Turkish Forum

Category: Claire Berlinski

Claire Berlinski writes about international news and trends, liberal democracy and its discontents, and living in interesting times. Her readers and writers join her in what has become Substack’s premier salon for the discussion of global affairs.

  • GULEN & AKP & ERDOGAN : Anatomy Of A Power Struggle

    GULEN & AKP & ERDOGAN : Anatomy Of A Power Struggle

    AN OFFICIAL REPORT FROM:

    AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY COUNCIL

    Anatomy Of A Power Struggle

    By Claire Berlinski
    The Journal of International Security Affairs
    December 19, 2012

    While Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs no introduction, the Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen is probably the most important person you’ve never heard about. He is an immensely powerful figure in Turkey, and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly powerful figure globally. Today, there are between three and six million Gülen followers. Gülen leads the cemaat, an Islamic civil society movement, that has until now been critical to the electoral success of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The cemaat is often described as Turkey’s Third Force—the other two being the AKP and the military.

    Gülen has been living in the Poconos since March 1999. Shortly after he decamped to the United States, ostensibly for medical treatment, Turkish television broadcast footage of the imam instructing his followers to infiltrate the organs of the state. He was prosecuted in absentia for seeking to overthrow the Turkish constitution. The charges were dismissed in 2008, so there is no longer any legal obstacle preventing him from returning to Turkey. But he remains in the United States where, among other things, he is a large player in the U.S. charter school business.

    Although the movement purports to be structured informally, this is generally not the view of scholars who are not on its payroll, or of those who have left its ranks. Almost uniformly, they observe that the movement’s organizational structure is strict, hierarchical, and undemocratic. So are its tenets. Gülenists assiduously cultivate the image of Gülen and his movement as tolerant, peace-loving, and modern. Gülen indeed sponsors lavish interfaith dialogue events, while his schools, cultural centers, conferences, newspapers, and television stations are the more important platform for the promotion of his agenda, which is decidedly less tolerant and modern. Gülen, for example, has expressed the belief that the penalty for apostasy should be death—if the transgressor fails to return to the Islamic fold by more peaceful means.

    Gülen says he does not wish to be involved in politics, but has nonetheless—until recently—used his influence, and particularly his vast media empire, to promote the AKP. This alliance was logical: Gülen and the AKP shared important goals, such as promoting a larger role for religion in Turkey and a smaller role for the military. The AKP and Gülen also shared a vision of expanding Turkish influence abroad, particularly in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. The movement has been instrumental in promoting Turkish business interests in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

    However, the AKP and the Gülen movement are by no means identical. Indeed, while a number of AKP MPs are followers of Gülen, Erdogan is not. Gülen and his followers can best be described as political opportunists; when the military removed Refah Party Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from power in 1996, Gülen positioned himself with the military. Later, his loyalties shifted to the AKP, which was an outgrowth of Refah. Generally, Gülen seeks to attach himself to power, cooperate with it, and use it to his advantage.

    The AKP and the cemaat for a time found each other extremely useful. The cemaat’s assiduous penetration of the police and the judiciary allowed Erdogan to confront the military and other key obstacles to the enlargement of his power; cemaat-controlled media organs generated public support for this. Erdogan was content to use the prosecution of suspected coup plotters (collectively referred to as the “Ergenekon” conspiracy) to purge his own enemies. But now that the government, with Gülen’s help, has largely demoralized the military, confined its most serious ideological opponents to prison, and terrified the rest into silence, the inevitable is happening. The victors are fighting over the spoils.

    Tensions began to rise over the “Ergenekon” investigations, which have grown increasingly embarrassing for the AKP. Hundreds of serving and retired military officers, including former Chief of General Staff Ilker Basbug, have been jailed, along with elected MPs and prominent academics. The arrests of journalists in particular have given rise to tremendous criticism, prompting Erdogan to dismiss the case’s lead prosecutor, Zekeriya Öz, the Gülenist mastermind of the “Ergenekon” probe. Still, while Erdogan appeared to be discomfited by this, he was willing to accept it; if a bit of embarrassment was the price he had to pay for getting rid of his enemies, so be it.

    But then, the cemaat began going after Erdogan’s friends. His trusted intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, is seen by the cemaat as soft—soft on Iran, but more importantly, soft on the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK). The cemaat is intensely hostile to the leftist (indeed, neo-Maoist) PKK, and when the news broke last year that Fidan had entered into secret negotiations with the group, it was apparently too much for Gülen to bear. The tension finally broke into the open.

    On February 7, special prosecutor Sadrettin Sarıkaya, who had been investigating the KCK, the alleged urban branch of the PKK, ordered the detention of Fidan, Fidan’s predecessor Emre Taner, and two others. Erdogan took the maneuver as a direct assault on his authority. Within days, the AKP drafted a new law making it impossible for the Justice Department to prosecute employees of MIT (Milli Istihbarat Teskilatı, or National Intelligence Organization) without the prime minister’s consent. The Gülen movement was enraged; a furious backlash ensued in the Gülenist press, which ran articles lambasting the party as authoritarian and accusing it of endangering Turkish democracy.

    For newspapers that had spent years applauding Erdogan and the AKP and relentlessly supporting his ever-increasing authoritarianism, this was a remarkable reversal. The fight, however, was not just about Fidan. It was also about Erdogan’s increasing discomfort with Gülen’s control over the judiciary and police, and the growing political cost of the sprawling investigations launched by the special authority courts.

