Author: Aylin D. Miller

Key Strategic Issues List for US Army on PKK

Key Strategic Issues List, July 2008

Edited by Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II.

Added July 16, 2008

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The Key Strategic Issues List (KSIL) offers military and civilian researchers a ready reference of topics that are of particular interest to the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense. The KSIL performs a valuable service by linking the research community with major defense organizations which, in turn, seek to benefit from focused research. It thus forms a critical link in an ongoing research cycle. With the publication of the AY 2008-09 KSIL, the Strategic Studies Institute and the U.S. Army War College invite the research community to address any of the many strategic challenges identified herein. Further information regarding specific topics can be obtained by contacting SSI faculty or relevant KSIL sponsors.

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United States European Command

IV. Kurds (Kongra Gel/PKK):

1. Case study of the potential impact and implications, both to Turkey

and to the Kongra Gel/PKK, of the transition of the Kongra Gel from

an insurgency to a political movement supporting the Kurdish cause

2. Case study of factors enabling the Kongra Gel, as a Marxist insurgency

made up of primarily of Muslims, to mitigate pressures to adopt more

of a radical Islamic agenda and maintain its focus on the basic Marxist

(secular) tenets of the organization

3. Case study of Kongra Gel/PKK insurgency from the basis of its ability

to avoid/prevent serious schisms or splintering, even after its leader’s

imprisonment, at least up to the current potential split. What are the

potential implications of the apparent division of the Kongra Gel into

“reformist” and “hardline” camps?

4. Case study of the effectiveness of Turkish Jandarma paramilitary

police forces in combating the Kongra Gel/PKK

5. Case study of the effectiveness of Turkish military operations against

the Kongra Gel/PKK inside northern Iraq from the 1990s to present.

Were these operations successful in disrupting the KGK/PKK, for

the long term, short term, or has there been little actual disruption to

Kongra Gel operations?

July 17, 2008
Can Football Diplomacy Lead To Peace?

Can Football Diplomacy Lead To Peace?

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian

July 16, 2008

By Brian Whitmore

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian has decided to try a little “football diplomacy” to defuse longstanding tensions with neighboring Turkey.

During a visit to Moscow in June, Sarkisian made waves by publicly announcing that he would like his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, to come to Yerevan to watch a World Cup qualifying soccer match between the two countries in September.

The Armenian leader repeated the invitation in a commentary titled “We Are Ready To Talk To Turkey,” published in the U.S. daily “The Wall Street Journal” on July 9.

“There is no real alternative to the establishment of normal diplomatic relations between our countries,” Sarkisian wrote. “It is my hope that both of our governments can pass through the threshold to this new open door.”

The Turkish Foreign Ministry says it is “studying” the proposal.

The sports element lends Sarkisian’s overture a tantalizing historical appeal, evoking memories of the “ping-pong diplomacy” of the 1970s — when an exchange of table-tennis teams helped set the stage for eventual rapprochement between the United States and China.

But what caused many observers to wonder aloud whether the current initiative might just lead to something serious was Russia’s apparent willingness to throw its diplomatic weight behind the idea — and grab the mantle on an issue where U.S. diplomats have, until now, played the leading role.

“Russian diplomats have been given the task of moving beyond the American initiative to normalize Armenian-Turkish relations,” David Hovhannisyan, a former Armenian diplomat and Yerevan-based political analyst, says.

Hovhannisyan adds that it is highly unlikely that Sarkisian would have made his dramatic gesture in Moscow without his host’s consent. Moreover, just a week after Sarkisian’s visit to Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to Istanbul, with the Armenia issue reportedly part of his agenda.

Adding to the air of anticipation, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian flew to Washington for an official visit this week.

“Moscow has developed a good relationship with Ankara, and being able to continue to develop that relationship, without complications emanating from its support for Yerevan, would be something that I think the Russian government would welcome,” says Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mosaic Of Distrust

Turkey’s frosty relations with Armenia, however, are part of a larger mosaic of deep animosities, historical grievances, and bitter tensions that have long plagued the region.

Turkey was among the first countries to recognize Armenian independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But when Armenian forces occupied Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, Ankara broke off diplomatic ties with Yerevan and closed its border with Armenia.

Most analysts say it is highly unlikely that Turkey would make any moves toward rapprochement with Armenia without Azerbaijan’s consent — making Armenian-Turkish reconciliation tightly bound to a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue.

Moreover, Yerevan’s claim that the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I constitutes genocide is angrily rejected by Turkey and continues to be a major roadblock in normalizing relations. In an attempt to entice Istanbul, Sarkisian has offered to have a joint commission of Armenian and Turkish scholars investigate the claims.

