Alienating the Turks

No one in their right minds would fish for such trouble by harassing, humiliating and degrading Turkish soldiers.

In the past, American soldiers apprehended some Turkish soldiers at the entrance of Kirkuk, handcuffed them and then handed them over to the Turkish authorities at Habur. Even that incident raised eyebrows and some resentment in Turkey, but people let it go because it was a chaotic period and the Americans were trying to disarm everyone and thus the incident was forgotten.

However, this time the Americans actually raided a compound of Turkish special teams stationed in Suleymaniyeh to monitor Kurdish insurgents who try to slip into Turkey from northern Iraq. The Turkish officers were reportedly handcuffed like prisoners or war, forced to wear hoods and taken to Kirkuk first and then moved to Baghdad. These are the soldiers of a country that is supposed to be America’s ally.

Who ordered this raid? What was his aim and what are the real facts that remain to be seen? It is too early to say much on the matter before the issue becomes crystal clear.

However, we can safely say that this incident will do not good to the already shaky relations between the U.S. and Turkey.

Yes, some people in Washington, and especially at the Pentagon, may resent the fact that Turkey did not allow the U.S. to open a northern front against Saddam Hussein’s forces. But we feel this does not call for such revenge tactics that will only complicate things at a time when the Americans need all the friends they can enlist to bring stability to Iraq and Turkey is a key country to do this.

Those of us who have promoted the idea of all out Turkish support for the Americans in Iraq even before the war were pragmatic people who, contrary to the beliefs of some Turkish Islamists, knew that the U.S. would attack Iraq even without Turkish cooperation and that Ankara should not have been left out of the Iraqi equation.

But there were too many Turks who opposed the war and quite a few who resented the overall attitude of the Bush administration on Iraq – an attitude that they felt was based on bullying. Whether we like it or not there are some anti-American sentiments among the Turkish masses, but these have been muted because everyone is aware that people gain nothing by falling out of odds with a superpower.

But Turks are also proud people who have very special affection for their soldiers. When allied soldiers start treating our soldiers with disrespect, let alone arrest them and humiliate them, the anti-American sentiments will deepen and even those of us who act with out minds and not with our hearts find this very hard to digest.

Someone has openly sabotaged Turkish-American relations. Let us hope this is the work of a misguided American local officer and not a Pentagon plot. Let us also hope the Iraqi Kurds had no finger in all this. Let no one make the mistake of not realising that sooner or later the Americans will go and after that we will be left to ourselves. We can all choose between partnership and friendship or confrontation.