Crown Prince Sultan dies
http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article521832.ece
By ARAB NEWS
Published: Oct 22, 2011 07:45 Updated: Oct 22, 2011 21:44
RIYADH: Crown Prince Sultan, deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, died on Saturday, the Royal Court said in a statement. He was in his eighties.
Sultan was a central figure in Saudi decision-making since becoming defense minister in 1962.
"With deep sorrow and sadness the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah mourns the death of his brother and his Crown Prince Sultan ... who died at dawn this morning Saturday outside the Kingdom following an illness," said the statement carried on Saudi Press Agency (SPA) and state television. Prince Sultan's health had declined in recent years.
King Abdullah is now expected to call to session the Allegiance Council to appoint the crown prince. Second Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Prince Naif is expected to be named crown prince.
The Allegiance Council was set up in 2006 soon after Abdullah became king, and is tasked with voting to approve the king's choice of crown prince or nominating its own choice instead.
"The succession will be orderly," said Asaad Al-Shamlan, a professor of political science in Riyadh. "The point of reference will be the ruling of the Allegiance Council. It seems to me most likely Naif will be chosen. If he becomes crown prince, I don't expect much immediate change."
Prince Naif has been interior minister since 1975 and was appointed second deputy premier in 2009, a position usually given to the man considered third in line to rule.
Saudi television broke its schedules early on Saturday to broadcast Qur'anic verses accompanied by footage of the Kaaba in Makkah. Funeral services will be held in Riyadh on Tuesday, SPA said.
Saudi king to hold historic vote
Saudi Arabia's absolute monarch will make an historic concession to the principle of the ballot in coming days as a special council votes for the first time on who should succeed him as ruler.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8843518/Saudi-king-to-hold-historic-vote.html
By Colin Freeman, Chief Foreign Correspondent
6:19PM BST 22 Oct 2011
The move follows the announcement yesterday of the death of 87-year-old King Abdullah's half-brother, 80-year-old Crown Prince Sultan, who was until now his nominated successor.
The man now expected to become heir to the throne is Prince Nayef, 78, another half-brother of King Abdullah who currently serves as interior minister in the oil-rich nation.
While the prospect of one ageing Arab prince taking over from another may scarcely rank alongside the upheavals elsewhere in the Middle East this year, one aspect of the reshuffle will show that even Saudi Arabia – the most conservative of all Arab nations - is cautiously embracing change.
For the first time, King Abdullah is expected to seek approval for his choice of heir from the Allegiance Council, a body he set up himself to make the royal family's complex and opaque succession procedure more transparent.
Composed of the 34 branches of the ruling family, the council's members can either vote to confirm the king's choice or nominate their own candidate.
In practice, the council, which is expected to meet in coming days, is unlikely to dissent from the king's choice of Prince Nayef, a man not previously noted as an enthusiastic reformer. A close ally of the country's hard-line clergy, he is on the record as opposing women being granted the right to vote or drive, and his accession to the throne will be unwelcome to those seeking to put the country on a more liberal path.
However, with King Abdullah himself now in poor health - he was in hospital himself in Riyadh yesterday, a week after having surgery for recurring back problems - Prince Nayef's time as ruler may well be imminent.
Yesterday, as Saudi television broadcast Koranic verses to mark Prince Sultan's death, political analysts said they did not expect the change in accession to prompt calls for quicker reform among the country's 27 million people.
"The demand for reform is there, but there is no pressure for it to come immediately," Jeddah-based analyst Mustafa Alani, of the Gulf Research Centre, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"The Saudi people have been looking at what has been going on in Yemen, Libya and Syria and they don't want that kind of chaos and bloodshed. They prefer evolution, not revolution, and things being done quietly and slowly. It might not be ideal policy, but it's safe."
The official handling of Crown Prince Sultan's passing was typical of the Saudi state's taciturn handling of public affairs. An announcement said he had simply died at dawn on Saturday "outside the kingdom following an illness". Diplomats, however, said the prince, formerly Saudi's defence minister, had passed away from colon cancer in New York, where he had often had medical treatment. One source added that he had been hooked up to life support systems and had actually been declared "clinically dead" more than a month ago. A funeral service is expected on Tuesday.