Observers in Turkey nevertheless remain skeptical.

Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul

“It looks like Armenia seriously wants to negotiate, but as far as we see there is no change in their position on Karabakh or on questions of Turkey’s territorial integrity,” Omer Lutem, TURKISHFORUM ADVISORY BOARD MEMEER and head of the Armenia department at the Istanbul-based Eurasian Strategic Research Center told RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service in a recent interview. “Will they give up on their claims of genocide, or will they fight? Will they make changes or not? It is not clear. If there will not be any changes, how will the question be resolved?”

Alizira agreed that untangling this web and resolving these issues would prove to be a complicated task. “There have been a lot of false dawns on this front,” he said.

But some observers say that the politics of the region at this particular time gives Moscow plenty of incentives to try.

Moscow’s Motives

Russia has been steadily losing influence in the South Caucasus in recent years. Relations with Georgia are embroiled in deep hostility over the pro-Moscow separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and over Tbilisi’s bid to join NATO. Azerbaijan, whose energy wealth grants it a degree of independence from Moscow, is increasingly looking West as well.

Russia maintains a large degree of influence in Armenia, where it maintains a military base and has invested heavily — particularly in the energy sector.

Alexander Iskandarian, director of Caucasus Media Institute in Yerevan, calls Armenia “Russia’s only trusted partner in the South Caucasus,” adding that it is not in Russia’s interests to have such an ally isolated, with its borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan closed. Moreover, Russian firms investing in Armenia badly want the border opened so they can use the country as a springboard to expand into markets throughout the region and beyond.

“When Russia was in a different position in the South Caucasus, the fact that Armenia was so isolated wasn’t so troublesome. Since the situation has changed, Russia is less satisfied with this situation,” Iskandarian says. “If the road to Turkey were open, and it will open if there would be normal diplomatic relations, Russian capital here could use this. It could go to the Turkish market, export goods and services. And Russian capital and Russian investment in Armenia is not small. This opens possibilities and makes entry into the Southern European and Middle Eastern markets cheaper.”

Total Russian investment in Armenia reached $1.2 billion this year. A spin-off company of Russia’s former electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems operates Armenia’s only nuclear power plant and would like to use Armenia’s grid to sell power to Turkey and elsewhere in the region. The state-controlled natural-gas monopoly Gazprom owns a majority stake in Armenia’s gas-distribution network. Russian investment is also heavy in the banking and gaming sectors.

Questions remain, however, about whether Russia has enough over Turkey and Armenia to broker a deal.

“I don’t think that they have much leverage on the Turkish side of the fence, and I’m not sure how much leverage they have on the Armenian side of the fence,” Aliriza says. “Secondly, the Russian-Turkish relationship, which is so important to Moscow and to Ankara for so many reasons, is not going to be a function of the Turkish-Armenian relationship from Moscow’s point of view.”

July 17, 2008
Norway’s Nazi offspring claim compensation
From Times Online

March 8, 2007

David Byers

They were conceived because of the desire of invading Nazi troops to create an Aryan master race to rule the world — and now they are demanding compensation because of the stigma and discrimination it has caused them.

In a landmark case, a group of Norwegian war children whose mothers were deliberately impregnated by German soldiers as part of a Nazi plan to build a blond-haired blue-eyed race, are today demanding a payout from Oslo for the suffering and discrimination it has caused them.

The applicants — numbering 154, plus four Swedes and a German — claim that the Norwegian Government was guilty of failing to protect them from the Nazis’ Lebensborn scheme during the German invasion of Norway in the Second World War between 1940 and 1945. They also claim the state institutionally discriminated against the children of Nazi soldiers for years afterwards.

Up to 12,000 children with a Norwegian mother and German father were born under the scheme, meaning Fountain of Life, which was founded by Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, in 1935.

Norway was the jewel of Himmler’s programme and, if today’s cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are successful, they are expected to lead to a flurry of complaints from other Nazi children in the country as well as children of German troops from neighbouring Sweden, which was also part of the scheme.

“We want it to be recognised that the Government of Norway violated the rights of these people, and we are asking for financial damages,” Randi Hagen Spydevold, a lawyer for the group, said.

The application was lodged with the ECHR after Oslo’s City Court in 2003 rejected a case by seven of the applicants because their claims came too long after a statutory time limit.

Norwegian courts have always ruled against any compensation claimants in the past, saying the country’s government cannot be held responsible for failing to sufficiently protect the Lebensborn children before 1953, when it signed the European Convention on Human Rights — however, the group of claimants argues that the ill-treatment continued long afterwards.

