by Burak Bekdil
Erdoğan believed Islam had to take a central role if a historic end to the conflict was to be achieved – one in which the Kurds would surrender their arms and live peacefully with their Turkish Muslim brothers.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, image via Pixabay CC
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 642, November 15, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan perceives the Kurdish belt along
Turkey’s Syrian and Iraqi borders as the country’s top security threat,
and has recalibrated his policies accordingly. But he has a Kurdish
constituency inside Turkey and will need their votes in 2019. During the
upcoming presidential campaign, Erdoğan will have to find a miracle
equilibrium: how to win Kurdish votes without losing nationalist Turkish
votes?
In 2015, soon after the Turkish people went to the
ballot box, the main Kurdish insurgency group, the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK), ended a ceasefire it had declared two years prior. Just a
few months earlier, there had been hope for peace. Even Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s fiercest critics praised him when he
bravely launched a difficult process meant to finally bring peace to a
country that had lost 40,000 people to ethnic strife. His government
negotiated with the Kurds and granted them broader cultural and
political rights, which his predecessors had not. The PKK would finally
say farewell to arms.
Instead, it took up arms once again. Since July
2015, Turkish (and Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish) cities have again
become battlegrounds in an almost century-old Turkish-Kurdish dispute.
Kurdish militants have attacked security forces countless times since
then, while the Turkish military has buried fallen soldiers and raided
Kurdish guerrilla camps in northern Iraq as well as inside Turkey.
Reports of casualties on both sides are a regularity most Turks now
grudgingly ignore.
Erdoğan, an Islamist, had miscalculated again. He
had thought he could solve the dispute through his usual “religious
lens.” He would use Islam as the glue to keep Muslim Turks and Muslim
Kurds united, because after all, why should they fight? They are all
Sunni Muslims.
Erdoğan believed Islam had to take a central role
if a historic end to the conflict was to be achieved – one in which the
Kurds would surrender their arms and live peacefully with their Turkish
Muslim brothers. He wished, accordingly, to restructure Turkey along
multi-ethnic lines, but with a greater role for Islam. But he relied too
much on religion to resolve what is essentially an ethnic conflict. The
experiment resulted in sprays of bombs, suicide attacks, bullets,
rockets, and coffins.
The parliamentary elections that took place on
June 7, 2015 marked a radical shift for Erdoğan from his usual religious
nationalism to ethnic nationalism (both of which have always been part
of his ideological policy calculus, to varying degrees). On that date,
his Justice and Development Party (AKP), after having sought peace with
the Kurds for the previous two years, lost its parliamentary majority
for the first time since it came to power in November 2002. With 41% of
the national vote (compared with 49.8% in the 2011 general elections),
the AKP won eighteen fewer seats than were necessary to form a
single-party government in Turkey’s 550-member parliament. More
importantly, its seat tally fell widely short of the minimum number
needed to rewrite the constitution in such a way as to introduce an
executive presidential system that would give Erdoğan almost
uncontrolled powers.
Amid a fresh wave of Kurdish violence, Erdoğan
gambled on new elections, calculating that the uptick in instability and
insecurity would push frightened voters towards single-party rule. His
gamble paid off. The elections of November 1, 2015 gave the AKP a
comfortable victory and a mandate to rule until 2019. His new ethnic
nationalist and anti-Kurdish policy won hearts and minds among Turkish
nationalists. They then proceeded, two years later, to support
constitutional amendments that paved the way for Erdoğan’s ultimate goal
of one-man rule.
Between June 7 and November 1, 2015, Erdoğan’s AKP
increased its votes by nearly nine percentage points. More than four
points of that rise came from votes from its nationalistic rival, the
Nationalist Movement Party, which shares more or less the same voter
base with the AKP. Even some Kurds, weary of renewed violence, shifted
from a pro-Kurdish party (for which they had voted on June 7) to the AKP
(on November 1).
