Tag: Recep Tayyip Erdogan

You could call it poetic justice. Back in 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then an up-and-coming young mayor of Istanbul with populist appeal and Islamist leanings, was sentenced to 10 months in jail for reciting a century-old poem that the country’s generals — the enforcers of Turkey’s constitutionally mandated secularism — found offensive. “Minarets are our bayonets,” the poem went, “the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the believers our army.” Erdogan was packed away for inciting religious hatred, but not before shouting that “this song is not yet over.”

And how. On June 12, Erdogan led his Justice and Development Party (the AKP) to its third consecutive victory in Turkish parliamentary elections, improving on his 47% landslide victory in 2007 by bringing in 50% of the vote. The Prime Minister, who has led the country since 2003 and is widely considered to be the most successful politician of his generation, had lost none of his bluster, proclaiming the results a victory “for Bosnia as much as Istanbul, Beirut as much as Izmir, Damascus as much as Ankara.” (See: “Turkey’s Election Offers a Last Chance to Integrate the Kurds.”)

Certainly people in all those places — and far beyond — were watching the election, which will likely have a critical impact on the region and the wider world. Erdogan has arguably been the most transformational leader in Turkey since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. A 57-year-old former soccer player and native of Istanbul’s tough Kasimpasa district, Erdogan, a pious Muslim with a headscarf-wearing wife, appeals to the devout among Turkey’s Anatolian masses, who, like religious Americans from the heartland, often feel condescended to by the coastal, secular elite. But he’s also popular among the urban working class, which is dealing with issues of cultural dislocation, and millions of small- and midsize-business owners who like what he’s done for the economy over the past decade. Erdogan may be a populist figure who knows how to chest-thump his way to points with a nationalist electorate, but he’s also a savvy economic manager and, to some, a reformer who would like Turkey to play a much bigger economic and political role on the global stage.

The first of those qualities cemented Erdogan’s victory this time around. “It’s the economy, stupid” could have been the slogan for this election. “Most people vote with their pocketbooks,” says Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar and expert on Turkey at the Carnegie Endowment. “This government is reaping the benefits of reforms started back in the 1980s.” That’s when Turkey, like so many developing nations, began to open up to the world and liberalize its markets. But it wasn’t until 2001 when Turkey began to enforce International Monetary Fund fiscal targets that things really improved. Since then, the AKP has steered the ship exceptionally well. During its tenure, per capita income in the country has tripled, exports have quadrupled, and inflation has dropped from as high as 37% to between 5% and 8%. Turkey has the 17th largest economy in the world, and Goldman Sachs predicts it will break into the top 10 by 2050, assuming things stay on track. (See: “Turkey’s Election: The Massive Implications of a Foregone Conclusion.”)

So far they have. While Old Europe is facing a debt meltdown and many of the East European tigers were blown up in the financial crisis, Turkey, with a population of 78.8 million, is one of a handful of countries that managed to rebound quickly from the global downturn. Turkey’s economy grew 8.9% last year, the fastest rate of any large country aside from China and India. “It’s kind of unbelievable how well they’ve managed the economy,” says Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who specializes in Middle Eastern economies. “Turkey has become a darling among foreign investors.”

Many of those investors are regional neighbors: there’s a lot of Gulf money in Turkey, and many Turkish multinationals operate in the Arab world. Iran and Iraq are among Turkey’s largest trading partners. But these economic alliances are only part of a larger role that Erdogan would like to see his country play in regional and world affairs. Turkey is a huge energy corridor, with oil and gas pipelines running across it. Like China, it’s a major builder of infrastructure projects at home and abroad. It has the second largest army in NATO after that of the U.S. And it hopes to become a member of the European Union, though European Islamophobia has in recent years soured those ambitions. Perhaps most important, it’s a working example of Muslim democracy. (See why Syria and Turkey are suddenly far apart on Arab Spring protests)

All this fuels Erdogan’s aspirations to be a regional leader. While there’s no real “Ankara consensus,” Turkey has in the past few years pursued a policy of “zero problems toward neighbors,” a phrase coined by charismatic Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The AKP has tried to warm relations with the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iran, Syria and other neighbors. But results have been mixed. Attempts to broker a deal between the U.N. and Iran to avoid further sanctions over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program fell apart. The once friendly relationship with Israel turned icy after the killing of aid workers aboard a Turkish flotilla headed for Gaza last year.

