The Kurdish Gambit

I have a piece up on the Eurasianet website looking at what the Turkish government's upcoming "Kurdish Initiative" -- a reform plan aimed at resolving the long-standing Kurdish issue -- might look like and what are some of the challenges facing it. There are a number of internal and external factors pushing Ankara to finally take a decisive (and non-military) step in dealing with the Kurdish issue, one of the more interesting ones being the fact that jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan is planning to release his own "road map" on how to solve the Kurdish problem.

Things are certainly moving forward on the issue in Ankara, with one of the more interesting and positive developments being the announcement that Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has finally agreed to meet with members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP). Erdogan has previously refused to even shake hands with the DTP's parliamentarians, saying they must first denounce the PKK.

More on this issue from my Eurasianet article:

After decades of conflict and repressive policies, Turkish leaders appear to be taking concrete steps toward resolving the Kurdish issue. But analysts warn that domestic opposition and the lack of consultation with Kurds themselves could limit any plan’s chances for success.

In recent months, Turkish leaders have sent strong signals that an initiative to deal with the Kurdish issue is in the works. In May, President Abdullah Gul said that Turkey had an "historic opportunity" to address the issue, while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, just before departing for a recent trip to Syria, told reporters: "Whether we call it the Kurdish, the southeast or eastern problem, whether we call it the Kurdish initiative, we have started work on this."

In late July, meanwhile, Turkish Interior Minister Besir Atalay said during a nationally televised news conference that the government is actively working on a comprehensive plan -- one based on democratization and expanded rights. Although he didn’t offer any specific details or a timeframe, Atalay told reporters, "We have the intention to take determined, patient and courageous steps."

Writing in the English-language Hurriyet Daily News, political analyst Mehmet Ali Birand said the government’s anticipated initiative does represent an important shift. "The Turkish Republic has now accepted the existence of a Kurdish issue and a [Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)] problem, and has started comprehensive efforts towards finding a solution. Until now, these issued were accepted, but ignored," he wrote.

"Now, for the first time, the Kurdish issue is being separated from the PKK issue, and again for the first time, a plan is being developed that will influence Turkey’s future," Birand continued.

According to reports in the Turkish press, the government’s plan may include a series of moves on the cultural rights front, including the establishment of private Kurdish-language television stations and Kurdish language faculties in universities, as well allowing towns and villages to once again use their original Kurdish names. It is not clear if it would include a wide-ranging amnesty program for members of the outlawed PKK. The group continues to attack Turkish security forces, mostly from its hideouts in northern Iraq.

Observers say a series of domestic and regional developments are forcing the political and military establishments in Ankara to confront the Kurdish issue in a new way. "The Turkish military is finally coming to grips with the fact that it cannot win this war, no matter what happens [to the PKK] in northern Iraq. It’s finally dawning on them that some kind of political solution is necessary," says Henri Barkey, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and an expert on Turkish politics.

Barkey also says Turkey’s ambitions to play a larger role on the world stage, particularly as a regional mediator, are also forcing Turkish leaders to take stock of the country’s own problems. "Turkey is lecturing other countries, like Israel and [China], about human rights issues and here you have a country where the Kurdish language is illegal. That is absurd," Barkey said. "They have to do something. There is a discrepancy between domestic Turkey and the image it is trying to project abroad...."

....The big question now being asked is, once the government announces its plan, what are its chances for success? The [International Crisis Group's Hugh] Pope says an important element of the current debate, which may help any government initiative succeed, is that it is mostly domestically driven. "Ten years ago everyone in Europe would be lecturing Turkey about the Kurds. This current talk about a Kurdish opening is domestically driven, which makes it a lot more legitimate," he says. "Before, when Turkey was being lectured from the outside, it caused people to circle the wagons and stop listening."

Dogu Ergil, a professor of political science at Ankara University, says the Kurdish initiative could be hurt by what he sees a lack of consultation between the government and other key players - particularly the Kurds themselves - about how to best approach the problem. "We lack a definition of what we are trying to solve and some people have gathered behind closed doors and decided they have the solution," he said.

"For the Kurdish people in Turkey, it is still a state initiative," Ergil continued. "The method has not been democratic enough so far. ... That’s the problem. The whole thing is a mystery."

