April 09, 2012 Is Turkey Implementing The Brookings Plan? The next steps the "west" will take to destruct Syria are now visible. They seem to follow this Brookings Institute paper: Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change (pdf): An alternative [to UN Security Council action] is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts. The Gülen movement financed daily Today Zaman is loyal to and sometimes a mouthpiece of Turkish prime minister Erdogan's government. It just published a piece describing the implementation of this plan. As we expected the truce is declared irrelevant even before it is supposed to happen: Turkey to tighten grip on Syria as Annan plan fails to deliver truce: With just hours left into what seems to be already collapsed UN brokered ceasefire deadline on April 10, the last minute diplomatic rush to avert more bloodshed in a 13-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad has gained momentum. Turkey is putting the squeeze on its southern neighbor with strong indications that Ankara is finalizing plans to set up a humanitarian corridor and possibly a buffer zone inside Syria in order to contain the burgeoning refugee crisis and border skirmishes.

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A series of security agreements, including 1998 Adana Agreement, Turkey has signed with Syria over the course of the last decade give Turkey the right to intervene in Syria if the security situation in the country becomes threatening to the national security of Turkey. Turkey may even ask NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which says that an attack on any member shall be considered an attack on all.

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Since the Assad regime allows the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its affiliates to launch attacks on Turkish soil and harbors some 1500 to 2000 hard-core PKK militants in areas close to the Turkish border, Turkey can very well utilize the NATO security provisions as a last resort.

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In the meantime, the tension at Turkey’s border with Syria got tense after Syrian forces fired shots across the border on Monday, wounding 19 and killing two Syrian refugees according to reports from the Kilis province near the border. The supposedly legal justification through the Adana agreement is bogus. It certainly does not allow for an invasion of Syria. Additionally NATO has never seen the Turkish fight against the Kurds as an exterior attack but rather as an internal Turkish problem. The Zaman account of the shots fired at the border lacks a rather important detail: According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the fighting along the Turkish border began before dawn Monday when rebel fighters attacked Syrian soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Turkish border, killing six soldiers. Turkey is openly hosting and supporting armed rebels that attack the Syrian state. If someone has justifiable reason to invade the other country it is Syria. If the Turkish government is really implementing the Brookings plan of "safe-havens" and "humanitarian corridors" as a starting point for further coercion we can expect the start of a wider war. Erdogan is currently on a visit to China. Let us hope that the Chinese will make clear to him that any such plan would be a serious blunder. Posted by b on April 9, 2012 at 15:26 UTC | Permalink Comments