Turkey's high-stakes march into
Lebanon By M K Bhadrakumar
Two years ago, in a political profile of
Turkish Prime Minister Racep Tayyip Erdogan, Der
Spiegel came close to concluding that he could be
harboring a secret dream of being an Ottoman
sultan.
The German magazine was
metaphorically summing up Erdogan's phenomenal
march from an obscure Istanbul prison cell to
Turkey's prime ministership. But the hunch was
stunningly prescient, too.
Curiously, even
as the Turkish parliament was bracing this week
for a
heated debate on the wisdom of deputing troops to
Lebanon as part of the United Nations'
stabilization force, Erdogan chose a forum of the
Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to speak
on the subject.
The venue of the OIC
conclave was highly significant - the ornate
Dolmabahce Palace overlooking the Golden Horn in
Istanbul, the abode of the last Ottoman sultan,
Mehmet VI. Referring to the Levant, Erdogan said,
"We can't forget our historic responsibility as an
OIC member."
With these few words, Erdogan
at once summoned memories of the Caliphate and a
host of images from a distant past that modern
Turkey has consciously tried to obliterate.
Earlier in the evening, Erdogan was quoted as
saying that a nation cut off from its past would
have no future. "We should own our values," he
said.
It is therefore not in the least bit
surprising that the decision by the Turkish
government to depute troops to Lebanon - duly
endorsed by the Turkish parliament in a majority
vote on Tuesday - has virtually split the
country's polity into two distinct worlds.
What Erdogan perceives as Turkey's age-old
"values" becomes heresy for the political
opposition, which perceives it as nothing less
than an invidious attempt by the Islamist ruling
party to bury Kemal Ataturk's legacy of Turkey as
a staunchly secular democratic-state model in the
Muslim world.
In this context, referring
to the pressure on the Turkish government from the
United States over the Lebanon deployment,
Cumhuriyet newspaper, the flag carrier of
"Ataturkism" in the Turkish media, wrote, "The
Bush administration is pushing Turkey to be an
Islamic state favoring the US, and ignoring the
solution of a secular, democratic-state model in a
Muslim society."
The 340-192 vote in
parliament authorizing the government to deploy a
naval force for one year to patrol the waters off
Lebanon, and possibly Turkish ground troops of an
unspecified number, might appear deceptively
simple. Actually, the topic proved to be highly
divisive, with significant sections of public
opinion, the country's president and all political
parties other than the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP) vehemently opposing the
move. Dissident opinion is apparently sizable even
within the AKP.
The Islamist and
nationalist camps argue that the Turkish
contingent in Lebanon might come to be viewed as
an occupation force, which would work against
"Islamic solidarity" and hurt Turkey's long-term
interests. The nationalists abhor the very idea of
Turkey getting entangled in any manner in the
Israeli-Arab conflict. They argue that Turkey
ought to concentrate attention on the pressing
challenge to national security posed by Kurdish
separatism.
"Leave aside Palestine; the
primary interest is in Mount Kandil and Kirkuk,"
said top nationalist leader and former deputy
prime minister Devlet Bahceli, in reference to
Kurdish militant strongholds in Turkey and Iraq,
respectively.
There is widespread concern
that the United Nations stabilization force will
be called on incrementally to serve US-Israeli
interests and will prove incapable of protecting
the Lebanese people from future Israeli
aggression. Overarching all this is the pervasive
skepticism about Turkey identifying with the
United States' controversial "New Middle East"
project.
In a televised address to the
nation, Erdogan made a forceful case for his
decision. He said the only way to safeguard
Turkey's interests would be by involving itself in
the region, rather than remaining a "mere
bystander"; the political opposition was "failing
to comprehend world realities"; Turkey's "elevated
interests" demanded involvement and any failure to
do so "amounted to a betrayal of our past"; the
preconditions for Turkey's deployment of troops
were fulfilled (a UN mandate, a ceasefire and
acceptability of a Turkish military presence by
all parties concerned).
Erdogan ruled out
any involvement of the Turkish contingent in a
combat role or in any task to disarm Hezbollah. He
said, "Hezbollah is a sovereign matter for Lebanon
and is an interlocutor of the Lebanese government.
