Sept. 11 Fallout Has Serious Implications for Turkey’s Fragile Economy, Regional Role

By Jon Gorvett

While most Turks were as shocked by the events of Sept. 11 as the inhabitants of any other country, the fallout from across the Atlantic had a particular effect here, with dark forecasts for the future being made.

Of major concern was the possible effect on Turkey’s fragile economy. After major economic crises in November 2000 and this past February, unemployment and bankruptcies have been soaring, while economic output has been shrinking. An IMF/World Bank-backed rescue package has been implemented, with widespread cutbacks in government funding and pressure to speed up privatization and economic restructuring.

All of which would have been hard enough under any normal circumstances, but, after Sept. 11, began to look almost impossible. Planned privatizations—such as that of the national carrier, Turkish Airlines—have been postponed, while tourism sector gurus are predicting a disaster for an industry that all had been relying on to boost the nation’s liquidity.

Trying to put a different spin on these events, however, and attempting to play Turkey’s strategic significance as a financial card, State Minister Kemal Dervis, the man appointed by the government to manage the economic restructuring, began a round of meetings in October with IMF and World Bank officials, followed by a road show through European capitals. The idea was that Turkey now should be given more aid than ever before, as it forms a bulwark of secular values against rising Islamist militancy.

Turkey could provide a large number of tanks, as well. In fact, on the military front, the fallout from Sept. 11 so far has been quite positive for the generals in Ankara. It seems likely that U.S. congressional restrictions on Turkey’s weapons buying—the result of pressure from Greek, Armenian and human rights lobbies—will be dropped. Local media reported in mid-October that all it would take would be “a slight nod” from President Bush for the guns to start flowing.

Too, with “terrorism” apparently now a concept that needs no more definition than any “anti-state group”—and anti-any state—many Turkish politicians and columnists began to use the attacks on the U.S. to lambaste the Europeans for “sheltering terrorism” over the years. “Good Morning Europe!” screamed the headline in Hurriyet, a rightist popular daily, when EU countries moved to curtail the activities of certain Islamist, leftist and Kurdish groups based within the Union. Another gift for the generals, courtesy of Osama bin Laden.

Turkey has long been against any campaign to topple Saddam Hussain.

Discussion then focused on a proposal reported in the U.S. media for an Islamic peacekeeping force to be sent to Afghanistan once the Taliban had been removed. This received enthusiastic coverage, despite the fact that it was nobody’s official position and, indeed, despite the fact that after weeks of bombing, the Taliban did not appear to be going. The appeal of the suggestion, however, was that this force would be led by Turkey.

Foreign Minister Ismail Cem reacted more coolly to the idea. Naturally, he said, Turkey would meet any international obligations the world community might wish to place on its shoulders, but Turkish troops would not be going to Kabul unless there was already a “safe environment” and a water-tight U.N. resolution behind the plan.

The most schizophrenic reactions to all this, however, came from the far-right, which is represented by the National Action Party (MHP), the second largest member of Turkey’s three-party coalition government. The pro-MHP press long has had a hankering for Turkey’s Central Asian origins. Its symbol, the grey wolf, it based on the legendary animal that first led the Turks out of the Asian steppes to Anatolia centuries ago. The concept that the Turkic peoples of the region—who are scattered from Azerbaijan to Xinjiang in Western China—should somehow be united under Turkish leadership is known as Turanism, and has a strong base of support among the MHP. Thus the idea of a Turkish-led force in Central Asia was something of a turn-on for the Nationalists.

The MHP is also at times quite anti-Western, however. This is in part the result of a grass roots feeling among Turks left, right and center that, while Turkey must align itself with the West in order to modernize, the West is still, at heart, the enemy. Leading such a force in Afghanistan might also be seen, then, as the West manipulating Turkey to act as a cop over its fellow Central Asians.

While anti-Western sentiment tends to focus on Europe rather than the U.S., when Western warplanes begin bombing eastern, Muslim countries, the popular reaction in Turkey is generally to identify with the people being bombed.

Many Turks therefore have great sympathy with the Iraqis, who have suffered years of U.S. and British bombing, in addition to a U.N. embargo. This feeling exists despite the fact that in the 1991 Gulf war Turkey was on the side of the allies—and despite the fact that Ankara still allows U.S. and British warplanes to launch its missions from a base in Turkey.

Ankara’s Kurdish Strategy

It also exists despite the fact that, as part of Ankara’s anti-Kurdish separatist strategy, Turkish troops themselves regularly cross over the border into Iraq and conduct their own bombing raids and artillery barrages against the local inhabitants. Indeed, this strategy was behind the deep concern in Ankara during late September and early October that the U.S. might widen the parameters of its “Enduring Freedom” and decide to topple Saddam Hussain.

Turkey has long been against any such campaign for fear that it would lead to northern Iraq—which has a largely Kurdish population and which has more or less run its own affairs since the end of the Gulf war—breaking away from Baghdad’s control and declaring itself an independent Kurdish state. This might make it difficult for Turkey to resist demands from its own Kurdish population, concentrated traditionally near the Iraqi border, for greater autonomy—if not outright secession.

Therefore British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was greeted with a barrage of Turkish diplomatic and political outcries when he arrived in Ankara mid-October. Straw was quick, though, to reassure Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit that there was no plan to extend the war to Iraq and that both the U.S. and Britain were now moving back to the idea of smart sanctions to deal with Saddam Hussain.

This left many here with the feeling that, despite all the sound and fury going on over Afghanistan and the new new world order, Ankara’s role in all this might really signify nothing much at all.

It seems unlikely, however, that the events now unfolding in Central Asia will not have a real impact on Turkey in the future. But all bets are off on just what that impact might be.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.