Turkish Forum

Category: Eastern Europe

  • Whither Turkish-Armenian relations?

    Whither Turkish-Armenian relations?

    By Nicholas Birch in Istanbul

    As symbolic gestures go, Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s attendance at an Armenia-Turkey football match in Yerevan on September 6 could not have been bettered.

    The first visit by a senior Turkish politician since Armenia became independent 17 years ago, it has sparked an upsurge of fraternal feeling on both sides of a border closed since 1993. And the signs are that there is more to come. If Armenia agrees to renounce territorial claims on eastern Turkey implicit in its founding charter, one senior Turkish diplomat says: “We could see diplomatic relations begun and rail links restarted within six months.”

    “The two sides are in agreement over a surprising number of issues,” agrees Richard Giragosian, a Yerevan-based analyst, describing Armenia’s invitation of Gul as “a vital foreign policy victory” for the Caucasian state’s embattled government. Armenia stands to benefit enormously from the rapprochement. With its Azeri and Turkish borders closed, Georgia has been its only window on the West. When Russia wrecked Georgian infrastructure in August, it was Armenians, not Georgians, who suffered from food shortages.

    It is no coincidence either that the two Turkish provinces bordering Armenia are the country’s poorest. For years, politicians in Kars and Igdir have been calling for the border to be opened. Trade between the two countries “would slow rapid population movement away from eastern Turkey,” says former Turkish ambassador to Russia, Volkan Vural. “It would provide Central Asia-bound exporters with a good new route. Plus energy security would be improved if Armenia joins current energy projects.”

    Though Turkey has increasingly used its key position on the “East-West” corridor connecting Europe to the Caspian as a card in its stumbling EU negotiations, such optimism seems premature, for three reasons.

    Reasons not to be cheerful

    First, it ignores the fact that Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan has been closed since the 1988-1994 armed conflict that took place in the small ethnic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in southwestern Azerbaijan, between the predominantly ethnic Armenians and Azeri forces. Azerbaijan showed considerable statesmanship in backing the Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. But there is no sign of progress on Nagorno-Karabakh. Instead, enriched with oil and gas money, Baku now spends $1bn annually on military rearmament. Belligerent rhetoric about re-taking lost territories is, if anything, on the up.

    Second, and much more importantly, Turkey’s talk of a new Caucasian pact appears to ignore the key lesson of August’s conflict in South Ossetia; in today’s Caucasus, Russia is boss. The August bust-up “was clearly not about Ossetia, only a little about Georgia, only a little about Nato, and a huge amount about geopolitics,” says David Smith, director of the Georgian Security Analysis Center in Tbilisi. “It was a shot fired at the East-West corridor, a warning to BP, ExxonMobil, anybody hoping to loosen Gazprom’s hold on Central Asia.”

    With Russian bombs falling within 200 metres of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, Georgia’s neighbours seem to have got the message. Azerbaijan recently upped oil exports via Russian pipelines when BTC flow was interrupted by a Turkish Kurdish separatist sabotage attack on the pipeline on August 6. And when US Vice-President Dick Cheney visited Baku on September 3 to drum up local support for a trans-Caspian gas line, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev turned him down.

    With the future of Nabucco, a hugely expensive EU-backed gas pipeline due to bring Caspian gas direct to Europe by 2013, looking increasingly doubtful, some analysts hint at the possibility of rerouting the East-West corridor through Armenia. But this talk of Armenia offering new energy security possibilities misses another point: Georgia earned its position on the East-West corridor thanks to its staunch pro-American stance; Armenia, meanwhile, to cite Richard Giragosian, is little better than “a Russian garrison state.”

    Visitors to Yerevan have their passports stamped by Russian border guards. Armenia’s energy and telecommunication sectors have been in Russian hands since 2005 and 2006 respectively. Russian Railways bought Armenian railways this January. In that context, Giragosian argues, opening the Turkish-Armenian border risks abetting Russian efforts to sideline Georgia. “The key question Turkey needs to ask itself over Armenia,” he says, “is do we have a partner on the other side.”

  • EU: Georgia crisis fortifies importance of Turkey

    EU: Georgia crisis fortifies importance of Turkey

    HELSINKI, Finland: The Georgian crisis has strengthened the strategic importance of Turkey both in the Caucasus and for the European Union, the bloc’s enlargement chief said Friday.

    EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said Turkey was “engaged in very active and evidently successful diplomacy” in its neighboring regions.

    Turkey has met separately with Georgian and Russian officials in an effort to promote peace between the two countries since their war in August.

    It is also helping to normalize ties between Syria and the EU and is mediating talks between Israel and the Palestinians in Istanbul.

