What are the messages from the ‘Abdulhamit Khan’ ship?

By Kostas Raptis

The spectacular staging of the departure of Turkey’s fourth, largest and most powerful floating drilling rig, named “Abdulhamit Khan”, from the port of Tasuçu, Mersina, was worthy of a Tayyip Erdogan: with an aerial inspection of the Turkish head of state and finally a helicopter visit.

The first mission of “Abdulhamit Khan”, however, has been incommensurate with the so far haughty declarations of the Turkish political leadership – and the concerns of Athens. Of all the possible scenarios for now (but this is certainly not a permanent commitment) the mildest prevails. The target of the floating drilling rig was announced to be the Yörükler-1 site, between Turkey and Cyprus, just 55 kilometers from the Turkish coast.

However, the message sent by the departure of “Abdulhamit Khan” is valid even without more daring choices. It is a message directed in principle to the interior, as demonstrated by Erdogan’s speech, but not exclusively to it.

This is the message of the emergence of a self-reliant Turkey, which, covering the gaps of decades in the last twenty years, as Erdoğan himself claimed, overcomes the obstacles posed by both its technological shortcomings and its “exclusion plans” from the Mediterranean and claims energy and not only its empowerment.

This is certainly an image that does not match at all with the one that the Turkish citizen faces in his difficult daily life in the midst of an economic crisis. But both apply, in a manner characteristic of the paradoxical mix of power and vulnerability that is modern Turkey. After all, the 238-meter long “Abdulhamit Khan”, which has a crew of 200 people and the ability to mine at much greater depths than the three pre-existing Turkish floating drilling rigs, is a reality and not a pre-election “mockup”. And Turkey’s economic problems are largely attributable, as Erdogan pointed out, to its energy dependence, which he hopes to cure by hydrocarbon exploration in the North and South, “without asking anyone’s permission.”

In the North, hopes are invested in the natural gas field, with a reported volume of 540 billion cubic meters discovered in the Black Sea, where, thanks to the exploitation of the Montreux Convention, a Russian-Turkish condominium has been established without disturbing interference from third parties.

In the eastern Mediterranean, things are certainly more complicated. But Turkey’s ambitions will not be fulfilled if they are not implemented in all three seas that surround it, including the Aegean. The physical communication of these three maritime spaces also illustrates their absolute geopolitical connection.

Of course, multilateralism is not particularly popular in Ankara. He prefers pairwise negotiations that will obey the logic of power relations. This is why the Turkish political leadership has recently become more irritated than anything else with the strong intervention of third parties, due to the development of American bases in Greek territory.

It is not precisely about “anti-Westernism”, but, as the recent shift in the rhetoric of the Turkish leaders in a pro-Western direction shows, about the logic that the West’s watchdog in the region is Turkey in person – the country, as it describes itself, with the second largest NATO army and the crucial, pro-common cause, role on multiple fronts, which should not be put on the same scale as the “selfish harassment” of those, such as Greece and Cyprus, who “abuse” their participation in the Euro-Atlantic institutions.

That, finally, Turkey’s fourth floating drilling rig received the name “Abdulhamit Khan” shows the completion of the “Turkish-Islamic composition”, as the memory of the last Caliph who reigned without constitutional restrictions and resisted the decline of Ottoman power comes to sanctify a project whose initiators and devotees are primarily in the field of the armed forces and nationalist officers.