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Syria conflict Turkey: Syrian troops said to mass on northwest border with Turkey

Pro-democracy activists say Syrian troops and tanks have rolled into areas near the border, across which refugees have fled to makeshift camps. The move could further strain ties with longtime ally Turkey, which has been critical of the crackdown.

By Alexandra Sandels, Los Angeles Times

June 24, 2011

Reporting from Beirut—

Syrian refugees pass a Turkish military vehicle as they cross the border near the Turkish village of Guvecci in Hatay province. Syrian activists say Syrian troops backed by tanks and snipers have entered a village along the border. (Burhan Ozbilici, Associated Press / June 24, 2011)

Syrian refugees pass a Turkish military vehicle as they cross the border near the Turkish village of Guvecci in Hatay province. Syrian activists say Syrian troops backed by tanks and snipers have entered a village along the border. (Burhan Ozbilici, Associated Press / June 24, 2011)

Syrian army units massed near the border with Turkey on Thursday, according to Syrian pro-democracy activists and media accounts, with some troops, backed by tanks, rolling into a village close to makeshift refugee camps housing civilians who fled villages in northwest Syria.

The expanded troop presence in the border zone could further aggravate already strained relations with Turkey, which has been critical of the ongoing Syrian crackdown on antigovernment protests.

An activist group, the Local Coordination Committees in Syria, said 40 tanks had been deployed in the border village of Khirbet Jouz and that snipers had taken positions on rooftops.

Syria has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage, making it difficult to independently verify activists’ accounts of the ongoing uprising against President Bashar Assad and his family’s decades-long regime.

Video aired by the Al Jazeera news channel showed Syrian military activity in full view of the Turkish border, including tanks with Syrian flags on a nearby hill and troops atop a tall building.

The Turkish Red Crescent said another 600 refugees had arrived in Turkey in response to the latest Syrian military move, joining the more than 10,000 who have fled in recent weeks.

The Associated Press reported that Turkish troops in the border area moved their positions back several hundred feet in an apparent bid to avoid a confrontation with the Syrian forces.

One analyst said the Syrian advance probably was more a case of asserting control of its territory than a deliberate provocation of its increasingly critical neighbor. The Syrian and Turkish foreign ministers discussed the border situation in a telephone conversation, Turkey’s semi-official Anatolian news agency reported.

For weeks, the Syrian army has attempted to root out opposition to Assad in northwestern cities and villages. Syrian state media has said that the army and security forces are hunting “armed terrorists” in the rugged mountainous areas near Turkey, an allegation that human rights activists deny.

In Brussels, the European Union said it had expanded its sanctions list against the Syrian regime, targeting seven more individuals and four companies, AP reported. That brings to 34 the number of people and entities, including Assad, faced with an asset freeze and travel ban. The EU also has an embargo on sales of arms and equipment that can be used to suppress demonstrations.

On Wednesday, Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Moallem, assailed European governments for the sanctions and said the West was fomenting unrest and instability in the Arab nation.

Despite the government crackdown, Syrian protesters called for new demonstrations.

Activists on the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page — which has become an important force behind the protest movement — called Thursday for a nationwide general strike and urged fresh protests Friday.

The Syrian opposition estimates that 1,400 people have been killed since the protests began three months ago and that about 10,000 have been detained.

Sandels is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell in Tunis, Tunisia, contributed to this report.

via Syria conflict Turkey: Syrian troops said to mass on northwest border with Turkey – latimes.com.

June 24, 2011
Syria Live Blog

Thousands of Syrians escaping violence in the north of the country have crossed the border into Turkey [Reuters]

Thousands continue to take to the streets across Syria, despite the bloody crackdown on protests. Activists say more than 1,300 civilians have been killed by security forces. We bring you the latest news from various sources.

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4 hours 23 min ago – Syria

Hundreds of displaced Syrians have fled into Turkey on Thursday after Syrian troops backed by tanks approached their makeshift camps in the bordering village of Khirbet al-Joz, the AFP news agency has reported.

They were flanked by Turkish paramilitary police vehicles and minibuses, called apparently to ferry the refugees to tent cities the Turkish Red Crescent has erected in the border province of Hatay, where more than 10,000 Syrians are already sheltering.

via Syria Live Blog | Al Jazeera Blogs.

