International Crisis Group

Watch Hugh Pope, Crisis Group’s Turkey/Cyprus Project Director, discuss the unrest in Turkey on the Charlie Rose Show

Photo: Flickr/Alan Hilditch

Listen to Crisis Group’s Turkey/Cyprus Project Director, Hugh Pope, discuss protest and crackdown in Turkey with Tom Ashbrook of WBUR’s On Point.

Photo: Elif Altinbasak/Flickr

Erdogan can win by engaging Turkey’s park protesters | Bloomberg

By Hugh Pope

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been in tighter spots: He was thrown in jail for alleged Islamism, saw his last political party closed down and survived a showdown with the once all-powerful Turkish military.

Yet the street protests that erupted first in Istanbul and then across the country at the end of last month present a challenge he has never faced before. So far, he has mishandled the situation, and on June 6 showed no sign of backing down. That’s a mistake, because he has the ability to turn the protests to his advantage and the country’s.

Erdogan is Turkey’s most effective leader since the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and much of his success has been based on determination, populist rhetoric and a focus on business. Born into one of Istanbul’s notoriously tough neighborhoods, he is both the unyielding bulldozer of Turkish politics and the fix-it charmer. Almost 50 percent of the population voted for his Justice and Development Party two years ago.

What is happening in Turkey today is mostly about the other 50 percent of the country’s 76 million people. An opinion poll by academics at Istanbul’s Bilgi University found that 70 percent of the protesters had no strong political affiliation. The protests have been full of humor, volunteer enthusiasm, modern women, celebrities and bands of idealistic children skipping school. For the first week, the crowds were leaderless, the only things uniting them being social-media networks and a common slogan: “Tayyip, resign!”

FULL ARTICLE (Bloomberg)

Photo: Flickr/Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

(Source: ekathimerini.com)

Turkey Finds that Trouble Knows No Bounds | Chatham House

By Hugh Pope, Crisis Group’s Turkey/Cyprus Project Director

As instability undermines the Arab states established in the post-First World War map of the Middle East, a now vigorous Turkey, heir of the Ottoman Empire that was the main loser from that 20th century order, is taking a new look at the region.

‘Those borders are all false’, sniffed one of Turkey’s former top diplomats over dinner in February. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, says that Syria’s growing troubles since 2011 now amount to ‘an internal affair’ for Turkey, while in private officials talk breezily of Syria as ‘our former province’.

In the capital Ankara, a senior security official agreed that tumult in Syria over the past two years had vaporized much of the Cold War frontier of barbed wire and watch-towers. ‘The borders have become meaningless,’ he said.

In short, a major change is under way after decades in which Turkish policy was predicated on making the best of what it found in the Middle East.

FULL ARTICLE (Chatham House)

Photo: Carlo Rainone/Flickr

Our recent blog post on the protests in Turkey was featured in the Wall Stret Journal’s “What We’re Reading Wednesday,” by Gerald F. Seib and David Wessel. Read the full article here.

Photo: Eser Karadağ/Flickr

Turkey’s Protests: The Politics of an Unexpected Movement

from Crisis Group’s blog, “Solving the EU-Turkey-Cyprus Triangle”

by Didem A. Collinsworth and Hugh Pope

Q – How did the Istanbul unrest start and how widespread is it?

The Istanbul unrest started out on 27 May as a small sit-in by a handful of people who wanted to prevent the uprooting of trees in Gezi Park, a rare patch of green in central Istanbul. Removing the trees was part of a government plan to redesign the adjacent Taksim Square. When, early on Thursday, 30 May, police tried to expel the Gezi Park activists with tear gas and set their tents on fire, the protests morphed into a popular movement.

During the next 24 hours, thousands joined in the demonstrations. The police tried to disperse them using high-pressure water hoses and tear gas, which Human Rights Watch described as an “excessive use of force against protestors”. Slogans began to change from protests against the Taksim Square project – which aimed to put a shopping mall on the park, add a sweeping pedestrian plaza, build a big new mosque, and clear up a clutter of shops blocking the view of a cathedral – to demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Erdoǧan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. By Saturday 1 June, 100 people had been reported wounded.

