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Turkey and the Central Asian ethnic
octopus
By K Gajendra Singh
Once again, Chechen suicide bombers have struck
in the center of Moscow, on December 10, this time to
influence the outcome of parliamentary elections in
Russia. An earlier devastating attack on a train near
Chechnya on December 5 killed over 40 persons and
injured hundreds more.
Russia has many millions
of Muslim citizens. Tragically, these bleeding attacks
are not expected to be the last. Chechens and other
tribes around the Black Sea and the Caspian and the
mountainous Caucasian region which separates Russia and
the Middle East and Anatolia migrated here and have
established deep roots. Like sleeper cells put in place
over the centuries, their presence could have
ramifications beyond their borders and serious
implications for the region.
In the Caucasian
region - which includes southwest Russia, Georgia,
Azerbaijan and Armenia - not only do the geological
plates grind against each other, making the area
earthquake prone, strategically the tectonic plates of
kingdoms and empires have rubbed against each other
throughout history. Powers and states have always
interfered with each other, and they still do so.
Earlier the actors were Turks and Mongols from Central
Asia and then the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Later,
the Russians replaced the Mongols and the Turks, and
after World War I the British from the southeast. Now,
the United States has taken over the mantle from the
British in this Great Game.
The region remains
very important and dangerous, with complex linkages and
relationships between the people of Turkey and the
people of the Caucasian region. These ties were
established when the Ottoman empire was shrinking, and
they are deep and abiding.
But after World War
I, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the creation
of the Turkish republic in Anatolia by Kemal Ataturk saw
outside contact with the Muslim peoples of not only
Central Asia but the Caucasian region cease almost
altogether. Ataturk jettisoned the Ottoman religious
heritage and he forced Turks to look West and become
Westernized, modern and secular citizens in an effort to
reach the levels of contemporary European civilization.
During my first tenure in Ankara (1969-73), there was
little real interest or even material available on
Central Asia. Pan-Turkic leaders like Alp Aslan Turkes
were looked on with suspicion.
The sudden
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey's
historical enemy, pleased the Turks to no end. It opened
the floodgates of exchanges and relations between the
Turks of Anatolia and the Turkic people of Central Asia
and the Caucasus. There were delegations galore, with
the two "lost people" hugging each other, with many
Central Asian leaders bending down to touch the soil of
Turkey with their foreheads on first arrival. The
initiative to bring the Turkic countries together was
taken up by president Turgut Ozal, but unfortunately he
died in 1993.
Migration and
intermingling among Turkics and Caucasians
From the
mid-19th century, tens of thousands of refugees flooded
into the Ottoman empire in flight from oppression and
massacres. The Ottoman countryside had been largely
depopulated since the 17th century as the result of
misrule and the ravages of war, famine and plague. So
the Refugee Code (Muhadrin Kanunnamesi) of 1857 granted
plots of state land to immigrant families and groups.
They were given exemptions from taxes and conscription
for six years if they settled in Rumeli (the European
part ) and for 12 years if they opted for Anatolia. They
were to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it
for 20 years and they had to became the subjects of the
sultan, accepting his laws and justice.
They had
freedom of religion, whatever their faith, and were
allowed to build churches if none were available. News
of the decree spread widely through Europe and met with
a ready response from various groups unable to find land
or political peace at home. Almost to the end, the
Ottoman rulers were tolerant of other religions. It is
the West which exploited ethnic and religion-based
nationalism to break the Ottoman empire and divide
Hindustan, Palestine, Cyprus and other regions. But the
same right is denied to the north Irish, Basques,
Corsicans, Sardinians and others.
A Refugee
Commission (Muhacirin Komisyort) established in 1860 in
the trade ministry became an independent agency in July
1861. It was a belated response to the influx. Most of
the refugees came from the Turkish, Tatar and Circassian
lands being conquered by the Russians to the north and
west of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Even though there
was no official Russian policy of driving these Muslims
from their homes, the new Christian governments imposed
in the Crimea (1783), in the areas of Baku and Kuban
(1796), in Nahcivan and the eastern Caucasus (1828), and
finally in Anapa and Poti, northeast of the Black Sea,
following the Treaty of Edirne (1829), made thousands of
Muslims uncomfortable enough to migrate, without special
permission or attraction, into Ottoman territory.
Even hundreds of Russian "Old Believers" had
fled from the reforms of Peter and Catherine, settling
in the Dobruca and along the Danube near the Black Sea.
