Ambassador Huseyin Bichakli (Hüseyin Avni Bıçaklı), the Turkish envoy to Ashgabat, who was revealed by WikiLeaks to have reportedly served as a source to the U.S. Embassy about concerns of uranium transfer to Iran, appears to have been recalled to Ankara. Ambassador Sevki Mutevellioglu has been appointed as the new Turkish ambassador to Turkmenistan.
But what about all those foreign diplomatic sources the American ambassadors talked to? U.S. officials have denounced WikiLeaks for possibly exposing human rights activists reporting on such topics as torture, although no such figures are known to have suffered retaliation (yet). Meanwhile, many of the "Cablegate" sources are among U.S. foreign service officers' own colleagues in the international diplomatic corps, and some of them may be in hot water now.
Turkey is going to produce its first entirely indigenous fighter jet, to be fielded by 2023, the country's defense minister Vecdi Gönül announced this week. From Hurriyet Daily News:
Gönül told reporters after a meeting of the Defense Industry Executive Committee that the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries, Turkey's procurement agency, would start talks with Turkish Aerospace Industries, the country's main aerospace company, for a "conceptual design" of a fighter aircraft and a jet trainer to be built after the year 2020.
"This … effectively is a decision for the making of Turkey's first fighter aircraft," he said...
Minister Gönül said Turkey's newly designed fighter aircraft "would be a next-generation type, would replace the [U.S.-made] F-4Es and would function well with the F-16 and the F-35." He therefore confirmed that the new aircraft mostly would be meant for air-to-air fighting.
Unfortunately, Gönül did not explain why Turkey would do such a thing. It's already planning to buy about 100 F-35s, the next-generation U.S.-built fighter, and had been discussing with Eurofighter to buy some Typhoon jets, but not any more. Why would it make sense to build their own instead?
His rhetoric at the announcement of the fighter plan did suggest some national-pride motivation:
The minister said Turkey may cooperate with South Korea, but implied that this is a small possibility. "We can manufacture the new fighter aircraft with them, we don't rule this out. But the decision we have taken now calls for the production of a totally national and original aircraft," he said.
Three bakers in the Tarlabasi district of Istanbul had been working only with the light from the bakery oven for an hour before they got a new lightbulb.
Jonathan Lewis is a freelance photojournalist based in Istanbul.
What is really of national security interest to the U.S. in the Caucasus and Central Asia? One of the latest WikiLeaks cables purports to answer that question, identifying "critical infrastructure and key resources within their host country which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States."
There are surprisingly few such facilities in Eurasia. Unsurprisingly, most of them have to do with oil. Azerbaijan's offshore Sangchal oil and natural gas terminal, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Novorossiysk oil export terminal (which is in Russia but ships oil from Azerbaijan) are all on the list.
In Turkey, in addition to the BTC pipeline, the Bosphorus Straits is listed, and a handful of Turkish industrial machinery makers are on the list as well, including Durma, Baykal and Ermaksan. All seem to be involved in the making of sheet metal, occasioning us to wonder why Turkish sheet metal is so vital to U.S. security. (Any ideas?: email and I'll update the post.)
Another curious inclusion: the Khromtau Ferrochromium Complex, a chromite mine located in western Kazakhstan, near the city of Aqtobe. Kazakhstan is apparently the world's third-largest producer of chromite, which is used in making stainless steel and other alloys. (Chromite mines in South Africa and India, the world's two largest chomite manufacturers, also appear in the cable, so it doesn't seem like there is anything particularly unique about Kazakh chromite.)
While the world awaits the big document dump from Wikileaks, some of those leaks have already been pre-leaking. One of the most explosive of those has been that the U.S. secretly aided Turkey's longtime foe the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and conversely, that Turkey had aided al Qaeda in Iraq. If true, this would obviously put some serious strain on an already strained relationship.
Hurriyet has been doing some good reporting from the Turkish side of this story and finds that, of course, all parties involved are denying that report:
“Turkey has never given support to any terrorist organization. Fighting against terror is our priority and we don’t make differentiations between terrorist organizations. Turkey has launched many operations against al-Qaeda,” a Turkish Foreign Ministry official told the Daily News.
Asked about the allegations that the U.S. helped the outlawed PKK, the same official said, “Turkey and the U.S. are carrying out an efficient cooperation in the fight against the PKK.”
And from the U.S. side:
Deborah Guido, spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Ankara, told the Daily News that the U.S. government’s policy “has never been nor will ever be in support of the PKK. Anything that implies otherwise is nonsense.”
Recalling that the United States considers the PKK a terrorist organization, Guido said: “Since 2007, our military cooperation with the Turkish government in fighting the PKK has shown results. The U.S. Treasury Department has also named top PKK figures as ‘drug kingpins’ in issuing further sanctions against the PKK.”
Most of the discussion around Turkey and the NATO missile defense system agreed upon this weekend at the Lisbon summit centered around whether or not Iran would be explicitly named as a threat, and the drama over whether Turkey would have to choose between East and West, as it was most simplistically framed.
