Istanbul Calling

Ready for Prime Time?

2011-10-05T15:19:00.002+03:00

Along with the ever-insightful Hugh Pope, I was recently a guest on the Australian Radio program "RearVision," talking about the "new" Turkey and its role in the Middle East. The show (audio and a transcript) can be found here.

The Eastern Mediterranean's Bermuda Triangle

2011-09-23T04:46:00.005+03:00

Turkey now finds itself managing rapidly escalating crises with three Eastern Mediterranean neighbors: Israel, Cyprus and Syria. The reasons for each crisis are different, but Milliyet's ever-sharp foreign affairs analyst Semih Idiz, finds a thread that connects them all and that leaves Ankara with some significant foreign policy challenges. From a recent column (in the Hurriyet Daily News):

Turkey is facing a difficult time in the eastern Mediterranean. It is almost as if we are heading for a hot confrontation in the region. It is not clear, however, how much international support Ankara has against Greek Cyprus and Israel. What is certain is that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s popularity on the Arab street will not be of much use here.

The irony is that any confrontation between Turkey and Greek Cyprus over offshore drilling rights, or between Turkey and Israel due to Ankara’s pledge to maintain safe passage in the eastern Mediterranean, will serve the interests of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at this present juncture.

It is clear, especially since Prime Minister Erdoğan is not mincing his words about the regime in Damascus anymore, that Syria and Turkey are adversaries at this stage. That is why any development that draws Turkey’s attention away from Syria at the present time will be much appreciated by Assad who is fighting for his political survival....

....To sum up, it is clear that the waters of the eastern Mediterranean are heating up and that Turkey is facing a multi-problem environment in this region. This is quite a change from the days when Ankara was aiming for “zero problems” in its regional ties.

The rest of the column can be found here. Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank that's considered to have good connections to the White House, has just published a brief that suggests that Ankara's increasingly sharp rhetoric, particularly regarding Israel, could become self-defeating. From the brief, written by Michael Werz and Ken Sofer:

The confrontation between Turkey and Israel, two of America’s closest allies in the region, is threatening to reverse substantial gains in U.S. foreign policy. In addition, the AKP is trying to coerce the United States into a position closer to its own when it comes to the recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

Of course, Turkey’s strategy is not smart vis-à-vis the White House or the Department of State, because they’ve broken the rules of democratic engagement. The current escalation creates unnecessary tensions; is based on unmediated, unilateral interests instead of searching for viable compromise; and has no longer-term perspective. And it goes beyond the question of whether or not Turkey’s government has a legitimate point in its criticism of Israel. The present oratory also undermines Turkey’s economic and security interests. This type of posture provides space for destabilizing actors in the region, ultimately endangering the country’s newly established political recognition in regions other than Europe.

Further, Turkey’s political and economic capital is largely dependent on its new role as pivot between the West and the Middle East. Besides its important geographic position between the two regions, it is the only country that has considerable leverage in both regions. This is what makes Turkey such an invaluable American ally and such an important voice for Middle Eastern nations. But if Turkey continues down its recent path and establishes a strong anti-Israeli posture, many in the United States and Europe will begin to review the level of trust and recognition that Turkey earned in the past year.

For the time being, the repercussions of these attacks won’t be as visible because of the Turkish prime minister’s wildly successful populism with its suggestive and simple interpretation of the world. But as a middle power in one of the most challenging political environments on the globe, Turkey has a limited amount of time to get away with this type of discourse....

....The current escalation has taken the Turkey-Israel relationship back four years. It needs to be rebuilt over time, accompanied by a more pragmatic and less selective Turkish foreign policy. But after picking up the pieces of a “zero problem policy” in shambles, Turkey has the option to develop a real neighborhood policy worthy of a democratic emerging power.

The U.S. administration needs to flank that process or risk losing a valuable ally in the Middle East to the type of shortsighted, populist foreign policy that limits the prospects for peace in the region. Turkey’s growth into a critical player on the international stage benefits not only Ankara, but Washington, Tel Aviv, and many capitals throughout Europe and the Middle East. The United States should continue to recognize and promote Turkish leadership but also make it clear that the current over-the-top rhetoric against a neighbor will diminish Turkey’s credibility in diplomatic circles.

In the short run, a breakdown in the Turkish-Israeli relationship may be politically beneficial for Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among their hawkish constituents. But poking holes in the relationship will only lead to a sinking ship and will ultimately hurt Turkey, Israel, and the United States.

You can find the full piece here.

Reviving the "Kurdish Opening"

2011-09-20T17:45:00.003+03:00

The International Crisis Group today released a superb report that examines Turkey's lingering Kurdish issue and the failure of recent efforts to solve, and that also offers some very clear and practical advice for how to move the issue forward. From the summary of the report, entitled "Turkey: Ending the PKK Insurgency":

A surge in violence has dashed plans for a negotiated end to the 27-year-old Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) insurgency. Since Turkey’s elections in mid-June, clashes have killed more than 110 people, country-wide ethnic friction has hardened opinion, and the government has started bombing PKK bases and talking about an imminent ground offensive in northern Iraq. The PKK must immediately end its new wave of terrorist and insurgent attacks, and the Turkish authorities must control the escalation with the aim to halt all violence. A hot war and militaristic tactics did not solve the Kurdish problem in the 1990s and will not now. A solution can only lie in advancing the constitutional, language and legal reforms of the past decade that have gone part way to giving Turkish Kurds equal rights. Given the recent violence, returning to a positive dynamic requires a substantial strategic leap of imagination from both sides. Neither should allow itself to be swept away by armed conflict that has already killed more than 30,000 since 1984.

The Turkish Kurd nationalist movement must firmly commit to a legal, non-violent struggle within Turkey, and its elected representatives must take up their seats in parliament, the only place to shape the country-wide reforms that can give Turkish Kurds long-denied universal rights. The Turkish authorities must implement radical judicial, social and political measures that persuade all Turkish Kurds they are fully respected citizens. They should reach out to non-violent nationalists and not abandon long-standing negotiations on disarmament with the PKK, including its jailed leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Although justified in acting resolutely to block the PKK’s recent attacks, the authorities must avoid falling into the trap of tit-for-tat escalation. Many big Turkish strikes against PKK bases in northern Iraq solved nothing in the past. As the more powerful party, the authorities should instead take the lead in creating opportunities to end the fighting.

For all its gaps, flaws, and unravelling since late 2009, the promises of the Democratic Opening developed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) remain the best way forward. That initiative counts as Turkey’s most credible attempt to heal the open wounds of conflict between the state and its estimated 15-20 per cent Kurdish-speaking population. This report details more than a dozen concrete steps it has involved so far, including broadening access to Kurdish-language television, legislating the right to make political speeches in Kurdish and overseeing an end to almost all torture in Turkish jails. Others have led to a new sense of freedom in Kurdish cities, high-level talks with Öcalan and a greater readiness by mainstream commentators to discuss previously forbidden ideas, like a change in Öcalan’s jail conditions after a full peace deal or a federal disposition for the Kurdish-majority south east.

The outline of a deal to end the insurgency that was also under negotiation – an end to the fighting, major legal reforms, an amnesty and Turkish Kurd acceptance to work within the legal Turkish system – remains the best long-term outcome for both sides. But while making these reforms, the authorities have arrested hundreds of Turkish Kurd nationalists, including many elected municipal officials and other nationalist party members. More than 3,000 nationalist activists are behind bars, many punished as “terrorists” for the non-violent expression of opinions under laws for which the AKP is responsible. On the other hand, what should have been the centrepiece of the Democratic Opening – a ground-breaking PKK amnesty in October 2009 – foundered when Turkish Kurd nationalists exploited it for propaganda purposes.

AKP’s relatively open-minded approach has won it half the Turkish Kurds’ votes, but the government has to go further and fully engage the other half and its representatives, who are the decision-makers in the Kurdish nationalist movement. It should offer educational options that respect Kurdish languages and culture and rewrite laws that unfairly jail nationalists as terrorists. It must also ensure its policies are fully implemented by all military, judicial and state bodies. Otherwise, as developments since the June 2011 elections show, the nationalists will feel unconvinced and threatened and be unready to reach a compromise deal.

AKP leaders must also speak out to convince mainstream Turkish public opinion that reform is essential to resolve the Kurdish problem; granting universal rights is not a concession; Turkish is not being undermined as the country’s official language; and almost all Turkish Kurds wish to continue living in a united Turkey. The government must order the security forces to try whenever possible to capture rather than kill PKK insurgents, and should engage the legal Kurdish nationalist party to the maximum extent.

The full report can be found here. Previous posts about the "Kurdish Opening" are here.

ICG's report comes out only a few days after the leaking to the Turkish press of a recording a previously secret meeting (held either in Europe or Northern Iraq) between Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's intelligence agency, and senior members of the PKK. Although opposition figures have criticized the government for meeting with the PKK, there are also suggestions that now that the fact that these meetings took place is out in the open it will help normalize the idea of the Turkish state and the PKK actually sitting down to negotiate. More on this development here (Hurriyet Daily News) and here (The National).

Out of Balance

2011-09-16T18:51:00.004+03:00

I have a new piece in the Forward looking at the breakdown of Turkey-Israel relations and the two countries' failure to find a new balance for their relationship after its initial security-heavy focus and Israel's continuing failure to correctly read the changes taking place in Turkey and how to best manage them. From the piece:

When Israel and Turkey first forged their now shattered alliance in the late 1990s, there was much to bring together the two countries. The odd men out in the Middle East, both were non-Arab military powers who had either strained or outright hostile relations with their neighbors, a domestic terrorism problem and a strategic vision that looked westward, particularly toward Washington. It was a marriage that its architects, particularly in Israel, believed was going to last.
It turns out, breaking up is actually easy to do.

With the almost complete deterioration in Turkey-Israel relations following last year’s tragic Gaza flotilla incident in which Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists, it’s clear that the alliance was built on a less-than-solid foundation.
Despite the closeness the two countries once enjoyed, the relationship between Turkey and Israel was never balanced, skewing heavily toward military and security relations and a sense of shared threat in a hostile region.

Turkey’s efforts over the past few years to alter the relationship, particularly by de-emphasizing its security and strategic components, and to reintegrate itself into the Middle East — and Israel’s failure to properly read those moves and other political and social changes in Turkey — has now left relations between the two countries woefully out of balance once again. For Israel, which now must rebuild its ties with Turkey from the ground up, this imbalance and a continuing misreading of its causes will likely only lead to more problems down the road.

You can find the full article here.

Dead in the Water

2011-09-05T19:15:00.003+03:00

I plan to post a bit more about the complete and troubling breakdown of Turkey-Israel relations, but for now I'm posting a bit from an article I recently wrote about the subject for Foreign Policy's website. From the article:

The world owes a debt of thanks to that anonymous diplomat who leaked the long-delayed U.N. report on the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident -- the ill-fated Israeli commando raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla that resulted in the deaths of nine Turks -- to the New York Times, thus single-handedly ending months of endless speculation and finally putting the floundering Turkey-Israel relationship out of its misery.

The report was issued by a panel headed by Geoffrey Palmer, the former prime minister of New Zealand, who was aided by Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia, along with one Turkish and one Israeli representative. While concluding that Israel's military takeover of the Mavi Marmara was "excessive and unreasonable," the report also decided that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal and based on legitimate security concerns.

With the report's leak and Israel's continuing refusal to meet Turkey's demand for an apology, Ankara deployed its long-threatened "Plan B" on Friday, Sept. 2 -- expelling the Israeli ambassador and downgrading diplomatic relations, suspending military agreements, and promising to help the families of flotilla victims pursue Israel in international courts. In a Friday news conference, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned, somewhat ominously, that Turkey would "take whatever measures it deems necessary in order to ensure the freedom of navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean."

Turkey's moves against Israel cap off what has been a steady deterioration between the two former allies -- one that started not with the Mavi Marmara affair but with Israel's attack on Gaza, which began in December 2008. The most recent steps taken by Ankara are therefore not a blip in Turkey-Israel relations, but represent what is likely to be a long-term freeze, one that could very well lead to further problems between the two countries in the near future.

At the heart of Friday's breakdown of Turkey-Israel relations -- and what makes any rapprochement between the two countries extremely unlikely at present -- is an increasingly divergent view of the Middle East and each country's role in the region. For Turkey, Israel's continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories (particularly Gaza) stand as the primary roadblock toward creating the kind of more harmonious regional order that Ankara envisions. For Israel, Turkey's outreach to Hamas in Gaza, President Bashar al-Assad in Syria (at least before his recent crackdown), and the Iranian regime are all proof that the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government is quickly on its way to joining the regional "axis of resistance" against it.

The U.N. report on the Gaza-bound flotilla incident is just the latest example of how Turkey and Israel now fail to see eye to eye on the region's most important questions. While Israel holds that it is enforcing a legal naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, Turkey sees a country that treats the Mediterranean as "a lake of its own," as the Turkish ambassador to Washington tweeted on Friday. Where Turkey sees the Mavi Marmara as a ship rushing desperately needed aid to Gaza, Israel sees a craft filled with violent Hamas supporters.

The response to the report continued along these lines. "The report is a professional, serious, and extensive document," a senior source in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office told the Israeli media. Turkish President Abdullah Gul, on the other hand, declared, "That report is actually null and void for Turkey."

The full article can be found here. Lots of previous posts tracking the failing of the Turkey-Israel relationship can be found here.

Event: A Year after the First Gaza Flotilla

2011-06-20T23:20:00.003+03:00

I will be part of a panel discussion this Friday in Washington that take a look at last year's Gaza flotilla and its impact on the region. Here are the details:

The SETA Foundation at Washington D.C. presents

The New Middle East:
A Year after the First Flotilla

Friday, June 24, 2011
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Panelists:
Noura Erakat
Human Rights Attorney and Activist

Yigal Schleifer
Independent Journalist

Nuh Yilmaz
Director, The SETA Foundation

Moderator: Kilic Kanat, Syracuse University

More than a year after the first flotilla, a second humanitarian aid flotilla is scheduled to set sail for Gaza on June 25, 2011. As civilian initiatives, flotillas had political and diplomatic repercussions for the regional dynamics. What kind of an impact did the first flotilla have on the region as a whole? Given the new regional dynamics after the Arab Spring, in what ways is the second flotilla different? Does the limited opening of the Rafah border by Egypt have a bearing on the rationale of the second flotilla? What are the implications for the Palestinian problem? Our panelists will seek answers these questions and discuss the New Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring a year after the first flotilla.

For more details, click here. [UPDATE: You can find a video and photos of the event here.]

The Democracy Agenda

2011-06-18T18:59:00.003+03:00

I have a new policy briefing out for the Project on Middle East Democracy that looks at Turkey's recent elections and what the results mean for the country's ongoing democratization project. From the briefing:

Turkey’s free and fair parliamentary elections on June 12 were yet another important achievement for a country that over the decades has seen four military coups and various other interventions in its democratic process. The poll was also a historic milestone for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won its third straight election and which again managed to increase its share of the national vote, this time reaching close to 50 percent.

But the AKP may have little time to celebrate its victory. While the party has broken significant political and economic ground over its nine years in power, the upcoming period might prove to be the most difficult yet. In the coming weeks and months, the AKP will have to address an overheating economy, turmoil in next-door Syria, escalating tension over the Kurdish issue, as well as questions about how it intends to push ahead on its plans to introduce a new constitution and to revive the stalled European Union (EU) membership process. At the same time, the AKP and, in particular, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are likely to continue facing charges both at home and abroad that Erdogan’s leadership style has become increasingly autocratic and that some of the democratic gains made in Turkey—particularly regarding freedom of the press and freedom of expression—are under threat.

How Erdogan and the AKP respond to these issues will have profound implications for the continuing development of Turkey’s democracy and will also require close monitoring by the United States. While policymakers and pundits alike have focused almost exclusively on Turkey’s possible “drift away from the West,” it is the internal drift from the path of domestic reform that should be the major cause for concern. Washington should coordinate closely with Ankara on the international front—particularly regarding events in the Middle East—but it must also keep a close eye on domestic developments in Turkey and be prepared to put Ankara on notice for any backsliding on the democracy front.

You can read the full piece here.

Turkish Elections 2011: The Post-Mortem

2011-06-13T12:06:00.004+03:00

The results of today’s parliamentary elections in Turkey are a bit deceptive. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), of course, can claim to be the day’s big winner, but the three other parties that made it into parliament can also claim something of a victory. That said, the victory parties shouldn’t last that long. Each party – the AKP included – comes out of this election facing some significant questions about what the future holds for it.

Some thoughts regarding each party and its performance:

AKP
According to current results, the AKP won the election with nearly 50 percent of vote, an increase of some 3.5 points over the last election and the party’s third consecutive victory at the polls. At the same time, because of Turkey’s parliamentary arithmetic, the party’s seats dropped from 341 to 326. In that sense, the AKP’s victory should be tempered by the fact that it failed to achieve its goal of winning at least 330 seats in this election, something which would have then allowed the party to pass a new constitution and then send it off to a national referendum, which it would have likely won.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in an effort to get above 330 seats, ran a blistering campaign that saw the AKP turn up the nationalist rhetoric in order to woo the voters of the rightist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and keep that party from reaching the 10 percent threshold necessary to enter parliament. In the end, the MHP still managed to pass the threshold, the AKP didn’t get the 330 seats it so desperately wanted, and Turkey is left with a Kurdish population that feels like it was badly burned by the PM in this election (the AKP lost quite a bit of ground in the Kurdish southeast region in this election) and a MHP that believes it was the government that was behind the “sex tape” scandal that seemed designed to bring the party to its knees. Obviously, this is not a good recipe for creating the kind of atmosphere needed to get the different parties in parliament to work together on drafting a new constitution, which is what Erdogan promised he would try to do in his victory speech. With its win, does the AKP use the occasion to further consolidate their power, or does the party work towards uniting what has become an increasingly fractured nation? After his party’s decisive win in the 2007 elections, Erdogan also promised to lead a government that represents all of Turkey, but that sense of inclusiveness soon fell to the wayside.

The election also leaves the AKP with unanswered questions about Erdogan’s future. Heading into the elections, the party’s forward plan revolved around introducing a new constitution that created a strong presidential system, with Erdogan moving into the president’s office after what would be his last term as PM. But its not clear if the AKP can get the other parties to agree to a new constitution that has the presidential system change in it (many in the AKP, especially current President Abdullah Gul, are apparently also not fond of the system change idea). The question then is what does Erdogan do after this term as PM, which is supposed to be his last according to his party’s bylaws? Does he become president under the current system, taking over a less-powerful position that would require him to play the role of non-partisan national paterfamilias? Does the AKP, which could very well find itself adrift without Erdogan at the helm, revise its bylaws to allow him to run again?

CHP
The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) saw its share of the vote increase from 20 percent in 2007 to just over 25 percent, while its number of seats in parliament rose from 112 to 135. Again, party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu can claim a kind of victory, but the party’s showing falls short of the 30 percent of the vote that it had hoped for. Despite barnstorming the country and riding on what seemed to be a wave of increased enthusiasm for the CHP, Kilicdaroglu still only managed to do well in Turkey’s western Aegean region, a long-time CHP stronghold, and in the eastern province of Tunceli, where he was born. In that sense, the CHP failed to break out in this election, and even fell back in some areas that had previously supported it.

For the CHP, the election raises questions about what are the natural limits of what a left-leaning, social democratic party can achieve in electoral terms in Turkey and just how the party can realistically manage to return to power some day. For Kilicdaroglu, today’s vote was also a referendum on his position as leader of the CHP. He can claim that he has led the party to its most successful showing since the early 1980’s, gaining some 3.5 million new voters. But there will be voices within the party that will accuse him of having failed to capitalize on an opportunity to gain even more votes and get close to the 30 percent mark and that will blame this failure on the party's departure from the the strict vision of Kemalism that it had espoused under its previous leadership. This will leave the party, which must find a way to update and modernize its Kemalist vision, again susceptible to the kind of infighting that Kilicdaroglu had to deal with when he first became party leader.

MHP
Since the MHP was in danger of being shut out of this parliament because of the “sex tapes” scandal that plagued it, by getting over the 10 percent threshold and winning 53 seats (as compared to 71 in 2007), the nationalist party can also claim victory. But the party comes out these elections an undeniably diminished one, failing to make a significant showing in any part of the country that counts and with mounting questions about its relevance and future direction. Just what does it mean to be a “nationalist” party in 2011 and does Turkey really need one? If the party wants to survive, does it do so by (dangerously) doubling down on the nationalism or by rebranding itself as a more traditional center-right party? Like the CHP, the MHP also has to come to terms with the built-in limits on how many votes it can obtain and what that means for its future viability on the national level. And, like the CHP, it is likely to see an internal leadership struggle emerge in the coming weeks or months.

BDP
The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), could be seen as one of Sunday’s big winners, gaining an expected 36 seats, up from 2007’s 22 (the party, in order to avoid the threshold question, runs all its candidates as independents). With its tight focus on the Kurdish issue and with its base of support mostly limited to the southeast region, the BDP will remain an identity-based party whose role in parliament is to advocate on behalf of a set of issues that have a limited ethnic and regional appeal, a kind of Turkish Bloq Quebecois. Clearly, the party has benefitted from Erdogan’s backsliding on the Kurdish issue, but getting that issue back on track will require the BDP to deal with the AKP, which is promising to get back to working on its “Kurdish opening” after the elections. Can the BDP and the AKP work together after this bruising campaign, or will Erdogan once again ignore it and render it ineffective? Can the party step back from the more provocative statements made by some of its more militant members and step out from under the shadow of the PKK, which would enable it to become a more “mainstream,” but possibly more effective, member of Turkish political life? Either way, it’s clear that any serious movement on the Kurdish issue will not be possible without the inclusion of the BDP and its parliamentary group.

Collectively, this election – which failed to give the AKP the ability to determine Turkey’s political future on its own terms – represents a potential “growing up” moment for the four parties that made it into parliament. Can they move beyond the political polarization that has increasingly characterized Turkish politics for the last decade and work together on drafting a new constitution and a new political climate that can take Turkey forward? Can the parties envision a shared sense of Turkish national identity that they can all work towards building and strengthening? If Erdogan can preside over and guide such a process, then his position in the pantheon of great Turkish leaders would be truly sealed. On the other hand, if he helps create an atmosphere that brings out the worst in his rivals, his legacy will be tainted.

(photo: Inside the AKP's Diyarbakir headquarters. By Yigal Schleifer)

Turkish Elections 2011: The Blog View

2011-06-10T17:00:00.009+03:00

With the Turkish elections set for Sunday, I've asked Aengus Collins, the man behind the very intelligent and informative "Istanbul Notes" blog to answer some questions about the vote's significance. His answers are posted below. In return, he sent me a series of questions about the election, and has posted my answers over on his blog. You can find those answers here.

1. Although this election's results have been more or less preordained, how significant is this year's parliamentary election in Turkey? What's at stake?

One of the things that makes this election potentially very significant is the simple fact that we're able to talk about its result as if it were almost a foregone conclusion. Nine years since the AKP first came to power, the chances of it being replaced by an alternative government are basically nil. In part that reflects the ineffectiveness of the political opposition, but it's also a reflection of the AKP's ruthless efficiency at consolidating its grip on power during its period in office. The AKP is now the natural party of government in Turkey. That won't always be the case, and there are tentative signs of progress within the CHP, but for the moment the AKP is the only game in town when it comes to winning elections.

That kind of electoral dominance is always a worry, because a prerequisite of healthy democratic politics is the realistic prospect of power changing hands. But the AKP's predominance takes on new significance in Sunday's election because of what's likely to follow in subsequent months and years. The most obvious consideration is the promised drafting of a new constitution. Ideally this would be thrashed out between the various parties and groupings that make up Turkey's deeply polarised public sphere. Instead, depending on the election result it's possible that AKP will get to write the constitution unilaterally. In a country that's not known for its traditions of political self-restraint this would be an unambiguously negative development.

In more general terms, there's a growing sense that years of uninterrupted success have started to go to the head of the AKP and of the prime minister, Mr Erdogan, in particular. The party's second term in office has been characterised by a prime ministerial swagger that has become uglier as the years have ticked by. There is a risk that this will simply be exacerbated once the party wins its third term. Of particular concern are persistent suggestions that Mr Erdogan hankers after a presidential system. This would formalise his personal dominance of the political scene. Again, this would be an unambiguously negative development. Countries with patchy democratic histories fare better with parliamentary institutions. Presidential systems offer too much leeway to leaders who wish to centralise power and sidestep as many checks and balances as possible.

2. If you look back at the last few years of AKP rule, what do you think a victory in these elections means for the democratization process in Turkey and the AKP's future role in it?

I think it's important to clarify what we mean by Turkey's democratisation process, because in a sense there are two of them. First, there's the actual, objective evolution of the country's democratic institutions and practices. I'm not sure that an AKP victory would make a huge difference to that process. It is certainly true that the government has been playing increasingly fast and loose with some key democratic principles, notably the separation of powers and the freedom of the press. This is of real concern, and one has to worry that more of the same would ensue if the AKP wins again. But if we take a step back and look at the broader sweep of events, these current failings don't necessarily represent a massive break with Turkey's deeply imperfect democratic traditions. Unfortunately, democratic abuses are nothing new here.

What is new, however, is the context in which these abuses are occurring. And this is where we come to the second democratisation process. This is a different beast entirely, reflecting not what's actually happening on the ground, but the way in which what's happening is spun to the electorate. Since 2007/08, the AKP seems to have twigged that in a country with a history like Turkey's, the rhetoric of democracy is a potent electoral tool. Since then, the party has relentlessly positioned itself as a democratising force. Given the AKP failings mentioned above, this has been a breathtakingly cynical exercise. But it has worked. In last September's constitutional referendum, the government basically managed to recast the poll as a choice between AKP democracy and the coup-mongering of the party's opponents. This would be laughable in its crudeness if it hadn't succeeded in playing a part in rewriting elements of the constitution.

It's on this second democratisation process, the spin-heavy AKP one, that I'd be more worried following Sunday's election. Because there must be a strong likelihood that the strategy that worked in September's referendum will be rolled out again in defence of the new constitution that will be drafted in the months ahead. Which leaves us with the risk that the AKP will write a constitution that serves its own interests and then sell it to the electorate as a democratic watershed for the country. The unfortunate truth is that the Turkish electorate may not be sufficiently democratically engaged to see through that kind of ruse. And more worrying still is the fact that the AKP's political opponents don't appear to have realised yet that they need to start contesting the AKP's colonisation of democratic rhetoric. Until that happens, the AKP will remain the driving force in Turkey's ambiguous process of democratisation.

3. It has been frequently said that Turkey's main political problem has been the lack of a credible opposition. Did Turkey overcome that problem in this campaign? How would you rate the CHP's performance, in particular?

