APPENDIX 19
Supplementary Memorandum from the Lobby
for Cyprus
THE TURKISH
QUESTION
1. We are concerned here with Turkey's domestic
and foreign affairs, its peripheral influence as a regional power
stretching from the Balkans to the Middle East, and its bid to
join the EU in the not-too-distant future. The Turkish Question
is viewed here within the modern tradition of the famous "Eastern
Question" that has marred European politics over the last
200 years, and given the ethnic crises in the Balkans, the Middle
East and Turkey itself, continues to do so. The suggestions integrated
into the text point out, inter alia, the need for a thorough
democratisation of the Turkish foreign and domestic policies,
which is seen as a solid precondition guaranteeing lasting peace
and co-operation in the Balkans and the Near East.
2. Turkey and, for that matter, modern Turkish
nationalism, is virtually a 20th-century phenomenon. Modern Turkey
has inherited much of the Ottoman Empire's habitat in terms of
corrupt administrative practices and authoritarianism, state dominance
of the economy, an Islamic society and the centrality of the army
in the political skeleton of the country. The essence of the Kemalist
habitus, however, rests on the perpetuation of the Ottoman experience
of external conspiracy and internal betrayal. This was presumably
culminated with the conspiracy schemes of 1915-16 for the territorial
partition of Anatolia, schemes that found their expression in
the clauses of the Treaty of Sevres (1920). The Sevres syndrome
developed into the backbone of the Kemalist Weltanschauung and
virtually all perceptions of Turkish security issues today inherently
emanate from this syndrome: that of the partition of Anatolia.
In this context, what follows can also be seen as an exemplification
of this Kemalist perception of security and threat. The central
thesis employed is that Turkey's foreign and domestic policies
today perpetuate this syndrome of "security-insecurity"
and that, in the long run, they are in effect detrimental to the
very security of the country. Thus, this paper should be seen
as a functional and positive contribution to the development of
Turkey's own European and democratic perspective.
3. Turkey is an amalgamation of ethnicities
(eg, nearly 21- out of 66-million of its population are Kurds),
Islamic religious minorities (eg, Suni and Alevis) and secular,
pro-Western military and political elites. It has an unstable
political system overseen—to use a light wording—by
the military. Currently it is administered by a coalition of parties.
The second most important party in this coalition is the Nationalist
Action Party (MHP), which is profoundly nationalistic and racist
by Western standards. Not every secular elite, either politico-military
or economic, is pro-European. Well-defined class interests that
want to preserve their privileges drawn from the state apparatus
(eg, administrative elites, state bourgeoisie) are dead against
the country's entry into the European Union. Similarly, some powerful
factions within the secular military oppose Turkey's European
perspective on the grounds that any future democratisation/federalisation
of Turkey alongside the principle of acquis communautaire
would lead to the fragmentation, even partition, of the country
(a similar view is also adopted by MHP). Islam dominates social
attitudes, customs and mres, and has a very strong political influence.
But political Islam is hardly tolerated by the secular elite.
When, in May 1999, Merve Kavakci, a newly elected female member
of the Islamic Virtue Party, walked into the Parliament wearing
a headscarf, the secular establishment reacted ferociously against
Kavacki and President Suleyman Demirel himself called her an agent
provocateur working for foreign powers. Vural Savas, Turkey's
chief prosecutor, called Kavacki an "Islamic vampire that
fed only on blood."
4. Modern Turkey prosecutes Islamists within
the country but happens, albeit selectively, to champion their
rights outside it. A firm ingredient of the Turkish foreign-policy
projection particularly in the Balkans after the end of the Cold
War has been that of promoting the rights of Muslim minorities
(eg, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Western Thrace, Albania). At times Turkey
has threatened to intervene militarily if it was perceived that
the host country was misbehaving. As far as its Middle Eastern
policy is concerned, Turkey is rather anti-Muslim. This, inter
alia, can be seen from its alliance with Israel and from its stance,
although qualified, after 11 September. Turkey is very sceptical
about accepting an American-led bombing of Iraq and also has objections
to lead the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in
Afghanistan, in case the force is established there permanently.
In this respect, and given the implications of 11 September on
world politics, Turkey's foreign policy pattern is arguably confusing
and causes embarrassment to the West.
