flash bulletin - news and comments on Kurdish and Middle Eastern issues

27 September 2006

1. "Kurdish mayors stand trial in Turkey", "We are standing behind each of the 405 words in our famous letter," Yenisehir Mayor Firat Anli told the court, reading from the five-page statement. "If examined, our letter points to the need for maturity to tolerate opposition to freedom of speech and the establishment of a democratic living system.".

2. "Barroso says EU needs constitution before letting Turkey in", The European Union needs to overhaul its decision-making machinery before admitting Turkey and Croatia, European Commission President Jose Barroso said.

3. "Let there be a train crash if that's how it's going to go", Comment by Mehmet Ali Birand.

4. "Draft Kurdish constitution may legitimize PKK presence in Iraq", The draft says that persons who seek political asylum in northern Iraq may not be extradited to the country where they are coming from, the BBC Turkish Service reported yesterday, noting that this may lead to granting a constitutional right to take refuge in Iraq to members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who are already located there.

5. "Iraq police station is seized by Kurds", Kurdish militiamen seized a police station in northern Iraq yesterday to prevent its transfer to a new Sunni Arab commander, igniting a daylong standoff that echoed the parliament's continuing unease over territory-sharing in the final administrative map of Iraq.

6. "Kurds and Arabs Vie for Control of Mosul", Across northern Iraq people are voting with their feet. In and around Mosul, the third-largest Iraqi city, some 70,000 Kurds have fled their homes so far this year.

1. - Associated Presse - "Kurdish mayors stand trial in Turkey":

ANKARA / 26 September 2006 / by Selcan Hacaoglu

Fifty-six Kurdish mayors stood trial Tuesday, accused in Turkey's latest freedom-of-speech case on charges of helping terrorists by arguing to keep a Kurdish TV station on the air.

The Denmark-based Roj television station is banned in Turkey. It often features leaders of the main outlawed Kurdish guerrilla group speaking by satellite telephone from their mountain hideouts in northern Iraq. Their comments are accompanied by images of rebels training or attacking Turkish soldiers.

The mayors from the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party were indicted after writing a letter to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen asking him not to pull the plug on the TV station, despite claims by Turkey that it is a PKK propaganda machine.

In recent years, the autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has stepped up its bombings and attacks across Turkey, targeting civilians and tourists as well as troops. The PKK has been listed by the EU and the United States as a terrorist organization.

Appearing before the court in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast, the mayors pleaded innocent to the charges and defended their letter as "free speech."

"We are standing behind each of the 405 words in our famous letter," Yenisehir Mayor Firat Anli told the court, reading from the five-page statement. "If examined, our letter points to the need for maturity to tolerate opposition to freedom of speech and the establishment of a democratic living system."

A Turkish prosecutor demanded 15 years in prison for the mayors, most of whom face separate charges for their alleged ties to the rebels. The court adjourned the trial until Nov. 21.

Danish-Turkish relations have long been strained over Kurdish groups based in Denmark. The trial could damage Turkey's relations with the European Union, which has been pushing it to strengthen the rights of its Kurdish minority and eliminate limits on free speech.

On Tuesday, EU official Olli Rehn said he could not imagine having a country as an EU member that doesn't respect freedom of speech. The EU wants Turkey to change laws that penalize insulting the Turkish Republic, its officials or "Turkishness."

The military is suspicious of the Kurdish mayors' affiliation and critical of their performance.

2. - bbj.hu / Bloomberg - "Barroso says EU needs constitution before letting Turkey in":

26 September 2006

The European Union needs to overhaul its decision-making machinery before admitting Turkey and Croatia, European Commission President Jose Barroso said. The defeat of the EU's planned constitution leaves the bloc with a decision-making system that will be stretched to the limit once Bulgaria and Romania become members, Barroso said at a news conference in Brussels yesterday with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. „We can't continue enlarging again and again without clarifying the institutional issue,” he said. „As a president of the EU commission I think it would be unwise to bring in other member states apart from Romania and Bulgaria, who will be joining us soon.” The commission, the EU's executive arm, will rule on Tuesday whether Romania and southern neighbor Bulgaria can join as scheduled on January 1. Turkey, with entry talks under way since October, is seeking to join in 10 to 15 years. Croatia is also negotiating entry and Macedonia was declared an EU „candidate” last month. Bulgaria and Romania would expand the EU to 27 countries, the limit under current treaties. The constitution, designed to make an even larger EU run more efficiently, was vetoed last year in referendums in France and the Netherlands. EU leaders have put off trying to salvage the constitution until the end of 2008. Barroso said he hoped the EU would conclude negotiations with Croatia „as quickly as possible.”

