ANKARA, 11 October 2003 — Ankara expects Washington to persuade Iraq’s Governing Council to accept Turkish troops before tough negotiations start on the precise conditions of its planned deployment, Turkish officials said yesterday.
Turkey’s Parliament gave the go-ahead this week for troops to go to neighboring Iraq to help secure and rebuild the war-ravaged country. But Iraq’s US-appointed Governing Council says it does not want troops from neighboring countries.
Talks in Baghdad between the council and the United States have failed to resolve the deadlock, which comes amid mounting US casualties in Iraq. “We are ready to begin negotiations but we are waiting for the United States to overcome the Iraqi opposition. The ball is in America’s court,” a senior Turkish official told reporters. “It would not be realistic to expect the talks to begin at the start of next week,” he added.
The negotiations in Ankara are expected to cover the size and location of the Turkish deployment, other logistical issues and combating Turkish Kurdish rebels holed up in northern Iraq. Officials have said in the past Turkey, NATO’s only mainly Muslim member, could send up to 10,000 troops to Iraq. They are most likely to be deployed not in the mainly Kurdish north but in central Iraq, dominated by Arab Sunni Muslims.
Turkey is “very much disturbed” by the Iraqi leadership’s opposition to its troops and has asked the United States to work out the wrangle, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said yesterday, Anatolia news agency reported. “Some members of the Iraqi Governing Council have recently started to manipulate us for their own political ends. We are very much disturbed and we have conveyed this very openly to the United States,” Gul told reporters in the southern city of Antalya.
Without mentioning names, Gul alluded that some members of the US-appointed body who were opposed to a Turkish deployment had in the past favored it. “One should not say something when speaking to us and another thing when speaking to others,” the minister said, according to Anatolia news agency.
Gul accused some members of using Turkey to score domestic political points. Gul said some Iraqi politicians were being inconsistent, privately encouraging Turkey to contribute troops but then coming out publicly against any Turkish military role.
Iraq’s Turkmens generally favor Turkey’s troop deployment. Turkish officials said they had also urged the United States to agree to open a second border crossing between Turkey and Iraq to help relieve congestion at the Habur entry point.
Turkey already has a few thousand soldiers in northern Iraq in forward bases set up in the mid-1990s to fight Turkish Kurd guerrillas. Turkish troops also command a peacekeeping force along a long-quiet front between two Iraqi Kurdish factions. Kurds have long demanded that the Turks leave. Iraq’s Kurds accuse Ankara of trying to stir up ethnic tensions between them and the Turkmen minority and keeping its forces in northern Iraq to stifle the Kurds’ federal ambitions.
Meanwhile, a Turkish court yesterday began hearing a controversial case brought against 405 soldiers for the alleged torture and repeated rape of a Kurdish woman on the several occasions she was held in custody. The woman, who is 31 and known only as S.E., said she was blindfolded when she was tortured and raped, leading the prosecution to charge all the soldiers who served during that period in two paramilitary stations in Mardin province where she claims she was abused.
The court in Mardin city adjourned the hearing to Nov. 5 on procedural grounds, a lawyer for the plaintiff, Reyhan Yalcindag, told AFP. The case has come under the spotlight in a country where authorities have been reluctant to look into widespread allegations of torture and rape by security forces in the mainly Kurdish southeast, the theater of a 15-year bloody conflict between separatist Kurdish rebels and the army.
Neither the plaintiff nor the defendants were present at yesterday’s hearing. S.E. says she was tortured and raped at the hands of paramilitary troops each time she was taken into custody in November 1993 and in March and August 1994, a period of intense fighting against Kurdish rebels. Her claims have been verified by a medical report.
