29 October 2004

1. "On the edges of Turkey, awaiting EU", today the divided Kurds remain a question mark for the region, and also for the European Union, which will watch how Turkey responds to the increasingly autonomous Kurds in northern Iraq.

2. "Minefields loom as Turks await EU", the southern border area has ethnic minefields - the recurring nationalism of the largest ethnic group of the region, the Kurds, for example - and a real minefield that spans the 822 kilometers, or 510 miles, of Turkey's frontier with Syria and parts of its 331-kilometer border with Iraq.

3. "No to headscarves, doping and sex scandals at top Turkish reception", tgnoring a threatened boycott by ruling party lawmakers, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer again barred women with Islamic headscarves from Friday's official reception to mark modern Turkey's founding and added athletes embroiled in doping and sex scandals to this year's black list.

4. "EU negotiations cannot proceed with this way of thinking", opinion by Mehmet Ali Birand.

5. "Giant underground economy burdens Turkey", 'Ghost' companies avoid taxes and delay financial recovery.

6. "Cypriot president ready to meet Turkish PM on sidelines of Rome summit", Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos said Thursday he is willing to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over Turkey's European bid on the sidelines of an EU summit in Rome.

1. - The International Herald Tribune - "On the edges of Turkey, awaiting EU":

ESENDERE / 29 October 2004 / by Thomas Fuller

Turkey Two giant portraits face each other at this remote, mountainous border post with Iran.

On the Turkish side, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, glares from a looming painting with the words, "Turkey is a secular state."

On the Iranian side, just beyond the border checkpoint 100 meters, or 330 feet, away, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country's late spiritual leader, stares from a competing mural.

"We will crush America under our boots," reads a sign on the Iranian side, a verbal joust that amuses Recep Aydin, 53, who crosses the border from Turkey nearly every day to buy cheap fruit and vegetables in Iran.

"Maybe they could crush one American, but if everyone in America went to Iran I don't think they could crush them all," Aydin said.

On a chilly weekday morning, Aydin and his friends were more eager to discuss not America and its growing role in the region but a decision breathlessly awaited in here and throughout Turkey: whether European Union leaders will agree in December to begin membership negotiations and open the door to Turkey joining the club.

If the Europeans say yes, this beautiful area of tall mountains and deep gorges could one day become the far southeast corner of Europe. And because Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to enter the Union in 2007, Aydin could one day drive from this spot - on the same longitude as Baghdad and slightly east of Moscow - all the way to Paris or Madrid without leaving European Union territory, a trip of more than 4,000 kilometers, or 2,480 miles.

The border here is already a place where two very different worlds collide: the strict teachings of Iran's anti-Western theocracy on one side, and on the other the almost fundamentalist secularism of Turkey, where prostitution is legal, alcohol flows freely in big cities and women in government offices are forbidden from wearing head scarves.

South of here is another fault line, the border with Iraq, which in some remote spots can be crossed by walking across a knee-deep mountain stream but in other places is lined with minefields.

Because the area has a history of insurgency by local Kurdish groups, Turkish military installations dominate hilltops like medieval fortresses and the police stop cars at checkpoints every few dozen kilometers.

If you close your eyes, you might imagine German tourists white-water rafting in this area, French skiers enjoying the snowbound peaks and Britons trekking through Kurdish villages, admiring the colorfully dressed women and men in turbans and baggy pants.

The only trekkers these days are the smugglers who carry cheap Iranian gasoline on mules across the mountain passes to cash in on the huge price difference: Filling up the tank of an average-size car costs $3 in Iran compared with about $80 in Turkey - a signal that the border here is not just a political fault line, but an economic one, too.

Some people here make a living growing vegetables in the lush, oasis-like valleys or tending bee hives. Others serve as "village guards," a militia created by the Turkish government as a way of co-opting villagers and enlisting them in the fight against Kurdish militants.

Mehmet Benek, a 35-year-old Kurd, receives the equivalent of about $230 a month for his work as a village guard. His family carries the scars of the Kurdish conflict - his mother and two brothers were killed by Kurdish rebels in the 1990s. His friends in the village of Senoba whisper that Benek collaborated with the Turkish government and that the killings were retaliation.

Benek has enormous hands, a big face and a thick mustache. He has eight children from two wives, only one of them legal, since Turkish law bans bigamy. He says he believes that the European Union could help deliver this region from conflict forever.

"It will make it free everywhere, more peaceful and we'll be able to travel to Europe," he said.

