17
July 2007
2. "Glance at Turkey's elections Sunday", Turkey: A look at Turkish elections.
3. "Turkey's ruling party set to win polls", Turkey's ruling party is likely to win a majority of seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday.
4. "Turkey: In Some Areas, Clans Call the Political Shots", in many parts of southeast Turkey, where hidebound traditions and blood ties rule and feudal clans dominate public life, politics can be a family affair. When election time comes around, political parties have long known that having a leader of a clan – known as “asiret” in Turkish – as a candidate can guarantee victory at the ballot box.
5. "For Turkey, a clash of civilizations", the balance it finds between Islam and secularism will have major implications for the U.S.
6. "Bomb blasts outside party offices in Turkey", two small bombs went off yesterday morning outside election offices of Turkey’s ruling party and an opposition party in the western city of Izmir, causing damage but no casualties, Anatolia news agency reported.
7. "Gündem Newspaper Closed for Fifteen Days", after an article on pre-election opinions in Batman, a south-eastern province, was published in the Gündem newspaper on 12 July, an Istanbul heavy penal court has closed the newspaper for 15 days.
8. "The Kurds: new key to long-term victory", the Kurds, of course, were in effect liberated from Saddam’s butchery after the first Gulf war by the US-UK nofly zone. They had their civil war in the 1990s and a stable polity emerged. The Kurdish peshmerga have been the only seriously competent force in Iraq since the fall of the Ba’athists and the disbanding of the army.
1. - VOA - "Kurds Hopeful in Turkish General Election":
DIYARBAKIR / 16 July 2007 / by Dorian Jones
As Turkish voters get ready to head to the polls for general elections July 22, tension is rising among the Kurds in Turkey's southeast. Although the Kurdish nationalist party has been gaining support in the region, it has been prevented from entering parliament because it has never received at least 10 percent of the vote in any national election, the percentage that Turkish law requires for parties to be represented in parliament. To get around this law, Kurdish party members are fielding candidates as independents who would then form a party once they took up their individual posts as lawmakers. For VOA, Dorian Jones has this report from southeast Turkey.
As Kurdish nationalist activists leave their headquarters in Diyarbakir for a day of campaigning, the roar of Turkish fighter jets is a reminder of the urgency of their work. In the last few months there has been a large Turkish military build-up in the southeast region of the country to fight the Kurdish separatist group, the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK.
The build-up comes as a result of a resurgence of attacks by the PKK. But the military's increased presence in the region is also seen by analysts as a way of eroding support for the ruling AK party in the run-up to the July elections.
The military continues to portray the AK party as capitulating to Kurdish "separatism and terrorism." The army, which views itself as the protector of the policy of secularism favored by the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, already has deep suspicions of the islamic roots of the governing party. In light of the political struggle, the Kurdish national party is pushing ahead.
Traveling to the Gullu village with one of the Kurdish candidates, Gulten Kisanak, on her way to drum up support among local villagers, we encounter one of the numerous army checkpoints.
"Today we are lucky, Kisanak tells me, the soldiers are from her home village and appear sympathetic. But it is not always like this," she said.
She says this is the place where they stopped us yesterday and checked for IDs. Soldiers were everywhere, some pointing their guns at us. There were even tanks. The soldiers searched all our cars and it took several hours. It was a show of force to tell everyone that they were in charge. We are little bit used to it now but we are very sad that we still face such treatment during democratic elections.
After two hours on the road, we arrive at Gullu village. For decades, it has been at the center of the conflict between separatists and the Turkish army. Over 30,000 people have been killed in the fighting. Most were villagers like the people living here.
Kisanak receives a warm welcome. Election fervor is just as strong here as in the cities of the region, fueled by the belief that their votes will count. While this region overwhelmingly votes in support of the Kurdish nationalist party, it has failed to win any parliamentary seats.
Speaking to villagers like this man, Hasan, there is widespread feeling that this election is special.
"Every election is important, but this one is even more important," said Hasan. "Because of the 10 percent barrier in the elections, our previous votes have been wasted and other parties benefited. But this time our candidates will win and they will be our eyes, ears and voice in parliament."
Listening to Hasan, Kisanak says she still expects to face numerous difficulties before Election Day. After the elections were called, the government rushed through legislation to make it more difficult for independent candidates to be elected. There have also been claims that some voters have been told to cast their ballots in far away cities. But Kisanak, like her fellow independent candidates, remains confident.
