Posted on 11/21/2003 3:53:50 PM PST by Destro
Nov 22, 2003 Middle East
Turkey: 'Sow war and reap terror'
By K Gajendra Singh
Sow war and reap terror - A banner in a February peace march in Paris
Many disquieting messages have been sent with the two car bombings in Istanbul on Thursday, just five days after attacks on two synagogues and coinciding with Queen Elizabeth's hosting of United States President George W Bush in London. Turkey's stock market fell immediately, and world markets felt the fallout. The latest attacks, which claimed the lives of at least 25 people, will certainly adversely affect Turkey's economic recovery.
The bombings were against British targets - the Istanbul British consulate and HSBC bank, which is Britain-based. An attack on British interests, and even its timing, had been generally predicted in London and Washington following attacks against the interests of Israel, Australia and other US allies, including Jordan, Turkey, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Only the locale was in question. It turned out to be Turkey's metropolitan and beautiful city of Istanbul, a capital of Romans and Byzantines for more than a millennium and of the Ottomans from 1453 until the new republic's capital was established in Ankara in 1923.
Apart from sending a very clear message to Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the two who have been at the forefront of the "war on terrorism", to which they added an attack on Iraq, without any justifiable reason, countries like Spain, Italy, Poland etc will think twice in siding further with them. India and Pakistan have said no to a request for troops, and Japan is rethinking its decision to send non-combat troops.
Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership, with its Islamic roots, after first refusing to let the US use its territory to open a second front against Iraq in March, will also be in a quandary. The Islamic jihad, like any other multinational, is now truly a globalized entity, and it has no love for such soft Islamic parties that rule in Turkey or elsewhere.
Turkey has a well-trained armed force of nearly a million, with experience of fighting a Marxist Kurdish insurgency in southeast of the country in which over 35,000 people, including 5,000 soldiers, have lost their lives. Turkey also feels that north Iraq was stolen by the British for its oil reserves after World War I, when Kemal Ataturk molded a secular republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire.
The armed forces are self-appointed guardians of Ataturk's secular legacy and have been at odds with the ruling AKP since the latter's massive electoral victory in last November's elections, which made it the first-ever Islamic party to come to power in Turkey since 1923. If even Turkey, which is close to a Western democratic secular model, can be destabilized, then the region will become like many volcanos gone wild.
The dangers to European security inherent in Turkey joining the Europe Union at any time soon - when Islamic bombers can strike with such ease - are obvious. This will provide the EU leadership justification for its policy of saying "not yet". In any case, while praising Turkey for its efforts in meeting its criteria of reforms to begin talks for entry, the EU has been humming and hawing about how the reforms will be implemented on the ground. So Turkey becoming a full member of the EU, never a possibility in my opinion, can now be put on the back burner. This will only disappoint and dishearten secular forces in Turkey and encourage and embolden Islamist elements.
However, taking advantage of the EU criteria, the AKP has succeeded in diminishing the military's dominant role in Turkish politics, which it had exercised though the all powerful National Security Council (NSC), whose recommendations had to be implemented by the government. The armed forces forced the first-ever Islamist prime minister, Nacmettin Erbakan, heading a coalition government, to resign in 1997.
The Turkish masses have in the past had the highest regard for the military, and have been generally happy that it has intervened to clean up the messes created by politicians in takeovers in 1960, 1971 and 1980. But eager to join the EU, which many feel will bring prosperity, people have been quite satisfied at the reduction in the military's role in politics.
Now, though, in the changed situation of terror and insecurity, it would be easy to win public approval for the NSC to be revived. President Ahmet Sezer, a former head of the Constitutional Court, another bastion of Turkey's secular establishment, was not happy to have signed the decree that emasculated the NSC and the Turkish armed forces. The AKP has a two-thirds majority in parliament, but its leadership, with a temperamental prime minister in Tayep Erdogan - his experience is limited to a stint as mayor of Istanbul - will have serious difficulties in tackling the new situation.
The missing Balkan period
Remember the two women premiers of Turkey and Pakistan in the mid-1990s, Tansu Ciller and Benazir Bhutto respectively, both allies of the US who visited Bosnia with US encouragement to show solidarity with the massacred and suppressed Muslims. They made the day of photographers by trying to outdo each other for photo opportunities.
During the current debate, the Balkan chapter of the 1990s and the US and European role in the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent events are not scrutinized closely. The origins of al-Qaeda and other terror groups during the Afghan war of 1979-1992, their fight against the Soviet army and the role of the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others is well documented, including Osama bin Laden's drive to recruit Muslim volunteers world-wide. US officials estimate that tens of thousands of foreign fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare tactics in Afghan camps that the US Central Intelligence Agency helped set up between 1985-92.