    Much to the Gülenists’ dismay, Erdogan was not chastened by their maneuvers. To the contrary, he was enraged. With a speed that astonished observers, the government removed Sarıkaya from the MIT case. The General Directorate for Security dismissed nine officials in the Istanbul police department who had been working in a KCK operations unit. Two other high-ranking police officials were also removed, and for good measure the chief prosecutors for various cases were reassigned to different posts. The message was perfectly clear: Erdogan, not Gülen, controlled Turkey. To make sure no one misunderstood, Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin gave the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors permission to begin an investigation into Sarıkaya on suspicion of violating the secrecy of the prosecution and abusing his power. To establish that no one misunderstood, 700 Istanbul police officers working in departments related to intelligence, terrorism, and organized crime in the Istanbul Emniyet were reassigned to the southeast.

    The next stage in the growing power struggle involved, of all things, soccer. The July 2011 arrest of Aziz Yildirim, the president of the Fenerbahçe sport club, on charges of match-fixing was of course about much more than European football; Yildirim is a major defense contractor for NATO. With him out of the way, many lucrative jobs could go to Gülen’s star entrepreneur, Ahmet Çalık.

    But the attack on Yildirim proved a serious misjudgment. The importance of football in Turkey cannot be underestimated (or understood, so don’t try). Fenerbahçe fans were enraged by Yildirim’s arrest. They took to the streets in massive numbers repeatedly, and were repeatedly tear-gassed; the videos of fans, many of them women, some even in headscarves, and children, being gassed by Gülenist “robocops” in full battle regalia circulated all over Facebook and Twitter.

    The AKP’s fear of a massive loss of votes if immensely popular footballers were to end up in prison for many years, prompted the party to propose limiting the maximum penalty for the crimes with which they were charged. Then, while Erdogan was in the hospital, President Abdullah Gül (who is known for having better relations with the Gülen movement) vetoed the bill. It was the first time in his four-year presidency that Gül had done so, and it was not at all a coincidence that this happened when Erdogan was in the hospital, being treated, or so his doctors said, for intestinal polyps. (The rumors that in fact he has colon cancer were and remain persistent, and they were obviously taken seriously by many of his supporters in the AKP, who believed it might be wise to throw in their lot with the Gülenists.) When Erdogan emerged from the hospital looking, at the very least, alive, parliament overrode the veto. Erdogan won the round, but the divide with the Gülenists was now impossible to ignore.

    The final straw was the prime minister’s attempt to abolish the special authority courts—which left the Gülenists positively hysterical. Hüseyin Gülerce, Gülen’s mouthpiece in Turkey, wrote columns with such striking rage and paranoia about these proposals that they would no doubt have been fodder for satirists were Turkish satirists not all too aware of what happens to their ilk. The move to abolish the courts followed the arrest of former Commander-in-Chief Ilker Basbug. This prompted Erdogan to say he was “disturbed” by the unending raids against current and former military officers, and to urge the prosecution to get their investigation “over and done with.”

    Outsiders might not notice that something has gone terribly wrong between Erdogan and Gülen. Neither has anything to gain from a visible power struggle. According to AKP MP (and former Erdogan advisor) Yalçın Akdogan, the impression of a conflict with the Gülen movement has been intentionally exaggerated; it is certainly true that opponents of both Erdogan and Gülen are greatly enjoying the discord. In June, Erdogan publicly invited Gülen to return to Turkey; two days later, Gülen declined, weeping (as he often does) as he expressed his fears that his return might damage his movement’s achievements. Erdogan’s invitation to Gülen was interpreted by some as a peace offering, but it was far from one. Erdogan simply had called Gülen’s bluff and cloaked it in a guise of magnanimity. It was a political master stroke.

    Erdogan is now endeavoring to shore up the support of the conservative wing of his party, proffering political favors to politicians capable of helping him erect an anti-Gülen alliance. Meanwhile, rumor has it that the Gülenists are considering putting their weight behind the more sympathetic Abdullah Gül as their politician of choice (one who recently signaled that he might run for another presidential term). Should he do so, it will end Erdogan’s vision of an easy ascent to a presidency with enhanced powers, and in all likelihood engender a split in the AKP.

    The rivalry may have healthy consequences. The Gülen media is finally covering stories that should have long ago been covered in a society with a vibrant opposition press. The pressure to eliminate the courts with special authority was long overdue. (Sadly, it has not resulted in the release of most of those arrested.) But it could also result in a race to the bottom, with both camps striving to blackmail, jail, and intimidate members of the other, while simultaneously attempting to position themselves as the more authentic defenders of Turkish nationalism and Islam—neither of which are ideologies known to give rise, historically, to anything we would recognize as a liberal democracy.

    Claire Berlinski is the American Foreign Policy Council’s Senior Fellow for Turkey, based in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books, 2011), and of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too (Crown Forum, 2006).

  • Turkey’s Sex, Lies and Videotapes

    Gatestone Institute 27 June 2012
    By Claire Berlinski

    Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals did not criminalize all porn recently—it just ruled that anyone in possession of videos depicting oral or anal sex may be sentenced to prison. This followed a recent ruling identifying videos of gay and group sex as “unnatural”—that is, in the same legal category as videos depicting sex with animals, children and corpses, all of which are forbidden by Article 262.2 of the Turkish Penal Code. This article stipulates that owning, trafficking, distributing or publishing such videos will earn you one-to-four. The ruling followed the sentencing by a local court of a suspect to six months in prison for selling CDs that depicted what we in the decadent West might call “sending your husband off to the office happy.”

    The case went up to the Supreme Court of Appeals, which not only ruled that the defendant’s sentence was too low, but declared that the activity in question was also “unnatural”— on a par with necrophilia. The court thus overruled the original sentence and replaced it with one consistent with Article 262.2.

