Death has escaped from Syria. The numbers
within its borders have climbed to near 30,000.
But over the past few months, death has scaled the
borders into Lebanon, threatening, as the Lebanese
Prime Minister Najib Mikati put it, to "drown" the
country in its neighbor's flood. Turkey has not
been immune from the escalating violence either.
Syrian refugee camps have been targeted by
the Syrian government's forces, and yesterday a
mortar attack into the
Turkish town of Akcakale
killed at least five people and wounded eight.
These numbers are miniscule compared to the dead
Syrians, and to the dead Turkish Kurds (30,000
killed, including in "operational accidents").
Nevertheless, they have set Turkey on
edge. The government has begun to clear camps on
the border, and Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu said, "No one should doubt Turkey's
defense capabilities."
Turkey retaliated
with artillery fire toward the Syrian city of
Idlib. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) went into a huddle as did the UN Security
Council. Whether this will escalate is to be seen.
NATO's statement stayed with a call for
consultation (article 4 of its Charter) and not
with a call to arms (article 5). This indicates
that there will be no escalation at this time.
Tension along the Syrian-Turkish border
had intensified over the past month. This is not
the first mortar attack on Akcakale. After a
September 28 strike, Turkey sent a diplomatic note
to Damascus. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister
Gennady Gatilov warned against "bomb diplomacy".
Tensions on the border, he noted, might provide
"pretexts for carrying out a military scenario or
to introduce initiatives such as humanitarian
corridors or buffer zones". Turkey had restrained
itself after Syrian government forces shot down a
Turkish F-4 Phantom in June of this year. The
Syrians claimed that the F-4 had flown at "very
low altitude and at high speed" into its
territorial waters near Latakia. At that time,
Turkey did not respond with force.
Yasser
al-Najjar, a member of the Syrian National Council
and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), recently told
journalist Lina Attalah in Cairo that the FSA
opposes any military intervention by the West, but
believes that a "no-fly zone can happen without
intervention". This is precisely what the then
Arab League head Amr Moussa believed when he
endorsed a no-fly zone over Libya on March 12,
2011. Eight days later, after the NATO bombardment
began, Moussa said, "What is happening in Libya
differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone.
And what we want is the protection of civilians
and not the shelling of more civilians." It is not
clear if what al-Najjar wants can be so easily
accomplished without a Libya-type intervention.
One of his hopes was for NATO missiles to be
stationed in Turkey to "protect 30 to 40
kilometers southward."
It is unlikely that
Turkey will allow NATO missiles to be stationed in
its southern districts to enforce a humanitarian
corridor in northern Syria. Over the course of the
past few years, the Turkish army has re-engaged
the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) forces in the
region. After a short hiatus between 1999 and
2004, sections of the PKK restarted its war,
pushing out of its redoubts in small guerrilla
bands to strike at guard posts and to conduct acts
of urban terror (including a 2007 bombing in
Ankara). Loss of its bases in Iraq and to some
extent in Syria and divides among the PKK
leadership prevented the kind of frontal assaults
that had wracked the 1990s. Over seven hundred
people have been killed this year alone, with the
Turkish army in operations over the course of
September in the mountainous border region that
links it to Iraq and Iran.
The reason for
the intensified battle between the PKK and the
Turkish military lies in a strategic decision by
Syria's Assad. This summer, he handed over much of
northern Syria, which is demographically Kurdish,
to the PKK and its Syrian front, the Party of the
Democratic Union. These new base areas allowed the
PKK to regroup and begin a major assault on the
town of Semdinli (the Turks accuse Assad's regime
of giving the PKK heavy armaments, including
rocket launchers and heavy caliber machine guns).
As this armed conflict stepped up in
September, the Turkish judiciary convicted 324
senior army officials for a plot to overthrow
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2003. Among
those convicted were Ibrahim Firtina (Air Force
head), Ozden Ornek (Navy chief) and Engin Alan
(who had helped capture and transport PKK head
Abdullah Ocalan from Kenya). The new military
leadership is aligned with the Erdogan government
and is nonplussed by these verdicts.
