TURKPULSE No:155..........MAY 16th, 2006
I wonder if there is any other country in the world that she has been to for the second time within a year since she took office. Don’t let us forget that at her first visit she had a talk with the Russian Foreign Minister in Ankara. Certainly it means something and that is the importance she attaches to Turkey. She has a very warm relationship with our Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. They share very important topics. It will not be right for me to reveal them now. There are things that we cannot speak about at this point on this topic.”
The top Turkish diplomat, Ali Tuygan’s unusual statement is a replicate of what Pulse has been writing about for years that no result can possibly be obtained in this part of the world despite Turkey, especially given the fact Ankara is carefully observing the necessary coordination and cooperation with the regional countries and the world power centres behind them since the present Erdogan Government has come to power three-and-a-half years ago.
The key word in Turkey’s foreign policy today is “balance”
What Ambassador Tuygan finds inappropriate to speak about at this point on Turkish policy concerning world affairs is not such a big secret for a political analyst to discuss. The whole Turkish policy can be summed up in one word- “balance” and it can be elaborated upon by clarifying that “In this case we are not talking of the ‘balance of horror’ of the cold war days.”
Aren’t we really, given the fact that Washington persistently declares “to have on the table every option,” including an all out war with Iran about Tehran’s current nuclear policy?
I suppose it will be appropriate for this article to emphasize that Turkey’s balance policy today is basically different from the balances of the previous periods of world history in that it foresees balance between Washington and Tehran in this dispute as well as aiming at a balanced result of precluding extremist alternatives for both sides. In other words, Turkey today aims at preventing Washington from a military assault on Iran as strongly as it aims at dissuading Tehran from working for nuclear weapons. Again this “policy of balance” does not permit Israel to have nuclear weapons when Iran is banned from these weapons with such severe threats from a superpower and Zionists find such new departures in the Turkish diplomacy as hard pills to swallow, but they have to resign to them.
Likewise, it was this magic word, balance, which made Turkey the first country in the world to host Hamas after its democratic election landslide. PM Erdogan’s remark to President Mahmoud Abbas, “Palestine is our national cause,” was apparently carefully underlined by Washington and Israel that Turkey’s disinformation mongers took exception to it, while it meant nothing more than Turkey’s determination to follow an even handed policy on the Palestinian issue.
This characteristic of the Turkish policy today, about being balanced and even handed in especially trouble spots of the BME, has recently become the main issue in “the troubled alliance” of Turkey and the United States. Ambassador Edelman was undiplomatic enough to recount to the Turkish media what would happen to Turkey under the American LISA (Libya, Iran Sanctions Act) if PM Erdogan went to Tehran, against the Turkish premier’s attempt to pass it off by saying that several other western statesmen had already gone to Iran despite that American law with dubious validity. Even though there are signs that the Edelman mentality still holds good in some American rulers’ minds, it is evident that the State Department has begun to resign to the realities of Turkey and this appreciation on the part of Washington makes the Edelman mentality “cracked voices inevitable in a pluralist democracy of the United States.”
Consequently, Washington has come to the point of accepting several Turkish policies which these “cracked voices” are still declaring “unacceptable”, including the vitally important Montreux Convention for the Turkish Straits. The Turkish press has reported last week that Washington is no longer insisting to have American naval bases in the Black Sea. Likewise, Turkey has been making top level contacts with Iran, Palestine, the Sudan and “the neighbours of Iraq” in spite of Washington’s frowns. It was noteworthy that Ambassador Ross Wilson’s first reaction to the Hamas visit to Turkey was a diplomatic one – rather than the visit itself, what is important is what Turkey said to Hamas. Later on Ambassador Wilson went to Washington and made tough statements about the Hamas visit being unacceptable to the United States etc. It was apparent that in Washington he had come under the fire of the extremists that he had heartened the Erdogan-Gul team in their Hamas policy with his mild statement in Ankara.
The frictions over Turkey’s new balance policy will continue between Turkey and the United States, but it is a healthy sign that Washington is gradually resigning to Turkey’s foreign policy steps outside the American line.
