ALL QUIET ON THE TURKISH-AMERICAN FRONT

 

The famous book on WW I, “All Quiet on the Western Front”, is very much the case for Turkish-American relations today. In the first half of the year top level official visits were exchanged with PM Erdogan’s visit to Washington in January and President Bush’s visit to Ankara and Istanbul a few weeks ago, and not even diplomatic euphony can any longer hide the problems in mutual relations. Even the American Disinformation Mechanism in the Turkish media has forgotten last year’s “strategic alliance” claim in this regard. It all boils down to the USA`s plans and efforts, along with its strategic allies - Israel and the UK to a lesser extent, to create an independent Kurdish State in northern Iraq with Kirkuk as its capital and Turkey’s determination to forestall it at any cost as it is bound to result in an unavoidable blood bath in the region. While this strife continues to empoison mutual relations with the United States due to the West’s greed for oil, as most Turks believe, Turkey is taking drastic steps that may push oil and natural gas out of world markets in a decade or two. It may also put an end to all this struggle over “A Century of War”, another excellent book by F. William Engdahl about the British occupation of Baghdad on 11 March 1917, and “Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order”.  For the details of these exceedingly interesting developments for the new millennium please read the article below.

 

This quiet in Turkish-American relations is far from being a healthy pause needed  to eliminate certain transitional discrepancies in mutual relations, but is the silence before the storm that may finish off years of preparations in vital foreign policy developments despite the other side’s efforts to forestall it.

Everything revolves around Kirkuk with Israel guiding the subversion

Needless to say, this issue is the current Iraq war which has turned into a horrible quagmire for the United States with the unbelievable resistance through a ruthless terror campaign of the majority of the Iraqi people to the foreign occupation and the invader’s determination to create an independent Kurdish State in the north to perpetuate its oil interests. 

Immediately after the American invasion of Iraq within 5-6 weeks, between 20 March and 1 May 2003, the Kurds hurried to capture Kirkuk and ransacked the local birth and land ownership documents, despite the Americans’ promise, to Turkey’s pre-warnings, that it would not happen. Americans ostensibly “punished” the Kurds by denying them the outstanding $3 billion oil revenue from Saddam`s time, but it was all a put up job aimed at finishing off the plans that the American-Israeli-Kurdish trio have been working for over decades.

According to Turkish security quarters’ reckoning in Ankara, the PKK terrorism in Turkey between August 1984 and February 1999 was the first big step for the creation of an independent Kurdish State in the region because they knew that a Kurdish State to be founded in northern Iraq could not survive a week unless they first set up an autonomous “Kurdistan” in south eastern Turkey. When this policy, indeed adventure, went bankrupt in February 1999 with the arrest of the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and Syria’s dropping their harbouring of the PKK, the same quarters engineered the current Kirkuk policy as the financier-to-be of their puppet Kurdish State in northern Iraq.

This fight is now heading for the final flash point with Turkey’s even firmer determination and relevant diplomatic manoeuvrings to prevent the success of the policy to make Kirkuk Kurdish. Turkish Diplomacy and Intelligence had long been receiving reliable reports containing undeniable evidence of Israeli and American financing to Kurds to buy lands in Kirkuk in addition to the heavy pressure on the Arabs and the Turkmens to leave that region for the Kurds to fill the gap. In October the Israeli press reported that Turkey had made representations to Israel through diplomatic channels against financing the Kurds to buy lands in the oil-rich Mosul and Kirkuk regions. In addition to these attempts to change in favour of the Kurds the demographic structure of Mosul and Kirkuk, which remain below Parallel 36, the Green line, Turkish security quarters have been underlining the fact that for more than a decade now, these Israeli activities have gone as far as Mossad’s giving commando training to the Kurds for the showdown ahead. Israelis with their dark skin and knowledge of Arabic and local conditions are more suitable for such subversive activities than the Anglo-Americans.

Turkish security forces were closely following these developments, the highlights of which the whole world finally learnt from a famous American journalist, Seymour Hersh, when he revealed exceedingly interesting information in the New Yorker magazine on June 21^st. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Hersh, who had exposed the American torture scandal in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, had a working breakfast with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul in Ankara before he published the article headed “As June 30^th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.”