Today the prospect of EU membership has weakened the standing of separatist-minded Kurds partly because the Turkish government, wanting to please Brussels, has given the Kurdish minority more cultural and political freedoms, allowing courses in the Kurdish language and freer circulation of Kurdish-language materials.

But instability remains, especially on the southern border with Iraq.

Of all of Turkey's borders, "the weak link is definitely the border with Iraq," said Erik Zürcher, professor of Turkish Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

"The fact that you have Kurdish nationalists on both sides makes the border less stable," Zürcher said. "There is some scope for nationalists demanding changes to the border."

Unlike the border with Iran, which dates to the mid-1600s and served as the dividing line between the Ottoman and Persian empires, the Turkey-Iraq frontier is a relatively new construct and was drawn mainly as a result of the quest for control over oil fields.

Britain, victorious in World War I, insisted that oil reserves in Kirkuk, which at the time had been discovered but were not yet exploited, be annexed from the defeated Ottoman Empire and included in the country that was to become Iraq.

The League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations, agreed and sent a special commission in 1925 that decided on a frontier dubbed the Brussels line, referring to where the league met.

The Brussels line, now the border, follows ravines and the crest of mountains. But it also divides the Kurdish people, a fact that has long engendered bitterness among Kurds, a mountain-dwelling group numbering somewhere around 15 million people in Turkey alone.

Mustafa Ismet Inonu, a former Turkish president and prime minister, offered a prescient warning to the British ambassador in Ankara in 1925.

"So long as any large number of Kurds are included in Iraq, the Turkish government would have perpetual trouble in eastern provinces," Ismet said, according to "Ataturk," a biography by Andrew Mango.

Today the divided Kurds remain a question mark for the region, and also for the European Union, which will watch how Turkey responds to the increasingly autonomous Kurds in northern Iraq.

Turkey's ambivalence toward the Iraqi Kurds is apparent at the border post outside the town of Silopi, which lies near the conjunction of Turkey's frontier with Iraq and Syria.

Border police allow only about 1,100 trucks a day to cross, according to an officer at the border. This leaves a permanent line of trucks at least 20 kilometers long waiting to enter Iraq.

Turkish taxi drivers also make the passage across the border because they can fill their tanks - often modified for extra capacity - with cheap gasoline. A liter of gasoline in Iraq costs the equivalent of 4 cents. In Turkey it costs the equivalent of $1.40 - 35 times as much.

The huge difference in price is a reminder, if any were needed, that the border drawn in the 1920s gave Iraq the benefit of the oil fields - and Turkey the dilemma over the Kurds.

2. - International Herald Tribune - "Minefields loom as Turks await EU":

PIRABOK / 28 October 2004 / by Thomas Fuller

Ahmed Degirmen, a 56-year-old shepherd, tends his flock on a vast plain next to the minefields and barbed wire that line Turkey's border with Syria.

It is a solitary place despite the trucks that swish past on a nearby rutted road and the Turkish soldiers who stand in watchtowers above the minefields.

Several thousand kilometers away in a Brussels conference room, leaders of the European Union will soon decide whether the pasture where Degirmen's sheep and goats graze could one day mark the frontier where Europe ends.

"They are human beings, and we are human beings," Degirmen said in the golden sunlight of a recent afternoon. "So we would like to join."

Southern Turkey is both poor and unstable compared with Western Europe, a reminder that Turkey's integration into the European Union would take decades, if it happens. The EU's decision on whether to begin membership negotiations with Turkey is expected on Dec. 17.

The region is a vast stretch of harsh, dusty and mostly treeless terrain steeped in Biblical history and the prehistory of ancient civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The southern border area has ethnic minefields - the recurring nationalism of the largest ethnic group of the region, the Kurds, for example - and a real minefield that spans the 822 kilometers, or 510 miles, of Turkey's frontier with Syria and parts of its 331-kilometer border with Iraq.

Turkish government officials along the border with Syria see membership in the European Union as a stabilizing force that could help the economy by increasing trade.

Metin Pamukcu, the mayor of Mardin, a centuries-old city built on a giant pillar of rock that rises abruptly from the plains, used a local expression to describe what membership in the EU would mean.

"The European Union brings nice weather on our face," he said. "Mardin will be a bridge between European countries and the Middle East."

But farther east, toward Turkey's border with Iraq, living conditions are more precarious and the rule of law weak.

