Turkey

This article was originally published here on the American Interest’s website on Tuesday, April 7, 2015.  It is eight weeks before Turkey’s general elections, the end of a stretch that has lasted a little more than a year during which Turks will have gone to the polls three times to elect their Mayors, President, and now legislators. The extended electoral season, made difficult by Turkey’s polarization, has not dampened the Istanbul-Ankara elite’s appetite for rank speculation, however. In years past, much of this chatter centered on parties and politicians who were going to save Turkey from whatever crisis of governance had befallen the country. There was the businessman Cem Uzan and his Youth Party in 2002; the dream team of Ismail Cem and Kemal Dervis, who were going to lead the New Turkey Party to victory also in 2002; Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the man to reverse the slide of the Republican People’s Party into the party of Izmir and certain Istanbul neighborhoods; and, of course, Abdullah Gul, the man to wrest control of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) from Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Uzan, however, was convicted of fraud in the United States and now lives in France, the New Turkey Party received a paltry 1.2 percent of the vote, Kilicdaroglu has presided over one defeat after the next, and Gul moved quietly from Ankara’s Cankaya Palace to Istanbul, where he seems to be enjoying retirement. So much for saving Turkey. As this year’s vote approaches, speculation has focused not on a would-be charismatic leader riding to the rescue, but rather on the relationship between Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and what it means for the future of Turkish politics. Continue reading here...

With all the hubbub over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s visit to New York City this week was almost entirely overlooked in the United States. Turkey’s opposition press—or what is left of it—is pretty much convinced that Davutoglu is not visiting Washington because he is not welcome here. That seems unlikely. No matter the discord between Washington and Ankara over the fight against the Islamic State, how to deal with Egypt, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and Turkey’s rollback of civil and political rights, the Turkish prime minister (regardless of who holds the position) is important enough to rate a meeting. Then again, it is possible that senior American officials are too busy with ongoing Iran negotiations, the war against ISIS, and the crisis in Ukraine to spare the time for Turkey’s head of government. Everyone in Washington knows that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wields all the power, making a meeting with Davutoglu more of a diplomatic obligation than an opportunity to get things done. Add to this the fact that Davutoglu is not well liked in Washington and the Turkish pundits just may be onto something. Davutoglu will be busy in New York, however, meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, attending a United Nations forum on gender equality, and speaking to corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Importantly, Davutoglu also has Mehmet Simsek, the minister of finance, and Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, who is responsible for the economy, in tow for meetings with international investors. According to Joe Parkinson and Emre Peker of the Wall Street Journal, the trio met with officials from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to assure them that they need not worry about Turkey’s financial management. Speaking of Citigroup, on Thursday, the firm announced it was exiting its 2007 investment in Akbank—one of the largest financial institutions in Turkey—and in the process taking an $800 million loss. Citi, which has operated in Turkey since 1975, will continue to operate Citibank AS that services corporate and commercial clients in the country. The sale of its stake in Akbank is, according to Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat, part of an overall strategy to focus on its “core business.” Fair enough, but the divestment also comes at a time when Standard & Poor’s issued a negative rating on Turkish banks. According to Today’s Zaman, S&P cited the “potential for political risks, or the perception of it, to directly or indirectly spillover into the financial system.” Here S&P was referring directly to the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund’s—Turkey’s equivalent of the Federal Deposit Insurance Company—seizure of a majority of Bank Asya’s preferred stock. Turkey’s bank regulators charge that Bank Asya’s operations made it difficult to conduct an audit of its operations. A bank operating without full transparency? That does seem like a good reason to takeover a bank thereby protecting investors and depositors. Turkey’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) deserves credit for its vigilance. Yet what is the “political risk” that worries S&P so much that it has gone sour on Turkish banks, once an attractive investment? Well, it turns out that Bank Asya’s management and its major investors are close to the Gulen movement, which has been on the losing end of a struggle with President Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) that broke into the open in December 2013. The Gulenists are believed to be behind leaks to the press that implicated senior members of the AKP as well as President Erdogan and his family in various corruption schemes. Erdogan subsequently vowed to make the Gulenists pay a price for these allegations, leading to the jailing of pro-Gulenist journalists, pressure on Gulenist business leaders, and purges of the bureaucracy. Clearly, S&P believes that the action against Bank Asya was politically motivated in order to further damage the Gulenists. This seems entirely plausible. In 2009, Erdogan and the AKP used the tax authority to hand the Dogan Media Group a $2 billion fine when its news outlets reported on potential corruption within an AKP-affiliated charity in Europe. More recently, Koc Holdings has faced what seem to be politically motivated lawsuits. (Full disclosure: Mustafa