Turkish Forum

Tag: Ergenekon

  • Turkey’s future Flags, veils and sharia

    Turkey’s future Flags, veils and sharia

    Turkey’s future

    Flags, veils and sharia

    Jul 17th 2008 | ANKARA, KARS AND TOKAT
    From The Economist print edition

    Behind the court case against Turkey’s ruling party lies an existential question: how Islamist has the country become?

    EPA  

    A MARBLE fountain held up by bare-breasted maidens in the eastern city of Kars is a source of pride for the city’s mayor, Naif Alibeyoglu. Yet last November the sculpture vanished a few days before a planned visit to Kars by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Fearful of incurring the wrath of Mr Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the mayor (himself an AKP man) reportedly arranged for its removal.

    In the event, the prime minister never arrived—and the fountain came back. The incident may be testimony to the prudery of Mr Erdogan, and of the AKP more broadly. But could it also be evidence of their desire to steer Turkey towards sharia law? The country’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, might say so. In March he petitioned the constitutional court to ban the AKP and to bar Mr Erdogan and 70 other named AKP officials, including the president, Abdullah Gul, from politics, on the ground that they are covertly seeking to establish an Islamist theocracy.

     

    Turkey has been in upheaval ever since. After hearings earlier this month, a verdict is expected soon, maybe in early August. Most observers expect it to go against the AKP. Turkey has banned no fewer than 24 parties in the past 50 years, including the AKP’s two forerunners. In 23 of these cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the bans violated its charter.

    Yet Mr Yalcinkaya’s indictment lacks hard evidence to show that the AKP is working to reverse secular rule. Much of his case rests on the words, not the actions, of Mr Erdogan and his lieutenants. Among Mr Erdogan’s listed “crimes” is his opinion that “Turkey as a modern Muslim nation can serve as an example for the harmony of civilisations.” That is hardly a call for jihad. The AKP has promoted Islamic values, but it has never attempted to pass laws inspired by the Koran.

    None of this seems to impress Turkey’s meddlesome generals, who are widely believed to be the driving force behind the “judicial coup” against the AKP. This follows the “e-coup” they threatened last year by issuing a warning on the internet against making Mr Gul president. Some renegade generals are also involved in the so-called Ergenekon group; 86 members were charged this week with plotting a coup (see article).

    The generals and their allies believe that nothing less than the future of Ataturk’s secular republic is at stake. Similar rumblings were heard when the now defunct pro-Islamic Welfare party first came to power in 1996. It was ejected a year later in a bloodless “velvet coup” and banned on similar charges to those now levelled at the AKP. But with each intervention the Islamists come back stronger.

    Unlike their pro-secular rivals, Islamists have been able to reinvent themselves to appeal to a growing base of voters. Nobody has done this more successfully than Mr Erdogan with the AKP. An Islamic cleric by training, Mr Erdogan became Istanbul’s mayor when Welfare won a municipal election in 1994. He was booted out in 1997, and jailed briefly a year later for reciting a nationalist poem in public that was deemed to incite “religious hatred”.

     

    It was a turning-point. Mr Erdogan defected from Welfare with fellow moderates to found the AKP in 2001. He and his friends said that they no longer believed in mixing religion with politics and that Turkish membership of the European Union was the AKP’s chief goal. And when the AKP won the general election of November 2002, it formed a single-party government that did something unusual for Turkey: it kept its word.

    The death penalty was abolished; the army’s powers were trimmed; women were given more rights than at any time since Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish state, made both sexes equal before the law. Despite Mr Erdogan’s calls for women to have “at least three children”, abortion remains legal and easy. This silent revolution eventually shamed the EU into opening formal membership talks with Turkey in 2005, an achievement that had eluded all the AKP’s predecessors in government.

    The government’s economic record was impressive, too. The economy bounced back from its nadir in 2001, growing by a steady average annual rate of 6% or more. Inflation was tamed (though it has crept back up recently). Above all, foreign direct investment, previously paltry, hit record levels. For a while, Turkey seemed to have become a stable and prosperous sort of place. That is surely why 47% of voters backed the AKP in July 2007, a big jump from only 34% in 2002.

    Many see the campaign to topple the AKP as part of a long battle pitting an old guard, used to monopolising wealth and power, against a rising class of pious Anatolians symbolised by the AKP. Others say it is mostly about an army that believes soldiers, not elected politicians, should have the final say over how the country is run.

