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40 Revue de Presse-Press Reviezv-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Bastn Ôzeti Turkey's Kurds Dreams and reality DIYARBAKIR AND OVAKOY The effects of northern Iraq on Turkey's Kurds are more complex than they seem STANDING by the stream that separates the hamlet of Ovakoy from northern Iraq, Hisyar Ozalp, a young Kurdish law¬ yer, gestures towards a cluster of pink houses on the opposite bank. "That is Kur¬ distan," he says. "And so is this." Any con¬ versation in Ovakoy shows why Turkey is so nervous about the effect of the Iraqi Kurds' semi-independent statelet. "I don't like Turkish, it's no good," declares Fatma, a five-year-old, using the commonest Kurdish dialect. A gaggle of Turkish con¬ scripts stares in mute incomprehension. In the province of Hakkari, members of a group inspired by the Kurdistan Demo¬ cratic Party (kdp) of Masoud Barzani, pres¬ ident of Iraq's Kurdish region, whisper of a new plan to unite the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Until recently, their KDP-Bakur disavowed the Kurdistan Workers' Party (pkk), which has escalated its long war against the Turkish army, kill¬ ing 48 soldiers in October alone. Today it says armed struggle may be "the only way." The Iraqi Kurds' march to indepen¬ dence since the 1991 Gulf war has stirred excitement among Turkey's 14m Kurds (roughly half of all Kurds). Mr Barzani's autobiography is being snapped up every¬ where. "Iraqi Kurdistan is like a beacon," says Ibrahim Guclu, a Kurdish politician. Like many Kurds, he believes that Tur¬ key's threat to clobber the pkk in northern Iraq is a cover for a full-scale invasion aimed at Iraq's Kurds. Warmongers in the Turkish media are howling for retribution against Mr Barzani for providing a haven for the pkk. Mr Barzani, who lost 200 of his own fighters helping the Turkish army against the pkk in the 1990s, says he would be happy to mediate but insists that the Turks should first recognise him as the Kurds' legitimate representative. Nothing doing, says Turkey, which this week an¬ nounced new sanctions against those who support the pkk. Despite Mr Barzani's popularity, the Turks can take heart from the millions of Kurds who have no desire to break away. That was the message of theJuly 22nd elec¬ tion, says Sehmus Akbas, a Kurdish busi¬ nessman in Diyarbakir. He is thinking of the big gains made by the Justice and De¬ velopment (ak) party in Kurdish areas, at the expense of the pro-Kurdish Demo¬ cratic People's Party (dtp). Such is the ap¬ peal of ak's mix of liberalism and Islamic piety that it might even wrest Diyarbakir, the Kurds' unofficial capital, from the dtp in local elections next March. Relations between Turks and Kurds are as intimate as they are fraught and com¬ plex. "We are like flesh and fingernail, in¬ separable," says Mr Akbas. Many Kurds cling to sentimental notions of an inde¬ pendent state. But the reality after centu¬ ries of cohabitation, intermarriage and economic integration is that "drawing Excitement stirs in Diyarbakir boundaries has become impossible", as Hasim Hasimi, a Kurdish politician, puts it. Take Istanbul; home to some 2m Kurds, and easily the world's biggest Kurdish city. Many Kurds are poor and unemployed, of¬ ten victims of the army's scorched-earth campaign against the pkk in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, they tend to support the re¬ bels. Yet thousands of middle-class Kurds with summer homes on the Aegean coast, who want their children to learn English not Kurdish, have little interest in politics. There are few signs that northern Iraq is luring Turkey's Kurds. More ethnic Turks than Turkish Kurds do business there. The frenzy of nationalism that has gripped Turkey since the pkk killed 12 Turk¬ ish soldiers and kidnapped another eight on October 21st is threatening to upset the fragile balance at home. In the western city of Bursa, ultra-nationalist vigilantes re¬ cently vandalised a chain of stores owned by a Kurdish family, after rumours spread that it was helping the rebels, dtp offices throughout Turkey have been pelted with rocks and, in one place, set on fire. "Is Turkey going towards partition?" asks Sezgin Tanrikulu, a human-rights law¬ yer in Diyarbakir. Very probably not. But with every funeral of a Turkish soldier, calls for revenge are growing. Ordinary Kurds risk being caught in the crossfire. ^e*^E*sewa5^Nf *#
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ôzeti REUTERS j November 4. 