A NEW FACE WITH OLD POLITICAL ROOTS

Hurriyet
Feb 23 2009
Turkey

ISTANBUL – A huge gathering was organized last month in Istanbul by
the Felicity Party, or SP, against the Israeli military operation in
Gaza, which according to some political commentators played a key role
in the Turkish prime minister’s subsequent harsh criticism of Israel.

The party’s newly elected leader, Numan KurtulmuÅ~_, held up a picture
of Rachel Corrie at the rally and said the Palestinian issue was
a matter of humanity and not of religion. Corrie was an American
activist killed in 2003 by a bulldozer in Gaza during a protest
against the demolition of Palestinian homes.

"Anti-Semitism arguments are part of Zionist propaganda," KurtulmuÅ~_
told the Hurriyet Daily News & Economic Review in a recent
interview. According to KurtulmuÅ~_, Turkey is not anti-Semitic but
strongly anti-Zionist.

KurtulmuÅ~_ is from Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood where his family
has lived for the past 80 years. Coming from an established family,
he is a well-known figure in Fatih. "Welcome my president," said an
old man with a long beard, clasping KurtulmuÅ~_’s hands as he got out
of his car at Fatih mosque’s garden for Friday prayer. A small group
of people surrounded KurtulmuÅ~_ in the garden and accompanied him to
the mosque. This was after a long interview on Islam, Turkey and the
ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, coming from the same
political tradition of the Milli GöruÅ~_ (National View) of Islamist
politician Necmettin Erbakan, however, with one major difference,
AKP leaders say they "distanced themselves from the National View."

KurtulmuÅ~_, after he was elected as the head of the SP in October,
was welcomed by many as the potential rival to Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, not in the upcoming local elections, but potentially
in the near future. As he has created visible enthusiasm among the
conservative electorate, KurtulmuÅ~_ seems set to worry the AKP.

"I do not currently believe that KurtulmuÅ~_ is a threat to
Erdogan. However, it took 2.3 percent of the votes (in the 2007
election) and was a serious handicap for the prime minister and his
party regarding their electorate," said journalist Bilal Cetin, the
Ankara representative of daily Vatan who closely watches political
circles. "It is necessary to closely watch him because it is obvious
he is a disturbing factor for the ruling party."

RuÅ~_en Cakır, the politics editor at the private news channel NTV,
said the SP and KurtulmuÅ~_ could be an alternative to the AKP only
when the latter started to decline. It would be wrong to expect the
SP to pull the AKP down at this stage, said Cakır.

‘AKP a by-product of military intervention’ For KurtulmuÅ~_, the main
difference between his party and the AKP is the fact that the AKP is a
by-product of special circumstances, meaning military intervention,
and as such, he drew parallels to late President Turgut Ozal’s
Motherland Party that ruled the country after the 1980 military coup.

"The AKP is not a party of ideology or a certain paradigm, but a
conjectural party," he said. "The political actors were all cleaned
out in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, Ozal would not have been
meaningful if there was no Sept. 12 coup."

However, in the period around Feb. 28, 1997, both actors and spectators
were thrown out of the political scene, according to KurtulmuÅ~_. "The
de-politicization of the people deepened," he said, adding that if
the Welfare Party of Erbakan was not closed after Feb. 28, the AKP
would not have existed.

The time when the military interfered in the coalition government
of the True Path Party and the Welfare Party, referred to as the
Feb. 28 period, occurred under the justification that the latter
was pursuing anti-secular activity. The pressure exerted by the army
through non-military means was described as a postmodern coup. It began
with a National Security Council, or MGK, meeting and the period took
its name from the date of the meeting.

The military listed what the government could and could not do,
triggering a process that led to the resignation of the coalition
government and the closure of the Welfare Party.

KurtulmuÅ~_ criticized the AKP for having an eclectic structure. The
party takes ideas from the National View in part, some liberal
ideas due to the support of liberal democrat intellectuals, and
also partially supports the European Union while at the same time
identifying with the current status quo, KurtulmuÅ~_ said.

One of the most common comments about KurtulmuÅ~_ is that he is an
intellectual politician. "The existence of KurtulmuÅ~_ in Turkish
politics is in itself a good thing," said Cakır. "He is an academic,
which is not very common in Turkish politics," Cakır said, adding
that KurtulmuÅ~_ was aware of the outside world because he had worked
abroad as well.

KurtulmuÅ~_ is a graduate of a vocational religious high school and
received academic degrees in management and human resources.

He is married to Sevgi KurtulmuÅ~_, also an academic, who was dismissed
from Istanbul University for wearing a headscarf during the term of
Kemal Alemdaroglu’s office as rector of the university.

An Islamic country "Turkey is an Islamic country with regard to
the [Muslim] majority of its population. However, it is also the
remainder of an empire that included a variety of religions, sects and
ethnicities that lived in peace throughout history," KurtulmuÅ~_ said.

What is critical for KurtulmuÅ~_ is that the Ottoman Empire managed
to create an environment in which all the different ethnic and
religious groups lived together in peace and harmony. "There is no
Muslim country that uses the word ‘gávur,’ (infidel). Gávur does
not mean non-Muslim, it means the one who behaves cruelly, who is an
imperialist," he said, adding that non-Muslims in Turkey do not think
of themselves as gávur. "The Ottoman concept had an understanding
that internalized everyone," he said, adding that past events, such
as Sept. 6 to 7 when the shops and houses of non-Muslims were pillaged
and destroyed and the Armenian issue, were all political provocations.

"The Kurdish question is a 30-year-old problem," he said. He then
outlined four points on the issue, a frequent habit when speaking
about his party’s policies. He said the four fundamental issues in
southeastern Anatolia are economic problems, individual freedoms,
the security and terror problem and the wrongful attitudes of public
officials toward people in the region, and all of them have been
neglected for years.

Secularism versus Islam KurtulmuÅ~_ also said he did not believe
practically nor historically that there was a conflict of Islam and
secularism among the Turkish people. "Islam is a unionizing unit
culturally, for non-Muslims, too," he said.

Turkey needs to have constitutionally defined secularism, according to
KurtulmuÅ~_. He said secularism is not a concept that occurred within
Turkey’s culture but one that came from the French Revolution, when
the clergy were targeted because they were seen as accomplices of the
aristocracy. "In our roots there is no aristocracy and no mosque that
supports aristocracy, neither were there Muslim ecclesiasts," he said.