Baykal: Nobody Has Provided Loan In Return For Political Imposition In History Of Turkish Republic

ANKARA - Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal defined on Sunday the 8.5 billion U.S. dollars of loan agreement between Turkey and the United States as ''an agreement which had not been made by Turkey since the last 80 years'' and added that nobody had provided loan in return for political imposition in the history of Turkish Republic.
Speaking in the Fifth Regular Provincial Congress of CHP, Baykal said that the loan agreement was signed with the United States ''after long discussions.''
Stating that he did not see the agreement, Baykal asked if he had the right to see that agreement as the leader of the main opposition party.
Baykal noted that the government should unveil the agreement and asked why it wasn't doing so.
Noting that under the agreement, Turkey committed that it would not send soldiers to north of Iraq even if conditions necessitated dispatch of soldiers, Baykal stressed that it could not be accepted.
''Accepting that we won't send soldiers to north of Iraq means giving up our legitimate defense right. Turkey's accepting that it will not intervene in north of Iraq means digesting the initiatives to turn north of Iraq into a base of the terrorist organization PKK/KADEK,'' Baykal said.
Baykal said that the government had noted that the issue would be taken up in the Council of Ministers meeting but some articles of the agreement were under authority of parliament.
(BRC) 28.09.2003