BELGRADE — Interior Minister Ivica Dačić says a member of the Kurdish Hezbollah, arrested yesterday, will be sent to Turkey if that country requests his extradition.

Serbian MUP officers are seen with Tamak after his arrest (Tanjug)

Serbian MUP officers are seen with Tamak after his arrest (Tanjug)

Ajdan Tamak was arrested while he was hiding in a truck at the Horgoš border crossing between Serbia and Hungary.

He is currently held by the border police, it was revealed.

Dačić said that the Turkish Interpol stated that Tamak was sentenced to life in prison “for committing several terrorist acts”, and that he was wanted on charges of being a member of “the terrorist group (known as) Turkish or Kurdish Hezbollah”.

The Serbian police arrested Tamak and another person as they were trying to illegally cross the border and leave Serbia early on Friday.

According to reports, Interpol offices in Serbia and Turkey collaborated in this case.

via B92 – News – Serbia to send member of Kurdish Hezbollah to Turkey.

A Kurdish Rebel Softens His Tone for Skeptical Ears

“We want the Kurdish problem — as a nation’s problem, as a people’s problem — to be solved not by guns, but by dialogue.”
MURAT KARAYILAN
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: December 31, 2010

Stephen Farrell and Namo Abdulla contributed reporting from Qandil, Iraq, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

QANDIL, Iraq

HIGH in the craggy mountains of Iraq’s northern frontier, where men (and, in this case, women) with guns have long operated beyond the control of any government, Murat Karayilan sounds more interested in pursuing peace than the war he has led against Turkey.

“We are not weak,” Mr. Karayilan said in an interview in this village, where he and other fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K., represent the law of the land, despite official claims to the contrary.

“Our youths are always ready, hot-blooded and combative, but we want the Kurdish problem — as a nation’s problem, as a people’s problem — to be solved not by guns, but by dialogue.”

Many will doubt Mr. Karayilan’s sincerity, especially in Turkey. The party’s violent struggle has lasted more than a quarter-century and cost 40,000 lives. But now, perhaps more than ever before, there are indications that the war may have reached its endgame.

And that has put Mr. Karayilan — either a noble insurgent fighting oppression or a narco-terrorist commander — at the center of a different kind of offensive.

He has been making the case for Kurdish rights in Turkey in surreptitiously arranged, if not exactly clandestine, interviews from his mountainous redoubt, irritating officials on both sides of the border who would rather see him fade into obscurity.

“The Kurdish people are an ancient people in the world,” he said. “All their national and linguistic rights have been denied. Our goal is to achieve those rights.”

Mr. Karayilan’s party, long designated a terrorist organization and since last year a drug trafficker by the United States, has declared a new cease-fire and already extended it into the new year. Whether by design or under duress, the party has reduced its own political demands, tempered by the profound political and economic changes that have swept Turkey and Iraq.

Mr. Karayilan no longer calls for a separate Kurdish state, but for a degree of autonomy within Turkey that is inspired by, but stops considerably short of, the federal system the Kurds set up for themselves in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003.

Iraq’s Kurdish leaders, eager to expand trade and cross-border cooperation, have supported efforts to end the fighting, offering their own model of self-determination and rising prosperity as an example. Even as officials in Turkey rule out negotiations with the party itself, intermediaries have held secret talks to discuss the possibility of a lasting peace, according to officials in Iraq and Turkey.

The presence of the P.K.K. has long been an irritant in relations, prompting cross-border raids and bombings as recently as last summer. Increasingly, though, it would seem to be a surmountable one.

“We continue to remind all: Violence will not be the way to solve this issue,” said Barham Salih, the prime minister of the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.

Iraq’s Kurds are “mindful of our relationship with Turkey,” Mr. Salih added. The experience of the Kurds within Iraq’s democratizing if not yet fully democratic system “dispels the notion that the Kurds are a destabilizing element in this part of the world,” he said.

“We don’t have to be stuck in the conflicts in the past,” he said.

MR. KARAYILAN is a garrulous man, portly but fit, mustachioed and nattily dressed in the handmade olive-gray uniform that the party’s fighters wear. His past is murky enough that the United States Treasury Department’s official terrorist designations give two birth dates for him, making him either 56 or 60.

He has been the day-to-day commander of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party since its charismatic founder, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured in 1999, tried and sent to an island prison in the Sea of Marmara.

The leadership moved to Qandil shortly afterward, and its fighters live more or less openly in what amounts to an undeclared haven. Its fighters — a large number of them women — adhere to a disciplined, ascetic lifestyle. While they have always used the mountains as refuge, the toppling of Saddam Hussein has made this much easier — to the chagrin of the Turkish government, which routinely complains to the United States and Iraq to do more to curtail the P.K.K.’s movements.

“For the first time in history, the Kurds have breathing space,” said the movement’s spokesman, Roj Welat.

Mr. Karayilan’s exact base is, of course, kept secret, but the party’s presence in the gorges around Qandil is not. Uniformed fighters maintain a checkpoint on the road from the Kurdish regional capital, Erbil, not far beyond the last official checkpoint.

The party’s flag flutters over its territory, while Mr. Ocalan’s portrait hangs ubiquitously. Mr. Ocalan remains the movement’s revered leader, but he “is not in a position to giver orders” from prison, as Mr. Karayilan put it, though his messages and writings are still circulated.

The party runs a clinic with a German doctor and a factory to make the uniforms. It neatly tends a cemetery with a 30-foot white obelisk that looms over the graves of Kurdish fighters from Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

Mr. Karayilan said donations from Kurds in their homeland or abroad sustained the movement. American and Turkish officials say smuggling does. As for weapons, Mr. Karayilan smiled coyly when asked. “You can get whatever you want,” he said. “It’s the Middle East.”

The party unilaterally declared a cease-fire after an eruption in cross-border violence from 2007 to 2009. The lull has largely coincided with concessions from the Turkish government under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to expand rights for the country’s Kurdish minority by, for example, allowing a Kurdish-language television station and Kurdish-language studies at universities.

Mr. Erdogan’s government has ignored the party’s announced terms for an end to violence altogether, including the release of arrested Kurdish political activists and the creation of a reconciliation commission like the one in post-apartheid South Africa. Instead the government has struck a more nationalistic tone before elections in June. Nevertheless, the government is expected to offer some new gestures for Kurds in hopes of marginalizing Mr. Karayilan’s group.

“Some of the things listed as preconditions are already part of the democratic standards by our government for all of our citizens, not only for Kurds,” said Omer Celik, a member of Parliament and one of Mr. Erdogan’s leading political advisers.

Mr. Karayilan said the Turkish government lacked the political will to pursue a true peace, though, tellingly, he did not close the door on a negotiated resolution.

