List of Tables in the Text

Table I: Dollar Value of U.S. Arms Deliveries to Turkey through the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Programs from FY 1950 to 1998
Table II: U.S. Security Assistance to Turkey, FY 1984 to FY 1999
Table III: Grant Excess Defense Articles (EDA) Under Section 516 to Turkey, FY 1990 to FY 1998
Table IV: International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) Assistance Received by Turkey, FY 1950 to FY 1999

Links to Appendix Tables

Table A: U.S. Arms Transfers to Turkey 1992 - Present
Table B: Turkey's Deals in the Works
Table C: Coproduction and Offsets with Turkey

Executive Summary

This report is being released at a critical juncture in the arms supply relationship between Turkey and the United States. As Turkey embarks upon an eight year, $31 billion military modernization plan, recent events - from the devastating August 17^th earthquake that resulted in 15,000 deaths to the announcement by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of its willingness to lay down its arms in exchange for a chance to pursue Kurdish rights within the Turkish political system - have raised serious questions about the wisdom of promoting a major weapons buildup in Turkey at this time.

Given its role as Turkey's principal arms supplier, the United States has enormous potential leverage over Turkish behavior on critical issues such as respect for human rights and the pursuit of negotiated settlements to the 15-year civil war with the PKK and the 25-year old division of Cyprus. The time to use this leverage is now. In a "political aftershock" prompted by the government's handling of the earthquake, the Turkish media and non-governmental organizations have stepped up demands for fundamental reforms such as the revision of Turkey's military-dominated constitution. In addition, Turkish human rights, economic, and security policies are about to face an intense international spotlight when 54 heads of state attend the upcoming summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation and Europe (OSCE) in Istanbul on November 18th-20th.

The Clinton administration has displayed a split personality in its approach to arms transfers and human rights in Turkey. A 1996 deal for Bell-Textron Cobra helicopters was shelved due to concerns about Turkey's use of U.S.-supplied helicopters against Kurdish civilians in its war on the PKK, and U.S. government subsidies for arms exports to Turkey have been cut back dramatically in the past two years. But the Clinton administration has maintained a steady flow of U.S. weaponry to Turkey (averaging $800 million per year in deliveries) and in late 1997, under pressure from arms makers, the administration cleared the way for Boeing and Bell-Textron to compete for a $4 billion sale of 145 advanced attack helicopters to Ankara.

State Department officials have told non-governmental human rights organizations that the department will not approve a license for a final sale of U.S. attack helicopters to Turkey unless the government makes significant progress on the following criteria:

1) decriminalization of free speech; 2) release of journalists and parliamentarians who have been imprisoned for political reasons; 3) an end to torture and police impunity;

4) reopening of non-governmental organizations that have been shut down by Turkish authorities; 5) democratization and expansion of political participation; 6) lifting the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey; and 7) resettlement of internal refugees displaced by the civil war. Yet despite Turkey's lack of progress in meeting these standards (see section VI, below), at a July 1999 press briefing in Ankara Secretary of Defense William Cohen tried to give Turkey a clean bill of health on human rights when he stated that he saw "no impediment" to any pending U.S. arms transfer to Turkey.

At this moment of tremendous political ferment in Turkey, the Clinton administration should side with the forces in Turkish civil society who are pressing for genuine democracy by abandoning Secretary Cohen's "business-as-usual" approach to weapons exports and conditioning future U.S. arms transfers to Turkey on concrete improvements in human rights and the peaceful resolution of Turkey's internal and external conflicts.

Major Findings

Finding 1 - Despite complaints by the Turkish government and media that the U.S. has imposed a "shadow embargo"on arms sales to Turkey, the United States remains Turkey's top arms supplier. The State Department has acknowledged that "the Turkish armed forces are roughly 80 percent dependent on U.S.-origin equipment." Turkey received over $4.9 billion in U.S. weaponry during first six years of the Clinton administration, an average of over $800 million per year.

Finding 2 - Turkey continues to use U.S.-supplied weaponry to prosecute its war against the PKK and maintain military control of northern Cyprus. U.S.-supplied fighter planes, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and rifles have been a mainstay of Turkey's 15-year long war against the PKK, which has claimed the lives of 37,000 people (mostly Kurds) and resulted in the destruction of 3,000 Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey. Press reports from Cyprus state that 90% of the Turkish military equipment in Cyprus is of U.S.-origin, and a classified report to Congress in the summer of 1999 revealed that both Turkey and Greece have sent U.S. arms to Cyprus, in contravention of a 1988 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act which prohibits equipment sold under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program from being transferred to the island. The steady flow of U.S. weaponry to Turkey has enabled the Turkish government and armed forces to resist a diplomatic settlement of the Cyprus question and ignore PKK peace overtures in pursuit of total military victory in the war in the southeast.

Finding 3 - The vast majority of U.S. arms transfers to Turkey have been subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. In many cases, these taxpayer funds are supporting military production and employment in Turkey, not in the United States. Of the $10.5 billion in U.S. weaponry delivered to Turkey since the outbreak of the war with the PKK in 1984, 77% of the value of those shipments - $8 billion in all - has been directly or indirectly financed by grants and subsidized loans provided by the U.S. government. Many of the largest deals - such as Lockheed Martin's sale of 240 F-16s to the Turkish air force and the FMC Corporation's provision of 1,698 armored vehicles to the Turkish army - involve coproduction and offset provisions which steer investments, jobs, and production to Turkey as a condition of the sale. For example, Turkey's F-16 assembly plant in Ankara - a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) - employs 2,000 production workers, almost entirely paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

Finding 4 - Despite recent gestures toward reform, to date the Turkish government has failed to make progress on the specific human rights criteria set out by the State Department as a condition for approving a final sale of U.S. attack helicopters to Ankara. A June 1999 ruling by the Council of Europe accused Ankara of "repeated and serious" human rights violations and charged that there had been "no significant progress" in the past two years in limiting incidents of torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. Turkey's continuing crackdown on journalists, independent human rights monitors, and Kurdish and Islamic political parties combined with its systematic failure to bring police and security personnel to justice for committing acts of murder and torture suggest that it will take more than a few changes in procedure or the revision of a few particularly egregious laws to create the conditions for genuine human rights improvements in Turkey. In September 1999, Sami Selcuk, the President of the Turkish Court of Appeals, gave a public address in which he indicated how far Turkey has to go to achieve a "real democracy." He argued that the legitimacy of Turkey's current constitution is "close to naught" because it was "imposed on society under threat," and urged that "Turkey must not enter the 21^st century as a country that is busy, by repressive laws, crushing its inhabitants and reducing them to silence."

Recommendations

Recommendation 1 - The Clinton administration should withhold final approval for the sale of U.S. attack helicopters to Turkey unless the Turkish government meets the seven human rights criteria previously outlined by the State Department as a condition of the deal: 1) decriminalization of free speech; 2) release of journalists and parliamentarians who have been imprisoned for political reasons; 3) an end to torture and police impunity; 4) reopening of non-governmental organizations that have been shut down by Turkish authorities; 5) democratization and expansion of political participation; 6) lifting the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey; and 7) resettlement of internal refugees displaced by the civil war.