Koc, chairman of Koc Holdings, is on CFR’s Global Board of Advisors). The government’s alleged effort to “bankrupt Bank Asya,” as some in the Turkish press have charged, is not the only political risk that is damaging the Turkish economy. Both Turkish and Western journalists have noted President Erdogan’s efforts over the past year or so to compromise the independence of Turkey’s Central Bank. Part of Erdogan’s success has been economic growth—or the perception of it—within Turkey’s middle class, which has felt richer during the AKP era. With the feeling of newfound wealth, middle class Turks have come to use (and abuse) credit for the first time in their lives. Low interest rates help to keep the economy growing, which makes Turks feel wealthier, resulting in more consumer spending and AKP electoral victories. Even as the lira depreciated and Economics 101 calls for a hike in the interest rate to avoid inflation and other deleterious effects of a falling currency, Erdogan has insisted on low interest rates. He had to accept a sharp increase in the interbank lending rate in January 2014. This helped avoid a currency crisis in Turkey and across emerging markets. Once the threat of that crisis passed in April 2014, however, Erdogan sought lower interests rates once again, cajoling the Central Bank to reverse course. Since last December the bank has cut interest rates twice, despite a currency in free fall, while Erdem Basci, the governor of the Central Bank, tries to beat back attacks on him and the bank from the AKP, which wants lower interest rates before the June 7 parliamentary elections. It seems that after all of Erdogan’s criticisms, he is in fact the “interest rate lobby.” If Davutoglu’s meetings with bankers in New York do not go well, Turkey’s political leaders will have only themselves to blame, though they will likely still blame the aforementioned interest rate lobby or Zionists or Zionist bankers or international Zionist bankers in cahoots with “Pennsylvania”—a reference to Fetullah Gulen who lives there. As with everything else in Turkey these days, Ankara is willing to put the long-term health of the economy at risk so long as it serves the political interests of the AKP and President Erdogan.

Erik Tillman from DePaul University responded to my recent piece on Politico.com. It is well worth a read. Recent events have spawned a number of articles analyzing Turkey’s current political situation. Having been awakened by events of the past two years to the observation that Turkey is not quite a model Muslim democracy, Western analysts are now instead debating whether Turkey can any longer be considered a democracy at all, and what these developments suggest about Turkey’s future. At one end of the spectrum are analyses that treat these recent developments as a case of democratic regression. A recent review essay by Larry Diamond suggests that Turkey reached a tipping point in 2014, while a column by Thomas Friedman notes that “it is really hard” to call Turkey democratic anymore. The language of “democratic regression” suggests that Turkey is at least a borderline democracy. One can also find genuinely naïve analyses suggesting that the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has only a few “overreactions” marring its otherwise “astounding” record. At the other end of the analytical spectrum, Steven Cook has recently published a provocative article claiming that Turkey’s situation is worse than most outside observers think. Describing Erdogan as “the sun around which all Turkish politics revolve,” Cook argues that Turkey has come to resemble the patrimonial dictatorships of many Middle Eastern states “in which neither individuals nor state organizations like the military or judiciary can check the ruler’s powers, and support for the system is generally narrow, often based on family, ethnic group or region.” This article is important, not least because it challenges Western complacency about the degree to which Turkish democracy has been undermined and the dangers that this poses to Western interests in the volatile Middle East. And its clear-eyed argument challenges observers of Turkish politics to think clearly about what (if any) prospects for democracy remain in the near-term. I offer a different interpretation that falls somewhere between these rival views. Most importantly, I share Cook’s belief that Turkey is no longer democratic. However, I argue that the presence of a large opposition and of nominally democratic institutions continue to place important constraints on Erdogan’s exercise of power. I argue that Turkey is best described as an example of competitive authoritarianism rather than patrimonialism. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way define competitive authoritarianism as a system in which “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising power,” but routine abuses of democratic institutions and practices by the incumbents “are both frequent enough and serious enough to create an uneven playing field between government and opposition.” Politics operates through nominally democratic institutions (i.e., free media, institutional checks on power, elections), but the rulers have used both formal and informal methods to corrupt and undermine these institutions to their advantage. However, and this is an important caveat, the rulers are not sufficiently powerful to eliminate these constraints on their power altogether. Thus, Turkey still has opposition print and television media outlets (though fewer than a decade ago), the judiciary and the Central Bank occasionally still act independently of Erdogan’s will, and opposition parties and civil society groups still vigorously (if not always effectively) contest elections and protest government actions. Recent developments illustrate the limitations to Erdogan’s personalization of power thus far. First, there is the electoral record. Given his Justice and Development Party’s (or AKP) extensive control of state resources and the media, it is surprising that only on one occasion has he or his party topped fifty percent of the national vote in an election. These election results matter. Despite the AKP’s landslide win in the 2011 general elections, it did