Category: 2021

Jan 13 2021

TASS, Russia

Jan 13 2021

Panorama, Armenia

Jan 13 2021

Jan 13 2021

Kaya Genç/December 30, 2020

Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s most skillful historical novelists, lives in solitary confinement in a cell four meters long, at Silivri Prison, Europe’s largest penal facility. In I’ll Never See This World Again, his fifteenth book, and the first he wrote from prison, Altan recalled the passing comment of a judge who held the author’s fate in his hands: “If only you had stuck to writing novels and kept your nose out of political affairs.”

 

 

Love in the Days of Rebellion

by Ahmet Altan, translated by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely

Buy on Bookshop

Europa Editions, 496 pp., $19.00

 

Like a Sword Wound

by Ahmet Altan, translated by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely

Buy on Bookshop

Europa Editions, 352 pp., $17.00

Altan’s punishment for that sin—he was charged with “sending subliminal messages” to topple Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—has been severe. “I will never see a sky unframed by the walls of a courtyard,” he realized upon receiving an aggravated life sentence in 2018. But politics has been an abiding theme of his work since the mid-1970s, when he cut his teeth as a young reporter. For much of his career, eroticism and the intrigues of Turkish politics had vitalized Altan’s writings and helped make him a household name. In 1982, aged 32, his debut novel launched a career marked by controversy and bestsellers: His second novel, Trace on the Water (1985), was found “obscene” by a court, which ordered police to burn it; Cheating, Altan’s erotic novella from 2002, sold over half a million copies, including one purchased by the cop who initially arrested him and chatted about its plot as the police van carried the giant of Turkish literature to Silivri Prison.

 

It was the Ottoman Quartet, an epic novel spanning the turbulent era between 1873, the year Sultan Abdülhamid II was enthroned, and 1915, when 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians died in an act of genocide, that earned Altan the distinction of a leading Turkish historical novelist, alongside younger authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. The Quartet is Altan’s life’s work (he hopes to complete its last volume once he regains access to a library) and proof that even while he “stuck to writing novels,” in his judge’s words, Altan couldn’t “keep his nose out of political affairs.” The saga’s first two volumes, Like a Sword Wound (1998) and Love in the Days of Rebellion (2001), now published in fine English translations by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely, probe Turkish historiography’s nationalist dichotomies between the autocratic Abdülhamid and progressive patriots who dethroned the Ottoman sultan. Altan’s Quartet shows that continuities, rather than ruptures, have defined the history of Turkish autocracy over the past century: Germanophile Young Turks were as tyrannical as Abdülhamid. Altan reaches this conclusion after raising a baffling question: Was “the March 31 Incident” of 1909 (an Islamist uprising to defend Abdülhamid’s absolute rule, whose suppression gave anti-sultan generals dictatorial powers) a Young Turk ploy?

Bridging Turkey’s past and present, in which such sinister moves to gain power are customary, Altan uses a smart conceit: Osman, his middle-aged protagonist, lives in modern Turkey and receives visits from family members who lived a century ago. These “transparent bodies” speak to him “in weak, broken voices,” granting Osman access to archives of familial and national history as he sits among heaps of tin cans in a dilapidated mansion. Perhaps it is this direct link to the present that has angered the authorities so much, the way his work likens the country’s problems today with its foundational shortcomings. In Turkey, a country that has insistently imprisoned its famous novelists over the past century, the treatment of Altan’s life and work is a warning to others willing to submit Turkish identity to a similarly probing critique.

 

Altan is skillful in laying the groundwork for this volume’s milieu: the penultimate decade of the Ottoman Caliphate. Once containing Islam’s Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, “the sick man of Europe” crumbles in the face of Western powers by the 1900s. The book’s characters orbit around Osman’s great-grandfather Yusuf, the sheikh of a Sufi monastery in Istanbul, the spiritual heart of a capital intent on severing ties with its Islamic past. Hikmet, a fragile bookworm who aligns with Young Turks (while reading their revolutionary oath, he puts a hand on the Qur’an and another on a pistol), marries Yusuf’s estranged wife, Mehpare, a free-spirited woman keen to realize her desires. “The only way to avoid punishment was to live in mansions with gardens large enough to conceal these sins,” she muses in a moment of self-reflection. The couple does live in a mansion with a large garden, owns a fancy six-seater landau with its team of two ponies and four Hungarian trove horses, leading a jealousy-inducing open marriage that almost destroys Hikmet (he misses the spot when he shoots himself in the heart). “True love is like a sword wound,” writes Altan, “and even if the wound heals, a deep scar remains.”

 

Hikmet’s father, Reşit Pasha, is cut from a different cloth. As Abdülhamid’s private physician, he is a conservative aristocrat who takes the voguish revolutionary spirit with a pinch of salt. But faced with Turkey’s rising middle classes (soldiers and medical professionals, mostly anti-sultan Young Turks), men like him stand little chance. Among those who root for rebels is Ragıp Bey, a young Ottoman lieutenant who takes refuge in Yusuf’s monastery for spiritual guidance. Moving to Berlin in search of adventure, Ragıp helps finance a plot against Abdülhamid’s tyranny, rubbing shoulders with Enver and Talat, Young Turk leaders who eventually deposed the sultan in 1908.

