In the Muslim world, Turkey and Iran are usually perceived as standing on opposite sides. Turkey stands for secularism, while the Shia clerics dominate the Iranian politics. Turkey is a “friend of the West”, and is also a Muslim country that has normal relations with Israel. While Iran, if it is not in the news for its controversial nuclear program, is in the news for its leadership’s polemics against the West and Israel. In Turkey, you can be renounced for wearing a hijab, while in Iran, you are required to wear it by the law. Due to their antipodal attitude towards religion and politics, it is hard to imagine the two countries having a cordial relationship. Yet this is the case.
An analysis by Yigal Schleifer in the Kuwait Times details the relationship between the two countries:
Trade between the two countries, for example, hit $10 billion in 2008, compared to a level of $1 billion in 2000. Iran also supplies close to a third of Turkey’s gas supply. Turkish officials, meanwhile, were among the first and only to congratulate Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad after his recent controversial reelection. Turkey and Iran share a 499-km border, and both Turkish and Iranian diplomats like to point out that the two Muslim neighbours have been at peace for centuries.
Iran and Turkey also share one common threat: their receptive Kurdish separatist movement. Growing collaboration between PKK (Kurdish rebels fighting against Turkey) and PJAK (Kurdish rebels fighting against Iran) has led Iranian and Turkish military to cooperate to attack the rebel group’s bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Recently, their relationship made headlines when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan supported Iran’s right to a nuclear program. Erdogen was quoted as saying that Iran’s nuclear program ” is an energy project with peaceful, humanitarian purposes”. He said talks between Tehran and world powers in Geneva on October 1 showed that it “can work with” the United States and Russia on uranium enrichment. As Al Jazeera reported his latest remarks came after an interview in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper in which he accused Western powers of treating Iran unfairly and referred to Ahmadinejad as a “friend”.
Al Jazeera also has a great program discussing the Iranian-Turkish relationship:
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Though Yigal Schleifer, in the Kuwait Times’ analysis, points out that Turkey’s interests in the region also dictate that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon:
But Turkish analysts say that the peace that Ankara and Tehran have maintained for so long is based on a delicate balance of military power between the two countries, one that would be fundamentally disturbed if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons. “The bottom line is that Turkey can’t accept an Iran with nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapons-capable Iran or a nuclear-armed Iran is not in the interest of Turkey,” says Kibaroglu (Mustafa Kibaroglu is an expert on nuclear non-proliferation issues at Bilkent University in Ankara).
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