ANKARA (AFP) — Turkish and Danish warships intercepted an attack by pirates on a Vietnamese cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, the Turkish army chief of staff said Monday.
Two Turkish helicopters helped repel Sunday’s attack on the M/V Diamond Falcon off Yemen’s southern coast after the Vietnamese boat issued a distress signal, an army statement said.
The Danish navy told AFP that the pirates, who attacked on two speedboats, fled, and that no arrests were made.
It added that the attack took place in a busy fishing zone, making it easier for the pirate craft to disguise their intent.
The statement did not give their nationality, but more than 100 attacks last year in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes have mostly been blamed on Somali pirates.
The United States, European Union countries, China and Russia have already deployed naval vessels to the region.
Representatives of more than 30 Armenian and Turkish non-governmental organizations met for a first-ever joint conference in Yerevan at the weekend to discuss ways of assisting in the ongoing dialogue between their estranged nations.
The event highlighted a dramatic thaw in relations between Armenia and Turkey. After months of intensive diplomatic contacts the governments of the two neighboring states appear close to establishing diplomatic relations and opening the Turkish-Armenian border.
According to Artak Kirakosian of the Yerevan-based Civil Society Institute, one of the Armenian organizers of the conference, it was initiated by Turkish civil society activists with the financial assistance of the British embassy in Turkey. He said they were emboldened and inspired by Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s historic September 2008 visit to Yerevan.
Participants of the two-day conference broadly agreed on the need for an unconditional normalization of bilateral ties. Some of them were optimistic about chances of that happening in the nearest future. “I am very hopeful and positive,” said Hakan Ataman of the Ankara-based Civil Society Development Center (CSDC).
The conference skirted sensitive problems hampering the border opening, focusing instead on the situation with democracy and human rights, environmental problems as well as youth and women’s issues in the two countries. Kirakosian told RFE/RL that the participants, among them the daughter of the slain Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Delal, agreed to meet on a regular basis and take joint actions in each of these areas.
“We live in the same region and naturally have the same problems,” said Lilit Asatrian, chairwoman of the Armenian Association of Young Women. “I believe that young people can make a very big contribution to settling historical problems that we have with our neighbor.”
The most sensitive and significant of those problems is differing interpretations of the World War One-era mass killings and deportations of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire seen by many historians as the first genocide of the 20th century. “I think that the Armenian genocide is the most important problem of the Turkish people,” Ataman told RFE/RL. “The Armenian genocide is not only an Armenian question. It’s also a Turkish question.”
Gokhan Kilinc, another Turkish participant, said Turkish-Armenian civil society contacts should concentrate on the future. “We should discuss not the past but what we can do for the future,” he said.
Turkey experienced a turbulent 2008 that included a constitutional crisis, strained civil-military relations, an economic slowdown and an activist foreign policy. As the country prepares for local elections later in March, the tension between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the rest of the Turkish body politic is once again rising. Moreover, growing questions about Turkey’s pro-Western orientation make the upcoming elections all the more critical. The future of Turkish democracy and its near-term geopolitical orientation could be significantly affected by the lessons the Erdogan government draws from the election.
On April 1, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) will host a discussion of the election results and the future of Turkey’s policies at home and abroad featuring two experts on Turkish politics, Soli Ozel and Murat Yetkin. Ozel is one of Turkey’s most respected analysts, and his post-election analyses have consistently been the gold standard in helping the Washington policy community understand electoral results. Yetkin is a prominent commentator on Turkish domestic politics and foreign policies whose years of reporting on Ankara enable him to provide a unique “inside the Ankara beltway” perspective.
Brookings nonresident Fellow Omer Taspinar, director of CUSE’s Turkey Project, will provide introductory remarks and will moderate the discussion. After the program, the featured speakers will take audience questions.
Participants
Introduction and Moderator
Omer Taspinar
Nonresident Fellow, Foreign Policy
Panelists
Murat Yetkin
Columnist and Ankara Bureau Chief, Radikal (Turkey)
Soli Ozel
Bilgi University, Istanbul
Event Information
When
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
9:30 AM to 11:00 AM
Where
Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC Map
Baku – APA. “The United States and Turkey have common targets on a number of issues, including Caucasus,” Turkey’s Deputy Foreign Minister, former Turkish ambassador to Azerbaijan Ahmet Unal Chevikoz, who ended his visit to Washington, said in his interview to Turkish service of the Voice of America, APA reports.
