Wild Turkey
Commenting Wednesday on
Turkey's capture of the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, the press across
western Europe made two principal demands: that Ocalan should not be executed,
as Turkish law allows, and that Turkey should seize this opportunity to reach a
peaceful settlement of its Kurdish problem. It was also generally accepted in
both Europe and the Middle East that U.S. intelligence was deeply involved in
Ocalan's mysterious delivery from the Greek Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he
had been sheltering, to an island prison near Istanbul.
El Mundo of Madrid ran
a front-page story on the CIA's involvement in Ocalan's "kidnapping,"
quoting a Turkish government source as saying that "the North American secret
services alerted us to his whereabouts." The same paper carried an exclusive
interview with Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, who said it
is entirely up to the judiciary to decide if Ocalan should receive a death
sentence.
The paper led its front page with Ecevit saying that he
hopes there will now be a solution to the Kurdish problem, though in the
interview he spoke of achieving this not through greater political autonomy, as
the Kurds demand, but through economic improvements in the southeast region of
Turkey where they live. In an editorial Tuesday in the English-language paper,
Turkish Daily News , Ilnur Cevik wrote that Ecevit and Iraqi Vice
President Tariq Aziz recently agreed to a resumption of oil sales and border
trade between southeast Turkey and Iraq, which had been interrupted by the
American and British bombing campaign. Cevik said Turkey should now press for a
lifting of sanctions against Iraq, and called on Baghdad "to utilize our unique
position as a friend and neighbor of Iraq to be able to integrate back into the
international community."
Mohammad Noureddin, a
leading Arab expert on Turkish affairs, told the London-based Mideast Mirror
news service Tuesday that Ocalan's "handover to Turkey by Greece via U.S.
intelligence suggests that Washington may be poised for a major operation in
Iraq in which it needs to enlist Ankara." Reporting the Israeli government's
denial that it had been in any way involved, Ha'aretz said
Wednesday that the denial was in response to Kurd suspicions based, in part, on
a column written earlier this month in the New York Times by William
Safire, who had said that "U.S. and Israeli intelligence and diplomats" were
helping to track down Ocalan.
The rioting of Kurds across Europe Tuesday, with burnings
and hostage-takings at Greek and Kenyan diplomatic missions, alarmed European
newspapers and generated countless pages of comment and analysis. These
included much self-criticism. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Wednesday in a front-page
editorial that Germany, which has a large Kurdish immigrant population, has
damaged both its own constitution and international agreements on terrorism by
refusing to request Ocalan's extradition from Italy last month, when it had an
international arrest warrant out on him. The paper also warned of the influence
the affair will have on Germany's highly charged debate about the integration
of immigrants into German society.
The Rome newspaper
La Repubblica
accused Germany of breaking European Union accords, with the result that "the
whole territory of Germany is in a state of siege by the Kurd intifada." The
editorial went on to say that Europe should take a common position toward
Turkey, "clarifying that its aspirations to membership of Europe will be
strictly dependent on the way it manages Ocalan's destiny. ... A country that
doesn't respect the rights of defendants and which practices the death penalty
doesn't have the right to be part of Europe." In Paris, Le Figaro said that Ankara
should "judge Ocalan with all the guarantees due to him, to prove that Turkey
is a state founded on the law." It added, "This is an essential condition for
any settlement of the Kurd question." Libération called for "a political solution that
necessarily requires a radical decentralization. ... It is here that the role
of the United States, which played a big part in Ocalan's arrest and which for
the moment can only see him as a terrorist, could be decisive."
In an interview with the British youth magazine
the Face , supermodel Kate Moss revealed that she hadn't walked sober
down the runway for 10 years. Moss, 25, who last year checked into a London
rehabilitation clinic, said that she and her fellow models drank champagne from
early in the morning and smoked pot all day.
