Guest Post: Turkish Kurds and Presidential Politics
July 1, 2014 § 4 Comments
Guest poster extraordinaire Dov Friedman, who is spending the summer doing research in Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey, weighs in today on why the Turkish government’s resumption of the peace process with the PKK is motivated by factors other than improving relations with the KRG in Iraq.
Late last week, the Turkish government submitted a bill to the Grand National Assembly advancing the stalled-but-ongoing process toward resolution of the country’s longstanding Kurdish Issue. The bill arrived after a long period of dormancy in the process. Since the negotiations with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan began, Prime Minister Erdoğan has faced mass social protests, corruption allegations, and contentious local elections.
The government recommences the process at a time when Iraq is melting down and the Turkey-KRG relationship looks stronger—and more elemental—than ever. This fact has not escaped commentators on the bill. The Wall Street Journal reported on the new bill and implicitly connected it to Turkey’s relationship with increasingly important relationship with the Iraqi Kurds.
That explanation is a bit too neat, and elides some of the complexities—both in the bill and in the Turkey-KRG relationship.
Hurriyet Daily News published a nice summary of the bill’s contents. The bill is mostly procedural. It sets out government control of the process and its reporting mechanisms. Only two articles appear ripe for analysis.
First, the bill explicitly grants targeted legal immunity to any government appointees tasked with negotiations on behalf of the Turkish state. If Erdoğan’s purges in the judiciary and police force were not enough, this article represents another swipe at the Gülen Movement—which has generally opposed negotiations with PKK insurgents as part of a solution to the Kurdish Issue.
In 2012, Gülenist prosecutors sought to bring criminal charges against intelligence chief and top Erdoğan adviser Hakan Fidan. Erdoğan countered by ramming through immunity from prosecution for Fidan. The immunity article formally extends protection to anyone involved in the negotiations, and is nothing more than a preemptive step to discourage Gülenist machinations.
Second, the government—in a very preliminary fashion—has launched the process of bringing PKK fighters down from the mountain and reintegrating them into society. This is a commendable—if long-overdue—step from Erdoğan, and any optimism about the process is pinned to this article. Some analysts may see this genuine step forward as motivated by the crumbling of Iraq.
We should avoid the temptation to connect this step to the ongoing Iraq crisis. As a factual matter, the AKP government advances this bill at the same time as its relationship with the KRG evolves precipitously. But the two are not necessarily related. Turgut Özal famously viewed relations with the KRG as a powerful antidote to Turkey’s Kurdish Issue. In response to Kurds in Turkey clamoring for a state, Özal believed Turkey could strengthen its position if it could point to a self-governing Kurdish region in Iraq. Relations with the KRG would not facilitate a solution, they would obviate the need for one.
Moreover, the KRG’s relationship with the PKK—as with so many intra-Kurdish group relations—is complex. The KRG has not worked especially hard to oust PKK fighters from the Qandil mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the same time, Barzani cultivated the Turkish relationship well before the Kurdish Issue solution process began. Since the Syrian civil war loosed the Syrian Kurds from centralized control, Barzani has worked to expand KDP influence—opening low-intensity conflict with Salih Muslim, leader of the PKK-aligned Syrian Kurdish PYD.
Finally, in a mildly surprising departure from the AKP’s usual lockstep messaging, debate has burbled up from the circle around the Prime Minister. Hüseyin Çelik, former Education Minister and Erdoğan’s close ally, said recently that if the crisis in Iraq leads to the state’s failure, the Kurds have a right to self-determination. Days later, Ibrahim Kalın—adviser to Erdoğan and frequent designee to explain government positions in English—wrote an impassioned defense of a unified Iraq. It would be strange if the government initiated domestic legislative action in response to the Iraq crisis without first sorting out what exactly its unified position on the crisis was.
