WARNING: WEST COULD LOSE TURKEY
Haroon Siddiqui, [email protected]
Toronto Star, Canada
95
July 26 2007
Turkey has just had a democratic revolution, but which the West has
failed to see, blinded as it is by its paranoia about Islam.
The ruling Justice and Development Party has won the largest share
of vote of any party in four decades – 46.6 per cent. The last time
a party in Canada got that kind of a mandate was in 1968,0 when the
Pierre Trudeau Liberals won 45.37 per cent of the vote.
The Justice Party, less than a decade old and representing a new
generation of mostly middle-class rural Turks, has handed a stunning
defeat to the parties representing the military-led urban cabal of
uniformed officers, judges and bureaucrats, who’ve had an iron grip
on power for 80 years, through military coups and other strong-arm
tactics.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ushered in an era of liberalism
that’s beginning to question the narrow nationalism that refuses to
acknowledge the 1915-17 genocide of Christian Armenians or the ethnic
and linguistic identity of the minority Kurds.
Yet our media coverage and commentary on Sunday’s historic election
has been stuck on one note: secularism vs. Islam.
Erdogan once belonged to an overtly Islamic party, a crime in Turkey.
By that standard, the 100 million or so Christian fundamentalist
Americans would be criminals. And Stockwell Day and his ilk would be
barred from parliament.
Erdogan’s wife and daughters wear the hijab. So does the wife of
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. But neither claims, unlike George W.
Bush, to take dictation from God in foreign or domestic policy.
Erdogan’s market-oriented economics helped bring down runaway
inflation, staved off a national bankruptcy, attracted record
investment, and improved medicare, public schools and social housing.
He liberalized enough domestic laws to convince the Europeans to
begin talks for a possible Turkish entry into the European Union.
The Kurdish language was initiated on radio and TV. Kurds have just
won seats in parliament, after a decade-long ban imposed when a
Kurdish MP dared speak her native language in the chamber.
On foreign policy, Erdogan bowed to popular will in denying U.S.
troops permission to use Turkey for invading Iraq. But he allowed
the use of an air base.
He continued close economic and military co-operation with Israel.
By contrast, when Orhan Pamuk – he who had raised the Armenian issue
– won the Nobel Prize for literature, the secularist establishment
refused to congratulate him.
The judiciary has been hounding writers and intellectuals on charges of
"insulting Turkishness."
The derin devlet (deep state), the shadowy network of
ultra-nationalists and rogue state elements, has been suspected of
having a hand in the bombing of a Kurdish bookstore and the murder
of an Armenian editor.
Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, head of the army, does not like the European
Union, especially its insistence on greater civilian control of the
army. So we end up with this dichotomy: The "Islamists" are liberal
democratic modernizers while the "secularists" are retrogrades. The
former want to fulfil Kemal Ataturk’s dream of joining Turkey to
Europe, while the latter, supposed defenders of his legacy, resist it.
One more irony: The European opponents of Turkey joining the EU –
France, Germany, Austria, etc. – may discover that the issue may
no longer be that Europe has no place for Turkey but that Turkey,
economically galloping at thrice the rate of Europe and getting tired
of Western hypocrisy, will have no room for Europe.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
