The first two days of the past week saw two momentous developments on the diplomatic front take place on the Turkish scene. But Tuesday night then witnessed a heinous terror attack that left the country reeling. The ruling Justice and Development Party (or AKP), led by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım (aka Hapless) and staunchly supported by the nominally neutral President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez), appeared in shock following a triple suicide attack on the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul . . . but could it be that these seemingly random and unrelated events are somehow interlinked and interconnected??

Last Monday and Tuesday (27-28 June 2016) have constituted a most momentous 48 hours for Turkey. At the very outset of the week, things looked up with the Turkish media (read, the state propaganda apparatus) reporting that Israel had finally decided to make reparations and reinstate cordial relations with Turkey, relations that have been shaky ever since then-PM Erdoğan’s “One Minute” performance at Davos (30 January 2009) and the subsequent deadly Mavi Marmara incident (31 May 2010). Later on during the same day then news emerged that Turkey had, in turn, made overtures towards Russia, in an attempt to patch up things between Ankara and Moscow, between Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin. Following these two major developments on the political scene, pundits and the public alike were busy regurgitating the facts when Tuesday night, towards 10 PM, terrorist struck at Istanbul’s main communication artery, the Atatürk Airport in Yeşilköy, the nation’s biggest and Europe’s third largest, in operation since 1924, serving more than 60 million passengers last year.

The Israeli Gambit

Those 48 hours began so well, the staunchly pro-AKP daily Sabah even proudly carrying the headline that Turkey had forced Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza strip. Turkey’s hapless PM Binali Yıldırım subsequently announced to the world that the “Gaza embargo [is] to be largely lifted,” even adding that “Turkish ship[s] carrying 10,000 tons of aid will move toward [the] Israeli port of Ashdod on Friday.” In this way, Turkey proclaimed that is has apparently done its bit for the besieged Palestinians living in the “world’s largest open air prison“ as the Israeli embargo on Gaza has now been “largely lifted.” The Israeli authorities, on the other hand, as worded by the Jerusalem-based journalist Allison Deger, beg to differ as they seem to indicate that the “blockade over the Gaza Strip . . . will remain in full”. In fact, Bibi (as in Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s more than hawkish PM and an apparent Jewish mirror image of the Turkish Prez himself), has made this abundantly clear that “[t]his [, the Gaza embargo] is our supreme security interest; I was not prepared to compromise on it.” Still, for Turkish domestic consumption, the AKP spin doctors are more than happy to bend the truth and paint the Prez and Hapless as the ultimate champions of oppressed Muslims worldwide, in particular of the Palestinians.

The English-language Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera reports in detail that the “deal will see Israel provide economic compensation worth $20m to the families of the 10 Turkish citizens killed by Israeli forces who raided the six-ship [Mavi Marmara] flotilla heading to break the Israeli siege on Gaza and provide humanitarian aid to the almost two million Palestinians living there. In addition to the compensation, the agreement will allow Turkey to deliver humanitarian aid, build a 200-bed hospital, a housing project and a desalination plant in Gaza, under the condition that materials go through the Israeli port of Ashdod first.” Even though Hapless made it seem that Turkey’s aid delivery to “[the] Israeli port of Ashdod” constitutes but a first step towards lifting Israel’s siege of Gaza, the reality is that Turkey will deliver aid to the Palestinians via the good offices of their jailers and occupiers, the State of Israel. Still, ties between Turkey and Israel will be restored, leading to revived trade links and a possible influx of Jewish tourists into the AKP-led country. These trade ties will not include arms’ deals however, as explained by an Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity: “This agreement does not confer a green light to restore the intimacy we once knew among our defense industries and military cadres, even if there was such a desire in Turkey, which is doubtful.” All in all, it seems to me that the Turkey-Israel deal, which was signed in Rome, looks a lot like a PR exercise on behalf of the Prez and Hapless, a PR exercise that conveyed he impression of a clear Turkish victory over Israeli wrongdoing, a victory that provides an lessening of Muslim (as in Palestinian) suffering.

The Russian Gambit

In the course of the same Monday that followed the previous Sunday, when Feridun Sinirlioğlu, undersecretary to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, and attorney Dr. Joseph Ciechanover, acting on behalf of the Israeli government, had started negotiating the deal in Rome, another news item appeared on the Turkey’s horizon. The news agency Sputnik namely reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had made an important announcement: “President Putin has received a letter from Turkish President Erdogan where the Turkish leader expresses interest in resolving the situation around the downing of a Russian bomber jet.” Peskov went on to say that in his letter, the Prez declared that Turkey “shares the pain of the downed Su-24 pilot’s death with his family,” even referring to it “as Turkey’s pain.” Dmitry Peskov continues that “[i]n the letter, the Turkish President also says he has always seen Russia as a strategic partner and a friend.” And that Tayyip Erdoğan in his missive literally said that “[w]e never intended to shoot down the aircraft of the Russian Federation.” In this instance, the Prez appears to have been eating humble pie in dealing with his Russian counterpart. Quite a reversal from late last year when he literally engaged Putin in a duel of words. At the time, neither side held back, taking swipe after swipe at his opponent. But times have clearly changed now and having abandoned his bluster with regard to the Russian President, Erdoğan did apparently not shy away from having an emotional missive penned on his behalf.

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that Tayyip Erdoğan’s “message includes both words expressing regret and the word ‘sorry,’ both are in there.” In contrast, earlier and to be precise, on Thursday, 26 November 2015, for instance, the Turkish President emphatically told the press “I will not apo-lo-gize!’ But now he has, even assuring his Russian counterpart that Moscow and Ankara are strategic partners. And going on to say that Turkey will pay compensation, as his missives pledges that Turkey will take all the steps necessarey to “relieve the pain and severity of damage,” inflicted upon the relatives of the Russian pilot Oleg Peshkov who was killed in mid-air. After having ejected from his plane, the pilot was shot by a member of the Turkish ultra-nationalist militant group the Grey Wolves (affiliated to the extreme rightwing MHP or Party of the National Movement), apparently fighting alongside Turkmen terrorists (or freedom fighters, if you will) battling the Assad regime. His name is Alparslan Çelik and the Turkish authorities arrested him and 16 other suspects on 31 March 2016 in the district of Karabağlar in the coastal city of İzmir. But as it happened, on the Monday prior to Dmitry Peskov’s statement regarding Tayyip Erdoğan’s letter, the Islamist and clearly pro-AKP daily Yeni Akit reported that the presiding judge had taken an interim decision, discharging seven suspects prohibiting them from leaving the country.

