The Economist - USA (2020-10-17)

44 Europe The EconomistOctober 17th 2020

2 tique and deadly powers.” The fact that Mr

Navalny survived, largely thanks to the pi-

lots who carried out an emergency landing

in Omsk, does not change that message.

Mr Navalny is also clear about the mo-

tives, which he says are linked to his ven-

turing beyond Moscow and into the re-

gions, the bastion of the regime’s power. He

was in Siberia, mobilising voters against

Mr Putin’s ruling United Russia party,

when he was poisoned. Having long lost

the support of middle-class Moscow and St

Petersburg, the Kremlin tolerated Mr Na-

valny’s activism in those cities. Moving

into the heartland spelled danger.

“The regime is held together by the per-

ception of its solid support among the ‘salt

of the earth’ people in the regions. Our

main task was to destroy that myth,” Mr Na-

valny says. To do it, he has built an exten-

sive regional network. He has also orches-

trated “smart voting”: directing those who

are fed up with the regime to the best-

placed alternative party in order to consoli-

date protest votes and deprive United Rus-

sia of its majority. “Whatever control the

Kremlin has over courts and security ser-

vices, its party is the most basic instrument

of its power,” he notes.

Over the past two years the Kremlin has

tried but failed to eradicate Mr Navalny’s

network by conventional means, including

harassment, the arrest of activists on fabri-

cated charges and the freezing of bank ac-

counts. But when mass protests broke out

almost simultaneously in far-eastern Kha-

barovsk and in Belarus on the western

flank of the former Soviet empire, the per-

ception of threat among Mr Putin’s security

men changed—and so did their tactics.

“They could not have told Putin that the

protest in Khabarovsk was the result of

broad discontent triggered by the arrest of a

popular governor,” says Mr Navalny. But

they could and probably did tell him that

this was part of a Western plan operating

through Mr Navalny, with more to come. So

permission for “special measures” was re-

quested and granted, he reckons.

Yet if they hoped to neutralise Mr Na-

valny, they have achieved the opposite. He

has gained the moral high ground and sym-

pathy among those who did not previously

support him. A hospital visit from Angela

Merkel, the German chancellor, has greatly

boosted his international standing.

The Kremlin seems desperate to stop

him from coming back, alleging he has ties

to the ciaand threatening treason charges.

Mr Navalny is determined to return to Rus-

sia, challenging Mr Putin’s legitimacy. “For

all their mighty powers and their control

over everything, they know that there is a

broad historic process that is moving

against them,” he says. Mr Navalny knows

the risks, but he has chosen a leading role

in the drama, whether it ends as tragedy or

with a Hollywood-style triumph. 7

I

n cities acrossTurkey’s east, it is no

longer an unusual scene. The local

mayor, clutching a bag stuffed with some

clothes and a toothbrush, the bare necessi-

ties for a long spell in prison, emerges from

his house before dawn, accompanied by a

group of policemen, and disappears into a

van. The scene played out most recently on

September 25th in Kars, a city near the Ar-

menian border, where police arrested Ay-

han Bilgen, who was elected to office last

year. A small crowd gathered to say good-

bye. “Kars is proud of you,” the chanting be-

gan. Dozens of other members of Turkey’s

biggest Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Demo-

cratic Party (hdp), including three former

parliamentarians, were rounded up the

same day.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdo-

gan, believes he is close to burying the

dream of Kurdish autonomy both inside

and outside the country’s borders. The

army has dealt Kurdish insurgents, known

as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (pkk), a se-

ries of heavy blows. State prosecutors have

crippled Kurdish politics through the

courts. Sixty-five mayors were elected on

the hdp’s ticket in local elections last year.

At least 59 of them have been forced out of

office or locked up, or both. Several former

members of parliament are also behind

bars. “The government...is using the judi-

ciary to try to neutralise the hdpand to in-

timidate the whole opposition,” writes Se-

lahattin Demirtas, the party’s former

leader, from a prison in western Turkey,

where he has languished since 2016. (Mr

Demirtas communicates with the outside

world through his lawyers.) “The situation

we and our recently arrested friends face

has nothing to do with the law.”

Officially, the charges against the hdp

politicians rounded up over the past weeks

date back to 2014, when the party called for

protests after Islamic State forces besieged

the Syrian border town of Kobane, populat-

ed mostly by Kurds, while Turkish tanks

looked on from hundreds of metres away

and Mr Erdogan sat on his hands. At least 37

people across Turkey were killed after

Kurdish and Turkish nationalists took to

the streets. The government has now de-

cided to hold the entire hdpleadership re-

sponsible for the violence.

Its motives look largely political. “They

want to prevent the hdpfrom functioning

and to upset the structure of the opposition

coalition,” says Galip Dalay, a fellow at the

Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. As a de

facto partner in an alliance led by Turkey’s

main secular party and nationalists who

split from a party allied to Mr Erdogan, the

Kurds helped propel the opposition to a

string of victories in last year’s local elec-

tions, most notably in the Istanbul mayoral

race. Mr Erdogan now hopes to provoke a

split within the alliance by exploiting his

main opponents’ reluctance to align open-

ly with the hdp, which many Turks view as

the pkk’s political arm. (Turkey, America

and the euconsider the pkkto be a terrorist

group.) “If the rest of the opposition criti-

cises the arrests, the government will say

they’re on the side of terrorists,” says Vahap

Coskun, an academic. “And if they don’t,

they risk being estranged from the hdp.”

The crackdown at home has gone hand

in hand with military interventions

abroad. In the mountains of northern Iraq,

Turkey has stepped up air and drone strikes

against pkkstrongholds. In northern Syria,

it has launched three separate offensives

against the group’s offshoot, destroying its

dream of a Kurdish statelet running the

length of the Turkish border. Mr Erdogan is

also enmeshed on other fronts. He has

troops operating in Libya, and he is also

deeply involved in the renewed conflict be-

tween Armenia and Azerbaijan over the

disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

After almost two weeks of fighting in and

around the enclave, a ceasefire is now in ef-

fect, though violations are reported.

Mr Erdogan thinks he has the pkkand

the hdpon the ropes. “We’ve completely

destroyed the morale of the terrorist

group,” his interior minister boasted last

month. But the government has an intract-

able problem—the Kurds themselves. In

every parliamentary election since 2015,

the hdphas been able to count on the votes

of 5m-6m people, the vast majority of them

Kurds. Even today, with its leaders in pri-

son, the party polls above 10%, enough to

make it the third or fourth group in parlia-

ment. Mr Erdogan rules on the battlefield

and in the courts. But he has no answer to

the Kurds at the ballot box. 7

ISTANBUL

President Erdogan locks up Kurdish

mayors

Tu r ke y

Wear a different

chain

SYRIA

IRAQ

IRAN

RUSSIA

ARMENIA

AZERBAIJAN

AZER.

Kars

Kobane

Kurdishforces

Turkisharmy

Kurdish

majority areas

GEORGIA

Nagorno-

Karabakh

TURKEY

Sources: M. Izady, Columbia University; Jane’s Conflict Monitor

200 km