Turkey Uses U.S. Arms to Attack Kurds
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Turkey Uses U.S. Arms to Attack Kurds by Jennifer Washburn St. Louis Post-Dispatch On July 20, Kurdish protesters participated in a hunger strike for 13 hot summer days on Capital Hill. Their aim was to draw attention to Turkey's intimate relationship with the US, which for over a decade has supplied Turkey with the weapons it uses to attack and forcibly evacuate Kurdish villages. One hunger striker, Dara Azadi, explains: "It is very important that we have a hunger strike here in America. The US is the most closely linked to the Turkish government. Most US military equipment...is used by the Turkish military to destroy villages. This is nothing new, the US government knows this and yet they continue to supply weapons." In June, the US State Department issued a report to Congress which acknowledges for the first time that Turkey regularly uses US weapons in operations where gross human rights violations occur. In Southeastern Turkey in particular, the report noted, Turkey employs Lockheed-Martin F-16 fighter planes, Textron-Bell Cobra and Super Cobra attack helicopters, United Technologies/Sikorsky Black Hawk troop transports, and various US tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery systems to attack Kurdish villages suspected of supporting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a militant Kurdish opposition group. As a consequence, the Turkish government has depopulated 2,000 Kurdish villages, and displaced over two million Kurds. Innocent villagers are caught in a deadly predicament: If they refuse to join the government- backed local militia (which is fighting their own people) they are branded as "PKK terrorists" and attacked; but if they express support for the government, they face potential attack from the PKK. Unfortunately, the Administration ignores the obvious implications of its own State Department report, and allows the conflict to spread into Northern Iraq. At dawn on July 5, some 3,000 Turkish troops invaded Northern Iraq in an operation targeting the military bases of the PKK. Careful to avoid any criticism of the attack, the Administration urged only that the operation remain limited in scope and protect civilians. Earlier, on March 20, when Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller launched a six-week-long invasion into Northern Iraq to rout out the PKK, the Administration was even more obliging. Prior to the invasion, according to Whitehouse spokesperson Michael McCurry, President Clinton spoke with Ciller to express his "understanding for Turkey's need to deal decisively" with the rebel PKK. For Turkey, advance US approval was essential: Turkish troops could not have marched into Northern Iraq if the US and other allied powers in the region had not suspended the UN-monitored "no fly zone" that has safeguarded Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein since the close of the Gulf War. Making a brutal mockery of the UN mission to create a Kurdish "safe haven" in the area, the US effectively authorized 35,000 foreign troops to invade. Since the Turkish crackdown on the PKK began in 1984, the US has contributed to the conflict by arming Turkey to the hilt--exporting more than $6.3 billion worth of weapons to an undemocratic, military-led government engaged in a ruthless campaign of terror against its Kurdish population. From 1987-91, Turkey bought 76% of its weapons from the US. From 1991-93, when the counterinsurgency war intensified and human rights abuses worsened, that number had increased to 80%. Though the defense industry lobby will argue that US weapons sales are needed to support US jobs, many of Turkey's weapons are highly subsidized by the American taxpayer through various military grants and "surplus" weapons programs. Turkey is hardly an isolated case. For over a decade, the US has provided $6 billion per year to US arms clients--in the form of government loans, grants and cash payments--for use in purchasing US weapons. In other words, as William Hartung of the World Policy Institute explains, "any fair accounting of the economic impacts of weapons transfers must begin by acknowledging that...approximately one-third of all arms exports are paid for by US taxpayers." Although the State Department has rarely restricted the flow of US weapons to Turkey, a proposal last June to sell Ankara 493 CBU-87 cluster bombs provoked considerable debate within various Executive Branch offices. The CBU-87, built by Alliant Techsystems Inc., can decimate an area the size of a football field with its 202 small bomblets, each of which explodes into 300 fragments. In February, rather than face an open rebuff based on its human rights practices, Turkey rescinded its request for the highly lethal bombs. Last year, Congress voted to withhold 10% of Turkey's $364.5 million FY95 military aid package, pending a State Department's report on human rights abuses and the role of US weapons. But Turkey, finding these conditions unacceptable, said it no longer wanted the additional 10% in military funds. Ankara can afford these charades only because of its considerable trust in the US-Turkey military relationship. With Congress ready to approve $320 million in military assistance for FY1996, that relationship appears as strong as ever. By contrast, several European countries, including Germany, have made a principled decision to freeze all military aid to Turkey. Turkey is desperate to enter into a customs union with Europe, which is up for ratification by European governments in October, and Germany's vote is crucial. The time is ripe for the US to join Germany in cutting off all weapons assistance. This would give the international community real "leverage" to pressure the Ciller government to abandon its ethnic war against the Kurds, and to pursue instead a political solution. In a recent poll by the daily Milliyet, 86% of the Turks questioned favored a political solution. Turkey's Kurds have long been denied basic political rights, freedom of speech and even the right to use their own language. Until ethnic discrimination, extrajudicial execution, torture, and gross violations of free speech (under Article 8 of Turkey's "Anti-Terror Law") cease to occur, the conflict can never end. For too long, the US has argued that arms exports to Turkey are needed "to preserve the strategic relationship" with one of the regions leading military powers, as one Administration official recently put it. But at a time when ethnic violence is on the rise, posing a major threat to global peace, US arms shipments to Turkey send exactly the wrong message to countries embroiled in ethnic and territorial conflicts throughout the world. --Jennifer Washburn is a research associate at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York
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E-mail: akin@kurdish.org
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