The visit of the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, coincided with a period wherein, the gulf between the Pakistan’s government and the opposition has dangerously widened, and is compounding the complexities Pakistan already confronts because of its security situation – a harsh reality that both the government and the opposition overlook the visible disadvantage of the people of Pakistan.
Besides the other subjects that the Turkish premier touched upon during his address to the joint session of Pakistan’s parliament, this deserves the focused attention of the government and the opposition.
Given the fact that he has very good working relationships with Pakistan’s government and the opposition, the Turkish premier is probably the only person who could help bridge the gulf between them.
Very appropriately, the Turkish premier emphasised the need for strengthening the democratic process by implementing economic reforms that convince both the citizens and investors of the reforms’ legality, rationality and fairness, as proved by the Turkish experience.
Following this route, the regime led by Erdogan had rebuilt Turkish faith in democracy, and during 2003-11, it was able to attract foreign direct investment worth $110 billion.
Unfortunately, however, in Pakistan, we have done the opposite as reflected by Pakistan’s worsening country risk perception.
Parliamentarians, he said carry the enormous responsibility of delivering according to the peoples’ will “because no one can withstand the wrath of the masses.” The condition of the power sector reflects that Pakistan’s parliamentarians have yet to fulfil the obligation of delivering on their many rosy promises.
Pakistan’s parliamentarians are clearly not conscious of the challenges their country faces.
Their energies are not focused on addressing these challenges, a gap that the Turkish premier highlighted during his address while advising the opposition that it must focus on mending the ways of the government, not as much on removing it.
But he balanced his advice by reminding the government of its obligations to deliver on the promises that a responsible regime commits itself to do after assuming power.
As a non-partisan entity, the Turkish premier is interested only in the well-being of Pakistan, which has a very special place in the hearts of the Turkish people, given their long history of struggle wherein our ancestors offered great sacrifices for Turkey and its people.
Turkey was among the foremost supporter of the Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP).
It was lack of preparation on part of Pakistan that proper project feasibilities were not readily available at the Dubai moot.
It has taken over three years for 14 projects in the power sector to be identified for Turkish firms to explore.
The Turkish side has cited bureaucratic hurdles, the taxation system and high tariff as impediments towards investment.
All these obstacles can be effectively tackled while staying within the law and observing rules and regulations.
Whenever investment proposals are pushed from the top, with the objective of saving time – there is bound to be trouble.
Karkey Rental is a prime example.
The Pakistan side needs to make the return on investment attractive for the investors and the Turkish side needs to show more understanding and patient.
After all, there are other destinations where the bureaucratic hurdles are much higher than Pakistan and return on investment even lower.
Pakistan needs to learn from the Turkish experience, both in terms of transition from a military-controlled government to a democratic dispensation; as well as the growing role it is playing as a regional powerhouse.
In both cases, the power lies in the strong growth of the Turkish economy – now the envy of Europe.
Public support for democracy emanates from the success of the civilian dispensation in delivering a better quality of life to the people at large.
A strong export-led growth has allowed Turkey to expand its trade with its neighbours in particular and the region in general.
It also provides the basis for its growing regional influence.
In Turkey, all the three tiers of government have come together and developed a coherent and proactive policy that addresses the economy, foreign affairs and defence in an integrated manner.
We need to do the same.
Last but not least, it is interesting to note that most people in North Africa and the Middle East believe that post-revolutionary states in the region (the countries afflicted by the contagion of the ‘Arab Spring’) should model their political systems on Turkey’s, according to an opinion poll commissioned by the Doha Debates.
Some analysts, therefore, believe that the Ottoman Empire is seeking to make a return not in order to restore its former glories, but rather to establish an effective presence for the Turkish state that greatly suits its economic and political interests.
Muslim countries, particularly Pakistan, are required to draw a valuable lesson from the fact that Ankara has successfully integrated Islam into politics, which probably fits into majority of these countries’ needs.
The remainder of my trip to Turkey sparked some further thoughts, including some qualifications to my last post. To wit:
1. I previously described the conference I attended — the Istanbul World Political Forum — as an illustration of Turkey’s emphasis on “soft power.” By creating a Davos-like annual meeting oriented towards issues central to emerging economies, the organizers sought to display Turkey’s growing importance as a political player. I still think that’s right, but my conversations with other attendees suggest that the IWPF will need to raise its game in the years ahead if they want to reap the full benefits. The panels were interesting and well-attended, and there were a number of informative speakers, but I also heard a lot of complaints about the overall level of organization of the operation. Some speakers didn’t know which panels they would appear on until the last minute, and the format of some sessions wasn’t clear until you showed up. I also heard complaints about haphazard travel arrangements, although in my own case the bookings worked well after some initial glitches. Putting on an event like this isn’t easy, but if the Turkish government and the other sponsors hope to use these forums as a way of demonstrating their efficiency, competence, and managerial ability, they’ve got a ways to go.
2. One of the more vivid impressions I took from the conference was the prevailing wariness — if not outright suspicion — with which the United States was viewed by many of the attendees. Virtually any statement that cast even mild doubt about U.S. policy (on Iran, Middle East peace, past interventions, Iraq, etc.) drew spontaneous approval from the audience, even if the statements weren’t especially provocative, penetrating, or anti-American. For example, in the panel on a possible war with Iran, I suggested that if the U.S. wanted to dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons, it might make sense to stop threatening Tehran with regime change. The audience immediately burst into loud applause. Similar statements by journalist and professor Stephen Kinzer and Juergen Chrobog of the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt elicited much the same response. And most of the questions (or diatribes) from the audience were either explicitly or implicitly critical of the U.S. position. I had a similar experience in my other panel as well.