    “Turkey remains a very important bridge between Europe and the Islamic world,” Rehn told reporters during a visit to Helsinki. “In other words, everything that has happened in recent weeks has only strengthened Turkey’s strategic importance from the EU’s point of view.”

    EU: Georgia crisis fortifies importance of Turkey – International Herald Tribune.

  • Turkey’s Near Abroad, and Russia

    Turkey’s Near Abroad, and Russia

    ISTANBUL — In the waning days of the conflict between Russia and Georgia last month, politicians in Turkey focused elsewhere — on Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Central Asian players in regional energy markets. Turkey’s energy minister visited the two former Soviet states to discuss longterm energy strategies (Today’sZaman), just three weeks after a tentative ceasefire was inked between Moscow and Tbilisi. The meeting, which came on the heels of a costly trade dispute (Today’sZaman) with Russia over Ankara’s decision to authorize U.S. naval access to the Black Sea during the Georgia fighting, has been widely interpreted as a warning shot to Russia that Turkey “is not about to be pushed around” (Stratfor).

    Looking east in troubled times comes naturally to Turkey, which was among the first countries to recognize the independence of Central Asian states (TurkishWeekly) when they split away from the disintegrating Soviet Union in the 1990s. Under former President Turgut Ozal (1989-1993), political and economic ties between Turkey and these Turkic-brethren states took off. Since 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took office, a renewed focus on Central Asia has led to rising foreign investment and international trade with Turkey’s eastern neighbors.

    Turkey’s Near Abroad, and Russia – washingtonpost.com.

  • Georgia on Our Mind

    Georgia on Our Mind

    by Morton Abramowitz

    09.16.2008

    Whether provoked or entrapped, President Saakashvili’s folly cost the United States $1 billion and counting. But that is only money. He has changed the world in ways neither he nor the West ever dreamed. If any compensation is found to tame Putin’s Russia, it will not likely be by the actions of Western governments, but by capital fleeing from Russia and the price of energy continuing its precipitous decline. The Bush administration is a spent force with little credibility. Only a new administration might pursue a policy that has coherence, purpose, and international support. A number of issues emanating from the Georgian conflict will face the next president, including energy policy in Central Asia and power politics in NATO.

    Following the conflict in the Caucuses, the energy equation of the region has radically changed. In Georgia, even if Saakashvili survives—that appears to be in doubt and will require huge Western help—he will face unremitting enmity from Moscow. Moscow was previously too weak to prevent the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline—the East-West energy corridor—to be built. But the notion that investors will put billions of dollars into a new pipeline for gas from Central Asia through the Caucasus before Georgia’s relations with Russia are restored defies the imagination.

    In any event, gas from Turkmenistan and other Central Asian countries is unlikely to be transmitted through Georgia on its way west. Georgia may be too bitter a lesson for these states. Pressure from Moscow makes it more likely that gas will continue to go through Russia onto the West or to Turkey.

    In addition to this shifting energy landscape, NATO has suffered a serious setback: Expansion of the alliance has reached a dangerous fork. Giving membership prospects to Georgia and Ukraine later this year is more likely to endanger, not strengthen them. The two countries would be under constant pressure from Russia, damaging or destroying Ukraine’s unity and Georgia’s stability. Besides, it is unlikely that consensus could be achieved on the membership issue. Turkey, for example, has few illusions about Putin’s Russia. But the Georgian war has cast doubt on Turkey’s full cooperation with the United States on Russian issues and NATO expansion. Turkey does not like Russia’s egregious intervention in the Caucasus, but is not particularly sympathetic to Shaakashvili’s Georgia either. Increasingly, the Turks are skeptical of American foreign policy management, and are not interested in getting into a hassle with Russia. Russia is Turkey’s leading trade partner and the supplier of the vast bulk of its imported energy (some $50 billion this year). The United States has expressed displeasure with Turkey’s choice of energy suppliers—Iran and Russia—but has yet to tell Ankara how they realistically propose to make up for them. Turkey can make money whether energy comes through Georgia or Russia. The Turks remain committed to NATO, but the Russian relationship is a matter of realism for Ankara—not an alliance matter—unless the Russians were to attack a NATO member. Most likely, Turkey, along with several others, will seek to postpone any potential membership offer to Georgia and Ukraine.

    Another international institution, the European Union, has also been impacted by the Georgian conflict. Although the EU is under attack in many quarters in the United States and Europe for its pusillanimous reaction to Russia’s brazen behavior in Georgia, it has the real ability to do something important for Ukraine and Georgia—namely beginning a serious process to admit these countries to the EU. One must be skeptical that the EU is actually prepared to do that. The EU also has the practical ability to do something about Russian behavior. Whether they will seriously try to or not remains to be seen. The Russians have skillfully created tensions between the “old” Europe and the “new” one.

