SONER CAGAPTAY

TURKEY FACES ITS

TOUGHEST TESTS

 ( Policy Focus 151 December 2016)

AMONG THE MIDDLE EAST STATES established after World War I, Turkey has proven especially durable in the face of economic and political shocks. Decades after its formation, Turkey navigated the harrowing 1970s, when the country’s economy collapsed and the resulting instability led to fighting involving right- and left-wing militant groups and government security forces, killing thousands. Then, in the 1990s, Turkey was pummeled by triple-digit inflation and a full-blown Kurdish insurgency supported by at least two of its neighbors, Iran and Syria, that left tens of thousands dead. Again, the country emerged intact.

Currently, the country faces a toxic mix of political polarization, economic slowdown after more than a decade of impressive growth, multiple external threats—including from Russia, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Islamic State (IS)—and a surge of terrorist attacks. Indeed, five of the six worst terrorist attacks in the country’s history have taken place in the last three years. These attacks, which have killed at least 250 and wounded another 800, are all linked to fallout from the Syrian civil war. The failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016, added a heavy layer of angst to the existing sense of national insecurity.

The long historical view suggests Turkey will be able to withstand the current shocks. But a shorter-term analytical perspective indicates things look different this time. For one thing, Kurdish problem has changed.

Until very recently, the country’s Kurdish community of 10 to 12 million, representing about 15 percent of the population, was not a unified political force; its internal splits followed the fault lines of the country as a whole.

Starting in the 1990s, nationalist Kurds tended to vote for parties sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)—considered a terrorist group by both Ankara and Washington—which was fighting the Turkish government. But PKK backers have not represented the whole of the Kurdish electorate. Since the 1960s, the left-leaning Alevi Kurds, who adhere to a liberal branch of Islam, have voted predominantly for the secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). More important, conservative Kurds, who represent nearly half the Kurdish population, have tended to vote for the governing, pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) since its 2001 establishment by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former prime minister and current president.

In short, many Kurds liked the government, which in turn fought only the nationalist Kurds. Erdogan even launched negotiations with the PKK in 2012 in hopes of ending the insurgency. Nevertheless, the dynamic changed during Turkey’s most recent elections, in June 2015, when the Kurds—liberal, conservative, and nationalist alike—coalesced around the Kurdish-nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Alevi Kurds were attracted to the HDP’s liberal approach to issues like women’s and workers’ rights, while conservative Kurds abandoned Erdogan’s party for the HDP presumably because of the president’s reluctance to help the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane when it was besieged by the Islamic State in September 2014.

The start of PKK violence in July 2015 scared some of these Kurds away from the HDP. As the November elections approached, such blocs included middle-class Kurds worried about violence and conservative Kurds who disliked the return of the PKK’s leftist message. Nevertheless, the HDP remains the dominant party in seven of Turkey’s solidly Kurdish-majority southeastern provinces, including Diyarbakir, where the party received a composite 73 percent of the vote.

Despite the defections in late 2015, the political consolidation of the Turkish Kurds under the HDP means Turkey’s new battle with the PKK risks starting a war with almost its entire Kurdish community. The nature of fighting over the past year has offered a case in point. In September 2015, the government enforced a weeklong curfew; shut down electricity, Internet, and phone access; and sent in thousands of troops and police to Cizre, a Kurdish-majority town of 130,000 on the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi border, before security forces could establish a tenuous hold on the area. Previously, when the government fought the PKK, it could count on help from the local Kurdish population, but that is no longer the case.

Turkey has other concerns as well. As a result of Ankara’s Syria policy, which since 2011 has aimed to oust the Assad regime without having secured concrete, long-term U.S. assistance, Turkey holds the unique position of being hated by all major actors fighting in Syria, from the Assad regime and Russia to the Islamic State, the PKK, and the PKK’s Syrian franchise, the Democratic Union Party (PYD).

The Assad regime is connected to at least one attack, the Reyhanli bombing in May 2013, which killed fifty-two people. Russia, upset with Turkey’s anti-regime stance and livid over its downing of a Russian jet in November 2015, threw its strength behind the PYD to defeat Ankara-backed, anti-Assad rebels in Syria. In return, Turkey has shelled PYD positions. Given its deep involvement in northern Syria, where the Ankara-supported rebels stand in the way of PYD plans to connect the group’s Afrin and Kobane cantons, Turkey risks a direct conflict with the PYD. Such a development could—for the first time ever—thrust Turkey into a two-country Kurdish insurgency.

