GEARS DON’T MESH WITH THE UNITED STATES

 

The developments of recent weeks make it all the more prominent that, far from having a strategic cooperation with the United States, Turkey is indeed heading all the more away from the United States in every field. For an analysis of this quite alarming, but inevitable trend caused by the USA’s long term intentions and plans for Turkey and this region please read the article below.

 

At a time when I was compiling data in drafting an article on Turkish-American cooperation being tactical rather than strategic for various reasons, the reputable daily Milliyet (which unfortunately smears that reputation at critical times by becoming the backbone of American disinformation initiatives) headlined on Tuesday (16^th) “Strategic letter to Erdogan from Bush.”  It concerned President Bush’s letter to PM Erdogan presented by the American Chargé d’Affaires Nancy McEldowney on 9 August calling for a “strategic vision” between Ankara and Washington.

What President Bush’s one-page letter meant by this “strategic vision” is not clear, but judging by what PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a TV interview, the Turkish side did not take it anymore serious than a mere courtesy initiative. Neither can it possibly be anything else as Turkey and the United States are clashing headlong on innumerous topics and fields as will be explained below, despite certain steps in the right direction by the United States in this region in recent weeks partly as a result of the compulsion it feels for keeping some of its arrangements with Turkey. Are these steps enough to induce Turkey to change its foreign policy course which have shaped with hard experiences in its dealings with the Super Power in recent decades? That is another question that makes it hard to gain any substance to President Bush’s suggestion to PM Erdogan for extending the “strategic vision” to political, military, economic and commercial fields as Ms McEldowney called for on behalf of her President.

Some constructive steps from Washington for Turkey’s region

President Bush has certainly taken some realistic, constructive and even energetic steps in the Middle East recently by forcing Israel to evacuate Gaza and some other occupied lands of the 1967 war. The question of whether or not it will go as far as bringing peace to the region or if it is a strategic tactic for other adventures in the region’s flash points like Iraq and Iran with their enormous oil resources is the preoccupation of Ankara along with every other capital. As long a period as four decades of untold war tragedies between two different races, traditions and religions certainly makes it hard to attain the longed for peace in this region. Mindful of this fact, Turkey started its initiatives for peace in Palestine at the end of last year by bringing together businessmen and tradesmen of Palestine and Israel in Istanbul to unexpected favourable responses from both sides which are fed up with violence. Despite this promising achievement, however, the US-guided Middle East Conference in London earlier this year included almost all of the EU and Middle East countries, but excluded Turkey, with an amazing and unexplainable American initiative. Ankara preferred to show a low profile over the whole affair instead of protest, but it did heavily underline the whole American discrimination against Turkey as a long term basic policy. To what extent this Turkish disenchantment will affect the future developments of the Middle East on Palestine developments remains to be seen. It is certain, however, that the Palestinians will find a good ally and supporter in the person of PM Tayyip Erdogan not only because of his strong religious feelings but also because the Arabs are the underdog in Palestine. This first support will be within the Mediterranean cooperation spirit at the Cernobbio conference on the Switzerland frontier of Italy between 1 and 3 September. In other words, Turkey will try to strengthen its hand on the Palestine question by trying to get the support of the EU’s Mediterranean countries like Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and even Greece to offset Washington’s and Zionism’s ever-ready weight on Israel’s side, while continuing with its traditional policy of not being a tool of anti- Semitism in the world either.

“How wrong can you get?” the U.S. Disinformation Mechanism

Certainly the vital key issue in Turkish-American relations these days --when the Iraqi Constitution is painfully shaping-- is the Iraq, Kurdish and Kirkuk issues and the PKK terrorism. The American Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, along with Chargé d’Affaires McEldowney, said in Ankara after their contacts with the Turkish Government on 25 August that the PKK question was much more complicated and difficult than the Turkish people thought and that its solution required time.

It was fresh confirmation of Turkey’s judgment that Washington was doing nothing about the PKK terrorism despite the American military’s several written assurances to Turkey that it would be seriously tackled and solved without delay. Worse still, Washington was using the PKK terrorism as a tool and underhandedly fostering it to induce Turkey to blindly come over to the American side in its Broader Middle East policy, as some Turkish rulers like Ozal, Ciller and some others did in the past. Much to the Americans’ shock, the Responsible for Iraq Affairs of the Turkish Government, Ambassador Osman Koruturk abruptly left the conference table in Washington at the Tripartite Security summit by Turkey, the United States and Iraq last July on the grounds that the Americans did nothing but dilly-dallying (Tercuman, 18 July). Rupturing diplomatic relations or delivering ultimatums for tactical reasons being alien to Turkish diplomacy, these “summits” have since been reduced to lower levels and, as expected, they have got nowhere with Turkey’s shifting the emphasis away from these tripartite summits towards other partners in this region.

To this background, when the American Embassy’s initiatives begun in Ankara for a new “strategic vision,” they have found equally deaf ears in Turkey as Ambassador Koruturk had received at the tripartite summits in Washington or elsewhere. No need to be an insider to know for sure what the American Chargé d’Affaires is saying to the Turkish Government, because for experienced eyes it is all over the media with heavy American disinformation.

