| Friday, 20 February 2009 10:08 |
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The U.S. has not knocked on Turkey’s door to set up a military base on the Black Sea coast after the Kyrgyzstan decision to close a key base for Afghanistan operations, a spokesman for the Turkish army said Friday. Recent media reports have suggested that the U.S. may look at setting up a military base in the Turkish city of Trabzon as an alternative to the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan which is due to close later this year. “There is no such demand as yet,” military spokesman Brig. Gen. Metin Gurak told a weekly press briefing. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev signed into law on Friday the closure of the Manas air base outside the Kyrgyz capital, a key U.S. military supply base for Afghanistan, making good on a decision that shocked Washington. Bakiyev’s announcement last month for the closure came after Russia offered more than $2 billion in aid to the struggling Kyrgyz economy. The government has insisted that Moscow did not set the closure as a conditıon The U.S. Air Force has been deployed at an airbase in Turkey’s southern city of Incirlik since the signing of a joint agreement in 1954. The NATO base is currently home to the United States’ 39th Air Base Wing and some 5,000 U.S. service personnel. Gurak also said the number of the Turkish troops could increase in Afghanistan, in line with the handover of the command of the Kabul Area Command to Turkey in August. Foreign policy experts here suggest that U.S. President Barack Obama may have asked for more Turkish troops or other Turkish contributions in Afghanistan during separate phone conversations he had with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week. Turkey currently has some 800 troops serving with NATO forces in Afghanistan, most of who are based in the capital, Kabul. Having the second biggest army within NATO and as the only Muslim country in the alliance, Turkey is uniquely placed to help. |
Category: News
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Turkish army says no demands yet from U.S.
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AKP’s Confrontation with the Dogan Group
A New Episode in the AKP’s Confrontation with the Dogan Group
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 34February 20, 2009Dogan media group (DMG), a conglomerate of various media companies owned by Dogan Holding, was fined on February 18 for tax evasion and accounting irregularities for the period from 2003 through 2006. DMG has been ordered to pay a total of TL 826.2 million ($484.3 million)—132.9 million in overdue taxes, 693.2 million ($407 million) in penalties, and a special irregularity fee of TL 165,000 ($97,000). DMG has 30 days to pay the fine or appeal the decision (Anadolu Ajansi, ANKA, February 19; Today’s Zaman, February 20).
Soon after receiving the notice, DMG group announced that the fine “will be noted in Turkish finance history as the greatest injustice imposed on a company.” DMG maintains that the alleged unpaid taxes concerned the sale of some of its shares of the company to the German Alex Springer group in 2007. Negotiations for the sale began in 2006 and ended in early 2007. According to the DMG, under the Turkish Commercial Code the sale was finalized in 2007 and it acted in conformity with Turkish regulations and paid the taxes as of 2007. DMG claims that the tax authorities decided that “the sale took place in 2006 and that the resulting tax had to be paid the same year.” Since DMG believes that this is illegal, it will challenge the allegations in court. “We are committed to unmasking the true intentions and vindictiveness that rests behind this illegal and unconscionable fine,” according to the company (Hurriyet Daily News, February 19).
The incident immediately sparked a nation-wide controversy. Supported by the main opposition party, the Dogan group launched a campaign to present this decision as a form of political punishment by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that the DMG-controlled media was using freedom of the press to advance their bosses’ commercial interests. Since this is not the first public confrontation between the Dogan group and the AKP government, the harsh statements coming from both sides on February 19 might presage a new war of words in the Turkish political scene.
In early September the group confronted the government over allegations of fraud raised by German prosecutors against a charity organization established by conservative Turks living in Europe. Deniz Feneri e.V. allegedly channeled donations to private corporations in Turkey, most notably to the Kanal 7 TV network, which is owned by close allies of the AKP. The media outlets critical of the government featured the German indictment in their headlines. DMG newspapers and TV stations led this campaign, which questioned the involvement of Erdogan’s associates and the government’s silence about this and other accusations of corruption. Erdogan took on the fight, warning the DMG publicly about the consequences of its coverage, and claimed that the Dogan group was trying to take revenge for the government’s earlier refusal to help its business interests (EDM, September 11).
