Turkey and Syria
One problem with a neighbour
Turkey’s tough talk on Syria is unlikely to be matched by action
Aug 20th 2011 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition
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Erdogan and Assad in happier days
IN A small café outside Istanbul’s Fatih mosque, a slight bearded man lifts his shirt to reveal two deep bullet wounds. “Assad’s soldiers did this to me,” says Motee Albatee, who served as an imam at a Sunni mosque in the besieged Syrian town of Deraa until he fled the country several weeks ago. Mr Albatee is among a growing number of Syrian dissidents who have found sanctuary in Turkey, many of them in refugee camps near the border. Some are angry over the reluctance of Turkey’s government to get tougher with Bashar Assad, Syria’s president. “Turkey must set up a buffer zone [inside Syria]” to protect more refugees from the fighting, insists Yayha Bedir, a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Like many seated around the table, he believes only drastic action will force the Syrian army to defect en masse, bringing down Mr Assad’s brutal regime.
Such talk is particularly loud online, where Syrian tweeters have voiced disdain for Turkey’s attempts to get Mr Assad to end the bloodshed. Their fury grew earlier this month when Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, flew to Damascus to deliver what Turkish officials tautologically called a final ultimatum. “We are at the end of our tether,” roared Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
Mr Assad’s response was to intensify his assaults against unarmed civilians, notably in the Mediterranean port of Latakia (see article). This prompted Mr Davutoglu to issue yet another warning: Turkey would not, he said, “remain indifferent” to continuing massacres. Yet he also ruled out intervening to create a buffer zone. So what leverage does Turkey actually have over its erstwhile Ottoman dominion?
None whatsoever, say critics of Mr Davutoglu’s much-vaunted “zero problems with the neighbours” policy. That is unfair. But as Soli Ozel, a political scientist, puts it, the Syrian crisis has revealed that “Turkey isn’t as influential as it thought.”
The last time Turkey got tough with its southern neighbour was in 1998, when it threatened to invade unless Syria booted out Abdullah Ocalan, leader of Turkey’s outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Syrians caved in, and relations between the two countries have flourished since. Trade has more than tripled in the eight years of Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) government, visas have been abolished and ministerial meetings have been held amid much fanfare. (Mr Davutoglu says he has made over 60 visits to Syria.) Crucially, Syria has ended its patronage of the PKK.
Rapprochement with Syria has also allowed Turkey to play a bigger regional role. The government came close to brokering a peace deal between Syria and Israel before the plan was scuppered by Israel’s attack on Gaza. Some Turks hoped that engagement with Syria would eventually yank Mr Assad out of the orbit of Iran, his biggest patron, and set him on a path towards reform. (His alleged involvement in the 2005 car-bomb assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, was quietly ignored.) All the more reason for Turkey’s feelings of betrayal.
Turkey’s Western allies are not about to mount an invasion of Syria. But they are turning the diplomatic screws, and are eager for AK to sever political and trade links with Mr Assad. But a bigger prize would be to drive a wedge between Turkey and Iran. Turkey’s mollycoddling of the mullahs has angered America, most recently when Mr Erdogan’s government voted against imposing further sanctions on Iran at the United Nations last year. Turkey has since sought to make amends. It has agreed to NATO plans for a nuclear-defence missile shield that is clearly aimed at Iran. And after some dithering, it is co-operating with the alliance’s military operations in Libya.
Yet Turkey is understandably wary of openly confronting Iran, one of its main sources of natural gas and the primary transit route for Turkish exports to Central Asia. Iran has also helped Turkey in its battle against the PKK—though it continues to flirt with hardliners who oppose any deal with the Turkish government. Lately the PKK has been stepping up the fight—some 30 Turkish soldiers have been killed in the past month. On August 17th, in a bid to quell mounting public anger, Mr Erdogan authorised the bombing of hundreds of PKK targets inside Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. But such actions have failed in the past and the last thing Turkey needs is a hostile Iran.
Besides, many of AK’s pious constituents see the unrest in Syria as yet another America-backed Zionist plot to pit Turkey against Iran. The ultimate goal, their thinking goes, is to cut Turkey down to size. Disappointingly, the same line is parroted by the main opposition Republican People’s Party, for all its claims of change under its new leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
So what are Turkey’s options? It can withdraw its ambassador from Damascus, continue to intercept the flow of weapons to Syria and impose economic sanctions. Other than that, as Mr Ozel suggests, it should desist from promising any more than it can deliver.
Syria and the region
Unfriended
Arab leaders are at last starting to desert the Syrian regime
The Economist, August 13, 2011
TIME is running out, but for whom? Since a popular uprising against his rule erupted five months ago, Syria’s President Bashar Assad has fought back with a mix of promised reforms and brutal repression. During Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month which started at the beginning of August, he has veered towards even starker repression.
In a rolling campaign of assaults Mr Assad’s men have shot and blasted their way into one rebellious town or city after another, swiftly adding some 300 more dead to the 1,500 Syrians killed since March. Brute force has chased unarmed protesters indoors in big cities such as Hama and Deir ez-Zor—though not for long, judging by the pattern elsewhere in Syria, where rebellion has reignited as soon as troops have left. It has also stoked mounting disgust at home and abroad, leaving Mr Assad more isolated than ever.
Syria’s neighbours, whose long silence reflected fears that Mr Assad’s fall might cause more trouble than his survival, seem to have changed their minds. Turkey shares an 850km-long border with Syria and has cultivated ties, partly to dissuade Syria from stirring trouble within its restless Kurdish minority. But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, its prime minister, now says bluntly that his patience is running out. Declaring ominously that he views Syria’s unrest as a domestic Turkish affair, he dispatched his foreign minister on August 9th to demand speeded up reforms and an immediate pull-out of troops from Syrian cities.
