Turkey and the Middle East: Beyond the Hype

The International Crisis Group has just released a clear-eyed and in-depth report that takes a look at Turkey's recent reengagement with the Middle East. The report covers this much-debated subject from a number of angles (the trade factor, the "Islam" factor, etc.) and is well worth reading. The bottom line? From the report's executive summary:

Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) leaders’ rhetoric, and their new regional activism extending from Persian Gulf states to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), have given rise to perceptions that they have changed Turkey’s fundamental Westward direction to become part of an Islamist bloc, are attempting to revive the Ottoman Empire or have “turned to the East”. These are incorrect. The basic trends in the country’s regional activism seen today were well established before AKP came to power, and NATO membership and the relationship with the U.S. remain pillars of Turkish policy.

While Turkey is bitter over attacks by France, Germany and others on its EU negotiation process between 2005 and 2008, half of its trade is still with the EU, and less than one quarter of its exports go to Middle East states – a proportion typical for the past twenty years. The global nature of Turkey’s realignment is underlined by the fact that Russia and Greece have been among the biggest beneficiaries of its regional trade boom.

Nevertheless, since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has been shifting its foreign policy priority from hard security concerns to soft power and commercial interests and moving away from being a kind of NATO-backed regional gendarme to a more independent player determined to use a plethora of regional integration tools in order to be taken seriously on its own account. Turkey’s U.S. and EU partners should support these efforts towards stabilisation through integration.

Ankara has many balls in the air and sometimes promises more than it can deliver, over-sells what it has achieved and seeks a role far away when critical problems remain unsolved at home. Turkey’s new prominence is partly attributable to confusion in the region after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a situation that is not necessarily permanent. Some Middle Eastern governments are also wary of the impact on their own publics of emotional Turkish rhetoric against Israel or about implicit claims to represent the whole Muslim world.

Turkey should sustain the positive dynamics of its balanced relationships with all actors in the neighbourhood and its efforts to apply innovatively the tactics of early EU-style integration with Middle East neighbours. While doing so, however, it should pay attention to messaging, both internationally, to ensure that gains with Middle Eastern public opinion are not undercut by loss of trust among traditional allies, and domestically, to ensure that all Turkish constituencies are included, informed and committed to new regional projects over the long term. Also, it will gain credibility and sustainability for its ambitions if it can solve disputes close to home first, like Cyprus and Armenia.

Middle Eastern elites worry about any sign of Ankara turning its back on its EU accession process. Much of their recent fascination with Turkey’s achievements derives from the higher standards, greater prosperity, broader democracy, legitimacy of civilian rulers, advances towards real secularism and successful reforms that have resulted from negotiating for membership of the EU. At the same time, Turkey and its leaders enjoy unprecedented popularity and prestige in Middle Eastern public opinion, notably thanks to their readiness to stand up to Israel. Turkey’s new strength, its experience in building a strong modern economy and its ambition to trade and integrate with its neighbours offer a better chance than most to bring more stability and reduce the conflicts that have plagued the Middle East for so long.

You can find a link to the full report here.

Also, via Kamil Pasha, here's a link to some reactions in the Arab media to another Turkish initiative to significantly raise its profile in the Middle East: the newly-launched Arabic-language satellite television network TRT 7 (run by Turkey's state broadcaster). More on the subject in this column in The National and in this Hurriyet Daily News article.

(photo: Turkish PM Erdogan at the launching of Turkey's new state-run Arabic satellite television network)

Neo-Ottomanism and Iran's Nuclear Program

Andrew Finkel has a good column in Sunday's Today's Zaman, looking at the much debated term "Neo Ottomanism," often used to describe Turkey's assertive new foreign policy, and how it relates to some of the thornier issues facing Ankara -- particularly relations with Armenia and Iran's nuclear program. From Finkel's piece:

....The notion of a more expansive, internationalist and problem-solving Turkey is an attractive one, as is that of a Turkey unfettered by nationalist-inspired tendency to isolationism. However, it is forced to confront a certain amount of skepticism. If Turkey is to adopt a neo-Ottoman posture, it has to contend with issues still unresolved from that imperial past. If it is to be a player in the great issues of the day, it cannot remain fettered by the great issues of a century ago. This is why the overture to Armenia that began with Abdullah Gül’s football diplomacy in 2008 had an importance even beyond the immediate issue of reducing tension on a troubled border.

The seeming collapse of that initiative has equally important consequences. The vote of a committee of the US House of Representatives to endorse a resolution recognizing genocide has sent Ankara into a tailspin or at least into a position which it struggles to sustain. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to demonstrate its displeasure, and the government has put pressure on civil institutions, such as the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSIAD), to cancel a US-bound delegation. Now the Turkish ambassador will go scurrying back to Massachusetts Avenue because, rightly enough, the prime minister realizes that not to take his seat at the Global Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in a week’s time would be a display of diplomatic pique that would do Turkey harm.

