The Economist exposes dirty Turkish politics (and its own unrealistic expectations)
Bad new vibrations
From The Economist print edition
The special relationship between the Turkish and Jewish states is at risk
WIDESPREAD outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza has sharply soured the tone of Turkey’s people and government towards the Jewish state. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, castigated it for hammering the Palestinians. So far he has resisted a clamour in Turkey to loosen or even sever his country’s close ties with Israel. But some advocates of the strategic friendship between the two countries fear it may be at risk.
Behind the scenes, Turkish policymakers, especially military ones, still cherish their ties with Israel. Speaking this week in Switzerland, Mr Erdogan seemed keen to draw a line under the row. He explained that he was incensed by the war in Gaza particularly because his tireless mediation had brought Israel and Syria close to a deal over the Golan Heights. He said he had also been trying to fix a deal with Hamas over a prisoner exchange, including freedom for a kidnapped Israeli corporal.
Similar rows have occurred before. In 2004 he annoyed Israel by calling it a terrorist state after it assassinated Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as he left a mosque in Gaza. Mr Erdogan then invited Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s present leader, to visit Turkey. But Israeli-Turkish relations were mended after prodding by the United States. Military co-operation went on. Israel has invariably chosen to turn a deaf ear to Turkey’s occasionally fierce rhetoric for the sake of that strategic liaison. In a bid to soothe the anger of Jews and Israelis, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ali Babacan, urged Hamas to decide “whether it wants to be an armed group or a political movement”.
But this time Mr Erdogan had been a lot angrier. Israel, he railed, was “committing a crime against humanity…The world must not turn a blind eye to Israel’s savagery…How can such a country, which totally ignores and does not implement the UN Security Council’s resolutions be let through the gates of the UN?”
An education ministry circular particularly annoyed Israel by telling Turkish schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence in solidarity with Palestinian children. In the event, the Israelis persuaded the Turks to cancel a proposed essay and drawing contest for schoolchildren to air their feelings of hatred towards Israel. Israeli officials were apparently poised to respond by proposing a programme in Israeli schools for discussing the genocide of Armenians by Turks in the first world war.
In any case, anti-Israeli anger on Turkey’s streets rose during the assault on Gaza. In rallies across the country demonstrators chanted “Killer Israel! Nazi Israel! Turkish armies, march on Jerusalem!” Calls to boycott Israeli goods and scrap military co-operation grew louder.
Not for the first time, anti-Semitism reared its head. In the western city of Eskisehir, members of a nationalist group brandished placards that read, “Only dogs can enter: no Armenians or Jews!” An outcry from Turkey’s 25,000-strong Jewish community, plus pressure from the foreign ministry, shamed a local prosecutor into launching a probe. Turkey’s Jewish community issued a rare statement saying that “we Turkish Jews, an inseparable part of the Turkish Republic, feel deep sorrow for the comments appearing in recent days in certain media outlets that belittle and insult our religion and present us as targets.”
Turks deny accusations of anti-Semitism, noting that the Ottoman Sultans opened their doors over 500 years ago to Jews fleeing from Christian persecution in Spain. In 1948, Turkey was among the first countries to recognise Israel. Under a military co-operation deal in 1996, Israeli pilots have been training in Turkish skies. In 2007, bilateral trade rose to $2.7 billion. Between 2006 and 2007, the number of Israelis visiting Turkey went up from 362,000 to 511,400—more than 7% of Israel’s population. Turkey has also earned praise from the Americans for its recent mediation between Syria and Israel.
But anti-Semitism is often part of a general anti-Christian and anti-Western feeling. “Jew” and “Armenian” are both often used as slurs. Last year a Pew Global Attitudes Survey found that anti-Jewish sentiment in Turkey had risen: 76% said they had negative views towards Jews, whereas only 7% said they looked kindly on them.
Anti-Semitism was also blatant during a campaign against an Israeli financier, Sammy Ofer, who had planned to invest with a Turkish partner in rehabilitating Istanbul’s historic Galata district and its port near the Golden Horn. The tender was cancelled amid widespread claims that the deal was crooked and that “Jewish capital” was trying to take over the country.
Radical Turkish Islamists have long tried to stir up anti-Semitism. Their long-standing jibe against the secular Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, was that he was “really a Jew”. In recent years assorted leftists and Kemalists have joined an anti-Jewish chorus that frequently accompanies hostility to America, which is often accused of plotting with Israel to set up an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq that will eventually take large chunks out of south-eastern Turkey.
Behind-the-scenes lobbying by Turkish, American and European Union diplomats may have persuaded Mr Erdogan to tone down his language. He recently told Turkey’s parliament, “As a leader, I have said that anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity.” But if anti-Israeli rhetoric in Turkey persists, the Israeli lobby in the United states could hit back by backing a congressional resolution to call the mass killings by Turks of some 1m Armenians “genocide”. Hitherto, Israel’s influential lobby in America has repeatedly helped block such a resolution, though Barack Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, have both referred to genocide in the past and have pledged to back the bill.
