Mavi Boncuk Archives

Article | Istanbul Yields Ancient Treasure

2012-01-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

Hundreds of bricks stamped “Konstans,” made in Constantinople starting in the fifth century, were found at Bathonea.

After Being Stricken by Drought, Istanbul Yields Ancient Treasure
By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI

N.Y.Times | Published: January 23, 2012

ISTANBUL — For 1,600 years, this city — Turkey’s largest — has been built and destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills.

Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.

The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople, a seat of power for three successive empires — the Eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.

While there are some historical records of this early period, precious few physical artifacts exist. The slim offerings in the Istanbul section of the Archaeological Museums here reflect that, paling in comparison with the riches on display from Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Lebanon.

So Bathonea (pronounced bath-oh-NAY-uh) has the potential to become a “library of Constantinople,” says Sengul Aydingun, the archaeologist who made the initial discovery.

After the drought exposed parts of a well-preserved sea wall nearly two and a half miles long, Dr. Aydingun and her team soon saw that the harbor had been equipped with docks, buildings and a jetty, probably dating to the fourth century. Other discoveries rapidly followed. In the last dig season alone, the archaeologists uncovered port walls, elaborate buildings, an enormous cistern, a Byzantine church and stone roads spanning more than 1,000 years of occupation.

“The fieldwork Sengul has conducted over the last few years is spectacular,” said Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England who surveyed Bathonea for two field seasons. “The discoveries made are now shedding a completely new light to the wider urbanized area of Constantinopolis. A fantastic story begins to unveil.”

In 2008, for example, Hakan Oniz, an archaeologist from Eastern Mediterranean University who specializes in underwater research, investigated a structure in the lake that local lore held was some kind of mystical minaret that appeared and disappeared in relation to the rate of sinful behavior by nearby villagers. The ruins, about 800 feet from shore, may have been a lighthouse.

Since then, Dr. Aydingun’s team and researchers from eight foreign universities have found a second, older port on the peninsula’s eastern side, its Greek influences suggesting that it dated to about the second century B.C.

Nearby, atop the round foundations of a Greek temple, they found the remains of a fifth- or sixth-century Byzantine church and cemetery with 20 burials, and a large stone relief of a Byzantine cross. Coins, pottery and other artifacts indicate that the church suffered damage in the devastating earthquake of 557 but was in use until 1037, when a tremor leveled it — crushing three men whose bodies were found beneath a collapsed wall, along with a coin bearing the image of a minor emperor who ruled during the year of the quake.

After bushwhacking through nettle-choked underbrush a mile and a half north of the harbor, the researchers excavated a 360-by-90-foot open-air cistern or pool, as well as walls and foundations from several multistory buildings that may have been part of a villa or palace altered over many centuries.

Because the archaeologists are at the beginning of a multiyear dig at a site not known from historical sources, they are hesitant to draw many conclusions. Even the name Bathonea is a placeholder, inspired by two ancient references: the first-century historian Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History,” which refers to the river feeding the lake as Bathynias; and a work by a ninth-century Byzantine monk, Theophanes, who called the region Bathyasos.

“There is a big question mark over the name,” Dr. Aydingun said. “It’s too early to say. But the name is not important. The important thing to note is that there are buildings, roads” where “people thought there was nothing.”

“But there’s something there,” she went on. “We need a lifetime to discover what it is. But even by next year, we’ll be able to say more.”

The archaeologists know this much: The site was large. It sprawled across at least three square miles, and its sea wall is nearly half the length of the one that surrounded Constantinople itself. It was moderately wealthy; the region was a country retreat for the urban elite, drawn by its fertile hunting grounds and Lake Kucukcekmece itself, the freshwater body closest to the city. They built villas and palaces all around the region.

Roman glass and high-end pottery dating as late as the 14th century were found throughout the site. Marble, including a gorgeous milky-blue variety, lined the walls and floors of the church and at least one of the buildings.

Also discovered were hundreds of bricks stamped “Konstans,” which were produced in Constantinople beginning in the fifth century and had mostly been discovered at imperial sites like Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century architectural marvel and primary cathedral of the Byzantine Empire for almost 900 years, and nearby Rhegion, a fifth-century compound on a hill across the lake from Bathonea, overlooking the Marmara Sea.

Bathonea was also well connected. Some pottery was made as far away as Palestine and Syria, typical of places with access to foreign goods. It had wide stone roads, the earliest dating to the Roman era.

But its relationship to Constantinople is still unclear. “I like the idea of Bathonea as a satellite port of a major city,” said Bradley A. Ault, a classical archaeologist with the University at Buffalo who has studied ancient port cities in Greece and Cyprus. “It falls in line with Athens and Piraeus, Rome and Ostia.”

If that is the case, the port may have served as a safe harbor on protected waters outside the city walls for both commercial ships and the imperial naval fleet. “In the fifth century, they had a major fleet around Constantinople,” said Robert Ousterhout, a Byzantine scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “They had ports around the Golden Horn and the Marmara.”

Now 13 to 65 feet deep, Lake Kucukcekmece would have been a deep bay navigable by ships of all sizes, Dr. Aydingun said. Sonar has revealed what may be six Byzantine iron anchors buried in the sand just offshore, and nails commonly used in shipbuilding were unearthed at the site.

In recent years, Istanbul has been the scene of several stunning discoveries during salvage archaeology digs, most notably at theYenikapi transit project, which unearthed a remarkable array of shipwrecks. No shipwrecks have been found at Bathonea; nor are they likely to be anytime soon, said Mr. Oniz, the underwater archaeologist. The lake is so polluted by industrial runoff that diving in it is dangerous, he said. A new water-treatment facility may make exploration possible within a few years.

The Bathonea archaeologists also hope to uncover more artifacts dating to the earliest days of civilization. In 2007, Dr. Aydingun and Emre Guldogan of Istanbul University found 9,000-year-old flint tools at the site that could be evidence of the earliest pre-pottery farming settlement in Europe. Bathonea’s role — and its real name — can be determined only through further study, Dr. Aydingun said.

Ground-penetrating radar has indicated that extensive structures remain beneath the soil. And as all of their efforts have been focused on the waterfront, the archaeologists have yet to investigate the patches of trees and brush farther inland that farmers have long avoided because their plows cannot cut through them.

Dr. Aydingun suspects there is a good reason for that. “I think all of these buildings continue,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

WATER RICHES A sea wall dating to the fourth century extends two and a half miles around ancient Bathonea, on a peninsula in Lake Kucukcekmece.

Foreign Policy's emotional and biased journalism on Turkey

2012-01-16T16:34:00.001-08:00

Mavi Boncuk |

Foreign Policy's emotional and biased journalism on Turkey
by İhsan Yılmaz

Journalist Nedim Şener (c) waves upon arrives at a courthouse in İstanbul in this March 5, 2011 file photo. (Photo: Reuters)

15 January 2012

On Jan. 11, 2012, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece titled “Behind the Bars in the Deep State” by Justin Vela.

The piece is neither objective nor accurate. It is one-sided and biased. It is also prejudicial against the Hizmet (Gülen) movement. It fails to give a balanced picture of Turkish politics and democracy and thus betrays its readers. Here are my specific reasons why:
The first sentence of the piece which is in much bigger font refers to Fethullah Gülen as a “shadowy mullah.” Is “shadowy” an objective or unbiased adjective to use for Gülen? His personality and ideas are known by almost everyone in Turkey and he is always a part of discussions and debates in the public sphere, but he is still shadowy? I find this usage strange, to say the least. Then, what about the word “mullah”? Is it an objective term in Western media and its audience or does it bring to mind “mad mullahs” and all these anti-civilization archetypes? The piece also refers to him as an “Islamist,” which I will discuss as well. But before that, let me ask what has happened since Aug. 13, 2008 when Foreign Policy together with Prospect magazine announced Gülen as the top public intellectual? I ask this since at that time FP referred to Gülen using objective adjectives, either as a cleric or an Islamic scholar, not with loaded terms such as Islamist or mullah. So let me ask again, what happened between Aug. 13, 2008 and Jan. 11, 2012? Why is this a huge change?
Let us look at the term “Islamist”; unfortunately, it in not a neutral academic term. When you refer to someone as Islamist, you most probably mean that he is a dodgy guy who wants to end democracy and establish a sort of dictatorship. Is there even a shred of evidence that would suggest that Gülen is against democracy? Has he established a political party so that he would be labeled Islamist? Or is he offering daily political solutions based on Islam? Voicing one's concerns in the public sphere, lobbying governments, etc. do not make one political. If you loosely define politics then everybody is a politician. Then who is a non-political person and just a member of civil society? If you claim that it simply refers to socially active and organized Muslims, then why do we need the term Islamist? If you empty the content of the term Islamist that refers to a post-19th century anti-Western modern phenomenon, then you need to call every practicing Muslim, including the Prophet (PBUH) an Islamist. What is more, there are hundreds of academic papers and books on Gülen and they concur that Gülen is not an Islamist. So why does FP deliberately use such a loaded term? Or is it ignorance?

'Thousands in detainment'

Vela also states that “in the past two years, thousands of citizens who have voiced criticism of the government have been detained.” This is really unbelievable and inaccurate to say the least. FP wants its readers to believe that the Turkish government simply imprisons anyone who criticizes it. So how come all these opposition deputies, not only the current ones but former ones, in addition to many journalists, writers, intellectuals, artists, etc. who are also critics of the government are not in prison? Do they not criticize the government? Or is Vela claiming that those who are imprisoned criticize the government more effectively than the opposition deputies? Then who are those people? Is there one single piece of concrete evidence that their criticism made the government fearful of them? Before the Ergenekon case the Justice and Development Party (AKP) received 47 percent of the votes and in 2011 it received 50 percent. Why would it bother to imprison these suspects based on fake evidence just because it fears their criticism? It is on the contrary, those imprisoned suspects became more vocal after they were put behind bars. Several of them keep publishing anti-AKP books. More importantly, why does FP not give an honest and accurate picture of the Ergenekon terrorist organization case? The European Union states on every occasion that the case is an opportunity for the consolidation of Turkish democracy. Why does FP not mention that the majority of the suspects are not intellectuals or journalists, but men with weapons -- either military officers or gang men? Why does FP never mention the concrete evidence found against the suspects, their fingerprints on weapons, their legally wiretapped conversations, the handwritten maps of buried weapons, several confessions even by full four-star generals and so on?
There may be some faults and mistakes in the indictments or in the judicial process that need to be criticized, but this can only be done by giving a complete and objective picture of the cases and a bigger picture of the fragile Turkish democracy that suffered heavy blows by coups in every decade. But FP readers are not informed on these very vital historical facts and background information. FP readers were not even informed that as late as April 27, 2007, the military threatened the government with a coup in order to prevent someone with a headscarved wife being elected as president. FP does not mention that Turkish democracy was so fragile because of the military thereat that opposition parties did not attend the presidential election in Parliament because of fear and prominent Republican People's Party (CHP) politicians, such as Onur Öymen, supporting the military against the AKP. Even some liberal columnists, such as Taha Akyol on CNN Türk, asked the AKP government to resign, instead of siding with the democratically elected government against the threatening generals.
The FP piece then frames Ahmet Şık's case. I use the academic term framing deliberately as FP does not give a full account of freedom of speech in Turkey, but by only framing one or two cases wants its readers to believe that every critic of the government or the Hizmet movement is sent to jail.
There are many problems in Turkey with regards to freedom of speech, free journalism, judicial processes, judges' inclination to side with the state against liberties and rights, their habit of imprisoning suspects, long detention periods (on this see the most recent Fair Trials International [FTI] report on EU countries' terrible record) and so on. We also criticize these issues and keep asking the government to modify legislation in line with the EU acquis. However, the full picture also tells us that Turkey has become more democratized under the AKP rule during the last 10 years despite a few mistakes and its recent Euro-fatigue for which not only the AKP but also the increasingly right-wing EU under the leadership of Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel should be blamed.

A ‘high profile detainee'

Vela refers to Şık as “one of the country's most high-profile detainees,” but fails to add that he has became high profile after he was detained. I have been reading papers for about three decades, but I only heard his name after he was prosecuted. At the time of prosecution he was unemployed and as far as the public was concerned he was an unknown quantity. There are several more high-profile critics of the Hizmet movement, such as Mehmet Şevket Eygi who keeps writing that the movement signed a secret agreement with the Vatican to Christianize Turkey or Sheikh Haydar Baş in whose media outlets Gülen is portrayed as a secret cardinal of the pope. Or Emin Çölaşan who wrote that Gülen does not know Arabic but murmurs some meaningless words and his “idiot” listeners think that he knows Arabic. Newspapers such as Cumhuriyet, Sözcü, Milli Gazete, Yeni Çağ, Yeni Mesaj, etc. are filled with anti-Gülen insults and nothing happens to them. There are several columnists in the Doğan media group who constantly criticize either the Hizmet movement or AKP and they continue to write these things. Bookshops' windows are full of anti-Gülen books that claim that he is either a CIA agent or a secret Khomeini, etc. Some of these books claim that Gülen has an army that is the police force. As a matter of fact, Şık's book is based on these widely available books and actually Şık's book does not contain anything new. Several rival police factions within the police have always blamed each other for being followers of Gülen. These allegations are documented in official reports but sides could not prove anything. Several books have been published on these reports. For instance, Sözcü columnist Saygı Öztürk's book is more comprehensive than Şık's book. Nothing happened to Saygı Öztürk and on the contrary he appeared on a debate program on the movement's Samanyolu TV. Why would the movement that operates in about 140 countries target an unknown, uninfluential and unemployed journalist just because of a book that contains nothing new and harm its international reputation?
Vela writes that Gülen's followers “have established themselves in top positions within Turkey's bureaucracy, police force, and judiciary.” Yet, it does not say that this is just an allegation. Moreover, there are millions of people in Turkey who like and respect Gülen. Should they not work in the state? Are they not full and equal citizens? You may ask why even one of them does not openly say they like Gülen. Then you need to tell your readers that in this country bureaucratic oligarchy is still trying to eliminate practicing Muslims from the state. Former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer used to get help from doormen to learn if a candidate's wife covered her head. It is not a myth that state officials would go and check the garbage of candidates to see if they drank alcoholic beverages. If they could NOT find beer or wine bottles, that was a bad sign. Yes we now have the AKP government but what will happen next as the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and CHP keep talking about revenge? In short, the oligarchy oppresses people so they prefer to hide their religious, ethnic and lingual identity, then turns back and blames them, claiming that “if you are hiding something, then you must be a bad guy.” Why does FP not question why, in a country where about 30-40 percent of people say their prayers, there is not even one military officer who could say their daily prayers? Why does it not inform their readers about Professor İskender Pala's book “Between Two Coups,” his personal life story on how he was oppressed in the military after he was “caught” praying in his office and eventually evicted without trial and without any pension rights. There are thousands like him.
The FP piece claims that because of the movement Turkey is becoming a less free country but neither mentions nor explains the following “dilemma”: If the movement hates freedoms, liberties and criticism why it is still the biggest champion of the EU process, transparency and accountability of the state and a new democratic constitution?
If FP is honestly curious about liberties and freedoms in Turkey and wants to do accurate reporting then why does it not ask the opinions of liberal democrats, such as Cengiz Çandar, Mehmet Ali Birand, Hasan Cemal, Taha Akyol, etc., and also Armenian intellectuals, such as Etyen Mahçupyan and Markar Esayan who criticize the government whenever they see a need and are not participants of the movement or the Ergenekon cases.

Article | Behind Bars in the Deep State

2012-01-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

Behind Bars in the Deep State

Does a shadowy mullah in Pennsylvania really hold the reins of power in Turkey? If not, then why are the country’s leaders so intent on silencing a single investigative journalist?

BY JUSTIN VELA | JANUARY 11, 2012
Justin Vela is an Istanbul-based journalist. Follow him on Twitter @justinvela.

For many Turkish citizens, the evolution of their democracy is best discussed in whispers. Turkey has come far in recent years, but these days they prefer not to speak too loudly about where it is headed.

In the past two years, thousands of citizens who have voiced criticism of the government have been detained, usually led away by police in predawn raids on their homes. On Jan. 5, one of the country's most high-profile detainees, investigative journalist Ahmet Sik, testified in court for the first time to defend himself against charges of propagandizing for a shadowy pro-military conspiracy called Ergenekon, which allegedly plotted to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In his testimony, Sik mocked the evidence presented against him, which included transcripts of telephone conversations, published news articles, and the draft of his unfinished book, The Imam's Army, which aimed to expose the Islamist Fethullah Gulen movement's pervasive influence within the Turkish state.

"I am here today because of a politically-motivated trial, which is devoid of justice and law and which is conducted with falsified and fabricated documents," he said.

The charges against Sik appeared absurd from the start. He had dedicated much of his professional life to investigating the very structures Ergenekon represented, along with their various human rights abuses. According to those that support the government line, Ergenekon represents the military "deep state," which has served as the self-appointed guardian of Turkey's secular identity since the republic's founding. Democratically-elected governments that met with the military's disapproval were ousted from power in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997.

But it's not the military that has moved against Sik -- it's another, different deep state. The Imam's Army chronicles the rise of Fethullah Gulen, an aging cleric living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania who has built up a powerful network that claims to operate thousands of schools in 140 countries. He calls for inter-faith dialogue and promotes the study of both science and religion in his classrooms. Supporters say the group is solely involved in fostering education and an ethic of public service throughout Turkey and the rest of the world. While the true reach of Gulen's network remains hard to quantify, his supporters flocked to Foreign Policy in 2008 to vote him as the top public intellectual of the year -- an open ballot in which over half a million votes were cast.

But Gulen hasn't just used his support network, known as the Cemaat (or "community") to tilt online polls -- his followers provide a key voter base for Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and have established themselves in top positions within Turkey's bureaucracy, police force, and judiciary. And as the Sik case shows, their influence appears to be one of the forces pushing Turkey in a less free direction.

In a nine-page, hand-written response to questions sent to him in jail, Sik said the Gulenists were a key driver behind the current crackdown. "What Nedim [Sener, another journalist on trial] and I experienced was meant to intimidate other people from the media who were opposed to the Cemaat," he wrote.

While Sik supported previous investigations into the Turkish military's covert influence over the country's civilian leadership, he said the Ergenekon trial -- which has seen the government push back against the armed services -- has become an "illusion" and an excuse for mass arrests.

"The Ergenekon investigations are the most important part of allowing the Cemaat to take power in the country," he wrote. "I must say that the deep state is still intact. Just the owner has changed. What I mean by this ownership ... is composed of the coalition of AKP and the Cemaat."

If the government's goal in arresting Sik was to squelch his research, it failed miserably. While Sik's book was initially banned, it was posted online soon after his arrest, most likely by friends who had copies of the unfinished manuscript. Later, it was published by a group of journalists and intellectuals under the title 000 Book -- the file name of one of the saved manuscripts of the book that police found on Sik's home computer. It currently has prominent placement in several bookstores along Istanbul's central Istiklal shopping street and at the city's airport.

The Gulenists were likely angered by Sik's reporting on how they intervened in multiple internal police investigations in order to keep their presence within the force under wraps, according to a friend of Sik's, journalist Ertugrul Mavioglu. Sik claims high-ranking members of the police force, both retired and active duty, as among his sources.

The criticisms of Gulen, who preaches a moderate version of Islam, are not focused on his religiosity but rather on the movement's lack of transparency. The group has accrued a large degree of influence over Turkey's nominally secular government and society, and the AKP's own parliamentary deputies have confirmed that the party has links to the Gulenists. While nobody can pinpoint the precise scope of the Gulen movement's influence in Turkish society, its affiliation with several prominent media outlets, such as the newspaper Zaman and the Samanyolu Broadcasting Group, and its prominence in the Gulen-affiliated Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists points to a highly organized, well-funded network.

"You can only make allegations and guesses about the institutionalization of the Cemaat within the state bureaucracy," Sik said. "Everybody should ask themselves, ‘Why such secrecy?' If their only aim is to provide charity works as they claim, why do they have to organize within the state? As you can see I am just asking."

Sik is far from the only victim of Turkey's runaway judiciary. Prosecutors moved on Jan. 9 to strip the country's main opposition leader of his parliamentary immunity so that he could face legal charges, and the former head of Turkey's armed forces, Ilker Basbug, was arrested on Jan. 5. And of course, dozens of journalists currently sit in Turkish jails, with the latest roundup coming only weeks ago.

The mass arrests are arguably the worst PR Turkey has faced in years, and the Sik case is a particularly nasty black mark on what has otherwise been a massively successful decade. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it has been lauded for introducing political stability, reining in the country's once all-powerful military, and presiding over economic growth that is second only to China's among the G20. However, the growing crackdown suggests Turkey's golden age for freedom of speech may be coming to an end.

"If Turkey wants to have international credibility and promote democracy in the region, it can't neglect the state of human rights at home," said Emma Sinclair-Webb, an Istanbul-based Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But the recent turmoil may be little more than a precursor to a larger political earthquake: a divorce between the Gulenists and the AKP.

"There was a marriage of convenience between the Gulenists and Erdogan because they shared the common goal of trying to demolish the old Kemalist regime," explained Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey expert and non-resident senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Now, with that job nearing completion, the relationship appears to be fraying.

The Gulenists and Erdogan differed recently over the response to military air strikes that killed 35 Kurdish civilians. Erdogan supported the military, while Gulen-affiliated media alleged that still untamed members of the deep state were trying to destabilize the country.

Last month, the two sides also clashed over a soccer match-fixing scandal involving top business interests within the country. Erdogan was pushing parliament for the amendment of lengthy sentences for those convicted in the scandal, while President Abdullah Gul -- who is considered closer to the Gulenists -- nearly succeeded in vetoing the legislation while Erdogan was convalescing after surgery.

If the partnership between Erdogan and Gulen is coming apart, it will be the end of a long relationship. Pictures show a younger Erdogan and Gulen, though their dates are difficult to verify. Turkish journalists who have investigated the movement, such as Mavioglu, said that at least one meeting took place between Erdogan and high-level Gulenists in Istanbul soon before the Ergenekon investigation began.

But with Erdogan only too aware of his own popularity and the power of the military quashed, a struggle for dominance has emerged within the alliance. Sik agreed with Jenkins that it would be the AKP that would have to rein in the Gulenists. "Erdogan saw what this uncontrolled power is capable of," he said. "Because there is no one left to struggle with, there will be a struggle in sharing power."

Jenkins said the tension is likely to intensify in the coming year, as Turkey begins writing a new constitution and Erdogan looks for a way to remain in power. AKP rules state that Erdogan cannot serve again as prime minister, and many analysts expect he will try to change Turkey to a presidential system of rule -- and then get himself elected president. "He has such control over the AKP that he can probably get them to draft a constitution along the ways that he wants it," Jenkins said

In this coming clash, it's remarkable how little even the most dedicated researchers understand about the Gulen movement. Sik himself admitted he did not have a clear grasp of its overall goal. He rejected the notion that the group is trying to establish an Islamic republic, making the point that any goal beyond seizing power was not very clear.

"'Something' has come to power in Turkey, but not sharia," he said in his letter. "I can't name that 'thing' properly."

What is clear is that the Gulenists are prepared to respond to those who ask uncomfortable questions with the same tools once wielded by the secretive military organizations that pulled the strings in decades past.

"You should obey or you should stay silent or you should go to jail," Sik said. "Yes, this is the new 'thing' that has come to power in Turkey."

Article | Turkey: Has Gülen Movement Replaced Deep State?

2012-01-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

Turkey: Has Gülen Movement Replaced Deep State?

December 29, 2011 - 11:00am, by Justin Vela

The December 26 trial of arrested Turkish journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener has pushed a shadowy organization known as the Gülen movement to the forefront of public attention in Turkey. The group’s influence has long been an open secret. Now, its weight is being felt at a time when the country’s democratic credentials are increasingly being called into question.

Şık and Şener were investigating the Gülen movement when they were arrested this past March for alleged membership in a group of supposed pro-military conspirators, known as Ergenekon. Alleged group members are charged with plotting to overthrow the government. Many Turkish journalists and analysts believe that the real reason for the detention of Şık and Şener was their investigation of the Gülen movement, led by Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who espouses a moderate form of Islam.

Gülen, who has lived in the United States for the past decade for alleged health reasons, claims that his group combines the “religious motive” with “social action” in pursuit of “education, interfaith dialogue [and] non-violent community services” that aims at “developing social and cultural potential.” The group’s “Gülen schools” in some 140 countries are the group’s highest profile endeavor, though it has established a presence in media and business circles, as well.