In the small city of Nusaybin, Ahmed Sakin, an 18-year-old with high cheekbones and an easy smile, spends nearly all of his time in bed beside a window overlooking a dirt road. He lost both of his legs in 1993 when he, his brother and two friends were playing soccer near the Syrian border and someone stepped on a mine. His brother and a friend died in the accident.

Turkey laid the mines during the cold war to protect itself from its Soviet-leaning neighbors and to prevent smugglers and Kurdish rebels from crossing the border illegally.

While mine accidents are relatively rare here - Sakin's mother, Besna, can name three other people who have been wounded or killed by mines in recent years - Sakin's story underlines the lack of government accountability, she said.

Besna Sakin considered seeking compensation for her son's accident from the military because the mines were laid in an area without any fence around them.

"Turkey is our country," Besna Sakin said. "It should defend our children, not hurt them."

But she did not pursue the claim after the city's governor admonished her to drop the case, saying the Kurdish insurgency of the 1990s had already made things tense.

It did not help her case that she, her daughters and Ahmed Sakin are all illiterate.

Nusaybin is a poor town where young boys and old men make the equivalent of $10 a day as porters and where the most lucrative business is selling tobacco, bread and other goods to the Syrians, who are even poorer.

The Turkish-Syrian border cuts through what was once the heart of the city; the Syrian side is known as Al Qamishli.

The entire area used to be part of the Ottoman empire, and thus no borders existed, only internal tax collection zones and provincial boundaries.

The division of Nusaybin dates to the 1920s and still annoys some local residents, who blame France for drawing what they believe was a random border.

"The Europeans decided on a tabletop somewhere that this would be the border," said Abdul Kadir Timur Agaoglu, a wealthy 74-year-old farmer whose land abuts the Turkish-Syrian border. "They never came here to survey," he said.

The border divides the Kurdish-speaking Kikan tribe, said Timur Agaoglu, whose kinsmen served as high-ranking officials in the area during Ottoman times, when the sultan in Istanbul ruled over much of the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa.

Two of his brothers who are now dead grew up on the Syrian side, he said.

"Turkey's southern borders are very much European constructs," said Kendal Nezan, the head of the Kurdish Institute in Paris and an expert on the region.

In the absence of other natural landmarks that could delineate a border, a Frenchman named Henry Franklin-Bouillon traveled to Ankara in 1921 and proposed that a German-built train line called the Baghdadbahn form the border between Turkey and the French-controlled area of what is now Syria, according to Erik Zürcher, a professor of Turkish Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. It was meant to be a temporary agreement but was later formalized as the permanent border.

Degirmen, the shepherd, used to lead his flock to the area where the mines now lie. He supports his family of 10 children by selling two sheep a month, for which he receives the equivalent of about $200.

"We are not yet in Europe," he said resignedly. "We will be poor until we join."

3. - AFP - "No to headscarves, doping and sex scandals at top Turkish reception":

ANKARA / 28 October 2004 / by Sibel Utku Bila

Ignoring a threatened boycott by ruling party lawmakers, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer again barred women with Islamic headscarves from Friday's official reception to mark modern Turkey's founding and added athletes embroiled in doping and sex scandals to this year's black list.

Unmoved by the uproar he caused last year when he barred women wearing headscarves, the staunchly secularist Sezer again refused to invite to the presidential palace wives of Justice and Development Party (AKP) legislators wearing what is seen by many as a symbol of political Islam.

The majority of the 368 AKP deputies are expected to boycott the reception, AKP sources said Thursday, which is the top event on Ankara's social calendar and this year marks the 81st anniversary of the modern Turkish republic.

Women wearing the headscarf have in the past attended receptions at the presidential palace, but Sezer introduced his stringent dress code for the first time last year after the AKP, a conservative party rooted in a now-banned Islamist movement, was voted into power.

He himself, meanwhile, has refused to take part in functions where the headcarf is likely to make an appeareance, among them a reception last year hosted by parliament speaker and AKP deputy Bulent Arinc which might have been attended by his wife Munevver sporting an Islamic headscarf.

Sezer was joined by top army generals and the opposition leader in his protest, which forced Arinc to host the reception on his own. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose wife Emine also covers her head, was spared the embarrassment of turning up alone again to this year's ceremony thanks to a scheduled trip to Rome for the signing ceremony of the new European Union constitution.

The wives of most AKP members wear the headscarf, which is banned from universities and government offices in Turkey, a mainly Muslim but strictly secular country.

