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.

Bibi’s back preparing for Sharon challenge

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How about that. CNN (and oth­ers) is report­ing that for­mer Israeli prime min­is­ter Benyamin Netanyahu has agreed to an offer by Prime Min­is­ter Ariel Sharon to become his for­eign min­is­ter on the con­di­tion that early elec­tions be called.
What a great idea! (Sar­casm here, by the way.) Here’s a great way to defuse Pales­tin­ian vio­lence by bring­ing in the second-most hawk­ish man in Israel (behind Sharon) to han­dle for­eign affairs. Bibi was almost as bad as Sharon in attempt­ing to stran­gle Pales­tin­ian aspi­ra­tions for state­hood and was aggres­sive in expand­ing set­tle­ments.
But Bibi’s ambi­tions are obvi­ous. He’s made no secret that he would like to sit in Sharon’s chair again, and a place in Sharon’s cab­i­net would give him a plat­form from which to launch a new elec­tion cam­paign, espe­cially if he gets his wish for a new timetable for elec­tions.
With Sharon at the head, a hard-line defense min­is­ter and now Netanyahu back, the Pales­tini­ans will be wish­ing for Barak to come back. (Back to Barak 2.0?) And not just Pales­tini­ans, but all Arabs. In the event of future hos­til­i­ties between Iraq and the United States, I wouldn’t be sur­prised to see Yas­sir Arafat exiled from the West Bank and pos­si­bly even the forced removal of Palesti­nans from the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries.
Heavy sigh. Peace is fur­ther away than ever. And no one in the West will escape the heat of a Mid­dle East in flames.

Hot new look, same great content

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Whew! It’s been a busy day, what with ana­lyz­ing the Turk­ish elec­tions, becom­ing out­raged at the com­plic­ity of the Kuwaitis in help­ing the U.S. thumb its nose at wimpy Euro­peans and … (drum roll) a redesign! Hope­fully, read­ers will find Back to Iraq 2.0 eas­ier on the eyes, and eas­ier to nav­i­gate through the extra stuff, which I’ve now draped over the sides like bunting instead of drip­ping down the right (I never did like that.)
Do let me know what you think of the new look and how it can be improved. Thanks every­one for reading.

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.

Kuwait backs U.S. on ICC

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In another indi­ca­tion that war seems inevitable, Kuwait has exempted Amer­i­can troops from pros­e­cu­tion by the Inter­na­tionl Crim­i­nal Court. The agree­ment would exempt U.S. troops from war crimes while oper­at­ing in Kuwaiti ter­ri­tory, which is con­ve­nient in its tim­ing, to say the least.