Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ozeti local library, named for the Kurdish nov¬ elist Mehmed Uzun, college students studied Kurdish grammar in anticipa¬ tion that one day the state would allow them to teach in Kurdish. Still, Kurds feel like second-class citizens. "There is the general view that all Kurds are criminals, that a Kurd has a gun or a bomb," said Mehmet Aktar, a lawyer who says he still refrains from speaking Kurdish in public when he vis¬ its Istanbul. Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party have brought unprecedented improvements for Kurds in the southeast, including a Kurdish television station, better health care and infrastructure. "To be fair, it was Erdogan who has taken the most radical steps on the path toward solving the Kurdish problem," said Vahap Coskun, a.law professor at LE FIGARO mercredi 6 mars 2013 LAURE MARCHAND ISTANBUL Dicle University in Diyarbakir. "These steps have allowed people to maintain their hopes that this problem will be solved." There is an ovemhelming sense here that the end of violence would not mean the end of the Kurdish struggle. The families of those killed by state paramil¬ itary units in the 1990s want justice, but the 20-year statute of limitations on murder is expiring on many of the cases, which have been slowly winding through the judicial system. "From now on, many cases will be dropped," said Tahir Elci, chairman of the local bar association, who has spent years pursuing such cases. "If victims cannot reach justice and they don't learn the truth about their relatives, it will be impossible to achieve social peace in this country." Meanwhile, a complex of centuries- old buildings within the walled city headquarters,jail and torture chambers for Turkey's counterterrorism forces is being remade into a tourist destina¬ tion. The site will include a cafeteria, a stage for puppet shows and an archae¬ ology museum that honors the city's Ot¬ toman past. There will be no acknowledgment of its recent horrors. "It gave me chills at first, but all those days are over," said Remzi Gendal, 29, a worker at the site, who added that former inmates sometimes visited. "For the moment, we have a lot of hope. But I am cautious. With God's will, this war will be over." Sebnem Arsu in Diyarbakir and Ceylan Yeginsu in Istanbul contributed report¬ Difficiles tractations entre Ankara et le PKK La Turquie cherche à négocier une sortie de crise dans son conflit sanglant avec les Kurdes du PKK et leur chef, Abdullah Ôcalan. ANATOLE «Les prisonniers turcs» dé¬ tenus par la guérilla kurde pourraient être libérés d'ici à la fin de la semaine, espère Gûltan Kisanak, vice-présidente du Parti pour la paix et la démocratie (BDP), vitrine politique du Parti des tra¬ vailleurs du Kurdistan (PKK). En s'ex- primant publiquement sur la libération possible d'une vingtaine d'otages, des fonctionnaires et des militaires qui ont été enlevés dans le sud-est de la Turquie, la représentante du parti pro-kurde donne à l'opinion publique turque un gage de la volonté des rebelles de faire aboutir les négociations engagées avec Ankara. Elle s'est exprimée depuis le Kurdistan irakien, où elle se trouvait ce week-end avec d'autres personnalités kurdes de Turquie. La délégation s'est rendue dans les monts Qandil, dans le nord de l'Irak, pour s'entretenir avec les chefs de guerre du PKK, quiy ont instal¬ lé leur base arrière. Ces derniers lui ont remis leur réponse à la feuille de route détaillant le plan de paix proposé par Abdullah Ôcalan, le chef de la guérilla, emprisonné sur l'île d'Imrali dans la mer de Marmara, à 1 500 kilomètres de là. Emprisonné sur une île Trois députés kurdes avaient été autori¬ sés.à embarquer à bord d'un garde-côte le 23 février pour aller rencontrer «Apo»,
14 Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Özeti 7 March 2013 Iraq 10 years on: From death to dollars - how Kurds struck it rich The Legacy - Day 5. The Kurds - Iraqi Kurdistan was the scene of Saddam’s greatest crime. It is also the home of the country’s newest oil fields, which present both an opportunity – and a threat – to its people PATRICK COCKBURN Erbil - Kurdistan presents itself as the new economic tiger of the Middle East, flush with the prospect of exploiting its oilfields. The tall towers of two new luxury hotels rise high above the Kurdish capital Erbil, the oldest inhabited city in the world whose skyline had previously been dominated by its ancient citadel for thousands of years. Nearby, a glittering new airport has replaced the old Iraqi military runway. In contrast to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities the cars in the streets look new. Above all, and again in sharp contrast to further south, there is a continuous supply of electricity. “I cannot find employees to go and work in the oilfield,” complains a Kurdish manager in a Western oil company. “I cannot even find