not secure a large enough seat share in parliament (330 of the 550 seats) to propose a new constitution without support from the opposition. Since then, its popular support has plateaued in the range of forty-five to fifty percent. A related development is the increasingly regular mass protests to Erdogan’s rule. Starting with the Gezi Park protests of May/June 2013, a new wave of protests seems to occur every six to nine months. The most recent wave started recently in response to the brutal murder of a young woman in the city of Mersin, which sparked criticism about the government’s policy toward women’s rights. Though none of these protests has forced Erdogan into concessions (quite the opposite), efforts to suppress them are costly to his government and its image. Finally, Erdogan’s personalization of power remains a mixture of formal legal changes to eliminate institutional constraints and informal abuses of those constraints. His decision to chair a cabinet meeting in January was a good illustration as it was unclear whether this will become a pattern. While he has centralized the government’s control over the judiciary and the media, he still faces constraints. Occasionally, court decisions go against him. His efforts to pressure the Central Bank into deep interest rate cuts in February were only partially successful. And efforts to ban social media use by opposition supporters proved ineffective. In this respect, comparisons to Vladimir Putin’s Russia are appropriate, though Turkey is arguably not as personalized. This distinction between competitive authoritarianism and patrimonialism is important when one considers Turkey’s future trajectory. Competitive authoritarianism is an unstable arrangement, which largely reflects the inability of either the government or the opposition to fully impose its preferred rules of the game. Eventually, the government either succeeds at centralizing its power—creating a genuinely authoritarian state—or the opposition forces concessions or gains power itself. By contrast, patrimonialism would describe a consolidated authoritarian regime in which there is genuinely no opportunity for opponents to block Erdogan’s ambitions through formal institutional means. Consider the upcoming June 2015 parliamentary elections. There are two targets for the AKP. If the party gains 330 seats, it can propose a constitution for a referendum without opposition support. With 367 votes, it can pass a new constitution without the need for a referendum. If the AKP have anything less than 330 seats, then it would need (as it does now) support from some part of the opposition to propose a new constitution, which it has evidently not received thus far. Erdogan has spoken frequently of his desire to create a new “presidential” system that will formalize greater powers for himself and move Turkey further towards the sort of patrimonalism that Cook describes. What will happen if the AKP fails to obtain 330 seats, as in 2011? Erdogan can continue to centralize power through the legislative process (as with the judicial bill in 2014 and the presently debated security law) and he can also continue to centralize his power through informal means. Either approach is necessarily more limited and provides more blocking opportunities for the opposition. However, he will be unable to institutionalize the “presidential” system that he desires, leaving open avenues for opposition to block his actions. Given Turkey’s bizarre electoral laws, the most important question in this election will not be whether the AKP will win by a large margin (they will), but whether the third of Turkey’s opposition parties—the People’s Democratic Party (HDP)—can win ten percent of the national vote and thus obtain seats in parliament. If they do, it is highly unlikely that the AKP will gain 330 seats. If the HDP fall short of ten percent, then the AKP will easily secure 330. (As an aside, this would suggest that areas of strong HDP support would be the most tempting targets for localized electoral fraud). As a concluding thought, I would like to suggest a closer consideration of the means through which Erdogan has centralized his power and some ways in which they might be more constrained than we would think. There are various mechanisms at work, which may in turn suggest alternative possibilities for resisting further personalization. First, he has sought to undermine the formal independent powers of rival institutions, such as the military, the judiciary, and the intelligence services. This is the most durable and significant form of personalization. Second, he has infringed upon the powers of these institutions by informal means—such as by chairing a cabinet meeting or purging institutions such as the police or judiciary of unfriendly members. Third, single-party control for over a decade has allowed Erdogan and the AKP to “pack” institutions with loyalists. Thus, even nominally independent institutions may not check his power simply because their members share his ambitions. Fourth, a divided opposition has allowed Erdogan to parlay the support of only half of the population into largely unrivaled political control. This is the result of a combination of electoral math, which hurts smaller parties, and the ideological gulf between the three opposition parties, which often precludes closer cooperation. These final three means of personalization are more contingent, with each being subject to reversal as circumstances change. For example, the opposition could eventually coalesce effectively to defeat Erdogan or the AKP, or continued personalization could lead the AKP members within parliament or the judiciary to attempt to obstruct him. In summary, Cook’s article, “Emperor Erdogan,” is an important warning to Western readers about just how personalized the regime has become. I suggest that it is probably not that personalized…yet. What should be clear is that Turkey has fallen below any standard threshold of democracy. While there are good reasons to be optimistic about Turkey’s long-term (i.e., post-Erdogan) democratic future, its medium-term future is more likely to veer somewhere between the competitive authoritarianism that I describe and the patrimonialism that Cook describes.