“They claim the violations are continuing in the sense that they are still reminded in negative terms of their origin and value,” the ECHR said in a statement.

The court said that many mothers of war children claimed they had been marginalised, had difficulties in obtaining employment, and their children were often adopted or placed in foster homes or institutions for their own protection.

Many Norwegian war children, meanwhile, were deprived of their original names and identity, subjected to discrimination, harassment and ill-treatment and left with psychological problems and registered disabled at an early age, the statement adds.

The cases include that of a woman who was regularly locked up when she was a child, sometimes with a dog chain, by her foster father, and had a swastika marked with a nail on her forehead when aged nine or 10.

One man, Paul Hansen, claims he was placed in psychiatric institutions until 1965 without his mental health ever having been assessed, while another, Karl Otto Zinken, said he was placed in a school for mentally disabled children where he was raped by two men.

In an attempt to settle the dispute, the Norwegian Government in 2002 offered to pay the children 200,000 kroner (now worth £16,700), provided they could prove that they had suffered sufficient discrimination. However, the group is now demanding £34,000 per person, and up to four times as much for those who suffered the most.

The ECHR will hear the group’s arguments today before deciding whether the case is admissible. A decision could take several months.

One of the world’s most famous Nazi children is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the brunette member of the pop group Abba, who was one of thousands of Swedish children known to have been born to a German soldier.

In Sweden the youngsters were often referred to as Tyskerbarnas, or German children, and Ms Lyngstad has spoken in the past of being persecuted and isolated in her own country.
Have your say
It is a shame that these children have received no compensation and are discrminated against by their own countrymen. Countries need to admit their wrong doing and begin to make compensation instead of trying to continue the coverup.

Kay Merrill, Baltimore , United States/Maryland

I think piggy Kruger needs to brush up on his WW2 History and show some humanity and compassion for his fellow men – two things neither Hitler or Stalin were capable of. Holding the children begotten by this eugenics experiment responisble for the actionsof their fathers is despicable and barbaric . They are as much victims as the thousands of childern murdered by lethal injection through the Nazi’s Euthanasia programme for the disabled and mentally ill.

island monkey, Shropshire, England

I never cease to be amazed at how adults blame children for the sins of their parents. The Norwegian state and society should be ashamed for not protecting these children. Their only crime was to be born.

Finn Olav, Drammen, Norway

If Hitlerism had succeeded, and these Nazi-fathered children had grown up holding authority in the German empire, would they have been as bestially cruel as their fathers and leaders?. We can only thank God, and Stalin, and Churchill, and all the millions of decent men and women who stood up against fascism, that we never had to find out.

Piggy Kruger, Bridgwater, UK

If Hitlerism had not been destroyed, largely through Russian efforts, and these Nazi- fathered children had held the whip, would they have been as beastly as their fathers and leaders?. We can only thank God, and Joseph Stalin, and Sir Winston,and Roosevelt, that we never had to find out.

Piggy Kruger, Bridgwater, UK
July 17, 2008
US, Armenia agree to upgrade Armenian capabilities against nuclear smuggling

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON: The United States and Armenia have agreed to cooperate against the smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian signed the agreement in what is called a “joint action plan” that makes the cooperation activities official.

The document was signed Monday at the State Department and establishes a 28-step program to increase Armenia’s abilities to prevent, detect and respond to attempts at smuggling dangerous nuclear materials.

In June 2003, authorities in Armenia’s neighbor Georgia arrested an individual trying to smuggle six ounces of highly enriched uranium into Armenia. Such trafficking surged as the Soviet Union broke apart in the early 1990s.

Source: International Herald Tribune, July 14, 2008

July 16, 2008
DALE: A fatal mistake – EU should embrace Turkey

Helle Dale
Wednesday, July 16, 2008

OP-ED:

Ask Turks whether they believe their country can be a model for a secular Muslim state and the answer is not quite as affirmative as one might have hoped. Today, the chasm between secular and religious Turks is growing ever-wider, and the strains within the Turkish state are seriously showing. The Turkish Constitutional Court is expected to rule in the next few weeks on whether the Turkish governing party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is fundamentalist Muslim in nature, is subverting the country’s political system. The court has further been asked to decide whether the president, the prime minister and 71 of its other members should be banned from politics for five years – as requested by Turkey‘s chief prosecutor.

The equivalent would be a challenge from the U.S. Justice Department taken all the way to the Supreme Court over whether Democrats or Republicans (with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and George Bush being the special targets) should be banned from political activity – a challenge that would shake the country and the American people’s faith in democracy to its core.

