Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE~PRESS REVIEW~BERHEVOKAÇAPÊ~RIVISTA STAMPA~DENTRO DE LA PRENSA~BASIN ÖZETi
turlcish daily news Saturday, July 2, 1994
CSIS panel discusses Operation Provide Comfort
Çandar: III Turkey, civilians have llO natiollal security policy. TlUJt's why they follow the military's lead
Wilkens on human rights: The US Congress is getting l1wre skeptical of Tw'key 'sjustification for fighting terrorism
By ugur Akmel
Turkish Daily News
WASHINGTON. In a panel organized
by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) in Washington on June 30,
the panelists Cengiz Candar (columnist for
daily Sabah), Ellen Laipson (U.S. National
Security Council), and Katherine Wilkens
(U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee)
discussed the implications of Operation
Provide Comfort for Turkey, the United
States and northern Iraq.
:rhe pan~l was ,!!oderated b¥ Bülent
Alinza, semar associate and the director of
CSIS's newly inaugurated Turkish Studies
section. Foreign Ministry Undersecretary
Ambassador Ozdem Sanberk was once a
guest of the Turkish Studies program.
The panel that focused on Candar' s
expert testimony emphasized the problematic
nature of the contentious support Turkey
has given to Operation Provide Comfort
(OPe).
Wilkens' testimony reflected another
view, that of the U.S. Congress. She made it
clear that the United States was not as
equivocal in its support for OPC, but that
Congress de-linked the importance of OPe
from U.S. policy vis-a-vis Turkey's human
rights records, i.e. the Congress did not feel
.like keeping silent in the face of certain
recent developments in Turkey just because
it also wanted to solicit Turkish support to
keep OPe going.
Laipson similarly voiced the administration's
strong and unproblematic support for
the OPe and said it continued to be a strong
deterrent against Saddam Hussein.
The panel was attended by an invited
group of journalists, public relations specialists,
scholars, representatives of the
Kurdish Democratic Party, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, the U.S. State
Department, the National Intelligence
Council and various defense firms. Also
among the select audience were representatives
of two Japanese banks: Bank of
Tokyo, and Sumitomo.
In his informative presentation, Candar
outlined the history of OPe. As a previous
consultant to the late Turkish President
Turgut Özal, Candar said that what had
started back in the spring of 1991 as a tern:
porary ad hoc measure to help the Ira91
refugees escaping from Saddam Hussein s
onslaught had been transformed into a permanent
fixture of the local geopolitical
scene.
His overall message was that today in
Turkey there were many people, including
many industrialists and die speaker of the
TurkIsh Parliament himself, who recognized
the need to change the approach to the
region and the Kurdish problem, and to create
a truly mu~ticultura1-democratic society.
But there was such a popular psychoSIS
about the assumed plots directed at
Turkey's territorial integrity that such solutions
still could not be Drought out and discussed
freely.
Particularly in relation to Operation
Provide Comfort, Candar explained that the
US-British-French umbrella spread over the
Kurds rekindled in the Turkish psyche
memories of the Sevres Treaty of 1920
which meant to carve an independent
Kurdistan out of Turkish territory.
Due to such a paranoia Turks fail to
notice the important fact that today the
PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) does not
want OPe, he said. Thus implying the question:
why should the PIQ( try to get nd of
OPC if It fostered Kurdish autonomy in
northern Iraq?
Candar's characterization of Turkey's
military's role with respect to OPe was one
of the highlights of ilie panel. After spotlighting
the Turkish military's unique historical
mission as the "protectors of the
nation and Turkish temtorial integrity,"
Candar stressed the fact that, in many cases,
the Turkish National Security Council
(NSC) was the real power holder in
Turkey.
The NSC decided which policies to follow
concerning national security. Although
civilians comprised one half of the counCil,
in practice soldiers dictated the outcome
alniost every time, he said.
To illustrate the Turkish military's dominance
he mentioned that the top five civilians
in Turkey did not know that OPe did
not keep any ground troops in northern Iraq.
"How can the civilians run the security policy
when they are not aware of even such
el~!ßentary.military facts?" he asked.
When Ozal was alive, he managed to
manipulate the NSC for his own ends and
Turkey benefited from this. But those who
followed him cannot do the same and the
military dominates the decision making
process," Candar said. As another illustration
of his point, he related how Prime
Minister Tansu Çiller reneged on her
promise to discuss the SpanIsh Basque
model in Turkey as a possible solution to
the Kurdish llroblem, following her consultation
with soldiers at a NSC meeting.
"Part of the paradox is that in Turkey
civilians do not have a national security policy
of their own. So they have to follow the
lead of the only &I:0upthat does have such a
policy, i.e. the military."
NSC ambivalence toward ope
Candar made two more interesting observations
concerning the situation in Turkey.
The first one concerned the ambivalent
approach of the NSC to Operation Provide
Comfort (OPe).
Çandar said that the soldiers did not actually
like OPC because they believed that
what started as a humanitarian assistance
program was fast becoming an umbrella for
the establishment of an independent
Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
But, on the other hand, OPe had become
such an integral part of U.S.-Turkish relations
in particular and Turkish-Western relation
in general that not renewing it would
certainTy send the wrong signals to the.
West.
So every six months, the NSC grudgingly
pushes for the extension of the operatIOn
while fighting the reasons for its existence
the rest of the time, Candar observed.
The second interesting point Candar
raised was the current lack of a consensus in
Turkey on many fundamental issues. "And
that is good," he added. "Because that
shows that we are thinking about these matters
for the fIrst time in the last 70 years. It
means we are making progress toward a
multicultural democratic society."
The columnist for the daily Sabah raised
some eyebrows in the room when he suggested
that Turkey should have "a close,
open-border relationship with an
autonomous (Kurdish) regime in northern
Iraq while sovereignty still rests totally
widi Baghdad. In that fashion the temtorial
integrity of Iraq would also be preserved."
But for that to happen "a restructuring of
the Turkish state and a restructuring of
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