Syria’s war impacts on Turkish politics

One of the focal points of next year’s elections will be how Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan handles the conflict raging within Turkey’s southern neighbor

By VICTORIA ADAL
Semih Işeri521 (photo credit: OSMAN ORSAL / REUTERS)
Semih Işeri521
(photo credit: OSMAN ORSAL / REUTERS)
Standing on broken glass and blood spatters from car bombs that exploded four days earlier, 21-year-old Semih Işeri gestures at the wreckage from a vantage point high up in a building overlooking the site of the second blast. “Erdoğan wants a new Ottoman Empire,” he says. “That’s what the Ottoman Empire looks like.”
Işeri, an international relations student, is a member of a Turkish opposition group with a Kemalist program of secularism and nationalism. He came to Reyhanli from Ankara in order to see for himself what is happening in his country. He blames the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for the attack, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government for supporting the rebels, whom he calls “terrorists.”
“There is an Arab Spring, or whatever you want to call it, but that’s [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s business. It’s Syria’s business. It’s not our business, but we are intervening because Erdoğan wants to make another Ottoman Empire,” Işeri says. “The West says we should declare war on Syria, but we don’t want war. We are not a strong country.”
The twin car bombs in Reyhanli May 11 left over 50 people dead and injured hundreds more, in the deadliest attack on Turkey’s soil in decades. They also exposed fissures inside the political structures of Turkey.
Ankara promptly pointed the finger at the Syrian regime, accusing Assad of working through a middleman, the fugitive Turkish terrorist, Mihraç Ural, who found asylum in Syria in 1980. Ural claimed responsibility for the massacre of hundreds in the coastal town of Baniyas, Syria, earlier in May.
But many Turks put the blame elsewhere.
In Reyhanli, conspiracy theories like Işeri’s abound, pointing the blame at FSA fighters.
Elsewhere in Turkey, opposition activists have protested against the policies of the government for letting the Syrian refugees in, in the first place.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, thousands turned out in Reyhanli, Antakya and other cities across Turkey to protest the opening of the borders to refugees and demand Erdoğan’s resignation. In Antakya, protesters demanded the closing of the “terrorist camps,” referring to the Syrian refugee camps inside Hatay province.
The protesters denounced the insensitivity of the government towards the will of the people, the general warmongering of the ruling party, amid accusations of the fomenting of sectarianism and Islamism and censoring free press. Riot police responded with tear gas and water cannons in a brutal show of force that many found appalling.
Later this year, Turkey will celebrate the 90th anniversary of its founding as a Westward-looking, secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk. Hailed as a foremost example of a Muslim democracy, it is also a country where major cities see protests every weekend, and where the riot police often radically outnumber protesters.
Tear gas wafts through the streets of Istanbul nearly every week, and a recent May Day protest, in which unions were not allowed to gather at Taksim Square as usual, had half the city’s 40,000 police deployed.
The ruling AKP party has lost support at home for its policy of siding with the Syrian rebels, and also for drafting legislation that many moderate Muslims find too radical. In an apparent effort to bolster his conservative voting base, Erdoğan has recently put a number of controversial items before the legislature, such as a ban on kissing in public and strict limitations on advertising and purchasing alcohol.
These issues existed before the Syrian war, but the war has given new grief to old arguments. And Hatay province lies at the crossroads of many of these issues.
Reyhanli lies on the Syrian border and serves as a corridor for humanitarian aid going into Syria and for refugees coming out.
Atmeh, just over the border on the Syrian side, is also known for its high number of foreign fighters (mujahideen), Muslims who come from elsewhere in the world to pursue jihad in Syria.
The town has one main strip and three roundabouts. Its pre- Syrian civil war population of 60,000 has nearly doubled, as some 40,000 Syrians have escaped, most in the past year, the increasingly brutal fighting at home.
Reyhanli’s economy has taken off as a result of its proximity to the Syrian border. Houses that were once rented for $100 a month now go for $700, says Yasir Alsyed, an attorney who used to defend political prisoners before military courts in Syria. He left Aleppo nearly a year and a half ago and has lived in Reyhanli for eight months, where he directs a rehabilitation center for disabled Syrians.
As Syria’s civil war has grown more and more sectarian, with largely Sunni rebels pitted against an Alawite regime, ordinary citizens have succumbed to anger and hatred based on sect as well. This is true in Syria but also in Turkey’s Hatay province, which used to be part of Syria. The older generations in Hatay speak Arabic as well as Turkish, and many families have members on both sides of the border. While Reyhanli’s Turks, as well as the Syrians who have found refuge there, are nearly 100 percent Sunni, Hatay province has many Alawites as well (not to be confused with Turkish Alevis, though both sects are Shia, and overall fairly secular). Not far away is Syria’s Latakia city, the homeland of the Alawites.
