Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with ‘reforms’
By Amir TaheriOctober 4, 2013 | 10:08pm
Modal Trigger
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the media in Ankara on Sept., 30, 2013
Photo: Getty Images
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan this week unveiled his long-promised “reform package” to “chart the path of the nation” for the next 10 years — that is, through 2023, 100 years after the founding of Turkey as a republic.
Which is ironic, since Erdogan seems bent on abolishing that republic in all but name.
His plan to amend the Constitution to replace the long-tested parliamentary system with a presidential one (with himself as president and commander-in-chief) is only part of it. He’d also undo the key achievement of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
In the 1920s, Ataturk created the Turkish nation from the debris of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk and the military and intellectual elite around him replaced Islam as the chief bond between the land’s many ethnic communities with Turkish nationhood.
Over the past 90 years, this project has not had 100 percent success. Nevertheless, it managed to create a strong sense of bonding among a majority of the citizens.
Now Erdogan is out to undermine that in two ways.
First, his package encourages many Turks to redefine their identities as minorities. For example, he has discovered the Lezgin minority and promises to allow its members to school their children in “their own language.”
Almost 20 percent of Turkey’s population may be of Lezgin and other Caucasian origin (among them the Charkess, Karachai, Udmurt and Dagestanis). Yet almost all of those have long forgotten their origins and melted in the larger pot of Turkish identity. What is the point of encouraging the re-emergence of minority identities?
Meanwhile, Erdogan is offering little to minorities that have managed to retain their identity over the past nine decades. Chief among these are the Kurds, 15 percent of the population.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, the AKP, partly owes its successive election victories to the Kurds. Without the Kurdish vote, AKP could not have collected more than 40 percent of the votes. Yet his package offers Kurds very little.
They would be allowed to use their language, but not to write it in their own alphabet. Nor could they use “w” and other letters that don’t exist in the Turkish-Latin alphabet but are frequent in Kurdish.
Kurdish leaders tell me that the package grants no more than 5 percent of what they had demanded in long negotiations with Erdogan.
Another real minority that gets little are the Alevites, who practice a moderate version of Islam and have acted as a chief support for secularism in Turkey. While Erdogan uses the resources of the state to support Sunni Islam, Alevites can’t even get building permits to construct their own places of prayer.
Armenians, too, get nothing — not even a promise of an impartial inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915.
The second leg of Erdogan’s strategy is to re-energize his Islamist base. Hundreds of associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood are to take over state-owned mosques, religious sites and endowment properties — thus offering AKP a vast power base across Turkey.
Indirectly, Erdogan is telling Turks to stop seeing themselves as citizens of a secular state and, instead, as minorities living in a state dominated by the Sunni Muslim majority. Call it neo-Ottomanism.
Erdogan is using “Manzikert” as a slogan to sell his package. Yet this refers to a battle between the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arsalan and the Byzantine Emperor Romanos in 1071, the first great victory of Muslim armies against Christians in Asia Minor. It happened centuries before the Ottoman Turks arrived in the region.
Invoking the battle as a victory of Islam against “the Infidel,” Erdogan supposedly has an eye on the battle’s thousandth anniversary. Does he mean to take Turkey back 1,000 years?
The Ottoman system divided the sultan’s subjects according to religious faith into dozens of “mullahs,” each allowed to enforce its own laws in personal and private domains while paying a poll tax.
It’s doubtful most Turks share Erdogan’s dream of recreating a mythical Islamic state with himself as caliph, albeit under the title of president. His effort to redefine Turkey’s republican and secular identity may wind up revitalizing it.
FILED UNDERRELIGION, TAYYIP ERDOGAN,
via Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with ‘reforms’ | New York Post.
Haven’t you learned anything yet, you victims of Islamo-fascism? You victims of high treason. You victims of occupation by foreign powers. Haven’t you learned that you and your Inshallahs are condoning, allowing, and approving the crimes of the fascist Islamists that have ruled Turkey for over a decade. All their plans are prefaced with barrages of “Inshallah,” as if Allah is complicit with their criminal schemes. You surely remember well their schemes. You have nightmares about them. Allah and God and Yahweh are not plunderers, not murderers, not liars, not traitors, not rapists, not conniving ignoramuses. So stop saying “Inshallah.” Allah is disgusted with his/her name being linked with such criminal, sinful behavior. If there were a judiciary system in Turkey Allah would sue the government for defamation of character. For if you continue using this defamatory mantra, you will be spiritual collaborators with those international felons who are destroying your country in the name of—guess who?—Allah! And in your name and the name of your Inshallahs!
