“The Turkomans of Iraq as A Factor in Turkish Foreign Policy: Socio-Political and Demographic Perspectives” H. Tarık Oğuzlu Dış Politika Enstitüsü – Foreign Policy Institute Ankara, 2001 The Turkomans of Iraq as A Factor in Turkish Foreign Policy ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This paper was written with two clear purposes in mind. First is the aim of making assessment as to the current presence of the Turkomans in Iraq and the second is to draw an analysis as to the current Turkish foreign policy in regard to northern Iraq. In doing so, the underlying motive lying behind this study has been an attempt at working out some new openings for the Turkish foreign policy towards northern Iraq, which would certainly im- ply the figuring out of Turkomans in Iraq as a more effective policy option needed to be capitalized on by Turkish foreign policy makers. The moral support encouraging me to undertake such a daunting task has come from the distinguished personality İhsan Doğramacı, a Turkoman by origin. If not for his intention that a study on the Turkomans should be made as urgently as possible, this paper would not be written. Therefore, our first and foremost sincere thanks go to him. Secondly, I would like to extend my thanks to Mustafa Ziya, the current representative of the Turkman Front in Ankara, for his enormous helps dur- ing the writing of this paper. Thirdly, I would like to also acknowledge that Seyfi Taşhan, the head of the Foreign Policy Institute, made useful contributions to the completion of this study by both providing me with intellectual advice and creating a dis- cussion forum under the roof of the Foreign Policy Institute in order for con- structive arguments to surface. Last but not least, my thanks go to Prof. Dr. Ali L. Karaosmanoğlu, the head of the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University. It was through regular discussions with him that I could be able to materialize this project. Without his academic guidance, it would be certain that this pa- per, as it is in its latest format, would be impossible to take place. 2 Socio-Political and Demographic Perspectives TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Origins 6 Population 7 Settlement 13 Turkomans during the Contemporary Iraq 13 Observations 17 Getting Politicized? 22 Options for Turkey: New Facts on the Ground 23 The ‘Constant’ in Turkey’s Iraq Policy 25 Turkomans and Iraq’s Future 28 Why are Turkomans Important for Turkey? 31 How to Incorporate Turkomans in Turkey’s Policy toward Iraq 33 Conclusion 38 Endnotes 40 3 The Turkomans of Iraq as A Factor in Turkish Foreign Policy INTRODUCTION There are two main research interests in this paper. Making an inquiry into the demographic structure of the Turkoman people residing in Iraq (though ‘Turkmen’ and ‘Turkman’ are also used, hereafter ‘Turkoman’ will be used) will be followed by a further analysis as to how the existence of the Turkomans in Iraq might serve Turkey’s interests in the region. While doing this, I will also examine the ways as to how Turkey might contribute to the betterment of Turkomans’ life. Throughout the paper, I will mainly deal with the political aspect of the Turkoman life in Iraq with a view to better compre- hending the contemporary history of these people since the establishment of Monarchy in Iraq. Despite the fact that a large literature exists on the cultural and social aspects of Turkoman life in Iraq, I will avoid of engaging in those aspects. Constituting one of the three major entities of the modern Iraqi State, the Turkomans have been the least advantageous of them. Since the founda- tion of Iraq in the aftermath of the First World War, the existence of Turko- mans has been denied by the official regimes in Baghdad in accordance with the state policy of ‘Arabization’. It was the attempt at sealing the border with Turkey that motivated the Baghdad regime and their protector, Britain, to de- liberately ignore the existence of the Turkoman people in the early years of Iraq. To the British and official circles in Baghdad, the presence of a large Turkish entity in the parts of Iraq bordering Turkey seems to have consti- tuted a impediment in the process of state building in Iraq. (1) Having strengthened the external borders, the next step of the Iraqi re- gimes was to create a nation state on the basis of Arabic identity. From an Arabist perspective, the fact that the overwhelming majority of the northern part of the country consists of the Kurdish and Turkish people was a problem needed to be tackled with. The policy of ‘Arabization’ was set into motion by Baghdad as soon as Iraq came into being. However, the process of Arabiza- tion was accelerated with