Turkish Forum

Author: Aylin D. Miller

  • Internship Opportunity at the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress

    Internship Opportunity at the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress

    The U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress (USAFMC) is seeking qualified interns for the Spring of 2009. The Association is a non-profit, bipartisan, non-advocacy organization with over 500 former Representatives and Senators as members. In addition to its programs for former members, USAFMC serves as the secretariat for a number of domestic and international programs involving its membership and the current Congress, such as the Congress to Campus Program, Democracy-Building Campaigns, and the Congressional Study Groups on Germany, Mexico, Japan, and Turkey.

    Your tasks as intern will be focused aiding in the planning of events for the Congressional Study Groups and other Association events.  Other tasks are varied, ranging from providing basic administrative and office support to writing/researching/editing information for the Association’s numerous programs. Interns will also attend and cover Association-sponsored events on the Hill, and be responsible for drafting reports.

    Because the Association plans numerous high-profile events, applicants must be extremely motivated, responsible, and have an in-depth knowledge of internet research and MS Office programs. Knowledge of German, Spanish, Turkish, or Japanese is a plus, but is absolutely not required.

    Although this is an unpaid position, the Association’s balance of domestic and international programs provides invaluable experience in both Political Science and International Affairs, and college credit in these disciplines is available.

    If you would like more information on the Association’s programs and events, please feel free to visit our website at www.usafmc.org.

    If you are interested in applying for this position, please email a cover letter, resume and to Ms. Whitney Novak at [email protected]

    —
    Oya Bain
    [email protected]

  • Venezuela’s Jews, already uneasy, are jolted by attack

    Venezuela’s Jews, already uneasy, are jolted by attack

    A break-in at a Caracas synagogue on Jan. 31 heightened the concerns of the country’s Jews. (Carlos Hernandez/The Associated Press)

    By Simon Romero
    Published: February 13, 2009

    Listen to Article

    CARACAS, Venezuela: This country’s small Jewish community was already on edge when vandals painted anti-Semitic epithets on the walls of Jewish institutions and businesses last month after President Hugo Chávez cut ties with Israel and called on Jews here to support his description of Israel’s leaders as a “government of assassins.”

    But another episode, the break-in and desecration of a Sephardic synagogue on Jan. 31, intensified the uncertainty among Jews here. Officials are also putting pressure on Jewish leaders to retract criticism of Chávez regarding the attack and to accept the government’s explanation of it as a simple robbery by corrupt members of the intelligence and municipal police forces.

    “The atmosphere of intimidation is terrifying,” said Rabbi Pynchas Brener, 77, a prominent Ashkenazi leader and an outspoken critic of Chávez’s government. “We do not know when this pressure will start to ease up.”

    The government’s handling of the episode has also sown confusion. Chávez has denounced the attack and other forms of anti-Semitism and proclaimed his friendship with Venezuela’s Jews. But he has also asserted that unidentified opponents of his attacked the synagogue to cause disarray before a referendum this Sunday to decide whether Chávez can run for re-election indefinitely.

    “Some sectors of the oligarchy want to overshadow the advances of the revolution with acts of violence,” Chávez said shortly after the attack.

    When the Interior Ministry seemed to contradict his assertion that the attack was an effort to weaken his rule, arresting 11 people and saying robbery was their motive, Chávez shifted his position. He attacked critics who claimed he had created a political atmosphere in which anti-Semitism could flourish, accusing them of harboring the “criminal intent to unleash a religious war in Venezuela.”

    Commentators on state media and pro-Chávez Web sites have taken up with relish Chávez’s initial position that the attack was a plot by his opponents. “The synagogue case seems to us like a media show assembled by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad,” said Hindu Anderi, a pro-Chávez journalist, in comments published by the government’s Bolivarian News Agency.

    Meanwhile, Mario Silva, the host of a program on state television, issued a menacing call for the rabbi of the desecrated synagogue to express gratitude publicly for a swift investigation.

