That's a rationale that might have left even Swift's Lilliputians with Brobdingnagian headache.
But it does not seem to trouble the Clinton administration, which is expected to press for congressional approval next month of a $130 million deal to sell 120 Army tactical missiles (ATACMS) to Turkey -- the first-ever export of these ballistic missiles with cluster munition warheads.
The sale is questionable on multiple grounds. It undermines U.S. led efforts to halt the spread of ballistic missiles and cluster munitions, and it is certain to ratchet up the dangerous arms race between Turkey and Greece, who nearly came to blows last month over possession of a desolate outcropping in the Aegean.
But on human rights grounds alone it is a disgrace: for almost certainly these weapons will be used to intensify Turkey's scorched-earth campaign against Turkish Kurdistan.
Turkey, of course, denies it has violated anyone's human rights and insists that the 11 year-old campaign is directed against the armed guerrillas of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist party. Yet Kurdish community leaders throughout the region say all they want is a measure of federalist autonomy, within the Turkish sovereignty, to protect their culture, and language against the virulence of Turkish nationalism. Even PKK leaders have repeatedly called for negotiations and a democratic resolution of the conflict, which has claimed an estimated 15,000 lives.
Beyond Ankara, there's not much debate that the Kurdish campaign
is a human rights abomination. In the past year, Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International and the U.S. congressional Commission on Security
and Cooperation in Europe all have issued well-documented reports and
resolutions concerning gross violations of human rights by Turkish forces
in Kurdistan. Last month, representatives Christopher Smith, R-NJ, and
Steny Hoyer, D-Md, sponsored a resolution demanding an investigation.
They put the death toll at 20,000, plus displacement of 3 million Kurds
and the destruction of more than 12.650 Kurdish villages.
Over the past decade, the United States have provided $5.3 billion in military aid to Turkey, making it the third-largest recipient after Israel and Egypt. In 1994, Turkey was the largest weapons importer in the world and the United States has long been seen its dominant supplier, now accounting for 75 to 80 percent of all its military equipment.
Even the State Department admitted in a 1995 report, that U.S. weapons have "been used in operations against the PKK during which human rights abuses have occurred. It is highly likely that such equipment was used in support of the evacuation and/or destruction of villages."
Such uses directly contravene the weapons export provisions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which the United States is a member -- a fact that has caused Europeans weapons exporters to suspend sales to Turkey on various occasions. But not the United States. While "there is no question that Turkey's human rights record is very bad," said the undersecretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, "for us to base our policies solely on Turkey's human rights record would be very shortsighted."
What is shortsighted is the failure of American arms export policy
to grasp the wisdom of an old Turkish proverb: "Give a man a hammer and he
will think all problems are nails."