TURKEY: THE SENTINEL SWIVELS
By Delphine Strauss and David Gardner
FT
July 20 2010 20:35
Crescent tense: a demonstrator stands behind the Turkish flag during a
protest outside Isreal’s consulate in Istanbul in May, after Israeli
warships killed nine Turks storming a flotilla of aid ships bound
for Gaza. Ankara warned then of ‘irreparable consequences’ for
bilateral ties
Toronto, Brussels, Bishkek and London in one week; in another, visits
ranging from Lisbon to Kabul. Since he became Turkey’s foreign minister
just over a year ago, Ahmet Davutoglu has clocked up more than 100
international trips as he hyperactively pursues his vision of Turkey
as a rising regional power. Not for nothing does he hail from Konya,
ancestral home of the whirling dervishes.
EDITOR’S CHOICE ‘Europe does not understand the sacrifices that Turkey
has made’ – Jul-20Turkey says EU membership is top priority – Jul-08FT
Video: Ahmet Davutoglu – Jul-08Israel warns aid vessel bound for Gaza
– Jul-13Philip Stephens: The west must offer Turkey a proper seat at
the table – Jun-17Turkish parties jostle for position over reforms –
Jul-08His message has been largely unexceptionable: expounding with a
professorial air and an academic fixation with numbers and dates his
doctrine of a “zero problems” rapprochement with Turkey’s neighbours
– a slogan similar to the “peace at home, peace abroad” favoured by
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic.
To that end, Mr Davutoglu has sought to mediate in conflicts from the
Balkans to Baghdad and has used Ankara’s fast-growing economic clout
to further new friendships, whether with emerging powers including
Russia and Brazil or with formerly antagonistic neighbours such as
Syria, Iraq and Greece.
But in recent months, tensions between Turkey’s regional aspirations
and its traditional alliances with the west have burst into the open.
First, the failure of an initiative to end a long stand-off with
Armenia has left Turkey fighting renewed efforts by Armenian diaspora
communities in the US and elsewhere to categorise the massacre of
Armenians by Ottoman Turkey during the first world war as genocide.
Then came May’s Israeli raid on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla seeking
to break the Gaza blockade, in which nine Turks died.
Ankara has stepped back from its threat to sever ties altogether
with Israel – but Mr Davutoglu is firm there will be no revival of a
once-close alliance without an international investigation and unless
Israel apologises and compensates the victims’ families. “Without
those questions being answered there can be no improvement in our
relations with Israel,” he said in London this month.
>>From a US perspective, the more telling shift in Ankara’s stance
came with a United Nations Security Council vote last month for
new sanctions against Iran. Slighted by the west’s dismissal of the
nuclear fuel swap with Tehran that it had arranged alongside Brazil,
and anxious to keep Iran at the negotiating table, Turkey did not
simply abstain to underline its opposition to sanctions: it voted No.
The storm that followed has, if nothing else, highlighted Turkey’s
growing importance to its western partners. The country has long
mattered; as a Nato member, energy corridor and with a large Muslim
population demonstrating the compatibility of Islam with secular and
democratic values. Now, a US engaged in two regional conflicts can
even less afford to alienate a pivotal partner in fostering stability
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ACCESSION AMBITIONS
‘Europe does not understand the sacrifices that Turkey has made’
The presence of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Srebrenica
this month to commemorate the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims
was a sign of Turkey’s growing involvement in the fraught field of
Balkan diplomacy, writes Delphine Strauss.
In the past year, Ankara has helped mediate between Serbia, Croatia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina and to reconcile rival factions in Serbia’s
majority-Muslim Sandzak region. It also helped persuade Belgrade –
where Mr Erdogan has just signed trade deals and a visa exemption –
to issue in March its first formal condemnation of the Srebrenica
killings.
The friendship with Serbia is an unlikely one – Serb nationalism was
for centuries defined by enmity with Ottoman Turks – but one thing
the countries now share is a frustrating fight for admittance to the
European Union.
For Mustafa Ceric, the religious leader of Bosnian Muslims, Turkey’s
EU bid is a test of Europe’s commitment to living with different
religions.
