Before the storm
Moves in Ankara to prepare for a refugee influx indicate that Turkey is resigned to war on its borders. James Martone reports from southeastern Turkey
A few hundred metres from its only legal border crossing with Iraq, Turkey is setting up tents for a refugee crisis it fears but hopes will not happen. This week, government and military officials and humanitarian workers will undergo exercises in how to deal with the real thing -- an expected wave of Iraqi Kurds heading over the mountains towards the Turkish border fleeing war.
Like most things connected with the war here, the refugee issue is a dilemma. Turkey wants to be seen as being prepared to avoid a repeat of the 1991 crisis, when half-a-million Kurds fled south. Some died crossing the freezing mountains. At the same time, Turkey, Iraq's neighbour and the only Muslim member of NATO, is still calling for diplomacy and would like to avoid appearing publicly as if war is a foregone conclusion. A Turkish Red Crescent official at the site says the 300-odd tents will be dismantled immediately after the two-day exercise, in line with the country's official position that a peaceful solution should be found to avert any war against Baghdad. But the fact that Turkey is preparing humanitarian, military and security officials for an influx of refugees is seen here as a clear sign that Ankara is resigned to the prospect of war on its borders.
With the United States pressing for Turkey to allow it to send American troops there to stage the northern part of a two-pronged attack on Iraq, Turkey, a strong US ally with ambitions of entering the European Union, is in a difficult position.
But a visit to southeast Turkey, where the country's Kurdish minority is concentrated, shows why the issue is particularly complicated.
Until last year, large areas of the southeast were under a state of emergency, a response the Turkish government said was necessary because of its battle against Kurdish separatists. Towns and villages near the Habur border crossing depend on trade with Iraq. Turkish-produced food, clothing and building supplies are sent to Iraq and Iraqi crude oil is sent back to Turkey. The oil trade is technically illegal under UN sanctions but Turkey argues if the region becomes any poorer, violence will flare up again.
The highway to the border gate was the Silk Road in ancient times. By the side of the road a group of young Kurdish boys watch the tents go up, close to the Habur Customs Gate. One is 15-year-old Mutalip who sells hard-boiled eggs to passing truck drivers who will make the long haul to the Iraqi city of Mosul to fill their tankers with crude oil to bring back to Turkish refineries. "Our life is already hard," says Mutalip, after a long drag on his cigarette. "It will be worse if there is a war. We are living off the drivers," he says.
And the drivers are living off oil from the Iraqi government. "We earn our bread from Saddam," says Cevdet, who has been waiting in his truck for two days to cross the border. "If America gave us our bread we would fight for America and think of America as just."
That is largely because during the 1991 Gulf war, all border trade with Iraq stopped. It slowly resumed in the years following, mostly in the form of oil but also in foodstuffs and other items regulated by the United Nations oil for food programme. But the talk of war is threatening trade again. An official at the Habur crossing says that before 2002, the trucks crossing at Habur numbered more than 6,000 a day. Presently that number has dropped to about 1,000.
On this day, the line of waiting oil tankers stretches back seven kilometres. Some of them have been waiting for as long as three days to get into Iraq, sleeping in their trucks and buying food by the side of the road. Cevdet raises 10 children on what he makes from driving oil tankers in and out of Iraq. He says any war in Iraq would be devastating to the lives of many Turks, already suffering under the country's worst economic crisis in decades. Cevdet, who drives a rented tanker, says he likes Saddam Hussein for providing him and thousands of other Turks a job. He calls the Iraqi regime's recorded abuse of its Kurdish population "an internal matter".
But the gestures of being handcuffed that Cevdet and the other drivers make when asked difficult questions are clear in any language and it is clear that they do not want to antagonise either the Iraqi or the Turkish governments.
The Turkish Parliament is set to vote soon on whether the country will allow US troops to use Turkey as a staging post for an invasion of northern Iraq. The Justice and Development Party, which swept to power only three months ago, is laying the groundwork by telling Turks that the country -- economically vulnerable and worried about Kurdish threats on its border -- cannot afford to stay out of any war. Statistics show overwhelming public opposition to any war which Turkey's government says would further damage the country's economy and possibly ignite Kurdish aspirations for a separate homeland. Still, observers say it is highly likely Turkey's government will be forced to succumb to Washington's requests for assistance in any war effort through heavy US political and financial pressure.
Three kilometres into Turkey from Habur lies the Kurdish hamlet of Kapili. Some of Kapili's residents say they have relatives living in the Iraqi border region they see just across the river. Arslan Yildirim, 17, says his Iraqi Kurdish relatives sometimes wave to him from their farm on the other side, but he prefers to be in Turkey.
During the 1991 Gulf war, Arslan and his family fled north with the rest of their village to the city of Diyarbakir, fearing the bombing in neighbouring Iraq. Arslan, who is studying computers, does not talk of fleeing this time. "The Turkish soldiers will protect us if there is war," he says, expressing a security most people along this border do not seem to feel.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 6 - 12 February 2003 (Issue No. 624)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/624/sc6.htm