Gulen - Turkish Forum

The Death of Turkey’s Democracy

-I no longer recognize Turkey, the country where I was raised and spend most of my time when I am not teaching in the U.S.
MAKALENİN İNGİLİZCESİ VE TURKCESİ ASAGİDADİR

PULAT TACAR, TURKISHFORUM DANISMA KURULU, BUYUKELCI(E)

The Death of Turkey’s Democracy
“I no longer recognize the country where I was raised.”
By DANI RODRIK

Ultra-nationalist supporters holding a banner identifying the “real” villain in the Ergenekon affair: “The plot will be foiled, America will lose, Turkey will win.”

I no longer recognize Turkey, the country where I was raised and spend most of my time when I am not teaching in the U.S.
It wasn’t so long ago that the country seemed to be taking significant strides in the direction of human rights and democracy. During its first term in government, between 2002 and 2007, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) worked hard to bring the country into the European Union, to reform its legal regime, and to relax restrictions on Kurds.
But more recently, the same government has been responsible for a politics of deception, dirty tricks, fear, and intimidation that couldn’t present a sharper contrast to its rhetoric on democracy. Several Turkish intellectuals abroad who have expressed critical views have told me they are afraid to return to Turkey. Eavesdropping has reached such levels that even housewives refrain from chatting about “sensitive” matters on the phone.
The AKP government has launched massive, politically motivated court cases against its opponents. Most glaring are the hundreds of current and retired military officers, lawyers, academics, and journalists who have been charged with membership in an armed terror organization, dubbed “Ergenekon,” which aims to destabilize and topple the AKP government.

Associated Press
Ultra-nationalist supporters holding a banner identifying the “real” villain in the Ergenekon affair: “The plot will be foiled, America will lose, Turkey will win.”

Pursued by a group of specially appointed prosecutors, and loudly cheered by AKP-friendly and AKP-controlled media, these Ergenekon trials make a mockery of due process. They are based on indictments full of inconsistencies, rely on anonymous informants of questionable credibility, and evince systematic prosecutorial misconduct. The evidence behind the charges ranges from the insubstantial to the blatantly manufactured. The main purpose of the prosecutions seems to be to discredit the accused and keep them under detention for as long as possible.
My personal wake-up call came in February when retired General Cetin Dogan, my father in law, was arrested in a parallel case. Mr. Dogan, an outspoken critic of the AKP, was charged with being the leader of an elaborate coup plot to overthrow the newly elected government in 2002-2003. The documents backing the charges, produced as usual by an anonymous informant, were full of anachronisms, discrepancies, and mistakes, raising serious questions about their authenticity. None of this derailed the government. Prosecutors ignored all indications of forgery, a government-controlled scientific body produced a patently misleading report lending support to the charges, and the pro-AKP media launched a vicious campaign of character assassination against Mr. Dogan. Mr. Erdogan and his circle joined in the chorus of attacks while denigrating judges that would dare rule in favor of the defendants. Mr. Dogan was kept for months in jail pending trial, along with tens of other active-duty and retired officers, despite the absence of credible evidence and obvious signs of fabrication.
Inexplicably, many supposed Turkish democrats and liberals have made common cause with the AKP government and have acted as cheerleaders for these cases. Their hope seems to be that the Ergenekon trials will bring the so-called “deep state”—clandestine networks of the military and their civilian allies—to account. There is little doubt that Turkey’s pre-AKP secular order featured strong anti-democratic undercurrents. But the AKP government has shown little interest in uncovering actual crimes or bringing real culprits to justice. Even though some of the Ergenekon suspects may be guilty of transgressions, they have been indicted not for specific, demonstrable offences, but for nebulous or fictitious crimes unlikely to result in convictions in a fair trial. Moreover, in these and other cases the government engages in exactly the kinds of activities that the liberals decry and want to bring to justice.
Consider some other examples. Despite considerable evidence that senior members of the police were, at a minimum, guilty of gross negligence in the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007, none of the policemen have been prosecuted. It is not a coincidence that some of these same police officials have led the Ergenekon investigations. A distinguished chief state prosecutor has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges of being a member of the Ergenekon network, even though he was one of the few prosecutors courageous enough to go after the military gendarmerie’s intelligence branch, a stronghold of the deep state, during 1998-1999. His real crime: Investigating religious orders connected to the AKP. Despite clear indications that the police and prosecutors have been involved in the planting of or tampering with evidence against Ergenekon suspects, there have been no attempts to explain, let alone investigate, the misconduct.
Given the trail of wrongdoings the AKP is leaving behind, it will likely do whatever it takes to avoid losing power in next summer’s elections. Sadly, Mr. Erdogan’s inclination will be to raise the temperature a few notches higher, both domestically and internationally (see its recent rapprochement with Iran, or its brinkmanship against its old friend Israel).
It’s clear now that Turkey is no longer the liberalizing, emerging democracy under the AKP that it was only a few years ago. It’s time the U.S. and Europe stopped treating it as such—both for their own sakes, and for the sake of the Turkish people.
-Mr. Rodrik is the Rafiq Hariri professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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Türkiye Demokrasisinin Ölümü

DANI RODRIK, Harvard Üniversitesi Uluslararası Siyasi Ekonomi Bölümü Profesörü.

