Economist: Turkish Nationalism

[Joseph]

Waving Ataturk's flag
Mar 8th 2007 | ISTANBUL AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition


AFP



There has been a lethal upsurge in ultra-nationalist feeling in Turkey
Get article background

SITTING in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits of Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says his mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from “Western imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us”. In the past two years Mr Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists' Union have launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under article 301 of the penal code, which makes “insulting Turkishness” a criminal offence.

Mr Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But elsewhere new ultra-nationalist groups, some of them led by retired army officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran to make Turks “the masters of the world” and even “to die and kill” in the process. In January one of Mr Kerincsiz's targets, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old, Ogun Samast, because he had “insulted the Turks”. The murder, in broad daylight on one of Istanbul's busiest streets, was a chilling manifestation of a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism aimed at Turkey's non-Muslim minorities and the Kurds—plus their defenders in the liberal elite.

The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed, it is partly in response to these reforms—more freedom for the Kurds, a trimming of the army's powers, concessions on Cyprus—that nationalist passions have been roused. The knowledge that many members of the European Union do not want Turkey to join has inflamed them further (the EU partially suspended membership talks with Turkey in December because of its refusal to open its ports and airspace to Greek-Cypriots).

Another factor is America's refusal to move against separatist PKK guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey's relationship with its ally would suffer “lasting damage”, says the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.

Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by Mr Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist nationalism espoused by the “Young Turks” in the dying days of the Ottoman empire (who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian subjects), and the siege mentality gripping Turkey today. The perception, now as then, is that Western powers are pressing for changes to empower their local collaborators (ie, Kurds and non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up the country. “This social Darwinist mindset that implies it's OK to kill your enemies in order to survive” has been perpetuated through an education system that tells young Turks that “they have no other friend than the Turks,” says Mr Belge. And it has been cynically exploited by politicians and generals alike.

Mr Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000 Turks gathered at Mr Dink's funeral chanting “We are all Armenians”, Mr Erdogan opined that they had gone “too far”. Both he and Mr Baykal have resisted calls to scrap article 301, though there have been hints that it will be amended.

The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up to November's parliamentary election. Mr Erdogan also hopes that burnishing his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing from Turkey's hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.

Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more threats to its national security than at any time in its modern history and added that only its “dynamic forces” [ie, the army] could prevent efforts to “partition the country”. These words, uttered during an official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct warning to Mr Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.

Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist elements within the army and retired officers who are organising new ultra-nationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist youths in Trabzon, where Dink's alleged murderers came from). “The real purpose is to sow chaos, to polarise society so they can regain ground [lost with the EU reforms],” argues Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist whose recent book about rogue security forces known as the “deep state” earned her a three-month jail sentence. It would not be surprising if their next target were a nationalist, she adds.

Meanwhile prominent writers and academics, including Mr Belge, continue to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police protection. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author whom Mr Kerincsiz took to court over his comments about the persecution of the Armenians and the Kurds, has fled to New York.

Where will matters go from here? This week one court banned access to YouTube after clips calling Ataturk gay appeared on it; and another sentenced a Kurdish politician to six months' jail for giving the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, an honorific Mr. But a private television station also withdrew a popular series, “The Valley of the Wolves”, that glorifies gun-toting nationalists who mow down their mainly Kurdish enemies, after the channel was inundated with calls for the show's axing. The battle for Turkey's soul is not over yet.

[ardakilic]

Waving Ataturk's flag
Mar 8th 2007 | ISTANBUL AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition


AFP



There has been a lethal upsurge in ultra-nationalist feeling in Turkey
Get article background

SITTING in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits of Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says his mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from “Western imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us”. In the past two years Mr Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists' Union have launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under article 301 of the penal code, which makes “insulting Turkishness” a criminal offence.

Mr Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But elsewhere new ultra-nationalist groups, some of them led by retired army officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran to make Turks “the masters of the world” and even “to die and kill” in the process. In January one of Mr Kerincsiz's targets, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old, Ogun Samast, because he had “insulted the Turks”. The murder, in broad daylight on one of Istanbul's busiest streets, was a chilling manifestation of a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism aimed at Turkey's non-Muslim minorities and the Kurds—plus their defenders in the liberal elite.

