Monthly Archives: July 2016

Middle East, Turkey, United States

Turkey’s failed coup raises concerns for the west…

TURKEY

News of a failed coup attempt in a NATO member country bordering the European Union would surely merit loud expressions of relief. Relief that the death toll has stopped rising from the 290 fatalities already recorded.

With almost every passing hour since last Friday’s putsch searching questions continue to arise over the nature of this coup attempt and what the resulting arrests of 6,000 people, including senior army commanders and some 3,000 judges, now means for the country and for geopolitical stability across the region.

Whether Turkey can now be considered a functioning democratic state within its own right must now be open to question in the wake of a remarkably swift and sweeping series of arrests of government critics. Not only have few dissenting voices been spared, but the imagery used by the country’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to describe them suggests an orchestrated retaliation altogether better organised (and more vicious) than the coup attempt itself. Mr Erdogan has wasted no time in expressing vitriolic language, declaring: ‘We will… continue to cleanse the virus from all state institutions, because this virus has spread… (and) has enveloped the state.”

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A US aircraft takes-off from Incirlik air base, a strategically important base for raids against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Such use of language, combined with the seizure and arrest of so many members of the country’s judiciary, suggest that President Erdogan is making full use of the opportunity to move against anyone he considers an enemy.

He has also taken advantage of the opportunity to accuse the American-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of being directly behind the plot and is demanding his extradition. No evidence has yet been furnished to support this demand and Mr Gulen strongly denies any involvement. The attempted coup, however, as mystifying in its origins as in its failure to succeed despite a notable mutiny of army personnel and air power support, has been swiftly seized upon to buttress Mr Erdogan’s position and to provide the pretext for further measures and reforms to tighten his already extensive grip on power. Autocracy is what Mr Erdogan ultimately craves.

Among the arrests was the military commander of Incirlik air base in the south, a strategically important site used by US-led coalition jets for raids against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It is said he and 10 other soldiers had been detained for their role in the coup.

In addition, 50 senior soldiers were detained in the western province of Denizli. Those arrested in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup included the commander of the Third Army, the commander of the Second Army and the former Chief of Air Staff.

One of the country’s most senior judges, Alparslan Altan, was among thousands of the senior judiciary taken into custody. Quite how Turkey can comply with US President Barack Obama’s stricture that it should remain within the rule of law is moot.

The putsch has created problems for western powers dependent on Turkey’s co-operation both in military actions against IS strongholds, and in curbing the flow of migrants into the EU. The country is also a putative EU member; and, it is widely thought that in order to secure Turkey’s continuing co-operation in migrant control its application for full EU membership has proceeded this far.

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Asia, China, Foreign Affairs, United States

China: An international ruling over the South China Sea

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Intro: The ruling was made by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, following a case which was brought by the Philippines

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS China has displayed an often aggressive stance over its vast territorial grab in the South China Sea. This has terrified its neighbours and set it on a collision course with the United States, long seen as the guarantor of peace in East Asia. In the last few days an international tribunal has demolished China’s vaguely defined claims to most of the South China Sea. How Beijing now reacts to this ruling is of the utmost geopolitical importance. If, in its anger, China flouts and ignores the verdict and continues its creeping annexation, it will be perceived as elevating brute force over international law as the arbiter of disputes among states. Continued bullying by China of its neighbours greatly raises the risk of a local clash and which could escalate into a war with America. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

The ruling was made by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, following a case which was brought by the Philippines. The verdict is firm, clear and everything which China did not want to hear. The judges decreed that the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) should solely determine how the waters of the South China Sea are divided among countries, and rejected China’s ill-explained ‘nine-dash line’ which implies the sea belongs to China. They ruled that none of the Spratly Islands in the south of the sea, claimed (and occupied) by several countries including China, can be defined as islands that can sustain human life. In practice, this means that no country can assert an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending up to 200 nautical miles around them.

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Map depicting the disputed islands in the South China Sea

While the court had no power to decide who owns which bits of land in the South China Sea, the judges said that by building on rocks visible only at low tide (and thus not entitled under UNCLOS to any sovereign waters), China had encroached illegally into the Philippines’ EEZ. The court also determined that China had violated UNCLOS by blocking Philippine fishing boats and oil-exploration vessels, and cited that Chinese ships had acted dangerously and unlawfully in doing so. Moreover, China’s island-building had caused ‘severe harm’ to the habitats of endangered species, and Chinese officials had turned a blind eye to such practices.

For China, this is undoubtedly a humiliation. Its leaders have been quick to denounce the proceedings as illegal. Its massive recent live-firing exercises in the South China Sea implies it may be planning a tough response. This might involve the imposition of an ‘Air Defence Identification Zone’ of the kind it has already declared over the East China Sea. Or it might mean that China starts building on the Scarborough Shoal, which it wrested from the Philippines in 2012 after a stand-off involving patrol vessels. That would be hugely provocative. Although the U.S. is deeply reluctant to risk a conflict, President Barack Obama is believed in March to have warned his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that any move on Scarborough Shoal would be seen as threatening American interests (the Philippines is a U.S. ally). Any attempt by China to call its bluff in a sea that carries $5.3 trillion in annual trade would be reckless and irresponsible.

