On Bruises, Beauties, and Makeup

[Gavur]

Hotel Tells Rape Victim: If You Don't Call Police We'll Give A Free Holiday

25 October 2005
HOTEL TELLS RAPE VICTIM: IF YOU DON'T CALL POLICE WE'LL GIVE A FREE HOLIDAY
Mum relives her ordeal in Turkey
By Vanessa Allen
A BRITISH teenager raped in Turkey was offered a free holiday if she did not tell police, her mother said yesterday.

The 17-year-old girl was brutally attacked inside the apartment building where she was staying with her mother and younger sister.

But when the distraught teenager identified a security guard at the complex as her alleged attacker, she said staff told her: "You can have a free holiday if you don't tell the police."

Her shocked mother told yesterday of her daughter's ordeal, saying: "The way we were treated was disgusting."

She said: "My daughter was absolutely terrified and she's still having nightmares. She's only 17.

"The rape itself was a dreadful experience but then the way she was treated afterwards made it even worse."

The girl, her mother, her 14-year-old sister and her six-month-old nephew - an older sister's child - went to the popular resort of Marmaris in Turkey for the two-week break last month. But five days into the holiday the girl was allegedly dragged from the lift at the apartment complex, the Club Alize, and raped.


Her mum said: "She and her sister were down on the patio, talking to some friends and her sister came back up to the room first.


"But when my oldest daughter came up she was dragged out of the lift and raped.


"When we told reception and she described the man, who had bad teeth, they said immediately it must be the guard.


"They brought him up and she identified him and we were taken into the manager's office to see the "top boss". A man spoke to us and said if we didn't go to the police we could have free meals and a free holiday next year.


"He said if the police thought she was lying they could put her in prison and also we wouldn't be allowed to leave Turkey."


The "boss" refused to tell the family his name, or the name of the guard but luckily an off-duty British policeman overheard what had happened and insisted the family went to police The girl - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - was interrogated for hours and made to go to two hospitals for tests which showed she had been raped.


"She was shown no compassion or sensitivity at all, it was like a circus," her mother added. "They made her go over everything again and again. When we got to the hospital she was so upset she said she didn't want to go any further with it and to forget it."


The next day the family returned to the police and were told to go to court because a man had been arrested.


There the family claims they were made to relive the whole ordeal before a court official.


The girl's mum said: "I'm a single mother and I had saved for ages to afford to take my kids away.I wish we'd never gone near the place."


Staff at the Club Alize apartments referred calls to First Choice where a spokeswoman said: "Any allegation of this nature is very serious. We are co-operating with authorities."


A man has been arrested and charged in connection with the alleged rape. Turkish police refused to release his name.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16289131&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=hotel-tells-rape-victim--if-you-don-t-call-police-we-ll-give-a-free-holiday--name_page.html

[Gavur]

Turk court fines 20 for using letters W and Q

REUTERS

8:28 a.m. October 25, 2005

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey – A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.
The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira ($75.53) for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet.

Under pressure from the European Union, Turkey has improved language and human rights for its Kurdish minority, but the EU says implementation has been patchy and loopholes remain.

The 1928 Law on the Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters changed the Turkish alphabet from the Arabic script to a modified Latin script and required all signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents to only use Turkish letters.

More than 30,000 people have been killed, most of them Kurds, since the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels began an armed campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.


Tsk Tsk when will they learn?

[Gavur]

Another suicide under Turk opression

JAILED KURDISH ACTIVIST BURNS HIMSELF TO DEATH IN TURKISH PRISON

Roj TV, Copenhagen
24 Oct 05

A Kurdish political prisoner called Serdar Asi committed
self-immolation at Izmir's Buca Prison. It was learned that Serdar
Ari, who was incarcerated at the F-type prison in Kiriklar on PKK
[Kurdistan Workers' Party] charges, committed self-immolation. It was
also reported that the family of Ari, whose body was transported to
the morgue, left Diyarbakir towards Izmir in order to claim his body.

