Apr 02, 2009 04:30 AM
Following his much-anticipated debut at three summits – G20, NATO and EU – Barack Obama will fly on Sunday to Turkey, his first presidential visit to a Muslim nation.
Turkey, the seat of the last great Muslim empire (the Ottoman), is not an Islamic state. It is not the largest Muslim nation (that being Indonesia). Nor is it rich (those being oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.) It has little oil.
But Turkey has led the 56-member Islamic Conference Organization. It’s the only Muslim member of NATO, with a contingent in Afghanistan. It wants to join the European Union, despite the latter’s xenophobic rebuffs. It has long-standing relations with Israel and it has emerged as a strong regional power.
One excuse for the Iraq war was to export democracy to the Arab Middle East. That mission has been a bust – the neighbourhood remains as autocratic as ever. Ironically, the biggest beneficiaries of the Iraq folly have been non-Arab Turkey and Iran, both already democratic in varying degrees. The rise of Iran is widely recognized. Turkey’s isn’t.
Turkey opposed the Iraq war. But it may serve as an exit point for American troops and equipment out of Iraq. It can also help Obama on other fronts.
The mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become sure-footed on both the domestic and foreign fronts.
It won re-election in 2005. Its candidate, Abdullah Gul, was elected president in 2007 over the stiff opposition of the military, judiciary and bureaucracy – the so-called Deep State that maintained a stranglehold on power by cleverly anointing itself the guardian of Turkey’s authoritarian secularism.
These same retrograde forces tried unsuccessfully to undermine the government through the courts last year, accusing it of creeping Islamism. Separately, a group of ultranationalists stand charged with planning terrorist attacks.
Erdogan is fixing Turkey’s two foundational but flawed precepts: that secularism equals hostility to religion, rather than neutrality between faiths; and that being Turkish means erasing ethnic, linguistic and other identities.
He has been inclusive of both the majority Muslim/Islamic identity and minority Kurdish rights. And he has quietly abandoned the pan-Turkish claims on Turkish minorities abroad, including the Turkoman in Iraq.
This has allowed the emergence of a regional Kurdish government in southern Turkey and the isolation of the PKK, the separatist terrorist Kurdish group.
It has also enabled Erdogan to make peace with Iraq. Now Baghdad is singing the Turkish tune, counselling the PKK to give up arms and enter into negotiations.
Turkey helped initiate contact between Israel and Pakistan and it arranged peace talks between Israel and Syria. The negotiations were suspended only after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which Erdogan denounced. He felt betrayed by Israel and shocked by the ferocity of the attack.
His anger spilled over at the Davos conference, where he walked out after tangling with President Shimon Peres. He returned home to a hero’s welcome. Palestinian flags were waved in Turkey and Turkish flags in Gaza. Yet relations with Israel remain intact.
Turkey helped secure a ceasefire in Gaza, with shuttle diplomacy between Egypt and Hamas. It is also working with Egypt on reconciling Hamas and Fatah, believing it to be the sine qua non of peace with Israel.
Turkey is a more credible interlocutor than Egypt, partly because it has provided a democratic outlet for public anger against the United States over the Iraq war and now against Israel’s excesses in Gaza.
Turkey talks to Iran as well.
Belonging to both the East and the West, Turkey is a strategic partner for peace in the Middle East and beyond, especially for Obama’s promised dialogue with the broader Muslim world.
Haroon Siddiqui writes Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca
Source: www.thestar.com, Apr 02, 2009