o CHILDREN INTERROGATED FOR PARTICIPATION IN RIGHTS COMPETITION.
On 18 February, the Turkish Human Rights Association (IHD) stated
that children of between 7 and 14 had been interrogated by inspectors of
the Ministry of Education for having participated in a competition run by
the IHD in Diyarbekir. "The enquiry was opened at the begining of February
and is continuing " specified Muharrem Erbay, of the IHD office in
Diyarbekir, who revealed that "the children's phychology has been serious
affected. The have been interrogated as if they had committed a crime by
making innicent drawings and essays ".

Some 300 children had taken part, in December 2001, in a competition of
drawings and essays to mark Human Rights Week. Twemty children and about
forty teachers have been interrogated by  inspectors on their reasons for
taking part in IHD's competition instead of the one organised by the
governor. The local authorities refused to make the slightest comment.
However, IHD had received the local Council's permission to organise this
competition and to publicise it through posters.
 

o CALL FOR THE LIBERATION OF IMPRISONNED KURDISH M.P.s.
A network of human rights associations, including CILDEKT and France Libertés have just
launched an appeal for the liberation of the four Kurdish former M.P.s who
have been imprisonned in Turkey for the last 8 years. Their only fault is a
fierce determination to make known the rights of the Kurdish people. Below
is an appeal to be sent, firstly, to the French Prime Minister, then to
Members of Parliament so as to arouse their awareness and make the French
political powers act on the fate of the ese Kurdish MPs jailed in contempt
of the most elementary Human Rights.

Mr. Prime Minister/Member of Parliament,

In November 2000 a campaign was launched "Your Human Rights, if your
Please!". Several tens of thousands of citizens took part in this public
opinion campaign , conducted in partnership with Agir pour un Monde
Solidaire, ACAT, Amnesty International, la CIMADE, CRADHOM, France
Libertés, and Le Mouvement de la Paix.

However, since then, the Human Rights situation in Turkey have barely
changed, and France has taken no steps to contribute to any improvement.
This situation is particularly for the Members of Parliament who are still
imprisonned to date. This is why we are launching an "Appeal for the
liberation of four former Kurdish M.P.s imprisonned in Turkey: Leyla Zana,
Hatip Dicle, Selim Sakak and Orhan Dogan".

Tried by the Ankara State Security Court on 8 December 1994, they were
sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. The European Human Rights Court, to
which the case was presented at the request of the former M.P.s handed down
its verdict on 17 July 2001. The Court unanimously found Turkey guilty of
violation of Article 17 on the European Human Rights Convention because  of
the lack of imdependence and impartiality of the Ankara State  Security
Court, since the petitioners had not been informed in time of the
alteration in the charges against them and had been given the possibility
of cross examining the prosecution witnesses.

The two recent reports on Turkey presented to the European Commission on 25
October and 13 November 2001, referring to the §17 July 2001 decision, ask
that Turkish legislation embody measures for taking into account
condemnations by the European Human Rights Court, and particularly a
guarantee of the restoration of civic and political rights in cases where
they had been restricted following sentence, the re-opening of the trial
procedings and the question of dammages in cases where the trial were found
inequitable.

We, French citizens, call on the French Government to take whatever
initiatives may be needed at the Ministerial Committee of the Council of
Europe for it to oversee the execution of the 17 July 2001 verdict of the
European Human Rights Court and that it demand that Turkey:

- take the necessary legislative measures to free the four imprisoned
MPs ­ Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Selim Sakak and Orhan Dogan,

- grant the right to a retrail before an independent and impartial
Court, in accordance  with the principles of the European Human Rights
Convention.

- ask the French Members of Parliament to create a Parliamentary study
group on the Kurdish question and to set up a mechanism for checking the
observence of Human Rights in Turkey and the context of the European
Union/Turkey Association Agreement.
 

o  ITALIAN AUTHORITIES  ACCUSE  TURKEY  OF TURNING BLIND-EYE
TO ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING IN PEOPLE. Eighty-four Iraqi Kurds were found in a
refrigerated lorry on a ferry arriving from Patrai (Greece) and going to
Ancona (Central Italy) according to the local daily Corriere Adriatico of
18 February. The illegal immigrants were discovered the day before, during
the sea crossing by the crew of the ferry, the Superfast II, who warned the
carrabiniere (national armed police). These Kurds had been obliged to pay
the smugglers over 1000 euros per head, according to the local paper, which
stressed that it was one of the largest attempts to land immigrants anyone
remembered in Ancona, apart from a boat load of Albanians in 1990.

Over 20,000 illegal immigrants landed in Italy last year and repartiation
procedures undertaken of people without papers concerned over 75,000,
according to figgures provided by a Ministry of the Interior official,
Alfredo Mantovano, who accused Turkey. "The real problem is to avoid that
derelict boats be filled in the Turkish ports of Istanbul and Smyrna, under
the eyes of the a police force that knows how to be very efficient when its
wants to be. Theyn then set sail for Europe, and especially for Italy,
passing through Greek territorial waters without much difficulty " he stated.

