Jia Qinglin (front), chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee, visits the Golan Heights and plants a tree symbolising friendship during a formal friendly visit to Syria on Nov. 1, 2010. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)
DAMASCUS, Nov. 1 (Xinhua) — Top Chinese political advisor Jia Qinglin visited the Golan Heights on Monday, pledging support for Syria’s efforts to resume the exercise of sovereignty over the mountainous region partially occupied by Israel.
“China unswervingly supports the just cause of the Syrian government and people to safeguard their national sovereignty and territorial integrity, backs Syria to resume the exercise of sovereignty there, and supports Syria’s long-time efforts for peace in the Middle East,” said Jia after visiting the ruins of Quneitra city, the Syrian headquarters for the heights.
China will, as always, play a positive and constructive role, and work along with Syria and the international community to strive for a comprehensive, fair and lasting peace in the Middle East at an early date, said Jia, chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee.
He planted an olive tree there to signify peace and friendship.
The Golan Heights, with its major part under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, remains a highly contested land straddling the borders of Syria and Israel.
During an interview with Syrian media on Sunday, Jia hailed the traditional friendship between China and Arab nations, highlighting political mutual trust, mutually beneficial economic cooperation, frequent cultural exchanges and well-organized coordination on international affairs.
“China always firmly supports the Arab states’ just strive for resuming legitimate national rights and interests, appreciates their support to China on issues concerning China’s core interests,” Jia said.
Labeling Arab nations as “good friends, brothers and partners” of China, Jia called for more cooperation between China and them to further boost their strategic cooperation.
Jia arrived here on Friday for a five-day visit to the country.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Tuesday that Turkey’s relations with its neighbors were based on friendship.
In this way, a synergy emerges through the solidarity and cooperation of countries in the region, added Gul who attended a meeting in southern province of Hatay which has a border with Syria.
Commenting on relations with Syria, Gul said that lifting of visa procedures and being in cooperation and solidarity with mutual respect and confidence positively affected the peoples of both Turkey and Syria.
In the past, when relations with neighboring countries were bad, it was not an advantage to be a border province, said Gul. He added that however, when there was cooperation, solidarity, assistance and mutual understanding with neighbors, the border provinces turned into metropolis.
Gul also said that Turkey attached importance to security, stability and economic cooperation in its region.
In June, Turkey and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding to build a new border crossing through the method of build-operate-transfer. Turkey has currently seven border crossings with Syria, and the new one is planned to be used mainly in transportation of goods.
Our question for today: is Turkey still a pro-Western country looking forward to entering the European Union. Or has Ankara, “unfortunately, joined the radical axis formed led by Iran and supported by Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah”.
Let’s start with a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on 11 October:
We also had wonderful, friendly relations with another country, with military cooperation, with full diplomatic relations, with visits by heads of state, with 400,000 Israeli visitors to that country. That country is called Turkey.
What prompts Netanyahu to use the past tense? Is it because Turkey ejected Israel from a planned international air force exercise or because Turkey and Syria held joint military exercises in late April? Is it because Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told off Israeli Prseident Shimon Peres over Israel’s bloody war in Gaza in World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 or because Turkey did not stop the Freedom Flotilla which tried to break the Gaza siege?
Is it because Turkey conditionally accepted NATO’s planned anti-missile system, saying that it should not be presented as a defence against Iran? (On Friday, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: “We do not perceive any threat from any neighbour countries and we do not think ouur neighbors form a threat to NATO.”) Or is it because of a joint Turkish-Chinese air-force exercise held two weeks ago?
If I may offer an alternative to the “radical axis” thesis at this point….
Ankara’s new foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party is not a revisionist manoeuvre but a reflection of its rising autonomy due amidst Washington’s decreasing power — from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq to the rest of the Middle East — coupled with regional powers taking more initiative, economically and politically. Ankara, like its regional neighbours, wants to get benefit from this international conjuncture.
And in order to become a stronger regional power, Ankara had to give up its discourse based on antagonism towards its neighbours (no need even to mention the need to solve its Armenian, Kurdish and ecumenical Greek Orthodox problems). The next step was to increase trade, boost bilateral relationships, build trust with old enemies, and raise your credibility with statements showing you are standing with the “weak”. Erdogan did this for Gazans and for Uighur Turks in northwest China. (How fast do we forget that Erdogan blamed a Chinese official of committing a “a near genocide” after the killing of 184 people last year in the conflict?)
