Turkey

There has been a lot of commentary and speculation about what is likely to happen in Turkey now that the country is past the March 30 municipal elections.  The Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) resounding tally—44 percent of voters chose the party’s candidates—has renewed questions whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will seek the presidency, about the disposition of the armed forces in Turkish society, and concerning the future of the Gulen movement.  There are also significant accusations of electoral fraud, especially in Ankara.  I have thoughts on all of these issues, but for the moment I will leave them to others.  All the recent attention lavished on Turkey as a result of last summer’s Gezi Park protests, the corruption scandal that broke last December, and now the municipal elections has me ruminating on how to write about the country. This may seem like excessive navel gazing to some, but the way in which analysts and journalists write about other countries (and their own) can have powerful political effects.  Ideas and images can become rooted and shape the way people view a given government or society.  The image of the “Terrible Turk,” for example, is a remnant of the late 15th century that lives on. Turkey is no different from other countries, of course: Check out the way the rest of the world portrays Americans.  But in some discrete ways Turkey seems particularly susceptible to clichés and misrepresentation.  One is geography, which leads to endless imagery of the country as “a bridge between East and West” (like fingernails on a chalkboard), another is religion and the fact that 99.8 percent of Turks are Muslims, which is always excellent fodder for discussions of the country’s “perennial kulturkampf between secularists and Islamists.” I have never understood why people writing in English tend to choose the German instead of just “culture war” nor why all pious Muslims are categorized in these tales as Islamists. Then there is the fact that Turkey is the inheritor of a great empire with a fascinating history and some seriously stunning architecture.  I mean, who would take a first look at the “city of 1,000 minarets” without their oriental juices flowing?  Bring on the kebap, water pipe, and harem. The Gezi Park protests last spring and Prime Minister Erdogan’s war on Twitter have added a whole new dimension to hoary cliché writing.  According to one Wall Street Journal dispatch last week, there is something called the “Gezi generation,” which is apparently made up of angry Turkish hipsters who congregate in the coolly gentrified Cihangir neighborhood of Istanbul and who tweet. This makes good copy, I guess, but it utterly fails to capture the diversity of the worldviews and goals of Gezi Park protesters, many of whom were well into middle age or older, pretty unhip looking, and did not seem to be firing off tweets.  For all the problems the Journal had capturing the complexities of contemporary Turkey, the New York Times’ Alan Cowell subjected his readers to one cheese ball platitude after another in, “Turkey Turns its Back on the E.U.” Here is a sampling: At the height of the Cold War, Turkey’s great landmass cemented its place in the Western alliance, its huge conscript army deployed across the sweeping expanse of Anatolia to safeguard NATO’s southeastern flank. I do not know how many times in my life I have read that sentence in one form or another, but Cowell was just warming up.  He the pivots to Turkey’s  “overlapping dilemmas” that are “brought into sharp relief” by—surprise—“ its geography”: While it straddles Europe and Asia, only a fraction of its soil lies west of the Bosporus that divides the two continents.  For all the boutiques and business of Istanbul that look west to Frankfurt and Milan, the country’s distant east surveys a much rougher neighborhood. Those two sentences tell us much more about what Cowell does not know about Turkey or the “distant east” than anything else, but he saves the best for last: While Western-looking, secular, middle-class Turks are frequently hostile to him, Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party still command the political bedrock among the working class and in the countryside where Islam—Turkey’s dominant faith—is strong. Never mind the fact that it is hard to talk about an urban-rural divide in Turkey any longer, but Cowell is telling his readers that Erdogan and the AKP keep winning elections because backward people respond to politicians based on faith and “Western-looking people” don’t.  No one would deny the ideological appeal of the AKP to pious Turks, yet Cowell neglects among other things that in the last decade under the Justice and Development Party’s stewardship, more people have healthcare, greater access to transportation, and jobs in addition to the development of an environment where they can express their religious identity openly without fear of persecution. Cowell does not know this so he falls back on what he imagines must be an explanation for Erdogan’s success—Islam. I did not spend the weekend marinating myself in Edward Said’s Orientalism, but Said is relevant here. Accusations of “orientalism” have become frequent among pro-AKP journalists and commentators in Turkey. It is usually deployed to delegitimize a perfectly legitimate criticism of Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP.  At the same time I understand why Turks might be put out by what is written about them.  Too many observers seem hard-wired to believe certain things about Turkey, notably that geography and religion are the destiny from/to which all else flows. Of course these factors matter, but they do not explain everything in Turkish politics and society.  To believe that is not to be an orientalist; it is to be ignorant.  

