Tag: Democracy

Turkey is held up by many as a beacon of democratic reform. But its youth are frustrated with social and political progress

o Joshua Surtees

o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 May 2011 11.00 BST

Turkey – Society – Sacred and Secular Istanbul

Many young Turks are concerned about gay rights, religious freedom, women’s rights and other principles of liberty. Photograph: David Bathgate/Corbis

Turkey is often held up as a symbol of progressive modernism – a Muslim democracy on the doorstep of Europe. But the young politically active Turks I spoke to recently in Istanbul feel that social and political freedom is not yet a reality in a country still oppressing its Kurdish population, still tentative on gay rights and still operating compulsory military conscription.

While Turkey is a long way from revolution, the complaints I heard in Istanbul are similar to the frustrations voiced by Arab activists across the Middle East. Those with progressive or liberal inclinations in Turkey are deeply frustrated by a political establishment that does not reflect their values.

Hacer Ocak, a 24-year-old teacher, voted for the Republican People’s party (CHP) at the last elections. Asked about her politics she told me it is not possible to “be political” in Turkey. “You have three options – the current government [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative Justice and Development party, or AKP], who to me represent the old religious regime; the MHP, who are a militant far-right party; and the CHP, which claims to represent the centre-left but drifts further and further to the right. I voted CHP by a process of elimination.”

Politics in Turkey is extremely divisive. Pelin, 28, a chef, would not tell me who she voted for. “It can destroy friendships,” she said. “Turkey is not a free country. You vote according to whether you are religious or not and Turkey right now is experiencing a huge divide. The young miniskirt wearers hate the burqa wearers and vice versa. The secular people are hugely judgmental of the religious population. Religion is a sensitive subject and cannot be separated from politics.”

When I asked about Turkey’s politically oppressive history in the context of the current situation in the Middle East – crackdowns and detentions in Syria and Yemen – it was interesting to note people were either unwilling to acknowledge Turkey’s dark past or were simply unaware of the brutal actions of the military dictatorship of the 1980s.

I put this down to a deep-seated sense of national pride that is bred through parenting and schooling. There is a strong reluctance in Turkey to criticise the history of their nation. It is this kind of blinkered pride that has seen Turkey steadfastly refusing to recognise or apologise for the Armenian genocide, carried out almost 100 years ago.

As far as the Middle East is concerned, liberal Turks feel that participating in military intervention in Libya is self-interested and hypocritical. Not many people I talked to were willing to discuss the situation in Syria, Libya and Egypt. “We have our own problems to deal with,” said Leyla Buyum, a peace activist. “How can we think of supporting Nato or sending troops to fight while in our own country we have a situation of political repression that isn’t publicised in the Turkish media and is ignored internationally?”

She was referring to the situation in south-eastern Turkey where violence between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists – the PKK – has continued for decades.

The right to protest is officially sanctioned in Turkey, so protesting is not a danger as it is in Syria. However, it is certainly not as straightforward as in European countries. Police tend to react over-zealously, as seen in the recent use of water cannons on student demonstrators in Ankara.

But what specific issues are there to protest about? There is little overt anti-government sentiment. Erdoğan has successfully taken the reins of the economy, has addressed previously taboo subjects such as the Kurdish question and seems set to be re-elected in June in elections recognised as free and fair.

Military conscription is widely opposed by Turkish youths who feel it represents an archaic militaristic ideal. “Why are we being conscripted? Who are we going to war with?” asked Yavuz Tuncay. “If Turkey really wants to become progressive this has to be abolished. And they must let gay [people] in the army.”

Attitudes towards homosexuality, along with religious freedom, women’s rights and other principles of liberty, are an important touchstone of social democracy, and an issue that Turkey continues to struggle with.

As I left Istanbul I got the sense that Turkey, while having achieved much in the past decade to establish itself as a country intent on progress and social inclusion, still has to deal with issues that its young population has identified as out of sync with democratic ideals.

It is clear that Turks on the street do not align themselves with Europe, the Arab world, the US or anywhere else. Turks feel very independent and fiercely proud of the state created by Atatürk in 1923.

International governments will continue to align themselves with Turkey for strategic purposes and this may further enhance Turkey’s diplomatic status. The assumption that Turkey is a burgeoning or even fully functioning democracy is not entirely accurate yet it is useful for global superpowers such as the US to promote this idea.

