TURKEY: A plan to settle refugees in northern Iraq could provide Turkey with a cover to further its strategic interests in the region, writes Nicholas Birch in Ankara
With a US-led assault on Iraq looming, Turkey's government has released details of a controversial plan to deal with a possible flood of refugees over the border separating Turkey from Iraq.
Ankara hopes above all to avoid a repeat of 1991, when the unexpected arrival of 500,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees at Turkey's border almost sparked a humanitarian disaster.
Published late in November in the Turkish daily Sabah, the plan describes how 275,000 refugees will be settled in 18 camps, built and supervised by the Turkish military in co-ordination with a dozen government agencies.
What makes the plan controversial, though, is its proposal that 12 of the 18 camps should be built within northern Iraq, on territory controlled since the Gulf war by the unofficial Kurdish government there. According to the plan, "foreigners approaching our borders will be stopped at control points and settled in primary camps" within Iraq. With an expected capacity of 80,000, the six camps within Turkey will only be brought into use, the plan says, when those in Iraq are full.
"We are preparing facilities for between 8,000 and 10,000 people in this province alone," says Mr Huseyin Baskaya, governor of one of the Turkish regions bordering Iraq, Sirnak. "But personally I do not expect anyone to come here. It is my belief, and my government's, that these people should be kept on their land."
"Preventing people from crossing the border to escape persecution would be in contravention of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights," says one official at Human Rights Watch, a Washington-based NGO which has criticised Turkey's management of earlier Iraqi refugee crises.
More seriously, it could also limit the scope of international humanitarian aid. "A refugee is someone who has fled to another country to avoid persecution," explains an official at the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ankara. "In such cases the UNHCR has an automatic mandate to intervene.
"Technically speaking, individuals held in camps in their own country are 'internally-displaced'," the official adds. "We have no mandate for them, and require either a request from the country hosting them, or a decision to intervene from the UN Security Council."
Critics also fear that the refugee plan could provide Ankara with a cover to further its strategic interests in the region.
"If the only aim of the invasion is to protect refugees, fine," says Mr Tahir Elci, a human rights lawyer based in Diyarbakir, in Turkey's mainly Kurdish south-east. "But given the conflict of interests between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds, I think that is unlikely."
Never friendly, relations between Turkey and the Kurdish authorities running northern Iraq since the Gulf war have deteriorated as the build-up to a strike on Saddam Hussein continues. Adamant that the Kurds' de facto autonomy is encouraging separatist tendencies among its own Kurdish population, Ankara vehemently opposes Iraqi Kurdish proposals for a federal Iraq.
In September, Turkey's then-prime minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, warned Kurdish leaders not to use regional instability to transform their autonomy into independence. "For us, this would be a cause for war," he said.
The newspaper Brayati, organ of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) which controls the western half of northern Iraq, responded that Kurds were "ready to make this land \ graveyard of Turkish troops".
The vast majority of Turks are opposed to war in Iraq, a fact most analysts see as the reason behind Turkey's continuing resistance to the deployment of US ground troops on its territory.
Mr Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA military analyst on Iraq, is less sure. "The Turks want to be able to intervene in northern Iraq without US interference," he told the Turkish Daily News. "That is why we need to be thereto serve as a peacekeeping force."
During his visit to Ankara on December 5th, US deputy defence secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz issued a veiled warning to the Turks not to act on their own.
"Our aim is to preserve Iraq's integrity and not have its resourcestaken by us or Turkey or another outside force. We want to see a situation in which neither the Kurds nor Turks nor any other group is imposing unilateral views on northern Iraq."
His statements have only partially reassured Mr Hoshyar Zebari, KDP's London representative. "We appreciate the help Turkey has given us since 1988 but plans of this sort have to be made in consultation with us. As it is, we have been presented with a fait accompli."
Sirnak governor Mr Huseyin Baskaya denies that his government has any responsibilities towards northern Iraqi authorities. "These so-called Kurdish leaders are just nomads. If we have a problem with Iraq, we talk to Saddam Hussein."