Bitter profits

(continued)

by Steven Stycos

Sitting with Baran at the dining-room table of his West Warwick home is Bawer Azadi, another Kurdish immigrant who has established a new life in Rhode Island. Like Baran, he is using a pseudonym and declines to be photographed. If they are identified, the two men fear, the Turkish government will retaliate against their relatives in Turkey.

Azadi, who is also in his early 30s, fled Turkey less than two years ago, leaving behind a profitable tour-bus business and three homes. Now, he works in the jewelry industry and as a store clerk, making half of what he earned in Turkey. But Azadi doesn't regret leaving. He tells of being blindfolded and beaten by police for two days after refusing to be an informant, and he was arrested on another occasion for attending a celebration of the Kurdish new year. A friend, Azadi says, was killed for reading a Kurdish newspaper. An uncle who was arrested last year in the Izmir bus station has not been seen since. Describing his decision to emigrate, Azadi says, "My friends were being killed one by one. I knew my turn was coming."

Like Baran, Azadi urges Textron's Campbell to reconsider the company's helicopter deal with Turkey. "That person who makes the decision to sell helicopters to Turkey," he says in Kurdish as Baran translates, "should imagine he was born a Kurd and living in a Kurdish village. Then, this village has been bombed by Cobra helicopters. Once he can imagine this vision, he could decide, `Should I send these helicopters to Turkey?' "

Another thing US decision-makers might consider: although Kurds are the most frequent victims of Turkey's human-rights violations, they are hardly the only ones.

In 1999, an elected delegate to the Turkish parliament was prevented from taking her oath of office because she was wearing a Muslim headscarf, according to Human Rights Watch. Also last year, the president of the Turkish Human Rights Association was sentenced to a year in prison for using the phrase "the Kurdish people" in a speech. In addition, the fundamentalist Muslim mayor of Istanbul was imprisoned, and banned from politics for life, for reading a few lines of a poem that did not contain any advocacy of violence.

Free speech is regularly suppressed in Turkey, according to the US State Department. Books are banned and newspapers seized. Last year, an appellate court upheld the imprisonment of nine students, for up to eight years, for unfurling a protest banner in parliament. Also in 1999, poet Yilmaz Odabasi was jailed for telling a judge, "I am ashamed to be in the same era and country as you"; cartoonist Dogan Guzel was sentenced for "insulting the president"; and playwright Mehmet Vahi Yazar and four actors were imprisoned for performing a play that was "insulting [to] the military."

In 1998, in response to pressure from human-rights groups, the State Department set eight human-rights benchmarks that Turkey supposedly must meet before Textron receives an export license for the Cobras. According to Amnesty's Greenwood, a coalition of human-rights groups told State Department officials in October that, although Turkey has taken small steps to improve human rights, "there hasn't been major progress" on the whole.

Technically, Congress could overturn a State Department decision to grant an export license, but that has never happened. And although congressional opposition exists, it appears to fall far short of the necessary majority.

Neither of Rhode Island's US senators has joined that opposition. Although Democrat Jack Reed is concerned about human rights and Turkey's continuing occupation of Cyprus, he supports the helicopter sale, according to press secretary Greg McCarthy, because Turkey is "an ally and NATO partner, and a country that's strategically located."

Republican Lincoln Chafee, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, admits he knew little of the issue before Kurds approached him this fall at a town meeting in Providence. He refused to sign a congressional letter supporting the sale, because "as those fellows at the town meeting said, Turkey uses these helicopters against the Kurds." But when asked if he would sign a letter opposing the sale, Chafee takes a long pause and remarks, "I'd have to find out more about it."

On the House side, US Representative-elect James Langevin "would be inclined to oppose the sale," according to spokesman Ray Sullivan. In April, US Representatives Robert Weygand and Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island and James McGovern of Worcester, Massachusetts, along with 26 others (none of them from New England), wrote to Clinton, urging him to deny an export license. Clinton's response was noncommittal, but he lauded Turkey's "significant progress" on human rights.

Because contract negotiations between Textron and Turkey are unlikely to be completed until spring, George W. Bush or Al Gore will have to make the export-license decision. But regardless of which man becomes president, recent congressional action suggests that Textron and Turkey will prevail.

