Turkey: Give me Your Tired, Your Poor
by Daniel Pipes
Turkish Times
August 15, 1993

Although little noted by the outside world, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey has for two centuries been a land of immigration. Millions of individuals running from trouble have turned up in Istanbul and Anatolia seeking refuge. As a French magazine recently noted, correctly, "Every historical upheaval releases a wave of emigration toward Turkey." Peoples fleeing persecution, foreign conquest, or other forms of turmoil-and here is another little-known fact-invariably found a welcome on arrival.

Turkic speakers make up a majority of the immigrants. The modern tradition of Turkic immigration began in 1783-85, when sizeable numbers of Crimean Tatars fled Moscow's conquest of their homeland by seeking asylum in Ottoman territory. Over the next century, Turkic speakers from the Volga-Ural area, the Caucasus, and Central Asia followed their example. Sunnis from Azerbaijan took refuge in Turkey in such large numbers, their proportion of the Azerbaijan population declined from over 50 percent to only 30 percent. Between 1926 and 1936, some 300,000 Turkic speakers arrived in Turkey, mostly from the Soviet Union. In 1951, Turkey accepted several hundred Kazakhs fleeing China. Cypriot Turks trickled in from the mid-1960s on.

The tradition continues today and includes numbers large and small. In 1982, 355 Kirghiz tribesmen from Afghanistan resettled near Van, in eastern Anatolia. The Bulgarian campaign of assimilation of the late 1980s, intended to make Bulgarian Turks lose their identity, prompted 320,000 of its Turkish population-including a world champion weight-lifter-to take refuge in Turkey. (With the fall of the communist regime, however, half of these returned to Bulgaria.) In 1992, the Turkish assembly unanimously voted to accept 50,000 Meskhetian Turks from southern Georgia and indicated a readiness to take in the Akhista (or Akhaltsikhe ) Turks of Kyrgyzstan.

Turkey plays a role for Turkic speakers akin to that the Federal Republic of Germany does for Germans: in both cases, ethnic kin are welcome to the motherland, even those whose ancestors left centuries earlier, or who never even had lived there. Turkey also resembles Israel in that it has a "law of return" on the books ; Turkic speakers like Jews are assured of a place to turn.

But not all immigrants speak Turkic languages. A broad range of "Ottoman Muslims," peoples who either converted to Islam under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire or tied closely to the Empire, have also moved to Turkey in substantial numbers. Circassians, Abkhaz, Chechens, Avars, Karachays , and many other Muslims emptied out of their homelands in the northern Caucasus during the mid-nineteenth century and went to Turkey. As the Ottomans lost ground in Europe, Muslim emigrants known as muhajirs took refuge in Anatolia. Albanians moved there around the turn of this century, mainly for economic reasons. Half a million Muslims, mostly Greek-speaking, arrived in Turkey from Greece between 1912 and 1930. Bosnian emigration to what is today Turkey began in the 1870s and revived in the 1990s. By November 1992, 15,000 Bosnians had newly arrived in Turkey , of which fully 14,000 settled with near relatives. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled Iraq after the end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988, and they continue to arrive.

Non-Muslims of many descriptions have also sought refuge or opportunity in Turkey. Sephardic Jews fleeing Spain after 1492 headed for Istanbul, as did Ashkenazi Jews four and a half centuries later fleeing Hitler. Christian Levantines in the nineteenth century arrived seeking to expand their horizons. On occasion, even Christian Europeans in need of political haven found a welcome, including Hungarian nationalists in 1848 and Germans escaping Nazi rule. Though small in number, these political refugees had an important impact both in their home countries and in Turkey.

Immigration has left Turkey with a strikingly diverse population. In this century alone, substantial numbers of immigrants have come from Bosnia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Iraq, Iran , the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and China. With only a touch of exaggeration, Nur Vergin of Bilkent University points to Turkey as ethnically "a microcosm of the Ottoman Empire." Numbers are hard to come by and are probably exaggerated: Turks of Azeri origins, for example, are said to number six million while nearly ten million Turks trace their origins to the Balkans. In all, the descendants of these immigrants probably number about twelve million, or one-fifth of the Turkish population.

