Weeping and going to Lebanon

TDN editorial by Yusuf KANLI Wednesday, September 6, 2006

With thousands of Turks demonstrating in the streets of Ankara against the country joining in a U.N. peacekeeping force to be deployed in southern Lebanon, the Turkish Parliament convened early from summer recess on Tuesday at the request of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.
Excluding the AKP, all groups in Parliament united, for a change, in condemning the government's move as an unnecessary move that could pull this country into the Arab-Israeli quagmire.
The recent sharp increase in separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) related violence was extensively used in arguments by the opposition spokesmen as a demonstration of the failure of the ruling AKP to act on national issues while pressing hard the ruling deputies to approve the request to dispatch troops for Lebanon.
The Parliament, the opposition underlined, should have been summoned by the government from summer recess to discuss what's happening in the country's fight against terrorism, rather than being called in for a special Parliamentary session to dispatch troops and thus try to appease the United States and the Israelis.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the top brass of the AKP, however, assured the deputies of the ruling party hours before the key vote that if Turkish troops were asked to disarm Hezbollah, Turkey would immediately withdraw from southern Lebanon. Despite all the warnings from the opposition that since Turkey was placing its troops under U.N. command the assurances by the premier would mean nothing in practice, the AKP deputies voted en masse to approve the government's authorization request.
Of course, neither the concept nor the scope of yesterday's authorization motion was similar to the one Parliament rejected on March 1, 2003. In the 2003 vote deputies opposing the government's request to open Turkish territory to the use of the United States in attacks on Iraq stated that before Turkey could make such a move, there was need for a U.N. Security Council resolution that would provide international legitimacy to the coming war. Besides, the Iraq war was related directly with Turkish security and the deputies were acting more in line with the widespread anti-war sentiments of the Turkish public, which wisely succeeded in seeing even then that the United States did not have an exit strategy and that post-war Iraq would pose a greater security risk to Turkey than it ever had done under Saddam Hussein.
Whereas this time there was a Security Council resolution calling on countries to contribute troops to an international U.N. peacekeeping force to be deployed in southern Lebanon. That is, regarding international legitimacy, the U.N. resolution was there.
Another difference from the March 1, 2003 vote was the approaching elections. Probably the AKP deputies who previously defied pressure from the government and rejected the motion in 2003, are now acting so as not to upset their party leader in the fear that he may not place them on Parliamentary election lists in the polls to be held in November next year at the latest. In contrast, at the time of the March 1 vote the Parliament had been elected only few months previously in November 2002 and Erdoğan himself had just reached parliament through a February by-election in Siirt.
Still, our talks with AKP deputies on Tuesday indicated that despite the U.N. resolution providing international legitimacy to a Turkish troop contribution, they were trying to find some other legitimating elements to support their “yes” vote, because most of them were voting “yes” under pressure from Erdoğan, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül and other heavyweights of the ruling party. On an individual basis, however, they did not want to see Turkey involved in an operation that could eventually turn into playing the role of Israel's gendarmerie.
That is, while the opposition mostly acted with a simple understanding of just opposing the government, the AKP deputies were acting very much in line with that old saying describing a young bride leaving her parents' house and moving to her new house: Weeping and going.