The Arab uprisings have reaffirmed Turkey’s strategic importance to the world’s political powers including the US, Israel and the Arab states. The country now occupies a privileged position as the nominal fulcrum of a newly emerging axis in east-west international relations. Turkey has played a central role in Libya and spoken out strongly on Syria. It acts as a base for the US military, a watchdog on Israeli actions and a prospective member of the EU.

The message from within Turkey is that domestic policy should be a higher priority than foreign policy. Many Turks feel that membership of the UN security council and roles in facilitating Nato interventions in external conflicts distract their government from crucial issues at home. They also feel the praise heaped on Turkey from abroad as a model of democratic reform is not yet warranted and may be counterproductive – there is still lots to get right. They hope Erdoğan will continue to give more attention to Turkish citizens’ expectations and social rights as part of a continuing momentum towards a freer and more inclusive society.

“Is Islam a ‘democratic’ religion?”

“Is Islam compatible with democracy?”

“What is the relationship between religion and governance in a Muslim country?”

For the past decade, Americans have increasingly questioned whether Islam and democracy are compatible. What many participants to the debate do not realize is that a similar debate took place more than a century-and-a-half ago amongst Ottoman intellectuals. American scholars were triggered to focus on this huge topic after a traumatic incident: the September 11 attacks and the necessity to re-define the global role of the United States. Ottoman scholars also wrote extensively on the same question after suffering another traumatic incident: successive Ottoman military defeats in the hands of Christian-European powers (most notably the Russian Empire) through the 19th century. Back then, Ottoman scholars asked this question in reference to progress: “Is Islam an inherently backward religion?” They also questioned its compatibility with more liberal and progressive governance models, such as constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Ottoman scholars believed that Islam was no more or no less advanced than either Christianity or Judaism, pointing to the scientific, literary and administrative advances made by the Muslim scholars which surpassed those made in the Christian realm throughout the medieval and post-medieval era.  These scholars had then asserted that the culprit was not Islam, but the way in which the religious clergy and its institutions interacted with the decision-making apparatus of the empire.

What then, was the role of Islam in a democratically conceived society? The question was posited in reverse by the famous Ottoman thinker Namik Kemal: “What is the role of democracy in an Islamically conceived society?” One must keep in mind that the main defining element here was the ‘Islamic society’ (ummah = community) since the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was also the Caliph (the leader of the Islamic community – a title assumed by the Ottoman sultans since 1517) and the dual title of the sultan-caliph meant that the religious-dynastic identity was the raison d’être of the Ottoman state. The sultan, apart from being the head of state, was the protector and enforcer of the Islamic law through legal bureaucracy; equal and just enforcement of this law (at least in discourse) was key for the empire to keep its sovereignty over a vast area of Muslim land. Due to this critical role that the sultan had to play, Ottoman thinkers had to demote democracy and make it secondary to the primary identity of religion: Islam was the ultimate identity and therefore, would not be subservient to any other authority or ideology. The closest political answer to these questions was constitutional monarchy. At that time, most Ottoman statesmen and thinkers had considered Islam and democracy to be compatible, but not equal.  The primary state identity had to be Islam and constitutionalism could be practiced as long as it did not breach the jurisdiction of Islam. What an Islamically conceived Ottoman state could do was to accept the freedom of religion, not because religion should be implemented as the basis of the state, but because it was the duty of the state to safeguard freedom. Freeing the conscience completely could only be effected, however, when the theocratic concept was eliminated from the body of the religious outlook.

The question then boiled down to: “Is Islam conceivable in a democratically constituted state?” Would a democratic state, as a polity incompatible with theocracy, recognize the demand to subordinate itself to religion as a right to be exercised on the principle of democratic freedom?

The assumption of the sovereignty of the people thus implied a religious view that was not merely residual to the political principle but rather an inherent part of it. The manner in which religion had become institutionalized in Turkey made it appear as though the question had implications for the whole of social existence. However, the constitutional monarchy as practiced under the well-known sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) was not good enough for the more progressive voices within the empire. The revolution of the Ottoman progressives (the Young Turks; later institutionalized under the umbrella organization Committee of Union and Progress – CUP) in 1908 was launched specifically to further limit the role of the sultan and the clerical institutions in the decision-making system and to check the power of the sultan via a politically organized parliament. The more radical wing of the CUP to which the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal belonged, were highly educated in Western standards with expertise in the social sciences, Islamic law and its practice. They saw very little utility in trying to retain the Islamic character of the state and asserted that the decision-making process had to be devoid of clerical interests. The idea of a secular republic as the primary identity of a modern state and the strict privatization of religious practice was, therefore, the final answer to the debate on the compatibility of Islam with democracy that was ongoing within Ottoman intellectual circles for almost two centuries.