"This election is important because Turkey is at the crossroads," she said. "Either it is going to opt for developing democratic alternatives or will bring the oppressive policies back on to the agenda. We are hoping for the democratic forces to come out of these elections much stronger and help to establish the options of democracy dialog and peace. We'll search for solutions not in violence, but in parliament. The people are also hoping for this, that's why this election is very critical.
The word crossroads can often be heard among Kurds. Its believed there are over 100,000 Turkish soldiers in the region, and nearly daily clashes with Kurdish separatists.
But despite such a massive military presence, And a resurgence
in attacks by the PKK, the hope here is that these elections will be
the start of a new process in which the ballot box will replace the
gun. 
2. - AP - "Glance at Turkey's elections Sunday":
ANKARA / 18 July 2007
Turkey: A look at Turkish elections Sunday:
VOTERS:
42.5 million Turks out of a population of more than 70 million vote in the general elections, which were called four months early following political tensions over the election of the next president. The tensions pitted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party against the secular opposition.
AT STAKE:
14 parties and some 700 independent candidates contesting 550 parliament seats. Parties must win at least 10 percent of the national vote to earn seats in Parliament.
MAIN PARTIES:
Justice and Development Party: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party, which was formed in 2001 by members of Turkey's Islamic movement and currently dominates Parliament. It has distanced itself from its Islamist past and denies any religious agenda. Polls show party is likely to win the elections but with a smaller majority.
Republican People's Party: The secular, main opposition party is led by Deniz Baykal, a former foreign minister, who has been fighting what the party regards as Islam's encroachment on politics. The party was formed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who created the secular Turkish republic, and is the oldest in Turkey. Polls show party coming in second and retaining position as the main opposition.
Nationalist Action Party: Far-right party led by Devlet Bahceli which is expected to return to Parliament after a five-year absence. The party is skeptical about Turkey's EU bid, accuses the government of being too soft on separatist Kurdish guerrillas, and supports a military incursion into northern Iraq to crack down on Kurdish rebels based there.
Democrat Party: Secular, center-right party led by Mehmet Agar, a former police chief and interior minister. Party was formerly called the True Path Party, which was once led by Tansu Ciller, Turkey's first woman prime minister. Efforts to merge with another center-right party earlier this year fell through.
Youth Party: Populist, nationalist party led by troubled businessman Cem Uzan whose family assets were seized by the government. Party showed surprising strength in the last elections but failed to pass the 10 percent threshold.
Democratic Society Party: Made up of ethnic minority Kurds,
the party led by Ahmet Turk seeks to circumvent the 10-percent barrier
by fielding independent candidates who would regroup as a party after
winning seats. The party won 6.23 percent of the votes in elections
in 2002.
3. - AP - "Turkey's ruling party set to win polls":
ISTANBUL / 16 July 2007
Turkey's ruling party is likely to win a majority of seats in parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Analysts expect that the polls will highlight the deepening divide between the Islamic-oriented government and opponents who fear religion is encroaching on secular traditions.
While most voter surveys put the ruling Justice and Development Party well ahead of its rivals, it is expected to win fewer seats than in the 2002 elections and as a result could have less leverage when the new Parliament faces its first critical test: electing a president.
The vote by legislators for a new president could amount to a replay of a showdown in late April and early May when the ruling party's candidate, a pious Muslim, was forced to abandon his bid after fierce opposition from the secular establishment.
The military, perpetrator of coups in the past, threatened to intervene to safeguard secularism.
''The main issue is the presidential election,'' analyst Taha Ozhan said of the campaign debate ahead of the parliamentary elections, which were called four months early to resolve the crisis.
This time, the government has said it will seek a presidential candidate based on consensus, though a sense of uncertainty pervades Turkish politics.
On the streets, the mood is festive.
Party flags and posters in Istanbul and other cities are plentiful, loudspeakers bark political slogans from roving vans and throngs of supporters with red-and-white Turkish flags cheer at campaign rallies.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who made predominantly Muslim Turkey's bid to join the European Union a pillar of his agenda, has said he has no intention of imposing religion on politics.
His government presided over reduced inflation, higher per capita income and more foreign investment, and enjoys the support of a growing class of conservative Muslims with economic and political clout.
Gul's bid for presidency
Despite its achievements, the government faced a backlash when Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul tried to become president.
Political opponents boycotted the parliamentary vote, arguing that Gul's election to a position with veto power would remove the last obstacle to an Islamic takeover of the government.
Turkey's top court, a secular institution, then declared the process invalid. At the time, huge crowds of pro-secular demonstrators rallied in major cities.
The Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, a research center in Ankara, assessed half a dozen polls by different companies and concluded that the ruling party would win 38 to 41 per cent of Sunday's vote.
