This is a country stuck at the epicenter of one of the world’s toughest neighborhoods, a region sorting desperately through the geopolitical garbage left by the end of the Cold War.
For most Americans, Turkey conjures up a series of blurry images: carpets and coffee and camels, mystery-laden Istanbul and “Midnight Express.”
Forget all that. What happens in Turkey is important, for it is a major Western ally squarely in the middle of a huge, strategically crucial area characterized by seething, incalculable change.
Not very far down the road, regardless what happens as it stumbles toward the end of the century, this nation of nearly 60 million people poised on the European-Asian divide will be part of that change.
There’s no avoiding it. Look at the map. Modern Turkey, child of the vast Ottoman Empire that persisted for six centuries before crumbling into irrelevance 70 years ago, is a prisoner of geography. Along with its neighbors, it’s woven tightly into a tapestry with a messy, uncertain pattern.
The distances between countries are uncomfortably close, no more than an hour or two by plane. And in every direction, there’s reason for anxiety: the specter of spreading Islamic fanaticism; the unceasing madness in former Yugoslavia; a busily rearming Iran; water disputes with Syria; continuing arguments with Greece over Cyprus, still split after Turkey’s 1974 invasion; the insistent demand of millions of Kurds in southeast Turkey and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, just to the south, for their own, long-denied autonomy; warring Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the fragmenting ethnic enclaves of the Caucasus beyond Turkey’s border with Georgia.
But there’s reason for hope, too, in the aspirations of many of the Turkic-speaking southwestern republics of the old Soviet Union. If they reject Iran-style rule by ayatollahs-and, if they get development aid from the West, it’s a good bet they will-they could slide toward the Western sphere of influence.
In the midst of all of this, Turkey is unique and uniquely schizophrenic. It is 98 percent Muslim but determinedly secular, neither fully East nor West in the minds of its citizens.
After a dozen go-go years, the nation’s economy has settled back into anemic growth rates, dragged down by huge, unprofitable state enterprises. But these account for far less of the gross national product than they once did, and the vibrant “gray market” sector gains force with each passing year. The problem is that it doesn’t pay taxes-a major drawback for the national treasury.
On one hand, Turkey can boast and does, endlessly, of a multiparty parliamentary democracy that it envisions as a role model for Muslim-populated Central Asian republics emerging from seven decades of brutal colonization by Moscow.
Its news media are highly politicized but essentially free. There are scattered pockets of Islamic militance, and one of the parliamentary parties is fundamentalist, but no one seems overly concerned.
On the other hand, Turkey’s human rights record is appalling. If Bill Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is to be believed, that fact is unlikely to be overlooked when his administration takes a harder look at what Turkey has to offer.
That process has begun. Turgut Ozal, president and former prime minister, and the visionary whose economic reforms kicked Turkey into high gear a dozen years ago, was one of the first high-level visitors to the Clinton White House.
Viewing itself as the logical conduit between the West and the poor but promising southern rim of the ex-USSR, Turkey had hoped its participation in the Persian Gulf war coalition two years ago would make it a full partner in the European Community.
For now, at least, that’s a dead issue. It has been stiffed by the Western Europeans, who were more interested in admitting Greece and now are focusing on their closer neighbors in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague.
They perceive Turkey as a Middle Eastern country-and, along with its neighbors, they suspect that Turkey’s oft-repeated mantra of “regional stability” masks a leftover Ottoman fantasy of renewed conquest, via economics if not by the sword.
“That is it, exactly-regional stability,” insists Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel. “We have to live with our neighbors. We are trying to be helpful.”
But the West so far has turned a collective deaf ear to Turkey’s offer of troops, ports and airfields to any United Nations-led coalition that might be formed to stop Serbian aggression against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. Concern that the conflict could spread beyond the borders of former Yugoslavia has not been sufficient to overcome doubt about Ankara’s ultimate intentions.
There is nothing especially new about the contradictions and knotty complications Turkey has to deal with, but they have been deepened by the end of the Cold War. Turkey no longer can comfortably view itself solely as NATO’s bulwark at the Soviet border. It’s playing under new rules.
But old facts, old memories, linger.
Dogu Ergil, a University of Ankara political scientist, recently took it upon himself to travel to all the areas of the region where Turkic-speaking peoples were left behind after the Ottoman demise. He was amazed at what he found.
“They are turning toward us,” he said. “We are not an internal sea here, we are part of an ocean that receded into Turkey, leaving lakes of population. After the Cold War, people are talking about shared roots, a cultural heritage, even long-lost relatives.
“It’s incredible, and very emotional. They’re saying `Welcome back.’ The image of empire has been resuscitated, but without the power of colonialism or any intention of imperialism.”