Recommendation 2 - All future U.S. arms sales to Turkey - from M-16 rifles to F-16 combat aircraft - should be conditioned on concrete improvements in human rights and democratization (as specified above) and efforts to negotiate peaceful settlements to the Cyprus dispute and Turkey's war against the Kurdish resistance in the southeast. Linking U.S. arms sales to peace and democratization may cause friction with the Turkish government in the short-term, but it offers the best hope of building a stable, long-term relationship between the United States and Turkey that addresses the best interests of the people of both nations.

Recommendation 3 - The U.S. government should replace its military-oriented, "arms for influence" policy towards Turkey with a more balanced, "peace first" strategy that emphasizes classic diplomatic and economic ties. Non-military aid and investment projects - from earthquake relief to proposals for a $3.7 billion oil pipeline - should take precedence over arms transfers as a basis for U.S.-Turkish relations.

Recommendation 4 - Congress should enact a uniform set of criteria for arms exports that would subject all countries to the same strict standards. This "Code of Conduct" should prevent U.S. arms sales to countries that are undemocratic, abuse human rights, are engaged in acts of armed aggression, or do not provide data on their arms imports and exports to the United Nations register of conventional armaments.

I. Introduction: Humanitarianism and Double Standards

In the wake of NATO's spring 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo, pundits and politicians alike have rushed to proclaim a new era in U.S. foreign relations in which humanitarian concerns are expected to play a greater role relative to the traditional strategic and economic interests that shaped U.S. policy during the Cold War. While this optimistic view ignores glaring flaws in the way NATO's Kosovo intervention was carried out - from the absence of a United Nations mandate to the widespread use of anti-personnel weapons that wounded and killed hundreds of civilian non-combatants - it definitely captures the emerging emphasis on human rights concepts and humanitarian rhetoric in providing a public rationale for major foreign policy undertakings.⁽¹⁾

The humanitarian impulses cited as justification for the intervention in Kosovo raise obvious questions regarding U.S. policies and practices in other parts of the world. At what point does a country's record of repression become so blatant that it outweighs other economic, military, and political considerations in crafting U.S. policy towards that nation? Will the standards that the U.S. applied to an adversary, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, also be applied to U.S. allies which have engaged in systematic and well-documented human rights abuses?

Perhaps the best test of the staying power of the "new humanitarianism" is the U.S. relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally that has engaged in its own unique brand of internal "ethnic cleansing" against its Kurdish population. Using U.S.-supplied combat planes, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and rifles, the Turkish armed forces have waged a 15-year long civil war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has resulted in over 37,000 deaths (mostly Kurds). Turkey's principal strategy in its war against the PKK has been a "scorched earth" policy in the southeastern portion of the country that has involved bombing, burning, and depopulating over 3,000 Kurdish villages and creating between 500,000 and 2.5 million internal refugees.⁽²⁾

While the current level of intensity of Turkey's 15-year war against the Kurds may differ from the Milosevic regime's massive spring 1999 campaign of ethnic slaughter in Kosovo, the underlying rationales are eerily similar. Just as ethnic cleansing by the Yugoslav armed forces and Serb militias in Kosovo were justified as responses to "terrorist" activities on the part of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Turkey's military repression of its Kurdish population has been rationalized as a legitimate reaction to PKK "terrorism." In both cases the underlying grievances of the affected populations - the denial of fundamental political and cultural rights and the imposition of military and paramilitary violence - have been ignored as the regime sought to impose its will through force of arms.

Beyond the intensity and duration of the killing, the most glaring difference between the two cases is the response of the United States. In Kosovo, the U.S. and its NATO allies waged a major air war to drive Serb forces out of the province. In Turkey, the United States and its NATO allies have been the primary suppliers of armaments to the Ankara regime.

If the Clinton administration can justify going to war over ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, it should be able to muster the political will for the far less demanding task of stopping the supply of U.S. weaponry that is being used to fuel ethnic repression in Turkey. The rationales for continuing to supply U.S. arms to Turkey - including its role as a NATO ally, its strategic position between Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus, and its role as an ally in recent conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo - must be weighed against the ongoing damage to U.S. credibility and Turkish stability entailed in providing so much of the weaponry that Turkey is using in its war against the Kurds.

This report is being released at a critical juncture in the arms supply relationship between the United States and Turkey. The Ankara regime is about to embark on an eight year, $31 billion arms buying spree, beginning with a major purchase of 145 attack helicopters at a total cost of $3.5 to $4 billion. The choice of a contractor for Turkey's new attack helicopter is slated for some time next year.

The attack helicopter deal is particularly controversial given the past use of U.S. helicopters to transport troops and support attacks on Kurdish villages. In 1996, a coalition of arms control and human rights groups persuaded the Clinton administration to withdraw a smaller deal involving Bell-Textron Cobra helicopters due to concerns over the potential use of the aircraft against the Kurdish population.⁽³⁾ The postponement of the Cobra deal and several other smaller sales to Turkey eventually prompted the Turkish government and its allies in the U.S. arms industry to complain bitterly of a "shadow embargo" on U.S. arms sales to Turkey. This claim does not hold up to scrutiny - Turkey has received $4.9 billion in U.S. weaponry during the Clinton administration - but it indicates the urgency that Turkish leaders and U.S. arms exporters place on getting some big new deals signed as soon as possible.

In late 1997, under pressure from Bell-Textron and Boeing, the Clinton administration approved licenses for these U.S. firms to participate in the competition to sell attack helicopters to Ankara.⁽⁴⁾ Mindful of the human rights concerns raised by the sale, State Department officials have asserted that they will not approve a final export license unless Turkey has made significant progress on human rights and agreed to a system under which Washington can monitor Turkey's use of U.S.-supplied equipment. State Department officials have told non-governmental human rights organizations that the Department's standards for measuring Turkey's progress on human rights will include the following: 1) decriminalization of free speech; 2) release of journalists and parliamentarians who have been imprisoned for political reasons; 3) an end to torture and police impunity; 4) reopening of non-governmental organizations that have been shut down by Turkish authorities; 5) democratization and expansion of political participation; 6) the lifting of the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey; and 7) the resettlement of internal refugees displaced by the civil war.⁽⁵⁾ In the year and one-half since the Clinton administration first articulated these criteria, Turkey has failed to show substantial improvement in most of these areas. In fact, in some ways its record has actually gotten worse (see section VI, below). Despite this lack of progress on human rights, there are rumors that President Clinton and his top aides may be preparing to lobby the Turkish government on behalf of U.S. helicopter makers when the president visits Turkey for the summit meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) scheduled for November 18^th-20^th in Istanbul.

Beyond the specifics of the attack helicopter sale, there are deeper issues raised by the U.S.-Turkish arms supply relationship. Is the supply of billions of dollars in top-of-the-line U.S. weaponry to a regime that has engaged in routine ethnic repression and widespread anti-democratic practices in the best interests of the U.S. or Turkish people? Are there better ways to promote democracy and stability in Turkey? Will the U.S. and its allies in NATO and the OSCE put a small fraction of the energy and resources they spent waging war in Kosovo into diplomatic efforts aimed at reversing ethnic repression and anti-democratic practices in Turkey? This report will address these questions in the context of an analysis of the costs and consequences - human, economic, and strategic - of continued U.S. weapons exports to Turkey.

