20 July 2007

1. "Turkey’s Election May Prove a Watershed", for 84 years, modern Turkey has been defined by a holy trinity — the army, the republic and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Each was linked inextricably to the others and all were beyond reproach. But a deep transformation is under way in this nation of 73 million and elections this Sunday may prove a watershed: liberal Turks, once the principal political supporters of the nation’s ruling secular elite, are turning their backs on it and pledging their votes to religious politicians as well as a broad new array of independents.

2. "Turkish nationalists look set for a comeback in general elections", ahead of general elections on Sunday, the leader of Turkey's hardline nationalists flung a hangman's noose from a podium to make a point during a political rally: the prime minister is soft on terrorism and should hang the imprisoned leader of Kurdish rebels.

3. "Turkish military marches into unknown", in triggering the forthcoming general election, the army may for once have damaged its own causes.

4. "Conscientious objector's case spotlights Turkish military", Turkey's most famous conscientious objector is embroiled in yet another controversy with authorities. Having already served 701 days in prison over the past 12 years, officials want to put Osman Murat Ulke behind bars again in connection with his refusal to answer his draft notice in 1995. The most recent move against Ulke places Turkey at odds with the European Court of Human Rights, which last year ruled that the government violated his rights.

5. "Condemning Military is "Not a Crime", a peace court in Sanliurfa has decreed that eight rights activists and members of professional associations were in their right to criticise the publication of an Internet memorandum by the General Staff on 27 April.

6. "Turkey bombards northern Iraq", Turkey's military has waged a cross-border incursion into Iraq, bombarding northern areas of the country, the Iraqi government said.

7. "Blood, oil and the Kurdish nightmare", the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. But foreign empires covet Kurdistan’s mountains for their treasure of black gold.

8. "Kurdish Journalist, Activist Sentenced To Death In Iran", authorities in Iran's northwestern Kurdistan Province have condemned two ethnic Kurds to death for acting against the country's national security.

1. - New York Times - "Turkey’s Election May Prove a Watershed":

ISTANBUL / 17 July 2007

For 84 years, modern Turkey has been defined by a holy trinity — the army, the republic and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Each was linked inextricably to the others and all were beyond reproach.

But a deep transformation is under way in this nation of 73 million and elections this Sunday may prove a watershed: liberal Turks, once the principal political supporters of the nation’s ruling secular elite, are turning their backs on it and pledging their votes to religious politicians as well as a broad new array of independents.

They say they are fed up with attempts by the elite to use religion to divide Turks and that Turkey, a predominantly Muslim democracy with a rapidly growing economy, needs to relax its controlling approach towards its own citizens in order to become a modern democracy.

“This election is a power struggle between those who want change and those who don’t,” said Zafer Uskul, a prominent constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate who is running from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-inspired party in southern Turkey. “Religion is just an excuse.”

“In 50 years, people will write that this was the time Turkey started to come to terms with its own people,” added Suat Kiniklioglu, a foreign policy expert who is one of about 20 liberal Turks who recently joined Mr. Erdogan’s party as part of its effort to appeal more broadly to secular Turkish society.

The real threat to Turkish democracy, he and others argue, comes not from Islamic fundamentalism, as the military and the secular parties it backs contend, but from political meddling by the military. Commanders have deposed elected governments four times in Turkey’s history and in April challenged the government in a written statement, precipitating elections.

Now, as the election approaches, unleashing a power struggle between the nation’s secular elite and a group of religious politicians who draw their support from Turkey’s lower and middle classes, a vocal new civil society may just tip the balance, and help offset the danger of rising nationalism. The number of independent candidates running have more than tripled compared to the last election, many of them members of smaller parties that would not clear a 10 percent hurdle. “You heat water to 99 degrees, and it’s still water,” said Baskin Oran, an opinionated political science professor running as an independent candidate in Istanbul. “You heat it one more degree and it’s not water any more. This one degree is the year 2007.”

The current shift has its roots in the dual nature of Turkish democracy. Since the 1940s, a powerful chain of bureaucrats, judges, and army generals from the secular upper classes have controlled the most sensitive Turkish affairs, while the elected government, currently headed by the Justice and Development party of Mr. Erdogan, manages more mundane aspects, much like a municipality.