He spoke for nearly two hours in a cinder-block house here in Qandil, not far from another house badly damaged by two Turkish bombs in the summer.

He traveled with only a small retinue of guards in Toyota Land Cruisers and took few other precautions. When the interview ended, he apologized for not being able to stay for dinner.

For all his polite charm, he remains strident at times, denouncing what he called Turkish occupation, oppression and genocide. But the outline of an accommodation that he sketches no longer seems so far-fetched.

He urged the United States, as well as other nations, to stop seeing the conflict through the prism of the “war on terror,” but rather through that of self-determination. “It is the cause of a nation that needs to be addressed,” he said.

Here’s a ‘today’ Yule story that occurred 3 weeks ago ~ AND NOW, in time for the holidays, I bring you the best Christmas story you never heard.
1.        
It started last Christmas, when Bennett and Vivian Levin were overwhelmed by sadness while listening to radio reports of injured American troops. “We have to let them know we care,” Vivian told Bennett. So they organized a trip to bring soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital to the annual Army-Navy football game in Philly, on Dec. 3.

The cool part is, they created their own train line to do it. Yes, there are people in this country who actually own real trains. Bennett Levin – native Philly guy, self-made millionaire and irascible former L&I commish – is one of them.

He has three luxury rail cars. Think mahogany paneling, plush seating and white-linen dining areas. He also has two locomotives, which he stores at his Juniata Park train yard. One car, the elegant Pennsylvania , carried John F. Kennedy to the Army-Navy game in 1961 and ’62. Later, it carried his brother Bobby’s body to D. C. for burial. “That’s a lot of history for one car,” says Bennett.

He and Vivian wanted to revive a tradition that endured from 1936 to 1975, during which trains carried Army-Navy spectators from around the country directly to the stadium where the annual game is played. The Levins could think of no better passengers to reinstate the ceremonial ride than the wounded men and women recovering at Walter Reed in D. C. and Bethesda , in Maryland . “We wanted to give them a first-class experience,” says Bennett. “Gourmet meals on board, private transportation from the train to the stadium, perfect seats – real hero treatment.”

Through the Army War College Foundation, of which he is a trustee, Bennett met with Walter Reed’s commanding general, who loved the idea. But Bennett had some ground rules first, all designed to keep the focus on the troops alone:

No press on the trip, lest the soldiers’ day of pampering devolve into a media circus.

No politicians either, because, says Bennett, “I didn’t want some idiot making this trip into a campaign photo op”

And no Pentagon suits on board, otherwise the soldiers would be too busy saluting superiors to relax.

The general agreed to the conditions, and Bennett realized he had a problem on his hands. “I had to actually make this thing happen,” he laughs.

Over the next months, he recruited owners of 15 other sumptuous rail cars from around the country – these people tend to know each other – into lending their vehicles for the day. The name of their temporary train? The Liberty Limited.

Amtrak volunteered to transport the cars to D. C. – where they’d be coupled together for the round-trip ride to Philly – then back to their owners later.

Conrail offered to service the Liberty while it was in Philly. And SEPTA drivers would bus the disabled soldiers 200 yards from the train to Lincoln Financial Field, for the game.

A benefactor from the War College ponied up 100 seats to the game – on the 50-yard line – and lunch in a hospitality suite.

And corporate donors filled, for free and without asking for publicity, goodie bags for attendees:

From Woolrich, stadium blankets. From Wal-Mart, digital cameras. From Nikon, field glasses. From GEAR, down jackets.

There was booty not just for the soldiers, but for their guests, too, since eachwas allowed to bring a friend or family member.

The Marines, though, declined the offer. “They voted not to take guests with them, so they could take more Marines,” says Levin, choking up at the memory.

Bennett’s an emotional guy, so he was worried about how he’d react to meeting the 88 troops and guests at D. C.’s Union Station, where the trip originated. Some GIs were missing limbs. Others were wheelchair-bound or accompanied by medical personnel for the day. “They made it easy to be with them,” he says. “They were all smiles on the ride to Philly. Not an ounce of self-pity from any of them. They’re so full of life and determination.”

At the stadium, the troops reveled in the game, recalls Bennett. Not even Army’s lopsided loss to Navy could deflate the group’s rollicking mood.

Afterward, it was back to the train and yet another gourmet meal – heroes get hungry, says Levin – before returning to Walter Reed and Bethesda . “The day was spectacular,” says Levin. “It was all about these kids. It was awesome to be part of it.”

The most poignant moment for the Levins was when 11 Marines hugged them goodbye, then sang them the Marine Hymn on the platform at Union Station.

“One of the guys was blind, but he said, ‘I can’t see you, but man, you must be beautiful!’ ” says Bennett. “I got a lump so big in my throat, I couldn’t even answer him.”

It’s been three weeks, but the Levins and their guests are still feeling the day’s love. “My Christmas came early,” says Levin, who is Jewish and who loves the Christmas season. “I can’t describe the feeling in the air.” Maybe it was hope.

As one guest wrote in a thank-you note to Bennett and Vivian, “The fond memories generated last Saturday will sustain us all – whatever the future may bring.”

God bless the Levins.

And bless the troops, every one.

Anti-terrorism raids on homes across Melbourne this morning were part of a national effort, with properties in Sydney and Perth also targeted.

In a joint blitz, police executed a number of search warrants as part of their investigation into organisations funding overseas terrorists.

The counter-terrorism teams include the Australian Federal Police, and officers from New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.

The raids are part of an investigation into the funding of terrorist organisations.

“The community can be assured that this investigation is not related to any terrorist-related threat or incident,” a police spokeswoman said.

The Melbourne raids took place in Glenroy, Coolaroo, Pascoe Vale, and Dandenong.

Police raided the offices of the Kurdish Association of Victoria on Fawkner Road, Pascoe Vale, before dawn.

They sealed off the area and entered the offices.

Police seized boxes full of documents in the raids.

They also took desktop computers, hard drives and bagged evidence to waiting police cars.

Local Kurds, however, said the raids were nothing more than a political stunt.

Sniffer dogs combed the scene and association members were barred from entering the property.

Up to seven police cars were at the scene at first light.

The raids are believed to be linked to Kurdish groups providing funding to terror organisations overseas.

The Kurdish Association of Victoria was established to help newly arrived Kurdish refugees and migrants.

Its website says it provides a range of services for the Kurdish community, including settlement, advocacy, referral, education and health issues.

It also offers cultural and recreational programs in the areas of folk dancing, traditional music and Kurdish language.