Ismet Berkan examines how Turkey’s upcoming parliamentary elections might affect the relationship between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Tom Stevenson takes a look at Egypt’s prisons, finding them to be a microcosm of Egyptian society. Muna Alfuzai argues that it is time for the international community and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to find a negotiated settlement to the Syrian civil war.

This article was originally published here on Politico.com on Tuesday, February 3, 2015. Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did something so outrageous he went viral. On January 12, Erdogan was photographed at the bottom of a grand staircase in his new mega-palace with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Behind them were 16 men wearing military garb celebrating pre-Ottoman Turkic and Ottoman-era warriors. From the picture it was unclear whether Abbas looked so painfully uncomfortable because he was meeting one of the leading patrons of his archrival Hamas or because of the awkward pageant unfolding around him that suggested he was standing next to the natural successor to the Ottoman sultans. Social media went into high snark over the photo, with hundreds of tweets and retweets referencing everything from the movie Night at the Museum to the ultimate geek game, Dungeons & Dragons. Like the photos of Kim Kardashian’s derriere, the Erdogan-royal-guard picture continues to ricochet around the Internet. Everyone seems to be having a good laugh at the Turkish president’s expense, but in fact the picture reveals much about the disturbingly authoritarian trajectory of Turkish politics. Tayyip Erdogan is not Saddam Hussein or Bashar Assad, but he has become the sun around which all Turkish politics revolve. He has even cultivated a cult of personality. During the big nationwide rallies in the summer of 2013 called to counter the Gezi Park protests, many of his supporters came in Erdogan masks, T-shirts and scarves. For 40 Turkish liras—about $16—demonstrators could purchase a carpet with Erdogan’s profile woven in. Continue reading here...

Since the outbreak of the Gezi Park protests, which began in May 2013, there has been an inordinate amount of commentary in the newspapers of record, opinion magazines, policy journals, and blogs about Turkey. The vast majority of it has been overwhelmingly negative. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have responded in a fairly typical fashion: They have sought to mint nationalist political gold from this bad press. In a calculated effort to derive the most political benefit from a cascade of critical editorials and articles, the Turkish government has vowed to fight what it considers to be an international smear campaign. The Turks deserve a lot of criticism, but to be fair, there is also a good deal of it that is either the result of malign intent or ignorance. In the interest of good analysis, it is important to understand the issues about which the Turks can be fairly criticized and those where assailing them does not make a lot of sense. Let’s begin with the topics about which it is acceptable to criticize Turkey: Erdogan’s thuggish approach to politics—This should be self-evident by now, but it has become clear since 2008 or so that the president governs the Turkish population that supports him and intimidates the rest. Erdogan and the AKP have routinely used the power of the Turkish state to intimidate detractors, using the tax authorities, courts, and police to strike fear into the hearts of opponents. He has also used government contracts—especially in the construction industry—as a way to co-opt business interests and then force firms to buy media properties, ensuring good coverage of the party and the president. If it all sounds Corleone-esqe, it is. As an aside, to say “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” in Turkish is: Ona reddedemeyeceği bir teklifte bulunacağım. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression—This too should be self-evident to anyone even half paying attention to Turkish politics. The recent arrests of journalists, editors, and even soap opera producers reinforces the fact that under Erdogan and the AKP, Turkey’s political trajectory is clearly authoritarian. The fact that the people detained were Gulenists—whose commitment to democracy has not always been without question—should not make a difference. Principle is principle. Anti-Americanism—This goes for the entire Turkish political establishment, including the opposition, the press, Kemalist elites, and big businesses, recognizing, of course, that there is overlap among these groups. As my friend and teacher Henri Barkey has often noted, no one in Turkey has ever publicly defended Ankara’s relationship with Washington. The relationship between the United States and Turkey has often been difficult—the Johnson letter of 1964 and the 1974 arms embargo being tow excellent examples—and there have been times when Washington has done things that directly and negatively affected Turkish security, such as Operation Iraq Freedom. Moreover, there is currently a difference of opinion on what to do with the Assad regime. Still, Washington has stood with Turkey on a variety of important issues ranging from PKK terrorism (including the 1999 apprehension of Abdullah Ocalan), EU membership, and the Armenian genocide, and it has never pushed the Turks to resolve the Cyprus issue. For all this, the Turkish elite traffic in some pretty awful anti-Americanism. Anti-Semitism—It is pretty clear that the AKP has fostered a new wave of anti-Semitism in Turkey. When he was in New York for last fall’s UN General Assembly meetings, President Erdogan expressed disappointment at being called an anti-Semite. He blamed it on the international media, claiming that he does not hate Jews, but reserves the right to criticize Israel for what President Erdogan believes to be war crimes. Fair enough, but there is too much Hitler lust coming from Erdogan, AKP officials, and their hangers-on in the press to make the “don’t confuse my ire toward Israel for Jew-hatred” to be credible. If anyone thinks that the opposition is any better, they should think again. Erdogan and his people got all the press attention for their bloodcurdling anti-Semitism, but the