The stability of Turkey itself has come into question. The country is entering its most crucial general election in decades against a background of renewed civil strife and increasing concern that the democratic process could be hijacked, prompting a new form of civil war.
It's a problem made yet more complex by Turkey's geography. To the south, Syria and Iraq are aflame with multi-sided conflicts. To the north and east, an arc of crisis and uncertainty extends from Moldova and Ukraine through Russia and the Caucasus to Iran.
If the Ankara bombing is any indication, the situation could be about to get a whole lot worse. Internal stability has been undermined throughout the country, threatening not only existing lines but also giant projects currently under development. This includes the $10 billion Trans Anatolian Pipeline, which is intended to carry some 16 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Turkey and Europe — and which the European Union views as an important element in its strategy to reduce its dependence on natural gas supplies from Russia.
Yet while European, and possibly global, energy security stands to be profoundly affected by what is happening in Turkey, it is crucial to stress that energy issues are scarcely playing any role in Turkey's current drama — or tragedy.
Free, Fair, Credible Elections
A general election has been called for Nov. 1, but already there is concern over whether it will meet any reasonable standards of a free and fair election. The issue is very simple: Just how far will President Recep Tayyip Erdogan go to ensure he can implement his dream of replacing Turkey's existing parliamentary government with a full-scale executive presidency?
The United States is already sufficiently concerned by the government's crackdown on opposition media to stress that it wants to see "free, fair, credible elections" — a phrase used by State Department spokesman John Kirby when asked Oct. 8 whether he believed the elections would be transparent in light of a major crackdown on opposition activity. Kirby specifically said, "We're concerned by the increasing number of investigations into media outlets for criticism of the government and for accusations of allegedly disseminating terrorist propaganda. We're also concerned by the aggressive use of judicial inquiries to curb free speech."
In international terms, the stakes could not be higher. On Syria, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, also speaking Oct. 8, said in the wake of two Russian warplane incursions into Turkish airspace that he was prepared to send forces to defend Turkey from the consequences of Russian military intervention on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. At the same time, the European Commission is calling for an acceleration of the tortuous negotiating process for Turkey's eventual membership in the European Union.
Turkey's allies appear to have been treating these issues — the Turkish elections, the Syria crisis, the negotiations with the European Union and, indeed, Turkey's role in global energy security — as essentially separate issues. The Ankara explosion should help to remind them — and the companies such as Azerbaijan's Socar and the United Kingdom's BP that are developing the $45 billion set of upstream development and pipeline projects known as the Southern Gas Corridor, which are crucially dependent on Turkish transit — that the underlying issue for Turkey's friends, allies and investors is the very stability of the country.
The government has suggested that the Ankara killings were carried out by suicide bombers who may have been from the Islamic State, another militant Islamist group or from the outlawed PKK. In July, a two-year-old cease-fire between the government and the PKK came to an end in the wake of the killing of two policemen in southeastern Turkey and the government decision to launch massive airstrikes against PKK bases in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq. Since then, according to air force chief Gen. Abidin Unal, Turkey has been at war with the PKK, attacking it in both northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. "Today the Turkish Air Forces are actually waging a war," Gen. Unal said Oct. 6. "More than just a medium scale war, it is fighting on two fronts."
But who is the enemy? A variety of civic groups called the rally in Ankara to protest Turkey's lurch back into civil war after two years of cease-fire and many more of long and difficult negotiations between the government and the PKK (in which imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan played a leading role) aimed at trying to work out how best to resolve the identity issues of Turkey's Kurds, who comprise between one-fifth and one-quarter of the country's population of 78 million. Yet the victims were mainly supporters of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the largely Kurdish political party that wants a cease-fire and the resumption of talks on a settlement of the Kurdish question. And when the PKK announced a cease-fire two hours after the bombings, the government's response was to launch a fresh wave of air attacks.
The danger for Turkey is that the government is trying to break the political stalemate resulting from the last general election, held June 7, by finding a way to prevent the HDP from once again crossing the 10 percent threshold across the country required for it to enter parliament. In June, the HDP secured 13.1 percent of the vote, a critical development that prevented Turkey's ruling, and increasingly Islamic, Justice and Development Party from winning an overall majority in the Grand National Assembly.
With Turkey now in turmoil and in open war in parts of the country, whether there can be "free, fair, credible elections" in Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey is very much an open question. The HDP will almost certainly need voting to take place in the region, and for the votes to be counted accurately, to once again cross the 10 percent threshold required to enter parliament, let alone to gain the 13 percent that current opinion polls suggest is still its level of national support. But should continued warfare effectively disenfranchise HDP supporters, Turkey's voting system would ensure that the result — whether free, fair, credible or otherwise — would be a one-party AKP government able to secure some kind of quasi-legal backing for the presidential system of government sought by Erdogan.
Concern in Europe and Russia
Disenfranchising the Kurds goes to the heart of the energy issue. It would certainly intensify the existing war, which in July and August included PKK bombings on the lines bringing natural gas from Iran and Azerbaijan and on the pipeline carrying oil from northern Iraq to Ceyhan. But with millions of Kurds now living in Turkey's major cities, notably Istanbul and Ankara, effective disenfranchisement also risks stirring up civil commotion within Turkey's cities, generating unrest on a scale unseen since the incipient civil war that prompted Turkey's last military coup, in September 1980.
In such circumstances, Turkey's position as an investment destination — whether for oil, natural gas, power or almost anything else — would deteriorate rapidly. In particular, the potential combination of widespread civil unrest and persistent bomb attacks would pose grave problems for the viability of the Trans-Anatolian pipeline, the key Turkish project in the Southern Gas Corridor, weakening Europe's ability to reduce its reliance on Russian natural gas supplies.
Yet it is not just European energy security that's at issue. Russia, too, has reasons to be nervous about what's happening in Turkey. Turkey's reliance on a caretaker government since the June elections is one reason Moscow and Ankara were not able to conclude a formal agreement that would enable Russia to start actual construction this year of its planned Turkish Stream pipeline under the Black Sea. Now Russia has said not only that it will halve the planned size of Turkish Stream from 63 bcm per year to 31.5 bcm per year but also that it has decided against a previously planned 3 bcm-per-year expansion of the existing 16 bcm-per-year Blue Stream pipeline under the Black Sea.
As for Russia's recent actions in Syria, Erdogan has already warned that Russian incursions into Turkish airspace could cost Moscow its massive natural gas export and nuclear construction contracts. Speaking Oct. 8, Erdogan said, "We are Russia's number one natural gas consumer. Losing Turkey would be a serious loss for Russia. If necessary, Turkey can get its natural gas from many different places." And although Russia's Rosatom has already spent some $3 billion on developing the $22 billion project to construct Turkey's first nuclear power plant at Akkuyu, Erdogan was still prepared to say, "These are matters for Russia to think about. If the Russians don't build Akkuyu, another will come and build it."
At the very least, such comments do not inspire continued confidence in the state of Russian-Turkish energy relations. But were Turkey to reduce, let alone terminate, its reliance on Russian natural gas imports, which account for close to 60 percent of the 50 bcm that Turkey is expected to import this year, it would have to import far more natural gas from Azerbaijan, Iran and, eventually, northern Iraq than it does today.
And for that to happen, Turkey will have to be stable — much more so than it is on the eve of its most critical election in a generation.