Chevikoz had high-level meetings with the U.S. officials in Washington and discussed President Barack Obama’s forthcoming visit to Ankara.
“Obama’s visit is very important. The relations between the two countries were discussed during the recent visit of the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Ankara. We saw that the two countries had very significant foreign policy targets. We have a common agenda on a number of issues, including our relations with Iraq, Afghanistan, Caucasus and Russia,” he said.
Commenting on Turkey’s policy with respect to Armenia Chevikoz said the whole world witnessed everything.
“After September 6 visit of President Abdullah Gul to Yerevan, high-level warm relations were formed between the two countries. Foreign Ministers met seven times. The ways to improve Turkey-Armenia relations were discussed at the meetings. We hope the relations will normalize soon and it will be continuous. There are some preparations in this respect and these preparations will be realized with support of the Foreign Ministers of the two countries,” he said.
Ahmet Unal Chevikoz also commented on Azerbaijan’s attitude towards Ankara-Yerevan relations.
“Being our nearest neighbor in the region Azerbaijan is attentively observing normalization of the relations between Turkey and Armenia. On the other hand, there is unsolved Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is normal that Azerbaijan is observing these processes. But Azerbaijan need not worry or doubt anything. Turkey’s position on Karabakh problem will continue as before, nothing has changed. Of course, normalization of the relations between Turkey and Armenia is parallel to the process of settlement of Nagorno Karabakh problem,” he said.
Turkish diplomat said his country was not mediator, but played an easing role in the settlement of the conflicts in the region.
Ankara has offered opportunities for contacts between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine and played an easing role in Israel-Syria and Syria-Lebanon dialogues and European Union’s contacts with Iran.
“All this is sourced from everybody’s confidence in Turkey,” he said.
The economic crisis is fuelling opposition to further EU enlargement. Yet the price of delay could be instability and deepening poverty, Katinka Barysch, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Reform argues.
This is part of a series of opinion pieces ahead of the June European elections.
The queue for EU membership keeps getting longer. The 27-nation EU has accepted Turkey, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Serbia and other Balkan countries as potential candidates. Recession-battered Iceland may follow.
Former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia have been told that they need to improve a lot before the EU will consider them as candidates.
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of eastward enlargement, the EU’s Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn released a report in February that explained how both the new members and the “old” EU have gained from integrating with each other.
Thanks to enlargement the EU is now the single biggest market in the world, and certainly a force to be reckoned with in the forthcoming G20 talks about how to fix the world economy.
Eastern progress
Over the last decade, the nimble, fast-growing East European countries also added a degree of dynamism to an EU economy that looked sluggish and sclerotic at the time.
The biggest winners have been the new members themselves.
Turkey's long-standing EU bid faces numerous hurdles
Nothing quite focuses politicians’ minds like the goal of joining the EU. The bloc is demanding: applicants have to open up their economies, tackle political favouritism and corruption, and adopt the EU’s accumulated legal rules. In return, they can expect booming trade with the EU’s 13 trillion-euro single market and large amounts of foreign investment.
Since 1973, when the UK joined what was then known as the European Community, the EU has welcomed new members on average every eight years.
Most recently, Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. They had missed the “big bang” enlargement of 2004 when 10 – mostly ex-communist – countries had joined the club.
Stumbling blocks
But even the candidate countries are stuck at the moment.
There are well-known reasons why enlargement is now proceeding slowly. Many of the current applicants are poor and backward; some, such as Bosnia, have yet to build a functioning state; Kosovo has not even been recognised by all current EU countries.
Turkey poses special issues. Because of its 70 million population, proud politicians and predominantly Muslim religion, many people in Austria, France, Germany and elsewhere question whether it should join the EU at all.
Moreover, many people in the EU are still struggling to digest the impact of the last enlargement.
Fears that eastward enlargement would lead to political gridlock and economic hardship have not materialised. Nevertheless, the current EU-wide recession has aggravated concerns that taking in more countries would bring more low-cost competition at a time when jobless queues are getting longer everywhere.
