By Ugur Ümit Üngör Turkey’s attempt at establishing a ‘ safe area ’ or an ISIS-free strip along the northern Syrian border is a re...
By Ugur Ümit Üngör
Turkey’s
attempt at establishing a ‘safe area’ or an ISIS-free strip along the
northern Syrian border is a recent attempt at formulating a policy towards the
civil war in Syria. Not only does this demonstrate a cynical
instrumentalization of Syrian suffering (intervention only when and if it suits
Turkey’s interests), but these moves also carry some echoes from the past by
reanimating some familiar themes from Turkish history. One of these is the occasional threat to invade Syria, but
another one is the Turkish nation state’s preoccupation with ethnic
demographics, especially in its borderlands.
Nation-state
Formation and Borderlands
Historically, state
formation has consisted of a dual strategy: the drawing up of physical and
political borders, as well as the construction of ethnic, cultural, and
national boundaries. Whereas in pre-modern empires, borders were porous zones without
the strict surveillance and monitoring of the modern state, two developments
changed border management in quite fundamental ways: technology enhanced and
continues to enhance infrastructural power over borders, and the rise and
spread of nationalism politicized borderland regions as essentially contested.
In the ideal nation
state, the population consists of the nation and only of the nation, that is,
they coincide exactly: every member of the nation is a resident of the nation
state, no member of the nation should reside outside it, and most importantly,
in principle no non-members of the nation are to reside in the state. Although
there are practically no ideal nation states, total, maximum, or sufficient
homogeneity remains a prime ideal of the nation state. Borderlands are spaces
where the homogeneity (and thereby the sovereignty) of the nation state are
most often challenged, for example in Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, or
Ethiopia.
A ‘Safe Zone’ in
Northern Syria?
Turkey is no exception
to the rule of nation-state border construction. From the establishment of the
Republic on (and possibly even before), successive Turkish governments have set
themselves the task to secure the borders politically and especially
ethno-demographically. As both countries’ longest land border, the
Turkish-Syrian border received special attention. It has alternatively been conceived
as a natural frontier where the Anatolian plateau transitions into the
Mesopotamian desert, then as a buffer zone against political Islam and
especially Kurdish nationalism, and in its latest variation as a ‘safe area’
for Syrians displaced internally.
There are at least two
problems with the currently conjured ‘safe area’ in Northern Syria, first and
foremost credible commitments. The dramatic fall
of the ‘safe area’ Srebrenica in July 1995 taught us the lesson
no place should be declared a safe zone, unless there is a robust, sustained
vigilance to protect it with overwhelming force. So far, the Turkish army has
not lifted a serious finger to deter the Assad regime from its annihilatory
violence against civilians right across the border. A safe area would
doubtlessly demand direct engagements with the Syrian army (and ISIS), as well
as maintaining civil administration and law and order in the area. Using Syrian
Turkmen soldiers as proxy peacekeepers is a half-baked response to the problem.
The second problem is
ethno-politics: as a nation-state, successive Turkish political elites have
conceived of Northern Syrian society as a series of ethnic liabilities. Turkey
is hostile to Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Alawites, Druze, and other
minorities that were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Turkey in the first half
of the twentieth century. Indeed, rather than a ‘safe zone’, the Turkish
Republic’s treatment of Eastern Anatolia can be characterized as a ‘zone of violence’. Particularly the border
region was consistently securitized since 1923. It is a dangerous strip of land,
where many people miss limbs due to minefields, vividly portrayed by Yılmaz
Güney in his classic movie “The Road” (Yol). In other words: any Turkish ‘safe
area’ in Syria is bound to be a project of ethno-religious homogenization as
well.
Echoes from a Past –
That Never Really Passed
A strikingly similar
logic of ethnic securitization in the borderlands was pursued in the 1930s
towards the Kurds. On 15 March 1937, the then Turkish Interior Minister Şükrü
Kaya wrote to his superior Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that the Syrian side of the
Turkish-Syrian border was too Kurdish. This affinity, or “unity of language,
character, and feeling of the people on either side of the Syrian border”, he
continued, could potentially inspire Kurdish nationalists to make claims to a
future independent Kurdistan. Kaya’s demographic solution to this security
threat was “Turkification” (Türkleştirme): deport Kurds away from the border,
and settle Turks in their stead. But the Kemalist regime did not suffice with
that. Syria expert Seda Altuğ has convincingly demonstrated how the
regime repeatedly requested the French mandate authorities to ‘cleanse’ the
Syrian side of the border of discordant minorities such as Armenians and Kurds.
