Perhaps Erdoğan Is Not As All-Powerful As We Thought
January 16, 2013 § 8 Comments
The worst kept secret in all of Turkish politics is that Prime Minister Erdoğan wants to revamp Turkey’s political system in order to create a strong presidency and make himself the first newly empowered president. Turkey’s constitutional commission had been meeting for the greater part of 2012, and it was expected to recommend that Turkey adopt a presidential system. The idea was for all four of the parties in the Grand National Assembly – AKP, CHP, MHP, and BDP – to come to a consensus, but because this was always going to be extremely unlikely, Erdoğan had plotted out an alternate path toward achieving his goal. He repeatedly warned that if there was no unanimous agreement on what the next constitution should look like, he would drop the consensus requirement and simply advance a draft constitution written by the AKP. In order to do this though, he was going to have to band together with another party, as the AKP is three seats short of the number it needs to have an automatic referendum on the constitution. The assumption that many people – myself very much included – made was that Erdoğan had cut a deal with the nationalist MHP, in which it would provide the votes to give Erdoğan his presidential system and in return Erdoğan would sell out the Kurds and not make any real moves toward recognizing Kurdish rights or Kurdish identity.
For awhile, this appeared to be exactly what was transpiring. Arrests of lawyers, journalists, and politicians sympathetic to the Kurdish cause were up, the government was not making any moves to revive its Kurdish Opening of a few years ago, and the AKP in collaboration with the MHP was refusing to even hold a parliamentary debate on the military operation against the PKK in the southeast of the country. All signs pointed to a new constitution rammed through with MHP votes that would maintain the fiction of one overarching Turkish identity as a reward to the MHP for supporting Erdoğan’s invigorated presidency.
Yet, the constitutional commission’s December 31 deadline came and went, and there has been no move on Erdoğan’s part to follow through on his public threats of abandoning the process and imposing his own vision of what the new constitution should look like. Instead, there has been little talk of what comes next, and haggling over the AKP’s proposed presidential system is delaying agreement on other proposed constitutional articles. More interestingly, the government has begun negotiating with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, which has infuriated the MHP to no end. This is not quite a renewed Kurdish Opening, but in some ways it is even more surprising and remarkable given the view of many Turks that Ocalan is an unrepentant terrorist who should not be lent any credibility through negotiations with the government.
Reading between the lines of all this, it is fairly obvious that Erdoğan’s plan to remake Turkey’s political system and give himself more power in the process has so far failed. I speculated in September that Erdoğan was facing some internal AKP discontent for the first time in his decade as PM, and my strong hunch now is that he does not have the support within his own party that he needs in order to create a strong presidency and force out Abdullah Gül so that he can take over the position. He also clearly does not have the MHP on board, since if he did he would never risk alienating them in the way that he has through the Ocalan negotiations. His dream of creating an imperial presidency is on the ropes, and it might even be entirely gone for good at this point. The only chance he has of rescuing it is trading MHP support for BDP support, and hence the out of the blue approach to Ocalan and the PKK. The AKP has always attempted to compete for Kurdish votes, and in this way it has a more natural partner in the BDP than the MHP since its approach to Kurdish issues is not the hardline one expressed by Turkish nationalists. Faced with the defeat of his ultimate political ambition, Erdoğan has done a complete 180 turnaround and decided that the road to a new Turkish constitution and presidential system is one that embraces Kurdish rights and identity rather than one that flouts them.
This is a good outcome for two reasons. First, any productive move on resolving Kurdish rights and recognizing Kurdish identity is one in which everyone wins and Turkey becomes internally stronger and more cohesive, rather than less so. The Kurdish issue has been dragging Turkey down for decades, and Turkish Kurds have a fundamental right to be able to speak their language and promote their rich cultural heritage free of restriction and discrimination. Second, it shows that Erdoğan is not quite as powerful as we though, which is a victory for Turkish democracy. As his prime ministry has progressed, Erdoğan has demonstrated an increasingly authoritarian side and has not been faced with any real challenges to his power. That he cannot just ram through a new presidential system at will is hopefully a harbinger of things to come and a sign of some greater checks on his power, and this too will ultimately make for a stronger, more prosperous, and more successful Turkey.
