Erdoğan Stays Home
September 24, 2012 § 1 Comment
Prime Minister Erdoğan, who was supposed to be traveling to New York for the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly, has canceled his trip and will instead be staying home. According to Hürriyet Daily News, “The ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) fourth congress on Sept. 30, the prime minister’s hesitation at going abroad amid increased militant activity, as well as the lack of a chance to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama, were all cited as three reasons for Erdoğan’s last-minute cancelation, according to a source from the Prime Ministry.” I have no doubt that all of these reasons are true to one extent or another, but the decision to skip the UNGA is nevertheless a curious one. With the AKP congress coming up, I wonder if Erdoğan is feeling some political heat for the first time during his decade-long tenure as prime minister given events at home.
There is really no overstating just how serious of a problem the government’s Syria policy has become. I know that I have written about this a lot, but it is putting nearly all of Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s accomplishments at risk. The fighting next door and the influx of refugees into Turkey has placed an economic burden on the country, not to mention the loss of trade with Syria and the general instability that makes Turkey a slightly less attractive target for foreign investment. It is no coincidence that Turkey’s 2012 growth forecast was just cut or that its GDP growth last quarter was lower than expected, and as the economy slows, Erdoğan has a lot less room for error. Foreign policy missteps could be papered over when the economy was making all stumbles seem more trivial, but this is no longer the case. The government has badly mismanaged Syria from the beginning, lurching from supporting Assad and hoping that he would reform long after the dye had been cast, to threatening to create buffer zones or even launch an invasion of Syria when it was clear that this would never happen, to supporting and arming opposition groups in Syria no matter how murky their provenance or motives. Turkey is now basically in the worst possible position, having taken a clear side in the Syrian civil war without getting involved enough to really affect the outcome. It’s no wonder that Erdoğan came off as highly defensive and testy in an interview with Lally Weymouth in the Washington Post, which is par for the course with Turkish interviewers but somewhat unusual for interviews with big American newspapers. The Syria policy is highly unpopular with the Turkish public and is an unmitigated disaster and that is dragging down Ahmet Davutoğlu’s entire foreign policy with it.
Relatedly, as I predicted back in May, this has been a horribly unstable and bloody summer when it comes to PKK violence, and it is clear that this is another area in which Erdoğan has made a bad miscalculation. The idea that the PKK could be quashed militarily and that would be the end of Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” was always suspect, but as the PYD has carved out its own territory along the Turkish border and as de facto Kurdish autonomy becomes a reality in both Iraq and Syria, Ankara’s dream of rolling along with the status quo in its own Kurdish-dominated southeast has become even more untenable. The army, while inflicting plenty of damage on the PKK, is taking bad losses of its own, and when parliament deputies are kidnapped in broad daylight and the government has to seal off entire districts to the outside world in order to fight effectively, it is tough to argue that Erdoğan is prosecuting the war successfully or that his overall Kurdish policy is anything but a disaster.
Finally, there is the recently concluded Sledgehammer trial in which 331 of the 365 defendants were sentenced to time in prison, including 20 year sentences for three former service chiefs. There have been signs that Erdoğan realized that the trial went too far, and the military cannot be happy at the visual of so many officers being sent to jail amid serious allegations of forged documents and falsified evidence. The chances of a coup in Turkey at this point are extremely slim to the point of non-existence, but if I were a prime minister running a country that suffered through four military hard or soft coups in as many decades and a trial just concluded that was seen in many quarters as a witch hunt targeting the army, I might be a little paranoid.
All of this backdrop must be taken into account with the news that Erdoğan is sticking to his home base. If ever there was a time for him to show up at the UN and try to wrangle up some support for intervention in Syria, this would be it, yet he has decided that there are more urgent matters to take care of. I think that there must be some grumbling going on behind the scenes, and that Erdoğan knows that his dream of becoming Turkey’s first directly elected president is in danger. This is the last AKP congress in which Erdoğan is running as party leader, and the fact that he is acting so risk-averse to the point of not even daring to leave the country may be a sign that all is not right in AKP land.
The Significance of Gaziantep
August 22, 2012 § 1 Comment
The car bomb that exploded in Gaziantep on Monday, killing nine and wounding nearly seventy others, was a horrific act of terrorism that many suspect is the work of the PKK, although the PKK has so far denied any involvement. Hüseyin Çelik has raised the possibility that Syria may be involved as well, but unless one is prepared to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories involving the deep state (and I certainly am not), this has the fingerprints of the PKK all over it given the upsurge in PKK violence this summer, the location of the bombing, and the fact that the intended target was a police station. Allowing for the assumption that the PKK was behind this latest terrorist atrocity, this is the second strategic misstep for the group in as many weeks following the earlier bizarre kidnapping and release of CHP deputy Hüseyin Aygün, which only inflamed opinion against the PKK and seemed to harden the government’s stance against the group even further.
That the PKK has denied being behind the Gaziantep bombing is significant because it indicates that the PKK realizes that this might actually represent a turning point. It is a strange move for a terrorist group to perpetrate an act of terrorism – generally designed to garner attention and demonstrate the group’s power – and then immediately deny all involvement, but it is not surprising in this instance given the civilian casualties involved and the fact that it was done on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. This was a major strategic miscalculation that backfired in a big way, and not only will it garner the PKK no sympathy, it will give cover to the government to go after the PKK even harder than it already has. Few will object to Turkish military operations against the group following this bombing.
