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

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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Özeti January 8, 2001 U.S., Britain Question Funds -ByNICOLE-WINFIELD Associated Press UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. sanctions committee on Iraq deadlocked Monday on an Iraqi request to give the Palestinians $949 million from itsoil-sale proceeds after the United States and Britain said the money should be spent on suffering Iraqis, not Palestinians. The chairman of the committee, Norwegian Ambassador Ole Peter Kolby, said the Iraqi request would be taken up at a future meeting and that he would meet with the Palestinian envoy to check his views about the proposal. Iraq's foreign minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf asked the Security Council last month to allocate the money this year from its U.N.-supervised oil sales to support the Palestinian uprising. In particular, the Iraqis said they wanted to compensate the families of the Palestinian victims and provide them with food and medicine in a show of solidarity with their cause. More than 360 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in near-daily clashes with Israeli troops. While several diplomats said the Palestinians could certainly use additional aid, they said the U.N. oil-for-food program wasn't the right way to get it to them. The program, which lets Iraq sell its oil to buy food and medicine for its people, was created in 1996 to care for Iraqis living under crippling U.N. trade sanctions. During Monday's meeting, the United States questioned why the Iraqis would want to divert money from the program when it complains that the United Nations is still failing to meet its humanitarian needs, a U.S. official said. And a British official said the U.N. resolutions were clear that the proceeds from Iraqi oil sales were to provide aid for Iraqis - not Palestinians or anyone else. Russia, China and Tunisia supported the Iraqi request, diplomats said. France, which often backs Iraq in the sanctions committee, said it was not opposed to the Iraqi request, but said the amount was too high. DiScussion of the Iraqi request came as the United Nations prepares for talks with Iraqi officials geared toward ending 10-year-old sanctions, imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. * * * * * DIYARBAKIR,Turkey, Jan 11 (AFP) - 13h56 - Turkish soldiers have killed six Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels in the southeastern province of Sirnak in the past two days, security officials said Thursday. Fighting broke between soldiers conducting an operation to "ensure order and safety" and a group of PKK rebels in the remote province which borders Syria and Iraq, said a statement from the emergency rule headquarters in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. The statement added that the dead rebels were believed to have entered Turkey from a neighbouring country, which it did not name. The PKK took up arms against the Ankara government in 1984 in pursuit of Kurdish self-rule in Turkey's eastern and southeastern regions, which are mainly populated by Kurds. But in September last year, the group declared that it was halting its armed campaign and withdrawing from Turkish territory to seek a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish conflict. Since then, previously heavy fighting in the region, which has claimed some 36,500 lives, has scaled down considerably. But the PKK truce, launched following peace calls from condemned rebel Abdullah Ocalan, was brushed aside by the Turkish army as a "terrorist ploy". Most of the rebels are believed to have crossed into northern Iraq, an area outside Baghdad's control sincethe 1991 Gulf war, since the. truce armouncement. The Turkish army frequently launches cross-border operations into Kurdish-held northern Iraq to hunt down the rebels who it says use the area as a springboard for attacks against Turke~ ' Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit armounced at the weekend that Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq were currently giving 'technical help" to the two leading Kurdish factions in the mountainous area to fight against the PKK. * * * * * 22
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Ozeti UPI 8 January 2001 By DERK KINNANE ROELOFSMA An unwelcome cuckoo in the nest WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (UPI) - The money on which the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Turkish Kurdish Marxist revolutionary party, the PKK, runs comes from Moscow, Iraq, Greece and elsewhere, Ibrahim Mammadov reported in the Baku newspaper Azad1yg. Germany is also well-known source of funds for the PKK. It is highly organized, raises considerable funds by contributions, both voluntary and extorted, from among the 500,000 Kurds living there as well as from involvement criminal activities, including drug trafficking. In Armenia, the PKK has camps at severallocations as well as a hospital for the treatment of party fighters wounded in Turkey and Iraq. PKK members, coming from Russia's "near abroad" and Eastern Europe are sent directly to the mountains under the supervision of the Armenian security services. PKK guides then take over, provided with communications equipment, night-vision and mine-clearing devices and weapons. On the border with Iran, the guides hand over to the party's Iranian guides. Iran is assisting some ten PKK bases in villages along the Iran-Iraq border in the region of the Iranian city of Urmia. In April to June 1999 alone, at least 300 people were trained in one camp in Iraq before a Turkish Air Force raid forced it to move elsewhere, Mammadov reports. But the PKK also has its troubles. Finances, military equipment and other supplies are not at the desired level and conditions are difficult for PKK forces still in southeastern Turkey. Wmter doesn't make things easier, except that it imposes a virtual prohibition on fighting. But the winter will give way to spring and Turkish politicians and generals are asking themselves what the PKK forces will do then? It would seem likely they would raise present level of their low-intensity war in Turkey while seeking to consolidate their position in Iraq. Turkey may be expected to resume doing as much as it can to destroy the PKK. If this involves further deep penetrations of Turkey, all kinds of questions may arise. In Iraqi Kurdistan, both Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan called on the Turkish military for assistance that was promptly delivered. If the Turks were to become a habitual presence deep inside Iraqi Kurdistan, serious questions would arise as to the integrity of the Iraqi state, something that so far Washington appears to wish preserved as much as Baghdad does. Fortunately, for the United States, long-term Turkish goals of building up diplomatic and important trade relations with Baghdad, with or without Saddam's presence, are a countervailing force to any ambition to colonize the Kurdish area. Similarly, its seems unlikely at this time that Ankara would bri,ng up the Mosul question - the Turkish claim that it was unjustly denied the oil-rich Ottoman province awarded to Iraq in 1926. Still, it is only a decade since the flamboyant Turkish prime minister, Turgut Ozal, briefly revived the issue. As for the United States, if it is serious about changing the regime in Baghdad, it can hardly be pleased with the prospect of a guerrilla force of several thousand, hostile to the West and in effect a proxy of Moscow and Tehran, being placed where they can destabilize the north of Iraq and possibly once again adjacent areas of Turkey. For one thing, a return of a revived PKK to Turkey in force would revive doubts about the security of a strategically important Turkish-U.S. project for a pipeline to carry oil from the Caspian Basin to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Given the president-elect's campaign statements about reducing U.S. military commitments abroad, it may be that Washington will be glad to leave it to the Turks alone, with their tough and experienced soldiery, to continue to deal withPKK. One thing is certain, such action would be bound to renewand probably intensify the odium in which Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership, is held by so much of the European political establishment. But that is another story. • • * • • 23
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