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2 Turks take no delight in Iraqi
visit By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki has read his history well. Forty-four
years ago, Iraqi president Abdulsalam Aref went to
Cairo to negotiate union with Egyptian president
Gamal Abdul Nasser and Syrian head of state
General Lu'ayy al-Atasi. The leaders of Iraq and
Syria wanted Nasser to share power with the Ba'ath
Party. Nasser refused, unable to forget that after
supporting him in 1958, the Ba'athists were among
the first to
abandon him in 1961.
With a straight face, and using his charm,
Nasser honored, embraced and courted the Iraqi
president, thinking that by doing so he could
trick him into believing that Egypt was sincere
about bilateral relations with Baghdad and
Damascus. Secretly, however, Nasser was working
against both him and Atasi. While Aref was in
Cairo, Nasser's agents were trying to pull off a
coup in Baghdad. That coup attempt, which did not
succeed, took place on May 25, 1963, and was
planned to take place while the Iraqi president
was in Egypt. This infuriated Aref, who called off
talks with Egypt and nearly closed down his
embassy in Cairo.
In July 1963, Nasser
tried to pull off another coup in Damascus, which
also ruined his relations with the Syrians. The
results: a permanent distrust in
Egyptian-Syrian-Iraqi relations that lasted until
Nasser's death in 1970. The Iraqis pledged - right
there and then - never to get tricked by anybody.
From 1963 onward, they would be the ones to trick
others in the neighborhood.
That is the
mentality with which Maliki arrived in the Turkish
capital Ankara this week for a meeting with his
counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That attitude
might have worked under a grand manipulator like
Saddam Hussein. It might have worked with certain
regional players, but not Turkey - and not a
seasoned statesman like Erdogan.
Maliki
smiled for the cameras, telling the world he would
work against Kurdish militias launching terrorist
attacks from Iraqi territory into Turkey. He was
referring to the Iraq-based Kurdish Workers' Party
(PKK), branded by the entire world - except Maliki
- as a terrorist organization. As he spoke, PKK
militants were operating from military bases in
northern Iraq, against Turkey.
"Iraq does
not allow party members [to operate] from its
territory, and will not allow it in the future,"
were the words of the Iraqi prime minister. Maliki
managed to keep a straight face while saying that,
though it was perfectly clear Erdogan did not
believe a word he was saying.
Over the
past two years, the PKK has launched a series of
attacks from Iraq, while the Iraqi government has
turned a blind eye so as not to upset Kurdish
politicians who are allied to Maliki. On
Wednesday, the prime minister refused to sign a
broad cooperation agreement, ostensibly claiming
that this needed parliamentary approval, but
instead he signed a much narrower memorandum of
understanding with the Turkish government.
Wrapping up his two-day visit to Turkey with a
30-man delegation, including his Kurdish foreign
minister, Hoshyar Zebari, he left for Iran on
Thursday to meet with President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, who shares Turkey's worries at
Maliki's endorsement of the PKK.
Maliki
has too much on his hands within Iraq to afford a
regional tour like this one. His entire cabinet is
on the verge of collapse after recent walkouts by
Sadrists, Sunnis and seculars led by former prime
minister Iyad Allawi. The reasons for this
Iran-Turkey trip are that both countries have been
launching military raids into northern Iraq since
May 2006. They aim at crushing the PKK, which has
long targeted both countries.
Maliki
realizes that Turkey is serious - very serious -
about crossing the border into Iraq to hunt down
members of the PKK. A new and reinforced Erdogan,
who won his country's elections last month, will
simply not tolerate the PKK for long. By showing
up in Turkey, and making promises he does not plan
to fulfill, Maliki hopes to delay an explosive
crisis with the Turks. He knows that he cannot get
Turkey to back down, since this is an issue of
national pride and security for the Turks, nor can
he - because of his need for domestic allies -
crack down on the PKK.
Last year, Turkey
amassed more than 250,000 troops (double the
number of US troops in Iraq at the time) to scare
off the PKK. That, along with US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Ankara, worked
at reducing tension, which ratcheted up again this
summer.
Maliki's cabinet objected to the
Turkish mobilization, both in 2006 and 2007,
claiming that it violated Iraq's sovereignty, but
both countries ignored the warning, claiming they
were acting in self-defense, since up to 4,000
members of the PKK had been using Iraq for attacks
against Turkey.
The PKK rebellion, which
has hit Turkey the hardest, has led to the death
of 35,000 Turks (including 5,000 soldiers) and
cost the Turks billions of US dollars. Last year,
the Turkish message was: the PKK cadres are the
infiltrators and we are protecting our border. Do
not allow the terror network to use your
territory. Fight against the terrorists who will
only terrorize you in the future.
The
Turks, who want to normalize relations with
everybody (including the US), nevertheless are
hot-headed when it comes to the PKK. If
eradicating the PKK means damaging relations with
Iraq (and the US), then so be it. For its part,
the US administration, despite pledges to fight
PKK activity, has been passive about Kurdish
attacks from northern Iraq. It opposes such acts,
but also "opposes" Turkish mobilization on the
border with Iraq.
A war with Turkey could
dramatically magnify the appalling security
conditions within Iraq. The Turks found a natural
ally in Ahmadinejad, who also cracked down on the
PKK in 2006-07. He did it for two reasons: (1) it
was in Iran's own natural interest to break
separatist movements like these; (2) he was
searching for allies in his diplomatic "nuclear"
war with the international community.
The
Erdogan-Ahmadinejad meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan,
in May 2006 angered the Americans. So did media
reports in Turkish dailies saying the PKK activity
could not have happened without endorsement of the
United States. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator,
Ali Larijani, also went to Turkey and said he had
documents proving US contacts with the PKK in
Mosul and Kirkuk, asking: "If the US is fighting
terrorism, why then is it meeting with the PKK?"
The Kurdish militias have been tolerated by
the Americans since the latter invaded Iraq in
2003. They have been allowed to roam Iraqi
Kurdistan freely and amass weapons. The question
that puzzles observers is: Why would the US have
such double standards when dealing with terrorist
organizations? Why tolerate the PKK?
One
answer is that the Americans have old, unspoken
and unsettled scores with Erdogan. They have not
forgotten that in March 2003, the Turkish
Parliament (headed by his Justice and Development
Party) vetoed a proposal to let US troops use
Turkish territory to launch their war on Iraq.
Two years later, in March 2005, then US
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke to Fox
News, saying: "Clearly if we had been able to get
the 4th Infantry Division in from the north, in
through Turkey, more of the Hussein-Ba'athist
regime would have been captured or killed." He
added that had Turkey been more cooperative, "the
insurgency today [in Iraq] would be less".
In 2005 it was the Turks who broke the
US-imposed isolation on Syria when President Ahmet
Necdet Sezer went to Damascus to meet with
President Bashar al-Assad. The US ambassador in
Turkey made loud calls on his hosts to refrain
from going to Damascus, but they fell on deaf
ears. Erdogan has also paid the Syrian leader
numerous visits since then, and he and Assad are
reportedly good friends.
Erdogan even
received the Damascus-based Khaled Meshaal, leader
of the Palestinian military group Hamas, in Ankara
in February 2006 at a time when the US was calling
on world leaders to boycott Hamas as a "terrorist"
organization. Erdogan turned down an invitation to
visit Israel in 2004, made by then prime minister
Ariel Sharon, and refused to meet then minister of
labor and trade, now premier, Ehud Olmert, who
went to Turkey in July 2004. The Americans do not
forget that easily, and are
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