The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed, it is partly in response to these reforms—more freedom for the Kurds, a trimming of the army's powers, concessions on Cyprus—that nationalist passions have been roused. The knowledge that many members of the European Union do not want Turkey to join has inflamed them further (the EU partially suspended membership talks with Turkey in December because of its refusal to open its ports and airspace to Greek-Cypriots).

Another factor is America's refusal to move against separatist PKK guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey's relationship with its ally would suffer “lasting damage”, says the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.

Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by Mr Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist nationalism espoused by the “Young Turks” in the dying days of the Ottoman empire (who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian subjects), and the siege mentality gripping Turkey today. The perception, now as then, is that Western powers are pressing for changes to empower their local collaborators (ie, Kurds and non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up the country. “This social Darwinist mindset that implies it's OK to kill your enemies in order to survive” has been perpetuated through an education system that tells young Turks that “they have no other friend than the Turks,” says Mr Belge. And it has been cynically exploited by politicians and generals alike.

Mr Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000 Turks gathered at Mr Dink's funeral chanting “We are all Armenians”, Mr Erdogan opined that they had gone “too far”. Both he and Mr Baykal have resisted calls to scrap article 301, though there have been hints that it will be amended.

The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up to November's parliamentary election. Mr Erdogan also hopes that burnishing his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing from Turkey's hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.

Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more threats to its national security than at any time in its modern history and added that only its “dynamic forces” [ie, the army] could prevent efforts to “partition the country”. These words, uttered during an official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct warning to Mr Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.

Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist elements within the army and retired officers who are organising new ultra-nationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist youths in Trabzon, where Dink's alleged murderers came from). “The real purpose is to sow chaos, to polarise society so they can regain ground [lost with the EU reforms],” argues Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist whose recent book about rogue security forces known as the “deep state” earned her a three-month jail sentence. It would not be surprising if their next target were a nationalist, she adds.

Meanwhile prominent writers and academics, including Mr Belge, continue to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police protection. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author whom Mr Kerincsiz took to court over his comments about the persecution of the Armenians and the Kurds, has fled to New York.

Where will matters go from here? This week one court banned access to YouTube after clips calling Ataturk gay appeared on it; and another sentenced a Kurdish politician to six months' jail for giving the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, an honorific Mr. But a private television station also withdrew a popular series, “The Valley of the Wolves”, that glorifies gun-toting nationalists who mow down their mainly Kurdish enemies, after the channel was inundated with calls for the show's axing. The battle for Turkey's soul is not over yet.

Kerincsiz and his equip tells a lie and abuse the religion. Abuse of religion is the characteristic of CUP-Kemalism. Kerincsiz is supported by Veli Küçük, who is now retired, was a general in the army. However, Küçük-Kerinçsiz is the last circle of the chain. I am going to refer this "chain" as Ergenekon group as they refer themselves (Ergenekon is a name of ancient Turkish myth, before Turks become Muslim). Who are in this group?

Süleyman Demirel (former president and prime minister),
Tansu Çiller (former prime minister)
Mehmet Ağar (former minister, now president of True Way Party-DYP)
Necdet Menzir (former Istanbul security manager)
Hayri Kozakçıoğlu (former Istanbul governor)
... and lots of generals (Çevik Bir, Yaşar Büyükanıt etc), plenty of officers from Foreign Affairs Ministry (İlter Türkmen...), many academician (Hasan Köni, called Commander of Non-Army Powers)...

In 90s, they struggled against Kurdish guerillas and used methods out of law. This group kidnapped Kurdish businessmen, burnt Kurdish villages, killed people with torture... In 1999, MOSSAD and CIA catched Abdullah Öcalan and hand over Turkish government (former leftist prime minister Ecevit told a newspaper "Still i cannot understand why they delivered Öcalan to us").

Is it so? In 90s, they also struggled against Islamists and in 1997 organized "coup d'état" against Islamist government headed by Necmettin Erbakan. In 27 February 1997, army and this group forced government to close religious schools, arrest people who wear religious dress, forbid headgear (an Islamic order for women) in universities, close many magazines, confiscated "Islamic" companies property, arrested Islamic intellectuals. These are called "28 Feburary" (28 Şubat in Turkish).

And, an interesting coincidence. Just three months before Öcalan cathced, in 31 December 1998, Salih Mirzabeyoğlu was arrested and sentenced to death penalty. He was student of Necip Fazıl, an Islamic philosopher, poet, novelist, painter and leader of an Islamic movement.