the ascendancy of the Ba’athist rule into power in the 1960s. Since then, the Turkomans have been put under intensive pressure by the official regime and life has been made difficult for them as each year went by with the Ba’ath rule in Baghdad. This paper consists of two main parts. The first part discusses the demographic aspects of the Turkoman community in Iraq in an effort to bet- ter understand the contemporary history of these people. The first section under this part will stress on the historical presence of the Turkomans in Iraq. Then, I will continue with the section on the demographic aspect of the 4 Socio-Political and Demographic Perspectives Turkomans. The major aim, in this part, is to estimate the Iraqi Turkoman population. Estimating the current Turkoman population in Iraq is a difficult task to do due to the lack of reliable sources to avail of. I need to admit at this stage that many of the sources, on which I had to rely in making estimations of the Turkoman population, are of Turkish or Turkoman origins. The reason for this lies in the scarcity of the western sources related with the issue. All foreign sources take a similar pattern to draw their estimations on the official records of the Iraqi government, which the Turkomans think reflect political motives. In addition to Turkoman and western sources, there are also some Kurdish studies on the demographic structure of the Turkoman people in Iraq. As an exemplary I will refer to one of them, which is thought of being reflecting a proto-Kurdish view on the issue. The next section, following population, will be on the settlement issue of the Turkomans in Iraq. Aiming at pointing to the places where Turkomans live in Iraq, this section is mainly descriptive and short compared to the oth- ers. After the part on settlement, I will give a sketch of the political- demographic history of the Turkoman people in the contemporary Iraqi State. In doing so, the underlying interest is to make an analysis of the situa- tion of the Iraqi Turkomans as far as their relationships with the official re- gime in Baghdad and Kurdish entities in northern Iraq are concerned. Whether or not there is an observable ‘up-down’ trend in the situation of these people constitutes my fundamental interest. I will then make some general points regarding the socio-political his- tory of the Turkomans in Iraq. The aim in this section will be to undercover some observable regularities in the Turkomans’ life in Iraq. The second part of the paper will be about Turkey’s foreign policy re- garding the developments in northern Iraq. The underlying research interest here is to make an inquiry into the current Turkish foreign policy towards Iraq. I will mainly try to assess the credibility of the policy of supporting Saddam in the expectation that only a strong Saddam can guarantee the terri- torial integrity of Iraq. Based on this assessment, I will further ascertain the possibility whether Turkey could take up the option of Turkomans in Iraq so as to realize her interests in a more satisfactory way. While doing this, a spe- cial attention will be paid to the discussions revolving around the future shape of Iraq. Whether Iraq will continue to live with Saddam or end up hav- ing with a new regime, likely to take place following either a coup or a popu- 5 The Turkomans of Iraq as A Factor in Turkish Foreign Policy lar insurgency, will definitely have impacts on the future conditions of the Turkomans, as well as the Turkish foreign policy towards the region. The paper will end with a conclusion by recapitulating the findings of the research. ORIGINS Even though the Turkic origin people living in Iraq are generally called differently as ‘Turkomans’, ‘Turkmens’ or ‘Turkmans’, it should not be mis- understood that these people are not coming from the same Turkish origin, so do the Turks of Anatolia and Azarbaijan. There were mainly two occasions when The Turkomans of Iraq were intentionally called ‘Turkmens’ mainly for political reasons. The first occasion took place during the Losusanne negotia- tions when the British delegates made the point that these Turkic origin peo- ple were different from the Turks of Anatolia in that the former came to Iraq from the steps of Central Asia and they are the direct descendants of Turk- men people who used to live in today’s Turkmenistan. The second occasion emerged in the aftermath of the 1958 Republican Revolution in Iraq when the new regime seriously considered to grand cul- tural rights to minorities in Iraq. When the Ba’ath regime granted on 24 Janu- ary 1970 new cultural rights to these people, they were again called ‘Turk- mens’. The underlying motive behind these attempts was purely political.