Turkey’s Dangerous Shift

Turkey’s Dangerous Shift

By Ariel Cohen
Washington Times | 4/10/2009

After attending three summits – of the Group of 20 richest countries, NATO and the European Union – President Obama ended his European trip in Turkey. His messages there highlight the importance Washington attaches to this regional player bridging Europe and Asia, a veteran NATO ally, and an influential Muslim country.

In his speeches, Mr. Obama emphasized that Turkey is a Muslim nation that respects democracy, the rule of law and is founded on a set of modern principles. In view of the Islamist Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) stranglehold on power, this may be an overstretch.

Mr. Obama also voiced support for Turkey’s membership in the EU. This did not endear him to many Europeans, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who rebuked the idea. Absent from these speeches was any mention of recent trends that have raised legitimate questions over Turkish leadership’s commitment to secular democracy, as well as its trajectory toward the West in general and NATO in particular.

Until the AKP rose to power in 2002, a secular Turkey founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I was considered a reliable U.S. partner that aspired for EU membership. Today, however, the AKP appears to be moving Turkey away from its pro-Western and pro-American orientation to a more Middle Eastern and Islamist one.

Turkish secular elites are worried about their country’s direction. They argue that the AKP promotes a creeping Islamic agenda – one close to Muslim Brotherhood’s fundamentalism.

While the AKP has enjoyed popular support since it came to power, for the first time since 2002 it lost support in the local elections. The global economic crisis is in part responsible, but voters are disappointed that AKP has strayed from its promises of a more liberal Turkey in the EU. Prominent supporters of democracy are concerned that the right of dissent, tolerance and government accountability are being eroded.

In foreign policy, there are important signs that Turkey is drifting away from the West. In 2006, Turkey became the first NATO member to host the leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal. Turkey also enthusiastically hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, whose government has been accused of genocide. Turkey’s geography justifies its relations with Iran, but not with Hamas or Sudan; only Islamist solidarity and anti-Western sentiment can explain these ties.

Although Turkey has been trying to facilitate an Arab-Israeli rapprochement by sponsoring Syrian-Israeli proximity talks and several other initiatives, it is losing its impartiality and, therefore, credibility.

This was evident when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke about Israel’s operation in Gaza and attacked the dovish Israeli President Shimon Peres before he stormed out of a panel at the recent Davos World Economic Forum – only to get a hero’s welcome back home. AKP and other Islamists also sponsored a flood of anti-Israel demonstrations, billboards and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Turkey could potentially play a role in U.S.-Iranian negotiations. However, Mr. Erdogan’s judgment has been called into question after he said last year that “those who ask Iran not to produce nuclear weapons should themselves give up their nuclear weapons first.”

Developments in Turkey’s Black Sea and Caucasus policies have also been worrisome. During the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Turkey proposed the “Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform,” a condominium of Russia and Turkey, together with the three South Caucasus countries, but initially omitted the United States and EU as well as Iran.

Turkey also temporarily blocked the transit of U.S. warships delivering humanitarian aid to Georgia. And it prioritized rapprochement with Russian ally Armenia over the ties with the secular, pro-Western Azerbaijan. These developments underscore Turkey’s cozying up to Russia, as Moscow provides nearly two-thirds of its gas supplies.

Turkey is critical to Europe’s efforts to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, including the proposed Nabucco gas pipeline that would bring Caspian Basin gas to Europe, bypassing Russia. However, Turkey is currently stalling a critical intergovernmental agreement on the Nabucco pipeline. Thus, Turkey is throwing away a decade of progress on the East-West energy corridor.

According to Mr. Erdogan, Turkey is open to providing assistance for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq through Turkey. This statement was borderline offensive in view of Turkey’s refusal to allow U.S. troops to cross its territory into Iraq in 2003. Yet the planned withdrawal of troops from Iraq raises the importance of the Incirlik U.S. Air Force Base through which 70 percent of supplies to Iraq move. Beyond this, Turkey has long-standing ties to Afghanistan and Pakistan and continues to play a positive role in both countries.

