TURKEY IN THE MIRROR
by Barbara Lerner
National Review
May 14, 2009 Thursday
In January, Turkey’s current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
created an international sensation at the World Economic Forum in
Davos when he stormed out of the meeting after accusing Israeli
soldiers of deliberately killing innocent Palestinians in Gaza,
calling it "a crime against humanity." When Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi,
the commander of those soldiers, heard that, he reportedly replied:
"Erdogan should first look in the mirror." General Mizrahi is right,
and all Turks should take his advice, but not for the reason most
Turks think.
Most Turks assumed General Mizrahi was referring to the increasingly
loud international chorus insisting that Turks, too, are guilty
of crimes against humanity because they committed genocide against
innocent Armenians in World War I. They think he was saying, in effect,
"We may be wanton killers, but you have no standing to criticize us,
because you are too." I don’t assume that’s what the general meant
— because the truth, and the point, is the opposite. Persistent and
hugely successful propaganda campaigns to the contrary notwithstanding,
Jews are no more guilty of wanton murder today than Turks were of
deliberate genocide in World War I (as I’ve argued here and here).
General Mizrahi’s legitimate point is that people who have felt
the lash of unjust accusations by corrupt foreign leaders, and the
dangerous mobs they incite, should refuse to join in when mobs unjustly
target another state, demonizing it and whitewashing its enemies.
That’s doubly true when the targeted state is a loyal, longtime ally
like Israel. And what is true for Israel is true as well for Turkey’s
other small, beleaguered ally, Azerbaijan, a Turkic sister state that
was finally freed from Russian occupation only to suffer again, now,
under partial Armenian occupation. Practical benefits reinforce the
moral claims that both these struggling democracies have on Turkey:
e.g., access to Israel’s technological and defense wizardry, to
Azerbaijani oil, and to the great promise of the Nabucco project to
make the abundant oil and gas of the Caspian Sea region available
to Turkey and the West in a way that will prevent Russia, Iran,
or the Arabs from having a stranglehold on vital resources we all
need. This latter project could make Azerbaijan a model for Kazakhstan
and Turkmenistan, two other newly freed Turkic states struggling for
a viable way forward, a way to exploit their gas and oil resources
without falling back under Russian domination. It would also give hope
to the other newly freed and struggling Muslim "Stans" in the region,
and to Georgia’s beleaguered Christians.
TURKEY IN THE TRANSNATIONAL MIRROR
Prime Minister Erdogan prioritizes none of that. His focus is on the
global stage, where Israel is hated, Azerbaijan is ignored to the point
of invisibility, and the "Stans" are not a big enough voting bloc to
matter. There, abandoning old allies and embracing Palestinians and
Armenians instead is a winning move. Let’s count the ways: It puts
Turkey in sync with both the Islamists and the blindly self-righteous
Socialists, the two big multinational blocs that dominate the U.N. It
pleases European Union transnationals who appease both blocs and call
it statesmanship. It gives the 57-member Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC) the Muslim unanimity against Israel that Turkey
denied it in the past (along with Iran, before the Islamists seized
power there in 1979). It wins Turkey special points with its new best
friends: an increasingly expansionist Russia; a rapidly nuclearizing
Iran, along with its satellite, Syria, and its terrorist surrogates,
Hezbollah and Hamas; and Sudan, a current practitioner of actual
genocide against its own desperate and friendless people.
Last but not least in this media-driven world of ours, condemning
Israel makes Erdogan an international celebrity, winning him flattering
attention not just in the Turkish press — increasingly owned and
dominated by his AKP (Justice and Development) party through relatives
and friends — and in Arab-government-controlled outlets like Qatar’s
ubiquitous al-Jazeera television network, but in the increasingly
anti-Western Western media too. And it evokes cheers from mobs in
streets, squares, and campuses from Cairo to London to Los Angeles. At
Ataturk Airport, on his return from Davos, Erdogan was greeted by a
cheering mob, shouting "Bravo Erdogan" and "Death to Israel."
Prime Minister Erdogan is an ambitious man. At Davos, he didn’t just
add Turkey’s voice to the growing multinational chorus demonizing
Israel and taking a see-no-evil stance toward the Palestinians. He
went beyond simple acquiescence, making a bid to put Turkey at the
head of the latest wave of Israel-bashing by saying what all the other
Jew-bashers were saying, but saying it louder and more dramatically,
from an unexpected platform.
TURKEY IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST
Many explanations have been offered for why Erdogan and his "moderate
Islamist" party are behaving this way, but the idea that the AKP is
reverting to the ways of its Ottoman ancestors is ahistorical and
demeaning to the Ottomans. It is true, as Muslim-bashers in the
West persistently point out, that Ottoman sultans were a far cry
from politically correct 21st-century liberals. But it is also true
that for 500 years, the Ottomans were light years ahead of their
contemporaries when it came to dealing with religious minorities,
particularly the Mizrahi — the Jews of the East. Those centuries saw
recurrent waves of anti-Jewish incitement, many culminating in terrible
peaks of slaughter. Demonization of Jews was rampant in the Muslim
world, and widespread in Christian Europe too. But not in Turkey.
