By Ziya Meral

During a speech to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) group in Turkey’s Parliament recently, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated his strong statements on Syria. While his call for humanitarian corridors to bring aid to Syrian people captured international attention, his talk also included an indirect yet equally strong challenge to third countries involved in the crisis.
 
After expressing his grave concern over the escalation of violence against civilians, Erdogan heavily criticized countries that “passively watch,” “give permission to” or “encourage” what is happening in Syria. He warned that their hesitancy to provide a solution would be “a dark stain in their history” and that the “single drop of the blood of an innocent child is many times [more important] than any kind of strategy, power and self-interested ambitions.”
 
While Erdogan and the Turkish government regularly make clear their stand on the atrocities of Syrian President Bashar Assad and overtly criticize the failures of international bodies, their references to specific countries behind such failures are almost always indirect – albeit increasingly strong and loud.
 
Turkish reluctance to publicly name these countries – namely Russia and Iran – is understandable. As Turkey navigates through its soft cold war with Iran amid attempts to galvanize nuclear negotiations, it cannot afford to clash with Tehran publicly. A similar reason explains why Turkey has limited its criticism of Russian involvement with Syria to closed door conversations and indirect public language.
 
When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Turkey in 2004, he was the first Russian head of state to visit the country in 32 years. Subsequent high-level visits resulted in the signing of a joint declaration in 2009 between Putin’s successor President Dmitri Medvedev and President Abdullah Gul, as well as the creation of the High-Level Cooperation Council in May 2010.
 
The council aims to enhance economic, diplomatic and cultural relations between the two countries. In line with the aims of the council, in January 2011 Foreign Ministers Ahmet Davutoglu and Sergei Lavrov signed the Strategic Planning Group Meeting Protocol and, one year later, the second meeting of the planning group was held in Moscow with Davutoglu’s participation.
 
All of these structures are starting to produce hard currency. The trade volume between Russia and Turkey rose from $11 billion in 2004 to $25 billion in 2010. Both countries have committed to increasing trade to the value of $100 billion by 2015. However, just as the so-called Arab Spring has soured the budding romance between Syria and Turkey, there are underlying anxieties over how long Turkey can keep calm about Russian involvement in Syria.
 
From the Turkish point of view, Russian interests in Syria are thin. A small symbolic naval base, seemingly lucrative yet limited arms sales, and assertion of the usual bravado of “standing against colonial Western interventionism” are no compensation for what Russia stands to lose through its dangerous Syria policy.
 
In contrast, for Turkey what happens next in Syria represents more than a distant humanitarian crisis. With a lengthy land border between the two countries, the implications of a large-scale refugee influx, the potential of prolonged civil war, all the ills that come with having a failed state as a neighbor, and possible spillover of Syria’s unrest into Turkey, the Syria question is a top concern for Turkey.
 
The AKP government has condemned the Assad regime and burned bridges painstakingly built since 1999 as soon as it became clear that the Assad family would not pursue reforms and end its violence. Turkey embraced great economic losses in the process, but it has stuck to its position that the Syria regime must go and championed many of the international initiatives in that direction.
 
Will Turkey soon adopt a similar bold stand against Russia, which has direct culpability in the deaths of thousands of innocent Syrians? Not likely. Turkey is pursuing quiet and friendly pressure on Russia to change Moscow’s position. The latest example was a series of recent statements by Gul in which he said that ultimately Russia would see that it had no choice but to join efforts to force Assad from office.
 
When Russia will finally accept this and what kind of solution it would back is far from clear. Now that the predestined Russian elections are over, President Vladimir Putin might indeed be moved to heed Erdogan’s exhortation that the blood of an innocent child is much more valuable than any possible short-term benefits Russia might achieve from the suffering of Syrians. If this kind of argument does not work, Putin might otherwise soon accept that Russia stands to lose far more than it will ever gain by backing Assad.
 
Ziya Meral is a London-based researcher. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemonsinternational.org, an online newsletter.