Tag: Bashar al-Assad

Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has met in Damascus with members of the Turkish political party Saadet, said that “no one can influence” the ties between the two nations, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.

The head of the Turkish delegation, Mustafa Kamalak, stressed during the meeting that the “Turkish people stand by Syria” in its crisis. He expressed opposition to any foreign intervention in Syria’s internal affairs, and said he hoped the relations between Turkey and Syria are to be repaired. (Roi Kais)

via Assad: No one can harm ties between Syria and Turkey – Israel News, Ynetnews.

By GRAEME WOOD

ISTANBUL — Which is scarier: a government that hunts down and kills dozens in cold blood, or a government that hunts down and kills dozens by accident?

On Thursday, Turkey admitted to being the second type of government, just as over the last few months Syria has demonstrated itself conclusively to be the first. Turkey’s mistake, which it acknowledged sheepishly, was to launch air-strikes on Wednesday against about 35 men hiking along unmarked trails between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish military says it thought the men were terrorist members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.). But evidence found near the corpses suggested a more benign activity: the men were smugglers evading onerous Turkish and Iraqi customs duties on diesel and tobacco at the official crossing point of Habur. They carried Kools, not Kalashnikovs.

In the past, Turkey’s Kurds have responded to incidents like this one by protesting in the streets and public squares, with a little bit of armed struggle from actual terrorists on the side. Last night in Istanbul, Kurds and their allies went to the streets. On Istliklal Avenue, in Beyoglu district in central Istanbul, at street corners normally reserved for upper-class shoppers in winter chic, riot police stood huffing into their hands to chase away the cold, waiting for violence that never came. But news agencies reported that in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, crowds threw stones and Molotov cocktails, and stores were shuttered for the day.

After violence in the southeast, recriminations and confrontations like these are common. But there’s a notable change of vocabulary this time. Whereas Kurds once looked to the West and patiently tried to master the human rights language of the European Union, now at least some of them are looking south, to the more urgent and concrete language of protest movements in the Arab world. And in adopting that rhetoric, the Kurdish leaders are making missteps.

“A leader who kills his own people has lost his legitimacy,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in September. Now Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish member of parliament who heads the Peace and Democracy Party, finds Erdogan’s words delicious. “Now I say the same thing back to him,” Demirtas said. “This was no accident: it was a massacre.” Demirtas, whose party is the sole legal political voice of the Kurds in Turkey these days, said he considered the killing caused by Wednesday’s air strike to be an Assad-level crime.

It’s a preposterous and self-discrediting comparison: Erdogan and Assad resemble each other in little more than their mustaches. The first people to acknowledge the differences between the two should be the Kurds themselves: Erdogan’s government has in many ways improved upon the nationalist Turkish governments of yesteryear, and the Kurds of Syria have always suffered far more grievously than the Kurds of Turkey. In the P.K.K. camps of northern Iraq, Syrian Kurds are overrepresented — the result of especially zealous oppression by the Assad regime.

It’s hard to begrudge a movement as aggrieved as the Kurds’ this moment of hyperbole. But let’s hope that the Kurds will reconsider their annexation of Arab Spring analogies. A movement that has spent the last couple of decades mastering the art of patience shouldn’t now sideline its own cause with a faulty comparison to a more desperate one.

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has lived and traveled in the Middle East for most of the last 10 years.

via A Turkish Assad? – NYTimes.com.

By Samia Nakhoul

Reuters

Turkey, with strong backing from its Arab and Western allies, very much wants Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down — but not just yet.

Under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his post-Islamist ruling party, Turkey has become the main organizing hub for Syria’s opposition — the 260-member liberal Syrian National Council, and the Free Syrian Army, comprising mainly army defectors.

But across the region and in Western capitals there are fears that Assad’s opponents are not ready to take power, and that Syria’s ethnic and sectarian mosaic could disintegrate and plunge the country of 22 million into chaos unless a way is found to smooth the transition.

“The key priority is for the opposition inside and outside (Syria) to come together, become a more credible option and include all sects and get their coordination right. Turkey is working on that,” a senior Western diplomat in Ankara told Reuters.

