THE NATIONALIST TURK AND THE WEST

Today’s Zaman
Feb 10 2010
Turkey

Nationalist Turks working for international organizations is an
interesting phenomenon which has not attracted the attention it
deserves.

This phenomenon first attracted my attention during a hearing before
the European Court of Human Rights in 1999.

It was a weeklong session of a fact-finding hearing during which we
learned that Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK), was captured in Kenya and was being transferred
to Turkey by plane. A Turkish gentleman working at the Turkish
section of the court who seemed particularly disinterested in the
content of the hearing became very excited with the news that reached
our courtroom.

During the break, he came by and spoke with me, saying very proudly,
"We got him." It was obvious that he was a Turkish nationalist and had
little to do with human rights. This was why the case before the court,
concerning the destruction of a village in Turkey’s Kurdish region,
was not at all interesting to him. Having observed him that week,
my Kurdish lawyer colleagues’ endless complaints about the Turkish
staff at the European court started to make sense to me.

Kurdish lawyers had always complained about the discriminative
behavior of the Turkish staff toward them. This claim was of course
very difficult to prove. But they felt this way and my observations
confirmed their feelings. Some Kurdish lawyers even planned to
deliver a petition to the European court complaining of the behavior
of some lawyers in the Turkish section, but somehow this wish remained
unfulfilled.

The European court is a human rights court, though I don’t think they
pay any attention to the human rights sensitivities of the staff they
employ. This may not be particularly problematic for other country
sections of the court, but when it comes to countries in which the
education system only serves as a way of brainwashing, there might
be serious problems. And there is no doubt that Turkey is a country
in which people are systematically indoctrinated during their entire
educational career. So if your only criteria is a university degree and
language abilities when you employ staff, it is highly possible that
you will end up with a "white Turk" who sees Kurds as second-class
citizens, religious minorities as the fifth column of imperialist
powers, Kemalism as the only truth, devout Muslims as the greatest
danger, military guardianship as a necessity and so on.

These people have a crucial role where Turkey and the West meet. These
people play quite an interesting role in the way in which the West
interprets Turkey and its political atmosphere. They are not only
working for the European court, they are also at the European
Commission, they are in think tanks in Washington and Brussels,
they are working for the UN, and they work for embassies in Ankara.

They had an important role in convincing the European court that
if the court rejects the headscarf ban, all women in Turkey will
be pressured to cover their heads. They play an important role in
deceiving Western institutions that too much religious freedom can
only support Islamists in Turkey. They lead Westerners to believe that
the Ergenekon gang is just a fabrication of the "Islamist government."

They are the false lenses through which you can only see a distorted
picture of Turkey.

They do not believe in "Western values" but they work for "Western
institutions." There is a kind of deception in the essence of Turkish
modernization and these "Western-looking Turkish nationalists"
carry this mentality in their genetic code. Turkish "modernization"
and "Westernization" is a very deep love-hate relationship. It is a
hopeless struggle to look Western while simultaneously harboring a
deep-seated hatred of the West. It is a Westernization that is based
on getting rid of most of the Western segments of society — namely,
Turkey’s non-Muslims. It is the internalization of the hated one,
so it is a kind of self-hatred. It is the imitation of the perceived
"enemy." It is all about forgetting the "real self."

If we had the same number of non-Muslims as we had in our population
before the Turkish Republic was established, would there be any
discussion over whether Turkey is a European country, whether there
is a danger of Shariah coming back, whether the "Western lifestyle"
is under threat or whether Turkey is a pluralistic society? The same
mentality which wiped out non-Muslims from Anatolia is also fighting
against the conservative segments of Turkish society today.

"Modern" does not equate with having a democratic mentality. The
Armenian massacres and the Holocaust are also part of the history of
this dimension of modernity. Without democracy, modernity is just a
deceiving appearance. Without having a democratic mentality, attaching
too much importance to being a "modern" person can only strengthen the
fascist within. And the nationalist modern Turk in Western institutions
is a textbook example of this. Be careful out there!