SATURDAY,NOVEMBER2,2019| THEGLOBEANDMAIL O OPINION | O3
A
little more than three
years ago, a small faction
within the Turkish military
attempted to overthrow the gov-
ernment. The coup would fizzle
out by morning, after claiming
more than 200 lives, but that
wasn’t certain in the middle of
the night when Turkish Presi-
dent Recep Tayyip Erdogan de-
clared it “a gift from God.”
It really was the gift that kept
on giving. As Turkey’s Reichstag
Fire – both metaphorically and
almost literally – it served as jus-
tification to arrest, purge and
blacklist tens of thousands with-
out due process, and all but guar-
anteed the passing of a referen-
dum greatly expanding the pow-
ers of the president. A century’s
worth of institutions were over-
hauled in less than a year, but
the coup didn’t accomplish ev-
erything Mr. Erdogan and his al-
lies hoped: It had failed to unify
an ideologically polarized coun-
try.
So the state tried to force it,
mobilizing media and entertain-
ment to hype national solidarity,
renaming entire towns and land-
marks after coup victims, staging
massive democracy vigils and in-
venting what it hoped would be-
come the country’s most impor-
tant national holiday. But the
half of the country in the opposi-
tion was simply going through
the motions. It didn’t feel like
their fight as much as a power
struggle between two religious
conservative former allies: Mr.
Erdogan and the exiled cleric
Fethullah Gulen.
But what the coup failed to
sell, the Kurds could deliver.
They were already established
bogeymen since the eighties, and
Turkish anxieties weren’t entire-
ly baseless – the country had
been fighting a 35-year insurgen-
cy by Kurdish separatists at a
cost of more than 40,000 lives. It
wasn’t too hard to reframe the
national emergency from reli-
gious versus religious to Turk
versus Kurd.
The process had already be-
gun a year earlier. After a poor
electoral performance by the rul-
ing party in mid-2015, the Kurdis-
tan Workers’ Party (PKK) was
provoked into reigniting dor-
mant violence, and a do-over
election five months later saw
the ruling party comfortably re-
gain its majority. And the coup
only accelerated the conflict. Just
one month after the putsch, Tur-
key would launch its first of
three incursions into northern
Syria against Syrian Kurdish
forces. A month later, Ankara
would remove elected opposi-
tion mayors in many of Turkey’s
Kurdish districts and replace
them with appointees. A month
after that, the leaders and MPs of
the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Rights
party would be arrested on ter-
rorism charges. Hostility would
snowball over the next three
years, to the point when Turkey’s
third and latest incursion into
northern Syria last month was
met with overwhelming national
fanfare. Everyone from school-
children to the national soccer
team and even contemporary art
fairs were clamouring to support
the troops, and thus by exten-
sion thegovernment. An amaz-
ing turn of fortune for an admin-
istration that had been harshly
rebuked in municipal elections
just a few months prior. Not only
did most of the major cities flip
to the opposition, but the gov-
ernment embarrassed itself fur-
ther by losing the largest city, Is-
tanbul, twice after it arranged a
do-over election.
From the outset, it looks like
this latest Operation Peace
Spring – as in water source, not
season – is just about cultivating
nationalist fervour to regain lost
political capital. Plus, there is the
added benefit of driving a wedge
between opposition parties.
With two of Turkey’s three oppo-
sition parties supporting the op-
eration while the pro-Kurdish
Rights party is singled out and
targeted by the authorities, the
nascent partnership so essential
to opposition victories earlier
this year has now been compro-
mised.
But those are just the immedi-
ate benefits to a much longer-
term plan to engineer a new
identity for Turkey. More specifi-
cally, there are two concurrent
engineering projects at work,
one in Syria and the other in Tur-
key, and seeing what is playing
out in the former reveals what to
expect from the latter. As soon as
the White House green-lit the
Turkish incursion, the world fo-
cused on two angles: U.S. Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s betrayal of
the U.S.’s Syrian Kurdish part-
ners, and their imminent geno-
cide at the hands of Turkey. Un-
derstandable, as the Syrian Dem-
ocratic Forces (SDF) had been an
invaluable partner in the fight
against the Islamic State and
rightfully earned considerable
global sympathy. But the SDF
was also closely affiliated with
Turkey’s own separatist PKK, a
group designated a terrorist or-
ganization by not just Turkey but
also the U.S. and European
Union. That is why the interna-
tional and Turkish narratives are
so divergent. The former por-
trays Turkey’s fight as againstKurds as a whole, whereas Tur-
key insists it is only against one
militant organization.
“This is not a move against the
Kurds,” presidential spokesman
Ibrahim Kalin told CNN in the
first days of the operation. “Tur-
key doesn’t have any problem
with the Kurds. We are fighting
against a terrorist organization
that has killed and oppressed the
Kurdish people as well.”
