Turkey in 2016?

On the brink, with Erdoğan

Could Turkey push NATO to war with Russia in 2016?

By  Michael Goldfarb

2015 is drawing to an end. The unanswered questions of the year — especially the ones related to ISIL, Syria and the massive flow of refugees from the region into Europe — are being carried over onto 2016’s balance sheet.

So are the unasked questions. Chief among them is, “For how long will you tolerate the government of Turkey, a member of NATO and would-be member of the EU, taking steps that make defeating ISIL, or Daesh, more difficult?”

And, as a supplementary question to the leaders of Europe, “Why are you buying off the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to gain its cooperation in dealing with all the problems arising from the disintegration of Syria? Shouldn’t his cooperation be part and parcel of membership in a democratic ‘alliance’?”

Around 800,000 people entered the EU via Turkey this year and at the end of November, EU leaders agreed to give their Turkish counterpart €3 billion in aid to help stem the flow. In addition, the leaders sweetened the pot with a new fast-track visa system for Turks traveling to Europe and agreeing to postpone publishing a progress report on Turkey’s human rights record that is part of ongoing talks on EU accession.

When the outline of the deal was made public in October, a Human Rights Watch analyst, Emma Sinclair Webb, wrote that “it is scandalous and short-sighted that the EU is willing to ignore the huge crackdown under way in Turkey in its attempt to secure a deal to keep out refugees.”

Webb was correct. Since the deal was signed, Erdoğan has continued his war on Turkey’s Kurdish population.

For much of December, the Turkish army has besieged the major towns and cities of southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish heartland of the country. The Turkish government says it is pursuing the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla group. The government’s tactics, though, look very much like collective punishment.

In Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Turkey’s Kurdish population, a 10-day curfew was imposed. The historic center came under heavy attack.

Last week the town of Çizre, with a population of over 100,000, was encircled by tanks. The BBC World Service managed to get a phone call through to a municipal worker hiding with 26 other people in two rooms in the center of Çizre and interview him as bullets flew around the building and tank rounds came crashing in.

“It’s like the state has declared war on the people of Çizre,” Bahattin Yagarcik told the Newshour programme on December 22. It was an eerie echo of the kind of interview people heard coming from the besieged Syrian city of Homs in the early days of the revolt against Bashar al-Assad.

More details are difficult to come by because, since the EU has agreed to put the human rights report aside, local news agency reporters in the Kurdish southeast have been arrested and charged with spreading terrorist propaganda. The one Western reporter based in Diyarbakir, Friederike Geerdink, has been expelled from the country.

The arrests of prominent national journalists haven’t given EU or America leaders pause. On November 26, days before the summit with Erdoğan, Can Dündar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, and one of his reporters, were arrested and charged with treason. They are currently being held in solitary confinement.

Çizre straddles the Tigris and from the bridge over the river you can see Syria. It is easy to tell where Turkey ends and Syria begins by the fence and the guard towers placed at regular intervals along the border.

The proximity helps explain why Erdogan’s disproportionate assault on Turkey’s Kurds raises questions for European leaders and for U.S. President Barack Obama, beyond the obvious ones related to human rights abuses. If the fight with ISIL is the “generational struggle of our time” (© British Prime Minister David Cameron), why are the leaders tolerating the Turkish government going to war against the one group that has been successful at fighting ISIL on the ground?

More than a year ago, when the throat-slitters swept out of Syria, their advance into Iraq towards the oil installations around Kirkuk was halted at a dusty little town called Makhmour by PKK fighters. In the successful fight to force ISIL out of the Syrian town of Kobani, the PKK provided much needed support to the YPG, Syria’s Kurdish fighters.

There are a number of reasons why the anti-ISIL coalition failed to build on those successes, but Erdogan’s assault on the PKK, and his government’s unwillingness to facilitate contact between the Syrian and Turkish Kurds, is a considerable part of the problem.

In Erdogan’s view there is no difference between the groups.

“There are no good or bad terrorists; all terrorists are the same for Turkey. The matter is not only PKK … or ISIL. All the terrorist organizations in the region are working collectively,” Erdoğan told a Turkish news channel in late October.

Unfortunately, the PKK’s activities in decades past — when it was trying to bomb its way to an independent Kurdistan — keep it on the U.S. State Department and EU list of terrorist organizations. Earlier this month, the European Parliament voted to keep the PKK on the list.

Ironically, in March, the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, issued a statement from his Turkish cell urging his followers to replace “armed struggle with democratic politics.” It was analogous to the moment when Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said the IRA’s armed struggle was over. Unfortunately, the Turkish government, and its extremely desperate allies, have been unable to reciprocate with the same generosity that the British government showed Adams.

Which means the ground force that everyone knows is necessary to fight ISIL is not in the field, and everyone is grasping at thin air for a solution to the ISIL problem.

And as President Erdoğan, who dominates all aspects of Turkish political life, slides through the degrees of authoritarianism and heads toward President for Life territory, the likelihood is that his high-handedness will add to the instability and danger created by the Syria/ISIL crisis.

Recently, Erdoğan has ordered troops into northern Iraq — without the invitation of the Iraqi government. This incident led Obama to publicly ask Turkey to “de-escalate tensions.” Erdoğan says they will remain, despite protests from Baghdad.

But that is small beer compared to a month ago, when a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian plane. Since then tensions have grown between the two countries. The Turkish newspaper Zaman reports of renewed tensions between the two countries in the south Caucasus, saying that defense officials in Ankara claim “it is only a matter of time before the tension over Nagorno-Karabakh relapses into war.”

If there is another incident — and given how crowded the skies along the Syria-Turkey border are, it can’t be ruled out — and Russia decides to retaliate by shooting down a Turkish jet, what happens then? Turkey is a NATO member and would be within its rights to invoke the Article 5 “collective defense” response.

Would the Alliance really go to war against Russia then?

That’s another question nobody asked at year’s end. I hope at least some of the Western Alliance’s leaders are thinking about the answer during the holidays.