NEWS FROM THE FRONT

"Given the current situation of active fighting and no prospect of peace, this decision from the Kongra-Gel/HPG to renounce the use of AP mines is significant. It reflects the will of the Kongra-Gel/HPG to commit itself to respect certain rules of behaviour during warfare and to spare civilians from the effects of landmines. We will follow up the implementation of this humanitarian commitment and we call upon the Government of Turkey to facilitate our work on the ground."
~ Elisabeth Reusse-Decrey, President, Geneva Call.

TSK has a plan for minefield identification and clearing, from Taraf:

Let Civilians enter the minefields first

Şırnak Brigade Command General Ahmet Yavuz released an immediate order for precautions against mine attacks: Use the most frequently mined roads indirectly rather than directly, use the roads after civilian vehicles pass through, enter such mined regions after shepherds and civilian passengers use them.

First shepherds and passengers enter

In order to reduce the casualties from mines that have been planted by PKK in The East, it turned out that civilians would be pushed forward. In a top secret document signed by Şırnak Brigade Command's General Ahmet Yavuz, there were the following suggestions to reduce troop casualties: first sending civilians to the minefields, sending civilian vehicles on roads where the possibility of the existence of mines are high. and appointing trained dogs to such regions.

In addition to these suggestions, there is a demand to use Claymore mines, which are banned by international law.

Apparently, these decisions were made after a meeting of Şırnak Brigade Headquarters, which the unit commanders, headquarter lieutenants and battalion commanders had attended at the beginning of June 2007. This meeting came about as the result of two mine explosions which resulted in the deaths of six Turkish soldiers and another in which eight were wounded. These explosions occured in May and June 2007.

The top secret document, numbered HRK:7130-115-07 / (58557), was sent to İkizce and Doğanköy units, Şırnak Province Jandarma Command, Jandarma Special Operations Battalion Command, and Jandarma Security Protection Command.

Taraf obtained a copy of the document and, among the suggested solutions to the problem of regional minefields, was the following:

The roads and regions where mine and hand-made explosives are intensively used must be constantly surveilled; instead of going into those regions directly, an indirect strategy must be implemented; such roads must be used after opened to civilian vehicle traffic; such regions must be entered after shepherd and passenger use.

Why am I not surprised that NATO's second largest army, the TSK, is, once again, engaging in war crimes?

HPG stopped using anti-personnel mines in 2006, although it still uses command-detonated mines.

Now some news from the front. Note: the front is everywhere.

At the beginning of September, operations were continuing in Bingöl. Thirty-six Turkish soldiers were killed, one of whom was a major and nineteen were Special Team members.

This HPG operation occured on 2 September against the Tevzan Garrison in Kiğı of Bingöl. According to statements from HPG-BİM, the operation started with an infilitration at 1800 hours that encircled the garrison. The garrison was targeted from three points. All the materials in the garrison's yard were destroyed, including one artillery gun.

An hour and a half into the attack, Cobras arrived on the scene. One Sikorsky, which came to intervene and contained one major and twenty Special Team members, came under intense fire from our guerrıllas while trying to land in the garrison yard. It was downed by our guerrillas and exploded. There were no survivors of the explosion.

The war balance from this operation included four Turkish officers, one of whom was a major, and thirty-six enemy soldiers killed. Twenty-six were wounded.

There were four HPG şehîds as a result of this operation. BİM tells the struggle of the operation's commander Ahmet Tevfik (Kahraman Haseki) as follows:

"Comrade Kahraman Haseki was seriously wounded. Despite the other comrades' insistence that they take him [out of the operation area for medical attention], he rejected this offer and his final words were 'Say hello to all comrades. We took revenge for the Bingöl şehîds. Bijî Serok Apo!' Our comrade exploded his grenade and entered martyrdom. In addition to his martyrdom, our comrades İrfan Gündoğan (Munzur Sara), Şirzat Paşar (Sefkan Çiya), and Derviş Köşker (Özgür Roni) were martyred.

Kahraman Haseki had been a guerrilla for 15 years.

