Turkish Forum

Tag: NYT

  • NYT editorial /U.S. Finds Itself on Shakier Ground as Erdogan Confronts Mutiny

    NYT editorial /U.S. Finds Itself on Shakier Ground as Erdogan Confronts Mutiny

    From: Demirtas Bayar [Demirtas@CelalBayar.org]

    Dear Friends,

    This article gives the general view of the American informed classes. What the underlying meaning of the article is that once the mutiny is suppressed there is now a greater danger that Erdogan will become even more of a tyrant dictator. One other editorial stated that he has become like Putin.

    Demirtas Bayar

     

    U.S. Finds Itself on Shakier Ground as Erdogan Confronts Mutiny

    NYT – By DAVID E. SANGER – JULY 15, 2016

    WASHINGTON — With all the crises in the Middle East, the Obama administration took solace in the fact that there was one reliable, democratically elected strongman — a stalwart member of NATO — that Washington could depend on: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

    No matter how the coup attempt against Mr. Erdogan plays out over the next hours and days, that certainty is shattered.

    Until midafternoon Friday, American officials thought Mr. Erdogan had tightened his iron grip on his country. He had purged the judiciary; jailed insouciant senior military officers three years ago and installed seemingly compliant successors; and cracked down on the opposition and the news media.

    As one senior American diplomat said Friday evening, no one had come to work that day at the White House, the State Department or the C.I.A. expecting to see Mr. Erdogan turn to FaceTime on his iPhone to plead with the Turkish people to take to the streets in his defense.

    Even though the coup attempt appeared to be failing by early Saturday morning in Turkey, the country had suddenly become another tumultuous one in a region that knows no end of turmoil.

    Mr. Erdogan would almost certainly have to begin a purge of the plotters and probably hunt for other challengers to his authority — extending a streak of ruthlessness that has left many of his NATO allies gasping.

    Friday’s events could leave in limbo some of the top priorities of the United States and Europe. They rely on Turkey to help battle the Islamic State, to contain the flow of migrants out of Syria, and to host American intelligence agencies and NATO forces seeking to grapple with upheaval in the Middle East.

    The coup attempt “presents a dilemma to the United States and European governments: Do you support a nondemocratic coup,” or an “increasingly nondemocratic leader?” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Erdogan has often come to talk with Americans influential in the relationship between the two countries.

    To many in Washington, that dilemma is secondary to the question of whether Turkey will be a reliable partner in the battle against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, a willing host to American forces and a stable player in the world’s most volatile corner.

    American officials say the next 24 to 48 hours will be crucial in determining whether the coup attempt will have lasting repercussions. Unlike past bloodless coups in Turkey, this one does not have the implicitly understood support of the public, which appears to be divided over the military intervention.

    “The danger here is this could spiral out of control and turn into a full-blown civil war,” Eric S. Edelman, a former American ambassador to Turkey and former leading Pentagon official under President George W. Bush, said in a telephone interview on Friday.

    A military that appeared, on the surface, to be largely under the thumb of Mr. Erdogan is clearly riven with divisions so severe that the chief of staff appears to have been be detained while lower-level officers put tanks on the streets of Istanbul and the air force over Ankara, the capital.

    Mr. Erdogan has plenty of enemies, eager to see him weakened or removed from power. Among them are Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a coup three years ago. The Russians, led by President Vladimir V. Putin, have tense relations with Mr. Erdogan, who has helped try to depose President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. And Mr. Assad himself would likely be both pleased and amazed if he held onto power longer than Mr. Erdogan.

    Europeans would have plenty to worry about: Just a few months ago they struck a deal with Mr. Erdogan, paying Turkey more than $6 billion to hold onto Syrian migrants rather than let them flow into Western Europe, where many others had settled. It was the migrant crisis more than anything else, the Europeans believe, that led to Britain’s decision to exit the European Union. A failure to stem the flow, they feared, could lead to the breakup of Europe — a fear that American officials, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, shared.