Mr. Obama attended a meeting between Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers, signaling U.S. support to the rapprochement between the two old foes. Mr. Obama avoided alienating a key ally by not by using the “G” word (genocide) when talking about Turkish-Armenian relations. He may face a domestic political blowback for this. Yet a strong U.S. endorsement for the enhanced Turkish-Azerbaijani cooperation is also necessary, and hopefully forthcoming.

Despite Turkey’s movement away from the West, the country continues to play a key role in NATO and the region. Washington should devote more attention to U.S.-Turkish relations. Strong bilateral security relations are particularly important for cooperation on the Iraq withdrawal, Afghanistan, dealing with Iran, and addressing a resurgent Russia. The administration should stress that it is in Turkey’s long-term interests to remain politically oriented toward the West.

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Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at the Sarah and Douglas Allison Center of the Davis Institute for International Studies at the Heritage Foundation

Turkey’s future Flags, veils and sharia

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=11745570

Turkey’s Future: Veils and Sharia

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11745570

Turkey: “In a very quiet, deep way, you can sense an Islamization”

Turkish secularism on the ropes. “A Secular Turkish City Feels Islam’s Pulse Beating Stronger, Causing Divisions,” by Sabrina Tavernise for the New York Times, with thanks to Steve:

DENIZLI, Turkey — The little red prayer book was handed out in a public primary school here in western Turkey in early May. It was small enough to fit in a pocket, but it carried a big message: Pray in the Muslim way. Get others to pray, too.“The message was clear to me,” said a retired civil servant, whose 13-year-old son, a student at the Yesilkoy Ibrahim Cengiz school, received the book. “This is not something that should be distributed in schools.”

This leafy, liberal city would seem like one of the least likely places to allow Islam to permeate public life. But for some residents, the book is part of a subtle shift toward increasingly public religiosity that has gone hand in hand with the ascent of the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The phenomenon is complex. The party has not ordered changes, but sets examples through a growing network of observant Muslim teachers and public servants hired since it came to power in 2002.

The shift goes to the heart of the question that has gripped this country for the past two months: As the party settles more deeply into the bureaucracy, will it leave its Islamic roots in the past and build a future that includes secular Turks, or will it impose its religion more rigorously?

[...]

“In a very quiet, deep way, you can sense an Islamization,” said Bedrettin Usanmaz, a jewelry shop owner in Denizli. “They’re not after rapid change. They’re investing for 50 years ahead.”

At the heart of the issue is a debate about the fundamental nature of Islam and its role in building an equitable society. Turks like Mr. Zeybekci contend that their country has come a long way since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution in 1923, and that it no longer needs to enforce controls like preventing women from wearing head scarves in public buildings. “It’s like locking everybody in a stadium, when you know that only three are thieves,” Mr. Zeybekci said, in his office, which has pictures of Mr. Erdogan and Ataturk.

But secular Turks contend that Islam will always seek more space in people’s lives, and therefore should be reined in. They look to the military as secularism’s final defender.

“Islam is not like other religions,” said Kadim Yildirim, a history teacher in Denizli from an opposition labor union. “It influences every part of your life, even your bedroom.”…

According to a report to Parliament by the education minister, 836 people from the government’s Religious Affairs Directorate have been transferred to the ministry’s offices during Mr. Erdogan’s tenure. That has also led to changes in the habits of the bureaucracy. In Denizli, the lunchroom in the local Ministry of Education no longer serves food during Ramadan, based on an assumption that all workers are observing the religious fast, employees said….

All education material, once vetted centrally, is now checked in a far looser fashion, according to one senior Ministry of Education official in Ankara, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was afraid for his job. A point system to rate textbooks has been loosened. The red prayer book, illustrated with pictures of small children praying, would probably not have been distributed in past years.

It is still unclear where today’s changes will lead the country. Mr. Oran says that although the ideology of Mr. Erdogan and his allies “is inevitably Islam,” they are workers and tradesmen who are ultimately motivated by profit. “They are very rapidly becoming bourgeois.”

