Turkish Forum

Tag: Kilicdaroglu

  • Turkey quits negotiations with PKK for increasing attacks

    Turkey quits negotiations with PKK for increasing attacks

    ANKARA, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) — Turkey quit the negotiation strategy with the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) as the organization sharply increased its attacks against soldiers and civilians.

    Ankara would only keep talks with the political leg of the Kurdish movement in the parliament, a Turkish official said Monday, indicating escalation of armed actions against the PKK.

    “The negotiations are now on the shelf. This struggle will last until the PKK lays its weapons down,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted by Daily Hurriyet newspaper as speaking to a group of journalists on Monday.

    The PKK has declared unilateral ceasefire several times during the negotiations. However, it ended the latest six-month ceasefire in February and shifted to an “active defense” position in which its members defend themselves against any attack.

    Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s jailed leader, publicized in July through his lawyers that he had agreed with government officials to set up a “peace council” that aimed at ending the conflict. Just when his remarks nearly ended the decades-long struggle, intense attacks from the PKK changed the momentum of the talks and drove the government to return to hardline policies against the PKK.

    Last week, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), a radical Kurdish group and a PKK front, claimed responsibility for a bomb attack that killed three people and injured 34 others in downtown Ankara.

    In an attack on a police station on Saturday, six Turkish soldiers died and 11 others injured in the Kurdish-dominated village of Belenoluk in Siirt province.

    The increase of PKK attacks came days after the Turkish government threatened to launch a cross-border ground operation against PKK camps in northern Iraq.

    In earlier September, Turkish Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin signaled that Ankara was preparing a ground operation in northern Iraq. The Turkish Air Force has bombed suspected PKK targets repeatedly since Aug. 17.

    Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc announced Monday that the government would submit to the parliament a motion to allow the Turkish armed forces to launch cross-border air and ground operations for another year.

    The increasing attacks by the PKK “are a result of the cross- border operations” targeting the PKK bases in northern Iraq, which was “having significant results,” Erdogan said.

    “As far as I am concerned, they are now seeking revenge, as they incurred serious losses in the military operations,” Erdogan told journalists Monday, adding that the Turkish armed forces on the border would step up actions.

    “They will be more effective, as they will be permanently based there. 5,000 people have been recruited. They are now undergoing training. Special operation units will also enter the cities,” he said.

    In spite of the escalating tension, Erdogan is to hold discussions with the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which refused to enter the parliament in protest of the ban on their elected deputies.

    Several imprisoned Kurdish deputies were elected in the elections in July, but the court did not let them to enter the parliament.

    “If the BDP enters Parliament, then we would hold political negotiations with them,” Erdogan said.

    Turkey and Iran were also cooperating against the PKK, Erdogan said, recalling that he met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iraqi President Jelal Talabani in New York last week.

    Ankara was mulling every possible measures, “including ground operations into northern Iraq,” against the PKK, Erdogan said.

    On the other hand, Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) harshly criticized the government for mounting terror attacks and talks with Ocalan.

    “If there is terror in Turkey today, the (ruling party) AKP government holds the sole responsibility. They are the ones who dragged Turkey into the quagmire of terror,” said CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

    More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the PKK, which was listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, took up arms to create an ethnic homeland in southeastern Turkey in 1984.

    Editor: Mu Xuequan

     

  • Kılıçdaroğlu says AK Party has secret agenda

    Kılıçdaroğlu says AK Party has secret agenda

    Kılıçdaroğlu says AK Party has secret agenda

    27 May 2011, Friday / REUTERS, İSTANBUL

    The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party accused the governing AK Party of a secret agenda to monopolise power and pledged to reinforce democracy if he becomes prime minister after June 12 elections.

    CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu greets his supporters during an election rally in İstanbul on Friday.
    CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu greets his supporters during an election rally in İstanbul on Friday.

    CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu greets his supporters during an election rally in İstanbul on Friday.

    Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), said he had created a “youthful and dynamic team” since taking the helm a year ago at what has long been regarded as a staid pillar of Turkey’s secularist establishment.

    But Kılıçdaroğlu faces a colossal task unseating Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose near decade in power has brought Turkey greater prosperity and unprecedented political stability.

