Turkish outpost: how war workers see the conflict

EVERY OTHER DAY, United States Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons roar aloft over the Kurdish quarter of the city of Adana, about an hour's drive inland from the Mediterranean coast of central Turkey, to patrol the skies over northern Iraq.

I arrive in Adana on Christmas Eve to check out the Incirlik military base, where the jet pilots are housed, seven miles outside the industrial metropolis of one million people.

Adana is mostly off limits to the thousands of British and American troops and reservists who are pouring into Turkey in preparation for possible war. Instead, the soldiers' main source of entertainment is the mile-long strip of shops immediately outside the base gates. Restaurants, gun dealers, carpet sellers, tailors, and bars offer goods ranging from burritos to pirate copies of the latest James Bond movies on DVD to homesick Americans. Along the strip, local women often leave the Cheers bar or the Happy House restaurant holding onto soldiers' arms to make a quick trip back to a cheap hotel in town before curfew closes the main base gate at 11 P.M.

On Christmas Day, however, the strip is quiet. At the Happy House, the only customers from the base are a group of older soldiers eating hamburgers and a fresh-faced twenty-something Texan who is struggling to converse with a middle-aged Turkish woman.

Mustapha, a Happy House regular, a.k.a., Tony Montana, greets us as we walk in. "What would you like, my friend? A car for the week or how about a girlfriend? All of these women are my bitches, my `ho's. Just say the word."

Over several beers, he glumly explains that business has been bad for a while. "It's the war. The Americans are afraid of terrorist attacks, so nobody is allowed to spend the night in town, and many would rather celebrate inside the base," he says. "In the past, the American soldiers were very friendly and we had great times together. One of the guys gave me my name, Tony Montana. Then I found out that another Turkish guy had taken the same name, so I went over to him and said: Listen, there can only be one Tony Montana, so you better change your name to something else like Joe. Now he's Joe Montana."

At 9 P.M. the bar owner decides to give up and close shop, so we wait outside for a "dolmus" shuttle back into Adana with Mustapha. During the ride back, he tells us that he applied for a job on the base with no luck. "That's what everyone here wants to do. Work at the base exchange, the bowling alley, the movie theater, or the post office," he says.

A company named Vinnell, Brown & Root (VBR) controls jobs on the base. The company is a joint venture of two U.S. multinationals--Vinnell of Fairfax, Virginia, and Kellogg Brown & Root of Houston, Texas. Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney headed up before taking his present position with George W. Bush in Washington, D.C.

Soon after VBR won its contract in 1988, Incirlik provided a major staging post for thousands of sorties flown against Iraq and occupied Kuwait during the Gulf War in January 1991. These planes dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs on military and civilian targets.

Today, the U.S. Air Force and VBR employ 1,450 local workers at the base. They must belong to the Harb-Is (war workers) trade union. The union's office is on the second floor of a building in central Adana, where a group of workers wearing smart business suits are careful not to criticize the United States.

Yurdal Yavuzcan, a supervisor in the mess and a union officer, says he loves his job. "We feed 2,000 soldiers, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have no complaints against the company or the air force," he says.

His boss, Orhan Sener, current president of Harb-Is, explains that the war has been a profitable business for his members.

"We were working overtime during the Gulf War," he says. "I was working at the fire department as a fire inspector. A lot of airplanes landed, and we had to support them twenty-four hours a day."

Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the Turkish public is against the war, Harb-Is says its workers will do whatever they are asked.

"Nobody can say that war is good. It is bad," says Sener. "But whatever our government decides, we're just going to support them despite the fact that I don't know what is going to happen as a result of the war. As you know, they might use nuclear weapons like Hiroshima or Nagasaki."

A couple of blocks away, his counterpart at Petrol-Is, the oil workers union, expresses a different opinion. Mehmet Oder, the president of Petrol-Is, said that the Gulf War had an adverse impact on the members of his union, many of whom lost their jobs when the United Nations imposed the food-for-oil program on Iraq.

"This was one of the most important industrial regions before the Gulf War," he says. "The textile industry completely collapsed. Another Gulf War may result in even more problems for us. I think that the situation should be resolved peacefully."