Tag: Bashar al-Assad

DAMASCUS, (SANA)- President Bashar al-Assad on Friday received a phone call from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey expressing Turkey’s keenness on the strategic relationship between the two friendly countries and people and preserving the level of this relationship and developing it in the future.

President al-Assad and Erdogan discussed the situation in the region and in Syria, with Premier Erdogan stressing Turkey’s standing by Syria and keenness on its security, stability and unity.

Both sides reiterated determination to continue the warm and transparent relationship between their countries and upgrading it in the interest of both countries and people and the region as a whole.

Last March, President al-Assad received a phone call from Erdogan.

During the call, Erdogan affirmed the solid Syrian-Turkish relations, lauding the reformative decisions taken by the Syrian leadership and stressing Turkey’s support to Syria.

H. Said / Ghossoun

via President al-Assad Receives Call from Erdogan Expressing Turkey’s Keenness on Strategic Relationship with Syria- SANA, Syria.

On Oct. 13, 2009, the Oncupinar border gate between Turkey and Syria played a starring role in a diplomatic photo op. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moualem, shook hands, smiled for the cameras and — en route to signing an agreement to end visa requirements between the two countries later that day — lifted the border barrier. The symbolism was lost on no one. Only 11 years earlier, thousands of Turkish troops had massed along the same border, awaiting orders to deploy. Throughout the 1990s, the Syrian government had sheltered Turkey’s public enemy No. 1, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist group. If Syria refused to expel him, the Turkish leadership made clear in 1998, then the Turks would march on Damascus. The Syrians flinched. Ocalan was sent packing.

In the years that followed the standoff, Syria and Turkey became close allies. Long-running land and water disputes were either settled or shelved. Trade boomed, from $773 million in 2002 to $2.5 billion in 2010. In April 2009, the two countries held joint military exercises. Just last year, together with Jordan and Lebanon, they signed a free-trade agreement that many Turkish commentators hailed as the dawn of a Middle East Union. (See pictures of the protests in Syria.)

In reaching out to the Syrian regime, Turkey managed to inspire its confidence, says Khaled Khoja, a Turkish-based member of the Damascus Declaration committee, a Syrian opposition group. In 2005, Khoja recalls, Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose government had been accused of orchestrating the assassination of Lebanese President Rafiq Hariri, found himself in a major bind. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused calls by the U.S. and others to isolate the Syrian regime. Instead, says Khoja, he helped bring Assad’s regime in from the cold: “He made Turkey a bridge to Syria.” What Turkey got out of all this, more than anything else, says Khoja, was Syria’s trust — the kind of trust that allowed it to mediate between Syria and Israel in 2008. This, says Khoja, “was a very good approach.”

But, he adds, it was not enough. “Turkey should have pushed Bashar to make reforms in past years,” says Khoja. “You cannot have an attitude, an active role, unless you are brave enough to step behind the reforms. You have to say this strongly.” Turkey did not. Over the past few years, in the face of Syria’s dismal human-rights record and its legacy of authoritarian rule, the government in Ankara has remained silent. If autocrats like Assad were to be prodded into changing course, Turkish officials argued, it would be through diplomacy, not pressure. “We tell our counterparts the importance of being respectful of human rights,” Davutoglu once said. “But we don’t do it in public.” (See “How Syria and Libya Got to Be Turkey’s Headaches.”)

Turkish officials were wrong to assume that a policy of behind-the-scenes prodding could yield tangible results in Syria, says Walid Saffour, president of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee. “All the time they were hearing that the Syrians were going to do so and so,” he says. “The Turkish government believed what Bashar and his advisers told [them]. That was a game of deception on the part of the Syrian government.”