Some other facts: Turkey signed eight new trade agreements with China in early October, bypassing the US dollar for direct business between the Turkish Lira and Yuan. The goal is to achieve a trade volume of $100 billion in ten years from the current amount of $17 billion. As for the “existential threat” of Iran, the trade volume between Iran and Turkey was $1.4 billion in 2000 but it was $8 billion in 2008. (And of this, only $236 million in 2000 were Turkish exports; by 2007, the figure was $1.3 billion.) Turkey is now carrying out around 14 to 15% of its trade with its neighbours as opposed to 3 to 4% in the previous decade.
As a champion of privatisation, Turkey is still a relatively “liberal” — perhaps neo-liberal — country, both economically and politically. This is still the same Ankara trying to be a part of European Union, following the adjustment of domestic law to the harmonization code of the EU in 2001 and in 2004. That is not to say Ankara is doing a great job fulfilling all of the democratic criteria to become a member state of the EU, but it has a pro-Western identity.
I call my closing witness. Who would like to see a stronger Turkey (with reduced tension with Israel, of course) that has close relationships and is diplomatically and economically capable of holding negotiations with Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan?
Talking to BBC’s “Record Europe”, US Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton said: “Turkey is becoming a greater global and regional power. Its economy is growing dramatically. They are extending to countries and try to be effective on their own as well as with us.”
Increasingly autonomous? Yes. Radically evil? No.
Article originally appeared on EA WorldView (http://www.enduringamerica.com/).
Turkey has given conditional approval to the deployment of a NATO missile shield on its soil, provided that the deployment’s official papers don’t name Iran and Syria as enemies.
Turkey indicated Thursday during a meeting of NATO ministers that it could approve the deployment of a proposed U.S.-led anti-missile system on Turkish soil, though it expressed reservations about the project.
“We demanded that Iran and Syria not be cited as ‘threats’ in NATO’s official documents on the planned defensive shield,” Turkish Foreign Ministry officials told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Friday. “Also, the deployment of the shield should cover the territory of all NATO allies, as well as the entire territory of Turkey.”
…
Ankara told the U.S. officials that if defense is the purpose of the system, no nations should be named in NATO documents as targets, since that would provoke those countries, according to the same diplomatic sources.
“In that case, Turkey could face problems with its neighbors due to the missile shield,” diplomatic sources told the Daily News.
The technical discussions on the issue will continue until the NATO summit Nov. 19-20 in Brussels, where a decision is expected to be made.
I suppose that Iran and Syria aren’t threats to Turkey, although they are threats to just about every other country in NATO.
Maybe the missile shield should be deployed someplace else.
Syrian President Bashar Assad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus on Monday.
Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and an American ally, appears to be developing a synchronized security strategy with Syria, a partner of Iran and the Shiite militia Hezbollah, in a development that is likely to increase Western anxieties over Turkey’s shift eastward.
Just a decade after Turkey and Syria nearly went to war over Syrian support for Kurdish militants, the two neighbors are working together to stamp out the most powerful rebel Kurd group, the Kurdish Workers Party, known by the Turkish acronym PKK.
On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Damascus to discuss a joint Syrian-Turkish security crackdown on the PKK, which maintains a strong presence in northern Syrian and southeastern Turkey. The Turkish press also reported on efforts to step up cooperation with Iraq and Iran in an effort to wipe out the PKK completely.
Even Syrian President Bashar Assad expressed surprise at the speed with which Turkish-Syrian relations have improved, according to an official Syrian report based on an interview the president gave last week to Arabic-language Turkish channel TRT TV.
“There is very great momentum and acceleration … so we can say that yes, we expected this, but we’re very glad that the time was less than expected,” Assad said.
Back in July, Turkish media reported that Syria had arrested over 400 Kurds thought to have links to the PKK, which is on both the American and European Union’s list of terrorist organizations.
The PKK has been officially maintaining a unilateral cease-fire since September, but the Turkish government says it will continue operations against the group. Doing so requires extending a Turkish parliamentary mandate to continue cross-border raids on PKK sites in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, a strategy that has caused tension between Turkey and the semi-autonomous government in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The ancestral homeland of the Kurds stretches from southeast Turkey through Syria and Iraq to northwest Iran. Most Kurds consider themselves ethnically distinct from the majority populations of those countries and live with varying degrees of tension with the ruling governments.
