Following the Brexit trade agreement with the European Union, the British government’s first international trade deal was with Turkey. It came into effect on 1 January 2021, without parliamentary debate. Simon Tisdall, of The Guardian, commented, ‘the new trade deal ignores the Turkish government’s continuing human rights abuses, boosts its president and undermines ministerial pledges that “global Britain” will uphold international law and values’ (3 January 2021). The deal is worse than that: it encourages Turkey’s continuing war on the Kurds, threatens Turkey’s neighbours and demonstrates that British imperialism is prepared to endanger European security for the sake of profits. Turkey’s President Erdogan hailed the deal as the start of a ‘new era’ and a landmark for Turkey. Well might he express his gratitude; when the US and EU are turning against Turkey, Erdogan finds a friend in Britain. TREVOR RAYNE reports.
In 2020 Britain’s trade with Turkey was worth nearly £19bn; Britain is Turkey’s second biggest export market, after Germany. Turkey is the EU’s fifth largest trading partner, but only the fourteenth biggest destination for British exports. British capitalists want to boost sales to Turkey. Many of these sales will be as weapons; Turkey is designated a ‘priority market’ by the British government’s arms export unit. Campaign Against the Arms Trade says Britain has exported £1.3bn worth of arms to Turkey since 2013, the year of the Gezi Park mass protests. Since the 2016 failed coup in Turkey, the British government has granted export licences for arms sales to Turkey worth £806m. In 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May signed a £100m deal for BAE Systems to help Turkey develop its own fighter aircraft. BAE Systems has a joint venture with Turkey’s Nurol Holdings to build 17 amphibious attack vehicles. Turkey’s F-16 fighter planes use laser targeting technology produced by Edinburgh-based aerospace company Leonardo. The armed drones that Turkey uses against the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and in Libya and recently in Nagorno-Karabakh, were made with technology supplied by EDO MBM of Brighton, now a subsidiary of the US firm 3Harris. Turkey produces tanks, armoured vehicles, helicopters and drones, but Turkey’s growing arms industry requires foreign-made parts – British firms intend to supply them.
Restoring the Ottoman reach
A report by the European Christian Political Movement provides a close examination of Turkey’s aggressive foreign policy behaviour since 2013 (Johannes de Jong and Christiaan Meineu, ‘European security, Turkish foreign policy and Article 5 of the NATO Treaty’, Sallux, November 2020). It describes how the domestic oppression of Turkey’s Kurds is tied to an Islamist, nationalist drive known as ‘neo-Ottomanism’ intended to raise Turkey’s power in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Mediterranean. With the 2011 revolt against the Syrian state, Turkey backed jihadist groups, including Islamic State, and combined them in the Syrian National Army (SNA). Turkey has deployed these jihadists against Syria and against Kurds and others in Syria and Iraq. It sent up to 15,000 jihadists to Libya and sent several thousands more to fight on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Sallux report shows that both the Russian and US states have, at different times, accused Turkey of implicitly or explicitly supporting IS over a long period: providing funds, weapons, medical treatment, intelligence and allowing Turkey to be used as a means of transit for IS recruits. IS has inflicted murder and terror on people in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it has committed atrocities across Europe: in Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Spain and Austria. None of these figure in the British government’s deal with Turkey.
At the end of September and beginning of October 2020 Turkey mounted three consecutive acts of aggression against its neighbours, all of which brought condemnation from the EU, but the British government remained silent. On 27 September, Turkey demonstrated its support for Azerbaijan’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh, defying EU and US calls for a ceasefire. On 8 October, Turkey seized land around Varosha beach in Northern Cyprus, robbing the Greek Cypriot owners of property worth billions of euros. Erdogan said he wanted to permanently split Cyprus, again in defiance of EU attempts to reunite the partitioned island. On 11 October, Turkey sent the research ship Oruc Reis into Greek and Cypriot waters looking for gas and oil. The French navy sent a carrier and part of its fleet to support Greece and Cyprus. Speaking on Al-Jazeera, French President Macron said, ‘I note that Turkey has imperial inclinations in the region, and I think that these imperial inclinations are not a good thing for the stability of the region, that’s it.’ Macron accused Turkey of ‘criminal’ behaviour in Libya.
