Antisemitism in the Turkish Media

[winoman]

poor Kurds...Turkey is "relocationg them" with its usual care..

Turkey: Hollow Promises for Kurds Displaced by Army
EU Officials Visiting Ankara Must Press Turkey to Reinvigorate Rights Reform
(Ankara, March 7, 2005) —

On a key benchmark for European Union membership, the Turkish government has failed to honor pledges to help 378,000 displaced people, mainly Kurds, return home more than a decade after the army forced them from their villages in southeastern Turkey, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

On March 7-8, the European Union’s commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, and a delegation of other high-level EU officials will visit Ankara to discuss Turkey’s membership. The EU officials should press Turkey to take effective steps to facilitate the return of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) to southeastern Turkey, where Turkish security forces expelled hundreds of thousands from their villages during an internal armed conflict that raged during the 1980s and 1990s.

The 37-page report, “Still Critical: Prospects in 2005 for Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey,” details how the Turkish government has failed to implement measures for IDPs the United Nations recommended nearly three years ago. Since the European Union confirmed Turkey’s membership candidacy in December, the Turkish government appears to have shelved plans to enact those measures.

The report also details how Turkey has overstated its progress on internal displacement in reports to the European Commission. Before the European Union announced its decision to open membership talks, the Turkish government sent the European Commission statistics suggesting that the problem was well on its way to a solution—a requirement Turkey must fulfill for full membership. Turkey claimed that a third of the displaced had already returned, but Human Rights Watch revealed that permanent returns in some places were less than a fifth of the government’s estimate.

“When we checked Turkey’s figures on helping the displaced return home, the numbers proved unreliable,” said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division. “Also, the bare figures don’t convey how, thanks to government inaction, villagers are returning to places that are practically uninhabitable.”

In southeastern Turkey, the government has failed to provide infrastructure such as electricity, telephone lines and schools to returning communities, and has not provided proper assistance with house reconstruction.

“What’s worse, the government’s paramilitary village guards are attacking and killing returnees in some parts of southeastern Turkey,” added Denber.

Numerous intergovernmental bodies, as well as Turkish parliamentary commissions, have condemned the village guard system, which was devised in the 1980s to combat the illegal armed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK, now known as Kongra Gel). More than 58,000 paramilitary village guards remain on the government payroll.

Human Rights Watch said that the government’s paramilitary guards have killed 11 returned villagers in southeastern Turkey in the past three years.

When the United Nations examined the plight of the displaced in Turkey in 2002, it recommended that the government establish a dedicated IDP unit, develop a partnership with the international community for the resolution of IDP problems, and provide compensation for the damages arising from the displacement. Nearly three years later, the Turkish government has established no joint projects with intergovernmental organizations, and there is still no central governmental office responsible for IDPs. Last year, the Turkish parliament passed a compensation law, but no payments have yet been made. (my comment: sound familiar...actually much of this does....fits the pattern...)

It is now 18 years since Human Rights Watch warned of the impending program of village destruction in a 1987 report during the conflict in southeastern Turkey. The Turkish army duly carried out its campaign with considerable violence, torturing, “disappearing” and extrajudicially executing villagers in the process. Human Rights Watch has since repeatedly criticized the Turkish government’s empty gestures in its return programs, issuing further reports in 1995 and 2002.

“The Turkish state tried to cover up what it did, and now it’s subjecting the displaced to years of delay,” said Denber. “When EU officials arrive in Ankara, they need to put the problem of the displaced at the top of their agenda.”

Human Rights Watch called on the European Union to press the Turkish government to move ahead by immediately approving an IDP project submitted last year by the United Nations Development Program. In addition, Ankara needs to establish an agency for IDPs that will take effective measures.

Since the European Union accepted Turkey’s membership candidacy in 1999, human rights reform has been a stop-start process in the country. Turkey still has much to do on the protection of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, language rights and protection against torture.

“The predicament of the displaced is the most pressing concern, but the Turkish government has lost focus on its reform task as a whole,” Denber noted. “Last week we had three delegates observing trials of Ragip Zarakolu and Fikret Baskaya, a publisher and a professor threatened with imprisonment for expressing their nonviolent opinions.”

