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Turkish-US tensions cast dark
clouds
By K Gajendra Singh
Expressions of regret over the "wrong" action by
the United States after a joint inquiry by Turkish
General Koksal Karabay and General John Silvester of
NATO into the July 4 arrest and imprisonment of 11
Turkish commandos in Kurdish northern Iraq, has for the
time being calmed the twitchy nerves of the two old
allies.
And while the outgoing General Tommy
Franks of the US Central Command did not bid his
farewells in Turkey, his successor, General John
Abizaid, visited Ankara on July 20 in an effort to
pacify Turkey. After this visit, and the earlier one of
General James Jones, the two sides reached agreement on
four points:
The Turkish Kurdish terrorist organization Marxist
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)-Kadek will be eradicated
in northern Iraq
The US will allow the dispatch of three Turkish
brigades to Iraq
Channels will be set up between Turkey and the US to
prevent events such as the detention of the 11 Turkish
soldiers
Turkey will take part in the rebuilding of Iraq.
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was due to
leave for Washington on Tuesday to follow up on this
agreement.
The latest crisis in Turkey's
relations with the US - which have been lukewarm ever
since Ankara denied Washington use of its soil to send
troops into northern Iraq - is a reflection of the fast
deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq.
According to Turkish media, a few US soldiers
entered a Turkish liaison office in Sulaimaniya, and
after having tea drew their guns. About 100 US troops
then barged into the building and handcuffed three
Turkish officers and eight non-commissioned officers,
covered their heads with sacks like prisoners in
Guantanamo Bay and took them to Baghdad. They also took
away many dossiers.
Despite the subsequent
furor, the soldiers were only released after 60 hours.
From Turkish President Ahemt Sezer downwards, political
parties and leaders, the media and the man in the
street, there were expressions of horror, public
statements seething with anger and protest marches in
many Turkish cities against the humiliation inflicted on
Turkey's highly respected armed forces.
The US
action really hurt the sensitivities of a proud nation,
which threatened retaliation if there were a repetition.
Now, a letter dated July 14 from US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayep
Erdogan, only partially disclosed, but apparently
justifying the US action, might keep the crisis
simmering.
The US's relations with Turkey (and
others) seems to have become a function of the ground
situation in Iraq and the undiplomatic and sometimes
abrasive interventions by Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul
Wolfowitz. Then it is left to the State Department and
the Turkish Foreign Ministry to clean up the mess, ease
tempers and repair the ruffled alliance.
The
Chief of General Staff, General Hilmi Ozkok, was shown
on Turkish TV haranguing US ambassador Robert Pearson
over the detention of the Turkish soldiers. He said,
"Unfortunately, this incident created the biggest crisis
of confidence between the two countries." Believing that
it was not US policy, Ozkok added that the US
administration had much to do to repair the honor of the
Turkish armed forces and Turkish national pride, which
were as important as Turkish-American relations. He
hoped that the problem would be resolved and "our
national pride" assuaged.
Justice minister and
government spokesman Cemil Cicek said that Turkish
troops would not withdraw from northern Iraq. "Iraq is
still unstable and a land of baseless accusations, lies
and provocations and the only way to end this chaos is
cooperation and constant dialogue between allied
countries. There is still an authority vacuum in Iraq,"
Cicek added.
An agitated Erdogan, who spoke to
US Vice President Dick Cheney, was told that the latter
was sorry, according to the Turkish press. Gul and
others called for an apology. "It was the United States
that lost in the Iraq incident, not Turkey," Gul told
the Turkish parliament, referring to the harm done to
the US's image in a traditionally pro-US Muslim country.
The Milliyet's respected and pro-US veteran
columnist Sami Kohen commented that the "Rambo-like
action" had inflicted a deep wound on the Turkish-US
relationship. "The behavior of the Rambos has caused
great indignation not only in the ranks of the Turkish
army but in the general public as well," he added. "This
grave incident between two allied countries was
unprecedented in the history of NATO; and the alliance
should draw conclusions from it."
On the other
hand, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said
at a daily press briefing that the US military had acted
on reports about possible illegal activities in
Sulaimaniya. Boucher added that the US had information
that raised serious concerns about the activities of
Turkish forces in the area. But he declined to give any
details. "We have discussed these matters with the
Turkish side and the US and Turkish military and
civilian officials will be undertaking a joint
investigation to look into all the facts of the mater."
