 4,000 officers were deployed in downtown Ankara for the demonstration and a police helicopter overflew the area, Anatolia news agency said.

Similar clashes marred a demonstration at the historical Beyazit square in Istanbul, which attracted another 1,000 students holding pancards with leftist slogans and portraits of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.

Police officers wearing helmets and carrying plastic shields were seen chasing protestors with dogs and firing tear gas. At least 50 people were taken into custody in Ankara and six others in Istanbul, reports said.

No major incidents were reported at other demonstrations across the country. In Diyarbakir, the central city of the Kurdish southeast, police refrained from using force to disperse the protestors even though they chanted slogans in favor of Kurdish rebels fighting the Ankara government, the agency reported.

YOK was created in a bid to place universities under tight control following years of bloodshed between leftist and rightist militants, among them scores of university students, which prompted the 1980 military coup.

Critics, however, say the council has today become an autoritarian body oppressing the administration of universities and impeding their scientific freedoms.

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6. - Boston Globe - "Along border, Kurds Say, Iran Gives Boost To Uprising":

TUWELLA / 7 November 2004 / by Thanassis Cambanis

A dirt track winds from this Kurdish border outpost to the top of a jagged mountain ridge separating Iran from Iraq's northern Kurdish enclave.

For years, and with the blessing of Iranian officials, Islamist terrorist groups have smuggled weapons and money into Iraq on this road, many Kurdish intelligence and security officials said. When US special forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters attacked Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda affiliate, in March 2003, hundreds of its members fled to Iran, the officials said, and have regrouped in several towns just over this border.

There, they continue to train, raise funds, and plan terrorist operations in Iraq, infiltrating operatives across a porous, rocky, high-altitude border that has long been a haven for smugglers and that, in practical terms, is impossible to police, the Kurdish officials say.

Iraqi and US officials have grumbled for more than a year about what they perceive as Iranian interference in Iraq. Iran has repeatedly and forcefully denied any such interference.

But here in the mountains of Kurdistan, the Kurdish officials point to what they say are tangible footprints of Iran's collaboration with terror and insurgent groups responsible for attacks inside Iraq.

According to a half-dozen officials in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, known as the PUK, which controls the southern half of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and commanders in the peshmerga, the force that provides security in the region, Iran has extended its network of agents inside Iraq.

Iran, the officials say, continues to aid groups like Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, now named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Even though Iran is a Shi'ite theocracy, these officials said, it helps Sunni insurgent groups because it wants to prevent a strong unified government from taking shape in Iraq.

"They go back and forth after running missions here," said Anwar Haji Othman, head of security in the area around Halabja, including a long stretch of the Iranian border. "They bring cash from Iran to Iraq across the border."

Iran denies supporting Iraqi insurgents, and has declared its support for a peaceful, democratic Iraq. Tehran has argued that an unstable, violent neighbor would undermine Iran's security.

Iraqi and Iranian officials have met repeatedly, and have pledged to work closely on security matters.

At Iraq's request, Iran stopped tens of thousands of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims who were flooding across the border to visit Iraq's shrine cities -- and bringing with them crime, infiltrators, and drug dealers, some Iraqi officials say.

Tensions have flared publicly. This summer, in widely repeated comments, the Iraqi defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, called Iran his country's "first enemy," and said Tehran's policies had "added fuel to the fire."

American officials have warned Iran against interfering in its neighbors affairs, but have sent mixed signals about whether they believe Iran's government is helping insurgents. Many top officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have called Iran's activities unhelpful, but General John Abizaid emphasized in April that "there are elements within Iran that are urging patience."

Tehran has said it does not allow militants to cross the border, but Iranian officials have not ruled out that Islamic fighters might be moving illegally from Iran to Iraq.

Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said at the time: "From the outset, Iran has tried to help Iraq overcome its problems."

But Othman, the Kurdish regional security chief, said that despite impressive internal security forces, Iran has not stopped terror groups from living and training just across the border in a group of Iranian Kurdish cities.

Othman said that Kurdish forces had arrested many members of Ansar al-Islam, including three top leaders over the last six months. Ansar al-Islam operated for two years in a cluster of villages between Halabja and Tuwella. The US government identified Ansar as a terrorist group, and believes it sheltered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for two months before the US invasion in 2003.

According to Othman and other intelligence officials, Ansar's members have reconstituted as a new group, Ansar al-Sunni, or have joined Zarqawi. US officials have made the same claim.