Mr. Yildirim draws hope from a recent exchange among his students he overheard. One posed a question: If you were rowing a boat with only one extra seat and passed by a deserted island with the Prophet Muhammad and Ataturk, whom would you save?

Another answered: “Ataturk is resourceful. He can save himself. Take Muhammad.”

So evidently Muhammad can’t save himself. He has to be zealously looked after, cf. Cartoon Rage, Pope Rage, etc

Turkish Secularism on the Ropes

Turkish Secularism on the Ropes
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 23, 2007
Turkish secularism is gravely threatened, and millions of Turks are deeply concerned that their country could become an Islamic state. The secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Democratic Left Party (DSP) have combined forces to try to stop the ruling AK Party, amid widespread fears that the AKP intends to destroy the secular foundation of the Turkish state. Turkish citizens have demonstrated in three immense pro-secularist rallies: 500,000 people demonstrated in Ankara, almost a million in Istanbul, and a million and a half in Izmir. These large-scale rallies are most encouraging, and show that while there is widespread popular support for an Islamic state in Turkey (otherwise the Prime Minister and others would not be in office), there is also widespread support for Kemalism, the philosophy of Turkish secularism devised by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who abolished the caliphate in 1924 and instituted a number of other controls on political Islam in Turkey, many of which remain in place to this day. He instituted restrictions on various Islamic observances, secularized marriage law, mandated that Turkish be written in Roman rather than in Arabic characters, and above all monitored mosques and regulated preaching within them, making sure that the tenets of political Islam were not taught. Consequently the chief opposition to Kemalism has always been religious, as it is now.  

At the same time, because most of the participants in these pro-secularist rallies are nominally Muslims, they illuminate certain important aspects of the way forward for opposition to Islamic Sharia rule in Islamic societies. Onur Oymen of the secularist Republican People’s Party recently denied that the secularist ralliers represented “moderate Islam.” He declared: “You can’t have democracy without secularism. The notion of moderate Islam to check radical Islam is nonsense. This idea being promoted by certain countries should be abandoned.”  

At first glance Oymen’s distinction between secularism and moderate Islam may seem to be a distinction without a difference. Wouldn’t a secular government in Turkey, and a movement in favor of that secularism, be essentially a movement of moderate Islam? After all, almost all of those who are protesting against Islamic rule in Turkey would identify themselves as Muslims.  

However, identification as a Muslim is one thing, and acceptance of the principles of political Islam is quite another. All over the world today jihadists are targeting peaceful Muslims in their recruitment efforts, and presenting themselves as the exponents of “true” and “pure” Islam, including – as the title of a widely-circulated publication had it – jihad, “the forgotten obligation.” Part of this presentation centers on a reassertion of political Islam. Cultural Muslims who have no desire to live in an Islamic state nonetheless have been able to formulate no response on Islamic grounds to the jihadist challenge. The only response that has ever gained traction in the Islamic world has been not just a de facto laying-aside of Islam’s political and social character, but a self-conscious elimination of that character – and Ataturk’s
Turkey has been the site of the greatest success of this approach. Ataturk realized that there would be a recrudescence and reassertion of political Islam whenever there was a revival of religious fervor. Thus Kemalism presented itself not as “moderate Islam,” nor as an Islamic construct at all, but as an explicit rejection of political Islam in favor of secularism. That is, it was never presented as an Islamic construct or justified by Islamic teachings, but was an explicit rejection of certain traditional aspects of Islam.  

Ataturk became the first political figure ever in the Islamic world to reject — avowedly and without apology — political Islam in favor of a Western model of the separation of the religion from the state. While this would not forever prevent — as recent events in Turkey clearly show — a reassertion of political Islam, it would give the state greater ability to resist this reassertion, while a state that was nominally an Islamic one or that paid even lip service to Sharia in its Constitution would not have that ability. So Turkish secularism is predicated not on moderate Islam, but on premises that are not Islamic at all. And Oymen knows that any modification of Turkish law to change that will simply open the door to a full reassertion of Sharia — Islamic law — in Turkey. 