In recent weeks, with the turmoil across its southern border showing no signs of coming to an end — threatening not only its rapprochement with Syria but also the stability of the entire region — Turkey has gone into emergency mode, with Erdogan regularly on the phone with Assad and top officials, including Davutoglu and an intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, who was dispatched to Damascus. As a senior Western diplomat in Damascus tells TIME, Turkey’s backdoor diplomacy might now be the outside world’s last remaining chance to persuade Assad to introduce new reforms and avoid more bloodshed. “The Turkish approach allows the Syrians to listen to the outside world’s concerns without feeling as if they are being lectured,” the diplomat tells TIME, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It allows them to make changes without giving the impression that someone is forcing their hand.” (See pictures of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)

Oppositionists like Saffour would prefer for the Turks to align themselves squarely with the demonstrators. “Today Erdogan condemns the killing, the detentions and the repeated massacres,” says Saffour, “but he is not blaming Bashar for this.” As much as the Turkish leader might want to ensure Assad’s survival, he adds, he will soon have to choose between the leadership and the protesters. “The people inside Syria are now calling for a change of regime altogether,” says Saffour. “The Turkish stand shouldn’t be [opposed to] the stand of the people. If they want to do something, they should support the people, not the regime.”

Reached by phone during a visit to Turkey, Riad al-Shaqfa, secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, says he believes Assad can step back from the brink. “The doors of reform always remain open if Bashar is serious in this matter and if the people feel that he is serious about it,” al-Shaqfa says through a translator. “To make the reforms does not take much. It took them 15 minutes to amend the constitution so that Bashar could inherit the country from his father. They can issue orders to withdraw the security forces and the tanks from the streets and to the stop bombardment of the people in a matter of hours.” However, the outlook is getting bleaker by the day, says al-Shaqfa, who adds, “There can be many initiatives and the Turks are demanding this, but nobody is listening.” Khoja sees no room for optimism. “If Bashar is not listening to Turkey,” he says, “then he is not listening to anyone.”

Piotr Zalewski is the Turkey correspondent for the Polish newsmagazine Polityka. He has contributed to Foreign Policy, the Atlantic.com and the National.

From Monday’s Globe and Mail

A regime that fires on unarmed mourners at a funeral for children is sending a message that it will stop at nothing to hold power and rule as it sees fit. This was the message of Libya, and it is, predictably, the message of Syria.

The stage appears set for a prolonged conflict with escalating bloodshed. The Syrian protesters, though they have not yet taken over the public square, as in Egypt, are not likely to be deterred by such extreme violence, or to accept, in these circumstances, the promises of reform offered by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. And Mr. al-Assad’s patrons in Iran are not likely to countenance too many steps toward a democracy.

In this citizen journalism image made on a mobile phone and acquired Saturday April 23, 2011, by The Associated Press, Syrian anti-government protesters carry the coffin of an activist who was killed on Friday during his funeral procession in Quaboun near Damascus, Syria, Saturday, April 23, 2011. Syrian security forces fired on tens of thousands of mourners during funeral processions Saturday, killing several people following the deadliest day of the uprising against authoritarian President Bashar Assad. (AP Photo)

Where to, then? The West is tied up in Libya, as Mr. al-Assad is fully aware. The attacks on Syrian civilians would be a basis for invocation of the responsibility-to-protect doctrine at the United Nations, if only there were plausible means to apply that principle. But in contrast to Libya, there is no distinct region to protect, let alone a rebel army which could benefit from air support. Instead, the Syrian protesters are scattered throughout the country.

The Assad regime is subsidized by Iran, though not enamoured of its theocratic patron. The current crisis, however, is too awkward a time to engineer a switching of allegiances, such as a turn to the West linked to a compromise on the Golan Heights, now governed by Israel. In these circumstances, perplexing as well as horrific, there is no clear way forward.

But Turkey (which not long ago was on bad terms with Syria) may be the country best positioned to do some good. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made a point of busy diplomatic engagement with numerous – and ideologically diverse – nations. Mr. Erdogan and his colleagues ought to do their best to dissuade the Syrian government from further resort to slaughter. They can present to Mr. al-Assad the example of their own country’s healthy secular democracy with a largely Muslim population – a model that Syria could move toward.

via Turkey may be Syria’s best hope – The Globe and Mail.

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