İngilizceden çeviren: Çimen Turunç Baturalp (The Wall Street Journal)

Büyüdüğüm ve Amerika’daki hocalığımdan arta kalan bütün zamanımı geçirdiğim ülkeyi, Türkiye’yi artık tanıyamıyorum. Ülkenin demokrasi ve insan haklarında dev adımlarla ilerliyor gibi görünmesinin üzerinden çok fazla zaman geçmedi. Hükümetin 2002 ile 2007 yılları arasındaki ilk döneminde Başbakan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’ın Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) ülkeyi AB’ye götürebilmek ve Kürtler üzerindeki kısıtlamaları gevşetebilmek için çalışmıştı.
Ama son zamanlarda aynı hükümet kendi demokrasi söylemi karşısında bundan daha keskin bir zıtlık sergileyemeyeceği ölçüdeki kirli oyunların, korku ve sindirme politikalarının sorumlusu haline geldi.
Eleştirel görüşlerini açıkça ifade etmiş olan yurtdışındaki birçok Türk entelektüeli bana Türkiye’ye dönmekten korktuklarını söylüyorlar. Gizli dinlemeler öyle boyutlara ulaşmış ki ev kadınları bile telefonda “hassas” konularda sohbet etmeye çekinir olmuşlar.
AKP hükümeti muhaliflerine karşı çok sayıda, siyasi motivasyonlu dava başlattı. En çok göze batan davalılar “Ergenekon” adı verilen ve ülkeyi karıştırarak AKP hükümetinin düşmesini sağlamak amacıyla kurulmuş silahlı bir terör örgütünün üyesi oldukları iddiası ile suçlanan yüzlerce emekli ve muvazzaf subay, avukat, akademisyen ve gazeteci oldu. Özel olarak atanmış bir grup savcı tarafından yürütülen ve AKP dostu, AKP tarafından kontrol edilen bir medyanın sevinç çığlıkları ile desteklenen bu Ergenekon davaları asıl süreçle alay etmektedir. Bu davalar genellikle tutarsızlıklarla dolu ithamlara dayanmakta, güvenilirlikleri tartışmalı adı meçhul ihbarcılara inanıldığını ve sistematik savcılık suiistimallerinin varlığını ortaya çıkarmaktadır. Suçlamaların dayandırıldığı kanıtlar, hayali olanından kabaca kurgulanılanına kadar gider. Savcılığın asıl amacı sanki itham edilenlerin itibarını düşürmek ve onları mümkün olduğu kadar uzunca bir süre gözaltında tutabilmektir.

