Category Archives: Turkey

AKP winning slim majority

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Reuters is report­ing that Turkey’s Jus­tice and Wel­fare Party (AKP) is win­ning 33.6 per­cent of the vote in Sunday’s national elec­tions, pos­si­bly giv­ing the Islamist party 280 seats out of 550 in Turkey’s par­lia­ment. If that per­cent­age holds, and the returns are still early, that would give the AKP, which has pro­jected a pro-Western, mod­er­ate image to the coun­try, enough seats to form a gov­ern­ment with­out part­ner­ing with any­one.
The Repub­li­can People’s Party (CHP) estab­lished by mod­ern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was sec­ond with 19.2 per­cent, and the True Path Party (DYP), headed by for­mer prime min­is­ter Tansu Ciller, just made it over the par­lia­men­tary thresh­old with 10.9 per­cent.
The night­mare sce­nario is this: The AKP gains an absolute major­ity and doesn’t form a coali­tion. The United States attacks Iraq while the Islamists in Ankara drag their feet in help­ing war on a fel­low Mus­lim nation. The Turk­ish gen­er­als force the gov­ern­ment out of power, unwill­ing to endan­ger their secu­rity rela­tion­ship with either the United States or Israel, both of which would be threat­ened in the event that Turkey is a reluc­tant ally in the region. Democ­racy in Turkey is set back — again.
I don’t know that this will hap­pen, but if AKP does take power, the new lead­er­ship will have to walk a very care­ful line.
There is some cause for opti­mism, how­ever, since in the major­ity of cases, a vote for AKP is a protest vote against the cor­rup­tion and incom­pe­tence of the cur­rent rul­ing par­ties. There is not a deep sup­port for Islamic law in Turkey or a turn­ing away from sec­u­lar­ism and the West, which is a pol­icy that bedev­iled Prime Min­is­ter Erbakan of the Wel­fare Party in 1997. The major­ity of Turks want a sec­u­lar, EU-member coun­try. But they’re dis­gusted with Prime Min­is­ter Bulent Ecevit’s mis­man­age­ment of the econ­omy and the power grabs that have char­ac­ter­ized most coali­tion gov­ern­ments in recent years.
So the real ques­tion is not what the mil­i­tary will do, but is the AKP as mod­er­ate as it says, has it learned the lessons of the Wel­fare Party? Will it see the elec­tion results as a man­date to affect sweep­ing change (which would be a mis­take, in my opin­ion) or real­ize this is an his­toric oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate a grad­ual free­ing of reli­gious expres­sion in Turkey. Time — and final elec­tion results — will tell.

From Atatürk to Allah?

