The Plight of Afrin Reverberates Across Europe

Today Afrin, Tomorrow Manbij…

There is good reason to believe that Erdogan intends to annex Afrin, as well as Manbij, also held by the YPG. Michael Martens, writing in the FAZ on March 17, quoted a former high-ranking Turkish diplomat to the effect that Erdogan intended to keep Afrin, as well as territory around Idlib. And Manbij. Martens also reported that Erdogan’s speaker and leading foreign policy advisor, Ibrahim Kalin, had spoken of an agreement struck with Rex Tillerson, who was the then US Secretary of State. The deal would have the US and Turkey setting up a “security zone” in and around Manbij, which implies the ethnic cleansing of the area, through expulsion of the Kurds.

And for whom are these zones to provide security? It may well be that Erdogan plans to resettle Syrian refugees from their current homes in camps to the areas cleansed of the native Kurdish population. Turkey, as Erdogan never fails to stress, has been hosting 3.5 million Syrians in refugee camps, financed largely by the European Union. There is good reason to believe this is the plan. Erdogan and other government officials have often spoken of their intention to repatriate the refugee “guests” to Syria, whenever possible. Ibrahim Kalin and Erdogan have both stated that they have no intention of handing Afrin (and presumably other conquered territories) back to the Assad regime. They have suggested that such a resettlement program might be in Europe’s interest, as it would alleviate pressure from refugee flows. Not only: reportedly, the Turkish agency responsible for disaster control, AFAD, has announced it wants to set up nine new refugee camps in the Idlib province and nearby areas that came under Turkish control during the “Euphrates Protective Shield” operation. Martens reports that the Red Crescent and AFAD are already preparing to receive 3,000 internally displaced persons.

The Erdogan project may involve even greater ambitions. Rainer Hermann, an area specialist who was a correspondent in Turkey for many years, suggested in an article on March 20, that the precedent for Turkey’s current military campaign may be the “National Pact” of 1919. In autumn of that year, he writes, Mustafa Kemal “Ataturk” and his companions agreed on a set of demands for their national resistance movement, accompanied by a map. The demands were then endorsed by the last Ottoman parliament on January 20, 1920. According to the document, which distinguished between Arabs and Turks, but not between Kurds and Turks, the jurisdiction over some areas inhabited by Arabs was to be decided by referendum. Other areas, however, were claimed as territory for the new Turkish republic. These included northern Syrian, with Aleppo and Afrin, as well as northern Iraq, with Mosul, certain Aegean islands and western Thrace.

The map, writes Hermann, fell into oblivion for decades, until the coup attempt in 2016 and the recent military campaigns, which seem to express “great empire phantasies.” Does Erdogan plan to annex these territories?

100 Years Later

“Never again”: more than a slogan, the phrase is a pledge, a commitment on the part of the survivors of genocide, that such crime shall never be repeated. A precondition for the prevention of such crimes is the recognition that they have occurred, and the acknowledgement on the part of those successor states of what their predecessors had perpetrated. Thus, the crucial significance of the recognition of the Holocaust on the part of the post-war German political class. Turkey has thus far refused to take similar steps in recognizing the genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk regime during World War I. One should not lose sight of the fact that, following the expulsion of the Armenians from their historical homelands, as they were deported and sent on death marches to concentration camps in Der el Zor (Syria), many of their homes were handed over to ethnic Turks, resettled from the Balkans (or to Kurds who had collaborated with the regime).

At the time, the Great Powers let it happen. Can it be that today entire populations can be shoved from one place to the next, expelling the lawful inhabitants? Azad Yusuf Bingöl, broadcasting from Munich, recently read out a statement of the Kurdish umbrella group Nav-Dem, which said, “The Western governments are silent. This makes the EU, the USA, Russia and the UN accomplices in this murder of the children of Afrin.” And, one might add, accomplices in the next, planned “population exchange.”

(Muriel Mirak-Weissbach is a regular contributor to the Armenian Mirror-Spectator. She is based in Germany.)