Turkey on the Edge

Desperate times call for desperate acts.
 
News is coming to us that the EU and Turkey have struck a breakthrough deal to halt (or, at least, significantly reduce) the migrant flows from Turkey to Europe. It appears that the Turks are prepared to take back every asylum seeker who arrives in Greece, in return for some concessions but mostly for good will.
 
One would like to think that this move is driven by altruism and a desire to be a better neighbour and global citizen. And perhaps it is.
But there is another way to read the situation.

One might look at Turkey’s current geopolitical position and conclude that Turkey is in a dire situation and needs as many friends as it can get.
 
 
Turkey’s weakness
Turkey’s great geopolitical weakness is the fact that the southwest quarter of Turkey is a land mostly populated by the ethnic minority, the Kurds. There are roughly 15 million Kurds in the southwestern corner of Turkey and roughly another fifteen million of them living just over the Turkish border in the adjacent corners of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Many of the Turkish Kurds have agitated for an independent state in the past. Many of them are still doing so today. What their efforts for independence have lacked in the past have been a powerful international sponsor.
 
 
The Threat from Russia
Right now Turkey must feel that there is a grave threat that Russia might ‘Play the Kurdish Card’
Russia is doing well in Syria, supporting the Assad regime, an opponent of Turkey (by Turkey here, and in the rest of the article, we will mean Turkey under the current government). The Syrian Kurds, yet another opponent of Turkey, are also doing well in Syria. Now while there is not yet any formal alliance between the Assad regime and the Kurds, they are in many ways natural allies. The Assad regime is based on the Alawite ethnic minority and so likes to protect minorities from being overwhelmed by Syria’s majority Sunni Arabs. The Kurds are another ethnic minority within Syria and they would like to keep the gains they have made in the Syrian Civil War. Not being numerous enough to control Syria themselves, the Kurds have to be considering that their lot might be better with the pro-minority Assad regime than with its majority Sunni Arab opponents.
 
Turkey is opposing both Russia and the Kurds in Syria. Turkey is afraid that these two might unite and then Russia might play the ‘Kurdish card’.
 
Right now, the conditions whereby Russia might seriously back Kurdish secession from Turkey appear to be drawing close.
Russia would have much to gain by such a move. It would: weaken an adversary; be seen as a liberator of an oppressed minority; create a large new ally in the Middle East, and; create, moreover, an ally which shares a border with Armenia a close ally of Russia and a member of its Eurasian Economic Union. A liberated Kurdistan could immediately join the Russia dominated Eurasian Economic Union. Something that would be an appealing prospect to the Russians for a number of reasons.
 

The Threat from the United States of America
The USA does not want to see Russia liberating the Kurds from Turkey and perhaps creating a strong pro-Russian Kurdish state encompassing all of the contiguous Kurdish regions from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and possibly even Iran. That would be a major coup for the Russians and would make them look like the liberator of an oppressed people. The USA likes to wear the mantle of liberator of oppressed peoples; it does not want the Russians to steal this mantle. So, to date, the USA has been keeping the Syrian Kurds away from the Russians by giving them lots of support and keeping Turkish troops away from them.
More than this the Americans are just putting the finishing touches on two military airbases within Syrian Kurdish territory.
 
The Turks must be very worried.
Could it be that the US is planning to support the Kurds rather than let the Russians support them? US warplanes are currently flying out of Turkish airbases; why build airbases just over the border in Kurdish held Syria? Is the US expecting a breach with Turkey?
 
The Turkish government has every reason to be extremely concerned. Right now it appears that both the world superpower and their closest military rival have some pressing reasons for supporting the independence aspirations of the Kurdish populations in their region. In the past, had one of these powers tried to 'Play the Kurdish Card' Turkey would have allied with the opposing power to help counteract the threat, but now that option does not appear possible.
Neither the USA or Russia have committed to supporting an independent Kurdistan yet, but the potential for such an action grows as both the Syrian and Iraqi Civil Wars rage on and the Kurds in both countries continue to be the most reliable allies that the USA has in both conflicts; while at the same time the Kurds are also the most logical allies of the Russians.
 
Given this predicament it is no wonder that the Turks are seeking to make an ally of Germany and the European Union. The Turks are in need of powerful friends and even more in need of international good will. In light of this, the fact that the Turks are suddenly agreeing to make big moves to help Europe solve its refuge crisis makes good sense.
 