June 23, 2011
Syrian embassy accused of threatening protesters in UK

UK activists say Assad agents have visited and intimidated them at home as campaigners fear for their Syrian families’ safety

* Matthew Taylor

* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 June 2011 21.35 BST

A Syrian refugee and child in Turkey. Protesters in Britain have claimed that agents of the Assad regime have threatened them and their families in Syria. Photograph: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty

Claims that Syrians involved in anti-government protests in the UK have been threatened and intimidated by agents of the Assad regime have prompted discussions between Scotland Yard and Foreign Office officials.

Syrians who have protested in London say they have received phone calls and visits to their homes, while members of their families in Syria have been threatened.

One man described how the country’s secret police had visited his parents’ home warning them to stop him taking part in any further demonstrations after he was photographed outside the embassy in London. Another said he had been warned not to mix with the demonstrators by a Syrian official after a protest this month.

The demonstrators say that although the embassy does not have the power to arrest expatriates, the regime can attempt to control their behaviour by intimidating and detaining their relatives, or threatening to arrest them if they return to Syria.

The Foreign Office said it had been made aware of claims that Syria’s embassy has photographed protesters, and that those images have been shown to their families in Syria in an attempt to harass them.

“We are looking into these reports and discussing them with the police. We urge anyone who’s been the subject of any intimidation to report it to the police,” said a Foreign Office spokesman.

The Syrian embassy denied the claims, insisting it served the entire Syrian community, irrespective of an individual’s political beliefs or actions. But a friend of three people whose families have been persecuted said that they were “extremely frightened” and were deciding whether to press ahead with their claims against the Syrian regime.

“It has to be understood that this is extremely serious for these people and their families,” said the London-based activist, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals. “They are worried about what has happened and the publicity around them and what that could mean for their families. They are considering carefully what to do next.”

A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said it had no knowledge of any complaint being made against the Syrian embassy, but added it was aware of the allegations. The Foreign Office urged any of those who felt they had been intimidated or threatened to come forward.

“Any such action [by the Syrian embassy] would be wholly wrong and unacceptable,” said a spokesman. “We’ve taken action in the past against diplomats whose activities were inappropriate and contrary to the interests of the UK, and we would do so again.”

Since the start of the Arab spring a number of regimes have been accused of intimidating their UK-based citizens. In April the Foreign Office condemned the Bahrain government when students on scholarships in Britain had their funding withdrawn after attending anti-government protests. The students said the regime had put intense pressure on their families after they were photographed attending a peaceful protest in Manchester in solidarity with the country’s pro-democracy movement.They said they feared their relatives could suffer beatings and torture as a result of the Bahrain government’s crackdown and that they were likely to be arrested upon their return.

In May the UK expelled two Libyan diplomats over allegations they were operating against UK-based demonstrators opposed to Muammar Gaddafi. The Foreign Office refused to comment on the behaviour which led to the expulsion of the diplomats and their dependants, but it was widely reported that they are suspected of seeking to intimidate pro-opposition Libyans .

via Syrian embassy accused of threatening protesters in UK | World news | The Guardian.

June 23, 2011
Worry over PKK, Kurds shape Turkey’s Syria policy

By Aaron Stein for Southeast European Times in Istanbul – 22/06/11

The potential for unrest in Syria’s Kurdish populated areas sparks concern. [Reuters]

”]Ankara’s partnership with Damascus is crumbling in the wake of Syria’s uprising and brutal government crackdown. Since events spiraled out of control, one of the major looming issues for Turkish security planners is how the chaos, and the threat of Syrian collapse, will impact Turkey’s domestic Kurdish problem and the fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Syria’s normally restive Kurdish population in the northeast of the country, contiguous to the Kurdish populated regions of Turkey and Iraq, have so far not been the centre of anti-regime protests and regime crackdowns. However, the prospect of a harsh military response in Kurdish populated areas, similar to those occurring in the Arab populated northwestern Syria, and the resultant refugee flows to Turkey’s border, have Turkish policy makers worried.

There is also a fear that, “if Syria were to destabilise further, the PKK could find a new safe haven in Syria or amongst the Syrian Kurds, similar to the situation in northern Iraq,” Saban Kardas, assistant professor of international relations at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, told SETimes.

The threat posed by Kurdish nationalism and separatist violence has underpinned Turkey’s relationship with Syria since the mid-1980s. Up until 1998, the relationship was marred by Syria’s harbouring of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

After agreeing to kick out the PKK leader in 1998 and Ocalan’s subsequent capture, relations between the two countries improved dramatically. In the wake of the war in Iraq in 2003, Syria and Turkey bolstered security ties in order to contain the perceived threat of growing Kurdish nationalism.

