Turkish Forum

Tag: Wikileaks

  • “Model partnership” with Turkish blemished by leaks

    “Model partnership” with Turkish blemished by leaks

    By Carsten Hoffmann Nov 30, 2010, 16:09 GMT

    Istanbul – The publication of confidential analyses of US diplomats on the situation in Turkey has badly shaken Ankara’s trust.

    While political leaders of the AKP, the governing Islamic- conservative party knew that some of them were suspect, the critical remarks about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his policies can be read as great American mistrust and also a large measure of ugliness towards this nation, with which President Barack Obama claims to be nurturing a ‘model partnership’.

    Cables from the US embassy in Ankara, uploaded to the Internet by WikiLeaks, paint a portrait of Turkey in which Islamist advisors and economists are increasingly influential. Erdogan himself gets his information only from an Islamist-coloured press, according to embassy cables.

    He depends upon ‘charisma, instinct and the filtered information of aides who pull plot theories out of the Internet or engage in neo- Ottoman, Islmamist fantasies’.

    Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, considered by a US government advisor as dangerous owing to his Islamist influence on Erdogan, received only an apology in Washington from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Turkish media reported Tuesday.

    Officially, Ankara brushes it all off. The Turkish Foreign Ministry has, however, set up a panel to assess the growing number of leaked US cables between Ankara and Washington.

    ‘The emperor wears no clothes,’ wrote the leftist-liberal Turkish newspaper Radikal and ran a caricature of an unclothed Uncle Sam who holds up one finger in his typical ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’ gesture but covers his nakedness with the other hand.

    Turkish newspapers term the leak of the documents as earth- shattering.

    However, US diplomats repeatedly determined that there is no alternative to the AKP and Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the present time.

    ‘Tayyip Bey believes in God … but he doesn’t trust him,’ the former US ambassador, in a 2004 cable, quoted an Erdogan aide as having said.

    The leader is termed as distrustful yet fair with those he works with.

    Such remarks will do no domestic political damage to Erdogan. Indeed, according to Radikal, if nothing horrific comes to light, the leaks may turn out to be ‘the best gift of all for the parliamentary elections of 2011’.

    via “Model partnership” with Turkish blemished by leaks (News Feature) – Monsters and Critics.

  • Turkish President Says Wikileaks Reports Can Cause Lack Of Confidence In Relations

    Turkish President Says Wikileaks Reports Can Cause Lack Of Confidence In Relations

    Turkey’s president said on Tuesday that documents leaked on Wikileaks web-site could cause lack of confidence in relations.

    301110 gulAbdullah Gul said Wikileaks reports were somehow a psychological thing, and it was so normal for such documents to cause lack of confidence.

    “Therefore, every one should be careful about what s/he says, however what I have seen so far is personal assessments and observations of American diplomats in different levels,” Gul told reporters before he flew to Kazakhstan.

    Gul said some diplomats were reporting their views to their countries, and great deal of reports about Turkey was in that format.

    President Gul also said leaking out of archives of a country was a thing that country had to think about and pay attention.

    International non-profit media organization, Wikileaks has recently leaked out classified U.S. State Department documents.

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  • Turkish Officials Fend Off Disclosures

    Turkish Officials Fend Off Disclosures

    By MARC CHAMPION

    Turkish officials fended off disclosures from leaked U.S. diplomatic cables that painted its prime minister as a distrustful authoritarian and its foreign minister as dangerously Islamist, and alleged its finance minister had dispensed stock tips.

    Amid the caustic U.S. assessments of several foreign leaders revealed in State Department cables released by WikiLeaks beginning this weekend, the diplomats’ takes on Turkey’s officials resonated within the country and fed into its already divisive national politics. Analysts said that while the dispatches were embarrassing, however, neither side was likely to let them become a game-changer in their relations.

    Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, on Monday shrugged off leaked communications that described him as an “exceptionally dangerous” Islamist with imperial delusions.

    “Turkish-American relations will not be affected,” Mr. Davutoglu told reporters in Washington after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State. He said Mrs. Clinton had apologized for the leaks, according to CNN Turk, but added “it is correct to depict this as the 9/11 of diplomacy,” the TV channel reported.