Michael Young on Patrick Seale’s struggle. Arun Kapil looks at the Turkish elections. Maged Atiya on Egypt’s forgotten man.    

Nader Bakkar says that harsh punishment, such as the recent wave of death sentences on Muslim Brotherhood members, is no way to combat radical takfiri ideology. Michael Koplow asks what will happen after the Turkish elections? A map showing who controls particular areas of Syria’s 19 border crossings, as well as territory inside Syria.

This article was originally published here on ForeignAffairs.com on Thursday, March 27, 2014.  Many observers, both in Turkey and abroad, believe that this is Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s moment to shine. In recent months, Turkey’s democracy has careened wildly off its democratic path, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resorted to increasingly authoritarian measures -- including a ban on access to Twitter and YouTube -- to suppress what he believes is an existential threat posed by his onetime ally Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic Turkish cleric who has followers in positions of influence throughout the government. Erdogan seems intent on trying to excise Gulenists from Turkish society entirely. Erdogan’s paranoia has also moved the AKP toward becoming an authoritarian cult of personality. This is where many Turks, Europeans, and Americans have hoped that Gul would step in to steer Turkey back onto a democratic course. In mid-February, Gunay Hilal Aygun, a columnist for the Gulen-affiliated Today’s Zaman, asked, “Will President Gul let the Turkish people down?” The Financial Times picked up on this theme a few weeks later when the editorial board called on Gul “to take a stand” against Erdogan. What these observers seem to want is for Gul to come down from the apolitical confines of his presidential office and directly challenge Erdogan for leadership of the AKP, with a promise of restoring the party’s original coalition, which included pious Muslims of all stripes, Kurds, secular liberals, and the business elite. These hopes aren’t entirely fanciful, but they are far too optimistic. In fact, they have fundamentally missed Gul’s broader reading of Turkish politics. Continue reading here...