5. Turkey has a wrecked economy, an endemic
inflation, a huge public debt and deficit, a weak banking sector
and a constant current-account deficit. Nearly 45 per cent of
its population is employed in agriculture and the economy is still
predominately run by the state, although efforts towards privatisation
and liberalisation of the markets are seemingly proceeding apace.
Turkey is in constant need of IMF injections in order to stave
off economic and monetary crises. The IMF imposes further conditions
on Turkey to carry out the reforms required and this widens the
gap between the bulk of the poor masses of Anatolia and the middle-
to-upper-middle classes. Yet, it is not quite right to talk of
Turkey as being an homogeneous socio-economic region: Western
Turkey and Eastern Turkey are two different worlds, much more
so than it is for example, mutatis mutandis, the split
between Italy's developed North and underdeveloped South. In particular,
Turkey's South-east is a region neglected by Turkey's economic
and social policies. This is because of the predominately Kurdish
character of the region. It is not true that Turkish Kurdistan
is underdeveloped because of the Turco-Kurdish war in the 1980s
and 1990s. Turkish Kurdistan is underdeveloped and backward because
of the lack of economic (eg, fixed capital investment) and social
(eg, development of welfare programmes) backing by the Turkish
governments since 1923. Needless to say, the Kurdish problem has
not gone away with the capture of Abdulah Ocalan in February 1999.
PKK and Ocalan have simply widened existing European concerns
regarding the Turco-Kurdish conflict, which is taking place in
the very sensitive security perimeter of Europe.
6. The Greek-Turkish dispute over the issues
of Cyprus and the Aegean are part and parcel of Turkey's persistent
policy to revise the 1923 settlements of Lausanne, and the Venizelos-Attaturk
Ankara Convention of friendship and reconciliation of 1930. This
is exemplified by the destruction of the Greek minority in Istanbul
in the 1950s and 1960s, and by Turkey's territorial claims over
Cyprus and the Aegean. Since the 1950s, Turkey has not been a
high-profile status-quo power but a low-profile revisionist power.
It seems that Turkey's "security-insecurity" complex
in Anatolia is projected westwards and at the expense of Greece,
in order to compensate any possible loss of territory, control
or influence in the South-East. In this context, Turkish micro-imperialism
is essentially territorial and old-fashioned.
7. In the light of this analysis, the assumption
that "Turkey is strategically important for the West and
that therefore needs special treatment since, after all, it has
the second-largest army in NATO," is inaccurate and rather
misleading. Thus, quite rightly, NATO's strategic analysts during
the Cold War had thought of the possibility not to protect Turkey's
Eastern borders in case of a Turco-Soviet war, as they were considered
to be "out-of-area." It should also be noted that both
Britain's and Turkey's contribution to the Western cause during
the Cold War remain ambiguous. Britain had unsuccessfully and
unnecessarily tried to challenge the USA's supremacy during the
Suez crisis, and Turkey had also unsuccessfully and unnecessarily
tried to challenge Cyprus's sovereignty in 1963, 1964 and 1974,
causing a major crisis in NATO's Southern flank. Given Britain's
role in fostering the division of the Greek and the Turkish communities
on the island, as well as Turkey's flirtation with the USSR between
1964 and 1974, Britain's and Turkey's actions could and should
not have been considered as positive for the West in its struggle
against Soviet expansion.
8. Unfortunately, the aforementioned assumption
of "Turkey's geo-strategic importance" cultivates illusions
for the Turkish secular elites themselves. They indeed fail to
see that if the USA were to make a decision on a strategic priority
issue choosing between Turkey and the European Union or, for that
matter, Germany, then there is no doubt that the superpower would
have opted in favour of Europe. The best thing that Turkey can
get out of this unbalanced equation is either strategic neutrality
on behalf of the USA or politico-intelligent support for Turkey
on issues in which Turkey is by far the strongest part (eg, the
support of the USA in the capture of Ocalan). This can be seen
by the way in which the USA positioned herself in the negotiations
with Britain and Turkey over Europe's ESDP (European Security
and Defence Policy). For reasons that will be explained below,
the fact of the matter is that Europe, Greece and Cyprus are valued
a lot in the USA's security and foreign-policy considerations.
9. Turkey reads therefore as a "mini-Ottoman
Empire." with real and virtual periods of expansion and contraction,
a corrupt system of power at the centre of which is located the
military, and a society rife with a number of religious, ethnic
and class tensions unparalleled in the Western world. The European
Union is well placed to project stability and democracy in Turkey.
