When a Russian-led military force intervened earlier this
month, it did more than help Kazakh President Qasym-Johart Toqayev restore and
strengthen his grip on power following days of protest and violent clashes with
security forces.
اضافة اعلان
The intervention brought to the fore a brewing competition
for spheres of influence in Eurasia between perceived Russian and Turkish
worlds whose boundaries are defined by civilization and/or language rather than
a nation state’s internationally recognized borders.
It is a competition that also impacts China, whose troubled
Turkic north-western province of Xinjiang borders Kazakhstan.
Although not incorporated in the Turkey-led Organization of
Turkic States (OTS), the group, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, recently signaled its affinity to China’s Turkic
Muslims.
China’s brutal crackdown on religious and ethnic expressions
of Uighur identity has sparked public dissent in Kazakhstan and Turkey and
forced the two governments to perform a delicate balancing act to not always
successfully avoid the People’s Republic’s wrath.
Countering perceptions that the Russian-led intervention in
Kazakhstan boosted Moscow’s security primacy in Central Asia and weakened
Turkish aspirations, widely respected Russia scholar Dmitri Trenin suggested
that salvaging Mr. Toqayev was the best of President Vladimir Putin’s bad
options.
“In order to preserve stable relations with an important
ally, partner, and neighbor, official Russia has often turned a blind eye to
the rise of ethnic Kazakh nationalism and reports of de facto discrimination
against ethnic Russians in the country. Toqayev is by no means Moscow’s client,
yet allowing him… to be toppled would, in Moscow’s thinking, allow the forces
of ultra-nationalism to come to the fore,” Trenin said.
Kazakhstan and other Central Asian nations, seeking to
balance their relationships with Moscow and Beijing in the wake of the United
States’ abandonment of the region with the withdrawal of US forces from
Afghanistan, see Ankara as a potential hedge.
Led by authoritarians who fear anti-government protests at
home, Russia and Turkey had a common interest in beating back a popular revolt
in Kazakhstan. As a result, standing aside as Russia stepped in may have best
served Turkey’s interests.
Despite its close military ties with Kazakhstan, a Turkish
intervention may have upset the delicate management of the Turkey-Russian
relationship. The relationship is fraught with disputes in which the two
countries are often on opposite sides of the divide.
While Turkish support for Toqayev may not have gone down
well with Kazakh protesters, it is not likely to have put much of a dent in
Turkish soft power in Central Asia that is built on linguistic and ethnic
affinity, the popularity of Turkish music and cinematic productions, and
investment in glitzy shopping malls.
Turkey also benefits from being a player that has
successfully challenged Russia in regional conflicts such as the Caucasus,
where it backed Azerbaijan in its 2020 war with Armenia, and further afar in
Libya and Syria.
In a rivalry for dominance of the Black Sea, Turkey has also
backed Ukraine and forged close defense ties with the embattled country. Home
to a large Crimean Tatar diaspora, Turkey has vocally supported the Turkic
community on the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
Finally, Turkey has at times, albeit intermittently, taken
China to task for its brutal crackdown on ethnic and religious expression of
Turkic Muslim identity in Xinjiang. China sees the projection of an Uyghur
ethnic, cultural, and religious identity as a mortal threat.
Turkish assertiveness seemingly emboldened Central Asian
members of the Organization of Turkic States, the formal Turkic equivalent of
Putin’s notion of a Russian World that defines its frontiers defined by the
geography of Russian speakers and adherents to Russian culture rather than
international law.
Central Asian members of the organization, a brainchild of
the now embattled former president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, joined
Turkey at its recent summit in November in Istanbul in sending subtle and less
subtle signals to both Russia and China as well as Iran, countries with
Turkic-speaking minorities.
By deciding to restrict association with the organization to
Turkic-speaking countries, the group hopes to keep Russia, China, and Iran at
bay despite their being home to Turkic-speaking minorities.
Moreover, the Central Asians took no exception when Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s far-right nationalist ally, Devlet Bahlevi,
released a picture on Facebook at the time of the summit of him gifting the
Turkish leader a map of the Turkic world that included chunks of Russia. The
picture capped a year of the trumpeting of irredentist claims to Russian
territory by nationalist Turkish media close to Erdogan.
Similarly, the Central Asians participated in the summit
even though it opened on November 12, a politically sensitive date for China.
Uighurs in Xinjiang twice declared their short-lived independence on November
12, first in 1993 and again in 1944.
Three weeks before the summit, Turkey joined 42 other,
mostly Western countries, in a United Nations statement that condemned the
Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang.
Raising the stakes further, 19 Uighur exiles filed a
criminal complaint with a Turkish prosecutor against Chinese officials,
accusing them of committing genocide, torture, rape, and crimes against
humanity.
Turkey is home to some 50,000 Uighurs, the largest community
outside of China. Long a supporter of Uighur religious and cultural
aspirations, Turkey has been careful not to allow the groups’ plight to rupture
its relations with Beijing.
At the same time, it has not followed the example of the
foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, as well as the
secretary-general of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GGC), who on a
visit to China this week reportedly expressed support for Chinese policy in
Xinjiang.
Responding in October to assertions by China’s deputy
ambassador to the United Nations, Geng Shuang, that Turkey had illegally
invaded north-eastern Syria and was depriving Kurds of water, Turkish
representative Feridun Sinirlioglu thundered that his country would not be
lectured by “those who violate international human rights law and international
humanitarian law”.
It was a war of words in which the kettle was calling the
pot black. It is not human rights, violated with abandon by all the region’s
players, that are at stake. What is at stake is an international order based on
legally defined nation-states that civilizational leaders like Putin and
Erdogan seek to rejigger with the law of the jungle that allows them to shift
state boundaries at will in geopolitical jockeying.
The writer is an award-winning journalist and scholar and a
senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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