“Twitter…schmitter,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reported to have said a few hours before a Turkish court gave the government legal writ to ban the micro-blogging service partially.  With Ankara’s actions came a torrent of Tweets from Turkish Tweeps in defiance of the prohibition, as well as an avalanche of commentary on the revolutionary nature of social media. Yawn.  This just an extension of the “Twitter revolution” meme that was going around at the time the Zine al Abidine Ben Ali was dumped in Tunisia, which was just the next evolution of commentary that began (in the mainstream) with a January 2009 New York Times Magazine article about Egypt’s Facebook activists.  There has been some good work out there on social media and some excellent analyses of what is happening in Turkey of course, but something is amiss.  No one has offered a convincing account for Erdogan’s behavior.  Why does he want to “eradicate Twitter” and what is he seeking to achieve by antagonizing a large portion of Turkey’s almost 6.1 million Twitter users (out of an estimated population of 81 million)? Various media outlets report that Erdogan is incensed over corruption scandal-related leaks via Twitter.  This is surely true, but it does not actually answer the questions raised above.  Others have suggested that he is isolated, surrounded by yes-men (and women) and thus he is not aware of the consequences of his actions.  It is clear that Erdogan is isolated, but that also is not the reason why he has taken action against Twitter.  In casual conversation some folks have wondered whether the Turkish prime minister has “lost it”—that perhaps as a result of illness, he is not of right mind.  This is the “out of explanations” explanation: when all else fails, speculate about psychological stability.  Erdogan is paranoid, but all good politicians are and he actually is among the few who has reason to be.  It strikes me that Erdogan has all of his faculties and despite living in a bubble where no one challenges him, he knows exactly what he is doing and he is pretty sure he understands the consequences. The prime minister is a shrewd and cunning cat.  His attack on Twitter is part of a political strategy that he has been pursuing since the Gezi Park protests shook Turkey last spring.  Erdogan is a great politician, but his strategy is fairly conventional and straightforward. Here is how it goes: He plays to his base, frames the issue as a plot among various outside and inside forces to bring Turkey to its knees, declares that he will not allow that to happen, and then emphasizes everything he and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has done for Turkey in the last eleven years.  Erdogan’s message in Turkey’s profoundly polarized political environment is a way to ensure that the bulk of his base never accepts his or the AKP’s culpability for anything. The fact that the prime minister is contributing to what seems to be a deep divide among Turks is all the better for Erdogan and his electoral prospects.  He will not be the first or the last politician to do something that is good for his narrow interests but is bad for society more generally. The prime minister’s adversaries cannot even count on international condemnation to shame Erdogan (he is shameless) or encourage him to rethink the proscription on Twitter. When the United States and the EU criticize Ankara, it helps Erdogan by giving his “interest-rate lobby-Zionist-U.S.-Ambassador Frank Ricciardone plot” a sense of plausibility among the people who love the prime minister.  It is easy for outsiders to wave their hands and dismiss this as conspiracy theorizing, but it is rather more complicated than that for Turks who have been reared on the idea that foreign powers want to undermine their country based on WWI and post-WWI history, as well as a variety of real and perceived international slights since.  Erdogan knows this, believes it, and thus cynically exploits it for his own political gain.  Of course the United States, Europeans, and good democrats everywhere should condemn the Turkish government’s attack on freedom of speech and expression, but it is also important to recognize the  limits of such  a move. Both the Gezi Park protests and the corruption scandal have weakened Erdogan. He is certainly acting that way.  Lashing out, threatening, holding mass rallies and now going after Twitter are all things a politician who was feeling particularly weak might do. Yet, it is precisely because Erdogan is not the master of Turkish politics in the same way he was a year ago that making a ruckus over Twitter, and in the process helping to secure his base and further divide the public, is a pretty good move.    

This article was originally published here on Politico.com on February 27, 2014, and  in the March/April 2014 issue of Politico on February 28, 2014 . In early April 2009, President Barack Obama made a high-profile visit to Turkey, where he gave an important, if often overlooked, address to the Turkish parliament. Obama moved the assembly with learned references to Turkey’s glorious Ottoman past and praise for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, since becoming prime minister in 2003, had overseen an array of constitutional reforms strengthening political parties, banning the death penalty, reinforcing personal freedoms and bringing the country’s coup-prone military to heel. Throughout his speech, Obama alluded both to Turkish democracy and the enduring alliance between Washington and Ankara—a friendship that grew so close Obama eventually named Erdogan a rare foreign leader with whom he had forged “bonds of trust.” The Bush administration had also hailed Erdogan and his party as a pathbreaking answer to the question very much on Western minds in the post-9/11 era: Is Islam compatible with democracy? But Obama seemed to hold Erdogan in special esteem; he essentially became Washington’s Chief Turkey Desk Officer, in a bromance that has fit with the administration’s strategic plans to make Turkey the centerpiece of its Middle East diplomacy. Erdogan didn’t make it easy for Obama; Turkey often still acted more like a frenemy than a friend. In May 2010, the country teamed up with Brazil to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran—but without approval from Washington, which scuttled the whole agreement. Weeks later, Turkey voted against a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran. Continue reading here...

Ahmet Erdi Ozturk says that the sphere of authority of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs should be redefined. A post from Cairobserver argues that Cairo has a strong potential for civic tourism, in which visitors come to see the city itself instead of only specific sites, that has not been tapped. Mohamad-Salah Omri discusses Tunisia’s recently approved constitution, claiming that it is important both for its content and for the process from which it resulted.

Flipboard.com’s  booklet of news related to press and media freedom across the Arab world. Turkey’s internet problem.  Reporters Without Borders worries about the lack of freedom of information in Libya and its effect on the prospects for democracy.

