TURKPULSE No:55..........NOVEMBER 4th, 2001
Turkey has decided to send its special commando forces to Northern Afghanistan as a result of the developments that followed the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s sudden visit to Turkey on October 17-18th. He had unprecedented satisfaction out of the visit, but this satisfaction was probably more because of the openhearted interlocutors he found in Ankara than full agreement in most topics. The developments concern not only Afghanistan, but also much more comprehensive topics such as the security and defence policy of the regions of the world with particular attention to ESDI/P (European Security and Defence Identity/Policy). Gen Kivrikoglu, Chief, TGS, was most outspoken on this topic at the ESDP talks in Ankara following the British Foreign Secretary’s visit. In a nutshell, it is the rejection to make the same mistake Turkey made over the Rogers Plan about Greece’s return to NATO’s military side.
It is a
month since the military operation started in Afghanistan and the American
forces have not done much other than bombing Taliban not infrequently civilian
targets, no matter how inadvertently. The main reason for this lack of success
was Washington’s hesitation between Turkey’s recommendations of defeating
Taliban by reinforcing the Northern Alliance and Pakistan’s insistence of
doing it from the south through the Peshtuns by mostly splitting up the
Taliban administration through buying off some of their leaders.
American military operations move to cooperation with the North
The
capture and summary execution by the Taliban in Afghanistan of Peshtun leader
Abdul Haq in the third week of the operation and confiscation of hundreds of
thousands of dollars in his possession for the purpose of buying off the
“moderate Taliban leaders” was apparently the end of that policy. It was
also the end of the Americans’ refraining from supporting the Northern
Alliance and not bombing the Taliban fronts facing General Rashid Dostum’s
Uzbek descent forces.
Along with
this change of policy on the part of Washington, the Turkish-American military
cooperation against the Taliban came into the picture in accordance with the
American application to Ankara on October 26th. The deliberations
of top level military and civilian security rulers under PM Ecevit in Ankara
resulted in the announcement on Thursday (1st) that Turkey would
send 90 soldiers to Uzbekistan or northern Afghanistan mostly to train Gen.
Dostum’s forces in a bid to capture Mezar-a Sherif to start with. PM Ecevit
did not rule out the possibility of the Turkish “maroon
berets” (special commando forces) from actively joining the combat if
necessary. Even though President Sezer and most official quarters decline to
accept such a possibility, it is apparent that these magnificent soldiers are
not going to Afghanistan “to peel potatoes in the kitchen” for the
fighting Anglo-American soldiers.
It all
began with the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s sudden visit to Ankara
on October 17-18th for top level contacts with the Turkish
Government including President Sezer. The British Foreign Secretary left
Ankara totally satisfied, unprecedented in recent years, and the pursuing
direct and indirect contacts in the Ankara- London-Washington triangle paved
the way for a new term of cooperation between Turkey and the Anglo-Americans
in the war against terrorism, far exceeding the limits of punishing Bin Laden
or the Taliban.
The Ecevit
Government’s decision to send the “Maroon Berets” to Afghanistan was the
right step taken in the right direction and at the right time, but it was only
a small part of this cooperation ahead if there will be further changes in the
West’s wrong policies towards Turkey in the last few decades.
The
post-11 September period seems to have brought Washington to the right policy
of dropping decisively its flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism symbolised
by Bin Laden and the Taliban. This change on the part of the United States,
for its part, saves Turkey from the dilemma of being a sincere and devout
member of the western world and having to cooperate in recent years with the
Russia-Iran-India triangle in Central Asia for the creation of a secular
region against the Taliban fanaticism and terrorism. If Turkey wants to have a
say in the reshaping of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the aftermath of the
Taliban it had to send symbolic, but effective forces to the region and the
latest important decision was a step to answer that need.
Ankara is
planning to win the hearts of the Afghan people by starting a development
drive in that country as soon as the Taliban stumbling block is removed.
Arrangements have already been made by Turkey to cooperate with a French NGO,
AKPED, to build 10,000 dwellings in Afghanistan, especially in the Uzbek and
Tajik regions of the Northern Alliance.
