A TURKISH MILITARY BASE IN THE CAUCASUS AFTER BLACKSEAFOR?

Unbelievably, Turkey is considering setting up a military base in the Caucasus, despite the past practice since the proclamation of the Republic and the restrictions of Article 92 of the Constitution. It has already established a joint naval force with the former Warsaw Pact countries in the Black Sea (Blackseafor) and other military steps are in the process of shaping up for the security of this region. What is it all about? Who or rather what is behind it? What is next in the world’s security arrangements according to international law and what is Turkey’s role especially in its own region? For an analysis of the past and current events in search of answers to these questions see the following article.

Regions adjacent to Turkey’s western frontiers in the north and south, namely the Balkans and Palestine, are currently active or potential trouble spots of close concern to Turkey’s security and stability arrangements. Arafat’s intifadat (explosion of the oppressed people) and Israeli retaliations have been intensified in Palestine in the south. It is now a bit calmer in the north after dangerous clashes caused by the ethnic Albanian rebels, the UCK, in Macedonia in the north, but the events that started with a terrorist bomb attack claiming the lives of seven civilian Serbs of Kosovo in a bus on 16 February may again erupt with external provocations.

Turkish diplomacy is actively working on both fronts to restore peace, but rather than the ages long incurable Palestinian problem, focuses attention on Macedonia in order to prevent the emergence of another incurable trouble spot in the vicinity involving millions of its “soydas”s (kinsmen). Defence Minister Selahattin Cakmakoglu was in Skopje last week to contribute to peace efforts in Macedonia, along with his counterparts from12 other East European countries.  With an unexpected and welcome letter from Secretary of State William Powell, Foreign Minister Ismail Cem has been invited to Skopje on April 12^th for the same purpose. These and similar efforts have already achieved relative calm there. The Macedonian Muslims who fled to Turkey have begun to return home. In 25 days since the outbreak of the events in the second half of February, 9194 Macedonian Muslims arrived in Turkey by car and 5959 of them have already returned home in recent days while new arrivals declined sharply. The stability arrangements within the “Southeast European Countries Cooperation Process” with Turkey’s considerable contributions are based on the OSCE’s (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) principles such as early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation in Europe, and they were instrumental in restoring peace in Macedonia.

The Black Sea Naval Cooperation Task Force (Blackseafor) starts work

Meanwhile, similar activities on the eastern frontiers of Turkey were going on full swing (within a plan based on OSCE principles to make the region secure and in peace, busy with economic development and trade rather than hot confrontations) both in the north and the south, namely the Black Sea and the Caucasus in the north, as well as Iraq and the Gulf in the south. To this end the mistakes and shortfalls of the past are being carefully studied and measures taken to avoid their recurrence in the new arrangements.

Turkey’s Gulf policy was “The security of the Gulf belongs to the Gulf”, in accordance with Brezhnev’s suggestion during his State visit to India, but it did not work when Saddam unwisely invaded Kuwait in August 1990 causing great harm and sufferings to his people as well as enormous economic losses to Turkey in the last ten years. The reason for the failure of Turkey’s Gulf policy was that it had no force to prevent the aggression to the region from within or outside. So how could the security of the Gulf possibly belong to the weak sheikdoms of the Gulf? Now the new arrangements of this policy for the regions around Turkey are based on preventing these shortcomings and the core of these activities are the principles of the OSCE since it was formally opened in Helsinki on July 3^rd, 1973 as the CSCE.

Last week, on April 2^nd, the world was astonished to see Turkey, NATO’s second biggest military force, signing in Istanbul the agreement for the official foundation of the Black Sea Naval Cooperation Task Force, BLACKSEAFOR, along with five former Warsaw Pact countries, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia.

The idea of this task force in the Black Sea was first launched in October 1998 by the then Naval Commander Admiral Salim Dervisoglu and followed up by Turkey until it came to life last week. This initiative is intended to enhance the cooperation and interoperability of the six Black Sea riparian countries for search and rescue operations at sea, as well as humanitarian assistance, anti-mine activities, environmental protection operations, mutual goodwill visits and other points agreed upon by the participant countries. The agreement will go into force upon its ratification by the parliaments of the six countries concerned, but without waiting for the completion of this formality (and Turkey is the “depositor” country    to keep these documents of ratification), the new force will hold its first exercise in the Black Sea in July, according to the unanimous decision taken by the six signatories in Istanbul last week.

