Will #Turkey go to war with #Syria? @Jenna_Krajeski on recent events that have increased tension btwn the former allieshttp://nyr.kr/VppHow
5:41 PM - 24 Oct 12 · Details
On October 3rd, a mother, her three children, and a visiting relative were killed in the Turkish border town Akcakale when a Syrian bomb hit near their home. The Turkish military retaliated, shelling Syrian military targets just across the border. The following day, the Turkish parliament passed a motion allowing military force to be used in Syria. Then, on October 10th, a Syrian Airlines passenger jet en route from Russia was forced to land in Turkey, where Turkish authorities searched it for weapons. These incidents were the latest in a series of calamities that has all but shredded the long border between Turkey and Syria, which had once been allies. But the tension had been building for a long time.
For Turkey, the impact of the violence in Syria has been profound, particularly in the border area. As Syria unravelled, Turks watched their neighbor’s Kurdish northeast, which they worried would be taken over by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) and used to launch attacks into Turkey. Meanwhile, refugees were spilling across the border. Turkey is now host to over a hundred thousand refugees, and the camps and nearby towns where they live also house rebel Free Syrian Army soldiers, who the Turkish government has been supporting, along with their civilian counterparts in the opposition.
Near Syria that support is evident. In April I visited a clinic for Free Syrian Army soldiers in Antakya, on the border. The recuperating soldiers credited Turkey not just for medical aid but also for assistance going back into Syria to fight. Turkish authorities, they told me, “close one eye” when they cross. Beside Syrian flags they had hung a Turkish one and a picture of Ataturk. The flags were a gesture of allegiance from the F.S.A. fighters to the Turkish government, and the secrecy around the clinic seemed nothing more than part of a carefully constructed, media-ready image. The clinic wasn’t meant to be secret; it was there to be seen and visited and reported on to garner support for the F.S.A., and it seemed inevitable then that this open bolstering of the opposition would lead to cross-border fighting and the suggestion of war, as it has.
Two other incidents have pulled Turkey closer to war. In April, refugees in the Kilis refugee camp were hit when Syrian forces fired shells across the border. Two months later, a Turkish jet was shot down by Syrian forces, which claimed that the plane had violated Syrian air space. Both incidents infuriated a public already opposed to the Assad regime, and terrified those living close to the camps and the border. The Turkish government was criticized for not reacting strongly enough and for failing to protect its citizens, and so when troops fired back, earlier this month, it seemed to be a response not just to the deaths in Akcakale but also to the violence in Kilis and the downed plane. After the bomb fell in Akcakale, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, with characteristic directness, “You should be ready at any moment to go to war if it is necessary. If you are not ready for this you are not a state. If you are not ready for this you are not a nation.” But even those Turks who had wished for a more aggressive reaction months ago didn’t seem eager for war. Erdogan didn’t get the last word on the subject.
On the day after parliament voted to authorize force, activists—who in Turkey seem to spring up and mobilize at a moment’s notice—filled Istanbul’s Taksim square to protest the government’s Syria policy. Their fervor reflected what polls have shown: that a large majority of Turks disagree with Turkey’s Syria policy, which they worry has the country willfully diving into the chaos. The wariness is understandable; it’s a brutal picture across the southern border, worlds apart from the functioning and pleasant streets of Istanbul. If Erdogan is going to drag Turkey into a foreign war, Turks won’t go willingly.
At the protests, people chanted against war with Syria. But the real battle seemed to be with Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.). Protesters accused the A.K.P. of imperialism, of warmongering, and of pandering to Western allies like the U.S. Others criticized the A.K.P. for its overtly Islamic identity, which its opponents say goes against Turkey’s secular roots. For these Turks, Syria is either the last straw or an excuse to chant against a government they never liked. Erdogan hadn’t declared war—in fact, he had said, “We could never be interested in starting a war”—but the protesters didn’t believe him.
“Most of the public is against the war,” Erdem Turkozu, a representative for the Turkish Human Rights Association, which was part of the protest and which opposes any military involvement in Syria, told me over e-mail. Then he steered the conversation away from war with Syria to concerns about Turkey’s leaders in general. “The A.K.P. has been constituting an authoritarian democracy and would like to dominate not only the citizens of the Republic of Turkey but also the Middle East.” While Erdogan would have his country be a “model” for the countries in transition after the Arab Spring, his opponents are eager to point out Turkey’s flaws: lack of minority rights, crackdown on freedom of expression, a broken judicial system, and now its policy regarding Syria.
“Turkey’s policy is seen as too aggressive, too hawkish,” Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment, told me. The refusal to support military action—what Ulgen termed “a fundamental allergy to international intervention”—is a legacy of Turkey’s own turbulent past and its failed foreign policies. Turks are still recovering from a military coup that, decades ago, pitched the country into violence.
And they remain in the midst of civil war with the P.K.K. that has stretched on for three decades now, and which in the past year has intensified considerably. Turks know the toll of conflict. They link their economic prosperity to their political stability. Until recently they got along with their neighbors as a matter of policy.
And they remain in the midst of civil war with the P.K.K. that has stretched on for three decades now, and which in the past year has intensified considerably. Turks know the toll of conflict. They link their economic prosperity to their political stability. Until recently they got along with their neighbors as a matter of policy.
That policy was official and had a name, “zero problems with neighbors.” By comparison, the past few weeks—a relatively tiny battle in the greater Syrian conflict—has looked to Turks like full-fledged war. The legacy of this zero-problems policy, coupled with the feelings of regional dominance, steers public opinion against the war. “Turks still have not bought into this idea that what happens in Syria is a matter for other countries,” Ulgen said. “They don’t think that Syria can realistically threaten a country like Turkey. They see it as a distant threat.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/will-turkey-go-to-war-with-syria.html#ixzz2AGdEiGXJ