[Gavur]

Turkish woman killed after TV appearance and accusing father of rape

Europe News



Nov 11, 2005, 14:41 GMT
printer friendly email this article


Ankara - A 32-year-old woman was killed by her father after appearing on a television talk show accusing him of repeatedly raping her when she was young, Turkish newspapers reported Friday.

Although heavily made-up and wearing dark glasses, Nermin Ardic's identity was discovered and her father Ersin Kaygas shot her dead using an unlicensed pistol on her return to Gokceali village outside Istanbul, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

Since April, three women including including Ardic have been killed after appearing on television talk shows complaining of ill treatment.

The earlier killings provoked outrage in Turkey over the ongoing phenomenon of honour killings in which a young boy is instructed to kill a female member of the family for bringing dishonour on them and also at sensationalist television programmes exploiting the vulnerable.

The state of women's rights in Turkey was also severely criticised by the European Union in a report issued on Wednesday.


© dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

[Gavur]

US will continue pressing Turkey for reopening of Halki Seminary School

Athens News Agency
Nov 10 2005



WASHINGTON, 11/10/2005 (ANA/T. Ellis)

The United States have repeatedly called on the Turkish government to
respect the unhindered operation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and
to allow the re-opening of the Halki Seminary School, US state
department Ambassador-At-Large for International Religious Freedom,
who heads the Office for the protection of religious freedoms, said
Tuesday, during a presentation of the State Department's annual
report on religious freedoms throughout the world.
"It is an issue we have brought up many times, and will continue to
put to the Turkish government," Hanford replied to a question by the
ANA, adding that "I have met with Turkish officials, and we have put
forward these problems, as well as the property problems, which go
hand-in-hand."

Replying to other questions, Hanford said that Washington was already
pressing, and intended to continue to do so, for the reopening of the
Halki Seminary, and opined that "we have some reasons to believe that
it will be resolved", but admitted that he felt "despair that this
matter has not progressed more quickly".

Turning to the occasional attacks against the Ecumenical
Patriarchate, Hanford said this was a "difficult" matter given that
the perpetrators of such attacks were "private individuals". he said
he and his associates "feel it is part of our responsiblity, and part
of that which is dectated by the legislation on which our Office was
set up, to encourage governments to protect citizens who suffer
attacks by private individuals, and this is such a case".

[Gavur]

Why Mr. Erdoðan's mindset cannot fit Europe's

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Burak Bekdil

Five months ago a university academic was put behind bars on charges of “organized crime.” The man spent five months in jail in the absence of an indictment against him. He hanged himself this weekend after telling his friends that he “could no longer stand the ugly slander.” His alleged mob fellow -- the rector of the university in Van -- had a heart attack upon news of the suicide of his “cellmate.” Both men are known to follow a secularist ideology.

Another university academic, this time a notoriously “good Muslim,” sent a letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to tell him he had seen a sheik in his dream and that this sheik told him that Mr. Erdogan's government should watch out for the Higher Education Board (YÖK) and some ministries.

Mr. Erdogan thought it would be best to put the letter that recounts a dream featuring a sheik advising on governmental affairs through bureaucratic channels, sending it to the Ministry of Education, which in turn sent it to YÖK. Mr. Erdogan regrets that someone leaked the process to the press, rather than regretting the “content” of the process.

This could well be the “tale of three academics”: One hangs himself in a prison cell; his cellmate is now in the intensive care ward of a hospital; and the third one advising the prime minister based on his dreams featuring a sheik… Welcome to EU-candidate Turkey!

According to the self-declared “Cradle of Democracy” that is America, the transformation of Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) into a democratic center-right group greatly contributed to Turkey's liberalization. If Dan Fried, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in Washington, was not talking about another Turkey on some other planet or another Mr. Erdogan, then he or the administration he represents must have a quite an exotic notion of democracy.

Ironically, Mr. Fried's praise for Mr. Erdogan's “liberalism” came at a time when (a) the prime minister's local governments were imposing subtle alcohol bans across Turkey; (b) Mr. Erdogan argued that the riots in France had been sparked (among others, in an unconvincingly corrected version of his statement) by a headscarf ban in this country; (c) Mr. Erdogan's party establishment monolithically disputed a legally undisputed verdict by the European Court of Human Rights that a ban on the headscarf at universities did not violate human rights and; (d) a leading AKP lawmaker questioned Turkey's EU bid after the verdict. Democracy?