But Turkish society has changed markedly in recent decades, with religious Turks gaining wealth and status and moving into public view. Women are seen now wearing head scarves — a tradition that early Turkish legislation tried to change by banning it from public buildings — as they shop in malls, ride motor scooters and drive cars, and rules against them seem woefully outdated.

“This narrow shirt of secularism has become a little too tight and choking for Turkish society,” said VolkanAytar, of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a prominent think tank.

Ilhan Dogus, a member of the Young Civilians, an association of young people who oppose the military’s role in politics, said mischievously that women in head scarves are more likely than their less religious counterparts to know that Marx refers to a German philosopher, not the British department store, Marks and Spencer.

The state elite “wanted society to fit their theory,” said Recep Senturk, a research fellow at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul. “If religion doesn’t disappear, we’ll make it disappear because our theory says so.”

Liberals like Mr. Uskul, are pioneers in joining political forces with Mr. Erdogan’s party, which is known by its Turkish initials, AK, and is considered by many secular Turks to be too Islamic.

In Tarsus, an upper middle class town in southern Turkey that has supported secular parties in the past, Mr. Uskul, 63, was talking to lawyers last Wednesday, asking for their vote.

“Some of you might be asking, ‘What is he doing in the AK party?’ ” he said at the Tarsus Bar Association, peering earnestly through rimless glasses and clasping his hands humbly between his knees. “There was no other party to do what I wanted to do in parliament. The people who should be defending democracy are holding on to military coups.”

A woman in a black T-shirt shot back: “I wonder whether you still have worries about AK as a threat to secularism?” He replied: “My wife has no concerns. Nor does my daughter, and you shouldn’t either.”

The portion of Turkish society hanging onto the old order is shrinking, Mr. Aytar asserts, so when more than a million Turks gathered this spring to protest what they said was creeping Islamism, bizarre combinations were on display. People wore masks of Ataturk, who died more than 50 years ago. The music that played was from 1930s. ”They have calcified,” Mr. Oran said.

Mr. Oran estimates that parties representing that order will get about a quarter of the vote, largely thanks to a campaign of fear that plays on secularism. An ad last week in Cumhuriyet, a staunchly pro-state daily, showed a black ballot box and a woman’s eyes behind the rectangular cut-out, evoking a facial veil. “Are you aware of the danger?” read the headline.

Before the ill-fated presidential election this spring, a television ad flashed the years 1881 and 2007 on a black screen, evoking the year of Ataturk’s birth and the year that the ad said his secular reforms died.

The campaign was a final straw for some Turkish liberals, who say that it distracts from Turkey’s real problems: unemployment, insufficient social security, poor relations with Kurds andArmenians, and European Union membership.

A dangerous offshoot is nationalists, who play on Turks’ fears by saying that the European Union wants to tear Turkey apart. The main nationalist party appears set to win enough votes to qualify for seats in the parliament, supported by Turks who feel overwhelmed by the sharp changes in the country over the past five years.

Liberals responded to the campaign with wit, appealing to everybody in Turkey’s complex political landscape.

When a liberal newspaper asked for a response to the ads, Ferhat Tumer, a 32-year-old advertising designer, and his colleagues at the ad agency Cocuklar began to brainstorm.

The result was a one-minute cartoon in the style of a late-night American television ad. Only two Turkish television channels were willing to air it, but it became a cult favorite overnight on the Internet.

“Is thinking a crime? Speech not allowed? Is your society excluding you, or forcing you to take sides?” a salesman-style voice asks in staccato Turkish. “Move away from fragile systems that are easily toppled. Original Democracy, adhered to by millions around the world, is now available in Turkey!”

The ad would probably not have been possible five years ago. But it is less confrontational than the one that Cocuklar, which means “Kids” in Turkish, first proposed, which was a direct dig at the military.

Though brave, the newspaper that called for the ads, Radikal, was not foolhardy.

“We believe there is a hidden group of people in Turkey who are bored by this talk,” said Mr. Tumer, fiddling with a green yoyo at a glass table. “We know you’re not afraid of this scarf. When she takes it off, she still has the same ideas.