I wish some U.S. government officials had been there to observe this phenomenon, because it drove home to me the degree to which U.S. policy is regarded by many is inherently myopic, selfish, and illegitimate. (And the positive bump produced by Obama’s election in 2008 is long gone). It’s not a deep hatred of Americans themselves, but rather a simmering resentment of America’s global role. And I think many Americans just don’t get this, especially when they spend all their time talking to their counterparts (i.e., the global 1 percent) in other countries.
3. The trip also highlighted for me the ambiguities of Turkey’s internal politics under the AKP. I’ve been trying to figure out where Turkey is headed for a number of years now, and I still don’t consider myself anything like an expert on political developments there. But several incidents on this trip underscored the deep tensions that still persist and may be getting worse.
On the one hand, the AKP has done an impressive job of stimulating economic growth, reforming ordinary criminal justice practice, encouraging some forms of democratic participation, and emphasizing higher education. I would also give them high marks for their overall handling of foreign policy. The much-ballyhooed “zero problems” strategy trumpeted by Prime Minister Erdogan and Foreign Minister Davatoglu has hit some rough spots in the past couple of years (most visibly over Syria), but it’s still a smart aspiration, even if it has proven more difficult to implement in practice. And I still think the U.S. has an important interest in maintaining good relations with Turkey going forward; to see this, just imagine how much more difficult our dealings with this region would be if Ankara and Washington were really at odds.
But on the other hand, AKP rule has been heavy-handed in a variety of disturbing ways, most notably in the protracted detention of the so-called Ergenekon suspects and in its various efforts to manipulate or intimidate the Turkish press. The AKP hasn’t been anywhere near as brutal as some previous military governments (among other things, Turkey’s overall human rights record is vastly better than in some earlier eras, but there are still a lot of disturbing elements. While I was at the conference, three different people came up to tell me privately that “things were really bad here,” and that the United States had to do more to pressure the AKP. It was clear after a few minutes of conversation that these speakers were secularists from the old order (i.e., they are part of a class that has been losing power), but it was nonetheless striking to hear their concerns. At a minimum, it suggested to me that that AKP has done a much better job of clipping the wings of the old guard than it has of reconciling them to the realities of the new Turkey.
Given Turkey’s turbulent past, this lingering animosity is not that surprising. But it does not bode well for the future, especially if the economic prosperity on which the AKP’s popularity rests begins to flag. And as I said on one panel, the continued deterioration of domestic freedoms in Turkey is bound to be exploited by groups who are worried about Turkey’s foreign policy direction, thereby damaging U.S.-Turkish relations in ways that both countries would soon regret.
4. Adding it all up, I’d argue that we are witnessing an important shift in world politics whose broader implications are worrisome for the United States. Political participation is broadening and deepening in more and more countries, and even if the results fall far short of some ideal vision of democracy (let alone the imperfect U.S. version of that ideal), these states are going to be increasingly sensitive to popular sentiment. Unfortunately, U.S. policy towards many parts of the world has depended more on cushy deals with oligarchs, dictators, and plutocrats, and past U.S. actions (most of them undertaken for various Cold War/anti-communist reasons) have left a toxic legacy that most Americans do not fully appreciate. Add to that our frequent resort to military force since the Cold War ended, our enthusiastic use of sanctions despite the human costs to ordinary citizens, and our insistence that there are really two sets of rules in world politics (the U.S. can violate other states’ sovereignty whenever we want, but weaker states who object to this get demonized and/or threatened with more of the same). The result is a world where many people would like to take us down several pegs, and where it can be costly for political leaders to be openly supportive of U.S. initiatives (see under: Pakistan).
America is still very powerful, and plenty of governments still understand that some of our strategic interests overlap. But we’re entering a world were fewer and fewer governments are going to be reflexively deferential to the United States, for the simple reason that they pay attention to popular sentiment and their own national interests aren’t in fact identical to ours. If we expect governments in these countries to be as supine as some of their predecessors, we had better get used to disappointment. What will be needed is a lot more nuance, flexibility, and diplomatic skill, as well as a greater sense of humility and restraint. I only hope that we are better at displaying these qualities in the future than we’ve been in the recent past.
The complex dynamics of Turkey’s geographical position and cultural uniqueness have always defied easy explanation. But in the decade since Tayip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) were first elected, change within Turkey and between Turkey and the world has erupted in a number of different directions. Consequently, the word “enigmatic” is perhaps the best way to describe Turkey’s foreign policy over the past ten years.
By Dr. Anthony Rusonik
Turkish society has shown conflicting signs of drift towards East and West under Ergodan’s rule. On one hand, we witness continued restrictions on press freedoms, trumped-up charges against rivals in the secular defense establishment, and a slow but deliberate injection of political Islam into the primary educational system. On the other, there is the 2010 Constitutional package that elevated an independent judiciary, encouraged freedom of association, and was designed to promote Turkey’s EU bid, albeit without success. One day Erdogan makes a personal apology to the Kurds for historic wrongs, the next day the Turkish army increases operations against the PKK in Northern Iraq, and Erdogan bristles at French and American recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Given these apparent contradictions, two common themes emerge in a survey of the literature that attempts to explain Turkish behaviour, as evidenced in a December 2010 episode of TV Ontario’s “The Agenda”. One school, led by scholars such as Daniel Pipes, considers that Turkey has gone “rogue”, shifted to Iran and is now bent on the destruction of the secular republic founded in 1923 by Kamal Ataturk. Pipes argues that Turkey can no longer be trusted by NATO and should be expelled from the alliance. The other school of thought represented by Janice Stein of U of T, maintains that Turkey’s “swings” are natural and manageable bumps on the road of a journey towards modernization, democratization, and constitutionalism. New forces unleashed vie for influence in a spirited pluralism.
