The United States has officially told Turkey at top level in diplomatic language that the disbursal of rapid and sufficient international financing into Turkey during the current economic distress (not to say “crisis”) depends on the continuation of the “economic and political processes” in Turkey. There is no problem about the “economic process” as Turkey religiously implemented the IMF’s disinflation program for 14 months and most reluctantly deviated from it by letting the dollar float on February 21st at Stanley Fischer’s insistence. So Washington has had nothing to say to Ankara about sticking to the “economic process”.
But on the political front, the US felt obliged to make Turkey understand beyond any doubt through the dispatches it leaked to the press that “the continuation of the political process” means Turkey’s cooperation on the American arrangements concerning Iraq, to start with.
Yet there has been little common understanding on most international political issues between Ankara and Washington for a long time. Even on NATO questions on which there has traditionally been an exemplary cooperation between the two allies, ever-widening discrepancies and differences of policies, going as far as Turkey’s using its veto on the European Emergency Force despite President Clinton’s express opposition, have begun to appear.
In Turkey’s view, “Ankara process” never became “Washington process” on Northern Iraq issues
On non-NATO questions, especially on international topics concerning Turkey’s own region, these differences have reached alarming dimensions and are constantly widening.
Let us start with the Gulf, the most topical and thorny issue. Turkey and the United States do not even agree on basic facts and figures, let alone work out a common policy, despite all efforts of Ankara to adapt itself to Washington’s views and policies.
Take the Iraq question. Ankara exerted strenuous efforts to work out a common policy with Washington on the most critical issue for itself, Northern Iraq and the Kurds. In the end the “Ankara process” was ironed out between Turkey and the United States in 1997, to see to the rights of minorities of Iraq in the North, near the Turkish frontier. It naturally involved the Turkmen community too at Turkey’s insistence. But only a year afterwards, with the Washington Accord signed on September 17th, 1998, the “Ankara process” turned into the “Washington process” by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hosting in the American capital the representatives of Iraqi dissident minorities of the South and North and totally ignoring the real representatives of the Turkmen community. (Issue No. 55, September 27th, 1998, “Turkey views Kurdish arrangements in Washington as temporary”.)
Ankara neither participated in nor approved of this new process and it announced that the Washington arrangements were temporary. The Middle East Chief of the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Ugur Ziyal, publicly told his American counterpart, Martin Indyk, back in September 1998, “The future regime in Iraq will be determined by the people of Iraq, including those of Northern Iraq, when the time comes. It is not right that this decision should be taken in Washington in the absence of the Baghdad Government. The decision to be taken by the people of Iraq in this regard should be respected by all.” Turkey also made it public at that time that it would not allow the Washington arrangements to pave the way for a federal system in Iraq with a Kurdish federated state there.
Since then there have been general elections in Iraq that have confirmed Saddam Hussein’s presidency. True that it was a near 100% majority for Saddam, unacceptable by any standards in real parliamentary democracies, but do other rulers of the Arab world concede to smaller majorities? Whether we like it or not, we have to accept these Arab style “elections” as a reality of today’s world. Turkey has done that exactly, not only with Saddam, but also with King Abdullah’s accession to the throne in flagrant violation of the Jordanian Constitution and with President Bashar al-Assad’s recent succession to his father upon his death in Syria.
Arabs are not the only masters in the legerdemain of statistics
Neither is this sleight of hand in figures a monopoly of the Arabs in politics. The “Washington process” is not devoid of such tricks either. Official State Department publications claim that the Turkmen community of Iraq is only 1% of the total Iraqi population. The report on human rights practices in Iraq released last month by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour of the State Department disseminates such an unbelievable claim and makes out Kirkuk and Mosul to be Kurdish cities, while they are traditionally Turkmen, despite the efforts of the British and Iraqi administrations to change their demographic structures through resettlements after the end of the Ottoman rule.
The US-based Iraqi Turkmen Organisation has invited the Turks to campaign against this falsified information about the Turkmen community, stressing that the least tampered census in Iraq was in 1957 where the official Turkmen figure was 567,000 (8.723%) of a total population of 6.5 million. Some unofficial Turkish figures go as high as 2.5-3 million Turkmen in Iraq, but these figures are not any more reliable than the Americans’ 1%, because the conditions of that country have not been suitable for any reliable census-taking for a long time.
Nevertheless, an undeniable fact is that the Turkmen are the third ethnical group of Iraq and that they are the best educated and most peaceful. Occasionally there have been suggestions (namely by an expert on Iraqi affairs, Prof Umit Ozdag) to arm the Turkmen in Northern Iraq to defend themselves against various Kurdish tribes armed to the teeth, but Ankara has persistently turned them down, even though it would cost nothing to direct towards them the enormous amounts of weapons and ammunition confiscated from the PKK and other terrorist groups in Turkey in the last few decades.
