What the June 12 Turkish elections mean for the Middle East and global finance
Anthony Randazzo | May 25, 2011
Istanbul—President Barack Obama outlined a number of goals for rebranding America to the Muslim world in his recent State Department speech, including the completion of Arab Spring democratic reforms and a bold position supporting a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine based on pre-1967 borders.
But if Washington is going to be successful, it is going to need Ankara on its side, as Turkey—and especially its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—is increasing looked to as a leader in the Muslim world. And much of that depends on the outcome of next month’s Turkish parliamentary elections on June 12.
Turkey is a hive of buzzing political activity these days. Banners are strung across nearly every street blazing the logos of Turkey’s leading parties—the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP).
Large busses roll up and down the streets and highways blasting propaganda and patriotic music and displaying the smiling faces of candidates. And pictures of party leaders Erdoğan (AKP) and Kemal Kılıcdaroğlu (CHP) staring solemnly into the distance adorn billboards, old palace walls, and signs along busy roads.
All and all, the swarm of political literature and advertising makes U.S. presidential elections look like a race for county treasurer. And this is despite the fact that there is little question as to who will win the election.
via Obama’s Success Hinges on Turkey’s Upcoming Election – Reason Magazine.
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).
Court records and the testimony of former government officials show that Fethullah Gulen, who presently resides in Pennsylvania, has amassed more than $25 billion in assets from the heroin route which runs from Afghanistan to Turkey.
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, testified that the drug money has been channeled into Gulen’s coffers by the C.I.A.
“A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes,” Ms. Edmonds said. “After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the US via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago, and Paterson, New Jersey.”
Ms. Edmonds further said that Turkish diplomats, who would never be searched by airport officials, have come into the country “with suitcases of heroin.”
According to Ms. Edmonds and other government witnesses, Gulen began to receive funding from the CIA in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union when federal officials realized that the U.S. could not obtain control of the vast energy resources of the newly created Russian republics because of deep-seated suspicion of American motives.
Turkey, the U.S. officials came to realize, could serve as a perfect “proxy” since it was a NATO ally that shared the same language, culture, and religion as the other Central Asian countries.
The strategy has met with success since Turkey has formed an alliance with Iran and is emerging as the world’s most powerful Islamic nation.
But the success has come with a price. The only way to provide Gulen with sufficient funds to topple Turkey’s secular regime and to conduct education jihad within the Russian republics came from the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
This scenario serves to explain why US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan are forbidden to firebomb the fields or fumigate the poppies with a chemical herbicide, such as glyphosate.
Despite such testimony and growing concern over Turkey, the Obama administration has opted to turn a blind eye to Gulen and his mountain fortress in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
Fethullah Gulen has been called the “most dangerous Islamist” on the planet.
In his native Turkey, Gulen’s vast fortune has been used to create the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP), which has gained control of the government.
With the elections of 2002, the AKP gained absolute control of the Turkish government.
Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education.
Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – – one for every 350- citizens – – the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – – and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.
Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.
Gulen has purchased newspapers, television networks, construction companies, universities, banks, utilities, technological outlets, pharmaceutics, and manufacturing firms throughout the country.
In addition, he has established thousands of madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) throughout Central Asia where students are indoctrinated in the tenets of militant Islam so they may be of service in the creation of a universal caliphate.
This notion is not an idle pipedream. The dream of a universal caliphate came closer to reality in recent weeks with the collapse of the secular government in Kyrgyzstan,.
But the Gulen movement is not confined to Turkey and Central Asia.
Eighty-five Gulen schools have been set up in the United States as charter academies funded by public funds.
Is Gulen really affiliated with the CIA?
In support of his application for permanent residency status, Gulen obtained letters of support and endorsement, from Graham Fuller and other former CIA officials.
His petition was also endorsed by former Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman, and former Ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williamsis the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.
Nursema, 10, a daughter of Ali Haydar Bengi, who was among the nine Turks killed during an Israeli raid on a flotilla trying to run the Gaza blockade.
