18
April 2007
1. "Turkey could create new Iraqi front", Turkey's military, long regarded as the protector and guarantor of the Kemalist ideal of a state based on "laïcité" - the separation of church and state and the absence of religious interference into government affairs - asked the Ankara administration last week to approve attacks on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. The reason for the request given by the Turkish military was its mounting frustration over the inability of Iraqi government and US forces to prevent Kurds from attacking Turkish troops across the border.
2. "Ambitions of Iraqi Kurds worry Turkey", Iraqi Kurds have begun flexing their political muscle with new vigor, raising alarms in neighboring Turkey and increasing the risk of greater instability in Iraq's oil-rich north.
3. "Kurds see strategic interest in security crackdown", bodybags have been arriving at regular intervals into this key town in the Kurdish held area of Iraq. Ever since the new security plan for Baghdad kicked in a few months ago the number of dead of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have been rising.
4. "Bill Clinton Favors the PKK", former US President Bill Clinton wants US military protection against Turkey for the Iraqi Kurds including the PKK -- see his interview today with the London Based Arabic language daily Ashrq Al-Awsat. To this end, Clinton wants US forces redeployed within Iraq to meet the Turkish threat. Clinton recommends this redeployment because he believes Turkish military operations against the PKK in northern Iraq would bring a disaster to Turkey and the region.
5. "Brussels declines to endorse 2013 date for Turkey's EU entry", the European Commission has welcomed Turkey's 400-page timetable for implementing EU legislation but refused to comment in advance on Ankara's desire to join the bloc by 2013.
6. "Ankara protest highlight's Turkey's 'culture war'", draped in flags, 370,000 Turks rallied in Ankara on April 14 against their religious-minded prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was a demonstration that emphasized both the intense opposition that Erdogan will face if he stands for president, and the depths of Turkey’s cultural division.
1. - Middle East Times - "Turkey could create new Iraqi front":
16 April 2007 / by Claude Salhani
Turkey's military, long regarded as the protector and guarantor of the Kemalist ideal of a state based on "laïcité" - the separation of church and state and the absence of religious interference into government affairs - asked the Ankara administration last week to approve attacks on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. The reason for the request given by the Turkish military was its mounting frustration over the inability of Iraqi government and US forces to prevent Kurds from attacking Turkish troops across the border.
While it remains unlikely the Ankara government would agree to such a request, there is always the possibility that the Turkish army - or, more likely, a single unit coming under Kurdish fire and suffering casualties - would retaliate, crossing the border into northern Iraq in pursuit of the rebels.
As a first step, Turkey will be pressuring Iraq and the United States to act more aggressively toward the rebels. But, in the absence of positive results, Turkey can - and most likely will - act unilaterally, as it has done in the past.
Turkey staged numerous incursions into Iraq back in the early 1990s using large forces, at times sending in as many as 50,000 troops. But it's a perpetual cat-and-mouse game between the Turkish army and the Kurdish rebels, the latter disappearing as soon as Turkish troops arrive, and reappearing the moment Ankara's soldiers have crossed back over the border.
Should the Turkish army undertake a major offensive against Kurds in Iraq, it would further strain an already thinly-stretched US military, placing it in a precarious situation between two powerful allies in the region; Turkey and the Kurds, both badly-needed friends in the war on terrorism.
Recent attacks by Kurdish forces in southeastern Turkey have frustrated the Turkish military, who would like to be allowed to pursue the Kurdish rebels well into Iraqi territory.
"An operation into Iraq is necessary," Turkey's Gen. Yasar Buyukanit told reporters recently.
Buyukanit said the military had already launched operations against separatists in Turkey's Kurdish region bordering Iraq.
"Our aim is to prevent them from taking positions in the region with the coming of spring," he said. Spring and the thawing of snow and ice allow rebels access to mountain passes.
Casualties suffered in recent clashes - 10 soldiers killed and 29 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters of the PKK or the Kurdish Workers Party - have the Turkish army champing at the bit to go in and eliminate the Kurdish threat, once and for all.
The army is asking the country's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to allow it to take a harsher line against Kurdish guerrillas.
While the Turkish people are almost entirely unified behind the army, Erdogan fears that a violent confrontation at this time might jeopardize his chances of winning the presidency in next month's elections - a vote that is already controversial, given Erdogan's affiliation to an Islamist party.
Indeed, April 14, tens of thousands of Turks took to the streets of Ankara in protest of Erdogan presidential ambitions, reminding the government of the country's Kemalist heritage.