However, once the Turkish War of Independence was won and the Kemalist revolutionaries became the ruling elite of modern Turkey, the same question – what is the role of Islam in a democratically constituted state –now had to be answered in a practical way. Just like the dilemma faced by Sultan Abdulhamid II, the new state would have to accept religious freedom, not because religion should be implemented as the basis of the state, but because it was the duty of the state to safeguard freedom. So that raised another question: “Would democracy, as a polity incompatible with theocracy, recognize the demand to subordinate it to religion as a right to be exercised on the principle of democratic freedom?” On the one hand, under the regime of popular sovereignty, this dilemma gave hope to religious enlightenment. On the other, it became the surrogate of a national existence, one of moral re-integration. Mustafa Kemal’s construction of secularism and the answer given by the Turkish history to the question ‘Is Islam compatible with democracy?’ took its final shape within the interaction of these two approaches.

The first (rationalist) approach was based upon a view shared by the Westernists and Islamists – the belief that Islam was a natural and rational religion. The idea of Islamic rationality for example was a deistic conviction for Mustafa Kemal. For him, the abolition of the Caliphate meant liberating Islam from the unreasonable traditional associates and interests of its clerical institution, preparing the ground for its emergence as a rational religion. Mustafa Kemal had understood the role of religion in the life of the people during the struggle for national liberation and had seen how dangerous religious fanaticism could be in moments of national disaster. He had, at the same time, felt the role of religion as a spontaneous expression of popular unity in consolidating national efforts. On the other hand, he had witnessed how the deep ignorance of the interpreters of religion was influencing the character of an entire umma and pushing Muslims further away from what he called ‘a genuine spiritual enlightenment’. The crux of all Mustafa Kemal’s experiments, according to him, was not to ‘Turkify’ Islam for the sake of Turkish nationalism, but to ‘Turkify’ Islam for the sake of religious enlightenment. His persistent objective – the one revoking the most severe denunciations from the clergy, the Islamists and the repositories of the secrets of the Arabic of the Qur’an – was to cut the ground out from under those vested interests claiming an exclusive monopoly over the understanding and interpretation of what they too claimed to be a natural and rational religion.

Therefore, Ataturk’s answer to the ‘Islam vs. democracy’ question was essentially: eradication of all religious ‘middlemen’, their brotherhoods and sects, thereby in his own way opening the individual’s way to personal enlightenment both spiritually and socially. This, however, was a practice that would be defined in today’s terms as ‘undemocratic’ and even ‘despotic’ by some; both of which were justifiable through the Kemalist period – republicanism is not the same thing as democracy. The latter point became a point of massive dispute between Mustafa Kemal and his wartime comrade-in-arms. While Mustafa Kemal wanted the new state to be a republican one, so that the influence of the clergy in the decision-making would be minimal, some of his associates criticized him, arguing that a republic is not necessarily more democratic than a constitutional monarchy.

With regard to Islam as practiced in the Arab-Middle East, Ottoman progressives took a stance that was surprisingly closer to today’s American neo-conservatism. As mentioned earlier, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the political organization Mustafa Kemal belonged to in his earlier career, was an alliance of devout Muslims as well as agnostics, who saw a need to minimize the political and social influence of Islam, without eliminating individual the religious liberties and practice of religion. Yet, especially the CUP went through a process of mentality shift, as a result of which it had attempted to bypass religious (Islamic) identity with an ethno-linguistic one. This in turn, had resulted in their Turkification attempts on Sunni-Arabs in the Middle East during World War I; a policy that emerged as  one of the primary reasons for the Arab Revolt of 1916. The ‘impossibility of saving the Arabs’ had also been pointed out by Mustafa Kemal himself, who had led several Arab divisions before and during World War I. His experiences with the Arab divisions of the Ottoman Empire caused him to grow increasingly more frustrated with the role of Islamic misinterpretation and the dominance of the Islamic clergy, which ended up pursuing its own political agenda, tainting the primary goal of spiritual guidance with political tutelage.

