The Turko-file

Despite the recent bleak assessments made by certain analysts, Turkey and Israel -- with intense American help -- have managed to pull off an early spring surprise and set in motion a process to restore their currently frayed relations and end a three-year drama that ultimately served nobody's interests.

Earlier today, towards the end of American President Barack Obama's three-day visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telephoned his Turkish counterpart and issued an apology for the deaths that took place due to "operational mistakes" when Israeli forces raid the Turkish Mavi Marmara Gaza aid ship some three years ago. In joint statements released by the two prime ministers' offices, the two countries said they are working out on an agreement for compensation/non-liability and will work together on improving the humanitarian situation in the "Palestinian territories." With this formula, it would appear that Israel has satisfied Turkey's demands for normalizing their relations.

He may be the sole inmate of an island prison in the Sea of Marmara, but Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), still knows how to command the headlines. Thursday, as Kurds celebrated the spring holiday of nevruz -- in years past an occasion for often violent protests -- Ocalan made what could turn out to be a game-changing call for the fighters of the PKK to cease fire and withdraw from Turkish soil.

From Reuters report on yesterday's events:

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, gathered in the regional center of Diyarbakir, cheered and waved banners bearing Ocalan's mustachioed image when a letter from the rebel leader, held since 1999 on a prison island in the Marmara Sea, was read out by a pro-Kurdish politician.

"Let guns be silenced and politics dominate," he said to a sea of red-yellow-green Kurdish flags. "The stage has been reached where our armed forces should withdraw beyond the borders ... It's not the end. It's the start of a new era."

Ocalan's call for a ceasefire, which had been expected for some weeks now, gives a major boost to the ongoing "peace talks" between Turkey and the Kurds and represents a major turnaround in how both sides had been dealing with each other. Up until a few years ago, it was common for Turkish courts to charge Kurdish politicians with the crime of referring to the jailed PKK leader as "the honorable Mr Ocalan." On the other hand, until fairly recently, many Kurdish leaders in Turkey had written off the government led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), considering it and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as having been cut from the same Kurdish-identity denying nationalist cloth as previous Turkish governments.

By now, it's become fairly commonplace to hear Turkey's once-vaunted "zero problems with neighbors" foreign policy spoken about in the past tense. The last two years have certainly not been kind to this policy, which had tried to break past some historical dynamics that had characterized Turkey's relations with certain neighboring countries for decades, if not centuries. While some of the "zero problems" policy's failure can be chalked up to mistakes -- both conceptual and practical -- made Turkish policymakers and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the changes brought about by the Arab uprising and the forces they unleashed, also helped undermine many of the assumptions that Ankara was -- rightly or wrongly -- working under.

In a new analysis, Ian Lesser, an astute observer of Turkish affairs with the German Marshal Fund, takes a look at some of these changes, suggesting that Ankara may be entering a period where it has to now fight several new "cold wars." From Lesser's article:

Over the past decade, Turkey’s foreign policy has been directed toward breaking this pattern of crisis-prone relations, with some real success in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East. The end of largescale competition in Eurasia, alongside Turkey’s economic dynamism and expanding regional commerce, created the conditions for a “zero-problems” approach to the neighborhood. This was a posture admirably suited to its times. But these favorable conditions are disappearing rapidly, and Ankara faces some troubling cold wars, new and old, that will shape the strategic environment and the nature of Turkey’s security partnerships.

Last week's visit to Turkey by Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras certainly hit all the right positive notes. Dozens of bilateral agreements were signed by the two countries and Samaras and his Turkish counterpart both vowed to increase trade between Turkey and Greece and to work together to solve the Cyprus problem.

The two once-bickering neighbors have certainly come a long way from decades past, when a visit like Samaras's to Turkey -- now something fairly routine -- would have been hailed as a major breakthrough. That said, it appears that some trouble might be in store for Turkey-Greece relations, particularly regarding the issue of Athens' desire to lay claim to a vast amount of potentially oil- and gas-rich maritime territory in the eastern Mediterranean. From a recent Wall Street Journal report that came out only days after Samaras left Turkey:

Greece has renewed its territorial claims over a broad swath of disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean where the indebted country hopes to find vast oil and gas deposits—a plan that risks sparking a confrontation with Turkey.

Over the past several weeks, senior government officials have made a series of public statements—both at home and abroad—pointing to an almost two-decade-old international treaty granting those rights, one Greece hasn't asserted until now. Athens also has been building support in other European capitals and stepping up a diplomatic campaign at the United Nations….

Seeing as its International Women's Day today, Hurriyet Daily News economics columnist Emre Deliveli uses the occasion to remind readers that the labor force participation (LFP) rate for women in Turkey is a woeful 29.5 percent (the average among countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which Turkey is a member of, is 61 percent).