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Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives buckled rather than confront a historical violation of human rights that was Turkey's most horrific abuse ever. In 1915 and 1916, Turkey forcibly deported its Armenian population to the Syrian desert to create living space for the Balkan Turks who lost their property during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, according to the Encyclopedia of Genocide (ABC-CLIO, 1999). Some Armenians were massacred outright; more than 500,000 others died from hunger or disease as they were deliberately denied food and water on the forced march. The Turkish government continues to deny that the elimination of its Armenian population was intentional.

A coalition of more than 80 representatives, including Kennedy, Weygand, and McGovern, sponsored a House resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. The resolution had no legal effect, but urged federal employees to be aware that the Turkish government sanctioned "ethnic cleansing" during World War I. The measure lay dormant in committee until September, when House leaders suddenly pushed a vote to aid the re-election campaign of US Representative James Rogan, a Republican from California. One of the House floor managers during President Clinton's impeachment trial, Rogan represents a district with a large Armenian population.

Once House leaders decided to move the resolution, it easily passed in committee and headed to the House floor. Outraged representatives of Turkey's government threatened to halt negotiations with Textron and instead buy helicopters from a Russian-Israeli consortium, according to Bloomberg News Service. Worried that the $4.5 billion deal might collapse, Textron lobbied the congressmen who represent the area surrounding the company's Fort Worth plant to kill the resolution. "We felt it was important to support Turkey," explains Kozicharow.

President Clinton also sided with Turkey, telling House Speaker Dennis Hastert in a letter, "We have significant interests in this troubled region of the world: containing the threat posed by East and Central Asia, stabilizing the Balkans and developing new sources of energy." In response, Hastert withdrew the resolution in late October. He conceded that it would have passed but explained, "Every patriotic American should heed the president's request."

The outcome disappointed Baran, who saw the resolution as important to the Kurdish human-rights struggle. "Had Turkey been condemned with Armenian genocide, would she be able to get American weapons to conduct another genocide against Kurds?" he asks. "I do not believe so."

But as has happened so many times, Turkey prevailed. "They play that card NATO has given them," says Baran, "and they play it at the highest efficiency."

The Armenian-Kurdish lobby did, however, receive a consolation prize. "We sent a message back to the Speaker," says Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Washington-based Armenian National Committee of America, by helping to defeat Rogan handily at the polls.

As for the current question, the signs are mixed. Amnesty's Greenwood is not ready to concede that Textron will receive permission to sell the Cobras to Turkey. In 1996, she notes, congressional pressure stopped the sale of 10 Cobras to Turkey and prevented US financing of a $38 million sale of armored personnel carriers in 1998. Across the Atlantic, the European Union (EU) shows no reluctance to hold the NATO ally accountable for its past. In November, the EU passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide and calling on Turkey to withdraw from Cyprus.

But in Washington, where Textron exerts major lobbying force for foreign arms sales and other business interests, the corporation's successful effort against the Armenian resolution was only one of several recent victories on Capitol Hill. According to the most recent disclosure forms, Textron devoted $4.5 million to lobbying Congress between July 1, 1999, and June 30, 2000. In addition, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Textron made $359,230 in contributions during the recent federal political campaign, 63 percent of which went to Republicans.

The expenditures paid off. Since July 1999, according to its lobbying reports, Textron has successfully pushed for improved trade relations with China, and against stronger automobile fuel-efficiency standards and the proposed patients' bill of rights. But most of Textron's lobbying focuses on military sales. According to its report, the company worked to ensure that a variety of Textron weapons, including the Osprey helicopter-plane, the Sensor Fuzed Weapon (manufactured at the Wilmington, Massachusetts, plant), unmanned planes, and the lightweight howitzer, would be financed by the Defense Appropriations Act. Textron pushed legislation to support sales by its Cessna Aircraft division to the FBI, CIA, Drug Enforcement Administration, Coast Guard, and Customs Service.

Textron also pushed hard for President Clinton's $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package for Colombia, a large portion of which will pay for the purchase of 42 Textron-produced Huey helicopters. As part of its Colombia lobbying efforts, according to Newsweek, the company brought helicopters to Washington's Reagan National Airport and took congressmen for rides.

The controversial aid package for Colombia passed, but with human-rights conditions. Then in August, Clinton used his authority to waive the human-rights provisions, because doing so was in the "national security interest." Once again, Textron made a big sale.

Steven Stycos is a frequent contributor to the Phoenix.

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