16.4.2007 by CrniLabudovi.

PKK members arrested in France, Belgium

12/02/2007

More than a dozen alleged members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have been arrested in France and Belgium since early February as part of an operation aimed at cutting off the financial resources of the group, which is listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU, the United States and Turkey.

(Various sources — 12/01/07 - 11/02/07; AP - 20/11/04; Wikipedia, Global Security, Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

Policemen walk in front of protesters in front of the Ahmet Kaya Kurdish Cultural Centre in Paris after the building was searched by police. Thirteen Kurds from Turkey were arrested February 5th on suspicion of financing terrorism. [Getty Images]

On February 5th, French police carried out raids in Paris’s Yvelines, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val d’Oise suburbs, arresting 12 Turks and one Australian, all of them of Kurdish descent. Two other Kurds were arrested later, one of them while on a trip to Belgium. Riza Altun and Nedim Seven, who are among the 15 people currently in custody in France, are said to be members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leadership.

“These are people we suspect of funding the PKK,” a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutors’ office told reporters.

The arrests were carried out as part of a co-ordinated operation, dubbed Octopus, which aims to cut off the financial resources of the PKK — considered a terrorist organisation by the EU, the United States and Turkey. The offensive, which has resulted in more than a dozen arrests this month in France and Belgium, was launched after about seven months of surveillance, prompted by the detention of two Kurds caught in Paris last July as they were trying to change 200,000 euros in cash into US dollars.

The investigation in France is headed by the country’s top antiterrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

Meanwhile, at least two important Kurdish rebel figures were arrested in Belgium — Zubeyir Aydar, the leader of Kongra-Gel, a PKK offshoot, and Remzi Kartal. They were subsequently released.

“No action can be taken against members of the terrorist organisation who have top leadership positions within the group, because they have been given asylum,” Turkish daily Zaman quoted police spokesman Ismail Caliskan as saying at a weekly press briefing on Friday (February 9th).

Turkish media reports linked the operation in Europe to a list of 148 PKK members, including Altun and Seven, provided to the US authorities by the Turkish foreign ministry last year. They also indicated that the anti-PKK raids would likely spread to other countries and lead to further arrests.

“Everyone will see that in coming days, even more important names will be taken under arrest,” Turkish Weekly reported Friday, quoting a senior Turkish police official. According to him, two of the key targets of the Octopus operation were Murat Karayilan, the PKK’s current leader, and Cemil Bayik, the group’s head of military operations. Together with financial chief Duran Kalkan, they form the organisation’s ruling troika, according to analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

Turkish Kurds hold a portrait of jailed PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan. [Getty Images]

The extremist group was founded in 1974 by Abdullah Ocalan as a Marxist-Leninist separatist organisation, officially becoming known as the PKK four years later. Comprised primarily of Turkish Kurds, its goal is to create an independent Kurdish state, encompassing parts of southeastern Turkey, northeastern Iraq, northeastern Syria and northwestern Iran.

In 1984, the PKK began an armed campaign for self-rule in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast. It lasted 15 years and left more than 30,000 dead. The violent insurgency targeted not only Turkish security forces and civilians, but also Kurds seen as siding or co-operating with the state. Turkish agents captured Ocalan in Kenya in February 1999, and the Turkish State Security Court later sentenced him to death. After the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He is currently serving that sentence on the Marmara Sea island of Imrali.

Several months after Ocalan’s capture, the PKK declared a ceasefire, only to call it off in June 2004 after the group’s militant wing, the People’s Defense Force, took control of the group. An increase in PKK attacks on civilians and Turkish military, police and governmental targets then ensued. In a statement from his prison cells issued in late September 2006, Ocalan called on the militants to lay down their arms. His call came after scores of people, including tourists at Turkish resort sites, were killed in attacks blamed on the PKK or affiliate groups. Clashes continued after the ceasefire.

Having set foot inside Europe, the organisation is said to have established a strong presence in different sectors of criminal activity on the continent — notably in the drug trade, especially in Germany and France. Citing experts, the WINEP says the group is believed responsible for up to 80% of narcotics trafficked into the Parisian suburbs and for producing and distributing 40% of Europe’s heroin. It is also said to be running prostitution rings as another means to raise funds.

In addition, the group receives donations, some channelled through its fundraising branches within Europe. It also operates several media outlets, such as the Danish-based Roj TV and Mezopotamya television.

The EU designated the PKK as a terrorist organisation in May 2002, a month after the group changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK). It again renamed itself as Kongra-Gel in late 2003 and the EU added it to its list of terrorist organisations in April 2004.

