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DESECURITIZATION OF TURKISH FOREIGN POLICY TOWARDS

NORTHERN IRAQ: ACTOR, CONTEXT, AND AUDIENCE1

(Draft-Please do not cite without author’s permission!)

ECPR 2017 General Conference

September 6-9, 2017

Oslo, Norway

Özlem Kayhan Pusane

Işık University, İstanbul, Turkey

Introduction

Since the 1961 Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, Turkish policymakers have been concerned

about the possibility of similar developments taking place in Turkey, where a large Kurdish

minority exists. Therefore, since the 1960s, Turkish foreign policymakers have presented the

possible emergence of a Kurdish autonomous region or an independent Kurdish state in northern

Iraq as an existential threat to Turkey. Turkey’s concerns significantly intensified in the

aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War with the establishment of a no-fly zone and a safe-haven for the

Kurds in this area. Although the then Turkish President Turgut Özal played a key role in the

creation of the no-fly zone, the PKK’s use of northern Iraq as a living space where its members

could easily cross the border into Turkey, and the gradual transformation of northern Iraq into

almost a de-facto Kurdish state led to a serious threat perception in the minds of the Turkish

policymakers throughout the 1990s.

                                                                                                               1 This research was in part supported by a TÜBİTAK career grant (grant number 114K354).

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With the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and the PKK’s subsequent

unilateral ceasefire in 1999, these concerns subsided to some extent. However, the 2003 US War

in Iraq provided a new favorable atmosphere for the PKK. Within the uncertain political

environment in Iraq in the face of the war, the PKK terrorism gained a new momentum. The

organization put an end to its unilateral ceasefire in 2004 and once again initiated its attacks

against Turkey. Since the PKK headquarters are located in the Qandil Mountains which remain

within the borders of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Turkey’s relations with the

KRG became highly securitized from the early 2000s onwards.

Despite this historical background, Turkey went through a process of desecuritization in

its relations with the KRG from 2007/2008 onwards. Since the period of 2007/2008, Turkish

foreign policy towards the KRG has moved off the country’s security agenda to a great extent

and returned into the realm of ‘normal politics’, where Turkey’s relations with the Iraqi Kurdish

actors ‘were given a consciously commercial focus, rather than concentrating exclusively on

security rivalry, as in the past’ (Robins, 2013: 387).

This paper explores the interaction between the securitizing actor, external context, and

the audience in the process of desecuritizing Turkish foreign policy towards the KRG from

2007/2008 onwards. Scholars have so far generated a vast literature on securitization and

desecuritization. However, one of the mostly cited criticisms about the existing

securitization/desecuritization studies is the utmost focus on the speech-act of the

(de)securitizing actor and the under-theorized nature of the context within which these processes

take place. In line with this criticism, this paper presents an empirical study to help better

understand different aspects of the processes of securitization and desecuritization. First, it shows

that from 2007/2008 onwards, Turkish Prime Minister (and then President) Tayyip Erdoğan was

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the main desecuritizing actor with respect to Turkey’s relations with the KRG, but only within

the constraints of the external context, namely the civil-military power struggle in Turkey and

the country’s broader economic and political conjuncture. Second, the paper argues that different

roles played by multiple audiences both at the bureaucratic and public levels paved the way for

the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations from 2007/2008 onwards. The rest of the paper

proceeds as follows: First, a general introduction about the securitization/desecuritization

framework is provided. The second section presents a detailed discussion about the social,

political, and the economic context within which the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations

has taken place. This section also discusses what kind of audiences took part in the

desecuritization of Turkish foreign policy towards the KRG. The final section summarizes the

paper’s main arguments and presents a number of conclusions.

Securitization, Desecuritization, and Turkey-KRG Relations

The concept of securitization has been one of the most important, yet disputed

contributions of the Copenhagen School (Stritzel, 2007: 358). According to Wæver and Buzan,

securitization is a speech act ‘through which an intersubjective understanding is constructed

within a political community to treat something as an existential threat to a valued referent

object, and to enable a call for urgent and exceptional measures to deal with the threat’ (Buzan

and Wæver, 2003: 491). ‘[B]y uttering “security,” a state representative moves a particular

development into a specific area and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are

necessary to block it’ (Wæver, 1995: 55).

The Copenhagen School’s securitization framework puts a great deal of emphasis on the

security speech-act, that is, the utterance of security itself. According to this framework, two

conditions are necessary for a successful securitization, namely ‘the internal, linguistic-

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grammatical’, and ‘the external, contextual, and social’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 32). Here, the

internal condition refers to the grammar of security, where the presence of an existential threat to

the referent object is incorporated into the state representatives’ discourse. The external

condition, on the other hand, has two dimensions: First, a securitization attempt becomes

successful to the extent that the securitizing actor is in a position of authority so that the audience

is likely to accept his/her attempt. Second, the characteristics of the claimed threats play an

important role in facilitating the process of securitization. Here, Buzan makes the case that

certain things are widely accepted as threatening, such as ‘tanks, hostile sentiments, or polluted

waters’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 33).

Although the securitization framework discusses both the internal and external conditions

for a securitization attempt to be successful, this framework has proven weak in conceptualizing

the external context within which securitization takes place. As noted above, the Copenhagen

School acknowledges that securitization is an intersubjective act. This signifies that in order for a

securitization act to take place, the proposed threat representation must be accepted (or shared)

by the audience. However, in this intersubjective process, it is necessary to have a suitable

context within which first, the securitizing actor is authorized to come up with a relevant security

utterance and second, the audience is convinced by the former’s security articulation as a valid

representation. Thus, this paper takes on Stritzel’s (2007) suggestion to pay significant attention

to the embeddedness of the securitization process.

