Turkey’s government has promised to stop making surprise arrests of State Department employees, U.S. diplomats announced Monday.
The pledge clears the way for the State Department to resume “limited visa services in Turkey,” which U.S. officials suspended in October. The diplomatic dispute, a rarity between two members of NATO, was part of a larger trend of fraying ties between the U.S. and a key ally in the Middle East.
“We have received initial high-level assurances from the Government of Turkey that there are no additional local employees of our Mission in Turkey under investigation,” the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, the Turkish capital, announced Monday. “We have also received initial assurances from the Government of Turkey that our local staff will not be detained or arrested for performing their official duties and that Turkish authorities will inform the U.S. government in advance if the Government of Turkey intends to detain or arrest a member of our local staff in the future.”
Turkey arrested a local official who works for the State Department in early October, before reportedly opening an investigation into another staffer, on allegations of supporting terrorism. More than a clash over State Department staff, the arrest stoked simmering tensions about followers of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s penchant for blaming the United States for a failed coup attempt against his regime in 2015.
“This arrest has raised questions about whether the goal of some officials is to disrupt the long-standing cooperation between Turkey and the United States,” U.S. Ambassador to Turkey John Bass said in a video responding to the charges.
U.S.-Turkey relations have caused growing alarm in recent years, as Erdogan has taken an authoritarian turn. At the same time, American cooperation with the Kurds in Syria and Iraq — who represent the most effective local fighting force against the Islamic State in the region — has angered Erdogan, who worries that their successes will empower a Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey that has fought a separatist war against the central government for decades.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has tried to rehabilitate the relationship in a series of trips to Turkey, even as the State Department barred the sale of weapons to Erdogan’s security team following attacks on protestors outside the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C.
“I’ve had now about six hours of meetings over three different occasions with President Erdogan, and I think each meeting things are getting a little better, in terms of the tone between us,” Tillerson said in July. “I think we are beginning to rebuild some of that trust that we lost in one another. They lost our trust, to a certain extent; we lost theirs.”
Those efforts didn’t forestall the arrest of the local embassy staffer, however, and the State Department made clear Friday that all is not well.
“We continue to have serious concerns about the existing cases against arrested local employees of our Mission in Turkey,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Monday. “We are also concerned about the cases against U.S. citizens who have been arrested under the state of emergency. U.S. officials will continue to engage with their Turkish counterparts to seek a satisfactory resolution of these cases.”