When they struggle against Kurdish guerillas, they express the action a "religiously-legitimated" and provocate people's religious emotions but on the other hand they were/are cruel to religious people. Also they refer themselves lay/secular. In fact, they are nor religious neither considering religious sensitivities.

[Joseph]

Kerincsiz and his equip tells a lie and abuse the religion. Abuse of religion is the characteristic of CUP-Kemalism. Kerincsiz is supported by Veli Küçük, who is now retired, was a general in the army. However, Küçük-Kerinçsiz is the last circle of the chain. I am going to refer this "chain" as Ergenekon group as they refer themselves (Ergenekon is a name of ancient Turkish myth, before Turks become Muslim). Who are in this group?

Süleyman Demirel (former president and prime minister),
Tansu Çiller (former prime minister)
Mehmet A?ar (former minister, now president of True Way Party-DYP)
Necdet Menzir (former Istanbul security manager)
Hayri Kozakç?o?lu (former Istanbul governor)
... and lots of generals (Çevik Bir, Ya?ar Büyükan?t etc), plenty of officers from Foreign Affairs Ministry (?lter Türkmen...), many academician (Hasan Köni, called Commander of Non-Army Powers)...

In 90s, they struggled against Kurdish guerillas and used methods out of law. This group kidnapped Kurdish businessmen, burnt Kurdish villages, killed people with torture... In 1999, MOSSAD and CIA catched Abdullah Öcalan and hand over Turkish government (former leftist prime minister Ecevit told a newspaper "Still i cannot understand why they delivered Öcalan to us").

Is it so? In 90s, they also struggled against Islamists and in 1997 organized "coup d'état" against Islamist government headed by Necmettin Erbakan. In 27 February 1997, army and this group forced government to close religious schools, arrest people who wear religious dress, forbid headgear (an Islamic order for women) in universities, close many magazines, confiscated "Islamic" companies property, arrested Islamic intellectuals. These are called "28 Feburary" (28 ?ubat in Turkish).

And, an interesting coincidence. Just three months before Öcalan cathced, in 31 December 1998, Salih Mirzabeyo?lu was arrested and sentenced to death penalty. He was student of Necip Faz?l, an Islamic philosopher, poet, novelist, painter and leader of an Islamic movement.

When they struggle against Kurdish guerillas, they express the action a "religiously-legitimated" and provocate people's religious emotions but on the other hand they were/are cruel to religious people. Also they refer themselves lay/secular. In fact, they are nor religious neither considering religious sensitivities.

Thanks for the insight.

[Joseph]

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9202614

Clash of civilisations
May 17th 2007 | KARS
From The Economist print edition
Beleaguered Armenians in Turkey˜and a closed border with Armenia


FOR a seasoned diplomat, Hasan Sultanoglu Zeynalov, Azerbaijan's consul-general in Kars, eastern Turkey, is unusually indiscreet. He openly complains about Naif Alibeyoglu, the mayor, who is promoting dialogue between Turkey, Azerbaijan and their common enemy, Armenia, just over the border. „I don't believe in dialogue,‰ Mr Zeynalov snorts. He recently ordered his compatriots to boycott an arts festival organised by the mayor after finding that „there were Armenians too.‰ Like his masters in Baku, Mr Zeynalov is unnerved at the thought of his country's biggest regional ally suddenly making peace with Armenia.
He will have been cheered by the victory of Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia's nationalist prime minister, in a general election on May 12th. Mr Sarkisian is said to have engineered a last-minute ban on Turkish observers of the election. „I think it would be unnatural to receive observing representatives from a country that does not even wish to have a civilised official dialogue,‰ he commented.





