T. Belman. The author suggests the following:
Instead of sanctions, the United States and Europe need to devise a mutually agreed plan of action with Ankara that would incorporate three major elements. First, they need to acknowledge that the policy of support to the Y.P.G. has ended; no long-term constructive engagement with Turkey can work otherwise.
Second, Turkey, the United States and Europe should restart a strategic dialogue to foster a common approach to the constitutional order and security arrangements for a new Syria. Otherwise, Moscow and Tehran will be in increasingly strong positions to reshape the regional order.
And third, Turkey’s western partners should incentivize Ankara to return to an agenda of domestic political reforms, which would also tackle the country’s longstanding Kurdish problem.
Much to think about. But is the Islamist Erdogan the one to lead this.
By Sinan Ulgen, NYT Oct. 16, 2019
The United States and Europe are erroneously banking on sanctioning Turkey to contain the fallout in Syria.
Ras al Ain, Syria, during bombardment by Turkish forces on Wednesday.
ISTANBUL — The sudden decision by President Trump to endorse Turkey’s move to send its troops into Syria and pull out most of the American forces posted there seems to have shocked the country’s political and military establishment. American analysts and policymakers see events of the past week as largely benefiting Russia, the Syrian government, the remnants of the Islamic State and Iran.
Amid the great clamor of commentary, the United States and Europe are erroneously banking on sanctioning Turkey to contain the fallout. The harsh truth is that the United States, Europe and Turkey share responsibility for the creation of this crisis. They have all made a series of policy mistakes since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011.
For the United States, the main failure was to naïvely believe that the partnership established with the People’s Protection Units, or the Y.P.G. — an organic offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K., which is recognized by Ankara, Washington and Brussels as a terrorist group — could be long lived. Oblivious to the huge and negative impact of this commitment on bilateral ties with Turkey, the White House followed the Pentagon’s recommendation based on its an assessment that the Turkish counteroffer, of a group of Syrian opposition fighters trained by both Turkey and the C.I.A., would be inadequate to carry the fight against the Islamic State.
Nevertheless, Turks never came to terms with the United States siding so clearly with a group they consider to be a core national security threat. And American support for the Y.P.G. pushed it toward a perilous overreach. Kurds constitute about 10 percent of Syria’s population but with American support, they came to control almost one-third of its territory.
Turkey’s big mistake was betting on radical and Islamist elements of the opposition, such as the Syrian Islamic Liberation Front and the Tawhid Brigade, to do so. Ankara was less zealous, at least initially, than its partners in the West to join the coalition against the Islamic State, because ISIS jihadists were also fighting against Mr. Assad, along with other Syrian opposition groups.
Europe’s biggest failure was outsourcing its Syrian refugee policy to Turkey. Despite auspicious beginnings in March 2016, the refugee deal between Turkey and the European Union came under severe strain following a downturn in the Turkish economy. Turkey has been hosting about 3.6 million Syrians, with only about 100,000 living in camps close to the Syria border. The majority are in Turkish towns and cities.
As the unemployment rate rose to 13 percent, Turks in disadvantaged areas increasingly came to see the refugees as competing for their jobs and government resources. The rising anti-refugee sentiment played out in the municipal elections earlier in the year and contributed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party losing control of Istanbul and Ankara.
Europe’s continuing resistance to a substantive resettlement program for Syrian migrants has created the political conditions for Mr. Erdogan’s government to seek another solution to this urgent problem. Ankara is justifying its cross-border operation into northern Syria as partly motivated by its desire to set up a safe zone, where at least a million Syrian refugees can be resettled.
Against such a political backdrop, American and European sanctions on Turkey will only backfire. They will be perceived as a reactive measure by Europe and the United States to penalize Turkey for unsettling the American plan to retain influence in the Middle East through its partnership with the Y.P.G. Sanctions could also decouple Turkey from the Western geostrategic orbit by weakening its allegiance to NATO — and accelerate its drift toward Russia and away from democratic values.
Turkey and the West need each other to influence the future of Syria. The United States and Europe need to shun the idea of sanctioning Turkey and follow a results-oriented policy with Ankara. Sanctions will cost the United States and Europe the ability to work with the only NATO nation bordering Syria. It will have ill-fated consequences for a lasting and sustainable settlement of the refugee problem and a more effective counterterrorism policy to address the challenge of the remaining foreign fighters in Syria.
And Turkey will lose the ability to leverage the support of its Western partners for its regional objectives. Turkey will be politically and diplomatically isolated in the negotiations for a political settlement in Syria, where Russia and Iran will play a major role.
Russia has already emerged as the most powerful piece on the Syrian chessboard. Moscow rapidly facilitated a deal between Mr. Assad’s regime and the Y.P.G., which allowed the Syrian Army — for the first time since 2012 — to take control of significant towns such as Manbij in northern Syria, which had been controlled by the Y.P.G.
