Why Is Turkey Going Out Of It's Way To Irk Ally Syria?

Assad, left, shaking Erdogan’s hand during 

a meeting in 2009.

Despite the fact that Turkey and Syria are supposed to be allies, Turkey is hosting the people who are calling on President Bashar Assad to resign:

Members of Syria's exiled opposition on Thursday called on President Bashar Assad to resign and hand over power to his vice president until a council is formed to transition the government to democracy.

Opposition leaders have been meeting for the past two days in Antalya, Turkey, to support the anti-government uprising in Syria. At the end of the conference Thursday, they issued their demands.

“The delegates have committed to the demands of the Syrian people to bring down the regime and support the people's revolution for freedom and dignity,” said the statement issued by 300 pro-democracy activists and opposition leaders.

Turkey may be friendly with Syria, but they are also pragmatic. The protests in Syria may not spread into Turkey, but as a result of the instability in Syria--something else may spread into Turkey: refugees. The potential Syrian refugee problem for Turkey was already being discussed in April.

Haaretz reports that last month, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was addressing the problem of the violence in Syria:

To judge from recent comments, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees unrest in Egypt and Syria as sharing a common thread. "[Syrian President Bashar] Assad must not reject his nation's demands for peace and democracy," he said in an interview with the American journalist, Charlie Rose, on PBS. Those are more or less the same words he used some two months ago when he proposed to then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak "to respond to the demands of his nation and to carry out immediate reforms."

And that brought angry words from Syria:

But what annoyed the Syrians was Erdogan's remarks in Turkey against the use of force and the fear of "a new Halabja and Hama," referring to the use of chemical weapons by Iraq against the Kurds, and the massacre of 10,000 residents of Hama in 1982 by Assad's father, Hafez Assad.

The Syrian newspaper Al-Wattan, which is owned by Rami Makhlouf, Bashar Assad's cousin and the richest man in the country, launched an unprecedented attack against the Turkish declarations.

This all raises problems for Turkey, whose volume of trade with Syria stands at about $2 billion--which makes it kind of odd that recently Mohammed Riad Shafeka, representative of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood visited Istanbul where he told the Turkish media that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was the moving force behind the protests in Syria.

Allowing Shafeka into Turkey did not please Syria either.

Which brings us to why Turkey is doing thinks that it knows will irk Syria. According to the end of the Haaretz article:

Turkey is concerned both by the possibility that the Assad regime will fall and by the fact that it does not see who could possibly replace it. Meanwhile it seems that Erdogan and his regime are mainly worried that the all-embracing foreign policy started by his government could crash and have an effect on the results of the elections to be held on June 12.

This policy, which has the slogan "Zero problems with all neighbors," is now coming up against the unexpected reality in which Turkey, despite all its efforts, finds itself floating on stormy waters, without being able to influence the course of events, and being seen as a supporter of the Assad dictatorship.

The influx of Syrian refugees may be the least of Erdogan's problems

Technorati Tag: Turkey and Syria and Assad and Erdogan.