Turkish Forum

Category: Asia and Pacific

  • Turkish Filmmakers Visited The Civilitas Foundation

    Turkish Filmmakers Visited The Civilitas Foundation

    A group of Turkish filmmakers visited The Civilitas foundation on December 4. Ten young filmmakers, visiting Armenia to participate in the Second Turkish- Armenian Workshop on “Cinema as Means of Cross-Border Dialogue and Mutual Understanding”.

    The workshop, initiated by the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, was a partnership between the Yerevan festival and the Anadolu Kültür Association of Turkey, as well as the Armenian Writers Union.

    The Turkish filmmakers and the organizers met with Civilitas founder Vartan Oskanian, and members of the Civilitas staff.

    Mr. Oskanian welcomed the initiative and spoke of the importance of such initiatives.
    He noted that the purpose of the workshop is to promote civil and cultural dialogue between Armenia and Turkey via means of cinema, encouraging cooperation and mutual recognition among Armenian and Turkish professionals.

    “There is a great deal of misunderstanding and mistrust between Turkey and Armenia. And if the governments of both countries are seriously thinking of normalization of relations, the civil societies in both countries should push the process forward.What better medium than cinema to bring people together,” Mr. Oskanian said.

    The Turkish filmmakers, many of whom already have working ties with their Armenian colleagues, said that one of their main goals of the cooperation is a possibility to work together on a joint project.
    “You, the filmmakers, should be able to explain to your government by means of cinema, that for the development of the region, for the normalization of the relations between the two people, opening the border is vital” Mr. Oskanian explained.

  • Chingiz Aitmatov’s Lifelong Journey Toward Eternity

    Chingiz Aitmatov’s Lifelong Journey Toward Eternity

    Chingiz Aitmatov

    December 12, 2008
    By Tyntchtykbek Tchoroev

     

    This week marks the culmination of a yearlong celebration in Kyrgyzstan of the writer and thinker Chingiz Aitmatov, who died on June 10, a few months short of his 80th birthday.

    Aitmatov is revered for building a bridge between the world of traditional Kyrgyz folklore and modern Eurasian literature. His writings illuminate the challenges that faced the peoples of the Soviet Union both before and after its demise, and his own life is an integral part of that broader turbulent pattern.

    He was born on December 12, 1928, and brought up in the village of Sheker in the Talas region of northern Kyrgyzstan. He studied in Jambul (in present-day Kazakhstan), Frunze (now Bishkek), and Moscow. He witnessed Josef Stalin’s purges of the 1930s firsthand: his father Torokul, a prominent political figure, was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year as an alleged enemy of the people and counterrevolutionary.

    It was only after Kyrgyzstan became independent that Torokul Aitmatov’s remains were found, together with those of other prominent intellectuals and politicians. He was given a state funeral in August 1992. Chyngyz Aitmatov named the new cemetery near Bishkek for victims of Stalinism “Ata Beyit,” or “The Graveyard Of Our Fathers.”

    Some superficial critics of Aitmatov argue that he was simply serving the communist system. They point to the numerous honors and awards — including the Order of Lenin and Hero of Socialist Labor — that he received for his work.

    But Aitmatov was equally respected outside the USSR: He received India’s Jawaharlal Nehru award, and was named a member of the World Academy of Science and Arts and the European Academy of Science, Arts, and Literature. His works were translated into more than 170 languages and sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, showing that their appeal transcends communist ideology.

    Changing From Within

    Aitmatov can be compared with Voltaire, the 18th-century French Enlightenment writer who revolted against the old system while enjoying all the benefits it had to offer. The intellectual war against authoritarianism found expression not only in the works of openly dissident writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but in a milder and more sophisticated way in Aitmatov’s novels.

    As a student in the then-Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, I could not find Solzhenitsyn’s main works in public libraries. But we could and did discuss Aitmatov’s easily available works relentlessly, deciphering the hidden meanings between the lines. How can anyone argue that the writings of exiled dissidents were the only effective weapon against totalitarianism when they remained unattainable to most readers?

    The Czech writer and playwright Karel Capek coined the word “robot” to describe a machine that resembles a human being; Aitmatov resurrected the old Kyrgyz word “mankurt,” meaning a robot-like human stripped of his intellect by a process of physical brainwashing imposed by a brutal, oriental tyranny.