To complete the picture of Turkey's ethnic diversity, one also has to remember the many peoples who antedate the Turks both Muslim (Kurds, Arabs, Laz, Georgians, et al.) and non-Muslim (Greeks, Armenians).

From the point of view of immigration, Turkey resembles France in important ways. Both are major countries with a long but non-ideological tradition of offering refuge and opportunity to a wide range of peoples. Both have powerful assimilationist cultures which discourage ethnic affiliation. The fact that both incorporated large numbers of foreign peoples without the outside world paying much attention testifies to the success of their operations. As in France, immigrants to Turkey have faced few obstacles to advancement; indeed, a number of prominent Turks trace their ancestry to outside Turkey. The mother of former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz, for example, came from Bosnia. Turks, in short, have not inflicted on others the sort of treatment they themselves have experienced in Germany.


Turkey and the Jews
by Daniel Pipes
Turkish Times
September 1, 1994



Jewish communities still extant in Muslim countries tend to be weak and without a future, mere shells of the vital populations that existed half a century ago. Anyone with energy or ambition long ago fled Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, or Tunisia; those who remain barely eke out a living. They have no role to speak of in the business or intellectual life of their countries; politically they count only as potential victims or as hostages to be bartered away. In The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (1991), Norman Stillman accurately described them as "a small, vestigial, and moribund remnant."

How different in Turkey! Here Jews, as in the West, play a disproportionate role in the life of the country. During a visit not long ago to Istanbul (the city where nearly all the Turkish Jews live), I had an opportunity to meet two of the country's tycoons, both Jewish. Jefi I. Kamhi is the flamboyant, jet-setting chairman of Profilo, a company which produces almost everything you can think of (prefabricated construction units, white goods, parts and accessories); in addition, it imports and exports, distributes consumer durables, and invests.

Uzeyir Garih, CEO of Alarko, is a more restrained figure; his company contracts projects, engineers them, and specializes in building big-ticket items such as pipelines, gas storage terminals, refineries, textile factories and office complexes. Both men are active in business associations, are counted among their country's leading philanthropists, and have strong ties to the highest political circles.

Thanks to their knowledge of European languages and foreign contacts, Jewish businessmen have played an important role in the expansion of Turkish companies into international markets. They also have a prominent role in fashion, advertising, and banking; for example, Jews dominate Istanbul's Tahtakale money market and effectively set the dollar exchange rate for Turkey's currency. These Jews are not small, vestigial, or moribund.

And it's not just the businessmen. I didn't get to see Sami Kohen this trip, but he's been for many the foreign affairs columnist for Turkey's largest circulation daily newspaper Milliyet, where he writes a sophisticated analysis of his country's geopoliticals, as well as frequently contributing to such American papers as the The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. Other Jews teach at the universities and work for the government, where they serve as diplomats and hold other positions of responsibility. In short, unlike the dying Jewish communities in other parts of the Muslim Middle East, the one in Turkey is vibrant and influential.

Interestingly, other Jews -- those of Israel and the United States -- also have a role in Turkey. In extensive talks with officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister's Office, I found a consistent interest in strengthening ties with Israel, and near delight with September's Israel-PLO agreement because it hastens this process. These analysts see Israel in a variety of ways: as a trading partner, a fellow democracy to help stabilize the region, an ally which can help deal with the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and a means of access to Washington. The first-ever visit by Turkey's Foreign Minister Hikmet Cetin to Israel last November consolidated these ties and raised high hopes for the future.

Which brings us to American Jews. One Turkish analyst pointed out to me that many of the leading American scholars of Turkey are Jewish (including Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, and Avigdor Levy). A Foreign Ministry official who noted that Turkey's strongest advocates in the United States are Jewish, mentioning specifically Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, concluded with the comment, "We love American Jews." Turkey's government despairs of a Turkish lobby ever emerging in the United States which will be capable of standing up to the Greeks and Armenians; in the meantime, it counts on Jews to make the argument for Turkey in Washington. More effectively than anyone else, these individuals point out Turkey's importance as an ally in an especially turbulent part of the world; its positive influence in the Middle East as an enduring democracy; and its importance as a model of secularism for the Muslim world as a whole.