Little concrete is known about the movement’s goals in Turkey. Some critics charge that it has a long-term goal of establishing an Islamic republic. Many also claim the group collaborates with the Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to stifle political opposition, pointing to the Ergenekon case and the crackdown on the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), a group criticized by Gülenists. The KCK is believed to be associated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

The December 20 arrests of some 38 journalists for alleged ties to the KCK has been widely condemned by international media and human rights groups as an assault on freedom of speech in Turkey.

High-profile arrests such as that of former intelligence official Hanefi Avcı, author of a book about the movement’s organization, and Ahmet Mahmut Ünlü, an Islamic preacher widely seen as a rival of Fethullah Gülen, have helped fuel an image of a movement with scant patience for public scrutiny or competition. “A lot of Turks are under the perception that they are being constantly watched by Big Brother,” commented Atilla Yeşilada, the co-founder of Istanbul Analytics, an independent economics and political consulting firm, and a critic of the movement. “If your name is mentioned, the Gülen order or AKP is going to retaliate.”

Citing personal safety concerns, several Turkish reporters, professors and columnists who have investigated the movement in Turkey declined to be interviewed by EurasiaNet.org.

AKP parliamentarian Galip Ensarioğlu from Diyarbakır concedes that links exist between the AKP and Gülen movement, but dismisses the notion that the party sees the Gülenists as a parallel power.

Although few specific names are known, Gülenists allegedly hold key posts in the interior and education ministries, judiciary system, and police. One journalist, Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, who has covered the movement for the daily Radikal, a government critic, contends that such a government presence allowed the AKP to gain control over the military.

The movement, he claims, has replaced the military as Turkey’s “deep state.”

“Erdoğan is successful because he is in government and Fethullah has a lot of people in the government,” Mavioğlu said, in reference to Prime Minister Recep Tayipp Erdoğan. “The state is Fethullah and the government is Erdoğan.”

Gülen and his followers only rarely comment on the extent of their influence.

However, Hüseyin Gülerce, a columnist for the daily Zaman newspaper, which regularly features Gülen’s writings, dismisses the notion that the movement has any direct influence on politics. Gülenists have worked in Turkey’s bureaucracy for decades, he claimed.

“People who were educated in [Gülen schools] are also part of this country,” said Gülerce, who is often described as a top figure within the movement’s Turkey branch, though denies being a spokesperson. “They have a right to work in the military, as a doctor, or as a bureaucrat, or a lawyer.”

For analyst Yeşilada, the movement’s connection with the AKP is less a concern than what he describes as its lack of transparency and supposed impatience with dissenting views. “[S]ince it doesn’t officially exist, doesn’t file tax records, we don’t know how many disciples [the Gülen movement] has, [or] what kind of activities it is engaged in,” he said. “So, it remains in the shadows, but its impact on the society is felt as if it was a legitimate NGO and I think this is wrong.”

Gülerce stressed that the movement is committed to providing a “service” to Turkey and the rest of the world through “education” and “dialogue,” and wants “all Muslims to integrate with the international world.”

In an apparent move to further such outreach, the Gülen-affiliated Samanyolu Broadcasting Group recently released a 3-D animated movie, called Allah’s Devoted Servant, about the life of 20th century Islamic philosopher Said Nursi, a source for Gülen’s teachings. Gülerce described Nursi as important for Turks as “the first religious leader in Turkey who advised people not to struggle with the state; instead of this, read the Quran and be faithful.”

Unlike some critics, journalist Mavioğlu rejects the notion that such precepts indicate that the group seeks to establish an Islamic republic in Turkey. Rather, he claims, it wants to increase its influence via its schools and to secure business contracts for its Turkish followers. Yeşilada pointed to the high-profile Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists, which openly uses Gülen schools to establish overseas contacts, as an example of this influence.

Columnist Gülerce did not address such activities, but emphasized that Turkish politics are not the group’s raison d’être. “Politics is not in our interest,” he said. “But people don’t believe this reality.”

“[M]aybe some people from the movement will enter politics,” Gülerce continued. “How can you stop them? If they think they are good at politics, you cannot say anything.”

For now, it looks like few Turks, ever looking over their shoulder, are likely to do so.

Article | Turkey moves far beyond Europe

2011-12-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

Turkey moves far beyond Europe
by Soner Cagaptay
CNN Global Public Square
December 22, 2011

The Turks are selling pasta to the Italians, educating Papua-New Guineans in their universities, building airports in Egypt, running schools in Nigeria and establishing diplomatic missions in Latin America. Turkey has not felt and acted like the confident global player it is today since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century.

After the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, the Turks tried to belong to Europe in hopes of eventually becoming an ordinary country subsumed by it. That dream has passed. In the past decade, a new Turkey was born, shaped by unprecedented political stability, domestic growth and new-found commercial and political clout overseas. This has instilled a sense of global confidence in the Turkish people, not seen since Suleiman the Magnificent ruled in Constantinople. "And the new Turkey is here to stay," says Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to Washington.

Like a Eurasian China, the new Turkey is interested in building influence across the globe and is no longer confined by a regional, European rubric.
Recently, visiting Istanbul, I attended a conference on the Arab Spring organized by Abant Platform, a local NGO that gathers Turkish intellectuals of different stripes for policy debates. The conference - this time with attendees from Washington, Tel Aviv, London, St. Petersburg and Arab capitals in addition to Turks - debated Turkey's leadership role in the Arab Spring.
The venue was Ciragan Palace, a former Ottoman residence on the Bosporus and an apt selection for the new Turkey. Over Turkish coffee served a la Ottoman with double-roasted Turkish delight on the side, Ali Aslan, a Turkish journalist, summed up the new Turkey for me: "Ten years ago, the Turks would not have organized a conference on the Middle East lest this made them look non-European. And if such a conference were ever conceived, it would be run by the government and staged in Ankara, with all the participants making arguments in favor of following Europe's footsteps."
The new Turkey looks beyond Europe and thinks globally for a variety of reasons. Turks feel confident as the world around them suffers from economic meltdown while Turkey booms: In the third quarter of 2011, the Turkish economy grew by a record 8.2 percent, outpacing not only the county's neighbors, but also all of Europe.
Furthermore, since 2002, the Turkish economy has nearly tripled in size, experiencing the longest spurt of prosperity in modern Turkish history. The Turkish daily Sabah wrote that in 2011 alone, another 9,755 millionaires joined the country's wealthy. Just as sudden spread of middle-class prosperity in 1950s United States instilled a can-do attitude in American sentiments towards the world, the same is now happening in Turkey. A young cab driver I spoke with in Istanbul said: "Europe is too small an arena for Turkey; we need to be a global player."

Turkish trade is already heading away from Europe. The continent's economic doldrums coupled with Turkey's new trans-European vision means that the country's traditional commercial bonds with Europe are eroding while its trade links with the non-European world flourish. In 1999, for instance, the European Union accounted for over fifty-six percent of Turkish trade. In 2011, this number went down to forty-one percent, while the share of members of the Organization of Islamic Countries in Turkish trade climbed from twelve percent to twenty percent in the same period.

Paralleling this trend, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has pursued a foreign policy that transcends Turkey's European vocation, irreversibly re-molding Turkey's identity. "After suffering through eight coalition governments and four economic crises, the Turkish people have welcomed ten years of a stable AKP government even if it has meant entrenched single-party rule" says Asli Aydintasbas, a columnist with mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet.
Elected in 2002 and slated to pick the country's next president in 2014, the AKP has already run Turkey longer than any other party since Ankara became a democracy in 1946. As it is likely to outlive even Ataturk's fifteen-year domination of Turkish politics in the early twentieth century, the AKP's global vision will continue to prevail.
Buoyed by economic dynamism, political stability, and a new supra-European vision, the Turks have accordingly reached far and abroad to build soft power in places they had earlier ignored, such as the Middle East, Africa and even far-flung countries such as Vietnam and Mongolia.
The private sector, universities and NGOs are driving this agenda, shaping the new Turkish supra-European identity. This trend can best be observed in cities dominated by the middle class: in Gaziantep, the country's sixth largest town, as well as other middle-sized towns such as Kayseri, Konya, Malatya, and Denizli. Dubbed "the Anatolian Tigers" for driving the country's record-breaking growth rate, these towns have also provided solid support to the AKP while linking Turkey to the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, has factories that manufacture almost everything, selling goods to over 70 countries. The town's pasta ends up on Italian dinner plates. In this sense, Gaziantep is like an Anatolian Guangzhou, the Chinese hub famous for selling its wares to the most distant and unlikely places.
But unlike Guangzhou, Gaziantep is also building soft power for Turkey. Zirve University in Gaziantep is a testimony to this. Funded by the local billionaire Nakiboglu family, which made its wealth recently in international commerce, the university has a gleaming campus that rises amid Gaziantep's famous pistachio groves.
Visiting this campus is like visiting the new Turkey. Gokhan Bacik, a professor of international relations who studies Turkey's new active Middle East policy, told me that already, over ten percent of the university's student body is foreign despite the fact that the university opened only two years ago. Many students hail from the Middle East, especially nearby Syria, as well as the Balkans, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even Europe. "We have students from Austria and Papua New Guinea," he added.

Gaziantep is the epitome of the new Turkey. For years, it was known in Turkey for its heavenly pistachio nut-filled baklavas. Today, shops in the town's gentrified medieval old city and along tram-lined streets in leafy middle-class districts proudly display the "world's best baklava," making a culinary claim to Turkey's new global identity.

Additionally, businesspeople from Gaziantep and other Anatolian Tigers are busy financing and managing construction projects across the world, including Cairo's new airport terminal and major projects from Russia to Mongolia. Others are launching schools to educate future elites in countries around the globe, including Nigeria, Morocco, Brazil, and Vietnam, demonstrating further soft power in the making. Most of these businessmen and schools belong to the Sufi-inspired Gulen Movement, a force to be reckoned with in the new Turkey. Mustafa Sungur, who sympathizes with the movement, says that the "Movement has Turkish schools in almost all countries of the world with the exception of authoritarian places such as North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia."
In the end, it all comes down to Istanbul. By securing itself in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa, the new Turkey is anchoring these regions in Istanbul. The city was the center of the Ottoman, Byzantine, and Roman empires for 1,700 years, and it is once again reclaiming its dominance as a global capital. Accounting for one-third of Turkey's 1.1 trillion dollar economy, Istanbul's wealth already dwarfs all of Turkey's neighbors, expect for oil-rich Iran.

Yet, the city reaches even beyond Turkey's immediate neighbors. Ten years ago, you could fly direct from Istanbul to a mere seventy-five international destinations, most of them in Europe, on Turkish Airlines, the country's flagship carrier. Today, Turkish Airlines offers direct flights from Istanbul to over 150 international destinations. The majority of the new destinations are in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, including Dhaka, Dar es Salam, and Damman. In Iraq alone, the airline serves six cities, providing the most connections between that country and the outside world, and in December, the company provided the first international connection to Misrata, Libya, beating the competition to reach Libya's oil capital.

Turkey's new global identity is increasingly shaping its foreign policy, as well. Like the country's national airlines, its diplomats seem to be following Turkey's businesspeople and reaching even further beyond. In the past decade, Turkey has opened up over forty new diplomatic missions, most of them in Africa and Asia, including Basra, Maputo, Accra, Juba and Yaoundé. It has also set up posts in Latin America and now has diplomatic reach in Bogota and Santiago.
This posturing suggests that Turkey's new supra-European identity and global confidence is here to stay. That, of course, requires the Turkish economy to keep humming and the country to remain stable. If Turkey plays its hand well, the same economic factors responsible for facilitating its rise beyond Europe will continue to help it maintain its confident global outlook.

Take, for instance, Turkey's current accounts deficit which stands at a whopping 9.8 percent, the highest figure among the forty-two developed economies recently reviewed by The Economist. Most economies cannot sustain such a high deficit, but it is likely that Turkey can due to its position of stability amongst its neighbors, causing a steady flow of money into the country.
My brother Ali Cagatay, Bloomberg Turkey's news editor, told me that as much as six billion dollars have flowed into Turkey from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the former Soviet Union in the first ten months of 2011 alone, helping the country's economy to finance its deficit. In Hatay province, which borders Syria, bank deposits have increased by 1.1 billion dollars in the past year, thanks to wealthy Syrians who are putting their money into Turkey for safeguarding. "In addition to money coming in from its non-European neighbors, Turkey also attracts massive inflows from European and other Western banks which see Turkish markets as a rare safe haven in these tumultuous times," adds a Turkish banker based in London.

This is why it is essential that the new Turkey is a responsible global player. The need for continued stability is the very reason Turkey cannot afford to be a bully. Take, for instance, Ankara's threats to Israel over the flotilla incident. After Israel refused to apologize, some officials threatened to send the Turkish navy to confront the Israelis. It is in Turkey's best interest to avoid conflict, which is the reason Ankara stepped away from confrontation with Israel.

Turkey is confident and can afford to look beyond Europe because it continues to grow. And Turkey grows because it is deemed stable and investment grade while the world around it goes through economic and political convulsions. A belligerent foreign policy and political instability would almost certainly usher in economic instability, ending Turkey's run for global influence. In short, the new Turkey's soft power rests on Turkey being a soft country.

Article | A Dapper Music Magnate and the Empire He Built

2011-11-21T09:48:00.001-08:00

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Dapper Music Magnate and the Empire He Built By JANET MASLIN

N.Y Times Published: November 20, 2011

Robert Greenfield [1] is the author of “S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones,” one of the most rollicking accounts ever written about a rock band at the peak of its powers. But Mr. Greenfield’s latest book is much more respectful and sedate. No wonder: the subject of “The Last Sultan” is Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born record company executive who set the high-water mark for personal panache and who remains a sacrosanct figure to most who knew him. Much of “The Last Sultan” is devoted to hyping and preserving the Ertegun legend.

The early part of the book, about Mr. Ertegun’s privileged upbringing as a son of the Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, France and the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, is perhaps its most unexpected. Mr. Ertegun was born a week after the Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24, 1923, and the Republic of Turkey was created. His elegance and diplomatic skills were ingrained early. So was the outsize personality that would sometimes cause him to be referred to as Ataturk (after the republic’s first president) by the tour manager of the Rolling Stones.

Ambassador Ertegun was powerful enough to stop MGM from making a film out of Franz Werfel’s “Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” an impassioned novel about the Turkish mass killings of Armenians during World War I. (Turkey has adamantly rejected the label of genocide.) And Ahmet, his younger son (the older was Nesuhi, who also became a music executive), inherited that same force of personality. According to Mr. Greenfield, Ahmet in his later years considered making a public acknowledgment of Turkey’s role in the massacre as a way of reducing the stigma attached to it, but he never got the chance. (He died in 2006 after being injured in a freak accident at the Beacon Theater, just before the Rolling Stones played their concert for former President Bill Clinton’s birthday and Martin Scorsese’s film “Shine a Light.”)

“The Last Sultan” follows the young Ahmet Ertegun into the music world and describes how he jointly founded Atlantic Records, the company over which he long presided. The hagiography here is intense, but it sometimes wavers. Mr. Greenfield praises Mr. Ertegun’s affinities for jazz and blues, noting that Mr. Ertegun felt that he knew more about black life than most Americans did. But he also points out that “what Ahmet did not know about actually running a record company was equally staggering.”

Mr. Ertegun founded Atlantic in 1947 with Herb Abramson, who had a degree in dentistry but preferred the music business because, as he told his wife, “I never saw a hip filling.” Together, the men toured the South on the hunt for talent, though they well knew that the recording pioneers and folklorists John and Alan Lomax had taken the same route 15 years before. One of their early discoveries, in 1953, was Ray Charles, who had already been making records but wound up on the Atlantic label. Here, as elsewhere in “The Last Sultan,” Mr. Greenfield emphasizes the importance of the Ertegun factor without making much of a case for it. “Whereas we thought we were producing Ray Charles, I realized by the third session that he was not only teaching me about music but also showing me how to make records,” Mr. Ertegun once said.

But the area in which the Ertegun style was incontrovertible was recreation. An inveterate partier and ladies’ man, he had as much of an affinity for mind-altering substances and abundant, beautiful women as any of Atlantic’s musicians ever did. He was the rare businessman who outshone rock stars in the debauchery department.

“The Last Sultan” describes his uneasy, ultimately unhappy partnership with Jerry Wexler, who supplanted Mr. Abramson and had much more forceful opinions about music than Mr. Ertegun did. Mr. Wexler had a great ear for musical talent. But in one story that Mr. Wexler never cared to repeat, he didn’t want to pursue rights to the first Beatles album because he found it “derivative” and because he so preferred artists like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding.

It was Mr. Redding, by the way, who mistakenly addressed Mr. Ertegun as Omelet, figuring that he had earned that nickname because he liked eggs. When Taylor Hackford’s film “Ray” gave Ray Charles that line, and put an actor playing the debonair Mr. Ertegun in two-toned shoes, Mr. Ertegun’s equally stylish wife, Mica, had to work hard to calm him down. According to Mr. Greenfield, a much better Ertegun film reference can be seen in Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels,” in which a character excitedly picks up a towel that Mr. Ertegun supposedly used as a bathmat six weeks earlier. The character snorts the towel and gets high.

Much of “The Last Sultan” concerns business deals, recapitulates other record-business books and is populated by figures not widely known outside the music world. Two notable exceptions are David Geffen, to whom Mr. Ertegun could be quite cruel, and Steve Ross, who ran the Warner Music Group (which eventually included Atlantic) as “one of the pioneers of monster executive compensation.” Mr. Ross paved the way for the luxury-loving stage of Mr. Ertegun’s life.

The best stories in this book have less to do with music than with Mr. Ertegun’s ways of impressing, teasing and outfoxing his rivals. He could feign interest in a band to make it look more attractive to a competitor. He could appropriate somebody else’s words verbatim when it came to voicing excitement about, say, Genesis — a group that may not have excited him at all. He could tease Mr. Wexler by replacing his passport photo with an obscene shot of a woman with a donkey. Mr. Wexler once suggested tartly that Mr. Ertegun’s tombstone ought to read, “He Meant It When He Said It.”

[1] Robert Greenfield (born 1946) is an American author, journalist and screenwriter.

Cigarette and Tobacco Smuggling Finances Terrorism Worldwide

2011-11-07T06:56:00.000-08:00

Cigarette and Tobacco Smuggling Finances Terrorism Worldwide, Says Report

By Matthew Harwood

06/30/2009 -

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism outfit, details how terrorists and insurgencies the world over have smuggled cigarettes to finance their organizations and their missions.

CPI's investigation concentrates on seven groups which range from Marxist insurgencies to jihadist terrorists and from republican terrorists to profit-driven Congolese rebels.

After crackdowns on fundraising following the 9/11 attacks, terrorist groups worldwide have increasingly turned to criminal rackets, officials say. And smuggling cigarettes — either untaxed or counterfeit — has proved a particularly lucrative, low-risk way to fund operations.

Hezbollah, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda are involved in smuggling cigarettes; so are the Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Terrorist financing through cigarette smuggling is “huge,” says Louise Shelley, a transnational crime expert at George Mason University and an adviser to the World Economic Forum on illicit trade. “Worldwide — it’s no exaggeration… No one thinks cigarette smuggling is too serious, so law enforcement doesn’t spend resources to go after it.”

“Cigarettes are easy to smuggle, easy to buy, and they have a pretty good return on the investment,” adds David Cid, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and deputy director of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. “Drug dogs don’t alert on your car if it’s full of Camels.” And, he notes, “The other advantage is you don’t go to jail for 50 years.”

Trafficking stolen and counterfeit cigarettes has unwittingly become a lucrative venture for terrorist and militant organizations because of the hefty taxation on tobacco, such as in the state of New York. According ot CPI, it costs $100,000 to produce 10 million cigarettes in China, which can reap revenues as high as $2 million in the United States. When you consider the relative cheapness of terrorist operations, 9-11 only cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to pull off, profit margins like these are enormously attractive to terrorists and militant groups.

But stopping the nexus between cigarette smuggling and terrorist financing is possible, reports CPI.

“You need to ensure that the products are being sold through legitimate channels through legitimate distributors — that they’re not committing willful blindness,”Larry Johnson, a terrorism and criminal finance investigator for BERG Associates, told CPI. “The contraband is fairly easy to deal with because it’s in the power of the distributors and producers to control the process. This is actually one of those few problems that is fixable.”

For more on the report and the relationship between terrorism financing and tobacco smuggling, see this article from the Agence France Presse.

For a short film on how taxes created an explosion in black market cigarettes in New York, watch the below from the CPI.

Illicit Cigarette Trafficking and the Funding of Terrorism

2011-11-07T06:51:00.001-08:00

Illicit Cigarette Trafficking and the Funding of Terrorism

By William Billingslea, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Washington, D.C

Since the dawn of terrorism, procuring finances sufficient to sustain terror operations has been a priority for terrorists. The illicit sale of cigarettes and other commodities by terrorist groups and their supporters has become a crucial part of their funding activities.Raising the tax on cigarettes widens the difference between the wholesale price and the retail price of the product and inadvertently creates opportunity for traffickers, who evade the tax and gain the profits. Today cigarette traffickers can make as much as $60 per carton of cigarettes sold illicitly.
Because of the immense profits in the illicit cigarette trade, as well as the potentially low penalties for getting caught, illicit cigarette trafficking now rivals drug trafficking as the method of choice to fill the bank accounts of terrorists and terrorist groups. Investigators have discovered that traffickers in the United States and the United Kingdom are providing material support to the Hezbollah and the Real IRA (RIRA), among other terrorist groups. In addition, law enforcement research indicates that groups tied to al Qaeda, Hamas, PKK (the Kurdish Workers Party), and Islamic Jihad (both Egyptian and Palestinian) are involved in the illicit trafficking of cigarettes.
Background and History
The trafficking of cigarettes by terrorists and their sympathizers has been going on worldwide since the mid-1990s, and the last four years have seen a sudden increase in trafficking. The trafficking schemes provide the terrorist groups with millions of dollars annually, which fund the purchasing of firearms and explosives to use against the United States, its allies, and other targets.

Authentic Michigan Cigarette Tax Stamps intercepted en route between Beirut, Lebanon, and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Stamps were being sent to Paraguay to be couterfeited. Both the sender of the Stamps and the receiver are believed to have Hezbollah connections.