A third school of thought – less credible in traditional Realist frameworks of analysis but nonetheless evident in observation of Erdogan and the pendulum that is now Turkish foreign policy – is that Turkey is more and more Mr. Erdogan’s country. Its fluctuations reflect the Prime Minister’s ego and mercurial temperament more than is allowed in “serious” analytical frameworks. In particular, Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions are merged with personal character traits where pride and honour sometimes overcome traditional state interests. In short, Mr. Erdogan bristles when he feels slighted, basks in the glory of praise, and this seems to affect his policy decisions.
Since neither Stein nor Pipes’ approaches can explain past behavior nor predict current outcomes with confidence, a framework based on leadership psychology deserves closer examination.
The Economist first offered this explanation in its assessment of Turkish-Syrian relations. Puzzled as to why Ankara demonstrated such patience for Bashar Assad’s crackdown and the resultant destabilization of Turkey’s southern border, The Economist concluded that the irreparable break between Erdogan and Assad didn’t occur until the former had the belated revelation that the latter chose not to heed his advice. It wasn’t Assad’s repression per se that produced a fit of pique in Erdogan and his barb that “Assad would end up like Qaddafi.” No, it was Assad’s apparent refusal to heed Erdogan’s personal advice to reform that led to Erdogan’s contempt for his former friend. Still, most in Syrian opposition see more bluster than action in Erdogan. Apart from support for Syrian refugees, Turkey has not acted against the Assad regime. Erdogan’s “zero problems” policy is in tatters and the moment for Turkey to assume leadership of the Arab Spring seems lost.
The same kind of personal reaction is evident in Turkey’s drift towards Iran after Ankara’s political liberalization and economic reforms failed to impress Germany and France. Former French President Sarkozy dismissed Turkey’s EU bid in no uncertain terms with “I do not think that Turkey has a place in Europe.” In a bid to spite the Europeans, Erdogan turned East despite Tehran’s support for Assad, despite competition with Iran for influence in the Arab world, and despite discomfort with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Unless and until, Erdogan declared, Western sanctions against Iran win UN endorsement and Israel’s nuclear program is also investigated, Turkey will continue to import Iranian oil. It appears a snubbed Erdogan has overplayed his hand, such that the Iranians tested his patience and forced him to prevent Iranian aircraft loaded with arms for Assad to overfly Turkish territory. It seems that Erdogan might have traded his last chance at EU membership for an alliance with Iran that may risk key Turkish interests.
The role of insult or perceived insult also deserves full investigation in the demise of Turkish-Israeli relations. Here, neither Pipes nor Stein can explain the Ankara-Jerusalem whirlwind without some of the puzzle pieces force-fit to their theories. Pipes maintains Erdogan’s break with Israel was an orchestrated and calculated policy that needed a pretext –The 2009 Gaza Flotilla– to launch a neo-Ottoman bid for Turkish resurgence in the Arab World. Pipes casts Erdogan in the provocative and reckless tradition of Gamal Nasser and Saddam Hussein, where the aspiring Muslim leader taunts Israel to win the Arab street, grows bolder with apparent success, then pays the price. If there is some truth to this assertion, it is still at odds with the image of Erdogan calling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with an offer –insistence—to send Turkish water bombers to help the Israelis fight forest fires, or the acceptance of Israeli humanitarian aid for Turkish earthquake victims.
On the other hand, Stein’s view of the tattered relationship as a natural re-balancing after a decade of close defense ties that have elevated Turkey’s military too high in domestic politics and rendered Turkey’s prestige too low in the Arab world doesn’t quite capture the dynamic of demise either. It fails to explain why Erdogan cannot muster more than rhetoric against Assad now because he cannot – or will not – reach out to Jerusalem to ensure its intentions and support – quiet or otherwise – should Turkey act against Damascus. His rhetorical threats to send another Flotilla with Turkish naval escort, or to challenge Israel and Cyprus over their massive natural gas finds in the Mediterranean, seem muted and frustrated. A diplomatic channel with Jerusalem, Erdogan must know, would allow him to negotiate Turkey’s economic claims to the undersea riches.
If Erdogan’s break with Israel is only partly explained by his half-hearted Nasserite ambitions and as a measure to curb Turkey’s military, then the lion’s share of the answer is indeed the fact that Erdogan considers that Israel is too proud, too stubborn, and has slighted Tayip Erdogan once too often.
Well before the Flotilla incident and Erdogan’s steadfast determination to extract an apology from Israel as a condition to restore a degree of warmth to the relationship, Erdogan perceived a series of insults from Israel.