     

    Yet the real struggle “is between Islam and modernity”, says Ismail Kara, a respected Islamic theologian. Adapting to the modern world without compromising their religious values is a dilemma that has long vexed Muslims. For Turkey the challenge is also to craft an identity that can embrace all its citizens, whether devout Muslims, hard-core secularists, Alevis or Kurds. If the generals had their way, everyone would be happy to call himself a Turk, all would refrain from public displays of piety and nobody would ever challenge their authority. But the Kemalist straitjacket no longer fits the modern country. Opinion polls suggest that most Turks now identify themselves primarily as Muslims, not as Turks. The AKP did not create this mindset: rather, it was born from it.

    The caliph of Istanbul

    Islam has been intertwined with Turkishness ever since the Ottoman Sultan adopted the title of “Caliph”, or spiritual leader, of the world’s Muslims almost six centuries ago. When Ataturk abolished the caliphate in 1924 and launched his secular revolution, he did not efface piety; he drove it underground. Turkey’s brand of secularism is not about separating religion from the state, as in France. It is about subordinating religion to the state. This is done through the diyanet, the state-run body that appoints imams to Turkey’s 77,000 mosques and tells them what to preach, even sometimes writing their sermons.

    In the early days of Ataturk’s republic, the façade of modernity was propped up by zealous Kemalists, who fanned out on civilising missions across Anatolia. They would drink wine and dance the Charleston at officers’ clubs in places like Kars. “My grandmother, she told me about the balls, the beautiful dresses. Kars was such a modern place then,” sighs Arzu Orhankazi, a feminist activist. In truth, life outside the cities continued much as before: deeply traditional and desperately poor.

    A big reason why Anatolia seemed less Islamist in the old days is because it was home to a large and vibrant community of Christians. But this demographic balance was brutally overturned by the mass killings and expulsions of Armenians and Greeks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Take Tokat, a leafy northern Anatolian town where Armenians made up nearly a third of the population before 1915. The only trace that remains of a once thriving Armenian community is a derelict cemetery overgrown with weeds and desecrated by treasure-hunting locals.

    Much of this history is overlooked by the secular elite. Pressed for evidence of creeping Islamisation under the AKP, they point to the growing number of women who wear the headscarf, which is proscribed as a symbol of Islamic militancy in state-run institutions and schools. Mr Erdogan’s attempt to lift the ban for universities, which was later overturned by the constitutional court, is a big part of Mr Yalcinkaya’s case against him and the AKP.

    Yet surveys suggest that, except for a small group of militant pro-secularists, most Turks do not oppose Islamic headgear, least of all in universities. Its proliferation probably has little to do with Islamist fervour, but is linked to the influx of rural Anatolians into towns and cities. The exodus from the countryside accelerated under Turgut Ozal, a former prime minister who liberalised the economy in the early 1980s. For conservative families, covering their daughters’ heads became a way of protecting them in a new and alien world.

    Once urbanisation is complete the headscarf will begin to fade, says Faruk Birtek, a sociologist at Istanbul’s Bogazici University. Bogazici was always refreshingly unbothered by students with headscarves. But the rules were tightened in the 1990s. And around the time the constitutional court in June overturned the new AKP law to let women with headscarves attend university, Bogazici’s liberal female director was squeezed out.

    Like many, Summeye Kavuncu, a sociology student at Bogazici, has been caught in the net. She complains that her stomach “gets all knotty each time I go to university. I no longer know whether to keep my scarf on or to take it off. The secularists look upon us as cockroaches, backward creatures who blot their landscape.” Few would guess that Ms Kavuncu belongs to a band of pious activists who dare to speak up for gays and transvestites.

    Social and class snobbery may partly drive the secularists’ contempt for their pious peers. But it is ignorance that drives their fear. Bridging these worlds can be tricky, “because Islam is not like other religions, it’s a 24-hour lifestyle,” comments Yilmaz Ensaroglu, an Islamic intellectual. “Devout Muslims pray five times a day.”

    Wine, women and schools

    The biggest fault-lines in Turkey’s sharpening secular/religious divide concern alcohol, women and education. When Welfare rose to power in the 1990s, one of its first acts was to ban booze in restaurants run by municipalities under its control. Party officials argued that pious citizens had the right to affordable leisure space that did not offend their values. Some AKP mayors have pushed this line further. They want to exile drinkers to “red zones” outside their cities. A newly prosperous class of devout Muslims is creating its own gated communities, and a growing number of hotels boast segregated beaches and no liquor. A survey shows that the number of such retreats has quadrupled under the AKP. Taha Erdem, a respected pollster, says the number of women wearing the turban, the least revealing headscarf of all, has quadrupled too.

