Turkey, like much of the Middle East, is discovering that what goes around comes around.

Not only because it is reaping the fruits of a decades-long flawed policy that was destined to aggravate and escalate deep-seated grievances, discord and conflict rather than fairly and responsibly address social, cultural and political issues that would contribute to enhanced societal cohesion.

But also because it violated international law in terms of basic freedoms, as well as in the case of its ongoing military intervention in Syria, the prohibition on trans-border aggression. The intervention raises the specter of ethnic cleansing with the potential replacement of the local Kurdish population with predominantly Syrian Arabs that have sought refuge in Turkey.

A Silver Lining

Ironically, there is a silver lining in Turkey’s latest offense. It glaringly lays bare the international community’s failure to universally ensure adherence to international law much like nations enforce the law within their own borders. It also spotlights the fact that neglect and abuse of international law allows leaders and countries to ignore options that may produce more sustainable and equitable results even if they are politically inconvenient.

Turkey’s intervention highlights a fundamental conundrum that contributes to an apparent breakdown of established governance and diplomatic norms that manifests itself most aggressively in the Middle East.

The breakdown is magnified in a world that struggles to accommodate the rise of new global and regional powers, including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran in an era dominated by leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms and believe that this gives them a free license.

Identifying the problem is easy, solving it is not, given that the players who need to redress the issue are the violators themselves.

Identifying the problem is easy, solving it is not, given that the players who need to redress the issue are the violators themselves. The violations are almost too many to recount. They include the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the Saudi-UAE led intervention in Yemen, Russian interference in Georgia and Ukraine, China’s cultural genocide of Turkic Muslims in its troubled north-western province of Xinjiang, and Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

Ensuring that nations and leaders respect international law in much the same way that citizens are expected to honor their country’s laws would entail strengthening international law itself as well as its adjudication that would have to involve a re-conceptualization of the United Nations Security Council as well as the International Court of Justice.

Mission Impossible

While that may sound like mission impossible, the lack of enforcement of international law most immediately enabled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to have seemingly miscalculated the fallout of what may prove to be a foolhardy intervention in Syria and neglect alternative options that could have strengthened Turkey’s position without sparking the ire of much of the international community.

Turkey’s denial of Kurdish identity and suppression of Kurdish cultural and political rights  was more likely than not to fuel conflict rather than encourage societal cohesion.

More fundamentally, it legitimizes what could prove to be a strategic error that is rooted in a systematic violation of international law for decades with Turkey’s denial of Kurdish identity and suppression of Kurdish cultural and political rights that was more likely than not to fuel conflict rather than encourage societal cohesion.

The policy midwifed the birth in the 1970s to militant groups like the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which only dropped its demand for Kurdish independence in recent years. 

The group that has waged a low intensity insurgency that has cost tens of thousands of lives has been declared a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.

Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the rights of the Kurds, who are believed to account for up to 20 percent of the country’s population traces its roots to the carving of modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire by its visionary founder, Mustafa Kemal, widely known as Ataturk, Father of the Turks.

It is entrenched in Mr. Kemal’s declaration in a speech in 1923 to celebrate Turkish independence of “how happy is the one who calls himself a Turk,” an effort to forge a national identity for a country that was an ethnic mosaic.

The phrase was incorporated half a century later in Turkey’s student oath and ultimately removed from it in 2013 at a time of peace talks between Turkey and the PKK by then prime minister, now President Erdogan. 

It took the influx of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as the 1991 declaration by the United States, Britain, and France of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq that enabled the emergence of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region to spark debate in Turkey about the Kurdish question and prompt the government to refer to Kurds as Kurds rather than mountain Turks.

Greater Rights, Not Secession

Ironically, Turkey’s enduring refusal to acknowledge Kurdish rights and its long neglect of development of the pre-dominantly Kurdish southeast of the country fueled demands for greater rights rather than majority support for Kurdish secession largely despite the emergence of the PKK. 

Most Turkish Kurds, who could rise to the highest offices in the land as long as they identified as Turks rather than Kurds, resembled Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.