    As if this were not enough to chill the country’s libido, the new ruling applies both to videos downloaded from the Internet or stored on a personal computer— in other words, it probably applies to every male with a computer in Turkey: according to Google, Turkey leads the world in searches for the word “porn” (followed, if you are curious, by Romania and Peru). As one Turkish friend put it, “Who wants to watch porn without oral sex?”

    Bans on porn in Turkey are nothing new—after the 1980 coup, for example, the military imposed a desultory ban; but what really happened was that newspapers unable to report about anything else started competing on skin, until, by the end of the decade, porn was a growth industry. A Turkish friend recently nostalgically reminisced about the kids who sold Kleenex outside his favorite Beyoglu cinema when he was growing up.

    By the late 1990s, the porn industry here was apparently in its Golden Age. I don’t know much about it and don’t really want to do the research; I’ll just take everyone’s word for it. Then the AKP came to power and began cracking down. In 2004, members of the government passed legislation making it illegal to distribute “obscene” images, words, or texts through any means of communication – pretty much criminalizing the entire country. In 2005, they banned the four erotic television channels available on Turkey’s sole satellite provider: Digiturk. Playboy TV, Exotica TV, Adult Channel, and Rouge TV all disappeared, to little outcry. No one watched porn on satellite TV anyway—it had long since entered the Internet age.

    But then they went too far: They announced plans to filter the stuff off the Internet. Delicacy prevents me from listing the banned words, but their move prompted the kind of outrage usually not seen in Turkey: people who had never before expressed the faintest interest in attending a protest said they planned to attend one.

    There were massive campaigns against the legislation on Facebook and Twitter, some of them quite sophisticated, defending the right to unfettered Internet access. The government was forced to back down: it would introduce a filtering system, it said, but adults could opt out.

    The issue people should have been concerned about, of course, was not porn at all, but the technical implementation of a system that allows the government at will to shut off channels of political dissent – a feat it managed quite successfully.

    The government has not given up the dream of banning porn, or books, for that matter. Last year, the Board for Protection of Minors from Obscene Publications brought a case against both the publisher and the Turkish translator of The Soft Machine by William Burroughs, pronouncing the book “incompatible with the morals of society and the people’s honor,” “injurious to sexuality” and “generally repugnant.” The owner of the publishing house, Irfan Sanci, had been tried on similar charges the year prior, and was acquitted for publishing a Turkish translation of Apollinaire’s The Adventures of a Young Don Juan. Now, however, the translator of The Soft Machine, Suha Sertabiboglu, faces up to three years in prison if convicted. The Board for the Protection of Minors also brought the publisher and translator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff to trial on charges of obscenity. Snuff is a satire of the porn industry, not an example of it, but the level of English language comprehension and literary sophistication one would need to appreciate this is far beyond that of the Board. The Board, by the way, has existed since 1921, but has been so somnolent that no one I know can even remember hearing about it until the AKP won its third term.

    Given the number of politicians, generals, journalists and other figures who have been blackmailed with illegally filmed videotapes of their sexual activity, this new ruling puts blackmailers, in particular, in a legal conundrum: If you aren’t allowed to keep these tapes on your computer, how can you threaten your enemies with them?

    Illicit sex tapes were a major feature of the last general election campaign that brought the AKP back to power for its third and arguably least glorious term. One well-timed sex-tape scandal after another held the opposition parties hostage, and may have contributed to the AKP’s capture of 326 votes in the 550 seat parliament—almost enough to put its proposals for constitutional reform to a referendum without the support of any other party. (Or perhaps it lost seats instead: Quite a bit of the country was just disgusted by the whole business.) Released just a month before the June 12 election, one tape appeared to show two (married) senior opposition party members engaged in a bit of rumpy-pumpy with female university students. The anonymous cinematographers warned the leader of the minority Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, that if he did not want to see more sex and audio tapes of his closest aides released, he might like to step aside.

    It’s possible that the wave of tape-scandals was an inside job: Some believed they were the work of a dissenting faction of the MHP. But they were also widely rumored to be the handiwork of the AKP or its supporters, and designed to push the MHP below the 10% election threshold. This would have barred the MHP from entering parliament and reassigned its seats to the parties that passed, giving the AKP the supermajority its members so badly wanted to be able to pass a new constitution without a referendum. It almost worked, too—the MHP squeaked in with just 53 seats.

    While the technique of ridding oneself of political rivals by means of a well-timed sex-tape leak is hardly unknown to the West, in Turkey the ritual has certain unique cultural adaptations: In the pre-election videotape scandal, a group that called itself “Different Idealism” began systematically releasing videotapes of MHP leaders in indecorous poses with, as one columnist here chastely put it, “women who do that sort of thing for a living.” Two video clips depicted Bülent Didinmez, a deputy chairman and former MHP Istanbul provincial branch leader and parliamentary candidate Ihsan Barutçu involved in acts that definitely did not involve the women to whom they were married. The clips were released shortly after a videotape displaying deputy chairmen and Adana Deputy Recai Yildirim and Kirºehir Deputy Metin Çobanoglu in an “intimate” conversation with two women to whom they, too, were not wed. When MHP leader Bahçeli publicly demanded the errant party leaders’ resignation, they stepped down.

    Up to this point we are still in familiar territory—all of this could have happened in the West. But then Didinmez and Barutçu defended themselves by saying that they had taken the women in the videos as their second wives—so it was all in fact quite legitimate, you see. The men claimed that many of the ruling AKP members had second or third wives outside their civil marriages, so they were only doing the same thing. Not even John Edwards could come up with a defense like that.

