Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has blown new life
into Turkey’s vision of a Turkic world that stretches from Anatolia to Xinjiang
in northwestern China.
اضافة اعلان
“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, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like his Chinese and Russian counterparts, made
no concerted effort to end the border clashes even though he was a mere 320km
away from the battlefield when he attended the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization 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, Erdogan
called on Russia to “return” Crimea to its “rightful owners”. Russia annexed
the peninsula in 2014.
Referring to the
Crimean Tatars, 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 are
helping Russians fleeing to Turkey to avoid military service after a
Putin-announced mobilization. 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 Putin
supporters.
Bini Sultan
Khamzayev, a member of the Russian parliament, charged that those protesting
Putin’s mobilization 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.
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.
Blaming Turkey for
anti-mobilization and anti-Putin sentiment in the Caucasus is more than
convenient scapegoating. Unrest in the region goes to 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 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 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 Erdogan and 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
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.
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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