Turkey under the electorally sanctioned dominion of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming ever more surreal for many of its people, and an increasingly unreliable partner for its allies in Nato and the EU. Mr Erdogan, elected president last year after three terms as prime minister, is focused on winning the next general election this summer, which would give him 10 successive victories at the polls. Securing triumph for his neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) and cementing his hold on power eclipses all other considerations but in ways that can be both disturbing and bizarre. Already facing criticism about Turkey’s reluctance to commit to the US-led coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), the government has imposed a court-ordered ban on reporting of documents that allegedly prove the country’s main spy agency sent arms to Syrian rebels last year, some of which may have ended up in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, the local chapter of al-Qaeda. The well-founded suspicion of arms shipments does not just reflect badly on Ankara. The US and European powers advocated the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime but declined to provide mainstream Syrian rebels with the means to do so. Instead, it largely outsourced support for the rebellion to the Gulf countries and Turkey, which became a jihadi pipeline into the Syrian war — one that could now blow back. But Turkey’s failure to adopt a robust policy against Isis — by, for example, making its bases available to coalition warplanes — is another matter. Mr Erdogan wants to avoid any chance of Isis reprisals inside Turkey. But from his point of view, Isis and Nusra are fighting against three enemies: the Iran-backed Shia axis that stretches from Baghdad to Beirut; Syrian Kurdish insurgents allied to the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) that has waged a 30-year struggle against Ankara; and the Assads. Yet Mr Erdogan and his handpicked successor as premier, Ahmet Davutoglu, are wriggling on the hook of a failed foreign policy. It is not just that their neo-Ottoman fantasy of regaining leadership of the Arab world, through allies like the Muslim Brotherhood, has gone up in flames. Mr Erdogan evidently admires Vladimir Putin. He has had little to say on Russia’s push into Ukraine, but periodically suggests Turkey should join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation rather than the EU, and vituperates against Nato allies. (They “look like friends but they want us dead”, he said last year). But it is not just what he does, it is the way he does it. One might think that his liberal use of illiberal bans merely amplifies the news he is trying to suppress. But Mr Erdogan’s calculus is domestic. In November, when the cost of his kitschy new palace, four times the size of Versailles, threatened to turn into a scandal, the president announced that Muslim explorers discovered America three centuries before Columbus. That certainly changed the subject. Similarly, his recent practice of greeting visiting dignitaries to the palace with an honour guard of 16 soldiers dressed up as Turkic warriors from bygone empires is beyond satire. But he can keep a straight face because the story is not the palace itself — and unlike the metropolitan Twitterati of Turkey who erupt in melancholy scorn at these spectacles, his followers get their news from supine TV stations. Yet even if his focus is domestic and tactical, such erratic and authoritarian behaviour may force the west to rethink its alliance with Mr Erdogan’s Turkey. Symbolism, moreover, even of the faux-Ottoman pantomime variety, ultimately needs substance.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 09:40:23 +0000