 

Class and gender bind those men. Raised in opulence, they operate in the most privileged sectors of Ottoman society, suffering from bouts of ennui while enjoying lavish lives endowed them by entitled parents. Frustrated about their futures and weary of their empire’s fate, they seek comfort in the arms of women. There is a sad tendency in Altan’s prose to gloss over the depths of female characters and present them as foils necessary for male self-realization. While recuperating from his wound at a French hospital, Hikmet flirts with a nun but fails to seduce her after gifting her an expensive copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Hikmet’s father welcomes him back home with a different gift: Hediye, a Circassian slave girl. Ottomans officially banned slave markets in 1847, but slavery continued clandestinely until 1908, and Altan skillfully shows its abhorrent consequences. Hikmet also courts Dilevser, a young bookworm with whom he can discuss Balzac and Tolstoy. “I was moved by the pain Anna Karenina suffered,” she tells Hikmet pointedly: “How selfishly men behave toward women.… How distant they are.” As Altan’s band of adventurers zigzag between moments of political upheaval and private intimacy, women balm their wounds, comfort their egos, and, at times, destroy their confidence.

 

Scenes of political turmoil are more layered. Love in the Days of Rebellion opens with a jubilant scene at Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square. Hagia Sophia (a Byzantine church that Erdoğan transformed into a mosque last summer) is surrounded by thousands of fezzes that ripple “like a ruby-red sea.” The revolutionary crowd is a testament to the plurality of the multiethnic empire:

Thracian shepherds, seamen from the islands, Arabs from whom wafted the spicy smell of their mysterious peninsula, Jews who had migrated from sacred cities, Montenegrins with pistols in their cummerbunds, Bulgarians and Kurds, Kirgiz, Gypsies who sang and danced constantly, and Tatars with high cheekbones.

 

When the sultan races through them in his carriage, the crowd parts “like the Red Sea miraculously parted when Moses touched it with his staff.”

Altan uses this revolutionary moment to reveal his characters’ reactions to chaos and order. Reşit is sheepishly loyal to his sultan, and his proximity to power gives Altan artistic license to portray Abdülhamid’s life in fine, mostly factual detail. A photography aficionado, a reader of Arthur Conan Doyle novels (the sultan personally told Conan Doyle he disliked his historical romances), and paranoid to the extent that he considers showering in a cage, Abdülhamid is “afraid and interested in everyone.” He has a rural coffeehouse built nearby, where a waiter treats him like an ordinary customer “to bring a little bit of the outside world into his palace.”

 

By the finale of Altan’s novel, German-educated Young Turks had sent Abdülhamid off to exile in Salonica. There is joy in watching the sultan “who had not allowed his subjects to read what they wanted” now complain about not being allowed to read newspapers himself—“he’d realized how painful this was.” The dishonored sultan was forced to sign “a document handing over a million in gold he had in German banks over to the army, he’d lost his teeth, he’d been imprisoned in a mansion in exile and had lost his wealth after abdicating.”

 

When Love in the Days of Rebellion first came out in Turkish, Altan described its style as neoclassical: “It will replace the postmodernist inclination in modern Turkish fiction.” To some degree it did. In the next two decades, a flurry of popular historical novels considered different facets of early-twentieth-century Turkey through styles less challenging than Pamuk’s and Shafak’s postmodern fictions. Novels by Altan and Ayşe Kulin, another bestselling writer translated into English, seeped into popular culture by raising questions about Turkey’s national identity built on othering Kurds and Armenians, and helped change the dominant nationalist perspective of Turkish historical novels.

 

Altan’s view of Turkish history is bleak and skeptical of a progressive arc.

Altan’s view of Turkish history is bleak and skeptical of a progressive arc. “Whatever you do, whatever you call your form of government, you end up with a sultan at the top,” one of his characters muses. Another sees how “tyranny never ended in this land, that one tyranny had ended only for another to begin, that nothing other than tyranny could grow” in Turkey. His novel’s final sections detail how Young Turks (“an administration unaccustomed to governance”) ruled Turkey even more harshly, selling out Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim revolutionaries who initially supported them to build a democratic country. Killing reactionary-looking Muslims (they were in fact drunken, unruly soldiers in Islamic garments), Sheikh Yusuf sees, was but a planned tactic for grabbing power. “While we were celebrating getting rid of one tyrant, a hundred more tyrants took over,” says Ragıp. The Germanophile general who takes over Turkey’s reins governs “like a complete dictator with an authority that no sultan had possessed for some years.”

