By NNN-KUNA
London : Turkey will launch military action against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq despite frantic appeals for restraint from the US and NATO, its prime minister told The Times newspaper Monday.
Speaking hours before the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party, killed at least 17 more Turkish soldiers Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey had urged the US and Iraqi governments repeatedly to expel the separatists, but they had done nothing.
Turkey’s patience was running out and the country had every right to defend itself, he said. “Whatever is necessary will be done. We don’t have to get permission from anybody,” he declared in his interview with the daily.
Erdogan, who begins a two-day visit to Britain Monday, also offered a bleak assessment of relations between the US and Turkey, a country of huge strategic importance to Washington.
He said that a “serious wave of anti-Americanism” was sweeping Turkey, called the US war in Iraq a failure, and served warning that if the US Congress approved a Bill accusing the Ottoman Turks of genocide against Armenians during the First World War, the US “might lose a very important friend”.
The sombre and unsmiling prime minister was only a little less critical of the European Union, accusing some members of reneging on their promises to admit Turkey and claiming that the EU had inflicted a “big injustice” on his country over Cyprus.
Erdogan’s belligerence will cause alarm in Washington and London, and was probably designed to do so, The Times noted. One aide said that he was engaging in “open diplomacy”.
The PKK is threatening to destroy pipelines carrying Iraqi oil to Turkey, and the only peaceful region of Iraq could easily be plunged into chaos.
In his interview with The Times, Erdogan was in no mood to heed Western appeals for restraint.
The PKK was hiding behind the US and Iraqi governments, he complained. It was using American weapons.
“We have told (US) President (George W.) Bush numerous times how sensitive we are about this issue but have not had a single positive result,” he added.
The targets were not innocent civilians or Iraq’s territorial integrity but a terrorist organisation that regularly attacked Turkish targets, he said. “If a neighbouring country is providing a safe haven for terrorism … we have rights under international law and we will use those rights and we don’t have to get permission from anybody.”
Military action could be avoided only if the Americans and Iraqis expelled the PKK, closed its camps and handed over its leaders, he said.
Erdogan said that last week’s parliamentary vote authorising military action showed that Turkey’s patience was exhausted.
He would not be drawn on the scale or timing of any operation, but Turkey is thought to have more than 60,000 soldiers massed along the Iraq border. Other Turkish officials said that the PKK had six training camps and 3,500 fighters in the mountains of northern Iraq.
Erdogan also rebuked The Times for publishing an interview last week with Murat Karayilan, a PKK leader in northern Iraq.
He said that the newspaper had allowed itself to be “used as a propaganda tool”. Erdogan will speak in Oxford, southern England, Monday night and meet British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Tuesday. He is likely to rebuke the US on several counts.
He said that the war in Iraq had fuelled Turkish hostility towards the US. “There’s no success that I can see. There’s only the deaths of tens of thousands of people. There’s just an Iraq whose entire infrastructure and superstructure has collapsed,” Erdogan added.