You and your “Inshallahs.” Like a neurotic, nervous tic, you drone Inshallahs for every mundane event. You will go shopping and Inshallah there will be bread. You will drive to the city and Inshallah there will be a parking place. You will go on vacation and Inshallah there will be good weather. Inshallah, the fish will be delicious at the restaurant you recommended. Inshallah, the mechanic will have a carburetor for your automobile. Inshallah, tomorrow I will stop saying Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah………..…
This so-called government of yours says “Inshallah” too. When it blinds your daughter, it says Inshallah. When it kills your sons, it says Inshallah. It gasses your children, destroys your mountains, your rivers, your farms, your security, all aspects of justice, and your human rights, then your government says Inshallah. It destroys the army and says Inshallah. It imprisons patriots and says Inshallah. It enslaves women in headscarves and says Inshallah. Your government perverts your educational system and says Inshallah. It finances genocide against the Syrian people and says Inshallah. Your government lies while addressing the United Nations and says Inshallah. It collaborates with America to betray your country in the name of Allah. It supports financially and morally the low-life scum that yells “Allahu ekber” while eating the hearts of still-living Syrian soldiers. Indeed, how great is this God? How great is this Allah when your government’s police attack your children shouting “Allahu ekber?” You say that these people are not your government, not your police. But your tax money finances them and your Inshallahs and their Inshallahs echo to the heavens all of them seeking Allah’s blessing. How sick is this? Just what is Allah to do, being bombarded with Inshallahs from all directions and for all purposes from trivial to bestial?
For God’s sake stop saying “İnshallah!”
And for Allah’s sake all you others stop saying “God bless America!”
James C. Ryan, Ph.D.
Dublin, Ireland
28 September 2013
Tension mounts between Turkey’s biggest Islamist players, Erdoğan and Gülen
ANATOLIAN DISPATCHES blog: Posts from across the Bosporus. The Republic of Turkey is turning its attention eastwards and proving itself a heavyweight in the Middle East arena. ‘Anatolian Dispatches’ sets the compass to the new Turkish orientation.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech
during the International Ombudsman Symposium meeting
in Ankara on September 3, 2013 (ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)
In politics, the pursuit of power always wins out over ideological affinity. That seems to be the moral behind the latest round of tensions between Turkey’s two most powerful Islamic groups: the government itself and the Fethullah Gülen Movement. Tensions that became visible mid-August when the Movement published a response to what it called “slanderous accusations” against it.
Most of the eleven allegations addressed in the August 13 statement are old hat: that its eponymous leader, based in Pennsylvania for the past 15 years, is a patsy of the United States and its pro-Israel and alleged anti-Muslim Brotherhood policies in the region, that its followers have infiltrated Turkey’s state bureaucracy and have used their power—among other things—to oppose the government’s Kurdish peace process.
A couple more allegations look like theories dreamed up by sycophants to raise their profiles in the eyes of the increasingly paranoid Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: claims that a bug in Erdoğan’s office was planted by the Movement, and that the Movement came within a whisker of arresting Erdoğan in February 2012.
Three, though, have never been aired in public before: the allegation that the Movement was responsible for the protests that swept the country in July, that its followers in the police and the judiciary blocked the arrest and trial of protesters, and that police linked to the Movement stoked protests by burning protesters’ tents and using excessive force.
Never mind the apparent contradiction between police who burn tents and then fail to arrest the protestors. For Kadri Gürsel, a commentator who writes for the daily Milliyet, the fact the Movement feels the need to answer such allegations implies it has heard them over and again in private discussions with the government. “If these allegations are expressed in the way they appear in the statement”, he says, that suggests “growing enmity” to the Movement in government circles.
On the face of it, there should be little reason for tension between the two. True, since its birth in the early 1970s, the Movement has played a much more cautious political game than the political Islamists of whom Erdoğan is the latest manifestation. While the latter were outspoken in their criticism of the Turkish secular regime, the Movement preferred to hedge its bets. It supported (and was protected) by the leaders of the 1980 coup. It did its best to keep a low profile during the army-led crackdown on political Islam in 1997, a crackdown that began with the forced resignation of Erdoğan’s predecessor and saw Erdoğan jailed for reciting a poem.
In terms of ideology, though, the two are more similar than they are different. Like Erdoğan’s speeches, Fethullah Gülen’s writings are full of references to a powerful Islamic past. Both men more or less explicitly associate the collapse of the Ottoman Empire with a turning away from religion, and both dream of an Islamic renaissance. And nobody has worked harder than the Movement, with its vast network of schools across Turkey and the world, to keep faith alive in the hearts of Turks and nurture a new generation of devout and morally upright young people.
