Turkey snaps over US bombing of its
brethren By K Gajendra Singh
For
the first time since the acrimonious exchange of words
in July last year following the arrest and imprisonment
of 11 Turkish commandos in Kurdish Iraq, for which
Washington expressed "regret", differences erupted
publicly this week between North Atlantic Treaty
Organization allies Turkey and the US over attacks on
Turkey's ethnic cousins, the Turkmens in northern Iraq.
Talking to a Turkish TV channel, Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul warned that if the US did not
cease its attacks on Tal Afar, a Turkmen city at the
junction of Turkey, Iraq and Syria, Ankara might
withdraw its support to the US in Iraq.
"I told
[US Secretary of State Colin Powell] that what is being
done there is harming the civilian population, that it
is wrong, and that if it continues, Turkey's cooperation
on issues regarding Iraq will come to a total stop." He
added, "We will continue to say these things. Of course
we will not stop only at words. If necessary, we will
not hesitate to do what has to be done."
Turkey
is a key US ally in a largely hostile region. US forces
use its Incirlik military base near northern Iraq.
Turkish firms are also involved heavily in the
construction and transport business in Iraq, with
hundreds of Turkish vehicles bringing in goods for the
US military every day. It is an alternative route
through friendly northern Kurdish territory to those
from Jordan and Kuwait. But many Turks have been
kidnapped by Iraqi insurgent groups and some have been
killed.
Turkey contains a large ethnic Turkmen
population and Ankara has long seen itself as the
guardian of their rights, particularly across the border
in northern Iraq, where they constitute a significant
minority.
The US attacks on Tal Afar, which
Iraqi Turkmen groups in Turkey say have left 120 dead
and over 200 injured, were launched, the US says, to
root out terrorists. The US has denied the extent of the
damage, saying that it
avoided civilian targets and killed only terrorists it
says were infiltrating the town from Syria.
US
ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman commented, "We are
carrying out a limited military operation and we are
trying to keep civilian losses to a minimum. We cannot
completely eliminate the possibility [of civilian
casualties] ... We believe the operation is being
conducted with great care," he said after briefing
Turkish officials. There have not been any reports of
further attacks since the Turkish warning.
The
deterioration in US-Turkish relations underlines the
fast-changing strategic scenario in the region in the
post-Cold War era after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the September 11 attacks on the US, the US-led
invasion on Iraq, now conceded as illegal by United
Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the
deteriorating security situation in that country.
Despite negative signals on Ankara's mission to
join the European Union, Turkey is moving away from the
US and closer to the EU - it is even looking to buy
Airbuses, and arms, from Europe rather than the US.
At the same time, Turkey is drawing closer to
Syria, normalizing relations with Iran and improving
economic relations with Russia, as well as discuss with
Moscow ways to counter terrorist acts, from which both
Russia and Turkey suffer. Russian President Vladimir
Putin called off a visit to Turkey when the hostage
crisis broke at Beslan in the Russian Caucasus last
week.
And Turkey has also moved away from
long-time friend Israel, the US's umbilically aligned
strategic partner in the Middle East. Turkey has accused
Israel of "state terrorism" against Palestinians. A
recent ruling party team from Turkey returned from Tel
Aviv not satisfied with Israeli explanations over
charges that it was interfering in northern Iraqi
affairs.
With newspapers full of stories and TV
screens showing the Turkmens being attacked in the US
operations at Tal Afar, many Turks are angry at what is
being done to their ethnic brethren. These have been
large protests outside the US Embassy in Ankara, and the
belief that the US attacks are a part of a campaign to
ethnically cleanse the Turkmens from northern Iraq is
widespread.
"Some people are uncomfortable with
the ethnic structure of this area, so, using claims of a
terrorist threat, they went in and killed people," said
Professor Suphi Saatci of the Kirkuk Foundation, one of
several Turkmen groups in Turkey.
He claims that
the the attacks are a part of a wider campaign to
establish Kurdish control over all of northern Iraq, and
he points to the removal of Turkmen officials from
governing positions in the region to be replaced by
Kurds. He also says that the Iraqi police force deployed
in northern Iraq is dominated by members of Kurdish
factions. "The US is acting completely under the
direction of the Kurdish parties in northern Iraq," says
Saatci. "Tal Afar is a clearly Turkmen area and this is
something they were very jealous of."
