What’s Behind the Turkish-Syrian Crisis?

Disputed Borders, the Kurdish Question, And Fear of Islamists

By Jon P. Gorvett

The 300-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border, drawn across barren hills and wide plains and dotted with small villages, low huts and cotton fields, is not an area where journalistic clichís work well. Armies have not fought back and forth across it over the centuries; it is not a normally sleepy backwater now echoing to the sound of gunfire or the roar of fighter planes; the situation is not tense, and it is not a time bomb waiting to explode.

However, since Turkish Land Forces Commander General Ates threatened at the end of September that Ankara’s patience with Damascus was about to run out—sentiments also echoed at the opening of the Turkish parliament by President Suleyman Demirel in early October—the Turkish media has been flooded on a nightly basis with images of an impending war. Library stock pictures of tanks and gunships, sometimes on exercises, sometimes fighting in Northern Iraq, have been the staple on television, and the papers have indulged in drumbeating of a kind not seen since the Gulf war. Yet the reality is that most observers were taken greatly by surprise at this outburst of hostility—and there are varying theories as to why now and why here.

That is not to say that there have been no flashpoints between Turkey and Syria before. The issues over which the two have been in dispute are fourfold. First, there is the stated reason for Turkey’s latest outburst—alleged Syrian support for the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Ankara has been fighting a lengthy war against the PKK, mainly in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, and in recent months has been noticeably successful—militarily—in this struggle.

The recent accord between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), signed in Washington in September, also contained provisions for the northern Iraqi Kurds to force the PKK out of its base of operations in northern Iraq. This leaves Syria as the only neighboring state from which the PKK can launch any serious offensives. And, according to the Turks, Syria is where the separatists have not only their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, but also training camps—particularly in the Syrian-controlled Bekka valley in Lebanon.

The second issue is that of Hatay province. This southern Turkish region, the site of ancient Antioch (once one of the greatest cities of the Roman Empire and now the small and pleasant Turkish town of Antakya), is largely Arab in its ethnic composition. Syria has a territorial claim on Hatay which it last dusted off at the beginning of the summer, with Syrian Foreign Ministry officials describing it as Damascus’ next target after the settling of the Golan Heights issue.

The Hatay dispute goes back to the inter-war years. Following the Treaty of Lausanne and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the status of this province was left up to a plebiscite, the local population to be asked at some future stage whether they wished to join Syria or Turkey.

France, Syria’s colonial master at the time, held the referendum in 1939, the result going in Turkey’s favor. However, the Syrians dispute the outcome, and there is some evidence to suggest that the French were over-anxious that the pro-Turkey camp should win in order to buy Turkish neutrality in the by-then highly foreseeable future World War II.

The third disputed issue is water. The River Euphrates rises in southern Turkey and heads south through Syria into Iraq, before linking up with its eastern neighbour, the River Tigris, at the Shatt-al-Arab delta. The Euphrates River has recently been harnessed by the Turks via a number of dams. The largest of these, the 169-meter-high Ataturk Dam, was completed in 1986, and since then the issue of control of the water flow of both the Euphrates and the Tigris—which also rises in Turkey, but flows directly into Iraq—has been one of contention.

Syria alleges that since the Turks began their dam and irrigation projects, the Euphrates has become polluted and its flow has been reduced to a level below Syria’s needs. Baghdad makes similar claims. Damascus also says that the dams give Turkey control over the river to such an extent that Ankara could simply decide to switch off the water in the event of a crisis.

Turkey disputes these claims, saying that, on the contrary, thanks to their project the flow is now regulated and constant, no longer subject to periodic droughts or floods. Ankara has called for a survey of the water needs of all three countries to be undertaken and decisions to be made on that basis, a position rejected by both Syria and Iraq.

Turkey certainly needs its dam projects. Southern and southeastern Turkey are some of the poorest areas in the country and the irrigation of these provinces with Tigris and Euphrates waters is planned to spark an economic regeneration of the region, which has also been badly hit by the war against the PKK and the collapse of trade following the Gulf war and the U.N. sanctions then imposed on Iraq.

It was Syrian and Iraqi protests over the water issue, stalemated for several years, that prefigured the current crisis, which is not helped by the non-existence of any hard and fast rules covering international disputes between riparian states.

The fourth issue is that of Israel and the shifting alliances of the contemporary Middle East. Turkey has developed strong links with Israel over the past few years. Syria sees these links as a direct threat—an axis between its northern and southern neighbors. The current crisis has been described by the Syrian media as an Israeli-inspired conspiracy to deflect attention from Israeli intransigence in the peace process.

Ankara, too, sees conspiracies. Recent meetings in Damascus between Greek, Syrian and Armenian foreign ministers were viewed from Ankara as evidence of a hostile coalition being built by Damascus to encircle Turkey. The Baghdad regime also enjoys closer ties with Damascus these days, while the accord between the two Kurdish parties of northern Iraq, the PUK and KDP, is viewed with suspicion in Turkey as a U.S. and U.K. blueprint for a future, hostile, Kurdish state on Ankara’s borders.

This atmosphere of mutual paranoia is compounded by historical mistrust between Turks and Arabs. What is less clear, however, is why the dispute has been brought to the top of the Turkish government’s agenda at this particular time. In fact, Turkish commentators are beginning to turn their attention back to what they might have missed in all the excitement.

In particular, there have been a string of recent revelations about the dark world of the Turkish mafia and its connections to senior politicians. The “battle of the tapes” has seen the publication of transcripts of a number of recorded phone conversations between the recently arrested crime godfather Alaatin Cakaci and government ministers—with Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz himself being implicated. Yilmaz currently faces four parliamentary investigative commissions looking into a range of criminal allegations against him.

In addition, there is also the issue of Turkey’s forthcoming general elections. These had been set for April of next year and now will be moved forward to December of this year. Either way, they look likely to see a repeat of the last, 1995, ballot. Back then, the largest party to emerge was the pro-Islamist Welfare Party, Refah. Now that Refah has been banned by the Turkish government, its Islamist successor, the Virtue Party (FP), appears likely to emerge with the largest number of seats—though well short of a majority. The Refah Party’s success in 1995 enabled it to form a coalition government with the conservative True Path Party (DYP) of Tansu Ciller. The coalition government was then ejected from office in July 1997 by the Turkish military.

With the prospect of another imminent Islamist victory, the Syrian crisis cannot do Yilmaz’ incumbent Motherland Party (ANAP) any harm if it is brought to a successful conclusion—or even if it continues unresolved.

A certain cynicism amongst the Turkish public over the crisis is also to be noted. The nightly television pictures of tanks and charging Mehmetcis (GIs) stir few in the teahouses back at the Turkish-Syrian border. “We don’t want a war,” says Bedrettin Karaboga, the managing director of a local factory in Mardin, southeast Turkey, some 15 miles from the frontier. “We’re still suffering from the effects of the last one—in the Gulf.”

The road to the Iraqi frontier gate at Harbur, running parallel to the Syrian border, is ample evidence of this: shuttered gas stations, and the roadsides littered with abandoned petrol tanks from the once mighty oil and diesel trade that went over the border. If trade with Syria is killed off too, and this becomes the frontline, there are few here who see the benefit.

Jon P. Gorvett is a British free-lance journalist based in Turkey.