Turkish Forum

Category: Michael Van Der Galien

  • Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Elite of Turkey

    Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Elite of Turkey

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    Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

    Nursema, 10, a daughter of Ali Haydar Bengi, who was among the nine Turks killed during an Israeli raid on a flotilla trying to run the Gaza blockade.

    By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU
    Published: July 15, 2010

    ISTANBUL — The Turkish charity that led the flotilla involved in a deadly Israeli raid has extensive connections with Turkey’s political elite, and the group’s efforts to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza received support at the top levels of the governing party, Turkish diplomats and government officials said.

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    Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

    An anti-Israel slogan in Istanbul reflects the rift in Israeli-Turkish relations after the raid. Turkey warns that relations could be irreparably damaged.

    The charity, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, often called I.H.H., has come under attack in Israel and the West for offering financial support to groups accused of terrorism. But in Turkey the group has helped Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan shore up support from conservative Muslims ahead of critical elections next year and improve Turkey’s standing and influence in the Arab world.

    According to a senior Turkish official close to the government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the issue, as many as 10 Parliament members from Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party were considering boarding the Mavi Marmara, the ship where the deadly raid occurred, but were warned off at the last minute by senior Foreign Ministry officials concerned that their presence might escalate tensions too much.

    When leaders of the charity returned home after nine Turks died in the Israeli raid, they were warmly embraced by top Turkish officials, said Huseyin Oruc, deputy director of the charity, who was aboard the flotilla.

    “When we flew back to Turkey, I was afraid we would be in trouble for what happened, but the first thing we saw when the plane’s door opened in Istanbul was Bulent Arinc, the deputy prime minister, in tears,” he said in an interview. “We have good coordination with Mr. Erdogan,” he added. “But I am not sure he is happy with us now.”

    The raid has caused a rupture between Turkey and Israel, and heightened alarm in the United States and Europe that Turkey, a large Muslim country and a major NATO member, is shifting allegiance toward the Arab world. Turkey has warned that its cooperative ties to Israel could be irreparably damaged unless the Israelis apologize and accept an international investigation, steps Israel has so far refused to take.

    The charity’s mission, political analysts said, has advanced Mr. Erdogan’s aim of shifting Turkey’s focus to the Muslim east when its prospects for joining the European Union are dim.

    The government “could have stopped the ship if it wanted to, but the mission to Gaza served both the I.H.H. and the government by making both heroes at home and in the Arab world,” said Ercan Citlioglu, a terrorism expert at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

    Turkish officials said that the charity operated independently and that its leadership had refused to drop plans to break Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, despite requests from the government. The officials said they had no legal authority to stop the work of a private charity.

    Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, said in an interview that the charity and the Justice and Development Party, called the AK Party, had no substantive ties, even if people in politics often became involved in charitable groups. “The I.H.H. has nothing to do with the AK Party, and we have no hidden agenda,” Mr. Bagis said.

    But critics say such statements belie the close connections between the party and the charity, as well as the extent to which Turkish officials were closely attuned to the details of the flotilla’s mission before its departure.

    “How can such a large country as Turkey, with interests in four continents, and with an export- and investment-driven economy requiring extra caution all around the globe, be dragged to the brink of war by a nongovernmental organization?” asked Semih Idiz, a columnist for the Hurriyet Daily News in Turkey, in a June 7 editorial. The answer, he added, is that the charity is a “GNGO” — a “governmental-nongovernmental-organization.”

    Many of the 21 people listed on the charity’s board have or had close links to the AK Party. In January, Murat Mercan, chairman of Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a senior party official, joined an overland aid convoy to Gaza organized by the charity that tried to force its way through the Rafah crossing from Egypt to Gaza.

    A trustee of the charity, Ali Yandir, is a senior manager at the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation. The corporation sold the Mavi Marmara, with a capacity for 1,090 passengers, to the charity for about $1.2 million. In 2004, Mr. Yandir was an AK Party candidate for the mayor’s office in Istanbul’s Esenler District.

    The charity’s board includes Zeyid Aslan, an AK Party member of Parliament and the acting head of the Turkey-Palestine Interparliamentary Friendship Group; Ahmet Faruk Unsal, an AK Party member of Parliament from 2002 to 2007; and Mehmet Emin Sen, a former AK Party mayor in the central Anatolian township of Mihalgazi.

