Turkey and the United States: A partnership at risk?

Date: 12/07/03

The strategic interests of America and Turkey may be diverging dangerously

THE much-vaunted “strategic partnership” cemented during more than half a century between Turkey and the United States looked in danger of coming unstuck four months ago when Turkey's parliament refused to let American troops use eastern Turkey as a launch-pad from which to attack Iraq. Since then, the two countries have tried to patch things up. But a new row has made matters worse, all over again. Turkey's top general, Hilmi Ozkok, said that the latest quarrel, sparked by the arrest on July 4th of 11 members of Turkey's special forces by American troops in northern Iraq, marked the “biggest crisis” ever between the armed forces of the two NATO allies. For now, the strategic-partnership phrase has dropped out of sight.

The captured Turks (freed a couple of days later) were members of a force deployed in the Kurdish enclave since 1996 to monitor a ceasefire between the two main Kurdish factions running northern Iraq. The Americans say they arrested the Turlish soldiers on suspicion of involvement in a plot to kill the Kurdish governor of Iraq's oil-rich province of Kirkuk. The Turkish special forces were further said to be acting in cahoots with an ethnic-Turkish militia called the Turcomen Front, which has been covertly armed and trained by Turkey as a lever against the Iraqi Kurds.

The American claims of a murder plot were nonsense, said Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People's Party, parliament's main opposition, fumed that nothing short of a formal American apology would do. Hursit Tolon, a top general, called the incident “disgusting” and cancelled a trip to America.

The captured Turks said that American soldiers had hit, handcuffed and cursed them, putting sacks over their heads during two days of interrogation in Baghdad. Anti-American feeling among Turks at large is rising. It could turn nastier if Congress passes a resolution recognising the deaths of at least 1m Armenians in Turkey in 1915 as genocide.

The American government insists that the recently captured Turks were not so innocent. Explosives and other apparently incriminating evidence were said to have been found on them. But even if that were so, the Turks think the Americans should have dealt with the matter through diplomatic channels rather than treat the Turkish soldiers as if they were enemies. Diplomats in the American State Department may well share that view. They had apparently been kept in the dark by the Pentagon.

The prevailing suspicion among ordinary Turks and their leaders is that hawks in the American administration are out to punish them for not letting American troops use Turkey as a rear base in the war against Iraq. But there is a deeper explanation. The two countries' interests have been diverging since the cold war ended. Though it backed the Americans strongly in the first Gulf war, in 1991, Turkey has since bitterly regretted one outcome: the consolidation of Kurdish self-rule in northern Iraq. Not only did it fan separatist feeling among Turkey's own Kurds; the war's outcome also lost Turkey trade with Iraq worth billions of dollars - a loss that Turks think was never appreciated by the Americans. Nor was Turkey compensated.

The Turks are becoming no less glum about the outcome of the recent American war, for Turkey is being slowly but surely eased out of northern Iraq, once again to the great satisfaction of Iraq's Kurds. The spectre of a Kurdish renaissance, courtesy of the Americans, is jangling Turkish nerves. That, not just the recent spat over the 11 captured Turkish soldiers, is what truly irks the Turks.

The strategic interests of America and Turkey may be diverging dangerously.