Turkish Politics in Action

Pinning the Blame

2012-01-23T08:46:00.004-05:00

Before the closing of the last Kurdish opening, the AKP-led government used a mix of carrots and sticks to tackle the burgeoning problem of Kurdish nationalism and the PKK violence with which it is associated.

As is now well-established, in 2005 the government entered indirect negotiations with the PKK command at Kandil in northern Iraq and with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan at Imrali. Three years later, those negotiations eventually became direct talks held in Oslo during which the government also began to pay more attention to Kurdish cultural rights within a unified Turkey. A Kurdish-language, albeit government-run channel, was introduced in the lead up to local elections in 2009, and later that summer the government announced grand plans for comprehensive reform (its “Kurdish opening,” which was later to be referred to as a “ democratic opening” ). Thus began an intense debate of what politicians, opinion leaders, and even the military began to approach as the “Kurdish problem”—not simply a problem with the PKK, but a more fundamental dilemma in demand of political solutions.

Yet, at the same time the government was pursuing its “Kurdish opening,” operations against Kurdish politicians and civil society leaders associated with the PKK began—and, much to the harm of AKP’s reception in the region, after the party had suffered fairly devastating losses in election. Local elections in March 2009 marked the first time the AKP had lost ground to Turkish nationalists since coming to power. Accusations of political revenge soon followed, as well as a claims on the part of Kurdish nationalists that the AKP’s aim was to eliminate the “bad Kurds (i.e., nationalist Kurds),” in order to force eventual assimilation. [A side note, but tragically ironic, if it was the government’s intent to eliminate nationalist Kurds from what some government officials called the “real Kurds,” it has been the PKK’s effort over the years to marginalize the more integrated Kurds—the PKK would use the term “assimilated”—from the nationalist Kurds, whom the PKK, in turn, considers the “ real Kurds.” The reality, of course, is that there is more than one reality, and that Kurds, qua individuals, get caught in the middle.] The PKK, as well as the BDP, have perpetuated, if not ramped up, this rhetoric of elimination since June’s election, making compromise all the more difficult. How can one negotiate with another party intent to eliminate you?

For the government’s part, there is increasingly less recognition of those Kurds who are nationalists as legitimate players with the right to participate in politics—of course, a fact not helped by the PKK’s intransigence when it comes to ending its violent campaign against Turkish state forces, many of which are conscripts or civilian police officers (or, in the most egregious cases, state-employed school teachers or family members and/or bystanders of PKK terrorism). Though the government has announced plans for yet another Kurdish opening, its new coordinated, rapid response military campaign against the PKK, which has unusually carried on throughout the winter months, seems armed with more sticks than carrots—and, again, the effect of that is a ratcheting up of the PKK/BDP’s rhetoric of elimination.

PHOTO from Rudaw

In an interview last week with Rudaw, the PKK’s leader in Kandil, Murat Karayilan, laid the blame of increased violence squarely at the feet of Prime Minister Erdogan. For Radikal columnist Cuneyt Ozdemir's take on the interview, click here. In Karayilan's mind, Erdogan has now taken control of the state: whereas before the prime minister could claim he could not control various elements of the state opposed to his agenda, in particular the Turkish Armed Forces and judiciary, according to Karayilan, the prime minister can no longer make that claim. Karayilan confirms negotiations with the government, and claims that the government would always explain the continued military and judicial operations against the PKK as out of its control, which again, according to Karayilan, they are not. Implying that negotiations were halted because the PKK realized the government’s lack of honesty as to its ability to halt operations against it, Karayilan naturally attempts to take the high ground while at the same time condemning the government’s plans for a second opening as insincere and, of course, ultimately aimed at destroying the Kurdish national movement and assimilating all Kurds.

Of course, the reality is that the government always used a mixture of carrots and sticks, and yes, the self-righteous attitude of Karayilan is to be expected. Yet, at the same time, the AKP’s situation is different than it was when negotiations began talks with the PKK five years ago. The AKP now not only has control of the prime ministry, but has largely civilianized the Turkish Armed Forces and tightened its control over the judiciary, which less than four years ago almost brought about its closure. The AKP is, to a large extent, in control of the state.

Semih Idiz depicts the AKP as Janus-faced, looking at once to the future while caught up in the past. More optimistically than other critics, Idiz argues that while the party has made significant progress on the democracy and human rights front, including on the Kurdish question, it has too easily been caught in the traps of the past—thus, the result is often two steps forward, one step back. I do not contradict Idiz here, but do think the party, and Turkey, risks more than a slower march toward progress. The bold moves the AKP made in efforts to transform the Kurdish question, most significantly its efforts to accommodate a Kurdish cultural reality and its opening negotiations with the PKK, could easily result in a serious setback should the party continue its high-intensity security struggle (a look back to the past) without ensuring that the carrots the government is now offering are more than mere gestures—that the party is serious about granting constitutional recognition to Kurds as citizens of Turkey, and is intent to negotiate with the nationalists as to other demands related to federalism and autonomy, and do so, of course, with respect to all Kurds—not just the nationalists—decide this is what they want.

Yet Karayilan is not correct here either. If Prime Minister Erdogan does wield control of the state, this still does not mean that the prime minister is necessarily in the position to make concessions, especially given divides within his own party on the Kurdish question and serious misgivings on the part of the Turkish public, which has had to deal with terrorist violence for more than twenty years. That Karayilan does not even begin to endeavor recognition of Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc's statement that group rights for Kurds will be enshrined in the constitution, including much demanded rights to Kurdish language education, gives reason to doubt the role of the PKK as a peacemaker -- or, at least the role of Kandil. When talks of a possible ceasefire occurred this past July in conjunction with Ocalan's call for a "peace council," it was Karayilan who resisted and what followed was a violent attack on Turkish conscripts that seriously set back any hope for an emerging peace process.

It is difficult to blame Ankara for being fed up, and even more impossible not to recognize some glimmer of hope in the deputy prime minister's recent statements, even amidst continued operations against alleged members of the KCK, such as respected academic Busra Ersanli. What is sure is that ramped up rhetoric, paranoia, and lack of trust on both sides is sure to keep the conflict alive, especially as long as violence remains part of the equation. The AKP may be intent to so weaken the PKK by this summer that it will be forced to lay down arms (an unlikely result), but given the PKK's recent posturing, it will be difficult to realize the give-and-take between the two sides that would mollify the PKK's conviction the government is out to eliminate it and pave the way for future talks. The burden is not just on the AKP, but also Kandil.

Division in the Ranks

2012-01-17T07:47:00.005-05:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Though Turkish society is pretty evenly divided between those who support the ruling AKP and those who do not, perhaps the more important divide in terms of determining the county's trajectory is within the government.

AKP officials have been careful to play down any division within party ranks, but events over the past year hint of a fissure between a faction in the party loyal to Prime Minister Erdogan and another closely aligned with Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader based in Pennsylvania who runs the Hizmet movement, a powerful network consisting of tens of thousands of followers (of those sympathetic to the movement, there are estimates well over 5 million) that has sought to exert its influence within the state and Turkish society.

Though Gulen and his supporters have stopped short of forming a political party, they have managed to gain key positions within state institutions and the ruling party. (For a nuanced take of the movement's engagement with state institutions, including its tactics and ruminations of its overall strategy, see Berna Turam's Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement.)

Further, critical investigations into the movement's activities have not been welcome. As foreign journalist Justin Vela explored last week in Foreign Policy, allegations have long existed that the movement is behind the operations against Ergenekon, the opaque deep-state organization accused of terrorism and plots to overthrow the state. Indeed, it was the Gulen movement journalist Ahmet Şık was investigating when he was charged as a member of Ergenekon.

While Gulenists wield considerable influence in the AKP, they do not necessarily determine the direction of the party, and divisions within AKP's ranks in recent months indicate what, according to many observers, is a power struggle between the Hizmet/Gulen movement and Prime Minister Erdogan.

These include a debate last month on a law that reduced sentences for wealthy businessmen charged with fixing football matches, as well as a difference in approaching the air strikes at Uludere that killed 34 Kurdish smugglers. In the latter instance, Prime Minister Erdogan defended the military and intelligence services while Gulen-affiliated press leveled accusations that the strikes were the work of the "deep state." For an example, in Turkish, see this op-ed in Zaman criticizing the government for not noticing what the author alleges is a deep-state conspiracy.

The most recent evidence of a difference of opinion between the two parties centers on whether former Chief of General Staff Ilker Basbug, who was arrested little more than a week ago, should be tried at the Constitutional Court or by the specially-authorized court that issued the warrant for his arrest. Most interestingly, President Gul, thought to be friendly to the Gulen movement, has broken ranks with the movement and called for Basbug to be tried at the Constitutional Court in accordance with what seems like a relatively clear dictate (Article 148) in the Turkish Constitution that chiefs of staff and force commanders are to be tried at the Supreme Court (for more on Basbug, and the rather nonsensical charges of how the former commander could overthrow the government using website, see past posts and this excellent bit of analysis by Gareth Jenkins). Prime Minister Erdogan, for his part, has said he supports Basbug's release pending trial.

Yet AKP members close to the Gulen movement disagree with both these positions. Instead, they have asserted that Basbug can be tried by the specially-authorized court because the charges against him are not related to his duties as Chief of General Staff and that the release of Basbug and other serving and retired military officials charged in connection with membership in Ergenekon would only encourage further acts of terrorism.

One of the most outspoken of these members is deputy chairman Huseyin Celik, who is known to be quite close to the Hizmet movement and before served as Minister of Education. In response to Gul, Celik reaffirmed his position that Basbug can be tried before the specially-authorized court. Gulen-affiliated Zaman ran Celik's comments last Thursday (in Turkish, click here). Other AKP members known to be close to Gulen have also taken Celik's view, including deputy chairman Mustafa Elitas, who contended that the president's views were not important, as well as Ayhan Sefer Ustun and Burhan Kuzu, who are, respectively, heads of the parliament's human rights and constitutional commissions.

Enough is Enough?

At the same time parliament appears divided on the issue of Basbug, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc announced last Wednesday that elected CHP deputies Mustafa Balbay and Mehmet Haberal, who are also accused of membership in Ergenekon, should be released and take their seats in parliament. His words were followed by those of Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin, who announced that the party would soon unveil judicial reform to shorten detention periods and bring about speedier trials.

Arinc and Ergin's announcement followed the release of a critical report on detention and specially-authorized courts by Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights. For the full report, click here.

As Vatan columnist Bilal Cetin reflected last week, recent developments lead to the conclusion that the winds are changing in Ankara. Has the prime minister grown further wary of international criticism pertaining to long detention times and jailed members of parliament? Is there a significant segment within the party, the prime minister included, that have themselves grown wary of the unwieldy nature of the Ergenekon investigation? There were hints of this when Ergenekon investigator Zekeriya Oz was replaced last March following Şık and Nedim Şener's arrest (see past post). Is enough simply enough?

Now that the AKP has a firm grip on the military, Erdogan might well be less interested in purging current and former military officials who were once in opposition to the AKP's ascendancy. As Rusen Cakir writes, for all intents and purposes, the AKP now controls the military -- and, given the most recent bout of judicial reforms, perhaps the state. Rather than participating in the old status quo or joining "deep state" elements, the AKP has created its own status quo.

If, as some critics like Gareth Jenkins assert, the alliance between the Gulen movement and the AKP was a marriage of convenience, we might indeed be looking at a potential divorce, but not without more vying for power. Where President Gul and Bulent Arinc stand in all of this is still a bit of a mystery (Arinc is also thought to be quite sympathetic to Gulen, and both are rumored to be potential contenders for prime minister once Erdogan departs), but there is no doubt that the next year will be interesting for the party.

KCK Operations Continue As Negotiations Remain Halted

2012-01-16T16:50:00.000-05:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Continued operations against the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), the political/civil society wing of the KCK established between 2005 and 2006, have resulted in the detention of 37 Kurdish nationalist activists, many from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).

The raids took place on Friday, and involved searches of 123 locations, including the BDP-controlled municipal building in Diyarbakir, BDP headquarters in Istanbul, and the Diyarbakir offices of the Confederation of Trade Unions and Public Employees (KESK), as well as the Kurdish language-cultural organization Kurdi-Der, the Education and Science Workers' Union (Egitem-Sen), the Human Righs Association (IHD), as well as various other non-governmental organizations accused of being linked to the KCK. Provincial and district offices of the BDP across several provinces were also raided, in addition to, most controversially, parliamentarian Leyla Zana's Ankara home (for more on Zana, click here). For an account of the raids in English from Bianet, click here.

The BDP maintains a largely subservient relationship with the PKK, and in the past year, many of its members, with cresendoing fervor, have expressed support for the terrorist organization, including crediting the armed struggle for the progress that has been made in recent years on the minority/cultural rights front. Yet the party remains the only viable legal representative of the Kurdish nationalist movement. The KCK's establishment and activity since its founding has greatly blurred the boundaries between the BDP and the PKK, further confounding its relationship to the PKK and the independence of its members.

For their part, BDP politicians argue the government is determined to push them out of politics, and that the KCK operations are the principal means for doing this. Kurdish members of the AKP are somewhat divided on the issue of the operations. For example, AKP parliamentarian Galip Ensarioglu told Rudaw that while the operations against the KCK are sometimes inaccurate, members of the KCK should understand that "they will have to pay the consequences." Other Kurdish AKP parliamentarians -- for example, Zafer Ozdemir from Batman -- offer stronger support.

Ensarioglu, like other Kurdish parliamentarians from the AKP who tread a thin line, attempt to create distance between the ongoing operations and the government, arguing that the KCK operations are carried out by sometimes overzealous prosecutors and not the AKP. That said, it is highly unlikely that the operations would continue without the AKP-led government's consent, and indeed, government officials have openly spoken out on their status. Soon after Friday's operations, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said the operations will continue.

. . . .

PKK head Murat Karayilan confirmed from Kandil that he was in negotiations with the Turkish government for five years, and that for two to three years, the negotiations were direct. Karayilan has gone onto elaborate that the return of refugees from Makhmour and Kandil were the result of negotiations between Prime Minister Erdogan and imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and came at the proposal of Ocalan.

On Oct. 18, 2009, two groups consisting of eight guerrillas and 26 refugees returned through the Habur border crossing between Turkey and Iraq to be met by Kurdish nationalist politicians and waves of cheering nationalist Kurds shouting pro-PKK slogans. The appetite of the Turkish public for the Kurdish opening the government had announced the previous summer was soon lost amidst displays of what looked to be victory celebrations that were broadcast for days across Turkish television.

Negotiations soon after ceased, and reports indicate that they have not picked up sense. Tapes leaked of negotiations in Oslo were released this past August, and were not denied by the AKP government. Despite the revelations that both sides of the conflict were at one point holding negotiations, there is no indication from the various centers of power within the PKK nor the AKP government that they will pick up again anytime soon.

For another PKK account of the negotiations, click here for Muzaffer Ayata's interview with Rudaw. When negotiations stopped, PKK violence escalated, and in the past year, has included violence perpetrated against civilians, including bombings in civilian areas and the abduction of school teachers sent to serve in the southeast.

Still in Search of Justice, But Perhaps Closer to It

2012-01-15T10:12:00.020-05:00

PHOTO from Birgün

New evidence presented on Tuesday to judges overseeing the Hrant Dink case has given further credence to the claim of Dink's lawyers that the Turkish Armenian journalist's murder was the work of an organized effort that included state elements.

Telephone records long sought by Dink's lawyers revealed conversations between the assassins currently on trial and five other people in the vicinity of the crime scene, in addition to 14 other people who were called from the crime scene and had connections to the defendants and other suspects in the case (for Bianet's more detailed report of the evidence presented, click here). For a full account of the hearing from Birgün, which has closely covered the case and positioned itself firmly in line with Dink's lawyers, click here.

The new evidence raises the possibility of another investigation, though judges hearing the unwieldy trial have expressed their desire to conclude it on Jan. 17. If this occurs, even more suspects could be named and evidence put forward that would further link suspects to police in Istanbul and gendarme officers in Trabzon, from where the murder plot was hatched.

Dink's lawyers have long demanded the release of the telephone records at the heart of the new discovery, though the police and the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate (TIB) have been reluctant to turn them over. The records were released to Dink's lawyers just this November after a months-long ordeal and plenty of conflicting excuses from the TIB. Prosecutors in the case maintain there is nothing new in the records, a claim with which the judges hearing it on Tuesday seemed to concur, though this seems hardly the case.

Erdogan: President in 2014

2012-01-14T16:37:00.002-05:00

PHOTO from Milliyet

This week the parliament's constitutional commission reached consensus to hold the country's first presidential elections in 2014. The decision allows Prime Minister Erdogan, who under the AKP's by-laws cannot continue to serve as leader of his party after 2015, to run for president. This would allow Erdogan to stay at the top of the political scene and work to realize his plans for Turkey's centennial in 2023.

This calculus is likely behind Erodgan's desire for a strong presidential system modeled on the United States and/or France, a move that would require a drastic reworking of Turkey's parliamentary system but might well be up for debate as parliament continue to work on provisions for a new constitution to replace the 1982 constitution drafted under military tutelage.

Yet enacting a presidential system will not be easy given that the AKP is shy of the two-thirds majority required to unilaterally pass amendments to the constitution, as well as the three-fifths majority needed to pass amendments and then take them to referendum. Amendments passed in this way require only a simple majority, which the AKP, as it did in September 2010, would likely have little difficult attaining. That said, the party is just three votes shy of the three-fifths needed (it currently has 327 seats of 350) to bring amendments to referendum.

So why is this week's decision so important? When Turkey amended its constitution in 2007 to hold popular presidential elections (before presidents were elected by parliament), the law was also changed to allow two consecutive five-year terms rather than one seven-year term. The question that is now near decided (parliament still needs to vote on the measure) is whether the new law applies to President Gul. Would Gul serve one seven-year term? Or, would he serve one five-year term and then be allowed to run for re-election, a move that would frustrate Erdogan's ambitions and remove him from the top of Turkish politics after 2014?

Though the delay deciding the issue essentially de facto scheduled elections for 2014 since there was little possibility of holding elections this year, the matter is now more decided. Now the question is more what will happen to the AKP after Erdogan becomes president. Will President Gul take the post or will it go to someone more junior over whom Erdogan can exert control (or, to a candidate like Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, who recently sided with Gul over Erdogan when the two were divided over a law reducing the penalty for match-fixing and over whom it might be more difficult for Erdogan to assert control)? If the latter is to happen, parliamentary elections will have to be moved from 2015, for when they are currently scheduled, to a year before, meaning that Turkey would hold presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in the same year. And, just as important, will Erdogan be able to enact his constitutional vision and expand his power after 2014?

The Radikal story linked to above has the details about the new law.

Will Roj TV Survive?

2012-01-14T15:42:00.000-05:00

Roj TV is the PKK-affiliated Kurdish-language satellite network that has been broadcasting from Denmark since 2004 after similar networks were closed in the United Kingdom and Belgium. A Danish court this week has ruled that the network and the PKK are in close communication, and that on occasion, the channel has spread propaganda on behalf of the organization.

If one watches the channel, this is nothing new, and is exactly why the channel's presence in Denmark for the past seven years has been to the serious ire of Turks, including the state, which has since 2004 worked on a number of diplomatic levels to have Denmark revoke Roj-Tv's broadcast license. That did not happen yesterday, though the network was fined ~7,000€ and the case could clear the way for the Danish Ministry of Justice to close the channel for good.

One of the Wikileaks on Turkey reveals that part of the deal to overcoming Turkish objections to the appointment of former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's to serve as NATO secretary-general was that Denmark would, in turn, take steps to shutdown the station. The case ruled on this week is the result of an indictment filed in August by Denmark's attorney general.

Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoglu said the case was the first step to assuring Roj be closed down.

How Much Longer Can "New" Last?

2012-01-13T23:29:00.011-05:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Since its disappointing election result in June, the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has been internally divided and hopelessly outmaneuvered on multiple fronts.

The delicate state in which the party and its widely perceived feckless leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, finds itself is particularly sad given that the CHP has dramatically transformed itself in the wake of the sex scandal that brought down its former stalwart leader, Deniz Baykal. In contrast to Baykal, who seemed opposed to anything in the slightest progressive, including the EU accession process, minority rights, and a more nuanced understanding of secularism (away from the antiquated and oppressive concept of laïcité), the "new CHP," as the party has since branded itself, is decidedly pro-EU, pro-minority rights, and open to renegotiating the old Kemalist framework of secularism. The party espouses a commitment to liberalism reminiscent of the old AKP, and in few places can one find a hint of the staunch nationalist chauvinism that once dominated its politics.

Yet the "new CHP" might not last much longer. Though the party had expected to win over 30 percent of the vote in June elections, it received just over 25 percent, and since then, some opinion polls show popular support diminishing. More troubling is that the old nationalist stalwarts, headed by Baykal and former party general-secretary Onder Sav, are waiting in the wings to re-assume control should the liberals fail. And fail they might. A petition originating last week has collected the necessary number of signatures to force the CHP to hold an extraordinary congress in March, at which time those Baykal and Sav are likely to attempt a challenge of Kilicdaroglu's leadership.

The call for an extraordinary congress comes at a time when Kilicdaroglu is fighting to appease those more sympathetic to the old guard of his party. These efforts include Kilicdaroglu's visits to Silivri Prison, where numerous alleged members of the Ergenekon organization are being detained on charges of terrorism. These include CHP parliamentarians Mustafa Balbay and Mehmet Haberal, who the CHP ran for parliament and placed high on their party list despite their association with Ergenekon and known nationalist views and much to the advantage of the AKP, which pointed to their election as evidence that the CHP had not changed at all.

Upon his Nov. 9 visit, Kilicdaroglu called Silivri Prison a concentration camp for those who disagreed with the government, and it is these remarks that prompted a zealous prosecutor to charge him with insulting state officials and attempting to influence the judiciary, both of which are illegal and broadly interpreted under the current Penal Code. The prosecutor also filed a request that Kilicdaroglu's parliamentary immunity be lifted. In a fiery denunciation of the charges against him, Kilicaroglu responded in turn that he wished hismmunity would be removed and filed a formal application to the effect so that he could stand trial to face the charges against him -- a move followed by 132 parliamentarians from his party. Kilicdaroglu further said that he could be the next to end up in Silivri Prison, and perhaps even at the gallows.

Yet it is highly unlikely that Prime Minister Erdogan will allow for the removal of Kilicdaroglu's immunity (for more on this, see Murat Yetkin's column, in Turkish), and in fact, Erdogan has spoken against it, accusing Kilicadaroglu of cheap theatrics. Careful not to attract more international criticism or be responsible for what could happen if Kilicdaroglu were brought to trial, Erdogan is instead hoping Kilicdaroglu will fall victim to the divisiveness within his own party. Plus, Erdogan does not have much to fear at the moment from the CHP, which due to circumstances largely beyond its control, has turned into more of a sideshow than a real contestant for power.

That said, Kilicdaroglu, like other progressive elements in the CHP, are in a difficult spot. If they are too progressive, they will lose support from staunch Kemalists sympathetic to the old guard views within their party; yet if they take up the cause of two rather unpopular figures (Balbay and Haberal) and move too much toward the old rhetoric, they are likely to lose the liberals who voted for them in the last election. Kilicdaroglu's most recent attempts to portray himself as a victim under threat of being sent to Silivri are an attempt to take a hardline and demonstrate solidarity with Balbay and Haberal while at the same time seize an opportunity to criticize the specially authorized courts the government has setup to try suspected Ergenekon suspects. Yet, in a large sector of the Turkish public's eyes, this gesturing is more likely to place Kilicdaroglu and the CHP in the camp of Balbay and Haberal rather than as true liberals who stand up for everyone's rights.

The CHP, for its part, is not sure where it stands. Before elections, the party called for an amendment to one of the three currently inviolable first three articles of the constitution that would remove ethnically chauvinist tracings from the current definition of Turkish citizenship (a key demand of nationalist Kurdish nationalists) only to return to the position that the first three articles should not be amended. Similarly, when the party boycotted parliament, it demanded the release of its own parliamentarians, saying little about the release of the six BDP-supported candidates also imprisoned and unable to take their seats.

Though these inconsistencies are no doubt a symptom of the democracy pains faced by the CHP as its new leadership struggles to revitalize the party and overturn Baykal's legacy (Baykal dominated the party for over 18 years), party officials should recognize that the increase it did make in its votes -- while shy from the 30 percent hoped for -- is the result of a more progressive, inclusive party that, at least in its campaign rhetoric, espoused hope for a "Turkey for everyone." The party did pick up votes from many liberals and progressives, a large number of whom have become disenchanted with the AKP and its increasing authoritarian tendencies. That said, this new support extended to the CHP is still incipient and not wide-reaching, and few voters, even if they voted for the party, trust it will deliver on the social democratic policies promised. Support for Kilicdaroglu, who simply does not compare to Erdogan at a rhetorical level, is probably lower.

So far, Erdogan has taken advantage of the CHP's dilemma. Kilicdaroglu, an Alevi with family ties to Dersim, where in 1937-8 over 10,000 Alevi (and Zaza) Kurds were killed in air strikes by Turkish forces, has long-proven to be more liberal on the Kurdish issue than the old guard within his party. The strikes occurred under the leadership of the CHP (though a much older, and obviously much different party), and in the last years of Ataturk's life. In November, in a brilliant political move, Erdogan apologized for the killings, a move sure to spark division within the CHP. Former CHP deputy chairman Onur Oymen's remarks toward Alevis had divided the party at the end of 2009 (before Kilicdaroglu came to power), and the prime minister knew it would divide the party once more, putting pressure on Kilicdaroglu at a time when he was simply trying to stay alive in his party and avoid an extraordinary party congress, which looks like it is now happening.

With Kilicdaroglu now evermore associated with Balbay and Haberal, especially given that both men were behind the CHP's boycott of parliament after the elections, Erdogan will now take credit for not removing the opposition leader's immunity -- for taking the high road. Kilicdaroglu will instead be let to fall on his own sword or that of Baykal, with whom Erdogan visited this past December, in order to, reportedly, discuss allowing Haberal to visit his dying mother.

Whether the "new CHP" will survive attempts by the stalwarts in its wings to bring back the old "Party of No" is yet to be seen, but is of critical importance at a time when anything liberal and progressive should be preserved. There has not been a viable opposition party in Turkey since the AKP came to power, which indubitably allowed the ruling party to consolidate its power over the past ten years. Though "the new CHP" is perhaps not yet viable, it is the closest thing Turkey has seen to a legitimate social democratic party since Bulent Ecevit's troubled Democratic Left Party in the 1990s. Baykal might no longer be holding the reins of the CHP, but it is not quite clear whether Kilicdaroglu is either, nor whether he will be able to hold onto power much longer.

More Trouble with Leyla Zana

2012-01-11T07:12:00.042-05:00

BDP parliamentarian and nationalist hardliner Leyla Zana has once more incited a firestorm of criticism. In a speech delivered in Frankfurt, Zana said arms were the Kurds' "insurance policy," and that the progress the Kurds have accomplished thus far is due to the PKK's armed struggle.

This could not be further from the truth. Reform passed in recent years on the Kurdish question has occurred when PKK violence has been at a low, the result of a commitment to liberalism and political rights that has allowed Kurdish activists and politicians to more freely participate in politics, albeit with continued serious restrictions. Any progress on the Kurdish front owes itself to liberalism and the EU accession process more than to violence, which has only stalled reform and led to the old political deadlock. The state is now attempting to assert itself against a Kurdish nationalist politics that thanks to the KCK has become inextricably entangled with violence. For my past post on Zana, click here.

Prime Minister Erdogan responded today by telling Zana that she should "go to the mountain," meaning she should give up parliamentary politics and join the PKK. While this was indubitably not the most productive thing to say, it is more evidence that the prime minister is "fed up," and that it is all the less likely to engage the BDP now than before.