The raids are believed to be linked to a crackdown on funding for the Kurdish Workers’ Party, which is listed as a terror organisation internationally. The PKK’s goal is to establish an independent Kurdish state.

with Reid Sexton

http://media.theage.com.au/entertainment/red-carpet/brownlow-party-booze-limits-1797523.html, 19 August 2010

Kurdish Children are taught Quran in a Sunni Mosque in Urmia, a Kurdish city of Iran.---------- Photo by Rudaw

By AZAD KURDI

ERBIL, Iraqi Kurdistan: Not long ago, three 19-year old boys left Iran’s Kurdish region to Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda. In the mid of last month, it was reported that they had been killed by the American and coalition forces.

The dead fighters were Kurds from the city of Saqiz where majority of the people are Sunni Kurds, poverty and unemployment on the rise.

Here in this city and other Kurdish towns of Iran, residents point to an increasing number of extremist Salafi groups spreading Jihadist ideologies and swaying beliefs of dozens of adults.

Many Kurds warned that the region was increasingly becoming a place to recruit fighters for al-Qaeda.

Iran’s Kurds are subjected to a doubled-discrimination. Firstly they are discriminated for being Kurds not Persians and second they for being Sunnis not Shiites.

Right after the disappearance of their sons, the parents of the three dead fighters started to file lawsuits against a number of Mullahs preaching extremism and anti-Western ideas.

Rudaw found out that none of the Mullahs had been arrested by the Shiite-led government.

Kurdish youths fighting against American and Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq is not a new thing. Last year, Suleiman Ahmadi, Iranian Kurds, was found killed in Afghanistan.

Experts see the rise of unemployment, using drugs, poverty in the region as main reasons why the adults join al-Qaeda.

“All of these play roles in strengthening the groups,” said Khalid Tawakwli, Iranian Kurdish sociologist.

Before 2003, in the Iraqi Kurdish mountains of Hawraman bordering Iran, there was a Kurdish offshoot of al-Qaeda under the name of “Ansar al-Islam.”

Their bases were bombed by the American missiles at the outbreak of the Iraq war, many members killed and the rest fled to Iran, south and center of Iraq and abroad.

The leader of the group, Mullah Krekar, is now based in Norway. It is not clear whether any of the former Ansar al-Islam members is working in the current Iranian-based groups.

But a senior member of a pro-Kurdish Iranian opposition party, Aram Mudaris, was convinced that many of the senior members of the Iranian extremist groups had been ex-members of Ansar al-Islam fled to Iran after the US-bombardment.

“Those groups are logistically and financially supported by the Iranian regime” said Mudaris, senior leader of Komala party.

He said that the groups have mainly relied on using mosques to practice their political work and convene with their members since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Some other experts say that Iran’s toleration of these groups is to kill two birds with one stone.

The first goal is domestic, that is, undermining Kurdish nationalism. The second one is to use the groups to weaken U.S. counter insurgency strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://rudaw.net/english/news/iran/3099.html, 11/08/2010

We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I’ve seen this opera before.

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told

the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

Erdogan’s Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen’s grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving “martyrdom” in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

The passengers’ plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

What explains Israel’s apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence – with whom it has a long history of collaboration – to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that “Turkish intelligence duped Israel”, which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings - also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

In Mozart’s Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha’s harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week’s version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart’s Osmin, who sings:

“First you’ll be beheaded!
Then hanged!
Then spitted on hot stakes!
Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!”

This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen.

The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009):

As Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey’s fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP’s rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world?

The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: “Whatever it can get.” It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran’s Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to “mediate” the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines.

But it is a bit more complex than that. Modern Turkey is an artificial construct, rather than a nation-state in the Western sense. Since the Turks completed the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the middle of the 14th century, a relatively thin crust of ethnic Turks has ruled over subject peoples. The Ottoman Empire at various points in its history had a Christian majority; its civil service at different points was more Venetian, Armenian and Jewish then Turkish; its self-understanding was global and religious, that is, as the caliphate of Islam, rather than as a national entity.

When World War I reduced Turkey to an Anatolian rump, Kemal Ataturk attempted to impose “Turkishness” as a secular, national ideology on the European model. To make the country “Turkish”, several million Orthodox Christians were estimated to have been killed. The hollowness of Ataturk’s secular construct, modeled on the nastier European national movements, made it vulnerable from the beginning. The army was the only institution that could hold Turkish society together.

What will replace Ataturk’s secularism? I wrote two years ago:

If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.

Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life”. His schools educate the elite of the Turkic world across Asia. Gulen’s interest, to be sure, focuses on the Turkish state, whose bureaucracy is now filled with his acolytes. But unlike Ataturk’s secular nationalism, which tried to redefine Turkey on a European model, Gulen’s Islamism is inherently expansionist.

What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia”, as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book, The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.

As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology.

Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.

He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself. The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen means the management of jinn.

Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

By Robert Dreyfuss | Wed September 9, 2009 2:13 PM PST Editors’ Note: Next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a feature on “The New Israel Lobby,” the liberal pro-Israel group J Street. Bob Dreyfuss’ story in the Mother Jones issue that hit the streets a few weeks ago also focuses on the shifting terrain for the Israel lobby.
AS TWO MEN AT THE PODIUM called out names in rapid succession, senators and members of Congress rose from their candlelit tables to acknowledge the cheers of 7,000 pro-Israel activists gathered to fete them. The scene was the vast Washington Convention Center; the occasion, the gala banquet capping the annual three-day conference of Washington’s most powerful lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. With more than half of Congress attending, and America’s top politicians fumbling to score crowd points with awkwardly delivered Hebrew phrases and fulminations concerning Iran, the reading of the names has become a yearly demonstration of AIPAC’s clout. Banquet speakers included Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry, looming on gigantic screens that lined the hall. Representing Israel were President Shimon Peres (whose address was interrupted by a half-dozen Code Pink activists) and, via satellite link, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a dog and pony show no other group-not the American Medical Association, not the National Rifle Association, not AARP-could hope to match.
For decades, AIPAC-together with Washington’s broader Israel lobby, which distributed more than $22 million in campaign contributions during the last election cycle-has had a well-earned reputation for getting what it wants. And many expected the same when, during the May conference, thousands of AIPAC foot soldiers fanned across Capitol Hill to talk up the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, a bill designed to throttle Iran’s economy by restricting its ability to import gasoline (which it doesn’t have much capacity to produce domestically). The legislation is a top priority for AIPAC, which views Iran’s nuclear enrichment push as an existential threat to the Jewish state.
But this time, AIPAC was in for a surprise. Rep. Howard Berman, a dependable Israel backer who authored the legislation this past spring, put it on ice just weeks after it was introduced. “I have no intention of moving this bill through the legislative process in the near future,” declared the California Democrat, who chairs the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
“Berman shocked everybody by not moving this bill forward,” an official from the Israel lobby told me. “He’s essentially put the kibosh on the bill. On his own bill! This is a major, major, major problem.”