    All this is feeding secularist paranoia about creeping Islam. Are these fears justified? In the big cities conservative Anatolians are expanding their living space. But this is not at the secularists’ expense. Life for urban middle-class Turks, and certainly for the rich, continues much as before. It is in rural backwaters that freewheeling Turks fall prey to what Serif Mardin, a respected sociologist, calls “neighbourhood pressure”. For instance, Tarsus, a sleepy eastern Mediterranean town (and birthplace of St Paul), made headlines recently when two teenage girls were attacked by syringe-wielding assailants who sprayed their legs with an acid-like substance because their skirts were “too short”.

    Habits in the workplace are changing too. Female school teachers have been reprimanded for wearing short-sleeved blouses. During the Ramadan fast last year the governor’s office in Kars stopped serving tea for a while. Secular Turks contend that Islam will inevitably wrest more space from their lives and must be reined in now. With no credible opposition in sight, many look to the army as secularism’s last defender.

    So do many of Turkey’s estimated 15m Alevis, who practise an idiosyncratic form of Islam: they do not pray in mosques, they are not teetotal and their women do not cover their heads. The government has not kept its promise formally to recognise Alevi houses of worship, called cemevler. Nor has it heeded Alevi demands for their children to be exempted from compulsory religious-education classes that are dominated by Sunni Islam. “There is a systematic campaign to brainwash us, to make us Sunnis,” complains Muharrem Erkan, an Alevi activist in Tokat.

    The battle for Turkey’s soul is being waged most fiercely in the country’s schools. Egitim-Sen, a leftist teachers’ union, charges that Islam has been permeating textbooks under the AKP. Darwin’s theory of evolution is being whittled away and creationism is seeping in. Islamist fraternities, or tarikat, continue to ensnare students by offering free accommodation. The quid pro quo is that they fast and pray, and girls cover their heads.

    Yet the biggest boost to religious education came from the army itself, after it seized power for the third time in 1980. Communism was the enemy at the time, so the generals encouraged Islam as an antidote. Religious teaching became mandatory. Islamic clerical-training schools, known as imam hatip, mushroomed.

    Another example of how army meddling goes awry is Hizbullah, Turkey’s deadliest home-grown Islamic terrorist outfit. Hizbullah (no relation to its Lebanese namesake) is alleged to have been encouraged by rogue security forces in the late 1980s to fight separatist PKK rebels in the Kurdish south-east. The group spiralled out of control until police raids in 2001 knocked it out of action. But not entirely. Former Hizbullah militants are said to have regrouped in cells linked to al-Qaeda, and took part in the 2003 bombings of Jewish and British targets in Istanbul.

    Banning the AKP could strengthen the hand of such extremists, who share the fierce secularists’ belief that Islam and democracy cannot co-exist. If instead the AKP stayed in power, that would bring Islamists closer to the mainstream. “Six years in government has tempered even the most radical AKP members,” comments Mr Ensaroglu. True enough. AKP members of parliament wear Zegna suits and happily shake women’s hands; their wives get nose jobs and watch football matches; their children are more likely to study English than the Koran.

    Had Mr Erdogan made an effort to reach out to secular Turks, “we might not be where we are today,” concedes a senior AKP official. He missed several chances. The first came last autumn when the AKP was trying to patch together a new constitution to replace the one written by the generals in the 1980s. Mr Erdogan never bothered to consult his secular opponents. He ignored them again when passing his law to let girls wear headscarves at universities. Critics say that his big election win turned his head. “Erdogan accepts no advice and no criticism,” whispers an AKP deputy. “He’s become a tyrant.”

    Maybe he has. But that does not mean he deserves to be barred from politics, and his party banned.

  • The Plot Against Turkey

    The Plot Against Turkey

    The Ergenekon case is the latest salvo in the battle between the ruling AKP and the nationalist old guard.

    By Mustafa Akyol | NEWSWEEK
    Jul 21, 2008 Issue

    Things are getting very hot this summer in Turkey—and it’s not just the weather. A long-simmering constitutional crisis is boiling over, and the country is experiencing one of its most turbulent periods in decades. Over the past several weeks, Turkish authorities have arrested two dozen members of a covert ultranationalist group named Ergenekon for allegedly plotting to provoke a military coup by staging political assassinations and whipping up social turmoil. Among the plotters: two retired top generals, the leader of a paramilitary group, and Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who has sued dozens of liberal intellectuals in the past for violating Turkey’s law against “insulting Turkishness.”

    The Ergenekon case is only the latest salvo in a political war between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Turkey’s nationalist and staunchly secularist old guard. The charges, if proved, point to a brazen conspiracy to undo the liberal reforms implemented by the AKP in recent years as part of its effort to move Turkey toward entry into the European Union. The plot seems to have grown out of fears that have been growing among Turkey’s nationalists since 2004, when the nation’s accession process began, and nationalists realized that as well as offering some economic advantages, the process could require Turkey to grant concessions on Cyprus, give greater freedoms to minorities and develop a more democratic political system.

    This battle is sometimes defined in the Western media as a tension between “Islamists” and “secularists,” but both terms are misleading. While AKP leaders, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, share an Islamist past, they abandoned that years ago and redefined themselves as “conservative democrats” who champion free markets, traditional (including religious) values and pro-EU reforms. Since it came to power in November 2002, the AKP has proved highly successful, winning a solid electoral victory in July 2007. Socially, the AKP represents Turkey’s economically minded masses, religious conservatives—including the rising “Islamic bourgeoisie” —and even most Kurds. As for those labeled secularists, they are not what one might think. Turkey’s definition of secularism is based not on the separation of mosque and state, but the dominance of the latter over the former—all mosques are simply run by the government. Secularist ideologues argue that the state also needs to safeguard society from religion. The Constitutional Court, one of the enforcers of this ideology, ruled in 1989 that “society should be kept away from thoughts and judgments that are not based on science and reason.” The result is a complete banishment of religion from the public square, including a ban on religious symbols such as headscarves.

     This illiberal secularism goes back to the formative years of the Turkish republic, born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He and his followers were deeply influenced by the French Enlightenment, and were convinced that the influence of religion must be swept away from society. Ethnic and cultural diversity were seen as threats—hence the decision to “Turkify” the Kurds. The Kemalists’ project was in fact a cultural revolution and a government they defined as “for the people, in spite of the people.”

    Though the Kemalists succeeded in building a strong state, most of the undesired social groups—such as pious Muslims and the Kurds—persisted in their demands for freedom and democracy. Yet Turkey’s establishment, represented by the military and the high courts and supported by urban elites, remains attached to Kemalism, which has turned into a rigid ideology perpetuated by an official cult of personality. The reverence shown to Ataturk, evident in his omnipresent image and oft-repeated mantras, approaches the level of leader worship you see in places like North Korea. The Ergenekon gang seems to have been an attempt by the most radical extreme secularists to preserve the old regime, which has given the old elite unchecked power and privilege. Cengiz Aktar, a liberal EU advocate, likens the plot to the coup attempted by Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero in Spain in 1981, when he stormed Parliament to halt the EU accession process and restore the Francoist regime.

    Like Tejero, the alleged Ergenekon conspiracy has failed. But the ideology behind it persists. One clear sign is the shocking case launched by Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, against the AKP four months ago. Defining the party “as an anti-secular threat to the regime,” he asked the Constitutional Court to close the party and ban from politics 71 of its members, including Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, a former AKP member. Their crimes, according to Yalcinkaya, include passing a constitutional amendment to allow headscarves in universities, and comments by Erdogan such as “Turkey needs a more liberal secularism like the American one.” The notoriously illiberal Constitutional Court is expected to give its verdict on AKP’s fate sometime in August. If the AKP prevails, it will likely continue on the path to the EU. But should the court rule against the party, it will also in the process strike a major blow to Turkish democracy and the country’s EU dreams. There will no longer be any need for gangs like Ergenekon; the coup will have been realized by legal means.

    Akyol is the deputy editor of the Turkish Daily News.

  • Turkey crisis: Hopes of democracy are hanging in the balance

    Turkey crisis: Hopes of democracy are hanging in the balance

    • Sunday July 6, 2008
    • Article history

    It is too soon to know how the battle between the AKP and the secular establishment will play itself out, but, while we wait, spare a thought for Turkey’s beleaguered democrats.

