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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ôzeti Since taking power in 2002, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has lifted bans on Kurdish-language broadcasting and education and called for a political solution to end the PKK insurrection. Al¬ most half the voters in the southeast backed the party in the July elections, helping Erdogan capture 341 seats in the 550-member parliament. People voted for Justice because they believed it has the power to solve the Kurdish problem," said Akboga, 33. Now the fear of bombs has eroded that hope." Increased government aid to the region for health care, basic services and educa¬ tion also drew Kurdish support, said Ah¬ met Sen, head of Hakkari's chamber of commerce. Hakkari's annual per-capita I Christian Science Monitor;?'*^ income is $1,000, less than a fifth of the national average, and unemployment is about 60 percent, he said. Any Turkish military operation ' 'shouldn't affect the livelihoods" of people on either side of the border, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan told reporters in Ankara today. Economic Mainstays The conflict with the PKK has nearly wiped out the former economic mainstays of agriculture and animal husbandry as thou¬ sands of Kurds have fled fighting near their villages for the town, where the population more than doubled in the 1990s to 70,000 now. Hakkari province's sole border crossing to Iraq has been shut for two decades, Sen said. Erdogan last week threatened trade November 01. 2007 restrictions to force Iraqi Kurds who run the semi- autonomous area there to crack down on the PKK. Ali Ozdemir, 42, works for a Turkish cons¬ truction company in northern Iraq and hasn't returned to his job because he fears an all-out war. He estimated 4,000 Turkish nationals work in Iraq's north, where ties. Kurds have family and linguistic ' 'These borders don't mean much to us, and an attack on north Iraq is an attack on our brothers," said Ozdemir, who voted for Erdogan in the last election. ' 'Justice won with the hope to end this conflict. A war will extinguish our optimism." Why Turks no longer love the U.S. US Secretary Rice arrives Friday to defuse tensions over Kurdish rebels in Iraq. By Yiaal Schleifer I Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Istanbul, Turkey The US has hailed Turkey as moderate Islamic democracy, the kind it would like to see develop elsewhere. It's a key NATO ally, with US aircraft stationed here. Yet, as Secretary of State Condoleez¬ za Rice arrives in Ankara Friday to defuse tensions over Kurdish rebels operating in Iraq, she faces a nation that is now the most anti-American in the world, according to one survey. In the meetings with Ms. Rice, and next Monday in Washington with President Bush, Turkey's prime minister is expected to press the US to take steps against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels in Iraq. That might help soften attitudes here toward the US. But given the depth of anti-American feeling that has deve¬ loped in just the past few years, few expect Turkish public opinion to turn quickly. In a recent global survey by the Pew Research Center, only 9 percent of Turks held a favorable view of the United States (down from 52 percent in 2000), a figure that placed Turkey at the rock bottom of the 46 countries surveyed. "People have become accustomed to this plot line of America being a threat to Turkish national security. This was inconceivable five years ago, but now it has come to be the prevailing view," says Ihsan Dagi, a professor of inter¬ national relations at Ankara's Middle East Technical University. That perception has been reinforced in the past two years by some of Turkey's most popular books and films which portray the US and Tur¬ key at odds - if not at war. Turkey's all-time box office champ, 2006's "Valley of the Wolves," saw a ragtag 14 Turkish force square off heroically against a whole division of bloodthirs¬ ty American soldiers in northern Iraq. "Metal Storm," a bestselling political fantasy book from the year before, went even further, describing an all out war between Ankara and Was¬ hington in the not so distant future (the year 2007, to be exact), in which Turkey ultimately prevails with the help of Russia and the European Union. Analysts say the public's mood re¬ presents a trend that has worrying implications for the future health of the ties between the two NATO allies. "The public is really convinced that the United States is no longer a friend and ally. That is really frustrating," says Professor Dagi. Real life