ERDOGAN’S HYPOCRISY SHOULDN’T HURT ISRAEL-TURKEY TIES
By Zvi Bar’el
Ha’aretz
es/1061754.html
Feb 5 2009
Israel
Dear Miss Manners. No matter how hard I try, everyone is against
me. They accuse me of having a secret agenda, of supporting terror
organizations in the Middle East and of trying to force women to wear a
head covering. All that has a strong effect on my nerves, and sometimes
I simply want to explode. But when I explode, the accusations against
me only increase. My staff claims that my behavior is childish and
unworthy of a statesman. How can I express my emotions without being
accused repeatedly of hysterical behavior?"
This passage, from a clever piece by Turkish columnist Nazlan Ertan,
which was published in the Hurriyet Daily News, is of course directed
at Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who caused an uproar
at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Ertan, as Miss Manners, suggests
to Erdogan that instead of shouting at elderly statesmen, he would
do better to learn from them. "Miss Manners believes that anyone can
learn manners, or at least pretend to have learned," wrote Ertan.
And in fact, there is a character trait that every diplomat who
arrives in Turkey is briefed about if he has to meet Erdogan: the
prime minister’s short fuse. Erdogan, who began his career selling
lemonade in the town of Rize on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, was shocked,
like other European leaders, by the pictures of destruction in Gaza
and by the numbers of dead and wounded. But as someone who believes
that "anger is an art of rhetoric," as he once said, he chose an
unconventional way of expressing his.
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This is not the first time that Erdogan has shouted at Israeli
leaders. About a year and a half ago he screamed at Shimon Peres
when he hosted him in Ankara, and before that he called former prime
minister Ariel Sharon a "terrorist," and described the deal signed
between Turkey and Israel for renovating Turkish tanks as a "disgrace."
We can only console ourselves with the fact that his close aides are
also exposed to a great deal of flak from him.
Erdogan has apparently forgotten a dark chapter in Turkish history, and
no, we are not referring to the massacre of Armenians in 1915. In the
1990s, Turkey destroyed about 3,500 Kurdish villages in the southeast
of the country as part of the long struggle against the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is classified as a terror organization.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were left homeless and were forced
to migrate to the large cities. Anyone visiting Istanbul or Ankara
can still today see the results of that huge migration. Thousands
of apartments that were built virtually overnight in order to house
the uprooted population decorate the approaches to those cities,
and in the area of Diyarbakir, in the southeast of the country,
there is still fear of the Turkish security forces.
In a phone conversation, a senior member of the Kurdish administration
in the Kurdistan region also compared the recent Turkish firing of
artillery on villages inside Iraqi Kurdistan to "the way you fired
into Gaza."
Incidentally, according to Turkish sources, the intelligence regarding
the location of the PKK training camps inside Kurdistan was gathered
with the help of Israeli drones that Turkey purchased – and continues
to purchase – from Israel.
As with the Armenian massacre, Israel bit its tongue when the Kurdish
villages were destroyed. The relationship formed at the time with
Turkey was more important. Only in off-the-record conversations are
Israeli officials willing to express anger and to remind Turkey that it
will soon need Israel’s help again when in about two months’ when the
Armenian issue comes up for discussion in the United States Congress.
The enigma of Turkish logic
But this accounting with Turkey is too simple. Israel needs Turkey
just as much as Turkey needs Israel. It’s not only a matter of Israel
Air Force exercises, weapons deals, flourishing tourism, Turkish
mediation between Israel and Syria and intelligence cooperation. A
unique strategic alliance has developed between the two countries,
an alliance that is no longer so dependent on the nature of the
governments or the prime ministers serving at any given time in
either country.
Turkey is being led at present by a religious party that makes sure
to present itself as a social-democratic group and is conducting a
nerve-racking dialogue with the army, which considers the party a
"fundamentalist danger," in the words of former chief of staff
Hilmi Ozkok.
And nevertheless that same "danger," which has excellent commercial
ties with Iran and good relations with Hamas and Hezbollah, is the
government that prevented the passage to Syria of Iranian transport
planes carrying weapons and whose ministers are frequent travelers
to and from Israel.
And that same "danger" that did not permit American forces to reach
Iraq through its territory in the Second Gulf War, is an ally of the
United States and a member of NATO.
Ostensibly, Turkish policy is a tangle of contradictions, but when
the country’s constitution grants the army the power to preserve the
character of the country as a secular country, while over 40 percent
of its approximately 70 million citizens vote for a religious party;
and when 1 million people demonstrate against Erdogan and the headscarf
law, but at the same time millions demonstrate against Israel after
seeing Palestinian Muslims being killed in Gaza – it is hard to
complain about the political and diplomatic zigzagging.
Israel is an important factor among Turkey’s many considerations, but
it is only one factor. A proper dialogue between the government and
its citizens, between the government and the army, and between the
government and its most important ally, the U.S., and all in light
of Turkey’s aspiration to become a member of the European Union –
mark the trail of Turkish logic.