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Tomor­row is elec­tion day in Turkey and it’s com­ing down to the home stretch! The Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) is likely to win about 30 per­cent of the vote, which would make them the senior part­ner in any coali­tion gov­ern­ment, assum­ing they don’t win out­right. The Repub­li­can People’s Party (CHP), founded by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is polling at 15 to 20 per­cent. How­ever, Atatürk’s party is avowedly sec­u­lar, so it’s unlikely the two would part­ner up.
The sit­u­a­tion is mak­ing the mil­i­tary and other sec­u­lar Turks very, very ner­vous. In 1997, the AKP’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Wel­fare Party, was eased out by the mil­i­tary in what many have called a “soft coup.” But that option isn’t avail­able now. With the Euro­pean Union still dan­gling the car­rot of mem­ber­ship, the Turk­ish mil­i­tary can’t risk step­ping in and muck­ing about with elec­tions and democ­racy. But the pow­ers that be in Turkey also worry that a gov­ern­ment headed by an Islamist party wouldn’t be attrac­tive to Europe either, so Turkey is kind of caught in a bind.
Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing the sit­u­a­tion, Mil­liyet reported last week that Turkey’s top state pros­e­cu­tor, Sabih Kanadoglu, has filed for the clo­sure of the AKP, cit­ing defi­ance by the party’s leader, for­mer Istan­bul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan, to give up his party post. Erdo­gan was banned from par­tic­i­pat­ing in pol­i­tics after he read a poem “incit­ing reli­gious hatred” in a mosque in 1997 and served four months in jail. Though the case won’t be decided for months, if the party even­tu­ally is shut down its sup­port­ers would see their votes wasted. All this legal maneu­ver­ing has been an attempt by the mil­i­tary and sec­u­lar lead­er­ship to depress the vote on AKP, and as I was told when I was in Ankara, “Turkey is the grave­yard of polit­i­cal par­ties.“
(For what it’s worth Sabah reported that U.S. State Depart­ment spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is opposed to ban­ning polit­i­cal par­ties. “The US sup­ports democ­racy and broad polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion in Turkey and else­where,” he is quoted as say­ing. “We oppose the ban­ning of polit­i­cal par­ties that are express­ing their views in a peace­ful and demo­c­ra­tic man­ner.”)
Though Erdo­gan is banned by law from serv­ing in a gov­ern­men­tal post — such as, oh, prime min­is­ter for exam­ple — the sus­pi­cion is that he will work behind the scenes run­ning the coun­try, prob­a­bly through a weak prime min­is­ter. There is also con­cern that his com­mit­ment to mod­er­a­tion and democ­racy is only skin deep. He was elected mayor of Istan­bul in 1994 and promptly banned alco­hol in the city’s restau­rants. He has close ties with for­mer Wel­fare Party prime min­is­ter Erbakan, who dined with ter­ror­ists and talked of pulling out of NATO. Per­haps most omi­nously, “You can­not be sec­u­lar and a Mus­lim at the same time,” Erdo­gan said in 1995.
But he’s been crafty in how he has answered ques­tions on how he would lib­er­al­ize laws con­cern­ing the pub­lic expres­sion of reli­gion. For exam­ple, it is cur­rently ille­gal for women to wear head­scarves in uni­ver­si­ties, schools and gov­ern­ment build­ings or at gov­ern­ment func­tions. This is a highly emo­tional issue in Turkey, with head­scarves being a potent sym­bol of polit­i­cal Islam. Erdo­gan has been care­ful to not iden­tify the AKP with this kind of con­tro­versy. Would his wife, an obser­vant Mus­lim, wear a head­scarf at gov­ern­ment func­tions? “I wouldn’t bring her,” he has said, neatly not answer­ing the ques­tion or assuag­ing Turk­ish women’s fears.
So what are the sce­nar­ios? Near as I can tell, they are as follows:

  • The AKP wins deci­sively with enough seats in Par­lia­ment to form a gov­ern­ment with­out resort­ing to a part­ner. The mil­i­tary might inter­vene or it might not. If it doesn’t, look for the AKP to be kept on a short leash.
  • The AKP wins a major­ity, but can­not form a gov­ern­ment, in which case they will part­ner up with — pos­si­bly — Deniz Baykal’s Devlet Bahceli’s Nation­al­ist Action Party (MHP). I think a coali­tion between the nation­al­ists and Islamists could be one of the worst com­bi­na­tions. “The result will def­i­nitely be another coali­tion, an anom­aly of very con­tra­dic­tory views,” said Prof. Deniz Ilgaz of Bogazi�i Uni­ver­sity when I emailed her about all of this.
  • The myr­iad sec­u­lar par­ties in Par­lia­ment band together in a broad-based coali­tion together to keep the AKP out of power. The result­ing gov­ern­ment would be weak and inef­fec­tual, and would pretty much cement the sta­tus quo. None of the prob­lems of Turkey would be addressed, and the mil­i­tary would remain the de facto ruler of the country.

So what will hap­pen and how might this affect the United States’ deter­mi­na­tion to open up some pre­ci­sion guided whoop-ass on Iraq, a fel­low Mus­lim coun­try and for­merly a major trad­ing part­ner to Turkey? We’ll have the out­lines in a day. But one thing is cer­tain is that the polit­i­cal land­scape is about to change in unpre­dictable ways.