3. - Turkish Daily News- "Let there be a train crash if that's how it's going to go":

26 September 2006 / Comment by Mehmet Ali Birand

If we are going to start a new fight every week and continuously cut each other’s throats in the name of opposing Europe, if the European Parliament is going to continue with its current attitude, if some EU countries in the hope of resolving domestic problems persist with ridiculous moves even at the risk of driving Turkey away from Europe, then let it jump from the frying pan into the fire.

I've been bothered by the same disturbance for a long time. I eventually exploded after Murat Yetkin wrote about it last week. Indeed, we are approaching an unbearably difficult point. Something inside me wants to say “If we really have no intention of pursuing this any longer and if we have vowed to turn life into hell for each other, then let's just give it up. Let there be a train wreck if that's what needs to happen.”

I don't utter this out loud because I know how costly the bill will be later once you stop negotiations. It's easy for those who do not know how huge that bill is to say, “What will be will be?” It's easy to freeze negotiations, but restarting talks would take compromises so huge, nobody could bear that burden.

We know that this is the greatest expectation of those who don't want to see Turkey in Europe. They want the Turkish public to run out of patience and start acting in its usual worked-up ways. They are even doing their best to provoke such a train wreck.

If there's one thing those who'd like to see Turkey in Europe should not do, it would be to try freezing negotiations.

This is what logic dictates; however, people cannot act only according to the rules of logic. We all sometimes base our decisions on emotions. Perhaps we have regrets later on, but there is a moment when we sometimes give in, feeling we can't take it anymore.

That limit has not yet been reached.

However, we're close.

If this is how it continues, we might be left with no other option but to allow things to collapse. We can turn in a one-way street.

Just look at this scene:

Unbelievably ridiculous arguments are being spawned merely for the sake of opposing and pursuing one's own interests to bring down the European project instead of thinking about the country's future.

Those who want Article 301 to be abolished are made to look like they support insults against Turkey. Whenever the Law on Associations is mentioned, the polemic of the Sevres and Lausanne treaties heats up again. As Parliament slams harmonization laws, Turkey's EU chief negotiator Ali Babacan is taking care of other business in different parts of the world. The ninth harmonization package, so important to the process, is being left to a bureaucrat and ministers who have little knowledge of the topic.

As the government has lost enthusiasm for the EU, a party like the Republican People's Party (CHP), supposedly a social democratic party, is opposing the very principles it should be protecting vehemently and the idea of Europe.

We are falling apart.

We are falling apart completely.

At one point, we thought our rulers had a vision. It all turned out to be a political show. Both the opposition and the government were actually thinking about themselves only.

Is Europe acting any smarter?

As much as Turkey has turned Europe into a matter of domestic politics and as much as Turkey is handling the issue coarsely and with an attitude that will create deep regret in the future, Europe has the same mentality.

Those who rule Europe also have clearly shown that they are dwarves, deprived of any vision and that they only think about domestic political gains on the subject of Turkey.

First, they made a mess of the Cyprus problem, then they turned the entire technical problem of Turkey opening its airports and ports to Greek Cyprus into a political one. Now they've reached an impasse.

Why?

Because games in domestic politics in France, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands call for that, that's why.

They have toughened negotiations on each chapter out of pure political or ideological concerns.

As if these weren't enough, the European Parliament has literally turned out to show up before Turkey with the most ridiculous expectations and demands in all of their coarseness.

Europe, too, is completely falling apart.

Neither Turkey nor Europe care about the other; they take each other lightly. They are playing domestic political games.

When confronted with this scene, one tells one's self, “Then we should deprive them of these toys so they'll learn their lesson,” only to hesitate upon thinking what would be at stake in that case.

Train wrecks can be avoided only up to a certain point.

Only so many games can be played.

4. - Turkish Daily News - "Draft Kurdish constitution may legitimize PKK presence in Iraq":

ANKARA / 26 September 2006

The regional Kurdish parliament in the de facto autonomous northern Iraq region has begun debating the region's permanent constitution, a contentious document laying claim to other parts of Iraq and setting conditions for Kurds to remain part of the country.

The 160-article document will be debated and amended ahead of a Dec. 1 parliamentary vote by the regional Kurdish parliament.

The draft says that persons who seek political asylum in northern Iraq may not be extradited to the country where they are coming from, the BBC Turkish Service reported yesterday, noting that this may lead to granting a constitutional right to take refuge in Iraq to members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who are already located there. Ankara says up to 5,000 PKK militants are using northern Iraq as a safe haven.

“Extradition of persons seeking political asylum to the countries where they escape from is not possible,” the Dogan News Agency quoted the related Article 40 of the draft constitution as saying.