In addition to the idea of embeddedness, audience is another concept that still needs

clarification in the securitization/desecuritization framework. Wæver argues that “[a]udience is

those who have to be convinced in order for the securitizing move to be successful…Although

one often tends to think in terms of ‘the population’ or citizenry being the audience (the ideal

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situation regarding ‘national security’ in a democratic society), it actually varies according to the

political system and the nature of the issue (Wæver, 2003: 11-12). Thus, scholars of

securitization have so far come up with different ways in which the concept of audience could be

conceptualized. One of the most recent and most important contributions about the

conceptualization of the audience came from Cote (2016), who highlighted the highly interactive

and iterative nature of the relationship between the desecuritizing actor and the audience.

Although Cote agrees with many securitization scholars on the case-specific character of the

audience, he defines it as “the individual(s) or group(s) that has the capability to authorize the

view of the issue presented by the securitizing actor and legitimize the treatment of the issue

through security practice” (Cote, 2016: 548).

The case of desecuritizing Turkey-KRG relations from 2007/2008 onwards constitutes a

useful example to have a better understanding of these different aspects of the

securitization/desecuritization framework. Despite hostile relations in the early 2000s, Turkey-

KRG relations have moved off Turkey’s security agenda to a great extent and has become an

issue of ‘normal politics’ since 2007/2008. In fact, from the 1960s onwards, Turkish

policymakers have been concerned about the Kurdish autonomous structure gradually emerging

in northern Iraq. However, with the 2003 US War in Iraq, Turkey’s relations with the Iraqi Kurds

further strained over a number of issues mainly related to Turkey’s Kurdish question and its

prolonged struggle against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan-PKK)

insurgency. First, Turkish policymakers were uneasy about the fact that the PKK headquarters

were located on the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq and they believed that the PKK presence

was tolerated by the KRG. Second, they were of the opinion that the PKK ended its unilateral

ceasefire against Turkey in 2004, mainly because it was encouraged by the uncertain political

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framework about the future of Iraq. There was a significant concern in the minds of the Turkish

policymakers that the flourishing Iraqi autonomous region, which might even lead to the

establishment of an independent Kurdish state, would encourage Turkey’s own Kurdish

population to seek similar developments in Turkey. Turkish policymakers were also worried

about the possibility that Kirkuk, an oil-rich Iraqi province where a significant Turcoman

minority lives, be included within the borders of the KRG. As a result, after the 2003 US War in

Iraq, Turkey’s relations with the Iraqi Kurds became highly securitized.

During this period, the then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s references about the KRG

mainly revolved around the PKK presence in northern Iraq attributing the increasing PKK

violence in Turkey to the comfortable environment the organization found in Iraq (Milliyet,

2006a: 21). Erdoğan specifically argued that the PKK was carrying out attacks against Turkish

targets through northern Iraq (Hürriyet, 2006). Also, these statements often emphasized the

importance of Iraq’s territorial integrity for Turkish national interests, fearing the emergence of

an independent Kurdish state. During this period, Turkey even ‘threatened to invade northern

Iraq in order to achieve its objectives’ (Kibaroğlu, 2007). Another key point in Erdoğan’s

speeches was the status of Kirkuk. While the Iraqi Kurdish leaders wanted Kirkuk to be added to

the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, the Turkish side was strongly against this idea.

Erdoğan expressed the sensitive nature of this issue and stated several times that a change in the

status of Kirkuk might lead to serious problems (Milliyet, 2006b: 17). Once, he even said that

Kirkuk ‘was like a bomb which was about to explode’.

However, the year 2007 marked the early signs of a significant change in Turkish foreign

policy discourse about the KRG. The security dimension of Turkey-KRG relations began to be

deemphasized, and Turkish foreign policy towards the KRG became part of normal politics to a

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great extent from 2008 onwards. During this period, the then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan

emerged as the main desecuritizing actor. However, he played an important role in this process

only within the constraints of the external social, political, and economic context as well as the

consent of different audiences.

The External Context of Desecuritizing Turkey-KRG Relations

As previously stated, the Copenhagen School mainly focuses on the security utterance

itself in understanding the processes of securitization and desecuritization. However, in order to

analyze security problems and account for cases of securitization/desecuritization, the linguistic

aspect proves inadequate and it becomes necessary to understand the external context. The

external social, political, and economic context are so important that ‘an actor cannot be

significant as a social actor and a speech act cannot have an impact on social relations without a

situation that constitutes them as significant’ (Stritzel, 2007: 367).

The external context within which the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations took

place from 2007/2008 onwards had two important dimensions, namely the civil-military relations

in Turkey at the time, and the country’s broader economic and political conjuncture. In the

process of desecuritizing this foreign policy issue, while the former mainly shaped the answer to

the question of who is authorized to speak with respect to desecuritization in Turkey, the latter

provided the historical conditions, which helped convince the audience and desecuritize Turkey-

KRG relations.

According to the original formulation of the securitization theory, the main claim about

the securitizing actor is that the state officials can constitute a new social reality and justify

extraordinary measures to address an issue by merely uttering security. However, ‘[t]his reading

presupposes a rather strong notion of the authority of a speaker and of “authorized language”’

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(cited in Stritzel, 2012: 552). As second-generation securitization scholars argue, the authority of

the speaker is not necessarily ‘consolidated and secured’ in every single context (Stritzel, 2012:

553). Thus, it is essential to approach to the issue of authorization as a more dynamic process,

which is subject to empirical analysis within the framework of specific social settings (Stritzel,

2012: 553, 556).

The changes in the civil-military relations in Turkey in the 2000s constituted such a

dynamic process. Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the military has been an

influential actor in Turkish politics. As a result of their role in the foundation of the Western-

style secular regime in Turkey and in the Turkish modernization project, the military elites have

always perceived themselves as the guardians of the Turkish state as well as the vanguards of the

process of Turkish modernization and Westernization. Since the 1960s, the Turkish Armed

Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri-TSK) intervened in politics several times, including with coups

d’état, and after every intervention they established institutional and political mechanisms

through which they could become part of domestic and foreign policy decision making

mechanisms in Turkey. Thus, over the years, the Turkish military emerged as a key actor in

securitizing several issues on the country’s political agenda, such as the Kurdish question and

Islamic reactionism. Within this framework, it was difficult to assume for a long time that the

political elites have been the only securitizing/desecuritizing actors in Turkey.

