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Guest post by Marta Furlan
In 2014, the Houthis, a Zaydi Shia armed group from the Sa’ada region of northern Yemen, aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been removed following the Arab Spring uprisings. Together, they defeated the government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and established control over the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and the entirety of northern Yemen.
At that time, Iran began to progressively increase its support for the Houthis, seeing partnership with the group as an opportunity to advance its revisionist agenda in the region and establish its influence in the southern Red Sea, an area of immense strategic significance. Threatened by aggressive Iranian expansionism at its doorstep, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia entered the war alongside Hadi. As Iran sided with the Houthis and Saudi Arabia sided with Hadi, Yemen became the battlefield of both a domestic competition for power between different local factions and a regional competition for influence between Teheran and Riyadh.
The complexity that characterizes the Yemeni conflict is not unique. In the modern Middle East, countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya also experienced civil wars that developed into multi-layered conflicts involving local, regional, and international actors. In Syria, for instance, the confrontation initially involved the Assad regime, the secular opposition, a plethora of jihadist groups, and the Syrian Kurds. It grew, however, into a competition between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey over the regional status quo and a competition between the United States and Russia over influence in the Middle East. Despite the civil war scholarship suggesting that one-sided victories become harder with the passing of time, the Syrian conflict ended de facto with the one-sided victory of Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russia and Iran.
As far as Yemen is concerned, the conflict is still ongoing. A major development, however, occurred two weeks ago when Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic ties and reopen embassies within two months, seven years after they severed relations. Following the signing of the agreement, which was brokered by China, questions emerged as to whether the deal might have positive implications for the war in Yemen.
Prospects aren’t promising. The conflict in Yemen is at its heart a civil war between Yemeni factions, which is driven by social and political tensions that emerged in Yemen following the country’s unification in May 1990. On the background of those tensions, the inception of the current conflict can truly be traced back to the early 2000s, when six rounds of confrontation saw the government and the Houthi movement fight each other in Sa’ada. Rather than being a simple binary confrontation between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government, the war in Yemen is a complex mosaic of multiple armed factions fighting against and, at times, alongside each other. Within the anti-Houthi camp, there is a significant degree of military and political fragmentation, with different militias harboring different interests and visions. Some of those include the Southern Transitional Council (STC); al-Islah; the National Resistance Forces led by Tareq Saleh; and the National Shield Force formed by Saudi Arabia.
A reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia will not address the deep-rooted and long-harbored hostility between the Houthis and their opponents, nor will it address the tensions and differences that dominate the anti-Houthi camp. At the very best, the Saudi-Iranian détente will facilitate the bilateral talks that have been ongoing between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. Those talks were initiated last October, when a six-month-long ceasefire expired, yet no side (Houthis, Saudi Arabia, the government) was willing to return to the battlefront amidst war fatigue. However, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC, Yemen’s de facto government) has been excluded from the Houthi-Saudi negotiation table. Its exclusion inevitably makes any Houthi-Saudi deal that might be reached in the future with Iranian support hardly consequential for the country’s peace and stability.
Will Yemen see a one-sided victory, similar to what happened in Syria? That’s unlikely. The Houthis and the government-aligned forces reached a mutually damaging stalemate in Marib that left them all weaker. Under these circumstances, academic research suggests that the warring parties could either take steps toward a negotiated settlement or persist indefinitely in a costly, stalled conflict.
The regional dimension of the war might gradually be moving toward a negotiated settlement between the Houthis and Iran, on one hand, and Saudi Arabia, on the other. Pummelled by years of fighting, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia seem to view bilateral negotiations favorably. But the domestic dimensions of the war continue to evade any negotiated settlement between Houthis and the PLC and between different PLC-affiliated militias. As the civil war literature suggests, the trajectory of the conflict will depend on how those parties assess what they can gain or lose from fighting versus negotiating. As the Houthis appear once again determined to resort to force, prospects for peace do not look particularly encouraging.
Marta Furlan is a research and policy consultant at Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) in Germany.
Seamen believe in luck, because they never know what the vast sea has in store for them, what blessings or disasters wait for them.
