Author: Aylin D. Miller

  • Will Israel and / or the U.S. Attack Iran?

    Will Israel and / or the U.S. Attack Iran?

    By URI AVNERY

    IF YOU want to understand the policy of a country, look at the map – as Napoleon recommended.

    Anyone who wants to guess whether Israel and/or the United States are going to attack Iran should look at the map of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.

    Through this narrow waterway, only 34 km wide, pass the ships that carry between a fifth and a third of the world’s oil, including that from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

    * * *

    MOST OF the commentators who talk about the inevitable American and Israeli attack on Iran do not take account of this map.

    There is talk about a “sterile”, a “surgical” air strike. The mighty air fleet of the United States will take off from the aircraft carriers already stationed in the Persian Gulf and the American air bases dispersed throughout the region and bomb all the nuclear sites of Iran – and on this happy occasion also bomb government institutions, army installations, industrial centers and anything else they might fancy. They will use bombs that can penetrate deep into the ground.

    Simple, quick and elegant – one blow and bye-bye Iran, bye-bye ayatollahs, bye-bye Ahmadinejad.

    If Israel attacks alone, the blow will be more modest. The most the attackers can hope for is the destruction of the main nuclear sites and a safe return.

    I have a modest request: before you start, please look at the map once more, at the Strait named (probably) after the god of Zarathustra.

    * * *

    THE INEVITABLE reaction to the bombing of Iran will be the blocking of this Strait. That should have been self-evident even without the explicit declaration by one of Iran’s highest ranking generals a few days ago.

    Iran dominates the whole length of the Strait. They can seal it hermetically with their missiles and artillery, both land based and naval.

    If that happens, the price of oil will skyrocket – far beyond the 200 dollars-per-barrel that pessimists dread now. That will cause a chain reaction: a world-wide depression, the collapse of whole industries and a catastrophic rise in unemployment in America, Europe and Japan.

    In order to avert this danger, the Americans would need to conquer parts of Iran – perhaps the whole of this large country. The US does not have at its disposal even a small part of the forces they would need. Practically all their land forces are tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The mighty American navy is menacing Iran – but the moment the Strait is closed, it will itself resemble those model ships in bottles. Perhaps it is this danger that made the navy chiefs extricate the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln from the Persian Gulf this week, ostensibly because of the situation in Pakistan.

    This leaves the possibility that the US will act by proxy. Israel will attack, and this will not officially involve the US, which will deny any responsibility.

    Indeed? Iran has already announced that it would consider an Israeli attack as an American operation, and act as if it had been directly attacked by the US. That is logical.

    * * *

    NO ISRAELI government would ever consider the possibility of starting such an operation without the explicit and unreserved agreement of the US. Such a confirmation will not be forthcoming.

    So what are all these exercises, which generate such dramatic headlines in the international media?

    The Israeli Air Force has held exercises at a distance of 1500 km from our shores. The Iranians have responded with test firings of their Shihab missiles, which have a similar range. Once, such activities were called “saber rattling”, nowadays the preferred term is “psychological warfare”. They are good for failed politicians with domestic needs, to divert attention, to scare citizens. They also make excellent television. But simple common sense tells us that whoever plans a surprise strike does not proclaim this from the rooftops. Menachem Begin did not stage public exercises before sending the bombers to destroy the Iraqi reactor, and even Ehud Olmert did not make a speech about his intention to bomb a mysterious building in Syria.

    * * *

    SINCE KING Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some 2500 years ago, who allowed the Israelite exiles in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and build a temple there, Israeli-Persian relations have their ups and downs.

    Until the Khomeini revolution, there was a close alliance between them. Israel trained the Shah’s dreaded secret police (“Savak”). The Shah was a partner in the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline which was designed to bypass the Suez Canal. (Iran is still trying to enforce payment for the oil it supplied then.)

    The Shah helped to infiltrate Israeli army officers into the Kurdish part of Iraq, where they assisted Mustafa Barzani’s revolt against Saddam Hussein. That operation came to an end when the Shah betrayed the Iraqi Kurds and made a deal with Saddam. But Israeli-Iranian cooperation was almost restored after Saddam attacked Iran. In the course of that long and cruel war (1980-1988), Israel secretly supported the Iran of the ayatollahs. The Irangate affair was only a small part of that story.