Erdogan also responded to comments made by BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas in response to remarks made by Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel in an interview with Milliyet in which Ozel said he has qualms with labeling PKK members "terrorists." Demirtas had responded that Ozel did not carry as much importance as a "colonel" and that he did not care what the military chief had to say. Erdogan declared that the PKK Demirtas serves would not allow the BDP leader to shepherd 100 sheep.

PHOTO from Habertürk

The prime minister also drew attention to BDP politicians who had placed PKK regalia on the coffins of some of the 35 people who were killed in the air strikes at Uludere, accusing them of politicizing the tragedy. A parliamentary sub-commission has been established to investigate the strike at Uludere while the government still has yet to issue an official apology or admit mistakes made by MIT or the Turkish Armed Forces. Habertürk reports that the Interior Ministry has stripped a local gendarme deputy commander of his post. The Sirnak governor's office is carrying out its own investigation in conjunction with the Interior Ministry.

In other news related to Uludere, Habertürk columnist Ece Temelkuran, a prominent and controversial Turkish journalist, has been fired for apparently taking too critical a line on the tragedy. In recent columns, Temelkuran had referred to the air strikes as a "massacre." The Wall Street Journal's Ayla Albayrak gives Temelkuran's firing attention in the international press.

What's Going On?

2012-01-08T20:51:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend Basbug denied charges of trying to overthrow the government, asking how he, in the time command of 700,000 troops, could or would opt to use websites to stage a military coup. Basbug assumed head of the Armed Forces in August 2008, and in February 2009, following news about the websites that appeared in Taraf, an Istanbul prosecutor launched an investigation that has led us to where we are today -- virtually clueless as to exactly what is going on, who is behind it, and why.

According to Basbug, the chief of general staff who preceded him, Yasar Buyukanit, launched many of the websites. Further, Basbug rejected accusations that he setup four new websites as evidenced by the document outlying the plan, and which Col. Dursun Cicek confirmed as authentic this past August. Indeed, according to Basbug, he shut many of the websites down. In comparison to Buyukanit, Basbug was seen as more moderate, and in reality, behaved with greater civility toward AKP than his more hardline predecessors.

One of the questions now is whether the retired general will stand trial in front of the Istanbul court that has arrested him, or whether his case will go before the Constitutional Court.

Will the case raise alarm with American and European officials who have heralded Turkey as a model for secular democracy in the Middle East?

A Historic Arrest

2012-01-06T21:10:00.000-05:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet

For the first time in Turkey's history, a former Chief of General Staff has been arrested. Ilker Basbug, who resigned from the post in August 2010, is charged with masterminding an attempt to overthrow the AKP government by setting up website that would spread propaganda aimed at ultimately bringing about an end to the party's almost 10-year hold on power.

Word of the potential arrest appeared earlier this week when news broke that a probe launched by an Istanbul prosecutor into the website conspiracy included Basbug. 22 other suspects, including seven generals, have been identified by the prosecutor as allegedly creating black-ops websites setup by the Turkish Armed Forces to disseminate fallacious rumors that would eventually bring about the overthrow of the government.

The website conspiracy began to surface this August when Col. Dursun Cicek confirmed the authenticity of a document outlying a plan to use the websites for propaganda purposes and said the operation was under the control of the General Staff, which was at the time of the document's production headed by Basbug. Days later Rt. Gen. Hakan Igsiz was arrested and allegedly testified that Basbug was responsible for the campaign. At the time, Islamist-oriented Yeni Akit called for Basbug's arrest.

Hurriyet columnist Ismet Berkan breaks down the history of the website conspiracy. In 2000, Bulent Ecevit called on state institutions to act against Islamist and separatist propaganda. According to Berkan, the General Staff responded to the call by setting up dozens of websites to do just this. When the AKP came to power in 2002 the websites released multiple stories highlighting the party's alleged anti-secular activities, many of which turned up in Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya's 2008 indictment to close the party. The websites made news in 2009 when Taraf ran a story about the websites that linked them to the General Staff.

It is hard to believe that the generals in question thought they could overthrow the government using websites, and as to Basbug's role in the affair, he alleges to have closed down many of the sites when he took power over the institution. Just what is going on here is still widely speculated, and should make for an interesting week ahead.

Two Journos Who Played with Fire

2012-01-05T22:57:00.002-05:00

PHOTO from The New York Times

The New York Times gave coverage yesterday to the issue of press freedom in Turkey in light of the ongoing trial against journalists Ahmet Şık (use Turkish letters when spelling!) and Nedim Sener (click here for past post). Both are world renown journalists, and Sener, in 2010, won the International Press Institute's World Press Hero award.

Both men have been in prison for 309 days since their arrest in March on charges of being "terrorists" affiliated with the shadowy Ergenekon network. They are being tried by an Istanbul court along with eight journalists in the employ of Oda TV. The charges against the journalists stem from a file that police reportedly found on a computer at Oda TV's offices, but which defense lawyers and expert witnesses say were electronically planted using malware. The file tied the journalists to the shadowy Ergenekon network, alleged to constitute the "deep state" and be behind numerous attempts to overthrow the government. The court did task the Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK) with carrying out analysis on the computer disks at the center of the investigation. Another hearing is expected on Jan. 23.

Sener says his arrest is revenge for working to reveal the forces behind the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, which contrary to the charges against Sener, is thought to be the work of the deep state. Neither Sener nor Şık have anything in common with the ultra-nationalist ideology with which the Ergenekon network is associated -- both are devout leftists with a long history of writing and political activity.

At the time of Şık's arrest, the journalist was working on a book about the infiltration of members of the also shadowy Gulen religious network, which is headed by Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric based in Pennsylvania who preaches a moderate version of Islam and whose ideas and influence have deeply penetrated Turkish state and society (for a foreign journalist's take on Gulen, see Financial Times reporter Delphine Strauss's take last April).

Gulen's intentions and influence in Turkish politics are widely debated, and he no doubt wields a great amount of power among elements of the ruling AKP government (for more, see past post). Indeed, tension between Gulenists and non-Gulenists in the AKP is speculated to run quite high and was on display last spring when Prime Minister Erdogan dismissed Zekeriya Oz, the prosecutor formerly responsible for the Ergenekon investigation, including the arrests of Şık and Sener; last fall when the AKP divided itself over a law aimed to reduce the penalty for fixing soccer matches; and in recent days, in coverage of the Uludere tragedy that has appeared in Zaman, which is owned by Gulen (for an example, see Aziz Istegun's analysis soon after the attack) and Gulen's declaration that the strike was coordinated by people intent to undermine "harmony."

The case has become a rallying cry in a country where, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) last April, at least 57 journalists are currently imprisoned (more than in China; the New York Times put the number at 97 in this report). The government has asserted that of these journalists are not in prison for anything they have written, but for being members of terrorist organizations, though the argument has failed to convince waves of protestors that have assembled since Şık and Sener's arrest, in addition to international critics (for the OSCE's report in April, click here).

A Lot of Noise Against Coups (But Maybe Not the Right Type)

2012-01-05T21:45:00.108-05:00

Former president and general Kenan Evren, leader of Turkey's 1980 military coup, could face trial at the age of 94. On Jan. 3, a prosecutor filed an indictment with an Ankara court alleging Evren, as well as former Air Force Commander Tahsin Sahinkaya, now 87, masterminded violent unrest later used to justify their military putsch. For more, in Turkish, click here.

PHOTO from Milliyet

The violence preceding the coup was some of the worst in Turkey's history, including a series of shootings against peaceful protestors gathered in public squares and assassinations of leftist figures, including the murder of Milliyet editor Abdi Ipekci with whose assassination the indictment against the two men alleges they are complicit. These attacks were carried out by rightist militias mainly in command of the infamous ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, and combined with the series of detentions and military trials after the coup, decimated the Turkish left (for more, see here).

The charges against the generals are facilitated by constitutional amendments passed in the September 2010 referendum, and were some of the few amendments that enjoyed broad public support, including that of the CHP opposition. A past attempt to bring charges against Evren made by former prosecutor Sacit Kayasu resulted in the prosecutor's disbarment. There is another investigation ongoing into the use of torture during the coup years. The coup brought about the assassination of 571 people, and over 700,000 people were detained in its aftermath. Torture was rampant, prison conditions horrible, and black-listings widespread.

Ozel Regrets "Terrorist" Label

2012-01-05T21:11:00.049-05:00

PHOTO from Milliyet

Milliyet's Fikret Bila has run an interview with Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel in which the head of the Turkish Armed Forces says he would not like to call PKK fighters "terrorists" since they, too, are citizens of Turkey.

According to Ozel, many PKK fighters have been deceived, a fact which the top general laments at the same time he gives casualty figures of how many terrorists have been killed in the past six months. Turkish forces in Turkey's near 18-year conflict with the PKK. That number is at 165, according to Ozel, while 112 have surrendered and another 50 have been captured.

Ozel's intimation that PKK fighters should not be labeled as "terrorists" has infuriated many Turks, and nationalist-minded bloggers are clamoring to criticize Ozel as ineffective, and many not simply vis-á-vis the Kurdish question, but in regard to the treatment of army generals who have been arrested in the ongoing Ergenekon investigations.

In the interview, Ozel also dismissed reports that the PKK has adopted a truce, arguing that the opposite is in fact true and that PKK operations have continued throughout the winter. He also said unequivocally that the Turkish Armed Forces were in no way involved in the negotiations between MIT and the PKK that seem to have ended at the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010. Ozel further states that he is against recognizing Kurdish as an official language or integrating it into school education and using it to administer public services.

The general goes on to state that the United States has provided assistance from northern Iraq, though the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has done little to assist with the situation. Iraqi officials have told Ankara that there is little they can do (see an account of TRT's interview, in Turkish, with Iraq Vice President Tariq Hashimi on Oct. 30). Meanwhile Iraqi President Jalal al-Talabani and KRG president Massoud Barzani, much to the likely frustration of Turkish officials, continue to dialogue with the BDP, urging the party, albeit without much visible success, toward peace.

Puppets of the PKK!, Says Erdogan

2012-01-04T22:52:00.010-05:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet

Prime Minister Erdogan addressed AKP's parliamentary group meeting yesterday, telling BDP parliamentarians that "they could not even use the restroom without being attached to their master's strings." Erdogan was likely incensed by charges that BDP deputy Hasip Kaplan incited the beating of Naif Yavuz and strong statements in recent days by BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas.

Though AKP officials have long charged that the BDP is closely affiliated to the PKK, Erdogan's strong language evinces the intense animosity between not only the BDP and his party, but also the Turkish public. There are news reports that the KCK operations have revealed links that speeches of BDP parliamentarians are drafted by or with the input of PKK leadership, and that BDP addresses are often coordinated with terrorist attacks. Though the government is short on hard evidence, accusations of the BDP taking its orders from Kandil are likely to heighten tensions with the BDP in the coming weeks. Demirtas, for his part, compared the nationalist resistance movement to that of the Palestinians and told supporters in Diyarbakir that Kurds would "fight like Palestinians."

Erdogan's demonstrable anger is no doubt related to his utter frustration with the BDP. The AKP has been trying to broker a peace agreement since 2005. The biggest blow to these efforts came in October 2009 when a return of PKK militants returned at the Habur border crossing to be greeted by Lurdish nationalist politicians and Kurdish nationalist crowds flashing victory signs. The AKP had designed the affair to be a solemn proceeding to mark the inception of a larger peace process, but was instead met with Kurdish nationalist fanfare and an enraged Turkish public irate over what it perceived as victory celebrations for terrorists. Soon after, the AKP's "democratic opening" rapidly began to crumble and the party distanced itself from Kurdish nationalist politicians.

The failed attempt also seemed to disrupt ongoing secret negotiations the AKP and MIT, Turkey's intelligency agency, had been holding with Ocalan and PKK representatives from Europe and Kandil. Tape recordings of negotiations held in Norway between unidentified representatives of MIT and the PKK were released this past August, and in a landmark moment and to Erdogan's credit, the prime minister defender MIT and its director Hakan Fidan, as well as the potential value of the talks at the time. Yet the prime minister has said that talks have since stopped, and there is no evidence otherwise to contradict that whatever negotiations were occuring between 2005 and 2009 have begun anew.

Further, relations with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, jailed in isolation on a small island called Imrali just outside of Istanbul, have also soured. Ocalan had sounded a calming note in early July, calling BDP politicians to end their boycott of parliament and calling a peace council to be formed. Yet, after these declarations in early July, the PKK launched a major attack in Diyarbakir that killed 13 soldiers. The attack coincided with the Democratic Society Congress (DTK)'s declaration of autonomy, though DTK leaders denied any connection. Erdogan quickly seemed to lose confidence in Ocalan -- either because he could not control the PKK, which in fact has multiple command centers often at odds with each other, the most important of which is Murat Karayilan's command over the organization from Kandil, or because the exiled leader betrayed him. The fact that the attack occurred right before the Ocalan's call to extend a July 15 ceasefire, and that public statements of and intelligence on PKK leadership in Kandil seemed to reveal the PKK had a different intention, lends evidence to the former. At the end of July, Erdogan declared Ocalan powerless, and shortly after cut off the exiled PKK leader's access to his attorneys, through whom the PKK leader would issue announcements to Kandil, the BDP, and the hardline Kurdish nationalist masses who support him. Talks with the BDP to re-enter parliament also collapsed.

The situation only intensified in the months ahead, though the BDP did decide to end its boycott of parliament just days before it reconvened at the beginning of October. Yet, again, soon after this decision the PKK killed 24 soldiers in Cukurca (Hakkari), the fourth most deadly attack in the history of Turkey's conflict with the PKK. The October 19 attack sparked public outcry throughout the country. In response, Erdogan increased pressure on Iraq to drive the PKK from Kandil and operations against the KCK intensified. On October 30, police detained 48 alleged KCK operatives, including controversial publisher Ragip Zarakolu and Busra Ersanli, an academic at Marmara University who was a member of the commission established to work on the constitution. KCK operations continued throughout November and December, and on December 20, over 50 individuals, mostly journalists, were detained in what police said was an operation targeting the press wing of the KCK.

With Habur, the DTK declaration, and Hakkari hardly water under the bridge, the increasing militancy of the BDP's rhetoric has curried the party little favor and driven Erdogan and members of his party to nationalist excesses of their own. Erdogan and other officials' impatience and outright anger toward the BDP, which were fully manifest in yesterday's parliamentary group meeting, have led to conjecture that the party could be closed. Yet doing so would come at tremendous political cost for the AKP. The closure of the BDP's predecessor, DTP, in December 2009, led to a wave of international criticism and significantly hampered the political process.

Whether the AKP likes it or not, the BDP is the only legal representative of Kurdish nationalism and Kurdish nationalists' only conduit into the Turkish political system. If the BDP were to be shut down, the alienation of Kurdish nationalists from the political process alredy exacerbated by the KCK operations would be near complete. Therefore, though many opinion leaders are pointing to the example of Batasuna's closure in Spain, which shared a comparable relationship to ETA before its closure in 2002, it should also be noted that Batasuna enjoyed much less political support and that the Basque nationalist political landscape was and is far more plural than the Kurdish nationalist scene in Turkey.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that the BDP will be closed; however, at the same time, it is also highly likely that the AKP will be conciliatory, especially when the militant rhetoric is escalating in intensity. The best indicator for this is the government's continued dedication to its coordinated, rapid response security measures, despite the incident in Uludere, and that Erdogan, though expressing great regret in the days following the strike, has since continued to defend the Turkish Armed Forces and intelligence agencies. It seems the state is intent to express its authority over elements of the Kurdish nationalist movement after months during which the movement used a combination of politics and terrorism in its own efforts to assert power.

. . . .

Erdogan also had strong words for Taraf, which has run stories in the past few days alleging that last week's air strike in Uludere that killed 35 innocent civilians resulted from intelligence collected by the MIT, as well as the CHP and its leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has called for a parliamentary investigation of what happened.

UPDATE I (1/5) -- President Gul and Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel met yesterday about what occurred at Uludere. Interestingly, Hakan Fidan, head of MIT, also attended the meeting. MIT is at the center of the schedule as allegations emerge that the attack resulted from faulty intelligence provided by the organization.

Fallout

2012-01-03T07:14:00.003-05:00

PHOTO from Taraf

Local governor Naif Yavuz was assaulted when visiting the village of Gulyazi from where many of the victims of the air strike in Uludere haled. There are reports that BDP deputy Hasip Kaplan stoked the mob, and that he gave reports to Yavuz not to visit the area because residents were armed and angry. Meanwhile most Turkish newspapers continue to demand an apology for the strikes, and CHP leader Kemal Kilicdarglu has promised to take the matter to parliament.

Despite the mass outrage, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc has said that it is premature for the government to apologize, though it deeply regrets the incident, and the government seems to be reluctant to admit full responsibility. Arinc said today that the trek on which the smugglers were traveling was a well-known PKK treading ground, and that they would have easily looked like PKK fighters. Meanwhile Taraf is reporting that the Turkish Armed Forces acted on information provided by Turkish intelligence (MIT), and carried reports earlier that the attack might have been carried out following intelligence received from a PKK informant.

Prime Minister Erdogan and Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel met yesterday to discuss the initial findings of the Turkish Armed Forces' investigation.

Tragedy in Sirnak

2012-01-01T11:45:00.003-05:00

PHOTO from Radikal

A Turkish air strike in the Turkey-Iraq border district of Uludere in Sirnak province early in the morning on Dec. 29 has resulted in the deaths of 35 people who were smuggling diesel from Iraq to Turkey. All are Turkish Kurds, and they do not appear to in any way be affiliated with the PKK or PKK activity. The strike is a great embarrassment to the government, military, and intelligence services, which in recent months have worked to facilitate a coordinated, rapid attack strategy. The 35 killed were targeted by unarmed Heron drones (not U.S. Predator drones based at Incirlik). Those killed were hauling diesel with mules, and according to initial statement by government and military officials, appeared to be PKK forces crossing into Turkey from Iraq.

Deputy AKP vice chair Huseyin Celik has characterized the strikes as an "operational accident," and Erdogan and other government officials have expressed deep regret for the incident, vowing a full investigation into the incident. In a statement made over the weekend, Erdogan said that innocent civilians might have been intentionally attacked from the air before (a reference to Dersim), but that this does not happen today and that the government will not stand for it. Turkish Armed Forces Chief of General Staff Necdet Ozel is conducting an investigation into the incident, and is expected to report to the government in the next few days.

Turkish newspapers resound that the state must apologize for the mistake, and sentiment is nearly universal that all efforts should be made to investigate the tragedy and avoid similar incidents in the future. That said, it is yet to be seen whether the results of the investigation will be shared with the public and those responsible policies and officials held to account. Now that the government has firmer control of the military and is at the head of efforts to coordinate efforts between it and Turkish intelligence, headed by MIT head Hakan Fidan, the investigation and policies to follow will be a critical test of AKP leadership.

Reform, Not Militancy

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

At a rally in Yuksekova (Hakkari), BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas again declared that Kurds want autonomy, and again, voiced implied support for violent struggle. According to Demirtas, Kurds will continue to wage resistance and fight against government pressure. The comments were made in response to government preparation's to reform laws that have increasingly been used to target nationalist Kurds who express opinions contrary to that of the government.

The government announced earlier this week that it has prepared a package of laws aimed to address the Kurdish question, including limited rights to freedom of expression and protest, as well as the possibility of an amnesty for "repentant terrorists." Though the reforms are far from a wholesale solution to current problems and come at a time when the government continues to target Kurdish nationalist politicians and journalists, as well as some Turks and Kurds whose ideas on the Kurdish question run contrary to that of the government, they are a step, however small, in the right direction. The AKP has proposed provisions to a current law restricting speech that "incites hatred," as well as an amendment to a law that allows individuals charged with making symbols of terrorism to be sentenced to 10 years in prison and a stop to prosecutions of Kurdish nationalist activists who use "Sayin" (a term of respect) to address PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

On Dec. 22, just one week before the reform plan was announced, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc declared that denying the identity of the Kurdish people was tantamount to denying their existence to people. He promised constitutional and other legal reforms that would protect Kurdish identity, and it seems the AKP may be intent on delivering.

Arinc's statement and the AKP's reform plans comes on the back of the detentions of 51 assumed Kurdish nationalist activists, mostly journalists, who are alleged PKK associates. The detentions seek to repress journalists offering support (or, what is conceived by the government to be support) of ideas shared by the PKK. The journalists are accused of working in cahoots or being members of the press arm of the KCK, the political organization setup by the PKK to penetrate Kurdish civil society and political life. Yet, as with other KCK sweeps, in many cases the evidence against the alleged PKK associates is slipshod and/or condemns journalists for writing reports that might be considered to support the organization. The problems with this approach are numerous, and reflect flaws in the government's larger approach to prosecute and imprison (for very long periods of time) political actors who have not actually engaged in terrorist offenses.

That said, Demirtas' remarks echo the militancy of BDP rhetoric in recent months and will contribute little to a solution. Turkish politicians and civil society are already in the midst of a serious debate as to whether "poems, songs, and art" can be considered terrorist acts as put forward by Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin (see Ahmet Hakan in Hurriyet). Arinc offers a potentially alternative take, and though it is still unclear in what direction the AKP will go, the BDP is making no progress on the issue by adopting a rhetoric of militancy rather than reform.

Rather than following a hardline in doubt shaped by Kandil and perhaps Imrali, Demirtas would be better to follow in the steps of fellow BDP member Serafettin Elci, who welcomed Arinc's remarks as a step forward and asked the government to produce concrete measures. The government did, showing that Elci and moderates within the BDP could be more powerful than the hardliners if given a chance.

The Trouble with Leyla Zana

2011-12-28T06:06:00.001-05:00

I stopped posting on this blog just over six months ago to focus on other projects with a post-election consideration of the BDP in the aftermath of last June's elections. Much to the chagrin of some of its followers and fellow Turkey observers, this post featured a photograph of Leyla Zana, a leading Kurdish activist representing the hardline segment of the "legal Kurdish nationalist movement" who had just been elected to parliament. It seems in some ways appropriate to pick up where I left off then, and this after six months of stirring political developments in the Turkish government's relationship with the BDP, the PKK, and the KCK, the political organization founded by the terrorist PKK between 2005 and 2006 and that has increasingly complicated the Kurdish political landscape, further blurring the boundaries between the BDP and the PKK.

In a recent interview with the Danish website Rudaw, which is supported by forces friendly to KRG president Massound Barzani, Zana declared that Kurds were no longer demanding simple autonomy, but rights to self-determination (for coverage in Hurriyet, click here). The troubles with Zana's claim are many, and not least is that "autonomy" is an instrument to actualizing rights a nation possesses to self-determination. In the interview, Zana says that a referendum ought to be held to let Kurds decide whether they want a federal system, an autonomy, or secession from Turkey. While many Kurds do understand themselves as belonging to a distinct nation, understood here as a unit exerting a demand to determine its own political future based on a common sense of belonging to a group, Zana is quite wrong to declare that somehow a territorially-based autonomy agreement or something else of the sort somehow falls short of recognizing Turkish Kurds' right to self-determination, which might be accommodated through any variety of scenarios.

First, I would like to say that there is nothing in my mind wrong with Kurdish nationalist politicians and activists articulating a right to self-determination and putting forward various political agendas to that affect. Though the Turkish state is far from ready to seriously discuss any such scenario and the AKP-led government unlikely to recognize a Kurdish right to self-determination and embrace a normal politics through which that right might be accommodate through minority rights-based policy solutions, Kurdish nationalism is a reality that will eventually have to be addressed. At the same time, Zana's understanding of how a right to self-determination might be asserted and thereby accommodated reveals a larger immaturity on the part of the Kurdish nationalist movement, and when accompanied by a significant number of Kurdish nationalists' unwillingness/inability to denounce violence, is greatly problematic and likely to lead simply to more violence. Here, it is also important to note that likely more than half of the Kurds in Turkey do not necessarily share such nationalist aspirations, and of those, far fewer, likely far less than 10 percent, support secession from Turkey. Kurdish Turks are more likely to look to Turkish cities in the West, in which about half of Turkey's Kurdish population now lives, than to cities in the north of Iraq. Kurds are tied to Turkey through politics, economy, culture, and family relations.

Further, the trouble with Leyla Zana is her dismissal of individual rights-based solutions to solve the conflict. While she acknowledges the government is attempting to solve the Kurdish question through providing for individual rights for Kurds (honestly, something that is still quite lacking), she dismisses these efforts as hopeless, declaring that Kurds "are not individuals but a nation." Just as assertive varieties of Turkish nationalism threaten individual rights and liberties, so does the predominant understanding of Kurdish nationalism that exists in most Kurdish nationalist circles. Ironically, Turks (including Turkish Kurds) have moved to embrace liberalism, as revealed by the rapid face of liberal reforms passed since Turkey began its EU accession process in 1999. Though the struggle for individual liberties is ongoing in Turkey and has suffered serious setbacks in recent years, from Zana's comments, one might conclude that liberalism (and with it, liberal nationalism) has a lot further to go in the predominantly Kurdish southeast than it does in the rest of Turkey.

In the past six months, the BDP's rhetoric has become increasingly militant and separatist, and to such a degree that it is difficult to recognize the party in comparison to the Democratic Society Party (DTP) that preceded it, and which was shut down in December 2009. The DTP, though far from liberal nationalist, was more reform-driven, more open to compromise, and in many ways, up against much greater odds than the current DTP. When the DTP was in power, the opposition CHP was dominated by assertive Turkish nationalists, and the AKP, though in some ways more accommodating than it is now after two summers of violent terrorist attacks and a failed liberalization initiative, much less able to fully tackle the problem. Now that the government has made significant headway in achieving civilian dominance over the army, a reasonable, responsible Kurdish nationalist party could in many ways accomplish a great deal, albeit with considerable resistance and back-peddling. Though the AKP government might in many ways be blamed for Kurdish nationalists' drift toward militarism and alienation, this in no way alleviates the BDP from responsibility, nor can the Turkish government be blamed for being reluctant to fairly deal with a political party that continues to endorse the utility of violence and align (perhaps even coordinate) itself with terrorist activity that has in recent months targeted civilians.

A solution to Turkey's Kurdish question is possible, but not without liberalism.

Rough Waters Ahead?

2011-06-15T23:44:00.143-04:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Sunday's elections created what is perhaps the most representative parliament in the history of the Turkish Republic. Of the 87% of eligible Turkish voters who showed up to cast ballots, only 4.4% voted for parties were not ultimately elected to parliament. This is down from 13% in 2007 and 32% in 2002. This representation problem has been a function of small political parties being unable to meet the country's high 10% threshold required to enter parliament. (The Kurdish BDP is an exception to this rule since it has not run as a political party, but rather chosen to run candidates as independents. A difficult feat to pull off, the BDP won 36 MPs this parliamentary election cycle.)

However, though there are now few political parties in parliament, this does not mean Turkey is necessarily any less divided. In fact, each of the four political parties now represented have unique constituencies and platforms that do not necessarily square with each other or facilitate compromise. As the AKP vows to seek compromise and civil society input as it moves forward with re-drafting the country's 1982 constitution, which was drafted in the shadow of a dramatic coup in 1980, it is unclear just how successful it can and will be.

Assessing the BDP

Cengiz Candar argues in today's Radikal that what a " BDP opening" is needed, meaning that the AKP must accommodate the voices and politics of the Kurdish nationalist party. At the same time, Candar, who is joined by other liberal public intellectuals who support Kurdish political, civil, and cultural rights, argues that the BDP has not shown itself to be a positive player when it comes to adopting the conciliatory politics required to reach a solution to the age-old Kurdish problem.