    They include the scholars who have questioned the very foundations of official history, the lawyers who have challenged its infamous penal code, the writers, journalists, translators and publishers who have refused to be intimidated by that code, the nationwide alliances of feminist and human rights activists, and the musicians and memoirists who defy official ideology by celebrating their multicultural roots.

    I could go on. These are loose-knit networks: though many go back several decades, it was when EU accession began to look like a real possibility, in the mid to late 1990s, that they came into their own. What they saw in the EU bid was a chance for a bloodless revolution – a measured reform of its repressive state bureaucracies, a democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem, and an end to what polite political scientists call tutelary democracy.

    In the Turkish context, they mean a democracy in which the army has the last word, involving itself in the day-to-day running of government and stepping in to shut it down whenever it deems it to have strayed from the righteous path.

    Many of those who would like to see Turkey become a real democracy are veterans of its political prisons. Some did time after the 1971 coup, others were imprisoned after the much more brutal coup in 1980. A significant number did two stints in prison and/or were forced to spend time in exile. Quite a few bear the marks of torture. By and large, they are secularist in background, education and temperament, but in the past decade they have worked in parallel with Islamist groups that support democratic pluralism and oppose militarist secularism. Whatever their views on religion, a large number of Turkey’s democrats supported the AKP in the last two elections. They did so because they saw it as the party most likely to challenge the status quo.

    And so it has. Not since the founding of the republic has any government challenged the military with such daring. But its defence of free expression and the rights of others has been patchy. In 2005 and 2006 it largely condoned the prosecution of more than a hundred of Turkey’s most prominent writers, publishers and scholars.

    It did not speak against relentless media hate campaigns that have resulted in most of the Turkish public seeing the 301 defendants as public enemies. It did not offer any protection to the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. After Dink’s assassination, it did assign round-the-clock protection to the most prominent 301 defendants. But do not assume that they are safe. They put their lives at risk every time they speak, wherever they speak. A casual aside in Kansas City one day will appear under bold and distorting headlines in the Turkish press the next, alongside pleas for civil society to ‘silence them for good’.

    Does democracy have a future in Turkey? A lot depends on the Ergenekon indictment; a lot more depends on the outcome of the case against the AKP. But for me the litmus test is whether or not Turkey’s democrats can press for change without facing prosecution, persecution and (all too often) death.

    · Maureen Freely is a novelist and writer. She translated ‘Snow’ by Orhan Pamuk

  • Turkish coup plot awakens fear of violent nationalism

    Turkish coup plot awakens fear of violent nationalism

    [Guardian – 6.7.2008]
    Evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow the pro-Western Islamist government has laid bare the resentment of the country’s secular elite in a divided country, reports Robert Tait in Istanbul

    A pro secular demonstrator chants slogans against the government in Istanbul. Photograph: Tolga Bozoglu/EPA

    In a recent declaration, Turkish nationalists identified what they described as the ‘six arrows’ of the country’s proper identity: nationalism, secularism, statism, republicanism, populism and revolutionism. Judging by the events of last week, it is the last arrow – revolution – that has preoccupied the more radical in recent months.

    In an extraordinary raid which led to the arrests of 21 people allegedly tied to Ergenekon, a shadowy nationalist grouping, police uncovered documents that revealed plans for a sustained campaign of terror and intimidation against the Islamist government due to begin this week. A perfect storm of disruption was to be whipped up, beginning with a groundswell of popular protest, followed by a wave of assassinations and bombings, culminating in an economic crisis and army coup. Turkey’s moderate Islamist government would be ousted in favour of a right-wing secular dictatorship. The documents appeared to identify a 30-member assassination squad targeting judges and other prominent figures.

    The episode is only the latest trauma to convulse the Turkish body politic. As the raids took place, the AKP government, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, was defending itself in court from accusations that it is trying to transform Turkey into a hardline Islamic state. If the AKP fails to convince the judges, 71 leading figures in the party, including Erdogan and Gul, risk being banned from politics for five years. Increasingly, Turkish democracy appears vulnerable to a vicious power struggle between a secular establishment and the affluent but religiously conservative middle class.

    According to Professor Soli Ozel, of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, the more fanatical nationalists are determined to bring down the AKP, which despite its Islamist origins is pro-Western and pro-EU. ‘They are trying to pump up a modern urban Turkish nationalism with a racist tinge,’ said Ozel. ‘They are anti-Western and want to ally Turkey with Russia, China and even Iran. It’s very schizophrenic and full of paradoxes.’

