Worry over PKK, Kurds shape Turkey’s Syria policy

By Aaron Stein for Southeast European Times in Istanbul – 22/06/11

The potential for unrest in Syria’s Kurdish populated areas sparks concern. [Reuters]

”]Ankara’s partnership with Damascus is crumbling in the wake of Syria’s uprising and brutal government crackdown. Since events spiraled out of control, one of the major looming issues for Turkish security planners is how the chaos, and the threat of Syrian collapse, will impact Turkey’s domestic Kurdish problem and the fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Syria’s normally restive Kurdish population in the northeast of the country, contiguous to the Kurdish populated regions of Turkey and Iraq, have so far not been the centre of anti-regime protests and regime crackdowns. However, the prospect of a harsh military response in Kurdish populated areas, similar to those occurring in the Arab populated northwestern Syria, and the resultant refugee flows to Turkey’s border, have Turkish policy makers worried.

There is also a fear that, “if Syria were to destabilise further, the PKK could find a new safe haven in Syria or amongst the Syrian Kurds, similar to the situation in northern Iraq,” Saban Kardas, assistant professor of international relations at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, told SETimes.

The threat posed by Kurdish nationalism and separatist violence has underpinned Turkey’s relationship with Syria since the mid-1980s. Up until 1998, the relationship was marred by Syria’s harbouring of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

After agreeing to kick out the PKK leader in 1998 and Ocalan’s subsequent capture, relations between the two countries improved dramatically. In the wake of the war in Iraq in 2003, Syria and Turkey bolstered security ties in order to contain the perceived threat of growing Kurdish nationalism.

Turkey invested a lot in cultivating its relationship with Syria, often resisting calls by the United States to isolate the regime for its ties to Iran, meddling in Lebanon and Iraq, and its support for Hamas.

Warming relations with Syria was seen as “the best example of Turkey’s changing foreign policy”, said Kardas, adding that “It was the cornerstone of Turkey’s Middle East policy.”

Maintaining regional stability is Turkey’s primary foreign policy priority. Wary of upsetting the status quo, Ankara has rejected rapid regime change in favour of an “evolutionary style, which would transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one through slow, structural and peaceful changes”, Nuh Yilmaz, director of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) in Washington told SETimes.

At the outset of the al-Assad regime’s bloody crackdown, Turkey reacted cautiously but “the refugee crisis has forced Prime Minister Erdogan’s hand politically,” William Hale, SOAS Emeritus professor told SETimes. “He [Erdogan] could not go on sitting on the fence saying that his good friend [al-Assad] would somehow turn Syria into a democratic government.”

Since the outbreak of hostilities, over 10,000 Arab refugees have fled Syria for Turkey, drawing comparisons to the flood of Kurdish refugees that escaped Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown in 1991. Turkey and allied forces responded by establishing a safe zone on the Iraqi side of the border with Turkey to protect refugees and provide humanitarian relief — which was later expanded into a protectorate over the Iraqi Kurds in the form of a no-fly zone. Amidst the chaos, the PKK was able to consolidate its positions in northern Iraq and launch cross border raids in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Turkish press has reported that the Turkish military has developed plans to create a buffer zone in northern Syria in the event of regime collapse, sectarian violence, and mass refugee flows to Turkey.

This content was commissioned for SETimes.com.

via Worry over PKK, Kurds shape Turkey’s Syria policy (SETimes.com).