As this report was going to press, the political situation in Turkey was transformed by the repercussions of the August 17^th earthquake, which resulted in 15,000 deaths and provoked serious questions from the Turkish media and public about the competence and integrity of the Turkish state. This in turn has resulted in calls for reform of Turkey's 1982 constitution - which was drafted by a military-led government - and for new approaches to longstanding conflicts like the war in the southeast and Turkey's dispute with Greece over the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Whether this reformist impulse will open the door to major changes in Turkish government policy on the issues of arms and human rights discussed in this report remains to be seen. At a minimum, the sheer costs of repairing the billions of dollars in damage caused by the earthquake should raise questions about the wisdom of proceeding with Turkey's current plans for a multi-billion dollar arms buildup. We will return to these questions below.

The report will cover the following topics: 1) the public rationale for U.S. arms exports to Turkey and a detailed accounting of U.S. arms transfers to Turkey since 1992; 2) an analysis of the use of U.S. weaponry in Turkey's war in the southeast; 3) the role of U.S. arms transfers in fueling tensions in Cyprus and sparking a potential arms race between Greece and Turkey; 4) an overview of Turkey's current weapons shopping spree, including background on the pending attack helicopter deal; 5) an assessment of Turkey's recent record on human rights and democratization; and 6) outlines of a new U.S. security policy towards Turkey.

II. U.S. Arms Sales to Turkey: Rhetoric and Reality

The United States has a longstanding arms supply relationship with Turkey, dating back to the provision of U.S. assistance to Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine in the early 1950s. The architects of the U.S. policy of containment of communism viewed Turkey as a valuable ally because of its strategic location, bordering the former Soviet Union and at the crossroads between Europe and the Middle East. Turkey was also favored because of the willingness of a succession of U.S.-backed regimes in Ankara to provide U.S. forces with access to everything from major airfields (like the air base at Incirlik) to intelligence listening posts that could be used to monitor developments in the Soviet Union.

The U.S.-Turkey security relationship was severely strained during the mid-1970s after Turkish forces used their U.S.-supplied weapons to invade and occupy a portion of the island of Cyprus, nearly sparking a full-scale war with Greece in the process. Public and Congressional reaction to the invasion of Cyprus led to a brief embargo on U.S. military aid to Turkey, but bilateral ties were reinvigorated in the last year of the Carter administration when the two nations signed a Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement (DECA) on March 29, 1980.⁽⁶⁾

Since the end of the Cold War, the rationale for maintaining the U.S. role as Turkey's top arms supplier has shifted from fighting communism to fighting instability, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Turkey is a moderate regime that lives in a "tough neighborhood," and that its value as an ally in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and recent conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo (not to mention potential future conflicts in the Middle East and the Caucasus) outweighs the negative consequences of its record of corruption, human rights abuses, and military interference in politics. A sanitized version of this viewpoint was provided in the FY 1999 edition of the State Department's Congressional Presentation for Foreign Operations:

"Turkey is vitally important to U.S. interests. Its position athwart the Bosporus - at the strategic nexus of Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Caspian - makes it an essential player on a wide range of issues vital to U.S. security, political, and economic interests. In a region of generally weak economies and shaky democratic traditions, political instability, terrorism, and ethnic strife, Turkey is a democratic secular nation that draws its political models from Western Europe and the United States. Turkey has cooperated intensively with the U.S. as a NATO ally and is also vigorously seeking to deepen its political and economic ties with Europe."⁽⁷⁾

The State Department's congressional presentation goes on to note that "Turkish armed forces are roughly 80 percent dependent on U.S.-origin equipment."⁽⁸⁾ Despite assertions to the contrary, to date Turkey's extreme dependence on U.S. weaponry has given the United States limited leverage in influencing Turkish behavior on fundamental issues such as respect for human rights, restraint in the war against the PKK, or negotiations to end tensions between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. As we will discuss in section VI, past promises by Turkey to improve its policies on human rights and democracy in exchange for a continuing flow of U.S. weapons and training have not been fulfilled, raising serious questions about whether the supply of weapons should remain the centerpiece of the U.S.-Turkish relationship (see section VII, below).

The State of the Trade - U.S. Weapons Transfers to Turkey:

Despite President-elect Bill Clinton's November 1992 pledge to "review our arms sales policy and take it up with the other major sellers of the world as part of a long-term effort to reduce the proliferation of weapons of destruction in the hands of people who might use them in very destructive ways," his administration has pursued a business-as-usual policy on arms sales which has, if anything, resulted in more aggressive government support for U.S. weapons exporting firms than they received under the Reagan and Bush administrations.⁽⁹⁾ Advocates of limiting arms sales based on human rights and arms control considerations have scored occasional victories, but in general the Clinton administration's approach to arms sales has been "whatever the market will bear." The ups and downs of U.S. arms exports in the Clinton era have had more to do with the availability of cash-paying customers than any consistent pattern of concern about the consequences of U.S. sales. This has certainly been the case with respect to Turkey, where the shelving of specific deals like a proposed 1994 sale of cluster bombs and a 1996 offer of Cobra attack helicopters have been counterbalanced by a steady flow of U.S. weaponry totaling nearly $4.9 billion during the first six years of the Clinton administration. U.S. sales to Turkey during the Clinton era have been more than four times as large as the entire value of U.S. arms transfers to Turkey during the 34 years from 1950 to 1983. For a detailed listing of major arms deals between the United States and Turkey during the Clinton era, see Appendix Table A.

Those who have expressed concern about a "shadow embargo" on U.S. weapons transfers to Turkey can rest easy: deliveries of U.S. weaponry under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) programs - the two largest channels of U.S. arms exports, topped $1 billion for the first time ever in FY 1997 (see Table I, below). U.S. arms transfers to Turkey during the Clinton administration have averaged out to over $800 million per year, making Turkey one of the largest recipients of U.S. arms during the 1990s, ranking right below such favored clients as Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Israel, and Egypt. And despite the fact that the Clinton administration's term of office has coincided with one of the most intense periods of Turkey's war against the PKK, the volume of U.S. weaponry supplied to Turkey has been increasing, not diminishing over this period. Of the $10.5 billion in U.S. weaponry supplied to Turkey since the civil war in the southeast began in 1984, 47% of the shipments (measured by value) have occurred during the Clinton administration. This large and uninterrupted flow of armaments to the Turkish armed forces speaks far more loudly than the occasional State Department protest or the even rarer instances in which a system is withheld or a deal is delayed due to human rights concerns. For a description of current "deals in the works" between U.S. arms makers and the Turkish armed forces, see Appendix Table B.

