20 February 2012. A World to Win News Service. Following is an edited version of an interview with Hassan Khaled Chatila, a Syrian revolutionary living in Europe. Although we have done our best to faithfully represent his views on the questions addressed here, they remain his own.
The balance of forces among the opposition now favours counter-revolutionaries, because [under current circumstances] the militarization of the movement against the regime favours international interference. Alongside the unarmed protests in the streets there are now significant armed actions. But there has not been much change in the political consciousness of the mass movement, which remains a spontaneous revolt whose unifying goal is the fall of the regime. Now street slogans call for armed action to achieve this
The head of the Free Syrian Army [formed by officers and soldiers who left the regime's armed forces] has been calling for foreign intervention since early on. It's not clear who they are. It seems that the name actually covers several armed groups aided and sheltered by Turkey. Because there is no real organization and little political unity among these army deserters, they are often act more like armed gangs, carrying out looting and rape. The FSA [claims its purpose is to] protect demonstrations in the cities from government attack. Their tactics are bad – they shoot at government soldiers who return fire and kill civilian protesters. Their real strategy is to militarize the clash between the movement and the regime so as to provoke foreign intervention.
Politically and ideologically the mass movement is not mature enough to achieve a democratic and nationalist state, because of the absence of a revolutionary left. The reactionary forces among the opposition seek to bring to power a military regime that could be even worse than Bashar al-Assad. In Egypt, the US wants the army to protect the state and keep peace with Israel. The issues in Syria are more complicated, because of its relations with Iran, Turkey, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The US wants the forces backed by Saudi Arabia to dominate in Syria and keep politics out of the hands of the people, who tend to support the Palestinians and the resistance to Israel, and are generally anti-American – much more so in Syria than in Egypt. Because of its relations with all those forces, Syria can play a key role in the region.
Since the death of [Egyptian President] Nasser in 1970 and the defeat of the Baathist left [associated with Nasser] in Syria around that time, Saudi Arabia has come to be the predominate country in the Arab world. [The weakening of the Saddam Hussein regime and its fall with the 2003 US-led invasion accentuated this situation.] Bashar's father Hafaz had good relations with the Saudis in some periods, though later they cooled. Both regimes want to avoid war with Israel and the US. Rami Maklouf [Syria's wealthiest businessman, a cousin of Bashar and pillar of the regime] is infamous for having once said that Syria's stability requires a stable Israel.
The Syrian National Council, an organization of opposition forces in exile in Europe, the US and Turkey, wants to be recognized as the representative of the people. It has no presence in Syria. Its chairman, Bourhan Ghaion, is a French citizen and teaches at the Sorbonne. Its spokeswoman has long worked for the European Union. Their official programme calls for the fall of the regime, a democratic republic and no political confessionalism [politics organized by religious groupings]. Its main forces comprise economic liberals, other secular forces and the Moslem Brotherhood. They are very actively soliciting foreign intervention. Their representatives are going from capital to capital to bring about foreign military intervention but they do very little inside the country.
The SNC has issued statements condemning the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah, and calling for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian problem.
Some Moslem Brotherhood members seek what they call a "civil state", a deliberately vague formulation that doesn't make it clear whether that state would be Islamic or secular. In other words, all citizens would be equal, but it seems that they would not accept a constitution that does not define Sharia [Islamic law] as the source of all law. So there are significant differences among the members of the Syrian National Council.
While the Council is backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and, implicitly, Europe and the US, it has no control over the Free Syrian Army.
There is also the non-revolutionary Syrian left, which is still seeking "a solution with and through" the Assad regime. This means change from above, not below. Their goal is to be part of a new government. Their influence among the people is limited, especially since they are widely reviled as agents of the regime. The various Local Coordinating Committees include people from the more revolutionary left and Arab nationalists.
The "Friends of Syria" meeting to be held in Tunis 24 February may be very significant. [This entity is being built on the model of the "Friends of Libya" under whose auspices Nato intervened in that country – in the present case, the purpose is to by-pass the need for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize foreign interference in Syria.] It was called by France’s President Sarkozy and backed by the [pro-US, Islamic-led] Tunisian government. There seems to be some differences among these "friends" about which Syrians to invite.
Opinion in the street is constantly changing. Some people carry banners hailing the SNC and calling for foreign intervention. In contrast, the 17 February demonstrations were called "the Friday of Resistance", with the view that the people should rely on themselves.
The opposition to the regime from within Syria's "political class" has come to be divided between a left that emphasizes the political and social rights of the people but is cut off from the masses, who have no confidence in any of the traditional political groups, and a neo-liberal right that demands foreign intervention. Both are in favour of globalized economic development in Syria and both fear the people.
The divisions among the people on religious/ethnic lines have been exaggerated abroad. There are people from all the religions and ethnicities on both sides. The 17 February "Friday of Resistance" brought several welcome developments in the capital. They hold the potential for bringing about another reversal in the relationship of forces between the armed opposition forces and the people’s movement.
[Until now the anti-regime movement has not shaken Damascus and Aleppo, as it has poorer provincial cities. Protests in Damascus have mainly been confined to the less well-off, mainly Sunni suburbs. The anti-regime protest that broke out in a popular suburb of Damascus 17 February spread to Mezze, an area of government and corporate offices and residences not far from the presidential palace. Alawites make up a large percentage of the population of Mezze – and the regime has drawn much of its core support from Alawite clans. Assad's troops killed three protesters in a small demonstration in Mezze on Friday. The next day, after their funeral, a small march swelled into at least many hundreds as men and women from the neighbourhood joined in.]
If the people were left to themselves, I don't think there could be a civil war among the people. But the situation is complex, and foreign intervention could lead to a reactionary, ethnic/religious-based civil war. In that case, Syria could explode, with enormous consequences for the surrounding countries where all these ethnicities are represented.
As of now, no one in Syria today has a real revolutionary strategy. Activists are doing everything on a day-to-day basis.
Posts mit dem Label Bashar Assad werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
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Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2012
Syria: no to Assad, no to foreign intervention!
13 February 2012. A World to Win News Service. The US military has "begun to review potential military options" in Syria, according to The New York Times (12 February). An unnamed American military official told this authoritative newspaper, "We're looking at a whole range of options, but as far as going to one course of action, I haven't seen anything." The report says the "possible options" that would be considered include "everything, from doing nothing to arming rebels to covert action, airstrikes or deploying ground troops."
