Erdogan’s dreams of empire are perilous for Turkey

[trident]

Erdogan’s dreams of empire are perilous for Turkey

Norman Stone

 

Ankara is becoming far bolder with its foreign policy. Provoking Russia over Syria may be a step too far, though

 

The aggressiveness of Turkish foreign policy is something new. It goes back to 2009 when, at Davos, President Erdoğan insulted Shimon Peres, then Israel’s president, using the Turkish form of “you” that is normally used for dogs, and accusing him of atrocities in Gaza. That went down very well with his home constituency, less well with Turks who think about things, and it also went down well in the Arab world.

Russia is right: fighting Isis is the priority for us all

 

Giora Eiland Erdoğan was lionised, and cut a big figure in the Arab spring that followed. In particular he tried to bring about change in Syria, and was much put out when President Assad did not respond to his urgings for reform, a reform that would have applied some version of Erdoğan’s own “Muslim democracy”. Expecting Assad to fall, he did nothing to stop the civil war that then erupted, and gave a hospitable welcome to more than 2 million refugees who flooded over the border.

He no doubt expected them to go back within weeks. They did not, and the Syrian mess has become more and more complicated, particularly by the emergence of a Kurdish entity on Turkey’s border. That entity could be a threat to Turkey’s own territorial integrity, given that south-eastern Turkey is largely Kurdish. The Russians then took a hand, directly supporting Assad, their man in the Levant, and driving his opponents back. And Turkey shot down a Russian bomber, an episode that from a Turkish perspective was utterly without precedent, even during the cold war. Where this will lead is anybody’s guess, but the consequences may be such that the framers of Turkish foreign policy will look back on the old days with nostalgia.

When the country finally got its present shape, in 1923, there were all sorts of loose ends – the longest, and the one with a fuse attached, the eastern border with northern Iraq, ie Kurdistan. The British fixed that border in 1926 with their own oil interests in mind, whereas the Turks regarded that part of the world as naturally belonging to them. However, they accepted the arrangement, and until recently pursued a prudent foreign policy, on the lines of their founder Kemal Atatürk’s words: peace at home, peace abroad. No adventures.

When Turkey did move forward, in 1938 over the Antioch area or in 1974 over Cyprus, it did so by invitation and with solid treaty-backing. Otherwise it was extra careful, especially where Russia was concerned. Although there were embittered Caucasian exiles all around – half of the urban population in the 1930s had been born abroad – Caucasus exile literature was forbidden, and a prominent central Asian scholar was imprisoned in 1945 for provoking trouble with Russia.

The reasoning behind all of this was simple enough. Russia was hugely powerful, had defeated the Ottoman empire in a dozen wars, but had also played a decisive part in protecting the new Turkish republic. The Russians sent gold and weaponry to the Turkish nationalists, and did a deal over borders, in effect swapping Armenia for Azerbaijan. Later on, they swapped Trotsky for a shirt factory, and a Russian took charge of energy planning. In return the Turks sacked pan-Turkists from Istanbul University and imprisoned a prominent scholar, ZV Togan.

That all came to an end after the second world war, when Stalin showed his teeth. He demanded a base in the Dardanelles and territories in eastern Turkey. The Americans and British supported the Turks, who abandoned their neutrality and joined Nato, having fought in the Korean war. They got Marshall aid and, given the enormous importance of their location, had a privileged position: thousands of students abroad, much help from the IMF, access to European markets and especially the German labour market.

 

Conservative Turks are now protesting against Erdogan, too – things must be bad

Alev Scott

 

The Anglo-American connection has been very important in lifting Turkey out of the Middle East – it now has an economy worth more than any of its local rivals, and then some. Since the American alliance at least implied democracy, the Turks had a free election in 1950. And the government that resulted was the grandfather of the present one. It made whoopee with state firms, and ensured popularity by giving Islam positions that the earlier republicans had denied it.

They had not actually persecuted Islam except in the sense that they stopped it from persecuting. “Houses of the people”, on a Soviet model, had gone up in the villages to teach literacy and healthy ways to poverty-stricken peasants for whom the imam was the natural guide, as was the priest for poverty-stricken peasants in rural Ireland or Italy. The 1950s government closed down the “houses of the people”, and mosques went up instead. There are now more than 80,000.