Çetin Doğan hakkındaki suçlamalar
Beni kişisel olarak uyandıran alarm, şubat ayında kayınpederim, emekli Orgeneral Çetin Doğan, paralel bir dava için tutuklandığında çaldı. AKP’ye karşı sesi gür çıkan bir muhalif olan Doğan, 2002-2003 yılında yeni seçilmiş hükümeti devirmek için özenle hazırlanmış bir darbe planının lideri olmakla suçlanıyordu. Suçlamalara temel olan belgeler, her zaman olduğu gibi adı meçhul bir ihbarcı tarafından üretilmiş, orijinalliğine ilişkin ciddi kuşkular uyandıran zamanlama hataları, çelişkiler ve yanlışlarla doluydu. Bunların hiçbiri hükümeti yolundan çevirmedi. Savcılar sahteciliğin tüm belirtilerini görmezden geldiler, hükümetin kontrolündeki bilimsel bir kuruluş suçlamalara destek veren açıkça yanıltıcı bir rapor üretti. Ve AKP yanlısı medya, Doğan’a karşı çirkin bir karalama kampanyası başlattı. Erdoğan ve çevresi bir yandan sanıkların lehine karar almaya cesaret edebilen hâkimlere iftiralar atarken bir yandan da saldırılar korosuna katıldı. Doğan, mahkemeyi beklerken onlarca muvazzaf ve emekli askerle birlikte, güvenilir deliller olmamasına ve sahteciliğin açık işaretlerine rağmen aylarca hapishane de tutuldu. Anlaşılmaz bir biçimde bu mesele birçok sözde Türk demokratı ve liberalinin ortak davası haline geldi ve bu insanlar bu davaların amigoluğunu yapar oldular. Herhalde Ergenekon davalarının derin devlete, yani ordu ve sivil müttefiklerinin kurduğu gizli ağlara hesap soracağı ümidini taşıyorlardı. Türkiye’nin AKP öncesi laik düzeninin güçlü antidemokratik eğilimlerin işaretlerine sahip olduğuna dair pek kuşku yoktur. Ama AKP hükümeti asıl suçların ortaya çıkarılması ve gerçek suçluların adaletin önüne getirilmesi konusuna pek fazla ilgi göstermedi. Bazı Ergenekon zanlıları ihlallerden dolayı suçlu da olabilirler. Ama bu kişilerin somut, kanıtlanabilir suçlar yerine, bulanık, kurmaca suçlarla itham edilmeleri adil bir mahkeme sonucuna ulaşma olasılığını yok etmektedir.
Dahası hükümetin kendisi bu ve diğer davalarda, liberallerin lanetlediği ve yargının önüne getirmek istediği türden faaliyetlerin tıpatıp aynısına girişmiştir. Başka örneklere bakalım. Yüksek rütbeli polislerin Ermeni gazeteci Hrant Dink’in Ocak 2007’de öldürülmesi olayında en azından, büyük ölçüde ihmallerinin olduğuna dair hatırı sayılır miktarda kanıt bulunmasına rağmen bu polislerin hiçbiri yargılanmadı. Aynı polislerin bazılarının Ergenekon soruşturmasını da yürütmüş olmaları bir tesadüf değildir. Saygın bir cumhuriyet savcısı, uydurma suçlamalara dayanılarak Ergenekon ağı üyesi olduğu iddiasıyla tutuklandı. Bu savcı 1998-1999 arasında derin devletin kalesi sayılan jandarma haberalma dairesinin üstüne gitmeye cesaret gösterebilen çok az sayıda savcıdan biriydi. Gerçek suçu, AKP ile bağlantısı olan tarikatları soruşturmaktı. Polis ve savcıların Ergenekon sanıkları aleyhine kanıtlarla oynanmasına karıştıklarını gösteren somut işaretler olduğu halde görevini kötüye kullanılmasına ilişkin, bırakın bir soruşturma yapılmasını, herhangi bir açıklama bile gelmedi.
Geride bıraktığı haksızlıkların izlerine bakılarak gelecek yaz yapılacak seçimlerde AKP’nin gücünü kaybetmemek için elinden geleni ardına bırakmayacağı söylenilebilir. Ne yazık ki Erdoğan’ın eğilimi hem iç hem de dış siyasette harareti birkaç derece arttırmak yönünde olacaktır. (Son günlerde İran’la yakınlaşması veya eski dostu İsrail’e karşı gerilim politikası.)
Şu açıktır ki Türkiye artık daha birkaç yıl önce AKP yönetiminde liberalleşen, gelişen demokrasi değil. Artık ABD’nin de Avrupa’nın da ona sanki öyleymiş gibi davranmaktan vazgeçmesinin zamanı geldi. Hem kendi hem de Türk halkının selameti adına…

July 2, 2010

Ottoman Past Shadows Turkish Present

Ankara’s turn against the U.S. on some crucial issues reflects centuries of power plays

By ANDREW MANGO

At its height in the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Indian Ocean. It was the greatest military power in the world. It was also a successful administrator, ruling a multitude of ethnic and religious, settled and nomadic communities—from the Unitarian Hungarians to the Iraqi Turkmen—with great tolerance.

The Bridgeman Art Library‘The Conquest of Belgrade by Sultan Suleyman I,’ a 16th-century depiction of an Ottoman victory.

The Ottoman experience, which forms part of the historical memory of Turkey’s present-day rulers, teaches them that in order to secure what they have, they must outsmart friends and foes alike, learning how to use them rather than be used by them—and how to turn danger into profit.

It’s crucial to keep Turkey’s history in mind today, as the alliance between Turkey and the U.S. appears to grow shakier, primarily over the Middle Eastern policy of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His finger-wagging rhetoric against Israel since its air strikes on Gaza in 2009, culminating in his endorsement of the Turkish Islamic activists who tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, did not help U.S. efforts to restart the Middle Eastern peace process. Mr. Erdogan’s ill-timed revival of an old proposal to swap enriched uranium with Iran, followed by his decision to vote in the Security Council against the imposition of further sanctions, served only to increase the threat of conflict.

After the failure of the Ottomans’ attempt to capture Vienna at the end of the 17th century, which revealed their technological backwardness, their main concern was to save the empire from collapse.

They did so for more than two centuries, and achieved periods of prosperity, by exploiting the rivalries of their enemies. The exploitation ran both ways. The European Great Powers made use of Turkey (the name they used for the Ottoman Empire) against each other, as well as to profit from the empire’s vast trading opportunities. At times the Europeans incited the Christian, and later Arab and Albanian, communities to rise against their Ottoman rulers, but nationalists within the empire also invited foreign support.