This admission comes as the US is already backing various forms of intervention in Syria, including Turkey's efforts to use Syrian military opposition elements to form an army under its control, and the money and arms allegedly pouring into the country from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are almost undoubtedly backing fellow Sunni Islamic fundamentalists, as they have everywhere else.
The US followed an often ambiguous policy toward Syria for many years, working to isolate and weaken the regime while also recognizing its importance in preserving the status quo in the region at times when that has been a prime American goal. Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez crushed the revolutionary Palestinian movement then centred in Lebanon in the 1970s, enforced peace with Israel despite the Zionist occupation of Syria's Golan Heights since 1967, and supported the US during the 1991 invasion of Iraq.
When the Syrian revolt broke last March, inspired by similar spontaneous revolts that toppled Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali, the US did not support its main demand, the fall of the regime. Instead Washington called on Assad to implement economic and political reforms meant to appease the movement while making it easier to pull Syria into the US orbit.
That revolt, Salameh Kaileh, a prominent Arab Marxist from Palestine living in Syria, told AWTWNS in an interview last August, was unleashed by the middle strata in the countryside. In smaller provincial cities, it now involves all social classes, including the merchants and local capitalists, Kaileh said.
"There are reasons why Damascus and Allepo haven't moved," he said at that time. "First, the concentration of security forces there makes any protest very difficult. Further, these two cities have benefited from economic changes during the preceding period. Thus we've seen Aleppo profit from the economic opening to Turkey and Iraq. Damascus, for its part, has profited from development of the service and tourism economy. But nevertheless in these two cities there are many poor sectors who are starting to move."
This situation has been complicated by the danger of the revolt being dragged down and degenerating into ethnic and religious conflict. The regime draws its core forces mainly from among Alawi (a branch of Shia Islam) clans with support from Christian forces, a configuration whose domination of the country was inherited from the French occupation. The revolt has been mainly rooted among the Sunni majority, as well as Kurds. Unforgivably, the regime has also enjoyed the support or neutrality of almost all of Syria's so-called left, which unlike in Tunisia and Egypt have played little role in the mass movement.
The revolt has often raised slogans and made gestures emphasizing the unity of the Syrian people against the regime, while it has been the regime that has most fanned the sparks of ethnic conflict to pose itself as the only alternative. But clearly the regime is not alone in seeing the potential of conflicts among the people as a way to achieve reactionary goals.
It was not until 18 August that Washington called for Assad to go. This was not because the Obama government had suddenly found out how bloodthirsty the Syrian regime is. There had already been five months of massacres of unarmed civilian demonstrators, and for years the US had turned over prisoners to Syria precisely in order that they be tortured. But the US saw both necessity and opportunity in the current situation.
As Kaileh said, the US was now seeking regime change, but a controlled regime change, hoping to avoid unleashing uncontrollable forces, including the masses of Syrian people themselves, that might lead to an outcome that would destabilize the whole US-dominated structure of region, including the regimes in neighbouring Turkey and Jordan.
"Following the Tunisian and Egyptian model, this change (sought by the US in Syria) would not be a radical one but a change within the regime itself", Kaileh said. One possible form would be a split within the power structure, particularly the armed forces and a coup, spurred on by or even possibly brought about by foreign military intervention.
The necessity was to step in a resolve a situation – a popular uprising – that imperilled American interests. The opportunity was that it had become possible to envisage taking out a formerly stable regime that formed a bloc with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Palestinian Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, posing serious problems for the US and threatening its reactionary regional allies. It is no coincidence that the US's eagerness to bring down Assad comes amid heightened US threats to attack Iran and/or back Israel in attacking it.
Even as the popular revolt in the Middle East and North Africa continues to acutely challenge some of the existing regimes and forms of imperialist domination, and the genie of the peoples' awakening has been released from the bottle, instead of giving in to the popular will and or even retreating slightly, the US has worked to advance its interests amid these turbulent waters.
To the so-called Tunisian and Egyptian models has now been added the "Libyan model" in which the US and the European powers (acting both in concert with the US and also out of rivalry with the US and each other) basically invaded (if mainly from the skies) and brought down the Gaddafi regime. This show of force was meant not only to assert control of Libya but also proclaim and maintain regional dominance in the face of both the peoples and other rivals, including Russia and China.
The foreign interference and stoking of civil war by the US and its allies in Syria is exactly the kind of thing the UN supposedly exists to prevent. A few years ago the US blustered threats against the Assad regime for interfering in Lebanon and demanded that the UN step in. For the US, UK and France, the question is not what is morally right or legal according to international law but what serves their imperialist interests.
Now that these powers have taken the opposite position regarding Syria: outside interference can be justified because Assad is "killing his own people". Further, if it is true that forces linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq are now fighting in Syria, this is not unrelated to the Gulf states' backing of other Islamic fundamentalist forces there. The point, for the West, is that their interference (or moves backed by them) is good, while anyone else's is an excuse for... Nato intervention.
As Robert Fisk pointed out in the UK Independent, one particularly sharp illustration of the hypocrisy of the US and Europe is that the absolute monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now portrayed as the region's best champions of "democracy" in Syria. The fact that the Saudi regime sent in troops to put down a rebellion by the Shia majority in Bahrain and is shooting Shia demonstrators in Eastern Saudi Arabia has been politely overlooked.
The increasing importance of the alliance between the US and the reactionary Gulf states – driven by the dread that the "Arab Spring" inspires in them all – is exemplified by the fact that they were able to change the position of the Arab League overnight, from one of at least apparent neutrality toward the Assad regime to putting forward a stunningly arrogant and detailed plan for what should happen next in Syria, beginning with a transfer of power from Assad to others within his regime, with or without a military coup.
The Arab League has called for a "joint Arab-UN peacekeeping mission" in Syria, but this isn't about peace. It called for providing "all forms of moral and material support" to opposition forces, but this isn't about helping the advance of what has been the main thrust of the people's revolt so far, an end to oppression.
What it resembles more closely is the 19th-century "gunboat diplomacy" when Western powers used their warships to force those local governments not already under colonial control to comply point-by-point with an imposed agenda. The fact that these demands come from Arab mouths does not change the fact that the US wrote the script, or at least gave it the green light. How could the Gulf monarchies threaten Syria without the spectre of Western gunboats (and aircraft and armies) looming just behind them?
