Category: Regions

Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria

Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria

Ankara won’t step into the conflict because it’s terrified Moscow will retaliate — again.

SONER CAGAPTAYMAY 6 2013, 10:16 AM ET

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu (R) reach out to shake hands following a joint news conference at Ciragan Palace in Istanbul on April 17, 2013. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov visited Ankara on April 17th, but the event went almost unnoticed. Despite deep differences between Ankara and Moscow over Syria, Turkey has refrained from rebuking Moscow. That’s because Turkey fears no country more than it fears Russia.

Ankara has nearly a dozen neighbors if you include its maritime neighbors across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Emboldened by its phenomenal economic growth in the past decade and rising political power, Turkey appears willing to square-off against any of them; Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has publicly chided the leaders of Syria, Iran, and Iraq. In fact, none of the country’s neighbors can feel safe from Ankara’s wrath — with the exception of Russia, that is.

“The Russians can make life miserable for us, they are good at this.”

The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.

Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians. Between 1568, when the Ottomans and Russians first clashed, to the end of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Turks and Russians fought 17 wars. In each encounter, Russia was the instigator and the victor. In these defeats, the Ottomans lost vast, and often solidly Turkish and Muslim, territories spanning from the Crimea to Circassia to the Russians. The Russians killed many inhabitants of these Ottoman lands and expelled the rest to Turkey. So many Turks descend from refugees from Russia that the adage in Turkey is: “If you scratch a Turk, you find a Circassian persecuted by Russians underneath.”

Having suffered at the hands of the Russians for centuries, the Turks now have a deeply engrained fear of the Russians. This explains why Turkey dived for the safety of NATO and the United States when Stalin demanded territory from Turkey and a base on the Bosporus in 1945. Fear of the Russians made Turkey one of the most committed Cold-War allies to the United States.

Recently, Turkish-Russian ties have improved measurably. Russia is Turkey’s number-one trading partner, and nearly four million Russians vacation in Turkey annually. At the same time, Turkey’s construction, retail, and manufacturing businesses are thriving in Russia. Turkish Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, offers daily flights from Istanbul to eight Russian cities.

Still, none of this has erased the Turks’ subconscious Russophobia. In 2012, I asked a policymaker in Ankara whether Turkey would take unilateral military action to depose the Assad regime in Damascus. “Not against the wishes of Moscow” my interlocutor said. Adding: “The Russians can make life miserable for us, they are good at this.”

At least some of the Turkish fear of Russia appears grounded in reality. Turkey is dependent on Russia more than any other country for its energy needs. Despite being a large economy, Turkey has neither significant natural gas and oil deposits, nor nuclear power stations of its own. Ankara is therefore bound to Moscow, which has often used natural gas supplies as a means to punish countries, such as Ukraine, that cross its foreign policy goals.

There is also a security component: Russia helped set up the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group that led a terror campaign against Turkey for decades, causing over 30,000 casualties. The PKK emerged under Russian tutelage in Lebanon’s then-Syrian occupied Bekaa Valley during the 1980s, and it has enjoyed intermittent Russian support even after the collapse of Communism.

Turkey recently entered peace talks with the PKK, and many in the group are likely to heed the advice of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and lay down their weapons. Yet, a pervasive fear in Ankara is that some rogue elements and hardliners could emerge from the PKK, denouncing the talks and continuing to fight Turkey.

Meanwhile, Ankara has been confronting the Assad regime in Damascus since late 2011 by supporting the Syrian opposition. This had led to a spike in PKK attacks against Turkey, most coming from Iran, which apparently has allowed the PKK freedom of movement in its territory to punish Ankara for its stance against Assad.

The fear in Ankara is that Russia might just do the same if Turkey were to invade Syria, propping up rogue PKK elements inside that country to lead an insurgency against Turkish troops. Together with other concerns, such as the risk of the conflict in Syria spilling over into Turkey, the Turkish fear of Russia has led Ankara to avoid direct intervention in Syria.

Such fears have also led Turkey to pivot further toward the United States, once again seeking protection under the NATO umbrella against the looming Russian giant. Taking into consideration Turkey’s fear of Russia, any Turkish military action against the Assad regime will have to be predicated on full NATO support and involvement.

For the Turks, history repeats itself every day when it comes to Moscow: don’t stand in Russia’s way lest it torment you, again.

via Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria – Soner Cagaptay – The Atlantic.

