The West is using Turkey, pushing it towards eastward expansion
The recent tragic events in Kazakhstan had at their core an important factor that was often ignored and glossed over in the official media.
I am talking about Turkish foreign policy expansion, which includes among others the post-Soviet republics of Transcaucasia and Central Asia with Turkic populations, among which Kazakhstan is also one. It takes place within a synthesis of pan-Turkism and neo-Ottomanism, two ideological trends adopted by the Turkish regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Their essence is to create a new type of Ottoman empire in the vast expanses of Eurasia and North Africa, challenging the influence of Russia (first of all), as well as Iran and China. While in the case of the Turkic peoples – Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Uighurs and Karakalpaks – the nationalist idea of a “single Turkic nation” or the so-called “Great Turan”, in which all Turkic peoples would be united under Ankara, neo-Ottomanism boils down to the unification of all Muslims of the Middle East under the rule of the Turkish Caliph. As a consequence, Turkey’s support for radical Islamists in Syria, Libya and the Caucasus. The synthesis of these two ideologies, one ethno-linguistic and the other religious-political, should turn modern Turkey into one of the continent’s most powerful states, a reborn Ottoman Empire.
A Turkish trail in Kazakhstan’s turmoil
Less than two months before the turmoil in Kazakhstan, the VIII summit of the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States was held on 12 November 2021 in Istanbul with the participation of the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. In addition to agreements on economic cooperation, the summit participants announced the transformation of the Turkic Council into the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) and adopted an action programme on the vision of the Turkic world until 2040. Interestingly, its initiator and ideologist was the first president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, who back in 2021 during his visit to Turkey called for uniting 200 million Turks “from Altai to the Mediterranean Sea”. In 2017, it was Nazarbayev’s decree that started Kazakhstan’s transition from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, which was presented as another important element in the rapprochement with Turkey. Nazarbayev also retains the status of honorary chairman of the OTG, while the formal general secretary of the organisation is the Kazakh pan-Turkist Baghdad Amreyev, who previously headed Astana’s embassies in Ankara and Tehran. At the same time, the de facto leader of the Organisation of Turkic States, who sets the vector of the movement, is Turkey.
The creation of such an organization is a serious challenge primarily to Russian integration projects in the post-Soviet space, which Turkey is actively trying to win over. Suffice it to note that Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which joined the Organization of Turkic States, are members of the CSTO and EAEU. Being within a CTG under the auspices of a NATO member country, they oppose their partner in the CSTO and EAEU, Armenia. Thus, for example, the declaration adopted at the Istanbul summit of the CTT contains congratulations to Azerbaijan in connection with the first anniversary of the victory in the 2nd Karabakh war and the “liberation of the occupied territories”.
Interestingly, the deployment of CSTO troops to Kazakhstan in the wake of the anti-government uprising there has intensified talk in the Turkish media about the creation of its own military structure based on the CTG, in which Turkey would play a leading role. Despite Ankara officials’ rather cautious statements on the events in Kazakhstan, Turkey was clearly concerned about the deployment of a Russian-led CSTO peacekeeper contingent in the country and perceived it as a direct threat to its interests in promoting “Turkic peace”. This was indicated by the involvement of structures, affiliated with Turkish non-governmental foundations and organisations, in attempts to discredit the peacekeepers that were helping to restore order in Kazakhstan.
Aimed at Russia’s collapse
Besides, one should not ignore the fact that manifestations of Kazakh nationalism and radical Islamism, which are based on zoological Russophobia, are the result of Turkish ideological influence. Cultural and political expansion by Turkey became widespread immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and affected not only the newly independent post-Soviet Turkic states of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, but also regions within Russia such as Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Crimea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Khakasia, Altai and Yakutia. Turkish money was used to implement humanitarian projects, build schools, mosques and cultural centres, and carry out student exchanges. Thus, Ankara used the “soft power” factor, forming its own lobby groups and local elites loyal to it.
“Alternative history was taught. Turkish teachers said: that Byzantium had achieved nothing, we should look at the Ottoman Empire. In short, there was open nationalist propaganda, presenting everything in such a way that Turkey was the leader around which the Turkic-speaking territories should unite. This also applied to the Russian constituent entities,” RIA Novosti quotes leading researcher Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences as saying.
