PRIME MINISTER ADMITS TURKEY’S ‘FASCIST’ PAST
Thomas Seibert
The National
May 26 2009
UAE
ISTANBUL // Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has
become his country’s first head of government to acknowledge publicly
that his country displayed a "fascist approach" in dealing with its
minorities in the past, when Christians and Jews fled abroad after
coming under pressure.
"For years, these things were done in this country," Mr Erdogan
told a meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party in Duzce,
north-western Turkey, last weekend.
"People of other ethnicities were driven from the country. Did we win
anything because of that? This was the result of a fascist approach."
With this "historic self-criticism", as newspapers called it, the
prime minister was reacting to opposition criticism aimed at government
plans to consider giving the job of clearing landmines along the border
with Syria to foreign – especially Israeli – companies. As relations
between Turkey and Syria have improved rapidly in recent years,
both countries have agreed to clear the mines on their border. The
parliament in Ankara is expected to debate a bill designed to organise
the mine-clearing operation along the border strip of almost 900km
this week.
The Erdogan government has been criticised repeatedly by opposition
parties for opening Turkey to foreign investors. A law concerning
the sale of real estate to foreigners has been stopped by the
constitutional court several times in recent years after nationalists
said the regulation would enable foreigners to take control over
large parts of Turkey’s territories.
Members of Turkey’s tiny non-Muslim minorities are regarded with
suspicion by Turkish nationalists, who see them as agents of such
foreign powers as Greece or Israel. Countering these accusations in
his Duzce speech, Mr Erdogan said: "Money is like mercury. It goes
where it finds the most adequate place." Referring to the opposition,
he added: "You see, some come out and say: ‘This Jewish investment
is wrong.’ No, this friend is coming to invest in my country. He is
investing a billion dollars. There is no ‘we don’t want that’."
In the mine-clearing debate, opposition parties accused the Erdogan
government of selling out to foreigners because the company that wins
the tender has the right to use the land for organic agriculture for
44 years after the clearing operation.
Opposition politicians said the government was about to hand over
control of the border area to Israel because Israeli companies are
reported to have come up with very competitive proposals.
"The border is holy, it is a place where national honour is being
protected," Erdal Sihapi, a member of parliament for the right-wing
Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) said in a speech this month. "Now
this honour is being given away to foreigners for 44 years."
Observers say Mr Erdogan went far beyond the usual rhetoric of a
Turkish politician when he answered the opposition’s accusations –
the kind of public self-criticism that is very unusual for Turkey.
"That statement was the most courageous thing ever said by Erdogan",
Halil Berktay, a historian at Istanbul’s Sabanci University, told
yesterday’s Vatan newspaper. Baskin Oran, another academic known for
his liberal views, told the Star newspaper he was "proud of a prime
minister who denounces ethnic and religious cleansing".
With his comments, Mr Erdogan touched a delicate subject in Turkey. In
several waves over the past several decades, thousands of Greeks,
Armenians and Jews have left the country after riots or after pressure
from the state in the form of punitive taxes. In one incident,
Turkish nationalists destroyed hundreds of shops owned by Greeks and
Armenians in Istanbul in one night on Sept 6 1955. The subject was
taboo in Turkey for a long time and has been discussed openly only
for a few years.
"The Greek community, which has been afraid to talk about the events of
the 6th and the 7th September, will now talk without fear about their
experiences after the prime minister’s statement," Mihailis Vasiliadis,
a journalist and member of Istanbul’s Greek community, told the Star.
The number of Greeks living in Istanbul has shrunk dramatically, to
about 3,000 from nearly 100,000 at the end of the 1950s, according
to Rev Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, a spokesman of the Greek-Orthodox
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul.
"These are tragic figures that speak volumes," Anagnostopoulos said
in an interview last month.
"They went away because they did not see a future for themselves."
Silvio Ovadio, leader of Turkey’s Jewish community, also welcomed Mr
Erdogan’s speech. "Everybody, whatever his religion, is made happy
by the prime minister’s words," he told the Star. The number of Jews
in Turkey, once around 60,000, has sunk to 20,000.
Opposition politicians, however, accused Mr Erdogan of defacing
Turkey’s history. Onur Oymen, a leading member of the Republican
People’s Party, the biggest opposition party in parliament, said no
Turkish citizen had ever been expelled because of his ethnicity, the
NTV news channel reported. Mr Oymen also said his party will send the
mine-clearing bill to the constitutional court if parliament adopts
it, according to news reports.
Oktay Vural of the MHP said Mr Erdogan’s words were an insult to the
Turkish nation.