There is now, in much of Western – including the German – mass media, a discourse evolving that, somehow, the war in Syria and refugee flows are also a responsibility of Turkey. Indeed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks neither as a winner nor as a humanist in this frustrating chain of events.
His behavior borders, in many regards, on the criminal. His attitude towards the Kurds was and is not only intolerant but eventually also ridiculous. Turkey’s support for the fundamentalist Al Nusra Front was even more contradictory, senseless and miscalculated than the U.S.’s anti-Soviet support for the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan had been in the 1980s.
But what would have happened had Erdogan behaved “wiser”?
Would Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad or Vladimir Putin and their allies in Iran and elsewhere have changed their aims, behavior or methods in Syria, if only Turkey had followed different policies?
Are Erdogan’s many failures and deficiencies really crucial determinants of how the Syrian story has developed and currently evolves?
Did Erdogan make the Syrians flee their homeland?
Erdogan is neither a democrat nor a pacifist and has made numerous mistakes with his interventions in the conflict by, above all, fanning it with his support of the Al Nusra Front.
But, at the end of the day, he has managed to become only a secondary actor in Syria – much as the inappropriately moralistic West which also tried to intervene, but with no avail. Ankara has as spectacularly failed as Washington and Brussels have in containing the continuing carnage in Syria.
Concerning the indirect co-financing of the Syrian war via large payments to Moscow for monthly energy imports from Siberia, the EU is rather more involved in the budgetary enabling of the Syrian calamity than Turkey. No lessons to be taught here to Turkey from Germany, Austria, or other Western countries.
To connect this – otherwise despicable autocrat – somehow to the tragedy that has now for years been evolving in Syria is a case of cognitive dissonance.
Given the enormous intake of refugees from Syria that Turkey has performed by now, smart European commentators from countries that have provided shelter for far fewer displaced people from Syria may as well shut up, for the time being.
Until their homelands have shouldered as much weight as Turkey has, in this trans-regional catastrophe, the thinly disguised double standards that many “ethical” observers eagerly apply to Ankara’s wanting performance and moral failures regarding Syria will be counter-productive to solving the crisis.