Preventing torture is another area where the Turkish government seems to have run out of energy. Turkey has made substantial improvement in recent years, but in order to combat persistent incidents of torture and ill-treatment, the European Union recommended in October 2004 that the Turkish government establish independent monitoring of detention facilities. Five months later, Turkey has still not implemented independent monitoring, even though the necessary legal mechanisms are already in place.

In 2000, the European Union presented Turkey with a list of benchmarks—known as the Accession Partnership—that Turkey had to meet to become a full member. This was revised in 2003, and will be revised again later this year.

[winoman]

Village guards...

Obstacles to Return

Paramilitary Village Guards

Although the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project also authorized regional governors to provide ad hoc support for returning villagers, Human Rights Watch’s earlier research indicated that such support was more likely to be paid to displaced village guards than to villagers displaced by the security forces. At any rate, relatively few villagers have been encouraged to return to their homes, and it is clear that the countryside remains under the influence of the brutal and corrupt paramilitary village guards. The Interior Ministry admits that there are currently 58,416 village guards operating in the southeast, and that it has no plans to disband them, despite the fact that every survey of the returns problem (including one carried out by the Turkish parliament in 1995) urged the abolition of this corrupt and corrupting system.

Village guards were involved in the original displacement, and in the intervening years have continued to commit murders and abductions. In some cases village guards are now occupying properties from which Kurdish villagers were forcibly evicted evacuated by Kurdish villagers or using their vacant lands. They are prepared to use violence to protect their illegal gains. In 2002 village guards allegedly killed three villagers who returned to the village of Nureddin, in Muş province, and in June 2004 killed five villagers in pastures near the village of Akpazar, near Diyadin, in Ağrı province. In March 2004, inhabitants of Mağara village, near Idil, in Şırnak province, applied to the local courts to remove village guards from the homes from which they had been forcibly evicted in the early 1990s. Their lawyer, Eren Keskin, who attempted to visit the village with a member of the Turkish Human Rights Association on September 9, 2004, reported that she was turned back at gunpoint by gendarmes. However, in another case in September in the same province, the authorities did evacuate village guards from nearby Sarı village in order to secure the return of the original inhabitants, members of the Assyrian minority.

On September 25, 2004, a village guard allegedly shot and killed Mustafa Koyun and wounded Mehmet Kaya in the village of Tellikaya of Diyarbakir. The villagers who were attacked had been forced to leave Tellikaya after they refused to join the village guard corps in the 1980s, and their lands had been occupied by village guards.

Some displaced persons have been told that they can only return to their homes if they join the village guards. In April former residents of Uluköy, near Kiziltepe, in Mardin province, who had been forced out of their homes in 1993 because they refused to join the village guards, were given permission to return to their village. However, when they attempted to enter the village, the local gendarmerie told them they would have to agree to village guard service. When the village headman asked for clarification, the governor reportedly told him that the villagers could return but that he could not be responsible for their safety. In the same month, villagers returning to Altınsu village, near Şemdinli, in Hakkari province, reported that the local gendarmerie commander held a meeting at which he demanded that returning villagers become village guards.

[winoman]

We've seen such empty promisses before

On July 27, 2004, the government passed a “Law for the Compensation of Damage arising from Terror and the War against Terror.” Under the law, compensation assessment commissions will be established to assess damages and levels of compensation. However, these commissions will be composed not of independent assessors, but of ministry representatives headed by assistant provincial governors—the very authorities who presided over the original displacement and have performed so poorly in achieving returns. Thousands of displaced people have started to apply for compensation under the law. It remains unclear whether this law will serve to channel funds to the displaced, or be a tool to avoid paying appropriate compensation.

The compensation provisions are restricted to events that took place within the emergency region, but forced migration also occurred from areas outside this area. In August Human Rights Watch spoke to two villagers of Yastik village, near Tercan, in Erzincan province, who had petitioned the Erzincan governor for assistance in returning to their village, which was evacuated in the early 1990s. The governor had replied that no assistance could be given with the repair and reconstruction of their bulldozed homes because Erzincan was not within the scope of the Return to Village and Rehabilitation program. At the same time the villagers received this disappointing response, they were fighting off a legal attempt by a local landowner to take possession of the land on which their village had stood.