“This paranoia, this tension, for the young generation, it’s just old fashioned.”

Inherent in Turkey’s progress was a strange contradiction. The state excluded religion from public life, and looked down upon religious, traditional Turks as backward — yet when those people became more integrated in public life, it condemned them as enemies of the state.

“Secular urban forces headed by the army look at these people as if they were aliens from outer space,” said Dogu Ergil, a sociology professor at Ankara University. “But they are the products of the very regime that left them out.”

As Turkey moves ahead, it will have to grapple with where Islam fits in the building of an equitable society. Almost all Turks, after all, are observant Muslims. But the liberals say that the debate will not be over whether Islam should be part of the government, but rather over what type of secularism fits best.

Mr. Uskul argues that Turkey’s bid for European Union membership, pushed by Mr. Erdogan’s party, has set it on a course of democracy that virtually guarantees secularism.

“The AK party is Turkey’s reality,” he said, chewing a cracker at a kebab restaurant. “Turks have to accept it.

“But it should proceed by showing it’s not a threat to Turkey. I am an example of its willingness to reform.”

2. - AP - "Turkish nationalists look set for a comeback in general elections":

ANKARA / 19 July 2007

Ahead of general elections on Sunday, the leader of Turkey's hardline nationalists flung a hangman's noose from a podium to make a point during a political rally: the prime minister is soft on terrorism and should hang the imprisoned leader of Kurdish rebels.

Turkey has abolished the death penalty, and there's little chance nationalist Devlet Bahceli will get his wish for now.

But his Nationalist Action Party is expected to make a comeback in a sign of growing frustration with the guerrilla problem as well as skepticism about Turkey's bid to join the European Union.

Opinion polls indicate the party, known by its Turkish acronym MHP, is likely to return to Parliament after a five-year absence and could become the third-largest group of lawmakers. The same polls suggest the Islamic-rooted party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to retain a majority of seats, albeit by a slimmer margin.

Even so, the MHP could emerge as a key player in any effort to form a coalition, though it is hard to tell where its allegiances might lie in a showdown between Erdogan's camp and a secular opposition that believes he is trying to impose Islam on society. The MHP has secular traditions, but many supporters come from the same traditional background as poor, conservative Muslims who back the ruling party.

The nationalist party has tried to harness anger over surging violence by separatist rebels from Turkey's ethnic Kurdish minority. It is also exploiting a growing view that the EU has been overbearing and arrogant as Turkey tries to join the European club.

Bahceli has urged stronger action against the imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan's rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, and against Iraqi Kurds who many in Turkey believe are at least tacitly cooperating with guerrillas striking Turkey from bases in northern Iraq.

Bahceli threw the hangman's noose after Erdogan poked fun at him for reluctantly agreeing to abolish the death penalty as part of EU-oriented reforms in 2002, when the nationalists were a junior member of the coalition government. Bahceli said Erdogan should have used his parliamentary majority to engineer the execution of Ocalan.

«If we have the majority, I will bring back hanging for war and terror crimes,» Bahceli said at another rally in a husky smoker's voice made more hoarse from constant public speaking. Bringing back capital punishment would require a constitutional change.

Bahceli, a former lecturer in economics, took control of the party in 1997 and ousted radicals, restraining the street fighting of young party members.

Battles in the 1970s between leftists and the Gray Wolves, an organization that Bahceli helped form as a student in the 1960s and which acts as the party's youth wing, killed around 5,000 people and prompted the military to seize power in 1980 to restore control. Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman who wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was a Gray Wolf.

Bahceli often appears reserved and unassuming, despite his past radical activities. Followers greet him by clasping their fingers into a «wolf» sign.

One candidate on the nationalist party ticket is Naim Suleymanoglu, a three-time Olympic gold medalist in weightlifting who is known as the «Pocket Hercules» for his diminutive size. An ethnic Turk from Bulgaria, Suleymanoglu defected to Turkey in 1986.

The party supports a military incursion into northern Iraq to root out Kurdish rebels there.
Zeynel, a medical student, said he would vote for Bahceli and accused Erdogan of doing «nothing» against the guerrillas. Yet he refused to give his last name, not wanting to be publicly identified with a party that opponents describe as fascist and racist.

