By Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes is
an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the president
of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal.
His writing focuses on the American foreign policy and the Middle East.
The Republic of Turkey, long a
democratising Muslim country solidly in the Western camp, now finds itself
internally racked and at the centre of two external crises: the civil war in
next-door Syria and the illegal immigration that is changing European politics.
The prospects for Turkey and its neighbours are worrisome, if not ominous.
The key development was the coming to power of
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2002, when a fluke election outcome gave him total
control of the government, which he parlayed into a personal dominion. After
years of restraint and modesty, his real personality — grandiloquent, Islamist
and aggressive — came out. Now he seeks to rule as a despot, an ambition that
causes his country incessant, avoidable problems.
Initially, Erdogan’s disciplined approach to
finance permitted the Turkish economy to achieve China-like economic growth and
won him increasing electoral support while making Ankara a new player in
regional affairs. But then conspiracy theories, corruption, short-sightedness,
and incompetence cut into the growth, making Turkey economically vulnerable.
Initially, Erdogan took unprecedented steps to
resolve his country’s Kurdish problem, acknowledging that this ethnic minority
making up roughly 20 per cent of the country’s population has its own culture
and allowing it to express itself in its own language. But then, for electoral
reasons, he abruptly reversed himself last year, resulting in a more determined
and violent Kurdish insurgency, to the point that civil war has become a real
prospect.
Initially, Erdogan accepted the traditional
autonomy of the major institutions in Turkish life: law courts, the military,
the press, banks, schools. No longer; now he seeks to control everything. Take
the case of two prominent journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul: because their
newspaper, Cumhuriyet, exposed the government’s clandestine support
for Islamic State, Erdogan had them imprisoned on the surreal charges of
espionage and terrorism. Worse, when the Constitutional Court (Turkey’s
highest) reversed this sentence, Erdogan accused the court of ruling “against
the country and its people” and indicated he would ignore its decision.
Initially, Erdogan maintained cautious and correct
relations with Moscow, benefiting economically and using Russia as a balance
against the US. But since the reckless Turkish shoot-down of a Russian warplane
last November, followed by a defiant lack of apology, the little bully
(Erdogan) has more than met his match with the big bully (Russia’s Vladimir
Putin) and Turkey is paying the price. French President Francois Hollande has
warned of “a risk of war” between Turkey and Russia.
Initially, Erdogan’s accommodating policies
translated into a calming of domestic politics; now, his bellicosity has led to
a string of acts of violence. To make matters worse, many of them are murky in
origin and purpose, building paranoia. For example, before Kurdish militant
group TAK claimed responsibility for the bombing last Sunday that killed 37
people near the Prime Minister’s office in Ankara, groups blamed included,
variously, the Kurds, Islamic State and the Turkish government. It was
interpreted as intending to justify a more forceful campaign against domestic
Kurds or punish the government for attacking the Kurds; to encourage a Turkish
military invasion of Syria or to frame Erdogan’s political enemy, the Gulen
movement.
Initially, Turkey became a plausible candidate for
membership in the EU thanks to Erdogan’s muted behaviour. Now, his slide
towards despotism and Islamism means the Europeans merely go through the
motions of pretending to negotiate with Ankara while counting on the Republic
of Cyprus to blackball its application; as Turkish journalist Burak Bekdil
says, “modern Turkey has never been this galactically distant from the core
values enshrined by the European civilisation and its institutions”.
In the early months of the Syrian uprising, Erdogan
offered sage advice to the dictator in Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, about
relaxing his grip and allowing political participation. Things have gone so
awry that, as Dundar and Gul reported, Erdogan now supports Islamic State, the
most fanatical and Islamist organisation today, perhaps ever. That support has
taken many forms: permitting foreigners to cross Turkey to reach Syria,
allowing recruitment in Turkey, providing medical care and provisioning money
and arms. Despite this, Islamic State, fearful of betrayal by Ankara, threatens
and attacks Turks.
Erdogan’s error of backing Islamic State and other
Sunni Islamist organisations in Syria has hurt him in another way, leading to a
huge influx of Syrian refugees to Turkey where, increasingly unwelcomed by the
indigenous population, they cause social and economic strains.
Which brings us to Erdogan’s latest gambit. Syrian
refugees wanting to go on to northwestern Europe provide him with a handy mechanism
to blackmail the EU: pay me huge amounts of money (€6 billion at latest count)
and permit 80 million Turks to travel visa-free to your countries or I will
dump more unwelcome Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis and others on you.
So far the ploy has worked and the Europeans are
succumbing to Erdogan’s demands. But this may well be a Pyrrhic victory,
hurting Erdogan’s long-term interests. In the first place, forcing Europeans to
pretend they are not being blackmailed and to welcome Turkey with clenched
teeth creates a foul mood, further reducing, if not killing off, Turkish
chances for membership.
Second, Erdogan’s game has prompted a profound and
probably lasting shift in mood in Europe against accepting more immigrants from
the Middle East — including Turks.
In combination, these errors by Erdogan point to
more crises ahead. Gokhan Bacik, a professor at Ipek University in Ankara, says
“Turkey is facing a multifaceted catastrophe”, the scale of which “is beyond Turkey’s
capacity for digestion”. If Iran is today the Middle East’s greatest danger,
Turkey is tomorrow’s.
Daniel Pipes is president of the
Middle East Forum.
DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes
