ERDOGAN’S DECADE
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan with Turkish military officers,
Ankara, July 29, 2011. Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images
Hugh Pope
The swirling currents of daily political life in Turkey enjoy a wild
unpredictability. But in November 2002, when Recep Tayyip Erdoðan’s
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi, or AKP)
swept to power with surprising strength, it turned out that it was
riding one of Turkey’s regular underlying tides. This sudden popular
reversal was much the same as in 1950 when a similar surge of votes
brought Adnan Menderes and the Democrat Party to power. And it happened
again in 1983 in favor of Turgut Ozal and the Motherland Party. On
each of these three occasions, the new leader catching the public
imagination was charismatic, pragmatic, and able to gather round
him a coalition of interests including conservative landowners,
progressive businessmen, Turkish nationalists, Kurds, the pious,
a scattering of liberals, and a bedrock of skepticism about Turkey’s
secularist ideology and its military enforcers. The stars of Menderes
and Ozal both faded after ten years, during which time they became
more autocratic and began to rely on an ever-narrowing circle of
advisers. Erdoðan, perhaps the most effective leader of them all,
reaches his tenth anniversary in November.
It was not immediately obvious that Erdoðan would emerge as such a
national leader. A graduate of an imam and preacher-training school,
he had risen through the youth wing of the implicitly pro-Islamist and
usually marginal movement led by veteran politician Necmettin Erbakan.
Erdoðan’s opportunity arrived in 1994, when divisions in Turkey’s
political system and his own campaigning energy secured him the
mayor’s seat in Istanbul, Turkey’s cultural and commercial capital,
with just one quarter of the vote. His split with the Erbakan movement
came in 2001, when he and the movement’s pragmatic wing realized they
needed mass appeal if they were ever to win national elections. And in
2002, Erdoðan benefited from a general sense of popular fatigue with
squabbling old-school politicians in a country still reeling from a
major economic crisis. Add to the mix the fact that he and his party
offered something plausible and new, and Erdoðan enjoyed a similar
confluence of circumstances that had allowed newcomers Menderes and
Ozal their surprise victories in 1950 and 1983.
The jury is still out on the achievements of the AKP’s first decade.
Great successes marked the early years–waves of reforms, the opening
of EU accession negotiations, the end of torture in jails, strong
economic expansion, and more improvements for ethnic Kurds than any
previous government. But the AKP has fumbled important policies,
often following failures of its own political will. Cyprus remains
unsolved; a great wedge between Turkey and the EU. The Armenian
genocide question, at one time at the gate of a path to resolution,
is once again an arena of growing friction. And the Kurdish problem,
in the process of being resolved in 2009, has fallen back into armed
conflict. Domestic critics see the similar corrosive effects of
absolute power on the AKP, with thousands of Turks being detained and
hundreds held for years on controversial grounds of “terrorism.” These
are mostly Turkish Kurd activists, but also include nationalists,
soldiers, university students, academics, and journalists.
As with the Menderes and Ozal parties before it, the fate of the AKP
is above all linked to Prime Minister Erdoðan. Some people say they
voted for the tall, broad-shouldered ex-mayor just because of the
confident swagger in his stride; others saw him as a scary product
of his former pro-Islamic party. There was radical fire enough in
a poem read out by Erdoðan in 1997 to cost him his job as Istanbul
mayor and provoke a temporary ban from politics: ‘The mosques are
our barracks, / The domes our helmets, / The minarets our bayonets,
/ And the believers our soldiers.’ But the poem was actually written
by Turkish nationalist panegyrist Ziya Gokalp (who died in 1924) and
Erdoðan’s ability to win 34 percent of the vote in 2002 proved that
ordinary Turks had accepted Erdoðan as a solid manager of Istanbul,
not as a scary fundamentalist.
Indeed, during the campaign, Erdoðan told visitors to the AKP’s
headquarters that he simply wanted to be known as a conservative and
explicitly stated that he had broken with his radical Islamist past.
“That period is over, finished,” he said, in his sometimes brusque
style. “We have opened a new page with a new group of people, a brand
new party . . . we were anti-European. Now we’re pro-European.” When
challenged over past statements such as “my reference is Islam,”
however, Erdoðan retained an element of the old ambivalence of
the Islamist underground. “Islam is a religion; democracy is a way
of ruling. You can’t compare the two. We just want to increase the
happiness of the people,” he said. Secularists remained nervous that a
new, Islamist ideology would take the place of their own. None missed
an opportunity to recall that Erdoðan had once cynically compared
democracy to “catching a train. When you get to your station, you
get off.”