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Turkish politics seems to have no such qualms -- it is truly remarkable that it has taken so long for signs of life to stir in the opposition. The lack of a credible opposition has had a debilitating effect on Turkish public life since the AKP came to power. Granted, there are institutional factors that tend to militate against change -- for example, the ten per cent electoral threshold is a major barrier to entry for new and smaller political parties. But there is really no excuse for the shamefully slow progress the CHP in particular has made.

It's difficult to know how to gauge the campaign performance of the CHP under Kemal Kilicdaroglu. If we compare Mr Kilicdaroglu's CHP to that of his predecessor, Deniz Baykal, then the party has at least lifted itself off the floor. Jettisoning the incapable Mr Baykal was always going to be a necessary condition for competing with the AKP. But it's not a sufficient condition, and the CHP has yet to produce an electoral platform that might form the basis of a really serious push for power. In that sense, the party continues to disappoint. It has not found a way to encourage enough semi-attached voters to peel away from the AKP and vote for a new government.

The process of rebuilding the CHP will take time. This election was always going to be too soon for Mr Kilicdaroglu to turn his party around. We should cut him some slack -- this campaign, like last September's referendum campaign, should give CHP supporters grounds for (very) cautious optimism. It is hard to conceive of Mr Kilicdaroglu ever becoming Turkey's leader, but he appears to grasp that the CHP needs to change very significantly. Despite a worrying lack of decisiveness, Mr Kilicadaroglu has made interesting noises on key litmus test issues like the Kurdish and headscarf questions. He has also wisely invested time and political capital trying to spread the CHP's reach into regions where it has traditionally been weak. These developments look like the long-overdue stirrings of a party that understands the need to broaden its appeal out to a potentially election-winning constituency rather than staying in the comfort zone of core-vote strategising.

4. At a time when Turkey is being vaunted by some as a model for democracy in the Middle East, but is simultaneously coming under increasing criticism for its failures vis a vis EU democratic norms, what does this election tell us about the quality of democracy in Turkey?

There's been an interesting shift recently in the backdrop against which Turkish democracy gets assessed, with the European Union fading and the nascent democratic movements of the Middle East moving to the fore. To a large extent this shift is down to analytical laziness, with commentators following the depressingly usual pattern of hitching Turkey to whatever bandwagon is flavour of the month. But there is some substance to it, and it has the potential to affect Turkey's democratic development in real ways.

To my mind, the diminution of the EU's soft power in relation to democracy in Turkey is significant and alarming. The EU bears much of the responsibility for the deterioration in relations -- through its strategic short-sightedness (for example, on Cyprus's accession), more recently through its much more understandable inward-looking focus on preventing a meltdown of the euro zone's monetary union.

But this stepping back by the EU has been greeted by something close to hubris on the Turkish side. All too often one hears the view trotted out that the EU needs Turkey more than vice versa, and that the country might be better off on its own. Frequently, this assessment rests on nothing more solid than a lazy comparison of current headline GDP growth rates. In terms of what Turkish democracy needs, this complacency in relation to the EU is wildly off the mark. For all the problems of the EU-Turkey relationship, it has been one that has constantly pushed Turkey to improve itself.

The same can't be said of this new 'democratic model' narrative that has arisen in response to the Arab spring. On the contrary, there's risk is that it will encourage a sense of complacency on the Turkish side by allowing the country to consider itself a democratic leader rather than a laggard as it has always been in the EU context. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

The reality is that Turkey's democracy remains deeply deficient by European standards. One can disagree strongly with many aspects of the EU's conduct towards Turkey, but it would be a real pity if the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. Being anchored in the European democratic mainstream should be of the highest strategic priority for Turkey's leaders. It would be a real worry if they take their eyes of that prize for any significant length of time.

5. Everyone agrees Turkey needs a new constitution, but is simply changing the constitution enough? What do you think needs to accompany the constitution writing process in order to improve the quality of democracy in Turkey?

No, a constitution alone isn't enough. Even the most democratic of constitutions can't sustain a healthy democracy alone. It's just one element in a constellation of factors that needs to be present. Unfortunately, Turkey has already fallen at the first hurdle by paying too little attention so far to the mechanics of drafting the new constitution. Ideally, a broad cross-section of society should be given this task, both to ensure that no significant interests are excluded from the deliberations, and, to lend society-wide legitimacy to the resulting document. In Turkey however, it's not yet clear how the new constitution will be drafted. It seems likely that the process will involve only the small subset of political parties that make it over the undemocratic ten per cent threshold into parliament. It is even possible that the process will only involve the AKP.

So even before it has begun, we can mark down this constitution-drafting process as a missed opportunity.

Not that a well-crafted and legitimate constitution would be enough either. Creating a healthy democracy means ensuring that the democratic principles set down in a constitution are faithfully, consistently and forcefully implemented and defended. At a minimum, that requires effective legislators as well as a commitment to uphold the rule of law. But neither of these can be relied upon in Turkey. My favourite example from the current constitution is its declaration of gender equality. To say that implementation of this provision hasn't had the full weight of the state behind it would be an understatement of the highest order.

So until Turkey's politicians internalise some key democratic norms, we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for major democratic step changes in the country, regardless of what ends up going in the new constitution. The country may have most of the electoral basics down, but there's a steep learning curve ahead in terms of trying to bed down a more sophisticated democratic culture. Ultimately, it will require real political vision and leadership to move Turkey's democracy forward. That kind of leadership doesn't appear to be on offer in Sunday's election.

The Kurdish (Cultural) Opening

2011-06-01T22:27:00.005+03:00

The New York Times (which seems to have discovered Turkey in recent days) has a good piece out about some of the interesting changes taking place on the Kurdish cultural front -- a move towards "cultural autonomy" as the article puts it. From the article:

A BALEFUL love song wafted from the Vizyon Muzik Market. Not so long ago playing Kurdish music over a loudspeaker into the streets here might have provoked the Turkish police. Just speaking the names of certain Kurdish singers at one time could have landed a Kurd in prison.

These days hundreds of CDs featuring Kurdish pop singers fill one of the long walls in the small, shoebox-shaped Vizyon Muzik. The discs face a few

dozen Turkish ones. Abdulvahap Ciftci, the 25-year-old Kurd who runs the place, told me one sunny morning not long ago that customers buy some 250 Kurdish albums a week. “And maybe I sell one Turkish album,” he calculated, wagging a single finger, slowly. “Maybe.”

Turkey is holding elections in a few days. For months pro-Kurdish activists have been staging rallies that during recent weeks have increasingly turned into violent confrontations with the police in this heavily Kurdish region of the southeast. Capitalizing on the Arab Spring and the general state of turmoil in that part of the world, as well as on Turkey’s vocal support for Egyptian reformers, the Kurds here have been looking toward elections to press longstanding claims for broader parliamentary representation and more freedoms, political and cultural.

(The full piece can be found here.)

The article hits upon an interesting paradox that I wrote about previously on this blog (see this post), which is that while on the political front Turkey's "Kurdish opening" has mostly fallen flat on its face, developments in the realm of culture have been much more encouraging. In terms of film, theater, music and books, Kurdish culture is becoming a much more visible and natural part the cultural landscape in Turkey, particularly in places like Istanbul, where this wasn't the case even a few years ago.

The question now, it would appear, is at what point does a move towards "cultural autonomy" start impacting or strengthening what is also a call in southeast Turkey for some kind of "political autonomy," mostly through the decentralization of the Turkish state, and how will the government respond to that?

(photo - poster for "Min Dit," a Kurdish-language film recently shown in Istanbul. By Yigal Schleifer)

Crisis? What Crisis?

2011-05-25T21:19:00.008+03:00

Reuters (via Today's Zaman) has just put out a good piece tracking some of the concerns economists have about the financial picture in Turkey. From the article:

Turkey's yawning balance of payments deficit and an exodus of foreign investors suggest its unorthodox monetary policy experiment may have gone too far, threatening to make Ankara a new flashpoint for risk in global emerging markets.

The country's monthly foreign funding shortfall is running at almost $10 billion, latest data shows -- a tough position to be in when confidence in developing markets is shaky and Western powers are preparing to wind down easy-money policies.

Financing such a deficit in recent years hasn't been difficult, with Turkey's stock and bond markets pumped up by huge foreign portfolio flows, its 2001 financial crash a distant memory.

But that picture could be changing.

A Bank of America/Merrill Lynch poll last week showed equity fund managers are underweight in Turkey for the first time in more than three years. A separate JPMorgan survey showed foreigners cut Turkish debt and currency exposure in May and went significantly underweight on its bonds.

Non-residents had also pulled $325 million out of Turkish stocks by mid-May this year, central bank data shows.

"There are very few countries in the world that run such a large current account deficit or are as vulnerable as Turkey to the withdrawal of capital from emerging markets," said Julian Thompson, head of emerging markets at Axa Investment Managers.

"It's sufficiently worrying to have next to no exposure there," added Thompson, who now has less than 1 percent of the money he manages in Turkish stocks, versus 5 percent last year.

The full article can be found here.

The article reflects the sentiments of several analysts in Turkey I have spoken with who are concerned that Turkey might again be heading towards the unpleasant part of a boom-bust cycle and that current economic policies are being used to boost the government's chances at reelection, rather than to put the brakes on what might be an "overheating" economy.

Meanwhile, on the same pages of the government-friendly Today's Zaman, columnist Ibrahim Ozturk offers a different picture. "Turkey's 'overheating' problem is being excessively abused in an irresponsible manner by some experts in the foreign as well as domestic media," he writes in today's paper. "This perspective has already been turned into a campaign against Turkey," he adds, saying that he believes additional measures will introduced "after the election" to get the economic picture back in order. (Full column here.)

For those interested in drilling down into the data on this a bit more, an analysis piece issued last month by Roubini Global Economics has lots of figures and charts that look at the role external funding is playing in driving the Turkish economy. The piece (found here) concludes with this:

In RGE’s view, the financing of Turkey’s large and growing CAD with short-term and historically more volatile capital inflows is a major risk factor attached to Turkey’s impressive economic recovery.

Whether the recent surge in capital inflows reverses and proves destabilizing is an open question. Turkey’s rapid recovery from the 2008-09 slump has proved the economy is more resilient than in the past, and capital inflows may enhance its long-term growth prospects. On the other hand, Turkey’s own history, and that of other EMs, shows that capital flows can rapidly reverse, and suggests the need for caution.

[UPDATE - A short report by Christian Keller, a very good Turkey analyst at Barclays, arrived in my mailbox soon after I posted this. Looking at recent activities and statements by the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT), Keller says, ".....we fail to follow the CBT’s surprisingly benign and, in our view, somewhat selective interpretation of recent data." His report (quite technical, be warned) can be found here.]

[UPDATE II - A bit more on this story from the Financial Times' "Beyond BRICS" blog, here.]

"Caspian Intelligence"

2011-05-23T18:52:00.002+03:00

That's the name of a new blog by Alex Jackson, a smart independent analyst of Caspian and Eurasian affairs. Based on his previous work, I'm sure his blog will become an essential read for anyone interested in the Caspian and nearby regions. Alex's blog can be found here.

Sex, Votes and Videotape

2011-05-18T19:39:00.004+03:00

Turkey's upcoming parliamentary elections continue to take a turn towards the tawdry and downright bizarre, with the escalation of an ongoing scandal that's engulfing the right-wing, ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

The party, the third largest in the parliament, has been hit with the release online of footage showing a number of its senior members in compromising situations with young women. Four MHP members have already resigned, but the mysterious website where the footage has been posted (www.farkliulkuculer.com) has issued a statement saying it will release footage implicating six more party members unless the MHP's embattled leader, Develt Bahceli resigns today.

Bahceli and the MHP, in response, have accused the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of orchestrating the campaign and even say they have proof that a member of the governing party is financing farkliulkuculer.com. More details here (Hurriyet Daily News) and here (Today's Zaman).

As I wrote in a recent post on Eurasianet's Turko-file blog, sex scandals and hidden-camera footage are turning out to have quite an impact on the course of Turkish politics these days. The fact that the main opposition Republican Peoples' Party (CHP) is at all competitive in these upcoming elections has everything to do with the fact that the party was able to dump it's ineffective long-time leader, Deniz Baykal, after he himself was implicated last year in a secret-camera sex scandal.

In the case of the MHP, the sex tapes and how they may impact the party's fortunes are also very significant, since polls show the party is fighting to get enough votes to make it above Turkey's 10 percent threshold for getting into parliament. The MHP failing to pass the threshold could be very significant, as Henri Barkey explained in a recent analysis:

Should MHP fail to pass the barrier, the AKP—given Turkey’s electoral rules—would almost certainly receive a disproportionate share of seats that otherwise would have gone to MHP. This outcome is what Erdogan would love to see and has strived to ensure. After all, every seat his party wins brings him closer to the 367 seats needed to alter the constitution with relative ease.

As I mentioned in my Eurasianet post, the MHP affair again brings up serious questions about the pervasive use of illegally obtained material (phone taps, video, etc.) in Turkish politics and the lack of decent legal mechanisms for stopping it. For more on that, take a look at this story I filed last year from Istanbul's phone tappers' bazaar.

(photo: MHP leader Devlet Bahceli)

Archival Bloggage

2011-05-13T21:18:00.002+03:00

This blog is honored to be included on Foreign Policy magazine's list of "must read" Middle East blogs. For those readers new to the blog, be sure to dig through the archive: its provides a helpful narrative arc for the last few years of the Turkey story.

Who's Muzzling the Turkish Press?

2011-05-06T19:42:00.005+03:00

Journalist Andrew Finkel, who was fired a few weeks ago by Today's Zaman because of a critical column he wrote, has a powerful opinion piece in today's International Herald Tribune about some of the recent troubling trends in the Turkish press. From his column:

Sadly, the most effective censor in Turkey today is the press itself. To adopt a stance critical of current policies is to position oneself in opposition to the government — and editors only do so as a calculated risk. Columns exposing corruption or criticizing the government’s sprawl-inducing environmental policies are simply spiked.

When Turkish newspapers try to speak their mind, they often discover their advertisers dropping out, explaining apologetically that they have “come under pressure.”

The full piece can be found here. A previous post about Finkel's firing and it's implications is here.

[UPDATE -- CNN's Ivan Watson has a new piece out about press issues in Turkey, which can be viewed here.]

Rockin' the Kurdish Vote

2011-04-15T23:06:00.007+03:00

A new Economist article points out why for Kurdish politicians in Turkey this summer's parliamentary elections might different than previous ones. As the article points out, this time around campaigning in Kurdish will be allowed, while the existence of a new Kurdish-language state-run television station and the arrival of several private Kurdish television and radio stations could also change the political landscape.

Credit for these changes should be given to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has done more than many of its predecessors to liberalize and reform the Kurdish issue (despite the fact that its much-heralded "Kurdish opening," announced in 2009, failed to get too far). So why is the AKP expected to take a big hit at the polls in the southeast, while the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party looks set to make big gains? The Economist explains:

There are several reasons for AK’s ailing fortunes among the country’s 14m Kurds. They are no longer swayed by free coal and talk of Islamic fraternity. AK’s “opening”, which was meant to lead to an amnesty for PKK rebels untainted by violence, has been shelved. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, blames the Kurds. He says the PKK provoked Turks in 2009 when fighters returning from Iraq started delivering “victory” speeches.

The government’s response was to lock up thousands of Kurdish politicians, including BDP mayors. Selahattin Demirtas, a BDP leader, reels off the figures. At least 2,300 Kurdish activists have been jailed since 2009. Sentences sought by prosecutors in an array of cases against the BDP’s 22 parliamentarians, including Mr Demirtas, add up to a staggering 2,350 years.

Egged on by Mr Ocalan, the BDP has raised the bar with a civil-disobedience campaign that has seen a Kurdish female parliamentarian slap a policeman. Kurds are spurning mosques staffed by state-appointed imams in favour of Kurdish-language prayers in fields. Their campaign will not end, they say, until BDP prisoners are released, an amnesty is given to PKK fighters, education in Kurdish is permitted and the 10% threshold is lowered.

The strategy is paying off. Analysts reckon the BDP could win some 30 seats in June’s election. AK’s case has not been helped by the lacklustre candidates it is fielding in the south-east. This may be a good thing. The more Kurds there are in Ankara, the more comprehensive will be the new constitution Mr Erdogan promises to deliver after the election.

A senior AKP official I recently spoke with told me that the government's two main post-election priorities are passing a new constitution and restarting the stalled Kurdish reform initiative. The big questions remain how well can the AKP and a stronger BDP work together in parliament (based on what we saw in the current parliament, not so well) and how much confidence will the AKP have to take the political risk of making significant reforms on the Kurdish front (again, based on what we have seen before, questionable). Another failed "Kurdish opening" could prove to be very dangerous.

(Today's Zaman takes a look at the BDP's clever list of candidates here. On a related note, for more on the rise of the southeast's pro-Kurdish imams, take a look at this Christian Science Monitor article of mine from a few years back, and at this more recent Today's Zaman story.)

(photo -- BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas campaigning near Diyarbakir, Turkey, in 2009. By Yigal Schleifer)

Tied Up in Knots

2011-04-11T23:56:00.004+03:00

Eurasianet's Nicholas Birch has a great piece up about an initiative in Turkey to get headscarved women on the ballot for the upcoming parliamentary elections. From his article:

A woman's group is stirring controversy in Turkey with a campaign to elect headscarf-wearing women to parliament. Some of the fiercest opposition to the initiative is coming not from secularists, but from religious conservatives.

With just over two months to go before Turkey’s parliamentary balloting, the country’s political leaders are starting to assemble party lists of candidates. The number of seats any given party wins is determined by the percentage of the vote it receives. The higher an individual candidate is on a party list, then, the better the odds of that person becoming a MP.

Turkish women's groups have been traditionally divided along ideological lines. But they are uniting behind the initiative, launched in March by a non-partisan group called Women Meet Halfway, to have women who wear headscarves placed high enough up on party lists so that they stand a decent chance of being elected.

"No headscarves, no vote," shouted sixty-odd women who gathered outside the parliament building in Ankara on April 8. "As it stands, our democracy is half-baked", said the group's spokeswoman, Nesrin Semiz. "Two-thirds of Turkish women cover their heads. Not one of them has a seat in parliament."

The campaign is generating an ambiguous reaction from an electoral constituency that, at least at first glance, would appear to be a natural ally: religiously conservative men.

The full article can be found here.

Turkey's political parties released their candidate lists today. Hurriyet takes a look at how women fared on the lists here. In the end, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) only nominated one headscarved candidate, placing her at the bottom of the candidates list, which means it's not very likely she'll get voted into parliament.

Inconvenient Truths

2011-04-09T00:08:00.007+03:00

The recent firing by the Today's Zaman newspaper of one of its top columnists, Andrew Finkel, for doing his job -- which is to write smart, questioning pieces that push forward the conversation on important and difficult issues -- should be cause for great concern for anyone who cares about the development of an independent and democratic press in Turkey.

Finkel is one of the smartest observers of Turkish politics, reporting on Turkey long enough to have an insider's deep understanding of what makes the country tick, while at the same time maintaining his outsider's critical distance. It's a combination that provided for frequently memorable and essential columns during his his three-year stint at Today's Zaman -- and which also got him into trouble before. In 1999, Finkel was charged with "insulting state institutions" after writing about some inconvenient truths regarding the Turkish military, which then led to his being fired by his employer, the Sabah newspaper, at the insistence of the country's National Security Council (MGK) .

Although the military wasn't involved this time around, it's clear that Finkel again got canned for writing (or trying to write) about another inconvenient truth. Today's Zaman is supported by the Fethullah Gulen movement, which is currently in the middle of another press-related controversy in Turkey, having to do with the arrest of a journalist who was preparing to publish a book that accuses the movement of having infiltrated the country's security forces. Following the arrest of the journalist, Ahmet Sik, on charges that his book is connected to the Ergenekon coup plot, prosecutors went on an aggressive campaign to confiscate any unpublished versions of the book and even indicated it would be a crime for individuals to be in possession of the manuscript.

Finkel wrote a column in response to these developments, but Today's Zaman refused to run it and then let the columnist go. In the column, which was printed instead in yesterday's Hurriyet Daily News, Finkel takes his (now former) employer and the Gulen movement to task for their response to recent events. From his column:

It was a bit over three years ago that I was recruited to write this column for this newspaper (Today’s Zaman). I remember the conversation well. The editor-in-chief anticipated that I might be hesitant to associate myself with a press group whose prejudices and principles might not always coincide with my own. He explained what I knew already, that the Zaman Group supported and was supported by the Fetullah Gülen Community and that I would have to take that on board. However, he explained the paper's mission was to fight for the democratization of Turkish society – that Turkey was no longer a country which should be ruled by military fiat. He also impressed upon me that he was committed to liberal values and to free discussion. And then, of course, he flattered me by saying that mine was a voice which the target audience of Today’s Zaman would want to hear. What helped me to make up my mind was the presence of columnists whose reputations I respected and whose standard of integrity had got them into trouble in other “corners” of the Turkish media....

....I have already expressed my concern that the fight against anti-democratic forces in Turkey has resorted to self-defeating anti-democratic methods. This in turn has led to a polarization in Turkey. If your side loses power then the natural fear is that they will use your methods against you. In case this sounds like I am speaking in riddles, I am referring to the aggressive prosecution of people who write books. These may be bad books, they may be books which are written with ulterior motives, they may be books which contain assertions which are not true. But at the end of the day, they are books – and there are libel courts – not criminal courts – designed to protect individuals from malicious falsehood. In short, writing a book offensive to the Gülen community is not a crime.

It may be in bad taste, it might be off beam. It might every bit as nonsensical as the conspiracy theories that fill the shelves of Turkish book stores. But it might not. And until we actually read it we cannot know. More to the point, we can only question the motives of those who don’t want us to read it. It blackens the names of the censors, increases the credibility of a book which no one has even read. It’s also extremely foolish because in an age of Internet, you can’t actually stop people from whispering your backs. The point about the ostrich with its head in the sand is that it only fools itself.

However, I write this in the interests of defending the good name of this newspaper, with whom I have been associated since the first copy appeared on the stands. Having started the dialogue, it cannot stop.

(The full column can be found here. And some thoughts from Jenny White here.)

Finkel's firing strikes me as a very bad omen for which direction the political discussion in Turkey may be heading and for the health of the Turkish press. It's also a troubling development for Today's Zaman (and its Turkish-language sister paper, Zaman), which has become an increasingly blunt instrument in recent months, frequently resorting to the the same questionable journalistic tactics that it had long criticized its rivals for using. As one of two English-language papers in Turkey and because many of its writers represent a Gulen perspective, the newspaper remains a valuable resource and an important read. But after Finkel's firing, it is a much diminished publication. Finkel in many ways embodied Today's Zaman's mandate, and was then fired for fulfilling that mandate. The question, then, is: has the paper's mandate changed?

"I do not doubt that the current Turkish government, like those that preceded it, uses both carrot and baseball bat to get the media on its side," Finkel wrote in a September, 2009 column on press issues that seems particularly relevant today. "Yet even were the elected government to value a free and vital press (and there are days when this appears to be the case), the question remains whether the press itself is prepared for the role."

[UPDATE -- Today's Zaman editor-in-chief Bulent Kenes has penned a column explaining why his paper let Finkel go. While Finkel was one of the first journalists that he thought about hiring when he launched the paper, Kenes says that something (or, as he sees it, someone) has now "changed."

"So what is it that has changed?" he writes. "What has changed is that some of our writers have come under the influence of the strong and dark propaganda that is at play and have started to stagger. Unfortunately I feel the same way about Finkel, who I know does not have ill intentions in any way."

That certainly seems to clear things up, doesn't it?]

Eastern Dreams

2011-03-31T22:55:00.003+03:00

Joshua Walker has a good piece up on the Huffington Post site that looks at the roots and trajectory of Turkey's current foreign policy and the role of historical memory in shaping that policy. From his piece:

Presenting Turkey as a "soft power"in the Middle East was made possible by Turkey's broader democratization since the end of the Cold War and in particular since September 11, 2001. There seems to be a relationship between greater democratization and Eastern oriented foreign policy initiatives throughout Turkish political history. The three longest serving prime ministers (Adnan Menderes, Türgüt Özal, and Recep Erdoğan) have all implemented at least one Eastern oriented initiative (Baghdad Pact 1955, Central Asian Initiative 1991, and "Strategic Depth" 2004) along with their domestic democratization efforts. These same prime ministers commanded the largest percentage of the parliament and were among the most responsive to public opinion, which led often to tenuous relationships with Turkey's traditional purveyors of foreign policy, the military. There is something electorally attractive about Eastern initiatives even if they are less institutional or formalized in the same way than Western initiatives have tended to be (NATO 1952, EC Application 1987, and EU candidate status 2004). Within the democratizing Turkey of the last decade civilian leaders cannot as easily ignore public opinion on critical foreign policy questions in the same way as military leaders who previously dominated Turkish foreign policy decision-making.

The role of history and imperial memories has further facilitated the transformation in Turkey's outlook on the Middle East. Turkey's "rediscovery" of the Middle East has been greatly initiated by the AKP's historical memory and ideas about Turkey's "rightful" place as the heir to the Ottoman Empire both in and outside the region. The rise of the AKP has subsequently meant a de-emphasis of the "othering" and "Islamic threat" in Turkey's view of the region. Closer Middle Eastern relations are not seen as being dichotomous or detrimental to Turkey's western orientation, at home or abroad, as they had been seen under military rule in the 1980s. Hence, a more "Islam-friendly" approach that focuses on economic opportunities and shared heritage has come to permeate Turkey's policy towards the region.

The full article can be found here.

The Libyan Rift

2011-03-28T22:06:00.004+03:00

I have a briefing up on the World Politics Review website that looks further at the difficulties Turkey has faced in formulating its Libya policy, how that has affected relations with some of its allies and what lessons that might provide in other cases of regional instability. From the briefing:

Ankara has backed off from its initial opposition to NATO being involved in the Libya crisis and is now even expressing its willingness to take a leading role in the military operation there. But Turkey's initial position and its hard bargaining within NATO before finally agreeing to let the alliance take over military operations in Libya could reinforce a gathering impression that Ankara is acting as a spoiler and outlier within the organization. That impression first surfaced following Turkey's initial opposition to the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO's new secretary-general in 2009, and it was further established by the tough conditions Ankara initially set for joining the alliance's missile defense program. If not addressed, it could risk hardening into a dangerous split between Turkey and NATO.

Meanwhile, relations between Turkey and France, which were already strained before the Libyan crisis because of differences over Ankara's European Union membership bid, appear to be heading towards an even rougher patch. Turkey was noticeably among the countries not invited to the Paris meeting that led to the start of military action against Libya, with French officials suggesting that Ankara's stated opposition to an intervention there disqualified it from attending. Turkish leaders, in response, have obliquely accused Paris of being motivated by oil concerns and seem to have made a priority of reducing the French leadership role in the Libyan operation.