According to Article 2, Iraq's Kurdish region consists of the three current provinces of Dohuk, Arbil and Sulaimaniya, but also the disputed city of Kirkuk and parts of the Diyalah, Nineveh and Wasit provinces, the Agence France-Presse reported.

Ankara has insistently said that holding a referendum to determine the status of the strategically important city of Kirkuk will not by itself offer a solution unless a consensus is reached among the different ethnic groups living in the city.

“The populations of these areas were taken from Kurdistan and when they are returned to Kurdistan, they will benefit from the same rights given to them by the federal constitution,” stated the article.

Large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and Shiites live in these areas and have not expressed an interest in being part of the Kurdish autonomous region.

During a meeting last month in Ankara, Turkmen groups said the inclusion of Kirkuk within the local Kurdish government in the north of Iraq cannot be accepted.

The official languages of the region are Arabic and Kurdish and the population is recognized to include Turkmens, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds and Arabs.

The constitution goes on to state that the Kurds have “chosen a liberal federation with Iraq as long as it respects the federal constitution, its federal, democratic and multiparty parliament.”

The Kurds reserve the right to review this choice should the federal constitution be violated, particularly the democratic or human rights aspects, or if a federal constitution article allowing a referendum for the future of Kirkuk is not respected.

The Kurdish national flag will hang in government offices side by side with the Iraqi federal flag (which has yet to be redrawn), stated the draft. Currently the Kurdish regional president, Massoud Barzani, has banned the display of Iraq's old national flag.

While the constitution bans the existence of militias, it recognizes the peshmerga as “the regular forces to protect and defend the region.”

5. - Baltimore Sun - "Iraq police station is seized by Kurds":

BAGHDAD / 26 September 2006 / by Kim Murphy

Kurdish militiamen seized a police station in northern Iraq yesterday to prevent its transfer to a new Sunni Arab commander, igniting a daylong standoff that echoed the parliament's continuing unease over territory-sharing in the final administrative map of Iraq.

The clash in the town of Jalawla underscored the potential for violence as parliament prepared to study the contentious issue of creating autonomous regions in this multiethnic and heavily armed nation.

While most of the biggest political disputes are likely to center on oil fields in the south, in largely Shiite areas, and the northern city of Kirkuk, an oil-rich area claimed by the Kurds, the clash in Jalawla was an early warning flash in what many fear could be a turbulent battle for the frontiers of a future Kurdish zone.

Authorities said the former Kurdish police commander in Jalawla, who was recently removed from his job by the Diyala provincial council, arrived at the station Sunday night, accompanied by a force of Kurdish armed men, and laid siege.

The Kurdish forces opened fire at the police station with heavy machine guns and rocket launchers, police sources said, destroying three cars and entering the building. The new commander and his men were reportedly locked in a room, but police had only sporadic communications through the day and did not know whether any were injured or killed.

Authorities in the nearby regional police headquarters had established a command post and were preparing a plan to retake the station, police sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Kurdish leaders say Jalawla, about 95 miles northeast of Baghdad, near Iran, was primarily a Kurdish town years ago. Hundreds of Kurds were driven out during the 1980s by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's "Arabization" campaign in northern Iraq.

Kurds have been pushing to include such lands within the boundaries of an officially designated and largely autonomous Kurdistan. Most prominent has been the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the scene of violence this month when six bombs exploded and killed 24 people. More than 80 people were injured.

The regional parliament of Kurdistan forwarded a draft constitution to the government in Baghdad on Sunday that includes Kirkuk and other disputed areas within Kurdish-controlled territories. As now organized, the northern Kurds have their own president, taxing powers and militia, and they exercise primary authority over natural resources, including oil and water. Many Shiites want similar powers in the south.

Like Kirkuk, Jalawla is a mixed city, with Arabs and Turkmen living alongside Kurds. The local council insists that the town, on the southern edge of the Kurdish-dominated north, remain part of the Diyala province and outside an eventual Kurdistan.

As the dispute has mounted in recent months, Arab residents have complained of harsh treatment at the hands of Kurdish militia forces. Those complaints were followed by the Kurdish police chief's ouster Sunday, setting the stage for the clash over the installation of the commander.

The broader scope of the debate was under way in Baghdad as the parliament began setting up a committee to review the constitution in preparation for proposed legislation that could clear the way for semiautonomous regions not only in Kurdistan but all over Iraq, including oil-rich Shiite areas of southern Iraq.

Sunni Arabs, concentrated in the resource-poor central and western regions, have sought to block the creation of more federated regions. They fear it would cut them off from oil revenues and splinter the country.

