IRAQ, IRAN AND THE ARMENIAN RESOLUTION
By Mehmet Kalyoncu, [email protected]
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Oct 10 2007
Turkey’s burgeoning civil society and transforming foreign policy
Oct. 10, 2007: the date when the US House of Representatives Committee
on Foreign Affairs will vote on the so-called genocide resolution is
finally set.
The Armenian diaspora is keen to see the long-awaited resolution
passing not only in the committee but also in the full House and
the Senate, in that order. In the meantime the Senate Democrats and
Republicans have agreed that it would be the best option to split Iraq
into three autonomous Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions and withdraw,
while Ankara is still too busy to realize what this means for Turkish
interests in northern Iraq, as it is overwhelmed with the question
of whether Turkey is becoming Malaysia or not. Last but not least,
the possibility of a military showdown between yet-to-nuclearize
Tehran and the Washington-Jerusalem coalition is more real than ever.
The Armenian resolution, the future of Iraq and the looming crisis
with Iran are the three foreign policy issues likely to strain
relations between Ankara and Washington in the short term. The ways
Ankara will have to deal with these issues are quite different from
the ways it would normally have done a decade or more ago, for two
reasons. First NGOs such as business associations, think tanks and
civil society organizations that are able to and do influence both the
government’s domestic and foreign policies have proliferated in recent
years. Secondly, the Turkish military’s institutional democratization,
which started with the former chiefs of General Staff Gen. Huseyin
Kývrýkoðlu and Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, has almost matured with current
Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaþar Buyukanýt.
These two concurrent and ongoing progresses in favor of civil society
have changed the way Turkish foreign policy is formulated and the
foreign policy decision making process itself.
Ankara: from elite rule to citizen rule
One of the most insightful sources in terms of understanding Turkey
is the accounts of foreign correspondents who have covered Turkey for
decades while living here; their accounts are critical but yet remain
immune to official scrutiny. In his book, "Crescent and Star," former
Ýstanbul Bureau Chief for The New York Times Stephen Kinzer captures
the essence of the classical power relation between the elite and
the masses that prevailed for decades and depicts the resistance of
the former to change: "The ruling elite, however, refuses to embrace
this new nation or even admit that it exists. Military commanders,
prosecutors, security officers, narrow-minded bureaucrats, lapdog
newspaper editors, rigidly conservative politicians and other members
of this sclerotic cadre remain psychologically trapped in the 1920s.
They see threats from across every one of Turkey’s eight borders and,
most dangerously, from within the country itself. In their minds Turkey
is still a nation under siege. To protect it from mortal danger,
they feel obliged to run it themselves. They not only ignore but
actively resist intensifying pressure from educated, worldly Turks
who want their country to break free of its shackles and complete
its march toward the democracy that was Ataturk’s dream."
Similarly, in their "Turkey Unveiled," referring to the elite’s
dominance of political and economic sphere, Nicole Pope, who covered
Turkey for Le Monde, and Hugh Pope, former Wall Street Journal
bureau chief in Istanbul, note that "until the Democrats’ victory,
the country had been dominated not just by the army but by an elitist
and tyrannical bureaucracy whose rule went back to the latter days
of the Ottoman empire" and "the attitude of disdain of the educated
classes and the state towards the ‘little people’ is still evident,
several decades after the DP’s [Democrat Party] success served the
bureaucracy its first notice."
In addition to the above-mentioned reasons, the lack of educated
individuals skilled in multiple Western languages within the general
public who would qualify to join the highly selective diplomatic
corps left the Turkish foreign policy making and implementation to
a small group of elite members. For the foreign capitals, dealing
with Turkey meant simply dealing with that group which had remained
generally unchanged, even if the individuals within it changed.
However, the late 1990s witnessed a rapid human development within
the general public, with increasing numbers of university graduates
gaining advanced degrees in the West, and the proliferation of NGOs
that directly or indirectly influence both the government’s domestic
and foreign policy. For this reason, Ankara’s foreign policy-making
has been different from the past in recent years and will be different
from now on with regard to the issues of Iraq, Iran and the Armenian
resolution at hand.
The question of Iraq: united versus divided Iraq?