“What worries them is that if Assad went today there will be more chaos, more destruction and they don’t know who will emerge and they want the opposition to be ready.”

The main worry, Syria watchers say, is that what began nine months ago as a civic uprising is turning into a shooting war capable of spilling into a lethal sectarian conflict.

While Ankara has publicly warned Damascus against encouraging the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to step up its attacks, and raised the stakes by joining Europe, the United States and the Arab League in sanctions against the Assad government, most observers believe Turkey is extremely reluctant to take any military action.

“I don’t expect any military action by the Turkish government unless there is an international consensus and a UN Security Council resolution or NATO operation,” says Mustafa Akyol, author of “Islam without extremes: a Muslim case for Liberty”.

“They will be more concerned about the Kurdish situation in Syria, because the PKK has a lot of Syrian Kurds in its ranks…and the government believes that Assad is supporting right now the PKK against Turkey”.

Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat now head of the liberal EDAM think-tank in Istanbul, says Ankara is wary of any rerun of a decade ago, when Kurdish refugees from Saddam Hussein streamed over the Turkish border in the aftermath of the Gulf War, and might now move to create a safe haven or humanitarian corridor inside Syria.

The US, France, and Turkey are on the same wavelength, said Ulgen, but Turkey would still want a Security Council resolution, and regional as well as NATO support to go ahead.

In a surprising move, Russia, Damascus’ longstanding ally, offered the Security Council on Thursday a new, stronger draft resolution on Syria, raising Western hopes of UN action following a sharp rise in sectarian killing.

The Western diplomat, by contrast, thinks Turkey would be reluctant to create a humanitarian safe haven because this would commit Turkish troops in Syrian territory.

“They will open their facilities and provide a humanitarian response but I don’t think they will intervene, and nor do they want anybody else to intervene,” he said. “I don’t think Turkish troops want to cross into Syria.”

Another Western diplomat in Ankara also doubts there will be military intervention, believing instead that sanctions, which are draining the resources of Assad and eroding his position, will be ratcheted up. __

via Saudi Gazette – Turkey seeks way out for Assad.

SYRIA/ TURKEY – Turkish MP Presents Note of Interrogation to Erdogan about His Government’s Stances toward Syria

Turkish MP Presents Note of Interrogation to Erdogan about His Government’s Stances toward Syria

Dec 15, 2011

ANKARA, (SANA)- Turkish MP of the opposition Republican People’s Party, Refik Eryilmaz, has presented a note of interrogation to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan regarding his government’s stances towards Syria.

Eryilmaz said that Erdogan government’s support to the Syrian opposition poses a threat to Turkey’s interests and national security.

He added in the note that Erdogan’s statements contradict international relations and will create many problems for Turkey.

The Turkish Parliamentarian requested immediate response from Erdogan to his questions asking “Is it true that Erdogan has already promised the Syrian opposition to cut off all ties with the Syrian leadership and to participate in international sanctions against Syria? Is it true that the Turkish government has made promises to arm the Syrian opposition and support it on the international level and to establish a buffer zone on the border with Syria?”

The statute of the Turkish Parliament grants the MPs the right to inquire about any issue of any minister or prime minister, without specifying the period within which such inquires are to be answered.

Turkish Merchants and Citizens criticize their government’s policy towards Syria

Turkish citizens and merchants reject the policies of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan towards Syria that harmed the Syrian and Turkish peoples alike, and obstructed the move of bilateral tourism and trade.

Emre Hadimogullari, 22, an electrical engineering student in Gaziantep, is so irate at the Turkish government’s policy towards Syria, he told the New York Times in a press statement.

“Turkey should mind its own business and stop interfering in another country’s affairs,” he said.

Turkish businesspeople here also questioned the wisdom of sanctions, saying that the Turkish new stances would negatively affect the economy and the Turkish people.

Cengiz Akinal, a shoe manufacturer who imports bows for his shoes from artisans in Syria, said that the Turkish tax increase on goods from Syria was forcing him to import bows from China.

( Fonte: www.sana.sy )

via SYRIA/ TURKEY – Turkish MP Presents Note of Interrogation to Erdogan about His Government’s Stances toward Syria « dagobertobellucci.