events have also done little to improve America's image in Tur¬ key. The recent passage by a US congressional committee of a resolu¬ tion recognizing the mass killing of Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire as a genocide - something Turkey strongly rejects - set public opinion aflame. At the same time, the renewed at¬ tacks on Turkish forces by PKK guerrillas have only strengthened the widespread belief that Washington is doing little to get rid of the PKK in northern Iraq. Ankara has been buil¬ ding up its troops on the Iraqi border and threatening an invasion, some¬ thing Washington strongly opposes. "The clearest fact is that the real threats against Turkey come not from its neighbors, but from its 'allies' and each new development brings Turkey face to face with its Western allies," Ali Bulac, a columnist for the liberal- Islamic Zaman newspaper, recently wrote. "The United States ... is taking its place on the stage as the force behind the PKK." Says Gunduz Aktan, a former Turkish ambassador who is currently a par¬ liamentarian with the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP): "The entire Turkish public opinion now is one of frustration and exasperation and a kind of acute expectation of the US to do something meaningful and concrete [on the PKK issue] and to understand the problem that we have in Turkey." But experts say Turkey's growing anti-Americanism also has a domes¬ tic element. The success of the Isla¬ mic-rooted ruling Justice and Deve¬ lopment Party (AKP) has forced Turkey to confront the issue of how to reconcile secularism with Islam, while the renewal of PKK violence has again brought to the surface the decades-long struggle to square a strong national Turkish identity with the country's diverse ethnic identities. "Turkey is caught right now between East and West, between Islam and secularism, between Kurdish and Turkish nationalism," says Omer Taspinar, director of the Turkey program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "Since the cold war ended, we are living in an era where all the problems that defi¬ ned the Turkish Republic in the early years are back, and Turkey is ming the West for this." bla¬ The Rice visit and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's trip to the White House on Nov. 5 are part of an effort to stave off any further deterioration in US-Turkish relations. "I will openly tell him [President George Bush] that we expect concrete, immediate steps against the terrorists," Mr. Erdogan recently told parliamentarians from his party. "The problem of the PKK terrorist organi¬ zation is a test of sincerity for every¬ body," he said. "This test carries great importance for the region and in determining the fate of our future relations." Observers inside and outside Turkey say Ankara could play a role in easing regional tensions by dropping its objections to speaking directly with the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq and its leader, Massoud Barzani. But METU's Dagi says that without American action on the PKK front, there is little Ankara can do to defuse the public's growing dislike of the US. "The government has somehow been taken hostage by this public mood," he says. "The first thing is to deal with this mood, and in that America has to contribute something." Most Anti-American Nations Percentage surveyed with an unfavo¬ rable view of the US 1 . Turkey - 83 percent 2. Pakistan - 68 3. Morocco -56 4. Argentina -72 5. Jordan - 78 6. Egypt - 78 7. Malaysia -69 8. Indonesia -66 9. Germany -66 10. Spain -60 Source: June 2007 Pew Global Attitu¬ des Project (Pewglobal.org)
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ozeti AsiaTimes By Pepe Escobar November 2, 2007 two double-crossing scenarios will inevitably take place. Washington simply cannot have its kebab and eat it too. The Bush administration's double standards are as glaring as meteor impacts. When, in the summer of 2006, Israel used the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah to unleash a pre-programmed devas¬ tating war on Lebanon, destroying great swathes of the country, the Bush administration immediately gave the Israelis the green light. When 12 Turkish soldiers are killed and eight captured by PKK guerrillas based in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush admi¬ nistration urges Ankara to take it easy. The "war on terror" is definitely not an equalopportunity business. That has prompted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizekto mischievously remark, regarding Turkey, "It's as if an intruder has gate¬ crashed the closed circle of 'we', the