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12th president of Turkey

Turkey faces a ‘war’ within its borders as Prime Minister Erdogan cracks down on opponents

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is firing judges, sacking policemen and raising concerns about the fragility of the country’s democracy according to diplomats and academics
Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey Photo: AP

By Ruth Sherlock, Istanbul

Posters of the candidates plaster the walls of Istanbul’s Qassim Pasha district, urging residents to vote in local and national elections later this year.

For the past decade the electoral decision within the ramshackle apartment blocks and tea houses of this neighbourhood – one of the poorest in the city – was a foregone conclusion. Recep Tayyip Erdogan,Turkey’s prime minister, grew up here and its residents are proud supporters of their man.

Now, however, a different mood is quietly infiltrating the air.

“Erdogan was a perfect leader but now we need someone new,” said Zulfu Yaroman, 65, a resident supporter of the ruling AKP Justice and Development party. “Erdogan can stay in the party but I don’t want him to head it any longer.”

So how is it that Mr Erdogan, the ultimate populist who was once awarded the People’s choice for Time 2011 Person Of The Year, who has enjoyed 11-years of unhindered rule has so mortally offended even his most loyal support base?

The answer lies in corruption scandals that have seen Mr Erdogan’s closest ministers, their families, and even his own son becoming embroiled. And it also lies in a furious response by the government, ordering sweeping arrests of police officers, the prosecution and the judiciary.

The scandal is rocking Turkish politics, even, on Thursday, prompting fist-fights among politicians in parliament.

Tezcan, a member of parliament from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, scuffles with ruling Justice and Development Party’s parliamentarian Saral (REUTERS)

The response to the scandals – a mixture of accusations of bribery and passing business contracts to family members – has left Mr Erdogan open to criticism of appearing increasingly autocratic and paranoid about holding on to power, at whatever cost. So serious is this charge that international observers question whether the country’s democracy is at threat.

“In Turkey you get the disappointing sense that there is insecurity at work,” a diplomat from one EU country told the Telegraph. “We are a champion of Turkey’s accession to the EU, but this threatens the momentum we’ve had in making that happen.”

This week saw the biggest overhaul of the judiciary in the country’s history when Mr Erdogan fired or reassigned 96 judges. Among these men were several who had spearheaded the corruption probe.

In all Mr Erdogan has purged more 2000 police officers from their post, replacing them with his own appointees. He is trying to push a bill through parliament that would give to his loyalists the vital role of appointments in the judiciary.

However, many agree, it is Mr Erdogan’s choleric temperament when faced with these challenges that is now most damaging his reputation as a strong progressive leader.

When under stress, both during the popular protests at Gezi park last year and during this corruption probe, Turkey’s premier has “lashed out”.

“There isn’t a politician in government that hasn’t felt the full weight of the prime minister,” said one source with contacts in the prime ministry.

Mr Erdogan’s AKP party members appeared to show their temper on Thursday, beating in parliament Bülent Tezcan, the main opposition party’s deputy chairman until he had to be admitted to hospital, after he raised the sensitive topic Bilal Erdogan, the prime minister’s son, being implicated in the corruption probe.

In public speeches Mr Erdogan has unhelpfully associated himself with autocrats, employing the fallback position used by strongmen – past and present – of the Middle East, of dismissing his problem, the corruption probe as a “dirty foreign plot”.

Based on little more than a rumour circulating in the Turkish press that Francis J. Ricciardone, the American envoy was “meddling” in domestic affairs during the corruption probe Mr Erdogan attacked foreign diplomats in Turkey. He said ambassadors should “mind their own business”, and that “we have no obligation to keep you in our country”.

(AFP)

With a hint of exasperation, an EU diplomat told the Telegraph said: “When there has been an internal problem in Turkey, to deflect attention from the government, a foreign threat is invoked.”

But the real reason behind Turkey’s political turmoil is much more complicated.

It is rooted in a bitter struggle between Mr Erdogan and Fethulleh Gulen, a spiritual leader who now lives in self-imposed exile in a Pennsylvania redoubt but whose movement, Hizmet, remains powerful in Turkey.