However, Turkey’s civil-military relations began to change gradually in the 2000s under

the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) government. First, with the

EU harmonization reforms to bring Turkey’s civil-military relations closer to the Western liberal

model as part of the country’s EU accession process; and second, with the influence of the

Ergenekon and Balyoz trials, which claimed that several members of the TSK engaged in alleged

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coup plots in the early 2000s, the Turkish military’s role in policymaking processes significantly

decreased. Turkey’s relations with the KRG began to desecuritize within this framework of

changing civil-military relations and increasing power of the civilians in the policymaking

process.

Turkey’s economic and political conjuncture constitutes another important framework

within which Turkey-KRG relations were gradually desecuritized. This framework is important

because in order to convince an audience that a phenomenon no longer poses an existential threat

to a valued referent object, “security articulations need to be related to their broader discursive

contexts” (Stritzel, 2007: 360). According to the externalist approaches to securitization and

desecuritization, it is this context that facilitates or hinders the process of desecuritization. From

the mid-2000s onwards, Turkey’s broader political and economic conditions and the discursive

context created by the policymakers provided such a framework which allowed the Turkish state

representatives, more specifically the then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan to move Turkey-KRG

relations off the country’s security agenda. This conjuncture was mainly about the new economic

necessities in Turkey, more specifically the increasing economic growth and need for energy as

well as the changing approach to the Kurdish question.

The next section provides a detailed discussion of the process of desecuritizing Turkey-

KRG relations from 2008 onwards. First, it shows that during this period, the then Prime

Minister Tayyip Erdoğan was the main desecuritizing actor, but only within the constraints of the

external circumstances, namely the civil-military power struggle in Turkey and the country’s

broader economic and political conjuncture. Second, it discusses what kind of audiences were

involved and had to be convinced in the process of desecuritizing Turkish foreign policy towards

the KRG.

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The Impact of Civil-Military Relations on the Desecuritization of Turkey-KRG Relations

The Turkish military has always been an important player in Turkish foreign policy,

particularly with respect to the military aspects of the policymaking process. Especially from the

early 1980s onwards, the military’s predominant role in Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign

against the PKK and the PKK’s use of northern Iraq as a spring board for attacks across the

Turkish border in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War significantly enhanced the military’s role

in the foreign policymaking process. The increasing number of PKK bases in northern Iraq

mainly stemmed from the imposition of a no-fly zone in this region after the Gulf War, which

was created as a safe-haven for the Kurds who rebelled against the Saddam Hussein regime and

received the latter’s brutal response. Thus, after the Gulf War ended, in Turkey’s struggle against

the PKK, northern Iraq gradually turned into ‘an important operational ground where for a

decade the Turkish military had had the opportunity to exert its power with almost no

interference’ (Özcan, 2010: 26).

With the 2003 US War in Iraq, especially after Turkey refused to allow the US troops to

be deployed on Turkish territory in order to open a northern front for the invasion of Iraq, the

Turkish military’s presence in this area decreased significantly (Özcan, 2010: 26). When coupled

with the EU harmonization reforms, which aimed to decrease the political role of the Turkish

military in the early 2000s, the Iraq War marked an important change with respect to the Turkish

military’s role in the foreign policymaking process.

After the 2002 national elections, the AKP came to office with a different vision of

foreign policy. Under the leadership of the AKP government, ‘Turkey began to emphasize

improving its relations with the regional countries, demonstrated an eagerness to play the role of

a mediator, promoted its soft power, and engaged in increasing economic relations with the

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region’ (Benli Altunışık and Martin, 2011: 569). In the early to mid-2000s, it was possible to see

the changing Turkish foreign policy attitude in a number of issue areas, such as the improvement

of relations with Syria and Iran, efforts to resolve the Cyprus issue, and increasing economic ties

with several Middle Eastern and African countries.

Within this framework, the AKP government also initiated an effort to improve Turkey’s

relations with the Iraqi Kurds. The beginning of this effort was marked by a number of covert

official meetings between Emre Taner, the then chief official of the National Intelligence

Organization (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı-MİT) and the Iraqi Kurdish leaders in the mid-2000s

(Sarı Ertem, 2011). However, this initiative did not immediately turn into a clear policy change,

because the AKP government and the Turkish military held different positions about what kind

of a policy Turkey should pursue towards northern Iraq. While the TSK thought that the PKK

presence in northern Iraq was an important aspect of Turkey’s struggle against the PKK and

suggested a cross-border military operation into northern Iraq in order to end the support that the

PKK received from the Iraqi Kurds, the AKP government was hesitant to carry out such an

operation and instead preferred engaging the Iraqi Kurds. Thus, the first audience that the

government had to convince in order to desecuritize Turkey-KRG relations was the Turkish

military.

The AKP’s stance resulted from several reasons. First, within the framework of the 2003

US occupation of Iraq and Turkey’s refusal to allow for the opening of a second front for this

invasion from Turkish territory, Turkish military officers were not in a position to move freely in

northern Iraq anymore and carry out a military operation without US permission. Second, a

rapprochement with the Iraqi Kurds was already in line with the AKP policy to demilitarize the

Kurdish issue in Turkey. Approaching to the Kurdish question within the framework of the

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country’s EU accession process was part of the AKP’s program from the very beginning. And

third, with a military approach towards northern Iraq, the AKP government did not want the TSK

to remain as a key actor in this important foreign policy issue.