Republican People’s Party, the National Movement Party, and important elements in the mainstream press traffic in this filth as well. The AKP’s support for Hamas—As I have written before, and as Jonathan Schanzer and David Weinberg have exposed more recently, the AKP has a blind spot for Hamas, believing that the Turkish Islamist experience is somehow parallel to that of Palestinian terrorists. I am not aware that the AKP or any of its predecessor parties condone bombing buses and cafes. Still, Erdogan believes that the fundamental unfairness with which Hamas has been treated, especially after it won an election in early 2006, and the pressure the organization is under from Israel, the Europeans, and the United States is similar to what the AKP and its predecessors had to endure in the context of radical Kemalist secularism. It is all rather strange until you read the work of Belul Ozkan, who was a student of the former foreign minister and current prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. Belul explicates the Davutoglu and the AKP worldview, which in brief believes that Turkey’s future is as a Muslim power and that Ankara must develop good ties with Islamist movements, including Hamas, around the region. Iran—The Turks helped weaken the West’s position on Iran’s nuclear development. In 2010, Erdogan went to Tehran and blessed the program, and in the same year Davutoglu hammered out the Turkish-Brazilian-Iranian Tehran Research Reactor Agreement. Ankara has turned the other way to pervasive sanctions-busting, and in a fit of pique at the Israeli government, Erdogan blew some of Israel’s intelligence assets in Iran. Syria and extremist groups—Over the weekend, the Turkish military accused the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (known as MIT) of shipping weapons to al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria. Hakan Fidan, one of President Erdogan’s most trusted advisors, runs MIT. Need I say more? It goes without saying that if these allegations prove to be true, the United States would be remiss if it did not take action against Ankara for this egregious violation of a norm American officials have worked hard to establish since the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Then again, they would also have to take action against a variety of other allies including Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. All that said, it is not acceptable to criticize Turkey for the following: Pursuing its own national security interests—The paradigmatic case here is Kobani. The Turks took a lot of heat for parking a few tanks within sight of the town this summer and then doing nothing to help the Kurds caught admist the ISIS onslaught. It made for very bad pictures, but the Turks have had good reasons to stay out of the Kobani fight and more generally resist American strategy in Iraq and Syria. It is worth repeating that (a) the Turks are wary of Kurdish nationalism and the PYD, the Syrian-Kurdish version of the PKK which has waged war on Turkey since 1994, (b) Turkey borders Syria and Iraq and so taking on ISIS in Kobani, thereby helping Ankara’s Kurdish enemy, would open Turkish cities up to retaliation by the so-called Islamic State, and (c) the Turks believe the problem is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and so will not fully commit to the anti-ISIS effort until there is a strategy for dealing with Damascus. If you are sitting in Ankara, this is all makes sense and is perfectly consistent with Turkish national interests. You can make similarly good cases for Turkey’s energy relationship with Iran and trade ties with Russia. Palestinian-Israeli conflict—The Turkish political establishment is fair game on anti-Semitism, but not for criticism of Israel. The Israelis have a lot to answer for in their treatment of the Palestinians under occupation, including Gaza. In addition, any objective reading of the current situation indicates that the Israeli government is neither capable of nor interested in a serious negotiation with the Palestinian Authority and have done much to make the “there is no partner for peace” narrative a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before the hate mail starts pouring in, this is not to excuse the perfidy of Hamas (and Turkish support for it) and the corrupt, weak-minded, double-dealing of the Palestinian Authority. Turkey’s approach to Egypt—Given Turkey’s history of military interventions, President Erdogan’s arrest and detention in 1998, and the AKP’s vision of Turkey as the leading Muslim power, it is perfectly reasonable for Ankara to assail Egypt’s July 2013 coup and the political process that unfolded after it. The very fact that Ankara’s stance has contributed to Turkey’s isolation in the region is clearly less important for President Erdogan than both principle and the domestic political benefit he gains from the perception that he is upholding democratic ideals and protecting Muslims. Turkey and NATO—It is hard to fault Turkey for not believing that NATO will come to its rescue. It is true that NATO Patriot missile batteries are deployed along the Syrian-Turkish border, but this is a symbolic show of force in response to what is basically a nonexistent threat. In other words, it does not cost NATO anything. The Turks are likely correct that if there was any significant spillover from Iraq and Syria into Turkey, Brussels would likely signal that the Turks are on their own. That’s probably fine given the Turks’ profound mistrust of foreign forces on Turkish soil. Remember the aftermath of World War I? You don’t? Well, the Turks do. Wanting regime change in Syria—Bashar al-Assad burned Prime Minister Davutoglu, embarrassed President Erdogan, has killed 206,603 people, and driven 1.5 million Syrians into Turkey. Of course, they want him to go. The problem for Ankara is that Turkey does not have the power to engage in regime change in Damascus and, absent an American intervention, the Turks have gotten themselves involved with extremist groups fighting Assad. No doubt I am missing some reasons to criticize Turkey and I have probably left out reasons to refrain from assailing Erdogan. Still, readers get the idea. The Turkish government has proven to be a problem in a variety of areas, let’s be clear about what they are.