‘Brother Tayyip’
Erdoðan had already come a long way from his Istanbul origins in a
working-class neighborhood whose proud men are a by-word in Turkey
for rejecting any compromise as an unacceptable loss of face. Joining
Turkey’s Islamist movement as a youth, Erdoðan and later his wife Emine
were responsible for consolidating the party’s vote-winning infantry
in the city. As much as the policies, it was Erdoðan’s control of this
organization, and an obsession for opinion polls and market surveys,
that was to bring him success in 2002 and keep his share of the vote
above 50 percent in 2011. By this time, Erdoðan was able to send his
children to U.S. universities–his daughters supposedly so they could
wear their headscarves (legally banned although tolerated on Turkish
campuses) but he never wanted anyone to think he had forgotten his
origins. “In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and
White Turks,” Erdoðan once said. “Your brother Tayyip belongs to the
Black Turks.”
Erdoðan’s first big test as AKP prime minister was the run-up to,
and fall-out from, the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq. As so
often in Turkey, the AKP’s instincts vacillated between alignment with
the West, Christian and disdainful yet rich and strong; and sympathy
for the Middle East, poorer and traumatized by conflicts, but fellow
Muslims and neighbors. Initially, Erdoðan promised to cooperate with
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in return for the promise of an extensive
Turkish say in the future of northern Iraq plus billions of dollars
in grant aid and loans. But the Americans didn’t read the complex
politics of Turkey correctly, and even Erdoðan underestimated the
strength of opposition to U.S. plans within his own party. On March
1, 2003, more than a quarter of his deputies declined to enter the
assembly or voted against Turkish cooperation with the Iraq invasion.
AKP leaders were left ashen-faced as they discovered they were three
deputies short of the necessary parliamentary quorum. The measure
was defeated.
There was no easy going back and Erdoðan had to embrace what he called
a “democratic outcome.” Polls showed 94 percent of Turks opposed the
war, because, like Europeans and others around the world, they did not
believe that Iraq was responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks
on America, and they feared intervention would further destabilize
the Middle East, hurt the Turkish economy, encourage ethnic Kurdish
separatism, and fuel radicalism in the region. Not surprisingly, U.S.
leaders were furious at being jilted just a couple of weeks before the
planned outbreak of hostilities, not just by the AKP but by lukewarm
Turkish generals too. American supply ships waiting off the Turkish
coast had to sail to the Persian Gulf, their advance units had to
reload what they had unloaded at Turkish ports, and troops had to leave
outposts already established along the Turkish highway to northern
Iraq–in one televised instance, pelted with stones by local people.
Thanks to the initial success and brevity of the military campaign,
the AKP escaped the full force of U.S. opprobrium. Erdoðan rushed to
make up by granting overflight rights, offering troops (in the event
rejected by Iraq’s new authority), and opening up supply routes for
the new U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. In 2007, Turkey and the U.S.
signed a deal that saw Ankara normalize relations with Iraqi Kurds and
secure U.S. intelligence in its fight against Turkish Kurd insurgents.
Indeed, by 2011, the U.S. increasingly treated Turkey as a key regional
partner as it moved back from engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan,
leading President Abdullah Gul to call this period a ‘golden age’
in relations with Washington.
The mid-2000s had not been smooth sailing for the AKP, however. The
new party needed allies as it faced bitter opposition from the
Kemalists within the bureaucracy and military, the staunch followers
of republican founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which proved the basis
for many later investigations of alleged coup plots. Showing their
pragmatic ability to seize an opportunity, Erdoðan and Gul sought
national inspiration and political protection by embracing the troubled
convergence process with the European Union. Shortly after his party’s
first electoral victory in 2002, Erdoðan set off on a whirlwind tour of
European capitals. The athletic, then-forty-eight-year-old Erdoðan’s
performance made a sharp contrast with his geriatric predecessor,
Bulent Ecevit. European counterparts were impressed by Erdoðan’s
direct approach and relieved by his reformist program. He also
received red carpet treatment in Greece, where he followed up on the
1999 rapprochement with Athens and promised a new start regarding
Cyprus, complete with new and strong support for the reunification
of the island.
Divorcing the EU
Erdoðan and the AKP continued with revolutionary reforms enacted
by Ankara since the 1999 recognition of Turkey as an EU membership
candidate. The secularist coalition of Prime Minister Ecevit had
already rewritten one-third of the Turkish constitution by adopting
international human rights laws, ending capital punishment, expanding
women’s rights, discouraging torture, and improving prison conditions.