    That did not prevent Ariel Sharon from planning to conquer Iran, as I have already disclosed in the past. When I was writing an in-depth article about him in 1981, after his appointment as Minister of Defense, he told me in confidence about this daring idea: after the death of Khomeini, Israel would forestall the Soviet Union in the race to Iran. The Israeli army would occupy Iran in a few days and turn the country over to the much slower Americans, who would have supplied Israel well in advance with large quantities of sophisticated arms for this express purpose.

    He also showed me the maps he intended to take with him to the annual strategic consultations in Washington. They looked very impressive. It seems, however, that the Americans were not so impressed.

    All this indicates that by itself, the idea of an Israeli military intervention in Iran is not so revolutionary. But a prior condition is close cooperation with the US. This will not be forthcoming, because the US would be the primary victim of the consequences.

    * * *

    IRAN IS now a regional power. It makes no sense to deny that.

    The irony of the matter is that for this they must thank their foremost benefactor in recent times: George W. Bush. If they had even a modicum of gratitude, they would erect a statue to him in Tehran’s central square.

    For many generations, Iraq was the gatekeeper of the Arab region. It was the wall of the Arab world against the Persian Shiites. It should be remembered that during the Iraqi-Iranian war, Arab Shiite Iraqis fought with great enthusiasm against Persian Shiite Iranians.

    When President Bush invaded Iraq and destroyed it, he opened the whole region to the growing might of Iran. In future generations, historians will wonder about this action, which deserves a chapter to itself in “The March of Folly”.

    Today it is already clear that the real American aim (as I have asserted in this column right from the beginning) was to take possession of the Caspian Sea/Persian Gulf oil region and station a permanent American garrison at its center. This aim was indeed achieved – the Americans are now talking about their forces remaining in Iraq “for a hundred years”, and they are now busily engaged in dividing Iraq’s huge oil reserves among the four or five giant American oil companies.

    But this war was started without wider strategic thinking and without looking at the geopolitical map. It was not decided who is the main enemy of the US in the region, neither was it clear where the main effort should be. The advantage of dominating Iraq may well be outweighed by the rise of Iran as a nuclear, military and political power that will overshadow America’s allies in the Arab world.

    * * *

    WHERE DO we Israelis stand in this game?

    For years now, we have been bombarded by a propaganda campaign that depicts the Iranian nuclear effort as an existential threat to Israel. Forget the Palestinians, forget Hamas and Hizbullah, forget Syria – the sole danger that threatens the very existence of the State of Israel is the Iranian nuclear bomb.

    I repeat what I have said before: I am not prey to this existential Angst. True, life is more pleasant without an Iranian nuclear bomb, and Ahmadinejad is not very nice either. But if the worst comes to the worst, we will have a “balance of terror” between the two nations, much like the American-Soviet balance of terror that saved mankind from World War III, or the Indian-Pakistani balance of terror that provides a framework for a rapprochement between those two countries that hate each other’s guts.

    * * *

    ON THE basis of all these considerations, I dare to predict that there will be no military attack on Iran this year – not by the Americans, not by the Israelis.

    As I write these lines, a little red light turns on in my head. It is related to a memory: in my youth I was an avid reader of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s weekly articles, which impressed me with their cold logic and clear style. In August 1939, Jabotinsky wrote an article in which he asserted categorically that no war would break out, in spite of all the rumors to the contrary. His reasoning: modern weapons are so terrible, that no country would dare to start a war.

    A few days later Germany invaded Poland, starting the most terrible war in human history (until now), which ended with the Americans dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, for 63 years, nobody has used nuclear weapons in a war.

    President Bush is about to end his career in disgrace. The same fate is waiting impatiently for Ehud Olmert. For politicians of this kind, it is easy to be tempted by a last adventure, a last chance for a decent place in history after all.

    All the same, I stick to my prognosis: it will not happen.

    Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, member of Gush Shalom and contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK / CounterPunch).

    Source: www.counterpunch.org, July 14, 2008

  • ‘Iran is friends with Israeli people’: Ahmadinejad aide

    ‘Iran is friends with Israeli people’: Ahmadinejad aide

    TEHRAN (AFP) — Iran is “friends with the Israeli people”, a deputy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, in stark contrast to Tehran’s usual verbal assaults against the Jewish state, local media reported on Sunday.

    Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, vice president in charge of tourism and one of Ahmadinejad’s closest confidants, also described the people of Iran’s arch-enemy the United States as “one of the best nations in the world”.

    “Today, Iran is friends with the American and Israeli people. No nation in the world is our enemy, this is an honour,” Rahim Mashaie said, according to the Fars news agency and Etemad newspaper.

    “Of course we have enemies and the most unfair hostilities are committed against the Iranian people,” he said on the sidelines of a tourism congress in Tehran.

    “We regard the American people as one of the best nations in the world.”

    Ahmadinejad has earned international notoriety for his frequent verbal assaults against Israel, which he has described as a “stinking corpse” and predicted is doomed to disappear.

    Rahim Mashaie is one of the figures closest to the president in the Iranian government. This was emphasised earlier this year when his daughter married Ahmadinejad’s son.

    Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Iran is ready to talk to all countries except the “Zionist regime”, Tehran’s usual description for Israel.

    “An unexpected statement: Mashaie talks about friendship with the people of Israel?!” was the headline on the conservative Tabnak news website.

    The website said it was all the more surprising he had made the comment when much of Ahmadinejad’s popularity in the Arab world stems from his hostility towards Israel and the United States.

    This is not the first time Rahim Mashaie has been involved in controversy. He was sharply criticised by MPs for allegedly watching a Turkish woman dance while at a tourism congress in Turkey.

    The Islamic republic has repeatedly vowed never to recognise Israel, which was an ally of pro-US shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ousted by the 1979 Islamic revolution.

    Source: AFP, 20 July 2008

  • Russian Military to End Their Use of Kazakh Space Site This Year

    Russian Military to End Their Use of Kazakh Space Site This Year

    Posted on: Sunday, 20 July 2008, 15:00 CDT

    Text of report by corporate-owned Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN website

    Baykonur (Kazakhstan), 16 July: The discontinuation of military units and the transfer of [Russian] Defence Ministry facilities located at the Baykonur space launch site to enterprises of the Russian space rocket sector will be completed in the autumn of this year.

    “The transfer of Defence Ministry facilities has begun this month and should be completed in late November 2008,” a source at the Baykonur space launch site has told Interfax-AVN.

    The source said the schedule of transfer of launch site facilities from the military to enterprises of the space rocket sector and the town administration had been agreed at meeting of representatives of the Defence Ministry and Roskosmos [Russian Federal Space Agency] held at Baykonur on Tuesday [15 July].

    Under the agreements reached [at the meeting], the source told the agency, the Krayniy aerodrome will be transferred to the centre for the use of ground space infrastructure, while the facilities of the missile test units of the launch site (the inhabited area and the launch silos for UR-100N (RS-18) missiles will be transferred to the NPO Mashinostroyeniya (Machine-Building Research and Production Association).

    The remaining facilities, i.e. the buildings and structures of the Russian Defence Ministry, will be accepted by Roskosmos enterprises and the town administration, the source told the agency..

    The Fifth State Space Test Launch Site of the Russian Federation Defence Ministry (the Baykonur space launch site) will be discontinued by 1 January 2009. After that date, about 250 servicemen of more than 1,000 currently serving at Baykonur will stay on at the space launch site. Some of them will be transferred to the reserve, while others will be moved to new service postings in Russia.

    Once the military structures at the launch site have been discontinued, it will operate purely as a civilian enterprise.

    Originally published by Interfax-AVN military news agency website, Moscow, in Russian 1158 20 Jul 08.

    (c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

    Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

  • Traditional head scarf unveils new rifts in Turkey

    Traditional head scarf unveils new rifts in Turkey

    ISTANBUL — Fatma Benli doesn’t like the word “symbol.” But somewhere in the folds of the flowered green and brown scarf wrapped tightly around her oval face – and the similar coverings worn by millions of Turkish women – is the crux of their country’s spreading political crisis, with its duelling allegations of coup plots and coming Islamic caliphates.

    It may have been centuries since a simple piece of cloth created such upheaval. The head scarf, specifically whether female university students should be allowed to wear them on campus, has set off a constitutional court case that could soon see the governing party banned from office and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan forced to resign any day now. The garment’s increasing ubiquity in Turkey likely played a role in motivating an alleged coup plot against the country’s mildly Islamist government.

    Just a year after the last political clash between the secularists and the Prime Minister’s Justice and Development (AK) Party resulted in snap elections that returned Mr. Erdogan to office, the head scarf tempest has grown into a maelstrom that could bring down the government and derail Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.

