Majority of Turks believe Turkey should not intervene in Syria
A clear majority of Turks are against a military intervention to put a halt to the violence in Syria, according to a recent poll by the German Marshall Fund.
Some 57 percent of Turkish respondents in the Transatlantic Trends survey categorically rejected a Turkish invasion after being asked: “Recently, there has been discussion of the desirability of intervening in Syria, where the government has been using military force to suppress an opposition movement which is fighting the Syrian government. In this situation, what do you think Turkey should do?”
The number of respondents opposed to a Turkish intervention would jump to 63 percent if Russia and China used their position as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to veto an intervention.
At the same time, 32 percent of Turks said the country should intervene.
The findings mirrored numbers elsewhere in the world, where 55 percent of U.S. respondents opposed an intervention, as did 59 of their EU counterparts.
The poll also revealed that Turks concerned about Iran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons outnumber those without such worries for the first time.
The survey, which has been conducted for the last 11 years, included Russia for the first time this year. While Americans, Europeans and Turks give broad approval to the responsibility to protect civilians from violence, a concept that came to dominate the international agenda with the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and, most recently, in Libya, they differed on how fulfilling such a responsibility should be approached.
Russia (at 40 percent), as well as Turkey and Poland (at 42 percent each), exhibited the lowest amount of support for the principle of the responsibility to protect civilians from violence. The EU average was 67 percent, with Sweden (81 percent) and France (76 percent) recording the highest rates of agreement.
Only 35 percent of the Turks agreed that war was sometimes necessary to obtain justice, one percentage point above the European average. In contrast, the rate was 74 percent in the United States.
13.09.2012
SOURCE: HDN