New laws curtailed existing restrictions on freedom of expression,
civil society, and the media, as well as diminishing the Turkish
military’s long-standing dominance of politics. The AKP followed this
with several further packages of EU reforms passed in 2003-4, which
expanded Kurdish cultural rights, brought a level of transparency to
the army budget, and restricted the executive power of the National
Security Council. The NSC was not merely a parallel government where
top civilian and military officials hammered out Turkish national
policy, but an entire military-dominated apparatus with a 600-man
secretariat that monitored sensitive areas of the administration and
had eyes in all state institutions. Pushing ever further, Erdoðan
announced in 2012 that the ‘national security’ lesson in schools
would end.
This reforming trend and the signed promise of increased normalcy
with Cyprus finally won Turkey its October 3, 2005 date to begin EU
membership negotiations. Nevertheless, at the December 2004 European
Council where this was decided, the Dutch premier of the day didn’t
receive any gratitude or back-slapping bear hugs that marked the
elated reactions of other Balkan states accorded the same green light.
Indeed, there is a deep ambivalence in Turkey towards the EU. Polls
typically show a roughly 60 percent majority of Turks supporting
membership but only 40 percent believe that it will actually happen.
Ironically, only about 40 percent of people in the EU can accept the
idea of Turkish membership although 60 percent believe Turkey will
get it anyway. On one hand, the digestive power of the EU went to
work as ministries modernized floor by floor and EU standards and
regulations crept into Turkish law across a broad front from motor
vehicle tests to snack stand environmental rules. But on the other
hand, a Turkish artist portrayed the process in a short video set in a
workshop where a worker in blue overalls steadily stone grinds a hard,
pointed piece of metal. As the flying sparks die away at the end,
the metal turns out to be the crescent moon of the Turkish flag, its
spiky point rounded off, and, by implication, now an impotent symbol,
curbed by new masters in Brussels.
Ankara still insists on its long-promised right to join. But almost no
Turkish leader, questioned privately, says they would immediately sign
membership treaties if and when the country fulfils all the necessary
criteria. President Gul has repeatedly said that Turkey might prefer
the Norwegian option, being able to join but choosing not to do so.
Indeed, Turkey continues to block Greek Cypriot access to Turkish
ports, thereby casting a pall over an accession process that has
only thickened over the years. By the end of the AKP’s second term
in office in June 2011, only thirteen chapters had been opened and
one provisionally closed, and all but the rest had been blocked. The
membership process had come to a virtual standstill.
Erdoðan and the AKP have blamed Europe for the slowdown. And, indeed,
the old continent’s right wing governments, populist parties, economic
slowdown, and loss of formerly expansive confidence have had a gravely
depressing effect. The pro-Turkey EU leaders who swung the 2004
European Council in favor of accession talks were gradually replaced.
But most damaging was the 2007 election of French President Nicolas
Sarkozy, who chose to win votes via direct attacks on the EU-Turkey
process. This short-term appeal to French anti-immigration sentiment
was both a breach of France’s treaty commitments and a blow to
France’s long-term commercial interests. It triggered an emotional
response in Turkey, where early republicanism was self-consciously
modeled on France’s Jacobin revolutionary heritage and secularist
ideology. Even if the previous EU-Turkey process could be compared
to a game in which Turkey pretended to join and the EU pretended to
accept it, Sarkozy’s determination to walk out on the deal effected
a rupture that had all the atmospherics of an acrimonious divorce.
However, Erdoðan and the AKP must also take their share of the blame
for the deterioration of ties with Europe. They voluntarily chose
not to enact the partial normalization with the Republic of Cyprus
required of them, later citing the EU’s failure to implement some
lesser promise. There were also other signs of an underlying lack of
Turkish enthusiasm for going all the way to EU-mandated transparency
in government, decentralization of power, and freedom of expression.
Until 2009, the chief Turkish EU negotiator was also a busy foreign
minister. Turkey’s EU General Secretariat, in charge of coordinating
the adoption of EU laws, was under staffed and under funded. Talk
of enacting the National Program for adopting those laws dragged
out for more than a year before it was enacted in 2008. The blunt
Erdoðan showed little aptitude for bonding with the less-colorful
and softer-spoken EU leaders while his grandstanding style made
them wonder how he would ever fit into the collegial atmosphere of
European Council meetings. EU officials bristled at their frequent
clashes with Turkish counterparts who kept negotiations on edge
until the last minute, were unable to make decisions on their own,
and whose uncompromising maximalism often made Turkey look as if it
wanted to have its cake and to eat it too.
