TURKEY’S PRESIDENCY – A TURKISH TANGLE

The Economist, UK
April 19 2007

The argument over the presidency of Turkey turns even nastier

WAS it another provocation by the "deep state"-the shadowy alliance
of rogue security forces and ultra-nationalist thugs-aimed at
stopping Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
from becoming the country’s new president? Or the work of Islamist
extremists? Speculation raged after yet another attack, on April 18th,
on Christian targets, this time a publishing house that distributes
Bibles in the city of Malatya. The killers bound the hands and legs
of three men and then slit their throats. Two of the victims, one of
them German, died immediately; the third died in hospital.

Turkey’s Christians are saying they no longer feel safe. The interior
minister, Abdulkadir Aksu, declared that the real target was the
country’s stability. Last year an Italian priest was shot by a
nationalist teenager in the Black Sea city of Trabzon. In January
another teenager shot dead an Armenian news editor, Hrant Dink.

The latest attack took place as Mr Erdogan was meeting fellow leaders
of his ruling AK Party to decide if he should replace President Ahmet
Necdet Sezer, a fiercely secular former judge, when his seven-year
term ends in May. They urged Mr Erdogan not to run, but instead to
lead the party into November’s parliamentary election.

Some aides reckon that Mr Erdogan may not declare his intentions
until just before the April 25th registration deadline.

Yet the longer he waits, the greater secular opposition becomes. In
the past two weeks, the chief of the general staff, General Yasar
Buyukanit, has said that the new president should be pro-secular not
only "in words" but also "in spirit". Days later Mr Sezer repeated an
assertion by the general that secularism "faces its gravest threat"
since Ataturk founded the republic 84 years ago. The main opposition
party is threatening to boycott the parliamentary vote for president
if Mr Erdogan runs.

On April 14th over 300,000 Turks, chanting anti-government slogans
and waving Turkish flags, marched on Ataturk’s mausoleum in Ankara.

It was one of the biggest public rallies in recent history. Citing
"public sensitivities", Arzuhan Yalcindag, president of TUSIAD,
Turkey’s big industrialists’ lobby, said she did not believe Mr Erdogan
would become president. "It was a polite way of advising him not to,"
said a fellow businesswoman.

Yet contrary to claims by the hotchpotch of retired generals,
nationalists and anti-European Union activists who organised
the rally, many attendees seemed less concerned by Mr Erdogan’s
supposedly Islamist agenda than by a general malaise over their
future. This reflects several things: worries over globalisation,
violence in neighbouring Iraq, renewed Kurdish separatism, a feeling
of being slighted by the EU. Many are also disgruntled by the rampant
corruption of some AK officials that Mr Erdogan has failed to curb.

The bigger worry among Turkey’s Western friends is Mr Erdogan’s waning
interest in human rights. Neither he nor anybody in his cabinet uttered
a peep when 50 policemen recently stormed the offices of a liberal
weekly, Nokta. Acting on orders from a military prosecutor, they copied
the contents of every single computer, including journalists’ personal
e-mails, on the ground that they might contain "official secrets". The
order came after Nokta had published an internal military document
blacklisting selected journalists.

The magazine is also under investigation for running excerpts from a
retired admiral’s diary. In it he describes two planned coups against
Mr Erdogan in 2004 cooked up by four top military commanders.

Codenamed "Moonlight" and "Blonde Girl", the plots failed to gather
support from fellow officers, the admiral wrote, "because the
Turkish people don’t want coups anymore." Nokta’s managing editor,
Alper Gormus, says the only sympathy he has had is a bouquet of
chrysanthemums from a local AK official. Yet the government could
have prevented the raid if it wanted to, he says, "because it was
the justice minister who gave the final nod."