I have been reluctant to comment on the attacks in Paris. As with a whole host of people who have popped up on television to make sense of last week’s violence, terrorism and European Muslim communities are not my areas of expertise. There has also been so much excellent written commentary on the topic that even if I were inclined to write, I would not have much to add. That said, I find the Turkish leadership’s response to the events in France striking. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu took part in the solidarity rally in Paris on Sunday, but among the near universal denunciation of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and subsequent killings at the Hyper Cache market, the Turkish reaction was disturbingly equivocal. In a public statement after the assault on the magazine, the foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu declared, “Terrorism and all types of Islamophobia perpetuate each other and we stand against this.” It is hard to disagree. Islamophobia, of which there is much in Europe and the United States, is bad, and terrorism is bad. Both are scourges that need to be fought, albeit in different ways. And while Davutoglu was more direct in his condemnation, cloaked in Cavusoglu’s outrage against anti-Muslim bias and terrorism, the foreign minister was saying something else entirely: The people targeted specifically in the Charlie Hebdo attack were Islamophobes who brought Cherif and Said Kouachi on themselves, producing a cycle of more Islamophobia and thus more violence. More broadly, Cavusoglu was signaling that the West is to blame for terror because it is irredeemably anti-Islam. Anyone who has been paying careful attention to Turkey understands that the foreign minister’s statement was calibrated and consistent with a message the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been hammering away at for some time. It is hard to tell whether the Turkish leadership believes what they are saying or whether it is invoked as a political strategy to keep the party’s core constituency mobilized. Either way it is dangerous. To be fair, the Turks are not completely wrong. Although American officials and members of Congress bristle at the idea, U.S. policy in the Middle East and South Asia has contributed to the radicalization of people who are at the other end—intentionally or otherwise—of the awesome firepower of the United States. For the Turks, however, the problem stops with the American/Western alleged war on Islam. They steadfastly refuse to recognize that there are some people like the Kouachi brothers, Amedy Coulibaly, and, apparently, Hayat Boumedienne who believe that they are engaged in a violent struggle in the name of Islam against what they believe to be unbelief, separate and apart from what the United States or the satirists of Charlie Hebdo are doing. Despite the outpouring of attention because 16 non-Muslims were murdered in Paris, the people who the Islamic State and al-Qaeda kill are overwhelmingly Muslim, including Ahmed Merabet, the police officer gunned down on the street in front of Charlie Hebdo’s offices. On the same day that the Kouachi brothers went on their rampage, al-Qaeda slaughtered thirty-seven people in the Yemeni capital Sanaa with a car bomb. Are all these dead Muslims Islamophobes? For the longest time, there was a belief among analysts, government officials in the United States and Europe, and academics that Turkey, imbued with a tolerant and mystical variant of Islam, was “a moderate voice” of the Muslim world, as condescending as that sounds. Turkish officials would often make this claim to their Western interlocutors when making the case for Turkey’s EU membership. Now, officials in Ankara—well, at least the foreign minister—implicitly justifies murder based on something that is real, Islamophobia, but not actually a factor in the Charlie Hebdo or Hyper Cache murders. The cartoonists and editors at Charlie Hebdo may have harbored animus for Muslims, but it is hard to make the case that they were uniquely anti-Islam. According to the always-excellent Arun Kapil, they seemed most of all to dislike the combination of authority and hypocrisy. If the magazine did not exist, the perpetrators would likely have found other targets to attack in their war against non-believers. It goes to show how far the AKP has moved Turkey from a self-proclaimed bastion of moderation and tolerance to impetuous and implicit defender of extremism by invoking Islamophobia. Contrast Foreign Minister Cavusoglu with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. It is true that the Egyptian strongman has a significant amount of blood on his hands and is decidedly not above blaming the West and the United States for a litany of his own self-made problems. However, on December 28, Sisi gave a speech before Egypt’s clerical establishment at the famous al-Azhar University in which he called for introspection about “Islamic thinking,” and not Islam per se, that strikes fear in the hearts of non-Muslims. It may very well be that historically Islam is no more violent than other religions, but Sisi’s call for critical examination—though it is not clear he fully grasps what he is implying—is a lot more productive than declaring the West made the Kouachi brothers do it.