While
Kurdish officials deny any attempt to alter the ethnic
balance in the region, last week Masud Barzani, leader
of one of the two largest Kurdish parties, the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP), said that Kirkuk "is a Kurdish
city" and one that the KDP was willing to fight for,
which certainly did not calm fears of the Turkmens and
angered the Turks. Many Turkmen see Kirkuk as
historically theirs. Turkey considers northern Iraq - ie
Kurdistan - as part of its sphere of influence,
especially the Turkmen minority. Ankara is especially
concerned that the Kurds in Iraq don't gain full
autonomy as this would likely fire the aspirations of
Turkey's Kurdish minority.
The US military
disputes that its forces laid siege to Tal Afar, saying
that the operation was to free the city from insurgents,
including foreign fighters, who had turned it into a
haven for militants smuggling men and arms across the
Syrian border. And a military spokesman denied that
Kurds were using US forces to gain the upper hand in
their ethnic struggle with the Turkmens. The US
characterized the resistance in Tal Afar as put up by a
disparate group of former Saddam Hussein loyalists,
religious extremists and foreign fighters who were
united only by their opposition to US forces.
Gareth Stansfield, a regional specialist at the
Center of Arab and Islamic Studies at Britain's
University of Exeter, said recently that "the most
important angle of what the Turkish concern is [and that
is] that there is a strong belief in Ankara that Iyad
Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, and the Americans,
were suckered into attacking Tal Afar by Kurdish
intelligence circles, and really brought to Tal Afar to
target ostensibly al-Qaeda and anti-occupation forces
with the Kurds knowing full well that this would also
bring them up against Turkmens and create a rift between
Washington and Ankara over their treatment of a Turkmen
city."
Turkey maintains a few hundred troops in
the region as a security presence to monitor Turkish
Kurd rebels who have some hideouts in the region. But
any large-scale presence has been derailed by the
objections of Iraqi Kurdish leaders. "That has created
an uneasy state of co-existence between Ankara and the
two major Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish
Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a
balance which any US military operation in the area
could easily disturb."
Stansfield added that the
incident shows how volatile tensions remain between
Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds, despite ongoing efforts by
both sides to work together. "The Turkish position has
become increasingly more sophisticated over the last
months, and arguably years, with Ankara finding an
accommodation with the KDP and PUK and beginning to
realize that while it is not their favored option to
allow the Kurds to be autonomous in the north of Iraq,
it is perhaps one of the better options that they are
faced with in this situation," said Stansfield.
He added, "However, the relationship between the
two principle Kurdish parties and the government of
Turkey will always be sensitized by the Kurds' treatment
of Turkmens and indeed now the American treatment of
Turkmens vis-a-vis Kurds."
Transfer of
sovereignty and the Kurds In January this year, the
then Iraqi Governing Council agreed to a federal
structure to enshrine Kurdish self-rule in three
northern provinces of Iraq. This was to be included in a
"fundamental law" that would precede national elections
in early 2005. The fate of three more provinces claimed
by the Kurds was to be decided later. "In the
fundamental law, Kurdistan will have the same legal
status as it has now," said a Kurdish council member,
referring to the region that has enjoyed virtual
autonomy since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
"When the constitution is written and elections
are held, we will not agree to less than what is in the
fundamental law, and we may ask for more," said the
Kurdish council member. Arabs, Turkmens, Sunnis and
Shi'ites expressed vociferous opposition to the proposed
federal system for Kurdish Iraq. They organized
demonstrations leading to ethnic tensions and violence
in Kirkuk and many other cities in north Iraq. Many
protesters were killed and scores were injured.
However, when "sovereignty" was transferred on
June 30 to the interim government led by Iyad Allawi,
the interim constitutional arrangement did not include a
federal structure for Kurdish self-rule, although to
pacify the Kurds, key portfolios of defense and foreign
affairs were allotted to them.
A press release
from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) stated that
"the current situation in Iraq and the new-found
attitude of the US, UK and UN has led to a serious
re-think for the Kurds. The proposed plans do not seem
to promise the expected Kurdish role in the future of a
new Iraq. The Kurds feel betrayed once again." It added
that "if the plight of the Kurds is ignored yet again
and we are left with no say in the future of a new Iraq,
the will of the Kurdish people will be too great for the
Kurdish political parties to ignore, leading to a total
withdrawal from any further discussions relating to the
formation of any new Iraqi government. This will
certainly not serve the unity of Iraq." Underlining that
the Kurds have been the only true friends and allies of
the US coalition, the release concluded that "the Kurds
will no longer be second-class citizens in Iraq".