With the pretext that Saddam Hussein was "killing his own people", two invasions separated by a decade of murderous sanctions not only led to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people but also plunged the Iraqi people into as dark a night as they have ever faced before, a situation very unfavourable for revolt. Then, on the same pretext, came the "Libyan" model, in which a regime that had become highly compliant with Western (and especially British and Italian) interests was brought down amidst the unleashing of all sorts of reactionary interests and forces, making life in Libya today as great a hell as ever before.
Right now the US is in no position to mount another large-scale invasion, thanks not to any sudden change of heart but the way the American projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out. On the other hand, the kind of "cheap" war in Libya (cheap to the US and other Nato members, not to the Libyan people who are still paying a horrendous price) may not be possible in Syria, where the last five months of revolt have shown that the regime reactionary does have a stronger social base as well as a real army.
American strategists (see, for example, Foreign Policy.com) bemoan the fact that an "air exclusion zone" would have little affect in Syria, where the regime hasn't been using war planes, and that air power cannot be applied to aid anti-regime forces because to the extent that combat is going now, it is in densely populated cities. "What is presented as an alternative to military intervention [on the ground] is more likely to pave the way to such intervention once it fails," Marc Lynch warns in that publication.
Will a coup provide them with a solution? That's one possibility, but Syria is not like Tunisia and Egypt, whose militaries were closely tied to and trusted by the US and not totally identified with the regime in the public mind. The Syrian military has run up huge blood debts with major sections of the people.
We can't predict what will happen – how the US and its allies might try to solve their dilemma and make a grab for Syria. But we should know by now, after all that we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so many other places, that what the imperialists are capable of is sometimes worse than we can imagine – and the results of their intervention are always disastrous for the people.
This admission comes as the US is already backing various forms of intervention in Syria, including Turkey's efforts to use Syrian military opposition elements to form an army under its control, and the money and arms allegedly pouring into the country from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are almost undoubtedly backing fellow Sunni Islamic fundamentalists, as they have everywhere else.
The US followed an often ambiguous policy toward Syria for many years, working to isolate and weaken the regime while also recognizing its importance in preserving the status quo in the region at times when that has been a prime American goal. Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez crushed the revolutionary Palestinian movement then centred in Lebanon in the 1970s, enforced peace with Israel despite the Zionist occupation of Syria's Golan Heights since 1967, and supported the US during the 1991 invasion of Iraq.
When the Syrian revolt broke last March, inspired by similar spontaneous revolts that toppled Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali, the US did not support its main demand, the fall of the regime. Instead Washington called on Assad to implement economic and political reforms meant to appease the movement while making it easier to pull Syria into the US orbit.
That revolt, Salameh Kaileh, a prominent Arab Marxist from Palestine living in Syria, told AWTWNS in an interview last August, was unleashed by the middle strata in the countryside. In smaller provincial cities, it now involves all social classes, including the merchants and local capitalists, Kaileh said.
"There are reasons why Damascus and Allepo haven't moved," he said at that time. "First, the concentration of security forces there makes any protest very difficult. Further, these two cities have benefited from economic changes during the preceding period. Thus we've seen Aleppo profit from the economic opening to Turkey and Iraq. Damascus, for its part, has profited from development of the service and tourism economy. But nevertheless in these two cities there are many poor sectors who are starting to move."
This situation has been complicated by the danger of the revolt being dragged down and degenerating into ethnic and religious conflict. The regime draws its core forces mainly from among Alawi (a branch of Shia Islam) clans with support from Christian forces, a configuration whose domination of the country was inherited from the French occupation. The revolt has been mainly rooted among the Sunni majority, as well as Kurds. Unforgivably, the regime has also enjoyed the support or neutrality of almost all of Syria's so-called left, which unlike in Tunisia and Egypt have played little role in the mass movement.
The revolt has often raised slogans and made gestures emphasizing the unity of the Syrian people against the regime, while it has been the regime that has most fanned the sparks of ethnic conflict to pose itself as the only alternative. But clearly the regime is not alone in seeing the potential of conflicts among the people as a way to achieve reactionary goals.
It was not until 18 August that Washington called for Assad to go. This was not because the Obama government had suddenly found out how bloodthirsty the Syrian regime is. There had already been five months of massacres of unarmed civilian demonstrators, and for years the US had turned over prisoners to Syria precisely in order that they be tortured. But the US saw both necessity and opportunity in the current situation.
As Kaileh said, the US was now seeking regime change, but a controlled regime change, hoping to avoid unleashing uncontrollable forces, including the masses of Syrian people themselves, that might lead to an outcome that would destabilize the whole US-dominated structure of region, including the regimes in neighbouring Turkey and Jordan.
"Following the Tunisian and Egyptian model, this change (sought by the US in Syria) would not be a radical one but a change within the regime itself", Kaileh said. One possible form would be a split within the power structure, particularly the armed forces and a coup, spurred on by or even possibly brought about by foreign military intervention.
The necessity was to step in a resolve a situation – a popular uprising – that imperilled American interests. The opportunity was that it had become possible to envisage taking out a formerly stable regime that formed a bloc with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Palestinian Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, posing serious problems for the US and threatening its reactionary regional allies. It is no coincidence that the US's eagerness to bring down Assad comes amid heightened US threats to attack Iran and/or back Israel in attacking it.
Even as the popular revolt in the Middle East and North Africa continues to acutely challenge some of the existing regimes and forms of imperialist domination, and the genie of the peoples' awakening has been released from the bottle, instead of giving in to the popular will and or even retreating slightly, the US has worked to advance its interests amid these turbulent waters.
To the so-called Tunisian and Egyptian models has now been added the "Libyan model" in which the US and the European powers (acting both in concert with the US and also out of rivalry with the US and each other) basically invaded (if mainly from the skies) and brought down the Gaddafi regime. This show of force was meant not only to assert control of Libya but also proclaim and maintain regional dominance in the face of both the peoples and other rivals, including Russia and China.
The foreign interference and stoking of civil war by the US and its allies in Syria is exactly the kind of thing the UN supposedly exists to prevent. A few years ago the US blustered threats against the Assad regime for interfering in Lebanon and demanded that the UN step in. For the US, UK and France, the question is not what is morally right or legal according to international law but what serves their imperialist interests.
Now that these powers have taken the opposite position regarding Syria: outside interference can be justified because Assad is "killing his own people". Further, if it is true that forces linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq are now fighting in Syria, this is not unrelated to the Gulf states' backing of other Islamic fundamentalist forces there. The point, for the West, is that their interference (or moves backed by them) is good, while anyone else's is an excuse for... Nato intervention.