 

Soon a hush descends on Istanbul: “There were no arguments, no shouting, no laughter, no shopkeepers bantering from one side of the street to the other, no women talking from their windows … it was even forbidden to run in the streets, people avoided walking quickly lest they be thought to be running, everyone made a point of walking slowly.” The first order of generals is to burn the denunciations commissioned by the paranoid Abdülhamid, and millions of sheets of paper are piled into stacks and set on fire. These terrifying letters of denunciation

 

that had darkened the lives of thousands of people and that had nourished and increased the unjustified fears of an apprehensive sultan spread over the capital as ash and smoke like a pus that had accumulated in the collective bloodstream of an entire society, reminding everyone of their guilt and complicity.

 

In Altan’s novel, not many people object to this bonfire of archives. What Young Turks did was to “clear the past and save everyone from past fears by burning these documents that proved almost everyone had taken part in the tyranny of this period.” The Quartet’s final novel, if it is ever written, will tell of the Armenian Genocide, another act of historical erasure, planned and executed by the same leaders.

 

To modern Turkey, too, these tactics left a troublesome legacy. The putschist mindset, crystallized in Ragıp’s Young Turk brother Cevat’s words—“Who else but the military can protect this country … if the army removes itself from politics the motherland will fall into the hands of the reactionaries”—later solidified in a militarist tutelage system that ruled Turkey into the twenty-first century (as recently as in 2016, a band of Turkish generals staged a violent coup crushed by civilians). It paused briefly in 2002 with the rise to power of Erdoğan, who initially fashioned himself as a conservative democrat keen to retrieve the lost honor of Sultan Abdülhamid and rolled back century-old racist laws that suppressed the minorities whose properties modern Turkey confiscated and was built on. But a few years into power, Erdoğan revealed his authoritarian ambitions. In 2018, he built a presidential system that allowed him to annul election results, detain and replace elected mayors with loyal placeholders, and rule Turkey by decree. As Altan foretold, anyone “who enters politics has a bit of Sultan in them” in Turkey.

 

In a chilling moment in his prison memoir, Altan recalls a scene from the Quartet where Ragıp ponders the gap between the moment a person’s destiny changes and the moment the person realizes this, which, he writes, is “the most tragic and frightening aspect of life.” The loss of control over one’s life is terrifying, all the more so for an author imprisoned for his ideas. “The future became clear, but the person continued to wait for another future with other expectations and dreams without realizing that the future had already been determined.” As he waited to hear the outcome of his trial in 2018, hoping for freedom but already condemned to life imprisonment, Altan felt a shiver: “I wrote years ago about the turmoil I’m going through at this very moment. I live now what I write in my novel. I am a novelist living his novel. My life imitates my novel.”

 

Kaya Genç, a Turkish novelist, is the author of Under the Shadow.

 

Read More: Critical Mass, Books, Culture, Turkey, Turkish Literature, Ahmet Altan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Ottoman Quartet

 

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN   JANUARY 12, 2021 22:19

Turkey fears President-elect Joe Biden and his incoming team may not take orders from Ankara and may not welcome its threats.

When US President Donald Trump won the election in 2016, many foreign countries wondered what kind of US foreign policy might be crafted by the new US administration. One country had already begun to put its eggs in the Trump basket.

Ankara’s regime led by the AKP Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan saw Trump’s isolationism as a means to an end. Turkey would seek a blank check from friends in Washington to begin a massive campaign of militarism, aggression and ethnic cleansing of opponents in Syria and across the region.

Now things may be changing. US officials such as James Jeffrey and Joel Rayburn have departed their roles with the US State Department, signaling that key figures of the last years are gone. Turkey’s leader counted on having unfettered access to the Trump administration. Now there are shifting policies in DC.

Over the last four years Turkey was allowed, often with approval from the Trump administration, to attack protesters in Washington, invade Afrin in Syria, threaten NATO partners, host Hamas, recruit poverty-stricken Syrians as mercenaries, encourage a war against Armenians and even threaten US troops in Syria. Now Turkey’s key allies in Washington are leaving office, including envoys and friends in the State Department that empowered Ankara’s authoritarianism and aggression.

Turkey fears that President-elect Joe Biden and his incoming team may not take orders from Ankara and may not welcome its threats. Turkey has stopped its aggressive behavior since learning of Biden’s victory, sensing the blank check to attack others has been reduced.  

For years, Turkey had been shifting from its interest in joining the European Union, which would require it having a free press and respecting human rights, to becoming a more authoritarian state. Ankara is the largest jailor of journalists in the world today.

Up until 2016 regarding foreign policy, Turkey had been reticent to use force, preferring to have no enemies and work with countries across the region. Turkey’s AKP had even come to power seeking reconciliation with the country's Kurdish minority and with Armenia. Turkey had worked with Israel on discussions with Syria.

 

BY 2016 that had all changed. Turkey’s ruler was seeking absolute power, arresting opposition journalists and seeking to overturn election results that had enabled the opposition HDP Party to gain inroads in parliament and many municipalities. Trump would be the key to an unhinged Turkey, with no checks or balances on its behavior.