Investigations have revealed that the terrorist groups work with organized crime groups as well as with the international drug trafficking organizations. Organized crime and drug trafficking organizations already have established trafficking routes, as well as business contacts for the transfer of the commodity for profit. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have found that Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Middle Eastern (mainly Pakistani, Lebanese, and Syrian) organized crime groups are highly involved in the trafficking of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes and counterfeit tax stamps for profit.
Known and suspected Hezbollah and Hamas members have established front companies and legitimate businesses in the cigarette trade in Central and South America. Indications from law enforcement sources are that these companies traffic in contraband and counterfeit cigarettes and tax stamps for profit and then use the proceeds to purchase arms and ammunition.
Using consumables, specifically cigarettes and gasoline, groups that are funding terrorism not only place a legal commodity into an illegal market system but also commit money laundering, fraud (both consumer and business), and tax evasion. The key is that these traffickers are not using the illicitly obtained funds for personal gain but are actually providing the funds as direct support to specific groups that espouse their political or ideological agenda.
Terrorist Group Involvement
The involvement of terrorist groups and their support personnel in the illicit movement of consumables began in the 1980s. The activities of the business people in the Middle East and Asia became a model in how to succeed in making money when most normal government or civil operations in these regions had become impotent or nonexistent. Terrorist groups and terrorist support networks observed how in uncertain or extreme times business people were still making money and had adapted to the cultural changes and hardships.
This was evident in the gold souks in Beirut, Lebanon, and the ad hoc gasoline service stations established along major lines of communication by entrepreneurs. These ad hoc businesses operated out of the back of vehicles and houses, and these business people were flourishing and expanding their hastily established operations. The primary reason they were so successful was that they were providing needed and luxury items to the average consumer after the economic system in the region had basically collapsed due to conflict or natural disaster. These business people were so resourceful it has been reported they were actually tunneling under the Israeli defense lines into the Gaza Strip bringing in gold and cigarettes from Egypt.¹
Selling their goods, these businessmen were evading import duties and sales and use taxes. In addition to the tax evasion, the business people were committing fraud by offering counterfeit products and providing products that had been obtained illegally for sale at cheaper prices, as well as doctoring products.
This type of system was easily adaptable to most regions of the world. It became a more important method of obtaining funds as countries began to raise the taxes levied on consumables to overcome budget deficits of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, governments in Europe and North America raised the taxes levied against tobacco products and alcohol in hopes of reducing their use. Although initially this did lower the demand for these items, it also made illicit trafficking more profitable. Entrepreneurs began to establish front companies and offshore businesses in Cyprus, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, and Bermuda and the Bahamas in the Caribbean. These businesses were established for the sole purpose of moving normally legal commodities (cigarettes, alcohol, and gasoline) through illicit channels to avoid the taxes and import duties associated with them.
Illicit Cigarette Trafficking around the World
In Europe: The IRA was one of the first groups to begin using cigarettes to fund their activities. Investigations by the Gardaí (Irish National Police), the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Scotland Yard, and U.K. Customs have led to seizures of cigarettes worth millions of dollars, as well as arms and explosives associated with the cigarette trafficking schemes. The IRA involvement in the illicit cigarette trade was due to the rise in taxes on cigarettes in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and most of northern Europe. By illicitly trafficking in cigarettes, and thereby avoiding the taxes and import duties, the IRA would be able to make an enormous profit. Current estimates place the amount of money made from the trafficking of illicit cigarettes by the three primary factions of the IRA, the Provisional IRA, Real IRA, and the Continuity IRA, at more than $100 million in just the past five years. According to police figures, the Provisional IRA is the biggest fundraiser generating $8.3 million to $13.2 million annually. This is compared to the Real IRA, which raises $8.3 million annually, as well as the Loyalist Volunteer Force, which raises $3.3 million and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which raises $2.5 million annually. A senior police officer in Northern Ireland stated that the Real IRA now resembles a criminal organization that sometimes carries out acts of terrorism rather than a terrorist group that has to dabble in crime.²
In keeping with a current trend in terrorist financing, dissident Irish republicans have joined forces with criminals in Britain to raise millions of dollars through cigarette trafficking and the sale of illegal fuel. According to British police information, the Real IRA has crossed the Irish Sea to Great Britain to expand their illicit operations. A report from a British House of Commons select committee stated that approximately $30 million was raised annually by paramilitaries on both sides of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
A British Minister of Parliament was reported as claiming that an Irish charity worker, employed to distribute aid in war-ravaged Croatia, was secretly setting up contacts with weapons smugglers in the Balkans.³ The charity worker had been known to Garda intelligence for 10 years prior to his post with the charity Irish Aid. The Minister of Parliament went on to state that the charity worker's employment in the Balkans occurred some 10 years after Garda intelligence had identified him as the leader of the Continuity IRA. The deals established in Croatia were an exchange of funds acquired from trafficking in illicit cigarettes for arms and ammunition.
In the Middle East: The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) is involved in the trafficking of contraband cigarettes and tax stamps. In one particular instance in 2000, the Turkish military and Turkish federal police conducted a raid at a PKK safe house, which was suspected of actually being one of the PKK headquarters for eastern Turkey. Initially, the Turkish authorities were expecting to find caches of arms, ammunition, and explosives. But the authorities actually found a gravure printing press for producing counterfeit tax stamps and other forged documentation.
The European Union commission on cigarette smuggling named the PKK as a "Kurdish Terror Network" regarding the group's involvement in the illicit trafficking of cigarettes.⁴ The EU Commission report states the PKK made large sums of money marketing smuggled U.S. cigarettes into Iraq across the Turkish border. The EU also alleges that the PKK has been smuggling American brand cigarettes into Iraq, where Saddam Hussein's son Uday would then control the cigarettes. Reports indicate that Saddam Hussein made as much as $2.7 billion annually after 1991 on the cigarette and oil smuggling business.
Other terrorist organizations that have turned to illicit cigarette trafficking to provide funding are Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al Qaeda. Law enforcement research indicates that people connected to al Qaeda are involved in moving contraband cigarettes and counterfeit tax stamps throughout the United States and Europe. Al Qaeda sleeper cells establish legitimate businesses and move the illicit product through the normal domestic market, effectively hiding their operations in plain sight.

Counterfeit Marlboro cigarettes, with affixed counterfeit California cigarette tax stamp. The cigarettes were part of shipment traveling from China to Los Angeles and were intercepted in Vancouver, Canada, by Canadian Customs.

In the United States: An ATF investigation initiated in 1996 with the Iredell Sheriff's Department in North Carolina illustrates the illicit cigarette trafficking in the United States. This case involved a cigarette trafficking scheme in North Carolina, a low tax state, from which millions of dollars' worth of cigarettes were smuggled to Michigan, a high tax state. The defendants, 25 in all, were moving cigarettes by rental vehicles from Charlotte to Detroit to sell on the streets. Proceeds were then transferred by wire and by courier to bank accounts in Beirut, Lebanon. Portions of the proceeds were used to provide material support to the Hezbollah international terrorist organization in Lebanon. In 2001, a federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted the 25 persons for money laundering, cigarette trafficking, conspiracy, and immigration violations. To date, 20 defendants have been convicted for violations of the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act (CCTA), conspiracy, money laundering, and immigration violations. In addition, three of those defendants were found guilty of providing material support to a terrorist organization (Hezbollah). Five defendants remain fugitives. This investigation resulted in seizures of cigarettes, real property, and currency worth close to $2 million dollars.
In another investigation into the trafficking of contraband cigarettes prior to the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, ATF discovered that a convicted cigarette trafficker was tied directly to Hamas. During the execution of search and arrest warrants, the suspect stated, when asked about the identity of a person in his residence, that the man was his cousin and that he was in Hamas, and that he had come to the United States to escape from the Israelis.

Counterfeit Marlboro cigarettes purchased from a Web site operated out of New York State, during an ATF undercover buy.

On the Internet: In addition to the interstate and international trafficking of illicit cigarettes for profit, research indicates that the terrorist groups are beginning to get involved in the Internet sales of cigarettes. The Internet is a busy marketplace, and operating an Internet site doesn't require sellers to establish a business within the United States or Europe. People or groups that operate Internet-based cigarette sales can set up operations in places such as Gibraltar or the Colon Free Trade Zone and sell their contraband cigarettes in any state within the United States or any country in the world without actually having to be present in the state or country. Internet sales of cigarettes are robbing states of millions of dollars annually. Current laws are not designed specifically to regulate the Internet sales of cigarettes. The violation of the current law (known as the Jenkins Act) is a misdemeanor and is difficult to prosecute in a federal court when other criminal charges are not viable.
Economics of Illicit Cigarette Trafficking
Just what are the economics associated with terrorist involvement in the trafficking of illicit cigarettes? First, of course, are the funds that are lost by the states and the federal government due to the trafficking. It is estimated by state and federal tax authorities that by the year 2005, the combined state losses due to illicit cigarette trafficking could reach into the billions of dollars. This is critical in today's economy, when the majority of states are experiencing record deficits and are looking to raise the taxes on cigarettes to supplement their budget shortfalls.
Second, the monetary support gained by the terrorist groups from the trafficking can cause much more than fiscal harm to the United States and its allies. With the funds received from the trafficking of illicit cigarettes, terrorist groups can purchase more arms, ammunition and explosives and use them against the United States and its interests, putting U.S. citizens at risk, as well as providing for a climate of fear around the world. Law enforcement intelligence, as well as credible open source information points to a definite benefit to terrorist groups from the illicit sale of tobacco.
To fully understand how terrorist funding is being supported by illicit cigarette trafficking it is necessary to fully understand the methodologies involved, as well as the various schemes used to traffic the illicit cigarettes. In addition, to fully combat the growing problem of illicit cigarette trafficking, law enforcement must be proactive in its investigations, including recognizing the current and future trends regarding illicit cigarette trafficking.
Methodology
A key to the current methodology of the terrorist groups and people that provide them with material support is provided in the earlier reported statement by a senior police officer from Northern Ireland. He said the Real IRA is "looking more and more like an organized crime group that also conducts terrorist acts, rather than a terrorist group that conducts criminal acts." This statement is key because it reveals the new face of terrorism.

Counterfeit Michigan cigarette tax stamps. This sheet is one of hundreds, each representing thousands of couterfeit tax stamps, obtained during raid conducted in the Dearborn, Michigan area.

Terrorist groups, on the whole, have changed their face within the past decade. With the integration of world markets and the push for a more equal global trading system, terrorist groups have also shifted their focus to infiltrate the ever expanding global trade and world markets. The new face of terrorism does not include the traditional organizations or enterprises of the past. The new face is totally different. It is more goal-oriented, and it has no problem integrating perfectly legal enterprises with criminal or illicit enterprises.
T. R. Young stated that organized crime is a growth industry in the United States. His view is that organized crime constitutes between 10 percent and 25 percent of the gross national product.⁵ With these figures, it is easy to understand why terrorist groups are beginning to act and operate in ways that are strikingly similar to organized crime. Organized crime's influence in world politics, world trade, and arms proliferation has grown tenfold since the opening up of Eastern Europe. It is no wonder many terrorist groups are working practically hand-in-hand with organized crime in order to obtain material and financial support for their organizations.
In many aspects the material support to terrorist organizations is based upon ethnic or cultural connections. With this in mind, both Europe and North America have seen a rise in immigrant involvement in criminal acts, including money laundering and fraud. Europe is having an extremely difficult time combating the amount of crime perpetrated by Albanian, Asian, and Russian organized criminal groups. The United States, although experiencing a decline in traditional organized crime groups such as the La Cosa Nostra, has seen a large rise in the amount of organized criminal groups ethnically tied to the Middle East and North Africa.
Establishment of Illicit Operations
How then do these "businesspersons" establish themselves in the United States? What allows them not only to succeed but also to expand their operations?
The general order of establishment is for the "family" to emigrate from their homeland singly but as part of a line of emigrants. They eventually become immigrants in Europe and North America and establish themselves and their family in retail and wholesale business ventures. In order to establish the business operations in the United States, the head of the family will usually immigrate to establish a retail sales or import-export trade business. The one uncompromising rule in the initial establishment is that it must be a male, which is the cultural norm for populations residing in southeast and southwest Asia and the Middle East. While there may be members who are not directly tied to the family, the norm is for family members to actually operate the business. In the case of the Middle Eastern criminal enterprises, the family will generally include fathers, sons, male cousins, uncles, and brothers.

Templates for printing counterfeit Chicago/Cook County and Illinois State cigarette tax stamps. The templates were recovered from a suspect who traveled from the West Bank in Israel to Amman, Jordan, and then flew to Chicago. Had the stamps been used, Chicago/Cook County and Illinois State would have been defrauded out of nearly $5 million in uncollected tobacco tax revenue.

The Schemes
There are various schemes used to traffic in illicit cigarettes. Some of the more obvious or most common schemes are trafficking from a low-tax state to a high-tax state, Internet and mail order sales, theft and hijacking, import-export operations, and counterfeiting cigarettes and tax stamps. Many of these schemes are used domestically and internationally and are often used in conjunction with other schemes. It's also not unusual for criminals to switch back and forth among schemes in an attempt to evade law enforcement scrutiny.
These are the trafficking schemes of choice among terrorist groups and the people that support them. The groups know it is important to be flexible. More than one scheme can be used depending on several factors including market forces and law enforcement scrutiny. Under pressure or scrutiny, it is common for the groups to turn to other crime or go underground. Once they come under scrutiny for cigarette trafficking, they will change to something else, such as gasoline fraud, food stamp fraud, and psuedoephedrine trafficking.
The sources of the illicit cigarettes come from several areas. They come from low-tax states, from a foreign free trade zone, from a customs bonded warehouse, from certain Native American reservations, from stolen or hijacked shipments, and from manufacturers of counterfeit cigarettes overseas.
Trends
Estimates from the various state tax officials show a decline of approximately $1.4 billion in revenue collection due to illicit cigarette trafficking. This figure, which is a 2001 estimate, shows just how lucrative cigarettes have become. Many states are reporting revenue losses; in 2001 nine states' combined loss was approximately $850 million. An IRS study has shown that, combined, states show over $1 billion in losses to non-taxed sales of cigarettes. To compound the problem, states continue to raise cigarette taxes as an easy way to raise needed revenue.
Just as with the organized crime groups of the past, terrorist organizations are drawn to illicit cigarette trafficking due to the possibility of large profits for little work. With the variations in state taxes levied on a pack of cigarettes nationwide, the illicit trafficker can make millions of dollars a year.
Indications are that terrorist involvement in illicit cigarette trafficking will grow. Each state that raises its cigarette taxes is a new prospect for illicit profits gained by trafficking in cigarettes.
In addition, the current relationship between terrorist groups and criminal groups will continue to grow. With the amount of profits obtained through illicit cigarette trafficking both types of organizations can benefit. This problem will not simply go away. The organizations and support mechanisms are fully entrenched in illicit cigarette trafficking operations. In some instances, the trafficking of illicit cigarettes are their only known means of support.

¹ Stephen Farrell, "Smugglers' Tunnels Undermine the Israeli Security Cordon," The Times (London), May 20, 2002.
² "Ulster Cigarette Smuggling Shock," Belfast Telegraph (Belfast, Northern Ireland), December 21, 2000.
³Donna Carton, "Aid Worker Used Balkan UP Weapons Pipeline for Mercy Mission to Set Rebel IRA Terrorists," Sunday Mirror (London), December 17, 2000.
⁴ "The PKK Is a Terrorist Organization," Turkish Press Summary, March 27, 2002.
⁵ T. R. Young, Socgrad Mini-lectures, The Red Feather Institute, September 1999, http://www.rf-institute.com/lectures/047techcrm3.htm.

From The Police Chief, vol. 71, no. 2, February 2004. Copyright held by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 515 North Washington Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 USA.

Article | Ottoman dreamer

2011-11-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

Turkish foreign policy

Ottoman dreamer

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s activist foreign policy has its strengths. Cheap populism is not one of them

Nov 5th 2011 | from the print edition

IN THEIR awakening this year, many Arabs have looked to Turkey for inspiration. Turkey is not just a fellow Muslim country and their former imperial power. It also offers, for all its faults, a shining (and rare) example in the Islamic world of a strong democracy and a successful free-market economy. And the Turks have responded well, if sometimes belatedly. They were early to call for change in Egypt. They endorsed NATO’s intervention in Libya. They are now unequivocally backing the opposition to the Assad regime in neighbouring Syria.

Yet Turkey’s active foreign policy has attracted censure in parts of the West, especially America. Critics in Washington recall the Turks’ 2003 refusal to allow American troops to cross their territory to invade Iraq. Nowadays they accuse the Turkish government of turning its back on the European Union and NATO. They point to continuing harsh treatment of Turkey’s Kurds and soft treatment of Iran. Above all, they blame Turkey for switching from being a firm friend of Israel, the only other established democracy in the region, into an implacable foe.

Even if broad-brush criticisms of Turkey’s foreign policy are overdone, some narrower ones are closer to the mark. It is no use professing to want zero problems with the neighbours without making a much broader effort to resolve such ancient quarrels as those with Armenia or over Cyprus. Turkey’s newly strong support for the Syrian opposition may be both brave and admirable, but the Turks should have urged reform and some dialogue between the opposition and the regime at an earlier stage (seearticle).Are such sweeping accusations justified? On the whole, no. The mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is right to pursue a policy, first enunciated by Ahmet Davutoglu, now foreign minister, of “zero problems with the neighbours”. This is a big improvement on previous governments that largely ignored their own backyard. Turkey remains a bastion of NATO, with the biggest army after the United States and a vital American air-force base at Incirlik. It is EU members like Cyprus, France and Germany—and not Turkey—that have done most to stall Turkish negotiations to join their club.

The mercurial and often autocratic instincts of Mr Erdogan are not conducive to careful diplomacy, as his belligerent recent outbursts over Greek-Cypriot and Israeli gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean have shown. As complex relations with Syria, Iran and Iraq are also confirming again, Turkey must reach a political settlement with its own Kurds if it is to play a positive role in the region. Yet Mr Erdogan seems to be moving back to a purely military solution to the conflict with rebels in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Mend fences with Jerusalem, too

And then there are relations with Israel, which have never recovered after the Israeli army’s killing of eight Turks and one Turkish-American aboard a Gaza-bound ship, the Mavi Marmara, last year. The intransigent Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is not popular with many EU governments or with the current American administration. He has been foolishly stubborn to refuse even the smallest apology over theMavi Marmara. But if Mr Erdogan calculates that he can pander to anti-Israeli prejudice at home without paying a price abroad, he is making a mistake. Turkey stands to gain from stable Arab-Israeli relations, which it ought ideally to be well-placed to promote. And, like it or not, many in the West take Turkey’s attitude to Israel as a yardstick of its broader intentions. If Turkey wants to preserve good relations with the West, it must find some way of mending fences with Israel as well.

from the print edition | Leaders

Article | Turkey in the Balkans

2011-11-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

Turkey in the Balkans

The good old days?

Talk of an Ottoman revival in the region seems exaggerated

Nov 5th 2011 | BELGRADE AND SARAJEVO | from the print edition

A shadow over an Ottoman domain

“SARAJEVO won today as much as Istanbul,” declared Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, after his election victory in June. His comment excited new debate in the western Balkans about Turkey’s activist foreign policy. Are the Ottomans coming back? Several examples suggest not.

In Ankara on October 22nd, Muslim politicians from Bosnia and Sandzak in Serbia praised the Turks for mending a rift between Serbia’s two Islamic groups. The deal swiftly collapsed. The Turks were also praised in 2010 for reconciling Serbia with Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) politicians in Sarajevo. Yet relations between Bosniak, Serb and Croat politicians in Bosnia remain icy. A recent poll showed that views of Turkey in the region divide pretty clearly between Muslims (pro) and Christians (anti).

The western Balkans matter little economically. High-profile road and airport projects give a false impression of huge Turkish investment. Except in Albania and Kosovo, there has been more talk than cash. Alida Vracic, an analyst in Sarajevo, says that when Bosniaks go to Istanbul there is a lot of “kiss, kiss” for Balkan cousins, but the money goes to Serbia. Even there Turkey is not among the top 20 foreign investors.Turkey does better with soft power. Turkish soap operas have edged out Latin American ones in popularity. The Turks are busy restoring Ottoman monuments. Turkish schools and universities, some linked to the controversial Gulen movement, now educate several thousand pupils in Muslim regions. Petrit Selimi, Kosovo’s deputy foreign minister, notes that in the past Turkey was seen as “more backward than us.” Now, by contrast, it is a “modernising force.”

The Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, waxes lyrical about a “golden age” of the Balkans with Turkey. But Zarko Petrovic, a Serbian commentator, says the region’s interest is largely emotional. Accession to the European Union remains the priority. And, as one Serbian official mutters, “we don’t want to get too close to Turkey, because we don’t want to be seen as part of an EU losers’ club.”

from the print edition | Europe

Article | Dormant Power Revival

2011-11-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

Turkish foreign policy

Dormant power revival

Tests mount up for Turkey’s newly assertive foreign policy

Nov 5th 2011 | ANKARA AND HATAY | from the print edition

ON A clear day in 2006 Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, took a leisurely drive along the Turkish-Syrian border with Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, at the wheel. Ahmet Davutoglu, then Mr Erdogan’s foreign-policy adviser, cheerfully translated from the back seat. With 700km (450 miles) of shared border, Syria is central to Mr Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbours” policy. Syria, it was hoped, might make a transition from authoritarian dictatorship to Turkish-style democracy in which secularism, piety and the free market happily co-exist. Turkish experts were sent to Damascus to plot this bright future, just as Turkey was trying to mend fences between Syria and Israel.

Nowadays, Mr Erdogan and Mr Davutoglu hint at military intervention against Mr Assad if he doesn’t stop murdering his own people. The same goes for Israel if it doesn’t stop drilling for gas with the Greek-Cypriots in the east Mediterranean. Friendship with Iran has soured after Turkey agreed to let NATO deploy parts of its missile shield on Turkish soil. Membership talks with the European Union are in effect frozen. So is a set of protocols Turkey signed with Armenia last year to establish diplomatic relations and reopen the border. And the Turks are carrying out air strikes against separatist Kurdish PKK rebels based in northern Iraq, complicating relations with America. Turkey remains busy in many different areas—including in its old Balkan stamping-ground (see article) and, this week, hosting a summit with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet Soli Ozel, a political scientist, concludes that “the zero [problems with] neighbours policy has come unstuck.”

This state of affairs is not entirely of Turkey’s making. Like the rest of the world, it was caught unprepared by the Arab spring. To his credit, Mr Erdogan was the first Muslim leader to tell Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to step down. After initially rejecting NATO intervention in Libya, Turkey backed its operations. And after months of patiently pressing Mr Assad for reform, Turkey opened its doors to the Syrian opposition.

The meltdown with Israel came after it attacked Gaza in December 2008 (just as Turkey was about to cement a deal between Israel and Syria). The final blow came when Israeli commandos raided a Turkish-led aid convoy bound for Gaza last year, killing nine civilians. Turkey kicked out Israel’s ambassador, and still rules out reconciliation unless Israel apologises for the deaths and pays compensation to the victims’ families. Mr Erdogan has escalated his anti-Israeli rhetoric, insisting that Israel lift its blockade on Gaza. Such talk has boosted his popularity on the Arab street and among pious Turks. Some of Mr Erdogan’s advisers say America is secretly pleased because, as one says, “only pro-Western moderate Muslim Turkey can burnish America’s battered image, not Israel.”

This is naive. Not only does the breach with Israel put America in an awkward position (especially close to the next presidential election); but also it reduces Turkish influence. This is particularly apparent in Syria. It was Turkey’s military alliance with Israel that helped to prompt an intimidated Syria to kick out the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1998. Nowadays the Syrians are unfazed by the presence of Colonel Riad al-Asaad, a Syrian army defector in the southern border province of Hatay. Waving a cell phone, Colonel Asaad excitedly claims that he is running an armed insurgency from a camp in Turkey and that the regime’s overthrow is nigh. His claims seem hardly credible since Turkey is neither arming nor training his men. Yet they might not ring so hollow had Turkey maintained its military ties with Israel.

And the bloodshed in Syria continues. NATO says it will not intervene. A war-weary America is not about to wade into what might be an even stickier conflict than the one in Iraq. Pressure is building on Turkey to take the lead. Talk of a buffer zone along the Turkish border is growing louder. Yet Turkey has enough trouble coping with the PKK, let alone getting embroiled in regime change. Syria is said to have resumed support for the Kurdish rebels, who kill Turkish soldiers almost daily.

America has agreed to give Turkey three Cobra attack helicopters to be used against the PKK, but the sale may run into congressional opposition because of the enmity between Turkey and Israel. One might expect American lawmakers also to worry about the arrests of activists, including this week a veteran human-rights defender and a law professor. Turkey’s Human Rights Association is investigating claims that the army has used chemical weapons against the PKK. These are probably overblown, but the refusal to hand over the bodies of 19 rebels killed in a recent clash in the south-eastern province of Hakkari has not helped. Luckily for Mr Erdogan, America has rarely made much fuss about Turkey’s human rights.

from the print edition | Europe

Article | Turkish Wirtschaftswunder

2011-10-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

Turkish Wirtschaftswunder
by Soner Cagaptay
Hurriyet Daily News
October 23, 2011

In the 1950s, Germany experienced a decade of sustained economic growth known as Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), which transformed the country into a major European power. Since 2002, Turkey has been experiencing its own decade-long Wirtschaftswunder, casting Ankara as the dominant power in its neighborhood.

Turkey's new foreign policy is as much rooted in the Turkish Wirtschaftswunder as it is in the country's transformation under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) beginning in 2002. Furthermore, in a near perfect alignment of the stars, Turkey's demographic situation and its political stability both suggest that the Turkish Wirtschaftswunder could continue until at least 2020, feeding into Ankara's claim to regional power.

Since 2002, the Turkish economy has more than doubled in size, reaching a magnitude of $1.1 trillion. Already the largest Middle Eastern economy, Turkey could rival Spain and Italy as the largest economy in the Mediterranean.

One key factor explaining this growth is the "demographic window": a unique opportunity that every country faces once in its history.

After a country undergoes a population boom, its young population eventually matures to the point that the majority of the populace falls within the 15-64 age group. This phenomenon, known as the "demographic window," drives creativity and dynamism. Provided that there is good governance, it also delivers miraculous economic growth.

Countries such as South Korea have recently experienced this "demographic window" and benefitted from its accompanying economic growth at dizzying rates.

Now, it is Turkey's turn. Projections by the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TÜSİAD) suggest that Turkey is only about halfway through its demographic window, with the majority of its population likely to remain in the productive 15-64 age category until 2020. Hence, the Turkish Wirtschaftswunder of 2002-2020.

Of course, the demographic window alone cannot account for the 6-8 percent annual economic growth that Turkey has witnessed over the last decade. Good governance is the key.