Generals and Headscarves
The EU process did, however, give the AKP cover as it saw off the
biggest threat to its rule, the Turkish armed forces. The Turkish
general staff had gritted its teeth as AKP took power in 2002 and
avoided attending official receptions where Turkey’s new leaders were
accompanied by their headscarfed wives. Their implicit insubordination
had an intimidating effect, following as it did the witch-hunts against
anyone with pro-Islamic tendencies after the 1997 ousting of Necmettin
Erbakan’s Refah Party. In 2009, when the AKP felt firmly in charge,
prosecutors discovered what they said was a web of coup conspiracies
organized by a deep state group they called Ergenekon and arrested
large numbers of senior officers. It is doubtful whether the plotting
was quite as widespread as some in the AKP thought. But for sure,
the secularist officer corps was seething with resentment against what
they saw as a political force determined to undo Ataturk’s secularist
legacy. And leaked documents and testimony do indicate discussions
and conspiracies against the government from 2003 onwards.
As it became clear that the AKP was intending to nominate one of its
leaders, Abdullah Gul, to become president in early 2007, the chief
of the general staff began dropping critical hints. A group, including
retired officers, started organizing pro-secularist demonstrations.
These drew hundreds of thousands in western cities, and serving
generals even circulated propaganda by email to urge on the movement.
On April 27, 2007, parliament held the first round of the presidential
election and Gul did not get the necessary two-thirds majority. The
same evening the general staff published on its website a memorandum
warning that it was “a party to these debates and the definitive
defender of secularism” and that it would “if necessary, openly display
its reaction.” Five days later, on May 1, another Kemalist stronghold,
the Constitutional Court, found in favor of an application to annul
the election on the grounds of a hitherto unknown quorum technicality
claimed by the secularist and opposition Republican People’s Party
(CHP).
After this public threat from the general staff, some AKP leaders and
sympathizers packed small suitcases, ready to be led off to jail the
next morning. But Turkey had changed, and Erdoðan, Gul, and the AKP
did not lose their nerve. They brought parliamentary elections forward
from November to July and, faced with a choice between the AKP and
the military, the Turkish people voted massively for the AKP. On July
22, 2007, the people gave the ruling party 46.6 percent of the vote;
thirteen points ahead of its 2002 performance. The pro-military CHP
trailed with 20.9 percent. On August 28, 2007, the new parliament duly
elected Gul as president and his wife, Hayrunnisa, became Turkey’s
first ‘first lady’ to wear a headscarf.
For several months, military top brass continued to boycott official
ceremonies, sometimes with considerable rudeness. There was, however,
no question that the military had been forced back to its barracks.
The army had been able to meddle so much in Turkey’s military-dominated
past because, when politicians were so obviously unpopular,
generals could plausibly present themselves as the voice of
the silent majority. But a conscript army could not be mobilized
against a political party that had won nearly half of the national
vote. Gradually the system adapted: it helped that Gul was always
engagingly polite and cultivated a moderate and statesmanlike image.
People became more used to seeing the headscarfed wives of the AKP
elite, some of whom, like the wife of the first AKP foreign minister,
Ali Babacan, dressed as elegantly as fairy-tale princesses.
Despite this, the AKP has been unable to overcome a deepening, almost
tribal polarization between the secularist and pious, religious
tendencies within society. This split was worsened by both the AKP’s
attitude that its parliamentary majority gave it and it alone the
right to decide what was best for the country, and the opposition’s
stubbornly zero-sum mentality that its popularity would be damaged
if it allowed the AKP to succeed in anything. The opposition refused
to discuss cooperation on a new constitution after 2007–essentially,
the AKP’s primary election pledge–and it did little to help the AKP’s
2009 initiative to reach out to Turkey’s Kurds. High society Istanbul
dinner parties often divided into viscerally angry debates in which
liberals would defend the AKP’s performance and secularists would
decry the AKP’s infringements of old Ataturkist norms. This could often
seem like class war. After all, the AKP represented a newly-urbanized
majority descended from villagers and small-town merchants, while the
secularists represented the old elite whose grandparents, refugees
from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, had taken over Anatolian
towns and built the Turkish republic from the 1920s.
