Turkey’s threat to launch a large-scale military invasion against PKK fighters in Northern Iraq is not only of great concern to policymakers in Washington, where President Bush will meet with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to make a last-ditch plea for Turkish restraint next Monday. Germany, too, is trying hard to prevent Ankara from embarking on a reckless military adventure with potentially disastrous consequences for security and stability across the region and beyond. Since last Sunday, when several hundred nationalist Turkish anti-PKK demonstrators attacked a Kurdish cultural center in Berlin, German authorities are now also increasingly concerned about the conflict’s violent repercussions for relations between the country’s sizeable Turkish and Kurdish migrant populations. While several hundred German riot police were able to fend off the barrage of bottles and stones thrown by the young Turkish attackers (15 of whom were arrested), the clashes also left 18 police officers injured. The head of Berlin’s security police is already bracing for a further escalation in violent Turkish-Kurdish clashes in the weeks and months to come. “The conflict in the border region with Iraq has already spilled over into Berlin. We have to be careful and look the problem straight in the eye.” In total, there are currently about 1.7 million Turks living in Germany. This figure does not include the 500,000 or so naturalized Germans of Turkish origin or children born to Turkish parents in Germany who acquired German citizenship by birth. In contrast, the number of Kurds is estimated to be around 650,000. However, an exact ethnic demographic breakdown is hard to establish as Kurds with a Turkish passport are also counted as part of Germany’s Turkish population. According to the 2006 Annual Report by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, about 11,500 left-wing Kurdish extremists and an almost equal number of right-wing Turkish nationalists are currently based in Germany. While Kurdish extremists have virtually stopped all their violent activities in Germany (they are now primarily focused on fundraising and propaganda operations), more and more young Turks in Germany are embracing a strange mix of both radical Turkish nationalist and Islamist ideas, making them prone to further violence. A Turkish military invasion of Northern Iraq, which should be prevented at all cost, would undoubtedly lead to more violent clashes on German streets. For sure, the deadly hit-and-run attacks on Turkey by the banned PKK terrorist organization have rightly been condemned by Western governments in Europe and the United States. However, there can be no doubt that the roughly 3,000 PKK fighters holed up in Northern Iraq pose no real strategic threat to Turkey, which boasts a 620,000-strong army that is the second biggest in the entire NATO alliance. Back in early 2003, Turkey’s Islamist-dominated parliament denied the United States the ability to move U.S. troops into Northern Iraq to take out Saddam in what was viewed by Washington as an operation of vital importance to U.S. national security. Now, in 2007, Turkey has massed more than 250,000 troops along its border with Northern Iraq in preparation for what would certainly be a disproportionate response to a limited tactical threat. It remains to be seen how much leverage President Bush can exert on the government of a country whose population ranks among the most anti-American in the world. According to the German Marshall Fund’s latest Transatlantic Trends public opinion survey, 74 percent of the Turkish population now views U.S. leadership in the world as “undesirable,” and only 3 percent approve of Bush’s handling of international affairs. In this context it may be more effective to use those levers that really matter to Ankara. Markus Soeder, the former conservative CSU party secretary general who now serves as the Bavarian State Minister in charge of Federal and European Affairs, demanded just this week that the EU immediately freeze its on-going accession talks with Ankara in the event of a Turkish military attack on Northern Iraq. “It cannot be that a country wanting to join the EU wages a war of aggression.”
