By Reza Akhlaghi
This month, the Turkish parliament approved a bill to clear more than 600,000 landmines along the Turkish-Syrian border that were planted in the 1950s to keep Kurdish separatists harbored by Syria from infiltrating into Turkish territory.
The bill was harshly criticized by Turkey’s opposition parties, which said it undermined Turkey’s national security. The cleaning project, which could also be opened to bidding from foreign companies, could cost as much as half a billion US dollars. Turkey claims that it is mandated to clear them by its signing of the 2003 Ottawa Treaty, which calls for a ban on anti-personnel landmines, but the reality is that the move is part of a strategic overhaul of the country’s standing in the Muslim world.
Turkey’s openness to Syria does not end with landmine cleanups. In late April, for the first time, Turkish and Syrian forces conducted joint military operations along the same mine-laden borders. Israel, unsurprisingly, frowned on the joint exercise and thought it might be a harbinger of things to come, especially given Tel Aviv’s close relations with Turkey, its only ally in the Muslim world. But the Turkish leadership is not naive enough to take sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict to the detriment of its strategic standing in a region that is being shaped by two wars and a rising Iran.
Turkey’s gradual about-face regarding its strategic position vis-a-vis the Muslim world can be seen as part of a soul-searching exercise that began with the rise of Islamists in the government in the early 1990s and the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. This soul-searching was born partly out of frustration with the country’s fiercely secular elite, who for decades tried to integrate Turkey into the European family of nations and change the country’s demography and cultural attitudes toward religion and its role in politics.
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