A Matter of Timing: It’s the Gas, Stupid

It seems highly suspect that these two diplomatic developments just happened to occur at the same time. And both events seem to have very strong economic ramifications. A cynic might just say that the Prez simply swallowed his pride to attempt to secure the return of Russian tourists to Turkey’s Mediterranean coastal resort of Antalya. Turkey’s tourism trade has incurred dramatic losses over the past months: “the number of Russian tourists visiting the resort [of Antalya] between June 1 and June 16 declined by 98.5 percent, and German tourists by 45 percent, compared to the same timeframe in 2015.” At the same time, the energy factor should not be discounted either as Turkey imports nearly 99% of the natural gas it consumes. Last year, before the infamous downing of the Russian Su-24, Turkey imported about 58% of the natural gas is from Russia (the remaining percentage points being Iran with 18%, Azerbaijan 12%, Algeria 7,7% and Nigeria 2,4%). And the Israel deal might also have a definite gas angle. The State of Israel might just be angling for a potential customer for its offshore gas exports. Israel’s 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, carrying the quasi-poetic name Operation Protective Edge (8 July-26 August 2014) was in small part carried out to secure the “Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells, inside the Leviathan field and off the Gaza coast.” The Geneva-based Anais Antreasyan rightly points out in the University of California’s Journal of Palestine Studies that Israel’s long-term goal is “to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations”. But, as the international security journalist and academic Dr. Nafeez Ahmed appropriately underlines, the 2014 “Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not all about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war.” And arguably Turkey would be a more than willing recipient of Gaza gas, via the infrastructure provided by the State of Israel — not just for its domestic consumption but also to fulfill its ambition of becoming a veritable and viable energy hub in the region. And the preparatory groundwork for this deal was done when last month Turkey rescinded its veto on any Israeli activity with NATO and the Jewish State was subsequently allowed to open offices in the Brussels NATO headquarters. It is thus no wonder that Hamas, the political force in charge of the Gaza strip, was not part of the current Israel-Turkey deal. This appears particularly curious, as on Friday, 17 June, the Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal met the Prez in Istanbul. The Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative, Mustafa Barghouti, for his part, appeared unable to hide his displeasure: “If it is true that the [Turkey-Israel] deal relates to a future gas deal, it will be very dangerous and disappointing,” adding that “[w]e are very worried about any country that cooperates with Israel in exporting gas. It’s a profitable measure and we view it as one that rewards the occupier. It is disappointing, especially from a country that says it supports Palestine.”

These heady developments between the threesome of Turkey, Russia, and Israel were all the talk during Monday and Tuesday, but then suddenly at 10 PM these diplomatic machinations all became secondary, as 3 unidentified suicide bombers attacked the Foreign Arrivals terminal of the Istanbul Atatürk Airport, killing 41 (of whom ten were foreign nationals) and injuring more than 200 innocent bystanders. This was the the fourth suicide bombing in Istanbul in 2016. Siobhán O’Grady, a staff writer at Foreign Policy, opined that the “attack comes just three months after a group of Islamic State militants launched a similar attack in the departures wing of the Brussels Airport, killing 15 people. The Turkish government has already blamed the strikes on unspecified terrorists, but has not yet named which group they believe is responsible. The two most likely suspects are the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) or the Islamic State, both of which have repeatedly carried out terrorist attacks in Turkey in recent years.” The Prez was quick to add his words, reminding his domestic as well international audience that Turkey would “continue [its] fight against these terrorists until the end, tirelessly and fearlessly.” The Hapless PM has since fallen in line with his boss and declared that “[t]his attack, targeting innocent people, is a vile, planned terrorist act . . . The findings of our security forces point at the Daesh organisation [or the IS/ISIS/ISIL] as the perpetrators of this terror attack.”

The Triple Suicide Attack: Another Caliphal Strike or Something More Sinister?!??

But this triple suicide attack, perpetrated by individuals travelling to the airport in the same taxi cab, came hot on the heels of a suicide car bomb attack earlier this month in the popular Istanbul neighborhood of Vezneciler, killing 11 people and wounding dozens more. The authorities also quickly pointed the finger at the Caliph and Merry Men (aka the Islamic State or Daesh/IS/ISIS/ISIL), though the outrage was never claimed by any terror group. But owning up to a terror act is nevertheless the usual MO followed by members of the Islamic State, who are keen to publicize their dastardly deeds widely via the internet and other social media. On Tuesday night, in the hours following the triple suicide attack, the German public-service broadcaster ARD floated the suggestion that the terror group TAK (the Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan or the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons) could be responsible for the outrage. And this might appear sensible indeed, keeping in mind the Ankara government’s continued war on sections of Turkey’s Kurdish population in the south-east of the country. On an earlier occasion, I also pointed to this terror group, active in Turkey. But the Prez and his sidekick Hapless appear keen to involve the Islamic State in Turkey’s War-on-Terror, deflecting attention from the Kurdish Issue and insinuating that firm government policy has all but snuffed out any initiative Kurdish terror groups might possess in Turkey. At the same time, this latest terror outrage also carried a number of arguably positive developments in its wake. For one thing, Vladimir Putin telephoned his Turkish counterpart on Wednesday, 29 June, expressing his condolences and vowing cooperation against terror threats all around. The telephone interaction happened for the first time in seven months. and both men spoke for 40 minutes. Rather than Tayyip Erdoğan having to make a first telephone overture towards Moscow following his by now quite famous letter, the Atatürk Airport attack moved Putin to break protocol and extend his hand in friendship — debatably, some kind of a minor diplomatic victory for the Turkish Prez. He also received other telephone calls of course, most notably from Barack Obama. White House press secretary Josh Earnest told the press gaggle in Washington, D.C. that “[t]his morning, the president was on the phone with President Erdogan of Turkey . . . [offering assurances of] any support that the Turks can benefit from as they conduct this investigation.”

But then Fuat Avni tweeted as long ago as Thursday, 23 June 2016, that “[a]ctions will be taken that will bring the country to the edge of a civil war. Explosions, conspiracies, the burning of vehicles will follow one another.” At the same time, CNN Türk’s Ankara representative Hande Fırat on air stated currently that “[a]t the beginning of June, about twenty days ago, intelligence units [had] sent a written warning to the highest reaches of the state and all of its sections in connection with Istanbul. This piece of writing included the names of locations as well.” Whether the Atatürk Airport was on that list remains unknown though. Do Fuat Avni and Hande Fırat’s statements now indicate that the events in these 48 hours had all been pre-planned?? That the diplomatic victory and defeat at the outset would become offset by an event of much greater immediacy and urgency, an event that would succeed in deflecting attention from potentially embarrassing details, liable to throw a bad light on the Prez and his image?? Or is this just another conspiracy theory to do with the oh-so popular but equally divisive Recep Tayyip Erdoğan?