Mideastunes.com, a “search engine,” of sorts, for finding music from the Middle East. Jenna Krajeski profiles Tahribad-i Isyan, a Turkish rap group from Sulukule, Istanbul and discusses the urban development and minority experience that inspire their songs. Holly Dagres looks at Iranian hip-hop, and how artists there have adapted the genre to make it their own.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a stunningly gifted politician.  He can be thuggish, high-handed, painfully arrogant, but he also seems to have an innate sense of what makes many Turks tick and how to connect with them.  The Gezi Park protests that began last spring—and never really ended—brought tens of thousands of people out into the streets in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, as well as smaller demonstrations in other cities to denounce the Turkish leader and his AK Party, but Erdogan was able to muster hundreds of thousands of supporters in response.  At the time I wrote that Erdogan was weak and vulnerable precisely because the prime minister felt compelled to stage rallies to prove his popularity.  That piece seems to dovetail well with more recent articles wondering if the current corruption scandal roiling Turkey means the “end of Erdogan” or whether his days “are numbered.” I stand by everything I wrote in “The Strong Man at His Weakest,” but Erdogan is not going anywhere.  He may even be the prime minister again. That does not mean that the apparent slugfest has not damaged Erdogan, it certainly has. Yet these injuries (mostly self-inflicted) are offset by the fact that the prime minister’s opponents have some significant political disadvantages and constraints of their own.  It may not seem that way, but upon close inspection Tayyip Bey may very well ride out this scandal. It seems that everyone in Ankara and Washington is waiting for Turkish president Abdullah Gul to exploit the prime minister’s current problems and wrest control of the AKP.  This makes sense, Gul is an enormously appealing personality.  Like Erdogan, he is charismatic, but in an altogether different way.  Gul is the quieter, confident, more thoughtful and statesman-like of the two. I have met President Gul on a number of occasions and after each encounter, I’ve wanted to stay at the Cankaya Palace so that some of his wisdom and what can only be described as that inner Gul-ian centeredness and self-actualization could rub off on me.  (Those who have also had the privilege of meeting the Turkish president know exactly what I am talking about.) By all measures, Gul is popular among Turks.  Large and enthusiastic crowds turn out to greet him whenever he travels around the country, leading some observers to speculate that Turkish voters might be tired of Erdogan’s bombast in favor of a more understated leader like Gul. Finally, the president has signaled, albeit mostly implicitly, that he disapproves of Erdogan’s decidedly illiberal turn domestically and his undisciplined approach to the world. When the Gezi Park protests kicked into high-gear last spring one of my Turkey yodas wondered aloud whether the president had the stomach to fight Erdogan.  It’s a good question, though I suspect Gul’s been in a fair number of political brawls in his time.  Whether the president has guts is not the problem.  Gul is an important figure in Turkey and in the AKP—he was among the party’s founders in August 2001 and served as Justice and Development’s first prime minister while Erdogan remained banned from politics—but one wonders how broad and deep his support runs in the party.  Of government ministers, I count only one who has remained solidly in the Gul camp while others became Erdogan men and the party’s parliamentary caucus belongs to the prime minister. There have been stories coming out of Ankara about a steady stream of AKP notables making their way to Gul’s office to encourage him to enter the political arena when his term is up this summer and take on Erdogan. That is good news for Gul boosters, but I am not sure this pilgrimage adds up to that much politically.  It is true that leaders tend to wear out their welcome after a decade—give or take a few years—and there is a noticeable uptick in Erdogan-fatigue of late, compounded by the corruption scandal. Yet the prime minister’s eleven years in office combined with both his particular political style and the fact that Gul’s position places him above politics gives Erdogan a certain advantage. The AK party is vertically and horizontally integrated into political and economic life of the country.  Erdogan’s patronage networks have taken a hit recently and the press is getting a bit braver, but these are not necessarily fatal problems for the prime minister.  