Tag: Politics

By Jonathan Head BBC News, Istanbul

Dance forms an important part of Alevi religious services

On 12 June, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has governed Turkey for the past eight years, will be seeking a third election victory.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ambitions to introduce far-reaching constitutional change and to do that he needs a larger, two-thirds majority of seats in the next parliament.

So the AKP needs to win new supporters. In particular, Mr Erdogan has tried to reach out to Turkey’s minorities. This is also an important requirement for Turkey’s EU membership bid.

One of the largest of these is the Alevi sect, a community whose beliefs combine elements of Shia Islam and pre-Islamic folk customs.

No-one knows how many Alevis there are, because no official census has ever been authorised. Unofficial estimates put their numbers at between 10% and 30% of the population. They include ethnic Turks and Kurds.

Centuries of oppression

Every Thursday, at community centres across Turkey called cemevi, Alevis gather to hold their unique religious services. Although officially defined as Muslims, Alevi prayer sessions are unorthodox.

Men and women pray together, in a circle, the women wearing colourful headscarves – although outside the cemevi, Alevi woman are usually uncovered.

The service is led by a community elder, known as a dede, and musicians perform on traditional instruments, like the seven-string saz, or lute.

Groups of men and women come forward to dance. They whirl around in a circle at increasing speed, the men stamping their feet, the women spinning, their arms outstretched, as if in a trance.

Alevis do not pray in mosques, do not face Mecca, nor do they observe the fast during Ramadan, or the ban on drinking alcohol.

So for much of Turkey’s history they have been viewed as heretics by the Sunni Muslim majority. In the past, they were often persecuted. In the 16th Century, huge numbers were killed at the orders of the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim.

“Throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire we suffered from repression and massacres,” says Kamil Aykanat, who heads the Okmeydani Alevi community in Istanbul.

“When the new Turkish republic was established in 1923, we expected to get equal rights -but that didn’t happen.”

The new republic was avowedly secular. Founding father Kemal Ataturk saw the influence of Sunni imams as a barrier to progress.

But it also promoted the idea of a homogenous Turkish nation led by a powerful state. Resistance to this uniformity was ruthlessly crushed.

Thousands more Alevis were killed during an uprising in 1937-8, and although overt persecution has ended, there are still many Alevi grievances.

Erdogan’s ‘opening’

Alevi people say their religion is neglected in schools

After his last election win in 2007, Mr Erdogan launched what he called his “Alevi opening”.

He commissioned a series of workshops led by the minister for religion to discuss Alevi demands for official recognition of their faith. They have been running for about a year, but have made little progress.

“These workshops are geared towards the election,” said Izzettin Dogan, chairman of the Cemevi Association.

“They are only to satisfy international opinion.”

Dursun Onal showed me the official textbook his son uses in the religious education classes which are compulsory in all Turkish schools.

Mostly it talks about Sunni Islam, with instructions on how to pray, fast, and make the pilgrimage to Mecca – with occasional references to Christianity and Judaism.

“You see, there is nothing about our beliefs in this book – from A to Z, nothing. This is a kind of torture for us.”

Alevis want these compulsory classes to stop. Some Alevis have gone to court – both in Turkey and to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg – and won their demands that their children be exempted from these classes, but the verdicts have not been implemented by the Turkish department of education.

Sunni resistance

That has not stopped Mr Erdogan from saying his party is the only one trying to do something about the status of Alevis – but the AKP is in a difficult position on Alevis, because of the conservative Sunni beliefs of its supporters.

“We should remember that many of the Sunni religious people support the AKP,” says Nilufer Narli, a sociologist at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

“The AKP does want to introduce changes in the school curriculum and include Alevi teaching, but some Sunni religious people resist this and they haven’t reached a consensus.”

There is even stronger resistance to giving official recognition of cemevi as places of worship. This matters to Alevis, because they miss out on the state funding that goes to Turkey’s 85,000 mosques.

Faith in Turkey is tightly regulated by the powerful state directorate of religious affairs, and its head, Mehmet Gormus, says it is not possible to give cemevi the same status as mosques.

“In Islam, no institution or person can speak on behalf of God. We don’t have the authority to designate this or that place as a house of worship. It is the Koran and teachings of our Prophet [Muhammad], which tell us what to practice, and where.”

The result of this stalemate is that most Alevis are likely to give their votes to the secular CHP.

Ties between the Alevis and the CHP go back a long way and the party’s leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is Alevi – though he rarely mentions it.

