Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East

by Raja Shehadeh

  The Islamic Republic has always striven to be seen as the superpower of the region and, for the first time since the 1979 revolution, the regime may be the closest it has ever been to fulfilling that dream. Iran, although still suffering from isolation, is now among the more stable countries in the Middle East. The chaos wreaked by the Islamic State, the disintegration of old alliances and the potential to redraw borders are kicking up opportunities – and Iran has thrust itself on to centre stage.

  The regime is also enjoying a more submissive population, for there is less thirst for dramatic domestic regime change than ever before. This is partly a result of the government’s brutal reaction to the 2009 protests and partly a result of the chaos raging in the countries across its borders – both of which have left Iranians feeling cautious and fearful. It is increasingly common to hear talk of change coming from within; even those who claim to abhor the regime seem resigned to slow, internal evolution. Unlike a decade ago, it is unusual to hear talk of outside intervention and of revolution.

  Suddenly, Tehran and Washington have found themselves on the same side, de facto (and unacknowledged) allies fighting a common threat. In late 2014, after a summer where the Islamic State swept through the border areas of both Iraq and Syria, the countries shared intelligence – although it must be remembered that it is not the first time this has happened. The Iranians shared intelligence with the US over the Taliban in 2001, and nothing came of that, so the question must be asked: can there be more than a temporary tactical union?

  But Washington and Tehran may be drifting closer to one another on the winds of war that blow through Mesopotamia. After the downfall of Maliki and the ascension of a more acceptable Iraqi regime to both Washington and Tehran, Iran has provided troops, military advice and equipment to help the Iraqi army against the IS onslaught. Similarly, the US-led coalition has provided air support to fight the same enemy. American Special Forces and Iranian Qods soldiers have been sharing the same battle space on the ground as Iranian and American jets fly above them. Not talking directly, not even acknowledging each other’s existence, but nonetheless comrades in arms against a common enemy.

  Iran’s engagement against the Islamic State has had a surprising effect at home: the Revolutionary Guards, who are usually viewed with suspicion and disdain, are being regarded with more respect; more and more Iranians are now proud that their forces are gaining the world’s attention and fighting off an evil enemy. Even the tone of opinion pieces in reformist newspapers such as Shargh and Etemaad is much more supportive of and positive towards the Revolutionary Guards, and its commander, Qassem Suleimani, has become a heroic figure.

  The rise of the Islamic State has also changed the game plan for nuclear negotiations. Détente with the West is key for Rouhani, not just in overcoming the hardliners, but in strengthening Iran’s role in the region. A positive outcome to the nuclear negotiations would allow sanctions to be lifted and oil sales to recover and give Iran access to some $100 billion in frozen assets.

  But the West needs resolution just as much as Rouhani. Before the emergence of the so-called Islamic State, the idea of a resolution was almost unthinkable; now a deal is conceivable, perhaps necessary for both sides. The collapse of the notion of the nation-state across northern Iraq and much of Syria, the infighting between rival movements within Sunni Islam in the region, and the key role that Iran can play in influencing Assad and combating Islamic State mean that the Arab Spring has provided Tehran with an opportunity to dramatically improve its international standing.

  Post-Arab Spring Iran has to face subtle choices over how far it wants to ease its relations with the West by winding down its nuclear programme and continuing its fight against IS alongside a growing coalition of Sunni Arab nations and Western powers. Doing so could strengthen the hand of reformers and return Iran to the community of nations. But it would meet with stiff resistance from Iran’s hardliners. Their doctrine of ‘resistance’ needs something to resist. And vested interests are not purely ideological – sanctions have served some members of the regime well, allowing for control of certain industries as well as the black market and the spectacular enrichment of clerics or their families.

  Nonetheless, it is much harder for the hardliners to continue to define Iran’s core mission as being the lone warrior against the West and most of the rest. That mission keeps Iran in the cold and does not risk opening the doors to economic expansion and political reform – both of which could, or would, inevitably follow an easing of sanctions and a thawing of international relations.

