Articles on Turkey, EU applicant‏

[Anybody see the BBC2 programme last Thursday on: "Turkey on the edge"?

The naive presenter concluded that Turkey was "at peace with itself"

and would be a "link between East and West" if it joined the EU.

The script would not have been better prepared by his hosts]

Today's Zaman, Turkey
Feb 14 2009
Ministry authorizes 70 probes under revised Article 301

Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Şahin has said his ministry has
allowed prosecutors to open 70 investigations over alleged violations
of the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK) since the
article was amended last May.

In response to a parliamentary inquiry recently submitted by
Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Manisa deputy Erkan Akçay,
Şahin said: "Since last May, the Justice Ministry has allowed
prosecutors to probe 70 cases regarding 301. We have denied
authorization for probes into 403 other cases since May. A total of
113 cases are currently under consideration."

The EU had previously been highly critical of Turkey for not amending
Article 301, under which a number of intellectuals and activists have
landed in court for "insulting Turkishness." In a previous annual
progress report, the European Commission proposed not opening
accession talks on one of the 35 negotiating chapters for EU accession
until Turkey amended or repealed the article. But a recent amendment
to the infamous article has improved the situation.

One of the changes to Article 301, which previously criminalized
"insulting Turkishness" and has long been seen as an obstacle to
freedom of speech in Turkey, made it obligatory for prosecutors to
secure approval from the Justice Ministry before launching cases on
301-related charges. The amendment was adopted in May of last year. In
the past, the article in question had been repeatedly challenged,
particularly with respect to the charges filed against Turkish Nobel
laureate Orhan Pamuk and Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who
was assassinated in 2007.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledged yesterday
that works for a civilian constitution would re-start soon after the
local elections, slated for March 29. Upon a question directed by a
university student over when the government would save the country
from the "coup Constitution", Erdoğan replied "in April." The
prime minister's words came as he was preparing to board a plane for
eastern Sivas province. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK
Party) started to work on a new and purely civilian constitution to
replace the one currently in place, which was prepared after a coup in
1980, but the Turkish nation's high hopes for improved democratic
rights were dashed by a court case filed for the disbandment of the
governing party.

EURO PARLIAMENT WANTS DEEPER PROBE INTO ERGENEKON
Today's Zaman
Feb 13 2009
Turkey

European lawmakers have urged Turkey to seriously focus on the
Ergenekon network's probable role in unresolved murders, including
the assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in
January 2007.

Ergenekon, a neo-nationalist group accused of involvement in plans
to stage a violent uprising against the government, was discovered at
the end of an investigation that came upon the heels of a police raid
in June 2007 that uncovered an arms depot in a house in Ä°stanbul's
Umraniye district. The prosecutor in the Ergenekon case has said the
group worked to create disorder and chaos through various violent acts
so that the public would be willing to accept a military intervention
to restore order.

The group is suspected of involvement in the murder of three Christian
missionaries in Malatya in 2007; the 2006 murder of a priest in the
northern city of Trabzon; the murder of Dink, editor-in-chief of the
bilingual Agos newspaper in 2007; a 2006 attack on the Council of
State; and a grenade attack on the Cumhuriyet daily in 2006.

Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament
on Wednesday adopted the draft for Parliament's annual resolution
on Turkey's progress toward European Union accession, which was
drawn up by Dutch Christian Democrat European Parliamentarian Ria
Oomen-Ruijten. The resolution was adopted by 65 votes to one, with
four abstentions.

The European Parliament "welcomes the beginning of the trial against
those accused of being members of the Ergenekon criminal organization;
encourages the authorities to continue investigations and to fully
uncover the organization's networks which reach into the state
structures; is concerned about reports regarding the treatment of
defendants in this case; urges the Turkish authorities to provide
them with a fair trial and to adhere strictly to the principles of
the rule of law," the report said.

The committee approved an amendment to add a sentence to this paragraph
saying, "While assessing unresolved cases such as the killing of
Hrant Dink, the thesis suggesting that Ergenekon has a role in these
incidents should be taken more seriously," the Anatolia news agency
reported.

