Why Turkish president has never been afraid of making enemies
DONALD Trump travelled to Turkey in 2012 for the opening of the Trump Towers complex.
The guest of honour was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s then Prime Minister, now the President.
Trump, in between plugging the US version of The Apprentice, heaped praise on Erdogan.
He said: “The Prime Minister is very highly respected.”
Last week Trump did Erdogan another favour by withdrawing US troops from northern Syria where they were helping Kurdish forces contain the Islamic State threat.
The US President effectively gave him the green light to launch an invasion, which Erdogan calls a “peace operation”, aimed at forcing out the Kurds from the region.
What happens next could determine the fate of the Middle East and redraw the battle lines in the power struggle between Russia and the West.
Erdogan is standing over a powder keg with a lit torch.
When the EU protested at his military incursion he threatened to send into Europe the
3.6 million Syrian refugees Brussels has paid Turkey £5.25billion to look after. Erdogan does not seem to care that the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces are being driven into the arms of Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The Turkish president has never been afraid of making enemies. Which may be just as well as he is about to make a lot more of them.
Born in 1954, the son of a coastguard, he supplemented the family’s meagre income by selling lemonade on Istanbul’s streets.
He studied business management before taking his first steps in politics during the 1970s.
Erdogan was elected to parliament in 1991 but was barred from taking his seat. He then became mayor of Istanbul in 1994.
In 1999 he was jailed for four months for reading out an Islamist poem that included the lines “the mosques are our barracks... and the faithful our soldiers”.
Two years later he founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) which swept to power in 2002 with Erdogan as PM.
In his initial years in power he reached out to the West, which at the time was hoping Turkey could one day join the EU.
Critics of his tendency to accumulate power and silence critics were won over by his economic reforms and technocratic flair.
But it became increasingly hard to ignore his authoritarian streak.
In 2014 he became the country’s first directly elected president.
Then in 2016 he used an aborted military coup to impose a state of emergency as he throttled dissent and imprisoned opponents.
He won a referendum in 2017 that gave him more powers.
Erdogan abolished the post of PM and gave himself the right to appoint ministers and civil servants, issue decrees and oversee all security matters. The UN said the scale of repression was “staggering”.
In three years a reported 160,000 people have been arrested and 152,000 civil servants sacked. Teachers and lawyers have been prosecuted on trumped-up charges; 300 journalists arrested; 100,000 websites blocked and 180 media outlets shut down. Turkey has 1.7 million UK visitors a year.
Erdogan’s recently completed presidential palace in Ankara cost about £476million, has over 1,000 rooms and makes Trump Towers look like an exhibit from LegoLand.
In the first sign that Erdogan’s grip on power may be slipping, his party lost the Istanbul elections in March.
After ordering a re-run on the unproven charges of vote rigging, he was defeated again with the Republican People’s Party winning by an even bigger margin.
The economy is slowing, with unemployment reaching 15%. His invasion of northern Syria is seen by some as a bid to distract attention from domestic failings.
Having won power as a nationalist hard man, Erdogan would have looked weak if he failed to move against Kurds who he has long accused of being terrorists. While lecturing the UN last month on the refugee crisis, he held a photo of the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015 after drowning trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Now, Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish territory have killed children and caused thousands of civilians to flee. The brutality on Turkey’s domestic front has extended to the foreign.
Erdogan’s autocratic rule means any chance of Turkey joining the EU has evaporated. This has pushed him closer to Russia.
Ties with Vladimir Putin were underlined by the recent purchase of Russian missiles, a move raising more questions about Turkey’s NATO membership.
Erdogan is playing a dangerous game. Several Arab states have slammed his incursion into north Syria amid fears it will upset the delicate balance of power in the region and lead to a revival of IS.
The nightmare outcome is a war between Turkey and the Syrian Democratic Forces now allied with Assad and supported with Russian firepower. If this happened, would NATO fulfil its duty to support an ally in all circumstances?
MP Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Commons Foreign Affairs committee, says Putin may emerge as the main winner, with Assad tightening his grip on Syria and the solidarity of NATO undermined. Mr Tugendhat said: “America pulling out was a display of weakness. The danger now is Russia wins either way.”
Whether Turkey wins is another matter. Erdogan risks turning a country that wanted to be the friends of the East and the West into a pariah state.