Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan | Arab News.
Turkey’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy poses a fundamental threat to stability and democracy in West Asia.One of the main features of Turkish foreign policy has been to question the status quo established in the Treaty of Lausanne at every opportunity on the basis of the Missak-i Milli. A three-part series on the Kurds.
THE NEO-OTTOMAN POLICY BEGAN WITH THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY
Over the past 100 years, the region has been plunged into a deep crisis whenever Turkey pursued its dream of conquering former Ottoman territories. The country’s military and politicians have repeatedly felt justified in using military, political, and economic pressure to change the existing borders of West Asia. In the eyes of the international community, this neo-Ottoman foreign policy increasingly turned Turkey into the biggest source of unrest in the region. Today, the country is facing the shambles of its expansionist dreams based on war and expulsion. In the face of a profound political, economic, social, and military crisis, Turkey has for some time been engaged in intensive discussions about reassessing its own role in the region.
Turkey’s Kurdish population plays a particularly important role in this context. This is because its Kurds have the necessary political organizing power and vision to replace the country’s failed foreign policy with an alternative approach to relations with neighbouring countries. Without them, it would therefore seem difficult to put an end to Turkey’s neo-Ottoman dreams and instead give the country a constructive role in the stabilization and democratization of West Asia.
Turkey’s foreign policy ambitions of this kind did not just emerge in recent years. In the course of the reorganization of West Asia after the First World War, the then-nascent Republic of Turkey attempted to counter the plans of international powers with its own vision. This took place in parallel with numerous uprisings by the Kurdish population in the region, who also opposed the reorganization of their homeland without taking the interests of the local population into account: in the form of the Simko Shikak uprising in eastern Kurdistan (north-western Iran, 1918-1922), the Sheikh Mahmud Berzenci uprising in northern Iraq (1919-1924) or the Sheikh Said uprising in northern Kurdistan (eastern Turkey, 1925). France and England in particular, made intensive efforts to divide the Ottoman Empire in the form of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).
A key document from this period, which is still an important basis for Turkish foreign policy today, is the Misak-i Milli (also: Ahd-ı Millî Beyannamesi, English: National Pact or National Oath). A new Ottoman Parliament was elected in October 1919 and began its work at the beginning of 1920. In agreement with the leader of the Turkish independence movement, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Parliament immediately began work on the Misak-i Milli. The six-point document was passed by Parliament on 28 January 2025. A central aspect of the Misak-i Milli was the definition of the country’s desired state borders. According to this, the area of Thrace (today’s Greece), the two areas known in the Ottoman Empire as the province of Mosul (northern Iraq) and the province of Aleppo (northern Syria), and the area of Batum (today’s Georgia) would accordingly become part of Turkish state territory.
Atatürk saw the national borders determined in this way as a kind of maximum demand for the negotiations with London and Paris.
The Treaty of Lausanne
Parallel to the military conflicts between the forces commanded by Atatürk and British, French, Italian and Russian troops, Ankara tried to reach a political agreement at the negotiating table regarding the future existence of the country. Ultimately, after more than six months of negotiations in Switzerland, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24, 1923. With the signing of the Treaty of Ankara in 1926, Turkey’s state borders were established. In territorial terms, this meant much better conditions for the newly established Republic of Turkey than the Treaty of Sèvres, which had been negotiated between France and London.
However, Ankara now accepted that large parts of Thrace, the Batum region and also northern Iraq and northern Syria would fall under the control of various neighboring countries. At the same time, the policies of the newly established Republic of Turkey quickly led to discontent among the country’s Kurdish population. Massive uprisings in Northern Kurdistan (Eastern Turkey), for example, the aforementioned Sheikh Said Uprising, the Ağrı Uprising (1926, 1927, 1930) and the Dersîm Uprising (1937/38), clearly expressed the Kurdish population’s criticism of the politically highly centralized and culturally extremely homogeneous orientation of the Republic of Turkey.