The first fissures in the relationship formed in January 2009 at Davos, where Erdogan assailed Israeli President Shimon Peres over the Gaza War. The tone of Erdogan’s attack at first appears to support Pipes’ position that Turkey calculated the break and used the Gaza war to launch a neo-Ottoman drive. The undercurrents, however, are of greater interest. First, the “last straw” from Erdogan in the debate wasn’t Peres per se, but the fact that the moderators allowed him less time to speak than Peres had. That’s what enraged Erdogan. Second, although he could not say it at the time, Erdogan was furious that the Gaza operation was planned and occurred while he had invested his personal energies and reputation in secret Israeli-Syrian negotiations The fact that had such diplomacy succeeded Erdogan would look a fool in hindsight now as Assad’s crackdown is unabated is both ironic and irrelevant. What counts is that Erdogan felt burned, and he never forgot it.
The sense of humiliation reached a new level a year later as the Israel summoned the Turkish ambassador over an anti-Israeli television broadcast in Turkey. To emphasize their displeasure, the Israelis declined to shake hands or display the Turkish flag, and they arranged to seat the Turkish ambassador in a lower position.
Erdogan bristled. Ankara called for Israel “to abide by diplomatic courtesy and respect.” The statement was less critical of the Israeli policy per se than in the way Turkey perceived Israel handled the differences.
In hindsight, then, it seems little wonder Erdogan attempted to restore Turkish pride and protest Israeli policy with his refusal of Israeli requests to curb the Gaza Flotilla in 2010. Erdogan maintained that the Flotilla was a popular expression of support for the Palestinians, and that the state would not interfere with that. In yet another irony, and regardless of where one casts blame in the incident, Erdogan’s immediate demand beyond an end to the blockade was for an apology and compensation – from the state of Israel to the Turkish state. This was no longer a private matter for Erdogan, but a national interest and a personal mission.
Lost in the aftermath of the incident was the fact that Turkey was a quiet advocate for the release of GIlad Shalit and secret Hamas-Israel talks, such that Turkey’ prestige as a power-broker was restored. The fact that the Israelis remained distrustful and preferred the now-deposed Mubarak regime in Egypt to mediate is immaterial.
No, the relationship did not hit rock bottom until the UN Palmer report concluded that Israel’s blockade was legal and, further, that Israeli commandos had a right to defend themselves when they encountered resistance on the Ravi Mamara. Stunned and enraged that he was contradicted by the UN, Erdogan denounced the report that he had insisted upon and awaited with uncharacteristic patience. Defiant, Erdogan reiterated his insistence on an Israeli apology and cancelled all residual military deals with Israel.
Israel has offered regret and humanitarian compensation, but refuses a formal diplomatic apology for legal reasons. The standoff continues, at considerable cost to both Ankara and Jerusalem. Israel is again excluded from NATO exercises at Erdogan’s insistence. Erdogan’s pride may be intact as a result, but his Syrian and Cypriot headaches would ease if he could swallow a bitter bill. Israel has made it national policy not to engage in a rhetorical war with Turkey or to prod at Erdogan’s wounds, but the American recognition of Armenian genocide- even as Israel withheld its own recognition- is a reminder that Jerusalem‘s isolation does not render it without means.
Warranted or not, and irrespective of one’s own biases, one must conclude that an Israeli apology could have far more impact on relations with Turkey than conventional analysis considers possible.
Turkey under Erdogan is neither a rogue in Eastern drift towards Iran nor a model for Westernized democratic Islam. Rather. Turkey under Erdogan is, well, Turkey under Erdogan.
Dr. Anthony Rusonik is a contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com.
The conference I’m attending has been pretty interesting, although as much for the atmospherics and side conversations as for the formal presentations. Here with a few quick thoughts before I head off for the second day.
In some ways this event — the Istanbul World Political Forum — is like a smaller-scale DAVOS, but with an emphasis on issues like global justice, emerging powers (e.g., Turkey), and (obviously) the Arab spring. The plenary session featured speeches by an Egyptian activist, the president of Libya, and a British MP, and there was a lot of rhetoric about the need for a new world order (which nobody quite defined). My first panel — on a “A New Just and Global Order” didn’t involve formal presentations (though we all had them ready), but instead was a discussion led by a moderator. The other participants were Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz and Professor Paul Taylor of the London School of Economics, and a lot of our discussion revolved around possible connections between the financial crisis, the Arab spring, and the need to adapt existing institutions (or create new ones) that better reflected the underlying balances of power in the world.
I emphasized that the U.S. was not disappearing as the world’s most powerful country, but that it was going to have make strategic choices and wasn’t going to interfere as often in the future as it had in the past. I also suggested that global institutions were likely to evolve, but that this would lag behind the shifts in the balance of power, in part because agreement on how to build new institutions or revise old ones was going to be elusive. Perhaps the most interesting thread in our conversation was the importance of each nation “coming to terms with its past,” which can only happen when there is freedom of thought and discourse and a willingness by scholars and journalists and other thought leaders to take advantage of that freedom to hold policymakers accountable.
I was also struck again by how Turkey is becoming a poster child for my colleague Joe Nye’s concept of “soft power.” Turkey’s growing stature obviously rests on certain “hard power” elements (economic growth, a large population, substantial military power, a key geographic location, etc.), but it is greatly enhanced by being perceived as a successful embodiment of Islamic democracy. And this conference — which is merely one of many that the Turkish government seems to be sponsoring these days, is a very smart illustration of “soft power.” There’s no explicit or overt agenda, and in fact a fairly wide range of views represented by the attendees — but the key point is that they are able to get lots of people from various countries to show up, converse, and generally have an interesting time. Organizing international forums isn’t that expensive, and by bringing lots of people from all over the world to Istanbul, Turkey undoubtedly generates a positive impression and builds connections with various people who might have some influence back in their home countries.