2007 Reuters - Bv Khaled Yacoub Owels DAMASUCUS - Security forces killed a Kurdish youth and wounded four other people in northeastern Syria while breaking up a protest against a possible Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan, witnesses and Kurdish activists said on Sunday. The incident revived the issue of longstanding Kurdish grievances in tightly controlled Syria and evoked painful memories of demonstrations and riots a few years ago that killed 30 people. Witnesses said Issa Khalil, 24, was among a group of 200 Kurds who gathered in the city of Qamishli on Friday in support of their brethren across the border in Iraq. The city was the scene of anti-government riots in 2004 that spread to Kurdish areas across Syria. Mâchai Jammo, a Kurdish activist, told Reu¬ ters police fired bullets and teargas to break up the demonstrations. Pro¬ testers responded by throwing stones. "Syria wants to send a message of support to Turkey. But its hostility to the Kurdish presence in the region risks a repeat of the 2004 anger on a larger scale," said Jammo, an official in the Kurdish Future Movement, which advocates democracy and equal rights for Syria's one million Kur¬ dish minority. Thousands of Kurds turned out for Khalil's funeral in Qamishly on Satur¬ day. Witnesses said security forces surrounded the funeral procession but did not interfere. "We could be looking at more funerals, which is keeping the situation tense. Two of the four with wounds are in serious condition," a resident of the city said.There was no comment from the Syrian authorities. Qamishly is heavily policed and news from the city is slow to filter out. Kurd killed in north Syria protest Police in the northern town of Aleppo prevented an anti-Turkish demons¬ tration last week but there were no casualties, human right activists said. TIES Turkey has amassed around 100,000 soldiers on its border with Iraqi Kurdistan for a possible attack on PKK separatists who have launched strikes against Turkish forces. Baghdad has sought to calm Turkey, saying it is prepared to pursue guerrilla leaders responsible for raids into Turkey to avert an invasion. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad expressed support for Turkey's policy toward the PKK on a visit to Ankara last month, although Information Minister Mohsen Bilal later said Assad did not back a Turkish attack on Iraq. Relations between Ankara and Damascus improved sharply in recent years as Kurdish power has risen in Iraq. In an interview with al-Jazeera television, Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani described Syria's position toward Iraqi Kurdistan as "negative". Syria's overtures toward Turkey have not gone down well with Syria's own Kurdish minority which includes thousands of disenfranchised Kurds without passports or official documents to own property or use govern¬ ment services. Under Turkish pressure, Syria has cracked down on the PKK. A security court handed several PKK members long sentences last year in trials criticised by human rights groups as illegitimate. Syria banned the PKK after a confrontation with Turkey in 1 998 over the group's activities. The two countries came close to a military conflict be¬ fore Damascus met Turkey's request to expel PKK leader Abdullah Oca¬ lan, who was later arrested and jailed by Turkey. Political dance of Turkish troops' release DOIS NEWS 5 November 2007 Bv Jim Muir BBC News, Baghdad The manner in which the eight Turkish soldiers captured by the Kurdish PKK rebels were relea¬ sed on Sunday says much about the complex politics surrounding the current border crisis between Turkey and northern Iraq. In an obviously pre-arranged scenario, the eight men were marched down from the remote border mountains where they had been held by the PKK, to a meeting point where a reception delegation was waiting for them. There, they were formally signed over into the care of the Kurdistan Regional Go¬ vernment (KRG), the administration that runs the autonomous region of Iraqi Kur¬ distan under a federal arrangement with Baghdad. The KRG team was carefully balanced between the two main parties that domi¬ nate Iraqi Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Bar¬ zani, who is president of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, who is president of Iraq. That was a signal that both parties agreed to share either the blame or the credit for acting as midwives to the release. Also present at the initial handover in the mountains were three Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament who had crossed the border to try to help bring about the release of the soldiers. The three, who are among the 20 MPs of the Democratic Society Party, are now being accused by some senior government figures in Ankara of complicity with the PKK. Carefully choreographed From the mountains, the freed soldiers were taken in a convoy of KRG vehicles to the regional capital, Erbil. There, they were handed into the custody of an Iraqi government delegation headed by Defence Minister Abdul Qader al- Obeidi. Also present was the Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus. Both men then joined the liberated Turks on a US military aircraft that flew them, not home to Turkey, but to a Turkishcontrolled airstrip at Bamarni, inside northern Iraq - one of several littlepublicised bases the Turks have maintai¬ ned there since the 1990s. At Bamarni, the soldiers were finally si¬ gned over to the Turkish military and put on a Turkish military flight home, as Anka¬ ra had insisted. According to several Kurdish and Iraqi accounts, their release had been agreed in principle by the PKK many days before, and had been heralded by many optimistic statements from officials in the know. But the modalities clearly took some ar¬ ranging. The men could simply have been set loose near one of the Turkish bases, or sent on foot across the border. The way it eventually happened was much more politically choreographed. Iraqi involvement From the outset, Ankara had refused to 41
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