    Of course, no scandal in Turkey is complete without the accusation of a foreign conspiracy: Deputy MHP Chairman Faruk Bal indignantly announced that “this is a product of a plan by domestic and foreign circles, and those who wish to see parliament without the MHP in it are actors of this plan.”

    His explanation, however, did not fly. Ten high-ranking party leaders were forced to resign after videos were released of them engaged in various shades of sociability with women definitely not their wives in a house the MHP apparently maintained for these secret liaisons. Worst of all, one of these men was caught on film bitching to his mistress about Devlet Bahçeli, the MHP party leader. There is stupid, then there is really stupid. This is Turkey: Take a second wife, okay, but do not criticize the party leader.

    It is customary, in Turkey, to blame Fethullah Gülen for these cinematographic feats. The aged preacher, who lives in self-imposed exile in the Poconos, is widely believed (not without reason) to control everything in Turkey, although most likely even he does not control these recreational partialities. State prosecutor Nuh Mete Yüksel, famous for indicting and imprisoning then-mayor and now prime minister Erdogan for reading, at a party rally, a poem with a putatively anti-secular interpretation, filed for the arrest of Gülen on August 3, 2000, at the Ankara State Court of Security on the charge that his sympathizers and he had sought to overthrow the secular state. A mere year later, a secretly-taped video of Yüksel engaged in hanky-panky (rumpy-pumpy, indecorous activities, whatever you like …) with a subordinate was released to the public. We can extend this list. If, for example, you want to know the fate of the journalist Ali Kirca, who broadcast the videotape of the Gülen sermon that prompted Yüksel to file those charges, try this Google search.

    In fairness, it must be noted, that in Turkey there is a long secular tradition of videotape shenanigans. The main opposition CHP leader, Deniz Baykal was filmed in happy bonhomie with one of his party’s female MPs, forcing him to resign — a CHP inside job, most believe; and while few could approve of the method, everyone approved of the outcome. Baykal was a fossilized old bore with no hope whatsoever of winning an election—not that his mouse-like successor, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, has been the improvement everyone had hoped for.

    Incidentally, they—whoever “they” are—have not been confining themselves to blackmailing opposition politicians, generals and dissidents of all stripes. They have also been filming their kids. Turning people’s kids into unintentional porn stars is about as dirty as it gets. Sadly, journalists who viewed the harassment of the family of the blind Chinese rights activist Chen Guangchen as beyond the unspeakable have not once suggested, as far as I know, that the humiliation and harassment of the families of dissidents in Turkey might be worthy of some moral outrage, as well.

    Shortly before the Turkish police arrested the former 1st Army Corps commander General Hasan Igsiz on charges of “making propaganda campaigns against civilian groups and the government,” photos of his son’s bobbling and naked rear end were splashed across the tabloid press. The term “civilian groups” is a euphemism here—the group in question is the Gülen movement—and Hakan Igsiz, whose anatomy became mildly famous, is not in much doubt that Gülen’s supporters were the cinematographers. Hakan, by the way, a sound technician, mentioned that he was in awe of the exceptionally high quality of their audio equipment—he said he had seen nothing like it in the industry before.

    The really huge news for blackmailers, though, is the government’s proposal to ban the publication in digital newspapers and the press of illegally-acquired sound recordings. Some believe that the purpose of this legislation is to protect prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from the kind of embarrassment to which he was exposed when it was revealed that his intelligence chief and personal confidant, Hakan Fidan, had been surreptitiously negotiating with the PKK—this despite Erdogan’s recent campaign bluster that had he been in charge when PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured, he would have had him hanged.

    Erdogan is now trying to arrange a deal to release the imprisoned military officers, who for years have been languishing in prison without a conviction. Why, you might wonder, does he want to do that? Well, we would all like to know, but the best we can do is guess. Perhaps he is worried that more officers will be hit, leaving in tatters what is left of the military. Perhaps he is worried that the Gülenist infiltration of the military has gone too far and is becoming a danger to him. Erdogan may be many things; a fool is not one of them: The situation in Syria may have reminded him that he might actually need his military, and in particular the generals who know how to use it—the best of whom are all in jail.

    This, of course, has the Gülen movement in a panic. There is no greater nightmare scenario for Gülen’s supporters than the combined and considerable wrath of Erdogan and the military. So in Turkey, as in the US, leaking season is here. The proposal to ban the publication of such recordings has the newspapers that plumped for the imprisonment of Turkey’s top military brass, and who are sympathetic to Gülen—who is no longer sympathetic to Erdogan—panic-stricken. Of late, Gülen’s supporters have been releasing illegally-taped recordings almost every day, mostly from jailed military leaders in Hasdal prison. These recordings—unsurprisingly—reveal that the men in jail are furious and wish ill upon the people who put them there—many of whom happen to be, in their eyes, the journalists frantically leaking these tapes. Tapes are surfacing from their archives almost every day now, killing two birds with one stone: first, the tapes hint that if the officers are released, the military will take bloody revenge; second, the journalists need to empty their pockets before their recordings are banned.

    It is rumored that Gülen’s supporters have quite the collection of recordings of Erdogan and his intimates (political or otherwise). It is also rumored — and pretty obvious — that they are threatening Erdogan with the release of recordings by means of unsubtle messages conveyed by sympathetic journalists such as Emre Uslu and Mehmet Baransu, who hint darkly on Twitter of their knowledge of “igrenç” information— a word Turkish for “disgusting,” and precious for its onomatopoeic aptness. I could not with certainty say this is what is happening—I’m not the one putting hidden cameras under people’s beds—but if I were a betting woman, I would place every penny I had on it.

