Wolf D. Fuhrig

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Turkey, A Handicapped Ally

When President Bush’s neoconservative advisers urged him to invade Iraq in March 2003, they counted on the government of Turkey to join the “coalition of the willing.” As so often, however, the President was misinformed.

Turkey has been America’s ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 1952, and in 1996 America’s ally, Israel, entered into a free trade and military training agreement with the Turkish government. Each side thought the deal furthered its interests. Israel’s leaders were eager to exploit the centuries-old rift between Turks and Arabs. Their relations have remained strained, if not hostile, mainly due to the 400 years of occupation of vast Arab lands under the Ottoman Empire.

Ninety-nine percent of the Turkish people, however, are Muslims who strongly sympathize with their oppressed Muslim brethren chafing under forty years of the U.S.-supported Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Hence, when the Bush administration urged Turkey to participate in the invasion of Iraq, Turkish public opinion strongly opposed it for two reasons: not to clash with Arabs again and not to join another conquest of a Muslim society by non-Muslims nations such as the U.S. and Britain.

Keenly aware of these realities, the Turkish parliament refused to allow U.S. troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. As was to be expected, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council also opposed the proposal to have Turkish troops join in the occupation.

In Iraq, Turks are facing not only Arab resentment but much more strongly the hostility of the Iraqi Kurds who, like Persians, are people of Indo-European origin. They live mainly in the mountains where Turkey, Iraq, and Iran meet, an area long known as "Kurdistan.” In each of the three countries whose domination they have to endure, Kurds have had to defend their national identity against often brutal pressures to assimilate them into Turkish, Arab, or Iranian culture.

When the President asked the Turks to join in the occupation of Iraq, he also ignored the many problems that are at least as urgent for them as ending the chaos in Iraq, among them the conflict between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island of Cyprus. In 1960, the Greek south of the island established itself as the Republic of Cyprus, but in 1974 Turkish troops invaded the island’s Turkish north and unilaterally declared it a state. No other country, however, recognized that entity. Worse yet for Turkey, the Greek-controlled Republic of Cyprus was subsequently admitted to the European Union (E.U.) as a full-fledged member

While the ethnic division of Cyprus and the future role of its Turkish minority remain unresolved, NATO member Turkey itself, a nation of 70 million, finds itself perennially frustrated in its effort to gain membership in the European Union. The government first applied in 1959. By 1999, the E.U. officially accepted Turkey as a candidate for entry. To get this far, Turkey had to abolish the death penalty, accept Kurdish as a language in schools, scrap state security courts, revise the penal code, and tighten civilian control over the army

As long as the Turkish government refuses to recognize Cyprus, it will not gain admittance to the E.U. Beyond that obstacle, however, there is a large segment of Europeans who believe that Turkey as a 99.8 percent Islamic society with 97 percent of its territory in Asia Minor fits much better into the Middle East than into Europe, geographically and culturally.

President Bush has told the Turkish prime minister that he wants his country admitted to the E.U. That, however, is one of the few decisions in international politics where the Europeans are unlikely to let him butt in.