Will Harper ever visit Turkey?

By Peter O’Neil

Postmedia News Europe Correspondent

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided to visit Greece following the G8 summit last month in France the furrowed-eyebrow reaction from some analysts was: “What about Turkey?”

Neighbouring Turkey, which Mr. Harper has never visited since taking office in 2006, has a booming economy, has more than seven times the population (78.8 million), and is an increasingly important western ally and regional power broker in the Middle East and North Africa.

Greece, with just under 11 million people, is staggering under a debt so vast it is barely able to assert its own sovereignty, let alone exert regional influence. Its trade with Canada is tiny and shrinking.

“We should be paying closer attention to Turkey, which is the Mediterranean’s economic tiger and the region’s only Muslim democracy,” said Fen Hampson, director of Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

“Turkey has a key stabilizing role to play in the Middle East and North African region. Its GDP is fast approaching the $1 trillion mark.”

There are also business interests who would like to see Canada’s rapidly growing trade relationship with Turkey flourish even more, particularly those seeking major government contracts, said Gar Knutson, an Ottawa lobbyist and former Liberal MP who sits on the board of the Canadian-Turkish Business Council.

“I think the prime minister at some point should go to Turkey. They’re an important NATO ally; it’s a quickly growing economy. We have lots of interests there,” Mr. Knutson said.

Mr. Harper’s aides have told the media that Canada has important historical and people-to-people ties with Greece, and there has been a long-standing invitation to Mr. Harper from Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Politics is another factor, since the Conservatives have long wooed the large Greek diaspora in Canada.

But Turkey, say Mr. Harper’s aides, is one of the countries the prime minister wants to visit.

“We did our best in a minority government situation to travel to as many countries as possible,” spokesman Andrew MacDougall said in an email this week.

“Of course, we haven’t had the opportunity to visit all the countries we would like to visit, including Turkey. We look forward to doing so at some point in the future.”

But the idea of a Harper visit to Turkey is fraught with domestic and foreign policy sensitivities due to decisions dating back to Mr. Harper’s time as official Opposition leader.

During that period he embraced the politically active Armenian-Canadian community’s claim that atrocities committed against their community in Ottoman Turkey starting in 1915 constituted genocide.

Plenty of politicians around the world have responded to the Armenian lobby effort, resulting in some 20 legislatures in various countries passing motions recognizing that genocide took place. Among them was the Canadian Senate, in 2002, and the House of Commons two years later.

But, according to Turkey, Canada’s Conservative government is the only one in the world to officially embrace the genocide narrative as official government policy.

Turkey objected furiously in 2006 when Mr. Harper formally stated the new policy, but some diplomats said a thaw had started to develop prior to the 2011 election campaign.

In April of 2010, for instance, Mr. Harper issued no statement to the general public to mark the anniversary of the tragedy. And recent high-level visits include a 2009 trip to Turkey by Lawrence Cannon, then minister of foreign affairs, and another last year by Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

Furthermore, Export Development Canada has just announced the opening of a regional office in Istanbul to help Canadian exporters break into the relatively thriving regional market, and there have been preliminary talks on possible free trade negotiations.

But then Mr. Harper issued an election campaign statement on the genocide, almost identical to the 2006 declaration, that got almost no mainstream media coverage in Canada but deeply angered Turkey.

Mr. Harper’s “wrong and unfair” judgment was based on “one-sided information” that came after a number of initiatives to improve relations, said an April 27 statement from the Turkish foreign ministry.

The government’s position was also “based on narrow political calculations” and “dealt a blow to these efforts,” the statement declared.

Rafet Akgunay, Turkey’s ambassador to Canada and a former senior foreign policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said there has never been a discussion initiated by either government regarding a possible Harper visit.

“I don’t want to comment on such assumptions. If he wants to visit Turkey I’m sure my authorities would consider it accordingly,” Mr. Akgunay told Postmedia News.

But he described Mr. Harper’s genocide position as a “major obstacle” standing in the way of improved relations.

While one senior Turkish foreign affairs official in Ankara told Postmedia News this week that Mr. Harper would be welcome, another former senior Turkish diplomat familiar with Canada said he doubted his country would agree to set out the welcome mat for a foreign leader who would likely inflame nationalist sentiment.

Mr. Hampson said Mr. Harper should try to find a way to mend relations.

“Turkey is far too important a country to shun or ignore or make hostage to our own domestic politics.”

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