Mr Erdogan will have to seek his stronger mandate elsewhere, probably among supporters of hard-line nationalist parties.

“The current government is trying to be tolerant,” says Aykan Erdemir, one of Turkey’s foremost experts on Alevism and now a CHP candidate.

“The problem is it is a mistaken goal. What we need in this new millennium is not greater tolerance, but recognition, acceptance of equal citizenship, acceptance of fundamental rights and freedoms.”

The best way for Turks to promote democracy would be to vote against the ruling party

MOST Turks are understandably grateful to the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, and especially to their prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured). Since AK first came into single-party government in November 2002, the economy has done exceptionally well. Turkey has reformed itself enough to secure the opening of membership negotiations with the European Union. It has pursued a more vigorous foreign policy in its neighbourhood. And a politically intrusive army has been firmly returned to its barracks.

Thanks to these achievements, Turkey has become an economic and political power, both in its region and in the world. Although its relations with Israel and America have soured, in the Islamic world it stands out as a thriving Muslim democracy—an inspiration to the Arab awakening. This is in striking contrast to the mess that the AK party inherited: an economic meltdown, a bust banking system, weak coalition governments that came and went with dizzying rapidity, and the ever-present threat of military intervention.

That Turkish voters are poised to return Mr Erdogan to power in the general election on June 12th is thus not surprising. It is, however, worrying. Mr Erdogan is riding sufficiently high in the polls to get quite close to the two-thirds parliamentary majority that he craves because it would allow him unilaterally to rewrite the constitution (see article). That would be bad for Turkey.

This judgment is not based on the canard that a theocracy is being built. Nine years ago Istanbul’s secular establishment fretted about AK’s Islamist roots—and some early squabbles over religious schools and allowing women to wear the Muslim headscarf at university were indeed troubling. But since then the pious Mr Erdogan and his party have been pragmatic. No matter what the army and too many Israelis (and Americans) whisper, there is scant evidence that AK is trying to turn a broadly tolerant Turkey into the next intolerant Iran.

Explore our interactive guide to Turkey’s upcoming general election

The real worry about the AK party’s untrammelled rule concerns democracy, not religion. Ever since Mr Erdogan won his battles with the army and the judiciary, he has faced few checks or balances. That has freed him to indulge his natural intolerance of criticism and fed his autocratic instincts. Corruption seems to be on the rise. Press freedom is under attack: more journalists are in jail in Turkey than in China. And a worrying number of Mr Erdogan’s critics and enemies, including a hatful of former army officers, are under investigation, in some cases on overblown conspiracy charges.

On top of this, on the campaign trail Mr Erdogan has begun to take a more stridently nationalist tone: he and his party are no longer making serious overtures to the Kurds, Turkey’s biggest and most disgruntled minority. Mr Erdogan has hinted that if he wins a two-thirds majority next week, he will change the constitution to create a powerful French-style presidency, presumably to be occupied by himself. In a country that is already excessively centralised, that would be a mistake.

It would be better if a new AK government were to take a more broadly inclusive approach. Turkey’s constitution does indeed need a makeover, but it should be rewritten in consultation with other political parties and interest groups, and not as an AK project. The best way to make sure this happens would be to push up the vote for the main opposition party, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP). Assuming that two smaller parties also get into the grand national assembly, that should be enough to deny AK its two-thirds majority.

As it happens, the newish CHP leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu (nicknamed Gandhi for his ascetic ways), has been a huge improvement on his dinosaur of a predecessor, Deniz Baykal. He has weeded out much of the party’s old guard, shown himself intolerant of corruption and shifted the party away from its instinctive sympathy for the army’s role in politics. Even more remarkably, Mr Kilicdaroglu has been attracting more supporters than Mr Erdogan to election rallies in the mainly Kurdish south-east, where the CHP has long been weak, by talking more openly of giving all of Turkey’s 81 provinces greater autonomy (it probably helps that he is from the Alevi Muslim minority and that he may have Kurdish forebears).

A vote against autocracy

The AK party is all but certain to form the next government. But we would recommend that Turks vote for the CHP. A stronger showing by Mr Kilicdaroglu’s party would both reduce the risks of unilateral changes that would make the constitution worse and give the opposition a fair chance of winning a future election. That would be by far the best guarantee of Turkey’s democracy.

from the print edition | Leaders

via Turkey’s election: One for the opposition | The Economist.

Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) — At least one demonstrator died and a bodyguard protecting Turkey’s prime minister was hospitalized after clashes erupted around a campaign rally Tuesday, less than two weeks before Turks go to the polls to vote in parliamentary elections.