The then Chief of General Staff (CGS) Hilmi Özkök initially gave a relatively positive

response to the AKP’s position on the Iraqi Kurds and said that Turkey’s policies could change

in line with the developments in Iraq (Radikal, 2005). With this statement, Özkök mainly was

referring to the 2005 elections in Iraq as well as the new Iraqi constitution, which officially

recognized the KRG as an autonomous entity in a federal Iraq. However, Özkök’s successor

General Yaşar Büyükanıt, who came to office in 2006, had a more hardline stance. He was not

only against establishing dialogue with the Iraqi Kurdish leaders, but also repeated several times

that it was necessary ‘to launch an offensive against the PKK and also possibly against the

strongholds of Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) who has

been accused of providing support to PKK terrorists in the north’ (cited in Kibaroğlu, 2007).

The vocal presence of General Büyükanıt in the news media showed that despite the

gradual decrease in the role of the military in Turkish politics, it was still an important actor

capable of influencing the policymaking process. When the then Prime Minister Erdoğan

declared that Turkey would establish direct talks with the Iraqi Kurdish leaders in February

2007, CGS Büyükanıt made an effort to block this policy initiative in the National Security

Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu-MGK). Before the MGK meeting, it was leaked to the press that

Büyükanıt would present evidence in the upcoming meeting about the Iraqi Kurdish leaders’

continuing support for the PKK (cited in Özcan, 2010: 39).

The Turkish policy debates about northern Iraq are in line with the idea that the authority

of the speaker is not necessarily guaranteed during attempts of securitization and desecuritization

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and that the processes of securitization and desecuritization constitute an intersubjective process

between the securitizing actor and the audience. In the Turkish case, there were two important

actors, namely the AKP government and the Turkish military, as well as their representatives,

namely Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and CGS Yaşar Büyükanıt, who provided divergent

discourses in the mid-2000s about what kind of a policy Turkey should pursue towards northern

Iraq. Both were politically influential actors that could influence the policymaking process. Thus,

the TSK was the government’s most capable and powerful audience that needed to be convinced

in order to desecuritize Turkey-KRG relations. Due to the divergence of opinions between the

government and the TSK, Turkey failed to develop a coherent policy towards northern Iraq

between 2005-2007 (See Kibaroğlu, 2007). On one hand, CGS Büyükanıt made a great effort to

keep Turkey’s northern Iraq policy on the country’s security agenda by depicting the KRG and

the PKK’s presence there as an existential threat to Turkey. On the other hand, while the AKP

government acknowledged the security aspect of the Turkey-KRG relations, it opted for a

strategy to engage the Iraqi Kurds rather than identify them as the implacable enemies of Turkey.

Despite this discursive battle between the government and the military with respect to

northern Iraq, there were two important indicators during this period, which showed that the

balance of power between the civilian government and the military was shifting towards the

former. First, CGS Büyükanıt’s efforts to maintain the securitized nature of the Turkey-KRG

relations constantly received harsh responses from the government. For example, when

Büyükanıt declared on 18 February 2007 that he would not talk with the Iraqi Kurdish groups in

northern Iraq due to their support for the PKK (Hürriyet, 2007), Erdoğan responded by saying

that that statement reflected CGS Büyükanıt’s personal opinions and that Turkey could not reach

any solution without talking with the Iraqi Kurds (Milliyet, 2007). Similarly, after Büyükanıt

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talked about the need to carry out a military operation across the Iraqi border in June 2007,

Erdoğan stated that ‘[t]he security forces should deal first with the 5,000 terrorists inside Turkey

before dealing with 500 of them in northern Iraq’ (cited in Kibaroğlu, 2007). Thus, the AKP

government did not hesitate to give blunt responses to the TSK whenever it received criticisms

from this institution with respect to Turkey’s northern Iraq policy (Özcan, 2010: 39). This was in

clear contrast to the past Turkish experience when the government preferred to remain silent vis-

à-vis such outbursts and criticisms coming from the military.

Second, the events that surrounded the 2007 presidential elections in Turkey turned out to

be another indicator of the changing civil-military balance of power towards the former. As the

presidential elections were approaching in Turkey in 2007, an important debate was about who

would be the next president. Since the AKP held a majority of seats in the Grand National

Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi-TBMM), the then Prime Minister Tayyip

Erdoğan was expected to be the party’s natural candidate. However, this possibility was

problematic on two grounds. On one hand, the presidency of Erdoğan would mean that the AKP

would control the three most powerful positions of the country, namely the positions of the prime

minister, president, and the speaker of the TBMM at the same time. The TSK perceived this as a

serious danger to the secular regime in Turkey due to the AKP’s Islamist background.1 On the

other hand, the possibility that Turkey have a first lady wearing a headscarf created substantial

unease in the eyes of the Turkish secular establishment, most importantly the military. Within the

framework of these debates and increasing tension in Turkish politics, although the AKP

eventually nominated Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül as its presidential candidate instead of

Erdoğan, this did not alleviate the above-mentioned concerns. After the first round of

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presidential vote in Turkey, on April 27, 2007, the General Staff put forth a strong press

declaration on its website at midnight, where it stated that:

‘In the last few days, the main question that came up during the election of the President

of the Republic was focused on the discussion of secularism. The Turkish Armed Forces are

watching this situation with concern. Don’t let us forget the Turkish Armed Forces take sides in

these discussions and are firm defenders of the secularist principle’ (quoted in Posch, 2007: 23).

After the General Staff’s press declaration, which has been widely referred to as the e-

memorandum, the presidential elections were declared void by the Constitutional Court with the

argument that the TBMM session did not have the necessary quorum of representatives. This

outcome led to the AKP’s call for national elections in July 2007, which once again resulted in

the AKP’s majority of seats in the TBMM and eventually the election of Abdullah Gül as the

new president of Turkey (Gürsoy, 2011: 296).

