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» Turkey's Iraq Policy: from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs » Turkish News from: Turkish Daily Press
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TURKEY
Turkey's border with Iraq runs through the Kurdish region of the country. And from 1984 until just recently, Turkish Kurds fought a bloody insurgency against the Turkish army to gain independence. It was the culmination of a struggle as old as the modern Turkish state founded by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in the early 1920s. Ataturk tried to engineer a secular Turkish identity. The problem for the millions of Kurds living within Turkey's borders is they could never be Turkish. They have their own language and distinct culture. In the late '70s Turkey's Kurds engaged in a national liberation struggle. More than 36,000 people died in an attempt to establish Kurdish autonomy, most of them Kurds. It was only in November of last year that Turkey finally ended the military state of emergency. Now that martial law has ended people are trying to enjoy the new, relaxed atmosphere. Today in the night clubs of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish part of Turkey, young Kurdish students can listen to electronic renditions of Kurdish songs that just a few years ago were banned by the Turkish government. On Diyarbakir's Street of Bars men enjoy raki - Turkish anisette - and serenade themselves with local Diyarbakir love songs.
Unlike Jordan, it is hard to find good English speakers in this corner of the world. Kurdish is everyone's first language. Turkish is everyone's second. The few who do speak English learn it in the street dealing with the area's infrequent tourists. Mehmet Nalbant picked up his English driving tourists and selling them carpets. I went to the Street of Bars for raki and chips with him. Mehmet grew up with the contradictions of being a Kurd in Turkey. Today, life for him is as good as it has ever been. "We feel better now than four years ago," he told me. Mehmet reminisced about being a teenager and ducking down side-streets when he saw an army patrol, even though he had done nothing wrong. The fear of arrest was that strong. Now his fear is that the war might give the government an excuse to bring the army back out on the street. The troops are still in the region. In one town of 60,000 people I went to a military base and counted more than 50 tanks parked and ready for action. The reason for Mehmet's anxiety is that there are millions of Kurds living just over the border in Iraq. They already have a semi-autonomous region with their own parliament. The Turkish authorities a concerned that war in Iraq might lead to renewed separatist activity in their own Kurdish territory. It's a four-hour drive from Diyarbakir to the border crossing point from Turkey into Iraq. The road slides down the edge of the mountainous plateau that makes up most of Turkey and you find yourself looking out on a green plain, the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. The border is clearly marked, every kilometer there is a Turkish Army watch tower and an armed bunker dug in just beside it. In the poor towns and fields, peasant life goes on. Along the road, trucks thunder by going in and out of Iraq, but not as many as there used to be, according to some drivers, killing time in the town of Silopi, the last stop before the border. The drivers complain because only oil trucks are being allowed to go back and forth at the moment. As in Jordan, Turkey must import its oil. About 10 percent comes from Iraq. Much of it is trucked in despite the fact that there is a pipeline that runs from Iraq into Turkey, Necdet Pamir, energy adviser to the Turkish government. Pamir points out that the pipeline operates at about 50 percent capacity because Saddam Hussein prefers it that way. "Saddam prefers to sell oil illegally to increase his own wealth," explains Pamir. So he ships the black stuff over the border illegally via tanker rather than through the pipeline whose flows can be monitored by the U.N., says Pamir. Much of that illegal oil is contained in the tankers going through Silopi.
Pamir acknowledges that there would be a benefit to Turkey's oil flow and revenues if Saddam was removed. He also points out that if war comes and oil prices rise, the effect on Turkey's struggling economy will be devastating. But Turkey's biggest fear about the war is that the Turkish oil pipeline's Iraqi terminus is in Kirkuk, a town just by the Kurdish protected area in Northern Iraq may have something to do with it. Perhaps the most surprising thing about traveling along Iraq's borders is the invisibility of the international relief community. In Jordan and Turkey, the governments face a delicate problem: if you allow relief organizations to set up facilities for refugees, you are acknowledging war is inevitable. When an overwhelming majority of your people don't want war that's a bad political move. High on a plateau above Silopi in Southeastern Turkey near the town of Midyat is the monastery of Saint Gabriel founded in 367 AD. For centuries Saint Gabriel's was a seminary training Syrian Orthodox priests to minister to the region's Christians.
But in Iraq there are a million and a half Syrian Orthodox Christians and during the first Gulf War, some of them were housed as refugees here, according to Bishop Samuel, the Metropolitan of the region, "Many flew to Turkey and many came here," he remembers, "and many people who were taking care of them were from Europe bringing lots of things to help them ... and from the monastery we took them to refugee camps." I asked the Bishop what preparation was underway for the upcoming conflict. "How we can prepare," he said testily. "There is nothing we can do. We are a small community here." The Bishop was being overly discreet. Before we spoke I had seen around 30 new hospital bed frames stacked in a vaulted room next to the monastery's crypt. When the conflict starts Saint Gabriel's will be prepared to receive refugees. A funny thing happened on the road to war, the Turkish parliament rejected its government's deal with the U.S. to allow American troops into the country to open up a second front in Iraq in the North from Turkey. It was a reflection of popular will. 95 percent of the Turkish people are against the conflict. Regardless of whether the Turkish government and parliament ultimately decide to allow U.S. troops into the country, the Turkish Army is already acting as if the war is about to start. It has been reported that Turkish forces are already over the border to control refugee flows and maintain order.
The view from Ankara about war ranges from ambivalent to anxious. In Diyarbakir the view ultimately is shaped by the recent past. Sitting in one of the drinking places in the Street of Bars, my friend Mehmet began to reminisce about the last Gulf War. Then the Iraqi Kurds were encouraged by the first President Bush to rise up against Saddam. They did. The U.S. did not come to their aid and thousands died and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee to the mountains. "I couldn't bear to see those people on the mountains. I was working with American soldiers then ... The Americans if they wanted to get rid of Saddam they could have but they didn't. It was all a big trick." It is strange to travel Iraq's borders in these days before war. The
calm is almost surreal. There is more fear and anger in the U.S. and Europe
than in the region that will bear the brunt of the conflict. Iraqi truck
drivers who may be dead within a month go about their business as if everything
was normal. Turkish Kurds living in towns within range of Iraqi missiles
carry on as if hell was not about to be unleashed just the other side
of the Tigris River. "Even now we pray for peace for all of humanity," then he adds
with a rueful chuckle, "But we don't think that America will make
peace. |
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