Turkey’s past has provided other lessons. First, national interests trump friendships, however long-established. From the 16th century to the end of the 18th, the French and the Ottomans had a common enemy in the Habsburgs. As a result, the French disregarded Christian solidarity and sent military contraband to the Turks. Then, when Napoleon defeated the Austrians, he invaded Ottoman Egypt. The Sultan’s government saw that the revolutionary liberty proclaimed in France was a cloak for imperialism. The British supported the Ottomans, first against the French and then against the Tsars’ expansionism, until the beginning of the 20th century when, faced with the threat of a militaristic Germany, Britain wrote off the Ottoman Empire to recruit Russia into the Triple Entente with France. British friendship, like that of the French, the Turks concluded, was fickle.

AlamyMustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Second, divide your enemies. Sultan Abdülhamid II (who ruled from 1876 to 1909) preserved Ottoman rule in Macedonia and the Arab lands for 30 years by pitting the Bulgarians against the Greeks, and threatening Britain and France with the specter of Islamic solidarity.

Third, be realistic: Avoid adventures at all costs and know your limitations. The empire which Abdülhamid had kept together was destroyed in 10 years by the Young Turks, who took over in 1908. They were politically naive but power-hungry young officers, who thought that the institution of a constitutional monarchy would reconcile the conflicting nationalities in the Ottoman Empire. Their one-size-fits-all constitutionalism did unite the various ethnic communities of the empire, but it united them against the Turks, who were then gradually converted to a defensive nationalism of their own. Foreign states that had acquired a privileged position in Ottoman possessions launched preemptive strikes, catching the Young Turks off-balance. In a last desperate gamble, the leaders of the Young Turks propelled their country into World War I on the side of Germany. The jihad, a holy war they proclaimed against the Allies, showed that Islamic solidarity was a myth: Indian Muslims, French Muslim Senegalese and Algerians, and the Tsar’s Tatar subjects fought in the armies of their imperial masters.

Mustafa Kemal (who later took the surname of Atatürk—Father of the Turks) learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. In 1919, at the age of 38, he became the leader of the Turkish national resistance against the Allies’ plans to partition what was left of Turkey. A successful commander who had won his spurs in Gallipoli, and an even better politician, he believed that to hold its own against the West, Turkey had to become part of it. Atatürk played off the major Allies one against the other, and convinced them all that an independent Turkish nation-state was perfectly compatible with their interests. As a result, he had to fight only the Greeks and the Armenians.

Atatürk did not believe in nonalignment: He used alliances where it suited him. In 1934 he became a founder of the Balkan Pact with his western neighbors and erstwhile foes, and, three years later, of the Saadabad Pact with Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, whose Hashemite rulers had fought against Atatürk when he commanded Ottoman forces in Syria during World War I. The Saadabad Pact disproves the myth that Atatürk turned his back on the Middle East. But he knew that the key to progress lay elsewhere: in the West, the center of the universal human civilization he was determined to join. His was not an either/or foreign policy. He cultivated the friendship of the Soviet Union and, at the same time, drew nearer to Britain and France.

Atatürk’s slogan was “Peace at home and peace abroad.” Peace was the key to rebuilding a ruined country and of spreading modern knowledge among its illiterate peasant population. When peace abroad came crashing down with the outbreak of World War II soon after Atatürk’s death, his successor Ismet Inönü managed to keep Turkey out of the hostilities. He used delaying tactics to resist Winston Churchill’s pressure to enter the war on the side of the Allies. He neutralized local nationalists who thought that by joining Germany, Turkey could realize the Young Turks’ dream of creating an empire of Turkic-speaking peoples. Inönü’s tactics raised the hackles of the Allies, but the outbreak of the Cold War came to his aid as he sought support to resist Stalin’s expansionism. The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, promising help to Greece and Turkey against the Soviets, ended Turkey’s brief period of isolation and marked the beginning of the American Alliance.

Critics of Turkey today, who complain that the country has drifted away from the West and toward the Middle East, forget that when Turkey sought the security of NATO membership at the beginning of the Cold War, Britain tried to foist on it a role in making the Middle East safe against Soviet subversion, and counter-proposed that Turkey join a Middle East Defense Organization. The leaders of the Democrat Party, who took over from Inönü after Turkey’s first free elections in 1950, saw off that effort by sending troops to Korea and earning U.S. support for Turkey’s NATO membership.

The Bridgeman Art LibrarySultan Bayezid II, who welcomed Jews exiled from Spain.

Turkey’s U.S. alliance soon came under strain. In 1964, when the Greek Cypriots denounced the constitution under which their island had achieved independence four years earlier and attacked their Turkish neighbors, President Lyndon Johnson sent a letter to Ankara, warning that if Turkey intervened, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization guarantee would not apply and NATO weapons could not be used. Inönü, who had returned to power after the hapless Democrat Party leader Adnan Menderes had been ousted by the military (and subsequently hanged), retorted: “If there is to be a new world, so be it! Turkey will find a place in it.”

The Johnson letter raised a wave of anti-Americanism in Turkey, which was given added impetus as student radicalism spread from France to Turkey in 1968. In 1974, when Turkey finally landed troops, and Cyprus was divided along lines that have persisted to this day, the U.S. Congress forced an unwilling administration to impose an arms embargo on Turkey. America, the Turks concluded, was an unreliable ally.