Prince Nayef, who has been interior minister since 1975, was appointed second-deputy prime minister in 2009, a position usually given to whoever is third-in-line to rule. He has often managed the kingdom's day-to-day affairs during absences of both the king and crown prince.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, he caused controversy by expressing doubts that Saudi militants had played a key role, saying that Osama bin Laden's network had no foothold in his country and suggesting that Jews were to blame instead. Subsequently, though, as the kingdom began suffering its own al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, he led a tough security crackdown, forcing the movement to relocate to neighbouring Yemen.
His grooming as the man to take over Saudi Arabia has dismayed the country's small liberal and reformist movement, who want accelerated change in the wake of the "Arab Spring". Others, though, point out that King Abdullah himself was a staunch conservative when he came to power in 1995, but has since proved to be reform-minded by Saudi standards.
The kingdom has avoided the kind of mass street protests that have convulsed the rest of the Middle East this year, with the few that have taken place encountering a heavy security response. Khaled al-Johani, a religious teacher who took part in a so-called "Day of Rage" protest last March, remains in jail after shouting: "We need democracy, we need freedom."
Last month, though, King Abdullah announced that women would be given the right to vote and run in future municipal elections. Women have also been openly taking to the wheel of their husbands' cars to protest at the continuing driving ban.
Elsewhere in the Middle East yesterday, the United Nations Security Council called for Yemen's president Ali Abdullah Saleh to immediately accept a deal to transfer power to his deputy and end escalating violence there.
Critics, though, claimed the council should have distanced itself from a deal by the Gulf Cooperation Council for Saleh to step down in exchange for immunity, saying he should now face criminal charges for unleashing snipers on protesters.
In happier circumstances, vote counting was under way in polls for a new constitutional assembly in Tunisia, in what was billed as first major election contest of the Arab Spring. To the alarm of some secularists, the Islamist Ennahda party was predicted to win up to 30 percent of the vote.
Scenarios of transition from Turkish Republic to Kurdish Republic (1)
http://www.todayszaman.com/columnistDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=260625
21 October 2011, Friday
HASAN KANBOLAT, Columnist
Have a look at TV channels and newspapers in Turkey. You will see photos and news footage displaying young women weeping over flag-draped coffins of slain soldiers and children beside them looking bewildered, trying to make sense of what is going on.
In the years when our first military causalities were sustained in southeastern of Turkey, the funerals of martyred soldiers would not receive much coverage by the media. Ordinary citizens did not show up at their funerals. There were no monuments erected in their honor in cities, towns and villages. Now, funerals teem with tens of thousands of mourners. Monuments for martyrs are appearing in every corner of the country. Turkey has entered into a new phase following the Oct. 19 multiple attacks in Hakkari. Youths took to streets carrying Turkish flags and drove around in cars with flags across their windows, sounding their horns to honor the martyrs and the windows of apartments throughout the country are bearing Turkish flags. Enraged masses once hopeful that these problems could end through democratic initiatives are flocking to the streets. This is a new step for Turkey. Patience is about to run out. The time is close at hand when the public will lose its patience. Every funeral for a martyr is another straw on a heap that has been piling up on the camel's back. One day this burden will break the camel's back. Have you ever thought about this? Which funeral is going to be the last straw? What else will this straw also break in the process? What other wounds will it open up?
What is it that Kurds who decline to adopt the Turkish identity want? What drives them to take up arms? The Arabic version of Turkey's Union and Progress Movement is the Baath and the Kurdish version being the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). From the outside they have an anti-imperialist stance but on the inside they are chauvinistic, nationalist and expansionist. One language, one accent, one flag, one country, one nation and one leader are the fundamentals of its ideology. A common dialect and accent is formulated in this regard. A right to life is denied to diverse ethnicities. Being the largest ethnic group after Kurds, the Zaza people and culture, identity and language are sought to be assimilated into the Kurdish identity. Other pro-Kurdish political movements are hindered.
A new map had been drawn displaying a new state with its borders encompassing northern half of Iraq, west part of Iran, north of Syria and southeastern and southern provinces of Turkey. It has access to the sea from the north through the Amanos Mountains in Hatay province. That is the Dörtyol-İskenderun line. The PKK is launching attacks around this very line which it claims to be its own territory. Pioneers of the Kurdish Movement rejecting the adoption of Turkish identity dreamed of founding a Diyarbakır-based Kurdish republic right on this map. The plan was to establish a semi-autonomous region and then to transform it into an independent state. Now, this view has been abandoned. The new borders of the "homeland" do not consist of eastern and southeastern provinces of Anatolia.