    Aitmatov in 1963

    Defying the ideology of mature socialism that promoted and glorified the merger of the USSR’s smaller ethnic groups with the Russian people as their only path to a “bright future,” albeit one in which their sense of national identity was lost, Aitmatov wrote a novel about a Kazakh woman, Mother Naiman, who begs her “mankurt” son to remember his father’s name, his ancestors, and his personal identity.

    Aitmatov’s famous predecessor Makhmud Kashghari, born near Lake Issyk-Kul in the 11th century, wrote a famous monograph on the Turkic languages (in Arabic), challenging the acknowledged supremacy of the Arabic language by likening Arabic and the Turkic languages to two horses galloping neck-and-neck.
    Aitmatov repeated the same challenge in the 1980s, urging the Kirghiz Soviet authorities to treat the Kyrgyz language with dignity and to elevate its official position to that of Russian, which one communist leader in Kirghizia at the time described as “the second mother tongue” of the Kyrgyz people.

    At that time, because of the emphasis placed on the “leading role” of the Russian language, there were only a few schools in Frunze with instruction in Kyrgyz. But on September 23, 1989, at the height of Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous “perestroika,” the Kyrgyz language was declared the sole state language of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, with Russian downgraded to the status of the lingua franca in a multiethnic society.

    Hero To Kyrgyz Nation

    Some of Aitmatov’s early works from the 1950s, written in Kyrgyz, incurred harsh condemnation from his enemies. One of his critics lambasted his early love story “Jamiyla” — which the French poet Louis Aragon described as “the world’s most beautiful love story” — arguing that it was immoral to praise the heroine, who fell in love with someone else while her husband was courageously fighting Nazi Germany during World War II.

    Aitmatov’s subsequent decision to write in Russian undoubtedly furthered his career. So too did his willingness to promote the Soviet authorities’ slant on specific developments. In 1977, two years after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, he published an article entitled “There Is No Alternate To Helsinki,” in which he affirmed: “We are changing the world, and the world is changing us.”

    In October 1986, Aitmatov founded the famous Issyk-Kul Forum, which brought intellectuals from the Soviet bloc and the West together at a lakeside resort to discuss major global challenges face to face. He served as an adviser to Gorbachev during the perestroika years, and after Kyrgyzstan became independent as Kyrgyz ambassador to UNESCO, EU, NATO, and the Benelux countries.

    In 1989, I was part of a group of young Kyrgyz historians that organized to challenge official Soviet historiography. We appealed to Aitmatov, at that time chairman of the Union of Writers of Kirghizia, and to his deputy, the poet Asan Jakshylykov, to allow us to hold the founding conference of our Young Kyrgyz Historians Association in the conference hall of the Union of Writers. And despite increasing pressure from the central authorities, they said yes, and thereby contributed to the emergence of a new generation of Kyrgyz historians.

    Throughout his life, Aitmatov preserved his love for his fellow men, and for nature and the animal world. His last novel, titled “When The Mountains Fall Down: The Eternal Bride,” was written in 2005 as a final appeal to his people to preserve the beauty of the Celestial Mountains (Tengir-Too in Kyrgyz, Tian-Shan in Chinese), which the Kyrgyz have traditionally regarded as sacred. The two heroes of the novel, a journalist named Arsen Samanchin and an indigenous snow leopard (Jaa Bars), both become victims of international poaching in a tale of the perils of the greedy and careless exploitation of the environment.

    Tyntchtykbek Tchoroev (Chorotegin) is the director of RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service. The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL

  • Azerbaijani student accused of Pan-Turkist activity sentenced to five years in Iran

    Azerbaijani student accused of Pan-Turkist activity sentenced to five years in Iran

    Baku. Ramil Mammadli – APA. Iranian court accused Azerbaijani student of Peyami-Nur University of Erdebil Esger Ekberzadeh of Pan-Turkist activity and national discrimination and sentenced him to five years. World Azerbaijanis Congress told APA that under another decision of the court Ekberzadeh had been sent to Zahidan jail in the east of Iran. The hearing was closed. Ekberzadeh’s lawyer, human rights defenders and family members were not allowed to attend the hearing.
    Esger Ekberzadeh was imprisoned for four months in 2006 for participation in the pickets against publication of caricatures insulting Azerbaijanis in the “Iran” newspaper. He was fined of 600,000 tomans for spreading leaflets calling to pickets.