For starters, when the Turkish economy collapsed in 2000-2001 during Turkey's worst economic crisis in modern history, seasoned economists, led by Kemal Derviş Minister of State for Economic Affairs at that time, cleaned up corruption in the financial sector, is one example of good governance. As a result, Turkey's banks were sufficiently solid to weather the financial meltdown that washed across the globe in 2008 like a tsunami. The sound economic policies and good governance of the AKP have also helped in this respect. In fact, these two factors may have bridged the gap between Turkey's demographic window and its Wirtschaftswunder.

Then, there is the fact that the Turkish political system produces stability when dominated by a single-party government. In contrast, the country experiences political and economic spasms when ruled by a coalition government. This is because, like some other states, Turkish society tends to eschew a horizontal stratification of labor (a must for successful coalition governments) in favor of a hierarchical division that encourages single party governments.

Historically, Turkey has always faced political and economic meltdown during periods of coalition government rule, as was the case in the 1970s and the 1990s. This correlation is especially evident when contrasted with the decades of political stability and economic growth in the 1950s, 1990s, and the AKP period of single-party governance.

Finally, Turkey's reorientation of its foreign policy in the last decade away from Europe and toward the Middle East has helped, by allowing the country to weather the fallout from fluctuations in developed economies since 2008. Just as its foreign policy has turned toward the Middle East, so has Turkey's trade. Before the AKP came to power, 53 percent of Turkey's trade was with Europe. Today, that figure is down to 42 percent. In comparison, its trade with the Middle East and North Africa has increased from 13 percent in 2002 to 26 percent today and rising.

Welcome to the Turkish Wirtschaftswunder and the new Turkey: a strong economy and a strong foreign policy, at least until 2020.

An Ottoman Hint for the World

2011-10-19T11:13:00.001-07:00

How Billionaires Can Build Bridges to the Middle Class
The wealthy should consider a new target for their philanthropy: public works.

By CHARLES LANDOW
AND COURTNEY LOBEL

The Washington Post reported recently that William Conway, co-founder of the major private equity firm Carlyle, is asking the public how to use $1 billion of his $2.7 billion fortune to create jobs. Here's an answer for Mr. Conway and America's other 413 billionaires: Build a bridge.
One of the most urgent economic problems facing the U.S. is the deplorable state of the country's roads, bridges, railways and other essential networks. In its latest report card in 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a D. A recent report from the Organization for International Investment concluded that this poor infrastructure "is eroding the country's ability to attract and retain dynamic global companies that create high-productivity, high-wage jobs."
But even if the problem is apparent, fiscal constraints and partisan gridlock are frustrating government efforts to address it. There is, however, an untapped, independent source of money for infrastructure needs: billionaires like Mr. Conway.
According to the most recent Forbes list, the 400 wealthiest Americans have a total net worth of $1.53 trillion. The top 50 alone hold more than $700 billion in personal wealth.
Why shouldn't these citizens have the opportunity to invest directly in infrastructure projects of their choice, along with incentives to do so? Their donations could be combined with public funds, and they would receive tax benefits and naming opportunities. To avoid bridges to nowhere (or, say, to a donor's private island), billionaires would select from a list of critical projects defined by an independent commission or department of transportation. And to prevent waste or diversion, donors could place money into an escrow account. Funds would then go to contractors when each stage of the project is complete.
Many wealthy Americans are already generous philanthropists. Investor Stephen Schwarzman, for instance, donated $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose main branch is now the Schwarzman Building. Entrepreneur Eli Broad pledged $600 million to Harvard University and MIT to establish the Broad Institute. History is filled with examples of gifts made by families with names like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Mellon.
None of this philanthropy has gone to public works, which have remained the domain of government. But what is the difference between an Eli Broad Institute and a William Conway Bridge? If anything, a bridge benefits society more. And it benefits the donor, too: Potholes and traffic jams are no fun, even in a chauffeured Bentley.
There is a precedent: Ottoman-era Turkey lacked a budget for the provision of basic services. To fill the void, more than 35,000 private foundations, known as vakif in Turkish, funded public-works projects and municipal services, from water systems and schools to hospitals, bridges and roads. Many modern Turkish foundations have continued to supply traditional infrastructure—the Sabancı Foundation, for example, has built more than 120 schools, hospitals, libraries, orphanages and other facilities. These assets are then transferred to state ministries, which run them.
Given the scale of U.S. infrastructure needs, it may seem that even the wealthiest Americans lack the financial firepower to make a measurable difference. And indeed, the funds needed for some projects are huge. Only a few ultra-wealthy donors could meaningfully contribute to a $10 billion-plus rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York City. But billionaires could fund significant portions of smaller projects that are still crucial for jobs and growth: $800 million to repair a portion of the Boston-New York-Washington train corridor, or $100 million to speed construction of the Dulles metrorail project, which will link Dulles International Airport to downtown Washington, D.C. Smaller projects could be built for even less.
To be sure, this is not a long-term solution. Infrastructure will continue to require substantial government investment. Individual contributions, however, can fill gaps, jump-start projects, and catalyze others to think creatively about how they can contribute to America's economic foundation. This would create jobs directly and set the stage for a stronger economy in the future, when individual contributions would not be so sorely needed.
Savvy investors can already buy shares in infrastructure such as toll roads with an eye toward turning a profit. This is similar to President Obama's proposed infrastructure bank, which would include private investments. But highways, bridges and the like also present prominent philanthropic opportunities, with the returns in public welfare and tangible legacies for donors and their families. Even a sewer grid could be sexy with the right billionaire's name attached.
Finally, visible gifts for infrastructure would be in the enlightened self-interest of donors. Good infrastructure is good for business. Gestures of clear value to the public are a wise idea at a time when anti-Wall Street sentiment and calls to redistribute wealth are on the rise.
Mr. Landow is associate director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Lobel is associate director for foundation relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ebullient Turkey ignores critics in Iran and Syria but worries about Kurds

2011-10-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

Ebullient Turkey ignores critics in Iran and Syria but worries about Kurds

Thomas Seibert

Oct 12, 2011

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday after he addressed members of his ruling Justice and Development Party at the parliament in Ankara. ADEM ALTAN / AFP PHOTO

ISTANBUL // As it bursts with self-confidence about its growing role in the Middle East, Turkey is unlikely to change its policies in the region as a result of sharp criticism from Syria and Iran. But Ankara is concerned about efforts by its neighbours to stir up Kurdish unrest, officials and analysts say.

“Our country’s prestige is growing by the day,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said in a speech yesterday, adding he had witnessed that development himself during his recent trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, where he enjoyed enthusiastic receptions and “indescribable affection”, as he put it.

Mr Erdogan shrugged off last weekend’s rebukes from Damascus and Tehran. The government of Bashar Al Assad, the Syrian president, warned its neighbours against recognising a Syrian opposition group that was established in Turkey, while Iran said the Turkish government should stop promoting its own version of a secular Muslim state and market economy as a model for Arab Spring countries.

In a veiled reference to those complaints, Mr Erdogan said during his televised speech to parliamentary deputies of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that he was sorry to see that Turkey was the target of “unjust criticism”, but that his country would stick to its policies.

“Turkey will do what its own principles and national interests call for and will continue along this path without diverting from its agenda,” Mr Erdogan said. He underlined that undemocratic regimes in the region could not count on Turkish support. “In our book, there can be no legitimate government that is not based on the people and that uses violence.”

But despite Mr Erdogan’s robust defence of Turkey’s unique approach to Middle Eastern issues, Ankara is watching statements from Iran and Syria very closely because it is concerned that governments there could try to stoke the flames of the Kurdish conflict inside Turkey.

“There is a fear that Syria will support the PKK,” said Semih Idiz, a foreign policy columnist for the Milliyet newspaper. He was referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel group that has been fighting for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey since 1984. Syria gave shelter to the PKK leadership in the 1990s.

Officials in Ankara are also doubtful about Iran’s role in the Kurdish conflict. A Turkish newspaper reported yesterday that Iran had recently captured Murat Karayilan, a top PKK commander wanted by Ankara, and set him free after two days instead of extraditing him to Turkey. Idris Naim Sahin, Turkey’s interior minister, said the government would comment on the report “when the time comes”, the NTV news channel reported.

Frustrated by the continuing violence in Syria and by what it sees as the regime’s rejection of political reform, Mr Erdogan’s government is preparing to announce a package of bilateral sanctions against Damascus, a former partner. Last month, Mr Erdogan publicly accused Mr Assad of lying to him.

“We cannot remain bystanders for much longer,” Mr Erdogan told Turkish reporters during a visit to South Africa last week. The prime minister had been scheduled to visit camps for Syrian refugees in southern Turkey last weekend, but cancelled the trip after his mother died last Friday. No new date for the visit has been set. According to news reports, Mr Al Assad was among foreign leaders calling Mr Erdogan to express their condolences.

Turkey has begun to implement some measures against Syria, such as a ban on all arms shipments to Syria via Turkish airspace or territory and an increased support for Syrian opposition groups. Representatives of the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) have asked for a meeting with Turkish foreign ministry officials, the Today’s Zaman newspaper reported yesterday. Such a meeting would help the SNC, which was formed in Istanbul in August, to gain international status, a development that Damascus wants to avoid.

Turkish foreign ministry sources said yesterday they could not confirm whether the meeting would go ahead. The SNC unites major opposition factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Local Coordination Committees and Kurdish and secular activist groups.

While Syria is concerned about Turkish support for the SNC, Iran is uneasy about Mr Erdogan’s promotion of the Turkish brand of secularism to the countries of the Arab Spring.

“Turkey is a democracy,” a senior foreign ministry official said when asked for his response to the Iranian criticism. Mustafa Akyol, a newspaper commentator and the author of a newly-released book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, said in a Twitter message that Iran had slammed Turkey “for all the good reasons”.

Mr Idiz, the foreign policy columnist, said he did not expect Turkey to stop extolling its own model because of Iran’s complaints. Mr Idiz told The National yesterday that Turkey was not particularly concerned that memories of Ottoman rule in the Middle East could be used to undermine its present-day policies as following “imperial intentions” in the region.

“What they have been promoting for Egypt and Syria are very much European values,” such as secularism and individual freedoms, Mr Idiz said about Turkish government officials. Only Arab nationalists were likely to try to play the Ottoman card against modern Turkey, he said.

tseibert@thenational.ae

The Forgotten American

2011-10-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

TROY, New York — The Dogans were a quiet family little noticed by their neighbors here in upstate New York. Ahmet Dogan had come to the area from Turkey to study accounting at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He was a serious student; the Dogans did little entertaining. But when their younger son, Furkan, was born in 1991, the family threw a party and a neighbor recalled a toast “to the first U.S. citizen in the family.”
Furkan Dogan would live just two years in Troy, returning to Turkey with his family in 1993. But he was proud of his American passport and dreamt of coming back after completing medical school. Five Israeli bullets — at least two of them to the head — ended that dream on May 31. Dogan was 19.
The young American, who had just completed high school with excellent grades in the central Turkish town of Kayseri, had seen an online advertisement for volunteers to deliver aid to Gaza. The ad, from a Turkish charity called the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or I.H.H, said the goal of the trip was to show that Israel’s “embargo/blockade can be legally broken.”
Little interested in politics, but with an aspiring doctor’s concern for Palestinian suffering, Dogan won a lottery to go.
How he was killed is disputed — as is just about everything concerning the Israeli naval takeover of the six-boat Gaza-bound flotilla — but his father suspects a video camera carried by his son may have provoked Israeli commandos.
O.K., enough said, that’s the start of the story you haven’t read about the short life of Furkan Dogan, an American killed by Israeli forces in international waters on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara.
In truth I have not been to Troy but I do find the effacement of Dogan since his death almost two months ago at once offensive and instructive.
I have little doubt that if the American killed on those ships had been Hedy Epstein, a St. Louis-based Holocaust survivor, or Edward Peck, a former U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, we would have heard a lot more. We would have read the kind of tick-tock reconstructions that the deaths of Americans abroad in violent and disputed circumstances tend to provoke. (Epstein had planned to be aboard the flotilla and Peck was.)
I also have little doubt that if the incident had been different — say a 19-year-old American student called Michael Sandler killed by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank when caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis — we would have been deluged in stories about him.
But a chill descends when you have the combination of Israeli commandos doing the firing, an American with a foreign-sounding Muslim name, and the frenzied pre-emptive arguments of Israel and those among its U.S. supporters who will brook no criticism of the Jewish state.
This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”
Let’s face it, without the flotilla outcry that allowed the Obama administration to question Israel’s self-defeating suffocation of Gaza, Israel would still be imposing the blockade that handed Hamas control of whatever was left of the Gaza economy. Now that blockade has been eased.
As this suggests, Israel will, ostrich-like, push policies born of the security mantra way beyond their rationale, only changing course when its critical friends raise their voices. It’s time for the U.S. Jewish establishment to think again — and think openly — or risk losing the many younger Jews troubled by Israel’s course.
I hope every member of Congress read Beinart’s piece. I contacted the office of Congressman Paul Tonko, who represents the Troy area, to ask about Dogan. A spokesman, Beau Duffy, wrote saying that “There really isn’t much of a local connection here” and that Tonko had no comment. Hardly a surprise: Nobody in Congress has had anything to say about this American death.
I called the State Department, where an official said the U.S. ambassador in Turkey has offered the Dogan family assistance. (He also denied reports that the United States plans to designate I.H.H. a terrorist organization.)
Any further action, including a possible F.B.I. investigation of Dogan’s death, will hinge on the results of the inquiry being led by a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice and including two foreign observers. The Dogan family could also request F.B.I. action.
But it seems they have few illusions. Professor Dogan, who teaches at Kayseri University, told the Wall Street Journal’s Marc Champion (who wrote the best piece on Dogan) that he’s been wondering what the U.S. response would have been if his son had been a Christian living stateside. Having lived in America, he said, “I know what people do there when a cat gets stuck in a tree.”
It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire.A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 27, 2010, in The International Herald Tribune.

Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs

2011-10-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs

Thousands of Arabs joined the fight against Anzac troops in Gallipoli

Forgotten soldiers. We all know about Gallipoli; hopelessly conceived mess, dreamed up by Churchill to move the Great War from the glued trenches of France to a fast-moving invasion of Germany's Ottoman allies in 1915.Embark a vast army of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, French and others east of Istanbul in order to smash "Johnny Turk". Problem: the Turks fought back ferociously as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, titan of the 20th century, etc) used his Turkish 19th Army Division to confront the invaders' first wave. Problem two: most of the division were not Turks at all.

They were Arabs. Indeed, two-thirds of the first men to push back the Anzac forces were Syrian Arabs from what is today Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and "Palestine". And of the 87,000 "Turkish" troops who died defending the Dardanelles, many were Arabs. As Palestinian Professor Salim Tamari now points out, the same applies to the Ottoman battles of Suez, Gaza and Kut al-Amara. In the hitherto unknown diary of Private Ihsan Turjman of the Ottoman Fourth Army – he would today be called a Palestinian Arab – there was nothing but scorn for those Arab delegations from Palestine and Syria who sent delegations "to salute the memory of our martyrs in this war and to visit the wounded".

What, he asked in his secretly kept diary, were these Arabs playing at? "Do they mean to strengthen the relationship between the Arab and Turkish nations... truth be told, the Palestinian and Syrian people are a cowardly and submissive lot. For if they were not so servile, they would have revolted against these Turkish barbarians," he wrote. This is stunning stuff.

Far more Arabs fought against the Allies on behalf of the Ottomans than ever joined Lawrence's Arab revolt, but here is Private Turjman expressing fury at his masters.

Year of the Locust is an odd little book, terribly short but darkly fascinating, concentrating on the Great War diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, one of them an actual Turk, the others Palestinian Arabs. We are used to British and German soldiers' accounts of the Great War; scarcely ever do we read of the personal lives of our Ottoman opponents. The Turjman family home, by extraordinary chance, is the very same Jerusalem building, in ruins since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but now transformed into an art gallery, which I visited in Jerusalem just three weeks ago today.

In 1917, when Turjman was shot dead by an Ottoman officer, Palestinian Arabs were less concerned about the Balfour Declaration than whether the British would give them independence, annex them to Egypt or allow them a Syrian homeland. How wrong could they have been? Britain had no intention of adding to its Egyptian interests when it had already given its support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later, as Tamari recounts, the lives of the other two diarists, one Turkish, the other Arab, would revolve around Palestinians who came to believe that it was Jewish immigration that would threaten their future. But it is the Great War that dominates their memoirs.

In the anti-Ottoman literature that permeated the Arab world (and the West) after the war, it is important to remember these Ottomans, Turkish or Arab. There is a touch of Robert Graves here. Turjman's diary records the plague of locusts that settled upon Jerusalem, the cholera and typhus and the 50 Jerusalem prostitutes sent to entertain Turkish officers, the Ottoman troops hanged outside the Jaffa Gate for desertion, the Turkish aircraft that crashes ("badly trained pilots or badly maintained engines"). Turjman even has a crush on a married woman.

Long forgotten now are the Arab-Turkish Ottoman inmates of the Tsarist prison camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, where Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, born in Jerusalem in 1892, ended up. Islam united them; class divided them. But there were concerts, sports clubs, football teams, a camp library, a Great War version of all the stalags and oflags made famous in the Second World War. Come the Bolshevik revolution, Shehadeh high-tailed it back to the Middle East – via Manchuria, Japan, China, India and Egypt via the Red Sea.

But the most impressive text in this tiny book is not a diary but a letter from Shehadeh's wife, Saema, in Jerusalem when, 30 years later, he had set off for Gaza as a British mandate officer. "I woke up early this morning," she writes. "I walked around in the garden for a while. I picked up some flowers and leaves. I picked up some beans to cook for myself. While I was milling around, you were always on my mind. It is your presence that makes this garden beautiful.

"Nothing has a taste without you. May God not deprive me of your presence, for it is you who makes my (our) life beautiful. When you left us last time I noticed that you had a little cold. I am thinking about it. Let me know about your health. Your life's partner, who loves you with all her heart. Saema." Now that's quite a love letter to get from your wife.

U.S. Ties to Turkey Face New Strains

2011-10-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

U.S. Ties to Turkey Face New Strains
By JAY SOLOMON in Washington and MARC CHAMPION in Istanbul Wall Street Journal Link

U.S. officials also are concerned by Turkish threats to deploy naval vessels to accompany flotillas headed to the Palestinian territories, which could heighten the potential for a military conflict between Turkey and Israel, both close U.S. allies. American diplomats have worked to broker a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel, but officials in the White House and State Department acknowledge the rift could endure.
WASHINGTON—Escalating tensions in the Mediterranean are complicating the U.S.-Turkey alliance at a time when President Barack Obama views Ankara as central to helping the U.S. manage the Middle East's political upheavals.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton privately has pressed Turkish officials to back off from their threats to send warships to waters around Cyprus in a dispute over energy deposits, according to U.S. officials. The top American diplomat cautioned that any escalation could jeopardize U.S. interests in the Mediterranean, as the gas fields are being jointly developed by Cyprus and Houston-based Noble Energy Inc.

Some strategists in Washington and Europe are calling on the Obama administration to lay down stricter red lines in the Mediterranean, by using more aggressive diplomacy and the U.S. Navy. This is seen as crucial for guarding against any miscalculations by Turkey, Israel or Cyprus, though they acknowledge such steps could anger Ankara.

"I don't think the Turks are intent on starting hostilities, but you never know what can happen in this environment," said Morton Abramowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey. He added that Washington needs to be up-front with Ankara and tell them that if conflict breaks out between Turkey and Israel, "We'll choose Israel."

Turkish officials stressed in interviews they aren't seeking a war with either Cyprus or Israel, and said Turkey has been forced to take action to guard against provocative steps by others. "Look, nobody wants any disasters here. We are aware of the situation," said a senior Turkish official.

Mr. Obama has cultivated Turkey as a major strategic partner since coming into office in 2009. White House officials say the U.S. president speaks regularly with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to coordinate on the political transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. And the Obama administration hailed Ankara's decision last month to house a North Atlantic Treaty Organization radar facility, which is focused on Iran's long-range missiles.

"Turkey is a NATO ally, a great friend and a partner on a whole host of issues," Mr. Obama said prior to a meeting with Mr. Erdogan last month.

Still, the deepening dispute between Turkey and Cyprus over energy exploration has placed Washington squarely in the middle.

Tensions flared last month when the Cypriot government announced that Noble Energy would begin drilling for gas in its Exclusive Economic Zone. Ankara doesn't recognize Cyprus's government and said the energy exploration undercuts prospects for a United Nations-backed process aimed at reunifying the island. Cyprus was divided into ethnic-Greek and Turkish enclaves in 1974, after Turkey invaded the island following a Greece-inspired coup.

In recent weeks, Turkey has dispatched naval vessels into this economic zone, including frigates and gunboats, according to senior Cypriot officials. They said these moves are a violation of international law and aimed at intimidating Cyprus and preventing Noble from moving ahead with developing the gas fields. Cyprus's government is calling on the U.N, U.S. and European Union to increase pressure on Ankara to pull out of Cypriot waters.

"The gravity of the problem stems from the threats that are being voiced, nearly daily, by the Turkish leadership," said Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, in an interview.

Turkish officials said the international community should be focused on the Cypriot actions, which they believe are aimed at undermining the U.N. talks.

More recently, Turkey also began exploring for energy deposits in Cypriot waters. "We just need to make a point... to show the Greek Cypriots that they don't own the whole island," said the Turkish official.

Continuing tensions between Turkey and Israel are also undercutting U.S. efforts to stabilize the Middle East. Once close allies, Turkey and Israel have been locked in a growing war of words in the wake of Israel's military action last year against an international aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip. The operation killed eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish-American.

For months, the Obama administration has worked to ease tensions between Israel and Turkey. But the process broke down after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government refused to apologize to Ankara for the flotilla deaths. Turkey cut military ties with Israel and downgraded diplomatic relations, saying it would use its navy to protect future aid flotillas headed toward Gaza.

On Friday, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davatoglu reiterated that threat, but specified that it applied to Turkish vessels in international waters.

Some Turkey analysts believe Mr. Erdogan is bluffing. But there are increasing fears that the Turkish leader, now among the most popular in the Muslim world, could have staked a position that will be hard to back away from. And they note that Washington would be likely be dragged into any conflict.

"At some point, the U.S. is going to have to say: This rhetoric is too much," said Henri Barkey, a Turkey scholar at Lehigh University.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Marc Champion atmarc.champion@wsj.com

Tasting Istanbul, From Humble to High Cuisine

2011-10-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

EUROPE ISSUE | CHOICE TABLES

Tasting Istanbul, From Humble to High Cuisine

Monique Jaques for The New York Times

A table at Asmali Cavit, which specializes in small plates. More Photos

By LIESL SCHILLINGER Published: September 30,

2011 SOMETIMES I think it’s no accident that Istanbul’s telephone area code is 212. Despite its minarets and its hilly cobblestone streets, itsGrand Bazaar and the sapphire waters of the Bosporus that glide through the city like a liquid sash, this eastern metropolis has a New York state of mind.You feel purposeful energy humming in the air as you watch the inhabitants stroll through the maze of streets and lanes, arm in arm. You sense their conviction that the city has been designed for their pleasure; that if they can make it here, they’ll make it anywhere. Sometimes they’re headed to experimentalmusic concerts, gallery openings or simply the office. But very often, they’re bound for cafes, meyhanes (think of them as Turkish tapas bars, serving small plates, wine, beer and raki) or any of the countless restaurants that edge the waterfront and sidewalks.

Visitors to Istanbul can find it bewildering to decide where to eat. On my first trip there, in 2004, I was squired around town by a friend and his Turkish wife on a culinary Magical Mystery Tour that unspooled like a delicious dream. But on this visit (my fourth), I wandered with the intention of passing along the names of five spots sure to please epicurean newcomers — bearing in mind that couples, thrill seekers and purists have different gustatory goals. But everyone will want a tip for the best meyhane, so that’s where I began.