The war between Mr Erdogan and Mr Gulen comes after a decade of friendship, in which the two men worked together to advance the other’s interests. Mr Erdogan gave opportunities to Hizmet’s members, staffing his offices with its followers. And in turn Mr Gulen used his sizeable connections in the business community and with foreign diplomats to promote Mr Erdogan’s tenure at home and abroad.

They worked together to defang the Turkish military, whose generals were notorious for plotting coup attempts against the country’s political rulers. But once the threat of the military was gone, the Gulen-Erdogan alliance broke down as they began to vie for power among themselves.

“Mr Erdogan allowed Gulen to staff his offices with Hizmet’s followers. But now the alliance is broken, he fears that they are more loyal to Gulen than to him; that the people who helped him [against the military] are plotting to destroy him. He feels threatened,” one source inside the government said.

Government officials say the decision by the judiciary to publicly announce the corruption charges in an election year is evidence that the probe is political, and they claim that behind the judges lies the influence of Mr Gulen who is using the probe as a tool to destroy the prime minister.

Whatever the truth it is incontrovertible that the recent turmoil has exposed as cosmetic many of the reforms that have built Mr Erdogan reputation as a moderniser for Turkey.

Despite sweeping constitutional reforms, which had made Turkey’s ruling system more compatible with the democratic requirements for entry to the EU and had improved the confidence of foreign investors to come to the country, the scandal has exposed a judiciary and police still riven with political alliances.

“What is happening in this process is the erosion of Turkey as a state. It is a meltdown. We see institutions are no longer dealing with one another as is written in the constitution,” said Soly Ozel, a political scientist at Kadir Has university.

The political turmoil has been deeply damaging to Turkey’s economy. The Turkish Lira has plunged almost 10% per cent since mid-December, as investors worry about the country’s future.

That is perhaps the most serious concern for Mr Erdogan, who faces elections this year, either for prime minister or president depending on what he decides to stand for.

Mr Ozel said: “I don’t believe he will lose his election. He remains the most powerful politician in the country and he constantly goes for broke.

So far he has won but at the end of this fight it will be like the World War One; even the winners will not be winners.”

telegraph.co.uk, 23 Jan 2014

January 24, 2014
The United States needs to tell Turkey to change course

By Morton Abramowitz, Eric Edelman and Blaise Misztal, Updated: Thursday, January 23, 6:32 PM

Morton Abramowitz and Eric Edelman are former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey and co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Turkey Initiative. Blaise Misztal is acting director of foreign policy at the center.

Whatever his achievements over the past decade, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is destroying his country’s parlous democracy. That is a profound problem for Turks and Turkey’s Western allies. Staying silent, out of fear that speaking out would harm some short-term interests, risks Turkey’s longer-term stability.

Last month police arrested more than 50 people close to Erdogan’s government — including prominent business executives and sons of government ministers — on charges of corruption. While graft has long permeated Turkish governments, these allegations are unprecedented. They reach high levels of government and involve not just domestic transgressions but also sizable evasions of Iranian sanctions.

Rather than ensuring a meticulous examination of these charges, Erdogan is burying them. He has removed the case’s lead prosecutors and some 3,000 police officers nationwide, sought to increase government control over a weak judiciary,limited the ability of police to conduct independent investigations, prevented journalists from reporting on the case andmounted a media campaign to destroy his enemies — particularly the followers of powerful religious leader Fethullah Gulen, who were once his strongest allies. And, as he did when protests erupted against his government last summer, Erdogan portrays the events as a massive plot against him. He has also implicated other opposition parties and foreign powers and even threatened to expel the U.S. ambassador.

These are not the actions of a politician simply seeking to stave off scandal. Erdogan is exploiting the allegations to further stifle dissent and strengthen his grip on Turkey.

His tactics are not new. When challenged, Erdogan has sought to destroy his opponents rather than compromise. After effectively sidelining the military’s political influence , Erdogan went after other centers of power: media, business leaders and civil society; now, the Gulenists, a strong, politically effective community. The prime minister has exploited crises — whether real or manufactured — to undermine the rule of law.