Turkey was different. It always stood largely apart from the great
waves of Jew-hatred that periodically darken the world, and was never
fully engulfed by them. Until the birth of America, it was virtually
unique in this respect. Turkish sultans didn’t demonize Jews, or join
forces with those who did. They didn’t echo or broadcast ugly Arab
or Christian blood libels. Instead, they did their best to impose
their own more rational and tolerant attitudes toward Jews and other
peaceful minorities on all the peoples they ruled, and to recognize
and utilize the skills of all their subjects. Of course Christians and
Jews were dhimmis in the Ottoman empire, and that is always a painful
burden. But Turkish sultans were also Caliphs — supreme interpreters
of Islam for all Muslims — and their Islam was not the Islam of
today’s Saudis or al-Qaeda. Under Ottoman rule, Jews and Christians
— Armenian Christians especially — could generally practice their
religions freely within their own self-governing millets.
The most famous illustration of this persistent Ottoman policy is the
remark of Beyazit II, the Turkish sultan who welcomed a new group of
Jews to Turkey in the 15th century — the ones who were expelled from
Spain during the Inquisition. He said: "How can you call Ferdinand
of Aragon a wise king? He has made his land poor and enriched ours."
This venerable Turkish stance toward the Jewish people didn’t end
with the Ottoman Empire. The secular republic of Turkey that rose from
its ashes in 1923 was neutral in World War II, like Switzerland, but
much more generous to the demonized victims of Europe’s last great
wave of hate. Turkey gave refuge to thousands of Jews fleeing the
Nazi inferno — Turkish Jews who had been living abroad, and many
Ashkenazi (Western) Jews too. Turkish ambassadors in Nazi-occupied
Europe took real risks to make it possible for Jews to escape to
Turkey. Free-thinking Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was
gone by then (he died in 1938), but his successor, a devout Muslim
named Ismet Inonu, struggled to be faithful to Ataturk’s vision of a
secular state that not only tolerated Jews and other loyal non-Muslims,
but abolished their dhimmi status altogether.
TURKEY IN THE DOMESTIC MIRROR TODAY
Judging by the responses I got when I visited with Istanbul’s Jews in
2001, the policy of Inonu and his successors worked. Like the Muslim
Turks I met on that same trip, the Istanbul Jews were honest about
Turkey’s lapses and flaws, and impatient with the less-than-competent
political leaders in those pre-AKP years, but they were fiercely
proud of their country, and fully at home in it. Today, after six and
a half years of AKP rule, many Jews are profoundly uneasy, painfully
aware that increasing numbers of their fellow Turks now echo the lies
others tell about them and see them as foreigners in the land they
have embraced as Turks for five centuries and more.
Jews aren’t the only people being demonized in Erdogan’s
Turkey. Indeed, their treatment, so far, is mild compared with that
being meted out to Turkey’s Muslim secularists. They are the targets
of a vast, ongoing conspiracy investigation known as Ergenekon. A
hitherto unknown government prosecutor, working with no-holds-barred
police investigators, launched the case in June 2007, weaving an ever
more complex and elaborate tale of a fantastically sinister secularist
plot to massacre large numbers of innocent Turks as a prelude to the
violent overthrow of the AKP government.
Some 200 alleged co-conspirators have been arrested so far, and
this year there are new arrests every month — some weeks, almost
every day. Many of the accused are prominent men and women who
fall into one of four categories: (1) Turkish journalists who have
criticized Erdogan and/or reported on AKP corruption, and owners of
the remaining independent media outlets that employ those journalists;
(2) Turkish military officers — at first mostly retired army men,
some quite high-ranking, and more recently, active army and navy
officers as well; (3) Turkish intellectuals — university rectors,
professors, scholars, and scientists — with records of outspoken
support for Ataturk’s bedrock commitment to the separation of mosque
and state as the defining principle of the Turkish republic; and (4)
Turkish business and professional men and women known to share those
views. A number of the arrestees are old and ill. Prison has been
hard on them. Some have died there, or soon after their release.
TURKEY, THE FUTURE, AND MAY 17, 2009
Turkey’s unique Ottoman Empire lasted for five centuries. The
question today is whether Turkey’s unique secular republic will
make it to its first centennial in 2023. The answer, sadly, will
be no, if the Turks continue to look to the European Union for
salvation. The transnationals who run the EU have many reservations
about admitting a Muslim-majority state like Turkey to their
national-sovereignty-superseding, Islamist-appeasing club, but a
principled objection to the idea of a "moderate Islamist" government
is not among them. They quite like that idea, seeing it, as President
George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once did,
as a model for other Muslim-majority states to emulate.