Under a law requiring parties to win 10 per cent of the vote in order to enter Parliament, the ruling party would secure a majority of 290-310 seats in the 550-seat legislature, said Ozhan, the center's director of economic research.
Such a result would allow Erdogan to form a single-party government, avoiding the need for a coalition that would require compromises with political partners and could lead to deadlock.
But it represents a reduction of seats from its current majority of two-thirds.
According to surveys, the secular party that led the boycott against Gul's presidential bid is expected to maintain its status as the second-biggest party in Parliament.
The Republican People's Party was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered national founder who curbed Islamic influence after the fall of the Ottoman Empire amid the chaos of World War I.
Kurdish rebels
A new factor is a nationalist party that appears poised to enter Parliament after a five-year absence, possibly by benefiting from perceptions that the government is soft on Kurdish rebels despite talk of a cross-border operation against their bases in Iraq.
If the Nationalist Action Party succeeds, its lawmakers could provide a swing vote in a presidential poll, though their choice would depend on a variety of factors, including the identity of the candidate.
Turkey, a NATO member, has warned it might go into Iraq to pursue rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, unless the United States cracks down on the PKK, deemed a terrorist organization by Washington.
''It has put Mr Erdogan on the defensive as 'weak on terror,'
complicating (the ruling party's) strategy of running on its impressive
record of reform and economic growth,'' Mark Parris, a former US ambassador
to Turkey and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote
in an analysis.
4. - Eurasianet - "Turkey: In Some Areas, Clans Call the Political Shots":
16 July 2007 / by Yigal Schleifer
When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdrogan recently expressed a wish to see more women running in the country’s upcoming July 22 parliamentary elections, Ibrahim Ozyavuz, a mayor from the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), heeded his leader’s call. Using his influence, Ozyavuz made sure that a woman’s name was added to the list of local AKP candidates, the first time a major political party had ever done so in the Sanliurfa region of southeastern Turkey, which, in social terms, is an extremely conservative place. Ozyavuz, the mayor of a small town outside the city of Sanliurfa, was intimately familiar with the groundbreaking candidate’s qualifications. After all, the parliamentary hopeful, a geophysicist named Cagla Ozyavuz, happened to be his wife. Not that this was anything unusual. In many parts of southeast Turkey, where hidebound traditions and blood ties rule and feudal clans dominate public life, politics can be a family affair. When election time comes around, political parties have long known that having a leader of a clan – known as “asiret” in Turkish – as a candidate can guarantee victory at the ballot box.
In Sanliurfa – an ancient city that is said to be the birthplace of Abraham, a revered figure among Jews, Muslims and Christians, as well as home to a sprawling and noisy bazaar, known for its finely crafted copper bowls and plates – members of important clans fill the top spots of the AKP’s candidate list and are prominent in several other parties’ lists. The same is true in other cities in the southeast.
In many ways, asirets are one of the most potent local political forces. For some, they are also the greatest obstacles to democratization in the region. “Family ties are very important here,” says Mustafa Zura, a tailor who works in a small workshop in a 500-year-old caravansary, its large courtyard filled with men sitting on low stools sipping tea and playing backgammon. “If you’re a member of an asiret, you are not alone, doors are opened for you. If you are outside it, you are on your own,” said Zura, who belongs to one of the city’s smaller asirets.
Talking to local politicians about the asirets, though, is a bit like forcing them to open up about a dirty and well-kept family secret. Muzaffer Cakmakli, a leader of the local branch of the right wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP), and himself reputed to be an asiret member, gave a dismissive wave of his hand when queried about the political influence of clans. “There are no more clans in [Sanliurfa], only political parties,” Cakmakli insisted.
The question of asirets, meanwhile, brought a pained look to the face of Mehmet Fevzi Uctepe, Sanliurfa’s deputy mayor. “They are part of civil society, like mutual aid societies,” Uctepe says, speaking slowly and parsing his words carefully during an interview in the modern-looking AKP-run city hall. “If we look at the clans as families, we can see the good things they do, such as helping each other.”
“Their political power is slowly decreasing,” Uctepe added. “A few years ago they were much more able to have their way.”
But some locals dispute the contention that asirets have lost much influence. They point to the AKP’s candidate list to support their argument. Zura, the tailor, singled out Zulfukar Izol, leader of a large and powerful clan and a current AKP parliamentarian running for reelection. “He’s uneducated. He’s not solving any of Sanliurfa’s problems. But he’s second on the candidate list,” the tailor alleged during a tea break. “Why? Because the party leaders know he can deliver votes.”
