The Real Challenge for U.S.-Turkish Relations: Turkish Kurds
In the past couple of months, news about Turkey has been littered with reports about the spasms of violence between Turkish troops and militants of the terrorist Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) in the rugged, mountainous eastern part of the country. After a decade of cease-fire, old hatreds have resurfaced with a vengeance, costing the lives of more than 250 soldiers in the past year, and 10 soldiers and 29 Kurdish guerillas this month alone. Mothers and wives kneeling and wailing over their sehit (martyr) sons draped in the Turkish flag have become regular images on Turkish television screens and in Turkish newspapers. "The last glance at his father," read a recent headline in an emotionally charged article, juxtaposed with a picture of an infant gazing at his father's lifeless body at the funeral.
According to a recent article from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a 2006 survey by the Turkish think tank TESEV revealed that terrorism ranked "among the public's top concerns," along with other major issues such as Turkey's crippling inflation rate. Turks cite the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the most important factor in the explosive new outburst of Kurdish separatist sentiment in Turkey. Indeed, despite a relative leveling of Turkish-American ties after the decline that followed the invasion of Iraq, Turkey's Kurdish issue continues to stand as a major roadblock on the path to a stronger alliance between the U.S. and Turkey -- at a time when Ankara's support is crucial to the United States.
Turkey's Disillusionment
"It is the great unreported story of the Iraq war," said Steven Cook, a Council on Foreign Relations expert on Turkey, in a recent interview, referring to the deteriorating ties between Turkey and the United States. "Not only does it have the potential for a blowup in U.S.-Turkey relations, it has already." Most pointed have been the views of Kadri G¸rsel, a journalist at the mass-circulation daily Milliyet: "The U.S. attitude [toward the PKK] has really pissed off the government and the army. The U.S. really doesn't understand how exhausted and fed up they are," he wrote in a recent column (in Turkish).
The disappointment and resentment toward the United States are palpable in Ankara's corridors of power. Last summer, Prime Minister Erdogan accused Washington of a double standard in its perception of terrorism. "They show tolerance towards country A and show a different approach to country B. This is unacceptable," he told reporters. "The way they [the United States] look at terror there [in Israel] and in Turkey is not the same." Similarly, according to a report in The Anatolian Times, Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah G¸l recently conveyed Turkey's uneasiness with the United State's minimal efforts in rooting out PKK terrorists during a telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Also contributing to the angry atmosphere was Rice's recent gaffe in congressional testimony, during which she referred to the Turkish-Iraq frontline as the "border between Turkey and Kurdistan." The remark touched a raw nerve in the Turkish media, where writers of all political persuasions loudly berated her. On a national broadcast, Erdogan also branded her description of the territory as "wrong" reinforcing his commitment to send the "necessary messages" to U.S. officials. And if there were any doubts about the U.S. dismissal of Turkey's PKK problem, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers put an end to them. "The fight against PKK, which is not an easy job to handle, does not have high priority in the agenda of the U.S.," Myers told Voice of America April 7.
This attitude is quite a departure from earlier years when President Bush, in a 2004 NATO conference in Istanbul, assured Turkish authorities he would subdue any PKK threat that existed in the area. The following year, Rice pledged that the United States would double its efforts in cracking down on Kurdish militants in Turkey. But it was only after a violence-drenched summer of 2006 that the U.S. State Department appointed Gen. Joseph Ralston as a special envoy to examine the PKK question. The words of Soner Cagoptay, Director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, reflect the superficial nature of the gesture in simple but sardonic terms: "Unless General Ralston's job description involves actually combating the PKK, his mission may only make a bad situation worse and further undermine U.S.-Turkish relations. . . . Symbolic, cosmetic steps will only increase Turkish frustration." Disheartened and embittered by the increasing cold shoulder from Washington, many in Turkey feel that the country must figure out its own response to the recent upsurge in violence.
