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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 30-Sep-2014
30-Sep-14 World View -- Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria

Web Log - September, 2014

30-Sep-14 World View -- Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria

Hong Kong police back off as demonstrations continue

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Hong Kong police back off as demonstrations continue
Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria

Hong Kong police back off as demonstrations continue

Riot police use pepper spray in Hong Kong on Sunday (Slate)

Riot police use pepper spray in Hong Kong on Sunday (Slate)

The massive protests in Hong Kong have caught the world's attention, and the world is waiting breathlessly to see how long China's government in Beijing is going to put up with being humiliated by the protests.

Hong Kong has already been forced to cancel a big, glorious fireworks celebration on Wednesday, October 1, China's National Day, and the 65th anniversary of China's communist revolution. Instead, the protests will be bigger than ever on Wednesday and Thursday, since those are two public holidays.

For Beijing, the hopeful outcome is that the protests will just die off of their own accord. That's probably why the HK police, who fired teargas and rubber bullets at protesters on Sunday evening, have backed off on Monday and allowed the protests to continue. The hopeful scenario is that the protesters will tire of protesting, and just go home.

Beijing's nightmare scenario is that the protests will grow, will continue to paralyze Hong Kong, and will continue to humiliate Beijing.

But the humiliation could be a lot worse if the rumors are true that China is considering use of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to break up the protests. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre shocked the world, and China has spent the last 25 years doing everything it can to try to get everyone to forget it ever happened, going so far as to make it a criminal offense for a Chinese citizen on the mainland to even talk about it. A new 2015 "Hong Kong massacre," in the world of Twitter and Facebook, would make both massacres world wide news again, completely reversing Xi Jinping's strategy of presenting a more positive Chinese face.

Nonetheless, nobody serious believes that Beijing is going to grant to Hong Kong the democratic freedoms that were promised in 1997, when Britain turned HK over to China. China has no pleasant choices in this situations, and most of the world really do not expect the demonstrations to end, except in new violence. Bloomberg and Global Times (Beijing)

Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria

Ever since the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011, Syrian refugees poured across the border into Turkey. Despite international pressure, Turkey refused to consider any military action in Syria, such as providing a refugee buffer zone within Syria, and more recently refused to participate in the American-led war against the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS).

But now the crisis in Kobani, Syria, on the border with Turkey, is presenting an existential threat to Turkey, and Turkish officials are now talking about both a buffer zone and joining the anti-ISIS coalition.

There have been two major reasons why Turkey has eschewed any military intervention in Syria since 2011:

Turkish officials, like American officials, were in a state of denial, expecting Syria's president Bashar al-Assad to be forced out of office within weeks, or at most a few months. This fantasy persisted even when the civil war morphed into a proxy war, with Russia supplying heavy weapons to al-Assad, and al-Assad's actions becoming increasingly genocidal.

Turkey feared that any military intervention against al-Assad would end up helping the Syrian Kurds. Turkey had recently fought its own civil war with the Kurds in Turkey, and there was no desire to help the Kurds in Syria.

But the crisis in Kobani, in Syria on the border with Turkey, has been so bad that Turkey is now forced to reassess its decisions.

Kobani has been a Kurdish stronghold in Syria. ISIS fighters have been advancing on Kobani in recent weeks, despite the fact that coalition bombers tried to stop them. But the coalition bombings have been a failure, and it's now expected that Kobani will fall to ISIS within the next couple of days.

The effect on Turkey has been nothing short of explosive. During the last two weeks, more than 160,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria have poured across the border into Turkey.

Back in 2011, when refugees started crossing into Turkey, Turkish officials estimated that they would be able to handle about 100,000 refugees, and after that there would be major problems. Well, as of last month over 1.2 million Syrian refugees have crossed into Turkey, and now 160,000 more refugees have joined them in the last few days.

In 2011, when there were only tens of thousands of refugees, then were kept in refugee camps near the border. But now these 1.5 million refugees have spread across Turkey, and are populating many cities and villages.

The effects have been mixed. Most of the refugees speak only Arabic, so there's a language problem with locals who speak only Turkish. In some villages they're helped and supported, but in other villages they're threatened, or even forced into slavery or human trafficking.

The Kobani crisis has been be a major shock to Turkish officials, who now realize that they have to take some military steps whether they like it or not. Turkey has already announced that it's reevaluating its decision to join the anti-ISIS coalition, and Turkey's foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu said on Monday that "A safe zone inside Syria is essential to make life easier for the Syrian refugees." Turkish tanks have already taken up positions facing Syria. Spiegel and Journal of Turkish Weekly and Daily Sabah (Ankara)

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 30-Sep-14 World View -- Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (30-Sep-2014) Permanent Link
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Hong Kong police back off as demonstrations continue

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30-Sep-14 World View -- Kobani crisis causes Turkey to reverse policy on Syria