Kurds and other Conundrums
One successful novelty of the early AKP years was a broadening
detente on the Kurdish problem, although it remained slow, imperfect,
and marred with continued outbreaks of violence and injustice. In
the parliamentary elections of November 2002, the explicitly Kurdish
nationalist party won 6.2 percent of the countrywide vote, but because
it failed to exceed the national barrier of 10 percent, it received
no seats in parliament. The party was banned for alleged links to
separatist terrorism in 2005 and in 2007 its successor chose to run
its candidates as independents, enough of whom won seats to qualify
as a twenty-deputy party bloc in parliament. Kurdish nationalist
politicians were enjoying long terms in power in many municipalities
in the southeast, becoming more of a working cog in the political
system and more responsive to civil needs. Indeed, generally lower
levels of violence, in addition to the AKP’s enlightened development
and road-building policies and rising levels of prosperity in Turkey
as a whole, transformed the face of Kurdish-majority cities, with
their new apartment buildings, shopping centers, and neater, greener
urban spaces. In 2009, as part of what became known as the ‘Democratic
Opening,’ a twenty-four-hour Kurdish language state television channel
went on air, local Kurdish broadcasters were allowed to broadcast
in Kurdish, a first attempt was made to bring Kurdish Workers Party
(PKK) guerrillas home to benefit from an amnesty, and universities
were permitted to register Kurdish language and literature courses.
Progress was, however, too slow and insincere to satisfy Kurdish
nationalists. They had to struggle every day against legal Turkish
harassment and social prejudice in order to win more respect and
political representation. During the first two years of the supposed
‘Democratic Opening’ (2009-11), for instance, the state jailed, for
various periods, more than 3,000 nationalist political activists,
not for any acts of violence but almost all on the presumption that
they sympathized with or spoke about one of the policies attributed
to the PKK.
The PKK had already withdrawn the ceasefire it had announced in
1999, saying that state forces hadn’t backed off. The late 2000s
were increasingly characterized by a cat-and-mouse game of clashes
and further ceasefires. During upswings of violence, PKK insurgents
ambushed outlying conscript-manned army outposts and lay roadside
bombs for passing convoys, while radical offshoots would sometimes
stage terrorist attacks in the hearts of major western Turkish cities
or against tourists on Mediterranean beaches. For its part, the Turkish
military would hunt insurgent units high in the mountains and conduct
aerial bombardments of their bases in northern Iraq, sometimes followed
up by land incursions. Extravagant Kurdish political shows of support
for the PKK or funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in lethal clashes
caused peaks of nationalist outrage that put pressure on the government
and hindered all attempts at political dialogue. The situation had
unraveled so far that, by the second half of 2011, fighting and
bombings killed more than 300 members of the security forces, PKK
fighters, and civilians. In the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakýr, a
general sense of a happier, tidier, more prosperous normalcy seemed
to co-exist with outbreaks of mayhem. Yet at the same time, a PKK
funeral could trigger a mass strike by shopkeepers, running battles
in the outskirts of town between the Turkish police and Kurdish
youths armed with knives, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails while
the police fired pistols in the air, released tear gas into crowds,
and photographed participants for later arrest. Turks in the west
of the country repeatedly failed to understand the Kurds’ need for
dignity and national recognition, to feel Kurdish pain as the bodies
of PKK guerrillas were brought home for burial, or the growing anger,
energy, and mobilization of the new and still-dispossessed generation
of Kurdish youth.
During its early years, the AKP managed to keep the support of
western Turkish liberals, who accepted that pragmatism outweighed
its religious leanings and shared its skeptical approach to the
old-school statism of the Kemalists. AKP leaders had split with the
pro-Islamist movement in 2001, and if they retained any Islamist
agenda, it was unstated and relatively subtle. Some Anatolian regions
resembled those provincial U.S. towns that banish liquor to brown bags
bought at stores on the outskirts, acquired alcohol prices of almost
Swedish levels in relative terms, and saw moralistic laws soft-focus
cigarettes and alcohol out of television shows. But the first years
of AKP rule also saw a blossoming of the open air restaurant and cafe
culture in many cities, a boom in Russian and European tourism, and a
phenomenal expansion of small enterprises manufacturing higher quality
wine and spirits. Erdoðan’s attempt in 2007 to revert to the pre-1998
criminalization of adultery in Turkey, apparently on religious grounds,
foundered not just on European disapproval but also on domestic outcry.
Liberals were gradually alienated, which brought more votes for the
opposition in western coastal cities and led to the AKP’s loss in
the 2009 municipal elections of the booming Mediterranean tourist
resort city of Antalya. And, the AKP did not root out the judiciary’s
authoritarian habits. At one point after the 2009 launch of the
Ergenekon complex of court cases, more than 10 percent of serving
generals and admirals were behind bars for supposed military and deep
state coup plotting. The prosecutors clearly went too far, rounding
up octogenarian activists, leaking evidence that appeared fraudulent,
and jailing one well-known secularist Ankara commentator, Mustafa
Balbay, for more than two years without informing him of the charges
against him. Turkish Kurds and other dissidents fared no better. As
happens too often in Turkey, the judicial system judged intention as
action, mistook smoke for fire, confused sympathy with rebel causes
for criminal anti-state revolt, and locked up many people on the
presumption of guilt as an inefficient judicial process limped along
for years until, as everyone knew was likely, many of the suspects
would be found innocent.