A mania, yes, but at bottom not so very different from the Victorian church-building that affected every street corner in England. Rural migrants need a centre, and that centre can mobilise their votes. The interesting question in Turkish politics is the failure of the left to divert them from the mosque. In effect the army had to take the role of the left, with coups from time to time, ensuring women their rights, and making sure that education was not entirely dominated by Qur’anic recitation.

There were (and, God knows, are) intelligent and sensible people on the religious side, and they know that religion should not be rammed down people’s throats. The real great man of modern Turkey is Turgut Özal, who outwitted the military in the 1980s, opened Turkey up to the exporting world, and created the (mostly) successful country of today. He had a strict religious background, but knew abroad (he had worked in the World Bank) and also understood that there would be real trouble if he pushed religion too far. He was part-Kurdish and knew that the problem there was that Turkey had allowed the Kurds to feel like second-class citizens. Above all, he understood the importance of keeping to the prudent tradition of Turkish foreign policy. He died in 1993, and no one has taken his place.

Özal was Turkey’s Thatcher (they got on very well) and the 1980s release of energy has carried Turkey to its present prosperity – its businessmen all over the world, its airline maybe the best, its writers read, its government everywhere consulted. But politics being complicated, he did not leave a conservative block that would perpetuate his legacy. Instead, we have the religious AKP, with an all-powerful leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has made it his duty to raise “pious generations” and who is helping his Muslim Brotherhood allies in the Syrian civil war.

 

Turkey could cut off Islamic State’s supply lines. So why doesn’t it?

David Graeber

 

It is also obvious that Islamic State has had help from Turkey, since the overthrow of the defiant Assad is Erdoğan’s priority, although the vastly respected editor of the country’s most venerable newspaper has been detained pending trial for publishing the evidence. And then there are the Kurds, clearly getting their act together. They are, as their greatest figure in Turkey, Kamran Inan (an Özal associate who has just died), said, “a wounded people”, partly alienated from Turkey, and the rest of the world now sees in Kurdistan a possible solution. Erdoğan’s adventurism has been quite successful so far, but it amounts to an extraordinary departure for Turkish foreign policy, and maybe even risks the destruction of the country. How on earth could this happen?

The background is an inferiority complex, and megalomania. For centuries, and even since the Mongols, sensible Islam has asked: “What went wrong? Why has God forsaken us, and allowed others to reach the moon?” And now Turkey stands tall, a voice unto the nations (and Tayyip Erdoğan, from his training on the soccer pitch and a religious school, indeed has a voice, part uplift-sermon, part referee-harangue, though its rhetorical effect does not translate).

Chancellor Merkel comes begging for help in the refugee crisis, and the Europeans shut up about editor-imprisoning. All of a sudden, they agree to change the visa system that humiliated Turkish businessmen and academics. The Americans can be managed. In the old days, Turkey had two foreign policies towards Washington, which controlled the IMF purse strings – “me, too” and “oh dear”. Now it is more likely to be the US adopting those positions.

President Erdoğan sits in his Chinese-airport palace and sees himself as restorer of the Ottoman empire. In the Ottomans’ great period, the 16th century, Russia was just a sort of noise off to the north. But in challenging it, the good President Erdoğan will find something a great deal more formidable. In breaking with the traditions of Turkish foreign policy, he has forgotten that the death blows come not from the west, but from the east – Iran and Syria, the army of which twice reached Istanbul in the 19th century.

Now it seems that the western powers will cooperate with Russia in tacit upholding of Assad, in pursuit of the greater enemy, Isis. In other words, Turkey might just be isolated. In this latest affair, is there an element of provocation – that if Putin responds harshly to the downing of his aircraft, the Americans will be pushed into proclaiming a no-fly zone behind which Erdoğan can quietly deal with the enemies whom he wants to deal with, the Kurds, who now amount to the main challenge to his regime? He has been immensely successful so far, but is this the step that will bring him down, as his tame central Anatolian constituency begins to feel the winter cold? If there is one lesson for a ruler of Turkey it is this: do not provoke Russia.

