America’s Neo-Turcophiles

AMERICA’S NEO-TURCOPHILES
By Barbara Lerner

National Review , NY
May 21 2007

Dangerous illusions about Turkey, Islam, and the EU.

Turkish columnist Burak Bekdil coined the term "Neo-Turcophile" in a
searing, must-read article about the looming threat to secularism
posed by the AKP’s continuing attempt to take over all major
government power-centers in Turkey. The AKP is an Islamist party,
and Neo-Turcophiles (hereafter, "Neos") are all the foreigners who
claim to believe that by supporting the AKP, they are supporting
Turkish democracy.

Many American Neos are quite sincere in this mistaken belief; most
other foreign AKP supporters are not. The list of AKP supporters
includes all of the Arab League despots and their associated terrorist
groups, the Kurdish terrorists of the PKK, the Armenian Diaspora
Holocaust Lobby, the unelect-ed bureaucrats who rule the European
Union, and their longtime partners in the AKP-headed Organization of
Islamic Countries. Diversity of motives notwithstanding, all the Neos
insist that the AKP poses no threat to Turkish democracy because,
unlike the banned, radical Islamist parties that the AKP’s leaders
formerly belonged to, their new party is a moderate Islamist party,
committed to making Turkey more Muslim and more democratic by throwing
it open to foreign investment and bringing it into the EU.

A False Analogy Bekdil uses the Washington Post’s Turkish
correspondent, Claire Berlinski, as his example of a dangerously
deluded American Neo and refutes her arguments. But for real clarity
about the essence of the Neos’ arguments – arguments echoed in a recent
NRO editorial, "Warm Turkey" – an earlier piece by John O’Sullivan
provides the best summary in the fewest words:

"[T]he AKP …is today the Muslim equivalent of a socially conservative
Christian Democrat party in Western Europe….its long-term policy
is to replace the Turkish army with the EU as the guardian of
secularism in Turkey….an aim that makes perfect sense for a socially
conservative Muslim party because Europe’s secularism is more tolerant
toward religious expression than either the Turkish army or Kemalism."

Sincere good intentions notwithstanding, there are two very dangerous
and fundamental illusions at work here. The first is assuming that
Islam is, ever was, or ever can be anything like Christianity, when
it comes to a role in government. The second is assuming that the EU
is capable or even desirous of protecting Turkey – or Britain, France,
or Spain, for that matter – from the growing threat of Islamicization.

Turkish secularists – even, or perhaps especially, the many pious
Muslims who march in their ranks – know in their bones that the first
assumption is so far off-the-mark that, by and large, only non-Muslims
really believe it. It was, after all, Christ, not Mohammed, who said,
"Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and
unto God the things that are God’s" and "My kingdom is not of this
world." Those statements are, at the very least, ambiguous enough to
allow Christianity to play a limited role in some secular governments
without turning them into all-encompassing theocracies. Islam’s Prophet
never said anything remotely similar, and there was no ambiguity
about what he did say on this topic. Islam is both a religion and a
complete, all-encompassing system of theocratic government, here on
this earth. Arguing that it can play a limited role in government is
like arguing that one can be a little bit pregnant.

Modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal – renamed Ataturk
("Father of the Turks") by his grateful countrymen – had a profound
grasp of these home truths, and acted on them in ways that changed
Turkey and the world. Ataturk is the man who abolished the Caliphate,
and with it, Turkey’s 500-year-old claim to a divine right to rule
the Muslim world and a good chunk of Europe, too. Ataturk is also
the man who made secularism – not democracy or liberty – the bedrock
constitutional principle of the Turkish Republic he founded in 1923.

He did that because he understood that liberty and democracy can
only coexist with Islam in a passionately secular state – a state
that maintains an all-but-complete separation of mosque and state,
confining Islam to the religious sphere, denying it any role at all in
government on principle, and remaining ever watchful against Islamist
encroachments on government. That was Ataturk’s formula for success,
and American Neos, especially, should "bethink" themselves before
dismissing it as an "unworkable" extreme, because it did work.

It kept liberty and democracy alive in Turkey for 84 continuous years,
and that’s a record no other mainly Muslim nation has ever approached,
and only a very few mainly Christian nations have ever equaled or
surpassed.

Ataturk’s contemporary followers – the Kemalists O’Sullivan sees as
less "tolerant of religious expression" than European secularists –
are, in fact, the most persistently tolerant Muslims the world has
ever known when it comes to respecting the right to worship in peace
of both their Sunni Muslim majority and their Alevi (Shiite) minority,
and of Turkish Christians, Jews, and Sufis, too. As Bekdil forcefully
reminds us, it wasn’t secularists who carried out the disturbing
series of violent attacks in Turkey over the past five years –
murders of priests, judges, Christian converts, and Armenians,
bombings of synagogues and Western consulates, and more.

The AKP didn’t order these attacks, but it is a mistake to ignore the
fact that all of the men who carried them out came from the ranks of
Islamists who back the AKP. Turkey’s secularists aren’t "intolerant,"
and they don’t reject Islam as a religion. They’re Muslims; it’s
their religion, too. What they reject is any role at all for Islam
in the governance of their Republic.