Early on, the AKP tried hard to settle chronic foreign policy
problems. One notable effort concerned Turkey’s long-standing
differences with Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. Years of secret
contact, civil society interaction, and then open negotiations resulted
in two protocols being signed in October 2009. These formed a framework
for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Turkey and
Armenia and the opening of their mutual border, closed by Turkey
in 1993. At the same time, the two sides agreed to establish joint
official commissions, including one with participation from Swiss
experts, to study their disputed history–principally the question
of how to agree on the underlying facts and denomination of what the
world calls the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, and what Turkey
increasingly accepts as tragic wartime massacres of several hundred
thousand. In parallel, Turkey harbored an unspoken hope that the
Armenians would withdraw from some of the 13.5 percent of Azerbaijan
that they occupied in the 1992-4 war that conquered Azerbaijan’s
Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno Karabagh. Unfortunately, the two
protocols stalled in late 2009 when strong objections were raised
by Azerbaijan–a major Turkish energy supplier, trading partner,
and ethnic cousin. To a lesser extent, the Armenian diaspora and
opposition were uncomfortable with any compromise towards Turkey, and
most Armenians opposed any explicit link to Armenian withdrawals from
conquered territories around the Karabagh mountains. As often seems
to happen, the breakdown was not a result of any bad intentions of
the AKP, but rather an apparent inability to think through the need
to stick by new policies when the political going got tough.
Despite this setback, Armenian and Turkish civil groups and media
have stayed in regular contact. Journalist exchanges, cultural
events, small business, and even the delivery of transit passes to
Armenian truck drivers driving through Turkey have kept pushing
normalization forward. The road has been bumpy, including the
infamous 2005 prosecution of Turkey’s leading writer Orhan Pamuk for
‘denigrating Turkishness’ by referring to the killings of Armenians
and Kurds. That charge was dropped on a technicality in 2006, the
year that Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But by 2011,
the debate had moved on so far that it was unremarkable to find,
for instance, a progressive Turkish newspaper commentary drawing
the conclusion that the 1915 massacres “may not be a genocide in
[legalistic] words, but that’s what they were in essence.” These
“massacres” were commemorated for the second year running in 2011
across Turkey, including Istanbul’s Taksim Square.
The AKP also failed to clear up another legacy of the past: the
well-grounded suspicions regarding the deep state’s failure to deal,
in a timely manner, with attacks against non-Muslim minorities. A
Catholic priest, Andreas Santoro, was murdered in Trabzon in 2006
and three Christian missionaries had their throats slit in Malatya
in April 2007. The Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who
was once convicted for ‘denigrating Turkishness’ on the basis of
mistranslated articles, was assassinated in January 2007. His death
shook the country, as did credible allegations of official involvement
with the teenage nationalist who murdered him. Tens of thousands of
people poured into the streets to demonstrate their solidarity with
the slain writer. But rather than giving justice to the victims’
families and reforming the intolerant xenophobia of the media and
education systems, which underlie these murders, the passing years
and eventual court ruling in January 2012, which allowed most of the
accused to walk free, points to official indulgence of, and indeed
complicity with, the perpetrators.
As the army became less of a threat and liberal support appeared
dispensable, the AKP gradually lost interest in Europe and EU norms,
and slowed reforms that would have brought greater transparency,
accountability, competition, and open markets, and limited the
government’s power to distribute patronage. Indeed, it was now
the secularists who needed to seize the banner of EU-bound reform,
something they failed to immediately appreciate. Even high-ranking
Turkish officials became scornful of the way several member states’
economies faltered after the 2008 financial crisis, the euro came
under attack, and deep political fault-lines made the EU look confused
and ineffective. Turkey, by contrast, helped by a recapitalized and
better-regulated banking sector, rebounded rapidly from the initial
crisis and appeared to have escaped the contagion. So it was perhaps
not surprising that Erdoðan and the AKP turned to the altogether more
congenial goal of becoming a champion in its region, particularly
in the Middle East, a goal that appeared to neatly serve Turkey’s
commercial as well as strategic interests.
Managing the ‘New Middle East’
At first, AKP leaders actively compared their new outreach to the
Middle East with the EU’s beginnings and championed benefits derived
from the freedom of movement for people, trade, capital, and services.
They explicitly aimed, like Europeans after World War II, to integrate
and reduce confrontation between neighbors traumatized by decades of
revolution, sanctions, and war. The policy has hints of political
ambition, not to mention Turkish preeminence, but this neo-Ottoman
flavor did not, at first, put off Turkey’s regional partners. Ankara’s
first step was to ease travel restrictions and lift visa requirements
for travelers from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Libya in 2009, thereby
adding to the already automatic system of granting visas to Iranians.
