Relations between Turkey and Syria in the 1980's and 1990's: Political Islam, Muslim Brotherhood and Intelligence Wars/1980 ve 1990'larda Turkiye ve Suriye arasindaki Iliskiler: Siyasi Islam, Musluman Kardesler ve Istihbarat Savaslari.

• Author: Ozkan, Behlul
• Position: Report

Turkey's post-2011 Syria policy has been the most ambitious as well as the riskiest foreign policy gambit in the history of the Republic. Launched amid confident predictions that the Assad regime would crumble within months or even weeks, Turkey's Syria adventure is now universally recognized as a drastic setback for the foreign policymakers of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). (1) In a moment of candor, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus admitted that many of Turkey's current problems are the result of the situation in Syria and the AKP's Syria policy. (2) Ankara's support for the Syrian rebels has set off a kind of chain reaction, causing the Syrian army to withdraw from much of the Turkish border and thus creating a power vacuum in northern Syria. This vacuum has been filled by the PYD (the Syrian branch of the PKK, with which Ankara has been fighting for more than 30 years), which has claimed autonomy in those regions. In recent years, Syria linked terror attacks have become a major security threat to Turkey, especially to big cities such as Ankara and Istanbul. In addition, there are now more than 3 million refugees of the Syrian war living in Turkey; whether they will return to Syria, and how to achieve the social, cultural, and economic integration of those who remain in Turkey, are quite pressing questions for the AKP government.

The core ideological dynamic underlying the AKP's post-2011 Syria policy has been political Islam. In the spring of 2011, when the first protests broke out against the Syrian regime, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood started to organize meetings in Turkey. Syrian-born businessman Ghazwan al-Masri, a prominent name in Turkey's Independent Industrialists and Businessmen Association (MUSIAD) and a close associate of Erdogan, played an important role in organizing these meetings. (3) Indignant at the AKP government's close ties to the Brotherhood, Syria issued the following warning to Turkey via its ambassador in Ankara: "For us, the Muslim Brotherhood is like the PKK is for Turkey." (4) Responding

to the holding of a press conference in Istanbul by Riad al-Shaqfa, a key figure in the Brotherhood and took part in the 1982 Hama Uprising, and its broadcasting by al-Jazeera, the Syrian ambassador stated, "You should not give a platform to people with blood on their hands." According to the ambassador, Erdogan had introduced Bashar Al-Assad and Al-Masri to each other in 2009, asking Assad to be of assistance to Al-Masri in Syria. But Damascus was uncomfortable with Al-Masri's financing of anti-Assad meetings. (5)

After Turkey had created an anti-Assad front in Syria following the Arab Uprisings, President Assad admitted that the AKP government's enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood predated 2011 by many years, stating:

From our earliest meetings on, he [Erdogan] was always very excited about the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Syria. He was so interested in the Brotherhood that he gave less priority to the improvement of Turkish-Syrian relations than he did to issues regarding the Brotherhood. This instinct to assist and protect the Brotherhood became the real starting-point, the fulcrum, of Erdogan's Syria policy. (6) The aim of this study is to examine how continuities and discontinuities over a period of nearly half a century have shaped the AKP government's relationship with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and the Assad regime. Turkish Islamists' interest in Syria and the Brotherhood dates back to before 1970, the year when Erbakan founded the Milli Nizam Partisi (National Order Party). Yet almost no academic studies have been done on this topic; the present article therefore aims to fill the existing gap. Moreover, contrary to what some scholars of Islamism claim, the relationship between the political establishment and political Islam during the Cold War era in NATO member Turkey was never articulated in terms of absolute polarities such as the center and the periphery or Kemalism and Islamism. (7) As the struggle against the communism constituted the ideological backbone of Cold War-era Turkey, a cooperative partnership was formed between political Islam, on the one hand, and the Turkish state and the political establishment on the other. These dynamics were equally prevalent in the complex web of interrelations among Turkey, Syria, Turkish Islamists, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. A close scrutiny of this historical process will explain what would otherwise seem like a bizarre turn of events: prior to 2011, Erdogan - who was well aware of the 1982 Hama Uprising-could still call Bashar Assad (the son and successor to the elder Assad, who had bloodily suppressed the massacre) his 'brother', only to pronounce him a 'dictator' and a 'murderer' just a few months later. Such a drastic reversal in such a short space of time is a rarity in international relations.