The scope of these activities is not restricted to the Black Sea either. At Ukraine’s initiative, it will also cover the Mediterranean in future, because the Marmara and Aegean seas are regarded as intermediary seas and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean are considered a single entity by Russia and Ukraine. As Turkey already has a similar arrangement with Israel and the United States for the Mediterranean, it is not certain if these activities overlap or clash when Blackseafor moves to the southern seas. At Turkey’s initiative, the Straits are kept outside the jurisdiction of this agreement as the 1936 Montreux Convention regulates the international status of the Straits.

Blackseafor will be a joint force of the six countries and will fulfil the above duties as an on-call force when the organisation so decides and summons it to duty. In other words, it is not a standing force with headquarters. Nor is it an alliance in the conventional sense, but a regional military cooperation, the first one between Turkey and the Russian Federation. Starting with Turkey, the architect of this arrangement, member countries will be in command for a year in alphabetical order.

Is Blackseafor a reaction to ESDI on the part of Turkey?

Washington was not at all pleased with this development, but did not actively object, because it is based on the OSCE principles and NATO’s PfP (Partnership for Peace). FM Ismail Cem said at the inaugural address in Istanbul last Monday, “It is significant that the countries that were competing politically up until 10 years ago have now come to a common stage of cooperation.”  Other participants (the Foreign Minister of Georgia, the Deputy Foreign Ministers of the other countries excluding Bulgaria and the Naval Commanders of all the six countries) stressed during their addresses that this formation would contribute to their countries’ integration with NATO and the European Union. The OSCE process was being brought from Europe to this region, they stressed.

Turkish sources dismissed the claim that Blackseafor was a reaction to ESDI (European Security and Defence Identity). Last December Turkey, in its half a century membership in NATO, used its first veto against ESDI because with Washington’s prodding the EU is eliminating Turkey from the decision-making mechanism of defence and security arrangements. British Foreign Secretary Cook said about ESDI in Brussels on February 6^th, 2001 at a joint press conference with US Secretary of State Powell, “We are both determined that this new European capacity shall be firmly anchored in NATO. We are not duplicating planning capabilities of NATO or destabilising it in any way. The US and its European partners can work through the modalities of this issue in the months ahead without any great difficulty.” 

True to the British Foreign Secretary’s expectations, FM Ismail Cem said about the Turkish veto that Turkey had no intention of deadlocking NATO with its vetoes. At his meeting with Powell at the NATO Council in Brussels on February 27^th, he noted that Turkey’s objections were not high-handed, but were based on concrete realities and the resolutions of the 1999 NATO summit in Washington. “Let us find the midway before long lest the forthcoming Budapest summit be overshadowed,” he suggested to the US Secretary of State. A month afterwards, FM Cem repeated these views to President Bush’s national security adviser Condoleessa Rice in Washington.

Meanwhile, Ankara stepped up activities for security arrangements in the region in accordance with the realities of the post cold war period. The first outcome was Blackseafor last week after two-and-a-half years of detailed deliberations and negotiations with the countries concerned. Turkey took special care to take a low profile about these activities. They also include President Demirel’s Caucasus Solidarity Pact initiative, which is heading for the establishment of Turkish military bases in Azerbaijan and Georgia at the initiative and arrangements of the leaders of the countries concerned, namely Presidents Aliyev and Shevardnadze. President Aliyev was in Ankara last month to sign nine agreements with Turkey on March 12^th and had talks with the TGS (Turkish General Staff). He declared during these contacts that he would welcome a Turkish military base in Azerbaijan. He also said that an agreement between Russia and Iran on the legal status of the Caspian Sea would not worry Azerbaijan. He had already signed such a declaration with President Putin in Baku at the beginning of the year, he affirmed. In other words, his speaking of the two issues in the same breath was significant, because the two issues, ie Turkey’s potential military arrangements in the Caucasus and the Caspian oil basin are directly linked. President Shevardnadze’s advisors (namely Salva Pishadre of the Georgian Foreign Relations Office) have also expressed approval of Turkey’s military existence in the Caucasus. As a matter of fact, Georgia has taken action before Azerbaijan in this regard and agreed last week that the Marneuli air base (30 km from Tbilisi) can now be used by Turkish military aircraft. Armenia’s reaction to these arrangements was to launch a worldwide campaign on March 9^th for the annulment of the 1921 Treaty of Kars with the claim that it handed Armenian lands to Turkey and Azerbaijan. The claim was made in Yerevan by the Chairman of the Armenian Human Rights Commission, Hayrikyan, only to isolate Armenia further in the Caucasus with such land claims that go totally against international law rules of today’s world.