  Rouhani has so far failed to deliver exactly what Iran’s theocrats most deeply fear – an end to isolation. But neither has he failed. He has the potential, and the regional political space, to wrong-foot hardliners within Iran’s body politic. The chaos in the Levant offers the possibility and the global community may need, may even welcome, Iran’s return to the warmth of international partnership. Coming in from the cold will have its costs for Tehran. A regime that has been built on a cold shoulder may find a warm embrace even harder to accept.

  CIVIC COURAGE: THE CLUE TO TURKEY’S FUTURE?

  Alev Scott

  WHERE WILL TURKEY be in fifteen years’ time? A country that is affected day to day by war-stricken neighbours, deepening social polarisation and an ongoing existential debate about its Islamic identity and role in the Middle East would be a challenge for any bookmaker or pundit. Living through the changes has been disorientating, but in many ways the picture in fifteen years is brighter than the events of tomorrow.

  Since the start of the Arab Spring and Turkey’s accompanying reactions and experiences, I have swung from optimism to pessimism and settled on one hopeful truth: Turkey’s political dramas may be impossible to predict but the Turks who protested against the destruction of a park in Istanbul in the summer of 2013 still turn up to protest about autocratic decisions and miscarriages of justice, despite the dangers of trigger-happy and arrest-prone riot police. These people display a bravery that holds hope for the future, while exposing the profound problems of today. There are reasons to trust in the potential of the younger generations, and this hope can perhaps be extended to other countries in the Middle East.

  I offer a triptych of scenes to illustrate the paths open to Turkey: the first is a huge crowd in Taksim Square, Istanbul, in June 2013. It is a weekday afternoon, but the square is full of people of all ages who have left work or school to come and celebrate the survival of Gezi Park, a rare patch of greenery the government recently vowed to build over. The riot police have gone. The mood is buoyantly happy, free food and water are handed out and somewhere in the crowd people are singing: a fleeting Utopia. This is the direct result of thousands of citizens coming together to block bulldozers and police, and Gezi has come to symbolise much more than a park. This is a celebration of civic courage.

  The second scene is also a protest, but the mood is very different – tense and fearful. It is 31 May 2014, the first anniversary of the initial raid on Gezi Park. Taksim Square has been closed off and guarded in advance by thousands of policemen with sub-machine guns who have learned valuable lessons in repression from last year. A small group of Gezi veterans have gathered in the streets nearby, intimidated by the masked police facing them but holding their ground. Suddenly, someone throws a bottle from a window above and it smashes in the road between the two groups. The police point their guns at the protesters, who retreat a small distance. It is a physical stand-off that mirrors the stand-off between the government and the considerable segment of Turkish society that has chosen to challenge the crackdown on dissent. Where will this stand-off end? The pessimistic answer is full-scale authoritarianism, and this is a real possibility.

  The third scene is a rally in the rural town of Kocaköy in the Kurdish region of Diyarbakir, in south-east Turkey. A woman is addressing the crowds through a megaphone – 33-year-old Berivan Elif Kiliç, a mother of two and former child bride with no education, representing the pro-Kurdish Pea
ce and Development Party (BDP). Berivan wears a headscarf and looks like she has just wandered out from the crowd herself. The nearby house where she lives is modest, like any other on that street. She is the antithesis of the typical Turkish politician accompanied by motor-cade, bodyguards and ego. While some of the towns-folk dismiss her, many others – especially women – are listening closely, impressed by her ambition in the overwhelmingly male world of Turkish politics, and see her as a role model (ironically, the name of their village, ‘Kocaköy’, means ‘husband village’). Berivan wins the municipal election a few days later (30 March 2014) and sets about encouraging the women and teenage girls in her constituency to discover their independence: to report abusive husbands, to insist on their right to continue school and to work. This is what progress looks like.