3. - Financial Times - "Turkish military marches into unknown":

In triggering the forthcoming general election, the army may for once have damaged its own causes.

ANKARA / 19 July 2007 / by Vincent Boland

A massive granite monument at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula in western Turkey commemorates the 86,692 Ottoman soldiers who died fighting the Allies during the first world war.

To many Turks it also represents the moment at which the armed forces stepped forward to shape the country's destiny. They have been doing so ever since, in one guise or another.

The latest manifestation of the military influence on political life is a constitutional crisis largely initiated by the general staff that has led to calls for an early general election to be held on July 22.

On April 27, in what has become known as "the e-coup", the general staff issued an ultimatum on its website about the "growing threat" to Turkey's secular republic. Since the time of Kemal Ataturk, the soldier who forged Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire, the military has seen itself as the guardian of the republic and its Kemalist principles, of which secularism - more accurately laicism, involving strict control of religious observance by the state - is probably the most important.

The ultimatum did not name names; nor did it really read like a coherent statement of principle - a fact that may account for its lack of gravitas.

But it was interpreted to mean that the imminent elevation of Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister with past links to Turkey's Islamist movement - like the governing AKP party of which he is a member - as the next president, was not acceptable to the military high command.

This time, though, the generals may have overestimated their ability to engineer a desirable outcome.

Turks have an admiring but not uncritical relationship with their soldiers. It is said - and not just by generals - that the armed forces are the country's most respected institution. Others say they are the most opaque, the most unaccountable, and the most self-regarding institution.

General Yashar Buyukanit, chief of the general staff - a gruff, bullish man of 67 - seems to embody the institution's contempt for Turkish civil society (such as it is). Few Europeans can name the head of their armed forces. In Turkey everybody knows who Gen Buyukanit is. This is to be expected: the Turkish armed forces have ousted four elected governments since 1960.

The coups have been rationalised as a necessary development that prevented something worse from happening at times of political crisis, although there is general agreement that the Latin American-style 1980 coup, with its total ban on political activity, did lasting damage to Turkey's political development.

The "e-coup" has arguably had two unexpected - or at least unintended - developments. One is a surge in support for the AKP.

Ihsan Dagi, professor of international relations at Middle East Technical University, says: "The military got what it wanted with the ultimatum, which was to prevent Gul's appointment as president. But it stirred the democratic reflex, and that has certainly increased the standing of the AKP."

Second, it damaged the credibility of the opposition CHP, an ostensibly social democratic party that appeared to support the ultimatum. The avowedly secularist CHP is so identified with the military that it can sometimes seem like its political wing.

There is no question that the military has an enormous stake in the outcome of this election, for political, ideological, and even commercial reasons. Its massive economic interests, from automotive to insurance, held through the armed forces pension funds, are a pillar of the secular business establishment.

This entrenched corporate hierarchy is facing competition for capital and resources from the Anatolian entrepreneurial bourgeoisie that forms the core of the AKP's support. The perceived threat to secularism posed by the AKP, however, lies behind the April 27 e-coup. Gen Buyukanit declared before that event that Turkey's next president should be "secular not just in word but in essence".

Clearly, he and his colleagues felt that Mr Gul, whose wife wears the Islamic headscarf, did not meet those criteria. After the election, parliament is expected to try again to elect a new president, and Mr Gul has not ruled out standing.

The question in that event is whether the general staff will have anything else to add to its April 27 statement. As Prof Dagi says: "The military may be capable of learning that once they interfere in the political process they damage their own cause."

4. - Eurasianet - "Conscientious objector's case spotlights Turkish military":

Turkey's most famous conscientious objector is embroiled in yet another controversy with authorities. Having already served 701 days in prison over the past 12 years, officials want to put Osman Murat Ulke behind bars again in connection with his refusal to answer his draft notice in 1995. The most recent move against Ulke places Turkey at odds with the European Court of Human Rights, which last year ruled that the government violated his rights.