The two have cooperated politically too. After years of adamantly refusing to come down in support of any one single party, the Movement’s powerful media backed Erdoğan’s government to the hilt in the run up to general elections in 2007 and a referendum to change the constitution in 2011. Moreover, without its support, and the support of Movement sympathizers widely acknowledged to be powerful in the Special Authority Courts that have tried scores of senior military officers over the past five years, Erdoğan could never have reined in the military.
But perhaps that is where the trouble all stems from: the alliance between the Movement and the government was cemented by a mutual hatred of overweening generals with a radically secular agenda and a deep hatred of anything that smacked of political Islam. The General Staff is now peopled with Erdoğan appointees and no longer presents a threat.
The first explicit signs that things might be falling apart came in February 2012, when prosecutors attached to Special Authority Courts issued a summons for five senior National Intelligence officials, including the National Intelligence chief Hakan Fidan. The summons came during peace talks with the Kurds. Prosecutors said they wanted to talk to Fidan about his links with the civilian arm of a Kurdish rebel group, but many in the media called it an act of sabotage. It escaped nobody’s attention that Fidan was an Erdoğan appointee, indeed, probably Erdoğan’s most trusted bureaucrat.
Erdoğan reacted fast. Within days, the parliament had pushed through an amendment preventing courts questioning the prime minister’s appointees. The government moved to whittle away the power of the Special Authority Courts. There were also widespread rumors of a purge of officials in the police and ministries known to be sympathetic to the Movement.
And then peace seemed to return. Erdoğan said nice things in public about Gülen and Gülen said nice things about Erdoğan, and the pro-Gülen media continued on the whole to support the government. On the whole it also supported Erdoğan—and this is what makes the allegations addressed in the 13 August response so odd—during the July protests. While a handful of liberal columnists employed by pro-Gülen newspapers criticized the government for its brutality, the general approach of the Movement’s newspapers and news channels was to link the unrest to a generation of youngsters that had been given too much liberty and to hint that the government should work together with the Movement to teach them good manners.
What the August 13 response makes clear is that tensions had never gone away. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be the case. Erdoğan is not known for his ability to forget, and the Movement’s role in trying to dislodge his political confidants, if it is true, is not the sort of thing he is likely to forgive. There are also hints that Erdoğan, ever the pragmatist, may blame the Movement for the ferociously severe sentences handed out by a court in August at the end of a mass trial of military officers (dozens of officers—including the last Chief of Staff, who was if anything a slightly unwilling ally of the prime minister—received prison terms of up to 200 years). Events in the Middle East have also driven a wedge between the two groups: Erdoğan sees the Muslim Brotherhood as blood brothers; Gülen has always been suspicious of them. On the other side, the Movement has been rocked by repeated government threats over the past year to close down the system of Dershane (classroom), private crammers that millions of Turkish teenagers attend every year in an effort to secure a university place, and a multi-billion dollar business for companies affiliated to the Movement.
Underneath it all, though, the key issue is almost certainly power. Erdoğan, as his response to the July protests showed, is a man who is allergic to any form of dissent. The criticisms leveled at him by secular liberals employed by the pro-Gülen media may have irked him, but it is Gülen himself that he must find difficult to stomach. For Gülen has charisma and he has support, and Erdoğan’s Turkey only has space for one charismatic leader.
Nicholas Birch
Nicholas Birch lived in Istanbul, Turkey, from 2002 to 2009, working as a freelancer. His work—mainly from Turkey and Iraq—has appeared in a range of publications, including the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. He was a stringer for the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London until the end of 2009. He now lives in London.
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Tagged with: Fethullah Gulen, Justice and Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey
We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them–
to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it.
That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That’s very important.
If you don’t forgive yourself you’ll never be able to forgive anybody else
and you’ll go on committing the same crimes forever. ANOTHER COUNTRY, James Baldwin
He bores me, this Erdoğan. A typically flawed tragic hero, now in his political death throes. The story’s been told a million times and the ending is always the same. And Erdoğan, like all the others, deserves it. Now the sharks are gathering. They pumped him up to do their job, this street-wise corner boy from Istanbul. Fingered early, he rose to power. He thought he was prime minister but he was really a pawn. To make up for that shattering awareness, he yelled, scowled and sneered for ten tedious years. They told him to be a tough guy. And he tried. But he thought tough meant straight ahead all the time, all the time with the mouth going. For a while that didn’t bother them. They thought he knew his country. But now they (and the world) know better.