That summit will be attended by some 40 leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao. Barack Obama is far more aggressive in trying to curtail nuclear proliferation and in reducing America’s own stockpile. During the summit, the subject of Iran’s race to develop a nuclear capability is bound to come up. Turkey, counter-intuitively, maintains that Tehran’s nuclear program is not intended to produce an offensive payload and is in no mood to impose sanctions come what may. Instead, it advertises its ability to play the role of an honest broker as the best means of coaxing Iran into abandoning its efforts to develop a bomb. Yet it does so, having painted itself into something of an absurd corner. Ankara now fumbles to impose some sort of sanction not against Iran but against the United States. And it does so because of the wording of a proposed text commemorating a tragedy that occurred 95 years ago.

You can read the full column here. More on neo-Ottomanism in these previous posts.

Speaking of Iran's nuclear program, it appears that there is a (unspoken) disagreement between Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan about what Teheran is actually up to. Erdogan has consistently defended Iran's nuclear program and has said he does not believe the Iranians are working towards building nuclear weapons (instead suggesting that other countries in the region (guess who) that already have such weapons and are criticizing Iran get rid of them first).

This more or less has been the position of the AKP government on the Iranian issue. A recent column in Forbes by foreign affairs writer Claudia Rosett finds President Gul speaking a bit more frankly on the issue. From her column:

Gul says he has no doubts that Iran wants the nuclear bomb: "This is an Iranian aspiration dating back to the previous regime, the days of the Shah." For Iran's current regime, says Gul, "I do believe it is their final aspiration to have a nuclear weapon in the end," as a matter of " 'national pride.' "

He says Turkey is against an Iranian bomb. He believes it would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East: "A major competition will start in the region."

You can read her full column (critical of Turkey's "zero problems with neighbors" approach) here. Rosett visited Turkey as part of a group that was brought over by a Turkish think tank. Gul's office has not denied the substance of what Rosett quotes the President as saying, only saying he did not give an interview to Forbes. In this column, Milliyet's Semih Idiz follows up on Rosett's piece and the significance of what Gul said.

More on Turkey's struggle regarding the Iranian nuclear issue in these previous posts.

The "Erdogan Factor" Returns

The great wild card in Turkish politics continues to be Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his shoot-from-the-hip take on things. From Darfur to Xinjiang, the "Erdogan Factor" (as previously discussed in this post) has frequently left Turkey watchers scratching their heads and Turkish policy makers picking up the pieces.

Erdogan's straight-talk express recently arrived in London, where the PM gave an interview to the BBC's Turkish-language service. In the interview (here, in Turkish) Erdogan suggested that one of the results of the recent Armenian genocide resolutions passed in Sweden and the United States could be the mass expulsion from Turkey of the thousands of Armenians working illegally in the country. "There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country,” Erdogan told the BBC . “Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens. I don’t have to keep them in my country.”

This is disturbing stuff on so many levels. Turkey is clearly not gearing up to do what Erdogan is suggesting might happen, but dragging the illegal Armenian workers into the dispute as a way of threatening Armenia and its politically active diaspora has ominous and unfortunate connotations. Analyst Mehmet Ali Birand makes the obvious point that merely invoking the possibility of a mass deportations in this case makes for truly bad politics. From his column in today's Hurriyet Daily News:

Now a smear campaign in the lines of “Turkey as a perpetrator of genocide did not want the poor Armenians to earn a few bucks” will start and people talk in purple prose saying, “In the past they killed millions of people and now they will condemn 100,000 Armenians to death by starving....”

....They’d say, “See, again the Turks are casting out the Armenians.”

And this action would be labeled “second deportation.”

You can read his full column here.

Today's Zaman, meanwhile, steps out of the Ergenekon/Balyoz thicket that it seems to have gotten lost in these days and, in today's paper, comes up with a journalistically solid piece, one that takes the PM to task for what he said and gets down to answering the important question of just how many Armenian illegals are actually working in Turkey? From the article:

Öztürk Türkdoğan, the chairman of the Human Rights Association (İHD), said Erdoğan’s remarks could easily be considered a “threat” and as discrimination. “These remarks could lead some people to think that to expel people is a 2010 version of forced migration. This mentality is far from human rights-oriented thinking. People have the right to work, and this is universal. There are many Turkish workers all over the world; does it mean that Turkey will accept their expulsion when there is an international problem? Secondly, these remarks are discriminatory; there are many workers in Turkey of different nationalities,” he said....