Kemal Kapakli, editor-in-chief of Guneydogu, Sanliurfa’s oldest daily newspaper, says the asirets still represent a kind of easy, one-stop shopping electoral opportunity for Turkey’s political parties. “The asirets are leaders in local politics. They are extremely strong. When party leaders are choosing candidates here, they are taking into consideration how many voters from their clan are standing behind them,” said Kapakli, who also serves as a kind of local historian. “It’s like a popular brand name.”
Up until the 1970’s, asirets were usually associated with Turkey’s rural towns and villages, where ancient feudal family structures revolving around agricultural life had survived intact. Rural displacement during the past few decades, though, has helped make asirets part of the social and political fabric in many cities in southeastern Turkey.
Mazhar Bagli, a professor of sociology at Dicle University, in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, estimated that close to 50 percent of Sanliurfa’s population is connected to one clan or another.
Bagli and others believe the power of the asirets, and the tendency of political parties to defer to the clan system in many areas, has hampered the democratization process in southeastern Turkey. “The parties must believe in the power of democratic politics, not only in the power of the asirets,” Bagli said. “If they want to have truly democratic power, they need to get their strength from something other than the asirets.”
The recent political experience of Mahmut Cevheri, a successful local businessman, underscores the continuing power that asirets enjoy. Cevheri created a scandal when he announced his intention to run as a candidate for the Democratic Party, even though his elder brother, Sabahattin, is the leader of a powerful local asiret, and is the AKP’s top candidate in city.
Ultimately, Cevheri’s quest to get on the Democratic Party’s candidate list failed. He attributed this disappointment to meddling by his relatives. “The power of the family is still strong,” Cevheri said with a resigned smile.
“It’s not democracy if people only follow what one person tells them to do. The families are bound together by blood, but it’s not democracy that binds them,” said Cevheri, sitting in his large office in an elite Sanliurfa private school he opened last year, where one wall is covered with students’ research projects about, among other things, the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
“If you are an individual from the village and you
need a loan from the bank, the asiret will help you get the loan. It’s
a kind of local government, and there are many local governments like
this in the city,” he added, striving to illuminate the source
of asirets’ continuing power. “Nobody wants this system to
continue, but it depends on the larger government system. If it becomes
responsive, then the asiret system will weaken, but if it isn’t
responsive, the clans will continue to be strong.”
5. - Dallas News - "For Turkey, a clash of civilizations":
The balance it finds between Islam and secularism will have major implications for the U.S.
15 July 2007
The problem facing Turkey is this: How will the Muslim country of 68 million resolve the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy? How will the key NATO nation and aspiring European Union member navigate between the rigid dogmas of yesterday and the modern realities of the 21st century? All of which is to say: How will the clash between Islam and secularism turn out?
A wedding party sings and dances on a ferry crossing the Sea of Marmara, paying little heed to the passing Turkish destroyers.
Here's the thing: Turkey, a physical and cultural bridge between West and East, confounds customary American categories. Are we talking about Islamic fundamentalism or the nationalist-secularist fundamentalism that has ruled the country harshly since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the republic in 1923? Are we talking about the unbending codes and customs of resurgent traditionalist Islam or the cramped strictures of Turkey's secularist ideology?
And are we talking about the right of the Turkish people to freely elect their own representatives, benefit from greater freedom of religion and speech, and enjoy economic liberalization and progress – all of which are taken for granted in modern democracies? From a U.S. point of view, are we talking about wanting to see a relatively pro-American government in Ankara?
If so, it is clear to many Western observers that the mild Islamists of the ruling Justice and Development Party (known in Turkey by the acronym AKP) are better for Turkey's development and stability than the secularist establishment – including the powerful military, which recently issued a veiled threat to mount a coup to protect the nation's official secularism. But anxious voices in the secularist camp – including well over a million anti-Islamist demonstrators who hit the streets of major Turkish cities this spring – call the AKP a Trojan horse through which the formal Islamization of the Turkish state and society will be accomplished.
As Turkey heads into its national parliamentary elections next Sunday, far more than the future of a single nation hangs in the balance. At issue is a political experiment whose success or failure will have ramifications not only for the United States and Europe, but also for the entire Islamic world. If liberal democracy and all it entails – free elections, broad civil rights, protection for minorities and modern economic practices – can't be made to work in Turkey, there is probably no Muslim country where it can.
Modern Turkey arose out of the ruins of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire, whose loss of its holdings during World War I capped a long decline. The final blow came in 1922, when a newly founded parliament deposed the last sultan.