It must have been nice to go to the White House and be hailed by the back-slapping Bush as the leader of the Turks. And because he knew no English and he thought Bush did, and because his advisors were yes-men and a few yes-women, Tayyip became the boss of the American pipedream about mixing moderate Islam with democracy. It will lead to peace in the Middle East, they said. And all honor and glory and riches to himself, he thought. And all he had to do was ramrod some changes on secular, democratic Turkey changing it into another country. They told him more: that he would be in a privileged relationship with the USA, like Israel. You have a free hand. And we will help you out in all respects. And Tayyip saw that it was a good deal and was pleased, so pleased that he always smiled broadly in the White House. The secular, democratic Turks at home in Turkey were surprised that their nation’s leader always looked constipated at home yet so frivolous in America. But it was merely noted in passing because they were mostly asleep, like the Turkish Army. No one even noticed that for his election night acceptance speech he wore a solid, Islamic green tie.
Later, when Obama came to Turkey spouting about “predominantly Christian America” and “predominantly Muslim Turkey,” Tayyip suddenly understood, like Archimedes floating in his bathtub. Shouting EUREKA! to himself, Tayyip had suddenly discovered DIVISION as a political process. Now you’re talking my language! So Tayyip went to work. He divided Sunni from Alevites, “his” people from the rest of the Turks, rakı and beer drinkers from ayran drinkers, head covered women from women whose hair blew gaily in the wind. He separated “his” people from terrorists (everyone else), “his” propaganda-spewing media from the few honest newspapers. And now, with the help of his bewildering foreign minister, has separated Turkey from the rest of the world. But make no mistake about one thing…Erdoğan has an incredible genius for unifying. Now, except for “his” people,” the world is unified AGAINST him.
He also has a genius for making money, tons of it.
In a decade he went from whining about how he couldn’t raise his family on a prime minister’s salary to countless wealth. His family owns fleets, land, everything imaginable. Rumors of Swiss bank accounts abound. A former American ambassador said as much. Erdoğan’s foreign excursions always include hundreds of his bad-actor* business cronies. America made a warrior out of him, pointing out the boundless financial opportunities inherent in destroying nations. Hence his avid embrace of the now catastrophic “Arab Spring.” Obama’s baseball bat and America’s fat wallet did wonders for Tayyip’s cooperative spirit. He could be a team player particularly after he became the team leader. Bye-bye Gadaffi! Who needs human rights awards when you can lead democracy’s charge across North Africa. Bye-bye Assad! Your uncovered wife makes mine nervous. So Hello NATO! Hello Al-Qaeda! Hello hell!
And here’s another “hello.” It goes way back. Hello Feto! a diminutive and derisive nickname for Fethullah Gülen. Gülen is a weepy, elementary-school-educated “Islamic leader” (and CIA asset) who lives in bucolic, well-protected splendor in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. A Green Card holder courtesy of his CIA sponsors, he is a treacherous financial dynamo seemingly lifted from a James Bond novel. His Movement, (cemaat in Turkish) has completely infiltrated and undermined secular Turkey. He had revealed his intent long before he had escaped from the Turkish courts into the loving arms of the CIA. A tape of his treacherous words surfaced in 1999 wherein he said:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…. Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt…The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it…You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey…Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence…trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here. **
Of course then, Gülen was talking treason. Today, he is acting treasonously. His infiltration of the Turkish state is everywhere. In the judiciary, the media, the military, the state police, the parliament and in the ruling party. It is well known that the Gülen movement’s heavy hand is instrumental in the legal fiasco that has destroyed the credibility of the Turkish legal system. The same hand was instrumental in the astonishing and ongoing police violence from the Gezi Park Movement.
Only a fool would fail to notice the common ground that Erdoğan and Gülen stand upon, united by their allegiance to the aims of the United States, fueled by cold, hard American dollars, ever encouraged by the cold, sneaky hand of the CIA. Erdogan controls everything in Turkey with his hands of stone. Thanks to their collaboration, the army’s professional leadership is in jail. The judicial system is rancid. There is neither justice nor democracy in Turkey but the police clubs, tear gas, water cannons, bullets (rubber and real) are everywhere. The police destroy all democratically demonstrating groups with the violence of Hitler’s Brownshirts. It is widely known that the Gulen movement played a major role in the legal fiasco called Ergenekon of which the prime minister dubbed himself chief prosecutor. The jail system is a penal industry by itself on the order of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago. Telephone conversations, e-mail messages, are monitored. There is no privacy in Turkey. The prime minister encourages so-called “neighbors” to report all fellow neighbors if they dare bang on pots protesting the government. He claims such banging violates people’s privacy. There is no freedom of banging in Turkey either. The cleansing of leftist patriots continues, in the army and in all institutions controlled by the government. The brutal crackdown on Gezi Park demonstrators continues in all its Erdoğanian fury. Call what’s happening in Turkey a post-modern extermination campaign. And the astonishingly unreliable political opposition acts as the ruling party’s best friend and may even be an active collaborator in the destruction of secular Turkey.
