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Turkey: 'Sow war and reap
terror'
By K Gajendra Singh
Sow war and reap terror - A banner
in a February peace march in Paris
Many
disquieting messages have been sent with the two car
bombings in Istanbul on Thursday, just five days after
attacks on two synagogues and coinciding with Queen
Elizabeth's hosting of United States President George W
Bush in London. Turkey's stock market fell immediately,
and world markets felt the fallout. The latest attacks,
which claimed the lives of at least 25 people, will
certainly adversely affect Turkey's economic recovery.
The bombings were against British targets - the
Istanbul British consulate and HSBC bank, which is
Britain-based. An attack on British interests, and even
its timing, had been generally predicted in London and
Washington following attacks against the interests of
Israel, Australia and other US allies, including Jordan,
Turkey, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Only the locale
was in question. It turned out to be Turkey's
metropolitan and beautiful city of Istanbul, a capital
of Romans and Byzantines for more than a millennium and
of the Ottomans from 1453 until the new republic's
capital was established in Ankara in 1923.
Apart
from sending a very clear message to Bush and British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, the two who have been at the
forefront of the "war on terrorism", to which they added
an attack on Iraq, without any justifiable reason,
countries like Spain, Italy, Poland etc will think twice
in siding further with them. India and Pakistan have
said no to a request for troops, and Japan is rethinking
its decision to send non-combat troops.
Turkey's
ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership,
with its Islamic roots, after first refusing to let the
US use its territory to open a second front against Iraq
in March, will also be in a quandary. The Islamic jihad,
like any other multinational, is now truly a globalized
entity, and it has no love for such soft Islamic parties
that rule in Turkey or elsewhere.
Turkey has a
well-trained armed force of nearly a million, with
experience of fighting a Marxist Kurdish insurgency in
southeast of the country in which over 35,000 people,
including 5,000 soldiers, have lost their lives. Turkey
also feels that north Iraq was stolen by the British for
its oil reserves after World War I, when Kemal Ataturk
molded a secular republic out of the ashes of the
Ottoman empire.
The armed forces are
self-appointed guardians of Ataturk's secular legacy and
have been at odds with the ruling AKP since the latter's
massive electoral victory in last November's elections,
which made it the first-ever Islamic party to come to
power in Turkey since 1923. If even Turkey, which is
close to a Western democratic secular model, can be
destabilized, then the region will become like many
volcanos gone wild.
The dangers to European
security inherent in Turkey joining the Europe Union at
any time soon - when Islamic bombers can strike with
such ease - are obvious. This will provide the EU
leadership justification for its policy of saying "not
yet". In any case, while praising Turkey for its efforts
in meeting its criteria of reforms to begin talks for
entry, the EU has been humming and hawing about how the
reforms will be implemented on the ground. So Turkey
becoming a full member of the EU, never a possibility in
my opinion, can now be put on the back burner. This will
only disappoint and dishearten secular forces in Turkey
and encourage and embolden Islamist elements.
However, taking advantage of the EU criteria,
the AKP has succeeded in diminishing the military's
dominant role in Turkish politics, which it had
exercised though the all powerful National Security
Council (NSC), whose recommendations had to be
implemented by the government. The armed forces forced
the first-ever Islamist prime minister, Nacmettin
Erbakan, heading a coalition government, to resign in
1997.
The Turkish masses have in the past had
the highest regard for the military, and have been
generally happy that it has intervened to clean up the
messes created by politicians in takeovers in 1960, 1971
and 1980. But eager to join the EU, which many feel will
bring prosperity, people have been quite satisfied at
the reduction in the military's role in politics.
Now, though, in the changed situation of terror
and insecurity, it would be easy to win public approval
for the NSC to be revived. President Ahmet Sezer, a
former head of the Constitutional Court, another bastion
of Turkey's secular establishment, was not happy to have
signed the decree that emasculated the NSC and the
Turkish armed forces. The AKP has a two-thirds majority
in parliament, but its leadership, with a temperamental
prime minister in Tayep Erdogan - his experience is
limited to a stint as mayor of Istanbul - will have
serious difficulties in tackling the new situation.
The missing Balkan period
Remember the
two women premiers of Turkey and Pakistan in the
mid-1990s, Tansu Ciller and Benazir Bhutto respectively,
both allies of the US who visited Bosnia with US
encouragement to show solidarity with the massacred and
suppressed Muslims. They made the day of photographers
by trying to outdo each other for photo opportunities.
During the current debate, the Balkan chapter of
the 1990s and the US and European role in the breakup of
Yugoslavia and subsequent events are not scrutinized
closely. The origins of al-Qaeda and other terror groups
during the Afghan war of 1979-1992, their fight against
the Soviet army and the role of the US, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia and others is well documented, including Osama
bin Laden's drive to recruit Muslim volunteers
world-wide. US officials estimate that tens of thousands
of foreign fighters were trained in bomb-making,
sabotage and guerrilla warfare tactics in Afghan camps
that the US Central Intelligence Agency helped set up
between 1985-92.
After the Russians withdrew
from Afghanistan in 1989, and the Najibullah communist
regime collapsed in 1992, the Afghan mujahideen became
irrelevant to the US. But the mujahideen had acquired a
taste for fighting, and now they had no cause. But soon
a new cause arose.
