Turkey's Syria Predicament

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu attends a foreign ministers meeting ahead of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Cairo, Feb. 4, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany)

By: Cengiz Çandar for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse. Posted on February 17.

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Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in a joint press conference with the Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos lambasted the European Union, United Nations and the international community, which means the United States and Europe. It was all about Syria.

Davutoglu said 70,000 people have died so far in Syria and ironically asked: “Does this have to reach 700,000 to take action?” He then appealed for “More pressure.”

This was a hopeless appeal. Who is going to take action? EU? The U.N.? Undefined international community with no known sanction mechanisms? Since none of them has not taken any action until now, why would they do now?

Doesn’t Davutoglu know that his appeal will fall on deaf ears? Of course he does. Therefore, we have to see his appeal not as actually seeking a result, but Turkey’s shifting the responsibility for the bloody panorama in Syria to the U.N. and the West after being harshly criticized by the Turkish public opinion for its Syria policy.

The Security Council couldn’t take any meaningful initiative on Syria because of the Russian and Chinese vetoes. There appears to be no reason for these two countries to change their positions today. To the contrary, one can even say that Russia is becoming a “”key nation” regarding the fate of Syria.

Forget about the EU, U.N. and the international community, which is the United States, ratcheting up their pressures, there is now a tendency to apply pressure toward having the opposition sit down at negotiation table with the regime.

The probability of "meeting with the regime" option that Turkey — in other words, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Davutoglu, that is the government — abhors is about to materialize. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem will soon travel to Moscow. There is also speculation that Moaz el-Khatib, the leader of the new opposition framework Syrian National Opposition and Revolutionary Forces Coalition formed at Doha in November 2012, will also be going to Moscow to meet Muallem.

Some time ago el-Khatib had conditionally said there could be negotiations with the regime and suggested Tunis, Cairo and Istanbul as possible venues for it. A short time after his suggestion, el-Khatib met with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich.

The most striking feature of Moaz el-Khatib’s remarks that aroused opposition ranks was the omission of Bashar al-Assad’s giving up power as a precondition of sitting down to negotiations with the regime.

Ankara wasn’t pleased with el-Khatib’s proposal. Until Moaz el-Khatib's name emerged and a new opposition structure was put together reportedly with Hillary Clinton’s initiative, the umbrella organization for the Syrian opposition was the Syrian National Council established in Istanbul under Turkey’s auspices. But even the SNC reacted strongly to the idea of sitting down with the regime before Assad’s departure.

The strongest reaction came from the Jabhat al-Nusra, said to be associated with al-Qaeda, which is boosting its muscle power in the field by the day and is not a member of the SNC or the coalition. Jabhat al-Nusra’s commander in Aleppo issued a threat that those advocating negotiating with the regime will be eliminated.

That is why after the car bomb at Cilvegozu border crossing between Turkey-Syria, 60 km from Aleppo, that killed and wounded many, suspicions focused on the usual suspect of Damascus regime. But there were also those who said this was an internal account settling between Syrian opposition fractions.