    “I still have not seen the first declaration from the rabbi of the synagogue saying, ‘Sirs, I am thankful to the government,’ ” Silva said Monday night.

    Silva appeared to get his wish on Thursday in the form of an impromptu ceremony broadcast on state television in which the foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, appeared at the synagogue to meet with Jewish leaders.

    Elías Farache, a leader of Venezuela’s Sephardic community, read a statement at the ceremony thanking Chávez and Maduro for prioritizing the investigation. “We hope the legal process will shed new light on the motivations behind this case,” Farache said.

    Despite the government’s efforts to put the controversy to rest, a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews. That number is down from as many as 20,000 in the 1990s because of emigration.

    Chávez and his government have long been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, at least since his association with Norberto Ceresole, an Argentine with anti-Semitic views who advised Chávez in the 1990s.

    Chávez later distanced himself from Ceresole but recent statements have led to renewed criticism from Jewish leaders — including one by Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia, who said last year that the brief coup against Chávez in 2002 included “many Mossad snipers, who were Venezuelan citizens but Jews.”

    The warm welcome that Chávez has extended to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has also troubled Jews.

    The tensions intensified last month when Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador to protest the war in Gaza, and senior officials attended a rally at the Sheik Ibrahim Mosque here in Caracas. “Our revolution is also the revolution for a Free Palestine,” Tareck El Aissami, the interior minister, said at the rally.

    On the sidelines of the televised rapprochement on Thursday at the synagogue, one observer, León Benaim, summed up his view of the attack and the government’s reaction to it.

    “The motive was simple,” said Benaim, 73, a Moroccan Jew who moved to Venezuela three decades ago. “It is to threaten and frighten the Jewish community so that we leave.”

    María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.

  • Azerbaijani People’s Poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh dies

    Azerbaijani People’s Poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh dies

     
     

    [Baku–APA. Azerbaijani People’s Poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh died on Friday. The poet died after a siege of illness, APA reports.

    Azerbaijani People’s Poet Bakhtiyar Mahmoud oglu Vahabzadeh was born in 1925 in Shaki. He migrated to Baku in 1934 and studied philology at Azerbaijan State University (1947). He became an assistant at the same department and completed his doctorate with his thesis on the famous Azerbaijani poet Samed Vurgun. He became a member of Azerbaijan Writers Union in 1945, honorary art figure in 1974. He was awarded with the Republican State Prize in 1975 and USSR State Prize in 1984. He was elected a corresponding member of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. He received the honorary title of Azerbaijani People’s Poet in 1985. He was awarded the Independence Medal in 1995 for his special contribution to the national-freedom movement of Azerbaijan.
    Vahabzadeh was an author of more than 70 poetry books, two monographs, 11 scientific-publicist books, more than 20 large poems and hundreds of articles. Vahabzadeh was a member of Azerbaijan Supreme Soviet (1980-1995) and Milli Majlis, Azerbaijani Parliament (1995-2000).
    Vahabzadeh was known not only in Azerbaijan, but also outside the country. His works were translated into Russian, Turkish, English French, German, Persian, Spanish, Hungarian, as well as to the languages of peoples of former USSR.

  • Presidents of Russia, Turkey adopt strategic declaration

    Presidents of Russia, Turkey adopt strategic declaration

       
     
       

    MOSCOW, February 13 (RIA Novosti) – The presidents of Russia and Turkey adopted a joint declaration following talks in Moscow on Friday to promote ties and enhance bilateral friendship and partnership.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul arrived for his first four-day visit to Russia on Thursday. Following his stay in Moscow, he travels to Kazan, the capital of Russia’s predominantly Muslim republic of Tatarstan.

    “This is a strategic document laying out the achievements of bilateral cooperation and setting tasks for enhancing it further,” a source in the Kremlin said earlier.

    In the declaration, the two presidents urged action to take effective measures to settle frozen conflicts that could destabilize the situation in the South Caucasus.

    They also vowed to move quicker in settling issues related to defense cooperation.