The outcome is perfectly in line with Russia’s envisaged endgame — to ensure that Mr. Assad extends territorial control to all of Syria. And in the meantime, Moscow intends to force Turkey to reconcile with Mr. Assad.
Instead of sanctions, the United States and Europe need to devise a mutually agreed plan of action with Ankara that would incorporate three major elements. First, they need to acknowledge that the policy of support to the Y.P.G. has ended; no long-term constructive engagement with Turkey can work otherwise.
Second, Turkey, the United States and Europe should restart a strategic dialogue to foster a common approach to the constitutional order and security arrangements for a new Syria. Otherwise, Moscow and Tehran will be in increasingly strong positions to reshape the regional order.
And third, Turkey’s western partners should incentivize Ankara to return to an agenda of domestic political reforms, which would also tackle the country’s longstanding Kurdish problem.
An end to the Western policy of arming the Y.P.G. and ensuring that northeastern Syria will not be used as a zone to challenge Turkish national security will create the right conditions for Turkey to overhaul its ailing political system and expand the sphere of liberties.
Sinan Ulgen is the chairman of the Istanbul-based EDAM think tank and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:Your detailed history of Turkish Atrocities is the mark. The Turks have been brutal to minorities in Turkey. They even outlawed teaching the Kurdish language in Kurdish Schools.
@ Bear Klein: I agree with you about this, Bear
Ulgen is obviously an unofficial spokesman for the Erdogan government, the chairman of a “think-tank” whose purpose is to persuade people in the U.S. and elswhere in the West that his government’s policies are justified. That is certainly his right. But we need to examine his statements about the PKK and the Erdogan government, which are misleading in important respects.
The classification of the PKK as a terrorist organization is unfair, even if it is endorsed by the U.S. The group has very rarely if at all deliberately attacked Turkish civilians. Its “operations” have directed at Turkish soldiers and police, who after all have been waging war against the Kurds as well.The Kurds, under th leadership of the PKK, have rebelled against longstanding Turkish government policies that nearly all Kurds consider unjust, such as bans on the use of Kurdish in all schools, government offices and even publications, and efforts to ban even Kurdish folk festivals and traditional holidays For decades, the Turkish government has tried to force the Kurds to abandon their language and culture and become completely assimilated into Turkish society and culture. It is understanbible that the Kurds have rebelled against this.
The Turkish reaction to the Kurdish uprising was extremely brutal. Hundreds of Kurdish villages were leveled, tens of thousands of Kurds killed, and the entire Kurdish population herded into a few urban centers. The incendiary bombs dropped on the Kurdish areas were so hot that they melted steel and concrete structures into a glasslike substance.
A Dutch born Jewish scholar who I know told me a few years ago that the Dutch press has reported up to a million Turkish Kurds were killed in these counterinsurgency operations, although this figure has not been confirmed in the U.S. press.
Even so, the PKK negotiated a truce with the Turkish government and armedmore than ten years ago, and rarely or never violated it. There were a few Kurdish terrorist atacks of Turks during the truce years, but very few. The PKK blamed these attacks on a small “militant” extremist group that had seceded from the PKK and formed their own more militant organization. The PKKs spokesmann denounced these attacks and denied involvement in them.
Then about four years ago, the Erdogan regime unilaterally ended the truce and resumed the counterinsurgency campaign against the PKK, using the same indiscriminate counterinsurgency tactics as in the earlier campaign. Only a few small areas of southeastern Anatolia were still held by the PKK in 2016, and these were conquered and occupied by the the Turkish army within a few months. The PKK has not been active militarily in Anatolia for several years now. The Turkish-Kurdish rebellion has been defeated.
As for the “Syrian Democratic Forces,” which consist mainly of Kurds who ideologically support the PKK and recognize their political leadership, U.S. intelligence and military sources claim that they have never given any military assistance to their PKK “comrades” across the Turkish border, and have never attacked Turkish forces in either Turkey or Syria. The claim by the Turks that the SDR is a military threat to Turkey is false.
The Truth is that the present Turkish invasion of Syria is motivated by ethnic-Turkish chauvinism. In that sense, it is a continuation of the turk’s extermination of the Anatolian Armenians, who once numbered about two million in northwestern Anatolia, in a series of genocidal operations between 1890 and 1922. It is also a continuation of the massacre and expulsion of over two million ethnic Greeks from Anatolia during the same period. It has lfor over a century been a project of Turkish nationalists to exterminate, expel or forcibly assimilate all non-ethnic-Turks in Anatolia , leaving only ethnic Turks in the entire peninsula. It is shameful that the U.S. has provided the Turkish military with arms and failed to condemn Turkish aggression and repression of=ver the past seventy years. Shame on us.
Major trouble with this article is NOT recognizing that Erdogan has become the Dictator of Turkey (sarcastically called the Sultan by Turks). He is an Islamist who works with terror groups in Syria and elsewhere (e.g. Hamas). He is the leader of the Turkish Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in essence and deed.
Turkey can NOT be reformed until normal democratic minded Turks are again in charge of Turkey.