As Henri Barkey elucidated at an event at the Carnegie Endowment today (podcast here), the BDP's victory is impressive in that it resulted not only from the support it receives in the southeast (and in Kurdish areas throughout the country), but also from its tremendous capacity to organize. Successfully unning independent candidates for parliament is no easy task, and basically required the party to apportion its support for specific candidates running at the provincial level and then organize voters to elect these candidates. For example, in Diyarbakir, where support for the BDP was high, BDP supporters were divided between the number of candidates the BDP thought it could successfully run. Such a strategy requires the BDP to perform a complicated electoral math in determining just how many candidates it can elect in the context of a complicated electoral system and successfully rally the vote behind these independent candidates.

Though the BDP's success should not be underestimated, it should also not be overplayed. As Candar explains, though the BDP has gotten better at electoral engineering, political support for the party has not necessarily increased. Further, it should not be forgotten that a significant number of Kurds voted for the AKP despite its heavy nationalist rhetoric (Candar estimates 42%). Had the AKP not run a nationalist campaign in an effort to run the MHP into the ground, the result might have been different. Candar also points attention to the factions the BDP has managed to bring together (for example, bringing leftists together with staunch Kurdish nationalists and pro-Kurdish conservatives like Altan Tan and Sereafettin Elci). According to Candar, though this coalition-building is taking place at the elite level, the BDP has not succeeded in doing so among voters.

Trouble Brewing

In the days after the election, the BDP used this mammoth victory to call for the release of PKK terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan and direct negotiations with the PKK, actions sure to infuriate the vast majority of Turkish votes. In doing, the BDP is alienating itself from the larger electorate and adopting a divisive politics sure to further fuel the conflict.

At the same time, the AKP has paid little attention to the Kurdish problem, the existence of which the party denied during the campaign, and is instead focusing on moving onward with business as usual. The two positions combined create the conditions for a political crisis, which could come soon given that six of BDP's deputies are currently in jail and their eligibility to hold seats in parliament still up in the air.

Chief among these is Hatip Dicle, who was convicted in 2009 for disseminating PKK propaganda and whose candidacy was at the heart of the riots that enfolded at the end of April when the High Election Board (YSK) invalidated the candidacies of 11 BDP candidates (see April 21 post). On June 9, just three days before the elections, the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld Dicle's conviction. Though it was too late to remove his name from the ballot, the High Elections Board will decide whether he is able to serve in parliament.

The six BDP candidates currently jailed as part of the KCK operations (and who are awaiting trial) include Gulseren Yildirm, Ibrahim Ayhan, Selma Irmak, Faysal Sarayildiz, Kemal Aktas, and Dicle. Dicle's case is special since he is not only jailed and awaiting trial for alleged membership in the PKK (KCK), but has been convicted previously and been unable to attain the necessary paperwork required to allow him to enter parliament. The Constitution bars convicted persons from holding parliamentary office. (In addition to the six jailed BDP candidates, two CHP candidates and one MHP candidate, both recently elected, are also currently detained (for their role in Ergenekon).)

Meeting in Diyarbakir yesterday, the BDP called for the release of all six elected members and demanded the release of Ocalan. If the release of the six was not controversial enough, combining such a move with Ocalan's release is not politically savvy nor helpful for the peace process. Reaction in the Turkish press, nationalist and otherwise, has been harsh, and will likely only increase in intensity should a crisis with Dicle come to a head.

Will the AKP Seek Compromise?

Speculation is still high as to whether Prime Minister Erdogan will seek a presidential term in either 2012 or 2014 given the party's successful election result. While some observers argues the party's loss of seats and new need for compromise when it comes to amending the country's constitution renders null the possibility of a powerful Erdogan presidency, others conjecture the AKP will still be able to find the support it needs to change the constitution and empower Erdogan.

The prime minister has announced that he will not run for parliament again, and the AKP's current by-laws prevent him from being appointed to another term as prime minister. CSIS' Bulent Aliriza writes

The new constitution seems certain to usher in a presidential system, and it is clear that Erdogan intends to run for the presidency, either in 2012 or more likely in 2014. If he were to choose the latter date, he would then be in a position to implement his “Target 2023” election manifesto through the centennial of the Turkish Republic as president. However, the inability of the JDP to obtain 330 seats, which would have enabled Erdogan to get public approval for a new constitution in a referendum, presents an obstacle that needs to be overcome.

Apart from the question of Erdogan continuance as the leading force in Turkish politics, the more immediate question is whether and just how the AKP will seek compromise and consensus on the constitution, especially given the likelihood of conflict over the jailed opposition candidates who have just been elected from parliament.

Again, a key question here is whether and how the party will attempt to repair the bridges it has burnt with the large number of Kurdish voters to whom the party turned its back. Though the AKP failed to push the ultra-nationalist MHP beneath the 10% threshold, according to Barkey, any increase in the AKP's number of voters (above the 50% of the country who supported it in this election) will come from nationalist voters.

Getting these votes is dependent on how the party treats the Kurdish issue, and should it be intent to continue its nationalist rhetoric, the BDP opening for which Candar hopes is simply not going to come to fruition. At the same time, the AKP has expressed intent to negotiate with the CHP and the MHP, and there are those in the party who realize the necessity of dealing with the BDP, however unsavory and threatening its politics. At the party's parliamentary group meeting today, Erdogan re-affirmed his intent to move forward with the constitution and said he would personally supervise negotiations with the opposition and engagement with civil society.

Just how all of this will happen is yet to be seen, especially given that the next few weeks could prove difficult if the courts and the YSK prevent the release and entry of those elected candidates currently jailed. And, while Turkey might have a more representative parliament, a less divided country it is not.

A Pyrhhic Victory?

2011-06-14T13:01:00.000-04:00

I recently wrote a short entry on the elections for Democracy Digest, a project of the National Endowment for Democracy. An excerpt:

Increasingly, Turkey is polarized between those who support the AKP and those who do not. The AKP’s critics include not only the secular elite, but also liberals, Kurds and other minority groups, and others who fear the intolerance with which the party deals with difference and dissent.

However, the new parliament presents fresh opportunities for compromise and reconciliation. All parties agree that Turkey should adopt a new constitution, and given the CHP’s progressive turn, the country now has a genuine opportunity to pass a liberal democratic constitution that will respect and affirm the rights of all citizens.

Nevertheless, and despite Prime Minister Erdogan’s acceptance speech yesterday in which he vowed to seek compromise on a new constitution, it is possible, even likely, that the AKP will promote its agenda with minimal compromise and consultation (as it has in the past). Such a unilateral approach increases the likelihood of the new constitution entrenching the illiberal practices evident in the AKP’s current exercise of power, including the targeting of journalists, libel suits, increased reliance on executive and administrative orders, enhanced cabinet powers at the expense of parliament, limited minority rights, and restrictions on freedom of association and civil society.

Turkish civil society is crucial to ensuring that Erdogan seeks compromise with the other three political parties that have entered parliament. In this context, civil society will prove just as key to saving Turkish democracy as it did during the optimistic years after the EU accepted Turkey’s application for membership in 1999 and major reforms started coming down the pipe. Support for strengthening political parties and institution building has been enormously successful, but further progress is unlikely without funding and empowering civil society to hold the government and political parties in check and goad them to respond to democratic demands.

A democratic regression in Turkey will not only mark the end of a regional success story but also set back Islamist/conservative democrats in other Muslim states who view the AKP as an exemplar. As recent survey research attests, 66% of Arabs view Turkey as a democratic model.

Turkish democracy is neither a mission accomplished nor a lost cause. Authoritarian trends can be reversed and the AKP government may yet return to the more liberal politics of its inception. However, this will take serious work and dedication from the government, opposition political parties, and civil society. These elections and upcoming plans to draft a new constitution provide at once a strong impetus for reform and a new starting point.

For the full entry, click here. The blog is a good way to monitor political development throughout the world.

A Country Divided

2011-06-13T01:15:00.014-04:00

Cartoon from Hurriyet

Sounding the same refrain as last September's constitutional referendum, yesterday's election results reveal Turkey to be increasingly divided between those who support the ruling AKP government and those who do not.

Yesterday the AKP managed to increase its vote from the 46.58% it captured in 2007 parliamentary elections to 49.91%, though the party lost lost seats and its 3/5 majority in parliament (see yesterday's post).

Additionally, the AKP became the first party since the Democratic Party in the 1950s to win three consecutive parliamentary elections; however, unlike the Democratic Party, the AKP has become more popular each election, not less. Yet, while the results hint at the AKP's growing popularity, they also hint at a growing disconnect between the party's supporters and those who fear its burgeoning illiberal tendencies (see last Tuesday's post).

The Other Half

As echoed by the results of a recent Pew poll, Turkey is becoming an increasingly divided country. While those who support the AKP continue to enthusiastically return it to power, the other half (and it is literally half) of its population is deeply concerned with the direction in which the country is headed. The abyss between the two camps has grown in recent years, revealing a social phenomenon much more complicated than the narrative so often told in Western newspapers of a conflict between the ascendant Islamist middle class and the secular Kemalist elite.

Instead, what is happening in Turkey is that half the population solidly supports the AKP and its policies while the other half are becoming increasingly alienated from the party for a variety of reasons. This "other half" is not some unified Kemalist/secularist/nationalist opposition bloc, but rather represents a diverse array of different facets of Turkish society that have been left out of the AKP's increasingly hegemonic vision.

Of those opposed to the AKP, there are those concerned with the party's Turkish-Sunni chauvinism. These include not only members of a secular elite, but also Alevis (15 to 20 million people), Kurds (also 15 to 20 million people, though many Kurds are also Alevis), liberals (including Islamists), and leftists concerned about the AKP's neoliberal economic schemes. There are also plenty of observant Sunni Muslims who are nonetheless less pious than the AKP and/or increasingly concerned with the party's attempts to legislate its values. At the same time, there is a significant number of voters (~10%) for whom the AKP is not chauvinist enough. Most of these vote for the ultra-nationalist MHP.

The Next Steps

From Radikal
Starting with Refah in 1994, the AKP's antecedent, the AKP has gradually increased its votes since first elected office in 2002 with the one exception being the March 2009 local elections.

This is where the steps the AKP takes after the elections become crucial. Prime Minister Erdogan is determined to push through a new constitution that would institute a presidential system. Erdogan is widely thought to have designs on running for president should the changes come into being.

However, in a twist, though the AKP increased its share of the popular vote, it lost seats in parliament and is now short of the 3/5 majority it needs to unilaterally amend the constitution as it did last year. The loss of seats is a function of two factors, namely a high 10% threshold and a complicated system of closed-list proportional representation: an increase in the number of independent deputies associated with the Kurdish nationalist BDP and the increased number of voters in big cities where the party tends to do less well.

As a result of the shortfall, the AKP to some degree be pressured to compromise with opposition political parties if a new constitution is going to emerge, an objective supported by all political parties entering parliament.

That said, and despite Prime Minister Erdogan's acceptance speech yesterday in which he vowed to seek consensus as his government moves forward with a new constitution, it is possible, even likely, that the AKP will use its power to push forward its agenda with minimal compromise and consultation (as it has in the past). However, the risk, of course, is the way that power is enacted (targeting of journalists, libel suits, increased reliance on executive and administrative orders, more power to cabinet/less to parliament, limited minority rights, restrictions on association/NGO activity, etc.).

The most popular politician in the history of Turkish electoral politics, Erdogan has accomplished a tremendous electoral feat. It is more likely to encourage his appetite for power than to tame it. Power corrupts, and the more absolute the power, the more absolutely it corrupts.

Weep Not for the Opposition

And, where does the opposition stand -- and those who did not vote for the AKP? For one, it is unlikely the AKP will be able to further increase its vote. Given that the number of people unhappy with the direction in which Turkey is headed is the same number of people who did not vote for the AKP (see Pew Poll above), there is little headway the AKP can make in terms of winning additional votes -- basically, the party is maxed out.

All the same, the AKP's uncanny ability to turn nationalist then liberal -- only to do it all over again -- cannot be underestimated, and the party has a decent shot at maintaining its current numbers, especially if it decides to move again to the left so as to not be out-done by the CHP. However, I do believe the party's most recent bout of illiberalism, on full-display in its handling of the Ergenekon investigation, has burned many bridges, as did its extreme nationalist return in the past few months preceding the election.

There is little likelihood that bridges with more nationalist-inclined Kurds can be repaired given the ruling party's tenor this election cycle, especially given the failure of its Kurdish opening to deliver many concretes. Even less likely is that the party will win back the liberals and progressives who have been breaking ranks since 2005, many of whom have come to fear the party as a new authoritarian threat.

While the AKP might win some hardline nationalist votes from the MHP, it is unlikely to have much success here without losing a certain remainder of optimistic liberals who have continued to support the party for its economic successes and in spite of its illiberal tendencies.

The CHP

PHOTO from Radikal

Meanwhile, the CHP should regard its performance yesterday as a victory. "The new CHP," as the party has billed itself in the run up to the elections, managed to increase its vote share by 5% (a larger increase than the AKP) and gain 38 seats. Additionally, the CHP seems to have broadened its geographic reach, winning its party leader's home province of Tunceli while faring reasonably better in areas outside of its traditional strongholds. Support for the party might not be as deep in traditonally nationalist coastal enclaves (Antalya, Canakkale, and Izmir) as it once was, but the party has broadened its support beyond voters in these provinces while successfully moving toward establishing a different, much more liberal, pro-European electoral base.

Though no doubt disappointed, the CHP should realize it will take time for the Turkish public to trust it. A party in transition, the CHP had been up until a year ago an intolerant, oftentimes destructive force, providing people with little to no alternative but to vote for the AKP. There are likely plenty of Turkish voters who cast ballots for the AKP but are less than solid supporters; however, they do not trust the CHP either.

Further, as Milliyet columnist Asli Aydintasbas (in Turkish) writes, the CHP lacks the organizational and fundraising capacity of the AKP and should give itself some time to catch up.

All the same, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is likely to face extreme pressure from his party. There are already rumors that the party's old guard is plotting his demise and some papers are reporting the leader offered to step down.

Message to CHP: Patience is a virtue. After many years of not being progressive, it is simply going to take time and commitment to get people to trust in the party. If the party decides to once more change course, it is likely to do more harm than good to its long-term viability.

The BDP

The BDP is the clear winner in this election. Most pre-election polls expected the BDP to win between 25 and 30 seats, a significant increase over its present 20. However, the BDP's ability to capture 36 seats has taken many by surprise, though it should not. As mentioned above, the AKP's nationalist turn (see past post) has thoroughly alienated many Kurds. Though many of these voters were already alienated, hence the BDP's electoral success in local elections in March 2009, the most recent electoral cycle has driven many to a virtual point of no return. It will be difficult for the AKP to build consensus with the party given the bad feeling and that the BDP will feel more emboldened by this recent triumph.
The good news is that two of the party's more dovish figures, Ahmet Turk and Aysel Tugluk, who were expelled from parliament in December 2009, have returned, but so has Leyla Zana, a Kurdish militant hardliner who often advocates on behalf of the PKK. Just what the BDP will do in the coming months is uncertain, but one thing is for certain: hardline Kurdish nationalism, including militancy, got a boost this election year.

The MHP

While many thought the sex scandal would finish off what was already an ultra-nationalist party in decline, the MHP managed to comfortably pass the 10% threshold with relative ease. This might in part be due to rising unrest in the southeast and Kurdish nationalism, to which equally virulent Turkish nationalism is too frequently the response. No matter how hard the AKP tries to devour this ultra-nationalist core of voters, they still do not seem comfortable voting for Erdogan. Pro-state, nationalist idealists are just simply not going to budge on this one.

Election Night . . .

2011-06-12T15:04:00.009-04:00

From Radikal

Election results started to come out at six o'clock in the evening Turkey time, and it became evident early on that the AKP had a commanding lead of the popular vote. However, despite capturing a near 50% of voters, the largest percentage the party has captured since it first came to power in 2002, the party fell four seats shy of the 330 seats it needs in parliament (a 3/5 majority) to push through a constitution unilaterally. For an electoral map complete with official results, click here.

This means that for the first time in a long time the AKP will have to engage in political bargaining (see yesterday's post). Last year the AKP successfully pushed through a series of constitutional amendments using its previous 3/5 majority before successfully submitting the amendments to referendum. Meanwhile, the ultra-nationalist MHP managed to comfortably surpass the 10% threshold required for political parties to enter parliament, winning 13% of the popular vote. Though the party went from 69 to 54 seats, coming in above then 10% threshold made it difficult for the AKP to meet the 3/5 marker.

The AKP's chances at gaining a 3/5 majority were further damaged by the historical success of the Kurdish nationalist party, the BDP. The BDP managed to pick up a whopping 36 seats (up from 20), no doubt a result in part to growing disenchantment with -- and, in many cases, outright hostility toward -- the party in Turkey's mostly Kurdish southeast. Running as independents so as to escape the 10% threshold, the BDP captured 6% of the vote.

The AKP's nationalist turn, presumably an effort to win voters away from the MHP, had the predictable effect of alienating Kurdish voters. Ironically, as the only other political party competitive in the region, it also contributed greatly to its failure to win 3/5 of parliamenatary seats since the BDP fared so well. AKP's efforts to defeat the MHP were a gamble, losing Kurdish votes for ultra-nationalist votes (while at the same time empowering the BDP), and the party paid the price.

In addition to MHP votes, the party did pick up a significant number of votes from the SP (Felicity Party), a legacy of Erbakan's National Outlook movement, consolidating its control over the Islamist vote. It also picked up votes from the center-right Democrat Party, which also harkens back to an earlier era. I would venture to say these are the blocs that explain the party's ability to increase its share of the popular vote.

Meanwhile, the CHP, which took enormous risks this election cycle, performed under expectations. The CHP captured 26% of the popular vote to gain 38 seats (from 97 to 135), but some expected the party to poll over 30%. During the campaign, the CHP became by far the most progressive mainline party, taking positions more pro-European, pro-peace, and pro-liberal than the AKP (again, see yesterday's post). However, the party's controversial positions, especially on the Kurdish issue, may have alienated some in its formerly nationalist base -- votes that would have gone to the AKP or the MHP. However, nonetheless, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and ""the new CHP" managed to gain almost 3.5 million new voters and pick up seats. Whether the CHP will continue to steer Kilicdaroglu's chart or be so frustrated with the results that it changes course once more remains to be seen.

In his acceptance speech, Prime Minister Erdogan vowed to build consensus on a new constitution and reiterated that he represented all Turkish citizens, not just those who voted for him. Prime Minister Erdogans aid the consensus would be built among political parties and civil society groups, all of which would be consulted during the process. However, the prime minister made the same promise last year and fell short.

All parties support drafting of a whole new document to replace the country's 1982 constitution drafted under military tutelage, but just what will happen in the coming months is very much up in the air. The AKP is far from weak, and could well gain the 3/5 majority it needs without too much maneuvering.

UPDATE I (6/13) -- For a truly wonderful electoral map complete with candidate names according to the provinces from which they were elected, click here. The AKP won more provinces along Turkey's more secular Western coast than it has in the past, but this should not be read as a significant setback for the CHP. Though the CHP no doubt lost votes in some of these Kemalist/nationalist strongholds, including majorities, it seems to have widened its support throughout the country, picking up votes in provinces where before it was not at all competitive.

What Will Happen Tomorrow (And After)?

2011-06-11T10:07:00.002-04:00

Reuters Photo from VOA Kurdish

I gave a radio interview this morning to Voice of America's Kurdish service in which I was asked what would be the impact of tomorrow's elections on the AKP-led government's plans to introduce a new constitution. Though the interview mostly focused on the Kurdish issue, of particular interest was just how successful the AKP could be in bringing forward plans to introduce a new constitution.

If the AKP wins at least 330 seats in the parliament (it now has 336), it will be able to introduce constitutional amendments without the need for much consensus before taking them to referendum -- an approach the AKP took last year and with great success. If the party manages to surpass 367 votes, it will have a 2/3 super majority that will allow it to unilaterally overhaul the constitution without the need for referendum. While the latter is unlikely and the former in doubt, the larger issue is just how sincere the party is in its reiterations that it will seek consensus as it moves forward. At the moment, all four parties with a chance of entering parliament have pledged to adopt a new constitution.

Last year, the party showed little concern as it pushed amendments rapidly forward. Neither civil society nor opposition political parties were given much voice in the process and the result was a referendum that basically polarized the Turkish public. The Kurdish nationalist BDP boycotted the referendum while the CHP and the MHP campaigned hard against the amendments. Though the official result was 58%, the actual number of Turkish citizens who approved the changes was lower given that a large number of Kurds who did boycott.

If the referendum is taken as a measure of the support for the AKP, it can be said that roughly over one-half of Turkish citizens approve of the party and the direction in which it is taking the country. This matches more or less with what a recent Pew poll found. According to the poll, 48 percent of Turkish citizens are satisfied with the direction the country is taking; however, 49 percent responded they are dissatisfied. The satisfied voters, more or less, can be assumed to be likely to vote for the AKP, but of more interest are those who are not. How many of these voters are simply typical Turkish cynics and how many are disenchanted with the party? The rising number of potentially disenchanted is cause for concern (and that is more than an understatement).

One of the most pressing problems in Turkish politics today is the amount of polarization in Turkish political society. Some of this can be explained by the increasing illiberal attitudes and policies of the AKP (see Tuesday's post), which, of course, is made all the more problematic by the AKP's seeming lack of willingness to engage opposition parties and craft serious political compromises when it comes to making government policy. Without an entrenched rights-based liberal democracy, the lack of compromise becomes all the more disturbing. A unilaterally-drawn up constitution will only serve to further polarize the Turkish public while continuing to fail at any real resolution of the classic dilemma posed by democracy and difference.

However, should the AKP fall short of 330 seats tomorrow, the party will be more inclined to compromise. Just exactly what this process of compromise would look like and what parties it would include remains to be seen, but perhaps for the first time in a long time the AKP will be forced to work with other parties to carve out a political agenda.

At stake are Erdogan's ambitions to institute a presidential system that would facilitate his ascendancy to the presidency. If Erdogan wins comfortably tomorrow, he will be more confident in these efforts. Even should the AKP fall short of gaining 3/5 of the seats in parliament, an increase in the popular vote for the AKP will embolden the already emboldened leader to move forward in his quest.

Meanwhile, just as interestingly, the CHP, which has drastically changed its leadership and party platform, will discover whether its new position in Turkish politics will be rewarded. The CHP is expected to pick up seats and increase its vote either way, but will likely have a difficult time gaining the 30% of the vote for which the party is striving. The CHP, which has billed itself as "the new CHP," has taken enormous risks this election cycle, presenting itself as pro-Europe, pro-liberal, pro-peace, and importantly, anti-nationalist and anti-coup. With Kilicdaroglu's victory over the party stalwart and former party secretary-general Onder Sav last year, the party has turned 180-degrees in many of its policies, especially in regard to the Kurds and its former pro-military/pro-coup attitude. Defeating Sav, Kilicdaroglu remarked, "The empire of fear is over in the CHP. Now it is time to end the empire of fear in Turkey."

The MHP will also face a serious test tomorrow. A little less than a month ago, there was serious question as to whether the ultra-nationalist party would be able to surpass the 10% threshold required to enter parliament. However, polls conducted at the end of June put the party safely over the threshold. That said, just how well the party does tomorrow will have an impact on the number of seats allocated to the AKP and CHP. The AKP has been competing for its nationalist voter base while the CHP's recent positions, especially in regard to the Kurds, might have alienated some in its former nationalist base to vote for the MHP.

And, finally, not without its own test will be the Kurdish nationalist BDP. The BDP currently has 20 seats in parliament, just enough to form a parliamentary group and be represented. However, there is little doubt that the BDP will surpass this number and could pick up well over 30 seats. Though the BDP candidates are running as independents since there in no chance they could meet the 10 percent threshold, the rising force of the party in the southeast and in Western cities populated by a large number of Kurdish migrants will indubitably be one of the most important stories of this election cycle. As its main challenger, the AKP's increased nationalist rhetoric is likely to work in favor of the party.

We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Fleeing for Their Lives

2011-06-10T01:05:00.006-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

Syrian refugees flooding over the border with Turkey now number over 3,000 persons as Turkish officials struggle to deal with the influx. Turkish sources are reporting that the government is prepared for 15,000 more to arrive from the town in the coming days.

Jandarma have been on the border since Wednesday when the killings begun, and there is talk of setting up a buffer zone (in Turkish) to check the identity of Syrian refugees before they are escorted to one of the four refugee camps that have been setup along the border. The buffer zone will be designed to prevent PKK members from using the crisis to enter Turkey. However, plans are still being drawn up and Turkish authorities are saying it will not be necessary unless the number of refugees

Meanwhile stories of the crisis continue to emerge from refugees. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Some Syrians waiting at the border are also meeting up with their relatives from the other side who bring them provisions, which they then carry back into Syria.

The town of Jisr al-Shughour was besieged from three directions, another Syrian refugee, Ahmet Arafat, 40, claimed. “There are wounded [people] in Jisr al-Shughour, and no one can help them,” he said.

“We had restaurants and shops in Jisr al-Shughour. They razed them to the ground. They are shooting protesters too. They even poisoned the waters. We saw people as they drank from the water and died,” said another Syrian refugee, K.F., 24.

Prime Minister Erdogan has said that today and Saturday will be very important in terms of determining Turkey's future relations with Assad. The National Security Council (MGK) is set to meet after Sunday's elections.

UPDATE I (6/10) -- Hurriyet Daily News correspondent Ipek Yazdani reports that Syrian refugees coming from Jisr al-Shughour, a town of 50,000 people just 12 miles over the Turkish-Syrian border, are telling Turkish authorities that Syrian security officials attacked the town early this morning. The town has been surrounded from three sides since Wednesday.

HDN had the exclusive footage of the Syrian refugees waiting at the Syria-Turkey border on Friday showing them protesting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"Syrian soldiers killed all the young men in the village", an old woman amongst the Syrian refugees waiting at the border said in an excluseive footage obtained by the HDN.

Syrians escaping from the Syrian security forces who allegedly made a military operation to Jisr al-Shughour, Ghani and other villages massed in Turkish border, chanting slogans like "We want freedom, we want liberty."

A woman from Sıleybi village said the Syrian soldiers killed her husband. "They (Syrian government forces) attacked us at 6:00 a.m., they have been trying to kill us all day long and they killed my husband. Now they pretend like nothing is happening, they are lying! They threw us out of our country, they threw us out from our land," she said.

Another woman who showed her baby to the cameras said, "President Assad, you left this one without a father. Don't you have any fear of God?"

A man who talked to the camera while walking said, "Assad, don't you have any conscience? Is this Bashar's justice? We were all kicked out of our homes, you see all of us, all the Syrians in this region are gathering here now. So all the world shall see what we are going through."

"They attacked all of us and we had to run away. They killed my husband, he was murdered while he was trying to protect us" another woman said in a different footage shot in a tent by the Syrian side of the border.

"Syrian soldiers killed all the young men in the village, they burned our houses, God punish them, God punish Assad", an old woman shouted to the camera.

UPDATE II (6/10) -- In response to this morning's incursion into Jisr al-Shughour, Prime Minister Erdogan issued his strongest statement yet against Assad, acussing the Syrian government of committing mass atrocities and "behaving inhumanely."

“In the face of violence, we cannot continue to support Syria. We do have relatives living in Syria,” said Erdogan. The prime minister indicated that he has not been in contract with Assad since the seige began.

Turkey is refraining from calling those fleeing refugees, saying he hopes they will soon be able to return home. In the meantime, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is prepared to step in should the Turkish government need assistance. At the moment, Erdogan says neither UNHCR assistance nor a "safe haven" are needed.

Though Turkey is keen to keep Syrian refugees safe and do the right thing here, it is also understandably concerned about its border and the potential for a repeat of Operation Provide Comfort, which played a major role in initiating the Kurdish conflict of the 1990s.

UPDATE III (6/13) -- The number of Syrian refugees is now up to 5,000, with another 10,000 waiting just over the Syrian border, ready to leave if need be. Syrian security forces are in complete control of Jisr al-Shughour.