And Erdoğan? Outside Turkey he has ruined himself. His near delirious rants, preposterous claims, the insults flying, the ignorance of his advisors all fully displayed on the world stage. His rage, greed, and arrogance have brought him to comic levels. But his money and his bad-actor friends and advisors remain. And so does he prime minister. In any other country he would have long been rejected by the electorate forthwith. But as long as America says, yes, Erdoğan remains. So sad for Turkey to be the lapdog of the likes of Erdoğan, Fethullah Gulen and America. So sad for Islam to be linked with these two masters of deceit. So sad for the Turkish people to be harnessed to the moral corruption that is Turkish politicized Islam.
Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Erdogan betrayed a lot more for a lot more. Treachery has always been a good business, indeed an American specialty in their CIA-driven foreign policy. And it perfectly suits Erdoğan’s two-faced description of “his” Turkey as an “advanced democracy.” But now he stands alone, babbling nonsense, rich, naked to the world and disgraced. One wonders if he even knows this much. What price this glory? What price this treason?
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
MACBETH, William Shakespeare
Cem Ryan, Ph.D.
25 August 2013
Istanbul
NOTES:
* According to the Merriman-Webster Dictionary, a “bad actor” is an unruly,
turbulent, or contentious individual.
** See Claire Berlinski’s excellent article, Who Is Fethullah Gülen? inCity Journal, Autumn 2012.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Erasmus
Forget what the big-mouth crime ministers and the duplicitous oral cavities of selected foreign ministers are shouting about democracy. About political “mandates.” About how they represent the living essences of “the will of the people.” And about how they all care so deeply for all the downtrodden and abused of the world. These ignoramus champions of democracy shamelessly harangue the world ad nauseam about the importance of elections, elections, elections. Remember the purple index fingers wagging after the first post-Saddam election in Iraq? And the wonderful “democracy” that followed and is still slaughtering its citizens. If democracy only needs elections then we are all indeed lost on the road to ruin with our purple index fingers tucked securely where the sun don’t shine. All these crime ministers and “Nobel” presidents babble gibberish because they understand very little about democracy. And the biggest babbler of all? The ever-scowling, ever-treacherous winner of the 2010 (and last) Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the crime minister of that so-called democracy, Turkey. The award was cancelled after Al-Gaddafi was disemboweled and anal raped by the valiant democratic gangs aided and abetted by NATO under the inspirational leadership of the two international thugs who are now attempting to destroy Syria, “Bonnie” Obama and his partner in international crime, “Clyde” Erdoğan. They have yet to be added to the following list of democratically elected dictators. But their day may be nearing.
The following betrayers of their oaths of office also had mandates. And they all promptly forgot, ignored or destroyed the other aspects of a democratic form of government. Elections without a fully aware, fully protected, fully functioning electorate are worthless. And also worthless were the elections of these dictators:
Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan), 1991-present
Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, Paraguay, 1813-1840
Jorge Ubico, Guatemala, 1931-1944
Forbes Burnham, Guyana, 1966-1984
Artur de Costa e Silva, Brazil 1947-1969
Juan Maria Bordaberry, Uruguay, 1972-1976
Alberto Fujimori, Peru, 1992-93
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt, 2012-2013
François Duvalier, Haiti, 1959-1971
Adolph Hitler, Germany, 1933-1945
It need not even be said that those who are democratically elected are duty-bound to honor and support both the process and institution called democracy. None of the above did, despite swearing to do so.
So let’s examine today’s most vocal defender of his own “democratic” essence, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. How does his own country, Turkey, stand regarding its democratic structure? “Democracy,” Erdoğan once declared, “is like a trolley car. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” This is a vitally important statement. While it reveals what we already know about Erdoğan, it also confirms that he knows nothing about the democratic process and, more dangerously, has no respect for the concept. Astounding it is that such a person could even be considered electable in a secular democracy. But then even the street dogs in Istanbul know how THAT happened. It undoubtedly will come as a surprise and shock to Erdoğan when learns that democracy is intended to outlast its participants and is not merely a stop at a mosque, a Turkish bath or the White House. Such deceit-filled thinking is typical of the deceptive language used throughout the decade-long Erdoğan regime.
