USA and Turkey: The Odd Couple

Jameel
The Muqata
16 August '10

See if you can keep up with these zigzags.

1. Obama vs Erdogan: The Financial Times reported the following today:

President Barack Obama has personally warned Turkey’s prime minister that unless Ankara shifts its position on Israel and Iran it stands little chance of obtaining the US weapons it wants to buy.

Mr Obama’s warning to Recep Tayyip Erdogan is particularly significant as Ankara wants to buy American drone aircraft – such as the missile-bearing Reaper – to attack the Kurdish separatist PKK after the US military pulls out of Iraq at the end of 2011.

The PKK has traditionally maintained bases in the remote mountains in the north of Iraq, near the Turkish border.

One senior administration official said: “The president has said to Erdogan that some of the actions that Turkey has taken have caused questions to be raised on the Hill about whether we can have confidence in Turkey as an ally. That means that some of the requests Turkey has made of us, for example in providing some of the weaponry that it would like to fight the PKK, will be harder for us to move through Congress.”

Washington was deeply frustrated when Turkey voted against United Nations sanctions on Iran in June.

Kudos to US President Obama for this bold move.

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Did Israel use illegal chemical weapons to deal with terrorists?

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War: A Blog
13 August '10

For those of us troubled by the way norms accepted by the global community are tramped underfoot by a well-connected, highly-ideological central government, there's a truly horrible story emerging today via the German media. It involves breaches of international law beyond, it has to be said, any reasonable doubt about who did what to whom.

Yet again, a weak but determined minority find their efforts to assert a fragile independence crushed via the brutality of an arrogant government willing to go to any lengths. Der Spiegel magazine's current edition lays it out in simple but sickening terms:

"German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show Palestinian fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Israeli government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Palestinian militants. German politicians are demanding an investigation... It would be difficult to exceed the horror shown in the photos, which feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts. The victims are scarcely even recognizable as human beings."

Read the whole appalling piece here. When you do, you may quickly realize that the story does not concern Palestinians or Israelis, despite the slightly doctored text and illustration above.

Now that you know the real elements of this horrifying abuse of power and breach of international norms, let's ask a few questions:

Where is the international outrage? Is the BBC covering this? The New York Times? CNN? [As of now, the answer is no.]

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Turkey's Two Faces

Emanuele Ottolenghi
standpointmag.co.uk
July/August '10

There is a non-Arab Middle Eastern country that has occupied foreign territory by force for more than three decades — and nobody else recognises that occupation. That same country has denied its national minorities such basic rights as cultural autonomy and has prevented them from using their own languages. A ruthless war has been raging against a self-appointed national liberation movement, which it calls terrorists. Not infrequently, it has launched brutal cross-border raids in pursuit of the said "terrorists", without bothering to ask its neighbours for permission. And it has blockaded a landlocked neighbour as punishment for a long-standing conflict tinged with the memory of a genocide that the blockading party denies ever happened.

If you thought I was describing Israel you'd be wrong: it's Turkey.

Turkey occupied Northern Cyprus in 1974, later supporting a separate Turkish-speaking republic there that is recognised by no one except Ankara.

Turkey has also fought the Kurdish PKK in a ruthless war that has seen tens of thousands killed. While fighting the PKK — in Iraq — Turkey has been reluctant to recognise Kurdish autonomy at home. Not only is separatism not indulged but the very notion of a separate Kurdish identity is dismissed. Kurds cannot teach and learn in their own language, while their national identity is routinely suppressed.

Turkey is reluctant (to put it mildly) to confront its past and still won't accept its genocide against the Armenians.

Now comes Turkey's harsh criticism of Israel, before and after the Gaza flotilla incident in June. You may notice a tinge of hypocrisy.

Naturally, Turks of all political stripes will object to at least some of the above. The PKK are terrorists, without the inverted commas — and it is hard to fight terrorism within the constraints of international law and human rights. Israel wouldn't disagree.

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Turkey, Hamas and the PKK

Wall Street Journal
11 June '10
Posted before Shabbat

The Middle East's regional superpower has again deployed its air force to bomb a rebel group considered by some to be terrorists and by others to be freedom fighters. Another Israeli air strike on Gaza? Not quite.

The attacker is the Turkish air force, which on Monday bombed PKK positions in northern Iraq for the second time in a month. The PKK, or "Kurdistan Workers' Party," has been fighting Ankara for more than 25 years to carve out an independent Kurdistan. Its ideology is a mishmash of Maoism, nationalism and, more recently, Islamism. Its methods are guerrilla warfare, hostage taking, drug trafficking and terrorism. Tens of thousands of Turks have been killed in the fighting.

So it is with good reason that Turkey will neither recognize nor negotiate with the PKK, much less accept the legitimacy of its cause. And while some European governments have gone wobbly over the PKK, the U.S. has been stalwart in siding with Ankara. So has Israel, which over the years has provided Turkey with military and counterterrorist assistance.

Israel has enemies similar to the PKK, including Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, and it has dealt with them in similar ways. Successive Israeli governments have also accepted the legitimacy of a Palestinian state, which is more than can be said for the Turkish government's attitude toward an independent Kurdistan.

Turkish governments once understood this, as they understood the benefits of siding with the West and Israel against regional radicals. Not so current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has taken up the anti-Israel banner with a relish befitting his new friends in Tehran and Damascus. The Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla last week has given Mr. Erdogan another chance to vent against the Jewish state and champion Hamas. However well Mr. Erdogan's dalliance with Islamic extremists plays at home, the world can plainly see his double standard.

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Syria and Turkey: Walking Arm in Arm Down the Same Road?

David Schenker
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Vol. 9, No. 13
01 December 09

The rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus is only the culmination of the increasingly problematic policies pursued by the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Two factors in particular seem to have led to Turkey's shift away from Israel and toward Syria. First, Turkey no longer needed Israeli assistance to pressure the Syrian government to change its policy of providing safe-haven to the terrorist Kurdish Worker's Organization (PKK). Second, in the past seven years, once secular Turkish politics have undergone a profound Islamist transformation.

At the same time, the dynamic between the Turkish military and the state's civilian leadership has changed. No longer does the military have the upper hand. Today, the Turkish military can do little to impact the policies of the Islamist AKP, which promote solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments.

As Ankara's politics under the AKP have shifted and Turkey has become seemingly less committed to Europe, the state has seen its star rise in the Middle East. Syria's Assad regime likely sees its bourgeoning relations with Turkey as an opportunity to shuffle the existing architecture of regional alliances.

Perhaps more worrisome is the prospect that Ankara may over time pursue a closer foreign policy alignment with Iran that would undermine U.S. and Israeli regional interests. Ankara's shift toward Damascus and Tehran makes it even more unlikely that Turkey will participate in "crippling sanctions" to help prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon.

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