If a
democratically-elected dictator wants to act as a conduit in a neighbour’s
civil war, what does he expect but massacres in his own major cities?
Turkey
is alone. First, we’ll take a look at the racist reasons for this. If 39 men
and women had been slaughtered in Paris or Brussels or Berlin
on New Year’s Eve, the headlines would ripple on for three or four days. Two or
three days if the victims had been western European. But of course, this being
Turkey, which is a Muslim country – whose people are not always as white as
those from “Christendom” – the headlines drifted off far more quickly. Not
our lot, we Westerners said.
Thus few
readers of this article will know that, proportionately, Arabs were among the
largest number of casualties of this mass murder: from tiny Lebanon
alone, three dead and four wounded, both Muslims and Christians. We are quite
unaware of the outrage in Lebanon at the domestic television coverage of the
massacre victims – morbid, sensational, deeply intrusive interviews with
collapsing family members, so gruesome that even the Lebanese prime minister
had to plead with journalists to leave relatives alone.
Then there
are the military reasons. Hasn’t Turkey been playing fast and loose in the
Syrian war? Hasn’t it allowed weapons and money to be funnelled across its
border to Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra (aka al-Qaeda, the murderers
of 9/11 and the heroes of eastern Aleppo) and to various US and British-backed
“moderates”, who can kill without apparently being “jihadis”? Hasn’t
Turkey gone back to war with its own Kurds and the Syrian Kurds, too? Hasn’t
the Turkish army – the largest in Nato, although for some reason we don’t
mention this these days – been a bit disloyal recently?
For last
July’s attempted coup – despite all the claptrap about “Gulenists” – was
essentially a military plot to overthrow President Recep Tayip Erdogan. If a democratically-elected
dictator (of which there are a growing number around the world) wants to act as
a conduit in a neighbour’s civil war – as Pakistan did in Afghanistan,
channelling weapons, funds and fighters to combat the Russians with
American and Saudi help and encouragement – what does it expect but massacres
in its own major cities? Touch Afghanistan, and the Pakistanis found the
Taliban marching on Islamabad. Touch Syria, and the fireworks explode in your
back yard.
Then there
are the political reasons. The Turks used to want to join the EU; they’re not so keen
now, and who can blame them? So their present policy is to take the EU’s
massive bribes (courtesy of Angela Merkel) for closing the seas to Muslim
refugees trying to reach Europe and demand the promised visa-free trips to
Europe for its 79 million citizens, while at the same time making up with
Russia, Iran, China and any other non-Arab nations that might be friends.
Oddly for a
man who is nostalgic for the old Turkish empire – hence, I suppose, his
newly-gilded palace in Istanbul — Erdogan has turned anti-Ottoman in his
foreign policy, virtually ignoring the Arabs whom he courted after the 2011
revolutions in favour of larger powers.
Erdogan, who
demanded that Trump’s name be taken off his towers in Istanbul after the then
presidential candidate called for restrictions on Muslim immigrants, now thinks
he may get a critic-free ride from the new guy in the White House. I wouldn’t
be so sure.
And that’s
part of the problem. For Erdogan is now so fickle in his alliances, shooting
down a Russian jet and then cosying up to Russia’s president, loving Assad at
the start of the Syrian revolution and hating him later, flirting with Europe
and then jeering at the EU, that no-one in their right mind would want to get
too close to the Caliph himself.
Anyone who
can bomb Kurds while claiming to bomb Isis, who can demand that no power dare
interfere in his country’s “domestic affairs” while positioning Turkish
troops in both Syria and Iraq (where Turkey’s involvement outside Mosul is
enraging the Baghdad government) is clearly walking a very dangerous path.
So what’s
next? More massacres? Of course. From Isis, Kurds, Marxists, you name it. More
attempted coups? Now there’s the more important political and military
question.
Eye-witness
describes Istanbul attack
More than
7,000 Turkish soldiers, including 164 generals, had been detained by last
October. Not, surely, just to punish them. Any sane army knows that when you
throw that many soldiers into the clink, it’s not to hand them over to the
judiciary, many of whose members have anyway been savaged by detentions.
No, the mass
arrests among Nato’s largest army is to prevent the military staging a
more successful coup attempt – in which the Caliph himself would end up in
prison. Or worse.
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