This screwed-up thinking is akin to his and his party’s claim that the mean old dictator, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, traumatized the citizens of the new Turkish Republic by changing the alphabet from Ottoman script to Roman script. Trauma indeed, for a nation’s people of whom 90% lived in rural areas and 97% were illiterate! Forget the trauma of unlearning one and relearning another alphabet, they never knew one in the first place. Instead, it was the “thrill” of enlightenment which “traumatized” them, a learning experience (or trauma) which still seems to have eluded Erdoğan and his supporters. In fact, Atatürk knew instinctively what the new republic’s fundamentally impoverished people needed most in order to live and prosper in a modern secular state and future democracy. And that was first, literacy, then, education.
It is important to expand this point. To remediate this national educational deficit, Atatürk conceived of a nationwide rural learning system called the Village Institute. Designed to teach language skills and much more, it began in 1940. Six years later, the first fatal sign of Turkish compliance with America’s needs appeared. Godless communism had become a threat after the World War II and God-filled Turkey had a job to do. And so came the nonsense of the Islamic Green Belt protecting the west and the tagging of Turkey as a religious nation. Thus the Village Institute System must be disbanded. Too risky. Too red. Those bad communists would infiltrate and overthrow everything. So it follows that the disaster that is Turkey today regarding the great percentage of its uninformed voters began with the abandonment of the Village Institute system. How generous were the Turkish democratic politicians selling out to America’s interests. So today illiteracy rates, particularly among rural women remain uncomfortably high. But no one, least of all, Erdoğan is concerned. It keeps him afloat politically. So far.
But let’s start at the beginning. What does a country need to maintain a viable flourishing democracy? First, its citizens need guaranteed protections, else why sign-on as citizens. This is codified in a constitution which enumerates the nature and conditions of personal and political rights. It also states the terms of fair and free elections. Also vital to democracy is the inviolable presence of an independent judiciary uninfluenced by the political regime. Another key requirement of democracy is the separation of powers, namely that executive, legislative and judicial branches operate independently. And how about Mr. Erdoğan’s record after swearing to support and defend the constitution of Turkey?
He has actively worked to subvert it. He has illegally detained and/or incarcerated thousands of those opposed to his regime. Articles dealing with freedom of speech, assembly, and media expression have been trampled by the heavy boots of religious fascism. The courts are the extension of the ruling party and the ruling party is simply Erdoğan, himself. He has even declared himself to be the “chief prosecutor” of a sham case called Ergenekon. And what about the security of the nation’s borders? Erdoğan, aided and abetted by America, has destroyed the nation’s defense system. The experienced commanding general staff is in prison. The collaborators now command. Senior officers sold out their subordinates. One general is even considered to have been a secret witness against his comrades in arms. So much for moral and esprit-de-corps. So much for trust and honor. So much for the viability of the military academies. Equally worrisome, the police rule with a viciousness unparalleled since the good old days of Pinochet’s Chile and Hitler’s Germany. The Gezi Park Movement revealed the full horror of Erdoğan’s state police. Even more troublesome for the Turkish citizenry, is the questionable allegiance of the nation’s security forces. They seem to be oddly influenced and even controlled by a foreign power, namely a longstanding CIA asset/imam residing in Pennsylvania. (In case this sounds strange to you, it has been in all the newspapers, even a few in Turkey). Worse yet, Erdoğan has jeopardized the nation’s security by collaborating with America in the destruction of numerous North African and Middle East nations, most lately Syria and Egypt. Put plainly, these have been disasters for all concerned, and a political and moral disaster for Erdoğan. The integrity of the Turkish state seems at great risk, particularly regarding its eastern borders. And finally, let’s speak of Erdoğan’s favorite subject, elections. The election campaigns, aside from his usual bombast, has consisted of bribes-for-votes. Coal, food, even refrigerators (whether or not the village has electricity) are delivered to the ever-grateful, if somewhat bemused, masses living in the hinterlands.
So what, you might be saying. That’s the way democracy works in the world. And anyway, all politicians are thieves and liars. Tragically, perhaps you are right. So let’s all just lean back and enjoy our extermination. But I am talking about Turkey here, a nation chosen by America to be a role model of Islamic democracy so peace can reign throughout the carnage that has always been the Middle East. Of course, the premise is ludicrous, even delusional. We all know it. And now the world knows it. How the people of the democratic, secular Republic of Turkey have suffered from this catastrophic delusion promoted by their deluding politicians. A few questions are necessary to complete this analysis of Erdoğan’s democratic credentials.
Is it a democracy when someone writing a political opinion unfavorable to the regime is jailed?
Is it a democracy when newspapers are controlled by the political regime?