It’s an arresting thought-the notion of disparate peoples loosely reaffiliating under an ethnic Turkish umbrella-but there are problems with it. Central Asia has been a litmus test.
After the USSR fell apart two years ago, Ankara rushed to extend ties to the 70 million Muslims in the Central Asian states-Kazakhstan, Kyrgistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Following a spate of initial diplomatic contacts, state-run Turkish TV began beaming special programming to the region, a government unit was set up to foster joint business projects, and plans were made to bring dozens of diplomats to Ankara for training as well as 10,000 Central Asian students on special scholarships.
Turkey also provided the so-called “stans” with food, medicine and bank credits eventually totaling $1.2 billion.
But the TV broadcasts have been sharply reduced because much of the intended audience spoke a different Turkic dialect and simply couldn’t understand them. Because of language and cultural problems, relatively few scholarship students stayed. And Central Asia’s ignorance of modern business practices-“They have no computers, they don’t know how to draw up contracts,” said a Western diplomat-has prevented most of the joint projects from getting off the ground.
“At the beginning, there was a lot of emotion in our meetings with our brothers after generations with no contact. Now we are more realistic,” said Bilal Simsir, the foreign ministry official in charge of Turkey’s relations with the ex-Soviet republics.
“They told us they wanted to follow the Turkish model. They are desperately poor, with rich natural resources but no infrastructure to exploit them. We know if they are left that way, all kinds of negative influences could play a role-(Islamic) fundamentalism, communism, supernationalism, chauvinism. But we don’t have the means to combat this by ourselves.”
Simsir scoffed at rumors that Turkey was building scores of mosques across Central Asia as part of an effort to encourage the region to adopt Turkey’s secular Islamic example. “We built just one, in Turkmenistan,” he said.
But echoing the worried comments of many diplomats in Turkey about Tehran’s current arms-buying spree, he said that Iran had dispatched heavily financed fundamentalist agents to the region to sway it toward ayatollah-style clerical autocracy.
The best way to prevent Central Asia from surrendering to the blandishments of Islamic fundamentalism, Simsir said, is for Washington and other Western capitals-presumably with Turkey available as an intermediary if need be-to deal with them more directly rather than, as now, largely through Moscow.
It’s not at all clear, however, despite ancient ethnic ties, that most Turks are keen to develop intimate ties with their Central Asian brethren. The issue has been widely and openly debated here.
“By and large, there appears to be a consensus . . . that the establishment of some kind of a political union of Turkic states would be detrimental to Turkish interests as well as to the quality of relations between Turkey and these countries,” said Kemal Kirisci of Bogazici University in Istanbul.
“This consensus reflects the idea that these countries have remained under the control of a big brother for 70 years, and the emergence of another one would not bring them any benefit.”
Azerbaijan, at war with Armenia, is another matter. Ethnically and linguistically, Azerbaijan is the closest to Turkey of the ex-Soviet republics, and many Turks were outraged by Demirel’s “evenhanded” policy of allowing Turkey to be used for transshipments of wheat and other aid to Armenia.
When Demirel announced last year that Ankara also would provide Armenia with 20,000 kilowatts of electricity, the outcry was so great that the offer had to be withdrawn.
But the most pressing internal matter on Turkey’s agenda is the Kurdish issue-with no sign that it can be resolved anytime soon.
No one knows how many Kurds there are in Turkey. Millions have relocated all across the nation from their ancient homeland in Turkey’s southeast and that they support the centuries-old vision of an independent Kurdistan extending into areas of not only Turkey but also Iran and Iraq.
Militants of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, have mounted repeated armed attacks in Turkey. The newspapers cry out almost daily against Kurdish “terrorists,” and the Turkish army and police have been used in force against them.
The zeal with which the anti-Kurdish campaign has been conducted has prompted even the U.S. State Department, which often soft-pedals abuses by allied governments, to say that “torture remains Turkey’s principal human rights problem.”
“Demirel promised during his (1991) election campaign that `the walls of all police stations in Turkey will be made of glass,’ ” says Amnesty International. “Demirel acknowledged that torture existed in Turkey but vowed to end it. Today, Demirel’s promise is shattered like a thousand shards of glass. Torture remains widespread and systematic.”
For Demirel, this is simply a non-issue. Himself a victim of seven years of house arrest (Turkey has had three military coups since 1960), he cited the 10 political parties represented in parliament, as well as the free press, as compelling evidence that Turkey has moved firmly away from institutionalized repression.
The bottom line, he said, is that “Turkish lives have to be protected.”
That statement goes further than a single issue. It’s the overriding theme of a nation operating in a tough neighborhood.