Only a couple of weeks earlier, Mr. Erdogan had defended the “supremacy of law” when a Turkish court arrested the president of the university, who was publicly known to have waged a war against radical Islam on the campus in Van and was at odds with the government. Typical Mr. Erdogan: supremacy of law, as long as it fits “our ideology.”

Last week, the European court's Grand Chamber unanimously rejected an appeal by Leyla Sahin, a Turkish university student who was denied access to education because she insisted on wearing an Islamic headscarf banned at all Turkish universities and government offices.

According to Mr. Erdogan's party ideologues, the European court's decision is binding only on the applicant. Can Turkey's rulers be unaware that the court's decisions are binding on Turkey (and the rest of Europe) and that they set an undisputed legal precedent for all future cases on the same issue? Can they really be unaware that Turkey every year pays large sums of compensation to applicants of rights abuses based on the court's verdicts, including even the famous Loizidou case? Of course not; it's just hypocrisy. Sadly, a leading AKP lawmaker was more honest when he commented on the verdict, “That's why I am against the EU!”

It was on the same ideological line that Mr. Erdogan “showed the way” to the French, who were busy trying to diffuse tensions and the riots in the land of Chauvin, “I told them (the French) before … the headscarf ban has triggered these riots.” As always, after public criticism, Mr. Erdogan corrected his statement that he had actually meant that “the headscarf ban was not the sole reason for the riots.”

And it is the same ideological line why AKP-controlled local governments across Turkey keep on refusing to issue alcohol licenses to cafes and restaurants, including many districts of Istanbul. Applicants are either denied right away or are intimidated by an immense wall of bureaucracy that none have so far managed to overcome. Several ministries have ordered a ban on alcohol at their recreational facilities.

But the prime minister has a non-ideological explanation, “We want to keep the youth away from this harmful material (alcohol).” One should ask the prime minister why his municipalities and ministries do not ban tobacco, which, according to many medical accounts, is even more harmful than alcohol? He would probably not find a convincing answer. It's the ideology.

The Americans may be content with Mr. Erdogan's democratic principles and his liberalism. But these democratic principles and liberalism cannot fit into the European mindset. Perhaps Mr. Erdogan should rethink the wisdom of his EU aspirations and consider a NAFTA membership for Turkey.

Or the prime minister must understand at once that he must choose between his Islamist-self and his reformist-self. Otherwise, he will have to keep on banging on two walls, instead of just one.

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=28361

[Gavur]

Women 'forced to wed rapists or die'

MERIEL BEATTIE
IN ANKARA


Key points
• UN report says Turkish women forced by families to wed rapists
• Hundreds of Turkish women killed in 'honour killings' each year, says report
• Report comes as Turkish government pressed to reform to join EU

Key quote
"When a girl is raped by a man, since she is no longer a virgin, it is usually believed that the best way to solve the problem is to get them married, especially if the man is not already married" - UN report


Story in full RAPE victims in Turkey can be forced by their own families to marry their rapists - or risk being killed in the name of family honour, according to a United Nations report released today.

The report, by the United Nations Population Fund, is the first in-depth study in Turkey of the different motivations behind "honour-killings", where women and young girls are murdered by their relatives for allegedly bringing shame on the family.

Human rights activists estimate that hundreds of Turkish women are murdered in such killings each year.

The issue is a major concern for the European Union, which is monitoring human rights improvements made by Turkey in its attempt to join the EU by 2015.

Many such killings take place in poorer communities where family life is dominated by patriarchal and tribal traditions.

The UN report reveals that in such communities, women who have been raped are often seen as having dishonoured their families.

"When a girl is raped by a man, since she is no longer a virgin, it is usually believed that the best way to solve the problem is to get them married, especially if the man is not already married," the report says.

It goes on: "If the man is already married and the raped girl is pregnant, this creates a more complicated situation and usually ends in the girl's murder."