During 1992-95, the Pentagon
helped with the movement of thousands of mujahideen and
other Islamic elements from Central Asia, even some
Turks, into Europe to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims
against the Serbs.
"It was very important in the
rise of mujahideen forces and in the emergence of
current cross-border Islamic terrorist groups who think
nothing of moving from state to state in the search of
outlets for their jihadi mission. In moving to Bosnia,
Islamic fighters were transported from the caves of
Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an
outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world
conflict of the day; from being yesterday's men to
fighting alongside the West's favored side in the clash
of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan
created the mujahideen, Western intervention in Bosnia
appears to have globalized it."
This is a
quotation from a Dutch government report after
investigations, prepared by Professor C Wiebes of
Amsterdam University, into the Srebrenica massacre of
July 1995, entitled "Intelligence and the War in
Bosnia", published in April 2002.
It details the
secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic
groups from the Middle East and their efforts to assist
Bosnia's Muslims. By 1993, a vast amount of weapons were
being smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims,
organized by "clandestine agencies" of the US, Turkey
and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups
that included the Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian
Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the
financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from
the Middle East to Bosnia - airlifts with which, Wiebes
points out, the US was "very closely involved".
The Pentagon's alliance with Islamic elements
permitted mujahideen fighters to be "flown in" as shock
troops for particularly hazardous operations against
Serb forces. According to a report in the Los Angeles
Times in October 2001, from 1992 as many as 4,000
mujahideen from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe
reached Bosnia to fight with the Muslims. Richard
Holbrooke, America's former chief Balkans peace
negotiator, said as much. The Bosnian Muslims "wouldn't
have survived" without the imported mujahideen, which
was a "pact with the devil" from which Bosnia would take
long to recover. If the US made a pact with the devil,
then the Muslim mujahideen made a pact with Satan. They
temporized with the Christian West to defeat the ungodly
Russian communists, now they are after the US-led
Crusaders.
During the mid-1990s the Turkish
media were full of reports of Muslim fighters in Bosnia
and Serbia. One Turkish journalist who went there was
even said to have fired at the Serbs. Many even
applauded the act. It was then easy for Turkish cadres
to mingle, learn and establish relationships with
al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other international cadres.
Many in the Turkish establishment are strong believers
in Sunni Islam. From time to time they have massacred
Turkey's Alevis - close to the Shi'ites in belief - most
of whom are perhaps the real Turkomens from Central
Asia.
The Balkans were part of the Ottoman
empire for centuries, as a result of which many Slavs
and others converted to Islam. Many Turkish tribes also
migrated to the Balkan vilayats (provinces) as
the ruling elite. As the Ottoman empire shrank, millions
of Muslims from the Balkans migrated to Turkey, and now
at least 5 million Turkish citizens have origins in the
Balkans or have relatives there, especially Bosnia, and
they exercise influence on the Turkish government.
Later, the Ottomans took wives from Bosnia. So contact
between Turks and Bosnians and Kosovars during the 1990s
was normal and natural, but it may have left a legacy,
perhaps deadly, yet to be investigated and untangled.
But by the end of the 1990s, State Department
officials (as now vis-a-vis the Pentagon), were
increasingly worried about the consequences of this
devil's pact sponsored by the Pentagon. Under the terms
of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, the foreign mujahideen
units were required to disband and leave the Balkans.
Yet in 2000, the State Department raised concerns about
the "hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists" who became
Bosnian citizens after fighting against the Serbs, and
who will remain a potential terror threat to Europe and
the United States.
US officials claimed that
"one of bin Laden's top lieutenants had sent operatives
to Bosnia", and that during the 1990s Bosnia had served
as a "staging area and safe haven" for al-Qaeda and
others. The Bill Clinton administration learned that it
was one thing to permit the movement of Islamic groups
across territories; it was quite another to rein them
back in again.
And in spite of the official US
stand against jihadis, it permitted the growth and
movement of mujahideen cadres in Europe during the
1990s. In the runup to Clinton and Blair's Kosovo war of
1999, the US backed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
against Serbia. The Jerusalem Post reported in 1998 that
KLA members, like the Bosnian Muslims earlier, were
"provided with financial and military support from
Islamic countries", and had been "bolstered by hundreds
of Iranian fighters or mujahideen ... [some of whom]
were trained in Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps in
Afghanistan". So the US's pact with the devil continued.
The aspect of the mujahideen's encouragement by
the US and its growth in Balkan Europe has been largely
overlooked, and the Bosnia connection remains largely
unexplored. In Jason Burke's excellent Al-Qaeda:
Casting a Shadow of Terror, Bosnia is mentioned only
in passing. Kimberley McCloud and Adam Dolnik of the
Monterey Institute of International Studies have written
some incisive commentary calling for rational thinking
when assessing al-Qaeda's origins and threat - but
little on the Bosnian link.
A cool analysis of
today's disparate Islamic terror groups, created in
Afghanistan and emboldened by the Bosnian experience,
would do much to shed some light on precisely the
dangers of such intervention. Car bombers in Istanbul on
November 15 and 20 are perhaps the results.
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. Email Gajendrak@hotmail.com
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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