    Those ties partly reflect the common agenda of the party and the charity. Both are involved in relief work among the poor and are bound by a common Islamic ideology. Many of the 60,000 people the charity claims as members come from the religious merchant class that helped Mr. Erdogan sweep to power.

    The Humanitarian Relief Foundation was founded in the early 1990s, first as a charity for the poor in Istanbul, and later for Bosnian war victims. It works in more than 100 countries and sent 33 tons of aid to Haiti after its January earthquake. The charity has one branch in the West Bank and another in Gaza, where Turkish families help pay for the care and education of 9,000 orphans.

    On Monday, Germany banned the charity’s offices there, citing its support for Hamas, which Germany considers a terrorist organization. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the charity abused donors’ good intentions “to support a terrorist organization with money supposedly donated for charitable purposes.” The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that from 2007 the charity collected $8.5 million and transferred money to six smaller organizations, two belonging directly to Hamas and four with close ties to it.

    The charity called the ban a “disgrace” and “misanthropic” and said it would challenge it in court.

    A June 21 letter signed by 87 United States senators urged the White House to investigate whether the charity should be designated a foreign terrorist organization. Israel has accused the charity of bolstering Hamas. It also says the group has links to Al Qaeda and has bought weapons, accusations the charity denies.

    A senior Turkish government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called such allegations false and said they would not persuade politicians who supported the group’s causes to shun it.

    “We are not trying to disengage ourselves from I.H.H. because of the current allegations on their terror links — we are simply not related with them,” the official said. “We consider Israeli efforts to link I.H.H. with terror in light of fake intelligence reports and hence hold AK Party government responsible for the killing of nine innocent people as extremely cheap and improper tactics.”

    This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

    Correction: July 23, 2010

    An article last Friday about the connections between Turkey’s political elite and I.H.H., the Turkish charity that organized the Gaza-bound aid flotilla stopped by a deadly Israeli raid on May 31, contained several errors.

    Because of an editing error, the article misstated the effect of a ban on I.H.H. in Germany, where a charity that operates under the same name and was founded by the same people became legally separate in 1997. The ban applied only to the German charity, not the Turkish one.

    The article also misstated the price paid by the Turkish charity for the lead flotilla vessel, the Mavi Marmara. It was $1.2 million, not $1.8 million.

    And the article referred incorrectly to the relationship between Istanbul Fast Ferries, the municipal agency that sold the Mavi Marmara to the Turkish charity, and the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation, another city agency. While both are controlled by Turkey’s ruling AK party, the transportation corporation is responsible for land transit; it does not oversee the ferry agency.

    A version of this article appeared in print on July 16, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.

  • Demopoulos and others v. Turkey

    Demopoulos and others v. Turkey

    This article was written by my good friend Robert Ellis and first appeared in the print edition of Hürriyet Daily News.

    The non-admissibility decision a fortnight ago by the European Court of Human Rights was welcomed as “historic” by the Turkish press and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, but it might be premature to pop the champagne corks. In fact, it is probably former Turkish Ambassador Tulay Uluçevik who struck the right note when he described the Court’s ruling as “a Pyrrhic victory.”

    Apart from the issue of security, that of property can be considered a major stumbling block for a solution to the Cyprus question, and the Annan Plan did little to assuage Greek Cypriot concerns. The right to restitution and return was effectively limited by a number of restrictions so that the majority of displaced Greek Cypriots were faced with compensation in the form of what Tassos Papadopoulos called “dubious paper.”

    The Property Board that the Annan Plan envisaged, which would have settled claims from both sides, would for the most part have been funded by the Greek Cypriots, so it would have been the merchant from Kayseri who fed his donkey with its own tail all over again.

    However, the Immovable Property Commission, or IPC, which the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”) established in December 2005 to deal with Greek Cypriot property claims, will in effect be funded by Turkey, as the “TRNC” has the status of “a subordinate local administration” under Turkish jurisdiction.

    The legal status of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, which was proclaimed in 1983, has been a bone of contention for previous property cases appearing before the European court, but it has been established in admissibility decisions (for example, Loizidou v. Turkey in 1995 and Xenides-Arestis v. Turkey in 2005) that Turkey is the respondent state.

    In the latter case, an attempt was made to avoid a judgment against Turkey by establishing an “Immovable Property Determination, Evaluation and Compensation Commission” in July 2003, so as to provide a domestic remedy that should be exhausted. Nevertheless, this only provided for compensation but not restitution, and as there were doubts about the impartiality of the Commission, the remedy was found to be neither effective nor adequate.