Asmali Cavit
When I’m in the mood for mezes, I usually grab a table at the always-thronged meyhanes Refik or Sofyali 9, which bob amid a torrent of other meyhanes on Sofyali Sokak, in Beyoglu, near Tunel Square. But on my most recent visit, my Turkish friend Mehmet Murat Somer, author of “The Kiss Murder” and other mysteries, insisted I try Cavit, on Asmalimescit Caddesi, just around the corner. A few bites into the chargrilled borek meat pastry (other meyhanes tend to fry them), I saw why. The flaky phyllo crust was marvelously crisp against the juicy meat and sautéed onions inside.
You don’t necessarily go to a meyhane for great food; a bonhomous atmosphere matters more. But Cavit offers both. From the street, it resembles a snug, wood-faced Alpine chalet, but seems to magically expand as you walk in. On a damp, cool night earlier this year, the second-floor dining room was packed to the (exposed) rafters. Murat, as he is known, waved me to a corner table where he and a lively entourage were already carousing, and called for a bottle of raki as a fleet of well-crafted standards began sailing onto the table: patlican salatasi (smoky, roasted eggplant purée with béchamel), tender braised squid, and lakerda — rose-beige petals of cured Black Sea tunny.
We delved into the house specialty, topik, a sweet and savory Armenian chickpea dish that has the smooth-grained, dense texture of halvah. Dotted with raisins and tahini, it melted on the tongue. Piping hot sardines arrived next. Each morsel was made of two silver fillets, placed back-to-back and grilled. On the plate, they resembled shimmering butterflies. We spritzed them with lemon and snapped them up, skins and all.
Asmali Cavit, Asmalimescit Caddesi No. 16/D, Beyoglu; (90-212) 292-4950; 70 Turkish lira, or about $40 at 1.80 lira to the dollar for a generous assortment for two, without drinks or tip.

Agatha, Pera Palace Hotel
Last spring, Yigal Schleifer (who has contributed to The Times Travel section) and Ansel Mullins, American expats who created the blog Istanbul Eats, fielded an online question from a diner: “Can you please help my clueless boyfriend (along with millions of Turkish men) find a nice and romantic place to propose?” They cagily did not reveal the place that Mr. Mullins himself chose when he popped the question to his wife a decade ago: Pera Palace, the grand Ottoman Victorian hotel where Agatha Christie is said to have written “Murder on the Orient Express.” Back then, Pera Palace was picturesquely rundown. But last year, it emerged from a meticulous restoration with the elegant addition of a downstairs restaurant called Agatha, which exudes belle époque glamour. As you descend a white marble staircase to the chandeliered dining room, you see, in a glass window case, shining pieces of 1892 Christofle silver, and in another case, a New Year’s Eve menu from 1924, offering “frivolités madrilènes.”
In 2011, Agatha may well offer Istanbul’s most stately gourmet experience. Each month, the German-born executive chef, Maximilian Thomae, devises a tasting menu inspired by a Turkish staple. One recent theme was olive oils, drawn from 60 orchards; a different variety flavored each dish. His vegetable mosaic terrine resembled a French knot garden, bordered in chard, paved with sumac-spiced rice and pebbled with carrot and zucchini. The citrusy oil he chose — Laleli Taylieli Extra Virgin — united the whole. He steeped his house-cured salmon in jasmine tea, and his velvety, tangy vine-leaves soup was balanced by crab dumplings — fluffy round soufflés the size of cherries, which arrived on their own side dish to be admired before being tumbled into their flavorful bath. He tenderized the quail kebab in milk and encased it in a beguiling peach pestil. As I marveled at these harmonies of texture and taste, I hunted for the Turkish clues lurking in each dish. Even the sorbet, silky smooth, made of limes and olive oil, was redolent of Turkey’s hillsides.
Agatha, Pera Palace Hotel, Mesrutiyet Caddesi 52, Tepebasi, Beyoglu; (90-212) 377-4000; perapalace.com. Chef’s Degustation Menu (recommended), 125 lira per person without wine.

Munferit
Scenesters who come to Istanbul in search of fascinating strangers head for Munferit, right off the bustling Istiklal pedestrian mall. Here Turkish and global gadabouts gather to drink Ferit Sarper’s thrice-distilled Beylerbeyi raki, made from grapes and anise at his family’s distillery in western Turkey, and to sample his stylish menu, notably the smoky fried eggplant with tahini, and the black couscous in squid ink, sprigged with magenta blossoms of grilled calamari. Main courses include chargrilled lamb chops with endive, and lettuce-wrapped sea bass with fennel. For a rustic touch, Mr. Sarper ships in crusty bread twice a week, baked in a village stove in his home province and served with a molten dollop of anchovy butter.
On weekdays, diners romance each other across candlelit tables that line the narrow terrace adjoining Munferit’s main dining room; but on weekends, Mr. Sarper D.J.’s, manning the laptop at the bar. As the music swells, a fashionable, fun-seeking crowd, redolent of Los Angeles and Moscow, fills the terrace, and the staff whisks away the tables, one by one, until the restaurant has transformed itself into a dance party. As I left on a Friday after midnight, the lyric “I’m in with the in crowd” surged from the speakers — it could be Munferit’s theme song.
Munferit, Firuzaga Mahallesi, Yeni Carsi Caddesi No. 19, Beyoglu; (90-212) 252-5067;munferit.com.tr; about 140 lira for an average meal for two, without drinks or tip.

Sehzade Erzurum Cag Kebabi
At heart, Turkish cuisine is not fussy; it’s unpretentious, locavore home cooking. Grown men in Istanbul routinely have their mothers bus them homemade meals from the provinces. At Sehzade Erzurum Cag Kebabi, a thrillingly authentic hole-in-the-wall near the Egyptian market, I perched on a plastic chair and lunched on an “extremely important kebab” with Mr. Mullins (who willingly travels an hour and a half to taste “the best bean in Istanbul”).
The lamb at Sehzade roasts on a horizontal spit, which maximizes its juiciness. Ozcan Yildirim, the usta (master chef), beamed at us from his grill, leaned around the doorway and proudly thrust a skewer of lamb toward my lips, coaxing me to pull the meat off with my teeth. His lambs had grazed on thyme and wildflowers in the mountains, he boasted. “Taste, taste!” he insisted. Instead, I used a pillow-soft sheet of doughy white lavash bread to gather up the delectable meat, and ate it with tomato-and-cucumber shepherd’s salad, and thick, lemony buffalo-milk yogurt.
Sehzade Erzurum Cag Kebabi, Hocapasa Sokak 3/A, Sirkeci; (90-212) 520-3361; 15 lira prix fixe.

Akdeniz Hatay Sofrasi
For a broader menu and a more elaborate gustatory spectacle, I took the tram with a Turkish friend and journeyed past the Grand Bazaar to a flower-garlanded restaurant called Hatay Sofrasi, which delivers the aromatic specialties of Turkey’s Hatay province, situated along the Mediterranean and the Syrian border. Waiters in white jackets and fezzes ushered us upstairs, where we took a table among a genteel crowd of bureaucrats and their wives.
Delicacies arrived in rapid succession: a tinglingly fresh salad of oregano leaves, confettied with red strips of tomato and green olives; a succulent dome of firik pilav — pearly cracked wheat dotted with braised lamb; and fried pastry torpedoes called oruk haslama, stuffed with spicy ground meat, walnuts and chiles. Glasses of rosewater and freshly squeezed orange-and-pomegranate juice cooled our palates, and soon a waiter emerged, bearing a triumphal platter that held a meter-long beef and lamb kebab, bejeweled with pine nuts, pomegranate pips and parsley. We tore off hanks of flatbread to enfold sandwich-size sections of kebab, spooning in muhammara (a creamy dip made of red peppers and walnuts) and barbecued eggplant purée for added savor. Another waiter wheeled in a cart topped with a rock-salt igloo, which he set alight. He then smashed the flaming salt crust with a mallet and unveiled a whole roasted chicken that was stuffed with cardamom-spiced rice and exhaled fragrant steam.
We could not resist a cool rectangle of the traditional Hatay candied pumpkin dessert, crisp and crunchy on the outside, fruity and jellied within; and the authentic walnut dessert: walnuts in the shell, softened in lime, and boiled in syrup until they could be cut with a butter knife, even the shells.
Akdeniz Hatay Sofrasi, Ahmediye Caddesi 44A, Fatih, Aksaray; (90-212) 531-3333;akdenizhataysofrasi.com.tr; about 100 lira for a generous meal for two, not including tip.No alcohol..

Article | Turkey's Elephant in the Room: Religious Freedom

2011-09-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

Turkey's Elephant in the Room:Religious Freedom

Performing ablution before prayersoutside the 17th century mosque in Istanbul, where the state exerts totalcontrol over Islam through its Religious Affairs Department.

By SUSANNE GUSTEN

September 28, 2011

ISTANBUL — With his triumphanttour of the countries of the Arab Spring this month, Prime Minister Recep TayyipErdogan has managed to set up Turkey on the international stage as a role modelfor a secular democracy in a Muslim country — as, in his words, “a secularstate where all religions are equal.”

The only trouble is that he hasyet to make that happen for Turkey.

The relationship between religionand the state, ever the sore spot of Turkish identity, is one of the mostexplosive issues of the debate on the new constitution that Mr. Erdogan haspledged to give the country in the new legislative term that opens Saturday.

That debate will have to deal withthe elephant in the room: the total control that the state exerts over Islamthrough its Religious Affairs Department, and the lack of a legal status forall other religions in a predominantly Sunni Muslim society.

“Turkey may look like a secularstate on paper, but in terms of international law it is actually a SunniIslamic state,” Izzettin Dogan, a leader of the country’s Alevi minority,charged at a joint press conference with leaders of several other minorityfaiths last week in Istanbul.

Mr. Dogan is honorary president ofthe Federation of Alevi Foundations, which represents many of what it claimsare up to 30 million adherents of the Alevi faith, an Anatolian religion closeto Sufi Islam but separate and distinct in its beliefs and practices.

“The state collects taxes from allof us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis aswell as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogansaid, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department.“What kind of secularism is that?”

A bureaucratic juggernaut with itsown news service and a dedicated trade union, the Religious Affairs Departmentemploys more than 106,000 civil servants, according to its latest annualreport, including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzins, all of them trained, hiredand fired by the state.

At the institution’s ministry-sizeheadquarters in Ankara, state-employed astronomers calculate prayer timesaround the world, while state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of theProphet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known asfatwas.

The department writes the sermonsfor Friday Prayer in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks forthe religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books andperiodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues aniPhoneapp featuring Koranic verses and a prayertime alarm. The department has amonopoly on Koran courses in the country, and it organizes the Hajj, thepilgrimage to Mecca, right down to the vaccination of pilgrims.

So centralized is the department’scontrol that its new president, Mehmet Gormez, is considered innovative forannouncing his intention to train preachers to deliver sermons in person,instead of having them piped into the mosque from the department over apublic-address system.

“In Turkey, Islam does notdetermine politics, but politics determine Islam,” Gunter Seufert, asociologist, concluded in a 2004 study of the department entitled “State andIslam in Turkey.”

“Run by a state agency, religionserves the nation state for the purpose of unifying the nation and Westernizingits Muslims,” he added.

With historical roots in theOttoman Empire, where state and Islam were linked in the union of sultanate andcaliphate, the Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the TurkishRepublic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.

Charged by law with managingIslam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since thecountry’s first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relicof the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering nationalunity.

Ministering to Sunni Islam of theHanafi school, the department does not recognize non-Sunni communities like theAlevis or Caferis as distinct religious faiths, subsuming them under the commonlabel of “Muslim,” the basis for the depiction of Turkey as a religiouslyhomogenous country that describes its population as “99 percent Muslim.”

While the distribution ofbelievers among the faiths encompassed by that term is contested, a 2007 surveyby the Konda institute, a public opinion research company in Turkey, found that82 percent of Turks describe themselves as Hanafi Sunni Muslims.

The new constitution, Mr. Dogan ofthe Alevi federation demanded, must do away with their privileged status. “Thestate must be impartial and treat all religious communities equally andmaintain equal distance to all of them,” he said. “These definitions must bewritten into the new constitution verbatim.”

Mr. Dogan was speaking at thepresentation of a report on the “Shared Problems and Demands of Turkey’sReligious Communities,” prepared by Ozge Genc and Ayhan Kaya, politicalscientists at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The report is based on research inthe Apostolic, Catholic and Protestant Armenian communities, the GreekOrthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches as well as theJewish community and Bahai, Yezidi, Shiite, Alevi, Mevlevi, Caferi and othergroups.

As the report underlines, thesecommunities all suffer from lack of legal status in Turkey, which renders itdifficult for them to conduct even the most basic affairs and forces them intoa shadowy existence at the mercy of political fashions and whims.

The 1,700-year-old Greek OrthodoxPatriarchate of Constantinople, for example, has come to the brink ofextinction since its seminary in Istanbul was closed down 40 years ago, dryingup its source of clergymen. The Patriarchate hopes that the new constitutionwill “create the conditions for a reopening of the seminary,” its spokesman,Pater Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, said by e-mail this week.

This will require a redefinitionof the concept of secularism in Turkey, or simply a definition of the term inthe Turkish constitution, as Mustafa Akyol, author of “Islam Without Extremes:A Muslim Case for Liberty,” points out.

“The present constitution statesthat Turkey is laic, secular, but does not define the term,” Mr. Akyol said bytelephone this week. The interpretation has been left up to the constitutionalcourt, he said, which has traditionally defined secularism as the completeabsence of religion from the public sphere, as seen in its ban on head scarvesfor university students. It was that ban, among other things, that triggeredthe current secularism debate in Islamist circles, Mr. Akyol said.

“They began to see nuances inWestern secularism. They saw that religious freedoms not available to them inTurkey, like the head scarf or the freedom to join Muslim orders, wereavailable in America and many European countries, excepting France,” he said.“They began to criticize the self-styled Turkish secularism, and to call for aredefinition of secularism.”

While the debate still rages inTurkish society, “I think Erdogan made it clear that he is sincere” in his callfor secularism, Mr. Akyol said. “That is how we would like to have it definedin the new constitution,” he added, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s remark that allreligions should be equal.

But the Religious AffairsDepartment may not be so easy to sideline. While most of the proposals for theconstitution prepared by nongovernmental organizations for the debate agreethat the department cannot continue in its present form, none suggestsabolishing it.

Even Tesev, an independentresearch institute in Istanbul, argues that “dissolving the Religious AffairsDepartment is not considered possible under present conditions.” It suggeststhat other religious groups should be given equal status and privilegesinstead.

Other constitutional proposalssuggest that the department’s reach should be extended to include other faiths,an idea unlikely to sit well with all communities.

The Patriarchate ofConstantinople, while declining to comment on the proposal, has strenuouslyresisted previous proposals to incorporate its seminary into the theologicalfaculty of a state university, arguing that it cannot relinquish control overits training.

While the Religious AffairsDepartment may face change, it is unlikely to be abolished, Mr. Akyol said.“Society is so used to it, so many people work for it,” he said. “I don’texpect it to change with the new constitution.”

2011-09-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

Crime and Punishment at Istanbul Film Festival

By SUSANNE GUSTEN

Published: September 21, 2011

ISTANBUL — What do so-called honor killings and coups d’état have in common?

The answer, according to Adem Sozuer, dean of law at Istanbul University, is love — the love the perpetrators profess for their victims.

“They love them, and they kill them,” Mr. Sozuer told a roomful of reporters, film critics and legal scholars in Istanbul last week.

“We hear a lot about fathers’ killing their beloved daughters in the name of honor and morals, for having been kidnapped or raped,” Mr. Sozuer said. “We see the same sick mind-set in the leaders of coups d’état and oppressive regimes: They love their countries and societies, but the coups they stage in the name of love and protection bring death and torture and loss to their peoples.”

Mr. Sozuer offered the analogy as an example of the “different perspectives” on coups and other crimes that organizers of the Crime and Punishment Film Festival hope to gain by juxtaposing artistic and academic viewpoints of the quest for justice.

The festival, which opens in Istanbul on Friday, will screen about 100 films from 40 countries dealing with all kinds of crimes and punishments, but focusing especially on coups d’état, the inaugural year’s main festival theme.

It is a theme with a special resonance in Turkey, which has seen four elected governments pushed out by the military since 1960 and has just started to overcome taboos surrounding that history.

A year ago, Turks voted in a referendum to abolish legal protections for generals involved in the violent coup of 1980. The coup leader, the retired general and former president Kenan Evren, has since been questioned by state prosecutors.

The focus of the Istanbul festival is also significant for those nations of the region facing the question of how to deal with crimes committed by dictatorial regimes toppled in the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring this year. Several filmmakers and academics from the Middle East are expected in Istanbul for the festival.

The distinguishing feature of the Crime and Punishment Festival are the legal panels, presentations and debates accompanying the screenings that will try to cross-pollinate artistic and academic exploration of the concept of justice.

Along with directors, producers, writers and actors, dozens of prominent legal scholars from around the world have been invited to Istanbul to draw on the insights and inspirations offered by the cinema.

“We believe cinematic art can be an effective vehicle to open up discussion of criminal law reform and its problems to society,” said Mr. Sozuer, the director of the festival, which is sponsored by Istanbul University’s law faculty and the Istanbul district of Basaksehir. “Criminal law reform should not be left to academics and Parliament alone — all of society has a responsibility here. We all discuss crime and punishment and justice every day, in society, among individuals and in the media. With this festival, we want to create a more effective forum of debate for society on a topic that is of such common interest.”

The festival opens with a screening of “17 Hours” by the Spanish director Chema de la Peña, a 2011 thriller about the attempted coup in which a group of soldiers tried to wrest back control of newly democratic Spain from Parliament in February 1981.

Other films in the main category of the festival, which runs through Sept. 30, include Mohammadreza Farzad’s documentary of the massacre of innocent citizens during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and a Honduran documentary of the popular resistance against the attempted coup in that country in 2009, as well as documentaries from Myanmar, Chile, and Colombia and feature films from the Philippines, Argentina and Rwanda.

Turkish films figure prominently in the “coup” category, with 4 recent feature films, 2 documentaries and 2 short films among the 20 contenders in that category.

“Our past is filled with coups,” Serdar Talas, a criminal-law specialist at Istanbul University and member of the festival’s jury, said in reference to the 1960, 1971 and 1980 military takeovers in Turkey and the 1997 “soft coup,” in which an elected government was ousted by the generals’ mere threat of an intervention.

With the film festival, “we want to contribute to a consensus that coups are a bad thing, so that if such a thing should happen to us again, people would not stay home and silent again,” Mr. Talas said, knocking on wood as he spoke.

To this end, the academic program of the festival is filled with debate on constitutional and juridical lessons to be learned from past experience around the world.

Mr. Sozuer added: “We hope to make a contribution to the debate about a new constitution that Turkey has embarked on. Because our present Constitution is the product of a coup, it is not possible to speak about the past without speaking of a new Constitution.”

The current Turkish Constitution was drawn up under military tutelage after the 1980 coup; much patched and amended over the past few years, it still remains a fundamentally illiberal document that most Turks agree should be replaced. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged to start work on a new constitution in the parliamentary term that opens next month, promising to throw the debate wide open to all.

Organizers of the film festival have taken him up on that promise. The program includes presentations by Chilean, Polish and Greek scholars on the legal aspects of coming to terms with the legacy of military dictatorships and repressive regimes, as carried out in their respective countries.

Other panels, with leading German scholars, focus on Germany’s transition from the Nazi period to democracy and on the constitutional problems posed by that country’s reunification after the collapse of Communism.

“The problem of military coups is extremely difficult in terms of jurisprudence, almost impossible to solve — perhaps art and cinema can come up with answers that we as legal scholars cannot provide,” Walter Gropp, a German law professor and member of the festival’s advisory board, said in Istanbul last week.

“The transition to a new system, a new constitution, poses the question of who should be held accountable” for the deeds of preceding system, Mr. Gropp added. “It is an endless question to which jurisprudence can provide no answers, to which we must seek the answers outside of the law: What is right and what is wrong?”

This is where the festival comes in.

“We legal scholars see the general principles, but cinematic art focuses on the human beings,” Mr. Gropp said. “This is a different approach that I believe could inspire new ideas.”

While the festival’s theme is clearly geared toward Turkish concerns, it resonates with other countries around the region, particularly those that are looking for new constitutions of their own.

“There is great interest from those countries, from Egypt, from Algeria, from Tunisia,” Mr. Sozuer said.

One festival session will focus on the transition process in Egypt and Tunisia, with presentations by legal scholars from those countries.

Joud Said, a Syrian director, is also expected to attend the festival, which will screen his 2009 film “Once Again” in the category “Love and Crime, Love and Punishment.” Other categories of the festival include “crime stories” like those involving the Mafia and bank heists was well as a short-film competition.

Future editions of the festival will focus on freedom of thought, domestic violence and torture, organizers say.

Israel and Turkey | Can it get worse?

2011-09-09T14:49:00.001-07:00

Israel and Turkey | Can it get worse?
The row between Israel and Turkey is becoming increasingly bitter
Sep 10th 2011 | ISTANBUL AND JERUSALEM | from the print edition

RELATIONS between Israel and Turkey, already rocky, have worsened. On September 2nd the Turkish government formally expelled the Israeli ambassador who, as it happened, was back in Israel. Military links have been suspended. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is to go to Egypt—the first visit at such a level for 15 years—to sign new military and economic agreements. Mr Erdogan may even visit the Gaza Strip, which Israel continues to blockade since it is still governed by Hamas, the Islamist movement that officially rejects Israel’s existence. That would be a real poke in Israel’s eye.

Turkey’s moves against Israel followed the publication by the UN on September 2nd of a report on Israel’s attack on a flotilla bringing aid to Gaza in May 2010, when Israeli commandos killed eight Turks and one Turkish-American. The report upheld the legality of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and hence its boarding the flotilla outside territorial waters, but found Israel’s methods “excessive and unreasonable”.

Israel agreed to adopt the report “with reservations”. Its officials quietly exulted over the legal vindication for the blockade and the right to board, at least in principle.

Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, called this ruling “null and void”. Mr Erdogan said “it means nothing to us.” In a statement attached to the report, the panel’s Turkish representative, Özdem Sanberk, said that “common sense and conscience dictate that the blockade is unlawful.”

The report urged Israel to make an “appropriate statement of regret” and offer damages to the victims’ families. Turkey has demanded an unequivocal apology. But Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said Israel would not apologise for its soldiers defending their lives.

Traders in both countries were relieved to learn that Mr Erdogan’s decision will not yet affect non-military commerce. Israeli statistics show two-way civilian trade rising steadily in the past three years, despite the political rift. Today it is worth more than $3.5 billion a year; Turkey is Israel’s sixth-largest trading partner.

Defence ties between the two countries have weakened during this period, and there are fears of lay-offs in Israeli companies if existing contracts are broken. In recent years Israel has upgraded hundreds of Turkey’s American-made tanks and supplied electronic systems to American-made Turkish military aircraft. Turkey uses Israeli-produced drones against Kurdish guerrillas. But once-frequent joint training exercises are a thing of the past. Israeli aircraft train over Bulgaria and Cyprus and have conducted war games with Turkey’s neighbour and traditional rival, Greece. Mr Erdogan noted ominously on September 6th that Turkish warships would “display themselves more often” in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean.

Israeli-Turkish relations have suffered in part because of Mr Erdogan’s determination to reduce his generals’ influence on foreign policy. In the past, keeping Israel close has allowed the army to cosy up to America. But the rise to power of Mr Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party and the exposure of mischief by soldiers—from coup plotting and corruption to incompetence in the field—has changed that. Cooling relations with Israel was a part of it. Israel’s assault on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009 enraged many of AK’s pious supporters. And AK was and remains keen to have warmer relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The Turkish government has no intention, however, of upsetting its NATO allies. It has agreed to host the radar component of a proposed NATO nuclear missile defence shield, a project that is aimed mainly at Iran, with which Turkey has a tricky relationship. And Turkey has turned against Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, though Mr Erdogan has not explicitly told the Syrian president to go, nor has he downgraded relations with Damascus.

from the print edition | Middle East and Africa

2011-09-08T08:06:00.001-07:00

Analysis: Turkey's gunboat diplomacy makes waves in region
By Ibon Villelabeitia
ANKARA | Thu Sep 8, 2011 5:48am EDT
(Reuters) - Turkey's plan to flex its naval muscles in the eastern Mediterranean risks being perceived as an over-reaction in Ankara's dispute with former ally Israel and as an assertion of regional power that could alienate even its new Arab admirers.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's ploy may fuel Western unease over Turkey's reliability as a NATO partner and its penchant for actions designed to court popularity in the Muslim world.

Turkey's mix of economic growth and secular democracy under an Islamist government has fascinated Arab countries eager for a new model, but even those in the throes of popular uprisings may feel qualms if Ankara starts throwing its military weight about.

Stung by Israel's refusal to apologize over last year's killing of nine Turks during an Israeli commando raid on an aid ship bound for Gaza, Erdogan said Turkish warships would be seen in waters where Israel's navy operates, raising the risk of a clash between the once close allies.

Bolstered by a booming economy and unprecedented political stability at home, Turkey has seen its "soft power" rise in the region under Erdogan's AK Party, rooted in political Islam.

