"The blast in Bosphurus ripped apart the Bosphorus bridge and halted the land
and sea traffic between the Orient and Europe. Following the attack, the Turkish
stock market plunged to it s lowest levels in decades". This could be one of the
possible articles in the world's newspapers if Turkey continues on its current
path of confrontation with Kurds rather than playing the diplomacy game with
them. What Turkey expects to gain in a "Zero sum game" confronting the Kurds in
the region? This will be further discussed in this article.
TURKISH JULY ELECTIONS
In [1]-[3], I gave some background information about the present Kurdish-Turkish
relations and tried to paint a picture of the dynamics of the situation from a
non-Turkish perspective. The dynamics has changed further after the recent July
elections in Turkey.
In the July 2007 elections, the Islamist AKP party managed to increase
its popular vote by more than 12% to around 46% of almost 35 Million voters [4].
Because of the minimum 10% threshold for parties to win seat in the parliament
and the rise of Nationalists' votes,AKP managed to gain 341 seats of the 550
seats in Turkish Parliament This falls short of the necessary two thirds of the
seats to elect a president.
The 6% increase in the votes for the Nationalist MHP party increased them above
10% threshold and brought them 71 seats in the parliament. As a result the
number of seats for the Islamist AKP decreased by 23 seats (despite the increase
of popular vote for the AKP in the polls). The rise of Nationalists and
Islamists in Turkey cost the opposition CHP party 66 seats. At the same time,
the pro Kurdish Independent DTP candidates manged to win around 22 seats in the
parliament.
OTTOMAN-ERA HANG OVER
With the rise of Islamists and Nationalists in Turkey and their victory in the
parliamentary elections in Turkey, the shadows of Ottomans and return to that
golden age has a come back among the Turkish politicians. The Turks after
WWI became secular and have not been playing the Sunni Ottoman card for almost a
century [3], but the page in history of Turkey as a secular republic is being
turned now. Is it turned backward or forward? Will Turkey march forward towards
joining EU and a new golden age or will look backward in history searching for
its past golden era?
The Islamist in Turkey wish to elect Gul or another Islamist AKP member to
become the pr esident this year. An Islamic Khalif in tie band and with no
turban has made the Turkish army the guardians of the secular republic
very wary. The prospects of the war between Kurds and Turks in the region should
be looked at in this context of EU Turkey or Ottoman Turkey. An army kept busy
with fighting the so called Kurdish separatists outside of Turkey will cause
less trouble for the Islamist' Ottoman dreams in Ankara. Will PKK help the
Islamists in their dream and distract the Turkish a rmy from a possible coup in
Turkey?
The reality that the Ottomanists in Turkey should face is that the historical
parameters that helped to create the Ottoman empire and its survival for
centuries does not exist any more. Ottoman territory was administrated as a
federal entity with Kurds and European subjects of the Ottomans ruling their own
autonomous regions under the umbrella of the Ottoman Union. With the
economical collapse of the Ottomans long before the WWI (i.e. the reason for it
being called the sick man of Europe), and its disintegration in WWI, the
territory of those Ottoman European subjects were later swallowed by the Soviet
Union and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, those entities are now becoming
part of the European union.
It is a pi pe dream for Ottomanists in Turkey to dream of resurrecting a dead
entity which was buried in history because of the advances of technology and
economical factors. The modern version of the Ottoman Union is the European
Union and by creating a confrontation with Kurds and Arabs in the region, the
Turks in the long term damage their own self interests and destabilize the
unstable region further.
TURKISH LONG TERM STRATEGY
By keeping the Turkish army busy fighting in Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, the
Islamists manage to remove the Damocles sword of the army on their head. The
sword will be used to expand the Turkish territory towards its Ottoman borders
in the south. Once past the Kurdish mountains and reaching Mosul, the Turks will
have no difficulty dominating or threatening the Arab territories.
These are the potential gains that the Islamists think they can achieve by their
present strategy. By trying to implement this strategy, they will surely derail
the Turkish plans for joining EU and alienate the Arabs in the region. Such a
move over the next 12 months has been welcomed by both Syria and Iran because it
will interfere with any US attacking Iran or Syria over the remaining term of
the presidency of George Bush.
The Turks also would like to bring US and Iraqi forces to their side to finish
the Kurdish resistance - a task which they have not managed to do by
themselves. In the process demolishing the infrastructure of the Kurdis tan
regional government in Northern Iraq and destabilizing Iraq further.
The Turks have claims to the share of the oil revenues of the Mosul velayat
(Northern Iraq) and would like to prevent the joining of Kirkuk oil regions with
the Kurdistan federal entity in Iraq. With the US troops starting to leave
Iraq from next year, the Turkish troops are planning to fill the power vacuum in
Iraq, sooner than other regional players. So the present move by Turkey and the
recent motion on Turkish troops in the Turkish parliament is a move byIslamists with
long term gains for Islamist and Turkish national interests in the region.
What the Turks have not considered in their calculations is a full scale war on
Turkish economy and infrastructure. A fire that will take Turkey back to the
primitive time before the creation of Ottoman empire and not its golden time.
REFERENCE
[1] G. Nowicki,
Kurds playing Judo with Turks, Kurdistan Observer, 22 Feb 2003.