I do not mean to minimize his political problems nor the very real challenge that the corruption investigations pose to Erdogan’s mastery of the political arena, but the prime minister still has considerable resources at his disposal that Gul does not have, if only because the president by dint of the apolitical nature of his office has not been pulling the levers and making things happen since 2007 when he was elected to the post. In addition to weighing his chances in a fight with Erdogan, Gul has to calculate how much damage it would do to the AKP.  The party may have become an expression of Erdogan, but it is also Gul’s baby and the vehicle for the president’s own success and Turkey’s transformation.  More than anything else an Erdogan-Gul fight for political supremacy will do considerable damage to the AKP and up-end both men’s ambitions.  Some observers do not think this is necessarily a bad idea and that it might be good for Turkish democracy if the inevitable result of an AKP clash of titans is a second center-right party.  It could be, but these observers are not Abdullah Gul, who has an entirely different set of issues, incentives, and constraints to consider.  And anyway it is important to remember that the last time there were two viable center-right parties in Turkey—Dogru Yol and Anavatan—it did not have a salutary effect on democracy. Speaking of parties, there is a conventional wisdom emerging that the Republican People’s Party (known by the Turkish, CHP) may be able to take advantage of Erdogan’s troubles in the March 30 local elections, especially in Istanbul.   There is a ton of buzz about the party’s candidate for mayor of the Greater Istanbul Muncipality, Mustafa Sarigul.  I am perfectly willing to believe that Sarigul is a more viable candidate than the false political saviors of Turkey’s past, but I still have reservations that he has as much appeal in Istanbul as is widely assumed.  It seems that DC and European-based Turkey watchers are thinking like DC and European-based Turkey watchers instead of trying to understand how an average Istanbuli might look at this race. Let’s remember that the CHP’s left-of-center, European-style social democracy is a meaningless label. It’s primarily an elite affair that does not have much to offer anyone beyond its core 25 percent constituency that is located primarily along the coastal rim roughly running from Istanbul to Anatalya. The party made some sputtering attempts to make an issue of the growing divide between rich and poor in the last national election, but it is clearly the party of the upscale districts of Istanbul like Sisli—where Sarigul serves as mayor of the local municipality. If your average Turk of modest means surveys the last decade, they will no doubt point out that they now have running water, healthcare, transportation, and some money in their pockets.  While the CHP was fighting internally and complaining of the perfidy of Erdogan, the AKP was providing services that Turks need and in the process broadened its constituency. Why would average Istanbulis who have benefitted from the AKP years vote for Sarigul and a party that has been contemptuous of them for years?  The fact that the AKP and people close to the prime minister were recently revealed to be corrupt is not likely to be enough to throw the election to the CHP candidate because of Siragul’s own well known problems with corruption. All things being equal then, the AKP’s candidate—who is not Erdogan, but might as well be—is likely to get the nod from voters.  The wild card here is Fethullah Gulen, the cleric and theologian who commands a huge following in Turkey (from Pennsylvania).  The corruption scandal is widely believed to be part of a larger battle between Gulen and Erdogan over who is the biggest man in Turkish politics: Gulen is rumored to have struck a deal with CHP leaders to throw his support behind Sarigul in the elections. It would be a setback to Erdogan if he loses Istanbul, his hometown. A symbolic blow to be sure, but in order to divine the prime minister’s political future, analysts are going to have to take a hard look at the local elections returns from all over the country.  Even then, it might not tell us very much.  In 2009, AKP candidates for local positions collectively garnered 38.9 percent of the vote, which was an 8-percentage point decrease from the party’s totals in the 2007 national parliamentary election. It did not tell us anything about the AKP’s prospects because the party came roaring back in the 2011 parliamentary elections with 49.95 percent of the vote—the most ever for a Turkish political party since 1954. I can hear the screaming of every Turkey watcher from Washington to Brussels.  I can assure them, I recognize the significant differences between 2009/2011 and now.  My only points are that no one has any inkling about the likely outcome of a Turkish election until about 2 or 3 weeks before the polls open and don’t count out Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  He is too good a politician and his opponents have more challenges going into these elections than people realize. No one should be surprised if they wake up on March 31 and it is Erdogan for the win.