So what happened? The first explanation is obvious: Like many Democrats, Berman is reluctant to stand in the way of President Obama’s foreign policy objectives, including his overture to Iran and his push for US leadership toward an Israeli-Palestinian accord. But Berman’s action also signaled a deterioration of AIPAC’s power. It’s begun to appear that “AIPAC is not the 800-pound gorilla everyone says they are,” says Dan Fleshler, author of Transforming America’s Israel Lobby. “They may be just a 400-pound gorilla.”

On Capitol Hill, a coalition of groups to the left of AIPAC has been mobilizing Democrats to support Obama’s agenda in the Middle East, even if it conflicts with the goals of AIPAC and Netanyahu. (See our graphic representation of the Israel lobby spectrum, and our who’s who of the major personalities). “Members of Congress are looking to support the president, and AIPAC hasn’t moderated itself as much as it should have,” says Patrick Disney, acting legislative director at the National Iranian American Council, which is part of the new coalition.

AIPAC is facing something of a perfect storm.

Advocating for stronger ties between the Obama administration and the current right-wing Israeli government would be a difficult chore under any circumstances; on top of that,

the megalobby has been weakened by a series of setbacks, including a long-running espionage drama involving two former officials accused of conspiring to pass along classified Pentagon Iran reports to Israel. Charges against the pair were dropped in May, but ripples from the scandal still tainted Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), one of AIPAC’s top allies on Capitol Hill, who was caught on a wiretap by the National Security Agency promising a suspected Israeli spy that she would try to get the charges reduced.

Most of all, AIPAC and its allies face a president who is determined to press both Israel and the Palestinians for a deal. He’s demanded that Israel halt its expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and in June, alarm bells went off in Israel when Obama, in his long-awaited Cairo speech on US-Muslim relations, expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians in terms rarely used by an American president: “Let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

On the Iran issue, “there is a chance for the most serious dispute between the US and Israel in the entire 61 years of relations between the two,” Robert Satloff, executive director of the Israel lobby’s chief think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told AIPAC in May. If Satloff is right, and Obama puts forward a Middle East peace plan that conflicts with the Israeli government’s desires, it will prove the severest test yet for AIPAC: Can a popular American president, determined to transform American policy toward West Bank settlements for the first time since 1967, roll over Washington’s most powerful lobby?

IN A SENSE, AIPAC and its allies are finding themselves hoist on their own petard. For years, the group has succeeded by gleefully aligning itself with the power of right-wing Republicans and pro-Israel evangelicals, the so-called Christian Zionists, who believe in the end-time and see a role for Israel within their own apocalyptic vision. These alliances proved a winning formula when the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and, later, when President George W. Bush unquestioningly backed a series of conservative Israeli governments. But the strategy doesn’t look so good anymore. “You do pay a price for having cozied up so intimately and with such apparent relish to the right wing of the Republican Party, to the neocons, and to the Christian right,” says Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who served as a top negotiator for Israel in 1995 and 2001.

To be sure, it would be a mistake to count AIPAC out. It still has 100,000 members, a $60 million budget, and a $140 million endowment. Some 300 staffers, including an army of lobbyists, work out of 18 AIPAC offices spread across the country; they are tight with State Department and Pentagon bureaucrats, and can call on a vast network of political action committees, campaign contributors, and influentials. At its May conference-event slogan: “Relationships Matter”-AIPAC chose Lee Rosenberg, an Illinois businessman with close ties to Obama, as its next president.

Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political action committee and does not contribute money directly to political campaigns. The Center for Responsive Politics, however, identifies 31 separate PACs as “pro-Israel” donors. And while independent of AIPAC, many of these organizations look to the mother ship for guidance on which candidates to support. During the 2008 election cycle, according to an analysis conducted for Mother Jones by the center, these 31 PACs and their individual donors funneled an eye-popping $22.5 million to various candidates. As detailed in The Israel Lobby, a 2007 book by Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer that drew withering criticism from Israel hardliners, AIPAC’s implicit-if unofficial-endorsement can open the floodgates for these contributions, especially for key candidates in tight races. Last year, Rep. Mark Kirk, a conservative Illinois Republican and AIPAC ally facing a stiff reelection challenge, raked in $407,431 from these sources.

Little surprise, then, that AIPAC is still an agenda setter on Capitol Hill. “If you’re looking for a measure of their efficacy,” notes a source close to the group, “just take a look at how many members of Congress voted in support of Israel’s right to defend themselves from Hamas this January [amid Israel's assault on Gaza]: unanimous in the Senate, and 390-to-5 in the House.” In sync with this year’s AIPAC conference, 328 House members and three-quarters of the Senate signed the lobby group’s letters to Obama, which urged the president to take an Israel-centric approach to Middle East peace and emphasized that “the parties themselves must negotiate the details of any agreement.” The letters went on to note that “the proven best way forward is to work closely and privately together” with Israel.

Malcolm Hoenlein-who, as executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, could be described as the unofficial chairman of the Israel lobby-admits that while Obama got three-quarters of the Jewish vote, many influential Jewish activists are upset with the administration’s direction. “There are people who are very worried,” he says. “I could show you how many emails I get every day, all day long, about all this stuff.”
Hoenlein doesn’t believe the growing friction between Obama and Netanyahu will lead to a head-to-head test of wills. “It’s early,” he says of Obama. “The numbers will change. His popularity will go down.” That may be true, but AIPAC and its allies face an even broader challenge: The fight over America’s Middle East policy is ratcheting up within the Israel lobby itself.

IN THE TINY, cluttered office warren occupied by the Israel Policy Forum (IPF) in downtown Washington, the group’s director of policy analysis, M.J. Rosenberg, waves at a visitor as he wraps up a phone call. Then, slouched on a sofa in shirtsleeves and stocking feet, surrounded by piles of paper, Rosenberg proceeds to blast one of AIPAC’s congressional allies, the House minority whip, for the graphic Holocaust imagery he invoked during his speech at the AIPAC convention. “I mean, Eric Cantor gets up there and talks about cattle cars and gas chambers!” Rosenberg tells me. “He’s from Virginia! Virginia! What the hell is he talking about?”

Rosenberg’s organization is one of the pillars of a growing collection of liberal, anti-war Israel policy groups that have emerged to challenge the traditional center-right Israel lobby. Among them are Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, and a new entry called J Street, founded last year, whose PAC has raised about $600,000 for congressional candidates who are willing to contest the Israeli government’s hardline positions.

Of course, compared to the millions of dollars AIPAC can mobilize, the new coalition is far outgunned. But Rosenberg, who worked for AIPAC during the 1980s, argues that it is a paper tiger that capitalizes on perception as much as on reality. “The lobby is kind of like the Wizard of Oz,” he explains. “Behind that curtain, there’s not very much. It’s an illusion.” On Capitol Hill, says Rosenberg, support for the group is wide, but not very deep. “They have a couple of people, Jewish members of Congress, who are AIPAC’s people on the Hill. Key, respected members-in the current Congress, for instance, Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor. The broad majority of members look to those members for guidance: ‘Well, this guy is for the resolution; it must be okay with AIPAC, so I’m for it.’” Members reflexively follow AIPAC, says Rosenberg, because they don’t want to be hassled by the Israel lobby, and nobody else in the debate carries near the same clout.