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

]]> https://journal-neo.org/2016/07/04/48-hours-in-turkey-diplomatic-victory-and-defeat-followed-a-terror-attack/feed/ 0 https://journal-neo.org/2016/06/25/turkeys-culture-war-the-art-of-fasting-in-the-new-turkey/ https://journal-neo.org/2016/06/25/turkeys-culture-war-the-art-of-fasting-in-the-new-turkey/#comments Sat, 25 Jun 2016 02:22:35 +0000 http://journal-neo.org/?p=53949 Reversing L. P. Hartley’s by now near-proverbial 1953 phrase, Turkey specialists, historians, and commentators alike are now in a position where they can safely remark that the present is “a different country,” that they really “do things differently there“…  And some would argue that the country and nation state founded by Mustafa Kemal in 1923 now appears to be on the brink of disappearing as a result of the momentous changes introduced by the political movement founded by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the outset of the 21st century.

Setting the Scene: Hapless not Quite in Charge

Traditionally, Turkey was held up as a beacon of progress and modernity in the Middle East, as a country where a lenient attitude and permissive government policies had given rise to a tolerant and Westernized society, a society that was living according to the precepts of what became known as “Turkish Secularism.” But this Occidental Re-Orientation of Turkish state and society was not necessarily universally welcomed and accepted. Discordant voices, singing the praises of the Ottomans and their beneficial services to the religion of Islam, occasionally managed to pierce the wall of Kemalist silence, a silence enveloping everything and everybody in a soothing hum of Turkish nationalism quietening down any considerations of Muslim solidarity and/or agitation. But the advent of Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (or AKP) has put a halt to all that, winning electoral contest after electoral contest, increasing its share of the vote time and again. The nationwide popularity enjoyed by the AKP has now even propelled the party founder to the position of President of the Republic. And as President (or Prez), Tayyip Erdoğan seems all but determined to abolish Turkey’s parliamentary system, only to replace it with a presidential one (arguably similar to the state of affairs in Russia and the U.S.). In a bold first move, the Prez stopped his cooperation with the academic-turned-politician Ahmed Davutoğlu (aka Wily), effectively putting a stop to the Dynamic Duo (Erdoğan-Davutoğlu) that had been implementing the AKP policy of Sunnification at home as well as abroad. In the next instance, the Prez appointed a more malleable figure to the post of Prime Minister, the arguably somewhat hapless erstwhile Transport Minister Binali Yıldırım. The latter seems more than happy to serve all but a minor role in the country, respectfully deferring to the figure of Erdoğan whenever necessary and expedient. The hapless PM Binali Yıldırım is also happy to go along with his predecessor’s programmes and to continue the erstwhile Dynamic Duo’s policy of Sunnification. The AKP government has effectively altered the nation’s educational system in such a way that future generations of Turkish citizens are bound to emerge from their school benches as pious and compliant Muslims. In 2014, before becoming Prez, then-still PM Tayyip Erdoğan made public declarations to the effect he wanted to raise “pious generations” to populate the country in the future.

Turkey’s Culture War: A Reversal of Power Relations?!?!!

These government policies have had direct effects on Turkish society as a whole, and in this context I would like to employ the phrase ‘Culture War’ in dealing with the social and societal ramifications of the AKP-sponsored Islamic réveil that is at present taking place in Turkey. The term ‘Culture War’ refers to the struggle between two sets of conflicting cultural values. Derived from the German noun Kulturkampf, the phrase is mostly known nowadays in its American usage as a shorthand for the assertion that there is a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or modernist. Its American circulation originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came head to head, with the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) being one of the then-culture war’s most prominent episodes. The expression regained currency in 1991 with the publication of the book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America written by the sociologist James Davison Hunter. The relevance of the term in a Turkish context appears straightforward, as I explained somewhere else: “In 1923, the foundation of the Republic of Turkey at the very edge of Europe led to a cultural malaise among its intellectual and political leaders alike. Established on the remains of the multi-ethnic yet staunchly Islamic Ottoman Empire, the Republic set out to emulate Western civilisation from an early date . . . chose to abandon the cultural idiom of Islam and to opt instead for the civilization of the West as Turkey’s structural and intellectual framework”.Throughout Turkey’s Kemalist period (1923-2002), Westernized elites found themselves in opposition to a pious rural population desperately clinging to its Islamic identity, yet forced to engage with the modern world and ill-at-ease with the values and habits propagated by the country’s urban leadership. But now, in the 21st century, this dichotomy has been reversed. Now the urban élites reflect conservative Islamic values, arguably in line with the hopes and aspirations of the vast majority of Turks living in the countryside as well as in the country’s major conurbations. The population of Turkey’s urban centres has increased tremendously over the past decades, due to inward migration from the country’s hinterlands. In this respect Turkey conforms to global trends, as the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) indicated in the summer of 2014 that “54 per cent of the world’s population [now] lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050.” This means that worldwide erstwhile rural populations and their values are increasingly coming face-to-face with urban élites and their standards, a trend that has been coming for a long time already as the “planet has gone through a process of rapid urbanization over the past six decades” now.

Listening to Radiohead during the Fast

In Kemalist Turkey this used to mean that pious migrants had to contend with “sophisticated” and “modernist” urbanites, reflecting the county’s political and economic leadership. But in the post-Kemalist reality created by the Dynamic Duo of the Prez and his sidekick Wily this dichotomy has been inverted. And now, the country’s political and economic leadership espouses values and habits in opposition to the lifestyles and habits of Turkish urban classes. Or, that is the narrative being pushed by the AKP hierarchy and its willing spin doctors, be they journalists or mere Aktrolls populating the internet. Over the years, successive AKP governments have been at pains to increase the visibility of Islam throughout the nation and the population has responded accordingly. Whereas Turkey’s urban centres used to be filled with bare-headed girls and women as well as clean-shaven men, nowadays headscarves and beards dominate the cityscape. Men and women of all walks of life are changing their habits and attire throughout the land, possibly due to social pressure and/or a sense of a genuine reawakened personal piety. At the moment, Muslims across the world are engaging in a month-long fast, abstaining from any kind of food or drink, including swimming and sexual relations, from sunrise to sundown. Known as Ramazan in Turkish, in the days of old, when the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was very much alive, very few inhabitants of the metropolis of Istanbul would partake of this pious act. But, the present is “a different country,” and today people “do things differently.” Over the past days, Turkey’s news agenda has been dominated by an act of apparently not-so gratuitous violence: a group of people listening to the new Radiohead album livestreaming event at a record shop (Velvet IndieGround) in the hip and happening Cihangir district of Istanbul (part of the greater Beyoğlu Municipality) was attacked by a violent mob apparently taking offence at this blatant transgression of respect and propriety, as alcohol was being consumed on the premises.

Pre-Planned Provocation or Spontaneous Act!??!?