After the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and the Najibullah communist regime collapsed in 1992, the Afghan mujahideen became irrelevant to the US. But the mujahideen had acquired a taste for fighting, and now they had no cause. But soon a new cause arose.
During 1992-95, the Pentagon helped with the movement of thousands of mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia, even some Turks, into Europe to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.
"It was very important in the rise of mujahideen forces and in the emergence of current cross-border Islamic terrorist groups who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadi mission. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the caves of Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday's men to fighting alongside the West's favored side in the clash of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahideen, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalized it."
This is a quotation from a Dutch government report after investigations, prepared by Professor C Wiebes of Amsterdam University, into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, entitled "Intelligence and the War in Bosnia", published in April 2002.
It details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East and their efforts to assist Bosnia's Muslims. By 1993, a vast amount of weapons were being smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organized by "clandestine agencies" of the US, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included the Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia - airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the US was "very closely involved".
The Pentagon's alliance with Islamic elements permitted mujahideen fighters to be "flown in" as shock troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times in October 2001, from 1992 as many as 4,000 mujahideen from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe reached Bosnia to fight with the Muslims. Richard Holbrooke, America's former chief Balkans peace negotiator, said as much. The Bosnian Muslims "wouldn't have survived" without the imported mujahideen, which was a "pact with the devil" from which Bosnia would take long to recover. If the US made a pact with the devil, then the Muslim mujahideen made a pact with Satan. They temporized with the Christian West to defeat the ungodly Russian communists, now they are after the US-led Crusaders.
During the mid-1990s the Turkish media were full of reports of Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Serbia. One Turkish journalist who went there was even said to have fired at the Serbs. Many even applauded the act. It was then easy for Turkish cadres to mingle, learn and establish relationships with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other international cadres. Many in the Turkish establishment are strong believers in Sunni Islam. From time to time they have massacred Turkey's Alevis - close to the Shi'ites in belief - most of whom are perhaps the real Turkomens from Central Asia.
The Balkans were part of the Ottoman empire for centuries, as a result of which many Slavs and others converted to Islam. Many Turkish tribes also migrated to the Balkan vilayats (provinces) as the ruling elite. As the Ottoman empire shrank, millions of Muslims from the Balkans migrated to Turkey, and now at least 5 million Turkish citizens have origins in the Balkans or have relatives there, especially Bosnia, and they exercise influence on the Turkish government. Later, the Ottomans took wives from Bosnia. So contact between Turks and Bosnians and Kosovars during the 1990s was normal and natural, but it may have left a legacy, perhaps deadly, yet to be investigated and untangled.
But by the end of the 1990s, State Department officials (as now vis-a-vis the Pentagon), were increasingly worried about the consequences of this devil's pact sponsored by the Pentagon. Under the terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, the foreign mujahideen units were required to disband and leave the Balkans. Yet in 2000, the State Department raised concerns about the "hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists" who became Bosnian citizens after fighting against the Serbs, and who will remain a potential terror threat to Europe and the United States.
US officials claimed that "one of bin Laden's top lieutenants had sent operatives to Bosnia", and that during the 1990s Bosnia had served as a "staging area and safe haven" for al-Qaeda and others. The Bill Clinton administration learned that it was one thing to permit the movement of Islamic groups across territories; it was quite another to rein them back in again.
And in spite of the official US stand against jihadis, it permitted the growth and movement of mujahideen cadres in Europe during the 1990s. In the runup to Clinton and Blair's Kosovo war of 1999, the US backed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against Serbia. The Jerusalem Post reported in 1998 that KLA members, like the Bosnian Muslims earlier, were "provided with financial and military support from Islamic countries", and had been "bolstered by hundreds of Iranian fighters or mujahideen ... [some of whom] were trained in Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan". So the US's pact with the devil continued.
The aspect of the mujahideen's encouragement by the US and its growth in Balkan Europe has been largely overlooked, and the Bosnia connection remains largely unexplored. In Jason Burke's excellent Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, Bosnia is mentioned only in passing. Kimberley McCloud and Adam Dolnik of the Monterey Institute of International Studies have written some incisive commentary calling for rational thinking when assessing al-Qaeda's origins and threat - but little on the Bosnian link.
A cool analysis of today's disparate Islamic terror groups, created in Afghanistan and emboldened by the Bosnian experience, would do much to shed some light on precisely the dangers of such intervention. Car bombers in Istanbul on November 15 and 20 are perhaps the results.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Email Gajendrak@hotmail.com
I agree. Excellent, marron. I don't even understand enough about this to ask questions. Your well-written post is very informative. Thank you.
By the way, ever raise money for Chechen causes, Turk?
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