Happy birthday, Turkey

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Happy 79th birth­day, Turkey! You look weeks younger!
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded by the mod­ern Turk­ish state Oct. 29, 79 years ago. For all of Turkey’s prob­lems today, no one should under­es­ti­mate the deter­mi­na­tion and accom­plish­ment of Atatürk. In the face of hos­tile ene­mies, a skep­ti­cal world and a col­lec­tion of peo­ples with no rea­son to band together, he forged a mod­ern and Western-facing nation out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Regard­less of how peo­ple view the mod­ern Turkey, it’s a damn sight bet­ter than what might have been had he failed. And for that I tip my hat to Father Turk.
I also think that were he alive today, he would have brought the same energy, deter­mi­na­tion (and, frankly, author­i­tar­i­an­ism) to the prob­lems of the Repub­lic. But he’s not, and Turkey needs to step out of the great man’s shadow and move on. Atatürk was able to accom­plish what he did because he didn’t worry about the demo­c­ra­tic process. And his approach was exactly right for what was needed at the time. But today, Turkey must embrace a full democ­racy and remove the mil­i­tary from the deci­sion mak­ing process. The slo­gan that adorns the steps lead­ing up to Atatürk’s mau­soleum in Ankara should be amended. Instead of “Sov­er­eignty rests with the Nation,” it should instead derive from the peo­ple — all of them, Turks and Kurds alike. His admo­ni­tion to the army to pro­tect the nation from all ene­mies for­eign and domes­tic should come with the appen­dix the peo­ple are not the enemy; they are cit­i­zens.
I’d like to think that Atatürk would rec­og­nize this. Turkey no longer needs a Great Man. It needs a great people.

Turkey and Iraqi Kurds headed for confrontation

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In an item from Ara​bic​News​.com, “Turk­ish offi­cials” tell the daily news­pa­per Bousta that there will be no Kur­dish state in north­ern Iraq.

In a tele­phone call with the Turk­ish daily Bousta, the Turk­ish offi­cials indi­cated in its Saturday’s issue that Wash­ing­ton gave guar­an­tees to Ankara that a (Kur­dish) state will not be estab­lished, stress­ing that it is impos­si­ble that the US will sac­ri­fice its good rela­tions with Turkey for the sake of found­ing an inde­pen­dent Kur­dish state in the after– Sad­dam phase.

This is almost assuredly true, since the United States needs Turkey a lot more than it needs the Kurds, and it’s been telling the Kuwaitis not to worry, that there will be no democ­racy in a post-Saddam Iraq.
And yet the Kurds, bless them, per­sist in mov­ing for­ward with their con­sti­tu­tion, a char­ter that is almost guar­an­teed to get them invaded by Turkey. A meet­ing of 35 Kur­dish par­ties, called for by the chair­man of the Kur­dis­tani Demo­c­ra­tic Social­ist Party, Muham­mad Haji Mah­moud, con­vened yes­ter­day in the town of Kuwis­in­jaq. While all Kur­dish par­ties, includ­ing the Islamist par­ties such as Islamic Move­ment and Islamic Union, are expected to attend, the Turkomen par­ties weren’t invited, an omi­nous omis­sion.
For not only will the Turks (and Syr­i­ans and Ira­ni­ans) look upon Kur­dish jostling for fed­er­al­ism in Iraq with alarm, Turkey could use the exclu­sion of the Turkomen as an excuse to inter­vene, espe­cially since Ankara has recently been refer­ring to Kirkuk, the pro­posed cap­i­tal of a Kur­dish entity in the north, as a “Turkomen” city. (Which isn’t true at all. The Kurds have a longer claim to it than the Turkomen.)
Ala Tal­a­bani, a spokesper­son for the PUK in Suleimanya, emailed me today and told me that the Kurds are doing every­thing they can to reas­sure Turkey. “Turkey, they are ner­vous, but par­ties here are doing theire best to make them under­stand that we are not look­ing for Inde­pen­dency; we will remain a part of Iraq,” she wrote. [Ed. I cleaned up her Eng­lish a lit­tle.] “Remem­ber that they have an elec­tion (com­ing up.) After that, their posi­tion will be clear.“
But what that posi­tion may be, no one knows. The rul­ing coali­tion of ail­ing Prime Min­is­ter Bulent Ece­vit will almost assuredly be removed come Nov. 3, and a party with roots in polit­i­cal Islam, Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment, is polling at 30 per­cent, far ahead of other par­ties. This means Turkey could be look­ing at a Prime Min­is­ter Abdul­lah Gul, a top Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment party leader. Remem­ber, in 1997 the Turk­ish mil­i­tary staged a “soft coup” to remove an Islamist rul­ing coali­tion when it strayed too far from the embrace of the West and chum­mied up with Iran and Libya.
I think a Jus­tice and Development-led gov­ern­ment would be even more hard­line on the ques­tion of the Kurds. Any civil­ian gov­ern­ment in Turkey must kow­tow to the mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment, which views both polit­i­cal Islam and Kur­dish sep­a­ratism with equal con­tempt. In order to pro­tect its posi­tion, Jus­tice and Devl­op­ment won’t do any­thing to piss off the gen­er­als in Ankara. Also, the Islamists, despite their rhetoric, are cool to the idea of the Euro­pean Union and its demands that Turkey tem­per its per­se­cu­tion of its eth­nic minori­ties. Since the EU snubbed Turkey in its lat­est round of talks, an Islamist-led Turkey would have lit­tle rea­son to accom­mo­date Europe — or the Kurds.
So the stage is set for chaos in north­ern Iraq, apres Sad­dam. And the only peo­ple who will be able to bring the par­ties to heel will be the United States. The ques­tion is, will it?

