hellenicantidote.
- Turkey’s Islamist rulers’ nationalist ambitions for a revivified
neo-Ottoman empire, which was cast by its leading ideologue current
foreign minister Ahmet Davoutoglu as ‘zero-problems with Turkey’s neighbours’, has unravelled more quickly than anybody could have imagined.
Indeed,
it seemed only last year with the outbreak of the ‘Arab Spring’ that a
number of a nationalist and Baathist regimes – in Egypt, Libya, Syria,
Tunisia – would be ousted and replaced by Islamists inclined towards
closer relations with Turkey. However, in Syria, the Assad regime
refused to fall while Egypt’s experiment with a Muslim Brotherhood
government has come crashing down, causing great consternation in Ankara
and a rupture in relations between Turkey and the new government in
Cairo.
Just as interesting are Turkey’s strained relations with
Iran, another country Turkey had wanted to bring within its orbit.
Indeed, in the article below, originally published here, the author
(William Armstrong) suggests that anti-Iranian feeling is so strong in
Turkey that there has been a surge in Sunni sectarian feeling that
doesn’t bode well for Turkey with its large Alevi minority.
Not so many years ago, a
strategic partnership
between Turkey and Iran seemed to be developing into one of the
region’s more unexpected modern developments. Turkey was vaunted as a
mediator in negotiations between the West and Iran over the latter’s
nuclear program, and the relationship was reinforced by crucial oil and
gas sales from Iran to Turkey. Those days feel rather long ago.
The
two countries now find themselves at loggerheads backing opposite sides
of the bloody civil war in neighboring Syria, with fears of a regional
sectarian conflagration steadily turning into an apocalyptic reality. A
marker of the Syrian
crisis’
deleterious effect on the Turkey-Iran relationship came with the
diplomatic spat that followed the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles on
Turkey’s southern border earlier this year, which lead the Iranian
army’s chief of staff to declare that the move could be a prelude to
‘world war.’
Less spectacular, but also very important, is Iran’s
clear unease with Turkey’s delicate ongoing peace process with the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which involves the rebel group
withdrawing its militants from Turkish soil to their bases in northern
Iraq. Tehran is concerned that the withdrawal could result in the
militants joining forces with the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan
(PJAK), which is the PKK’s offshoot in Iran.
The schism between
Turkey and Iran widened to such an extent that Patrick Cockburn recently
described relations between the two as ‘poisonous’ and this is
increasingly being reflected in the rising levels of anti-Iran sentiment
in Turkey’s Islamist press. In addition to countless pieces targeting
Iran for supporting the al-Assad regime in Syria, it has also been
striking to see the AKP media include Iranians among the dark ‘outside
forces’
stoking the recent Gezi Park protests, supposedly out of discomfort with Turkey’s economic success.
In
the early days of the demonstrations, it was eagerly reported in all
government-supporting media outlets that an “Iranian agent” had been
arrested on suspicion of being a ‘provocateur’ behind protests in
Ankara. It later emerged in more sceptical news
organisations that the individual concerned, Shayan Shamloo, was in fact a rapper who was living in Turkey as a refugee.
Soon
afterwards – in one of those truly befuddling Today’s Zaman stories –
Abdullah Bozkurt wrote a column titled ‘Iran plays a subversive role in
Turkey,’ in which he argued with a straight face (pardon the pun) that
Iran was using the protests to infiltrate Turkey with spies disguised as
LGBT people in an attempt to bring down the government:
‘Recent protests exposed, among other things, the depth of Iranian
infiltration into Turkey… [During the protests] about a dozen Iranian
agents who were trying to turn rallies into violent anti-government
demonstrations were caught by the police… Since it is difficult to
distinguish legitimate non-Muslim minority or LGBT (lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender) people from spies, Iranian intelligence often
uses them as a cover to infiltrate Turkey and third countries.’
However weird, Bozkurt’s column wasn’t an outlier in
pointing
the finger at Iran for Turkey’s problems. Indeed, Zaman and Today’s
Zaman have recently been publishing a steady stream of articles and
columns critical of negative Iranian influence in the region, and it’s
probably also worth noting here that the Today’s Zaman editor, Bülent
Kenes, wrote a book on Iran’s links
to international terrorism last year.
Much of the Iran-bashing in the Turkish press goes hand in hand with pieces on Turkey’s Alevi minority.
The
Alevis are an offshoot of Shiism, (distinct from the Alawites in
Syria), and have historically been associated by some in Turkey as
dangerous fifth columnists with divided loyalties to Iran. Indeed, that
association goes back as far as Bosphorus bridge-commemorated Sultan
Selim the Grim, whose decision to kill tens of thousands of Alevis was
taken during a military campaign against the Persian Safavid Empire in
the 16th century.
Some of the most enthusiastic and unpleasant
examples negatively associating Alevis with Iran come from the extreme
Islamist daily Yeni Akit. For two consecutive days in June, for example,
Yeni Akit carried front page headline stories claiming that Iranian
authorities had invited Alevi religious leaders across the border to
visit Ayatollah Khamenei in an attempt to foment sectarian war in
Turkey.
The headline of the first day’s story, ‘Iran is playing
with fire’ (Iran, atesle oynuyor), was a stomach-turning play on the
Turkish term for ‘flame’ (ates), in reference the fire often used in
Alevi rituals.
Of course, it should be stressed that Yeni Akit is
far from representative of majority sentiment in Turkey, but it
probably isn’t quite as marginal as most people like to think. In fact, a
few months ago Erdogan even put two of its writers – including
editor-in-chief Hasan Karakaya - on his ‘Wise Men Commission,’ charged
with the august task of repeating whatever he said about the ongoing
Kurdish peace process.
It all adds up to a worrying picture. With the Syrian crisis
having exploded into a wider geopolitical struggle splitting the region
on sectarian lines, it’s increasingly clear that the growing schism
between majority-Sunni Turkey and majority-Shia Iran is more than just a
temporary trend.
