Abdullah visit a boost for Turkey-Iran ties

Though the trip is focused on increasing trade, a visit by Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, to Iran is a boost for ties between the two countries

The Turkish president Abdullah Gul, right, last travelled to Iran in 2009. He will meet Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, in Tehran tomorrow, on the second day of his four-day state visit. Show more

ISTANBUL // A four-day visit by Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, to Iran starting today offers the first chance for Turkey's leaders to assess for themselves the mood in Tehran after the recent failure of international talks about the Islamic republic's nuclear programme.
On the trip, the first state visit by a Turkish president in Iran in almost 10 years, Mr Gul will be accompanied by Ahmet Davutoglu, the foreign minister, as well as a large business delegation. Mr Gul is to meet his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran tomorrow. Mr Gul's talks in Tehran, Tabriz and Isfahan will focus on efforts to widen economic relations, but the nuclear issue is certain to come up as well, according to a senior Turkish diplomat.
"We always nudge the Iranians" to be more flexible in the row about their nuclear programme, which the West thinks may have military aims, the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But they always come up with the argument that they cannot trust the West."
As the Turkish president does not set policy, Mr Gul's visit is "more symbolic", the diplomat added. Still, Mr Gul, a former Turkish prime minister and foreign minister, is a statesman who enjoys respect on the international stage and whose word carries weight.
Last month, Turkey hosted talks between the Iranians and representatives of the veto powers of the UN Security Council - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States - plus Germany. The two-day meeting in Istanbul failed to produce any agreement. No date has been set for further talks.
"We don't know whether there will be a third round of talks" after a meeting in Geneva in December and the Istanbul conference, the diplomat said. "There is a deep mistrust between the two sides."
Turkey saw the Istanbul meeting as a chance to strengthen its role as a regional power, and news reports beforehand said Ankara had told the Iranians that Mr Gul's trip might be cancelled if Tehran were to demonstrate a lack of flexibility at the talks. But since then, the Turks have decided to move on and concentrate on progress in bilateral ties with Iran, which have improved considerably in recent years.
"Turkey's Iran policy is rather pragmatic," Bayram Sinkaya, an expert on Iran, wrote in an analysis for the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, or Orsam. "The main aim is to expand economic relations with Iran and increase exports to that country."
Zafer Caglayan, Turkey's foreign trade minister, said the aim was to increase trade volume between the two countries to US$30 billion (Dh110bn) from the current $10bn in the next four years. Iran is Turkey's most important supplier of natural gas after Russia.
For Turkey, efforts to deepen ties with Tehran come with both economic and political risks. Ankara complies with UN sanctions against Tehran, but says separate US or European Union sanctions against Iran do not concern Turkey. Earlier this month, the United States blacklisted three Turkish companies accused of having business relations with the Iranians banned under US sanctions.
Politically, Mr Gul's visit to Iran could trigger fresh concerns that Nato member and EU hopeful Turkey is getting too cosy with Middle Eastern neighbours such as Iran and Syria while sending relations with Israel, Iran's and Syria's arch enemy, into a state of crisis. The religiously conservative government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, has denied an eastward drift towards Islamic states, but has not been able to quiet criticism in the West.
"This visit will probably be seen as the result of an 'ideologically' motivated shift of the axis in Turkey's foreign policy," Mr Sinkaya wrote.
The last state visit by a president of Turkey, a secular western-style republic, to the Islamic republic of Iran was by Mr Gul's predecessor, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, in 2002, but diplomatic traffic between the two countries has increased in recent years. Mr Gul travelled to Tehran in 2009 to take part in an international economic summit there, and Mr Erdogan has also visited Tehran several times. Mr Ahmadinejad has visited Turkey on four occasions since 2008.
Turkey also raised eyebrows in the West last year by securing an agreement with Iran and Brazil designed to defuse the nuclear row that was rejected by the EU and the US, and by voting against a fresh round of Iran sanctions in the UN Security Council. Last November, Ankara vetoed Nato plans to name Iran as a source of threat for the alliance in a policy document.
Confronted with western criticism, Turkey has consistently argued that, as a direct geographical neighbour of Iran, it has to find a way to get along with the regime in Tehran and cannot be expected to follow the strictly anti-Iranian approach of western European countries or the US. "We are not Denmark," was how the foreign ministry put it at one point. But Turkey also says it agrees with the West in that it does not want a nuclear-armed Iran.
While insisting that Turkey is not turning away from the West and is pursuing the same aims as its western partners in the Iranian nuclear issue, Ankara says sanctions are not the right way to deal with Tehran.
"Do sanctions have an effect? Yes, they make life harder for the Iranians," the Turkish diplomat said. "But are sanctions changing the Iranian position? I don't think so."