The embargo had two unintended consequences. Turkey developed its own defense industry (using the main U.S. technology under license), and gradually began acquiring (largely U.S.-designed) weaponry from Israel. Turkey had been prompt to recognize Israel, the first Muslim state to do so, on the simple grounds that diplomacy had to recognize reality. But relations were discreet and slow to develop. Israel had from the outset a number of Turkish admirers. A leading Turkish secularist journalist famously called it “a republic of reason.”

It would be silly to claim that Turkey is free of anti-Semitism, but relations between Turks and Jews have been amicable more often than not, since the Ottoman Sultans welcomed Jews expelled from Spain. While anti-Semitism was largely absent, envy of prosperous Christians and Jews was ever-present and peaked during World War II, when a discriminatory capital levy despoiled Christians and Jews alike of most of their wealth. Paradoxically, at the same time, Turkey welcomed a host of German Jewish academics and artists. The insecurity caused by the capital levy led to a mass emigration of Turkish Jews to Israel soon after the creation of the state. But the emigrants bore little animosity toward the country where they and their ancestors had lived and prospered for centuries.

Today, Turkish and U.S. interests have diverged on a number of issues. They coincide on Iraq, whose unity Turkey wants to promote, lest Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites compromise their neighbors’ stability as they fight each other. They differ on Syria, which is a promising destination for Turkish exports and investments, and above all on Iran, which Turkey neither fears nor particularly likes, but with which it hopes to develop profitable economic ties.

View Full Image

CorbisA map of the Turkish empire, circa 1600.

turkey

The European Union no longer needs the Turkish security shield, and its electorate, particularly in a period of recession, resists the idea of Turkish membership and the prospect of the free circulation of labor. Russia, no longer a threat, is becoming Turkey’s most important economic partner. The EU still takes more than 40% of Turkish exports and is the country’s main source of investments and tourists, but the prospects of growth lie elsewhere—in trade with producers of oil and gas, which Turkey lacks, including Russia, the Arab countries and Iran.

Turkey has also changed. Its economy, which earns it a place in the G-20, has survived the crisis well, and is growing at a rate second only to China’s. Social change has brought power to conservatives, who dominate the government. But just as Turkish secularists are split between authoritarian and liberal followers of Atatürk, so too Turkish conservatives include fundamentalists (who manned the flotilla to Gaza) and the upwardly mobile followers of the preacher Fethullah Gülen (long resident in Pennsylvania) who want to engage with the modern world.

Finally, there is the unpredictable personal element in political leadership. Mr. Erdogan started as a shrewd calculator of the national interest. Domestic difficulties and a perception of his country’s growing importance seem to have bred in him a desire to cut a figure on the world stage. The lesson of the disasters brought about by the Young Turk adventurers have inspired Turkey’s careful and wise foreign policy. Friends of Turkey can only hope that the same lesson does not have to be learned again.

—Andrew Mango is the author of “Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey” and “From Sultan to Atatürk.”

July 2, 2010

Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders

By Spengler

We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I’ve seen this opera before.

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told

the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

Erdogan’s Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen’s grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving “martyrdom” in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

The passengers’ plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

What explains Israel’s apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence – with whom it has a long history of collaboration – to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that “Turkish intelligence duped Israel”, which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings – also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

In Mozart’s Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha’s harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week’s version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart’s Osmin, who sings:

“First you’ll be beheaded!
Then hanged!
Then spitted on hot stakes!
Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!”

This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen.

The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009):

As Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey’s fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP’s rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world?

The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: “Whatever it can get.” It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran’s Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to “mediate” the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines.

But it is a bit more complex than that. Modern Turkey is an artificial construct, rather than a nation-state in the Western sense. Since the Turks completed the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the middle of the 14th century, a relatively thin crust of ethnic Turks has ruled over subject peoples. The Ottoman Empire at various points in its history had a Christian majority; its civil service at different points was more Venetian, Armenian and Jewish then Turkish; its self-understanding was global and religious, that is, as the caliphate of Islam, rather than as a national entity.

When World War I reduced Turkey to an Anatolian rump, Kemal Ataturk attempted to impose “Turkishness” as a secular, national ideology on the European model. To make the country “Turkish”, several million Orthodox Christians were estimated to have been killed. The hollowness of Ataturk’s secular construct, modeled on the nastier European national movements, made it vulnerable from the beginning. The army was the only institution that could hold Turkish society together.

What will replace Ataturk’s secularism? I wrote two years ago:

If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.

Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life”. His schools educate the elite of the Turkic world across Asia. Gulen’s interest, to be sure, focuses on the Turkish state, whose bureaucracy is now filled with his acolytes. But unlike Ataturk’s secular nationalism, which tried to redefine Turkey on a European model, Gulen’s Islamism is inherently expansionist.

What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia”, as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book, The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.

As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology.

Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.