If they keep doing this for a decade or more, then over time there will be a growing cadre of people who are familiar with Turkish policy, and some of them will be favorably inclined to the Turkish point of view. It won’t work with everyone, and it’s nothing so crass as “buying influence” (i.e., we’re not getting paid to attend). Rather, it’s more a matter of simply creating a positive impression. Just contrast this with countries who remain largely cut off from regular exchange with others (North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc.) and you can see how this degree of openness could be a nice supplement to Turkey’s rising economic clout. And the cost for Turkey is probably trivial compared with purchasing an advanced fighter plane or equipping an armored division.
I’ve also been struck by the number of students in attendance, and especially by the range of countries they represent. For example, I had a fascinating conversation last night with two students from Kazakhstan, both studying politics at a Turkish university and obviously very familiar with contemporary thinking about foreign policy and democratic theory. Another sign of globalization, as well as the rapid growth of higher education here.
Finally, I flew here on Turkish Airlines via John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The flight was fine, but the on-the-ground experience in JFK was one of the more miserable I’ve had in the past decade. And I couldn’t help but wonder — and not for the first time — how this affects how non-Americans view the U.S. when they arrive here. So I have the following modest proposal to offer: Every U.S. congressperson should be forced to fly through JFK on their own (i.e., with no staff to help), and to go through the normal TSA procedure (no VIP lines). And then they should be flown to a really first class airport in some foreign country (say, in Singapore, or Munich), so that they can see just how decrepit U.S. transportation infrastructure has become. And a few hours interacting with the Keystone Cops at JFK’s TSA checkpoints would be instructive for them too. I’d like them to have those experiences in mind the next time they have to vote on some expensive nation-building project far away.
A walk through Istanbul with Martin Vialon, a German scholar who is memorializing the work of Erich Auerbach, founder of comparative literature studies, who found refuge there when Turkey opened its gates to academics fleeing Nazism.
By Benny Ziffer
The building where Auerbach lived in the Bebek quarter of Istanbul. His apartment was on the ground floor, on the left.
Visible through the windows of the Kitchenette restaurant is a broad ceremonial square, bustling with life even under lowering skies and bitter cold. Outside, the snow and rain intermix and pelt the tiled paving and the buses and the row of yellow taxis waiting for clients outside the Marmara luxury hotel. In the center of the square, passengers emerging from the subway cringe for a moment at the encounter with the freezing cold. Quickly, they scatter and disappear behind the gray curtain of precipitation that blurs the lines of the buildings around the square and softens the stiff contours of an old-fashioned concrete dinosaur posing as a concert hall, named for the founder of the Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk. The hall has been closed for some time, after it was found to have been built in part from asbestos. In the meantime, it has been superseded by more sophisticated concert halls and theaters in other parts of the city, and will probably never reopen.
I waited, glancing outside with uncertainty and almost apprehension, for the arrival of someone I had never met in person. All I knew about him was his name, Martin Louis Vialon. All the rest − that he is a German scholar who lives in Istanbul (his field of research will be divulged below), that he identifies totally with the object of his study and that he has chosen an unconventional way of life here, far from the pleasantries of German academe − seemed to me almost incredible, if not a complete fiction.
The building where Auerbach lived in the Bebek quarter of Istanbul. His apartment was on the ground floor, on the left.
Let’s start from the fact that his surname, with its French ring, suggests – as he explained to me on the phone – his distant Huguenot origins. His forebears were among the Protestant exiles who fled from France to Germany following their persecution and massacre by the Catholics in the 16th century. Vialon had always felt like an outsider in Germany, even though he and his forefathers – and their forefathers, too – were born there. The children in his native village branded him “the Jew,” perhaps because of his argumentative character and because his family was more left wing than expected in rural western Germany.
In short, I didn’t know what to expect, but when an unshaven man wrapped in a wool scarf and bundled into a black coat burst tempestuously into the restaurant, I knew immediately that this was the man. Uneasiness is a blatant trademark of foreigners in this country, a land in which the people are never in a hurry to get anywhere.
Dr. Martin Vialon. In the footsteps of Auerbach.
Vialon is currently a lecturer in the English and linguistics departments of Yeditepe University, which lies on the Asiatic, or “Jewish” (more accurately: the formerly Jewish) side of Istanbul, in the Erenkoy quarter. As soon as he mentioned that name, I remembered that my mother’s high school was located there − it celebrated its centenary last year and my older brother, Daniel, was invited to speak at the ceremony. But apart from teaching, Vialon is pursuing a life project: to memorialize the German-Jewish linguist Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), who is considered the founder of the discipline of comparative literature and is the author of the monumental foundation work in this field, “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” (1946). The book was published in Switzerland (an English translation, by Willard Trask, appeared in 1953, and a Hebrew translation, by Baruch Karu, in 1958). But everyone who ever read its introduction knows that it was written in Istanbul during the Second World War, when Auerbach was living, teaching and doing research there, together with a community of other deportee academics from Germany, for whom Turkey opened its gates at Atatürk’s instruction and thus saved their lives.
It is seemingly only by chance that “Mimesis” was written in Istanbul and not elsewhere, for it was the hand of fate that landed Auerbach in Istanbul after he was dismissed by the University of Marburg when Hitler came to power. However, this is not Vialon’s view. He believes − and this is in part the focus of his study of Auerbach − that “Mimesis,” a book that seeks to sum up the representation of reality in the literature of the West, could not have been written except as a result of the trauma of being uprooted from the heart of European culture to a country that ostensibly lies outside the boundaries of that culture and which, at that particular moment of European eclipse, assumed the role of taking Europe’s place as the lodging place of the humanities-in-exile.