In July 2015, after IS claimed credit for a suicide bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc that killed more than thirty, Erdogan agreed to open Turkish bases to U.S. planes and drones, and pledged to join the U.S. campaign to bomb IS targets in Syria. In doing so, Erdogan has ensured that IS sees Turkey as an enemy and the group will inevitably, and unfortunately, attack Turkey again. An Istanbul car bombing in June 2016 marked one such strike.

In theory, Turkey is powerful enough, with U.S. backing, to withstand the threats from both IS and the PKK. It is not clear, however, whether the government has the necessary domestic support to do

so. This is the crux of current worries over Turkey’s trajectory: at another time, most Turks, however grudgingly, would have stood behind the government for the sake of their own security, even at

the cost of life and liberty. That no longer seems to be true, given the transformed political climate, and herein lies the greatest challenge:

Turkey is already torn, with the pro- and anti-AKP blocs hating each other even more than they fear terrorism at large. Moreover, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, but it increasingly

looks like a de facto presidential system with Erdogan at

the helm. Erdogan has won successive elections since 2002 and built a cult of personality rooted in his self-portrayal as an authoritarian underdog, a victim forced to crack down harshly on those whose “conspiracies” undermine his authority. On this basis, he has successfully targeted and politically brutalized the secular Turkish military, businesses, liberals, the media, Armenians, Jews, left-wing voters, Alevis, and now the Kurds.

Combined with the story of Turkey’s economic success, this narrative has contributed to Erdogan’s enduring, if shrinking, popularity. Although he stepped down as prime minister and AKP leader

in August 2014 to honor his party’s term limits, he has continued to run Turkey as president from behind the scenes. The June 2016 resignation of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his replacement

by former transportation minister Binali Yildirim—along with a reshuffled cabinet heavily oriented to Erdogan’s interests and roots in the East Black Sea region—have reinforced the sense of power

consolidation under Erdogan. Separately, the AKP won about 49.5 percent of the vote in the

last election, and Erdogan himself retains significant support from Turks who identify with his humble roots and social conservatism. Erdogan thus continues to dominate not only AKP politics but also

Turkish politics. In seeking his goal of officially transforming Turkey into a presidential

system, Erdogan is intent on maintaining his image as a strongman to boost his right-wing base. In this regard, Erdogan is hoping to peel away voters from the right-wing Nationalist Action

Party (MHP). Accordingly, he will maintain a hardline posture against the PKK, and by extension the PYD in Syria. This part of Erdogan’s presidential agenda could put Turkey on a collision course with the United States, which relies on the PYD to fight IS. It is thus in Washington’s interest to monitor the Turkish-PYD relationship and, more important, promote Turkish-PKK peace, the only path to a corresponding, and permanent, Turkish-PYD peace. The core questions thus emerge: Can Turkey withstand the simultaneous challenges of a multicountry Kurdish insurgency, IS attacks, and political violence between pro- and anti-AKP camps, and perhaps a rupture with the United States over the PYD issue? More broadly, can Turkey replicate its resilience of the 1970s and the 1990s?

The answers lie largely with Erdogan, whose plans to change the country’s constitution and render himself an executive president, only emboldened by the overthrow attempt, could result in an increasingly polarized Turkey. Such a country, overwhelmed by terrorist attacks and exposed to manipulation by Putin and IS, will crumble.

In that context, and given the country’s deep divisions, Turkey’s only way out, unlikely even before the coup attempt, would have entailed Erdogan pulling back to his powers as defined by the Turkish constitution: a nonpartisan president who does not run the government. Even if Erdogan were to somehow accept such an outcome, his doing so would not necessarily heal the damage he has wrought, particularly when it comes to Syria. Turkey will remain exposed to the civil war there, and Russian intervention will only complicate its position. But insofar as Erdogan has brought his country to the brink, he has the ultimate responsibility for easing tensions before they explode.