Tag Archives: Turkey

The Eastern Question(s).

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In what language were the warnings to the Russian pilots issued? The Turks claim that the warnings were made in English (which I understand to be the international language of air traffic control). Still, the Department of Defense needs to release the recordings and soon.

Who cares what the President of Turkey wants? On the one hand, Erdogan has been attacking the EU through the refugee crisis. Domestically, he’s been playing the nationalist card in order to increase his own authority and re-design the constitution. First, his hostility was directed against the Kurds. Now he’s getting into air-battles with the Russians and calling on NATO to back him up. On the other hand, he’s deeply worried about the rise of a Kurdish proto-state in northern Iraq. He has legitimate reason to be worried about this danger to the future integrity of Turkey. The US attack on Iraq in 2003 looks worse and worse with the passage of time. Which is saying something.

ISIS made its spectacular gains last summer in operations against two states (Iraq and Syria) rotted by internal conflicts in which many people were estranged from their governments and the governments forces were back on their heels. Despite the bitterness in the press announcements, there is a certain congruence of policy. American policy has been to try to reduce internal strife in Iraq by evicting the Shi’ite president and getting his Shi’ite successors to tone down their anti-Sunni policies. Russia has chosen to try to reduce the internal strife in Syria by helping the Alawite government defeat their Sunni opponents. Both the Americans and the Russians are doing much the same thing, if only the Americans would see it: stop the further collapse of the front-line states opposing ISIS. The chief difference here is that the Russians have made a clear choice to back the Shi’ite side in that civil war in alliance with Iran and the government of Iraq, while the Americans are trying to straddle the Shi’ite-Sunni civil war. President Obama’s proposal to stage a new Libya in Syria—overthrowing the government, then walking away as the place burns, which is what the US did a few years ago—is not going to improve the situation. (See: Obama versus Putin.) The Russians aren’t the ones who need to get their act together.

A Turk’s Head Knot.

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After years of keeping hundreds of thousands of refugees from the civil war in neighboring Syria within its borders, Turkey has been allowing many of them (and from other troubled places) to leave for Europe. How can we explain this sudden shift in Turkish policy?

In the June 2015 elections, long-time ruler Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its majority to a coalition of Kurds, leftists, secularists, and young people under the umbrella of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).[1] The defeat, however, did not create a clear majority for Erdogan’s opponents. Instead, it created a “hung parliament” that made new elections necessary on 1 November 2015. One key element in the popular estrangement from Erdogan had been his increasingly autocratic tendencies and his desire to revise the Turkish constitution to grant more power to the executive. The frustrated Erdogan cast about for some means of regaining the lost voters before the looming election.

One answer came in an attack on the Kurds. The First Gulf War (1990-1991) resulted in a protected area for Kurds in northern Iraq. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the creation of a nascent Kurdish state in northern Iraq. Since Summer 2014, the war against ISIS has bolstered American support for the Kurds. A Kurdish state has been rising on Turkey’s southern border for some time. However, Erdogan’s government had been engaged in peace-talks with the Kurds. Suddenly, after the June elections, Erdogan lashed out. Turkey belatedly joined the air war against ISIS, but its attacks have mostly targeted Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria. These attacks struck groups purportedly linked to the Kurdish autonomist (i.e independence) group, the PKK. Nationalist mobs attacked Kurdo-phile[2] sites in Turkey.[3] In mid-October 2015, two suicide bombers killed about 100 people at an anti-government rally in the capital city of Ankara. Although police already had discovered suicide vests in raids on ISIS hide-outs in turkey, security at the rally appears to have been very lax.[4]

Another answer came in an attack on the European Union. Although the EU seems to have been content to ignore the increasing authoritarianism in the leader of a country seeking EU membership, this hasn’t satisfied Erdogan. Suddenly, huge numbers of Syrian (and other) refugees in Turkey began to flood westward.   Most of them departed from a narrow section of the Turkish coast adjacent to the Greek island of Lesbos. Recently, the over-whelmed European Union (EU) sent German Chancellor Angela Merkel to try to negotiate a solution with President Erdogan. The Turkish president opened the conference by demanding $3 billion in EU aid for the 2 million refugees currently in Turkey. However, he extended the deal beyond just the refugee crisis. Erdogan asked for an end to the requirement that Turks entering the EU obtain a visa and for revival of and progress on Turkey’s application for membership in the European Union. In return, Turkey would halt the flow of refugees out of the country. Merkel could make no firm response to Erdogan’s proposal because any change in policy would have to be approved by the EU member nations. Thus, it is clear that Turkey is manipulating the refugee crisis to advance other policies.

How did this strategy pan-out for Erdogan and the AKP? In the 1 November elections, the AKP won 49.5 percent of the vote and 317 legislative seats, giving it majority of 84. The question now is whether Erdogan has poisoned one or more wells in his quest for a majority.

[1] “Turkey: Onslaught against Kurds as election nears,” The Week, 25 September 2015, p. 15.

[2] Is this a real term?

[3] While the cops stood around with their hands in their pockets.

[4] “Turkey: Who benefits from a gruesome attack?” The Week, 23 October 2015, p. 14.

Turkey.

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After the former general Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk” established the Turkish Republic, the Army became the guardian of his secular and modernizing vision of Turkey’s future. On four occasions since 1960 the Army has overthrown civilian governments that diverged from its vision of Turkey’s proper course.