He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself. The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen means the management of jinn.

Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

July 1, 2010

SYMPATHY FOR THE TURKISH DEVIL

By Spengler

The American commentariat is shocked, shocked , to discover that Turkey has abandoned the Western alliance for an adventurous bid to become the dominant Muslim power in the Middle East. Tom Friedman of the New York Times suggested on June 15 that “President [Barack] Obama should invite him for a weekend at Camp David to clear the air before US-Turkey relations get where they’re going – over a cliff.” Friedman blames the European Community for rejecting Turkey’s membership bid which, he says, was a “key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world”.

But it is not quite so simple. Friedman and the conventional wisdom are wrong, as usual. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is behaving dreadfully, to the point that a group of retired senior Turkish diplomats denounced him for “neo-Ottomanism”. But Turkey has not moved closer to Iran, except in tactical diplomatic terms. The problem is more subtle: America’s blunders in Iraq gave Iran the chance to become a regional hegemon, and Turkey must vie with Iran for this role as a matter of self-preservation.

It was not the European Community, but rather the George W Bush administration, that pulled the rug out from under Turkey’s secularists and built up Erdogan as a paragon of “moderate Islam”. America’s feckless nation-building policy in Iraq helped Turkey over the edge into Islamism.

In a recent essay [1], I portrayed the Mavi Marmara incident in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli commandos onboard one of the six boats attempting to breach the blockade on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, as a Turkish farce. It should be obvious to anyone with access to YouTube that Erdogan conducted an exercise in guerilla theater, which qualifies as a comedy of sorts unless you were one of the dead Turks on the boat. What has transpired over the past eight years, though, is a tragedy.

Turkey is held together by weak glue. It never was a nation-state, despite founding father Kemal Ataturk’s ferocious efforts to make it appear to be one. Kurds comprise somewhere between six million and 20 million (the Kurdish nationalists’ claim) of Turkey’s population, and Kurdish separatism poses a continuing threat to Turkey’s national integrity.

For the usual corrupt and foolish reasons, world opinion has focused on the nine dead Turks on the flotilla; of far greater consequence are the several dozen Turkish soldiers who died at the hands of Kurdish guerillas in the past two weeks. More important still are the 2,000 or so Turkic people who died in Kyrgyzstan in the past weeks. Much less distinguishes a failed state like Kyrgyzstan from an apparently successful state like Turkey than Westerners think.

America is about to leave Iraq; Iraq is likely to break up; and if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the breakup it will become a magnet for Kurdish separatists within Turkey. Erdogan has 1,500 Kurds under arrest, including the mayors of some Kurdish towns.

Ataturk’s post-war secularism defined “Turkishness” as a national identity that had never before existed. “Turkishness” is something of a blood pudding. Ottoman identity had nothing to do with nationality in the Western sense. It was religious and ethnic. A fifth of the population of Anatolia before World War I was Christian, mainly Armenian and Greek; virtually all were expelled or murdered. The Turks killed more than a million-and-a-half Armenians, employing Kurdish militia to do most of the actual dirty work (that is why what is now “Turkish Kurdistan” was until 1916 “Western Armenia”. The modern Turkish state was born in a bloodbath, and founded on massive population shifts. The enormous Kurdish minority got the southeast as a consolation prize but still longs for its own language, culture and eventual national state.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a monster, but for the Turks a useful monster. The 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq killed up to 180,000 of them, and the crackdown on the Kurds after the 1991 First Gulf War killed as many as 100,000. The Turks, by contrast, killed perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 Kurds during the 1980s and 1990s.

Turkey in 2003 refused America permission to open a northern front against Saddam out of fear that the war would destroy Turkey’s ability to control its restive border. The destruction of the Iraqi state, moreover, created a de facto independent Kurdish entity on Turkey’s border, the last thing Ankara wanted. If America had simply installed a new strongman and left, Turkey would have been relieved. But America’s commitment to “nation-building” and “democracy” in Iraq, to Ankara’s way of thinking, meant that Iraq inevitably would break up; the Kurdish entity in northern Iraq would become a breakaway state; and Iran’s power would grow at the expense of Turkey.

Turkey has many reasons to fear Iran, whose possible nuclear ambitions make it a prospective spoiler in the region. But there is another vital issue. Among the fault lines that run through the modern Turkish state is a religious divide. Iran exercises influence through the Alevi minority in Turkey, a heretical Muslim sect closer in some ways to Shi’ite than Sunni Islam. No accurate census of the Alevi exists; they may comprise between a fifth and a quarter of of Turkey’s population. The late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared the Alevi to be part of Shi’ite Islam in the 1970s, and they have been subjected to occasional violence by Sunni Turks.