This is why the American question: ‘can Islam co-exist with democracy?’ was answered both as ‘yes’ and ‘no’ by Ottoman-Turkish history, whose final decision on the matter was Kemalist secularism in which transformative republicanism (not necessarily democratic) was upheld over Islam and also over democracy. In other words, while the Kemalist intention was to save democracy from the tutelage of the Islamic state, it ended up replacing democratic tutelage with republican-secularism. This caused democracy to be gradually picked up by the disaffected Islamist segments of the society marginalized by the Kemalist practice of secularism, which then tried to reformulate a new answer to the Islam-democracy debate on constructing Islamic expression from the viewpoint of the individual and of social liberty. Kemalist secularism however, should not be confused with being anti-Islamic, atheist or even agnostic; one of the key aspects of Kemalism was to eradicate religious institutionalism, not as an anti-Islamic move, but rather as a move that aimed to ‘purify’ Islam of the hold of clerical institutions, and instead allowing the individual to study and practice religion in an introverted and private matter.

Therefore, today’s Islam-democracy debate in the United States, especially the policy debate in Washington, is largely elementary and redundant. Many of the questions posited by American scholars were answered by 19th century Ottoman political literature and early Turkish republican reform efforts; re-inventing this wheel can be prevented by focusing instead on another question: “Is democracy possible in a country ruled by a rentierstate?” A scholar can discover a more satisfying pattern by looking at the role of capital mobility in state-society relations in non or under-democratic countries in the Middle East.

* First Published at FAIR OBSERVER and AKINUNVER.com

**H. Akin Unver is the Ertegun Lecturer in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

My ears perked at the first sound of staccato drumbeats as we waited for dinner in Istanbul last month. The rhythmic chant over a bullhorn moved me to my feet on our last night in Turkey. Our already extremely educational vacation in the Muslim nation where East meets West was about to turn eye-opening. A protest was passing by.

The Middle East was not in turmoil when my wife, Diane, and I planned our trip last year. Istanbul would give us a chance, we thought, to observe a place where Islam is the religion of 99.8 percent of the people. With Turkey’s growing influence in Central Asia and the Middle East, with its so-far successful balance of Islam and secular government and with a dynamic, if developing, economy, we were drawn to learn.

….

Greg Johnson’s columns appear on Wednesdays, Fridays and the second Sunday of each month. Read more on his blog at . E-mail him at [email protected].

via Greg Johnson: Istanbul rally a reminder of democracy’s virtues » Knoxville News Sentinel.

JUST AT the moment that Turkey is being held up as a model for Arab states emerging from authoritarianism, its claim to be the Muslim world’s leading democracy is in danger. Don’t take it from us: Here is what the country’s president, Abdullah Gul, has to say: “The impression I get is that there are certain developments that the public conscience cannot accept. This is casting a shadow over the level that Turkey has reached and the image that is lauded by everyone.”

Mr. Gul was referring to the arrests last week of nine journalists and writers – at least seven of whom were subsequently jailed on charges of involvement in a coup plot against the moderate Islamist government of Mr. Gul’s Justice and Development (AK) party. That the president would publicly express concern shows that Turkey is still a ways from becoming the authoritarian regime that its domestic and foreign critics describe. But it is clearly headed in the wrong direction.

The recent arrests are a good example of what sometimes looks like an assault on liberal democratic values. Four of the journalists work for an anti-government news Web site whose owner was arrested last month; two others were prominent investigative journalists whose work made authorities uncomfortable. One was working on a book about the alleged penetration of security forces by a hard-line Islamist group.

All are charged with participating in a shadowy conspiracy called Ergenekon, which allegedly plotted to overthrow the AK government. Since 2007, more than 400 suspects have been arrested or put on trial in the steadily expanding investigation – including more than one-tenth of the serving generals in the Turkish army as well as academics and politicians from the secular establishment that ruled Turkey before the AK came to power in 2002. Turkey’s journalist association says that 58 journalists have been imprisoned and that thousands could face charges.

There’s no question that some generals, judges and others hoped to force the AK from power by undemocratic means. But there are also abundant indications that the prosecutors pursuing the Ergenekon investigation are overreaching. Much of the evidence they have marshaled looks flimsy and even fabricated. When journalists point out the weaknesses in the case or protest the arrest of their colleagues, the investigators take this as evidence that they, too, have joined the supposed plot.

It’s good that Mr. Gul spoke up. But the real power is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who does not seem discomfited by the media crackdown. Claiming that his government has nothing to do with the prosecutions, Mr. Erdogan nevertheless hotly criticized U.S. Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone Jr. when he questioned arrests of journalists last month, calling him – incorrectly – a “rookie” ambassador who knew nothing about Turkey.