By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU
Published: July 15, 2010
ISTANBUL — The Turkish charity that led the flotilla involved in a deadly Israeli raid has extensive connections with Turkey’s political elite, and the group’s efforts to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza received support at the top levels of the governing party, Turkish diplomats and government officials said.
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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
An anti-Israel slogan in Istanbul reflects the rift in Israeli-Turkish relations after the raid. Turkey warns that relations could be irreparably damaged.
The charity, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, often called I.H.H., has come under attack in Israel and the West for offering financial support to groups accused of terrorism. But in Turkey the group has helped Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan shore up support from conservative Muslims ahead of critical elections next year and improve Turkey’s standing and influence in the Arab world.
According to a senior Turkish official close to the government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the issue, as many as 10 Parliament members from Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party were considering boarding the Mavi Marmara, the ship where the deadly raid occurred, but were warned off at the last minute by senior Foreign Ministry officials concerned that their presence might escalate tensions too much.
When leaders of the charity returned home after nine Turks died in the Israeli raid, they were warmly embraced by top Turkish officials, said Huseyin Oruc, deputy director of the charity, who was aboard the flotilla.
“When we flew back to Turkey, I was afraid we would be in trouble for what happened, but the first thing we saw when the plane’s door opened in Istanbul was Bulent Arinc, the deputy prime minister, in tears,” he said in an interview. “We have good coordination with Mr. Erdogan,” he added. “But I am not sure he is happy with us now.”
The raid has caused a rupture between Turkey and Israel, and heightened alarm in the United States and Europe that Turkey, a large Muslim country and a major NATO member, is shifting allegiance toward the Arab world. Turkey has warned that its cooperative ties to Israel could be irreparably damaged unless the Israelis apologize and accept an international investigation, steps Israel has so far refused to take.
The charity’s mission, political analysts said, has advanced Mr. Erdogan’s aim of shifting Turkey’s focus to the Muslim east when its prospects for joining the European Union are dim.
The government “could have stopped the ship if it wanted to, but the mission to Gaza served both the I.H.H. and the government by making both heroes at home and in the Arab world,” said Ercan Citlioglu, a terrorism expert at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.
Turkish officials said that the charity operated independently and that its leadership had refused to drop plans to break Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, despite requests from the government. The officials said they had no legal authority to stop the work of a private charity.
Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, said in an interview that the charity and the Justice and Development Party, called the AK Party, had no substantive ties, even if people in politics often became involved in charitable groups. “The I.H.H. has nothing to do with the AK Party, and we have no hidden agenda,” Mr. Bagis said.
But critics say such statements belie the close connections between the party and the charity, as well as the extent to which Turkish officials were closely attuned to the details of the flotilla’s mission before its departure.
“How can such a large country as Turkey, with interests in four continents, and with an export- and investment-driven economy requiring extra caution all around the globe, be dragged to the brink of war by a nongovernmental organization?” asked Semih Idiz, a columnist for the Hurriyet Daily News in Turkey, in a June 7 editorial. The answer, he added, is that the charity is a “GNGO” — a “governmental-nongovernmental-organization.”
Many of the 21 people listed on the charity’s board have or had close links to the AK Party. In January, Murat Mercan, chairman of Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a senior party official, joined an overland aid convoy to Gaza organized by the charity that tried to force its way through the Rafah crossing from Egypt to Gaza.
A trustee of the charity, Ali Yandir, is a senior manager at the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation. The corporation sold the Mavi Marmara, with a capacity for 1,090 passengers, to the charity for about $1.2 million. In 2004, Mr. Yandir was an AK Party candidate for the mayor’s office in Istanbul’s Esenler District.
The charity’s board includes Zeyid Aslan, an AK Party member of Parliament and the acting head of the Turkey-Palestine Interparliamentary Friendship Group; Ahmet Faruk Unsal, an AK Party member of Parliament from 2002 to 2007; and Mehmet Emin Sen, a former AK Party mayor in the central Anatolian township of Mihalgazi.
Those ties partly reflect the common agenda of the party and the charity. Both are involved in relief work among the poor and are bound by a common Islamic ideology. Many of the 60,000 people the charity claims as members come from the religious merchant class that helped Mr. Erdogan sweep to power.
