12
May 2003
2. "Daughters of the revolution", high in Iraq's Qandil mountains, 5,000 armed women stand ready to go into battle for liberation and sexual equality. To some, they are glorious freedom fighters, but to the west they are dangerous terrorists... Jason Burke meets the soldiers of the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress
3. “The Erdogan Experiment”, by Deborah Sontag, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
4. "Turkey takes a dive in the fortunes of war", investors looking around the world to identify who stands to gain from the war in Iraq are in for some surprises. Russia looks good. Turkey doesn't.
5. "Turkey’s stand on Iraq war", by acting both courageously and cautiously in its approach to wards the Iraq war, Turkey has secured the image of a dignified Muslim nation which does not compromise its national interest and regional preference, even if that goes against the will of the mighty United States.
6. "Elation in Cyprus for Now, but Hard Bargaining Lies in Wait", for the past three weeks, the Greeks and Turks of this long divided island have known the strange and exhilarating experience of mingling, an abrupt change after glowering at each other across a cease-fire line for almost 30 years.
1. - AFP - "Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq war crackdown would trigger war":
DIYARBAKIR / 12 May 2003 / by Mahmut Bozarslan
Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) warned at the weekend
that it would retaliate with force if either Turkey or the United States
moved to purge northern Iraq of its militants. Some 5,000 PKK rebels
are believed to have found refuge in the mountainous area across the
border in Iraq since 1999, when the separatist group declared an end
to its 15-year armed struggle for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern
Turkey.
But a top PKK official warned Turkish and US troops not to drive Kurdish rebels out of northern Iraq, which has been outside Baghdad's control since the 1991 Gulf war. "It would be misjudgment for Turkey to count on the United States against us... Turkey should not play with fire," Mustafa Karasu, a member of the PKK's leadership council, told the Europe-based pro-Kurdish Medya-TV late on Sunday.
"No force could expel us from here. That is day-dreaming... If they crack down on us, we will restart the war," he added, without giving details. Karasu said PKK militants would only lay down their arms if there was a solution to the Kurdish conflict and that they were prepared to establish ties with regional powers to facilitate a settlement.
"We will establish ties with anyone for the interests of our people. This could be the United States, this could be Israel, but the US should help the resolution of the dispute, not block it," he said.
Ankara maintains several thousand troops in northern Iraq to hunt down PKK militants and is counting on US soldiers present there to crack down on the group, which Washington also describes as a "terrorist organisation". A senior US government official said in a Turkish television interview last week Washington was determined to purge northern Iraq of the PKK and hinted of possible moves against the rebels.
"PKK is a terrorist organisation. I don't think we can tolerate a terrorist organisation in northern Iraq," US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz told CNN-Turk television. "How we deal with that is a difficult issue ... but I think we are absolutely in clear agreemeent with Turkey and I think with the major (Iraqi) Kurdish groups that these people are terrorists and troublemakers and we don't need that kind of trouble," he added.
Wolfowitz signalled that once northern Iraq ceased to be a "sanctuary for terrorists" attacking Turkey, there would ne no need for Ankara to maintain a military presence in northern Iraq. The Turkish army, which sees the PKK as its number-one enemy, has dismissed the group's 1999 truce and demanded that the rebels either surrender or face the military's wrath. Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said on Monday the government was working on a new limited amnesty bill for PKK rebels to speed up the dissolution of the organisation.
Previous amnesty bills had offered reductions in penalties only to PKK rebels who were not senior leaders of the organisation, who had not killed any Turkish soldiers and who were able to provide useful information on the group. But Cicek hinted that the new law would include different provisions. "It will be a different law and will be a satisfactory arrangement," Anatolia news agency reported him as saying. More than 36,000 people were killed in when the PKK -- now renamed KADEK -- took up arms against Ankara for self-rule in 1984, triggering a harsh military crackdown.
The fighting has significantly abated since the PKK declared
a ceasefire in 1999 and Ankara has in the meantime granted its Kurdish
minority broader cultural freedoms as part of efforts to boost the country's
bid to join the European Union. 
2 . - The Observer - "Daughters of the revolution":
High in Iraq's Qandil mountains, 5,000 armed women stand ready to go into battle for liberation and sexual equality. To some, they are glorious freedom fighters, but to the west they are dangerous terrorists... Jason Burke meets the soldiers of the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress
11 May 2003 / by Jason Burke
She is five foot nothing in her trainers with hair pulled into a
ponytail that reaches the small of her back and a multicoloured thread
round one slim wrist. She is wearing green combat fatigues with a radio
antenna sticking out from one pocket of her well-worn, olive-drab jacket.
She has an AK47 over one shoulder and she is talking about killing men.
'I first saw action in 1992 when I was 13,' she says. 'There was a long battle up in the mountains on the Badinan line. It went on for weeks, but eventually we won. I threw grenades and shot with my Kalashnikov. When the enemy were attacking we killed many of them. We shot them in the head, in the lungs, in their abdomen and legs. Mostly we shot them in the head. I killed a man from about 50 metres away. I shot him in the head. I don't remember his face.'
We are sitting on the grass under a tree on a ridge in the Qandil mountains high on the triple border between Iraq, Iran and Turkey. It is the last week of April and the sky is a clear blue, though the clouds building to the south mean heavy rain soon. The clouds are moving fast and cast swift shadows on the steep wooded slopes of the rocky hills. In the valleys, a long way beneath us, small villages sit improbably under precipices.
A few metres from where we are sitting a dozen or so young women are playing volleyball on a patch of earth cleared among the trees. They are still wearing their uniforms, though they have leant their guns against tree trunks or fallen logs. Another 20 young women are sitting, smoking cigarettes of green local tobacco rolled with paper and making tea over small open fires. They are listening to shortwave radios, laughing and talking. There is a group of young men a few yards away, but they are keeping to themselves around their own fire. They, too, are in high spirits. Some of them are preparing to play football and are setting up goalposts using broken branches as posts and the lengths of the fabric they wind round their waists as cummberbunds as crossbars. But for the small stacks of weapons everywhere, the smell of unwashed bodies and the hard, pinched faces of the older women, the scene is almost bucolic.
'I have been in many battles since then,' Comrade Gulbar is saying, one hand on her gun and the other fiddling with the scrunchy in her hair. She is slightly irritated by my questions, though too polite to say anything, and is frowning. 'I have not kept track of the men I have killed. There are many of them. I did not see them all die. Often in battles it is very dark and very confused. I have been wounded three times. In the arm and the leg.'
Comrade Gulbar is a military commander, in charge of a unit of 30 young men and women of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK). Her struggle, she tells me, is twofold. She is fighting for the Kurdish people and for the liberation of women. She says that the two issues are inextricably connected.
To those who have suffered most from their activities, the PKK is a brutal, criminal terrorist organisation given to indiscriminate attacks on civilians and motivated by a fanaticism paralleled only by Osama bin Laden's Islamic militants. To many Kurds, either in the diaspora or in the heartland Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, northern Iraq and eastern Syria, the PKK are freedom fighters, battling for a homeland, or at least better rights, for a people without a nation. Up to half the PKK are women and, throughout the group's 30-year history, the 'struggle for women's freedom' as Comrade Gulbar terms it, has been an integral part of its campaign.
