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Κυριακή 15 Ιανουαρίου 2012

NEWS OF INTERNATIONAL INTERESTING


Ιαν15

 by anacondagr on Ιανουαρίου 15th, 2012 at 10:30

Posted In: Διεθνείς Εξελίξεις
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Can Turkey Really Be a Political Model for Its Region?

From the outset of the ‘Arab Spring’, Turkey has pursued an active foreign policy and supported a number of recent popular uprisings throughout the Arab world.
BY SEYED ALI ALAVI | JANUARY 13, 2012
RECEP_TAYYIP_ERDOGAN
Having appeared on Arab TV channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to express Turkish support of political opposition in revolutionary Arab countries, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Ahmet Dayutoglu, is now a familiar and popular figure in the Arab world. The Turkish Prime Minister conducted an ‘Arab Spring Tour’, where he visited post-uprising Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. In his visit to the latter, Ergodan was greeted at the airport by chairman of Libya’s new National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil. Ergodan has even been compared by some to the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan Arab propaganda, amongst other factors, made him a regional hero in the 1950s.
What is more, Turkey has, as its Western allies, stepped up pressure on neighbouring Syria – a country that Mr. Ergodan once promoted close connections with – by calling on Bashar Al Assad to recognise the will of the Syrian people and step down as president. His view is – somewhat ironically, as the latter part of this article will show – that a future cannot be built on ‘the blood of the oppressed’. Statements such as this one have been warmly received by the Arab streets, as has Turkey’s leading sponsorship of exiled Syrian opposition, whose meetings and events have been facilitated in Istanbul and Ankara.
Just as Turkey’s support for the popular uprisings was welcomed in the Arab world, the country’s (op)position toward the Assad regime has been commended by the United States and the European Union. More generally, the country has received praise from Western and Arab pundits, some of whom have suggested that the seemingly successful political model in which Turkey’s moderate Islamic government coexists with democracy and secularism, be the model that emerging democracies in the region replicate. There is, however, reason to be vigilant about Turkey as a regional political role model. In late December 2011, around the period when Turkish foreign delegates were visiting Arab countries and making strong statements in support of revolutionary uprisings, the Turkish military launched an offensive air strike using highly advanced F-16 warplanes, targeted at Kurdish villages along the Turkish and Iraq-Kurdistan border. The attacks killed 35 villagers. To its major embarrassment, the Turkish government admitted that the dead, originally thought to be fighters from the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), were in fact civilians. This episode brings to mind Turkey’s ongoing and longstanding ethnic rights issue towards its Kurdish minority, for which it has yet to find a peaceful solution. This is in spite of what has appeared as goodwill – or perhaps simply good diplomacy – on part of the Turkish Prime Minister who, when taking office in 2003, promised that his government would alter Turkey’s policy of Kurdish suppression. The ethnic minority issue also persists despite Mr. Ergodan being the first Turkish Prime Minister to visit Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq, and opening a Turkish consulate there in March 2011.
Some elements within the Turkish political and military establishment as well as some extremists within the Kurdistan Worker’s Party’s political structure seem to view any Turkish initiatives towards the Kurdish question as disadvantageous for their respective political ambitions. Be that as it may, escalation of ‘domestic’ violence in Turkey begs the question of whether the country in fact merits the praise and role model status that some have granted it. Being a democratic country requires implementation of ethnic minorities’ human rights. In order for the ‘Turkish model’ to be one worth replicating in post-authoritarian Arab states, Turkey must first and foremost pursue coherently within its own borders the pro-democracy rhetoric that it has been promoting throughout the Arab world.
Seyed Ali Alavi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies


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by anacondagr on Ιανουαρίου 14th, 2012 at 20:37
Posted In: Διεθνείς Εξελίξεις
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January 14, 2012