The game changer, he says, is Obama. “I don’t believe that many members would follow AIPAC rather than the president of the United States if the president of the United States calls,” Rosenberg explains. And thanks to decades of gerrymandering, he says, many lawmakers are so secure in their districts that there’s not that much AIPAC could do to unseat them, even with its vast contributor network.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the slight and soft-spoken executive director of J Street, says the change on Capitol Hill is palpable. More and more members of Congress see AIPAC as an obstacle to America’s crucial national interest-a durable Middle East peace deal. “Our role is to demonstrate that there is significant and meaningful political support for leadership to achieve peace,” Ben-Ami says.

In January, when Obama named former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special Middle East envoy, J Street got 104 legislators to sign a statement supporting Mitchell. (The traditional Israel lobby views Mitchell, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, as a little too “even-handed.”) In May, when AIPAC’s warning letter to Obama began amassing signatures in the House-it ultimately got 328-J Street and its allies put out a competing House letter calling for strong American leadership that accumulated 86 names. “There are a number of members of Congress who are seeking out new voices on the issue,” says Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), one of those 86, who visited Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza in May. “There is still a resistance to having open, honest dialogue out of fear about being on the wrong side of AIPAC, but I’m not going to be driven by what one lobby says. What I learned on my trip is that I don’t think AIPAC represents even the majority view in Israel.”

Netanyahu, who made a pilgrimage to Capitol Hill last spring after meeting with Obama, discovered the emerging new reality firsthand. The Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in Manhattan, quoted the prime minister’s aides as saying their boss was “stunned” by “what seemed like a well-coordinated attack against his stand on settlements,” even from traditional Israel supporters like John Kerry (D-Mass.), who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee-as well as representatives Berman and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). While all have impeccable credentials with the Israel lobby, it’s clear that they’re increasingly unhappy with Jerusalem’s hard-right tilt. And when legislators can point to different views within the Israel policy community, it’s harder for groups like AIPAC to accuse them of being anti-Israel.

All the while, Obama has been cementing his Jewish support-as a senior public relations specialist with close ties to the Israeli Embassy groused to me. “I mean, look at the agenda!” the official said. “He went to the Holocaust Museum on Holocaust Memorial Day, and then he declared Jewish Cultural Awareness Month, which is, you know, Bagels Month, and then he had Passover at the White House, which makes all the cultural Jews, the reform Jews, go, ‘Oh my God, he’s our guy! Seder in the White House, Bagel Month, Passover at the White House!’”
Says Levy, the former Israel negotiator, “I think they’re nervous that if there’s a showdown, where do the Jews go? And I think it’s clear where the majority of the Jews would go. They’d go with Obama.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT with America’s Middle East policy will depend on whether Obama can advance an Israel-Palestine compromise as a critical US interest. This would be a sharp break from the past, when US negotiators often ended up in the role of “Israel’s lawyer,” in the words of Aaron David Miller, who helped oversee the peace process under President Clinton.

This is a key moment in the debate, says Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby. “It will be important whether he gets enough cover from J Street and the Israel Policy Forum so Obama can say, ‘AIPAC is not representative of the American Jewish community.’ But I must say, I’m not wildly optimistic about this. I don’t know if Obama is really ready to buck them.”

The power struggle comes down to “who will do a better job of interfering in the other’s politics,” says David Mack, a deputy assistant secretary of state under George H.W. Bush who spent decades as a diplomat in the region. “Bibi [Netanyahu] is very good at this. He really knows how to play the American game. He knows how to line up various groups, right-wing hawks, right-wing evangelicals, the military industrial complex, and the right wing of the American Jewish community.”

But Mack suggests that Obama might have a few tricks up his own sleeve-including an array of allies with solid Israel contacts who can be deployed to muster support in Israeli politics and media. Among them, Mack says, are former ambassadors to Israel Samuel Lewis, Daniel Kurtzer, and Martin Indyk, as well as Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, who volunteered on an Israeli supply base during the Gulf War, and Dennis Ross, a White House adviser who spent years at the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the six decades of Israel’s existence, there have been few full-fledged confrontations between an American president and the Israel lobby. In the early 1980s, after Ronald Reagan decided to sell an advanced airborne radar system to Saudi Arabia, he won a showdown with AIPAC. A decade later, George H.W. Bush and James Baker, his secretary of state, threatened to withhold loan guarantees for Israel to pressure the Jewish state over the peace process; they stared down AIPAC, contributing to the collapse of a right-wing government in Israel.
But those were only skirmishes. What’s at stake today is what many observers believe is the last best hope for a peace accord, one that will require Israel to remove hundreds of thousands of settlers, withdraw from the West Bank, and accept at least some Palestinian authority in now occupied East Jerusalem. The nation’s most formidable lobby can huff and it can puff, but if it resists, it may be its own house that gets blown down.
Correction: Robert Satloff’s comment on US-Israel relations was made to AIPAC, not Haaretz, as previously reported. He was referring specifically to a rift over Iran policy. The story has been updated to reflect this.

The most difficult time for the non-Kurdish components in the north of Iraq: Is it the disputed areas or seized areas?

Date: 25 August, 2009

The extent of demographical change in Kerkuk province:
A region in Kerkuk city: map of 2002 compared with map of 2007

No: Rep.22-H2509

Unfortunately, Iraqis have lived for years with the suffering of decades of dictatorship, war, economic embargo, and most recently the U.S. occupation. This long period has psychologically and physically exhausted Iraqi people from all its communities.

Despite all these disasters that befell Iraq, Iraqis continue to rebuild their country and sympathizers among the global and regional powers have been involved in helping Iraq with moral and material aid to build the bases of the new Iraqi state. The Iraqis are determined to build a democratic Iraq and a culture of human rights. With the support and concern of the world, particularly that of the West, hoped that they have the same goals and targets, they will establish the cornerstones of democracy in the Middle East.

But the problems faced by Iraqis after the occupation are numerous. The sectarian religious and ethnic racism are of the most important of these problems. It was the cause of imbalance, political instability and insecurity, and had an effective role in economic instability, which negatively impacted all areas of daily life.

The religious sectarianism and tendency for reprisals are considered the basic causes of the killing of dozens, or even hundreds, of Iraqis every day for years during and after the U.S. occupation. At a time when national and international efforts are concentrated on stopping the bloodshed in central Iraq, there continue to be systematic violations of human rights in those areas of northern Iraq under the control of the Kurdish parties, backed by the Peshmerga militia and security units.