    “Reaching agreements on burning issues in defense cooperation between the two countries will open up more opportunities for broader cooperation in the sphere,” the two presidents said in the declaration.

    The two countries, which as the Russian and Ottoman empires established diplomatic relations over five centuries ago, also agreed on mutual aid to restore and build monuments.

    Taking into account the leading role of private businesses in bilateral trade, Russia and Turkey agreed “to facilitate and speed up business contacts… and visa procedures for businessmen.”

    The Turkish president said annual bilateral trade, which exceeded $30 billion last year, could soon grow to $50 billion.

    “We could push the [bilateral trade] index to the level of $40 billion-$50 billion in the near future in the interests of our nations,” Gul said.

    Moscow and Ankara agreed that energy was a strategic sphere in bilateral cooperation that had potential for growth.

    Turkey receives about 65% of its gas from Russia, which is pumped via Ukraine and the Blue Stream pipeline that passes directly from Russia to Turkey under the Black Sea.

    Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko told reporters on Friday that Russia could sign an energy contract worth more than $60 billion with Turkey on the construction of a nuclear power plant and power supplies to the country for the next 15 years.

    He said four reactors for a potential nuclear plant in Turkey could cost $18 billion-$20 billion.

    At the conclusion of the talks, the Turkish president invited his Russian counterpart to make a return trip to Turkey.

    “I believe my current visit will open up a new page in the history of Russian-Turkish ties,” Gul said.

  • Greeks boycott Israeli fair over Turkish Cyprus attendence

    Greeks boycott Israeli fair over Turkish Cyprus attendence

    Greek Cyprus boycotted international fair in Israel over Turkish Cyprus attendence, Turkish state media reported.

    Thursday, 12 February 2009
    World Bulletin / News Desk

    Greek Cyprus boycotted international fair in Israel over Turkish Cyprus attendence, Turkish state media reported.

    Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) has attended to the International Mediterranean Tourism Fair at Tel Aviv for the first time despite efforts of Cypriot Greeks to disturb.

    Cypriot Greek officials, up to the last minute, tried hard to prevent TRNC to attend the fair. When they could not succeed to prevent, they boycotted the fair which they attended for 15 years.

    The officials of the fair reminded to the Greeks that both sides had had their places at the fairs in Berlin and London, but they could not convince them. However, tourism firms from Cypriot Greeks attended the fair despite their state did not.

    Source:  www.worldbulletin.net, 12 February 2009
  • Gaza’s Future

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.


    ATTENTION: ARTICLE IS WRITTEN ONE YEAR AGO

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman 7 February 2008

    The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

    Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

    Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

    As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres.

    It is not even true that the siege of Gaza and the boycott of Hamas were necessary to get a peace process with Abbas and his Fatah party underway, as Bush and Olmert claimed when they met in Washington in June 2007. Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from which Hamas was excluded.

    Ironically, Abbas probably has far less flexibility in negotiations with Israel when he is in an adversarial relationship with Hamas. As long as Fatah and Hamas are at war, Hamas will condemn any compromise as Abbas’s collaboration with the enemy. In the best of circumstances it would be hard to conceive of the terms of a peace accord acceptable to both sides: they are entirely out of reach so long as Fatah and Hamas remain unreconciled.

    Certainly the peace process the US and Israel have promoted following the break between Fatah and Hamas has not produced anything other than empty rhetoric and emptier promises. On the ground, absolutely nothing has changed: not in anticipation of the Annapolis conference; not at the conference itself; not following the conference’s conclusion; and not following Bush’s visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah. For all the pomp and ceremony of that occasion and the uplifting talk of adherence to Road Map obligations, not a single so-called illegal outpost has been removed, and the checkpoints that Israel solemnly promised to reduce have in fact been increased. (Whether the intention to deny all new construction in East Jerusalem and in the settlements announced by Olmert’s office as I write these lines will suffer a similar fate remains to be seen.)