Illusions about the Turkish Military No matter, say the Neos:
contemporary Kemalists are only a tiny, unrepresentative elite, working
to thwart the will of the Turkish majority by allying themselves
with the real threat to Turkish democracy: undemo-cratic Turkish
military officers who cling to what EU Neos call "their illegitimate,
self-appointed role" as guardians of the secular Republic. As Neos see
it, these power-hungry military officers are just itching to mount a
military coup, and are only barely restrained by the steady stream of
warnings, threats, and condemnations issued against them by the EU in
April and, sadly, echoed by our own feckless State Department in May.

These Neo warnings to Turkish generals may sound righteous to many
Americans, but they offend and anger tens of millions of Turks because
they ignore the actual Turkish facts about the Turkish military and
its role in Turkish life. In place of these facts, Neos impose the
conventional Western view of "the military," refusing to recognize
the unique character of Turkey’s military and the unique role it has
always played in making Turkey the Muslim world’s only successful
democracy. It is a mistaken view, on all counts.

First, with regard to the military’s constitutional role, American
Neos may believe this "illegitimate, self-appointed" nonsense; EU
Neos know better. That is why the EU’s unelected bureaucrats have
worked so aggressively to force the Turks to abrogate Ataturk’s
constitution and change their laws in order to deny the military –
not the Islamists – any role in Turkey’s government. In fact, as I
pointed out in in 2002, the Turkish constitution tasks the military
with a sworn duty to act as a necessary check on democratic excesses
that violate the constitution – a check our Founding Fathers also
deemed necessary in order to preserve constitutional democracy. The
big difference is that our Constitution assigns this role to the
Supreme Court; Turkey’s constitution assigns it to the military. This
is hardly surprising in light of the differing origins of America’s
democracy and Turkey’s. Many of our founding fathers were lawyers;
most of Turkey’s were professional military officers, like Ataturk.

The Turkish military’s duty to intervene militarily to defend the
secular state if necessary is a fact – not a prediction. The Neos
insistence that General Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of Turkey’s general
staff today, is eager to mount a military coup in order to seize
and hold power for himself – that’s a fantasy. The Turkish military
did take power directly on two occasions in the past, and could,
easily, have held onto it permanently, as military leaders in the
Arab world routinely do, using it to enrich themselves and beggar
their countrymen. But Turkey’s top commanders have always rejected
this path. Both past military takeovers were brief, and unmarred by
financial corruption. Both times, the generals restored civilian
control voluntarily, without need of lectures from self-appointed
foreign overseers. Two other times, Turkey’s military chiefs saw
no need to go that far, relying, instead, on verbal warnings that
encouraged civilian authorities – the president, the parliament, the
constitutional court, secular political parties and private civic
organizations – to act to preserve Turkish secularism without need
for tanks in the squares.

That is what General Buyukanit hoped to achieve by responding
to the AKP’s takeover attempt with his warnings on April 12 and
April 27, and so far, it seems to be working. The leader of the
only secular opposition party in parliament, the CHP, challenged
the constitutionality of the AKP’s parliamentary maneuver, and the
constitutional court swiftly ruled in his favor, nullifying the AKP’s
April takeover attempt, and setting the scene for early elections
for a new parliament, now scheduled for July 22.

Finally, we come to Neo claims that the Turkish military oppresses
the Turkish people and threatens Turkish democracy by frustrating the
will of an Islam-hungry majority, hostile to secularism. These claims
should be weighed against poll data which consistently show that an
overwhelming majority of Turkish citizens rate their uncompromisingly
secular military as the most admired and trusted institution in the
land. Contrast that with the very low approval ratings Turks give
to both their religious leaders and their politicians in these same
polls, and the hollowness of Neo claims about the "oppressive" Turkish
military is easy to see. It’s easy to explain, too. Turks admire their
military because it has a long record of putting the nation first,
and doing it with honor, integrity, and competence.

Most Turks are very proud of their army. They’re not eager for a
military coup, anymore than the military itself is, but it offends
them to hear foreigners lecture their generals. The history of Turkish
political parties and their relation to the Turkish people is, alas,
a different story entirely, and I’ll deal with that next.

First, though, I would be remiss, as an American, to end this
discussion of the Turkish military without noting that it has long
been the most consistently pro-American institution in Turkey, and
a more loyal and dependable NATO ally than many other NATO countries.

To get some fledgling appreciation of just how valuable Turkey’s
military cooperation is, check out the role that Turkish troops are
playing in Afghanistan today, and then, instead of lecturing the Turks,
try apologizing to them for the fact that we have not reciprocated
by doing all we could and should do to help them stop the flow of
PKK terrorists from Iraq into Turkey.

The Turkish People vs. Turkish Politicians What, then, of the Neos’
claim that, among Turkish civilians, only a tiny, unrepresentative
elite really support Ataturk’s brand of secularism? Exactly how many
committed secularists there are in Turkey today is the great unknown,
but the amazing popular response of the Turkish people to the AKP
takeover attempt clearly puts the lie to any notion that secularists
are only a tiny minority, or that they exist only among the elite.

