Abstract
The end of openness?
Twenty years ago, in March 1979, the Energy and Justice Departments embarked on an ill-conceived and ultimately disastrous assault on the First Amendment. A federal lawsuit known as the Progressive case resulted in the longest prior restraint against publication in U.S. history.
When Hazel O'Leary was confirmed as Energy Secretary in 1993 she promised the department would demonstrate a completely new attitude about disseminating information. Under her stewardship, the Energy Department established an enlightened policy of openness. Much previously classified information concerning nuclear weapons (testing, production, and stockpiling), fissionable materials production, and human radiation experimentation was declassified and placed in public repositories and made available on the Internet.
Since O'Leary departed, however, the policy of openness seems to be at an end. The Energy Department–like the villainous android in Terminator 2–is apparently trying to “morph” back into its pre-O'Leary configuration. For example:
▪ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request processing has nearly stopped. At a public meeting in 1997, Bryan Siebert, the department's chief declassification officer, complained that the only FOIA requests being processed then were those associated with federal court cases.
▪ Documents released under FOIA are more heavily redacted than ever and are now being reviewed by other agencies as well as Energy. In many cases, these other agencies did not review versions of these documents that were declassified earlier. I recently received a document I requested in 1993; it had more and bigger holes in it than the earlier versions in my archives which were reviewed in 1992 and 1995. The latest version was reviewed by Energy, Defense, and the National Security Council; the latter two agencies had not reviewed either of the earlier versions.
▪ At least a dozen more old Atomic Energy Commission films have been declassified and are ready for release to the public. But their release has been delayed since Bill Richardson took the helm.
▪ The public session of the annual declassifiers' symposium in Nevada has been discontinued. This public meeting was held in 1995, 1996, and 1997; at the 1997 public meeting, no non-Energy Department speakers were invited. (I spoke in 1996 and Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists spoke in 1995.)
▪ A history of enriched uranium production, analogous to the plutonium production history released a few years ago, is apparently still not completed, and it may never be released.
▪ A table released by O'Leary in 1994 listing total stockpile numbers, stockpile megatonnage, weapon retirements, and weapon dismantlements has not been updated in five years–except for the dismantlement numbers, which Energy reports to Congress each spring. When I filed a FOIA request to obtain the missing numbers, it was denied on the grounds that the additional information was–and apparently will forever be–“Formerly Restricted Data,” even though similar information for the years before 1994 had been declassified and published.
▪ A recent update of Energy's interpretation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 retains the concept of “private restricted data,” under which uncleared private citizens can be prosecuted for disclosing or disseminating “restricted data” as defined under the act even if those citizens invented or derived the information themselves or found it in a public library. A 1992 in-house Energy Department study had recommended that this category of information be dropped because of its clear conflict with constitutional protections.
▪ The National Archives recently declassified the minutes of Atomic Energy Commission meetings between 1946 and 1961. Unfortunately, acting at the behest of Energy, entire pages–not words, sentences, or paragraphs–have been removed. These pages describe weapons development and testing, and many are available either in part or in their entirety in earlier versions of the minutes that were declassified and made public in the 1980s and early 1990s. The reclassification of declassified data is expressly forbidden by presidential executive order.
These incidents suggest that Energy is reverting to its old adversarial relationship with the American taxpayers it ostensibly serves. The drift toward more classification of innocuous information is deeply disturbing. I hope that the policy will soon be reversed–one Progressive case was enough, but another may be inevitable if Energy does not return to openness.
Chuck Hansen
Editor, The Swords of Armageddon
Kevin McKiernan's article in the March/April 1999 Bulletin makes unjustified accusations against Turkey and the Turks. The name of the article–“Turkey's War on the Kurds”–is more than enough to show that McKiernan is prejudiced against the Turkish people. The author also tends to tolerate terrorism by the Kurdish Workers Party, the “PKK.”
According to the author, communitarian strife between the Turks and Kurds has resulted in a civil war between Kurdish entities and the Turkish state. But the author does not seem to know the basic historical facts of the Kurds' position within Turkish society.
There is no ethnic discrimination against the Kurds in Turkey. Consequently, talk about ethnic conflict is unfounded. For an ethnic conflict to take place, there must be an unequal distribution of economic, political, and cultural rights and liabilities at the expense of one of the ethnic groups.
“Brendan learned about heat-seeking missiles in current events today.”
Theoretically speaking, discrimination based on ethnic differences will arise in three main areas–education, employment, and housing. That sort of discrimination cannot be said to exist in Turkey. Discrimination in employment against people of a particular ethnic ancestry almost never takes place. In marriage and human relations, ethnic origin is far from being a determining factor. Citizens of Kurdish descent can live in any part of country; they can be elected to the parliament, and they can take part in public services with no discrimination.