19 July 2007 / by Nicholas Birch

An official summons issued in June ordered Ulke to turn himself in to serve a 17-month prison sentence in connection with what authorities have deemed draft-dodging. If Ulke does not voluntarily surrender, an arrest warrant could be issued against him, a military prosecutor warned in the summons.

Ulke insists he is a conscientious objector to military service. However, Turkey, where all males must serve in the armed forces, does not recognize conscientious objection as a legal way out of the draft. Ulke's long tangle with authority began in 1995, when, as part of a nascent group dedicated to winning legal status for conscientious objection, he publicly burned his draft notice and declared to journalists; "I am not a soldier, and never will be."

In Israel or South Korea, conscientious objectors face imprisonment only once. In Turkey, however, pacifism can draw repeated punishment. In Ulke's case, punishment began in 1996, when he was prosecuted on charges of "alienating the public from the institution of military service." Rather than jailing him, authorities tried to "impress" him, forcibly taking him to a military post in the town of Bilecik. When he refused to don a uniform or to respond to orders, he was put in a military prison for insubordination.

A month later, he was released and immediately became caught in a Kafkaesque cycle of defiance and confinement within the closed system of military justice. From 1996-98, he was convicted of desertion by a military court on several occasions. His desertion convictions brought on a variety of civil penalties that had the cumulative effect of rendering him a non-person. For example, he is denied the right to hold a passport, or open a bank account. And he is legally barred from marrying the mother of his three-year-old son. Even a weekend trip with friends is fraught with danger. "Book into a hotel, and I could be arrested," Ulke says on the phone from his home in the western Turkish city of Izmir.

In 1998, Ulke filed suit with the European Court of Human Rights seeking to force Turkey to confront the issue of conscientious objection. In January 2006, the court ruled that the punishments meted out against him "had been disproportionate to the aim of ensuring that he did his military service."

"The clandestine life amounting almost to 'civil death' which the applicant has been compelled to adopt is incompatible with the punishment regime of a democratic society," the ECHR ruling added.

Under the ruling, Turkey was found in breach of Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights and ordered to pay Ulke €10,000 (about US$13,800). In saluting the decision, Ulke stated that "conscientious objection has always been the sine qua non condition of my loyalty to my identity, character and convictions." Although the ECHR recognized that Ulke's suffering was brought about by the deprivation of rights, the court did not touch on the legality of conscientious objection.

Since the ECHR ruling, Ulke has suffered from an increase in official harassment, including police surveillance, according to Human Rights Watch. The most recent summons would appear to totally flout the ECHR's decision. "It's possible the prosecutor hasn't heard of the judgment", says Ulke's British lawyer, Tony Fisher. "But that in itself constitutes a breach of the ECHR decision, which Turkey's government had an obligation to inform its judiciary about."

The Committee of Ministers, the European body charged with ensuring that states party to the convention comply with ECHR judgments, has been following Ulke's case closely since 2006. At a February 2007 meeting, it issued a statement deploring "the fact that the Turkish authorities had as yet taken no individual measure to put an end to the violation found by the Court [ECHR]."

This June, the Turkish authorities informed the Committee of Ministers that a draft law aimed at preventing repeated punishment of conscientious objectors was under preparation. Contacted by phone, officials were unable to say when the law might be passed.

"Turkey is normally pretty quick at complying with ECHR judgments", said Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a prominent Turkish human rights lawyer. "If there is delay here, it's because we're in the military zone."

Until mid-July, prosecutors had left Ulke alone for six years, in what appeared an attempt to avoid controversy. But that didn't make his life any easier.

The case is placing the military's role in Turkish society in the spotlight at a sensitive time for the country, when parliamentary elections are to be held 22 July, and the government's hopes for near-term accession to the European Union are flagging, if not altogether exhausted.

Ulke's predicament is tied to the fact that he lives in a country that prides itself on being a "nation of soldiers." From the start of their school education, Turkish children are encouraged to exalt the army. In the second year of high school, all students attend a compulsory class on "national security" taught by a military officer. Written under the army's auspices, the textbook used describes military service as "the most sacred service to the nation." A person who has not done it, it adds, "cannot be useful to himself, his family, or his homeland."

The attitude is widely echoed in traditional Turkish society, where men who have not done their military service are often considered unfit either to work or to marry.

