U.S. lobbies Turkey for restraint

ISTANBUL, Turkey — U.S. officials began an intense lobbying effort over the weekend to defuse Turkish threats to launch a cross-border military attack on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and to limit access to critical air and land routes that have become a lifeline for U.S. troops in Iraq.

But even as the U.S. official appealed for restraint, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking at a political rally in Istanbul on Saturday, urged the parliament to vote unanimously next week to "declare a mobilization" against Kurdish rebels and their "terrorist organization," the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Fears of a new frontier of instability in the troubled Middle East sent oil prices soaring Friday to a record high of $84 a barrel. U.S. military officials predicted disastrous consequences if Turkey carries out a threat to strike northern Iraq and warned of serious repercussions for the safety of American troops if Turkey reduces the supply lines it now permits.

The confluence of two seemingly unrelated events could not have come at a worse time. The bodies of 13 Turkish soldiers killed last weekend in the most deadly attack by Kurdish separatists in more than a decade had barely been buried in towns across Turkey amid a flurry of emotional media coverage when the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington approved a resolution labeling as genocide the mass killings of Armenians during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., whose district includes many influential Armenian Americans, has indicated she will press for a full House vote, Reuters has reported, and similar action in the Senate remains uncertain.

Turkey does not deny the deaths but argues that they occurred as part of a war in which Turks were also killed.

"This is not only about a resolution," said Egemen Bagis, a member of the Turkish parliament and a foreign-policy adviser to Erdogan. "We're fed up with the PKK — it is a clear and present danger for us. This insult over the genocide claims is the last straw."

Domestic politics in both countries — the Armenian lobby that pushed for the genocide resolution in the U.S. Congress and growing pressure on the Turkish president to stop Kurdish rebel attacks — collided to create an international crisis.

"It's a difficult time for the relationship," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters Saturday during her trip to Russia, noting that senior State Department officials had traveled to Turkey to reassure the Turks "that we really value this relationship."

A recent poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a trans-Atlantic public-policy organization, found that Turkish attitudes toward the United States were becoming increasingly hostile. Using its 100-degree thermometer scale, the fund found that Turkish "warmth" toward the United States had plunged from 28 degrees in 2004 to 11 degrees in 2007.

"Each time we have a soldier killed, many people look at Washington and they believe that Americans are responsible for this because they prevent us from stopping the infiltration into Turkey," said Onur Oymen, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People's Party.

Erdogan is feeling increased heat from his military, which is suspicious of his Islamic roots and acquiescence to Washington in taking no action against Kurdish rebels in Iraq. His public is angry over the genocide vote, frustrated with a European Union that is unwilling to admit Turkey to its club, and outraged that the U.S. has turned its back on what Turks consider their own fight against terrorism, a 23-year-long war with the Kurdish separatists.

A major operation by Turkey "would start a war with the Iraqi Kurds," warned Henri Barkey, a former State Department official who now heads the International Relations Department at Lehigh University. "Northern Iraq is the only place that the U.S. has managed to achieve a modicum of stability and [the U.S.] is afraid that a major operation would unleash violence in the north."

Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and undersecretary of state for political affairs during President Bush's first term, said there were three reasons the United States has been reluctant to take action in northern Iraq against the PKK: U.S. troops are already fully engaged, and the north is generally stable.

Plus, he said, "there's a lot of sympathy in some parts of our government for the Kurds and some residual disappointment for the Turkish government decision on March 1, 2003" to forbid the United States to launch an assault in Iraq through Turkey.

Human-rights groups have long criticized Turkey for the brutal treatment of its Kurdish minority and its efforts to suppress the Kurdish culture and language within Turkish borders.

Even though the U.S. government was the first foreign country to declare the PKK a terrorist organization, it appeared to many Turkish officials that the United States was setting a double standard in not allowing them to attack the rebels to protect their soldiers and citizens.

After the past two weeks' spate of PKK attacks, which killed a total of 30 soldiers, police officers and civilians, Turkish authorities arrested suspected rebels who were carrying U.S. military-issue 9-mm Glock semiautomatic pistols. U.S. officials said at the time that the weapons had been stolen.

Bagis' response: "The good news, we have found your stolen weapons; the bad news, they're killing us."

He added, "And while all this is going on, all of a sudden this resolution comes along with this ally you consider as your most important strategic partner in the world, your strong NATO ally — insulting you with something that is claimed to have happened back in 1915."

Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Scholars view it as the first genocide of the 20th century, but Turkey says the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

It is a crime in Turkey to portray the killings as "genocide," and Ankara recalled its ambassador to Washington after Wednesday's vote to express its anger over the House panel's action.

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 during a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a Muslim ally of Ankara, and maintains a virtual blockade that hurts Armenia's economy.

Background on the Armenian deaths was provided by The Associated Press.