TURKISH CRISIS: THE TURKISH DILEMMA SEEMS TO RUN MUCH DEEPER THAN A CONFLICT BETWEEN SECULARISM AND RELIGIOUS RADICALISM
by Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard
The Daily Standard
May 1, 2007 Tuesday
SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND citizens of the Turkish Republic rallied in
Istanbul Sunday. Two weeks ago, 300,000 participated in a similar
demonstration. Marchers in the latest protest chanted, "neither sharia
nor a coup, but real democracy." They and millions of their peers
have found themselves beset by bad choices, and with no positive
outcome in sight.
Commenting to foreigners, Turks tend to simplify their dilemma,
posing it exclusively as a confrontation between radical Islam and
secularism. The threat of the former is represented by Abdullah Gul,
the chosen presidential candidate of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s AK party (Justice and Development). Gul is currently the
AK’s foreign minister. Balloting for the presidency was to have taken
place May 9 but has now been called off by Turkey’s supreme court,
after complaints from secular opposition parties that the first round
of voting (which takes place within parliament) violated rules calling
for a two-thirds quorum.
Erdogan himself had been expected to run, but encountered so much
protest from secularists that he chose Gul–who is hardly a unifying
figure. Gul belonged to the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan,
pushed out of power by the army in the "soft coup" of 1997, on the
charge that he and his colleagues intended to undermine secularism
and draw Turkey closer to Sunni Arab countries. Further, Gul’s wife
Hayrunisa wears a head-scarf, which would be her own business except
that many Turks view it as a symbolic assertion that fundamentalists
are better Muslims than their fellow Turks. The military had threatened
to intervene against Gul.
Each of the opposing forces in the standoff–militarists and
Islamists–uses the undeniable faults of the other to justify
its position. Turkish entry into the European Union will never be
consummated so long as the republic’s army insists on its right to
throw out elected governments. And more than 80 years of militarist
secularism has left Turkey with a brutal soldier caste that has
been accused of major human rights violations, along with a grossly
corrupt police, and overall failure to fulfill the promises made to
the Turkish citizenry in the name of modernity and progress.
It is unsurprising that people disappointed by life under a secular
regime would be tempted to allow religious believers to govern,
presuming they might rule with a higher sense of ethics. Something
similar, but less troubling than the situation in Turkey, happened
in Mexico in 2000 when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for
which secularism was long an official posture, was replaced by the
historically-Catholic National Action Party.
But the AK party is clearly an Islamist, Sunni-preferential movement
with questionable links in the global underworld of Muslim extremism.
An Islamist Turkey is doubtless a worse choice than a militarist
Turkey from the European and global perspective, although Europeans
have called on the Turks to hold free elections without any military
meddling.
When one interviews ordinary Turks, as well as Kurds from Turkey,
as I have recently done–that is, people who are neither lobbyists
for the military nor for the Islamists–the Turkish dilemma seems
to run much deeper than a conflict between secularism and religious
radicalism. Both the secularists and the Islamists have execrable
records on a more basic issue dividing Turkish society: the nature
of Turkish identity.
Turkish citizens include ethnic Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Greeks,
Arabs, and other minorities, professing Islam in differing forms, as
well as various sects of Christianity, plus Judaism, and, for some,
no religion.
The Turkish military and the Turkish Islamists are as one in their
bigotry against the Alevi Shia community of 22 million–up to a
third of the country–and in their insistence that Turks are almost
entirely Sunnis. As noted by Irfan Bozan, author of a recent report
on the religious situation issued by the influential Turkish Economic
and Social Studies Foundation, the willingness of the militant-Sunni
AK party to accommodate the Alevi minority is the "acid test" of
Erdogan’s professed loyalty to secularism.
The Turkish military and the Turkish Islamists also agree in refusing
to grant cultural autonomy to the Kurdish minority, which makes up
a fifth of the population. And the Turkish military and the Turkish
Islamists unite in denial of the historical truth about the Armenians
who were brutally massacred in Turkey during the first world war.
Turkish militarism and Islamism both implicitly define good citizens
as Turks and Sunnis by ethnicity and by heritage. But a forced, single
nationality was always artificial and the attempt at institutionalizing
it has manifestly failed.
Finally, the Turkish military and the Turkish Islamists agree in their
current hostility to the U.S., especially over the status of Iraqi
Kurdistan. Erdogan and Gul have threatened to obstruct the Kurdish
assumption of control over the Iraqi city of Kirkuk–presumably by
armed action. Anti-American propaganda of a particularly vicious
kind has pullulated in Turkey and its communities abroad, focusing
on alleged atrocities by U.S. troops in Iraq.
Turkish and Kurdish Alevis fear that as the power of secularism
declines, the military will itself turn in a Sunni-extremist direction,
given the need for a new unifying ideology. And they point out,
paradoxically, one of the worst consequences of compulsory secularism:
a long gap in quality religious education, which could combine with
the Sunni exclusivity of AK to promote untrained, radical preachers
in the mold of the fundamentalist and ultraviolent Saudi-Wahhabi cult,
which inspires al Qaeda.
The Sunday marchers in Istanbul got it right. Between militarist
secularism and radical Islam, most Turkish citizens would likely
continue to take their chances with the army. But the country will
not move forward until it adopts three indispensable principles of
a real democracy: a non-political military, religious pluralism,
and full equality for all minorities.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.