On Sept. 26, the United States Senate passed a non-binding resolution
suggesting that the United States should support a political settlement
among Iraqis based on a federal system of government, which would
create Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab and Kurdish regions with a viable but
limited central government in Iraq. Earlier, at one of his town hall
meetings for his 2008 Presidential campaign, Senator Joseph Biden
(D-DE), the chief sponsor of the resolution, had suggested that a
wall like the one separating the Palestinian territories from the
Israeli settlements which would separate the Kurds, the Sunnis and the
Shiites would be useful to minimize possible ethno-religious violence
once the federal system is installed. The plan is viewed infeasible,
for it would require, as Arizona’s Republican Senator John McCaine
argues, splitting the intermarried families of the Kurds, the Sunnis
and the Shiites. On his way back to Baghdad after his appearance
at the UN General Assembly in New York, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki condemned the idea of splitting Iraq into federal regions,
"Iraqis are eager for Iraq’s unity. … Dividing Iraq is a problem
and a decision like that would be a catastrophe."
Along similar lines, the Arab League’s head of the Arab Relations
Department, Ali al-Jaroush, insisted that the idea was "hostile to
Arab interests" and the best response would be to help the Iraqi
people drive occupying forces out of the country.
Ankara joins Maliki in believing that there would be catastrophic
consequences of dividing Iraq in one way or another not only for the
Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites, but also more so for the Turkmens
within Iraq and for Turkey itself, bringing it to a collision course
with the Kurdistan regional administration in northern Iraq over
the issue of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terror as well as the
status of Kirkuk. As the idea of creating a federal system in Iraq
which leaves the north to the Kurds with lucrative oil resources is
likely to take deeper root in the minds of US policy makers once the
Bush administration is gone, Ankara is likely to primarily demand
more cooperation from Washington to root the terrorist PKK out of
northern Iraq and secondarily pressure on both Washington and Baghdad
to preserve Iraq’s unity as to secure Turkmens who would otherwise
be left out as a minority vulnerable to the Kurdish majority.
If it was the 1990s or before, Ankara would either willingly or
unwillingly be complacent with the partition of Iraq and consequently
build up its military presence on the Iraqi border, putting all of
southeastern Turkey under "emergency rule." As some would argue,
this would be a more than welcome development for the infamous elite
because it would curb the authority of the civilian administration
on the grounds of the so-called security threat emanating from both
inside and outside. This is not the case any more. That is, a vast
majority of society and civil society organizations are quite vocal
about and reactionary toward the government’s policies. The online
polls conducted by such major newspapers as Zaman, Hurriyet, Milliyet
and Yeni Þafak, among others, by recently emerged survey companies
create a direct channel of communication between the government and
the public who elected it. Therefore the government is no longer
as independent as before in foreign policy making nor immune to
public scrutiny, and as such any foreign policy preference that would
dramatically contradict public opinion would simply mean a farewell
to office in the next elections. Second, the Turkish military is no
longer as interested, as some would argue, as before to override the
civilian administration’s foreign policy preferences — as proven
multiple times before and during the US invasion of Iraq.
The question of Iran: will Turks be cooperative?
The frequent argument within Washington’s neoconservative circles that
Iran poses an imminent threat to both regional and global order and
therefore should be dealt with militarily before it acquires nuclear
capabilities is unlikely to convince Turks to pledge support to any
possible US or US-Israeli operation against Iran for several reasons.
First of all, unlike the US invasion of Iraq, where Saddam’s
dictatorship and army were already eliminated in the early days of
the invasion, a possible military conflict with Iran would spark a
state-to-state war, as former National Security Advisor to President
Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests, and as such rapidly
destabilize the entire region. Second, even with the hard-line
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran is a containable threat. In his
"Hidden Iran," Ray Takeyh suggests that in quest for returning back
to the roots of the Islamic Revolution, the new generation of Iranian
clergy is hostile to establishing dialogue with the United States and
indifferent to doing so with Europe. Yet the grim economic realities,
such as increasing unemployment and the raised cost of living across
Iran make it imperative for Tehran to work with the few allies it
has left. According to the recent energy agreement between Ankara
and Tehran, the two will bring Turkmenistan’s natural gas through
Iran and Turkey and Iran’s gas through Turkey to the European markets.
Additionally, Ankara is to assist Tehran to develop its gas field in
the Persian Gulf province of Assaluyeh.