Erich Auerbach.
Accordingly, Vialon’s biography of Auerbach, which was published in Turkey two years ago, is titled “The Bitter Bread of Exile.” The title is taken from a letter that Auerbach sent from his place of exile in Istanbul. And the sentence quoted is from Dante, who is one of Auerbach’s major subjects of research. Indeed, “the bitter bread of exile” encapsulates the whole story of the deportees across the generations, whose anger, frustration and sense of affront and injustice engendered what might not have been accomplished had they lived a sweet life in their homeland.
But far beyond refuting hypotheses, Vialon is a great documenter. He has collected every bit of correspondence, every photograph, every narrated testimony he could get his hands on that is related to Auerbach and his years in Istanbul. He met with Auerbach’s son, Clemens, who was a youth at the time but vividly recollects many details. (A volume of articles about Auerbach, published in Germany in 2007, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, was accompanied by a CD of Auerbach delivering a lecture and of his son recalling their deportation from Germany.) Vialon interviewed former students of Auerbach from the University of Istanbul, including a woman who was 100-years-old at the time of the interview.
Erich Auerbach (center, with bow tie) at a party with Turkish intellectuals held in his honor in 1957. His wife, Marie, is seated on the right in the second row.
One of the questions − one of many − that is answered by the documents is how Auerbach managed to work on his studies in linguistics and comparative literature in Istanbul without having available a systematic library of the Greek and Roman classics. During his quest, Vialon visited the place in Istanbul that housed just such a perfect classical library. It is located in a Dominican monastery tucked away in one of the lanes that run down from the Galata Tower. Vialon found a letter from Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the papal nuncio to Istanbul in the Second World War, allowing the Jewish professor Erich Auerbach to use the library in the St. Peter and St. Paul Monastery to his heart’s content. This same Roncalli became pope in 1958, taking the name John XXIII, and was later beatified.
“Let’s go there,” Vialon suggested. We bundled up in our coats and went out, taking care not to slip on the ancient stones leading up to the Galata. Vialon stopped at the door of a building and rang the bell once and then again. No one answered. He went to try another door. Someone answered through the intercom and after lengthy explanations, someone arrived to open the gate. It was Father Alberto, one of the five monks who live in this insular monastery in the heart of the city, a place where the halls are not heated in the winter and where the power supply is also erratic. Because Father Alberto is in charge of cataloging the monastery’s library and archive, Vialon asked him whether he had come across the name of Auerbach while sorting through the letters. The affable monk knew nothing about this.
Dr. Vialon and Father Alberto in the entrance to the Dominican monastery, whose library Auerbach used in his research.
Under a faint light, he showed us a long bookcase in one of the corridors, containing 300 volumes of the Migne edition, which includes all the extant Latin and Greek texts. These were the very books Auerbach used to write “Mimesis” and other studies he published during his Istanbul years.
We shivered with cold, but that did not stop Vialon and Father Alberto from continuing their learned conversation about the monastery’s archive. The latter went off to look for copies of an article he had written about the history of the Dominican order. In the meantime, I peeked into the huge hall, now completely empty, which had in the past held the monastery’s library and was now being renovated. Through a barred window, at the end of a corridor that branched off from the one we were in, lay a melancholy inner courtyard, nude of vegetation and surrounded by a pink portico of columns in the Italianate style.
“In the summer everything blooms in this garden,” the abbot said. “You are welcome to visit anytime.” Outside, there was no way to suspect that the grim walls and dense rows of houses in the ancient neighborhood hid a courtyard like this, a box holding an Italian dream in the middle of Turkey.
But isn’t all of Istanbul a compilation of unexpected surprise packages like this? Another one awaited us in the Bebek neighborhood, which winds down a hill leading to the Bosphorus. It was here, on the ground floor of an apartment building whose balconies once offered a view of the Bosphorus that is now blocked by a series of restaurants and fancy delis, that the Auerbach family lived during their Turkish exile.
Vialon pointed out the exact apartment. I watched with curiosity as a maid emerged onto the balcony of the second-floor apartment and started to scrub the railing. What I found no less interesting than the fact that Auerbach lived here was to see that life in the building – and in the whole neighborhood for that matter – was continuing as usual without paying attention to the specific people who had lived, died or left.
The opposite is equally true: Auerbach the researcher, immersed up to his neck in his studies, looked at Istanbul largely as a beautiful but backward place. In a letter dated December 12, 1936 − Auerbach’s first letter from Istanbul to his colleague Walter Benjamin, who was living in Paris at the time (though who could have known then that in four years he would put an end to his life while fleeing to Spain?) − he describes enthusiastically his rapid acclimatization in Turkey. But in his second letter to Benjamin, amid a detailed and rather ridiculing portrait of Istanbul, whose European sections seem to him at times “a caricature of a 19th-century European city,” one feels that the reality of their ordeals is for both great scholars mere adornment, and that the true essence lies in their lives of research and study. Auerbach’s wife, Marie, sought solutions to his everyday problems in Istanbul; his assistants padded the other difficulties.
