Remembering Turgut Ozal: some personal recollections.

• Author: Abramowitz, Morton
• Position: COMMENTARY - In memoriam

Two very different Turkish leaders have played impressively on both the world and domestic stages--Turgut Ozal and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both have been transformational leaders with great achievements. Ozal was a new type of Turkish leader with a realistic vision for where Turkey should be headed, and the intellect, pragmatism, determination and political skill to remake the economy. He dominated the Turkish scene for a decade.

Erdogan, the beneficiary of Ozal's radical changes, has followed in his footsteps but had nothing like Ozal's knowledge and experience. He has rather a different style of pugnacious, in your face, endlessly pronouncing leadership. Still, he also has had the personality, dynamism, and political skills to do no less than change Turkey politically and give the country a cache it never had.

For all his achievements, however, Ozal left office diminished and unpopular. I remember vividly his coming to a performance of the Ankara symphony where only a few in the large audience stood up when he entered last. After ten incredible years, Erdogan retains great public approval. But unlike Ozal, who won great affection in the U.S. during the Gulf war, Americans outside of Mr. Obama know little of Erdogan or can pronounce his name correctly. Indeed, many in the American cognoscenti dislike his "doings" and fear the direction he is leading Turkey. Personal American views of Turkish leaders don't carry much ice in Turkey, but I have been asked to provide one American's perspective on Ozal, although I will frequently compare the two leaders, the second unfortunately mostly from afar. The perceived differences may help illuminate my picture of Ozal.

Some Optics

I became a personal Ozal fan from the start of my ambassadorship in Turkey (July 1989-July 1991). I went to the border with Bulgaria in the late summer of 1989 shortly after my arrival to view the exodus of huge numbers of Turkish Bulgarians forced to leave Bulgaria. I received an appointment to see then Prime Minister to give him a few suggestions on generating greater international support to help deal with the large influx. He thanked me for the suggestions and then turned to his assistants and said in Turkish (my Turkish speaking assistant Robert Finn later told me) don't let the bureaucracy get hold of this and just do it. I have remained a fan since. I probably had the easiest of times for American ambassadors in Turkey, because I could when necessary bypass the bureaucracy, go to Ozal, and get an answer right away, even if it was not always one I wanted to hear.

I had numerous discussions with Ozal since those early days, particularly over the Iraq war and limiting its adverse impact on Turkey. I saw him with George H. W. Bush in the US and in Turkey, and met him several times in the U.S. after I left Turkey in July 1991, including on his hospital bed in Houston. I saw him alone in Ankara a few weeks before he died. This recounting is based not on detailed research but on my recollections, perhaps wrong sometimes but if so impaired by age not by design.

I will first discuss my sense of Ozal's perspective of the U.S., go on to the two issues that consumed much of my time and brought me into close contact with him--the first Iraq war and its Kurdish aftermath and the American Armenian genocide debate of 1990 in Washington, and end with my perspective on Ozal as leader and personality.

Ozal and the U.S.

Unlike the present Turkish leadership, the U.S. always occupied a special political and personal place for Ozal. Of course the world has changed and Ozal's Turkey was different than today's far more dynamic and influential Turkey. For most of his prime ministerial time Ozal focused on radically changing the Turkish economy and restoring domestic politics; he was careful not to challenge his military overlords. He wanted large-scale American aid and support for his efforts to transform Turkey into a market oriented economy and continuing American military assistance to better preserve internal stability and keep the military satisfied. The U.S. and NATO remained the coin of the realm as long as the Soviet Union lived, a perspective Ozal always maintained even after its demise, but one that changed initially when the AKP took power. The US connection also was essential for much of everything else he wanted to do--e.g., to spur the EU accession process, to help make Turkey a regional power and support his first, mostly economic, forays into the Central Asian republics and the Middle East (later much more effectively emulated by Erdogan with a far more dynamic Turkey), to make peace with Greece--because Ozal knew that the U.S. was still the major external player in most areas, cold war or not.

The end of the cold war...