CAAT condemns the signing yesterday of a Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Turkey for the potential sale of 40 Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft by the UK to Turkey. The move comes as Germany, one of the co-producers of the aircraft along with the UK, Italy, and Spain, has apparently withdrawn its opposition to the sale.
Turkey’s President Erdoğan leads an increasingly autocratic and repressive regime, which imprisons political dissidents and journalists en masse, including, earlier this year, opposition Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoğlu, widely expected to be Erdoğan’s main challenger in the next Presidential election. The huge protests that followed were met with the mass arrest of 1,100 people. The Turkish state engages in particularly severe repression of its Kurdish minority, regularly banning Kurdish-led political parties, imprisoning activists, and arbitrarily removing elected mayors and governors of Kurdish-led parties.
While the current process of disarmament by the Kurdish armed group the PKK may be a welcome step towards peace, there have been no clear concessions by Turkey to the demands for cultural and linguistic rights, or regional autonomy, for the Kurdish minority, and there is thus no sign of a clear end to this decades-long conflict. Moreover, Turkey remains in occupation of large swathes of northern Syria where, together with allied Syrian militia, it has committed severe human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law. There have been no signs that Turkey has softened its attitude to the autonomous regional administration in the Kurdish majority Syrian region of Rojava, against which Turkey carried out its invasion of north-east Syria in 2019. It intensified bombing of the region earlier this year. Turkey has also carried out regular bombing attacks on the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.
The proposed sale of Eurofighters will not contribute to regional peace or security – rather, it will bolster an autocratic regime, and gives rise to a serious risk that the planes will be used aggressively against Turkey’s neighbours in Iraq and Syria, as well as for domestic repression.
It is very regrettable that Germany, which appears to indulge in intermittent and highly selective outrage at human rights abuses, has dropped its previous, and very justified, opposition to the sale. But the primary responsibility lies with the UK government which has been driving the deal, for the primary benefit of arms company BAE Systems, whose influence over successive UK governments is grossly excessive and seriously distorts UK foreign policy and democracy.