Apparently wishing to ensure his presence at the next Bilderberg conference, a prominent member of the American Disinformation Mechanism in the Turkish media, Cuneyt Ulsever, devoted his first three articles in Hurriyet (23th, 24^th and 25^th), after his two weeks of summer holiday, to the PKK and Middle East under the heading, “The (Turkish) Government has no policies for either the Kurds or the Middle East!”

Obviously reflecting the briefings he had had from the “boss” while on holiday, Ulsever forecasts that Turkey will never be able to solve the PKK problem before it brings clarity to its Iraq and PKK policies. He claims that because the PM’s and his advisors’ minds are perplexed on the Middle East question, they are dragging the “Kurdish problem” towards dangerous adventures. He takes exception to PM Erdogan’s words that “The Kurdish problem and the PKK terrorism are different topics” and invites the “intellectuals” to ask him how Abdullah Ocalan managed to get published the full texts of his 101 contacts with his visitors since 1999 from the prison island of Imrali even though he was not even given a pen to write with or “without any exchange of documents.”

Before going on with the details of these interesting articles may I take the liberty of reflecting my 50 years of experience as a political scientist to show how unfair is the claim that the Turkish Government has no policies for the Kurds or the Middle East, starting with answering Ulsever’s question about the leakages to the press of Ocalan’s 101 contacts from his isolated prison island – the CIA is providing it to the PKK with or without its sophisticated space technologies.

As for the claim that Turkey knows nothing about the Iraq war, the United States started the war on 20 March 2003, a day after the Ankara process came to an end with the 11-point Final Statement, indeed an official protocol, reached between Turkey and United States including all the eight political forces of the then Iraqi opposition (ADM, CMM, INA, INC, ITF, Barzani’s KDP, Talabani’s PUK and SCIRI – in alphabetical order). This vitally important document which the American Disinformation Mechanism hushed up from the Turkish and world Medias was carefully placed in the MFA’s webpage in Ankara as a guideline for the outcome of the Iraq war.

So, far from having no idea about the Iraqi affairs, Turkey did establish with an official document at the beginning, the conditions and results of the Iraq war. Whether the signatories and endorsers of the agreement keep to their pledges now is another question. They would certainly not have been in their current plight and the quagmire in Iraq today if they had applied this protocol sincerely.

As for the “Kurdish question,” and Ulsever’s claim that Turkey has no policy about it, my mind goes back to my service as a junior Turkish diplomat in Beirut in 1958 and thereafter. As a young second secretary brainwashed with American economic miracle and democracy, I used to put all the blame on the Communist Soviet Union and never believe that the United States would make any such thing as separatist subversion in an ally. Yet the representative of the Turkish Intelligence Service, an Arabic speaking Major working as assistant military attaché, used to whisper to my ears that the Kurdish problem was not the Soviet doing, but the Americans. He used to point to the American Embassy’s Air Attaché and say that the American Air Colonel (whose name I’ve now forgotten) had stirred up lots of problems for Turkey in Eastern Anatolia when he worked in Incirlik before coming to Beirut and that he was continuing with this Kurdish subversion against Turkey at the Middle East level “now”. So, far from Ulsever’s claim that Turkey has no Kurdish policy, the Turkish intelligence was aware of everything even 50 years ago and I personally lived through these critical days ranging from the Kingdom’s downfall in Iraq by the Kurdish General Kassem on 14 July 1958 to Saddam’s services to the CIA.

Cutting these old stories short let us come to this day. Are Turkey’s PKK, Kurdish and Iraq policies determined by PM Erdogan’s and his handful advisers’ “confused minds” now, as the American Disinformation mongers claim or by Turkey’s centuries old security organizations such as the TGS, the MFA, MIT? Here is what these “sound forces” whisper to the ears of a more reliable journalist than Ulserver, on a next column to the former. Yalcin Dogan writes in Hurriyet of 26 July 2005 about the PKK terrorism:

“Officials who serve in the Southeast have very striking observations. They say, ‘The terrorist organization (PKK) was a novice in their activism in the past. In laying a mine, for instance, they used to wrap fabric around it or you could notice from distance where the mine was. Now they are laying the mines with the methods of professional and modern armies. Certain quarters teach it to the PKK. It is otherwise impossible.” Yalcin Dogan further says, “Mines are now laid much more professionally. Their equipment now are much higher quality and much more abundant. Terrorists are now much better trained. The PKK is no longer the old PKK. The kind of activism, the materials it uses, the logistical support it receives, the level of knowledge it has, the results it obtains; these are all proofs that the PKK can never do all that alone. It is because all these far exceed the capabilities of the PKK. Consequently, we are up against another PKK. How does it do it; by receiving what from where? I am not talking of the political support that some European countries have long been providing them. Here there is a much more knowledgeable and different support that goes into practice and that is what I am talking of.” Yalcin Dogan underlines that the intercepted wireless conversations of the PKK members facing the Turkish forces on the Iraqi frontier prove that they speak perfect English. The whole thing, he observes, is “as if someone has declared war on us. It is an unnamed, underhandedly run war. Some quarters train the PKK, distribute to it abundant war materials gratis. It is as if someone has declared war on us using the PKK.”