The Iraq war undermined the position of the Kemalist military, which had bloodied its hands for decades in counter-insurgency operations against the Kurds. Erdogan’s Islamists argued that the weak glue of secular Turkish identity no longer could hold Turkey together, and proposed instead to win the Kurds over through Islamic solidarity. The Kurds are quite traditional Muslims; unlike the Turkish Sunnis, the provincial Kurds of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq often practice female circumcision.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the George W Bush administration saw no reason to back the Turkish generals who had let them down in Iraq, and instead threw their backing to the Islamists, on the theory that Erdogan represented a sort of “moderate Islam” that would provide an example to other prospective democratic Muslim regimes. When Erdogan won parliamentary elections in 2003, Bush invited him to the White House before he took office, a gesture that persuaded most Turks that America had jettisoned its erstwhile secular allies, as I wrote in 2007. [2]

The Bush State Department stuck to the story of “moderate Islam” in Turkey even while Erdogan used outlandishly extra-legal methods to dismantle the secular establishment, as I wrote in 2008. [3] In fairness to the State Department, the idea that Turkey was home to a specially moderate strain of Islam was not the invention of American foreign policy analysts but of the Islam specialists of the Jesuit order. Father Christian Troll, a German Islamologist who advises Pope Benedict XVI, and his student Father Felix Koerner popularized the notion of a less virulent strain of Turkish Islam. I reviewed Koerner’s book on Turkish Islam in 2008. [4]

One cannot blame the Bush administration (nor the Jesuit Islamologists) for the person Erdogan has become. By the turn of the millennium, Kemalist secularism was a grotesque relic of 1930s European nationalism. Turkey’s leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk, evoked the spiritual misery of secularist Turkey and the attractions of radical Islam in his Nobel-prize-winning novel Snow, which I reviewed in this space in 2004. [5]

To the extent that there was some hope of keeping Turkey in the Western camp, though, the Bush administration’s nation-building blunders in Iraq and credulous admiration of “moderate Islam” in Ankara destroyed it.

Political Islam as a replacement for Kemalist nationalism is the glue that will hold Turkey together, in Erdogan’s view. It does not seem to be doing a good job. Islamic solidarity was supposed to persuade the Kurds to behave themselves, along with a few nods in the direction of the use of the Kurdish language, which the Kemalists tried to suppress. The killing of 11 Turkish soldiers in raids staged from Iraq and the bombing of a military bus in Ankara show that Kurdish resistance has not diminished. Erdogan, previously so concerned about human rights and the Biblical injunction against killing, raged that the Kurdish rebels will “drown in their own blood”.

Erdogan’s political Islam failed to stabilize Turkey. It will contribute to instability in the region to an extent that is difficult to foresee. Iran now has the more reason to assert its influence in Iraq, perhaps by encouraging the breakup of the country and the emergence of a Kurdish state that might threaten Turkey.

Turkey, in turn, has all the more reason to agitate among the Turkish-speaking, or Azeri, quarter of Iran’s population. Iran will use its influence among Turkish Alevis to challenge the Turkish Sunni establishment; Iran will encourage Turkish separatism. Meanwhile Erdogan’s alliance of opportunity with Hamas undercuts the American-allied Sunni Arab states, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestine Authority.

With the United States in full strategic withdrawal, a Thirty Years War in western and central Asia seems all the more likely.

Notes
1. Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders Asia Times Online, June 9, 2010.
2. Why does Turkey hate America? Asia Times Online, October 23, 2007.
3. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.
4. Tin-opener theology from Turkey Asia Times Online, June 3, 2008.
5. In defense of Turkish cigarettes Asia Times Online, August 24, 2004.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things magazine (www.firstthings.com).

__._,_.___

July 1, 2010

Kurdish Heritage Reclaimed: Stephen Kinzer

After years of conflict, Turkey’s tradition-rich Kurdish minority is experiencing a joyous cultural reawakening

By Stephen Kinzer
Photographs by Lynsey Addario
Smithsonian magazine, June 2010

Isolation allowed the Kurds to survive for thousands of years while other cultures faded from history.

More from Smithsonian.com

Iraq’s Resilient Minority
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

In the breathtakingly rugged Turkish province of Hakkari, pristine rivers surge through spectacular mountain gorges and partridges feed beneath tall clusters of white hollyhock. I’m attending the marriage celebration of 24-year-old Baris and his 21-year-old bride, Dilan, in the Kurdish heartland near the borders of Syria, Iran and Iraq. This is not the actual wedding; the civil and religious ceremonies were performed earlier in the week. Not until after this party, though, will the couple spend their first night together as husband and wife. It will be a short celebration by Kurdish standards—barely 36 hours.

Neither eating nor drinking plays much of a role at a traditional Kurdish wedding. On the patio of a four-story apartment house, guests are served only small plates of rice and meatballs. Instead, the event is centered on music and dance. Hour after hour, the band plays lustily as lines of guests, their arms linked behind their backs, kick, step and join in song in ever-changing combinations. Children watch intently, absorbing a tradition passed down through generations.