Eavesdropping on Erdoğan
January 3, 2013 § Leave a Comment
There is some very strange stuff going on in Turkey and I don’t quite know what to make of it just yet, so I thought I’d do some speculative musing out loud in the hopes of sparking a discussion. In September, Prime Minister Erdoğan completely out of the blue fired his head of security and many of his bodyguards en masse and replaced them with new people. In October, his office went through a complete root and branch renovation. These moves led to speculation that Erdoğan was concerned that he’d been spied on, since they seemed like unusual steps to take absent some evidence of outside parties listening in and monitoring the prime minister’s private communications. Then in December, Erdoğan revealed that his home office had been bugged, and more bugs were found in his parliamentary office and his car. Erdoğan initially blamed the deep state, and then later essentially said he wanted to just put the whole thing behind him, although the MIT (Turkish intelligence) is investigating. Erdoğan also issued special “crypto phones” to all Turkish ministers in order to prevent their communications from being intercepted as well.
A couple of things here are particularly odd to me. First, why did Erdoğan decide in December to publicly reveal that he’d been spied on? The rumors were flying for months, but it seems like a very strange thing to confirm since the benefit of doing so is not readily appreciable. It relays a sense of governmental incompetence, particularly given the scope of devices that were allegedly found, and does not inspire confidence in Erdoğan and his team. The announcement was also not made in an effort to be as transparent and informative as possible, since neither of these things are exactly hallmarks of the current Turkish government. Erdoğan is also a guy who almost never admits he was wrong about anything, and while having your office bugged and phones tapped is not an error on Erdoğan’s part, his letting everyone know that it happened is an unusual admission that something went wrong somewhere.
Second, why did Erdoğan rush to blame the usual suspects in the deep state and then offer to drop the subject entirely? It’s almost as if he geared up for another fight with the military and other deep state actors, and then was somehow frightened off. Certainly it is very much out of character for Erdoğan to publicly back down on anything, and even more out of character to offer not to pursue someone who has spied on him. It leaves the impression that either something or someone spooked him, or that his initial conjecture about the responsible parties was wrong. I can’t recall another instance of Erdoğan giving off the impression that he is ready for battle and then bowing out.
Here are some completely unfounded ideas as to what may be going on here. Taking all of this together, I think that things in Turkey are about to get a lot more unpleasant, with a new round of arrests, prosecutions, and trials. If Erdoğan did not intend to go after someone or something, there would have been no reason for him to announce that his office was bugged. Letting the public know is an effort to get on the right side of public opinion before whatever comes next, much like exposing coup plots, whether real or imagined, was necessary before prosecuting hundreds of military officers. Erdoğan revealing that he is being spied on signaled to me the beginning of a renewed campaign of Ergenekon redux.
The weird part then is his backtracking, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Does whoever bugged his office have information being used to blackmail Erdoğan? Is this whole thing an exercise in paranoid delusion? I have no clue at all. The other question is, who was Erdoğan preparing to go after? It could be the military, which would make sense given his initial blaming the deep state. On the other hand, there are rumors that the party responsible for the bugs is the Gülenists. To my mind, if Erdoğan is preparing to go after someone, it is Gülenists rather than the military, since the growing split between the prime minister and his former cheerleaders has been a long time coming. There is irony in Gülenists banding together with Erdoğan in using shadowy tactics and accusations to bring down the military, to now have Erdoğan turn around and use the same playbook on the Gülen movement. As I said, this is complete conjecture on my part, but something is definitely going on behind the scenes and I think it’s about to get messy. If anyone can shed any more light on this whole strange affair, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
When It Comes To Freedom Of Speech, Turkey Is Still All Talk
December 17, 2012 § Leave a Comment
It looks like the attention being paid to Turkey’s abysmal record on speech issues has finally created enough noise to get the government to sit up and take notice. Deputy PM Bülent Arınç said on Saturday that there is a draft law in the works that will change the Anti-Terror Law, which criminalizes making “propaganda” on behalf of a terrorist organization, to have “propaganda” be interpreted more loosely. According to Arınç, he does not want to see any journalists in jail, and he claimed that this issue has been discussed in cabinet meetings and should be resolved soon, although he did not hesitate to add that no parties save the BDP want to see the Anti-Terrorism Law scrapped entirely.