The event took place on a Friday night (17 June) and the next day, a peaceful protest was dispersed by police using water cannon and tear gas. On the independent television station Halk TV, the journalist Ayşenur Arslan and the politician and trade unionist Süleyman Çelebi discussed the event at length. Though the mob apparently consisted of about twenty people, one man seems to have been the prime mover and main instigator, as evidenced by the available video evidence. Ayşenur Arslan identifies the main culprit as “Duygun Bilmez” and then proceeds to fill in the blanks. Though the video footage confirms that the man took offence at the consumption of alcohol during the “holy month of Ramazan,” he apparently told a sympathetic paper that his actions were caused by events that had taken place earlier in the day, involving his head-scarved wife and a number of local louts, with apparently no direct connection to the Radiohead events at Velvet IndieGround. Nevertheless the Mayor of the Municipality of Beyoğlu A. Misbah Demircan took to twitter to denounce the organisers of the Velvet IndieGround Radiohead event as perpetrators of a provocative action aimed at disrupting the social cohesion of the neighbourhood during the “holy month of Ramazan.” In reality though, the neighbourhood of Cihangir, which used to be the preserve of artists and bohemians in years gone by, is at present home to numerous cafés and bars, frequented by multitudes of urbanites wishing to while away some time, while more often than not partaking of some alcoholic beverage. Ayşenur Arslan and Süleyman Çelebi contend that the above-recounted Cihangir event was nothing but a pre-planned provocative act, similar to the since debunked Kabataş event in the context of the Gezi protests in 2013, when the then-still-PM Tayyip Erdoğan at length spoke about his “head-scarved sister” who was molested by drunken louts: “Security camera footage disclosed Feb. 13 [, 2014] has revealed there was no physical attack on a woman who claimed she and her baby were attacked by up to 100 protesters in Istanbul at the height of the nationwide Gezi demonstrations for wearing a headscarf.” Arslan and Çelebi see the incident in Cihangir as another orchestrated occasion meant to create moral outrage amongst pious Turks and leading to a further hardening of positions in the ongoing polarization between AKP supporters and those critical of Tayyip Erdoğan and his blatant attempt to create a Muslim nation liberated from the shackles of Atatürk who founded the nation state based on a wide and inclusive definition of the principle of Turkish nationalism unburdened by the Prophet’s tenets and the rules and regulations of Islam.

Dismantling the Nation State: Back to the Future

The journalist Ayşenur Arslan did not mince words during her show, saying that “their goal is the Republic.” Çelebi concurred and made a plea for united action to safeguard the nation. Even though she remained vague, not really pointing an accusatory finger at anyone, it seems that Arslan was clearly talking about none other than the Prez himself and his supporters. As such, as long ago as December 2013, I wrote down the following: “Opponents of Erdoğan and the AKP . . . fear that the government’s long-term goal (as arguably expressed in the AKP’s policy statement Hedef 2023) is to transform the nation state Turkey into an Anatolian federation of Muslim ethnicities, possibly linked to a revived caliphate. In this way, Turkey’s future (as a nation state) would arguably become subject to Anatolia’s past as a home to many different Muslims of divergent ethnic background. The fact that Erdoğan’s oft-repeated reference point [at the time was] the first assembly of what was to become Turkey’s parliament on 23 April, 1920, seems to render strength to such contentions. The first assembly consisted of representatives of Anatolia’s Muslim population, the then-Kemalist constituency, who had pledged allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph, Mehmed VI.”

At present, the AKP machinery also seems to play the Turkish nationalist card liberally. This is done in the context of the Ankara government’s ongoing conflict with the outlawed left-leaning PKK, which I would call a serious effort to mobilise pious Kurds and convince them to join the fold of the believers. Thus the increasing official enlistment of Islam as a social force to unite and strengthen the nation seems beyond doubt. As a result, I would now like to argue that Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP cohorts are getting ready to launch more offensives in Turkey’s Culture War in the coming summer months, attempting to weaken and defeat the opposition and pressurise the population-at-large into openly embracing the Prophet Muhammad and the religion of Islam as constituting the only markers of Turkish citizenship and national cohesion.

This then leads me to pose the following queries about Turkey: namely whether its future will also become “a different country” and whether Atatürk’s legacy will become but a footnote in future history tomes dealing with the Anatolian peninsula during the 20th century?? And how will the summer of 2016 play out in the long run and will the Prez achieve his goals?? Will future generations of Turks look back wistfully and murmur Hartley’s original sentence to themselves with a pain in their hearts: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Recent developments on Turkey’s political scene have all but reinforced the impression that the ruling Justice and Development Party (or AKP) is nothing but a willing handmaiden to the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who ambition apparently knows no bounds.

On 1 November 2015 Turkey’s electorate gave the ruling AKP a huge vote of confidence. And many observers were taken aback, domestically as well as abroad. As a result, I decided to employ the term “Turkey’s November Surprise” in connection with this electoral outcome. But, in reality, for a variety of reasons some were actually expecting such a result at the ballot box… talking to business news website IntelliNews, just a few days prior to election day and published on October, 30th, I said the following: “If the AKP secures 45% votes, they will continue driving home their liberal economic policies and their policies of Sunnification.” As it turned out, the AKP gained 49.5% of the vote and wily PM Ahmed Davutoğlu steadfastly continued his demolition of stalwart Kemalist institutions and attitudes. But it still wasn’t all plain sailing, as since the year 2010, his boss, the proverbial Prez, or, the nation’s first-ever popularly elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had been clamouring for the abolition of Turkey’s parliamentary system in favour of a presidential one. One could argue that Tayyip Erdoğan was inspired by Vladimir Putin’s switcheroo in neighbouring Russia, from PM to President and back again. And as a consequence, back in Turkey last year, during the campaign season prior to the big day, wily Davutoğlu also mentioned the ultimate goal of transitioning to a presidential system, without pressing the issue though. But the best-laid plans of yesteryear have a tendency of eventually coming to fruition, sooner rather than later. About a fortnight ago, on May, 5th to be precise, the wily PM announced that he would take his ruling AKP to an extraordinary general convention, a convention where he himself would not run for the position of chairman and/or prime minister (given that political tradition determines that the former always assumes the latter post as well).

The twitter-happy whistleblower Fuat Avni had been spreading the word of a growing rift between the wily PM and the idiosyncratic Prez, Ahmed Davutoğlu and Tayyip Erdoğan. And the day prior to his announcement, the wily PM did visit the presidential palace to have a long deliberation with his boss, the party founder. As a result, this sudden resignation was seen by most, if not all, as proof of Erdoğan’s ever-increasing power-lust and Davutoğlu’s ultimate failure in the game of politics. Davutoğlu set the date for the all-important convention for 22 May, and quite a few names started floating around in the ether as candidates for the post of Prime Minister. For all intents and purposes, the academic-turned-advisor-turned-politician Ahmed Davutoğlu really has to be understood as the brains behind the whole AKP operation. After all, his boss the divisive yet universally loved Tayyip Erdoğan is the proud product of a so-called İmam-Hatip Lisesi or Muslim Preacher Preparatory Secondary school. As a result, his expertise lies in rhetoric and the art of persuasion rather than in political theory and policy analysis. Both men have been cooperating for many years, ever since 14 March 2003 when Erdoğan took over the reins of government and Davutoğlu started acting as prime ministerial Chief Advisor. In 2009, the latter even became Foreign Minister and his policies all but dovetailed with the former’s domestic agenda. From 28 August 2014 onward, they effectively became Turkey’s Dynamic Duo of the Prez and Wily that guided Turkey’s state and society deeper into post-Kemalist waters and Sunni Islamic climes.