    The high-stakes power struggle in this country of 70 million people – 99 per cent of whom identify themselves as Muslim – is often portrayed as a battle over whether to follow the path of open, European-style secularism mandated by the Turkish constitution, or the stern religiosity that rules much of the Middle East. Here in the city that links those two land masses, the head scarf is often seen as a marker of the side of the divide on which a woman stands.

    But while Ms. Benli, 34, says she covers her head “because of my religious beliefs, because of my God,” she argues that the conflict between religion and secularism is not, in fact, why Turkey is in tumult. Like many here, the human-rights lawyer says the real issue is that the elites who have controlled Turkey and its economy since the fall of the Ottoman Empire are angry about losing their grip on the levers of power.

    And despite consecutive elections that demonstrated that widespread popularity of the AK Party among both the rural poor and the emerging middle class, the old guard is refusing to let go without a fight.

    Ms. Benli says she is an example of how the fear of political Islam is used to keep social conservatives from joining the upper echelons of society. Born in rural Turkey, she was the first woman in her family to get a university education. But while she has a diploma on her office wall certifying that she passed the Istanbul bar exam, and she is free to meet her clients in her downtown office, she can’t go into the courtroom to argue their cases unless she removes her head scarf. So she prepares the arguments, then hands them to other lawyers to argue in court on her behalf.

    “This has nothing to do with secularism versus Islam … in real secularism, you can do what you want and wear what you want,” Ms. Benli said. “This is all about classism. This is about people who lived in nice neighbourhoods, shopped in nice stores and saw us people from the countryside moving in. So they used the head scarf as a pretext.”

    Reflecting the widening social divide, two new terms have joined the country’s political lexicon since the AKP took office in 2002. The better educated, moneyed and high-living Turks who come from old Istanbul and Ankara families are now colloquially known as the “White Turks” – a term that has nothing to do with skin colour, although they generally are more European looking in appearance. Meanwhile, AKP followers – devout, poor and usually rural – are dubbed the Black Turks.

    “We’re proud to represent the Black Turks,” smiles Suat Kiniklioglu, an AKP member who is spokesman of the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He said his party has presided over a reform process since 2002 that has seen the country’s economy grow at more than 5 per cent each year and moved Turkey closer than ever before to Mr. Erdogan’s treasured goal of European Union membership.

    That reform process has seen the government overhaul the criminal code, take steps to tackle endemic corruption and introduce greater civilian oversight of the military. Taken collectively, Mr. Kiniklioglu said, the measures turned the status quo on its head.

    “The periphery has come to occupy the centre. The so-called lower classes, the more traditional, rural elite has come to the government, to run the country, and to the surprise of many has done a pretty good job,” the 43-year-old Carleton University political science graduate said between sips of sweet tea during an interview in the garden of Turkey’s imposing Grand National Assembly building in Ankara. “Every change produces winners and losers. … The losers in this were the people accustomed to the old order, those I call the exclusive state elite: the military, the judges, university rectors, some media.”

    Black and White Turks alike agree that the social and political revolution taking place in Turkey actually began decades ago, when the urban poor began moving to cities such as Istanbul and Ankara in search of better paying jobs. White Turks wistfully recall the Turkey of decades ago, when the anti-religious reformation launched by the country’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was still the dominant political ideology.

    “When I was a university student, there was not a single [woman on campus] wearing the head scarf. Not only inside the university, but out in the street,” said Onur Oymen, the 68-year-old deputy leader of the Republican People’s Party.

    Mr. Oymen likens the head scarf to the effective prohibition on neckties after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, or the uniforms worn by young revolutionaries in Maoist China – a political symbol worn by those bent on overthrowing the established constitutional order.

    Such fears are believed to have motivated a shadowy ultranationalist organization of senior ex-army officers – along with leading political, business and media figures – that is alleged to have plotted on four separate occasions to bring down Mr. Erdogan and the AKP. Known as Ergenekon, after a mythical valley where, according to legend, the Turkic peoples hid to escape the Mongol hordes, the group is alleged to have plotted to instigate a campaign of violence and assassinations around the country in hopes of provoking the military to intervene and take power. While Mr. Oymen scoffs at the Ergenekon allegations and says the charges amount to persecution of Mr. Erdogan’s political opponents, supporters of the AKP say it’s more proof of just how far the old guard will go to regain its former hold.

