Tag: Time

  • Abdullah Gul | By Elif Shafak

    Abdullah Gul | By Elif Shafak

    fft5_mf221505A Turkish moderate with a tough choice ahead

    Turkish politics is too masculinist and polarized, but Turkey’s 11th President, Abdullah Gul, stands out with his moderate tone and conciliatory style. In the run-up to the general elections in June 2015, both those who support him and those who doubt him agree that his role in Turkish politics has recently been amplified.

    As Foreign Minister, Prime Minister and President, Gul has for many years been an ally of Turkey’s dominant political figure, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but also his main rival. When the Gezi Park riots erupted last year in protest against a decision by Erdogan to build a shopping center in the park, Gul declared that peaceful assembly was a democratic right. After Twitter was blocked, he was among the millions of citizens who broke the ban. “A complete shutdown of social-media platforms cannot be approved,” he tweeted.

    Turkey’s democrats have high expectations of Gul, some of which have been shadowed by his signing of controversial bills. Gul is now at an important crossroads. He can choose a calmer life or go back into active politics to push for the democratization that the country sorely needs today.

    Shafak is a Turkish novelist, columnist and speaker

    via Abdullah Gul | TIME.com.

  • Turkey Reaction To Gul on TIME 100 Notes Absence of Erdogan

    Turkey Reaction To Gul on TIME 100 Notes Absence of Erdogan

    Abdullah Gul (President, Turkey)Turkey’s controversial Prime Minister is more used to the spotlight than his ally and rival, President Abdullah Gul

    First reactions in Turkey to the inclusion of President Abdullah Gul on the 2014 TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people took note of the absence of Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s most powerful political figure, from the list. “TIME 100: Gul is there, Erdogan Isn’t,” read the headline on the Hurriyet news site. Said the daily Vatan: “Flash! Gul is on the list, Erdogan doesn’t exist!”

    Twitter – the social media site that Erdogan ordered shut down in Turkey after it posted links to apparently incriminating corruption wiretaps — echoed with skepticism of the choice: “JOKE OF THE DAY: Turkish President Gul in Time’s “The most influential people in the world” list..:) :)@TIME > Influential for what??” wrote @GayeAkarca

    “Is he even influential in Turkey? Discuss,” quipped Bloomberg’s Turkey bureau chief, Benjamin Harvey @benjaminharvey.

    In a mainstream media largely intimidated by Erdogan’s heavyhanded attentions, most early reports cited what novelist Elif Shafak had written on Gul without further comment. Gul has tacked his own course through the controversies that have erupted around Erdogan over the past year. The two men were among the founders of the moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party that has dominated Turkish politics for almost a dozen years, but Erdogan has strongly signaled his interest in running for the president’s office that Gul now holds.

     

    For his part, Gul has largely refrained from being drawn on the subject, except to signal his reluctance to leave the office in order to take Erdogan’s place as prime minister.

    via Turkey Reaction To Gul on TIME 100 Notes Absence of Erdogan | TIME.com.

  • Remembering Atatürk: Turkey’s Founding Father Appeared on TIME’s 4th Issue

    Remembering Atatürk: Turkey’s Founding Father Appeared on TIME’s 4th Issue

    Today marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish republic, which emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire as a sovereign, independent nation thanks in large part to the leadership of one man: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Nine decades ago, too, a new American newsweekly had started shaking up New York’s media scene. TIME’s fourth-ever issue placed “Mustapha Kemal Pasha” — he had yet to win his sobriquet “Ataturk,” or “father of the Turks” — on its March 24 cover, hailing him as the “Emancipator of Turkey” who had “lifted the people out of the slough of servile submission to alien authority, brought them to a realization of their inherent qualities and to an independence of thought and action.”

    mustafa-kemal-ataturkFrom being an officer in the Ottoman army, Ataturk went on to marshal Turkish forces in the political mess that followed the empire’s collapse at the end of World War I and preserve it from the predations of Western European empires. Here’s what TIME wrote in 1923, as Turkey moved toward becoming a new republic:

    Kemal is pure Turk… and has proved to the whole world that he is the core of Modern Turkey. He is a fine type of professional soldier, who has earned his laurels by sticking to his calling. Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, in his admirably written book, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, says of him: “He proved by a personal demonstration that a Turk can be his own master in Anatolia without having to wait for a better world, and under his inspiration the National Movement sprang to life.” Without doubt Mustapha Kemal Pasha is one of the great figures in contemporary history. He stands now against the unseen forces of Western civilization, determined to hold what Turkey has won.

    But as Turkey’s first President, Ataturk went on to refashion a land that was once part of a sprawling, multi-ethnic empire along the lines of modern Western nation-states. Ataturk’s militarist and secularist brand of nationalism would define Turkey — for good and for ill — for decades to come. No single 20th century statesman meant as much to his nation as he did; he remains, as TIME wrote 90 years ago, very much at the “core” of the Turkish story.