domain of those who hold the de facto monopoly on military humanitarianism." The US and Israeli establishment regards Hezbol¬ lah as a group of evil super-terrorists. But the PKK consists of just "minor" terrorists, and very useful ones at that, since the US Central Intelligence Agency is covertly financing and arming the PJAK (Party for Free Life in Kurdistan), the Iranian arm of the PKK, whose mission is to "liberate" parts of northwest Iran. Not accidentally, the new PKK overdrive coincides with US - and also Israeli - covert support for the PJAK. Israel has not only invested a lot in scores of business ventures in Iraqi Kurdistan, it has also extensively trained Kurdish peshmerga special commandos, who could easily share their kno¬ wledge with their PKK cousins. The new PKK offensive coincides with a PKK flush with new mortars, anti-tank weapons, rocketpropelled grenades and even anti-aircraft missiles. And most of all, the PKK drive coincides with the mysteriously vanished scores of light weapons the Pentagon sent to Iraq with no serial numbers to identify 97% of them. The person responsible for this still unsolved mystery is none other than the counterinsurgency messiah and top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus. The suspicion that the Pentagon never wanted these weapons to be traced in the first place cannot be easily dismissed. Either that or the PKK has been very active lately in the black market for light weapons. The Turkish-Israeli plan US corporate media totally ignore the US/Israeli coddling of the PJAK - and by extension the PKK. The larger context is lost. No one bothers to ask how come the Bush administration seems to be such a huge fan of a greater Kurdistan. As much as the PJAK - and the PKK - use Ameri¬ can largesse for greater Kurdistan ends, the Bush administration uses especially the PJAK for its wider "war on terror" target: the destabilization of Iran. Turkish-US relations in this case are no more than a casualty of war. Now the Turks are up not only against Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but also the US and the Euro¬ pean Union in Brussels. And in addition, the PKK denies it has attacked Turkey out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey has angrily reacted to the US Senate propo¬ sal for "soft" partition of Iraq. This is the famous US "Plan B" for Iraq - more an "A" than a "B" because it THE ROVING EYE Double-crossing in Kurdistan was floated years ago. And the authors are Israel and ... the Turks themselves. The plan has been extensively documented, among others, by the Center for Research at the Kurdish Library in New York. According to its "Kurdish Life" newsletter, "Back in 1990, Turkey's then prime minister Turgut Ozal made a deal with the US and Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Masterminded by an Israel obsessed with breaking up the 'sea of Arabs' in the Middle East, the plan has proceeded apace ever since, influen¬ cing and directing virtually all of Washington's political and military tactics in Iraq. And yet even today it remains nobody's business." The Israeli mastermind was Leslie Gelb, a relative¬ ly moderate Zionist. The plan duly featured in the Turkish press at the time. It proposed a federal Iraq, with a Kurdistan, a section of Kirkuk and Mosul for the Turkomans; and the rest, in fact most of the country, for "the Arabs", Sunni and Shi'ite alike. To get their autonomous mini-state, the Iraqi Kurds just had to guarantee to smash the PKK. As for Turkish Kurds, the Turkish prime minister's spo¬ kesman said at the time that since "two-thirds of Turkey's Kurds are scattered through the country" and the rest "fully integrated into Turkish society", they would have no business dreaming about autonomy. Barzani and Jalal Talabani, Iraqi Kurdish leaders, rival warlords and wily opportunists, duly fulfilled their part of the deal - especially in October 1992 during a joint offensive with the Turkish army against the PKK. They may have sold out the PKK 15 years ago, but that won't happen again; at least that's what the two have vocally promised. For their part, the PJAK-PKK have been tremendously helpful for the Bush administration agenda of "des¬ tabilizing" Iran. The Kurdish Life newsletter argues that the cause of Turkey's current woes is not the US or the Iraqi Kurds. It's a self-inflicted wound, all spelled out in Ozal's plan. "With his untimely death in 1993, the plan was revised, with an autonomous Iraqi Kurdis¬ tan to include Kirkuk, and more, and the remainder of Iraq to be divided between Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs. The