Given all
these facts, it is apparent that the decision to send Turkish soldiers to
Afghanistan was not taken under the pressure of Turkey’s current economic
problems as Tansu Ciller claims and most people seem to believe, but with much
more radical calculations and principles. Of course, if it helps the solution
of Turkey’s economic problems with the forthcoming $3.1 billion IMF loan to
start with, and it seems it may, all the better.
Turkey’s
relations with its neighbours will be preserved unharmed
One
possible disadvantage of Thursday’s decision about sending Turkish troops to
Afghanistan is that it may foul or at least sour Turkey’s relations with the
Islamic world and attract Taliban terrorism into the country. Every measure is
being taken in Ankara to prevent such occurrences.
Above all,
it is common knowledge that Turkey has received assurances from the Allies
that the military operation and the activities within Article
5 of the NATO Pact will not
cover Iraq or any other country. The State Minister for Customs,
Mehmet Kececiler, has said this in so many words. He stressed at a ceremony to
introduce automation with the latest technology to the Habur frontier gate
that Iraq is remaining outside the current crisis in Afghanistan thanks to
Turkey. “We
do not want the war to come anywhere near our country,” he
said. On
the same day (31st), a high-powered 148 strong Turkish trade
mission left for Iraq to attend the Baghdad International Fair with 112
Turkish firms, ranging from the automotive industry to electronics, chemicals
and textiles, and “to establish Turkey
in the Iraqi market in a permanent way,” as the delegation chief,
Kursat Tuzmen, the Under-Secretary of Foreign Trade, put it.
Also,
between October 31st and November 2nd, State Minister
Yilmaz Karakoyunlu (ANAP-Istanbul) was heading an equally big Turkish
delegation for economic talks in
Moscow and Kazan. While the Russian side urged the Turkish
delegation not to miss the train for investments in that country, as it was
the right time now, Karakoyunlu stressed that the growing mutual trade was
grossly in favour of the Russian Federation. Russian exports to Turkey were
already 8-fold those of Turkish sales to Russia and the gap would grow much
bigger when the Blue Stream Project went into operation at the beginning of
the next year, unless Moscow did something about rectifying this huge
imbalance by importing Turkish goods and services in payment for these
exports. It seems that the Russian and Tartar rulers did not sweep
Karakoyunlu’s complaints under the carpet and important decisions were taken
especially for long-term economic cooperation by Turkish small- and
medium-size enterprises to move into these countries in the following months.
It will give a spur to Turkey’s efforts to enter the former Soviet markets
in the aftermath of the disintegration of the USSR in the early 1990s.
On
November 1st and 2nd, the Chinese
aircraft carrier, Varyag, passed through the Bosphorus Straits to
put an end to a 3-year dispute between Ankara and the former communist world.
It was more of a symbol of the cooperation ahead with China and the other
former communist countries than an important economic breakthrough. These
undesirable developments for the West, such as the arrival of Iranian gas into
Turkey through a pipeline within the next few weeks despite all the
undermining of the Americans, the Blue Stream from Russia and massive
interregional trade between Turkey and its neighbours will unfold one by one
in the months ahead.
Within BSEC
(Black Sea Economic Cooperation), decisions were taken last week to
carry out an extensive cooperation in
transport, especially on land among the member countries and this
will give a boost to the expansion of Turkey’s trade and economic relations
with its neighbours as from the new year. Eleven members of the BSEC put into
force in Antalya on October 25th, “The
International Black Sea Land Transport Cooperation Project” to
ensure uniform transport rules in all 11 countries and to promote the regional
trade. IRU (the International Road Union) was present at these activities.
Communication Minister Oktay Vural (MHP-Izmir) said that thanks to the Union
founded within the BSEC for land transportation, “The
transport problems of the Black Sea countries will be solved and the monopoly
in the telecom sector will be warded off by 2003.”
The
following day, at the fifth BSEC Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Antalya,
Foreign Minister Ismail Cem handed the BSEC chairmanship to his Ukrainian
counterpart boasting that in his term the BSEC completed the formalities to be
fully established as an international organisation and the BSEC Economic
Agenda 2000 had been successfully put in force.
