Turkey and its Kurdish obsession

S P SETH

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to believe that not only is he is  the country’s strongman but also its savior. And that image was further reinforced when his ruling AKP won the November 1 parliamentary elections. Earlier, on June 7, the ruling party had lost its parliamentary majority, though it still had the most seats with 41per cent of the vote. The victory on November 1 was engineered by creating an image of a security crisis for the country from the separatist Kurdish militant movement, PKK. The period between the June and November elections saw an explosion of violence with two suicide bombings, one on July 20 in the border town of Suruc that killed 33 people, and the second in the capital Ankara on October 10 killing 102 people during a peace march. In both cases, the IS was believed to have been behind the explosions and most of the victims were Kurds.

Before the November 1 elections last year, the Erdogan government blamed it all on PKK and the Kurds in general and started a crackdown in the predominantly Kurdish populated area of southeastern Turkey. And it continued even after the ruling AKP won its parliamentary majority. In the November election, even though the predominantly Kurdish party, HDP, still managed to secure just over 10 per cent of the votes as mandatory requirement for parliamentary representation, it wasn’t able to hold on to the 13 per cent it had won with the support of some non-Kurdish minority votes, as Erdogan sought to paint them as well as a security threat.

In other words, all Kurds in Turkey, constituting 15 to 20 per cent of its population, were suspects of some sort or the other. And it has destroyed a political process that was going on, before violence erupted recently, that had sought to accommodate some of the Kurdish cultural and political sensitivities without making them sound anti-national. Erdogan declared, soon after the parliamentary elections, that his government would go after the PKK “until all its members surrender or are eliminated …” He added, “The period ahead of us is not one of talks and discussions.” And now the Kurdish southeast region of Turkey is turned into a battle zone and the region is under seize.

And why has Erdogan gone back on this path, which had marred Turkey in a prolonged bloody conflict with the Kurds costing about 45,000 lives and causing devastation to much of the predominantly Kurdish southeastern region? And there hangs a tale that keeps getting more tangled and dangerous. When IS emerged as a major regional threat after the fall of Mosul in June 2014, Ankara was shaken when its 40-odd consulate staff was taken hostages. But, despite the IS’ usual barbarity in disposing of their hostages, in this case they released their Turkish hostages without any harm, and that was a welcome surprise. When asked about how it happened, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that the hostages were freed through the Turkish intelligence agencies’ “own methods.” It certainly wasn’t done through any rescue operations. It would, therefore, appear that there was some tacit understanding/agreement that Turkey would refrain from becoming part of the US-led aerial operations against IS. That received credence when Turkey kept out of the military coalition against IS, nor did it grant the use of its bases for bombing IS targets and territory even though it is a NATO ally. This, though, changed a little later, as we shall see.

During the US-led operations against IS, Kurds emerged as a very effective force on the ground to fight IS, making them a virtual US ally. Ankara saw this as a threat to Turkish national unity, as YPG (Syrian Kurdish movement) virtually carved out an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria on the Turkish border. The Assad regime, overstretched as it was, had earlier withdrawn from Syria’s Kurdish region. And YPG are the ones fielding their fighters on the ground successfully pushing back IS, as the US keeps bombing IS positions. The US supports YPG fighters in Syria that are engaged against IS, while it goes along with Turkey which has outlawed militant PKK.  But Turkey doesn’t make any distinction between the two-- Turkish-based PKK and Syrian-based YPG. They are both terrorists.

Indeed, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davotoglu reiterated his country’s position during a recent visit of the US Vice President Joe Biden. Which is that YPG in Syria is part of the larger PKK movement. He also reportedly said that YPG had become an increasing threat to Turkey and it would attack its positions in northern Syria. And this Turkey is doing now so that they don’t consolidate their hold on northern Turkish border. While Turkey is firing at YPG positions, it fears that a recent bomb explosion in the Turkish capital, Ankara, might have been the handiwork of the Kurdish YPG. It could as well be IS as was suspected in earlier bombings, but Ankara is inclined to put it YPG.

For quite sometime now, Ankara has been pushing US to put up a no fly zone over northern Syria to both frustrate the Kurdish designs as well as to deter Russian bombing missions. In other words Turkey would like NATO to be drawn into the whole complicated business of fighting its multiple enemies. The question is: will the US and its NATO allies widen the stakes to make it into anti-Russian operations and in the process be distracted from the main game of destroying IS? So far, Turkey is not succeeding in this.

There are two problems with Erdogan and his administration. First: He sees Turkey in his own larger-than-life image where he is the new Sultan and wants the world to recognize and respect him in that role. And if and when this doesn’t happen, he tends to overshoot, so to say. Its most blatant example was the shooting of a Russian plane to force Moscow to stop propping up the Assad regime, which has backfired. At the same time, it hasn’t been happy with the US for not getting rid of the Assad regime when it used chemical weapons on its citizens.

President Obama had promised, more or less, to do this, as it was tantamount to crossing his ‘red line’. And Erdogan showed his annoyance by keeping out of the military coalition against IS, and denying the US the use of its air base for bombing IS positions, until now. But its obsession remains with the Kurds, where YPG in Syria has carved out an autonomous region and its perceived links with the PKK. Ankara sees that its perceived threat is already a reality. Which accounts for a major part of Erdogan’s irrational policies both at home and abroad. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.    

