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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Another stay for Ocalan
By Gareth Jenkins
Turkey's tripartite coalition government last week announced that it would delay forwarding the death sentence of imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan to parliament for ratification, pending a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which is not expected until 2001.
The decision followed nearly eight hours of bargaining between the coalition partners. Under Turkish law, all death sentences must be ratified by parliament before being carried out. The ultra-nationalist National Action Party (MHP), which is the second largest partner in the coalition, has recently been under intense grassroots pressure to ensure that Ocalan is executed as quickly as possible. But the other coalition partners, the nationalist left Democratic Left Party (DSP) and centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP) have both been reluctant to defy the ECHR, of which Turkey is a member, so soon after the EU last month finally included Turkey on the list of candidates for membership. The EU has already warned Ankara that Brussels is vigorously opposed to the death penalty.
Under the compromise reached last week, the coalition partners agreed to suspend bringing Ocalan's death penalty to parliament. But, in a concession to the MHP, the government also announced that it would neither commute Ocalan's sentence to life imprisonment nor attempt to abolish the death penalty. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has also warned that Ocalan's death sentence could be brought before parliament much sooner if there is an upsurge in PKK violence.
Nonetheless, the agreement has failed to satisfy hard-liners in the MHP who argue, with some justification, that the MHP's stunning success in last April's general elections, when it more than doubled its share of the vote, was largely attributable to its promise to hang Ocalan if it came to power.
"The party leadership has lost its backbone," complained one MHP stalwart. "They have become seduced by being in power. The next thing we know they'll be treating Ocalan like another Mandela. How can they justify all this to the mothers of the soldiers who have been killed?"
But there is also increasing evidence that the focus of anti-government violence is shifting from Kurdish separatism to fringe Islamist groups. On Sunday militants from the Islamic Raiders of the Greater Eastern Front (IBDA-C), which has been held responsible for last October's car bomb assassination of the leading secularist Ahmet Taner Kislali, planted a bomb at the offices of the daily newspaper Hurriyet, although without causing any injuries.
More seriously, on Monday, one militant from a rival radical Islamist group, the Turkish Hezbullah, was killed and two others arrested during a three hour firefight when security forces raided a safe house in Beykoz, an affluent Istanbul suburb, during an investigation into a recent series of kidnappings of moderate Islamist businessmen.
The kidnappings appear to signal a new stage in Hezbullah's campaign. Previously, its activities have been restricted to southeast Turkey, where it has conducted a campaign of assassination and intimidation against supporters of the ostensibly Marxist PKK, often with the alleged connivance of the local police. But its activities have mushroomed as of late. Turkish intelligence reports indicate that Hezbullah now has a well-established network of terrorist cells in major cities and up to 5,000 armed militants in the mountains of east and southeast Turkey, many of them defectors from the PKK in the wake of Ocalan's August 1999 announcement of a cease fire.