Turkey invested a lot in cultivating its relationship with Syria, often resisting calls by the United States to isolate the regime for its ties to Iran, meddling in Lebanon and Iraq, and its support for Hamas.

Warming relations with Syria was seen as “the best example of Turkey’s changing foreign policy”, said Kardas, adding that “It was the cornerstone of Turkey’s Middle East policy.”

Maintaining regional stability is Turkey’s primary foreign policy priority. Wary of upsetting the status quo, Ankara has rejected rapid regime change in favour of an “evolutionary style, which would transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one through slow, structural and peaceful changes”, Nuh Yilmaz, director of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) in Washington told SETimes.

At the outset of the al-Assad regime’s bloody crackdown, Turkey reacted cautiously but “the refugee crisis has forced Prime Minister Erdogan’s hand politically,” William Hale, SOAS Emeritus professor told SETimes. “He [Erdogan] could not go on sitting on the fence saying that his good friend [al-Assad] would somehow turn Syria into a democratic government.”

Since the outbreak of hostilities, over 10,000 Arab refugees have fled Syria for Turkey, drawing comparisons to the flood of Kurdish refugees that escaped Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown in 1991. Turkey and allied forces responded by establishing a safe zone on the Iraqi side of the border with Turkey to protect refugees and provide humanitarian relief — which was later expanded into a protectorate over the Iraqi Kurds in the form of a no-fly zone. Amidst the chaos, the PKK was able to consolidate its positions in northern Iraq and launch cross border raids in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Turkish press has reported that the Turkish military has developed plans to create a buffer zone in northern Syria in the event of regime collapse, sectarian violence, and mass refugee flows to Turkey.

This content was commissioned for SETimes.com.

via Worry over PKK, Kurds shape Turkey’s Syria policy (SETimes.com).

June 23, 2011
Learning human rights lessons from Turkey?

Turkey promised to keep its borders open for the people fleeing the violence in Syria. Many thousands of Syrians have crossed into Turkey and footage shows men and women, children walking into that country.

Even though Turkey is a country with a large population of over seventy million and already coping with an overflow of many other nationalities, it has not lost its humanity in doing the right thing by extending its hospitality to those so much worse off. They are quickly opening disused buildings and building camps, constructing a temporary hospital.

If Turkey can do it, where is our compassion?

Lack of ‘humaneness’ is what seems to doggedly divide Australia from most of the rest of the world with a deeply engrained hostility towards others. It is especially directed to those hapless victims of endless wars that somehow managed to make it anywhere near our shores.

Our present minister and previous Government ministers have exalted in, ‘we must make conditions here as harsh as possible as a deterrent’. The general gist of the messages from our ‘Leaders’ has been very constant, ‘No-one, we repeat, no-one should come here under the understanding they will be treated with compassion or care if they jump the ‘queue’ or come ‘illegal’ by boat,’ is what they mainly are saying. The political leaders are well aware that those sentiments will be well rewarded with the approval of thousand of voters.

The latest threat of sending at least 800 refugees to Malaysia just about takes the cake in the manoeuvring of our desperate Government keen to further whip up our xenophobia. The fact that this whipping might be translated to a caning in Malaysia was just seen as a mere bagatelle, easily overcome with a few soothing words of a promise that that would most likely not happen. The UNHCR seems less convinced.

While the conversation is continuing and a flurry of visits to New Guinea and Nauru intending to underline our tough stance once again, some might question where this dreadful fear comes from. Is there something in our history that gives us clues?

We couldn’t do much wrong by visiting our most recent history of how we treated children, both in our mother country of the UK and in our own.

Just having seen the film Oranges and Sunshine and previously read David Hill’s, The Forgotten Children, I wonder if one day we might admit there was something rotten going on in our culture dating back perhaps hundreds of years. I know of no other country that exported and deported over 130,000 children in recent times. I also know of no other country that then allowed the further destruction of those children in the institutions they arrived at.

Is it is the history of bullying children and sending them into the hierarchical system of the English Boarding Schools, the Public (Private) Schools with its whipping masters and the degrading of all those coming into contact with the ‘British system’ of parenting and educating?

This seems to go to the very heart of why Australia has never managed to shake of that bullying that defined us from the very start.