    Turkey is one of the world’s most opaque countries, so it is hard to discern which snake is biting which tail in this story, which broke the other week:

    Police and specially authorized prosecutors raided several homes and military buildings across the country yesterday as part of an ongoing probe into an alleged espionage ring. …

    The locations searched included secure military buildings, including the General Command of the Turkish Gendarmerie Forces, the Navy, the Special Forces Command top secret room and the Military Hospital (GATA) in Ankara.

    The latest raids were part of an investigation launched in Izmir last month into allegations that secret military documents were acquired through blackmail. According to the probe, nine active-duty members of the military allegedly used a prostitution ring to blackmail high-ranking officers and obtain confidential information about the Turkish military.

    The members of the prostitution ring allegedly recorded secret footage of high-ranking officers as they had sexual intercourse with escorts and later used the footage to blackmail them. The active-duty soldiers police arrested had been blackmailed themselves and later participated in ensnaring their colleagues. They also allegedly profited financially from the ring’s activities.

    There is almost certainly more to this than what you just read. And this is the model democracy we are promoting to the Middle East?

  • The secret flotilla negotiations between Turkey and Israel

    The secret flotilla negotiations between Turkey and Israel

    Claire Berlinski, one of the best observers and reporters out of Turkey, has a must-read article on what happened during the negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the Palmer report on the flotilla:

    The Turkish journalist Kadri Gürsel published an interesting piece the other day inMillyet about the failure of the negotiations between Turkey and Israel to normalize relations in the wake of the Mavi Marmara fiasco. Kadri Gürsel is a journalist whose work and opinions I take seriously; here, for example, he’s written a thoughtful piece in Turkish Policy Quarterly that will help you locate him in the spectrum of Turkish political opinion.

    Gürsel first places the blame for the failure of the negotiations on the Turkish foreign ministry’s incompetence (he uses the more tactful phrase “lack of experience,” but the Turkish foreign ministry is hardly inexperienced, so I assume we’re to read between the lines). He then moves to what has become something of a standard narrative in Turkey and elsewhere: that the deal was “95 percent completed,” but fell through only because of Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman’s intransigence:

    But the deal was never “100 percent complete” because in Israel, the obstacle, the extreme of the extreme Lieberman was not overcome. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not persuade Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for an apology and compensation. And the Turkey-Israel secret negotiations that started after the U.N. Investigation Panel was formed in August 2010, collapsed in June following the days when the draft agreement was prepared.

    Matters in this “duplex channel” were held tight. The Israeli member of the U.N. Investigation Committee, Joseph Ciechanover and Ambassador Özdem Sanberk, who represented Turkey on the panel, were also negotiating through the duplex channel. The head of the panel Geoffrey Palmer and his deputy Alvaro Uribe, even if they were aware of that secret negotiations were conducted between the two countries, they did not know that Ciechanover and Sanberk were the participants. The “duplex channel” held meetings in Geneva, Bucharest and Rome.

    Despite all, this draft agreement could be the operational basis for a new normalization process between Turkey and Israel. Of course, if it is possible to persuade Lieberman in the light of new situations in the Middle East.

    I asked an Israeli official who was close to these negotiations–and who has thus far never provided me with information that has proved unreliable–for comment. This is what he said:

    I’ve seen the “draft deal” and the formula for apology includes indeed the English word “apologize”, though the phrase “operational mistakes that caused life losses and injuries to Turkish people” was preceded by an “if.” (I can’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like: Israel apologizes if there were any operational mistakes etc … ) This was the mutually agreed formula, and by using the conditional mode, it was possible for us to apologize without admitting that we actually did something wrong, which of course we believe we didn’t.

    It is also correct that we agreed to pay compensations (through a bi-national fund, not directly), though the Turks did not specify at that point how much they thought would be reasonable. We thought the details and the sum could be worked out later on, based on mutual trust that would arise from the approval of the package deal.

    Turkey, however, did not guarantee that “Turkish citizens and their legal representatives would not take legal action against Israel.” It agreed to promise not to prosecute Israelis, but explained it could commit itself on behalf of private citizens in Turkey or abroad. This made some Israelis suspicious: what would happen if we endorsed the deal, and then had to face suits by members of the Turkish public, maybe even with covert assistance by the government? What guarantee did we have that the “deal” would actually end all claims and enable Israel and Turkey to reconcile and restart their relationship? This suspicion grew stronger in light of Turkey’s insistence that the text should state that Israeli soldiers killed activists “intentionally.” Why insist on this admission of guilt if not to enable legal action? As Gürsel himself says, this text which the Israeli government was supposed to approve was not completely agreed upon by Turkey, because they still wanted to include the intentionality wording. Even if the Israeli government had approved the draft, it would have left us with Turkish disavowal and discontent.

    Another condition set forth by the Turks, and agreed to by Israel, was shelving the Palmer Report. Strange that Gürsel should say nothing of this, since he starts his discussion with the meaning of the Report to Turkey. The Turks were very keen on making the report disappear …

    Finally, when it all came down to a discussion in the Israeli Cabinet, it wasn’t just Lieberman who was reluctant to approve the whole package deal. Others, too, did not exactly trust Erdoğan, and raised doubts as to his real intentions: what would we get in return for the (indirect) apology, the compensations and the shelving of the report? Restoring ties with Ankara and an “end of conflict.” But what if, after all was said and done, Erdoğan would claim that not all of his conditions were met? That Israel did not fulfill the requirements? All of a sudden, he speaks about lifting the siege on Gaza as a condition – but it was never mentioned in the negotiations nor in the draft! How easily it could have served as a pretext not to restore ties. And as for taking legal action against Israelis, well … With the intentionality clause still open, and with Turkey’s non-commitment to stop private suits, and with the Palmer Report scrapped, where would it all lead us? Certainly not to an end of conflict, but rather to a further deterioration, with us in an inferior position.