Of course, Turkey also has its share of fundamentalist Muslims, fascists and other forms of anti-Semite. Like their counterparts elsewhere, these spread conspiracy theories about Jews and fulminate against Israel. But in Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab countries, these people don't make policy, nor do conspiracy theories dominate political thinking. Perhaps most important, Turks don't engage in violence against Jews. (It was foreigners, not Turks, who carried out the one major act of violence against Turkey's Jews, the 1986 bombing of Neve Shalom Synagogue.)

There's every reason to think the good news will continue in the years ahead -- that Jews of Turkey will flourish; that Ankara's relations with Israel will expand; and that American Jews will play a valuable role explaining Turkey in the United States. With regard to Jews, as is the case in so many other ways, Turkey has successfully removed itself from the paranoia and repression of the Middle East and made itself a part of the West.

Hot Spot: Turkey, Iraq, and Mosul
by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
September 1995

Unnoticed by the international media, a brief controversy flared up in the Middle East during early May 1995, when Turkey's President Suleyman Demirel gave several interviews with Turkish journalists in which he called for a change in Turkey's borders with Iraq. While the controversy quickly disappeared, it raised an issue that could return.

Background

In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious Allies in August 1920 imposed the Treaty of Sevres on the defeated Ottoman Empire. This treaty placed the Dardenelle Sstraits region under international control, then carved up Anatolia into Greek, Italian, French, Armenian, and Kurdish zones; Turks remained sovereign only in a rump state in northwest Anatolia to be constrained by many limits on its authority. Thanks to Kemal Ataturk's military victories in the period May 1919-October 1922, however, Sevres was never implemented. Instead, the much more balanced Treaty of Lausanne was signed in July 1923, confirming most of Turkey's present borders.

Indeed, the Lausanne treaty specified all of Turkey's boundaries except one-that with Iraq, where only a provisional frontier (called the "Brussels line") was in place. This issue was left open for a "friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months." Failing that, the issue would be referred to the League of Nations. The Turkish government resisted giving up its old province Mosul, on several grounds: the political wishes of Mosul's inhabitants, its many Turkish-speakers, its oil reserves, and the direction of its trade. In addition, British forces were twelve miles away from the city of Mosul on 30 October 1918, the day London signed the Armistice of Mudros that ended its war with the Turks; this made the legality of the British presence in Mosul very dubious.

Despite Turkish claims to Mosul, London claimed the province in its entirety for Iraq; it also turned down Ankara's proposal that a plebiscite be held to measure views in the province. Unable to reach a "friendly arrangement," the two parties referred the dispute to the League of Nations, which endorsed Mosul's becoming part of Iraq. After prolonged tensions, which included threats of armed confrontation in the Turkish press, Ankara eventually signed a treaty in July 1926 that made the Brussels line the international frontier, leaving the Mosul region and its 600,000 or so inhabitants in Iraq.

The issue then died down for sixty years, only to revive during the Iraq-Iran War, when Saddam Husayn's government lost effective control of northern Iraq. Four times after May 1983, he gave permission for Turkish troops fighting insurgents from the Kurdish Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerana Kurdistan-PKK) to engage in hot pursuit onto Iraq territory. The Turkish press began to raise the issue of Turkey's claims to the Mosul region, and the government reportedly informed its allies of an intent to take control of Mosul in case the Iraqi regime should fall. The Kuwait war of 1991 and the subsequent collapse of Iraqi authority north of the 36th parallel stimulated Turkish warnings that it would not countenance Syrian or Iranian encroachments on the Mosul area. During the period March 20-May 2, 1995, in an effort dubbed Operation Steel, some 35,000 Turkish troops moved into northern Iraq attempting to clean out PKK strongholds.

The Demirel Statements

Just as the Turkish forces were leaving Iraqi territory, Demirel made a dramatic statement to an Istanbul newspaper:

The border is wrong. The Mosul Province was within the Ottoman Empire's territory. Had that place been a part of Turkey, none of the problems we are confronted with at the present time would have existed.
In another meeting, with newspaper columnists, Demirel pointed to a map of the current border area and elaborated:
The border on those heights is wrong. Actually, that is the boundary of the oil region. Turkey begins where that boundary ends. Geologists drew that line. It is not Turkey's national border. That is a matter that has to be rectified. I said some time ago that "the area will be infiltrated when we withdraw [from northern Iraq]."... The terrorists will return. We will be confronted with a similar situation in two or three months. So, let us correct the border line. Turkey cannot readjust its border with Iraq by itself. The border line on the heights has to be brought down to the lower areas. I only want to point out that the border line is wrong. Had it been in the low areas at the foot of the mountains, the [PKK] militants would not have been able to assemble in that region.
In a third interview, Demirel accused the West of still wanting to implement the Treaty of Sevres: "It wants the area beyond the Euphrates."