    The CHP has not tasted power for decades and is unlikely to do so after Turkey votes on June 12. Polls put its support at 25-30 percent, some 20 points behind Erdoğan’s AK Party.

    “We believe the AK Party has a secret agenda,” Kılıçdaroğlu told Reuters in an interview in his campaign bus as it sped between election rallies in the country’s largest city İstanbul.

    “The AKP has created its own partisan media, its own investment groups and its own judiciary.”

    “We want to embrace modern civilisation, we want to embrace freedom and democracy in line with Western standards,” he said, sat below the six-arrowed emblem of the CHP, the party of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

    Those arrows symbolise the pillars of Kemalist ideology: republicanism, populism, secularism, revolutionism, nationalism and statism.

    “GANDHI KEMAL”

    Critics say the weight of that old secularist ideology, dating backing to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, has held the party back amid the meteoric transformation which the country has gone through in the past decades.

    Kılıçdaroğlu said he headed a new party, stressing human rights and freedoms, alongside traditional attachment to secularism. He has dropped old guard loyalists and introduced a record number of women as candidates in a bid to regain ground.

    Nicknamed “Gandhi Kemal” because of his slight, bespectacled appearance rather than for any statesman-like vision, the CHP leader has boosted support for his party since taking over from Deniz Baykal, unseated by a video sex scandal last year.

    His popular touch is clear as he weaves through crowds in İstanbul’s Ortaköy district on the shores of the Bosphorus, shaking hands with applauding shopkeepers.

    Critics accuse Erdoğan of having authoritarian tendencies. The prime minister has vowed to rewrite the constitution if he wins, and there is speculation he intends a switch to a more presidential form of government, and has eyes on the presidency.

    Kılıçdaroğlu also attacked the government’s record on foreign policy, focusing on what he said was its failure to advance Turkey’s troubled bid for EU membership and tensions with the West over its Middle East policy, particularly on Iran.

    “What I have seen in foreign policy is that Turkey has to a great extent lost its power in the international arena,” he said.

    Kılıçdaroğlu, born in 1948 in the mountainous eastern province of Tunceli province, spent his professional life as a civil servant in the finance ministry and social security before entering parliament in 2002 after his retirement.

    He is married and has three children, including a son who is a drummer in a rock band.

    via zaman

  • Turkey’s Opposition Makeover

    Turkey’s Opposition Makeover

    Reuters
    Reuters

    Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party, greets supporters during a rally in September 2010.

    Even critics of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party are admitting to pleasant surprise at the party’s new election manifesto.

    For the last two elections, the party, generally known by its CHP acronym, had positioned itself as a hard-line secular and nationalist bulwark against the Islamist threat it claimed the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, posed to Turkey’s secular constitution. It didn’t work. At the last election in 2007, the AKP won 47% of the vote to the CHP’s 21%.

    So, after purging a reluctant old guard from the party’s candidate list, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has put out an election manifesto that appears tailored to woo voters who previously rejected the party — namely, ethnic Kurds and liberals. The CHP’s election slogan for the June 12 polls: “Turkey will breathe freely.”

    Last September, for example, the CHP tried and failed to block constitutional amendments in a referendum, saying they served the AKP’s political interests. Now the CHP is matching AKP proposals replace the constitution altogether.

    The manifesto also promises to lower the 10% threshold — Europe’s highest — that Turkish political parties have to cross to get into Parliament. The threshold minimizes the risk of unstable coalition governments, but is widely seen as a ruse to keep any Kurdish party from getting into a position of power. The main Kurdish Peace and Democracy party runs its candidates as independents to get around that rule.

    That pledge could appeal to Kurds in Turkey’s southeast, where the CHP drew few votes in 2007, leaving the field to the AKP and Kurdish independents. The CHP manifesto also pledges to form commissions to investigate the many unsolved murders of ethnic Kurds during heavy fighting between the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and Turkish security forces in the 1990s. And it promises to turn Diyarbakir prison, notorious for the torture of Kurdish prisoners in the 1990s, into a museum.