Redrawing the Borders
As part of the War of Independence (1919-1922), which Atatürk was instrumental in commanding and which also saw the significant participation of fighters from Kurdish tribes, the country had prevented the far-reaching British and French plans to divide Anatolia and northern Kurdistan (eastern Turkey) into several small states. At the same time, it had become clear in the course of the heavy fighting that the strength of Ankara’s troops would not be sufficient to repel French and British claims to the geostrategically important and economically valuable territories in Syria and Iraq. Atatürk ultimately took a pragmatic approach and, in return for international recognition of the Republic of Turkey, relinquished the former Ottoman provinces of Aleppo and Mosul, among others.
Since then, one of the main features of Turkish foreign policy has been to question the status quo established in the Treaty of Lausanne at every opportunity on the basis of the Missak-i Milli.
A map of modern Turkey. | yandunts.blogspot.com.
It was during Atatürk’s reign that the first violent border shift was carried out by Turkey. According to a Franco-Turkish agreement from 1921, the province of Sanjak of Alexandretta (today: Hatay) in the far northwest of Syria lay outside Turkish territory. However, Turkey never gave up its claim to the predominantly Arab-inhabited area. At the end of 1936, Atatürk accordingly announced to the Turkish parliament: “[A] major issue that keeps our nation busy day and night is the fate of Iskenderun, Antakya, and their surroundings, of which the Turk is the true owner.” Less than two years later, Turkish troops occupied the area. The annexation of Hatay by Turkey on June 29, 1939, led to the flight of a considerable part of the Arab population living there, while Syria never ceased to regard the province as part of its own territory.
The occupation of Northern Cyprus in 1974 marked the second significant border shift in the region, which was again enforced by the deployment of Turkish troops. In accordance with Article 20 of the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey had given up its claim to Cyprus, which was formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. However, Turkey took advantage of ethnic tensions and a Greek-instigated military coup on the island to occupy a small part of northern Cyprus on July 20, 1974.
Only a few weeks later, Turkish troops expanded their attacks and occupied about 36% of the island. 150,000 of the Greek Cypriots were expelled from the north of the island, while 60,000 Turkish Cypriots were forced to move to the north. To this day, Turkey is the only country that has officially recognized the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Since Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, Turkey has illegally occupied EU territory according to international law.
In the 1990s, the Republic of Turkey’s expansion efforts based on the Misak-i Milli continued. Due to the increasingly brutal war against Turkey’s Kurdish population, the then Turkish President Turgut Özal had come to the conclusion that a political solution to the Kurdish question was in the country’s interest. Supported by Eşref Bitlis, a general in the Turkish gendarmerie, Özal made contact with the chairman of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) Jalal Talabani in northern Iraq. Talabani received a Turkish passport in 1992 so that he could travel between the two countries without any problems. Özal went even further and established communication channels to Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), with Talabani’s help.
One of the main goals of the Turkish president at the time was to negotiate with Talabani and Öcalan about a federal integration of northern Iraq into Turkey. After the death of General Bitlis in a plane crash in February 1993 and the death of Özal from heart failure in April of the same year, the plans for a federal union with northern Iraq were no longer pursued by Turkey.
Erdogan Comes to Power
When Erdogan came to power in 2002, Turkey was not dissuaded from questioning the borders in West Asia with reference to the Misak-i Milli.
In a speech in November 2017, Turkish President Erdogan stated accordingly: “We have also failed to implement the Misak-i Milli adopted at the beginning of the war of liberation. I keep bringing up the developments in Syria and Iraq. And I say: We must take up the Misak-i Milli again. When attacks are launched on our country from these borders, we do not have the luxury of simply saying, please carry on. We are obliged to do everything necessary in the required way. That is what is being done in Idlib. And I hereby declare: This is also what is being done in Efrîn.”
Erdogan’s government partner and chairman of the ultra-nationalist MHP party Devlet Bahçeli reacted in a similar tone to the looming fall of the Assad government in Syria on December 3, 2024: “Not a single child of this fatherland can be found whose heart does not tremble at the word Aleppo. Because Aleppo is completely Turkish and Islamic. [...] Leaving Aleppo behind in a fragmented Syria and handing it over to wild and foreign hands is an unrealistic scenario. And when that moment comes, history will repeat itself, line by line, page by page, the commercial break will end, the trailer will end and geography will return to its origins.”
(Exclusive to NatStrat)
End of Part I of the three-part series. Parts II and III to follow.