Symbolic Dates: 1 November and 19 May

But these days are over now, and speculations concerning the new PM have been allayed on 19 May, when deputy AKP leader and spokesperson Ömer Çelik announced that the figure of Binali Yıldırım, the Minister for Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communication, would be the one chosen to succeed Wily as party head and PM. Yıldırım has almost continuously headed his post at the Transport Ministry since 2002, with the significant exception of the period between 4 June 2014 and 24 November 2015, when he acted as Senior Advisor to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a role earlier played by none other than Ahmed Davutoğlu. Hence, a new dynamic duo seems to be on the brink of emerging on the scene. Like Davutoğlu, Yıldırım has very sound Muslim credentials and his dedication to pursuing the Prez’s intent of raising future generations of pious Turks and to solidifying the AKP policy of Sunnification seem beyond doubt. In fact, the whole exercise of establishing Turkey’s 64th government appears steeped in anti-Kemalist and pro-Ottoman (read Islamic) symbolism.

The election that ushered in Davutoğlu as the country’s 26th Prime Minister was held on the same date that, in 1922, saw the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate, namely November, 1st. Therefore, it seems to me that the AKP leadership and its propaganda apparatus very skillfully picked the day for 2015’s second and conclusive elections to broadcast a specific and poignant message: namely that Tayyip Erdoğan successfully took his first steps towards establishing a presidential system in a Muslim land on the same date that Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] had effectively done away with the tradition of Ottoman (or Islamic) rule in Turkey. In the same way, the act of releasing the name of Turkey’s new presumptive 27th Prime Minister on 19 May is equally charged. Traditionally, Turkish citizen celebrate the Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day on this date, commemorating Mustafa Kemal’s landing at the Anatolian port city of Samsun in 1919, which is understood as marking the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence and thus the first step towards establishing the Republic of Turkey (1923), as a new nation state oriented towards the West and distanced from its Muslim neighbours and from the religion of Islam. Even though, the reality on the ground in the Turkish Republic was still very much steeped in Islamic piety and Muslim traditions, conservative opponents of the Kemalist regime regarded the official attitude of leniency towards Islamic restrictions as tantamount to denying the important place of Allah in the lives of the inhabitants of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace.

A “Just Order” in the 21st Century

The Kemalist regime had its opponents since the very beginnings, but the state was always able to successfully suppress any opposition and safeguard the status quo, arguably largely due to the support of the country’s large and powerful military establishment. As a result, a self-styled secularist élite inhabiting Istanbul and Ankara ruled the country and emulated the West to its heart’s content, while many aspects of modernization and innovation simply bypassed the bulk of Anatolia’s population that remained bound to the traditions of Islam and its self-proclaimed spiritual and less spiritual leadership. Tayyip Erdoğan’s new political project that sprang to life in the early years of the 21st century has been aimed at deconstructing the Kemalist consensus and re-introducing the religion of Islam to all aspects of Turkey’s public and private life. Erdoğan’s political mentor Erbakan, during a parliamentary group meeting of his RP (Refah Partisi, erroneously translated as Welfare Party), had on 13 April 1994 declared that the transition to what he called a “Just Order” (arguably, a shorthand for Islamic rule) would occur but that the means could either be “sweet” or “bloody.” Less than a decade later, Erdoğan’s new political project ensured that the transformation would be “sweet,” or in accordance to the rules of parliamentary democracy and popular participation in election contests. I would argue that the academic-turned-advisor-turned-politician Davutoğlu was probably largely responsible for such a smooth changeover. As a political scientist, who also possessed deep levels of personal piety, he had become the respectable face of political Islam in Turkey at the end of the previous century. As a result, Davutoğlu could not but gravitate towards the figure of Tayyip Erdoğan, an ambitious politician with comparable deep levels of personal piety. And the two cooperated for more than a decade, eventually even becoming Turkey’s Dynamic Duo that effectively killed the memory of Atatürk in people’s hearts and minds and effectively emasculated the so-called secular opposition.

The New Turkey: The Rightful Heir to the Ottoman Tradition

The Prez and Wily built the New Turkey with their own hands and minds, shaping the state’s institutions and the social reality of its inhabitants to fit their personal agenda of Sunnification and gradual reintegration into the Muslim Middle East, the Ottoman hinterland of yesteryear. But now, it seems, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personal ambition and proclivity for micro-management have gotten the better of him and he thus summarily fired his Prime Minister and opted for a more malleable replacement. Alternatively, one could arguably reason, given that the switcheroo towards a presidential system had been in the air since 2010, when Davutoğlu was busy acting as Turkey’s wily FM, that the latter’s present and sudden dismissal was all but executed according to plan. After all, following his public declaration of intent, the soon-to-be-replaced PM happily acted as one of the witnesses to Sümeyye Erdoğan’s marriage to the defence industrialist engineer Selçuk Bayraktar. In fact, the Prez also invited his former brother-in-arms, former Turkish President Abdullah Gül to attend the ceremony. In this way, Tayyip Erdoğan united the two names appearing in the popular press as potential rivals under one roof, making plain to the world that a “Just Order” had finally been established in Turkey, a “Just Order” under the firm yet benevolent leadership of the nation’s first popularly elected president, keen to hold the reins of state tight and micro-manage the country’s affairs according to the Prophet precepts and the rules, regulations and restrictions imposed by Islam. The new PM, Binali Yıldırım, who was tasked to form a new government in the aftermath of the AKP’s Sunday Congress on 22 May 2016, has in the past given ample proof of his personal piety and has now also publicly expressed that “obedience” to the chief, or rather the Prez, is tantamount to a religious duty.

As a result, Turkey’s 2015 November Surprise steadied the country’s descent down a post-Kemalist path, whereas the 2016 celebration of the Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day marked the true beginning of Turkey’s post-Kemalist century…

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Far from rocking the world to its foundations, the

The other day, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (or ICIJ) made public a vast database containing “information on almost 320,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers and the Offshore Leaks investigations.” This information dates back as long ago as 40 years and is up-to-date till the end of last year. And though the reach of the documents appears wide and far, the mainstream media focus so far has been primarily on the Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose name does not even feature in the Panama Papers, and on the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose name is also conspicuous only in its absence. In all fairness, reading the account given by two German journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, responsible for the original publication and wider dissemination of the leak and now available in book form, one cannot but wonder about the motivations of the mainstream media. Reading the text, one is struck by the journalists’ apparent bias, as they immediately set out to look for any kinds of clues that would demonstrate that either Putin or Assad are implicated in financial wrongdoing. Apparently, the mainstream narrative that the Russian President as well as his Syrian counterpart are at present the West’s main foes has not just been able to sway public opinion in the Free World subject to NATO dominance, but also the minds and hearts of prominent journalist, in other words, the minds and hearts of those arguably responsible for creating public opinion around the globe. After all, a critical voice like Pepe Escobar calls Obermayer and Obermaier’s employer the “NATO-friendly Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.”