Financial Support to Libyan Opposition

2011-06-10T00:45:00.023-04:00

Speaking on the sidelines of the third Libya contract group, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Aduvtoglu has pledged $100 million to fund the Libyan Transitional Council. From Hurriyet Daily News:

"There is a real need for humanitarian access as well as for the natural needs of Libya like schools, hospitals and all those facilities," Davutoğlu said, according to a report by Reuters.

Davutoğlu was speaking to reporters at a summit of Western and Arab countries backing Libya's rebels and planned to prepare for a political structure after the departure of leader Moammar Gadhafi from power, Reuters reported on its website.

The statements came at the third meeting of the International Contact Group on Libya in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Davutoğlu was among participants at the meeting along with his counterparts from 21 countries. The participants also included U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Contact Group, including the United States, European powers, allies from the Middle East and international bodies, was established during an international conference in London in March to lead international efforts to map out Libya's future. The group held its first meeting in Qatar, the second in Italy. The fourth meeting of the Libya Contact Group will be held in Turkey (click here for more).

Yesterday United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates criticized Turkey alongside four other NATO member states for not doing enough to support NATO's ongoing military operations. The United Kingdom, France, and the United States have vowed not to quit the strikes until Gadhafi is removed from power. At the third Libyan contact group meeting, Turkey argued the Tripoli regime consisted of more personalities than just Gadhafi.

Getting the Nationalist Vote . . .

2011-06-10T00:37:00.029-04:00

EPA Photo from Al-Jazeera English

As the part of the AKP's continuing efforts to cater its election rhetoric to nationalist voters, Prime Minister Erdogan has declared that he would have executed jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan had he been prime minister at the time. Erdogan accused the MHP of giving its support to a 2002 that abolished the death penalty, implying that problems with Ocalan would have been solved if the government at the time had properly sent him to the gallows.

The remarks came in response to unfounded allegations from the MHP that the AKP-led government was in negotiations with the PKK to arrange for Ocalan's release. At the moment, the AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP are both competing to win nationalist votes. For more on this dynamic, click here.

While the AKP might succeed in luring votes away from MHP by taking a hardline position on the Kurdish issue, it does so at the cost of further alienating Kurdish voters in Turkey's mostly Kurdish southeast. Recently, the party has been behaving as if these voters simply do not matter and the result will indubitably be a historic increase in the number of votes the Kurdish nationalist party receives on Sunday.

More troubling is that the AKP's election rhetoric will seriously hamper its chances of repairing its relationship with nationalist Kurds with whom it will likely have to work with to some degree if it is going to pass a constitution that takes all views into account, as Erdogan has expressed is his intention. Given the party's nationalist turn, it will be very difficult to win Kurdish nationalist voters, even those who are not necessarily supportive of the PKK-affiliated BDP.

Meanwhile, an even bigger danger lurks that could further compounds AKP's Kurdish problem. Ocalan, through his lawyers, is threatening a drastic increase in PKK violence should the government not move to negotiate with the PKK by June 15. The specter of renewed PKK violence of the kind last summer will only serve to distract from the government's efforts to pass a constitution and further polarize Turks and Kurds.

Consolidating Power . . .

2011-06-09T01:27:00.000-04:00

AA Photo from Hurriyet Daily News

Ahead of the AKP's expected victory on Sunday, Prime Minister Erdogan announced plans to alter the structure of his cabinet, a move many are reading as a step toward realizing Erdogan's ultimate ambition to establish a presidential system.

The new cabinet will contain 25 ministers, including the prime minister. Some ministries, such as the Ministry for Women and Family, will be eliminated or merged, while six more will be added. From Hurriyet Daily News:

If his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is returned to power in the June polls, Erdoğan said, the administration will have six new ministries, while the total number of ministries will be lowered from 27 to 25.

The prime minister said eight current state ministries will be abolished. The new ministries will be the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, the Ministry of European Union, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Ministry of Customs and Trade and the Ministry of Development. The Ministry of European Union will coordinate the affairs for Turkey’s EU bid.

Currently these areas fall under the responsibility of state ministers in Ankara; the new ministries will also have offices around the country.

“We will also create a deputy minister position” that will rank between the minister and the undersecretary, Erdoğan said, speaking at his party’s headquarters.

The new Cabinet will include 20 ministers plus the prime minister and four deputy prime ministers. Each of the 20 ministers will be assigned deputies.

The deputy ministers will not be parliamentary deputies, but will be appointed to their positions with the new government and will leave their posts if it is voted out of power. The deputy ministers will be experts in their sectors and will be selected for their ability to make the ministries operate faster and more efficiently, Erdoğan said. “It will be possible to bring them in from the private sector,” he added.

Each deputy minister will be appointed with the approval of the respective minister, the prime minister and the president. The appointees will not have to have university degrees, “and can even be elementary school graduates,” Erdoğan said, pointing to important businesspeople such as Vehbi Koç as examples.

“They will work as a political undersecretary, and the current undersecretaries will carry out the administrative functions,” the prime minister said.

Some ministries will be renamed or merged under the proposed restructuring. The Ministry of Industry and Trade will become the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, while the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs will be changed to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Livestock. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry will meanwhile merge with the Ministry of Public Affairs and Settlement to become the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and City Planning.

One concern with the new plan is that each ministry will now have an undersecretary responsible for the technical aspects of the ministerial portfolio as well as a deputy prime minister responsible for the politics involved therein. What happens if the two ministers have conflicting views? Will the deputy ministers, who do not sit in parliament, be subject to parliamentary oversight?

Hurriyet Daily News columnist Izgi Gungor reviews some of the potential problems with the deputy minister scheme here, including the potential for further privatization given that the deputies will be appointed outside normal bureaucratic channels and that many of whom will be coming from the private sector. Privatization of public resources has been a keystone of Erdogan's political and economic agenda.

President Gul has expressed his opposition to the presidency, which Erdogan has expressed his intention to occupy should a presidential system come to be as the government moves forward to re-write a whole new constitution after Sunday's elections.

UPDATE I (6/9) -- Human Rights Watch echoes the concerns of many Turkish women's groups in response to the government's plans to eliminate the Ministry for Women and Family Affairs. The government is planning to create another ministry re-named the Ministry of Family and Social Policies. Women's groups have expressed concerns that women's issues are important only insomuch as they involve the family and this despite rising domestic violence and continuing problems related to underemployment and representation in politics. Jenny White expounds on the problem here.

UPDATE II (6/10) -- The CHP has announced its intention to challenge the restructuring at the Constitutional Court. For more, click here.

"A Blessing from God"?

2011-06-09T01:05:00.001-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet

The fears of those who opposed last September's referendum on the grounds that the constitutional amendments approved therein would strengthen the AKP government's hold over the judiciary may be coming home to roost. The Council of State, Turkey's chief administrative court, has elected Huseyin Karakullukcu to the court's presidency, a vote facilitated by newly appointed Council of State judges. For more (in Turkish), click here.

In Turkey, judges are appointed by the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), the composition of which was altered by the recent amendments. The HSYK was expanded from seven to 22 members, 19 of which are appointed by a variety of institutions. Earlier Nazim Kaynak, another friend of Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, was appointed to head the Supreme Court of Appeals, the same institution that in 2008 brought a closure case against the AKP.

After Karakullukcu's election, Arinc said the appointment was "another blessing given by God."

The Row with Austria

2011-06-09T00:59:00.009-04:00

Tensions between Austria and Turkey are high after Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced on Friday that Turkey would block the nomination of former Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik to become secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

According to Austrian officials, President Abdullah Gul promised Austria it would not veto Plassnik's nomination during a recent visit to Vienna. Austrian officials cite that Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made the same promise. Turkish officials reject the allegations.

Austrian officials top even Sarkozy and Merkel in their opposition to Turkey's accession to the European Union and, like Sarkozy and Merkel, Plassnik has called for Europe to conclude a strategic partnership with Turkey rather than granting it membership.

Turkey had nominated its own candidate, Ersin Ercin, though Greek Cyprus and Armenia blocked the appointment.

Relations with Vienna have been particularly sore since December when Austrian rightist MP Ewald Stadler lambasted Turkish Ambassador to Austria Evcet Tezcan in a fiery (fascist?) speech in Austria's parliament. Stadler and the Austrian right have led staunch anti-immigration reform efforts in Austria.
For the speech, see here:

I am not suggesting that blocking Plassnik's nomination is payback, but it is understandable why Turkey would not want yet another Islamophobe heading a key European institution.

Syrian Refugees Pour Into Turkey

2011-06-08T01:01:00.002-04:00

As Syrian security forces surround the the town of Jisr al-Shughour, located just 12 miles from the Turkish border, traumatized refugees continue to pour into the country. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Turkey will not close its doors to Syrians fleeing unrest in their country, the Turkish prime minister said Wednesday after a group of 169 Syrians fled the border town of Jisr al-Shughour overnight, fearing bloodshed.

“We are monitoring developments in Syria with concern,” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan said at a news conference, urging Damascus to “change its attitude toward civilians” and “take its attitude to a more tolerant level as soon as possible.”

Turkey has exerted efforts for a peaceful transition process in Syria, but reforms have not been carried out at the desired speed and are being outpaced by growing violence, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told the private channel NTV in an interview Wednesday. He said Turkey is prepared to deal with a mass influx of Syrian refugees.

“We have taken all necessary precautions in case of a massive flow of crossings,” Davutoğlu said. Implying a security check would be made for Syrian refugees, he added, “We have to determine their intention [in] seeking refuge.”

People who fled the town of Jisr al-Shughour on Wednesday, fearing a crackdown by their government after the alleged massacre of 120 policemen, are sheltering at a camp set up by the Turkish Red Crescent in the Yayladagi district of Hatay, a Turkish city on the Syrian border.

A total of 420 Syrians have crossed the border and stayed in Turkey since the start of the unrest, a Turkish Foreign Ministry diplomat told the Daily News. The Anatolia news agency reported, however, that new groups are continuing to arrive at the Turkish border. Turkish officials also told reporters that many Syrians were waiting at villages near the border.

There are reports in the Turkish press that Syrian opposition is urging Syrians trapped in the conflict to flee over the border. Zaman reports that 200 refugees arrived in Turkey late on Monday night, and that the numbers have increased since. For Syrian expert Joshua Landis's account of what is going on, click here.

As Turkey gears up to respond to an influx of Syrian refugees as it continues to call on Syrian President Assad to cease human rights abuses and institute major reforms, the London School of Economics has released a report stating what is all the more obvious given Turkey's increasingly prominent role in the Arab spring. According to the newly released LSE report, "Turkey's influence and reach are certain to be central to the future of the economic and political development of the region as the revolutions responsible for overthrowing governments make the difficult transition to constructing them." For the full report, click here.

UPDATE I (6/9) -- Sabah reports (in Turkish) that the number of refugees arriving from Jisr al-Shughour now total over 400. According to the paper, the government has allocated 30 million Turkish Lira to deal with a wave of refugees it is expecting to total from 500,000 to one million persons. Prime Minister Erdogan has said the border will stay open. At the moment, Turkey is the only country to have an open border with Syria.

Additionally, refugees are giving Turkish authorities information that what Syria alleges was a massacre of 120 people by the opposition was instead a massacre of 120 people committed by Syrian security officials following a mutiny within the country's security apparatus.

UPDATE II (6/9) -- Refugees coming from Jisr al-Shughour are continuing to confirm stories that a mutiny occurred when Syrian security officials refused to do the regime's dirty work. From Hurriyet Daily News: A Syrian security officer who fled with the civilian refugees told the Hürriyet Daily News:

that they received an order by phone Friday to kill all the protesters in the town.

“We received a phone call from the center, and they ordered us to shoot and kill all the protesters,” said Ahmad Gavi, 21, a Syrian soldier who fled to Turkey following the deadly clashes in Jisr Al-Shughour.

“Five soldiers who refused to follow this order were killed immediately in front of me. Then commanders and some soldiers started to shoot each other,” Gavi said. “There were 180 soldiers at the security check post and 120 of them were killed.”

Gavi said he dropped his gun and ran away to Turkey as a refugee. “It was not the protesters who killed the soldiers, it was the commanders who killed them; most of the soldiers ran away with the protesters then,” he said, adding that there are 60 Syrian soldiers in the group that fled to Turkey.

Over 200 Syrians are reported to be hospitalized in Hatay. The narratives drastically increase the likelihood that Erdogan will strangthen the Turkish government's line with Assad. The National Security Council (MGK) is scheduled to meet after Sunday's elections.

Not Just a Thin Skin . . .

2011-06-08T00:34:00.002-04:00

The Wall Street Journal's Marc Champion will no doubt soon be on the AKP's list of journalists being used by international gangs to undermine its government. In an article appearing yesterday, Champion reports on what observers of Turkish politics have long known: Prime Minister Erdogan is a very, very litigious man. For the story, click here.

According to Champion, Erdogan had filed 57 libel suits by 2005, just two years after taking office. He won 21 of the cases, netting a total 700,000 Turkish Lira, or about $440,000, in compensation. An excerpt:

Since then, the government has refused to answer further questions on the matter. It said that whomever Mr. Erdogan sues—under article 125 of the Turkish penal code—is a private affair. The law criminalizes insults against a person's honor, differentiating such barbs from other protected free speech. Guilty parties face a maximum penalty of two years in jail.

Mr. Erdogan's spokesman didn't respond to several phone and email requests for comment.

Fikret Ilkiz, a prominent Turkish press freedom lawyer, says the frequency with which the prime minister's lawyers launch insult suits on his behalf has increased since 2005. By now the tally is "in the hundreds," he estimates, and has triggered a boom in lawsuits launched by cabinet ministers and legislators. Mr. Ilkiz added that previous prime ministers rarely used article 125.

The article goes on to document a few recent libel suits the prime minister has filed, including the one against the Milliyet cartoonist who depicted him as a cat tied up in yarn, as well as another involving a theater troupe and the case against British citizen Michael Dickinson, who drew the prime minister's head on a dog's body.

While the prime minister seem to have problems dealing with criticism, however tasteless or disrespectful it might be, he has no problems dishing it out. Erdogan recently called Milliyet journalist Nuray Mert "despicable" for having written that new roads the government is building in the southeast will facilitate security operations and threatened another journalist, Abbas Guclu, for tying the prime minister to a scandal involving Turkey's university entrance exam. In regard to Guclu, Erdogan said the journalist would "pay the price" for his allegations. For a litany of such allegations, see Sedat Ergin's recent column (in Turkish) in Hurriyet.

UPDATE I (6/9) -- Another example (from Milliyet, in Turkish) of the prime minister's thin skin was displayed when Erdogan accused Taraf columnist Ahmet Altan of insulting him after the columnist said he would not be voting for the AKP on Sunday.

Why Turkey and Turkish Civil Society Matter

2011-06-07T01:27:00.008-04:00

Far too many Western political leaders, thinkers, and donors, especially here in Washington, have come to think of Turkish democracy as a “mission accomplished,” or at least, a project "near complete.” The sad state of affairs is indeed the opposite, and mostly sadly, it is this premature attitude that could turn Turkey back toward its authoritarian past rather than build on the democratic successes it has achieved in the past 15 years.

As American think-tanks bandy about a “Turkish model” as some ideal path for the newly emerging Arab democracies to follow, the real state of Turkish political affairs remains a mystery to all too many. In fact, Turkey now has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world, including China. And, like China, a new Internet regulation that goes into effect Aug. 22 will set up an online filtering and surveillance system by which every Turkish citizen will be followed by the government using an online profile. These developments are all the more disturbing given the ongoing Ergenekon investigation, which while supposed to bring down the infamous Turkish “deep state,” instead has been used as a political tool to go after the ruling AKP government’s political enemies.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish conflict, which the government’s “Kurdish opening” was to finally bring to a close by granting Turkey’s Kurdish population of 15 million plus people cultural and minority rights, has ground to a halt. Prime Minister Erdogan just over a year ago recognized the “Kurdish problem” as a democracy problem, but has since denied its existence. Last summer saw the largest escalation of the conflict since the 1990s, and given the government’s recent nationalist posturing, it is highly unlikely that the problem will be resolved.

Most important of all is Turkey’s stalled European Union accession process, the primary fuel behind the rapid-pace reforms that constitute Turkey’s democratic successes at the turn of the millennium. However, more than four years have passed since Turkey began accession negotiations, wherein the country has made little progress in fully meeting the EU’s Copenhagen criteria for democracy and human rights. Indeed, as Dilek Kurban notes in yesterday’s post, progress has actually become regression. Turkey now has a repressive Anti-Terrorism Law in place that has landed thousands in prison without adequate legal redress and torture, illegal detention, and impunity remain problems just as daunting as they were before the AKP entered power in 2002.

The main problem, more than any other, is a ruling party that has distanced itself from the liberal democracy it once embraced to in its place champion a majoritarian conception of rule by the people where minorities, opposition figures, and political dissenters are becoming less secure in their rights by the day. Democracy, as the AKP understands it, is rule by the majority—it is electoral authoritarianism dressed up to look nice for Western audiences keen to fondly fixate on the notion of an Islamist party that has somehow come to champion a long oppressed majority while adopting liberal values. However, the AKP is not liberal. While there is plenty of truth that the majority of conservative Muslim Anatolia has been repressed throughout the history of the country’s history, now it is the majority who is comfortable to reign over the minority.

There is no resolving the Madisonian dilemma—the inherent conflict between majority rule and individual liberties—for the ruling AKP government. There is only a will to power—a will evinced by Prime Minister Erdogan’s designs to create a presidential system. As The Economist noted in its controversial editorial endorsing the CHP and which now has the prime minister fuming about Zionist-driven conspiracies, if the AKP is to unilaterally push through a new constitution, it could end up being worse than the greatly amended one currently in place.

Ironically, if the United States and Europe do not move fast to realize what is happening inside Turkey, the world will lose a country that really could serve as a democratic example to the Arab Middle East. The AKP government made tremendous progress when it first came to power in 2002, and it could be said that the party’s first years in office provided the best government in the history of the Turkish Republic. However, a lot has happened since and the model is at risk. If Turkey’s democratic progress is ultimately lost, then there will not only be the lack of a democratic success story in the region but a failure that could set back Islamist/conservative democrats in other Muslim countries who otherwise have good chances of making democracy work. And, as recent survey research attests, Arabs are paying attention. (66% of Arabs surveyed at the end of last summer said they viewed Turkey as a democratic model.)

What is to be done?

Now is the time for action. The EU accession engine that powered the AKP’s early reform efforts is imperiled by the Greek Cypriot presidency, which will commence in just a little more than a year from now. This means the Turkish government, which will still be led by the AKP whether the party gains a super majority or not, must make serious progress toward accession. The country is in a race against time. And, no matter what happens in June elections, movement toward a new constitution, or at least major constitutional reform, will be on the plate.

In this context, Turkish civil society will prove key to saving Turkish democracy just as it did during the optimistic years after the EU accepted Turkey’s application for membership in 1999 and major reforms started coming down the pipe. The authoritarian tendencies of Turkish political parties, not exclusive to the current party in power, need to be countered by civil society.

When the AKP tried to make adultery illegal in 2004 and ignore legislative proposals that would reduce the sentences for honor killings and rape in certain instances, it was a highly mobilized network of women’s groups that pushed the party to do the right thing. Many of these groups had become empowered thanks to donor money and expertise, and they fought the good fight, and well, won.

Though Turkey is now confronting a different set of challenges, support for civil society is just as critical now as it was then to support these groups. And, what kind of support exactly? What is needed are not requests for proposals that nearly prompt groups to apply for money, but rather funds for genuine projects grown out of grassroots understandings of political expediency. Turkish civil society groups should be encouraged to do more to work together, as women’s groups did in 2004, and even more importantly, engage political parties, the government, and the state (listed here in an ascending order of difficulty).

Support for strengthening political parties and institution-building has been enormously successful in Turkey, and to some extent, has resulted in the recent democratic turn by CHP we have seen of late, but without funding civil society to keep political parties in check and goad them to respond to democratic demands, little will get done.

And, the impact?

The AKP has accomplished tremendous feats in its time in power, but the party has grown too strong while civil society has lagged behind. Now confident that it is the voice of the majority, without an active, challenging, forward-looking civil society to remind it of its earlier liberal promises, the party will be doomed to failure—and, with it, Turkish democracy. It is no coincidence that civil society and liberalism emerged together in the history of other countries’ political development, and the two go together in Turkey as well.

If Turkish civil society, adequately funded and attended to, can take the mass protest movements we have seen in response to the government’s plans to pass draconian restrictions on Internet usage and round-up journalists and actually organize this anomic political mobilization into smart, organic political engagement with politicians, the result would prove not only beneficial to the longevity of Turkish democracy but also serve as an example to the Arab world.

Gulen Schools in Texas

2011-06-07T00:20:00.003-04:00

The New York Times has an extended investigative piece on Gulen schools operating in my home state of Texas. The schools, known as "Harmony Schools," are owned by the Cosmos Foundation, which the paper reports was founded by a group of Turkish businessmen and professors. The piece centers on the ways the school uses public monies. The Cosmos Foundation operates 33 charter schools in Texas, more than any other charter school operator, and receive $100 million in taxpayer money. An excerpt:

Some of the schools’ operators and founders, and many of their suppliers, are followers of Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish preacher of a moderate brand of Islam whose devotees have built a worldwide religious, social and nationalistic movement in his name. Gulen followers have been involved in starting similar schools around the country — there are about 120 in all, mostly in urban centers in 25 states, one of the largest collections of charter schools in America.

The growth of these “Turkish schools,” as they are often called, has come with a measure of backlash, not all of it untainted by xenophobia. Nationwide, the primary focus of complaints has been on hundreds of teachers and administrators imported from Turkey: in Ohio and Illinois, the federal Department of Labor is investigating union accusations that the schools have abused a special visa program in bringing in their expatriate employees.

But an examination by The New York Times of the Harmony Schools in Texas casts light on a different area: the way they spend public money. And it raises questions about whether, ultimately, the schools are using taxpayer dollars to benefit the Gulen movement — by giving business to Gulen followers, or through financial arrangements with local foundations that promote Gulen teachings and Turkish culture.

For more about earlier allegations as to the Gulen movement's abuse of the U.S. visa system (now the subject of an FBI investigation), click here. For more on the Gulen movement in Turkey, see past posts.

No Progress on the Human Rights Front . . .

2011-06-06T01:04:00.001-04:00

Police beating a group of women assembling during Newroz festivities in Van in 2008. PHOTO by Anonymous

As Prime Minister Erdogan spent his time this weekend denouncing The Economist's recent endorsement of the CHP, TESEV researcher and Radikal columnist Dilek Kurban writes (in Turkish) about the deterioration of human rights that has taken place since 2005 when Turkey's EU accession negotiations slowed down to a snail's speed.

Writing specifically on the issue of police brutality, torture, and the abuse of detained suspects, Kurban joins thousands of other liberal observers in drawing the conclusion that 2005 marked a turning point not only in Turkey's progress toward EU accession, but also its development toward a healthy, functioning liberal democracy. Kurban mentions two key legal changes that were pushed through with little domestic criticism but that nonetheless set back the significant progress Turkey had made in curtailing the power of the police.

In June 2006, Turkey joined many countries in the world in the wake of 9-11 to pass comprehensive anti-terror legislation. Under Turkey's revamped Anti-Terrorism Law (TMYK), suspects in terrorism-related cases were allowed to be detained up to 24 hours without access to their attorney. The law also led soon to a rapid increase in the number of journalists, activists, and politicians facing jail time for allegedly spreading terrorist propaganda.

In June 2007, amendments to the Police Duties and Authority Law (PVSK) have police the power to conduct searches without warrants and inspect the IDs of people on the streets. Police were also given the authority to open fire on citizens who refused to abide by police orders. The effect of the police law was to essentially reinforce a culture of already existing impunity in regard to human rights violations committed by police and other security officials.

Since both these laws went into force, Turkey has seen a drastic increase in police-related violence, a phenomenon well-documented by Human Rights Watch's end of 2008 report on the issue (for my reflections on the issue at the time, see Dec. 9, 2008 post). The past two years have seen little progress on the issue. In fact, despite a supposed "zero tolerance" policy on torture, Turkey is still grappling with the problem. According to the UN Committee against Torture (UNCAT), Turkish citizens still suffer from "numerous, ongoing, and consistent allegations concerning the use of torture, particularly in unofficial places of detention."

Kurban concurs with the UNCAT, and noting an increase in the number of torture cases, also points attention to the promotions of police officials with questionable human rights records.

Kurban highlights that a year before The Economist endorsed the AKP in the country's troubled 2007 parliamentary elections, which took place in a period of intense political pressure and interference from the Turkish Armed forces, the AKP had already begun to lose its liberal credentials. However, at the time, there was no mainline party with anything better to offer. The CHP was still holding true to the strong nationalist posture it had taken since re-emerging as the chief opposition party in the early 2000s, and the hopes for a more liberal, more human rights-oriented government justifiably rested with the AKP.

Now, as The Economist duly recognizes, times have changed. The lack of progress, and in some cases, outright regression, is no longer acceptable. Not only has the AKP failed to take advantage of critical opportunities to move the country further afield in terms of human rights, a course which it did a terrific job of steering from 2002 to 2005, the past six years of inaction if now endangering Turkey's progress toward accession. Most unacceptably, the party has done little in recent years, and in stark contrast in earlier efforts, to ensure that Turkish citizens are secure in their personal rights and liberties.

For more on the practice of detention under the Anti-Terrorism Law, which has spiked in recent months given the violence in Turkey's mostly Kurdish southeast, see this post from earlier last month.

Even MHP Recognizes the Kurdish Problem

2011-06-06T00:30:00.002-04:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Even the ultra-nationalist MHP seems to recognize the Kurdish problem. In the party's first campaign rally in the mostly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir yesterday, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli went a step ahead of Erdogan in recognizing the persistence of the Kurdish problem (for story, in Turkish, click here).

In Diyarbakir last Wednesday, Prime Minister Erdogan declared the Kurdish problem "solved," seemingly closing the peace initiative his government announced in July 2009. In contrast, Bahceli said, "I know you have a problem, but the solution is not street protests." Bahceli, like Erdogan, called for more economic development in the region while arguing that amending the constitution to end prohibitions on education in mother tongue, a long-time and principal demand of many Kurds, will not "fill your stomach."

In the past, the MHP has taken the most hawkish position on the Kurdish issue. An ultra-nationalist Turkey party with historical roots to gangs that target leftists and nationalist Kurds, the party has little hope of being competitive in the region. At the same time, it is significant that even it felt the need to hold a campaign rally in Diyarbakir.

In his speech, Bahceli said Kurds are regarded as equal to Turks, stressing that they too are members of the Turkish "nation," a claim many more nationalist Kurds adamantly reject. While many Kurds are fine being Turkish citizens, the claim that they are Turks due to their bonds of citizenship with the Turkish state (a claim stipulated in Article 66 of the Turkish constitution) raises the ire of more than a small number.

The CHP has proposed amending the constitution to eliminate the controversial article so that Turkish citizenship will not longer beat an ethnic definition, a move which has been denounced by both the AKP and the MHP. It was the first mainline Turkish party in the history of the Turkish republic to do so.

Come Again??

2011-06-05T15:54:00.000-04:00

AA PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

Campaigning over the weekend, Prime Minister Erdogan said the recent op-ed in The Economist endorsing the CHP was the work of "international gangs" and linked the magazine's support of the CHP to the opposition party's policy supposedly more friendly policy toward Israel. In an interview with the TRGT news channel on Saturday evening, the prime minister said, "This international media, as they are supported by Israel, would not be happy with the continuation of the AKP government. . . . Of course, they have their hands on Turkey nowadays." Is it a Zionist conspiracy? Or, is it that the prime minister simply cannot endure criticism or dissenting opinions?