Between 1848 and 1850 they were joined by thousands of
non-Muslim immigrants, farmers as well as political and
intellectual leaders fleeing from the repression that
accompanied and followed the revolutions of 1848,
especially from Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. While many
of these were absorbed by Ottoman urban life, many were
settled as farmers or managers of the farms being built
by large landowners, contributing to both
estate-building and the improvement of cultivation.
The flow
became a torrent after the Crimean War following new
persecutions elsewhere in Europe. The war itself led the
Russians to change their relatively tolerant policy
toward the Tatars and Circassians into one of active
persecution and resettlement from their original homes
to desolate areas in Siberia and even farther east.
(This was repeated during World War 2) The result was
mass migration into Ottoman territory, often with the
encouragement of the Russians, who were glad to get rid
of the old population to Russianize and Christianize the
southern areas of their new empire.
From individual accounts it appears that the
numbers were immense. Some 176,700 Tatars from the Nogay
and Kuban settled in central and southern Anatolia
between 1854 and 1860. (I always stopped by Esksehir for
lunch, where Tatars sell fried thin-rolled bread like
puris in India, except it is more delicious).
Approximately a million came in the next decade, of whom
a third were settled in Rumeli, the rest in Anatolia and
Syria. From the Crimea alone, from 1854 to 1876, 1.4
million Tatars migrated into the Ottoman empire.
Even Slavic migration begun before the Crimean
War intensified - Cossacks who fled from the Russian
army settled as farmers in Macedonia, Thrace and western
Anatolia. Bulgarians settled in the Crimea to replace
the Tatars returned to their homes in the Ottoman empire
from an alien environment. The mass migration of Muslims
continued, though at a somewhat less intense pace,
during the early years of Abdulhamit II, mostly in
consequence of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1888 and
the autonomy given to Bulgaria and Romania, Austrian
control of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the cession of
northern Dobruca to Romania and northern Macedonia to
Serbia. Official statistics estimated that over a
million refugees entered the empire between 1876 and
1895. The number of male Muslims doubled during the
years from 1831 to 1882, with the proportion of Muslims
to non-Muslims increasing substantially.
The
immigrants were settled widely throughout the empire,
many in villages that had been abandoned and some in
eastern Anatolia, particularly in Cilicia (Adana region)
and Arab lands like Syria, sometimes leading to conflict
and problems. The lands could not have been intensively
cultivated and the rural middle class built up had it
not been for the tremendous influx of refugees who
provided the necessary labor and males for future wars.
But the ingress and intermingling of Caucasian
people with the Turks is much deeper among its elite.
"Young girls of extraordinary beauty, plucked from the
slave market, were sent to the sultan's court, often as
gifts from his governors. Among the singular, lasting
privileges of the valide [mother] sultana was the
right to present her son with a slave girl on the eve of
Kurban Bayram [sacrificial day]. The girls were all
non-Muslims, uprooted at a tender age. The sultans were
partial to the fair, doe-eyed beauties from the Caucasus
region. Circassians, Georgians and Abkhasians were proud
mountain girls, believed to be the descendents of the
Amazon women who had lived in Scythia near the Black Sea
in ancient times and who had swept down through Greece
as far as Athens, waging a war that nearly ended the
city's glamorous history.
"Now they were being
kidnapped or sold by impoverished parents. A customs
declaration from around 1790 establishes their worth at
about 20 percent to 40 percent of a horse. The promise
of a life of luxury and ease overcame parental scruples
against delivering their children into concubinage. Many
Circassian and Georgian families encouraged their
daughters to enter that life willingly. They were
immediately converted to Islam and began an arduous
training in palace etiquette and Islamic culture." (From
Harem by Alev Lytle Croutier).
Lucie Duff
Gordon also reported it in her 1864 travel diary. While
the earlier mothers of sultans were Greek or Serbian
princesses married to the rulers, after the capital
shifted to Constantinople, everyone was a member of the
harem under valide sultana's control, with those
giving birth to children, especially boys, jumping up in
the harem hierarchy.
Many of the mother sultanas
were Circassians and Georgians, one even French, Aimee
de Rivery. They exercised great influence over their
sons, now the sultan. The harem politics also became a
reason for the decline of the empire. The word
odalisque literally "woman in the room", comes
from oda (room). But harem life was embellished
by feverish European imagination, whose rulers were no
less sensual, but lacked wealth and culture at that
time.