As a matter of fact, along with the Gulf war, the Turkmen community was divided into two by the 36th parallel, Kirkuk remaining in the Arab south and Mosul in the North with Anglo-American assisted Kurdish domination of various ethnic groups. Ankara’s policy about the Turkmen of the south was to induce them to be loyal citizens of Iraq. In the North they were organized more actively with their own schools, cultural centres, radio and TV broadcasts.
This organization of the Turkmen in Northern Iraq with Turkey’s help has not been easy or uneventful. Only a couple of weeks ago, between March 9th and 16th, the Turkmen House in Erbil was attacked and Barzani forces molested the Turkmen guards. Previously, on two occasions, 10-11 August 1998 and 11-12 July 2000, there had been more serious acts of violence against the Turkmen in Erbil and various other parts of the Barzani dominated regions.
Nevertheless, despite all these discriminations against themselves by most Iraqi governments since that country’s independence, the Turkmen have been able to retain their ethnic character and looked to Turkey for education and economic development. They account for about 15 per cent of the total Iraqi population and their villages and towns link to one another as a line separating the Arabs and Kurds. It is now this community that will see to the Turkish trucks’ security when the second frontier gate is opened further west than Habur, at the Turkish-Iraqi-Syrian frontiers’ juncture. The international developments that will ensue with the inauguration of the new frontier gate may show Washington how mistaken they are by estimating the Turkish or Turkmen community as a mere 1%.
In fact, the UN sanctions period after the Gulf war in 1990 was the period of transforming the Turkish existence in Iraq, especially in northern Iraq, into Kurdish identity. On November 17th, 1991 Talabani and Barzani forces entered Kirkuk to especially ransack and destroy Turkish buildings and monuments. They also amended the birth records to make the Turks out to be Kurdish. Turks were also persecuted and forced to migrate during this period. As from April 19th. 1991 these efforts were intensified with an end to creating a Kurdish state in the north. Turkey’s strong opposition to a Kurdish State was the main stumbling block in bringing these plans to life. With the “Ankara Process” the Americans even agreed to reinforce the Turkmen existence in the region, but the following year this process was replaced by the “Washington process” which did not include any Turkmen representatives as explained above. So what is this “political process” that Washington is now speaking of as a prerequisite of financing to Turkey.
The “political processes” in the Balkans and the Caucasus are not any different
Just as the PKK and the Kurds of Northern Iraq were designed, organised and supported by Washington to interrupt Turkey’s and the Russian world’s (the former USSR’s) trade with the Gulf, so is Yugoslavia designed by the Americans as a device to disrupt the free flow of trade and communication in Southeast Europe, the term used for the Balkans today.
When Tansu Ciller became PM in June 1993 with her alleged links to the CIA, she began to talk of “a political solution to the PKK question,” much to the strong objection of the security forces. In the end, it was explained to her that the PKK was not a coincidence, but an externally planned, organised, financed and executed plan to disrupt Turkey as was the Treaty of Sevres after World War One. About her “conspiracy theory” inclinations, the security forces presented her with a semi-official American publication dated 1980. It explained how Yugoslavia and the USSR would be disintegrated into smaller states and contained a map of Turkey with a blot of black paint covering Eastern Anatolia as “PKK country.”
Ciller was told, “The first one of these plans happened in Yugoslavia, the second happened in the Soviet Union, and they are now executing the third leg of this plan with all-out support to the PKK.”
Turkpulse of March 9th, 2001 writes (end of page 3) “PM Ecevit attended the summit of Southeast European countries in Skopje on February 22nd. A week before the summit, on February 15th and 16th, President Sezer was in Plovdiv attending the tripartite summit with Presidents Stoyanov and Iliescu of Bulgaria and Romania. They decided to reopen the Pan-European Transport Corridor which was tragically damaged by NATO’s bombings of Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s rule.”
In the last three weeks since these words were written, the ethnic Albanian rebels, the UCK, have launched an upsurge of terrorism in Macedonia menacing the security and re-activation of the Pan-European Transport Corridor and it tends to throw the entire Balkans into massive hot clashes again. Is it a conspiracy theory to think that this wave of unrest and violence are aimed at paralysing this route built mostly with Turkish initiative as a Eurasian plan for development of the region?
The TGS (Turkish General Staff) does not think so. Asked about the disturbances in Macedonia, Deputy Chief of TGS, General Yasar Buyukanit said at the Greek national day reception on Monday (26th), “They (the ethnic Albanian rebels) will not last long if they are not supported from abroad. The PKK would not have lasted so long if it had not been for the support of our friends.”
“Our friends” is a term used for the Americans in Turkey’s official correspondence in referring to their mischievous operations. These words by the rarely speaking Turkish TGS are a significant indicator that in the Balkans too, there is not much common “political process” to continue with between Ankara and Washington.
As for the Caucasus stability pact, the Black Sea economic and military developments and Eurasian events stretching as far as Taliban vandalism, the differences between Turkey and the United States require another article to analyse.