Turkey Remains a Powerful Mid-East Player

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Turkey has not fared too badly in combatting COVID-19, and so that hasn’t stopped President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from continuing his foreign policy adventures in the Middle East. 

As in dozens of other countries, Turkey has seen the virus spread throughout the nation. There were slightly more than 5,000 deaths by early July, though some doctors dispute that, claiming the real figure could be twice as high because Turkey only includes those who test positive.

Still, for a nation of 82 million people, Turkey has “clearly averted a much bigger disaster,” according to Dr. Jeremy Rossman, at the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent in England.

You’d think that would be good news. But Erdogan insists that any negative stories about the country’s handling of the crisis are the result of anti-Turkish bias.

During a coronavirus briefing on May 4. he accused the secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which governs Istanbul, of having a “fascist mindset” and supporting military coups. He went on to claim it conspires with “terrorists” and “evil powers.”

The CHP’s actions are guided by “a desire to usurp the country’s administration through a coup rather than coming to power through democratic means,” he charged, adding, “This is what the picture tells us when you sum up the statements of CHP leaders.”

Erdogan also warned against the “Armenian and Greek lobbies” that were, he claimed, plotting against Turkey. “We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country,” he said.

The government was initially caught off-guard by the intensity and speed of the pandemic, and by mid-March Turkey had experienced one of the steepest infection curves in the world.

In that month Turkey allowed 21,000 pilgrims to travel to Saudi Arabia, and many weren’t quarantined when they returned, spreading the virus to their hometowns.

Turkey suffered from protective equipment shortages in the beginning, and intensive care wards in some hospitals were nearly overrun. A survey by the Turkish Medical Association in March showed that 66 per cent of medical staff experienced shortages of masks, and 40 per cent had not received any training in dealing with infectious diseases.

Not only did the government refuse to acknowledge these problems, but when medical staff or the few remaining critical reporters were brave enough to speak out, they were harassed, fired, investigated or even taken into custody.

Erdogan knows that political adventures outside Turkish borders increases his popularity, especially when economic hardships during the pandemic could impact his approval at home. Hence his increasing involvement in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars.

Long an enemy of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, last October Erdogan sent Turkish forces into the northwestern province of Idlib, the last rebel-held province of Syria, to stem a Syrian government advance. More than 50 Turkish troops were killed by Syrian government fire there in late February. 

Turkey is also trying to prevent Syria’s Kurdish community, which formed the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in 2011 to defend Kurdish-inhabited areas, from establishing control over the border region, fearing this would encourage Kurdish separatism within Turkey itself. 

Further afield, Erdogan is now involved in Libya. Since 2014, it has been split between two rival factions and their governments, based in Tobruk in the east and Tripoli in the west. In April of last year, General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), with the support of Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), began a major push from his eastern base to take Tripoli, the country’s capital, from Fayez Serraj’s UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA).

However, Turkey signed a maritime and military deal with the GNA late last year, and since then Turkey’s technological and tactical backing for Serraj has seen Haftar’s advance stopped and even reversed in some strategic areas.

Part of that strategy involved installing new air defense systems, which allowed Turkish drones to start a major campaign of air strikes in January, crippling Haftar’s ability to resupply his forces. It was Turkey’s most forceful intervention in the oil-rich North African nation since the end of the Ottoman Empire over a century ago.

“The balance in Libya changed significantly as a result,” declared Turkey’s Defence Minister Hulusi Akar on May 20.