Turkey

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.  

This article was originally posted here on ForeignAffairs.com on Thursday, January 9, 2014.  In 1996, Ergun Ozbudun, a well-known and well-regarded Turkish academic, published an article in the Journal of Democracy called “Turkey: How Far from Consolidation?” Jumping off from the work of the political scientists Guillermo O’Donnell, Adam Przeworski, and Samuel Huntington, Ozbudun sought to examine the challenges to the development of consolidated democracy in Turkey. At the time Ozbudun was writing, Turkey had enjoyed multiparty politics since 1946 and had conducted 12 consecutive free and fair elections, and Turks had internalized democratic norms. But the country could still not be considered a consolidated democracy, a state of affairs in which democracy, has, in Przeworski’s words, “become the only game in town, when no one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions, when all the losers want to do is to try again within the same institutions under which they have lost.” Ozbudun and other analysts of the era identified four primary obstacles: the fragmentation of party politics, the influential role of the military, Islamism and the lack of elite convergence between Islamist politicians and their secular counterparts, and Kurdish nationalism. When, six years after Ozbudun’s article appeared, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power and launched a program of wide-ranging political reforms, observers held out hope that Turkey would overcome its problems. Yet for all the change that has come to the country in the decade since -- including to the normalization of the military’s role, the stabilization of party politics, and improvements in Kurds’ political, economic, and social status -- the Turkish political system remains precisely where it was when Ozbudun put pen to paper. Continue reading here...

AUC Librarian Mark Muehlhaeusler, who launched a new blog called Cairo Booklore, takes a look at Egyptian-Anglophone literature. Hernan del Valle discusses how political deadlock between rebel and government forces is failing to stop lethal Polio outbreaks in Syria. Burak Bekdil, writing for Hurriyet Daily News,  takes issue with the claim that Turkey is a "great Islamic democracy."

I remember sitting in the lobby of the Kempinski hotel in Cairo on a late afternoon in September 2011 chatting with an Egyptian friend and an American colleague when I became distracted and lost the train of the conversation.  I was hearing familiar sounds, but they were totally out of place.  In a few split desperate seconds, I asked myself, “Who?  What? Where?” until I regained my composure and thought, “Oh, that’s right...The Turks are here.”  In Cairo, where I am programmed to hear only Arabic or English, the out-of-place singsong of Turkish threw me momentarily.  This was the eve of what was billed as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s triumphant visit to Egypt and members of Turkey’s press corps were starting to fill up the capital’s hotels.  Huge posters with Erdogan’s visage and interwoven Egyptian and Turkish flags were placed around Cairo’s thoroughfares declaring “With United Hands for the Future.” It was a nice sentiment, but mutual enmity and strategic competition turned out to be the future of Egypt-Turkey relations.  Prime Minister Erdogan’s ongoing criticism of the July 3 coup d’etat and his continuing support for the Muslim Brotherhood are the immediate cause for the Egyptian decision to downgrade relations with Turkey, but this is a spat that has long been in the making. Critics of Prime Minister Erdogan will no doubt add the deterioration of Egypt-Turkey relations to the growing list of baffling statements, positions, and policies he has pursued recently.  Yet, unlike the prime minister’s demagoguery on coed college dormitories, for example, he is not entirely to blame for the Cairo-Ankara row.  The Turks now have difficult relations with every important country in the Middle East, but there are a series of underlying of political and structural issues that presaged the current dispute with the Egyptians.  My dear friend, the inestimable Bassem Sabry, captured what would be the eventual disconnect between Egypt and Turkey when, right after Erdogan left Cairo in 2011, he quipped, “The Turks don’t understand. When we say ‘Yay Ottomans!’ We mean the furniture.” Before the January 25th uprising, ties between the two countries were correct, but hardly warm. Hosni Mubarak did not like Erdogan and one got the distinct sense that the feeling was mutual. The two leaders could not have been more different from each other:  Mubarak was old, exceedingly cautious, staid, and an authoritarian, while Erdogan was young, dynamic, charismatic, and a reformer (until his authoritarian streak emerged).  Mubarak, always suspicious of Islamists, did not much care for even the Turkish variety, which the press often described oddly as “mild.”  