More likely, the bill on the Kurdish Issue solution is tied directly to the worst-kept secret in Turkey: Erdoğan’s upcoming presidential bid. During his tenure, Erdoğan has often made small but flashy gestures toward solving the Kurdish Issue during election season. The Prime Minister still commands a tricky coalition of forces. It includes urban Kurds, who want to see progress on a solution, and religious nationalists, who will bristle at concessions too swift or numerous.
Erdoğan plainly wants to win the presidency on a single ballot, and he needs both of these voter groups in support to do so. Hence, this bill. It signals to Kurdish supporters that he is serious, if deliberate, in his efforts to solve the long-running conflict. To conservative nationalists, it indicates that the Prime Minister will make no immediate sweeping changes and will pair attention to security with any conflict de-escalation.
As much as Erdoğan benefits from cracking down on free media, weakening Turkey’s institutions, and concentrating power in his person, bills like this one are the primary reason Erdoğan continues to rule Turkey. No other Turkish politician has deciphered how to command such an effective—and impressively stable—coalition. The joint opposition’s management of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu’s presidential campaign inspires precisely zero confidence that it is any closer than it has been over the last decade to offering a viable political alternative. Thus, we can expect more artful baby steps toward a solution to the Kurdish Issue in the coming years under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Why Turkey Should Let NATO Operate Its Patriot Missiles
November 28, 2012 § 1 Comment
After weeks of rumors and some hemming and hawing, NATO officials began surveying possible sites on Tuesday for the deployment of Patriot missiles in Turkey. Despite the ludicrous claims of CHP opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu that Turkey is receiving Patriots now, rather than six months ago, as a result of negotiations with the Israeli government and that the Patriots are actually intended to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles headed to Israel, the deployment of Patriots is intended to assuage Turkish fears of Syrian aggression. Kılıçdaroğlu denied that there is any missile threat from Syria during his bashing of the government yesterday, which naturally led to his conspiracy theorizing about Turkey being in cahoots with Israel, but the fact remains that providing Ankara with some peace of mind is worth the cost irrespective of whether the threat from Syria is real or not. While the Patriots make no sense if Turkey is trying to mount a no-fly zone, they do provide protection from chemical weapons mounted on Scuds should Assad ever go that route and they symbolize a NATO commitment to Turkey, so this is a no-brainer from NATO’s perspective.
Now that the decision to station Patriots along the Syrian border appears to have been finalized, the next question is who will control them. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that NATO, and not Turkey, will command the Patriot batteries and decide if and when they will actually be used. This will no doubt cause some angst within Turkey, and the government will probably get hit hard by the nationalist MHP for letting an outside entity assume control over Turkey’s defense against Syria. In fact, Turkish defense minister Ismet Yılmaz has stressed that Turkish defense officials are among the people in the Patriots’ command center and Hüseyin Çelik has claimed that Turkey will be “holding the trigger” so it is obviously a sensitive topic.
Taking a step back though and looking at the wider goals, Turkey should actually be begging off from having to man the Patriot batteries or take any control over them at all. The reason for this is quite simple; if non-Turkish NATO troops are operating the Patriots and NATO is deciding when they should be used, the likelihood of deterring Assad – assuming that he can be deterred, which is a big if – from lobbing missiles toward Turkey or from shelling the Patriot positions is greatly magnified. This is the tripwire theory of deterrence, which purposely places troops in harm’s way in order to ensure that an offensive will be met with a forceful response. The prototypical example of this is the U.S. posture along the DMZ between South Korea and North Korea. Any move on Seoul by North Korea would cause huge U.S. casualties since there are nearly 30,000 American soldiers deliberately standing in the line of fire, and the theory behind this is that North Korea will not risk attacking South Korea since it would automatically embroil it in a war with the U.S. If Turkey is genuinely afraid of Syrian shelling and Syrian missiles, then the same principle applies here as well and Turkey should be doing everything it can to get as many foreign NATO soldiers stationed along its border as it can, since this will theoretically reduce the chances of the Syrian army mounting an assault on Turkey. Syria might think that Turkey is a paper tiger, but Assad is probably still clear-headed enough to realize that an attack that kills American or German troops operating Patriot batteries means full-blown NATO intervention, and that is an outcome that he desperately wants to avoid.