The next year, parliament declared a republic, and a war hero named Mustafa Kemal became its first president. He was an authoritarian nationalist who was later granted the title "Ataturk," meaning Father of the Turks. The grandiose sobriquet suited his ambition, for he set about frog-marching his nation into the modern world.
For Ataturk modernization meant Westernization. Ataturk blamed religion and traditional life for Turkey's backwardness and weakness. Mandating a radical break from a past he regarded as shameful, Ataturk severed Islam from the state and undertook a stark program to impose his vision. He banned Islamic religious orders and traditional clothing, imposed a Western-style alphabet onto the Turkish language and pushed for the emancipation of women. All this and much more Ataturk commanded so that his country could be, in a word he frequently used, "civilized."
"We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilizations of the West," Ataturk said in an early speech, adding that rejecting modern life would keep his listeners as "lepers, pariahs, alone in your obstinacy, with your customs of another age."
Secularism, as was often explained to me by Turks on a recent trip to Istanbul, is not the same concept as secularism in America. In the United States, the legal framework of the state is careful to keep religion from overextending itself into the governmental sphere – and vice versa. Turkey, in contrast, follows a more radical version of the French republican model, which not only keeps religion out of government, but also pushes it to the margins of public life to a degree that most Americans would find intolerable.
Ataturk, who died in 1938, was an astonishing figure, but no man is powerful enough to erase a people's past entirely. Though his successors have firmly adhered to the secularist, or "Kemalist" line, the armed forces, which regard themselves as guardians of Ataturk's secularist legacy, have been unafraid to overthrow elected governments (most recently a relatively hard Islamist one in 1997) to defend Kemalism.
Yet resistance to secularism persists, especially in rural Anatolia, the conservative population of which has been streaming into the more liberal, secularist cities in recent years. Turks, especially middle-class ones, have not been immune to the revival of Islamic feeling that has swept the Muslim world over the last generation. In his recent novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Prize-winning Istanbul writer, explores the appeal of a militant Islamic consciousness to rural and provincial Turks who remain poor, uncertain in their identity and hungry for dignity. Mr. Pamuk's novel also touches on the spiritual desolation endured by Westernized Turks, caught between a Europe that won't fully accept them and Islamic traditions to which they are strangers.
Journalist David Pryce-Jones, who has written extensively about the Muslim world, captures the melancholy and uncertainty that pervades Turkey as Kemalism soldiers on: "Portraits and statues of Ataturk are visible everywhere in public places, and his memory is held in high esteem, but neither he nor anyone else has yet explained how Western lifestyles and habits acquire meaning or coherence in the absence of their supporting institutions."
The conundrum facing Turkey's establishment today: What do self-described modernizers do when times change so much that to be religious is to be more in touch with emerging modernity than to be resolutely secular?
In 2001, some former members of the Islamist-oriented Welfare Party, which was dismantled by the military as a threat to secularism, created the center-right AK Party, modeling it along the conservative, pro-business lines of European Christian Democratic parties. The AKP leader, former Istanbul mayor Recip Tayyip Erdogan, became prime minister in 2002 after his party won a plurality in parliament.
Mr. Erdogan has presided over an impressive five-year period of economic growth and political stability. His liberalizing reforms so pleased the Europeans that in 2005, they formally issued an invitation to Turkey to apply for European Union membership. Fears that the AKP would lead the republic toward the Iranian model have so far been revealed as baseless.
Mustafa Akyol, a 35-year-old Istanbul journalist who often defends the AKP in his column, says the party miscalculated when it tried to criminalize adultery and to create alcohol-free areas in some towns. That gave secularists an excuse to accuse the party of setting off on the slippery slope to Turkey's Talibanization.
"From my point of view, this is just a conservative moral policy which even sometimes I criticize – but this is not the way to sharia," Mr. Akyol says. "If you can't negotiate and agree on these things, you push [observant Muslims], and you tell them there is no place for your lifestyle in this country."
"Since there's a justified suspicion of Islamism in the world, they're calling anybody with an Islamic identity who wants to get involved in politics a Taliban. The thing we have to remember is that the Muslim world is really diverse. It's not always a clean debate between 'good' secularists and 'bad' Islamists."
The affable Mr. Akyol is himself a practicing Muslim, at ease with European and American thought. He believes it is certainly possible for Islam to be reconciled to liberal democracy and points out that the modernizing ideas of Fazlur Rahman, the late University of Chicago scholar who was a towering figure of contemporary Islamic thought, are highly influential in leading Turkish Islamic circles – including the AKP leadership. Mr. Akyol also points to the popularity of Islamic teachers like Fethullah Gulen and Mr. Gulen's mentor, the late Said Nursi, who advocate a more liberal form of Islam that seeks dialogue with other religious traditions, for the sake of resisting materialism.