The e-memorandum marked a turning point for Turkey’s civil-military relations, because

first, rather than remain silent in the face of the military’s harsh ultimatum, the AKP responded

to it by saying that according to the Turkish Constitution, the CGS was answerable to the Prime

Minister (Aknur, 2013: 139). Second, despite the Turkish military’s outright opposition to the

possible presidency of Erdoğan and Gül, the latter was elected president of Turkey after the

AKP’s election victory in July 2007. These developments clearly demonstrated that the civil-

military relations in Turkey were changing and the military no longer had the ultimate say in

Turkish politics.

This process of change, more specifically the uncertainties that resulted from it, had

negative implications for Turkey, which partly reflected itself in the country’s ambivalent

northern Iraq policy. Especially throughout 2007, due to the opposing views coming from the

military and the government circles, Erdoğan’s discourse about northern Iraq and Turkey-KRG

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relations showed substantial ups and downs. For example, while in February 2007 Erdoğan

declared that it was possible to take steps to improve Turkey’s relations with the KRG, in June

2007 he stated that (referring to the KRG president Massoud Barzani) he would not talk with

tribal leaders and Turkey would deal only with the central government in Iraq (Milliyet, 2007).

Similarly, while in June 2007 Erdoğan was openly opposed to a cross-border operation in

northern Iraq and stated that Turkey should first address the thousands of PKK militants in

Turkey, in October 2007 with the resurgence of the PKK violence in the country and the

increasing public pressure on the government, he led the effort to receive the TBMM’s

authorization for a cross-border operation in northern Iraq. With this authorization, the TSK

carried out airstrikes on the PKK bases in northern Iraq in December 2007 as well as a large-

scale cross-border operation in February 2008. These developments demonstrated that during

this period Prime Minister Erdoğan could not establish himself as the sole authorized speaker for

Turkish foreign policy towards northern Iraq and could not receive the consent of the military for

his policy preferences.

However, the developments of 2008 showed that it was the TSK that ‘seemed to have lost

the battle of words’ (cited in Özcan, 2010: 44). Despite the military’s unease, the AKP

government went ahead with the policy of engagement with the Iraqi Kurds and eventually

managed to desecuritize Turkey-KRG relations to a great extent. It is highly likely that in

addition to the EU harmonization reforms, which decreased the military’s influence in the policy

making process and the events that followed the 2007 e-memorandum, the legal investigations of

2007-2008 about the alleged coup attempts in the TSK against the AKP government also played

an important role in marginalizing the military during this period. Thus, despite clear opposition

from the military to the policy of building ties with the KRG, several meetings took place

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between the AKP and KDP representatives in 2007 (Durukan, 2007; also see Özcan, 2010: 40).

Furthermore, on 24 April, 2008, as a result of tough negotiations with the Turkish military, the

MGK ‘approved a proposal that allowed the government to establish contacts with all of the Iraqi

groups, including the Kurds (Oktav, 2011: 60). This was a clear indication that the military,

willingly or unwillingly ended up accepting the government’s attempt to desecuritize Turkish

foreign policy towards the KRG.

At the bureaucratic level, the military was the most formidable audience that the AKP

government had to confront in order to carry out its policy of desecuritizing the Turkey-KRG

relationship. In fact, besides Prime Minister (and then President) Tayyip Erdoğan, the leading

AKP figures at the time, including Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy advisor Ahmet Davutoğlu and

President Abdullah Gül, were already supportive of the idea of desecuritizing Turkish foreign

policy towards the KRG. Furthermore, in the mid-2000s, several high-level bureaucrats in the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the MİT were also of the opinion that Turkey’s militarized

approach to the Kurdish question had to change (Park, 2014: 9). Some of these figures included

the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Feridun Sinirlioğlu, Turkey’s Special

Envoy to Iraq (and later Turkey’s Ambassador to Bahgdad) Murat Özçelik, Undersecretary of

the MİT Emre Taner and Turkey’s first Consul General in Erbil Aydın Selcen. These bureaucrats

all played significant roles in establishing contacts with the KRG officials at different levels

especially from 2007/2008 onwards and providing a favorable framework to move Turkey’s

relations with the KRG off the country’s security agenda to a great extent. Thus, in terms of the

‘formal support’ (i.e. support from the formal institutions) as indicated by Thierry Balsacq

(2005: 185), once the military decided to go along with the government’s preferences about

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Turkey’s KRG policy, Tayyip Erdoğan did not have much problem about receiving support from

those audiences that were capable of disrupting this policy.

The Impact of Political and Economic Conjuncture on the Desecuritization of Turkey-KRG

Relations

In addition to the fact that the authority of the speaker needs to be consolidated before

s/he could successfully securitize or desecuritize an issue, it is also essential to have a suitable

environment that will allow for this process. As noted earlier, in order to convince an audience

that an issue no longer poses an existential threat to a referent object, the statements of the

desecuritizing actor must be in line with the external discursive context.

With the changing civil-military balance of power in Turkey in the 2000s, once the

military gave up on its explicit opposition to the desecuritization of Turkish foreign policy

towards the KRG and once the MGK approved the government’s initiative to establish contacts

with the Iraqi Kurds, the AKP government did not need any other formal support from the major

bureaucratic institutions involved in the decision making process. In the mid-2000s, both the

AKP government and the key civilian bureaucratic institutions in Turkey, namely the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs and the MİT, were already supportive of the efforts to desecuritize Turkey-KRG

relations. Thus, from 2007/2008 onwards, another audience that the then Prime Minister Erdoğan

had to convince was the public. Around the mid-2000s, the political and economic conjuncture in

Turkey created a favorable environment, which allowed the state representatives to receive the

consent of different groups among the public about the idea that the KRG was not an existential

threat to Turkey anymore and that Turkey should engage in a dialogue with the Iraqi Kurds.