Turkey's Desire to Move On
Fueled also in part by regional president of Iraqi Kurdistan Massoud Barzani's provocative comments, Turkish authorities have been compelled to take a harsher stance on the Kurdish question. Earlier this month, emboldened by having the U.S. military as an ally, Barzani threatened to invade southeastern Turkish territory if Turkey obstructs the Kurds' attempt to attach the city of Kirkuk to the de facto autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. In an interview with Al-Arabiya TV, Barzani sound off a warning: "Turkey is not allowed to intervene in the Kirkuk issue and if it does, we will interfere in Diyarbakir's [the pseudo-capital of Turkey's Kurds and a hotbed for Kurdish nationalism] issues and other cities in Turkey." Alluding to a potential Turkish assault on Kurdish militants, Erdogan responded with vigor: "They should be very careful in their use of words . . . otherwise they will be crushed by those words."
Indeed, it should not come as a surprise if the Turkish military soon launches a cross-border operation against Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. In mid-April, the Turkish military chief, Gen. Yasar B¸y¸kanit, asked the government to grant the military permission to undertake a cross-border incursion into northern Iraq. "An operation into Iraq is necessary," Gen. B¸y¸kanit said, signaling the country's growing frustration over inadequate action against Kurdish militants by American and Iraqi forces. For Turkey's gargantuan and elaborate military, the target is hardly elusive: there are approximately 4,000 PKK guerillas inside Iraq, who move about freely, acquiring weapons and launching cross-border attacks into Turkish territory, according to the Associated Press. Retired Turkish Gen. Edip Baser pithily examines the situation as he sees it: "It is hard to understand why we should not use one of our international rights, as this terrorist organization is still active and coming into my country, and acting in my country, killing people and then going back to northern Iraq," he said. "Why should I not go after them?"
In the past, Turkey has not shied away from taking the PKK issue into her own hands. In a quest to disrupt PKK safe havens in Iraq, an estimated 20,000 Turkish troops entered Iraq in 1992. Then again in 1995, a major military operation was launched against Kurds in northern Iraq, involving 35,000 Turkish troops. In 1998, relations between Syria and Turkey reached a fever pitch when Turkey threatened Damascus with war for harboring PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and his clan, which resulted in the mass deployment of Turkish soldiers on the Syrian border. Today, Turkey's resentment of Iraq's harboring of PKK militants is just as grave as it was in the previous decade.
If the recent warnings of a Turkish "surge" into northern Iraq worry Washington, so should the increase in Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey that's occurring in conjunction with a deep erosion of pro-American sentiment. The United States continues to tout Turkey as a strategic ally straddling Europe and the Muslim Middle East, but many Turks question whether Washington's inadequate action against the PKK is a ploy to dislocate the entire Middle Eastern region. Turkish media is saturated with provocative articles and conspiracy theories about the pro-American activities of Kurds in northern Iraq, as well as stories about clandestine American and European funding of the PKK activities. The notion that the United State's new Middle Eastern project entails the formation of an independent Kurdish state that encompasses Turkey's southeastern border is widespread. Turks are increasingly convinced that the United States is provoking age-old ethnic animosities in the same spirit with which European forces brought about the tumbling of the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire.
The numbers are telling. America's positive image has plunged to a historic low of 12 percent in 2006 from a favorable 52 percent in 2000, according to polling from the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Moreover, 71 percent of Turks believe the United States may someday threaten their country, while their positive opinions about Christians have fallen from 31 percent in 2004 to 16 percent, just one percent higher than their opinion of Jews.
As long as the United States remains reluctant to directly increase its efforts in helping resolve Turkey's security concerns, ties between the United States and its most important ally in the region will continue to suffer. Mere symbolic gestures cannot solve a problem of the magnitude and scope of Turkey's Kurdish issue. Concrete and definitive steps by American forces are necessary to ensure that Turkey remains a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. In the region's volatile political environment, which is characterized by numerous and fluctuating threats, Washington and Ankara still need one another.
