Turkey’s Erdogan: The Neo-Ottoman

On May 3, Turkey sent its navy in a maritime area between the islands of Cyprus and Crete to escort its drillship “Fatih” and muddy the oil and gas-rich waters between the Greek, Egyptian and Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ). The U.S. State Department, European Union, Israel and Egypt condemned the incident. Since then, Turkey initiated research and drilling operations 30 nautical miles off the west coast of Cyprus, and consequently Cyprus issued an international arrest warrant for crew-members of the drillship.

As an act of solidarity with Cyprus, the European Union announced the suspension of accession talks with Turkey, an official candidate to join the EU since 1999, and threatened of taking “targeted measures” against Turkey. In response to that, Turkey sent a new naval armada with a second drillship to further expand its drilling operations in the Eastern Mediterranean.

But why on earth did President Recep Erdogan, who purchased two formerly Greek-owned drillships in less than a year, decide to rename them from Deep Sea Metro I and II to “Fatih” after Muhammad-II, the conqueror of Constantinople, and “Yavuz” after Yavuz Sultan Selim, the first Ottoman sultan, self-titled as caliph to be regarded as the successor of Muhammad and the protector of all Sunni Muslim states?

It is easy to overlook the significance of names. What does it matter if Mr. Erdogan christens a ship Fatih? He could just have easily named it something else. But ignoring the messages underlying names would be a mistake on our part. Mr. Erdogan’s choice of names is a dog-whistle to his domestic audience, one which the uninformed Western observer would easily miss. In this, he is following a long-standing Ottoman tradition of inventing a past to bolster his legitimacy in the present.

Historically, the Ottomans fed their appetite for power and prestige through military success. However, unlike other Muslim dynasties, they couldn’t invoke an enduring right to rule through a bloodline with the prophet. The sultans, unable to emulate the Christian Roman emperors’ tradition, who claimed to act as representative of God on Earth, had to develop other ways to bolster their legitimacy.

Given its Christian population and storied Roman past, Constantinople remained a controversial choice as the new Ottoman capital after its fall in 1453. To mollify Muslim dissent, in 1459, Muhammad II, constructed the Fatih Mosque on the site of the Holy Apostles Church; the burial place of Emperor Constantine, founder of Imperial Constantinople. He built it exactly where his spiritual leader, dervish Sheikh Ak Shams al-Din, claimed to have discovered the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s comrade, Abu Abuyab al-Ansari, who died in 669 AD during one of the many Arabic sieges on the Byzantine capital. This expedient discovery helped bridge the religio-political “legitimacy deficit” between the new Ottoman capital and the prophet.

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire formed an imperial alliance with the German Empire. Western powers broke up the defeated Ottoman Empire through the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French took control of Syria in 1921 after signing the Ankara Treaty. Article 9 of the treaty assured that, the Tomb of Suleyman Shah (grandfather of Osman I, the founding patriarch of the Ottoman Empire) in Syria “shall remain, with its appurtenances, the property of Turkey, who may appoint guardians for it and may hoist the Turkish flag there.”

In February 2015, Turkish forces entered war-torn Syria to evacuate troops guarding the tomb under the pretext of an ISIS attack threat. As a result, the tomb was demolished and the remains moved to another site for a second time in 42 years. A leaked recording of top Turkish officials exposed an apparent “wag-the-dog” style plot in Syria to attack Kurds and boost Mr. Erdogan’s chances in the coming election. It was one of several embarrassing leaks that led the government blocking YouTube and Twitter. In the end, ISIS never attacked and neither did the Turks. Mr. Erdogan handily won the elections while revealing the Ottoman-revivalist obsession with legitimacy and the president’s fondness for skullduggery.

In November 2014, during a conference of Latin American Muslim leaders in Istanbul, President Erdoganclaimed that Muslim sailors discovered the Americas 300 years before Christopher Columbus and stated his willingness to build a commemorative mosque in Cuba. Although the president has a penchant for territorial expansion, the Caribbean states have little to fear since his primary concern now is the energy game in his backyard.

Since the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 and the end of the Erdogan-supported Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 in Egypt, trilateral diplomatic efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean have evolved and intensified. More precisely, the two triangles of Israel-Greece-Cyprus and Greece-Cyprus–Egypt understand the rules of win-win gamesmanship and know how to play fair and square. The compositional glue for this geopolitical mosaic in the Near East, recently rebranded EastMed, relies on two components: security and hydrocarbons.

For example, few would have imagined the Egyptian Energy Minister inviting his Israeli counterpart to the newborn Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum in Cairo. Additionally, the sixth trilateral meeting between Israel-Greece-Cyprus held in Jerusalem last March, was marked by the presence of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Leaders agreed to “increase regional cooperation; to support energy independence and security; and to defend against external malign influences in the EastMed and the broader Middle East.” These developments transpired in concert with ExxonMobil’s largest gas discovery in Cyprus‘ EEZ, the supermajor’s publicly demonstrated interest to drill south of Crete (DelphiForum 2019) and NATO’s invitation of a Cypriot delegation to NATO’s Europe commander handover ceremony, which Turkey called an “unforgivable mistake”.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the schoolyard, Ankara is cornered as it attempts to rescue its crumbling economy while juggling multiple balls; 1) balancing the purchase of S-400 missiles from Russia under U.S. sanction threats and its forthcoming expulsion from the F-35 fighter jet program; 2) exerting authority over a proposed Syrian safe zone vs. the Kurds; 3) finding a way around U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil.

Amid this chaotic environment, Turkey seems determined to foment trouble in the Mediterranean with its drillships. Historical precedent was established in 1976, when a Canadian company discovered significant amounts of oil in the waters of Northern Greece. Subsequently, Turkey claimed rights to half the Aegean Sea; sending a fleet to accompany seismic vessel Hora (later Sismik) into Greek waters and leading both countries to the brink of a war. The crew of the vessel, inspired by Ottoman custom, sacrificed a lamb and painted their foreheads with its blood, praying to Allah for victory. War was ultimately avoided. The same results occurred in the crises of 1987 and 1996.

On May 7, Mr. Erdogan, who still insists on converting the former Christian Cathedral of “Hagia Sophia” from a museum to a mosque, addressed AKP parliamentarians and “prayed for oil and gas.” He wished that Allah enlightens the ones usurping Turkish rights in Cyprus, the EastMed and the Aegean, implying the United States and the EU. Blinded by revisionism, he can’t see how he got himself locked out of the grown-ups’ room.

But even domestically, his most recent move to annul the municipal elections his party lost, demonstrates that the president is not willing to take no for an answer regardless of whether he’s dealing with Turkey’s opposition or the U.S. president himself. Therefore, “Erdogan the Conqueror” who now considers even Kemal Ataturk a heretic and traitor for signing the Lausanne Treaty, needs to invoke an enduring right to rule the Eastern Med in the eyes of the faithful, just like “Fatih” Sultan Mehmet and expand Turkey’s territory, just like “Yavuz” Sultan Selim who expanded the empire in the Levantine, Egyptand Saudi Arabia.

That, in a nutshell, is why he named the drillships: to legitimize his territorial claim so that his Neo-Ottomanism keeps marching.

Constantinos Papalucas, is an adjunct lecturer of Energy Strategy and Management at the University of Cyprus. He is a member of the United Nations Group of Gas Experts (UNECE).