Thirdly, the Turkish-speaking Azeri Iranians that constitute 24
percent of Iran’s 65 million-population would also be a considerable
concern to the Turkish public in the event of what may soon turn into a
full-fledged war. Even if their plight may not suffice to make Ankara
stand in the way of Washington, the rapid surge of anti-Americanism
among the public would not avail the government to cooperate with
Washington on any other matter either. Fourthly, according to the
German Marshall Fund’s survey Transatlantic Trends 2006, while 56
percent of the Turkish respondents view Iran’s developing nuclear
weapons as being normal, only 10 percent supports military action
against it. Finally, if not the general public, the intellectuals
are well aware of the impact of the political intervention in 1953
and how it sowed the seeds of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The Armenian resolution: a new civilian approach
Thanks to burgeoning civil society and public debate on even the most
dogma-ridden subjects, Turks are ever-closer to understanding that
fierce attacks on Turkey and seeking means to inflict pain on her and
her people is likely to be the only way in which the Armenian diaspora,
especially its second and third generations, is familiar with as a
way to serve their perceived Armenian cause. Some argue that it is
for this very reason that, as Kinzer notes, in the 1970s and 1980s,
terrorists calling themselves Justice Commandos against Armenian
Genocide (JCAG) assassinated not only 75 Turkish diplomats in the
United States and Europe but also their relatives, wives, children
and the mere bystanders, and bombed targets like the Turkish Airline
(THY) counter at Orly Airport in Paris. Again, it may be for this
very reason that Armenia has long supported the terrorist PKK —
to bleed Turkey to death. For Turks the answer to "Why do they hate
us?" may not necessarily be that Armenians are inherently hostile to
Turks, which is certainly quite unlikely given the ongoing dialogue
between non-fanatical Turks and Armenians, but that "those who hate us"
have no ability to sympathize with Turks because their mental image
of Turkey and Turks is associated with nothing but the massacres
they heard of one way or another. Therefore the Armenian diaspora’s
relentless campaign for the resolutions such as H. Res.
106 in the US Congress may be tolerated.
However, the failure of Turkish civil society, including Turks and
Armenians, to show the Armenian diaspora how to better serve the
Armenian cause cannot be tolerated. Therefore, Turks and Armenians
of Turkey have recently started to allocate at least part of their
time and resources to help the Armenian diaspora realize how to
better serve the Armenian interests, instead of solely countering its
attacks. It goes without saying that the foremost of those interests
are respectively to better the socioeconomic and political conditions
of Armenians in Turkey and help Armenia settle its disputes with its
neighbors and prosper economically. As the Turkish-Armenian Patriarch
Mesrob II stated during his recent trip to Washington, D.C., during
which his speech at Georgetown University was allegedly cancelled
due to the security threats voiced by fanatical Armenian groups, the
primary need of the Turkish-Armenians is to open a theological school
where they can educate their priests. In addition the Patriarchate
needs to be able to procure income through means other than member
donations, which is not allowed under the current legal framework.
Therefore it is widely held that it would be more reasonable for
the Armenian diaspora to donate the financial resources, at least
partially, which are currently used for lobbying to the Patriarchate.
Similarly it would be more rational for Armenian Foreign Minister
Vartan Oskanian to seek ways to solve his country’s problems with the
neighboring Azerbaijan, 20 percent of the land of which is currently
under Armenian occupation, instead of protesting the letter of the
eight US Secretaries of State by advising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
that the resolution would not affect Turkish-Armenian relations,
simply because there are no such relations. He is indeed right that
Turkish-Armenian relations are plagued primarily by the latter’s
partial occupation of Azerbaijan, as Suat Kýnýklýoðlu, deputy of the
ruling Justice and Development (AK Party), puts it. Nevertheless,
Yerevan’s goodwill efforts on the so-called genocide debate would
certainly encourage Ankara to be more proactive in solving Armenia’s
regional problems.
Otherwise, even if passing the genocide resolution in the US Congress
would satisfy the collective ego of the diaspora and for a short period
of time relieve Congress members of the Armenian lobby’s ceaseless
pressure, it will have disastrous impact on not only American-Turkish
relations but also on Armenian-Turkish relations too. The impact on
the former is highly likely to be enduring, because the Turkish public
opinion is that the US Congress has nothing to do with the so-called
genocide issue and is further politicizing it by bringing to the vote.
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