The Humanitarian Relief Foundation was founded in the early 1990s, first as a charity for the poor in Istanbul, and later for Bosnian war victims. It works in more than 100 countries and sent 33 tons of aid to Haiti after its January earthquake. The charity has one branch in the West Bank and another in Gaza, where Turkish families help pay for the care and education of 9,000 orphans.
On Monday, Germany banned the charity’s offices there, citing its support for Hamas, which Germany considers a terrorist organization. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the charity abused donors’ good intentions “to support a terrorist organization with money supposedly donated for charitable purposes.” The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that from 2007 the charity collected $8.5 million and transferred money to six smaller organizations, two belonging directly to Hamas and four with close ties to it.
The charity called the ban a “disgrace” and “misanthropic” and said it would challenge it in court.
A June 21 letter signed by 87 United States senators urged the White House to investigate whether the charity should be designated a foreign terrorist organization. Israel has accused the charity of bolstering Hamas. It also says the group has links to Al Qaeda and has bought weapons, accusations the charity denies.
A senior Turkish government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called such allegations false and said they would not persuade politicians who supported the group’s causes to shun it.
“We are not trying to disengage ourselves from I.H.H. because of the current allegations on their terror links — we are simply not related with them,” the official said. “We consider Israeli efforts to link I.H.H. with terror in light of fake intelligence reports and hence hold AK Party government responsible for the killing of nine innocent people as extremely cheap and improper tactics.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 23, 2010
An article last Friday about the connections between Turkey’s political elite and I.H.H., the Turkish charity that organized the Gaza-bound aid flotilla stopped by a deadly Israeli raid on May 31, contained several errors.
Because of an editing error, the article misstated the effect of a ban on I.H.H. in Germany, where a charity that operates under the same name and was founded by the same people became legally separate in 1997. The ban applied only to the German charity, not the Turkish one.
The article also misstated the price paid by the Turkish charity for the lead flotilla vessel, the Mavi Marmara. It was $1.2 million, not $1.8 million.
And the article referred incorrectly to the relationship between Istanbul Fast Ferries, the municipal agency that sold the Mavi Marmara to the Turkish charity, and the Istanbul City Municipality Transportation Corporation, another city agency. While both are controlled by Turkey’s ruling AK party, the transportation corporation is responsible for land transit; it does not oversee the ferry agency.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 16, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
Deputies from Turkey’s ruling party have voted down a proposal to name a new university in İzmir after Zübeyde Hanım, mother of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
During a debate Tuesday evening in Parliament, the name “Zübeyde Hanım” was proposed for one of the eight new universities around the country to be established under a recent draft law.
Parliament convened to debate the new draft and decided that the university would be named “Katip Çelebi” instead.
During the debate Tuesday before the draft passed, Bülent Baratalı and seven deputies of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, proposed a resolution for the naming of the new university in İzmir “Zübeyde Hanım University.”
Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu, however, expressed her disagreement with the CHP proposal.
CHP deputy Baratalı pointed out that İzmir currently has seven universities and the new university in question was initially named “Turgut Reis,” but this name was later changed to “Katip Çelebi” by Parliament’s Planning and Budgeting Commission.
“For the first time, a university in Turkey would have been named after a woman. At the time the founder of the nation, Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was installed as president, he bore the title of parliamentary deputy – from İzmir,” Baratalı said. “His wife was from İzmir and he laid his mother to rest in İzmir – her grave is in [the local district of] Karşıyaka. For that reason, we, the people of İzmir, owe this homage to the founder of our nation.”
The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, members, however, rejected the resolution proposed by the CHP deputy, and the new university will be named after Çelebi, an Ottoman scientist who lived between 1608 and 1656.
The other universities established under the new law are Yıldırım Beyazıt University in Ankara, Bursa Technical University, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Konya University, Erzurum Technical University, Kayseri Abdullah Gül University and the International University of Antalya.
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NOTE: This is not a scientific poll. The results are for information purposes only, and should not be confused with the results of the scientific polls conducted by CBS News.
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