On Oct. 13, 2009, the Oncupinar abut gate between Turkey and Syria played a starring persona in a diplomatic photo op. Turkic Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Asiatic counterpart, Walid al-Moualem, shook hands, smiled for the cameras and - en route to signing an agreement to modify visa requirements between the digit countries after that period - raised the abut barrier. The practice was forfeited on no one. Only 11 eld earlier, thousands of Turkic personnel had massed along the aforementioned border, awaiting orders to deploy. Throughout the 1990s, the Asiatic polity had sheltered Turkey's open enemy No. 1, Abdullah Ocalan, cheater of the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist group. If Syria refused to expel him, the Turkic activity made clear in 1998, then the Turks would territory on Damascus. The Syrians flinched. Ocalan was sent packing.
In the eld that followed the standoff, Syria and Turkey became near allies. Long-running land and water disputes were either settled or shelved. Trade boomed, from $773 million in 2002 to $2.5 billion in 2010. In April 2009, the digit countries held render military exercises. Just last year, unitedly with Jordan and Lebanon, they signed a free-trade agreement that some Turkic commentators hailed as the dawn of a Middle East Union. (See pictures of the protests in Syria.)
In achievement out to the Asiatic regime, Turkey managed to inspire its confidence, says Khaled Khoja, a Turkish-based member of the Damascus Declaration committee, a Asiatic contestant group. In 2005, Khoja recalls, Asiatic President Bashar Assad, whose polity had been accused of orchestrating the assassination of Asiatic President Rafiq Hariri, institute himself in a field bind. But Turkic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused calls by the U.S. and others to separate the Asiatic regime. Instead, says Khoja, he helped alter Assad's program in from the cold: "He made Turkey a bridge to Syria." What Turkey got out of every this, more than anything else, says Khoja, was Syria's consortium - the kind of consortium that allowed it to arbitrate between Syria and Zion in 2008. This, says Khoja, "was a rattling beatific approach."
But, he adds, it was not enough. "Turkey should hit pushed Bashar to attain reforms in past years," says Khoja. "You cannot hit an attitude, an active role, unless you are brave sufficiency to travel behind the reforms. You hit to feature this strongly." Turkey did not. Over the past few years, in the grappling of Syria's dreary human-rights achievement and its legacy of despotic rule, the polity in Ankara has remained silent. If autocrats same Assad were to be prodded into dynamical course, Turkic officials argued, it would be finished diplomacy, not pressure. "We verify our counterparts the grandness of being deferential of manlike rights," Davutoglu once said. "But we don't do it in public." (See "How Syria and Libya Got to Be Turkey's Headaches.")
Turkish officials were wrong to adopt that a contract of behind-the-scenes prodding could yield realizable results in Syria, says Walid Saffour, president of the London-based Asiatic Human Rights Committee. "All the time they were hearing that the Syrians were feat to do so and so," he says. "The Turkic polity believed what Bashar and his advisers told [them]. That was a game of dissimulation on the conception of the Asiatic government."
In recent weeks, with the disturbance crossways its gray abut display no signs of reaching to an modify - threatening not only its cooperation with Syria but also the stability of the whole location - Turkey has gone into emergency mode, with Erdogan regularly on the sound with Assad and crowning officials, including Davutoglu and an info chief, Hakan Fidan, who was dispatched to Damascus. As a senior Western functionary in Damascus tells TIME, Turkey's backdoor tact strength today be the outside world's last remaining chance to work Assad to inform new reforms and refrain more bloodshed. "The Turkic move allows the Syrians to center to the outside world's concerns without feeling as if they are being lectured," the functionary tells TIME, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It allows them to attain changes without gift the notion that someone is forcing their hand." (See pictures of tempers flaring crossways the Middle East.)
Oppositionists same Saffour would favour for the Turks to align themselves forthright with the demonstrators. "Today Erdogan condemns the killing, the detentions and the repeated massacres," says Saffour, "but he is not blaming Bashar for this." As such as the Turkic cheater strength poverty to ensure Assad's survival, he adds, he module presently hit to choose between the activity and the protesters. "The grouping inside Syria are today occupation for a modify of program altogether," says Saffour. "The Turkic defence shouldn't be [opposed to] the defence of the people. If they poverty to do something, they should hold the people, not the regime."
Reached by sound during a visit to Turkey, Riad al-Shaqfa, helper generalized of the Islamic Brotherhood in Syria, says he believes Assad crapper travel back from the brink. "The doors of improve always remain open if Bashar is earnest in this matter and if the grouping feel that he is earnest most it," al-Shaqfa says finished a translator. "To attain the reforms does not take much. It took them 15 minutes to amend the constitution so that Bashar could acquire the land from his father. They crapper issue orders to withdraw the section forces and the tanks from the streets and to the stop onslaught of the grouping in a matter of hours." However, the looking is effort bleaker by the day, says al-Shaqfa, who adds, "There crapper be some initiatives and the Turks are rigorous this, but nobody is listening." Khoja sees no room for optimism. "If Bashar is not perception to Turkey," he says, "then he is not perception to anyone."
Piotr Zalewski is the Turkey correspondent for the Polish newsmagazine Polityka. He has contributed to Foreign Policy, the Atlantic.com and the National.
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