The fact that an ambitious middle power like France spearheaded the action in Libya highlights the ways in which the crisis represents a missed opportunity for Turkey to have assumed the kind of regional leadership role it aspires to play. While Erdogan, Davutoglu and other Turkish leaders have long talked about their desire to create a proactive Middle East foreign policy that respects regional sensitivities, Ankara's undefined and overly accommodating approach to the Libyan crisis, at least in the early stages, left the door open for other actors to step in and assert their vision for how the problem should be resolved.

Turkey, though, could look at Libya as a dress rehearsal. With unrest continuing in Yemen and especially in neighboring Syria -- two countries where Ankara has recently been investing heavily in both political and economic terms -- Turkey is likely to be faced with some of the same, if not more-complicated, policy problems it faced in Libya. How Ankara chooses to confront those challenges could very well be an indicator of the lessons it has drawn from the Libyan crisis.

You can find the full piece here, and a look at Turkey's Libya policy by the Economist's Amberin Zaman here.

For Ankara, of course, the biggest worry right now is probably what's taking place in next-door Syria. Writing in Today's Zaman, Omer Taspinar suggests that events there could provide another test for Turkey and its efforts to become a regional leaders. From his piece:

Ankara has had a love affair with Damascus under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government over the last eight years. The Syrian-Turkish bilateral relationship is a remarkable story of a journey from enmity to best friendship. This puts a lot responsibility and pressure on Turkey’s shoulders. The events in Syria will provide a crucial litmus test for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in terms of testing his commitment to democratization in the region.

Turkey is uniquely placed to apply some friendly advice and pressure on Syria for constitutional reforms. Over the weekend Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu delivered a lecture in which he emphasized the importance of striking the right balance in the Middle East between freedom and democracy. Damascus may be in no mood to listen, but this is the right time for Turkey to use its leverage with Syria to send a clear message that change is unavoidable. Syria’s balance between freedom and security will need to change with rapid political, social and economic reforms. The Assad regime needs to act now.

More here.

Banned in Turkey - Again!

2011-03-13T02:45:00.007+02:00

[UPDATE -- Despite reports that the ban on access to Blogger has been lifted, the block appears to still be in effect (as of March 31, 2011).]

[UPDATE II -- According to this article in Milliyet, the block is still on because the court order to restore service refers to something called "Blogsport," not "Blogspot." Sad, but true.]

This blog, along with every other one hosted on Google's Blogger service, is currently not accessible in Turkey by court order. As was the case the previous time this happened, it appears that some blogs on Blogger are showing clips of Turkish football/soccer matches that cable provider Digiturk has exclusive rights to, prompting the provider to ask the court to take Blogger down. Turkey's problematic (to put it mildly) internet laws allow for sites to be taken down wholesale, rather than simply blocking access to the offending pages. This was the case with YouTube, which was banned in Turkey for years because Google refused to remove a few videos that mocked Ataturk.

Take a look at this previous post for more information about Turkey's misguided internet laws, which not only allow the courts but also a government agency to block access to sites. Meanwhile, Today's Zaman's Andrew Finkel takes a look at the Blogger ban and the wider issue of freedom of expression in Turkey in a column that leaves not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Turkish officials have indicated that new internet-related legislation which should avoid bans like this is coming down the pike, but there is some concern among activists that it could in fact make things worse. According to Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul's Bilgi University and one of the leading Turkish authorities on internet issues, the new legislation will create four types of centrally-administered filtered profiles that every Turkish internet subscriber will have to sign up for (the default one being a "standard" profile which will also be filtered, although it's not yet clear what will be filtered out). "What they are building is NOT a child protection mechanism but Turkey's Internet Censorship Infrastructure. You can quote me on that," Akdeniz, who has taken a look at the proposed legislation, wrote me in a recent email.

For now, if were in Turkey and tried to find this blog (and are too honest to use proxies), this is what you would reach:

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir.

(Translation: "This site has been disabled by court order.")

Libyan Roulette

2011-03-10T01:05:00.002+02:00

I have a piece up on the Eurasianet website looking at the dilemma Turkey is facing in formulating its approach to the crisis in Libya, which has found Ankara, as one analyst put it, “torn between a kind of idealistic narrative of Turkish foreign policy and a more mercantilist realpolitik

From the piece:

Only a few weeks ago, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was in the vanguard of those calling for political change in Egypt. These days, Erdogan’s government in Ankara is taking a very different approach toward the uprising in Libya.

Turkey is opposing the imposition of sanctions against the regime of strongman Muammar Qaddafi, as well as resisting any NATO-led military intervention in the country. Erdogan also pointedly refused suggestions that he return a “human rights” prize awarded to him in 2009 in Tripoli by a Qaddafi family foundation.

While Erdogan’s position on the Egyptian crisis helped raise Turkey’s profile in the Middle East, experts say Ankara’s stance on Libya – a large part of it dictated by concerns over the fate of large-scale Turkish investments in the North African country – could prove problematic, possibly diminishing some of the country’s newfound regional prestige.

“The ongoing Libyan crisis, with no end in sight, has created a problem for the Turkish government,” says Bulent Aliriza, head of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The contradiction here is that instead of being able to repeat what he said during the Egyptian crisis, Prime Minister Erdogan has clearly taken into account ... commercial interests which require maintaining ties with the embattled [Libyan] regime. That undercuts the role of Turkey as a potential model for countries in the Middle East.”

Ankara’s Libya policy, particularly its opposition to any sort of NATO-led intervention there, could also undermine some of the recent gains Turkey has made in repairing its ties with the United States, says Omer Taspinar, a Turkey expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

“I think it’s costing in terms of [U.S. President Barack] Obama’s patience and it’s costing in terms of relations with the Pentagon, which has been a strong supporter of Turkey. It’s being seen as a serious mistake by Turkey,” he said.
Turkey’s economic interests in Libya are extensive, particularly in the construction sector, where the country has secured some $15.5 billion in tenders over the last five years, representing 15 percent of its global contracting business. Trade between the two countries has also been growing steadily, increasing by 60 percent over the last two years.

When Turkey was forced to evacuate the estimated 25,000 of its citizens working in Libya in a massive rescue operation, Foreign Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan assured journalists, as one newspaper put it, “that Turkish contractors have no intention of pulling out from Libya but have simply paused operations for security reasons.”

“We have a huge stake, a lot of interest in that country. The situation for us is different than other countries, so we have to be very careful,” Selim Yenel, a deputy undersecretary at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a recent briefing in Washington. “When Qaddafi is killing his own people, you have to be careful about your own citizens. Nobody knows what is going to happen there, so we have to be more cautious.”

The full piece can be found here. Joshua Walker and Nader Habibi offer another critical look at Turkey's stance on Libya here.

Test Driving the "Turkish Model"

2011-02-14T21:54:00.009+02:00

There's been a lot written in recent days about how the Turkish experience might serve as a model for post-Mubarak Egypt (here's just one sample). Omer Taspinar and Steven Cook both do a good job at breaking this suggestion down and looking at some of the structural differences between Turkey and Egypt, as well as some of the areas where Turkey's experience might serve as an inspiration for Egypt. And this Foreign Policy piece, by Nuh Yilmaz and Burhanettin Duran, asks the important question of just which Turkish model Egypt could end up following: "The old authoritarian Turkey under military oversight or the new democratic Turkey with its dignified foreign policy?"

A lot of this "Turkey as a model" talk has struck me as somewhat shallow, failing especially to take a look at how Turkey got to where it is today, as if the Turkish miracle was immaculately conceived. None of the newspaper pieces I read on the subject, for example, mentioned Turkey's European Union bid and how so much of the country's successful political reforms (such as reducing the military's hold on the political process) have come as a result of Ankara's engagement with the EU. If we look under the hood, the Turkish model has some significant parts that were made in Europe, which poses interesting questions about how to export it.

But what I've found especially problematic about much of the "Turkey as a model" talk is that it has a premature, "mission accomplished" quality to it. Although Turkey has made historic and laudable strides on the reform front in recent years, it remains a work in progress, with the country still facing huge challenges. A long-promised civilian constitution still needs to drafted and passed (no small task). The Kurdish issue continues to loom dangerously large, as do the stalled initiatives regarding Cyprus and Armenia. Improving a troubled educational system and its outdated, nationalistic curriculum, decentralizing the Ankara-dominated government and finding a way past the country's deep political and social divisions are some of the other significant and thorny items on Turkey's reform to-do list. Failure on any of these issues could pose a serious setback for Turkey's ongoing democratization efforts.

Egypt's and the wider Middle East's Generation Facebook, meanwhile, might also want to take a look at Ankara's recent record on new media and freedom of expression issues. Although certainly not in the same league as some of its neighbors when it comes to controlling and patrolling the internet, Turkey has shown some disturbing tendencies in recent times (there was even at one point a veiled threat to shut down access to Facebook), last year joining Russia and Belarus as countries "under surveillance" by Reporters Without Borders. You can read more about Turkey's problematic internet laws in previous posts here. Likewise, lawsuits by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other government officials against protesters and critical journalists and politicians and the increasingly heavy hand being used by Turkey's state television watchdog have raised some important red flags on the freedom of expression front.

Turkey can certainly serve as a kind of inspiration for the Middle East, but wise shoppers may want to wait for next year's improved model before they commit.

(photo: A 1974 Anadol, the first Turkish mass-produced car. Via Wikimedia Commons)

Talking Turkey

2011-02-10T23:14:00.004+02:00

(Note: This talk has been postponed to a later date, yet to be decided. Apologies to anyone who has already registered.)

I will be in New York next week to give a talk about current Turkish affairs at the Manhattan JCC. Along with the current developments in the Middle East and how Turkey fits into them, I will be speaking about Turkey's evolving foreign and domestic policy and the current and future state of Turkish-Israeli relations.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday, Feb. 17

Time: 7pm

Location: 334 Amsterdam Ave. (@76th Street)

(For more information or to register, call 646-505-5708)

Turkey's Riddle of the Sphinx

2011-02-01T23:29:00.005+02:00

The political crisis in Egypt is proving to be an interesting test for Turkey's desire to play a more influential role in the Middle East and -- like Ankara's still-born attempt to defuse the recent crisis in Lebanon -- is perhaps also showing the current limits and constraints of the country's influence in the region.

Ankara was effectively silent during the recent "Jasmine Revolution" in Tunisia and, until a speech in parliament today by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said nothing about the events in Egypt. Interestingly, the only stated action taken by Turkey up until now was to create a "crisis desk" for Egypt and Tunisia -- not at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mind you, but at the Ministry of Trade, in order to deal with any problems faced by Turkish investors doing business there. And as Today's Zaman reports, the Turkish MFA has been mostly busy coordinating the mobilization of one of Turkey's most powerful foreign policy tools -- aka Turkish Airlines -- to ferry its own citizens out of Egypt and even those of other countries (talk about building customer loyalty).

So where does Turkey fit into all of this? On the one hand, Ankara and PM Erdogan have increasingly spoken of Turkey's desire to see democracy flourish and justice prevail in the Middle East. Indeed, in his speech today, Erdogan continued with that line, telling embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to "listen to the shouting of the people, the extremely humane demands. Without hesitation, satisfy the people's desire for change." Added Erdogan: "If there is a problem, the place for solution is the ballot box."

But as my Eurasianet colleague Nicholas Birch points out in a very good analysis piece, Ankara's position on Egypt is undercut by its close support for some of the region's more autocratic regimes, especially Syria and Iran. From his piece:

Far from being a spokesman for the oppressed, [analyst Soli] Ozel argued, Erdogan has more often than not taken the side of regional leaders: Ankara, for example, defended Mahmud Ahmedinejad’s administration in Iran during election-related upheaval in 2009 and continues to maintain close relations with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

"Of course, Erdogan is not going to call for Mubarak's resignation, but a country which claims to be a moral leader does need to show some sort of principles," Ozel said.

A foreign affairs columnist for the daily Milliyet, Semih Idiz thinks the hesitation of Turkish leaders to take a stance on unrest in the region reflects the conservatism inherent in the policy of good neighborliness that has guided the AKP’s regional diplomacy. "Recent events risk capsizing [Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu's 'regional vision' because it was based on deepening relations with neighboring powers by getting along well with them," Idiz said.

He adds that there is little the AKP government can do with a Middle East shaken by popular rebellions, at least, not until the new representatives of regional order are in place.

Echoing Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan on February 1 repeatedly emphasized democracy's role as a stabilizing agent. The difficulty he faces today, argued Bulent Aliriza, an expert on Turkey at the Center for Strategic and International Relations in Washington, is that the regional road to democratic stability looks set to bring instability right to Turkey's borders....

...."If you are pursuing the end of a more democratic Middle East, that is laudable," said Aliriza. "But you get to a point where supporting that creates instability in countries you have close relations with. It is a dilemma Turkey is struggling with, and it explains why, beneath all the brave rhetoric, Erdogan trod a very careful line today."

(The full piece can be found here.)

The crisis in Egypt still presents Turkey with some opportunities. It's no secret that Mubarak is not a fan of Ankara's recent efforts to expand its influence in the region and had previously told the Turks to butt out of Egypt's traditional spheres of influence, particularly regarding Palestinian affairs. And before the Mavi Marmara, Turkey had another Gaza-related diplomatic crisis, this time with Egypt, when a land-based Gaza aid convoy that included several Turkish MP's and NGO's ended with a violent confrontation on the Egypt-Gaza border that left an Egyptian soldier dead and Turkish Islamists burning pictures of Mubarak in the streets of Istanbul. So, a diminished (if not gone) Mubarak could mean that Turkey will have more space to operate in the region.

The general turmoil in the Middle East could also give Ankara a chance to again put forward the new "Turkish model" -- democratic, Islamic, economically vibrant and rapidly shedding the influence of the military -- as one for other countries in the region to emulate. But for this to happen, Turkey has to overcome the obstacle put forward by it not being an Arab country. The best (and perhaps only) way to do this is to is to emphasize its Islamic identity, which may explain why in his parliament speech, Erdogan use a distinctly religious tone in his appeal for Mubarak to step down.

"Mr. Hosni Mubarak: I want to make a very sincere recommendation, a very candid warning... All of us will die and will be questioned over what we left behind," Erdogan said. "As Muslims, where we all go is a two cubic meter hole."

This may yield dividends in the Middle East, but at a time when Ankara is accusing European Union countries of stalling on Turkey's membership bid by turning the EU into a "Christian Club," attempts at expanding influence through overt calls for Islamic solidarity could create problems elsewhere.

[UPDATE -- I have uploaded an official translation of Erdogan's speech, which can be found here.]

New Location, Same Great Flavor

2011-02-01T23:19:00.004+02:00

This blog is now coming to you from the latest outpost to be served by the ever-growing Turkish Airlines: Washington, D.C. Despite the new location, the blog's focus will remain on Turkey and Turkish foreign and domestic affairs, perhaps with a bit more of the view from Washington. Stay tuned for more.

Talking Heads

2010-12-14T18:59:00.003+02:00

If you have a half-hour to spend, take a look at the latest installment of Bloggingheads.tv, where Foreign Policy managing editor Blake Hounshell and I try to start making sense of the Turkey-related Wikileaks, Turkey-US relations and the last eight years of Turkish foreign policy. The video is embedded below for your viewing pleasure:

The Deal in Review

2010-12-07T16:38:00.002+02:00

Now that the next round of talks between Iran and the "P5+1" group of countries -- China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and U.S. -- will be convening in Istanbul early next year, it seems like a good time to take another look at the nuclear swap deal brokered between Turkey, Brazil and Iran last May. Although the deal was dismissed by the United States and others at the time as being insufficient, the venue of the upcoming talks does raise the question of where that deal might fit into the new round of discussions and what role the "Turkish approach" (less confrontation, more engagement) to Iran might play in how these new talks unfold.

To get a better sense of what some of the answers to these questions might be, I recently had an email interview with Aaron Stein, a a research fellow at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation in Istanbul, where he works on Turkey’s security policy and how Turkey perceives the Iranian nuclear program. Here's our exchange:

1. What is your assessment of the swap agreement worked out between Turkey, Brazil and Iran?

In my opinion, the Joint Declaration signed and negotiated by Iran, Turkey and Brazil has little nonproliferation value and does little to slow Iran’s controversial nuclear program. I am convinced that Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Taip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had the best of intentions when negotiating the Declaration. Despite their best intentions, the document does not address, or limit Iran’s enrichment program. The Declaration fails to take into account Iran’s decision to enrich uranium to 19.75 percent. The Declaration resulted from months of diplomatic negotiations, which were preceded by similar negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran. The length of negotiations prompted prominent Arms Control and Nuclear Weapons Expert Jeffrey Lewis to call the Declaration the, “Zombie fuel swap” because it the initiative never seems to die.

The first iteration of the fuel swap appeared during negotiations in October 2009 between the P5 +1 and Iran. During these negotiations Iran agreed in principle to send 1,200 kg of low enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France for fuel rod fabrication. The Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) – a small 5 MWt research reactor supplied by the United States to Iran in 1967 - is expected to run out of 19.7 percent enriched LEU fuel in 2010. Tehran’s dwindling supply of LEU fuel prompted the Iranian government to seek foreign suppliers, and signal its readiness to negotiate a fuel swap arrangement. Faced with the prospect of the TRR’s impending shutdown, Iranian ministers tentatively agreed with representatives of the P5+1 to this fuel swap arrangement at a meeting in October 2009. Despite the apparent diplomatic breakthrough, Iran backed off of its original agreement, proposing to ship out its LEU in 400 kg increments, and demanded that the transfer take place on the Iranian Gulf Island of Kish. The IAEA, the United States, and other members of the P5+1 rejected Iran’s counter proposal, claiming that it violated the spirit of the initial agreement, which called for the shipment of all 1,200 kg in one batch. The Obama administration and other members of the P5+1 were demanding that Iran ship all 1,200 kg LEU to France and Russia because, at the time, this would have left Iran without enough LEU for a nuclear weapon, should Iran choose to further enrich its LEU stockpile to weapons grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). At the time, the IAEA had reported that Iran had stockpiled 1,500 kg of LEU. If Iran were to have shipped all 1,200 kg of LEU, it would have taken Iran many months to replenish its LEU reserves, thus limiting its weapons break out capability.

The diplomatic impasse prompted Mohammed El-Baradei, the former director General Director of the IAEA, to step in and suggest Turkey as an alternative site for the fuel swap. El-Baradei believed that Turkey’s long standing participation in the NATO alliance and its close relations with the Islamic Republic made it an ideal place for the fuel swap to take place. Following the proposal, Ahmet Davutoglu indicated his country’s willingness to hold Iranian LEU. Thus, setting in motion Turkey’s participation in the Iran fuel swap negotiations.

Beginning in November, Ahmet Davutoglu and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehe Mottaki met a number of times to discuss the fuel swap arrangement. This culminated with the release of the Joint Declaration (for a full text of the Declaration please visit, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/julian-borger-global-security-blog/2010/may/17/iran-brazil-turkey-nuclear) indicating Iran’s willingness to ship 1,200 kg of LEU to Turkey within a month, if the Vienna Group (The United States, France, Russia and the United Nations) endorsed the declaration and specifically agreed to deliver LEU fuel rods to Iran for use at the TRR.

In its current form, the current Declaration has little non-proliferation value and does not address Iran’s nuclear breakout capability. Experts estimate that a country like Iran would need 1,200 kg of LEU to produce enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, should Iran decide to enrich its LEU to 90 percent. When the Declaration was concluded, the IAEA had reported that Iran had accumulated 2,300 kg of LEU. The removal of 1,200 kg of LEU would allow Iran to replenish its LEU stockpile quickly, thus negating the non-proliferation benefits of the fuel swap arrangement.

In addition, the Declaration does not address other issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Since the Iranian rejection of the original fuel swap proposal in October 2009, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) decided to further enrich its stockpiled LEU to 19.7 percent for use in the TRR. In May 2010, the IAEA released its comprehensive Safeguard Report, which detailed Iran’s stockpile of 19.75 enriched uranium. As of November 2010, Iran has produced 21 kg of 19.75 percent enriched uranium. Perhaps the most glaring weakness of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil declaration is that Iranian enrichment issue is not addressed. The process to further enrich uranium is very complicated. It requires the disassembly and reassemble of centrifuge cascades, while ensuring that the machines will still function correctly. These recent developments, combined with Iran’s growing knowledge about centrifuge technology, has demonstrated Tehran’s ability to produce weapons grade uranium, should it choose to enrich its LEU.

2. Does the agreement bring anything new to the table?

The first iteration of the agreement had a lot of positive aspects and would have delayed Iran’s ability to further enrich LEU for a nuclear weapon, should it choose to do so. The original intention of the fuel swap was to limit Iran’s break out capability. The P5+1 believed that the removal of 1,200 kg of Iranian LEU would give the P5+1 and Iran time to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. The Obama administration’s original intention was to use this “window” to move negotiations along quickly and eventually conclude some sort of nuclear agreement with Iran.

The Declaration does not ascribe to the spirit of original agreement and most importantly, does not deal with any of the major issues that I outlined above – namely Iran’s decision to enrich uranium to twenty percent.

3. Turkey is arguing that the swap deal is useful as a confidence building measure with Iran, which could lay the groundwork for further deals with the country? Do you see any value in that argument?
Despite the tepid response from the P5+1, AK Party officials maintain that the fuel swap arrangement is an important confidence building measure. They argue that the Agreement is nearly identical to the October P5+1 proposal that Iran rejected in October. Despite Iran’s questionable LEU accounting, Iran’s willingness to ship 1,200 kg of LEU to Turkey, all at once and before receiving the reactor fuel from France and Russia, is a step in the right direction. In my opinion, there is some validity to Turkey’s argument.

For Iran-Turkey relations, the Agreement reaffirms the AK Party’s commitment to pursuing a negotiated settlement to the Iranian nuclear issue, despite heavy U.S. pressure to support the latest UN Sanction’s package. Turkey has proven that it is committed to strengthening its relations with Iran, despite pressure from its traditional allies. By doing so, Ankara may have proven itself to be a valuable intermediary between Iran and the West. It also reaffirms Ankara’s new independent minded foreign policy, and may signal to leaders in Tehran that Turkey acts in good faith when discussing its nuclear program.

In my opinion, any agreement with Iran over its nuclear program is a “diplomatic win” and should be pursued whole-heartedly. In the complex world of international relations, agreements and iterated interaction between two parties increases trust and cooperation. It breaks the cycle of negative reciprocity, and may lead to each side making concessions. In short, any effort to break the persistence and perseverance of “zero-sum” thinking can help move diplomatic processes forward and help contribute to an eventual agreement. Thus, the confidence building argument has some validity and I do not think critics of the Agreement shouldn’t dismiss Turkey’s diplomatic efforts.

However, non-one should believe that this Agreement, even if it were to be implemented, wasn’t politically motivated and served the interests of all of the parties involved, especially Iran.
4. What's your take on the role Turkey has been playing in helping resolve the Iran nuclear issue?

Since the election of the AK Party in 2003, Turkey has set about changing the basic tenets of its foreign policy in the Middle East. AK Party’s foreign policy has been based on what Turkey’s current Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutogolu, calls “strategic depth”- a foreign policy seeking to balance Turkey’s relations with the West and its former Ottoman provinces in the South and East. Davutoglu promotes Turkish “soft power,” believing that friendly relations with all of Turkey’s neighbors will benefit Turkish economic and political interests in the region. The AK Party is opposed to further sanctions against Iran, arguing that they hurt Turkish economic interests, and that they serve as the first step towards the legitimization of war.

The statistics and evidence back Davutoglu’s arguments and Ankara’s Iran policy makes perfect sense. Iran is Turkey’s second largest provider of natural gas and bilateral trade between the countries topped 10 billion dollars in 2008. Thus, from an economic standpoint Turkey’s hesitation to support any new UNSC sanctions is perfectly logical. In addition, Turkey and Iran share a common threat from Kurdish separatist groups operating based in Northern Iraq. Since the formation of the Party for Freedom in Kurdistan (PJAK), a sister terrorist organization of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkey and Iran have increased counter-terrorism and military cooperation.

Furthermore, Turkey’s determination to conclude some sort of nuclear agreement with Iran reflects the AK Party’s thinking about foreign policy. Turkey’s negotiations with Iran can simply be seen as a manifestation of what Davutoglu and the AK Party have been saying all along. Namely, that while in power they would pursue an interest led foreign policy, promoting regional peace, while balancing Turkey’s relations with the East and West. Turkey’s recent actions smack of Realpolitique, a term and concept that should not be foreign to leaders in Washington, Paris and London.

5. There seems to be less concern in Turkey about a nuclear Iran than in Europe and the US. Why do you think that is?

Since the election of AK Party, one cannot go one week without reading a headline in some major American/European newspaper that asks “Is Turkey Turning East?” Reporters, security analysts, and foreign policy bloggers often point to Turkey’s religious government and its balanced foreign policy as proof of Ankara’s creeping “Islamization.” Frequently, these article are precipitated by a comment or speech made by Prime Minister Erdogan, where he says something about his country’s Iran policy. These fears are exacerbated by Turkey’s position on the Iranian nuclear issue and by its recent decision to vote “no” on the latest UNSC sanctions.

I believe that the difference between the West and Turkey’s position on the dangers posed by Iran’s nuclear program is driven by each country’s immediate and long-term security threats. The West views Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon as a threat because they believe that an Iranian nuclear weapon will upset regional stability and prompt the Sunni Arab states to build their own nuclear weapons. Needless to say, a nuclear arms race in the world’s oil producing nations would harm American and European security and economic interests.

Secondly, I don’t think that one can ignore the West’s discomfort with Islam and its immediate association with terrorism. Thus, there is a persuasive and pervasive discourse in American and European communities that believe Iran’s religious beliefs will exempt them from believing in the traditional concepts of deterrence.

Turkey and Iran, on the other hand, have a shared sense of national identity that stems from a common history of powerful empires that were usurped by imperialism. Both countries are home to historic Middle Eastern Empires that controlled large swaths of territory in the Middle East and Central Asia. The two former empires share a number of cultural and religious similarities and they have shared a common and un-changing border since the signing the Kasr-i Şırın Treaty in 1639. I believe that the long history of cordial relations has lessened Turkish threat perceptions.

Despite the similarities, there are differing perceptions within Turkey about the dangers posed by a nuclear Iran. In my opinion, Turkish thinking about the potential dangers posed by Iran’s nuclear program appear to correlate with an individuals interpretation of Turkey’s secularist principles – those that argue that Iran’s nuclear program is a major threat to tend to favor a rigid and strict interpretation of secularism, while those that favor a more loose interpretation of Ataturk’s secularist principles are generally less threatened by Iran’s nuclear program.