In northern Iraq live the majority of country’s diverse ethnic and religious communities: Shabaks, Yazidis, Chaldo-Assyrians, Turkmen, Kurds and Arabs. Regardless of their respective sizes, the standard of living of everyone was approximately equal and all suffered the harshness of the former political system. But after 1991, and particularly after the U.S. occupation in 2003, the balance between these components was disturbed.

When the Safe Haven for the Kurds was set up, it gave rise to a large gap in the economical, political and even cultural potentials between the Kurdish citizen on one hand and members of other Iraqi communities on the other hand.  The result led to the hegemony of the Kurdish racist political parties in northern Iraq.

The most important factors that led to the imbalance between the components in northern Iraq after 1991 are:

Ö         While non-Kurdish communities were subjected to decades of suppression, and were unable to directly challenge the Ba’athist Government, the Kurdish community obtained material and moral support from regional and western powers, facilitating their domination of the reins of power in the northern region.

Ö         Establishment of the Kurdish Safe Haven excluded other Iraqi components whilst handing its administration to the Kurdish tribal and militia-backed political parties which politicized the security services and led to the marginalization of the non-Kurdish communities.

Ö         Independent access by the Kurdish nationalist parties to a large proportion of Iraq’s national income and their control of revenue from the northern border gate provided the Kurdish authorities with additional sources of finance and strength.

The policy of the Kurdish parties to glorify Kurdish race has led to the preparation of curricula based on incorrect historical and geographical information that encourages the development of a fanatic generation of Kurds ready to quarrel against any people they feel to be threatening their ethnic goals. In these circumstances, Kurdish militias (Peshmerga), Security Services (Asayish) and intelligence agencies (Parastin) were built with the same concepts.

By the time of the 2003 occupation, the Kurdish people had already gained a sense of injustice that their fatherland has been occupied by others and the Kurdish parties and people were convinced of the Kurdish nature of northern Iraq, and in particular the city of Kerkuk. Despite historical and academic sources offering a different opinion, they believe they have the historical right to build their country on vast Iraqi lands. (See references below)

Kurdish man had developed an overwhelming desire to establish a Kurdish state at any cost. The absolute support of the occupation forces to the Kurdish parties and the absence of any authority or rule of law due to demolition of the Iraqi state became as a catalyst for the implementation of these base-less aspirations by the Kurdish authorities. The material and moral support of the West, resulting from sympathy to the Kurdish case after the latter were targeted for their fighting against Saddam Hussein, played a great role in strengthening this rush.

Up to this stage the Kurdish parties and their cadres lacked experience and were characterized by toughness, tribalism, intolerance and inefficiency after having been fighting the Iraqi state amid the rugged mountains for decades. These parties have withdrawn all of these specifications with them into the period of Safe Haven in early nineties and into the after occupation period.

Thus began the most difficult time for the millions of Iraqi non-Kurds who form the majority in northern Iraq. The Kurdish political parties, militias and security services took control of most of the state’s civil administration, security, and military departments. Under the supervision of the occupation forces, their control was extended to include more than 75% of the province of Mosul (± 3 million inhabitants), 20% of the province of Salah al-Din (± 1 million inhabitants) and 90% of the province of Kerkuk (al-Tamim) (830,000 inhabitants) and about 50% of the Diyala province (1.37 million inhabitants), whilst several millions of Arabs, Turkmen, Yazidis and Shabaks are living in these areas. The estimated size of the Kurds in this vast area is thought not to exceed one million inhabitants.

Kurdish control also overwhelmingly dominated those lands outside the Kurdish region that are at the root of plans to annex them to the Kurdish administration.  There is pressure on millions of non-Kurdish Iraqis to change their nationality with the aim of changing the demography of the region – aided by the resettlement of Kurdish families and ethnic cleansing.

The first days of occupation

In the absence of state institutions, the looting and burning of government departments began and spread to banks, universities, municipalities and community radio, television and even hospitals.  Peshmerga militias seized the wheels of government, of the Ba’ath party and in many cases of non-Kurdish inhabitants. Arabs were forced to leave their villages and had their property appropriated. Large numbers of machines, vehicles and government documents were transferred to Sulaymaniya, Duhok and Erbil.

The Kurdish militia, supported by political parties, also started seizing government buildings in these vast lands, and especially in Kerkuk, sharing these properties among themselves.  Many of these buildings were turned into offices or housing for the Kurdish families brought to the region as part of the Kurdification process.

Demographic change

State institutions

Almost all of the Iraqi state institutions have been dismembered and the Iraqi citizens have been psychologically and economically exhausted, making it easier for the Kurdish parties and militias, which were well-armed and organized to enter and extend control over these areas in the four provinces and all of its governmental institutions, under the supervision of the occupying forces. The partisans and members of Kurdish Peshmerga, who did not have the minimum degrees of education, received the top posts in the cities, districts and sub-districts. Consequently, they have been appointed as district and sub-district managers and mayors. Thus, most managers of the state offices come from the ethnic Kurds and they took control of the city councils. Tens of thousands of Kurds had been appointed in the government offices in these vast areas of northern Iraq, where the number of state employees has increased twofold in some regions.

Kurdish nationalism and party affiliation has been adopted the basis for appointments.  By these means many non-Kurdish inhabitants were forced to work for the agendas of Kurdish parties away from their parties. Additionally, Kurdish parties seized large numbers of jobs in the Iraqi state, which are disproportional with their size. From the total of 165 senior posts in the Iraqi State, the Kurds hold 65 posts.

Kurdish parties with militias has ruled the northern regions of Iraq in the full absence of state institutions while the concern of the international community and Government of Iraq remained with the fighting and bleeding in the center of the country. In the midst of these circumstances, the rebuilding of all the institutions of the state including the military, security and police systems, was carried out with the intention of ‘Kurdifying’ the institutions. The staff of the civil service was in many accusations doubled and in addition to the large numbers of Kurdish Peshmerga militias, distributed throughout the governorates, the overwhelming majority of the two Iraqi military brigades stationed in Mosul were Kurdish.

In Kerkuk, the security system has been replaced by hundreds of Kurds, brought from Sulaymaniya, Erbil and Duhok.  The majority of officers and members of the police came from the Kurdish parties in Kerkuk province and they control of these devices in most of other regions. The Kurdish parties seized all weapons of the dissolved Iraqi army in the northern regions, which were about more than a quarter of the strength of the total weapon of Iraq – amounting to hundreds of thousands of light and heavy weapons, including tanks and many types of anti-aircraft missiles and mortars, all of which were transferred to the Kurdish provinces.

Two important factors led to replacement of large numbers of qualified personnel in these vast areas by non-qualified Kurds:

Ö         The adoption by Kurdish political parties of a concerted Kurdification policy.