In all fairness, emotional outbursts are common in Turkish politics, especially less than two weeks away from an election. At the same time, if the prime minister is looking to counter criticisms that he is thin-skinned, authoritarian, and intolerant of dissent, such baseless and strongly accusatory remarks are not winning him or his party any points.

Fellow party cadres Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and EU Chief Negotiator Egeman Bagis have also chimed in. According to Davutoglu, The Economist "violated media ethics" in printing the op-ed. From Bagis's point of view, the op-ed is mere "rubbish" and must have been ordered by "dark powers" inside Turkey (see Radikal columnist Cuneyt Ozdemir (in Turkish)). Okay . . . so not the work on international gangs . . . Ergenekon?

For more in English, see this story from Hurriyet Daily News.

Syrian Opposition Plans a Second Meeting after Elections

2011-06-05T14:13:00.001-04:00

Syrian opposition figures are planning another meeting in Turkey after the elections on June 12. Opposition spokesman Khaled Khoja told Turkish press the opposition did not want to create problems for the Turkish government before elections, but that the next meeting will be larger than the one held in Antalya last week and draw on the opposition in Syria who were not able to attend the earlier meeting. However, whether the opposition will be able to cross the border given Syrian security remains to be seen.

The opposition is also hoping for more support and facilitation from the Turkish government, which at this time, is still in regular contact with President Assad. Anonymous Turkish diplomatic officials are telling Turkish press that the Turkish government has given Assad an ultimatum: reform or be prepared for a withdrawal of Turkish support. From Hurriyet Daily News:

In a televised interview over the weekend, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said his government would place much focus on the developments in the Middle East and North Africa after the elections.

“We cannot repeat our previous performance during the election time. I am actually quite interested in Syria at this time … I talked on the phone with Mr. Bashar al-Assad,” he said.

The Syrian president is misinforming the Turkish government, according to the Syrian opposition.

“Al-Assad is sending some messages to satisfy the Turkish government that he is going on with new reforms but we don’t believe it at all. This is just to satisfy the public opinion in Turkey and in the international community,” Khoja said.

Asked if they had any contacts within the Turkish government, he said: “At the low level we have some contacts but at the high level, no.”

The planned meeting after the Turkish elections will be more important than the Antalya meeting “because a lot of committees from Syria will gather here,” Khoja said.

“Now they are preparing in Syria to send representatives, some of whom are from Damascus. This will represent the real movement in Syria,” he added. “The opposition outside Syria can only support the movement inside Syria but since the movement in Syria will represent itself at that upcoming meeting, it will be more important.”

Khoja said the group chose Turkey as a venue for its meetings “because Turkey is in the middle of the active countries and it’s so easy to gather here without any visas.” Turkey and Syria abolished visa requirements for travel in 2009.

For an English-language translation of the declaration drafted at the conclusion of the conference on Friday, see Joshua Landis's excellent blog, Syria Comment. Human rights groups are reporting that security forces killed 35 demonstrators over the weekend.

Falling Out of Love

2011-06-03T12:24:00.008-04:00

Signalling that the Western media is falling out of love with the AKP, The Economist has endorsed the CHP ahead of the June 12 elections. In 2007, and in the midst of seriously high tensions with the Turkish military over the election of President Gul, the magazine endorsed Erdogan. Now it seems the magazine has turned an about-face. An excerpt:

That Turkish voters are poised to return Mr Erdogan to power in the general election on June 12th is thus not surprising. It is, however, worrying. Mr Erdogan is riding sufficiently high in the polls to get quite close to the two-thirds parliamentary majority that he craves because it would allow him unilaterally to rewrite the constitution. That would be bad for Turkey.

This judgment is not based on the canard that a theocracy is being built. Nine years ago Istanbul’s secular establishment fretted about AK’s Islamist roots—and some early squabbles over religious schools and allowing women to wear the Muslim headscarf at university were indeed troubling. But since then the pious Mr Erdogan and his party have been pragmatic. No matter what the army and too many Israelis (and Americans) whisper, there is scant evidence that AK is trying to turn a broadly tolerant Turkey into the next intolerant Iran.

The real worry about the AK party’s untrammelled rule concerns democracy, not religion. Ever since Mr Erdogan won his battles with the army and the judiciary, he has faced few checks or balances. That has freed him to indulge his natural intolerance of criticism and fed his autocratic instincts. Corruption seems to be on the rise. Press freedom is under attack: more journalists are in jail in Turkey than in China. And a worrying number of Mr Erdogan’s critics and enemies, including a hatful of former army officers, are under investigation, in some cases on overblown conspiracy charges.

On top of this, on the campaign trail Mr Erdogan has begun to take a more stridently nationalist tone: he and his party are no longer making serious overtures to the Kurds, Turkey’s biggest and most disgruntled minority. Mr Erdogan has hinted that if he wins a two-thirds majority next week, he will change the constitution to create a powerful French-style presidency, presumably to be occupied by himself. In a country that is already excessively centralised, that would be a mistake.

It would be better if a new AK government were to take a more broadly inclusive approach. Turkey’s constitution does indeed need a makeover, but it should be rewritten in consultation with other political parties and interest groups, and not as an AK project. The best way to make sure this happens would be to push up the vote for the main opposition party, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP). Assuming that two smaller parties also get into the grand national assembly, that should be enough to deny AK its two-thirds majority.

As it happens, the newish CHP leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu (nicknamed Gandhi for his ascetic ways), has been a huge improvement on his dinosaur of a predecessor, Deniz Baykal. He has weeded out much of the party’s old guard, shown himself intolerant of corruption and shifted the party away from its instinctive sympathy for the army’s role in politics. Even more remarkably, Mr Kilicdaroglu has been attracting more supporters than Mr Erdogan to election rallies in the mainly Kurdish south-east, where the CHP has long been weak, by talking more openly of giving all of Turkey’s 81 provinces greater autonomy (it probably helps that he is from the Alevi Muslim minority and that he may have Kurdish forebears).

The AK party is all but certain to form the next government. But we would recommend that Turks vote for the CHP. A stronger showing by Mr Kilicdaroglu’s party would both reduce the risks of unilateral changes that would make the constitution worse and give the opposition a fair chance of winning a future election. That would be by far the best guarantee of Turkey’s democracy.

The Economist has a Turkish-print edition and the endorsement matters. There are already items in the Turkish press that the prime minister is denouncing the magazine, a move that will likely earn him only more scorn. For the story that ran with the op-ed, click here.

In addition to The Economist, Erdogan has also caught the attention of the New York Times, which, while not endorsing the CHP, expresses many of the same concerns about the prime minister's ironclad rule. From the Times:

Turkey does need a new, more democratic constitution. But if the AKP gains 330 of the 550 seats, it will be able to push through a constitutional draft without support from the opposition and put it straight to a referendum. (If the AKP gained 367 seats, it could even to adopt the constitution in a parliamentary vote.) A “one-party” constitution would lead to further divisions in Turkey’s already-polarized political system. The opposition parties, together representing half of Turkey’s electorate, might well boycott a constitutional process dominated by the AKP.

Even among AKP supporters there might not be much debate: Erdogan has single-handedly struck 220 of the current 334 AKP MPs off the candidates’ list and replaced them with little-known loyalists. In a party that was once proud of its local roots, the top-down sweep has left many members cross.

Many observers suspect that Erdogan’s main objective in the new constitution is to move Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system along French lines. Already, the AKP has amended the current Constitution so that future presidents will no longer be elected by Parliament but by the people. The new constitution would presumably give the presidency bigger powers, commensurate with its popular mandate.

Most Turks expect that Erdogan himself will want to become president when Abdullah Gul’s term expires.

In Turkey’s already highly centralized system, a move toward a presidential system does not look like a good idea. It could lead either to rivalry and paralysis between a strengthened president and a traditionally powerful prime minister, both backed by a popular mandate. Or it could further erode checks and balances and reinforce autocratic tendencies.

For my own thoughts, along similar lines, see past posts on the AKP's simple majoritarian conception of democracy and burgeoning authoritarian tendencies. What Turkey is faced with should the AKP continue on its current trajectory is illiberal democracy, or perhaps better (worse?) put, electoral authoritarianism.

I laid much of this out in March 2009 when the AKP first introduced the major constitutional overhaul it pushed through in last September's referendum.

Syrian Opposition Meeting Concludes

2011-06-03T00:48:00.001-04:00

PHOTO from Syria Comment

The three-day meeting of Syrian opposition in Antalya concluded today with a common declaration of principles and agreement to form a committee of 31 members representative of different groups in the opposition. The Turkish government is still denying that it had any role in planning the meeting and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has made it clear that he has held no meetings with Syrian opposition figures. That said, the meeting's presence on Turkish soil indubitably adds to the pressure Turkey is placing on the Assad regime.

Turkey had been instrumental in alleviating Assad's virtual isolation, but in recent years has taken steps to distance itself from the leader. Prime Minister Erdogan has continually called on Assad to restrain from violence and implement democratic reforms, which the Turkish pro-government papers such as Zaman say has been effective. At the same time, as Assad's regime kills more and more people, bringing an end to the conflict with simple reform becomes more and more unlikely -- a reality not taken for granted by the Turkish government.

At the same time the Syrian opposition was holding its meeting, pro-Assad forces were holding another meeting at a hotel in the same city in attempt to convince the Turkish people that Assad is an Ataturk-type figure deserving of respect and patience.By my estimation, Turks are not buying it.

For more on the meeting and Syria in general, see Joshua Landis's excellent blog, Syria Comment.

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back (Maybe More)

2011-06-02T16:22:00.002-04:00

PHOTO from Radikal

It seems the AKP took two big steps forward when it announced what was initially billed as a "Kurdish opening" in July 2009 (the initiative later went through many name changes), froze in place (following the nationalist uproar in October 2009 after the Habur affair), and then three steps back in recent months as the party campaigns for the June 12 elections. Though Prime Minister Erdogan had a chance to re-set his approach to the Kurdish conflict during an AKP campaign rally in Diyarbakir yesterday, the prime minister instead sounded the same notes he did in Van two weeks ago when he denied the existence of the Kurdish problem and then proceeded to blame the CHP for its creation.

In addition, as Hurriyet columnist Sedat Ergin points out, the prime minister burned all bridges with the pro-Kurdish, PKK-affiliated BDP, making it near impossible for him to work with the party in the future. Accusing the BDP of basically behaving like a terrorist organization, he said the strength of the BDP came from the PKK and then proceeded to link the CHP with the PKK. Instead of denouncing violence and pushing forward a democracy agenda as CHP leader Kemal Kilicdarolgu did when he spoke in Diyarbakir the day before, Erdogan relied on attacking opposition parties. The CHP and BDP are fascists, according to Erdogan, bent on stoking separatism and tearing the nation apart. As in Van, he wrongly pinned the existence of the Kurdish problem on the CHP's association with the Dersim rebellion in 1937-38, going so far back as to attack former Ismet Inonu, who was not even in charge at the time.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the prime minister relied on the religious card, accusing the BDP of promoting Zoroastrianism in the region (still, I want to know where this comes from) and waging a campaign against imams (see past post). For Erdogan, it seems the Kurdish problem is solved. Nowhere in his address was there even a mention of carrying on the Kurdish initiative, which did little in actualizing all the hopes it initially engendered. Instead, the focus was on economic development (more "Islamist bananas," as Milliyet columnist Ece Temelkuran articulated in 2007), an old theme the AKP sounded in 2008 and that most observers thought it had transcended during the Kurdish initiative (for a history of Erdogan's addresses in Diyarbakir and the prime minister's recent nationalist turn, see this past post).

As Milliyet columnist and leading Kurdish expert Fikret Bila (in Turkish) postulates, for Erdogan, the Kurdish problem is in the past. The demands for constitutional reform put forward by the BDP are irrelevant, and are only used by the "bad Kurds" to stir up trouble. Never mind that the CHP has also put forward serious constitutional changes, including mother tongue education and removing the ethnic chauvinism that currently defines Turkey's constitutional understanding of citizenship.

"How can Muslims ever follow the BDP?" asks Erdogan. In the prime minister's world, at least at the moment and in the midst of competing for the nationalist vote with the ultra-nationalist MHP, the days of denial and assimilation are over. It is too bad that there are plenty of Kurds who do not feel this way, and too bad that until their demands are met by the state, Turkey's Kurdish conflict will rage on.

For a good play-by-play (or, step-back, step-back) accounting of the speech, see Hurriyet columnist Ahmet Hakan's column (in Turkish). For an English-language news account, click here for coverage from Hurriyet Daily News.

A Matter of Culture

2011-06-02T00:12:00.028-04:00

PHOTO by Jodi Hilton / New York Times

The New York Times has a piece today examining the expanded space given to Kurdish culture in Turkey despite existing obstacles. This space is, undeniably, to be owed to the AKP, which worked hard in its first years in power to curb the state's repressive attitude toward Kurds in Turkey at a time when no other major political party lifted a finger on the issue. However, as evinced by the CHP's announcement that it is willing to change the constitution to include a non-ethnic definition of citizenship, there are other players now, as well as, most importantly, an influential, albeit incipient and still quite fragile, Kurdish civil society that is paving a middle way between competing Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms. An excerpt:

Concessions by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2009 made way for the first Kurdish national television station, and the government also permitted the teaching of Kurdish language classes in private universities (but not public ones). Token gestures, they made front-page headlines: first because they were signals to the outside world that a democratic state run by an Islamic leader will not automatically become xenophobic or tribalist, and second because even small steps toward acknowledging Kurdish culture can provoke political firestorms inside the country. Turkish nationalists raised a ruckus. Nationalists regard even the most basic Kurdish demand — that their language also be allowed in grade schools and at official settings where Kurds are involved — as treason.

Turkish Kurds respond that increased cultural freedom only encourages their loyalty to the Turkish state. But in this deeply patriotic country, where sentiments are old and entrenched, Mr. Erdogan’s government, guarding its tenuous majority in Parliament on the verge of the elections, has assumed a more and more hawkish line lately. The arrests of large numbers of Kurdish political activists have fed the Kurds’ concern that the government never really had true democracy in mind for them but just cooked up some window dressing for Western consumption. Recent clashes in this city between the police and hundreds of protesters attending the funerals of separatist militants proved how fragile the peace is in the region.

As I have written elsewhere here, Kurdish disenchantment with the AKP is high. That said, perhaps the party will take a less nationalist posture once the elections are over and it is done competing with the MHP for nationalist votes.

Everyone is a Turkish Citizen

2011-06-01T00:58:00.000-04:00

PHOTO from Taraf

The CHP has declared its support to amend the constitution in favor of a non-ethnic understanding of Turkish citizenship. Under the country's current constitution (drafted under military tutelage) all citizens of Turkey are members of the Turkish nation (click here, in Turkish). Further, according to Article 66, every Turkish citizen is considered to be a Turk. This is the first time that any major Turkish political party in the entire history of the Turkish republic has offered such a non-ethnic understanding of citizenship.

The change is proposed as part of a wide series of concrete constitutional reforms the CHP has endeavored to put forward. The proposed reforms were drafted by CHP vice-president Suheyl Batum with a team of 35 academics. Though some have speculated that the CHP is too diverse a coalition to generate concrete proposals (Batum himself hales from the center-right), the constitutional proposals are more solid in substantive than the rhetoric coming out of the AKP.

The CHP has also expressed its support for education in mother tongue, which requires amending Article 42, which stipulates that no Turkish citizen can receive education in any mother tongue language other than Turkish. Article 42 specifically targets languages native to Anatolia, such as Kurdish, while allowing for education in English, French, and other foreign languages.

Kilicdaroglu addressing a campaign rally in Hakkari. PHOTO from Milliyet

Meanwhile, for the first time in nine years, the CHP held an election rally in Diyarbakir a day ahead of the rally AKP is expecting to hold tomorrow. Though turnout was somewhat disappointing for the party (only ~2,000 people showed up), it is clear the CHP is performing a series of firsts that could find itself winning voters in the southeast and currying favor with liberal reformers who have since become disenchanted by the AKP.

For an accounting and history, as well as some more context, of the proposals the CHP is putting forward on the Kurdish issue, see this post from a few weeks ago.

Prime Minister Erdogan will hold a rally in Diyarbakir today.

Mass Protest in Hopa

2011-05-31T18:06:00.001-04:00

PHOTO from Radikal

An election rally for Prime Minister Erdgoan in the Black sea town of Hopa (Artvin) near the border with Georgia resulted in mass protests today. Though the town was relatively calm during Erdogan's speech, the situation intensified later as the prime minister's convoy was leaving Hopa. Protestors threw stones at the convoy, seriously injuring a bodyguard. Police used teargas to breakup the protestors and fired shots in the air, which led to the death of demonstrator Metin Lokumcu (he had a heart attack).

According to news reports, protests spread to Ankara later in the day at word of Lokumcu's death. When protestors attempted to try to leave a black wreath at the Prime Ministry, police intervened. Clashes broke out that involved more teargas, more water cannons, and more detentions (around 60).

UPDATE I (6/2) -- For an English-language account of the protests from Bianet, click here. Bianet reports 54 people were detained in Ankara, four of whom were formally arrested. Protests also broke out in Istanbul and Izmir.

Return of the Mavi Marmara

2011-05-31T16:54:00.004-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

Thousands gathered in Taksim Square last night on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Israel's raid of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara in which Israeli commandos eight Turkish citizens and one American of Turkish descent.

Yesterday morning, the International Relief Foundation (IHH) held a press conference announcing the organization is continuing to move forward with plans for 15 ships carrying 1,500 activists from 38 countries to sail to Gaza at the end of June. The Mavi Marmara is expected to be at the front-and-center.

Diplomatic relations also heated up around the one-year anniversary as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey would retaliate should Israel once more carry out military operations on the ships. According to Israeli press reports, the Israel Defense Forces are mobilizing to meet the flotilla, though is focusing on counter-riot strategies. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the flotilla will not be permitted to land in Gaza and that force will be used when and where necessary.

The United States is attempting to break the impasse, though Turkish government officials are have maintained their argument that they do not have the legal power to intervene to stop a Turkish NGO from carrying out such a mission.

In the meantime, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has extended the working period for the UN Panel of Inquiry currently investigating last year's raid.

UPDATE I (6/2) -- Hurriyet reports (in Turkish) the United States is planning to submit a proposal to Turkey by which Turkey would block IHH's flotilla plans in exchange for making Turkey the place of upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

UPDATE II (6/6) -- Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has publicly called on the IHH to delay plans to send a flotilla to Gaza. The IHH rejected the foreign minister's request, arguing that the flotilla was necessary to providing Gazans with much needed aid and asserting sovereignty over their ports. The government is arguing that the IHH should wait to see what happens in the wake of the Rafah border crossing being opened (it is opened for civilian crossings, but not for aid supplies) and plans to install a new Palestinian unity government.

Grey Wolf Attacks on BDP Politicians

2011-05-31T01:09:00.000-04:00

Ultra-nationalist youth attacked two people distributing waivers for Labor, Democracy, and Freedom Block candidate Emrullah Bingul in Izmit, a town just outside Istanbul (and where I spent my first year in Turkey). The attackers were reported to be Grey Wolves, a fascist youth organization connected to the ultra-nationalist MHP. The attack took place at a mosque near the main municipal building where supporters of the BDP and the Labor Party (EMEP) were distributing campaign material.

The previous day, the convoy of candidate Levent Tuzel, a member of the same party block, was attacked in Istanbul, also reportedly by Grey Wolves.

The Grey Wolves have a nasty past. Linked to numerous attacks on leftists since the 1970s, including assassinations and wholesale massacres of Turks who deviate from their Turkish-Sunni chauvinist idealism, the youth groups are still around and attack vulnerable targets when tensions are high.

In the wake of a massive sex scandal, the MHP is still hovering at around 10% in public opinion polls, the threshold parties must meet in order to enter parliament. If the the MHP falls under this threshold, ultra-nationalism, a force in Turkey that has been on the decline in recent years (though there were huge outbursts in 2007) will no longer be represented in parliament. However, there is legitimate fear that the party, which has renounced violence, might become more reactionary should this come to fruition.

For a bit more about the ultra-nationalist right, see this early post from 2008. An excerpt:

Although the early [MHP] was not particularly successful in electoral politics, it gained notoriety when it founded its youth organization, the Hearths of the Ideal (Ülkü Ocakları). Members of the group began to call themselves the "Grey Wolves" ("Bozkurtlar") and the group soon took on a paramilitary dimension when it opened camps to train members to engage in violent acts against the Turkish left. The enemy of the time was not Islamist, but communist, and the Grey Wolves became an increasing threat to those who it saw as opposed to their Sunni Muslim-Turkish identity. By the late 1970s, political violence against the left was rife and reveals itself most violently in the slaughter of Alevis that took place in Kahramanmaraş in December 1978 when well over 100 Alevis were murdered in a pogrom organized by the Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves had two reasons to hate the Alevis: first, they practice a heterodox form of Shi'a Islam that was at odds with their Sunni bigotry, and second, the Alevis were generally aligned with the left. It is also likely that the group was responsible for the May Day violence of 1977 in which 39 people lost their lives when unknown gunmen opened fire on leftist protesters and operated with the cooperation of some sectors of the Turkish Armed Forces as part of the theorized "deep state" (see Jan. 25 post).

Violent acts were also engaged in on the part of the extreme left, but did not compare to the prolific heinousness of the Grey Wolves. Indeed, the violence of both groups attributed to the political instability that the military coup of 1980 claimed as justification for their political intervention. After the military seized control in September of that year, it closed down all political parties, began work on a new constitution, and arrested and tortured several people it claimed to be trouble-makers. Those arrested included Türkeş and members of the Grey Wolves, but the principal aim of the military was to end what it saw as an emerging threat coming from the radical Turkish left (a view it had in common with the Grey Wolves). As in Iran in the 1970s, several leftists were detained for indefinite periods of time in political prisons and subjected to tortured. Interestingly, there is evidence that implicates United States-CIA involvement in the coup and that puts these events in the Cold War context in which they occurred.

It is interesting to think of how exogenous the events at Akdeniz seems in the stalemate of the current political climate. The factors for this stalemate are twofold: first, the moderation of the radical right to a degree that it is now able to represent itself in the form of an establishment party; second, the demise of the Turkish left to such a degree that its policies now seem more in line with the far right than with its own history (see Feb. 12 post).

To explain the first factor, it is necessary to understand the development of MHP in the post-coup years. In many ways, the 1980 coup tamed it and with its reconstitution in 1983, MHP began to move past its involvement in paramilitary activities and at the same time seek a greater role in electoral politics. With the death of Türkeş in 1997, Bahçeli further moderated the party's positions while also seeking to expand its base by appealing to pious Muslim voters with strong natioanlist leanings. The party became declared its opposition to the türban ban at universities and argued that türban-wearing women should be able to work in government. In 1999, the party won 18 percent of the vote thanks to this more religious platform and promises to execute Abdullah Öcalan.

Some have attributed the rise of MHP as symptomatic of an increase in nationalist feeling in recent years, but others have pointed to the party's success as rooted in the turbulent political situation in which Turkey found itself when the old center-right parties weakened in the closing years of the 1990s. Worthy of examination is Bülent Aras and Gökcen Bacık's 2000 article, "The Rise of the Nationalist Action Party and Turkish Politics" in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (Vol. 6:2, pp. 48-64), in which the authors argue the latter.

Given that MHP's meeting the 10% threshold is the big question for the upcoming June 12 elections, I thought it might be useful to link back to this so readers can get more of a sense of the party's origins and just where it stands in the Turkish political landscape.

The Impact of Turkish Culture in Iraq

2011-05-30T23:37:00.006-04:00

Much has been written in both the foreign and Turkish press about the impact of Turkish television serials, particularly soap operas (dizi) in the Arab world. However, in Iraq, the interest in Turkish television series has resulted in an interest in Turkish literature and language for a growing number of students. From Hurriyet Daily News:

“The ever-developing relations between [Iraq and Turkey] and Turkish soap operas on Iraq TV have triggered this new trend. Students are eager to learn Turkish, while families also want their children to learn Turkish,” Professor Talib al-Qurayshi, the head of the Iraq University Foreign Languages Department, recently told Anatolia news agency.

When Turkish Literature and Language Department head Ziyad Tariq Abduljabbar took over his new department’s management in 2008, there were only 60 students but there are now 730 undergraduate students, 17 post-graduate students and three PhD students in the program.

Speaking about the links between Turkish soap operas and the country’s literature, Nilüfer Narlı, a sociologist at Bahçeşehir University, said Turkey had increased its “soft power” in the Middle East and Balkan countries.

“As the circulation of soap operas in the international arena has increased, learning Turkish language and culture have become very important in the Arab and Balkan countries. This is what we call ‘soft power,’ within the context of the culture industry,” she said.

Of course, there are other reasons for the increased interest in Turkish in Iraq, especially economic ones, said al-Qurayshi. “Growing investment and business opportunities draw people to learn Turkish in Iraq. Students are concerned about their future and the current investments have triggered the education in Turkish.”

According to a TESEV survey conducted last year, 78% of respondents throughout the region had watched a Turkish television series. It is good to see that this interest in soap operas is feeding into other aspects of Turkish culture . . .

Struggling to Make Sense of It All

2011-05-29T01:37:00.002-04:00

As Turkey grapples to deal with all that is going on in the Arab Middle East these days, the Turkish media is having an equally difficult time keeping up. The following piece from the Foreign Policy Research Institute comes thanks to a post of Jenny White at Kamil Pasha. An excerpt:

Not surprisingly, the media plays an important role in both reflecting and influencing public opinion in Turkey. Since the outbreak of the first protests in Tunisia, Turkish media coverage of the Arab Awakening has portrayed a confused but ambitious picture of Turkey’s role regarding an intervention in Libya. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s “zero problem (with neighbors) policy” and Turkey’s role model status for democratizing Middle Eastern countries have contributed to an optimistic and ambitious domestic environment. However, the pace of developments in the Middle East, which required swift responses from Turkey and the West, unfolded more rapidly than Turkey had expected, causing confusion in Turkish government and foreign policy circles, as well as in public opinion. This is particularly evident when examining some of the most popular newspapers in Turkey—Hürriyet, Milliyet, Zaman, Taraf, Radikal, and Haber Türk—and their portrayal of the Western intervention in Libya.

The Turkish media in general, and columnists and commentators in particular, are primarily concerned about Turkish foreign policy direction and an appropriate Turkish response regarding the recent events in the Middle East. [4] Pleased with Erdoğan’s responses to the uprisings in Tunisia and especially in Egypt, many columnists supported Turkey’s initial criticism of the Western intervention—regardless of their general attitude towards the government and its policies. However, while several columnists lost interest, others ceased opposing the intervention once Turkey began participating in it. They, then, shied away from criticizing government policies, which presented a complete reversal of its position vis-à-vis the intervention within a few days. So, the media’s initial criticism of the Western intervention in Libya—like that of the Turkish government—appears to have been rooted in opposing France’s leadership of the operation. [5]

However, the majority in the Turkish media—namely the Islamists, leftists, and nationalists, continue to oppose any Western involvement in the Middle East. This unifying position among various opposing blocs in Turkey reflects a general suspicion of Western intentions in the Middle East. This theme features prominently in the government’s own discourse, especially with the approaching elections on June 13, 2011. Moreover, the West is perceived as monolithic in Turkey; only rarely are distinctions made between the U.S. and the European powers. Rarer still are the policies of the European powers evaluated individually. News of America’s $25 million of financial aid to the opposition in Libya, [6] the death of more than 800 Libyans fleeing Gaddafi’s crackdown, [7] and NATO’s “indifference” [8] to the growing number of people dying or trying to escape has caused increasing suspicion in the media. [9] Coverage and analyses also usually focused on this type of headline grabbing news.

The Turkish media primarily covers the Western politicians and Western media rather than Arab leaders and Arab media. While most are suspicious of Western intentions in the region, it appears, the Turkish media remain disinterested in the details of this complex situation.