The PKK was established in 1978 as a Kurdish nationalist party that drew heavily from revolutionary socialist ideology. From the early 1980s until the late 1990s, Syria allowed the PKK to establish a base of operations in the north of the country, but eventually ended its support for the group under Turkish pressure. Since then, Damascus has become increasingly suspicious of its Kurdish minority, cracking down violently on expressions of Kurdish identity.
Meanwhile, trade, tourism and politics have brought Turkey and Syria even closer. The two countries have signed a number of trade agreements, done away with visa requirements, and have both been known to seek political gains by playing East and West against each other.
Assad has credited Turkey’s support for Syria despite Western hostility for the rapprochement, in addition to historical and cultural ties.
Turkey, which has long sought membership in the European Union, also benefits from showing the West that it can find other friends, thank you very much. A recent article in the Israeli press voiced anxieties over Turkey’s ties with China and Iran, two allies of Syria.
“When a number of countries were attempting to isolate Syria … most of these countries were participating in this isolation in fear of or in compliance with external pressure … but Turkey maintained [steady relations with Syria],” Assad told TRT.
“We move towards any people that proved their independence and motivated their state to be independent like the Turkish people,” he added. “I believe that these are the main factors that led to this fast launch in relations.”
— Meris Lutz in Beirut
Photo: Syrian President Bashar Assad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus on Monday. Credit: Syrian Arab News Agency
Damascus has once more underlined that it is ready to grant amnesty to Syrian members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), but according to experts, Syria can take this step only if Turkey does so simultaneously and if Turkey’s efforts for a solution are based on a general expansion of democratic rights, as opposed to the specific recognition of the rights of Kurds as an ethnic group.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday coordinated the two countries’ ongoing cooperation against PKK activities and also discussed the government-formation crisis in neighboring Iraq.
After meeting with al-Assad, Erdoğan answered a question regarding the possibility of amnesty for the Syrian members of the PKK, saying this subject is not new and has been on the agenda for a while. “We have to open a gate for everybody who committed a mistake. This door should remain open. The doors of amnesty should not be opened only once and closed later but should be kept open all the time, whether in Turkey, in Iraq or in Iran,” he said.
Erdoğan brought up the fact that some PKK members’ families are in Syria and stated that he believes that if this issue is addressed in cooperation with Syria the problem will be at least minimized. Erdoğan did not elaborate further. It is known that many of the Syrian members of the PKK emigrated from Turkey to Syria during the Kurdish uprisings after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Syria has not granted citizenship to most of these individuals, and they are believed to number around 200,000, according to Syrian journalist Husni Mahalli.
Mahalli has stated that most Syrian PKK members come from such immigrant families and that the Syrian government recently prepared a plan to further integrate these families by granting them citizenship and some other rights gradually; however, this plan was not implemented due to unrest a few years ago in Qamishli, a border town mostly populated by Kurds.
“This is a difficult issue to solve. Erdoğan did not elaborate on it but mentioned cooperation. Maybe these people will be told that they might go back to Turkey if they want, maybe they will be granted citizenship,” he said.
Mahalli added that Syria can grant amnesty to Syrian members of the PKK, but only if Turkey does so as well, and added that another condition is that any solution should not open the gate for any movements that might harm the territorial integrity of Turkey. “For the solution of the Kurdish problem in the region, the situation in Turkey has a determining effect. Any step in Turkey will affect the future of Syria, too. If there is a move that may lead to autonomy or something similar to that, it will not be accepted by Syria since it will obliged to do the same,” he told Today’s Zaman.
İbrahim Güçlü, a prominent Kurdish intellectual, explained that the most radical elements within the PKK actually come from Syria and that it is this group that defends the idea of terrorist attacks. “The Syrian members of the PKK think that Turkish members are ready to compromise, but they are against it. Any possible amnesty might change the whole situation on the ground and also the Kurdish movement itself, but Syria will obviously not say yes to any solution that includes recognition of Kurd’s rights. If this happens, it will feel threatened,” Güçlü told Today’s Zaman.
In a July interview with Today’s Zaman, Assad said he backed the PKK’s possible decision to lay down its arms so that it could transform itself into a political actor and added that any campaign against terrorism should include political and social measures along with military ones. “If the PKK lays down its arms and becomes a political party, this would be a positive development. As long as there are no weapons and no terrorism, countries in the region, including Turkey, can have dialogue with the PKK. If it lays down its arms, we can also welcome back 1,500 Syrian nationals within the PKK,” Assad had said at the time.