The PKK debate: talking the process before talking the end
http://www.todayszaman.com/columnistDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=260601
21 October 2011, Friday
EMRE USLU, Columnist
Following the recent Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attack, Turkey once again has been discussing the PKK issue. The political debates have centered on two arguments. One group is saying that it is impossible to stop the PKK by military means and therefore, both parties should come to the negotiating table, which they will eventually do anyway, and negotiate an agreement for peace. The second group argues that Turkey has the power to wipe out the PKK and therefore should implement the Sri Lanka model, referring to the killing of the Tamil Tigers, and expect the Turkish state to implement a similar policy.
Analyzing both arguments indicates that Turkey may have been concentrating too much on the results of the PKK issue. In other words, the debate surrounding this issue is a result-oriented debate that does not produce any intellectual contribution about the process toward the results. Instead of talking about the result, which is a long-term debate, and focusing on what we want to see at the end, we need to talk about the process and how to achieve the end we desire.
If we want to promote peaceful negotiations between the two sides, what kinds of tools do we have at our hands to use? What are the risks of such peace negotiations? Do the parties, both the Turkish government and the PKK, want peace? If so, under what conditions? Do the PKK really want to lay down its arms? Does the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government want peace? Can it take political risks towards peace negotiations? Even if political negotiations resume once again, how can we ensure that the unpredictable political climate in the Middle East will not harm the process? Would Iran want peace for instance? Would Syria use the PKK for its own interests?
Of course there are many more questions that can be added to show that that there are very few discussions on how to deal with the PKK. Just like in the media, I know there is very little discussion about it, on a bureaucratic and political level as well. Perhaps the weakest point of the government has been to begin talking about the issue and the process toward a solution without addressing methods. Unfortunately, the Turkish government could not develop such culture and thinking among its bureaucracy to talk about the process.
If the government needs first to talk about the process of implementing its policies, which I think it should, it needs to divide the issue into three categories. First, it should think about how to deal with the Kurdish population in the southeastern provinces where the PKK dominates and is developing anti-state propaganda making Kurds believe untrue stories. Related with this is how to deal with the PKK's unstoppable political networks that carry the PKK's messages to every home and every corner of the region and its ability to mobilize Kurds en mass on certain issues. Second, the government should consider how to deal with the PKK militants in the mountains, since the militants in the mountains are considered heroes of the Kurdish people, at least the majority of the Kurds respect them and their sacrifice. The state needs to come up with a contingency plan to deal with this group. Thirdly, how to handle the international aspect of the issue needs to be thought about. Given the fact that there is a sizable Kurdish diaspora in Europe which is completely disconnected with the reality of Turkey, Turkey should come up with a plan to address the diaspora issue. Moreover, Turkey should develop a plan to decide with whom Turkey needs to partner up with in its fight against the PKK. Would it be alright for Turkey to share intelligence that is coming form the US with Iran or would it need to convince the US Congress to go against the PKK.
All in all there are many loopholes in Turkey's approaches toward the PKK that we do not talk about and it is the main reason why we cannot defeat or negotiate with the PKK.
Russian sympathizers of PKK set up committee for release of PKK leader
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-260635-russian-sympathizers-of-pkk-set-up-committee-for-release-of-pkk-leader.html
21 October 2011, Friday / FARUK AKKAN, MOSCOW
Supporters of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have set up a committee in Moscow to work toward the release of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan three days after one of the deadliest PKK attacks in Turkey with death toll of 34 people in two consecutive days.
The committee, formed under chairmanship of Russian politician and former deputy of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Mitrofanov, has been established with the aim of extending support to free Öcalan, who was put on trial and jailed in Turkey after his capture in 1999. According to the Russian Ria Novosti report, the committee will also be aiming to draw attention to the humanitarian side of the conflict with terrorists, whom the Turkish government calls "Kurdish separatists."
Mitrofanov's committee attempt comes after a letter sent by the extreme rightwing Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky to European capitals to invite them to support the aspirations of what he called the Kurdish movement. Zhirinovsky and Mitrofanov greeted Öcalan at a Moscow airport after Öcalan was sent out of Syria in 1998. Öcalan was eventually captured in Kenya one year later. Mitrofanov briefly hosted Öcalan in his house as a guest, but Öcalan left the country when the Russian government rejected his appeal to be admitted as a political refugee.
Zhirinovsky called on the US, NATO and the UN to do more to protect the rights of Kurds to prevent a war, according to a note released on the party's website. He also complained that the West had intervened in Libya and was now mulling over involvement in Syria for the sake of human rights, but turned a blind eye on Kurds.
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