The report suggests that the practice of forcing rape victims to marry their attackers had been partly reinforced by an earlier, but now obsolete, Turkish penal code.

This stipulated that if a rapist married his victim, his penalty would be suspended and if he stayed married to her for five years, it would be cancelled completely.

The UN report, which is based on interviews with more than 250 people in Istanbul and other cities with large Kurdish populations, details several such cases.

One involved the rape of a mentally challenged girl. "The brothers of the girl offered her in marriage to the man and said that they would pay all wedding costs, all in an effort to avoid gossip," the report says.

"In the end, they shot the man dead. Later, they threw the girl into a water channel.

"Somehow the girl was not hurt; she was saved and then she was sent to another place through [social] organisations. However, the family is still after her."

The UN report will make depressing reading for the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, which was told last month by the European Commission that it needs to accelerate reforms.

Women's rights was one of the areas singled out by Brussels as needing particular attention.

A report by the European Commission said earlier this month that there had been "little progress regarding women's rights ... the main areas of concern for women in Turkey continue to be domestic violence, 'honour killings', a high illiteracy rate, and low participation in parliament, local representative bodies and the labour market".

The government has recently taken a tougher stand: a new penal code makes honour killings punishable with life sentences. But prosecution is difficult, as honour killings are often passed off as suicides and some are never discovered.

Apart from rape, the report defines other situations where a woman from such a community might be murdered.

A married women who has an affair, runs away with another man, or who leaves or divorces her husband might be at risk of being hunted down and killed.

Similarly, a divorced woman, who is often still regarded as the property of her former husband, might be murdered if she starts seeing another man. Unmarried girls who have a boyfriend are also at risk.

In some "honour" crimes, the families involved may come to another settlement.

The report gives details of the practice of "Berdel", where a young girl from one family is given to another to compensate for a grievance. Sometimes the gift is a car or gun instead of a girl.

What emerges from the report is a picture of a segment of Turkish society in which notions of "honour" are deeply ingrained, even among comparatively educated people.

"I'm definitely against divorce," the report quotes one 34-year-old, secondary school educated man from the south-eastern city of Batman as saying. "If my wife is unfaithful to me, I will either kill her, or if she has a brother, an older brother, I will tell him: 'You kill her.'"

Although the Turkish parliament now has a special committee on "honour killings", so far there have been few concerted state efforts to address the issue.

Much of the interest and funding for existing research has come from abroad.

State intervention is not always easy. The UN report points out that many of the communities where such killings take place are in areas which have a large Kurdish population.

"After long years of fighting between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatist groups in which as many as 30,000 people are thought to have died, the south-east of Turkey remains tense," it observes.

One major concern highlighted by the report was the lack of shelters for women on the run from their families.
©2005 Scotsman.com



Tue 22 Nov 2005


Turkish women who have been raped are seen in some areas as having brought shame on their families.
Picture: Mustafa Ozer/ AFP/ Getty Images

[Gavur]

In a “more relaxed’ Turkey, descendants of converted Armenians seek roots

(AFP)

3 December 2005

Khaleej Times Online

ISTANBUL - The descendants of Armenians who converted to Islam to escape the World War I massacres of their kinsmen by the Ottomans are now emerging from the shadows and seeking their roots, thanks to falling social taboos and a more relaxed attitude in Turkish society.


The catalyst was “My Grandmother”, a 2004 memoir in which Istanbul lawyer Fethiye Cetin told the tragic tale of her Armenian grandmother Heranush, born in a village in the eastern Turkish province of Elazig.

The biography is based on Heranush’s memories, kept secret until the very end of her life, of how the men of her village were massacred and the women deported from 1915 onwards, and how she was adopted by a Turkish Muslim family who converted her to Islam.

The book sold 12,000 copies -- a more than honorable performance for a non-fiction book in Turkey -- and is about to go into a seventh printing.

“What really counts,” Cetin told AFP, “is that many people who were in the same situation called me up to say, “My grandmother too...’”

