Hamilton Spectator, Canada
March 10 2007
Is Turkey about to fall upon itself?
Fatih Saribas, Reuters
Ogun Samast is charged with the killing of Turk-Armenian editor Hrant
Dink.
Virulent nationalism threatens to tear fragile country apart
The Economist
(Mar 10, 2007)
Sitting in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits of
Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says his
mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from "Western
imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us."
In the past two years Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists’ Union have
launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under Article
301 of the penal code, which makes "insulting Turkishness" a criminal
offence.
Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But elsewhere
new ultranationalist groups, some of them led by retired army
officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran to make
Turks "the masters of the world" and even "to die and kill" in the
process.
In January one of Kerincsiz’s targets, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper
editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old, Ogun Samast,
because he had "insulted the Turks." The murder, in broad daylight on
one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, was a chilling manifestation of a
resurgence of xenophobic nationalism aimed at Turkey’s non-Muslim
minorities and the Kurds — plus their defenders in the liberal
elite.
The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by
the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed,
it is partly in response to these reforms — more freedom for the
Kurds, a trimming of the army’s powers, concessions on Cyprus — that
nationalist passions have been roused.
The knowledge that many members of the European Union do not want
Turkey to join has inflamed them further (the EU partially suspended
membership talks with Turkey in December because of its refusal to
open its ports and airspace to Greek-Cypriots).
Another factor is America’s refusal to move against separatist PKK
guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States
Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the mass
slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey’s
relationship with its ally would suffer "lasting damage," says the
foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.
Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by
Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist
nationalism espoused by the "Young Turks" in the dying days of the
Ottoman Empire (who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian
subjects), and the siege mentality gripping Turkey today.
The perception, now as then, is that Western powers are pressing for
changes to empower their local collaborators (i.e., Kurds and
non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up the country.
"This social Darwinist mindset that implies it’s OK to kill your
enemies in order to survive" has been perpetuated through an
education system that tells young Turks that "they have no other
friend than the Turks," says Belge. And it has been cynically
exploited by politicians and generals alike.
Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican
People’s Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000
Turks gathered at Dink’s funeral chanting, "We are all Armenians,"
Erdogan opined that they had gone "too far." Both he and Baykal have
resisted calls to scrap Article 301, though it may be amended.
The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up to
November’s parliamentary election. Erdogan also hopes that burnishing
his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing from
Turkey’s hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely
secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.
Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar
Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more
threats to its national security than at any time in its modern
history and added that only its "dynamic forces" (the army) could
prevent efforts to "partition the country." These words, uttered
during an official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct
warning to Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.
Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist
elements within the army and retired officers who are organizing new
ultranationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist
youths in Trabzon, where Dink’s alleged murderers came from).
"The real purpose is to sow chaos, to polarize society so they can
regain ground (lost with EU reforms)," argues Belma Akcura, an
investigative journalist whose recent book about rogue security
forces known as the "deep state" earned her a three-month jail stay.
It would not be surprising if their next target were a nationalist,
she adds.
Meanwhile, prominent writers and academics, including Belge, continue
to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police protection.
Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning author whom Kerincsiz took to
court over his comments about the persecution of the Armenians and
the Kurds, has fled to New York.
The battle for Turkey’s soul is not over yet.
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