Some analysts suggest that the AKP government may find itself in a bind on the issue. "They are going to have to sell this to a skeptical public and the opposition is going to raise hell," noted Barkey.

Ultimately, the government’s main challenge may be to come up with a plan that is politically viable, but which also meets rising expectations. "The problem with things like this is that when you raise expectations so high and then you don’t do something, it’s like setting a match to a tank of gasoline," says Barkey.

You can read the full article here.

Dueling Pipelines and Turkey’s Delicate Energy Dance

A few weeks ago, Ankara was the scene of the celebratory signing of an intergovernmental agreement for the troubled Nabucco pipeline project, designed to weaken Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supply by bringing Caspian and Middle Eastern gas to the continent via Turkey and the Balkans. (For more background on Nabucco, take a look at this series of posts from Istanbul Calling.) Although the pipeline is still far from becoming a reality, the signing in Ankara was hailed as an important step in helping Europe diversify its energy supply.

Cut to last week, when Ankara was the scene of the signing of another series of energy-related agreements, only this time with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Among the agreements signed was one that would allow Russia’s proposed South Stream gas pipeline – seen as a potentially lethal rival to the Nabucco project – to run through Turkish waters on the Black Sea.

What’s going on here? Had Ankara just stabbed Nabucco (and the European Union, it’s main supporter) in the back? Turkish officials clearly don’t want things to look that way, with “diplomatic sources” telling the English-language Hurriyet Daily News that “Nabucco is still [Turkey’s] priority.” That might be the case, but Ankara certainly also knows that as it moves along on Nabucco, it also needs to keep Moscow’s interests in mind. If anything, the recent dueling signings in Ankara serve as a good example of the delicate dance that Turkey now has to perform as part of its new, multi-polar foreign policy, which seeks to minimize conflict with its neighbors while also raising the country’s regional and international profile. As political scientist Bulent Aras points out in a new report he wrote on Turkish-Russian relations for the Foundation for Political Economic and Social Research (SETA), an Ankara-based think tank: “Under the strong influence of its new geographic thinking toward Russia, Ankara tries to avoid taking sides in any ‘Russia versus the West’ struggles, while developing its own relations with Moscow.”

From being intense regional rivals and then Cold War foes, Turkey and Russia have moved towards being strong partners in trade, defense and energy. That said, Turkey – like Europe – also finds itself heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies, importing 63 percent of its gas and 28 percent of its oil from Russia. It is now also working out terms with a Russian company to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, something that critics say will only deepen the country’s dependence on Russia. Still, Ankara policymakers realize that working together with Russia makes more sense for Turkey than antagonizing it.

But as Aras points out in his SETA report, this new approach to Russia will not be without its limitations:

“There is no guarantee that the Turkish politicians’ projection of good relations with Russia will be possible without endangering its relations with the EU and the US….

…. The current developments indicate that Turkish and Russian policy-makers have the political will to improve bilateral relations in the realm of politics, economy and security. However, these relations are not free of a number of serious problems that could threaten a derailing in the growing ties; both countries have converging and conflicting interests in neighboring regions. This fact, in combination with the high-profile status of both countries, makes Turkish-Russian relations promising, yet difficult.”

Death By Taxes

Is the Turkish government trying to break the back of the media group that has served as its most vocal opposition by slapping it with a whopping $2.5 billion tax penalty? I’m not an accountant, but there certainly seems to be something suspicious about the record-breaking fine levied on the Dogan Media Group, which publishes several powerful newspapers (Hurriyet, Milliyet and Radikal among them) and owns CNN-Turk, the Turkish-language version of CNN, among other channels. The penalty (which equals the entire value of the company) comes on the heels of a $500 million tax fine issued against Dogan a few months ago. According to Turkish tax officials, Dogan has engaged in deceptive practices and has failed to pay tax on income earned through the sale of a company and through the transfer of shares between companies within the group itself. According to the Dogan Group, everything has been above board and the government, through its taxmen, is out to get it by twisting the country’s financial rules to suit its purposes.

First, the background: Over the last few years, the Dogan group’s media outlets have emerged as perhaps the most vocal critics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). At one point, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even called for his supporters to boycott the group’s publications. Interestingly, relations between the AKP and the media group turned especially sour after some of the Dogan publications aggressively reported on the gross financial misdeeds committed by the German branch of a Turkish Islamic charity with close ties to the AKP leadership.