The EU member states should consider starting accession talks with
Turkey in areas where the country meets technical criteria set by the
EU, the committee also said. The recommendation did not feature in
the original draft resolution put forward by Oomen-Ruijten, however,
it emerged as a compromise amendment by center-left deputies. The
final resolution called on member states "to consider making progress
on opening of negotiations on chapters in which Turkey, according
to the European Commission's assessment, fulfilled the conditions
for opening."

Ankara must commit itself to a lasting settlement of the Kurdish
issue, the committee also said. This will require better economic and
social integration of citizens of Kurdish origin, including offering
them real opportunities to learn Kurdish in the public and private
schooling system and to use it in broadcasting, in daily life and in
access to public services, it said, while welcoming the government's
launch of a 24-hour Kurdish-language TV channel on the state-owned
Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) on Jan. 1.

Arutz Sheva, Israel
Feb 14 2009
Turkish-Israeli Ties in a Stew: Elections 'Paint a Dark Picture'
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu


(IsraelNN.com) Relations between Israel and Turkey worsened Saturday
with Ankara's official warnings that Israel's election results
"painted a very dark picture" for the Middle East. Turkey also
summoned Israel's ambassador following a critical statement by an IDF
officer.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with
Turkish media, "Unfortunately we have seen that the (Israeli) people
have voted for these (rightist) parties and that makes me a bit
sad. Unfortunately the election has painted a very dark picture."

Israel has had friendly relations with Turkey, and comments on a
general election are considered unusual.

However, the country's relations with Israel have been problematic
since last month's dramatic confrontation at the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, when Erodgan scolded Israeli President Shimon
Peres over Israel's war against terror in Gaza and called for the
United Nations to expel Israel from the international body. Erodgan
walked out during a response by President Peres.

In an apparent response to the criticism, IDF ground force commander
Major-General Avi Mizrachi commented that the Turkish Prime Minister
should "look in the mirror" before criticizing Israel. His references,
some of them veiled, to genocide of Armenians, Turkish oppression of
Kurds and its occupation in northern Cyprus prompted Ankara to summon
Israeli ambassador Gabi Levy.

In an effort to calm the storm, the IDF issued a rare repudiation of
Mizrachi's comments, stating that they did not represent the IDF
position.

Hürriyet, Turkey
Feb 14 2009
Turkey delivers diplomatic note to Israel over commander's remarks

The Turkish Foreign Ministry delivered on Saturday a diplomatic note
to Israel concerning the harsh remarks of an Israeli general. In a
separate statement, the Turkish army said the remarks are in an extent
that could harm the bilateral relations.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement Saturday that Israeli
Ambassador to Ankara Gabby Levy had been summoned to the ministry by
the undersecretary regarding the general's comments.

His remarks violated all forms of diplomatic practices, and
contradicted with the historical and current realities therefore these
"accusations and nonsensical talks" targeting prime minister and the
country had been protested by a note, the Turkish foreign ministry
said in a statement.

"Furthermore, we have stressed that the relevant statements of Avi
Mizrahi are ungrounded and unacceptable and as such we have requested
an urgent explanation from Israeli authorities," the statement added.

On Friday, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Maj. Gen. Avi
Mizrahi, a veteran professional officer, called on Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan to look in the mirror.

The Israeli General took a step further and accused Turkey of
"committing massacre of the Armenians as well as the suppression of
the Kurds". Mizrahi also mentioned the so-called Turkish occupation of
northern Cyprus, according to the report.

ARMY'S STATEMENT

The Turkish army issued a statement on Saturday to slam Mizrahi over
his words.

"These remarks, as the way they were published in the media reports,
are considered to be misleading the facts, unfortunate, unacceptable
and more importantly in an extent that could harm the national
interests between two countries," the army said in a statement posted
on its Web site.

The military also called on the Israeli army, "which is considered to
be attaching great importance to its relations with the Turkish Armed
Forces", to clarify Mizrahi's statement.

Erdogan has harshly criticized Israel's operations in Gaza which
killed more than 1,300 people dead. The relations strained after
Erdogan stormed out of a Gaza debate in Davos with Israeli President
Shimon Peres.

