I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.
Willam Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
I read the news today, oh boy. Here’s what Reuters said: “Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has applied to Turkey’s constitutional court on Friday to challenge the alleged violation of his and his family’s rights by social media, a senior official in his office told Reuters.”
Isn’t it grand, this so-called rule of law. The prime minister is correct in his action. Long ago his family’s rights were well-established as were his. When the fox owns the chicken coop every day the menu-du-jour is chicken. We and the world know the quality of those who rule this sad country.
But who’s to argue? Not the sheep…if they whimper, they’re next. And besides, they’re well-bribed with food and coal and things magical from the bountiful Ankara sky. They have indeed learned to deeply love their Big Brother. They repay with their pathetic ballots. So, who? Perhaps young people who, like all young people everywhere, thought they had a future? Sorry. Enough of them have died and been maimed. Maimed by the prime minister who now frets about his and his family’s rights. Hah! So surely it will be the political opposition who once thought they had a patriotic responsibility, even a cause? No cause. No thought. No brains. No nothing. The military? The ones with the soundest, strongest emotional and ethical legacy? Nope. Folded up like a cheap suit. Hardly a whimper. Generals now bow their heads to thieving politicians. Cowardly submissive stuff like that makes one wonder if they ever received an education (and at taxpayer expense). Atatürk? Huh? Please, we must not speak aloud of such things. So who’s left to argue? Media? Ha! Sold-out. Universities? Ha! Ha! Expounding on pet obscurities, historical quirks, dead poets and deader laws and what once was and now will never be. There is no time left for history and literature and law and medicine and philosophy and too many more words. Speaking of which, what about writers? Well, who reads? The world is too much with all of us, and we are all too late.
So who will care? Care enough to act, to really act? To stand up and say that this is enough. That the people will no longer be governed by a corrupt political process. Nor by numbskull, repetitive political opposition parties nor by America’s CIA gangsters? Is that too much to ask?
It seems so. Time grows short. Another crooked election is coming, this one presidential. One way or another the same small people will throw the same big stones at us. Ah Turkey, the saddest country with the saddest people with the saddest stories. Always beating on, always being beaten. Ah, dear Turkey, Atatürk’s children deserved so much more. So did Atatürk.
James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
19 April 2014
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Twitter says its executives will meet with the Turkish government after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the company of tax evasion.
According to AAP Twitter executives will meet officials from Turkey’s government, a company spokesman says, after the country’s prime minister vowed to pursue the site for alleged tax evasion.
“I can confirm that Twitter representatives will be in Turkey to meet with government officials,” a Twitter spokesman said on Sunday, without providing further details.
Reports have said a meeting between Twitter and Turkish government officials was set for Monday.
It comes after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday accused the micro-blogging site of tax evasion.
“Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are international companies established for profit and making money,” Erdogan said.
“Twitter is at the same time a tax evader. We will go after it.”
On March 20, Erdogan’s government banned access to the site over leaks on the social network implicating his inner circle in corruption claims.
The ban sparked outrage among Turkey’s NATO allies and international human rights groups who viewed it as a setback for democracy in the European Union-hopeful country.
Ankara had to lift the ban on April 3 after its highest court ruled the blockade breached the right to free speech.
Premier can no longer return country to moderate path
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, this weekend faces the biggest test of his 11 years in power. In the past few months, the 60-year-old premier has polarised Turkish society by passing a raft of illiberal laws with the apparent intent of protecting himself and his cronies from corruption allegations that have rocked his government. To save his political skin, Mr Erdogan reassigned thousands of police officials investigating the allegations. He has now gone a step further by banning Twitter and YouTube ahead of the vote. Understandably, many fear Turkey is lurching towards authoritarian government.
Mr Erdogan faces a moment of reckoning on Sunday when Turks vote in local elections across the country. If Mr Erdogan’s AK party scores about 45 per cent or higher, his position will be consolidated and he will be in a position to meet his goal of running for the Turkish presidency. But if he wins less than 40 per cent or loses the crucial cities of Istanbul or Ankara, his leadership will be seriously damaged.
The people of Turkey must decide their political future. That is only right. But even if Mr Erdogan performs well – and the AKP retains a very strong following in its Anatolian heartland and beyond – he can no longer be regarded as a figure who can unite Turkey and return the country to stability. Turkey must start looking for its next generation of leaders – even within the ranks of the AKP – who can end the political turmoil.