In friendly arguments with Turkish
friends, mostly diplomats, I would tease them, "What do
you mean you are a Turk. You don't even look like a
Turk. They are chinky-eyed and have little hair on their
face. Of course you speak good Turkish, as you have been
practicing it for 500 years." This devastating repartee
usually ended the argument. Most would smile and happily
admit that his grand uncle or grandmother came from
Circassia or Bosnia. During the days of the empire, the
elite called itself the Ottomans. The word Turk was
reserved for the village yokel and a term of contempt.
It was Kemal Ataturk who bestowed dignity on the word
Turk.
Turkey and Central Asia
President Ozal's successor, Sulieman Demirel, did
not have his vision or drive with regards to Central
Asia and the whole thing came to a standstill, although
after initial resistance to Turkish aggression Turkic
leaders felt more comfortable in an institutional
relationship with Turkey. In any case, even if Turkey
had wished for a bigger role in Central Asia, it did not
have the wherewithal to play it. Many Central Asian
leaders to whom power fell like manna from heaven in
1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union were confused
and rudderless. They were cautious and wanted good
relations with all. The US encouraged Turkey and was
afraid that Russia would try to come back, which it
tried in some ways, but the horse had already bolted the
stable.
Fears that Iran would spread its version
of fanatic Islam and support anti-US regimes also proved
farfetched. After an eight-year exhausting war with Iraq
in the 1980s, in which Iran lost a million young people,
there was little energy or money left to spread its
message of Shi'ite revolution. Except for the Azeris and
some other pockets, most people in Central Asia are
Sunni Muslims, closer to the more mystic Sufi way of
life. They have a very high level of education and a
lifestyle of drinking and good living. With deep-grained
nomadic habits, they could not easily be led to Islamic
fundamentalism. It was ill-conceived US, Saudi and
Pakistani policies that brought Wahhabi Islam to Central
Asia.
Except for the Caspian basin for its
energy resources and in Kyrgyzstan, the American
leadership soon lost interest. The Caspian basin has
between 60 to 200 billion barrels of oil. The US courted
Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev, touting him as a democrat
and helped his country join the World Trade Organization
in 1998. The reason was to have a friendly regime with
freedom to base personnel and sensing equipment to
monitor China, next door. Akayev has proved no different
than leaders of other Central Asian republics in terms
of his record on democracy though.
The early
1990s were a very opportune moment for Turkey, which
under the dynamic leadership of Ozal had successfully
undergone a decade of economic reforms and had opened
its economy to the West, especially Europe. The country
had many trained managers and experts who, because of
ethnic, linguistic and religious similarity, became
advisers and even ministers in the new Turkic
governments in Central Asia. Both at state level and in
the private sector, Turkey made large investments in
Central Asia and Azerbaijan. The Turkish government
provided loans amounting to US$750 million to
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and
Tajikistan. Turkish private investment runs into
billions of dollars. Turks have established industries
and run hotels and other businesses.
Turkey also
arranged to train 10,000 students and teachers from the
new republics. Turkish as spoken in the republics has
been purified by excluding many Arabic and Persian
words. Many European words, especially from French
(almost all in the game of bridge) have been added. The
Azeri language is quite similar to Turkish, as well as
the Turcoman language. The languages spoken by Uzbeks,
Kyrgyz and in Kazakhstan are somewhat different.
Originally, Soviet Russians prescribed Latin script for
the Central Asian languages, but when Ataturk changed to
the Latin script from Arabic, the Russians changed to
Cyrillic. Many Turks have opened schools in Central
Asia, too. Turkey has also started beaming Avrasia TV
programs to Central Asia, but with uneven results.
But Turkey's efforts to create an area of
influence in Central Asia were opposed by the newly
independent leadership. A loose organization of Turkic
states exists without having achieved much. The old
Baghdad pact was joined by the new Central Asian
republics and became the Economic Cooperation
Organization (ECO). To soothe the Russians, a Black Sea
organization was also created, but it remains equally
ineffective. Tansu Chiller, who had still not shot to
fame by becoming the first woman prime minister of
Turkey, told me that Central Asian governments did not
repay Turkish loans, while they paid back Western ones.
I had also been told that the new leadership in Central
Asia would like to establish authoritarian political
regimes and try to follow the capitalist system of East
Asia. It has certainly succeeded rather well in its
first objective.
Problems in the Caucasus
Soon nationalist Russian politicians, ex-communist
cadres, ambitious Russian generals, local mafia and
international oil executives all entered the fray to
play their part for personal or national gains on the
Caucasian chessboard.