Yet, even though the oper-
ation is justified in terms of secu-
rity concerns, Turkey has made
no secret of its plans for demo-
graphic engineering in the re-
gion, which will affect SDF and
civilians alike. The stated objec-
tive of Peace Spring is to drive
the SDF from a 30-kilometre-
deep strip along the border, then
move in about two million of the
3.5 million Syrian Arab refugees
currently hosted in Turkey. Thus,
Ankara would not only weaken
any future Kurdish claims for ter-
ritorial autonomy or independ-
ence, but also reduce its politi-
cally costly refugee burden.
A glimpse of what to expect
for northeastern Syria is already
available in the city of Afrin, an
isolated predominantly Kurdish
enclave in northwestern Syria
taken by Turkish forces during its
previous incursion in early 2018.
A UN report after the operation
noted: “The Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights
is concerned that permitting eth-
nic Arabs to occupy houses of
Kurds who have fled effectively
prevents the Kurds from return-
ing to their homes and may be
an attempt to change perma-
nently the ethnic composition of
the area.”
In any case, Peace Spring pro-
ceeded rapidly, killing hundreds
and displacing tens of thousands
in a week, and soon ceasefire
agreements were reached with
foreign powers, first with the
United States, then with Russia.
Turkey got at the diplomacy ta-
ble what it had set out to accom-
plish militarily: the evacuation
of the SDF from the 30-kilometre
strip.
But the demographic engi-
neering isn’t just about ethnicity;
it’s also about ideology and life-
style. The SDF and PKK are left-
wing and secular, a major annoy-
ance for Turkey’s religious con-
servative government. “It’s really
an irony of history that the Unit-
ed States has picked up a Marx-
ist-Leninist organization in Syria
as its ally,” Mr. Kalin said in the
aforementioned CNN interview.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s allies in Sy-
ria, and the people it would rath-
er move in to replace the Kurds,
are much closer ideologically to
the government. Their enemies
are even accusing them of being
outright jihadis. That Islamic
State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghda-di was found and killed by U.S.
forces last week in the western
city of Idlib–astone’s throw
from the Turkish border and un-
der the gaze of Turkish observa-
tion posts – shows that Turkey is,
at the very least, less concerned
with religious extremists than it
is of left-wing Kurds.
So it raised a few eyebrows
when Mr. Erdogan explained
rather bluntly during an inter-
view last week that, “the people
best suited for [the northeastern
stretch] are the Arabs. It isn’t an
area suitable for the Kurds’ life-
style.” Asked to clarify, he added,
“because it’s a desert,” but eye-
brows were still raised. After all,
Afrin wasn’t a desert and the
Kurds weren’t suitable for it, ei-
ther.
This engineering in Syria also
hints at what is planned for Tur-
key. The country was established
as an aggressively secular repub-
lic a century ago after the fall of
the Ottoman Empire. Religious
conservatives such as Mr. Erdo-
gan were marginalized or worse,
and their rise has been fuelled
largely by a reactionary backlash
against enforced secularism. He
has made clear his intention to
“raise pious generations,” and re-
sources are increasingly invested
in religious education and other
religious institutions. But secu-
larism and religious conserva-
tism are seen as mutually exclu-
sive, and it’s not easy converting
members of one team to the oth-
er. That is where nationalism
comes in, creating a backdoor
that allows leaders to dissemi-
nate other ideas. In Turkey, na-
tionalism isn’t the end, it’s the
means to the end.
When Turkey’s founders first
introduced secularism to the
conservative people of Anatolia,
they were able to do so because
of the nationalist fervour of the
Turkish War of Independence
waged mostly against the Greeks.
Now, if the future is to be pious, a
similar existential threat needs
to be cultivated and maintained.
Which is why there can be no
peaceful resolution between An-
kara and the Kurds. Get people
worked up over Turkishness, and
they might not notice why
mosques are now mobilized in
support of troops or why their
kids are being directed toward
religious schooling whether par-
ents want it or not.
In 2023, Turkey will be cele-
brating its centennial, a date gov-
ernment officials bring up time
and again with ominous under-
tones, a sort of watershed mo-
ment marking Mr. Erdogan’s
grand “New Turkey” project. If
this new Turkey aims to bring
about a radically new identity,
likely a more religious and more
anti-Western one, then it will be
nationalism that gets it there.Onenation,underTurkey
TheinvasionofSyriaispartofthecountry’sdrivetowardaradicalnewidentity
CINARKIPER
OPINIONTurkish journalist based
in Vancouver
Aglimpse of what to
expect for northeastern
Syria is already available
in the city ofAfrin, an
isolated predominantly
Kurdish enclave in
northwestern Syria
taken by Turkish forces
during its previous
incursion in early 2018.AwomanstandsalongthesideofaroadneartheSyrianKurdishtownofRasal-AynalongtheborderwithTurkeylastmonth.Thesmokeplumesoftirefiresbillowinginthebackground
aremeanttodecreasevisibilityforTurkishwarplanesthatarepartofoperationPeaceSpring.DELILSOULEIMAN/AFP/GETTYIMAGES