U.S. Presence Has Turks Fidgeting

The Americans have come to Batman, but not everyone here in the shadow of Iraq thinks that it is a good idea.

American troops, officially described as a search-and-rescue detachment, have slipped quietly into a Turkish air base outside of town. They have become a magnet for trouble in Batman.

Turkish riot police and blue-beret army commandos faced down surly anti-war loiterers here Sunday in this oil town 80 miles from Iraq. There was no violence, but an after-prayers protest by around 1,500 marchers Friday triggered scuffles in which Turkish soldiers fired hundreds of shots into the air. Eight people, including the police chief, were injured and 40 were arrested.

“God is great!” chanted the crowd emerging from Batman’s biggest mosque in what became an anti-American and anti-Israeli protest.

Similar anti-war demonstrations organized by an unlikely alliance of fundamentalist Muslims and leftist political parties have roiled other cities here in southeastern Turkey. One protester was shot to death in Tatvan, farther east.

In Ankara, the capital, bomb explosions damaged the offices of French, Japanese and Saudi Arabian airlines on Sunday. And in far-off Istanbul in western Turkey, government medical personnel demonstrated Sunday against assignments transferring them to Batman and other cities along the 206-mile Turkish-Iraqi border.

Batman’s misgivings with war echo a national reluctance to follow bellicose President Turgut Ozal in lining up with the multinational alliance against Iraq. The reasons are rooted in Turkey’s history and its Islamic faith.

“Why should Turkey get a bloody nose defending American oil interests?” demanded leftist lawyer Abdullah Duran. Historically, Turkey has taken no side in Middle East trauma, but Ozal has emerged as one of the U.S.-led alliance’s most outspoken hawks, and many Turks fear that their country will be dragged into the war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“We don’t want to go to hell for Ozal’s sake. We say Saddam should go, but we don’t want to be America’s gendarme. Was there such an outcry when Israel took noble Jerusalem?” asked Nafis Yuce, provincial leader of the conservative Islamic Welfare Party. His views were widely shared Sunday among believers in a dusty main square in Batman, bathed by tension and a cold winter sun.

People in southeastern Turkey, many of them Kurds, take their religion seriously. However much they may dislike Saddam Hussein, they have no quarrel with their Muslim and Kurdish kin in northern Iraq.

More particularly, Batman residents complain that the newly arrived Americans spotlight their railhead city of 180,000 as an inviting, and defenseless, target.

“This is the most dangerous place in Turkey. There are no Patriots (missiles) here to protect us, or any gas masks either,” said Sahin Gondiken, an oil company engineer. Gondiken, like many Batman fathers, has sent his children to stay with relatives in safer western Turkey.

Focus of the municipal concern and collective dislike is an American detachment that has come with big green helicopters to live in tents at a military airstrip that parallels the highway to Batman.

The Americans, who arrived as soon as war began, are the U.S. forces stationed closest to Iraq in Turkey. Despite national disquiet, Turkey is now the launch pad for controversial American second-front bombing raids against Iraqi targets from the big Incirlik Air Base near the city of Adana farther west.

The neat American camp and its helicopters here are clearly visible to travelers on the highway--and are certainly no secret to Iraqi target plotters, the people of Batman fear.

Once, the Batman base was a modest support facility. Now, emphatically off limits to locals, it bristles with Turkish jet fighters as well as the Americans, whom townsfolk imagine number between 500 and 600.

The United States, which offers little detail about its operations in Turkey, says Batman’s Americans are a search-and-rescue detachment that would be used to aid downed airmen in northern Iraq. As of this weekend, the need had not arisen, according to one American source.

But townsfolk who can easily imagine their oil refinery in flames are suspicious of the official account.

“There are four helicopters, but people say there may be warplanes as well,” said Nizamettin Izgi, owner of Batman’s weekly newspaper.

If the Americans’ presence weighs on the city, they are seldom seen in Batman. “They brought their own food, even water, from America,” one tea-sipping local assured visitors Sunday.

Some of the Americans have reportedly ventured quietly into town. But everyone assumes that because of the street protests, they will not soon return.

“If the Americans came as individuals, we would share our bread with them. That is our tradition,” said Izgi. “But collectively, many people oppose what they stand for and are hostile to them.”

Many are also afraid. At least half the population fled in the days before the war. Now that the fighting is under way and the Americans have come, many who went to nearby villages are, perversely, returning to Batman. The city’s rhythm has picked up, but thousands of residents, particularly women and children, remain in distant refuges.