Table I:

Total Dollar Value of U.S. Arms Deliveries to Turkey through the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Programs from FY 1950 to 1998

(dollars in thousands)

Fiscal Year	DCS	FMS	Total
FY 1950 to FY 1983	63,831	1,132,234	$1,196,065
FY 1984	26,751	304,907	$331,658
FY 1985	27,848	389,296	$417,144
FY 1986	23,813	282,300	$306,113
FY 1987	67,947	277,138	$345,085
FY 1988	47,464	699,944	$747,408
FY 1989	342,653	620,929	$963,582
FY 1990	220,302	760,801	$981,103
FY 1991	79,922	626,575	$706,497
FY 1992	37,673	703,369	$741,042
FY 1993	122,481	755,811	$878,292
FY 1994	14,824	937,019	$951,843
FY 1995	162,510	374,425	$536,935
FY 1996	64,124	482,850	$546,974
FY 1997	103,866	1,167,109	$1,270,975
FY 1998* (estimate)	201,000	541,204	742,204
Total 1984 to 1998	$1,543,178	$8,923,677	$10,466,855
Total 1993 to 1998 (Clinton Administration)	$668,805	$4,258,418	$4,927,223
Total 1950 to 1998	$1,607,009	$10,055,911	$11,662,920

Source: Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts, Defense Security Assistance Agency as of September 1997. *The FY1998 Direct Commercial Sales estimate was taken from the FY2000 Congressional Presentation for Foreign Operations prepared by the U.S. Department of State, and the Foreign Military Sales FY1998 figure was taken from the Section 655 Report prepared by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Who Pays for Turkey's Weapons Imports - Tracking U.S. Government Subsidies:

The vast majority of U.S. arms transfers to Turkey have been subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Of the $10.5 billion in U.S. weaponry delivered to Turkey under the FMS and commercial sales programs since the outbreak of the war with the PKK in 1984, 77% of the value of those shipments - over $8 billion in all - has been directly or indirectly subsidized under three major security assistance programs: 1) $1 billion in grants under the Military Assistance Program (discontinued in 1989); 2) $1.9 billion in grants and $3.7 billion in subsidized loans under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program; and 3) $1.1 billion in grants and $148.5 million in loans under the Economic Support Fund (ESF) program (see Table II, below). Of the $8 billion in total U.S. subsidies granted since 1984, over $2 billion of that amount was provided during FY 1993 through FY 1998, during the first six years of the Clinton administration.

The three main export subsidy programs have different structures and legislative histories, but their net impacts are similar. The MAP and FMF programs are direct subsidies for weapons exports, while the ESF program is a powerful indirect subsidy. ESF grants and loans are provided only to countries of special security concern to the United States, with the bulk of the funds in recent years going to Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. In Turkey's case, the vast majority of ESF funds have been in the form of cash grants which have been used to offset the costs of weapons purchases from the United States.

Table II:

U.S. Security Assistance to Turkey, FY 1984 to FY 1999

Source: Congressional Presentation for Foreign Operations, U.S. Department of State, FY 1986-2000.

[3] ESF assistance to Turkey has been provided primarily in the form of cash payments which Turkey uses to offset the cost of substantial weapon purchases from the U.S. As such ESF to Turkey represents an important indirect subsidy for U.S. arms exports to Turkey.

In addition to the billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry transferred via the FMS and commercial sales programs, Turkey has been a prime beneficiary of surplus U.S. weapons deliveries, both under the Pentagon's Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program and through the process of "cascading" weapons that the U.S. took out of service in order to meet its commitments under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. During the 1990s alone, the U.S. has given Turkey weaponry with an original acquisition value of over $1.9 billion under the grant EDA program. More than three-quarters of the value of EDA transfers ($1.53 billion) occurred during the Clinton administration (see Table III, below).

Due to depreciation, weapons transferred under EDA are generally worth anywhere from 50% to 80% less than they were when they were originally purchased by U.S. armed forces; but even allowing for this factor, Turkey has received substantial amounts of usable combat equipment via this route. A 1996 report by the Arms Sales Monitoring Project of the Federation of American Scientists stated that in the first half of this decade, Turkey received an impressive arsenal of equipment from the United States via the EDA and CFE cascading channels: 922 main battle tanks, 250 armored personnel carriers, 72 artillery pieces, 145 combat aircraft, 42 helicopters, and 9 combat ships. Surplus transfers to Turkey represent an additional U.S. subsidy worth hundreds of millions of dollars.⁽¹⁰⁾

Table III:

Grant Excess Defense Articles (EDA) Under Section 516 to Turkey, FY 1990 to FY 1998

(Congressional Notifications)

Fiscal Year	Original Acquisition Value
FY 1990	$56,800,000
FY 1991	$342,400,000
FY 1992	$238,300,000
FY 1993	$626,300,000
FY 1994	$107,900,000
FY 1995	$156,900,000
FY 1996	$18,125,000
FY 1997	$273,350,000
FY 1998	$111,547,000
Total	$1,931,622,000

Source: Congressional Presentation for Foreign Operations, U.S. Department of State, FY 1990-2000.

Another economically small but militarily influential form of U.S. support for the Turkish armed forces comes via the Pentagon's International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, which has provided U.S.-funded training to 23,268 Turkish military personnel since 1950. Nearly 2,900 Turkish soldiers, sailors, and pilots have been trained by the U.S. since the beginning of Turkey's war in the southeast in 1984, and of that total 976 have been trained during the Clinton administration's tenure. Over the past decade, Turkey has been the biggest recipient of U.S. military training, outstripping even first-line U.S. allies like Israel and Egypt. The dollar amounts involved are fairly modest relative to the costs of other U.S. security assistance programs to Turkey - a total of $10.7 million in IMET funding has been provided from FY 1993 to FY 1999 (see Table IV, next page). But, as the State Department notes in its most recent presentation to Congress on security assistance, the IMET program is viewed as "a low cost, highly efficient component of U.S. security assistance" that "facilitates the development of important professional and personal relationships that have provided U.S. access and influence in a sector of society that often plays a pivotal role in the transition to democracy."⁽¹¹⁾ In short, IMET is viewed as a way of gaining influence with and access to military leaders in key countries. But since the program is mostly involved with imparting military skills, its impact on promoting human rights and democratization is arguable. This is particularly true in a country like Turkey, which is in the midst of prosecuting a longstanding and brutal civil conflict in which U.S. personnel and independent observers such as journalists and human rights monitors are rarely allowed to observe what is happening in the main zones of combat.

Table IV:

International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) Assistance Received by Turkey, FY 1950 to FY 1999

(dollars in thousands)

Fiscal Year	$ Value	No. of Students
FY 1950 to FY 1983	119,937	20,413
FY 1984	3,160	215
FY 1985	3,297	255
FY 1986	3,075	207
FY 1987	3,375	196
FY 1988	3,461	210
FY 1989	3,408	201
FY 1990	3,371	212
FY 1991	3,552	223
FY 1992	3,288	189
FY 1993	3,032	211
FY 1994	1,006	64
FY 1995	1,102	109
FY 1996	1,095	121
FY 1997	1,454	84
FY 1998	1,505	194
FY 1999 (estimate)	1,500	193
Total 1984 to 1999	$40,681	2,884
Total 1993 to 1999 (Clinton Administration)	$10,694	976
Total 1950 to 1999	$160,618	23,297

Source: Congressional Presentation for Foreign Operations, U.S. Department of State, FY2000 and Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales and Military Assistance Facts, Defense Security Assistance Agency as of September 1997.

Over the past few years, the levels of U.S. aid provided to Turkey under major security assistance programs like the Foreign Military Financing and Economic Support Funds programs have dropped off dramatically, from an average of $400 million per year in grants and loans under the two programs during the five years from FY 1993 through FY 1997 down to zero in FY 1998 and FY 1999. In some cases these reductions have been mandated by Congress to send a message of disapproval regarding Turkey's human rights performance and its conduct of the war in the southeast. For example, Rep. John Porter (R-IL) passed an amendment to the FY 1998 foreign operations appropriations bill limiting ESF to Turkey to $40 million, half of which had to be given to non-governmental organizations.⁽¹²⁾ But the bulk of the reductions have been driven by other factors, such as the need to find cuts in the context of a shrinking foreign aid pie; Congressional concerns over the risks inherent in FMF loans (a major source of support for Turkey) which led to the termination of the loan program; an assessment that Turkey's overall economic performance justified phasing out ESF and FMF funding as of FY 1999; and the need to divert scarce security assistance funding towards new commitments such as helping prospective members of the NATO alliance upgrade their arsenals to make them interoperable with those of existing NATO members. Whichever factor was predominant, the drop-off in U.S. aid was dramatic. The only military aid programs to receive new infusions of funding over the past two years have been the IMET program, at about $1.5 million per year, and the Excess Defense Articles program, which in FY 1998 authorized the transfer of equipment to Turkey with an original acquisition value of over $111 million.