Violence erupted in Hopa, Turkey, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to speak

The violence erupted in the Black Sea town of Hopa, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to address a rally.

Turkish television showed protesters hurling stones and climbing police barricades, as security forces fired tear gas and water cannons to break up the demonstration.

An emergency room doctor confirmed to CNN that a demonstrator named Metin Lokumcu died of a heart attack after being brought to the emergency room of Hopa State Hospital.

But in a statement released on the website of the opposition Freedom and Solidarity Party (ODP), the party’s deputy chairman Onder Isleyen accused Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of killing the protester.

“As a result of the AKP’s murderous attack, our brother and friend Metin Lokumcu died,” Isleyen wrote. “The AKP is attacking the public everywhere using tear gas and batons.”

Two officials with Erdogan’s entourage, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that a demonstrator died in Hopa on Wednesday, though one of the officials told CNN the man died as the result of a heart attack.

Later in the day, a small group of demonstrators hurled stones at Erdogan’s campaign bus as it was leaving the scene.

“One of the stones hit a bodyguard on the head and he fell off the bus, and when he fell he also hit his head on the ground,” said one of the officials with Erdogan’s campaign, again speaking on condition of anonymity.

Turkish television news filmed dramatic footage of the bodyguard tumbling from the bus, apparently unconscious as it sped down the street. The bodyguard was later hospitalized with head-wounds.

At a subsequent campaign rally in the Black Sea port of Trabzon, Erdogan lashed out at the protesters, calling them “bandits.”

“Bandits with stones in their hands came to Hopa and unfortunately, of course, they attacked our vehicles with stones,” Erdogan said.

Hours later, several hundred flag-waving demonstrators from leftist and secularist political parties hurled bottles and debris at riot police in Istanbul and chanted “murderers” as they ripped down a giant campaign poster of Erdogan.

Polls predict Erdogan’s party will win another term in office in parliamentary elections scheduled for June 12. The party has been in power since it swept to an initial electoral victory 2002.

via Clashes break out at campaign rally for Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan – CNN.com.

ISTANBUL | Fri May 27, 2011 11:23am EDT

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Five serving generals, two colonels and an admiral appeared in an Istanbul court on Friday for questioning over an alleged 2003 plot to unseat the government of Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

The move by prosecutors to call such senior serving officers marked an escalation in a case that has so far led to nearly 200 serving and retired officers being charged of links to an alleged conspiracy, dubbed “Operation Sledgehammer.”

Most of the officers charged are being held in prison.

Coming a little over two weeks before Turkey votes in a parliamentary election, the latest development, according to Turkish media, has strained already tense relations between the country’s secular top brass and a ruling party whose roots go back to banned Islamist movements.

Some television and newspaper reports suggested the armed forces’ surprise last-minute cancellation of its largest regular exercises in the Aegean region this week was a reaction to the decision to summon the generals for questioning.

An armed forces official said they were canceled for purely military reasons, while political leaders have declined comment.

The most senior officer among those called by prosecutors to answer questions was General Bilgin Balanli, commander of the military academies. Their questioning follows the seizure of fresh documents at a retired colonel’s house.

By coincidence on Friday, Erdogan visited the home town of Adnan Menderes, the prime minister who was ousted in a military coup on May 27, 1960 and was subsequently executed.

The military has overthrown three elected governments since 1960, and forced a coalition led by an Islamist party to quit in 1997, in an event that led to Erdogan and other leaders of banned religious parties to form the AK Party.

Opinion polls show Erdogan’s AK set to win a third consecutive term of single party rule when Turkey votes on June 12, having first swept to power in 2002.

Credited with overseeing a period of unprecedented prosperity, Erdogan aims to introduce a new constitution, to replace one drafted under military tutelage following a coup in 1980. His critics fear the new charter will be in the mold of the AK, though Erdogan says it should strengthen democracy.

Most of the defendants in the Sledgehammer case, which broke wide open more than a year ago, are currently being detained at Silivri jail, just over an hour’s drive outside Istanbul.

The most senior among them is retired General Cetin Dogan, former head of the prestigious First Army, who along with several other officers and journalists caught up in other conspiracy probes, is campaigning to win a seat in parliament.

Defendants in the Sledgehammer case say the documents presented by the prosecution were part of a war game scenario used in a military seminar and that other documents were faked.

(Writing by Daren Butler and Simon Cameron-Moore; Editing by Jon Hemming)

via Generals questioned as Turkey’s pre-poll tensions show | Reuters.