Since 2015, Erdoğan has been enjoying the fruits
of his newfound ethnic nationalism. He has ordered the security forces
to fight the PKK “till they finish it off,” and has pursued hawkish
politics via the judiciary he controls. Several leading Kurdish MPs are
now in jail on terrorism charges. More than 1,400 academics who signed a
petition “for peace” have been prosecuted and/or dismissed from their
universities. Talking about Kurdish rights is now almost tantamount to
bombing a square in Istanbul.
Across Turkey’s Syrian and Iraqi borders, Erdoğan
has also recalibrated his policy in line with a reprioritizing of
security threats. A Kurdish belt along Turkey’s southern borders is now
perceived as the top threat – worse than ISIS, or Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s pro-Shiite (and therefore anti-Sunni, anti-Turkish,
and anti- Erdoğan) regime in Damascus, or the growing Shiite military
presence in northern Iraq (Hashd al-Shaab). In the hope of countering
what he considers the worst of all possible threats, Erdoğan is now a
reluctant partner in the Russia-Iran-dominated Shiite theater in
northern Iraq and Syria.
In Erdoğan’s view, the emergence of a near-state
Kurdish actor in Mesopotamia would be an existential threat to Turkey.
Hence his radical retaliation against the Iraqi Kurdish referendum of
September 25, along with his reluctant alliance with Tehran and
Tehran-controlled Baghdad.
But there is more for Erdoğan to calculate. When
he devises his policy calculus towards the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, he
must also keep an eye on the Turkish Kurds, whose votes he will need in
2019 when Turks go once again to the ballot box. Election 2019 will be
the most historic race in Erdoğan’s political career – an election he
knows he cannot afford to lose. He needs every single vote, from
Islamists to liberals to nationalists to Kurds. And that makes things
tricky.
Election 2019 will take place at a time when both
Erdoğan and the insurgent Kurds will have less appetite for a new
peace-based political adventure. Kurds trust him less than they did
between 2011 and 2013. At the same time, Erdoğan has discovered that he
wins more votes if he plays to nationalist Turkish constituencies rather
than to Kurdish ones. He will be more reluctant to shake hands with
Kurds than he was in 2013.
Although the Turks have a clear military
advantage, the Kurdish minority possesses a weapon of its own: the
fertility rate in Kurdish-speaking parts of Turkey is higher than in the
Turkish-majority regions. The Kurds may emerge as the Turkish
Islamists’ main rivals in the not-too-distant future simply by virtue of
their having more babies.
There are, moreover, sociopolitical and
demographic reasons to anticipate that both Islamists and Kurds will
perform better in the upcoming Turkish election. From a political
perspective, Turkey is becoming increasingly right-wing and religiously
conservative. F. Michael Wuthrich of the University of Kansas Center for
Global and International Studies has demonstrated that Turkish voting
bloc patterns have progressively shifted to the right, from 59.8% in
1950 to 66.7% in 2011. This pattern, presumably still in progress, will
work in favor of the AKP and any other political party championing
Islamist-nationalist ideas.
But the Kurds’ demographic advantage is
significant. At present, the total fertility rate in eastern and
southeastern, Kurdish-speaking Turkey is 3.41, compared to an average of
2.09 in the non-eastern, Turkish-speaking areas. Erdoğan has urged
every Turkish family to have “at least three, if possible more”
children, but things are not moving as he wishes. The total fertility
rate in Turkey has in fact dropped from 4.33 in 1978 to 2.26 in 2013.
Just as less-educated (and more devout) Turks grew
in number and percentages over the past decades and brought Erdoğan to
power simply by combining demographics and the ballot box, the Kurds may
emerge as the Turkish Islamists’ main rivals by using the same
political weapon.
As he campaigns ahead of the 2019 election,
Erdoğan will have to find a miracle equilibrium: how to win Kurdish
votes without losing nationalist Turkish votes? So far, he has managed
this challenge exceptionally well. He has won nationalist votes, and his
party has come in second in Kurdish regions of Turkey. In 2019,
however, he will face a bigger challenge.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/erdogan-turkey-kurds/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment