The tragedy of Turkey under Erdogan
It has been a truly dismal start to the new year in the Middle East, and with much to choose from we would argue that the most dispiriting developments have been in Turkey.
The first days of 2014 have reinforced concerns about the Sunni jihadist revival in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt.
In Iraq, this resurgence has brought the country once again to the threshold of civil war. During the first week of January, for instance, the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized key towns close to Iraq’s border with Syria, making their most significant advances since the withdrawal of American troops in December 2011. Some, at least, of the motivation for ISIL’s recent offensive in Iraq has been the presence of Iraqi Shia militia troops in Syria.
Many Sunni tribesmen in Iraq see the Shia-dominated government led by Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad as a lesser evil than the al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists, but the jihadists are unquestionably making the most of the opportunities presented by the civil war in Syria to advance the jihadist cause in Iraq. The jihadists have also capitalized on the moves by the Maliki government to break up a year-old Sunni protest camp outside the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi on 30 December. It was this that led to (and enabled) ISIL’s move to take control of the city of Fallujah, just 37 miles from Baghdad, as well as parts of Ramadi.
Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, put it well when he said: “ISIL has been able to leverage its networks and capabilities in Iraq to become a strong presence in Syria, and has used its presence in Syria to leverage its position in Iraq.”
Likewise in Lebanon, there has been an escalation of violence that can be linked to the war in Syria. Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese group linked to Iran, has sent troops to Syria to defend the Shia-related Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad. This has, in turn, led to attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon by Sunni groups. Last week, a suicide bombing claimed by ISIL killed half-a-dozen people in a Hezbollah enclave in south Beirut.
In some sense, this Shia-Sunni conflict has become a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is why it was not a surprise that during the past week Bahrain’s Public Security Chief Major General Tariq Al Hassan has claimed to have “hard evidence” of Hezbollah activity in Bahrain, where the Sunni ruling family is struggling, with Saudi Arabian support, to defuse majority Shia unrest. Al Hassan said: “We are certain that Hezbollah and the Iraqi Hezbollah Brigades support elements within Bahrain that are seeking to destabilize the country. We are not talking only about confessions; we have hard evidence which we uncovered on their confiscated computers, overheard on their telephone conversations, and documented in their financial activities.” He added that while he was not accusing the government of Iran of involvement “there are groups within Iran who are involved”.
Al Hassan talked about sleeper cells with plans to target key infrastructure in the country, and he said: “We have documents proving their criminal intentions, and we are certain that these terrorists were trained abroad. We have the evidence to support this, and many of these sleeper cells have been eliminated.”
It should also be noted that, as regards Iraq, on 6 January Iran’s deputy chief of staff of the army General Mohammad Hejazi, said that Iran was ready and able to help Iraq with military equipment and advisers, if asked by Baghdad.
Meanwhile there are well-founded fears that the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt could fuel a resurgence of jihadism in North Africa, armed from the ample flow of weapons from the looted arsenals of the late Colonel Gaddafi. Although aimed mostly at the regime in Cairo and other Arab countries of North Africa, the jihadist resurgence would also threaten Israel through its use of Sinai as a refuge.
Amongst all this uncertainty, it might be thought that Turkey, at least, could provide an island of democratic stability and sanity to which the post-Arab Spring Middle East could look for example and impartial mediation.
This was the hope from the outset of the Arab Spring in 2011. Before the advent of the Arab Spring, Turkey was following a policy of ‘zero problems’ with its neighbours, a policy that was formulated by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The central component of the policy was to take active steps to resolve any existing problems between Turkey and its neighbours. Unfortunately, as regards Turkey’s Arab neighbours, it was a policy that did not survive the upheavals that began in the region in December 2010. Relations with Israel had already suffered a serious blow with the May 2010 Mavi Marmara incident.
The tragedy is that Erdogan abandoned ‘zero problems’ at exactly the moment when such a policy could have paid maximum dividends. However, as we argued in our 27 November issue, despite this unfortunate start, even three full years after the outset of the Arab Spring it was not too late for Turkey to correct its course.
But the hope that Turkey might still be able provide a sensible moderately Islamic, but fully democratic, role model for the post-Arab Spring Middle East, forming a bridge between the Middle East and the West, looks increasingly forlorn following the eruption of a major scandal affecting the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the government’s reaction to it.
Without going into too much detail, on 17 December Turkey’s public prosecutor brought charges against ministers in the AKP government and their associates in a scandal involving Halkbank and the enabling of allegedly sanctions-busting trade with Iran. Amongst others, four ministers, sons of three former ministers, the general manager of Halkbank, Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, and a number of Turkish businessmen have been charged.