The dilemma is that US-Turkey relations exceed limits of mutuality
Indeed, there is no problem to Turkey’s security if the United States has a base in the Black Sea, but it would constitute dynamite to Turkish-Russian mutual relations and mean a return to the cold war days if Ankara favoured it. From Washington’s angle also, there is no security risk for anyone whether or not the US Navy is in the Black Sea, but its non-presence is tantamount to collapse of the Americans’ “global democracy” policy, as the current “democracies” in Ukraine, Georgia and other ex-Warsaw Pact countries of the region can never survive without the American bases there. (See turkpulse 153 below- “Black Sea stands in the way of American plans”.)
During Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit last month, no common strategic vision appeared from the Ankara talks, as speculated about in the media, but Turkey’s policy of balance was very much at work about the danger of Turkey being too dependent on Russia for oil and especially natural gas. Will this apprehension go as far as Ankara’s exerting all out efforts to switch Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan towards the American camp rather than the Moscow line, remains to be seen. President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan has a super summer residence in Kemer, Antalya (not far from the modest Pulse office) and he holds cordial private talks with Turkish rulers every year, several times a year sometimes. He is today under heavy pressure from the opposed directions from Washington and Moscow about supporting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan also enter the picture when natural gas is in question. The balance in this superpower struggle is in Moscow’s favour at the moment, but Turkey’s weight may tip it off for Washington. It would definitely go against Turkey’s policy of balance, however, to exert such an unusual effort in this case, even though FM Gul may have given his American counterpart a cautious promise to try his hand in this issue during the recent Ankara talks.
Azerbaijan was one of the hosts of recently held Islamic international gatherings and there was no indication from PM Tayyip Erdogan that he had made any such energetic effort for the Americans at the Baku conference of ECO (Economic Cooperation Organization,) on 5 May. It was rather an occasion for the demonstration of the Ankara-Tehran solidarity against the PKK.
U.S gazes at PM Erdogan with utter suspicion at international gatherings
At the official dinner of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference) Parliamentarians Union Summit in Istanbul in the second week of April PM Tayyip Erdogan sat next to Ayetullah Nuri Natik, the third man of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. While the new Hamas Government in Palestine had not been invited to the Arab League summit in Khartoum at the end of March, the Hamas representative was in Istanbul with Turkey declaring, “We believe in the legitimacy of the Palestinian elections.” Turkey officially opposed the economic embargo against Hamas.
At the Ankara talks, both Erdogan and Gul urged Rice to end the West’s economic embargo on Hamas for the sake of peace. Gul emphatically pointed out that the solution of the Palestinian problem depended on the realization of economic projects such as the Erez industrial development project with a tripartite cooperation by Palestine, Israel and Turkey. Already $3 billion had been secured for this project and Turkish private enterprise would actively work for its coming to life in as short a period as six months if all parties cooperated. Rice said it was acceptable to the United States if Israel accepted, but she declined to receive the head of Turkish private enterprise, Rifat Hisarciklioglu, in Istanbul to explain her details of the project. Ankara continues to believe that the only lasting solution to the Middle East question is easing the unemployment problem of the Palestinian people with such projects.
At the ECO summit in Baku in the first week of May PM Erdogan sat next to President Ahmedinejat of Iran at a time when US-Iranian tension was at its peak with Iran’s announcement to be the eighth nuclear power of the world. The Turkish delegation conveyed to Iran its appreciation with the Iranian bombings of PKK terrorists in the Kandil camp in northern Iraq close to the Turkish and Iranian frontiers. Minister of Communications Binali Yildirim passed on to his Iranian counterpart Rahmet Rahmeti, Turkey’s appreciation of the bombing, following Turkish and Iranian security forces meetings in Van, near the Iranian frontier at the end of April. Erdogan and Ahmedinejad focused on economic cooperation within wider context of Islamic institutions. The nuclear energy issues were mostly left to Iran’s high security official Ali Laricani to discuss with Turkey during his visit to Ankara after the Baku summit.
