AS the ‘Arab Spring’ is replaced by other, gloomier seasons, profiles of nations outside the hard core Arab arena swim into our ken – Turkey, for instance.

Indian independence coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. India became a leader of the non-aligned movement which dictated a sort of indifference to Turkey which had become a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In other words, it stood in opposition to Soviet Russia with which India was developing a special friendship. Iran and Pakistan also joined the western bloc, facilitating what came to be known as the Teheran, Islamabad, Ankara axis, not without a tinge of hostility towards India, as towards other non-aligned nations. In 1978, Afghan communist parties came to power in Kabul paving the way for Soviet occupation. This traumatic event further enhanced Islamabad’s role in the anti-Soviet jehad.

A year later, the Ayatullahs replaced the Shah in Teheran. At the outset, it was a most peaceful transition. Ayatullah Khomeini, in exile on the outskirts of Paris, was flown into Teheran even as the Shah was flown out. But contrary to whatever game plans the West may have had, the Ayatullahs entrenched themselves and, according to western allegations, are now well and truly on the nuclear path. To stall this eventuality, war clouds are hovering over the straits of Hormuz.

Ankara, meanwhile, has been a steadfast member of NATO, an American camp follower and, until the other day, an enthusiastic candidate for entry into Europe. According to a distinguished Turkish journalist, Mehmet Birand, we were ‘a docile ally of the West,’ without much interest in the Middle East or other areas of foreign policy. ‘But today we are a dissident country in the western alliance.’

For decades, the secularism bes-towed by Ataturk was non-negotiable, and the army was its principal protector. But the hard ground on which the army’s secularism stood began to soften somewhat in the aftermath of the Bosnian war which lasted from 1992 to 1995.

Bosnia-Herzegovina resonates in the Turkish psyche because it was once a key part of the Ottoman empire. Sarajevo derives from the Turkish word sarai or a halting place. The televised four year long siege of Sarajevo deeply affected the Turkish population, stoked anti-westernism and helped bring the Islamist Refah party to power in Ankara.

 

This Islamist streak was totally against the secular grain of the army. It was no surprise, therefore, that Necmettin Erbakan was dethroned from prime ministership. A determined Refah reinvented itself as a toned down conservative party, but without abandoning its Islamist rhetoric. Under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, the new Justice and Development party (AK party) steadily consolidated its hold.

Are we witnessing the winds of change in favour of Islamism in the land of Ataturk? The secularism imposed by Ataturk, which sought to totally banish religion from public spaces, was always somewhat of an artificial imposition. It began to fray when the post 9/11 war on terror began to hurt first the image and subsequently the psyche of Muslims. In this frame of mind, the West’s let-down on Cyprus, the blocking of Turkey’s entry into Europe, the televised attack on Iraq, the two intefadas, and the Bosnian war, cumulatively helped boost the Justice and Development or AK party.

The result has been historic. By universal consent, Erdogan has emerged as the most charismatic Turkish leader since Ataturk. In fact, his grip on the countryside is much firmer than any Turkish leader ever.

As a general rule, incumbency may be a handicap in electoral politics. But Erdogan has made that dictum stand on its head. He has won three elections on a trot with 36, 42 and 50 per cent votes. But who will step into his shoes after 2012, since he cannot serve for more than three terms? In all probability it will be the current President, Abdullah Gul, as there is considerable harmony between the two.

 

The supreme dominance of the Justice and Development party has placed the army on a civilian leash. Further, the AK party’s capacity for autonomous action may not be to the liking of the US. In 2003, Erdogan cited public opinion as the reason for stopping US troops from marching through Turkey on their Iraq expedition. This step, an affront to the Turkish Army, boosted the party’s popularity among the people in the context of escalating anti-Americanism in Muslim societies. Over 90 per cent Turks opposed the US led war against Iraq.

While a series of events strained US-Turkey ties, an expedition in the Balkans worked as a balm on their relations. This was the 78 day bombing of Serbia to contain Slobodan Milosevic’s excesses, both in Bosnia as well as Kosovo. In fact, the emergence of a new Muslim state, Kosovo, is widely seen as a US-Turkey cooperative venture which is an affront to the pan-Slavic sentiment binding Russia and Serbia, from which Kosovo was carved.