    The leaks received heavy coverage in Turkey’s media Monday. That, analysts say, was in part because of the sheer number of documents related to Turkey— close to 8,000 cables came from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara alone—and because of the way they played into Turkey’s internal debate over the Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its leaders.

    On Monday, Turkey’s finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, denied a comment in one of the U.S. embassy cables that in 2008 he had urged foreign investors to sell stock in Turkey’s largest media company, Dogan Yayin Holding AS, as it became locked in a tax battle with the government.

    Mr. Simsek told a group of investors in London to sell stock in Dogan because it “won’t be around much longer,” according to the cable. Its U.S. diplomat author outlined the growing dispute between the Dogan group and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

    “There are suggestions of a deliberate political move against Dogan,” the cable said. “Indeed, after Prime Minister Erdogan’s attacks began last week, Dogan stock fell 8%.”

    Mr. Simsek, a former Merrill Lynch banker with a strong links to the international investor community, said in a statement thatthe allegations were “baseless” and “fabricated.” He pointed to an error in the document, which incorrectly identified his 2008 post as “trade minister,” as evidence that its contents couldn’t be trusted.

    Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party leapt on the claims against Mr. Simsek, demanding an investigation. Daily newspapers such as the Dogan-owned Milliyet highlighted excerpts from the assessments of U.S. diplomats and their sources that chime closely with the views of Mr. Erdogan’s secularist opponents in Turkey.

    Those assessments included one in a 2004 cable that referred to Mr. Davutoglu’s Islamist influence on Mr. Erdogan and said Mr. Erdogan himself was an “authoritarian” surrounded “by sycophantic (but contemptuous) advisers.” A more recent cable mocked Mr. Davutoglu’s talk about restoring the influence of the former Ottoman Empire.

    With thousands of Turkey-related documents still unpublished, speculation continued to swirl Monday on TV talk shows here that cables yet to be revealed would show that the U.S. supported anti-Turkish terrorists from the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, in Northern Iraq. That is a potentially explosive claim that U.S. diplomats have denied in advance.

    But failing some future bombshell, Turkish leaders will draw the distinction between diplomatic cables and policy, said Ilter Turan, professor of international relations at Bilgi Univeristy in Istanbul.

    Mr. Turan also pointed out there was an upside to the leaks. Cables from early in the government’s tenure, soon after the AKP had taken power and when Turkey had just rejected U.S. requests for help in its invasion of Iraq, were far more critical and dismissive than more recent ones. Later cables accept the insistence of Turkish leaders that they aren’t turning from the West by adopting a foreign policy that sometimes conflicts with that of the U.S. in the region, but merely re-engaging with their neighborhood.

    “There may have been questions about what Turkey was doing and where it was going, but it was not at the level of policy,” said Mr. Turan. “I think on whole both parties will work to make sure damage to an already strenuous relationship is limited.”

    —Joe Parkinson contributed to this article.

    Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com

    via Turkish Officials Fend Off Disclosures – WSJ.com.

  • Azerbaijani president no fan of Turkey’s AKP, say US diplomats

    Azerbaijani president no fan of Turkey’s AKP, say US diplomats

    ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

    Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev is no fan of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to U.S. diplomatic cables made public Sunday by the WikiLeaks website.

    A report prepared Feb. 25, 2010, by a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, focuses on a recent meeting between Aliyev and William Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs.

    The document says Aliyev “made clear his distaste for the Erdoğan government, underscoring the ‘naivete’ of their foreign policy and the failure of their initiatives, including the loss of support for Turkey among traditional international friends because of Ankara’s hostility to Israel.”

    The Azerbaijani president reportedly noted that Erdoğan’s insistence on promoting Hamas and Gaza while Arab countries were notably silent on those issues had brought Turkey no benefits.

    In the same meeting, Aliyev reportedly said Turkey should demonstrate “constructive behavior” in regards to a gas-transit deal that was signed in June. Aliyev also professed to be worried that active Turkish-Russian cooperation could impede the deal’s progress. He reportedly confided: “Turkish Energy Minister [Taner] Yıldız recently told the head of the Azerbaijani State Oil Company, ‘Why do you want to ruin our relations with Russia? Do you really need Nabucco?’”

    The Nabucco pipeline is planned to carry natural gas from Turkey to Austria to reduce Europe’s energy dependence on Russia.