Those Kurds who were
dispossessed, denaturalized, expelled, and permanently exiled from their
ancestral villages, then suffered a similar fate on the other side of the fresh
border. For four decades, the Arab-nationalist Assad regime ran a similar program of ethnic securitization on
their side of the border. From the 1962-63 program to deport Kurds away from
the borderlands to the 2004 Qamishli riot and massacre, the Syrian Kurds were
subjected to complex forms of “Arabization” (تعريب, taʻrib). They lost their
right to work, employment, education, travel, the right to own property,
cultivate agricultural land, etc. Besides the methodical similarities with the
Turkish-nationalist policies only decades earlier, the objectives too bore the
same stultifying characteristics of nationalist homogenization: co-optation,
cultural assimilation, deportation, imprisonment, disenfranchisement, and the
unrelenting (threat of) violence that always loomed large in the Syrian Arab
Republic.
AKP Rule in Turkey:
Plus Ça Change…?
When the AKP rose to power
in Turkey in 2002, there was widespread hope that the narrow, discriminatory,
and exclusivist definition of Turkish citizenship would give way to a slightly
broader one embracing all Muslims, including the Kurds. During the elections of
2007 and 2011, the AKP did fairly well in the Kurdish areas, and a significant
Kurdish constituency still supports the AKP over the HDP. In cities such as
Bitlis or Van, some extended families and tribes are split halfway for each
political party. “We are first Muslims, then Kurds”, would be a fairly typical
attitude of Kurds who support the AKP. This changed in 2015. It appeared that
President Erdoğan is an excellent politician, but a terrible peacemaker.
Despite the fact that he had a lasting peace accord at his fingertips, he
selfishly opted to expand and sustain his power base. If it is peace with the
PKK that will empower him, he will make peace with the PKK; if it is war with
the PKK that will empower him, he will make war with the PKK. The logic is
inscrutable.
The AKP’s policies have
devolved into an eye-opener, a revelation. Rather than a sustained expansionof the Turkish
Republic’s ‘in-group’ to all Muslims, its Syria policy demonstrates that
regardless of the government (Republicanist, Nationalist, Islamist), the
Turkish Republic seems hardwired to homogenize not only its ethnic differences,
but also securitize its borderlands on ethno-nationalist principles. It looks,
indeed must look, with unhealthy paranoia, perhaps even a syndrome, at the tiny, landlocked,
teetering Republic of Armenia on its eastern border. It refuses to take
seriously the Syrian Kurds as political players (on top of its existential
suspicion of domestic Kurds), and the Arab Alawis of Hatay are viewed with
impeachment and guilt by association.
The Responsibilities
of Neighbors
Mass repression and
genocides are often stopped by neighboring countries. Vietnam invaded Cambodia
in 1978, the Soviet Union pushed all the way through to Berlin to end Hitler’s
multiple genocides (and commit a few of their own), and only when the Uganda-backed
RPF defeated the Rwandan army did the 1994 genocide end (and expand into
neighboring DRC). In none of these cases was the objective of the interventions
the ending of the violence against civilians, but nonetheless its result. Had
Turkey, possibly in tandem with a regional alliance, taken a much more robust
stance against the Assad regime’s systematic, categorical violence against
civilians in 2011, we would not have had a strong ISIS, obscene levels of
civilian suffering, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, and disaffected
Muslim youth joining jihadist movements. Humanitarian intervention and genocide
prevention are often seen as mutually exclusive phenomena. In
this case, intervention could have been a form of prevention.
The hackneyed concept of
‘conflict spill-over’ misses a major point: for countries that share a long
land border and overlapping populations with similar customs, ‘spillover’ is a
natural sociological corollary of transnational ties, be it family or tribal.
Şükrü Kaya had understood this perhaps better than Turkey’s current
politicians.
This article was first published at E-International Relations' Website on September 22, 2015
About The Author:
Ugur Ümit
Üngör gained his Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude) at the University of
Amsterdam. In 2008-09, he was Lecturer in International History at the
Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009-10, he was
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University
College Dublin. Currently he is Associate Professor at the Department of History
at Utrecht University and Research Fellow at the Institute for War, Holocaust,
and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.