Few entities in the world’s literature are as written about as the sea. From the works of Homer to Robert Louis Stevenson to Annie Proulx, the mystery and might of the sea invites narratives about people with salt-hardened palms and the strange, iridescent beauty that lurks just beyond the depths of human senses. The obscurity of the sea’s downward expanse reflects the murky nature of human complexity, draws questions about what lies beneath, and pushes human beings to their physical and mental limits. Like life itself, the sea is a turbulent, fickle mistress that rewards those who learn to swim between its unstable waves. It is in these liminal crashes of seawater that Zülfü Livaneli’s novel The Fisherman and His Son homes in on the measured devastations and triumphs that come with sea life on the Aegean, bringing to earth the romanticism of Western writers who tend to forget that the sea, while a stunning component of natural aestheticism, is also a border—a border with all the complications of contemporary sociopolitical tensions.
The Fisherman and the Sea begins by inviting comparison to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, from the title to its opening with a short memoir detailing Livaneli’s intimate relationship with that novel. It was through reading Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning book that Livaneli learned about how to push the limits of human endurance on the page, and through reading the novel for a radio adaptation that he learned to write dialogue. It was Hemingway whose work Livaneli read as a child, hiding under his bed with a flashlight to escape the punishing eye of his father. But this is where Hemingway ends and Livaneli begins.
In the opening moments of the novel, when a tourist relates the plot of The Old Man and the Sea, the narrator reminds us that the fisherman of Livaneli’s novel is young and that the titular old man of Hemingway’s novel was stupid for holding onto the fish. The fisherman remarks to the tourist that he believes the massive marlin of Hemingway’s novel should have been granted the opportunity to remain free:
If that fish was so wonderful, if it struggled for its life for days, he should have cut the line and said, Go, my lion, you deserve to live, may the sea bless you. Sometimes you catch a huge fish, sir, you come eye to eye with it as you pull it into the boat, and it looks at you so pitifully you can’t bear to kill it, so you throw it back into the sea.
Creatures who fight so hard for their freedom should be permitted to remain free. The novel then proceeds to place distance between itself and Hemingway’s work in order to present a story bathed in Aegean saltwater and soaked in Aegean concerns.
The novel centers around a couple living on a Turkish coastal village in the Aegean Sea. The wife, Mesude, of Cretan descent, and the husband Mustafa, a Turkish fisherman, represent both sides of a porous border. They lose their only son, Deniz, to the sea when the boy is only seven, and their relationship has soured as a result. When Mustafa finds a baby, pushed to him by a dolphin, amongst the floating bodies of refugees who had been on a capsized boat during their flight to Greece, he seizes on the opportunity to fill in the space of his marriage that had been lost upon Deniz’s death. The sea had taken his son from him, but now it supplies him with a new child. The rest of the novel follows the relationship between Mesude and Mustafa as authorities grow suspicious about a child reported missing from the boat’s wreckage. The child’s mother, it seems, has survived. In order to retain possession of the child they have nursed back to health, they hatch a plan to fool the authorities, one that involves Mustafa’s pregnant sister.
The backdrop of this narrative is one of modernization, gentrification, and international political upheaval. Of industrialism disrupting an agrarian working class. Of nature corrupted by an intrusive capitalism. Mining and fish farms have changed the landscape quite literally, resorts have brought in the bustle of tourists who fetishize local fishermen, and poisonous, invasive fish species eat through fishing nets and devour the local fish populations. The government sends a university scholar to explain how to combat these invasive species, but his advice only serves to contextualize a destruction that seems inevitable. Further, a refugee crisis has arisen, and more than sixteen thousand refugees—from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and other places—have drowned during transport across the Aegean. International governments and corporations, just as invasive as the fish species, have poisoned Mustafa’s coastal village and its people by rejecting human decency in favor of bureaucratic brutality and corporate profit.
This is a novel in conversation with Hemingway, one that grounds Hemingway’s seagoing theme of resilience with threads of pragmatism and an understanding of the larger consequences of conflict on individuals. Mustafa and Mesude represent both sides of a maritime border that blends with multicultural concerns instead of dividing along constructed definitions of national identity. The surge in refugees fleeing across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece has only grown since the 2016 deployment of a NATO fleet to the region to address the crisis and has led to the building of fences across the land border between the two nations, and even threats of war. Livaneli touches on this tension and the bureaucratic tension created by water crossings throughout the novel.
