Just as it was a century ago, Turkey has become the sick man of Europe. For a year, U.S. officials have nervously watched economic and political conditions in Turkey deteriorate. But the invasion of Iraq has lifted concerns to new heights. Western European governments have been openly critical. That has made Americans fearful that Turkey will become diplomatically isolated, at precisely the wrong time.
“Turkey,” says Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, “has become the frontline state.” No kidding. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the cold war have given modern Turkey land borders with eight nations: Greece, Bulgaria, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. How tough is that neighborhood? Try this: the only one of those nations that boasts anything like a genuine democracy is Greece, with whom Turkey’s relations are poisonous. From the Balkans to the Caucasus, from the Middle East to Teheran, many of Eurasia’s trouble spots demand a selfconfident Turkish government determined to avoid adventurism.
Such a government Turkey does not have. just as in Mexico-another “borderland” country on the edge of the rich world with which it has a lot in common - Turkey’s economic reforms in the 1980s were deceptive. Annual inflation is now running at around 130 percent, and last year industrial production contracted by 7.6 percent. Refugees from the long-running war against Kurdish terrorists in the southeast are streaming into Turkish cities. Promising clean government in the shantytowns, Refah, a party of Islamic fundamentalists, won nearly 20 percent of the vote in municipal elections last year and now controls both Istanbul and Ankara. The government of Tansu Ciller is chronically weak. Privately, senior U.S. and European officials doubt if she has real control over the army’s general staff, whom they suspect of planning the invasion of Iraq on their own.
U.S. policymakers concede that Turkey faces a genuine security threat to the southeast. After an army offensive in Turkey last year, the PKK guerrillas moved their camps into northern Iraq. But Iraqi Kurdistan is a security vacuum: Saddam Hussein’s writ has not run there since the gulf war. The Iraqi Kurds, whom a multinational force is meant to be protecting, are engaged in a bitter war among themselves. So the PKK was able to operate with some impunity. A senior U.S. official says that Turkey has a right to go “in and out on sporadic missions” but that the United States will not countenance a permanent Turkish “security zone.” In Washington last week Erdal Inonu, the Turkish foreign minister, promised Turkey would leave Iraq in “a few weeks.”
But what then? Unless the PKK has been eradicated, or the Iraqi Kurds stop their internecine war, this whole mess will repeat itself in a year or two. Meanwhile, the Turkish action has done incalculable political harm. Twice during Inonu’s visit, U.S. officials gave him a lecture on the consequences of Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. In Western Europe, ratification of a Turkish customs union with the European Union is now in serious doubt. And in the Kurdish areas of Turkey itself, the actions in Iraq are unlikely to win the government good will.
Washington will continue its policy of friendship to Turkey. “We have made a conscious decision to be less critical of the Turks than the Europeans,” says Holbrooke, who will visit Ankara with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott this week. (Ciller then flies to Washington.) During Prime Minister John Major’s trip to Washington last week, a senior British official said to “cut Turkey off” by denying the EU customs union would be “a serious mistake.” But understanding for Turkey’s plight is only half of a policy; if the Ankara government cannot engender economic growth and tolerate some autonomy for the Kurds, new crises beckon. In the end, the message for the sick man of Europe may be the oldest one of all: patient, heal thyself.