“I am disappointed that Europe does not understand the sacrifices
Turkey has made for the road to Europe,” he told the Financial Times
during a visit to Turkey earlier this year.
“Europe should not push Turkey to go to the east. For Turkey to
remain and not change course, westernisation and the experience of
secularisation must now bear fruit,” he said, adding: “Europe must
learn how to live with Muslims.”
Mr Ceric, who preaches reconciliation in Bosnia and moderation among
young Muslims vulnerable to radical ideology, argues that Muslims
living in Europe must overcome feelings of alienation by taking a
more active part in public debates.
“A core problem between the Muslim world and the west is that Muslims
fell subject to European policies they were not active in decisions,”
he said.
For Mr Ceric, a friend of Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu,
Turkey’s growing economic weight and active participation in
international affairs is therefore more important than anything its
government may say or do about religion.
“Once you’re a member of the EU you’re not only an observer, you’re
not an object but a subject,” he says. “We need an example. Turkey
in the EU is a good example.”
By emerging as a popular champion of Palestinian rights, Turkey has
for now ended Iran’s ability to make the running in the region. Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish prime minister, has eclipsed Hassan Nasrallah
of Hizbollah, Tehran’s most potent ally, in the fickle affections of
the Arab street.
“In Syria, people say that when Damascus feels threatened it goes
to Tehran, and when it seeks opportunities it goes to Turkey,”
says Nathalie Tocci of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based
think-tank.
Ankara’s evident willingness to assert its independence from Washington
has enhanced its regional credibility. The government is on a firmer
footing in Moscow and Baghdad because it resisted US pressure to use
Turkish territory for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and restricted
American warships entering the Black Sea during Russia’s 2008 clash
with Georgia.
Conversely, the perception in Washington is that Ankara is becoming a
volatile and unreliable partner. Some in Congress view the breakdown of
relations with Israel as proof of an eastward tilt by an authoritarian
Islamist government. US officials, usually careful to keep differences
behind closed doors, are expressing doubts. Philip Gordon, assistant
secretary of state and one of Turkey’s strongest supporters in the
state department, says the country’s commitment to Nato, the EU and
the US “needs to be demonstrated”.
Yet the eruption of Turkey in the stormy geopolitics of the Middle
East should hardly have come as a surprise. Once the cold war ended
and the Balkans, central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the broader
Middle East reopened as natural regions of political and commercial
influence for Turkey, Ankara was bound to seek a bigger stage than
its role within Nato as the sentinel of the eastern marches.
Mr Davutoglu is offended by any suggestion that his country is somehow
on probation. “Turkey is not an issue, Turkey is an actor,” he says.
“We were an actor when we used hard power to defend the west inside
Nato and we are an actor today, using soft power to defend EU values
in the eastern Mediterranean”.
Turkey is not just a member of Nato but chairs the 57-state
Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a dual identity its current
government believes obliges it to be activist in a combustible region
plagued by a vacuum of leadership. The Turkish view is that Israel’s
belligerent intransigence and the stand-off over Iran’s nuclear
ambitions are two potentially deadly regional triggers. Hence Ankara’s
past efforts to mediate between Israel and Syria, and between Israel
and the Palestinians (including Hamas), as well as the deal Turkey
and Brazil arrived at with Iran on holding its low enriched uranium
in escrow.
This is not just a fit of pique at the European Union’s reluctance to
advance Turkey’s accession negotiations. Neither is it a strategic
turn east, nor an ideological tilt by the governing neo-Islamist
Justice and Development party (AKP) towards Muslim countries. Mr
Erdogan does want to demonstrate that a confident and dynamic Turkey
has options and is proficient in the “soft power” that Europe seems
to have forgotten how to use in its Middle East backyard. But, says
Mr Davutoglu, there is no turn east or against the west: “Still our
first and most strategic objective is [integration with] Europe”.
Other commentators, including those critical of AKP diplomacy, point
out that Turkey’s influence and appeal in the Arab world will depend
in large part on its maintaining its western ties and identity. “What
is liked about Turkey is the western image it projects, an image
which is lacking in the Middle East,” writes Semih Idiz, a columnist
for Milliyet newspaper. The television melodramas that shape Arab
perceptions of Turkey are popular viewing precisely because they
depict the romantic freedoms and westernised lifestyle that are in
short supply in Islamic countries, he notes.