Livaneli’s inclusion of the true story of a British-built Greek destroyer, the Adrias, arriving half-obliterated in the harbor during World War II highlights the bureaucratic failures of Western administration in the Aegean. The British military returns the mauled destroyer to Greece, leaving behind one very distraught Greek sailor. While the Turkish residents of the World War II-era port community took in the Greek sailor as one of their own, the contemporary Turkish population feels this same mercy is not given to refugees attempting to enter Europe through Crete and the Aegean. Instead of caring for refugees whose boats are disintegrating in the high waves, Turkey and Greece have decided to return these refugees to countries where they face penalties for attempting to flee. The flashback acts as a historical referent to demonstrate the kindness inherent in a Turkish culture that embraces hospitality, even when acting as a neutral power uninvolved in the conflicts of other countries. The refugees of the contemporary Aegean Sea are people fleeing conflicts in countries such Syria and Afghanistan, yet they are not often afforded the same sort of asylum that even Western belligerents were given during World War II.
When Mesude meets the baby’s mother, she is forced into a dilemma echoing that of the port community and the Greek ship during World War II—should she provide a safe home for the baby or will the baby be left wailing in a cemetery (like the Greek sailor after the ship leaves) when the mother is punished for the abandonment of their Afghan home? Mustafa and Mesude must make a choice to carry on in the ill-fated pursuit of replacing their drowned son with the baby gifted them by the ocean—a pursuit that will surely land them in prison—or hand the baby over in an act that will likely result in the baby’s demise. In the process of making this choice, they realize people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
At his core, Livaneli is an activist. Through a career that spans twenty books, several literary awards, forty music albums, and a term in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, he has elevated issues that impact the Turkish people. This novel carries on that trend by focusing on the deaths of refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey through the Aegean, refugees who have come from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It seeks to explore and amplify the impact on the border that is the Aegean Sea as it struggles with a refugee crisis, one brought on by international conflict and not by anything the local population has done. As the narrator points out, “the villagers could nothing but watch their sea die a slow death.”
The translator is Brendan Freely, a Turkish resident who previously translated Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, and Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan. Here, he has translated the spirit of Livaneli’s activism into a smooth prose unafraid of the complicated metaphors contained within the novel. In reference to the rumors surrounding the temporary separation of Mustafa and Mesude, the village is compared to “the sponges that divers brought up from the depths. It absorbed and digested pain, sorrow, delight, and disaster,” giving readers a gateway into the culture of small-town Turkish maritime communities. When Mustafa enters into a deep depression and considers fleeing his home, the narrator asks, “Could someone who knew how to swim succeed at drowning himself? Even if he made the decision, would his body obey?” In Mustafa’s pain and brief desire to share in his birth son’s death, Freely translates the emotional response present in the prose that reminds us that Mustafa has the resilience and competence to move beyond his agony. While at times these metaphors become a touch heavy-handed, I believe such metaphors help to direct readers to the urgency of the matters touched on in the work.
As a whole, The Fisherman and His Son tackles a big subject—the braiding of international conflict with familial desire—and lands in a moment of optimism for Mustafa and his wife, despite larger systemic pressures that threaten their livelihood. This is a novel in line with the sort of compassionate revolution that Livaneli himself espouses: one in which love and solidarity lays the groundwork for survival in the tumult of modern life. The focus on working-class characters caught in a larger sea of international discord juxtaposed with a backdrop of the corporate consolidation of local life helps highlight why human compassion is so revolutionary in the contemporary world. In the face of an encroaching capitalism that threatens the livelihoods of fisherman navigating the Aegean in small boats, even as his friends look to sabotage the corporate fish farms taking on what was once their economic contribution, Mustafa remembers that human life is what remains most sacred to him and to his culture. It is in the sea-soaked bundle of a child’s life that the sustainability of his village truly lies, where the refusal to succumb to autocratic dictates of who lives and who dies generates resistance. When Mustafa is told that the future of the village is “something that concerns us all,” and chooses to care for the child he has found, we, as readers, are reminded of our own individual calls to compassion and activism. This novel further proves Livaneli is an artist, one who understands how a single compassionate act by one or two people can resist the grinding wheels of international politics and invasive capitalism. And it is in this resistance, in this struggle, that Livaneli’s fisherman finds a way to help a child lost among the waves become free.
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From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
The post Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide? appeared first on Public Books.
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
The post Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge / People queue for clean water on February 9, 2023, in Hatay, Turkey. (credit: Getty | Burak Kara)
Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation.
As of Thursday, Turkey’s national emergency management agency reported more than 17,000 deaths, as well as over 70,000 injured. Syrian Ministry of Health, meanwhile, reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. Rescuers in rebel-held northwest areas of the country reported at least 2,030 deaths and at least 2,950 injured.
As heroic rescue crews continue sifting through the rubble of collapsed structures, concern is growing for those tens of thousands injured and countless others made more vulnerable by the crisis.
