The geopolitical minefields of a Turkic world
By James M. Dorsey
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“Central Asia now resembles the 1990s when there
was a huge competition between global and regional powers for influence over
the resource-rich region. The shadow of Russia on the region, coupled with the
desire of the Central Asian states to counterbalance Russia and China, has helped further foster relations between Turkey and the Central Asian
states on politics and defense,” said Eurasia scholar Isik
Kuscu Bonnenfant.
Opportunity for Turkey may be beckoning, but geopolitical
minefields pockmark it.
For starters, Turkey's successful development of
a battle-proven killer drone makes it a party to conflicts in Central Asia and
a de facto participant in wars in the Caucasus, where Turkey is interested in
good relations with Azerbaijan but also its arch-enemy Armenia.
Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine’s use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 combat drones in the Central Asian
state’s border clashes with Tajikistan, and Ukraine’s war
against Russia has sparked controversy.
Even before the latest clashes, Kyrgyzstan
unsuccessfully sought to delay, if not block, the sale of Turkish drones to
Tajikistan.
In April, Kyrgyz foreign minister Jeenbek
Kulubaev told parliament that Turkey had responded to the Kyrgyz request by
saying "that it was business.” Even so, Turkey and Tajikistan have
yet to ink a deal.
Remarkably, Mr. Erdogan, like his Chinese and
Russian counterparts, made no concerted effort to end the border clashes even
though he was mere 320 kilometres away from the battlefield when he attended
the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in September.
The clashes were the most serious Central Asian
military conflict since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine is an even larger minefield for Turkey
not only because of the sale of drones but also given plans to build a Turkish drone manufacturing facility in the war-torn country and Turkish links to ethnic Turks in Crimea.
In August, Mr. Erdogan called on Russia to "return" Crimea to its
"rightful owners." Russia annexed the
peninsula in 2014.
Referring to the Crimean Tatars, Mr.
Erdogan told Russian President Vladimir Putin: "These are our
descendants at the same time, the people who are living there. If you were to
take this step forward, if you could leave us, you would also be relieving the
Crimean Tatars and Ukraine as well."
Complicating affairs, a coalition of tens of Caucasian civil society groups in Turkey is
helping Russians fleeing to Turkey to avoid military
service after Mr. Putin announced a mobilisation. Turkey is home to 4 million
Turkish nationals whose roots are in the Caucasus.
In past times, the Caucasian community supported
refugees from Russian interventions in the Georgian regions of South Ossetia,
Abkhazia, and in Chechnya, as well as Circassians fleeing the war in Syria
after the eruption of civil strife in 2011.
The support for Russians refusing to fight in
Ukraine came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to Russia’s ethnic peoples to resist the Kremlin’s military call-up.
The support, against the backdrop of anti-war
protests in the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Dagestan in the northern Caucasus, has not gone unnoticed by supporters of Mr.
Putin.
Bini Sultan Khamzayev, a member of the Russian
parliament, charged that those protesting Mr. Putin’s mobilisation were ethnic
Turkish Kumyuks whom he accused of waging a Turkish-directed jihad against Russia since the time of Tsar Peter the Great. Kumyuks are the largest
ethnic Turkish group in the northern Caucasus.
Blaming Turkey for anti-mobilisation and
anti-Putin sentiment in the Caucasus is more than convenient scapegoating.
Unrest in the region goes to Mr. Putin's perception of the Caucasus as Russia's
soft underbelly.
Preventing the Islamist sentiment that flourished
in the Syrian civil war from spreading to Muslim regions of Russia was one
reason why Mr. Putin intervened militarily in Syria to ensure the survival of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Were the Kremlin’s regime to wobble because of
factors stemming from the Ukraine war, Russia…could become a low-calorie version of the former Yugoslavia, unable to control its historic territories in the Caucasus, Siberia,
and East Asia,” said geopolitical strategist Robert D. Kaplan.
Beyond the plight of Crimean Tartars and ethnic
Caucasian support for anti-Ukraine war sentiment, Uighur exiles are another
Turkic group that complicates Turkey’s vision of a Turkic world.
The exiles have become increasingly vocal in
their outcry against China’s brutal repression of the Turkic minority in
Xinjiang.
Uighur activity is a particularly sensitive issue
for Turkey and China because of long-standing Turkish support for their ethnic
cousins and the fact that Turkey is home to the world's largest Uighur exile
community. China does not take kindly to any foreign criticism.
More recently, Turkey has sought to silence Uighur protests amid reports of a relaxation of the crackdown in Xinjiang.
Turkey scored diplomatic brownie points this week
by arranging an informal tripartite meeting between Mr. Erdogan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Armenian
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on the sidelines of a European summit in Prague.
It was the first-ever meeting between Mr. Erdogan
and Mr. Pashinyan. Turkey, which supported Azerbaijan in the 2020 Caucasus war
against Armenia and renewed clashes in September, has not had diplomatic or
commercial ties with Armenia since the 1990s.
The two countries, despite differences over the
deaths of 1.5 million people Armenia says were killed in 1915 by the Ottoman
Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, have been seeking to reestablish ties
since early this year.
Even so, Turkey has to tread carefully in its
rapprochement with Armenia to ensure that its diplomacy remains synced with
Azerbaijan, its foremost ally in the Caucasus.
Turkey’s positioning of itself as the protector
of Turkic and Muslim interests may not be enough to match Chinese progress on
the ground in Central Asia, even if it stands to benefit from the scramble to operationalize an alternative trans-Eurasian transport
corridor from China to Europe that would circumvent
Russia by traversing independent former Soviet republics.
“Turkey has not had the kind of economic
firepower to push into the region in the same way as China,” said scholar
Raffaelo Pantucci in a recent webinar, despite conducting brisk trade with
Central Asian nations.
Turkey hopes its emphasis on cultural links will
compensate for its economic weakness.
Last week, Turkey became the first non-Central
Asian country to host the World Nomadic Games, a competition dedicated to Turkic
ethnic sports. The games were opened by Mr. Erdogan, whose son, Bilal, heads
the World Ethnosports Confederation.
“Hosting sports organizations of this scale is a
crucial aspect of soft power… It focuses on intangible heritage worth saving,”
said sports economist Sabahattin Devecioglu.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an
award-winning journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang
Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and
the author of the syndicated column and blog, The
Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
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