    For liberals, the CHP manifesto pledges press freedom — something that the AKP is widely criticized for failing to guarantee. Families are wooed by monthly family allowances, and youth by shorter military services.

    All of that represents a makeover for the CHP from when Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s predecessor, Deniz Baykal, ran the party. He stepped down amid a sex scandal a year ago. Still, the AKP remains a hot favorite to win a comfortable third term majority and the CHP may have to go a lot further to peel voters away from it.

    What Kurds really want, for example, is education in Kurdish and more autonomy in the southeast. Promising that, however, would alienate many Turkish voters. The CHP manifesto offers only Kurdish language classes for Kurds, something that’s already allowed in Turkey.

    * Turkey’s 2012 Election

    via Turkey’s Opposition Makeover – Emerging Europe Real Time – WSJ.

  • Traditionalist Opposition Party Attempts Radical Makeover

    Traditionalist Opposition Party Attempts Radical Makeover

    Kemal Kilicdaroglu, or 'Ghandi Kemal," has been treading lightly since coming to head Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP) last May, but supporters hope he will provide serious opposition to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Here, Kilicdaroglu addresses a crowd of supporters at a rally last July. (Photo courtesy CHP.)
    Kemal Kilicdaroglu, or 'Ghandi Kemal," has been treading lightly since coming to head Turkey's Republican People's Party (CHP) last May, but supporters hope he will provide serious opposition to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Here, Kilicdaroglu addresses a crowd of supporters at a rally last July. (Photo courtesy CHP.)

    Could a revolution in Turkey within the political party founded by Ataturk actually be occurring? It is a word many observers are using these days, after the head of the chief opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, recently overhauled the party’s leadership.

    “We have defeated the empire of fear in the party, and now we will defeat the empire of fear in Turkey,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu told cheering party supporters in Ankara in early November.

    Known in Turkey as “Gandhi Kemal” because of his physical slightness, his mild manners and his glasses, Kilicdaroglu was elected head of the CHP this May, following the resignation of his predecessor in a sex scandal.

    His arrival has raised hopes that the CHP, which ran Turkey as a single-party until 1946 and (apart from a blip in the 1970s) has been all but unelectable ever since, may soon be in position to give the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) a run for its money.

    Known for his modest lifestyle and his well-documented exposes of AKP corruption, Kilicdaroglu has shied away from the ideological rigidity that has characterized the CHP over the past decade.

    Despite describing his victory as a sign that “change has begun,” he gave the impression of being shackled, promising radical policy changes one day, backtracking the next. Having repeatedly promised to “solve” bans on headscarves in state buildings, he declined to attend an October 29 reception hosted by the headscarf-wearing wife of Turkey’s president.

    His performance on the issue of rights for Turkey’s non-Turkish ethnic groups was even more disappointing, given that he was born into a family speaking Dimili, an Indo-European language.

    Known as Zaza, most Dimili-speakers today consider themselves Kurds. Kilicdaroglu didn’t mention the word Kurd once during six weeks of campaigning for a September 12 referendum in which the Kurdish vote was key.

    And when a senior CHP politician sparked a scandal by appearing to defend the CHP-backed massacre of thousands of Zaza women and children after a 1937 uprising, he simply said that he hadn’t been “born when it happened.”

    The problem, many observers say, was that while he was leader, he was surrounded by senior party figures of a very different ideological bent, including Onder Sav, the CHP General Secretary for the past decade, and a party member for over half a century.

    Widely thought to have had a hand in the resignation of Kilicdaroglu’s predecessor and Kilicdaroglu’s election, Sav raised the flag of revolt when Kilicdaroglu removed him from the party management.

    For a moment it looked as though his weight within the party would prevail: when he called an assembly to protest Kilicdaroglu’s move, 60 out of 80 party delegates declared themselves with him.

    Kilicdaroglu was strengthened, however, by his grass-roots popularity, and the political skills of his number two Gursel Tekin, the CHP Istanbul chief whose narrow defeat in municipal elections last summer raised hopes that the CHP’s fortunes were rising. Tekin now appears to be the new eminence grise in the party.