So, is the Turkish government involved in a Putin-esque attempt to silence one of its critics, as part of a larger plan to create compliant media? That’s certainly the view of the people working for the Dogan Group. In a column in Milliyet, Fikret Bila, the newspapers’s Ankara representative and one of Turkey’s leading veteran journalists, says this:

This never, ever seen arbitrary tax penalty is beyond imagination. Without any legal ground, such a practice could not be welcomed anywhere in the world. It was not even seen during the Ottoman Sultanate. Even sultans did not exploit state authority so much.

These two consecutive tax levies are nothing but “tax terror” against the company owner, Aydın Doğan. Motives are not only picking up back-taxes. This is obvious. They are not only additional income for the Treasury. That’s for sure. But it is rather confiscation of Doğan companies. These two fines clearly show that the purpose is Mr. Doğan’s bankruptcy.

What is saddening here is that tax officials committed misconduct. Unfortunately tax officials vulnerable to such temptations are casting shadows over this well-respected duty.

The Doğan Group will soon be asked to return all its assets to the state due to such astronomically high tax fines levied by the said tax officials. This is obviously a confiscation process, not just tax penalties.

The government, in its defense, says the massive fine is simply the result of tax inspectors doing their job.

There really are no clear-cut heroes or villains in this affair. Aydin Dogan, chairman of the Dogan organization, is not a scrappy newspaperman fighting for his life, but rather a media baron and business magnate who is a kind of Turkish Rupert Murdoch, controlling a very large slice of the Turkish media scene. As Andrew Finkel points out in an excellent recent column in Today’s Zaman:

As Turkey's press baron extraordinaire, [Dogan] openly promoted his allies and intimidated his foes to carve out a world favorable to himself. He confessed as much in an interview I once did for TIME magazine in which he defended his papers' support for a press law which actually restricted freedoms of expression but which allowed his media holding to be more aggressive in expanding his share of the television market. Why, he asked me, should he cut off his nose to spite his face?

Mr. Doğan was used to cultivating governments, and in the days of weak coalitions, his support mattered. Many regard the 1995 general election in Turkey as a proxy fight between the Doğan Group and Sabah rather than the parties on the ballot paper. Before entering a (failed) coalition with Tansu Çiller, Mesut Yılmaz went to consult with Doğan and the two remained allies. This in itself was not a crime (Tony Blair paid similar sorts of homage to Rupert Murdoch). However, the Doğan Group was persistently criticized for rendering paper thin the firewall between editorial independence and financial self-interest. Ertuğrul Özkök, the editor of the flagship Hürriyet newspaper, proudly wore two hats -- that of a journalist and that of a member of the board who could happily negotiate incentives from the government for factories his parent company was trying to build.

That said, the recent developments are troubling. I would be more comfortable with the possibility of the government taking the Dogan Group down if there existed a truly independent press in Turkey that could step in and fill the vacuum that would be created. That, unfortunately, is not the case. As I have written before, Turkey’s deeply domestic political polarization has worked its way into the country’s media. Whatever the sins of the Dogan Group’s outlets, the pro-government press (Zaman and it’s English-language affiliate Today’s Zaman, in particular) have not distinguished themselves in recent years, showing a disturbing willingness to be used as tools for spreading disinformation. (You can check out previous media-related posts here.)

Tax officials and Dogan are apparently entering negotiations that might lead to a settlement of some kind, although it’s hard to imagine the government backing down too far on this. Whatever happens, it certainly could cost Turkey, both domestically and abroad, raising questions of press freedoms in the country. The European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has already expressed its concern, with a spokesman in Brussels saying the other day: "When the sanction is of such magnitude that it threatens the very existence of an entire press group, like in this case, then freedom of the press is at stake.”

A Last "Last Chance" for Cyprus?

The International Crisis Group and its Turkey analyst, Hugh Pope, have had in recent years the thankless task of reminding the world (and the European Union, in particular) about the importance of solving the decades-old Cyprus problem. In a new report, ICG warns that time is really running out for a solution and that the island may be heading towards a permanent split. From the executive summary:

Three decades of efforts to reunify Cyprus are about to end, leaving a stark choice ahead between a hostile, de facto partition of the island and a collaborative federation between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities living in two constituent states. Most actors agree that the window of opportunity for this bicommunal, bizonal settlement will close by April 2010, the date of the next Turkish Cypriot elections, when the pro-settlement leader risks losing his office to a more hardline candidate. If no accord is reached by then, it will be the fourth major set of UN-facilitated peace talks to fail, and there is a widespread feeling that if the current like-minded, pro-solution Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders cannot compromise on a federal solution, nobody can….