May 7, 2013
Armless artist Karipbek Kuyukov ‘denied entry’ to UK

İstanbul’daki İngiliz Konsolosluğu kolları olmayan Kazak sanatçı’ya parmak izi bırakmadığı için vize vermedi!

Karipbek Kuyukov says he is disappointed he could not enter the UK

A Kazakh artist who was born without arms says he could not get permission to enter the UK last month because he could not give fingerprints.

Karipbek Kuyukov planned to attend an anti-nuclear conference in Edinburgh.

But he got a letter from the British Consulate in Istanbul saying his “biometrics were of poor quality” and asking him to resubmit his application.

The UK Home Office said his visa was not refused and it may have been the result of a “miscommunication”.

Mr Kuyukov, 44, who was forced to cancel his attendance at the conference, spoke of his disappointment.

‘Did not understand’

“Maybe they did not understand that I am disabled or check the information provided,” said the artist.

“But in my online visa application it was written that I am an artist and that I don’t have hands. I paint by holding a brush in my mouth and between my toes.”

Mr Kuyukov was born in the region of Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet Union’s main nuclear testing ground.

Many thousands of children were born with disabilities during the nuclear test programme.

Mr Kuyukov has used his painting to campaign for nuclear disarmament for the past 20 years.

May 7, 2013
German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey

When a majority of fellow citizens believe that the religion you follow is incompatible with their nation then you may be inspired to move elsewhere.

When you are less likely to get a job that you are as qualified as anyone else to perform because of the way your name sounds that may inspire you to want to leave.

It appears that after years of being treated as second-class citizens a large number of Turks are going back to Turkey. No doubt Islamophobes will be partying, but who will they scapegoat now?

The euro crisis and Islamophobia are making Turkey more appealing to the descendants of Turkish immigrants who have been living in Germany.

In 1961, desperate to increase its labor force, West Germany signed an employment agreement with Turkey and launched a wave of immigration that continues to have repercussions today.

Now, after years of being treated as second-class citizens in Europe’s economic powerhouse, large numbers of Turks — descendants of the first wave of immigrants — are returning to Turkey.

In A Strange Land

Yucel Yolcu, 44, has a good life in Istanbul. He likes his job as a film director; his sunny apartment on a hill above the Bosphorus is alive with the sounds of guests and pets.

But when he thinks back to his early childhood in Germany, he’s amazed things worked out this way. His early memories are of being left on his own at age 5 while his parents went off to work in a German factory.

“It was a backyard of an old Berlin building, and I saw there were other black-haired kids like me … staying all the day in the backyard, and we didn’t know what we are doing there,” he says. “And there were other kids, blond, looking a little bit different, and we couldn’t understand each other.”

Some would argue that Germans and their growing Turkish minority never learned to understand each other.

Reasons To Leave

At first, the Turks believed they would soon be returning home with the wealth to start a better life. But as Turkey’s political situation was roiled by violent unrest and military coups, more and more Turks opted to stay in Germany.

Semra Guzel-Korver with the European Broadcasting Union has made two documentaries on Turks in Germany. She’s not surprised that a growing number of them are leaving Germany, now that Turkey’s economy is robust and growing.

“A lot of Turkish, especially young generation, come back to Istanbul and other Turkish cities, because … they cannot find jobs anymore in Germany,” she says.

“They finished the university, they know three or four languages, everything is perfect — but their name is Turkish,” Guzel-Korver adds.

She says the euro crisis has increased racism and Islamophobia.

Resorting To Gangs

Racism and Islamophobia are what drove some Turks in Germany to make a stand. They watched in dismay as a recession in the 1980s and the reunification of Germany after 1989 brought a rise in neo-Nazi violence against immigrants.

As the neo-Nazi attacks spiked in the early ’90s, young Turkish immigrants began to form street gangs and confront them. Al Jazeera’s English channel aired a documentary about the most famous of the Turkish gangs, known as “36 Boys.” In the film, former gang member Soner Arslan said organizing was a matter of survival.

“The 36 Boys, people think we’re dangerous and beat people up all the time, but the reality wasn’t like that,” he said. “We had a war here, and we had to protect ourselves. They wanted to kill us, and the German police and politicians did nothing about it.”

Coming ‘Home’

For decades, the Turks kept coming, but now the flow is reversing. One recent study concludes that some 193,000 Turks left Germany to come home between 2007 and 2011. The most commonly cited reasons were better job prospects in Turkey and discrimination in Germany.

Yolcu was a member of the 36 Boys gang (named after the postal code of a tough Berlin neighborhood where many of them grew up). But one day, he decided that he was never going to get work in films if he stayed in a drug- and violence-prone gang.