The protests in Gezi Park last year and the present scandal are neither isolated domestic disturbances nor simple political infighting. Their occurrence and the government’s reaction are symptomatic of a struggle between an increasingly authoritarian government, which seeks to reduce resistance to its rule, and opposition movements ranging from secular liberals to conservative Gulenists.

That struggle has entered a new phase. Turkey has important local elections at the end of March, followed by presidential and parliamentary campaigns. Erdogan has not yet declared whether he will seek the presidency or reelection as prime minister, but he is intent on continuing to run Turkey. These allegations, and his subsequent actions, could lower his vote tallies; they have given the opposition parties new life.

Turkey’s democratic decline creates a pressing dilemma for the United States. Erdogan’s current course would take Turkey from an imperfect democracy to an autocracy. Such a fate for a close ally and NATO member would have profound implications for our partnership, the United States’ beleaguered credibility and the prospects for democracy in the region. It would also threaten Turkey’s economy.

Secretary of State John Kerry, with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in tow, recently made some modest, generalized public references to U.S. devotion to democracy and the rule of law while insisting that the United States would stay out of Turkish domestic politics and rhapsodizing on the bilateral relationship. Not surprisingly, Davutoglu agreed.

Erdogan’s denunciation of supposed U.S. meddling puts Washington in a difficult position: If the United States weighs in on the scandal, it might give his accusations merit and rally more supporters to his side.

Yet for much of Erdogan’s rule, the U.S. approach has been mostly public silence on unfavorable developments, with occasional private rebukes. As we argued in a recent Bipartisan Policy Center report, this strategy has not succeeded. It has not influenced important aspects of Erdogan’s foreign policy, which have often diverged from U.S. policy; moderated his confrontational rhetoric; or led to a less antagonistic domestic policy. Indeed, U.S. silence all these years might have encouraged Erdogan.

U.S. policymakers should lay aside their reluctance to confront the disastrous impact of Erdogan’s dictatorial tendencies and remind the Turkish leader of the importance the United States attaches to Turkey’s political stability and democratic vitality. Particularly as their influence is greater than it appears: While Turks do not trust the United States, neither do they like to be at odds with it.

Erdogan has exploited Turkey’s partnership with the United States and his close personal relationship with President Obama to burnish his legitimacy. U.S. condemnation of his recent actions — publicly and even more strongly in private — might temper his posturing. However significant U.S. interests with Turkey are, neither silence nor platitudes will help halt its political descent.

Erdogan is doing great harm to Turkey’s democracy. The United States should make clear, privately and publicly, that his extreme actions and demagoguery are subverting Turkey’s political institutions and values and endangering the U.S.-Turkey relationship.

January 23, 2014
Loose Lips Threaten Turkey’s Powerful

As the corruption scandal rages, eye-opening wiretapped conversations of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his main rival, Fethullah Gülen, have been leaked to the public

The corruption scandal that continues to rock Turkey reached a new high this week when taped conversations of the country’s two biggest power brokers were leaked online. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was wiretapped, police reports show, and so was his chief rival, Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric the Turkish government accuses of being behind the corruption investigation.

The wiretaps reveal previously unknown information about both men. It appears that Gülen had direct ties with Turkey’s business elite, and a police investigation is trying to tie Erdoğan to figures affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The tape wars started Monday when a Twitter user began spreadingSoundcloud links containing of the four leaked recordings of Gülen’s conversations (one of the recordings mysteriously vanished later). The account was suspended in a heartbeat, but the links had already made it to the media. The phone conversations were between Gülen and “some executives from institutions established and run by the people who are inspired by [his] movement,” according to Bülent Keneş, the editor of the daily Today’s Zaman, a paper sympathetic to the Gülenist cause.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s control of the country could be in jeopardy. (REUTERS)

Living in the Poconos in a self-imposed exile since the late ’90s, Gülen is the leader of a religious movement that spans the globe. The Gülenist movement encompasses a wide network of businessmen and runs charter schools in 90 countries (including at least 120 in the U.S.), a media company in Turkey and a private Turkish bank that adheres to Islamic lending practices, Bank Asya. More importantly, the movement heavily influences Turkey’s police and judiciary.