Supporters of the governments of Egypt and Turkey have become adept at telling the world that under presidents Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan respectively, these countries are making progress toward more open and just political systems. In reality, they are nothing more than tin-pot dictatorships. Over the weekend, Egyptian authorities detained, questioned, and deported my friend and colleague Michele Dunne as she sought to enter Egypt at the invitation of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. Michele, who is the most well-respected Egypt analyst in Washington, has not been shy in her criticism of the Egyptian government. Not to be outdone, yesterday the Turks arrested 27 people including journalists, TV producers, and police commanders on terrorism charges. All of the detainees are either members or suspected members of the Gulen movement. Fethullah Gulen and his followers were at one time allied with Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), working together, for example, to subordinate the armed forces to civilian leaders, though at the expense of the rule of law and due process. In early 2013, a falling out over the government’s negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party erupted later that year into revelations about official corruption and other malfeasance at the highest levels of the AKP, which in turn became a sort of political death match between the two big men of Turkish politics. President Erdogan, secure after sweeping AKP victories in municipal elections and his own ascendancy to the presidency, is now exacting his revenge on the Gulenists. Though in some ways shocking, what happened to Michele in Egypt and to those detained in Turkey is not at all surprising given what has transpired in both countries since the summer of 2013: Number of those indicted and/or jailed for taking part in protests Egypt: 16,000 (est.) Turkey: 5,500 (est.) Number of protesters killed Egypt: 1,000-2,500 (est.) Turkey: 63 Number of protesters injured Egypt: 17,000 (est.) Turkey: 8,000-10,000 (est.) Passage of new laws targeting NGOs Egypt: Yes Turkey: Yes Passage of new laws restricting demonstrations Egypt: Yes Turkey: Yes Freedom House Press Freedom Ranking* Egypt: 155, Not Free Turkey: 134, Not Free Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index Ranking (2013)† Egypt: 135 Turkey: 93 World Bank Rule of Law Indicator (2013)‡ Egypt: 34.12 Turkey: 55.92 World Bank Governance Score (2013)# Egypt: -0.60 Turkey: 0.08 Despite all the official declarations of positive change in Egypt and Turkey, they rank below or close to countries like Bahrain, Jordan, Malaysia, Greece, and South Africa. You don’t even need to plumb various tables and indices, however, to understand that Sisi and Erdogan are overseeing remarkably similar politics, built on cults of personalities, manipulation, intimidation, fear, and violence. Sadly, that many Egyptians and Turks are willing to support this kind of governance out of either a desire for revenge or schadenfreude is, ultimately, shortsighted. In both Sisi’s Egypt and Erdogan’s Turkey, anyone could be next. That’s what happens in dictatorships. *Out of 197 countries. †Out of 167 countries. ‡Score out of 100. #Values range from -2.50 to +2.50.

Browse through Hossam Atef’s photo gallery, the photographer known as Antikka who recently made headlines with his latest project, “SpiderMan At Egypt.” Pinar Tremblay investigates the discriminatory effects of introducing Ottoman Turkish to the national curriculum. Joel Wing asks if militias in Iraq can be successfully integrated into the national security forces.

This article was originally published here on Politico.com on Thursday, November 27, 2014. Without fail every year, starting around November 10, my #Turkey Twitter feed is jammed with not just the latest news from Ankara and Istanbul, but also Auntie Jean’s turkey recipe and suggestions about how to deep fry the bird without blowing up your house. And every year, on behalf of Turks and Turkey scholars the world over, I plaintively ask the tweeting masses to change #Turkey to #Turkiye, the actual Turkish name for the country that borders Greece, Bulgaria, Iran, Iraq and Syria—alas, with no success. This year, however, basting and brining be damned, I am not going to make my annual plea. In an odd sort of way, #Turkey and #Turkiye have come together for me. That’s because after a mere 90 days as president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become the man who has eaten Turkey—the country. He is president and de facto prime minister, making him Turkey’s first “Primesident”—sort of like the political version of Turducken. Yet Erdogan’s powers run even further and deeper. He is also, effectively, the country’s foreign minister and chief judge, a prosecutor and big city mayor, university rector and father figure. There is nothing that better represents how Erdogan has gorged on Turkey than the president’s own newly unveiled Ak Saray, or White Palace, with its $350-$650 million price tag, 1,000 rooms and more than 2 million square feet. Erdogan was, of course, larger than life before he took the presidential oath of office in August. Continue reading here...