We stood there, on the sidewalk in front of the building, and talked about him as though he were still alive behind the shuttered windows. Directly behind us, in a building whose front part rests on pillars planted in the water and on the south side borders on the Bebek Mosque, lived Traugott Fuchs, Auerbach’s student and his salient venerator. Fuchs, who was not a Jew, lost his job in Germany only because he tried to organize a protest against the dismissal of his Jewish teachers at the University of Marburg. With Auerbach and the linguist Leo Spitzer, he went into exile in Istanbul and remained there until his death at the end of the 1990s.
Behind the ordinary facade and the latticed gate of the building, then, lies a story of German sacrifice of a rare variety, in memory of which I didn’t mind in the least standing motionless in the pouring rain and listening to Martin Vialon tell it. Traugott Fuchs was a junior lecturer who could have gone on with his life and pursued a distinguished academic career in Nazi Germany, but chose to throw in his lot with the downtrodden and the wretched in an unknown land.
But in the spirit of German academic restraint, no one seems to have made a big deal out of this heroic act of sacrifice. And strangest of all is the fact that even though he and Auerbach lived about 10 meters from each other, and could easily have met every day for a chat over a cup of tea in their homes or in a cafe, they communicated by letter.
Dozens of letters, in which research issues, linguistic matters and reading experiences are discussed. In a very personal letter, dated October 22, 1938, and sent from Auerbach’s home to his neighbor across the road, Auerbach calms his admirer, and supposedly also himself, and scolds him, “Don’t be so melodramatic.” Life and books, he adds, have taught him not to fall prey to illusions.
Vialon suggested that we warm up a little in a hidden teahouse behind the wall of the neighborhood mosque and to the right of a small cemetery. There he showed me copies of the studies he had written about Auerbach’s letters from the years in exile. Auerbach was definitely a master correspondent. Among the hundreds of letters, Vialon noted a brief correspondence with Martin Buber, who resided in Jerusalem and asked Auerbach to write an introduction to the Hebrew edition of “Mimesis.” Auerbach declined, noting that the first chapter, which deals with the binding of Isaac, is in itself a worthy prologue for the Hebrew reader.
Vialon opened a red folder containing copies of letters, more and more letters. But while he went on speaking, I turned my head toward the outside at the sight of movement in the courtyard of the mosque. A green ornamental covering, inlaid with gold embroidery, was draped over a coffin that was being placed on a pickup. The vehicle pulled away and the mourners walked behind it until they disappeared from view.
Observing this quiet ritual, I thought about the good fortune that had befallen Auerbach: while his Jewish colleagues in Europe were being mercilessly persecuted, murdered and committing suicide in despair, he was able to open a window in the morning and see the splendor of the Bosphorus.
Moreover, Auerbach enjoyed honor and prestige in Istanbul. He was a sought-after guest at soirees of the city’s high society, and his Jewishness did not bother anyone for an instant. In a photograph from 1957, taken at a reception in his honor at the home of a former student of his, he is seen perched on a sofa in his ever-present bow tie, surrounded by some of the best-known intellectuals in Turkey, among them the essayist Sabahattin Eyüboglu, whose brother, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu, married a Jewish Romanian who became a revered Turkish artist.
Tolerance in Turkey was never the result of a philosophical conclusion but part of everyday life; it’s why a German-Jewish professor was accepted so naturally as a leading authority in the realm of the Turkish spirit. And it is noteworthy, as Vialon emphasized, that Auerbach was not an especially charismatic figure. He was a serious scholar and a great researcher. That’s enough.
On the edge of that photograph, on the right side, Taurgott Fuchs – the assistant and former admirer of Auerbach – is seen sitting on the floor, his look contemplative, as though unpleased by the festivities. A close perusal of Auerbach’s face suggests that his thoughts too have wandered from this salon to other realms of the mind. Is there any more salient feature of humanism than this? It’s the whole story in a nutshell: to be physically in Istanbul, because of historical circumstances. But at the same time to take literature and use it like a hot-air balloon and float over continents, oceans and the vicissitudes of the time in search − perhaps − of this thing called eternity, which bubbles, seethes and disappears like the vapors of the samovar in the teahouse in which we tried to grasp the threads of time past.
Hatay, Turkey (CNN) — Two dolphins who were rescued from a filthy pool at a Turkish tourism resort were released back into the wild this week after years in captivity.
So far, the male dolphins have exceeded their trainers’ expectations: Within 48 hours, satellite transmitters showed that Tom and Misha had traveled more than 100 miles, and they were observed hunting fish as a team and interacting with other wild dolphins.
“It’s unbelievable to see them travel this hard and fast,” said Jeff Foster, a Seattle-based sea mammal expert who oversaw the dolphins’ rehabilitation and preparation for release into the wild.
“The assumption is they’re going back to the area that they were a pod in. They’re definitely on a mission,” Foster said.
Foster spoke to CNN by telephone from a sailboat in the Aegean Sea, where he and his team have been tracking the animals’ progress with the help of transmitters attached to the dolphins’ dorsal fins. Because of bad weather, the team hasn’t been able to keep direct contact with the dolphins since their release Wednesday, although they are still able to track them via satellite.
Both dolphins were in failing health when wildlife activists discovered them at a run-down tourist park in 2010.
Foster suspects the dolphins are racing back to the waters around the Turkish city of Izmir where they were initially believed to be captured years ago.
Tom and Misha are part of an expensive, ambitious and risky program sponsored by the UK-based Born Free Foundation, which is aiming to prove that captive dolphins can be reintroduced to the wild.
For more than a year, Foster and his team worked in a quiet cove on the Aegean, teaching the two dolphins how to catch their own food. He said the intensive training was necessary to get the dolphins ready to fend for themselves.