Thus, like all of Turkish politics there is an internal struggle over the direction of the country’s foreign policy. I think these divergent opinions can be traced back to the words of Ataturk who said “Peace at home, peace in the region.” Thus far, the AK party has flipped the meaning of these words and has come to believe that “peace in the region leads to peace at home.” The AK Party’s primary fear is an American or Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear sites. The resulting chaos, they believe, will upset Turkey’s economic growth and could contribute to terrorist activity in the Southeast. The specter of a nuclear Iran takes a back seat to Turkey’s immediate security interests, meaning that in the short term the prospect of an American/Israeli attack is more of a threat to Turkey’s security than a nuclear armed Iran. In the West, the opposite is true; officials argue that a nuclear-armed Iran will be the catalyst for regional upheaval and instability.

Thus, it seems that the two sides will continue to not see eye-to-eye on this important issue.

The Leak in Review

2010-11-30T20:51:00.013+02:00

It's been three days since the Wikileaks diplomatic cables release and it's hard to imagine things going back to the way they were before. How could they now that we know that diplomats say one thing in public and different, much blunter things, in private; that the Arab states, from Egypt to the Gulf, are itching for the United States to take out Iran's nuclear program; that Israeli officials believe Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "hates" their country; and that the Turkish leader may have eight secret bank accounts in Switzerland (OK, on that count, maybe there is something to these leaks after all).

On the Turkey front, at least, despite the advance hype, there was little earth shattering material in the leaked cables. After taking a look at what was released so far, the Hurriyet Daily News was able to come up with this vapid observation: "U.S. diplomats in Turkey have been deeply interested in the politics of the country, according to United States State Department cables made public by whistleblower site WikiLeaks." As analyst Semih Idiz wrote in the same paper:

The documents now may provide interesting and entertaining reading on Turkey, and may be very upsetting for some people in the government, but they are not of “historic” caliber.

As for the frank and direct language in the cables, this may be something of a novelty for the layman, but the language in the diplomatic dispatches from Turkish embassies abroad – or any embassy for that matter - is probably not much different.

What these leaked cables have done, on the other hand, is confirm what has been talked about or speculated about on the basis of factual information or “educated guessing” among diplomats and diplomatic observers in Ankara for some time.

Still, digging through the Turkey-related cables does yield some illuminating and instructive material. One thing they make clear is the difficulty Washington initially had in understanding Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Former Ambassador Eric Edelman's cables from the AKP's early years, in particular, while getting some things right also seriously misread Erdogan and rely on dubious sources for their information, such as a conspiracy-theory loving pollster who predicts the AKP's imminent demise.

Things seem to improve as time goes by, though. Most recent Ambassador to Ankara James Jeffrey's early 2010 cable about the "new" Turkish foreign policy was sharp, perceptive and more attuned to the nuances of Turkish politics, offering up some very interesting criticisms of Turkey's current foreign policy. From the cable, which is worth reading in full:

Despite their success and relative power, the Turks really can't compete on equal terms with either the US or regional "leaders" (EU in the Balkans, Russia in the Caucasus/Black Sea, Saudis, Egyptians and even Iranians in the ME). With Rolls Royce ambitions but Rover resources, to cut themselves in on the action the Turks have to "cheat" by finding an underdog (this also plays to Erdogan's own worldview), a Siladjcic, Mish'al, or Ahmadinejad, who will be happy to have the Turks take up his cause. The Turks then attempt to ram through revisions to at least the reigning "Western" position to the favor of their guy. Given, again, the questioning of Western policy and motives by much of the Turkish public and the AKP, such an approach provides a relatively low cost and popular tool to demonstrate influence, power, and the "we're back" slogan.

There are also some interesting items dealing with the Turkey-Israel relationship, which give an indication of how Erdogan might be looking at Israel as a political (and possibly strategic) liability and how he is recalibrating Turkey's regional strategic posture vis-a-vis the country. In another cable by Jeffrey, from October of 2009, the ambassador writes about the cancellation of the Anatolian Eagle military exercises after Erdogan barred Israel's participation only "hours" before the exercises were to start. Although Erdogan's action has previously been described as the result of his not wanting to take the domestic political risk of being seen as having played host to the same air force that bombed Gaza only a few months before, Jeffrey provides a different explanation:

With an Israeli strike - across Turkish airspace - against targets in Iran a possibility, Erdogan decided he could not afford the political risk of being accused of training the forces which would carry out such a raid.

In another cable, this one from early 2010, the ambassador lays out some of Turkey's worries about getting involved with Washington's new missile defense plan (which eventually became the one approved at the recent NATO summit in Lisbon). Something similar plays out here:

Erdogan is concerned that Turkey's participation might later give Israel protection from an Iranian counter-strike.

In fact, as the years go by, Iran starts to increasingly dominate the material in the cables leaked so far. Along with the material coming out of the rest of the Middle East, the leaks show how profoundly out of step Turkey is with most of its allies and neighbors regarding the urgency of forcefully dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue and in terms of being concerned about what others see as Tehran's "destabilizing" regional actions. At the same time, they also seem to highlight one of the built-in tensions in the Turkey-Iran relationship, which is Ankara's belief that its engagement with Tehran is moderating the Iranian regime and "isolating" it regionally, something which could eventually lead to tension between the two countries.

For example, in a cable from late 2009 that describes a somewhat testy meeting between Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Gordon accuses the Turks of not being tough enough on the Iranian. The Turkish FM counters that Ankara is providing an alternative vision for the region and, as a result, the Turks "limit Iranian influence in the region." In another cable, from an early 2010 meeting between the State Department's Nicholas Burns and the Turkish MFA's Feridun Siniroglu, the issue of Syria comes up. In this case the cable reports:

Sinirlioglu contended Turkey's diplomatic efforts are beginning to pull Syria out of Iran's orbit. He said a shared hatred for Saddam had been the original impetus for their unlikely alliance. "Now, their interests are diverging." Once again pitching Israel-Syria proximity talks, Sinirlioglu contended Israel's acceptance of Turkey as a mediator could break Syria free of Tehran's influence and further isolate Iran.

For now, it doesn't seem like it's the leaks themselves that will do any harm to Turkey's relations with some of the countries involved. In the case of the US, the leaked cables won't create bad chemistry -- they only confirm and help us further understand the bad chemistry that existed before the leaks. But the leaks' domestic ramifications in Turkey -- particularly the material charging Erdogan and other AKP members with corruption, something the opposition has already started using against the government -- could ultimately prove damaging to Turkish-US relations.

With general elections coming up, it's likely that Erdogan and the AKP will try to stir up an anti-American backlash to the leaks as a way of diverting attention away from the damaging material inside them. In fact, that might have already started: in a strongly-worded speech he gave today, Erdogan undiplomatically suggested his lawyers might sue some of the American diplomats responsible for writing the leaked cables. “This is the United States’ problem, not ours... Those who have slandered us will be crushed under these claims, will be finished and will disappear,” the HDN reported the Turkish PM as saying at an Ankara municipal ceremony. Other AKP officials, meanwhile, are portraying the leaks as part of an Israeli plot to weaken and corner Turkey.

So much for Wikileaks heralding the arrival of a new day.

A Boycott for Mr. Naipaul

2010-11-25T19:39:00.003+02:00

What is it about Turks and winners of the Nobel prize for literature? Their own home-grown one, Orhan Pamuk, has more-or-less been hounded out of the country for alleged insults against the nation. And now V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born 2001 winner of the prize, has been forced to cancel a speech he was to make in Turkey because of an uproar over alleged insults he made against Islam.

The story's background, via the Wall Street Journal:

Nobel Prize-winning author Sir V.S. Naipaul has pulled out of a writers' conference in Istanbul that starts Thursday, pressured by religious conservative media in Turkey that objected to statements he has made on Islam.

The move sparked two Turkish authors to pull out of the event, its organizers said Wednesday.

Mr. Naipaul, author of some 30 books, had been due to give the opening speech at the European Parliament of Writers, a literary event organized here to mark Istanbul's status as a European Capital of Culture this year.

For the past week, however, religious conservative Turkish newspapers, including Yeni Safak and Zaman, have been campaigning against the decision to honor Mr. Naipaul, a 78-year-old Trinidadian of Indian origin. While some Turkish authors supported his right to attend the conference, defending him on grounds of free speech, others said they would boycott the event if he attended.

"How can our writers bear to sit by the same table with Naipaul, who has seen Muslims worthy of so many insults?" wrote poet and Zaman columnist Hilmi Yavuz, who initiated the planned boycott last week and described Mr. Naipaul as "an enemy of Islam" and "a colonialist."

Is it me, or is there an ill wind of intolerance blowing through Turkey these days? From television stations being fined for what guests said during debates, to ministers suing columnists for perceived insults and armed gangs attacking art gallery openings, there seems to be a worrying trend developing here.

The great irony regarding the scratched Naipaul visit was that the cantankerous author was actually in Istanbul this past July and not a peep was heard. At that time, he came as a key speaker in something called "Istancool," an arts and culture festival sponsored by Turkish Airlines and the Turkish Ministry of Tourism. Four months later, Istanbul doesn't seem so cool, at least not on the cultural front.

Turkey is trying to position Istanbul as a global capital of, among other things, culture. The Naipaul affair is a sign that, at least for now, the internal forces and contradictions that continue to tug at the Turkish sense of self-identity will prevent the city from playing that role. Indeed, as Sameer Rahim, the Daily Telegraph's assistant books editor, wrote in a column about the affair, Naipaul's writing probably has a lot to offer Turkey:

Naipaul, like Turkey, contains unfathomable contradictions. (He does, after all, have a Pakistani wife.) Those Turks who opposed his entry might do well to ignore his provocations and read his powerful novels of inbetweeness.

A very interesting 2005 New York Times profile of Naipaul, meanwhile, sheds more light on his complicated and sometimes problematic approach to Islam, but also shows that the author and the two books about his travels in parts of the Muslim world, which have been the source for some of the criticism leveled against Naipaul, might also have something to say for today's Turkey. From the article:

The books raise but don't necessarily answer deep and vexing questions: Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does one necessarily have to abandon one's individual cultural and religious identity to become part of the West? Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom?

Cat Fight

2010-11-24T17:02:00.004+02:00

In the end, Ankara decided to use the recent NATO summit in Lisbon not as an opportunity to make a De Gaulle-style break with the alliance, but rather as a chance to reaffirm Turkey's commitment to the concept of collective security and to fend off those who were looking for another piece of evidence to prove the alleged Turkish drift eastward.

The Turkish government was able to bring home the goods on the issue it fought hardest on, which was to not name any country (i.e. Iran) as the reason behind the new NATO missile defense shield program that was agreed upon at the summit. On the other hand, as the Wall Street Journal reported, "Most of a series of other demands Turkey had made in the weeks leading up to the meeting were either dropped or, as in the case of a demand for the control center to be located in Turkey, pushed into the future. Turkish President Abdullah Gul didn't press these issues on Friday, say people attending the summit."

Without any drama or showdowns at the summit itself, things got more interesting once it ended. As Burak Bekdil writes in a typically acerbic column in Today's Hurriyet Daily News:

“In France, we call a cat a cat. We all know we are talking about Iran,” President Nicholas Sarkozy said after the NATO summit in Lisbon. Apparently, the French president dislikes verbal contortions surrounding the proposed missile defense architecture. “We, too, call a cat a cat,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied in Turkey, while vigorously avoiding calling a cat a cat.

Meanwhile, President Abdullah Gül was proud because Turkey’s efforts to not call a cat a cat had succeeded at the Lisbon summit. Now we have a cat at our east door, but neither we nor our NATO allies would call it a cat. All the same, Mssrs. Sarkozy and Erdoğan claim that they would call a cat a cat.

In September, NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen had also called a cat a cat. The missile shield system, Mr. Rasmussen said, would be against possible attacks from rogue states. It was apparent that his definition of rogue states did not imply Singapore or New Zealand. The secretary general named Iran’s nuclear program as one of the reasons justifying the missile shield. The cat?!

I think the question is not so much Turkey refusing to "call a cat a cat," but rather how it perceives the feline. To some of Ankara's allies (most crucially, the U.S.), the cat is a growling one that often tries to claw those reaching out to stroke it. To Turkey, on the other hand, the cat is a potentially cuddly stray that simply needs to be brought in from the cold (perhaps, as Semih Idiz points out in a recent column, that's why one of the first things Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu did after the summit was call his Iranian counterpart to update him on developments).

At the end of the day, though, by joining the missile shield agreement, it appears that Ankara is not taking any chances one way or another. In a good analysis of what the Lisbon summit means for Turkey and transtlantic relations, the German Marshall Fund's Ian Lesser points out that:

....the approach to ballistic missile defense architecture, agreed in principle in Lisbon, suits Turkish security interests to a surprising degree. Turkey’s close political and commercial relations with Tehran, and Ankara’s “no” vote on UN Security Council sanctions, contributed to an atmo- sphere of friction with Western partners on Iran policy. Yet, beneath the differences on Iran diplomacy, Turkey shares — or should share — some concerns about Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In a technical sense, Turkey is the most exposed member of the alliance when it comes to the growing reach of ballistic missile systems deployed or under development in the Middle East. Ankara may wish to keep an open line with Tehran, but the defense of Turkish territory, including key population centers, still matters.

Lesser's analysis paints a fairly positive picture of the post-summit Turkey-NATO/western alliance dynamic, writing:

....the Lisbon experience suggests that some aspects of Turkish foreign policy remain cautious and traditional, and the NATO connection still matters when it comes to working with Ankara.

On the other hand, in his conclusion, Lesser looks ahead, offering this thought:

The dynamics in Lisbon do not reverse recent trends in Turkish strategy, nor are they irrelevant to future prospects. For the United States and Europe, the Lisbon summit underscores the reality that Turkey’s foreign and security policy is increasingly diverse, in character as well as direction.

Clearly, many more opportunities to see who calls a cat a cat await Turkey and NATO down the road.

Sticks and Stones....

2010-11-05T15:57:00.005+02:00

The case of Oktay Eksi -- the long-time Hurriyet columnist who resigned this past week in the face of government and "public" pressure -- has been staying with me. The background: in what was to be one of his final columns, Eksi, a fixture in his newspaper's pages for some 40 years, railed against the Prime Minister and other government officials for their plan to build a series of controversial dams in a scenic part of northeastern Turkey. In an intemperate flight of rhetorical (and metaphorical) fancy, the columnist accused Erdogan and the others of being willing to "sell their own mothers."

Following strong criticism from Erdogan and the government and facing angry protesters in front of Hurriyet, Eksi quickly resigned. As Andrew Finkel makes clear in a very good Today's Zaman column (found here), Eksi is a difficult character to defend and it's obvious that many of his colleagues were probably happy to see him and his antiquated take on Turkish politics go.

Still, there's something disturbing about his departure. As Finkel writes: "Mr. Ekşi was in effect forced to resign by a newspaper that is not eager to insult the government at a time when it is trying to wiggle free of a punitive tax bill of some TL 2 billion." Even more disturbing is what has happened since the former columnist's resignation. Not satisfied with only having Eksi's scalp, Erdogan and Energy Minister Taner Yildiz are suing him for "insulting" their honor and reputation. This is the latest in a string of similar cases initiated by Erdogan, who is asking for $71,000 in damages.

Should public officials be suing columnists for their rhetorical missteps? (The European Court of Human Rights says "no.") It would appear that the message that's being sent out in the Eksi case has more to it than simply the defense of honor.

(On a related note, Jennifer Hattam of the TreeHugger blog has a great post up about just what is happening with the dam project that Eksi wrote about and why people are getting so fired up about the government's actions on the issue.)

Criminalizing Protest

2010-11-01T17:10:00.005+02:00

Human Rights Watch has an excellent new report out that looks at the troubling use of anti-terror laws to imprison Kurdish protestors and stifle dissent in southeast Turkey.

According to Turkish law, protestors (even non-violent ones) can be accused of being members of a terrorist organization (read, the PKK) if they go to a demonstration that was deemed to have been organized by that organization. That had led to numerous cases of people who have been given fairly severe sentences for basically showing up at a protest. Some of examples covered in HRW's report include the case of an illiterate mother of six who was sentenced to seven years in jail for joining a protest where she held up a banner that said "The approach to peace lies through Ocalan" and that of a university student who was given six years in jail after being filmed flashing a victory sign at the Diyarbakir funeral procession of a slain PKK fighter and then later seen clapping his hands at a protest at his university.

From a release about the report:

....Over the past three years, courts have relied on broadly drafted terrorism laws introduced as provisions of the 2005 Turkish Penal Code, plus case law, to prosecute demonstrators. The courts have ruled that merely being present at a demonstration that the PKK encouraged people to attend amounts to acting under PKK orders. Demonstrators have been punished severely for acts of terrorism even if their offense was making a victory sign, clapping, shouting a PKK slogan, throwing a stone, or burning a tire....

...."When it comes to the Kurdish question, the courts in Turkey are all too quick to label political opposition as terrorism," said Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "When you close off the space for free speech and association, it has the counterproductive effect of making armed opposition more attractive."

The report can be found here.

(photo: a group of Kurdish women at a 2007 rally in Diyarbakir. By Yigal Schleifer)

Transatlantic Drift

2010-10-20T17:02:00.002+03:00

Simon Tisdall has an interesting piece up on the Guardian website look at how Washington's effort to create a NATO-led missile defense program in Europe is, "bringing longstanding tensions over European security into the open, to the potential advantage of Russia and Turkey, the maverick guardians of the EU's eastern flank." The full column can be found here.

Also of interest is a new study by the European Council on Foreign Relations that Tisdall links to, titled "The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe." From the report's summary:

The findings:
The post-Cold War order is unravelling. Rather than uniting under a single system, Europe’s big powers are moving apart. Tensions between them have made security systems dysfunctional: they failed to prevent war in Kosovo and Georgia, instability in Kyrgyzstan, disruption to Europe’s gas supplies, and solve frozen conflicts.
The EU has spent much of the last decade defending a European order that no longer functions. Russia and Turkey may complain more, but the EU has the most to lose from the current peaceful disorder.
A frustrated Turkey still wants to join the EU, but it is increasingly pursuing an independent foreign policy and looking for a larger role as a regional power. In the words of foreign minister Davutoglu, Turkey is now an ‘actor not an issue’. Its accession negotiations to the EU should be speeded up, and it must also be engaged as an important regional power.
Russia never accepted the post-Cold War order. Moscow is now strong enough to openly challenge it, but its Westpolitik strategy also means that it is open to engagement – that is why Dmitri Medvedev suggested a new European security treaty a couple of years ago.
Obama’s non-appearance at the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was the latest sign that the US is no longer focused on Europe’s internal security. Washington has its hands full dealing with Afghanistan, Iran and China and is no longer a European power.
The Recommendations:
An informal ‘trialogue’ involving the EU, Turkey and Russia should be established, allowing cooperation over security to build from the ground up.
In order to strengthen Turkey’s European identity, Ankara should be given a top-table seat at the trialogue, in parallel with enhanced EU accession negotiations. New chapters should be opened on CSDP and energy.
The EU should be represented by the foreign affairs high representative, Catherine Ashton, institutionalising the EU as a security actor.
A European security identity should be fostered by encouraging the involvement of Russia in projects like missile defence that focus on external threats to Europe.
Russian resolve should be tested by a commitment to dealing with frozen conflicts and instability in the wider European area.

The Full report can be found here.

Unguided Missiles

2010-10-19T17:25:00.003+03:00

As James Traub points out in his most recent Foreign Policy column, Turkey currently aspires to be many things, some of which may ultimately contradict each other. Can one have rapidly warming political and trade ties with Iran while at the same time playing host to a new NATO-sponsored missile defense system that is squarely aimed at countering an Iranian threat? That appears to be the fix Ankara is currently in.

With NATO and Washington pushing for a new missile defense system, one that would make extensive use of Turkey's strategic geographic location, Ankara is now looking for ways to neither offend its neighbor to the east nor its allies in the West. In a column in Today's Zaman, analyst Lale Kemal takes a look at what appears to be Turkey's solution to the conundrum it is facing, which is to only agree to join the missile defense program if it doesn't name any specific targets. Is Tehran assuaged that easily? Perhaps.

Not joining the missile shield program is, of course, also an option for Turkey, but it would certainly only give only more ammunition to those making the case that the country is "drifting east," with more articles like this one certain to come. All in all, the missile defense decision appears to be one that crystalizes the difficult balancing act Turkey is trying to maintain while both hanging on to its traditional role as a reliable NATO member and developing its new role as a more independent and unconventional regional player.

More background on the missile defense debate in Turkey can be found in previous posts, here.

On "Public Opinion"

2010-10-15T14:40:00.003+03:00

In the previous post, I wrote about the tricky nature of "public opinion" in Turkey. In a new piece for the German Marshall Fund, Bilgi University's Ilter Turan tackles the same issue, looking at a the results of a few recent public opinion polls taken in Turkey and trying to figure out what they say. His interesting analysis can be found here(pdf).

"Zero Problems, Maximum Trade": Chinese Edition

2010-10-08T15:57:00.004+03:00

In July of 2009, after dozens of Uighurs were killed or went missing in the wake of ethnic riots in western China's Xinjiang province, Turkish merchants were setting fire to Chinese-made products, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed a "genocide" had been committed and a diplomatic crisis between Ankara and Beijing appeared to be brewing. (For more details, take a look at these previous posts.)

Cut to today, with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao coming to Turkey on an official visit and announcing with Erdogan that the two countries are establishing a "strategic partnership" and plan to triple their trade in the next five years. This comes on the heels of reports that Turkish and Chinese military jets trained together, as part of the annual Anatolian Eagle exercises that Ankara last year controversially banned Israel from participating in (on the grounds that the Turkish public wouldn't accept the presence of the same military that attacked Gaza on Turkish soil). Uighurs? "Genocide?" Let bygones be bygones. Clearly Turkey and China have bigger fish to fry these days.

It's fairly obvious to say that when it wants to be, the Erdogan government can be exceedingly pragmatic, especially when the issue is expanding trade. But I think the interaction with China also says a lot about "public opinion" in Turkey and how it can be shaped by official attitudes. Since the "genocide" remark in July of 2009, Erdogan and other officials have said very little about the situation in Xinjiang and have refrained from criticizing China. The result? Where one would expect at least some reaction on the behalf of the Turkish public on behalf of their Uighur kin during the Chinese leader's visit, there has been silence.

Sowing the Seeds of Paranoia

2010-10-05T15:35:00.003+03:00

The start of the academic year is always a good time to instill some wisdom and knowledge in the minds of young and impressionable students, which is just what Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, head of Turkey's Higher Board of Education (YOK), tried to do in a recent talk in front of students at Central Turkey's Nevsehir University.

The subject of the talk given by Ozcan (pictured above) -- Turkey's highest-level academic, essentially -- was the importance of Turkey's universities ramping up their own research capabilities. To support his argument, Ozcan brought up the subject of tomato seeds, most of which he claimed are being imported from the United States and Israel, with dire consequences for Turkish eaters.

Here's a translation of what he had to say on the subject:

The seeds of the tomatoes and wheat we grow in Turkey mostly come from abroad, because we don't have enough seeds of our own. They come from the US and Israel. As a Turkish intellectual, sometimes I feel very little.

I mean, can't we produce our tomato seeds here in our country?.... And we don't know the consequences either. You're buying these tomato seeds. There is something called 'genetic programming.' They can implant a genetic mechanism into the tomatoes and we can eat it without even knowing. We can be infected with some diseases that we don't know anything about. In the meantime, you can destroy a whole nation. They can implant such things that people who eat these seeds die in the meantime. There are things like that and it is very dangerous. Therefore our universities need to help us in that matter.

More details (in Turkish) here.

Beyond the disturbing thought of the head of Turkey's highest academic body selling a group of students a conspiracy theory built on bad science, it turns out that Ozcan's basic data is also wrong. Forced to respond to Ozcan's allegations, Turkey's Minister of Agriculture said that the country, in fact, imports only about 6 percent of its seeds from Israel. More here.

More than tomato seeds imported from Israel, perhaps the greatest challenge facing Turkey is the quality of its educational system, from the primary level all the way to the top (for a very interesting take on that issue, read this great blog post by Aengus Collins). Ozcan's Nevsehir talk may be an indication of how far Turkey has to go in dealing with that challenge.

"Zero Problems, Maximum Trade"

2010-09-27T18:29:00.004+03:00

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the political motivations behind Turkey's ambitious foreign policy moves, but what about the economic angle? The evolution of the mantra governing Ankara's new foreign policy from "Zero Problems With Neighbors" to "Zero Problems, Maximum Trade" seems to say quite a bit about what role economics and the pursuit of economic growth have to do with Turkey's changing approach to many of its neighbors.

I took a look at the economic underpinnings of Turkey's foreign policy in a recent article for Institutional Investor magazine. A pdf version of the article can be read here.

Today's Zaman, meanwhile, report today about another Turkish initiative that brings together Ankara's economic and political ambitions meet: the creation of a free-trade zone with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. The article can be found here.

Mass Politics

2010-09-20T21:17:00.005+03:00

I have an article and photo essay up on the Eurasianet website about yesterday's historic mass at the Akdamar island Armenian church in eastern Turkey's Lake Van. It was the first time a mass had been held in the church in 95 years and the event saw the largest number of Armenians in the Van area since 1915, when they were either driven or wiped out by the Ottoman authorities.

Although the event was seen by some as an elaborate public relations effort on behalf of the Turkish government and there was some controversy over the Turkish authorities failure to place a cross on the church's roof (its name in Armenian is, after all, "Church of the Holy Cross"), I still think the event was a significant one, in terms of getting Turks to come to terms with the fact that their country actually has an Armenian history and that Armenians can stake a claim (in historical and cultural terms) to parts of Turkey.

From my article:

As an Armenian growing up in Basra, Iraq, Vanuhi Ohannesian was always hearing about eastern Turkey’s Lake Van region, her grandparents’ birthplace and the place after which she is named.

Ohannesian’s grandparents were forced to leave the lakeside city of Van in 1915, when the Ottoman authorities drove out the region’s ethnic Armenians; her father was born during the family’s trek from Van to safety in Iraq.

“My father died two years ago and was always telling me to come to Van. He said this was our motherland,” said 68-year-old Ohannesian, who today lives in Los Angeles.

Some 95 years after her grandparents’ flight from Turkey, Ohannesian finds herself standing beside one of the Armenians’ most sacred sites, the 1,089-year-old church on Lake Van’s Akdamar Island. Closed since 1915, the island church was restored by the Turkish authorities between 2005 and 2007 and reopened as a museum.

On September 19, the authorities allowed a historic mass to be held on Akdamar, an event that drew several thousand visitors to the island throughout the day, including many Armenians from abroad, such as Ohannesian, who had never been to Turkey before.

“I never believed I would be coming here,” said Ohannesian, standing on a small hill that overlooks the church and holding a small bottle filled with lake water which she plans to bring back to Los Angeles and place at her father’s grave. “We believed people didn’t change, that if they did something once, they would do it again....”