As Robert Fisk pointed out in the UK Independent, one particularly sharp illustration of the hypocrisy of the US and Europe is that the absolute monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now portrayed as the region's best champions of "democracy" in Syria. The fact that the Saudi regime sent in troops to put down a rebellion by the Shia majority in Bahrain and is shooting Shia demonstrators in Eastern Saudi Arabia has been politely overlooked.
The increasing importance of the alliance between the US and the reactionary Gulf states – driven by the dread that the "Arab Spring" inspires in them all – is exemplified by the fact that they were able to change the position of the Arab League overnight, from one of at least apparent neutrality toward the Assad regime to putting forward a stunningly arrogant and detailed plan for what should happen next in Syria, beginning with a transfer of power from Assad to others within his regime, with or without a military coup.
The Arab League has called for a "joint Arab-UN peacekeeping mission" in Syria, but this isn't about peace. It called for providing "all forms of moral and material support" to opposition forces, but this isn't about helping the advance of what has been the main thrust of the people's revolt so far, an end to oppression.
What it resembles more closely is the 19th-century "gunboat diplomacy" when Western powers used their warships to force those local governments not already under colonial control to comply point-by-point with an imposed agenda. The fact that these demands come from Arab mouths does not change the fact that the US wrote the script, or at least gave it the green light. How could the Gulf monarchies threaten Syria without the spectre of Western gunboats (and aircraft and armies) looming just behind them?
With the pretext that Saddam Hussein was "killing his own people", two invasions separated by a decade of murderous sanctions not only led to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people but also plunged the Iraqi people into as dark a night as they have ever faced before, a situation very unfavourable for revolt. Then, on the same pretext, came the "Libyan" model, in which a regime that had become highly compliant with Western (and especially British and Italian) interests was brought down amidst the unleashing of all sorts of reactionary interests and forces, making life in Libya today as great a hell as ever before.
Right now the US is in no position to mount another large-scale invasion, thanks not to any sudden change of heart but the way the American projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out. On the other hand, the kind of "cheap" war in Libya (cheap to the US and other Nato members, not to the Libyan people who are still paying a horrendous price) may not be possible in Syria, where the last five months of revolt have shown that the regime reactionary does have a stronger social base as well as a real army.
American strategists (see, for example, Foreign Policy.com) bemoan the fact that an "air exclusion zone" would have little affect in Syria, where the regime hasn't been using war planes, and that air power cannot be applied to aid anti-regime forces because to the extent that combat is going now, it is in densely populated cities. "What is presented as an alternative to military intervention [on the ground] is more likely to pave the way to such intervention once it fails," Marc Lynch warns in that publication.
Will a coup provide them with a solution? That's one possibility, but Syria is not like Tunisia and Egypt, whose militaries were closely tied to and trusted by the US and not totally identified with the regime in the public mind. The Syrian military has run up huge blood debts with major sections of the people.
We can't predict what will happen – how the US and its allies might try to solve their dilemma and make a grab for Syria. But we should know by now, after all that we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so many other places, that what the imperialists are capable of is sometimes worse than we can imagine – and the results of their intervention are always disastrous for the people.
Sonntag, 23. Oktober 2011
Turkey as a "role model" and its contradictions
by Aydin M.
17 October 2011. A World to Win News Service. The following is a contribution to the discussion of how to view the Turkish regime and its role in the world.
The new role that Turkey has sought and has been encouraged to play has become more evident in its behaviour towards Syria, where a mass protest has been going on for months. Turkey's leaders have even asked Syrian head of state Bashar Assad to step down. Turkey has been trying to increase its influence in Syria by accepting Syrians fleeing the regime's brutality and also by imposing an embargo on arms shipments. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, "If there are planes carrying weapons, or such shipments by land, then we would stop and confiscate them." (New York Times, 23 September 2011) Turkey has gone so far as to challenge Iran, a country with which it had good relations in the past and one of the main backers of the Syrian regime. According to the same report "Turkey intercepted an arms shipment from Iran to Syria in August, and it seized the cargo of an Iranian plane bound for Syria in March."
But Turkey's renewed activity in the region is not limited to neighbouring Syria. Erdogan's tour last month to Tunisia, Egypt and as the first head of country to visit Libya, the three Arab countries that have undergone regime changes this year, cannot be underestimated as routine diplomatic visits. In fact this new role has been noticed by many observers who attribute it to the intelligence of Turkey's leadership in skilfully taking the right side in the Arab revolts and thus becoming more respected and influential in the region. It is said that Turkey has a vision and good sense of how things are going, and more than that, that it represents a solution, or a key component of a solution, to the region's instability. Another NYT article puts it this way:
"[I]n an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions." (26 September 2011)
Over the last couple of years Turkey has also been trying to influence the Arab world by publicly distancing itself from Israel and expressing sympathy for the Palestinians.
The truth is that Turkey did not take the right side at the right time. For a long time and especially in 1990s, Turkey was Israel's strategic regional ally. Their friendly political relations as well as military and security cooperation was unhidden, as was the fact that this was part of cooperation with the US and other Western imperialists in their domination of Middle Eastern peoples. In an attempt to influence the Middle East, Turkey also worked hard to buy the friendship of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Bashar Assad of Syria and also developed good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It sent tens of thousand of immigrants to work in Libya. Turkish relations with Libya were such that as a Nato member, Turkey opposed its intervention in Libya.
Clearly Turkey is playing a more important role in the Middle East and doing its best to increase its influence in the region, and new developments in the region have encouraged those ambitions. It is important to examine their sources and content.
Turkey and the international scene
There is no doubt that Turkey's ambitions cannot be separated from the international scene and the new imperialist world order that has partly taken shape or at least that the imperialist are trying to forge.
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (JDP) was elected last June with a large majority for the third consecutive time, with a voter participation of 87 percent. This victory represented a new development in Turkey's ruling class and its relations with Nato and the Western imperialists. The most important aspect of it is that some of the Kemalist elements (named after Mustafa Kemal Atatutrk, the founder of the modern Turkish state) in the political structure of Turkey's ruling class are losing their traditional political colouring and a new form of political structure is emerging. The main goal of this political reform is to establish a more powerful and stable rule so that Turkey can play a strategic role in the Middle East in accordance with Western imperialist interests as well as its own. These reforms have been influenced by a range of major developments in the social-economic structure of Turkey, such as a greater development of capitalism and the formation of a relatively powerful Kurdish bourgeoisie.