Most Turkish Kurds, who could rise to the highest offices in the land as long as they identified as Turks rather than Kurds, resembled Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, whose options were more limited even if they endorsed the notion of a Jewish state. 

Nonetheless, both minorities favored an independent state for their brethren on the other side of the border but did not want to surrender the opportunities that either Turkey or Israel offered them.

The existence for close to three decades of a Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and a 2017 referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted for Iraqi Kurdish independence, bitterly rejected and ultimately nullified by Iraqi, Turkish, and Iranian opposition, did little to fundamentally change Turkish Kurdish attitudes.

If the referendum briefly soured Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish relations, it failed to undermine the basic understanding underlying a relationship that could have guided Turkey’s approach towards the Kurds in Syria even if dealing with Iraqi Kurds may have been easier because, unlike Turkish Kurds, they had not engaged in political violence against Turkey. 

The notion that there was no alternative to the Turkish intervention in Syria is further countered by the fact that Turkish PKK negotiations that started in 2012 led a year later to a ceasefire and a boosting of efforts to secure a peaceful resolution with the initiation of peace talks.

The talks prompted imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to publish a letter endorsing the ceasefire, the disarmament and withdrawal from Turkey of PKK fighters, and a call for an end to the insurgency. Mr. Ocalan predicted that 2013 would be the year in which the Turkish Kurdish issues would be resolved peacefully.

The PKK’s military leader, Cemil Bayik, told the BBC three years later that “we don’t want to separate from Turkey and set up a state. We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely.”

The talks broke down in 2015 against the backdrop of the Syrian war and the rise as a US ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State of the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Bitterly opposed to the US-YPG alliance, Turkey demanded that the PKK halt its resumption of attacks on Turkish targets and disarm prior to further negotiations.

A Lost Opportunity

Turkey responded to the breakdown and resumption of violence with a brutal crackdown in the southeast of the country and on the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

Nonetheless, in a statement issued from prison earlier this year that envisioned an understanding between Turkey and Syrian Kurdish forces believed to be aligned with the PKK, Mr. Ocalan declared that “we believe, with regard to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the problems in Syria should be resolved within the framework of the unity of Syria, based on constitutional guarantees and local democratic perspectives. In this regard, it should be sensitive to Turkey’s concerns.”

Turkey’s emergence as one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s foremost investors and trading partners in exchange for Iraqi Kurdish acquiescence in Turkish countering the PKK’s presence in the region could have provided inspiration for a US-sponsored safe zone in northern Syria that Washington and Ankara had contemplated.

Turkey’s emergence as one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s foremost investors and trading partners in exchange for Iraqi Kurdish acquiescence in Turkish countering the PKK’s presence in the region could have provided inspiration for a US-sponsored safe zone in northern Syria that Washington and Ankara had contemplated. 

The Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish understanding enabled Turkey to allow an armed Iraqi Kurdish force to transit Turkish territory in 2014 to help prevent the Islamic State from conquering the Syrian city of Kobani.

An internationally sanctioned safe zone would have helped “realign the relationship between Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its Syrian offshoot . . . The safe-zone arrangements . . . envision(ed) drawing down the YPG presence along the border—a good starting point for reining in the PKK, improving U.S. ties with Ankara, and avoiding a potentially destructive Turkish intervention in Syria,” Turkey scholar Sonar Cagaptay suggested in August.

The opportunity that could have created the beginnings of a sustainable solution that would have benefited Turkey as well as the Kurds fell by the wayside with Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria.

Conclusion

In many ways, Mr. Erdogan’s decision to opt for a military solution fits the mold of a critical mass of world leaders who ignore international law, look at the world through a civilizational prism, and often view national borders in relative terms.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin pointed the way with his 2008 intervention in Georgia and the annexation in 2014 of Crimea as well as Russia’s stirring of pro-Russian insurgencies in two regions of Ukraine.

Mr. Erdogan appears to believe that if Mr. Putin can ignore international law, so can he.