Perhaps most pertinent, Erdogan, who likes to paint himself as a man of the people, has been far from sure-footed in his handling of the revolutions in the Middle East. Many Anatolian companies have carved substantial business opportunities in the autocracies surrounding Turkey, which makes them defenders of the status quo. That’s made it tricky for Erdogan to get in sync with rapidly changing public opinion in the region. Two years ago, for example, when Iranians took to the streets to protest election results, Erdogan sent his congratulations to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When fighting began this spring in Libya, Turkey initially backed longtime strongman Muammar Gaddafi; only in May did popular anger over civilian deaths in Libya force Erdogan, during the run-up to the election, to call for Gaddafi’s departure. And Turkey has only just started to protest the vicious crackdown on demonstrators in neighboring Syria, in part because Syrian refugees have begun pouring over the border. “It’s good that Erdogan has moved away from his initial position on Libya and Syria,” says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the whole thing has compromised Turkey’s claims to have some special insight into the people of the region.”

Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, a man whose self-aggrandising style of leadership has already been coming in for increasing criticism, outdid himself in his victory speech following Sunday’s parliamentary elections. Sometimes public figures push themselves to a place beyond parody. This was one of those occasions.

Let’s be clear at the outset, however, that this is not to begrudge Mr Erdoğan his general air of jubilation. He was a convincing victor in Sunday’s election, demonstrating once again his easy dominance of the political scene and copper-fastening his position as Turkey’s most significant leader since Atatürk.

Much in Mr Erdoğan’s speech was to be expected. His avowed commitment to a collaborative process of constitution-making was particularly welcome, even if its sincerity can’t be complacently assumed given some of his words and deeds in office. But what are we to make of the following sentence? What do we make of a national leader who responds to domestic victory with words like these, invoking the international scene in quite this way?

“Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as İzmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakır.”

At times, Mr Erdoğan is derided somewhat unfairly for his egomania and his delusions of grandeur. There’s no doubt that he’s possessed of these traits, but to focus on them alone is to ignore unfairly the political astuteness that’s required to build and sustain the kind of success that he has enjoyed. But with this sentence, he really does seem to have conformed to the stereotype and lost the run of himself.

If one wanted to go out of one’s way to interpret his words charitably, one would suggest that all Mr Erdoğan meant was that Turkey’s neighbours should take succour from Turkey’s combination of (relative) strength and (relatively) democratic institutions. This is the by-now-familiar narrative of Turkey as a model for the nascent moves towards increased democracy in the middle east.

But of the course the words are more loaded than that. It’s hard to put one’s finger on quite what animates them, but there is certainly a large degree of condescension at work—as if the states (and the Palestinian non-state) he mentions should be grateful to be offered crumbs from the table of Turkish democracy. Lest we forget, Mr Erdoğan speaks as the leader of the state that succeeded the region’s imperial power.

More troubling still, however, is the mounting enthusiasm with which Mr Erdoğan seems to want to insert Turkey into the flow of events in the middle east. Pursuing an assertive foreign policy is one thing (and I believe that a Turkish government of any stripe would be aggressively expanding its non-European trade and diplomatic ties). But throwing oneself in such a feet first fashion into perhaps the world’s most protractedly poisonous geopolitical cauldron smacks of strategic folly.

One starts to wonder where this might lead and exactly what Mr Erdoğan understands his own position in the region and the world to be. It is not unreasonable for him to take personal gratification from his sustained domestic electoral success. The AKP’s dominance in Turkey is down in large measure to his individual magnetism, to the comfortable sway that he personally holds over much of the country.

In Turkey, Mr Erdoğan is simply untouchable at this point in time. But to project that sense of personal invincibility beyond the borders of the Turkish state and into the wider world? That strikes me as one of the more worrying developments in Turkey in recent months and years.

via Election 2011: a victory for the West Bank, you say? « istanbul notes.

