ANKARA, 12 April 2003 — Turkey accepted yesterday US promises to block any bid by Iraqi Kurds to control northern oil fields, but signaled it was still ready to send its own troops if it saw a Kurdish move toward independence. Turkey sounded an alarm on Thursday after Kurdish peshmerga fighters moved into the oil city of Kirkuk abandoned by Iraqi government forces. The Kurds had crossed a “red line”, one of many Ankara sees in its fraught relations with Iraqi Kurds.
The United States, fearing a disruptive Kurdish-Turkish clash if Ankara invaded, moved quickly to dispatch its own units to take control of the situation. “Due to our initiatives those who entered Kirkuk have now begun to leave; those who entered Mosul will also move out,” Prime Minister Abdullah Gul told a news conference. But he left a pointed reminder for the Americans, working with the peshmerga, of a deep-seated historic Turkish suspicion of Kurdish ambitions in the region.
“Yesterday we told (US Secretary of State Colin) Powell that if their forces are not enough, we can do it (take control) together and if neither of those work, we could do it on our own,” Gul said. Images of the jubilant peshmerga, splashed over newspapers, touched on a raw nerve in Turkey where schoolchildren learn of perfidious Western powers conniving 80 years ago at the partition of Turkey’s heartland and creation of a Kurdish state. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres, settling borders after World War I, created Kurdish and Armenian states partly in what is now Turkey but it was repudiated by the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Conservative Turks and others argue an Iraqi Kurdish state would reignite separatism in the Turkish southeast that killed 30,000 in the 1980s and 1990s. Turkish troops and armor wait on Turkey’s mountainous border with Iraq. The Kurdish issue is a potent one in both Turkey’s domestic and its foreign policy.
Bulent Akarcali of the liberal Democracy Foundation believes Turkey and other neighbors with Kurdish minorities should accept assurances they do not seek independence, only autonomy in a new, federal Iraq. “The Kurds have understood they cannot survive by being in conflict with Turkey, Syria and Iran,” he said. But on the streets of Ankara there was a prevailing mood of skepticism about the appearance of Kurds in a city that could provide the wealth a Kurdish state would need. “I know the Kurds,” said Mahmut Sahin, a lottery ticket seller who served as a soldier in the southeast in the 1990s. “What they want is to take Kirkuk and its oil to begin a state.”