rooms in the new hotels for visiting executives because they are so full.” Convoys of shiny black vehicles conveying delegations of visiting businessmen from Germany, France, the UAE and Turkey race through the city. Many of those now coming to Kurdistan could not have found it on the map a few years ago and – so Kurds who have met them caustically remark – are often still unsure of its location when they leave. But there is no doubting international business enthusiasm for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the semiindependent enclave in northern Iraq that is prospering like no other part of the country. A Kurdish businessman says: “We are benefiting from having a boom at a time of austerity and slow growth in the rest of the world, so the boardrooms of international companies are particularly interested in us.” At the heart of the boom are 50 or 60 foreign oil companies seeking to find and exploit Kurdistan’s oil, on better terms and with greater security and official backing than they could find in the rest of Iraq. This influx started with small and obscure foreign companies in the years after the fall of Saddam in 2003. But foreign interest deepened, the size of the oil companies increased, and in 2010 ExxonMobil signed an exploration contract with the KRG. The central government in Baghdad was furious and threatened to punish Exxon, which has large interests in southern Iraq, but failed to do so as other oil majors – Chevron, Total and Gazprom – had also signed their own deals. When the Kurds first encouraged foreign oil companies to look for oil on territory they controlled, Baghdad was sanguine. In 2007 Iraq’s Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani, now Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy-related issues, said to me that, even if foreign oil companies found oil, they would not be able to export it. He asked sarcastically: “Are they going to carry it out in buckets?” It is this calculation that has changed radically in the last year. A new pipeline is being built between the KRG and Turkey, which in theory would enable the Kurds to export crude and get paid for it without permission from Baghdad. This would give the five million Iraqi Kurds an economically and politically independent state for the first time in their history after decades of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. On the other hand, Turkey may decide that it is not in its interests to defy Baghdad and break up Iraq. Self-determination is close, but not quite there yet. One Kurdish observer said: “We Kurds have one of the most complicated political situations in the world.” It is easy to forget this in the present boom-town atmosphere of the KRG. First, the Kurdish autonomous zone is landlocked and on all sides faces powers – Turkey, Iran, Syria and the rest of Iraq – that are oppressing Kurds or have oppressed them in the recent past. The KRG may be a haven of peace for the moment but violence is not far away. Syria, Iraq and Turkey are fighting guerrilla insurgences of varying levels of intensity just A 1988 photograph shows a Kurdish father holding his baby in his arms in Halabja, northeastern Iraq. Both were killed in an Iraqi chemical attack on the city beyond the KRG’s frontiers. In recent weeks al-Qa’ida suicide bombers blew up the main police station in Kirkuk 50 miles south of Erbil and assassinated a senior general and his bodyguards in Mosul, a similar distance to the west. The political geography of the Middle East is changing in ways that so far are to the advantage of the Iraqi Kurds, though the trends may not always be so. The KRG consists of three provinces – Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaimanya – that won de facto autonomy in 1991 after the Kurdish uprising in the wake of the first Gulf War. This area expanded dramatically in 2003 as the Kurdish pesh merga militiamen advanced and Saddam Hussein’s forces collapsed. The Kurds captured Kirkuk and its oilfields as well as a swathe of territory north and east of Mosul and have never been likely to give it up. An explosive aspect of the deal with ExxonMobil in 2010 is that three of its six exploration blocks are outside the KRG, but inside territories disputed between Kurds and Arabs and between the governments in Erbil and Baghdad. Last year pesh merga and Iraqi troops confronted each other along the so-called “trigger” line, stretching from the Syrian to the Iranian border. It is a moment of unprecedented political change in the region. Iraq as a country is getting close to disintegration as a single state, but this is not inevitable. Old alliances are being junked and hated enemies embraced. Massoud Barzani, long demonised in Turkey, was a guest at the conference of Turkey’s ruling AKP party and was given a standing ovation. The Iraqi Kurds are tipping towards Ankara ➤
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