Erdogan’s reaction to this has been to lash out in all directions, alleging both domestic and foreign-backed plots to bring about the downfall of his government.
One of Erdogan’s principal targets has been the domestic movement led by US-based cleric Fetullah Gullen. Gullen was once an ally of Erdogan, but Erdogan has become increasingly suspicious of Gullen’s sympathizers in the police and judiciary. The corruption scandal and the linked conflict with the Gulen movement seems certain to further destabilize Turkey as it enters a year replete with important elections, beginning with the 30 March local elections.
But Erdogan has also looked for external scapegoats, of which the principal one has been the United States. On 21 December, for instance, four pro-government newspapers ran a story about the US ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, telling a gathering of EU ambassadors that the US had warned Turkey to cut the links with Iran maintained by Halkbank, the bank accused of aiding sanctions-busting transactions with Tehran. According to these papers, Ricciardone then said that as the Turkish government had not heeded these warnings, “you are now watching the collapse of an empire”, ie the downfall of the AKP government.
The US denies that this alleged meeting between Ricciardone and the European ambassadors ever took place. A US diplomatic source said that a message was sent to Ankara indicating the US’s disquiet over being used as a pawn in Turkey’s internal politics and asking that the government refrain from making any further statements that could “jeopardize the future of our relationship”.
Erdogan was unmoved, telling supporters on 21 December: “In recent days, very strangely, ambassadors have been involved in some provocative acts. I am calling on them: Do your job. If you leave your area of duty this could extent into our government’s area of jurisdiction. We do not have to keep you [Ricciardone] in our country.”
On 1 January, the pro-government dailies Yeni Safak and Aksam returned to the fray, accusing US diplomat Ashwin Bijanki of laying the groundwork of the “plot” against the government over the course of a year or more. The two newspapers claimed that Bijanki had asked the heads of certain non-governmental organizations to lobby against the government. Also on 1 January, the Takvim daily alleged that former CIA chief David Petraeus was the mastermind behind the 17 December plot.
This attack on the US could be seen as just unfortunate collateral damage from robust domestic politics, but the evidence suggests there is more to it than that and that it is part of a wider malaise in Turkish foreign policy decision-making.
In its 6 January edition, the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper summed up a widespread judgement on Turkey’s recent foreign policy performance by saying that 2013 would be seen as “an unfortunate era when several failures occurred one after the other, when all assumptions that the policies were based on have totally collapsed, when the perceptions of the country in the world was changed, and when its regional reliability went upside down”.
In our view, this is not an overly harsh judgement. Turkey’s relations with Egypt have broken down almost completely; its policy on Syria has not worked; little progress has been made in mending fences with Israel, once a close ally; in Palestinian affairs, Turkey’s preference for Hamas over Fatah is not helpful to the cause of peace; and its burgeoning rapprochement with Iran and the Iranian-backed Iraqi government will not please Saudi Arabia, which is already at odds with Ankara over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Further afield, progress towards eventual membership of the European Union remains stalled while (as already mentioned) relations with the United States have deteriorated sharply. By contrast, Erdogan has suggested to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that Turkish membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (which links the former Soviet republics of Central Asia with Russia and China) could provide a better future than the EU on the grounds of “shared values”.
But of all Erdogan’s foreign policy initiatives, perhaps the most interesting is his generally friendly approach towards Iran. Given this service’s support for Turkey’s former policy of ‘zero problems’ with neighbours, we don’t criticize Erdogan’s desire for stable relations with Tehran simply because Iran has been such a problem for the Western powers for so long. Our concern lies in the reason why Erdogan (who, after all, has rejected the policy of ‘zero problems’) retains positive feelings towards Tehran despite fundamental differences over Syria. And his reason seems to be a personal sympathy for Iran’s anti-Westernism.
Erdogan is now scheduled to visit Iran at the end of January following the one-day visit to Turkey by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on 4 January. In return, Iran’s President Hassan Rowhani is expected to visit Turkey in February.
Sources in Ankara tell us that the key to understanding Turkey’s foreign policy today is to realize that it is based almost entirely on the personal preferences of the prime minister and not on any deep analysis of Turkey’s strategic interests - and these preferences are strongly anti-Western despite Turkey’s continuing Nato membership and ongoing efforts to join the European Union.
The tragedy is that at the very moment when secular pro-Western Ataturkism could have delivered Turkey a central and indispensible role in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, Erdogan has jettisoned this in favour of a failed push for Muslim Brotherhood hegemony and an anti-Westernism that favours Iran and Russia (not to mention the SCO over the European Union) despite deep-seated differences with those two countries over Syria. It is the triumph of personal prejudice over national interest, and it is a tragedy for both Turkey and for the Middle East as a whole. JdeC.