The economic instability seen in some of the new eastern member countries, such as Latvia and Hungary, now will make voters in the West even warier of further enlargement.
At a recent meeting of foreign ministers, Germany and the Netherlands effectively blocked the application of Montenegro, a Mediterranean country of 620,000. If Montenegro made progress, they may have reasoned, Albania, Bosnia and Serbia would hand in their official applications this year as well, thus putting pressure on the EU to act.
Even before the foreign ministers’ meeting, there were signs of trouble.
Bilateral disputes
Various existing EU members have been holding the enlargement process hostage to bilateral spats they are having with some applicant or other. EU governments have always thrown their specific worries or pet projects into accession negotiations. What is new is the boldness with which some now hold up the entire process, to get what they want.
The most blatant example is Slovenia’s dispute with Croatia over a stretch of Mediterranean coastline.
Croatia was hoping to wrap up its accession negotiations this year so that it can join in 2010. But while 26 EU countries (and the European Commission) wanted to open 10 new “chapters” in the negotiations in 2008, Slovenia vetoed all but one.
Since then, the political atmosphere between Ljubljana and Zagreb has become so poisonous that the EU has called in Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Martti Ahtisaari to find a way out.
Greece is holding Macedonia’s application hostage to its long-running dispute over the country’s proper name.
Cyprus is blocking several chapters in Turkey’s accession talks, probably in the hope of gaining leverage in the peace talks on the divided island. France is also holding up the talks, but for more profound reasons: since President Nicolas Sarkozy prefers a “privileged partnership”, he argues that Turkey need not bother with those chapters of the acquis – the EU rulebook – that are only relevant for full members.
These small-minded vetoes are dangerous. The East European and Balkan region has been hit hard by the economic crisis. These countries would find it a lot easier to get through the crisis if they had the prospect of EU membership to guide them.
EU governments need some vision here. They should conclude a “gentlemen’s agreement” about not vetoing accessions because of bilateral grievances. They need to find a way of keeping Turkey’s accession process alive, even if no breakthrough is achieved in Cyprus this year. And they should allow the applications of the Balkan countries to proceed.
The alternative could be a region full of political instability, economic turmoil and disgruntled people dreaming.
The Centre for European Reform is a privately-funded think-tank, based in London, that favours European integration while pushing for EU reform.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney appears on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday, March 15, 2009, in Washington. Cheney's going high-tech with a BlackBerry and a wireless device for reading books. And he's driving a car these days. Such is life after 8 years as vice president. Two months after leaving office, Cheney also is getting used to being out of the loop when it comes national secrets. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that President Barack Obama’s overturning of Bush administration terrorism-fighting initiatives are making Americans less safe. In noting the sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Cheney said nearly all the Republican administration’s goals there had been met.
Obama has suspended military trials for suspected terrorists and announced he will close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as overseas sites where the CIA has held some detainees. The president also ordered CIA interrogators to abide by the U.S. Army Field Manual’s regulations for treatment of detainees and denounced waterboarding, part of the Bush program of enhanced interrogation, as torture.
Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he thought Obama has made Americans less safe with those actions, Cheney replied, “I do.”
“I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11,” Cheney said.
“I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles,” he said. “President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”
Some Democratic lawmakers and other administration critics have denounced those and other Bush programs, such as warrantless surveillance, as counterproductive and illegal. In defending these policies established by President George W. Bush following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney said he had seen a report itemizing specific attacks that had been stopped because of the intelligence gathered through those programs.
“It’s still classified. I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them,” he said.
Cheney said the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has led to democratic elections and a constitution as well as the defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq and Iran’s efforts to influence events in Iraq.
“We have succeeded in creating in the heart of the Middle East a democratically governed Iraq, and that is a big deal, and it is, in fact, what we set out to do,” he said.
Asked if he was declaring “mission accomplished” — those words graced a banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that heralded Bush’s overly optimistic declaration on May 1, 2003, that major combat operations had ended in Iraq — Cheney replied: “I wouldn’t use that, just because it triggers reactions that we don’t need.”
He added: “But I would ask people — and the press, too — to take an honest look at the circumstances in Iraq today and how far we’ve come.”