It is out of the question for the UN peacekeeping
force to be drawn into any task of disarming
Hezbollah."
Stepping into a quagmire
The government's sensitivity has to be
viewed against the backdrop of Turkey's foreign
policy, which is traditionally aimed at avoiding
the quagmire in the Middle East - a course
originally set by Ataturk, the father of the
modern Turkish state. Thus Turkey consistently
refrained from taking sides in the countless
vanity fairs and disputes among its Arab neighbors
(who were historically part of the Ottoman
Empire), or in the 50-year Arab-Israeli conflict.
This policy ensured that Turkey kept out
of wars and made no fierce enemies in the region,
though a deleterious side-effect, arguably, was
that Turkey had no firm friends in its
neighborhood, either.
Erdogan is now
relegating to history that chapter of "masterly
inactivity" in Turkey's Middle East policy. This
hasn't happened all of a sudden. In his past three
years in power, Erdogan dexterously took a huge
arc, almost unobtrusively for the most part, of
shifting the course of Turkish policy.
He
followed a two-pronged approach. Even as he
counted on the Foreign Ministry to maintain
diplomatic ties with Israel on an even keel, he
himself resorted to a "tilt" toward Turkey's Arab
brethren at the political level. The "tilt" took
the form of a more vocal stance within the OIC,
intensified political exchanges with Arab
countries, dealings with Hamas in Palestine, a
warming of relations with Syria and Iran, and
Erdogan himself directing an occasional barb or
two against Israel.
Thus Turkey's
political leadership blamed Israel for the latest
flare-up in the Middle East, and was manifestly
reluctant to criticize Hezbollah. Erdogan resorted
to sharp rhetoric at the OIC's emergency meeting
on Lebanon held in Kuala Lumpur on August 3. He
said: "No justification can show what is happening
[in Lebanon] to be innocent. This war that we are
witnessing can never be accepted as legitimate by
any means. It cannot be defended."
Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul strode further ahead in an
article in the Washington Post: "Throughout the
world, the same question is being asked: Why has
the sole superpower, which alone has the
capability to stop this tragedy, turned a blind
eye to the images of human suffering and a deaf
ear to the cries for mercy? The grave tragedy that
has been unfolding before our eyes in Lebanon, and
the inability of the international community to
bring it to an end after three weeks of suffering,
unfortunately raise questions about the US and its
proud legacy of leadership for freedom and
justice."
Interestingly, both Washington
and Jerusalem took such strident criticism calmly,
estimating probably the need for the Turkish
leadership to ride the crest of domestic opinion
that was so overwhelmingly surcharged over the
US-Israeli axis in the Middle East.
What
are Erdogan's calculations? First, the Turkish
military and political leaderships want to regain
the ground lost in Ankara's equations with the
administration of US President George W Bush after
the rejection by the Turkish parliament in March
2003 of the idea of deployment of US troops on
Turkish soil in the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq.
Second, in political terms, Erdogan
has been bearing the brunt of the chill in
US-Turkey relations. A fresh turn offers itself
during his forthcoming official visit to
Washington on October 6-7. US backing will become
useful for him politically when Turkey prepares
for presidential and parliamentary elections next
year. Erdogan is equally conscious that his
Islamist credentials are useful for the US in the
Middle East's politics.
Third, Erdogan
intends to enhance Turkey's profile as a key
player in the region. He hopes that along with
Turkey's regional standing, his own leadership
role in the Muslim world will get a fillip, and
that in turn is bound to have resonance in the
Islamic constituency in Turkey, especially if he
projects himself as a candidate in the
presidential election in May.
Finally,
through a significant military presence in
Lebanon, Ankara will be drawing the attention of
the European Union once again to Turkey's
unmatchable role as a bridge between the Western
world and Muslim Middle East.
But there
are dangers in Erdogan's audacious decision.
First, there are inherent uncertainties in the
Lebanon situation over which Turkey has no
influence. Second, what today begins as a benign
peacekeeping mission by the UN can transform in
due course.