Questioning the military's preeminence remains a dangerous thing. A well-known novelist and columnist Perihan Magden faced 3 years in jail last year when an Istanbul prosecutor deemed an article she wrote in support of a civilian alternative to military service an "insult to Turkishness." A trial in 2006 resulted in her acquittal.

An author of a book on Turkish militarism, Ayse Gul Altinay, thinks the state has painted itself into a corner. "When you have presented [military service] as an essential part of national identity, how do you go about changing it?" she asks.

Attitudes are nonetheless changing.

Ulke remembers that when he decided to declare his conscientious objection in 1992, even like-minded people thought it was "an act of insanity." "Now human rights organizations, parties and individuals are beginning to show sympathy, even if only passive," he says. "The taboo has been broken."

While the number of people evading military service in Turkey is thought to be more than 100,000, conscientious objectors remain a tiny minority, with only about 80 men openly stating their convictions. "That hasn't stopped almost all Turks hearing about us", says Ugur Yorulmaz, who studied in a military high school before turning pacifist.

"We're a cost-effective bunch."

5. - Bianet - "Condemning Military is "Not a Crime":

A peace court in Sanliurfa has decreed that eight rights activists and members of professional associations were in their right to criticise the publication of an Internet memorandum by the General Staff on 27 April.

ISTANBUL / 18 July 2007

Eight rights activists and members of professional associations who had publicly condemned the General Staff's "e-warning" on its Internet site, published in the night of 27 April, have been acquitted. The peace court in Sanliurfa, in south-east Turkey, decreed yesterday (16 July) that "there was no evidence of a crime" and that the press release by the accused was "within the framework of legitimate criticism and the freedom of expression".

Wrong people on trial

Mustafa Arisüt, branch president of the Association for Human Rights and Solidarity with the Oppressed (MAZLUMDER) and one of those on trial, evaluated the decision as "positive". However, he maintained the demand for those publishing the warning to be prosecuted. He added that the fact that those condemning the warning had been prosecuted was wrong.

The activists had been prosecuted for "degrading the army" under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. In a press release entitled "Military Interference in Politics is Unacceptable", they had said: "It is unacceptable that the army, which is fed and armed with modern weapons through the taxes of Turkey's people, becomes known as a 'coup/memorandum' army domestically and abroad."

Those on trial were: Mustafa Arisüt (MAZLUMDER), Gulay Koca (branch president of the Human Rights Association), Ömer Avci (Sanliurfa Lawyers' Association), Ibrahim Ayhan (Confederation of Trade Unions of Public Employees- KESK), Ahmet Kaytan (Confederation of Trade Unions of Civil Servants - MEMURSEN), Atilla Yazar (Union of Turkish Engineers and Architects' Chambers - TMMOB), Salih Samak (RUHA-DER) and Sadik Demir (branch president of trade union GENEL-IS).

Unsuccessful suit against General Staff

Indeed, NGOs in Diyarbakir, a province in south-east Turkey, have brought the General Staff to court for the memorandum. The Diyarbakir Bar Association, the Diyarbakir branch of the Human Rights Association, and the Diyarbakir branch of MAZLUMDER have sued the General Staff for the memorandum published on its website. The memorandum had implied the threat of a military coup.

However, an administrative court in Ankara has decreed that the memorandum was "not a warning, but a press statement with administrative content".

6. - Press TV - "Turkey bombards northern Iraq":

19 July 2007

Turkey's military has waged a cross-border incursion into Iraq, bombarding northern areas of the country, the Iraqi government said.

The Iraqi government said Wednesday that Turkish artillery and warplanes bombarded areas of northern Iraq and urged Turkey to stop military operations and resort to dialogue, according to news agencies.

The claim occurred amid mounting Turkish threats to strike bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, which has been launching attacks against targets in Turkey from sanctuaries in Iraq.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has told that the bombardment struck areas of the northern province of Dahuk, some 430 kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

Col. Hussein Kamal said about 250 shells were fired into Iraq from Turkey. He added that there were no casualties on the Iraqi side of the border.