The PKK's ideology is, to coin a phrase, very last century. Were it not for its propensity for extreme violence, self-immolation, bombing towns and kidnapping journalists and tourists, there would be something quaint about its talk of dialectic materialism, the struggle against imperialism, false consciousness, the alienated capitalist self and so on. When you talk about 'gender issues' with PKK members (they don't have cadres, I am told, but volunteers), you are suddenly returned to agitprop feminist debate, circa 1980.
Take the issue of marriage. PKK volunteers are not allowed to marry because truly free gender relations are impossible given the oppression inherent in the capitalist world system that is currently dominant. In that system, individuals and their emotions are reduced to commodities and so marriage, a bourgeois concept based on ownership, can only aid the continued dominance of patriarchal (and imperialist) power. As no truly power-free gender relations are possible (and here the revolutionary Marxism shades into French existentialism) until capitalism is replaced by a system which allows truly free relations between individuals, no marriage between PKK volunteers is permissible. Instead, all must strive for the revolution. As an added incentive, sex is banned, too, also until the revolution. It is 'not included in the programme plans of the party'.
Such sophomoric Leftism is understandable given the origins of the movement. The PKK was formed in 1974 by Abdullah Ocalan, a charismatic Kurdish political activist from Turkey. They were based in Syria through the 80s, but moved to their current bases in the mountains of northern Iraq in the chaos following the first Gulf War of 1991. With the local Kurdish parties weakened by the war on Saddam Hussein and by internecine rivalry, the PKK was able to hack out a substantial and effectively self-ruled feifdom. The early and mid-90s saw horrific violence in southeastern Turkey as the Turkish state attempted to force the PKK out of its enclave and to crush dissent among its own restive Kurdish minority. Both sides committed terrible atrocities, burning villages and killing civilians. Around 40,000 people died and the Turkish government's brutality was condemned by a series of international human rights organisations. The PKK took to suicide operations and explosions in Turkish cities and swiftly earned themselves a place on British and American lists of banned terrorist organisations. A series of military operations during the 90s involving thousands of Turkish troops backed by Kurdish groups and auxiliaries failed to dislodge the group from its mountain stronghold. Once again, casualties on both sides were heavy. In all, Ankara says, more than 20,000 PKK fighters have been killed and several thousand Turkish soldiers and security militia men.
In 1999, there was something of a breakthrough. Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya and, from his Turkish prison cell, issued a directive saying that the military strategy pursued by the PKK hitherto had been misguided. The PKK renounced violence, except in self-defence. Last year, it renamed itself Kadek, the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress, and the hammer and sickle was dropped from its flag, though the red, yellow and green motif featuring a five-pointed star remains. Kadek now says it wants to pursue Kurdish and women's rights through democratic means. Up in its enclave, it exacts customs duties and taxes on the local people, builds roads and the occasional clinic, runs a standing army of about 10,000 fighters, directs a sophisticated international network of activists and fundraisers (and extortionists) and overall acts like a mini-state.
'We are not terrorists. We are a liberated people in a liberated land,' said Comrade Gulbar. Many disagree. The PKK is still banned almost all over the world. Given that the Americans are committed to a 'war on terror' and are now in power in Baghdad this is an important point that seems to have escaped the notice of most PKK cadres.
I had first tried to see the PKK in 1991. The group was in the process of launching its guerrilla war against the Turkish security forces and meeting them had proved too difficult and too dangerous. Twelve years later, back in Kurdistan to cover the US-led war on Baghdad, things were easier. As Kadek, the group is keener on media exposure. We were told the days of kidnapping journalists are long gone. Contacts in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimania carried our request up to the mountains and came back with an invitation.
We left Sulaimania as it got light and drove west. It was Easter Sunday. By mid-morning we had hired a local taxi, passed through the final government checkpoint and were on a dirt road heading up a narrow gorge. It opened on to a high wooded plateau, surrounded by huge peaks, with the colours of the trees and fields all muted by a swollen, lowering, overcast sky. On a spur at one side of the plateau was a small base built of wood, mud and breeze blocks with small turrets, a defensive wall, an aggressive mongrel, and several flags displaying the PKK star flapping in the wind. We were stopped there and waited.
War, as any soldier will tell you, involves a lot of waiting. Guerrillas do more waiting than most. They wait for dark, for supplies, for orders, for the enemy, for the right time to attack, for the political situation to change, for someone to convene a committee and make a decision. The PKK has been waiting for a long time and are very good at it. Western journalists are not so good at it. So after two days we were somewhat relieved when word came that a senior commander was ready to see us.
In fact, two senior commanders were ready to see us. We had hoped to meet Osman Ocalan, chairman Abdullah's brother, but he was unavailable. Instead we were asked to join Murad Karailluh, aka Comrade Jamal, and Haleeja Actac, aka Comrade Chedam, for dinner.
Karailluh turned out to be a tubby, moustachioed and avuncular 46-year-old man who has spent 25 years fighting for the PKK. Actac was a slim and intense 31-year-old woman who, in just 10 years in the movement, has risen to be one of the group's top military commanders. Both Karailluh and Actac are members of the PKK high command. I was mildly amused to see that, whereas the lowly grunts with whom we had spent the previous two days ate nothing more than greasy fried potatoes, rice and the occasional egg, we were served chicken, fresh bread and Coca-Cola.
Karailluh was jolly enough, however. He sat and belched loudly on to the back of his hand and spoke for long periods expecting everyone to listen. He was one of the original band of activists who had helped found the PKK with 'Apo', as Abdullah Ocalan is universally known, in the mid-70s. In 1980, he said, the Turkish government had destroyed his home and tortured and killed his father, a sheep farmer, to punish him for his militant activities. Actac grew up in Istanbul. She had become involved with the PKK in 1994 as a geography student at the university and was imprisoned for two years as a result. On her release she had travelled to Europe and then, after four years in Greece, made her way to the Qandil mountains.
As we eat I ask her why she joined the PKK. She answers in rapid Turkish. 'I became involved primarily for the feminist struggle, secondly because my friends were [involved], thirdly because when I saw that Kurdish people were persecuted in my own country I felt I had to do something.'
She explains that in almost all of the Middle East women are repressed. Their basic human rights are denied and they are treated as the property of their husbands. To fight the repression of women in the Middle East and in the world more generally, Actac says, is a significant part of the PKK's mission. 'Our revolutionary struggle means that here men and women are equal, standing shoulder to shoulder,' she says. 'Only in our party is this the case and so we are an example of how men and women should work and live together. Our role is to inspire and mobilise. When women see us they will understand that there is an alternative to the way they are forced to live their lives.'
Until a decade or so ago it was the Soviet Union that performed this role, Actac says, until the leadership's 'deviation into dogmatism' caused the Communist regime to collapse. Actac is adamant. 'The failure of the USSR is one of the main reasons for the continuing reactionary ignorance among the masses, both the dominant men and the unconscious women,' she says. 'We have to be the standard bearers of liberation now.'
I ask whether there is anything she misses from her former life. 'It's a hard life up here in the mountains,' I say. 'Back in Istanbul there are people out clubbing, dancing with boyfriends, drinking, having fun. Don't you miss all of that?'
I also want to know if Actac and Khairallah are, as they appear to be from their body language, an item. This must be a problem for an organisation that bans sex between its members, but has 10,000 men and women living together in close confines up mountains with very little in the way of diversion. The attempt to eradicate any mention or practice of sex merely makes everyone obsess about it. I want to know if my suspicions about Actac and Khairallah are correct partly because it would be a flagrant, if magnificent, breach of party rules by the senior command and partly because it would be an amusing confirmation that they are both human, flawed and, despite the potential for dialectic pillow talk, occasionally have fun.