But before any contemplation about giving Turkey the green light
to enter the European Union, a thorough democratisation process
must begin in Turkey in a manner perhaps not very dissimilar to
the way in which Greece, Portugal and Spain achieved their own
transition to democracy in the1970s. It is Turkey itself that
should begin its transition to full democracy, whereas the EU
factor should be seen as a catalyst "stepping in" to
consolidate the newly born democracy. For this to happen, a number
of radical reforms are necessary, and a number of practical gestures
of good will have to take place.
In the same way that the Turkish invasions of
Cyprus in Summer 1974 facilitated the collapse of the disintegrating
Greek junta and the transition to democracy in Greece under the
leadership of Constantine Karamanlis, so the first step towards
Turkey's democratisation must be the withdrawal of its illegally
placed troops in Cyprus. As long as the Turkish troops remain
in Cyprus in defiance of international law and the UN resolutions,
lasting peace in South-eastern Europe cannot be guaranteed. Any
form of hostilities in Cyprus or over the Aegean would have catastrophic
consequences for the coherence of NATO in Southern Europe and
the Balkans, so much so today because of its eastward expansion,
which is also aiming to include Bulgaria and Romania. Both Greece
and Turkey support Bulgaria's and Romania's inclusion in the alliance
and a Greek-Turkish war is likely to destabilise the Aegean, the
Black Sea and the Danube regions. Given the existence of Turkish
minorities in Bulgaria and Greek Thrace, the Hungarian minorities
in Romania and Serbia, as well as the unstable situation in Macedonia,
Albania (where a large Greek minority exists in the South) and
the former Yugoslavia, Greek-Turkish hostilities are likely to
engage the whole region. In addition, Turkey's proximity to the
Middle East and her bad relations with Armenia, Syria and Iran
make an exportation of the conflict there a comprehensive possibility.
Neither the European Union nor NATO wants this to happen unless
a wider strategic plan for redrawing the map of the region as
a whole is envisaged. In this context, Turkey is foolish in playing
the tension card with Greece over Cyprus and the Aegean and contributes
very little to her own security, as well as that of NATO and the
European Union. But both Greece and the West want to protect Turkey's
territorial integrity and enhance her sense of security, not least
because tensions and conflicts within Turkey can easily be exported
to Greece, Europe and the Middle East.
10. Aegean Greece and Eastern Mediterranean
Cyprus are therefore very important for the West as factors of
regional stability. Any closure of the Aegean by the integrated
Greek forces would disrupt sea trade and Flight Information Regions
(FIRs) causing havoc in Europe, the Balkans and the Near East.
In point of fact, Greece can lay a firm grip on the Aegean and
is in a position to block the Black Sea navigation route through
the Turkish Straits, making it strategically useless as merchant
and war ships will be deprived of access to the high seas and
the Suez. In this context, the USA and the European Union, today
as well as in the past, should want peace and not war between
Greece and Turkey. But Turkey continues to play the tension card
and, faithful to her low- profile revisionist strategy, continues
to open bilateral issues disregarding international law, established
treaties and conventions since the 1950s. Understandably enough,
the American and the European responses to Turkey's attitude have
been to encourage rapprochement between the two countries. This
serves Turkey's modernising elite to the extent they see Greece
as a stepping stone towards Europe. This Turkish strategy is not
new. It was first employed by Atatrk himself in the late 1920s
when, by promoting co-operation with Greece, he was aiming at
getting the European powers to sign the revision of the settlements
regulating the Straits, something which Turkey achieved in 1936
with the Convention of Montreux, allowing her to re-militarise
the Dardanelles. But rapprochement serves Greece and Europe, too,
in that it enables them to advance economic and cultural co-operation
with Turkey in general, and with Western Turkey in particular,
the most secular and developed part of Turkey, whose modern economy
was predominately established and run by Greek, Jewish and Armenian
communities before 1923. But this, in turn, may well increase
the regional and class cleavages of the country leading to further
peripheralisation of Eastern Anatolia from an Europeanised Balkan
core.
11. In light of this, the second crucial
and simultaneous action to take place for the democratisation
of Turkey is the launching of a Social Democratic type of reform,
aiming at bridging the gap between regions and classes. The Turkish
modernising elite sees IMF and European handouts as a panacea.