[winoman]

Conclusion

The public of Turkey, which applied for E.U. membership in 1987, was shocked when Croatia was given a date for membership negotiations in June 2004 after having only applied in 2003. However, the Turkish government’s policies stand in contrast to those of Croatia on the crucial question of displacement. It is significant that, despite shortcomings in the process, UNHCR and the OSCE were integrated in the development, implementation, monitoring, and funding of initiatives to address problems related to the return of Croatian Serbs who had been displaced to neighboring countries. It is inconceivable that Croatia would have made such progress if it had resisted partnership with the international community on this issue.

In the course of the fifteen-year armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, Turkish security forces committed grave human rights and humanitarian law violations against the residents of the region, forcing many hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. For over a decade now, the Turkish government has consistently failed to acknowledge the widespread and severe human rights abuses committed by its security forces, much less to provide restitution to its victims or facilitate their return to their homes. Today over 380,000 persons remain internally displaced throughout Turkey, most living in poverty and despair. The displaced cannot afford to rely on government promises of good faith; they need to see concrete action. The international community, if truly committed to resolving the plight of the IDPs of Turkey, can also ill afford to rely on verbal promises from the Turkish government. It must also insist on concrete action.

The role of international agencies has been repeatedly identified as a key element in an effective return process by all intergovernmental bodies that have looked at the situation in Turkey. It has also been given lip-service by the Turkish government which has declared that it is “determined to deal with [the return of the displaced] … in cooperation with international bodies, especially the U.N. and the EU.” In practice, however, the government continues to hold the international community at arm’s length.

The Turkish government’s failure to move from dialogue to action raises serious doubts about its good faith commitment to a successful returns process for those displaced by the armed conflict in the southeast. Without a formal partnership with international organizations, it is probable that the government will continue its ten year strategy of delay and ultimately never provide for the return of its internally displaced.

Nothing in the accession process to date has resulted in a fundamental change in the Turkish government’s policies on the internally displaced. Its response has been wholly inadequate. The government can point to just three steps it has taken for the displaced. Firstly, it claims to have procured the return of a quarter of the displaced, but has never given any information about which villages have been repopulated, or what it has done to support their return. Secondly, it is working with UNHCR in arranging the return of a group of about 10,000 Kurdish villagers who fled from Şırnak province across the border to Iraq in 1994 when Turkish air force jets and helicopters bombed villages killing 36 villagers, including 17 children. Thirdly, it has passed a compensation law which cannot be assessed for effectiveness until well into 2005. The government cannot pass these measures off as effective action for the displaced while it continues to ignore the recommendations of the SRSG and the PACE for introducing an intergovernmental element into its return program.

To date, the E.U. accession process has managed to place the concerns of IDPs onto the Turkish government’s agenda, but it has done little to resolve their plight or ensure that they are provide with financial compensation and reconstruction aid. The period from October – December 2004 – the time before the European Commission determines whether Turkey will get a firm date to begin membership negotiations – may provide a last opportunity for the displaced to obtain substantial assistance from the international community, which did absolutely nothing to prevent their original displacement.

[winoman]

Turkey claims it was doing them a favor!

Destruction of Infrastructure

The violence that was used during the forced evacuation of the villages, coupled with a decade of neglect, means that villagers face return to near wilderness punctuated with piles of stones where their homes once stood. Their fields are overgrown, and their pasture turned to ungrazeable scrub. Many villages in the former conflict areas have no telephone connection, no electricity supply, no school, no health centre, no water or sanitation system, and often no passable road.

Civil servants sometimes cite the extremely primitive conditions in some villages to argue that the settlements are fundamentally and intrinsically non-viable, but it is important to note that fifteen years ago, prior to their destruction, the villages had electricity and telephone connections. In most cases, road access deteriorated as a result of a decade of neglect. Most villages also had ready access to schools before the late 1980s, when the PKK began its policy of killing teachers, and the state began destroying school buildings and other infrastructure.

[winoman]

Typical tactics

(this is excerpted from first report)

Automatic exclusions from compensation

The law prohibits the provision of compensation to those who damaged their own property; for damage arising from offences under the Anti-Terror Law committed by the claimant; and for “damage arising from economic or social factors not connected with terrorism.” In some cases, these ostensibly justifiable reservations may result in unfair exclusions.

