The Statesman (India)
July 29, 2007 Sunday

HOW FAR TURKEY CAN RESIST GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS IS LITTLE CLEARER NOW

Modern Turkey was founded as a secular state by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
in 1923 out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. In recent years,
Turkey has been perceived internationally as a moderate Muslim
democracy, something of a rarity. This is why the results of last
weeks parliamentary election in Turkey were eagerly awaited by a
watching world. Like so many significant elections, the outcome has
proved complex and difficult to interpret. Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogans AKP (Justice and Development) Party received 47 per cent of
the vote, significantly more than five years earlier, and with about
340 seats out of 550, is the clear winner.

The right-wing nationalists received about 70 seats, while the party
of the Kurdish minority hold about 22 seats; many of these stood as
independents, to circumvent restrictions on Kurdish representation.
The loser was the Republican Peoples Party, the CHP, the party of
Kemal Ataturk, which has only 110 seats in the new parliament. The
long-term strategy of Erdogans party remains something of an enigma.
It is described in the Western press as mildly Islamic. It
exemplifies a moderate Islam, although its roots were in a more
openly Islamic party, banned under the secular constitution, of which
the military have been the principal upholders and enforcers. The
military have intervened in Turkish politics three times in the past
50 years, most recently in 1980; and it was in consequence of yet
another threat from the army that Erdogan called early elections this
month. The issue was over the AK Partys nomination to the Presidency.
It had chosen Abdullah Gul, whose wife openly wears a headscarf, a
religious emblem prohibited in public places by the Constitution.
Demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara by secularists earlier in the
year gave the impression of powerful forces in favour of maintaining
the place of religion as subservient to the State. The success, even
of the mild Islamists remains open to interpretation: the wearing of
headscarves has actually become more prevalent in Turkey in recent
years. Does this mean a hardening of the popular sensibility in
favour of a more committed Islam, or does it, combined with
widespread support for the AK, serve as a warning to the military not
to intervene again in the politics of Turkey? Some commentators
believe that the AK has a more profoundly Islamist long-term agenda;
and as confirmation of this, they point to the growing commitment of
Muslims all over the world to a less compromising form of political
Islam. On the other hand, Erdogan has presided over five years of
considerable economic growth. He has furthered negotiations for
Turkey to become part of the European Union, in spite of considerable
hostility from many members of the EU. He has shown himself in favour
of modernisation and the prosperity this brings, a process surely
incompatible with a concealed religious objective. The AK is
vigorously opposed by the ultra-nationalists of the MHP, who have
been suspicious of Europe ever since the break-up of the Ottoman
Empire, and they fear Europe has further designs on their country: an
inflow of foreign investment, the modernising of Turkey in the
interests of admission to the European Union, the growth of the
market economy which has left many people, especially poor, rural
people, stranded in a bewildering limbo, have provided fertile ground
for the nationalists. In the past year an American journalist was
killed, and three Christian evangelists murdered in Turkey: this was
the work of extreme nationalists, who are more suspicious of the West
than they are of the Islamists. There are, of course, also darker
historical aspects of Turkish nationalism. Before Kemal Ataturk could
drag what was a medieval society into the modern world, Turkish
nationalism, promoted by the Young Turks had come to dominate the
Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany and
Austro-Hungary in the First World War, an aborted attack on Russia
was blamed on the Armenians, who were Christian. This led to a
slaughter of Armenians by the Turks, the first of the many genocides
of the 20th century. Between 1915 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of
Armenians were massacred. Discussion of this event became taboo in
Turkey; as recently as 2005, Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk
was threatened with jail for mentioning the Armenian issue. But it is
the position of the large Kurdish minority in Turkey that remains the
most vibrant issue in the rise of the nationalists. Kurds constitute
more than 15 per cent of the population of Turkey; and they also make
up sizeable minorities in neighbouring Iran, Syria and Iraq, where
they now form the most stable part of liberated Iraq. Ever since the
birth of the Turkish Republic, there have been uprisings and
struggles for independence by the Kurds. These especially in 1927 –
1930 and again in 1938 39, were brutally put down by the Turkish
military, and between 1983 and 1991, use of the Kurdish language was
prohibited, and a policy of forced assimilation or Turkification was
pursued. The Kurdish separatist Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the
Left-wing Kurdish Workers Party, was arrested, tried and sentenced to
death for terrorism in 1999. On the intervention of the European
powers, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, a leniency
which infuriated the Turkish nationalists, who saw it as voluntary
self-abasement of Turkey to the diktat of the Europe. The Kurds
remain the largest linguistically and culturally homogeneous group
people in the world who lack a separate state; and as such, their
presence remains a threat to the countries where they live. In
Turkey, although many Kurds speak Turkish and many more are
bilingual, about five million are Kurdish-speakers only. The presence
in Iraq of a semi-autonomous Kurdish region has led to the massing of
the Turkish army on the border with Iraq; and the question of a
Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, in pursuit of Kurdish
separatists or terrorists, poses yet another problem for the US and
coalition forces in Iraq. These, then, are the issues that remain
unresolved, even by this, the most decisive of election results. The
question of minorities, the ambiguous relationship between a
secularism (which in Turkey has been enforced with a heavy, even
authoritarian, hand) and the growth of religious ideology, itself a
conservative reaction of people fearful of a modern economy which,
while wiping out their traditional agricultural function, appears to
offer them no space these are issues that touch not only Turkey, but
almost every so-called developing country. The results in Turkey
suggest that this is a victory for democracy. But these are only
temporary arrangements: mandates expire, or are overtaken by more
dramatic events. What happens in Turkey is not necessarily dependent
upon what happens within Turkey, as the nationalists perceive.
Whether the military will impose a more aggressive secularism,
provoking increased religious militancy, and whether the modernising
thrust will call forth a conservative backlash, have their echo in
many other countries now embarked upon the road of Western-style
development (by no means all of them Islamic). The fate of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturks party, the CHP, reduced to mimic its more vehement
nationalistic rivals, is a measure of the decay of truly secular
ideologies in the face of the rising wave of religious fundamentalism
in the world. How far Turkey can resist these global developments is
little clearer now than it was before the elections.