    The Ergenekon group is named after a legendary mountain in Asia where the ancient Turks are said to have taken refuge from the Mongols. Those arrested in dawn raids in Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Trabzon included two recently retired army generals, Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon. Eruygur, a former head of the paramilitary gendarmerie for internal security, is chairman of the Kemalist Thought Association, a group dedicated to Ataturk’s ideals of modernism, which include subjugating religion to the state. He is believed to have played a central role in two previous failed coup attempts against the AKP, which was re-elected in a landslide last July. Nationalist lawyers, prominent secular journalists, far-right politicians and even a mafia boss have also been detained.

    The inquiry began after a cache of hand grenades was found in an Istanbul slum in June last year. Investigators claim to have since uncovered evidence of a motley coalition of secular nationalists colluding in a catalogue of past atrocities, including bomb attacks, a grenade attack on a newspaper and the murder last year of a Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink. The alleged aim was to destabilise the AKP government by creating a climate of chaos.

    Critics were quick to question the authenticity of the documents and accuse the AKP of instigating a witchhunt against its opponents, using its friends in the police. Nevertheless the detention of two former senior army commanders carried huge symbolic weight in a country where the military has always played the decisive political role since Ataturk established the modern Turkish state in 1923.

    So, too, did the timing. The arrests came hours before the chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, appeared before the constitutional court in Ankara to argue that the AKP should be closed for allegedly undermining Turkey’s secular system. The case against the AKP is contained in a 162-page indictment accusing the AKP of trying to create an Islamic state, a charge it denies.

    Given the conspiratorial game that Turkish politics has become, cynics are suggesting that the Ergenekon case will be used as a bargaining counter to ensure the survival of the AKP.

    The constitutional court had been widely expected to close the party when it delivers its verdict, probably next month. But with prosecutors saying they are ready to press terrorism-related charges against up to 60 suspects in the Ergenekon case, some suspect a deal has already been struck with moderate army commanders to try to avoid closure.

    Eruygur’s arrest inside a military residential compound may provide a clue, since many believe it could not have happened without army top brass approval. Erdogan recently met General Ilker Basbug, due to take over soon as head of the army. Basbug appealed for calm after last week’s arrests, but avoided condemning them. ‘We all have to be acting with more common sense, more carefully and more responsibly,’ he said.

    ‘The arrests were a pretty coup for the AKP,’ said Professor Ozel. ‘Many people think this couldn’t have happened without the tacit approval of the military, at least from the legalists within it. If there is a tacit agreement with the military and they are working with the Prime Minister, you can expect that the court has decided that the AKP is not such a big threat after all.’

    Whatever the outcome of the forthcoming battle of wills between Turkey’s nationalists and Islamists, the latest tremors in Turkey’s political landscape have revealed the enduring shadow of the country’s ‘deep state’. Secretive nationalist elements in the security apparatus are believed to have been behind a host of atrocities against the Kurds and other minorities, including the Alevis, a heterodox Islamic sect, during the 1990s. But, according to Ozel, if the Ergenekon trial ends in prosecutions ‘maybe that kind of nationalism in Turkey is going to weaken’.

    Who’s who in Turkey

    The AKP: In power for a year. Islamist, but has so far pursued a pro-Western agenda. In favour of Turkey becoming a member of the EU. Attempts to raise profile of Islam in Turkish society have led its opponents to accuse it of flouting Turkey’s secular constitution.

    Republican People’s party: The main parliamentary opposition. Secular and nationalist. Seen as hostile to the EU.

    The PKK: Outlawed Kurdish separatist party

    The judges: Trial involving AKP could lead to party being disbanded for instituting Islamic state.

    The military: Staged coup in 1980. Widely seen as responsible for fall of Islamist government in 1997

     

  • Turkey Not Ready To Recognize The Genocide Of Armenians by Gevorg Harutyunyan

    Turkey Not Ready To Recognize The Genocide Of Armenians by Gevorg Harutyunyan

     

    Turkey Not Ready To Recognize The Genocide Of Armenians

    by

    Gevorg Harutyunyan
    Hayots Ashkhar Daily, July 04, 2008 Armenia
    Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences, Turkologist Ruben Safrastyan is the interlocutor of “Hayots Ashkharh” daily.