What more can Turkey do?
Turkey needs to make its peace with the Kurds.
There are two ways it could do this. It could either let the Kurds secede or it could bring the Kurds so far into its power structures that they will see the Turkish state as belonging as much to them as to any Turk.
 
The Turks could benefit from letting the Kurds secede.
Geopolitically speaking, in many ways the Kurds and the Turks are natural partners. Even if all the Kurdish regions were combined into a large Kurdish state it would still be a landlocked country. Kurdistan would need to befriend a neighbour with some coastline. The relatively developed and prosperous peninsula ofTurkey would be a logical economic partner for an Independent Kurdistan. Even under today’s difficult conditions Iraqi Kurdistan has allied with Turkey to secretly build an oil pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
One also need not think that there would be an insurmountable reservoir of ill will from the Kurds toward their former rulers either. Hungary was under Austrian Habsburg rule for hundreds of years and yet now Austria is in many ways Hungary’s preferred neighbour. The reason why is because Austria agreed to allow local plebiscites along its border so that local communities could vote on which country they wanted to be in. By one such plebiscite the city of Sopron went from being Austrian to being Hungarian. As a result Hungary has no border disputes with Austria, unlike many of its other neighbours, and consequently Austrian-Hungarian relations are strong.
 
If Turkey, of its own volition, was to grant its Kurdish regions independence and ensure that the borders were in the right places. It would be seen as the midwife of Kurdish independence and gain much gratitude as a result. It would also immediately gain tremendous kudos with the Kurdish populations in neighbouring countries.
 
If Turkey is the first country to grant its Kurds independence it will immediately be seen as the greatest friend of the Kurds in the region and consequently any future Kurdish nation would be far more likely to form an economic or even political union with Turkey than any other of its neighbours. Letting the Kurds have independence could be Turkey’s road to truly becoming the leader of its region.
 
Even without its Kurdish corner Turkey would still be a large and powerful state of 65 million. It would be a richer place on average, as the Kurdish corner is a poorer region, and it may well be accepted into the European Union, as the ‘Kurdish Problem’ is the most cited reason for why the EU has not accepted Turkey to date.
 
 
Bringing the Kurds in
If Turkey is unwilling to see a quarter of its territory lost to another country (and most nations and leaders would be) then the only way to really make peace with the Kurds would be to bring them into the power structure so they feel that the country they share with the Turks is as much theirs as any Turk's. To do this they would probably need to change the name of the country and create some sort of federation. A Kurdish president might then convince the Kurdish masses that they were living in a country that was truly theirs.
 
In an earlier article below, I have already outlined that this is what I suspect Turkey’s president Erdogan has realised and is possibly trying to achieve. The constitutional changes that would be needed would never get through the Turkish parliament as it now stands, so that might be one of the reasons why Erdogan is trying to change system so that he has more power as president. It is also a potential reason for his recent secretive visits to the jailed Kurdish resistance leader Abdullah Ocalan and Abdullah Ocalan’s consequent request that the Kurdish partisans put down their arms and cooperate in a democratic solution. It is possible that Ocalan found the idea of a Kurdish/Turkish federation an acceptable alternative to an independent Kurdistan.
If Erdogan did have such plans it is understandable that he would not make them publically known as they would not be popular with many Turkish nationalist and in a democratic system they could easily be blocked. Erdogan might well be seeking his increased powers in order to be able to make the changes to the country that he sees as necessary.  For now, Erdogan is pursuing a constitutional route to increased presidential powers, but with all that is going on in Turkey at the moment, combining terrorist attacks with refugees and wars on its borders, one could imagine Erdogan finding enough justification in some near future event for the declaration of martial law. He could then take to himself all the powers that he needs. Such a declaration of martial law, need not necessarily be contrived either. There are many ways in which the wars on Turkey’s borders could eventually impact on Turkey in a way that makes the assumption of martial law prudent.
 
In conclusion
Turkey’s offers of to take back all refugees travelling to Greece from Turkey should buy a lot of goodwill from Germany and the EU, and Turkey is very much in need of allies at the moment. In this article I have set out, in relatively simple terms, what Turkey has to fear and some possible solutions.
There are many scenarios that could play out from our current circumstances that would bring transformative change to Turkey.  The sudden, dramatic offers in relation to refugees are an indicator that the governing elite of Turkey know that they are in a far more precarious and challenging situation than most would like to admit.