WarSclerotic

The last action Parliament performed in terms of legislation before going into recess on Sept. 10 was to approve a controversial preferential trade agreement (PTA) with Iran when, in fact, a large number of crucial bills and international agreements had been piling up on the agenda, waiting to be debated.

The fact that the PTA with Iran represents the first concession agreement Turkey has ever committed to with any other country — with the exception of the customs union with the EU as part of accession talks and free trade agreements (FTA) with 17 countries — is by itself an indication of how the Iranian regime has accumulated a significant amount of political capital in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which is heavily dominated by political Islamist zealots.

The pro-Iranian lobby in the government has been silently pushing the legislation through the Turkish Parliament after Iran ratified it in its own legislature, or Majlis, in May. Cevdet Yılmaz, the development minister who made no secret of his love affair with the Iranian revolution, is the chief architect of this deal and has worked very hard to carry it through. As the co-chairman of the Turkey-Iran Joint Economic Commission, and with the blessing of his boss President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Yılmaz pushed the legislation through the bureaucratic channels and made it happen.

The agreement was signed during Erdoğan’s visit to Tehran at the end of January this year when he was still serving as the prime minister. It almost fell apart, though, when the Iranians played a last-minute Persian diplomacy trick. In fact, the whole saga was recorded by reporters. The scene captured on camera revealed how Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekçi, who was visibly uneasy at the ceremony, refused to sign the deal when Iranian Minister of Industries and Mines Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh produced no Turkish version of the agreement.

But in the end Zeybekçi had to put his name on the document, albeit reluctantly, after Erdoğan instructed him to do so with a hand signal in front of the Iranian delegation present at the bilateral meeting in Tehran. This was completely against established diplomatic protocols and received a harsh rebuke from Turkey’s main opposition party at the time.

The timing of the agreement also raised questions about Erdoğan, who openly called Iran his second home during this visit, despite a host of policy differences Turkey has with the country ranging from Syria to Iraq. Moreover, Erdoğan poked the eye of his key ally, the United States, by disregarding the friendly warning from Washington that was conveyed to his government by visiting US Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen just a day before Erdoğan went to Tehran.

The US official urged Turkey to be cautious, saying there are still significant sanctions in place against Iran and that business deals with Iran should be postponed. “Iran is not open for business. Sanctions [on Iran] remain in place and are still quite significant, and businesses that are interested in engaging with Iran really should hold off,” he said publicly in Ankara. “The day may come when Iran is open for business, but that day is not today,” Cohen emphasized.

Negotiations on the agreement started in the first term of the AKP government and took 10 years to conclude. When looking at the details of the agreement, one may get the feeling that the Turkish side has been cheated and has offered more concessions than Iran.

For example, Iran received tariff and quota reductions on 140 agricultural products, while Turkey obtained discounts on only 125 industrial products. Considering the fact that in 2013 Turkey exported a total of $4 billion worth industrial goods to Iran, the agreement covers only $612 million worth of this trade (or some 15 percent of Turkish exports to Iran), leaving a substantial amount of industrial goods out of the scope of the PTA.

In fact, the percentage of goods covered by the PTA was higher in 2010 and 2011 (28 percent and 27 percent, respectively). That means Iran recognized an area where Turkey was already losing competitiveness and took advantage of it.

I’m not sure that what the Iranians say on paper will actually be enforced on the ground. Turkish firms have been facing significant red tape in Iranian markets despite the agreements to the contrary, and Turkish truckers have effectively given up crossing through Iran en route to Central Asia because of illegal fuel subsidies, fees and technical hindrance by Iran. The fact that the trade volume between Iran and Turkey is mostly based on hydrocarbons purchased by Turkey — and that it fails to reflect the true strength of both economies in terms of gross domestic product — is a testament to Iran’s consistent efforts to block Turkey’s penetration of Iranian markets.

The trade volume between Turkey and Iran was $14.6 billion in 2013 and dropped a sharp 47 percent from $21.9 billion in 2012, when Iran had moved gold through Turkey to circumvent financial sanctions. The trade imbalance heavily favors Iran, with a $6.2 billion surplus as of 2013 figures.

