All quiet on the southeastern front
A prickly calm reigns in Turkey's border towns following a week of increased tensions over military intervention in northern Iraq, reports Nyier Abdou in Silopi
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Demonstrations in Ankara on Saturday to protest Iraqi Kurdish moves into the Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul
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On Thursday afternoon, three tanks set out from Turkey's southeastern city of Diyarbakir for the Iraqi border. The movement was almost laughably symbolic, coinciding with a warning by Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul that Kurdish control of Iraq's strategic oil towns of Kirkuk and Mosul was unacceptable. An estimated 100,000 Turkish troops are already amassed on the border, poised to cross if given the green light from Ankara, and several thousand maintain a permanent presence inside northern Iraq.
But tensions were boiling from Ankara to the border town of Silopi when Kurdish peshmerga fighters, backed by United States special forces, took Kirkuk on Thursday, amid speculation that the move would spark the Turkish military intervention in northern Iraq that has long seemed imminent. Potent fear in policy circles that the Kurds of northern Iraq will use the confusion and power vacuum engendered by the ousting of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to declare an independent state has emboldened the Turkish leadership to speak openly of a military incursion, even if it was in defiance of the US.
The tense standoff was nonetheless swiftly neutralised by American diplomacy, with Gul stating that Turkey was satisfied by US assurances that Kurdish fighters would leave Kirkuk and Mosul and relinquish control to US forces. In Silopi, where Turkey's large military build-up just outside town dominates the mood, the brief buzz of nervousness subsided and the uneasy quiet that permeates the town has returned.
The military has been characterised as eager to enter northern Iraq, but many observers maintain that an intervention was never a real possibility. "I believe it was already a foregone conclusion that they would not intervene," Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul, told Al-Ahram Weekly. Turkey, he said, is not willing to risk another diplomatic row with "the rest of the world -- and that includes the Arab world".
"Our relation with the US is a relationship of alliance," agrees Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Bilkent University in Ankara. "There was a serious demand from Turkey to the Americans to take care of the situation [in Kirkuk and Mosul] and I think that situation is now under control. It could have led to a problem, but it didn't."
Tashan argues that "there is no such policy" that the military is seeking an excuse to enter northern Iraq, noting that it would take a major crisis, such as significant violence against the ethnic Turkomen minority or a large refugee problem, to move Turkey across the border.
Otherwise, Turkey's threats about a military intervention may be more bravado than policy. Ozel notes that a Turkish march to Kirkuk would be foolhardy and questions whether Turkey is actually prepared to enter another guerrilla war, this time outside its borders. "Do you really want to go to Kirkuk and Mosul, where there are four million Kurds who don't exactly like your presence?" asks Ozel.
While much has been said of the military's disapproval of an independent Kurdistan, it is relevant to consider the means by which they hope to avoid the situation. Northern Iraq has some 70,000 peshmerga fighters and while the activities of the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) -- now known as KADEK (the Kurdish People's Democratic Freedom Party) -- have been virtually stamped out in southeastern Turkey, the group has a strong presence in northern Iraq. It is a long way to Kirkuk -- some 350 kilometres -- and the local population would hardly welcome yet another occupying force. Nor would the Americans, who fear incidents of friendly fire could exacerbate the already tense relations between the two countries.
Turkey's relentless posturing on the need to defend its borders and stave off the declaration of a Kurdish state could end up becoming a self- fulfilling prophecy. A military incursion, in fact, could create the conditions that foster separatist passions, even though Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) leader Massoud Barzani and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) founder Jalal Talabani have consistently maintained that they are not looking to establish a separate state. It was Talabani's forces who triumphantly took Kirkuk last week.
Bahruz Galali, Talabani's representative in Ankara, told the Weekly that there are no plans to control Kirkuk or Mosul and that following a Kurdish retreat from the two cities, "the situation is normal". Rejecting claims of Kurdish hopes to hold onto Kirkuk as a future capital of an independent Kurdistan, Galali insisted that Ankara has always turned a deaf ear to Kurdish insistence that autonomy is enough. Noting that Kirkuk and Mosul are "Arab cities", Galali offered a vision of "brotherhood" for the mélange of ethnicities living in the north -- Kurds, Turkomen and Arabs. "We are a democratic force in Iraq. We want to reunite Iraq and have a democratic, civil Iraq for all the people living there."
Asked if there was anything that Barzani or Talabani could do to convince Turkey that Iraqi Kurds are not looking to declare a state, Ozel scoffed, "If Talabani told me there's only one God, I wouldn't believe it. He's speaking from a position of weakness."
Ozel argues that the skirmish over control of Kirkuk and Mosul has actually put Turkey in a better position. "We saw that Kurdish groups cannot trust each other," he said, adding that it is now all the more clear that what is needed is better ties between Turkey and the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq. "The reality is, the Kurds will have to rely on Turkey for their future. It all went for the best that Turkey did not intervene."
"I tend to think Barzani and Talabani will continue to cooperate with Turkey," the Foreign Policy Institute's Tashan remarked, though he did admit that a renewal of nationalist sentiments remains a possibility that "cannot be dismissed out of hand". Arguing that in post-Saddam Iraq, "someone will have to be held accountable" for what happens in the north, Tashan suggested that diplomacy will prevail. "We are still in the realm of politics," he said.
Still, the military remains on high alert. Aside from the 15 "military observers" sent to Kirkuk on Saturday to watch the situation and monitor the treatment of Iraq's minority Turkomen, military sources say that Turkish special forces are active in northern Iraq. It is also said that a convoy of 35 trucks of so-called rural guard -- local villagers drafted to defend their towns during Turkey's 20-year struggle against the PKK -- were dispatched from Cizre, some 15 kilometres north of Silopi, to Habur gate, on the Iraqi border.
This could be an indication that Turkey fears a resurgence of PKK activity in the southeast -- although in talks with local rural guard, there was no indication that there were fears that the calm that has reigned for the last few years would be shattered. Still, one Turkish officer based in Diyarbakir told the Weekly that in the last couple of days security has been stepped up significantly in the region. For the last two months the army's centre of operations has been underground and new anti-terrorism squads have been set up.
Mehmet Ali Kislali, a prominent columnist for the Turkish daily Radikal and a security expert, told the Weekly that it is unlikely that the southeast will see a return to conflict. "Turkey had a very good lesson in [its] struggle against the PKK," he said. Noting that special forces still operate in the mountains where the PKK is said to have a shadow presence, Kislali did concede that there is always a risk of a rise in militant activity.
"It's a backward region; there are young men without jobs. Those are good conditions for the PKK to find new militants," he suggested. But long years of brutally strict security measures and the unilateral cease-fire called by PKK leader Abdullah …calan in 1999 have dampened the allure of separatist militancy. "They cannot easily get hold of this region again," Kislali said.