    So, seen in those terms, the IPC must be considered an improved model as its provisions provide for restitution, exchange or compensation in return for rights over the immovable property and compensation for loss of use if claimed. Furthermore, two of the IPC’s five to seven members are independent international members, and persons who occupy Greek-Cypriot property are expressly excluded.

    Consequently, on the basis of the 85 cases concluded by last November, the Court found that the IPC provides an accessible and effective framework of redress for property issues “in the current situation of occupation that it is beyond this Court’s competence to resolve.”

    In view of the redress offered by the Annan Plan, it must be a disappointment for Greek Cypriots that the Court maintains its view that “it must leave the choice of implementation of redress for breaches of property rights to Contracting States” and that, from a Convention perspective, “property is a material commodity which can be valued and compensated for in monetary terms.” In fact, in more than 70 cases claimants opted for compensation.

    A further bone of contention in the current talks between Dimitris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat is whether it is the legal or the current owner of the property who should decide whether redress should be in the form of restitution, exchange or compensation.

    On this issue, the Court states, “It is still necessary to ensure that the redress applied to those old injuries does not create disproportionate new wrongs.” Finally, the Court concludes that this decision is not to be interpreted as requiring that applicants make use of the IPC. They may choose not to do so and await a political settlement, but in the meantime the Court’s decision provides a legal basis.

    Davutoğlu believes the Court’s decision has boosted the international legitimacy of the “TRNC”, in which case he has neglected to read the small print. “The Court maintains its opinion that allowing the respondent State to correct wrongs imputable to it does not amount to an indirect legitimization of a regime unlawful under international law.”

    Furthermore, “Accepting the functional reality of remedies is not tantamount to holding that Turkey wields internationally-recognized sovereignty over northern Cyprus.” The European Parliament has, in a resolution, called on Turkey to immediately start to withdraw its troops from Cyprus and address the issue of the settlement of Turkish citizens as well as enable the return of the sealed-off section of Famagusta to its lawful inhabitants.

    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has indicated he is willing to withdraw Turkish troops in the event of a solution, but his chief EU negotiator, Egemen Bağış, has boasted that Turkey has not withdrawn a single soldier or given away territory.

    Considering that not only the future of Cyprus but also Turkey’s prospects of EU membership hang in the balance, that kind of attitude is singularly unhelpful.

    Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.

  • Another Crossroads for Turkey

    Another Crossroads for Turkey

    In all probability the Turkish ruling party, AKP (Justice and Development Party), will experience another victory at the local elections on March 29. Since November 2002, when the AKP came to power with 34 percent of the votes, the party has noted a growing success with 42 percent of the votes in the 2004 local elections and 47 percent at the general election in 2007.

    The AKP government has used its six years in power to create a new elite centred around Istanbul, Ankara and industrial cities like Konya, Kayseri and Gaziantep in Anatolia. At the same time the party has replaced the top echelons inside state administration, education, the judiciary and independent boards with supporterswho share the government’s conservative, Islamic values.

    By Robert Ellis

    For example, last October 600 leading staff from TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) were transferred to posts as “researchers” as part of a process of “restructuring”. And the March edition of the prestigious journal “Bilim ve Teknik” (Science and Technology) was subject to censorship. There was a picture of Darwin on the cover and a 16-page article celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. But TÜBITAK (Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council) intervened and the cover picture, article and editor were removed.

    The editor of Bilim ve Teknik, Dr. Cigdem Atakuman, and the offending cover
    Darwin’s theory of evolution is at odds with creationism, which the government supports and which has been introduced into school textbooks. According to Riza Türmen, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, this move indicates that what the Turkish government is attempting to achieve is “social engineering, a radical transformation of society”. Incidentally, Riza Türmen’s appointment at the Human Rights Court was not renewed, as he upheld the headscarf ban at Turkish universities in the landmark legal decision in Sahin v. Turkey in 2005.

    The secret of the AKP’s success as a political party is that it is a grassroots movement built up on a local level, and therefore a convincing victory on March 29 will mean a consolidation of the AKP’s power base. The fact that now only 19 out of Turkey’s 81 provinces do not have an ban on alcohol consumption at municipal and public restaurants is a good example of how extensive the AKP’s influence is.

