Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opulent election rally in Sarajevo on Sunday was a carefully stage-managed performance, designed to benefit both Erdogan and his host, the Bosniak member of Bosnia’s tripartite state presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic.
For Erdogan, still stinging from embarrassing rebuffs from Germany and Austria, the visit was an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of his assertive foreign policy, especially in the Balkans and the Caucasus, where the EU and the US still maintain a degree of strategic interest, and which Ankara can clearly muddy.
And styling himself a latter-day “Sultan”, the old Ottoman “ties” between these regions are anything but incidental to this project.
For Izetbegovic, meanwhile, the visit was an opportunity to shore up support for his Party of Democratic Action, SDA, which has been haemorrhaging members and is in the midst of its worst crisis since its founding in 1990.
That he came off as no more than a lowly vassal to Erdogan’s megalomaniacal pursuit of power and prestige in Turkey’s “near abroad” was of no consequence to Izetbegovic, or, clearly, to the throngs of SDA supporters who joined thousands of Turks from across Southeast Europe in the Zetra arena to see the duo work their magic.
But behind the euphoria, serious damage was done to Bosnia’s international standing and to the country’s already weak democratic institutions.
Whether anyone in the so-called “pro-Bosnian” political establishment has the courage to say so or not, Erdogan is an autocrat.
Under his tenure, Turkey has become a non-democratic state, an assessment shared by every major monitoring organization in the world, to say nothing of the scholarly consensus.
What can this regime offer Bosnia and Herzegovina? His government invests more in Serbia than Bosnia, and its ties with both the EU and NATO are in a shambles.
Turkey is now known to the international community primarily as a state in which thousands of journalists, academics, students, lawyers, doctors, and all manner of innocent civilians are currently detained without trial for largely imagined roles in a 2016 coup attempt.
It is also a government that has begun to “disappear” people even in the Balkans – while to Sarajevo it brought its particular brand of media censorship.
Such a regime can only be a liability for Bosnia, which is already adrift in an increasingly hostile international climate. Indeed, it is clear that much of the support, or tolerance, for Erdogan in Sarajevo comes from his government’s purported backing for Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
But let us investigate this support a bit more seriously.
The alpha and omega of Bosnian security is accession to NATO. This is far and away the country’s most urgent strategic priority, even more so than constitutional reform and EU membership.
Where is Erdogan’s actual advocacy for Bosnia’s membership in NATO, beyond occasional lip service? Ankara’s own relationship with its NATO allies has grown so strained that it is now, at best, an “unhappy marriage”.
While Turkey is unlikely to leave NATO as a result of these strained ties, Erdogan’s government has certainly not endeared itself to Western capitals. And that, by extension, imperils Bosnia.
The counter to this line of reasoning is that these same Western capitals have shown themselves to be deaf to the growing concerns in Sarajevo about Bosnian Serb and Croat nationalist brinkmanship.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