Armenian National Committee of America
PRESS RELEASE
February 13, 2009
PALLONE CHALLENGES TURKEY'S GENOCIDE HYPOCRISY

"If Turkey wants to move closer to the West it should
practice some self-reflection on its own history regarding
the Armenian Genocide and help to end the Genocide in
Darfur." -- Rep. Frank Pallone, February 13, 2008

WASHINGTON, DC ? Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) today sharply
criticized Turkey's hypocrisy in leveling human rights charges
against Israel even as it continues to deny the Armenian Genocide
and strengthen its ties to the genocidal Sudanese regime, reported
the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

In a speech on the House floor, the Armenian Caucus Co-Chairman,
called the attention of his colleagues to increasingly strident
Turkish attacks on Israel, including menacing, even threatening,
remarks by Prime Minister Erdogan, as well as a recent Washington
Post report that a Turkey-based non-governmental organization has
initiated a probe to investigate if war crimes and genocide were
committed by Israel during the recent Gaza Conflict. Commenting on
these developments, he noted that, "For a nation that for 94 years
has practiced wide-spread genocide denial of the killing of one and
half million Armenians, hypocrisy runs deep today in Ankara."

The New Jersey legislator stressed that, "the Turkish people need
to step back and question their skewed understanding of genocide.
Look in the mirror, look at your own history, come to terms with
the fact that 1.5 million Armenians died and when contemporary
genocides, like Darfur, take place it must be denounced." He added
that Turkey, rather than denouncing the Darfur Genocide, has
actually strengthened its ties to Khartoum: "Last year, Turkish
President Abdullah Gul warmly welcomed Sudanese President Omar al-
Bashir to Ankara. Yet, Al-Bashir continues to preside over a
genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of 300,000 Sudanese
people in the Darfur region of the country."

The full text of Congressman Pallone's statement is provided below.

To view his remarks on YouTube, visit:
http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=1660

ESSAY: GENOCIDE BY ANY INTERNATIONAL STANDARD
By Sean Gannon
Jerusalem Post
Feb 13 2009

"The persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented
proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate
a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful populations and through
arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and
deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied by
frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder turning into massacre,
to bring destruction and destitution on them." - Henry Morgenthau Sr.,
US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, July 10, 1915

But did this constitute genocide? Not according to Israel which, for
reasons of "practical realpolitik" regarding relations with Turkey
has long refused to recognize the 1915-1923 massacre of up to 1.5
million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as an act of ethnic extermination.

Nor according to the United States, which bases its refusal on
similar grounds.

And not without cause. Most recently, Turkey responded to an October
2007 draft congressional resolution calling on president George Bush
to characterize the killings as genocide by threatening to cut its
logistical support for US operations in Iraq and close its strategic
Incirlik air base to American aircraft. Turkey spent $300,000 a month
on Washington lobbyists to ensure its message hit home. The resolution,
which had already passed the committee stage and had 225 cosponsors
in the House of Representatives, was quickly withdrawn.

Ankara's indefatigable efforts to prevent international recognition of
the Armenian genocide derive from the fact that its denial is part of
Turkey's founding mythology, a plank of official policy since the 1922
Lausanne Conference, where claims of mass killings were dismissed as
"Christian propaganda." In 1934, it successfully lobbied Washington
to persuade MGM to drop plans to film The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,
Franz Werfel's best-selling novel about the Armenian experience,
by threatening to boycott American films.

This campaign of denial intensified after 1965 when Armenian
commemorations of the 50th anniversary brought the issue to
international attention. By the mid-1970s, Turkey was engaged in
what Richard Falk described as "a major, proactive, deliberate
effort to... keep the truth about the Armenian genocide from
general acknowledgment." By the 1990s, this included the endowment
of chairs in Turkish studies at several US universities with the aim
of disseminating Ankara's version of events.

ACCORDING TO THIS VERSION, Armenians have willfully painted an
inaccurate picture of what happened in the World War I period and
why. And there is certainly truth in Turkey's claim that the situation
was not as clear-cut as generally presented. Rarely acknowledged,
for instance, is that the rise of Armenian nationalism in the 19th
century led to enormous tensions between Armenians and their Ottoman
overlords, and that many had sided against the empire in the 1828,
1854 and 1877 wars.