There is a better way. China could climb down, and, in effect, quietly recognise the court’s ruling. That would mean ceasing its island-building, letting other countries fish where UNCLOS allows and putting a stop to poaching by its own fishermen. It should have good reason: its prestige and prosperity largely depends on a rules-based order. It certainly would be in China’s own interests to secure peace in its region by sitting down with the Philippines, Vietnam and other South-East Asian neighbours and trying to resolve differences.

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Government, Politics, Turkey, United States

Turkey’s failed military coup…

TURKEY

Intro: Turkey’s failed coup now gives Recep Tayyip Erdogan a chance to seize more power

IN just the space of four decades Turkey has seen four governments ousted by its military, the most recent was in the late 1990s. Until now, another coup had been considered extremely unlikely. Many senior army officers resent Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian and autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his single-handed attempts to reshape society along Islamic lines and to rein in the military. Few would have reason to think that an attempt to depose him would ever have been successful. Mr Erdogan has won every election since 2002, and retains the support of roughly half the electorate. A decade of economic prosperity, Mr Erdogan is considered a lesser evil than army rule even by many of his committed opponents.

The attempted coup on July 15th, was dismantled in just a matter of hours amid a massive show of popular support for continued civilian rule. According to official sources, at least 265 people were killed. Mr Erdogan has emerged from the episode stronger than ever. His ultimate desire of changing the constitution to grant the presidency executive powers may now be within reach. Mr Erdogan wants power around himself and not shared through parliament.

The Turkish president plays a masterful game at being both victor and victim. This is the man who brought Turkey’s secularist old guard to heel and gave a voice to the country’s conservatives, but, at the same time, also claimed to be surrounded by enemies both at home and abroad. For Mr Erdogan, the world is divided into two groups: on the one hand, his voters; on the other, a coalition of foes that includes the political opposition, Western countries ostensibly envious of Turkey’s progress, the global financial elite, and a secretive Islamic movement, the Gulen community. In the eyes of his supporters, the coup attempt has proven Mr Erdogan right. He will now likely claim a mandate for amassing even more power and eliminating the remaining centres of opposition.

To the relief of most Turks, the military is no longer the credible and alternative power base it once was. It will be the first target for any purge under sweeping changes being considered by Mr Erdogan. While the coup had the support of only part of the officer corps, this was not a coup by the military as an institution but more of a mutiny. The plotters did, however, deploy large numbers of troops and heavy armour in both Istanbul and in Ankara, where their aircraft bombed the national parliament. Over 2,800 military personnel, including a number of generals, have been arrested.

Another target on Mr Erdogan’s radar will be the Gulen movement, a Muslim sect headed by a cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who was a close ally of the Turkish president before falling out with him in 2013. The government immediately charged the group with masterminding the violence. The government labelled the Gulenists a terror group this year, and it now has a green light to pursue anyone even remotely suspected of links to them. Some Turkish officials insist that the Gulenists have their finger prints all over this latest coup attempt. On July 16th, Binali Yildirim, Turkey’s prime minister, demanded that America extradite Mr Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania. “The country that stands behind this man is no friend to Turkey,” he warned.

Mr Erdogan has long sought to undermine his parliamentary political opposition. Last year he responded with massive force to a growing insurgency in the southeast by groups aligned to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), fanning the flames of the violence and providing an excuse to link moderate Kurdish MPs to the terrorists. They have since been stripped of parliamentary immunity, and now face terrorism charges. Bomb attacks by the PKK and by Islamic State, which Turkey says it is battling in Syria, have legitimised a government crackdown on independent media and free expression. The main independent newspapers and television broadcasters have been taken over by government organisations aligned to the previously issued instructions of Mr Erdogan. Prosecutors have opened some 2000 cases against people suspected of insulting the president since 2014. Following the coup, such repression will probably intensify.

Perhaps most troubling, the coup will provide an opportunity for Mr Erdogan to eliminate what remains of Turkey’s independent judiciary. On July 16th, the government announced that 2,700 judges had been suspended from duty. Two members of the constitutional court have also been detained.

The irony is that the coup’s failure demonstrated just how weak a threat Mr Erdogan actually faces. Almost all people spoke out against the coup, including the entire political class, as well as the overwhelming majority of Turkey’s citizens. That is the good news. The bad is that today’s sense of unity risks being drowned out tomorrow by calls for vengeance. The day after the coup attempt a group of men clad in Turkish flags marched down Istanbul’s main street shouting “We want executions”. The death penalty was abolished in Turkey in the early 2000s. Media photographs and video footage online from the coup’s aftermath showed protesters on one of Istanbul’s bridges beating soldiers and whipping them with their belts.

The failed coup is a golden opportunity for Mr Erdogan to heal a deeply divided society. Past experience suggests that he will instead respond with a vicious crackdown. During the night of July 15th, Turks of all stripes managed to protect their country from a relapse into military rule. Yet, the fragile democracy that many of them died to defend is now in Mr Erdogan’s increasingly untrustworthy hands.

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