Mr Sarkisian's hawkish views are echoed by Robert Kocharian, the Armenian president, whom he is tipped to succeed in a presidential election next year. Both men hail from Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave wrested by the Armenians from Azerbaijan in a vicious war in the early 1990s. This prompted Turkey to seal its border (but not air links) with Armenia in 1993. The effect on Kars's economy has been disastrous, which is why Mr Alibeyoglu is so keen to reopen the border.
Ethnic Azeris, who make up a third of his city's 80,000 residents, are less enthusiastic. They are likely to vote in droves for the far-right MHP party in Turkey's parliamentary election on July 22nd. The party's fortunes have risen on a tide of xenophobic nationalism that has engulfed Turkey. Dismissing opinion polls that give Mr Alibeyoglu's AK party a big lead over its rivals, Oktay Aktas, the local MHP boss, confidently predicts victory. He would like Turkey to invade northern Iraq and to hang the Kurdish PKK rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan. He also says there is no question of easing the blockade on Armenia˜certainly not until it stops referring to his region as western Armenia and calling the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 a genocide.
The sensitiveness of the genocide issue was reflected in January in the killing of Hrant Dink, an ethnic-Armenian newspaper editor in Istanbul, who had talked openly about it. The killer was a school dropout from the port of Trabzon. Mr Dink's lawyer, Ergin Cinmen, says there is compelling evidence that the Istanbul police were given warning of a planned attack at least a year ago, but they did nothing to protect Mr Dink. This week Istanbul's Armenians were shocked once again by a letter sent from Trabzon warning them to defend Turkey against the genocide claims or „face the consequences‰. It was delivered to an Armenian primary school.
Such threats have dispelled the surge of goodwill that followed a huge turnout at Mr Dink's funeral and the reopening in March of an old Armenian church restored by Turkey's AK government. Etyen Mahcupyan, who replaced Mr Dink at his newspaper, says some of his kin are now talking of leaving Turkey for good. The border may stay closed for many more years.

[Gavur]

The white cap of hatred

Jun 1st 2007
From Economist.com

Our Europe editor glimpses a nasty nationalism






Friday
BACK in Kars, we have dinner with the mayor, Naif Alibeyoglu. He is an AK Party man, and a progressive fan of modern sculpture, examples of which unexpectedly adorn bits of his city. The food and wine, as always, even in far-flung parts of Turkey, are superb. Mr Alibeyoglu is an optimist on the subject of improving ties with Armenia. He would like to reopen the border, he wants to encourage Armenian tourists and he invites Armenians to come, even if by roundabout routes, to his local art and music festivals.

But he has plenty of enemies: Azerbaijan, for one, which fought a ruinous war against Armenia in the early 1990s. Perhaps one-third of Kars’s population is Azeri (the languages are both Turkic). The local Azerbaijani consul-general is a positive fomenter of dissent with the Armenians. But there are also plenty of Turkish nationalists to deal with.

I go to see one of them, the local boss of the far-right MHP Party, who says he expects to do well in the election in July. Surrounded by a villainous-looking group of thugs, he puts forward several hair-raising policies, including the early invasion of northern Iraq and the execution of the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. He is against normalisation of relations with Armenia until and unless Armenians stop calling this part of Turkey “western Armenia” and drop their “absurd” demands for an acknowledgment of Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks in 1915.

Nationalism in Turkey is, in a sense, the downside of Ataturkism. The great man was a patriot above all else. But in the process of forging a modern Turkey, he and his successors have lost the easygoing Ottoman tolerance of a multicultural empire. This is not just a problem for Kurds and Armenians. The Alevis, an Islamic sect, also feel persecuted. It is dismayingly hard to open a Christian church anywhere, despite Anatolia’s long Christian heritage. And the beleaguered Greek community of Istanbul, the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch and of the (closed) Halki Greek Orthodox seminary, are under pressure as never before.



Trabzon the tarnished jewelWalking through Kars, I stumble across a sad example of the new nationalism. Three boys are playing football outside a former Armenian church. One, hardly 12 years old, sports the white cap that was supposedly worn by the young assassin of Hrant Dink, an ethnic Armenian newspaper editor shot dead in Istanbul. The assassin seems to have come from Trabzon, north of Kars, now a hotbed of Turkish nationalism. Ironically it was, as Trebizond, once a jewel of Greek Orthodox and Jewish culture. We remonstrate with the boy about wearing such provocative headgear outside an Armenian church—but his response is merely to kick the church wall.

As we head back to Erzurum in search of some of the city’s obsidian necklaces and worry-beads, I brood again on Turkey’s fractious politics. The heavy-handed military intervention in defence of secularism and the rejection of the AK Party’s candidate for the Turkish presidency have inflamed passions ahead of the election in late July. It looks as if the AK Party will win, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will continue as prime minister. But Turkey’s angry nationalism and the bitterness unleashed before the election will play into the hands of those in the European Union, including the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who are against its EU membership. Turkish and European Union leaders have much fence-mending ahead of them.