    As for America, the Bush administration will continue to pay for Saakashvili’s battle with the Russians and give Georgia strong moral support. But with a financial system in disaster, the administration’s writ on controversial matters during their last months in office does not extend far.

    Although the next president will have many foreign-policy challenges, cleaning up after the Georgian war needs early attention. Most importantly, the United States and its allies must create an effective Russian policy. They have to sort out their relations with an angry and internationally disruptive Russia, while ensuring Russian cooperation on pressing issues, such as stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program and energy security. Slogans and fulminations won’t do the trick.

     

    Morton Abramowitz is a former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

  • Invoking Both Kosovo and Abkhazia, Tatar Independence Movement Steps Up Its Campaign

    Invoking Both Kosovo and Abkhazia, Tatar Independence Movement Steps Up Its Campaign

    Paul Goble

    Vienna, September 16 – In advance of commemorations of the 456th anniversary of the Russian defeat and occupation of Kazan, the Tatar Ittifaq Party of National Independence this week has launched a website to ensure that its declarations and those of other Idel-Ural nations will reach a larger audience.
    The site, which is located at azatlyk-vatan.blogspot.com/, consists of three sections: current news, including a declaration posted online today concerning the upcoming anniversary; a file of earlier posts in Tatar, Russian and English; and an extensive listing of Tatar and Muslim resources on the Internet.
    In her lead post for yesterday, Fauziya Bayramova, Ittifaq’s leader and a member of the executive committee of the World Congress of Tatars, argues that the fall of Kazan to the forces of Ivan the Terrible was “the greatest tragedy in the history of the Tatars, not only extinguishing their independent statehood but opening “centuries’ long slavery” for them.
    Let no one be fooled by statements about the “sovereignty” of Tatarstan,” she writes. “Tatarstan is not an independent state and Kazan is not a Tatar city because [there] Russian laws rule. To say nothing about such historically Tatar lands as Astrakhan, Siberia and Crimea, which long ago were hopelessly russified.”
    But the Tatars of Kazan must not give up, Bayramova continues. “If we cease to struggle for independence and the right to our own bright future, the same fate awaits us, the Tatars of Idel-Ural, because Russian laws prohibit instruction in [Tatar], courses on Orthodoxy are included in the curriculum in many regions, and there is ongoing talk about the destruction of national republics and the unitarization of the Russian state.”
    “After the occupation of Kazan, the Russian empire set itself a single goal – to russify and baptize all the peoples of the empire, in the first instance the Tatars. But the empire was never able to subordinate the Tatars all the way. Even having destroyed [the Tatar] state, it could not destroy the language and religion of the Tatars or the spirit of resistance which helped the Tatars to survive as a nation.”
    The situation has continued to get worse in recent decades, the Ittifaq leader insists, and “in such conditions, we have only two ways out – to struggle for independence and having build our own Tatar state, to begin to live by our own laws or to cease to exist as an independent nation.”
    “We Tatars must choose the first path, the path of life, struggle and victory! Right is on our side!” she says. And she points to one new reason for her hopeful conclusion: shifts in the position of the West and of the Russian Federation itself concerning the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination.
    “The international community having recognizing the state independence of Kosovo, and the Russian Federation having recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Bayramova says, “must recognize the independence of the Republic of Tatarstan! The Tatar nation has every right to live in its own independent state!”

  • ‘Good Basis’ for Solving Armenia Conflict: Azerbaijani President

    ‘Good Basis’ for Solving Armenia Conflict: Azerbaijani President

     

     

     

     

     

    AFP

    Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday said there was “a good basis” for resolving a long-running conflict with Armenia after talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev near Moscow.

    “It seems to us that there is now a good basis for a resolution of the conflict, which would fit with the interests of all states and would be based on the principles of international law,” Aliyev said.

    “If the conflict is resolved in the near future, I am sure that there will be new perspectives for regional cooperation,” Aliyev said.

    Aliyev also expressed his concern over the situation in the region following Russia’s war in Georgia, saying that conflict “should be resolved in a peaceful way, through dialogue, by finding common points and based on mutual respect.”

    Aliyev visited Medvedev at his residence near Moscow for talks on last month’s conflict in Georgia and on Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbour Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

    Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a tense stand-off over the enclave, which ethnic Armenian forces seized in the early 1990s in a war that killed nearly 30,000 people and forced another million on both sides to flee their homes.

    A ceasefire was signed between the two former Soviet republics in 1994 but the dispute remains unresolved after more than a decade of negotiations, and shootings between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the region are common.