Turkey gives talking one more
chance By Jacques N Couvas
ANKARA - With Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan due to meet with US President
George W Bush in Washington on Monday for critical
talks on the crisis over the presence of the
outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Iraq,
many observers hope that another key meeting last
Friday foreshadows what can be expected.
Speaking at a press conference in Ankara,
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared
the PKK an enemy shared with
Turkey, while stressing the
importance of the two allies jointly working out a
viable solution.
Erdogan said recently, "I
will tell him [Bush] that we expect immediate
concrete steps against the terrorists. The problem
of the PKK is a sincerity test for everyone. It is
important to determine the fate of our future
relations."
Turkey, in a state of
belligerent paroxysm for some days, had been
waiting for the US position to become clear.
Government officials, politicians, the army and
the media have been adding oil to the fire of
popular demand for revenge after the killing of 12
soldiers in an ambush by PKK guerrillas in
October.
Friday's press conference
followed a meeting between Rice, Turkish President
Abdullah Gul, Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ali
Babacan.
Rice said the US was committed to
intensifying its efforts to eliminate the threat
to Turkey from the PKK. Recognizing that the
situation was destabilizing Iraq, she said it was
for the US and Turkey to work together to restore
security in the region.
"I affirmed to the
prime minister as well as to the foreign minister
that the United States considers the PKK a
terrorist organization, and indeed that we have a
common enemy, that we must find ways to take
effective action so that Turkey will not suffer
from terrorist attacks," she said.
"This
is going to take persistence and it is going to
take commitment. This is a very difficult problem
... rooting out terrorism is hard."
She
did not formulate any direct warnings against
military action by Turkey. En route to Ankara,
however, she told reporters that resorting to
incursion into northern Iraq was not in the
interest of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) ally.
"Anything that would
destabilize the north of Iraq is not going to be
in Turkey's interests, it is not going to be in
our interests, and it is not going to be in the
Iraqis' interests."
Her visit to Ankara
was aimed at convincing Turkey to abstain from
crossing over to northern Iraq, which harbors
about 3,000 armed PKK members who regularly launch
subversive actions against Turkey.
The PKK
began guerrilla activities in 1984, demanding
independence for the 12 to 19 million ethnic Kurds
believed to live in Turkey. The country has a
total population of 72 million.
Its claims
have now been toned down to the creation of an
autonomous province, but Ankara has categorically
refused to consider the idea, fearing eventual
separatism and a precedent for other minorities in
the country. Turkey does not recognize ethnic
minorities as separate entities.
Turkey
has demanded that the Iraqi government close down
the bases PKK maintains in northern Iraq and to
hand over its wanted members. This was flatly
turned down last week by Massoud Barzani,
president of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, which has
jurisdiction over defense and security in the
province.
Rice did not detail US plans to
secure the Turkish border, but said her government
already provides "actionable intelligence" on PKK
posts, and has obtained cooperation from the
northern Iraqi provincial government to reduce the
number of border passes to better control the
movement of PKK commandos.
Neither the
Turkish government nor press have been impressed
by these assurances. The US has repeatedly been
accused in the past in Turkey of secretly
supplying weapons to the PKK, while for many Turks
Barzani's word is worthless.
Meanwhile,
Ankara has announced a series of measures aimed at
isolating northern Iraq, whose economy and energy
supplies depend on Turkey. Trucking companies have
been instructed to route their vehicles via Syria
for commerce and logistics with Iraq, and Turkey
has imposed a ban on flights to northern Iraq.
This has prompted Baghdad and the
Kurdistan government to issue new reassuring
statements of goodwill to find a mutually
satisfactory solution that excludes boycott and
armed conflict.
The Turkish Armed Forces
(TSK) have, nevertheless, put their units on high
alert and have already deployed 100,000 to 140,000
troops along the 200 kilometer border between
Turkey and northern Iraq. Pounding of Iraqi
villages by artillery and helicopter gunships
became routine a week ago, leading to an exodus of
women and children from townships along the
border.
Since February, when the PKK
resumed its activities, Turkey has bombed this
patch of Iraq's border at least 97 times, with as
many as 800 shells and six aerial assaults, says
Colonel Hussein Thamer, regional head of Iraq's
border guards.
Following the recent
hostilities between the TSK and the PKK,
increasingly large groups of refugees are reported
to be crossing daily into Turkey, where
authorities either turn them back or put them in
confinement camps.
The economic sanctions
and raids against Kurdish villages may be a tactic
by Ankara to get the attention of the US
administration prior to the talks between Bush and
Erdogan.
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