TURKEY’S ARCHAIC AUTHORITARIAN MODEL CRUMBLING
Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, Canada
Aug 30 2007

The election of Abdullah Gul as Turkey’s first "Islamist" president
over the objections of the "secularist" military is more than a
triumph of democracy.

Combined with last month’s sweeping victory of the ruling party,
it represents a historic development with domestic and international
implications.

We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the 84-year-old
authoritarian model put in place by Kemal Ataturk at the end of the
Ottoman Empire.

He set up a quasi-dictatorship, featuring narrow Turkish nationalism;
state suppression of Islam in public spaces; and the centralization
of power in the army, which enabled the generals to mount three
coups against elected governments and help topple a fourth through
the courts.

In the early 1980s, when Turkey was battling leftist anarchists, the
army positioned itself as the guardian of the Turkish Islamic nation.

Lately, it has styled itself as the bulwark against "Islamists"
threatening secularism.

What the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has really
threatened is the power of the army.

The row over Mrs. Gul’s hijab is mostly a red herring. While there is
no denying the symbolic importance of the fact that she’s the first
First Lady to wear one, the real issue is that the army hated losing
the presidency though which it controlled the machinery of government.

The next battle will be over an Oct. 21 referendum on constitutional
changes guaranteeing freedom of speech, religion and dress, thereby
ending fascist notions of what constitutes "Turkishness," what Turks
can or cannot say about the 1915-17 Armenian genocide, and what women
can or cannot wear.

The marginalization of the army and the secular establishment also
represents the triumph of majority Turkish Muslim sentiment long
suppressed by the ruling minority.

The new order reflects the economic and social rise of the great
unwashed from Anatolia and elsewhere, whom the elites have long held
in contempt.

Credit for these developments belongs equally to the European Union.

It set democratic benchmarks for Turkey’s possible entry into the EU.

Without those, Erdogan wouldn’t have been able to pull off the miracles
he has.

His success also proves that "Islamist parties can operate within a
democratic and constitutional framework," notes Prof. James Reilly,
a University of Toronto expert on Turkey.

The West should be encouraging this democratic model across the Muslim
world, rather than relying on authoritarian rulers, as it sometimes
has – the Shah in Iran; Gamal Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt; Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan – with disastrous
consequences.

Reilly compares Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party to the
Christian Democratic parties of Europe, rooted in religion but
respectful of the secular state, as Erdogan and Gul have been. In
return, the secularists should respect Muslims, rather than engage
in cultural warfare with them.

It is no accident that Turkey’s democratic leaders have also been the
chief architects of Turkey’s bid to join the EU. It is a sentiment
Europe should reciprocate.

Just as the Ottoman Empire was part of both the Islamic and European
worlds, Turkey belongs to NATO and the Muslim world. It has good
relations with the U.S. and Israel, as well as with the Arabs (it
hopes to host the proposed Middle East peace conference in the fall),
with Syria (which can serve as a back channel to Israel) and with Iran.

Turkey’s new order is welcome, and long overdue.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus,
appears Thursday in World and Sunday in the A-section. Email:
hsiddiq@thestar.ca

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