Mr. Gulen, like Mr. Nursi before him, ran afoul of the Kemalist state and had his views suppressed. This crushing of even moderate Islam is exactly the kind of thing that feeds religious radicalism, Mr. Akyol argues. That, and the class snobbery of secularists. Among the elite, he says, religious consciousness is considered a mark of the rube. But this stereotype, which the journalist admits has more than a kernel of sociological truth, is giving way to a new reality that secular elites are reluctant to accept.
"What's happening now is that Islamic people are changing. Their children are getting an education, and they're getting some power," says Mr. Akyol. "In Turkey, this is a class issue, too. The upper classes are afraid of the lower classes becoming as high as themselves."
Turkish-born Zeyno Baran is a friend of Mr. Akyol's, a member of his generation and a practicing Muslim who nevertheless defines herself as a secularist. Yet Ms. Baran, director of the Center for Eurasian Policy at The Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, embodies the deep skepticism secular Turks have of the AK Party and its intentions. Islamists who profess to be democrats are merely tacticians, Ms. Baran argues. Unlike governments in the U.S. and Europe, she doesn't buy the idea that the soft Islamists of the AKP can be trusted.
"The concern that the reasonable secularists have is not that there's going to be sharia in two or three or five years but, in the longer term, that the gradual erosion of the secularist establishment will strengthen the Islamist mindset," she says. "Once those floodgates open, you can't stop it.
"No country other than Turkey, which has a 99 percent Muslim majority, has managed to keep religion and state separate," she continues. "And Turkey has managed to do this so far, despite all the criticism we have, with a very fierce protection of the secular system. What [secularists] are concerned about is when other countries, from Pakistan to Egypt to Iran, try to bring in the Islamists, the Islamists end up taking over. That's why they're very afraid."
At what point, though, must fair-minded secularists accede to popular demand for a greater role of Islam in government? Ms. Baran counters by questioning what AKP voters are truly looking for. She believes that most Turks vote Islamist because they believe – mistakenly, in her view – that because the Islamists fear God, they'll be less likely to steal.
Besides, many AKP supporters embrace the party for its economic accomplishments out of a misplaced faith that if the Islamists push too far against secularism, the military will come to Turkey's rescue. What they overlook, she says, is that Islamism in power creates the cultural conditions for the gradual popular erosion of secularist ideals – which will result in less freedom, especially for women.
Along those lines, the scholar warns, Americans are too quick to assume that other peoples and cultures are like their own, resulting in a dangerous naïvete about what democracy is and requires – in part, institutions and customs that arise from democratic thought and culture.
"In a majority Muslim country, you cannot have democracy without secularism, but the reverse is not true," Ms. Baran contends. "I think the mistake America made with Iraq and the Hamas elections came in thinking that democracy was just putting out the ballot box. And if you do that, and if people are given nothing else to go on, people are thinking out of fear and out of holding on to their religious or tribal or ethnic identities; that's how they're going to vote."
Islamism thrives at the popular level, she says, because voters are angry and frustrated over poverty and joblessness – and because they don't understand how much political Islam distorts the true faith and puts their own freedom at risk.
Though they are on opposite sides of the secular-religious political divide, both Mr. Akyol and Ms. Beran agree that Turkey has entered a critical period and that the United States has been slow to recognize its own interests with its increasingly estranged ally.
Anti-American sentiment is at a shocking high in Turkey, with barely one in 10 Turks polled expressing positive feelings toward the United States. Turks are furious with America over Iraq, and popular conspiracy theories abound, typically positing the U.S. as a sinister power dedicated to weakening both Muslims and the Turkish state. Some secularist politicians advocate for Turkey to loosen historic ties to the U.S. and move closer to China, Russia and Iran.
Much of this has to do with U.S. support for Iraq's Kurds, who have set up a de facto nation in the Iraqi north, and Washington's related failure to police anti-Turkish rebels based there. Ankara has long struggled with its substantial Kurdish minority, which dwells primarily in Turkey's southeast, along the border with Iraq. Many Turkish Kurds long for independence and support the guerrilla movement fighting for it. A full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash Kurdish guerrilla bases is a serious risk – just last week, Iraq's foreign minister, a Kurd, accused Turkey of massing 140,000 troops on its border, a charge the Turks refused to comment on. With the U.S. pledged to defend Iraq, a Turkish invasion could pit two NATO allies on the opposite side of a war.