The relationship between the United States and Turkey has hit the skids. The controversy over Kobani has revealed deep fissures and deep mistrust between Washington and Ankara. It is true that U.S.-Turkish ties were never easy. Beyond the gauzy rhetoric of fighting and dying together in Korea and standing shoulder-to-shoulder to counter the Soviet threat, there was a war of words between President Lyndon Johnson and Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Inonu over Cyprus, and then after the Turks invaded the island in 1974, Washington imposed an arms embargo on Ankara. In between and even in the years after the United States lifted the sanctions on Turkey, mistrust was a constant feature of the relationship. No doubt some Turkey watchers will claim that if bilateral ties survived the difficult period of the 1960s and 1970s, there is no reason to believe that relations will be permanently impaired now, but that is a lazy argument. The factors that drove the strategic relationship—the Soviet Union, Middle East peacemaking, Turkey’s EU project, and soft landings in the Arab world—no longer exist. At the same time, the accumulated evidence from recent experience in Syria, Israel-Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq indicate that Washington and Ankara simply have different goals. Kobani, where the Turks have good reason to be reluctant to commit themselves to the fight, is a big strategic issue, as are the other conflicts roiling the Middle East that have similarly divided Washington and Ankara. These differences are frustrating for American policymakers, but they are the unfortunate reality of complex conflicts in a profoundly unsettled regional political environment. Policymakers and members of Congress could probably live with these circumstances if it did not seem that Ankara was going out of its way to poison the relationship in a variety of small ways that are irritating in isolation, but together have begun to take a toll on U.S.-Turkey relations. Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, not a single Turkish official has defended the bilateral relationship in Turkey publicly. It might have been hard for the Turks to champion their ties with the United States after the invasion of Iraq, but since 2007, and certainly after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Washington has sought to repair the relationship in a variety of important ways. These include real-time intelligence that helped the Turkish military target the terrorists of the PKK effectively, the investment in personal ties between the president and Turkish leaders, resistance to recognizing the massacres of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, intelligence sharing despite concerns about the way the Turks handle sensitive information, and a general unwillingness to censure Turkey for behavior that undermines American interests in the region from the Balkans to the Middle East. In return for the equanimity, pro-government journalists and AKP-affiliated intellectuals have taken every opportunity to unleash a torrent of criticism at the United States, mostly over Israel, but also concerning Syria and Egypt. Washington is not blameless in the maelstrom of the Middle East, but the Turks act as if they have offered wise counsel to Washington and are thus blameless when, in fact, Ankara’s policies have often contributed to the deepening of regional conflicts, especially Syria. While Ankara claims that U.S. bumbling is principally to blame for Syria’s descent into darkness, Turkish leaders privately beg Washington to save them from their own Syrian blunders. And what is it that the Turks would like the United States to do in Syria? Regime change. For the Turks, Bashar al-Assad is the wellspring of ISIS and ridding the world of Assad will bring an end to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his vision for a reconstructed caliphate. Never mind the circumstantial evidence of Ankara’s dalliances with ISIS or that the group existed for a decade before the Syrian uprising became a civil war, the Turkish policy prescription reveals just how little the Turks understand post-Iraq American politics as well as Syria. Back to the little things. On November 12, a group of Turks accosted five American sailors on shore leave in the Eminonu area of Istanbul. The sailors, who were not in uniform, were splattered with red paint as their assailants attempted to place hoods over their heads. The American servicemen acquitted themselves quite well during the assault, refraining from retaliation. In response, Turkish authorities merely brushed off the incident as the work of a small marginal group of activists and released them without serious charge. The incident demonstrates perfectly the double-game that the Turks play. They derive political benefit and international prestige from their NATO membership and strategic ties with the United States, but they don’t take their responsibilities as an ally seriously, such as providing access to the Incirlik airbase or protecting American servicemen enjoying the sights, sounds, and tastes of Istanbul. Of course, the Turks have always played this game, but in the context of their recent truculence and thinly veiled hostility toward Washington, it is hard to overlook. Many analysts of Turkey can make sophisticated arguments about how the combination of politics and history produce a reservoir of anti-Americanism that Turkish politicians ignore at their own peril. No doubt these claims are to a large extent accurate, but lately they have come to feel like excuses for Ankara. Turkey has no real interest in a partnership with the United States, which many of the ruling party’s intellectuals believe is waning. Moreover, Turkey’s grand pretensions to be a leading Muslim power are driving Ankara away from Washington. In the context of this big shift, the bilateral relationship is dying by a thousand slights. The Turks do not seem to care, but given their shoddy track record of understanding the changes in the Middle East, they may wake up one day to find that they are not a leading Muslim power, not a member of the EU, and not a model partner of the United States.