Admittedly, some of Turkey's problems have an ethnic color, but that by no means implies an ethnic struggle between the Turks and the Kurds. Turkish citizenship is not based on ethnicity. The Turkish constitution states that all persons who are citizens of the Turkish Republic are Turks.
The author also errs in claiming that the Kurds constitute about 25 percent of the country's population. According to a study by Servet Mutlu (“Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study,” which appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies), Kurds make up 12.6 percent of the population.
Although a group of Kurdish intellectuals supported the idea of establishing an independent Kurdish state at the beginning of the century, most Kurds opposed this plan and fought for an independent Turkey. McKiernan claims there were dozens of Kurdish uprisings in the first 25 years of the Turkish Republic. There were some riots in the first 15 years of the Turkish Republic, but these rebellions were feudal in character rather than national. Most Kurds refused to support the rebellions and remained loyal citizens of Turkey.
The author describes the people who left southeastern Turkey as refugees, arguing that they left “Kurdistan” because of the PKK terror or, in some cases, because of repressive measures by the Turkish state. But he does not explain why these people preferred to settle in western Turkey rather than in northern Iran, which is inhabited mainly by Kurds. Had there been an ethnic conflict in Turkey, surely these immigrants would not have wished to settle in an area where mostly non-Kurds were living.
Moreover, citing the PKK terror as well as repression by the Turkish state against the supporters of the PKK overlooks a major reason for migration. Southeastern Turkey's underdevelopment has led many people to move to western Turkey, where there are more opportunities for employment. It is not appropriate to call these people refugees.
McKiernan's claim that the Kurds lack cultural opportunities–for Kurdish education and publishing and broadcasting in Kurdish–is also misleading. There are restrictions on education and publishing and broadcasting–as is the case with other minority language groups. However, broadcasting in Kurdish is not totally prohibited. There are 24 radio stations and four television channels that broadcast in both Turkish and Kurdish. Publishing in Kurdish has not been a problem since the 1970s, except between 1980-1985. There are 28 Kurdish newspapers and journals. Even pro-PKK newspapers (which are financially supported by the PKK) are published.
The Turkish state will not allow a local language spoken in a narrow region to be the language of education in the public schools. But there are no barriers to private courses in Kurdish.
What is happening in Turkey is a war between a Kurdish terrorist organization, the PKK, and the Turkish security forces, which are trying to preserve the territorial integrity of the Republic of Turkey, where Kurds and Turks have lived in peace and harmony for centuries.
Umit Ozdag
Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey
Kevin McKiernan replies:
Umit Ozdag's remarks continue a dialogue the two of us began before the publication of my article. In a tape-recorded interview conducted last year, Ozdag categorically denied that the Turkish Army had terrorized Kurdish civilians in the course of the war with PKK rebels. He suggested that terror by the government was no more likely in Turkey than it was in Germany or in the United States. He did acknowledge that Amnesty International holds the government responsible for many (by no means all) of the human rights violations in Turkey. However, he dismissed Amnesty's numerous documentations as merely “their opinion.”
The U.S. State Department also disagrees with Ozdag's views. In repeated reports to the Congress, the department has painted a grim picture of human rights violations by the Turkish security forces against civilians, including forced displacement, torture, and disappearance. The State Department (which has condemned rights violations by PKK rebels, as well) concedes that the Turkish Army has used U.S. weapons in its scorched earth campaign in southeast Turkey. According to international estimates, some 3,500 civilian villages have been emptied or destroyed during the campaign.
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Ozdag's views parallel the official positions of the Turkish government that the 15-year-old conflict with the Kurds is not “ethnic” and that there is no evidence of discrimination based on “an unequal distribution of economic, political, and cultural rights and liabilities at the expense of one of the ethnic groups.” Although socio-economic issues were not the focus of my article, the fact is that southeast Turkey, the home to the majority of the Kurds, has the lowest per capita income, the fewest jobs, the worst roads, and the poorest education of anywhere in the country. It is a little like Mississippi 50 years ago.
It is true that Kurdish citizens can and have succeeded in many walks of life in Turkish society; some have even been elected to the parliament. But Kurds who assert their Kurdish identity cannot do so, and they may well be endangered if they try.
As to population numbers, the Turkish study cited by Ozdag is several years old. Most international sources count the Kurds as 20-25 percent of the population. More accurate estimates are difficult because the Turkish constitution does not recognize the Kurds and national identity cannot be listed on the official census.
Terminology is always a sensitive issue in describing conflicts. Ozdag refers to historical Kurdish uprisings as “riots” and the current one as “terrorism.” In fact, there were dozens of such rebellions in the early years of the Turkish Republic. It is probably correct that they were “feudal in character rather than national.” Unlike today, there was no unified structure and the leadership was often tribal and isolated. The revolts, many of which were betrayed from the inside, were easily crushed. The government took steps at the time to make sure that the price of resistance would be remembered. For example, the bodies of the leaders of the famous 1925 uprising in Diyarbakir hung in the public square for days after their execution. Nonetheless, other rebellions followed in 1930, 1936, 1938, and beyond.