It’s a principle with a much wider application than Turkey alone: for peaceful Muslims to prevail over the proponents of jihad and Sharia, they must be prepared not just to ignore, but to reject explicitly, the elements of Sharia that are at variance with accepted norms of human rights and with government that does not establish a state religion. Only then will they have a chance of defending those rights and standing up against the theological and societal challenge of jihadism. That is not just the Turks, but all free people, have a stake in the survival of Turkish secularism.

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A Critical Moment For Turkey

A Critical Moment For Turkey
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 16, 2007
My visit to Istanbul this week comes in the midst of the greatest challenge to the Turkish secular republic since its creation in 1923.

Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the republic came into existence at about the high-water mark of Western confidence, when it appeared that European ways would become the global template. Atatürk imposed a dizzying array of changes, including European laws, the Latin alphabet, the Gregorian calendar, personal last names, hats instead of fezzes, monogamy, Sunday as the day of rest, a ban on dervishes, the legal right to drink alcohol, and Turkish as a liturgical language.

Many reforms took root; going back to the Arabic script or discarding last names is inconceivable. That said, the country has generally reverted to Islamic ways. Increased religious instruction in the schools and more state-funded mosques are complemented by more women taking on head-scarves.

Several factors account for this development: the predictable reaction against Atatürk’s excesses; Turkey’s greater democratization, which gave the masses a chance to express themselves; the higher demographic rate of Anatolians, generally cooler to Atatürk’s changes; and the Islamist surge that began in the mid-1970s.

This surge translated into a substantial Islamic representation in the Grand National Assembly, beginning as a single seat in the 1960s and then – aided by Turkish electoral peculiarities – reaching a nearly two-thirds majority today. Islamic parties have twice controlled the prime ministry, in 1996-97 and since 2002. The first time, Necmettin Erbakan’s headstrong personality and overt Islamist program prompted the military, guardian of Atatürk’s traditions, to oust him from power within a year.

After Erbakan’s collapse, a former lieutenant, Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, founded Justice and Development (or AKP), now the governing party. Learning from the 1996-97 fiasco, Erdoðan and his team took a much more cautious approach to Islamization. Also, they displayed competence at governing, handling well the economy, the European Union, Cyprus, and other matters.

But last month Erdoðan reached too far in picking Abdullah Gül, his close associate, to run for the republic’s presidency. In a fast-paced sequence of events, Gül failed to get the necessary votes, the Constitutional Court voided the election, millions of secularists took to the streets, the military hinted of a coup, and Erdoðan dissolved parliament. Both it and a new president will soon be voted on.

Questions abound: Can the AKP again win a majority of seats? Failing that, can it form a ruling coalition? Will it succeed in installing one of its own as president?

More fundamentally, what are the AKP leadership’s intentions? Did it, having witnessed Erbakan’s fate, retain a secret Islamist program and simply learn to disguise its Islamist goals? Or did it actually give up on those goals and accept secularism?

These questions of intent can only be answered speculatively. Judging whether the AKP has a hidden agenda, I concluded after a trip to Turkey in mid-2005, resembles a “sophisticated intellectual puzzle,” with persuasive evidence in both directions. That remains the case, I find on this visit two years later. There’s just more data to process and interpret.

Each Turk must judge the AKP for himself, as must key foreign governments. If the polls show Turkish voters still quite undecided, foreign leaders have opted in Erdoðan’s favor. The Council of Europe condemned military intervention and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone further, praising the AKP for “pulling Turkey west toward Europe” and specifically endorsed its efforts to make Turkey’s laws conform to Europe’s in the areas of individual and religious freedom.

But her statement ignores AKP efforts to apply the Islamic law by criminalizing adultery and creating alcohol-free zones, not to speak of its privileging Islamic courts over secular courts, its reliance on dirty money, and its bias against religious minorities as well as the persecution of political opponents. Further, European Union membership offers the AKP a huge side-benefit: by reducing the political role of Turkey’s arch-secular military leadership, paradoxically, it eases the way to apply Islamic laws. Would the AKP’s caution outlast its neutering the officer corps? Finally, Secretary Rice ignores AKP-induced tensions in U.S.-Turkish relations.