  • Trouble in the Other Middle East

    Trouble in the Other Middle East

     

     

    December 8, 2008
    Op-Ed Contributor
     
    By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

    Washington

    THE divisions we split the world into during the cold war have at long last crumbled thanks to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. No longer will we view South Asia as a region distinct from the Middle East. Now there is only one long continuum stretching from the Mediterranean to the jungles of Burma, with every crisis from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west to the Hindu-Muslim dispute in the east interlocked with the one next door.

    Yet this elongated Greater Near East does not signify something new but something old.

    For significant parts of medieval and early modern history, Delhi was under the same sovereignty as Kabul, yet under a different one from Bangalore. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Mughal dynasty, created by Muslims from Central Asia, governed a sprawling empire encompassing northern and central India, almost all of Pakistan and much of Afghanistan — even as Hindu Maratha warriors in India’s south held out against Mughal armies. India’s whole history — what has created its rich syncretic civilization of Turko-Persian gems like the Taj Mahal and the elaborate Hindu temples of Orissa — is a story of waves of Muslim invaders in turn killing, interacting with and ultimately being influenced by indigenous Hindus. There is even a name for the kind of enchanting architecture that punctuates India and blends Islamic and Hindu styles: Indo-Saracenic, a reference to the Saracens, the term by which Arabs were known to Europeans of the Middle Ages.

    Hindu-Muslim relations have historically been tense. Remember that the 1947 partition of the subcontinent uprooted at least 15 million people and led to the violent deaths of around half a million. Given this record, the relatively peaceful relations between the majority Hindus and India’s 150 million Muslims has been testimony to India’s successful experiment in democracy. Democracy has so far kept the lid on an ethnic and religious divide that, while its roots run centuries back, has in recent years essentially become a reinvented modern hostility.

    The culprit has been globalization. The secular Indian nationalism of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, built around a rejection of Western colonialism, is more and more a thing of the past. As the dynamic Indian economy merges with that of the wider world, Hindus and Muslims have begun separate searches for roots to anchor them inside a bland global civilization. Mass communications have produced a uniform and severe Hinduism from a host of local variants, even as the country’s economically disenfranchised Muslims are increasingly part of an Islamic world community.

    The Muslim reaction to this Hindu nationalism has been less anger and violence than simple psychological withdrawal: into beards, skull caps and burkas in some cases; self-segregating into Muslim ghettos in others. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai had a number of aims, one of which was to set a fuse to this tense intercommunal standoff. The jihadists not only want to destroy Pakistan, they want to destroy India as well. India in their eyes is everything they hate: Hindu, vibrantly free and democratic, implicitly and increasingly pro-American, and militarily cozy with Israel. For Washington, this is no simple matter of defending Pakistan against chaos by moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. It is a whole region we are dealing with. Thus for the jihadists, the concept of a 9/11-scale attack on India was brilliant.

    Just as the chaos in Iraq through early 2007 threatened the post-Ottoman state system from Lebanon to Iran, creeping anarchy in Pakistan undermines not only Afghanistan but also the whole Indian subcontinent. The existence of terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba that have links with the Pakistani security apparatus but are outside the control of Pakistan’s own civilian authorities is the very definition of chaos.

    A collapsing Pakistan, and with it the loss of any real border separating India from Afghanistan, is India’s worst nightmare. It brings us back toward the borders of the Mughal world, but not in a peaceful way. Indeed, the route that intelligence agencies feel was taken by the fishing boat hijacked by the terrorists — from Porbandar in India’s Gujarat State, then north to Karachi in Pakistan, and then south to Mumbai — follows centuries-old Indian Ocean trade routes.

    The jihadist attack on India’s financial center not only damages Indian-Pakistani relations, but makes Pakistan’s new civilian government — which has genuinely tried to improve ties with India — look utterly pathetic. Thus, the attack weakens both countries. Any understanding over Kashmir, the disputed Muslim-majority territory claimed by Pakistan, is now further than ever from materializing, with mass violence there a distinct possibility.

    This, in turn, reduces the chance of an Indian-Pakistani rapprochement on Afghanistan, whose government Pakistan seeks to undermine and India sends millions of dollars in aid to help prop up. The Pakistani security services want a radical Islamized Afghanistan as a strategic rear base against India, while India wants a moderate, secular Afghanistan as a weapon against Pakistan.