Properly, the State Department backed Mr. Ricciardone and said again last week that the Obama administration has “concerns about trends in Turkey.” Mr. Erdogan, who doesn’t hide his ambitions for regional and even global leadership, ought to be concerned as well. If Turkey ceases to become a functioning democracy with unquestionably free media, neither Arab states nor anyone else will look to Turkey as a mentor.

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkish writers and the country’s president questioned this week’s arrest of several high-profile journalists, amid dwindling support for Turkish prosecutors’ investigation into an alleged secret terrorist organization within the state.

Prosecutors this week formally arrested six journalists and a writer on charges they belonged to the alleged organization, known as Ergenekon, which is accused of attempting to destabilize Turkey and topple its leaders.

Ever since authorities launched the Ergenekon investigation in 2007, Turks have been polarized by the case. Some have seen it as overdue justice against a “deep state” of military and security officials, academics, journalists and others. Other Turks have viewed the probe as a government tool to crush opponents.

Hundreds of defendants have so far been indicted in the case. Nobody has been convicted.

Those charged this week include Ahemet Sik and Nedim Sener, two journalists with records of uncovering human-rights abuses and exposing the deep state—the group they now stand accused of working for.

“Ahmet Sik is a symbol. He is well known,” Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a newspaper columnist who has supported the Ergenekon investigation, said by telephone Wednesday. “He always took correct positions and fought against the deep state. So it was shocking for all of us to see he was implicated in this investigation.”

The newest arrests reignited charges that the government is failing to protect press freedom and has led some to worry over the future development of the rule of law in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim nation often held up as a model democracy for the Middle East.

In a rare criticism of the case from top officials, President Abdullah Gul expressed his “concern” over the arrests in an interview wıth Mr. Sener’s newspaper, Milliyet, on Sunday, describing them as “developments that the public conscience cannot accept.”

“When even President Abdullah Gul goes to the limits of his office to express his concerns, something big is happening,” Jost Lagendijk, another supporter of the Ergenekon case, wrote Wednesday in the pro-government newspaper Today’s Zaman. This week’s arrests had “shattered that trust” in the prosecutors, he wrote.

One of the arrested men, Mr. Sener, received the International Press Institute’s World Press Hero award last year, for his book about the 2007 assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. In the book, Mr. Sener sought to expose links between the murder and state security forces.

Columnist Mr. Cengiz said he still believes the Ergenekon case is essential to entrench Turkey’s democracy. He noted that unsolved assassinations such as Mr. Dink’s, which plagued Turkey for decades, have all but ceased since the investigation started.

“The prosecutors started to lose their direction and have started to see people who criticize the case as therefore members of Ergenekon themselves. It is very dangerous,” Mr. Cengiz said.

Mr. Sik recently wrote a book about the Ergenekon case, concluding the investigation has disappointed democracy advocates by focusing too broadly and on recent alleged plots, rather than on actual crimes conducted in the past.

The prosecutors’ office said in a statement that none of the journalists had been arrested in connection with their legitimate activity as journalists, and that the judicial process should be allowed to take its course.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday the arrests were a judicial affair and shouldn’t be used to tar the government.

Prosecutors have declined to reveal the evidence based on which they arrested Messrs. Sik and Sener, citing “the confidentiality of the case.” However, transcripts of his interrogation leaked to the media show that questioning centered almost entirely on a book he was planning to publish ahead of national elections on June 12.

“Ahmet Sik is a journalist and can write a book about anyone and anything,” Mr. Sik’s lawyer, Fikret Ilkiz said in an interview, adding that he has advised Mr. Sik to go ahead with publishing. “It is hard to understand how this can be considered a crime.”

According to the interrogation transcript, a copy of Mr. Sik’s forthcoming book was discovered during a raid on the offices of OdaTV, a nationalist website that is critical of the government. Prosecutors allege that OdaTV was a propaganda wing of Ergenekon, and their questions to Mr. Sik suggest they believe he was working with OdaTV to produce the book.

Mr. Ilkiz said he couldn’t confirm news reports that the book would be about an alleged takeover from within of Turkey’s police force by followers of Fetullah Gulen, a U.S.-based imam whose religious group critics say has close ties to the government. Mr. Ilkis said the book features statements by several police chiefs.

—Erkan Oz contributed to this article.

Write to Marc Champion at [email protected]

via Arrests of Turkish Journalists Spur Backlash – WSJ.com.