The good news here is that it appears that the efforts of NGOs to highlight the detestable state of press freedom in Turkey are having an effect. Arınç cited the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Press Institute, both of whom recently have called out Ankara for jailing journalists. When the CPJ issued its report in October, I was critical of the organization for not calling attention to this issue sooner and for actually providing cover to Turkey in the past by downplaying the scope of the problem. Thankfully Ankara is sufficiently worried about the CPJ report to feel the need to address it publicly, which is why Arınç was trotted out there to talk about how terrible it is for even one journalist to be wrongly imprisoned. If the Turkish government didn’t feel some heat over this issue, it would still be doing what it did when the report was released in October, which is try to sweep the whole thing under the table.
Nevertheless, I am highly skeptical that Arınç’s public relations offensive represents a genuine move to ameliorate Turkey’s draconian treatment of the press. It is difficult to imagine that Prime Minister Erdoğan and his cabinet are seriously considering amending the Anti-Terrorism Law to make it easier for journalists to report on Kurdish issues and to criticize the government at the same time that Erdoğan is calling for the creators of a soap opera to be prosecuted because he doesn’t like the way they are portraying Ottomans sultans, or when members of his government are introducing bills to not only ban the show but to educate Turkish filmmakers on proper Turkish values and morals. On the one hand, the AKP wants to shut down any speech that it finds objectionable in any way at all, and the on the other hand it wants you to believe that it is going to loosen restrictions on speech that it has long claimed to be a security threat that is equivalent to terrorism. It also beggars belief that Erdoğan is considering any real amendments to Articles 6 and 7 of the terrorism law at the same time that dozens of Kurdish politicians are being arrested under these very same provisions and the prime minister is trying to strip BDP deputies of their parliamentary immunity. That Arınç can even say with a straight face that he has a draft of a revised law on his desk and that he hopes it can be passed soon when the campaign to sweep up even more people under these very same articles he claims to want to revise is being prosecuted with even greater ferocity is outrageous. It’s as if the government thinks people have no capacity to independently judge what is taking place, and that everyone should just trust that they will do the right thing despite having no track record worthy of garnering trust.
Furthermore, Arınç’s claim that the law is going to be reinterpreted is a specious one even if you set aside the government’s recent actions. As noted above, after saying that the government was going to relax the law, he made it very clear that the law is here to stay, that all parties other than the Kurdish BDP support it, and that propaganda is going to remain a crime if it lauds terrorism or violence. So, based on Arınç’s interpretation of things, right now Turkey has a law on the books which it uses to throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism, and after these alleged revisions that the government is debating, Turkey will still have a law on the books that will allow it throw journalists in prison by claiming that their reporting has supported terrorism. I fail to see what Arınç claims is going to be tangibly changed aside from a loose promise to reinterpret the word propaganda, which is a meaningless and empty promise if the law as it is currently written is not significantly altered or done away with. In short, given the government’s continuing assault on free speech of all varieties and arrests of Kurdish journalists and politicians, there is little reason for anyone to trust that Arınç means what he says. Until the Erdoğan government takes some actual steps toward relaxing its restrictions on speech, its rhetoric and promises on this issue will remain hollow and meaningless.
Egypt Is Adopting A Turkish Model After All
December 12, 2012 § 5 Comments
As Mohamed Morsi continues his campaign to push through a referendum on the Egyptian draft constitution at all costs, it is increasingly clear that Egypt is emulating a Turkish model, but not the one it might have intended to emulate. I wrote last week about the danger of Egypt falling into the same pattern as Turkey when it comes to military interventions in civilian politics, and while that may indeed come to pass, it is still too early to tell. The new Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government is, however, following Turkey down another path. The Turkish model that Egypt has already begun to mimic is one of an alternate, yet just as unsavory, variety, which is the government’s adaptation of the very same authoritarian strategies of its predecessors despite formerly being victimized by those very same strategies and tactics. It requires a sort of historical amnesia to do to your opponents what was previously done to you, and while in Turkey this took a little more time to play out, in Egypt it is happening at lightning speed.