To get to Trump, Turkey operationalized its lobbyists in Washington and worked with key voices, from think tanks to right-wing friends, to get an invitation to DC. Erdogan arrived in May 2017. He felt so empowered by the White House that he sent presidential security to attack peaceful US protesters near the Turkish ambassador’s residence.

This was unprecedented in American history. Usually protests may be banned abroad, but protesters have a right to peacefully assemble in the US and protest foreign leaders. Now the message was that in the heart of Washington, Turkey had the run of things. Charges were dropped.  

The attack on the protesters came as Turkey was purging hundreds of thousands of civil servants and others, accusing them of being “terrorists” and “coup plotters.” Ankara’s friends in Washington also spread stories about a US “deep state,” the kind they alleged also existed in Turkey, and claimed this “deep state” was seeking to undermine Trump.

Meanwhile, a referendum in Turkey also gave the presidency more power. Ankara sought immediate access to Trump, first via his original National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, and then direct access. US National Security Advisor John Bolton would later reveal how the US administration appeared to take orders from Erdogan’s regime, including to drop a case against Turkey's large, state-owned Halkbank. These revelations alleged corruption and other elements at work, according to reports at the Washington Post, ABC and other news outlets.

In January 2018, Turkey recruited Syrian rebels to fight Kurds in Syria. It’s goal was to end the Syrian rebellion against Assad’s regime by co-opting Syrians to fight what Ankara claimed were “terrorists” in Syria. There were no “terrorists” in the Kurdish area of Afrin, but Turkey attacked the Syrian area, sent Syrian rebels to plunder it and then ethnically cleansed it of Kurds. Women were systematically removed from all government positions under Turkey’s occupation, and many women were kidnapped to secret prisons run by Turkey’s extremist allies in Syria.

 

THE DESTRUCTION of Afrin was only the first step. Turkey sensed the US administration was so pro-Turkey that Ankara could get the US to even abandon its partners in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces. Working with the US State Department, which wanted to humiliate the Pentagon and Central Command’s successful operations in eastern Syria, Turkey ordered Trump to withdraw US forces. Never in history had a US NATO ally threatened US troops and bombed its partner forces. But Ankara understood that this US administration would put Turkey first.  

To sell its foreign policy in DC circles, Turkey understood that right-wing voices in the US tended to be anti-Iran as well as critics of Obama’s policies. Ankara sold its attack on Kurds in Syria as a way to upend “Obama era policies.” Meanwhile, Turkey was working with Tehran and Moscow, buying the S-400 air defense system from Russia, and seeking a deal with Iran on Syria that would isolate America and not include US partner forces in Syria negotiations.

In DC, the Turkish lobby claimed that Ankara was a bulwark against Russia and confronting Iran. To Trump, Turkey had a different message: It would save the US money by dealing with ISIS. In fact, Ankara’s regime was dealing with ISIS by letting ISIS fighters transit through Turkey to Idlib in Syria, where Turkish-backed extremists operated.

Turkey’s policy in Syria – getting the US to withdraw from part of northern Syria in October 2019 – ended up with Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime gaining ground. Yet Ankara sold the policy as upending Obama’s policies and confronting Iran. Instead, US soldiers were ordered to withdraw and Kurdish civilians were bombed by Turkey.

Ankara’s threats continued in 2020. It hosted Hamas twice with red carpets for the terror group's leaders, as if they ran a foreign country; expelled 60 mayors from HDP cities; and handed journalists and opposition politicians decades-long prison sentences – all the while knowing that it had a blank check from Washington to crush dissent and threaten other countries. Turkey threatened Greece, claimed it would use Syrian refugees against Greece, harassed Greek ships, and then sent Syrians to fight in Libya, in violation of sanctions.

Then Turkey prodded Azerbaijan to attack Armenians in Nagorna-Karabakh. Under Turkey’s rampaging foreign policy at least 300,000 people have been ethnically cleansed in Syria in areas under Ankara’s occupation, and tens of thousands of Armenians have been ethnically cleansed in Nagorna-Karabakh. Kurds and Armenians have been murdered, beheaded and kidnapped. Ankara even fueled terror attacks in France by pushing incitement against Paris. It also accused Israel of being similar to Nazi Germany, and threatened to “liberate” Jerusalem from Israel’s control.  

 

MUCH OF Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian and militarist behavior was done with American support or acquiescence over the last several years, a major departure from usual US foreign policy. A less chaotic administration, in which the president doesn’t take phone calls and orders from Ankara, might have worked with its own Pentagon, State Department and allies when Turkey demanded US forces withdraw. Instead the White House twice announced withdrawals from Syria without even telling key US allies. The UK, France and Israel were left out of the loop, raising concerns.  

At the same time, a strategy was put in place by pro-Ankara political appointees at the US State Department. They wanted to sabotage what they saw as an Obama-era policy in Syria where the US was working with the SDF, mostly Kurdish forces, in eastern Syria.