A new border crossing was inaugurated with Syria, and Cold War-era
minefields were removed between the two countries. Groups of senior
cabinet ministers began to hold regular joint meetings, as the AKP
had done with other neighbors such as Greece and Russia. And in 2010,
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan agreed to transform their bilateral
free trade areas into a jointly-managed free trade zone, a first step
towards an EU-style multilateral mechanism.
At the same time, Turkey became an observer at the Arab League and
hosted foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Istanbul.
In 2005, a Turk, Ekmeleddin I.hsanoðlu, won the first contested
election to lead the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which
includes representatives from fifty-seven Muslim countries; it’s
worth noting too that in 2010 a Turk was also elected to head the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Alongside its civilian
and military contributions to North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s
Afghan and Balkan efforts, Turkey also began contributing ships and
1,000 military personnel and engineers to the United Nations Interim
Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Broad regional support elevated Turkey
to a non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council for 2009-10,
the first time since the early 1960s.
Middle Easterners are finding Turkey more attractive for many reasons.
The AKP’s victory had buried the image of a country long seen as
having turned its back on Islam to act as a treacherous cat’s paw for
Western imperialism in the region. Some prized Turkey’s readiness to
challenge Israel openly, arguably the main reason for Turkey’s appeal
on Arab streets when it became a pronounced Turkish trait after 2009.
Turkey also appears to have made peace between its Muslim soul and
secular political pragmatism. Some Middle Easterners respect its
status as the only Muslim country to be accepted as a potential equal
by rich, powerful Europe, as shown by the hundreds of journalists from
the region who attended key EU meetings on Turkey’s future membership.
Some like its success in moving from authoritarianism to democracy.
Some simply admire the pure electoral legitimacy of Turkish
leaders–and readiness to step down from power at the end of their
terms.
The AKP has also presided over a period of unprecedented economic and
commercial success. After the restructuring that followed a 2000-1
domestic financial crisis, global buoyancy helped Turkey streak ahead.
Annual growth averaged 7 percent for the AKP’s early years in office,
between 2002 and 2007. Inflation tumbled from an average of 75 percent
in the 1990s to 9.5 percent in 2009. Exports quadrupled from $36.1
billion in 2002 to $132 billion in 2008. Foreign investment, which
had lingered around $1-2 billion per year for decades, soared to
$5.8 billion in 2005 and then averaged about $20 billion for the next
three years. In the short term, at least, Turkey’s cleaned-up banking
system and relative freedom from mortgage-backed debt allowed it to
escape the worst of the 2008-9 global downturn. There is likely to
be an adjustment in store for the Turkish economy in 2012, not just
because of the slowdown in its main markets in Europe, but because
uprisings in the Arab world will likely cause years of tumult and
lower economic demand.
The AKP has endured some criticism for the way its ambitious intentions
led to embracing unsavory Middle Eastern dictators, who were then
disgraced by the 2011 Arab revolts. Nevertheless, in the long term,
the AKP’s early proactive and even-handed diplomacy in the region
retains the potential to encourage peace and stability, without
which prosperity and democracy are unlikely to take root. The streets
of Turkish cities and seaside resorts are audibly more filled with
visitors from Iran and the Arab world than previously. At the same
time, Turkish capital, films, television series, music, and products
are establishing themselves in Middle Eastern markets. With more
than seventy Turkish TV series sold and dubbed around the region,
from Morocco to Kazakhstan, a meeting between a Bosnian, a Croat,
and a Serb who differ on everything political could agree on what to
make of the last heartbreak in the latest Turkish soap opera.
The AKP’s handling of Israel has been erratic, with trade still
continuing but minimal diplomatic relations being conducted through
second secretaries and a near-complete break in former military
cooperation. As part of a return to the best of what the AKP
represented in the early-to mid-2000s, Turkey would benefit from a
normalization of ties with Israel as part of a Turkish strategy of
equidistance from all its neighbors. However, in this case, the AKP
is arguably less to blame for current troubles than the government of
Israel. Until 2009, the AKP continued the previous policy of engagement
with Israel. AKP leaders often visited the Jewish state, trade rose,
and in 2005 Prime Minister Erdoðan himself paid his respects at the
Yad Vashem holocaust memorial, although he declined to cover his head
with a yarmulke. Turkey productively hosted several rounds of modest
proximity talks between Israel and Syria in 2008.