    “Mr. Safrastyan at this stage of the geo-political developments what peculiarities do Armenian-Turkish relations have?”

    “We must record that Turkey’s attitude towards Armenia is at clarification stage in the condition of the aggravation of the country’s internal-political situation. As we know the ruling party “Justice and Development” is facing different charges.

    Besides that, recently the sector of the Turkish secret organization named “Ergenekon” was revealed. The goal of the organization is to stage a military coup d’tat in Turkey.

    Ex-military-men, influential figures, Generals and representatives of Turkish elite are the members of the before mentioned organization, by the name of a Turkish epos.

    In fact it is the regular attempt of the traditional Turkish kemaly elite to maintain power. The thing is there is a struggle between two pro-governmental groupings in Turkey. The newly formed elite united with the pro-governmental “Justice and Development” party is struggling against the kemaly elite that has been in power for decades.

    This struggle has created great tension in Turkey’s internal political life. In such conditions the government in power did certain steps regarding Armenian Turkish relations, aimed at gaining the support of the West, especially the USA. It is not a secret that for many years the USA puts pressure on Turkey to open the borders with Armenia.

    In this context, it’s worth mentioning that the victory of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barrack Obama is becoming quite possible.

    Turkish analysts preview that in this case it will be impossible to avert the adoption of resolution 106 in the Congress.

    It is not accidental that the representatives of Turkish Foreign Ministry met with Obama’s counselors, during which according to our information the Americans recommended their Turkish partners to elaborate another program of Armenian-Turkish relations. The Turks will most probably try to create delusion among American democracy as if they are doing their best to improve relations with Armenia.”

    “Why delusion? Doesn’t Turkish people, society, or the authorities want to have regular relations with Armenia?”

    “In my view Turkey is not ready for principled changed in their policy regarding Armenia. According to Turkey Armenia must announce that it doesn’t have any territorial demands towards Turkey and that it recognizes Kars agreement, that it is ready for unilateral concessions regarding Karabakh, refuses the goal of the recognition of the Genocide of Armenians and will remove this issue from its foreign policy.

    Of course the latter is the most important issue for Turkey. But we must also record that Armenian historians and the specialists have already recognized the fact of the Genocide. American scientist’s society doesn’t accept Turkish stance saying that the fact of the Genocide is disputable.

    The US leadership also accepts the fact of the Genocide, but not officially, taking into account their state interests. But in the very near future the USA will have to officially recognize the Genocide of Armenians. In this regard Turkey intimidates that it will break off with the USA and will use sanctions, but it is of course ridiculous. And the USA in its turn recommends Turkey not to lose face and to find serious solutions.”

    “Recently OSCE Parliamentary Assembly adopted Turkey’s proposal, according to which the Parliaments of the member countries must encourage the idea of the formation of the joint committees of the countries with disputable issues, to conduct historical investigations. Thus many issues will be solved.”

    “Still in 2005, when Erdoghan sent a letter to our President to set up a committee of historians, Armenia officially responded that we are ready to set up a committee to study all the spheres. In my view this is the only way to bilaterally discuss, all the existing problems and achieve results.

    In case of setting up a committee of historians, believe me, Armenia will never agree to making the issue of the Genocide of Armenians a matter of discussion. We are ready to discuss the reasons and consequences of the Genocide in the framework of historical facts. But before the discussion there should be a certain consensus. For scientific dispute there are certain principles that must be mutually agreed upon. Otherwise the discussion is senseless.”

  • Are The University Presidents Next?

    Are The University Presidents Next?

    Are The University Presidents Next?

    This time the radical Islamist Turkish daily Vakit targeted the secular university rectors [presidents] in today’s issue, with a front page headliner that read, “Pro-Coup Rectors In Panic”.

    Vakit claimed that the secular university presidents were “shaking in their boots out of fear” that they would be the next to be investigated, allegedly for their links to the “Ergenekon terrorist organization”. Vakit claimed that 15 of these professors had had a meeting with the detained Gen. Sener Eruygur in 2003, when he was the commander of the gendarmerie.

    For a long time the Islamist, pro-AKP media has been targeting certain names that were taken into police custody soon thereafter, raising suspicions that these media organs were being given information about the details of the investigation that by law should be conducted in secrecy.

    Source: Vakit, habervaktim.com, Turkey, July 3, 2008