How do you sabotage a successful counter-ISIS effort? First, they wanted Turkey to control policy in Syria. They also believed in Cold War-era thinking that Turkey was a “balance” to Russia, even though Ankara was increasingly allied with Moscow and Tehran against US policy in Syria. Third they wanted to empower extremists, because they believed US counter-terror strategy unfairly targeted Sunni fighters, and they wanted the US to target Shi’ite Iran.

Kurds, a peaceful minority subjected to abuses by the Assad regime and also by extremists, were a nuisance in their assessment. Geopolitics is about grand strategy; minority groups like Kurds who are “in the way” would be brushed aside, or genocided as they had been under the Saddam regime – a genocide the US neglected to condemn.  

 

TO DESTROY the SDF, the US political appointees at the State Department, working with Ankara, had to sideline both the forces and Central Command. They told the SDF to work with Damascus and that they had no future in Syria. They told them the US role in Syria was temporary, transactional and tactical. The SDF, taking a cue from Washington, opened talks with Damascus. This gave the pro-Turkey members of the State Department a way to then allege that the SDF was working with Assad and Iran. Now they could set in motion Turkey’s invasion of Syria, which was their end goal, to get the US behind Turkey’s role in Idlib and get the US out of eastern Syria.

Historically, US policymakers don't work to undermine America's own policies, remove US leverage and destroy a successful campaign, like the one in Syria. But Turkey's ability to get the White House to do its bidding led to a strange era between 2017 and 2019.

Once the SDF had been told the US would leave, the officials told the White House that the SDF was talking to Damascus and that it was an example of Obama-era Iran policy. Under this advice, the White House accepted Ankara’s logic. Ankara’s real goal, however, was to destroy the SDF, which it claimed was linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Turkey had crushed the PKK in 2015, but wanted to destroy Kurdish left-leaning groups in Syria as well. After the SDF stuck with the US in the wake of the invasion of Afrin, Kurds were promised by US officials that no more Afrins would happen.

Behind the scenes, however, a US political appointee brought Ankara maps of areas the US would give Turkey in eastern Syria. All Turkey had to do was demand the US withdraw. In the summer of 2019, Turkey’s threats grew and Central Command was told that it needed to get the SDF to assure Turkey there were no threats from Syria. The SDF complied and tore up military positions near the Turkish border.

What Central Command didn’t know was that in the State Department and White House, work with Ankara was ongoing to invade Syria. Central Command was duped along with the SDF into believing that if they just removed some bunkers, this would build confidence with Turkey. Erdogan called Trump in October 2019 and the US ordered Central Command to move its forces to make way for Turkey. 200,000 Kurds fled the Turkish attack.

This was mission accomplished for the pro-Turkey elements close to Trump in Washington. The SDF had been humiliated and would be forced into the hands of Moscow and Damascus, while Turkey would be given parts of Syria. Hundreds of thousands would be ethnically cleansed and peaceful cities with Kurds and Christians would be depopulated as in Afrin. It didn’t quite work, because the US Congress was outraged at how Ankara had threatened Washington and appeared to have gotten the White House to work against its own policymakers.  

 

HAVING SABOTAGED US policy in Syria in 2019, most of 2020 was spent trying to restrain Turkey from more attacks on US partners when it became clear that its real goal was to make a deal with Russia, the Syrian regime and Iran to partition areas of former US control. The attacks and ethnic cleansing of Christians in Turkish-occupied areas of Syria didn’t sit well with those who believed the US should be supporting religious freedom in Syria. Attacks on women also didn’t sit well, and people wondered why the US appeared to be siding with an anti-American Ankara against pro-American SDF partners and friends in Syria.

The US political appointees dealing with US Syrian policy continued trying to provoke a showdown between Turkey and Russia in Idlib, hoping their theory that Turkey would obstruct Russia would play out. Instead Ankara and Moscow signed deals and the Syrian regime got more territory as Russia’s S-400 systems flowed to Turkey.

The last straw of the Ankara war effort through Washington was the decision to inflame the Caucasus. Turkey pushed Azerbaijan to war and encouraged more op-eds in DC about how the war on Armenians was about confronting Russia. However, the end result was like in Syria: Turkey ended up working with Russia and Iran in the Caucasus and Russian troops came in as peacekeepers.

Russia was empowered. Azerbaijan and Armenia’s leaders went to Moscow on January 11, 2021; they didn’t go to Washington. Russia gained influence. Turkey and Russia now work together in Syria, Libya and the Caucasus. The US role has been sidelined in each conflict, partly because Turkey got the US to outsource conflicts to Ankara.

 

ANKARA'S REGIME senses that its blank check is ending. It can’t use right-wing voices in the US to push the narrative that it is “against Iran” with the new US administration. Its only card now is reconciliation, which it is pushing with Greece, France, Israel and whoever will listen.