The fundamental problem the nation faces is the schism between Mr Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen, a powerful Sunni Muslim cleric based in Pennsylvania. A decade ago, Mr Erdogan and Mr Gulen joined forces to conduct a peaceful revolution against Turkey’s army and secularist leaders, allowing the moderate Muslim AKP to consolidate power. Now the Gulenists are leveraging their position inside Turkey’s security and judicial structures to undermine Mr Erdogan, whom they believe has become a detached authoritarian. As is often the case in history, the revolution is devouring its own children.
The internecine warfare is destroying Turkey’s independent institutions and the international reputation it earned in the early years of AKP power. Then it was hailed as an example of a moderate democratic Muslim majority state. In order to sully Mr Erdogan’s reputation, the Gulenists, members of a shadowy group that can in no way be seen as a responsible opposition, appear to be leaking compromising tape recordings alleging corruption by Mr Erdogan and his allies. Mr Erdogan’s ban on Twitter, which is still in force despite an adverse court ruling, came as he tried to staunch the leaks. Overall, Mr Erdogan’s high-handed conduct in office brings immense cost to the country’s standing.
When set against the past decade of Turkish history, this is a tragic turn of events. At the start of the millennium, Turkey acquired much political favour in the west as it carried out reforms under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the EU.
Once the country’s negotiations on EU membership stalled, progress quickly unwound. But what the country is also discovering is that the strong levels of economic growth enjoyed during Mr Erdogan’s first decade in office may be drawing to an end. Growth this year could be a mere 2 per cent, down from about 9 per cent a few years back.
This weekend’s election must therefore mark a watershed in Mr Erdogan’s leadership. Whatever the result, the way forward for Turkey is to restore authority and integrity to the nation’s institutions. It may well be that Mr Erdogan wins enough backing on Sunday to remain at the helm of national politics. But his reputation as a statesman is shredded.
The Turkish MP has missed the chance to become a contributor to democracy
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Seeing as it was Recep Tayyip Erdoganbs last term as Prime Minister, when his Justice and Development Party (JDP) won a landslide victory in the 2011 General Elections, one of his aims was to introduce a presidential system in Turkey.
Perhaps having this in mind, on the very evening of his election victory, he would announce that in his new term he would embrace all strata of the Turkish society, both his supporters and the opposition.
Wishfully thinking, many optimists, including myself, believed that it was most likely that he would try to establish better relations with other political parties to achieve his goal. We hoped for less political tensions and more consensus in Turkey, and finally a widespread Spanish-style (as in 1978) cooperation to draft a new democratic constitution. We could not have been more wrong.
The ban on Twitter after a court decision last week was only one of many restrictive measures that the Erdogan government have taken since 2011, if not the most meaningless one.
The law on the Internet last month had already tightened state control diminishing individual autonomy with the pretext that, in Erdoganbs words, the government was b only taking precautions against blackmail and immorality.
B If the Internet and computers are not used in a proper way under certain monitoring and order, they do not constitute beneficial and educational tools anymore. Instead, they turn into dangers with bitter results.b B
The imposition of the governmentbs self-defined moralism have curbed freedom of speech and opinion to the extent that Turkey has beaten China and Iran in becoming the worldbs top jailer of journalists (not to mention those who lost their jobs).B
What was as striking is that the people of Turkey spent last November reading and watching discussions whether studentsb mixed-sex house share was against the countrybs ethical code, an issue which received little coverage in world media. As a matter of fact, the police were bursting into the houses of university students in the middle of nights to check who was living with whom.B
A certain moral authority defined by a narrow group was once again being imposed over others: non-Muslims, liberals, LGBTs, feminists, atheists, etc. It was a testament that the Erdogan government was unaware of the educative function of endowing individuals with rights and liberties and an autonomous will guaranteed by a functioning and independent judicial system.
I am sincerely sorry that Erdogan has lost a big opportunity to become a true contributor to the history of democracy as he seems to fail to continue his peace-minded discourses, which used to call for advanced democracy, the alliance of civilisations and Turkeybs potential exemplary role to marry its Islamic (among others) customs with democratic values.