I am wondering about Marxist sex - thesis, antithesis, synthesis - when Actac answers my question. Her words rattle out like gravel hitting ceramic. 'I had a boyfriend and I drank and smoked and danced, but I found all those things trivial,' she says. 'They are not things that are comparable to what I am now seeking. They are small things. I am engaged on important things.
I cannot be happy when I see a nation persecuted. I cannot stand by. I have to struggle.'
I ask Actac brightly if she has any questions for me. 'Yes' she says. 'Why are you asking me social questions and asking my [male] comrade political questions?' I move on to books. Other PKK cadres have cited Simone de Beauvoir as a favourite author. Who would be hers? 'Lenin,' she says.
Spending time with the PKK is disorientating. It is impossible to get a firm grasp on what is going on. One moment they resemble a joint girl guides/boy scouts summer camp led by someone with a worrying interest in rifle-shooting, the next they are back to talking, seriously, of martyrs, self-immolation, death and the struggle. The combination is disconcerting. Even moments of levity - a girls' game which involves hurling a ball at each other and screaming with high-pitched giggles if hit, a surreptitious cigarette out of the commander's sight, a fit of bashfulness when faced by a Western photographer - are tainted by an underlying darkness.
Who are these teenage cadres? Why do they make their way to the mountains in the knowledge that to go back to their homes will be, given the attention of the security services in their own countries, very hard? Few are in contact with their families. All profess a willingness to kill and die for the cause. All have made huge sacrifices, though they may not know it yet. All appear to be having tremendous fun.
With some, questions are deflected with the language of the manifestoes. Comrade Janda, from Qamishli in eastern Syria says she joined four years ago, at the age of 12, 'because [her] nation is under persecution and torture'. 'It is useless to have lessons when you are in an occupied country,' she says, adding that her family, who have a long history of left-wing political involvement, suffered 'indirect' repression. 'The regime were putting obstacles in front of the Kurdish people. My family did not prevent me coming. It is better to be here than anywhere else.'
Seventeen-year-old Comrade Rosa, a Russian Kurd, born in Moscow and, like comrade Janda, raised in a 'revolutionary family' tells me how she was 'very influenced by the ideology of the manifesto of Abdullah Ocalan. Firstly, the liberation of humanity, secondly the liberation of women.' She clenches a fist.
Others don't bother with the ideology. Comrade Shaheen, 20, left his home in northeastern Iraq in 1998. His father is a tailor and had taken him out of school to help him earn money for his family. Shaheen says he joined the PKK because he 'was influenced by the kind of life of my comrades here, living in the mountains, hiking and marching and training for a specific aim.'
Then there is the 18-year-old, also born into a family with a history of political activism though this time in Germany, who joined the PKK to be close to his Kurdish roots. There's the 29-year-old Swiss man, entirely devoid of Kurdish blood, who says he is an 'internationalist and a humanist'. And there is the Kurdish girl from Holland, who speaks English, Dutch and Kurdish with equal facility, who left her college in Amsterdam to join. 'You can go anywhere and life will be the same, but here you have 5,000 women fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights,' she says. 'We will stay here until the final victory.'
So, after spending several days talking to several dozen recruits, what have I understood? Very little, to be honest. The recruits are young, many are from families with a history of involvement in left-wing politics, most are Kurdish, some feel strongly nationalistic, some are politically inspired, some are drawn by the prospect of adventure, and some by both. Given the minimal life opportunities available in your average provincial town in the Kurdish dominated regions of the Middle East, particularly for women, one can see the attraction of life as a guerrilla. Or maybe I am just too jaded and simply cannot credit their unabashed, unalloyed idealism, their genuine commitment to a cause.
After all, currently life isn't so bad in the hills. No one has had to fight for nearly three years. There are no knocks on the door from the government's heavies in the middle of the night. The daily routine involves a dawn reveille, physical exercise for an hour, military lessons for the rest of the morning and then political lessons in the afternoon, all interspersed with lots of volleyball and soccer and hiking. The prohibition on sex between cadres must be very difficult to enforce, as a number of cadres hint to me. There are books to read and films to see. On a shelf in one bunker I found the following: Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, six of Ocalan's works all with titles like We Will Win Freedom, Ten Days with Commander Marcos and the Zapatistas by a Turkish journalist, An Introduction to the History of Thought and Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are also communal video screenings of carefully selected 'revolutionary works'. The most popular is Braveheart.
On the plateau where we spent two days waiting, is a small, white-washed concrete building with a spire. It looks like a mosque or a shrine and, for those who have made the leap of faith, performs a similar function. It is the PKK's 'martyrs memorial'. In its well-kept garden are rows of graves, each with a name, age and date of death inscribed on it. Inside the memorial are large posters of Abdullah Ocalan, a huge PKK flag and, in carefully constructed wooden display cases, rows of photographs of young faces. The pictures cover one wall and half of another. The rest of that wall is covered by the flags and the posters. There are no pictures on the other two walls. But they are not empty. There are a series of wooden display frames waiting to be filled with the faces of the dead. And outside, there is room for many more graves.
The day I stood at the memorial, Jay Garner, the retired general appointed by Washington to govern Iraq, arrived in Baghdad. The implications of this do not appear to have sunk in up in the Qandil mountains. Comrade Jamal was very sanguine about the prospects for Kadek. Capitalism was entering its final stage, he told me. All other forms of government were being swept aside. The autocracy in Iraq had gone. The monarchy in Saudi Arabia was next. Then would come the oligarchy of Turkey. The maps of the Middle East were being withdrawn and the old borders of the colonial era dissolving. This was a tremendous opportunity for the party, he said. Victory was drawing close.
There is another reading of the current situation of the PKK. The PKK is a terrorist organisation. It exists on a piece of land which is now directly governed by America. America is in the middle of a war on terror. Turkey and the other local Kurdish groups are, despite occasional differences, strategic allies. In short, it is only a matter of time before the US, with willing auxiliaries, moves to destroy the PKK, Kadek, its mountain enclave and comrades Gulbar, Rosa, Chedam and everyone else.
Outside the martyrs memorial is a detachment of new recruits,
two thirds male, one third female, but commanded by a woman. They have
just arrived in Kadek territory and are taken directly to the martyr's
memorial. They walk around the graves and the pictures with solemn faces
and then stand in ranks as a salute is fired. Then they sit on benches
in the memorial gardens, boys on one bench, girls on another, and drink
orange squash, smoke, play with flowers and talk and laugh. Then they
form ranks and march away into the hills.
3. – The New York Times – “The Erdogan Experiment”:
11 May 2003 / by Deborah Sontag
The new prime minister of Turkey stood stiffly in his formal office
in Ankara, his mustache pulling his mouth into a frown. Serious pouches
hung beneath his eyes as he shook hands briskly and positioned his lanky
frame on a high-backed chair. Like a patient nodding to the dentist,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49, signaled he was ready to be interviewed. It
seemed clear that he would have preferred to stretch out on the carpet
and go to sleep.