Is it a democracy when citizens exercise their constitution right to assemble and are brutally attacked by police with tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, real bullets, clubs, truncheons, boots, scimitars, butcher knives and blades of all varieties?
Is it a democracy when these same police are celebrated by the prime minister as heroes? Is it a democracy when telephone conversations are recorded without a court order?
Is it a democracy when people are arrested and incarcerated for years without due process?
Is it a democracy when a prime minister’s children openly campaign to subvert the provisions of the Turkish constitution?
Is it a democracy when houses are ransacked in “fishing expeditions” for evidence without court order? Is it a democracy when a nation’s judicial system is controlled by the ruling political party?
Is it a democracy when the police brutally assault, even murder, innocent citizens and are not held accountable? Is it a democracy when secret witnesses give testimony that is never examined in open court?
Is it a democracy when journalists, writers, academicians, political thinkers, rot in jail because they dare to have ideas?
Is it a democracy when convicted murderers of judges are bribed to give secret testimony and are afterwards acquitted?
Is it a democracy when an entire military leadership cadre is jailed on trumped-up charges that even schoolchildren would laugh at?
Is it a democracy when anyone opposed to the ruling party is considered a terrorist? I
Is it democracy when opposition parties that gain less than 10% of the total vote are denied seating in parliament?
Is it democracy when a prime minister advises neighbors to report to the police other neighbors who bang on pots and pans in protest against his regime?
Is it democracy when school authorities are told to inform on students and teachers who may have participated in the Gezi Park protests?
Is it a democracy when prime ministers insult the legitimacy of religious groups such as the Alevites in Turkey?
Is it a democracy when the houses of Alevites are marked with hate messages?
Is it a democracy when government vendettas are conducted against businesses, humanitarian organizations, lawyers and doctors, all those public spirited entities, who act to defend the constitutionally guaranteed interests of innocent citizens being brutally attacked by the state police force?
Is it a democracy when a government engages in general devastation of the environment, larceny of a nation’s treasure, captures the public space as its own, conducts unremitting surveillance of the populace, degrades the civil conscience and constantly rebukes contrary opinions?
If so, then what? If not, then what?
Regarding Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, what is he?
Cem Ryan, Ph.D.
Istanbul
19 August 2013
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bilal Erdoğan, the Turkish prime minister’s son. 16 August 2013. At Fatih Mosque, Istanbul, participating in a demonstration for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Placards advocated against democracy and for the return of the caliphate
Demonstration at Fatih Mosque, Istanbul. 16 August 2013
Demonstration at Fatih Mosque, Istanbul. 16 August 2013
The government of Turkey, in primary collaboration with the government of the United States of America, has dared to attempt to destroy the duly constituted government of Syria. In that process it has funded, encouraged and armed a motley gang of terrorist killers that include numerous members of Al-Qaeda and other recognized terrorist groups. The Hatay region of Turkey is being used as a staging area for attacks on a neighboring country, a country that until relatively recently had enjoyed great favor with Turkey. Hatay, perhaps the most enlightened, peaceful region in Turkey, now is under occupation by gangs of terrorist killers. The people are regularly accosted on the streets by these ruffians, and asked if they are Alevites. You will be next, they are told. This anti-Alevite dialogue is fostered by divisive statements made by the Turkish government.
In 2012, a rash of hate crimes broke out in Turkey against members of the Alevite religious sect (20 million in Turkey), an enlightened, modern-thinking branch of Islam. (It is important to note that there is a long, violent history of hate crimes committed against the Alevites in Turkey.) Last year, verbal insults, beatings, and the painting of threats on houses spread throughout the country. Inexplicably, there were no statements of warning, concern or reproach issued by the government. Making matters worse and fanning the flames of violence, the prime minister called the houses of worship of the Alevites “ucube,” a “freak.” Clearly this should have been deemed as “hate speech” and punished as such under the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 20 (as ratified by The Republic of Turkey on 23 September 2003). Interestingly, Turkey, a majority Sunni Islamic country, has no specific hate crimes laws.
And there are many Alevites in Syria. Many innocent Syrian people have been murdered by this assembled-in-Turkey terrorist machine. Moreover, the citizens of Hatay are daily threatened by these terrorist gangs that the government of Turkey has organized, of course, with the help of the CIA, proven by history to be experts in unspeakably violent subversions. These crimes are well known and now well-documented. This lawless behavior, indeed a crime against the Syrian people, and a war crime in terms of the Geneva Conventions, is the supreme insult to all truth, all justice, all morality and all religion.