Though the ruling AKP is expected to emerge from the voting with a strengthened parliamentary majority, the fall presidential election looms as a potential crisis flash point. The generals have made plain that an Islamist candidate for the largely symbolic post is unacceptable – but what are they prepared to do about it? A coup is unlikely, but a decisive confrontation with the military over secularism is very much in play, especially considering how the volatile military situation on Turkey's border with Iraq could affect domestic politics.
Both the Western and Islamic worlds will continue to watch with intense interest the development of political Islam in Turkey. If Prime Minister Erdogan's Turkey continues to progress with Western-style political, economic and social reforms, a hopeful "third way" between dictatorial Islamism and autocratic secularism will have been pioneered. But if the generals oust the AKP government, Islamists in Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere may conclude that no political Muslims, no matter how moderate and pro-Western, stand a chance of holding power in a democracy. They could therefore conclude that violence is the only way to realize their legitimate political aspirations.
Put starkly: If Turkey succeeds with its soft-Islamist
reforms, it will be a sign that Islam, democracy and modernity can co-exist,
and a model for other Muslim countries emerging from autocracy. If Turkey
fails, and the generals end the democratic Islamist experiment at the
point of a gun, Islamist populists in other countries may conclude that
no political Muslims, no matter how moderate and accommodating of Western
ideals, stand a chance of gaining and holding power through democratic
means. If that is the eventual lesson of Turkey, international relations
in the 21st century will be more perilous than one cares to contemplate.
6. - AFP - "Bomb blasts outside party offices in Turkey":
ANKARA / 16 July 2007
Two small bombs went off yesterday morning outside election offices of Turkey’s ruling party and an opposition party in the western city of Izmir, causing damage but no casualties, Anatolia news agency reported.
Turkey holds legislative elections next Sunday.
Police said they believed the blasts were caused by homemade time bombs designed to make loud noise rather than kill, Anatolia said.
The first device exploded outside an election bureau of the far-right Nationalist Action Party in the district of Buca, shattering the windows of nearby buildings.
The second blast went off 10 minutes later in the same street, outside an election bureau of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, Anatolia said.
There was no immediate word on who might be behind the blasts.
Kurdish rebels were blamed for the bombing of an Izmir
marketplace in May in which a vendor was killed and 15 other people
injured.
7. - Bianet - "Gündem Newspaper Closed for Fifteen Days":
After an article on pre-election opinions in Batman, a south-eastern province, was published in the Gündem newspaper on 12 July, an Istanbul heavy penal court has closed the newspaper for 15 days.
ISTANBUL / 16 July 2007
A Heavy Penal Court in Istanbul has decided to close the "Gündem" newspaper for fifteen days. Cause for the closure was an article published on 12 July in issued 132, entitled: "The Batman Message: Stand By the Guerrillas".
The newspaper has been closed for 30 and 15 days before and has now been closed for "spreading PKK propaganda in a call for violence". Friday's issue (13 July) of the newspaper was confiscated.
Gündem's Editor-in-chief Yuksel Genc argued that the closure was a violation of the freedom of the press. He said that the newspaper has continually been targeted, but that the last two months seemed more normal. "We find it meaningful that our newspaper is closed in the week running up to the elections," he said. "It becomes clear once again that in such a time, Kurds are silenced."
Pre-election interviews
In the article, journalist Cengiz Kapmaz had been evaluating the pre-election period in Batman, a province in the south-east of Turkey. One worker who he spoke to had said:
"The people's expectations of the [pro-Kurdish] independent
candidates are very clear. The people are sending them to parliament
not in order to support PKK terrorism, but to support the people's children
who are struggling for their rights. They must not forget that. Those
who call [PKK leader] Abdullah Öcalan "honourable" whenever
they mention him, we expect to attend the funerals of the people's children
who are killed."
8. - The Sunday Times - "The Kurds: new key to long-term victory":
16 July 2007 / by Andrew Sullivan
The phrase on everyone’s lips now is “postsurge”. The logistics of military tour cycles, the logic of congressional politics and the sheer impossibility of putting Iraq back together again in anything like the foreseeable future have caused something of a Rubicon in Washington.
It has been approaching for a while but last week you could feel the collective decision being made. Some time in the next six months there will be a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Quite when it happens, how it happens and who will take credit or blame have yet to be determined. But it will happen. The question then becomes: what is salvageable? What is the opportunity in this transition?