There was no trace of Erdogan's famous charisma, of the fiery oratorical skills on display just the previous day in Parliament, when I found myself responding instinctively to his booming voice's cues, knowing, without understanding the Turkish, when I was supposed to rise, to clap, to cheer. Rather, during that evening interview last month, at several points while his remarks were being translated, Erdogan's head bobbed forward and his eyelids drooped shut. He could be forgiven; his party's first months in office had been grueling.
The war in neighboring Iraq was drawing to a close, much to Erdogan's relief. The war was unpopular in Turkey and costly to Erdogan. Because he is a pragmatist, Erdogan supported America's request to use Turkish soil as a staging ground. Yet, despite the fact that his party held two-thirds of the Parliament, he failed to win legislators' approval for the request. It was a significant failure, damaging his new government's relations with the Bush administration, depriving Turkey of billions in loans and grants and provoking questions about Erdogan's competence and control of his party.
As he also backpedaled on the ever-divisive Cyprus issue, fumbled with Turkey's wrecked economy and confronted Kurdish riots in an earthquake zone it seemed that Erdogan was extinguishing all too quickly the hopefulness that his fledgling party's emphatic win in the Nov. 3 general elections had produced. Influential Turkish columnists abandoned their infatuation with the young Turk who had vanquished the old guard. One, Cengiz Candar, told me he had ''stopped even pronouncing Erdogan's name publicly.'' (It is pronounced EHR-doe-ahn, by the way).
Such pressure would have taxed the most seasoned politician, and Erdogan, once a popular mayor of Istanbul, was a novice on the national stage. Yet Erdogan was accustomed to proving himself. A pious man in a country where secularism is worshiped, and once a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he had always been an outsider. And now, though he was tired, he was, more precisely, annoyed. It had been only a month since he assumed the premiership. He clearly felt, not unreasonably, that he deserved the benefit of the doubt.
The stakes were high, as not only his advisers but also opposition leaders told me. Tayyip Erdogan was an experiment for Turkey with ramifications that went well beyond Turkey. As a devout Muslim with an Islamist past who had nonetheless evolved into a modern, pro-Western democrat, Erdogan had the potential to set a powerful example for the region. If he could ease Turks into a less hostile separation of mosque and state, if he could help Turkey undertake long-overdue democratic reforms, then perhaps one day he would exemplify a way in which Islamic faith and democratic principles not only coexisted but also collaborated.
But first he needed to be given a chance to succeed. The transition to statesman after a life of struggle with the state was not a simple one. Fingering the Turkish flag on his lapel, Erdogan crossed his legs. ''Our people made us the governing party,'' he said defiantly. ''Those who claim to respect democracy, why don't they respect the vote of the people?''
Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look down on him or do both. He knows they can't quite believe that Erdogan is their prime minister; indeed, many seem embarrassed by his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf that his wife wears as an emblem of her faith. He knows they are suspicious of his claims that he has evolved and that they imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the nation. ''I have faced this all my life,'' Erdogan said.
But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,'' Erdogan said. ''As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party cannot have a religion. Only individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be exploiting religion, and religion is so supreme that it cannot be exploited or taken advantage of.''
To understand Erdogan's dilemma, it helps to understand the depths of Turkey's commitment to secularism. It began with the very establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and the founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rejection of traditional Islam as incompatible with his goal of establishing a modern European state. Ataturk shut the Islamic caliphate, dissolved religious courts, outlawed mystic sects and secularized schools. He replaced the Arabic script with Latin script. He outlawed the fez and all but imposed the homburg. He adopted the Swiss civil code and granted women the vote.
As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military took on the role of protecting Ataturk's legacy, which meant keeping elected officials on a leash and overthrowing or undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on probation. Turkey's ''deep state'' sees its duty as preventing the nation from backsliding into religion and ethnic, especially Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out. While most Turks came to consider themselves Turks first, they were still Muslims. And from the start, especially in the heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this day, in what seems an arcane, self-defeating expression of Turkey's secularism, women wearing head scarves are not allowed to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister Erdogan's two daughters, in fact, go to Indiana University, where they are free to cover their hair and get a degree at the same time. His wife does not appear at state functions lest her designer head scarf provoke fears of an imminent theocracy.
Erdogan's family comes from a devout world in the Black Sea region. His father, Ahmet, migrated to Istanbul in the 1930's, settled in Kasimpasa, a rough working-class quarter, and found work as a captain with a state maritime company. Kasimpasa has a body language all its own, and Turks say that Erdogan retains the Kasimpasa swagger, a way of leading with his right shoulder. Although the district was infamous for its gangs and pickpockets, Erdogan remembers the neighborhood as an idyll, with fruit trees and fields, where kids could get their hands dirty. ''I was shaped by that mud,'' he said, ''not like the poor kids of today who are surrounded by asphalt.''
Near the now-ramshackle mosque where Erdogan studied the Koran as a child, the district manager of Kasimpasa, Ali Riza Sivritepe, spoke of growing up with him. They fetched water from the same well, flew kites and shot marbles over the irregular paving stones. (Erdogan, steely in his ambition even then, always won.) ''He was a very serious child,'' Sivritepe said. ''Everyone respected him here and called him Big Brother.''
His father, according to a biography, was an authoritarian with a temper that could be tamed best by Erdogan's kissing his shoes. Once, Erdogan's father punished him for using bad language by hanging him from the ceiling by the arms. ''After that day, I never swore again,'' Erdogan said.
When Erdogan was 7, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes -- ''God bless his soul,'' Erdogan said -- was hanged. Elected in 1950 in Turkey's first free elections, Menderes was a secularist but demonstrated a tolerance for religious practice that his predecessors had not possessed. Over 10 years in government, he faltered and became repressive, and when the Turkish military overthrew him, the coup was largely welcomed. But when Menderes was sent to the gallows, many Turks were horrified. ''Some are saddened by things like this, and they give up,'' Erdogan said. ''In my case, this sadness turned into an attraction for politics.''
Part of the Erdogan lore is that in fifth grade he refused to use a newspaper as a prayer rug in a religion class. It was inappropriate, he told his teacher, who took a special interest in him and persuaded Erdogan's father to send him to a state-run Prayer Leaders and Preachers school, which offered a secular curriculum amplified by religious instruction. Erdogan was particularly good at reciting nationalist poetry. During poetry contests, Sivritepe recalled, Erdogan would hide a Turkish flag inside his shirt and whip it out for dramatic effect.
Erdogan was also good at soccer, but he kept his playing secret from his father for years, hiding his soccer shoes in the coal bin. His father considered soccer a diversion from education and faith. In truth, politics was the real diversion. Erdogan juggled soccer -- playing professionally for 11 years -- political activism and school for more than a decade. He graduated with a degree in management at age 27.
During that era, political Islam became a force in Turkey, and Necmettin Erbakan, a German-educated engineer, emerged as its leader. Erbakan preached a return to religious values, which resonated in the heartland and in the poorer urban neighborhoods. While Erbakan's first party, National Order, was banned for fomenting fundamentalism, the authorities later encouraged him to try again, seeing him as a counterweight to leftist parties. But his second party, National Salvation, grew steadily more radical and anti-Western, inspired by the Islamic revolution in neighboring Iran.
