Turk empire strikes low

The Ottoman Empire, like many of its Middle Eastern predecessors, had the bad habit of moving entire peoples around if they were causing trouble. And sometimes, as happened to the Armenians during World War I, what started as deportation ended up as genocide.

The empire collapsed a century ago but old habits die hard. Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan has a new plan. He is going to move a million Kurds away from Turkey’s southern frontier with Syria and replace them with a million Arabs. And if his Western allies don’t like that, he will dump another million or so Arabs in Europe.

‘‘Either this happens [in Syria],’’ he said last week, ‘‘or we will have to open the gates [to Europe].’’ This is a threat with teeth – it was the sudden arrival of a million Syrian refugees in Europe in 2016 that energised extreme Right-wing populists from England to Hungary.

All this is happening because Erdogan is obsessed about the Kurds – or at least he knows a lot of other Turks are obsessed about the Kurds and he is in political trouble at home so he needs to feed their fantasies.

To be fair, the Kurds are a real problem for the Turks. They are about a fifth of the country’s population, concentrated mostly in the southeast.

They have been mistreated and their identity denied by the Turkish state for so long that many of them would rather be independent.

Some of them have taken up arms against Turkey in an organisation called the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), which is now mostly based across the border in Kurdish-speaking northern Iraq. There was a ceasefire and peace talks early in this decade, but Erdogan started bombing the PKK again in 2015 when he had a tricky election to win and needed to appeal to Turkish nationalists.

Now, he is in trouble again. His party lost control of all Turkey’s big cities in the last election.

Time to whack the Kurds again and this time it is going to be the Syrian Kurds, another fragment of the Kurdish people who live in northern Syria, just across the border from Turkey’s Kurds.

Erdogan says the Syrian Kurds are really ‘‘terrorists’’ allied to the PKK, although there have been no attacks on Turkey from Syria during the eight-year Syrian civil war. What the Syrian Kurds were actually doing was defeating the real terrorists, Islamic State, in Syria, with strong support from the United States.

However, there is no gratitude in politics. Erdogan now wants to evict the Syrian Kurds from their homes and drive them south, away from the Turkish border. And to make sure they don’t come back, he wants to settle a million Arabs there permanently instead.

There are 41⁄2 million Syrian Arab refugees in Turkey. They would like to go home, but most of them fear Bashar al-assad, the cruel dictator who has won the Syrian civil war. As Erdogan said recently in Ankara: ‘‘We can build towns there in lieu of the tent cities here.’’ The only hitch is the US may feel queasy about betraying the Syrian Kurds who fought alongside American troops to destroy Islamic State. To solve that problem, Erdogan is threatening to send a million or so Arab refugees west into Europe. The Europeans will panic and make the Americans go along with his plan, or so he believes. He is probably right.

US President Donald Trump wants US troops out of Syria before next year’s election, so he will probably give in to Erdogan – and the Europeans.

But the Syrian Kurds will probably fight to protect their homes.