On 4, 5, and 6 September, operations continued in Hakkari, Şırnak, and Bingöl, in which eight soldiers and one JITEM were killed. Clashes between our guerrillas and the TSK in areas of Yüksekova, Hakkari on 5 September resulted in the death of four soldiers, with one wounded. On the same day, in Şırnak, Navyana Şeyxan garrison, YJA-STAR forces engaged in a clash with the TSK that resulted in two sergeants and three soldiers killed, and two soldiers wounded. On the same day in the Bingöl region, one JITEM and two soldiers were killed, and one wounded. On 6 September, in Kato Jirka of Beytüşşebap, operations were ongoing, including an operation initiated by TSK.

On 7 and 8 September, in two separate operations, HPG forces killed three enemy soldiers and wounded five others. On 8 September, a TSK command center was targeted by HPG in the Meydan Kolyan area, which was coordinating the Kato Jirka operation. The command center contained 15 officers, which were HPG's targets. Eight enemy soldiers were killed and seven wounded by HPG at the command center. After the operation, three helicopters came to remove the dead and wounded. Meanwhile, on 7 September in an operation in Şemdinli, HPG forces killed six soldiers and three village guards. Two of the dead soldiers were officers. The bodies were under the control of our guerrillas.

On 7 September, in villages of the Dicle district of Amed (Diyarbakır), three enemy soldiers were killed and two wounded. On 8 September in the Beytüşşebap district of Şırnak, YJA-STAR forces launched rocket attacks and heavy arms fire against police housing. Casualties from this attack have not yet been confirmed.

HPG has confirmed all of the şehîds from clashes on 16 and 28 August in the region of Bitlis, as follows:

Şehîd nemirin!

OTTAWA TREATY: TURKEY NONCOMPLIANT

"I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war."
~ Robert Mueller.

Gordon Taylor has another piece on the guerrillas--an epitaph for Şehîd Halil Uysal:

Halil seems to have had an affinity for his chosen terrain. His PKK code name was Halil Dağ ("Halil Mountain"), and he wrote about his mountains as well as photographing them. I used a lot of images from the PKK's website (see some of them here), and it now seems likely that quite a few of those were actually made by Halil. But it is as a filmmaker that Halil won his biggest audience. Hevallo, at this post, gives a synopsis of the three films that Halil made while living in the mountains, and provides video clips as well.

I have not, I confess, ever seen Halil's films. Turkish newspapers have dismissed them as propaganda, and by their standards of course they are correct. But to Turkish nationalists anything (including this post) is vicious pro-terrorist propaganda when it dares to depict the soldiers of the PKK as human beings. Well, guilty as charged. The young man above looks like a human being to me.

Toprağı bol olsun. Rest in peace, Halil Bey.

Şehîd nemirin!

What have I been complaining about for a while? Among other things:

The Initiative for a Turkey without Mines has said that despite its promise to destroy its stock of landmines by 1 March, Turkey has not completed the operation.

Making a statement before the First International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action on 4 April, the initiative said that, still, every three days a person was wounded or killed by a landmine in Turkey.

[ . . . ]

The Ottawa Convention was negotiated ten years ago and ratified by Turkey in 2003. According to the convention, Turkey is supposed to have cleared all the landmines in the ground by 2014.

[ . . . ]

Between 1950-55 and 1984-94, 1 million mines were buried in Turkey. There are a further 3 million mines stored which need to be destroyed.

As I've written previously, the Ankara regime has made no effort to clear mines from The Southeast, nor has it followed proper mine protocol.

It's amazing that the Ankara regime does absolutely nothing to improve the situation of its own citizens. The regime got involved with compliance for the Ottawa Treaty way back in 2000. Here we are in 2008, and still nothing has been done, and this is all supposed to be taken care of by 2014.

I have one piece of advice: Don't hold your breath.

See how well Turkey complies with the treaties to which it's signatory?

More mine news, this time from South Kurdistan:

De-mining operations continue but have been slowed due to natural difficulties and lack of military maps of planted mines.

Landmines are everywhere in Kurdistan Region. The mines, nearly three for every person in Kurdistan Region, were laid mostly against Kurdish armed movements since the 1960s, more so than at any other time during regional wars over the past three decades.

The Iraqi government announced recently that nearly 25 million mines lay unearthed over the entire country. Sources from the Kurdistan Region Mine Action Agency (MAA) say that most of those- nearly 12-15 million- are in the region.

