Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Recep Tayyip Erdogan on January 3, 2012. AFP PHOTO/ADEM ALTAN
Amid continuing unrest at home on Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with senior officials from Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement ruling the Gaza Strip, including its exiled leader Khaled Meshaal and Gaza’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, in Ankara. Foremost on the agenda was the crisis in Syria, conditions in blockaded Gaza, and Erdogan’s controversial planned visit to the region.
Turkish officials insist such a visit is aimed at facilitating Hamas’ reconciliation with the Fatah-controlled West Bank, but many observers fear it will have the opposite effect. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already denounced any Turkish visit to Gaza as detrimental to reconciliation efforts - a criticism echoed by the United States. When the visit was first announced in May, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry requested that Erdogan forestall the trip to avoid endangering both Palestinian reconciliation efforts, and a U.S.-brokered normalization process with Israel. Nonetheless, Erdogan, eager to position Ankara as a regional heavyweight capable of mediating between Hamas and Fatah, has announced he will maintain the visit, though no dates have been confirmed. Beyond the prime minister’s purported diplomatic ambitions, however, may lie a symbolic attempt to prop up waning Turkish support for Erdogan’s reconciliation with Israel via solidarity with Palestine’s Islamist leadership — starting with Tuesday’s meeting.
The timing of Erdogan’s face-to-face with Hamas is curious, coinciding as it does with the spread of a popular anti-government movement across Turkey. Granted, it may be an indirect way to create some distance from an at-times contentious alliance; many Turkish protesters have denounced the prime minister as an “American stooge” and as Obama’s puppet. (Note that both the United States and Israel view Hamas as a terrorist organization). That said, since unrest began in Istanbul in late May — before then spreading throughout the country — Erdogan has taken an antagonistic stance to the popular movement by dismissing protestors’ claims and ordering security crackdowns. Even without the fraught timing, Erdogan’s rapprochement with Hamas would have been a “high-stakes venture for Ankara” to prove it can successfully navigate the Hamas-Fatah tensions, and on a broader level, actively contribute to easing a Palestine-Israeli stalemate. But amidst the most potent challenge to Erdogan’s rule since he took office ten years ago, it appears to bring mostly risk, and little gain.
Especially since there’s little chance that Erdogan’s efforts to play peacemaker will work — not with two of the three involved parties (Fatah and Israel) giving him the cold shoulder. And as Erdogan’s international stature flails over continued unrest at home, he can ill afford to be seen as a meddler in a tenuous regional peace. The brash leader is already on the rocks with the E.U. Parliament, not to mention Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, who noted, “the initial extremely heavy-handed response to the protests is still a major part of the problem.” What’s more, if the Turkish leader extends his regional gamble with a trip to Gaza, he risks further cooling relations with Ankara’s most important ally, the United States, which are already being tested by the mass unrest in Turkey. For now, the only clear winner to emerge is Hamas, whose quest for regional credibility will be well served by the meeting with Erdogan and his future Gaza visit. In the meantime, as Erdogan weighs his next regional moves, his domestic woes show no sign of abating.