This disinterest is particularly troubling given Turkey's increased role in the region and frequent references to it as a model for the Middle East, something that Turks (and myself) are still having trouble getting their heads around, especially in light of the AKP's increasing illiberal attitudes.

As I have written here before, though Turkey's role in the Middle East has been expanding in recent years, few Turks think of their country as a heavy hitter in the region and fewer still no much about the complexities. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish foreign policy establishment has generally aimed to keep Turkey out of the complex scene of Middle East politics, allying itself firmly with the United States and NATO.

Turkish news is still largely "Arab light" despite the AKP's recent efforts to build new relationships and pursue markets in the Arab world. This was more or less acceptable when the status quo was what it was before the Arab spring, a stagnate scene of disparate authoritarian regimes that provided the kind of stability that loaned Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's "zero problems" with neighbors policy some kind of working feasibility. Turkey could approach its relations with each country bilaterally without so much having to worry with the larger regional picture other than Israel, which was seemingly excluded from the "zero problems" equation to begin with. However, given the emergence of the post-Arab spring and the likelihood that Turkey will continue to play a leading role in the region, better coverage of Arab politics and the complexities therein is most certainly welcome.

Bomb Explodes in Etiler

2011-05-26T14:55:00.022-04:00

DHA PHOTO from Milliyet

A bomb exploded in Etiler, an up-scale neighborhood in Istanbul, this morning has injured eight people.

According to news reports, the blog was mounted on a bicycle and might have targeted police given that there is a police training school nearby. It is not clear at this time who or what organization is behind the bomb.

The bomb was the first in a long time to target citizens. The normal PKK has typically avoided hitting citizen targets, though the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), a radical and much more violent PKK-offshoot, has been known to target civilians with regularity. Various leftist groups have also been associated with such attacks.

Syrian Opposition Meeting in Antalya

2011-05-26T02:03:00.057-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet

News is breaking that Syrian opposition leaders are planning to meet in Antalya next week. According to Hurriyet, the meeting is scheduled for May 31 to June 2 at the five-star Falez Hotel. Ammar Qurabi, president of the exiled Syrian National Organization for Human Rights, has confirmed the meeting will draw together numerous members of the opposition from across different factions.

Turkey's role in organizing the meeting is unclear, though there is no word from the government or in the Turkish press that the government is doing anything other than allowing the meeting to take place. Travel to and from Syria to Turkey became visa-free in 2009.

In April, MUSIAD, the Islamist-affiliated Independent Industrialist's and Businessmen's Association, organized a conference of the Muslim Brotherhood in Istanbul. This meeting will apparently include more parties than just the Brotherhood.

An interesting tidbit (if true) from the hardline Debka website has also appeared. According to Debka, Turkey has taken is taking serious steps to distance itself from Assad.

1. The following message was posted to Damascus on Tuesday, May 24: Turkey is not a member of the European Union and is therefore not bound by its sanctions it has imposed freezing Assad's assets and barring him and his regime heads from travelling. Nonetheless, the Syrian ruler is advised not to try and test its intentions by trying to visit Turkey.

2. Assad's repression of the uprising in the Kurdish regions of northern Syria is causing ferment among the Kurds of southern Turkey. Unless it is stopped forthwith, Ankara will take overt action against the Syrian ruler.

3. Erdogan has discontinued his almost daily phone conversations with Assad. In any case, his advice to the Syrian ruler on how to overcome the uprising against him was never heeded.

Our sources report that he also ordered the Hakan Fidan, chief of Turkish MIT intelligence service, to stop traveling to Damascus with updates on Syrian opposition activities. Assad has thus lost his key source of information about what the opposition is up to.

My understanding is that this information should be treated with a grain of salt, and according to official Turkish government reports, Erdogan is still in regular contact with Assad.

More as it happens . . .

UPDATE I (5/26) -- Joshua Landis of Syria Comment has a few more details on the meeting, as well as some history of the MUSIAD meeting from April and its potential to seriously irritate Assad's Syria.

UPDATE II (5/27) -- More on the opposition meeting from Joshua Landis's blog can be found here. Still not much in the Turkish press . . .

An Opportunity for Citizen Journalism

2011-05-26T01:35:00.001-04:00

Erkan Saka, whose English-language blog I feature in the blogroll ("Turkey in the Media") to the right, is leading a group of Bilgi University students in a social media project aimed to collect information garnered by citizen journalists monitoring the June 12 elections. From Hurriyet Daily News:

The website, http://secim2011.crowdmap.com, is a Turkish version of the Ushahidi website which uses the concept of crowdsourcing via multiple channels, including SMS, email, Twitter and the Internet, to provide citizens with a platform to upload their own instant media independently of mainstream networks.

“Our website allows the public to reach [campaign] reports in the easiest way,” media and communications student Metin Özer recently told the Hürriyet Daily News Economic Review.

Regarding recent protests in Taksim Square against plans to increase filters against the Internet, Erkan Saka, an academic at the university's Media and Communication Systems Department, told the Daily News that because no political parties were front and center during the demonstrations, it suggested that citizens were now experiencing a period of real activism and that such anti-censorship movements provided an example of mass collaboration.

“Turkish websites have become a refuge where hate speech or censorship is often protested [as evidenced by the] thousands who gathered in Taksim Square [earlier in May to demand a free Internet],” Saka said, adding that the group had launched the project not simply due to the protest but also because the website could be useful in promoting more productive uses of information technology.

Emphasizing the importance of the website, Özer said the project was a mission to support local journalism. The mainstream media collects its news from the wires, but it takes too long to format the information and post it for the public, he added.

“[The] purpose was to develop a collective mind through social media,” Saka said.

Saka has been active in the mass protests that have taken place throughout Turkey in reaction to Turkey's plans to introduce an Internet filtering and profile system set to launch Aug. 22. The protests in the Taksim Square and other places throughout the country evince the mass protest the government's plans have sparked.

However, what is needed in addition to the "real activism" of which Saka speaks is organization. The CHP has taken an active role in protesting the government's plan as well, and while there are a limited number of NGOs working on Internet freedom issues, in particular Bilgi University professor Yaman Akdeniz's Cyber-Rights.org and Bianet, which is challenging Turkey's already restrictive Internet law at the European Court of Human Rights, what is lacking are well-funded, well-organized civil society groups that are able to viably connect the protestors with the state.

Gul Urges Hamas to Recognize Israel

2011-05-21T00:54:00.023-04:00

In reaction to Obama's Thursday speech on Mideast policy, President Gul has given an interview to the Wall Street Journal lauding Obama's seeming call for a two-state solution based on 1967 borders while calling on Hamas to recognize Israel. From Alternet:

Turkey's President Abdullah Gul has urged the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to recognise Israel's right to exist, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

In an interview a day after U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech on the Middle East, Gul also hailed Obama's reference to creating a Palestinian state based on Israel's pre-1967 borders as "a very important step".

Turkey has regarded Hamas as a key factor in the Middle East peace process since it won Palestinian elections in 2006.

Gul said President Obama "has a point" when he said in his speech that Israel could not be expected to negotiate with a body that does not recognise Israel's right to exist.

Asked if he was willing to press Hamas on that issue, Gul said, "I already advised them."

In a meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Ankara in 2006, Gul said he told Meshaal, "you have to be rational" about recognising Israel's right to exist.

Gul said he believed Hamas was ready to recognise Israel in its pre-1967 borders but wants that to happen simultaneously with Israel's recognition of a Palestinian state.

The AKP government has had friendly relations with Hamas since 2006 when a five-member delegation led by Meshaal first visited Ankara. Since that time the AKP government has been committed to improving relations between Hamas and the international community, a policy that has won the party few friends in Israel and in certain Washington policy circles. For background on the AKP government's relations with Hamas, see June 10 post.

Obama's speech aired live on Turkish state television Thursday night at a time when most Turks are still very much trying to figuring out their own country's position in the post-Arab spring Middle East.

Ankara is expected to facilitate negotiations between Hamas and Fatah next week.

The Prime Minister's Curious Obsession with Inonu

2011-05-20T00:22:00.002-04:00

Commemorations of the Dersim rebellion were held in the city (now known as Tunceli) on Wednesday. The Tunceli Cultural Association and Dersim Associations Federation organized the demonstrations. DHA PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

In an election rally in the southeastern city of Van, Prime Minister Erdogan once again took the opportunity to assail the CHP for its role in the massacre of thousands of Alevi Kurds in the fall of 1937/spring of 1938. Curiously, Erdogan focused his scorn on then-CHP leader Ismet Inonu, who was not president at the time (an error repeated here in Today's Zaman (also repeated in Zaman) -- in fact, Inonu, after a political fallout with Ataturk, resigned in fall 1937). Obviously the CHP, the oldest party in Turkey and the party of Ataturk, has undergone numerous transformations since 1938.

This Wednesday marked the annual commemoration of the Dersim massacre, an oft-overlooked event in Turkish history that has received increasing attention in the Turkish media in recent years as Turks begin to discover and constructively discuss the darker side of the republic's formative years.

The attempt by Erdogan to associate the CHP with Dersim is not the first. He made the same remarks last August while campaigning for Kurdish votes for the September referendum (see here, in Turkish).

Just as significant to the prime minister's remarks in Van was the religious tone of his speech, calling on Turks and Kurds to unite as Muslims and accusing the pro-Kurdish BDP of creating dangerous divisions. Particularly disturbing, and completely fallacious, the prime minister, speaking in Siirt, another southeastern town, accused the BDP of fostering Zoroastrianism. I would like to know more about the roots of this accusation (is there some Turkish/Kurdish cultural significance? where did this come from?), and so if anyone has any information, please send it onward.

In March, BDP leader Selahattin Demirtas warned Kurds from speaking openly at mosques, hinting that imams appointed by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, might be spies for the state (a dangerous intimation given that the PKK was killing imams in the dirty war in the 1990s). Also curiously, the BDP, which is well-known for its neo-Marxist, secular views (not Zoroastrianism!!), has made efforts this election cycle to compete with the AKP for religious votes. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Erdoğan said the course in solving the Kurdish issue has been changed since 2002, as they have ceased to ignore the existence of the problem. Outlining five documents issued by İnönü in the late 1940s that prohibited the use of Kurdish and ordered the confiscation of books written in the language. “Dear residents of Van! When you were suffering this pain here in Van, we were suffering the same pains in Istanbul. This period of denial has lasted until we came to power.”

The police and gendarmerie have taken extraordinary security measures in the city in order to prevent a potential dispute between the ruling and pro-Kurdish party fans. However tight security measures in the eastern province of Van ahead of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s election rally Friday did not dissuade protesters from taking to the streets for a mass prayer.

Despite a crackdown resembling the days when the region was under a state of emergency, some 5,000 members and supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, gathered outside to hold their midday prayers at a park instead of in a mosque.

Imams in Turkey are selected and assigned by the state. The BDP has charged the government with using religion as a political tool.

Hundreds of police officers silently joined in the act of civil disobedience, held just hours before Erdoğan was set to arrive. The thousands of people who showed up for the prayer dispersed silently, without a trace of slogans or banners.

“They used to say the religion of Kurds is Zerdust, not Islam. Who said that? The man in İmralı and those who follow him,” Erdoğan said Thursday at a campaign event in Siirt, referring to the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

“What do they do now? They say, ‘You cannot pray behind the state’s imam; gather elsewhere.’ The Friday prayer is about being together. They try such things to break our togetherness,” the prime minister said.

Time will tell if the AKP will have any success maintaining its strong base of more religiously-inclined voters in the southeast. Kurds are indeed more conservative, especially outside the major cities, and the AKP fared well in 2007 parliamentary elections, capturing as much as half the vote even in the Kurdish nationalist stronghold of Diyarbakir. However, those victories were diminished in March 2009 local elections, and the BDP's new efforts to woo these voters from the AKP and shed its perceived strict secularist credentials could allow the Kurdish nationalist party to make serious inroads this time around.

As to Dersim, CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, engaged in similar electioneering efforts, has asked for a state-led commission of inquiry into what happened. Kilicdarolgu is himself Alevi, and his comments follow a remarked turn for the CHP. Last year, after denouncing fellow CHP party member Onur Oymen for insulting remarks Oymen made justifying the Dersim massacres, Kilicdaroglu was forced to back-down. However, Baykal's resignation as party leader and Kilicdarolgu's recent ascendancy to the party's top leadership position (in particular, his defeat of former Secretary-General Onder Sav, who was close to Baykal), have drastically changed CHP's role in the political scene.

Caught on Tape...Sex Scandal Hits the MHP

2011-05-19T00:26:00.067-04:00

As violence boils over in the southeast, the MHP, Turkey's third largest party, finds itself in the midst of a major sex scandal. For over a week, a mysterious website has been threatening to release sex tapes unless MHP leader Devlet Bahceli resigns. The MHP had until yesterday to meet the demands or have the website release the names of the party members who were caught on film.As promised, the website released names and tapes. Among the MHP members "caught" are three deputies, as well as the party's secretary-general.

In addition to video that has been released (nothing too explicit), there is audiotape. The tape is probably more damning than the video, featuring MHP politicians saying particularly dirty things to prostitutes. The tapes are getting wide play in the Turkish press.

Crazy things tend to happen in elections, but in Turkey the level of "craziness" is particularly high. Just one year ago former CHP leader Deniz Baykal was forced to resign his long-held top position in the chief opposition party following the release of a sex tape documenting what Baykal likely now considers a rather unfortunate affair with a female deputy within his party. The tape was released a few months before last year's constitutional referendum. Like the CHP scandal, the forces behind this new wave of videotapes is not known.

The MHP is accusing the ruling AKP of being behind the tapes. The footage was apparently taken in a house the party used for illicit liaisons with women who were most likely prostitutes. The house seems to have been under surveillance for a long period of time.

The MHP is hovering just above 10% in public opinion polls -- the same percentage the party needs to capture to be able to enter parliament. The AKP has the most to gain should the MHP fall under the 10% mark since it would be rewarded the majority of the seats the MHP does not pick up according to Turkey's rather unhealthy D'Hondt system of proportional representation. For more on how this works, click here. At stake for the AKP is the ability to unilaterally put through a new constitution. The party needs 330 seats (3/5 of the parliament's 550 seats) to craft amendments to submit to popular referendum (as was the case with the recent constitutional changes passed Sept. 12) and 367 seats to push through amendments without the referendum requirement(2/3 of the 550 seats).

Last year, the ultra-nationalist MHP staked its political future on opposing the AKP's referendum and grand-standing on the Kurdish issue. Despite the government's failed "Kurdish opening" and the wave of PKK terrorist violence that was raging at the time, the MHP failed to get many of its voters out. Now that the AKP seems to have taken a more nationalist turn, Prime Minister Erdogan recently declaring "one nation, one language, one flag," the MHP is having difficulties winning over its usual constituency. The sex tape scandal will further injure its chances of remaining a major player in Turkish politics.

Averting Another Flotilla Crisis

2011-05-18T23:59:00.105-04:00

The Turkish NGO Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) is preparing another flotilla campaign involving vessels sailing from multiple European countries, including the Mavi Marmara, which will once again sail from Turkey. The vessels are set to sail after the Turkish elections on June 12.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon has said the United States is urging Turkey not to allow the IHH to send another flotilla. In testimony to the U.S. Senate before Congress yesterday, Gordon said, “In the year since the last flotilla episode, Israel has changed the humanitarian regime for Gaza [and] made it very clear that there are alternative ways to get humanitarian assistance to Gaza. We have been very clear with the Turkish government that that’s the case.”

The Turkish government, as before, has said that Turkey is in no position to prevent lawfully registered NGOs from setting sail for Gaza. The IHH is accepting applications for the campaign, heavily advertising in Turkey and throughout Europe.

For more on the IHH and last year's flotilla incident, click here. For my feature in the Jerusalem Post analyzing Turkey-Israel relations in the wake of the flotilla, click here.

Is AKP Nationalism a Mistake?

2011-05-18T23:59:00.104-04:00

In recent weeks, the AKP has taken an increasingly nationalist tone. As AKP puts its effort into winning votes from the constituency of the ultra-nationalist MHP, it risks not only a massive electoral loss in Turkey's Kurdish southeast but stoking Kurdish counter-nationalist sentiments. The violence, which should be read as a backlash against the AKP, is already at a level the ruling party has yet to see and risks getting worse.

Milliyet columnist Semih Idiz argues that the AKP is playing with fire. As large scale protests continue throughout the southeast in response to allegations that the Turkish military, which is in theory now under the command of the AKP civilian government, abandoned the bodies of 12 PKK militants, the prime minister continues to play the nationalist card.

Since the failed Kurdish opening, Erdogan has taken the position that there are "good Kurds" and "bad Kurds," and that it is the latter who are at the heart of the unrest. At the same time, he has seemingly drawn back from previous government initiatives to provide the Kurds with more cultural rights and is instead focusing on "eliminating" the "bad Kurds," which many in the region see the AKP as doing by way of the KCK operations, which began after the AKP suffered electoral losses in the 2009 local elections.

Pandering to nationalist sentiment makes sense from one angle. In recent public opinion polls, the MHP is hovering at the 10% threshold required for political parties to enter parliament and the party will likely fare even worse given the sex scandal in which it is now deeply entangled. If the AKP can shut the MHP out parliament, it will be that much closer to the super majority required to enact a new constitution unilaterally and without going to referendum.

While some AKP apologists have made claims that the military action not to return the bodies to their families (a claim that is still confusing and largely unsubstantiated) is the result of a deep state conspiracy aimed at undermining the AKP before elections (a frequently convenient, oft-used excuse), the AKP is doing little to step back from its nationalist posturing. From Idiz:

How Erdoğan can stand up, in the face of what is actually happening, and claim that “Turkey’s Kurdish problem is over” is a mystery. He appears to be telling us that all the protests we see by the Kurds, the position that the BDP is taking in this respect, and the intense public debate about this issue represent something other than the Kurdish problem.

Even the highly respect columnist Hasan Cemal, who is known for supporting the AKP and also for his outspoken stance on issues like the Kurdish issue, is admitting that Erdoğan’s playing of the nationalist card to undermine the MHP has crossed a line. Erdoğan is relying on the fact that the MHP’s nationalist strongholds all voted “yes” for the AKP’s package of constitutional amendments in last September’s referendum.

That happened despite the fact that MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli argued against the constitutional changes by maintaining that Erdoğan was betraying the country and actively dividing it with his Kurdish initiative. Under normal circumstances, this allegation should have made MHP supporters vote against the constitutional amendments. But it did not, thus encouraging Erdoğan to switch from a position of empathy with the Kurds to pandering to the nationalists.

. . . .

There are also those, Cemal being one of them, who argue that if the Turkish army is under the orders of the elected government, as the AKP claims it is when it serves its interests to do so, then Erdoğan should step in and prevent the military from engaging in operations that merely make a bad situation worse. In the meantime there are regional developments that stand to aggravate the issue further.

Ankara has of course normalized ties with the Kurds of northern Iraq, and as belated as this was, it is nevertheless a good development contributing to regional stability. Developments in Syria, however, have energized the Kurdish movement in that country and it is not clear how this situation will affect Turkey’s Kurdish problem.

The bottom line here is that there appears to be little political wisdom in Erdoğan’s current approach to the problem, which in fact smacks of political opportunism aimed at the nationalist vote, rather than a consideration of the welfare of the whole of Turkey. But what he is achieving in doing this is stoking up Kurdish nationalism and contributing to a further division of the country.

While the party won over many Kurdish skeptics in 2005 when Erdogan delivered a landmark speech painting Turkey as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country, a speech that eschewed nationalism and began to move understanding "Turkishness" as something other than an ethnic or even national identity, those votes are mostly gone. Given the crisis in Syria and that the AKP is likely to lose a huge number of Kurdish voters in the southeast, what is happening in the southeast right now is particularly dangerous.

The June elections will be a showdown between the AKP and the PKK-affiliated BDP, and at the moment, neither side is taking a nonviolent, accommodationist position. Unless something changes, just what will come of this cannot possibly be good.

More Internet Unrest

2011-05-18T01:09:00.001-04:00

PHOTO by Emrah Guler / Hurriyet Daily News

Multiple progressive Turkish websites are being attacked just three days following large-scale protests of the Turkish government's plan to pass broadly restrictive measure on Internet use. From RSF:

Several websites that backed anti-censorship demonstrations held on 15 May have been intermittently inaccessible since then because of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The targets include the site of the left-wing daily Birgün, the news site haber.sol.org.tr and the media freedom website Bianet.

“We are going to carry on publishing under alternative addresses in case we should become the subject of similar attacks in the future,” Bianet announced today after being inaccessible for eight hours yesterday. “If this should occur, the alternative address will be published on Twitter and via other channels.”

For the announcement from Bianet, click here.

In other Internet freedom-related news, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has asked the Turkish government to reconsider its plan to institute new regulations on the Internet, which are currently scheduled to go into effect on Aug. 22. The OSCE has also offered its assistance in helping Turkey draft an internet law that will respect freedom of expression. The Turksih government is also taking heat from the European Commission.

In a letter to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE’s, representative on media freedom expressed concern about the Turkish government’s plans to introduce mandatory content filtering for all Internet users.

“This regulation would limit the right of individuals to access information they want and impose regulation of Internet content by the authorities,” OSCE representative Dunja Mijatovic wrote, adding that Internet users must have the freedom to make independent decisions about the use of content filters.

“If enforced, this regulation would contravene OSCE and international standards on free flow of information.” Mijatovic added.

Turkey also received international criticism from the European Commission, with a spokeswoman for Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule telling reporters Tuesday that the body is closely following developments regarding the filtering of online access in Turkey and other restrictions on the Internet.

She also expressed the European Commission’s uneasiness about Turkey’s blocking access to Internet sites frequently and disproportionately in terms of content and time, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The CHP is also taking advantage of the opportunity to challenge the government issue, utilizing its youth branches to capture support for the party before the upcoming elections on June 12.

Ahmet Şık and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu Cleared in One Case

2011-05-17T00:18:00.000-04:00

Though Ahmet Şık remains under arrest for alleged, but highly questionable, links to the shadowy Ergenekon gang (see here), an Istanbul court recently acquitted him in a case involving other charges related to a book the journalist wrote with Ertugrul Mavioglu concerning the Ergenekon investigation. From Hurriyet Daily News:

The decision came after the second hearing of the case involving accusations of violation of investigation secrecy based on a two-volume book called “40 Katır 40 Satır: Kontrgerilla ve Ergenekon’u Anlama Rehberi” (Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Guide to Understanding Counter-guerilla and Ergenekon) and “40 Katır 40 Satır: Ergenekon’da Kim Kimdir?” (Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Who is Who in Ergenekon).

The defense first presented their plea to the court said the accusations involving another Ergenekon suspect Hasan Ataman Yıldırım claims. The lawyers said the subject of the case is irrelevant as an another case has already been filed against the journalists. The two-volume book was published in 2010 and the case was filed immediately afterward with the justification of “violation of secrecy” in the Ergenekon investigation.

Both Şık and Mavioğlu expressed in their defense, “cases are filed against every news story, book regarding Ergenekon,” Şık said their book was not sourced by leaks from police or prosecutor as some journalists said, but careful inspection of open sources. “Our sources do not include CIA, the prime minister or the chief of general staff either,” Mavioğlu added.

Regarding Şık’s lack of presence at the first hearing, the lawyers argued that there is no sufficient explanation given by the officials of the prison during their testimony. The prison where he is being held said in their written statement they did not have enough vehicles for transportation to the Kadıköy courthouse on April 14.

Şık has been under arrest in the scope of the ongoing Ergenekon case since March 6 and was taken to the court between high security measurements taken by the police and gendarmerie as the protests was being held out of the courthouse. The crowd including the press members and Republican People Party, or CHP, party members chanted, “Ahmet will get out of the prison and write again,” and, “There can be no bomb made by a poem or book, prime minister”

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan previously compared Şık’s book draft called “İmamın Ordusu” (The Imam’s Army) to a bomb. The slogan referred to both Erdoğan’s remarks, while reminding the prime minister of the time he served in prison for reading a poem before he was elected to his office.

Journalist Ruşen Çakır, who read a press statement in front of the courthouse, said 68 journalists are behind bars in a country.

For additional reportage from Bianet, click here. The counter to Prime Minister Erdogan's remarks refers to the case brought against the prime minister after he read a famous Islamic poem about mosques becoming minarets. Erdogan's reading of the poem resulted in a temporary ban from politics, after which the AKP rose as Turkey's only significant liberal party. Now the AKP's commitment to liberalism is under serious question.

This is a victory for Şık, who, in this case, was charged with revealing state secrets for publishing a piece in which all the information was public. However, the larger case brought against him in March looms ahead and the journalist remains under arrest.

DIHA Journalist Ersin Celik Sent to Prison

2011-05-17T00:10:00.024-04:00

From Bianet:

Imprisonment of ten months was the verdict for journalist Ersin Çelik on the grounds of a news item about the death of Dicle University student Aydın Erdem. In his article, Çelik had put forward that Erdem died from police bullets when he attended a demonstration in 2009.

The student had actually joined a protest march for people who lost their lives because they were shot by the police and was then gunned down himself. Çelik, reporter for the Dicle News Agency (DİHA) at the time, was tried because he named the alleged perpetrators in his article.

It was reported on Friday (13 May) that the Diyarbakır 6th High Criminal Court handed down a ten-month prison sentence to the journalists on charges of "disclosing the identity of a public official on anti-terror duties".

Çelik was not able to attend the hearing because he is currently being detained in the scope of another trial. He was represented by his lawyer Servet Özen.

Erdem was killed in the mass protests that consumed the southeast in December 2009. In September, charges were brought against Erdem's father for inscribing a martyr's prayer on his son's headstone. The Diyarbakir Chief Prosecutor's Office accused Erdem's father with "praising a crime and a criminal" under Article 215 of the Turkish Penal Code. I am not sure if the charges were dropped. Remember, in Turkey, charges are easily brought by zealous prosecutors looking to make and/or score political points. In Celik's case, those charges have resulted in a prison sentence.

Detentions and Arrests Spike in the Southeast

2011-05-16T01:55:00.002-04:00

Newroz demonstrations in Diyarbakir / PHOTO from Efe

The number of detentions and arrests in Turkey's mostly Kurdish southeast has drastically increased in the past month. The spike follows the BDP's "democratic solutions" campaign launched in March, as well as the mass unrest two weeks ago following the Election Board's attempt to bar some candidates from the pro-Kurdish BDP party from running in parliamentary elections. The number of people detained and arrested in conjunction with the government's ongoign operations against the KCK is also part of the equation. From Bianet:

A total of 2506 people were taken into police custody in Turkey between 24 March and 11 May 2011. Operations that resulted in the arrest of more than 400 people were carried out between the Newroz celebrations (end of March) and 1 May demonstrations.

According to the Dicle News Agency (DİHA), an estimated 2506 people were taken into police custody for political reasons in the course of police operations that started after the Newroz festivals and peaked with the veto decision of the Supreme Election Board (YSK) on 18 April. Hundreds of people were arrested. Only within the past five days, 155 people were taken into custody and 53 people were arrested.

According to data compiled by DİHA from the news the agency obtained, more than 2000 people were taken into custody between 24 March and 29 April, a period of six weeks. On 29 April, the last day of this wave of operations, at least 66 people were taken into custody in seven different cities.

According to figures announced by the Human Rights Association (İHD), 831 people, 189 of whom were children, were taken into police custody after the veto decision of the YSK between 19 and 29 April. The YSK had decided to bar twelve independent candidates from the general elections, a decision that was partly reversed later on. During the same period of time, two people were killed by the police and 308 people were injured during demonstrations.

* At least 177 people were taken into police custody in the scope of operations carried out between 29 April and 5 May.

* On Friday 6 May, 163 people were taken into police custody in Kurdish provinces and Hatay/Dörtyol, Bodrum and Adana, 19 of whom were arrested. On 7 May, another 24 arrests and an additional eleven people were registered.