Turkey’s more authoritarian bent during the last five years or so of AKP rule has manifested itself primarily in restrictions on speech and targeting journalists, politicians, and others for expressing opinions outside the bounds of what the government deems to be acceptable. Turkey has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world, and more recently there has been controversy over Prime Minister Erdoğan suggesting that prosecutors should take action against a soap opera depicting the life and times of Suleiman the Magnificent and over a fine levied against a private broadcasting station for airing an episode of The Simpsons deemed to be blasphemous. Erdoğan’s beef with the soap opera, Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century in English), is that he does not like the stylized description of Suleiman’s life as an endless parade of battles and harem trysts, and he threatened to have production shut down by saying, “Those who toy with these values should be taught a lesson within the premises of the law.” One of the AKP MPs followed up by introducing a bill that would ban the show along with establishing guidelines for filmmakers to conform with Turkish moral values. What is surprising about the heavy emphasis on targeting objectionable speech is that this is precisely the tactic used by previous governments and the Turkish military to go after current AKP members in the past. As pointed out by the blog Atatürk’s Republic, “Having been born, raised and educated in a society which accepted and even welcomed a certain level of state media control, the leadership of the AKP has now begun to echo their secular predecessors, almost in spite of themselves. After all, Erdogan himself spent nearly a year in jail for a speech crime.” The hypocrisy of Erdoğan, who was imprisoned for four months (although sentenced to ten) for reading a poem at a rally that the state deemed as a violation of the law against inciting religious hatred, now going after others for speech that offends his values carries a large degree of irony, and is part of a pattern of the AKP resorting to the same tactics as its predecessors used on it to punish action that it does not like.
In Egypt, Morsi has taken this lesson and run with it. For years, Muslim Brotherhood members were subject to torture on the part of the Mubarak regime intended to elicit false confessions and uncover hidden evidence of foreign conspiracies. During the uprising against Mubarak in January 2011, opponents of the regime were detained, beaten by plainclothes thugs bussed into Cairo from other parts of the country, had their wallets and phones confiscated while being tortured into confessing that they were being paid to demonstrate, and Mubarak would give speeches alleging foreign hands trying to break the sovereignty of the state and how it was up to him to hold firm and protect Egypt from outsiders. And yet, last week this scenario played out identically except that it was Muslim Brotherhood thugs rather than felool baltagiya doing the detaining and beating, and it was Morsi giving a speech decrying the nefarious influence of foreign conspirators determined to bring down Egypt. It was Morsi threatening to reinstate martial law and claiming that “temporary” emergency measures would be necessary to restore order and calm. If I put up two articles side by side, one from January 2011 and one from last week, and removed all named references to the actors involved, you’d be hard pressed to tell which article was from which time period, and yet before it was Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (among others) being repressed and now it is Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood using the exact same playbook to do the repressing.
The reason this happens is simple. Like I wrote about military intervention last week, existing institutions constrain the range of available political outcomes, and make it easier for a country’s politics to repeat the same patterns irrespective of who is at the top. New governments often inherit a logic of action and behavior that is difficult to unlodge, and when the same institutional rules, resources, and patterns of competition remain in place from one regime to the next, the behavior exhibited by the state’s new rulers begins to look identical to that exhibited by the state’s former ones. In this case there is something else at work as well as my friend and colleague Hesham Sallam has insightfully pointed out, which is that Egypt has a deep state of powerful interests and institutions that have resisted attempts to break their autonomy, and it thus becomes easy for the Muslim Brotherhood to cut a deal with these military and security apparatuses and adopt the same tactics used by its predecessor. This all combines to create a situation in which Morsi was elected to the presidency, realized early on that the easiest way to get what he wanted given Egypt’s weak political institutions and lack of cohesion was to adopt the same antidemocratic measures under the guise of legalism as Mubarak did, and when faced with protests resorted to the same tactics of torture, prosecuting his leading opponents, and alleging foreign conspiracies. Because he cut a deal with Egypt’s deep state, he is so far getting away with all of this under the protection of the military and security forces, who are happy to let him do as he pleases as long as their own prerogatives are not trampled. And just like that, it turns out that the man and organization that bitterly denounced Mubarak for torture, detentions, and giving up any pretense to democracy are doing the exact same thing themselves not even one year into coming to power.