It is also infrequently admitted that although 250,000 Armenians
were conscripted into the Ottoman armies during World War I, another
150,000, out of a sense of religious affinity with the Orthodox Slavs
and in the hope that a Russian victory would lead to an independent
Armenian state, volunteered to serve under the czar, while a further
50,000 joined Armenian guerrilla groups which openly sided with
him. Seldom spoken of either is the fact that hundreds of thousands
of Muslim, Greek and Jewish civilians died directly at their hands.

But while Constantinople may have gained grounds for viewing the
Armenians as a fifth column, nonpartisan sources make clear that their
deportation and murder began before any attempted insurrection. As
David Fromkin, who studied German sources, has written: "There are
historians today who continue to support the claim... that the Ottoman
rulers acted only after Armenia had risen against them. But observers
at the time who were by no means anti-Turk reported that such was
not the case. German officers stationed there agreed that the area
was quiet until the deportations began."

Ankara also denies that 1.5 million Armenians actually died. While
some Turkish historians allow that up to 600,000 were killed, the
semi-official Turkish Historical Society puts the figure closer to
300,000 and argues that, of these, only 10,000 were massacred, the
remainder dying of starvation and disease. It further claims that
these 10,000 were killed, not as part of a genocidal plan, but in
the heat of battle and more often than not by Kurds.

But it is a matter of historical record that the Special Organization,
an official arm of the Defense Ministry, oversaw the activities
of Einsatzgruppen-style killing squads that, in the words of one
US diplomat, "swept the countryside, massacring [Armenian] men,
women and children." And while Kurds were certainly involved in the
killing, they were deliberately coopted for the task by the Turkish
War Ministry in the knowledge that, as the Armenians' historic blood
enemies, they would lose no opportunity to avenge ancient grudges.

Ankara's distinction between those directly murdered and those who
died indirectly from starvation, disease and exposure is also highly
questionable. With no provision made for clothing, food or shelter,
the anticipated outcome of the deportations into the Syrian desert
was obviously death. In fact, the Turkish interior minister termed
them "marches to eternity" and his meaning was clear to his appalled
German allies who distanced themselves from the policy. To say that
the Armenians who died during the deportations were not deliberately
killed is like claiming there were no intentional Jewish deaths during
their "relocation" to the East or on the death marches to the West
during World War II.

THE FACT IS that the Armenian massacres constituted genocide by any
international standard, conforming to the UN's criterion of having been
"committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group." Indeed, Raphael Lemkin, who
coined the term 'genocide' in 1944, used the Armenian massacres as
an illustrative example.

Today Turkey's campaign to prevent its recognition is assuming
a Canute-like quality. Some 21 countries have already formally
acknowledged it, including Russia, Canada and France, as has
the European Parliament, the World Council of Churches and the
International Association of Genocide Scholars. And with President
Barack Obama (who twice pledged to recognize the genocide during his
election campaign), Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, CIA chief Leon Panetta
and the NSC's director of multilateral affairs Samantha Power also on
board, we now have what the Turkish daily Hurriyet described as the
"most pro-Armenian [administration] in history," and the Armenian
National Committee of America is currently preparing to place another
"recognition resolution" before Congress. In fact, Obama may well use
this year's April 24 White House statement commemorating the killings
to recognize them as genocide.

Furthermore, an official with a leading American Jewish organization
recently told The Jerusalem Post that the post-Cast Lead "deterioration
in Israel-Turkey relations might prompt his group and others to
reconsider" their traditional support for Ankara's stance. And Israel,
which Yair Auron, author of The Banality of Denial: Israel and the
Armenian Genocide, describes as Turkey's "principal partner" in denial,
has itself made similar noises, with Deputy Foreign Minister Majallie
Whbee warning that if Turkey persists in its claims that genocide is
taking place in Gaza, "we will then recognize the Armenian-related
events as genocide."

Albeit for the wrong reasons, this is surely the right thing to
do. For, while fears regarding repercussions for both bilateral
relations and Turkey's 25,000-strong Jewish community are unfortunately
well-founded, Israel, perhaps more than other nations, has a moral
obligation to call this crime by its name.

The writer is a freelance journalist, writing mainly on Irish and
Middle Eastern affairs. He is currently preparing a book on the
history of Irish-Israeli relations.
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