That illusion is further fed by the ill-perceived Greek membership
of the European Economic Community which, it is believed, has
alone stabilised the Greek economy. This is fundamentally wrong.
The consolidation of democracy in Greece and the economic prosperity
of the Greek people in the 1980s and 1990s were the result of
political management of the country by Social Democratic governments,
and not the European aid as such. Turkey is in need of a political
class that understands realities and is committed to undertaking
a thorough process of modernisation and democratisation, also
by way of isolating reactionary anti-European elites. European
structural funds and IMF money alone are not enough, not least
because a neo-liberal management of them along Reaganite/Thatcherite
lines would increase the gap between East-West regions and between
classes, producing further social and political tensions. What
is indeed needed is rational management of resources in view of
diminishing the hiatus between regions and between classes. This
can be achieved only with the emergence and establishment of a
Western European type of Social Democratic party or political
class. And that party or class still does not exist in Turkey.
Yet this is the only game in town if Turkey really wants to solve
her security complex, isolate reactionary military elites and
anti-European economic factions and provide high living standards
for her peoples within Europe.
12. That is why the courageous—in
the Turkish context—reforms undertaken in 2001 are just
a drop of hope in the ocean of pessimism. Broadcasting in Kurdish
is still forbidden by the existing Broadcasting Law. Permission
for education in Kurdish language is virtually forbidden by a
cluster of a Byzantine-type of legislation. Impartial Amnesty
International documents point out that torture is systematic and
widespread and that, in general, no concrete steps have been taken
to improve the human-rights situation of the various minorities.
In particular, MHP resists any concession to Turkey's populous
Kurdish minority. Amnesty International confirms that Article
8 of the Anti-Terror Law, which criminalises peaceful "separatist
propaganda," was used to sentence Dr Fikret Baskaya to 16-months
imprisonment in June 2000, because he wrote an article in a pro-Kurdish
newspaper. Despite the reform of Article 118 of the Constitution,
the army maintains a key position in the National Security Council.
Economic reforms are clumsy and badly planned, whereas corruption
scandals are the order of the day each time auditors and accountants
open privatisation procedures. Turkey, in its bid to win a $16
billion IMF loan, adopted a law reducing scope for corruption
in public procurement. This is definitely a good sign but it contrasts
sharply with the unsoundness of the banking system, which triggered
two financial crises in just over a year. The list of bad news
is endless. The Report of the European Commission has made clear
that Turkey, as every other country wanting to join the club,
has to conform fully to the economic and political criteria.
13. But the best defence is to attack! Turkey
objects to Cyprus's application to join the European Union on
the grounds that the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, namely Articles
I(2) and II(2), forbids Cyprus from joining any international
organisation from which either Greece or Turkey is excluded. This
is a very shallow argument. These articles are not concerned with
membership in regional economic associations. These articles are
nevertheless concerned with union with another state. The purpose
of these articles was to prevent union of Cyprus, or of any part
of it, with Greece or Turkey, as well as to forbid the partition
of the island. Cyprus has therefore the legal right to participate
in any international organisation regardless of whether Turkey,
Greece or Britain is a member. At any rate, Turkey cannot call
on the 1960 settlements when it is convenient, as on other occasions
she has declared these very settlements as wholly invalid. The
crux of the matter is that Cyprus's application to join the European
Union has put Turkey with her back against the wall, because the
European bid conforms with that of the UN resolutions which, in
the main, since 1963 have been disapproving of Turkey's foreign
policy in the island. The choir is joined by the Council of Europe—in
which Turkey is a member—by way of accusing Turkey's procrastination
in dealing with the case of Titina Loizidou, a Greek Cypriot refugee
who won her case against Turkey over her property rights before
the European Court of Human Rights. This case exemplifies the
issue of Cyprus when the island joins the European Union. Given
that more than 85 per cent of the land and properties in northern
Cyprus have Greek-Cypriots as legal owners, the European Union
would be in a predicament if it was to apply quasi- strategic
derogations, unless a settlement is agreed between the two communities
before Cyprus's accession. In any case, any form of settlement
has to include the right of 200,000 refugees to return to their
properties, as they are the sole legal possessors of the title
deeds. It is absurd to argue today that the Turkish-Cypriots feel
insecure, as if the reborn ghosts of Greek nationalists of the
1960s have new plans in store for the extermination of Turks after
the re-unification of the island. Whoever says this is simply
out of touch with the social and economic realities of today's
free Cyprus, a society and an economy that is ahead, together
with Slovenia, of all the other applicant countries queuing to
join the European Union in 2003-04.
