The unspoken reason

What are the main factors behind this radical attitude that has moved Turkey away from friendly relations and towards antagonism with its southern neighbor?

If it is the cruelty of the Syrian government against dissidents or its resistance to democratic currents, there are worse countries in the region, including the recent past of Turkey, which is now being put on trial.

It is true that Syrian citizens are fleeing their country into Turkey (so far 25,000) trying to avoid reprisals for their dissidence. While Turkey is doing what it can to accommodate the incoming immigrants, it is trying to rally international pressure on the Assad regime to stop using brute force against its people.

The feeling among the members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government ruling Turkey is that Kofi Annan’s peace plan serves to provide time for the Assad government to crush the opposition, while it does not include any clauses to say what will happen if its conditions not to use arms and asymmetrical force are not met. Events are proving that they are right. However, this feeling is less out of concern for the democratic rights of the Syrian people; the Turkish government is more concerned with an unspoken worry that has haunted the country’s administration for decades. It is the “Kurdish issue.”

Nationalist regimes leave no room for ethnicities and cultural groups that do not fit into the official identity afforded to the nation. The Kurds have always posed a problem and threat to the Turks and Arabs alike, who have defined their nations as being made up of a single ethnicity -- theirs only. That is why other ethnicities and cultural groups are either repressed or expelled. Neither Turkish nor Arab nationalism afforded equality or power-sharing to Kurds (among other ethnicities) other than in cases that involved outside intervention, as was the case in Iraq.

When Arab nationalism, namely the Baath regime, clashed with its Turkish equivalent, it did not refrain from using its oppressed Kurds against Turkey that had banished a number of them from its lands during the Kurdish rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s. For decades the Assad family provided a safe haven for the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and helped this organization recruit a number of its militants from among Syrian Kurds.

This fact brought the two countries to the brink of war (1998). The Syrian government backed down and evicted the PKK chieftain, Abdullah Öcalan, who is currently in a prison cell in Turkey. Turkish-Syrian rapprochement started after that.

However, the popular uprising in Syria has put the Kurds in this country in a pivotal position. If they join the ranks of the opposition, the rebellion will most probably end with victory for the opposition. If they side with the government, the rebellion will either become protracted or precarious, or be quickly extinguished.

Bashar al-Assad is doing his best to satisfy the Kurds and promise them the rights they have so far been denied. This means the Kurdish settlements along the Turkish border will be run by an assertive PKK that is allowed free movement in Syria provided that they are against the rebellion and serve as a defense force against a probable Turkish onslaught to crush the Kurdish visibility/empowerment in Syria.

If the Assad regime is brought down by the opposition in the future, it is a realistic expectation that the Kurds, under the leadership of the PKK, will try to ensure their autonomy in the new political setup. This is the worst case scenario for the Turkish government, which has always looked at the Kurdish issue as a matter of security. In short, the visibility and empowerment of the Kurds will deliver a fatal blow to Arab and Turkish nationalisms alike, as well as the political systems that are built on them.

Time is ushering in pluralism and multiculturalism in the Middle East. The problem is for how long the governments and the peoples that are nurtured by ethnic nationalism will resist that fact. This will be a test of both the governments and peoples against the realities and challenges of the times and the countries they live in.