Washington, DC - Europe's odd man out, Turkey, has come to play a pivotal role in the Middle East and Central Asia, despite the cold shoulder it continues to receive from the European Community. But Turkey's new importance, strongly encouraged by the United States and more recently by Israel, has not been without its growing pains. Attacked by many liberals for its military campaign against the guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), Turkey has reacted by extending back-handed support to Saddam Hussein with the aim of preventing the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. This in turn has created a major opportunity for Iran, which by all accounts today calls the shots in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Turkey and Iran have increasingly become rivals, not only in the struggle over the future of Iraq but in Central Asia and beyond. For the peoples of Central Asia, Turkey's secular democracy, with its strong ties to the West, presents a refreshing alternative to Iran's dour fundamentalism. Turkish-language broadcasting and television stations have attracted a wider audience in Central Asia than their Iranian counterparts. With little popular response to political Islam in the Central Asian republics, Iran has largely abandoned its earlier attempts to export its revolutionary ideology and has instead forged more practical ties with the countries of the region based on economic cooperation and trade. And in one case, Iran has even sided against a Muslim neighbor - Azerbaijan - in favor of Christian Armenia, in the ongoing dispute between those two countries. (Iran's aversion to the current regime in Azerbaijan is based on several factors, not the least of which is Azerbaijan's strong ties to Turkey and its intermittent claims to ethnic Azeri areas in northern Iran).
The fundamental difference in approach between theocratic Iran and secular Turkey is exemplified by the new security relationship Turkey has been forging with Israel. The two countries signed a landmark military cooperation agreement in February. Last week [April 15], Turkey became the first Muslim nation ever to openly play host to Israeli Air Force jets, which flew to Turkey to engage in a week of joint training exercises. Although both countries have emphasized that the Israeli planes will not be armed or carry electronic surveillance equipment, neighboring Syria and Iran have strongly criticized the Turks for their new relationship with Israel, and have accused Israel for seeking to use Turkey as a spy-base against their countries.
Speaking during a visit to Kuwait as the Air Force training exercises began, a deputy Iranian foreign minister, Murtada Sarmadi, lashed out that it was "not to the benefit of the Islamic world that one of its member states concludes such an agreement with an enemy state."
A less public side to this newfound partnership between Israel and Turkey has already had a tremendous impact in both countries: intelligence sharing on international terrorism. The first glimpse of what appears to be a growing intelligence sharing arrangement between the countries was provided on April 7, when Israeli security officials announced they had arrested a Palestinian who had been recruited by Islamic Jihad while studying medicine in Turkey. The Israelis claimed the student, identified as 24-year old Khalil Abu Easa, confessed that he had been sent to Iran last August by Islamic Jihad to receive training in weapons and explosives use. They apprehended Abu Easa as he arrived back in the country at Ben Gurion international airport. Officials suggested privately that they had been tipped off to Abu Easa's arrival by the Turks, and that he was headed back to the Gaza Strip to orchestrate terrorist attacks against Israel.
Like Israel, Turkey and its secular democracy have been the targets of so-called "Islamic" terrorists trained in Iran, who have brutally murdered Turkish intellectuals, politicians, and journalists over the past eleven years. In March 1994, then Istanbul police chief Necdet Menzir said in a rare interview that police investigators had "positively linked" four of the assassinations to Iranian intelligence. In addition, Iranian agents were believed to have masterminded the slaying of two Saudi diplomats posted to Ankara, in October of 1988, and October 1989.
Menzir made available the videotaped confession of a radical Turkish Islamic leader, Mehmet Ali Bilici, who not only acknowledged his involvement in some of those murders, but provided explicit details of the training he and other members of his clandestine network had received at a terrorist training camp near the Iranian holy city of Qom. As police chief Menzir put it, Turkey was "effectively under siege by Iran." Turkey's combination of democracy and secular rule "has made us the prime target of the fundamentalists," Menzir said. It had also made Turkey "the only country that eventually can stop them."
Earlier this year yet another Turkish Islamist hitman, Irfan Cagirici, admitted to having been trained in Iran. Among the accusations now weighing against him are the assassination of Iranian dissidents in Istanbul in 1992 and the 1990 shooting death of Turkish columnist Cetin Emec, an outspoken proponent of secular rule.