Needless to say, Erdogan has little love lost for the professional military class from which Mubarak hailed. Beyond these kinds of personal differences, Erdogan’s active regional foreign policy and willingness to lambaste the Israelis both encroached upon what Mubarak considered to be Egypt’s natural domain and made the Egyptian leader look bad.  Much of the Erdogan mystique in the Middle East rested on the Palestinian issue and the principled stand he took against Israel’s blockade of Gaza—a policy in which Mubarak was, of course, complicit.  The Egyptian intelligence chief, the late Omar Suleiman, also harbored a grudge against the Turks for what he perceived to be Turkish “meddling” in Palestinian affairs, especially the development of relations between Ankara and Hamas.  To Omar Pasha, Turkey-Hamas ties compromised his ability to apply pressure on the organization by giving its leaders a respectable alternative to Syria or Iran.  For Mubarak and Suleiman, the proper place for the Turks in the region was on the sideline.  Whatever befell the Egyptians during the late Mubarak period, their leaders still maintained the pretension of regional influence and prestige.  They were simply not going to submit to Ankara’s effort to supplant Cairo’s traditional place. Yet Erdogan did not just grate on the Egyptian leadership.  It’s hard to believe now, especially after Mohammed Morsi’s thunderous welcome at the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) 2012  convention, but the Muslim Brothers did not much like Turkey’s Islamists even though the AKP’s political success intrigued them.  The Brotherhood, which regards itself as the granddaddy of Islamist movements, saw the AKP as a bunch of upstart Turks who were a little too liberal and a little too nationalist for its tastes.  Still, the Brothers—and many other Egyptians—were deeply appreciative when Erdogan was the first world leader to call on Hosni Mubarak to listen to his people and step down.  It was only after Mubarak’s fall that the Brothers sought to build a relationship with the Turks who could be an important source of diplomatic, political, and economic support for Egypt and themselves. From the end of 2011 through 2012 and part of 2013, Erdogan was looking like a man in full.  The AKP-friendly press and the prime minister’s supporters were jubilant.  The 21st century was going to be a Turkish century and in the Middle East, newly empowered Islamist movements would look to Ankara for leadership.  Egypt, being the largest Arab country, was central to the way in which the AKP leadership imagined their future.  So caught up in his own mythology as master of both Turkey and the region, the Turkish prime minister grafted his party’s experience onto the Brotherhood and Egypt.  To the extent that Erdogan saw the Muslim Brotherhood as the analogue to his own party, the Turks apparently believed that the Brothers would follow the AKP’s own successful path.  Even after Morsi ran into significant opposition when it became clear that he had no real intention of upholding the principles of the revolution, the Turkish leadership refused to see what was actually happening in Egypt.  Instead, the prime minister and his advisers blamed the United States and the West for the Egyptian president’s troubles because Washington, in particular, could not tolerate the accumulation of Islamist power.  This was, of course, at variance with the vast majority of Morsi’s opponents who accused the United States along with Turkey of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood to the detriment of Egyptian society. Then, of course, came the July 3 coup d’état that ended Egypt’s experiment with Muslim Brotherhood rule.  By now, it should be clear that given Turkey’s history with military interventions and the unhappy experience of Turkish Islamists as a result of the 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 coups, Erdogan would be critical of Major General Abdel Fattah al Sisi.  Yet “the history of coups” argument is too pat and obvious.  There are more complicated and nuanced reasons for Erdogan’s seemingly pathological ire toward the new Egyptian authorities. The overwhelming Egyptian support for the July 3 coup is a rejection of the “new Turkish model,” which is inextricably linked to Erdogan.  The AKP’s leaders have been careful not to use the word “model” and have from time to time been vocal in their rejection of the term, but privately they believe in it.  They regard Turkey’s experience of political and economic liberalization under the leadership of a popularly elected Islamist party as a template for countries in the Arab world.  When Egyptians came out into the streets en masse on June 30, demanding the end of Mohammed Morsi’s rule and Egypt’s senior command obliged them, it was a significant strategic setback for the AKP’s vision for Turkey’s leadership role.  No wonder then that the Turkish prime minister is angry.  If, after all, the largest Arab country rejects Turkey’s model, Ankara’s prospects for regional leadership are greatly diminished.  