In November 2004, Dutch police arrested 29 people during a raid on a PKK training camp in the town of Liempde in the south of the Netherlands. The operation was described as the largest against the PKK in Europe.

Police seal off the area where Dutch police raided a suspected training camp of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in November 2004 in Liempde, in the Netherlands. [Getty Images]

In January of this year, a 42-year-old Turkish national was arrested in southern Germany after a series of raids targeting suspected PKK members. The man was suspected to have been serving as the PKK’s “area manager” in the greater Stuttgart region since June 2006.

The arrests in France were condemned by a number of Kurdish organisations, including Kongra-Gel, with Aydar calling for an end to the raids and for the immediate release of the detainees. Roj TV quoted him as also urging Kurds across Europe to step up their “democratic struggle”.

On February 6th, about 1,000 Kurds joined a protest in Paris against the arrests of “important” PKK leaders. As they marched through the city, the participants in the demonstration, organised by the PKK, chanted “we are not terrorists” and “free our friends”. Some of the demonstrators carried banners, reading “stop criminalising Kurds” and “Turkey must respect human rights, France too”.

The early February arrests in Europe came after complaints by Turkey in recent months that the United States was not doing enough to counter the PKK militants operating from the Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

But in a statement last week, US Ambassador to Turkey Ross Wilson suggested that his country was involved in the Octopus operation, which followed a series of meetings between US and European officials. “What we are trying to do in Europe aims at ensuring that the financial sources of the PKK will be cut and that the main leaders of the PKK are detained,” the US diplomat was quoted as saying.

http://setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/articles/2007/02/13/reportage-01

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16.4.2007 by CrniLabudovi.

BiH makes strides towards NATO

13/04/2007

Bosnia and Herzegovina has made inroads towards their NATO accession by being the first of the new Partnership for Peace countries to submit their Presentation Document.

By Antonio Prlenda for Southeast European Times in Sarajevo –13/04/07

The country must conduct an overview of its armed forces and give detailed information of the forces which they are prepared to make available for PfP co-operation. [Getty Images]

Since officially joining NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) in December 2006, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has taken several formal steps towards full NATO membership.

NATO Headquarters Sarajevo (NHQSa) Political Advisor Bruce McLane recently said that the Alliance recognizes the progress as a clear, positive sign that the country expresses not just pure political will but a concrete desire to co-operate in the PfP.

“Among the new three PfP members, BiH is the first that already submitted its Presentation Document. Another crucial point was signing the Security Agreement with NATO,” said McLane, about the steps that neighbouring Montenegro and Serbia have yet to accomplish.

The Presentation Document outlines individual activities that a partner country selects to implement within the PfP framework, based on its ambitions and capabilities. Reportedly, BiH presented standard free usage of its roads, railways, sea and airspace for NATO, if needed. From its military capabilities, BiH offers the infantry personnel and expertise in the unexploded ordnance disposal and training in mine removal.

The Security Agreement — signed during NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s March 16th visit to Sarajevo – provides the basics for any classified information shared between BiH and the Alliance. The agreement made it possible to open the official BiH mission to NATO at Brussels, which former BiH Defence Minister Nikola Radovanovic will head. Current Deputy Minister of Defence Igor Crnadak hopes the mission can be fully established this fall.

McLane stressed the next step for BiH is to develop Individual Partnership Programmes (IPP). These two-year programmes are drawn up from an extensive menu of activities reflecting partnership objectives and priorities. It also touches on virtually every field of NATO activity, including defence policy and planning, civil-military relations, education and training, air defence, communications and information systems, defence conversion matters, crisis management and civil emergency planning as well as scientific co-operation.

Crnadak said the IPP for BiH might be completed before the end of the month. He stresses that the most comprehensive job will be accomplishing the Planning and Review Process (PARP). For the PARP, the country must complete a form containing an extensive overview of its armed forces and detailed information of the forces which they are prepared to make available for PfP co-operation.

“We will finish our first version of PARP before the end of April,” said Crnadak. “Then it will be submitted to NATO to provide additional notes for further fine-tuning. After the end of the process our Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministers will defend the PARP at the North-Atlantic Council (NAC) meeting.” According to Crnadak, BiH is already prepared to work on its Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), which has wider political aspects and Crnadak believes BiH will be able to accept its IPAP in 2008.

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16.4.2007 by CrniLabudovi.

EU initials visa easing accords with Albania, BiH, Montenegro

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