RELATED: MEET FETULLAH GULEN, THE BILLY GRAHAM OF TURKEY

The phone conversations reveal that Gülen gets daily briefings about the country’s political and economic matters. “[The recordings] would come as a surprise to many who think of Gülen only as a cleric, only praying and studying religion, but he’s a figure with a huge influence all over the world,” says Nazlı Ilıcak, a journalist who wrote a book on the Gülenists in 2011, in a phone interview. “Therefore it’s normal for businessmen to regularly visit him, him being involved in business dealings.”

Fetullah Gülen carries a heavy influence inside Turkey despite living in Pennsylvania.

According to the recordings, Gülen’s aides deliver messages from many influential Turkish tycoons, including Mustafa Koç, whose Koç Holding company generates annual sales equal to 6 percent of Turkey’s economy. The recording also features Gülen and his aide discussing whether Koç would sponsor the Turkish Olympics, an annual event in which students from Gülen’s charter schools compete to see who can make the best speech in Turkish. Koç was, indeed, one of the four sponsors of the event, along with Bank Asya. A spokesperson for Koç Holding did not return calls or emails for comment.

RELATED: CAN TURKEY BECOME THE KINGPIN OF ISLAMIC BANKING?

In one conversation, Gülen’s aide refers to Erdoğan as an “empty minister.” Two of the recordings date back to October and November of 2013. The police launched the corruption investigation on Dec. 17. The other recordings are dated Dec. 21 and Dec. 25. These, according to Ilıcak, actually reveal fears of a conspiracy against Gülen. “If rumors spread that Bank Asya is vulnerable,” his aide tells Gülen, “it would be very bad for us. We need a deposit of approximately $300 million.”

A day after the Gülen leaks, the Erdoğan files surfaced. According to police reports obtained by the independent news site T24.com.tr, Erdoğan’s son, Bilal, is closely linked with the Saudi Arabian tycoon Yasin al-Qadi—a man the U.S. has designated as a “specially designated global terrorist.” The police tapped the phone of Cengiz Aktürk, a wealthy businessman and Erdoğan ally, and concluded that Erdoğan and al-Qadi were secret partners in Aktürk’s firm, Bosphorus 360. Aktürk, speaking to Hürriyet, denied the claims but said he knows al-Qadi and “would like to help that brother to invest in Turkey.”

Aktürk also has investments in the cosmetics industry and has partnered with Usama Qutb, an Egyptian businessman. According to Hürriyet, Qutb is the nephew of Sayyid Qutb, whose writings are believed to have beenthe inspiration for Al Qaeda. Sayyid Qutb was executed in 1966 for his role in an assassination plot against then-Egyptian President Gamal Nasser.

RELATED: TURKEY’S VERY UNSEXY POLITICAL SEX TAPE SCANDAL

More wiretaps, disclosed by Turkey’s Artı 1 news network, reveal that Usama Qutb spoke to Erdoğan’s aide to arrange a private meeting with the prime minister. Another conversation between Qutb and Bilal Erdoğan reveal the two planning a meeting. Erdoğan refers to him with a Turkish honorarium loosely translated as “elder brother.”

The most surprising aspect of the police investigation revealed that even Prime Minister Erdoğan’s phone was tapped—a conversation between Erdoğan and his close friend Latif Topbaş, the 25th wealthiest businessman in Forbes Turkey’s list. Police reports show that the two men talked about construction permits in an area reserved for a forest. Topbaş is also accused of being a secret partner of Aktürk, Qutb, and Bilal Erdoğan. A spokesperson for Topbaş could not be reached for comment.

According to Yavuz Oğhan, the news editor of Artı 1 TV, Erdoğan’s wiretaps were held for a year before being leaked shortly after the Gülen tapes.

Meanwhile, Gulen’s lawyer is preparing to file a criminal complaint against those responsible for wiretapping his phone. “I think it’s orchestrated by those who want to harm Gülen,” Ilıcak adds. But Keneş is more explicit: He implies that the government is behind the leaks.

Let the blame game begin.

AUTHOR:Oray Egin

January 18, 2014
Turkish graft scandal deepens with more arrests, police dismissals

Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan arrives at the cabinet meeting in Ankara

(Reuters) – Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government purged hundreds of police officers overnight, media said, as part of a crackdown on a rival he accuses of trying to usurp state power by tarring him with a specious corruption investigation.