But her superficial analysis has one inadvertent benefit: given Turkey’s fervid anti-Americanism these days, American support for the AKP might actually cause it to lose votes. Such cynical humor aside, Washington should stop bolstering the AKP and instead side with its natural allies, the secularists.

1.5 million Turks rally against government Protesters: Pro-Islamic ruling party a threat to nation’s modern foundations

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18641418/

Pew: Can Secular Democracy Survive in Turkey?

By Andrew L. Jaffee, netwmd.com

Turkey’s constitutional crisis over electing a new (Islamist) president has stirred passions. “…More than a million moderate Muslims in five marches protested the bid of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to take over the presidency of the republic.” A Turkish pundit, İbrahim Karagül, found a link on my blog netwmd.com entitled, “Will Turkey Have an Islamist President?” by Michael Rubin. Karagül blogged Rubin’s article in a piece called, “Ak Parti’ye neocon tuzağı!,” which roughly translates to “AKP neocon trap/decoy!” Thousands of Turks read Rubin’s article, which I hope is a sign that political discourse is alive and well in Turkey. Unfortunately, several readers zeroed in on the fact that Rubin is Jewish. As usual, the “Zionists” were accused of interfering in Turkey’s politics (see reader comments, e.g., “you are disgusting” and “Fuck you and fuck israil”). Rather than extrapolating Turkish public opinion based on some wacky comment-trolls, I decided to see if I could find out what’s going on in the Turkish mind. I found an opinion poll from the Pew Research Center, “Can Secular Democracy Survive in Turkey?”

…Pew surveys find that Turks believe Islam is playing a larger role in the nation’s political life, and a majority worries that religion’s influence may be harmful. There also are growing doubts among Turks about democracy’s viability there. …

Among those who see a struggle over modernism in progress, a clear majority favors secular ways: Some two-thirds (67%) of those who said they see such a struggle also say they identified with groups wanting to modernize, compared with less than one in five (16%) who identified with Islamic fundamentalists. (Another 18% of this group did not know or declined to answer.)…