Conservative on social and religious issues and liberal on economic ones, the AK government has cemented business ties in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa and pursued a foreign policy of "zero problems with neighbors" -- a policy buffeted by the dispute with Israel and tensions with Syria.

But threats to deploy warships show that Turkey, a prickly NATO member and European Union candidate, is now tempted to use its military power to push its interests in a changing region.

"Erdogan is taking a very aggressive stance to assert Turkey's status as a regional power instead of using the soft power we have seen until recently," said Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based security analyst.

"There is a sense in the AK Party that Turkey is a major regional power and that the Mediterranean is its sphere of influence. But NATO and the West increasingly see Turkey as a loose cannon," he said.

"Turkey played its cards well in the past when it had good relations with everyone, but now it is playing them very badly."

Jenkins said non-Arab Turkey behaving like a neighborhood bully would be regarded with grave concern by Arabs, who were subjects of the Ottoman empire for centuries.

"The Arabs distinguish between a Turkey that stands up to Israel and engages with them and a Turkey that wants to dominate the entire region," Jenkins said.

Omer Taspinar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Turkey might be using Israel as a convenient punching bag following a series of diplomatic setbacks and domestic failures, including the Kurdish problem.

Turkey's ties with Syria, a former friend, are near breaking point -- President Bashar al-Assad has defied Turkish calls for him to end a bloody crackdown on protesters. Shi'ite Iran, another close ally of Turkey, has reacted frostily to Ankara's decision to host a NATO early-warning radar system.

"Turkey is going through a difficult period and Israel has given Erdogan the chance to demonstrate he is a strong leader in a strong country," Taspinar said.

"Turkey has experienced a period of economic growth and political stability and it feels very powerful. But they don't realize there is a price to pay for this saber-rattling."

A larger presence of Turkish vessels in the eastern Mediterranean would be unsettling Greece and for the divided island of Cyprus as it eyes oil drilling exploration.

Turkey says oil deals granted by the Greek Cypriot government, which represents the island in the European Union, are illegal as the borders of Cyprus remain undetermined while Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots pursue reunification talks.

Turkey and Greece, also a NATO member, have a history of territorial disputes, and their navies were involved in a standoff in 1996 over an uninhabited islet in the Aegean Sea.

BALANCE OF FORCES

Turkey is NATO's second biggest military and its navy is considered to be far superior to that of Israel, although the Jewish state is widely assumed to have submarines that carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Israel has expanded patrols in the eastern Mediterranean to enforce the Gaza blockade it says is needed to prevent arms smuggling to the Palestinian group Hamas and to deter any Lebanese Hezbollah militant attack on offshore gas platforms.

Few Turkish analysts believe Turkey is planning to send frigates in open defiance of Israel's blockade of Gaza, which the United Nations has declared legal, but their mere presence in international waters not far from Gaza could risk a clash.

It seems implausible that Turkey, as a NATO member, could get involved in actual hostilities with Israel.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday that the Turkish-Israeli relationship was a "bilateral matter" and urged the two to find ways to ease tensions.

However, Erdogan's words that Turkish naval bases have "the power and opportunity to provide escorts," suggesting that Ankara could put a future aid flotilla under its protection, set off alarm bells.

"They have created the conditions for another flotilla to challenge the blockade," said Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"What is the Turkish navy going to do if another flotilla decides to go in? They would have to keep their promise and escort the flotilla. This puts the U.S. administration in a terrible position."

President Barack Obama's administration is keen to smooth ties between its two most important allies in the Middle East and U.S. diplomats are working in private to heal the rift.

CYPRUS

Some Turkish and Israeli analysts say that Turkey's motive is not to seek a showdown with Israel over Gaza, but to build up a naval presence between Cyprus and Israel to create a sense of menace and scare investors away from the gas fields there.

Turkey has been chafing at Cypriot-Israeli energy deals, and the tensions with Israel could enable Ankara to send a message without making explicit threats.

"Turkey's emphasis on freedom of navigation is also connected to the assessment that in the eastern Mediterranean there are natural gas deposits beyond what have already been discovered," said Gallia Lindenstrauss of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Sinan Ulgen, from the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, said Erdogan, known as a temperamental leader, is driven by public opinion.

Erdogan, who won a third consecutive term in office last June, has become a hero among Muslims for his stance against Israel and in favor of the Palestinians.

"It is very dangerous for a country when it starts to believe its own propaganda," Jenkins said.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

Article | Israel and Turkey Sever Ties

2011-09-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

Israel and Turkey Sever Ties

Sep 2, 2011

The two countries are facing a major diplomatic rupture over a report on the Gaza flotilla raid, and neither side is backing down.

Turkey all but broke off diplomatic relations with its one-time ally Israel Friday after Jerusalem refused to apologize for the killing of eight Turkish protesters and one Turkish American by Israeli commandos last May. The break marks a dramatic deterioration in a relationship which just 10 years ago was one of Israel’s closest strategic partnerships—and certainly its closest alliance in the Muslim world.

The proximate cause of the row was Israel’s refusal to apologize to Turkey after a United Nations report on thestorming of the Mavi Marmara flotilla as it attempted to break an Israeli blockade of Gaza, called Israel’s use of “substantial force… excessive and unreasonable.”

But the root causes of the rift between Ankara and Jerusalem go back to 2002 when the Israeli Defense Force went into the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus and Turkey’s then-newly elected prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, protested strongly. Ever since, Turkey’s Islamist-rooted AK Party government has been vocal in its condemnation of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—most famously in 2009 when Erdogan stormed out of panel discussions in Davos after accusing Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill.” At the same time the Turkish Army, the Turkish institution traditionally closest to Israel, has also seen its once-dominant political influence slip away.

In truth, by this past week there was already little left to suspend by way of ties between Israel and Turkey. Turkey had already recalled its own ambassador to Israel last June “for consultations”—a step down, in the language of diplomatic conflict, from formally recalling him—in the aftermath of the flotilla attack. Joint training exercises between the Turkish and Israeli Air Force were also cancelled at the same time. That was a serious blow to the Israeli military’s pilot-training program because there’s not much airspace at home—an F-16 fighter can fly the 470-kilometer (293-mile) length of Israel in just 16 minutes.

With public feeling running strong in both Israel and Turkey, Erdogan and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had little possibility of backing down over the Mavi Marmara raid even if they’d wished to do so. According to a February poll by the Ankara-based MetroPOLL Strategic and Social Research Center, 23 percent of Turks singled out Israel as Turkey’s No. 1 enemy (42 percent said the U.S. was). A major rupture has been all but inevitable ever since it became clear as early as June that the U.N. report on the Mavi Marmara—leaked to The New York Times this week—would blame Israel for using “unreasonable force.” U.S. diplomats have been shuttling between Ankara and Jerusalem trying to come up with a form of words that would allow Turkey to claim that an apology had been made while allowing Israel to claim that it hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, no such face-saving solution was found.

Palestinian protesters wave their national (back) and Turksh flags during a demonstration in the port of Gaza City on June 2, 2010 against Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla on May i31, 2010., Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty Images

Instead, Turkey chose to sever diplomatic ties in all but name. The Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv will remain open, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced Friday, but all staff over the rank of second secretary will be recalled, leaving only junior diplomats to maintain a token presence. Ankara has said that it will not approve a replacement for Israel’s Ambassador Gabby Levy, currently in Israel and whose accreditation is due to expire next week.

Levy’s own remarks, as reported earlier this week by WikiLeaks, may have played a role in the exact form of retaliation Turkey chose to take. In a confidential October 2009 cable sent by the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Levy is quoted as calling Erdogan a “fundamentalist” who hates the Jewish state for personal and religious reasons. “Levy dismissed political calculation as a motivator for Erdogan’s hostility, arguing the prime minister’s party had not gained a single point in the polls from his bashing of Israel,” says the cable. “Instead, Levy attributed Erdogan’s harshness to deep-seated emotion: ‘He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously’ and his hatred is spreading.”

It’s not clear how Israel will react. But the Israeli blogosphere erupted with calls for Israel to pressure the U.S. to take draconian steps, from blocking the sale of F-35 stealth aircraft to Ankara to kicking Turkey out of NATO. “It’s also unthinkable that Turkey shall remain a member of NATO, as it engages in military cooperation with Iran and China, two states considered NATO enemies,” wrote one Guy Bechor on the Israeli Ynet portal. Washington, for its part, is in a quandary. With the Assad regime in Syria tottering under continued onslaughts from protesters, the U.S. badly needs Ankara’s help to manage the fallout from a possible civil war. And, damaged as the U.S.’s own relations are with Turkey, Ankara is emerging as the true regional victor of the Iraq War, becoming not only the economic power house but also a diplomatic power broker in the region. Washington still badly needs Turkey’s goodwill—and Davutoglu, too, still insisted in an interview with Newsweekearlier this year that NATO and the West is its “No. 1 strategic priority.” As if to prove the point, this week Turkey annouced that it would agree to host a U.S.-proposed missile defense system to warn NATO of missiles launched from Iran by the provinces of Adana and Mersin, the west's front line of defense against possible attack by Tehran. Israel and Turkey, then, still seek to be friends with Washington even as they become enemies of each other.

Article | The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

2011-09-04T22:25:00.000-07:00

The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

Sep 5, 2011 1:00 AM EDT

Turkish Soap operas are sweeping the Middle East and luring viewers with scandalous storylines.

A handsome ottoman prince is hunting in a forest when a cavalcade of horsemen rides up bearing a fateful message. Meanwhile, a slave ship full of nubile Russian women destined for the harems of Istanbul creaks its way across the Black Sea. So begins Magnificent Century, Turkey’s answer to Showtime’s The Tudors. A bodice-ripping historical soap opera based on the life of the 16th-century Suleiman the Magnificent, it’s just one of more than 100 shows produced last year by Turkey’s booming TV-drama industry. The programs are becoming a wildly popular cultural phenomenon across the Middle East, bringing in their wake a renaissance in Turkey’s soft power and ushering in a low-key social revolution among the housewives of the Arab world.

Last year the final episode of Turkey’s rags-to-riches soap Noor clocked 85 million viewers from Syria to Morocco. “These serials have a huge impact,” says Izzet Pinto, CEO of Turkey’s Global Agency, which distributes Magnificent Century and 1001 Nights,another Turkish blockbuster set in modern-day Istanbul. “In the Balkans, newborns are being named after 1001 Nights characters.” The secret is familiarity. “Neither the characters nor the subject matter nor the featured locations are foreign” to viewers, says Kemal Uzun, director of Noor. “They do not feel like outsiders to what is taking place. We are close cultures, close geographies; we have close ties.”

Sultan Suleiman is portrayed in an advertisement for Magnificent Century., Murad Sezer / Reuters-Landov

Of course, what really hooks viewers are the rollicking storylines. The secret of a good soap is that all human joys and troubles are there, usually larger than life.The Grapevine Mansion, the first great Turkish soap, debuted back in 2002. It was the tale of an urban sophisticate who marries into a small-town family living in an old mansion. There, she comes face to face with the old Turkey that most viewers left behind just a generation ago: blood feuds, illegitimate children, the bitter rivalries of the women of the house. Noor, turning the same theme on its head, is a Cinderella tale of a village girl who marries a rich Istanbul hunk, overcomes the envy of his evil mother and sister, and (spoiler alert) eventually saves the family textile business. Last year’s crop of Turkish soaps were edgier: 1001 Nightsfollows a widow forced to sleep with her boss to get medicine for her son’s leukemia; Forbidden Love is a roller coaster of suicide, betrayal, and adultery featuring an immoral mother and a vengeance-driven daughter.

“Ties” is a euphemism for the Ottoman Empire, when Turks ruled over the region that now avidly consumes their dramas. But despite a century of Arab nationalism, Arab viewers have nonetheless become keen fans of shows that hark back to an idealized Ottoman past. The craze began in 2008, when Saudi media tycoon Sheik Waleed al-Ibrahim began buying up Turkish dramas for his Pan-Arab cable network, MBC. Instead of dubbing the shows in classical Arabic, al-Ibrahim rendered them into a colloquial dialect of Syrian Arabic readily understood by ordinary viewers across the Middle East

.All successful soaps are aspirational—the key to the worldwide popularity of Dallasand Dynasty in the 1980s. But Turkish soaps are also fascinating to Middle Eastern audiences because they show how Turks-—and particularly Turkish women—handle modernity. “These serials show what the closed societies of the Middle East long to see, hear, even live: being Muslim with a modern lifestyle, a high standard of living, equality between men and women,” says Irfan Sahin, CEO of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s biggest media group and producer of Noor. ForNoor’s director Uzun, the secret of his show’s appeal is that it depicts the kind of family that the average Arab housewife longs for. “A handsome blond husband, very much in love with his only wife; a wife [who] has the economic freedom to walk away if she needs to because she’s a modern working woman; a family patriarch who is strict yet tolerant to his children and daughters-in-law.”

The world of Turkish soaps, for all its obsession with adultery and revenge, depicts an idealized Muslim and secular country—a stylized version of modern Turkey. No wonder, believes Sahin, that in real life Turkey has become “a role model with a great impact on its neighboring countries.” The rising popularity of Turkish soaps has coincided with the rise of Turkey’s soft power in the Middle East. Trade with the region has quadrupled since 2002, and last year Turkey announced a free-trade zone with Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Turkey has also been intimately engaged with the Arab Spring, pressing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to leave and attempting to mediate between Libya’s rebels and Muammar Gaddafi. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, 17 percent of Turks believe their country should look to Europe for inspiration, while 25 percent think that Turkey’s future lies with the Middle East.

One tangible sign of this regional love-in is a massive boom in Arab tourism to Turkey, fueled by new visa-free travel from Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. This summer an estimated 150,000 tourists from the Arab world were expected in Istanbul. That’s more than triple the number just four years ago. “In Europe, people are hostile and unfriendly,” says Abdullah al-Aziz, a Saudi investment consultant who brought his veiled wife, children, and Indonesian nanny to Istanbul this summer. “Here, people in hotels and restaurants speak Arabic, and they want your business.” The Aziz family was touring Büyükada, an island often used for soap-opera filming because of its preserved Ottoman villas, and planned to take a cruise to visit the Bosporus mansion where Noor is set.

Not all viewers are as enthusiastic about Turkey and its cultural exports. WhenNoor first aired in Saudi Arabia, the chairman of the country’s Supreme Judiciary Council called for the murder of satellite-television executives for showing “immorality.” Indeed, as dramas become edgier, touching on taboo subjects such as adultery, abortion, and alcohol, and as they portray women in leading roles in business, not just family life, controversy has grown. Even Magnificent Centurycaused a row in Turkey, with conservative Turks denouncing its portrayal of Suleiman drinking wine and having a harem full of sexy women (both details are historically accurate). Even Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan weighed in, calling it “an effort to show our history in a negative light to the younger generations.” Needless to say, ratings soared after the row.

What’s clear is that, like it or not, television changes societies by shaping the aspirations of ordinary people. Over the last 80 years, Turkey’s state-enforced secularism and a heavy exposure to U.S. popular culture made Turkey infinitely more Western than its neighbors in everything from dress to politics to sexual mores. In the 1980s, soaps like Dallas influenced Turkish society at a time when the country was gradually permitting enterprise and materialism. Now, as the Arab world finds itself in a similar period of flux, many television viewers are, consciously or not, looking to Turkey—not this time as resented Ottoman masters, but for a lifestyle that is both Muslim and modern.

With Deniz Mumcuoglu in Istanbul

The Turkish model | A hard act to follow

2011-09-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Turkish model | A hard act to follow

In many ways Turkey’s Islamists seem to have got things right. But it took them a long time to emerge from the country’s army-guided secularism

Aug 6th 2011 | from the Economist print edition

Advice from Erdogan (right) for Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chairman of Libya’s rebel council

PALE, bespectacled and polite, Bekir Berat Ozipek, a young professor at Istanbul’s Commerce University, is no street-fighter. But he was excited by the heady atmosphere he experienced on a recent trip to Egypt. He and two fellow Turkish scholars went to a conference at the University of Cairo where their ideas on civil-military relations were keenly gobbled up.

Then late one night, on the eve of a big protest, they went to Tahrir Square, the heart of Egypt’s uprising. They loved what they found: young people directing traffic, exuberant songs and slogans, a joker imitating ex-President Hosni Mubarak. Then they dived into a restaurant, where their chat about Egypt’s political system was joined by youngsters at the next table, as well as the waiter. Mr Ozipek thought he was living in the era of Voltaire.

A few days earlier another Turkish-Arab encounter took place. Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, was winding up a visit to rebel-controlled Libya when he decided, to his minders’ alarm, to go to the central square of Benghazi, which like its Cairene counterpart is called Tahrir, or Liberation. As the crowd chanted “Erdogan, Turkey, Muslim”, he brought greetings from his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and told them: “We have a common future and a history.”

From North Africa to the Gulf, the region seems to be going through a Turkish moment. In years past Turkey’s spotty democracy was often cited to prove a negative: the Turkish case (along with Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s, also with reservations) showed that Islam did not pose an insuperable barrier to multiparty democracy. But nothing much flowed from that observation—until the Arab spring. Turkey is now being studied by Arabs as a unique phenomenon: a movement of moderate Islamists, the Justice and Development (AK) party, has overseen an economic boom, boosted the country’s standing and shown that the coming to power of pious people need not mean a dramatic rupture in ties with the West.

Whatever the flaws of the Turkish experiment, it is clearly true that Turkey under the AK party presents a more benign picture than many other versions—real and hypothetical—of Islamist rule. The country has gained influence in the Middle East by keeping cordial ties with Iran and standing up for the Palestinians. But there is no suggestion that it will leave NATO or cut diplomatic links, however strained, with Israel. Life has been made easier for pious Muslims in ways that secular Turks dislike; but so far, at least, Turkey is a long way from any Iranian-style enforcement of female dress, let alone a clerical class that has the final say in all big decisions.

For Western observers of the Middle East, an evolution in a Turkish direction—towards relative political and economic freedom—would be a happier outcome than many others. So is there any reason why the Arab countries, having passed through their current upheavals, should not live happily, and Turkishly, ever after?

In fact, there are many reasons to be cautious about expecting Arabs to follow Turks. Turkey’s moderate Islamism did not evolve overnight. Its emergence, and taming, took a long time; it depended on many countervailing forces, including an army which was firm in its defence of a secular constitution, and was strong enough, at least until recently, to deter any imposition of Islamic rule (see article).

Both in Turkey and Egypt veterans of political Islam have seen a mixture of repression and limited participation in politics—but in Egypt the repression was harsher and the opportunities to practise democracy fewer. Albeit with fits and starts, Turkey’s Islamists had already learned some political lessons when they took power in 2002. And compared with many other politically active armies, Turkey’s has played a disinterested role. After taking power in 1980, the army moved fairly soon to restart multiparty politics and launch a free-market experiment. It did give a sop to Islam by introducing religion in schools; but that was a modest concession, made from a position of strength.

Compared with its Arab counterparts, Turkey’s secular order has deep roots, going back to the creation of a republic by Mustafa Kemal in 1923. Modern Turkey’s defining event—the defeat of a Greek expeditionary force dispatched with Western backing—was also the starting-point of a ruthless reform effort whose declared aims included “fighting religion” and ending the theocratic backwardness of the Ottomans. For decades afterwards, memory of this victorious moment was enough to fill secular nationalists with confidence, and put pious forces on the defensive.

As a largely devout Muslim nation, Turkey never ceased to produce charismatic religious leaders, but they had to adapt to the realities of a secular republic or else face prison or exile. To this day Turkey’s political and legal system bears the marks of years of army-guided secularism. Even Turkey’s Islamists remain “children of the republic”, says Berna Turam, a scholar at Boston’s Northeastern University.

Guidance from Fethullah Gulen
These days the religious teacher who wields most influence over the Turks is Fethullah Gulen, who lives in America and forms the apex of a huge conglomerate that includes NGOs, firms, newspapers and college dormitories in Turkey, plus schools across the world. Whatever the ultimate aim of Mr Gulen, his talk is Western-friendly: he mixes the vocabulary of Sufism with language that is broadly pro-business and pro-democracy.

In contrast to many Arab Islamists he tries to please Christians and Jews. Turkish sceptics say the Gulen movement is more fundamentalist, and less liberal, at its hard core than its benign external face would suggest. The fate of several journalists who have tried probing it, and found themselves prosecuted or jailed, lends weight to that belief. People who criticise the movement can face nasty smear campaigns.

But followers of Mr Gulen claim that meetings they held in the 1990s had a huge influence on Mr Erdogan, persuading him to abandon the idea of an Islamic state. Mr Gulen made an unusual break with the government after last year’s killing of nine Turks by Israeli commandos who swooped on a ship taking supplies to Gaza. He said it was partly the Turkish side’s fault: the flotilla should not have defied Israel. Thus, when Mr Erdogan faces pressure from pious mentors, it is not to be more radical but rather the opposite.

Another feature of Turkish Islamism is the number of thriving businesses with ties to the Gulen movement. Among the drivers of Turkey’s expansion—the country’s GDP per head is three times that of Egypt, with a similar population—are provincial entrepreneurs. It is now commonplace to stress the AK party’s roots in the new Anatolian bourgeoisie, and its appeal to the consumers of the country’s new-found wealth: people who mix Muslim piety with a taste for expensive cars. These groups set limits to the AK party’s ambitions; like most rich folk they favour stability. In the Arab world there are middle-class Muslims who look with envy at the confidence of their Turkish counterparts.

Ibrahim Kalin, an adviser to Mr Erdogan, posits another difference between AK and political Islam as it emerged in Egypt and Pakistan in the 20th century. Even when pretending not to, the latter movements always dreamed of a powerful Islamic government, using the tools of modern statehood, like universal education, to impose a Muslim order. AK, by contrast, lives comfortably in a world of “lighter” states, where other agencies, including NGOs, the private sector and academia can play a bigger role.

In AK circles it is common to hear such postmodern talk mixed with nostalgia for the Ottoman era, when each faith ran its own system of education and personal law. Ali Bulac, a columnist, argues that citizens with civil disputes should consider Muslim arbitration: he says that could be combined with retaining the secular penal code, a cornerstone of the republic. Muslim democracy alla turca is already an unusual creature, and is still mutating.

from the print edition | Briefing

Turkey and the Kurds | Giving war a chance

2011-09-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

Turkey and the Kurds | Giving war a chance
The Turkish response to a surge in Kurdish violence has been swift and hard
Aug 27th 2011 | DIYARBAKIR AND ULUDERE | from the print edition

THE dull thud of mortar shells echoes across the barren mountains separating Turkey from Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. Columns of armoured vehicles trundle along the border as Turkish F-16 fighter jets screech over their targets: rebels of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). On a nearby peak hundreds of Kurdish “peace mothers” keep vigil for their sons; some of them soldiers in the Turkish army, others PKK fighters inside Iraq. They won’t come down, they say, until Turkey halts its air strikes. The army is blocking buses containing thousands of Kurds who want to join the protests, paralysing traffic in the narrow mountain roads. “They are being used by the PKK—we won’t allow it,” says a stony-faced corporal.

The scenes are ominously reminiscent of the worst excesses of the 1990s, when some 3,000 Kurdish villages were emptied and destroyed, and torture and extra-judicial killings of dissidents were rife. But life has since got better for Turkey’s 14m Kurds, particularly under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Justice and Development (AK) party, which has ruled the country since 2002.

Mr Erdogan is the first Turkish leader to acknowledge the state’s “mistakes” in its handling of the Kurds. In a slew of groundbreaking reforms, AK has eased restrictions on the Kurds’ long-banned mother tongue, poured money into their impoverished region and launched secret talks with the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. In 2009 a deal to disarm the rebels seemed within reach.

This collapsed after a string of deadly PKK attacks. Yet the government continued to talk to Mr Ocalan, who, despite having spent the last 12 years behind bars, has largely retained his grip on the PKK. But everything changed last month when the rebels escalated the violence, killing more than 40 Turkish soldiers and policemen.

Matters came to a head when the PKK set off a landmine in the township of Cukurca near the Iraqi border, killing nine soldiers. Declaring that his patience had run out, Mr Erdogan ordered a wave of air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq. The army claims that at least 100 rebels have been killed since the operation started on August 17th. The PKK says it has lost only three men. A war of words has erupted over the reported killing of seven Iraqi Kurdish civilians, two of them babies, by a stray Turkish bomb. The army has dismissed footage of their dismembered bodies as “PKK propaganda”. But Masoud Barzani, head of the Iraqi Kurds’ semi-independent enclave, insists that the claims are real and has angrily called for an immediate end to the Turkish offensive.