The women wear dazzling, embroidered gowns. But it’s the men who catch my eye. Some of them are wearing one-piece outfits—khaki or gray overalls with patterned cummerbunds—inspired by the uniforms of Kurdish guerrillas who fought a fierce campaign for self-rule against the Turkish government throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s. The Turkish military, which harshly suppressed this insurgency, would not have tolerated such outfits just a few years ago. These days, life is more relaxed.

As darkness falls and there is still no sign of the bride, some friends and I decide to visit the center of Hakkari, the provincial capital. An armored personnel carrier, with a Turkish soldier in the turret peering over his machine gun, rumbles ominously through the city, which is swollen with unemployed Kurdish refugees from the countryside. But stalls in music stores overflow with CDs by Kurdish singers, including performers who were banned because Turkish authorities judged their music incendiary. Signs written in the once-taboo Kurdish language decorate shop windows.

By luck, we encounter Ihsan Colemerikli, a Kurdish intellectual whose book Hakkari in Mesopotamian Civilization is a highly regarded work of historical research. He invites us to his home, where we sip tea under an arbor. Colemerikli says there have been 28 Kurdish rebellions in the past 86 years—inspired by centuries of successful resistance to outsiders, invaders and would-be conquerors.

“Kurdish culture is a strong and mighty tree with deep roots,” he says. “Turks, Persians and Arabs have spent centuries trying to cut off this tree’s water so it would wither and die. But in the last 15 to 20 years there has been a new surge of water, so the tree is blossoming very richly.”

Back at the wedding party, the bride finally appears, wearing a brightly patterned, translucent veil and surrounded by attendants carrying candles. She is led slowly through the crowd to one of two armchairs in the center of the patio. Her husband sits in the other one. For half an hour they sit quietly and watch the party, then rise for their first dance, again surrounded by candles. I notice that the bride never smiles, and I ask if something is amiss. No, I’m told. It is customary for a Kurdish bride to appear somber as a way of showing how sad she is to leave her parents.

The party will go on until dawn, only to resume a few hours later. But as midnight approaches, my companions and I depart, our destination a corba salonu—a soup salon. In a few minutes we enter a brightly lit café. There are two soups on the menu. Lentil is my favorite, but when traveling I prefer the unfamiliar. The sheep’s head soup, made with meat scraped from inside the skull, is strong, lemony and assertive.

June 29, 2010

TURKISH FORUM INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

With Friends Like These ; Turkey is ready to start a new round of diplomatic initiatives to stop countries that supply the PKK with arms. Turkey has undertaken similar initiatives in previous years.

Over the past few months, the PKK has relied on arms from Mediterranean countries, intelligence reports indicate. The roadside bomb that exploded in Halkalı on Tuesday was of Portuguese origin, intelligence sources said, adding this country to the list of countries that supply arms to the terrorist organization. That attack was carried out by the PKK’s urban offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).

The most crucial question is how the PKK is able to bring these arms supplies it obtains from Mediterranean countries to northern Iraq. US journalist Seymour Hersh claimed in 2007 that this was done via Israel.

The General Staff has seized PKK arms and ammunition originating from
31 different countries.However, NATO-member countries have been the biggest suppliers. Most of the arms and ammunition seized are of Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese origin.

EARLIER REPORTS

May 22, 2007

C4 plastic explosive

Explosion rocks Ankara, the Turkish capital

Five people have been killed and at least 60 hurt in an explosion during evening rush hour at the entrance to a shopping centre in the district of Ulus. A Pakistan national was among the dead. The area has been cordoned off and an investigation has begun. Unconfirmed reports suggest an explosive device may have been left at a nearby bus stop and is PKK related. It is suspected that the explosive is C4 which was supplied (as Block demolition charge M112, which may also be cut and/or removed from the mylar wrapper and hand formed as desired to suit the target) to US forces in Iraq and is more that a few tons are missing . PKK routinely uses Italian sourced plastic land mines and Armenian made remote detonation (cell phone type) equipment. In recent months huge weapons caches were discovered in many parts of Turkey such as Muğla, Van, İzmir, Ağrı and Şırnak.

C-4 is the standard-issue plastic explosive used by the US military.
C-4 or (Composition C-4) is used for any stable explosive, and “Composition A” and “Composition B” are other known variants. Made up of explosive, plastic binder, plasticizer and, usually, marker or taggant chemicals such as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane (DMDNB) to help detect the explosive and identify its source C-4 is 1.34 times as explosive as trinitrotoluene (TNT).

C-4 is made by combining RDX slurry with binder dissolved in a solvent. The solvent is then evaporated away and the mixture is dried and filtered. The final material is an off-white solid with a feel similar to modelling clay. A major advantage of C-4 is that it can easily be moulded into any desired shape. C-4 can be pressed into gaps/voids in buildings, bridges, equipment or machinery. C-4 is also well known for its durability, reliability, and safety. It will not explode even if hit by a bullet, punched, cut, or thrown into a fire.

The only reliable method for detonation is via both heat and pressure, i.e a detonator or blasting cap.

June 26, 2010

Tag: Gulen