Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his associates often like to present Turkey as an anti-colonial hero. While Erdoğan, a teetotaling Islamist, despises Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an alcoholic secularist, he often cites Atatürk’s experience preventing the colonial division of Anatolia as proof that Turkey is a bulwark against colonialism.
İlnur Çevik, a prominent newspaper editor and columnist, for example, wrote a decade ago against the backdrop of Erdoğan’s diplomatic push into Africa: “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s liberation movement in Anatolia in the twentieth century was the source of inspiration for Africans against the colonialists and oppressors.”
Abdülkadir Özkan, a former advisor to Erdoğan, made a similar case in a 2012 column in the Islamist daily, Millî Gazete. After the Syrian civil war erupted, he wrote, “Let us state immediately that all developments are related to imperialist interests and Israel’s security.” Turkey, on the other hand, had pure, anti-imperialist motives.
The Turkish Army has not only occupied Cyprus for more than a half century, but actively exploits its resources.
Of course, the notion that Turkey is anti-imperialist is farcical. The Turkish Army has not only occupied Cyprus for more than a half century, but actively exploits its resources, be they agriculture, fish, or gas. Turkey owes the Cypriot government more than $100 billion for resource theft, accrued interest, and reparations based on Turkey denying the opportunity for development. Nor is Cyprus alone: Turkey today seeks to steal both Libyan and Somali offshore resources.
Erdoğan’s regime has published irredentist maps depicting all of Cyprus and Armenia, Crete and northern Grece, and parts of Bulgaria, Syria, and Iraq as part of Turkey. Rejection of Turkey living within its own borders underlays Erdoğan’s frequent rhetoric about revising the Lausanne Treaty. Neo-Ottomanism, meanwhile, seeks at its core to reverse the national borders that arose from victorious liberation movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Erdoğan apologists in Washington think tanks and academe dismiss his rhetoric as words that are meant more to assuage a nationalist base than be a literal call for colonization. Turkey’s establishment of facts on the ground, though, suggest Erdoğan’s bombast provides a window into his real ambition. Turkey maintains dozens of bases across northern Iraq. Its forces’ presence in Bashiqa has more to do with its irredentist claims toward the former Mosul Vilayat than with any security need. But nowhere is Turkey’s colonial intent greater than in Syria. Turkey maintains domestic post offices, for example, in Al-Bab, Jarabulus, Afrin, Azaz, and Tal Abyad. At best, Erdoğan sees Syria as a proxy like northern Cyprus and the Barzani-held areas of Iraqi Kurdistan; at worst, Turkey sees it as its future Anschluss.
Turkish diplomats and Erdoğan’s court sycophants inside the Turkish government might react with umbrage, but Syrians know better. Turkey’s imperial encroachment upon Syria predates Erdoğan and his efforts to use the promise of imperial grandeur to distract from his family’s embezzlement and his regime’s financial mismanagement. Indeed, it dates to the very foundation of Turkey.
Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Syria formed from the old Ottoman vilayets of Damascus and Aleppo. France had occupied a sanjak (district) of the Alexandretta just weeks after the end of World War I. For France, it was a land grab as the League of Nations prepared to award mandates. From 1921 to 1937, the Sanjak of Alexandretta was autonomous, separate from the rest of Syria much like Lebanon.
As the French mandate neared expiration, Atatürk began advocating for Alexandretta to join Turkey. The population had little interest in Turkey. As Armenians and Arabs, most residents sought either independence or formal incorporation into Syria. In essence, Atatürk, who built his legitimacy upon expelling foreign powers from Anatolia, did the opposite, seeking to establish through military force an unjust claim.
When fact could not support his claims, Atatürk turned to fantasy. He coined the term “Hatay” for the region, retroactively asserting a claim that its residents were descendants of the Hittites. After extensive negotiations, the League of Nations blessed the creation in September 1938 of the State of Hatay, independent but linked to Syria for foreign policy.
[Atatürk] coined the term “Hatay” for the region, retroactively asserting a claim that its residents were descendants of the Hittites.
One year later, the dream of independence ended. The Turkish government sent tens of thousands of Turks into Hatay ahead of a referendum on continued statehood; they voted to join Turkey. France, meanwhile, cynically acquiesced to Turkey’s imperial land grab to keep Turkey from allying itself with Nazi Germany as World War II loomed. As with all appeasement of Turkey, it failed: Turkey remained officially neutral but supplied the Nazi military machine with chromite that Berlin needed for aircraft engines and armored vehicles.
Today, Erdoğan’s hypocrisy is in overdrive, as he demands that Somaliland remain in Somalia out of supposed respect for sovereignty, even as he pretends Turkey’s annexation of a territory that was always Syrian, if not independent, is legitimate.
Erdoğan also pretends to be an ally of Syria, protecting its sovereignty against devolved power in Kurdish-populated regions or exaggerated threats from Israel. His hypocrisy is stunning. While Israel controls a 155-square mile buffer zone in southern Syria, Turkey’s occupation of Hatay represents an area more than thirteen times larger. Put simply, Turkey is the largest occupying power in Syria.
If Turkey truly stands against imperialism, perhaps it should engage in imperialism. Likewise, if interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa truly stands for Syria’s sovereignty, he should not remain silent regarding Turkey’s occupation. Syrians should demand nothing less than the complete withdrawal of Turkey and the end to longest occupation in the Middle East.