She said that since the publication of her book, she received hundreds of letters telling similar tales, “always against a backdrop of suffering.”

“I hope my book opened the gates,” she said. “Before, there was fear, the subject was taboo. The Armenians were the baddies; it was an insult to be called an Armenian...

“But now,” she said, “an entire process of self-questioning has begun.”

After “My Grandmother” was released, many people, including the popular newspaper columnist Bekir Coskun, publicly revealed at least partial Armenian origins; many began to probe their sometimes-blurry family pasts.

One of them was film director Berke Bas, who went back to seek traces of her great-grandmother in the eastern Black Sea port of Ordu.

“A lot of people talked to me,” she said, “people who very clearly remembered their old neighbors.

“The people of Ordu remember those times (of coexistence) with sorrow, as if they were missing something,” she said.

The young woman, who found out about her Armenian origins only after reaching adulthood, said Turks are now “more relaxed” about facing their past.

“There are now several versions of history, instead of the just one official version we knew so far,” she told AFP.

“Tragic events”

Open debate on the killings that occurred between 1915 and 1917 has become almost commonplace here in recent months, thanks in great part to Turkey’s bid to join the European Union with which it opened accession talks on October 4.

Still, the government maintains its decades old official position on the issue and refuses to describe the killings as ”genocide”.

The official Turkish version says 300,000 Armenians and “at least as many Turks” died in the “tragic events” that accompanied the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire during World War I; the Armenians say at least 1.5 million of their kinsmen were victims of ”genocide.”

In the name of freedom of expression, the government nonetheless recently encouraged -- after one of its members first strongly opposed -- the first academic conference on the Armenian question to be held by opponents of the official history.

During the September conference at an Istanbul university, participants stressed the need to investigate the cases of Armenians -- mostly children and young women -- who converted to Islam to escape the killings.

Some participants in the forum put their number at 100,000 to 200,000

“If you ask me, half of Turkey is discovering that it has Armenian origins,” joked Luiz Bakar, an attorney with the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul, citing the cases of people who came forward to tell her of their origins.

She said about 20 people a year come to the Patriarchate to be baptised, most of them “people who lived as Muslims” and want to reconvert to their original religion before dying.

[Gavur]

Villager proposes runaway wife swap

From: Reuters From correspondents in Istanbul
December 09, 2005

A TURKISH villager who ran away with his friend's wife has offered his own wife in exchange, newspapers said today.

Farm labourer Cengiz Esme said Gulhan, his wife of 18 years, disappeared a month ago after leaving their village to go shopping in the southern Turkish town of Tarsus.
The 36-year-old said his village friend Mehmet Yaksi had telephoned him the next day and said: "I've run off with your wife .... You take my wife", the Radikal newspaper reported.

Mr Esme pleaded for Gulhan to return and said he was ready to forgive her and make a fresh start elsewhere.


The reports said Mr Yaksi's wife, a mother of three, declined to comment on the situation.

[Gavur]

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Burak Bekdil

Five months ago a university academic was put behind bars on charges of “organized crime.” The man spent five months in jail in the absence of an indictment against him. He hanged himself this weekend after telling his friends that he “could no longer stand the ugly slander.” His alleged mob fellow -- the rector of the university in Van -- had a heart attack upon news of the suicide of his “cellmate.” Both men are known to follow a secularist ideology.

Another university academic, this time a notoriously “good Muslim,” sent a letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to tell him he had seen a sheik in his dream and that this sheik told him that Mr. Erdogan's government should watch out for the Higher Education Board (YÖK) and some ministries.

Mr. Erdogan thought it would be best to put the letter that recounts a dream featuring a sheik advising on governmental affairs through bureaucratic channels, sending it to the Ministry of Education, which in turn sent it to YÖK. Mr. Erdogan regrets that someone leaked the process to the press, rather than regretting the “content” of the process.

This could well be the “tale of three academics”: One hangs himself in a prison cell; his cellmate is now in the intensive care ward of a hospital; and the third one advising the prime minister based on his dreams featuring a sheik… Welcome to EU-candidate Turkey!