And unless Turks can be convinced that the Egyptians have no capacity to determine their future and that al Sisi’s intervention was the result of a Zionist-American manipulation, this setback might have domestic political consequences for Erdogan whose supporters have previously called him “the King of the Arab Street.” The coup also revealed the widely differing worldviews of Turks and Egyptians, at least at this particular moment.  For the Turks, subordinating the General Staff to civilian leaders and making it virtually impossible for them to intervene in the political system is critical in creating an environment more conducive to democratic development (though it’s not sufficient as the Turkish case demonstrates).  Many Egyptians, in contrast, regard the military as a savior that rescued their country from chaos and almost certain collapse.  According to this view, Morsi clearly squandered his electoral mandate during his disastrous tenure in the presidency and he was overthrown with the expressed will of millions upon millions of Egyptians who took to the streets.  The military’s intervention, the argument goes, has given Egyptians another chance to reset politics and realize the democratic goals of Tahrir Square.  Needless to say, this account has lost all context, but it is what large numbers of Egyptians seem to believe rather fervently.  I suspect the Turks are correct—coups are not good for democracy—but the important point here is the significant gap between the way Turks and Egyptians view the world. Observers should not expect Egypt-Turkey relations to improve any time soon.  Sure, Erdogan engages in over-heated rhetoric and the Egyptians hold onto a regional status from a by-gone era, but these are manifestations of a deeper problem.  Prime Minister Erdogan’s narrative is deeply unsettling and politically dangerous to Egypt’s current rulers and the return of the Egyptian military and concomitant effort to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood is the AKP’s nightmare.

I first arrived in Turkey on a chilly, gray afternoon in early October 1992.  I had been living in Jerusalem studying Arabic and Hebrew—this was during my Arab-Israeli conflict stage—when the guy with whom I was sharing a flat suggested that we backpack through Turkey during the month that Israel was essentially closed for Jewish holidays.  When we landed in Istanbul, we pulled out a used Lonely Planet, and somehow managed to communicate—Mark, who is now a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech, spoke pretty good German, which helped a bit—to a taxi driver that we wanted to go to the Orient Hostel in Sultanahmet.  We knew nothing about the place, just that it was cheap and sounded decent.  Wistful for my early twenties, whenever I find myself in Sultanahmet, which is pretty rare these days, I take a stroll past the place. That trip has stayed with me like none other.  From the Sumela monastery near Trabzon, the Alps-like hills near Uzungol, the grit of Erzurum, the haunting ruins of Ani, and the Kurdish wedding we unexpectedly attended in Dogubeyazit, to the weirdly severe and austere architecture of Ankara, the amazing caves of Cappadocia, the long walk through the Ilhara Valley, and finally the warm, soft waves of the Mediterranean in the seaside village of Side, I fell for Turkey.  What had started out as a goof turned into a new area of inquiry and interest.  Until then for me Turkey was a country run by a guy named Turgut Ozal of whom President George H. W. Bush seemed to be particularly fond.  It was a big Muslim country that had been the colonial power in the Middle East for 500 years or so, but my interest lay with the Arab world, specifically Palestinians, and their conflict with the Israelis. After I returned to Jerusalem from Turkey toting a Fenerbahce jersey and a large Turkish flag as souvenirs, I began to read about Turkish history and politics.  Books by Bernard Lewis, Kemal Karpat, and Feroz Ahmad were my formal introductions to the country.  It was almost exactly seven years after my backpacking adventure, when the Turkish General Staff succeeded in ending the country’s first experiment with Islamist-led government, that gave me an insight that led to my dissertation and later my first book. I suppose that for as long as I have been working on the Middle East professionally, people might have assumed that I am, and always have been, an Egypt obsessive, but it was Turkey that had an earlier impact on my intellectual development. Besides piquing my curiosity, one of the things that stuck with me all these years was the uncommon kindness of everyone I/we met during those four weeks on the road.  Turks looked after us, made sure we got on the correct bus, took the right dolmus, and helped us find hotels/hostels in out-of-the-way places.  One memorable moment came when Mark and I sat down at a local restaurant the afternoon we arrived in Dogubeyazit.  As we stuffed ourselves silly, a bunch of large men, dressed in black and toting military rifles, sat down next to us.  