Leaks around the world: John Doe and his Intentions

There are those who see Washington’s fingerprints all over the internet leak, with the already-quoted Escobar calling the revelation of “approximately 11.5 million documents” an “infowar operation by the NSA.” But now, the anonymous leaker calling himself John (and not Jane) Doe, in an obvious hint at Hollywood and the make-believe usual suspects populating Tinseltown, has actually provided his co-operators with a manifesto of sorts: an 1800-word statement entitled The Revolution Will Be Digitized. If nothing else, John Doe is at pains to portray himself as a real do-gooder, a whistleblower who does not suffer in comparison to the idealistic and now-exiled Edward Snowden. John Doe’s statement reveals that his intentions are pure and beyond doubt, as he pronounces that “[i]ncome inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over.” Reading these words, an unsuspecting reader could expect the whistleblower to call for the overthrow of the Capitalist system at the root of today’s woes. In truth, the anonymous do-gooder however does not appear to pursue such a revolutionary purpose. Rather than criticizing the system, he poses the question as to why this issue has become so urgent today, next providing the rather self-evident follow-up, namely that the “Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to [this] question: massive, pervasive corruption.”

John Doe, Oxfam and Bernie Sanders

In effect, John Doe presents his leak as a salient item on the current news agenda, as an item reacting to other relevant news stories. Stories such as the ones dealing with a report released earlier this year by Oxfam, the renowned NGO describing itself as a “world-wide development organization that mobilizes the power of people against poverty.” Released about four months ago, the report, called An Economy For the 1%, presents a stark picture indeed: “[i]n 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010”. In fact, John Doe and the people at Oxfam all but pursue the same goal, as the report’s introductory summary reveals: the “richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined . . . A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion.” As a result, John Doe is really doing the bidding of Oxfam now, or is he? After all, Oxfam is but a humble NGO merely paying its top executive less than $180,000 a year, as revealed a Daily Telegraph’s investigation. Other NGOs or charities are known to pay their bosses over $250,000 on an annual basis, the same analysis showed. But John Doe’s deeds do not just resonate with Oxfam reports, his manifesto also sounds a lot like many of the sound bites used by Democrat hopeful Bernie Sanders. For instance, more than two years ago now, using the hashtag #EnoughIsEnough, Bernie even tweeted that a ” nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”

In fact, Bernie Sanders said a lot more than that . . . in early October 2011, he gave a speech on the Senate floor dealing with a proposed trade agreement with Panama, harking back to the days of George W. Bush (2001-9). Bernie told his colleagues that “Panama’s entire annual economic output is only $26.7 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the U.S. economy. No-one can legitimately make the claim that approving this free trade agreement will significantly increase American jobs . . . Well, it turns out that Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in off-shore tax havens. And, the Panama Free Trade Agreement would make this bad situation much worse.” In spite of Bernie’s words of warning, Obama went ahead and signed the agreement on 21 October 2011, together with trade deals with deals involving South Korea and Colombia. At the time the news agency Reuters noted significantly that the President “signed the agreements in the Oval Office outside the view of television cameras.” Just the other day, in fact at the beginning of last month as Panama Papers were breaking, the journalist Clark Mindock and David Sirota explained that “[s]oon after taking office in 2009, Obama and his secretary of state [, the notorious Hilary Clinton, Bernie’s current nemesis] began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Colombia and South Korea.” After having pushed for nearly three years, Obama and Clinton were finally able to secure the deal, even if “[c]ritics,” as noted by Mindock and Sirota “said the pact would make it easier for rich Americans and corporations to set up offshore corporations and bank accounts and avoid paying many taxes altogether.”

An Expendable Player: Turkey

But rather than focusing on Obama and his hidden hand in smoothing the way for establishing offshore corporations and bank accounts in Panama, the mainstream media, with Obermayer and Obermaier leading the pack, instead chose to focus on Putin and Assad, or rather on figures close to these two enemies of the West, namely on Boris and Arkady Rotenberg and Sergi Roldugin as well as Rami Makhlouf and members of his extended family. And, even though had so forcefully asserted that “wealthy Americans and large corporations” would also readily employ the Panamanian route, U.S. billionaires and tax-dodgers are largely absent from John Doe’s leaks. In all fairness, the ICIJ does indicate that “at least 36 Americans accused of serious financial wrongdoing, including fraud and racketeering.” In comparison, such an comparatively small fish like the country of Turkey now has, with the ICIJ’s recent move, the distinction of being linked to a total of 500 businessmen and 21 intermediaries with offshore corporations based out of Panama. Turkey, but also such places like Azerbaijan or Argentina are basically what Escobar calls “disposable pawns,” or expendable player on the world stage.

Those in Turkey hoping for some damning evidence linking the Prez, or the divisive figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to dodgy corporations and such-like enterprises used for tax evasion are disappointed of course. Particularly now that the German tabloid Bild has publicly raised “questions as to how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s children amassed their vast wealth, including one fortune worth tens of millions, when their father only earns some €50 thousand a year as head of state.” Alas, the Panama Papers do not appear to offer any answers in this respect. Instead, some very familiar names do make their appearance, such as Ömer Sabancı, and İnan Kıraç. Both men are members of the two business families competing for the top spot in Turkey’s wealth list, the Sabancı and the Koç families. At the same time, members of other rich familes populating the Turkish tabloid press appear to figure prominently — names such as of the Zorlu, the Çarmıklı, the Doğan, the Hattat, and the Altınbaş families.

Guilt by Association: Tayyip Erdogan

Still, Can Dündar’s paper Cumhuriyet gleefully reports that the name of Remzi Gür also appears in the Panama Papers. This Turkish entrepreneur is the founder and owner of the Ramsey clothing manufacturing and retail company. But, more important than that, “Mr Gür is best known for a decade-long ‘close friendship’ with” none other than the Prez himself, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as expressed by the FT’s Alex Barker. In 2008, Gür was even convicted of corruption charges. At the time, the businessman stated the following: “If you’re genuine friends with someone, you support one another through good and bad days . . . We were there for him when times were tough. We stood by him as friends. I’m sure he will be there for us if, god forbid, our lives take a bad turn.” He was accused of attempting to bribe Mehmet Yıldırım, a member of the opposition People’s Republican Party (or CHP). In 2010, his conviction of 6 months’ imprisonment was changed to a fine of TL6,000, on the orders of Judge Oktay Saday. Whether this is but an example of the benefits that the close ties of friendship can bring, however, remains an open question. But as in the case of Putin and his best friend, the paper Cumhuriyet argues for a verdict of guilt by association for the figure of Turkey’s President, calling Gür Erdoğan’s Vault, asserting the he also provided Erdoğan’s children with scholarships allowing them to pursue their studies abroad. And continuing in this vein, the journalist Pelin Ünker asserts that the appearance of Ahmet Çalık’s name in the Papers is highly incriminating as well. As the founder of the company Çalık Enerji, he namely employed the services of the current Energy Minister Berat Albayrak — a man who just happens to be the Prez’s son-in-law.

