Tag Archives: kurds

‘Zero problems’ in Ankara is havoc for the neighbourhood

By Michael Young –Sep 29, 2011–

Much hyperbole has been deployed in describing Turkey’s reorientation towards the Middle East. Partly, this has been the fault of the Turks themselves, who have sought to ride the wave of Ankara’s popularity in the region – primarily a result of its rift with Israel and vocal support for the Palestinian cause. But the reality is considerably more complicated, as Turkey is increasingly drawn into the treacherous byways of Arab and Iranian affairs.

In a much-discussed book he wrote before taking office, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, enunciated what he called the policy of “zero problems with neighbours”. This has shaped Ankara’s approach to the Middle East in past years. However, today the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan finds itself managing problems – open or more subtly stated – with virtually every country in its perimeter, especially those to the south and east.

This was predictable. For nearly a century Turkey has focused on Europe. Ankara’s renewed attention southwards poses a challenge to Arab states and Iran, which are little prepared to make room for what can come across as an overbearing Turkish government with a tendency to overplay its hand. Arab regimes have publicly embraced Mr Erdogan. But they have also set limits to Turkish actions involving them.

Take Mr Erdogan’s recent visit to Egypt. Although it was hailed as a success, Egypt regards Turkish involvement on the Palestinian front, particularly in the Gaza Strip, as an irritant. Cairo views itself as the interlocutor of choice with the Palestinians, and President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster has not changed that. Anything that strengthens Hamas could have damaging repercussions for Egyptian internal security. The military leadership in Cairo is also watching carefully how the mildly Islamist government in Ankara inspires elements of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which the generals mistrust.

Turkish spokesmen erred in announcing before the Egypt trip that Mr Erdogan might enter Gaza. Neither Egypt nor the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, relished such a prospect, and ultimately the Turkish prime minister backtracked. Here was a classic example of Mr Erdogan going too far. Mr Abbas opposed a move that would have legitimised Hamas at his expense. The military council in Cairo surely agreed, seeing no reason to hand Turkey a new wedge to insert itself politically on Egypt’s eastern border.

Mr Erdogan justifiably expressed outrage with Israel after its soldiers killed Turkish protesters trying to breach the Gaza blockade in May 2010. Israel’s government refused to apologise, leading Turkey recently to downgrade diplomatic ties. Early on, the Turkish prime minister caught the mood of exasperation with Israel for its intransigence toward the Palestinians, which he has used to his advantage to garner Arab approval.

However, once the indignation is used up, does Turkey really gain from having undermined the mediation role it once could play between Arabs and Israelis? Did Mr Erdogan need to go as far as he did? He has made an apology and the lifting of the blockade of Gaza conditions for the resumption of normal relations with Israel. The first demand is defensible, but is Gaza enough of a Turkish national priority to justify the prime minister’s second, tougher stipulation?

Mr Erdogan’s ability to exploit regional transformations has been neutralised by his outspokenness. A resumption of Arab-Israeli, even Palestinian-Israeli, negotiations is, admittedly, unlikely in the foreseeable future. However, Turkey could have seriously aspired to play a key role in a revived peace process. But today, Israeli ill-feeling against Mr Erdogan, the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to see their position undercut by the prime minister’s demagogical instincts, and international recognition that Turkey is now more a part of the problem than the solution, have effectively sidelined Ankara.

In Syria, Turkey has broken with President Bashar Al Assad’s regime. That was to be expected. But Syria is tricky for the Turks. If the country collapses into civil war, this might not only push Syria’s Kurds, who have no affection for Ankara, to seek autonomy. It might also drive Arab Alawites in Turkey’s Hatay province to assist their Syrian brethren.

At the same time, Mr Erdogan cannot afford to do nothing. The prime minister heads a Sunni Islamist party, a substantial part of whose appeal is that it can build bridges to Arab Islamists. To allow Mr Al Assad to pursue his slaughter of peaceful protesters, many of whom happen to be Sunnis, represents a humanitarian and religious affront to the values Mr Erdogan claims to espouse. More cynically, as the uprising in Syria takes on an overtly sectarian colouring, thanks principally to the brutality of Alawite-dominated security services and military units, Ankara does not want to be on the losing side.

That Mr Erdogan has turned against Mr Al Assad is to his credit. Yet Turkey’s worsening ties with Syria have also heightened tension with Damascus’s ally Iran – which lately has also opposed Turkey’s decision to host a Nato early-warning radar system. Iran and Turkey are vying for regional influence, so they are destined to clash many more times. Not surprisingly, this rivalry has affected Lebanon, where Turkey has invested in predominantly poor Sunni areas. Earlier this year Mr Davutoglu helped Qatar mediate in the Lebanese political crisis. Their efforts were thwarted by Hizbollah and Syria.

As Turkey gets caught up in the Middle East’s contradictions, it can no longer seriously portray itself as being above the fray, on friendly terms with all. Words are cheap, and when Mr Erdogan hears praise he should be wary. No one will give Ankara a free ride in a region that cheerfully grinds down the self-assured.

Turkey and the Syrian Kurds

September 15,  2011

While all eyes are on a likely Turkish land incursion against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq, Turkey faces the prospect of another security and ideological challenge in the Kurdish hinterland across its border, this time in Syria.