An agreement over the weekend put off a political crisis by calling for the constitutional review and a delay in creating any such regions for at least 18 months after any new federalism law is enacted.

But parliament deputies argued yesterday morning over the timing of the constitutional review. Kurdish deputies at one point walked out in the face of accusations from one lawmaker that Kurds had driven Arabs out of the northern city of Mosul.

The parliament ultimately agreed to the proportional composition of the review committee and was set to name its members today. Parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashadani, a Sunni, urged lawmakers not to lose sight of the significance of the compromise in an issue that had threatened Iraq's four-month-old national unity government.

Kim Murphy writes for the Los Angeles Times.

6. - The Independent - "Kurds and Arabs Vie for Control of Mosul":

27 September 2006 / by Patrick Cockburn

Across northern Iraq people are voting with their feet. In and around Mosul, the third-largest Iraqi city, some 70,000 Kurds have fled their homes so far this year. Many have run away after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a note telling them to get out in 72 hours. Others became refugees because they feared that a war between Arabs and Kurds for control of the region was not far off.

"There is no solution except the division of the province," said Khasro Goran, the powerful Kurdish deputy governor of Mosul. He believes that all the Kurds in the province want to join the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which under the federal constitution is almost an independent state.

Violence in Mosul, a city of 1.75 million people, is not as bad as in Baghdad or Diyala province, claims Mr Goran, who is also head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Mosul, during an interview with The Independent inside his heavily fortified headquarters. This is not saying a great deal, since he added that 40 to 50 people were being killed in Mosul every week.

"Two officials from the KDP working in this building were shot dead outside their homes a few days ago," said Mr Goran, an urbane, highly educated man who spent 11 years in exile in Sweden and speaks five languages. He has been the target of eight assassination attempts, in which several guards have been killed.

It was only possible for me to go to Mosul because Mr Goran sent several of his bodyguards in two cars to pick me up in the Kurdish capital, Arbil. Travelling at high speed into Mosul, they pointed to the remains of the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which had been destroyed by a large suicide bomb in a Volvo in mid-August. The blast killed 17 men, mostly soldiers on guard. Fearing a similar attack, the KDP had just added another concrete blast wall to its already impressive defences.

The fate of Mosul, the largest city in Iraq in which Sunni Arabs are in the majority, may determine how far Iraq survives as a single country. The proportion of Arabs to Kurds in the province and city is much disputed.

There is no doubt that the Arabs are in a majority of around 55 per cent in the province, but they angrily dispute the Kurdish claim to make up a third of the 2.7 million population. When an Arab MP in parliament in Baghdad claimed this week that the Kurds made up only 4 per cent of the population of the city, all the Kurdish MPs staged a walk-out in a fury.

At the moment nobody wholly controls Mosul, one of the oldest urban centres on the planet, sprawling along both banks of the Tigris river. The 2nd Iraqi Army Division is based in the city, and the 3rd Division is outside, each 15,000-strong, and both of them are at least 50 per cent Kurdish, and with Kurdish commanders. But the Americans, fearful of the Sunni Arab reaction, have forbidden the army to patrol too aggressively.

If the Kurds have the army, the Arabs have the police. There are 16,000 policemen in the province, and 6,000 in the city. The Kurds regard them with the greatest suspicion. As we drove to the KDP headquarters, one of the Kurdish bodyguards told me to "hide your notebook and pen if we stop at a police checkpoint, because we don't trust them". The Kurds have long accused senior police officers of being crypto-Baathists, sympathetic to the insurgents.

The US experience in Mosul has not been happy. During the first year of the occupation General David Petraeus, the US commander of the 101st Division, tried to conciliate the many officers and officials of Saddan Hussein's regime who came from Mosul. In the long term the experiment failed. When US marines stormed Fallujah in November 2004, most of the police in Mosul resigned, and insurgents captured 30 police stations and $40m (£21m) worth of arms almost without firing a shot. The US was forced to call in Kurdish peshmerga fighters to retake the city.

The US and Kurds still co-operate. The Americans are highly reliant on Kurdish intelligence to search for guerrillas. But they are also conscious that a recent confidential Pentagon poll leaked to ABC television showed that 75 per cent of Sunni Arabs in Iraq supported armed resistance. The US forces, who used to have four bases in the city, have now retreated to one large base at the airport.

A final explosion may not be far away. Under article 140 of the new Iraqi constitution, there must be a vote by the end of 2007 to decide which regions will join the KRG. Mr Goran says that such a poll could see all of Mosul province east of the Tigris and the districts of Sinjar and Talafar to the west of the river joining the KRG. "As we get closer to the implementation of article 140, the problems will get worse," he says.