They looked at us and we looked at them.  We discovered through their broken English that they were Turkish soldiers of some sort (we assumed they were special forces operators) who were fighting the PKK in the nearby mountains.  They made it clear to us—in the nicest way possible for guys with large guns—that we should not leave our hotel after dark.  We appreciated the heads-up and were a bit freaked out that we stupidly stumbled into a war zone, and grabbed the first bus out of town the next morning, to where I do not remember.  Another time when a bus never showed up in a small town where we spent the night, a guy took pity on the two yabanci and drove us to a town where he knew we could find transportation to our next destination.  He refused our efforts to pay him for his trouble. The warm feelings toward Turkey and Turks that I developed in the early 1990s  were only reinforced some years later when my wife and I lived in Ankara for an extended period of time.  I am sorry to say, however, that they have begun to wane. Turkey is endlessly fascinating, but it is no longer fun.  I cherish my friendships with Turks and value my professional relationship with a long list of Turkish academics, journalists, and business leaders, but there is no denying any longer the fact that the environment for someone like me has become downright hostile. For the better part of the last three years, it seems that every time I write about Turkey, I am subjected to a stream of disturbing and conspiracy-laden criticism that almost always concludes that my arguments about Turkey’s eroding strategic position in the Middle East or the illiberal turn in its domestic politics are not a function of research and careful analysis. Rather, to Turkish officials, journalists, a few academics, and a slew of Twitter trolls, my work reflects my Jewish faith and thus some kind of special attachment to Israel and the Israel lobby that compels me to compromise my professional integrity to smear Turkey for the benefit of the Netanyahu government. Anyone who has spent any time reading my work would know that this is fantasy.  They would also know that I welcome substantive critiques on the merits of my arguments.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am indeed Jewish, though my religion has never been a factor in my work.  I have Israeli friends and I also have three Mexico-born second cousins who, by dint of their American mother’s second marriage to an Israeli national, spent part of their lives growing up in greater Tel Aviv.  One is now a successful artist in Mexico City, another teaches English literature at the University of Georgia, and the other lives near Haifa with his wife and children.  I have also spoken to AIPAC groups. It is easy to dismiss the fairly regular attacks on me and my identity as nonsense and the unfortunate price I pay for working on controversial topics, but it has gone well beyond the bounds of civil discourse and belies Turkish claims to being an inclusive and tolerant society.  I do not know how many times I have heard how the Ottoman Empire accepted the Jews of Spain during the Inquisition and how the remnant of that community remains and thrives in Istanbul and Izmir.  Yet that was a long time ago and from what I understand, Turkish Jews are leaving for the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel because they no longer feel welcome in their own home. There is no direct evidence that the Justice and Development Party or government officials are engaged in an effort to smear crudely and delegitimize critics of Turkish policy, but they have certainly created an environment in which it has become the norm.  In my own case, it began when I wrote a piece in May 2011 for Foreign Policy.com titled, “Arab Spring, Turkish Fall,” in which I observed that for a variety of structural, historical, and political factors, Turkey was unlikely to lead the Middle East in ways that Ankara and its cheerleaders in the West assumed.  Almost immediately I began hearing from friends who relayed to me inquiries from journalists and people in official circles in Ankara asking if I had written such a critical piece because I am Jewish.  Of course, my religious background did not matter when I wrote “Cheering an Islamist Victory” for the Boston Globe in July 2007 after AKP garnered 47 percent of the popular vote in that year’s national elections.  More recently, a Turkish journalist named Kahraman Haliscelik who works for Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) in New York City wondered on Twitter why I was no longer a “friend of Turkey,” suggesting that I was working on behalf of Israel. Until now, I have chosen to ignore these creepy slurs.  Why bother giving this kind of stuff credence? Yet in the last six months, something has changed.  Turkish political discourse is darker and the attacks on foreign observers of Turkish politics have become relentless.  