But there are intriguing commercial angles, as well, as a good piece in Hurriyet today points out. For some time, Turkey has been shopping for a new air defense system of its own. And among the four top candidates are Russian and Chinese companies. As Hurriyet points out, the NATO system should be integrated with Turkey's own system, but that would make the Russian or Chinese systems a hard sell:
The United States and some of its Western partners are staunchly opposed to the integration of any Russian or Chinese system into the NATO missile shield. “American officials already have said that non-NATO elements would cause serious interoperability problems,” said one Turkish official.
One Ankara-based defense analyst said Western worries are related to both defense and commercial concerns: “They simply don’t want Turkey to select Russian or Chinese options, and part of their concern is commercial.”
Buying the Russian or Chinese systems seemed like a long shot from the beginning. Turkey buys most of its imported equipment from the U.S. or European companies, and the other top two candidates for the air defense system are U.S. and Italian. Hurriyet suggests that Turkey may be trying to dangle the threat of a Russian or Chinese option to get NATO financial subsidies to buy the Western systems, instead:
Is Turkey's burgeoning defense cooperation with Azerbaijan nudging Baku toward the West and away from Russia? That's the conclusion of officials and analysts in Baku, according to a report from IWPR:
Mehman Karimov, chairman of the Integration to NATO group, says an Azerbaijani delegation at an exhibition in Jordan this May laid the groundwork for extensive cooperation with the United States as well as Turkey.
“To date, Azerbaijan has struggled with defence industry cooperation with NATO countries. Prior to the launch of defence cooperation with Turkey and the United States, Azerbaijan was obliged to be satisfied with the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, chief among them Russia and Ukraine,” Karimov said.
“I believe Turkey will continue helping Azerbaijan to move to NATO standards, develop its naval security, transforming its border guards and interior ministry forces, organise frontier security and so on. To this end, purchases of military technology from Turkey will also continue,” he said.
One analyst, Ildirim Mammadov of the Baku think tank Centre for Military Analytical Investigations, said that NATO, "in the shape of Turkey," is trying to wean Azerbaijan from its dependence on Russian arms, but that Russia was not likely to take the challenge lying down.
Turkey has long been an advocate of the beleaguered Uyghur minority in China, and when ethnic violence broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese last year in Xinjiang, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that China's treatment of Uyghurs amounted to a "genocide." So what to make now of the news that Turkey is engaging in a second round of military exercises with China -- which a Chinese commentator says is probably designed with fighting Uyghurs in mind? I asked Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American activist and lawyer in Washington, D.C., for his thoughts.
Turkel said that Turkey has built a lot of goodwill over the years among Uyghurs, which accounts for the fact that Uyghur groups haven't said much publicly about the exercises. Privately, though, he said they are "outraged."
“When you look at Turkish-Chinese relations, Uyghurs have always been a thorny issue, but never as much as it's been since last summer, and the prime minister's provocative statements. Then, China started taking Turkey very seriously,” he said.
Chinese relations with Turkey were strong enough that Beijing's reaction to Erdogan's comments was relatively muted, Turkel said. While Chinese media criticized the statement, there was no official condemnation. “I can't even imagine what would have happened if Obama had made those comments,” he said. Nevertheless, Erdogan with that statement "elevated the Uyghur issue in Turkish-Chinese relations.” Turkel also noted that when Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotoglu visited China recently, his first stop was the majority-Uyghur city of Kashgar, which was "very symbolic." The plight of China's Uyghurs is also a popular issue with the Turkish public.
Remember how worked up everyone got when it emerged that Turkey and China had done joint air force exercises together? Well, now China's Ministry of National Defense is saying that the two countries are conducting ground force exercises. From Xinhua:
The Chinese People's Liberation Army and Turkey's armed forces kicked off a week-long joint military training in Turkey Monday, according to China's Ministry of National Defense.
The training, attended by ground forces from both countries, includes training of basic assault skills in hilly terrains and tactics, the ministry said in a statement.
The training is aimed at enhancing mutual understanding and trust, deepening communication and cooperation between the two armies, it reads.
That's the entire story, and thus far no one in Turkey seems to have reported it.
The South China Morning Post (subscription only) quotes a Chinese security expert suggesting that China's goal with the exercises is to practice against Uyghur terrorists, which probably won't go down well among the Turkish public, which is generally sympathetic to the Uyghur cause:
Mainland security experts said it was a counter-insurgency drill. Though the scale of the exercise is small, it will send a strong political message to Uygur separatists in the restive Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Beijing has accused some Uygur groups of conducting terrorist activities in Xinjiang.
"Both sides chose to hold the exercise in mountainous terrain. That is a strong indication, as it is where terrorists usually hide," Li Wei , an anti-terrorism expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said.
Whirling dervishes perform a Sema ceremony at the Mevlana Cultural Center - built to honor Islamic religious leader Mevlâna Jelaleddin Rumî - in Konya, Turkey. The Sufi ceremony in Konya features Mevlevi Dervishes in long white robes spinning for up to 15 minutes to the rhythm of traditional Turkish musical instruments.
The annual whirling dervish festival at the Mevlana Cultural Center will take place Dec. 10-17.
Husniddin Ato is a freelance photographer based in Uzbekistan.
