TURKS PRESS RICE ON REBELS
By Anne Gearan
The Associated Press
Nov 2 2007
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Faced with the prospect of another front opening
in the already difficult Iraq war, the United States struggled Friday
to persuade Turkey not to send its Army across the Iraq border to
attack guerrillas who use the remote terrain to launch terror attacks
inside Turkey.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged calm and cooperation in a
string of meetings with top Turkish leaders fed up with rebel attacks
and insistent that Turkey will do what it must to stop them.
She was making a similar argument later Friday in a separate meeting
with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government has said
it will not stand for any cross-border assault.
Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sounded impatient, and he offered her
no public promise of the restraint Washington seeks.
"We have great expectations from the United States," Babacan said at a
news conference following his meeting with Rice. "We are at the point
where words have been exhausted and where there is need for action."
Ankara has said Turkey wants to hear specifics about what the United
States is prepared to do to counter the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party,
or PKK, or Turkey will launch an attack. Rebel attacks against Turkish
positions over the last month have left 47 dead, including 35 soldiers,
according to government and media reports.
Many Turks are furious with the United States for its perceived failure
to pressure Iraq into cracking down on the PKK, which operates from
bases in the semiautonomous northern Kurdish region of Iraq. Street
protesters have urged the government to send forces across the border
even if it means a deepening of the rift with the U.S., their Cold
War-era ally.
Turkey’s military chief has said the country will wait until after
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with President Bush next
week in Washington to make a final decision about an assault.
Washington worries that a cross-border attack would bring instability
to what has been the calmest part of Iraq, and could set a precedent
for other countries, like Iran, that also have conflicts with Kurdish
rebels. Babacan just returned from a trip to Iran last week, lobbying
for support for the Turkish side and underscoring that Turkey will
act as it sees fit, regardless of U.S. pressure.
"We all need to redouble our efforts and the United States is committed
to redoubling our efforts," Rice said. "No one should doubt the
commitment of the United States in this situation."
She said the United States is working to broaden its sharing of
intelligence and has begun discussing longer-term solutions that
would involve Turkey, Iraq and the United States.
The United States charges that weapons and foreign fighters flow
over Iraq’s borders from Iran and Syria to confront U.S. forces,
but until now the border area with Turkey has been relatively quiet.
"It is our hope and our desire that as a country that has been the
target of a big terror attack the U.S. will understand the situation
we are in, understand the frustration we feel, the outrage," Babacan
said, according to a simultaneous English translation of his words.
The conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish rebels predates the 2003
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has little to do with the sectarian
divisions that have all but paralyzed Iraq’s fragile U.S.-backed
government and prolonged the war.
The United States paid little attention to the issue, despite Turkish
complaints, until the burst of rebel attacks this fall threatened
to bring open warfare to Iraq’s largely self-governing north – the
only part of the country that has been relatively safe, stable and
economically sound.
Bush had named a former NATO supreme commander – retired Air Force
Gen. Joseph Ralston – as a U.S. envoy to try to defuse tensions,
but the general resigned in apparent frustration last month.
Rice’s visit to Ankara is a sign of the priority Washington now
places on cooling a conflict that places the U.S. between important
NATO ally Turkey, the weak U.S.-backed government in Baghdad and the
self-governing Kurds in Iraq’s oil-rich north.
Rice rearranged a previously scheduled trip to Turkey to add meetings
in the capital, where she also tried to soothe lingering Turkish
irritation over a vote in Congress last month that labeled as genocide
the 1915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.