Republicans of the Bush administration cemented it into the Iraqi constitution under the rubric 'federation'." That's no less than the "soft" partition the US Se¬ nate recently voted for. That's the future Washing¬ ton wants for Iraqi Kurdistan. And that's the scheme the US - and Israel - don't want their ally Turkey to spoil by attacking the PKK in Iraqi Kurdis¬ tan. No wonder the Turkish leadership - not to mention Turkish public opinion - is fuming. Chronicle of an invasion foretold To compound this misery, the much-touted Turkish invasion has been in the making for months. As early as March, Bush administration officials were promising the Turks that US special forces would dislodge the PKK from the Qandil mountains. Nothing happened. In April, Barzani was threatening "to take responsi¬ bility for our response" if the Turks interfered with a referendum on the integration of oil-rich Kirkuk into Kurdistan. Also in April, the US prohibited Turkish cross-border raids, according to the Turkish daily Sabah. The massing of Turkish soldiers at the Iraqi border started in May. Then in June, Turkish General Yasar Buyukanit virtually spelled out in public what this was all about, "There is not only the PKK in northern Iraq. There is Massoud Barzani as well. Turkey cannot afford an independent Kurdish state headed by Barzani on its southern border." Barzani - who for Turkish popular media is the country's public enemy number one - answered back with a star¬ tling concept; he said that if Turkey invaded, "We would deal with it as an Iraqi issue." So what kind of Kurdish "sovereignty" is this? Iraqi Kurds detest, and ignore, the Baghdad government like the plague, and prize their independence; but as soon as they're threatened, they instantly seek refuge under Baghdad's (clipped) wings. Kurdistan and its mountainous 75,000 square kilometers is not really Iraq. Baghdad is an entity far, far away. Iraqi Kurdistan has its own constitu¬ tion, parliament, anthem, legal code, language, currency and media - and most of all the welltrained peshmerga army. A democracy it is not - because virtually everything is subordinated to the two warlords turned politicians, Barzani and Tala¬ bani. The KRG has paid the price for Kurdistan as a "model" of a functioning Iraq by collaborating noholds-barred with the US since the early 1990s. In June, Barzani confirmed that the PKK is an Iraqi problem, "A Turkish invasion would be first of all an attack on Iraqi sovereignty, and then an attack on the Kurds." Following Barzani's logic, since Iraq is under occupation, the Turks would be actually invading a colonial possession of the US. Thus it should be Petraeus to confront the Turks about what they're up to. Washington in a way has proved its point: Iraqi Kurdistan is a fragile entity that only exists because it always depended on American protection. Turkey and Iran, united Kurdistan's pull in Washington is guaranteed thanks largely to Qubad Talabani, son of President Jalal Talabani, also known in Kurdistan as "Uncle Jalal". While dad sells Kurdistan as an indisputable suc¬ cess story, son lobbies furiously, to the extent that Frank Lavin, US under secretary of commerce for international trade, recently went to Kurdistan to promote it as a gateway for US businesses in Iraq. But to believe that Ankara will tolerate an oil-rich, water-rich Kurdish mini-state on its southeast border, creating a magnet for Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iran and Syria, is to believe in miracles. Not only Turkey and Iran are vehemently against it, but also Saudi Arabia (the House of Saud believing that a Kurdistan counterpart - Shi'iteistan in sou¬ thern Iraq - would be subservient to Iran). What the Bush administration's games have achieved so far is to unite Turkey and Iran on the issue. Turkey regards the Kurds just like China regards Tibetans and Uighurs; they are part of a unitary Turkish state and have no right to autonomy. If Washington condemns China for its repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, it should behave the same way regarding Turkey. Not only will this not hap¬ pen, but now the Americans need the Turks more than the Turks need the Americans. A true measure of White House and neoconservative desperation to facilitate the relentless surge towards war on Iran is whether it would be willing to plunge Iraqi Kurdistan into war, compro¬ mise the Turkish-Iraq corridor (through wich flows 70% of US supplies to Iraq) and future US Big Oil investments in Iraqi Kurdistan. Barzani keeps insisting he and Washington are in 15
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