    Pakistan is not only chaotic but dangerously lonely. Islam has not proved effective in bringing together its regionally based ethnic groups, and thus a resort to a fierce ideology as a unifying device among fundamentalist Muslims has been the country’s signal tragedy. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military suspects that Washington will desert their nation the moment the leadership of Al Qaeda is, by any chance, killed or captured.

    Making matters worse, every time the United States launches an air attack into Pakistan from Afghanistan, it further destabilizes the Pakistani state. That is why the Mumbai attacks bring true joy to the most dangerous elements of the Pakistani security establishment: the tragedy has caused the world to focus on India’s weaknesses — its lax security, its vulnerability to age-old maritime infiltration and, most of all, the constant threat of caste and tribal violence — that have been obscured by its economic success. See, many Pakistanis are saying, your beloved India is not so stable either.

    This is nonsense, of course. India, with all its troubles, is far more stable than Pakistan. In the meantime, every day that goes by without riots in India is a defeat for the Mumbai terrorists. Indeed, India’s own Muslims have demonstrated against the attacks.

    But India, not just Pakistan, desperately needs help. Just as solving or at least neutralizing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a requirement for reducing radicalism and Iranian influence throughout the Levant, the same is true of the Indian-Pakistani dispute at the other end of the Greater Middle East. Our notion of the “peace process” is antiquated and needs expanding. We need a second special negotiator for the Middle East, a skilled diplomat shuttling regularly among New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul. (There has been some speculation, in fact, that Barack Obama is considering Richard Holbrooke, the former United Nations ambassador, for just such a job.)

    The Middle East is back to where it was centuries ago, not because of ancient hatreds but because of globalization. Instead of bold lines on a map we have a child’s messy finger painting, as the circumvention of borders and the ease of communications allow the brisk movement of ideas and people and terrorists from one place to another. Our best strategy is, as difficult and trite as it sounds, to be at all places at once, Not with troops, necessarily, but with every bit of energy and constant attention that our entire national security apparatus — and those of our allies — can bring to bear.

    Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

  • Obama’s Turkish Partners

    Obama’s Turkish Partners

    A democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim capitals is exactly what the West needs.

    By Mustafa Akyol | NEWSWEEK

    Published Dec 6, 2008
    From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008

    For years Ankara’s foreign policy was fixated on a few narrow topics—how to handle the Greeks, the Kurds and Armenians—and Turkish policymakers seemed unable to solve even these chronic problems, let alone the problems of others. But these days Turkey has tackled such regional concerns with a new gusto—making the first real headway on the Cyprus issue in decades, for instance—while playing a far larger role in global affairs. In May Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government mediated indirect peace talks between Syrian and Israeli officials in Istanbul. The talks are now ongoing, and further meetings have reportedly been scheduled. Erdogan also recently stepped forward to offer help to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to deal with Iran, which Turkey’s prime minister and many others expect to be Obama’s biggest foreign-policy challenge. On November 11 Erdogan told The New York Times his government was willing to be the mediator between the new U.S. administration and Tehran. “We are the only capital that is trusted by both sides,” he reiterated later in Washington. “We are the ideal negotiator.”

    This surge of interest in becoming something of a global peacemaker is in part the result of the ongoing process of Turkish democratization. The nation’s old elite consisted of the more isolationist Kemalists, the dedicated followers of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who established a republic without democracy in 1923 to westernize and secularize the nation. For many decades to come, society remained divided between the dominant Kemalist center and the more traditional periphery it kept under its thumb. But things fundamentally changed after the election victories of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 and 2007. The “other Turkey” was now out of the periphery and into power, and while it proved to be more religious than the old elite, it also proved to be more pro-Western, and more committed to the European Union accession bid than its growingly xenophobic secular rivals.

    This was not simply a convenient tactic, as some have argued. Turkey’s conservative Muslims had been undergoing a silent reformation since the 1980s, as evidenced by the country’s growing “Islamic bourgeoisie,” which sees its future in global markets, not Sharia courts. Ideas about the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy flourished, as recently evidenced by headscarved women rallying in the streets for civil liberties for all.