....Cengiz Aktar, director of the European Studies Department at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, says the event may have been symbolic, but it also represents a deeper, more encouraging dynamic.

“It’s part of a slow but steady process of normalization regarding the non-Muslim minorities in Turkey and the glorious past of coexistence of religions in this land that was shattered by the emergence of the nation state,” said Aktar, who is active in civil society Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts.

“At the end of the day, there is a reality that is unearthed,” he continued. “This is what should prevail. At the end of the day, we are rediscovering the Armenian past in this region.”

You can find the full article here, and the accompanying photoessay here.

(photo: view of the Akdamar church in Lake Van, Turkey, taken in 2006. Photo by Yigal Schleifer)

Referendum Talk

2010-09-13T02:11:00.002+03:00

I was on Chicago Public Radio's "Worldview" program talking about the Sept. 12 referendum in Turkey and the constitutional reform package that Turkish voters passed today. You can hear the interview, which also covers a number of other related issues, here.

From Tehran to Jerusalem

2010-09-09T02:00:00.002+03:00

In recent months, the two most glaring trouble spots for Turkish foreign policy have been relations with Israel and Iran. In the case of Israel, it's been the deterioration in relations that has caused trouble for Turkey, while in the case of Iran it's been the improvement in relations that has proved problematic (at least in terms of relations with western allies). The International Crisis Group has a new report out that takes a clear-eyed look at Ankara's relations with Israel and Iran and how the changes in those relations are fueling questions about in which direction Ankara is heading. Like other ICG reports, it also offers some very practical suggestions for everyone concerned about how to take things forward. From the report:

Damage to Turkey’s relations with Israel and suspicions in Western capitals about its relationship with Iran have dealt setbacks to Ankara’s “zero-problem” foreign policy. At the same time, there have been many misconceptions about Turkey’s new engagement in the Middle East, which aims to build regional peace and prosperity. From a Turkish perspective, Israel and Iran issues have separate dynamics and involve more collaboration and shared goals with Western partners than is usually acknowledged. Ankara’s share of the blame for the falling out with Western friends and Israel has been exaggerated, but there are problems in the government’s formulation and presentation of its foreign policy. These include short-sightedness, heated rhetoric, over-reach and distraction from Turkey’s core conflict-resolution challenges in its immediate neigh bourhood, including a Cyprus settlement, normalisation with Armenia, resolution of new Kurdish tensions and commitment to EU convergence....

....Turkey has changed greatly over the past two decades, becoming richer and more self-confident, no longer dependent on Washington or Brussels alone. While Ankara should not exaggerate its own importance or capacities, its Western partners should recognise its genuine significance in its region and beyond and spend more time talking to it quietly, constructively and at high-levels. To this end, Washington and Ankara in particular might usefully consider establishing new mechanisms for regular dialogue and better coordination on the full range of their shared foreign policy interests, including in the Middle East. Moreover, while Turkey remains committed to its EU path, France and Germany must keep its membership perspectives credible, if all are to take maximum advantage of their shared Middle East goals. These commonalities remain a strong basis for cooperating to increase stability and diminish conflicts in the region.

You can find a link to the full report here.

The Kurdish Kurdish Opening

2010-09-04T00:19:00.003+03:00

I've been on the road lately, so I'm just now catching up on current developments. One article that jumped out at me is Henri Barkey's Aug. 31 piece on the Foreign Policy website, "Turkey's Silent Crisis." In the article, Barkey -- who just returned from a trip to Southeast Turkey -- takes a look at the resurgent Kurdish problem in Turkey and at some of the trouble brewing under the surface. One of the interesting developments he looks at is how Kurdish politicians in Turkey are increasingly organizing an effort to move towards some form of local self government (trying to nip this movement in the bud, the Turkish state is currently prosecuting dozens of Kurdish mayors in the southeast). From his article:

The end of the Kurdish opening has also served to consolidate Kurdish attitudes toward the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the primary legal Kurdish political organization. The BDP has close ties to the PKK and increasingly sees itself as the Turkish equivalent of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

In the absence of political progress with the government, the BDP and Kurds in general are also beginning to put together the rudimentary institutional structures of self-governance in the southeastern provinces. The prosecution's 7,500-page indictment against members of the BDP, largely resting on conjecture and unsubstantiated allegations, nevertheless manages to sketch the contours of a parallel self-governance structure the Kurds have been attempting to put into place -- independent of Ankara.

For most activist Kurds, the PKK's armed insurrection is of secondary importance. The PKK, and especially its imprisoned leader Ocalan, is a symbolic force that they admire for raising the Kurdish issue to the forefront of Turkish politics. "Without the PKK, no one would be talking of Kurdish rights today," goes the refrain. At least in the southeastern provinces, Kurds now have an important advantage: control of the municipalities. This provides them with organizational capabilities to deepen their political struggle for recognition. Psychologically, the Turkish state may have already lost these provinces.

You can read the full article here. To get a better sense of what the BDP's leadership is thinking, take a look at this interesting interview with its co-chair, Gultan Kisanak, where she talks about the party's demands for decentralizing the Turkish state.

A (not so) Simple Yes or No Will Do

2010-08-12T23:22:00.004+03:00

Constitutional reform is tricky business. Fortunately for the average Turk, who is being asked to vote on a constitutional reform package in a national referendum on Sept. 12, Turkey's political parties are making things simple. Rather than talking about what's in the package, they have turned the referendum into a vote of confidence on the ruling AKP government and boiled down the whole thing into a simple matter of "yes" versus "no." Like the government? vote "evet." Don't like the government? Vote "hayir."

Or maybe things are not so simple. Writes Andrew Finkel in Today's Zaman:

In a nation already susceptible to polarization, who, one might ask, was the bright spark who came up with the idea of a political mechanism where the issues could only be decided with a nod or a shake of the head. It has already got to the point, the press reports, where brides and groom are falling out even before they leave the registry office over whether to take their vows with a government-leaning “yes” or the more contrary “I do.”

So what's in the reform package (which was passed in parliament a few months ago, but not with enough votes to avoid going to referendum)? Like many other AKP initiatives, it's a strange confection, layers of sweet-tasting and sensible-sounding enticements wrapped around a core of harder to swallow and clumsily disguised political self-interest.

What's causing the most debate in the package are the amendments that would change the way judges are appointed to Turkey's top court and to the powerful Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK). Joost Lagendijk, a former member of the European parliament, takes a look at some of the criticism that's being leveled at that part of the reform package in a recent Hurriyet Daily News column.

Turkey, of course, is in dire need of constitutional reform, currently burdened with a constitution that was drafted by the military after the 1980 coup. The current document is designed to protect the state, rather than individual citizens -- a mindset that still permeates much of Turkish law. The AKP had actually campaigned in 2007 with the promise of a new civil constitution, but backed off on that promise once it got into office, using the political capital of its 47 percent victory and large parliamentary majority to pass a single constitutional amendment, one which would allow for headscarves to be worn at universities (and which was promptly annulled by Turkey's Constitutional Court).

The current package, which has some 20 articles, is again being delivered with a promise that this is only a prelude to further amendments, if not the long-awaited complete overhaul of the problematic current constitution. But there is good reason to worry about if more constitutional reforms will be coming any time soon, if at all, especially after all the effort that will be spent on passing (or killing) the current reform package. Hard to imagine anyone in the government having the appetite to go through the process again. One group of liberal intellectuals, who are supporting the package, are running a campaign called "Not enough, but 'yes'" -- not quite a ringing endorsement and one that struck as carrying a whiff of resignation to it.

For those interested in the actual details of the package, SETA, a government-leaning think tank based in Ankara has a rundown of the reform package, which can be found here (pdf).

Turkey and Israel, By the Numbers

2010-08-06T17:49:00.004+03:00

The New York Times' Dan Bilefsky has a piece out looking at how on the commercial front its been business as usual between Israel and Turkey, despite the post-Mavi Marmara incident tensions. The article paints a fairly rosy picture of trade-driven pragmatism trumping nationalist sentiment.

I recently had a chance to speak with a major Turkish businessman who has been active in trade with Israel and got a less positive sense of things. Private sector dealings are perhaps not as affected right now, but he said that many Israeli companies he spoke with were deeply worried about being shut out of government tenders in Turkey and losing access to local financing for projects. Tourism figures, meanwhile, tell a very troubling story: this past June, only 2,605 Israelis visited Turkey, compared to 27,289 the year before (a figure which was already lower than previous years, since Israeli tourism to Turkey started dropping after the early 2009 Gaza war and the subsequent harsh Turkish response). There was a 44 percent drop in Israeli tourism to Turkey between 2008 and 2009 and one can only imagine how low 2010's figures will be.

On the other hand, Turkey and Israel appear to be making furtive moves towards restoring some semblance of normalcy in their relationship. The three Turkish ships involved in the flotilla incident, including the Mavi Marmara, have been released by the Israeli government and are currently being towed back to a port on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Israel has also agreed to participate in a United Nations inquiry into the flotilla incident, although the committee seems designed less to get to the bottom of the affair and more as a way of offering both Turkey and Israel a chance to step back from the maximalist positions they have taken on the issue.

In general, I get the sense that Ankara is still searching for a workable game in the wake of the Mavi Marmara incident. Threats and harsh rhetoric against Israel have not worked, and the whole affair (combined with Turkey's "no" vote in the Security Council on Iran sanctions) has worked to strain relations with Washington. In many ways, Turkey makes me think of a stylishly-playing soccer/football team whose game falls apart upon encountering a rival with a hard-nosed and rough-playing defense.

Analyst Semih Idiz takes a look at this in today's Hurriyet Daily News, in a column entitled "Govt's Mavi Marmara Frustration Deepens." The column can be found here.

Turkey Flying High

2010-07-30T10:16:00.009+03:00

The Wall Street Journal's Turkey correspondent, Marc Champion, has another great article out, this time taking a look at the spectacular recent growth of Turkish Airlines (THY) and how that is both mirroring and working hand-in-hand with Turkey's rising political and economic ambitions.

Though no longer fully state-owned, THY is very much being used as a tool of state policy, with flights to strategic new destinations (mostly in economic terms) all over the world being added almost at the same time as the government makes diplomatic and trade overtures in those same places.

I was especially struck by how some of the industry concerns and criticisms of the airline's rapid growth mirrored some of the concerns being aired about Turkey's rapidly evolving foreign policy. From Champion's piece:

Meanwhile, there's some discreet grumbling among THY's Star Alliance partners about the airline's expansion and pricing strategy.

"Turkish seems to be the new Emirates—no-one wants to be in an alliance with Emirates because there is no room for a partner, the aim is to connect everything via Dubai," said an aviation official, who declined to be named. That could mean trouble for the future, the official said….

….There are concerns, too, about the speed of Turkish Airlines' growth. The crash of a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 as it approached Amsterdam airport last year, killing nine, revived memories of the airline's historically spotty safety record before it bought one of the world's newest fleets. Meanwhile, when fog blocked Ataturk Airport in November, the airport's systems crumbled. Just a few transit-desk computer terminals were available to change the flights of thousands of stranded passengers after passenger-information screens froze. At one point, passengers stormed over the transit desk and began pounding on the door of the office where frightened ground staff had retreated.

Indeed, much of the criticism being aimed at Turkish foreign policy these days -- particularly by Ankara's traditional Western allies -- is that it is less consultative and increasingly self-centered. Inside Turkey, meanwhile, there are concerns that Ankara has too many balls up in the air on the foreign policy front without sufficient resources to keep those balls from crashing to the ground. Launching initiatives and opening up embassies and consulates all over the world (just like adding flight destinations) is a great idea, but not if you don't have sufficiently trained personnel to follow through on those initiatives or meaningfully staff those postings (or properly fly the airplanes).

Those interested in charting the course of Turkish foreign policy in the coming years, then, might also want to start keeping their eye on how Turkish Airlines does and where it goes. It could tell a lot.

The Kurdish Problem, Again

2010-07-14T16:43:00.004+03:00

The signals coming out of Turkey's predominantly-Kurdish southeast region and from along the border with Iraq are not comforting. In recent weeks, Turkish soldiers are being on an almost daily basis in attacks by the resurgent Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Turkey's state-run news agency happily reports that 46 PKK members have been killed in the past month, failing to mention that most of them are also young Turkish citizens whose bodies will be returned home to be buried and mourned. Turkish jets have been bombing targets in Northern Iraq with increasing regularity, while Today's Zaman reports that military checkpoints have now been reintroduced in the southeast and that a previously-abandoned ban on herders taking their flocks up to the region's high plateaus has also been reinstated.

It seems like the hope and good will created by the Turkish government's "democratic opening," a reform initiative announced last summer that's mostly designed to deal with the decades-old Kurdish problem, has very quickly evaporated. Cengiz Candar, an astute analyst whose warnings are worth listening to, writes in a column in today's Hurriyet Daily News:

The democratic initiative is not going anywhere. It has come to a halt, deviated even. We have an endless number of signs showing that we are back to the square one....

....The pre-1990 conditions settle in the Southeast again. We are going back to a state in which people are fed up with check points and barricades.

The full column (worth reading, though poorly translated) is here.

Fixing One Leak, Springing Another

2010-07-01T16:13:00.006+03:00

While reporting for my recent Eurasianet story about the current strained state of Turkey-U.S. relations, one Washington analyst told me he believes that the tension between Turkey and Israel has now seeped into the relationship between Ankara and Washington.

Well, now it appears that the Turkish-Israeli tensions has also seeped into Israel's internal politics. The first attempt at holding a high-level gathering between Turkish and Israeli officials since last month's Gaza flotilla raid -- a (no longer) secret meeting in Brussels yesterday between the Turkish Foreign Minister and Israel's Minister of Trade -- has led to controversy in Israel, with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman loudly complaining that he was cut out of the loop. More on the details here and here, plus some good analysis by Judah Grunstein here.

A few thoughts about this latest development on the Turkey-Israel front. One is that, among the many other things that it has brought into sharp relief, the Mavi Marmara incident has also made clear what a rickety contraption the Netanyahu government is. At a time of deep crisis with what used to be one of its most important allies, Israel not only can't utilize its Foreign Minister for problem solving, but actually has to keep him and his ministry in the dark about what it's doing to fix the problem. Officials in Ankara have previously said that they don't believe they can work with this current Israeli administration, and it's hard to see how this latest development will give them more confidence in Bibi and company.

Two, although the meeting in Brussels was a positive step, the fact remains that there is no serious high-level contact between Turkey and Israel. This was already true before the flotilla incident (and was likely one of the main factors that contributed to the tragedy that ensued) and has only gotten worse since. Before the incident, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who serves as a stand-in foreign minister in situations where Lieberman is persona non grata, had a good rapport with the Turks. Post incident, the Turkey portfolio is now in the hands of Minister of Trade Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who also has a good rapport with Ankara but is not the diplomatic heavyweight that the current crisis requires.

Finally, the "secret" meeting in Brussels is an indication of really just how fragile the Turkish-Israeli relationship is right now. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan the other day again offered up Turkey as a mediator between Syria and Israel, but the truth is that it's looking more and more like it's Turkey and Israel that could use some mediation help. We've gone from Turkey holding secret talks between Israel and Syria to Turkey and Israel being reduced to holding secret talks between themselves. Not good.

The road forward, meanwhile, looks problematic. Turkey had previously pegged any improvement in its relations with Israel to an improvement in the Gaza situation. Post flotilla, Turkey is now conditioning any normalization in the relations on Israel also making an official apology, compensating the families of the victims and allowing for an international inquiry. As one friend put it here, it's gone from Gaza to Gaza "plus on your knees." Hard to see Israel meeting all of those conditions.

A Turkish official told me that Ankara has made clear to Israel that there's a defined "road map" for normalizing relations. Considering the success that other recent "road maps" have had in the region, improving Turkish-Israeli relations could be a lengthy process.

"An Undeclared Crisis"

2010-06-29T15:55:00.002+03:00

I have a piece up on the Eurasianet website that takes a look at the ongoing evolution (devolution?) of the Turkish-American relationship, from "strategic alliance" to "model partnership" to the next, yet-to-be named stage. From the article:

Analysts are warning that relations between Turkey and the United States may be heading for a period of volatility, particularly in the wake of the botched May 31 Israeli commando raid on a Gaza aid flotilla, along with Ankara’s recent decision to vote “no” in the United Nations Security Council on sanctions against Iran.

“There is a ceiling above which Turkish-American relations cannot improve, and there’s a floor which it can’t go below. But we are getting pretty close to the floor and the ability of the two countries to improve their relations really has a huge question mark over it. We are now talking about an undeclared crisis in the relations,” said Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Indeed, in a recent interview with The Associated Press, Philip Gordon, the State Department’s top official for European and Eurasian affairs seemed to echo that assessment. Gordon suggested that Turkey needed to take demonstrable action to affirm its commitment to both the United States and the Atlantic Alliance.

Ankara, in recent years, has been plotting an increasingly independent and ambitious foreign policy course, one that sees an increased role for itself in regional and even global affairs. But observers say Turkey’s role in the Gaza flotilla incident and its subsequent harsh rhetoric against Israel, as well as its decision regarding the Iran sanctions vote, have brought into sharper relief some of the differences between Ankara’s and Washington’s approach on some key issues. [For background see EurasiaNet’s archive].

“I think the administration realizes it has a problem with Turkey, but it’s not a major rift. It’s subtler than that. I think what they will do is start looking at Turkey at a more transactional level for a while, meaning ‘What are you doing for me?’ and ‘This is what I can do for you,’” said Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “In the past we would have jumped through hoops for the Turks, but the Turks need to start being more sensitive to our concerns,” Barkey added.

On the other hand, things may be less subtle in Congress, Barkey warned. “The fact that the Hamas and Iran issues coincided within a week of each other have created a combustible situation on the Hill,” he said. “The Turks have a problem on the Hill.”

Speaking at a recent news conference, Rep. Mike Pence, a Republican from Indiana considered to be a Congressional supporter of Turkey, told reporters: “There will be a cost, if Turkey stays on its present heading of growing closer to Iran and more antagonistic to the state of Israel. It will bear upon my view and I believe the view of many members of Congress on the state of the relationship with Turkey.”

Sensing trouble, the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) dispatched in mid-June a team of legislators and party members to Washington in order to engage in damage control. But the mission met with limited success. “The atmosphere in Washington was not the most cordial one,” says Suat Kiniklioglu, the AKP’s Deputy Chairman of External Affairs.

“Especially in the House, the atmosphere was fully demonstrating that American legislators have been convinced that the flotilla incident and the [Security Council sanctions] vote on Iran are part and parcel of the same thing,” Kiniklioglu said. “Turkey and the United States don’t disagree on the objectives when it comes to Iran. We disagree about how to get there. This is a point we tried to make clear.”

Kiniklioglu suggested that Turkey and the United States should “compartmentalize” its relations. “Just because we can’t agree on how to prevent a nuclear Iran, that does not mean a rupture in the whole relationship,” Kiniklioglu said. “There has to be some sanity about how the relationship is discussed.”

To a certain extent, tension between Ankara and Washington is nothing new. What is different now, noted Carnegie’s Barkey, is that Ankara’s independent foreign policy course creates more opportunities for Turkey and the United States to have policy disagreements.

“The Turkish-American relationship was always difficult. Let’s not kid ourselves. But on the other hand, the difference between then and now is that Turkish foreign policy used to be more self centered. Now, to their credit, they are playing a more global role, but that has meant that the points of friction have increased as a result,” he said.

You can read the full piece here.

Heavy Mossad

2010-06-24T11:35:00.005+03:00

Tomorrow marks the start of Sonisphere, a three-day metalfest in Istanbul that will bring together for the first time the "big four:" Metallica, Slayer, Megadeath and Anthrax. The powerpacked bill also includes German shock rockers Rammstein and a host of other big names. Needless to say, music lovers from across the region are rejoicing, with Iranian metalheads already arriving in Istanbul.

Another example of Turkey's ability to straddle different worlds? Not for the folks over at the Islamist Vakit newspaper, who are having none of this musical bridge between east and west business. In an article published yesterday (here -- in Turkish and with a graphic photo from a Rammstein concert), the paper exposed Sonisphere for what it really is: a Mossad plot to mock Turkey.

From the Hurriyet Daily News's account of the story:

Turkish daily Vakit yesterday harshly criticized the festival and called for officials to cancel it. Defining the festival as “disgrace,” Vakit reported that Akbank, affiliated with Sabancı Holding, sponsored the festival, which is being organized by an Israeli company and will host Europe’s most scandalous music band, Rammstein.

According to Murat Alan’s story, while many festivals are cancelled in the country in order to mourn martyrs who died because of terrorist events, the Sonisphere Festival will poison young Turkish people for three days.

“The most striking name of the festival is a band named Rammstein, whose pornographic music videos are banned in many countries. The videos of the band air after midnight in European Union countries since they encourage violence, masochism, homosexuality and other perversities. The band will be on stage Friday at the İnönü Stadium. Also, there is no age limit for concerts and a ban on alcohol.”

The festival was organized by Israeli company Purple Concerts and the security will be provided by ICTS company, established by Israeli Mossad agents, according to the story. “This means to make fun of our citizens who lost their lives at the hands of the Israeli government as they carried humanitarian supplies to Gaza on the Mavi Marmara ship.”

Full article here.

The "Israeli company" in question is Purple Concerts, a big concert promoter based in Germany and run by two Israelis. The company recently brought to Turkey unwitting Mossad stooges such as Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood and the members of the "WrestleMania Revenge Tour."

(Photo: Metallica's James Hetfield. By Flowkey, Wikipedia Commons)

"More Like Erdogan"

2010-06-22T16:39:00.003+03:00

Reporter Thannasis Cambanis has a very interesting "Letter from Gaza" in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, which looks at Hamas's clever strategy for surviving -- both economically and diplomatically. The piece also gives some more insight into the Hamas-Turkey relationship and the role Hamas would like Ankara to play in its efforts to earn diplomatic legitimacy.

"We want the West to understand it can do business with us," one top Hamas official told Cambanis. "They want to know if we are more like the Taliban or like [Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. They will see that we are closer to Erdogan. We are flexible."

The full piece is here.

Open and Shut

2010-06-18T16:07:00.003+03:00

More troubling news for the Turkish government's initially promising "democratic opening," a reform initiative announced last summer that's mostly designed to deal with the decades-old Kurdish problem.

As the Turkish press reports today, ten members of a group 34 Kurds who returned to Turkey last October after several years in exile in northern Iraq have been arrested after being charged with supporting the PKK. The group's return (several of them were former PKK members) was one of the first visible signs -- and tests -- of the government's new initiative (sometimes referred to as the "Kurdish opening"). More groups of exiled Kurds were supposed to come after the first one, but the heros' welcome given to the initial group and the fact that jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan said they returned at his command, turned the whole thing into something very costly for the government, and plans for further returns were put on hold.

Since then, everyone in the group of returnees (save for four minors) has been charged with making statements on behalf of the PKK and are currently standing trial for "supporting a terrorist organization." So much for amnesty and reconciliation.

Take a look at this Eurasianet article of mine for more background on the "Kurdish opening."

These arrests, when put together with the recent increase in clashes between the military and the PKK in Turkey's predominantly-Kurdish southeast and an ongoing court case against a large number of Kurdish politicians who are also accused of supporting the PKK, paint a troubling picture. For now, Ankara appears to be struggling to find a way of pushing forward its much needed Kurdish initiative while at the same time keeping Ocalan and the PKK -- who still hold a considerable amount of influence -- out of the process.

Shift vs. Drift

2010-06-17T18:09:00.003+03:00

I have a briefing up today on the Christian Science Monitor's website that looks at the development of the new role Turkey has been carving out for itself both regionally and globally. From the briefing:

Turkey is motivated by a mix of political, economic, and ideological factors. The government feels that Turkey has punched below its weight for too long and has missed important opportunities.

Turkey has the world's 16th-largest economy – its growth between 2002 and 2007 averaged an impressive 6 percent – and believes that continued economic growth depends on actively developing its political and trade relations on a global scale.

But Turkey's leaders also believe that, as heirs of the Ottoman Empire, their country should have a greater say in regional – even global – affairs and play a leading role in the Muslim world. Turkey is less interested in tying itself down to the "West" or the "East"; it wants to be a center of power.

"I believe the thinking now in government circles is that Turkey itself can now be an axis," says Sami Kohen, a foreign-affairs analyst.

The full briefing is here.

Forecast: Hot Summer, Increasing Showers of Rhetoric

2010-06-15T16:02:00.004+03:00

Two interesting pieces in Turkey's English-language press today looking at how the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla raid will play out in terms of Turkey's domestic politics.

Today's Zaman's Lale Kemal believes that the flotilla incident and the resulting tension with Israel is helping the Turkish government turn attention away from other problems and believes it will turn the rhetoric up higher as next year's elections approach. From her piece:

Both Turkey’s domestic and external political environment at the time of the incident are worth elaborating on to shed some light in particular on the strength of the criticism Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan leveled at Israel. This is not to say that Israel did not deserve such severe criticism.

Externally, the AK Party government, successfully pursuing a policy of zero problems with neighbors, has, however, failed to put into force protocols with Armenia on its northwest aimed at normalizing its relations with Yerevan. The Cyprus problem has been at a standstill, creating a serious roadblock to any move over continuing accession talks between Turkey and the European Union. The EU has to take its share of the blame over the stalled talks with Turkey by even declining to open the food chapter, a non-political issue.

Internally, the democratic initiative aimed to find a peaceful solution to the decades-old Kurdish problem. The hope of reducing an almost 30-year-old threat posed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has failed to work at the desired level partly due to the government’s timidity in taking bold reformist steps on the issue. The opposition parties, meanwhile, are partly to blame for the initiative’s partial failure for declining to lend support to the government over this problem -- Turkey’s biggest -- and one that has external dimensions. The PKK’s increased violence is a matter of extreme concern.

The Constitutional Court’s pending decision over whether to cancel the constitutional reform package upon the initiative of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) remains a serious issue, the result of which will either help stability or lead to instability. If the court cancels the reforms passed by Parliament, thus preventing it from being taken to referendum on Sept. 12, it is highly likely that elections may be held in a couple of months rather than in July next year as planned.

Against this background, and in the absence of an opposition playing a constructive role in helping Turkish stability, the government, in frustration both internally and externally, appears to have increased the strength of its criticism of Israel. As the general elections, earlier or as planned, get closer, the government has inclined towards using the crisis with Israel for domestic purposes.

The full column is here.

Milliyet's Semih Idiz, writing in the Hurriyet Daily News, paints a similar picture, suggesting that a populist (actually, he suggests "demagogic") tone could come to dominate the governments rhetoric in the coming months. From his column:

....Erdogan is set to raise the volume of his bellicosity in coming weeks and months, given that Turkey will, for all intents and purposes, be moving into “election mode.” We had an opportunity to talk to Hikmet Cetin, a highly respected veteran politician and former Foreign Minister, the other day.