Thursday
TO LEAVE Istanbul and Ankara and head east is to visit another country. In the towns and villages around Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish south-east, one can still find a grinding rural poverty that would be unimaginable in the sophisticated west of Turkey. In the north-east, in Erzurum and Kars, where I now go, the poverty may be slightly less grinding, but the sense of being on a frontier is if anything even stronger—as is a renewed and unattractive spirit of Turkish nationalism.

Erzurum is the sinister backcloth to John Buchan’s “Greenmantle”, set in the first world war. This was then a key playground in the great game with the Russians, who had long occupied a chunk of what is now north-eastern Turkey. At least they left intact the city’s wonderful madrassas (religious seminaries), though in accordance with Ataturk’s precepts these are today all secular museums. Farther east, in Kars, most of the grey stone buildings, including the city’s best hotel, were actually built by the Russians. Kars is also the setting of Orhan Pamuk’s novel “Snow”.

Appropriately enough, even in May the mountains around the city are still topped by snow. This is a high-altitude place, in the foothills of the Caucasus and quite near the biblical Mount Ararat. On a chilly afternoon we head east out of Kars and towards Armenia. Our goal is not that country, however, for the land border is still firmly closed. It is Ani, one of the world’s great historical and architectural gems.

As capital of Armenia in the tenth century and a great trading station on the old silk road to China, Ani once vied with Byzantium as a place of wealth and of Christian observance. It is located on a plateau high above the River Arpa that divides Armenia from Turkey—but it is firmly on the Turkish side. Given the testy relations between the two countries, and a revival of nationalist feeling in Turkey, it is not surprising that the Turks should have somewhat neglected the place, which is entirely deserted as we wander around (save for a couple of glum-looking soldiers who come from the old fort that looks across into Armenia).

AFP

Noah's old neighbourhoodAt least, some restoration has been done here in recent years. There are four or five early medieval churches, one of which later became the first mosque in Anatolia, most of them complete with some superb frescoes. They would create a sensation if they were transplanted lock, stock and barrel to western Europe. But here they are xxxxxed over by the resident sheep and goats, and very little else. There is no hotel, restaurant, bar or guide anywhere in sight. The atmosphere is all the more haunting as a result. My advice is to go to Ani, or, if you cannot, at least visit its excellent website, before the world’s tourists discover and ruin it.

As an antidote after such high-blown culture, we decide on returning to Kars to visit a well-known local truckstop and bar. The chief attraction of the place is not the food and drink, however: it is the Azeri prostitutes who lounge around one of the tables, being gawped at by the almost entirely male clientele. Occasionally one of them wanders around the bar singing and inviting customers to stuff banknotes into her skimpy top. But the beer is expensive, and the ladies are scarcely more beguiling than their intended clients. At least I can put the excursion down to experience—and, with luck, charge the tab to expenses.

Back to top >>



Wednesday
ON TO Ankara, Turkey’s unattractive capital. A small village when Ataturk picked it as the new capital, it is now a dusty metropolis of more than three million residents. It has a shiny new out-of-town airport, but still no direct flights to London, Paris or the United States.

Ankara is suffering an outbreak of political fever as the election in July approaches. The area around the Turkish parliament is thick with television crews; inside deputies were recently engaged in fisticuffs. A pro-secular politician wanders over to promise that the ruling AK Party is “finished” and that voters will rally to the opposition.

I wonder. Opinion polls give AK and its charismatic prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, around 40% of the vote, up from 34% in 2002 (when the party won a huge parliamentary majority because only one opposition party crossed the 10% threshold).

One reason voters may back Mr Erdogan is that he has given them five exceptionally successful years. Before 2002, when the country was run by varying coalitions of secular parties, it lurched from one crisis to another, with inflation roaring, banks going bust and frequent recourse to the IMF.

The ground for Turkey’s recovery was laid by Kemal Dervis, finance minister in 2001; but the AK Party stuck to his course, tamed inflation, restored growth and won the prize of accession talks with the European Union. However much they dislike Mr Erdogan’s Islamist leanings, even fierce secularists concede that his economic and political record is impressive.

