TIME TO BURY ATATURK
Foreign Correspondent, Canada
May 7 2007
Western politicians and media unvarying hail Turkey as a democratic
and social role model for other Muslim nations. `Why can’t the Muslim
World be more likely Turkey,’ goes the refrain in Washington.
The recent dramatic political events in Turkey should instruct us
that behind its veneer of parliamentary democracy lie unelected,
semi-totalitarian power structures that have directed this nation’s
affairs since the 1920’s.
Exhibit A: attempts by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party
(known as AK) to elect its able Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, as
president. Under the current unrepresentative system, parliament,
rather than voters, elects the powerful president.
Gul failed to win election due to a boycott of parliament by opposition
parties and threats from the military. He withdrew his candidacy and
called for the direct election of Turkey’s president.
What Turks call their `deep government’ had once again used its
iron fist.
AK, which runs Turkey’s most popular and successful government in
living memory, is mildly Islamist. It advocates Islamic principles
of social justice, better education, some wealth distribution, and
fighting corruption. AK does not advocate imposition of Sharia law
or major social restrictions, as in neighboring Iran.
In fact, the moderate, centrist AK is quite close in outlook to
Europe’s Christian Democratic parties.
AK has enacted more beneficial reforms in human rights, education,
public finance, health,and relations with old foe Greece than all of
Turkey’s previous governments since 1945.
Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has achieved great strides in aligning
Turkey with the European Union’s laws and conventions. Today, the EU
is the world’s leader in human rights and advancement of democracy.
Turkey’s westernized elite mobilized to prevent Abdullah Gul from
replacing the outgoing president, Ahmet Necdet, a hardline secularist
installed by Turkey’s powerful military. Turkey’s ironically-named
Constitutional Court, created by the armed forces after its last coup,
denied Gul’s legitimate election. In response, AK called national
elections for 22 July.
Political power in Turkey has long been contested between the elected
parliament and the generals of the 515,000-man armed forces, NATO’s
second largest. Turkey’s military, too-powerful security forces,
courts, government bureaucracy, universities, and industrial oligarchy
are widely known as the `deep government.’ This minority has held
power since the 1920’s.
Turkey’s military and security organs closely control the nation’s
religious life and clergy, who are paid by the government. All sermons
are written by government officials and distributed to mosques for
Friday services. Islam, in Turkey, is on a tight leash.
In fact, Turkey’s state control of religion was likely directly
inspired by Stalin’s takeover and management of the Russian Orthodox
Church.
The `deep government’ has battled all attempts to alter the status
quo or abandon Turkey’s state religion, the bizarre cult of 1930’s
dictator Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who continues as an idol of veneration
by Turkey’s hard right and westernized elite.
Turkey’s `deep government’ has not hesitated to use gangsters and
neo-fascist nationalist groups against opponents or arrest political
opponents. In Turkey’s chronically unstable political equation,
the `deep government’ holds about 60% of real power and the elected
parliament roughly 40%.
The election of Abdullah Gul to the presidency could have seriously
altered this status quo. As president, he would have been able to
appoint the military’s senior officers and bringing the armed forces,
a state within the state, under control of the civilian government
for the first time in Turkey’s modern history.
In recent weeks, Turkey’s glowering generals openly threatened to
overthrow the AK-led government of Prime Minister Erdogan. Turkey’s
military juntas have ousted four governments since the 1950’s,
including the last Islamist-light government in 1997. While mayor of
Istanbul, the highly popular Erdogan was actually jailed for reading
a classic poem that the military deemed too Islamist.
Until recently, Turkey’s military junta received unlimited American
backing. Turkey closely followed Washington’s lead and acted as
its regional gendarme. Close political, military, intelligence, and
commercial relations were established with Israel which, in return,
opened all doors in Washington for Turkey and held America’s powerful
Greek and Armenian lobbies at bay. But after recent brazen coup threats
by Turkey’s brass, the US and the EU rightly warned them to stay out
of politics.