However, the Kurds did not precipitate matters.
Demographic changes in north Iraq Kirkuk, with a population of some 750,000, and other
towns are now the scene of ethnic and demographic
struggles between Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds, with the
last wanting to take over the region and make the city a
part of an autonomous zone, with Kirkuk as its capital.
The area around Kirkuk has 6% of the world's oil
reserves. In April 2003, it was estimated that the
population was 250,000 each for Turkmen, Arab and Kurd.
A large number of Arabs were settled there by Saddam
Hussein, and they are mostly Shi'ites from the south.
The Turkmens are generally Shi'ites, like their ethnic
kin, the Alevis in Turkey, but many have given up
Turkmen traditions in favor of the urban, clerical
religion common among the Arabs of the south. Kirkuk is
therefore a stronghold of the Muqtada al-Sadr movement
which has given US-led forces such a hard time in the
south in Najaf. The influential Shi'ite political party,
the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI), also has good support, perhaps 40%, in the
region. Kurds are mostly Sunnis, and were the dominant
population in Kirkuk in the 1960s and 1970s, before
Saddam's Arabization policy saw a lot of Kurds moved
further north.
According to some estimates, over
70,000 Kurds have entered Kirkuk over the past 17
months, and about 50,000 Arabs have fled back to the
south. It can be said, therefore, that now there are
about 320,000 Kurds and 200,000 Arabs in the city. The
number of Turkmen has also been augmented. During the
Ottoman rule, the Turkmen dominated the city, and it was
so until oil was discovered. It is reported that,
encouraged by the Kurdish leadership, as many as 500
Kurds a day are returning to the city. The changes are
being carried out for the quick-fix census planned for
October, which in turn will be the basis for the
proportional representation for the planned January
elections, if these are even held, given the country's
security problems. Both the Turkmens and Arabs have said
that the Kurds are using these demographic changes to
engulf Kirkuk and ensure that it is added to the
enlarged Kurdish province which they are planning. The
Kurds hope to get at least semi-autonomous status from
Baghdad.
North Iraq and Turkey's Kurdish
problem Turkey has serious problems with its own
Kurds, who form 20% 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 was 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 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 were removed. The PKK - now also called
Konga-Gel - shifted almost 4,000 of its cadres to
northern Iraq and refused to lay down arms as required
by a Turkish "repentance law". The US's priority to
disarm PKK cadres was never very high. In fact, the US
wants to reward Iraqi Kurds, who have remained mostly
peaceful and loyal while the rest of the country has
not.
Early this month, Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey's patience was running
out over US reluctance to take military action against
Turkish Kurds hiding in northern Iraq. In 1999, the PKK
declared a unilateral ceasefire after the capture of its
leader, Ocalan. But the ceasefire was not renewed in
June and there have been increasing skirmishes and
battles between Kurdish insurgents and Turkish security
forces inside Turkey. Turkey remains frustrated over US
reluctance to employ military means against the PKK
fighters - in spite of promises to do so.
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.
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 around Kirkuk, which would
give them financial autonomy, and this would also
constitute a reason for entry into north Iraq. The Turks
vehemently oppose any change in the ethnic composition
of the city of Kirkuk .
The Turks manifest a
pervasive distrust of autonomy or models of a federal
state for Iraqi Kurds. It would affect and encourage the
aspirations of their 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 Mustafa Kemal Ataturk opted for the unitary
state of Turkey and Kurdish rebellions in Turkey were
ruthlessly suppressed.
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 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, US
president 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 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. This state of affairs has allowed the PKK a free
run in north Iraq.
After the 1991 war, Turkey
lost out instead of gaining as promised by the US. 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 Turkish trucks
roaring up and down to Iraq, only exacerbated the
economic and social problems in the Kurdish heartland
and the center of the PKK rebellion.
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 Turkmen who
lived in Kirkuk with the Kurds before Arabization
changed the ethnic balance of the region.
With
its attacks on Tal Afar, the US is stirring a very deep
well of discontent.
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. Emai: Gajendrak@hotmail.com
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damage, saying that it
avoided civilian targets and killed only terrorists it
says were infiltrating the town from Syria. 