Unfortunately, this is how authoritarian politics works, and nobody should be surprised to see the same patterns repeating themselves. In some ways, it is a miracle that democracy ever occurs, and the conditions have to be right and a healthy dose of luck must be involved for a successful transition to happen. In Egypt, neither of these two variables seem to apply so far, and thus it has been very easy for Morsi to morph into Mubarak. There is a reason that Mubarak resorted to the tactics that he did, which is that it was the most effective way for him to hold on to power, and Morsi has quickly learned that the Mubarak playbook works. Just like Erdoğan has conveniently forgotten what was done to him, so too has Morsi, and it means that Egypt is even more unlikely now than it ever was to adopt the Turkish model of a religious society with a democratic secular government.
Kemalism Is Alive And Well
December 11, 2012 § 3 Comments
Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it has been increasingly fashionable to declare that Kemalism – Turkey’s dominant political ideology since the founding of the republic in 1923 – is on life support. Successive governments have paid lip service to Kemalism, particularly since the military has always viewed itself as the ultimate guardian of Kemalist principles and crossing Kemalist red lines has been the best way to precipitate a military coup, but the AKP is viewed as hollowing out Kemalism through its electoral dominance. Most people immediately associate Kemalism with secularism and Westernization, and whether it be the AKP’s battle to make wearing a headscarf acceptable in universities or the controversial decision to allow middle schoolers to attend imam hatip religious schools, the government certainly does not appear to feel that Kemalism should constrain its policies.
It is not just the AKP, however, that has embraced this trend. The opposition CHP, which was essentially created to translate the precepts of Kemalism into tangible policies, has also seemed to go through a post-Kemalist phase. In July, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu defended charges that his party has moved away from Kemalism by declaring that Kemalism is a dynamic ideology and that he rejects a “traditional” interpretation of Kemalism. Kılıçdaroğlu’s elevation to CHP leader was widely viewed as heralding a new direction for the party, which has been out of power for decades, and part of this new direction was a greater focus on social liberalism and less of a focus on traditional Kemalist principles.
Kemalism, however, was always about much more than secularism, and the CHP’s current line of attack against the government demonstrates that Kemalist principles still carry some weight. Kemalism has six arrows, and the two that bear on recent events are republicanism and populism. Republicanism meant popular sovereignty, freedom, and legal equality, and stood in stark opposition to the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate. While Atatürk’s idea of republicanism was based on the French model, the pre-democratic reality of Turkish republicanism was a paternalistic dictatorship containing aspects of liberal rule. Republicanism in the Kemalist sense meant sovereignty of the people as the basis of the state rather than sovereignty of the sultan, and the idea that the state existed to further the advancement of its citizens rather than the glory of a royal dynasty. Connected to this was the idea of populism, which was the notion that the Turkish people should be mobilized in the name of social progress and modernity, but also encapsulated a sense of solidarity among disparate societal or professional groups. Unity was essential in Atatürk’s mind to building a modern state, and he believed that only through popular unity and solidarity had Turkey achieved its independence. Populism was operationalized in a way that would ensure unity among different groups and eliminate class conflict by enacting socioeconomic and educational reforms meant to achieve equality and social mobility. This tied into republicanism, since equality and unity required the rejection of the Ottoman sultanate as it privileged a ruling class above the people. It was also a response to Marxism and the concept of revolutionary class struggle, and was meant to forestall any such possibility in Turkey. Throughout the 1930s, populism was used to push off dealing with potentially disruptive social issues by repeating that there were no class or social fissures in Turkey, and among the six principles of Kemalism this was the one that gained the most widespread acceptance prior to WWII.