Middle Eastern Reactions

These comments roused immediate, strong reactions in the Middle East. A spokesman for Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Command Council said that "Iraq rejects any discussion of the issue and warns Turkey against any unilateral step that would breach the national border. Iraq will resist any act of this kind by all legitimate means." The Iraqi News Agency warned that "the Iraqi people, who are rallying around their leader, will resist any encroachment on Iraq's national borders and territorial integrity by all legitimate means. Mesopotamia will always remain united from the far north to the far south." An Iraqi daily warned the Turks that they are "playing a dangerous game and endangering the security of both Iraq and Turkey." A columnist revived the "sick man" sobriquet for Turkey and warned of Iraqi retaliation ("We will cut off the hands of those who try to harm us").

Opposition forces agreed with Baghdad on this issue. The Iraqi National Congress denounced Demirel's statement, which, it said, "runs counter to... the UN Charter and violates the policy of good neighborliness and the history of Mosul." The Kurdish response was wary. Bruska Shaways of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP) offered an analysis more than a condemnation: "If the Turks come [to northern Iraq], then they do not come because of the PKK but because of their old claim to the Ottoman province of Mosul in northern Iraq, which they would like to integrate into Turkey."

The Iranian regime made its sentiments known through the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), its anti-Saddam movement of Iraqis. SAIRI called the Turkish president's statement "a serious threat to the sovereignty of a state that enjoys internationally recognized borders," condemned "any threat to Iraq's sovereignty and geographic integrity," and called on the Turkish government "to give a satisfactory explanation for these statements and their motives and to apologize to the Iraqi people."

In Egypt, Foreign Minister 'Amr Musa declared his government's opposition to "any encroachment on Arab territorial integrity, including that of Iraq." An unnamed Egyptian official commented that "talk about historic rights to Arab territories is an old tune" and urged Ankara to refrain from "talking about historic rights" and "harming Iraqi territorial integrity." The chief editor of a Cairene daily characterized Demirel's words as a demand that part of Iraq be annexed to Turkey and blamed this mainly on Saddam's "sinful aggression against Kuwait." But what "really causes anger," he noted, "is the silence of the Western countries, notably the United States."

Retraction

Demirel responded to these and other comments with further interviews. On May 8, he backtracked slightly: "Talk of changing [the border] must proceed through dialogue and coordination with the countries concerned." (Use of the plural-"countries"-suggests bringing the United States into the discussions, which makes sense, for it partially controls Iraq north of the 36th parallel.) When this statement failed to quiet his critics, Demirel went further and effectively denied that he meant what he had earlier said:
The views I outlined have been misunderstood. The border between Turkey and Iraq is a problem. However, that state of affairs is not a matter that can be solved now. Turkey does not plan to use force to either solve the problem or gain territory. Nevertheless, something could have been achieved through the cooperation of the peoples of the two countries. That is what I suggested some time ago. We maintain that approach now.
The Turkish ambassador in Tehran explicitly denied a Turkish intention to occupy Mosul and interpreted Demirel as having done nothing more than "implied that a minor change can be made with the concurrence of the two sides in some parts of the border." Demirel himself more emphatically retracted his earlier statements to an Arabic newspaper:
Turkey has no regional claims on any of its neighbors, including Iraq. The question of Mosul was settled in 1926 and it is not now considered an item on the Turkish foreign policy agenda.... Turkey has no policy about any new border arrangements and has no plans to reconsider such matters.
This emphatic retraction evidently pleased Baghdad, which replied with soothing words. An Iraqi parliamentarian visiting Ankara declared the two countries had turned over a new leaf in their relations. Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan declared his government's interest in "strong good-neighborly ties with Turkey." And so, the incident apparently came to an end, at least temporarily. But nothing was actually resolved and the Mosul issue could flare up into a crisis, especially if the Iraqi government continues to weaken.