We would like to add that Turkish soft power targeting Turkic and Muslim peoples of the Northern Caucasus, the Crimea, the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia is even more serious challenge for Russia than Ankara’s active policy in our soft underbelly – Kazakhstan, Central Asia or Azerbaijan. For the simple reason that it directly and severely threatens the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. Let us not forget the recent attempts by our close geopolitical “partners”, including Turkey, to separate the North Caucasus from Russia, which resulted in two bloody Chechen wars. We do not need to remind you who Ankara supported in those wars. Actually, this is best illustrated by the monuments to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the ringleader of the so-called Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, on the territory of Turkey. Incidentally, the first public garden named after Dudayev in Istanbul was opened immediately after his liquidation. And it was opened by none other than the then mayor of the former capital of the Ottoman Empire, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
And the nationalist, but in fact separatist and Islamist aspirations in Tatarstan, for example, are far from extinct. You do not have to run far for examples. Googling the recent story in Aktanysh in Tatarstan, where nationalist extremists sawed down an Orthodox cross on the grave of a Russian resident, and local officials recommended the relatives of the deceased not to restore the monument and to get out of Aktanysh on the grounds that it is a “purely Tatar district” where they try to preserve “national purity.
It is noteworthy that Turkish officials do not even try to mask their claims to a significant part not only of the post-Soviet space, but to about a third of the Russian Federation as such. Just look at this photo from the official Twitter account of the Turkish neo-Nazi “Nationalist Movement Party”. The same one that has a paramilitary wing called the Grey Wolves. Recall that it was militants of this group who were involved in the murder of Russian pilot Oleg Peshkov, who ejected after his Su-24M bomber was shot down by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet in the skies over Syria on November 24, 2015. Well, in this photo the leader of Turkish national-extremists Devlet Bahceli and Turkish President Erdogan pose with a “map of the Turkic world”. It is not difficult to notice that the zone of Turkish influence includes not only the whole Caucasus and Central Asia but also a large part of the Russian Federation and even the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.
Turkish expansionism in the service of the West
At first glance, Erdoğan’s geopolitical ambitions should be met with categorical hostility from the collective West. From time to time, the globalists do try to shrugging off an unhinged partner in the fez. But Turkey remains an important NATO member, ensuring the Western bloc’s military dominance in the Black Sea region. And behind the geopolitical project of the “Great Turan”, a new Ottoman Empire, there are obvious ears of the American and British secret services. They are trying to provoke a large-scale military-political conflict in Eurasia with Ankara’s hands and using Turkey as a “proxy”, which should become an impassable barrier to the economic and geopolitical aspirations of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.
Again, one does not need to go far to find examples. It is enough to see what forces are now unfolding an active information campaign to discredit the Russian peacekeeping contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh. And this is happening both from the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides. While the former are being led to believe that Russia’s intervention prevented Azerbaijan from achieving a final victory and taking Stepanakert and then Armenian Zangezur by cutting a direct corridor to Nakhichevan, the latter are being imposed the idea of revenge and restoration of Armenian control over Nagorny Karabakh, which the Russian peacekeepers who have stopped the bloodshed are allegedly preventing. The recent attempts to ignite a direct armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Iran, with Turkey- and West-leaning pan-Turkists acting as “hawks” on Baku’s side, are a case in point.
However, everything new is, as a rule, well forgotten old. Suffice it to recall how in the 19th and early 20th centuries Turkey which turned into the “sick man of Europe” was used by the Western powers, above all Great Britain and France, to restrain the Russian Empire, prevent it from reaching the Black Sea straits and thus becoming the centre of world Orthodoxy, the liberator of Tsargrad.
Today, history is repeating itself and Ankara, which, with the blessing of the West, has its expansionist ambitions to the East, is carrying out an extremely important mission, following in the wake of the desperate struggle by the US and its satellites to preserve the American unipolar world.
Dmitry Pavlenko, specially for News Front