Turkey preparing to invade Kurdistan?

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Turkey has been mak­ing noises that the Iraqi Kurds should not get too hope­ful about estab­lish­ing a quasi-independent entity in the three gov­er­nates they con­trol in north­ern Iraq. Now, it looks like Turkey is ready to back up their words with force. (At least they’re con­sis­tent.) How­ever, there is an elec­tion com­ing up in Turkey, so the pos­si­bil­ity that this is all fod­der for domes­tic con­stituen­cies can­not be ruled out.
On the they-really-mean-it side of the equa­tion, Ara​bic​News​.com is report­ing that Turk­ish deputy prime min­is­ter Doulat Bah­jali said that his coun­try must recon­sider its stance regard­ing north­ern Iraq. Since 1991 when it got dragged into Oper­a­tion Pro­vide Com­fort (the allied estab­lish­ment of the north­ern no-fly zone to pro­tect Kur­dish refugees from the 1990 – 91 Gulf War,) Turky has gone back and forth in its rela­tions with the PUK and KDP. At times the rela­tion­ship was warm enough that Barzani and Tal­a­bani, the lead­ers of the respec­tive par­ties, trav­eled under Turk­ish diplo­matic pass­ports.
That has appar­ently ended with final­ity after the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment con­vened its par­lia­ment in Octo­ber and intro­duced a pro­posal for a fed­eral repub­lic of Iraq with a Kur­dish entity in the north and with Kirkuk as its cap­i­tal. Kirkuk, rich in oil and his­tory is home to Kurds, Arabs, Assyr­i­ans and Turkomen, to whose defense Bah­jali is leap­ing.
“The pres­sures which are imposed on the Turkomen under Sad­dam Hus­sein were great and that they are at the mean­time exposed to a new threat by the two Kur­dish lead­ers Masoud al-Barazani and Jalal al-Talabani tar­get­ing their cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Arbil,” Ara​bic​News​.com says. (Ed. I changed some spellings of towns in this quote.)
This backs up the it’s-all-politics argu­ment, since the Turkomen are a nat­ural ally of Bahjali’s National Move­ment Party, and bash­ing the Kurds is always a sure­fire way to rally the nation­al­ist faith­ful. How­ever, Turk­ish defense min­is­ter Sbah Eddin Oglo said Oct. 14 that Turkey intends to estab­lish ‘a secu­rity belt’ in north­ern Iraq and that intel­li­gence agen­cies have reported that Turkey has increased its troop strength in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan from 4,000 to 10,000 troops.
All of this must be dri­ving the United States crazy. The last thing it needs is a Kurdish-Turkish dis­pute in north­ern Iraq just when it’s try­ing to get its ducks in a row should shoot­ing start. And this is exactly the kind of chaos var­i­ous pun­dits have pre­dicted would hap­pen if Sad­dam is removed and regional rival­ries are allowed to flare. But wasn’t that sup­posed to hap­pen after a war?
Keep watch­ing the Turks. They hold the key to all of this.