For the United States, the whole episode points to a lose-lose situation. If the Turkish Parliament, at the request of the government were to authorize military action against the Kurds, chances are good the US would lose an irreplaceable ally in northern Iraq.
On the other hand, Washington cannot afford to lose Ankara as an ally, either. Turkey plays an important role in securing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's eastern flank. In that respect, Turkey would be the first line of defense in a region boiling over with Islamist insurgencies, and where anti-US sentiment has never before been so high.
Thus, Washington seems trapped in a "Catch 22" situation: damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If the US government sides with Turkey, it will infuriate the Kurds and lose an ally; if it stands with the Kurds, it could risk losing Ankara's support.
In the US federal capital, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack recognized the legitimacy of Turkey's concerns and called on Ankara and Baghdad to work closely in an effort to resolve the problem. A good idea in theory, but it bears remembering that Baghdad is hardly in a position to dictate policy to the Kurds, who have been administering their region quite successfully since the end of the 1990-91 Gulf War.
The only way out of the bind is for Washington to step
up diplomatic efforts - not exactly the strong point, so far, of the
Bush administration in the Middle East. 
2. - AP - "Ambitions of Iraqi Kurds worry Turkey":
AMMAN / 17 April 2007 / by Robert H. Reid *
Iraqi Kurds have begun flexing their political muscle with new vigor, raising alarms in neighboring Turkey and increasing the risk of greater instability in Iraq's oil-rich north.
The moves — among the most significant involving Kurds since the 2003 invasion of Iraq — have been largely overshadowed by the struggle to curb violence around Baghdad, but they could have a strong impact on Iraq's future, including whether it remains a united country.
Kurdish boldness also comes at a critical time for Turkey, which is facing a growing threat in its own Kurdish region from separatist guerrillas raiding out of northern Iraq and has a presidential election coming up that could aggravate tensions between Islamist and secular Turks.
The fallout already has shaken relations between the United States and Turkey, a longtime ally increasingly frustrated that the overstretched American military in Iraq cannot crack down on Kurdish guerrillas.
That has the United States in a bind — "unwilling to open a new front in northern Iraq. Nor can it afford to lose its support from Iraq's Kurdish population," said Dr. Andrew McGregor, a security analyst and Kurdish expert in Canada, writing on the Web site of the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative think tank.
At the center of the fight are Kurdish aspirations for the ancient city of Kirkuk, the center of Iraq's northern oilfields.
The Kurds want to incorporate Kirkuk into their self-governing region in northern Iraq. They won a major concession in March when they pressured the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into approving plans to move thousands of Arabs out of Kirkuk and resettle them elsewhere.
The program targets Arabs who moved to Kirkuk after July 14, 1968, when Saddam Hussein's party took power. Saddam sent thousands of Arabs, many of them impoverished Shiite Muslims from the south, into Kirkuk to dilute the Kurdish presence there.
The Kurds' aim is to reduce the Arab population of the city before Kirkuk residents vote later this year whether to join the Kurdish self-governing region.
Opponents hope to delay the referendum or cancel it altogether. They fear that gaining control of Kirkuk would lead the Kurds, who make up 15 percent to 20 percent of Iraq's population, to set up an independent country entirely.
Nevertheless, the opponents within al-Maliki's administration caved in after the Kurds threatened to resign from the Cabinet — a move that would have spelled the end of the fragile, U.S.-backed governing coalition.
"For the Kurds, Kirkuk is nonnegotiable," said Dr. Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Violence will only continue and spike toward the referendum."
The Kurds used similar hardball tactics in February to win concessions granting them a major say in what companies are granted rights to exploit Iraqi oilfields in Kurdish-controlled areas.
But the March decision on relocation was even bigger, sending shock waves into neighboring Turkey, which has long feared the rising stature of Iraqi Kurds will further embolden Kurdish guerrillas fighting for self-rule in southeastern Turkey.
The insurgent Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, use bases in northern Iraq to launch attacks into southern Turkey, and Turkey is growing angry over the failure of U.S. and Iraqi forces to curb the attacks.
After the Iraqi Cabinet's decision to relocate Arabs from Kirkuk, Turkey warned publicly that its interests in the region cannot be ignored.
The hardline head of Turkey's military, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, went further, requesting permission last week to attack Kurdish guerrillas inside Iraq. Turkey's government isn't likely to approve, but the request alone has strained relations between Ankara and Washington.
