Pressure on Ankara to respond to PKK attack may hurt EU, US ties

Analysts say the NATO member must be careful about escalating tension in the volatile region

Military officers are seen praying yesterday at the funeral ceremony in Istanbul for two of the Turkish soldiers killed in clashes with Kurdish separatist PKK rebels in southeast Turkey on October 3.

By Ibon Villelabeitia - Reuters

ANKARA – Turkey faces increasing pressure at home after Friday’s deadly ambush to launch a major offensive against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq that would hurt its ties with Washington and the European Union, analysts say.

Tapping into widespread indignation and nationalism sparked by the attack that killed at least 15 Turkish soldiers, newspaper Vatan’s front-page headline said, “Enough is enough!” – along with photos of the dead soldiers.

Turkish television stations yesterday broadcast live the soldiers’ funerals, with tens of thousands of mourners across the country waving Turkish flags.

In the worst single attack on the military in a year, rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on Friday raided a military outpost in a region in southeast Turkey bordering Iraq. Twenty soldiers were wounded and two more are still missing.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the powerful military have vowed to step up operations to crush the PKK, which has been weakened by Turkish warplane strikes in their bases in northern Iraq.

But analysts said the attack puts the government in a difficult position as it faces calls to strike back at the PKK but must be careful not to alienate its allies with any large-scale response.

NATO member Turkey has attacked PKK bases in northern Iraq several times in the past 12 months but has confined itself to shelling and air strikes since a brief land offensive in February, which Ankara cut short under US pressure.

Washington and the EU, which Ankara hopes to join, are concerned that prolonged Turkish military operations inside Iraq could further destabilize Iraq and the wider region.

Hugh Pope, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the attack appeared timed to “hijack Turkish politics” as the country tries to put behind it a power struggle between the secularist establishment and the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP)and focus instead on pushing ahead with EU reforms.

“The PKK thrives on polarization,” said Pope, who has written several books on Turkey. “The PKK is trying to tempt the military into carrying out a major incursion into northern Iraq, which would put pressure on US-Turkey relations and bring it criticism from the European Union,” he said.

“EU reforms to grant more rights to Kurds make the PKK irrelevant. The government must be careful and not fall into this knee-jerk and nationalistic reaction from newspapers.”

Analysts said the attack was similar to one in October last year, when PKK rebels killed 13 soldiers. That attack was seen as the catalyst for the February offensive, which strained ties between Ankara and Baghdad and rattled Turkish markets.Parliament next week is scheduled to approve a new mandate to launch military operations against the PKK in Iraq as needed.

The current mandate expires on October 17.

“The PKK is trying to make a propaganda point, ” said Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based security analyst who believes air strikes have drastically reduced the military capability of the PKK from its heyday in the 1990s. “They want to prove to the state and to their supporters that they have not been destroyed,” Jenkins said.

Although the PKK no longer poses a serious security threat to Turkey, analysts said military operations will not suffice to crush the rebels unless combined with a non-military fight to overcome political and cultural problems that have fostered insurgency in the impoverished southeast.

Erdogan has announced plans to invest up to $12 billion in southeast Turkey and to grant cultural rights to Kurds, including allowing Kurdish-language TV, to drain support for the PKK but similar promises in the past have not been fulfilled.

The AKP hopes to wrest control of key cities in the southeast in municipal elections next March, luring war-weary Kurdish voters away from a pro-Kurdish political party. But now the AKP might want to appear tough in the eyes of an increasingly nationalistic and anti-US electorate.

“A new and more comprehensive policy must be developed. Erdogan and (Chief of General Staff Ilker) Basbug should be brave enough to take this step,” wrote Murat Yetkin in the liberal Radikal newspaper. “If this fire is not extinguished in Ankara, it will jump to other corners in Anatolia and burn there.”

ANKARA (AP) – Turkish warplanes have bombed Kurdish rebel bases in northern Iraq, the military said yesterday, two days after rebels killed 15 soldiers in an attack staged partly from Iraqi soil. The planes bombed Saturday in Iraq’s Avasin Basyan region and returned safely to their bases, the military said.

The military’s deputy chief, meanwhile, accused leaders in northern Iraq of tolerating the rebels. “We don’t receive any kind of support from the local administration in the northern part of Iraq,” Turkey’s General Hasan Igsiz said yesterday. “Our expectation from them is to accept that the terrorist organization is a terrorist organization and eliminate the support provided to it.”