Erdogan was one of Erbakan's disciples. His political climb began when he was appointed chairman of National Salvation's youth group. Young Erdogan would practice his fiery rhetoric on abandoned ships, facing into the wind as he rehearsed his salutation: ''My sacred brothers whose hearts beat with the excitement of a big future Islamic conquest. . . . ''
Erdogan's future wife, Emine, belonged to an Islamist women's group, the Idealist Ladies Association, and she was mesmerized by his oratory. After six months of chaperoned dating, the couple became engaged and married in 1978. Two years later, National Salvation was dissolved along with all other parties in another military coup. Not to be suppressed, National Salvation was reborn as the Welfare Party, which is where the Islamists, some of whom saw an Islamic state as their goal and some of whom aspired only to greater tolerance of religion, hit their organizational stride.
Erdogan named a son after his leader, and Erbakan made him chairman of the Welfare Party's Istanbul branch. They built a political machine that provided social services as it secured political power, appealing to the needy and disgruntled as well as to the faithful. But they did not always agree. Erdogan stopped kissing Erbakan's hand because it struck him as retrograde, and he subtly pushed for greater democracy within the party and for broader outreach. Erdogan was not Erbakan's first choice to be the Welfare Party candidate for mayor, but the older man bowed to the will of the party. Erdogan took his campaign into pubs, discotheques and even bordellos, and computerized the campaign offices. He made women the worker bees of his organization and involved secular men too.
In 1994, Erdogan was elected the first Islamist-oriented mayor of Istanbul. His victory stunned the country. It meant that the Islamists were succeeding in reaching beyond the mosque communities. It also meant that Erdogan was a force to be contended with. Indeed, many found Erdogan a more compelling package than his mentor. Whereas Erbakan was a flashy dresser and and an autocratic figure, Erdogan styled himself as an authentic representative of the masses. ''In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks,'' Erdogan once said. ''Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.''
At the Hope Barbershop in Kasimpasa that Erdogan used to frequent, Ibrahim Azak, a barber, called him ''the best'' at politics for just that reason. ''He was raised in a place like this,'' Azak said. ''He doesn't come from a palace. When he shops, he carries the bags himself.''
As mayor, Erdogan adopted modern management practices and proved singularly adept at delivering services, installing new water lines, cleaning up the streets, planting trees and improving transportation. He opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his e-mail address, established municipal hot lines. He was considered ethical and evenhanded. (One building-trade professional, however, told me that the corruption endemic to Istanbul City Hall persisted under Erdogan and that donations of equipment and vehicles were still solicited in exchange for building permits.)
Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of Istanbul, Erdogan began both provoking anxieties and recoiling from the fact that he had provoked them. He banned alcohol from municipal establishments, which created concern that he would eliminate alcohol from restaurants too. But he never did. He revived an elaborate project for a mosque complex in the city's heart, then backed off when there were protests. He never clearly allayed secular concerns, keeping them alive instead with comments like: ''Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.''
Meanwhile, the Welfare Party finished first in a close national election, and Erbakan became the country's first Islamist prime minister in 1996. With his rhetorical cannons firing away, he declared Turkish politics a pitiful imitation of the West and announced a campaign for worldwide Muslim solidarity. He overreached. After 12 months, the military forced him to resign.
There had long been differences between the younger party leaders, who came to be known as the modernists, and Erbakan and his men -- whom they called the Politburo. When Erbakan was ousted and subsequently banned from politics, the modernists had their opening. But first they had to withstand the legacy of Erbakan's radical provocations of the establishment, a crackdown that would pave the way for Erdogan's rise.
In December 1997, the Welfare Party sent Erdogan to a political rally in southeastern Siirt, an impoverished, religious district where his wife's family originated. On that day, as he had several times before, he recited a quatrain by Ziya Gokalp, an ideologue of Turkish nationalism: ''The mosques are our barracks,/the domes our helmets,/the minarets our bayonets,/ and the believers our soldiers.''
Erdogan told me that the poem had been approved for textbooks by the education ministry, and he added, somewhat disingenuously, I think, that it principally served oratorical purposes. ''It was an attention getter,'' he said. ''It would make the people spirited.'' In the speech following the poem, however, Erdogan went on to proclaim that Islam was his compass and that anyone who tried to stifle prayer in Turkey would face an exploding volcano.
It was what one observer, Asla Aydintasbas, a New York-based columnist for the newspaper Sabah, described as an ''Al Sharpton moment.'' Erdogan was playing to the crowd and prodding the military. And the military took the bait. Erdogan was charged with inciting hatred on the basis of religion, and convicted.
But this time, it was the bureaucracy that had overreached. Erdogan's conviction not only enhanced his popularity among religious Turks but also disturbed many secular Turks. ''It's not right what happened to him,'' said Cuneyd Zapsu, a businessman who owns the Azizler holding company. ''I don't want to live in a country where someone goes to jail for a poem. He was persecuted because they sensed his power, and I think it was not religion but a class thing. The so-called elite has never lived in this country's reality. They've always been afraid of the people. That's why all our laws are restrictions, not freedoms.''
In 1999, thousands accompanied Erdogan to the gates of the prison in western Thrace where he would serve five months. Erdogan told me that when the door clanked shut behind him it marked a breaking point as well as a turning point. ''Prison,'' Erdogan said, ''matures you.''
Zapsu visited Erdogan in prison frequently. A free-spirited 46-year-old, Zapsu first met Erdogan when he was running for mayor. Erdogan had been looking for a liaison to the business community, and he heard that Zapsu, whose grandfather was a well-known Kurdish poet, was a maverick with an open mind. '' 'I don't want your money,' '' Zapsu said Erdogan told him. '' 'I want your help. Nobody from the establishment wants to talk to me.' '' At that time, Zapsu said, Erdogan was more rigid. He wouldn't shake the hands of Zapsu's daughters; he hugs them now. But Zapsu said there was something special about Erdogan. During Erdogan's incarceration, Zapsu worked to persuade him to break with Erbakan and his anti-Western philosophy. It wasn't that hard, Zapsu said. Erdogan was coming to that conclusion himself. And Erbakan never visited anyway.
For the modernists in the Welfare Party, Erbakan's ouster followed by Erdogan's conviction undeniably demonstrated that confrontation with the establishment wasn't getting them anywhere. Fehmi Koru, columnist for an Islamic-oriented newspaper, told me: ''When I first started writing about democracy, some members of the community criticized me openly, saying Islam and democracy were incompatible. But they grew ready for a change.''
They decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader political base. They would stop conducting politics with religious symbols and demonstrate instead how true belief informs politics wisely. Metin Heper, a political scientist, said that Erdogan believes in the potential of Islam to unite people around an ideal and build morality, integrity and drive. ''He believes in a kind of Islamic version of the Protestant work ethic, where you work hard for the benefit of the country because it is the good and right thing to do according to Islam,'' Heper said. A poll taken to determine the public's chief concerns generated the party name, Justice and Development, and its symbol, a glowing electric light bulb.
Justice and Development would be a party in which religious people could feel at home, but it wouldn't be a religious party. Its members would be Muslim Democrats in the mold of Europe's Christian Democrats. It would entice Westernized Turks from abroad, like Egemen Bagis, 33, a businessman living in New Jersey until Erdogan recruited him to run for Parliament without, Bagis said, ever asking whether he drank (he does) or whether his wife covered her hair (she doesn't).
Zapsu, a founder of the party, introduced Erdogan to Ishak Alaton, an industrialist who is part of Istanbul's small Jewish community. The avuncular Alaton told me that he came to see Erdogan as a ''practical man of good will'' who represents ''the forces of change'' in Turkey.