Mass popular-protest demonstrations for secularism and against the
AKP’s attempt to seize Turkey’s presidency began on April 14, when
more than a million Turkish Muslim protesters turned mile after mile
of Ankara into a sea of red flags – the flag of Ataturk’s secular
Republic. Above them, like the sails of a mighty flotilla, there
were hundreds of thousands of white picket signs with messages like:
"Turkey is not Iran," "Shoulder to shoulder against sharia," "Turkey
is secular and will remain secular," and "We don’t want an imam as
president." More than a million protested again in Istanbul on April
29, with the same flags, and the same messages.

Protests weren’t limited to Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey’s equivalent
to Washington and New York, either. On May 5, there were sizeable
protests in smaller cities – Manisa, Canakkale, Marmaris – and on May
13 in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, a third demonstration with
more than a million protesters. The protesters included truck drivers,
farmers, and waiters, as well as college professors, lawyers, and
business people, and huge numbers of Turkish women, young and old,
rich and poor. There were even some who chose to wear headscarves,
but marched for the right of their daughters to make a different
choice. They marched and sang and shouted out their slogans, cheered
speakers who were passionate about the seriousness and immediacy of
the AKP threat to Islamicize their secular Republic, and vowed to stand
fast against it. But they never let their passion cross the line into
violence. Despite the massive numbers of people involved, there were
no violent incidents at any of the secularist demonstrations.

The obvious question, in light of this remarkable outpouring, is
how did an Islamist party like the AKP ever succeed in getting a
nearly two-thirds majority in parliament in the election of 2002 –
the overwhelming parliamentary majority that put the AKP in position to
try to capture Turkey’s presidency as well as its prime ministership?

Neos would have you believe it happened because a majority of Turks
voted for the AKP in a democratic election, and we must all support
their choice, but that’s not true. The AKP won its overwhelming
majority in parliament with only about a third of the vote, because
Turkish law requires a party to get at least ten percent of the vote
in order to be represented in parliament at all, and only one of
Turkey’s multiplicity of small, endlessly squabbling secular parties
met that threshold.

Two-thirds of all Turkish voters said no to the AKP in 2002, but
they were so disgusted with Turkey’s secular parties that they said
no to them, too. Their disgust had nothing to do with secularism
and everything to do with the endemic corruption, incompetence, and
petty, what’s-in-it for-me selfishness and divisiveness that made
all of Turkey’s formerly ruling parties unworthy of the people they
governed and incapable of managing the economy in a reasonable way.

Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that even the one-third of
Turkey’s citizens who actually voted for the AKP did so because
they wanted a more Islamic government. An unknown but potentially
sizeable number did so because the AKP used its embrace of the EU to
disguise its hostility to secularism – it didn’t try to criminalize
adultery or to ban alcohol until after the election. And many Turks
liked the fact that the AKP was a new party, as yet unstained by the
economic disgraces and disasters that previous ruling parties were
responsible for.

Still, the AKP has had almost five years to infiltrate Turkish
institutions, to propagandize the pious for their version of "moderate"
Islamic government, and to bribe the poor with hand-outs financed by
a vast inflow of Arab oil money. As a result, it is unclear, at this
point, how many committed Turkish secularists remain.

The latest polls of Turkish voters are no help. According to the Sonar
poll, the AKP would get 29 percent in a new election, but four secular
parties would now meet the 10 percent threshold: the new DP party,
a center-right merger of DYP and ANAP, would garner 21 percent of
the vote; the CHP, a center-left party, would get 14 percent, and 22
percent if it succeeds in merg-ing with the DSP; the MHP, a nationalist
party, would get 12 percent; and the new GP party would get almost 11
percent. These numbers give some reason for optimism.A and G Research
poll numbers do not. They say the AKP will get 41 percent next time,
and only two secular parties will meet the 10 percent threshold:
CHP with 13.5 percent and DYP with 10.7 percent.

Frustrated and impatient with so much alphabet soup? Imagine how
much more frustrated and impatient the Turkish people are: they’ve
had to live with it for years. For them, the big question is whether
Turkey’s fractious secular politicians will finally quit fighting
over meaningless differences between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee,
and unite to save the secular Republic that gave Turkey the relative
freedom and peace it has enjoyed for so long. If they fail, again,
to give their countrymen secular parties worth voting for, Turkey
could face an increasingly dangerous and violent future. Burak Bekdil
ends his article with a chillingly realistic look at just how bad it
could be: "Of course, Mr. Erdogan [the AKP prime minister] and his
men disapprove of violence in the name of Islam. But there would be a
very thin line between violent Islam and ‘Muslim democracy’ when the
latter becomes the dominant ideology of an unstable, unpredictable
and young populace."

Fortunately, for Turkey and for the West, millions of deeply
concerned and wide awake Turkish citizens are doing everything they
can to prevent this disastrous development. Americans should be doing
everything we can to support them. Instead, our State Department and
too many other Americans are blindly backing the Islamists. When will
we wake up?

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