Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAPÊ-RIVISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LA PRENSA-BASIN ÖZETÎ
Çiller in France.' Success abroad, chaos at home
. Prime Minister's ability to convey important messages to French officials and public opinion was
shadowed by the domestic problems which accompanied her on her 'image-building toUr'
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By NazlanErtan
. Turkish Daily News
PARIS/ANKARA- Prime Minister
Tansu Çiller was justified in calling
her visIt to France a success, had
domestic' problems - her personal
wealth and the cabinet reshuffle ---C.
not accompanied her on the trip.
. Çiller's ability to convey important
messages on Turkish human rights
and Turkey's European voc.ation to
French official circles and, more crucially,
to French public opinion, was
shadowed. by an urgent need for
clearer explanations on those two
domestic issues. .'
While Çiller was able to give clear
messages to the French, the same
clarity'was not seen on two key questions
being asked by the Turkish
journalists accompanyin& her on the
visit: "Will she, or won t she bring
her wealth to Turkey?" or "Will she,
or won't she keep Hikmet Çetin as
the foreign minister?" Admittedly,
Çiller is not the sole object of either
question. With reference to the queslion
on her wealth, il is no secretthat
she andher businessman husband
Özer Çiller have a disagreement.
Özer Çiller, speaking to a journalist
and a businessman on his way to
Paris, admitted that he was unwilling
to bring their property to Turkey
from the United States. "She will be
the prime minister for a few years,
and then what?" he reportedly said.
"Is there any guarantee that I can buy
the same property there.in five years
time? Is it right to ask"ll private citizen
- which is what I .anl - to suffer
financial bereavement?"
But when he was quoted in a front
page story as saying he W9uld not
allow "a single item of his prop,el1y
to be brought to Turkey," Ozer
Çiller, something of a.medla personality,
made retractions.
'This is a political decision, and I
am not a political personality. Tbe
decision is hers and I will carry oui
what she decides to do," he said,
somewhat ruefully. .
Sources close tothe Çiller couple
hint that the prime mimster and her
husband disagree on the issue. A cartoonist has called the
conflicting remarks - another daily quoted both Çillers
as saying thatthey would bring their wealth to Turkey -
as 'The Last Tango in Paris", in which the couple have
been locked in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance
on whether to bring back their wealth or not.
Neither is the second question, l'elatJ,ng to the tutureof
Çetin, up to Çiller. In fact, many of the talks between
Karayalçm and his new choice for foreign minister,
MümlaZ Soysal, transpiredwithout Çiller's knowledge. It
was re,Ported by bureaucrats that Çiller learned about
Soysal s demands from secondary sources and from the
papers. She made her irritation known when asked about
the change in the cabinet:
"I do not intend to reply to speculations, which is all I
am faced with at the moment. I have no information other
than that." Pressed further on whether she knew about the.
offer to Soxsal in particular, and ca~inet changes in general,
she replied, With guarded restramt, that they "had discussed
cabinet change but had talked of principles rather
than going through names." "I was planning to talk to
KarayaIçm but I could not," she said before she arrived in
Istanbul, where Karayalçm was also to be found. .
But questions on whether Soysal had "special requests"
have met with Çiller's "no-nonsense"voice:
. "We have signed a protocol which we have no intention
of changing," Çiller said. "Foreign policy is part of the
g0.v~rnm~nt program :" I do no.t see why the Foreign
Ministry IS taken as a different entity."
But aware of the graveness of the debate, Çiller cut
short her trip to Paris and returned to Istanbul half a day
early. This meant the cancellation of her interviews with
leading media representatives, but Çiller's aides said that,
despite the lack of individual intervIews,her trip had been
successful "PR-wise."
It would not be far off the mark to conclude that "PRwise"
Çiller's "imafe-making" visit to Paris was one of
the most successfu of her tours. Due to tight security
taken by the French police and the fact that the French
government has banned the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK) and its affiliates. the visit was not overshadowed
by Kurdish demonstrations, as was the case in her visit to
Germany.
Another point of satisfaction to Çiller was that unlike in
the United States. the French media showed considerable
interest in the first visit of Turkey' s first female foreign
minister. This was in part due to Çiller's clear messages.
In an interview with Le Figaro. Çiller said: "Isolate
Turkey and fundamentalism infiltrates to the only secular
democracy of the Moslem world" - playing to the fundamentalism
worries of France in the wake of the trouhles in
Algeria.
OI:!human rights and terrorism
Çiller and her aides had said at the beginning of the
viSit that she aimed to correct "misconœptions in France"
regarding the Kurdish situation and human rights. On this
issue, it appeared that bothsides had learned their lesson
well. ForeIgn Minister Alain luppe, according .to his
spokeswoman, told Mrs. Çiller tha't France supported
Turkey's detennination to maintain its tenitorial integrity.
"But France also believes that there cannot be a solutionbased~imply
on security measures and that only a
political approach can find a durable solution," luppe
said, accordmg to spokeswoman Catherine Colonna.
It appeared that the French foreign minister had substi-