“I have to make a new start. I felt like I have to earn money with art, and all my friends were dealers. I mean, they are still dealing,” he says.

Yolcu wound up in Istanbul, sleeping on a friend’s couch and trying to break into the film business. It was around that time that he began a new, unexpected process of adjustment. For all his efforts to cling to a Turkish identity while in Germany, he now found that in some ways these Turks were utter foreigners to him.

He was surprised to find a Germanic desire for order welling up in him one day while walking down Istanbul’s teeming downtown thoroughfare, with masses of people jostling this way and that.

“You know, I can’t understand why all the people are walking like this! And one day I was nearly to cry, ‘Stop! You go right and you go left!’ ” he says. “I mean, I couldn’t understand why there is no people who says, ‘It’s too much people here! You don’t see it?’ ”

Over time, Yolcu grew to embrace the relative chaos of Turkey and now feels at home here. He also keeps an eye out for his fellow Almancis, or German-Turks, because he knows what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your homeland.

via German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey | loonwatch.com.

May 7, 2013
Turkey’s steps on Kurdish issues help EU integration efforts

ANKARA, Turkey, May 6 (UPI) — Addressing outstanding Kurdish issues will support Turkey’s effort to join the European Union, the EU envoy to Turkey said.

Members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, are to begin a phased withdrawal from Turkish territory this week.

More than 4,000 people have died in fighting between the separatist PKK and the Turkish military since the 1980s.

EU Ambassador to Turkey Jean-Maurice Ripert told Turkish newspaper Hurriyet the measure would help with Kurdish cultural and political issues in addition to easing security strains.

“So an agreement by all the citizens of this country on the structure of the state, on identity, language rights and the fight against all kinds of discrimination, is key for the future of this country, and this will tremendously help the accession process of Turkey to the EU,” he said.

The withdrawal follows a series of discussions between Turkish government officials and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Pro-Kurdish leaders said they were concerned about the lack of security guarantees for withdrawing fighters.

The European Union lists the PKK as a terrorist organization.

via Turkey’s steps on Kurdish issues help EU integration efforts – UPI.com.

May 7, 2013
If Turkey Does Not Change Its Syria Policy …

US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) meets with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Ankara Palace in Ankara, March 1, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Jacquelyn Martin)

By: Kadri Gursel for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse Posted on May 6.

Let’s begin by reading some paragraphs from a speech that captures Turkey’s new profile in the Middle East, complete with its policy, ideology and, of course, rhetoric. International readers who follow Turkey closely will guess who the speaker was. These quotes are long, but not boring:

About This Article

Summary :

If Turkey doesn’t change its partisan, sectarian approach to Syria, it will provoke further sectarian tensions among armed groups in Turkey and the region, writes Kadri Gursel.

Original Title:

If Turkey Does Not Change Its Syria Policy…

Author: Kadri Gursel

Translated by: Timur Goksel

Categories : Originals Syria Turkey

“Today they are saying prayers for us. They are praying for us in Gaza, Beirut and Mecca. This is the massive responsibility we are shouldering. You are not only responsible for Edirne, Hakkari and Van. You are bearing the responsibility for Nicosia, Sarajevo, Baghdad, Gaza, Jerusalem, Erbil and Damascus. There is the responsibility for 250 innocent Syrians who were viciously massacred yesterday [May 4] by having their throats slit at Banias. I am appealing to my organization. Every life lost in Syria is one of ours. … We don’t care who says what. What we care about is the conviction that ‘Believers are brothers.’ …

“We are not like other states. We are not a state that will keep quiet to protect its interests. We want to be able to account for ourselves when the book is placed in front of us. When screams of slaughtered children are resonating, we can’t be mute devils. You, Bashar Assad, you will pay for this. You will pay heavily, very heavily for showing courage you can’t show to others to babies with pacifiers in their mouths. A blessed revenge will smother you. With God’s permission we will see this criminal asked to account and bless his almighty. What is going on has long reached the point of forcing the limits of tolerance. The international community has not yet taken the steps expected from it about Syria. … To the Syrians who ask when is God’s help coming, I say there is no doubt God’s help is near.”

I took these lines from a May 6 news report in the daily Milliyet. When you read it, you’ll see that the speech was on May 5, and that from the references to cities, the speaker was from Turkey.