"We have received reports that the Turkish government and the Turkish army have bombed border villages. The Iraqi government regrets the Turkish military operations against border cities and towns," al-Dabbagh said.

Last week, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari declared that Turkey had deployed 140,000 soldiers along its border with Iraq.

Kurdish rebels staged a bomb attack against a military vehicle, killing two Turkish soldiers and wounding six others near the Iraqi border on Wednesday.

7. - Khaleej Times - "Blood, oil and the Kurdish nightmare":

19 July 2007 / by Matein Khalid

IT WAS cruelly symbolic that Saddam Hussein invaded Iran on September 22, 1980, the very night the oil ministers of OPEC were gathered to celebrate its twentieth anniversary in the ornate Hapsburg Palace in Vienna.

The catalyst for the Iran–Iraq war, a choreography of mass slaughter that was to convulse the politics of the Gulf forever, were rooted in the unique political pathologies of Baathist Iraq and Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Once again, as in Palestine and Lebanon, the ghosts of the dismembered Ottoman Empire proved a time bomb for the destruction of an Arab state in our time. While Saddam posed as the champion of Arab nationalism against a resurgent imperial Persia camouflaged in the trappings of a revolutionary Shia theocracy, the immediate cassus belli was the Shatt al–Arab, the delta and waterway created by the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the boundary between two powerful but tormented provinces of black gold in the Middle East.

The politics of oil had compelled Winston Churchill to bulldoze ethnic and sectarian fault–lines to create the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq from the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish vassals of the Ottoman sultans. The Treaty of Sevres promised the Kurds their own homeland after the abdication of the last sultan but British colonial interests needed a pliant client state in Baghdad to control the oilfields of Kirkuk, whose oil seepages from ancient times earned it the name Baba Ghargour (“father of fire” in Persian).

A war over the Shatt al-Arab was, in essence, a war to control the production and transport of oil. Iran’s Abadan oil refinery and Iraq’s entire oil infrastructure – the port of Basra, pumping stations and loading terminals, pipelines and storage depots were all clustered on the Shatt al-Arab. While Saddam had hedged his geopolitical risk on the Shatt al-Arab with land pipelines to Syria and Turkey, while Khomeini’s Iran inherited the Shah’s offshore terminal at Kharg Island for supertankers, the fact remained the Shatt al – Arab was critical to the DNA of the oil and gas business of both Baghdad and Tehran. The struggle to control it would cost the lives of a million Iraqi and Persian young men in the bloodiest trench warfare since the battle of the Somme. It was yet another Middle East war where blood was the currency of power and control of crude oil.

The 30 million Kurds, serial losers from the cynical imperial deal making that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the phony peace of Versailles, are now the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without a state of their own. Sandwiched between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, the Kurds were victims of British imperial rule, the brutal megalomania of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad, the nationalist dictatorships in Ataturk’s Ankara, Pahlavi/Khomeini’s Iran and Alawite Syria. An old Kurdish adage goes that the only friends of the Kurds are the mountains of their hauntingly beautiful homeland. Not true. In Iraqi Kurdistan, even the mountains betrayed the Kurds. Because the mountains held one of history’s great geological lotteries. Oilfields bigger than anything that ever gushed out of Alaska, the North Sea or West Texas, second only to the Saudi kingdom’s elephantine Ghawar field.

The Royal air Force bombed Kurdish villages when their tribes revolted against the British Empire’s Hashemite client King Faisal. Every Iraqi dictator – Kassem, Aref, Ahmed Hassan Bakr and Saddam Hussein – fought wars to assert the sovereignty of an Arab state over a people whose roots were Persian, who celebrated Nawrooz as their new year, whose men wore the baggy shalwars of Kabul or Peshawar, not the thobes of the Nejd and Diyala. The Shah of Iran and the Nixon–Kissinger White House had once cynically manipulated the Kurds, with SAVAK and CIA agents running arms and hard currency to the leaders of the Kurdish peshmerga, the militia whose very name means “those who seek death”.

