The New York Times
November 3, 2007 Saturday
Late Edition – Final
Pressed by Turks, Rice Seeks to Solve Kurdish Rebel Threat While
Urging Restraint
By HELENE COOPER and SABRINA TAVERNISE; Helene Cooper reported from
Ankara, and Sabrina Tavernise from Istanbul.
ANKARA, Turkey, Nov. 2
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came under pressure Friday from
Turkish leaders seeking American help to curb Kurdish guerrillas in
northern Iraq. But it was not clear whether her public pronouncements
at the outset of this long-awaited visit would be enough to satisfy
them.
During a string of meetings in the capital, Ankara, before heading to
Istanbul, Ms. Rice took pains to demonstrate support for Turkey. She
called for restraint in an attempt to forestall any Turkish military
incursion into northern Iraq, where the Kurdish rebels stage attacks
on Turkey from mountain hide-outs.
”I think it’s fair to say that we all need to redouble our efforts,”
Ms. Rice said at a press conference on Friday. ”All across the world
we’ve seen that it’s not easy to root out terrorism.”
Turkish leaders continued to sound resolute. ”Our expectations of the
United States are very high,” the foreign minister, Ali Babacan,
said, standing next to Ms. Rice. ”We want action.”
Less than two weeks before Ms. Rice’s visit, the Kurdish rebels, the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party, killed 12 Turkish soldiers near the border
with Iraq, prompting Turkey to threaten a military offensive. Turkey
is a NATO member and a strong American ally in a troubled region, so a
military offensive into Iraq –whose territory is controlled by the
United States military — could be deeply problematic for all parties.
The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been skeptical
of military action in the past, and is well aware of the damage an
offensive would inflict on Turkey, which is pressing for acceptance
into the European Union.
Few Turkish officials expect the United States to offer military
action, but a public display of support for Mr. Erdogan could ease the
pressure on him to choose military action.
”The Americans are not being concrete, and that is narrowing down the
field of maneuver for the government,” said Ilter Turan, a professor
of political science at Bilgi University in Istanbul. The political
opposition is fanning nationalism, he said, and with trust in the
United States at a low in Turkish society, it is ”difficult for the
Turkish government to appear that it is trusting the Americans without
some concrete results.”
Mr. Erdogan will meet with President Bush next week, and he reiterated
this week that he would not press for a large-scale offensive, but
that he expected support from the United States.
But with American forces already stretched thin in Iraq, American
military commanders have balked at taking action against the rebels,
known by their initials, the P.K.K., and the Bush administration has
focused its efforts on pressing Iraq’s Kurdish leaders, who control
the area in which the P.K.K. hides, to take action against the
group. Those leaders, however, say that it is impossible to dislodge
the fighters from the remote mountains where they hide, and that the
only solution is through diplomacy and amnesty.
The Kurdish rebel situation ”has now become, rightly or wrongly, a
test of where the United States holds Turkey,” said Soli Ozel, a
professor of international relations at Bilgi University.
Support for the United States eroded further last month, when a House
committee approved a resolution condemning the mass killings of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I as genocide. The full
House did not vote on the resolution, but Turkey reacted angrily,
threatening to shut off its territory as an American supply hub for
Iraq, and recalling its ambassador from Washington.
The Bush administration opposed the genocide vote, and has worked to
smooth things over since then. Ms. Rice delicately referred to the
Armenian issue on Friday as ”the events of 1915,” but made no
mention of the word genocide, a term the Turks strongly reject.
Even within the Bush administration, there has been criticism that the
United States, in more than four years in Iraq, should have done more
to rein in the Kurdish guerrillas. Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who is
retired from the Air Force and until last month was the United States
special envoy for countering the P.K.K., told McClatchy Newspapers on
Friday that United States inaction on the P.K.K. issue might force
Turkey to act. General Ralston resigned his post, administration
officials said, because he was frustrated with the failure of Iraq and
the United States to do more in northern Iraq.
Bush administration officials are in the middle of a delicate
balancing act, trying to shore up Mr. Erdogan’s hand against those in
his country calling for military action. But they are also strenuously
trying to avoid a new front in the war, and Ms. Rice must find a way
to give Mr. Erdogan public backing while privately urging restraint.
Professor Turan said that might not be enough. ”This kind of
explanation is often seen as buying time,” he said. ”I think what
the public wants to hear is something concrete.”
Speaking to reporters on her flight to Ankara, Ms. Rice said pointedly
that Turkey’s problems with the Kurds could not all be laid at
America’s door. ”This didn’t arise with the liberation of Iraq,” she
said. ”The problem has been there, and no one has been able to deal
with it. And so now at least we have an Iraqi government that wants to
deal with it.”
But there is little trust between the Turks and the Iraqi government;
Mr. Babacan, the foreign minister, spoke Friday of doubts about the
efforts of the Iraqi government to rein in the Kurdish guerrillas.
Ms. Rice is supposed to participate with Iraqi and Turkish officials
in a three-way discussion on Saturday to try to come up with a joint
plan that all sides can agree on. Administration officials said that
the American military had collected a list of P.K.K. guerrillas and
issued orders for American forces to pick them up if they encounter
them in Iraq. Beyond that, American spy planes will also feed
intelligence to Turkish forces on P.K.K. movements in northern Iraq,
administration officials said.