The JDP first came into office in 2003 with the support of the US and the European Union. It envisaged the launching of an extensive privatisation programme, beginning to integrate the Kurdish bourgeoisie into the political structure, and helping to carry out US and Western plans in the Middle East.
To further understand the necessity of such changes for Turkey's ruling class and their imperialist backers, it is necessary to briefly examine the development of Turkey's political power structure from an international perspective.
Some background
The Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk was formed in 1923 after the collapse of Ottoman Empire in World War 1. This was part of the Middle East political order that took shape after the war. After the Second World War and especially in the 1950s, Turkey played a major role in the imperialist bloc headed by the US to counter communism and the Soviet Union, which remained the US's chief rival even as it changed from a socialist society to a capitalist one in a phoney state "socialist" form.
But the political structure that took shape during that time no longer conforms to today's imperialist world order and requires some changes.
In economic terms, especially over the last few decades, Turkey has undergone major capitalist development and its economy has become even more deeply integrated into a globalised capitalist system.
The other important development is the formation of a relatively powerful Kurdish bourgeoisie that is seeking a greater share of the country's power structure.
Pitting Turks against the oppressed Kurds and using Turkish nationalism to unite all different factions of the ruling class has always been an important part of Kemalism. But there has been increasing pressure to qualitatively expand the Kurdish bourgeoisie's role in the power structure. For example, one capital condition posed by the European Union for Turkey's admission into its union was that it "resolve the Kurdish question". Undertaking such reforms was not easy for the Turkish power structure, but refusing was not easy either.
In fact, given the present situation, such reforms developed into a necessity. Erdogan promised to reform Turkey's constitution in regard to the status of the Kurds.
In the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet bloc created room to integrate Turkey even more deeply into the capitalist world order and repair some of its most important flaws so that it could become a strategic player in the region. The "war on terror" at the beginning of this century made that an urgent issue for the imperialists.
The economic reform to restructure Turkey's economy and integrate it deeper into the imperialists' world economy started earlier, after the military coup that took place in 1981. Turgut Ozal, who became president in 1983, started to implement the reforms that the IMF and WB had designed for Turkey. They brought about tremendous economic changes as well as an economic crisis that accelerated the large displacement of population from the countryside and the formation of slums around the large cities, rampant inflation and extensive unemployment.
Another round of reforms that was proposed by the IMF for Turkey started in 2001. By then Turkey had received a 31 billion dollar loan from the IMF.
The repayment of these loans and interest was consuming half of Turkish GNP. The country's currency, the lira, lost half its value, and people were fast losing their purchasing power and savings. When the JDP came to power, they started to sell off all state-owned enterprises, even ports and roads. Foreign companies were given access to all sectors of economy except oil.
According to the latest figures, Turkey's economic growth is around 9 per cent and its per capita income is twice as much as in 2002, around 10,000 US dollars. But its unemployment is 11.5 percent and its economy is stamped with the illness of unevenness that has divided the country into the big rich cities and the remote and poor and backward regions. The fissures among different regions are deep. A few big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Adana account for 49 percent of the GNP, while regions such as southern and eastern Anatolia have a share of only 4 percent. This uneven development is a serious limitation for Turkey's economy and could ruin the whole plan for Turkey.
The rise of an Islamist party
The army has played an important role in building the present political structure. The main aim of the 1980 military coup and the formation of a military government was to uproot the communist and revolutionary left trends in Turkey, especially after the revolution that overthrew the Shah's regime in Iran. In order to block the growth of communists, the army started to promote Islamism. The popularisation and propaganda of religious ideology that started then has continued through today.
The generals in power made religious study in schools mandatory. This had a certain impact on the educational system. History was taught from a religious point of view. The teaching of biology and other sciences was influenced by religious beliefs. Using Christian-fundamentalist textbooks as the model, textbooks were rewritten explicitly on the basis of "creationist" theory (the claim that living things did not evolve but were created by god). Generating an anti-evolutionist climate was part of the programme to promote religion. (See Cloning Creationism in Turkey, National Center for Science Education, Edis Taner/1999, pp. 30-35)
In fact the role of religion in the state has its roots in the Ottoman Empire and has never been diminished. The regime's Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the Turkish Republic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.
This department's job was to help unify the ruling class. "Charged by law with managing Islam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since the country's first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relic of the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering national unity." (NYT, 28 September 2011)
State promotion of Islamism went even further as the armed struggle of Kurdish nationalist PKK [Kurdish Workers Party] expanded towards the end of 1980s.
Following the increase of poverty in the remote areas and the war in Kurdistan, the army was facing two internal threats: the PKK and the growth of fundamentalism. The army then used the Islamic forces against PKK and other leftist forces, while at the same time applying pressure to some Islamic forces, including those in the state apparatus such as the Islamic Welfare Party. When this party was banned from political activity in 1998 , Erdogan was one of its leaders. He fled to the US and established close relations with US politicians. He finally "saw", he says, the necessity of a "strategic alliance of the Islamic forces of Turkey with the US". When he returned to Turkey he founded the JDP. The party won the 2002 elections with the support of the US and at least some Turkish army generals. The JDP also took control of the Turkish Parliament. Paul Wolfowitz, at that time the US assistant defence secretary, was closely watching and even supervising the process.
Some people argue that the Turkish army opposed this process because the army advocates secularism. In fact the army has never advocated secularism, and the Islamists who run the government are not opposed to the army or military rule. In fact, together they form a state machine based on the monopoly of "legitimate" violence, with the security of the ruling class as its central goal. The JDP has brought the Turkish state a bigger mass base than the army could have dreamed of. Turkey's regime as a whole is using this mass base or "legitimacy" to arrest, imprison and punish opposition forces, workers and journalists, and is using its arms to suppress the Kurdish people and regions. The role that "Kemalism" once played, along with the army; is now being played by "modernised" and "Westernised" Islamic ideology and forces, along with the army (and with a continuing major role for Turkish chauvinism). The army has been and continues to be the main pillar of the political system of the Turkish ruling class, which is deeply dependent on imperialism.
This is the secret of what is known as "the Turkish model' in today's Middle East.
Turkey as a model
At the same time, it is important to distinguish between the new role that Turkey has been assigned to play in the region, on the one hand, and the "model" it is being said to offer other Middle Eastern countries.