So the question should not be whether Turkey is drifting east but
rather whether it is pursuing its interests effectively, managing
to balance old and new alliances as it assumes a bigger role in
regional affairs.
Thus far, the results of Mr Davutoglu’s doctrine have been mixed.
Successes include the new friendship with Syria, reasonable relations
with Kurdish politicians in northern Iraq and the first steps towards
the grand vision of a Middle Eastern customs union. Foreign diplomats
in Ankara say Turkey’s involvement in the Balkans and between political
factions in Iraq has been helpful. But they also talk of hubris and
say Ankara may be overreaching.
Turkey’s role in the Iranian uranium swap deal, initially hailed as
a triumph, may make western partners reluctant to include it in any
further talks with Tehran. Ankara has ruled itself out of further
mediation between Israel and Syria. Initiatives to improve relations
with Armenia and Greece, which would have helped convince sceptics
that the AKP was not simply pitching to the Islamic world, are no
further forward.
As for Turkey’s 40-year-old bid to join the EU, Suat Kiniklioglu,
the AKP’s deputy chairman for foreign affairs, diverges from the
official line to suggest that both sides are “happy with low-level
engagement that doesn’t force a decision”. Technical negotiations on
food safety standards began this month but the fig leaf of progress
is looking flimsier.
One problem is that while Turkey’s strategy of greater regional
engagement makes sense, its coherence is at the mercy of periodic
outbursts by the fiery Mr Erdogan. Anger at Israel after the flotilla
raid was understandable but Turkish diplomats prefer not to comment
when Mr Erdogan invokes the 10 commandments in lambasting Benjamin
Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, or insinuates that Israel sponsored
attacks in Turkey by Kurdish rebels.
Even the urbane Mr Davutoglu has courted controversy. According
to anecdotes circulating in Washington, the ex-academic thumped the
table and shouted at Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, when he went
to demand US help in securing the pro-Gaza activists’ release. The
foreign minister refuses to be drawn on this, merely observing that
“no country should have the feeling it is above the law”.
Much of the grandstanding is aimed at a domestic audience. Foreign
policy until the 1990s was guided largely by security concerns. Now
it increasingly aligns with the views of a public suspicious of all
external influence and fiercely anti-American.
“What we are witnessing”, says Omer Taspinar at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, “is not the emergence of an Islamist
foreign policy but rather the rise of a populist government that
caters to and exploits Turkish frustration with America and Europe”.
Some think populist instincts are leading Mr Erdogan and his AKP to
squander Turkey’s big opportunity to gain global influence. “They
were handed the world on a silver plate and they chose Gaza,” fumes
Soli Ozel of Bilgi university in Istanbul. “Their responsibility is
not to placate public sentiment. Their responsibility is to run the
foreign policy of this country, and my fear is that between the Arab
street and the Turkish street, they have lost control of the process.”
The official line in Ankara is that Turkey’s partners will simply have
to get used to its new assertiveness. Even so, Mr Davutoglu is at
pains to correct the impression that he cares only about the Middle
East. Last week’s appointment of a Turkish diplomat to a senior Nato
post proves Turkey’s importance in the organisation, he maintains.
Yet Mr Davutoglu may soon be forced to limit his foreign adventures
to attend to events closer to home. This summer is proving one of
the bloodiest for years in Turkey’s south-east, where the rebel
Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) is launching one raid after another
from its mountain bases across the Iraqi border.
As PKK violence mounts, so does the pressure on the government to
secure help from all its allies to curb the group. Mr Erdogan wants
more direct military assistance as well as intelligence sharing from
the US, action from the EU to cut off funding sources, and more effort
by the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq to cut the PKK’s
supply lines and dislodge it from mountain bases.
Ilker Basbug, Turkey’s outgoing chief of general staff, said this month
he expected the renewed conflict to strain relations both with Iraqi
authorities and with the US. For all their international ambitions,
in other words, Mr Erdogan and Mr Davutoglu may be about to run up
against the old dictum that all politics is local.
From: A. Papazian