Russia Today
Aug 28 2014
All’s well that ends well: The new Turkey’s PM rise to the top
Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in Ä°stanbul, with a
wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and
the Greater Middle East.
For the past 90 years Turkey, NATO’s most eastern member and the
Islamic world’s gateway to the West, has been a nation state comprised
of a manifold of ethnic groups and sub-groups bonded by the religion
of Islam.
Even though Kemalist social engineering and effective rewriting of
national history and identity (1923-1994/2002) successfully
transformed the Ottoman banner into a symbol of Turkish nationalism,
adherence to the Muslim creed has always been the common core of
Turkish citizenship. The mere existence of a Directorate of Religious
Affairs since 1924 all but underlines this fact.
This Muslim undertow of Turkish nationalism has always been quietly
accepted and even acknowledged; for example, non-Muslim Turkish
citizens (such as Jews, Greek Orthodox, Armenians of various Christian
denominations, or Assyrians) were, and still are, not really accepted
as `equal Turks’ by the majority of the population, and even the
nation’s administration and courts, as persuasively argued for by the
member of Antalya Bar Association, Nazım Tural.
But it was not until the municipal elections of 1994, when Islamist
politician Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP)
gained the majority of the national votes, promoting the now notorious
Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the position of Mayor of Metropolitan
Istanbul, that this undertow suddenly came to the fore and was slowly
transformed into the political current it is today.
Throughout the remainder of the 1990s the expectedly unexpected RP’s
victory, arguably in part necessitated by the constitutional effects
of the 1980 military coup, determined the flow of Turkish politics
until the party was banned following a “harsh army-led secularist
campaign.’
But the genie had been let out of the bottle, and slowly but surely
Islam became an openly accredited determinant in the social and
political life of Turkey once more. And once Erdogan founded his
Justice and Development Party (or AKP), the floodgates were well and
truly wide open, inundating the Lausanne Treaty-agreed upon
territories forming the successor nation state to the multi-ethnic,
poly-religious yet staunchly Islamic Ottoman State with “Pure Water
for Thirsty Muslims,’ to use the words of the Ottoman poet and
bureaucrat Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali Efendi (1541-1600).
Prime Minister Erdogan has ruled Turkey for more than ten years now,
and following the outcome of the recent presidential elections
(gaining 52% of the popular vote) he will arguably continue to play an
important part in Turkish life after he moves to the presidential
residence in Ankara on 28 August.
The compliant successor?
At the moment, the question whether he will actually push for a
constitutional change that would transform Turkey’s regime from a
parliamentary into a presidential system seems to have taken a
backseat. Instead, attention is now focused on the wily Foreign
Minister Ahmed Davutoglu who has been “appointed” the future party
leader and PM by Erdogan on 21 August 2014. Erdogan said that the
“candidate for party leadership and prime minister will realize the
ideal of a new Turkey and the AKP’s targets for 2023.’ Do these words
indicate that Davutoglu will be nothing but a compliant and malleable
successor, fashioned into an agreeable and useful shape by
puppet-master Erdogan? After all, the Associated Press confidently
reports that the new President of Turkey “has made no secret of his
ambition to strengthen the powers of the presidency, until now largely
ceremonial. He has indicated he intends to keep his grip on the
executive by making use of the presidency’s seldom-used powers,
including calling and presiding over Cabinet meetings. Analysts said
Erdogan wanted to install a friendly prime minister who will allow him
to largely control government.”
Underestimating the considerable command and resourcefulness of the
as-yet still FM Davutoglu appears somewhat naive and possibly
misguided, particularly if one were to keep in mind that both men
share the same ideology and harbor similar, if not downright
identical, ambitions for Turkey domestically as well as
internationally.
As expressed by the pan-Arab Al Jazeera, “Davutoglu has steered
Turkey’s foreign policy since 2009 and as an adviser to Erdogan before
that.” Before leaping on to the political stage, Prof. Dr. Ahmed
Davutoglu was a somewhat unassuming academic specializing in the now
presumably “hot” field of international relations. In addition, he was
also recognized internationally as an Islamist thinker of high
standing in the ivory tower world of academia.
