From Canadian Globe and Mail globeandmail.ca
Turkey agrees to send troops to Iraq
Government risks inflaming its voters for U.S. economic, military incentives
By TIMOTHY APPLEBY
With a report from Reuters
Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - Page A18
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In a move laden with potential benefits but fraught with risk, Turkey announced plans yesterday to send thousands of peacekeeping troops to join the U.S.-led coalition occupying Iraq.
The Turkish parliament will be asked as early as today to approve the government's decision, which follows weeks of pressure from Washington and a generous accompanying package of military and economic inducements.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) voiced confidence the deployment will go ahead. If it does, a role in Iraq for NATO's only Muslim-majority nation would be a coup for the Pentagon's hard-pressed military planners.
Shortly before the March invasion, that same Turkish parliament, where the AKP wields a majority, dealt the United States a severe setback by refusing to let Turkey be a launch pad for an attack on Iraq's northern flank.
The U.S. campaign in Iraq, moreover, remains highly unpopular among Turkey's 40 million voters, with constant antiwar demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul.
In a shift of emphasis, the government is touting its decision as a bid to help stabilize its neighbour, with which it has long had strong commercial ties, and to gain a renewed stake in Iraq's future.
"Turkey is the first country to be affected by developments in Iraq, both negative and positive," Justice Minister Cemil Cicek told Agence France-Presse, adding that its troop deployment should last no longer than a year.
"We cannot just stand by and watch what is happening there."
Many Turks, however, fear getting sucked into a swamp. A poll published yesterday in Ankara's Radikal newspaper found that half of those asked believed it would be folly to dispatch peacekeepers to Iraq. About 40 per cent supported the government decision.
The 10,000 troops expected to go to Iraq will likely be concentrated in the volatile, Sunni-dominated centre of the country, where the U.S. occupation is meeting fiercest resistance.
"The Turks are taking an immense risk, and this could be very dicey because they will potentially be subject to the same kind of attacks that the Americans are," said Rex Brynen of McGill University's department of political science in Montreal, noting that for centuries Iraq chafed under Ottoman occupation.
"Turkey has been under great pressure from Washington, particularly the Turkish military, but I don't think this will go over at all well domestically, and it'll become even worse when the first Turkish soldier is shot."
As a further incentive to join the coalition, Washington offered last month to give debt-saddled Turkey $8.5-billion (U.S.) in loans. Ankara's "co-operation" in Iraq was one of the clauses attached to the agreement.
Still more compelling, perhaps, was an assurance from the U.S. State Department last week that it would help crush the independence-seeking Kurdish rebels of eastern Turkey, whose base remains in northern Iraq, where several thousand low-profile Turkish soldiers are already deployed.
The Kurdistan Workers Party fought a 15-year running war with Ankara in which an estimated 37,000 people died and one million more were displaced.
That war wound down four years ago with the capture of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, but last month Kurdish militants declared a resumption in hostilities, saying Turkey had defaulted on pledges to grant greater political and cultural rights.
There are about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 10,500 from Britain and 10,000 drawn from 27 other countries. Japan is weighing a contribution of 2,000 soldiers. |
