Turkey for sale

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 11, 2005
Turks, Nervous About European Prospects, Turn to U.S.
By CRAIG S. SMITH

IZMIT, Turkey, June 10 - Zeynel Erdem, a leading Turkish businessman, came 
to Izmit, a seaside industrial town, to give 400 of his prominent peers a 
message.

"Don't count on the European Union," he told the crowd after a chicken 
dinner in a hotel ballroom here. "Look to the U.S.; they're our real friends."

That view is spreading in Turkey, a sprawling land of 70 million people who 
have yearned for decades to become a part of Europe. With the European 
Union in political disarray after the French and Dutch rejected a European 
constitution, and with opposition to Turkish membership gaining ground in 
Europe, many Turks are beginning to wonder whether their European dreams 
are worth the effort. They are reassessing instead their relationship with 
the United States, a relationship that has suffered since the start of the 
Iraq war.

Turkey's stated goal is still to join the European Union, but the shift in 
sentiment signals a deepening ambivalence toward the vaunted vision of 
shared sovereignty.

Just as French and Dutch voters expressed dismay at the increasing 
European-level control over their lives and worried aloud about immigrants 
diluting their nations, many Turks are now questioning whether their 
country should see its future as part of Europe.

Of course, few Turks have bought into the American program for reshaping 
the Middle East, and relations with the United States lost their 
pre-eminence during the Iraq war, which Turkey opposed. Turkey's focus 
shifted to Europe.

But that is beginning to change. Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan's 
fence-mending trip to Washington this week played well here. He even won 
some support from Washington in ending the economic and political isolation 
of Turkish Cypriots.

In an interview at The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Erdogan demurred on 
the question of a shift away from Europe. "The E.U. and the U.S. are not 
mutually exclusive for Turkey," he said.

European Union leaders agreed in December to begin membership negotiations 
with Turkey on Oct. 3, and the country has done a great deal to make that 
happen. It has put a new penal code into effect and agreed to sign a 
protocol extending its customs union to all the newest members, including 
the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus, which Turkey does not recognize.

Yet despite all that, the prospects for Turkey's membership look gloomier 
than ever. Turkey will have a larger population than any member country by 
the time it completes its membership process - a projected 80 million - and 
will probably still be far poorer. More troubling to many Europeans is that 
Turkish membership would create a powerful Muslim presence and push 
Europe's eastern borders out to Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Some European politicians have started talking openly about offering a 
"privileged partnership" instead of full membership, something roundly 
rejected here. The idea, first suggested publicly three years ago by the 
former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, has most recently been 
taken up by German's Christian Democrats, whose leader, Angela Merkel, is 
expected to run against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in September. Ms. 
Merkel's party has stated unequivocally that it will try to block Turkey's 
membership if it comes to power.

Hanging in the background is the pledge last year by President Jacques 
Chirac of France to submit Turkish membership to a national referendum. 
After last month's rejection of the constitution, few believe such a 
referendum would pass.

Many Turks say they are getting fed up with meeting Europe's manifold 
demands without some guarantee that they will become a part of Europe in 
the end.

"Europe is playing a dangerous game with Turkey," said Can Paker, chairman 
of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation. "It's giving a 
stronger hand and more motivation to people who want the status quo to 
prevail."

It is also fueling Turkish nationalist sentiment, which was stirred last 
month when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey must give 
the Kurdish separatist Abdullah Ocalan a new trial.

Some Turks are beginning to imagine a day when Turkey does not need Europe 
at all, particularly because it gets so much support from the United States.

Turkey's economic output surged nearly 10 percent last year and is expected 
to grow as much as 6 percent this year. The current 10 percent inflation 
rate is the lowest in more than 30 years. Foreign investment from the West, 
slow because of Turkey's chronic corruption, has picked up.

Pekin Baran, a Turkish shipping tycoon, believes that negotiations with 
Europe will start in October, as planned, but that "it will be a very, very 
nasty ride." Under the negotiating rules laid out in December, all 25 
members have to agree on every point. That gives Cyprus or any other 
country hostile to Turkish membership effective veto power.

"The pity is that we are convinced that Turkey could have contributed to 
the future of Europe much more than she could reasonably have expected to 
get in exchange," said Mr. Baran, from his office overlooking the 
glittering Bosporus, which separates Europe from Asia, where the bulk of 
Turkey lies. He nonetheless maintains that Turkey should press ahead for 
full membership, in part because the negotiation process itself is valuable 
in driving political and economic changes.

While there is still strong support for membership, polls have recorded a 
decline in national enthusiasm to 63 percent before the French referendum 
in May from more than 70 percent a year ago.

Hansjörg Kretschmer, the European Union's point man in Turkey, warns that 
without better understanding on both sides, Turkish attitudes could turn 
quickly.