During the parliamentary debate yesterday over the next budget, the Kılıçdaroğlu accused Prime Minister Erdoğan of running roughshod over republican principles by trying to circumvent the Grand National Assembly’s role in budget planning. Kılıçdaroğlu claimed that Erdoğan and the AKP are trying to elevate themselves above the republic, which Erdoğan vehemently denied and said that making comparisons between Turkey’s economic performance under the AKP and Turkey’s economic performance in decades prior is intended only to demonstrate how the AKP has improved Turkey. This seems like a strange argument to be having, as there shouldn’t be a question as to whether the current government is part and parcel of the republic or not, yet it can be understood in the context of Kemalism and whether or not the AKP is adhering to its tenets. Republicanism was meant to forestall exactly the charge that Kılıçdaroğlu is hurling at the government, of placing its own glory above the good of the people and the state, and the fact that it appears to have hit a nerve with Erdoğan demonstrates just how ingrained Kemalism really is. The CHP is attempting to tar the AKP with only looking out for its own interests, and Erdoğan’s response has been that the AKP’s success is actually Turkey’s success and the republic’s success, which feeds directly into the Kemalist republican ideal. Similarly, the debate involves populism as well, since the idea of popular solidarity and unity is violated by the AKP’s claiming economic success as uniquely its own.
In a world in which Kemalism was defunct, none of this would really matter; in fact, it would be perfectly natural for a party to crow about its economic success and use it as a tool with which to hammer its opponents. The fact that Erdoğan felt the need yesterday to reiterate his commitment to the republic and that Kılıçdaroğlu was nakedly appealing to two of the six tenets of Kemalism in order to score political points demonstrates that for all of the talk about post-Kemalist Turkey, shaking off decades of Kemalist ideological hegemony is easier said than done. As much as the AKP may want to water down the secularist component of Kemalism, the rest of it is still very much intact.
Guest Post: Are Islamism And Authoritarianism The Same Thing?
November 28, 2012 § 7 Comments
Friend of O&Z and frequent guest poster Dov Friedman – who tweets from @DovSFriedman – is back today with thoughts on Egypt and President Morsi, and whether focusing on the Islamist character of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood risks missing the forest of authoritarianism for the trees of Islamism. Bonus points for relating the debate over Morsi to the debate over Turkey and the AKP and making sure to cover the Ottomans portion of this blog, which has been lacking as of late due to Gaza and the upcoming Israeli elections. Without further ado, here’s Dov:
In The New Republic on Monday, Eric Trager criticized those who bought into the idea of Mohamed Morsi as a moderate during the Egyptian uprising. The timing of the piece makes sense, as Morsi expanded his already considerable power last Thursday in a constitutional declaration. Trager was among the analysts consistently skeptical of the supposed moderation and democratic potential of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yesterday’s piece served to remind observers that not every analyst bought into last year’s dominant narrative. As evidence, Trager provides excellent detail about the Muslim Brotherhood’s “cultish” structure and immoderation:
That’s because the very process through which one becomes a Muslim Brother is designed to weed out moderates. It begins when specially designated Brotherhood recruiters, who work at mosques and universities across Egypt, identify pious young men and begin engaging them in social activities to assess their suitability for the organization. The Brotherhood’s ideological brainwashing begins a few months later, as new recruits are incorporated into Brotherhood cells (known as “families”) and introduced to the organization’s curriculum, which emphasizes Qur’anic memorization and the writings of founder Hassan al-Banna, among others. Then, over a five-to-eight-year period, a team of three senior Muslim Brothers monitors each recruit as he advances through five different ranks of Brotherhood membership—muhib, muayyad, muntasib, muntazim, and finally ach amal, or “active brother.”
I encourage you to read the whole thing.
The problem with Trager’s analysis is that the facts marshaled fail to support the hypothesis—it uses evidence of ideologically conformist Islamism to support a claim about Morsi’s authoritarianism. Of course this may be correct, but it is not inherently so.
This same conflation occurs in the conversation about Turkey, the AK Party, and Prime Minister Erdoğan. At its most benign, the error manifests itself as The Economist’s insistence on calling the AK Party “mildly Islamist.” The same misdirected criticism turns quite noxious at times. Look no further than Daniel Pipes or Andrew McCarthy in National Review.
As Istanbul-based independent journalist Claire Berlinski has argued, it would be more appropriate—and more helpful—if The Economist called the AK Party “mildly authoritarian.” Put differently, AK Party acts increasingly authoritarian in ways unrelated to its Islamist roots. Critics’ focus on Islamist identity diverts their attention from the main problem: alarmingly anti-democratic developments under Erdoğan’s rule. So they may snarl at last year’s education reforms or the current project to build a mosque in Taksim Square, but they miss Erdoğan’s systematic crackdowns on free speech, press, and association.