If there were any official records of the destruction of villages, they would have been kept by local gendarmerie units who were in most cases responsible for the displacement. It is not known whether such records exist or what they might contain, but in order to cover up their abuses, it is possible that gendarmes may have recorded that villagers destroyed their own property intentionally or negligently. In some cases, gendarmes forced villagers to destroy their own property. Çiftlibahçe villagers, for example, told Human Rights Watch that gendarmes made them pull up their extensive and valuable tobacco crop with their own hands.

The destruction of a village generally followed frequent large scale security operations in which the males of the village were detained and interrogated under torture, and then tried in state security courts for “sheltering members of an armed organization.” The pattern of torture and unfair trial was extensively documented by nongovernmental organizations and in judgments at the European Court of Human Rights. As a consequence of these judgments, state security courts were abolished in June 2004. Automatic exclusion of an applicant simply on the grounds of a conviction in a state security court for “sheltering” would be unfair.

After the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project was established in 1999, villagers who wanted to apply for assistance were required to sign a special printed form, and tick a box indicating the reason for their original migration, choosing alternatives ranging from “employment” and “health” to PKK-instigated “terror.” There was no option for indicating that the reason was intimidation or forced evacuation by state forces. Many villagers resisted signing this form, and as a consequence some were threatened, beaten, and denied access to the village. Rıdvan Kızgın, president of the Bingöl branch of the Human Rights Association, believes that some villagers may have checked boxes indicating social or economic reasons simply to regain access to their property. Automatic exclusion on the basis of these unreliable documents would be unfair.

Inappropriate limitations on acceptable forms of evidence

The implementing regulation for the Compensation Law requires that information about the extent of damage should be collected from “public bodies and organizations,” “the declaration of the person who has suffered the loss, and information from judicial, administrative and military bodies.” It also states that, in cases of property damage, assessment commissions will work on the basis of “incident reports describing how the damage occurred and its extent…and all forms of document relating to the assessment of damage.”

Since the testimony of fellow villagers who were eye-witnesses to the destruction is potentially excluded from this list because such evidence is not mentioned explicitly in the regulation, the testimony of the muhtar (the government representative elected in all villages) will be critical. There is, however, a long history of muhtars being subjected to various forms of pressure by gendarmerie and governors. At the peak of the displacements, several muhtars were murdered. Mehmet Gürkan, muhtar of Akçayurt in Diyarbakır province, forcibly evacuated on July 7, 1994, held a press conference and reported that gendarmes had tortured him to tell television journalists that the PKK had destroyed his village. In fact, he said, security forces had burned Akçayurt. When he returned to the village a month later an eye-witness saw soldiers detain him and take him away in a helicopter. He was never seen again. Since that time, pressures ranging from threats of violence to withdrawal of official favour and funding have remained common. As a result, some muhtars may be reluctant to provide evidence to the commissions concerning the destruction of villages by state security forces.

Assessment Commissions should be aware that witnesses who give evidence may fear reprisals if they implicate security forces or village guards in house destruction and forced evacuation. Commissions should offer appropriate protective measures for witnesses, and investigate thoroughly any allegations of intimidation.

[winoman]

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/12/15/turkey9865.htm

Human Rights Watch’s key concerns on Turkey for 2005


We are also at a departure point for human rights in Turkey: just ten years ago, torture was pandemic, with deaths in custody running at approximately one a week. State forces committed extrajudicial executions and “disappearances,” or political killings through their proxies, almost daily. Security forces burned villages in intense conflict with the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and drove hundreds of thousands of Kurdish farmers out of their homes. Courts often branded writers or politicians, who mentioned Turkey’s minorities, as terrorists, and imprisoned them.

In two areas, however, Turkey’s respect for human rights continues to fall well below international standards: torture and ill-treatment in police custody remain common, and there has been little progress on the return of internally-displaced Kurds to their homes.

Torture and Ill-Treatment

Torture remains common in Turkey today. In the twenty years following the 1980 military coup, successive governments maintained a system of detention and interrogation that encouraged torture and protected the perpetrators. As a result, more than 400 Turkish citizens died in custody apparently as a result of torture, with forty-five deaths in 1994 alone.

Internal Displacement

In the early 1990s, at least 380,000 Kurdish villagers were forcibly displaced by security forces in an intense conflict in the mountains of southeast Turkey. Most internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Turkey still live in conditions of hardship and poverty in the cities, with no state assistance or compensation. Government initiatives for return have been mainly cosmetic while the government has yet to implement the recommendations from the international community

In the last three months Human Rights Watch has noted several attacks on civilians by village guards in areas of return, including in the provinces of Diyarbakır, Muş, Mardin and Hakkari.