In Antakya, most merchants are Alawi, Alsyed explains, and when international aid organizations began basing themselves in Reyhanli, the trade for Sunnis went up, and the trade for Alawites in Antakya went down. And as the civil war in Syria took an increasingly sectarian tone, he adds, “now Sunnis always look for Sunni shops. They won’t buy from Alawites in Antakya. It wasn’t like this before.”
Sitting behind a stately desk in what would be a normal office, except that all the windows have been blown out, Reyhanli Mayor Hüseyin Can Şanverdi reiterates the national government’s assertions about those responsible for the attack. “It was the Syrian regime, certainly,” he says. “They attacked Reyhanli because Reyhanli cooperates so much with Syrian people and sends so much aid. For two years, there have never been any problems here.”
Over the sound of bulldozers that operate frenetically to scrape up rubble, Şanverdi asserts that Reyhanli will move forward, and that his building will be repaired within a week. But for the largerscale questions, he says, “the international community and the US definitely have to help Turkey with the situation.”
Turkey has taken center stage both as the obvious place to flee, and because the government has openly supported the rebels from the beginning. Perhaps expecting support from the international community, the Turkish government is now in the uncomfortable position of receiving none, and being drawn into a war that is only getting worse – there is some possible evidence of chemical weapons, Hezbollah fighters have entered on Assad’s side, and Jebhat al-Nusra, the most powerful of the rebel groups, has sworn openly an alliance to al-Qaida and is blacklisted by the US as a terrorist organization. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which collects data from both sides of the conflict, counts between 100 and 200 dead every day.
Erdoğan’s visit to Washington, on May 16, to meet US President Barack Obama, was rained out in more ways than one – while many expected him to lobby heavily for US assistance, the meeting and press conference were overshadowed by Obama’s domestic troubles, an IRS scandal and residual questions about the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed acting Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Just after the Reyhanli bombings, Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu threatened that such attacks on Turkish soil would force retaliation, but the rhetoric toned down quickly after the meeting failed to gain US backing for direct military intervention.
Many Turks are skeptical about how quick the government was to point the finger at Mihraç Ural, a Turkish Alawite from Iskenderun, just north of Antakya in Hatay province. Protesters accused Erdoğan of fomenting sectarianism with the rapid accusation against Ural, and they say this sectarianism is also a factor in the AKP stance on opposition political movements.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP), a center-leftist party with a Kemalist ideology, is currently the main opposition bloc in parliament. Erdoğan has accused the CHP of supporting the Assad regime by criticizing the aggressive strategy of the AKP and advocating a political solution.
The Hürriyet newspaper reported on March 22 that Erdoğan said, in an apparent reference to the Alevi faith of CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, “Don’t forget that a person’s religion is the religion of his friend. Tell me who your friend is and I’ll tell you who you are.”
But this is disinformation. Bashar Assad’s minority Alawite sect, a Shia offshoot, has ruled Syria since his father, Hafez, took power in 1970. Many Turks are Alevi, another Shia sect, the name of which also derives from the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin Ali; but the two sects are not the same. Alevis practice an eclectic mixture of Shiism, shamanism and Sufi Islam. Alawites can more properly be called Nusayris, as their branch of Shiism is distinguished by an allegiance to a 9th century cleric known as Ibn Nusayr.
The conflict between the ruling party and the Alevis didn’t start yesterday. In 1993, Salafis torched a hotel in Sivas where a prominent Alevi poet and many other Alevi intellectuals were gathered for a cultural event. The fire left 37 people dead – 35 Alevis and two hotel employees – and many feel that the government pursued the prosecution of those responsible halfheartedly, until the statute of limitations came into effect. Protests in support of free speech and secularism continue to occur on the anniversary of the massacre every year.
The final insult added to the injury of the Reyhanli attacks was when the city’s District Court banned press members from working in the area in the immediate aftermath of the explosions. Citing privacy concerns for the victims and concern for the integrity of the investigation, within two hours of the bombings, the Reyhanli Magistrate’s Court issued a ban on transmission of news concerning the attacks. Reporters Without Borders condemned the move.
Turkey is already ranked by the Committee to Protect Journalists as the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with 49 held in prison as of last December; 98 percent on anti-state laws or accusations of abetting terror groups, and 74 percent are members of pro-Kurdish media. According to CPJ, many of those imprisoned are “charged under a vague anti-terror law that allows the authorities to equate coverage of banned groups with terrorism itself.”
It is a confusing panorama for a modern democracy that has bitten off more than it can chew alone in supporting the Syrian rebels. Turkish elections next year will presumably focus on how Erdoğan and the AKP handle the crisis.
But in the meantime, with the war in Syria showing no signs of ending, the realities on the other side of the border are more immediate. “Some people don’t agree, but the government helps for humanitarian reasons,” says Izeffin Kanadaş, a schoolteacher in Reyhanli.
“But the Syrian people are running away from death.” 