Turkey’s Limited Options for Projecting Power in North Africa



Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the head of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), said in an interview published in Turkish media Wednesday that Turkey had agreed to train the new Libyan army. Abdel-Jalil said the deal, which will see Libyan soldiers sent to Turkey for instruction, was arranged when he met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Istanbul last week.
Abdel-Jalil did not say precisely when the training will begin and there was no immediate confirmation from Ankara. But the announcement itself obscures a larger issue: Libya does not yet actually have a fully established army. In fact, in the aftermath of the downfall of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, Libya still lacks any centralized political authority. The country is still struggling to recover from the monthslong war against Gadhafi, and neither the NTC nor the transitional government it formed in November constitutes a true, legitimized authority. Power lies in the hands of the armed militias, and none of those are strong enough on their own to begin acting as a national military force. The international community has long viewed the NTC as the embryo of the future Libyan state. Yet at the moment, the NTC counts among its challenges the most basic task of state formation: establishing internal security. The ongoing formation of the Libyan National Army is the centerpiece of the NTC’s push to accomplish this task, but so far, all attempts at threatening the militias into subservience have accomplished next to nothing.
Ankara is in no position to help Abdel-Jalil and the NTC consolidate power, but the Turks do see an opportunity in Libya to re-establish their influence in North Africa. Turkey is thus dealing with the governing body with which, as a result of the war, it is most familiar. Turkey was hesitant to come on board with the NATO operation that sought to oust Gadhafi, and it never did participate in the air campaign itself. Nevertheless, Ankara staunchly supported the NTC in several other arenas throughout most of the conflict. Abdel-Jalil has a personal relationship with the Turkish leadership, which sees in Libya a bigger opportunity than what exists in Tunisia and Egypt. Unlike the other two North African countries affected this year by regional uprisings, Libya underwent a complete regime collapse, meaning there is a much larger power vacuum for outside players to fill. In the eyes of the NTC, Turkey helped play a role – even if a slight one — in ousting the Gadhafi regime. Considering the amount of high-quality crude oil Libya possesses, Ankara sees the potential for more than just strategic benefits in filling such a vacuum.
North Africa was always a difficult place for the Turks to control, even during the height of the Ottoman Empire. The region sat on the empire’s periphery and typically proved a net drain on Turkey’s resources. Egypt, which Turkey wants to shape as its regional proxy in North Africa, could never truly be conquered by outside powers — whether that power was British, French or Ottoman. Although Turkey seems to believe it will be able to bring Egypt back under its influence, the Egyptian ruling elite is highly unlikely to share this vision. As concerns the Maghreb, the Ottomans found great difficulty in trying to project influence along the Barbary Coast and in fact, they outsourced much of their imperial management in this region to the Barbary States. Now that new Islamist-oriented polities are rising in stature in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the government led by the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara is searching for a warm reception for a return of Turkish influence in the region. In any case, Turkey must first deal with a set of constraints much closer to home. These will make North Africa a secondary issue concern for the time being.
Internally, Turkey is dealing with several issues that will require much of the AKP’s attention in the coming year: a looming struggle to amend the constitution, rumored reports that Erdogan is suffering from a severe and potentially life-threatening illness and an ongoing political power struggle between Islamists and secularists. Libya is not even Ankara’s top foreign policy priority. Turkey is far more concerned with the instability right across its own border in Syria, for example, than it is with the state of the Libyan army. Despite the headlines, Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s regime has shown no signs of imminent collapse, and it is very possible that this problem will continue to fester throughout next year.
Turkey has made clear its stance in Syria’s regard: it wants al Assad to go. Ankara wants Syria to return to Sunni rule, but the Turkish government has not shown that it is prepared to do what it takes to make this happen. Most critically, Turkey is watching a power vacuum in Iraq being filled by the Shia majority and by Turkey’s natural competitor, Iran. The intensifying crisis in Iraq is already causing the country to show signs of either fracturing or coming under the control of a centralized Shiite power in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal. Either of the above scenarios would have an impact on Kurdish militants in Turkey and on Turkey’s overall ability to expand in the region. Turkey undoubtedly has a strategic interest in North Africa. The question is whether Ankara will actually be able to project influence further afield, at a time when it faces much more critical issues closer to home

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