The Dogan group denied the allegations and accused the government of suppressing freedom of the press. Statements by Erdogan that he could reveal some documents proving inappropriate requests made by the Dogan group were interpreted by the DMG as blackmail to quash any allegations about AKP politicians and pro-AKP businesses and media outlets (Radikal, September 9).
Following a war of words, including personal attacks, between Erdogan and Aydin Dogan, chairman of the Dogan group, a de facto truce was thought to have been reached when the two met at a wedding reception (www.habervitrini.com, October 25). Meanwhile, the investigation of various Dogan group companies, which predated the confrontation in September, continued; and the current showdown over alleged tax fraud has reheated this controversy. Both sides have returned to their entrenched positions, leveling more or less the same accusations against each other.
Startled by the DMG’s charges, the Ministry of Finance released a statement defending its decision and arguing that the penalties levied on Dogan were based on careful investigation. The statement also criticized the DMG’s attempts to misrepresent the case and said that the Ministry would seek legal recourse for the DMG’s defamation campaign (Anadolu Ajansi, February 19). A statement from the AKP also noted that the investigation had started long before the conflict between Erdogan and Dogan and that Erdogan had not requested this tax examination. Noting that some AKP deputies were also being investigated on different charges, the statement claimed that the DMG was not being discriminated against (www.ntvmsnbc.com.tr, February 19).
In its response to these statements, however, the Dogan group questioned the sincerity of the other investigations and maintained that by constantly scrutinizing various companies in the group over a long period of time, the government was seeking to intimidate the group’s independent reporting (Cihan Haber Ajansi, February 19).
Regardless of the final ruling on the fraud allegations, this incident is likely to deepen political divisions. The critics will continue to view Erdogan’s aggressive attitude as yet another indication of his authoritarian leadership style and disrespect for democracy. Moreover, it will strengthen their belief that the AKP is intent on using state power to silence opposing views and consolidate the position of his own cronies in business and the media. Government circles will continue to present it as yet another victory against vested business interests, which have traditionally acquired their wealth through political influence.
As an earlier EDM report concluded, however, this episode once again shows “the continuing paucity of impartial news coverage that has not been filtered through, and frequently distorted by, Turkish media owners’ political preferences and perceived business interests.” It is an example of how public attention can be diverted away from more pressing economic and social issues (EDM, September 11).
https://jamestown.org/program/a-new-episode-in-the-akps-confrontation-with-the-dogan-group/
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Civil liberties villain of the week: Facebook
The social networking site’s attempt to take advantage of its users’ content highlights the danger of granting a commercial entity access to your private life
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 February 2009 11.47 GMT
Drumroll, please: the first liberty central award for corporate privacy abuse goes to … Facebook, in recognition of its attempt to lay “an irrevocable, perpetual” claim to users’ original content.
Under Facebook’s previous terms of service, the company’s right to your original content expired if you deleted your account. On February 4, it announced it had updated the terms of service. Sharp-eyed users quickly realised the new conditions retrospectivly granted the company the right to retain their old content – even if they closed their account, Facebook retained the right to market and licence their pictures and blogposts in perpetuity.
Facebook defended the new terms, with its founder Mark Zuckerberg posting a blog titled On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information, which could be crudely summarised as “trust us”. But yesterday, the company was forced to perform a U-turn, ditching the new stipulations in the face of heavy criticism from privacy campaigners, the threat of legal action and revolt by users. One Facebook group, People Against the New Terms of Service, grew to a membership of more than 109,000 in a matter of days. The company has now reinstated the old terms of service and has promised users more imput via a new Facebook group called the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Perhaps the real problem with Facebook is that it creates an illusion of privacy, while in reality your private thoughts will eternally reside in cyberspace. With a new study suggesting social networking sites can damage our health by reducing the time we spend building relationships face-to-face, perhaps its time we all log off and get a life?
Nominate your civil liberties villain of the week in the comments below.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk, 19 February 2009
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Brzezinski reviews US policy towards Russia
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, claims that bringing the Ukraine closer to the West is the key to assuring the democratization of Russia.
In an interview for the French paper Le Figaro said that the West must work to reopen relations with Russia and that Georgia and the Ukraine must be part of that dialogue.