    Davos
    Some days before Israel’s invasion of Gaza the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confided to Israeli premier Ehud Olmert that he needed a high-profile international diplomatic success to deflect domestic criticism and gain legitimacy from Turkey’s secular opposition. For that reason Erdogan set as a precondition for his participation in the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos that there was to be a panel discussion on Gaza, preferably where Israeli president Shimon Peres would be present.

    Seen in this light, Erdogan’s outburst at Peres appears to be a well-planned PR stunt calculated at legitimizing his government on the home front and establishing Turkey as a regional power in the Middle East. The reaction was not long coming. At Istanbul airport Erdogan was greeted as “the conqueror of Davos” and the Lebanese newspaper Dar Al-Hayat suggested that Erdogan should restore the Ottoman empire and be the Caliph of all Muslims. Considering that Turkish foreign policy under the AKP has been dubbed “neo-Ottoman” and that one of Erdogan’s nicknames is “The Imam of Istanbul”, this proposal must have tied in with Erdogan’s ambitions.

    But his outburst has also backfired. According to a senior Israeli diplomatic official Erdogan has with his support of Hamas “lost all credibility as an honest broker in peace discussions”. And the official added: “As long as he is the prime minister of the country, Turkey has no place in peace negotiations or discussions. It is not a trustworthy diplomatic partner anymore.”

    At the same time Erdogan has painted himself into a corner. His defence of Hamas as a legitimate political party hardly fits in with the ongoing closure case against the Kurdish political party DTP (Democratic Society Party) because of alleged connections with the PKK. The Kurdish vote is decisive for the AKP’s control of eastern and southeastern Turkey, where the party won over half the votes in 2007.

    Financial crisis
    Erdogan’s heroic status after Davos is, of course, a vote catcher, but the AKP has also resorted to other methods. Local authorities receive most of their funding from the central government, and the Minister of Justice has threatened voters that if they vote for the opposition, it is unlikely those municipalities will receive government help in the future.

    In Tunceli province in southeastern Turkey, where the mayor of Tunceli, Ms. Songül Erol Abdi, is from the DTP, the state social aid and solidarity fund (the “Fak-Fuk Fon”) has distributed household appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers, and even computers to the local population. The only problem is that some of the villages are without electricity or running water. The Supreme Election Board has ruled against the distribution of aid but the provincial governor has continued with Prime Minister Erdogan’s support.

    Turkey has also been hit by the global financial crisis and there has been a marked rise in unemployment. This year Turkish public and private institutions will need $100 billion in external funding, which is why a new accord with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is imperative. However, as the IMF has demanded cuts in public spending, talks have been suspended until after the March 29 local elections.

    Another sensitive issue in connection with the local elections is the underrepresentation of women among the candidates. There are at present 18 female mayors out of 3,225 in Turkey and only 834 out of 34,477 local administrators are women. No significant change can be expected, as there are only 400 women out of 14,000 nominated for local office.

    Women constitute 26 percent of the labour force, but last July the AKP passed a social security law which cut maternity leave from six months to one . On Wednesday Economy Minister Mehmet Simsek, who himself comes from a poor Kurdish family, also blamed the rising unemployment rate on housewives looking for jobs.

    Columnist Burak Bekdil has criticized Turkey’s new elite for their conspicuous consumption and called them “display Muslims”. Nevertheless, many Turks link their hopes for a better future to the rise of the AK party. As they say in Turkish: Keci can derdinde, kasap et derdinde. The goat fears for its life and the butcher fears for his meat.

    Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and from 2005 to 2008 he was a frequent contributor to Turkish Daily News. However, after a critical article on the AKP in the Los Angeles Times last March, he was informed by the American editor-in-chief of TDN (now Hürriyet Daily News) he was persona non grata.

    This post first appeared on PoliGazette

  • The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan

    The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan

    From PoliGazette January 30, 2009. “The furious passage of Tayyip Erdogan,” by Robert Ellis.

    The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan

    By Robert Ellis

    Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, is not a man who brooks being contradicted and a panel debate on the Gaza war at the World Economic Forum was no exception. What was hoped to be a bridge-building exercise to ameliorate Erdogan’s harsh criticisms of Israel’s incursion into Gaza and support for Hamas has turned out to be a public relations disaster.

    Erdogan delivered his own presentation in a forceful tone, calling for Hamas to be included in the solution and expressing Turkey’s willingness to be included in the process. However, after Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, had made his presentation, Erdogan responded with a tirade against Peres but was reminded by the moderator of a time limit. Erdogan pushed the moderator away, rose to his feet and left the stage, declaring he did not think he would be coming back to Davos, because he had not been allowed to speak.

