Wake-Up Call From Saddam: Turkey Is A Friend In Need, A Friend Indeed

If nothing else, the renewed outbreak of hostilities with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is an important reminder of the volatility of the strategically sensitive neighborhood in which one of the United States’s allies, Turkey, lives. What is more, if the minimalist strike flown on 13 January 1993 against southern Iraqi air defense units proves not to be the last word in the struggle with Baghdad, the indispensability of Turkey to any effective U.S. policy toward Iraq and the region will be borne out once again.

Such insights could not come at a more important time. Despite the lessons on these fronts that should have been drawn from the invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath(1), the last U.S. Congress saw fit to decrease dramatically the military assistance Washington has traditionally provided Ankara. This was the practical effect of a seemingly minor bookkeeping adjustment — one which changed the basis of American aid from grants to loans at roughly commercial interest rates. By that action, taken over the Bush Administration’s objections, Congress conveyed a signal of insulting indifference toward a friend and ally whose security depends critically upon U.S. support.

The Makings of a Crisis in Turkish-American Relations

The present crisis is, in no small measure, the handiwork of Rep. David Obey (D-WI), chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. Obey — with a well-established reputation for penny-wise and pound-foolish approaches to foreign aid in general and a lack of appreciation of Turkey in particular — insisted on cutting the overall amount of U.S. assistance to Ankara in Fiscal Year 1993 and on converting it from a grant aid to loans.

Obey’s argument boiled down to the following: U.S. support for Turkey was a relic of the Cold War which, with its passing, no longer warranted American largesse. It played into the general anti-foreign aid sentiment (a feeling that sadly ignores the cost-effective contribution such assistance can make to U.S. security) and other Members’ criticisms of Turkish actions taken to counter the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).

The Kurds Need Turkey

Turkey has been as central to the U.S.-led effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War as it was to the effort to expel his forces from Kuwait. In this test case of the prospects for a "New World Order" built on collective security arrangements and alliance burden-sharing, Turkey’s contributions in the form of permission to use its bases to protect the Kurdish population of Iraq (Operation Provide Comfort) and to enforce the ongoing embargo against Baghdad have been of incalculable value.

Indeed, Operation Provide Comfort would not be possible without Turkey’s assistance. In fact, were Ankara no longer able to support the allied effort, the four million Kurds of northern Iraq would once again be susceptible to Saddam Hussein’s brutal aggression. A 3 January 1993 article in the New York Times provided shocking evidence of the magnitude of Saddam’s earlier, brutal campaign, describing new evidence which "provides a detailed picture of the day-to-day operations of the Iraqi Government and its security apparatus as they carried out what researchers now believe was genocide against the Iraqi Kurds." Baghdad’s subsequent threats against the Kurds and its recent, violent interference with U.N. relief missions to their population centers offer abundant evidence of the abiding danger Saddam poses to the Kurds — absent the coalition’s protection made possible by Turkey.

It must be remembered that in 1988 Turkey saved 65,000 Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam’s chemical weapons attacks. Similarly, after the Gulf War, Turkey aided 500,000 Kurds when they massed along the Turkish-Iraqi border to escape reprisals from the Iraqi leadership. Today, as in the past, Turkish help may spell the difference between the Kurds’ survival and their mass extermination. Importantly, Turkey’s Parliament voted last month to extend the mandate enabling U.S. and coalition forces to continue using its territory to organize and provide humanitarian relief for the Kurdish people of Iraq.

Turkey Needs Support in its Struggle with the PKK

Charges that Turkey is oppressing its own Kurdish minority, however, frequently overshadow whatever credit Turkey is given for helping Iraq’s Kurds. Congressional figures and allied governments have been particularly quick to assail the Turks for harsh measures adopted to suppress the PKK.

In so doing, Turkey’s critics have studiously ignored certain facts:

• The PKK is an avowedly Marxist organization that routinely employs terrorist techniques in its campaign against the democratic government of Turkey, a campaign aiming at a PKK state on Turkish territory. Despite 15 years of operations, however, the PKK has failed to generate any significant support among Turkish citizens of Kurdish ethnic origin. To the contrary, its indiscriminate violence has alienated the very populace it claims to represent. The overwhelming majority of Turkey’s Kurdish citizens support the country’s unity and territorial integrity.(2)

 

• Interestingly, despite PKK claims of Kurdish solidarity, the organization has little, if any, support in northern Iraq either. Instead, it is viewed by Iraqi Kurds as an oppressive gang. The PKK is even seen as an instrument of the hated Iraqi dictator(3); it has, after all, served his purposes in attacking Kurdish villages in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey that are out of reach of his own army. The PKK has also helped to disrupt vital supply routes for relief to the Iraqi Kurds at a time when supplies and foodstuffs were critical to surviving the harsh winter.