One aspect of this favorable environment was related to the economic conditions in

Turkey. From the early 2000s onwards until the 2008 global financial crisis, the Turkish

  19  

economy experienced ‘one of the most rapid growth periods since 1950’ as well as a 400 percent

increase in per capita income (Tol, 2014: 3). The growing Turkish economy brought with it both

the need to search for new markets to improve Turkey’s trade connections and an increasing

demand for energy. The issue of energy was especially important, because the Turkish economy

has been relying on foreign energy to a significant extent. While approximately 20 percent of

Turkey’s natural gas consumption is imported from Iran, around 60 percent is coming from

Russia. Furthermore, until 2011 Turkey imported approximately 50 percent of its oil from Iran

(Hürriyet, 2014; Çetingüleç, 2015). These figures are problematic not only because they

demonstrate Turkey’s energy dependency on foreign energy resources, but also due to the

uncertainties that involve these countries’ relations with the international community.

Particularly with respect to the imports from Iran, Turkey received a lot of US pressure in the

past to end its business relations with Iran due to the economic sanctions imposed on this country

(Romano, 2015: 92).

Within this context, the KRG emerged as an important alternative for Turkey as a source

of oil and natural gas and as also a cheaper exporter (Romano, 2015: 93). In the past few years,

Turkey signed several agreements with the KRG in the area of energy. Most importantly, in

November 2013, the then Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and the KRG Prime Minister

Nechirvan Barzani agreed on a critical deal, which allowed for the KRG’s direct exports to

Turkey through a new pipeline (Pamuk and Coşkun, 2013).2 As a result, the amount of oil that

Turkey imported from Iraq rose from 10 percent to 32 percent by the year 2013 (Yurdakul,

2014).3 In a meeting with the KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, Erdoğan stated that

Turkey and the KRG were determined to maintain and improve their energy cooperation

(Hürriyet, 2014).

  20  

In fact, ‘[t]he growth of cross-border trade [between Turkey and the KRG] predated the

improvement in the political atmosphere’ (Park, 2014: 12). In Turkey’s former Consul General

in Erbil Aydın Selcen’s words, the diplomacy between Turkey and the KRG first advanced

through the path opened by the businessmen, contractors, and the oilmen, and then further paved

the way for them (Selcen, 2017). Thus, the members of the Turkish business sector, those

workers who took advantage of the KRG market, and Turkey’s Kurdish citizens in the Southeast

who acted as intermediaries in this business relationship had a positive attitude about the

improvement of Turkey’s relationship with the KRG (BacheFidan, 2015) and these groups

supported the government’s initiative to desecuritize Turkish foreign policy towards the KRG.

Thus, the economic conditions in Turkey provided an important external framework that

facilitated the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations. Due to the increasing need for new

markets for Turkish products as well as the energy demand of the booming economy, the

presentation of the KRG as a key economic partner for Turkey found widespread acceptance

among several groups of the Turkish public audience. However, this was not the only external

condition that facilitated the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations. During this period, it was

also important that the AKP government embarked on a policy to end the prolonged PKK

insurgency and resolve Turkey’s Kurdish question through political means.

The AKP came to office in 2002 with a strong democracy and human rights discourse,

which also shaped this political party’s approach to the Kurdish question. In the early 2000s, as

part of Turkey’s EU accession process, the AKP government passed a number of EU

harmonization reforms through the TBMM, which brought important improvements with respect

to the Kurdish question (Kayhan Pusane, 2014: 85). Furthermore, in 2005, in an historical speech

in Diyarbakır, Tayyip Erdoğan became the first prime minister who openly acknowledged that

  21  

Turkey mishandled its Kurdish question, and like all great nations it has to face its past (cited in

Economist, 2005).

Taking advantage of the decreasing role of the military in Turkey’s national security

issues, the AKP government initiated the Kurdish opening policy in 2009 with the goal of

finding a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. Although the opening policy failed in the

run-up to the Turkish national elections in 2011 (Tol, 2014: 3), the AKP initiated the settlement

process from early 2013 onwards, which involved meetings between the jailed PKK leader

Abdullah Öcalan and the MİT representatives. In this process, pro-Kurdish Peace and

Democracy Party (later Peoples’ Democracy Party-Halkların Demokrasi Partisi-HDP) deputies

were also given the opportunity to visit Öcalan in his prison cell on the İmralı Island at the

Marmara Sea. With the settlement process, the AKP government wanted to eventually disarm the

PKK and bring the PKK insurgency to an end.

From the beginning of the AKP government’s tenure in 2002 onwards, there was already

an effort to develop an alternative understanding about the Kurdish question, which avoided

looking at this issue merely with security lenses. From the mid-2000s onwards, especially with

the 2009 Kurdish opening policy and the 2013 solution process, this approach became even more

evident. Thus, the AKP made a significant effort to desecuritize Turkey’s Kurdish question and

to present it as a political issue from the early 2000s onwards. This approach played an important

role in also convincing the Turkish public that the KRG did not pose an existential threat to

Turkey. During this process, the KRG president Massoud Barzani also played a facilitating role.

From 2008 onwards the AKP government representatives, most importantly the then Prime

Minister Tayyip Erdoğan publicly made the case that Iraqi Kurds are Turkey’s neighbors with

  22  

whom Turkey has common interests and with whom Turkey could resolve its problems through

political means.

In sum, from 2008 onwards, the external circumstances were aligned in such a way that

they facilitated the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations. Turkey’s need for new markets

and especially new oil and gas resources for its improving economy as well as the AKP

government’s policy to resolve the Kurdish question through peaceful means provided a

favorable context within which the Turkish public could look at the Iraqi Kurds as Turkey’s

neighbors and economic partners rather than enemies.4

The Process of Desecuritizing Turkey-KRG Relations from 2008 Onwards

As the then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan was left as the main authorized speaker for

the direction of Turkish foreign policy from 2008 onwards (in the face of the decreasing political

power of the Turkish military), and as the economic and political conjuncture in the country

facilitated different audiences’ acceptance of a change in Turkey’s northern Iraq policy, it was

possible to observe a gradual desecuritization of Turkey-KRG relations from 2008 onwards. The

first direct high-level meeting took place in Baghdad between the KRG Prime Minister

Nechirvan Barzani and a Turkish delegation composed of Murat Özçelik, Turkey’s special envoy

for Iraq and Ahmet Davutoğlu, Erdoğan’s chief foreign policy advisor (Charountaki, 2012: 192).