 

source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/06/erdogan-turkey-russia-syria-foreign-policy

Edited December 6, 2015 by trident

[umbertino]

Erdogan is a dangerous Individual / Dictator. It seems his son is involved in the purchase / sale of ISIS oil

[umbertino]

He hates the Kurds and wants to destroy them

[trident]

Turkish journalists charged over claim that secret services armed Syrian rebels

Two editors from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper face lengthy jail sentences for alleging that Ankara’s intelligence agency was supplying weapons

Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, right, and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul outside court on Thursday. Photograph: Vedat Arik/AP Agence France-Presse Friday 27 November 2015 

 

A court in Istanbul has charged two journalists from the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper with spying after they alleged Turkey’s secret services had sent arms to Islamist rebels in Syria.

 

Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief, and Erdem Gul, the paper’s Ankara bureau chief, are accused of spying and “divulging state secrets”, Turkish media reported. Both men were placed in pre-trial detention.

Turkey: journalists and political rivals arrested as Erdoğan crackdown widens

 

According to Cumhuriyet, Turkish security forces in January 2014 intercepted a convoy of trucks near the Syrian border and discovered boxes of what the daily described as weapons and ammunition to be sent to rebels fighting against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

It linked the seized trucks to the Turkish national intelligence organisation (MIT).

The revelations, published in May, caused a political storm in Turkey, and enraged president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who vowed Dundar would pay a “heavy price”.

He personally filed a criminal complaint against Dundar, 54, demanding he serve multiple life sentences.

Turkey has vehemently denied aiding Islamist rebels in Syria, such as the Islamic State group, although it wants to see Assad toppled.

“Don’t worry, this ruling is nothing but a badge of honour to us,” Dundar told reporters and civil society representatives at the court before he was taken into custody.

Reporters Without Borders had earlier on Thursday urged the judge hearing the case to dismiss the charges against the pair, condemning the trial as “political persecution”.

The Cumhuriyet daily was awarded the media watchdog’s 2015 Press Freedom Prize just last week, with Dundar travelling to Strasbourg to receive the award.

“If these two journalists are imprisoned, it will be additional evidence that the Turkish authorities are ready to use methods worthy of a bygone age in order to suppress independent journalism in Turkey,” said RSF secretary general Christophe Deloire in a statement.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 149th out of 180 in its 2015 press freedom index last month, warning of a “dangerous surge in censorship”.

 

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/27/turkish-journalists-charged-over-claim-that-secret-services-armed-syrian-rebels

[trident]

Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey’s President.

 

In addition to son Bilal’s illegal and lucrative oil trading for ISIS, Sümeyye Erdogan, the daughter of the Turkish President apparently runs a secret hospital camp inside Turkey just over the Syrian border.

 

By ZeroHedge.com | November 30, 2015

 

Bilal Erdogan, the son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan leaves a polling station after he voted, in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, June 7, 2015.

Turks are heading to the polls in a crucial parliamentary election that will determine whether ruling party lawmakers can rewrite the constitution to bolster the powers of President Erdogan.

All eyes will be on the results for the main Kurdish party, the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, (HDP). If it crosses a 10 percent threshold for entering parliament as a party, that would extinguish AKP’s constitutional plans. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Russia’s Sergey Lavrov is not one foreign minister known to mince his words. Just earlier today, 24 hours after a Russian plane was brought down by the country whose president three years ago said “a short-term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack”, had this to say: “We have serious doubts this was an unintended incident and believe this is a planned provocation” by Turkey.

But even that was tame compared to what Lavrov said to his Turkish counterparty Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier today during a phone call between the two (Lavrov who was supposed to travel to Turkey has since canceled such plans).

 

As Sputnik transcribes, according to a press release from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov pointed out that, “by shooting down a Russian plane on a counter-terrorist mission of the Russian Aerospace Force in Syria, and one that did not violate Turkey’s airspace, the Turkish government has in effect sided with ISIS.”

It was in this context when Lavrov added that “Turkey’s actions appear premeditated, planned, and undertaken with a specific objective.”

More importantly, Lavrov pointed to Turkey’s role in the propping up the terror network through the oil trade. Per the Russian statement:

“The Russian Minister reminded his counterpart about Turkey’s involvement in the ISIS’ illegal trade in oil, which is transported via the area where the Russian plane was shot down,

and about the terrorist infrastructure, arms and munitions depots and control centers that are also located there

.”

Others reaffirmed Lavrov’s stance, such as retired French General Dominique Trinquand, who said that “Turkey is either not fighting ISIL at all or very little, and does not interfere with different types of smuggling that takes place on its border, be it oil, phosphate, cotton or people,” he said.