    While the slowly emerging details of the sensational Ergenekon case have gripped the Turkish news media since prosecutors filed an indictment against 86 suspects early last week, it’s the outcome of another court proceeding – due any day now – that could have more serious short-term repercussions. The constitutional court is expected to rule any time in the next month on whether to ban the AKP and 71 of its individual members, including Mr. Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from politics over alleged breaches of the country’s secular constitution.

    The case was launched three weeks after the AKP moved in February to lift the ban on women wearing head scarves on campus, a ban the constitutional court quickly reinstated. According to some studies, roughly two-thirds of Turkish women now wear the head covering.

    Although most outsiders view the case as spurious, eight of the constitutional court’s 11 members are seen as members of the old guard and many within the AKP expect the court to impose a ban. Murat Mercan, vice-president of the AKP, said the party is already making preparations to reform under a new name and possibly new leadership, just as it did after its predecessor, the Welfare Party, was banned in 1998.

    “Simply put, we are headed to chaos,” said Yavuz Baydar, a columnist with Today’s Zaman newspaper, which is seen as pro-government. “When [the AKP] is shut down, we will be facing an unprecedented situation, where a majority government has to go. … Even those who initiated this process don’t know what the outcome will be.”

    Even some secularists aren’t sure they want the outcome the country seems to be hurtling toward. Down a back alley off Independence Street on the trendy European side of Istanbul, men still gather around tables to talk politics in front of the same restaurant where Ataturk used to drink, dine and plot the new Turkish republic he envisioned emerging from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

    Over tea and cigarettes, Ataturk’s modern-day followers condemn the AKP and compare Mr. Erdogan to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. But with Turkish businesses starting to feel the pinch of the global economic slowdown, few want to see the constitutional court plunge the country into further turmoil. Besides, some noted, whether the White Turks like it or not, the Islamists are clearly be here to stay.

    “They shouldn’t close the party down,” said Seyhan Oduk, a lanky 37-year-old who was waiting on tables at the restaurant. “If they do, they will just come back more powerful.”

    Source: www.theglobeandmail.com, July 20, 2008

  • Turkey’s future Flags, veils and sharia

    Turkey’s future Flags, veils and sharia

    Turkey’s future

    Flags, veils and sharia

    Jul 17th 2008 | ANKARA, KARS AND TOKAT
    From The Economist print edition

    Behind the court case against Turkey’s ruling party lies an existential question: how Islamist has the country become?

    EPA  

    A MARBLE fountain held up by bare-breasted maidens in the eastern city of Kars is a source of pride for the city’s mayor, Naif Alibeyoglu. Yet last November the sculpture vanished a few days before a planned visit to Kars by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Fearful of incurring the wrath of Mr Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the mayor (himself an AKP man) reportedly arranged for its removal.

    In the event, the prime minister never arrived—and the fountain came back. The incident may be testimony to the prudery of Mr Erdogan, and of the AKP more broadly. But could it also be evidence of their desire to steer Turkey towards sharia law? The country’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, might say so. In March he petitioned the constitutional court to ban the AKP and to bar Mr Erdogan and 70 other named AKP officials, including the president, Abdullah Gul, from politics, on the ground that they are covertly seeking to establish an Islamist theocracy.

     

    Turkey has been in upheaval ever since. After hearings earlier this month, a verdict is expected soon, maybe in early August. Most observers expect it to go against the AKP. Turkey has banned no fewer than 24 parties in the past 50 years, including the AKP’s two forerunners. In 23 of these cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the bans violated its charter.

    Yet Mr Yalcinkaya’s indictment lacks hard evidence to show that the AKP is working to reverse secular rule. Much of his case rests on the words, not the actions, of Mr Erdogan and his lieutenants. Among Mr Erdogan’s listed “crimes” is his opinion that “Turkey as a modern Muslim nation can serve as an example for the harmony of civilisations.” That is hardly a call for jihad. The AKP has promoted Islamic values, but it has never attempted to pass laws inspired by the Koran.

    None of this seems to impress Turkey’s meddlesome generals, who are widely believed to be the driving force behind the “judicial coup” against the AKP. This follows the “e-coup” they threatened last year by issuing a warning on the internet against making Mr Gul president. Some renegade generals are also involved in the so-called Ergenekon group; 86 members were charged this week with plotting a coup (see article).