Just as Zapsu was Erdogan's Henry Higgins, advising him on how to deal with the establishment and the West, Alaton took on introducing Erdogan to the American Jewish community and helping him send signals that he would maintain Turkey's relationship with Israel. It required a little re-education first. ''They had this impression that the world was run by Jews,'' Alaton said.
On Nov. 3 last year, Erdogan's 16-month-old political party captured the first single-party majority in 15 years and the first substantial one in 50 years. It won 34 percent of the popular vote, which translated into a phenomenal 363 seats out of 550 seats in Parliament. All but one of Turkey's established political parties -- the Republican People's, founded by Ataturk -- failed to reach the 10 percent threshold needed for representation.
The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt, mismanaged and fragmented Turkish political order. It was also an embrace of Erdogan personally but not of Islamism. On election night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment that he would not be an agent of unwanted change. In a news conference, he said that his government would not interfere with anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, would abide by an International Monetary Fund rescue plan and would continue the battle for admission to the European Union. The Turkish markets soared.
Even then, many distrusted his transformation. ''He's saying all the right things about Europe and moving westward,'' an American diplomat told me, ''but I fear he's like a wolf in sheep's clothing.'' Those who knew him well, though, took him at his word. ''He wanted to change the system, but the system changed him,'' said Rusen Cakir, one of Erdogan's biographers. Alaton said he had no concerns that Erdogan was a closet fundamentalist. ''He came to power partly because he had this religious platform, but he knows it's a dead end. He knows confrontation with the bureaucracy on religion would break him.'' One Turkish lawyer put it to me more cynically: ''He believes in profits, not prophets.''
After his victory, Erdogan had a problem: banned from politics in 1998, he could not become prime minister. So Abdullah Gul, who is now the foreign minister, assumed the premiership temporarily. In early December, President Bush invited Erdogan, still only chairman of the party, to the White House. This caused considerable controversy in Turkey, since it meant the United States was according international legitimacy to a leader considered illegitimate by the Turkish military.
According to Bagis, who served as Erdogan's interpreter during the December meeting, Bush raised the issue of faith that Erdogan has worked so hard to keep in the background. Startling the Turks, Bush said: ''You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in the Almighty. That's why we'll be great partners.'' Erdogan left Washington with Bush's backing for Turkey's long-frustrated accession to the European Union and headed to Europe to lobby for a firm date for talks. There he faced his first serious setback. The E.U. scheduled negotiations to begin in December 2004, but only if Turkey had undertaken sufficient reforms.
Erdogan's party, meanwhile, speedily passed a reform of a more self-interested variety, amending the Turkish constitution so that the ban on Erdogan could be lifted. Conveniently, the results of elections in Siirt were nullified because of procedural irregularities, opening up a few seats in Parliament. So Erdogan was preparing to run in by-elections just as the United States was moving closer to war in Iraq.
Erdogan had been open in his disdain for Saddam Hussein and calculating in his backing for the American request to base tens of thousands of troops in southern Turkey. The Turkish public, however, was adamantly antiwar, and many in Erdogan's party, especially the more hard-line religious members, firmly opposed him on this issue. Erdogan was quickly learning that his high-wire act wasn't going to be easy to pull off. He was supposed to be the anti-Erbakan, so he was not about to impose his will on his party. Critics of Erdogan's performance, however, say that he should have done just that. ''Leaders have to lead,'' the columnist Candar said, adding cuttingly, ''Being the darling of the simple people is not enough during such turbulent times.''
Erdogan's advisers said that the United States did not fully grasp the political risk that he was taking and how much he needed written agreements demonstrating what Turkey would get in return for cooperating. ''They were used to dealing with our generals and not a politician trying to be democratic,'' Zapsu said. The Turks were insulted when the Americans sent a State Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an agreement with them. They acknowledge that they misjudged the United States' determination to launch a war, with or without Turkey's help, and that they bargained inexpertly. They were thin-skinned too when details of the financial bartering were leaked and cartoons in American newspapers portrayed them as bazaar hagglers. ''There was a very ugly campaign against my country,'' Erdogan said.
In the end, Gul, the acting prime minister, had to go to Parliament with promises but no signed guarantees from the Americans. The military establishment didn't want to help Erdogan, so the generals, whose support for Turkey's participation in the war might have persuaded opposition members to vote for it, kept a low profile. Parliament failed -- by three votes -- to authorize the stationing of American troops in Turkey. The Americans were furious.
In early March, Erdogan was elected to Parliament and Gul prepared to step aside. Erdogan told me that Bush called to congratulate him, saying he'd never known any politician who had won 85 percent of the vote; Bush also asked him to try again in Parliament. Erdogan, however, told the American president that he needed to wait for Parliament to formally approve him as prime minister first, which his Turkish critics saw as cheeky, immature standing on ceremony.
By the time Erdogan was installed as prime minister, the Americans were asking only for the right to fly over Turkish airspace, and they got it, Erdogan said. Luckily for Turkey, the war was quick and contained. As it was drawing to a close, during that April interview, Erdogan insisted that Turkey had done more for the U.S. war effort than any other country except England. Turkish airspace was a singularly essential ingredient, he said. ''How could they feel let down by our doing all this?'' he said defensively.
Earlier this year, when Muslim faithful were traveling to Saudi Arabia for the hajj, the new Turkish authorities shrouded a billboard at the airport that featured a model in an itsy bitsy bikini. Arch-secularists wrung their hands: this must be the first sign of the coming fundamentalism, they cried. The swimsuit company sued the government, and secularists cheered it on, until one day some realized that they were rushing to the defense of a pretty cheesy picture. Suddenly, everyone got quiet. Overnight, the billboard was moved to a discreet location and uncovered. It was a small, common-sensical compromise. But it raised the possibility of grander, more profound ones.
Alaton argues that Erdogan should be given more time by his own people and more open support from Europe and America. ''Erdogan shouldn't be punished,'' he said. ''Maybe people of good faith should understand how important he is.''
And even Kemal Dervis -- a leading opposition figure and, as an elite, polyglot former World Bank official, the antithesis of Erdogan -- told me he thinks the government's success, remote as it seems now, would truly reverberate. ''It would send the message that you can be an overtly Muslim country and part of the club of developed nations too,'' Dervis said. ''The significance of that for the world at large would be incredible.''
Unfortunately for him, Erdogan has been scrambling on several fronts. His government rattled the business community by advocating a pension increase, just the kind of populist spending measure that Turkey didn't need. Further, while he had pledged to push a plan to reunify Cyprus, his government ended up backing away from a showdown with Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, and the Turkish military at a critical moment. This greatly disappointed those who thought he would be an agent of change. To take on the military too soon might be suicidal, they acknowledged, but to defer confrontation could also render him impotent.
Slipping confidence in Erdogan, as always, has been colored by distrust of his intentions -- or at least his party's intentions -- on the religion issue. But maybe that concern is misplaced.
Maybe Erdogan doesn't have the guts or power to push through
any serious reforms, least of all on religion. Or maybe Erdogan, straddling
two worlds, is the perfect person to defuse the tensions between secular
and religious forces in Turkey.
4. - The Financial Times - "Turkey takes a dive in the fortunes of war":
12 May 2003 / by Ian Bremmar
Investors looking around the world to identify who stands to gain
from the war in Iraq are in for some surprises. Russia looks good. Turkey
doesn't.