[winoman]

The Case of Nuyire Kesbir (excerpt)

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/10/28/turkey10317.htm

October 28, 2004

Piet Hein Donner
Minister of Justice
Ministry for Justice
Schedeldoekshaven 100
Postbus 20301
2500 EH Den Haag

Re: Case of Nuriye Kesbir

Minister Donner:

I am writing on behalf of Human Rights Watch (HRW) regarding the case of Nuriye Kesbir. Ms. Kesbir’s lawyers have provided us with a copy of the September 7, 2004 decision in which you authorize Ms. Kesbir’s extradition to Turkey. Human Rights Watch is deeply disturbed that this decision apparently was taken with no regard for the human rights considerations detailed in our letter to you of May 24, 2004, in which we argue that extraditing Ms. Kesbir to Turkey puts her at real risk of torture and ill-treatment. Moreover, our letter detailed the problems inherent in relying on diplomatic assurances from the Turkish authorities that Ms. Kesbir will not be so ill-treated upon return.

It appears that your decision to extradite Ms. Kesbir is based, in the main, on the fact that the Dutch authorities have secured diplomatic assurances from the Turkish authorities that she will not be tortured or ill-treated and will receive a fair trial upon return to Turkey. In seeking such assurances, the Dutch government acknowledges that Ms. Kesbir is indeed at risk of torture or ill-treatment if returned. The assurances allegedly serve as a safeguard against such treatment. Our research, however, detailed in an April 2004 report titled, “Empty Promises: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, strongly indicates that assurances from governments where torture is systematic or widespread, or from governments that do not have effective control or supervisory mechanisms over the forces that commit torture, cannot be trusted and thus do not provide a reliable or effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment.

...ongoing gender discrimination in the form of sexual violence against women detainees...

Diplomatic Assurances from Turkey Inherently Unreliable

Governmental authorities in states where torture is a serious human rights problem often deny the existence of torture, however, since such abusive practices are in breach of fundamental international obligations. To rely on assurances given by a state that practises torture is to rely on promises from a state that cannot be trusted to comply with its international obligations.

Turkish state authorities do not have sufficient control over the forces perpetrating acts of torture, nor the will to hold abusers accountable.

...the formal protections against torture in Turkey are among the strongest in Europe, but it is personnel in police and detention facilities that routinely ignore these legal safeguards, leading to ongoing serious abuses.

The diplomatic assurances proffered by the Turkish authorities in Ms. Kesbir’s case are not reliable due to the Turkish governments unwillingness to adequately supervise those who continue to commit acts of torture and ill-treatment, and they do not meet even the minimum standards required by the Special Rapporteur on Torture to ensure Ms. Kesbir’s safety and full respect for her rights.

Torture is illegal and therefore practised in secret. Prison personnel, including prison doctors, are often trained in torture techniques—including the use of electric shock—that are undetectable, except to the eye of one who is expertly trained. Independent experts, medics and lawyers are usually denied unhindered and private access to detainees. Detainees themselves are frequently intimidated into silence, fearing further abuses if they speak about the torture. Women torture victims, in particular, are less inclined to discuss their abuse, particularly if it involves sexual violence.

Conclusion

Upon the information and belief contained in this letter, we are convinced that extraditing Ms. Kesbir puts her at real risk of torture and ill-treatment upon return to Turkey. The diplomatic assurances given by the Turkish government in the extradition case of Ms. Kesbir are neither reliable nor adequate, and cannot guarantee that she will not be subjected to torture or ill-treatment upon return.

Yours sincerely,

Holly Cartner
Executive Director
Europe and Central Asia Division
Human Rights Watch

[TUR-Friend]

Jesus Christ! I thought that TIT (Turkish Revenge Brigades) was a joke of some uneducated MHP members. I can't believe they're actively doing something intelligent, and not being illiteral morons. That's so good news, I want to see the 3rd World War before I die.

[winoman]

So this is the only response from our friendly and enlightened Turks on the forum? Typical - Turkish memory is aparently so short that they can forget about atrocites their people commited that they have read about not 10 seconds before...