During the Gezi Park protests, the thuggish mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, accused a BBC reporter of Turkish origin of being a traitor because she was reporting on the brutal crackdown on demonstrators in his city.  Recently, a Dutch journalist named Bram Vermeulen, was informed that his press card was not renewed and that he would not be permitted back into Turkey after his current visa expires, apparently in revenge for his reporting on Turkey’s recent tumult.  The Gezi Park protests represent an important point of departure for the AKP establishments and its supporters. Rather than a cause for introspection about why so many Turks—though not a majority by any means—are angry at their government, the ruling party and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cynically framed the narrative in a way that places blame for Turkey’s political turbulence on outsiders seeking to bring the country to its knees.  The fact that they have been successful speaks to the continuing trauma of the post-WWI period when foreigners—the British, Greeks, French, and Italians—did actually seek to carve up Anatolia.  As a result, a depressingly large number of Turks blamed CNN, the BBC, the “interest rate lobby,” “Zionists,” the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael Rubin for the events surrounding Gezi. In reality the outrage on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara this past summer had nothing to do with foreigners, but that did not stop a veritable army of AKP’s followers, government ministers, and a variety of bootlickers from questioning the integrity of those of us who were telling the world what was happening around them.  Among the worst was Nasuhi Gungor, the head of TRT’s Turkish-language service.  Gungor poses as a journalist, but is little more than a propagandist for the Justice and Development Party.  When I was dodging teargas on Istiklal Cadessi on the night of June 15, 2013, he tweeted: “@stevenacook is a [sic] islamophobic zionist hanging around Istiklal. If anybody identify him be careful about provocations!” This was clearly an effort to intimidate me.  It did not have the desired effect, but it unleashed what seemed like thousands of Twitter trolls hurling the worst kind of invective.  Another pathetic and disturbing display came from Edibe Sozen, a former AKP deputy and professor of sociology at Marmara University.  Over Twitter she conveyed an unrelenting paranoia wanting to know why I was in Turkey, who sent me, and what my mission was. Perhaps the most grotesque distortion of what it means to be a journalist in contemporary Turkey came more recently in the pro-AKP newspaper Yeni Safak thanks to someone named Yakup Kocaman.  On October 21 he published a front page story alleging that David Ignatius, the Council on Foreign Relations, Raytheon and I fabricated a story about Turkey blowing an Israeli spy ring in Iran because Raytheon was unhappy that it lost a contract with the Turkish military for air supply defense missiles to a Chinese firm. And, also I am a “neocon,” which in current Turkish discourse is a synonym for “Jew.” The only one doing any fabricating was Kocaman.  There is no record that Kocaman ever called my office, called the communications department at CFR, spoke to anyone in the executive office at CFR, or even bothered to read what my co-author, Michael Koplow, and I actually wrote about David Ignatius’s explosive allegations in the Washington Post on October 16. In the interest of full disclosure, in my ten years at CFR, I have met David Ignatius a handful of times during which it became clear that we don’t agree on very much about the Middle East, I do not know anyone from Raytheon, and CFR is a non-partisan, non-profit, independent membership organization and think tank.  It is important to point out that Kocaman is making serious allegations against an organization that has hosted President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Erdogan, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy Ali Babacan, Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bagis, and various AKP parliamentarians. Kocaman is clearly a fraud, but of course, this did not stop other parts of the Turkish press.  Ferhat Unlu of Sabah followed Kocaman with his own rambling article blowing the cover on Turkey’s “opponents” in Washington.  This would not be worth much in the way of comment, but for the fact that while actual professional journalists in Turkey—of which there are many—cower in the corner for fear of being fired for criticizing the government, people like Gungor, Kocaman, Unlu, and Haliscelik  frame the terms of debate.  Needless to say, this is unhealthy for Turkey’s democratic development. Turks are fond of saying that “good friends speak bitterly to good friends.”  It’s a very nice aphorism, but it is not true.  Turks only like it one way.  If you dare offer a critique of Turkish politics, supporters of the government will attack you, your professional ethics, your employer, and your very identity.  A sad state of affairs.      

