TURKEY THREATENS REGIONAL STABILITY WITH WAR Update

 

TURKEY VOTES TO SEND TROOPS TO NORHTERN IRAQ 
By Tim Butcher, Middle East Correspondent

Turkey's parliament today voted overwhelmingly in favour of empowering the armed forces to launch a cross-border assault against Kurdish insurgents based in northern Iraq.

Telegraph Talk: Oil prices surge as Turkey squares up to Iraq

Despite an appeal for calm by the Baghdad government, the Ankara parliament voted 507-19 in support of the government's motion.

 

 

The ruling party and major opposition groups backed the motion

Turkish leaders have stressed that an offensive against the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, will not immediately follow the authorisation.

But the vote will be seen as an escalation of a growing threat to regional stability.

With oil prices hovering close to the record level of $90 a barrel as markets factored in the chance of renewed fighting, the Nato secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, telephoned the Turkish president to urge restraint.

Turkish television carried live coverage of parliament as it debated the latest motion calling for the military attack on the gunmen of the PKK, a revolutionary group fighting for a homeland in Turkey.

Parliamentarians from the ruling Justice and Development Party led by the prime minister Tayyip Erdogan gave speeches calling for decisive military action.

Their sentiments were echoed by opposition MPs who fell in behind the government, angered by recent PKK attacks on Turkish troops in the south east of the country.

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In one attack a fortnight ago 15 soldiers were killed.

"Turkey must eliminate this threat to its military, economic and diplomatic interests," opposition lawmaker Sukru Elekdag told parliament, pledging his party's support for the motion.

While the rhetoric was powerful the reality is the Turkish military has staged more than a dozen cross-border incursions since 1990 against the PKK but the rugged mountain terrain of north Iraq means none of them have been decisive.

The PKK has been able to avoid crippling losses and simply melt away into the hills. Unfortunately, civilians have not got off so lightly and there have been reports of hundreds of villages destroyed with largescale loss of life.

Turkey has been here before, with the parliament twice passing a motion authorising force in 2003 but in the end Turkey held back from attacking, in part because it wanted to see how post-Saddam Hussein Iraq would deal with the PKK issue.

Under the US-led occupation of Iraq, the north-eastern Kurdish section of the country has enjoyed substantial autonomy but while the official Iraqi Kurdish groups publicly condemn the PKK, Turkey is not happy they are actually dealing with their threat.

This has threatened to sour relations between Turkey and post-Hussein Iraq although Jalal Talabani, the current Iraqi president who happens to be an ethnic Kurd, on Wednesday distanced his people from the PKK.

"We consider the activities of the PKK against the interests of the Kurdish people and against the interests of Turkey," he said during an official visit to Paris.

"We have asked the PKK to stop fighting and end military activity."

Similar sentiments were expressed by Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, during a telephone call to Mr Erdogan.

Mr de Hoop Scheffer and Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations secretary general, also joined the chorus calling for a diplomatic, not military, solution to the current crisis.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, struck a different tone during an official visit to Ankara, the capital of Turkey, when he said Turkey had the right to act decisively against what he called the "terrorism" of the PKK.

Ankara blames the PKK, considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since the group launched its armed struggle for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984.