    This is the reason why quite a few ministers refused to endorse the draft. The Turkish anger at the leak of the Palmer Report, and Davutoğlu’s hot-headed reaction and statements, only seemed to confirm our worst doubts: they were never in earnest to begin with.

  • The Sound of Turkey Clapping

    The Sound of Turkey Clapping

    Claire Berlinski

    The Sound of Turkey Clapping

    Thoughts on the recent elections, mostly ignored around the world

    22 June 2011

    Having long before accepted a lecturing assignment on Hillsdale College’s Baltic Cruise, I wasn’t in Istanbul for the June 12 general election. So despite months of following the campaign in minute detail, when it actually happened, I was physically and metaphorically isolated from the mood in Turkey. There was some value to that: contemplating the pale, glassy, silent Baltic Sea puts Turkish hysteria in perspective.

    And hysterical—and ugly—the election campaign was, marked by terrorist attacks, including one on the prime minister’s convoy; the release of sex tapes starring opposition leaders; blackmail; vulgar anti-Semitic rhetoric; insane conspiracy theory upon insane conspiracy theory; a scandal revealing the rigging of college entrance exams; the arrests of more military officers on charges of coup plotting (these arrests have been going on for years); threats by leading Kurdish politicians to set the country ablaze; serious efforts by Kurdish terrorists to do precisely that; growing Internet and press censorship; the last-minute discovery of 10 million new voters on the electoral rolls, only half of whom could even remotely be explained by Turkey’s changing demography; and noise, constant noise. It had become difficult even to imagine five minutes without the sound of loudspeakers blaring from campaign buses, or the prime minister’s bellowing voice, mute only for a few notable minutes when at one rally his teleprompter failed, leaving him staring speechless into the void.

    Yet in the end, the Turkish people spoke. The only deaths related to the election, on the very day, appear to have been of natural causes. Given that this region is not known for its gift for democracy, the world applauded a bit too loudly that an election was held at all. Turkey won the Democracy Special Olympics! It occurred to few foreign observers that going into rapture over the mere fact of an election in the Islamic world was deeply patronizing, the clear unspoken message being, “You’re a credit to your kind.”

    The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was expected to win, and it did. The AKP increased its take of the vote to 50 percent, a strong showing over the last election in 2007, but did not achieve a super-majority, which would have permitted the prime minister’s party to draft a new constitution on its own. Nor did the party achieve a majority sufficient to take a draft constitution to a referendum with its own votes in parliament. The opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, did better, electorally, than it has since 1977. Overall, owing to the peculiarities of the Turkish electoral system, the AKP actually lost seats in the 550-seat Grand National Assembly, with its numbers declining from 341 to 326. For those hoping to see some limits imposed upon the prime minister’s power, the results were decent, but not great.

    In a gesture either lacking sensitivity to historic resonance or perfectly attuned to it, Prime Minister Erdoğan delivered a victory speech from the balcony of his headquarters in Ankara. His tone was magnanimous. “No one should doubt,” he said, “that we will protect the dignity, faith, and lifestyles of those who did not vote for us.” Shortly afterward, he offered to drop most of his libel suits against private individuals, politicians, and journalists who had insulted him (except the suits against those who were really beyond the pale). The world cheered. Few noted the grotesquerie of the implicit suggestion that Turkish citizens’ right to say what they please is granted at their ruler’s pleasure. Numerous journalists who before the election had been tentatively critical of the ruling party fell quickly into line. No hope of getting rid of them, I imagine they thought, it’s time to fawn. Journalist Mehmet Ali Birand, whose enthusiasms are an excellent guide to Turkey’s power dynamics—whoever has it, he’s for them—summed it up: “Bravo, well done. There is no word to be uttered now.”

    Geographically, the AKP’s electoral hold reached the Aegean. The party gained considerable ground even in the West, the country’s contested territory. Conventional wisdom holds that the economy was, again, the major factor in the AKP’s success. This is likely true, at least up to a point, but one shouldn’t discount the competence of the AKP’s electoral machine in winning votes. The AKP has indeed presided over a long period of economic growth, but Turkey hasn’t become as wealthy as outside media tends to assume. It is still a poor country. Most people here have difficult lives. AKP politicians are good at talking to poor people and making them feel as if they care. The opposition hasn’t mastered this yet.

    Probably, the AKP is now Turkey’s permanent ruling party. Students of politics call it a “dominant party system,” one in which one party consistently obtains twice as much of the electoral pie as the runner-up. That seems to describe Turkey.

    From my distant perspective in the Baltics, I was struck by the rest of the world’s indifference. Few knew these elections were taking place; few cared. It’s widely believed in Turkey that foreign powers are eternally meddling in Turkish politics. Meddling? They’re oblivious. Turkey is a minor curiosity to the world beyond its own borders, at best. Westerners on the cruise asked me, “Are they our friends?” When I tried to explain the complicated answer, eyes glazed over. It might have dismayed me, but after a few weeks of travel, I began to wonder if the indifference didn’t contain its own wisdom. What is Turkey, compared with ruined Russia, with its aging nuclear arsenal, under the control of corrupt, ruthless drunks? Compared with Europe, rapidly confronting the failure of its grand integration project? Compared with America, now fighting three wars and its own economic meltdown? Compared with Iran, surveying its imploding neighborhood covetously, preparing for its new role as regional hegemon? Compared with China, soon to be the major center of Pacific power, if American fears prove correct? Turkey is, in fact, by comparison, just not that important. It is only Turkey that cares about Turkey.