PM Erdogan has recently blamed a Scandinavian country for extending financial aid to the PKK and he later clarified that that country is Norway. The EU representative in Ankara, Ambassador Hans-Jorg Kretschmer was provided with the necessary documents about how a Norwegian youth organization sent money to the PKK. Certain Turkish politicians and journalists, knowingly or unknowingly, blame the EU as the force behind the PKK terrorism, but Turkish security organizations with their decades old experience know that it is nothing but the United States that foster this terrorism as a basic American policy. The other European and Middle Eastern sources are only tools that the Americans use.

Ankara seems to have achieved to explain certain realities to European rulers. They now are campaigning for the new Kurdish formation in Turkey, the DTH (Demokratik Toplum Hareketi = the Democratic Community Movement) to severe itself from the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan for their support for the “Zana Group,” but the United States has gone too deep in its involvement in the PKK terrorism and the UDI for Barzani and Talabani. Consequently, it has no other alternative than playing for time and trying to confuse the world through disinformation. That fact, for itself, forestalls Ankara from sincerely cooperating with Washington on its timid constructive steps in its BME policy.

Turkey defeats intrigues over the recognition of “The Republic of Cyprus”

Another American step in the right direction in recent weeks was over Cyprus. On 9-10 August some employees of the American Congress flew to the Turkish part of Cyprus as a significant step to undo the isolation of the TRNC, but these were only junior congressional assistants and it was far from ending the embargo on the Turkish Cypriots.

Turkey took the final step for starting the EU accession negotiations on October 3^rd. It concerned extending the Turkey-EU Customs Union to the new ten members including the “Republic of Cyprus”. Ankara was reluctant to sign such an agreement maintaining that it was not necessary because after the Customs Union went into force on 1 January 1996 the EU had three new members to increase the number of its members from 12 to 15 and the extension of the Turkey-EU Customs Union to them was automatic. It should be the same for the new ten members, maintained Turkey this time also, but to no avail. Neither was Turkey’s initiative was accepted about a reservation in the agreement on the grounds that it is a bilateral agreement between Turkey and the EU and there can be no reservations in bilateral agreements.

There was only one way out for Turkey and it was to announce to the world with a declaration that the agreement did not mean that Turkey had recognized the Republic of Cyprus, but then it was obvious that the EU would issue a counter declaration to say that the agreement was clear enough and that the Turkish declaration was not binding on the Union. And indeed it did do that.

The Turkish diplomacy transcended with an unprecedented skill over all these difficulties put in its way by a super power. This excellent maneuver on the part of Turkish diplomacy has badly outwitted the West and they do not know what to do now. There are cracked voices from especially Paris, even exceeding the Greek Cypriots and Greece, for an unexplainable reason. Quite a big world power as France is, it is evident that it will get nowhere in this surprising anti-Turkish  initiative because the other powers, including the USA and the UK who are determined not to loose Turkey to other world powers, will stand in its way. Chancellor Schroeder and Foreign Minister Fischer render ineffective the CDU’s opposition to Turkey’s accession. CDU Chairperson Angela Merker has already accepted that she would not stand in the way of the commencement of the 3 October talks with Turkey even if she becomes the Chancellor at the 18 September early elections in Germany. By all indications, the COREPER conference in Brussels on 31 August and the EU Foreign Ministers unofficial conference in Wales on 1-2 September will not go any further than saying that the Turkish declaration in question is political rather than legal, but they will also know fully well that it is a perfect “de jure” document.

As for what this mastermind Turkish diplomacy was, it was making the declaration of reservation an indivisible part of the agreement about extending the customs union to the ten new members. The cover, the agreement and the declaration are all a whole and these three pieces of documents will be ratified together. So no one can claim that they are not bound by the Turkish declaration. Just as the Turkish parliament the EU members will also ratify the whole thing together or reject it. The Turkish declaration and agreement reluctantly endorse the existence of the Republic of Cyprus, but emphatically announces that this is not the Republic of Cyprus that was founded in 1960. In other words, the world, the church and everyone may register President Papadopoulos as Archbishop and President Makarios. But this Makarios is not that of 1960. Neither are his properties and legacies.   

Will all these disputes make Turkey’s negotiation process ahead too difficult for attaining the happy end of full membership to the EU? No one has any doubt about it any more, but no one in Turkey expects a miracle about it either. If the EU accession will be a reality for Turkey one day it will only be after Ankara will prove to the world that its regional cooperation with Moscow, Tehran, New Delhi and the far off Beijing, within or without the SCO, is doing marvels in the world’s international balances today. That is to say, there are other gears in the world that meshes Turkey’s ones much better, if Washington persists on agreeing on one thing with Ankara and engineering other plots on sensitive issues for Turkey such as the PKK terrorism, Kurdish UDI or “Kurdishized Kirkuk.” The world will see that none of these Super Power plans will work with the Turkish determination. uras@ada.net.tr – August 27^th, 2005