LET US BE FAIR TO TURKEY..!

I would like to share the article of "Norman Stone" under the title of "Worried about war? Then consider how it is in Turkey", which appeared in the prominent "The Times" daily of England on February 22, 2003.

There is a persistent air of slow-motion surrealism as Turks contemplate what is about to happen in Iraq. On television news, American convoys trundle east and men in orange suits are preparing the population for chemical warfare-Ankara is, after all, within range of missiles fired from Iraq. These preparations mingle strangely with the snow clearing and the blizzard reports; the war crisis is somehow muffled. There are endless discussion programs, as prominent journalists and well-informed retired generals discuss it, but it is all very slow-motion.

Mosul and Kirkuk, the population of which is Turkoman, once nomadic cousins of the Turks, were claimed by the young republican Turkey in 1923, and only a decision, rigged by the British, prevented the claim from being realized. Turkey, attaches great importance to the security of the Turkoman, living in Mosul and Kirkuk, and clearly states that it will never let the Kurds claim these regions.

The Turks' demand for compensation is, in fact, fair enough. Their tourism may entirely disappear and the auguries otherwise are not good. In 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War, the then chief figure in Turkish politics, the hugely influential Turgut Ozal, did more or less whatever the US wanted. It was not a great success, because the problem of Iraq was not solved at all. Instead, Turkey had an inflow of Kurdish refugees that she could barely handle, and cross-border trade declined so far as to impoverish large areas of the Anatolian east. The Black Sea port of Trabzon used to do well out of trade with the northern Middle East. It, and the Black Sea coast generally, now has the second lowest GDP per capita in the country.

Turks put a figure of $30 billion on their losses since 1991, but the political losses have also been severe. South-eastern Turkey, on the Iraqi border, has a largely Kurdish population, often sunk in traditional tribal ways, with polygamy and a vast demographic problem. Uncertainties on the border have put a stop to organized trade. Worse, they have encouraged smuggling, not least of drugs and people.

Almost no Turk wants a war.

Then there is the Kurdish problem in Northern Iraq. The Americans want to establish a "Kurdish entity". But the Kurds of northern Iraq have cousins over the Turkish border, and since Ottoman times the whole region has been very difficult to control. It is not, Turks say, as if one could straightforwardly talk of "Kurdistan", whatever the Americans believe. The Kurds are divided along tribal lines and there are other deep divisions, of religion, in that many are not Sunni at all, but Turkish-Alevi, so heretical as almost not to count as Muslims.

There is also no single Kurdish language. Abroad, efforts are being made to standardize "Kurdish", but on the ground they make no sense because there are at least seven strikingly different variants. In Iraq an Arabic alphabet is used, in Turkey a Latin one. It is sometimes claimed that Turkey bans Kurdish publications, but this has not been true for years. In fact, people do not buy them. The PKK (newly KADEK), the communist guerilla movement with which Turkey has had to contend all these years, itself used Turkish and announced that Turkish would be the official language of "Kurdistan".

If Iraq breaks up, will Turkey then face some sort of Kurdish entity-either dirt-poor, in the manner of Somalia, or, if it gets Kirkuk and Mosul, oil rich and able to threaten all its neighbors as Saddam did?

A landslide brought a new government to office a few months ago. It has been a godsend for the US, which is only too glad to see a democratic Muslim state, helpful to it in its dealings with the difficult Europeans.

High-level Americans have been back and forth to Ankara again and again, asking it in effect to repeat Turkey's behavior over Korea. At that time, after all, Turkey put herself again on the world map. This earned her a great deal of support, in US aid and in membership of international bodies such as the OECD that were reserved to the respectable. Why, say the Americans, not do a Korea over Iraq?

But Korea was not next door, and it did not open up various exceedingly difficult historical questions that the westernizing Turks would be very glad indeed to forget. It is a time of slow-motion apprehension, and, whatever happens, the answers for Turkey are neither simple nor welcome.