Turkish Officials Fend Off Disclosures

By MARC CHAMPION

Turkish officials fended off disclosures from leaked U.S. diplomatic cables that painted its prime minister as a distrustful authoritarian and its foreign minister as dangerously Islamist, and alleged its finance minister had dispensed stock tips.

Amid the caustic U.S. assessments of several foreign leaders revealed in State Department cables released by WikiLeaks beginning this weekend, the diplomats’ takes on Turkey’s officials resonated within the country and fed into its already divisive national politics. Analysts said that while the dispatches were embarrassing, however, neither side was likely to let them become a game-changer in their relations.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, on Monday shrugged off leaked communications that described him as an “exceptionally dangerous” Islamist with imperial delusions.

“Turkish-American relations will not be affected,” Mr. Davutoglu told reporters in Washington after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State. He said Mrs. Clinton had apologized for the leaks, according to CNN Turk, but added “it is correct to depict this as the 9/11 of diplomacy,” the TV channel reported.

The leaks received heavy coverage in Turkey’s media Monday. That, analysts say, was in part because of the sheer number of documents related to Turkey— close to 8,000 cables came from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara alone—and because of the way they played into Turkey’s internal debate over the Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its leaders.

On Monday, Turkey’s finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, denied a comment in one of the U.S. embassy cables that in 2008 he had urged foreign investors to sell stock in Turkey’s largest media company, Dogan Yayin Holding AS, as it became locked in a tax battle with the government.

Mr. Simsek told a group of investors in London to sell stock in Dogan because it “won’t be around much longer,” according to the cable. Its U.S. diplomat author outlined the growing dispute between the Dogan group and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

“There are suggestions of a deliberate political move against Dogan,” the cable said. “Indeed, after Prime Minister Erdogan’s attacks began last week, Dogan stock fell 8%.”

Mr. Simsek, a former Merrill Lynch banker with a strong links to the international investor community, said in a statement thatthe allegations were “baseless” and “fabricated.” He pointed to an error in the document, which incorrectly identified his 2008 post as “trade minister,” as evidence that its contents couldn’t be trusted.

Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party leapt on the claims against Mr. Simsek, demanding an investigation. Daily newspapers such as the Dogan-owned Milliyet highlighted excerpts from the assessments of U.S. diplomats and their sources that chime closely with the views of Mr. Erdogan’s secularist opponents in Turkey.

Those assessments included one in a 2004 cable that referred to Mr. Davutoglu’s Islamist influence on Mr. Erdogan and said Mr. Erdogan himself was an “authoritarian” surrounded “by sycophantic (but contemptuous) advisers.” A more recent cable mocked Mr. Davutoglu’s talk about restoring the influence of the former Ottoman Empire.

With thousands of Turkey-related documents still unpublished, speculation continued to swirl Monday on TV talk shows here that cables yet to be revealed would show that the U.S. supported anti-Turkish terrorists from the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, in Northern Iraq. That is a potentially explosive claim that U.S. diplomats have denied in advance.

But failing some future bombshell, Turkish leaders will draw the distinction between diplomatic cables and policy, said Ilter Turan, professor of international relations at Bilgi Univeristy in Istanbul.

Mr. Turan also pointed out there was an upside to the leaks. Cables from early in the government’s tenure, soon after the AKP had taken power and when Turkey had just rejected U.S. requests for help in its invasion of Iraq, were far more critical and dismissive than more recent ones. Later cables accept the insistence of Turkish leaders that they aren’t turning from the West by adopting a foreign policy that sometimes conflicts with that of the U.S. in the region, but merely re-engaging with their neighborhood.

“There may have been questions about what Turkey was doing and where it was going, but it was not at the level of policy,” said Mr. Turan. “I think on whole both parties will work to make sure damage to an already strenuous relationship is limited.”

—Joe Parkinson contributed to this article.

Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com

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