BY ZEYNEP GURCANLI
STAR- Columnist Zeynep Gurcanli predicts a crisis over US aid expected for Turkey. A summary of her column is as follows:
The three-day detention of 11 Turkish special forces soldiers last weekend by US troops in Sulaimaniyah, northern Iraq, was bad enough. However, this seems to be just the beginning of a new tension between Ankara and Washington. US sources have started to signal a new crisis, one involving a US credit to Turkey. Earlier this year, in his Iraq war budget, US President George W. Bush requested that Turkey be provided with a grant totaling $1 billion, translatable into long-term credits of a much greater amount. However, there were two conditions of disbursement of this sum: Turkey would cooperate with the US in Iraq and comply completely with the International Monetary Fund’s economic program.
At that time there was no great crisis between Turkey and the US over northern Iraq, so those conditions didn’t sound any alarm bells in Ankara. However, with the Sulaimaniyah incident all bets are off. It showed that Turkey and the US aren’t cooperating in northern Iraq; instead, they are competing. Since the incident, US sources have been reminding Turkey of Washington’s conditions for the credit and started to signal that the funds might be delayed. While doing this, the US is effectively saying that Turkey’s soldiers should withdraw from northern Iraq.
The Sulaimaniyah incident is only the tip of the iceberg, and the part underneath is much more complicated and intractable. The detention was nothing but Washington’s warning to Ankara to withdraw its soldiers from northern Iraq. The US doesn’t want any foreign forces there besides its own. However, Turkey’s grounds for keeping an eye on what’s going on in its ‘backyard’ are much more justified. This is where the problem gets knotty. The hidden part of the iceberg lies in Turkey’s the domestic political balances. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) reacted very harshly to the detention, thus defending its right to be in the region. In a way, it’s signaling that withdrawing from Iraq would be a mistake.
By moving European Union reforms forward and not reacting against the US forces’ harsh treatment of Turkish soldiers, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government is playing to its domestic audience. The TSK thinks that it’s trumping the AKP’s influence on domestic politics by playing the US or EU card, but actually it’s losing a ‘bargaining chip’ with Europe and especially Washington in terms of foreign policy.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION