Turkey rattles the sabre over Kirkuk

Turkish threats of military action against Iraqi Kurds sent shockwaves across the region, writes Gareth Jenkins from Ankara

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On Monday, as Iraqi officials began counting the votes from Sunday's elections, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul implicitly threatened the Kurds in the north of the country that Turkey would respond militarily to any attempt to establish an independent political entity or even bring the oil-rich city of Kirkuk under Kurdish control.

His comments were the latest in a series of recent statements by leading Turkish officials who have become increasingly alarmed by the settlement of large numbers of Kurds in Kirkuk. The Kurdish authorities claim that the arrivals are merely returning to their former homes, from where they had been displaced by former President Saddam Hussein as part of his policy of diluting concentrations of groups potentially hostile to his regime. But Turkey claims that the resettlement is part of a plan to "Kurdify" Kirkuk prior to establishing it as the capital of an autonomous Kurdish region or even an independent state in northern Iraq.

Ankara maintains that Kirkuk is a mixed city with a substantial population of both Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkoman. Until the 1990s, Turkey had largely ignored the Turkoman minority in Iraq for fear of antagonising Saddam Hussein and jeopardising lucrative economic ties. But in recent years Ankara has begun providing the Turkomans with both financial and political support through the Iraqi Turkoman Front (ITF) in the hope of using the ITF leverage to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from establishing a Kurdish political entity in northern Iraq, something which Turkey fears could fuel separatist tendencies amongst its own large Kurdish minority. Since the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi Turkoman have become a cause celebre for Turkish nationalists and the Turkish media is often filled with reports of their alleged sufferings at the hands of the Kurds.

Last Wednesday, in a press briefing carried live on Turkish television, General Ilker Basbug, the deputy chief of the Turkish General Staff (TGS), warned the Iraqi Kurds against attempting to take control of Kirkuk.

"The Kurdish administration of Kirkuk would be the first step towards the establishment of a Kurdish state," he said. "It could also trigger a civil war. In such a situation, Kirkuk would become a security problem for Turkey. Kirkuk's status is of vital importance for Turkey. Nobody should expect Turkey to remain silent if the rights of our ethnic brethren are threatened."

The press briefing was organised by the TGS on its own initiative without any input from the civilian government. But on the following day Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan backed the military's hard-line stance, stating that developments in Kirkuk were "cause for concern".

On Monday Foreign Minister Gul added his own thinly veiled warning: "If our brothers are not treated well, if they are subjected to oppression, such developments will hurt us deeply, and in a democratic society administrations cannot remain indifferent, or merely spectators, to such developments."

Privately, Turkish military officials admit that they are as worried by the possibility of Turkish ultra-nationalist groups -- many of them composed of veterans of Turkey's 15-year war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) -- staging "provocations", such as planting bombs in predominantly Turkoman areas, as they are by the Iraqi Kurds themselves.

But Iraqi Kurdish officials remain adamant that Kirkuk was, and shall be again, a Kurdish city and that, although they have no fixed timetable, Kurdish independence is only matter of time. Most are also confident that Turkey will be unable to implement its threat of military intervention.

In reality, there is very little Turkey can do. No one doubts that the Turkish military could crush any resistance from the poorly-armed Iraqi Kurdish militias, but the question would be what Turkey would do next: a long-term occupation of northern Iraq is not a viable option. More critically, any attempt to interfere militarily in northern Iraq would put an end to Turkish hopes of EU accession, just months after it had finally been granted a date for the opening of official accession negotiations. It would also result in a confrontation with the US.

During talks with Erdogan in Ankara on Monday, US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated Washington's commitment to Iraq's political and territorial integrity. But privately US officials admit that this is what they would like to see, not necessarily what they would be prepared to enforce.

"We don't want Iraq to break up," said a US military official. "We want Iraq to be a united, democratic country. But if, some time after the elections, there is a lot of chaos and factional tensions and the Kurds decide to go their own way, I can't see us using military force to prevent them. You have to remember that in the war against Saddam Hussein these are people who fought alongside us and often risked their lives to save US soldiers. We don't want to go to war against them and we won't look too kindly on anyone who does."