Indeed, it was in part to offset the loss of Kosovo that the Russians separated Abkhazia and Ossetia from Georgia. The ding-dong continues to this day. Thousands of Serbs in Kosovo sought Russian citizenship last month!

Turkey’s strategic location has bestowed on it a nimble foreign policy. President Abdullah Gul recounts the following story with great relish. A group of European Foreign Ministers asked him for a brief sketch of Turkish foreign policy. ‘I dwelt on Cyprus, the Aegean Sea, Russia, Iran, Black Sea, Balkans, Caspian, Europe, Iraq, Syria, Mediterranean, Greece…’ One of the Foreign Ministers spontaneously exclaimed: ‘Are you sure you are not talking about the US’s foreign involvements.’

Ataturk’s Turkey, under the army’s supervision, was a western camp follower, without its own convictions. Thus Turkey had little influence in foreign affairs because nations could pressure Washington or Europe to influence Ankara.

 

Yet, even in those days there were red lines which the army and the state had drawn and which could not be violated. Turkish nationalism could not be bruised. One such occasion was the Greek Cypriot plot for union with Greece, or Enosis, which resulted in civil war on the island warranting the landing of Turkish troops in Cyprus to protect the Turkish population. Bulent Ecevit, the last of the Kemalist prime ministers, took the step in 1974. The island remains divided to this day.

A similar red line is an issue concerning the Kurds in South East Turkey linking up with Iraqi Kurdistan. In fact, the Kurds, spread over the territories of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran are a pressure point on each one of these states – 18 million Kurds in Turkey and eight, seven and two million in Iran, Iraq and Syria respectively. Recently, when Turkey tried to implement a new policy on Syria, turning away from President Bashar al Assad, there was a sudden eruption of violence in the South East Kurdish areas. Analysts suspected a Syrian hand, but there are so many nationalities clustered around the same region that it is not easy to pinpoint the perpetrators of the mischief.

 

In the early stages of the Arab Spring, neither Syria nor Turkey were a principal focus. On 17 December 2010, Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian pavement salesman ignited regional change by setting himself alight for having been insulted by an Tunisian policewoman. Mass protests in Tunis and Tahrir Square, Cairo, were unexpected. But when President Zain el Abedin bin Ali and later, President Hosni Mobarak fell, the world sat up and took notice.

‘What these events teach us is humility,’ Dan Merridor, Israel’s Minister for Intelligence told me in his Jerusalem office. This was an extraordinarily admission by one of the most powerful ministers in the Israel cabinet. The implication of what he said was straightforward: a national security state like Israel, with total reliance on its intelligence agencies, had no clue that Mobarak would fall. Israel had no idea the Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas were reaching a rapprochement. The most surprising aspect was that while earlier any political move in Cairo was analyzed by intelligence agencies in Jerusalem before it was processed in Cairo, this was no longer the case.

This slippage in Cairo-Jerusalem coordination was seen to be a precursor of what was to follow: the Israelis had nightmares that the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty of 1978 might unravel. So far, no threat to the treaty exists but the completion of the election process in Egypt, will reveal more.

The momentum the Arab Spring had acquired was abruptly halted when King Abdullah, who had been convalescing in Europe, returned to Riyadh in February 2011. He thought the Americans had much too easily thrown in the towel in Tunis as well as in Cairo. The expendability of bin Ali and Mobarak also sent the wrong signals.

Ruling on behalf of the ailing King Abdullah, the hard line Saudi Crown Prince, Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, began to reverse the trends that the Americans had acquiesced in. So strong was the Saudi resolve to ‘take charge’ that they did not hesitate riding roughshod, even in the face of American opposition.