Ö         The fleeing of large numbers of staff who previously held key positions in government offices .

There was therefore a great need to find qualified replacement personnel but the failure of the Kurdish administration to find such personnel has led to the majority of appointments being made to non-qualified Kurdish staff, who in many cases has not studied in either primary or secondary school. Taxi drivers consequently became police chiefs, while graduates of the Institute of Agriculture became directors in unrelated government offices. Peshmerga militants who have not received any formal training or education held the posts of manager in government offices and the graduates of a primary school became officers in the army, police or security forces.

Hundreds of Kurdish party headquarters backed by militias and security forces have been spread throughout the cities, districts and sub-districts. Kurdish parties spent large sums to recruit a large number of collaborators from other nationalities.

Iraqi elections were held in these vast areas under the control of the Kurdish parties and their militias all of whom do not hide their insistence on the Kurdishness of these areas and of the need to seize it by force if necessary. The population number of Kerkuk province at the day of occupation was 870,000 people. The number of voters in this province became 800,000 in the elections of December 2005.

During the elections, the poverty of non-Kurdish citizens was exploited to obtain their votes after paying symbolic sums to them. Furthermore, large sums have also been paid to many of those who hold important posts for their support for the Kurdish party’s agendas. After using all kinds of manipulations and election frauds, the Kurdish parties won in most areas, which increased their control on all key positions in administration and decision-making mechanism in these areas. For example:

Ö         The number of Kurds in Nineveh province council was 31 out of 41 members. This was partially due to the Sunni boycott.

Ö         In Kerkuk province council, the number of Kurds is 24 out of 41 members.

Ö         In Erbil, the sets of provincial council were divided equally between the two Kurdish parties

Ö         All members of the City Council of Kifri are of Kurdish ethnicity

Ö         In Khanaqin after intimidation and temptation, the representatives of other nationalities in the city council joined to the Kurdish parties.

Kurdish migration

Kurdish parties started with the beginning of the occupation to encourage hundreds of thousands of Kurdish citizens to migrate to new areas that the Peshmerga had entered after the occupation, frequently paying a sum or/and salaries to them. Those who held high positions in the political parties or in Peshmerga militias, acquired finances for the construction of their homes, which are built on the lands of the municipalities, government or non-Kurdish peoples. Hundreds of family members joined those who received new posts and dozens of new neighborhoods have arisen in the cities of these vast areas. The number of Kurds and Turkmen who were removed from Kerkuk by the Baath regime was estimated to 120,000 Kurds but the bulk of those deported from Kerkuk were born in Sulaymaniya or Erbil.

The Kurdified administration forged ration cards and transferred population registration records of the Kurdish people coming to the new areas, in particular that of Kerkuk province. The newcomers were provided with the identity cards and passports but attempts of the Kurdish parties to transfer the population registration records of Shaykhan district to Kurdish Duhok province failed. Thousands of staff and teachers from the province of Sulaimaniya, Erbil and Dohuk have been appointed to teach the Kurdish language instead of Arabic. Elements of the Peshmerga militias have been fixed in the many checkpoints that have been developed on public roads between many cities like Erbil, Bartalah, Shaykhan and Dohuk.

Thousands of Arab families left these vast areas after the initial entry of Peshmerga militias, while other Arabs left the region after animosity and hostility grew at the same time as the Kurdish militia consolidated their control of the region. In Kerkuk province alone about 25 villages were evacuated of which many had existed before the Ba’ath regime.

Appropriation of lands particularly that of government and inhabitants lands is considered a major characteristic of the period after the creation of the Kurdish Safe Haven in these regions, particularly after occupation. The Kurdish parties, which held for the first time the administration of governmental offices in 1991, have lacked the understanding of concept of a state and the management of its institutions. Consequently, the newcomers from the mountainous regions supported by Kurdified administration have captured vast lands belonging to municipalities, government and inhabitants.  The share of these lands going to party members and militias was also enormous, for example, the Barzani family seized on the territory of the entire Salah al-Din district. Meanwhile, in Kerkuk province, the Kurdish families have seized on all types of lands and large numbers of buildings. This resulted in the number of lawsuit presented to the Property Claims Commission in Kerkuk province reaching over 40,000 individual cases, most of which related to Turkmen.

Other human rights situations

After occupation, the general situation in northern Iraq was characterized by:

1. Absence of the rule of law and the forces which preserve it
2. Absolute control of the Kurdish parties and militias, which are characterized by:

a.       Non-democratic tribal mentality

b.       Lack of professionalism resulting from a lack of education and vocational training

c.       Tough aggressive nature because of living in the harsh mountainous areas in a state of a war, which lasted for decades

1. The Iraqi State and the international community were engaged to address the disaster caused by the fighting in central Iraq
2. Iraq’s other ethnic groups in the region were exhausted as a result of the assimilation policies of former dictatorship.
3. The absence of international human rights organizations and even the United Nations and the lack of monitoring or follow-up has led to lack of registration and documentation of large numbers of violations of human rights for a period of years.

Under these circumstances, although the region did not face a conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, there have been thousands of cases of intimidation, arrests, detention, torture in prisons, kidnapping, assassinations, killings and loss of persons from non-Kurdish ethnic groups and many others who oppose the policies of Kurdification. With the lack of security, thousands of Yezidi, Shabak, Chaldeo-Assyrians, Turkmen and Arab families migrated from the regions where Kurdish Peshmerga militias were in charge of security. Today, it is estimated that 238 people were kidnapped in Kerkuk and there are a lot of abductees who have not been counted.

In these vast regions, the Kurdish security forces (Asayish) have converted the buildings of Ba’ath party into the headquarters for Kurdish militias, where the oppositions were detained. Hundreds of these offices are today scattered east of Mosul city and in the plain of Nineveh, working to suppress the non-Kurdish population by all types of intimidations. In coordination with the headquarters of the Kurdish parties, the security agents collect information on citizens and prevent the Shabaks and Chaldeo-Assyrians from entering the city of Duhok and other regions and target the Yazidis who reject the dominance of the Kurdish parties.

During the attempts of Kurdish militias to control the district of Tal Afar, which was put in the map of so-called Kurdistan, the region was subjected to two destructive attacks using all types of heavy weapons including tanks and helicopters.  As a result, thousands of occupation troops and Kurdish militias swamped the city causing 100,000 inhabitants to leave Telafer. The minor attacks, arrests, assassinations, kidnappings continued for three years. Large numbers of populations are still considered internally displaced.

In 2005, Kurdish militias broke into Turkmen political party buildings and institutions, confiscating twenty-four buildings including, fifteen schools, newspaper, print houses, local radio and television stations and the headquarters of political parties. Turkmen living in Erbil who were not loyal to the Kurdish parties were denied work in government offices. The non-Kurdish inhabitants of all the regions were forced to study Kurdish in schools.