For nearly a decade the US in particular has been promoting Turkey as its caretaker in the region. Obama has continued to follow this policy. In fact, the US has seen the so-called "democratisation" of Turkey's political structure, and its blend with a modernised Islam, to forge a relatively stable and powerful political system, as a good thing for American imperial interests because they may strengthen Turkey's ability to play this role for the US.
After winning the June elections, Erdogan said this was not just a victory for Turkey but from Turkey to Bosnia, Beirut, Damascus, Ramallah, Nablas, Jenin, Quds (Jerusalem) and across north Africa. Much of this region that Turkey wants to influence was once under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey had already taken some steps to raise its reputation and authority in the region. For example, it attempted to help resolve the nuclear dispute between the West and Iran, intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and influence Pakistan. Its attempts to gain a gateway into the Middle East by establishing good relations with Libya and Syria were also part of that.
However the start of the people's uprising in Tunisia and Egypt and its quick spread throughout the Middle East, and the intentions of the US and other Western imperialists to influence and control these uprisings, created new opportunities for Turkey.
The US and European imperialists are looking at Turkey as their Islamic broker in the region. The fact that Turkey is governed by an Islamic party can help it sell itself as a force that "belongs" to the region. Dumping military cooperation with Israel after the Zionists attacked the ferries carrying aid to people of Gaza was a gesture with a similar purpose, although Turkey has been careful to limit its opposition to Israel. For instance, it pulled the Mavi Marmara out of the most recent aid flotilla. Since the Turkish ship was supposed to be the main vessel, this was a major factor in sabotaging the flotilla and avoiding a confrontation with Israel.
Turkey might be the role model that the imperialists are showing in their shop windows in some ways. What they are offering to other countries in the Middle East is that they can combine dependency on world capitalism/imperialism with Islam. Also, perhaps the role that the Turkish army plays as not only the heart of the state but the ultimate supervisor of the government could be reproduced in some countries in various forms. However the role allocated to Turkey as the US's caretaker in the region cannot be offered to other countries in the Middle East.
Limitations of this plan
The Turkish system and regime suffer from very serious weaknesses. Whether or not Turkey can resolve them is not clear yet and depends on many different factors and the way they develop.
The Kurdish question is one of them. It is true that one of the important issues Erdogan wants to deal with in the current review of the constitution is the status of the Kurds. A reform might be able to integrate part of the Kurdish bourgeoisie into the state apparatus, but even if that goes smoothly and temporarily reduces some of the contradictions, the fundamental contradiction – the fact that of that Kurds are an oppressed nation – will remain and the discrimination against them and other minority nationalities will not end. The oppression and suppression of the Kurdish masses will continue and aggravate the contradiction sooner or later.
In early October the Turkish police detained more than 140 pro-Kurdish political activists in coordinated raids all over Turkey. According to reports among those arrested were a number of elected mayors from Kurdish regions in south-eastern Turkey. This is in addition to the hundreds of pro-Kurdish political activists already in jail. Further, after Erdogan's electoral victory in June, his government launched intensive military air and artillery operations against the Kurdish rebels. The Turkish government has reportedly applied to buy or lease drones (pilot-less missiles) to use against the Kurdish rebels. This shows the kind of reform that Erdogan is going for.
Another political aspect of the new ruling power is its Islamism. It is true that the kind of Islamism espoused by Erdogan's party is currently acceptable to the US and other imperialists and has turned out to be an advantage for Turkey's ruling class. However that doesn't eliminate the fact that the Turkish state is in some way a religious state. Even at the height of "Kemalism" the Turkish state had inherited this aspect of the Ottoman Empire's legacy, and with an Islamic party in power this aspect has been strengthened.
“The Religious Affairs Department, with a budget of 1.5 billion dollars, and with its own news service and a dedicated trade union... Employs more than 106,000 civil servants including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzin, all of them trained, hired and fired by the state... state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known as fatwas.... The department writes the sermons for Friday prayers in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks for the religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books and periodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues an iPhone app featuring Koranic verses and a prayer-time alarm.” (NYT, 28 September 2011)
The point is that this combination of state and religion might be different from that of Iran or Afghanistan but under fast-changing economic conditions could give rise to contradictions, as could the discrimination against minority religions. And sooner or later the honeymoon with Islamism could come to an end, and generate problems both for the Turkish ruling class and its imperialist backers. The whole plan could possibly turn into its opposite.
There are also other important issues that could pose grave problems for the current plans for Turkey.
Turkey's economic growth on a weak basis, such as the great fissures between big cities and remote villages, and dependency on imperialist loans and short-term investments, could make the economy very shaky. In case of recession imperialist capital could exit and the economy turn into a disaster.
Even assuming that Turkey can overcome its conflict with Greece over Cyprus, an issue that has the potential to inflict a big blow on Turkey's ambitions, Turkey's new role could impose even more strains on these other political contradictions and could break the back of Erdogan and the imperialists' plans.
17 October 2011. A World to Win News Service. The following is a contribution to the discussion of how to view the Turkish regime and its role in the world.
The new role that Turkey has sought and has been encouraged to play has become more evident in its behaviour towards Syria, where a mass protest has been going on for months. Turkey's leaders have even asked Syrian head of state Bashar Assad to step down. Turkey has been trying to increase its influence in Syria by accepting Syrians fleeing the regime's brutality and also by imposing an embargo on arms shipments. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, "If there are planes carrying weapons, or such shipments by land, then we would stop and confiscate them." (New York Times, 23 September 2011) Turkey has gone so far as to challenge Iran, a country with which it had good relations in the past and one of the main backers of the Syrian regime. According to the same report "Turkey intercepted an arms shipment from Iran to Syria in August, and it seized the cargo of an Iranian plane bound for Syria in March."
But Turkey's renewed activity in the region is not limited to neighbouring Syria. Erdogan's tour last month to Tunisia, Egypt and as the first head of country to visit Libya, the three Arab countries that have undergone regime changes this year, cannot be underestimated as routine diplomatic visits. In fact this new role has been noticed by many observers who attribute it to the intelligence of Turkey's leadership in skilfully taking the right side in the Arab revolts and thus becoming more respected and influential in the region. It is said that Turkey has a vision and good sense of how things are going, and more than that, that it represents a solution, or a key component of a solution, to the region's instability. Another NYT article puts it this way:
"[I]n an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions." (26 September 2011)
Over the last couple of years Turkey has also been trying to influence the Arab world by publicly distancing itself from Israel and expressing sympathy for the Palestinians.