For the 350,000 people who were driven from their homes by Ankara’s invasion; the 200,000 or so purged and some imprisoned in Turkey; the journalists like Can Dundar who have been persecuted and driven into exile; the Kurdish women forced from office and replaced by extremists; the HDP mayors thrown out; and the politicians taken to prison on trumped-up “terror” charges, the last few years have been a nightmare.

For US officials in the Pentagon and State Department, the years where US Syria envoys would conduct policy that appeared to undermine Central Command – and where the White House wouldn’t even consult with or inform heads of the State Department and Pentagon about withdrawals from places like Syria – the era appears to be ending. US officials that bragged of hiding troop numbers from the White House – or told Ankara one thing, the SDF another and the White House something else – might stop.

Damage has been done to the SDF, key US partners who were sidelined for years by machinations in DC. In addition US policy, aiming to sabotage the Obama administration’s role in Syria, isolated the US from the Astana talks and made it entirely dependent on Turkey in Syria, partnering with extremists and authoritarians.

It remains to be seen if a new administration can figure out a way to have a consistent Syria policy.

 

 

13.01.2021/

Sergey Markedonov

It is extremely important for Moscow to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, maintaining a balance in relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as with Turkey and Iran, and with partners in the OSCE Minsk Group. There is no rational need to create additional tensions with the West over Karabakh until (and if) the United States and its allies begin to revise the currently fragile consensus with Russia, Valdai Club expert Sergey Markedonov writes.

 

The trilateral meeting of Vladimir Putin, Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan, dedicated to the implementation of the joint statement on the cessation of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh, in addition to its substantive nature, is a symbolic event. It shows that, despite the radical change in the status quo in the Caucasus region which happened at the end of last year, the resolution of the long-standing ethno-political conflict in the year of 2021 remains an urgent task, directly both for Baku and Yerevan, as well as for Moscow. And this process is not an easy one.

 

Non-absolute results  

 

 

The entire dynamics of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has repeatedly confirmed the correctness of Carl von Clausewitz’s formula that the outcome of a war never represents something absolute. “Even the final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations,” wrote the famed military theorist. In 1994, many in Yerevan and Stepanakert thought that the defeat of Azerbaijan and the loss of territories both in the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region (NKAO) and around it would at the very least lead to a long-standing, if not final, state of affairs. The Armenians were confident that the world, over time, would just get used to the new status quo, as had happened in Cyprus. However, the events of 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016 and especially 2020 revealed the illusion of these assertions. The military-political situation in Karabakh has changed radically. The former “line of contact” has disappeared; not only the seven districts surrounding the former NKAO, but a number of territories that were previously part of it (Shusha, the villages of Hadrut, the Martuni and Mardakert districts) have fallen under Baku’s control. And today, representatives of the Azerbaijani establishment are already talking about the conflict in Karabakh in the past tense, focusing almost exclusively on socio-economic plans to restore destroyed and neglected territories. Meanwhile, conclusions about the “end of history” regarding one of the most dramatic conflicts in the former Soviet Union today look at least premature.

  

 

  

What else has not been “solved” in the Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation? First of all, one should pay attention to the fact that the document signed on November 9, 2020, by the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia, is not a political agreement, as journalists often call it. This is a joint statement by the leaders of the three countries, aimed at ending the military confrontation. It stipulates only one of the “baskets” of the peace process — the de-occupation of territories outside the former NKAO. But the second “basket” — the status of the disputed region, which, in fact, served as a trigger of the conflict in its time, is not considered. It is not even mentioned. The reason for this silence is obvious. At the stage when the priority task was to suspend hostilities, it was impossible to raise such a question as a precondition for a ceasefire. This would inevitably doom the peace initiative to failure. It would simply repeat the fate of the three previous proposals put forth by Russia, France and the United States.

 

However, this issue has not disappeared from the settlement agenda, as evidenced by the statement by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan following a trilateral meeting in Moscow on January 11, 2021. On the contrary, Azerbaijan considers this issue to be actually resolved, identifying the status problem with the restoration of territorial integrity. It should also be kept in mind that Pashinyan’s persistence is largely due to the internal political situation in Armenia. Dissatisfaction with Yerevan’s concessions to Baku remains too great. And there is still a solution to the issue of the delimitation and demarcation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, which was sharply actualised after the second Karabakh war. The possibility of new, even meagre territorial concessions creates additional risks for Pashinyan. However, this story is not limited to individual politicians.