    The generals and their allies believe that nothing less than the future of Ataturk’s secular republic is at stake. Similar rumblings were heard when the now defunct pro-Islamic Welfare party first came to power in 1996. It was ejected a year later in a bloodless “velvet coup” and banned on similar charges to those now levelled at the AKP. But with each intervention the Islamists come back stronger.

    Unlike their pro-secular rivals, Islamists have been able to reinvent themselves to appeal to a growing base of voters. Nobody has done this more successfully than Mr Erdogan with the AKP. An Islamic cleric by training, Mr Erdogan became Istanbul’s mayor when Welfare won a municipal election in 1994. He was booted out in 1997, and jailed briefly a year later for reciting a nationalist poem in public that was deemed to incite “religious hatred”.

     

    It was a turning-point. Mr Erdogan defected from Welfare with fellow moderates to found the AKP in 2001. He and his friends said that they no longer believed in mixing religion with politics and that Turkish membership of the European Union was the AKP’s chief goal. And when the AKP won the general election of November 2002, it formed a single-party government that did something unusual for Turkey: it kept its word.

    The death penalty was abolished; the army’s powers were trimmed; women were given more rights than at any time since Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish state, made both sexes equal before the law. Despite Mr Erdogan’s calls for women to have “at least three children”, abortion remains legal and easy. This silent revolution eventually shamed the EU into opening formal membership talks with Turkey in 2005, an achievement that had eluded all the AKP’s predecessors in government.

    The government’s economic record was impressive, too. The economy bounced back from its nadir in 2001, growing by a steady average annual rate of 6% or more. Inflation was tamed (though it has crept back up recently). Above all, foreign direct investment, previously paltry, hit record levels. For a while, Turkey seemed to have become a stable and prosperous sort of place. That is surely why 47% of voters backed the AKP in July 2007, a big jump from only 34% in 2002.

    Many see the campaign to topple the AKP as part of a long battle pitting an old guard, used to monopolising wealth and power, against a rising class of pious Anatolians symbolised by the AKP. Others say it is mostly about an army that believes soldiers, not elected politicians, should have the final say over how the country is run.

     

    Yet the real struggle “is between Islam and modernity”, says Ismail Kara, a respected Islamic theologian. Adapting to the modern world without compromising their religious values is a dilemma that has long vexed Muslims. For Turkey the challenge is also to craft an identity that can embrace all its citizens, whether devout Muslims, hard-core secularists, Alevis or Kurds. If the generals had their way, everyone would be happy to call himself a Turk, all would refrain from public displays of piety and nobody would ever challenge their authority. But the Kemalist straitjacket no longer fits the modern country. Opinion polls suggest that most Turks now identify themselves primarily as Muslims, not as Turks. The AKP did not create this mindset: rather, it was born from it.

    The caliph of Istanbul

    Islam has been intertwined with Turkishness ever since the Ottoman Sultan adopted the title of “Caliph”, or spiritual leader, of the world’s Muslims almost six centuries ago. When Ataturk abolished the caliphate in 1924 and launched his secular revolution, he did not efface piety; he drove it underground. Turkey’s brand of secularism is not about separating religion from the state, as in France. It is about subordinating religion to the state. This is done through the diyanet, the state-run body that appoints imams to Turkey’s 77,000 mosques and tells them what to preach, even sometimes writing their sermons.

    In the early days of Ataturk’s republic, the façade of modernity was propped up by zealous Kemalists, who fanned out on civilising missions across Anatolia. They would drink wine and dance the Charleston at officers’ clubs in places like Kars. “My grandmother, she told me about the balls, the beautiful dresses. Kars was such a modern place then,” sighs Arzu Orhankazi, a feminist activist. In truth, life outside the cities continued much as before: deeply traditional and desperately poor.

    A big reason why Anatolia seemed less Islamist in the old days is because it was home to a large and vibrant community of Christians. But this demographic balance was brutally overturned by the mass killings and expulsions of Armenians and Greeks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Take Tokat, a leafy northern Anatolian town where Armenians made up nearly a third of the population before 1915. The only trace that remains of a once thriving Armenian community is a derelict cemetery overgrown with weeds and desecrated by treasure-hunting locals.