    Yet this message posted by a friend on Facebook still made me feel a flicker of pity:

    To me, yesterday’s elections was not a matter of numbers in the parliament. To me, it showed that as a nation, we don’t have the capacity to choose right from wrong. Yesterday Turkey voted for the guy who cheated in the major exams which would also determine the voters’ kids’ future. They were cheated and they still said “yes.” Turkey voted for a man who believes he has the right to tell you what to read, see or know (internet censorship). Turkey voted for a man whose minister talks of the “female” citizens as “a girl or a woman, whatever” meaning if she is a virgin or not (girl-woman difference, especially in Turkish), meaning if she is a prostitute. She is a “bitch” in the eyes of Erdoğan’s ministers because she speaks, she uses her right to express herself. People complain about using the most expensive fuel but still voted for this guy. People voted for a man who supports three kids in a family when he knows (and will do his best to keep it that way) that these three kids will not have education to question his authority or what he does. To him, all these three ignorant kids will grow up to be his “voters.”

    This picture is to me darker than the number of seats. Because I believe numbers can change but only slightly unless the mentality changes which is impossible when the nation is so blind to see what is going on. And I who says this am nothing more than a 30-year-old translator with a knowledge of literature and history but not particularly of political science, no one smarter than the majority. As a young woman in Turkey, I feel dead when I look at the big picture.

    As of today, Turkey is more f*cked than ever. People who support freedom and rights or issues like education, we will be buried alive here. But who cares, we are dead already.

    No, I wrote back, you’re not dead yet. And since you’re alive, you’ll have to keep fighting. That’s the way it goes in a democracy, and at least Turkey is that, however compromised. It’s the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. That’s all the West ever promised you about it.

    Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul.

  • Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Claire Berlinski

    Can’t Go Back to Constantinople

    Istanbul’s history deserves preservation, but at what cost to development?

    CJ 21 2

    Anyone who has ever sat in one of Istanbul’s endless traffic jams, listening to a taxi driver blast his horn and curse the son-of-a-donkey unloading a moving van in front of him, will agree that the city’s transportation system leaves much to be desired. City planners meant to solve this problem when they began construction of a $4 billion subway tunnel beneath the Bosporus. Then, to the planners’ horror, the project’s engineers discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius. Known to archaeologists only from ancient texts, the port had been sleeping peacefully since the fourth century ad—directly underneath the site of the proposed main transit station in Yenikapı.

    The tunnel-digging halted, entailing untold millions in economic losses, and the artifact-digging began. An army of archaeologists descended upon the pit, working around the clock to preserve the ancient jetties and docks, while Istanbul’s traffic grew yet more snarled. Newspapers reported that Metin Gokcay, the dig’s chief archaeologist, was “rejecting all talk of deadlines.” It’s not difficult to imagine the hand-wringing that those words must have prompted among budget planners.

    The planners no doubt considered throwing themselves into the Bosporus when the excavation then unearthed something even better—or worse, depending on your perspective—underneath those remains: 8,000-year-old human clothes, urns, ashes, and utensils. These artifacts stunned historians and forced them to revisit their understanding of the city’s age and origins. The discovery posed a fresh moral problem, too: excavating the top layer might damage the one above it—or vice versa. So the decision was no longer, “Should we conserve these remains?” It was, “Which remains should we conserve?”

    The subway project, originally scheduled to be finished in May 2010, is now at least six years behind schedule. The route has been changed 11 times in response to new findings, driving everyone concerned to the brink of madness. The government is desperate to finish the project but well aware that the world is watching. No one wants to be known to future generations as the destroyer of 8,000 years’ worth of civilization.

    Decisions like this are made on a smaller scale every day in every neighborhood of Istanbul. Istanbul’s population—by some estimates, as high as 20 million—has more than tripled since 1980, enlarged by decades of migration from Turkey’s poor rural regions. The city desperately needs better roads, subways, and housing. Its infrastructure is archaic, a problem illustrated in 2009 when flash floods gushed across the city’s arterial roads, killing scores. The catastrophe was widely ascribed to inadequate infrastructure, shoddy construction, and poor urban planning.

    But building the city’s future will assuredly destroy its past. Thriving human settlements existed here thousands of years before the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. If you look under the ground around Istanbul’s Golden Horn, it’s almost impossible not to find something archaeologically significant. Developers covet these sites today for precisely the geographic features—for example, natural ports—that made them equally desirable long ago. The more economically attractive the location, the more likely it is to have significant remains, and the more likely it is that someone will have an economic motivation to make those remains disappear.

    Government-backed developers, for example, were determined to expand the Four Seasons Hotel in Sultanhamet, even though it sat atop relics from the Palatium Magnum built by Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century ad. Dogged local investigative journalism and the threat of international opprobrium put a halt to those plans. On the other side of the Golden Horn, when it became obvious that the construction of the Swiss and the Conrad Hotels in Beşiktaş would destroy significant archaeological artifacts, the local government objected, pointing to Turkey’s laws on historic preservation. The developers went over their heads to Ankara and appealed to the laws on promoting tourism. Parliament decided that Turkey needed foreign direct investment, and the tourism laws prevailed. There was an irony in the decision, of course: Istanbul’s heritage is precisely what attracts tourists. Then again, if there are no hotels, there’s nowhere for tourists to stay.