Western nations, including Poland and the United States, must rework their relations with Russia in order to `slowly limit Russia’s nostalgia for imperialism and renew disarmament negotiations.`
Brzezinski told the paper that initiating a new dialogue with Russia cannot happen at the cost of limiting the aspirations of those countries seeking NATO membership – such as the Ukraine and Georgia – especially because the Ukraine, as a NATO member opens up a transformative path to democratize Russia.
Source: The Georgian Times, 02.19.2009
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The Islamists Show Their Hand
by Soner Cagaptay
Newsweek, International Edition, Turkey
Pg. 0 Vol. 153 No. 08 ISSN: 0163-7053When Turkey’s justice and development party (AKP) first took power in 2002, it tried to reassure moderates fearful it might chip away at the country’s secular, democratic and pro-Western values. The AKP renounced its Islamist heritage and began working instead to secure European Union membership and to turn Turkey into an even more liberal and pro-Western place. Almost seven years later, however, the AKP seems anything but reformist. The recent performance of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the party’s leader and Turkey’s prime minister, at Davos–where he stormed off a panel with Israeli President Shimon Peres, vowing never to return–has convinced many skeptics that the party is turning its back on the West. So have moves like saying he wants to represent Hamas on international platforms and defending Iran’s nuclear weapons. The AKP now sides with Islamists and ignores their crimes. This is radically different from the Turkey of old. What happened?
To understand the AKP’s turnaround, remember where it came from. The party’s founders, including Erdogan, cut their teeth in an earlier, more explicitly Islamist party, which featured strong anti-Western, anti-Semitic and antisecular elements. The Welfare Party, as it was known, joined a coalition government in 1996 before alienating the secular Turkish military, the courts, and the West, leading it to be banned in 1998. Yet the party never truly disappeared, and Erdogan re-created it as the pro-American, pro-EU, capitalist and reformist AKP.
Its transformation was a cynical one, however, and no sooner had the party gained power than it began to undermine the liberal values it supposedly stood for. In 2002, for instance, it began to hire top bureaucrats from an exclusive pool of religious conservatives, and the percentage of women in executive positions in government dropped.
Efforts by secular institutions to curb the AKP only backfired. When the Constitutional Court tried to prevent it from appointing one of its own as president in 2007, the AKP cast itself as the underdog representative of Turkey’s poor Muslim masses and won a monumental election victory. This hastened the party’s return to its core values. The AKP began abandoning its displays of pluralism, dismissing dissent and ignoring checks and balances and condemned the media for daring to criticize it.
The failure of EU accession talks also hurt. Having made a number of painful reforms in order to improve its chances of entry, in 2005 Turkey nonetheless hit stiff opposition led by France–at which point the AKP decided there was no point in making more painful and unpopular reforms. The nail in the coffin came that same year, when the European Court of Human Rights upheld Turkey’s old ban on Islamic headscarves on college campuses. The AKP had hoped Europe might help recalibrate Turkish secularism into a more tolerant form. But this wasn’t in the cards.
Soon the AKP began abandoning its pro-Western foreign policies as well. Despite Ankara’s historic friendship with Washington, the United States is highly unpopular among the Turkish masses. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the AKP realized it could use this anti-Americanism to bolster its own support. And when the Gaza operation began in December, it decided to add anti-Israeli language to the mix, which culminated at Davos, where Erdogan lectured Peres for his supposed crimes before flying home to an orchestrated hero’s welcome.
Such behavior has fanned the flames of anti-Semitism in traditionally tolerant Turkey. Erdogan has blamed “the Jewish-influenced media for misrepresenting facts about Gaza,” and the AKP-run government of Istanbul has erected giant billboards across the city reading, “You cannot be the children of Moses.”
Seven years after the AKP came to power, Turkey’s Islamists have returned to their roots. The AKP experience demonstrates that when Islamist parties moderate, it reflects not a strategic change but a tactical response to strong domestic and foreign opposition. Once these firewalls weaken, Islamist parties regress, driven by popular sentiment. A recent survey shows that the AKP’s popularity jumped 10 percent after the Davos incident, suggesting the party could pass the game-changing 50 percent threshold in the upcoming March 29 local elections. The AKP’s renewed Islamism may play well at the polls. But Turkey, and its allies, will be left worse off for it.
Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey.”