    Of the many intelligence failures that surrounded the Arab Spring uprisings five years ago, the coup in Turkey may soon be added to the list. A senior administration official who deals with Middle Eastern issues said that American diplomats and intelligence agencies were, before Friday, near unanimous in their view that a coup attempt was highly unlikely there.

     

    Mr. Erdogan, in their view, was secure, the official said, bemoaning the state of American intelligence gathering in Turkey. In fact, diplomatic cables and intelligence reports written as recently as this month concluded that Mr. Erdogan had won enough support in the upper ranks of the military to head off any possible plots before they materialized, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence reporting.

    Officials will spend a lot of time determining what they missed. But as Cengiz Candar, a Turkey expert with Al-Monitor, an online news outlet, noted on Friday evening, Mr. Erdogan “made a Faustian bargain with the military, and now the military is back.”

    “It was an alliance,” Mr. Candar said, “but the military is not his friend — not emotionally, not institutionally, not ideologically.”

    Washington had its own problems with Mr. Erdogan and the crosscurrents of Turkish politics. Mr. Erdogan came to power a seeming reformist, and for a while the country seemed to be a flowering democracy. It was not too many years ago that Turkey was cited by many in the United States as a model for the Islamic world, a country that, like Indonesia, could find the right mix of moderate Islamism and democracy.

    But for the past three years Mr. Erdogan’s crackdowns have become an increasing embarrassment to his NATO allies. His efforts to veer toward Islamism and crack down on the news media and opposition groups have left American officials caught between their instincts to support democracy and their reliance on an increasingly authoritarian leader.

    The State Department human rights report, updated last month, complained about new laws allowing the government “to restrict freedom of expression, the press and the internet,” and the arrests of more than 30 journalists. It reported on arbitrary arrests and the denial of fair trials. It complained that Mr. Erdogan’s campaign against the Kurds, and the government’s fear of the Kurdish separatist movement, meant that one NATO ally was bombing rebel groups in Syria while the United States and others were funding — and depending — on those same groups.

    Any prolonged instability in Turkey could impede Mr. Kerry’s latest effort to bring a cease-fire to Syria, and perhaps threaten the American ability to operate from the major air base at Incirlik, where many of the operations against the Islamic State are launched.

     

  • Censoring Mein Kampf – or anything – simply makes its ugly ideas more attractive

    Censoring Mein Kampf – or anything – simply makes its ugly ideas more attractive

    By Kate Maltby History Last updated: July 4th, 2014

    Is this the Summer of Censorship? In the US, it emerged that the NBC network requested a film trailer remove the word “abortion” in order to be advertised on its website. From New York to Tel Aviv, there are calls to scrap the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “The Death of Klinghoffer”, lest it “inflame anti-Semitism”. Here in Britain, we’re being urged to ban junk food advertising full-stop, the same week as the “Right To Be Forgotten” came into force, which allows those wealthy and clued-up enough to sue internet search engines into removing information they find embarrassing from search results, however accurate that information may be. So major newspapers are being informed their content will not be displayed on Google, but in the interests of privacy, they can’t be informed why, or who requested the block. It’s a misnomer, another instance of what I’ve called our chronic addiction to the language of rights. Hear a mention of a “right to be forgotten” on the radio, and who could possibly object? Rephrase it as “the right to forget Robert Peston’s exposure of the financial crisis”, or as Mark Stephens calls it, “the right to burn the index cards in a library of record”, and it suddenly sounds a lot more sinister.

    But the  biggest censorship row brewing is one of our oldest. A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a jovial bookseller in Istanbul. We were talking in German, which was quicker for him than English, and closer to the realms of possibility for me than Turkish. Having established, therefore, my interest in Germany, his eyes lit up. “Ah! I have a real secret for you. It’s banned in Germany, you know. The Jews won’t let you read it.” And as I bristled in doorway, uncertain whether how safely I would walk the streets of Cağaloğlu if I confronted him on his own turf, my formerly charming companion pressed into my hands a shiny, newly published copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