    Having initially threatened to fight Kilicdaroglu to the bitter end, Sav publicly handed over authority to the man Kilicdaroglu’s hand-picked choice to replace him November 10. “It was the end of an epoch in the party,” says Mahmut Ovur, a journalist who follows the CHP closely. “Kilicdaroglu has real power now. The time of making excuses for not changing has come to an end.”

    Ovur compares CHP today to Turkey’s Islamist movement at the end of the 1990s: freed of its ideological constraints by a team led by the now Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it expanded from a relatively traditional Islamist party struggling to win more than 20 percent of the vote to a centre-right party capable of garnering over 40 percent support.

    “Ideology has no place in Turkish politics anymore, and yet CHP is still promoting the six arrows” of Ataturk’s ideology, he says. “Turkish voters want better services, not a vision of what the perfect society is.”

    Political scientist Ihsan Dagi agrees with Ovur in thinking Kilicdaroglu and his team understand the electoral landscape. He is less sure that party supporters have. “The founders of the AKP were lucky because the majority of their natural support base had realized the limitations of Islamist ideology,” he says. “The CHP’s support base strikes me as having backed itself into an ideological dead-end.”

    Like Dagi, the political scientist Hakan Yilmaz thinks CHP supporters’ attachment to somewhat authoritarian ideas of secularism and national identity should not be a problem. “The efforts of some CHP supporters to set up hard-line secularist parties failed totally,” he says. “These people have nowhere to go but the CHP.”

    But the signs are that Kilicdaroglu still feels the need to test the waters. “I want you to be clear of one thing,” he told supporters on November 6. “When we talk of a new CHP, we reject the idea of forgetting our past. What we mean by ‘new CHP’ is new CHP leadership.”

    A liberal secular political commentator, Gulay Gokturk sees Kilicdaroglu’s careful words as a warning to those hoping for a brand-new, electable CHP. “The social and political change Turkey is going through is eight on the Richter scale: nobody can stay still,” she says. “How can you call Kilicdaroglu’s one-step-forward-and-one-step-back approach change?”

    Editor’s note:  Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.

    via Turkey: Traditionalist Opposition Party Attempts Radical Makeover | EurasiaNet.org.

  • Main opposition seeks Parliament inquiry into Turkey’s foreign policy

    Main opposition seeks Parliament inquiry into Turkey’s foreign policy

    In the last two weeks, a member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has presented two separate motions to Parliament seeking to open an investigation into the developments of the last eight years in the country’s foreign policy, that’s to say since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power for the first time in 2002.

    kilicdaroglu1Although the two motions request a parliamentary investigation commission on the country’s foreign policy listed almost a dozen of topics, the reasoning for these motions elaborated solely on only two of these topics. “The developments noted in the last eight years concerning foreign policy in Turkey show that there are negative developments in Turkey’s relations, particularly with the European Union and the US, as well as with Greece, the Greek Cypriot Republic of Southern Cyprus, Armenia, Iraq and Israel, and that these relations have not developed as expected,” Birgen Keleş, the CHP’s İstanbul deputy, said in her first motion presented to the Parliament Speaker’s Office on Oct. 19 and signed by her colleagues from the main opposition party.

    Keleş apparently intended to use the official wording for the Greek Cypriot administration that is used by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, but instead used new wording by saying, “the Greek Cypriot Republic of Southern Cyprus.” The Turkish Foreign Ministry, like all the other institutions of the Republic of Turkey, refers to it as “the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus [abbreviated as GKRY],” highlighting that Ankara doesn’t recognize the Greek Cypriot-controlled ‘Republic of Cyprus’.”

    “The establishment of a parliamentary investigation commission is important for examining said relations with the participation of academics from outside of Parliament and of authorities from the Foreign Ministry,” Keleş, also a member of the Turkish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), said.

    “Policies implemented by the government directly influence the future of the country and society. No doubt, policies may vary according to the governments and to developments noted at home and abroad. However, the presence of consistency and indispensable principles is extremely important in terms of external relations and the economy,” she said.

    The second motion presented this week focuses on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s constant objection to Turkey’s full accession into the EU, noting that statements on the issue by these leaders have been “beyond the limits of respect.”