Copyright 2009 Newsweek
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AN IMPORTANT CAMPAIGN – PLEASE JOIN US
Please send this THANK YOU message to the US organization had a courage and resources to stand against Terrorist supporters MEANING Armenian American lobby… we should show that: WE ARE 100% SUPPORTING THEIR ACTIONS. MAIN OUTLINE OF THIS LETTER IS PREPARED BY A FRIEND.. Please sign the letter with your name and forward to the address given… you welcome to write a new letter if you wish… PLEASE DISTRUBUTE THIS INFO AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE. And promote this campaign in your circles. … TURKISH FORUM
LUTFEN ASAGIDAKI İNGİLİZCE TEŞEKKÜR MEKTUBUNU KENDİ İMZANIZLA GONDERİNİZ .. BU MEKTUP AMERİKAN KANUNLARINI TURKİYENIN ALEYHİNE KULLANMAK İÇİN SEFERBER OLMUS AMERİKAN ERMENİ LOBİSİNİ CEZALANDIRMAK İÇİN KANUNİ İŞLEMİ BAŞLATMIŞ OLAN AMERIKAN SİVİL TOPLUM KURULUŞUNA TEŞEKKÜR ETMEK VE KENDİLEİNİ DESTEKLEMEK İÇİN ELİMİZDEN GELENLERİ YAPACAGIMIZI BİLDİRMEK İÇİNDİR … YALNIZ OLMADIKLARINI BİLSINLER .VE EN ÖNEMLİSİ İSE . GÖZÜ DÖNMÜŞ SOYKIRIM TAÇİRLERİNİN CEZALANDIRILMASINDA SİZİNDE TUZUNUZ BULUNSUN … TURKISH FORUM
To: nseligman@citizensforethics.org
Subject: Congratulation on your rightful and courageous action
Madam/Sir,
All my congratulations for your courage, because you filed a complaint against the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). It is time for legal procedures against the violations of law by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, in USA and elsewhere.
From 1972 to 1986, the ARF had a terrorist branch, the JCAG/ARA which committeed several attacks the US territory, including assassinations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a1c_5APvto
Mourad Topalian, president of the ANCA from 1991 to 1999, currently in charge of political financing, was sentenced, in 2001, to 37 months of jail for storing illegal explosives and owning two machine guns, i.e. complicity with the terrorist dashnak group:
Despite this sentence, Mr. Topalian was fully supported, and even awarded, by the ANCA, during and after the investigation and trial.
The ARF terrorists received financial from drug smugglers, like Noubar Soufoyon. See Michael M. Gunter, “Pursuing the Just Cause of their People”. A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism, Westport-New York-London, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 75-76.
Both before and after 1986, supporters of ANCA attacked physically Turkish American associations and friends of Turkey. For example:
The fanatic activists of the ARF/ANCA will perhaps attempt to intimidate you by insisting that they are doing the right things for their race… what ever is their excuse… it was proven at historical and legal circles that Armenia is a terrorist state controlled by Armenian diaspora located in USA. They are afraid of opening ARF archives which goes over 100 years and located in Boston. Some of The facts as we Turkish Americans and the friends of Turkey see are documented in Turkish forum’s letter to President Obama… WE ARE WITH YOU 100% TO STOP THESE GENOCIDE MERCHANTS… AND THEIR INTERFARANCE TO AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM WITH FALSE CLAIMS OF GENOCIDE.
https://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/2009/02/08/turkish-forums-letter-of-facts-to-president-barrack-huseyin-obama-special-anouncment-to-members/
GOD BLESS YOU
Sincerely yours,
(…………………………)
YUKARDAKi MEKTUBUN ALTINA iSMiNiZi VE EYALETiNiZi VEYA ULKENIZI YAZIP GONDERiNiZ
PLEASE WRITE YOUR NAME AND CITY OR COUNTRY IN THE SIGNATURE BLOCK AND MAIL THE LETTER
Turkish Forum
07.02.2008 Turkish Forum Duyuru2009 ÜYELİK AİDATLARI VE BAGIŞLARINIZ
THE FOLLOWING LINKS WILL TAKE YOU TO THE DUES AND DONATIONS PAGE
https://www.turkishnews.com/tr/content/2009/02/14/2009-yili-uye-aidatlari-ve-bagislariniz/Turkish Forum
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