These cutbacks in security assistance have not dampened the Pentagon and State Department's optimistic outlook regarding future U.S. weapons exports to Turkey. In its FY 1999 congressional presentation, State asserts that despite the reductions, "The U.S. intends to continue to support the maintenance and refurbishing of U.S.-origin defense systems already in the Turkish inventory."⁽¹³⁾ In addition to the commitment to maintain current systems, statistics presented in the FY 2000 congressional presentation suggest a significant increase in U.S. sales to Turkey, with agreements under the FMS program expected to more than double, from $240.5 million in FY 1998 to $575 million in FY 2000.⁽¹⁴⁾ It was also estimated that projected deliveries under the commercial sales program - which are generally much harder to predict with any accuracy - could quadruple from FY1998 to FY1999. These large projected increases of U.S. weapons deliveries to Turkey during a period in which short-term subsidies for U.S. arms sales to Ankara have been sharply reduced suggest that some of the new sales may be financed via existing loans and grants that have yet to be fully tapped, or that the Clinton administration will seek creative means of financing to support new deals. The alternative would be for Turkey to devote a larger share of its own budget to weapons purchases at a time when it is seeking billions of dollars worth of humanitarian relief from the United States and other nations to deal with the consequences of the August 17^th earthquake.

The creative financing approach has been utilized before with respect to Turkey - in the early 1990s, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) spearheaded a successful effort to pass legislation allowing the Export-Import Bank to make a special one-time military loan to Turkey in support of a $1.3 billion deal for Connecticut-built Black Hawk helicopters (manufactured by the Sikorsky helicopter unit of the United Technologies corporation). And the Aerospace Industries Association has been lobbying Congress and the Clinton administration to allow borrowers using the Pentagon's Defense Export Loan Guarantee program to roll the costs of exposure fees associated with arms sales loans into the cost of the total loan.⁽¹⁵⁾ This change would allow borrowers like Turkey to use the program with no up front costs, but it would also increase the risk of defaults that would have to be paid for by the U.S. Treasury.

If a U.S. firm wins a major new deal for the sale of tanks, fighter aircraft, or attack helicopters in the context of Turkey's new weapons shopping spree (see section IV, below), there is a high likelihood that Turkey and its allies in the U.S. arms industry will either seek new channels of taxpayer subsidies to support the deal or seek to get Turkey back on the rolls of the existing FMF or ESF programs.

Offsets and Coproduction - Subsidizing Turkey's Military-Industrial Complex:

In addition to the benefits that the Turkish military has derived from the billions of dollars in U.S. military grants and loans that it has received over the past two decades, Turkey's military industry has been a prime beneficiary of assistance from U.S. arms exporters as a result of arms sales offsets. Offsets are arrangements negotiated between arms exporting firms and their major client nations in which the weapons company agrees to provide specified investments and other economic assistance to "offset" the costs of importing the system in question. An offset deal is essentially a quid pro quo: if we buy your weapons, you have to plow some money into our economy. Direct offsets involve production of components of the weapons system in the purchasing country. If major portions of the system are produced overseas (including final assembly), a direct offset deal is known as a coproduction arrangement. There are also indirect offsets, in which weapons companies make investments or undertake promotional activities on behalf of the client nation in non-military areas. For example, a company might agree to help build a hotel complex in the client nation, or provide subcontracts to companies in the host country for non-military projects, or help promote that client nation's exports in the U.S. market.⁽¹⁶⁾ The investments and technology transfers provided by U.S. arms companies to their foreign clients have mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar business. In many instances, the business transferred overseas as part of an offset deal comes at the expense of U.S. firms - e.g., in a 1997 Commerce Department survey, 83% of the defense contractors surveyed reported losing significant business to foreign companies as a result of offset deals.⁽¹⁷⁾

In the case of Turkey, offset deals often directly benefit officials of the armed forces, who are heavily involved in Turkish industry via stock ownership and representation on corporate boards of directors. As a result, U.S. offset deals with Turkey serve to enhance the economic power of Turkey's military elite, which in turn increases their already considerable political clout. Since the Turkish arms industry is one of the top beneficiaries of defense offsets from the United States (see Appendix Table C, below), the economic and political impacts of these deals are substantial. Under the "Peace Onyx" program, Lockheed Martin (and its predecessor on the F-16 program, General Dynamics) has helped Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) establish one of the largest assembly lines for combat aircraft in the world in a facility located on the southern outskirts of Ankara. Since the program was inaugurated in 1984, Turkey has ordered 240 F-16s, of which 175 have been delivered to date. The vast majority of the aircraft have been assembled at TAI's Ankara facility, which employs 2,000 production workers.⁽¹⁸⁾

Turkey's F-16 program goes far beyond merely assembling components produced in the United States. U.S. firms are providing Turkey with technology, training, and financing to establish a foothold in the major aspects of military aerospace production. Towards that end, General Electric helped create Tusas Engine Industries, a Turkish-American joint stock company which manufactures engine parts and assembles the F110-GE-100 engine for the TAI F-16 production line. Lockheed Martin owns a 49% share in MIKES, a Turkish firm that produces the ALQ-178-V5 radar and electronic countermeasures systems used on the F-16. And Litton is collaborating with the Turkish firm Aselsan to build F-16 components.

Just as Lockheed Martin is at the center of helping Turkey build its own aerospace industry, the U.S.-based FMC Corporation (which now produces armored vehicles as part of a joint venture arrangement with the Harsco Corporation under the name United Defense) has been in on the ground floor of helping Turkish industry develop a capability to build armored personnel carriers and military trucks. In 1991, the Turkish firm FMC-Nurol began production on 1,698 U.S.-designed M-113 armored personnel carriers; as of last year 1,500 of the vehicles had been delivered. The Texas Instruments corporation is helping the Turkish firm Aselsan build optical sights and night vision equipment for the Turkish M-113s, and the U.S. firm Sergant Fletcher has a joint venture with the Turkish company Kayseri Werkplaats to upgrade existing Turkish M-113s. With assistance from United Defense, FMC-Nurol has developed a 'family of military vehicles' ranging from light military trucks to armored personnel carriers that it is now seeking to export to markets in Europe and the Middle East.⁽¹⁹⁾

Turkey will also be seeking coproduction of its new attack helicopter, which is being bid on by both Boeing (the Apache) and Bell Helicopter Textron (the King Cobra, an advanced version of the company's Super Cobra model), as well as a planned $7 billlion purchase of main battle tanks, in which foreign bidders must team up with potential Turkish co-producers.⁽²⁰⁾ An early 1990s deal for coproduction of Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters fell through after criticisms were raised about the use of these aircraft to ferry Turkish troops into combat in the southeast, but during this decade Turkey has purchased a total of 95 Black Hawks through direct commercial channels.