There were 18 mine victims in Kurdistan during the first three months of 2008; 4 died and 14 were wounded, including two de-miners. Eight of them were in Suleimaniya and the rest were in Duhok and Erbil, according to information provided by Ako Aziz, MAA director of Mine Risk Education.

In 2007, 13 people, mostly villagers, were killed and 36 were wounded due to explosives and mine explosions. Most occurred in Chamchamal west of Suleimaniya, Zakho in Duhok province, and in Choman northeast of Erbil.

[ . . . ]

On the anniversary of International Mine Ban Treaty of Ottawa, on April 4, the MAA handed over nine minefields to landowners. The MAA alone has cleaned 1.5 square kilometers of 4,000 land mines and 9 square kilometers of 11,500,000 other unexploded ordnance.

Much de-mining operation time is spent on preparations for removing mines because of lack of basic data.

"Unfortunately, we don't have military maps [of the planted mines]; very, very little has reached us," said Barzani [Siraj Barzani, head of the MAA]. "For example, for a landmine that needs to be cleaned in nine months, we spend several months on preparatory works." Many of the minefields are located in hard-to-reach mountainous areas where it is hard to transport equipment, and conditions may have changed the positions of the mines over the years.

Credit where credit is due: Bravo to KRG for continuing to slog it out in their battle with the mines. Now, of course, there are all those cluster bombs to clear, too.

IMAGE AND UXO'S

"During interviews Landmine Monitor conducted with people living in the Diyarbakır and Mardin provinces of the region of southeastern Anatolia, they said they had the impression that security forces sometimes purposefully leave unexploded debris in areas endangering civilians."
~ Landmine Monitor, 2006 Report, Turkey.

Abdullah Gul has been selected by AKP to compete for the Turkish presidency this year, and to hear the NYTimes tell it, you'd think the biggest problems facing the TC were non-segregated swimming pools. But what a fantastic legacy for AKP, eh?

Then there's Reuters, which tries to sell an Islamist as a "reformist." Well, at least it's an original idea.

Unexploded TSK ordnance in Şirnex killed one child and injured three others (two of which were also children). Bianet notes that local media failed to mention Turkey's status as signatory to the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, its obligations under the treaty, as well as local media's failure to take a critical approach in covering the incident in Şirnex.

What a shock.

There's more on that subject from Landmine Monitor's 2006 report on Turkey. Back in 2005, AKP cooked up a rather unconventional scheme to demine "The Southeast," as described by Reuters last month:

To clear explosives in heavily mined areas of the South and Southeast, Turkey's Finance Ministry has opened two tenders since 2005. Both were part of an effort to conform to the Ottowa Convention which gave signatories like Turkey 10 years to de-mine its interiors.

But both tenders were called off.

While most de-mining contracts are based on cash payments for land cleared, the Turkish ones were set up so the winning bidder would win the right to establish an organic farm on the cleaned land for 49 years after clearing it, in a kind of 'rehabilitate and operate' system.

"The government is trying to get the land cleared without spending any money," said de-mining consultant Ali Koknar, who heads Washington-based AMK Risk Management.

"The winning bid has to agree to farm the land for 49 years. That's not the way the de-mining industry works," he said.

No kidding.

But there were also problems with the real ruling elite, the Paşas:

In 2003, Turkey pledged to clear the land of mines, in a process to be completed by 2014. However the mine clearance business has turned into another controversial issue, since the question of how the land will be used after being cleared led to fierce debate between the government and the opposition. The ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party government launched a tender, but then it was canceled since the TSK said it has both capacity and means to clear the border of mines.

TSK may have the "capacity and means" to clear mines from the "border," but it doesn't have the will. And if it doesn't have the will to clear mines from the border, it certainly doesn't have the will to clear them from Kurdish lands. Although a 1998 directive from the Turkish General Staff forbade the use of landmines, there was a report from FIDH that as late as 2003, TSK was laying more landmines along the border with South Kurdistan. Naturally the TSK failed to inform the local population of these new minefields because they weren't supposed to be laying them, according to the Genelkurmay Baskanligi.

So much for reform; so much for substance. It's all about image. For the sake of the image of the TC, Kurdish kids will continue to be blown to bits.