The neo-Ottomans are back. How should Lebanese Armenians respond?

Lebanese resilience is being severely tested by the ongoing financial crisis. Economic and social costs are overwhelming, and the middle class is disappearing as poverty spirals out of control. The Lebanese currency has almost lost 60 percent of its value compared to US dollars in the black market. Unemployment has reached 55 percent. Poverty has exceeded 65 percent, and we have an uncertain and unpredictable political environment. The roaring but essentially non-violent civilian protests, which have swept through Lebanon for several months, have conveyed a compelling demand for change. However, during the last two months, protesters took a violent path, looting and burning banks and stores. On a regional level, the Sunni-Shia conflict has been intensified from Yemen to Syria where institutional decay has further inflamed the region. Amid these uncertainties, Turkey has started to spread its tentacles and mobilize its proxies in Lebanon.

Davit Hirst in his book “Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East” argues that Lebanon is a reflection of the geopolitical developments in the Middle East. Sometimes, the political developments in Lebanon reflect on the region. I would say both the political shifts in the country and the region are interdependent due to the sectarian infrastructure that had shaped the region after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The fall of Saddam inflamed a Sunni versus Shia conflict whose roots go back to 632 AD following the death of Prophet Mohammad. The conflict was later regenerated with the political vacuum that Americans left with the ousting of the Baathist regime in Iraq. Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli would have advised otherwise, that instead of dissolving the Iraqi army, which was playing the role of “check and balance” to Iran’s influence, the US would have used this army to contain the Iranian expansion and preserve the regional status quo. However, President George W. Bush’s administration unleashed more chaos in the region.

In recent years, the Sunni-Shia relations have been increasingly marked by conflict, particularly the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. Sectarian violence persists to this day from Pakistan to Yemen and is a major element of friction throughout the Middle East. Regionally, Saudi Arabia, once the champion of the Muslim cause in the region, is in retreat. The Saudis are unable to win a war they started in Yemen against the Houthi rebels, they failed in isolating tiny Qatar, they failed to prevent the expansion of Iranian influence in the region, and finally, they are no more the main players in Syria and Lebanon. All these developments created a power vacuum in the Sunni street. It was within this geopolitical context that Turkey under President Erdogan engaged in strategic opportunism and spread its influence in the region. Turkey wanted to replace moderate Islam with an ideology based on the beliefs of Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, which is recognized as a terrorist organization by many Muslim countries, has been directly funded by Turkey and Qatar and consolidated its network in many Arab countries. Turkey’s neo-Ottoman ambitions spread all over the region and expanded even towards the oil-rich Libya. By supporting the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated al-Sarraj’s government, Turkey and Libya agreed to draw the maritime border between both, and hence, Turkey gained the biggest share of the oil and gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean. This action alarmed the Egyptian leadership which mobilized its troops along the Libyan border. Turkey’s main goal was to use the Muslim Brotherhood to its benefit in becoming a pivotal regional energy and political hub. Therefore, it is important to understand and analyze Turkey’s involvement in Lebanon from a purely geopolitical and geo-economic context.

Turkey started to play the chessboard in Lebanon too, where last week’s small incident can be recorded as the beginning of its political influence in Lebanon. It all started when Nishan Der-Haroutunian, the host of a popular Lebanese television program on Al Jadeed TV, received a social media message from a spectator calling him “a refugee and insidious foreigner.” In response, Der-Haroutunian confronted the messenger and stressed that Erdogan, Turkey and the Ottoman Turks are insidious, and those who think otherwise should study Ottoman and Lebanese history. This type of rhetoric has become commonplace against the Armenian community in Lebanon. It started after the centennial of the Armenian Genocide when a group of pro-Turkey Muslim clerics in Beirut and the northern city of Tripoli announced in 2015 that they no longer will accept the “insults towards the grandchildren of the Ottomans.” It is not surprising that many Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated websites and social media pages spread fake publications about “Armenians committing genocide against Muslims.” Such anti-Armenianism and genocide denial also spread in mosque sermons and conferences were organized “exposing the Armenian lies.”