He too expressed serious concerns that Erdogan and the AKP would make anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric the centerpiece of his political campaign in the lead-up to the elections in 2011. Mr. Cetin is right to be concerned of course.

Erdogan is, after all, utilizing the least sophisticated of political tools to increase support for the AKP at home, and totally disregarding what harm he may be doing to Turkey’s well established links with the West in general and the U.S. in particular – regardless of the periodic turbulence in these ties over specific issues.

There are those who say that he is in fact doing all of this intentionally, because he is trying to turn Turkey’s direction from the West to the Islamic East. We personally believe that whatever his ultimate aim and intentions may be in this respect, Mr. Erdogan will find that it is much harder to turn Turkey’s direction than he thinks.

But it can not be denied that he and his government are providing material for those in the West who feel Turkey is in fact “drifting away.” There is truth, of course, in the contention being also put forward by some in the West today that certain countries and leaders in Europe have made it easier for the AKP to hit at the West. This is highly apparent from Erdogan’s lambasting Europe while also pursuing his populist line of demagoguery.

Some in Europe have been clinging to Mr. Erdogan and his party as the only viable reformist force in Turkey and providing him with a benefit of the doubt way beyond what is justified (even as he feeds the anti-western undercurrents in this country.) Less admiration and more attention on their part to what he is actually saying and doing at this stage should provide a wake-up call, as his latest actions and remarks appear to have done in Washington.

The bottom line is that while some may be worrying that Mr. Erdogan and the AKP are changing Turkey’s course, the truth is that it is not clear what they are trying to do, or if they even have a viable master plan for a modern Westward looking Turkey at this stage. As matters stand it appears that Mr. Erdogan is simply riding the crest of a populist conservative and Islamist wave – with nationalist overtones - which enables him to fog some seminal questions about where he is taking the country.

Full piece here.

Turkish Gaullism

2010-06-14T17:34:00.003+03:00

Omer Taspinar, an astute Turkey analyst at the Brookings Institute in Washington and a columnist with Today's Zaman, has a great piece today about what he is calling "Turkish Gaullism." Taspinar suggests a different approach to looking at Turkey's recent moves on the world stage, which goes beyond simply asking whether Turkey is "drifting east" or if its foreign policy is becoming more "Islamic." From his column:

I believe one of the major mistakes in analyzing Turkish foreign policy is done when analysts speak of a “secular” versus “Islamic” divide in Ankara’s strategic choices. While the growing importance of religion in Turkey should not be dismissed, the real threat to Turkey’s Western orientation today is not so much Islamization but growing nationalism and frustration with the United States, Europe and Israel.

Long before the recent turn of events, I argued that if current trends continue, what we will see emerging in Turkey is not an Islamist foreign policy but a much more nationalist, defiant, independent, self-confident and self-centered strategic orientation in Ankara. Because of similarities between the French and Turkish political tradition, I think it helps to think of this new Turkish sense of self-confidence, nationalism, grandeur and frustration with traditional partners such as America, Europe and Israel as “Turkish Gaullism.” One should not underestimate the emergence of such a new Turkey that transcends the Islamic-secular divide because both the Kemalist neo-nationalist (ulusalcı) foreign policy and the Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) neo-Ottomanism -- the ideal of regional influence -- share the traits of Turkish Gaullism.

If you scratch the surface of what seems to be a secular versus Islamist divide in Turkish attitudes toward the West, you will quickly see that both the so-called Islamist and secular camps embrace the same narrative vis-à-vis Europe and America: nationalist frustration. New obstacles to EU accession, perceived injustice in Cyprus, growing global recognition of the Armenian genocide and Western sympathy for Kurdish national aspirations are all major factors forcing Turks to question the value of their long-standing pro-Western geostrategic commitments. Until a couple of years ago, I used to argue that Western-oriented Kemalist elites had traded places with the once eastward-leaning Islamists on the grounds that it was the AK Party that seemed more interested in maintaining close ties with Europe and the United States. The AK Party, in my eyes, needed the West more than Turkey’s Kemalist establishment for a simple reason: It needed to prove to the Turkish military, to secularist segment of society at home and to Western partners in the international community that it was not an Islamist party.

Now, however, I increasingly believe that the AK Party, too, has decided to jump on the bandwagon of nationalist frustration with the West. After all, this is the most powerful societal undercurrent in Turkey, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needs to win elections. As the events of the last couple of weeks have shown, America and Europe should pay attention to Turkey’s Gaullist inclinations. In the past, Americans and Europeans would often ask whether Turkey had any realistic geopolitical alternatives and complacently reassure themselves that it did not. But today such alternatives are starting to look more realistic to many Turks. The rise of Turkish Gaullism need not come fully at the expense of America and Europe. But Turks are already looking for economic and strategic opportunities in Russia, India, China and, of course, the Middle East and Africa. It is high time for American analysts to stop overplaying the Islamic-secular divide in Turkish foreign policy and pay more attention to what unites both camps: Turkish nationalism.

The full piece is here.

Taspinar's view dovetails with my own take, which is that rather than looking east or west, Turkey sees itself as an emerging axis, a regional power that others will "drift" towards. Still, I think the question of how the religious sentiments of Turkey's top leaders -- particularly the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister -- will help shape this "Turkish Gaullism" remains an open one.

The Information Blockade

2010-06-11T15:45:00.006+03:00

I am taking a break from flotilla-related writing to report about the latest developments in the ongoing case of Turkey v. Google. As recounted here previously, a ban on Google's YouTube ha been in place in Turkey since 2008 after a court ruled that certain videos that were up on the site violated the law against insulting Ataturk. The ban was made possible by new Turkish legislation that critics have called too broad and too arbitrary. You can read about it here.

In recent days, strange things have been happening with several other Google sites. They aren't quite blocked, but access to them has been slowed down to point of them not being usable. Google Maps, for example, is one of the victims. Turkish officials haven't really explained what's going on, but Turkey's transportation minister, also responsible for internet matters, hinted that there was some kind of tax dispute between Ankara and Google.

What's disturbing about the Google slowdown is that rather than by court order (like in the case of YouTube) this action is being done by Telecommunications Directorate, the government agency that monitors the Internet and which is allowed to shut down sites without a court order. A lawsuit in the matter has already been filed by a group of "media freedom activists" who want the Turkish government to lift its Google blockade. Today's Zaman columnist Beril Dedeoglu writes in Friday's paper about the cost of the slowdown to Turkey's e-commerce and tourism sector. Column here.

Obviously, there will be those wags out there who will somehow try to use the Google affair as further evidence that Turkey is "drifting east." This blog will not join them, except to say that liberally interpreting the rule of law and arbitrarily applying it, as well as thuggishly depriving a country's population access to important knowledge-based services to prove a point in a tax dispute, does certainly smack of some kind of drift, eastward or other.

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

2010-06-08T16:56:00.002+03:00

I have a briefing up on the World Politics Review website looking at the domestic component of the tragic Gaza flotilla incident -- both before and after the Israeli commando raid on the Turkish-led aid convoy. From the piece:

With a general election coming up in about a year's time, the AKP now faces a resurgent Islamist right that has gained renewed political clout because of the flotilla incident. Meanwhile, a reformed secularist opposition with new leadership is promising to go after the government where it is most vulnerable: over issues such as unemployment and corruption. As a result, the AKP could find it expedient to continue turning the heat up on the Israel front, taking an increasingly more populist line on the issue.

"This is now going to be part and parcel in the internal tug of war between the AKP and the other political parties in Turkey," says Gencer Ozcan, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. "In this case, [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is not going to defuse the tension."

Speaking on Sunday, Erdogan already went after Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the new leader of the Republican People's Party, the main secularist opposition party, for his approach to the flotilla incident. "Some people speak in the name of Tel Aviv, advocate for Tel Aviv," Erdogan said. "They question our way of diplomacy."

But beyond electioneering, increased tension with Israel could also help the AKP make further gains in its ongoing effort to reduce the Turkish military's control over the state. As Israeli researcher and Turkey expert Anat Lapidot-Firilla recently put it, such an approach would emphasize "the support of the defense establishment and the Kemalist bureaucracy to immoral Israel and the lack of interest in the fate of their Muslim brethren in Palestine."

You can read the full briefing here.

In a Today's Zaman column from the other day, Yavuz Baydar also touches on the domestic aspect of the AKP government's response to the flotilla incident. Meanwhile, Milliyet foreign affairs columnist Semih Idiz has a good piece in today's Hurriyet Daily News where he looks at some of the domestic questions that the recent events raise for Turkey, particularly regarding how a group like the IHH (a "Governmental Non-Governmental Organization" as he puts it) came to commandeer Turkish foreign and domestic policy over the last few days. From his column:

As for the Turkish side, there are equally – if not more – serious questions to be asked and we are happy to see that they are slowly but surely surfacing now. The most important of these questions must of course be this: How can such a large country as Turkey with interests in four continents, and with an export and investment driven economy requiring extra caution all around the globe be dragged to the brink of war by a nongovernmental organization?

To many in and outside Turkey, the answer seems to be simple. This happened because the NGO in question is what a friend humorously referred to as a “GNGO,” in other words a “governmental-non-governmental-organization.” While there may not be any evidence of a direct link here, there can be no mistake that the Erdoğan government is morally and politically behind this group – the İHH – that has now gained international fame according to some, and notoriety according to others.

Neither is this the first instance of this group putting Turkey in a difficult situation diplomatically after it was aided and abetted by the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. It will be recalled that the same group tried to force its way through the sealed off Rafah gate between Egypt and Gaza some months ago, only to end up clashing with Egyptian forces and straining ties between Ankara and Cairo.

It was telling then that one of the leading “activists” on the Turkish side in that event was Murat Mercan, a key AKP figure, a parliamentary deputy and the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Parliament. Turkish-Egyptian ties are still recovering from what happened at that time. But it is clear that the latest events in the Eastern Mediterranean were watched closely in Cairo too, where there must have been further displeasure among the leadership over Prime Minister Erdoğan’s agitation of Arab streets.

As for the images from Turkey that were reflected across the globe following last week’s incident, it was a purely Islamic one, with headscarved and turbaned protestors chanting Islamic slogans under Islamic banners, and invoking the name of Allah for days on end in front of Israeli missions in this country. Certain remarks by Prime Minister Erdoğan, on the other hand, only went to reinforce this impression, especially when he told a visibly Islamic crowd in Konya a few days ago that Hamas was not a terrorist organization.

It was inevitable then that all of this should have started to turn the tide in the Western media against Turkey, as is apparent from a number of commentaries that have appeared over the past few days. If one considers that there is still an Iran crisis that has to be played out between Turkey and the West and particularly between Turkey and the U.S., it is clear that this impression is only going to crystallize further in the coming days and weeks in ways that Foreign Minister Davutoglu would obviously not want to see.

Put in a nutshell, the sympathy that Turkey initially garnered as a result of the lethal way that Israel conducted this operation is set to evaporate in the West if the AKP government does not begin to chart a more balanced course on Iran and Hamas, a course which is more in keeping with the country’s international commitments as a NATO ally.

It’s all very well for Turkish officials to shower Israel and the Netanyahu government with negative adjectives, no doubt most of them deserved in this case. But Turkey has to tread cautiously in such matters because of a host of reasons to do with its own long term interests. It also goes without saying that Israel cannot afford to squander its longstanding ties with Turkey, no matter what the anger in that country may be toward the Erdoğan government.

Full column here.

A New (Old) Front in the Turkey-Israel Fight

2010-06-06T12:45:00.005+03:00

As if more fuel was needed to be poured on the fire burning in the wake of last week's tragically botched Israeli flotilla raid, a new campaign is being mounted in Turkey to link Israel with increased activity by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The main impetus for this is the fact that around the same time that Israeli commandos were sliding down their ropes onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish cruise ship turned naval embargo buster, PKK guerillas attacked a naval base on the southern Turkish coast, killing six sailors. The implication is that Israel was using the PKK attack as a kind of virtual smoke screen against the Turkish-led flotilla and sending out a warning shot to Turkey to not push things too far.

Turkish officials have certainly been hinting at that being the case. “We do not think the two attacks are a coincidence,” Huseyin Celik, deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), said. Turkey's interior minister, Besir Atalay, also expressed his concern that the two events were somehow connected and said any links will be investigated. In an article in Sunday's edition, Today's Zaman runs a fairly long piece entitled, "Suspicion growing about possible link between PKK and Israel," quoting a host of analysts who make some fairly inflammatory accusations (Israeli agents training PKK terrorists in how to "penetrate" cities and that captured PKK guerillas have confessed that they were trained by Israel, for example) without offering much evidence.

In a column in the same paper, Andrew Finkel -- one of the few voices of caution in the overheated Turkish media -- sees the attempt to link Israel with the PKK as part of a worrying trend. From his column:

....It is this sense of events slipping out of control which is among the most worrying aspects of Turkey’s current standoff with Israel. As if the nation did not have enough issues to deal with, it has now taken on responsibility for the Middle East. If the government appears to be taking a hard line on Israel, public opinion is shouting that it should take a harder line still. A recent public opinion survey undertaken by the MetroPOLL organization reports that 60 percent of the population believe the government has under-reacted to events. If pressure continues to build then Turkey will continue to back into uncharted waters.

There must be suspicion among the cynical few that the government is not displeased with the current crisis with Israel. Its total command of the headlines and the uniformity of the popular outrage has usefully overshadowed debates over constitutional reform, unemployment and the resurgence of the PKK. However, such cynicism would be misplaced; a more realistic view is that the government is genuinely concerned that those of its citizens trying to run the blockade in Gaza are now wagging the dog of Turkish foreign policy. One can only assume there is debate among the highest echelons between those who believe that the last week has served to redefine Turkey’s new soft power in a positive way and those who worry this exercise is getting out of hand; the contrast between a Turkey which enjoys more prestige and one which risks dismantling its carefully nurtured image of an ambassador between different regions. Distaste for the policies of the Netanyahu government aside, a Turkey able to speak to Israel presents a very different picture to the world than a Turkey which might adopt the anti-Zionist discourse of the Middle East.

Full piece here.

Making a link between Israel and the PKK/Kurds is not a new trope in Turkey. It was raised a few years ago during the American war in Iraq, when Turks were particularly worried about how the war might empower the Iraqi Kurds and the PKK and threaten Turkey. At the time, the rumors didn't only involve suggestions that Israel was training Kurdish peshmergas and helping the PKK, but also included the mother of all rumors -- that Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani is in fact Jewish (there was a line of rabbis in Kurdistan, which until recent decades had a large and thriving Jewish community, named Barzani). His being "Jewish," of course, would explain everything very neatly. Follow this link to an article I wrote at the time about this particular "who's a Jew" campaign.

A full-scale diplomatic war is clearly going on between Israel and Turkey right now. But there are clearly also efforts being made to drive a further wedge between the two countries, something both sides should be very vigilant about.

The Hoca Speaks

2010-06-04T18:56:00.004+03:00

You know you've been covering Turkey for too long when you breathlessly tell an editor in the U.S. about something significant that Fethullah Gulen just said and the editor says, "Fethullah who?"

Still, an interview with the U.S.-based Gulen in today's Wall Street Journal does seem very significant, at least in the Turkish domestic context. No matter how you look at it, Gulen is among the most powerful figures in Turkey, even without living in the country. Which makes his criticism in the interview of the recent Gaza flotilla fiasco, an event that has brought Turkish-Israel relations to brink and unleashed a wave of fury in Turkey, very interesting. From the WSJ article:

Speaking in his first interview with a U.S. news organization, Mr. Gülen spoke of watching news coverage of Monday's deadly confrontation between Israeli commandos and Turkish aid group members as its flotilla approached Israel's sea blockade of Gaza. "What I saw was not pretty," he said. "It was ugly."

Mr. Gülen said organizers' failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid "is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters."

Mr. Gülen's views and influence within Turkey are under growing scrutiny now, as factions within the country battle to remold a democracy that is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The struggle, as many observers characterize it, pits the country's old-guard secularist and military establishment against Islamist-leaning government workers and ruling politicians who say they seek a more democratic and religiously tolerant Turkey. Mr. Gülen inspires a swath of the latter camp, though the extent of his reach remains hotly disputed.

His words of restraint come as many in Turkey gave flotilla members a hero's welcome after two days of detention in Israel. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the ruling Justice and Development Party condemned Israel's moves as "bullying" and a "historic mistake."

Mr. Gülen said he had only recently heard of IHH, the Istanbul-based Islamic charity active in more than 100 countries that was a lead flotilla organizer. "It is not easy to say if they are politicized or not," he said. He said that when a charity organization linked with his movement wanted to help Gazans, he insisted they get Israel's permission. He added that assigning blame in the matter is best left to the United Nations.

The full article is here.

My own read on this is that Gulen and his (wide) circle of supporters, who represent a more moderate approach, must be alarmed by the legitimacy the flotilla incident is giving to the Islamic far-right in Turkey and are intervening before things go any further.

I have a piece up now on the Christian Science Monitor's website that looks at the rise of the IHH, the Turkish NGO behind the flotilla and how it reflects a kind of mainstreaming of the Turkish Islamic far right, particularly regarding the discourse on Israel/Palestine. From my article:

At the heart of the diplomatic crisis between Israel and Turkey over the Gaza 'Freedom Flotilla' lies the rise of the previously obscure IHH. The Turkish Islamic NGO bought and manned the Mavi Mamara, by far the largest boat in the flotilla and the one that saw a fatal skirmish between rod-wielding activists and Israeli commandos who killed nine activists after resorting to gunfire.

It was the financial heft of the IHH that set this flotilla apart – even before the Israeli raid – from previous convoys that had bobbed toward the blockaded Gaza Strip with little effect. But Israel is troubled that its ally Turkey has in effect paved the way for such a group to rise to a position of such strength and influence.

Indeed, some very profound changes, both promising and troubling, have reshaped the landscape of Turkish society. The Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was driven a wide-reaching effort at democratization and liberalization since coming to power in 2002. This has allowed civil society organizations to flourish – a phenomenon that has been especially pronounced for Islamic groups, which had previously been targeted by secularist state institutions.

“They have more room to operate in Turkey now,” says Soli Ozel, a political analyst and columnist for the Haberturk newspaper. “The more room comes from the fact that we do have a party in government that doesn’t see them as alien creatures.”

So far from seeing the IHH, which had been targeted by the government in 1997, as alien, Turkish authorities helped make the flotilla possible by selling the Mavi Mamara, a decommissioned 1,000-passenger cruise ship formerly owned by the Istanbul municipality, for a mere $800,000.

The blessing Ankara gave IHH's lead role in the Gaza aid convoy is also reflective of a potentially troubling move of groups from Turkey’s Islamist far right into the mainstream, particularly regarding the volatile Israeli-Palestinian issue, says anthropologist Jenny White of Boston University.

“What it says to me is that the far-right Islamists have captured the political issue of Gaza and the government is using this for their purposes,” says Prof. White, who is currently working on a book about Islam and Turkish nationalism. “It doesn’t mean that society is becoming more radicalized but the radical segment of society has captured the issue of Gaza and the anti-Israel sentiment, which has a lot of political capital behind it.”

The question now, she adds, is to what extent the government will feel a need to pay back those radical groups and leaders.

Full article here.

Is the fallout from Israel's flotilla attack going to lead to an internal struggle between Turkey's perhaps now rival Islamic camps? The blowback from the flotilla incident may end being more unpredictable for Turkey than previously expected.

Frenemies?

2010-06-02T19:22:00.002+03:00

In a very thought-provoking piece in Foreign Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations' Steven Cook suggests that along with the Turkish-Israeli relationship, another victim from Monday's Gaza flotilla fiasco might be the long-standing Turkish-American alliance. From Cook's piece:

It is hard to admit, but after six decades of strategic cooperation, Turkey and the United States are becoming strategic competitors -- especially in the Middle East. This is the logical result of profound shifts in Turkish foreign and domestic politics and changes in the international system.

This reality has been driven home by Turkey's angry response to Israel's interdiction of the Istanbul-organized flotilla of ships that tried Monday to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. After Israel's attempts to halt the vessels resulted in the deaths of at least nine activists, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu referred to Israel's actions as "murder conducted by a state." The Turkish government also spearheaded efforts at the U.N. Security Council to issue a harsh rebuke of Israel.

Monday's events might prove a wake-up call for the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Among the small group of Turkey watchers inside the Beltway, nostalgia rules the day. U.S. officialdom yearns to return to a brief moment in history when Washington and Ankara's security interests were aligned, due to the shared threat posed by the Soviet Union. Returning to the halcyon days of the U.S.-Turkish relationship, however, is increasingly untenable.

This revelation comes despite the hopes of U.S. President Barack Obama, whose inauguration was greeted with a sigh of relief along both the Potomac and the Bosphorus. Officials in both countries hoped that the Obama administration's international approach, which emphasized diplomatic engagement, multilateralism, and regional stability, would mesh nicely with that of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party. The White House made it clear from the beginning that Turkey was a priority for Obama, who raised the idea of a "model partnership" between the two countries. Turkey, the theory went, had a set of attributes and assets that it could bring to bear to help the United States achieve its interests in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Naturally, as a longtime U.S. ally, Turkey was thought to share America's interests in these regions. That was the thinking, anyway.

A little more than a year after Obama addressed the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Washington seems caught between its attempts to advance this model partnership, and recognition of the reality that Ankara has moved on. This desire to restore close relations with Turkey is partially based on a rose-tinted view of the alliance's glory days; even then, the relationship was often quite difficult, buffeted by Turkey's troubled relations with Greece, Ankara's invasion of Cyprus, and the Armenian-American community's calls for recognition of the 1915 massacres as genocide. Back then, Turkey was a fractious junior partner in the global chess game with the Soviets. Today, Turkey is all grown up, sporting the 16th largest economy in the world, and is coming into its own diplomatically.

Nowhere is Turkey asserting itself more than in the Middle East, where it has gone from a tepid observer to an influential player in eight short years. In the abstract, Washington and Ankara do share the same goals: peace between Israel and the Palestinians; a stable, unified Iraq; an Iran without nuclear weapons; stability in Afghanistan; and a Western-oriented Syria. When you get down to details, however, Washington and Ankara are on the opposite ends of virtually all these issues.

You can read the full article here.

Seeing Through the Storm Clouds

2010-06-02T10:45:00.003+03:00

A friend forwarded an interesting post from a Lebanese political blog called Qifa Nakbi. The post takes a look at how the Gaza flotilla debacle fits into Turkey's regional and global ambitions. You can read it here.

Also worth reading is a column by Israeli researcher Anat Lapidot-Firilla, which also takes a smart look at how this all fits into Turkey's regional and global aspirations, particularly its efforts to carve out for itself a leadership role in the Muslim world. You can find it here.

Lost at Sea, Pt. II

2010-06-01T23:00:00.004+03:00

I have a piece up on the Christian Science Monitor's website looking at the fallout from Monday's Gaza flotilla incident and what it says about the future of Turkish-Israeli relations and of Turkish foreign policy. From my article:

Ankara’s harsh response to Israel’s action is the strongest signal yet that Turkey may be abandoning its efforts to become a regional mediator between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, favoring instead a more pointed foreign policy. The shift will allow it to capitalize on Muslim frustration with Israel, giving an added boost to its already rising profile in the Middle East.

“This mediation thing is over. Turkey now is one of the sides in the Middle East conflict. It is quite clearly opposed to Israel,” says Sami Kohen, a veteran Turkish political analyst and columnist who writes for the Milliyet daily. “This event is almost a climax in this shift.”

“Turkey’s hand in the region is strengthened now,” Mr. Kohen adds. “There is now more reason for Turkey to take a more active part in the events of the Middle East, since it has suffered personally from this attack. Now it can justify its anti-Israeli positions, which get a good deal of sympathy in the Arab and Islamic world.”

Ankara's shift complicates a historic alliance between Turkey and the US, which has become more important in recent years. An air base in southern Turkey is one of the most important transit bases for ferrying troops and supplies to Afghanistan. Turkish mediation, meanwhile, had gotten Israel and Syria back to the peace table until that effort was aborted when the Gaza war broke out.

Increased tension between Turkey and Israel clouds one of the few sunny spots the US had previously enjoyed in the region.

The deterioration in the once-close relationship between Turkey and Israel has been mirrored by an equally precipitous rise in Turkey’s visibility and involvement in the Middle East, an area that it had kept at arm’s length for decades because of historical enmity and mutual suspicion.

After coming to power in 2002, the government of the liberal Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) worked to forge close relations with neighbors such as Syria and Iran.

“It’s [an AKP] project whose goal is to set up Turkey as an international player, on the one hand, and to get recognition of Turkey as a moderate, market-friendly leader in the Muslim world and be treated as such in international bodies,” says Anat Lapidot-Firilla, senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

“The significance of this is that we are going to see more and more Turkish pressure to be involved in regional affairs and global affairs. They are raising the level of their requests and their global aspirations.”

Until recently, Turkey’s growing involvement in the Middle East included a desire to parlay its good relations with both Israel and the Arab states into a role as a regional mediator. Ankara, for example, hosted Israel and Syria for a round of (ultimately failed) secret peace talks in 2008.

But for now, analysts say, Turkey appears to have abandoned its mediation efforts in the region in return for a more pronounced leadership role in the Middle East.

“For the time being, I don’t see any kind of opening for the peace process. So if there isn’t any peace process, there isn’t any need for the good offices of a mediator,” says Gencer Ozcan, an expert on Turkey-Israel relations at Istanbul’s Bilgi University.

You can read the full article here.

Clearly, this rupture between Turkey and Israel has been long coming. As I've written before, Turkey has, for the last few years, pegged its relations with Israel to what happens on the Palestinian front (or, more specifically, on the Gaza front). Although technically not a bilateral issue between the two countries, the situation in Gaza has, in many ways, become the issue that defines the current relations between Israel and Turkey.

In that sense, although the Gaza aid flotilla was organized by a Turkish NGO (the Islamist IHH) and was not sponsored by the Turkish government, it acted as a proxy for Turkish policy. Also, because the Turkish government had elevated the cause of the Gazans to a level of such political importance, there was little room for it to work out a diplomatic solution to the impending flotilla crisis, lest it be accused by its opposition (particularly on the Islamic right) of giving up on the Gazans.

The tragic blunders committed by Israel in this incident are too numerous to count. On the other hand, for a country that has been an increasingly vocal proponent of the power of diplomacy in defusing regional tensions, Turkey, in this case, seemed more than willing to let the tensions rise higher.

Lost at Sea

2010-06-01T16:44:00.002+03:00

I will be posting more in a while about the latest -- and most troubling -- downturn in Turkish-Israeli relations. In the meantime, you can track the downward spiral of the two countries' relations by following this trail of previous posts.