It appears that the action had been cleared with
Pentagon, which has closely watched the Turkish military
presence in northern Iraq.
Washington's
justifications were vague, and according to unconfirmed
Iraqi Kurdish intelligence claims, the 11 soldiers taken
into US custody were part of a plot to assassinate the
new Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, which the governor
himself described as improbable and Turks as "absolute
nonsense".
Even before the pre-war controversy
over US troops using Turkey as a launching pad,
US-Turkish relations had been tested by the overwhelming
victory in November of Erdogan's Justice and Development
party (AKP) , which has Islamic antecedents. The
inexperienced party leadership has also been in constant
conflict with Turkey's secular elite, led by its
powerful and autonomous armed forces.
The AKP
claims to be a moderate and centrist party, but its
Islamist roots make it suspect, certainly in US eyes.
Erdogan was initially barred from becoming a member of
parliament and prime minister because of a previous
conviction for reciting an Islamic poem that included
the lines, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our
helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our
soldiers." Only after a constitutional change was rammed
through parliament with a two-thirds majority was he
able to take charge.
The strained relationship
erupted into a full blown crisis on March 1 when the
Turkish parliament rejected a government resolution to
allow the US to use Turkish territory as a base to open
a second front in north Iraq. Matters were made worse by
what the Turks felt was American bullying during
negotiations over the terms of the proposed deal and its
patronizing and sometimes scurrilous coverage in the US
media. Washington had offered an aid package of US$15
billion, which could have been leveraged into loans
worth $26 billion. But the terms and conditions of the
proposed agreement were unclear and the US attitude was
brash.
The US took Turkey for granted, unlike
the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war, when then president
George Bush Sr pampered Turkish president Turgut Ozal
with telephone calls and an invitation to the White
House. But most of the verbal promises made to Turkey
were forgotten after the war.
In any case, the
parliament vote was simply a reflection of strong public
opposition to the war in Turkey. Polls showed that 90
percent of Turks were opposed to a war against Muslim
Iraq, perhaps the only traditional friend among
neighbors. The ruling AKP made intense but futile
efforts to avoid a war. No wonder, then, that the
parliament failed to adopt the resolution, but by three
votes only. The US was very much miffed. Later, in
March, parliament did vote for a resolution to allow
coalition aircraft to carry troops into Iraq and to use
Turkish air space to reach Iraqi targets or for
humanitarian and other causes. As a contingency measure,
the Bush administration did provide in its budget a $1
billion aid package for Turkey.
Soon after the
sudden collapse of Iraqi resistance at the gates of
Baghdad on April 9, neo-conservatives embedded in the
Pentagon and elsewhere came down heavily on Turkey for
its March refusal. They recalled that US ships waiting
to unload military hardware at the Turkish Mediterranean
port of Iskendrun had to be re-routed to the Red Sea and
the Gulf, a delay that had then appeared critical. When
US land forces became bogged down on the way to Baghdad,
neo-conservatives faced the flak back home, with
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz getting most of it.
Not
surprisingly, then, the first tongue lashing after the
war's end came from Wolfowitz, who asked Turkey to admit
to its mistake and take remedial measures. He was harsh
on the Turkish armed forces, berating them for not
pressurizing parliament harder to vote for the
resolution and not "playing the strong leadership role
that we would expect".
In a CNN-Turk television
interview, Wolfowitz said that turning a new page in
relations depended on Turkey's close cooperation in Iraq
as well as towards Iran and Syria, which the US accused
of sponsoring terrorism, and with whom the Turkish
government was improving relations. "Let's have a Turkey
that steps up and says, 'We made a mistake, we should
have known how bad things were in Iraq, but we know now.
Let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to
the Americans.' I'd like to see a different sort of
attitude than I have yet detected." Others in Washington
conveyed the same message, albeit a bit more politely.
Turkish leaders rebuffed Wolfowitz's criticism.
"Turkey, from the very beginning, never made any
mistakes, and has taken all the necessary steps in all
sincerity," said Erdogan. Government spokesman Cemil
Cicek said that the US should have admitted its mistakes
because Washington had not fully kept its promises to
Turkey, which cost it tens of billions in US dollars, in
return for its cooperation in the 1991 Gulf War.
Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition
Republican People's Party (RPP) in parliament, said,
"Turkey is a democratic country and everybody who
appreciates the functioning of true democracy should
respect this."