The president of Iraq's Kurdish self-governing region, Massoud Barzani, further angered Turkish leaders by warning that Kurds "will not let the Turks intervene in Kirkuk."
Some analysts believe Barzani pushed for the Arab relocation plan because he fears the U.S. might block the referendum on Kirkuk's status, both to ease ethnic tensions and placate Turkey.
"He's trying to create a sense of inevitability that would make it impossible for the (U.S.) administration" to stand in the Kurds' way on Kirkuk, said Mark Parris, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey.
Barzani also may have timed his move to exploit political uncertainty in Turkey, as the Islamic-leaning prime minister seeks to be president, raising fears of serious friction with the secular-minded Turkish military.
Barzani also may be using the PKK guerrillas as leverage in exchange for Turkey's acceptance of a Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk.
"The one card (Barzani) has to deal with the Turks is the PKK," Parris said. "He could tell them, 'Don't forget, I'm the only guy who can solve your PKK problem.'"
* Robert H. Reid is correspondent-at-large for The
Associated Press based in Amman, Jordan, and has reported from the Middle
East frequently since 1978.
3. - Gulf News - "Kurds see strategic interest in security crackdown":
ARBIL / 17 April 2007 / by Basil Adas
Bodybags have been arriving at regular intervals into this key town in the Kurdish held area of Iraq.
Ever since the new security plan for Baghdad kicked in a few months ago the number of dead of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have been rising.
More than 5,000 Peshmerga fighters have been recruited after the announcement of security plan and they form the bulk of forces leading the drive against insurgents in Baghdad.
"We fought vigorously the former regime and martyred thousands, so we are always ready to fight and sacrifice, therefore we don't consider this task as a shock," Farhad Esmail, Peshmerga officer, told Gulf News.
"It is the continuation of the long and arduous clashes we have gone through. We believe in combat and we consider ourselves part of a united democratic federal Iraq."
But not all share the enthusiasm of Farhad. Umm Shirzad, a Kurdish mother says it is a difficult life.
"We had a long struggle with Saddam Hussain's regime, we were the target of genocide in Halabja and the Anfal operations. After the end of our battle and establishing our stable territory, we rejoiced," she told Gulf News. "My son is deployed in Baghdad. The security situation is troublesome there and I believe that his life is exposed to dangers every day," she said.
"I am more anxious and frightened especially after the return of the four Peshmerga martyrs. God willing, our sons will return safe and peace prevails in Baghdad and all the Iraqi cities".
Security
In most of the Kurd-controlled regions of Iraq like Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaymania, the Peshmerga brigades continue training hard in order to deal with any state of emergency.
The commanders say the fighters have to be ready for any serious eruption of sectarian strife in Baghdad or a massive US troop withdrawal which could lead to chaos.
"It is true that Kurdistan is a secure region, but
we are convinced that its stability is hinged on Iraq's security as
a whole," Fadhil Merani, the Kurdistan Democratic Party secretary,
told Gulf News. "Also the Kurds' strategic interest lies in restoring
order and peace throughout Iraq. It will guarantee the security of Kurdistan
territory. Therefore, we are actively involved in fighting terrorism,"
Merani added. Kurdistan is witnessing unprecedented peace and security
in its history and has large rebuilding campaigns under way.
4. - The Conservative Voice - "Bill Clinton Favors the PKK":
17 April 2007 / by Scott Sullivan
Former US President Bill Clinton wants US military protection against Turkey for the Iraqi Kurds including the PKK -- see his interview today with the London Based Arabic language daily Ashrq Al-Awsat. To this end, Clinton wants US forces redeployed within Iraq to meet the Turkish threat. Clinton recommends this redeployment because he believes Turkish military operations against the PKK in northern Iraq would bring a disaster to Turkey and the region.
To reinforce his pro-PKK tilt, Clinton does not even call on the PKK to refrain from attacking Turkey from its bases in northern Iraq, even as he calls for Turkish military restraint. In Clinton’s approach, the PKK should be left alone to wage war on Turkey, while Turkey would not be permitted to strike the PKK bases in northern Iraq.
A number of persuasive countervailing arguments can be brought against Clinton’s pro-PKK recommendations. A US approach favoring the PKK in northern Iraq would promote PKK' campaign against Turkey; strengthen the nationalist extremist parties within Turkey; destabilize Turkish political life on the eve of Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections next month; isolate the US in the region; and assist Iran, the rising superpower. Iran would gain as Turkey weakens under PKK activities, and as US-Turkey relations deteriorate.