    Much of this history is overlooked by the secular elite. Pressed for evidence of creeping Islamisation under the AKP, they point to the growing number of women who wear the headscarf, which is proscribed as a symbol of Islamic militancy in state-run institutions and schools. Mr Erdogan’s attempt to lift the ban for universities, which was later overturned by the constitutional court, is a big part of Mr Yalcinkaya’s case against him and the AKP.

    Yet surveys suggest that, except for a small group of militant pro-secularists, most Turks do not oppose Islamic headgear, least of all in universities. Its proliferation probably has little to do with Islamist fervour, but is linked to the influx of rural Anatolians into towns and cities. The exodus from the countryside accelerated under Turgut Ozal, a former prime minister who liberalised the economy in the early 1980s. For conservative families, covering their daughters’ heads became a way of protecting them in a new and alien world.

    Once urbanisation is complete the headscarf will begin to fade, says Faruk Birtek, a sociologist at Istanbul’s Bogazici University. Bogazici was always refreshingly unbothered by students with headscarves. But the rules were tightened in the 1990s. And around the time the constitutional court in June overturned the new AKP law to let women with headscarves attend university, Bogazici’s liberal female director was squeezed out.

    Like many, Summeye Kavuncu, a sociology student at Bogazici, has been caught in the net. She complains that her stomach “gets all knotty each time I go to university. I no longer know whether to keep my scarf on or to take it off. The secularists look upon us as cockroaches, backward creatures who blot their landscape.” Few would guess that Ms Kavuncu belongs to a band of pious activists who dare to speak up for gays and transvestites.

    Social and class snobbery may partly drive the secularists’ contempt for their pious peers. But it is ignorance that drives their fear. Bridging these worlds can be tricky, “because Islam is not like other religions, it’s a 24-hour lifestyle,” comments Yilmaz Ensaroglu, an Islamic intellectual. “Devout Muslims pray five times a day.”

    Wine, women and schools

    The biggest fault-lines in Turkey’s sharpening secular/religious divide concern alcohol, women and education. When Welfare rose to power in the 1990s, one of its first acts was to ban booze in restaurants run by municipalities under its control. Party officials argued that pious citizens had the right to affordable leisure space that did not offend their values. Some AKP mayors have pushed this line further. They want to exile drinkers to “red zones” outside their cities. A newly prosperous class of devout Muslims is creating its own gated communities, and a growing number of hotels boast segregated beaches and no liquor. A survey shows that the number of such retreats has quadrupled under the AKP. Taha Erdem, a respected pollster, says the number of women wearing the turban, the least revealing headscarf of all, has quadrupled too.

    All this is feeding secularist paranoia about creeping Islam. Are these fears justified? In the big cities conservative Anatolians are expanding their living space. But this is not at the secularists’ expense. Life for urban middle-class Turks, and certainly for the rich, continues much as before. It is in rural backwaters that freewheeling Turks fall prey to what Serif Mardin, a respected sociologist, calls “neighbourhood pressure”. For instance, Tarsus, a sleepy eastern Mediterranean town (and birthplace of St Paul), made headlines recently when two teenage girls were attacked by syringe-wielding assailants who sprayed their legs with an acid-like substance because their skirts were “too short”.

    Habits in the workplace are changing too. Female school teachers have been reprimanded for wearing short-sleeved blouses. During the Ramadan fast last year the governor’s office in Kars stopped serving tea for a while. Secular Turks contend that Islam will inevitably wrest more space from their lives and must be reined in now. With no credible opposition in sight, many look to the army as secularism’s last defender.

    So do many of Turkey’s estimated 15m Alevis, who practise an idiosyncratic form of Islam: they do not pray in mosques, they are not teetotal and their women do not cover their heads. The government has not kept its promise formally to recognise Alevi houses of worship, called cemevler. Nor has it heeded Alevi demands for their children to be exempted from compulsory religious-education classes that are dominated by Sunni Islam. “There is a systematic campaign to brainwash us, to make us Sunnis,” complains Muharrem Erkan, an Alevi activist in Tokat.

    The battle for Turkey’s soul is being waged most fiercely in the country’s schools. Egitim-Sen, a leftist teachers’ union, charges that Islam has been permeating textbooks under the AKP. Darwin’s theory of evolution is being whittled away and creationism is seeping in. Islamist fraternities, or tarikat, continue to ensnare students by offering free accommodation. The quid pro quo is that they fast and pray, and girls cover their heads.

