November 8, 2004, Monday Morning, Lebanon: Debate over a report criticizing breaches of minority rights in aspiring European Union member Turkey turned ugly last week when members of a government-sponsored human rights group that issued the document clashed in public.

The incident was the latest episode in a row within the Human Rights Advisory Board, a body attached to the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which highlighted widespread hostility in Turkey to advanced cultural freedoms for the country's Kurdish and non-Muslim communities.

Nationalist members of the board, which is comprised of government officials, academics and civic groups, sabotaged a news conference called to formally release the report, which makes some controversial recommendations to the government and excerpts of which were earlier leaked to the media.

Shortly after the head of the board, Ibrahim Kaboglu, had started to speak, a nationalist unionist grabbed the papers from his hands and tore them to pieces, yelling: "This report is a fabrication and should be torn up!"

Kaboglu was forced to leave the hall, saying: "We can't even hold a news conference. This is the state of freedom of thought in Turkey". The EU, which Turkey is seeking to join, has long pressed Ankara to grant equal cultural freedoms to its sizeable Kurdish minority as well as smaller, non-Muslim communities such as Greeks, Armenians and Jews. The document maintains that Turkey's understanding of minority rights had fallen behind universal norms and proposes far-reaching amendments to the constitution and related laws, atop reforms that Turkey had already undertaken as part of its EU membership bid. The report describes as "paranoia" widespread concerns that equal cultural rights for minorities could lead to the country's breakup, fuelled by a bloody Kurdish rebellion in the Southeast in the 1980s and 1990s.

"There is no doubt that a more humane treatment by the state of its own people will be much more helpful for the country's unity... The citizens the state should fear the least are the ones whom it has granted their rights", it says. The report also underlines that for decades Turkey had breached its founding instrument, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which envisages the free use by all Turkish citizens of any language in commercial activities, meetings and in the press. It maintains that non-Muslims in particular are subject to discrimination and are sometimes treated as foreigners rather than equal Turkish citizens.

Critics last week blasted the report as "a document of treason" and asked an Ankara court to launch legal proceedings against its authors.