In contrast, AKP legislators' wives who shun the Islamic scarf were invited, as were women legislators and wives of deputies from the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), who never wear the controversial kerchief.

Outraged by the ban, several AKP deputies said they had returned their invitations to the president in protest. "It is not possible to understand this negative stance the president has against the headscarf, which the majority of women in this country wear," one deputy, Mustafa Nuri Akbulut, said in a brief letter to Sezer.

Snubbed wives also joined the protest.

"I too would have liked to attend the celebration... I condemn your desire to turn the republic into a regime that belongs only to those who do not cover their heads," Sabahat Yagci, the wife of AKP deputy Ziyattin Yagci, wrote in a letter to the president, seen by AFP.

Her husband said: "I will not attend because I am against discrimination."

Sezer's guest list this year appeared to send not only a message of secularism but also of ethics in sports. The president snubbed the first Turkish woman to win an Olympic gold medal, weightlifter Nurcan Taylan, after her record breaking performance in Athens this summer was overshadowed by claims of sexual harrassment against her coach.

Taylan defended her coach, calling teammates who levelled the accusations "lesbians."

All other medal winners from the Athens Olympics were invited to the reception. Also off the list was runner Sureyya Ayhan, the reigning European women's 1500 metres champion, who missed the Games and is under investigation for fixing a doping test.

4. - Turkis Daily News - "EU negotiations cannot proceed with this way of thinking":

27 October 2004 / opinion by Mehmet Ali Birand

I have mentioned this before and I would like to repeat it. A statement made by Justice Minister Cemil CIcek alerted me to a fact when he said, "Before opening European Union negotiations, we need to debate whether we really want to accept European values."

It was a very accurate assessment.

Later, Yalin Eralp also commented on the matter, saying, "With this frame of mind, we won't be able to handle the EU negotiations."

We are truly faced with a quandary.

We are about to enter a very long negotiation period with the EU, but our way of thinking is still not up to it. We don't know what the EU means or what its values are. We, as a nation, seem to be living on a different planet. Let's just ignore the public for a while. Even our intellectuals don't know what they are doing or what they are talking about.

Let's just take a look at the debates going on in our universities. Let's take a look at what our instructors think about the matter. Let's listen to our journalists and commentators. And let us take a look at what our politicians are thinking.

The situation we face is very scary.

The way the basis of our society -- scientists, journalists, authors and politicians -- thinks about Turkey and the EU's values are very different.

I guess we have no idea where we are going. We don't know about the values we need to respect. What is even worse is that we have no intention of learning it either.

Whatever we are, the EU is just the opposite:

The concept of sovereignty in the EU is very different from the way we understand it. The era of Ankara ruling over the rest of the country is at an end. Ankara will no longer do as it pleases.
Territorial integrity, opposition to the concept of "minorities," pressure applied on the Alawites and being scared of religious fundamentalists will no longer be excuses to limit human rights or freedoms.
Ankara will not be able to make any economic decision it wants. It will not be able to spend as it deems appropriate. The black market economy will disappear.
In foreign policy, Turkey will have to adhere to certain rules. It will have to ask Brussels for its opinion before taking a decision. It will need to cooperate with 25 other countries.
The Kurdish issue will no longer be ignored. Even if we don't like it, we need to decrease the election threshold and allow the election of representatives of the Kurds. There will be an amnesty for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK/Kongra-Gel) and Turkey will have to invest in the Southeast.
We need to implement an alternative foreign policy against the ridiculous "Armenian genocide" accusations and courageous steps will need to be taken.
Southern Cyprus will be officially recognized.
We are living on a different planet
We, on the other hand, still believe that things will continue as they have over the last few decades.

When we are faced with requests from the EU calling on us to adhere to the Copenhagen criteria we cry out, "Our sovereignty is in danger!"

We are acting like we are not aware of the fact that we need to transfer an important portion of our sovereign rights to Brussels.

We live in a time capsule that is the Independence War.

We believe foreigners are formulating a conspiracy against our country and we are doing everything we can to resist this encroachment.

We should try to reach an agreement on these matters. We need not wait for the Dec. 17 summit. If not, our negotiations with the EU will be very hard.

5. - The Daily Star - "Giant underground economy burdens Turkey":

'Ghost' companies avoid taxes and delay financial recovery

ANKARA / 29 October 2004

To leave decades of financial trouble behind it, Turkey must undertake a long, painstaking reform process to fight a giant underground economy fuelled by high taxes and unemployment, experts maintain.