Mai Shams El-Din looks at clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood from the angle of al-Azhar, where the student body supports the Brotherhood but the leadership allies with the state. Where would the 2 million Syrian refugees, along with the 5 million Syrians who have been internally displaced, fit in the United States? This interactive shows the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Zachary Keck tells readers why Turkey is buying Chinese missile systems.

Samia Errazzouki examines Morocco’s new cabinet, and argues that authoritarian politics remains the dominant trend in the country. Maya Gebeily discusses the irony of Saudi Arabia’s decision to sit out its turn on the UN Security Council. Syria Deeply does a Q&A with analyst Gokhan Bacik, exploring the question of whether Turkey’s stance on Syria is shifting.

I co-authored this piece with my friend and colleague, Michael Koplow, author of the blog Ottomans and Zionists. Ehud Barak’s political instincts have never been great, but his security instincts are generally top-notch. So when he warned in 2010 that any intelligence information shared with Turkey might be passed on to Iran, his fears may not have been completely unfounded. David Ignatius reported yesterday that in 2012, Turkey deliberately blew the cover of ten Iranians who were working as Israeli agents and exposed their identities to the Iranian government. Ignatius also wrote that in the wake of the incident, which was obviously a large intelligence setback for efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program, the United States did not protest directly to Turkey and instead walled off intelligence issues from broader policymaking. There are lots of questions that Ignatius’s report raises, and it will take some time to parse them out and figure out the answers. First and foremost is the report completely accurate? This is a very big deal if true, and it casts increasingly cool U.S. behavior toward Turkey over the past year in a more interesting light, yet it also makes it puzzling to figure out how something like this was kept quiet. Likewise, it is tough to see how and why the United States would separate intelligence issues from larger policy issues in the wake of such a huge betrayal of an important U.S. intelligence ally. Especially when such duplicity amounts to a purposeful blow to joint American-Israeli aims to slow down Iran’s nuclear program. Next, who are the sources for this story, and why leak the story now? If this new information came from the United States, then it indicates that someone has finally had it with Turkey turning a blind eye to (if not actively enabling) a growing al Qaeda presence in Syria, and anger over Turkey’s deal to buy a missile defense system from a Chinese firm already under sanctions rather than from NATO. The flip side to this is that if it is a U.S. government source fed up with Turkish behavior, it also does not cast the United States in a great light given the lack of an official reaction following Turkey’s exposure of Israeli intelligence assets. If the leak came from the Israeli side, then the timing is strange since there would have been little reason to hold this information until now, as Israeli-Turkish relations were at their absolute low point. The only plausible reason for Israel to leak this now would be if it came from someone who is disenchanted with Bibi Netanyahu’s efforts to patch things up with Turkey, as these allegations are deeply embarrassing in light of the Mavi Marmara apology. Questions aside, and assuming that the veracity of the report– and so far no American or Israeli official has publicly denied it – the bigger picture here is not the future of Israel-Turkey ties, but how the United States views Turkey. It is important to remember that from its earliest days the Obama administration sought to rebuild and strengthen ties with Ankara during a particularly difficult period that coincided with the American occupation of Iraq and the return of PKK terrorism. The Turks got a presidential visit and speech to the Grand National Assembly, Obama punted on his promise to recognize the Armenian genocide, and more broadly brought a new energy and urgency to a partnership that American officials hoped would work to achieve common goals in a swath of the globe from the Balkans to Central Asia. What started off well-enough quickly ran into trouble. By the spring of 2010, the Turks had negotiated a separate nuclear deal with Iran (and the Brazilians) that the administration claimed it had not authorized and voted against additional UN Security Council sanctions on Tehran.  