    Meanwhile, Ahmet Davutoglu, an erudite scholar who became Erdogan’s chief adviser, outlined a new foreign-policy vision. Turkey had unwisely denied its cultural links with the Middle East for decades, he argued, but the time had come to turn Turkey into a “soft power” that exports peace, stability and growth in its region. Hence came the rapprochement in recent years and months with Greece, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan and most recently Armenia, where President Abdullah Gül paid an ice-breaking visit in September.

    Kemalist Turks dislike this “neo-Ottoman” approach, which prescribes closer relations with other Muslim nations. When Erdogan greets his Arab counterparts “in the name of God,” they are horrified and argue that the country’s secular principles are under threat. And to garner support from Westerners who are concerned about political Islam, for good reasons, they try to depict the AKP as Taliban in sheep’s clothing. But, in fact, a democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim capitals, that can speak their language and that is willing to use this leverage for peace and reconciliation is exactly what the West needs.

    Some in the West fear this approach as well, taking notice of AKP’s interests in Islam and the rampant anti-Americanism in Turkey, and sometimes conflating and confusing the two. Yet that anti-American wave is a reaction to the Iraq War and its aftermath. By empowering the Kurds in the north, the post-Saddam era unleashed the deepest of all Turkish fears: the emergence of a Greater Kurdistan. In other words, anti-Americanism is almost a derivative of anti-Kurdism, and, not too surprisingly, is strongest in the nationalist circles, which include the Kemalists. These groups, represented by the two main opposition parties, deride the AKP as American puppets and Kurdish collaborators. A 2007 bestselling book, whose Kemalist author was covertly financed by the military intelligence, even argues that both Erdogan and former AKP member President Gül are actually covert Jews who serve “the elders of Zion” by undermining Atatürk’s republic.

    Turkey’s new elites are not covert Jews as some fringe Kemalists fantasize, of course. But neither are they creeping Islamists as smarter Kemalists portray. In fact they are Muslim democrats, who can both take Turkey closer to becoming a true capitalist democracy and inspire other Muslim nations to follow a similar route. For sure, they need to combat ugly nationalism inside their borders and take continued steps toward deepening liberal reforms. With such a combination of sound domestic leadership and visionary foreign policy, they would be ideal partners for the Obama administration in its own effort to reach out to the troublesome actors in the Middle East.

    Akyol is a columnist for Istanbul-based Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

    © 2008

    Source: Newsweek, 6 December 2008

  • THE FUTURE OF TURKEY?

    THE FUTURE OF TURKEY?

    Ramday Javed Iqbal (lead)

    Alistair Corbett

    October 2008

     

    The Royal College of Defence Studies

     

    RCDS 2008 – CONTEMPORARY STRATEGIC ISSUES

    Key Judgements

    • Turkey is likely to internally consolidate its democracy, resolve conflict between secularism and political Islam and sustain economic growth. Some tension between democratic forces and secular elite will remain.

     

    • The Kurdish problem will slightly ease up due to mitigating internal political developments but essentially stay frozen due to external regional situation.

    • While Turkey-EU dialogue will continue, Turkey is likely to face continuous hurdles in securing full membership of the EU, in the foreseeable future.

    • Turkey’s position as a hub of energy pipelines linking Caspian Sea with Europe will increase its importance to EU for its energy security.

    • In view of the efforts at resolution of Cyprus issue the likelihood of its settlement has increased.

    • The EU attitude towards Turkish membership, Russian reassertiveness in her “near abroad”, the stability and orientation of the Persian Gulf region, Chinese influence in Central and West Asia and the orientation of the future Iraq will determine Turkey’s role as regional power.

     

    Discussion

    • Having lost an empire Turkey has been trying to find its soul for a century. Internally, it decided to make a break with the imperial past by opting for a harsh form of western secularism. Economy remained on the rocks. Turkish nationalism was brittle and paranoid. Externally, problems with Greece persisted even as both had membership of NATO. The twenty first century has begun with changes in the internal and external scene for Turkey. How Turkey perceives threats and opportunities in the new environment will dictate the future of Turkey. This paper essentially follows and examines dominant factors to draw relevant conclusions and reach key judgments.

     

    • Secularism vs Political Islam. In recent years the long drawn battle between secularism and political Islam has come to the fore. Although Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not yet clearly out of the woods the tide of political legitimacy seems to be turning in favor of democratic forces. The military and judiciary seem to have realized that, political space will have to be conceded to democratic forces particularly when it brings along economic prosperity, keeps Turkey on track for EU membership and safeguards the security interests. Slowly, and due to EU membership requirements, the democratic culture will mature in the mid-term.

