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AFP (with additional material by Reuters). 3 March 2003. Turkey to forfeit proposed US aid package over troops vote defeat. WASHINGTON -- Turkey will forfeit nearly all of a proposed six-billion-dollar US aid package should its parliament continue to refuse to accept the deployment of US troops for a possible war with Iraq, the State Department said Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that unless Turkish lawmakers reversed their stance, the six billion dollars would be off the table. "As far as this particular package, most of it was predicated on helping Turkey meet the cost of involvement ... therefore I'd have to say that much of that would not occur if there was no involvement," he told reporters. The money could have been leveraged into loans worth some 30 billion dollars, according to US and Turkish officials. The Turkish parliament on Saturday rejected by a margin of three votes a government motion to allow the deployment of 62,000 US troops in Turkey for a possible war against Iraq and the deployment of Turkish troops in northern Iraq. No new vote is expected for two or three weeks, according to a senior official of Turkey's ruling AKP party. At the point, however, approval will likely be too late, US officials have said. "The vote was a surprise, the outcome was a surprise, to Turkish officials as well as to American officials," Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters. Senior US officials said overwhelming public opposition in Turkey to war and current domestic instability made it unlikely Prime Minister Abdullah Gul of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would seek another vote. U.S. officials and analysts are worried that Kurds in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq might try to seize oil fields if there was little or no U.S. presence in the early days of an attack. Former U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary Larry Korb, now a senior official with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said Saturday's vote raised "a very serious problem." "They (the Pentagon) will say that they can come in from the south and we will still win," he said. "But if you don't come in from the north, who's going to grab the oil fields? Are the Kurds going to try and take them?" Korb added. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ProletarianNews http://www.utopia2000.org --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bdn7KI.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html ==^================================================================