There are claims about Turkey’s military arrangements in the Caucasus that a NATO base was being set up in the Caucasus against the Russians, but it is far from reality. Turkey is moving carefully totally within international law rules set out in the UN Charter, the OSCE documents and resolutions, the Charter for European Security signed in Istanbul in November 1999 as well as NATO documents and trying to antagonise neither Washington nor Moscow in these arrangements.

General Carlton Fulford, second in command of the American Forces in Europe, visited Yerevan and Baku last month and said that the solution of the Karabakh problem would pave the way for deepening the USA’s military presence in the Caucasus. In Baku the Defence Minister, Sefer Abiyev, told the American general that Azerbaijan was consolidating its military relations with Turkey and NATO. “Why shouldn’t we consider the arrival in the region of NATO’s military forces,” he wanted to know.

Even though Moscow prefers “action rather than talk” in these issues and it has not made its opinion public knowledge yet, there is reason to believe that Karabakh will be the first problem to be solved if these military arrangements in the region are to go ahead. Russia, who helped Armenia to have the upper hand in Karabakh with a massive military assistance because President Elchibey was dismantling the Soviet bases from his country straight after independence, has the trump card for the solution of this problem today. That is why Turkey believes that with a consensus among Moscow, Ankara, Tbilisi, as well as the warring parties, the Karabakh problem can eventually be solved.  If this solution also enjoys the approval and support of Washington and Paris all the better, but given the influence of the Armenian Diasporas in those countries there is not much room for optimism.

Indeed, Washington’s initiative last week as from April 3^rd about calling a Summit in Florida with Presidents Aliyev and Kocharian in an attempt to solve the Novorno Karabakh problem was not expected to be successful by Turkey, and by all indications so far it has not. 

Asked why Turkey was excluded from the Florida talks, the Under-Secretary of the MFA, Ambassador Faruk Looglu, said that only the three co-chairmen of the Minsk Group, the USA, France and the Russian Federation, were taking part in the conference. “Before the Florida Summit, Aliyev and Kocharian held meetings in Moscow on 26-27 January and later on in Paris on 4-5 March. They were also given audiences by President Jacques Chirac. Florida meetings are the continuation of this work,” he said.

Kazak Oil shipment through the Straits starts after careful calculations     

Another significant development within the Black Sea cooperation last week was Turkey’s gaining observer status (at the 59^th general assembly in Budapest on April 2^nd) of the Budapest-based Danube Commission, as a big stride to full membership of this 11-member international organisation. Its members are Austria, Federal Germany, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Ukraine and the Yugoslav Federation. Even though the Danube does not pass through Turkey it is important for Turkey’s trade with Europe and the environmental cleanliness of the Black Sea, as well as the Straits.

In 1992 the Main was linked to the Danube with a canal. It created a perfect, economic trade route by water to the whole of Europe, but also intensified Turkey’s pollution problems of the seas. By entering this organisation Ankara expects to facilitate its exports to Europe and to check the pollution of its seas.

At the Istanbul conference for the Black Sea last week it was claimed that the shipment of Kazak oil from Novorossiysk by tankers as from July will pollute the Turkish Straits and create danger for Istanbul.

State Minister for navigation Ramazan Mirzaoglu said last week that Turkey reserved its right to restrict the passages of tankers through the straits. Both the First Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, Alexander Aldeyev, who represented his country at the Istanbul conference last week, and the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister for Caspian Oil, Viktor Kalujniy (in Ashkabad), took exception to it. Kalujniy said that it was not possible because they had made all the calculations in cooperation with Turkey about how much oil could pass through the Straits. He said, “When an important investment like this starts all its calculations are made from scratch to the end. The environmental and financial dimensions of the project as well as the transport costs are assessed in all detail. The Tengiz-Novorossiysk pipeline construction was no exception to this rule.”

Indeed, there is a sincere cooperation between Ankara and Moscow on energy questions in recent years and it is especially true of oil and natural gas projects, as Turkey is the biggest energy importer of this region. It is especially true for the coming decades. Energy, therefore, rests at the root of Turkey`s foreign policy and security arrangements and Moscow is very careful about adjusting its policies to Turkey’s national interests, if it can. This cooperation seems to be working satisfactorily at the moment. uras@ada.net/tr - April 9th, 2001