The truth is that Turkey did not take the right side at the right time. For a long time and especially in 1990s, Turkey was Israel's strategic regional ally. Their friendly political relations as well as military and security cooperation was unhidden, as was the fact that this was part of cooperation with the US and other Western imperialists in their domination of Middle Eastern peoples. In an attempt to influence the Middle East, Turkey also worked hard to buy the friendship of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Bashar Assad of Syria and also developed good relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It sent tens of thousand of immigrants to work in Libya. Turkish relations with Libya were such that as a Nato member, Turkey opposed its intervention in Libya.
Clearly Turkey is playing a more important role in the Middle East and doing its best to increase its influence in the region, and new developments in the region have encouraged those ambitions. It is important to examine their sources and content.
Turkey and the international scene
There is no doubt that Turkey's ambitions cannot be separated from the international scene and the new imperialist world order that has partly taken shape or at least that the imperialist are trying to forge.
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (JDP) was elected last June with a large majority for the third consecutive time, with a voter participation of 87 percent. This victory represented a new development in Turkey's ruling class and its relations with Nato and the Western imperialists. The most important aspect of it is that some of the Kemalist elements (named after Mustafa Kemal Atatutrk, the founder of the modern Turkish state) in the political structure of Turkey's ruling class are losing their traditional political colouring and a new form of political structure is emerging. The main goal of this political reform is to establish a more powerful and stable rule so that Turkey can play a strategic role in the Middle East in accordance with Western imperialist interests as well as its own. These reforms have been influenced by a range of major developments in the social-economic structure of Turkey, such as a greater development of capitalism and the formation of a relatively powerful Kurdish bourgeoisie.
The JDP first came into office in 2003 with the support of the US and the European Union. It envisaged the launching of an extensive privatisation programme, beginning to integrate the Kurdish bourgeoisie into the political structure, and helping to carry out US and Western plans in the Middle East.
To further understand the necessity of such changes for Turkey's ruling class and their imperialist backers, it is necessary to briefly examine the development of Turkey's political power structure from an international perspective.
Some background
The Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk was formed in 1923 after the collapse of Ottoman Empire in World War 1. This was part of the Middle East political order that took shape after the war. After the Second World War and especially in the 1950s, Turkey played a major role in the imperialist bloc headed by the US to counter communism and the Soviet Union, which remained the US's chief rival even as it changed from a socialist society to a capitalist one in a phoney state "socialist" form.
But the political structure that took shape during that time no longer conforms to today's imperialist world order and requires some changes.
In economic terms, especially over the last few decades, Turkey has undergone major capitalist development and its economy has become even more deeply integrated into a globalised capitalist system.
The other important development is the formation of a relatively powerful Kurdish bourgeoisie that is seeking a greater share of the country's power structure.
Pitting Turks against the oppressed Kurds and using Turkish nationalism to unite all different factions of the ruling class has always been an important part of Kemalism. But there has been increasing pressure to qualitatively expand the Kurdish bourgeoisie's role in the power structure. For example, one capital condition posed by the European Union for Turkey's admission into its union was that it "resolve the Kurdish question". Undertaking such reforms was not easy for the Turkish power structure, but refusing was not easy either.
In fact, given the present situation, such reforms developed into a necessity. Erdogan promised to reform Turkey's constitution in regard to the status of the Kurds.
In the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet bloc created room to integrate Turkey even more deeply into the capitalist world order and repair some of its most important flaws so that it could become a strategic player in the region. The "war on terror" at the beginning of this century made that an urgent issue for the imperialists.
The economic reform to restructure Turkey's economy and integrate it deeper into the imperialists' world economy started earlier, after the military coup that took place in 1981. Turgut Ozal, who became president in 1983, started to implement the reforms that the IMF and WB had designed for Turkey. They brought about tremendous economic changes as well as an economic crisis that accelerated the large displacement of population from the countryside and the formation of slums around the large cities, rampant inflation and extensive unemployment.
Another round of reforms that was proposed by the IMF for Turkey started in 2001. By then Turkey had received a 31 billion dollar loan from the IMF.
The repayment of these loans and interest was consuming half of Turkish GNP. The country's currency, the lira, lost half its value, and people were fast losing their purchasing power and savings. When the JDP came to power, they started to sell off all state-owned enterprises, even ports and roads. Foreign companies were given access to all sectors of economy except oil.
According to the latest figures, Turkey's economic growth is around 9 per cent and its per capita income is twice as much as in 2002, around 10,000 US dollars. But its unemployment is 11.5 percent and its economy is stamped with the illness of unevenness that has divided the country into the big rich cities and the remote and poor and backward regions. The fissures among different regions are deep. A few big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Adana account for 49 percent of the GNP, while regions such as southern and eastern Anatolia have a share of only 4 percent. This uneven development is a serious limitation for Turkey's economy and could ruin the whole plan for Turkey.
The rise of an Islamist party
The army has played an important role in building the present political structure. The main aim of the 1980 military coup and the formation of a military government was to uproot the communist and revolutionary left trends in Turkey, especially after the revolution that overthrew the Shah's regime in Iran. In order to block the growth of communists, the army started to promote Islamism. The popularisation and propaganda of religious ideology that started then has continued through today.
The generals in power made religious study in schools mandatory. This had a certain impact on the educational system. History was taught from a religious point of view. The teaching of biology and other sciences was influenced by religious beliefs. Using Christian-fundamentalist textbooks as the model, textbooks were rewritten explicitly on the basis of "creationist" theory (the claim that living things did not evolve but were created by god). Generating an anti-evolutionist climate was part of the programme to promote religion. (See Cloning Creationism in Turkey, National Center for Science Education, Edis Taner/1999, pp. 30-35)
In fact the role of religion in the state has its roots in the Ottoman Empire and has never been diminished. The regime's Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the Turkish Republic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.
This department's job was to help unify the ruling class. "Charged by law with managing Islam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since the country's first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relic of the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering national unity." (NYT, 28 September 2011)
State promotion of Islamism went even further as the armed struggle of Kurdish nationalist PKK [Kurdish Workers Party] expanded towards the end of 1980s.