14. We do not have access to the minutes
of the trilateral negotiations between the UK, the USA and Turkey
over Europe's use of NATO's assets. We have only clues based on
journalistic reports. There is no official position of Europe's
ESDP on the matter as yet. All we know is that the USA was pretty-much
neutral in the negotiations, playing on the unstable equilibrium
of antagonism between Turkey and the UK over which of the two
will be more influential in Middle Eastern matters. The USA is
in no need to peg Turkey, but the UK is. Similarly, the UK cannot
afford to be neutral in a protracted Greek-Turkish conflict over
the Aegean and/or Cyprus, simply because of the status of its
sovereign bases in Cyprus. The UK would almost certainly, overtly
or not, side with Turkey unless the USA puts pressure on her to
do otherwise. The principle is that no power ever takes part in
any action if previously it has not established an interest in
it. The UK competes now with Turkey for influence in the Near
and Middle East and this is the result of her unwise policies
in the 1950s. Namely, by engaging Turkey in Cyprus, which till
then was a purely Anglo-Hellenic dispute, Britain undermined her
own interests in the region offering strategic advantages to Turkey,
which today she is exploiting in earnest.
15. Conflict in or over Cyprus, Thrace and
the Aegean may not necessarily be triggered off by the Greek-Turkish
antagonism as such. It may well be the result of the evacuation
of one of the British sovereign bases in Cyprus, namely that of
Dekhelia. The right angle from which one should approach the recent
move of Turkey in the small Greek-Cypriot village of Strovilia
(summer 2000) is the context of UK-Turkey relations. The Turkish
forces, by moving the cease-fire line some 300 metres into the
UN-patrolled buffer zone, created a "border" with the
British sovereign base of Dekhelia. The reason laying behind Turkey"s
provocative action is that she wants to enhance her bargaining
power on security and policy matters regarding the island, the
Eastern Mediterranean and the Israel-Syria-Lebanon-Palestine zone
will be enhanced. In this context, the Strovilia action paves
the way for a Turkish occupation of the British base, when Britain
decides to evacuate the territory in the future, thus giving Turkey
strategic control of the entire Cyprus. But if this unlawful event
ever happens, which would almost mean Turkey's fulfilment of her
national strategy regarding Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean,
then the balance of power between Greece and Turkey will be further
destabilised and a war of incalculable consequences may well break
out. But whatever the result of this war, one thing is certain:
most of the ingredients will be there so as to make Britain's
influence in the Middle East further downgraded.
16. We are thus back to "square one."
Turkey today remains rife with enormous social, ethnic, religious
and political contradictions, but not all of them appear in the
surface because of the repressive character of the Turkish polity,
which operates on the basis of the Ottoman experience of external
conspiracy and internal betrayal. In order to boost the coherence
of her fragmented social and political tissues, Turkey employs
an aggressive foreign policy and often resorts to a display of
power and determination towards Greece and Cyprus (eg, the Imia/Kardak
crisis or the killings of Greek Cypriots in Cyprus in 1996). But
these tactics, if at all, only temporarily defuse Turkey's domestic
economic and social problems. In the long run, these tactics work
at the expense of the prosperity of the Turkish people and of
Turkey's own security. We therefore recommend here, first and
foremost, that the Turkish elites and the Western media should
cease to entertain themselves with the misleading notion of "Turkey's
geo-strategic importance," because this assumption undermines
Turkey's security per se and, together, the security of Europe
and the Middle East. In this respect, the paramount stability
factor of political stability is the democratisation of the Turkish
polity, which should begin with radical political and economic
reforms led by a new Social Democratic political class in order
to bridge the geo-economic and class cleavages of the country.
This process of democratisation goes hand in glove with the withdrawal
of the Turkish troops from Cyprus and the drafting of a new Cypriot
Constitution guaranteeing the unfettered independence of the Republic
of Cyprus (NATO membership for Cyprus is also highly recommended).
This should be followed by Turkey's full membership of the European
Union, a membership that would consolidate Turkey's democracy,
along with providing stability, substantial co-operation and friendship
between Greece and Turkey, and thus lasting peace in the Balkans
and the Near East.
Lobby for Cyprus
February 2002
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