According to the self-declared “Cradle of Democracy” that is America, the transformation of Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) into a democratic center-right group greatly contributed to Turkey's liberalization. If Dan Fried, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in Washington, was not talking about another Turkey on some other planet or another Mr. Erdogan, then he or the administration he represents must have a quite an exotic notion of democracy.

Ironically, Mr. Fried's praise for Mr. Erdogan's “liberalism” came at a time when (a) the prime minister's local governments were imposing subtle alcohol bans across Turkey; (b) Mr. Erdogan argued that the riots in France had been sparked (among others, in an unconvincingly corrected version of his statement) by a headscarf ban in this country; (c) Mr. Erdogan's party establishment monolithically disputed a legally undisputed verdict by the European Court of Human Rights that a ban on the headscarf at universities did not violate human rights and; (d) a leading AKP lawmaker questioned Turkey's EU bid after the verdict. Democracy?

Only a couple of weeks earlier, Mr. Erdogan had defended the “supremacy of law” when a Turkish court arrested the president of the university, who was publicly known to have waged a war against radical Islam on the campus in Van and was at odds with the government. Typical Mr. Erdogan: supremacy of law, as long as it fits “our ideology.”

Last week, the European court's Grand Chamber unanimously rejected an appeal by Leyla Sahin, a Turkish university student who was denied access to education because she insisted on wearing an Islamic headscarf banned at all Turkish universities and government offices.

According to Mr. Erdogan's party ideologues, the European court's decision is binding only on the applicant. Can Turkey's rulers be unaware that the court's decisions are binding on Turkey (and the rest of Europe) and that they set an undisputed legal precedent for all future cases on the same issue? Can they really be unaware that Turkey every year pays large sums of compensation to applicants of rights abuses based on the court's verdicts, including even the famous Loizidou case? Of course not; it's just hypocrisy. Sadly, a leading AKP lawmaker was more honest when he commented on the verdict, “That's why I am against the EU!”

It was on the same ideological line that Mr. Erdogan “showed the way” to the French, who were busy trying to diffuse tensions and the riots in the land of Chauvin, “I told them (the French) before … the headscarf ban has triggered these riots.” As always, after public criticism, Mr. Erdogan corrected his statement that he had actually meant that “the headscarf ban was not the sole reason for the riots.”

And it is the same ideological line why AKP-controlled local governments across Turkey keep on refusing to issue alcohol licenses to cafes and restaurants, including many districts of Istanbul. Applicants are either denied right away or are intimidated by an immense wall of bureaucracy that none have so far managed to overcome. Several ministries have ordered a ban on alcohol at their recreational facilities.

But the prime minister has a non-ideological explanation, “We want to keep the youth away from this harmful material (alcohol).” One should ask the prime minister why his municipalities and ministries do not ban tobacco, which, according to many medical accounts, is even more harmful than alcohol? He would probably not find a convincing answer. It's the ideology.

The Americans may be content with Mr. Erdogan's democratic principles and his liberalism. But these democratic principles and liberalism cannot fit into the European mindset. Perhaps Mr. Erdogan should rethink the wisdom of his EU aspirations and consider a NAFTA membership for Turkey.

Or the prime minister must understand at once that he must choose between his Islamist-self and his reformist-self. Otherwise, he will have to keep on banging on two walls, instead of just one.
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/a...?enewsid=28361

Why Mr. Erdogan's mindset cannot fit Europe's (II)
Wednesday, December 14, 2005




Well, the history of Turkey’s two major Western allies across the Atlantic is full of 'Frankenstein stories,' with Osama bin Laden perhaps being only one of them. There are many others who are not (physically) as violent as the world’s best-known Islamic terrorist, others with whom 'things went wrong' from a cross-Atlantic point of view. The allies do not tend to take lessons from the past.

Burak Bekdil
Well, the history of Turkey's two major Western allies across the Atlantic is full of “Frankenstein stories,” with Osama bin Laden perhaps being only one of them. There are many others who are not (physically) as violent as the world's best-known Islamic terrorist, others with whom “things went wrong” from a cross-Atlantic point of view. The allies do not tend to take lessons from the past.