Democracy, as he seems to understand it, works only for those who support the government. Democracy is still a matter of elections. Democracy is national will.
The increasingly authoritarian rhetoric he embraced since 2011, i.e. during his b mastershipb as a politician, as he calls it, came to a peak during the Gezi Parki events last summer. The dissidents managed to prevent the destruction of the park in Istanbul, which was planned to be turned into a shopping mall that Istanbul hardly lacks.
The Erdogan government saw a widespread opposition for the first time during its office time, an opposition that none of the oppositional parties, weakly organised and ideologically narrow-minded, could have supplied before. As the world watched live, the police, heroes of the Erdogan government at the time, suppressed the demonstrators with pepper gas and excessive use of force, which has led to the death of many civilians and police officers, the last being only ten days ago.
Erdogan would claim that it was the international interest rate lobby who were responsible for the events, disregarding protestorsb demands for liberal democratic rights and liberties. We have seen a perfect example of authoritarianism where the governments show a lack of concern for the wants and views of others and suggest unconditional obedience to authority.
Since December 2013, the appearance of several tapes of phone talks of the JDPbs inner circle of ministers and bureaucrats seems to have uncovered one of the greatest corruption scandals in Turkish history.
When it was revealed that Erdogan had asked in his phone talks with his son to stash away the money they have in their house on 24 February, the Prime Minister said that the recordings were fake. With the technology in hand, he furthered, his men would prepare a similar incriminating tape within a week or ten days. So far no scientific reports have shown that the tapes are fake, while we are still looking forward to seeing how tapes of this kind can be fabricated.
While new records aiming to show the level of corruption in the Turkish government and bureaucracy are being released every other day, Erdogan has got a new enemy now, the Gulen Movement, which he accuses of setting up a plot against him and of getting entrenched within the police and judiciary. Hundreds have been re-appointed in the police departments and other bureaucratic posts since the first tapes were released.
As optimistically as they were when Erdogan was re-elected PM three years ago, the freedom-minded people of Turkey, who want nothing but equal freedoms and liberties for all, are wishfully thinking that the Gezi Parki protests with its liberal democratic spirit are not over yet.
Yet they are uncertain what has been going on within the police departments and state offices.
They are uncertain if they can still trust the judicial system in Turkey. They are uncertain if a corrupt version of neo-liberal alliances has been stealing from the pockets of ordinary women and men, and how much.
They are uncertain which political party can provide a real alternative to the JDP by fully committing to democracy – a democracy which seeks to inject rights and liberties into the social, political and moral bloodstream of society regardless of ethnicity, religion or gender, embracing all, as Erdogan had once promised.
Dr Ozan Ozavci is Research Fellow, The University of Southampton
Today, the Black Sea rages red.
Today, the missiles of the west tremble in anticipation.
And today, the Turkish navy sends a task force on a three-month circumnavigation around Africa.
How nice.
In the face of great strategic uncertainty and dangerous border vulnerability, such is what passes for a strategic maneuver.
Such is the condition of military thinking in the demolished Turkish military.
How sad.
The Turkish military, the true founder of modern Turkey.
It had hurled the western occupying imperialist powers into the sea.
The Turkish military, the pride of Atatürk.
But that was then. And today is today. And the general staff now bow their collective heads to the politicians. Bow their heads!
“Don’t fall into the temptation of trying to please pea-brains,” said Mustafa Kemal to his fellow officer, Ahmet Cemal, in 1910. “If you condescend to gain strength from the favor of this or that man, you may get it at present, but you’ll have a rotten future.”
Today, Turkey is already experiencing such a rotten future. And we already know the pea-brains.
Today, I learned that one of the pea-brains decreed that Turkish military cadets may no longer apply to West Point. Extremely competitive, acceptance there requires sponsorship by the government. Instead they will be applying to the Chinese and Korean academies. This is a major shift in Turkish foreign policy. This is a de-westernization of its best and brightest youth.
And then I thought of my first meeting with Mustafa Kemal.
My senior year at West Point, the winter of 1962.
I am fully absorbed in a course entitled The History of the Military Art.
We are now studying World War I. Except for its first few weeks of brilliant German maneuvers, it’s a blood-ridden, boring stalemate, a slaughterhouse in the trenches.