The Kurdish Shabab

2010-05-24T17:39:00.003+03:00

Nicholas Birch has an interesting article up on the Eurasianet website about the breakdown of discipline and the chain of command in Turkey's Kurdish movement, much of it fueled by angry youths in Turkey's southeast. It's a trend that should certainly raise alarm bells among both officials in the Turkish government and the Kurdish movement. From Birch's article:

....Many observers see the rise in urban violence as a sign both of the growing vacuum at the heart of the Kurdish nationalist movement, and the changing dynamics of the PKK's support base.

"In the old days, there was a clear chain of command," says one Yuksekova politician. "The PKK would tell the politicians 'the shops will be closed today' and the politicians would pass that on to the shopkeepers. Today, they both say 'don't close the shops down', but then some 18 year old claiming to be the right-hand man of a PKK commander comes along and countermands their orders."

Locals say the break-up in the PKK hierarchy began in 2005, when three separate PKK groups began to set up civilian support organizations in Hakkari Province. The PKK has always used civil 'militias' to spread its message and ensure a steady influx of provisions and money. After 2005, however, the rapid growth of militias, and the lack of a clear chain of command, led some members to use the PKK trademark to enrich themselves.

In 2008, two Yuksekova men were found dead, allegedly murdered by the PKK for running a protection racket under the guise of collecting for militias. Some locals say the group has since moved to professionalize what were once volunteer militia units, to avoid a repeat of the same problem.

"In the old days, rhetoric about the Kurdish struggle was enough to bring people onside," says Irfan Aktan, a Yuksekova-born reporter who writes widely about the Kurdish issue. "But war has left a whole generation in poverty. They have nothing to lose. Money is infinitely more important to these people than ideology."

A journalist based in Diyarbakir, Ahmet Sumbul sees no evidence that the PKK is professionalizing itself to ensure the loyalty of its supporters. But he agrees that urban violence is on the rise, and changing too. In the past, he says, protestors used to stone police stations and state offices. "Over the past five years, they have started throwing stones at everybody and everything. Small shopkeepers get the worst of it."

"The PKK can use these people, but they can't control them. It's just unfocussed anger. Kids no longer listen to their fathers. Kurds no longer listen to the mountains," Sumbul added.

You can read the full piece here.

Turkey's Iran Gamble

2010-05-20T20:18:00.003+03:00

I have an analysis piece up on the World Politics Review website looking at Turkey's role in brokering the recently signed nuclear fuel swap deal with Iran and what the agreement says about Turkey's relationship with Iran and with its traditional allies. From the piece:

Although its future is shrouded in doubt, the deal announced on Monday by the Turkish and Brazilian presidents that would allow Iran to ship half of its enriched uranium across the border to Turkey will very likely also serve as an important milestone in the development of a new Turkish foreign policy that is increasingly independent, assertive and engaged in regional -- and even global -- affairs.

For Turkey, the deal represents a major achievement in its effort to engage Iran and to promote a diplomatic solution to the ongoing debate over Tehran's nuclear program -- while in the process burnishing its credentials as a regional mediator and diplomatic heavyweight. But the agreement could also end up driving a wedge in Ankara's relations with Washington and some its European allies....

....The contrasting reactions to the fuel swap agreement stems from a significant difference of opinion between Ankara and its Western allies about how to best approach the question of Iran.

Turkey and its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, appear to be taking a longer-term view on the issue, hoping to manage Iran, rather than confront it. The hope is that confidence-building measures might slowly change the Iranian leadership's mentality. Turkish diplomats speak of changing Iran's "psychology," and, indeed, Davutoglu's comments after the agreement was signed echoed that very clearly. The agreement represents "an important psychological threshold" of trust with Iran, he said after it was signed, adding that it also requires Tehran to make "psychological sacrifices."

You can read the full piece here.

Framing Ataturk

2010-05-13T15:16:00.003+03:00

Continuing with the movie theme of the previous post, I have a piece up on the Christian Science Monitor website that takes a look at some recent films about Ataturk and the controversy surrounding them. The debate over how to define Ataturk's legacy goes to the core of the current ideological battles currently raging in Turkey, it appears to me. From my article:

It's easy to mistake Muratoglu Kirtasiye, a tidy Istanbul stationery store, for perhaps a small museum dedicated to the memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's secularizing founder.

Located in a bustling district filled with print shops near the heart of Istanbul's Old City, Muratoglu specializes in providing schools with Ataturk paraphernalia and is stocked floor to ceiling with items bearing his image. There are gold-colored busts, clocks with his picture on them, and framed photographs and paintings that seem suited for every conceivable setting: Ataturk riding victoriously in uniform on horseback, gazing pensively skyward, surrounded by children with a kind smile on his face, looking gentlemanly while sitting in a wicker chair and dressed in a smoking jacket.

"He's the world's biggest man. There's no one else like him," says Fadil Karali, the store's manager, scanning the numerous pictures of Ataturk, who died in 1938, lining the walls.

"He was the kind of person that, unfortunately, only comes once every 100 years," Mr. Karali adds. "He died a long time ago, but we haven't forgotten him."

But the question that seems to be increasingly facing Turks is which Ataturk to remember? Like the multitude of images in Karali's store, there now appear to be competing, if not conflicting, takes on just who Ataturk was.

One place where the battle over how to define Ataturk and his legacy can be clearly seen these days is on the big screen in Turkey. In the past two years, three new films about the legendary leader have been released: a controversial documentary that, despite its efforts to humanize Ataturk, was criticized for insulting his memory, and two biopics that were in turn criticized for glossing over certain difficult details and for overly romanticizing the life of a complicated figure.

Turkey is currently going through a period of deep political polarization, much of it over two unresolved issues left over since the time of Ataturk: What role should religion play in the public square, and what role should the powerful state play in private life? In many ways, it appears that the battle over how to portray Ataturk is very much at the heart of Turkey's ongoing struggle over how to define itself.

You can read the full piece here.

(photo by Yigal Schleifer)

The "Kurdish Initiative": Now in Theaters!

2010-05-07T12:23:00.006+03:00

Although, on a political level, the government's "Kurdish initiative" -- a democratization program announced last summer that's designed to tackle the decades-old Kurdish problem -- seems stuck in the muck (see this previous post) of Turkey's political polarization, interesting things are happening on the cultural front.

Case in point, the recent opening in Istanbul of "Min Dît," the first Kurdish-language film to get a full theatrical release in Turkey. The film tells the story of three Kurdish children in Diyarbakir who witness the murder of their parents by a paramilitary group. I took the photo above, of a marquee advertising the film (the title is roughly translated as "I witnessed"), while walking down Istanbul's Istiklal boulevard the other day. Considering the restrictions that were in place up until only a few years ago on the public use of Kurdish, the fact that a billboard in Kurdish could be put up in the heart of downtown Istanbul without much fanfare or reaction struck me as significant. (That said, it should be noted that there are still politicians on trial in Turkey for campaigning in Kurdish and that a court in Diyarbakir recently sentenced the former editor-in-chief of a Kurdish newspaper to 166 years in prison for having "disseminated the propaganda of a terrorist organization." Read about it here.)

Today's Zaman recently interviewed the film's director, Miraz bezar, who won the "best director" award at last month's Istanbul Film Festival. You can read the interview here.

Kurdish-language cinema has come far in Turkey. A few years ago, when the restrictions on Kurdish language in Turkey were starting to ease up, I went down to Diyarbakir to profile what was then a budding homegrown movie making scene. At the time, it was an extremely low-budget, though highly resourceful scene that was strictly serving the local market. You can read the story, in Canada's Walrus magazine, here.

The Cyprus Blues Again

2010-05-06T17:39:00.006+03:00

Following the recent presidential elections in Northern Cyprus, there seems to be a fresh breeze of pessimism blowing out of the little island that couldn't.

The April 18 elections brought into power Dervis Eroglu, a hardline nationalist who has made clear his disenchantment with the current peace negotiations being held on the island. Eroglu has committed himself to returning to the negotiation table, but the concern is that he might employ a kind of rope-a-dope strategy, revisiting previous agreements and slowing things down to the point that the negotiations could very well run out of time. In an analysis released a few days after the election, the International Crisis Group's Hugh Pope makes clear why resolving the Cyprus issue matters. Pope writes:

[If the talks stagnate], everyone loses: the Greek Cypriots will suffer Turkish troops on the island indefinitely, lose the hope of winning back territory and see compensation for property made much harder; the Turkish Cypriot zone will be absorbed further into Turkey and its original inhabitants will scatter even farther; Turkey will see its EU process freeze up completely; Greece will suffer continued indefinite, expensive tensions in the Aegean; and Europe will lose any chance of normalizing EU-NATO relations.

The full piece, which offers Pope's prescription for keeping the talks on track, can be found here.

Turkish analyst Soli Ozel also takes a look at the Cyprus situation in a piece written for the German Marshall Fund. Like Pope, Ozel sees the clock in Cyprus ticking and suggests the international community step up its involvement. From his piece:

Although nobody feels any pressure for a deadline, the end of 2010 is actually a critical threshold. In 2011, Turkey will have entered its electoral campaign season and Erdoğan will be under pressure from nationalist forces for his Cyprus policies as well. Then, at the beginning of 2012, the Greek Cypriots will have their election, usually not a good season for peace seeking
in the South.

The window of opportunity is narrow. Missing this final chance will likely stall the process. Such an eventuality will further deteriorate Turkey-EU relations. Not to mention the blockage that Cyprus presents for EU-NATO relations and European security architecture in general.

Therefore it is high time for a paralyzed, ineffectual and unimaginative European Union and the equally lethargic UN to internationalize the negotiating process and bring all the relevant parties to a Dayton style conference. The leadership for such an initiative can come from the United States as well. Although Washington has its hands full in Iraq, AfPAk, Iran, and elsewhere, tipping the scales in favor of a settlement in what is an overripe situation would be worth the trouble.

The full analysis (pdf) is here.

For some background on the election and why Eroglu won, take a look at this day after piece that I filed for the Christian Science Monitor. One interesting point that I wasn't able to get into my article was how much things have turned around in the relationship between Ankara, which very much would like to see the Cyprus issue resolved, and Northern Cyprus. As Turkish Cypriot analyst Mete Hatay put it, "It’s a very ironic situation now. The left and the yes sayers are waiting for Turkish intervention and the nationalists are opposing Turkey." The question now is how much can the Turkish government push for a solution in Cyprus before having to fend off its own nationalists?

(photo: A man sitting at the Ledra crossing in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. By Yigal Schleifer)

A Thick Glass Ceiling

2010-05-05T09:00:00.003+03:00

Turkey's State Personnel Department has just released figures detailing the participation (or lack thereof) of women in the country's bureaucracy. It's not a pretty picture. From a report in Today's Zaman:

All undersecretaries in Turkish ministries are male. Out of 79 deputy undersecretaries, only 2 are female. Out of 96 director generals in Turkish ministries, 91 are male. All of the 175 governors in Turkey are male. Out of 450 deputy governors, 12 are female. Out of 8,284 high level bureaucrats, 7,713 are male while only 571 seats are taken by female public servants.

Out of 989 district governors, 19 are female.

The full article -- which, true to the paper's ideological leanings, blames the imbalance on Turkey's ongoing headscarf ban -- is here. Turkey, in recent years, has consistently ranked very low in various indexes that measure the level of female participation in political and economic life. Last year's World Economic Forum Gender Gap report gave Turkey a dismal review, ranking the country 129th out of 134 countries (read Turkey's profile here (pdf)).

And while the European Union's most recent progress report on Turkey was seen as mild compared to previous years, it was very forceful in its criticism of the country's recent record on gender equality (you can read it here (pdf -- go to page 22 for the relevant section)).

Turkey's "Bloodless Civil War"

2010-05-04T14:07:00.004+03:00

The Wall Street Journal's Istanbul correspondent, Marc Champion, has a terrific piece in today's paper about an ongoing court case that really goes to the heart of the current political battles that are raging in Turkey.

The case has to do with Ilhan Cihaner, until recently the respected chief prosecutor in the eastern Turkish city of Erzincan and currently under arrest and on trial for working to destabilize and perhaps overthrow Turkey's government. The case is deeply intertwined with all the big issues of day in Turkey -- Ergenekon, judicial and constitutional reform, the role of Islamic groups in political life -- with each side in the country's political divide seeing the case of proof of the correctness of their position. Ironically, from opposing perspectives both supporters of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and its secularist critics see the Cihaner case as one rife with judicial interference, prosecutorial zealotry and illegal doings.

The case is a complicated one, with -- like other Ergenekon-related cases -- many bizarre twists and turns and plenty of alleged intrigue and skullduggery. Champion does a great job in unpacking some of what's behind the case. You can find the article here -- highly recommended reading.

Nuclear Test

2010-05-04T09:00:00.002+03:00

Alexander Jackson, senior editor at CRIA, an online journal covering the Caucasus and the surrounding region, has an interesting analysis piece looking at how the Iran nuclear issue might test Turkey's "zero problems with neighbors" foreign policy. From his piece (which includes some of my analysis):

Maintaining good commercial links with its neighbours is one of the central pillars of Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbours” approach. Widely lauded when it was developed by [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu in the early 2000s, this policy is now coming under serious strain. Turkey is attempting to utilise its regional links, and [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan seems to think that by publicly supporting Iran, he can benefit the West by maintaining a channel of communication which no other country has.

As [Yigal] Schleifer points out, “this is a risky approach”. Playing a double game cannot be sustained forever, and neither Iran nor the West will be pleased if Turkey appears to be misleading them. At some point Ankara will have to choose between harming its commercial interests in Iran and damaging its relationship with Brussels and Washington (not to mention Israel).

This point looks to be arriving soon, as the Security Council moves towards a vote on a new round of economic sanctions. Voting “no” would cause disappointment if not anger in the Obama Administration, and could also – as Lesser observes – be a further blow to Turkey’s EU membership ambitions. Voting “yes” would cause a rupture with Tehran, with all the related political and economic implications. Abstention, the most likely course, would be a diplomatic fudge.

It would raise the question of whether the ‘zero problems’ approach can survive in moments of crisis, when hard choices have to be made. It also tests the limitations of that policy. Does Ankara even have the leverage to persuade Iran to accept a deal?

Foreign Minister Davutoglu seems assured – in recent weeks he has confidently stated that concrete progress has been made on the topic, presumably regarding a proposal to enrich uranium outside of Iran (Today’s Zaman, April 21). However to date he has offered no concrete indicators of success.

In addition, Tehran has responded politely to Turkey’s offers of mediation, but it may simply be stalling for time. No other friendly states – including Russia and China – have been able to negotiate a deal. Ankara’s enthusiasm and confidence may be seriously misplaced, especially if Mr Gul’s comments are seen in Iran as proof that Turkey’s public and private positions are different.

The issue goes to the heart of Turkey’s foreign policy vision. If Ankara cannot persuade its neighbour, with whom it has “very special” relations, to change its behaviour, then its claims to regional influence will look decidedly weaker to the West, as well as neighbouring states. Its economic, political, and cultural links with Iran will come to be seen not as assets, but as liabilities. By proclaiming its support of Iran so loudly, and by insisting on its unique ability to mediate in the dispute, Turkey may be setting itself up for a fall.

You can read the full analysis here.

Protocols on the Rocks, Cont.

2010-05-03T18:16:00.004+03:00

I didn't get a chance to post this earlier, but I have a piece up on the (redesigned!) Eurasianet website that looks at the impact Turkey's domestic politics are having on the troubled Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process. From the piece:

Publicly, Turkish officials express their continued support for a rapprochement process with Armenia, despite Yerevan having recently suspended the ratification process for peace protocols signed with Ankara last October. But observers say that political considerations are making it very difficult for Turkey to move forward on the issue.

"Unfortunately, everything has been frozen," says Noyan Soyak, the Istanbul-based Vice-Chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council.

"There isn’t an agreement now on even basic points. We don’t see any minimum agreement to move forward, which is unfortunate, because we believed that this?. was a unique period," Soyak continued. "It was a very important chance that was given to both countries by the international community, but both countries couldn’t use the chance to solve the problems, or even talk about the problems...."

....Turkish officials say that from their perspective, the protocols are still alive. "The protocols are waiting in my drawer to be overseen by the committee. They are not frozen," says Murat Mercan, a member of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and chairman of the Turkish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Speaking before parliament in late April, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu insisted that Turkey remains committed to improving its relations with Armenia.

"We can opt for preserving the status quo and we can live happily and comfortably for a while as a result. But we will end up leaving a troubled Caucasus to our grandchildren," Davutoglu said. "The status quo in the Caucasus is not in the interests of Turkey or Azerbaijan or Armenia or Russia, but so far no brave step has been taken to change it. Now, what we want is to change it."

"Our parliaments will ratify the protocols when political conditions are ripe," he added.

But Cengiz Aktar, director of the European Studies Department at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University says he believes there will be little progress on the Armenian issue until after the next Turkish general elections, which are scheduled for 2011. "The parliamentary opposition is dead set against these protocols and they want the protocols to be withdrawn from where they are in the [foreign affairs] commission," Aktar says. "The government cannot take the risk of another battlefront with the opposition, in addition to the other things they have going on. That is the position."

You can read the full piece here.

Protocols on the Rocks

2010-04-22T16:46:00.002+03:00

The Armenian ruling coalition's announcement today that is putting a halt to the ratification process of the normalization protocols signed last year with Turkey was perhaps only an official confirmation of what has been obvious for some time now: that the accords are frozen in place.

Since their signing last October, the protocols -- designed to open up the borders and restore diplomatic relations -- have been languishing in parliament in both Ankara and Yerevan, with each side accusing the other one of adding conditions that were not initially agreed upon. The Armenians say the problem lies with Turkey, which has made clear that progress on the accords depends on progress surrounding the also frozen Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The Turks, meanwhile, say the problem is with a decision made by the Armenian constitutional court, which gave the accords a green light while making some stipulations that Ankara finds objectionable (particularly regarding the genocide issue).

In many ways, it appears that the process that started as roadmap to reconciliation is now turning into a game of diplomatic chicken, especially considering that April 24, the day the genocide is commemorated, is just around the corner. From a Reuters analysis:

Analysts said the peace process was far from over, and the suspension, rather than a full withdrawal, was designed to shift the pressure onto Turkey.

"This was a lot weaker than feared," said Yerevan-based U.S. analyst Richard Giragosian. "This is a political tactic rather than a shift in strategic policy."

Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, who also faces resistance to the rapprochement from opponents at home and the huge Armenian diaspora abroad, was due to make a statement on national television later on Thursday.

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama urged Armenia and Turkey to "make every effort" to advance normalisation, which would boost stability in the volatile south Caucasus, a region criss-crossed by pipelines carrying oil and gas to the West.

Obama will make a speech on the mass killings of Armenians on April 24, the 95th anniversary of the events, and was expected to address progress on the accords.

Turkey has demanded that ethnic Armenian forces pull back from the frontlines of Nagorno-Karabakh as a condition for ratifying the peace deal. Armenia says Nagorno-Karabakh is a strictly separate issue.

The Turkish condition is aimed at placating close Muslim ally Azerbaijan, an oil and gas exporter which lost control over Nagorno-Karabakh when ethnic Armenians backed by Christian Armenia broke away as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Semih Idiz, a foreign affairs columnist for Turkey's Milliyet newspaper, told CNN Turk the Armenian decision was meant to put pressure on Erdogan ahead of April 24, when Armenians will again press Obama to fulfil a campaign pledge to label the killings as genocide.

"There's nothing to upset Ankara too much. This does not mean the process is over...This is a personal call to Erdogan, since he made the Nagorno-Karabakh precondition," Idiz said.

You can read the full piece here. Previous post on Turkey and Armenia here.

Nuclear Posturing

2010-04-15T22:14:00.011+03:00

I have an article up on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website that takes a look at what's driving Turkey's contrarian approach to the Iranian nuclear issue (a mix of commercial, political and ideological reasons). You can read the article here.

The piece also takes a look at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly frequent calls, as part of his stated desire to see the Middle East as a nuclear-free region, for Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal to also be examined by those who criticize Iran. An interesting aspect to this, which I didn't have the space to get into in my article, is how Erdogan's approach might impact the question of the American nuclear weapons that Turkey hosts at Incirlik airbase in the country's south.

Turkey is one of five European countries that is home to U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, with an estimated 90 bombs at Incirlik. Today's Zaman's Lale Kemal took a look at this issue in a column today. From her piece:

While the issue of Iran has continued to be a matter of serious disagreement between Turkey and the US in particular, Erdoğan will soon face a dilemma over nuclear arms the US deployed during the Cold War years at İncirlik Air Base in southern Turkey. This displays an inconsistency between Erdoğan's call for a nuclear-free zone in the region while hosting US nuclear weapons on its soil. Will Erdoğan be ready to agree on the withdrawal of those weapons at İncirlik?....

....While there has been a debate over whether those nuclear weapons are enough of a deterrent to meet today's threats, the US is believed to keep the nukes at İncirlik as a means of deterring Iran from any possible nuclear strike.

According to one opinion, it may be good to keep the guns on the table because in taking the guns off the table, one can lose tremendous leverage over the other.

When asked for his opinion on the nukes at İncirlik whilst on board the plane taking him to Washington on Sunday, Erdoğan refrained from talking about this specific issue. He only said there have been changes at İncirlik under his government, but he fell short of elaborating.

Though his remarks over this issue were unclear, it is known that the US has expanded its operations at İncirlik in the last 10 years. The US has been using İncirlik as an air bridge for flights to Afghanistan and as a cargo hub for neighboring Iraq, and as a consequence Turkey has become more agreeable to İncirlik being used for other purposes.

In the meantime, despite Erdoğan's call for a nuclear free zone in the region, it will be interesting to see what his stance will be when the possibility of withdrawing nuclear bombs from İncirlik begins to be debated as part of START. Will Erdoğan agree or disagree over their withdrawal, placed at the time as part of a NATO requirement? Turkey will be at a crossroads on its overall nuclear arms policy.

You can read the full column here.

The issue of the U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey was also the subject of an interesting analysis a few months back in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From that piece, which takes a look at some of the obstacles to removing the U.S. nukes from Turkey (one of them, according to the authors, being Ankara's concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions):

Then there is the issue of Tehran's nuclear program, which seriously complicates any discussion of the United States removing its tactical nuclear weapons from Turkey. An Iranian nuclear capability could spark an arms race in the Middle East and bring about a "proliferation cascade," which could cause Turkey to reconsider its nuclear options--especially if the United States pulls its nuclear weapons from Incirlik. When asked directly about its response to an Iranian nuclear weapon, a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official said that Turkey would immediately arm itself with a bomb. This isn't Ankara's official policy, but it seems to indicate a general feeling among its leaders. Whether Turkey is primarily concerned about security or prestige, the bottom line is that it would not sit idly by as Iran established a regional hegemony.

This seems to be one legacy of Turkey's Cold War relationship with the U.S. that Ankara has held off on revisiting. The full piece is here.

[UPDATE: More on the subject of the nukes in Turkey in this analysis by Richard Weitz.]

It's hard to criticize some of the sentiment and logic behind Erdogan's calls for greater scrutiny of Israel's nuclear program, as part of a wider effort to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Who doesn't want a region (or a world, for that matter) free of nukes? But it seems like the PM's current approach -- soft on Iran, hard on Israel -- is not creating the kind of environment that would either keep Tehran from moving ahead with its historic quest to obtain nuclear weapons or would convince Jerusalem it's safe enough to give up its long-held policy of maintaining an ambiguous nuclear deterrent. If anything, Erdogan's increasingly belligerent criticism of Israel has only worked to make the country feel more isolated in the region, which can only work to make it hold to its nukes even tighter.

Really moving the Middle East in a direction that would end up with the region being a nuclear free one requires visionary statesmanship and the presence of actors who can transcend the region's tribal battles and deep-seated enmity. Turkey is (or was, one could argue) perhaps the only country with the potential to play that role, but, for now, it seems that Erdogan is mostly offering populist posturing on a subject that is, to say the least, explosive.

A New Look at the Armenian Genocide Issue

2010-04-09T14:30:00.003+03:00

Der Spiegel's English-language website has a very interesting article about a new German documentary that looks into the Armenian genocide issue. You can read the article here.

The website also has a new interview with Armenian President Serge Sarkisian, who talks about the stalled reconciliation process with Turkey and about the role the genocide issue plays in Armenian politics and society. You can read it here.

Turkey and the Middle East: Beyond the Hype

2010-04-08T16:26:00.004+03:00

The International Crisis Group has just released a clear-eyed and in-depth report that takes a look at Turkey's recent reengagement with the Middle East. The report covers this much-debated subject from a number of angles (the trade factor, the "Islam" factor, etc.) and is well worth reading. The bottom line? From the report's executive summary:

Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) leaders’ rhetoric, and their new regional activism extending from Persian Gulf states to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), have given rise to perceptions that they have changed Turkey’s fundamental Westward direction to become part of an Islamist bloc, are attempting to revive the Ottoman Empire or have “turned to the East”. These are incorrect. The basic trends in the country’s regional activism seen today were well established before AKP came to power, and NATO membership and the relationship with the U.S. remain pillars of Turkish policy.

While Turkey is bitter over attacks by France, Germany and others on its EU negotiation process between 2005 and 2008, half of its trade is still with the EU, and less than one quarter of its exports go to Middle East states – a proportion typical for the past twenty years. The global nature of Turkey’s realignment is underlined by the fact that Russia and Greece have been among the biggest beneficiaries of its regional trade boom.

Nevertheless, since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has been shifting its foreign policy priority from hard security concerns to soft power and commercial interests and moving away from being a kind of NATO-backed regional gendarme to a more independent player determined to use a plethora of regional integration tools in order to be taken seriously on its own account. Turkey’s U.S. and EU partners should support these efforts towards stabilisation through integration.

Ankara has many balls in the air and sometimes promises more than it can deliver, over-sells what it has achieved and seeks a role far away when critical problems remain unsolved at home. Turkey’s new prominence is partly attributable to confusion in the region after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a situation that is not necessarily permanent. Some Middle Eastern governments are also wary of the impact on their own publics of emotional Turkish rhetoric against Israel or about implicit claims to represent the whole Muslim world.

Turkey should sustain the positive dynamics of its balanced relationships with all actors in the neighbourhood and its efforts to apply innovatively the tactics of early EU-style integration with Middle East neighbours. While doing so, however, it should pay attention to messaging, both internationally, to ensure that gains with Middle Eastern public opinion are not undercut by loss of trust among traditional allies, and domestically, to ensure that all Turkish constituencies are included, informed and committed to new regional projects over the long term. Also, it will gain credibility and sustainability for its ambitions if it can solve disputes close to home first, like Cyprus and Armenia.