….In the absence of a Cyprus settlement, both communities on the island and Turkey will experience slower economic progress, greater defence spending and reduced international credibility.

You can find the summary and the full report here.

It's easy to dismiss the Cyprus issue, but it's one that matters -- not only for the divided island, but also for Turkey, the EU and NATO. The Cyprus problem not only has the potential to derail Turkey's EU bid, but it has already worked its way into the EU, where Cyprus uses the issue to punish Turkey, and NATO, where Turkey uses it to punish Cyprus. (For more background, take a look at a piece I wrote last year for Eurasianet). One imagines that a permanent division would only see that dynamic intensify, to the detriment of both organizations' ability to function properly.

As the report mentions, some in Turkey and Northern Cyprus believe that even if there is a permanent division, the island's tiny Turkish republic could achieve a kind of "Taiwanisation" -- de facto international recognition that leads to viability as a state. That belief, the report makes clear, is mistaken:

But north Cyprus and Taiwan can hardly be compared. Less than 300,000 Turkish Cypriots cannot measure against a large, self-governing modern industrial power with 23 million people. The EU is the most powerful actor in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Greek Cypriots are probably able to block any attempt by a member state to work in any way with the self-declared Turkish Cypriot state. Even sympathetic Turkic states like Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan have failed to lay on direct flights to the main Turkish Cypriot airport, primarily because of Greek Cypriot influence in the EU.

Turkey and Armenia: The Rocky Road Ahead

I have a briefing up on the World Politics Review website looking at the protocols recently signed by Turkey and Armenia to restore diplomatic relations and some of the hurdles these protocols might face in being implemented. From the briefing:

Yesterday's signing of protocols by Turkey and Armenia that pave the way for restoring relations between the two countries was, without a doubt, a historic moment. But it's still too early to break out the champagne.

The protocols -- signed in Zurich in the presence of the American, French and Russian foreign ministers -- spell out in the clearest terms to date what needs to happen in order for diplomatic ties to be restored and for the two countries' borders to be reopened. But significant hurdles, some of which involve actors outside of Turkey and Armenia themselves, still stand in the way of that actually happening.

Ankara and Yerevan broke off relations in 1993, when Turkey closed its border with Armenia. The move followed Armenia's invasion of the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, but the animosity between the two countries goes backs decades further, to what Armenia alleges was the genocide of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Turks during World War I.

Turkey admits that Armenians were killed, but claims in significantly lower numbers, and fiercely rejects suggestions that the killings were genocide. Ankara argues instead that the deaths were a result of a civil uprising, when Armenians joined forces with invading Russians.

The protocols -- signed with the help of Swiss mediation and American and European arm twisting -- call for the renewal of diplomatic ties, opening of the common border and the establishment of a host of intergovernmental sub-commissions. The most significant of the latter will include experts who will take a look at the "historical dimension" of the Turkish-Armenian relationship.

The only catch -- and a potentially deal-breaking one -- is that the protocols will only go into effect once the parliaments in both countries ratify them. And in both Turkey and Armenia, domestic opposition could stand in the way of that happening....

....Still, restoring ties promises to pay significant dividends for both Turkey and Armenia.

For Turkey, restoring relations with Armenia is critical, both for its European Union candidacy and for its regional ambitions. Ankara hopes to play a larger political and diplomatic role in the surrounding region, and to establish itself as an important energy transit route. The closed border with Armenia remains one of the glaring exceptions to Turkey's new foreign policy, which it describes as "zero problems with neighbors." It also leaves Turkey -- and the West -- dependent on volatile Georgia as the main transit route for Caspian oil and gas.

For Armenia, restoring relations with Turkey would end its isolation in the region and could provide the cash-strapped country with new economic opportunities.

The question for both countries, as well as for some of their neighbors in the region, is whether they can find a way to create a new reality in the Caucasus, or if instead they will remain hostages to history and enmity.

(You can read the full briefing here.)