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Political dance of Turkish troops' release |
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Written by BBC News
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Monday, 05 November 2007 |
In an obviously pre-arranged scenario, the eight men were marched down from the remote border mountains where they had been held by the PKK, to a meeting point where a reception delegation was waiting for them.
There, they were formally signed over into the care of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the administration that runs the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan under a federal arrangement with Baghdad.
The KRG team was carefully balanced between the two main parties that dominate Iraqi Kurdish politics, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani, who is president of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by Jalal Talabani, who is president of Iraq.
That was a signal that both parties agreed to share either the blame or the credit for acting as midwives to the release.
Also present at the initial handover in the mountains were three Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament who had crossed the border to try to help bring about the release of the soldiers.
The three, who are among the 20 MPs of the Democratic Society Party, are now being accused by some senior government figures in Ankara of complicity with the PKK.
Carefully choreographed
From the mountains, the freed soldiers were taken in a convoy of KRG vehicles to the regional capital, Erbil.
Turkey has troops near the border for a possible ground invasion
There, they were handed into the custody of an Iraqi government delegation headed by Defence Minister Abdul Qader al-Obeidi.
Also present was the Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus.
Both men then joined the liberated Turks on a US military aircraft that flew them, not home to Turkey, but to a Turkish-controlled airstrip at Bamarni, inside northern Iraq - one of several little-publicised bases the Turks have maintained there since the 1990s.
At Bamarni, the soldiers were finally signed over to the Turkish military and put on a Turkish military flight home, as Ankara had insisted.
According to several Kurdish and Iraqi accounts, their release had been agreed in principle by the PKK many days before, and had been heralded by many optimistic statements from officials in the know.
But the modalities clearly took some arranging. The men could simply have been set loose near one of the Turkish bases, or sent on foot across the border.
The way it eventually happened was much more politically choreographed.
Iraqi involvement
From the outset, Ankara had refused to talk directly to the Iraqi Kurds of the KRG on the issue.
It insisted on the Iraqi government in Baghdad as its interlocutor although the area is beyond the writ of the central administration and firmly in the hands of the Kurds.
So the Turkish soldiers were handed over by an official Iraqi government delegation, flown in on an MNF plane by Gen Petraeus.
Although the KRG had clearly done the legwork in persuading the PKK to give the soldiers up and acted as the first link in the chain, both Baghdad and the Americans were demonstrating to the Turks that they could deliver, as they were under strong pressure to do.
Since its overriding concern was to try to avert the threatened Turkish incursion - which it fears would be directed as much against itself as against the PKK - the KRG was happy to let the central Iraqi government preside over the handover, despite its negligible involvement in the release.
That casts the crisis as one between Turkey and Iraq, not Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds. An invasion could thus be portrayed as a threat to Iraq's stability, not just the KRG.
There are times when it suits the independent-minded Iraqi Kurds to cling to the Baghdad government. This was one of them. Whether it will prove a lasting trend remains to be seen.
The timing of the release was probably no coincidence. It gave US President George W Bush something new and positive to point to when he met an angry Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Washington the following day. |
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