It makes sense when the allies think that (a) Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the best option available to run this critical terrain; (b) his pragmatism often goes beyond his Islamism; hence (c) his nomination as best model for moderate Islam; and (d) his pragmatism plus his (not-so-genuine) reformism may keep Turkey anchored at a European, if not a reluctant, American bay. All that may be true, in theory. In practice, Mr. Erdogan's “genes” may cause an uncalculated strategic disaster pertaining to “cross-Atlantic interests” in this part of the world.

True, from a cross-Atlantic standpoint, Mr. Erdogan is a “controllable risk” for the moment. True, also, Turkey is not so much of a “fertile land” for recruiting impressive leaders by conventional Western criteria -- hence Mr. Erdogan's unchallenged governance. All that is the static picture. But what if, one day, the “controllable risk” goes “uncontrollable” in dynamic Turkey?

The Turks do not have good memories, and it's not possible that they are a nation that cares too much about decent governance. It's their problem if there is widespread corruption/nepotism so much so as to hurt even Mr. Erdogan's own men like Turhan Comez. According to Transparency International, 39 percent of Turks believe corruption in Turkey has increased (a little, or significantly) over the past there years or, in other words, since Mr. Erdogan's party took power, although it is pretty certain that most of these Turks will vote for Mr. Erdogan's party in the next election. But it may in the near future be a problem for Mr. Erdogan's Western allies if his “genes” go beyond the tolerable limits of his allies' pragmatism.

We are talking about a leader who controls two-thirds of Parliament but who won only one-third of the vote; a leader who warns Europe that opposing Turkish membership will only seal the EU as a Christian club (is he not aware that Muslim Bosnia will probably become a member earlier than Turkey, and possibly Kosovo and Albania, too?); who officially circulates a letter that mentions governmental advice from a sheik seen in some Islamists' dreams; who challenges the EU's jurisprudence on the headscarf ban; who thinks the European Court of Human Rights should have taken advice from Islamic scholars before ruling on the same ban; who thinks the same ban lies behind the French street riots; who sues cartoonists/humorists/writers and demands prison sentences for them; whose undersecretary has been found guilty of academic plagiarizing but is still at his desk; whose deputies think that Fallujah was “genocide” and that a secularist university president now under arrest “is of Armenian descent;” who categorically refuses the existence of “Islamic terror” despite New York, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Bali and Amman; whose tourism minister, humorously, was awarded a “best tourism minister of the year” prize for a year he was NOT the tourism minister; and a leader who thinks adultery is an offense that should carry a prison sentence. The retrospective list of “whos” and “whoses” can be broadly expanded, but there is probably no need for that as evinced by the present-day list.

Mr. Erdogan's mayor in the Turkish capital tends to name mosques, parks, streets, neighborhoods and even dams after himself. Meanwhile, the man who styles himself as the “Goldsmith by Appointment to His Majesty the Prime Minister” suddenly decides to go into the lucrative energy business. Mr. Erdogan's local governments test the waters (and retreat after too much public criticism) with explicit alcohol bans, even in tourist resorts, as if these municipalities have fully resolved the serious problems of infrastructure, illegal construction and other services (or lack thereof) that they exist for. His other local governments poison, probably out of neglect, thousands with infected water supplies.

And Mr. Erdogan thinks “religion is the cement that keeps Turkey (and the Turkish citizens) united.” If he thinks so, he must at once think of better cement, for both historical and present-day indications show religion may not do the trick. How, otherwise, can the Muslim (separatist) Kurds fight Muslim Turks and (non-separatist) Kurds? Or how, otherwise, can non-Muslim Turks (Greeks, Armenians and Jews) not have fought Muslim Turks over the past 82 years of the republic? Or, alternatively, why have Muslim (and Islamist) Turks and Muslim (and secular) Turks been fighting a cold war for the past few decades?

Mr. Erdogan's mindset, or call it his deepest genes, cannot fit Europe's from a long-term perspective. But the same mindset exposes Turkey to the risk of becoming a loose cannon in an already loose cannon-like part of the world.