This is the subtext to Germany’s beseeching Turkey to pare down its demands for Patriots, as Germany, the U.S., and the Netherlands are the countries set to send Patriot batteries to the Syrian border. German troops are required to man the German Patriots, and Berlin has a general policy of not getting involved in international conflicts outside its borders, which is eminently understandable in light of WWI and WWII. The German government knows that it only takes one stray artillery shell to embroil Germany in a wider war with German troops so close to a hot border, and thus it would like to limit its commitment to filling Turkey’s missile defense request. Rather than arguing with NATO for a larger role, Ankara should be smart in realizing that the more foreign troops along the border, the safer Turkey will be. It is inevitable that Ankara wants to assert a strong nationalist posture when it comes to defense policy, but this is one instance in which Turkey might be better off swallowing its pride, since doing so will resound to its benefit.
PKK Pressure Both Internal and External
May 25, 2012 § 2 Comments
Turkey suffered a terrible bout of PKK terrorism today, with a bomb killing one policeman in central Turkey on top of the news that the PKK has abducted ten civilians in Diyarbakır. There are two primary reasons that there is a new round of PKK violence, one of which appears to be in Turkey’s power to control and one which is not. The first is a result of internal politics, namely the ongoing controversy over the Uludere drone strike that killed 34 civilians last year. The strike itself was bad enough as it stirred up enormous anger and resentment, but those feelings were magnified further this week after Interior Minister Idris Şahin referred to those killed as “PKK extras” and said that the government did not owe anyone an apology over the matter. This has prompted a furious backlash, including from AKP deputy chair Hüseyin Çelik who blasted Şahin’s remarks as inhumane and reiterated that his position was not shared by Prime Minister Erdoğan or the government. The damage has been done though, and the government’s continuing clumsy efforts to close the door on the episode are not going to alleviate things much, if at all. While Ankara paid the victims compensation, it has held the line on issuing an apology and has been unwilling to go further than expressing regret (which is ironically the same stance that Israel has taken on the Mavi Marmara deaths). This is, of course, not making the PKK any less popular in southeastern Turkey, and while there is absolutely zero justification for terrorist violence at all, the government is not making it easier to get that message to stick. Increased support for the PKK among Turkey’s Kurds leads to more terrorist attacks, and that is part of what is now going on.
The other set of pressures is external and has to do with Syria. The government in Damascus has been holding the threat of PKK support over Turkey’s head if it does not back off its tough stance against Assad, and by some accounts this seems to be working. Soner Çağaptay argues that Turkey’s fear of a Syrian Kurdistan with a strong PKK presence has led Ankara to take a wait and see attitude when it comes to Assad after its earlier aggressive position. The Syrian support for the PKK is also driving the new PKK attacks in Turkey since they have a new base for training, logistics, and safe haven that they have been lacking since the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq cracked down on them after repeated Turkish entreaties to do so. It also does not help things that the removal of Syria as a massive trading partner is leading to renewed economic depression in Diyarbakır, since increased trade and economic activity in southeastern Turkey was designed to make Turkey’s Kurdish population happier and thus less likely to support separatism or autonomy. Neither Syrian support for the PKK nor the drop-off in trade is in Turkey’s power to alter, but these factors are starting to give rise to a slow burn underneath the Kurdish issue that is making the government’s life a lot more difficult.
What all of this means is that PKK terrorism, which has dwindled in recent years, is probably making a comeback. Turkey can do some things to alleviate it, such as actually resolving the Uludere issue to Kurds’ satisfaction rather than letting it linger and endless live on, but the situation in Syria is largely out of Turkey’s hands and certainly no longer a problem of its own making. The PKK violence against civilians this week is unfortunately a bad sign that this is going to be an unstable and bloody summer.
