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  • Improbable Embrace

    http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/22/turkey-armenia-er dogan-putin-genocide-opinions-columnists-melik-kay lan.html

    Improbable Embrace

    Melik Kaylan, 10.23.09, 12:01 AM ET

    Turkey and Armenia are about to restore diplomatic relations. At the
    very least, they signed a landmark agreement to do so on Oct. 10 in
    Switzerland--after some tense last-minute wrangling in a Zurich hotel
    room with Hillary Clinton mediating. An astonishing development. A
    marvel to see in one's lifetime, not unlike the fall of the Soviet
    Union. Two ancient peoples in eternal enmity. Sounds utterly
    implausible. Ancient hatreds never go away.

    That, at any rate, is the narrative--an arguably fraudulent one--that
    we've been fed for several generations. In fact, depending on how you
    calculate it, Turks and Armenians lived peaceably together for almost
    600 years--or almost 900 years--until the 20th century. The
    calculation depends on whether you date their time together from the
    Seljuks or the later Ottomans--and where you end the timeline. Either
    way, it was an epoch or two, possibly an unprecedented achievement.
    Then, according to the prevailing interpretation, the Turks turned
    suddenly on their cheek-by-jowl neighbors, unprovoked, and wished to
    obliterate them from the Earth entirely as a people. It's possible.
    Strange things have happened in the annals of genocide, though not
    after that long a duration of mutual tolerance. If so, why then? What
    changed?

    Here you enter into difficult terrain. Because you can easily slip
    into an alternate viewpoint, one that goes something like this: Turks
    and Armenians lived in peace until Czarist Russia began to move
    southward down the Caucasus, purging Muslims downward into Turkish
    territory--throughout the 19th century. All those fiery Daghestanis,
    Chechens, Abkhaz, Kurds. Many ended up in Ottoman lands, some say half
    a million. At one point, Russia actually occupied a whole swath of
    Turkey, including the provincial capital of Kars, for several decades
    until World War I ended. The Russians did their conquering explicitly
    as a Christian Crusade, claiming the complicity of all Eastern
    Christians (including Armenians) in that part of Turkey, an area
    seething with displaced Caucasus Muslims and Muslim Kurds. In short,
    if you are curious about a proximate cause for catastrophic bloodshed,
    look no further than Russkie provocation--a plausible scenario
    considering their conduct right up to the present in Georgia--of
    stirring one ethnicity against another for imperial ends.

    Discretion being the better part of valor, let us leave the historical
    dispute delicately hanging there for professional historians to sort
    out. The present is complicated enough. What happens if Turkey and
    Armenia bury the hatchet? Azerbaijan gets upset, for sure, and Azeris
    are close kin to the Turks. Why does that matter to America and the
    West? The Armenians carved out a slice of Azerbaijan in a secessionist
    war with Russian help during the post-Soviet chaos in the Caucasus.
    Azeris want it back. Armenians wish to keep it. Azeris don't want
    Turkey to make peace with Armenia. Azerbaijan is a critical source of
    non-Middle Eastern oil to the West via pipeline through Turkey. Azeri
    oil will help liberate Europe from Moscow's oil. No wonder foreign
    minister Sergei Lavrov attended the signing ceremony in Switzerland:
    Russia would benefit from driving a wedge between Turkey and
    Azerbaijan. The Azeris are already threatening to re-route their oil
    through Russia. So why is Turkey ready to alienate Azerbaijan?

    As many have observed, Turkey is pushing a neo-Ottoman strategic
    vision under Prime Minister Erdogan and his busybody foreign minister
    Ahmet Davutoglu. Until their collapse in the 20th century, the
    Ottomans pursued a centuries-long game of diplomatic promiscuity with
    other world powers, allowing Venetians and Genoese trading rights
    early on, giving Sephardic Jews a new home after their expulsion from
    Spain, letting the British help them against the Czars and against
    Napoleon, inviting the Russians and Hapsburgs to compete over
    privileges in Ottoman lands.

    As the Ottomans declined militarily they used the country's strategic
    position diplomatically to stay afloat. Under the more insular
    nationalist republic of Ataturk, Turkey allied exclusively with NATO
    and stayed out of regional engagement. Now Ankara is making friends
    with all its neighbors. Suddenly, the minefields along the Syrian
    border are being lifted and Syrians may enter Turkey with minimal red
    tape. Georgians have similar status. Baghdad and Ankara have just
    signed a slew of deals involving water, oil and trade. Greece and
    Turkey are friendlier than they've been in, say, 200 years with Greece
    actually backing Turkey's candidacy to the E.U. Natural gas comes in
    from Russia while Turkish construction companies are doing more than
    anyone to build infrastructure across the Russian Federation. In
    short, a neo-Ottoman approach means that Ankara is allowing all the
    neighbor countries to gain so much benefit from Turkey's
    evenhandedness that all are invested in keeping the country stable and
    prosperous.