By SUSANNE GÜSTEN

ISTANBUL — Gazing out over a sea of cheering Turks after his election victory on Sunday night, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised his voice to address an audience far beyond the Turkish borders.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Tuesday.

“I greet with affection the peoples of Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Tunis, Sarajevo, Skopje, Baku, Nicosia and all other friends and brother peoples who are following the news out of Turkey with great excitement,” Mr. Erdogan called from a balcony in Ankara, hours after sweeping into a third term in office in a parliamentary election that won his Justice and Development Party 50 percent of the vote.

“Today, the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans have won as much as Turkey,” Mr. Erdogan said. “We will become much more active in regional and global affairs.” To the elated crowd, he added: “We will take on a more effective role. We will call, as we have, for rights in our region, for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom and democracy.”

With his victory speech, Mr. Erdogan outlined a shift in Turkish foreign policy approach that could have wide-ranging consequences in a turbulent region, analysts say. Caught off-guard by the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, Ankara is ditching a policy that prized stability above all else, rested almost exclusively on contacts with regional governments and made Turkey, a country aspiring to be a regional leader, appear like a friend of dictators.

In the new era, Mr. Erdogan will bypass governments in the region if necessary and reach out to their citizens with support for democratic and economic reforms, government officials and foreign policy experts say. While the approach is new, Ankara’s strategic goal remains to bolster a region that can prosper and also offer opportunities for Turkey’s growing economy.

Ibrahim Kalin, Mr. Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser, said this week, “Right now, change is the key to stability in the region,” adding that “we will see a lot of exchange between Turkey and these countries.” He emphasized that Turkey would be “supportive of the process” of transition to democracy.

Outreach to populations in the region does not preclude more traditional ties to governments. “Turkey is able to reach out to both the people and the governments,” Mr. Kalin said. “We will continue to work with elected governments.”

One element likely to play a key role in the new Turkish approach is the near pop-star status enjoyed by Mr. Erdogan in parts of the Middle East. He has become hugely popular among Arab populations because of Turkey’s success in joining Islam with democracy, Celalettin Yavuz, deputy director of the Turkish Center for International Relations & Strategic Analysis, a research group in Ankara, said in a telephone interview.

Another part of Turkey’s appeal is its growing affluence. The country’s gross domestic product has tripled since the governing Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., came to power in 2002. “They want to see the A.K.P. as a model and Erdogan as a leader,” Mr. Yavuz said about people in the Middle East. “The dictatorial regimes of many Arab countries may hate Turkey for this, but Turkey’s influence on the public in these countries is rising.”

Until last year, Turkey’s regional foreign policy efforts had been focused on projects like a free-trade zone of Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, Mr. Yavuz said. “Now, who is even talking about such a common market in the region?”

Mr. Erdogan’s victory speech marked the official start of the new era, analysts say. “It is a historical initiative — he was setting out a new vision” for Turkish foreign policy, Hasan Kanbolat, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, another research group in Ankara, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Erdogan specifically addressed himself to the regions of Turkey’s historical sphere of influence, Mr. Kanbolat said, noting that it was the first time he had raised foreign policy issues in an election night speech. “He was telling those peoples that Turkey will stand up for their rights not only on its own soil but in the whole region,” Mr. Kanbolat said. “We are entering an era in which Turkey will be more involved” in the problems of its neighbors, he added. “The main change is that there will be less emphasis on top-level and economic ties, and more emphasis on closer ties to the populaces, to the people.”

via Mandate for a New Turkish Era – NYTimes.com.

By FARRAG ISMAIL

Al Arabiya

When I met Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 1994 in his office, he was the mayor of Istanbul. Along one whole hour during which I stayed with him, in the presence of the Turkish Islamist Sheikh Saleh Uzgan—who was at the time the president of Faisal Ismalic Bank in Turkey—, I haven’t felt that he might one day become the founder of a political party that would later become the “forbidden love” dreamt of by the Arabs in the aftermath of their Spring revolutions.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L), Farrag Ismail (C) and Turkish Islamist Sheikh Saleh Uzgan.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper that I worked in at the time did not like the big area that I had dedicated for the interview. He thought that it was too large for him—as an unknown person—despite his post at that time. I had to shorten it. Neither I nor he had the slightest idea that he would turn out to become Turkey’s star, who will become the winner—for the third time—of the latest legislative elections.

