By Alexander Willox
The recent downing
of a Russian jet by the Turkish armed forces has again highlighted Turkey’s
chaotic domestic situation. The honeymoon period afforded to President Erdogan,
resoundingly vindicated for his hard-line political stance in the November
elections and the subsequent bounce in the value of the Turkish Lira, is well
and truly over.
Image Attribute: Turkish PM Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan / Source: Wikimedia Commons
This has been a
tumultuous year for Turkish politics and Turkey in general. A general election
in June resulted in a hung parliament and the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP) refusing to cede power during negotiations with opposition parties.
A snap
election was called and a second electoral cycle in almost as many
months begun. The result was the AKP returned as a majority party to govern
over a country torn apart by ethnic, religious and ideological divisions.
These divisions
bubbled to the surface in October, when the deadliest suicide bomb in Turkish
history killed 102, mostly Kurdish, peace protesters in Ankara. Then on
November 24 the Turkish armed forces shot down a Russian jet running bombing
missions over northern Syria, ostensibly because it strayed into Turkish
airspace for less than 20 seconds.
The downing of the
Russian jet had the world on edge for 48 hours as NATO awaited the normally
bellicose President Putin’s response. However, his response was
uncharacteristically measured while being pointed in his admonition of
President Erdogan, his autocratic Middle Eastern soul mate. The response of
Putin was in stark contrast to the sabre rattling which emanated from Ankara
following the incident. Ankara made a point of insisting it would not
apologise for the incursion into its air space, whilst its NATO allies
tried, somewhat in vain, to drag the coalition’s efforts and attention back to
ISIS.
A lack of remorse
from Turkey has lead to Russia effectively halting Russian tourism to Turkey, a
huge part of the Turkish tourism sector, and imposing economic sanctions on
Turkey. Erdogan made a point of insisting he had given the order to fire on the
Russian plane himself,
which strongly suggests that the Turkish military had been waiting sometime for
such an opportunity to present itself. While Russia was foolhardy to stray so
close to the Turkish border, it can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate
such an incident.
Turkey, and
specifically Erdogan, have been very public in their dislike of Bashar Al-Assad
and his Baathist government in Syria, causing direct conflict with Russia.
Turkey has been openly supporting rebel groups with arms and money and most
importantly with the blind eye it has turned to its territory being used
as what is effectively a jihadist staging ground.
The rebel soldiers
who allegedly shot and killed the Russian pilot who ejected from the jet were a
group of Turkmen
rebels armed and trained by Turkey. Accusations that Turkey has been supporting
ISIS through its military intelligence wing, and even through Erdogan’s son
Bilal, refuse to go away. Indeed, President Putin has directly linked the
downing of the jet and Turkey’s reluctance to act against ISIS, accusing
Turkey of shooting down the plan to protect ISIS oil supplies. This
tacit acceptance of Sunni jihadism has ruptured Turkish society like never
before and has caused far more problems than Erdogan might have hoped it would
solve.
The government’s
verbal and actual war against the Kurds has muddied the waters in Turkey
significantly. The Kurds represent approximately 18
percent of the country’s population and Turkey had been moving slowly
and inexorably toward a peaceful solution to the decades-old ethnic war. That
is until Erdogan used the Kurdish-backed People’s Democratic Party as the
national scapegoat for his own failures and launched air strikes on Kurdish
militia operating against ISIS in northern Syria. The metropolitan areas, more
commonly represented in government by the traditional secular party the
Republican People’s Party (CHP), have also been treated poorly as memories of
the Gezi park protest movement have been largely crushed through Erdogan’s
relentless harassment of the free media.
The Turkish
government recently
arrested two editors of the independent Cumhurriyet newspaper.
Recent years have seen the steady erosion of freedom of the press in Turkey,
with nine journalists arrested on charges ranging from treason to revealing
state secrets. Cumhurriyet Editor-in-Chief Can Dundar and
Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul have said they will wear these charges “like a
badge of honour”. They are currently imprisoned because they revealed that
Turkey is shipping truckloads of weapons into Syria, something that almost
everyone already knew and that Putin
has been explicit about since the downing of the jet. Not content with
simply arresting the two main journalists at one of the country’s largest and
most successful newspapers, the government has also ordered
an investigation into the newspaper’s tax records, which seems to be
nothing more than low-level harassment for a media outlet that refuses to toe
the line.
With an
increasingly convoluted war on the nation’s doorstep, a growing and seemingly
unstoppable refugee crisis occurring in its borders, divisions along ethnic,
religious and ideological lines growing by the day and the erosion of freedoms
traditionally taken for granted in Turkey, the country looks more and more
unstable. This instability and the downing of the Russian jet have led to a
dive in the Lira’s value and the end of investor confidence. There can
be no denying that Erdogan is still in charge of Turkey and that he is slowly
and seemingly unstoppably taking control of more and more of the nation’s
institutions. He is the king of his castle; however if he continues down the
path he has chosen he may be the king of a very broken castle indeed.
About The Author:
Alexander Willox is a freelance international
political analyst and an analyst at Political Monitor. He tweets @frederickcon.
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Publication Details:
This article can was originally published at Australian Institute of International Affairs on December 4, 2015, with attribution under a Creative Commons
License.