No longer a Turkish bluff

Oct.10, 2007

No longer a Turkish bluff

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not bluffing when he says his government has authorised the military to take whatever measures as it deems fit, including a military incursion in northern Iraq , as part of stepped up measures against Kurdish rebel bases in the region.
The move came after the Erdogan government came under renewed pressure from the public following the killing of 15 Turkish soldiers by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose fighters are waging an cross-border insurgency from their bases located in northern Iraq.
The problem has been brewing for some time now, with Turkey issuing repeated warnings that it would not hesitate to stage military operations across the border in order to eliminate the PKK threat.
Iraqi Kurds, who have close relations with the US, have warned Turkey against any such incursion, but they are not seen to be effecively moving against the PKK in order to address the Turkish concerns.
The Washington response to the latest Turkish declaration was a reaffirmation that the US is committed to working with Turkey and Iraq to combat the PKK. But the US admnistration would not comment specifically on whether it would support Turkey authorising a possible incursion into northern Iraq.
Washington has its own considerations in northern Iraq, where it has indirect links with Iranian Kurdish dissidents in the mountainous Iraq-Iran border area through the PKK. It would like to use the Iranian Kurds against the Tehran regime at the right time, and a Turkish operation in northern Iraq would seriously dent the alliance.
Indeed, the US is caught in a bind. It cannot afford to have any destabilisation of the northern Kurdish regions of Iraq, but that is precisely what would happen if Turkish soldiers were to cross the border. It is highly unlikely that Turkey would limit its operations to the PKK if it orders it military across the border. Ankara would definitely like to cut down to size the Iraqi Kurds — who run their autonomous region without any interference from Baghdad while pursuing their ambitions of independent statehood in Kurdistan.
Kurdish independence is anathema to Turkey in view of its own Kurdish insurgency and separatist ambitions.
Indeed, the confrontation between Iraqi Kurds and Turkey is coming to a head-on clash by the end of the year when a referendum will decide the status of the oil-rich Kirkuk area. Ankara, which says it is determined to protect the interests of the nearly two million Turkomen population in the area, has cautioned against conducting the referendum and charged that the Kurds have changed the demography in order to secure the out of the plebscite in their favour.
No matter how we look at it, any Turkish incursion into northern Iraq would have serious destabilisation effects in the already volatile area. We would only hope that cool heads and moderation would prevail on all sides since the end losers would be the ordinary people living in the border region.