TURKEY’S ACTIONS IN SYRIA SEE PM RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN GO FROM MODEL MIDDLE EAST ‘STRONGMAN’ TO TIN-POT DICTATOR
Recep Tayyip Erdogan (centre) greeted by MPs from his Justice and
Development (AKP) Party; his government shut down social media over
a corruption scandal before recent elections
Once a cuddly ally of Barack Obama, the Turkish Prime Minister has
shown himself to be increasingly authoritarian
Robert Fisk
Istanbul
Thursday 10 April 2014
Recep Tayyip Erdogan used to be one of Barack Obama’s cuddliest
allies. Religious but secular, powerful but democratic, independent
but a reliable Nato chum, he was the kind of guy the White House and
the Pentagon could rely on to provide a guiding hand in the Arab part
of the old Ottoman empire – and a channel for rebels who could bring
down the hated Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
The American think-tank mountebanks – taking their cue as usual from
the US ‘official sources’ – even proclaimed Turkey as a “role model”
for the post-dictatorship Arab world.
Queue in hollow laughter. Was a nation which still mistreated its
Kurds, acted as a holocaust denier in refusing to acknowledge the
1915 Armenian genocide, and which even trashed the trial of those who
killed the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in an Istanbul street in
2007, really the kind of mirror into which the Muslim world should
stare with approval? Yeah, now the mask has fallen.
Erdogan sent in the police to crush the demonstrators of Gezi Park last
year, went berserk when it was suggested his party and relatives were
involved in corruption scams, and fired or removed hundreds of police
and security officers. Then he promised to wipe out “social media”
– Facebook and YouTube were the new ‘terrorists’, it seemed – before
the municipal elections which he inevitably won, and uttered the kind
of threats against Turkey’s ever more compliant press in words that
might have come from the late Saddam Hussein. It turned out that the
only role model Turkey was a role model for was – well, Turkey.
So had yet another Middle East ‘strongman’ turned into a tin-pot (and
dangerous) dictator? Or had a conservative, level headed democrat
suddenly shown his true colours? When the Arab awakening began to
destroy the local dictators in 2011, Erdogan was the first Muslim
leader to grasp its significance and praise its revolutionaries. Who
would have believed that the old Ottoman flag – or the current Turkish
version of it – would be flown once more with pride over Arab homes
in Gaza and Egypt? Even when the latter’s elected president Mohamed
Morsi was chucked out by that wonderful democracy-loving Egyptian
deputy prime minister, defence minister and chief of staff – Erdogan
could scarcely bring himself to pronounce General al-Sissi’s name –
the Turkish prime minister, like Qatar, insisted that Morsi was still
the leader of Egypt.
Next on his target list, I suspect, will be the Daily Zaman, one of the
most feisty and provocative of Turkish newspapers which will soon – its
journalists fear – feel Erdogan’s lash. The paper this week trashed
the prime minister’s attacks on his Islamist antagonist Fetullah
Gulen, currently residing in Pennsylvania, as having no basis in law,
approvingly quoting a retired supreme appeal court prosecutor as saying
that Erdogan was trying to influence the justice system. The paper,
regarded as close to Gulen ideologically, has carried articles asking
if corruption and bribery contributed to Erdorgan’s 45 per cent Justice
and Development Party election victory. And in an unprecedented report,
it also wrote that Armenians driven on 16 March from their homes in
the Syrian town of Kassab by Islamist rebels supported by Turkey,
were drawing parallels with the 1915 mass killings – which the paper
was not quite brave enough to call a genocide.
Supporters of the newly elected mayor of Ankara from the AKP, which
triumphed in elections on 30 March (Getty Images) Turkey denies all
this, just as it denies the genocide. Both statements are nonsense. The
Jabhat al-Nusra men who stormed into Kassab did not come from Iraq or
Jordan. The town, in which thousands of Armenians lived in the very
last part of what had been Ottoman Armenia, is only a few miles from
the Syrian border where the Turks have been furnishing their Syrian
rebel allies – both Islamist and secular – with arms. The Armenian
expulsions have provided ample opportunity once again for the Assad
regime to demonstrate the cruelty of its opponents.