Erdogan has expressed his intention to restore Turkey’s imperial reach and leadership of Muslim countries. In July 2020, when Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was changed from a museum to a mosque, Erdogan said his intention was to revive Islam from Bukhara in Uzbekistan to Andalusia in Spain. The redesignation was presented in the context wherein the US government had announced it was relocating its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Erdogan could claim to be standing up for Islam and the Palestinians. The Oruc Reis is named after an Ottoman admiral who became governor of Algiers and chief governor of the West Mediterranean. He died fighting Spain in 1518. Oruc Reis established an Ottoman presence in North Africa which lasted four centuries, until it began to unravel with the loss of Algeria to France in 1830 and ended with the First World War. The Oruc Reis symbolises Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions.
The threat of sanctions
Responding to Turkey’s intrusion into Greek and Cypriot waters, the EU is soon to decide on whether to impose financial sanctions on Turkey. When the French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered in a Paris suburb on 16 October 2020, Macron described it as a ‘typical Islamist terrorist attack’. Erdogan responded, saying that ‘Macron needs treatment on a mental level’ and called for a boycott of French products. Elements of the SNA waved IS flags in anti-French protests. During the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh supporters of the Turkish fascist organisation Grey Wolves attacked Armenians in the French city of Lyon. On 2 November, the French state then joined Austria in banning the Grey Wolves. This fascist organisation is attached to the Nationalist Movement Party, which forms a governing alliance with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. The Turkish state vowed a ‘firm response’ to the banning order. In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that continued detention of the former co-chair of the Kurdish-led Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas, in Turkey’s prisons is unlawful and politically motivated. Unrepentant, the Turkish state, resolute in its war against the Kurds, immediately sentenced former HDP MP and co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress Leyla Guven – who had been n bail since her release from custody in January 2019 – to serve over 22 years imprisonment on trumped-up terrorism charges.
It is not only with the EU that Turkey is having problems. On 14 December 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Turkey, banning all US export licences and authorisations to Turkey’s Defence Industries, as well as an asset freeze and visa restrictions on the organisation’s president and other top officers. Turkey had rejected US offers of its Raytheon Patriot missile system in favour of a deal to buy Russia’s S-400 air defence missile system, worth $2.5bn. Despite the US removing Turkey from its joint F-35 stealth fighter programme as a punishment for the purchase, on 16 October 2020 Turkey activated and tested its S-400 system. The US and NATO failure to stop Turkey going ahead with the S-400 system has resulted in India making an advance payment for the system and Saudi Arabia saying it wanted to buy it too. The new US Congress and President Biden will likely take further steps against Turkey if it continues with the S-400. The US is believed to be considering relocating its main nuclear base away from Incirlik in Turkey to Souda Bay in Crete, Greece, following a visit to the base by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in September 2020. US subsidiaries in Britain could be used to bypass US state restrictions on arms supplies to Turkey.
The willingness of the US and EU to act against Turkey is restricted by imperialist investment in the country and fear of the consequent losses that may result from financial penalties. Since 2003, when Erdogan became Prime Minister, Turkey has received $165bn of foreign direct investment, of which $120bn came from Europe. The Netherlands has FDI in Turkey worth $26.2bn, the US $12.9bn, and Britain $11.6bn. Additionally, Turkey has relied on capital flows to maintain its private firms. These are bank loans, share purchases, bonds and such like, amounting to over $150bn from 2002 to 2018, three quarters of this money coming from European banks and other investors. Today, Turkey’s non-financial companies have foreign exchange liabilities of about $300bn. US and EU sanctions could push Turkey’s economy into crisis triggering defaults on payments, foreign investors would suffer serious losses and European banks a potential crisis.
Seeking to build on Turkey’s trade deal with Britain, Erdogan has said that he wants to ‘turn a new page’ with the west. What he really wants is continuing flows of capital and other investments. In a video call with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 9 January 2021, Erdogan said that ‘Turkey’s future is in Europe’. Erdogan and Macron have exchanged letters, with new year’s greetings and proposals for talks.
In September, almost a quarter of Turkey’s youth aged 15-24 were out of work. The official overall unemployment rate stood at 12.7%, but many people have dropped out of the labour force and given up looking for work. Turkey’s population is about 84.3 million people, of whom 31.1 million were not in work in September, up from 28.7 million a year before. Erdogan will seek EU money. The British ruling class will seek to profit from the tensions between Turkey and the US and EU, but Turkey’s fate as a would-be rising regional power will now be negotiated in Washington and Brussels.