I cite Turkey as an example because the decade of AK Party rule has contained policy approaches that confounded critics. In the early 2000s, Kemalist and secularist critics invoked fears that AK Party would impose a radical ideology on the country. Erdoğan and President Gül stymied criticism by pursuing, among other policies, EU accession—the centerpiece of Kemalist and liberal dreams for Turkey. When the AK Party did pursue some conservative domestic policies, the earlier conflation of Islamist identity and anti-liberalism robbed opponents of clarity in their criticisms.
Similarly, the early moments of AK Party’s authoritarian creep coincided with a period in which Turkey’s foreign policy was becoming deeply internationalist and aligned with the West. In 2007 and 2008, Turkey spearheaded mediation efforts between Israel and Syria, and between Serbia and Bosnia. In 2009, Istanbul hosted the Alliance of Civilization. In 2010, a former Turkish MP served as president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. At the same time, in 2010, the government levied punitive fines on Doğan Holding, an AK Party critic. By 2011, Turkey already imprisoned journalists in alarming numbers. Erdoğan and other government officials have filed suit and won judgments against individuals who “insult” them. The Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials mutated in recent years from legitimate investigations to score-settling efforts to crush opposition voices. Here again, arguments about Erdoğan’s nefarious Islamism were easily brushed aside, and—worse—masked some crude anti-democratic domestic developments.
Yesterday in The Atlantic, Trager expanded upon the previous day’s post and broadened the argument. He argued that Morsi’s domestic power grab suggested that after the Brotherhood’s domestic power is consolidated, Morsi would construct a conservative Islamist foreign policy. As evidence, he pointed to a series of distressing statements by top Muslim Brotherhood officials.
Prime Minister Erdoğan has also made distressing statements of late, as Michael has discussed in previous posts. He’s called Israel a terrorist state and claimed that rocket fire is a legitimate means of resistance. Turkey observers recognize that while these statements are odious—and likely detrimental to Turkey’s foreign policy standing—they may also serve a more complex purpose than simply representing the Prime Minister’s foreign policy beliefs.
I note these pairs of similarities to make a relatively simple point. The number of world leaders with Islamist backgrounds has increased in the post-Arab Uprisings world. Funneling analysis of their domestic and foreign policy actions through the lens of their radical Islamist ideology may, at times, inhibit the ability to understand not only why these leaders act in particular ways but also how these leaders may act in the future. A strict focus on their Islamist identities may also overlook actions that are deeply problematic but do not naturally fit into a discourse of Islamist creep. This has certainly been the case with Turkey.
Trager is very knowledgeable about Egypt, and thus I defer to him and other analysts to continue informing those of us for whom Egypt is an interest but not a specialty. However, nuance in interpreting not only what has happened but also why it has happened remains crucial.
Pointing Out The Obvious On Turkish-Israeli Reconciliation
November 26, 2012 § 8 Comments
Like clockwork every 6-12 months, this weekend brought the now familiar news story informing us that Turkey and Israel are holding secret talks aimed at reconciling. As usual, this one has all of the elements that we’ve come to expect: backchannel negotiations between relatively powerless envoys, breathless claims that the two sides are not that far apart despite all evidence to the contrary, leaks from one side or the other that have everything to do with domestic politics and absolutely nothing to do with the two countries’ relationship, and a political situation at the top that leaves the talks destined to fail. My reaction is the same this time as it has been every other time, which is that the talks have as much chance of succeeding as Dick Morris does of getting a political prediction right. One of these times I am going to be wrong, but let me explain why I don’t think today is going to be that day.
First, the fundamentals of the situation have not changed. Turkey is still making three demands: an apology over the deaths of nine Turkish citizens aboard the Mavi Marmara, compensation for their families, and an end to the Gaza blockade. It is this last one that is the sticking point, since Israel has no intention of ending its enforcement of the Gaza blockade, particularly since the UN Palmer Commission ruled that the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is legal under international law. Israel also feels that the blockade is none of Turkey’s business, anymore than it would be Israel’s business to insist that Turkey undertake a more lenient policy toward the PKK as a condition of resuming ties. Ahmet Davutoğlu reiterated on Sunday, however, that Turkey’s three demands are not subject to negotiation and thus unless a creative solution can be found to break this impasse (more on this below), these talks will meet the same fate as their forebears.