Coproduction arrangements with Turkey raise a number of economic and security questions. On the economic front, coproduction shifts jobs to Turkey from arms plants in the United States. Lockheed Martin now assembles or produces components of its F-16 fighter in 11 countries, with full assembly lines in South Korea and Turkey that rival its main U.S. line - in Fort Worth, Texas - in size. The assembly line in Turkey has been used not only to produce the planes purchased by Ankara, but also as the primary production site for an order of 40 F-16s that went to Egypt in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. The Egyptian deal - in which aircraft paid for by $1.6 billion in U.S. military aid were produced in Turkey - is a worst case example of how coproduction can result in the export of U.S. jobs. To add insult to injury, the Turkish facility has also been used to train South Korean workers in production techniques for use on the F-16 line in Seoul - only after unionized workers at the U.S. F-16 plant in Fort Worth, Texas refused to train their South Korean counterparts to do their jobs.⁽²¹⁾ Similarly, FMC-Nurol's interest in exporting U.S.-designed M-113s and military trucks could cut into business that might otherwise go to U.S. firms - including FMC's own U.S. facilities.

On the security front, the massive transfer of arms production techniques has implications both for arms proliferation and for the ability of the United States to exert leverage over Turkey's use of U.S.-supplied systems. As Turkish firms master larger and larger shares of the production techniques needed to build U.S. systems, it will be harder for the U.S. government to influence Turkish behavior by cutting off spare parts. In addition, the involvement of Turkish firms in the production of sensitive systems based on U.S. technology - from ammunition production in conjunction with the U.S. firm General Defense to the participation of the Turkish firms Aselsan and Rokestan in a European consortium building the Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles - could eventually lead to a situation in which Turkey might become yet another significant source of light weaponry to regions of active conflict.

Measuring Dependency - The Role of U.S. Weapons in the Turkish Armed Forces:

The dependency of the Turkish military on U.S. aid and arms has created a situation in which it is hard to imagine Turkish forces undertaking any major operation without utilizing U.S. equipment. U.S. weaponry is particularly prevalent in the Turkish army and air force, the two services most heavily involved in the war in the southeast.

Of the more than 4,200 main battle tanks in the inventory of the Turkish army, over 3,800 are U.S.-designed M-48 and M-60 models which have been transferred primarily under surplus weapons giveaway programs. Similarly, the vast bulk of Turkey's holdings of armored infantry fighting vehicles (AIFV) and armored personnel carriers (APC's) consists of 2,813 United Defense M-113 APC's - this equipment has been used both in Turkey's war in the southeast and in the Turkish armed forces periodic attacks on Kurdish camps in northern Iraq (see next section). The Turkish army's attack helicopter force (37 aircraft) is composed entirely of Bell-Textron AH-1W Cobra helicopters, which have also reportedly been used in attacks on Kurdish villages. And the most important transport helicopter in the Turkish inventory is the Sikorsky Black Hawk (55 transferred to date).⁽²²⁾

If anything, the Turkish air force is even more dependent on U.S. technology than the army. Aside from 44 Spanish CN-235 transport aircraft which were coproduced in Turkey by Turkish Aerospace Industries, virtually the entire stock of combat aircraft operated by the Turkish Air Force is made up of U.S.-origin planes, including 175 Lockheed Martin F-16s, 87 Northrop (now Northrop Grumman) F-5s, and 178 McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) F-4Es.⁽²³⁾ For a full accounting of U.S. weaponry transferred to Turkey since 1992, see Appendix Table A, below.

III. Turkey's Use of U.S.-Origin Weaponry in Its War Against the Kurds

Since 1984 the Turkish armed forces have been engaged in a brutal and costly war against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a militant Kurdish opposition group. As noted above, since the outbreak of the war, over 37,000 people have been killed, most of them Kurds. In addition, approximately 3,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed in the southeastern provinces as part of the Turkish military's strategy of attempting to eliminate support for the PKK by attacking entire areas inhabited by suspected PKK sympathizers.

Turkey has shown little interest in pursuing anything but a decisive military victory over the PKK and its sympathizers, however costly or elusive that objective may be in practice. Since the November 12, 1998 capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, the Turkish government has refused numerous offers from Ocalan and other PKK officials for a negotiated end to the conflict. Instead, the Turkish government is seeking the death penalty against Ocalan for his alleged role in terrorism. The Turkish military seems intent on pursuing a military solution to an essentially political problem - the desire of Turkey's Kurdish population for greater cultural and political autonomy.

The root of the conflict is the Turkish state's unwillingness to allow members of the Kurdish population to live as Kurds within Turkey. Turkey is home to approximately ten million Kurds, who account for roughly 20% of Turkey's population. Prior to the war, the majority of Turkey's Kurdish population lived in the nine provinces in the southeast, an area that is poorer and more economically underdeveloped than the rest of Turkey. Among other restrictions, Kurds are banned from speaking their own language in any official forum or in schools. Kurdish newspapers, cultural centers, and political parties are routinely banned, attacked, and in some cases physically destroyed. And while it is true that some Kurds have been integrated into Turkish society and even enjoy positions of political and economic influence, they have been able to achieve this status only by defining themselves as Turks and giving up their distinct ethnic and cultural heritage. Although many Kurds oppose the violent tactics of the PKK, the underlying goals of the insurgency are believed to enjoy strong sympathy from Kurds who oppose the Turkish government's harsh repression of their political, civil, and cultural rights.

Both sides in the war have engaged in serious violations of human rights. PKK abuses have included extrajudicial killings, kidnapping, extortion, and destruction of property. Attacks are often targeted against those the PKK accuses of "cooperating with the state," including civil servants, teachers, and the families of Kurds who have joined the "village guards," a civil defense militia armed and paid for by the Turkish military.

The Turkish military, for its part, has undertaken a systematic scorched earth campaign in the southeast, intended to eradicate any popular base of support for the PKK. This policy has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Kurdish civilians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more. The two million or more Kurds who have been driven from their homes by the war receive little or no resettlement aid from the Turkish state, and most of them live in desperate poverty in Turkey's urban shanty towns.

For most Kurdish civilians, the war presents an impossible predicament. If villagers provide food or logistical support to the PKK, they risk attack by the Turkish military. If they decide instead to join the government-aligned "village guards," they will be subject to attack by PKK forces. As the State Department has noted, "reputable human rights NGOs, after undertaking research and field interviews, report that most village evacuations result from actions by Turkish security forces and that forced displacements usually result from refusal to join the village guard system or from supporting the PKK, usually for giving food or a place to sleep, or for suspicion of committing such acts"⁽²⁴⁾ (emphasis added). Some villagers willingly join the village guards out of economic need or political commitment, but many are pressured to enter the system. In January 1997, for example, there were reports of large scale detentions by the gendarmarie in the Lice district of Dyarbakir (the largest city in the southeast) based on the refusal of Kurds to join the village guard system.

Throughout much of the war, the Turkish government has imposed a state of emergency in the southeast, making it very difficult for journalists, human rights monitors, or other independent observers to document what is happening there. The Red Cross has also been banned from conducting relief work in the region. A center for torture survivors set up by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey was shut down for four months just after it opened in 1998, and staff at the center have been harassed by Turkish officials since that time.