Some of the officers, who included members of the financial and organised crime, smuggling and anti-terrorism units, were moved to traffic duties, according to the reports. Ankara police, chief focus of the action, declined to comment.

Despite the dismissals, among them senior commanders, police and prosecutors continued arrests, which on Tuesday targeted the state railway company and a western port.

Erdogan, facing the biggest challenge of an 11-year rule that has seen the army banished from politics, the economy booming and Ankara pressing its role in the Middle East, portrays the raids and arrests as a “dirty plot” by an Islamic cleric. The cleric backs no political party but exercises broad, if covert, influence in police and judiciary.

Details of accusations have not been made public, but are believed to relate to corruption in construction and real estate projects and Turkey’s gold trade with Iran, according to Turkish newspaper reports citing prosecutors’ documents. Prominent business people, the sons of three cabinet ministers and state officials are among those detained for questioning.

The government has hit back by sacking or reassigning hundreds of police across the country since the crisis broke with a day of raids and arrests on December 17.

A second investigation into large infrastructure projects championed by Erdogan, including a rail tunnel beneath the Bosphorus strait linking the European and Asian sides of Istanbul, has been blocked by government.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Around 350 officers in Ankara, including members of the financial and organised crime, smuggling and anti-terrorism units, were dismissed or reassigned overnight to new roles including traffic or district duties, the media reports said.

According to the Hurriyet daily, some 1,700 police have been dismissed or reassigned in Istanbul and Ankara alone since the corruption investigations became public.

Some would have been directly linked to the inquiries, while others may have been removed because of links to the Hizmet (Service) movement of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen Erdogan now describes as an intolerable “state within a state”.

The two were close allies when Erdogan’s AK Party was first elected in 2002; but they have fallen out in the last couple of years over policy towards the United States and Israel and a recent attempt by Erdogan to close down the private schools that are the centre of a global Hizmet network.

Prosecutors meanwhile deepened their investigations, with at least 25 more people including public officials detained as part of an investigation into the activities of a port in the Aegean province of Izmir, broadcaster CNN Turk said.

Eight officials from the state railway company TCDD were among those detained in the raids, the company said in a statement, denying reports its headquarters had been searched.

“Neither side appears willing to give up at this stage in this high stakes battle for control of the state,” said Timothy Ash, head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank.

The corruption scandal is shaking investor confidence at a time when the lira currency is languishing around record lows, inflation is rising and growth slowing. As much as its Islamist-rooted ideology, AK Party’s support has relied on its avowed commitment to fight corruption and its economic record.

Erdogan and the Hizmet movement which exercises influence through a network of contacts built on sponsorship of schools and other social and media organisations, accuse each other of manipulating the police and compromising the independence of the judiciary. Hizmet denies unleashing the investigation.

“Purges, or more accurately massacres, are being carried out of civil servants who are fulfilling their duties defined by the law,” Gulen said in a letter to President Abdullah Gul, written as the row intensified in late December but published by the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper on Monday.

Erdogan, who has won three general elections and remains widely popular, casts the scandal as an attempted “judicial coup”, a foreign-backed plot by those jealous of his success.

The scandal – which exploded on December 17 with the detention of businessmen close to the government and sons of three cabinet ministers – has weakened Erdogan’s AK Party just before local elections due in March and presidential polls in August.

(Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

January 7, 2014
Will Turkey’s Erdoğan Cause His Own Downfall?

December 27, 2013

Posted by Dexter Filkins

The revolution always eats its children: in France, in the Soviet Union, in China, and, now, in Turkey.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of the most remarkable figures in the modern Middle East, is fast discovering that the authoritarian measures he has increasingly relied on to govern Turkey, and the cult of personality he has built around himself, are conspiring to bring about his political demise. Early this week, three members of Erdoğan’s cabinet, their sons implicated in a far-reaching corruption investigation, resigned, and one of them called on Erdoğan himself to quit. Yesterday, Erdoğan, in a blatant attempt to thwart the investigation, dismissed the lead prosecutor after he announced that he was investigating Erdoğan’s son. The drama is just beginning.

