10 March 2016
Turkey and the EU
They both need each other.
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week’s EU summit was dominated by negotiations with Turkey to secure its help in tackling the migrant crisis. The EU had agreed to pay Turkey €3 billion and allow Turkish citizens visa-free travel within the Schengen zone, in return for Turkey stopping the flow of migrants across the Aegean, building more refugee camps from which the EU will accept immigrants, and co-operating with an anti-migrant naval force from Nato and the EU patrolling its coast. But now Turkey is demanding €6 billion and improved prospects for EU membership. These new demands were backed by Chancellor Merkel, but other EU leaders insisted on postponing agreement until the next EU summit, due on March 18.
This reluctance to be hurried into an agreement was due, no doubt, to an awareness that the migrant crisis puts the EU in a very weak negotiating position. There has been much talk of Turkey “having the EU over a barrel”. But Turkey itself is being battered by even more and even bigger crises. It’s worth considering those crises before bargaining strengths and weaknesses are re-assessed at that next summit on March 18.
Turkey’s first crisis is a constitutional one. President Erdogan has made no secret of his ambition to transform his country’s parliamentary system into a presidential one. It was the theme of last year’s first election, and prompted the defeat of his AKP party. The AKP did better at the subsequent election, but the ambition remains thwarted. His frustration has driven him to seek less orthodox means of empowering his office. He has taken an aggressive attitude to opposition of all kinds: official criticism has been answered by sackings and intimidation; accusations of corruption against associates and relatives have been answered with removals from office; opposition newspapers and media groups have been seized by courts and journalists have been arrested. Almost two thousand people have been charged with the offence of insulting the president since Erdogan came to power in 2014.
Turkey’s second crisis is the renewed Kurdish PKK insurgency in the south east of the country. Turkey and its Kurdish separatists were enjoying a negotiated peace until those first elections last year gave Turkey’s Kurds a fair representation in parliament for the first time. Turkey then used its entry into the war against Isis in Syria as an opportunity to bomb Kurdish PKK positions in that country, which in turn provoked a renewal of the Kurdish separatists’ insurgency inside Turkey’s borders. Hundreds of soldiers and policemen and many more civilians have been killed in the conflict, with ambushes and bomb attacks aimed at the military, and tanks and artillery bombardments reducing houses to rubble.
Its border with Syria has presented Turkey with a number of crises. As a Sunni power, it has seen the destruction of the Assad regime as a priority. This has resulted in a dangerous confrontation with Putin, Assad’s ally; the shooting down of a Russian aircraft has taken it to the very brink of open war against Russia. Until recently, Russia was an important diplomatic and economic partner of Turkey; Turkey is dependent on Russia for a number of commodities, not least oil, and did well filling the trading vacuum left by EU sanctions against Moscow. So Turkey’s economic well-being as well as its security is under threat from Russian hostility.
Its involvement in Syria is ostensibly as a partner in the international action against Isis. Prior to that, Turkey had been subject to accusations that it was sympathetic and even helpful towards Isis; but since its involvement it has been the victim of a number of terrorist attacks by Isis. A bomb killed 31 people in the town of Suruc last July; another killed 97 people in Ankara last October; a third killed 10 and injured 15 in central Istanbul in January. All are suspected to be the work of Isis.
The conflict in Syria has enabled Turkey to attack other Kurdish groups in the Kurdish territories on the other side of its borders. Turkey cannot tolerate the embryonic independent Kurdish state taking root there, fearing that such a state sees the insurgency within Turkey as part of its war of independence. But this has had two adverse consequences for Turkey. First, it has intensified the PKK insurgency. Second, it has alienated Turkey’s most important ally, the USA. The Syrian Kurds are the US’s most valued and effective ally in the fight against Isis, and the US is not happy, to say the least, to have them shelled by Turkish artillery or bombed by Turkish warplanes.
As if bomb attacks by PKK militants and Isis terrorists isn’t enough, a new terror group – or rather, a resurgent old one – struck in Istanbul this week. Two female militants armed with grenades and a machine gun attacked a police bus in Istanbul, and were subsequently shot dead by police. It’s thought they were members of the DHKP-C, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group.
And, of course, there is the migrant crisis. It is as much of a crisis for Turkey as it is for the EU, indeed, even more so. Turkey has always been a buffer between the Middle East and Europe. There are already over two and half million refugees in Turkey – most of them from Syria, others from Afghanistan and Iraq – and there are more on the way. That’s a huge burden for Turkey to bear. People-trafficking is rife. Its Aegean coastline is long and policing it will require huge resources if the westward trek to Europe is to be contained there.
So. Terrorist attacks from Isis, Kurds and Marxist-Leninists. A president with ambitions to increase his power. Civil rights under threat. A proxy war in Syria against Assad and his allies, including powerful Russia. The loss of Russian markets. The alienation of the USA. Open war against Isis. War against the Syrian Kurds. A Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey which is almost a civil war. An almost insupportable refugee crisis. How many crises is that? And how do they compare with the EU’s migrant crisis? And once those questions have been considered, the next one is “So who is more dependent on whom?”
The EU and Turkey need each other’s help to overcome the migrant crisis which they both share. Turkey needs as much goodwill from beyond its own borders as possible, now more than ever. All things considered, when the EU and Turkey meet again at the next EU summit to agree on what they can do for each other, it should be in the spirit of mutual aid and need, and not in the spirit of traders haggling and looking for advantages in a bazaar or bourse.
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