* This rate increased further between 7 and 11 May. Throughout five days, 155 people were taken into custody and 53 were arrested. On 9 May, seven university students were arrested, among them one DİHA reporter. On 10 May, 34 people were taken into police custody, three of them are alleged members of the 'Group Comment' organization.

* Police operations were conducted in Hakkari, Mardin, Şırnak, Diyarbakır, Siirt, Van, Urfa, Söke, Erzurum and Malatya between 7 and 11 May.

Detentions and arrests are different in Turkey. Polce have the right to detain suspects for up to 24 hours, and a judge may extend this time to 48 hours, excluding the time it takes to transport detainees from different facilities. During this time, a detainee is entitled to the right to an attorney.

However, under the Anti-Terrorism Law, in cases where a suspect is thought to be linked to a terrorist organization no such right is afforded. In the southeast, this is the case in the vast majority of detentions. In most of these cases, detainees are not allowed to see an attorney until after the detention period is over, allowing police to freely interrogate people without an attorney "getting in the way." According to human rights groups, it is during this time that torture and other forms of ill-treatment is most likely to occur.

According to Serkan Akbas, a lawyer with the Diyarbakir Bar Association, most detentions and arrests are based on photographs of people attending this or that event or meeting with people thought to be associated with the KCK or PKK. This has long been the case, though I assume the situation has gotten only worse. A mere photograph and a vendetta can land a person in serious trouble.

Detentions also routinely follow demonstrations and clashes with police, such as have been occurring in relation to the "peace tents" the BDP has setup in relation to the "democratic solutions" campaign.

Those arrested during protests can face more jail time than actual militants who decide to surrender. Under a limited amnesty law, militants receive a maximum of six year and three months in prison. Meanwhile, protestors can face between seven and 15 years in prison. For more on this, see Human Right Watch's November report on protesting as a criminal offense.

Further, arrests, even if based on the shoddiest of evidence, can land one in prison for months. According to the Minister of Justice, the average length of time between arrest and a trial verdict was 580 days. The problem of prolonged periods of arrest is indubitably a violation of the right to an expedient trial guaranteed under the European Convention of Human Rights. In the wake of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer investigations, yhe practice has been criticized by the Turkish Bar Associations' Union. Bilgi Univeristy law professor Idil Elveris writes about the issue here.

A Bloody Weekend, A Riotous Week

2011-05-15T16:30:00.003-04:00

PHOTO from Radikal

Predominantly Kurdish cities throughout the southeast are in an uproar this week after clashes with PKK fighters attempting cross the border from northern Iraq resulted in the death of 12 militants. PKK news sources claim five Turkish soldiers were killed in retaliation. Major fighting has been taking place on the border since the Turkish military launched a large-scale operations on Thursday.

According to news reports, three of the bodies were not collected by the Turkish Armed Forces and returned to their families, as is usually the practice. In an effort to retrieve the bodies, a group of approximately people marched from Sirnak province over the Iraqi border, where they got into a confrontation with the Turkish military. The conflict was defused by local officials, after which the military retrieved the bodies to in the end return them to relatives.

Just one month before elections, Kurdish AKP deputy Galip Ensarioglu accused the powers-that-be of using the clashes as a means to stoke ultra-nationalist sentiment and keep the MHP above the 10% threshold. The AKP is attempting to win voters from MHP's usual constituency in an effort to have the part fall below the threshold, the occurrence of which would help secure an AKP super-majority.

UPDATE I (5/17) -- Bianet reports that 47 people were detained on Sunday night in Hakkari (like Sirnak, also on the border with Iraq) after protests there. There were also wide-scale protests in Diyarbakir and Istanbul. In Istanbul, 1,000 people assembled outside Galatasary Lisesi on Istiklal. Bianet also reports that Turkish military officers today fired upon a high school in Cizre, a town in Sirnak, after students began to protest and shout pro-PKK slogans.

Radikal reports that Sirnak governor Vahdettin Ozkan requested Gen. Mustafa Bakici to collect the bodies, but that the general refused on the grounds that the people should "experience the power of the state." There are also allegations that the Turkish military insensitively called BDP offices and told them to come pick up the bodies of the militants. None of this has been confirmed. BDP deputy Gulten Kisanak conveys her narrative of what happened here. It all seems like an incredibly confusing incident with plenty of politics on both sides.

Prime Minister Erdogan is set to hold an election rally in Siirt on Thursday.

"Don't Touch My Internet!"

2011-05-15T00:56:00.021-04:00

Tens of thousands of protestors took to the street yesterday to protest the government's plans to further regulate the Internet. (For more on the new regulations, click here). From Bianet, which has challenged the new regulations in a case to be heard by the Council of State:

Hundreds of thousands of Turkish internet users took the streets in 31 Turkish provinces on Sunday (15 May) to demonstrate against the "Draft Bill on Rules and Procedures of the Safety of Internet Use" that was approved by the Council of Information Technologies and Telecommunication (BTK) in the end of February.

The participants of the protest action got organized via Facebook and Twitter. They walked along Istiklal Avenue all the way from Taksim Square to the Tünel district. Many groups joined the demonstration, among them also political parties, the Linux Users Association, the LGBTT initiative LambdaIstanbul, the 'Hands off the Internet' Initiative and websites like Kaldıraç, İnci Dictionary, Ekşi Dictionary, bobiler.org, Uykusuz, and the Ulusağ dictionary.

Labor unions also joined the protests.

CHP Supports Devolution in the Southeast Ahead of Elections

2011-05-13T02:56:00.001-04:00

The CHP has announced four main planks to solving the Kurdish problem: devolution, Kurdish language education, lowering of the current 10% threshold parties must attain to enter parliament, and the establishment of truth commission-like institution to investigate crimes committed during the 1990s. The devolution proposal is the most racial of these given Turkey's long history of unitary government. The CHP is arguing that Turkey should fully implement the European Administrations Local Autonomy Condition to which Turkey has currently attached reservations. From Hurriyet Daily News:

CHP deputy leader Sezgin Tanrıkulu said the Kurdish problem could be solved within the unitary structure of Turkey by empowering local administrations with the full implementation of the European Local Administrations Autonomy Condition.

Tanrıkulu revealed the democratization targets of CHP in a meeting to a group of journalists in Istanbul. CHP has proposals for four main democratization issues in Turkey in its election statement, Tanrıkulu said.

“Turkey is one of the countries that has signed the European Local Administrations Autonomy Condition, however Turkey has attached annotation for seven of its articles. We want these annotations removed. If these annotations are removed, then there would be no question of democratic autonomy for the Kurdish people, the whole issue can be solved within the unitary structure of Turkey,” said Tanrıkulu.

The CHP is also in favor of having everybody to learn their mother tongue in the school, said Tanrıkulu. “Not only should our Kurdish citizens, but everybody in Turkey should have the chance to learn their mother tongue at the school, if they want to. The most important thing is accepting this as a fundamental right,” said Tanrıkulu.

“We will overcome the obstacles that lie before our Kurdish citizens to live their identity freely by establishing a pluralist and libertarian democracy,” said Tanrıkulu.

Reducing the election threshold is another proposal of CHP in its “democratization targets.”

“CHP has already proposed that the Parliament reduce the threshold from 10 percent to 7 percent last year, however as our leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu said, it could be even reduced to 5 percent or less. Reducing or lifting the threshold in whole, is essential for the reflection of people’s will to the Parliament,” Tanrıkulu said.

Regarding the discussions on implementation of the presidential system in Turkey, Tanrıkulu said, “These discussions cannot go any further than being a fantasy.”

The fourth main proposal of the CHP in its democratization package is “creating a research commission for inquiry of unsolved murders.” “There should a research commission in international standards in order to enlighten the unsolved murders in Turkey,” said Tanrıkulu.

Tanrıkulu said the CHP wants a new libertarian constitution that would secure every aspect of the human rights issues, including the civil, political, social, economical, cultural rights for everyone. “However in order to reach these targets that the CHP drew for democratization, we don’t need a new constitution, we can make these changes even without a new constitution,” said Tanrıkulu.

There is still no reference here to removing the ethnic chauvinism in Turkey's current understanding of Turkish citizenship, which addresses all Turkish citizens as belonging to the "Turkish nation." Amending the constitution in this regard has long been a key demand for Kurds.

However, there is no doubt the CHP is giving the AKP a run for its money in meeting long-held demands of Kurds. Local autonomy for Kurdish municipalities has become a big issue since last summer, and the CHP's willingness to address the issue is big news.

Turkish Newspaper to Have Pages in Kurdish

2011-05-12T01:21:00.000-04:00

The Turkish daily Radikal will begin publishing some of the pages its weekly magazine supplement in Kurdish. Content includes a feature on Kurdish broadcasting and excerpts from a new novel by a Kurdish author. The first edition will premiere in time for the Diyarbakir Book Fair, which I had the pleasure of attending last year.

Progress on the Domestic Violence Front

2011-05-12T00:35:00.002-04:00

Turkey has signed a new Council of Europe convention to prevent and combat violence against women. As documented by a report released by Human Rights Watch earlier this month, Turkey has been plagued by domestic violence over the years thanks in part to problems implementing existing law. Turkey pushed very hard for the Convention to be opened for signatures at the Council's recent ministerial meeting. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Reaching a consensus proved difficult as many countries expressed resistance to the far-reaching provisions of the convention, but Turkey adopted a negotiation position based on international standards, Acar told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview.

“We did not hide behind any cultural, economic or political pretexts and we resisted those who wanted to water down the stipulations,” she added.

The convention is revolutionary in the sense that it accepts violence against women as a human-rights violation, according to Acar. “This is very important, because violence against women will no longer be seen as a social problem. This will strengthen women’s demands for access to judicial recourse as well as protection,” she said.

Also important is the fact that the convention has endorsed a wide-ranging definition of “violence,” Acar added.

“Violence is not only physical. It can be economic or psychological; stalking is, for instance, a type of violence,” she said. The convention also includes violence against immigrant women, a measure that was resisted by some countries.

The convention covers what are called “the 4 Ps”: prevention, protection, prosecution and policy.

“The fourth P is especially important for Turkey, since we lack an integrated policy on gender equality. This convention will be known as the Istanbul convention and that way Turkey will be known as a country championing the cause of combating violence against women,” Acar told the Daily News.

“Just as we endorsed a zero-tolerance policy on preventing torture, we need to endorse zero tolerance on violence against women. In this sense, this convention will be a new driving force for Turkish domestic efforts,” she said. “Because we really need a mentality change, especially as far as implementation is concerned. All the judges, prosecutors, police and health officials will have to be trained. And for that Turkey needs to ratify the convention as soon as possible to set a good example as well.”

And more from Bianet:

Some 20 to 25 percent of women across the European region suffer physical or sexual violence at some point in their lives, according to the explanatory memorandum accompanying the Convention.

The convention is the first legally binding instrument in the region that creates a comprehensive legal framework to combat violence against women through prevention, protection, prosecution, and victim support. It defines and criminalizes multiple forms of violence against women: physical, sexual and psychological violence, as well as forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The treaty also establishes an international group of independent experts to monitor its implementation at the national level.

The Convention addresses gaps in domestic violence legislation and implementation, such as weak laws, bad implementation of protection laws, lack of coordination, lack of access to justice, low funding for domestic violence responses, lack of shelters, and lack of prevention measures.

To implement the convention, countries will establish hotlines, shelters, medical and forensic services, counseling, as well as legal aid.

Progress at the top to be sure, but real change, of course, will be shown from below and Turkey's willingness and effectiveness to ensure that police officers and other state agents responsible for protecting women follow legal guidelines.

Torn Between Worlds

2011-05-09T14:06:00.000-04:00

Hranuysh Hagopyan, Armenia’s diaspora minister, walks with acting Patriarch Aram Atesyan after an award ceremony in Istanbul on Sunday. PHOTO by Hasan Altinisik / Hurriyet Daily News

A group of Turkish Armenians were recently honored in Istanbul in a ceremony involving Archbishop Aram Atesyan, and significantly, Armenia's minister responsible for dealing with the Armenian diaspora, Hranuysh Hagopyan. Many Turkish Armenian intellectuals, newspaper, and some of the honorees questioned whether the presence of the diaspora minister was desirable. From Hurriyet Daily News:

“I would prefer not to have a diaspora minister in Turkey,” author Mıgırdıç Margosyan told the Hürriyet Daily News before receiving his gold medal from Armenian minister Hranuysh Hagopyan.

“I’ve been living on the land that [we have] been living on for thousands of years. I am not in the diaspora. This is a terrible irony,” Margosyan said. The writer also directed his criticism toward the Turkish government, saying the lack of a Turkish state official at the ceremony was disappointing.

. . . .

After attending the Global Summit of Women in Istanbul, Hagopyan handed out medals to 15 Turkish Armenians, including Margosyan, composers Garo Mafyan and Cenk Taşkan and Alis Manukyan, the first Armenian female vocalist in Turkey’s State Opera and Ballet.

“We are living in the lands where we have to live. And we continue to pay our debt to these lands,” Mafyan, who is arguably the best-known popular music composer, told the Daily News. He added that he is ready to do everything he can to make sure dialogue continues between Turkey and Armenia.

“It is [still] very important to receive an award from Armenia for contributing to Turkish popular music,” he said.

Turks of Armenian descent or Turkish Armenians or Armenian Turks or however one would group them are a population of at least 60 million people. Most belong to the Armenian Orthodox Church, which has a Turkish Patriarchate in Istanbul apart from Yerevan. Some Turkish Armenians are Catholics, and there are yet others of Armenian descent that do not enjoy minority status under Turkish law and whose numbers are not counted in official government numbers. This "hidden" Armenian minority, consists of people, sometimes referred to as crypto-Armenians, who converted to Islam in the latter half of the nineteenth-century and early part of the twentieth-century when Armenians began to face sharp discrimination, and eventually, Ottoman state-engineered ethnic cleansing.

Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Armenians, along with Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews, enjoy "minority status" based on religion. The status granted these minorities rights certain rights vis-a-vis the new republican Turkish state, and essentially granted two separate legal regimes: one for ordinary Turkish citizens, and another for the minorities granted status under the Treaty of Lausanne. (Syriac Christians, Alevis, Caferis, as well as ethnic groups, such as the Kurds, were denied such rights.)

However, some Armenians, Greeks, and Jews complain of being treated as second-class citizens. These minorities are still sometimes accused of collaborating with foreign enemies, and even in the context of receiving EU accession monies designed to protect and promote minority rights, face criticism from some nationalist circles for seeking to undermine the Turkish state.Armenians, in particular, have long faced suspicion of being linked to Armenian terrorist groups and secretly desiring the dissolution of the Turkish state, which many Turks are taught has two main enemies: the external enemies of imperial Europe, and the internal enemies, i.e. minorities who see the disintegration of the country. To make matters worse, Turkish Armenians often get caught in the middle of Turkey's politics with Armenia and other countries, such as when Prime Minister Erdogan responded to a genocide resolution in Sweden by threatening to expel Armenian immigrants in radio interview last March. (This is not to say that the poor Armenian immigrants were not more caught.)

At the same time, Armenians also face criticism from Armenians in Armenia, as well as from the sizable Armenian diaspora. As a result, Turkish Armenians are torn between Turkish citizenship, their relation to the diaspora, of which they are not a part since, unlike even the vast majority of Armenians living in Armenia, they did not immigrate. The vast majority of Turkey's Armenian population are the descendents of Armenians who migrated to cosmopolitan Istanbul following the hard times of the 1890s and onward under the Ottoman Empire (and before 1915), and so escaped the massacres at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the mass dislocation into Syria, the Soviet Union, and scores of other countries that followed.

Vahe Sarukhanyan, writing for Heqt Online, has an interesting piece up discussing Istanbul Armenians as the "Diaspora's Outsiders." An excerpt:

Sociologist [Arus] Yumul says that for the worldwide Armenian diaspora, the Istanbul-Armenian community is akin to a "lost lamb", an "outsider". She says that other Armenians have taken them to task for being non-active in Armenian affairs and for cow-towing to the government in Ankara. Yumul says she agrees with these assessments when it comes to the Ottoman period, but that after Turkish independence Armenians not only didn’t get involved in Armenian politics but also Turkish affairs. It was kind of a survival strategy she noted.

Yumul added that the community is slowly integrating into the larger Turkish society and that mixed marriages are paving the way.

"At one time Armenian parents resisted but this too has faded. The next generation will be more like a hybrid, free to chose whether they are Armenian, Turk..."

She was quick to add that this doesn’t mean that Armenians will disappear in Turkey.

However, the use of Armenian as a daily language of communication is also on the decline; the number of Armenians who can’t speak the mother tongue is growing. Parents send their kids to Armenian elementary schools but afterwards many go to private or foreign high schools so that they won’t have problems with the Turkish language in college.

The 1990s were a turning point for the community in many ways. Armenians, like the other minority communities, began to voice their concerns, speak about the discrimination they faced, and even raise the taboo subject of the 1915 Armenian Genocide

Twenty years ago, all this was unthinkable. What the next twenty will bring for the community remains a big question mark.

More evidence that Lausanne is outdated, and that its continued legal character is becoming more and more anachronistic as Turkey opens up . . .

On another note, Kadir Has University has announced plans to start teaching courses in Armenian. The classes are offered in the context of improving regional relations with Armenia.

For more on the Treaty of Lausanne's lasting impact in Turkish politics, see my post from 2008, "Article 301: An Anti-Imperialist Discourse." For the treaty's misused application in relation to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, see this past post. For more on Turkey's Armenian minority, click here.

Attack on the Prime Minister's Convoy

2011-05-06T01:11:00.011-04:00

DHA Photo from Hurriyet Daily News

Prime Minister Erdogan's convoy was attacked yesterday while traveling through Kastamonu. One police officer died during a firefight that ensued with the assailants. The police in Kastamonu are blaming the PKK. The prime minister was not traveling with the convoy, and it appears that the attackers did not necessarily know the police-protected convoy belonged to the prime minister.

"He Loves You, He Beats You"

2011-05-05T01:13:00.050-04:00

Human Rights Watch has released a report on domestic violence, a problem that has been gaining increased attention in recent years. As HRW reports, police too often neglect their responsibilities to protect women against violence, which has led to a plethora of stories of women who ended up dead despite their efforts to seek police protection. Following a June 2009 decision of the European Court of Human Rights, it is a state obligation to protect women when they report such violence. As HRW's report documents, problems with implementation of the ruling continue. From the report's summary:

“It always happened at night,” Hamiyet M. told Human Rights Watch. For 24 long years, Hamiyet’s husband had abused her by severely beating her and raping her almost daily. When she finally summoned the courage to go to police in her town in eastern Turkey, they sent her home, twice. The beatings continued, in one instance proving so severe she wound up in hospital where she spoke with a police officer for a third time. Yet again, she received neither sympathy nor help. “Are we supposed to deal with you all the time?” the officer scolded.

Some 42 percent of all women older than 15 in Turkey and 47 percent of women living in the country’s rural areas—approximately eleven million women in total—have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of a husband or partner at some point in their lives, according to a 2009 survey conducted by a leading Turkish university.

Female domestic violence survivors, lawyers, and local experts on family violence interviewed for this report described husbands and family members inflicting brutal and long-lasting violence on women and girls that in some cases lasted for decades, affecting several generations of women. Researchers documented women and girls as young as 14 being raped; stabbed; kicked in the abdomen when pregnant; beaten with hammers, sticks, branches, and hoses to the point of broken bones and fractured skulls; locked up with dogs or other animals; starved; shot with a stun gun; injected with poison; pushed off a roof; and subjected to severe psychological violence. The violence occurred in all areas where researchers conducted interviews, and across income and education levels.

In recent years Turkey has taken important legislative steps towards addressing violence against women. But despite these impressive advances, most notably Law 4320 on the Protection of the Family (“Law 4320” or “protection law”), remaining gaps in the law and failures of implementation make the protection system unpredictable at best, and at times downright dangerous. Furthermore, this legislative process is undermined by the government’s failure to better prevent abuse in the first place, change discriminatory attitudes, and effectively address the barriers that deter women and girls from reporting abuse and accessing protection.

This report focuses on the civil remedies available in Turkey to survivors of domestic violence. These options—which aim to provide immediate protection from harm, create space for a victim to decide her course of action, and prevent an abuser hampering criminal or divorce proceedings with intimidation or threats—take two main forms. The first is physical protection in shelters, the second is civil protection orders—emergency measures intended to stop further abuse, which is common in domestic violence cases, including instructions to an abuser to stay away from the house and refrain from violence against the victim.

The research found that implementation of Law 4320 regularly falls short because enforcement officers, judges, and prosecutors neglect their duties, often due to lack of expertise or will to deal with cases of violence against women and girls in a manner that is effective and sensitive to the needs and human rights of victims. Women who do report family violence to police risk being turned away, and face poor enforcement of protection orders: indeed, some women have been murdered after obtaining a protection order against their killer. Shelters are lacking, and those that do exist often exclude certain groups of women, restrict movement and communications, and are vulnerable to security breaches. Environments in which women are supposed to report violence—particularly police stations and family courts—often lack the private space necessary to do so. In addition, differing understandings of the law—specifically, the scope of eligibility for protection orders—undermine its effectiveness and can exclude the most vulnerable victims of domestic violence.

Implementing Law 4320 was supposed to be a priority of the Ministry of Women and Family. Last March Selma Aliye Kavaf, who heads the ministry, said many women who reported abuse were not properly protected because the police to whom they reported did not in turn report to the Ministry, and so proper procedures were not followed. As far as I can tell, little progress has been made here. Further, under Turkish law, each municipality with a population of over 50,000 people is supposed to have a women's shelter, though this is still far from the case (see this post from last March). For news coverage of the report from Hurriyet Daily News, click here.

Pressure on Municipalities Extends Beyond BDP

2011-05-03T00:57:00.015-04:00

Izmir Mayor Aziz Kocaoğlu addresses thousands of people who came together in central İzmir Monday to protest the recent police raid on the municipality. DHA photo from Hurriyet Daily News

From Hurriyet Daily News:

Approximately 50 employees of municipalities in the Aegean provinces of İzmir’s Metropolitan and Karabağlar municipalities as well as Aydın’s Kuşadası Municipality, including high-ranking officials, were detained Monday morning on corruption allegations that included interfering with public tenders.

The move came after a report prepared by the Court of Accounts, indicating corruption claims worth 40 million Turkish Liras in the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality.

While the police search continued on Tuesday, some 10 people were released after investigation. The probe surrounding 34 İzmir Municipality officials still continues.

“It is a politically oriented move aiming to disperse a fear of empire not only in the İzmir and Aydın but also among overall CHP-run municipalities in the country prior to the elections,” former Health Ministry undersecretary Aytun Çıray, who is also the CHP’s deputy candidate for İzmir, told the Hürriyet Daily News.

. . . .

The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, members, meanwhile, emphasized the role of judiciary in the move. Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek on Tuesday said what happened in İzmir was a result of the court decision and the investigation carried out by İzmir Public Prosecutor Office could not be associated with the ruling government.

The AKP has announced that capture Izmir in the June parliamentary elections is a major goal for the party. Izmir, long seen as haven of trendy swimsuit-wearing, fish-eating "white Turks," has long been a CHP stronghold. The CHP has denounced the raids as political. Izmir mayor Aziz Kocaoglu has called for the release of those municipal officials detained in the raid.

Historic Low for Media Freedom in Turkey

2011-05-03T00:29:00.116-04:00

PHOTO by Hasan Altinisik / Hurriyet Daily News

In commemoration of World Press Freedom Day, I have decided to take the time to briefly reflect on the state of media freedom in Turkey, an issue about which I have written about repeatedly (click here).

In October, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Turkey 138th of 175 countries assessed in its recent survey of press freedom in countries around the world. According to RSF, 47 members of the Turkish press are under arrest and waiting trial. Most of these work for Kurdish news outlets, and are being prosecuted under Turkey's Anti-Terrorism Law, which makes it illegal to make or disseminate what the law vaguely refers to as "terrorist propaganda." Since then, a record number of journalists have been arrested in conjunction with the Ergenekon investigation, including, most recently, Ahmet Şık and Nedim Sener, who the International Press Institute (IPI) honored last year with the World Press Freedom Hero Award.

In addition to the prosecution of journalists, Turkey is a world leader when it comes to its restrictions on the Internet. Though not China or Burma, Turkey's Internet policy borders on authoritarian and is getting worse. The government is planning a wide-scale Internet filtering system that will create user categories for all Turkish citizens and allow the government to better track their usage. Most disturbingly, under the new provisions, which are set to go into effect this August, the government will be able to censor content without users even knowing their government stands between them and the World Wide Web (see last Friday's post). And, if Internet was not enough, neither radio nor television have not escaped the Turkish government's heavy hand. Television broadcasts are routinely censored for being "morally objectionable," and a new law on broadcast media passed this February gives the government even more power to intervene.

Though many are focused on democracy in the Arab world at the moment, the rapidly declining state of media freedom in Turkey should make the world pay heed to the questionable state of Turkish democracy, what I have referred to here as a rising electoral authoritarianism that is polarizing the country in new ways and, if not curbed, has the potential of bringing the tremendous democratic gains of the past twelve years. While it is true Turkey chose a democratic trajectory after its application for EU membership was granted in Helsinki in 1999, since then Turkey's EU-driven democratization process has considerably slowed and many of the liberals that helped bring the AKP government to power in 2002 have fallen away from the party. If press freedom is any indicator of liberal democracy, liberalism is in a period of rapid decline. For more reflections on liberal democracy and the Turkish government's need to go beyond its current majoritarian understanding, click here.

For World Press Freedom Day events that have occurred in Washington this week, click here.

Another May Day in Taksim Square

2011-05-01T16:04:00.002-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

Today marks International Worker's Day, or May Day, a big day in Turkish politics since 1977 when 34 demonstrators were shot dead in Istanbul's famed Taksim Square. Last year marked the first time in years that the Istanbul municipality allowed May Day celebrations. Before then, the days before May Day were marked with curiosity as to just how bad the clash would be between the police and protestors. Following massive criticisms against the government following
a large crackdown celebrations/demonstrations in 2008, President Gul declared May Day a national holiday the following year.

Always a big day for the left, it seems this year there were some additional players around. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Members of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and socialist parties such as the Freedom and Solidarity Party, or ÖDP, were unsurprising sights at the May Day celebrations, as they have been participating in the May Day festivities for a long time.

This year, however, they were joined by members of the People’s Voice Party, or HSP, founded by Islamic-rooted politician Numan Kurtulmuş. Members of the group carried posters saying, “We want a deputy with a headscarf” and “Say no to subcontracted labor.” Party members attending the celebration included women wearing headscarves and young people wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the image of revolutionary Che Guevara.

Barbaros Risal, a young member of the party, said he has socialist views but feels close to the HSP. “Being left-wing means being on the side of the oppressed ones. In this context our rhetoric is no different from the Communist Party’s rhetoric,” said Risal.

Journalists demanding press freedom were also among the groups celebrating May Day in Taksim Square. “As journalists we are subjected to a lot of oppression in Turkey. Now we are here to voice our demand for press freedom and for the release of our colleagues who are in prison just because of their journalistic activities,” said Elif Ilgaz, a journalist who is a member of the group “Friends of Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener,” named after two recently arrested reporters.

This year's May Day also premiered a replica of the banner that hung in the square in 1977.

How Turks Perceive Kurdish Demands

2011-05-01T02:28:00.002-04:00

TESEV researchers Dilek Kurban and Yilmaz Ensarioglu have a new study analyzing Kurdish demands and discussing possible policy solutions in light of a series of roundtable discussions the researchers had with Turks regarding their perception of Kurdish demands.

