In Bodrum’s marina, yachts anchor next to the flimsy rubber boats that take refugees across the three-mile (4.8km) stretch of sea to Greece and Europe. Two worlds coexist, largely oblivious of one another. On a recent night, as the yachts swayed gently and disco music wafted out from the bars along the harbour, a Turkish coastguard vessel, working with a team of volunteer divers, brought in 95 refugees, mostly Syrian, whose boat had capsized in the Aegean. The scene seemed to sum up in a startling way our era of disruption, of wealth, violence and chaos, where leisure and suffering can cohabit in strange ways, where the news headlines are all about terrorist acts or the drowning of children, but where acts of extraordinary generosity go unnoticed.
Turkey stands at the crossroads of all of this — its huge land mass acting as a buffer zone between Europe and the unprecedented turmoil of the Middle East. It’s no surprise that EU leaders are intent on harnessing Turkey’s cooperation in trying to stem the flow of refugees westwards — and Angela Merkel’s visit to Ankara might be a landmark in that negotiation. But the complexities of Turkey’s predicament cannot be overlooked. Nor should the response of its citizens be ignored. Many, like the divers of Bodrum and those who fundraise for their efforts, have shown exemplary readiness to help the destitute.
This country of 75 million people has taken in two million refugees over the past four years, and spent the equivalent of over €5 billion (£3.7 billion; Dh20.87 billion) to do so. The domestic fallout from these massive arrivals has been — compared to the xenophobia on show in much of Europe — rather contained.
Turkish national pride is certainly deployed by the authoritarian regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is also a nation that has fallen prey to terrorist attacks: the Ankara bombings last Saturday exacerbated ethnic and political tensions ahead of a snap election due on November 1.
But looking at a country ruled by a strongman and now dealing with a range of fault lines and conflicts, it is easy to forget that things didn’t need to become so bad. Turks need to be helped out of their problems, not shunned or stigmatised.
It’s hard to think of a nation that in peacetime has undergone so many transformations in a generation. Turkey has been a member of Nato since 1952 and was accepted as a formal candidate for EU membership in 1999, but many questions over its anchoring in the western world have been reignited.
In the early 1990s, Turkey rediscovered its eastern dimension. It was a time when the then president, Turgut Ozal, made emotional visits to the ancient sites of Sufi groups in the Turkish-speaking lands of Central Asia, and when brilliant young Turkish diplomats opened up channels of communication with the Caucasus. Turkey’s coastal cities on the Black Sea bustled with trade. Turkey rediscovered its traditional Muslim roots, under the surge of a growing Anatolian middle class who wanted to break out of the strict secularism that was Ataturk’s legacy. That brought the emergence, in the early 2000s, of the moderate Islamist AK party — today still hanging on to power. A Turkish analyst told me at the time: “We have gone from a military barracks to a supermarket.” He was pointing to the shift from military rule to a vibrant economy, as borders opened up. And as recently as 2011, Turkey was described as a model for the nations of the Arab Spring trying to break out of dictatorships and to balance Islam with democracy.
So what went wrong? Much has been said about Erdogan’s obsession with becoming a new “sultan”. His latest policies certainly demonstrate that he has resorted to war with the Kurds to rally nationalists and crush opponents with police-state methods.
But other aspects come into play: confusing western policies, the deployment of Russian forces in Turkey’s vicinity, and the widening of cultural gaps. One speaker at an international conference in Bodrum last week asked what would have happened if Turkey had been held closer by the EU? Many liberal, democratic-minded Turks feel that opportunities were squandered. EU accession negotiations stalled years ago, mostly because European public opinion could never accept the notion of engaging with such a large Muslim country. This fed a Turkish reflex of looking elsewhere: towards Russia (Turkey’s main energy provider today) and the Middle East (the notion of a “neo-Ottoman” diplomacy, which ended with the outbreak of war in Syria).
I remember in 2005 a French MP boasting privately about how efficient it was to rally French voters’ support by brandishing Turkey as a scarecrow: the old European phobia of the dangerous Muslim at our door. The rise of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and security concerns have only amplified that kind of thinking.
Europeans are today reaching out to a rather lonely Turkey. Its many calls for “safe zones” inside Syria, with the help of allies, were never heeded. Polls show that a majority of Turks don’t know who their main international partner is these days. The US is seen as a strategic ally by only 23 per cent. The EU and Germany are viewed favourably by only 41 per cent and 38 per cent of Turks respectively. Turkey used to aspire to being a regional soft power. Now it struggles with a slowing economy, insecurity and domestic discontent — whose effects might be seen in the upcoming elections.
The waters of the Aegean off Bodrum will soon be dangerously cold for refugees. “You die after 20 minutes in that water,” one Turkish rescuer told me, as he displayed a collection of fake life-jackets sold to refugees by networks of smugglers: bits of tissue and foam, with false labels on them.The EU says it will increase its aid to Turkey, but tackling the many dimensions of this country’s crises will require more than money. Europeans need to rethink the wider relationship they want to build with a nation that feels many promises — not just humanitarian ones — have not been kept.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