By contrast, Israel has clearly taken the key steps that escalated
the post-2009 deterioration in its relationship with Turkey.
Understandably, Erdoðan felt personally betrayed in December 2008 when
Israel launched its Gaza operation only days after he had spent five
hours dining with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his residence,
doing his best as the Israeli-Syrian process seemed to be close to
achieving real results. It was when this Gaza operation killed 1,430
Palestinians, including many civilians, that Erdoðan staged his angry
outburst against Israeli President Shimon Peres and his now legendary
walk-out from the World Economic Forum in Davos. It was an Israeli
deputy foreign minister who chose later, in 2009, to insult the
Turkish ambassador in front of TV cameras. It was Israeli commandos
who killed nine Turks (including a Turkish-American) in May 2010,
on board a multi-national flotilla that was, in theory, trying to
break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This may have been a reckless
idea implicitly approved of by the AKP, but the midnight Israeli
assault was on a ship, in practice, steaming south towards Egypt in
international waters seventy miles off the Israeli coast. It was also
the Israeli government that has declined to endorse an Israeli apology
for this incident, the text of which diplomats from both sides have
already agreed.
In the short term, the AKP’s challenge to Israel became a principal
ingredient in Turkey’s new popularity on the Arab street. However,
since the mid-2000s, the AKP has been neglecting another key element
of Turkey’s success–and its regional appeal–namely, a healthy
relationship with the EU. Europe as a whole still takes more than half
of Turkey’s exports, against only a quarter taken by the Middle East.
EU states supply more than three quarters of Turkey’s foreign direct
investment, the best pointer toward future economic integration. And of
the 183 million people who visited the country in the first decade of
the new millennium, only 10 percent of visitors came from the Muslim
world. Europe is home to up to four million Turks, while less than
100,000 live and work in the Middle East. High oil prices offer Middle
Eastern opportunities for Turkish commercial expansion, but these
markets are continuing to prove as risky as they have in the past.
The AKP’s and Erdoðan’s principal ambition is to see Turkey as a
rich and powerful hub between the Middle East and Europe, and the
Mediterranean and Russia. To achieve this, it will have to find its
way back to a balance between the spokes of that hub, including,
for instance, Turkey’s place as part of European and transatlantic
alliances. This is precisely what has, for a long time, made it seem
so special to the Middle East.
Turkey and the AKP are riding high in international opinion. The
energetic reforms of the AKP’s’s first years in office have, after
a time lag, succeeded in changing the minds of Westerners who have
for too long been skeptical about Turkey. The Middle East has been
charmed by Turkey’s commercial success, the legitimacy of its politics,
and its willingness to publicly challenge Israel. Domestically and
internationally, the AKP has done more than any previous government
towards solving the problems that have hobbled Turkey for decades: the
overbearing dominance of the Turkish military, human rights abuses,
infrastructural development, Cyprus, the Turkish Kurd problem, and
the Armenian question.
As a result, there has been remarkably little weight given to a growing
drumbeat bearing news of similarities to the bad old days of the 1990s:
shrill complaints from Turkish media about official pressure to toe
the government line, hundreds of dissidents in jail on flimsy charges
of terrorism, and a new flaring up of the PKK insurgency. Nearly
all segments of Turkish society complain that the judicial system
is failing to deliver justice, that the education system needs to
move much faster from learning by rote, and that polarization in
politics and along the secular-religious divide means that much-needed
constitutional reform is hamstrung. AKP initiatives on Cyprus, the
Kurds, and Armenia have all run out of steam. The old moral hazard
from the Cold War years also appears to be returning, as Washington
once again overlooks Ankara’s domestic policy shortcomings in return
for support for the U.S. agenda in the region.
Even so, at the ten-year point, Erdoðan’s AKP is in a much better
position than his most similar predecessors, Menderes’ Democrat Party
in the 1950s and Ozal’s Motherland Party in the 1980s-90s. Erdoðan is
able to command massive public support and has strong international
winds filling his sails. Still, much of that support is derived from
the reputation established during the AKP’s early years, dynamics that
are now much-diminished: real work on EU convergence, more consensual
decision-making and a modest, equidistant approach to Turkey’s complex
diplomatic engagements. It is to these dynamics that Erdoðan and the
AKP must return if they are to succeed in truly taking Turkey into
the global first division.
Hugh Pope is the Turkey/Cyprus project director for the International
Crisis Group. For twenty-five years he was a correspondent based
in Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, most recently with the Wall Street
Journal. His latest book is Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades
Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East. He is also the author of
Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, and co-author of
Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey. He was a Bosch Fellow at
the German Marshall Fund of the Transatlantic Academy in Washington,
DC.
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=149