This was followed by several other meetings, including those between Minister of Foreign

Affairs Ahmet Davutoğlu and the KRG President Massoud Barzani in October 2009 and

between the then Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Barzani in June 2010. These meetings

played an important role in initiating a gradual return of the issue of Turkey-KRG relations to the

country’s normal political agenda.5 During this period, Turkey began to refer to the Iraqi Kurds

as the ‘relatives’ of Turkey rather than its ‘enemies’ (cited in Sarı Ertem, 2011: 61). In October

  23  

2008, Erdoğan declared that the politicians, investors, industrialists, intellectuals, the media and

non-governmental organizations should all give up on perceiving Turkey’s relations with the

KRG as merely a security issue (Milliyet 2008).

From 2008 onwards, Turkey-KRG relations began to be discussed more within the

framework of the economic interests between these two actors and less in connection to the PKK

presence there. News began to revolve around the joint hydrocarbon pipelines, investments of

the Turkish oil and gas companies in the KRG, and the energy agreements between Ankara and

Erbil (Romano, 2015: 91). Turkey’s exports to Iraq (a significant portion of which goes to the

KRG) ‘increased from less than 2 billion dollars in 2004 to well over 10 billion in 2013’

(Barkey, 2015: 4). In 2009, while there were 485 Turkish companies in the KRG, this number

increased to approximately 1500 in 2013 (Çağaptay, Bache Fidan and Sacikara, 2015). Turkish

companies invested in a variety of different sectors in the KRG, including construction, banking

and finance, education, oil/gas exploration and services, telecommunication, and transportation

(Çağaptay, Bache Fidan and Sacikara, 2015). Most importantly, it was the Turkish companies

that built the international airport in Erbil, major roads, and several government buildings.

Finally, from May 2014 onwards, KRG’s oil began to arrive at the international markets through

the Turkish route (Cagaptay, 2015: 2).

In this process, it also became evident that Turkey finally acknowledged Iraq’s federal

structure and came to terms with the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. In March

2011, Tayyip Erdoğan became the first Turkish prime minister who visited the KRG (Hürriyet,

2011). In a speech in the opening ceremony of the Erbil International Airport, he referred to the

Iraqi Kurds as Turkey’s brothers and stated that ‘we are happy that the Kurdish public’s welfare

is increasing’ (Aslan, 2011). Erdoğan also added that

  24  

A strong Turkey means a strong Iraq and a strong Iraq means a strong Turkey. Our

investments in this region show how our hearts are united. God willing, we will do more. We will

see better days (Hasanoğlu, 2011).

In 2012, the KRG president Barzani was invited to give a speech in the AKP’s congress,

which was an unprecedented development considering that Barzani was disparaged as a tribal

leader by Turkey’s top policymakers a few years ago. During this period, Barzani also began to

play an important role in Turkey’s most recent settlement process with the PKK, which aimed at

ending the PKK violence and resolving the Kurdish question through peaceful means. In the

same year, during a meeting between Erdoğan and Barzani in İstanbul, after mentioning the

common economic interests, Erdoğan stated that Turkey and the KRG had the same approach

towards the PKK (NTV, 2012). Both leaders argued that the PKK should end its armed struggle

against Turkey and follow a peaceful approach in order to seek further rights for the Kurds

(Hürriyet Daily News, 2012). At a press conference, Barzani even declared that “[i]f the PKK

continues its armed conflict then they will bear the consequences. I will not allow the PKK to

continue its rule in Iraqi Kurdistan” (Hürriyet Daily News, 2012).

Another indication of normalizing Turkey-KRG relations was the public appearance of

Erdoğan and Barzani together in Diyarbakır in November 2013 where they participated in a

number of ceremonies. This was a historic event where the KRG and Turkish flags flew side by

side. With the ‘Diyarbakır encounter’ of Erdoğan and Barzani, the AKP government had the

opportunity to show that it was sincere in the ongoing settlement process and that it was in a

clear effort to improve Turkey’s ties with the Iraqi Kurds. Furthermore, during this meeting

Erdoğan, for the first time, used the term ‘Kurdistan region’ in his reference to the Iraqi Kurds

living in northern Iraq. In his long speech, Erdoğan addressed Barzani by saying that ‘[j]ust like

your father and your uncles, welcome to the Turkish Republic, the land of your brothers’

  25  

(Hürriyet Daily News, 2013). He also added that ‘[i]n Arbil, we have felt like being in our own

city. Now feel Diyarbakır as your own city’ (Öktem, 2014: 6).

Finally, a landmark development with respect to the desecuritization of Turkey-KRG

relations came in the summer of 2014. In his interview with Financial Times, the AKP

spokesman Hüseyin Çelik made certain comments, which were widely interpreted as Turkey’s

readiness to accept an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq. Çelik stated that ‘In the past an

independent Kurdish state was a reason for war [for Turkey] but no one has the right to say this

now…If Iraq is divided and it is inevitable, they are our brothers…’ (Dombey, 2014).

In sum, as the then Prime Minister Erdoğan consolidated his position as the main

authorized actor to speak about Turkish foreign policy from 2008 onwards and as the new

political and economic framework allowed for different audiences both at the bureaucratic and

public levels to accept a change in Turkey’s northern Iraq policy, Turkey’s relations with the

KRG have been in a process of desecuritization.