Then the Mavi Marmara incident happened, further complicating Washington’s relations with both Ankara and Jerusalem.  A “reset” of sorts occurred on the sidelines of the September 2010 G-20 summit in Toronto with a meeting in which President Obama and Prime Minister Erdogan talked tough with each other and cleared the air, setting the stage for what Turkish officials like to describe as a “golden age” in relations.  Even so, despite the apparent mutual respect—even friendship—between President Obama and Prime Minister Erdogan, there was a sense that the Turks did not share interests and goals as much as advertised.  For example, there was Erdogan’s visit to Tehran in June 2010 when he implicitly justified Iran’s nuclear program. There were also difficult negotiations over a NATO early warning radar system on Turkish territory and after Ankara finally agreed, last minute needless wrangling over Israeli access to the data from the system . More recently, Turkey has spurned its NATO allies in order to build a missile defense system with China.  Ankara has also been enormously unhelpful on Syria, even working at cross-purposes against current U.S. aims.  The Turks have complicated efforts to solve the political crisis in Egypt by insisting that deposed President Mohammed Morsi be returned to office and thus only further destabilizing Egyptian politics.  In addition, these new revelations (along with ongoing efforts to get around sanctions on Iranian oil and gas) make it clear that Turkey has been actively assisting Iran in flouting American attempts to set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The state-owned Halk Bank was, until recently, involved in clearing financial transactions for Iranian counterparts, though Istanbul’s gold traders continue to do a robust business with Iran. And this all comes on top of the general fallout that has ensued as a result of Turkey doing everything in its power to take shots at Israel (which, no matter if some Turkish analysts want to argue that Ankara is more strategically valuable to the U.S. than Jerusalem, is a critical U.S. ally), whether it be absurdly blaming Israel for the coup in Egypt or preventing Israel from participating in NATO forums. Considering Turkey’s record, how can the Obama administration continue to tout Turkey as a “model partner” or even treat it as an ally? Not a single one of its goals for Turkey—anchoring Turkey in NATO and the West; advancing U.S. national security goals such as non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and promoting democracy; and holding Turkey out a “model” of a secular democracy—have been met. Ignatius’s recent revelation, if true, undermine the first two goals. As for the third, Erdogan’s continuing harsh crackdown on protesters resulting from last summer’s Gezi Park demonstrations, pressure on journalists, efforts to intimidate civil society organizations, and other efforts to silence critics makes Turkey a negative example for countries struggling to build more just and open societies. We have crossed the line of reasonable disagreement and arrived at a point where Turkey is very clearly and very actively working to subvert American aims in the Middle East on a host of issues. That Erdogan and/or his intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, were willing to undermine a broad Western effort to stop Iran’s nuclear development for no other reason than to stick it to Israel should be a wake-up call as to whether the current Turkish government can be trusted as a partner on anything.

Zeinobia from the Egyptian Chronicles argues that Sisi is the new Pharaoh. Hamza Hamouchene asks, “Is Algeria an Anti-Imperialist State?” Nuray Mert gives her opinion on the reasons for lack of democracy in Turkey.