Even Turkey was put in an
embarrassing situation when Azeri president Heydar
Aliyev, who died last Friday at the age of 80, accused a
Turkish group in 1995 of trying to overthrow him with
the help of his opponents in the capital Baku. But
generally Demirel, a believer in the status quo, was
helpful to Aliyev. Himself sent packing twice by the
armed forces when prime minister, Demirel suggested to
Aliyev to go on television and take other steps to
control rebellions in Baku. This was a technique King
Carlos of Spain had used successfully to quell rebellion
by his armed forces.
East and south Turkey
and the Kurdish rebellion
From 1984 to 1999,
Abdullah Ocalan led the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party)
rebellion for a Kurdish state in the southeast of
Turkey, a campaign that cost over 35,000 lives, mostly
Kurds, including the lives of more than 5,000 Turkish
soldiers. To control and neutralize the rebellion,
thousands of Kurdish villages were bombed, destroyed,
abandoned or relocated; millions of Kurds were moved to
shanty towns in the south and east or migrated
westwards. The economy of the region was shattered. Half
of the Kurdish population now lives in western Turkey,
making Istanbul the second largest Kurdish city after
Diyarbakir. With a third of the Turkish army tied up in
the southeast, the cost of countering the insurgency
amounted to between $6 billion to $8 billion a year.
After the capture of Ocalan in 1999 and the passage of
laws last year to ease the lives of Kurds, things have
now quieted.
The war in the 1980s between Iraq
and resurgent Shi'ite Iran helped the PKK to establish
itself in the lawless Kurdish territory in northern
Iraq. The PKK also helped itself with arms freely
available in the region during the eight-year war. After
the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war, with lack of legitimate
authority and absence of possible Turko-Iraqi joint
offensives against the Kurds in the north of Iraq, the
Kurdish rebellion blossomed most violently. Turkey
crossed over quite deep into north Iraq from time to
time for punitive attacks on PKK hideouts and
formations, despite the usual international furor. It
even bombed some border areas in Iran too, where the PKK
might have taken shelter.
The attempt by the
Turkish armed forces and the establishment to clear east
and south Turkey of Kurdish rebels (and populations) ,
has made it easy for groups to move around from one
country to another, notably from Turkey to Iran and
Afghanistan and from Azerbaijan to Chechnya.
Once, while I was able to drive along the sea
coast from Baku to the border with Daghestan, I was
advised not to go towards Gynza, towards the border with
Georgia. It was a dangerous area under Surat Hassonov, a
mafia chief and smuggler and once prime minister of
Azerbaijan under Aliyev. There are many such areas in
the region, and mafia teams in the import and export
business do not pay customs duties. Even ministers are
involved. The bludgeoning truck-based trade between
Turkey and the Central Asian republics via Azerbaijan
and Iran, without proper police control, means control
by the mafia and freedom of movement for those who are
determined or prepared to pay up.
Political-police-mafia link in
Turkey
In a notorious case,
an automobile crashed at Susurluk in western Anatolia on
November 3, 1996. In the accident, Haseyin Kocadag,
director of the Istanbul police academy, Abdallah Gatli,
a "Grey Wolf" ultra-nationalist militant and gangster
who was implicated in seven murders in 1978 and
convicted on drugs charges in Switzerland, and Gatli's
mistress, Goncas, were all killed in the same car. The
driver of the car was Sedat Bucak, a ruling True Path
party deputy and Kurdish chieftain heading a large gang
of "village guards" (that is, pro-government Kurdish
militiamen paid for and trained by the armed forces),
who was the only occupant to survive. The crash
suggested credible links between the security forces,
the "Grey Wolves", organized crime and pro-government
Kurdish chiefs.
In the
beginning of November 1998, 25 prosecutions were
launched covering murder, gangsterism and narcotics
smuggling, in which 75 suspects were charged and the
parliamentary immunities of both Bucak and of Mehmet
Agar, the minister of interior, was lifted. But after
two years, only two relatively low-ranking police
officers had been convicted. Most of the alleged
ringleaders in these crimes remained at large, some
abroad, with even diplomatic passports. Inquiries
revealed nothing concrete, but it emerged that the
police regularly used mafia hit men to kill PKK people.
