Turkey sees Kurdish threat in Syria
unrest By Jacques N Couvas
ANKARA - A new week, a new campaign for
Ankara's diplomacy. After a victorious
arm-twisting on Saturday with the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) to divert the
leadership of the aerial war against Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi from France to NATO, Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned his
attention to trouble closer to home, Syria.
Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad had daily phone calls during the weekend,
and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
followed up with a teleconference with his Syrian
counterpart Wallid al-Mouellem to offer Turkey's
assistance in the event of a reform process
towards a democratic regime.
The head of
the Turkish National Intelligence (MIT), Hakan
Fidan, was dispatched on Sunday to Damascus to
express his
government's concerns about
spreading social unrest from Daraa, in Syria's
southwest, to larger cities such as Latakia, a
Mediterranean port nearer the Turkish border.
Close to 100 demonstrators have died and
hundreds wounded in the clashes with the Syrian
security and military forces since the rallies
began two weeks ago.
Domestic problems in
Syria are of particular sensitivity to Turkey.
Although the two countries still have open
territorial issues, upheaval in one may result in
destabilizing the other. Their 800-kilometer
common border provides safe passage to political
activists with mischievous intentions.
A
major concern for Turkey is the Kurdish population
in Syria of 1.4 million, which, in case of
collapse of Assad's regime could collude with the
estimated 15 million or more ethnic Kurds in
Turkey, 7 million Iranian Kurds, and 6 million
Northern Iraqi Kurds to claim an independent
state.
In anticipation of such
eventuality, Ankara and Damascus formed in 2009 a
High Level Strategic Cooperation Council (HSCC)
and held in April 2010 their first joint military
exercises.
Turkey has since 1978 been in
armed conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK), a belligerent "independentista"
organization classified as a terrorist group by
Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
The hostilities have caused the death of
at least 40,000 Turkish soldiers and gendarmes,
PKK guerillas, and civilians, while the number of
wounded has exceeded 30,000, and that of the
missing is estimated at 17,000.
A study in
1998 by Brunswick University in the US reported
that at least 3 million people had by that time
been displaced in southeastern Turkey and the area
bordering Iraq, for war operational reasons, while
3,000 villages were totally or partially
destroyed.
Kurdish autonomy is a sensitive
issue in public opinion in Turkey, Iran and Syria
alike, where territorial integrity has ranked at
the top of these countries' priorities since their
respective independence from Western rule.
The current regimes in Tehran and Damascus
are intransigent on Kurdish freedoms, while
Erdogan's government, in power since 2002, has
begun a dialogue process with the Turkish ethnic
Kurds to enable cultural autonomy, which, after
this year's national elections, might evolve into
devolution of some governance powers to the local
administrations. The main opposition, nationalist
parties and the military are, however, implacable
in their hostility to such perspective.
The Turkish nervousness about the Syrian
domestic situation is also influenced by economic
and geopolitical concerns. After a long period of
cold neighborhood relations, with occasional
threats of armed confrontation, Assad and Erdogan
have crossed the fence to develop a cosy
relationship, building on the settlement in 1998
of old political disputes.
On the
strategic plane, both countries see cooperation as
being instrumental to maintain the geopolitical
status quo of Iraq's territorial integrity,
frustrate pan-Kurdish aspirations, and to keep
Israel's and Iran's testosterone on check.
The Turkish premier, speaking on Monday to
journalists, confirmed he had urged the Syrian
president over the weekend to adopt a conciliatory
spirit with his people.
"We advised Mr
Assad that responding to the people's years-old
demands positively, with a reformist approach,
would help Syria overcome the problems more
easily," said Erdogan. "I did not get a 'no'
answer," he commented, adding that he expected
reforms to be announced by Damascus this week.
Syria has a long record of iron-fist
governance style, aimed at securing the survival
of the ruling Ba'ath party. Hafez al-Assad, father
of the current president and leader of the coup
which installed it in power in 1963, immediately
imposed an emergency law, which suspended
practically all civil liberties and is still in
force today.
The Ba'ath party, dominated
by Allawis, a tolerant religious Shi'ite Muslim
denomination, has been at odds with the Sunni
movement in Syria. Hafez al-Assad in 1982
violently crushed a Sunni Islamist Brotherhood
revolt, killing 20,000 rebels. Tolerance and
appetite for power did, obviously, not coexist.
Amnesty International has repeatedly
ranked Syria as the country with the most
repressive laws in the Middle East. In an attempt
to calm the spirits, Bashar al-Assad offered last
week to amend the emergency law and allow for new
parties to be formed. The gesture was turned down
by the demonstrators, who insist on full
democratization of the system.
Turkish
business executives and political observers have
been recommending that Erdogan include in his
prescription to al-Assad to also work on reducing
corruption, clientelism and cronyism, which are
endemic in the Syrian economy and sources of
poverty for the population. They hamper foreign
direct investment from Turkey to Syria.
But Turkey - a majority Sunni state with
religious minorities that were "tamed" by the
military in the 20th century - feels uncomfortable
giving lessons to its neighbor, an increasingly
important trading partner.
With ongoing
domestic unrest next door, but also in Bahrain,
Jordan, Yemen, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi
Arabia, Algeria and Morocco, Ankara's Middle
Eastern and Northern African ambitious plans are
poised to return to the drawing board.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110