But there is growing evidence that Turkey’s – or rather Erdogan’s
– involvement with the revolt against Assad is critical to his
relationship with Obama. The Syrian government were, of course, the
first to claim that the sarin gas which killed hundreds of Syrian
civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta last August had come from
Turkey – and had then been used by Islamist groups in the hope that
the West would blame Assad and turn its strategic weapons against
the regime. When The Independent enquired about the attacks in Syria,
Russian sources stated that the chemicals had not been sold to Assad.
They had come from stocks sold by Moscow to the former Gaddafi regime
in Libya.
Syrian army officers and one figure close to Assad complained to me,
too, that when the US and its allies insisted the regime was to blame
for the gas attack – which of course they did at once – no heed was
paid to public evidence that sarin gas was being transported through
part of Turkey for rebels in the north of Syria. They constantly
referred to a 130-page Turkish indictment of ten al-Nusra men accused
of transporting through southern Turkey what local police identified as
chemical precursors for sarin. They were correct. The ringleader of the
group, Haytham Qassab, appeared in court where a Turkish prosecutor
demanded 25 years imprisonment, but he was later released “pending
trial”. They have all since disappeared, while Turkey’s ambassador
to Moscow was later to dismiss the arrests, claiming – with almost
Saddam-like conviction – that the ‘sarin’ was “anti-freeze”.
That most controversial of American investigative journalists,
Seymour Hersh – I confess he is an old mate of mine even though he
often uses my most hated phrase, anonymous “officials” and “experts”,
as his sources – has now published his own disturbing and compelling
research on the use of chemicals in Syria and points the finger at
Turkey for allowing rebels to use sarin in an earlier chemical attack
against the Syrian village of Khan al-Assal.
Far more explosively, he claims that the British Porton Down defence
laboratory examined the sarin used in Ghouta (courtesy of a Russian
military intelligence operative) – this was the attack that propelled
Obama and his administration into paroxysms of rage against Assad – and
that British intelligence confirmed to the Americans that the gas did
not come from stocks in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons’ arsenal.
This, according to Hersh – who naturally has his own detractors – was
enough to persuade the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to tell President Obama
that he must not use the Ghouta attack as an excuse for a military
strike against Syria. Obama finally agreed – although he used a sudden
(and still unexplained) decision to seek congressional approval for a
bombardment of Syria – permission he knew he was unlikely to get. The
Turks – and here comes the Erdogan connection – were outraged that
the Americans had not fallen into their trap of destroying Assad.
Erdogan, according to Hersh, had allowed the Americans to ship a
‘rat line’ of weapons from Libya via Turkey to the Syrian rebels –
hence the connection to earlier shipments of sarin to Libya from the
then Soviet Union. Hersh says that for months after the Ghouta attack
occurred, this ‘rat line’ continued. So did permission to the Turks
to trade in gold with Iran – a profitable enterprise which created a
slush fund of billions of dollars, the very same corruption money which
later appeared to fall into the hands of senior figures around Erdogan.
One Turkish journalist insisted to me in Istanbul this week that
Erdogan’s ‘madness’ – although already evident – reached ferocity
pitch after the Ghouta sarin attack in Damascus which was supposed to
drive Obama to attack the Assad regime, but which ultimately failed to
do so. If the US bombardment had taken place, Turkey would have been
the ‘kingmaker’ in any new Syria, and that ancient nation might even
have become part of a putative, enlarged, Ottoman-style empire. This
is taking things too far. Erdogan is, like Yossarian in Catch 22,
a very odd person. There are signs of political megalomania.
But Hersh does detail a dinner on 16 May last year between Erdogan
and Obama – and a senior Turkish intelligence official called Hakan
Fidan – at which Obama angrily pointed at Fidan and said: “We know
what you’re doing with the (rebel) radicals in Syria.” The dinner
took place. No-one, of course, will reveal on the record what was said.
Turkey’s meddling in the Syria war will continue, whatever the
Americans do. Obama believes the rebels are both untrustworthy,
dangerous and are being beaten. But one of the tapes which so enraged
Erdogan when it appeared on YouTube – hence the ban – showed an
apparent conversation between Turkish officials seeking an excuse to
stage their own attack on Syria. “Manipulated,” screamed the Turkish
government. No doubt.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/turkeys-actions-in-syria-see-pm-recep-tayyip-erdogan-go-from-model-middle-east-strongman-to-tinpot-dictator-9252366.html