 

In Bahrain, for instance, the Saudis scuttled a peace process which had been negotiated by one of America’s ace Arabists, Jeffrey Feltman. A reasonable power-sharing agreement had been worked out between the moderate leader of the Shia majority, Sheikh Ali Salman and the Bahrain crown prince. But the king’s brother (the crown prince’s uncle), the all powerful prime minister, consulted Prince Nayef and within 24 hours, Saudi and GCC armoured personal carriers rolled across the 37 kilometre causeway from Saudi Arabia to Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

This was the most unreasonable of all outcomes. After all, just as demonstrators had appeared on most Arab streets in imitation of Tahrir Square, so had Bahrain’s youth (initially there were some Sunnis also in the crowd) turned up at the city’s Pearl Square in a demonstration so peaceful that even Mahatma Gandhi’s photograph was noticeable among the placards. But the Saudis rammed in a military solution.

Two developments have taken place simultaneously. An extremely hard line Crown Prince Nayef, a great favourite of the kingdom’s all-powerful Wahabi clergy, has come on top in the post-Abdullah succession stakes. Second, to the Saudis the Shia arc appears to be closing in on a restive Shia dominated eastern province – Dammam, Dahrain, Qatif – where most of the country’s oil is located. Only a causeway separates this region from Bahrain, where 70 per cent of the population is Shia. This is not far from Kuwait where 25 per cent of the population is Shia, and not very different from the 65 per cent Shia in contiguous Iraq which has an extensive border with Iran.

The arrival of the Ayatullahs in Teheran in 1979 did ring alarm bells for the region, but it was the emergence of Shia rule in Iraq that actually generated the sort of Shia phobia which has held the Saudi regime in its grip. What has aggravated this phobia is the global drum-beating about Iran taking the nuclear route to becoming a regional hegemon.

In addition to the Shia arc is an equally disturbing Shia-type arc which includes the Zaidis and the Huthis in Yemen, and the Alawis in Syria.

 

Until about June 2011, there was no focus on Syria or Turkey in the context of the Arab Spring. The Israelis were quite straightforward: the border with Syria has been the most peaceful in decades. Consequently, there seemed to be no need to open up a new front. However, different strategic concerns swiftly entered the discourse and a Syria, which seemed so insulated from the currents of change across West Asia has, in the space of months, been projected as a society riven with sectarian conflict.

Turki al Faisal, former Saudi Ambassador to the US, wrote in the New York Times some months ago that unless the US throws its weight behind an early two state solution for Palestine, ‘pariah states like Syria and Iran would gain.’ The use of abusive terms for Syria and Iran was a virtual declaration of war. In the context of the extraordinary warmth in relations between Washington, Jerusalem and Riyadh, the concerted attack on Damascus is easy to understand. The idea is to remove Syria from the Iran, Syria, Hezbullah, Hamas axis. Once Syria is removed, the chain breaks.

The blandishment for Turkey is that its moderate Sunni constituency would be much more in harmony with the Muslim Brotherhood tendencies among Syria’s majority Sunni community. Also, all too easily, young think-tanks begin to imagine a grouping on the line of the Commonwealth. ‘If Britain can have a Commonwealth, why can’t nations with a common experience under the Ottoman Empire seek a grouping?’

 

The earlier rapport between Kemalist and Ba’ath secularism, one being a mirror image of the other, has in recent months been replaced by shades of Islamism on both sides of the border. During his meetings with Bashar al Assad, Turkish Premier Erdogan repeated the advice: Assad must accommodate the Muslim Brotherhood to defuse tensions in Syria. Any accommodation with the Brotherhood would create that much more space for Turkey in the West Asian theatre. This, in turn, would accord Turkey a regional role a few notches above the one accorded to Iran.

But Erdogan has been such a deft political player that he is cautious about entering the West Asian theatre without a strong hand which would give him traction in the Arab street. Erdogan knows that the popularity of both President Mahmud Ahmedinejad and Hezbullah strongman, Hassan Nasrallah on the Arab street is on account of their rejection of US and Israeli policies (or lack of them) on the Palestinian issue.

To be unpopular with the US and Israel on the issue of Palestine is a badge of honour among the Arab populations. This Erdogan knows all too well. In fact, his public spat with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos in 2009, only boosted his popularity among Arabs. Later, a row over Israel’s refusal to apologize for a deadly raid on an aid ship which killed nine Turkish volunteers, further soured Ankara-Jerusalem relations.