Second, when Feridun Sinirlioğlu and Yosef Chiechanover worked out language over an apology in the summer of 2011, it was ultimately scuttled when Bibi Netanyahu decided that Avigdor Lieberman’s hardline position against an apology presented too much of a political threat to him. Netanyahu was afraid that Lieberman would hammer him from the right if he apologized for the IDF’s actions, so the whole thing went nowhere. Fast forward to November 2012, and Lieberman is now even more powerful than he was two summers ago since Likud and his own Yisrael Beiteinu party are running in the January elections on a joint list. If Lieberman had the power to sabotage even a partial agreement over the language of an apology back when he was a much derided and often ignored foreign minister, his opposition this time will make the entire thing a non-starter.
Third, the January 22 election makes the timing of this almost impossible to pull off. The objections to issuing an apology and compensation for the Mavi Marmara come from Netanyahu’s right, and in the aftermath of Operation Pillar of Cloud, rightwing nationalist parties are polling much stronger than they were before. One of the latest polls has Jewish Home and National Union at 13 seats and Strong Israel at 4 seats, and while those parties can be expected to join a Likud-led coalition after the election, Netanyahu cannot afford to have them attacking him from the right before the election, even if their support wanes (which is likely). Making concessions to Turkey plays right into their hands, and it is something that the ever-cautious Netanyahu will be loathe to do.
Finally, and this last one cannot be stressed enough, Prime Minister Erdoğan’s rhetoric during the Gaza operation was so over the top and outside the lines of acceptable discourse and basic civility that no government would be able to just set that aside and continue along as if nothing happened, irrespective of what the status of the negotiations was before Israel launched Pillar of Cloud. Calling Israel a terrorist state of baby killers and denying that thousands of rockets being launched at civilians creates any right to self defense is the kind of thing that is tough to move past. If Erdoğan thinks that Israel is going to come and plead with Turkey to reconcile after his tirade, then his grasp of how governments operate is, to put it delicately, less than sound.
It’s pretty clear that the sudden leaking of these talks is coming from the Turkish side as part of Ankara’s effort to demonstrate its relevance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One cannot help but note the amateurish display of Erdoğan originally stating that there are zero contacts between Israel and Turkey to then have Davutoğlu claim a few days later that Turkey was “actively involved” in trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and that Ankara and Jerusalem were talking as part of that involvement. The fact that Turkey has essentially made itself irrelevant when it comes to anything involving Israel has been widely noted and the absurdity of Erdoğan’s positions is being criticized by Turks as well. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu are now furiously trying to spin the ceasefire as partly a Turkish achievement, but that is only believable insofar as it can be demonstrated that Turkey has any sway left at all with the Israelis. Hence the timing of this leak and Erdoğan letting it slip that Mossad head Tamir Pardo and MIT chief Hakan Fidan met in Cairo. All of a sudden, claiming that Turkey has absolutely no contacts with Israel has become a political loser and a source of criticism, and so the Turkish government is now trying to make it seem as if reconciliation is a possibility when the reality is that rapprochement between the two sides remains a distant dream given how things currently stand.
All this aside, there seems to me to be an obvious out here. As I mentioned above, the real long term sticking point here is the demand that Israel end the Gaza blockade, but the imprecise language makes this a point that can easily be massaged. Israel is not going to end its naval blockade, particularly given the renewed focus on Iranian missiles that are being shipped to Sudan rather than directly to Gaza in an effort to avoid the Israeli navy. There is also, however, the land blockade that is enforced by both Israel and Egypt, and if Israel and Egypt jointly loosen restrictions on the land crossings to allow more goods in and out of Gaza, then Israel and Turkey can both reasonably claim victory, and it might pave the way for the countries to make up. Unless something changes though, feel free to ignore any and all news reports about secret talks and back channel negotiations between Ankara and Jerusalem.
