The BBC reports this morning that Sudan’s odious president Omar al-Bashir has suddenly discovered some pressing business at home that will prevent him from attending this week’s Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) summit in Turkey.
Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the ongoing war in Darfur, had earlier been expected to attend. This was a diplomatic problem for Turkey’s government, run by the pro-Islam AK Party. Partly because it wants to restore Turkey’s old Ottoman-era role of leadership in the Islamic world, partly because Turkey has a lot of important interests in the Middle East, partly because of Islamic populism, partly because of a wave of anti-American sentiment fueled by the war in Iraq and American support for Israel, and partly because Europe seems to be cooling on Turkey’s bid for membership in the EU, Turkey’s foreign policy has been looking East more than West from time to time lately. Turkey has improved relations with both Syria and Iran. It has refused to join western efforts to isolate Hamas. It canceled Israeli participation in a military exercise. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last winter, Turkey’s prime minister made headlines by denouncing Israel in a meeting with Shimon Peres. Turkey has also been strengthening its ties with Russia.
Against this background, welcoming a man widely denounced in the West as a genocidal war criminal would have created some problems for Turkey. On the other hand, Sudan is a member of the Organization of Islamic Countries; was Turkey going to tell this organization who it could and could not invite to its events? Without a public fuss, Turkey apparently worked behind the scenes to help President Bashir understand that he had some important political business at home and that attending the OIC summit just wasn’t going to happen this year.
This was, characteristically, a cautious and thoughtful move by the Turks. Critics of Turkish foreign policy under the AK government sometimes overlook its record of accomplishment. On two extremely sensitive issues — relations with the Kurdish region of Iraq and the nation of Armenia — Turkey has been both pragmatic and far-sighted. It has built economic relations with Iraqi Kurds and worked with them to isolate the Kurdish terrorist groups still bent on armed struggle in Turkey itself. And in a historic move, Turkey and Armenia recently established normal diplomatic relations. Given both the past relations between Turks and Armenians and the present stand off between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this wasn’t easy. Some of Turkey’s high profile moves that alarm its western friends need to be seen as part of the price being paid for accomplishments like these.
If Germany is our biggest and richest NATO ally, and Britain and Canada are our two closest ones, Turkey may be, politically speaking, the most important. As a predominantly Muslim country ruled by a party that is committed to reconciling Islamic belief with democratic practice, and as a country that straddles the divide between Europe and the Middle East, the decisions that Turks make will do much to shape the world for the rest of us.
I’m glad this morning that so many of Turkey’s decisions are good ones; Americans and Europeans need to give Turkey more credit for what it gets right.
I plan to visit Ankara in the next few weeks; I’ll be blogging from Turkey, sharing my impressions about a country that Americans need to understand better and value more.