Turkey and the world in the Syria test

The Syrian nightmare that has descended on the Arab Spring constitutes a veritable examination for everyone. On the one hand this examination reveals everyone's real position toward the revolutions taking place in the Arab countries, and on the other it invites us to rejoin, this time in favor of realism, the age-old debate in international politics between idealism and realism. Everyone is joining this debate, this process, according to his own quality; everyone is adopting in this event the attitude that befits him.

A new day dawns for those who pronounce that "there is no idealism in foreign policy, and certainly no room for sentimentality"; for them it is all "countries have interests." But they cannot keep the accounting of these interests correctly either. Who could keep the accounting of an interest that has excluded friendships, human relations and sentimentality? Such an interest no longer has evaluable limits and measures even in the science of economics...

In the foreign policy it has pursued over the past 9 years, Turkey, with its emphasis on sentiment, principles and values, has on the one hand served the rise of these values and on the other secured the very fruitful gains of acting with these values. In doing so it made others gain as much as it gained. In the developments taking place in the Arab world, which gave peoples above all a revolution of self-confidence, the share of this fruitfulness is, from whichever side you look, very great. These days Turkey, with its government and its society, has embarked on a complete uprising of conscience for Somalia and the other African countries in the grip of hunger, where it can have no visible interest whatsoever.

Compare the intervention in Somalia, through the people's aid campaign that has turned into a veritable race, with the interventions of the so-called strong, superpower countries in problematic regions until now.

The US has been remembering Somalia and intervening there now and then for twenty years. None of these interventions thought of seeking a solution to the hunger there. With the bombs it has dropped there, the weapons it has transferred or the financing of armies, ten Somalias could have been stood back on their feet by now. With only a small portion of the military spending on Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently Libya, perhaps all the problems of both countries could have been solved. But whatever the US hoped to gain from this military spending there, today it is busy paying a far heavier bill for it. Turkey, on the other hand, grows more, gains self-confidence, and becomes a society more tightly knit both with its own people and with its state by rushing to help, being swept up in sentiment, investing in peace, and exalting human values.

When a problem arises somewhere, Turkey does not see massing its military forces there at once as a good sanction or solution. Instead it invests in peace, mediation and negotiation by mobilizing the human, moral and cultural power it has accumulated over the years. And the more it does so, the more deterrent, the more persuasive and the more effective it becomes. What made Bashar al-Assad listen for 6.5 hours to Davutoğlu's speeches full of warnings and lessons was neither Turkey's warrior power nor the possibility that he had brought a message from America; on the contrary, it was precisely the power of the esteem and the cultural and symbolic capital it has accumulated over the years through these very features.

Turkey was much criticized for not displaying in Libya the attitude it first displayed in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet the course of events vindicated this policy of Turkey. Turkey does not have to take its place on the side of one of the parties wherever there is a dispute, still less necessarily on the side of the opposition. It is a very great asset for someone to be in a position to end the quarrel eventually while others are fighting, and the fact that in many cases no one but Turkey can be in this position is Turkey's greatest success. "If two parties of the believers fight, make peace between them; and if one of the parties commits clear injustice, transgression and obstinacy, then fight against it too" is a manner taught by the Qur'an.

An Iranian diplomat I spoke with a few days before Davutoğlu's latest visit on the Syria issue was asking, "Is it right for Turkey to keep up relations with both Bashar and his opponents in Syria at the same time?" As best my tongue could manage, I reminded him of this Qur'anic principle and asked what could be more right than this. Iran's choice, as the country with the Islamic Revolution, to conduct its own foreign policy solely on the basis of its own state interests without regard for any human and Islamic value needs a serious warning.

Turkey's stance on the Syria issue has no sectarian concern or dimension whatsoever. Turkey refuses in advance to take a place on the axis of a possible Shiite-Sunni conflict. Prime Minister Erdoğan's visit to Najaf, and his saying "I am not a Sunni, I am a Muslim" while addressing Iraqis in the midst of sectarian strife, is a reference stance. And when Bülent Arınç, again with a boundary-setting phrase, says "we can have no friendship with oppressors," it is not important at all whether these oppressors are Shiite or Sunni. Therefore, whether the subject is Bahrain, Syria or Yemen, the real value to be observed is not Sunnism or Shiism but justice. In truth, there is an urgent need for Iran to understand this sensitivity and priority of Turkey correctly.

Each of those who provoke Turkey, in every dispute, to hastily decide in favor of one party has his own calculations. It is very important that Turkey give credit to none of these calculations and follow its own calculation, one that surely looks from a much deeper and wider horizon and observes human and universal values.

The cruelties committed by the Assad regime in Syria are such that one cannot remain a spectator; but if there is a possibility of stopping these cruelties before they lead to heavier and irreversible consequences, using that possibility to the end is a separate responsibility. Turkey has no luxury of being goaded on over Syria.