    Yet Abbas and Fayyad have pretended that they are engaged in a significant peace process with Israel that could produce, in Bush’s words, ‘a viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent’ Palestinian state by the end of this year. Presumably they know better. If not, the big difference between Fatah and Hamas is not so much that one is committed to a political process and the other to violence, or that one is secular and the other Islamic, but rather that the former lives in a world of fantasy and the other does not.

    Does the situation in Gaza justify the relentless missile and mortar assaults that continue to target Israeli civilians in Sderot? To argue, as Hamas’s leaders do, that these primitive Qassam rockets have resulted in no more than two or three Israeli deaths over the years, while Israeli retaliations cause the daily killing not only of militants but of innocent men, women and children, is not a justification for Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians. That Qassam rockets have not fallen on a kindergarten full of children in Sderot is not the result of skilful humanitarian targeting on the part of Islamic Jihad and Hamas militants. It is simply extraordinary luck.

    On the other hand, the immorality of Hamas’s assaults on Israeli civilians is not a licence to bring Gaza’s civilian population to a state of near starvation. The insensitivity that prevents Israelis from seeing that their behaviour towards Palestinian civilians – whether in Gaza or in the West Bank – is not very different from the Palestinians’ targeting of Israeli civilians could not have found more unfortunate expression than in Olmert’s assurance that while Israel ‘will provide the population [in Gaza] with everything needed to prevent a crisis, we will not supply luxuries that would make their life more comfortable.’ What UNRWA’s commissioner-general Karen Abu Zayd sees as a people ‘intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution’ is seen by Olmert as a people deprived of ‘luxuries’.

    In the face of such criticism, Israelis angrily respond that instead of condemning Israel’s policy towards Gaza, their critics would be better advised to demand that Gaza’s citizens remove their Hamas-led government. The absurdity of such a suggestion aside, one has to wonder how Israelis would respond if they were told by Palestinians that instead of condemning Hamas’s terrorist assaults on Israeli citizens, they should remove their own government for failing to end the occupation.

    That said, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the breach in the barrier between Gaza and Egypt has created a new strategic situation. Of course, the barrier separating Gaza from Egypt will be closed again, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo ante can be restored and the absolute closure on Gaza’s population reimposed. As Ha’aretz suggested in an editorial of 24 January, the crisis in Rafah is an opportunity to pursue policies that are ‘more creative than assassinations and starvation’.

    Which brings me to the second of the fundamental realities. The current goal of isolating Hamas and negotiating a peace agreement with Fatah is based on the fantasy that such an agreement can be implemented despite Hamas’s opposition. Hamas is a movement with deep roots and a significant role in Palestinian politics that opposition from Israel and the US can only strengthen. New border arrangements to prevent a serious breakdown between Israel and Egypt cannot be implemented without somehow involving Hamas. And for domestic reasons, it is inconceivable that either Abbas or the Egyptian government would consent to the creation of a new cross-border regime that aims at the continued strangulation of Gaza’s population.

    The inevitability of four-party discussions between Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas presents the US with an opportunity to change course and to encourage Israel to engage Hamas in talks aiming at a ceasefire, the only way to end the Qassam assaults. The talks could then address the question of the acceptance by Hamas of the Arab peace initiative. Of course, there can be no certainty that Hamas would agree: what is certain is that it will never agree while Israel and the US seek its overthrow, and without negotiations that deal with both sides’ grievances.

    Equally important, the issue of Hamas’s recognition of Israel should not be expanded by Israel beyond normal international practice. Israel’s requirement that this recognition include a pronouncement on the Jewish state’s legitimacy, or on its ethnic and religious character, is gratuitous and inappropriate. A simple statement of recognition of Israel’s statehood should suffice. No US government has ever asked anyone to affirm the legitimacy of the dispossession of America’s Indians as a condition for the establishing of normal relations.

    If the Bush administration were to take advantage of the new situation in Gaza to promote internal Palestinian reconciliation it might yet lay the groundwork for an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. If it maintains its current posture, it will remain essentially irrelevant, with far-reaching implications for all the parties to the conflict – not to mention the rest of the world.

    25 January

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.