BUSH ANNOUNCES THREE-WAY MILITARY PARTNERSHIP
AFP
Tuesday, 06 November 2007
WASHINGTON
U.S. vows to help Turkey fight PKK rebels
President George W. Bush, vying to avert a Turkish incursion into Iraq,
pledged Monday to step up U.S. military and intelligence cooperation
to aid Turkey’s fight against Kurdish rebels.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed Bush’s promise
made at crisis talks here, but said his country had no plans to
withdraw some 100,000 troops massed on the border with Iraq.
Bush insisted that the United States stood shoulder to shoulder with
its NATO ally Turkey over a spate of deadly cross-border attacks by
the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
"Turkey is a strategic partner and strong ally of America," the
president told reporters, sitting next to Erdogan in the White House
Oval Office.
"(The) PKK is a terrorist organization. They’re an enemy of
Turkey. They’re an enemy of Iraq. And they’re an enemy of the United
States," Bush said.
The president announced a new three-way military partnership grouping
the United States, Turkey and Iraq to improve the sharing of real-time
intelligence on the PKK.
Washington was also looking at cutting off money flows to the Kurdish
rebels, and their ease of travel, he said.
As the two leaders met, hundreds of banner-waving ethnic Kurds rallied
outside the White House with chants of "stop the Turkish invasion."
"We are not after war. We have a mandate from the Turkish parliament
to conduct an (anti-PKK) operation," Erdogan said at Washington’s
National Press Club, describing himself has "happy" as a result of
his talks with Bush.
The prime minister said Turkey had no expansionist designs in Iraq,
but stressed that his country’s patience with the PKK was exhausted.
In Ankara on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledged to
"redouble" U.S. efforts to combat the Kurdish fighters, but stressed
it would take time and effort to flush them out of their mountainous
redoubts.
Iraqi Kurdish regional prime minister Nechirvan Barzani proposed
four-party talks to end the PKK incursions — with his administration
as one of the participants along with Ankara, Baghdad and Washington.
But PKK leader Murat Karayilan called on the Iraqi Kurdish leadership
to stand by its ethnic kin.
Erdogan was accompanied by Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan
and Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul on his brief visit to Washington,
before he headed on to Rome for talks with Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi.
Some observers fear that U.S. influence with Turkey has been undermined
by a push in Congress to label the Ottoman Empire’s World War I
massacre of ethnic Armenians as "genocide."
But fierce pressure from both Turkey and the White House appears to
have paid off for now, with its Democratic authors agreeing to shelve
a debate on the resolution in the House of Representatives.
"We view this with cautious optimism," Erdogan said, after his
government had threatened to cut off U.S. military access to a Turkish
air base if the resolution was adopted by the full House.
"We are ready to settle accounts with our history, but our documents
indicate that no such genocide took place. In fact our values do not
permit our people to commit genocide," the Turkish leader said.