    I thought of my Turkish encounter this week, as it emerged that the Interior Ministers of the 16 German Länder have just agreed to do their utmost to continue the legal injunctions on publications of Mein Kampf in Germany after copyright expires on the first day of 2016. Currently, the state of Bavaria owns the literary estate of Adolf Hitler, and limits publication in Germany to a few excerpts for official history textbooks. As Sally McGrane reports in The New Yorker, the state has even withdrawn support for an academic edition which plans to publish the text with heavily critical annotations. For example, the passage in which Hitler complains about the treatment of First World War veterans will be accompanied by a reminder that his own regime would later gas 5,000 shell-shocked veterans of that war under his euthanasia plan. But even this official history is an allowance too far for the Bavarian state, which withdrew its authorisation last December (though it gave up on reclaiming its money). The highly respected Institute for Contemporary History is pressing ahead with the project nonetheless, and hopes that it will be able to publish after the copyright expires in 2016 – but the ongoing legal battles which inspired this week’s announcement may yet see the Institute’s years of academic study buried.

    Berlin’s caginess over the issue is understandable – Hitler’s legacy remains acutely sensitive in Germany, and in a nation which once centrally instituted state power to enact the most totalitarian of brutalities, the libertarian position of absolving the nation state any ongoing cultural responsibility chafes against a collective memory.  To be more cynical, no politician wants to be the minister who brought back Mein Kampf. And as McGrane’s report makes clear, Germany is haunted by the image of “Neo-Nazis handing out the book in school yards”.

    But if there’s a danger of Mein Kampf flooding school libraries, it’s not in Germany.  In Turkey, where Israel remains the local villain, the book is a best seller. And when I remember my friendly bookseller in Istanbul, I remember how sure he was that the ban would be the book’s unique selling point, his absolute conviction that censorship implied conspiracy. The publication of Mein Kampf may well be a traumatic moment for Germany internally. But as a leading player on the global stage, it also has an international responsibility. Germany’s leaders need to think about how the Mein Kampf ban affects the Middle East, and what it says about the West’s values of free speech, at a time when we are constantly forced to defend ourselves against accusations of hypocrisy. I think I may explode if I hear one more activist claim that the West, collectively, discriminates against Islam, because we decline to ban blasphemy against the Prophet, while Germany maintains its bans against Holocaust Denial or publishing Mein Kampf. This is the self-pity of the oppressor, demands for special treatment dressed up as victimhood. Germany’s bans around Holocaust material are the exception in the West’s approach to freedom of speech, not the rule. But they are a dangerous exception, undermining any claim that Western civilisation promotes an equal playing field of ideas.

    Mein Kampf is, of course, unreadable. Seven hundred pages long in the official Nazi edition, it reminds me above all of the screed spewed out by Elliot Rodger, the mentally ill misogynist killer from California. It’s as ragefully biographical – what McGrane generously calls “bildungsroman style”, and what nowadays would be a little-read livejournal entry – with chapters called “In the House of my Parents” and “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna”. If Hitler were female, he’d have included a chapter called “My Bitter First Period”. But even were Hitler’s prose peerless, it would remain important for us to engage with dangerous ideas. That’s why I was horrified to learn earlier this term that at my own university, UCL, the student union had taken it upon itself to ban a “Nietzsche Society”, in so far as a pompous union has the power to do so. (Their published statement on the matter emphasises the union’s dedication to “fighting the root cause of fascism — capitalism”, which is the Closing of the British Mind in a neat nutshell. I thought their job was to help students support themselves). When I was an undergraduate, I encountered Nietzsche seriously for the first time – and sure enough, I felt an odd thrill at finally hearing an intellectual explanation of a philosopher’s name which had always evoked taboo. But there’s nothing like spending hours jawing with purist 21-year-olds about every possible translation of die ewige Wiederkehr to wean one away from fascism. Perhaps, if Germany really wants to neutralize the dangers of Mein Kampf, it needs to institute a new set of punishments in schools. Force your kids to write out lines of Hitler’s verbiage in detention, and there’s no way they’ll waste lunch breaks passing it round the playground.

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