Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with `reforms’
By Amir Taheri
October 4, 2013 | 10:08pm
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the media in
Ankara on Sept., 30, 2013
Photo: Getty Images
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan this week unveiled his
long-promised `reform package’ to `chart the path of the nation’ for
the next 10 years – that is, through 2023, 100 years after the
founding of Turkey as a republic.
Which is ironic, since Erdogan seems bent on abolishing that republic
in all but name.
His plan to amend the Constitution to replace the long-tested
parliamentary system with a presidential one (with himself as
president and commander-in-chief) is only part of it. He’d also undo
the key achievement of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
In the 1920s, Ataturk created the Turkish nation from the debris of
the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk and the military and intellectual elite
around him replaced Islam as the chief bond between the land’s many
ethnic communities with Turkish nationhood.
Over the past 90 years, this project has not had 100 percent success.
Nevertheless, it managed to create a strong sense of bonding among a
majority of the citizens.
Now Erdogan is out to undermine that in two ways.
First, his package encourages many Turks to redefine their identities
as minorities. For example, he has discovered the Lezgin minority and
promises to allow its members to school their children in `their own
language.’
Almost 20 percent of Turkey’s population may be of Lezgin and other
Caucasian origin (among them the Charkess, Karachai, Udmurt and
Dagestanis). Yet almost all of those have long forgotten their origins
and melted in the larger pot of Turkish identity. What is the point of
encouraging the re-emergence of minority identities?
Meanwhile, Erdogan is offering little to minorities that have managed
to retain their identity over the past nine decades. Chief among these
are the Kurds, 15 percent of the population.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, the AKP, partly owes its
successive election victories to the Kurds. Without the Kurdish vote,
AKP could not have collected more than 40 percent of the votes. Yet
his package offers Kurds very little.
They would be allowed to use their language, but not to write it in
their own alphabet. Nor could they use `w’ and other letters that
don’t exist in the Turkish-Latin alphabet but are frequent in Kurdish.
Kurdish leaders tell me that the package grants no more than 5 percent
of what they had demanded in long negotiations with Erdogan.
Another real minority that gets little are the Alevites, who practice
a moderate version of Islam and have acted as a chief support for
secularism in Turkey. While Erdogan uses the resources of the state to
support Sunni Islam, Alevites can’t even get building permits to
construct their own places of prayer.
Armenians, too, get nothing – not even a promise of an impartial
inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915.
The second leg of Erdogan’s strategy is to re-energize his Islamist
base. Hundreds of associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood
are to take over state-owned mosques, religious sites and endowment
properties – thus offering AKP a vast power base across Turkey.
Indirectly, Erdogan is telling Turks to stop seeing themselves as
citizens of a secular state and, instead, as minorities living in a
state dominated by the Sunni Muslim majority. Call it neo-Ottomanism.
Erdogan is using `Manzikert’ as a slogan to sell his package. Yet this
refers to a battle between the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arsalan and the
Byzantine Emperor Romanos in 1071, the first great victory of Muslim
armies against Christians in Asia Minor. It happened centuries before
the Ottoman Turks arrived in the region.
Invoking the battle as a victory of Islam against `the Infidel,’
Erdogan supposedly has an eye on the battle’s thousandth anniversary.
Does he mean to take Turkey back 1,000 years?
The Ottoman system divided the sultan’s subjects according to
religious faith into dozens of `mullahs,’ each allowed to enforce its
own laws in personal and private domains while paying a poll tax.
It’s doubtful most Turks share Erdogan’s dream of recreating a
mythical Islamic state with himself as caliph, albeit under the title
of president. His effort to redefine Turkey’s republican and secular
identity may wind up revitalizing it.