Recently Ankara has taken energetic steps to promote trade ties with Iran on both bilateral and multilateral basis. FM Abdullah Gul said to Fikret Bila of Milliyet (5 April), “There is no comparison between Iran and Iraq as independent countries. Iran is a genuine country. With its history, culture, diplomacy it is a powerful nation from every angle. It is a country that has diplomatic capability. It is bound to find a solution (to the nuclear energy crisis with the U.S.) through diplomatic way. Iraq had a leader (Saddam Hussein). We could not reach him even to pass on a message. Iran is not like that.”
In other words, far from being a spring board for an American military assault, Turkish rulers even dismiss the possibility of Turkey’s joining in an American economic embargo against Iran. They note that 75,000 TIR trailers a year carry Turkish exports to central Asia and turn a deaf ear to the Americans’ hinting at the UN debates that the embargo will not include these passages. It is because these transit passages through Iran are only a small part of the 6,000 trailers that travel between Turkey and Iran every day. Turkey imports $3.5 billion of natural gas from and makes $1.5 billion exports to Iran every year. This mutual trade volume is expected to reach $6 billion this year and more than one million Iranian tourists will help balancing out this trade revenue for Turkey.
We’ll see who will despair in the end
The top level Turkish-Iranian talks of recent months did not only further advance the recently intensified mutual cooperation on the economic and security fields, but they also energized the stagnating Islamic projects, primarily the D-8, initiated in 1997 by the political Islamic leader of Turkey before Tayyip Erdogan, the then outgoing PM Necmettin Erbakan.
D-8 was patterned after the G-8 of the prosperous world and even though it stands for “The Developing-Eight,” the Americans love to mock with it by calling it “The Desperate-Eight.”
Indeed, from the very first day of its foundation, the organization seemed to stand no chance of getting anywhere. Above all, it lost its founding father, Necmettin Erbakan, from the top of Turkey with a quasi military coup in June 1997 where the political Islam seemed to have no real chance of success with the Military, Judiciary, and intellectuals watching with hawk eyes any religious move in the political life. However that was the case only until Washington made its historic mistake by mobilizing its subversive mechanisms a few decades ago in order to set up a kind of an Islamic “Free Masonry” in Turkey through Fetullah Gulen, as has been explained in previous Pulse issues in all detail.
The CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of these unwise American polities, PM Tayyip Erdogan, is now squarely on the saddle in Turkey with Washington tearing its hair to unseat him in view of the outcome of his work. First of all, Erdogan’s AKP rule has really done very good things to the Turkish nation in the economy, foreign policy and some social fields. As for its possible potential harms to the nation with intentions to create another Islamic Revolution like Iran in Turkey, the Ataturkist forces are doubly on alert to prevent it. The outcome of this struggle remains to be seen, but the Turkish nation’s millenniums old experience in world affairs and its patriotism have so far found solutions to the problems and they are sure to pass over future hurdles too.
What’s more, this Turkish experience and skill is also showing the way for the other distressed nations facing same plots today, just as Mustafa Kemal’s independence war enlightened the way to many colonized nations after WW I.
The D-8 includes the most populous eight Islamic countries – Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. It gathers together a total population of nearly one billion (825 million) and a total trade volume of $800 billion. At its latest Bali summit last Saturday (13th) PM Tayyip Erdogan and his counterparts of the other seven signed a protocol to eliminate non-tariff barriers and to reduce tariffs in trade among the members. This protocol is expected to give a boost to Turkey’s $2 billion exports to and $6 billion imports from these seven countries. A Trade Ministers Council founded in Bali will supervise the smooth functioning of this protocol. President Ahmedinejad managed to get a support from the D-8 for his nuclear energy projects for civilian purposes.
As for Washington’s reactions to these activities, there are signs that the Americans are seeking ways of making Turkey repent and eventually toe the line. The exodus of foreign capital from the Turkish stock exchange, finance markets and the economy in general for the last few days may be a sign of this new trend, but Ankara is confident that no one will be able to repeat the November 2000 and February 2001 financial crises in Turkey. The Turkish economy is too strong this time and it has other external supports against such a recurrence, they note. uras@adanet.tr – May 16th, 2006