An honest assessment would have to acknowledge that in many parts of Iraq even worse horrors will probably unfold. In areas of sectarian conflict the violence could be dreadful even by Iraqi standards. This is one reason not to feel uncomplicated relief at some realism entering into US policy so late.
I think intelligent, careful withdrawal is the least worst option. But I’m not going to pretend it’s morally clean. It isn’t. Many innocents will die. The problem is: staying isn’t morally clean either. And many innocents are already dying in a civil war we cannot get a handle on.
But it’s also a stretch to see all of Iraq necessarily going up in smoke. There are smaller regional success stories. Anbar is one, where Sunni tribes in a homogeneous Sunni region have aligned effectively with US forces to fight Al-Qaeda. But the real success story ? and the great unsung achievement of the West for the past 15 years ? is the emergence of a relatively peaceful, increasingly prosperous, largely democratic Kurdish region in the north. It’s a success story we have no reason to turn into a failure.
The Kurds, of course, were in effect liberated from Saddam’s butchery after the first Gulf war by the US-UK nofly zone. They had their civil war in the 1990s and a stable polity emerged. The Kurdish peshmerga have been the only seriously competent force in Iraq since the fall of the Ba’athists and the disbanding of the army.
More important: they are Sunni Muslims. They have a fledgling democracy. And they love the US. If the US can salvage a democratic, peaceful Kurdistan from the wreckage of the Iraq occupation, the war will not have been entirely in vain. I don’t mean independence. I mean an effective soft-partition that keeps the Kurdish dream alive.
Yes, there are many issues remaining: the status of Kirkuk and Mosul, potential ethnic clashes and rogue Kurdish terrorists. But they are certainly more manageable than keeping the lid on the entire country of Iraq in the absence of a central government.
One obvious postsurge option for US troops is therefore to redeploy to Iraq’s territorial borders to deter an influx of foreign agents, but primarily to defend and police the territorial integrity of Kurdistan. In this, Washington needs to hold Turkey’s hand tightly and patiently. It too is a critical ally, a Muslim democracy and essential to restraining the centrifugal forces of Iraq.
But the Turks are deeply and understandably suspicious of Kurdish aspirations. The Turkish-Kurdish border therefore badly needs Nato troops to keep it stable and prevent incursions from either side.
The benefits of rescuing Kurdistan include a positive and constructive narrative for the next stage of the war. Americans do not like losing and they need to be reminded that the sacrifice of thousands of young soldiers has not been for nothing. But protecting Kurdistan has profound strategic advantages as well.
It would create a democratic buffer against Arab extremism from Israel through Turkey to Kurdistan. That arc points directly at Iran, a country in the grip of spiralling inflation, public unrest and a brutal crackdown on dissent. Iran too has a Kurdish population, and a free Kurdistan under US protection could act as a focus for Kurdish unrest in Iran’s north. Persians are not Arabs. Many of them love the West and are potentially a great ally against Wahhabist insanity. If the next few years are about rattling Tehran’s cage, a free, stable Kurdistan would help.
It’s also worth remembering that some things are true even if George W Bush believes them. One of those truths is that the Middle East should not be consigned to Islamist fundamentalism or secular dictatorship for eternity. If we are going to win the long war against Islamo-fascism, some models of democracy in the region are essential.
There are encouraging global precedents. In Asia, for example, Taiwan followed Japan’s capitalist, democratic path, and the domino effect eventually brought China and Vietnam into the global economy. Even in the Gulf, Dubai is showing that freedom and capitalism are not impossible for Arab states. But they cannot be imposed by force. They can rather be defended by force, protected, nurtured and then held up as role models. If part of Iraq succeeds in this way, what better example for the other parts? Or for the region as a whole?
It’s also, it seems to me, far too soon to give up on Afghanistan. It is not a hopelessly divided sectarian mess like Mesopotamia. It is rather a hard-to-govern wasteland that has nonetheless come a long way since liberation from the Taliban.
The problem in Iraq is that there is no real government, no central entity that can unite the country’s sects and control its warring militias. Afghanistan is nowhere near as hopeless.
Am I being naively optimistic? I hope not. I still believe that removing Saddam was a morally and strategically defensible act. For the Kurds it ended a hideous chapter in a long history of oppression and violence. They remain grateful. They want to be a solid ally in the region and an oasis from Islamist terror.
Like the Jews, they have endured centuries of persecution in other people’s lands with no home of their own. They have one now and the West helped give it to them. We should do all we can to ensure nobody takes it away.
There are many things left to fight for in Iraq. Kurdistan
is one of them.