That is different from pre-war expectations. Russia's decision to join France and Germany in opposition to the war surprised many in the Bush administration, rekindling Cold War voices that said "you can't trust the Russians". Relations between the two countries cooled as the war unfolded, with Russian technology - and technicians - facilitating some of the few losses experienced by US forces on the ground. Russia's continued support for Iran's nuclear programme has made matters worse. Hopes were pinned on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent trip to Moscow, but President Vladimir Putin chose to focus on the so far undiscovered Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and rebuffed Blair's request to abandon Iraqi sanctions at the UN.
There will be no quick return to Mr Bush's ranch for Mr Putin. But US frustrations with Russia are short-term. The Bush administration views foreign policy through a national security lens - and in the war on terror Russia is a strategic partner. Washington receives more and better counterterrorist intelligence from Moscow than anywhere except Israel. The significance of this, anchored by regular and high-level relations between the intelligence organisations of both countries, is difficult to overestimate.
Russia is also important as NATO focuses on soft security issues and protection from rogue states. Europe does not have much interest in North Korea. Moscow does, and in an escalating conflict Putin will be called on by Washington to act.
Russia's oil is at least as important. Russia, the world's largest producer, is America's first option to diversify global energy supply away from the Middle East - a key policy goal of the Bush administration.
Finally, unlike Mr Schroeder and Mr Chirac, Putin has a functional relationship with Mr Bush. Through the worst of their troubles, the two spoke regularly. Next month's summit in St Petersburg will bring the two presidents together again, and expectations for the meeting deserve to be high.
Last year Turkey seemed in a secure position. As the sole member of NATO in the region and a strong US ally, the pending war in Iraq only enhanced Turkey's importance to the US. Times have changed. An irony of the war on Iraq is that the most democratic of Islamic states caused the greatest trouble for Washington. Washington relied on the strength of its relations with Turkey's most anti-democratic (and secular) institution, the Turkish military. That was before the fateful vote on March 1, when the Turkish parliament rejected the US request to use Turkish bases for the war on Iraq. Turkey's initial request to the US Treasury department for $90bn to secure its full co-operation (40 per cent of annual Turkish gross domestic product) hardly smoothed the way.
Unfortunately, the problems of Turkey have as much to do with changing geopolitics of the region as with Prime Minister Erdogan and his party's unwillingness to go along with US strategy. Despite the Kurdish issue in the north, Iraqi stability plays against Turkey's importance to the US. The more smoothly the state-building process proceeds in a new Iraq with a large US military presence, pro-Western emigres at the helm and a pro-Israel foreign policy, the less weight Turkey carries as a strategic ally of the United States. And with Saddam Hussein no longer a threat, the US military presence in Turkey will diminish. This, together with the reduction of US troops in Germany and Saudi Arabia, makes likely an announcement on force reductions in Turkey in coming months. It is hard to imagine America's reliance on Turkey remaining intact.
To make matters worse, tense relations between the US and "old Europe" have raised a question over those aspiring European Union member states that played a supportive role in the war. Anyone who believed Turkey's EU accession was on a smooth path had to revise his position by the time the second UN resolution was shot down and Mr Chirac wagged a finger at the "irresponsible" East Europeans. Turkey was always a stretch to be considered a member of Europe proper. Seemingly benefiting from both NATO and the EU, Turkey is now positioned to fall foul of both.
As for Turkey's immediate payments schedule, the government can ride a small post-war euphoric trend and should not fail to fulfil its obligations over the coming months. But if Turkey's external balances are to benefit from its expanded scope for trade with Iraq in the near term, its relationship with the US will have to improve. That, I fear, is not on the cards.
* The author is president of Eurasia Group and senior
fellow at the World Policy Institute
4. - HiPakistan - "Turkey’s stand on Iraq war":
12 May 2003 / by Ishtiaq Ahmad
By acting both courageously and cautiously in its approach to wards
the Iraq war, Turkey has secured the image of a dignified Muslim nation
which does not compromise its national interest and regional preference,
even if that goes against the will of the mighty United States.
The positive outcome of such an approach is already visible in the form of the transformation of the Turkish image in the Arab-Muslim public opinion from one of a traditionally pro-Israeli US puppet to a progressive Muslim state that has the guts to stand up for its own cause and that of its Arab-Muslim neighbors in the most difficult of circumstances.
Ankara’s commendable diplomatic conduct during the Iraq war has broken two traditional myths about Turkey in the Muslim world: one, that its secular-nationalist establishment is always subservient to US-Jewish interests; and, two, that only political Islamists can bring about a pro-Arab/Muslim orientation in the Turkey’s Middle Eastern policy. What has happened in Turkey is quite the opposite of what can be expected from it under a pro-Islamic regime.
Islamist leaders of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, did not spare any opportunity to secure Turkish land access for the US Forth Infantry Division to open the ‘northern front’ against Iraq. Thanks to the public posturing and backdoor manoeuvring by the secular-nationalist state establishment and opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) that political opportunism and naivety on the part of AKP leadership failed to materialize.
On March 1, the AKP government tabled the motion to authorize the deployment of US troops and other forces on Turkish soil in the Grand National Assembly. The government had deliberately delayed tabling of the motion for two days to get a “state cover” for it at the National Security Council (MGK) meeting of 31 February. However, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer continued his opposition to the government proposal on the basis of its lack of constitutionality and international legitimacy. Military members of the MGK, including Chief of the General Staff Hilmi Ozkuk, did not make any recommendation. Both CHP MPs and a number of AKP MPs decided to follow the boldly cautious state line, causing the parliamentary rejection of the motion.
The Islamists still hoped that Erdogan’s assumption of premiership after his electoral victory on March 9 could reverse the historic decision. But this also did not occur. In the end, the parliament did open the Turkish airspace for US-British air operations against Iraq after the start of the war; it did endorse the April 3 government agreement with US Secretary of State Colin Powel for allowing US “supplies and humanitarian aid” to cross the Turkish territory. However, both permissions had a pre-condition: the right of around 40,000 Turkish troops deployed alongside south-eastern Iraqi border to cross into northern Iraq if Kurdish authorities there make any move towards independence.
The price-tag for the Turkish sell-out to Washington was quite huge: US $ 8.5 as six-month bridge loan and $ 26 billion as longer-term loan. The Islamist government was out there to use the US money to consolidate its domestic political position, disregarding the anti-war public mood at home and abroad, as well as the potentially negative fallout such a move on Turkey’s part could have vis-è-vis its ties with the Arab neighbors and with regard to the larger context of Washington’s post-Iraq war, and potentially pro-Israeli agenda, for the Middle East. But the secular state establishment and its political allies stood firmly.
The ‘northern front’ never opened, and the huge US armada stranded in the Eastern Mediterranean, including 60, 000 troops and 255 warplanes, had to take the long route via Suez Canal to invade the south of Iraq. It was a big rebuke to Washington. Yet Ankara has been able to secure the US help in containing Kurdish aspirations for independence.
Annoyed it may be at Ankara, but Washington surely would not like to be embroiled in a Kurdish quagmire in northern Iraq. The US appreciation of the Turkish sensitivity to the Iraqi Kurdish question is clear from the way it allowed Turkish military advisors to visit the oil-rich Kirkuk within no time of its capture by Kurdish peshmargas and US marines. Turkish troops continue to be stationed along the Iraqi border, as well as the 20-kilometre border buffer zone in northern Iraq, to deter any independence bid by Iraqi Kurds and prevent cross-border infiltration of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in the guise of refugees.