As for broadcast freedom, the government controls when and if the Kurdish language may be used, by whom, and about what subjects. As for freedom of the press, Turkey leads the world, for the fifth straight year, in the number of imprisoned journalists. Reporting continues to be a dangerous profession. In the first week of April 1999, Amnesty issued a safety alert to try to protect a Turkish journalist who was repeatedly threatened and harassed by police after he revealed at a press conference that a fellow detainee, another journalist, had been tortured to death in a nearby cell. During the same week, according to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, a third journalist died on a hunger strike in a Turkish jail.
Ozdag suggests that the Kurds who are made homeless by the destruction of villages are not genuine refugees, just people who have migrated to the big cities in search of better employment. But the war was a direct cause of the “migration,” and such terminology is misleading. The counterinsurgency strategy of the Turkish Army continues to “drain the lake to get at the fish.” Whether these Kurdish civilians are “refugees” or merely “unlucky fish,” one thing is clear: there are two million of them so far. Today they can be found in the Kurdish slums of Diyarbakir, Batman, Adana, Ankara, Istanbul, and other cities. Most have war stories about the U.S.-equipped Turkish Army and tales of lost homes and separated families. Few of them have jobs.
Mustafa Kibaroglu offers an intriguing version of Greek-Turkish relations in his letter (“Turkey's Deterrent,” March/April 1999). Before I take up his notion of deterrence that explains Turkey's opposition to settling the Cyprus problem, let us first examine some history.
Following the defeat of the Central Powers (and Turkey) in World War I, the Treaty of Sèvres allotted the Asia Minor coastal area of Turkey–where two million Greeks had lived since antiquity–to Greece. Turkish units then began a guerrilla war against Greek forces in Asia Minor, and in an effort to defeat their attackers, the Greek military foolishly attempted to strike deep into Turkish territory. They were routed and expelled from Asia Minor.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was negotiated, under which the Greeks ceded all Turkish territory and repatriated the majority of Asia Minor Greeks. That was indeed at the beginning of the Republic of Turkey, as Kibaroglu remarks.
In 1974, a military dictatorship in Greece, again foolishly, encouraged an extreme right-wing faction of Cypriots to topple the legitimate Cypriot government in a coup d'etat and declare the union of Cyprus with Greece. The coup failed, yet Turkey landed troops to “protect” the Turkish minority (17 percent of the population) living in the northern 10 percent of Cyprus. The troops subsequently invaded approximately 40 percent of Cyprus, occupied areas inhabited by Greek Cypriots, and expelled them in an effort at ethnic cleansing. Several hundred Greek Cypriots from the areas occupied by the Turkish Army remain unaccounted for. Turkey certainly knows how to take advantage of the ineptitudes of the Greek military.
“This is Doctor Knoedelbaum—He thinks up all our imaginary numbers.”
Turkey claims large areas of Greek territory and threatens Greece with war if the Greeks expand their territorial waters to 12 nautical miles, as mandated by the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, signed by all nations except Turkey.
In 1975, Turkey established the “Army of the Aegean.” Consisting mostly of assault units, this force has 200 amphibious assault ships stationed along the Asia Minor coastline, less than 10 miles from Greek islands. In addition, 44 percent of Turkey's military airfields are less than 100 miles from Greece.
The strategic advantage lies with Turkey and not with Greece in the eastern Aegean: detailed Turkish operational plans for the invasion of Greek islands exist. The Greeks, with one-fifth the population, one-third the armed forces, and half the air force of Turkey, have no invasion plans. Besides, they learned their lesson in 1923. Turkey does not need a strategic deterrent in the form of threats against Cypriot independence to protect herself from Greece.
The remarkable aspect of Kibaroglu's thesis is his tacit assertion that Turkey has the right to forbid the sovereign state of Cyprus from reinforcing its defenses against the very country that occupies 40 percent of its territory and threatens it with further invasion, and that the U.N.-sponsored peace on Cyprus is unacceptable.
He evidently considers it perfectly legitimate to threaten the independence of one sovereign nation in order to blackmail another. The arrogance and international lawlessness of the Turkish military-diplomatic elite is clearly reflected here. But this does not serve real Turkish interests because it makes Turkey appear to be a rogue state ready to violate international norms whenever it pleases.
No wonder the European Union hesitates to offer Turkey membership. Who would welcome a bully into their family?
Kosta Tsipis
Cambridge, Massachusetts
(The author has been science and technology adviser to Greek ministers of defense since 1976.)