AFPTheir secularism is best sensed by visiting Ataturk’s mausoleum high above the city (pictured, left). Here you find not just the great man’s coffin and a museum about his life, but such other memorabilia as his cars, his cigarettes and even three of his chickpeas. A film records how Ataturk saved the nation, and then personally educated and modernised it. The atmosphere is almost religious in fervour: to coin an oxymoron, it is a place of secular religion.

It is plain that modern Turkey owes a lot to Ataturk. Without him it might have been summarily chopped up into pieces by the allies in 1918-19. Yet there is something creepy about the reverence that he is now accorded. It is an offence to insult his memory in even the most trivial way. And it is thanks to him that the army is treated as an oracle by secularists—and by much of public opinion.

Yet Turkey’s military is no great respecter of human rights—nor of democracy, for that matter. Besides waging a long and brutal war against Kurdish rebels, its habitual response to critics has been to try to silence them.

For many years the generals backed Turkey’s aspirations to join the EU, because they saw this as the ultimate fulfilment of Ataturk’s dreams. Now, however, some seem to be having second thoughts. The EU has a pesky way of insisting on freedom of speech and religion, on human rights—and on subordinating the army to civilian authorities.

As it happens, the talk in Ankara is that Turkey’s EU ambitions may come to nought because of rising opposition from the French, Austrians and Germans. But there is here another paradox about Ataturkism. The army considers itself the guardian of Ataturk’s legacy. But if Turkey is to achieve true modernisation by getting into the EU, the military must lose its special status. And that is also why, despite the secularists’ arguments, I conclude that another AK victory will, ultimately, be the right result.

Back to top >>

Tuesday
NOBODY should visit Istanbul without going to the Topkapi palace and Aya Sofia, both now museums. The Topkapi houses a fabulous collection of rugs, weapons, jewels, pottery and mosaics accumulated by sultans over the centuries. But almost as big an appeal is its setting: grassy courtyards, fountains and cool flowerbeds all set high above the Bosporus. You can while away hours watching the boats, tankers and ferries scurrying across the busy waters of Istanbul’s harbour.

What really pulls in the tourists is something else: the Topkapi’s famous harem, which was opened to the public only in 1960. Yet though it sounds salacious, in reality it simply houses the private quarters of the sultans, including several of the finest rooms in the entire palace. Because it imposes an extra charge and does not admit guided tours, the harem is also mercifully quieter than the rest of the museum—and than Aya Sofia outside.

Sadly, Aya Sofia (pictured below) is disfigured by internal scaffolding, but the immense scale of the basilica, built by Justinian between 532 and 537 AD, is staggering. It was turned into a mosque on the day that Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. It is fitting, given today’s arguments over his secular legacy, that it was Ataturk who turned it into a museum in 1935. Besides the mosaics on the first floor, I am intrigued to stumble across a memorial to Enrico Dandolo, the blind 90-year-old Doge of Venice who led the appalling 1204 Fourth Crusade—in the course of which, instead of going to Jerusalem, the crusaders sacked Constantinople, paving the way for the fall of the city to the Turks.

That is enough history, I reflect, as I wander off to meet Norman Stone, an eminent British historian who decamped from Oxford to Turkey a decade ago, basing himself first at Bilkent University in Ankara, and now at Koc University in Istanbul. He complains about the traffic and says that he might return to Ankara if a high-speed train link is built with Istanbul. We talk about the political situation in Turkey. But I swiftly find that it is impossible to escape the burden of history. For one of Mr Stone's bugbears is the Armenian “genocide” of 1915.

AFPHe shares the mainstream view of many Turks: it happened at a messy time during the first world war; some Armenians were fighting (with the Russians) against Ottoman forces; a decision was taken by the Ottoman government to deport them; a large number of Armenians died. But he insists that this did not amount to genocide. Other historians disagree. They have found archived plans laid by the Young Turks in Constantinople that had the explicit aim of killing Turkey’s ethnic Armenians.

I cannot judge the truth, but I note one peculiarity with regret. Inside Turkey, it is an offence to talk about the mass-slaughter of the Armenians. A number of writers have been prosecuted. An ethnic Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was gunned down recently on his own doorstep in Istanbul. Elsewhere, it can be an offence to deny that this was a genocide. The French National Assembly recently passed a bill to this effect, and there is one before the American Congress. With laws like these flying around, whatever happened to free speech and the disinterested unearthing of historical truth?