Syria’s 1.8 million Kurds (10% of the population) have arguably been the most quiescent of the Kurdish populations of the Middle East as a result of the hard hand of the state and the tentacles of its security apparatuses.

They have also experienced some of the most restrictions on their political and cultural rights in an Arab nationalist state that denies their identity. At best they are second class citizens, at worst persona non gratis.
Photo: Reuters
However, the general uprising in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been a game changer and the Kurds have entered the protests on the side of reform, calling for the ouster of Assad and the recognition of their political and cultural rights.

“The Kurds were the first to demonstrate in 2011, as they have demonstrated in January 25th in Hasakeh and were locked up, while their areas in Aleppo were under heavy military presence,” notes Syrian dissident Ausaman Monajed.

According to Christian Sinclair, Assistant Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona who has studied the Syrian Kurds, “There is a vast network amongst Kurdish youth, connecting them with Arab youth groups, to organize demonstrations. These ‘local coordination committees’ operate clandestinely, and are all over the country. Protests have been a regular feature in Qamishli, Amude, Efrin, etc, for months now.”

However, the Syrian Kurds are divided into over a dozen illegal Kurdish parties that have been unable to organize and agree amongst themselves, much less between a fractured Arab opposition in Syria and the diaspora.

The Assad regime has been able to play the proverbial Kurdish card, stoking fear amongst Arabs of Kurdish separatism while trying to divide the Kurdish opposition. There is even suspicion the regime has infiltrated some of the Kurdish parties.

All this would suggest that just as the Arab street is at the forefront of the protests, so too are their Kurdish counterparts.

“For the moment, at any rate, the Kurdish parties in Syria are on their own. They have before them the task of reconciliation with the Arab opposition, with each other and, most important, with the Kurdish street,” concludes Sinclair in the recently published “The Evolution of Kurdish Politics in Syria.”

The Syrian uprising comes at a particularly difficult juncture in Turkey’s own Kurdish problem. First announced in 2009, the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) “Kurdish Opening” – which aimed to deemphasize the security focus of the state’s Kurdish policy in favor of the expansion of Kurdish political and cultural rights — has come to a standstill.

The government has reached a political impasse with the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) following the June 12th election. The BDP is boycotting parliament over the arrest of six elected MPs for their alleged membership in the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), claimed to be the urban arm of the PKK.

Reinforcing the Turkish state’s security-focused policy towards the Kurds is the rising violence between the PKK and Turkish security forces. This summer the conflict has claimed the lives of over 40 Turkish soldiers, in addition to nearly 160 PKK guerrillas.

All this bodes poorly for the soon-to-open negotiations on writing a new civilian constitution that many observers expect to resolve some of the foundational issues between the state and its Kurdish minority.

In Syria, Ankara is concerned over the PKK and its links to the Syrian Kurds, most notably through the PYD (Democratic Union Party), an offshoot of the PKK in Syria.

“The PKK is active in Syria under the guise of the PYD, with an extensive network and a lot of clout amongst the Kurdish population in Syria. New PKK members are regularly recruited in Syria and then smuggled across the borders [of Iraq and Turkey],” says Sinclair.

Instability in Syrian Kurdistan could open space for the PKK to operate, posing a particularly difficult challenge for Turkey – including the use of the Syrian Kurds or the PKK as proxies in the inter-state rivalries of the region and the struggle for influence in Syria.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Syria was the PKK’s largest patron and harbored the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan. However, Syria ended its support for the PKK in 1998 following Turkish threats of military intervention. Since then Syria and Turkey have co-operated against Kurdish nationalism,www.ekurd.netdriven in large part by mutual concern that Kurdish political gains in post-Saddam Iraq would have a spill-over effect on their own Kurdish populations.

Indeed, as the pace-setters of Kurdish nationalism the gains of the Iraqi Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq have had an influence on the Syrian Kurds. In 2004, riots broke out between Kurds and Arabs in Qamishli after the Iraqi Kurds declared autonomy. In the ensuing crackdown Syrian security forces killed 34. The regime has since kept a tight lid on all Kurdish political, cultural and social activity.

However, as the Syrian uprising enters its seventh month the lid on the Kurds has boiled over. This has caused concern in Ankara over what the regime’s end-game may look like as well as the nature of a post-Assad Syria and the position of the Syrian Kurds within it.

The problem for Turkey is that the Syrian Kurds, like their brethren in Turkey, demand language rights, constitutional recognition of the Kurds as an ethnic group and, for some, autonomy.

While these demands may have been muted under the iron fist of the Assad regime and the fractured nature of Syrian Kurdish politics, they are now coming to the fore, pitting Syrian Kurds against Arab nationalism, and possibly the Turkish state.

If the Kurds are unable to attain their demands vis-à-vis the Arab opposition this could lead to the conflict the spilling over into Turkey. At the same time, Ankara is especially wary of any kind of autonomy for the Kurds in Syria and how this would influence Turkey’s Kurds. According to Sinclair, rather than “a spill over in the physical sense, there is a concern for any power the Kurds may gain in a new Syria and then the influence of that spilling over.”

http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2011/09/15/turkey-and-the-syrian-kurds/