“It would be like taking your dog and releasing it into the woods,” Foster said. “If you don’t prepare your dog for that, it would never happen.”
When Foster first met these dolphins more than a year ago, he said they would eat only if humans placed dead fish directly in their mouths.
“We had literally thousands of fish in the pen, and they just wouldn’t look at them,” Foster said. “They had just been so used to being hand-fed in a captive situation that they did not recognize fish as a food source.”
Foster has prior experience with another high-profile release program that ultimately ended in failure. He worked in Iceland more than 10 years ago as part of a multimillion-dollar effort to prepare the killer whale Keiko from the movie “Free Willy” for release back into the wild.
Less than a year after his release, Keiko died off the coast of Norway. But Foster said he believes Tom and Misha stand a much better chance of survival.
The dolphins had to learn how to catch their own food before their release.
“These animals haven’t been in captivity as long as Keiko. Keiko was held in captivity for more than 20 years. He was held as a solitary animal for many of those years,” Foster said.
Tom and Misha are each estimated to be around 12 years old, after initially being caught in the Aegean Sea five or six years ago.
“They’ve probably spent the majority of their life out in the wild,” Foster said. “Because we’re dealing with two males, you can develop competition feeding with them … they’re ideal candidates for reintroduction back into the wild.”
Tom and Misha first attracted the attention of wildlife conservation activists in 2010. At the time, they were being kept at a Turkish resort where tourists paid to swim with the dolphins in a shallow, filthy swimming pool.
“The pool in Hisaronu, Turkey, where Tom and Misha had spent the summer months of 2010 had such a high bacterial count … that it was a significant health hazard to the dolphins and for the unsuspecting tourists who paid to swim with them,” wrote Shirley Galligan, a representative of the Born Free Foundation, in an e-mail to CNN. “The water was filthy with feces and dead fish and a layer of ‘sludge’ at the bottom.”
According to Born Free, a nonprofit conservation group based in the United Kingdom, the dolphins were underweight and listless and would not have survived much longer in the pool, which “having been hastily constructed, was in danger of collapse from subsidence.”
A coalition of environmental groups successfully campaigned to rescue the animals and transport them in the back of a truck to a sea pen in the Aegean.
Dolphins rescued from filthy pool
Mystery animal deaths = beach warning
Family pulls stranded dolphin to safety
Hundreds of dolphins race tourists’ boat
In the final days before their release, Foster and his team attached specially designed transmitters to Tom and Misha. The tags, which are about the size of a cell phone, broadcast the dolphins’ location via satellite and VHF radio.
The sponsors of the program admit there is no guarantee of success.
“There have only been a handful of reintroduction programmes with mixed results,” Galligan wrote. “Returning any captive wild animal to the wild is never without risk.”
One of the few successful cetacean reintroductions on record involved an orphaned female orca named Springer. Foster was a member of the team that helped rehabilitate the emaciated animal and eventually reintroduce her to a pod of related killer whales off of Canada’s Pacific Coast a decade ago. She has reportedly survived and thrived in those waters ever since.
Michael Moore, a marine mammal expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, predicted major challenges for Tom and Misha.
“Can they break the bond with humans, and can they create a bond with other [wild] dolphins?” he asked, in a phone interview with CNN. “The irony is that if these animals do get released into the wild, it’s a big, bad world out there and they will have to learn how not to get entangled in fishing gear.”
According to Moore, Tom and Misha’s release will have virtually no impact on the world’s wild dolphin population, which faces an onslaught from industrial fishing nets, decimated fish stocks and polluted seas.
But he and other dolphin experts say successful reintroduction could increase biodiversity awareness in Turkey and set an important example for the multibillion-dollar captive marine mammal entertainment industry.
There has been a rapid increase in the number of “dolphinariums” and “swim-with-dolphin” programs cropping up across Turkey over the last decade.
Dolphin parks like the one that held Tom and Misha are common in Turkey’s tourist areas but aren’t fully regulated.
“Turkey, being a very popular and beautiful holiday destination, is sadly responding to the public demand for that ‘dolphin experience’ by providing more captive dolphin facilities than anywhere else in Europe,” wrote Born Free’s Galligan. “Conditions in general are very poor.”
Born Free did not publicly announce the day of Tom and Misha’s release in order to protect them from curious onlookers. On Wednesday, after divers peeled away the last barrier separating the dolphins from freedom, the pair initially hesitated.
“They sat in the pen for 15 to 20 minutes after we opened the gate. These guys are cautious animals,” Foster said. Eventually, trainers gave them a hand cue to leave.
Underwater video filmed by scuba divers shows Tom slowly turning and leaving the sea pen. Misha then sped off after him.
Within hours, the Born Free team photographed Misha flipping large local fish called mullet out of the water. And then, they witnessed strange behavior from a dolphin rolling on the surface. It took some time to identify the animal by its dorsal fin.
“It was totally completely different dolphin!” Foster said. “A single dolphin that was interacting with Misha. Within the first four or five hours after we let them out, they were pursuing fish and interacting with wild dolphins. It was everything and more than we expected.”
Despite initial encouraging behavior, Born Free is not yet celebrating.
“We must remain cautious,” the organization announced on its website. “There is still a way to go before we know 100 per cent that Tom and Misha have readapted fully to life back in the wild.”
Dolphins rescued from filthy pool
Family pulls stranded dolphin to safety