Turkey’s `secularists,’ who have been staging large anti-AK
demonstrations, fear AK will curtail the privileges they enjoy. The
generals would cease being Turkey’s shadow government and benefiting
from arms purchases. Industrialists could lose their monopolies and
state contracts, government bureaucrats in Ankara their perks.
Many of Turkey’s westernized urban dwellers fear Islamists, even AK’s
moderate ones, might impose Iranian-style Sharia law, including dress
codes and bans on alcohol. AK supporters, many of whom have emigrated
from rural to urban areas in recent decades, support a return to
Turkey’s more Islamic culture, but hardly to an Islamic theocracy,
as claim their secular enemies.
This is the traditional open-minded, easy-going Islamic culture that
Attatuk ripped out by its roots in the 1930’s in his headlong effort
to transform Turkey from a Muslim into a western European nation.
Remarkably, almost eighty years later, the ghost of this deified
dictator, who was deeply influenced by such contemporaries as Mussolini
and Stalin, continues to hold Turkey in thrall. Ataturk’s ruthless
anti-Islamic revolution also left Turkey with a permanent case of
national schizophrenia, unsure to this day whether it is a western
or Asian nation.
Americans and Europeans who cite Turkey as a model of Islamic good
government have little understanding of what really transpires behind
its facade of parliamentary democracy. Turkey cannot become a real
democracy or modern nation until the power of its self-serving generals
and industrial oligarchs is replaced by a truly independent government,
and Turks are allowed to worship as they please.
Those nations who claim to be friends of Turkey, like the US and the
EU, should keep telling Turkey’s generals to get out of politics and
return to their barracks for good. It’s time to shine bright lights
into Turkey’s `deep government’ and end its sinister, reactionary
influence.
copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007
WRITER’S NOTEBOOK
*No surprise in France. Sarkozy won election by a big margins,
confirming France’s desire to bring in tough, painful economic
reforms. Problem is, those who want reform, want someone else to bear
the pain. If anyone can effect substantial reform, it’s the human
buzz-saw Sarko. But he will soon be at war with France’s violent
farmers, transport and industrial unions, the bloated state and
educational bureaucracy, and all those who live off the government.
Get your riot gear ready. Another point, parliamentary elections will
be held in June. French may hand parliament over to the opposition
parties, to make sure Sarko and his conservatives do not go too far.
*Among the many smarmy neoconservatives that infested the Bush
Administration, Paul Wolfowitz was probably the most loathsome(
though Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is a strong contender for
this title.) Photographed licking his comb, or touring a mosque in
socks with holes in both toes, this personally unclean academic was
the main architect of the Iraq War and a leading American lobbyist
for Israel’s rightwing Likud Party. Some in CIA called him a `fifth
columnist.’ An arrant fool and serial liar, Wolfie and his even dimmer
deputy, Douglas Feith, should have faced indictment on criminal charges
for the fraudulent Iraq War. Instead, he was sent to the World Bank
by Bush. Caught in a tawdry scandal over a girlfriend, Wolfowitz is
struggling to hang on as chief. He is still being backed by Bush and
Bush’s new, eager-bever sidekick, Canada’s Stephen Harper. Throw out
this creature and send him back to richly deserved obscurity.
*Learning that poor, little Jamaica and wretched Haiti have become the
world’s most crime-infested nations, and the whole Caribbean is now
a major crime zone, is really tragic. I used to live in Jamaica and
still keep its charm and beauty in my heart. Drugs have swamped the
region. It has become an entrepot between South America and the US. I
lost an old Haitian friend, Tijo Noustas, murdered by drug traders. Now
Jamaica is sinking into criminality and gunplay. A powerful argument
for de-criminalizing drugs. Bush’s so-called `war on drugs’ is doing
even worse than his botched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
***
Eric Margolis Foreign Correspondent / Defense Analyst & Columnist
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