 

  

This means that it is extremely important to work out some kind of comprehensive agreement that will extend beyond the suspension of hostilities. At first glance, it already exists. These are the “basic principles” that became the basis for the 2009 negotiations. But they were adopted under the old status quo, and a significant part of them were implemented, although not at the negotiating table, but during the course of hostilities. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, peacekeepers have appeared in Karabakh. Their role is positively assessed, both in Baku and in Yerevan. However, their mandate is limited to five years, which, for example, was not the case in Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Transnistria. Obviously, Yerevan and Baku are pinning diametrically opposite hopes on the Russian mission. Today we see, on the one hand, the integration of the territories around the NKAO into Azerbaijan, and on the other, the preservation of the infrastructure of the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, albeit in a reduced form. Its own administration operates on its territory, personnel reshuffles are carried out, and plans for the future are being drawn up outside the jurisdiction of Baku. By themselves, such collisions will not disappear. The differing views of large external players on how to arrange Karabakh won’t disappear either. While Russia, Iran and Turkey would prefer to interact with each other and that the involvement of “Western partners” remained minimal, the three Eurasian giants have assessed the prospects of the Caucasus and their participation in resolving the problems of this region differently. Thus, along with the remaining Armenian-Azerbaijani contradictions (the final status of Karabakh plus a new border delimitation), the geopolitical factor also has a significant “added value”. Amid these conditions, the search for a solution outside the framework of a military ceasefire will take place.

  

 

After Russia managed to stop the military conflict and take the lead in the negotiation process under the new status quo, the collective West, as a player in Karabakh affairs, was quickly discounted by many. However, the more active involvement of the United States and its allies does not seem like a completely closed topic. Today Washington and Paris (the two co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group) are watching Moscow’s activity and leadership positions. However, this is far from passive observance. Suffice it to look at the recent initiative of the US Congress regarding Karabakh, addressed to the Director of American National Intelligence.  

 

Any failure of Russia in the Caucasus, caused both by the deterioration of relations between Moscow and Baku or Yerevan, and by the confrontation with Turkey, will be used to increase interference in the Caucasian regional agenda.

 

 And that is why today the Russian side is striving so hard not only to talk about the resolution of the conflict, but also to tie the parties to the conflict to the search for an effective peaceful solution through joint economic projects. Any repetition of the Georgian scenarios on Karabakh soil is fraught with more complex and intricate formats for the internationalisation of the region in comparison with the confrontation between Russia and NATO. And in this regard, it is extremely important for Moscow to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, maintaining a balance in relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as with Turkey and Iran, and with partners in the OSCE Minsk Group. There is no rational need to create additional tensions with the West over Karabakh until (and if) the United States and its allies begin to revise the currently fragile consensus with Russia.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-delayed-resolution/

 

 

 

 

If we follow Plato’s understanding of regime transitions, it appears that Armenia can soon become a ‘tyranny’. This issue can be traced back to the beginning of the ‘Karabakh’ movement and the desire for independence from the Soviet Union.

 

 

The Soviet Union was a classic example of a totalitarian regime. It possessed a centralised government that faced little to no opposition, as well as an (at least publicly) obedient citizenry. In relation to Plato’s description of tyranny, it appears that many modern totalitarian regimes have adopted a very similar model of rule.

 

 

Despite this, when the pressures of Soviet totalitarianism proved too much to bare, citizens searched for ways to change the system. Starting in Poland with the rise of Solidarity, demonstrations against the region’s communist regimes soon resulted in a domino effect reaching other countries, including Soviet Armenia. Following this, ethnic Armenians also started to demand the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) autonomous region from Soviet Azerbaijan.

 

 

Both the people and political elite of the ‘Karabakh’ movement expressed their desire to see an ‘aristocrat’ among them become the leader of their newly established country. This was Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first democratically elected president of Armenia in 1991. He was chosen as he was a prominent scholar, highly intelligent (‘wise’, as Plato would say), spoke six or seven languages, and was able to negotiate and represent his nation well. For a short time, Armenia enjoyed the rule of its ‘wise’ leader, who was even able to give speeches in the UN General Assembly in English. As Plato said, however, a ‘Philosopher King’ will only remain on the throne until “the gold is mixed with copper and the iron with silver, and as a result the balance between virtue and human weaknesses is shifted”.

 

 

In keeping with Plato’s outlook, Levon Ter-Petrosyan was eventually removed from the throne by the country’s ‘timocrats’ or ‘warriors’. In the case of Armenia, these soldiers were those who fought in the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to make sure that Ter-Petrosyan could not “give back the lands”. This outcome would have been unacceptable for the warriors, as Artsakh represented the base of their power and influence. How could they let him give away their pride – the region for which they had fought without the final status for Nagorno Karabakh? Besides, there was also an ongoing security issue for both Artsakh and Armenia, which was ‘ensured’ by the adjacent regions to Artsakh (until the status of Artsakh will be solved). This issue does not exist any more as the recent Moscow-brokered agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia those regions were given back to Azerbaijan. The current situation has created new challenges for Yerevan and the internationally unrecognised Republic of Artsakh.