Many Chaldea-Assyrian villages were evacuated, tens of Yazidi politicians were arrested, Shabak activists were assassinated, hundreds of leading Baathists were killed and Turkmen lands were confiscated.

The Kurdish authorities recruited large numbers of collaborators from other communities and used them to establish parties and civil society organizations against their own national parties. These collaborators were used in political companies. Many spied for Kurdish parties. The votes of other communities were bought in the elections.

Names of the cities, streets and buildings were changed from Turkmen or Arabic to Kurdish. The signboards in the governmental offices were written in Kurdish, the non-Kurdish inhabitants greatly suffered particularly in the hospitals.

Domination of the Kurdish parties on the administration in these vast regions led to the revival of the Kurdish neighborhoods and cities and retardation of the development in non-Kurdish regions.

One of the most dangerous phenomena that have begun to emerge in northern Iraq is the large differences in standard of living and economic power between the Kurdish people on one hand and the non-Kurdish people on the other hand. This phenomenon is attributed to the following factors, which should be generalized to the vast regions which the Kurdish militias controlled after occupation:

1.       The appointment of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in areas occupied by the Kurdish parties, after the occupation:

a.       In government offices, for example,

a.       The appointment of more than ten thousand staff in Kerkuk province, 90% of whom are of Kurdish ethnicity.

b.       About two thousand Kurds were appointed in Kara Tepe sub-district.

c.       Thousands of Kurdish teachers from Duhok were appointed in Mosul region.

b.       In the Iraqi army, for example, more than 80% of the two Iraqi army divisions in Mosul are of Kurdish ethnicity.

c.       In security service and police, for example, almost all the security system in Kerkuk province were replaced by Kurds in Kerkuk province

d.       Increase in the number of Peshmerga militias, for example, the recruitment of tens of thousands of Peshmerga militants in 2004 – 2005

e.       Appointments in Kurdish regions, for example, being it is based on the party affiliation; there are about million staffs in Kurdish regions who are also members of Kurdish parties. In contrary, the number of non-Kurdish appointments is severely restricted.

2.       Kurdish authorities:

a.       Receive 13% of Iraq’s income since mid 1990s, while the other communities receive no share. Despite the important decline in the number of Kurds in the three Kurdish provinces after occupation, the Kurdish share increased to 17% of the total Iraqi budget and other Iraqi communities have remained deprived of any share.

b.       Collect massive sum from Khabour border crossing since 1991, where almost all the Iraqi imports were entering.

3.        Kurdish domination on the governmental offices in the north of Iraq has brought another economic benefit to the Kurdish people. Since occupation and in these vast regions, the Kurdified administrations gave thousands projects to the Kurdish contractors who use the Kurdish officials and Kurdish workers.

These are the developments in the north of Iraq since the occupation and for a period of six years, where the Kurds dominate economy, civil, military, security administrations working to subdue the non-Kurdish communities to contain their lands and to annex it to the Kurdish region.

___________________________
References:

1.        Phebe Marr, “The Modern History of Iraq”, P. 9

“In recent history, Kurds have been migrating from the mountains into foothills and plains, many settling in and around Mosul in the north and in the cities and towns along the Diyalah River in the south, but most Kurds still live along the lower mountain slopes where they practice agriculture and raise livestock”

2.        Edger O’balance, “The Kurdish Revolt”, P. 33

“Right up until the end of the 19th century the sight of a large tribal federation, with all its livestock, moving across the mountains and plains of the northern parts of the Middle East in search of fresh grazing, was both splendid and ominous – as nomadic Kurds moved like a plague of locusts, feeding and feuding”.

3.        David McDowall, “A Modern History of the Kurds”, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd Publishers 1996, London & New York, P. 144.

“The towns and villages along the high road running from Mosul to Baghdad were mainly Turkish speaking, being Turkmen”,

“But, as the commission noted, the Kurd ‘is taking possession of the arable and in “Kurdizing” certain towns’ specially the Turkmen’s ones of the high road”

4.        William R. Hay, “Two Years in Kurdistan 1918 – 1920″, (William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles 1921), P. 81 – 83

“Dizai tribe descended from the hills about 3 centuries ago, and occupied a few villages round Qush Tappah. In the middle half of the 19th century they started to expand, and rapidly covered the whole country up to Tigris. In the late 1920s, they constitute one third of the Erbil district population.” “It is reported that less than a century ago trees and shrubs were plentiful on the slopes of Qara Choq Dagh; when the Kurds came, however, they were quickly taken for fire woods and no trace of them now remains”

5.        Ibid, P. 10

“Mandali in fact was an ideal training ground. Four languages were current in the district, and most of the townsmen could speak all four. As children they learnt their mother tongue, Turkish, from their parents, and the local Kurdo-Lurish dialect from their nurses and the people of the hills, whither they were sent for the hot weather. Subsequently they acquired Arabic from the men who tended their date-gardens, and Persian from the merchants who visited their town and became guests in their houses”.

6.        George Keppel, “Personal Narrative of Travels in Babylonia, Assyria, Media, and Scythia”, H. Colburn 1827, Vol. I, P. 30

“Not many weeks before we saw this Moolah, he was one of the principal persons of Mendali, a Turkish town near the frontier. In those days he was the bosom friend of Davoud Pasha, “his best of cut-throats” and most willing instrument of assassination”

7.        Ibid. P. 267

“From the ferry we rode about 2 miles along the banks of the river, arrived at Bacoubah, our second day’s march. This appears to have been a very considerable place, but has been laid almost entirely in ruins by the army of Coords, under the command of Mohammad Ali Meerze”.

8.        Ibid., P. 276 – 281

“We reached Shahraban at eleven o’clock P.M., and found it almost entirely deserted. —. We wondered through the desolate street, some time without finding any house with inhabitants, till we came to a caravanserai, where we met a man who told us that all the inhabitants had left the place, which had been sacked and ruined by the Coords.” “This town was, not many months back, one of the most populous and thriving in the pashalick of Baghdad, now the whole population consisted of about 3 families”

9.        Ibid., P. 290 – 291

“Our tents were pitched to the north of the town. Kizil Rubaut, in common with its neighbors from the vindictive spirits of its Coordish enemies”

10.     Ibid., P. 293

“In an hour and a half we found ourselves at Baradan, which, in common with other villages, has suffered from the inroads of the Coordish army”

11.     Ibid., P. 297

“Khanaki, which is of reputed antiquity, defines the frontier of the Pashalick of Bagdad, and has met with a fate natural to its unfortunate position between two rival powers. About two years ago, it was taken by Mohummud “Ali Meerza, and must at that time have had its share of the calamities of war”