The reason we find this line of questioning fascinating is that just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”

Precisely one week later, in even more tragic circumstances, suddenly everyone is asking this question.

And while we patiently dig to find who the on and offshore “commodity trading” middleman are, who cart away ISIS oil to European and other international markets in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, one name keeps popping up as the primary culprit of regional demand for the Islamic State’s “terrorist oil” – that of Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s son: Bilal Erdogan.

His very brief bio:

Necmettin Bilal Erdogan, commonly known as Bilal Erdogan (born 23 April 1980) is the third child of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the current President of Turkey.

After graduating from Kartal Imam Hatip High School in 1999, Bilal Erdogan moved to the US for undergraduate education. He also earned a Masters Degree in John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2004. After graduation, he served in the World Bank as intern for a while. He returned Turkey in 2006 and started to his business life. Bilal Erdogan is one of the three equal shareholders of “BMZ Group Denizcilik “, a marine transportation corporation.

Here is a recent picture of Bilal, shown in a photo from a Turkish 2014 article, which “asked why his ships are now in Syria”:

In the next few days, we will present a full breakdown of Bilal’s various business ventures, starting with his BMZ Group which is the name implicated most often in the smuggling of illegal Iraqi and Islamic State through to the western supply chain, but for now here is a brief, if very disturbing snapshot, of both father and son Erdogan by F. William Engdahl, one which should make everyone ask whether the son of Turkey’s president (and thus, the father) is the silent mastermind who has been responsible for converting millions of barrels of Syrian Oil into hundreds of millions of dollars of Islamic State revenue.

By F. William Engdahl, posted originally in New Eastern Outlook:

Erdogan’s Dirth Dangerous ISIS Games

More and more details are coming to light revealing that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, variously known as ISIS, IS or Daesh, is being fed and kept alive by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish President and by his Turkish intelligence service, including MIT, the Turkish CIA. Turkey, as a result of Erdogan’s pursuit of what some call a Neo-Ottoman Empire fantasies that stretch all the way to China, Syria and Iraq, threatens not only to destroy Turkey but much of the Middle East if he continues on his present path.

In October 2014 US Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard gathering that Erdogan’s regime was backing ISIS with “hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons…” Biden later apologized clearly for tactical reasons to get Erdo?an’s permission to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, but the dimensions of Erdogan’s backing for ISIS since revealed is far, far more than Biden hinted.

ISIS militants were trained by US, Israeli and now it emerges, by Turkish special forces at secret bases in Konya Province inside the Turkish border to Syria, over the past three years. Erdo?an’s involvement in ISIS goes much deeper. At a time when Washington, Saudi Arabia and even Qatar appear to have cut off their support for ISIS, they remaining amazingly durable. The reason appears to be the scale of the backing from Erdo?an and his fellow neo-Ottoman Sunni Islam Prime Minister, Ahmet Davuto?lu.

 

Nice Family Business

 

The prime source of money feeding ISIS these days is sale of Iraqi oil from the Mosul region oilfields where they maintain a stronghold. The son of Erdogan it seems is the man who makes the export sales of ISIS-controlled oil possible.

Bilal Erdo?an owns several maritime companies. He has allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries. The Turkish government buys Iraqi plundered oil which is being produced from the Iraqi seized oil wells. Bilal Erdogan’s maritime companies own special wharfs in Beirut and Ceyhan ports that are transporting ISIS’ smuggled crude oil in Japan-bound oil tankers.

Gürsel Tekin vice-president of the Turkish Republican Peoples’ Party, CHP, declared in a recent Turkish media interview, “President Erdogan claims that according to international transportation conventions there is no legal infraction concerning Bilal’s illicit activities and his son is doing an ordinary business with the registered Japanese companies, but in fact Bilal Erdo?an is up to his neck in complicity with terrorism, but as long as his father holds office he will be immune from any judicial prosecution.” Tekin adds that Bilal’s maritime company doing the oil trades for ISIS, BMZ Ltd, is “a family business and president Erdogan’s close relatives hold shares in BMZ and they misused public funds and took illicit loans from Turkish banks.”

 

In addition to son Bilal’s illegal and lucrative oil trading for ISIS, Sümeyye Erdogan, the daughter of the Turkish President apparently runs a secret hospital camp inside Turkey just over the Syrian border where Turkish army trucks daily being in scores of wounded ISIS Jihadists to be patched up and sent back to wage the bloody Jihad in Syria, according to the testimony of a nurse who was recruited to work there until it was discovered she was a member of the Alawite branch of Islam, the same as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who Erdogan seems hell-bent on toppling.

