Friday, April 29, 2005
The view from Ankara
Saeed Naqvi
One's worst fears on Iraq may well be realised in the forseeable future. So far I have been looking at Iraq from Amman, Baghdad, Fallujah, Karbala, Najaf, even Saudi Arabia. But the vantage point from where Iraq looks inevitably doomed to a three-way separation are some well-informed drawing rooms in Turkey.
In fact it was a Turkish intellectual, Ilber Ortayli, who had first alerted me to Iraq's eventual fate. It is quite impossible to put Iraq back as it was. And now that I am here, in Ankara, I am having difficulty finding scholars, officials, journalists willing to refute Ortayli.
A regular fixture for Indian journalists visiting Ankara is Ilnur Cevik. The Ceviks floated The Turkish Daily News some decades ago, the solitary English language paper. Recently Cevik sold it and launched the equally impressive New Anatolia. Last time I met him he was returning from Iraq, particularly the Kurdish north where among his friends is Jalal Talabani, now president of Iraq.
I was walking into Cevik's Ankara office when some pictures in the hallway caught my eye. One was the new airport at Suleimaniyeh (north Iraq), nearly complete. There were others of other massive construction sites in Erbil. We are building the new Kurdish Parliament complex in Erbil, says Cevik with quiet satisfaction. His publishing interests are now a side show. He is big in construction in northern Iraq, which in Cevik's conversation is interchangeable with southeast Turkey.
Turkey itself is in the throes of rapid change. Some years ago you could not mention the word Kurd in, say, an open cafe before a man in a long coat nudged you in the elbow and demanded your travel documents. Position yourself to take a photograph of the Bosphorous and, from nowhere, the man in the long coat would materialise.
Turkey was a hard, centralised, police state rather like the Shah's Iran with its infamous Savak. The functioning of democracy was under the army's stern supervision. In the mid-90s, when the army saw the Islamist Refah party a threat to Kemalist secularism, it was shown the door, for good.
The Justice and Development Party, or the AKP, now in power has actually risen from the ashes of the Refah. But this time the army is not in a position to act against the AK for compelling reasons. First, the AK has come to power with a massive majority, 357 seats in a house of 550. This majority cannot be explained in terms of a wave only, though that too is a factor. The post 9/11 war on terror came across to the Turks as anti-Muslim. They closed ranks and gave AK the unprecedented majority. Also, the the strength is built on widespread cadres who have enabled 50 of the country's 70 mayors to be creatures of the AK.
Second, the army hand is stayed from proceeding against an Islamist regime because of the prospect of joining the EU. The single most important focus of Turkey is Europe. In December the EU invited Turkey to begin negotiations on European membership. Full membership of the EU entails a high degree of clubability, the club rules dictated entirely by Brussels. In this framework, the man in that long coat has had to make himself scarce. The army, though still the protector of the Kemalist legacy, has to be less intrusive and surrender some of its aces. The flaw with Kemalism was that it preached modernism, a European lifestyle, without leaving sufficient room for democratic institutions. The army and the AK are, therefore, involved in a three-legged slow walk into Europe. The pursuit of Europe imposes constraints upon the AK to prune its Islamist edges even as the army gradually compromises its overarching role. Both change in the process.
Attitudes towards Kurds too are changing. The other day some young people burnt the Turkish flag in Mersin in the southeast. It was presumed to be part of the new Kurdish assertiveness. For two days there was sullen silence. Then the army spoke up. Suddenly the entire nation was busy putting up the Turkish flag, outside homes, shops, walls, official buildings, everywhere. In March 2003, the army and the AK risked American wrath by disallowing US troop movement through the Kurdish areas. The army could not bear the thought of 50,000 foreign troops in the Kurdish southeast.
Then Iraq erupted. Everything in that US expedition began to go wrong, except the Kurdish north of Iraq, protected by a 12-year-old no-fly zone.
Last week Turkey reversed its decision on the Incirlik air base in the region, it can now be used for logistics in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Ilnur Cevik is not the only Turk shaping north Iraq. Many Turkish Kurds are too. North Iraq is beginning to look like a continuation of southeast Turkey. Kurdistan is not going to happen in a hurry without a huge regional eruption. But something is cooking.
© 2005: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.