Canada and NATO need to stand up against Turkey
By Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
While the world is focused on the war between Russia and Ukraine, another conflict has been reignited on the southern borders of Russia, one that seems to have escaped our collective attention.
Like the Ukraine war, this conflict, too, originates in the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics — this time, the hostility is between Christian Armenia and Islamic Azerbaijan and centres around the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorna-Karabakh that is cut off from the rest of Armenia.
Access for the Christian population of Nagorno-Karabakh (known as Artsakh by Armenia) with the rest of Armenia is through Azerbaijan, backed by NATO member Turkey which considers Azeris an extension of Turkish identity.
Before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Nagorna-Karabakh was part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic. Still, as the USSR broke up from the Baltic Sea republics to the southern Caspian Sea, administrative boundaries gave way to ethnic and linguistic frontiers; the Armenians wanted to be with the new Armenian Republic, not with their Azeri neighbours who were Muslim and Turkish ancestry. This sparked the movement in the region to join Armenia.
As a result, Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war over Nagorno-Karabakh, which ended inconclusively in 1994, placing Nagorno-Karabakh as a de-facto protectorate of Armenia.
Periodic clashes had persisted since then, when Azerbaijan invested its growing oil wealth into a modern military. In 2020, a second all-out war erupted for six weeks, leaving Azerbaijan in control of most of the enclave.
To demonstrate its pan-Islamic view of the world, Pakistan too sent its troops to fight alongside the Azeris and Turks, some of whom see the world through pan-Turanianism, an ideology that aims at creating a Turkic superstate stretching from the Balkans in Europe, eastwards across Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia up to and including northwest China. (Trust the Pakistanis to be where they are not even on the invitation list).
On the Armenian side, the biggest worry is what’ll happen to the 120,000 residents of Artsakh — as Armenia calls Nagorno-Karabakh — if the blockade continues. At the United Nations Security Council, France on Wednesday called on Azerbaijan to reopen the corridor.
“It’s like West Berlin,” Ruben Vardanyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire and philanthropist recently appointed state minister by the self-proclaimed government of Artsakh, tells Ian Bremmer of GZero.
In an interview, Vardanyan says, Azerbaijan can’t have it both ways: “If you want us to be citizens, you must let us live a normal life. We need to find a way to live together like neighbours, not together from (the same) country, but (as) neighbours who need to accept each other, and not hate each other, and not kill each other,” he says. “We will not live together like one state, but we can live together in one region because we’ve been living close to each other (for) hundreds of years.”
They are easier said than done. The conflict on the Caspian Sea cannot be resolved unless Turkey comes to terms with its status as just an ordinary member of NATO; it should not be allowed to blackmail or bully its neighbours and Kurdish minority and lift its veto on Sweden and Finland joining NATO.
A NATO without Turkey would be a far better fit for the Western alliance than keeping the likes of an Islamist such as Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an association committed to liberal secular democracy that lives for the future of humanity rather than a Caliph who has wet dreams of his troops on the Gates of Vienna from where they were driven off on 9/11 in the year 1683.
As Kevin Williamson wrote in the National Review: “It’s time to boot Turkey from NATO.”
Making little effort to hide his frustrations with the wannabe Ottoman Caliph, Williamson wrote:”NATO is not only a military alliance. It is also a community of liberal-democratic values — which Turkey rejects with increasing vigour and openness. The West once hoped — naively, as it turns out — that Erdogan would carry the banners of secularism, democracy, and liberty for the Turkish people. Still, he has led Turkey in the opposite direction: toward Islamist politics, authoritarianism, and tyranny. It is time to expel Turkey from NATO.”
Elsewhere, the Foreign Editor of the U.K. Guardian, Simon Tisdall, opined two years ago that “Erdoğan is both a bully and a menace. Europe ignores him at its peril.” Comparing Europe’s harsh criticism of Belarus’ Lukashenko, the Guardian writer shamed the EU for “its reluctance to openly denounce the latest machinations in the eastern Mediterranean of what it referred to as the “elective dictatorship … of Turkey’s long-entrenched leader.”
Unless the rest of NATO, including Canada, puts its foot down, Erdogan is on his way to reintroducing the Ottoman Caliphate that colonized not just Eastern Europe but much of the Arab World for over 600 years.
Suppose we do not stand up for Armenia and warn Turkey to back off from using Azerbaijan as its Central Asian goon squad wrapped in Islamism. In that case, we risk a war in which Pakistan will be selling its nukes to offset its derelict financial status.