   

 

• More than 5,100 people have died in the PKK’s eight-year "independence" campaign, most of them fellow Kurds who declined to support the terrorists’ cause or whose death was otherwise effected by the PKK to intimidate and coerce others to do so. As a result, the regional Kurdish government of northern Iraq has displayed its antipathy toward the PKK by joining forces with the Turkish military in major operations designed to eradicate the PKK from the latter’s bases in northern Iraq.

   

• Turkey’s is a young, still-forming and — by some standards — imperfect democracy. In the face of reports of Turkish human rights abuses, two points need to be borne in mind:
  • First, the democratic tradition in Turkey is only about seventy years old. It took the United States the better part of two hundred years to give all its citizens the right to vote and full protection under the law. This reality should encourage Americans to recognize that others’ commitment to democracy may be no less profound or genuine but simply less well-developed — and still worthy of staunch U.S. support.

   

  That said, Turkey is making important progress toward consolidating its democracy. For example, on 30 November 1992, Turkish President Turgut Ozal signed into law legal reform legislation that will, among other things, refine the country’s Code of Criminal Procedure. This pivotal piece of legislation brings Turkish law into conformity with international standards in the vital areas of detention periods, arrest procedures and interrogation practices.

   

  • Second, democratic Turkey faces serious dangers, not only from the internal threat posed by terrorist organizations like the PKK but also from the hostile powers that surround it. Three of the six countries on the U.S. State Department’s list of state-sponsors of terrorism border Turkey to the southeast. In fact, located as it is between the Balkans, the Middle East, and formerly Soviet Central Asia, Turkey must contend with neighbors who are — virtually without exception — antipathetic to the development of and proliferation of democratic freedoms.

     

 

• Much is riding on Turkey’s survival and success as a bulwark of Western secularism, democracy and free enterprise in a rising sea of Islamic radicalism, ethnic genocide, state-sponsored terrorism and, possibly, renascent Soviet-style authoritarianism. There is a school of thought — particularly popular in radical Muslim circles — that contends Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and Westernization. Turkey is the sole example in the world to refute this portentous line of argument. Therefore, the success of the Turkish experiment — combining religious freedom for a predominantly Muslim country together with Western political and economic institutions — is of historic importance: Its outcome will help shape a large part of the world for the century to come.

The Bottom Line

An important facet of the PKK’s strategy — and that of Turkey’s other adversaries — is to frustrate Turkey’s ties with the West, especially its move towards economic and political integration with Europe. These ties will help solidify Turkish secular democracy and its pluralistic multi-party system.

Against the backdrop of an increasingly unstable region, the importance of ensuring that Turkey continues to develop democracy and promote Western values should be self-evident. Far from becoming expendable in the post-Cold War world, a strong and secure Turkey is in fact more important today than ever before.

One thing should now be clear: The degree to which still more Kurdish civilians will become the victims of terrorism (whether through Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign or that inflicted by the PKK striking in Turkey and northern Iraq) will depend, in part, upon the willingness of Western nations to oppose such violence and support Turkey’s struggle against the PKK.

More importantly, one of the key tests of whether the Clinton Administration is going to have a strategic view of America’s interests going into the twenty-first century — or whether it will be stuck in the same short-sighted rut of ad hoc foreign policy and crisis management that characterized the Bush presidency — will be found in its assessment of the importance of Turkey and the need to give renewed priority to U.S.-Turkish ties. In this connection, its decision with respect to restoring grant security assistance to Ankara will be a critical straw in the wind.

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1. It is no overstatement to say that, without Ankara’s courageous and unwavering support, there probably would have been no Operation Desert Shield; there certainly would have been no Desert Storm. It was the Turks’ willingness to take the considerable risks associated with suspending Iraqi oil exports across their soil in the aftermath of the invasion of Kuwait that encouraged the Saudis to do likewise and created the conditions under which economic sanctions, allied military deployments and subsequent combat operations in the region could be undertaken.

2. In sharp contrast to the systematic repression faced by their counterparts living under the totalitarian regimes of neighboring countries, Turkish Kurds have the democratic rights of all Turkish citizens. They are represented in Turkey’s Parliament and government and have been assimilated into the Turkish population. (The current foreign minister, for example, is a Kurd.) As part of its campaign to improve personal freedoms, the Turkish government has, moreover, recently broadened the human rights and freedoms of its citizens of Kurdish ethnic origin to preserve and develop their ethnic identity.

3. Several other bad actors in the region, notably Syria’s Hafez Assad and the mullahs of Iran, have been known to provide logistical and materiel support to the PKK as part of their ongoing effort to weaken or destroy their common enemy — democratic Turkey.