....The İHD’s Türkdoğan was also critical of Erdoğan’s remarks regarding ethnically Armenian Turkish citizens: “We can see that the classic republican understanding based on ethnic Turkism is still valid. Minorities cannot be the subject of bargaining in international relations. This is racist discourse and only proves how far we are from a human rights-oriented perspective,” Türkdoğan said.

You can read the full piece here.

Based on its reporting, Today's Zaman estimates that there are probably 12,000 to 13,000 Armenians working illegally in Turkey, rather than 100,000 (94 percent of them are women, most likely doing domestic work). (A report on the issue from the Eurasia Partnership Foundation Armenia can be found here.) It appears that the number has been inflated over the years, perhaps so that it can be used as a political bargaining chip with Armenia and as an instrument for trumpeting Turkish tolerance.

Certainly, some of the damage control that members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have tried to do in the wake of Erdogan's comments has smacked of this.

“As has been known for many years, there are Armenians illegally living and working in Turkey, and as a reflection of our goodwill and efforts toward normalization which started in 2005, we do not really touch them," AKP member of parliament Suat Kiniklioglu told Today's Zaman.

"We tolerate them and take their difficult circumstances into consideration. In particular, we are not questioning their status due to the acceleration of the normalization process in Turkish-Armenian relations. The prime minister needed to draw this fact to people’s attention, especially now, when resolutions have been accepted which damage normalization. I think Turkey’s magnanimity is being ignored.”

Erdogan's comment about the illegal Armenians also ended up obscuring some of the more important and to-the-point comments that he made in the BBC interview. One of these comments was about the need for Armenia to break free from the hold of its diaspora, but his remarks about the illegals were a gift-wrapped present for the diaspora and its political lobby, which is intent on portraying Turkey as unrepentant country that has learned little from the past.

Beyond Ataturk

Two interesting recent article looking at the current political battles raging in Turkey and how they are connected to the country's struggle to define a kind of post-Kemalist identity for itself.

In the Financial Times, David Gardner examines the growing political divide in Turkey and sees it as a result of:

....a clash between two rival establishments jostling for supremacy: the traditional metropolitan elites who see themselves as the guardians of the secular, republican heritage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey; and the new AKP establishment that combines the conservative and religiously observant traditions of Anatolia with a huge constituency in Turkey’s modern but Muslim middle class....

....What [Turkey] desperately needs is a regrouping of secular, liberal and social democratic forces into an electable party (something an EU re-engagement with Turkey would help).

Banging on about secularism is therapeutic but ultimately futile. A viable centre-left needs to abandon the fragmented, pre-modern to Jurassic, and episodically putschist secular parties. Instead of worshipping at Ataturk’s shrine they should follow his example. The founder of Turkey built the republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Even Mr Erdogan looked far beyond the wreckage of Turkish Islamism to create the AKP. Turkey’s centre-left should emulate him and start again.

You can read his full piece here (registration required).

Meanwhile, in a piece in Newsweek, Turkish liberal Islamic columnist Mustafa Akyol writes that the recent developments and changes in Turkey are an indication of a "new, post-Kemalist" era. From his piece:

The passing of Kemalism as an official doctrine is a good thing, for the age of ideological regimes is long past. Some critics fear that the new elite, the religious conservatives, will prove just as intolerant as the generals before them. But that is an exaggerated fear, for what is really eroding Kemalism—the expanding pluralism of Turkish society—will defy any new attempt at authoritarianism. The AKP is hardly a party of Jeffersonian democrats—like other Turkish parties, it is hierarchical, intolerant of criticism, and eager to manipulate the media—but it has proven pragmatic enough to learn from its mistakes. And its leaders remain more liberal than the old guard on many issues, including the rights of Kurds and Christians.

Still, to consolidate Turkey's democratic gains the country needs a new Constitution that guarantees all rights and liberties with checks and balances. This new charter should limit the power of the central state and increase that of local administrations, while creating a nonpartisan judiciary, autonomous universities, and enforcing accountability both for politicians and bureaucrats. Most fundamentally, unlike the previous constitutions forged by the Kemalists, whose motto read, "For the people, despite the people," this new one should be made for the people and by them.

You can read Akyol's full article here.

To a certain extent, I think Akyol's celebration of the arrival of a new, "post-Kemalist" age is a bit premature. For sure, Turkey is moving away from the rigidity imposed upon it by the strict Kemalism that was practiced in the country, particularly following the 1980 coup. But I don't believe the country has yet to fully figure out how to deal and work with the legacy of Ataturk. It's a work in progress, and one that -- depending on the circumstances -- could very well swing back in the direction of a regressive neo-Kemalism, rather than something more progressive.