The Cagirici case is important, because he named four Iranian intelligence officers posing as diplomats at the Istanbul consulate, as the organizers of the terrorist network to which he belonged. Last month, Turkey quietly demanded that Iran withdraw the diplomats. When the Iranians refused, Turkey dispatched a senior envoy to Tehran, to lay out the details of the case. Iran retaliated by arresting four Turkish diplomats posted in western Iran on April 9, on accusations of espionage and subversive activities.
Clearly, Turkey's success in maintaining its Islamic credentials within the framework of a secular democracy poses a challenge and a threat to Iran, which has not hesitated to use terrorism against Turkey. But Iran's assault on secular Turkey also involves direct military support for Turkey's avowed enemy, the PKK.
Turkey accuses Iran of providing training and military supplies to the PKK, whose guerrillas have been steadily losing ground to Turkey's massive military campaign. Three years ago, southeastern Turkey was virtually under their control; now, say U.S. officials, "the PKK no longer has the run of the land." But they do still benefit from Iranian support and, more recently, from safe havens in Iraqi Kurdistan, where Iran has coerced local leaders to provide them refuge. Iran also maintains training camps for the PKK near Qom and at other locations inside Iran.
Turkey's ineptness in dealing with its Kurdish population has largely fed the Euro-liberals. While Turkey argues, rightly, that it is facing a terrorist challenge, it has reacted by treating large numbers of Turkish Kurds who have little sympathy for the PKK as potential enemies. This is a tragic mistake which the PKK's sophisticated public relations machine in Europe has exploited with skill.
So is Turkey's aversion to Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish groups who have abandoned the PKK's separatist agenda, in favor of winning full civil and political rights within their respective countries.
Turkey suspects that the Iraqi Kurds have forged a secret pact with the PKK, and has grown impatient with the UN sanctions on Saddam, which have taken a substantial toll on the Turkish economy. As a result, Ankara has actively opposed the emergence of a pro-Western democratic enclave in northern Iraq.
But in the end, it was the Clinton administration's acquiescence to Ankara that finally doomed the effort to build democracy in Iraq. The U.S. does no favor to Turkey by acquiescing to a bad policy. If Washington had more forcibly supported the multi-ethnic experiment underway in Iraqi Kurdistan, Ankara would have gone along, Kurdish experts here believe. Instead, the lack of U.S. leadership and Turkey's blundering created a vacuum in northern Iraq into which Tehran has leapt. There was nothing inevitable about this, and it is a major U.S. foreign policy failure whose effects have yet to be felt. Here was a historic opportunity to sow the seeds of democracy in the Middle East, and it was missed. By all accounts, Iran now calls the shots in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Now the Iraqi Kurds - and other opposition groups as well - are turning to King Hussein as the only remaining alternative The King, whose Hashemite dynasty ruled Iraq in the 1920s, is highly respected by most Iraqis, who believe they can gain by some form of federation with Jordan that would guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity and the rights of Iraq's large minorities. (The King came to Washington last month to sell the idea of an Iraqi-Jordanian federation to the Clinton administration, although no news has filtered out on the results).
The Iraqi Kurds believe that the Turkish model of secular democracy has much to offer, and that Turkey can resolve its difficulties with its own Kurds. But Turkey needs help, and constructive criticism, to do so - not blind acquiescence, such as it has received from Washington, or the ill-intentioned attacks it has received from the PKK propaganda machine and those seeking to prevent Turkey from joining Europe.
Turkey can not only play a constructive role in northern Iraq, but it can serve as a counterweight and as an alternative to Iran throughout the region. Indeed, the Turkish "model" has already got Tehran's mullahs worried, since the success of Turkey's democracy stands in stark contrast to a theocratic dictatorship that has only maintained its hold on power by brutally suppressing all opposition.
Kenneth Timmerman is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI). FDI is a private, non-profit corporation registered in the State of Maryland. FDI materials, including the FDI News Update, are available free-of-charge via the Internet at http://www.iran.org/.