And so it is with Turkey, except that Constitutional challenges have been the order of the day for a while. The impact could nevertheless be devastating – not just for Turkey’s political situation at home, but also for its ever-dwindling chances to join the European Union, where Turkey’s political and human rights issues are being scrutinized closely.

What is critical as the case moves forward is that Turkey’s secular institutions remain protected from Islamist incursions, while at the same time, the democratic political system is sustained. This may, of course, be easier said than done as the tensions between the two grow more pronounced, as indeed they are in a number of European countries.

It all started in early February, when the AKP lifted a five-year ban on women’s headscarves in public universities in Turkey, a red flag for Turkish secularists. On March 14, Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya took action accusing the AKP of overstepping its boundaries as a secular government and trying to install Sharia law in Turkey. This would be anathema in a country that, since its founding by Kemal Ataturk in 1923, has held to a strong secular tradition, making it a rare example of a secular, Muslim state. While the AKP submitted its defense in April, the court in June voted to uphold the ban on headscarves, a major defeat of the AKP.

It is far from the first time the Turkish courts and the military have stepped in to preserve this course. In 1960, a general-led coup ousted the president for misuse of public funds and for relaxing restrictions on Islam. In 1971, the military again stepped in and took action in 1980. Military intervention, however, was a trend that many in Europe, in particular, had hoped would be a thing of Turkey’s past, as clearly not the way to run a democracy. In August of 2007, however, the AKP majority party voted Abdullah Gul the first president of Turkey with an overtly Islamic leaning, a move that was fiercely opposed by the Turkish military, but reaffirmed in a popular vote. The stage was set for the confrontation between religious influence and political freedoms.

What makes the Turkish case so important and watched so closely abroad is that it is a crucible for the conflict taking place within Western civilization trying to accommodate growing Muslim populations. With the emergence of the Iranian theocracy in the late 1970s and the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and with growing concern that other states of the Middle East might move in the direction of Muslim fundamentalist theocracy, this has been an issue of growing importance. Since Sept. 11 and the emergence of even more virulent strains of Islamist fundamentalism – whose remote but deeply held goal is the establishment of an Islamist Caliphate throughout the southern crest of Europe – these concerns have only deepened.

For many years, Turkey was often held up as the example of a Muslim country that had successfully managed to disentangle the thorny issues of religion and politics. Other countries, mainly in Asia, have also managed to pull it off – Indonesia for instance. Yet Turkey, with its critical location between East and West, has been a particularly appealing example for Westerners looking for a model.

As the United States has remained a steadfast ally of Turkey through all these years, the failure of the European Union to cement Turkey’s long-desired ties to Europe may well turn out to be a fatal mistake.

Helle Dale is director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

July 16, 2008
Paradise Lost

by Amy Waldman — Publishers Weekly, 7/14/2008

Ariel Sabar’s father, Yona, was from an Armenian-speaking Jewish community in remote Kurdistan. Yona immigrated to California and had a son who felt alienated from Yona’s antiquated ways. In My Father’s Paradise (Reviews, June 23), Sabar journeys to Kurdistan to bridge the barrier.

What is the most surprising thing you learned?

How central Iraq was to the history of the Jewish Diaspora. This was Babylon, where most Jews were exiled when they were booted out of ancient Israel. This is where synagogue Judaism got its start and where the Babylonian Talmud was written. Iraq allowed Judaism to succeed and flourish in exile. In Kurdistan, it mattered more what your contributions were to the community than whether or not you were Muslim, Jewish or Christian. The terrain itself, the towering mountains that bred this community, kept out the ideologies and intolerance that have led to so much bloodshed in recent history.

What was your father’s reaction when you told him you wanted to write about him, and did your relationship change as a result?

Initially, I think he humored me. He was supportive, but thought I was a little crazy when I told him I wanted us to go to Iraq together. We talk more now and a lot of the old tensions that were there when I was younger have faded. I now see and appreciate the cultural inheritance he’s passed on to me.

The book is about your father, but what did your mother think?

She thought I captured him fairly well, but wondered, a little jealously I think, why I wasn’t also writing about her family. I told her that the story of the Ashkenazi Jews had been written many times, but my father’s story hadn’t. I wanted to bring the story of the Kurdish Jews to a wider audience.

Is there a message you hope people will take away from the book?

For much of its history, Iraq looked nothing like the place we read about in the headlines today. It was a country where Jews and Christians lived harmoniously with their Muslim neighbors. There were occasional rough times for religious minorities, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust. What’s happening now is not representative of Iraq’s larger history. I hope people can come away thinking of Iraq in a more hopeful time, that some of the values that sustained that multicultural worldview are still there somewhere and can perhaps be recovered.

Source: Publishers Weekly, 14/7/2008

July 16, 2008