The United States, which has held up Turkey as a model of Islamic democracy for the Arab world, has been left confounded by its ally’s heavy-handed response to anti-government protests, analysts said.
The crisis in Turkey is all the more embarrassing as it comes just days after President Barack Obama warmly received Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House.
“The Americans are really ill at ease over Turkey, which they had presented as some kind of example for the Muslim world, a country which reconciles Islam, democracy and economic progress,” said Bayram Balci, a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank.
The crackdown on a week of deadly unrest that has left three people dead and 4,785 people injured, according to a doctors union, has wrong-footed the US administration, and led to a sharp exchange of words with Turkish officials.
And it comes at a delicate diplomatic time, as the US looks to Turkey for help in dealing with both the Middle East peace process and the conflict in Syria, which has sent a wave of refugees flooding across the border.
Secretary of State John Kerry did condemn “reports of excessive brutality” in quelling the protests, reportedly drawing a sharp retort from his Turkish counterpart that “Turkey is not a second-class democracy.”
But Obama has not made any comment, and the White House and State Department were quick to praise those Turkish leaders who have called for calm.
The US is “embarrassed because they feel they have pampered a regime, a government which has betrayed the principles and ideals which the Americans hold dear,” Balci told AFP.
The spread and depth of the anger triggered by plans to redevelop an Istanbul park appears to have caught most by surprise.
“Like every other part of the Arab Spring, none of us expected this in Turkey,” Senator John McCain told a conference at the Brookings Institution.
Erdogan’s angry reaction denouncing what he called “terrorists” for fomenting the unrest is also damaging Turkey’s credibility as a reliable ally in the Syrian crisis as rebels seek to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
“Listening to Erdogan talk about the demonstrators is like listening to Assad talk about his opponents at the start of the revolution in Syria. That complicates the task for the Americans and the international community,” said Balci.
Above all else, Turkey is a strategic ally of the United States, and has been a NATO member since 1952.
Washington was already walking a tightrope by holding up Turkey as a model of democracy while “not saying things about jailed journalists, for example,” Steven Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations said, highlighting a concern voiced by human rights organizations.
Cook quoted a former US government official responsible for Turkey-related matters who told him: “It is not that we did not know that there was an authoritarian turn in Turkish politics, but we turned an eye away from it because we need Turkey on a variety of other important regional issues.”
Some 17 camps dot the Turkish-Syrian border sheltering hundreds of thousands who have fled the fighting in Syria.
Turkish towns have also come under rocket attack, forcing NATO to station Patriot missiles along the frontier to shoot down incoming fire.
Ankara is also a key player as Kerry grapples to try to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
In March, Obama brokered a breakthrough in a three-year dispute between Turkey and Israel over a bloody Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.
And although the US eschews any contact with Hamas militants who run the Gaza Strip, Erdogan’s plans to visit the Palestinian territory have been met by only mild expressions of US concern.
“This is the world leader that President Obama has said he feels closest to. So to what extent has President Obama leverage here?” asked Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
Henri Barkey, expert on international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, replied that “on human rights, the United States has no leverage when it comes to these issues with Turkey. It never had, does not have it now, it is unlikely to have any time in the future.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the protests brought the fight to the US media with a full-page ad in The New York Times.
“People of Turkey have spoken: we will not be oppressed,” read the ad, with smoke from a tear gas canister drifting across the words.
US caught out by deadly Turkey unrest: experts