Death, like oil, was all too spectacular in Iraqi Kurdistan. When the Iran and the United States abandoned the Kurds, the Baathists launched an offensive against the peshmerga six hours after Saddam and Reza Pahlavi signed the diplomatic communiqué in Algeria in 1975. When Saddam and his Tikriti thugs seized power in the summer of 1979 from President Bakr, the nightmare of the Kurds became genocidal. Mass executions, torture, poison gas attacks, the shame of Halabja and Chemical Ali during the Anfal campaign in 1988, a chronicle of terror against the Kurdish people amid the silence of the Islamic world. Washington and London saw the dead children and women of Halabja, gassed to death like the victims of Auschwitz and Treblinka, but Iraq’s oil and hatred for the Ayatollah’s Iran more than compensated for 200,000 murdered Kurdish human beings. So the West and the Arab world embraced Iraq, tilted to Baghdad and sealed their conscience from the anguish of the Kurds.

In 1991, the Kurds revolted once again in the aftermath of Iraq’s epic defeat in Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait. Saddam used the same Republican Guard helicopter gunships against the Kurds that the USSR had used against the mujaheedin in pre Stinger missile Afghanistan. Two million people fled across the icy mountain passes into Turkey, a humanitarian disaster televised on CNN that finally forced the West to act, to create a de facto sovereign state in Iraqi Kurdistan. 1991 witnessed the worst snowfall in a century and winter proved as decisive in international politics in northern Iraq as it had done when Napoleon’s Grand Armee encircled Moscow in 1812 or when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Soviet Russia in 1941.

The game of nations is lethal in post–Saddam Iraq. The Kurdistan regional government of Massoud Barzani sits on one of the Arab world’s most priceless oilfields. Norwegian, Canadian, British and Chinese wildcatters are drilling for oil in the Kurd provinces of Irbil, Dahuk and Sulaimaniyah, where no Iraqi flags or soldiers are permitted and where children learn English, not Arabic, as a second language. Kirkuk could well become the new Kashmir, Jerusalem or Alsace-Lorraine of international politics, as the Turkish armed forces amass combat troops on the border to punish the PKK. Saddam tried to Arabise Kirkuk, expelled its Kurds, Assyrian and Turkomans. But Iraqi Kurdistan has 55 billion barrels of proven reserves, five times more than Mexico. The Petroleum Law in Baghdad can never be ratified if the Iraqi parliament, one fourth Kurdish, rejects it.

The world’s oil colossi are reluctant to drill in Kurdistan as the political risk is simply too great. Barzani desperately needs to appease the Turkish Army generals as Kurd oil can only be exported via pipeline to Ceyhan. Meanwhile, natural gas flares and crude oil blaze from the hills. The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. But foreign empires covet Kurdistan’s mountains for their treasure of black gold.

* Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst.

8. - RFE/RL - "Kurdish Journalist, Activist Sentenced To Death In Iran":

19 July 2007

Authorities in Iran's northwestern Kurdistan Province have condemned two ethnic Kurds to death for acting against the country's national security.

Their lawyers told Radio Farda that they will appeal their death sentences.

The trial has been accompanied by unconfirmed suggestions in the Iranian media that the two men -- journalist Adnan Hassanpur and social activist Hiwa Butimar -- were working with banned groups that oppose the government.

Iran's heavily Kurdish northwest is the scene of sporadic tensions between locals and the central authorities.

Hassanpur and Butimar were reportedly convicted of acting against Iran's national security.

The men are currently being held at an unknown location or locations.

Some Iranian news websites have suggested that both men are members of Kurdish groups that oppose the central government.

Hassanpur's sister today rejected such suggestions in comments to Radio Farda:

"I think his only [offense] is his pen and the articles he has written," she said. "As Adnan's sister, I know all about him -- he didn't have any relation to any political party inside or outside Iran. All our relatives and friends know that Adnan was not related to any [opposition] parties and he's been a totally independent journalist."

Hassanpur was a member of the editorial board of the weekly "Assu," which covered the situation in Iran's Kurdistan Province -- including unrest in 2005 over the death of a youth activist.

The weekly was shut down by authorities in August 2005.

Reports say Hassanpur has been in jail since late January.

Butimar was reportedly jailed in early January.

The news of the death sentences against the two Kurds came as four Iranian-Americans, three of whom are in detention, are also facing charges of acting against Iran's nationality security.