Recip Tayyip Erdogan forged an alliance between his own Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Fethullah Gulen, an imam with a wide network of supporters in the bureaucracy, business, and media. In 2002 Erdogan led the AKP to power in free elections. The position of the Army with regard to a religious party worried Erdogan.[1] Those worries increased in advance of the 2007 elections when the Army publically affirmed its role as guarantor of Turkey’s secular identity and that Islamism was incompatible with that identity.

In 2010 prosecutors charged 236 senior serving or retired Army officers with planning a coup against the government. Government prosecutors based their case largely on computer files regarding “Operation Sledgehammer,” an alleged army plot dating back to 2003 to overthrow the Erdogan government. They won convictions after the court refused to allow the defendants to introduce evidence that the computer files were fraudulent.[2] Most of the defendants got long prison terms.

By 2012 Erdogan had begun to fall out with Gulen. Erdogan and the AKP had worn out their welcome with many Turks. Having been in power for over a decade, they had lost their strict sense of right and wrong. Critics accused the government of corrupt alliances with business interests under the guise of modernizing Turkey. In Summer 2013, massive demonstrations took place in Istanbul over plans to convert a public park into a shopping mall. In December 2013 prosecutors—apparently part of Gulen’s network of supporters–charged several government ministers with graft. Erdogan lashed out at Gulen’s “parallel state,” which he accused of plotting its own coup. Thousands of members of the police and judiciary were summarily removed as Erdogan sought to purge the administration. Erdogan now found himself in an awkward position. He had allied with the Gulen network to tame the Army, but now he had fallen out with the Gulen network.

To make matters worse, in Summer 2014, ISIS suddenly exploded as a regional danger in neighboring Iraq and Syria. Like Al Shabab in Somalia, the Houthis rebels in Yeman, and Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS is made up of irregular fighters who cannot stand up to a real army backed by an effective government. ISIS posed no danger to Turkey so long as the Army would fight and the government could act. Aye, there’s the rub. Would the Army back Erdogan against both the Gulen network and ISIS, or would it devise its own solution?[3]

In 2014 the convictions were over-turned by the constitutional court, which ordered a re-trial. In Spring 2015, the government appointed a new prosecutor to handle the case. In March 2015, Erdogan announced to a gathering of senior Army officers that “starting with myself, the whole country was misled, tricked. We were subjected to a conspiracy, a coup attempt, to seize control of Turkey.” The prosecutor asked the court to dismiss the charges because he was shocked, shocked to discover that there was gambling going on. No, wait, he discovered that the computer files on which the conviction had been based were fraudulent.

[1] Emre Peker, “Turkish Court Acquits Officers in Coup Plot,” WSJ, 1 April 2015 (although I believe the report to be true).

[2] For example, documents dated in 2003 could be shown to have been produced using Microsoft Word 2007.

[3] The latter might involve shooting Erdogan and tossing his body on a garbage heap.

The heirs of Mustapha Kemal

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Turkey has been an emphatically “secular” country since its foundation. Mustapha Kemal “Ataturk” (“Father of the Turks”) wanted a secular state, not one of those messed up backward Arab countries. He prohibited the wearing of the fez for men and veils for women. He granted women equal rights with men (including the outlawing of polygamy). He insisted upon the separation of Church and State. This included banning the “sharia” (Islamic religious law).   Kemal was a general and the army he created has been the guardian of Turkish identity since its foundation. The army has overthrown governments from time to time when they strayed too far from honest or secular government. Explicitly religious parties have been banned from time to time.

A bunch of the religious politicians migrated from the banned parties to the Justice and Development Party, which was formally not a religious party. (Wink, wink.) In 2002 the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a majority in the parliament and formed a government under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Hostility soon mounted between the AKP and the army. In 2007 the generals were alarmed by the direction being taken by the AKP. They made a veiled threat of a coup. Many Turks took offense at the threat and voted for the AKP in the next election, increasing its majority. In 2008 the army tried to get the Constitutional Court to declare the AKP illegal on the grounds that it was trying to impose the “sharia” on the country. The Court rejected this charge. The AKP government then launched a hunt for conspirators among the ranks of present and—especially—retired officers. From 2008 to 2010 hundreds of officers were arrested and many were charged with conspiring to commit terrorist offenses. At the same time journalists, professors, and human-rights activists also were targeted. The government alleged a plot to provoke Islamists into violence, then to use that as a justification for a new military government in place of the AKP. The government leaked a huge file of documents to the press. The army’s response is that all the government has found are the records of contingency planning for an Islamist revolt.

“The struggle for Turkey’s soul,” The Week, 26 March 2010, p. 15.

The quarrel between the secularist military and the democratically-elected AKP has important implications. First, Turkey has been trying to get into the European Union. The Europeans are deeply concerned about Muslim immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. What Frenchman wants to see Notre Dame turned into a mosque? So the prospect of a fundamentalist government in Turkey does nothing for the country’s prospects of admission into the European Union.

Second, the United States sees Turkey as an important regional power in an area of American concern. The Greeks are nice, but the Turks are tough. The Turks offer a model of what other Muslim countries might become if they would just get their ten pounds in a five pound bag. Turkey borders on the Kurdish part of Iraq and contains its own large Kurdish population. The possibility of Kurdish nationalism messing up conditions in both Iraq and Turkey is very real. Turkey was the one Muslim state that was reasonably pro-Israel. American officials dread that “one man, one vote” in an Islamist Turkey might take place only one time, leaving the country in the hands of a pro-fundamentalist, pro-Iranian, and anti-American government.

Third, ISIS is on the southern border. So the Army will protect the Republic, right?