In light of the historical background between Turkey and Syria, it is surely no coincidence that a Syrian-born businessman like Ghazwan al-Masri should assume important duties in MUSIAD and-starting in the spring of 2011- should organize the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Assad regime. Nor is it a coincidence that another Syrian-born individual, Halit Hoca, whose family fled to Turkey due to their membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, should become president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces with the AKP's support. (8) The embrace of principles like Arab nationalism, socialism, and secularism by the Ba'ath regime which has been in power in Syria since 1963 has given it a unique importance for Islamists in Turkey in terms of their outlook on the Middle East and their efforts to interpret the region. In Islamist discourse, the Ba'ath regime in Syria, just like the Kemalists in Turkey and the Arab nationalist regimes of Nasser, Gaddafi, Bourguiba, Saddam, and Arafat in the Middle East, is one of the greatest obstacles to the unification of the Muslim world as an ummah. Moreover, from the 1970s onward, Islamists began to bring a sectarian approach to their understanding of Syria, viewing the Assad regime as an instance of the tyranny of Syria's Alawite minority over its Sunni majority. This historical legacy inevitably colored the AKP's Syria policy following the Arab Uprisings. In 2011, AKP Deputy Chairman Huseyin Celik stated, "There are genetic ties between the CHP and Ba'athist regimes in Arab countries. The CHP is Turkey's Ba'ath party." In addition, making allusions to CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu's status as a member of Turkey's Alevi community (who share some doctrinal similarities with, yet are still distinct from, Syrian Alawites), Celik asked, "Why do you come to the defense of the Ba'athist regime in Syria? Some unflattering reasons come to mind, to be honest. The Baathist regime in Syria relies on its Alawite base of support, which is 15% of Syria's population. Is this why Mr. Kilicdaroglu takes such an interest in Syria - out of a feeling of sectarian solidarity?" (9) Similarly, in 2012, then-foreign minister Davutoglu, addressing the CHP in Parliament, said, "Those who favor the Baathist way of politics cannot understand us"; likewise, in 2014, he stated, "all their [i.e. the CHP's] efforts have been to preserve the Syrian regime and Assad. The mentality is exactly the same. Assad is the Arab Ba'ath, the CHP is the Turkish Ba'ath, and the HDP is the Kurdish Baath."(10)Around the same time, then-prime minister Erdogan put it even more bluntly: "Honorable Mr. Kilicdaroglu, you are a Baathist." (11) Such remarks show the ideological influence of Turkey's Islamists, whose the Cold War-era outlook was both sectarian and polarizing, making them approach Syria through the lens of the struggle against communism and see the Muslim Brotherhood as the sole legitimate alternative to the Assad regime.

Turkish Islamists' Views on Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood During the Cold War

From the second half of the 1940s-when the Muslim Brotherhood started to become politically influential in Egypt and Syria - until the mid-1960s, relations between the Brotherhood and Islamists in Turkey were close to non-existent. Cevat Rifat Atilhan, a founder of a number of Islamically-oriented but politically ineffectual parties that sprang up after 1945, and later a writer for Islamist journals such as Buyuk Dogu and Sebilurresad, argued that Turks and Arabs ought to be part of a broader Islamic Union. (12) But these calls for unity fell on deaf ears, both in Turkey and throughout the Middle East. However, in 1952 and 1953, Sebilurresad published interviews with Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan Ismail al-Hudaybi, conducted by Turkish journalists who had traveled to Egypt in order to observe the Egyptian revolution first hand. Al-Hudaybi stated that he was following developments in Turkey closely and that members of the Brotherhood had visited Istanbul: "The problem cannot be solved merely through having the prayer-call in Arabic or having imam hatip schools. The Turkish government should, in a single stroke, accept Islam as the social order, make religious education mandatory, and recognize the Qur'an as the supreme law. Until you do this, you cannot make any progress." (13) Significantly, Al-Hudaybi mentioned that the Muslim Brotherhood had a presence in many countries but did not yet have a branch in Turkey. Nonetheless, Hudeybi optimistically predicted that "in the near future," he and his associates "would see much closer ties" with the Turkish society; it would be a "felicitous time" for them. (14)And indeed, starting in the 1960s, ties between the Brotherhood (not only in Egypt but also in Syria) and the Islamist movement in Turkey would develop rapidly.

The first half of the 1960s ushered in a 'golden age' of translation for Turkish Islamism, with the works of numerous Middle Eastern Islamists (especially from Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan) being translated into...