  Three scenarios that signal possible directions for Turkey: a happy moment of peaceful but determined protest; an uneasy and dangerous stand-off between citizens and state; and a woman speaking to a village crowd about everyday democracy. Which will be the most dominant notes in fifteen years’ time? Turkey’s disputed period of democratisation has been a roller-coaster in recent years. As lately as 2010 or early 2011, the country was seen as a beacon of hope for the Middle East. Under the AKP, the Justice and Development Party that came to power in 2002 and flourished under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey appeared to have brought to fruition a long-awaited marriage of Islam and democracy. The apparently Western-friendly, so-called ‘moderate Islamic’ ruling party was achieving great things: a rapidly growing economy, more efficient public services, greater freedom of religion, intensified EU negotiations and an enviable volume of trade with both Eastern and Western partners. Turkey was the promising new power of the region.

  In its heyday up to 2010, the AKP’s foreign policy consisted of ‘zero problems with neighbours’. Although arguably never a very realistic policy, it unravelled in the wake of the Arab Spring (along with much else in the Middle East), and most saliently through Turkey’s engagement with the Syrian uprising and the subsequent years of brutal war. Before the Arab Spring, Turkey had fairly warm relations with the Syrian government. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Erdoğan were personal friends, but that amity quickly collapsed after Erdoğan called Assad in the early days of the unrest and attempted to advise him on how to deal with the spiralling protests.

  Turkey’s geographic position, especially in relation to Syria and Iraq, means it automatically has a difficult juggling act in foreign policy. However, many of its problems are self-inflicted. It has become embroiled in the Syrian war not only by proximity but through its apparently indiscriminate support of rebels, effectively giving the Syrian war a platform in Turkish territory near the borders and arguably accelerating the rise of radical Islamic groups such as ISIL. While Turkey has been, and should be, commended for its great generosity to nearly 2 million Syrian refugees so far, the free passage granted not only to refugees but to rebel fighters across the Turkish–Syrian border, at least in the early years of the war, has worsened the inevitable problems of proximity to a warzone. Jihadist recruitment in vulnerable neighbourhoods, sleeper cells, kidnappings, hostage-taking and the risk of large-scale terrorist attack by groups like ISIL have been increased, meaning that Ankara now has its hands tied in dealings with these extremist groups. Turkey’s current position has in turn caused diplomatic problems with the West, as, for example, in the case of the siege of Kobane in September 2014, which I will discuss later, or the simple fact that the US has carried out remote airstrikes against ISIL without the cooperation – in fact, against the wishes – of a hugely important NATO ally.

  Internally, Turkey has also undergone its own series of challenges (including what the government calls an attempted ‘coup’ by followers of the America-based cleric Fetullah Gülen in late 2013). As a result, the AKP government became ever-more paranoid and suppressive when it came to public opposition in any form, so that Turkey began to look like an increasingly undemocratic place. The uncompromising attitude of the AKP government in recent years extended to its foreign policy, so that Turkey’s relationships with regional neighbours, as well as with previously solid Western allies, have become increasingly strained, very far from ‘zero problems’. The architect of that policy, Ahmet Davutoğlu, followed Erdoğan as prime minister and continued to depict Turkey as the leading light of the Middle East, in a recycled and grandiose Ottomanesque vision of regional hegemony. There are both ideological and practical problems with Turkey ‘leading’ a complex region in various states of civil war, not least Turkey’s own problems of polarisation and authoritarianism.

  How bad is the bigger picture? While Turkey’s geopolitical importance means it will always remain ‘on the map’ in terms of diplomatic and trade relations for both East and West, it has lost significant allies in the Middle East – Egypt, Israel and Syria, for example – and it is more frequently, and openly, criticised by the EU and the US for breaches of human rights, leading to a feeling of isolation on all sides. Egypt is possibly the most dramatic example of diplomatic fall-out. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey since August 2014 and before that the prime minister from 2003, was a very vocal supporter of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and an unflinching critic of Morsi’s overthrow and the consequent Sisiled regime, the result of which was that the Egyptian ambassador was expelled from Turkey in 2013. Recent relations with Israel have also been turbulent, starting with the Israeli attack on the first Mavi Marmara Gaza flotilla in 2010, which led to the death of nine Turkish activists and the departure of the Israeli ambassador from Ankara. During the 2014 summer bombardment of Gaza, Erdoğan claimed that Israel was ‘worse than Hitler’ and would drown in its own blood, triggering the departure of more Israeli embassy staff from Ankara. In early 2015, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and President Erdoğan welcomed Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to Ankara after the latter’s purported expulsion from Qatar, alarming Western powers, which regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