In its content and style, this text is a perfect specimen of the Islamist, pro-Ottoman political culture that has spread and gained strength in Turkey over recent years. Those who apply the norms of traditional diplomacy and statesmanship that prevail in international institutions to this text might surmise that that the speech was given by a fiery Islamist orator. But these remarks belong to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Turkish Republic — generally assumed to be a secular state.

He was addressing members of the parliament and officials of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The venue was the town of Kizilcahamam, near Ankara. The meeting’s purpose was a discussion of party policies.

The prime minister often gives these kinds of talks. Whenever he does, Turkey’s political culture becomes more closely attuned to the Middle East.

The debate in Turkey drags on: What is the reality of Ankara’s Syria policy? What have we reached with this policy, what results did we obtain and how would it affect Turkey if we persist without making changes?

To answer these questions, a reality check is needed that goes beyond Turkey’s feverish, epic-heavy rhetoric. Objective and cool-headed observations from outside become important at times like this.

An April 30 report by the International Crisis Group, “Blurring the Borders: Syrian Spillover Risks for Turkey,” represents a significant contribution that objectively narrates the results of Turkey’s response to the Syrian crisis — and the risks it poses for the country.

The follow assessments made in the report’s executive summary illustrate the gap between Erdogan’s rhetoric and realities: “Turkey is seen increasingly as a partisan actor. While Turkish leaders claim it has sufficient resources to be the region’s main power, leverage over Syrian events is clearly limited. … Turkey has no capacity to solve intractable problems inside Syria alone, and is not considering significant military intervention. Stepped-up arming of opposition fighters seems unlikely to enable them to topple the regime quickly. And Turkey’s wishful thinking about the Ottoman past and a leading historical and economic role in its Sunni Muslim neighbourhood is at odds with the present reality that it now has an uncontrollable, fractured, radicalised no-man’s-land on its doorstep.”

In the same section of the report, Turkey is asked to accept that the Syrian crisis may continue for a long time and to make long-term political modifications accordingly. The Syrian crisis served as a litmus test that exposed the neo-Ottoman tendencies of those running Turkey’s foreign policy. By definition, the pro-Ottoman inclination of the neo-Islamist ruling political class is also pro-Sunni. Turkey’s Syria policy has put Turkey on the Sunni side of the Sunni-Shiite fault line in the Middle East. This gives rise to a perceived geopolitical threat among Shiite actors.

The report warns on this tendency: “Whereas Turkey in 2008 was praised for its ability to speak to all regional players from Israel to Iran, it has now aligned predominantly with conservative Sunni Muslim partners such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia… In order to talk to all parties from a position of greater moral authority, it should avoid projecting the image of being a Sunni Muslim hegemon. It should also re-secure its border and ask Syrian opposition fighters to move to Syria. Publicly adopting a profile of a balanced regional power, rather than a Sunni Muslim one, would likewise do much to reduce any possibility that the sectarian polarization that is crippling Syria will jump the border to Turkey, in particular to Hatay province.”

The International Crisis Group suggests that Turkey not follow a tacitly Islamist foreign policy, but rather a secular one. This is an appropriate recommendation. Of course, to follow a foreign policy not imbued with Islamism, the Islamists have to make extraordinary efforts. But if this Islamist, pro-Sunni and pro-Ottoman Syria policy is maintained in its current form, Turkey will find itself in opposition to alienated Muslim actors who are not conservatively Sunni. This will substantially weaken Turkey’s soft power in the Middle East and the world and will limit its ability to launch initiatives.

A pro-Sunni foreign policy and narrative could also upset the already sensitive sectarian harmony in Turkey.

Turkey decided in August 2011 to topple the Baath regime and open its borders to the armed Syrian opposition, thus making Turkey the rear base of rebel forces. Border security was intentionally neglected to ease the movements of rebel forces. To change this policy now, and to act again as a state of law and order, may lead to a loss of prestige and influence by Ankara over the armed opposition, especially the Free Syrian Army. But if this risk isn’t taken, the consequence will be that Turkey will substantially fall short of having a state of law. The Turkish-Syrian border may pose threats to Turkey’s security, as seen in the Feb. 11 bombing at Cilvegozu border crossing [Bab al-Hawa] that resulted in the deaths of 14 people.

In addition to internal clashes in Syria mutating into a sectarian civil war, the danger for Turkey involves its image as a party to this war — and the possibility that it may be held responsible for its share of the war crimes committed by Sunni groups it has been militarily supporting.

To be sure, there is a political price to be paid by Turkey for changing its Syria policy — but the cost of not changing it will be higher.