    Reasoning and concord

    Although there is no direct reference in the motions to modalities of foreign policy assumed in the last eight years, which is widely labeled “pro-active,” the reasoning of the first motion says that “established and indispensable principles should not be ignored.”

    The first reasoning doesn’t elaborate at all which such principles have been ignored in relations with, for example, Greece, Greek Cyprus, Iraq, Israel and the United States, while it indicates that the government has been making concessions on the rapprochement process with neighboring Armenia that has led to the deterioration of the country’s reputation in the international arena.

    The reasoning for the second motion mainly focuses on the customs union agreement signed between Turkey and the EU, which came into force in 1996. It was signed in 1995 by a coalition government in which the CHP was a partner and at a time when the AK Party had not yet been formed.

    “The sacrifices tolerated by Turkey for years to become a full member are extremely important and heavy. The customs union tops these [sacrifices]. Turkey, which accepted the customs union assuming that it would become a full member shortly afterwards, has entirely opened its internal market to the EU; moreover, it was obliged to make similar agreements with countries that made bilateral agreements with the EU. Turkey is the only country that shouldered liabilities of the customs union without enjoying the opportunities introduced through full membership,” Keleş, who has a master’s degree in economics, said, concluding that the establishment of a parliamentary investigation commission is particularly necessary to examine the course of affairs in Turkey-EU relations, particularly in the last 14 years, namely after the customs union went into force.

    Following his election as the leader of the main opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu made his first official contact with top figures in the EU during a September visit to Brussels in a bid to promote his party, defining itself as a social democratic party, in the international arena.

    It is no secret that the CHP has failed to act in unison on several issues since Kılıçdaroğlu’s election. Whether foreign policy will become a determining issue in an apparent split within the party is a question that needs time in order to be answered. And whether the CHP leadership will choose to explain itself and its views on foreign policy via direct contacts with its counterparts abroad — as Kılıçdaroğlu attempted to do in Brussels — or whether it will basically try to use foreign policy issues solely to score domestic goals is another question that remains to be answered.

    Yet, given the unclear objectives of the two recent motions, it is noteworthy to remember praise for the government’s foreign policy achievements which came from a CHP deputy — delivered not long ago in Washington. As a member of Parliament’s US caucus, the CHP’s Ankara deputy, Emrehan Halıcı, was among a parliamentary delegation that held talks with US officials in Washington in late September.

    At a press conference held following the talks, Halıcı told reporters that US officials have been eager to meet with Kılıçdaroğlu, while he praised the government’s performance in external relations. In response to a question, Halıcı firstly noted that it is natural for ruling parties to be more active abroad. “It is necessary to confess that the Justice and Development Party’s contacts with the US have displayed that their relations are very strong and that they have exerted successful efforts and [it is necessary] to congratulate them. We, as the main opposition party, and I guess other main opposition parties, too, need to create and then maintain similar relations. I will convey these feelings and thoughts of mine to Mr. Chairman as well,” Halıcı concluded.

    31 October 2010, Sunday

    EMİNE KART ANKARA

  • Headscarf causes row in Turkey

    Headscarf causes row in Turkey

    ANKARA, Turkey, Oct. 30 (UPI) — Turkish President Abdullah Gul says his wife’s wearing of a headscarf doesn’t have any political significance.

    kilicdarogluHayrunnisa Gul wore a headscarf to Republic Day celebrations in Ankara, but the occasion was notable in the absence of Turkish military leaders and members of the opposition Republican People’s Party, the BBC reported.

    Military officials held a separate celebration just prior to the main event. But opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said he didn’t boycott the event because Turkey’s first lady wore a headscarf.

    “I am going to celebrate it among the people,” Kilicdaroglu said, but added, “we are being unfair to the first lady. It is wrong to suggest that we are not going there because she wears a headscarf. Her choice of dress is her concern, not ours.”

    The fact that Gul’s wife wears a headscarf initially blocked his bid for the presidency three years ago, and his Justice and Development Party narrowly avoided being banned by the Constitutional Court, the BBC said.

    Secular Turks fear lifting the ban on headscarves could be the start of a creeping Islamization of Turkish society, but Gul’s government has dismissed such concerns as groundless.