In the end, it seems that the Panama Papers have only succeeded in incriminating the smaller players, arguably leaving the really big fish free to pursue their monetary gains in other waters. As I asserted earlier, the real message of the leak, whether or not it was Washington-inspired or even an NSA-conducted “infowar operation,” appears to be a confirmation of the “fact that we are now really living in a post-democratic world order, that oligarchs all around the world dictate policy while busily hiding their ill-gotten gains and enjoying the high life.”

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

At the outset of the 21st century, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan created a new political project in Turkey, namely the Justice and Development Party (or AKP) that set out as defining itself as a Muslim-Democrat entity similar to the many Christian-Democrat parties active in Western Europe. Erdoğan’s party has now led Turkey for many years and succeeded in transforming Anatolia and Western Thrace into a hitherto unknown country: namely into the “New Turkey,” a place where freedom of the press and freedom of expression are becoming more and more tenuous concepts, and the religion of Islam is once again an important part of the political discourse and public life.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been a divisive figure ever since he set foot on the public stage in 1994. The outcome of at that year’s local elections in Turkey shocked the nation and put the fear of God in many a citizen’s heart. For, at long last, the Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan (1926-2011) and his Refah Partisi (or RP. erroneously translated as Welfare Party) succeeded in conquering the country, local council by local council. And the mayoral seat of the metropolitan municipality of Istanbul went to Tayyip Erdoğan in a decisive electoral victory achieved by means of procuring 25.19% of the popular vote. Never shy of controversy, Erdoğan immediately set out to broadcast disturbing message after disturbing message. As a result, after assuming his mayoral duties at the end of March, certain members of the public and particularly left-leaning and self-proclaimed secularist intellectuals started attacking Erdoğan’s figure on a near-continual basis. And, more often than not, the Mayor responded in kind. A very telling instance occurred on 22 November 1994. The well-known journalist and broadcaster Hulki Cevizoğlu was talking to his studio guest, the popular writer and humorist Aziz Nesin (1915-95) about the latter’s remarks concerning Istanbul’s Mayor and his public attachment to the religion of Islam and the Shariah, at the time still a topic anathema to large swathes of the public-at-large as the Kemalist system was still in place safeguarded by the country’s Armed Forces and ostensibly set in stone by the nation’s Constitution (1982). And at that point, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan joined the conversation via telephone. Starting off by casting aspersions on Aziz Nesin’s status as an intellectual, the Mayor then proceeded to quote the 1985 edition the Turkish translation of the Grand Larousse encyclopédique, one of the great standard works of reference in the pre-internet age. Specifically, Erdoğan recited a passage from volume II, page 762 dealing with Islam and explaining that the religion can be defined as consisting of the Shariah: “Who is a Muslim? Somebody who believes in the religion of Islam. Given that I proclaim, alḥamdulillāh [or praise be to God or Allah], I am a Muslim, according to this [just-quoted] description [or definition] I [also] have the right to proclaim, alḥamdulillāh, I am a proponent of the Shariah.”

Turks are Muslims

Tayyip Erdoğan’s televised 1994 telephone intervention demonstrated in living colour that he would be a politician quite unlike any of his predecessors in Turkey. Though his political and spiritual mentor Erbakan had been advocating an Islamic réveil since 1969, no Turkish politician had previously dared to public confess his (or her) allegiance to the Prophet’s cause in such stark and honest fashion: “alḥamdulillāh, I am a Muslim . . . alḥamdulillāh, I am a proponent of the Shariah.” Though the self-proclaimed secularist élite and urban classes recoiled in disgust upon hearing these words, these words undoubtedly struck a chord with large swathes of pious Anatolian Turks. After all, the Turks had founded the Ottoman Empire in the late 13th century that became the last bastion of Islam in a world increasingly dominated by the Christian West and its colonial ambitions in the early modern and more recent periods. The Ottomans as a political entity claimed primacy in the world of Islam as the most powerful state able to hold the Caliphate as the spiritual leaders of Sunni Muslims worldwide. As a result, it seems all but natural that the Turks as a nation would equally feel deeply attached to the Prophet Muhammad and his religion. Even the nation state’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) argued that Turks should not waver from their commitment to Islam as their guiding principle, yet warned the world that over the centuries Turkish progress had been hampered by a “confused and artificial religion riddled with superstitions.” Atatürk’s version of secularism entailed a strict state control over religion in all of its aspects through the offices of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (or Diyanet, in Turkish). Still the ruling classes and the political leadership easily identified Islam as an irrational and retrogressive force and opted for the adoption of a lenient version of the rules and regulations laid down by the Prophet. This attitude created a quasi-insurmountable rift between ruling élite and the population-at-large, still very much attached to their religion and its arguably ridiculous superstitions.

As a result, in the post-war period politics in the Republic of Turkey evolved in the usual pattern that saw a split between the right and the left, between advocates of conservative market economics and proponents of statist intervention and socialist welfare. Islam as a topic of social mobilization or even political discourse was anathema to the Turkish system. Throughout the 1950s, the Demokrat Parti (or DP) attempted to re-connect the Anatolian landlords and their dependents to the urban centres of the country by means of appealing to Islamic sentiment and chauvinism, but in the end, the army intervened in 1960 thereby setting the tone for the coming decades. Even a politician like Necmettin Erbakan toed the Kemalist line to a large extent, only truly coming into his own during the 1990s. The RP’s not really unexpected rise to power throughout the decade also gave ample opportunities to previously quite unknown political figures like Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül. And the former took centre-stage right from the start, becoming the charismatic Mayor of Istanbul with a fondness for making sweeping statements, such as assuring that the headscarf was bound to become fashionable in Turkey and promising to tear down Taksim’s Atatürk Cultural Centre (known locally by the acronym AKM) only to replace it with a big mosque.

