Turkey
Uses U.S. Arms to Attack Kurds

	On July 20, Kurdish protesters participated in a hunger strike for 13 hot 
summer days on Capital Hill.  Their aim was to draw attention to Turkey's 
intimate relationship with the US, which for over a decade has supplied 
Turkey with the weapons it uses to attack and forcibly evacuate Kurdish 
villages.  One hunger striker, Dara Azadi, explains: "It is very important that 
we have a hunger strike here in America.  The US is the most closely linked 
to the Turkish government.  Most US military equipment...is used by the 
Turkish military to destroy villages.  This is nothing new, the US 
government knows this and yet they continue to supply weapons."
	In June, the US State Department issued a report to Congress which 
acknowledges for the first time that Turkey regularly uses US weapons in 
operations where gross human rights violations occur.  In Southeastern 
Turkey in particular, the report noted, Turkey employs Lockheed-Martin F-16 
fighter planes, Textron-Bell Cobra and Super Cobra attack helicopters, United 
Technologies/Sikorsky Black Hawk troop transports, and various US tanks, 
armored personnel carriers and artillery systems to attack Kurdish villages 
suspected of supporting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a militant 
Kurdish opposition group.  
	As a consequence, the Turkish government has depopulated 2,000 
Kurdish villages, and displaced over two million Kurds.  Innocent villagers 
are caught in a deadly predicament:  If they refuse to join the government-
backed local militia (which is fighting their own people) they are branded as 
"PKK terrorists" and attacked; but if they express support for the government, 
they face potential attack from the PKK.
	Unfortunately, the Administration ignores the obvious implications of 
its own State Department report, and allows the conflict to spread into 
Northern Iraq.  At dawn on July 5, some 3,000 Turkish troops invaded 
Northern Iraq in an operation targeting the military bases of the PKK.  Careful 
to avoid any criticism of the attack, the Administration urged only that the 
operation remain limited in scope and protect civilians.  
	Earlier, on March 20, when Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller 
launched a six-week-long invasion into Northern Iraq to rout out the PKK, 
the Administration was even more obliging.  Prior to the invasion, according 
to Whitehouse spokesperson Michael McCurry, President Clinton spoke with 
Ciller to express his "understanding for Turkey's need to deal decisively" 
with the rebel PKK.  For Turkey, advance US approval was essential: Turkish 
troops could not have marched into Northern Iraq if the US and other allied 
powers in the region had not suspended the UN-monitored "no fly zone" 
that has safeguarded Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein since the close of the 
Gulf War.  Making a brutal mockery of the UN mission to create a Kurdish 
"safe haven" in the area, the US effectively authorized 35,000 foreign troops 
to invade.
	Since the Turkish crackdown on the PKK began in 1984, the US has 
contributed to the conflict by arming Turkey to the hilt--exporting more than 
$6.3 billion worth of weapons to an undemocratic, military-led government 
engaged in a ruthless campaign of terror against its Kurdish population.  
From 1987-91, Turkey bought 76% of its weapons from the US.  From 1991-93, 
when the counterinsurgency war intensified and human rights abuses 
worsened, that number had increased to 80%.
	Though the defense industry lobby will argue that US weapons sales 
are needed to support US jobs, many of Turkey's weapons are highly 
subsidized by the American taxpayer through various military grants and 
"surplus" weapons programs.  Turkey is hardly an isolated case.  For over a 
decade, the US has provided $6 billion per year to US arms clients--in the 
form of government loans, grants and cash payments--for use in purchasing 
US weapons.  In other words, as William Hartung of the World Policy 
Institute explains, "any fair accounting of the economic impacts of weapons 
transfers must begin by acknowledging that...approximately one-third of all 
arms exports are paid for by US taxpayers."
	Although the State Department has rarely restricted the flow of US 
weapons to Turkey, a proposal last June to sell Ankara 493 CBU-87 cluster 
bombs provoked considerable debate within various Executive Branch offices.  
The CBU-87, built by Alliant Techsystems Inc., can decimate an area the size 
of a football field with its 202 small bomblets, each of which explodes into 300 
fragments.  In February, rather than face an open rebuff based on its human 
rights practices, Turkey rescinded its request for the highly lethal bombs.  Last 
year, Congress voted to withhold 10% of Turkey's $364.5 million FY95 
military aid package, pending a State Department's report on human rights 
abuses and the role of US weapons.  But Turkey, finding these conditions 
unacceptable, said it no longer wanted the additional 10% in military funds. 
	Ankara can afford these charades only because of its considerable trust 
in the US-Turkey military relationship.  With Congress ready to approve $320 
million in military assistance for FY1996, that relationship appears as strong 
as ever.  By contrast, several European countries, including Germany, have 
made a principled decision to freeze all military aid to Turkey.  Turkey is 
desperate to enter into a customs union with Europe, which is up for 
ratification by European governments in October, and Germany's vote is 
crucial.  The time is ripe for the US to join Germany in cutting off all 
weapons assistance.  This would give the international community real 
"leverage" to pressure the Ciller government to abandon its ethnic war 
against the Kurds, and to pursue instead a political solution.  
	In a recent poll by the daily Milliyet, 86% of the Turks questioned 
favored a political solution.  Turkey's Kurds have long been denied basic 
political rights, freedom of speech and even the right to use their own 
language.  Until ethnic discrimination, extrajudicial execution, torture, and 
gross violations of free speech (under Article 8 of Turkey's "Anti-Terror 
Law") cease to occur, the conflict can never end.  
	For too long, the US has argued that arms exports to Turkey are needed 
"to preserve the strategic relationship" with one of the regions leading 
military powers, as one Administration official recently put it.  But at a time 
when ethnic violence is on the rise, posing a major threat to global peace, US 
arms shipments to Turkey send exactly the wrong message to countries 
embroiled in ethnic and territorial conflicts throughout the world. 

--Jennifer Washburn is a research associate at the World Policy Institute at the 
New School in New York