America, which has backed Turkey in its battle against the PKK (it shares satellite intelligence on the rebels), is getting nervous. The fitful entente between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds is crucial to America’s quest to keep Iraq stable. But Turkey insists its attacks will continue.

What can Turkey hope to achieve? Not a lot, probably. Previous incursions into Iraq have damaged PKK bases and killed many rebels. But the fighters keep coming back, and in greater numbers. Lack of co-ordination, and mutual mistrust, between the army and the police do not help. Mr Erdogan has often admitted that the Kurdish problem cannot be solved by military means alone, and he has vowed to continue his reforms. Yet officials close to the prime minister say he is fed up with the Kurds’ unrelenting demands.

The Kurds reply that the impasse is entirely Turkey’s fault. “We are treated like pariahs,” insists Ayla Akat Ata, one of 35 deputies from the pro-Kurdish BDP party elected to parliament in a general election in June. Six of her fellow deputies remain in prison, mostly on terrorism charges. The BDP is boycotting parliament until the government agrees to legal changes that would set them free. At least 3,500 other pro-Kurdish figures, including several elected mayors, have been imprisoned on AK’s watch. Evidence “proving” their links to the PKK includes their sporting chequered Palestinian-style scarves and attending rebel funerals.

The BDP’s wishlist includes regional autonomy, Kurdish-language education, an amnesty for PKK fighters and an end to laws that land not only Kurds but dissidents of all stripes in jail. When Mr Erdogan begins to draft the new constitution he has promised, he will have to accommodate some of these demands. But even if he meets all of them it is not clear that the violence will cease, says a senior Turkish security official in a border province.

The PKK began as a home-grown movement fed by genuine grievances. But it has since evolved into a complex network spanning Europe and the Middle East, with connections to organised crime and rogue elements in the Turkish security forces, who have profited from the war and want it to continue. (Both the United States and the European Union brand the PKK a terrorist organisation.)

Equally unhelpfully, Syria and Iran have long used the PKK as leverage against Turkey. Turkish intelligence sources claim that the Cukurca attack was ordered by Fehman Hussein, a Syrian PKK commander. In a further twist, Murat Karayilan, the senior PKK commander in northern Iraq, who is seen as a moderate and who was involved in brokering the now-defunct deal with Turkey, has gone missing. Rumour is rife that he is in Iranian hands. Amid the speculation, one truth stands out: the Kurds and their problems will be around for a long time to come.

from the print edition | Europe

Article | Dimming the Red Lights in Turkey

2011-08-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

Dimming the Red Lights in Turkey
The unsavory, garbage-strewn pathway to the city's sex district.
By ANNA LOUIE SUSSMAN[1]
Published NY Times: August 19, 2011
[1]Anna Louie Sussman reported from Istanbul with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

On a Sunday afternoon earlier this summer, hundreds of Turkish men disappeared down a short alleyway just a five-minute walk from the Istanbul Modern art museum. Some flicked prayer beads around their fingers. The younger ones arrived in small groups, flashing nervous grins and smoothing their hair down with spit. They strode by a pile of garbage bags holding wadded-up tissues and cigarette butts before reaching a metal gate that separated the alley from their destination: Kadem Street, a narrow cul-de-sac and one of the country’s few remaining red-light districts.

A policeman scanned the men’s identification cards and ushered them through a metal detector and into the fray, where voluptuous women in bras and underwear occupied the doorways of the half-dozen houses that lined the street. Minors were refused entry. Minors who could afford a 20-lira bribe were not.

Since the 1870s, prostitution has thrived in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district, which houses Kadem and its sister street, Zurafa. For five decades, an Armenian businesswoman, Matild Manukyan, ran an empire of Beyoglu brothels that netted her an estimated $4 million annually until her death in 2001. Sunday, the last day of rest before the workweek, always brought her particularly brisk business.

Now, the alleyway leading to Kadem is lined with plumbing and appliance shops, all of which are closed on Sunday. For most of the day, the only commerce on the street consisted of a man hawking peeled cucumbers from a wooden cart at one end and a shoe shiner with bloodshot eyes and a raspy voice at the other. Midafternoon, a man trudged by with another cart, this one bearing bananas.

“Cucumbers and bananas, for energy,” explained Yenten, an unemployed construction worker. He emerged from prison two days earlier, after a three-month stint for failing to pay alimony to his ex-wife. Saturday he visited relatives, and Sunday found him sitting on the sidewalk outside Kadem, pulling on cigarettes and contemplating a little diversion.

“I’m a single man,” he said. “I need this.”

A no-frills encounter costs 35 Turkish lira, around $20. Twenty lira goes to the house, the rest to the woman. A little tenderness — kissing, caressing, honeyed words — costs 15 to 20 lira extra, which strikes Yenten as unjust.

“That place is a money trap,” he said. “If you don’t give the extra 20 lira tip, they act very rude. They just have sex and throw you out.”

Sitting next to him on the curb were two cousins, recent high-school graduates, who live on the fringes of Istanbul. The blond one was 18, short and stout, with a pimply face. “If we have money, even just a little, we come here,” he said. “These women are healthy, the government checks them and we trust them.” Other options for paid sex — “telegirls,” who are reachable via cellphone or Web sites; Eastern European women, or “Natashas,” who work out of unlicensed houses; and pavyons, hostess bars, which require an evening of drinking — hold less appeal.

His handsome, green-eyed cousin visits Kadem Street regularly, although he has a serious girlfriend whom he meets late at night in a park near his house. They kiss, but sex before marriage is out of the question. “You can’t just sleep with the girl you love,” he says. Nor can you tell her you visit brothels. “She would break up with me immediately.”

With Manukyan’s death, the city lost not only a substantial source of revenue (she reportedly paid $1.2 million in taxes in 1992), but also a good half-dozen of its best-known brothels. Her son, an engineer, closed her properties. None have reopened, a likely consequence of the ruling Islamist party’s disdain for this particular line of work.

Jafar, a mustachioed man who identified himself as a brothel guard, said the government has essentially stopped granting sex licenses. Numbers are notoriously difficult to come by, but Jafar estimates that as many as 7,000 women in Istanbul have pending applications, while only around 130, according to the research of Sevval Kilic, an activist for sex workers’ rights, are officially registered. She estimates that at least 100,000 women work in Turkey’s sex industry illegally.

Yasemin, a sex worker with full lips and blue eyes, arrived at Kadem Street eight years ago, after nearly three decades in brothels in other parts of Turkey. At 45, she doesn’t do the half-clothed-and-beckoning routine. She waits inside, listening to music on her headphones. She sees 5 to 15 clients in a day, mostly regulars, netting up to $6,000 a month. Her colleagues, she said, will see as many as 50 men in a 12-hour workday.

“Nowadays these women have all lost their morals,” she said. “There’s no more service, no more caring for the customers.”

Once upon a time, she said, “these used to be houses of love.”

We in Turkey and the Middle East have replaced humiliation with dignity

2011-08-10T09:08:00.001-07:00

We in Turkey and the Middle East have replaced humiliation with dignity
From Libya to Turkey the will of the people has revived a sense of common destiny. This is now our region[*]
Ahmet Davutoglu Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey.

[•]This is an edited extract of a speech Ahmet Davutoglu delivered this week at the sixth Al-Jazeera forum in Doha

wave of revolutions in the Arab world was spontaneous. But it also had to happen. They were necessary in order to restore the natural flow of history. In our region – west Asia and the south Mediterranean – there were two abnormalities in the last century: first, colonialism in the 1930s, 40s and 50s that divided the region into colonial entities, and severed the natural links between peoples and communities. For example, Syria was a French colony and Iraq a British one, so the historical and economic links between Damascus and Baghdad were cut.

The second abnormality was the cold war, which added a further division: countries that had lived together for centuries became enemies, like Turkey and Syria. We were in Nato; Syria was pro-Soviet. Our border became not a border between two nation states, but the border between two blocs. Yemen was likewise divided.

Now it is time to naturalise the flow of history. I see all these revolutions as a delayed process that should have happened in the late 80s and 90s as in eastern Europe. It did not because some argued that Arab societies didn't deserve democracy, and needed authoritarian regimes to preserve the status quo and prevent Islamist radicalism. Some countries and leaders who were proud of their own democracy, insisted that democracy in the Middle East would threaten security in our region.

Now we are saying all together: no. An ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian can change history. We believe that democracy is good, and that our people deserve it. This is a natural flow of history. Everybody must respect this will of the people.

If we fail to understand that there is a need to reconnect societies, communities, tribes and ethnicities in our region, we will lose the momentum of history. Our future is our sense of common destiny. All of us in the region have a common destiny.

Now, if this transformation is a natural flow of the history, then how should we respond? First, we need an emergency plan to save people's lives, to prevent disaster. Second, we need to normalise life. And finally, we need to reconstruct and restore the political systems in our region, just as we would rebuild our houses after a tsunami.

But in order to undertake that restoration, we need a plan, a vision. And we need the self-confidence to do it – the self-confidence to say: this region is ours, and we will be the rebuilders of it. But for all this to happen, we must be clear about the basic principles that we have to follow.

First, we need to trust the masses in our region, who want respect and dignity. This is the critical concept today: dignity. For decades we have been insulted. For decades we have been humiliated. Now we want dignity. That is what the young people in Tahrir Square demanded. After listening to them, I became much more optimistic for the future. That generation is the future of Egypt. They know what they want. This is a new momentum in our region, and it should be respected.

The second principle is that change and transformation are a necessity, not a choice. If history flows and you try to resist it, you will lose. No leader, however charismatic, can stop the flow of history. Now it is time for change. Nobody should cling to the old cold war logic. Nobody should argue that only a particular regime or person can guarantee a country's stability. The only guarantee of stability is the people.

Third, this change must be peaceful – security and freedom are not alternatives; we need both. In this region we are fed up with civil wars, and tension. All of us have to act wisely without creating violence or civil strife between brothers and sisters. We have to make this change possible with the same spirit of common destiny.

Fourth, we need transparency, accountability, human rights and the rule of law, and to protect our social and state institutions. Revolution does not mean destruction. The Egyptian case is a good example: the army acted very wisely not to confront the people. But if there is no clear separation between the military and civilian roles of the political institutions, you may face problems. I am impressed by Field Marshal Tantawi's decision to deliver power to the civilian authority as soon as possible.

Finally, the territorial integrity of our countries and the region must be protected. The legal status and territorial integrity of states including Libya and Yemen should be protected. During colonialism and cold war we had enough divisions, enough separations.

This process must be led by the people of each country, but there should be regional ownership. This is our region. Intellectuals, opinion-makers, politicians of this region should come together more frequently in order to decide what should happen in our region in the future. We are linked to each other for centuries to come.

Whatever happens in Egypt, in Libya, in Yemen, in Iraq or in Lebanon affects us all. Therefore we should show solidarity with the people of these countries. There should be more regional forums, for politicians and leaders, for intellectuals, for the media.

Usually the "Middle East" – an orientalist term – is regarded as synonymous with tensions, conflicts and underdevelopment. But our region has been the centre of civilisation for millennia, leading to strong traditions of political order in which multicultural environments flourish. In addition to this civilisational and political heritage, we have sufficient economic resources today to make our region a global centre of gravity.

Now it is time to make historic reassessments in order to transform our region into one of stability, freedom, prosperity, cultural revival and co-existence. In this new regional order there should be less violence and fewer barriers between countries, societies and sects. But there should be more economic interdependency, more political dialogue and more cultural interaction.

Today the search for a new global order is under way. After the international financial crisis, we need to develop an economic order based on justice, and a social order based on respect and dignity. And this region – our region – can contribute to the formation of this emerging new order: a global, political, economic and cultural new order.

Our responsibility is to open the way for this new generation, and to build a new region over the coming decade that will be specified by the will of its people.

Article | Turkey after the election

2011-07-17T04:58:00.000-07:00

Turkey after the election
Business as usual
It has not taken long for rancour to return to Turkish politics
Jun 30th 2011 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

RIDING on pledges of continaued stability and more democracy, on June 12th Turkey’s conservative Justice and Development (AK) party was returned to an unprecedented third term of office. In his victory speech the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared that he would work with the opposition to write a new constitution. Yet a fortnight later the country seems on the verge of political deadlock. At the opening session of the new parliament almost one-third of the deputies refused to be sworn in.

The largest group of refuseniks came from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Some 132 of the party’s deputies declined to take their oath in protest against a court decision to keep two of their elected colleagues in prison. Mustafa Balbay, a journalist, and Mehmet Haberal, a doctor, have been awaiting trial for over two years in the so-called Ergenekon case, involving scores of generals and allies who allegedly plotted to overthrow AK.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the CHP’s leader, says both men should be considered innocent until proven guilty and has called on Mr Erdogan to come up with legal changes that would allow them to be freed. He was quick to remind the prime minister that when he had faced similar troubles it was the CHP that helped him out. In 1998 Mr Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, was briefly imprisoned and barred from politics for five years after he had recited several verses from a nationalist poem that prosecutors deemed to be a call for sharia rule. When AK won power in 2002 it was only after the CHP approved constitutional tweaks that Mr Erdogan was permitted to stand in a by-election and claim the premiership.

Yet the prime minister seems unswayed. Unlike the CHP jailbirds, he says, he was prosecuted not for a “terror” crime but for his thoughts. Tell that to the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which is boycotting the grand national assembly altogether and collectively sulking in Diyarbakir, the Kurds’ unofficial capital. Five of the party’s elected members have been told by a court that they must remain in prison, where they face trial on terror-related charges. A sixth Kurdish deputy, Hatip Dicle, was barred from parliament because of a prior conviction on charges of membership of the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Mr Dicle’s crime was to have publicly backed the PKK’s right to defend itself against the army. Yet the decision to keep him behind bars appears to contradict an earlier ruling that he should be allowed to stand for election.

AK officials hint darkly at a new Ergenekon-inspired plot to sabotage democracy. The BDP and CHP retort that the electoral board and courts are stacked with pro-AK men. Either way, what seems clear is that despite many AK-inspired reforms, Turkey’s judicial and electoral system is in need of a radical overhaul.

Meanwhile, the PKK is threatening to end its truce and to carry its insurgency to the cities unless the BDP deputies are freed. But Mr Erdogan shows no signs of relenting. Judicial independence must be respected, he insists. He has spurned the CHP’s demands for legal changes, saying that the opposition created the mess by fielding controversial candidates. As for the Kurds, this week Mr Erdogan rebuffed the BDP’s request for a meeting.

There are several reasons for this uncompromising stance. Mr Erdogan may fear that creating legal loopholes for the jailed CHP deputies will weaken the case against the rest of the Ergenekon suspects. And he is maintaining the determinedly nationalist tone he adopted on the campaign trail, a tactic designed to steal votes from the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Yet although an MHP deputy is also in prison, the nationalists took their oaths this week. Could a new alliance be in the works? Add the MHP’s 53 seats to AK’s 328 and a new constitution, which requires some cross-party support, would be in the bag. But at what price? Deepening political and economic instability and, possibly, further bloodshed seem the likely answer. The canny Mr Erdogan has always known when to pull back from the brink. The hopes are that he will do so again.

from the print edition | Europe

The lofty Mr Erdogan

2011-07-17T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Turkish government
The lofty Mr Erdogan
The prime minister picks a government and lures the opposition to parliament
Jul 14th 2011 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL | from the print edition

TURKEY’S prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has a knack for getting his way. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), had vowed that he and his colleagues would not be sworn in until two jailed members who won seats in a general election on June 12th were freed. But this week the party’s deputies took their oaths in parliament, averting a drawn-out political crisis, even though the courts had rejected appeals for the members’ release.

Mr Kilicdaroglu had said it was up to Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party to make the necessary legal changes. In the event it took no more than vaguely worded pledges for the CHP to cave in. The laws are untouched—and the CHP jailbirds remain banged up. So do five new deputies from the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), who are behind bars on terror-related charges. The BDP had boycotted parliament altogether, holding its own sessions in the Kurds’ unofficial capital, Diyarbakir. But as The Economist went to press, they too seemed to be on the verge of striking a deal, just as the derisive Mr Erdogan had predicted.

Mr Erdogan has good reason for his lofty confidence. In June AK was elected to a third term of single-party rule, with a record vote of just under 50%. Only the vagaries of the electoral system gave it less than the two-thirds majority in the 550-strong chamber that would have allowed it unilaterally to write a new constitution. The latest polls give it an even bigger share of the vote. Perhaps this is no surprise. As his opponents have been sulking, Mr Erdogan has been playing the statesman.

He has announced a new cabinet that keeps the main ministers in their jobs. And he has launched several ambitious diplomatic initiatives. His foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was cheered by thousands of Libyans in Benghazi when he told them (in fluent Arabic) that it was time for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to go. Their enthusiasm will have been shared in Western capitals that once lamented Turkish reluctance to sever ties to the Libyan leader.

This week Mr Davutoglu took aim at the European Union and Cyprus. He said relations between Turkey and the EU would be “frozen” if the Greek-Cypriots took on the rotating EU presidency in July 2012 with the island still divided. Turkey does not recognise the Greek-Cypriot republic as the legitimate representative of the island so “we would not accept them as interlocutors”, said Mr Davutoglu. His statement came as the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Stefan Fule, was in Ankara.

Some might say Turkey’s EU accession talks are already frozen. Of the 35 chapters in the talks as many as 18 are blocked, whether by the EU as a whole, by Cyprus or by France. The last new chapter to be opened was on food safety, in June 2010. Yet predictions that an irate Mr Erdogan would scrap the EU portfolio in his government were wrong. Not only has his EU negotiator, Egemen Bagis, kept his job, he has been upgraded to minister. And in a bid to jump-start flagging Cyprus talks, Turkey is reportedly ready to discuss land swaps without preconditions.

Despite his autocratic reputation Mr Erdogan has also made conciliatory gestures at home. He has withdrawn a series of defamation suits against writers and others. This week the government moved to help rescue a tiny newspaper still read by Istanbul’s shrinking Greek population. And secret talks between the government and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdish PKK leader, continue despite Mr Erdogan’s anti-Kurdish tone during the campaign.

Mr Ocalan has suggested that a deal to bring an end to the PKK’s 27 years of insurgency might be within reach. The risk is that residual mischief-makers in the army and elsewhere might try to stop this. As ever the best antidote is more democracy. This can only come by writing a new constitution that does away with the strictures in the document written by the generals after a coup in 1980. This requires engaging the opposition, not sneering at it—which is what Mr Erdogan has been doing since his election victory.

As the deputy prime minister for the economy, Ali Babacan, also noted this week, Turkey cannot remain immune to the economic turmoil in Europe. On the contrary, with an overheating economy (the current-account deficit is likely to hit 9% of GDP this year) and almost half its trade conducted with Europe, Turkey looks vulnerable. The biggest reason for AK’s popularity is its successful economic management. It is a record that is becoming harder to sustain.

from the print edition | Europe

Frick | Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette

2011-07-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

M. de Chamfort, Mustapha et Zeangir. Tragédie en cinq actes et en vers. Représentée sur le Théâtre de Fontainebleau devant leurs Majestés, le premier Novembre 1776 et le 7 Novembre 1777. A Paris, sur le Théâtre de la Comédie Française, le 15 Décembre 1777. Dédiée à la Reine. Par M. de Chamfort, Secrétaire des Commandemens de son Altesse Sérénissime Monseigneur le Prince de Condé, Membre de l'Académie de Marseille. Nouvelle Edition. A Paris, Chez Delalain, rue & à côté de la Comédie Françoise, 1778
In-8, 48 pp.

By the late eighteenth century, France had long been fascinated by the Ottoman empire. Trade with Turkish territories had gone on for centuries, bringing precious velvets, brocades, carpets, arabesque-decorated leathers, and metalwork to the Continent. In the fall of 1776, a performance of Mustapha and Zeangir, a tragedy in five acts by Sebastien-Roch Chamford that played in Paris, seems to have launched a taste for interiors “à la Turc,” or “in the Turkish style.” Soon after, boudoirs turcs were created in several royal residences, especially in the circle of Marie-Antoinette and the comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s younger brother. This taste seems to have been confined largely to the royal court and the French aristocracy, and few objects from such rooms survive today. In the summer of 2011, the Frick will present a dossier exhibition on the subject, bringing together several examples that have rarely — or, in some cases never — been on view in New York City.

This exhibition was inspired by a pair of French console-tables at the Frick, whose exceptional quality suggests a royal origin. The tabletops are supported by two Nubian slaves who wear pearl-bedecked turbans; each figure holds a floral garland surrounding a medallion depicting a Sultan. The Turkish iconography is complemented by a frieze of crossed crescents, a symbol of the Ottoman empire. Such objects were not literal copies of Turkish models. Rather, they were created by interior decorators, architects, designers, and craftsmen inspired by an imaginary Ottoman empire, such as that depicted in A Thousand and One Nights and in the aforementioned tragedy Mustapha and Zeangir. Although the objects often featured turbaned figures, camels, palm trees, cornucopias, arabesques, crossed crescents, pearls and jewel-like ornaments, elaborate draperies, and heavy garlands of fruits and flowers, their form and function remained essentially French. Having been made for the royal family or wealthy aristocrats, the objects were usually of the highest quality, and can be attributed to the best artists and craftsmen of the time.

Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette is being organized by Charlotte Vignon, the Frick’s Associate Curator of Decorative Arts.

Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette

2011-07-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette
June 8 through September 11, 2011

Introduction to the Exhibition

Soon after Marie-Antoinette ascended the throne in France in May 1775, the young queen embraced a new fashion for interiors à la turc. This style grew out of a taste for neoclassical decoration initiated about 1770 by architects and designers who had studied ancient architecture in Italy. To the classical motifs, le goût turc called for the addition of turbaned figures, camels, crossed crescents, pearls, and other decorative elements associated with the Ottoman Empire. Such an eccentric style was reserved for the decoration of private spaces, boudoirs, or cabinets, which gave designers and architects more freedom than was permitted in public apartments at court or in aristocratic residences. As a result, furniture and decoration for such spaces were particularly ornate.

Marie-Antoinette's brother-in-law, the comte d'Artois, was also fond of interiors decorated in the Turkish style. The younger brother of Louis XVI, d'Artois took the lead in 1776 by commissioning a cabinet turc for his Parisian residence, the Palais du Temple. He was soon followed by Marie-Antoinette, who created a boudoir turc at the Château de Fontainebleau in 1777. The comte d'Artois commissioned two other cabinets turcs: one at Versailles in 1781–82 and an additional one in the Palais du Temple in 1783. Meanwhile, the queen commissioned a boudoir turc for her apartments at Versailles, and her friend the princess of Guéméné added one to her Château de Montreuil. Although a few other Turkish rooms existed, this fashion was confined almost exclusively to the royal court and the French aristocracy.

Le goût turc was inspired by several operas and plays with Turkish themes that were popular at the time, such as Achmet and Almazine, The Three Sultanas, and Zémire and Azor, which were performed at the French court in 1776 and 1777. On November 1, 1776, the royal theater of Fontainebleau premiered Mustapha and Zéangir, a tragedy in five acts by Sebastien-Roch Chamford. Marie-Antoinette was so pleased with the production that she congratulated the author with a handsome reward of 1,200 livres.

Such performances belonged to a century-long craze for Oriental tales, which took root soon after the first translation in French of Antoine Galland's Thousand and One Nights, published in several volumes between 1704 and 1717. Besides this central text, other famous and influential works of eighteenth-century Orientalist literature included the satirical Persian Letters by Montesquieu (1721), the comte de Caylus's Oriental Tales (1743), Voltaire's play Mahomet (1736), and his philosophical account Zadig (1747), to cite only a few. Some of these were works of pure fiction, others derived directly from Oriental narratives, and some were inspired by the epic lives of historical figures.

The relationship between the Turkish rooms at the court of Marie-Antoinette and a fictional Orient diffused through tales, plays, and operas is strengthened by the fact that some of the architects responsible for the designs of such Turkish productions were also involved in the creation of Turkish rooms. All the stage sets have disappeared, and only one cabinet turc has survived: the one made in 1777 for Marie-Antoinette at Fontainebleau. Sadly, only a few of the decorative elements and pieces of furniture made especially for Turkish rooms have survived; among these examples are the six pieces presented in this exhibition. These objects often feature motifs associated with Turkish culture but are not literal copies of Turkish originals; their form and function remain essentially French. All are of the highest quality, as we would expect of works of art made for a queen, a future king, or wealthy aristocrats by some of the finest artists and craftsmen employed by the royal court.

The exhibition is made possible by Koç Holding.

Chronicling the Caliphate

2011-06-21T04:28:00.000-07:00

Chronicling the Caliphate
The Ottoman Empire’s greatest travel writer captured a peak moment in Islamic civilization.