As these government and foreign operatives have dared to drag the Turkish people through their filth of deceit, lies and murder, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, since the normal channels of the media and the Turkish justice system have failed so miserably to do so. If people fail to speak out they become accomplices to this murderous travesty of justice. But there is more to this, much more.
At the root of it all is one man, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A man of great ambition and great scowls. A perpetrator of epic police violence against the peaceful Gezi Parl protesters, he and his henchmen were also revealed to be epic story tellers. The entire world has witnessed their performance so there is little to add. Since he came to power he has relentlessly embarked on a policy to divide and weaken the republic. Who is this man, Erdoğan? Or as Cassius asked the reluctant assassins of Julius Caesar, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?”
In the Turkish case I suspect American hamburgers and hotdogs. For he and his ilk are of them. And now, during these days of tragedy, there are no longer any secrets. The truth is as bare as an eyeball hanging from its socket. Blood and death in the Turkish streets, poisonous pepper gas supplied by valiant allies like America and Brazil. Government street thugs wielding machetes. Beatings, clubbings, mass arrests. Roundups of lawyers, physicians, anyone who provided humanitarian aid to the protesters. Savage reprisals are now in full sway. And threats, threats, threats.
And of late, the finish of the destruction of the Turkish military, for how else to divide and reparcel the once integral Republic of Turkey in order to conform to the dictates of its American master’s pipe dream of regional stability? The ludicrous show trials called Ergenekon and its related fantasies that polluted all concept sof legal jurisprudence. Hundreds falsely imprisoned: military officers, journalists, writers, academicians. Secret witnesses, false testimony admitted without cross-examination. Lawyers jailed for making procedural objections in court. It all boils down to two words, justice raped.
Turkey is a nation held captive by the not-so-secret Obama-Erdoğan cabal. This is aided and abetted by its foreign policy, intelligence and espionage operations, and includes nongovernmental freelance organizations, both financial and mercenary. It is a stunning and deceitful array of destructive operators. The target? To destroy Turkish secularity, replacing it with a post-modern blend of religious fascism and uneducated compliance, a lethal long-term cocktail indeed. But they are adamant to once and for all create a compliant Turkish puppet state. And that’s where Erdoğan comes in. And Mustafa Kemal Atatürk departs. And that’s where Turkey is today, under occupation by a cabal of domestic ruling (AKP) and foreign (USA) powers. The army secular leadership is in jail. The police are feral and rabidly loyal to the ruling power. The situation is dire.
But we in Turkey do live in a wider world though this is rarely obvious in the discourses of the two occupying powers. And, believe it or not, there are indeed laws that are upheld and enforced in this wider world. Below are a few that are being violated by the prime minister of Turkey and the President of the United States and the members of their cabal. The dimensions are of Hitlerian proportions which was the motive force for establishing many of these laws and protocols. We, the real people of the real world, should demand their enforcement. The nightmare is here. It is time.
James (Cem) Ryan, Ph.D.
Istanbul
14 August 2013
LAWS AND PROTOCOLS BEING VIOLATED
UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 3314: Definition of Aggression Aggression is the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Article 20. 1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.
NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL CHARTER
The Tribunal established by the Agreement referred to Article 1 hereof for the trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis
countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes. The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility: (a) Crimes Against Peace:namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
(c) Crimes Against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated. leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common Plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
Note: the above provisions were codified as legal principles by the International Law Commission of the United Nations.
PROTOCOL ADDITIONAL TO THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS OF 12 AUGUST 1949, AND RELATING TO
THE PROTECTION OF VICTIMS OF INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICTS (PROTOCOL 1) (2ND PART) Article 50. Definition of civilians and civilian population 1. A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A (1), (2), (3) and (6)
of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian. 2.The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians. 3.The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.
Article 51. Protection of the civilian population
1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.
2.The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.
3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. 4.Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
(a) Those which are not directed at a specific military objective; (b) Those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; (c) Those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and
consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate: (a)An attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated
and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and
(b) An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. 6.Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited. 7.The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations. 8. Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures provided
for in Article 57.
Article 52. General protection of civilian objects 1.Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2. 2.Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military of advantage. 3.In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.
Article 57. Precautions in attack 1. In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects. 2. With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:
(a)Those who plan or decide upon an attack shall:
(i) Do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection but are military objectives within the meaning of paragraph 2 of Article 52 and that it is not prohibited by the provisions of this Protocol to attack them; (ii)Take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects;
THE NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES These principles define a crime against peace as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for accomplishment of any of the forgoing.”
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT Rules of Procedure and Evidence U.N. Doc. PCNICC/2000/1/Add.1 (2000). http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/iccrulesofprocedure.html