However, with the recent developments regarding the upcoming Iraqi Kurdish

independence referendum on September 25, 20017, the security dimension of the Turkey-KRG

relationship has once again moved to the forefront of political discussions. While the Turkish

Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım called the independence referendum ‘irresponsible’, adding that

‘the region had enough problems at the moment’ (Reuters, 2017), The Ministry of Foreign

Affairs referred to the Iraqi Kurdish referemdum as a ‘grave mistake’ with the argument that

‘Iraq’s territorial integrity and political unity was a fundamental principle for Ankara’ (Hürriyet

Daily News, 2017a). Furthermore, the Chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi

Hareket Partisi-MHP) Devlet Bahçeli suggested that the planned referendum in the KRG

‘should be deemed a ‘cause of war’ for Turkey if necessary’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 2017b).

  26  

Thus, the future of the desecuritized Turkey-KRG relationship remains to be seen in light of the

future developments in the region.

Conclusion

This paper discusses the change in Turkey-KRG relations from 2007/2008 onwards in

light of the literature on securitization and desecuritization. Since the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq in

the early 1960s, Turkish policymakers have been concerned about the possibility that Turkey’s

Kurds be influenced by the growing Kurdish nationalism among the Iraqi Kurds and encouraged

to seek a similar path. Thus, from the 1960s onwards, Turkish policymakers presented the

possible emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region or an independent Kurdish state in

northern Iraq as an existential threat to Turkey. This threat perception increased tremendously

first in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, which led to the creation of a safe-haven for the

Kurds in northern Iraq, and second, with the 2003 US War in Iraq, which resulted in the

emergence of an officially recognized KRG in the new Iraqi Constitution.

Despite this historical background, Turkey has been experiencing a gradual

desecuritization of its relations with the KRG from the mid-2000s onwards. Especially since

2008, the issue of Turkey-KRG relations has moved off the country’s security agenda to a great

extent and gradually became part of non-security related political and economic discussions..

This paper argues that in the process of desecuritizing Turkey-KRG relations, the then Prime

minister Tayyip Erdoğan was the main desecuritizing actor, but only within the constraints of the

external context, namely the civil-military power struggle in Turkey and the country’s broader

economic and political conjuncture. In order to desecuritize Turkish foreign policy towards the

KRG, Erdoğan received the consent and support of multiple audiences both at the bureaucratic

and public levels. Due to the changing civil-military relations in the country in the 2000s, the

  27  

TSK was the most formidable audience that Erdoğan had to convince in this process. Thus, this

paper agrees with the widespread criticism that the original securitization/desecuritization

framework puts too much emphasis on the security utterance itself and does not pay sufficient

attention to the external circumstances within which securitization/desecuritization takes place. It

is more in line with the second-generation literature, which shows the importance of political,

economic, and social conditions as key facilitators or hindrances to the processes of

securitization/desecuritization.

Here, it is important to emphasize two points. First, considering the rapidly changing

Turkish domestic politics and the regional context, it is not clear to what extent the current

desecuritized nature of the Turkey-KRG relations will remain permanent. The common

economic interests between Turkey and the KRG as well as the rising Islamic State of Iraq and

Al-Sham (ISIS) threat and the emergence of the Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union

Party (Partiya Yekitiya Demokrat-PYD) as the strongest actor in northern Syria have recently

brought Turkey and the KRG closer. However, considering that the Iraqi Kurds transformed into

Turkey’s brothers from being its archenemies in a few years’ time, it is possible to observe

another similar transformation if the domestic and regional circumstances change once again.

Second, a cursory glance at the regional developments show that the desecuritization of the

Turkey-KRG relations is not automatically linked to Turkey’s relations with other Kurdish actors

in the region. For example, despite the improvement in Turkey-KRG relations, Turkey’s

settlement process with the PKK gave way to a significant increase in the PKK violence in the

aftermath of the June 2015 elections. Furthermore, despite good relations with the KRG, Turkish

policymakers have been very concerned about the gains of the Syrian Kurds within the context

of the Syrian civil war. In October 2014, Erdoğan openly argued that ‘[a]t the moment, the PYD

  28  

is equal with the PKK for us. It is also a terrorist organization’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 2014). In

2015, a pro-Government newspaper even published the assessment that the PYD is more

dangerous than ISIS for Turkey’s interests (Sabah, 2015). Thus, it is important to emphasize that

the recent desecuritized nature of the Turkey-KRG relationship neither presents proof that it will

last forever, nor guarantees a similar process of desecuritization with other Kurdish actors in the

region. In order to make a future assessment, it seems essential to observe the Turkey-KRG

relationship once the planned independence referendum in the KRG takes place in September.

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                                                                                                               1 Although the AKP has presented itself as a Conservative Democrat Party since its establishment in 2001, many AKP deputies in the TBMM had served in the Islamist political parties in Turkey in the past, including the Felicity Party and the Welfare Party. Indeed, the AKP was established by those politicians who separated from the Felicity Party. That is why, in the eyes of the Turkish military, the AKP was still part of the Islamist political tradition in Turkey, namely the National Outlook Movement (Milli Görüş Hareketi). 2 Crude oil started flowing through the new pipeline in 2014. Although the KRG and the Iraqi central government reached an agreement on the export of oil through the pipeline to Turkey and revenue sharing by December 2014, this agreement broke down in a short period of time. 3 It is not easy to have access to the exact figures for more recent years due to the worsening security environment in the KRG since the intensification of the ISIS threat in 2014. 4 Here, an important point must be made with regard to the public perception of Turkey-KRG relations. Although the idea of improving Turkey’s relations with the KRG has found widespread acceptance among different groups in the public, the nationalist circles have not been comfortable with the idea of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq. For example, in a public opinion poll about Turkish foreign policy, carried out in January 2010, 69.1 percent of the participants opposed to the possible establishment of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq. See https://www.academia.edu/1435581/Kamuoyu_Ve_Türk_Dış_Politikası_Anketi_Ocak_2010. 5 Without a doubt, the KRG’s efforts to restrict the actions of the PKK in northern Iraq during this period also facilitated this process.