Moreover, Turkey would never accept such a US pro-PKK policy, nor would Iraq’s neighbors, with the exception of Iran, who would be the only beneficiary of a US policy favoring the Kurds.
Set these doubts aside for a moment. Assume Clinton’s non-intervention policy against the PKK in northern Iraq is sound. Where does that leave Turkish and US policy on the 15 November referendum on the status of Kirkuk? Such an Iraqi referendum would bring Kirkuk and its oil wealth under immediate Kurdish control. This outcome would create Iraq’s true disaster. This is because the PKK would run wild, not only in northern Iraq but in Turkey and the region as a whole. The newly empowered PKK would proclaim an independent Kurdistan carved from Iraq, now favored by ninety-five percent of Iraqi Kurds. The PKK would then move on to reclaim large portions of Turkey and Syria. Iran would make its own move for regional dominance alongside the PKK. Finally, Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda would jump in as Iraq disintegrates.
In other words, if Turkey is persuaded to give the PKK a free hand in northern Iraq, as advocated by Clinton, the Iraqi government must consider postponing or canceling altogether the Kirkuk referendum. To attempt to move forward with a US policy favoring the PKK in northern Iraq and the Kirkuk referendum would be imprudent if not reckless.
So, two final questions remain. Does Bill Clinton, with
his pro-PKK approach, speak for all Democrats? Even more importantly,
does Clinton speak for President Bush?
5. - EUOBSERVER - "Brussels declines to endorse 2013 date for Turkey's EU entry":
BRUSSELS / 17 April 2007 / by Lucia Kubosova
The European Commission has welcomed Turkey's 400-page timetable for implementing EU legislation but refused to comment in advance on Ankara's desire to join the bloc by 2013.
Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul unveiled his country's roadmap towards EU membership on Tuesday (17 April), with details on forthcoming legislative proposals aiming to put Turkey's laws in line with European legislation.
The plan includes reforms in eight areas temporarily blocked from further
negotiations between Ankara and Brussels, as a result of a member states'
decision last December due to Turkey's stance over Cyprus.
The dispute centers around the candidate country's reluctance to allow Greek Cypriot ships and planes to access its ports and airspace as agreed before the accession negotiations kicked off.
Ankara is insisting that such a move should be preceded by the end of an EU trade embargo on Turkish Cypriots in the north of the divided island.
Mr Gul said on Tuesday that the root of the dispute with Europe is political, adding "When the political problems are one day resolved, we will meet with the EU and it will take us half an hour to open and close those chapters."
The EU enlargement commissioner's spokeswoman commented that the plan as put forward by Turkey is "exactly what is expected from every candidate country."
But concerning Ankara's provisional date of 2013 as the deadline for finalising the required reforms and being ready to join the EU just after, she said the EU executive does not define accession dates in advance as they depend on a country's "progress in reform on the ground."
In Turkey, Tuesday's announcement was overshadowed by tensions over a potential presidential bid by the country's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has until 25 April to decide whether to register his candidacy.
Several hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in
Ankara over the weekend against him running for the top chair due to
fears that as a candidate of the Islamist Justice and Development Party
(AKP) he would endanger the secular character of the Turkish republic.
6. - Eurasianet - "Ankara protest highlight's Turkey's 'culture war'":
16 April 2007 / by Nicolas Birch*
Draped in flags, 370,000 Turks rallied in Ankara on April 14 against their religious-minded prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was a demonstration that emphasized both the intense opposition that Erdogan will face if he stands for president, and the depths of Turkey’s cultural division.
Among the slogans chanted by protesters as they marched to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, were: “Turkey is secular and will stay secular” and “We don’t want an imam in the presidential palace.”
Erdogan hasn’t yet announced whether he wants to take over as president on May 16, replacing the incumbent, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who is retiring. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. If he does, Erdogan is virtually assured of election: the chief executive here is selected by the parliament, where the prime minister’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds a huge majority. Under Turkey’s constitution, Turkey’s president is largely a figurehead. Yet, the chief executive does possess some important prerogatives, including the authority to confirm the appointments of governmental officials.
Sezer, an arch-secularist, has used his presidential powers to slow AKP efforts to expand its influence over the machinery of state, blocking the nominations of hundreds of senior bureaucrats proposed by the government. If Erdogan takes Sezer’s place, and the AKP wins parliamentary elections later this year, “Turkey would look like a single-party state”, Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish expert at the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, argues in a recent paper.
