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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ôzeti
Guardian
November November 20, 2007
Turkey's fickle friends
Arrogant acts by the country's generals, the Bush administration and the
EU have doomed prospects for peace with the Kurds
Stephen Kinzer
The democratic revolution that has brought
in
unprecedented levels of freedom to Turkey
recent years will not be complete until the
festering Kurdish problem is resolved. When I
toured the Kurdish region two years ago, a
solution seemed tantalisingly close. Kurds were
overflowing with optimism. Now that optimism
has crashed back into frustration and
What happened?
anger.
In the summer of 2005, prime minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan flew to Diyarbakir, the biggest
city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, and
delivered a speech that was shocking in its
candor. "A great and powerful nation must have
the confidence to face itself, recognise the
mistakes and sins of the past and march
confidently into the future," he said. "The Kurdish
issue does not belong to a part of our nation, but
to us all ... . We accept it as real and are ready
to face it.'Today, southeastern Turkey is again
militarised. Thousands of soldiers are poised to
stage cross-border raids into northern Iraq,
where Kurdish guerrillas of the rebel PKK
maintain fortified bases. Turks who call for a
peaceful, democratic solution to the Kurdish
problem are once again branded traitors.
Kurdish mayors are being arrested.
Last week, Turkish prosecutors accused the
main Kurdish political party, which might have
been a bridge between Kurdish and Turkish
nationalists, of collaborating with the PKK, and
asked the supreme court to ban it. Some of the
party's supporters took to the streets in protest,
and violent clashes ensued.
There are three villains in this sad story. First is
the Turkish state. In 1999 security officers
captured the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. At
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November 22 2007
his trial he repented his rebellion and said he
wanted to "serve the state" by asking his
followers to lay down their weapons. But the
state, which was then still dominated by
generals, refused his offer. Military commanders
have never wavered from their fierce conviction
that the Kurdish challenge can only be met with
force and that to suggest cooperating with
Ocalan was treasonous.
The second blow to the dreams of reconciliation
in southeastern Turkey was dealt by the United
States, through its invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Turks understood perfectly well that this invasion
would produce a fragmentation of power in Iraq
that would allow the PKK to establish protected
bases in regions bordering on Turkey. They
warned the Bush administration that an invasion
would open a deep breach between the US and
Turkey, and also set off a new and destabilising
Middle East crisis. These warnings were
brushed aside with the same response President
Bush and his aides gave to other warnings they
heard in 2003: we are determined to invade Iraq,
we are powerful enough to resolve whatever
problems might emerge afterward and anyone
who believes otherwise is defeatist.
Precisely what Turks predicted has now
happened. The Kurdish regime in northern Iraq
has given sanctuary to PKK guerrillas, and those
guerrillas are launching deadly forays into
Turkey. This has set Turkey afire with outrage
and made any peaceful overture to Kurds
politically impossible.
The final blow to Kurdish hopes came from
Europe. When I travelled through the Kurdish
region of Turkey two years ago, everyone I met
told me that the main reason they felt so hopeful
was that Turkey was progressing toward
membership in the European Union. That meant
the army could not repress them and
prosecutors could not limit their freedom of
speech. Then, last December, the EU slammed
its door in Turkey's face by suspending talks on
key aspects of Turkey's application.
This was an enormous gift to anti-democratic
forces in Turkey. Nowhere has it had greater
impact than in the Kurdish region. Diplomats in
faraway Brussels, claiming perhaps sincerely to
represent the democratically expressed wishes
of their constituents, undermined the nascent
democracy that had been settling over
southeastern Turkey.
The inevitable crisis to which these misbegotten
policies gave birth has now erupted. Prime
minister Erdogan, much to his credit, has
refused to order the massive attack on northern
Iraq that would make him a national hero. He
realises that an attack would not succeed in
wiping out the PKK, would weaken Turkish
democracy by giving new power to military
commanders and would further diminish
Turkey's already dimmed chances of entering
the EU.
Arrogant acts by Turkish generals, the Bush
administration and the EU have devastated
prospects for peace in southeastern Turkey.
Prime minister Erdogan, who not long ago
seemed on the verge of a historic breakthrough
that might have brought peace to that longsuffering
region, now has little margin for
decisive action. It is an example of how fully
even mid-sized powers like Turkey are at the
mercy of those who claim to be their friends.
Kurdistan dispute damps hopes of further rise
in Iraqi exports
By Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent, and Dino Mahtani in, London
Iraq said yesterday it had boosted
oil exports to nearly 2m barrels a
day, thanks to the opening of a
pipeline to Turkey. However, hopes
for future increases could be dam¬
ped by an in-creasingly vicious
dispute between the Baghdad oil
ministry and the northern Kurdistan
autonomous region.
Falah Alamri, directorgeneral of
Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organisa¬
tion, told an international security
forum in Bahrain that exports were
now 1.8m-1.9m b/d, and production
was 2.5m b/d - the highest that it
has been since late 2004.
Iraqi exports in September reached
1.9m b/d, a postwar record, and
unlike earlier spikes the increase
appears to have been sustai¬
ned. The principal reason for the
increased exports are the 300,000
b/d now traveling from the northern
Kirkuk region to the Turkish Medi¬
terranean port of Ceyhan. The new
pipeline, which had been paralyzed
by attacks, opened in August.
Mr Alamri said production could
increase to 3m b/d by the end of
2008 and to 6m b/d within six
years. However, Iraq's chances of
attracting foreign investment into
the sector depend heavily on the
passage of a law regulating the oil
industry and the chances of its swift
passage have been set back by an
increasingly -bitter exchange of
accusations between Baghdad and
Kurdistan officials.
The KRG and Baghdad have been
deadlocked for more than a year on
details of the proposed law and are
now clashing over who has the right
to sign deals with oil companies in
the interim.
The Kurdistan government says
Iraq's constitution gives it the right
to develop new oil fields in its terri¬
tory, and it last week announced
five new exploration deals with
companies from -Britain, South
Korea and elsewhere. The Iraqi
press yesterday quoted Hussein al-
Falluji, a lawmaker from the Sunniled
Iraqi Consensus Front, as
saying parliament was preparing a
blacklist of companies that had
signed contracts with the Kurdistan
Regional Government.
The statement echoed remarks by
Hussein al-Shahristani, the oil
minister who last week warned that
any oil company that signed a
contract without federal government
approval would "compromise their
chances of getting business in
future in Iraq".
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