Now, with the almost mission
impossible in living up to its pre-war promises to the
people of Iraq, and with US soldiers being killed on a
daily basis, the US administration has sobered up
somewhat and there has been some rethinking. As such,
there have been conciliatory statements from both sides.
Those from the Turkish side have come from Gul, secular
political party leaders, the establishment and the
media, but not from the armed forces.
Brief
history of the alliance
Turkey, which was forged
by Kemal Ataturk out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire,
which had sided with Germany in World War I, remained
neutral during World War II. After the war, the Soviet
Union laid claim to Turkey's two provinces in the
northeast and wanted a revision of the Montreux
convention regime for the Bosporus straits. Turkey then
sought shelter under the US umbrella. It began with the
Truman Doctrine in 1947, which promised protection for
Turkey and other countries threatened by the Soviet
Union. Turkey sent troops to fight along with US troops
in the Korean war, and formally joined NATO in 1952.
During the Cold War, Turkey, with its
well-trained armed forces of nearly a million, acted as
NATO's aircraft carrier against the USSR-led communist
bloc and provided bases for flights and a direct defense
line against hostile states such as Bulgaria ,Georgia,
Armenia and Romania. Incirlik air base in the south of
Turkey, important for the US and NATO war planes
throughout the Cold War, after the 1991 Gulf War
provided a platform for US and British planes to patrol
the "safe haven" for the Kurds in northern Iraq and save
them from the excesses of Saddam Hussein's rule.
Even after the fall of the Berlin wall, Turkey
remained geostrategically important for the US and
Europe. It borders Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in
southeastern Europe and is lapped by the Black Sea, the
Aegean and the Mediterranean in Asian Anatolia. It is at
the crossroads of Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and the
Caspian basin, the Arab world and Iran. Although 99
percent Muslim, it is a secular democratic republic and
a buffer between Europe and a Middle East in turmoil.
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, a
Washington think tank, during his June visit on July 8,
Turkey's Undersecretary for foreign affairs, Ugur Ziyal,
stressed that his country and the US shared a common
strategic vision in "fighting terrorism, settling the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, reforming the Middle East,
uniting Europe, ending conflicts in the Caucasus,
consolidating the independence of Central Asian
republics and stabilizing the Balkans".
In June,
NATO designated the NATO base at Izmir on Turkey's
Mediterranean coast as the command center of its new
south wing air operations.
North Iraq and
Turkey's Kurdish problem
Turkey has serious
problems with its own Kurds, who form 20 percent of the
population. A rebellion since 1984 against the Turkish
state led by Abdullah Ocalan of the Marxist Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) has cost over 35,000 lives,
including 5,000 soldiers. To control and neutralize the
rebellion, thousands of Kurdish villages have been
bombed, destroyed, abandoned or relocated; millions of
Kurds have been moved to shanty towns in the south and
east or migrated westwards. The economy of the region
lies shattered. With a third of the Turkish army tied up
in the southeast, the cost of countering the insurgency
at its height amounted to between $6 billion to $8
billion a year. The rebellion has died down after the
arrest and trial of Ocalan, in 1999, but not eradicated.
After a court in Turkey in 2002 commuted to life
imprisonment the death sentence passed on Ocalan and
parliament granted rights for the use of the Kurdish
language, some of the root causes of the Kurdish
rebellion have been removed.
But clashes still
occur, and the PKK - now also called Kadek - has shifted
almost 4,000 of its cadres to northern Iraq. They have
refused to lay down arms as required by a new
"repentance law", now under discussion in the Turkish
parliament. They have also ensconced themselves on the
border between Iraq and Iran. The US's priority to
disarm PKK cadres has not been very high. In fact, the
US wants to reward Iraqi Kurds, who have remained
peaceful while the rest of the country has not.
But Henri Barkey, a Kurdish expert at Lehigh
University in the US, feels the urgent need for close
cooperation between Turkey and the US. "On its own, even
a liberal amnesty is unlikely to be enough to break up
the diehards," he says. "It must be backed up by the
threat of force, US force." Barkey adds that "Centcom's
harsh treatment of the Turkish soldiers shows just how
angry it is". "This is not an atmosphere conducive to
sympathy for Turkey's very real military concerns. The
message here is very clear: 'We'll deal with your PKK,
but only when it is convenient for us'." But the attack
and death of two US soldiers on July 20 in the to date
safe and peaceful north Iraq is a bad omen and could
lead to some rethinking.