Erdogan became the beloved star of the Arabs, especially the Islamists eyeing authority. He has become a good model for the Islamist movements that started to give up—or already gave up—their strictness and stands towards democracy and ballot boxes.

At that time, Sheikh Saleh Uzgan told me that Mr. “Erdodan will excel over his own mentor—the late leader of Al Rafah Party Najm Al Din Arabakan,” and that it was best for me “to get acquainted with his thoughts.” However, I never imagined that his prophesy would be accomplished that much.

As much as thousands of Arabs sit in front of the TV satellite channels awaiting the Turkish soap opera “The Forbidden Love,” they similarly awaited last Sunday, June 12, for the results of the legislative election in which the Justice and Development Party (AKP)—led by Erdogan—was declared the winner.

That man who has Brotherhood roots and his party—that was not founded long ago—is now seen as the dreamt-of regime expected by Egypt for example.

Even the Coptic billionaire Naguib Sawiris—the founder of Free Egyptians Party after the January 25 Revolution—revealed that he said to himself “this is the Islam that we want in Egypt” when he visited Turkey and was impressed by its renaissance.

Mr. Erdogan is aware of this impression and that’s why he included the Arab world in his speech following the winning of his party: “The victory belongs to Istanbul and Jerusalem, to Ankara and Syria, to Izmir and Beirut, to Bursa and Baghdad, to Diar Baker, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, Gaza and all the neighboring countries.”

A two thirds majority (367 seats) enables the AKP to demand laying the new constitution, but it did not get that number of seats. Its seats retreated—despite its sounding popularity—by 49.9% to around 326 seats, which is less than the 341 seats that it had in the previous parliament.

It is widely believed that such retreat is due to the coalitions—especially between the opposition Republican People’s Party and the Kurds—but some think that it is a kind of smartness to achieve a kind of balance among the political powers, because the new constitution is a matter of destiny that shouldn’t be controlled by one party only, regardless of its big popularity.

Thus, Mr. Erdogan would be in need of concurrence with other parties in the parliament, which is possible, especially that the Republican People’s Party—which is the main opposition that won 25.99%—had included this suggestion in its election campaign.

Some people think that the AKP aims at getting rid of secularism in the suggested new constitution, which has been also underlined in the election campaign of the opposition parties, but this is not true. During his previous term, his party set up a draft that does not approach the secular system—approved by all the Turkish powers—but its main target is the liabilities granted within the framework of the current constitution to legislative associations, judiciary system, army and education. That is what the AKP wants to get rid of.

Mr. Erdogan was born on February 26, 1954, in Qassim Pasha Neighborhood—the poorest in Istanbul—and he was nicknamed ‘Sheikh Recep’ during his elementary education because he refused to lead his colleagues in the prayers over a newspaper that contained photos of women.

He graduated at the “Imam Khatib” school, which was the most famous Islamic education school in Turkey. After his successful graduation from high school, he joined the Ministry of Economics in Marmara University. He also spent around 10 years playing football at a sporting club.

When the Islamist Fadeela (Virtue) Party was dissolved and divided into two parts: a conservative part and a youthful part led by Mr. Erdogan and the current Turkish President Abdullah Gul, who later founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001.

He is married to Mrs. Ameena, who is of Arab origin, and who was a member of the National Islamist Salamat Party. Both of them formed a marvelous Islamist “duet.”

He named his son Najm Al Din, after the name of his mentor Najm Al Din Arbakan. As for his daughter Sumaya, she got her education in the United States because she was not permitted to study in Turkey due to her Islamic hijab (veil.)

(Farrag Ismail is the Editorial Manager of AlArabiya.net, he can be reached at: farrag.ismail@mbc.net)

via Insight / Farrag Ismail: Meeting the unknown Sheikh Erdogan.