Improving the visibility and participation of women in the workplace has certainly been one of the areas where the current Turkish government has failed to take any strong action. The most recent World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, for example, finds Turkey ranked 124 out of 135 countries. Beyond the low LFP rate for women, Turkey also has extremely low numbers of women in senior and managerial positions in government and academia.

Still, despite the discouraging numbers, things may be changing. From a recent article by Guven Sak, executive director of the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey:

Embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad probably gets very few visitors these days, and rightly so. Still, it appears Assad can count on the friendship of the Republican People's Party (CHP), Turkey's main opposition party, which recently sent a high-level delegation to visit the Syrian autocrat in Damascus. Reports the Hurriyet Daily News:

A parliamentary delegation from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad early yesterday. The three-member group, which consisted of deputy leader Şafak Pavey and deputies from the neighboring Hatay province, Hasan Akgöl and Mevlut Dudu, was in Syria following an invitation from al-Assad, according to CHP sources.

Al-Assad told the team there was “a need to distinguish between the stance of the Turkish people, who back stability in Syria, and the positions of Premier Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, which supports terrorism.

“The Syrian people appreciates the position adopted by forces and parties in Turkey that reject the Erdoğan government’s negative impact on our societies, which are multi-religious and multi-ethnic,” al-Assad added.

As noted in a recent previous post on this blog, despite their interests converging with regards to several significant issues, Turkey and the United States might not quite be in the "golden age" of relations that some folks -- in Ankara, in particular -- have claimed the two allies to be in.

Newly installed Secretary of State John Kerry's current visit to Turkey offers a good indication of the current delicate state of affairs between Ankara and Washington. The fact that Turkey is one of the first countries Kerry is visiting on his maiden voyage abroad as Secretary of State confirms that Ankara remains a crucial ally to the US. But, as Murat Yetkin points out in a column in today's Hurriyet Daily News, Kerry arrives in Turkey bearing a "heavy agenda," with critical and potentially volatile issues relating to Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey-Israel relations where Ankara and Washington are not on the same page.

In a column that appeared the other day on the website of The Hill, Bulent Aras -- a Turkish academic who now directs the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affair's in-house think tank -- and Emirhan Yorulmazlar, a Washington-based analyst, describe the current state of affairs in Turkey-US relations this way:

As the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Turkey's southeast region appears to be rich with water resources. But a new study indicates that the reality might be quite different. From a release about the study, issued by NASA and the University of California, Irvine:

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

The findings, to be published Friday, Feb. 15, in the journal Water Resources Research, are the result of one of the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region. Because obtaining ground-based data in the area is difficult, satellite data, such as those from NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, are essential. GRACE is providing a global picture of water storage trends and is invaluable when hydrologic observations are not routinely collected or shared beyond political boundaries.

One of the more impressive success stories of the last decade has been the growth of the Turkish Cooperation and
Coordination Agency (TIKA), Turkey's foreign aid agency. From being a country that frequently received international assistance, Turkey has gone on to become a quite interesting and dynamic player in the foreign aid field. As academic Saban Kardas points out in a very interesting report for the German Marshall Fund, TIKA's development assistance funds shot up 27 fold over the last decade, today standing at some $2.3 billion, with Turkey now playing a leading development role in a number of countries, particularly in Afghanistan and Somalia.

More interesting, as Kardas writes, is the mix of humanitarian and foreign policy goals that lie behind Turkey's growing foreign aid program. From his analysis:

While in some cases, Turkey’s assistance is motivated by
purely global humanitarian considerations and takes the
form of technical assistance or development credits, in other
cases, Turkey supports cultural projects and works toward the
goal of reconnecting with the countries with which it shares
a common, cultural, and historic heritage. The emphasis
that Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu places on Turkey’s
historic responsibility towards civilizational kin has provided
added impetus for channeling aid to specific regions.

In addition to carrying out technical assistance projects
that are intended to bolster ties with the countries in
the Ottoman-Turkish cultural zone by contributing to
their economic and political development, some projects
supported by Turkey focused on the discovery or restoration
of historic artifacts or monuments in a geography
stretching from Mongolia to the Balkans. Similarly, Turkey

This has not been a great week for Francis Ricciardone, the American ambassador in Turkey. Last Friday his embassy was attacked by a leftist suicide bomber, resulting in the death of a Turkish guard. The event should have brought Turkey and the United States closer, but only a few days after the attack, Ricciardone found himself being harshly criticized by government officials and summoned to the foreign ministry after he delivered comments questioning the fairness of Turkey's judicial system and the country's record on freedom of expression.

But the dustup over the ambassador's remarks is actually only one of several issues that are now threatening what is supposed to be yet another "golden age" in Turkey-US relations. While a few years ago the two countries didn't see eye-to-eye on a host of problems, particularly regarding Iran's nuclear program and Turkey's deteriorating relations with Israel, cooperation on dealing with the crisis in Syria, Ankara's distancing itself from Iran and an American push to forge a strong personal relationship between President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have all helped bring Turkey-US ties to a renewed high point.