Asked to exert influence on Teheran to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, Erdogan has maintained that the only way to dissuade Teheran from its alleged nuclear path is to bring Israeli’s nuclear arsenal onto the negotiating table as well. While this is anathema to Jerusalem and Washington, the demand for Israeli-Iranian nuclear parity has further advanced Erdogan’s popularity among Arabs by leaps and bounds.

Despite Washington’s concerted effort to have Assad vacate the gaddi in Damascus, the regime does not appear to be on it last legs. This needs some explanation.

 

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Great Red Army primarily turned out to be a Russian army. When Yugoslavia disintegrated, the Yugoslav Army was without any dilution a Serbian Army. Something similar applies to Syria, where the 70 per cent Sunni population holds most of the land. Alawis, more like Shias, being a poorer minority of about 20 per cent, traditionally gravitated towards the army. In other words, the Syrian Army is primarily an Alawi Army.

It turns out that Assad is an Alawi. This means that the Assad clan – his brother controls the army – sits at the top of the power structure of which the Alawi Army forms the tough, highest echelon. This power structure is superimposed upon a several million strong Ba’ath Party, trade unions and so on. In the case of Iraq, the US smashed the entire structure, Saddam downwards. In Syria, the entire structure remains intact.

Yes, there has always been a Muslim Brotherhood deviation in some parts of Syria like Hama in the middle of the country. The 1982 Salafi uprising in Hama was a consequence of exaggerated fears of Shia expansion after the 1979 emergence of the Ayatullahs in Teheran. Haffez al Assad’s brutal crackdown left at least 20,000 dead.

 

These incipient Brotherhood cells have developed connections with neighbours in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. A distinguished Sunni family from Aleppo on the Turkish border told the author they were witness to arms being supplied by sanctuaries in Turkey. Darra has similar stories of external help being given to the insurgency from Jordan. I was in Jordan when Salafists brandishing knives held a demonstration on the outskirts of Amman demanding Shariah law!

All these groups can bank on assistance from the Obama administration which, according to the New York Times’s James Glanz and John Markoff, is leading a global effort to deploy ‘shadow’ internet and mobile phone systems that ‘dissidents can use to undermine progressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.’ The irony is that these assets supplied by the US are supposed to be at the disposal of the Brotherhood, which scares the West-inclined secularists. This is an enigma inside a riddle.

The purpose of this technological largesse could well be to create just enough chaos which could be managed in the event of an impending showdown with Iran, which has scored a huge propaganda victory over the US by bringing down an American stealth aircraft as it flew over the Iranian city of Kashmar.

How tense the situation remains can be gauged from Iran’s Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh’s declaration that Teheran will target the NATO missile shield in Turkey if Iran is attacked by Israel or the US.

A possible assurance that there may be no war is that threats and counter threats have been exchanged for well over a year. Threats are not necessarily precursors to wars. And yet, every student of warfare knows that continuous brinkmanship lends itself to miscalculation and accident.

Soon after the so called Arab Spring erupted in Tunis in December 2010, it divided itself into three theatres: from Morocco to Egypt, the North African theatre having a European, Mediterranean face and considerable African depth. Then, NATO and its cohorts made a tragedy out of Qaddafi. Libya is still living through an almighty internal power struggle. The tragedy lingers.

The third theatre is the one the Saudis took firm charge of – its own Shia dominated eastern province, Bahrain, Yemen and Kuwait, while keeping a steady gaze on Shia dominated Iraq. All these regions have a large Shia population, a fact which gives the Saudis nightmares.

The fourth necklace is the Iran, Syria, Hezbullah and Hamas axis. The hope that Syria will offer opportunities because it will erupt into civil war appears somewhat far-fetched. Syria at the moment has a firm grip over its own establishment. What is giving Syria a bad name is minimal internal trouble amplified by excessive propaganda.

The game changer could be Turkey entering the Arab theatre as some sort of a model democracy. But a wise Turkish leadership will enter the fray only when the Israeli nuclear arsenal is also placed in the balance to make a persuasive case against Iran taking the nuclear route. In this, believe it or not, much to the chagrin of Israel, even Saudi Arabia would throw its weight against a denuclearization of West Asia.