Following the increase of poverty in the remote areas and the war in Kurdistan, the army was facing two internal threats: the PKK and the growth of fundamentalism. The army then used the Islamic forces against PKK and other leftist forces, while at the same time applying pressure to some Islamic forces, including those in the state apparatus such as the Islamic Welfare Party. When this party was banned from political activity in 1998 , Erdogan was one of its leaders. He fled to the US and established close relations with US politicians. He finally "saw", he says, the necessity of a "strategic alliance of the Islamic forces of Turkey with the US". When he returned to Turkey he founded the JDP. The party won the 2002 elections with the support of the US and at least some Turkish army generals. The JDP also took control of the Turkish Parliament. Paul Wolfowitz, at that time the US assistant defence secretary, was closely watching and even supervising the process.
Some people argue that the Turkish army opposed this process because the army advocates secularism. In fact the army has never advocated secularism, and the Islamists who run the government are not opposed to the army or military rule. In fact, together they form a state machine based on the monopoly of "legitimate" violence, with the security of the ruling class as its central goal. The JDP has brought the Turkish state a bigger mass base than the army could have dreamed of. Turkey's regime as a whole is using this mass base or "legitimacy" to arrest, imprison and punish opposition forces, workers and journalists, and is using its arms to suppress the Kurdish people and regions. The role that "Kemalism" once played, along with the army; is now being played by "modernised" and "Westernised" Islamic ideology and forces, along with the army (and with a continuing major role for Turkish chauvinism). The army has been and continues to be the main pillar of the political system of the Turkish ruling class, which is deeply dependent on imperialism.
This is the secret of what is known as "the Turkish model' in today's Middle East.
Turkey as a model
At the same time, it is important to distinguish between the new role that Turkey has been assigned to play in the region, on the one hand, and the "model" it is being said to offer other Middle Eastern countries.
For nearly a decade the US in particular has been promoting Turkey as its caretaker in the region. Obama has continued to follow this policy. In fact, the US has seen the so-called "democratisation" of Turkey's political structure, and its blend with a modernised Islam, to forge a relatively stable and powerful political system, as a good thing for American imperial interests because they may strengthen Turkey's ability to play this role for the US.
After winning the June elections, Erdogan said this was not just a victory for Turkey but from Turkey to Bosnia, Beirut, Damascus, Ramallah, Nablas, Jenin, Quds (Jerusalem) and across north Africa. Much of this region that Turkey wants to influence was once under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey had already taken some steps to raise its reputation and authority in the region. For example, it attempted to help resolve the nuclear dispute between the West and Iran, intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and influence Pakistan. Its attempts to gain a gateway into the Middle East by establishing good relations with Libya and Syria were also part of that.
However the start of the people's uprising in Tunisia and Egypt and its quick spread throughout the Middle East, and the intentions of the US and other Western imperialists to influence and control these uprisings, created new opportunities for Turkey.
The US and European imperialists are looking at Turkey as their Islamic broker in the region. The fact that Turkey is governed by an Islamic party can help it sell itself as a force that "belongs" to the region. Dumping military cooperation with Israel after the Zionists attacked the ferries carrying aid to people of Gaza was a gesture with a similar purpose, although Turkey has been careful to limit its opposition to Israel. For instance, it pulled the Mavi Marmara out of the most recent aid flotilla. Since the Turkish ship was supposed to be the main vessel, this was a major factor in sabotaging the flotilla and avoiding a confrontation with Israel.
Turkey might be the role model that the imperialists are showing in their shop windows in some ways. What they are offering to other countries in the Middle East is that they can combine dependency on world capitalism/imperialism with Islam. Also, perhaps the role that the Turkish army plays as not only the heart of the state but the ultimate supervisor of the government could be reproduced in some countries in various forms. However the role allocated to Turkey as the US's caretaker in the region cannot be offered to other countries in the Middle East.
Limitations of this plan
The Turkish system and regime suffer from very serious weaknesses. Whether or not Turkey can resolve them is not clear yet and depends on many different factors and the way they develop.
The Kurdish question is one of them. It is true that one of the important issues Erdogan wants to deal with in the current review of the constitution is the status of the Kurds. A reform might be able to integrate part of the Kurdish bourgeoisie into the state apparatus, but even if that goes smoothly and temporarily reduces some of the contradictions, the fundamental contradiction – the fact that of that Kurds are an oppressed nation – will remain and the discrimination against them and other minority nationalities will not end. The oppression and suppression of the Kurdish masses will continue and aggravate the contradiction sooner or later.
In early October the Turkish police detained more than 140 pro-Kurdish political activists in coordinated raids all over Turkey. According to reports among those arrested were a number of elected mayors from Kurdish regions in south-eastern Turkey. This is in addition to the hundreds of pro-Kurdish political activists already in jail. Further, after Erdogan's electoral victory in June, his government launched intensive military air and artillery operations against the Kurdish rebels. The Turkish government has reportedly applied to buy or lease drones (pilot-less missiles) to use against the Kurdish rebels. This shows the kind of reform that Erdogan is going for.
Another political aspect of the new ruling power is its Islamism. It is true that the kind of Islamism espoused by Erdogan's party is currently acceptable to the US and other imperialists and has turned out to be an advantage for Turkey's ruling class. However that doesn't eliminate the fact that the Turkish state is in some way a religious state. Even at the height of "Kemalism" the Turkish state had inherited this aspect of the Ottoman Empire's legacy, and with an Islamic party in power this aspect has been strengthened.
“The Religious Affairs Department, with a budget of 1.5 billion dollars, and with its own news service and a dedicated trade union... Employs more than 106,000 civil servants including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzin, all of them trained, hired and fired by the state... state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known as fatwas.... The department writes the sermons for Friday prayers in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks for the religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books and periodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues an iPhone app featuring Koranic verses and a prayer-time alarm.” (NYT, 28 September 2011)
The point is that this combination of state and religion might be different from that of Iran or Afghanistan but under fast-changing economic conditions could give rise to contradictions, as could the discrimination against minority religions. And sooner or later the honeymoon with Islamism could come to an end, and generate problems both for the Turkish ruling class and its imperialist backers. The whole plan could possibly turn into its opposite.
There are also other important issues that could pose grave problems for the current plans for Turkey.
Turkey's economic growth on a weak basis, such as the great fissures between big cities and remote villages, and dependency on imperialist loans and short-term investments, could make the economy very shaky. In case of recession imperialist capital could exit and the economy turn into a disaster.
Even assuming that Turkey can overcome its conflict with Greece over Cyprus, an issue that has the potential to inflict a big blow on Turkey's ambitions, Turkey's new role could impose even more strains on these other political contradictions and could break the back of Erdogan and the imperialists' plans.
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