Yet, when it comes to cattle or suicidal whales we all get teary eyed, ban the export of cattle or stand in the sea for days stroking dying whales. Where is the stroking for the flotsam of humans cast on our shores?

Last Monday’s Four Corners: again ‘bullying and degrading’ at the very core of our armed forces. It is totally ‘us’ and not just the isolated few of ‘them’. Howard, Ruddock, Abbott, Gillard, Morrison, Bowen. What chance did they all have growing up and indoctrinated into a system of bullying? No Government except the British conduct parliament so appallingly and again, bullying is at the very heart of it.

In the meantime we should take a leaf out of Turkey’s book. We will not turn them away, is what the Turkish Minister for Immigration is reported as saying. They are human beings in distress.

I can’t even imagine one of our politicians saying that.

via Learning human rights lessons from Turkey? – The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

June 21, 2011
With Syria on fire between them, Turkey and Israel move to avoid a new fiasco at sea

Posted by Karl Vick

Flotilla flagship drops out after Turkey sizes up the potential damage to delicate balance of relations with Israel, Washington

It’s hard to overstate the zesty potency of the words “Mavi Marama” in Turkey. Giant posters on Istanbul’s busiest streets trumpet the impending return to sea of the ferry that Israeli commandos intercepted in the Mediterranean a year ago, killing nine activists en route to break the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. The botched raid set back Israel’s public image yet again, and threatened to totally fracture relations between erstwhile allies who have yet to find their way back to common ground.

But that may be changing with the news that the Marmara will not be part of the sequel flotilla preparing to depart. Instead of serving as flagship, the vessel will remain at dock undergoing repairs, according to an official version of events that, really, no one much believes. By all appearances, what’s actually occurred is quiet diplomacy: Israel (and, surely, Washington) prevailing on Ankara, which in turn prevailed upon the Humanitarian Aid Foundation, the Islamic charity known by its Turkish acronym IHH, which quietly withdrew from the project on Friday.

Only last month, the group was calling news conferences to declare why the new flotilla should go forward even though Israel broadened the list of goods it permitted into the Strip over land crossings — and even though Egypt opened its own border crossing at Rafah to most of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. “They opened the gate at Rafah, so why are you doing the Mavi Marama?” IHH chairman Bulent Yildirim asked at an Istanbul presser, seated beside two men with beards as full as his own, and a covered woman. His answer to his own question ranged far, touching on international demands to “embargo Israel” and the bad behavior of the Israel Defense Forces after the raid (laptops and credit cards went missing from passenger’s confiscated luggage). “They kill kids picnicking on the shore,” he finally said, meaning the Israelis. “They have the right to a shoreline. That’s why we’re continuing with the Mavi Marmara despite the fact there are other routes.”

But access to Gaza wasn’t the only thing changing. As the Arab Spring has overturned the region’s politics, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been stepping lively. No longer is it enough to just look tough standing up to Israel in the name of suffering fellow Muslims (even bigger than the phrase “Mavi Marmara” was “bir dikkat! bir dikkat!” [“one minute! one minute!”] his warning, with raised index finger, to Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos Economic Forum as he dressed him down for the 2008-9 offensive that killed some 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza). Erdogan remains hugely popular inside and outside Turkey, but Libya sorely tested his government’s “zero problems” foreign policy: the two countries had good relations, with 25,000 Turks working in Libya. But Erdogan, having early on called for Mubarak to step down in Egypt, eventually had to call for Gaddafi to quit.

Syria presents an even more delicate situation. Erdogan and his wife actually vacationed with the Bashar Assads, which may be help explain why Erdogan continues to call for the Syrian president to institute “reforms” rather than just take a hike. Then there’s the refugee issue: Thousands of Syrians are fleeing into Turkey as the government’s sledge approaches. Israel also shares a border with Syria, and has an even bigger stake in what transpires there, what with Syrian sponsorship of both Hezbollah and Hamas. Washington wants things to calm down, too, on all three fronts. Which is surely one reason Erdogan’s foreign minister earlier this month asked the IHH to pull out of the new flotilla. Things just don’t look so simple as they did a year ago.

via Flotilla flagship drops out after Turkey sizes up the potential damage to delicate balance of relations with Israel, Washington – Global Spin – TIME.com.

With Syria on fire between them, Turkey and Israel move to avoid a new fiasco at sea

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June 20, 2011