In nearly eleven years in power, Erdoğan, as the head of the Justice and Development Party, has transformed the Turkish state and society, and helped send the economy on a decade-long run of rapid growth. With a mix of populist bluster and political savvy, Erdoğan gave voice to the long-suppressed yearnings of Turkey’s pious majority and, at least in the beginning, seemed to give proof to the idea that Islam and democracy could thrive together. Through all of that, Erdoğan broke the power of the Turkish military, a reactionary institution that has stifled Turkey’s democratic yearnings since its founding.

But in recent years, intoxicated by his own ascent, Erdoğan began to act like a leader who believed that Turkey’s success and his own could not be separated. And the very mechanisms that enabled his rise began to turn on him.

From the beginning, Erdoğan’s success was made possible by, among other things, an alliance with the followers of Fethullah Gülen, the leader of a far-flung Islamic order whose members pride themselves not just on their piety but also on their business acumen. As I wrote last year in the magazine, the Gülenists, as they’re known, come across in person as amalgams of Dale Carnegie and a Christian missionary: smiling, clean cut, and relentlessly cheerful. Gülen himself lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, having fled Turkey in 1999, when it appeared as though the Turkish military was preparing to arrest him on charges of conspiring to overthrow the country’s secular order. (Gülen was acquitted in 2008, but he has not returned.)

For much of Turkey’s history, civilian governments, together with the military, enforced a rigid and often mindless secularism, where even the most nominal displays of piety were suppressed. For this reason, the Gülenists, as members of an Islamic order, operated in secret, rarely advertising their affiliation, even though their brand of Islam is ostensibly moderate.

When Erdoğan came to power, in 2003, the Gülenists, whether by agreement or by design, began to infiltrate Turkey’s police departments and judiciary. This enabled Erdoğan to begin an epic crackdown on the military and on what Turks call “the deep state,” a shadowy network of élites that, since Turkey’s founding in 1923, has helped enforce the secular order. The crackdown, beginning in 2007, targeted something called “Ergenekon,” which prosecutors and police claimed was the name given to the deep state itself. Over the past six years, hundreds of Turks have been arrested and jailed, not just military officers but university leaders, newspapers editors, owners of television stations, and opposition politicians, as well.

There isn’t much doubt that something called “the deep state” actually existed in Turkey, and that it used violence and intimidation to enforce the secular state enshrined by Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk. But the Ergenekon investigation, along with its sister case, called Sledgehammer, rapidly evolved into something much more pernicious: a campaign to crush Erdoğan’s political opposition. The Ergenekon and Sledgehammer prosecutions were built on mostly fabricated evidence.

In case that didn’t work, Erdoğan embarked on an aggressive campaign to silence anyone who might criticize him, most notably the press. Just last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Turkey had forty reporters behind bars, more than any other country in the world.

All this worked for a while, in no small part because Erdoğan faced almost no criticism from the West. The Obama Administration, grateful for an ally in an otherwise unfriendly part of the world, largely gave the Prime Minister a pass. Erdoğan, who is planning to run for President in 2014, seemed destined to stay in power for years to come.

But then it all unravelled. It’s not clear why Erdoğan and Gülen are splitting now, but, according to some reports, the roots may lie in disagreements over foreign policy and how to deal with the country’s Kurdish minority. Among other things, the Gülenists oppose Erdoğan’s arming of rebels in Syria and the cooling of the Turkish government’s long-standing friendship with Israel. The Erdoğan-Gülen break also follows Erdoğan’s brutal suppression of anti-government protests that swept the country ealier this year. Those began when the police forcibly evicted a group of peaceful demonstrators in Gezi Park in Istanbul, where they had gathered to protest Erdoğan’s drift toward authoritarianism. The resulting crackdown injured some eight thousand people and killed five. For Erdoğan and Turkey, if not for Gülen, Gezi Park was a turning point.

What happens now? The AK Party, as it is known, has been in power for eleven years, and the smell of corruption is everywhere. Erdoğan has denied any wrongdoing, and said this week that anyone who tried to implicate him would be left “empty-handed.” But if prosecutors are inclined to follow their leads, and if the imam in Pennsylvania is behind them, there is no telling how far they will go, or when stability will finally return to Turkey.

