Turkey Is No Partner for Peace
How Ankara’s Sectarianism Hobbles U.S. Syria Policy
Halil Karaveli
September 11, 2012
After years of cozying up to Middle East dictators, Turkey now urges
its neighbors to liberalize — or risk regime change. But these calls
for change will ring hollow unless Turkey gets its own democracy in
order.
Erdogan, right, attends the funeral of two pilots shot down by Syria
in June. (Umit Bektas / Courtesy Reuters)
At first glance, it appears that the United States and Turkey are
working hand in hand to end the Syrian civil war. On August 11, after
meeting with Turkish officials, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton released a statement that the two countries’ foreign
ministries were coordinating to support the Syrian opposition and
bring about a democratic transition. In Ankara on August 23, U.S. and
Turkish officials turned those words into action, holding their first
operational planning meeting aimed at hastening the downfall of the
regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Beneath their common desire to oust Assad, however, Washington and
Ankara have two distinctly different visions of a post-revolutionary
Syria. The United States insists that any solution to the Syrian
crisis should guarantee religious and ethnic pluralism. But Turkey,
which is ruled by a Sunni government, has come to see the conflict in
sectarian terms, building close ties with Syria’s Muslim
Brotherhood`dominated Sunni opposition, seeking to suppress the rights
of Syrian Kurds, and castigating the minority Alawites — Assad’s sect
— as enemies. That should be unsettling for the Obama administration,
since it means that Turkey will not be of help in promoting a
multi-ethnic, democratic government in Damascus. In fact, Turkish
attitudes have already contributed to Syria’s worsening sectarian
divisions.
Turkey has framed the Syrian conflict in alienating religious terms.
Washington is pushing for pluralism. In Istanbul last month, U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip
Gordon emphasized that `the Syrian opposition needs to be inclusive,
needs to give a voice to all of the groups in Syria . . . and that
includes Kurds.’ Clinton, after meeting with her Turkish counterpart,
Foreign Minister Ahmet DavutoÄ?lu, stressed that a new Syrian
government `will need to protect the rights of all Syrians regardless
of religion, gender, or ethnicity.’
It is unclear, however, whether Ankara is on board. As it lends
critical support to the Sunni rebellion, Turkey has not made an
attempt to reach out to the other ethnic and sectarian communities in
the country. Instead, Turkey has framed the Syrian conflict in
alienating religious terms. The governing Justice and Development
Party (AKP), a Sunni conservative bloc, singles out Syria’s Alawites
as villains, regularly denouncing their `minority regime.’ Hüseyin
Çelik, an AKP spokesperson, claimed at a press conference on September
8, 2011, that `the Baath regime relies on a mass of 15 percent’ — the
percentage of Alawites in the country. Such a narrative overlooks the
fact that the Baath regime has long owed its survival to the support
of a significant portion of the majority Sunnis.
The AKP has antagonized not only Syria’s Alawites but also its Kurds.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted that his
country would resist any Kurdish push for autonomy in parts of
northeastern Syria, going so far as to threaten military intervention.
The Turkish government’s unreserved support for the Sunni opposition
is due not only to an ideological affinity with it but also to the
fact that the Sunni rebels oppose the aspirations of the Syrian Kurds.
Meanwhile, the AKP has sought to sell its anti-Assad policy to the
Turkish public by fanning the flames of sectarianism at home. The AKP
has directed increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward Turkey’s largest
religious minority, the Alevis, and accused them of supporting the
Alawites out of religious solidarity. The Alevis, a Turkish- and
Kurdish-speaking heterodox Muslim minority that comprises
approximately one-fifth of Turkey’s population, constitute a separate
group from the Arab Alawites. But both creeds share the fate of being
treated as heretics by the Sunnis.
At the September 2011 press conference, Çelik insinuated that Kemal
KiliçdaroÄ?lu, an Alevi Kurd who leads Turkey’s social democratic
Republican People’s Party (CHP), based his opposition to Turkey’s
entanglement in the Syrian civil war on sectarian motives. `Why are
you defending the Baath regime?’ he inquired. `Bad things come to my
mind. Is it perhaps because of sectarian solidarity?’ In a similar
vein, Erdogan claimed in March that KiliçdaroÄ?lu’s motives for
supposedly befriending the Syrian president were religious, stating,
`Don’t forget that a person’s religion is the religion of his friend.’