One day after class, I visit the Cadet Bookstore.
I see Gallipoli, by Alan Moorehead, an Australian by birth.
I purchase it, outside reading never hurts.
Moorehead introduces Kemal to me on page nine:
“There was one name, more important than all the rest, that is missing from the list of guests at Harold Nicholson’s dinner party.” (Nicholson was junior secretary in the British Embassy)
“He waited in resentful claustrophobia for the opportunity that never came.”
“Through all these chaotic years it was Kemal’s galling fate to take orders from this man.” (Enver)
“No one in his wildest dreams would have imagined that half a century later Kemal’s name would be reverenced all over Turkey, that every child at school would know by heart the gaunt lines of his face, the grim mouth and the washed eyes, while his spectacular rival would be all but forgotten.”
Who was this Kemal? My professors had never mentioned him, nor had our textbooks. We had studied Napoleon and Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Grant and Eisenhower and Guderian and Rommel and MacArthur. But about this Kemal, not a word.
I could not stop reading my new book, Page 129: “It was at this point that Mustafa Kemal arrived.” (It was at Chanuk Bair.) “Kemal’s astonishing career as a commanding officer dates from this moment.”
And from this point, the book “belongs” to Mustafa Kemal.
His “air of inspired desperation.”
His “fanatical attack on the Anzac beachhead all afternoon.”
His reconnaissance during the cease fire: “It was even said that Kemal had disguised himself as a sergeant and had spent the whole nine hours with various burial parties close to the Anzac trenches.”
His detailed journal: “He always sees the battle from a fresh point of view.”
His prophecy of the landing at Suvla: “From the 6th August onwards the enemy’s plans turned out just as I expected. I could not imagine the feelings of those who, two months before, had insisted on not accepting my explanations….They had allowed the whole situation to become critical and the nation to be exposed to very great danger.”
Mustafa Kemal, the savior, the father, the inspiration of the Turkish people, or at least those who are able to comprehend his genius.
And so I graduated from West Point and did my duty.
And so went the years and the decades and by a quirk of fate I came to Turkey.
And then I read another book: Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey by Andrew Mango.
And after that I read more and more books about this splendid man and I read his writings too. And I realized how my earlier education at West Point had been severely flawed.
Why?
Because Atatürk was the exemplar of the soldier-statesman we all should have studied and emulated. My god, he had won and built a nation. He had defeated the dark-minded forces that had enslaved the minds of Turkish men and women for centuries. He was a liberator beyond compare. Military, political, social, economical, educational, philosophical, cultural…he had mastered and implemented all the arts of modernization. He had given to all an explosive burst of genuine freedom. Indeed, he had set the way to an incomparable secular, democratic, republic of Turkey. And we, in the greatest military academy in the world, failed to know anything about him!
How I wish now that sixty years ago I had a Turkish cadet classmate at West Point. How he could have inspired us all with the full story of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And how enlightening it would have been for West Point and the “West.”
One night soon after I had arrived in Turkey, I went to a concert at the AKM. AKM stands for the Atatürk Cultural Center. It was a splendid concert auditorium with a vast stage for theater and ballet. It has since been left to ruin by the abominable government that now rules this fast-fading country. Outside were parked numerous buses. Inside was a contingent of cadets from a local military high school. I struck up a conversation. They all spoke perfect English.
“So what’s next for you guys?” I asked.
“I’m going to West Point next year,” one answered with a confident pride.
“Really?” I said, “I went there.”
He was as surprised as I was.
He was a solid kid, like all of them, facing an uncertain future. And I thought of myself, so unknowing, so long ago.
“You will have a great advantage at West Point, you know, with your military preparation,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I hope so, sir.”
“You will,” I said, “More than any of them there now.”
“Why is that, sir?”
“You have Atatürk,” I said. “And make sure you tell all of them all you know about him. Share him!”
And then the bell sounded softly three times. Last call. We said goodbye and scattered to our seats.
I wonder now about those splendid boys… By now they are officers. Army? Navy? Air Force? Are any in jail due to the ongoing criminal and nonsensical conspiracy of the CIA, Fethullah Gülen, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to destroy the Turkish military and Mustafa Kemal?