As this report was going to press, some analysts were discerning a glimmer of hope that the Turkish military might be quietly shifting its attitude towards Kurdish cultural rights in response to the PKK's announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Turkish territory and suspend armed operations in exchange for the opportunity to seek Kurdish rights through the Turkish political process. In a meeting with a select group of Turkish journalists in early September, Turkey's military chief-of-staff, General Huseyin Kivrikoglu, acknowledged that the PKK had scaled back its demands for an independent Kurdistan: "They don't want a federation. What they want are some cultural rights. Some of these have been granted anyway." While hardly a ringing endorsement of Kurdish rights, General Kivrikoglu's statements were greeted warmly by PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who described them as a "positive step in developing cultural freedom and democratization." Ertugrul Ozkok, the editor of Turkey's largest circulation paper, Hurriyet, viewed the tone of the general's remarks on the Kurdish issue as a significant breakthrough, and suggested dramatically that "Turkey has come to the brink of a solution."⁽²⁵⁾ But the Turkish army quickly distanced itself from these optimistic projections in a statement asserting that "It is out of the question that the general staff accept the PKK terror organization as an interlocutor, discuss its suggestions, or make nay concessions."⁽²⁶⁾ The army later affirmed that "the Turkish armed forces are determined to continue the battle until the last terrorist has been neutralized," or the PKK completely and unconditionally surrenders.⁽²⁷⁾

Ongoing military activities suggest a continued hardline position on the part of the Turkish armed forces. On September 5^th - four days after PKK leaders had announced their intention to put down their arms and leave Turkey - Turkish forces stepped up attacks on the organization, killing 19 rebels in a battle in the mountains outside of the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. On September 15^th, Turkish forces killed 10 PKK rebels in the mountains of Hakkari province, which borders Iran and Iraq. On September 29^th, about 5,000 Turkish troops and armed helicopters entered northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK rebels, bombing suspected PKK sites and killing at least 13 rebels.⁽²⁸⁾

The Turkish government's reaction to the PKK's peace offer has been mixed at best. In late August the Turkish parliament passed a "repentance law" which would provide an amnesty for PKK rebels who lay down their arms, but it only covers rebels who never participated in any armed operations. Similarly, a recent law pardoning journalists convicted of writing articles sympathetic to the PKK continues to uphold the notion that such writings are a crime under Turkish law, and threatens to imprison authors of similar pieces in the future (see further discussion below, in section VI).⁽²⁹⁾

U.S. policy on arms exports to Turkey can have an important impact on the Turkish government's decision making with regard to the war in the southeast. An open-handed policy of providing arms without tough conditions on human rights or a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish conflict could embolden hardliners in the Turkish military who seek a military "final victory." Restricting arms unless and until Turkey makes measurable progress on human rights and peace in the southeast could help tip the balance towards those in the Turkish government who may be open to a non-military solution to the Kurdish problem. In deciding how to handle pending arms requests from Turkey, U.S. policy makers should take a hard look at Turkey's recent history on arms and human rights.

The Role of U.S. Weapons in Turkish Human Rights Abuses:

Today, it is widely understood that U.S. weapons have been used extensively by the Turkish government in its war in the southeast, and that in many instances these weapons have been used to abuse human rights and violate the laws of war. The only dispute is over the extent of abuses utilizing U.S. systems, and whether they have increased, decreased, or remained steady through the course of the conflict.

The first official acknowledgment of the role of U.S. weaponry in human rights violations in Turkey came in a June 1995 State Department report that was conducted as the result of legislation promoted by key members of Congress such as Rep. John Porter (R-IL). Although State Department investigators were denied access to key conflict areas in the southeast by the Turkish government, their summary of the evidence they were able to gather was conclusive: "U.S.-origin equipment, which accounts for most major items of the Turkish military inventory, has been used in operations against the PKK during which human rights abuses have occurred." The report also found "highly credible" evidence that U.S.-manufactured Sikorsky Black Hawk transport helicopters, Bell-Textron Super Cobra attack helicopters, and FMC Corp. M-113 armored personnel carriers had been used to attack Kurdish villages and violate the human rights of civilians. Citing evidence from 1992 through 1995, during the height of Turkey's campaign to depopulate Kurdish villages, the report notes that "it is highly likely that such equipment was used in the evacuation and/or destruction of villages."⁽³⁰⁾

Just three months after the State Department's report came out, Human Rights Watch issued its own extensive report entitled "Weapons Transfers and Violations of the Laws of War in Turkey," based on field research and interviews conducted inside Turkey. Human Rights Watch sharply rebuked the State Department report for its "failure to provide original investigative findings," and for failing to make "independent and full access to the southeast a top priority in its dealings with Turkish authorities." Based on its own original research, the Human Rights Watch report came up with a stronger version of the conclusion that had been arrived at by the State Department: "U.S. weapons, as well as those supplied by other NATO members, are regularly used by Turkey to commit severe human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war in the southeast."⁽³¹⁾

In light of the pending sale of 145 attack helicopters to Turkey, Human Rights Watch's finding that U.S.-made helicopters "are the backbone of the Turkish counterinsurgency effort" is particularly relevant. Transport helicopters, "most likely U.S.-made and -supplied S-70A Black Hawks and UH-1 Hueys," are used to bring troops to Kurdish villages where Turkish soldiers engage in "forcible displacements, summary executions, indiscriminate fire, or torture." The report also notes that "helicopter gunships, most probably U.S.-supplied Cobras, are used to fire indiscriminately at villages or other civilian settlements, either in an attempt to frighten villagers into leaving or as part of an indiscriminate attack against suspected PKK guerillas or suspected PKK civilian sympathizers."

Human Rights Watch also found that U.S. made tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other weaponry were directly implicated in abuses perpetrated by Turkish security forces. One specific example underscores how these U.S. systems have been used by Turkish forces in their campaign of destruction against Kurdish villages:

"A former Turkish soldier told Human Rights Watch that on August 18-20, 1992, troops used U.S.-supplied M-48 and M-60 tanks, 105mm artillery, U.S.-supplied M-113 armored personnel carriers, U.S.-designed M-16 rifles, and LAW anti-tank rockets to assault the town of Sirnak following an alleged PKK provocation. Twenty-two civilians died in the assault, sixty were wounded, and many of the town's 25,000 residents fled in panic. Much of the town was destroyed."⁽³²⁾

Human Rights Watch has also confirmed that Turkish forces often use U.S.-origin small arms to commit abuses: "Particularly troubling was the preference displayed by Turkey's special counterinsurgency forces, who are renowned for their abusive behavior, for U.S. designed-small arms such as the M-16 assault rifle," made by Colt Industries. The report goes on to note that U.S.-designed M-16 rifles and M-203 grenade launchers, capable of firing a wide range of 40 mm high explosives, are "prevalent in the Jandarma and special police forces, which have the worst human rights reputation in Turkey's southeast." In addition, officers in the Bolu and Kayseri Commando brigades of the Turkish army, who have been trained by the U.S. and "are considered far more abusive of the civilian population than the regular Army," carry U.S.-made M-16s.⁽³³⁾