When Tayyip Erdogan took over the reins of government on March 14,
2003, Davutoglu continued being active as prime ministerial Chief
Advisor. At the same time, as ambassador, he was nevertheless able to
act as a prime-mover on Turkey’s behalf in the shuttle diplomacy
conducted to reach a settlement in the Israel`Gaza conflict, Operation
Cast Lead (27 December 2008-18 January 2009). The violence and
bloodshed in Gaza caused quite an uproar in Turkey, with PM Erdogan
overtly condemning Israeli aggression and publicly speaking as the
voice of oppressed Muslims in Palestine (and beyond arguably).
Sometime after the end of Israel’s onslaught the Turkish PM travelled
to Davos, to attend that year’s World Economic Forum. On 29 January
2009 Erdogan famously requested `one minute’ from the moderator David
Ignatius in a panel discussion with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, and notably Israeli
President Shimon Peres. Before walking off the stage in anger and
outrage, Tayyip Erdogan exclaimed: `One minute! One minute! No! One
minute!.. Mr. Peres you are older than me. Your voice is very loud. I
know that you are speaking aloud because of the requirement of a sense
of guilt. My voice will not be that loud.’
Moving into unfriendly waters
Could it be that Erdogan’s determined stance on Palestine (and Israel)
and particularly his momentous performance in Switzerland were in no
small measure inspired by words uttered by his Chief Advisor, the
Islamist intellectual and IR specialist Prof. Dr. Ahmed Davutoglu?
In fact, Erdogan appeared very pleased with the services rendered by
Davutoglu, so pleased that on May 1, 2009, he appointed him Minister
of Foreign Affairs. And since then, the wily FM has “steered Turkey’s
foreign policy” into a hitherto unknown direction and region.
I have earlier used the term “pseudo-Ottoman” to refer to this Turkish
policy aimed at the erstwhile Ottoman hinterland and beyond, as a
policy attempting to reap commercial and tactical benefits from
countries and regions that had previously been ignored by the
Eurocentric Turkey. For the first time in its relatively short history
Turkey started engaging its Arab neighbors. Turkey’s esteem and
reputation was on a high in the wider Islamic world, especially after
Erdogan’s arguably carefully scripted Davos stunt. In fact, the
Palestinian-American journalist Jamal Dajani at the time proclaimed
that the “new hero of the Arab street is Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan.’ Arguably, this revised and revived appreciation of a
Turkish politician by his Arab contemporaries was all down to the
tactical scheming of Davutoglu, the man behind the scenes.
>From his safe spot away from the madding crowd and irritating
spotlights, the wily Davutoglu secured Turkish support for the
toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; encouraged the Tahrir Square
uprising and the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;
opposed the Shiite-led government in Baghdad by granting asylum to the
disgraced Sunni Tariq al-Hashimi; and finally, cooperated with Barack
Obama and others to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in the process
apparently freely supporting such extreme organizations as the Jabhat
al-Nusra and ISIS (now known as the Islamic State led by Caliph
Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi). Pseudo-Ottoman Turkey has indeed
travelled far in the past five years.
As a result, the peaceful pseudo-Ottoman course advocated by the
dynamic duo Erdogan- Davutoglu, a course leading to maximized profits
and heightened prestige, has taken a sharp turn over the past months.
Rather than fostering commercial relations and friendly ties inside
the wider Islamic world, the erstwhile advisor-turned-FM-turned-PM
Davutoglu seems to have guided the Turkish state’s ship into the
decidedly unfriendly waters of the Sunni-Shia rivalry that I have
elsewhere referred to as the intra-Islamic Cold War.
Dr. Behlul Ozkan’s, Assistant Professor in IR at Istanbul’s Marmara
University and a former student of Davutoglu’s, believes that Prime
Minister Davutoglu would aim to establish an Islamic Union. Ozkan sees
the politician as a “Pan-Islamist, as he is not [acting in a]
defensive [manner], but [rather] expansionistically; not passive but
rather [pro-] active”. He goes as far as saying that Davutoglu regards
Turkey as the centre of the Middle East, a Muslim realm that would
also include such places like Albania and Bosnia (Muslim areas of the
Ottoman Balkans), and Davutoglu’s “Pan-Islamist world is an order
dominated by the Sunni creed”.
Davutoglu’s foreign policy adventures in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq
all but underline his Ottomanist strand, supporting a Sunni insurgence
in the wider Ottoman hinterland, stretching from Tripoli to Baghdad
and from Cairo to Damascus. Will the new PM really “realize the ideal
of a new Turkey and the AKP’s targets for 2023,” as Tayyip Erdogan
hopefully claimed some time ago? Time will tell.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely
those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
From: A. Papazian