Iraqi Kurds have been
ambivalent to the PKK, helping them at times. Ankara has
entered north Iraq from time to time - despite protests
- to attack PKK bases and its cadres, and it keeps
between 5,000 to 10,000 troops in the region. Ankara has
also said that it would regard an independent Kurdish
entity as a cause for war. It is opposed to the Kurds
seizing the oil centers of Kirkuk or Mosul, which would
give them financial autonomy, and this would also
constitute a reason for entry into north Iraq. However,
neither has happened so far, and after the quick
collapse of Saddam's forces, the Turks have muted their
talk of such "red lines", that is, seizure of oil fields
or autonomy.
The roots of the Kurdish problem
were sown during the decline of the Ottoman Empire and
the birth of the Turkish Republic after World War I when
the Christian West used the stick of religion and
nationalism to break up the empire during the 19th and
early 20th century. The first to leave were the Balkan
Christians, and in the late 19th century it was feared
that even the Kurds might desert, like the Egyptians.
But the last straw was the revolt by Muslim Arabs, for
the Ottoman Caliphs were always Muslims first and then
Turks.
Hence, Turks manifest a pervasive
distrust of autonomy or models of a federal state for
Iraqi Kurds. It would affect and encourage the
aspirations of its own Kurds. It also revives memories
of Western conspiracies against Turkey and the
unratified 1920 Treaty of Sevres forced on the Ottoman
Sultan by the World War I victors which had promised
independence to the Armenians and autonomy to Turkey's
Kurds. So Ataturk opted for a unitary state and Kurdish
rebellions in Turkey were ruthlessly suppressed.
Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War
The
1990-91 Gulf crisis and war proved to be a watershed in
the violent explosion of the Kurdish rebellion in
Turkey. A nebulous and ambiguous situation emerged in
north Iraq when, at the end of the war, Bush Sr
encouraged the Kurds (and the hapless Shi'ites in the
south) to revolt against Saddam's Sunni Arab regime.
Turkey was dead against it, as a Kurdish state in the
north would give ideas to its own to Kurds.
Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in the Gulf
were totally opposed to a Shi'ite state in south Iraq.
The hapless Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites paid a heavy price.
Thousands were butchered. The international media's
coverage of the pitiable conditions, with more than half
a million Iraqi Kurds escaping towards the Turkish
border from Saddam's forces in March 1991, led to the
creation of a protected zone in north Iraq, later
patrolled by US and British war planes. The Iraqi Kurds
did elect a parliament, but it never functioned
properly. Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal
Talabani run almost autonomous administrations in their
areas. They made forced handshakes under US pressure.
This state of affairs has allowed the PKK a free run in
north Iraq.
But many Turks still remain
fascinated with the dream of "getting back" the Ottoman
provinces of Kurdish majority Mosul and Kirkuk in Iraq.
They were originally included within the sacred borders
of the republic proclaimed in the National Pact of 1919
by Ataturk and his comrades, who had started organizing
resistance to fight for Turkey's independence from the
occupying World War I victors. So it has always remained
a mission and objective to be reclaimed some time. The
oil-rich part of Mosul region was occupied by the
British forces illegally after the armistice and then
annexed to Iraq, then under British mandate, in 1925,
much to Turkish chagrin. Iraq was created by joining
Ottoman Baghdad and Basra vilayats (provinces).
Turks also base their claims on behalf of less than half
a million Turkomen (ethnic Turks living in Iraq), who
lived in Kirkuk with the Kurds before Arabization
changed the ethnic balance of the region.
After
1991, Turkey lost out instead of gaining. The closure of
Iraqi pipelines, economic sanctions and the loss of
trade with Iraq, which used to pump billions of US
dollars into the economy and provide employment to
hundreds of thousands, with thousands of trucks roaring
up and down to Iraq, further exacerbated the economic
and social problems in the Kurdish heartland and the
center of the rebellion.
The 1980s war between
Iraq and resurgent Shi'ites in Iran helped the PKK to
establish itself in the lawless north Kurdish Iraq
territory. The PKK also helped itself with arms freely
available in the region during the eight-year long war.
It is factors such as these that make Turkey,
and the United States for that matter, very anxious, and
which provide all the more reason for the two countries
to cooperate, rather than to confront each other if they
want to avoid the unrest that grips much of Iraq from
spreading to the north.
K Gajendra
Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as
ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996.
Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan,
Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the
Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies.
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