"Strong support based on ignorance is not good because it can collapse very 
quickly," he said before meeting Tuesday with representatives of 
nongovernmental organizations in Trabzon, on the Black Sea. "The key 
element is that Turkey does its homework and completes the necessary 
political and other reforms. No one will say no to a Turkey which has 
become a liberal democracy in the European understanding."

Prime Minister Erdogan, in his Times interview on Friday, said he believed 
Turks' enthusiasm for membership in the European Union would remain high.

"If you look at the polls, support for the E.U. may have gone down just a 
little bit, but it is still at 60 percent," he said. "In fact, in the last 
couple of weeks the situation in France and the Netherlands may have had a 
negative effect that brought down the numbers, but when the time arrives to 
begin the negotiations in the fall, I think that these numbers will start 
climbing up again in support of membership."

Saban Disli, deputy chairman for foreign affairs in the ruling Justice and 
Development Party, said Europe should not try to project a decision of 10 
years from now by looking at Turkey today. "Who knows?" he said, "Maybe in 
10 years' time, it will be Turkey who holds a referendum to see if Turks 
still want to become a part of the E.U."

===

NY Times, June 11, 2005
Turkish Leader Spells Out More Vigorous Role in Iraq
By WARREN HOGE

Turkey's prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, said yesterday that while 
Iraq had become a "training ground for terrorists" since the start of the 
war, which Turkey opposed, he had confidence in Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the 
Iraqi leader, and was helping him to make Iraq a democracy.

"My impression with meeting Mr. Jaafari is that he is very keen on 
achieving democracy in Iraq, he really believes in democracy, and he asked 
for our support, and we said we are ready to help in any way with all our 
institutions," Mr. Erdogan said.

Speaking in an interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times, 
Mr. Erdogan said Turkey was furnishing supplies, including food, fuel, 
water and electricity, and had just extended by another year the American 
military's use of the Incirlik Air Base, 250 miles southeast of Ankara, for 
replenishing supplies and refueling aircraft.

He also said Turkey was warily trying to exert influence on Syria, with 
which it has had difficult relations for four decades.

"Turkey cannot in any way approve of oppressive regimes," Mr. Erdogan said, 
"and at this point there is nothing Turkey can take as an example from 
Syria, while there is lots that Syria can take as examples from Turkey."

The two countries are sharing intelligence for the first time and 
dismantling mines along their 600-mile border, he said, and Damascus is 
starting to turn over information about fighters hiding in Syria who belong 
to the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is outlawed in Turkey.

"Of course, this was not the case until recently," Mr. Erdogan said, 
speaking through an interpreter. "If Syria were to be harboring terrorists, 
then Syria would be left alone in the world."

He said Turkey's primary concern was the "territorial integrity" of Iraq - 
shorthand for making sure that Kurds in northern Iraq do not break with 
Baghdad and seek to join forces with Kurdish separatists on the Turkish 
side of the border.

He said Turkey was paying close attention to the evolving status of Kirkuk, 
an oil-rich northern Iraqi city that is home to ethnic cousins of the Turks 
known as Turkmens. "Kirkuk should belong to all of Iraq, and anything to 
the contrary would be repeating mistakes that Saddam Hussein made in the 
past," he said. "We have to take care on that point."

He said Turkey, a secular Muslim state, was trying to project democracy 
throughout the Middle East, and he quarreled with the notion that democracy 
and Islam were incompatible. "Turkey has been able to marry democratic 
culture with Islamic culture," he said. "They can coexist."

"Some use the term 'Islamic democracy,' and we feel this is wrong because 
it alludes to a theocratic association which is not the way we see things," 
he said. "That is why I put the emphasis on coexistence, and this is in 
fact what we explain to our friends in the Middle East."

Turkey's effort to join the European Union should be seen in this light, he 
said. "We say that Turkey's quest for membership should be considered in 
the context of proving Huntington wrong," he said.

His reference was to a Harvard professor, Samuel P. Huntington, who 
predicted in 1996 that cold-war rivalries would be replaced by a "clash of 
civilizations" between Islamic fundamentalism and secular democracy.

"We see the E.U. as a club of common political values, not as a Christian 
club," he said, "and the world not one where there is a clash of 
civilizations but a cooperation of civilizations."

Mr. Erdogan said he had asked Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United 
Nations to revive his efforts to restart talks on the reunification of 
Cyprus. The island has been divided along ethnic lines since Turkish troops 
invaded in 1974 to prevent an Athens-backed coup aimed at uniting the 
island with mainland Greece.

A plan advanced by Mr. Annan and favored by Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots 
collapsed in April 2004 when Greek Cypriots rejected it in a referendum. 
The Greek Cypriots then joined the European Union in the name of the whole 
island. Mr. Erdogan complained that this left the Turkish Cypriots 
powerless while the Greek Cypriots were "rewarded" for intransigence.