- Click here for complete poll results

Cross-posted at netwmd.com and IsraPundit

Posted by Andrew Jaffee @ 9:21 am |

The Relative Stablity of Turkey

By J.R. Dunn

Nicolas Sarkozy’s triumph was not the only good news for the resurgant West this past
weekend. The Islamists also suffered a setback in Turkey, by way of the May 5 announcement by Abdullah Gul, the fundamentalists’ favorite candidate, that he will no longer seek election as prime minister. For this we have to thank a man who has been dead for seventy years.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was one of the most fascinating, impressive, and unlikely figures of the past century. A Muslim from birth who became a champion of the secular state, a dictator who established the sole working democracy in the Muslim world, an ascetic visionary who died of complications of alcoholism, Kemal deserves to be much better known than he is. He accomplished with Turkey what many insist even today is an impossibility: dragging a battered, defeated, nearly medieval Muslim state into the modern era by main force, and without the wholesale brutality demonstrated by nearly all other nationalist leaders of his era.
No one seeing Kemal in the years prior to WW I would have expected anything of the sort. He was an army officer who had aroused the suspicions of the ruling triumvirate of the Young Turks – Djemal, Enver, and Talat. Few ever survived such suspicions, and Kemal might have suffered the same fate if he hadn’t spent much of his time outside the country.
During WWI, Kemal played a crucial role in the Battle of Gallipoli as a divisional commander. It was largely through his efforts that the British landing was contained and at last turned back. He led from the front, at one point making his way alone into the center of no man’s land before giving the signal to attack.
He later served in the Caucasus, fighting the Russians. He had nothing to do with the Armenian massacres, instigated by the vicious and paranoid Djemal Pasha. At the end of the war he was commanding an army on the Palestine front. He escaped Edmund Allenby’s breakthrough at Megiddo, keeping most of his command intact. Retreating to Aleppo, he reorganized and succeeded in holding the British at the border of Anatolia, on the line that still exists as the frontier between Turkey and Syria.
Turkey was now a defeated empire, facing occupation and partition by the Allies, who had  decided to solve the longstanding Turkish Question by eliminating Turkey itself. The discredited Young Turks had fled, leaving a power vacuum. Kemal began organizing a Turkish national movement to resist the occupiers. Fleeing to Anatolia just ahead of an execution order, he set up a government at Ankara, the new parliament first sitting in April 1920. The sultan’s government in Istanbul effectively lost legitimacy after signing the Treaty of Sevres, which agreed to Allied occupation of Anatolia. Kemal immediately picked up the reins.
Allied forces moved against Kemal, attacking on no less than three fronts. Kemal allowed them to advance within fifty miles of Ankara before striking. The three-week long battle of Sakarya in August-September 1921 turned back the Greek army. After a diplomatic blitz which persuaded the French and Italians to withdraw their support from the occupation, Kemal routed the British-backed Greek forces at Dumlipinar on August 30, 1922. Within weeks all foreign forces had fled the country.
Kemal now began the reform of Turkish society from top to bottom. He effectively dismissed the sultan, ending centuries of Ottoman rule. In the sultan’s place, he set up a representative government, with the balance of power resting in the parliament. He completely severed relations between government and Islam, insisting on secularism as the basis of the new Turkey. Kemal was so insistent on democratic forms that he not once but twice founded opposition parties to serve as competition for his own Republican People’s Party.
His actions reached deep into the daily lives of the Turks. He banned the fez, internationally recognized as the symbol of Turkey, on the grounds that modern nations wore modern hats. He liberalized the dietary laws, particularly as involved alcohol. (He himself was grievously addicted to raki, the Turkish national liquor.) He was an adamant proponent of the rights of women. Two of his adopted daughters pioneered new roles for women in Turkish society. Afet Inan became a professor of sociology at a time when few women in the West held such positions. Sabiha Gokcen joined the Turkish air force and became the world’s first female combat pilot.
Some of these changes went down with difficulty in a traditionalist society for centuries kept in ignorance and isolation. Several revolts occurred, the most serious of them a 1925 religious revolt triggered by Sheik Said Piran in the guise of a Kurdish nationalist uprising. But no one else joined the rebels and they were defeated in a little over a month.
Kemal had an easy solution for such throwbacks – he had them shot. But as ruthless as he could be in defense of his vision of a new Turkey, he never approached the excesses committed by other nationalist leaders of the period. He considered Mussolini and Stalin to be thugs, and Hitler no better than a maniac.
Kemal’s drinking caught up with him at last in November 1938, when he died of cirrhosis. He was succeeded by his comrade-in-arms and chosen successor Ismet Inonu, who continued his reforms. Kemal today is known today as “Ataturk”, Father of Turks. He remains a legend among the Turks, a combination of Washington, Pericles, and Suleiman. The Kemalist state endures to this day, the oldest governmental institution in the Islamic world.
One of the things that has preserved it is an odd and unique system of checks and balances in which the army acts as the guarantor of the Turkish state. If extremism or corruption of any sort threatens the state, the army intercedes. It generally does not take over governing on its own, but stabilizes the situation and makes way for a new civilian government. It has on several occasions overthrown rulers it considers to be fundamentalist, the last time occurring in 1997, when the army forced Necmettin Erbakan out of office. This is not a procedure anyone would wish to import or encourage, but it has unquestionably worked to keep Turkey a democratic nation. While Kemal himself would probably have disapproved, it cannot be denied that the process grew directly out of the Kemalist system.
This is what stymied Abdullah Gul on April 27. The army expressed its displeasure with Gul’s Islamist inclinations and policies, and clearly implied he would not be allowed to take office. Gul has obviously thought the better of his ambitions. While this is far from what we would call democratic, it’s possible to disapprove while still retaining the ability to appreciate the results – this is, after the Middle East, where worse happens every hour. Turning respect for democracy and its forms into what amounts to an ideology accomplishes nothing and succeeds nowhere. (Anyone who doubts this is invited to look at the current situation in the Palestinian Authority.) We can say with some confidence that Turkey will not go Islamist anytime soon – and that’s a good day’s work by anyone’s measure.
The Islamists have been stymied by the hand of a dead legend reaching out of the past. Think about that when the war appears to have gone on too long and the defeatists are all you can hear and a Jihadi victory appears inescapable. There are currents beneath the surface that are operating in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom, and not all of them are operating against us. History keeps its own counsel, and makes no one any promises. Mustafa Kemal, the soldier who salvaged a nation, would be the first to agree.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.