Secret talks between Turkey and Armenia to open diplomatic ties and reopen their borders are hotly opposed by some in the Armenian diaspora’s lobby in America. American Jews have long felt queasy about defending Turkey over the massacre of Armenians. Hitherto, pragmatism has prevailed and they have sided with the Turks. But if Mr Erdogan keeps on lambasting Israel, they may change their mind.
Conspiracy theories
From The Economist print edition
The arrest of still more suspects in the Ergenekon case is raising new questions about the relationship between the army and the government
SOMEWHERE under the ground between the south-eastern town of Cizre and the Iraqi border lie scores of corpses of dissident Kurds who disappeared at the height of the 24-year-long separatist rebellion by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They were tortured and murdered by counter-insurgency forces that had been given free rein in the battle against the rebels. So go the claims of a former PKK informant, Abdulkadir Aygan, who made headlines this week as he described in gruesome detail a slew of extra-judicial killings allegedly carried out on the orders of the army. A local prosecutor has agreed to investigate the charges after 47 families petitioned him to launch a search for the bodies of relatives who have been missing for years.
Mr Aygan’s confessions are the latest in a series of sensational revelations unfolding in a case that takes its name from Ergenekon, a supposedly clandestine organisation. Some 86 people, including retired generals, journalists and politicians, who purportedly planned to carry out a string of high-profile murders, sow chaos and provoke a military coup in Turkey, have been on trial. Some defendants are said to have ties with the mafia and drug gangs.
On January 22nd a further 39 people (five of them serving army officers) were rounded up in pre-dawn raids across the country. These arrests have turned Ergenekon into what many say is the most significant criminal investigation in Turkey’s history. The prosecutors are now exploring links with the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian editor, who had been threatened by a retired general, Veli Kucuk, before his death. Mr Kucuk was arrested in January 2008 and is alleged to be among Ergenekon’s ringleaders.
If the prosecution ever gets to the bottom of the case, some dark chapters in Turkey’s recent past will stand revealed. And Turkey will have taken a giant step towards becoming a full-blooded Western-style democracy—and a suitable candidate for membership of the European Union. But at present the if is still big.
Since the trial began in October, claims have grown that the case is a conspiracy by the mild Islamists ruling Turkey to discredit the army. The determinedly secular generals have never disguised their distaste for the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development (AK) Party narrowly escaped a ban by the Constitutional Court last year on charges of seeking to introduce religious rule.
The leaked diaries of a retired naval commander revealed that some fellow officers (two of whom are now in jail for alleged links to Ergenekon) had plotted at least two coups against Mr Erdogan that were blocked by the then chief of the general staff, Hilmi Ozkok. But tensions between the army and the government returned when a retired colonel shot himself dead on January 19th, after allegations in the Turkish press that he had been involved in the extra-judicial killings of Kurds. The top brass showed up in force at his funeral and in an angry statement all but blamed the media for his death. Speculation is widespread that it was pressure from the army that led to the swift release of two retired generals detained in an earlier raid on January 7th.
The Ergenekon case has become so broad and complex, and the arguments of the 2,500-page indictment so muddling, that it has left most people utterly confused. Many of those arrested still do not know what they are being charged with. Yet a recent opinion poll showed that some 60% of Turks believe in the conspiracy. Even some former prime ministers have acknowledged the existence of a shadowy network of rogue security officials and bureaucrats known as the “deep state” who will stop at nothing to stay in power. Their supposed aims include sabotaging Turkey’s efforts to join the EU (not that much sabotage is needed just now: several parts of the EU negotiations remain frozen and when Mr Erdogan visited Brussels recently he left largely empty-handed).
The number of hidden weapons uncovered during the course of the Ergenekon investigation has bolstered claims that the gang meant real business. In early January a map found at a leading suspect’s home in Ankara led police to an arms cache that included 300 bullets, 700 grams (1.5lb) of plastic explosives and two anti-tank weapons. Further searches have yielded bombs and other equipment.
The growing body of evidence has embarrassed the generals. It has also exposed divisions within the army, pitting anti-Western soldiers who favour closer links with Iran and Russia and are known as “Eurasianists” against those committed to Turkey’s friendship with America and its putative membership of the EU. The second group includes General Ilker Basbug, who is now the chief of the general staff.
The desire to weed out the Eurasianists may explain the army’s silence in the face of the arrests of serving soldiers who have been implicated in the Ergenekon case. It may also explain the apparent truce that has been struck between Mr Basbug and Mr Erdogan, who have recently agreed that they should hold weekly consultations.
The worry is that the price of any compromise between the army and the government may be to let some of the high-ranking officers thought to be involved in the conspiracy off the hook. An opportunity to assert civilian control over the army once and for all would then have been missed. For Turkey’s reputation in the West, especially in Brussels, much is riding on the outcome of this case.
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