Photograph: Umit Bektas/Reuters

December 31, 2013
Turkey Needs Erdogan’s ’Master Period’ to End

The hope that Turkey might provide a model for modernizing Muslim countries — combining Islam, democracy and market economics — is being tested. A bitter quarrel between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his former allies continues to escalate. Financial markets are running scared, punishing the country’s stocks and currency. The fight doesn’t just threaten Erdogan’s government; it also calls into question vital Turkish institutions, including the rule of law.

In this struggle among Turkey’s religious conservatives, there’s no sense in outsiders choosing sides — though they can remind Erdogan and his opponents of what is at stake. If Turkey is to move past this new outbreak of strife, the government and its critics alike must take up the unfinished business of strengthening the country’s still-fragile civic foundations. As yet, there seems little appetite for that in either camp.

The heaviest responsibility lies with Erdogan himself, who on Sunday accused his opponents of “treason” that had cost the economy billions of dollars. Since he swept to a third successive election victory in 2011, ominously declaring the advent of his “master period,” he’s moved away from the pragmatism that made him strong. Now challenged by followers of Fetullah Gulen, an Islamic teacher, his response has been more desperate than masterful.

Corruption investigations implicating ministers in Erdogan’s government provoked this new crisis. It’s widely believed that many prosecutors and investigators are Gulenists, and that their charges are politically motivated. Erdogan repeated on Sunday that a “parallel state” was trying to force him from power, and in a way he’s right. So far the probes have forced him to accept the resignations of three cabinet ministers and remove a fourth in a broader cabinet reshuffle. Now prosecutors are trying to launch a new inquiry into an organization run by Erdogan’s family. After resigning on Christmas Day, former minister for the environment and urban works Erdogan Bayraktar said that Erdogan personally approved deals under investigation and should quit.

Erdogan is much to blame for his predicament. He inherited institutions that had been tools of the army-backed secularist establishment that had previously ruled Turkey. Instead of reforming them, he filled them with then-allies from the Gulen movement. He made the courts, police and special prosecutors tools of his own and they duly crushed the military, sometimes using fabricated evidence.

Once the military was tamed, Erdogan and Gulen fell out. The same prosecutors turned on the government, and Erdogan has now turned on them. In the past two weeks he’s purged about 500 senior police officers believed to be sympathetic to Gulen; new prosecutors have been inserted into the corruption investigations; and a lead prosecutor in the cases was removed after complaining about interference. Erdogan’s new cabinet is packed with loyalists, and it seems designed mainly to take on Gulen.

Erdogan has called it a second “independence struggle,” invoking the real war that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk fought to prevent Greece, France, Britain and Russia from carving up the heart of the collapsed Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s. He’s even hinted that the U.S. ambassador in Ankara is behind an international conspiracy to unseat him. Nonsense of this sort threatens Turkey’s most important security relationship — and who will it convince in any case? The investigators may be politically motivated, but the evidence they’ve collected is reaching the public and the wrongdoing they seem to have uncovered can’t be so easily dismissed.

Erdogan needs to make clear that the corruption cases will be properly investigated and answered. To make that credible, he should admit to his own role in politicizing the courts and judiciary, then embark on genuine reform. He should also call early parliamentary elections. His Justice and Development Party would most likely return to power, though with a smaller majority that might oblige him to share power. He should declare his willingness to do that.

The U.S. and European Union should mostly stand aside, lest they feed Erdogan’s conspiracy theories. But the EU would do well to recognize that the 2009 decision to block negotiations for Turkey’s entry into the union, especially in the area of justice, freedom and security, was a mistake. That error should be put right, encouraging Turkey to meet the EU’s judicial and law-enforcement standards, which would help build confidence in its institutions.

But the country’s fate lies mainly with Erdogan. For the most part, he served Turkey well during his first two terms. He can serve it well again and retrieve its stability and growing prosperity — by bringing his disastrous “master period” to an end.

via Turkey Needs Erdogan’s ’Master Period’ to End – Bloomberg.

December 31, 2013