· POLICE RAID PRO-KURDISH HADEP PARTY. On 30 November, Turkish
police pulled in about fifty members of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic
Party (HADEP) in the course of a search made at the party's offices in
Istanbul. The searches were carried out on the basis of a decision of a
State Security Court, whose tenor was not revealed to the party concerned.
Moreover, the party offices in the Kurdish province of Siirt were also searched.

HADEP, that argues for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question is being
subjected to legal proceeding aimed at banning it for "organic links " with the PKK.
 

· KURDISH FORMER MP MAHMUT ALINAK FACES SIX YEARS IMPRISONMENT
FOR HAVING "DESPISED MORAL PERSONALITY OF THE GOVERNMENT ".
Sued on the basis of Article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code for "having insulted and despised
the moral personality of the government ", Mahmut Alinak, former independent M.P. for Sirnak,
tried and sentenced in 1994 on the same charges as the M.P.s of the Party for Democracy
(DEP ­ since banned) faces six years jail.

According to the Turkish daily Hurriyet  of 4 December, the "social,
economic and moral " enquiry carried out by the Kars police, on the
instructions of the Public Prosecutor, Sinan Tur, can be summed up as
follows: the subject person "is still practicing as a barrister and has no
economic difficulties although having no regular income ". "he consumes
alcoholic drinks without, for all that, being an alcoholic ", "he doesn't
keep his promises " and he is "immoral ". The prosecution brief looks a bit thin
 

· POLICE CLAIM TO  CAPTURE MURDERER OF MEHMET SINCAR
 The Turkish authorities state (Hurriyet 6/12/2001) that the
assassin of Mehmet Sincar (Kurdish M.P. for Mardin, member of the Party for
Democracy (DEP ­ since banned), killed on 4 September 1993 at Batman) has
been arrested in the course of police operations between Yalova and
Istanbul, which were aimed at arresting the assassins of three Turkish
police officers in October 2001, at Sefakoy (Istanbul).

Rifat Demir, described as the military chief of Ilim, one of the branches
of the Hizbullah (God's Party ) organisation and a cousin of Huseyin
Velioglu (Editor's Note: Head of Hizbullah, killed a short while ago in a
clash with the Turkish police) is said to have confessed to the murder,
saying:  "The man we were really aiming at was Nizamettin Tokuç, M.P. for
Siirt. We learnt later that the one we'd executed was Sincar and not Tokuç
". R. Tokuç was arrested, along with a dozen of his comrades, for
possession of arms and false identity papers.

Moreover, in the course of an operation against the Hizbullah at Idil, in
Sirnak province, many of the weapons found, including 20 Kalashnikovs and
three rocket launchers were revealed as belonging to the Turkish Army. A
check on the registration numbers inconveniently disclosed the fact that
these weapons had been registered as belonging to the Turkish Army. The
assistant commander of the Sirnak gendarmerie, Albay Nevzat Alyanak, simply
wrote to the Diyarbekir N° 3 State Security Court to demand that these
weapons be returned: " These identified, numbered and inventoried weapns,
seized following an operation carried out by the Sirnak command of the
gendarmerie and lent for the period of the enquiry, belong to the Army.
Please, therefore, restore these arms, originally registered by the Sirnak
gendarmerie command, so that they can be returned to N° 173 Army accounts
department  ".

This event confirms the long standing suspicion that The Turkish government
has, for a long time, supported the Hizbullah and used its activists as
hired hands in the death squads that have assassinated over 4,500
non-violent Kurdish public figures and political activists.
 

· COLIN POWELL VISITS TURKEY. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell,
arrived at Ankara on 4 December to discuss Turkish support of the coalition
against international terrorism after the military campaign in Afghanistan.
Turkey has made known its profound anxiety, fearing that, after
Afghanistan, Washington will turn on Iraq, its neighbour to the South-East.
Washington is worried by Iraqi aspirations to produce weapons of mass
destruction and accuses Baghdad of being one of the States that support
terrorism.

The hard liners in the Bush Administration want a large scale operation
against Baghdad and the President himself, last month, made threatening
remarks directed at the Iraqi leaders. Colin Powel stated, on 5 December,
that President Bush had not yet decided whether the next phase of the
struggle against terrorism should cover Iraq. "This continues to be one of
our preoccupations   but the President has not yet made any decision
regarding the next phase of our campaign against terrorism " declared Colin
Powell.

Turkey, the first Moslem country to commit troops to Afghanistan, is
opposed to the United States extending the campaign it is waging against
terrorism to Iraq. "We do not want an American operation against Iraq "
President Ahmet Necdet Sezer declared on 4 December.

However Faruk Logoglu, Turkish Ambassador to Washington, followed by
Sabahattin Çakmakoglu, Turkish Minister of Defence (Editor's Note: coming
straight from a meeting of the National Security Council) had, last week,
given the impression of a more flexible Turkish policy on Iraq by declaring
that Ankara would have no objection to an American military attack if
"circumstances changed ".
 

· SCANDAL OVER WORD "KURDISTAN" IN FILM FESTIVAL BROCHURE.
The English language version of a brochure describing a film
festival in Ankara attracted the therunder bolts of wrath of the
nationalists when they noticed that the Kurdish region was described as
Kurdistan instead of the official term of "South-East Anatolia ". In the
face of these attacks, particularly by Emin Çölasan, influential columnist
of the daily Hurriyet  and close to the Army, Cetin Oner, President of the
festival, hastened to beg for absolution "Following on your remarks, we
have acted rapidly by stopping distribution of the brochure. We thank you
for your warning ".

Hurriyet, in which Emin Çolasan regularly induges in this sort of media
lynching campaign, proudly announced, on 6 December, that, thanks to the
action of their journalists in this case, two members of Atilim University
had "resigned ".