Since 1995, the peak year for the Turkish government's strategy of widespread depopulation of Kurdish villages, reporting on the use of U.S. weaponry in the war in the southeast has been much more sporadic. A July 1997 State Department report on "U.S. Military Equipment and Human Rights Violations" in Turkey suggests that there has been a decline in the use of U.S. weaponry to abuse human rights in Turkey simply because the southeast has been severely depopulated and there are therefore fewer examples of large-scale abuses. But the report's own underlying logic seems to suggest that Turkish government forces are still engaging in human rights abuses, but are doing so in a series of smaller actions dictated by the current stage of the conflict. For example, at one point the report notes that "because so many villages have already been evacuated . . . there are fewer large-scale forced evacuations of villages by security forces." But, after noting that most of the fighting is now occurring in more remote mountainous areas, the report states that "smaller-scale forced evacuations from remote areas continue." In short, State seems to be describing a change in Turkish military tactics, not an improvement in human rights attitudes or performance. The State Department's 1997 report also acknowledges that use of U.S. equipment during operations against the PKK in which "serious abuses are committed by security forces" remains "likely," and further notes that the Jandarma and police paramilitary units - the groups most frequently implicated in "disappearances" and political killings - continue to be armed with U.S.-origin M-16 rifles and M-203 grenade launchers.⁽³⁴⁾

Another particularly troubling use of U.S. weaponry by Turkish forces is the involvement of U.S. combat aircraft, troop transport helicopters, and armored vehicles in Turkey's ongoing series of raids on suspected Kurdish strongholds in neighboring Iran and Iraq. Although purportedly aimed at PKK fighters, the attacks on northern Iraq have caused significant civilian casualties and depopulated Iraqi villages along the Turkish border. In mid-July of 1999, the Iranian government charged the Turkish air force with bombing targets inside Iranian territory, killing five people and injuring ten. Turkish authorities denied the attack at first, as they had done in the case of a 1994 incursion that Turkey later acknowledged. But as of this writing the Turkish government had agreed to undertake a joint investigation of the alleged attack in conjunction with Iranian authorities.⁽³⁵⁾ Turkish aerial and land invasions of northern Iraq - which is supposed to be a United Nations approved "no fly zone" designed to protect the vulnerable Iraqi Kurdish population - have become routine occurrences over the past five years, ranging from a 35,000-strong invasion in 1995 that was described as the largest cross-border military action in Turkish history, to a 10,000-person incursion that was undertaken in July of 1999.⁽³⁶⁾ The Clinton administration's willingness to stand by and let Turkey bomb and shell northern Iraq in pursuit of alleged PKK units stands in stark (and hypocritical) contrast to the participation of U.S. forces in Operation Northern Watch, the no fly zone that is meant to keep the Iraqi air force out of the very same territory.

IV. Fueling Tensions: Cyprus and the Greek/Turkish Arms Race

Regional Tensions:

While U.S.-supplied helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and small arms are misused by the Turkish military against Kurdish rebels, U.S.-origin warships and fighter jets are also used by Turkey to provoke and threaten Greece and to maintain the conflict in Cyprus, directly impacting U.S. strategic interests. Though both are members of NATO, Greece and Turkey have long been bitter rivals whose regular clashes occasionally risk erupting into military conflict. Disputes between Turkey and Greece often impact the formulation of NATO policy, but a full military confrontation between them would be disastrous for the alliance. Yet by supplying both Greece and Turkey with large quantities of sophisticated armaments, the U.S. is helping to augment, rather than alleviate, regional tensions and is undercutting its own efforts to promote peace in the Aegean.

The fractious relationship between Greece and Turkey centers upon Turkey's 25-year occupation of northern Cyprus, disagreement over the rights to several Aegean islands and natural resources in the seabed, contention of territorial waters and airspace delineation, and Greece's alleged support for the PKK. These disputes have sometimes prompted Turkey to threaten military force against Greece or Cyprus, threats which cannot always be written off as grandstanding for domestic consumption. For instance, Greek ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention in 1995 - which would allow Greece to extend its territorial waters to cover most of the Aegean, cutting off major Turkish ports from free access to the high seas - led the Turkish parliament to give the government the right to use "all necessary measures," including force, to prevent this move.⁽³⁷⁾ Greece has militarized several islands near the Turkish coast, and Turkey has deployed a large Turkish amphibious force - outside of NATO command - along the nearby shore.⁽³⁸⁾ Turkish threats of force in the winter of 1998-99 pressured the Cypriot government to change course on a planned purchase of S-300 surface-to-air missiles and deploy them in Crete instead. Tensions grew so high over the missile dispute that the U.S. sent in an aircraft carrier to "monitor events in the region."⁽³⁹⁾ Turkey again threatened force against Greece in March 1999 after it was revealed that Greece had sheltered PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in its embassy in Kenya for several weeks.

The U.S. government has regularly encouraged Greece and Turkey to engage in confidence-building measures and to avoid antagonizing acts. But rather than using arms control as a stabilizing measure, the administration's approach has been to make sure that similar amounts of new weapons enter the Aegean arsenals in parallel. For example, Turkey's decision in the summer of 1999 to co-produce Popeye air-to-ground missiles with Israel prompted the U.S. government to release a sale of similar air-to-ground missiles to Greece.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Frigates, destroyers, and Hellfire antitank missiles sold to Greece in the summer of 1998 were matched with a sale of frigates and Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Turkey. These sales were announced at a time when the U.S. was trying unsuccessfully to launch an effort to renew dialogue on Cyprus, leading one to wonder how the sales notifications to Congress could genuinely proclaim that the sales "will not adversely affect either the military balance in the region or U.S. efforts to encourage a negotiated settlement of the Cyprus question."

The U.S. government should recognize that selling equal amounts of arms to both parties to a dispute is not an equalizing tactic, but a destabilizing one.⁽⁴¹⁾ Both states cite the other as an external security threat and often a justification for new arms acquisitions. For example, Turkey sought new frigates and sea helicopters following the flare-up of tensions in the Aegean in 1996.⁽⁴²⁾ Moreover, each new level of technology introduced in the region ratchets up the arms race another notch, fueling expensive purchases on both sides. The Turkish decision to launch a $31 billion dollar military modernization program over the next 10 years was countered by a Greek decision to reverse its economizing defense cuts and build up its arsenal as well with $24 billion over the next eight years.⁽⁴³⁾ Greece is currently considering buying a group of F-15 fighter jets, prompting Turkey to consider upgrading its less sophisticated F-16 fleet.

Finally, this "evenhanded" approach only heightens the militarization of a region already laden with large quantities of weapons. Given the close quarters in which these rivals conduct military exercises and training, clashes are a regular occurrence, as are the crises they induce. In training missions or other sorties, Turkey regularly flies F-16 and F-4 fighters into Greek airspace, twice buzzing the planes of high Greek officials and often leading Greece to intercept the jets.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Turkish ships also often enter Greek territorial waters during exercises, and Greek and Turkish ships regularly challenge each other in contested waters.

Cyprus remains one of the most militarized spots in the world, with Turkey maintaining about 30,000 troops on the northern part of Cyprus and Greece also keeping several thousand troops stationed in the south. A classified report to Congress in the summer of 1999 revealed that U.S. arms have been sent by both Greece and Turkey to Cyprus, in contravention of a 1988 law which prohibits equipment sold under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program from being transferred to the island.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Press reports from Cyprus state that 90% of the Turkish military equipment in Cyprus - including tanks, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft systems, and small arms - are of U.S. origin, though commercial arms sales or pre-1988 FMS sales would not violate the 1988 law.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Both Turkey and Greece sent F-16s to Cyprus in a show of force over the pending S-300 missile sale, and Turkey also used F-16 and F-4s during a 1997 major military exercise in Cyprus .⁽⁴⁷⁾ Both countries conduct military exercises on the island, and - despite occasional sho