Third, Erdogan may believe
that Turkey has a natural role to play in the
Middle East but, as Michael Rubin, former Pentagon
official and prominent Middle East expert with the
American Enterprise Institute, put it, "His
[Erdogan's] neo-Ottomanism aside, he is neither
trusted by the Israelis nor the Lebanese. Many in
Israel will not forgive his statements of sympathy
for Palestinian terrorist groups, and the Lebanese
remember that when they had their Cedar Revolution
and the world was pressuring Syria to preserve
Lebanese freedom, Erdogan chose Damascus over
Beirut."
Most important, Ankara is pinning
hopes on Washington's capacity to appreciate its
gesture. Whereas peacekeepers, when successful,
are soon forgotten, in Lebanon, on the other hand,
the chances of things going wrong are real, which
would make Turkish participation risky.
But what will matter to the Turkish
leadership (civilian and military) is the extent
to which Washington is willing to reciprocate
Turkey's goodwill by cooperating with Turkey's
"war on terror" against the Kurdish Workers' Party
(PKK). There is uneasiness in Ankara whether
Washington will go beyond a few cosmetic moves
aimed at appeasing Turkey, and proceed to take
concrete steps against the Kurdish guerrillas.
To be sure, Bush's recent pledges of a
larger anti-PKK effort had an effect on Erdogan.
As National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley
acknowledged, the PKK matter is "something we
[Washington] have to address more aggressively.
The president has made that assurance to Prime
Minister Erdogan, and I think he was relieved. Now
we've got to deliver on it."
The problem
is, Washington has made such pledges in the past
by way of appeasing Ankara and keeping it from
intervening forcefully in northern Iraq. If
Turkish expectations are not fulfilled this time
around, Erdogan will face a serious problem, as he
will be seen to be doing "America's job" in
Lebanon.
And that is a public perception
that Erdogan simply cannot afford with an election
year looming. Turkish columnist Burak Bekdil
recently explained that "anti-Americanism" in
Turkey had traversed ideological divides and now
is an apolitical phenomenon. Bekdil wrote:
"Islamists, nationalists, Kemalists, liberals,
social democrats, leftists, your cleaning lady,
the waiter at your favorite restaurant, the owner
of the shop on the corner, the taxi driver, even
the modern Turkish youth who 'try to live like the
Americans' are anti-American."
Washington's moves on the PKK issue,
therefore, will be a litmus test for Ankara. The
Bush administration recently issued an appeal to
the PKK to lay down arms. But a Turkish Foreign
Ministry spokesman curtly reacted, "We found the
statement somewhat odd, because we would expect
the US to take rather more concrete steps instead
of a statement expressing the obvious."
Again, Washington has appointed retired
General Joseph Ralston as a "coordinator" for the
PKK matter. But according to top Turkish
commentator Fatih Altayli, this only "caused
annoyance" to Turkish security agencies, which
felt that the move held no "meaning" for Turkey as
there was "no need for such a coordination group".
Altayli quoted Turkish intelligence sources as
sensing a "dangerous aspect" to Washington's
decision, since "if a US coordinator, who will
have an official title, meets with the PKK, and
that, too, with Turkey's approval, and performs
the role of a go-between for Turkey and the PKK,
then Turkey will face a fait accompli".
The question once again returns like a bad
coin to the war in Iraq: Can Washington afford to
antagonize its Kurdish allies in northern Iraq?
All in all, therefore, Erdogan has taken
Turkish policy into uncharted waters. He is indeed
a brave and gifted politician with an
extraordinary track record of salvaging the ground
from hopeless situations. But as opposition leader
Deniz Baykal described last week, Erdogan is
taking on epic forces.
Baykal said,
"Turkey is entering the vortex of the clash of
civilizations. How sad, this is a Jewish-Muslim
war! In all honesty, Turkey will gain if it keeps
out. This is only the first phase of the conflict.
One doesn't end the world's oldest conflict by
sending in a UN peacekeeping force."
Yet
settling a civilizational clash from the dawn of
history would have been a tall order for even
Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66), the sultan
under whom the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
(Copyright 2006 Asia
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