In the first seven months of 2014, the trade volume took another dive, declining 17 percent to $7.8 billion from $9.4 billion in the same period last year. As the trade volume dropped two consecutive years, the trade imbalance working against Turkey grew bigger. Under the circumstances, the target of reaching a trade volume of $30 billion by the end of 2015 — a target announced publicly by Erdoğan in 2009 and later reconfirmed during his January visit this year.

But this trade deal holds advantages for Tehran. It enables Iranian firms to get a firmer hold on the Turkish market, and many of the companies are simply fronts for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). That is why the pro-Iranian lobby in the Turkish Parliament carefully navigated the deal through parliamentary commissions in order to not attract any noise. Since this is essentially a trade agreement, first and foremost, it should have gone through the parliamentary Commission on Industry, Trade, Energy, Natural Resources and Information Technology. Instead, it was sent to the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Commission on June 24, 2014 for review. The Planning and Budgetary Commission must have also examined the deal to conduct “impact analyses.”

That did not happen, either. Instead, the Foreign Affairs Commission debated the agreement and approved it on July 3, 2014. It was interesting that the commission met only to discuss this deal and that it was approved in half an hour without much debate, before Volkan Bozkır, the chairman of the commission (now the EU minister), closed the session.

The key person who managed the traffic between Erdoğan’s government and Parliament was Beşir Atalay, who served as deputy prime minister from 2011 until the end of last month, when he became the AKP deputy chairman and party spokesperson. Atalay has been a long-time Iranian sympathizer, according to the anonymous Twitter account @ACEMUSAKLARI, which posted documents, photographs and video footage of what appears to be the original investigation file into the deadly Iran-backed terrorist organization, Tawhid-Salam. The leak claims that Atalay’s family origins extend to Iran, even though his family settled in the Keskin district of Kırıkkale province, an hour’s drive to the east from Ankara.

Atalay’s family has been very active in the Shiite Bab-ı Ali (Ehl-i Beyt) İlim Vakfı foundation in the province. The contact address for this foundation in Kırıkkale is listed as the Çile Bookstore, whose owner, Bahattin Atalay, is the brother of Beşir Atalay. The file on Atalay revealed that he was exposed to Iranian propaganda throughout his youth. He even went to Iran to attend annual celebrations of the Iranian revolution.

A confidential police document dated Feb. 26, 1982 indicates that Atalay, at the time a research assistant in the department of sociology at the faculty of management and economy of Erzurum Atatürk University, went to Tehran to attend the third annual celebrations for the Iranian revolution. He was arrested on April 27, 1983 in Erzurum when police raided different cells of an Iranian-linked network in the eastern province. Police found Iranian revolutionary documents and materials in Atalay’s house. He told the police he had spent 12 days in Iran.

In 1984, police sent a confidential memo on Beşir Atalay to the rector’s office at Erzurum University, detailing his activities, which included seminars in student houses praising the Iranian revolution and recruiting for an Iranian group at the university. He reportedly espoused a doctrine claiming Turkey could also be saved through a similar revolution. The police also exposed Atalay’s links to then-Iranian Consul M. Tahari at the Iranian Consulate in Erzurum.

Atalay also served as the rector of Kırıkkale University between 1992 and 1997 and appointed pro-Iranian sympathizers to key positions at the university. The investigation file claims that he also established the Fifth Way group at Kırıkkale University, which was officially organized under the Fifth Season Association. Its members subscribe to a radical Shiite doctrine and praise Shiite ideology as the fifth true school of thought in Islamic law, which generally accepts the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali schools as the leading Sunni schools of thought in Islamic jurisprudence.

Atalay is also believed to have been the architect of Turkey’s tilt toward Iran during AKP rule. He was identified as the key pro-Iranian official in helping Iran sympathizers move to senior positions in the Turkish government. Intelligence chief Hakan Fidan and Interior Minister Efkan Ala are among many of his protégés, according to @ACEMUSAKLARI. He publicly admitted in 2012 that he was the one who helped Fidan make a name for himself in the government.

Hence, Turkey’s trade agreement with Iran, though it appears to be an innocent deal at first glance, raises a lot of questions as to the way it was managed, how it was pushed through Parliament and the extent of involvement of pro-Iranian figures in Turkey. It smells bad, and I would say having no deal with Iran is certainly better than having a bad deal.