On the face of it, the Obama administration’s positions on Syria are
consistent with those of Turkey. In their meetings in Turkey, Clinton
reiterated that Washington `share[s] Turkey’s determination that Syria
must not become a haven for [Kurdish] terrorists,’ and Gordon
underlined that the United States has `been clear both with the Kurds
of Syria and our counterparts in Turkey that we don’t support any
movement towards autonomy or separatism which we think would be a
slippery slope.’ Such statements may comfort the Turkish government,
but the preferred U.S. outcome of a Syria where all ethnic and
religious communities enjoy equal rights would nonetheless require
accommodating the aspirations of the Kurds to be recognized as a
distinct group. And that is precisely what Turkey deems unacceptable.
Consider the fact that Turkey has persecuted its own Kurdish movement
for raising the same demand; in the last three years, Ankara has
arrested 8,000 Kurdish politicians and activists to keep the
nationalist movement in check.
None of this is to suggest that the United States should not work with
Turkey, especially since Saudi Arabia, the other main participant in
the effort to bring down Assad, has even less of an interest in
promoting democracy. But to have a reliable partner in the Syria
crisis, Washington will have to pressure Ankara to rise above its
ethnic and sectarian considerations.
The United States should therefore confront these differences in
approach head-on and encourage Turkey to see the benefits of pursuing
a more pluralistic policy. Despite its fear of Kurdish agitation at
home, Turkey would stand to gain from establishing a mutually
beneficial relationship with the Kurds in Syria, like the one that it
has come to enjoy with the Kurdish regional government in northern
Iraq. Indeed, representatives of the leading Syrian Kurdish party, the
Democratic Union Party (PYD), have urged Ankara to forge a similar
partnership. In an interview with the International Middle East Peace
Research Center, Salih Muhammad Muslim, the leader of the PYD, said
that Turkey should get over its `Kurdish phobia.’ Erdogan’s government
seems reluctant to do so, fearing that by reaching out to Syria’s
Kurds and other minorities, and accepting the idea of a pluralistic
Syria, Turkey would encourage its own ethnic and religious minorities
to seek constitutional reform and equality. But if Turkey allows
ethnic and sectarian divisions in Syria to further spiral out of
control, those divisions may spill over its own borders.
By now, it should have dawned on Ankara that shouldering the Sunni
cause to project power in its neighborhood courts all kinds of
dangers. Framing Turkey’s involvement in Syria in religious terms
leads Sunni Turks to imagine that they are waging a battle for the
emancipation of faithful Muslims from the oppression of supposed
heretics. This fanning of sectarian prejudice against Syria’s Alawites
naturally engenders hostility toward religious minority groups in
Turkey, leading the country’s already fragile social fabric to fray.
There is a bigger risk here, too. The AKP’s pro-Sunni agenda in Syria
threatens to embroil Turkey in the wider Sunni-Shiite conflict across
the Middle East. By taking on Iran’s ally, Turkey has exposed itself
to aggression from the Islamic Republic. In a statement last month,
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s chief of staff, General Hasan
Firouzabadi, warned that Turkey, along with the other countries
combating Assad, can expect internal turmoil as a result of their
interference. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish rebel
group considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United
States, stepped up its attacks over the summer, notably staging a
major offensive in Turkey’s Hakkari Province, which borders Iran and
Iraq. Iran denies any responsibility for the PKK attacks, but Turkish
officials assume that Tehran is involved and that PKK militants cross
into Turkey from Iran.
Until now, the Sunni bent of Turkish foreign policy has suited the
geopolitical aims of the United States, as it has meant that Turkey,
abandoning its previous ambition to have `zero problems’ with its
neighbors, has joined the camp against Iran. That advantage quelled
whatever misgivings U.S. officials may have harbored about Turkey’s
sectarian drift. But if the United States achieves, with Turkish help,
its strategic objective of ousting Assad, it will need a different
kind of Turkey as its partner for what comes after.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138104/halil-karaveli/turkey-is-no-partner-for-peace?page=show