Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

A promising 2000 ends on a sour note for Turkey
by Mideast Mirror, January 8, 2001
Posted: Saturday, January 20, 2001 03:47 am CST

Turkey went into the year 2000 having finally been accepted as a candidate for membership of the European Union (EU). The IMF and the World Bank had promised support to help Turkey defeat the monster of inflation that had played havoc with its economy for almost 25 years, Youssef ash-Shareef writes from Ankara for pan-Arab al-Hayat.

The West seemed to bend over backwards to help the Turks into the EU. Relations between Ankara on the one hand and Brussels and international financial institutions on the other were riding high, something not lost on the Istanbul stock market which rose to record heights last January.

Flush with optimism, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit declared that his country would commence membership negotiations with the EU in 2001 with a view to becoming a full member by 2004.

The crowning glory came when Istanbul's Galatasaray soccer club won the European Champions Cup in May. Turkey's happiness was complete.

NEIGHBORS: This euphoric atmosphere reflected positively on Turkey's relations with neighbors Greece, Syria and Iraq, Shareef writes.

For the first time in 39 years, a Greek foreign minister paid a visit to Turkey in early 2000. Six Greek-Turkish joint committees were set up to discuss ways of improving bilateral relations. Ankara and Athens outbid each other in showering diplomatic niceties on the other side, their Foreign Ministers Ismail Cem and George Papandreou profusely praising each other's country.

To the south, Syrian and Turkish officials linked hands to perform the traditional dabkeh in the Turkish border village of Ceylan Pinar, declaring that a new page had been opened in relations between Damascus and Ankara. The rapprochement was cemented by a visit to the Turkish capital by Syria's Vice -President Abdelhalim Khaddam in November.

Taking advantage of (subsequently-dropped) moves by the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution recognizing that Turks committed genocide against the Armenian nation in 1915, Turkey began implementing its plan to improve relations with its other southern Arab neighbor Iraq.

A succession of Turkish delegations made up of MPs, government ministers and businessmen made the trek to Baghdad where they conducted official negotiations and took part in trade fairs. Issues such as opening a new border crossing between the two countries, and reviving the Mosul-Aleppo-Turkey rail line were discussed -- all steps designed to further develop economic ties between Iraq and Turkey. Since last October, Turkish aircraft have been making irregular flights into Baghdad's Saddam International Airport.

But Ankara wasn't only busy improving relations with the Iraqi government: the Turks made a deal with Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under which the PUK agreed to join forces with Ankara in fighting the Turkish rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Turkey thus succeeded in winning both main Iraqi Kurdish factions (the other is Masoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP) to its side, despite the mutual antagonism between the PUK and KDP.

DOMESTIC SCENE: The positive atmosphere that prevailed in 2000 between Turkey and the EU was reflected on the Turkish domestic scene. A new president was elected to succeed Suleyman Demirel. Turks had never before known a president like former Constitutional Court chairman Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Here is a man who holds the law in the highest esteem.

Sezer took it upon himself to redraw the relationship between the presidency and the Turkish army. He upheld the principle of equality before the law, and called for state institutions to be the first to uphold the rule of law as a way to bring the powerful military to heel and end the privileges the Turkish generals enjoy.

These attempts led to several indirect confrontations between Sezer and the generals, which were all settled to the president's advantage. These victories enhanced Sezer's standing with the Turkish people, and he became the first ever Turkish president to win more public support than the army itself.

The military establishment itself wasn't immune from change during that exceptional year. The Supreme Military Council met last August and decided to dismiss the more pro-Israeli officers from the Turkish armed forces. At the same meeting, plans were made to regulate internal army affairs for the next 10 years -- which prompted some to believe that the role of the army in Turkish life will change at the end of those 10 years.

It was also reported that the army was preparing to restructure itself and change into a more compact and professional force more on the lines of the U.S. army. Also in 2000, it was decided to relocate army headquarters from its location on the Black Sea coast to the Mediterranean coast -- as a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War and the shifting of interest to the eastern Mediterranean.

The Turkish military command also cancelled a number of planned visits to Tel Aviv with the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising -- a step seen as a rethink of the military's ties with the Jewish state.

KURDISH FRONT: The year 2000 also witnessed important developments on the Kurdish front, Shareef continues.

Government coalition leaders agreed to postpone carrying out the death sentence passed by a Turkish court on PKK leader Abdallah Ocalan pending a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on his appeal.

Nowruz 2000 (the Kurdish new year) passed without incident for the first time in 20 years, thanks in no small measure to an initiative promoted by Ocalan and other Kurdish groups to persuade PKK fighters to give themselves up to the Turkish authorities as a gesture of good will.

But the Turkish National Security Council -- at the army's behest -- rejected the Ocalan initiative. Prime Minister Ecevit proposed an alternative plan which involved rebuilding the mainly Kurdish southeast.

Like its many predecessors, the Ecevit plan never saw the light of day -- while the Turkish army continued its policy of resettling Kurdish villagers in new, more secure hamlets. The state of emergency was lifted in three Kurdish provinces, but that didn't do anything to improve social and economic conditions.

In 2000, the army declared that the domestic threat posed by the PKK was finally over. To do so, the army had to fight and defeat those parties that took up arms alongside or against the PKK. In early 2000, the military launched a campaign against the Turkish Hizbollah -- an organization now believed to have been a government creation designed to counter the Kurdish insurgency, but which seems to have overgrown its designated role and begun to follow its own agenda.

Several armed nationalist and leftist leaders, as well as leaders of organized crime rings, were liquidated last year. 2000 also saw Turkey's first ever genuine (and vociferous) debate about Kurdish cultural rights.

ECONOMY: All these steps designed to sever Turkey's links with the excesses of the past were part of the European path Ankara had decided to pursue. The economy, which was also beset with irregularities and excesses, received attention as well.

Last fall, the government decided to pull the plug on a number of banking operations that had been declared bankrupt for some time but which were kept afloat thanks to the support of some politicians. Nine banks were closed down, which led to a considerable reduction in investor confidence. Turkey lost $ 7 billion in foreign investments in a single month.

Certain groups -- dubbed "the enemies of success" by Ecevit -- began undermining the government's economic policy, which prompted Ankara to ask for help from the IMF which duly obliged, and agreed to loan Turkey $ 10 billion.

Instead of paying back some of its nearly $ 200 billion foreign debt, Turkey found itself deeper in the red. This led some observers to say that Turkey has capitulated to the IMF, and that 2001 will see the Fund rule the country.

TURNING SOUR: Turkey's relations with the EU turned sour before the year was out. Tensions with Greece resurfaced during NATO exercises in the Aegean; the short honeymoon seemed well and truly over.

Cyprus reemerged as a major source of friction between Turkey and the EU: in its so-called Accession Partnership Accord (APA), the EU made its acceptance of Turkish membership conditional on a satisfactory settlement of the Cyprus problem. In protest, the Turks withdrew from the UN-sponsored Cyprus peace talks after five rounds described as "sterile" by Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash.

Though Turkey subsequently approved an amended APA, tensions returned to relations between Ankara and Brussels thanks to an EU decision to defer negotiations on Turkish membership until 2010, as well as Ankara's obstruction of an EU-NATO agreement designed to enable Europe's planned Rapid Reaction Force to use NATO assets.

And so the year 2000, which seemed so promising for Turkey at the beginning, ended on a sour note. Ankara's dreams of reconciliation with Europe turned into nightmares endangering its economic plans and threatening to subject the country to IMF control, Shareef concludes.

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