    • Economy. After the shock of 2001, Turkey embarked upon macro institutional reforms opening up the economy, within the framework of an IMF programme. As a result, Turkish economy has witnessed sustained and robust growth. The current global financial crises will impact Turkey less than others. Having received the dividends it is unlikely that any government will reverse course.

    • Kurds. No other security issue has engaged the Turkish mind and energies as the Kurdish problem. The broader issue is not the PKK but Kurdish independence. The US invasion of Iraq and resultant autonomy for the Kurds in the north has raised the spectre of an independent or autonomous Kurd region with Kirkuk oil wealth. This could further create a pull on the Turkish Kurds. In the past, Turkish response to the challenge has been brutal suppression of any Kurdish cultural or political expression. Recently, in addition to military operations the AKP government has slightly eased the political environment. While this may work, the external regional linkages are likely to strain the Turkish restraint in the foreseeable future. The issue will continue to dog Turkish governments for at least another generation.

    • EU. The AKP government has undertaken several political, legal and economic reforms to prepare itself for EU membership. It has also maintained a steady political course for securing membership. Meanwhile, it has made reasonable economic progress, remains important to European energy security and made moves to reduce the baggage of its Cyprus issue. On the EU side however, still there are significant historical, religious and psychological barriers to Turkish entry in to the club. In the mid-term this could change. However, this is not, and will not be a settled issue till at least 2015. Eventually, Turkey may choose to be a beneficiary of EU “variable geometry” (ie not a full member but economically integrated while independently sovereign). Turkey will certainly continue to seek markets and allies to the east also.

    • US and NATO. Increasingly, Turkey’s anchors to the west are drifting or are under strain. NATO, for decades the bedrock of Turkey’s western identity, particularly for its influential military, has lost lustre. Despite laudable garden-tending by senior officials on both sides, US-Turkish relations have not recovered the depth and breadth they had in the 1990’s. This is happening at a time when Middle East, West Asia, Central Asia and Caucasus are transforming and Turkey’s relevance to the US is increasingly going to come to the fore. Recently, in the wake of August war in Georgia, Turkey has opposed introduction of NATO forces in to the Black Sea. While a dramatic NATO split is not envisaged, in the future the alliance will come under strain.

    • Greece and Cyprus. Turkey – Greece rivalry goes back several centuries. However, starting in 1999, the earthquake diplomacy has helped thaw the relations and Greece has supported Turkey’s candidacy for EU membership. Meanwhile, Greek Cyprus has joined the EU – granting Nicosia a veto over all things Turkish. There are efforts at hand to resolve the Cyprus issue. Should they succeed, they will free Turkey from a significant burden and improve her chances for the EU membership as well. 

    Conclusions

     

    •Turkey is the heir to the Ottoman Empire, which at various points dominated the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Balkans, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Black Sea region until it met the expanding Russian empire. Its collapse after WW-I created an oddity – an inward looking state in Asia Minor. It sat out 20th century or allowed its strategic space to be used. The situation has changed dramatically.

     

    • Turkey is at a critical stage in its quest for a democratic political dispensation and economic upswing. The road ahead remains rocky. However, the signs indicate that Turkey will most likely stay the course and internal stability will lead to its increased potential for playing a regional role.

    • Turkey has quietly emerged as the prize in a new great game over who will develop and bring to the EU / world markets the vast oil and gas resources of the Central Asian states. Turkey will in the years ahead become one of the world’s major energy hubs, supplied by the pipelines which will crisscross Anatolia. It will depend on US and EU as to where those lines run and whose products pass through those lines.

    • Turkey’s EU project faces a hopeful but uncertain future. The relevance of NATO has dimmed. The US nexus has fallen victim to the US invasion of Iraq and support for the Iraqi Kurds. Yet, all this happens at a time when Turkey is rising and in the future the West’s need for Turkey will increase. The strategic spaces around Turkey are all in turmoil. They have also been traditional areas of Turkish influence. Turkey will inevitably attempt to influence these spaces. How and to whose advantage this happens will depend as much on US / EU, as on Turkey.

     

    Ramday Javed Iqbal (lead)

    Alistair Corbett