Like many, I woke up in shock at the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. The earthquake, centered in Gaziantep, has killed 3,000 as of Monday afternoon devastated southeast Turkey and northern Syria. In addition to Gaziantep, other affected Turkish cities were Sanliurfa and Diyarbakir [Note-these aren’t the proper spellings as I can’t figure out how to insert Turkish characters].
Any destruction and death on this scale is a tragedy, but the earthquake followed a string of other problems for the region. Turkey’s southeast was long marginalized, and the site of an insurgency by its Kurdish population. This seemed like it may change when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002; the AKP invested in the southeast’s economy and made overtures to the Kurds.
It seemed particularly unfair that this region should suffer further.
When I first visited Gaziantep (also known as Antep), in 2009, it was booming. Expanded relations between Turkey and Syria led to a rise in Syrian tourism, from which Antep–on the border–benefited. New construction projects dotted the city and the local officials and civic groups I met with were full of pride and optimism. Nearby Sanliurfa (or Urfa), was quieter but still vibrant, attracting tourists to its many holy sites.
This did not last, however. As the Arab Spring spiraled into civi war in Syria, this region of Turkey absorbed many of the refugees fleeing the conflict. The resulting social and economic strain reversed some of this progress. Meanwhile, the AKP’s Erdogan slid further and further into authoritarianism, while the Kurdish conflict broke out again. And the bordering region of Syria–centered on the city of Aleppo–was devastated by the civil war.
So it seemed particularly unfair that this region should suffer further. Given Erdogan’s administrative and economic struggles, and the Syrian government’s lack of concern for its citizens, I’m skeptical that they will rebuild this area.
When I read the news this morning I thought I should say something. I try to avoid Facebook, and have increasingly avoided Twitter since Musk’s takeover, so the usual post on those sites wasn’t going to happen. I have this platform, but it felt lame to write a blog post that just says “how horrible.”
Is it a problem to write about how horrible a disaster is if I have nothing helpful to contribute?
I tried to think of some analytical spin on this. But it didn’t feel right. Should we really take a tragedy and use it to highlight our research? It would be one thing if I studied post-disaster reconstruction, but nothing I work on would really contribute to the response to this disaster.
At the same time, “thoughts and prayers” has come under fire, at least in the United States. This tends to be how conservatives respond to mass shootings, instead of taking action to prevent them. Does that extend to international relations? Is it a problem to write about how horrible a disaster is if I have nothing helpful to contribute?
Maybe.
I’d say definitely if I used this post to talk about how this disaster affected me (i.e. “I hope that kebab place I liked survived). And anytime a Westerner writes about the tragedy and promise of the Middle East it comes off a bit Orientalist. But maybe there is a way to just express solidarity, and maybe that’s better than trying to force an analysis onto a tragedy.
At the least, here is a useful article listing the organizations currently on the ground in Turkey and Syria.
Enlarge / Map of major earthquakes and aftershocks in Turkey on Monday. (credit: US Geological Survey)
A major earthquake and a series of strong aftershocks shook Southern Turkey and other parts of the Middle East on Monday. The most powerful of these registered 7.8 magnitude, placing it among the five most powerful earthquakes recorded during the 21st century in the world.
This first earthquake, at 4:17 am local time in Turkey (Sunday evening in the United States), was followed later in the day by another powerful temblor hundreds of kilometers away, at magnitude 7.5, as well as additional aftershocks. These earthquakes appeared to be occurring along the East Anatolian Fault, which divides the Eurasian tectonic plate to the north from the Anatolian plate to the south.
Earthquakes of this magnitude produce violent shaking of the ground and landslides and can level buildings. They are terrifying and deadly events for people living nearby. Early death counts, as of Monday, had already exceeded 1,600 people, The New York Times reports.
Guest post by Meghan Garrity
January 30, 2023 marks 100 years since the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.
This population exchange was not the first such agreement, but it was the first compulsory exchange. Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion and Muslim Greek nationals did not have the option to remain. Further, Greek and Muslim refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire and Greece, respectively, were not allowed to return to their homes. Only small populations in Istanbul and Western Thrace were exempted from the treaty.
The population exchange between Greece and Turkey is an example of the broader phenomenon of mass expulsion—a government policy to systematically remove an ethnic group without individual legal review and with no recognition of the right to return. Far from an isolated incident, the Lausanne Convention was one of 19 population “transfers” or “exchanges” throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. These expulsions occurred with the stroke of a pen, but mass expulsions also occur at the point of a sword. Governments use violence to force out “undesirable” groups by destroying their homes, appropriating their assets and income, and in some cases, killing members of the group to encourage others to flee.