According to information gleaned from questioning of the arrested Ansar members, Othman said, former Ansar fighters are now based in the Iranian border towns of Marivan (home to about 60 Kurdish Islamists), Sanandaj, Dezli (where about 30 Iranian villagers have joined the Islamist cause) and Orumiyeh (the base for up to 300 Islamists, including Gulf Arabs, Afghans and Kurds). They have a training camp in Dolanau, just a few kilometers from the Iraqi border. Three other leading officials have confirmed this.

"Iran continues its relationship with Ansar," Othman said. "They are training them how to use explosive ordnance for terrorist attacks in the south of Iraq."

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan controls the half of the region that includes the major cities of Suleimaniya and Halabja, where three powerful groups held territory from 2001 to 2003.

Its security and intelligence arm, the Asaish, has offices across Iraq, including Mosul, Baghdad, and Baquba, and has sources in centers including Fallujah, said the agency's leader, Dana Ahmed Majid. The Asaish has operated as an independent agency for more than a decade, and has worked closely with US intelligence.

Mohammed Mohammed Saeed, a peshmerga commander and the top PUK official in the region around Halabja, said that Iran regularly sends intelligence agents into Kurdistan to monitor the Kurdish peshmerga and the movements of Americans.

Iran used to have offices in Suleimaniya and Halabja until US special forces landed in the region in March 2003. But, Saeed said, the Iranians have retained their spy network inside Iraq, and are now using it to watch American forces and to help insurgents.

"The Iranians are worried," he said. "They don't want a pro-American government in Iraq. The Iranians want neighboring countries to be full of anarchy, violence, and chaos."

When Iran still operated openly in Kurdistan, Saeed said, locals bribed Iranian officials with television sets to get visas. The PUK, he said, paid the Iranians to restrain the Islamist forces that controlled the valley stretching from Halabja to Iran. There, one group, Komala, or the Islamic Group, led by Ali Bapir, controlled the town of Khurmal. Ansar al-Islam controlled Biyara, and a third allied group, called the Islamic Movement, held Tuwella.

One Kurdish official in Tuwella, named Tahir Mustafa Ali, said the three groups should be viewed as "three wings of the same bird." Ali added that the terror groups responsible for much of the killing, hostage-taking, and bombing in Iraq, despite their different names, should similarly be viewed as part of a single network.

Iran has deep ties with many of the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein's leadership. They sheltered Kurds when Hussein attacked them with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and in the south they sheltered Shi'ites who were fleeing retribution for the 1991 uprising.

And the Kurds and Shi'ites, among others, who have not secured their future in a post-Hussein Iraq, hesitate to repudiate their erstwhile ally to the west.

"They have been a friend to us," Saeed said. "We do not want to have any problem with Iran."

Daily, about 50 truckloads of legal imports stream into Iraq through this tiny border crossing above Tuwella, carrying cement and soft drinks. The illegal trade is just as important; Iraqi smugglers openly drive by the Iranian checkpoint and, farther down a dirt track, carry goods across the border on foot or by donkey.

At the border post last week, Iranian soldiers -- under the watchful eye of a Revolutionary Guard officer -- refused to speak to a reporter. "The intelligence will punish us if we talk to you," one said with a smile.

Down the dirt track, in the town of Tuwella, the local PUK chief, Ismail Ameen, said he kept his PUK membership a secret during the two years that Islamists ruled Tuwella. Just before the war, in February 2003, he saw six gray Toyota Landcruisers drive into town from the Iranian border. He said the trucks were loaded with bullets and mortar shells for Islamic Movement fighters.

"They would have run out of ammunition . . . without the supplies they got from Iran," he said.

Two top PUK security officials, and three members of the PUK's political bureau, also contended that Iran has continued to support Islamist insurgents.

Majid, head of the PUK's security agency, said that one former Ansar leader, Omar Baziani, had been caught by US forces in Baghdad six months earlier. Through interrogations, authorities heard that Baziani had crossed the border from Iran, Majid said, and had met with Zarqawi in Fallujah.

"It's easy to cross the Iranian border," Majid said. He added that the presence of Islamist terrorists in Iran, and their apparent ease in moving between the two countries, did not prove that Iran was sponsoring the groups.

According to the Kurdish officials, four former Ansar leaders have been arrested in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and the border town of Penjwin in the past six months. All four are believed to have been planning or supervising attacks.

There's a long history in the area of nations giving shelter to their enemies' enemies.

In Iraq, Hussein funded the cult-like Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalk.

In Iran, shelter was given to an array of Iraqi opposition groups, ranging from those considered allied with Tehran's ideology, like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to the secular Iraqi National Congress.

The apparent Iranian ties to mujahedeen groups operating inside Iraq only continues this long Machiavellian tradition, the Kurdish officials said.

"They work with groups like Ansar, whose ideology is so opposed to theirs, because they want to have a card to play in Iraq," Saeed said.