According to Turkish Intelligence, Israeli activities providing training for Kurdish commando units and running covert operations in Iraq dates back decades, but Seymour Hersh reports that Israel decided to step up its role in Kurdistan last summer after it was clear that the United States invasion of Iraq was failing. Indeed, in the autumn the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak told vice president Dick Cheney that the United States had lost in Iraq. Israel “had learned that there is no way to win an occupation” and that the only issue for the Americans was choosing the time and size of admitting defeat, said Barak to Cheney.

Ankara’s warnings to Israel is in fact for the real target, the USA

The Americans having failed in their 15-year PKK adventure to create an autonomous Kurdistan in eastern Turkey and later in the occupation of Iraq, Ankara suspects that they may now try their hand in Iraq over a Kurdish State with Kirkuk as its capital, and if President Bush is re-elected in November the adventure may be widened towards Iran. As Turkey’s facilitating all that from Incirlik or elsewhere is clearly out of the question, the alleged “strategic alliance or cooperation” turns out in practice to be “strategic obstruction” if not “strategic hostility”, true to President Bush’s prognosis, “You are either with me or against”.   

That is why the Bush Administration’s plans about Iraq and Iran are bound to find active resistance from Turkey and signs of it have already begun to appear. First the Turkish parliament rejected on March 1^st, 2003 the American military operations in Iraq from Turkey. Ankara then turned down the $8.5 billion American financial aid when Congress tied it to the evacuation of Turkish forces in northern Iraq. Turkey is now reinforcing these forces by modernising the strategic Bamerni airport near the Turkish frontier. In recent weeks the Disinformation Mechanism in the Turkish press repeatedly and systematically reported that the Turkish forces in northern Iraq had been withdrawn as another step to drop Turkey’s “red lines” in the region (after dropping the military action threat in case of a federal structure for the Kurds). The truth was the exact opposite and Bamerni airport protected by Turkish tanks in northern Iraq has recently been equipped with sophisticated electronic devices and reinforced with logistics needed for good reconnaissance and quick military operations in northern Iraq. Before that, on 19 May, Turkish forces on the Iraqi side of the frontier further east had a showdown with the American officers when they moved at night into this Turkish security area upon Kurdish peshmergas’ complaints. The result was not putting hoods on the American soldiers in retaliation to their misdeed of 14 July 2003 in Sulaimaniya, as the Turkish press claimed, but the backing down of the Americans in front of the Turkish soldiers’ firm stance. Turkey is determined to maintain its security forces in northern Iraq so long as the Americans keep on sidestepping their several commitments to eliminate the PKK under various names, Kongra-Gel, as it stands today.

The interesting story of this affair is that at the outset of the Iraq war, in March 2003, the American Air Force brutally obliterated the camps of the pro-Iranian terrorist organisation, Ansar Al Islam, in northern Iraq, but retained the PKK despite long negotiations with Turkey and contrary to its pledge that they would “put an end to Iraq being a base of terror.”

A week before President Bush started the Iraq war he sent a letter to PM Tayyip Erdogan on 13 March 2003 confirming that they shared Turkey’s sensitivity in northern Iraq and promising that they would work with Ankara to prevent northern Iraq from being a base for terrorist assaults on Turkey. The then American Ambassador Robert Pearson said of the PKK a week later, “They will either surrender or face its alternative, the deployment of military force.”

However, in the year and a half that has since gone by neither has happened even though Turkey complied with the American request of passing an amnesty for the PKK to surrender within a certain period, until February 2004. The turnout was negligible and it proved to be one of the Americans’ endless time gaining tactics. Others included the arrival in Ankara of an official American delegation on 12 September 2003 for these talks and its continuation with a more powerful American delegation a month later. The talks did not only concern the 5000 armed PKK militants on the Qandil mountains near the Turkish and Iranian frontiers, but also the 20,000 Kurds from Turkey settled in the Makhmur UN camp 70 km south of Mosul and controlled by the PKK with American financing for over a decade now.

After months of negotiations, Turkey and the United States worked out an agreement rendering the PKK ineffective in Makhmur by evacuating the camp. Assistant Secretary of State Arthur Dewey said in Ankara on 22 January 2004 that he would sign the relevant agreement  before he left Turkey, but it never happened. The “neocons” in Washington, i.e. the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz team, must have undermined it. Now the Americans have washed their hands of it all and say that the new interim Government under PK Allawi will deal with it. Meanwhile the PKK has resumed its violence in Turkey and is also trying to infiltrate into Iran.