But the sad truth is that under the AKP, emulation is proceeding in
the opposite direction: Turkey is becoming more like the oppressive,
corrupt, and propaganda-dominated Arab states from which Ataturk
deliberately distanced Turkey. Today, it’s fashionable in some
Turkish circles to disparage Ataturk for his "isolationism," but a
more accurate summary would describe him as a leader who was highly
selective about the close ties he established with foreign nations —
the tie with Australia, for example, which remains strong to this day.
Another, even sadder truth, for me as an American, is that support
from the U.S. for Turkey’s proud, secular tradition is even less
likely under our current president. Barack Obama shares the EU’s
enthusiasm for "moderate Islamist" states. Unlike ex-president Bush,
he also shares the EU’s uncritical embrace of the view that the
massacre of Armenians in World War I was full-scale genocide on the
part of Turkey, and why not? Our popular new president embraces all
the currently popular transnational prejudices, including those that
unfairly target America — exaggerating our sins and ignoring the
role we have played in making the world a safer, freer, more civilized
place, and the enormous price we have paid to do that. Instead, Obama
joins Erdogan in courting U.N. and OIC favor by giving short shrift to
embattled friends (e.g., Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Colombia,
and Mexico, as well as Israel), while simultaneously reaching far
out to countries with dangerously hostile and aggressive leaders —
countries like Iran, Syria, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba.
The bottom-line truth is that if Turkey’s unique secular republic is
to be saved, it will be Turks alone who save it. Right now, the odds
against that look intimidatingly high, but they were much higher in
the 1920s, when the Turkish republic was born. Like Turkey’s isolated
and embattled secular loyalists today, Turks then had many foreign
enemies and no foreign friends. Everyone was sure the Turks would
not only lose their remaining imperial possessions; they would lose
sovereignty over their historic homeland too. But they did not.
Ataturk accepted the loss of empire without regret, for the most part,
but he rallied and unified the Turkish people into an indomitable
force that ultimately defeated every attempt to subject Turkey to
foreign control. Today, it’s home-grown Islamists who are trying
to turn Turkey into something foreign: a state as oppressive and
intolerant as the ones that dominate the OIC, intimidate the EU,
and cooperate with self-righteous socialists to turn the U.N. into
a mockery of the principles of its founders.
Can Turkey’s secularists turn back the tide and regain control of their
country? In elections in March of this year, they reduced the AKP vote
for the first time since the party took power in 2002, increasing
their own vote totals even in poor areas where the AKP tried to buy
votes by giving out free washing machines and refrigerators. But
Turkey’s secular politicians, like Israel’s unapologetic Zionists,
have yet to put aside their relatively minor political differences
and unite into a truly formidable electoral force.
Ordinary Turks have had less difficulty making that necessary move. In
April 2007 they came together in mass demonstrations across Turkey to
pledge support for their secular republic and denounce AKP efforts
to Islamicize it. Rallies in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir drew more
than a million supporters each, and there were sizeable gatherings
in smaller cities too. Speakers at all the rallies were impassioned,
as were the cheering crowds, but, unlike the more frequent but much
smaller demonstrations by Islamists and by Turkey’s hard Left, the
secularist demonstrations were all peaceful.
In 2008, Turkey’s secularists took their protest to the courts. When
the Erdogan government pushed for legislation to lift the ban on
Muslim headscarves for women on university campuses, secularists
petitioned to have the courts declare that this, and a number of
other AKP actions, were clear violations of constitutional provisions
limiting the reach of Islam in Turkish society. These provisions have
been central to the Turkish Republic since Ataturk founded it; they
are a large part of what has made modern Turkey so different from
every other Muslim-majority nation for the past 85 years. They are
not anti-religious provisions — mosques are plentiful in Turkey, and
Turks are free to worship in them as they choose — but they insist on
a sharp separation between mosque and state, forbidding any intrusion
of Islam into government, any government action to promote Islam,
or any imposition of sharia on Turkish citizens by law.
The chief prosecutor of Turkey’s Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman
Yalcinkaya, asked the Constitutional Court to find the AKP guilty
and apply the legally prescribed remedy — removing Erdogan and his
cohorts from office and holding new elections. The high court agreed
that the AKP had violated the constitution, but fell one vote short
of the margin required to oust the party. The judges let AKP off with
a fine and a warning, and the government celebrated its victory by
making more Ergenekon arrests.
Secularist Turks — Ataturk’s Turks — are hoping to mount mass
rallies again on May 17, and the size of the crowds will give us some
indication of the current strength of their movement. If defeatism
prevails and the crowds are smaller than they were in 2007, the
near-term future looks bleak. But if secular-state loyalists turn
out in numbers that exceed the impressive totals of 2007, Turkey may
yet surprise the world again. For the future — not just of the Turks
but of everyone who loves freedom — we should all pray that they do.