 

Turkish citizen Ramazan Bagol, captured this month by Kurdish People’s Defence Units,YPG, as he attempted to join ISIS from Konya province, told his captors that said he was sent to ISIS by the ‘Ismailia Sect,’ a strict Turkish Islam sect reported to be tied to Recep Erdogan.

 

Baol said the sect recruits members and provides logistic support to the radical Islamist organization. He added that the Sect gives jihad training in neighborhoods of Konya and sends those trained here to join ISIS gangs in Syria.

 

According to French geopolitical analyst, Thierry Meyssan, Recep Erdogan “organised the pillage of Syria, dismantled all the factories in Aleppo, the economic capital, and stole the machine-tools. Similarly, he organised the theft of archeological treasures and set up an international market in Antioch…with the help of General Benoît Puga, Chief of Staff for the Elysée, he organised a false-flag operation intended to provoke the launching of a war by the Atlantic Alliance – the chemical bombing of la Ghoutta in Damascus, in August 2013. “

Meyssan claims that the Syria strategy of Erdo?an was initially secretly developed in coordination with former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and Erdogan’s then Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu, in 2011, after Juppe won a hesitant Erdogan to the idea of supporting the attack on traditional Turkish ally Syria in return for a promise of French support for Turkish membership in the EU. France later backed out, leaving Erdogan to continue the Syrian bloodbath largely on his own using ISIS.

 

Gen. John R. Allen, an opponent of Obama’s Iran peace strategy, now US diplomatic envoy coordinating the coalition against the Islamic State, exceeded his authorized role after meeting with Erdogan and “promised to create a “no-fly zone” ninety miles wide, over Syrian territory, along the whole border with Turkey, supposedly intended to help Syrian refugees fleeing from their government, but in reality to apply the “Juppé-Wright plan”.

 

The Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, revealed US support for the project on the TV channel A Haber by launching a bombing raid against the PKK.” Meyssan adds.

 

There are never winners in war and Erdogan’s war against Syria’s Assad demonstrates that in bold. Turkey and the world deserve better. Ahmet Davutoglu’s famous “Zero Problems With Neighbors” foreign policy has been turned into massive problems with all neighbors due to the foolish ambitions of Erdogan and his gang.

Copyright ©2009-2015 ZeroHedge.com

Edited December 6, 2015 by trident

[gymrat76541]

Games within games = business as usual in the ME.

 

America is a major player. Arming select rebel groups hoping to unseat Assad. Russia is responding by backing Assad.

Obama hides his intentions by telling the American people we are fighting ISIS.

Other rebel factions within Syria do not cooperate, but neither do they fight each other very often either!

Russia bombs any group fighting against Assad. America is trying to get Russia to only attack ISIS.

Turkey has been a player from the start. They are backing ISIS against Assad & against the Kurds.

The Russians plane shot down was no mistake! Turkey does not like Russia's support of ISIS & it does not like America's support of the Kurds.

Saudi does not like anyone supporting anyone who is not Sunni.

 

America thinks that there are only Muslim's fighting. There are Christian Syrians, Sunni Syrians, Shia Syrians, Kurds, almost every terrorist organization in the Middle East. Plus Turkey, Iran, Saudi, America and Russia.

 

You need a score card to be able to identify who is attacking who every day in Syria. LOL

[sandfly]

TAKE HIM DOWN TOO

[trident]

There is speculation that Turkey’s military presence on Iraqi soil is to protect Turkey’s oil interests. The Barzani family, which heads the Kurdistan Regional Government, is running the oil business, while the Erdogan family handles the Turkish end (government and oil). President Erdogan’s son-in-law is the energy minister, while Erdogan’s son, Bilal, has the exclusive right to transport oil from Iraqi Kurdistan (and ISIS) through Turkey. Barzani’s 632,000 b/d oil operation depends heavily on a pipeline that runs from Iraq to Ceyhan (the Turkish port where Bilal Erdogan’s ships are based). However, over the summer the PKK attacked the pipeline, costing the KRG some $250 million in lost revenue.

 

https://undercoverinfo.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/turkey-refuses-ultimatum-to-withdraw-military-from-iraq/