    There is no way to resolve the tension between letting this megacity develop economically and protecting its priceless archaeological treasures. Obviously, you can’t turn an entire city into a museum where no new construction is allowed. According to some archaeologists, that’s exactly what you’d have to do to protect Turkish historic artifacts—leave them all in the ground, untouched, since even careful excavation might destroy them. But Turkey is not a wealthy country. It’s hard to feel morally confident in saying that Turkish citizens need Neolithic hairbrushes more than they need houses, factories, ports, dams, mines, and roads—especially when they’re dying in flash floods.

    So something has to be destroyed. But who decides which part of the city’s past is most important? Legally, Turkey’s monument board has the authority to decide what to save: in principle, if more than 60 percent of a neighborhood is more than 100 years old, it cannot be touched without the board’s permission. The board deals daily with a massive number of requests and decisions, but it has neither the time nor the resources to ensure that its decisions are upheld. For example, it reviews all plans for development in sensitive areas. The plans then get sent to municipal government offices for approval—but often, the plans submitted to the board are different from the ones that go to the local government, and the board is none the wiser.

    Further, the process of evaluating a preservation claim is often slow and bureaucratic. Sara Nur Yildiz, a historian at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, recalls noticing a distinctive earthen mound at the edge of a construction site in her upscale neighborhood in Cihangir. She suspected immediately that it was an archaeologically significant well. “I told them to stop digging,” she says, “but they ignored me.” She filed a petition with the monument board. Ultimately, the board agreed with her and halted the construction. But by the time the board finished studying the case and relaying its verdict to the workers, half of the structure had been demolished.

    In general, Ottoman Empire relics fare better than Byzantine ruins. In the minds of certain officials, the latter sound a bit too much like Greek ruins, which aren’t, after all, part of their history. Archaeologists associated with TAY—the Archaeological Settlements of Turkey Project—have compiled inventories of priceless endangered sites. They report a “persistent and intense threat” to Byzantine remains throughout the city from the construction of roads and modern housing. The Edirnekapı and Topkapı sections of the historic city walls, they lament, vanished during the construction of Adnan Menderes Boulevard and Millet Street. Another problem: there is “almost no coordination,” say archaeologists with TAY, between the government departments charged with preserving cultural heritage and those responsible for public works.

    Many academics have worked to draw up conservation plans for the city. So has UNESCO. But they don’t have the power to enforce them. UNESCO, claiming that the Turkish government has disregarded its reports, has threatened to embarrass Istanbul by putting its cultural treasures on its endangered list. But on the historic peninsula, rates of return on investment in development are among the highest in the world—exceeded only by those in Moscow. For developers, the amount of money at stake is phantasmagoric. They’re willing to spend a lot to make legal and political obstacles go away. Archaeologists can’t compete.

    So come visit now, while it’s all still here.

    Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul.

  • The Strangeness of Turkey–Two Views

    The Strangeness of Turkey–Two Views

    We at Discovery have a couple of friends who know Turkey well, though each in a different way. Usually these days Mustafa Akyol, a columnist in Istanbul, and Claire Berlinski, an American writer living there, disagree about Turkish policy, culture and foreign policy. But both have well-considered perspectives worth knowing. Mustafa is author of a forthcoming book on the reform path Islam might take (Mustafa, of course, is Muslim). He is irenic, pro-Western and cautious, but also very hopeful for the future of his country.

    Claire, on the other hand, has both the insights and the limitations that come from the perspective of an outsider. A sympathetic, generally secular Jew, Claire has spent five years in Turkey and renders an excellent assist to her fellow Americans to understand a society that operates in a less linear, sequential manner than their own.

    Turks are given to conspiracy theories about many things and their policies often don’t make sense in Western terms.

    Nonetheless, as Claire observes in a fine interview that Michael Totten has conducted with her for Pajamas Media, Americans need to work harder at comprehending Turkey and to work harder explaining our own values to the Turks. Right now, she points out, the Turks are fighting a small civil war with Kurdish rebels and incurring many casualties, but this is hardly mentioned in the Western media. Turkey’s government is pursuing a wholly implausible policy of comity with Iran, even though Iran surely will upset Turkey greatly when the Iranians build their atomic bombs. And the Turkish government, having promoted the flotilla that tried to overcome the Israelis and enter the Gaza Strip, may want to hold back a second flotilla–which is forming–but presently seem unable to do so.

    If any of this reminds you of the confusion that afflicted the Ottoman Empire in its final years, you wouldn’t be far off. The difference is that the Ottomans were in material decline at the time, while Turkey is thriving economically today. The country could be a bulwark of reasonable accommodation between Islam and the West. In any event, Claire warns, do not confuse Turkey with either Iranian or Arab lands.

    On that and some other points, Mustafa Akyol would agree. Generally, Mustafa (who, like Claire, is well known to us at Discovery Institute) approves of the current political leadership of Turkey. His patriotic emotion running high, he even supported the first flotilla. But he lately has begun to see flaws in the current regime. It is hard for a liberal like Mustafa, for example, to countenance the arrest of dissident journalists or to credit the exaggerated claims the government has made about its domestic opponents.

    One thing both writers would agree on (in addition to mutual personal regard) is that–in addition to all our other concerns–Americans need to learn more about Turkey. Our relations with that country are important in themselves, but they also have serious resonance elsewhere in the region. They need us, we need them. If there ever is to be peace in that part of the world, Turkey will have to be part of it.

    via Discovery News – The Strangeness of Turkey–Two Views.