BUSH TEETERS ON TURKISH-KURD TIGHTROPE
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times Online
25Ak05.html
Oct 24 2007
Hong Kong
WASHINGTON – Spurred by the deployment of at least 100,000 troops
along Turkey’s border with Iraq, the administration of US President
George W Bush is pressing its closest clients in Iraqi Kurdistan to
crack down hard against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which
Washington considers a terrorist organization.
Given the administration’s refusal so far to back up that pressure
with military muscle, however, it remains unclear whether its efforts
will translate into action by local Kurdish authorities, or
prevent a cross-border offensive that could throw into chaos the one
Iraqi region that has enjoyed stability since the 2003 US invasion.
The indications are that US pressure is having only a limited impact.
The PKK’s offer to observe a conditional ceasefire was dismissed both
by Ankara and officials in Washington, who noted that such declarations
had proved meaningless in the past.
And a declaration by the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki that it will close down all PKK offices throughout Iraq
was also considered toothless, since Iraqi troops at least nominally
under Maliki’s control are not permitted to operate in Kurdistan
where the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia forces, are charged with
maintaining security.
"I understand there’s this commitment to shut down offices," said US
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "Okay, but what you need
to see are actual outputs from inputs that the Iraqi government might
make. The outputs are that you need to stop terrorist attacks; there
needs to be prevention of terrorist attacks, and you need to get to
the root cause here, and that is to stop this terrorist organization
from operating on Iraqi soil," he added.
Most analysts in Washington believe that neither Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor his military commanders are eager
to send their forces into Iraq to deal with the estimated 3,000 PKK
guerrillas who are thought to be based there and that diplomacy,
which has intensified dramatically over the past several days, has
at least several more days to play itself out.
Indeed, senior Turkish officials themselves have stressed they prefer
diplomatic, and, if that doesn’t work, economic pressure to persuade
Iraqi and regional authorities to move against the PKK. Kurdistan
is landlocked and its economy is heavily dependent on open borders
with Turkey, as well as Iran and Syria, both of which, with large and
restive Kurdish populations of their own, have expressed solidarity
with Ankara in recent days.
But any major new attack by Iraq-based PKK guerrillas, who killed 12
Turkish soldiers and claimed to have taken prisoner eight more over
the weekend, will likely force Erdogan to order his military to cross
the border – initially with air strikes and commandos, according to
analysts – as authorized by the Turkish Parliament last week.
"If there is another event, Erdogan and the military, despite their
reluctance to be drawn reflexively across that border, will probably
have to do something, and the options aren’t particularly good,"
according to a former US ambassador to Ankara, Mark Parris.
"I have no doubt that [US ambassador to Iraq] Ryan Crocker, [US Iraq
commander General David] Petraeus and people here are pounding on
the Iraqi leadership to get this under control," Parris added in a
teleconference on the crisis sponsored by the New York-based Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR).
At the same time, however, the administration finds its influence
over the key parties at a particularly low ebb. Anti-US sentiment in
an increasingly democratic Turkey is at an all-time high, not least
because of Washington’s refusal to date to seriously address Ankara’s
concerns about the PKK, a refusal that has fed the perception that
the US has a secret agenda to break up Iraq and create an independent
Kurdistan that will naturally act as an inspiration for Kurds in
Turkey to seek independence.
"We have just not answered the mail on this," according to Ian Lesser,
an expert at the German Marshall Fund and author of a new book on
US-Turkey relations, significantly entitled Beyond Suspicion.
"We’re seeing the result of letting this issue lie for so long,"
according to Stephen Cook, a Turkey expert at CFR, who noted that
Joseph Ralston, the special US envoy appointed by Bush last year to
deal with Turkey’s concerns, resigned recently, reportedly out of
frustration at the administration’s neglect. "The Turks have very
little trust in our ability to do anything on this issue."
At the same time, Ankara enjoys considerable leverage over the US both
as a key North Atlantic Treaty Organization partner that contributes
1,000 troops to the alliance’s forces in Afghanistan and as the host
of Incirlik air base, a major logistical hub for US forces in Iraq.
Hints by Turkish officials that Ankara would restrict access to
the base after a key Congressional committee approved a non-binding
resolution on the "genocide" of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the
last days of the Ottoman Empire spurred an all-out lobbying effort
by the administration and the Pentagon, in particular, to persuade
lawmakers to drop the matter.
Washington similarly finds its leverage over Iraqi Kurds limited, not
least because it has all but ruled out deploying already-stretched
US troops from central and southern Iraq to the north’s mountain
redoubts where the PKK guerrillas are based, and because the PKK is
believed to have strong popular support in Kurdistan.
"US action against the PKK could be as destabilizing as a Turkish
incursion," according to Parris, who also noted that US strategy for
building an Iraqi army capable of assuming much of the security burden
that has been shouldered by US troops has come to depend mainly on
the supply of Peshmerga recruits by the Kurdistan authorities.
The authorities may be seeking to exact a high price for cracking down
on the PKK; namely, the holding of a referendum in oil-rich Kirkuk on
its absorption by Kurdistan, a step that the Turks have long warned
against and one that could provoke a broader military intervention.
On this issue, US diplomacy until now has been more activist than
on the PKK. It has successfully delayed the holding of such a
referendum, which was mandated to take place this year by the 2005
constitution, until at least next year. Washington is concerned
that the referendum could spark major ethnic violence in the region,
as well as intervention by Turkey.