    There are side benefits too. A Syria dependent on Turkey may become
    less dependent on Iran economically. Ankara's deals with Baghdad show
    Iraq's Kurds that hostility to Turkey will only leave them out of the
    loop economically. In the past, almost all neighboring capitals had a
    hand in aiding the Kurdish insurrection within Turkey--Moscow, Athens,
    Damascus, Baghdad and all the Iron Curtain belt nearby played that
    game. These days only the E.U. and the U.S. are pushing the issue of
    Kurdish rights. Prime Minister Erdogan calculates that as Turkey gains
    increasing leverage through befriending one and all indiscriminately
    while shifting an inch this way or that (such as publicly snubbing
    Israel), even the U.S. and E.U. will have to ease pressures or risk
    pushing Ankara further into the arms of rivals. The Erdogan government
    may calculate that Azerbaijan, too, will come around and realize that
    it will only lose from a rift with the Turks as the Azeris can, in
    reaction to the Armenia demarche, only befriend the Russian bear--and
    only for a while before it swallows them whole.

    Meantime, Ankara is going about eradicating the leverage of outside
    powers over Turkey over such matters as ethnic rights. The Kurds now
    have broadcasts in Kurdish. Armenia may finally have a partner other
    than Russia to trade with--that's a lot of incentive. It's a lot of
    incentive for the U.S. to climb on board too. Turkish-Armenian amity
    in the region will soon de-fang the various genocide bills so beloved
    of the Armenian diaspora.

    All this comes under the rubric of "neo-Ottoman" for another reason.
    The Ottomans held Islam's Caliphate for five centuries, and it was
    under Islamic laws that they extended rights to religious minorities
    while ostensibly treating all Muslims as equals with no preference to
    ethnicity. Erdogan's slide toward Islamist inclusiveness ironically
    stirs a beneficent echo in the hearts of Armenians in the region. They
    have flourished relatively unhindered in the Middle East under
    countries hostile to the West, such as Syria and Iran. They've had no
    problem living under anti-Western regimes such as the Soviet Union.
    Their historical sense of identity is anchored in ambivalence toward
    the West going way back to their doomed alliance with the Persians
    against Roman power. Throughout the Middle Ages they identified with
    Eastern Christianity against the Vatican. The Armenian patriarch
    showed no friendship toward proselytizing Protestant missionaries in
    the Ottoman era. In short, Armenians of the region feel no discomfort
    with Mid-eastern traditions or Islamization, and certainly not
    Erdogan's apparently moderate version of it.

    One can only dream and hope for the day when Armenians, like Greeks do
    now, interact with Turkey in large numbers and perhaps even settle
    back into their interrupted history there. But that it happens under
    an Islamizing umbrella--and there's the rub. For it's not at all clear
    that once you drift in that direction, there can be any way back--that
    is, short of a Kemalist or, much worse, a Soviet-style enforced
    secularism. Erdogan's strategy of giving all comers a stake in the
    stability of Turkey also anchors them in Turkey's renewed Islamist
    pull. Israel is unlikely to benefit from this, except perhaps in the
    leverage it gives Turkey to negotiate for Israel with Islamic
    countries. The Europeans will soon lose all purchase on Turkey's
    cultural and political center of gravity as the Turks learn that money
    from non-Western allies outdoes any expected benefits from the E.U.

    Erdogan's policies are neo-Ottoman in this way too: in decline,
    Ottoman state policy, the Sultan or the Sublime Porte in Western
    parlance, was open to the influence of the highest bidder outside or
    inside the country. Everyone may benefit in the short term, especially
    the Turks with their new-found diplomatic clout. But in the long term,
    that kind of polity cannot be transparent. It can be enlightened in
    all sorts of ways except a fully Westernized one. Erdogan's government
    is already swallowing up independent news media a la Putin. Backroom
    deals fill his party's coffers and reward party loyalists at all
    levels of the economy. This kind of thing went on aplenty under the
    secularists too, but you can manifestly turn back from secularism,
    whereas Islamism looks like a one-way street and derives larger
    financial benefits from Saudi and Gulf investment. As money flows
    in--the IMF ranked Turkey as the world?s 17th-largest economy last
    year--the Turks can easily leave off struggling for their own
    freedoms.

    Republican Turkey has offered the single example, thus far, of a
    Muslim country living under Western democratic laws, however clunkily.
    But Islamic nostalgia is a powerful and insidious force. What people
    forget is that, from the 1400s onward, Turkey was as much based in
    Europe as in Asia. The Turks do not harbor a fundamentally eastern
    identity as many in the West mistakenly believe. The U.S. and E.U. can
    still keep the Turks in their camp. But first they must want to do so.
    And finally, they must start bidding higher.

    Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for
    Forbes. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The
    Best American Travel Writing 2008.
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