Saudi paranoia

S P SETH

Saudi Arabia is one terribly insecure kingdom that sees dangers lurking all around and, therefore, tends to shoot in all directions, metaphorically speaking; though it is not much of an exaggeration when one looks at how over-extended it is. It has its forces in Bahrain, it is bombing Yemen indiscriminately to crush the Houthi rebellion there, said to be instigated and supported by Iran, and it has been arming and providing financial support for all kinds of rebel groups in Syria to overthrow the Bashar regime. And Saudi-backed High Negotiating Committee of Syrian opposition and rebel groups has been basically trying to set preconditions at Geneva designed to sabotage the peace process and it looks like they might succeed.  

At home in Saudi Arabia, the regime has a pact of sorts with the country’s clerical establishment, which supports the monarchy and, in turn, the kingdom is the champion of Islamic orthodoxy and promotes the Wahhabi brand of Islam, regionally and globally, with generous funding of mosques, madrassas (religious schools) and in all sorts of other ways. And these Saudi-funded and promoted institutions have been the well-spring of militant ideology embodied in al-Qaeda and now IS, that is causing havoc, starting with the al Qaeda-linked 9/11 attacks in the US and now by IS militants in a number of countries. With no demonstrable popular support at home by way of periodic elections or any other way, the Saudi monarchy has sought to establish legitimacy by championing Islamic orthodoxy combined with the custodianship of Islamic faith’s holiest sites. And its strategic and economic ties with the US underwrote its security and continue to do so. Saudi Arabia’s status as the world’s largest oil producer, and the US’s increasing dependence on oil imports from it during much of the last century, created a symbiotic relationship between the two countries that seemed to override other considerations.

But things are changing slowly, creating even greater nervousness in the kingdom. First, the eruption of the Arab Spring early in the decade created political turbulence in the region, starting with Tunisia and spreading on to Egypt and elsewhere in the region. Riyadh believed that its long-standing strategic relationship with the US gave it a determining role in Washington’s regional policy, as had generally been the case. But the popular character of the movement and its speed didn’t leave the US much choice but to follow the course being set by the unfolding events. Besides, the incoming Obama administration seemed open to new initiatives. Therefore, all the Saudi protestations with the US to save the Hosni Mubarak regime failed to goad the Obama administration into active intervention against the fully charged Arab Spring at the time. Mubarak fell and Saudi Arabia felt its tremors. If the US didn’t save Mubarak, a long term US ally, Saudi Arabia’s monarchy could be as expendable as well, if it came to that. For a regime without a demonstrable popular base at home, its ultimate protector, the US, wasn’t appearing as reliable as was expected.

Other developments in the region weren’t propitious either. The popular rebellion in Syria, for instance, provided an excellent opportunity to get rid of the Bashar al-Assad regime, regarded as an Iranian proxy in the largely Sunni Arab world, but it wasn’t going by the plan. Iran, considered a malevolent force that sought to destabilize the region by stirring up Shia Muslims in Arab countries, including the oil bearing eastern province of Saudi Arabia, was not contained. Indeed, the Arab Spring had stirred up Saudi Arabia’s Shia population leading to protests and demonstrations that were brutally suppressed. Iran was also considered behind the popular uprising in Bahrain, with its predominantly Shia population ruled over by a Sunni monarchy. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies sent their forces there to crush the rebellion. And now Saudi Arabia is bogged down in Yemen seeking to crush Houthi rebellion, said to be Iran-inspired, supported and aided, that had overthrown the country’s pro-Saudi Sunni regime. Even though Riyadh has US’ political support and military backing by way of weapons’ supplies, patrolling of the Gulf waters and advanced intelligence and surveillance, it is still not working to Riyadh’s satisfaction.  

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad is still there. And that, to Riyadh’s exasperation, is largely because the US wavered in taking decisive action to remove him from power when it was the right time to do and Obama had promised to do. Obama had said that the US would intervene decisively if the Assad regime used chemical weapons against the rebels, as this would constitute his ‘red line’. And when Assad did use chemical weapons, the US wavered and found refuge in the Russian initiative to get rid of the regime’s chemical stocks, which Damascus agreed to surrender, thus staying in power. It wasn’t terribly reassuring for the Saudi regime that the US dithered when Riyadh depended on it to act decisively. In other words, the US and Saudi interests were starting to diverge in some ways.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

And when the US signed the nuclear deal with Iran, despite all Riyadh’s protestations, it looked like a serious breach of trust that only further reinforced Saudi paranoia. It seemed to be losing its centrality in the US scheme of things when it came to the Middle Eastern affairs. Washington seemed to be exploring ways of dealing within the region outside the box to give its policy some flexibility, however limited. In other words, Saudi Arabia was still an important element of its Middle Eastern policy but it seemed to be losing its veto power. And the Saudis have reacted badly to it, having never believed in the efficacy of diplomacy to deal with contentious regional issues, because that is indicative of weakness and vulnerability.

On surface they must show strength against their enemies at home and abroad. And that was unequivocally demonstrated with the execution of the prominent Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, for alleged terrorism offences. And this seemed to have been done without consulting the US as Washington was taken aback counseling both Iran, where anti-Saudi protesters vandalized Saudi embassy in the midst of strong protests, and Saudi Arabia to exercise restraint. Riyadh seemed keen to demonstrate its strength and resolve to crush any kind of dissidence as terrorism. And at the same time, this sounded like the dangerous tantrums of a child used to having its own way. The US thus would have a serious problem diversifying its Middle East policy, with Riyadh ready to act as a spoiler. It would be interesting to see how the US would handle Saudi Arabia’s erratic behavior.