Turkey

September 15 marks the 205(th) day of a little-known vigil at Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C. A group of us, mostly Kurds and some Americans, are keeping an around-the-clock protest watch to effect the freedom of four Kurdish parliamentarians imprisoned in Turkey on trumped-up charges linked to their declaration of a Kurdish ethnicity. Their liberty still remains beyond our reach. Who will win? It's hard to tell.

The conflict between liberty and tyranny is an ancient one. In our times, the Kurds can be cited as a prime example of a people denied its most basic human rights.

What causes a community to shift from one language to another is generally a significant consideration for language maintenance programs. Yet research in specific language communities seldom investigates the community's ideas about the causes of its language shift. The researcher thus runs a risk of assuming that the attitudes of one or two key informants reflect the attitudes of the entire community. This assumption might in turn influence the direction of the research and may render it irrelevant to the community's needs.

Instead of making a hard-line appeal for renewed struggle during his trial for treason in May-June, 1999, Ocalan issued a remarkable statement that called for the implementation of true democracy to solve the Kurdish problem within the existing borders of a united Turkey. In recent years, Attaturk's [the founder of modern Turkey] goal of a modern Turkish nation has ultimately meant membership in what has now become the EU.

Abdullah (Apo) Ocalan -- the longtime leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) -- was sentenced to death by a Turkish State Security Court for treason, separatism, and murder on June 29, 1999.

By Anna Matveeva 2002 Minority Rights Group 2002 ISBN 1-85383-952-3

Dialogue Across an International
Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish
Armenian Dialogue
By Taner Akcam
Zoryan Institute 2001
ISBN 1-895485-03-7

The success of global covenants and international declarations pertaining to biodiversity and sustainable development—in particular those emerging in the wake of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992 and now the Johannesburg World Summit—require not only the formulation of enabling legislation at the national level but, more importantly, implementation plans at the local level: culturally appropriate plans that empower both urban and rural dwellers to take control of their destinies as global resource managers.

As the various papers presented in this volume attest, growing populations and ever-dwindling global resources have rendered negotiation over the sharing of natural resources can increasingly urgent and critical issue. Such negotiations constitute a special category within the discipline of conflict resolution, not only because they deal with sensitive environmental and resource issues, but also because they are typically inter-cultural negotiations dealing with various parties and stakeholders, either within one state's boundaries or in an international context.

Vestiges of the Ottoman Past: Muslims Under Siege in Contemporary Greek. Thrace

The war in Bosnia is a tragic testimony to the political and ideological abuse of religious differences in a society whose historical integrity is embedded in their mutual acculturation. Despite the succession of different indigenous and extraneous rulerships in the nine centuries of its history, Bosnia has managed to preserve religious and cultural pluralism. Why is this pluralism now in jeopardy? Why does the same history that bears witness to Bosnian diversity serve as a platform for its destruction?

Establishing consensus-building procedures and structures which involve different ethnic groups in former communist societies poses a number of significant challenges. The success of democratizing societies in answering these challenges will be critical to the establishment of a civic society and to the resolution of ethnic tensions in a peaceful and participatory manner. Often times the test as to whether a society can handle these tensions within legitimized structures are expressed through conflicts centering on economic, educational, cultural and environmental issues.

Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Eastern Europe, are perhaps the region's most misunderstood, most persecuted, and maligned minority. Since their migration from India approximately six hundred years ago, Roma have suffered economic, political and cultural discrimination at the hands of both communist and capitalist and both democratic and totalitarian societies.

The population of Bulgaria includes several different groups which can be identified according to the criterion of ethnic self-ascription.

Nationalism and Pluralism in the Heart of the Balkans: The Republic of. Macedonia

China's "New Dominion"

Despite a growing movement for independence, the plight of the Uighurs of western China has received little attention. One of many ethnic groups struggling for autonomy under Chinese rule. the Uighurs, live in poverty, while China exploits their resource-rich land.

The region is officially called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Province, but that name is misleading. In Chinese, Zinjiang means "new dominion," yet China first conquered the area in the Third Century, BC.

The State of the Nation: Indigenous nations struggle to be heard over the. din of state policies

During World War II there were fewer than 50 states - countries with centralized governments - in the world, By 1990 there were nearly 70. By the year 2000 the figure could well exceed 200.

Nations - geographic areas inhabited by a common people - however, have not fated so well. We don't know how many there were in the world at the time of World War II, or at any time prior to that. Today there are an estimated 5,000.

If the suffering of the Kurds in Iraq is a preview of the much-touted new world order, then we all are in for some rough times.

The two CSQ issues on militarization and indigenous peoples are intended to acquaint our readers with the important role militarization plays in the lives of even the most isolated tribal groups. The articles contained in these issues focus mostly on the consequences of shooting wars and on the increasing number of groups involved in them, directly or indirectly. This increasingly militarized world also affects the lives of indigenous peoples in a number of other important ways.