The decision to abandon West Point training, made by someone somewhere in the Turkish chain of command, is a particularly harmful one. It insults the wise heritage of Mustafa Kemal. It severs the alliance of American and Turkish military academy-trained officers. And it stinks of political opportunism and ignorance. But those details can be debated some other day, hopefully by the young Turkish cadets who will easily see the profoundly catastrophic effects of a military turning its back on the world’s preeminent military institution. It’s a decision that penalizes both West Point and the Turkish Military Academy. It’s a decision made by those pea-brains, domestic and foreign, who today cause such havoc in Turkey.
Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
MACBETH, William Shakespeare
In your repetition, in your ranting, you bore me immensely and to tears.
Yet in your supernatural excess, you never fail to astonish.
Now a hunted man, who curses stars for giving light to darkness,
you cannot control your rotting tongue.
There must surely be some divine disgust coming.
You should be pitied, such an inhuman piece of wreckage.
But in your deceit you transcend pity.
The condition of your end surpasses words, except perhaps one– UNSPEAKABLE
Nine months ago you murdered a fifteen year-old boy.
It took Berkin Elvan nine months to be born.
And nine months to die by your hand.
Nine months in a coma, tubed and hosed, draining away in a hospital.
A hospital where, the day he died, you gassed and beat his mourners.
And that night, you gassed and beat his mourners all over the nation.
And that night I wrote about rage and outrage.
“HEY YOU!” I shouted… “HEY ERDOĞAN!”
That night I asked you, “Tomorrow, will you attack the boy’s corpse?”
I felt so strange asking that question. Who would do such blasphemy?
But true to your deceitful form, you would.
And did.
And without qualms, so cool, so cold, so devastating your style.
Every religion, one way or another says, never speak ill of the dead.
But you…unspeakable you…What in hell is your religion?
And the next day you continued to defile the boy’s corpse.
You went to Siirt.
Your wife’s hometown.
And how courageous you were imitating the home-grown liar and thief Jet Fadil whose parliamentary seat you occupy in historically perfect irony.
Imposter! Charlatan! Infidel!
The boy was a “terrorist, you yelled to your mob of bootlickers in the plaza at Siirt.
Clap-clap-clap went your mob.
He was carrying a slingshot, steel marbles and wearing a scarf, you lied.
Clap-clap-clap went your mob.
Yes,true to your form, you lied.
The picture was photoshopped by one of your corrupt cops.
Everyone knows this.
Everyone except your Allah-dazzled mobs.
Clap-clappity-clap went your bedazzled bootlickers.
Clap-clappity-clap…
Then you insulted the boy’s mother.
“I couldn’t understand why you threw steel marbles and carnations into your son’s grave,” you yelled.
Booooooooo! yelled your mob in avid, oblivious agreement. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Who? What? When? Where? Why? …..
I mean words fail…a head of state talking such abominable trash, such profanity…
Booing a dead child’s mother?
Your mob, your perverted followers.
Your mobs in plazas where no light ever shines. YOUR “people.”
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!
What idiot advises you to say and do such things?
The guy with the pig-greased hair?
That peddler of slime and subterfuge?
The one who is ready to die for you?
Hadi!
Go!
Die!
Lead by example!
Do the right thing!
Or do you advise yourself?
Or was it Egemen Bağış, your thieving ex-minister?
The pervert who called Berkin’s mourners “necrophiles.”
Or was it Mehmet Ali Şahin, Turkey’s greatest verbal defecator.
In Ergenekon, as he had so vividly explained, “Turkey is defecating. Turkey will continue cleansing its intestines.”
About Berkin, he was even less sensitive.
If Berkin had died after the election, he blathered, the funeral crowd would not have been so large.
And for all this, and for so much more, you will all soon go forever.
The door is knocking.
Can you hear it?
Your advisors won’t tell.
Only the knock tells.
The knock that appalls.
A knock, and you disappear.
Somewhere, beyond the sun, beyond the touch of humanity,
Beyond the light. Beyond thought.
And all that remains, all those “things” of yours,
will be razed, destroyed, plowed over.
And the land will be calm.
And your hands?
Your bloody, thieving, deceiving, murderous hands?
They too will be food for worms.
Listen well, for it has already been written:
Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. HAMLET, William Shakespeare