  Erdoğan’s promotion of himself as a regional Muslim leader has had a significant part to play in Turkey’s recent regional affairs. This self-promotion relied to a great extent on his very public condemnation of Israel, which earned him automatic respect in the Middle East from ordinary people, as well as on home ground. They appreciate him standing up for Palestinians and openly condemning Israel and America, and for his symbolic gestures of solidarity. For example, in August 2014 he appeared in the last session of parliament before the presidential elections (which, of course, he duly won) wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh. Photos of this act of solidarity with the victims of the Gaza bombardment were widely shared over the Arab world. Behind the rhetoric and photo opportunities, however, the facts on the ground don’t quite match up. Israeli–Turkish trade, for example, is at an all-time high; in 2014 there was $5.6 billion worth of trade between the two countries, an increase of nearly 50 per cent from 2009. In short, you can read the headlines and look at what is ostensibly happening with Turkey and its relationships with Middle Eastern countries, but things are never quite what they seem to be on the ground.

  In a world that is increasingly concerned with radical Islam, and looks at ‘moderate’ Islamic countries like Turkey to combat this radicalism, it is useful to examine what someone like Erdoğan has to say about this himself. In 2007 he responded to the label of ‘moderate Islam’ by saying: ‘These descriptions are very ugly, offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.’ Erdoğan’s primary argument was that acts of terrorism should not be associated with Islam, because terrorism and acts of violence are ‘incompatible with Islam’. Still, it is significant that a long-time leader of a country the West perceives as one of the most promising case studies for a moderate Islamic society roundly rejects the concept itself.

  So, Erdoğan has been a problematic Muslim leader and Turkey has lost important friends in the Middle East, in which case wh
ere is there potential for optimism? In a general election on 7 June 2015, days before this book went to print, the AKP lost their majority in parliament for the first time since 2002. This unexpected result came thanks to the performance of the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a party with Kurdish roots that managed to win 13 per cent of the vote by appealing to the wider Turkish electorate with a pluralistic manifesto promising decentralisation of power and greater rights for minorities, an attractive alternative to the AKP’s polarising rhetoric and the static mainstream opposition. However, the result concerned many Turks who associate the party with the PKK, the separatist Kurdish militia based in the south-east of Turkey which carried out a slew of attacks in the 1990s, and on whose behalf the HDP negotiated with the AKP for a peace settlement. At this point, it is unclear what the future of the Turkish government will be after this dramatic shake-up of a thirteen-year-old hegemony, but I sincerely hope that an empowered opposition will benefit the country, especially with regards to the Kurdish issue. Already, greater regional pressure was pushing the AKP government in the direction of compromise, despite its stalled domestic peace settlement, when it was forced to cooperate with President Barzani of Iraqi Kurdistan in the fight against ISIL. Despite obvious difficulties, one of the most positive things I can imagine emerging from the mess in the Middle East at the moment is a friendship of necessity – a sort of marriage of convenience – between Kurdistan and Turkey. Kurdistan’s forces have been at the forefront of the fight against ISIL, most famously helping to liberate the town of Kobane, near the Turkish-Syrian border, in early 2015, and taking oil-rich territories in Iraq. The Kurds of northern Iraq, and now of Syria, are becoming emboldened, and we can understand why. We can also see how the Turkish government might be forced to take them more seriously, especially with the HDP now holding eighty seats in the Turkish parliament.