World Press on Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus (December 16, 2011)

The Washington Post reported that the founder of a newspaper critical of authorities in the restive province of Dagestan in Russia’s North Caucasus has died after he was gunned down in a hail of bullets outside his office, police said Friday. Khadzhimurad Kamalov’s leading independent weekly paper Chernovik (Rough Draft) has reported extensively on police abuses in the fight against an Islamist insurgency that originated in neighboring Chechnya and has spread across the region. Vyacheslav Gasanov, a spokesman for the Russian Interior Minister in Dagestan, said a masked gunman riddled Kamalov with bullets outside the office in the provincial capital, Makhachkala. Kamalov died of his wounds at a local hospital shortly after.

The New York Times published the article headlined “Stop U.S. Drone Flights, Iran Warns Afghanistan.” It says that Iran escalated its confrontation with the United States on Thursday over the captured American spy drone launched from Afghanistan, warning the Afghan government to order a halt to such surveillance flights. Any further flights would be regarded as a hostile act, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in an interview with Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. His warning threatened to drag Afghanistan directly into the dispute over American aerial surveillance of Iran.  There was no immediate response from the United States or Afghanistan to Mr. Salehi’s admonition.

The other article published by the same information agency says that Iran may relocate its uranium enrichment work to more secure locations, a senior Iranian defense official said Wednesday, an acknowledgment of increased concern that Iran’s suspected nuclear program could face a military attack from Israel or the United States. The official, Gholamreza Jalali, who is the director of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, did not cite a particular threat or specify when the relocation might take place. But his statement came against the backdrop of sharply increased tensions with the West over the nuclear program, which Iran contends is solely for peaceful purposes.

The Turkish information agency Hurriyet reported that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sent a letter today to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, warning of the "grave consequences" a French bill recognizing Armenian genocide claims would have on bilateral relations. "I want to express this clearly," Erdoğan said. "These steps will lead to grave consequences for the cultural, economic and political relations between France and Turkey, and the responsibility of these consequences will fall on those who initiated those steps." Erdoğan further said such a bill would be seen as directly "targeting the Turkish state, the Turkish nation, and the Turkish community living in France."  The Turkish community still has fresh memories of the assassinations of Turkish diplomats and statesmen by Armenian militants, the letter read.