Furthermore, a Greek fishing boat carrying 131 illegal immigrants,
mostlynKurds, ran aground at Karystos. In their first statements, the
immigrants indicated that the smugglers had picked them up on the Turkish
coast, According to the coastguards, they included 8 women and 12 children,
 

oTURKISH POLITICIANS DEBATE  "POLITICISATION OF PKK",
WHILE KURDISH M.P.S  REMAIN JAILED  FOR  THOUGHT CRIMES.
On 25 Fenruary, the Speaker of the Turkish Parliament Omer Izgi, categorically
opposed a "politicisation" of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) indicating
that there was no place in the Turkish political horizon for a "terrorist
organisation ". "The PKK is a terrorist organisation that has asserted
itself by actions aimed at dividing the country " he said in reoly to
another Minister last week. "It is impossible for an organisation like the
PKK, that reflects its will to act in terrorist actions, could have any
place in Turkish political life ", Mr. Izgi declared.

The Minister of State for Customs, Mehmet Kececiler, member of the
influential Motherland Party (ANAP) which is part of the three-party
coalition government, had indicated, in  statements that appeared on 21
February in the Turkish press, that his party "would beat " the PKK in the
Kurdish provinces in the event of its presenting candidates at the next
General Election. This debate is taking place at a time when Leyla Zana and
her three fellow MPs of the pro-Kurdish Party for Democracy (DEP) are still
in Ankara prison after eight years for crimes of opinion, and when the
Turkish authorities refuse to discuss the release of these elected representatives.

The ANAP, whose chief, Mesut Yilmaz is Deputy Prime Minister responsible
for European affairs, camapaigns for Turkey to rapidly join the European
Union and so adopts a more moderate approach to the granting of cultural
rights to the Kurds ­ to the great anger on the National Action Party
(neo-fascist), also a coalition party, of which Mr. Izgi is a  member.

However, observers do not seem to be fooled by his declarations, especially
as the opinion polls give less than 10% of voting intentions to ANAP and is
seeking to attract the Kurds. In any case Mehmet Keçeciler, who represents
the islamist-conservative wing of his party, backed off his statements the
very next day, insisting that he had been "misunderstood", and that in
anycase he had only expressed a personal opinion that in no way committed
the party. "If you question the coalition government partners they will
tell you that the next elections will be in April 2004    but the present
political man uvres of the members of the coalition suggest that the
elections will be sooner than we think " wrote Ilnur Çevik, editorial
writer of the English language Turkish Daily News on 27 February.
 

o TURKISH ARMY ANNOUNCES MINE CLEARING OF SYRIAN BORDER.
On25 February, the -Turkish Army General Staff announced that a mine
clearance programme on the Turco-Syrian border would be launched at a cost
of $35 million over a five year period. The border, which is 877 Km long,
includes the Kurdish towns of Mardin, Urfa, Antp, Kilis, and Hatay will
thus be cleared of mines, according to the Turkish Army, which has already
received a budget of 15 trillion Turkish lire (12 million euros) to this
end. "With the mine clearence, an area of 350,000 ares will be available
for irrigation. The cotton fields which will replace the minefields should
produce 160,000 tonnes of crops, that is 64, trillion Turkish lire (52.5
million euros) in annual revenue " declared the Member of Parliament for
Urfa, Nehmet Yalçinkaya when the project was announced.
 

o TRIAL OF PUBLISHER OF JONATHAN RANDAL BOOK:
EXTRACTS  FROM INDICTMENT. Even while Turkey aims at joining the
European Union, freedom of expression continues to be flouted by the
Turkish authorities and merely to mention the Kurds or Kurdistan
constitutes a crime in Turkey, under Article 7 of the Anti-Terrorist Act
that represses "terrorist propaganda ".  Thus the Turkish language edition
of the book by Jonathan Randal, former Washington Post correspondent and
author of "After Such Knowkedge, What  Forgiveness? " found itself in the
dock and its publisher risks imprisonment for this book, that has already
been published in Kurdish, Persian Arabic and English. "Curiously, the
preface to my book, that I wrote specially for the Turkish translation, was
excluded from the charges against the book, although I particularly
welcomed in it the recent democratic reforms in Turkey and indicated that
Turkey was the country where the Kurds might have the best chance of seeing
their ambition of being treated like first class citizens realised "
indicated J. Randal,.

The Istanbul State Security Court accuses the book's publisher of the
following incriminating passages:

Page 23: I was woken up, in a cheap hotel in Turkish Kurdistan, by
uninterrupted volleys of gunfire only a few hundred yards from there

Page 25: In recent times the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Turkey have all been
engaged in simultaneous but uncoordinated revolts   In 1991, the first
Kurds in seven decades were elected to Parliament in Turkey as
representatives of Kurdish interests. Insurprisingly they lacked political
qualities to avoid isolation, arrest and imprisonment ­ means used by the
government dominated by the Turkish Armed Forces.

Page 27: Modern Turkey has been pursuing, for the last 70 years, a policy
whose aim is to wipe out the Kurds' cultural as well as political identity.
In March 1924, less than a year afteer the foundation of Mustafa Kemal's
Turkish Republic, the Kurdish culture, language and even place names were
banned. For decades, Turkey has insisted on the 'fact' that the Kurds were
"mountain Turks " who lived in the "East and South-East" and not in any
"Kurdistan ".

Page 49: In the last days before the Kuweit war in 1991, for example,
hundreds of thousands of Kurds of Turkey fled their himes in the South-East
of Turkey   Late in the night, at the bus stop, I observed desperate men
sending their wives and children as far as possible from the Kurdish
regions considered to be most dangerous.

Page 309:  All these hopes evaporated when successive governments failed,
after 1984, with the ever more ruinous civil war that began in Turkish Kurdistan