You are here

Reversal of fortune

Mar 22,2016 - Last updated at Mar 22,2016

These are testing times for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the man who once represented Turkey’s best hopes to end conflicts with its neighbours and present a new face of moderate political Islam to the region and the world.

Today he finds himself in a tight spot: waging war against the PKK and its Syrian off-shoot, confronting Daesh-related terror at home, crushing his critics and political opponents, and losing his influence over the course of the Syrian conflict.

For years Erdogan sought to boost his power, first as prime minister and now as president, as he attempted to amend the constitution and change Turkey’s political system into a presidential one.

His political ambitions of reviving Turkey’s regional role, after decades of Ankara looking to the West, led him to interfere in the affairs of Syria and Egypt as they faced internal turmoil. Finally, he became a major player in the Syrian conflict by allowing the flow of thousands of foreign jihadists who made up the backbone of Daesh in Syria and Iraq.

In the process, Turkey became host to millions of Syrian refugees.

Erdogan’s war against the Kurds started as a political gimmick aimed at boosting his party’s popularity ahead of important general elections.

The ploy worked when the AKP won an absolute majority. But the PKK fought back and as the Syrian conflict evolved, with the Russian military intervention, Turkey found itself fighting the Kurdish minority at home, bombing PKK’s positions in northern Iraq and Syria’s own Kurds whose armed militias, backed by both the US and Russia, were able to repulse Daesh militants and liberate most of their territories in northern and eastern Syria.

Erdogan was forced to join the US-led coalition fighting Daesh without getting any of the concessions he wanted. He sought mainly to create a safe or buffer zone along Syria’s long borders with Turkey, allegedly for humanitarian reasons, but in reality meant to derail any attempt by Syria’s Kurds to create their own self-rule region.

They did just that last week, as Kurdish groups announced the establishment of a federal system in regions under their control in northern Syria.

The move was rejected outright by Turkey and others like Iran, the Syrian opposition, the Damascus regime and the United States, but the reality is that the Kurds, who are an ethnic group of 28 million living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, had moved closer than ever before to achieving their most cherished goal of independence.

Erdogan suffered another setback when Washington rebuffed his protestations over allying itself with Syria’s Kurds and even backed Russian calls to include Kurdish groups in the Geneva peace talks.

Relations between Moscow and Ankara dipped following Turkey’s downing of a Russian MiG near the Syrian border last year.

Russia has warned against any land operation by Turkey into northern Syria.

And when Erdogan tried to escalate the crisis by calling on his NATO allies to back him, he received lukewarm support.

Turkey’s controversial role in Syria has overshadowed relations between Ankara and Washington.

US President Barack Obama recently criticised Erdogan’s authoritarian style of government and lamented his failure.

To make his conflict with the Kurds even worse, Erdogan accused charismatic leader of the main Kurdish party Selahattin Demirtas of “treason” over his call for autonomy for the country’s Kurdish minority.

The pro-Kurdish HDP party became a major rival to Erdogan’s AKP party in recent elections.

Another problem Erdogan is accused of creating is his government’s failure to stop the flow of Syrian refugees from Turkey into Europe via Greece, often resulting in the drowning of hundreds of migrants.

The influx of refugees has complicated relations between Turkey and Europe, and resulted in rifts within the EU over immigration policies and open borders. It also heightened fears of infiltration of terrorists returning from Syria.

And when the Europeans criticised Erdogan’s human rights record and his campaign to muzzle the media and his critics, he slammed back by accusing them of mistreating refugees and of backing Kurdish rebels.

Certainly this has damaged chances of discussing Turkey’s membership in the EU in the near future.

But in spite of Erdogan’s recent setbacks on a number of fronts, his authority remains unchallenged.

There are cracks in the ranks of his party and he has sought ways to keep the AKP united behind him, but it will take some time before his rule shows signs of fatigue. 

The wave of terror attacks by the PKK and Daesh is something that he for sure did not expect and will result in public agitation.

In addition, and as Syria’s Kurds rally to strengthen their enclave, inspiring perhaps Turkey’s own Kurdish minority, Erdogan will be seen as the leader who fought against the Kurds but was ultimately defeated.

 

The writer is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman.

up
16 users have voted.


Newsletter

Get top stories and blog posts emailed to you each day.

PDF