BY OKTAY EKSI
HURRIYET- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to the US has begun. Milliyet Columnist Yasemin Congar wrote yesterday that recent efforts to soften Washington had yielded little. According to Congar, before Erdogan’s arrival in Washington, US President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Staphen Hadley said: ‘Turkey’s American friends should claim Turkish-American friendship in the public arena… And America’s Turkish friends should defend America against the outrageous charges against the US.’
Hadley’s words amount to saying, ‘You are failing defend us.’ Otherwise, Hadley would give examples of Turkey’s American friends defending it. After the famous motion of March 1, 2003 [rejecting US troops in Turkey for an offensive into Iraq], in an interview with CNN Turk on May 6-7, then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former Ambassador to Ankara Marc Grossman weighed in with this advice: ‘We can tell you what the right thing for you is. Just do what we tell you.’ If not at this time, when should our American friends raise their voices? Despite all this, Erdogan in order to be welcomed by Washington visited Israel, which he had once branded a ‘terrorist state.’ He met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who used to be the leader of a band of terrorists. It was a sort of repentance. As if he wasn’t the one who called the people who died in Fallujah ‘martyrs,’ Erdogan issued a message on May 21: ‘Our relations with the US are different then with any other country. The US, our friend and our ally, is our primary partner vis-a-vis problems both regional and worldwide.’ But we still don’t know whether he curries favor with the US.
Whether Erdogan likes it or not, I would like to tell him how he could cut the Gordian knot of Turkish-US relations: PKK terrorists are still in the mountains… They came from Iraq, a region under the control of the US, into Turkey. The US doesn’t allow Turkey to conduct operations in the region, but doesn’t say anything about the PKK’s armaments and meeting its needs like food and fuel in a region under US control. Consequently, the US then, whether willingly or not, supports the PKK. With this fact, and the Turkish martyrs coming from southeastern Turkey, the US shouldn’t expect to win the hearts of the Turkish people.