I wrote about Turkey's search for a "post-Ottoman" and "post-Kemalist" identity -- and the difficulty of doing that in the midst of deep political turmoil -- for The Majalla magazine last November. From that article:

While Ankara has achieved notable success in the foreign policy field, Turkey today faces deep and potentially destabilizing domestic political divisions and a political system that sometimes flirts with dysfunctionality. With a political culture that emphasizes confrontation over cooperation and a political opposition that seems unable to develop a forward-looking vision for the country, Turkey may find its efforts at democratization and at burnishing its foreign policy credentials defeated by its political divisions at home.

At the heart of Turkey’s domestic trouble lies the country’s ongoing effort to define its post-Ottoman identity. The Kemalist vision laid out by Ataturk – that of a secular, western-oriented Turkey that emphasized a uniform sense of Turkish identity – was successful in helping the country rise out of the rubble after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But the rise of the AKP, which represents an emerging Islamic elite that is less connected to the Kemalist approach, has put that vision to the test. In many ways, the AKP is trying to formulate a post-Kemalist identity for Turkey, one that provides greater room for religious identity and ethnic diversity....

....What’s the way forward for Turkey? To really step out from under the shadow of its domestic divisions, Turkey needs to have a frank and wide-ranging discussion about what Turkish identity means today and what kind of country it would like to become. Having that conversation when nobody will listen to each other will be difficult.

You can read the full piece here.

The Roma Initiative

The AKP government organized a historic event yesterday, bringing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan together with some 10,000 Turkish Roma. From a report about the meeting in Today's Zaman:

Addressing thousands of Roma who came to İstanbul to attend a meeting organized as part of a government initiative to find solutions to problems faced by the ethnic minority, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he sees the Roma's problems as his own.

Erdoğan met with nearly 10,000 Roma yesterday in a meeting with a festive atmosphere, a move that came as a part of the government's democratic initiative, which is intended to expand the rights of previously disadvantaged groups and communities such as the Kurds, the Alevis and the Roma. “As the state, we have shouldered the responsibility on this [Roma] issue. From now on, your problems are my problems. Nobody in this country can be treated as ‘half' a person."

"We cannot tolerate this,” the prime minister said during the speech he delivered at the Roma meeting at İstanbul’s Abdi İpekçi Sports Hall yesterday.

You can read the full article here. From some background on Turkey's Roma community, take a look at this Eurasianet article of mine.

The Roma in Turkey have long faced discrimination in terms of access to housing, employment and education, which makes this very public gesture by the Erdogan government a very welcome and important one. But, as Jenny White points out, one can't help but think about what the relocated residents of Sulukule -- a historical Roma neighborhood in Istanbul's

city that was recently demolished to make way for "luxury villas" -- think about the government's initiative.

For more on Sulukule, take a look at this audio slideshow I made for Eurasianet in the summer of 2008, when the demolition of the neighborhood -- done by the AKP-controlled local municipality -- began.

(photo: A child in Istanbul's Sulukule neighborhood during demolition in 2008. By Yigal Schleifer)

Turkey's Internet Laws "Under Surveillance"

Reporters Without Borders has just issued its latest list of "Internet Enemies," looking at countries where online activity is monitored, restricted or punished. This year, RSF has designated Turkey as a country "Under Surveillance" -- joining Russia and Belarus, among others. As mentioned in these previous posts here, here and here, Turkey has some very strong -- and misguided -- internet censorship laws, which allow both the courts and the government to block access to websites (the ongoing ban on YouTube in the country the most famous example).

You can read RSF's report on Turkey here.

General Malaise

Ilter Turan, a respected professor of International Relations at Istanbul's Bilgi University, has written a briefing for the German Marshall Fund looking at the recent arrest of dozens of high-ranking Turkish military officers – among them the former heads of the Navy and Air Force – as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey’s AKP government.

The arrests in the investigation into the Balyoz ("Sledgehammer") plot have been rightly hailed as a milestone in Turkey's continuing struggle to increase civilian oversight over the powerful and historically meddlesome military. The arrests have also been described as an important step in Turkey's democratization. Turan makes the point that the deep political divisions in Turkey and some of the AKP's (or, more specifically, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's) illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies pose a challenge for Ankara to turn the Balyoz developments into an opportunity for consolidating democracy. From Turan's piece:

It is clear that the military has lost its political clout while the probability of a military intervention has all but disappeared. The courts, on the other hand, are no longer as uniformed on what defending the interests of the state means. Such changes do not, however, confirm that Turkish democracy is deepening. Checks on the government’s exercise of power have been weakening. The prime minister has been growing more authoritarian in word and deed, while the government has began to behave increasingly partisan in its daily conduct of business. The country is deeply polarized and faces an impasse. An election 18 months away may or may not offer a way out. Turkish politics is in need of a grand compromise to consolidate democracy. Political will, however, seems currently to be sorely lacking.

Turan's briefing also gives some interesting background about the political atmosphere that surrounded Turkey's previous coups. You can read it here (pdf).