During these court proceedings and as the
Turkish army seemed tied down by the PKK, the Free
Syrian Army moved its base in Turkey's Hatay
province into Syria. The tone of the FSA was that
it was now ready to take the fight to the Assad
regime on its own soil. The Turkish government's
signal can be read in many ways: either they
accept the FSA's view that it must intensify its
campaign inside Syria, or that the Turkish
government is trying to find a way to extricate
itself from its forward policy.
Turkish
foreign policy under the Erdogan-Davutoglu regime
oscillates between the politics of "zero problems
with neighbors" and a neo-Ottoman big power
(buyuk devlet) politics. It was the latter
that moved Erdogan-Davutoglu to take a strong
position against the Assad regime, and as the
Kurdish problem has raised its head, it is the
former to which they seem to have returned. The
mortar attack of October 3 and the Turkish
retaliation change the situation somewhat.
Contact group Set up by Egypt's
President Mohammed Morsi, the Syria Contact Group
was to have met on the sidelines of the UN General
Assembly in New York last week. The point of the
meeting was to produce a pathway to end the
bloodshed in Syria. The Group's members (Egypt,
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) had pledged to have
their foreign ministers meet in Cairo before the
UN meet, and then send their heads of government
to hash out some kind of document in New York. The
Saudi Foreign Minister skipped the Cairo meeting;
it was said that he was ill ("The
Mystery of the Syria Contact Group," Asia
Times Online, September 22). The other foreign
ministers continued with the meeting, except that
without Saudi Arabia things remained in stasis.
In Cairo, the Egyptians unveiled the four
principles for the Contact Group's approach to
Syria: 1. Cease Violence. 2. Reject Foreign
Intervention. 3. Preserve the Unity of the Syrian
People and Land. 4. Maintain Political Unity. The
first three points are self-explanatory, and were
accepted by the Iranians and the Turks. The fourth
point is much more ambiguous - how can political
unity be maintained if the country is in a civil
war. Turkey was not convinced of the possibility
of unity; it has called for the ouster of Bashar
al-Assad and his clique, which means that it does
not see them as party to a future Syria.
Nevertheless, Turkey's Davutoglu did not indicate
that his government would leave the Contact Group
because of this disagreement.
Neither
Saudi Arabia nor Turkey has been a willing partner
in the Contact Group. Both have missed meetings,
and both have been reluctant to adopt the four
principles laid out by Morsi. Nonetheless, all
four countries have good reasons to be in the
Group. Turkey buys a third of its oil from Iran
and proposes to double its current $15 billion
trade with that country despite the US and
European sanctions. The PKK offensive and the
tension on the Syrian-Turkey border heighten the
fears that Turkey will not be able to insulate its
own problems from the vortex of Syria. Saudi
Arabia, as I reported earlier, had insinuated a
deal with the Iranians for the former to back off
from Syria if the latter close down its support
for the demonstrations in eastern Saudi Arabia.
This is why it is Qatar once more that has
made noises about an Arab intervention in Syria
(this is unlikely to materialize since Qatar's
military is largely staffed by Pakistanis and it
would rely upon a reluctant Egypt to provide the
bodies for the actual force). Iran is desperate
for a ceasefire in Syria. When the Contact Group
seemed on life support in New York, Iran's
President Ahmadinejad suggested that he was
forming a new Group to deal with the Syrian
problem. This is unlikely to materialize. Egypt is
still keen on the Group, and it requires Iran in
it since Tehran is the only regional capital with
credibility with Assad (apart from Baghdad).
Did the Contact Group die at Akcakale?
Will NATO emerge from its huddle and provide the
"no-fly zone" that al-Najjar asks for, which is
tantamount to a NATO intervention into the Syrian
conflict?
Vijay Prashad's latest
book is Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK
Press), whose Turkish edition, Arap Bahari,
Libya Kisi is available from Yordam Kitap.
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