Kadri Gürsel is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse and has written a column for the Turkish daily Milliyet since 2007. He focuses primarily on Turkish foreign policy, international affairs and Turkey’s Kurdish question, as well as Turkey’s evolving political Islam.

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2013/05/turkey-syria-policy-backfire-sectarian.html#ixzz2Sa5FdwMl

May 7, 2013
‘Chemical weapons for Syrian opposition may have come from Turkey’

Syria’s chemical weapons compound is heavily guarded, with the state fully aware of the consequences of a security lapse, German journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter told RT, noting the opposition could have acquired the weapons through Turkey.

In this image made available by the Syrian News Agency (SANA) on March 19, 2013, a man is brought to a hospital in the Khan al-Assal region in the northern Aleppo province, as Syria’s government accused rebel forces of using chemical weapons for the first time (AFP Photo / Sana)

The Western-backed theory that chemical weapons were taken from the Syrian government’s military compound is very doubtful, according to Ochsenreiter, because “the military compound where gas is stored is heavily guarded. The Syrian government knows exactly what might happen if this gas comes out.”

He said that the weapons might have been from Turkey as it is one of the “most important players in the conflict, which supports the so-called armed opposition” and “Turkey already used chemical weapons in battles against the Kurdish population and militia.”

There have been false statements before, for example the blame of the Syrian government for the June 2012 Houla massacre, which was later refuted “but it didn’t have any affect or result in diplomatic means” noted the German journalist.

Peace activist and journalist Ryan Dawson told RT that it would be difficult to determine where the weapons originated from as the so-called opposition has many outside sources financing it and aiding with weapons.

“We have the Gulf monarchs and Israel. Probably not directly from the US and Israel, because they like to have plausible deniability – they probably went through Qatar or Turkey.”

RT: There’s been widespread opinion, promoted by some major world powers that any chemical weapons use in Syria would only ever be down to the Assad regime. So are you surprised to hear it may have been the rebels using them?

Ryan Dawson: I’m not surprised, because we’ve heard that before, back in December there was a scare about chemical weapons and red lines being crossed. That turned out to be the terrorist mercenaries in Syria. And there was an Israeli airstrike following that in January. So this is the exact same scenario.

RT: If it turns out to be true, where would the rebels have got them from?

RD: It will be difficult to pen down because the so-called opposition has so many outside sources financing them and aiding with weapons. We have the Gulf monarchs and Israel. Probably not directly from the US and Israel, because they like to have plausible deniability – they probably went through Qatar or Turkey.

RT: This investigation is separate from the one launched by the UN’s own chief – so why are there two different probes being carried out by the same body?

RD: The first party to call for the UN investigation was the Syrian government themselves, that’s how confident they were that the mercenaries used the chemical weapons. When you look at it, the US and Israel don’t have a leg to stand on to be lecturing anybody about having or using chemical weapons

RT: Syria was hit this weekend by a series of Israeli airstrikes – do you have any ideas why the attacks took place? Was it really self-defense?

RD: Of course not. But its hard to explain Israel’s actions. You are not talking about a rational player. It’s not the first time Israel has struck inside of Syria. Israel from time to time invades Gaza, attacks Syria, they are trying to bolster their image in the Middle East and get the fear factor and deterrent for themselves. Yet again Israel will claim that Syria was shipping weapons to Hezbollah, which they consider a terrorist group. Though the Israelis are aiding the mercenaries in Syria, which have killed up to 70, 000 people. So concerning the chemical weapons killing a dozen or so people – that is just a red line, they are just looking for a pretext. The wanted to strike anyway.

RT: There are so many blank spaces in the story, mostly because Israel’s avoiding all questions about the strikes – Why is that? Do you think international bodies will move in to shatter this silent strategy?

RD: Israel is fishing for escalation; the mercenaries are starting to lose. You’ll see the Western powers backing the mercenary groups just enough to keep the perpetual conflict going. But there are no decisive battles. That’s the whole point, the profit from it, to destroy Syria from within.

RT: Could Israel face justice here?

RD: They ought to, but they won’t. Israel has absolute immunity from international bodies, because the US and Canada back them up no matter what they do. We are talking about a state that has open apartheid, open ethnic cleansing, they are colonizing Palestine, they shoot children at will – they are breaking UN resolutions and nothing ever happens. Israel felt confident that they could go on a clumsy pretext of chemical weapons and bomb whatever they want and get away with it.

via ‘Chemical weapons for Syrian opposition may have come from Turkey’ — RT Op-Edge.

May 7, 2013