A similar message came from Saudi Arabia, where worries over the spread of Arab revolutions had until now outweighed distaste for Syria’s alliance with what it regards as a menacingly meddlesome Shia Iran. On August 7th King Abdullah, a self-appointed bastion of Sunni Islam, issued a rare public statement demanding a stop to Syria’s “killing machine”. The kingdom withdrew its ambassador, a move swiftly followed by other Gulf monarchies. The Arab League, notably silent about Syria, was suddenly emboldened to announce its own concern over the loss of civilian life. Egypt’s foreign minister warned that Syria was reaching a point of no return, an opinion echoed by such diverse Egyptian institutions as al-Azhar University and the cineastes union.
The chorus of regional criticism amounts to more than an embarrassment for Mr Assad. It removes excuses for Russia and China to block tougher words or action from the UN Security Council, as they did earlier this month. With other countries now adopting the same rhetoric that Western powers have used since May, when America called on Mr Assad to reform or step aside, the stage looks set for worse punishment. Leaks from Washington suggest that the Obama administration may consider demanding Mr Assad’s departure. Further sanctions, on top of EU and American targeting of some regime figures, were imposed by America on August 10th, though some analysts now suggest it would be better to promise to lift them if Mr Assad agreed to go.
No one expects a Libya-like military intervention. Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, has pointed out that Syria’s opposition does not wish for such help. Besides, relatively densely populated Syria presents far more awkward military terrain than barren Libya, and NATO has no appetite for further adventures.
To date, Mr Assad’s regime has categorically rejected foreign criticism,
sticking to the line that its forces are flushing out terrorist gangs and enemy agents. Near self-sufficiency in food and energy, and fear felt by many middle-class Syrians—carefully nurtured by the regime—of a descent into Iraq-style sectarian bloodletting, have all helped to bolster the government.
Yet observers inside Syria now sense a shift in mood that outside pressure can only help to accelerate further. It is not just growing revulsion against the security forces’ tactics that fire Syrian sentiment, but a spreading conviction that the regime is entering its twilight. Promises of reform are not trusted and cannot in any case match the demands on the street. Whispers of defections, and the recent, unexplained replacement of Mr Assad’s defence minister, hint at a shrinking of the regime’s inner circle.
Despite some evidence of isolated reprisals against security men, the opposition has relied almost entirely on peaceful methods of protest, undermining government claims of sectarian motives. The savagery of the regime’s response has convinced protesters that the movement has to continue or, as one protester in Damascus warns, “face revenge of unimaginable proportions.”
Europeans and US seek targeted sanctions against Syria including arms embargo
By Associated Press, Published: August23
UNITED NATIONS — European nations and the United States circulated a draft U.N. Security Council resolution Tuesday seeking an arms embargo and other sanctions aimed at stopping the Syrian government’s ongoing crackdown on opposition protesters.
But the supporters faced immediate opposition from veto-wielding Russia. Asked whether it was the right time to slap sanctions on Bashar Assad’s regime, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters, “No. We don’t think so.”
The draft resolution calls for an asset freeze against 23 key Syrian figures including Bashar Assad, his younger brother, Maher, who is believed to be in command of much of the current bloody crackdown, and his millionaire cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who controls the mobile phone network and other lucrative enterprises in Syria and has been the target of many protesters’ rage.
It also calls for an asset freeze against two companies controlled by Makhlouf — Bena Properties and Al Mashreq Investment — and the Military Housing Establishment and Syrian General Intelligence Directorate. The resolution would also impose a travel ban on 21 individuals including Makhlouf, but not Assad or his younger brother.
Last week, a high-level U.N. human rights team said that Syria’s crackdown “may amount to crimes against humanity” and should be referred to the International Criminal Court. U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said Thursday she asked the Security Council to refer Syria to the permanent war crimes tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands.
The draft resolution, obtained by The Associated Press, echoes the team’s conclusion and notes Pillay’s recommendation “that the Security Council consider referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.” But it does not order Syria to be referred to the court, saying only that “those responsible for violence should be held accountable.”
British deputy ambassador Philip Parham told reporters after Tuesday’s closed council session that Syria “can stop the killing, release detainees, and allow access” for humanitarian aid.
“The focus of the resolution is to apply pressure to achieve that,” he said. “The solution lies in a Syrian-led political process.”
While the resolution is backed by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and the U.S., it is likely to face opposition not only from Russia but also from veto-wielding China — and possibly from council members Brazil, India and South Africa.
Parham said council action could come in “the next few days.”
“We want to allow people time to look at it carefully and consult with capitals,” he said. “But then we do want to move, if we can, as quickly as possible.”
The draft resolution “strongly condemns the continued grave and systematic human rights violations by the Syrian authorities, such as arbitrary executions, excessive use of force and the killing and persecution of protesters and human rights defenders, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment of detainees, also of children.”
With Assad’s forces continuing to crack down on the protests, the U.N. said this week the overall death toll has reached 2,200.
The draft would express “profound regret at the deaths of thousands of people including children.”
It would demand that Syrian authorities immediately stop human rights violations and the use of force against civilians and “allow the full exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms for its entire population, including rights of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, and lift restrictions on all forms of media.”
The proposed resolution “calls for an inclusive Syrian-led political process conducted in an environment free from fear and intimidation and aimed at effectively addressing the legitimate aspirations and concerns of Syria’s population.”