During the protest in Ankara, it was not constitutional niceties that people were worried about; it was Erdogan’s political views. A former Islamist-turned-“Muslim democrat,” Erdogan’s management skills have impressed many political analysts since his party came to power in 2002. Turkey’s economy has grown by nearly 33 percent over the past four years. In addition, his government managed to push through reforms that opened the way for the country’s European Union accession process, 40 years after Turkey first knocked on Brussels’ door. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
But many Turks remain convinced Erdogan’s pro-market, pro-western make-over masks an Islamist core. These critics are quick to point out that Erdogan is a man who once said, “thank God, I’m for Shar’ia [Islamic law].” Recent tax hikes on alcohol, efforts to alter the country’s secular educational system, and a failed attempt to criminalize adultery provide additional evidence that Erdogan still harbors a conservative Islamist agenda, and is just waiting until the pillars of Turkey’s secularist institutions are sufficiently undermined before he moves to implement it, critics say.
“If this man becomes president, Turkey will go back to the Middle Ages”, says retired civil servant Bahriye Yesilfidan, 49. “He isn’t sincere about democracy. He just wants to turn Turkey into Iran, or Saudi Arabia.”
President Sezer thinks the same. “Foreign forces,” he said during an April 13 speech, are collaborating with some Turks “to introduce a moderate Islamic regime under the name of democracy. This is a fundamentalist model.”
“The ideology of the modern Turkish Republic contained in Ataturk’s principles is a state ideology that all citizens should take as their own,” Sezer added.
Sezer’s speech underscores the depths of Turkey’s current dilemma: though the AKP’s secular credentials are undoubtedly questionable, the secularists’ democratic credentials are even more so.
The organizer of the April 14 march was an NGO chaired by a retired military police chief rumored to have led two coup attempts against the government in 2004. That link encouraged many to stay away – one prominent intellectual even compared the protest to the march on Rome that brought Mussolini to power in 1922.
Many of the Ankara protesters had nothing to do with either the organizing NGO, or Turkey’s head opposition party, whose leader occasionally makes veiled calls for military intervention. Yet there was something evocative of the tumultuous 1920s about the rally. Ubiquitous images of Ataturk, who died in 1938, contributed to that, as did the participants’ defiant rhetoric. It’s clear that present-day partisans of Turkey’s secularist tradition see themselves as on the frontlines of a culture war over the future direction of the state.
“We won the Liberation War despite the fanatics, and we won’t lose now”, read the slogan on one woman’s back, referring to the war leading to Turkey’s foundation in 1923. Others carried postcard-sized badges reading simply “Mustafa Kemal will win the war.”
“We are today’s mad Turks”, schoolteacher Hasan Devecioglu said approvingly, as a speaker on the platform called for the “imperialist” International Monetary Fund, the US and the EU to “get your hands off Turkey.”
He was referring to a fictionalized retelling of the Kemalist version of Turkey’s liberation struggle that has barely left best-seller lists since it was published in 2005. The success of Turgut Ozakman’s “Those Mad Turks” stems largely from the fact many Turks see parallels between the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and today.
After the First World War, while the Sultan and his Istanbul government collaborated with British occupation forces, Turkish nationalists prepared to fight from the depths of Anatolia. Today, increasingly anti-Western secularists think, the collaborators are the AKP and the invaders are Brussels and Washington.
Fiercely opposed to globalization, supporters of the secularist-nationalist cause also dream of a return to the economic statism of the early Republic. “Is it an accident that there are simply no radical secularists who argue for a free-market economy?” economist Eser Karakas asked in a recent article in daily Zaman.
Small wonder Turkish big business has turned its back on them, or that Turkey’s small band of secular liberals are wondering how long it will take the secular nationalists to come to their senses.
“You don’t win elections by frightening people”, daily Radikal editor Ismet Berkan wrote in a commentary published April 14, referring to President Sezer’s warning that Turkey has never faced so many threats in its 84 year history. “You win them by being reasonable. If the opposition one day gets bored of being in opposition and really sets out to win power, it will learn this.”
Political scientist at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Ali Carkoglu agrees. “These people [secular nationalists] have a point, but they sound like [our] grandparents,” he says. “Turkey can only move forward when its modernists modernize themselves.”
* Editor’s Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in
Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.