There are important reasons why we should all learn more about life during the Ottoman Empire. It was the last era in which a sultan-caliph, a sort of Islamic emperor-pope, held sway over virtually the entire Muslim geosphere. Many Islamists today explicitly yearn for the return of such a unified Muslim super-state. At the Ottoman Empire’s zenith, roughly between 1600 and 1700, Sharia dominated human affairs from India to Morocco and deep into Europe, stopping just short of Vienna. That era could furnish clues to what it might be like again if the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk gain widespread momentum. Furthermore, with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banging on about his party’s “neo-Ottoman” approach to foreign policy, it behooves us to know what coherent world view, if any, he and other nostalgists are drawing on for their grand designs.
The most exhaustive chronicle of the Ottoman world and environs was recorded by Evliya Çelebi (b. 1611), a figure celebrated in the Muslim world as one of history’s greatest travel writers, on par with Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A Turk born in Istanbul to a privileged court family, Çelebi traveled for about 45 years, from 1640 up to the year he died in Cairo. He spent those decades crisscrossing the sultan’s dominions, completing pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem and even entering “infidel” Vienna as an ambassador. A native Istanbullu, his intricate portrait of the costumes and conventions of his hometown remains the richest source text for historians. He wrote 10 long volumes of his Seyahatname, or travelogue, in the ornately archaic Arabic-scripted Ottoman language of his day, a language as remote to modern Turks as Latin to Italians. Turks know all about him, name parks after him, but very few read him at any length.

A volume of outtakes from his work, titled An Ottoman Traveller: Selections From the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, was recently published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Çelebi’s birth. Selected and translated by Ottoman experts Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, it gives us the most accessible glimpse to date into Çelebi’s text, itself a window onto a highly cultivated sensibility living at a peak moment in Islamic civilization. Çelebi embarked on his travels two years after the brutally efficient Sultan Murat IV reconquered Baghdad from the Persians in 1638. (The honorific title of Çelebi denoted a gentleman or esquire of Sultan Murat’s era, and indeed the ancestors of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi originally came from Turkey with the sultan’s invasion forces.) In various campaigns Murat had stamped out revolts in Anatolia and stabilized the empire’s borders. The ensuing order made the Seyahatname possible, though Murat died the same year that Çelebi set out.

The book can be enjoyed on many levels—for its descriptions of towns, natural wonders, and ancient monuments such as the Parthenon and the Kaaba; for its Sufi-dervish notions of “mystical” love; for its nutty take on history, such as the bios of Jesus and Plato; and for the pleasant company of its unreliable narrator. But one’s first reaction is to marvel at the utter strangeness of the world on view. From Istanbul’s guilds of lion tamers and snow procurers to sorcerers and torturers in far-flung provinces, the unfolding panorama teeming with marvels and superstitions seems closer to the world of antiquity than to our own day.

Çelebi certainly knows how to tell a tall tale, but he makes you wade through thickets of religious allusions and invocations, an odd habit in a narrative full of bawdy moments. Çelebi was a renowned reciter of the Quran, and he indulges his erudition at every turn. Take the stormy shipwreck in the Black Sea. “By God’s will black clouds appeared in the sky,” he says, and soon he detects God’s unknowable wisdom in the horrors that follow, which he survives wrapped around a floating bowsprit, in a yarn as gripping as any that Joseph Conrad spun. Some years later, a sorcerer at the court of the Kurdish Ziyaeddin Khan in Diyarbakir flies in the sky and pees out an entire lake onto the audience, to the khan’s delight. When the sorcerer eventually quarrels with the khan and has his head split open with an ax, Çelebi detects the inscrutable will of God. He offers the Quranic quote, “There is no turning away His decree, and no preventing His judgment.”

Çelebi visits Sofia in Bulgaria and finds the townsfolk much attached to prostitutes. The pasha in charge ultimately punishes the town: “A few of [the prostitutes], by the leave of the Sharia and the reform of the world, were strung up like chandeliers.” Sadly, this results in a curse: “By God’s wisdom, the plague did spread in the city from day to day. Seventy-seven of our fortunate [sic] lord’s highest officers died.” The city empties. The pasha is ousted.

What was Çelebi’s message, always punctuated by piety, in relating such baffling incidents that occur frequently in the book? The editors give us no clues. Did Çelebi intend for us to believe his stories? And what kind of arbitrary God was he pointing to? Turkish scholars would say that when Çelebi gets fantastical he is purveying parables or satires akin to, say, Gulliver’s Travels, with embedded political messages. The explanation works up to a point. On one occasion, Çelebi visits the relatively Islamized Crimean Tatars and joins in battle against another Turkic tribe, the pagan Kalmyks. He tells a literally incredible story in which an old Kalmyk shaman, with no discernible motive, helps Çelebi’s side retreat by casting a spell to temporarily freeze a river. Read it how you will, no hidden message can be gleaned from this or myriad similar incidents. We’re left thinking that Çelebi lived in a kind of magic-realist ambience where physics and metaphysics had yet to separate, where the miraculous abounded because it was impious to seek cause and effect in the world of matter.

It’s worth remembering that Galileo, who effectively launched modern science in the West, died around the time Çelebi set off traveling. Galileo suffered for his “heresies,” but by the time Çelebi died, Britain’s Royal Society under Charles II was conducting officially sanctioned experiments in empirical observation. How does this offer any sort of bearing on the present, you might ask? Answer: think only of places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan’s tribal territories, where caliph-besotted Sharia-mongers thrive. Think of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, in which the perpetrators genuinely believed their martyred bodies would exude perfume as they attained paradise. At its worst, this world view may seem appallingly superstitious and cruel; nevertheless, Çelebi’s universe is one that many either still inhabit or would like others to reinhabit. Their kind will not read Çelebi: they’re not allowed to stray that far from scripture. For them, a little empirical brush-up on history would work miracles.
Kaylan was born in Turkey and educated in England. A journalist in New York for 25 years, he writes about cultures in conflict from China to the Middle East. He covers culture for The Wall Street Journal.

Prime Minister Erdogan: Turkey's Man of The People

2011-06-19T04:40:00.000-07:00

Prime Minister Erdogan: Turkey's Man of The People
By RANA FOROOHAR Monday, June 27, 2011

You could call it poetic justice. Back in 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then an up-and-coming young mayor of Istanbul with populist appeal and Islamist leanings, was sentenced to 10 months in jail for reciting a century-old poem that the country's generals — the enforcers of Turkey's constitutionally mandated secularism — found offensive. "Minarets are our bayonets," the poem went, "the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the believers our army." Erdogan was packed away for inciting religious hatred, but not before shouting that "this song is not yet over."

And how. On June 12, Erdogan led his Justice and Development Party (the AKP) to its third consecutive victory in Turkish parliamentary elections, improving on his 47% landslide victory in 2007 by bringing in 50% of the vote. The Prime Minister, who has led the country since 2003 and is widely considered to be the most successful politician of his generation, had lost none of his bluster, proclaiming the results a victory "for Bosnia as much as Istanbul, Beirut as much as Izmir, Damascus as much as Ankara."

Certainly people in all those places — and far beyond — were watching the election, which will likely have a critical impact on the region and the wider world. Erdogan has arguably been the most transformational leader in Turkey since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. A 57-year-old former soccer player and native of Istanbul's tough Kasimpasa district, Erdogan, a pious Muslim with a headscarf-wearing wife, appeals to the devout among Turkey's Anatolian masses, who, like religious Americans from the heartland, often feel condescended to by the coastal, secular elite. But he's also popular among the urban working class, which is dealing with issues of cultural dislocation, and millions of small- and midsize-business owners who like what he's done for the economy over the past decade. Erdogan may be a populist figure who knows how to chest-thump his way to points with a nationalist electorate, but he's also a savvy economic manager and, to some, a reformer who would like Turkey to play a much bigger economic and political role on the global stage.

The first of those qualities cemented Erdogan's victory this time around. "It's the economy, stupid" could have been the slogan for this election. "Most people vote with their pocketbooks," says Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar and expert on Turkey at the Carnegie Endowment. "This government is reaping the benefits of reforms started back in the 1980s." That's when Turkey, like so many developing nations, began to open up to the world and liberalize its markets. But it wasn't until 2001 when Turkey began to enforce International Monetary Fund fiscal targets that things really improved. Since then, the AKP has steered the ship exceptionally well. During its tenure, per capita income in the country has tripled, exports have quadrupled, and inflation has dropped from as high as 37% to between 5% and 8%. Turkey has the 17th largest economy in the world, and Goldman Sachs predicts it will break into the top 10 by 2050, assuming things stay on track.

So far they have. While Old Europe is facing a debt meltdown and many of the East European tigers were blown up in the financial crisis, Turkey, with a population of 78.8 million, is one of a handful of countries that managed to rebound quickly from the global downturn. Turkey's economy grew 8.9% last year, the fastest rate of any large country aside from China and India. "It's kind of unbelievable how well they've managed the economy," says Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who specializes in Middle Eastern economies. "Turkey has become a darling among foreign investors."
Many of those investors are regional neighbors: there's a lot of Gulf money in Turkey, and many Turkish multinationals operate in the Arab world. Iran and Iraq are among Turkey's largest trading partners. But these economic alliances are only part of a larger role that Erdogan would like to see his country play in regional and world affairs. Turkey is a huge energy corridor, with oil and gas pipelines running across it. Like China, it's a major builder of infrastructure projects at home and abroad. It has the second largest army in NATO after that of the U.S. And it hopes to become a member of the European Union, though European Islamophobia has in recent years soured those ambitions. Perhaps most important, it's a working example of Muslim democracy.
(See why Syria and Turkey are suddenly far apart on Arab Spring protests)
All this fuels Erdogan's aspirations to be a regional leader. While there's no real "Ankara consensus," Turkey has in the past few years pursued a policy of "zero problems toward neighbors," a phrase coined by charismatic Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The AKP has tried to warm relations with the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iran, Syria and other neighbors. But results have been mixed. Attempts to broker a deal between the U.N. and Iran to avoid further sanctions over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program fell apart. The once friendly relationship with Israel turned icy after the killing of aid workers aboard a Turkish flotilla headed for Gaza last year.

Perhaps most pertinent, Erdogan, who likes to paint himself as a man of the people, has been far from sure-footed in his handling of the revolutions in the Middle East. Many Anatolian companies have carved substantial business opportunities in the autocracies surrounding Turkey, which makes them defenders of the status quo. That's made it tricky for Erdogan to get in sync with rapidly changing public opinion in the region. Two years ago, for example, when Iranians took to the streets to protest election results, Erdogan sent his congratulations to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When fighting began this spring in Libya, Turkey initially backed longtime strongman Muammar Gaddafi; only in May did popular anger over civilian deaths in Libya force Erdogan, during the run-up to the election, to call for Gaddafi's departure. And Turkey has only just started to protest the vicious crackdown on demonstrators in neighboring Syria, in part because Syrian refugees have begun pouring over the border. "It's good that Erdogan has moved away from his initial position on Libya and Syria," says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "But the whole thing has compromised Turkey's claims to have some special insight into the people of the region."

A Liberal Democracy — or Not?
In truth, the Arab Spring has forced Turkey to confront the question of exactly what kind of emerging power it wants to be. It could end up like China, nationalist and self-interested, using its economic muscle to advance its political ambitions. Or it could be ready to take on the challenges of multilateral diplomacy and regional leadership. "I don't think that Erdogan wants Turkey to be seen in the same light as China, as a country that will do anything to preserve its economic self-interest," says the New America Foundation's Molavi. "But the big question that Turkey has to ask itself is this: Are we a liberal democracy or not?"
The answer will have ramifications both at home and abroad. For years, the AKP has been trying to rewrite Turkey's constitution to limit the power of the military, which since Ataturk's day has been the enforcer of the secular order, occasionally by force. The party would like to loosen rules regarding things like the wearing of headscarves, which are banned in state-owned spaces such as universities, courtrooms and political institutions. Erdogan would also like to shift the country from its parliamentary system to a presidential one, which would allow him to further consolidate power. But while the AKP did well in the parliamentary elections, it didn't win enough seats to rewrite the constitution without consultation. The election "gives Erdogan the message that he needs to work together with opposition parties to do this, rather than trying to do it on his own based on his own principles, which wouldn't be healthy," says Sahin Alpay, a political professor at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

The constitution has been repeatedly tweaked, most recently last year, but there's widespread agreement that it needs updating. The document does more to protect the state than the nation's citizens and is reflective of the insecure Turkey of a previous era that desperately wanted to move into the modern (read: Western) world. The headscarf ban that is supposed to be a reflection of the secular state, for example, is now considered by many a violation of civil liberties. Updating the constitution would allow more freedom of speech and protect the rights of minorities like the Kurds, 14 million strong, who live in the southeastern part of the country. The current constitution allows the government to prevent Kurds from speaking their language and gathering for cultural events.

In the past, Erdogan has been a defender of the Kurds, giving them more freedom and autonomy. He's promised more still, including amnesty for the guerrilla fighters of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group whose leaders are based in the mountains of northern Iraq. But Erdogan hasn't yet delivered, leading to a mounting sense of unrest in the Kurdish southeast. Meanwhile, there are growing concerns about the AKP's suppression of civil rights within Turkey. Under Erdogan, the police have become increasingly powerful and are allegedly dominated by a tightly knit religious brotherhood. Two internationally acclaimed Turkish journalists investigating the police were detained and jailed in March and have yet to be tried. Journalists now assume that their phones are tapped; public leaks of private conversations have become commonplace. Many believe the AKP was behind the recent release of a spate of sex tapes showing senior members of an opposition party in bed with women who were not their wives.
Erdogan's critics are also concerned about runaway economic growth and its impact on the environment. Just as in China, breakneck development in Turkey has had serious consequences. Yet when thousands of villagers along the Black Sea and the Aegean coast gathered to protest pollution from power plants, Erdogan called them "bandits." He has been similarly dismissive of opposition to the plans to build the country's first nuclear power plant in an earthquake zone, though polls show a majority of Turks to be against the project.

All this raises questions about exactly what Turks can expect from the AKP in its third term. Erdogan's party may have scored an enormous victory, but challenges are brewing on many fronts. The economy, while still robust, needs rebalancing. Exports are beginning to slow, and the country's current account deficit is growing. There's a lot of hot money in the country, which could leave at any moment. Policymakers badly need to loosen the labor market and institute tax reforms. And Turkey's ambition to shape the future of the region remains a hostage to the many conservative Turkish entrepreneurs doing business with the Middle East's old regimes.

Yet for all the concerns about Erdogan and the challenges facing his new government, both the U.S. and Western Europe have a stake in seeing Turkey succeed and become the sort of open, economically dynamic, politically confident nation that can act as a model in the Islamic world. The test will come over rewriting the constitution. If Erdogan uses the negotiations primarily to try to push forward a religious agenda and consolidate his power base, he could end up alienating both Kurds and secular liberals and make it impossible for Turkey to serve as a model of liberal Islamic democracy. But if he makes civil rights and individual liberty the focus, he may be remembered as the man who brought Turkey into its next stage of development on its own terms. Either way, the eyes of the world will be on him.
— With reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul

Erdogan's landslide

2011-06-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

Turkey's election
Erdogan's landslide
The re-elected Turkish prime minister should seek consensus not confrontation

Jun 16th 2011 | from the print edition of The Economist

IT WAS a commanding victory by any standard. In the Turkish election on June 12th the Justice and Development (AK) party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the sitting prime minister, took nearly 50% of the vote, on a turnout of 87%. This is AK’s third win in a row; its share of the vote has risen each time. Amid the turmoil of the Arab spring, Turkey offers a heartening example of a secular democracy in the Muslim world.

It was heartening for another reason, too: that AK fell short of its hoped-for two-thirds majority in parliament (see article). Had he surpassed that, Mr Erdogan could have done the thing he most wants to do—rewrite the constitution—without taking anybody else’s views into account.

The constitution, drafted by the army after a military coup in 1980, does indeed need updating if Turkey is to become a more liberal democracy. But it would be better done in consultation with the opposition. That would be the case anywhere, but is especially true in Turkey. For the worrying thing about an AK third term is not that the party might draw on its roots by trying to “Islamise” the secular republic; it is that Mr Erdogan will indulge his autocratic bent. Already, too many critical journalists are being held in jail.

The next four years may tempt Mr Erdogan to be even less tolerant of criticism, for he will surely receive more of it. The economy’s exceptional strength has underpinned AK’s support for the past decade. But it appears to be overheating (the current-account deficit has just hit a whopping 8% of GDP) and, given that unemployment is still around 11%, the measures that are needed to slow it down will be unpopular.

In foreign policy, too, the going is likely to get tougher. Turkey has done well to promote the causes of democracy and human rights in its Arab neighbours, including Syria (see next leader), but unrest and violence on its doorstep will test its diplomacy. Relations with Israel are frosty, and Turkey’s membership talks with the European Union are stuck. If he is to make progress on either front, Mr Erdogan needs to be more conciliatory than in the past.

Forget the presidency, consider the legacy

But the constitution remains his biggest test. On this Mr Erdogan should do two things. First, he should give up his ambition to create the powerful French-style executive presidency that he had hoped to bag at the end of this term as prime minister. This is a bad idea for an overcentralised country like Turkey, and no other party is likely to accept it. There is no reason why Mr Erdogan should not be president; but he should wait patiently to succeed his AK party colleague, Abdullah Gul, in what is largely a figurehead job, in 2014—or, if Mr Gul gets a second term, in 2019. That would put him in the Cankaya Palace in time to mark the republic’s centenary in 2023.

Second, he should make a new effort to solve Turkey’s gravest problem: relations with the country’s 15m Kurds. The election returned 36 members for the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Two years ago Mr Erdogan launched a “Kurdish opening”, but he gave it up in the face of renewed clashes between the army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Since he needs help to rewrite the constitution, he should now turn to the BDP, offering more minority rights and devolution in exchange for an end to violence—even if that means talking to the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Mr Erdogan will not run a fourth time, which is why he has his eye on the presidency. He should think rather of his place in history. A sound liberal constitution and a settlement with the Kurds: such a legacy would give him a place alongside Ataturk among modern Turkey’s greatest men.

Article | AK all over again

2011-06-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

Turkey's election
AK all over again
It was an impressive victory for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. What will he do with it?

Jun 16th 2011 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL | from the print edition of The Economist

THERE was a decided feeling of déjà vu when Turkey’s prime minister gave a victory speech on the balcony of his Justice and Development (AK) party’s Ankara headquarters after the June 12th election. When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was returned to single-party rule with a 47% voting share in 2007, he made identical-sounding pledges: to embrace those who did not vote for him, to mollify the opposition, to write a new constitution, not to interfere in secular Turks’ lifestyles, and to make peace with the Kurds. This time voters gave Mr Erdogan 50%, making him the first Turkish leader to win three elections in a row—and to increase his vote share each time. Turnout was high (87%) and the polls were unmarred by violence or fraud.

Will Mr Erdogan honour his promises? The AK government’s nine-year record of strong growth, improved social services and unprecedented stability pushed aside worries about the economy overheating. It was also enough to overcome growing concerns over Mr Erdogan’s authoritarian manner. These have been serious enough to lose him the support of many liberals, who had previously backed him both in his pursuit of European Union membership and in his struggle with a politically overweening army.

In his victory speech Mr Erdogan sought to ease their concerns. “Nobody should have any doubt: whether you vote for us or not, all of your lifestyles and beliefs are a matter of honour for us,” he said. Yet the voting map confirms the polarised picture seen after last September’s constitutional referendum: huge AK majorities across Anatolia, but continuing support for the secular opposition in the west, especially in Izmir and west of Istanbul.

Indeed, AK’s success largely reflects the rise of conservative Sunni Muslims from Anatolia, who have supplanted the army-backed elite. Their influence is increasingly felt in the economy as well as in the media. The government is stacked with AK bureaucrats, and there are more and more AK-chosen judges. The army has been defanged: scores of generals are in jail awaiting trial in the so-called Ergenekon case against alleged coup plotters. Mr Erdogan’s campaign talk of leading the country until 2023, the centenary of Ataturk’s republic, is no longer far-fetched. His critics gloomily compare AK to Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled for half a century.

Despite this, the election result will have disappointed Mr Erdogan. AK won 5m more votes than in 2007, but slightly fewer seats (326) in the 550-seat grand national assembly. That is far less than the two-thirds majority it was seeking, which would have allowed it to rewrite the constitution unilaterally, and even below the three-fifths majority that would have let it make changes subject to a referendum. Mr Erdogan will now have to win opposition support for his new constitution.

He has made no secret of his wish to scrap the current document, which was written by the generals after a coup in 1980. He dreams of a French-style presidential system, boosting the powers of an office he still hopes to occupy himself. Under AK’s internal rules Mr Erdogan cannot run for a fourth term as prime minister, so he has nowhere to go save upstairs.

Aiming to win the supermajority that would have eased this task, Mr Erdogan embraced a strident anti-Kurdish tone on the campaign trail. This was a clear bid to keep the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) below the 10% threshold needed to win seats. MHP officials claimed that AK was behind a slew of sex videos showing their colleagues in compromising circumstances that surfaced on the internet shortly before the election and led to the resignations of ten MHP candidates. Yet in the event the MHP scraped through with 13 %.

Explore our interactive guide to Turkey's general election
The scale of AK’s victory suggests it would win any referendum on a new constitution. But the opposition is unlikely to agree to changes that enhance the president’s powers. The main opposition, the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP), won 26% of the vote, up from 21% in 2007, its best result in almost three decades. But it remains unclear if this will be enough to cement the leadership of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who took over only last year.

Mr Kilicdaroglu has tried to reshape the CHP, which had long been a slavish mouthpiece for the army. He has even called for a decentralising of power, granting the Kurds greater autonomy and keeping the generals under strict civilian control. He would like to scrap the special security courts where thousands of (mainly Kurdish) dissidents are prosecuted for such crimes as singing militant songs. Appalled remnants of the CHP old guard are plotting to overthrow Mr Kilicdaroglu. His predecessor, Deniz Baykal, who was forced out after a sex scandal, is leading the charge—no matter that in two decades as leader he failed to win a single election. Mr Kilicdaroglu has proved himself a tough and canny operator, but he may be distracted by internal dissent for months.

Another challenge for Mr Erdogan will come from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party (BDP), which now has a record 36 deputies (including a Christian) who campaigned as independents. This puts the party in a strong position to pursue its pet issues, from the prison conditions of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels, to allowing education in Kurdish, to ending army operations against the PKK. It will be hard for Mr Erdogan to meet their demands without compromising his popularity. Worse, the PKK threatens to end its unilateral ceasefire and take its battle to cities beyond the south-east if the government ignores its calls.

A magnanimous and conciliatory prime minister in his final term could do more. He has already reshaped some ministries, including scrapping the ministry for women (to the fury of feminists). Brussels is pleased by the establishment of a new ministry for European affairs, but more may be needed to reinvigorate Turkey’s largely stalled EU membership talks. Hopes that Mr Erdogan might make a unilateral gesture on Cyprus by opening Turkish ports to Cypriot vessels so as to win the opening of blocked chapters in the talks seem likely to be dashed. Mr Erdogan could also reinstate and build on the “Kurdish opening” that he launched two years ago. Yet Cengiz Aktar, an academic commentator in Istanbul, notes that Turkish governments have been good at conflict, but not so good at conflict resolution.

There is anyway a more immediate source of trouble on the border. More than 5,000 Syrians have fled to Turkey in recent days, as Bashar Assad intensifies his bloody battle against protesters (see article). Mr Erdogan has been urging Mr Assad to meet their demands. The Turks have met the Syrian opposition to increase pressure on the regime. Yet the bloodshed continues—and Mr Erdogan’s patience is wearing thin. As one official puts it, “all options are on the table.” Mr Erdogan will have much on his plate in the coming months.

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Tasting Istanbul, From Humble to High Cuisine

Article | Turkey's Elephant in the Room: Religious Freedom

Crime and Punishment at Istanbul Film Festival

By SUSANNE GUSTEN

Published: September 21, 2011

Israel and Turkey | Can it get worse?

Article | Israel and Turkey Sever Ties

Article | The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

The Turkish model | A hard act to follow

Turkey and the Kurds | Giving war a chance

Article | Dimming the Red Lights in Turkey

We in Turkey and the Middle East have replaced humiliation with dignity

Article | Turkey after the election

The lofty Mr Erdogan

Frick | Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette

Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette

Chronicling the Caliphate

Prime Minister Erdogan: Turkey's Man of The People

Erdogan's landslide

Article | AK all over again

Foreign Policy's emotional and biased journalism on Turkey
by İhsan Yılmaz