World Press on Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus (December 20, 2011)

The Washington Post reported that the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il finds the United States with little knowledge of and virtually no leverage over what is to come in a country whose nuclear arsenal and belligerent foreign policy have long made it a leading threat to the West. In a year in which dictators elsewhere have fallen like dominoes and the Obama administration has pressured strongmen still standing in places such as Iran and Syria, North Korea remains opaque and as unyielding as ever to outside influence. Administration officials who last week spoke of small steps toward a resumption of the six-party talks on nuclear disarmament said they expect all substantive contact with North Korea to be suspended during a period of mourning and internal upheaval. No one knows how long this period will last.

The New York Times published the article headlined “Iran Admits Western Sanctions Are Inflicting Damage.” It says that Iran’s veneer of stoicism toward the Western sanctions that have disrupted its economy showed some new strains on Monday, as the deputy oil minister acknowledged a decline in domestic petroleum production because of dwindling foreign investment, and four-year-old talks between the Iranians and Poland’s biggest natural gas developer collapsed. The Iranians also suffered an embarrassment after prematurely announcing that a Russian oil company had committed $1 billion to help revive a dormant oil field in Iran’s southwest. Hours later, the Russian company, Tatneft, denied on its Web site that a deal had been signed. And there were signals that Saudi Arabia, which Iran had confidently predicted last week would not increase oil production to compensate for any Iranian shortfall caused by the sanctions, was becoming increasingly irritated with Iran.

“Turkish MPs lobby against ‘genocide’ bill” is an article published by the Turkish information agency Hurriyet. It says that A Turkish parliamentary delegation started a three-day campaign in Paris yesterday to halt a French motion criminalizing the denial of Armenian genocide claims, warning that the bill’s passage would seriously damage bilateral ties. Volkan Bozkır, head of Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, met yesterday with his French counterpart, Axel Poniatowski; the delegation also met with Pierre Moscovici from the Socialist Party to drum up opposition to the motion.  A vote on the bill is expected to take place Dec. 22. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Turkey would “not remain silent” if the French parliament adopted the bill and renewed calls on France’s intellectual community to resist the legislation.

The Iranian information agency Press TV reported that a recent poll has shown that the majority of the people of eight European countries are against Turkey's membership in the European Union. The telephone survey, conducted by The German Marshall Fund, indicated that 71 percent of the participants in Germany, England, France, Austria, Czech, Poland, Italy, and Spain were against Turkey's accession to the EU. About 28 percent of the respondents voiced agreement with the move. Only one percent said they did not have any opinion on the issue. The study was conducted among about 3,000 adults between November 4 and 19 and its results were published on December 9.