Ankara's stance on Gaza and its efforts to become a regional player worry those who favour pursuing EU membership, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
TURKEY OFFERED to send peacekeepers to monitor a potential ceasefire in Gaza this week, rounding off a week of intensive diplomatic efforts to mobilise regional leaders to push for an end to Israel's offensive.
Coming at the start of a year that could be decisive for the country's stalled EU membership bid, however, the inflammatory rhetoric of its leaders suggests a nation increasingly struggling to balance western dreams with efforts to increase its regional influence.
"Hamas abided by the truce [with Israel]," prime minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday, comparing Palestine to "an open prison" and adding that "Allah will punish those who violate the rights of the innocent". He was speaking on his return from a two-day tour of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia over the New Year during which he tried unsuccessfully to drum up Arab support for an immediate ceasefire.
Another top Turkish official went to Damascus for talks with Hamas's hawkish political chief, Khalid Mish'al.
The rhetoric and the diplomacy have gone down well among Turks, who have flocked onto the streets to protest at Israeli aggression against their Palestinian co-religionists in numbers not seen since the huge secularist demonstrations of spring 2007.
But analysts say Erdogan's openly pro-Hamas stance — which affiliates him with Iran and Syria against Egypt and Saudi Arabia — undermines Turkey's growing clout as a regional peacemaker and betrays his roots in political Islam.
"The more Turkey presents itself as Hamas's patron, the more it undermines the role it could play in bringing an end to Palestinian suffering," says Cengiz Candar, a leading Turkish foreign policy analyst. "Emotions have no place in foreign policy, least of all in the Middle East."
Several Israeli newspapers called this week for Israel to withdraw its ambassador from Ankara in protest, acidly pointing out that Turkey had been bombing Kurdish militants in northern Iraq for the last year.
The approach that Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has taken to the Gaza crisis is a continuation of policies it has implemented since it came to power in 2002.
A secular state with a majority Sunni Muslim population, Turkey used to keep its co-religionists in the Middle East at arms length, prioritising strategic relations with Israel, which it was the first regional power to recognise. The AKP has favoured multilateralism.
"Our motto is zero problems on our borders," says Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan's chief foreign policy adviser and the brains behind the transformation.
AKP's policy has brought striking successes, not least an almost 1,000 per cent rise in trade with the Middle East. A decade ago Turkey was on the brink of war with Syria. Now the two are so close that wags call Syria "Turkey's 82nd province". Turkey has used its new influence to begin mediating peace talks between Syria and Israel last year.
Last October, Ankara was rewarded for its new activism in the Middle East and the Caucasus with a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council.
But its diplomatic hyperactivity has also raised eyebrows, not least its decision to invite a senior Hamas delegation headed by Mish'al to Ankara in 2006 and to host Iranian president Mahmud Ahmedinejad last summer.
Ahmet Davutoglu insists that growing Turkish relations with Hamas and Iran are an obligation, not a reflection of ideological closeness.
Turkey's EU membership bid and Nato membership are "key parameters of Turkish foreign policy that will remain unchanged", he says.
But AKP's strategy has begun to unnerve even analysts broadly sympathetic to the party.
"It is clear that leading AKP politicians feel more comfortable in the Middle East than in Europe," says Ihsan Dagi, an international relations expert and columnist for a pro-government daily. "For me, AKP's most visible vulnerability today is its lack of a second Davutoglu, a Davutoglu who would look west."
That vulnerability looks particularly crucial at the start of a year some fear could see Turkey's EU bid — hamstrung by growing Turkish rancour at what it not unreasonably perceives as hypocrisy on the part of some EU member states — fall off the radar screen for good.
The crux looks set to be December 2009, when Turkey has a deadline to open its ports to Greek Cypriot traffic. Eight of Turkey's negotiating chapters have already been suspended because of its failure to do this so far. By this autumn, a report by the International Crisis Group warned last month, "there will be no chapters left to open".
"I don't think either side would dare call an official end to negotiations, but they face de facto death," says Cengiz Aktar, an EU expert at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.
Aktar pessimistically describes Turkey's EU hopes as "over". That's an exaggeration. A liberal who stood for the AKP in 2007 elections because of its hitherto pro-European stance, deputy Suat Kiniklioglu says he is impressed by "the number of AKP deputies, even on the party's conservative wing, calling for all capital to be invested in the EU process".
A recent Eurobarometer poll showed 48 per cent of Turks still think membership would benefit the country. In Croatia, a fellow EU candidate, only 24 per cent responded positively.
AKP began 2009 with two very clear statements that it had not altogether abandoned its reformist zeal. January 1st saw the launch of a 24-hour Kurdish channel on state television, a remarkable step in a country that denied Kurds existed until 1991. Earlier this week an AKP spokesman announced that it was rehabilitating Nazim Hikmet, the most famous Turkish poet of the 20th century and a communist who died in exile in Moscow in 1961.
"2009 holds a real risk of breakdown in Turkey's EU prospects, but it also provides an opportunity," says foreign policy expert Sinan Ulgen. "Both sides now realise that current attitudes ... lead to a dead end. By raising the stakes, 2009 provides the incentive for a fresh start."