Kemalism on the Line

Kemalism on the Line
By Claude Salhani
The Washington Times | May 9, 2007
Turkey’s Islamist government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Does the prime minister want the country to follow in the Kemalist tradition of respecting the notion of laicite — the strict secular separation of mosque and state — as instituted by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern-day Turkey, and eventually join the rest of Europe, or is he more intent on pushing the country into the Islamic court? 

Turkey finds itself at a crucial crossroad today, hesitating between jumping into the European fray and flirting with Islamist fundamentalism. The ongoing delay imposed by Brussels on allowing Turkey into the European Union is certainly not helpful, either, as many Turks have started to question becoming part of the EU. 

Turkey’s latest crisis began when Mr. Erdogan’s Islamic AKP — Justice and Development Party — set its eyes on the presidency. The position is largely ceremonial but still carries a certain amount of clout. The Turkish president, who serves a seven-year term, can block laws and official appointments. The president nominates the judges of the Constitutional Court and military advocates. 

Winning the presidency would have consolidated the AKP’s power, but also set a precedent in the modern Turkish republic by mixing politics and religion. 

According to the Turkish Constitution, the president is elected by the Parliament and not by universal balloting. Enjoying a clear majority in parliament with 353 seats, the AKP put forward the name of a single candidate — Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a longtime friend and associate of Mr. Erdogan. 

Mr. Gul, who is also co-founder of the ruling moderate AKP, however, failed to win the necessary two-thirds majority of the Parliament, or 367 votes in the first round of voting. But a victory by Mr. Gul in a third round was a certain shoo-in, given that he would only need a simple majority to win. 

Then there were massive demonstrations in the Turkish capital of Ankara and in its commercial center, Istanbul, with more than 1 million people taking to the streets in protest. And perhaps of greater importance was the not-so-thinly veiled threat from the country’s military — traditional guardians of the Kemalist secularist notion — of having the armed forces intervene. 

The army general staff did not mince words: “The Turkish armed forces observe the situation with concern. Attacks on the basic values of the republic, in particular secularism, have escalated and developed into an open challenge to the state. In part, this is happening with the knowledge and the permission of the government authorities. The Turkish armed forces are against these discussions. They regard themselves as the guardians of the secular order and will openly make their position clear if necessary. Nobody should be in any doubt about this.” 

That was enough to persuade the Turkish Constitutional Court to issue a ruling halting the presidential election. The court declared the first round of the election illegal on the grounds less than the required two-thirds of parliamentarians were present at the time of the vote. The CHP — the Republican People’s Party — the AKP’s only viable opposition, purposely boycotted the first round. 

Mr. Erdogan’s response was to propose new parliamentary elections, believing he could do even better next time around. 

Turkish politicians know better than to tempt their military. Turkey’s generals have intervened four times in the last 40 years to protect the secularist Kemalist tenet. Three coups d’etat — in 1960, 1971 and 1980 — brought the military out of their barracks and the politicians into line. The military’s latest incursion into the country’s politics was no later than in 1997, when they forced the resignation of Necmettin Erbakan, the head of government and leader of an Islamic party. 

As could be expected, the EU has reacted with alarm to threats by Turkey’s military forces. A military coup at Europe’s doorstep is indeed a frightening prospect. But then again, so is an Islamist state for the vast majority of Europeans. 

So maybe Europe can waste less time in opening its door to a secularist Turkey — while there is still one to contend with — and Mr. Gul could say gule gule (bye-bye in Turkish) to his presidential ambitions.

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