The European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have both warned that the size of the country's underground - or unregistered - economy is casting a pall on its remarkable recovery since a severe crisis in 2001.

An OECD survey last week described Turkey's parallel economy as "a major concern," accounting for more than half of all labor and reducing the tax base of this cash-strapped country.

The problem has been rampant for years, but critics say governments failed to take any genuine measures to encourage "ghost" companies to register and pay taxes.

Estimates of the size of the underground sector range from 32 percent to 65 percent of the country's gross national income, which stood at $197.2 billion in 2003.

Analysts say high taxes and social security charges - well above the level of the richest OECD countries - plus red tape, corruption, poor state control and employees' willingness to work illegally because of high unemployment has forced thousands of firms underground.

A recent report by the Ankara Trade Chamber described Turkey as a "tax hell," where investors are also scared off by the high price of vital inputs such as oil and electricity.

The corporate tax in Turkey is 33 percent. In addition, registered firms are subject to other taxes automatically withheld whether they make a profit or not.

Employers also pay the bulk of their workers' social security contributions: the cost to the employer of an employee working at the current minimum monthly wage of 318 million lira ($214) is 540 million lira.

Critics say governments have doubled the tax burden of companies over the past 15 years as an easy way of boosting revenues instead of taking measures to expand the tax base.

"The tax system is not fair. The state taxes whoever it can grab," said Sadik Kirbas, head of Istanbul's Okan University and a researcher on the informal economy.

"Reducing tax rates is not easy either because the government cannot afford a decrease in revenue while it is under pressure from the IMF to meet tight budget targets," he added.

Moreover, registered companies often resort to fraud to ease the tax load.

"As far as I can see, nobody declares their real revenue," said an Ankara-based financial consultant who works mainly with small companies. "We turn a blind eye because this has become the rule. The system is deadlocked."

Kirbas suggested that the real remedy would be a far-reaching structural reform aimed at transforming small-scale companies, which constitute 90 percent of all firms in Turkey and are "extremely difficult" to control.

Bulent Pirler, secretary-general of Turkey's main employers' union, TISK, said the reform process should be gradual and take social factors into consideration because the underground economy became a "buffer zone" during the economic crisis, when scores of companies collapsed and thousands of people were left jobless.

"Many people went to work in the unregistered economy, knowingly giving up their social security instead of remaining broke," he said.

Pirler also said the government must overhaul its cumbersome bureaucracy.

6. - AFP - "Cypriot president ready to meet Turkish PM on sidelines of Rome summit":

NICOSIA / 28 October 2004

Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos said Thursday he is willing to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over Turkey's European bid on the sidelines of an EU summit in Rome.

"There is no reason why we shouldn't talk to Mr Erdogan; the problem lies on his side," Papadopoulos told reporters in Nicosia before leaving for Rome, where he will sign the new EU constitution on Friday.

Erdogan and Papadopoulos have had brief chance meetings in the past. Papadopoulos, also leader of the Greek Cypriot community on the divided island, said the difficulty for Erdogan is that while Ankara does not recognise the Cyprus Republic Turkey's EU accession bid had changed the climate.

"Now Turkey expects a date for when accession talks can begin, the obstacle posed to Mr Erdogan that any such meeting could be tantamount to recognition of the Cyprus Republic has less significance than it did before," he said.

Papadopoulos said EU summits offer ample opportunity for quiet diplomacy and differences to be resolved.

"At such meetings the most significant contacts happen on the sidelines, and I'm sure they will this time."

The internationally recognized Cypriot government argues that Turkey needs to restore full diplomatic and bilateral relations with it if Ankara is to achieve EU membership.

Papadopoulos has said his government would not stand in the way of Turkey securing an EU accession date in December if Turkey officially recognised Cyprus, as it does the other 24 EU states. He has also not ruled out using the veto against Turkey.

Cyprus would also like to link the question of an accession date with a withdrawal of 35,000 Turkish troops on the island, where they are technically occupiers on EU soil.

Publicly, Erdogan has dismissed the issue of recognition and of troop withdrawals. Turkey has occupied the island's nothern third since 1974 when it invaded in response to an Athens-engineered coup seeking to join Cyprus with Greece.

In an April referendum, Greek Cypriots rejected a UN reunification plan, while Turkish Cypriots approved it. As a result a divided island joined the European Union in May, with the Turkish Cypriots left out in the cold.