    Yet the biggest boost to religious education came from the army itself, after it seized power for the third time in 1980. Communism was the enemy at the time, so the generals encouraged Islam as an antidote. Religious teaching became mandatory. Islamic clerical-training schools, known as imam hatip, mushroomed.

    Another example of how army meddling goes awry is Hizbullah, Turkey’s deadliest home-grown Islamic terrorist outfit. Hizbullah (no relation to its Lebanese namesake) is alleged to have been encouraged by rogue security forces in the late 1980s to fight separatist PKK rebels in the Kurdish south-east. The group spiralled out of control until police raids in 2001 knocked it out of action. But not entirely. Former Hizbullah militants are said to have regrouped in cells linked to al-Qaeda, and took part in the 2003 bombings of Jewish and British targets in Istanbul.

    Banning the AKP could strengthen the hand of such extremists, who share the fierce secularists’ belief that Islam and democracy cannot co-exist. If instead the AKP stayed in power, that would bring Islamists closer to the mainstream. “Six years in government has tempered even the most radical AKP members,” comments Mr Ensaroglu. True enough. AKP members of parliament wear Zegna suits and happily shake women’s hands; their wives get nose jobs and watch football matches; their children are more likely to study English than the Koran.

    Had Mr Erdogan made an effort to reach out to secular Turks, “we might not be where we are today,” concedes a senior AKP official. He missed several chances. The first came last autumn when the AKP was trying to patch together a new constitution to replace the one written by the generals in the 1980s. Mr Erdogan never bothered to consult his secular opponents. He ignored them again when passing his law to let girls wear headscarves at universities. Critics say that his big election win turned his head. “Erdogan accepts no advice and no criticism,” whispers an AKP deputy. “He’s become a tyrant.”

    Maybe he has. But that does not mean he deserves to be barred from politics, and his party banned.

  • Turkey stands by its offer to give Greek Cypriots water on drought-hit island

    Turkey stands by its offer to give Greek Cypriots water on drought-hit island

    The Associated Press
    Published: July 19, 2008

    NICOSIA, Cyprus: Turkey’s offer to provide drinking water to Greek Cypriots on ethnically-divided Cyprus still stands, even though it has been publicly rejected, the Turkish Cypriot leader said Saturday.

    Mehmet Ali Talat said Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, “made it very clear that Turkey is ready to help” to alleviate a water crisis lashing the island.

    Talat told a news conference with Erdogan that he has made the water offer to Greek Cypriot officials “on different channels.” He said although they have publicly spurned the offer, “no official answer” has been given yet.

    The Turkish Cypriot leader said water tankers making the 75-kilometer (45-mile) trip from Turkey to the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north would be shared with Greek Cypriots in the internationally-recognized south, if they accept the offer.

    Greek Cypriot government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou has said water diplomacy is not possible as long as the Cyprus issue remains unresolved. Cyprus was split in 1974 when Turkey invaded in response to a short-lived coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece. The self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognized only by Turkey which does not recognize the Greek Cypriot-dominated government.

    Many U.N.-led reunification efforts have since failed, including the most comprehensive bid in 2004 when Greek Cypriots rejected — and Turkish Cypriots approved — a U.N. plan.

    Talat and Cyprus President Dimitris Christofias agreed in March to revive the dormant peace process after a preparation period.They are scheduled to meet on July 25 to decide a date for the start of full-fledged negotiations.

    Erdogan said Saturday that he hopes a reunification deal based on “a new partnership” between “two equal peoples” and “two constituent states” would be found soon.

    A rainless winter has dwindled dam reserves to crisis levels, forcing the government to ration water to Greek Cypriot households and import quantities from Greece aboard tankers.

    Fresh water produced from two desalination plants is not enough to cover a 17 million cubic meter (600 million cubic feet) shortfall in water reserves. The south needs 66.7 million cubic meters (2.35 billion cubic feet)of water a year to meet its needs.

    Erdogan said work to build an undersea water pipeline linking Turkey to the north would begin in 2009 and be completed three years later.

    The Turkish prime minister is midway through a three-day visit to the north to attend invasion [sic.] celebrations on Sunday. The Greek Cypriot government condemned the visit as illegal.

    Source: International Herald Tribune, July 19, 2008