Turkey’s multilateral diplomatic efforts to counter plans over Kirkuk

All these developments have stepped up Turkey’s cooperation with the “neighbouring countries” of Iraq with particular emphasis on Iran and Syria. The last session of these meetings was held last week in Cairo and it was decided to take measures against terrorist incursions or infiltrations from Iraq into other countries. The next meeting in Tehran will consider concrete steps about it. In the meantime Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul will chair an interim session in New York during UN debates in September.

In addition to this cooperation among the States of the region, Turkey is encouraging the cooperation of the Turkmens with the Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq. The census taking in October is bound to yield unfavourable results for the Turkmen because of this systematic Kurdish population inflow into Kirkuk with American assistance and Israeli subversion. Still the Arabs and the Turkmens together constitute a 70-75% majority in Kirkuk and they are trying to work out a comprehensive cooperation with the Turkmens of Mosul supporting the Arabs and the Arabs voting for the Turkmens in Kirkuk. PUK leader Jelal Talabani recently visited Ankara suggesting an international status like that of Brussels for Kirkuk and also cooperation against the Arabs between the Kurds and the Turkmens, but Ankara suspected an unreliable Kurdish tactic in it and turned it down. As for the Brussels formula, it seems to be the only way out of this dilemma at the moment.

Iraq developments facilitate Turkey’s cooperation with France and Germany

 PM Tayyip Erdogan’s official visit to Paris on 19-20 July brought to the surface the strategic importance the Iraq events have gained for Turkey. The contract signed for the purchase of 36 Airbus passenger-liners by Turkish Airlines, as against 15 Boeings from the United States, was only a small part of Turkey’s cooperation with France and Germany as a big boost to its EU accession. A much more important development concerned the construction of nuclear energy reactors in Turkey.

The details of this nuclear energy cooperation are still unknown, but what is at stake is common knowledge. Turkey owns 70-75% of the world’s borax and thorium deposits. France, which obtains 85% of its energy from nuclear reactors, has very advanced technology on thorium reactors which are uncommon in the world. Borax was exceedingly important to the Soviet space industry 4-5 decades ago and is still vital for the German and French cooperation with Russia whose importance for Turkey’s energy imports is obvious.

Turkey has long been working on hydrogen energy and finally took concrete steps last May to make the Istanbul region the hydrogen energy research centre of the world. Two world famous Turkish scientists and pioneers of quantum physics, Prof Nejat Veziroglu and Prof Oktay Sinanoglu are heading these activities. They already briefed the National Security Council on hydrogen energy in 2000. Even though the financial crisis in Turkey in 2000 and 2001 prevented implementing the NSC resolution to found the ICHET (International Centre for Hydrogen Energy Technologies) in Istanbul, in November 2003 Energy Minister Hilmi Guler signed a protocol for it in Vienna. By all indications “A Century of War” i.e. Anglo-American oil politics over Iraq that started in March 1917 with the British Army’s capture of Baghdad from the Ottomans may fade away a century later, in 2017 or so when Turkey becomes a prominent member of the EU with a comprehensive cooperation with the “Old Europe” plus Russia and Turkey on especially energy.

Pending this rather distant future, Turkey’s relations with both the Russian Federation and the EU is progressing promisingly. The EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy was in Istanbul and Ankara on 21-22 July for the Fourth Euro-Med trade ministers conference and bilateral trade issues with Turkey. It concerned “deepening and widening”  the Customs Union by including services and public procurement under the EU/Turkey Customs Union.  Lamy said, “Our Customs Union with Turkey, which will celebrate at the end of next year its tenth birthday, provides for a deep trade relationship which is constantly evolving.”

The relevant EU press release reads:

“In 2003 Turkey ranked 8th in the EU’s top export and 10th for EU imports markets. The EU accounts for 47.9% of Turkey’s total external trade, followed by the US (7.3%), Russia (5.8%), Switzerland (2.7%) and China (1.9%)...In 2003, the EU imported goods worth Euro23.9 billion and exported goods worth Euro28.1 billion, with a resulting trade surplus of approximately Euro 4.3 billion.”

The interesting point in this regard is that in addition to the official foreign trade with Russia, Turkey has billions of dollars of the so called “suitcase trade” exports to that country as well as services exports through Turkish contractors and workers.

What will “globalisation” bring to Turkish-American trade relations as from next year remains to be seen.  uras@ada.net.tr – July 24th, 2004