The Turkish Left’s love for Assad Anti-imperialists have only empowered Erdoğan

For these strands of the Left, anti-regime activities in Syria were an imperialist ploy. After the rebels moved their command centre from Turkey to Damascus in 2012, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times claimed that the CIA and US special operations units were training Syrian rebels in Turkey and Jordan, months before Barack Obama had approved sending arms. These reports sufficed to convince the Turkish Left that the Syrian suffering was manufactured in Western capitals and disseminated by the Western press to convince the world to intervene in the civil war. Instead of sharing the pain of those who suffered unspeakable tortures at Sednaya Prison — the “Human Slaughterhouse” — they tried to invalidate and belittle their experience. Instead of showing empathy, they came up with various conspiracy theories about how Turkish secularism would take a hit if those tortured by the Syrian regime could achieve some justice in Damascus.

This mindset expressed itself in various ways. Take the Orhan Pamuk affair. In 2012, a year into the civil war, the French daily Libération published a letter addressed to Assad and signed by various international writers including Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Laureate in literature. They demanded Assad’s resignation, warning him that “other than resignation, there will be just one road that remains and that will be a death similar to what happened to Saddam or Gaddafi. Or life imprisonment in a cell at the Hague.”

This created a furore in Turkey. SOL, the publication of the Turkish Communist Party, depicted Pamuk wielding a shotgun on their front page. “You’re a fascist,” read the accompanying headline. Elsewhere, Ulusal Kanal, the television broadcaster of the Kemalist Patriotic Party, called the intellectuals’ letter “an open threat” and described Pamuk as “an intellectual loser… After the Young Turk revolution, his new target is Syria.” According to Ulusal Kanal, Pamuk “had collaborated with the imperialists and remained under the wings of the US”.

Increasingly, the secular Turkish opposition to Erdoğan and his Islamist allies took the form of anti-immigration and anti-Syrian sentiment. A decade into the Civil War, Turkey was hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees: the highest number in the world. And by 2021, anti-Syrian riots rocked Turkey, with activist groups torching Syrian houses and shops in Ankara. Then, this summer, more than 470 people were arrested for attacking shops and smashing cars in Kayseri. Ugly, racist questions became increasingly unmuted: who were those Syrians filling up our streets anyway? Weren’t they paid-up voters of the Islamist government? Weren’t they inflicting violence on Turkish women on the streets? Weren’t they the sole cause of Turkey’s recent demise?

And immigration played a decisive role in the general elections last year. Erdoğan seemed to be on his way out in 2023: his one-party regime had rattled millions with its ceaseless nepotism, while his unorthodox economic policies, including lowering interest rates as an antidote to inflation led the Turkish lira to a free fall. Turkey was ready to turn the page from his ilk.

But Erdoğan had an advantage. As an Islamist, he could claim that his loyalties were clear and accuse the opposition of flip-flopping when it came to issues like the Syrian refugees. He told his voters that while the secularists were promising to understand the pious now, it was nothing more than a calculated electioneering strategy. The Left’s hatred against immigrants was proof that they were no humanists, but opportunists. The opposition parties suffered from the same selfishness; the alternative to Islamist rule was no better, so people should elect the autocrat they already knew.

Although Turkey’s leading opposition party promised change, purporting to have become a democratic party and extending a hand to Turkish Kurds and Armenians, the Leftist CHP reverted to its ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric days before the second round. The party allied with far-Right firebrand Ümit Özdağ, and covered thousands of billboards with a pledge to deport “15 million immigrants”. Had they been elected to office, the Turkish Left would have forcefully sent back all immigrants from Turkey to Syria by May 2024.

Erdoğan wanted the best of both worlds: incorporating the rhetoric of “anti-imperialist” Third Worldism, demonising “foreign intervention” and “internal enemies” in the pay of foreign powers, while sustaining Turkey’s involvement in Syria and its support for Syrian dissidents. But the fall of Assad is not all good news for Turkey’s president. It removes a rhetorical device from his lexicon — no longer can he rule out domestic secular opponents by comparing them to Assad and his allies such as Egypt’s Sisi. And the Left can regain popularity without drawing from Erdoğan’s playbook. Take Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. Having strayed from anti-immigrant rhetoric, İmamoğlu has shown how a social democrat politician doesn’t need far-Right ideas to retain popularity. He was reelected earlier this year, thwarting Erdoğan’s preferred candidate. He will likely run for president in 2028.

In the meantime, it looks as if Turkey’s Syrian immigrants will return. Last week, BBC’s Turkish service reported how “almost all Syrians say their country is safe to return now” and how Turkey’s Syrians, “women, men, young and old, say in unison: ‘It’s now time for us to go back.’” Their departure will mean a culturally poorer and ethnically more homogenous Turkey.

Will the self-fashioned Turkish “communists” and Kemalists, whose hateful chatter about imperialist designs and regressive Arabs is now passé, feel ashamed about the fall of the Assad regime? Will they feel guilty about the bodies of dissidents (reportedly deported from European countries and Turkey) found at Sednaya Prison? More likely, they’ll pour their resentments on other targets: the heinous liberal intelligentsia or any other group they believe they can easily scapegoat without consequences.

And so whenever foreign journalists and scholar friends ask me how Erdoğan remains this popular in Turkey despite his autocratic rule and the accompanying financial meltdown, I remind them of what Turkey’s public perceives as his alternative. For so long, the tragic fate of Turkey’s secular resistance was to act heartless in the face of tragedy just beyond Turkey’s borders. From now on, if they want to convince people that they act ethically and not out of self-interest, they must do better.