Middle Eastern elites worry about any sign of Ankara turning its back on its EU accession process. Much of their recent fascination with Turkey’s achievements derives from the higher standards, greater prosperity, broader democracy, legitimacy of civilian rulers, advances towards real secularism and successful reforms that have resulted from negotiating for membership of the EU. At the same time, Turkey and its leaders enjoy unprecedented popularity and prestige in Middle Eastern public opinion, notably thanks to their readiness to stand up to Israel. Turkey’s new strength, its experience in building a strong modern economy and its ambition to trade and integrate with its neighbours offer a better chance than most to bring more stability and reduce the conflicts that have plagued the Middle East for so long.

You can find a link to the full report here.

Also, via Kamil Pasha, here's a link to some reactions in the Arab media to another Turkish initiative to significantly raise its profile in the Middle East: the newly-launched Arabic-language satellite television network TRT 7 (run by Turkey's state broadcaster). More on the subject in this column in The National and in this Hurriyet Daily News article.

(photo: Turkish PM Erdogan at the launching of Turkey's new state-run Arabic satellite television network)

Neo-Ottomanism and Iran's Nuclear Program

2010-04-04T09:45:00.002+03:00

Andrew Finkel has a good column in Sunday's Today's Zaman, looking at the much debated term "Neo Ottomanism," often used to describe Turkey's assertive new foreign policy, and how it relates to some of the thornier issues facing Ankara -- particularly relations with Armenia and Iran's nuclear program. From Finkel's piece:

....The notion of a more expansive, internationalist and problem-solving Turkey is an attractive one, as is that of a Turkey unfettered by nationalist-inspired tendency to isolationism. However, it is forced to confront a certain amount of skepticism. If Turkey is to adopt a neo-Ottoman posture, it has to contend with issues still unresolved from that imperial past. If it is to be a player in the great issues of the day, it cannot remain fettered by the great issues of a century ago. This is why the overture to Armenia that began with Abdullah Gül’s football diplomacy in 2008 had an importance even beyond the immediate issue of reducing tension on a troubled border.

The seeming collapse of that initiative has equally important consequences. The vote of a committee of the US House of Representatives to endorse a resolution recognizing genocide has sent Ankara into a tailspin or at least into a position which it struggles to sustain. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to demonstrate its displeasure, and the government has put pressure on civil institutions, such as the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSIAD), to cancel a US-bound delegation. Now the Turkish ambassador will go scurrying back to Massachusetts Avenue because, rightly enough, the prime minister realizes that not to take his seat at the Global Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in a week’s time would be a display of diplomatic pique that would do Turkey harm.

That summit will be attended by some 40 leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao. Barack Obama is far more aggressive in trying to curtail nuclear proliferation and in reducing America’s own stockpile. During the summit, the subject of Iran’s race to develop a nuclear capability is bound to come up. Turkey, counter-intuitively, maintains that Tehran’s nuclear program is not intended to produce an offensive payload and is in no mood to impose sanctions come what may. Instead, it advertises its ability to play the role of an honest broker as the best means of coaxing Iran into abandoning its efforts to develop a bomb. Yet it does so, having painted itself into something of an absurd corner. Ankara now fumbles to impose some sort of sanction not against Iran but against the United States. And it does so because of the wording of a proposed text commemorating a tragedy that occurred 95 years ago.

You can read the full column here. More on neo-Ottomanism in these previous posts.

Speaking of Iran's nuclear program, it appears that there is a (unspoken) disagreement between Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan about what Teheran is actually up to. Erdogan has consistently defended Iran's nuclear program and has said he does not believe the Iranians are working towards building nuclear weapons (instead suggesting that other countries in the region (guess who) that already have such weapons and are criticizing Iran get rid of them first).

This more or less has been the position of the AKP government on the Iranian issue. A recent column in Forbes by foreign affairs writer Claudia Rosett finds President Gul speaking a bit more frankly on the issue. From her column:

Gul says he has no doubts that Iran wants the nuclear bomb: "This is an Iranian aspiration dating back to the previous regime, the days of the Shah." For Iran's current regime, says Gul, "I do believe it is their final aspiration to have a nuclear weapon in the end," as a matter of " 'national pride.' "

He says Turkey is against an Iranian bomb. He believes it would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East: "A major competition will start in the region."

You can read her full column (critical of Turkey's "zero problems with neighbors" approach) here. Rosett visited Turkey as part of a group that was brought over by a Turkish think tank. Gul's office has not denied the substance of what Rosett quotes the President as saying, only saying he did not give an interview to Forbes. In this column, Milliyet's Semih Idiz follows up on Rosett's piece and the significance of what Gul said.

More on Turkey's struggle regarding the Iranian nuclear issue in these previous posts.

The "Erdogan Factor" Returns

2010-03-18T15:57:00.006+02:00

The great wild card in Turkish politics continues to be Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his shoot-from-the-hip take on things. From Darfur to Xinjiang, the "Erdogan Factor" (as previously discussed in this post) has frequently left Turkey watchers scratching their heads and Turkish policy makers picking up the pieces.

Erdogan's straight-talk express recently arrived in London, where the PM gave an interview to the BBC's Turkish-language service. In the interview (here, in Turkish) Erdogan suggested that one of the results of the recent Armenian genocide resolutions passed in Sweden and the United States could be the mass expulsion from Turkey of the thousands of Armenians working illegally in the country. "There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country,” Erdogan told the BBC . “Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens. I don’t have to keep them in my country.”

This is disturbing stuff on so many levels. Turkey is clearly not gearing up to do what Erdogan is suggesting might happen, but dragging the illegal Armenian workers into the dispute as a way of threatening Armenia and its politically active diaspora has ominous and unfortunate connotations. Analyst Mehmet Ali Birand makes the obvious point that merely invoking the possibility of a mass deportations in this case makes for truly bad politics. From his column in today's Hurriyet Daily News:

Now a smear campaign in the lines of “Turkey as a perpetrator of genocide did not want the poor Armenians to earn a few bucks” will start and people talk in purple prose saying, “In the past they killed millions of people and now they will condemn 100,000 Armenians to death by starving....”

....They’d say, “See, again the Turks are casting out the Armenians.”

And this action would be labeled “second deportation.”

You can read his full column here.

Today's Zaman, meanwhile, steps out of the Ergenekon/Balyoz thicket that it seems to have gotten lost in these days and, in today's paper, comes up with a journalistically solid piece, one that takes the PM to task for what he said and gets down to answering the important question of just how many Armenian illegals are actually working in Turkey? From the article:

Öztürk Türkdoğan, the chairman of the Human Rights Association (İHD), said Erdoğan’s remarks could easily be considered a “threat” and as discrimination. “These remarks could lead some people to think that to expel people is a 2010 version of forced migration. This mentality is far from human rights-oriented thinking. People have the right to work, and this is universal. There are many Turkish workers all over the world; does it mean that Turkey will accept their expulsion when there is an international problem? Secondly, these remarks are discriminatory; there are many workers in Turkey of different nationalities,” he said....

....The İHD’s Türkdoğan was also critical of Erdoğan’s remarks regarding ethnically Armenian Turkish citizens: “We can see that the classic republican understanding based on ethnic Turkism is still valid. Minorities cannot be the subject of bargaining in international relations. This is racist discourse and only proves how far we are from a human rights-oriented perspective,” Türkdoğan said.

You can read the full piece here.

Based on its reporting, Today's Zaman estimates that there are probably 12,000 to 13,000 Armenians working illegally in Turkey, rather than 100,000 (94 percent of them are women, most likely doing domestic work). (A report on the issue from the Eurasia Partnership Foundation Armenia can be found here.) It appears that the number has been inflated over the years, perhaps so that it can be used as a political bargaining chip with Armenia and as an instrument for trumpeting Turkish tolerance.

Certainly, some of the damage control that members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have tried to do in the wake of Erdogan's comments has smacked of this.

“As has been known for many years, there are Armenians illegally living and working in Turkey, and as a reflection of our goodwill and efforts toward normalization which started in 2005, we do not really touch them," AKP member of parliament Suat Kiniklioglu told Today's Zaman.

"We tolerate them and take their difficult circumstances into consideration. In particular, we are not questioning their status due to the acceleration of the normalization process in Turkish-Armenian relations. The prime minister needed to draw this fact to people’s attention, especially now, when resolutions have been accepted which damage normalization. I think Turkey’s magnanimity is being ignored.”

Erdogan's comment about the illegal Armenians also ended up obscuring some of the more important and to-the-point comments that he made in the BBC interview. One of these comments was about the need for Armenia to break free from the hold of its diaspora, but his remarks about the illegals were a gift-wrapped present for the diaspora and its political lobby, which is intent on portraying Turkey as unrepentant country that has learned little from the past.

Beyond Ataturk

2010-03-16T17:53:00.003+02:00

Two interesting recent article looking at the current political battles raging in Turkey and how they are connected to the country's struggle to define a kind of post-Kemalist identity for itself.

In the Financial Times, David Gardner examines the growing political divide in Turkey and sees it as a result of:

....a clash between two rival establishments jostling for supremacy: the traditional metropolitan elites who see themselves as the guardians of the secular, republican heritage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey; and the new AKP establishment that combines the conservative and religiously observant traditions of Anatolia with a huge constituency in Turkey’s modern but Muslim middle class....

....What [Turkey] desperately needs is a regrouping of secular, liberal and social democratic forces into an electable party (something an EU re-engagement with Turkey would help).

Banging on about secularism is therapeutic but ultimately futile. A viable centre-left needs to abandon the fragmented, pre-modern to Jurassic, and episodically putschist secular parties. Instead of worshipping at Ataturk’s shrine they should follow his example. The founder of Turkey built the republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Even Mr Erdogan looked far beyond the wreckage of Turkish Islamism to create the AKP. Turkey’s centre-left should emulate him and start again.

You can read his full piece here (registration required).

Meanwhile, in a piece in Newsweek, Turkish liberal Islamic columnist Mustafa Akyol writes that the recent developments and changes in Turkey are an indication of a "new, post-Kemalist" era. From his piece:

The passing of Kemalism as an official doctrine is a good thing, for the age of ideological regimes is long past. Some critics fear that the new elite, the religious conservatives, will prove just as intolerant as the generals before them. But that is an exaggerated fear, for what is really eroding Kemalism—the expanding pluralism of Turkish society—will defy any new attempt at authoritarianism. The AKP is hardly a party of Jeffersonian democrats—like other Turkish parties, it is hierarchical, intolerant of criticism, and eager to manipulate the media—but it has proven pragmatic enough to learn from its mistakes. And its leaders remain more liberal than the old guard on many issues, including the rights of Kurds and Christians.

Still, to consolidate Turkey's democratic gains the country needs a new Constitution that guarantees all rights and liberties with checks and balances. This new charter should limit the power of the central state and increase that of local administrations, while creating a nonpartisan judiciary, autonomous universities, and enforcing accountability both for politicians and bureaucrats. Most fundamentally, unlike the previous constitutions forged by the Kemalists, whose motto read, "For the people, despite the people," this new one should be made for the people and by them.

You can read Akyol's full article here.

To a certain extent, I think Akyol's celebration of the arrival of a new, "post-Kemalist" age is a bit premature. For sure, Turkey is moving away from the rigidity imposed upon it by the strict Kemalism that was practiced in the country, particularly following the 1980 coup. But I don't believe the country has yet to fully figure out how to deal and work with the legacy of Ataturk. It's a work in progress, and one that -- depending on the circumstances -- could very well swing back in the direction of a regressive neo-Kemalism, rather than something more progressive.

I wrote about Turkey's search for a "post-Ottoman" and "post-Kemalist" identity -- and the difficulty of doing that in the midst of deep political turmoil -- for The Majalla magazine last November. From that article:

While Ankara has achieved notable success in the foreign policy field, Turkey today faces deep and potentially destabilizing domestic political divisions and a political system that sometimes flirts with dysfunctionality. With a political culture that emphasizes confrontation over cooperation and a political opposition that seems unable to develop a forward-looking vision for the country, Turkey may find its efforts at democratization and at burnishing its foreign policy credentials defeated by its political divisions at home.

At the heart of Turkey’s domestic trouble lies the country’s ongoing effort to define its post-Ottoman identity. The Kemalist vision laid out by Ataturk – that of a secular, western-oriented Turkey that emphasized a uniform sense of Turkish identity – was successful in helping the country rise out of the rubble after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But the rise of the AKP, which represents an emerging Islamic elite that is less connected to the Kemalist approach, has put that vision to the test. In many ways, the AKP is trying to formulate a post-Kemalist identity for Turkey, one that provides greater room for religious identity and ethnic diversity....

....What’s the way forward for Turkey? To really step out from under the shadow of its domestic divisions, Turkey needs to have a frank and wide-ranging discussion about what Turkish identity means today and what kind of country it would like to become. Having that conversation when nobody will listen to each other will be difficult.

You can read the full piece here.

The Roma Initiative

2010-03-15T11:13:00.005+02:00

The AKP government organized a historic event yesterday, bringing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan together with some 10,000 Turkish Roma. From a report about the meeting in Today's Zaman:

Addressing thousands of Roma who came to İstanbul to attend a meeting organized as part of a government initiative to find solutions to problems faced by the ethnic minority, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he sees the Roma's problems as his own.

Erdoğan met with nearly 10,000 Roma yesterday in a meeting with a festive atmosphere, a move that came as a part of the government's democratic initiative, which is intended to expand the rights of previously disadvantaged groups and communities such as the Kurds, the Alevis and the Roma. “As the state, we have shouldered the responsibility on this [Roma] issue. From now on, your problems are my problems. Nobody in this country can be treated as ‘half' a person."

"We cannot tolerate this,” the prime minister said during the speech he delivered at the Roma meeting at İstanbul’s Abdi İpekçi Sports Hall yesterday.

You can read the full article here. From some background on Turkey's Roma community, take a look at this Eurasianet article of mine.

The Roma in Turkey have long faced discrimination in terms of access to housing, employment and education, which makes this very public gesture by the Erdogan government a very welcome and important one. But, as Jenny White points out, one can't help but think about what the relocated residents of Sulukule -- a historical Roma neighborhood in Istanbul's

city that was recently demolished to make way for "luxury villas" -- think about the government's initiative.

For more on Sulukule, take a look at this audio slideshow I made for Eurasianet in the summer of 2008, when the demolition of the neighborhood -- done by the AKP-controlled local municipality -- began.

(photo: A child in Istanbul's Sulukule neighborhood during demolition in 2008. By Yigal Schleifer)

Turkey's Internet Laws "Under Surveillance"

2010-03-12T12:13:00.003+02:00

Reporters Without Borders has just issued its latest list of "Internet Enemies," looking at countries where online activity is monitored, restricted or punished. This year, RSF has designated Turkey as a country "Under Surveillance" -- joining Russia and Belarus, among others. As mentioned in these previous posts here, here and here, Turkey has some very strong -- and misguided -- internet censorship laws, which allow both the courts and the government to block access to websites (the ongoing ban on YouTube in the country the most famous example).

You can read RSF's report on Turkey here.

General Malaise

2010-03-10T17:08:00.002+02:00

Ilter Turan, a respected professor of International Relations at Istanbul's Bilgi University, has written a briefing for the German Marshall Fund looking at the recent arrest of dozens of high-ranking Turkish military officers – among them the former heads of the Navy and Air Force – as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey’s AKP government.

The arrests in the investigation into the Balyoz ("Sledgehammer") plot have been rightly hailed as a milestone in Turkey's continuing struggle to increase civilian oversight over the powerful and historically meddlesome military. The arrests have also been described as an important step in Turkey's democratization. Turan makes the point that the deep political divisions in Turkey and some of the AKP's (or, more specifically, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's) illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies pose a challenge for Ankara to turn the Balyoz developments into an opportunity for consolidating democracy. From Turan's piece:

It is clear that the military has lost its political clout while the probability of a military intervention has all but disappeared. The courts, on the other hand, are no longer as uniformed on what defending the interests of the state means. Such changes do not, however, confirm that Turkish democracy is deepening. Checks on the government’s exercise of power have been weakening. The prime minister has been growing more authoritarian in word and deed, while the government has began to behave increasingly partisan in its daily conduct of business. The country is deeply polarized and faces an impasse. An election 18 months away may or may not offer a way out. Turkish politics is in need of a grand compromise to consolidate democracy. Political will, however, seems currently to be sorely lacking.

Turan's briefing also gives some interesting background about the political atmosphere that surrounded Turkey's previous coups. You can read it here (pdf).

Getting to Boring

2010-03-09T10:28:00.004+02:00

I have a short analysis piece up in the new issue of the online magazine The Majalla. The question I was asked to answer was "Why Turkey Should Join the EU?" (from the Turkish perspective). The combination of Turkey's growing self-confidence on the world stage, the lack of political ambition being projected from Brussels and the economic turmoil in Greece certainly make it harder to make the case for Europe these days. Here's my take on why Turkey should still be keeping its eyes on the EU membership prize:

....many of Ankara’s long-term foreign policy objectives would get an important boost from a meaningful partnership with the EU. Turkey’s plan to turn itself into a major transit hub for oil and gas would be handicapped if the country were not fully integrated into Europe’s common energy policy and pipeline network. Meanwhile, Ankara’s plans to turn itself into a regional soft power broker, particularly in the Middle East, are tied up in being able to present Turkey as a “bridge” to Europe. Making that bridge easier to cross, something EU membership would do, would further enhance Turkey’s claim to being a country that spans East and West.

More significantly, EU membership will help Turkey overcome its domestic differences, which stand as the largest hurdle towards Ankara realizing the ambitious goals it has set out for itself. Ultimately, joining the EU—or at least meaningfully engaging in a process that would lead towards membership—offers Turkey the best chance at developing a political system that can successfully manage those dangerous divisions and blunt their impact.

Indeed, it’s important not to underestimate what a difference simply being engaged in the EU process over the last decade has made for Turkey in terms of developing civil society, strengthening institutions and the rule of law, and forming a polity that is learning to recognize and accept differences. The opening of EU-funded small business support centers in some of Turkey’s most impoverished areas and the training of lawyers and judges by European counterparts are not the kinds of trends that make headlines. Yet, they are the kind of low-profile projects that have helped make an impact on how the country operates.

Meanwhile, considering Turkey’s limited experience with true democracy—with its history of military coups, powerful nationalism and intense division based along ethnic lines—the promise of joining the EU has created am impetus for enacting reforms that the country might not have otherwise been implemented.

Joining the EU, as one analyst recently put it, is an essential part of Turkey becoming a member in good standing of the “rules and regulations community.” It sounds boring and it is boring. But after four coups and decades of bitter infighting, perhaps what Turkey needs is a bit less political turmoil and excitement, and a bit more of the boring stuff.

You can read the full piece here. Also, be sure to read Nicholas Birch's excellent Al Majalla cover story, which looks at the interplay between Turkey's growing trade and political involvement in the Middle East. The magazine also has two more takes on the Turkey-EU question, one by Huseyin Bagci, a professor at Ankara's Middle East Technical University, and Erdgal Guven, a columnist at Radikal. You can find their pieces here.

Like Déjà vu All Over Again

2010-03-03T15:26:00.004+02:00

There are moments in a nation’s history when the threats are so great that all political divisions and disagreements need to be thrown aside in an effort to defend the motherland. For Turkey, that moment comes almost once every year, when it’s time for the country to fight yet another attempt to pass a bill in Washington recognizing the Armenian genocide.

A House of Representatives committee is set to vote on a “genocide” resolution tomorrow and teams of Turkish politicians from both sides of the deep political divide in Ankara have been dispatched to Washington to lobby against the effort getting any farther (while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already warned that Turkish-American relations could be harmed if Congress passes a resolution).

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its main rival, the Republican Peoples Party (CHP) can’t see eye-to-eye on some of the most critical issues facing Turkey – the country’s EU bid or revising the problematic constitution, for example – but the bitter political rivals have agreed to work together on fighting the genocide claim. I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I saw a photo in the paper of AKP parliamentarian Murat Mercan sitting together in Washington with the CHP’s Sukru Elekdag, an old school (if not retrograde) Kemalist who has been at the forefront of fighting the genocide claim for decades. Back in Ankara these two have very little to say to each other, but there they were making Turkey’s case together. In the American context, try imagining rookie Democratic Senator Al Franken hitting the road to lobby on behalf of American policy with late Republican Senator Jesse Helms. It’s something like that.

This year, of course, was supposed to be different. The historic accords that Turkey and Armenia signed this past October to restore diplomatic relations and put in motion a process to examine the past, were supposed to take the legs out from under any effort to tar Turkey with the “genocide” label. But, because of domestic and regional pressures, neither Ankara nor Yerevan has ratified the accords, leaving Turkey once again exposed on the issue.

The problem is that it’s not only Turkey that’s exposed – it’s also Washington. As it has before, the administration will ultimately get dragged into Ankara’s battle on Capital Hill against the “genocide” bill. Previous administrations, worried about a rupture with Turkey, have stepped in and asked Congress to shelve such bills. And although during his presidential campaign Barack Obama promised to recognize the genocide, in his statement released during last year’s April 24 commemoration of the event, the President – careful not to upset the delicate negotiations that were taking place at the time between Ankara and Yerevan – took the Solomonic approach of calling it by its Armenian name, medz yeghern (or “great catastrophe”). But after going out on a limb for Turkey last year on the genocide issue because of not wanting to harm the Armenia talks, will Obama and others in Washington do the same thing again this time around, especially considering that Ankara has played a decisive role in the freezing of the accords process?

The picture does not look good, certainly for those who were hoping that the deal signed between Ankara and Yerevan would get all the countries involved out of this lose-lose cycle. At the same time, a recent 60 Minutes episode (or the “provocation,” as one Turkish paper called it in its front-page headline) on the genocide issue was a good reminder of just why Turkey will continue to fight the claim so hard. The word “genocide” obviously brings up the image of the Nazis and the Holocaust, things no country wants to have associated with it, but the 60 Minutes episode charges the Ottoman Turks with actually creating the blueprint for the kind of mass killing that the Third Reich ultimately perfected. That’s a charge that's even harder for Ankara to swallow, particularly on an issue that cuts to the core of Turkish national pride. You can watch the episode here.

Meanwhile, for a good look at just how much political cynicism surrounds the Armenian genocide issue, take a look at this op-ed by Turkey expert Henri Barkey in today’s Washington Post. Previous post on the Armenian issue can be found here.

Turkey's Nuclear Iran Problem

2010-03-03T10:14:00.004+02:00

The German Marshall Fund has just posted a new briefing by its astute Turkey analyst, Ian Lesser, about the difficult choices Ankara will have to make regarding the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons. From his piece:

Within the next few weeks, and in the absence of visible progress on the diplomatic front, the UN Security Council is likely to take up the question of new economic sanctions against Iran. This will pose serious dilemmas for Turkey’s leadership. Ankara has understandably opposed the idea of economic sanctions that would harm Turkish economic interests and, it argues, are unlikely to change Iranian behavior (they may well be right about this). A negotiated solution, perhaps with a Turkish role in nuclear storage and enrichment arrangements, would certainly be the best outcome for Ankara. But the prospects for a solution of this kind are not good, and Ankara may now confront some very uncomfortable decisions. The government’s choices can have far reaching implications.

If Turkey votes “no” or opts to abstain in a Security Coun¬cil vote, it will bolster unnecessarily the view of those who argue that Ankara is drifting toward closer alignment with Middle Eastern and Eurasian partners. It will fuel the sterile debate about “losing Turkey” and complicate Turkish-West¬ern relations across the board. Far more importantly, the absence of consensus with Turkey may actually hasten the use of force to deal with the problem—the worst develop¬ment from the perspective of Turkish interests. In Wash¬ington, the looming Iran sanctions question is emerging as the leading test for U.S.-Turkish relations under the Obama administration. The challenge of a nuclear Iran is one of the inescapable foreign policy issues facing an administra¬tion hard pressed on several fronts. Iran policy can reinforce or seriously erode the bilateral goodwill established over the past year. If Turkey cannot support a sanctions package in the Security Council—and this may turn critically on what the package contains—then at least it should be seen to take much tougher messages to Tehran on the nuclear question.

Western observers are increasingly concerned that Turkish-Iranian discussions do not have this quality. Turkish public, and even elite opinion may encourage Turkey’s leaders to talk about the desirability of a nuclear free Middle East, and to favor arguments about the equivalence of Israeli and Iranian nuclear weapons. In terms of Turkey’s own strategic interests, there is no equivalence at all. A nuclear Iran will spell trouble for Turkish security and undermine Turkey’s political objectives across multiple regions.

The whole briefing, which gives a good overview of Turkey's nuclear policy past and present and which is well worth reading, can be found here(pdf).

Previous posts about Turkey's nuclear iran dilemma can be found here.

Slow Train Coming

2010-02-17T20:05:00.008+02:00

It took some 18 hours for it to cover 500 kilometers (310 miles), but the first train in decades to run between Iraq and Turkey ended its maiden voyage today, starting in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and arriving in southern Turkey's Gaziantep (with a short leg through Syria).

The train, which carried 13 passengers, runs along a line built a century ago by German engineers who helped create a rail link that stretches from Berlin to Baghdad (the Haydarpasa station on Istanbul's Asian side was constructed as part of the same project). From the BBC's report about the renewed rail service:

The revived rail link symbolises the increasingly close ties between the three countries [Turkey, Syria and Iraq].

Having overcome its fear of Kurdish nationalism, Turkey now does about $10bn of trade with Iraq's Kurdish regional government every year - about 80% of goods sold there are Turkish.

Relations between Iraq and Syria are more fragile - in the past Syria has been accused of backing the insurgents behind several big bomb attacks in Iraq.

But trade between them - and between Syria and Turkey - is growing rapidly.
Turkey is gradually upgrading its railway network with high-speed routes and Iraq also plans big investments in its railways.

The Turkish government is now talking of a fast rail link running all the way to Pakistan.

You can read the full story here. An AFP report is here.

The railway desk at Ankara's "zero problems with neighbors" policy department certainly seems to be very active these days. Along with the Mosul line, Turkey is building a fast train link between Gaziantep and Aleppo in Syria and is part of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project, which conceivably could end up being linked up to a rail network that stretches all the way to China.

[UPDATE -- I forgot to originally also mention Turkey's ongoing Marmaray tunnel project, which will create an underwater rail link between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. Currently, trains heading from Europe to Asia (or the other way around), need to be put onto ferries that take them across the Bosphorus. Once Marmaray is complete, there will be an uninterrupted rail line between the two continents.]

Despite its lack of speed, it would seem that the slow train from Mosul might be a harbinger of important things to come. Turkish foreign policy watchers might now need to add trainspotting to their list of activities.

(graphic from the BBC)

"Neo-Ottomanism" Unveiled

2010-02-16T16:40:00.003+02:00

Turkish foreign policy officials don't like it, but the term "Neo-Ottomanism" -- often used to describe Ankara's active regional diplomacy these days -- seems to be sticking around. In a new article up on the World Politics Review website, I take a look at why Ankara dislikes the term so and what the proper definition of "Neo-Ottomanism" might be. You can read it here.