Without the ‘northern front’ option, the US has anyway won the war in Iraq, and, due to American annoyance, Turkey may not get a significant role in the reconstruction of Iraq. However, by sacrificing such short-term temptations, Turkey may have secured longer-term gains, which, apart from regional strategic achievement and public image improvement, include the enhancement of its international stature as a country that is not up for sale (a lesson for the Americans not to miscalculate again) and its preference for international justice and the rule of law over Iraq (a proof to European Union leaders, France and Germany, that Turkey’s quest for European Union membership is not without practical manifestation of its growing adherence to European values that they themselves championed in the Iraqi context).
Turkey’s conduct on Iraq offers two important lessons for Pakistan: First, any change in favour of a bold, pragmatic and dignified foreign policy should not be expected from inherently dogmatic Islamists in government or on the streets, or their na_ve and opportunistic counterparts in politics. While the political Islamists of Turkey were ironically hell bent upon the serving the US interests on a matter involving not just the destiny of Iraqi Muslims but Muslim nations all across the world; their more radical counterparts in Pakistan go to the opposite extreme of a militant-reactionary expression against hegemonic power such as the United States, further maligning the ‘Pakistani image’ in the Western world.
The second lesson is that if a state establishment sincerely wants, it can really make a difference in causing a radical foreign policy change. After all, Turkey’s secular establishment, led by the military, has had a long track-record of promoting a subservient national relationship with the United States. Its indirect but instrumental role in achieving the landmark parliamentary decision of March 1 cannot be overlooked.
In Pakistan also, it is the military-led state establishment
that has to make a choice: As it did in the case of Afghanistan twice
in the last 20 years, the military leadership can continue to pursue
a policy of total subservience to the United States for meagre short-term
politico-economic gains, and lose consequently not only national honour
and integrity but larger strategic/regional interest and international
prestige and image. Or, instead, it can follow the Turkish example.
5. - BBC - "Pro-Islamic Turkish leader returns":
12 May 2003
Turkey's former Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan has returned
to political life after a five-year ban for violating the country's
secular constitution.
The 77-year-old veteran politician was forced by the poweful military to leave government in 1997, and a year later his Welfare Party was shut down by Turkey's Constitutional Court on charges of "undermining" the secular political system.
He was sentenced to prison for his pro-Islamist and pro-Kurdish remarks, but escaped the one-year term under a political amnesty.
To mark his return, Mr Erbakan has taken up the position of chairman of the pro-Islamic Saadet - or Felicity - party, a movement which failed to win any parliamentary seats in last November's election
Promoting Islam
Despite the current weakness of Saadet, Mr Erbakan is nonetheless seen as a potential rival to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The AKP, which won a landslide victory in the November elections, traces its roots back to Mr Erbakan's Welfare Party, and Mr Erdogan himself was once a member.
Saadet accuses the AKP of being too moderate, and demands the stronger promotion of Islam.
The secular-minded military is extremely sensitive about any efforts to increase the profile of the faith in the country.
While the AKP has sought to distance itself from the Islamist label, there have been signs of rising tensions between the government and the secular establishment, most recently sparked by the issue of the wearing of Islamist-style headscarves.
The military has warned the AKP against any modification
of the strict regulations which ban headscarves being worn in public
buildings.
6. - The New York Times - "Elation in Cyprus for Now, but Hard Bargaining Lies in Wait":
NICOSIA / 12 May 2003 / by Marlise Simons
For the past three weeks, the Greeks and Turks of this long divided
island have known the strange and exhilarating experience of mingling,
an abrupt change after glowering at each other across a cease-fire line
for almost 30 years.
But politicians and diplomats say that the more difficult part of finding a permanent settlement lies ahead.
For the moment, emotions are still running high. With more border checkpoints opening up, crossing has become easier and people keep visiting each other's side of the line.
Both sides are now re-establishing telephone communications and allowing some trade. They are clearing war debris in the no man's land and have announced plans for digging up old minefields. In the divided capital of Nicosia, mayors of the two sides have met to talk about reconnecting barricaded streets.
Changes have come so fast since April 23, when the Turkish side unexpectedly lifted its ban on travel across the cease-fire line, that the new momentum may seem unstoppable.
The politicians of the two sides, accustomed to distrusting each other, cautiously welcome every new gesture, but at the same time examine it for pitfalls. They point to the many previous failed efforts to end the Cyprus crisis as warning signs.
Neither side has showed a firm interest at this point in reopening talks on a permanent agreement — nor, for that matter, in resuming the mediation efforts by the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, which broke down in March.
Álvaro de Soto, Mr. Annan's envoy for Cyprus, said at a recent gathering in New York that the situation "is not stable and does not address the underlying problems."
In less than a year, Cyprus will become a member of the European Union, still a divided island, with no peace settlement in sight. The Greek Cypriot side has negotiated entry on behalf of the whole island. If no settlement is reached, then Turkey, with close to 40,000 troops here, will in effect occupy a portion of a European Union country. Turkey invaded the island in 1974 to stop a coup aimed at uniting Cyprus with Greece.
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited northern Cyprus on Friday, did not offer to cut back troops or return a portion of occupied land, as some in the south had hoped. Instead he asked for the lifting of international sanctions against the north, something that the Greek Cypriot government says can only be part of a broader agreement. Mr. Erdogan repeated the longstanding Turkish view that a future solution had to be based on a federation of two separate Cypriot states.
But talks about such a federation have bogged down over the years, with issues like land and property as the particular sore points. Few property deeds were ever settled after the 1974 Turkish invasion, when 180,000 Greeks fled or were forced to move south. At the same time, 80,000 Turks were forced north. Much land and many houses on both sides still rightfully belong to previous owners.
Under the United Nations plan, the Turkish side, which controls 37 percent of the land, with less than one-fourth of the population, would have to hand over some of that territory. That would mean relocating about 24,000 people, according to the United Nations plan. The Turkish Cypriot leader has refused.
But whatever is worked out at the negotiating table, the results are likely to translate into myriad personal dramas. Families who have explored their chances for return in recent weeks tell widely different stories.
Maro Xanthoulis and her son Pavlos recently visited their long-lost home in Famagusta, now occupied by a Turkish family. They were welcomed inside and saw some of their furniture and the trees they had once planted. Most touching of all, Pavlos said, they were presented with some of their old family photographs thatthe occupants had kept, as if expecting the rightful owners to return someday.
"If we get compensation, we'll buy another house, in the same town," said Pavlos Xanthoulis. "But we will not insist on this one. A peaceful solution is the most important."
Others sound less optimistic. Gulderen Nasifoglu, who is Turkish, described her return to her hometown of Limassol on the Greek side. The house where she grew up no longer existed. It had been replaced by an apartment building. Where her husband's home once stood is now a paved road.
"I felt very sad," she said. "I'm not going back anymore, it's finished. My life has moved on."
Few Cypriots with property claims, though, are likely to remain passive. Already in the first three weeks since the lifting of travel restrictions, there has been a flood of enquiries at Greek government offices by Turkish Cypriots about the deeds to their land or their homes.
Greeks for their part, as future citizens of the European
Union, are reaching for different solutions. Hundreds of suits for property
claims have already been filed by Greeks at the European Court of Justice.
Court officials fear that they may be further inundated.