Back to top>>

Monday
BY ANY measure Istanbul is a world-class historical city. As first Byzantium and later Constantinople, it was capital of a Roman Empire that lasted longer in the east than in the west. It became the Sublime Porte, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Islamic caliphate. Coming into the city from Ataturk airport, you pass right through the thick walls of Constantine (which kept Ottoman besiegers at bay until 1453) before emerging into a forest of minarets perched spectacularly above a blue sea.

Yet this is no dead town from the past. Istanbul now has over 10m people, making it Europe’s biggest and fastest-growing city (in 1950 it had only about a million). The noise, the traffic, the streets crowding down to the Bosporus and the Golden Horn are overwhelmingly busy. There is little sign of the political crisis that threatens to engulf Turkey, and provokes my visit.

This crisis is over the secular inheritance of Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, who abolished the Ottoman sultanate and the caliphate in the 1920s, and moved the capital to Ankara. Turks revere Ataturk, whose secular legacy is jealously guarded by the army. A month ago the army put out a statement criticising the government’s choice of Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister, as candidate for the Turkish presidency, and implicitly threatening a military coup.


The army has always disliked the AK Party government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for its Islamist roots. Mr Gul’s particular offence is to have a wife who wears the Muslim headscarf, which is banned in public buildings.The details of the subsequent in-fighting and court cases are too boring to discuss, but the upshot is that no president has been chosen and Turkey is preparing for a general election in late July.

It seems likely that the AK Party will win again, though perhaps not with the same big majority that it won in 2002. The party may again try to install a mild Islamist as president. So the threat of a military intervention still hangs over Turkey, which has a long history of coups.

You might expect that the worldly elite of Istanbul would deplore such heavy-handed military threats and firmly back democracy. But that is not the opinion of most of the journalists, former diplomats and bankers who gather at a splendid dinner party hosted by colleague here in her apartment in the city’s Galata district. On the contrary, they are overtly sympathetic to the army, concerned to preserve secularism in Turkey, and suspicious that the AK Party has a hidden Islamist agenda to turn their country into a new Iran.

In an era of creeping fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world, such concerns are understandable. Yet to a Westerner from Europe the notion that a military coup might be preferable to a woman's sporting a headscarf in the presidential palace in Ankara seems bizarre. The truth is that, in Turkey, secularism has turned into another form of fundamentalism that trumps other values, including democracy and the country’s prospects of joining the European Union.

Here prosperity and urbanisation play a part. Behind these arguments lies a class issue. What the elite really objects to is the influx of scarf-wearing Anatolian Muslim peasants that has swelled the population of Istanbul and other cities. Yet, as in many other countries, this is something they will just have to learn to live with.

http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9246145

[Joseph]

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10609214

A new silk road
The return of the scarves
Jan 31st 2008 | AGACLI
From The Economist print edition

Rural Kurds revive an old Armenian tradition

FOR centuries Armenians in the village of Agacli, in south-east Turkey, cultivated silk. With it they wove fine carpets and flowing scarves that were traded all along the silk road from China to Europe. That was until 1915, when Ottoman forces slaughtered most of the villagers, and hundreds of thousands of other Armenians. The village was taken over by Kurds and, in the 1990s, became a target for terrorists from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Residents began to flee when the PKK started raiding the area demanding food and shelter.

Focus

Follow the yellow silk road
Weary of the violence, Agacli's 62-year-old mayor, Yusuf Bayram, decided two years ago to try to revive the silk trade. He was inspired by his wife, the daughter of two Armenians rescued as children by Kurdish neighbours during the 1915 massacres. But a lone pair of gnarled mulberry trees planted by the Armenians were all Mr Bayram had—until the European Union rode to the rescue with a big grant.


New mulberry trees were planted, silkworms and looms brought in. Some 15 teenage girls have been trained to spin, weave and dye the silk. Despite finger-numbing cold, they have just produced their first batch of scarves. Gulay Aslan, a former seamstress who trains the girls, says their biggest challenge is sustainability. “The EU money is finished. We need to stand on our own feet, to find markets,” she declares.

The women have formed a co-operative, but their only customer is Diyarbakir's chamber of commerce. At $35 each, the scarves cost far more than those of competitors in China and India. “They use machine-spun silk, our girls make everything by hand,” boasts Mr Bayram. Just like the Armenians, he adds.