 

 

A ‘timocracy’ often emerges due to the inherent drawbacks of ‘aristocracy’. In reality, a timocratic system represents a combination of both aristocratic and oligarchic elements. Power is crucial in a timocracy, which is strengthened at the expense of virtue. The desire to accumulate property is very typical in this system. The seeds of this type of rule were already planted under Ter-Petrosyan. These later blossomed during the rule of Robert Kocharyan, the second president of Armenia. With warriors in power, strict order and rule is maintained in the country. Subsequently, citizens must become more obedient to their government. Eventually, the warriors’ desire for power grows at such a rate that timocracy gradually turns into an ‘oligarchy’.

 

 

Such oligarchic rule was clear during under Kocharyan and it became even stronger under his successor Serzh Sargsyan. In an oligarchy, those who have money become the leaders of the country. As a result, materialism grows and becomes a key part of the oligarchic system. Laws are written to protect the property of those in power and their relatives. During this time, strict measures are taken to protect the property of the oligarchs. In an oligarchy, the society is divided into rich and poor and this social polarisation eventually becomes so clear that one day the society finds itself threatened by revolution. Following this, the ‘democratic’ leader comes to power. In the case of Armenia, this occurred as a result of the “Velvet Revolution” in 2018.

 

 

In a democracy power belongs to the people. Despite this, the leaders, who are meant to be the voice of the people, may start doing what they want without consulting the population. This issue is typical in societies where there are no established democratic traditions. During and right after the revolution, the Armenian people were mostly willing to ignore minor violations and infringements by the new leader. After all, Nikol Pashinyan was “their king”. Should the ‘king’ continue to ignore previous promises, however, the people may start to behave in a similar way to their beloved leader of the revolution. Blocking the streets, for example, is a method that has proven to work well in Armenia. This has become a key tactic for various interest groups in the country. For example, importers of right-hand drive vehicles blocked government buildings and organised a demonstration in order to challenge a decree that threatened their business interests. There are many other examples of these protest tactics in the country. Today, Pashinyan has become a victim of his own success. His own revolutionary tactics are now being used against him by people demanding his resignation following the country’s recent capitulation.

 

 

According to Plato, “democracy is the son of oligarchy”. If in many cases the oligarch, according to him, has temperate characteristics, the democrat is characterised to have insatiable desires. In Armenia, for example, the oligarchs were earning money by evading taxes, while the revolutionary government justified its own desire to earn money by introducing a bonus system for its “well-deserving” public servants. Or when many oligarchs were found to be smoking marijuana in private, the democratic parliament members started to speak about the necessity of legalising the drug. Whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing, this should not be a priority immediately following the country’s military defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh. Military and civilian captives are still being held by Azerbaijan, their return still remains a crucial issue and many people are homeless and jobless as a consequence of the war. There are more urgent challenges to deal with at the moment!

 

 

Democrats are by nature adventurous and this creates the instability that leads them to lose control. This situation can ultimately lead to anarchy. This appears to describe what is happening in Armenia now. After the disgraceful capitulation, Nikol Pashinyan is unable to manage government affairs and has been distracted by micromanagement. Referring to Plato, democrats in an anarchic society are usually afraid of being killed as they soon find themselves with many enemies. After the revolution in 2018, Pashinyan could freely walk the streets. Now, his security in parliament has been strengthened with additional forces from the police. This is an example of how a democratic leader can become a tyrant.

  

 

 

Pashinyan is not able to run the country because he has spent all his life criticising the previous regime. The ability to criticise government and have an effective opposition is essential to building truly democratic institutions, but not enough to govern. The prime minister should have spent time strengthening state security, enhancing democratic institutions, creating favourable conditions for investment and improving strategic relations in accordance with the country’s geopolitical peculiarities. However, he has shown that he now only acts in accordance with his own desires. He has divided the country into ‘black and white’. He started to abuse the power by violating the principle of independence. For instance, he has publicly ordered the courts to open cases against the officials of previous corrupt regimes and has even demanded that the police and the national security services “hunt” his opponents. Overall, he has turned hatred into a principle of governance and lies into a form of governing. The country’s military capitulation has led to anarchy and no public institution has functioned properly ever since.

 

 

This situation can not last for a long time. According to Plato, a new cycle should start with the creation of an aristocracy. Plato’s aristocrat, when updated for modern times, resembles a modern technocrat. Today’s Armenia needs technocrats and it does not matter what political party they represent. This is because both the country’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ political factions include many acceptable politicians. Armenia must put an end to this distorted ‘democracy’ and anarchic regime. The country needs a technocratic government, which will help the country rise from its knees, establish the rule of law and continue on its chosen path to real democracy otherwise it will collapse.

 

This article was originally published in Armenian in the daily online news outlet Aravot.

 

Tatevik Hovhannisyan is a political scientist, specialised in political communications and civil society affairs. She is a graduate of the “Hannah Arendt” Promotion at the College of Europe in Natolin, 2019-2020.

 

 

Armenian President Armen Sarkissian, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, was hospitalized with double pneumonia, the president's office said on Wednesday.

ANI  | Yerevan | Updated: 13-01-2021 16:01 IST | Created: 13-01-2021 16:01 IST