The report, entitled "How Legitimate Are the Kurds' Demands?: The Kurdish Question Through the Lens of Turkey's West," follows up on the 2008 report TESEV published on possible solutions to the Kurdish question. That report was published right before the government's announced "Kurdish Opening," and had the government paid it more heed, it would have most likely been saved the mess it encountered last year. From this latest report:

Until recently, the Kurdish Question was mostly limited to the relations between Kurds, actually one group of Kurds, and the state, and it had not yet become a social problem. Some recent events particularly in Turkey’s western provinces point to the likelihood of tension, even conflict, between Turks and Kurds. Reaching a solution while keeping social harmony intact will be possible if different segments of society take part in the process of discussion and solution, that is to say, if everyone is ensured to have a chance to communicate their take on a solution.

While the lion’s share of responsibility in this regard falls upon the shoulders of political circles including first of all the government, there is no doubt that the media, intellectuals, universities and especially non-governmental organizations also have important roles to play.

Accordingly, we opened to debate the 2008 TESEV report, which effectively compiled Kurds’ opinions and demands, in western provinces where Kurds do not constitute the majority of the total residents. To that end, we held five roundtable discussions, two in İzmir and one each in Mersin, Trabzon and Ankara, with participants living in those cities and in neighboring cities. We invited individuals from as many different ethnic, cultural and political communities as possible, and aimed to bring participants into a discussion on both Kurds’ demands on the basis of the 2008 report and their own respective approaches, objections, concerns and expectations.

The main goal of preparing and publishing the Report was to identify as accurately as possible how the voices of Kurds, the group with a primary stake in the question, are perceived around Turkey, which of their demands are considered reasonable and which are deemed unacceptable, and to act as an intermediary helping with the presentation of the opinions of non-Kurdish segments of society on the Kurdish Question to the public opinion.

I have yet to review it, but thought I would go ahead and post for interested readers.

The Forbidden Zone

2011-04-29T00:02:00.039-04:00

The Turkish government via the Prime Ministry's Information Technologies Board (BTK) recently introduced a system in which websites bearing domain names carrying certain words will be automatically banned. Yesterday the government, through the Telecommunication Directorate (TIB) sent the list to Internet service providers ordering that website carrying these domain names be banned. From Hurriyet Daily News:

The affect of the decision could see the closure of many website that feature the banned words. For example, the website “donanimalemi.com” (hardwareworld.com) because the domain name has “animal” in it, a banned word and likewise “sanaldestekunitesi.com,” (virtualsupportunit.com) would not be able to operate under its current name because it has “anal” in it; also among the 138 banned words. Websites cannot have the number 31 in their domain names either because it is slang for male masturbation.

Some more banned English words are: “beat,” “escort,” “homemade,” “hot,” “nubile,” “free” and “teen.” Some others in English have different meanings: “pic,” short for picture, is banned because it means “bastard” in Turkish. The past tense of the verb “get” is also banned because “got” means “butt” in Turkish. Haydar, a very common Alevi name for men, is also banned because it means penis in slang.

“Gay” and its Turkish pronunciation “gey,” “çıplak” (naked), “itiraf” (confession), “liseli” (high school student), “nefes” (breath) and “yasak” (forbidden) are some of the other banned words.

Obviously there are problems with the list, and I do not think I have to mention that a website does not contain pornography just because an Internet domain site includes the word "gay."According to Yaman Akdeniz, who is at the lead of the fight for Internet freedom in Turkey, the government is in violation of the law. As draconian as Turkey's 2006 Internet regulation might be, there indeed seems little legal basis for what the BTK is doing.

“Hosting companies are not responsible for monitoring for illegal activities; their liability arises only if they take no action after being notified by the TİB – or any other party – and are asked to remove certain illegal content,” Akdeniz said.

The TİB cited the Internet ban law number 5651 and related legislation as the legal ground for its request. The law, however, does not authorize firms to take action related to banning websites.

“The hosting company is not responsible for controlling the content of the websites it provides domains to or researching/exploring on whether there is any illegal activity or not. They are responsible for removing illegal content when they are informed and there is the technical possibility of doing so,” according to Article 5 of the law.

On Thursday, following the heated debate surround the “forbidden” list, the TİB said the list was sent to hosting firms for informatory purposes. But the statement further confused the situation, as the body threatened companies with punishment if they did not obey its directions regarding the list in the first letter sent to service providers.

So, not only is the government violating rights to freedom of expression on a large scale, it is not even acting according to the rule of law -- at least not yet. The ban on domain names occurs at the same time the government is moving to implement a new regulation that paves the way for such infringements in the future.

As far as I can tell, the BTK is not citing recent regulation as the legal basis for its authority to demand internet service providers block access to these domain names, instead basing its authority on the 2006 Internet Law (No. 5651), which I have written about extensively. This law is draconian, but what is coming seems even worse.

The new regulations gives the government the authority to block and filter websites according to its own designs (independent of any court order), and importantly, not make its blocking and filtering practices public. Though the old regulation does give the TIB the authority to block access to websites, the authority blocking the website, whether the TIB or a specific court, is public information and the person trying to access the website encounters a message that the website is blocked. The TIB also acts on a set of criteria determined by the 2006 Internet law. For more on the old law, click here. If anyone can give me more information on the legal scheme here, I would much appreciate it.

Though Turkey has made considerable democratic progress in the past 10-15 years and in many ways improved its human record, this backsliding on media freedom raises serious questions about its democratic trajectory. Increasingly, the government seems to take the position that they can do anything they want as long as they are elected by a majority. Liberal democracy this is not. Electoral authoritarianism? Maybe.

UPDATE I (5/5) -- Bianet, a new portal from which I post regularly, is challenging the new regulations at the Council of State. Other websites are also following suit, and it might not be too much longer before the European Court of Human Rights is inundated with another round of freedom of expression cases in Turkey. Here is hoping the government repeals this insanity now and begins to work with experts on Internet law to pass a new Internet law that does not violate rights to freedom of expression and access to information, at least not on such a massive scale. For a bit of legal analysis from experts quoted in Hurriyet Daily News, click here.

A Second Bosporus . . . ?

2011-04-28T01:34:00.026-04:00

IMAGE from Hurriyet Daily News

The Turkish government's plans to build a second canal right through the heart of Istanbul have raised more than a few eyebrows. The government first talked about this last fall, but yesterday announced a two-year study plan, after which construction would begin. Jenny White gives a summary of the project and asks a couple of really good questions at Kamil Pasha:

There will be a two-year “study period”. Then they’ll start digging. Goal to finish is 2023. Expected cost, a mere $10 billion. Istanbul will become an island and two half-islands. The canal site will be on state-owned land, but there will also be expropriations.

The idea is to allow the biggest tankers to go through the city in the new canal instead of along the Bosphorus, thereby avoiding potential environmental catastrophe in case of a ship crash, oil spill, floods, etc on the Bosphorus. Because the Bosphorus is an international waterway there are all kinds of hazardous materials traveling unhindered through the middle of the city. But the ships in the new canal would still be going through the middle of the city, admittedly without the treacherous currents that afflict Bosphorus traffic. The canal, unlike the Bosphorus, would be fully under Turkish control. Can Turkey legally ban ships from using the Bosphorus? What if the ships prefer that route instead of using the canal (especially if the canal is more expensive)?

Canal length: 45-50km. Depth: 25 meters. Width: 145-150 meters. The soil will be used to build a new harbor and a new airport. (click here)

Maybe it’s me, that I just can’t think big enough. But I also don’t trust the government’s reasons, rationale, and ability to do this properly with sufficient study and technical expertise. (eg what effect would this have on Istanbul’s earthquake susceptibility?)

Hmm, yeah? . . .

UPDATE I (4/30) -- Aengus Collins asks some more good questions of his blog Istanbul Notes.

Mr Erdoğan clearly wants to present himself as a visionary leader who is ready and willing to stamp the power of his imagination on the most significant city in his country. But there are many more imaginative things that he might have chosen to do, many other ways in which he might have sought to improve the lives of the city’s millions of inhabitants had he wanted to.

How about a serious attempt to remedy Istanbul’s criminal unpreparedness for the major earthquake that everyone knows is coming and that everyone knows will kill thousands upon thousands? How about an overhaul of the planning system to incorporate some awareness of the fact that the built environment isn’t an end in itself, but a means of furthering a wide range of human needs? How about overcoming the insanity that passes itself off as driving on Istanbul’s roads? How about a public library worthy of one of the world’s great cities? How about a commitment to retain what little green space is left here and perhaps recover some that has been lost? How about a concerted attempt to deal with the various countrywide factors that are driving crippling and unsustainable increases in the city’s population?

I think Jenny and Aengus have this covered, and so I will leave it at that.

Defense Lawyers Threaten to Boycott KCK Trial

2011-04-26T19:27:00.002-04:00

DHA Photo from Radikal

Defense lawyers announced Monday that they will boycott the KCK trial currently ongoing in Diyarbakir unless the court allows defendants to use Kurdish when defending themselves in the courtroom. For background, click here. From Hurriyet Daily News:

Defense lawyers withdrew themselves at a Tuesday hearing from the Kurdish Communities Union, or KCK, trial and gathered to discuss whether the action should be permanent or not.

The trial has been grid-locked many times over the suspects’ demand to give their defense in Kurdish despite the court’s consistent refusal.

The 21st hearing of the case started with suspect Songül Erol Abdil, the former mayor of Tunceli province, offering his defense in Zaza, which the court refused to hear, stating the statement was in “a language believed to be Kurdish.”

Abdil corrected the court, saying that the language was Zaza and offered the defense in writing. The court refused it once more, saying, “The suspect knows Turkish.” Defense lawyers said the action was illegal and that written statements must be translated and put into the case file.

After the same thing occurred with another suspect, the defense demanded that the statements be included in the case file in both Kurdish and Turkish, that the court make a decision of lack of jurisdiction and transfer the trial to the Constitutional Court and that all the arrested suspects be present at hearings.

The court tried to end the hearing after a recess without addressing the demands, leading about 100 defense lawyers to withdraw from the case, stating they cannot do their jobs.

UPDATE I (4/27) --The Diyarbakir hearing the KCK case has ruled that the Diyarbakir Bar Association will be asked to provide new representation to clients should the lawyers who have announced to boycott the trial not attend the next hearing. The Bar Association has said it will not do this. Hurriyet Daily News quotes Emin Aktar, a lawyer in the KCK case and current chairman of the Bar Association:

“The trial is already in a gridlock; six months have passed and not one defense has gone on record.”

"It is meaningless for us to be there,” he added.
“The court will not even add defense in Kurdish to the [case] file, let alone allow it to be read,” he said, adding that according to the law, the defenses should be translated into Turkish and added to the case files.

“There are lots of wire-tapped conversations in Kurdish used as evidence against the suspects,” Aktar said. “You [the court] translated then and [added them to the file]. Then take those out too.”

The defense lawyers have also objected to the suspects being brought to trial in groups of six, rather than altogether, even though the courtroom is large enough to handle all of them and none of the suspects caused any disturbance or insulted the court when they were brought before it, Aktar said.

“It is against the universal concept of law. The indictment accuses them of being in an organization together, of being connected to each other somehow, so they should be tried together, but you will bring some of them to the hearings and not others,” he said. “You will start to read the evidence and those not present will not be able to answer the [claims] about them. And this would be called a trial.”

Moreover, Aktar said, the defense lawyers are unaware of which suspects will be brought to court beforehand and thus cannot prepare a defense. He called for the Justice Ministry to intervene to solve the problem or for the court to “give up on its stubbornness.”

It is highly unlikely that the Justice Ministry will intervene in the trial as doing so would constitute a major concession from the government and be perceived as a political victory for the BDP.

Kurdish Nationalism is Not Going Away

2011-04-25T16:36:00.001-04:00

The backs of young men shouting slogans in support of Ocalan and the PKK at a festival organized by the Diyarbakir municipality. PHOTO by Ragan Updegraff

In the wake of the spate of violence sparked last week after the Elections Board (YSK) decided to bar 12 BDP candidates from running in June's parliamentary elections (the board decided on Thursday to reverse the decision), this Monday, as last, threatens more unrest as police acted to detain prominent BDP politicians.

Police detained 35 people Monday in the southeastern province of Hakkari, including the deputy mayor and other local officials, in connection with ongoing investigations into the Kurdish Communities Union, or KCK.

The operations, reportedly carried out by police with special authority at city-center locations and at the “Democratic Solution Tent” set up by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, drew strong criticism from the party.

“This policy of the government is aimed at emptying out our party and [demoralizing] all those who love peace and democracy. This is psychological warfare,” said Mehmet Salih Yıldız, an independent candidate for Parliament supported by the BDP.

The 35 people who were detained in the operations include Hakkari Deputy Mayor Nurullah Çiftçi, Vice Mayor Hatice Demir, provincial council head Ferzınde Yılmaz, BDP provincial chairman Orhan Koparan, BDP central district chairman Kenan Kaya, the area “muhtar” (headman) and members of the provincial council and the municipality.

The suspects will be transferred to court after being questioned by the Hakkari police, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The recent operations in Hakkari are sinfificant in that they include top officials in the BDP-governed municipality, which is one of the most fervent BDP strongholds in the country. Since local elections in March 2009 in which the BDP captured large majorities in several southeastern provinces, the party has worked hard to govern these municipalities as relatively sovereign from Ankara. The party has focused on providing municipal services and using the municipality in novel ways to further its political agenda, including organizing political fora, such as the "democratic solution" tent in Hakkari, that challenge the AKP's approach to dealing with the problem.

And what is that approach? For many Kurds, more important than the "Kurdish opening" is what they see as the ruling party's attempts to suppress Kurdish political organization that challenges the AKP agenda. Though the "Kurdish opening," which was soon changed to a "democratic opening" and then to a project to promote "national unity and brotherhood," promised to offer solutions to long-existing problems, particularly in the area of cultural and minority rights, the opening gained little momentum and was largely dead by October. (For a history of the opening up to May of last year, click here.) After a very violent summer, there is little hope for the opening in the region and the AKP is facing record lows in terms of its popularity in provinces like Hakkari and Sirnak.

Monday's detentions will only further stoke nationalist sentiments and resentment against the AKP among Kurds already inclined to support the BDP. Combined with the complete and utter mess that defines the trials of alleged "KCK members" currently ongoing in Diyarbakir and Van, relations between Turks and Kurds will get worse before they get better. The BDP stands to gain votes as a result of the increased tensions, and in my analysis, the AKP is misguided if it thinks it can seriously "remove" (a nasty word) the Kurdish political actors it deems more unsavory.

Some leading AKP figures have attempted in the past year to distinguish between "bad Kurds" and "good Kurds," the main criterion for the separation between the two being the latter's support of the government. If the AKP thinks this a waiting game, that these players, attitudes, and demands will just go away with enough repression, it is sorely mistaken. As former Turkish security officials and long-time observers of the Kurdish question can testify, such an approach has been taken before, it has failed before, and it will fail again.

Hence, we have former Turkish officials like retired MIT deputy director Cevat Ones calling for a serious reconsideration of the problem, a re-working of Turkish nationalism and the constitutional foundations of the Turkish state that accommodates the self-determination demands of nationalist-minded Kurds. Ones's words seem to be falling on deaf ears, but the problem is not going away. (See Nese Duzel's column in Taraf (in Turkish) for more on Ones.)

Remembering Mec Yeġeṙn

2011-04-25T00:59:00.068-04:00

PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

April 24 marks the day of remembrance for the purported 1.5 million Armenians who perished in the year 1915 during what Armenians refer to as Mec Yeġeṙn. While Armenians have pushed for years to pass laws in other states acknowledging Mec Yeġeṙn as "genocide" such efforts have done little to yield recognition of the tragedy inside Turkey. However, despite these efforts, an increasing number of Turks are exploring the history of the events of 1915 when what was then the Ottoman Empire systematically eliminated the Armenian population then living in Anatolia after concerns that Armenians were cooperating with the Russians to bring about dissolution of the Empire.

Yesterday, for the second year in a row, Turks gathered in Taksim Square to pay homage to the Armenians who lost their lives almost 100 years ago and call for a "coming to terms history." The first demonstration of this kind was held last year when the world was paying more attention to whether United States President Barack Obama would refer to Mec Yeġeṙn as "genocide" in his annual speech commemorating the tragedy. He did not, but what did not get noticed, and in what my mind is more important, is that Taksim was home to Turks raising awareness of the issue. Whether they called Mec Yeġeṙn "genocide" is less important than that there is now a lively discussion in Turkey that was not at all present 5-10 years ago. Last year hundreds of Turkish intellectuals and common citizens signed an online apology for what they referred to as "the Great Catastrophe." From Hurriyet Daily News:

Apart from two events in Istanbul, sit-ins were held simultaneously in Ankara, İzmir, Diyarbakır, Bursa and Bodrum. Prayers for the tragedies were conducted in all Armenian churches in Istanbul after the Easters prayer. The church’s limited their commemorations to prayers and no statement were made.

The first of the events in Istanbul was held in Sultanahmet by the Human Rights Association, or İHD, in front of the Turk Islam Artifacts Museum at 2 p.m. The crowd gathered with red cloves and read a press statement. The cloves had the names of Armenian intellectuals who were taken from their homes in Istanbul on April 24, 1915, and died in exile. The black banners held by the crowd read, “The Museum – prison of 1915” and “The intellectuals were held before sent to the journey of death.” The names of 250 intellectuals were read and the crowd left the cloves and banners near a tree in front of the museum before disassembling.

Ayşe Günarsu, member of the İHD Istanbul branch and the Commission Against Racism and Discrimination, spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review. She said they were there to refresh a memory that society was made to forget. “This location where the museum stands used to be İbrahimpaşa Palace in those years; also called the Central Prison. The intellectuals were gathered here and then sent to exile from Haydarpaşa train station. Many of the intellectuals never returned.” Günaysu said the Turkish intellectuals are too late “to commemorate the genocide.” İHD held a protest at Haydarpaşa last year.

“This is a matter of conscience,” said İhsan Kaçar, another member of the commission. “Intellectuals are not sufficient for Turkey to face itself. The NGOs need to have a clear stance on this matter. Facing the Armenian taboo will mean Turkey has to face its own history.”

For coverage of the demonstration last year and the strong efforts to pass a genocide resolution in the U.S. House last year, click here. For more on Turkish efforts to address the Armenian question, which is still difficult in Turkey given the country's many laws limiting freedom of expression, click here.

Women, the Headscarf, and Discrimination in the Work Place

2011-04-24T21:49:00.071-04:00

This month the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), one of the country's leading think-tanks, released a study examining employment discrimination against women who wear the headscarf. While the headscarf has long been a controversial issue in the public arena (for more, click here and here), much less attention has been paid to the issue in the private realm. What obstacles are faced by women who wear the headscarf and do manage to graduate from university (or, for those who may choose to don it after graduation)? For the report, authored by TESEV's Dilek Cindoglu, click here.

The rate of women's employment in Turkey is lower than any other OECD country--21.6%, and down from 34.3% in 1988. The average in the European Union is 57%. Female employment has been dropping for a variety of reasons, among them the decline in agricultural employment. However, apart from structural changes to the economy, a number of impediments prevent women from entering the workforce, including the low level of female education, the lack of adequate childcare facilities, sexual harassment, and conservative attitudes when it comes to women working and leaving the house/traveling about. Another is no doubt the systematic labor discrimination that women who choose to wear the headscarf face both in terms of getting a job and no doubt once they are in a job as well.

The headscarf has long been seen as an obstacle to women's employment, though camps on both sides of the issue face the issue differently. Pro-headscarf advocates argue that limitations on covered women entering university poses a serious hindrance to their position in higher-level unemployment, and that once out of university, women continue to face discrimination, and often, outright ridicule. Proponents of restrictions on headscarves, including some women's rights groups, argue the headscarf is a function of conservative, patriarchal attitudes, and that frequently it is the attitudes of covered women's families, most importantly, their husbands, that keep them out of the workplace. This study very much disputes this notion in documenting cases where women choose to work, and in many cases, where their employment is necessary to the livelihood of their family. Cindoglu, along with Ebru Ilhan, published a similar study on the subject last summer.

Last fall, Richard Peres wrote an excellent article in Today's Zaman discussing the issue, as well as the prospects for Turkey to adopt a remedy along the lines of the affirmative action policies the United States put in place for African Americans in the 1960s. From Peres's article (which I stumbled upon thanks to Jenny White at Kamil Pasha, who adds some thoughts of her own here):

In addition to professionals, women who wear headscarves face perhaps the largest and most difficult barrier in white collar jobs. Preference is given to uncovered women for the better positions in private industry, such as office and information workers, as well as sales positions. The reasons vary from simple prejudice against covered women to organizations not wanting to be viewed as fundamentalist. According to a report by AKDER in November 2008, “Even in sectors for production of commercial goods and services, the employment level of the women who wear the headscarf is low.”

I have a friend who wears a headscarf who had to go to Cyprus for her college degree. She is bilingual -- she helped me interview Turks for a book I am writing -- but has been unable to find a white collar job for over a year. Often when she shows up for an interview, she finds that the position has been mysteriously filled or is no longer available. She has little recourse but to keep trying or to migrate to another country.

. . . .

s Turkey ready to implement a remedy for discrimination against covered women like the American experience? I doubt it. The reason: The American civil rights movement was the result of a long political struggle that mobilized millions of people throughout the country to bring about change. African-Americans and women did not sit back and wait for one political party or another to effect change, or for an agency like the Higher Education Board (YÖK) to send a letter. They got organized, influenced elections directly, exposed discrimination, fought cases in court, ran for elections, and put real political pressure on state legislatures and the US Congress. Waiting for the government to act was not enough to bring about landmark legislation with real enforcement power and supportive agencies to handle and investigate complaints, and go to court on the behalf of complainants if necessary.

That said, there is a decent amount of activism on the issue, like this TESEV report, as well as from organizations like the Women’s Rights Association Against Discrimination (AK-DER). Nonetheless, I have met more than covered woman who has told me she does not participate in such activism because the cause seems hopeless, etc. Yet, last fall's relaxing of headscarf requirements at university and the amount of progress being made on the issue is likely to spark more activism and pressure.

If you should be in Washington, Cinodoglu will present the study at SETA-DC tomorrow at 12 p.m. Merve Kavakci will serve as discussant. Click here for event details.

Mass Protects Continue in Response to YSK Decision

2011-04-21T19:04:00.000-04:00

President Gul called today for Turkey's Supreme Election Board (YSK) to solve problems surrounding the candidacy of 12 BDP members the BDP put forward earlier this month. The YSK barred these candidates from running on Monday, sparking protests across the country that are still ongoing and have resulted in at least one death. The YSK, under tremendous pressure, is set to meet tomorrow to review its decision.

On Monday, the YSK set a deadline of Wednesday for the candidates to submit proper documentation that they had resolved outstanding issues related to prior convictions. The YSK lifted the barring of some BDP candidates, including Sebahat Tuncel, Gültan Kışanak, Leyla Zana, Ertuğrul Kürkçü and Hatip Dicle, after candidates submitted proper documentation.

The YSK is backing down on its decision and most surely looking for an exit strategy despite earlier declarations it would stand by its decision. That said, some candidates have yet to be reinstated and so the issue is still up in the air as to whether the BDP will actually go through with its threat to boycott the June elections.

The YSK decision has also raised discussed of the 10% threshold currently in place for Turkish parties to represent parliament. If the BDP candidates had been running a full-fledged party members rather than independent candidates, they would not have been subject to the YSK's scrutiny.

More as it happens . . .

UPDATE I (4/22) -- The YSK has reversed its decision (from Radikal, in Turkish).

UPDATE II (4/24) -- Aengus Collins reflects on the YSK debacle and "the rules of the game." An excerpt:

As soon as the YSK barred the Kurdish candidates, the game was lost. There were better and worse ways of trying to recover the situation, but none that would prevent a bright light being shone on serious problems. Had the YSK dug its heels in and insisted that the rules gave it no choice but to exclude the candidates from June’s election, Turkey’s outrageous infringements of the political rights of its Kurdish voters and politicians would have been advertised more glaringly than is usually the case.

Far preferable, then, for the YSK to have reversed its decision relatively swiftly? Well, yes, up to a point. The decision’s reversal is to be welcomed. But look at what it says about the robustness of the system that underpins Turkey’s electoral mechanics. On Monday, the rules were interpreted to mean that these individuals had forfeited the right to stand for election. This was the conclusion of a state body the decisions of which are not subject to appeal. And yet on Thursday the same body performed a neat little pirouette to arrive at more or less the opposite of its position on Monday.

What does this tell us about the integrity of the rules? It tells us that what matters in Turkey is not the formal construction of the rules, but the spirit in which they’re interpreted and implemented at any given time. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to Turkey, and it is not a phenomenon that necessarily yields negative results. But at a time when Turkey is considering a wholesale revision of its constitution and when the gap between lofty democratic rhetoric and grubby coalface politics is wider than ever, it warrants some attention.

AKP Takes a Nationalist Turn

2011-04-20T00:03:00.005-04:00

In the wake of massive unrest sparked by the Election Board's decision to bar 12 BDP candidates from running for parliament (see below), Prime Minister Erdogan has declared that "there is no Kurdish problem." The declaration came during an introductory meeting of the AKP's parliamentary candidates. Remarks included:

"The Kurdish problem in this country no longer exists. There are the problems of my Kurdish brothers and sisters who are abused. They tell that the AKP withdrew the Kurdish origin candidates in the Southeast region. As I said before, they either speak with ignorance or they do not know that we nominated our professional candidates there.

. . . .

We see no difference in our peoples, regardless of their origins and identities. We do not discriminate between Kurds and Lazs. What matters is a single identity and to be a citizen of the Republic of Turkey. However, some people are troubled with this flag. Why does this flag disturb? The colour of this flag was taken from the martyrs of all of us. A single nation, single flag and a single land is coming. A single land with 780 thousand square meters. The land which will belong to all of us, not to any ethnic constituent or a group. This state is all ours and will not be separated. My Kurdish brothers and sisters can easily speak their language there. Having enabled speaking Kurdish in prisons and Kurdish courses, we will continue our way with this step”.

The remarks reflect a nationalist turnabout for the party, which in July 2009 declared a "Kurdih opening." The Kurdish opening followed a famous speech in Diyarbakir in 2005 in which the prime minister said "the Kurdish problem is my problem."

Perhaps Erdogan thinks the problem is "solved" now, but the statement certainly flies in the face of a Kurdish opening that produced little in terms of concrete results other than a change to the political parties law that allowed campaigning in Kurdish and another to the criminal code that halted treating minors as adults in criminal trials, a practice that had landed thousands of Kurdish children in regular courts.

More likely, it seems the party is going after nationalist voters, namely those inclined to vote for the ultra-nationalist MHP. The party is hovering at the 10% threshold parties must meet to enter parliament. If the party fails to meet the threshold, its votes will get dispersed between the AKP and the CHP according to Turkey's D'Hondt system of proportional representation. If this happens, the AKP would be much closer to a 2/3 majority in parliament, allowing it to unilaterally push through a new constitution.

All the same, Erdogan's most recent bit of rhetoric stands in contrast to statements he has made in preparation of and since the government's "Kurdish opening." In May 2009 in Duzce, Erdogan argued that Turkey's historical treatment of minorities is "a result of a fascist mentality."

It is not the first time the prime minister has backed down from statements on the Kurdish issue. In a historic speech in Diyarbakir in 2005, the prime minister spoke of a multi-ethnic Turkey, eschewing references to nationalism. Yet, in another speech delivered in Diyarbakir in 2008, Erdogan referred to "one nation, one flag, one motherland, and one state," a reference that deeply bothered many Kurds and in many ways affirmed what was already the party's growing distance from a key sector of pro-Kurdish cultural rights voters in the region.

For past posts on the break, click here (reflecting on the Kurdish question at the end of 2008) and here (reflections on my trip to Diyarbakir when this speech was given) and here (on what Ece Temelkuran penned as AKP's policy of "Islamist banana" charity and a clairvoyant piece by Kerem Oktem).