The PKK’s terrorism campaign is a thorny one with no real end in sight for a number of reasons. The PKK is able to draw on a base of ethnic Kurdish support, which makes it difficult to root out and eliminate entirely. It also does not help that Turkish Kurds have a set of legitimate political grievances, yet the government has adopted a nearly exclusively military approach to the problem, assuming that once the PKK is gone, Kurdish political demands will dissipate. What this means is that the PKK draws on a well of Kurdish sympathy even in places where there is no outright support for the group or its actions. In Gaziantep, however, the PKK has done something that might actually cut into that base of sympathy. Trying to shore up support among the Kurdish population by blowing up civilians during a religious holiday is a strange strategy indeed, and it is bound to be a losing one. Maybe, just maybe, the PKK’s denials here are an indication that it realizes just how far it has gone.
One of the ways in which terrorism ends is when a terrorist group is faced with dwindling support arising from outrage at moral atrocities. There is a large moral distinction to be made between killing Turkish soldiers – and let me be crystal clear that I do not condone such PKK actions at all – and killing and maiming civilians with bombs placed in the middle of cities. The PKK pretty clearly realizes the danger here, which accounts for its widely derided denial of responsibility. If this attack cuts into the PKK’s support and contributes in any small way to the end of its terrorism campaign, then at least the senseless killing of nine Turks will perhaps be a spur to a better and more peaceful Turkey down the road. Reduced support for the PKK and a genuine political solution to the Kurdish issue are the only ways in which the conflict between the Turkish government and the PKK will ever be resolved.
Turkey’s Dysfunctional Politics
August 15, 2012 § 1 Comment
If someone told you that there was a country whose government sealed off a district and cut off all information to the outside world and its own citizens for weeks in order to fight violent separatists, where a member of parliament was kidnapped by a terrorist group, where there are thousands of refugees streaming across the border, where the army is engaged in a virtual war inside its own borders but the parties in parliament cannot agree to even meet to discuss the best course of action, you would be justified in thinking that the country being described is well on its way to being a failed state. I am of course listing events that have taken place over the past month in Turkey, which is certainly nowhere close to being a failed state, but I do so to illustrate just how quickly Turkey’s fortunes are slipping. By any measure, Turkey has had an incredible run over the last half decade as its economy has boomed and its global clout has increased, but as Turkey deals with chaos next door in Syria and chaos at home with the PKK, it appears that darker days lie ahead.
To a large extent, all of this is out of Turkey’s control. Irrespective of how shoddily the government has dealt with the Kurdish issue, the PKK is a terrorist group that cannot be allowed to run free in pockets of southeastern Turkey. Similarly, there is nothing Turkey could have done to prevent the Syrian civil war (even if it is not handling the situation so well now). The problem is that Turkey’s politics is increasingly looking broken, and a dysfunctional political system exacerbates all of the dilemmas that Turkey currently faces.
On the Kurds and the PKK, the dysfunction starts at the top. Erdoğan has moved from the standard nationalist/Kemalist policy he inherited to the short-lived Kurdish Opening to a more limited recognition of Kurdish identity that does not go nearly far enough in solving the problem. All signs point to the AKP and the MHP banding together to ensure that Kurdish identity and Kurdish rights are buried in the new Turkish constitution, and Erdoğan believes that eradicating the PKK will solve all problems. This is not a policy as much as it is wishful thinking, and the reluctance to sit down and figure out the hard but necessary steps to be taken is not an indication of a strict zero tolerance policy on terrorism but an indication of political amateurishness. It is incredible – and I mean this in the literal sense of stretching the bounds of credulity rather than in any positive sense – that the AKP and CHP cannot agree to both attend a special session of parliament to talk about PKK attacks in the aftermath of Hüseyin Aygün’s kidnapping and whatever is going on in Şemdinli. Imagine if Nancy Pelosi called for a special House session following al-Qaida attacks in New Mexico that were met with an overwhelming but secret military response, and John Boehner and the GOP simply refused to attend so as not to legitimate al-Qaida. It demonstrates the astonishing arrogance of the AKP and the feckless impotence of the CHP, and neither of these things make for a functioning and efficient political system.
A similar dynamic is at work when it comes to Syria. Nobody is going to look at the Turkish government’s Syria policy and describe it as successful. Erdoğan clung to Assad for too long, and then cut him loose with assorted threats on which Turkey has not and cannot make good. The endless whispers of buffer zones and calls for international intervention are entirely hollow since they have zero chance of happening, and because Turkey is hamstrung, it could not even mount an effective response to shots across the border or the downing of the Turkish jet (and as Claire Berlinski has extensively pointed out, we still don’t know the full story of what happened). The CHP has been hammering away at the AKP’s ineffectiveness on Syria, and yet it’s ever so brilliant plan is an international conference. Have you ever heard of a more uninspired, platitudinous, hopelessly naive solution than the following one expressed by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu? “After expressing their views on the issue at the opening of the conference, the Syrian administration and opposition should negotiate under the supervision of the secretary-general of the UN. In the final portion of the conference, a document of agreement prepared by the secretary-general of the UN, reflecting an agreement between the Syrian opposition and administration could be submitted to the UN Security Council.” This is the best that Turkey’s main opposition party can come up with?
A dysfunctional political system with parties that cannot agree to even talk to each other without a bevy of flying insults and outrageous accusations is not a hallmark of a rising power. It is the mark of a state bound to crash against its own limits. An important component of Turkey’s foreign policy is crumbling as its relations with Syria and Iran deteriorate to open hostility, but Ankara should be paying more attention to its own domestic political problems, because Turkey’s external strength is supported first and foremost by its internal political foundation, which is dangerously teetering.