Protests grew exponentially, first to other neighbourhoods in Istanbul, and then to other provinces, with over 60 of Turkey’s 81 provinces experiencing some form of protest by Monday 3 June. In Ankara and İzmir, clashes were at times fierce. One protestor was shot dead in unclear circumstances in Hatay province, another killed when a car ran into a crowd of protestors in Istanbul. Milliyet newspaper reports 3,400 protestors arrested nationwide, with many later released, and the Doctors’ Union reports 1,800 protestors wounded by 4 June. The government says 244 police have been injured too. Sunday and Monday nights, 2 and 3 June, saw especially ugly battles in Ankara and on two major streets in Istanbul, where several badly hurt protestors were taken in for treatment in a waterfront Ottoman mosque commandeered by volunteer medics.

FULL POST

Photo: Reuters

With its Syria plan in tatters, Turkey needs a strategy reboot | The Globe and Mail

By Hugh Pope

For much of the late 2000s, Turkey hoped that a booming economy, the prestige of combative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a burst of regional admiration for its successful mix of Muslim governance and democracy would reap it a harvest of Middle Eastern influence and profit.

At the heart of this strategy was an intimate relationship with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, the model for Turkey’s “zero problems” policy. The two countries signed model deals for visa-less travel, free trade and infrastructure integration. The leaders brought half their Cabinets to summit meetings. The Assads even lunched with the Erdogans on the eve of their 2008 holiday on the Turkish riviera.

Now the Syrian catastrophe has landed squarely on Turkey’s doorstep: 450,000 refugees, with the UN predicting double that by year’s end; costs of $1-billion and rising to look after the influx, only a tenth of which is covered by outside donors; and increasing tensions on the border. A recent Syrian air force raid close to one Turkish border crossing killed five Syrians, wounded 50 people, hit an aid warehouse and an opposition base. Just days later at another border crossing, Syrians wanting to cross rioted, fired weapons and killed a Turkish policeman, wounded 11 other people and burned buildings and cars.

As regional instability has spread since 2010, Turkey’s Middle Eastern position has suffered too. The Libya war badly disrupted Turkey’s big contracting interests there. The loss of Syrian trucking routes to regional markets has joined the previous loss of Iraqi ones. Ankara’s backing of armed Syrian opposition groups has encouraged negative perceptions of Turkey acting not just as a would-be Sunni Muslim hegemon, but also as taking sides within the Sunni Arab world. Arab and Iranian commentators are critical of what they see as Ankara’s hubristic tendency to seek what they see as Ottoman-style regional dominance.

FULL ARTICLE (The Globe and Mail)

Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum

The Best-Laid Plans | The Majalla

By Hugh Pope, Crisis Group’s Turkey/Cyprus Project Director

When the Syrian crisis first broke out, Ankara planned for a short, easily resolved conflict. As the civil war stretches into its third year, Turkey needs to rethink its refugee strategy or face burdensome expenditure and increasing regional tensions.

Syria’s catastrophe is increasingly leaping over the border of its northern neighbor, Turkey, igniting a whole new set of challenges for the Ankara government and blurring what was once a hard Cold War frontier.

At least 300,000 Syrian refugees have now officially fled to Turkey, with the real number probably 450,000 and set to double this year. Turkey has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, which it can barely afford, looking after them, and so far aid from its allies and donors is covering only a fraction of outgoings.

Pressed against the Turkish border, 100,000 more Syrians are waiting. Turkey only lets in a trickle, hoping their problems can be dealt with inside northern Syria. Currently, only a small amount of humanitarian aid can cross the Turkey–Syria border, limited by sovereign sensitivities at the UN, bureaucratic obstacles in Ankara and security risks in northern Syria.

FULL ARTICLE (The Majalla)

Photo: IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation/Flickr