Istanbul bombs
The human bombers who
destroyed two synagogues in Istanbul last month have
been traced to Bingol, a small dusty town near the
Iranian border. It means 1,000 lakes, and includes lake
Van. I spent four quiet days in 1969 looking around the
region, including lake Van, as the guest of its
vali (governor) Kemal Ozturk, a very charming and
gracious host, with evenings beginning with high
officials - including the military chief - at 6pm and
ending two hours past midnight. I found the same kind of
lavish hospitality, now declining in Turkey, at Babur
University as well as at private homes in Uzbekistan's
Ferghana Valley city of Andijan (the birth place of
Babur, the founder of the Moghul Empire in India ) which
I visited in 1998.
By the 1990s Bingol had
become Kurdish rebel-infested and dangerous. When I
revisited nearby cities like Diyarbakir, the main
Kurdish stronghold, by 4pm before sundown everyone,
including the police, would retire for the day, thus
leaving most of the countryside in south and east Turkey
for rebels and others to roam about and transfer
personnel and arms.
Nearby is the city of
Batman, which had become the center of the Turkish
Hezbollah. Unfortunately, the Turkey establishment
helped this organization by encouraging some of its
units in the region in the mid-1990s to eliminate PKK
guerillas or sympathizers in southeast Turkey. The
Turkish Hezbollah is quite different from the Lebanese
one, and was reportedly helped by the Iranians. Only
when Hezbollah started creating cells in Istanbul and
west Turkey was the experiment abandoned, but the cat
was out of the bag.
Jordan connection
Despite very strong control by the security
establishment in Jordan, mostly manned by loyal
tribesmen, the country with nearly a 60 percent
population of Palestinian origin remains a place of
acute underground activity. Daily killings and
counter-killings across the border in the occupied West
Bank and Gaza make things worse. It is a stronghold of
Muslim Brotherhood, which did very well in 1990
elections, with King Hussein even including some of them
in the cabinet to face Western criticism of not joining
in the coalition against Saddam Hussein.
The
United Kingdom and the United States blatantly
encouraged Islamic and obscurantist groups to counter
nationalist and socialist regimes in the Middle East and
elsewhere from the beginning of the 1950s to the end of
the 1970s, when Iran's Shi'ite revolution unnerved
everyone. But for the Western support to Islamic
elements, it would have led to more equitable and
democratic regimes in the region. So the current talk by
Western leaders and the media of ushering democracy into
the region is absolute humbug. And nobody is fooled,
except sometimes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
Jordan has produced many well-known jihadis,
like Ibn-al-Khatib. There are now two new factors. The
reported linkages between Jordanians of Caucasus origin
and Chechens. Most of them are Circassians, known as
Cherkess. It could be a very dangerous development
because the Cherkess are the Hashemite kingdom's palace
guards and hold important key positions in the police
establishment and elsewhere.
Although only about
15,000 in number, a seat in parliament is reserved for
them. After World War I, when Emir Abdullah, son of King
Hussein of Hejaz and great great-grandfather of King
Abdullah, stopped at Amman to reclaim Syria, which had
been promised by the British to the Arabs for revolting
against the Ottomans, the Cherkess community, which had
been established since the 19th century, was the first
to express its loyalty to him. Although the Cherkess
community has remained loyal, there are now murmurs of
disaffection. The number of Circassians in Syria is much
higher, but then Syria exercises very strict control
over such groups. Thoughtless efforts by the US
neo-conservatives to destabilize Syria would have
devastating consequences.
The late King Hussein,
before dying of cancer in 1999, to further strengthen
the British and the American motivation to protect the
kingdom and his dynasty, at the last minute removed his
younger brother, Crown Prince Hassan, married to late
Indian chief justice Shri M Hidayatullah's niece, and
instead made his son Abdullah the Crown Prince. Abdullah
was the eldest son of the late king and his second wife
Toni, a British citizen who embraced Islam and remained
Queen of Jordan until 1972 when she and the late king
divorced.
The US embassy in Amman, Jordan's
capital, which I visited just before leaving in 1992, is
like a fortress, replete with underground chambers.
During the 1990- 91 Gulf crises and war, King Hussein
adroitly remained neutral, much to the anger of the
Anglo-Saxons, but the masses remained peaceful and under
control. King Abdullah is not as nimble or experienced,
and many Jordanians feel that he is siding with the
Americans and extending them help, so there remains a
danger to the throne. Such warnings were conveyed by
attacks on the embassy of Jordan in Baghdad.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador
(retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August
1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as
ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is
currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic
Studies. Email Gajendrak@hotmail.com
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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