Turkey
will attend at presidential level the conference in Kazakhstan on November
8-10th for
“Cooperation and Confidence-building Measures in Asia”
and it may lead to developments widening the new born Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation, the former Shanghai Five, as the nucleus of an
arrangement in Asia similar to the OSCE for Europe, bringing Turkey into Asian
affairs more actively.
Before
that President Sezer will pay a
state visit to Tajikistan in an
attempt to coordinate the cooperation of the Northern Alliance.
The
question about these developments is whether or not the West, particularly
Washington, will resign to their happening or will the underhanded struggle
between Turkey and the United States that has been going on for the last few
decades continue in the new era too. There is reason to believe that the post-
September 11th period will help the two sides to hammer out a
consensus.
Ankara
is determined not to leave things to chance or potential goodwill
During his
State visit to Pakistan last week, President Sezer said in Islamabad that
Afghanistan belongs to the Afghans. These works were a repetition of
Turkey’s Gulf policy before the Gulf War erupted in August 1990 – “The
defence of the Gulf belongs to the Gulf countries.”
Yet the
Gulf War has proved to Turkey and the world that this policy was wrong for the
simple reason that the small Gulf Emirates are incapable of defending
themselves against an aggressor from within themselves, much less an
aggression by an outside big power.
For the
last 10 years or so Ankara has been toiling on the elimination of this
weakness and the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) or
similar arrangements for other regions seem to be the answer. That is where
President Demirel’s stillborn proposal for Security and Cooperation for the
Caucasus comes into the picture.
Whether or
not this proposal got anywhere after Demirel’s departure is not so
important. It is still in the minds of Turkey’s military rulers, as well as
foreign policy experts. During the talks Turkey conducted with the West in the
aftermath of the Straw visit, General Kivrikoglu expressly brought this matter
up and asked the British and American delegations “Now
let us presume that your interests are impassed in the Caucasus. Will you then
ask for our help? Will Europe have the cheek to seek our help in that
event?” General Kivrikoglu put this question to the British
delegation under the Political Director of the UK Foreign Office, Peter
Ricketts, at the second round of talks on ESDP in Ankara on October 25th.
The answer was, according to General Kivrikoglu’s revelations on Republic
Day, “We would then overcome that hurdle
over the United States,” meaning that they would bring the
Americans into the dispute to talk Turkey into it.
These
tripartite talks also attended by the Turkish delegation headed by the
Under-Secretary of the MFA, Ambassador Ugur Ziyal, and Ricketts’s American
counterpart, Robert Bradtke, were an attempt to bridge the gap, before
NATO’s Prague Summit, between Turkey and the West over the EU’s efforts to
set up a 60,000 strong European emergency force without including Turkey in
the decision making mechanism and Turkey’s veto in NATO to prevent the
European force from using NATO’s facilities.
The third
round of these tripartite talks will be held in London on November 7th.
The Americans have reportedly told Turkey at the Ankara talks that the EU
could set up its own logistics, intelligence and military installations
totally independent of NATO and that it would isolate Turkey. Yet Ankara’s
calculations are that it would be too costly and time consuming for Europe to
do so. Such duplications go totally against the capitalist world’s business
principles. General Kivrikoglu says it in so many words that the flexibility
Turkey showed in the early Eighties about the Rogers Plan in readmitting
Greece into NATO’s military side was a mistake and that it would not be
repeated.
Still
Ankara is working on some formulas such as lifting its veto on the European
Emergency Force for the regions outside its sphere of interest and the
forthcoming London conference may narrow this gap. Cyprus is again on the
agenda with a dangerous development, according to Foreign Minister Ismail Cem.
As General Kivrikoglu has stressed at his Republic Day chat with the
press, 13 of the 16 trouble spots in the world are in Turkey’s vicinity. The
security and cooperation for them are being sought by Ankara in a balanced
policy between the West and the Shaighai centred security arrangements of the
former communist world. uras@ada.net.tr
- November 4th, 2001