    The reaction has not been long coming. This morning AJC, the American Jewish Committee, issued a statement calling Tayyip Erdogan’s attack “a public disgrace” and “gasoline on the fire of surging anti-Semitism”. Furthermore, last week AJC and four other American Jewish organizations sent a letter to Erdogan, expressing concern over the current wave of anti-Semitism in Turkey, and Erdogan’s outburst has done nothing to allay these fears.

    Unfortunately the Turkish prime mnister has a track record of shooting himself in the foot, which, if the sport became an Olympic discipline, would guarantee him a number of gold medals. (more…)

  • Turkey Threatens Iraqi Kurdistan with Incursion

    Turkey Threatens Iraqi Kurdistan with Incursion

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened Iraqi Kurdistan on Tuesday with an incursion. The threat came days after militants for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attacked Turkish troops within Turkey’s borders, kiling 17.Most PKK militants stage attacks in Turkey after which they quickly cross the border with Iraq where they hide. Northern Iraq is home to many Kurds, and the PKK has established several major training camps for future militants.

    The PKK is deemed a terrorist organization by, among others, Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

    Iraq’s central government had promised several times in the last couple of years to do something about the PKK presence in the northern part of the country, but has yet to take significant action.

    “The sole target of a possible cross-border operation will be the terrorist organisation,” Erdogan told lawmakers from his ruling party the AK Parti (or Justice and Development Party).

    “Turkey is in a position of self-defence when it comes to terrorism. Everyone should understand this,” he said. “The best choice for the regional administration of northern Iraq is to cooperate with us against terrorist elements because the terrorist organisation is a cause of regional unrest and tension.”

    Iraq and Turkey have been at odds with each other for years over this issue. Turkey believes that Baghdad is not doing enough against the PKK, forcing Turkey to do take matter into its own hands, while Baghdad says there is not much it can do because the PKK hides in regions difficult to enter for government forces, and argues that cross border operations by Turkey are unacceptable, because Turkey would not be allowed to act in breach with Iraq’s territorial integrity.

    The United States, meanwhile, is caught in the middle because it has fought a war against terrorism for quite some years itself, and has invaded two countries in order to destroy terrorist organizations (both Afghanistan and arguably Iraq). This means that it is difficult if not impossible for the U.S. to criticize Turkey when it goes into Iraq, occupies a significant part of its ‘Kurdistan’ part, and withdraws weeks, perhaps months, later.

    On the other hand, Iraq’s government is not willing to let Turkey deal with problems too big for itself to handle, and calls on Turkey to withdraw immediately whenever it takes military action against PKK target in Iraq. The U.S. has to, of course, stand with Iraq, also because more than 100,000 of its troops are stationed in this country. Furthermore, the U.S. fears that a Turkish incursion will destabilize one of the historically most stable parts of Iraq.

  • Bin Laden’s Days in Istanbul

    Bin Laden’s Days in Istanbul

    Osama Bin Laden told Egyptian reporters for Arabic daily Cairo in 1994 that he had spent some time in Istanbul. He lived and worked in Istanbul, he said, because of “some troubles” with the Kingdom Saudi Arabia which he declined to specify.The report was ignored by most media outlets until recently; Bin Laden’s time in Istanbul became publicly known after the content of a CIA report became known.

    Turkish Daily Hurriyet quoted Bin Laden as saying: “When the Soviet Union invaded Kabul, I was residing in Turkey, having left the kingdom because of some differences, which I don’t like to mention now. I was working in trade.”

    “During my stay in Istanbul, I got acquainted with many Iranian merchants who had escaped from Iran at the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war. During that time, Arab mujahidin started going to Afghanistan with the help of the U.S. CIA, which set up a transit camp in Istanbul. Volunteers stayed in the camp and were then dispatched to Afghanistan,” he added.

    He also explained what his ‘charity’ organizations were doing, and where they operated. They had, he said, offices in 13 countries: “The Bin Ladin Establishment’s aid covers 13 countries, including Albania, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Britain, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and some Gulf countries that there is no need to mention. This aid comes in particular from the Human Concern International Society, which was founded in Afghanistan in 1982,” he said during the interview.

    Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in Pakistan now. He fled Afghanistan after the war in 2001, which came in response to his terrorist organization’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.