Although mass expulsion is rare, it is recurring. Between 1900–2020, governments expelled over 30 million citizens and non-citizens in 139 different episodes around the world.
Far from a historical phenomenon, over the last 50 years governments have continued to implement expulsion policies at an average rate of 1.56 per year. In just the last two decades (from 2000–2020) there were 24 expulsion events, including Eritreans from Ethiopia (1998–99); Rohingya from Myanmar (2012–13; 2016–18); and Afghans from Pakistan (2016).
What explains this recurrence? In the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly after World War I, minority groups were seen as dangerous Trojan horses that sowed instability and brought insecurity. The “Great Powers” and international institutions like the League of Nations, promoted expulsion as a necessary policy to “unmix” antagonistic populations. It was believed that only by reuniting groups with their co-ethnics and establishing homogenous nation-states—however fanciful that idea was in practice—could international peace and security be achieved.
Therefore, in post-conflict environments mass expulsion was often considered a viable policy, typically disguised in the more benign-sounding language of population “transfer” or “exchange.” The 1923 Lausanne Convention was part of one such post-conflict peace agreement that ended the war between Greece and Turkey and redrew the borders of the soon-to-be Turkish Republic.
Notable figures such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Herbert Hoover openly promoted and lobbied for mass expulsion. In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Czechoslovakia President-in-exile Edvard Beneš wrote in Foreign Affairs, “It will be necessary after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war. This must be done in as humane a manner as possible, internationally organized and internationally financed.” After the war, the Allied Powers carried out Beneš’ wish. The 1945 Potsdam Agreement authorized the “orderly and humane” expulsion of between nine and 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
But international norms and law slowly began to shift. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included the right of nationals to return to their country of origin. The next year the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibited “individual or mass forcible transfers.” Protection for refugees soon followed with the 1951 Refugee Convention explicitly stating, “No contracting state shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee.” Subsequent regional human rights treaties bolstered legal frameworks against the expulsion of both nationals and non-nationals, including the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 4 (1963), American Convention on Human Rights (1969), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), and more recently the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004). In 1998 the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court included “deportation or forcible transfer of populations” as Crimes Against Humanity.
Yet despite these legal advancements, mass expulsion persists. Although laws against expulsion are in place, there is minimal, if any, regional or international enforcement. In the face of myriad atrocities and human rights abuses, cases of mass expulsion are not prioritized. The limited international justice resources are dedicated to accountability for more heinous atrocities like genocide. Unfortunately, multiple rounds of mass expulsion may eventually escalate to more serious violence as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar: expelled in 1978, 1991–92, 2012–13, and 2016–18. Only this latest episode has been referred to the International Court of Justice amidst accusations of genocide.
Governments also hesitate to call out others for implementing expulsion policies because they too have expelled. In 1983 Nigeria expelled over two million West African migrants without any serious criticism from its regional neighbors. Affected countries like Ghana, Niger, and Chad had previously expelled populations from their territories, and thus refrained from condemning Nigeria.
Furthermore, while mass expulsion has continued over time, the nature of the person targeted has changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, mass expulsions almost exclusively targeted citizens. Since 1950, only 12 incidents of citizen-only expulsions have occurred, which at first glance seems to indicate the customary international law against expelling citizens has diffused around the world. But, on the contrary, expelling states have simply modified their strategy by removing citizens simultaneously with non-citizens—foreign nationals, resident aliens, and/or refugees. When non-citizens are the main target of expulsion, these decisions are often considered “immigration policies” under the sovereign jurisdiction of the state. However, international law also guarantees the protection of non-nationals from mass expulsion and requires certain rules to be followed, including non-discrimination and individual legal review. The en masse removal of groups based on identity characteristics is illegal.
Mass expulsion, in whatever form it takes, has gross humanitarian consequences for those affected. In the chaos families are separated, homes and livelihoods are left behind, and in some cases, lives are lost. Importantly, research shows these policies do not bring the positive outcomes their advocates proclaim, and expelling states often suffer economically and politically in their aftermath.
The anniversary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention is a moment to reflect on the tragedy of the Greek-Turkish “population exchange.” More policy attention is needed to prevent and punish mass expulsion.
Meghan Garrity is a postdoctoral fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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