    Ishaan Tharoor @ishaantharoor

    Ishaan Tharoor is a Senior Editor at TIME magazine and Editor of TIME World, based in New York City.

    via Remembering Atatürk: Turkey’s Founding Father Appeared on TIME’s 4th Issue | TIME.com.

  • WikiLeaks’ Assange on China’s ‘Reform Potential’

    WikiLeaks’ Assange on China’s ‘Reform Potential’

    assange

    In a Skype interview with TIME managing editor Rick Stengel, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discusses the ‘reform potential’ of free speech in places like China

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  • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Secrets, the U.S. and China

    WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Secrets, the U.S. and China

    By HOWARD CHUA-EOAN – 59 mins ago

    “Secrecy is important for many things,” said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview with TIME over Skype on Monday. Managing editor Richard Stengel had just asked him whether there were instances when secrecy could be an asset in diplomacy or global affairs. WikiLeaks has, of course, grabbed headlines the world over by making public U.S. diplomatic cables that were supposed to stay private and secret, embarrassing the State Department as well as leaders around the world. But secrecy has its place, said Assange. “We keep secret the identity of our sources, as an example, take great pains to do it.” But, he said, secrecy “shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” (Watch TIME’s video “WikiLeaks’ Assange on China’s ‘Reform Potential.’”)

    Asked if he wanted to expose the secret dealings of China and Russia the way WikiLeaks has done with America, Assange said, “Yes, indeed. In fact, we believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential.” He sounded heartened, if not overwhelmed, by the response to the megaleak so far. “The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it.” But he believed that there was a shake-up going on, adding that “there is a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries.” (See why Julian Assange wants Hillary Clinton to resign.)

    In his 36-minute interview with TIME (the full audio will be available soon on TIME.com), Assange explained that exposing abuses can lead to positive change in two ways. When abusive organizations are in the public spotlight, “they have one of two choices.” The first, he said, “is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public.” The second choice, he says, “is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” What he left unsaid but clearly implied was that organizations of the second type eventually fail.

    And where does the U.S. fall between the two categories? He said, “It’s becoming more closed” as a society and its “relative degree of openness … probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since.” That, he said, was a result of, among other things, America’s enormous economy, which calibrates power in the U.S. in economic, or as he says, “fiscal,” terms. He points out that, today, China may be easier to reform than the U.S. “Aspects of the Chinese government, [the] Chinese public-security service, appear to be terrified of free speech, and while one might say that means something awful is happening in the country, I actually think that is a very optimistic sign because it means that speech can still cause reform and that the power structure is still inherently political as opposed to fiscal. So journalism and writing are capable of achieving change and that is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it.” On the other hand, in the U.S. and much of the West, he said, “the basic elements of society have been so heavily fiscalized through contractual obligations that political change doesn’t seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn’t result in change.” (See how the magazine of al-Qaeda was scooped by WikiLeaks.)

    Assange appears to believe that the U.S. has not become “a much worse-behaved superpower” because its federalism, “this strength of the states,” has been a drag on the combination of the burgeoning power of the central government and a presidency that can only expand its influence by way of foreign affairs. (Given the same economic and geographical advantages as America’s, Russia, he says, would not have turned out as beneficent.) Still, though he cites the Bill of Rights approvingly, he is not overly impressed with the U.S. During the interview, when Stengel asked him about the idea of American exceptionalism, saying, “You seem to believe in American exceptionalism in a negative sense, that America is exceptional only in the harm and damage it does to the world,” Assange said those views “lack the necessary subtlety.” He does conclude, however, that “the U.S. is, I don’t think by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles.”

    Assange talked about WikiLeaks’ own founding principles – and the evolution of the original conception of how the online conduit for whistle-blowing documents would work. In the beginning, in 2006, given the huge amounts of raw, “quality, important content” the site was providing, he said, “we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on.” Analyzing secret Chinese data or internal documents from Somalia, he said, was “surely” more interesting than blogging about “what’s on the front page of the New York Times, or about your cat or something.”

    But, he said, “when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth. Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that’s going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they’re in favor of that interpretation or not.” (Comment on this story.)

    Instead, it is the people “funded after a career structure” that incentivizes analysis who are the primary consumers of WikiLeaks. “The heavy lifting – heavy analytical lifting – that is done with our materials is done by us and is done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human-rights activists. It is not done by the broader community.” The social networks come in only after “a story becomes a story,” becoming then “an amplifier of what we are doing.” He doesn’t denigrate the role of social networks or WikiLeaks’ need for them. In the ecological cycle of news on the Web and the world, they have become “a supply of sources for us.”

    Yahoo