    The leaked document adds that Aliyev made a gas deal with Russia to prevent Turkey from becoming an energy hub.

    “Aliyev spelled out the reasons Azerbaijan decided to sell gas to Russia last year, noting that ‘Moscow had asked’ and offered a good price for gas that was surplus anyway,” the cable read. “But the real reason, Aliyev confided, was that the sale illustrated to ‘our Turkish friends’ that they will not be allowed to create a gas distribution hub.”

  • Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks

    Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks

    After protests from some Turkish authors, Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul decided against giving the opening speech at the inaugural European Writers’ Parliament last week. The European Writers’ Parliament was conceived by two other Nobel laureates — Jose Saramago and Orhan Pamuk — and was held in Pamuk’s home city, Istanbul.

    naipaul2

    The protests came from some authors who were uneasy about comments Naipaul has made about Islam. “The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling. I cannot attend the event given all of this,” Cihan Aktas told the media. Naipaul has both a history of being critical of religion, particularly Islam, and of speaking his mind.

    Turkey has an uneasy relationship with free speech; in 2005, it implemented a new penal code making it illegal to insult Turkey and its institutions. For telling a Swiss magazine that Armenians and Kurds had been killed in Turkey, Pamuk himself faced trial. After much international attention, the charges against him were dismissed.

    Was it frustrating for Pamuk that his effort to bring authors together for an open discussion wound up with a kind of self-censorship? If it did, the author who stepped in for Naipaul may have been the best alternative.

    While our Turkey Day was dawning in the United States, British writer Hari Kunzru gave the opening speech in Istanbul. “I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal with divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given,” he said. Kunzru has posted his speech on his website:

    You have accepted this invitation, presumably because like me, and you have a particular sense of the role of the writer. I don’t believe the writer is merely an entertainer, though we certainly shouldn’t be above entertainment, above giving pleasure. Nor are we just journalists, recorders of the doings of the world, or apolitical bohemians, dedicated to aesthetic shock. We may be any of these things, but this is not all we are. As lovers of language, as people who are dedicated to it and who value it very highly, we are -– whether we like it or not –- always already engaged in the political struggles of our day, many of which take place on the terrain of language — its use to produce social and national identity, its use to frame laws and norms, its use to define what it means to be a human, to lead a good or just or valuable life.

    There’s a saying that culture is something that is done to us, but art is something we do to culture. …

    I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture. In saying this, I’m aware that this is a prime example of a concept which has been degraded by the war on terror -– that many European Muslims misidentify it as a tool of Anglo-Saxon interests, a license to insult them, rather than the sole guarantee of their right to be heard.

    “Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognizing the situation here, where we are speaking,” Kunzru continued. “I know by doing so, as a guest, I risk giving offense, but it would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms.”

    Free speech in the abstract is easy to embrace; exercising it in concrete terms can be uncomfortable. Take WikiLeaks, whose Sunday releases of U.S. embassy cables have sent the State Department and contractors scrambling. The Los Angeles Times reports that the cables “show that diplomats have been asked to gather counterparts’ credit card and frequent flier numbers, iris scans, as well as information on their Internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use.” Wayne E. White, a former senior official with the State Department’s intelligence arm, told The Times that the news that diplomats were gathering such information “could upset a number of foreign governments.”

    Are these documents enlightening? Should they be seen? U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says that the Justice Department will prosecute if violations of U.S. law are uncovered, condemning the disclosures as having put the nation’s security at risk.

    — Carolyn Kellogg

    Photo: V.S. Naipaul at home in 2001. Credit: Chris Ison / AFP

    via Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times.

  • PM Erdoğan questions WikiLeaks’ credibility

    PM Erdoğan questions WikiLeaks’ credibility

    erdogan1Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday voiced doubts about the credibility of the website that has made thousands of United States’ State Department reports public.

    “Wikileaks’ credibility is doubtful,” the prime minister told reporters at a press conference at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport prior to departing for Libya. “Once WikiLeaks publishes the documents it has possession of, we can then evaluate the seriousness of the issues raised in those documents.”

    Everyone should wait and see the contents of the documents scheduled to be released by WikiLeaks, Erdoğan said, adding that he would make a formal statement after the leaked documents have been evaluated.