The New Turkey: Mass Murder of Women

All the while Erdoğan’s popularity keeps increasing daily, his mere presence on the scene emboldening previously manacled Muslims to throw away their erstwhile timidity in the face of the Kemalist status quo that limited their experience of Islam to a government decree and proudly proclaim “alḥamdulillāh, I am a Muslim . . . alḥamdulillāh, I am a proponent of the Shariah.” Domestically, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s position appears unassailable, and the press in Turkey has largely become an AKP bullhorn. Opposition journalists face censorship and even imprisonment, with the professor of journalism Roy Greenslade stating just last month that “[p]ress freedom in Turkey is ‘under siege’, said the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in a letter to Turkey’s prime minister.” The case of the recently temporarily released-yet-not quite free journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül emphatically illustrates just how tenuous the mere concept of freedom of expression has become in Tayyip Erdoğan’s New Turkey. At the same time, now-emboldened supposedly “pious” Turks are also exercising their rights; like for instance a man known only as Kadir E., who battered his fiancé Hülya B. tell[ing the] police: “I hit her, because she insulted Erdogan.” And subsequently, the police questioned the young woman on account of her having supposedly insulted the President of the Republic. In fact, violence against women has been on the increase in AKP-led Turkey. As long ago as September 2011, the independent Bianet News Centre posted on its website that the “number of women murders in Turkey [has] increased by 1,400 percent [over the past] seven years [, 2004-11]. As far as divorce cases are concerned, 85 percent of all applications in Istanbul are related to violence,” adding that, “[w]hile 66 women were murdered in 2002, this figure [has] rocketed to 953 women murders in 2009.” Earlier this year, the Umut Vakfı (or Hope Foundation) released a report on the issue of violence against women, calling on NGOs to conduct comprehensive studies on the issue, which it described as a “mass murder of women.”

Does this now mean that the figure of Tayyip Erdoğan inspires his male followers to commit acts of violence against women?!?? After all, the AKP-led government has been actively advocating a more passive role for women in Turkish society, a more passive role as symbolized by the now really ubiquitous (or fashionable) headscarf and demure forms of attire now worn by untold women. About a year and a half ago, the President himself also told his believers (or followers, if you will) that “[o]ne cannot put women and men on an equal footing,” adding poignantly that “[i]t is against nature.” Actually speaking at a women’s conference, Erdoğan explained that “[o]ur religion regards motherhood very highly,” before stating that “[f]eminists don’t understand that, they reject motherhood.” About the same time, his then still close friend and ally Bülent Arınç (acting as Deputy PM, 2009-15) joined his boss remarking off-hand that “[c]hastity is so important. It’s not just a word, it’s an ornament [for women] . . . A woman should be chaste. She should know the difference between public and private. She should not laugh in public.” Since then, Arınç and Erdoğan seem to have grown apart, but the former’s views on the “fair sex” have probably not changed all that much. Whereas, previous generations of Turkish politicians encouraged women to take pride in their more active roles in Kemalist society, the present leadership of the country all but wants to turn back the clock and confine women to home, hearth, and kitchen. In the previous century, many a woman in Turkey expressed her gratitude to Atatürk for having liberated Turkish womankind from the shackles of Islamic custom, gender segregation, and a secluded life.

Lacking a Sense of Humour?!??

Tayyip Erdoğan’s tendency to micro-manage the state’s affair is well-known and subject to a lot of criticism, with detractors openly calling his behaviour dictatorial and un-democratic. In fact, his nostalgic appreciation of the Ottoman past might lead some to compare President Erdoğan to Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Both leaders appear suspicious and overly concerned with their personal safety, and Abdülhamid’s army of spies and snitches reporting on their fellow-citizens seems more than matched by the AKP-employed internet trolls apparently numbering about 6,000 and conducting “centralized, orchestrated social media campaigns.” At the same time, Erdoğan and his AKP machinery have blocked access to 15,562 websites in 2011, 22,536 in 2012, 35,000 in 2013, 40,773 in 2014 and 96,000 last year. Whereas recent news reports indicating that Turks living in the Netherlands are encouraged to report fellow-Turks voicing criticism of the government and/or disparaging remarks about the figure of the President of the Republic are equally testament to the recurrence of paranoia in the highest echelons of Turkey’s political élite. But Erdoğan’s paranoia seems to go a lot further, as “hundreds of people, including high-profile media figures such as Sedef Kabas, Hidayet Karaca and Mehmet Baransu, have been detained for allegedly insulting Erdogan,” as reported at the end of last year by Press TV. During a meeting in Ankara late in 2014, the President himself curtly stated that “[m]edia should never have been given the liberty to insult.” And now, Erdogan’s thin skin has also managed to create an international incident.

At the end of last March. the German satirist Jan Böhmermann appeared on the German state broadcaster ZDF hosting his regular programme Neo Magazin Royale and taking direct aim at the figure of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Böhmermann’s show can be situated in the tradition of satirical and frankly absurd television programmes, oftentimes veering towards tasteless comedy nevertheless meant to be funny, that have become synonymous with German humour, or perhaps rather the lack thereof (tellingly, Böhmermann himself refers to his own show as a “Quatschsendung” or ‘nonsense programme’). Before launching into his diatribe against Erdogan, the German appeared to be poking fun at himself, explaining that according to the German Constitution the presentation of defamatory or abusive criticism, containing ad hominem attacks (“Schmähkritik,” in German), is strictly prohibited and frowned upon. And in the further course of his delivery, Böhmermann actually pretends to be testing the waters continuously seeking assurance from his co-host or sidekick that his uttered sentences would be strictly off-limits according to German law. As such, his monologue, now usually referred to as a “Schmähgedicht” or defamatory or abusive poem, in English, was true to form a compilation of ad hominem jabs at the Turkish President or if you will, a collection of personal insults, ranging from calling him “stupid, cowardly and uptight,” over comparing his personal smell to that of a “pig’s fart,” and proclaiming that Erdoğan has a small member. But, in my opinion, the most damning aspect of Böhmermann’s poem consists of its repetition of certain standard Islamophobic tropes.

Islamophobic Tropes and other Clichés

In fact, Böhmermann’s performance was quite a feat as he managed to smear Erdogan as a Muslim without even mentioning the word Islam or the name Muhammad. The German comic claimed that the Turkish President habitually engages in “goat-fucking” and spends his nights watching “child-porn.” These two charges are standard phrases continuously encountered in Islamophobic discourse. The slur that Muslims generally engage in sexual congress with members of cloven-hoofed, ruminant mammals has become nothing but a cliché nowadays. And, the fact that the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh was killed by the Dutch-Moroccan Muslim man Mohammed Bouyeri on 2 November 2004 is a telling illustration thereof. As an outspoken critic of the state of affairs in the Netherlands, Van Gogh appeared regularly on Dutch television, and as a matter of natural course, when talking about Muslims (be they of Moroccan, Turkish or whatever descent) he simply called them “goat-fuckers.” As for Böhmermann’s reference to child pornography, it has to be noted that the charge that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile (on account of his marriage to the six-year old Aisha) has also become a much-touted cliché in Islamophobic discourse. In this way, the German comic succeeded in painting the Turkish President as your typical Islamic fundamentalist without having to take recourse to explicit references or even actual facts. In this way, the German comic hit the Turkish politician exactly where he is most vulnerable, namely at his identity as a pious Muslim. As explained above, Erdogan has turned his personal piety or adherence to the precepts of the Prophet into his personal credo, informing all aspects of his personal as well as political being.

Böhmermann effectively circumvented Article 216 of the German penal code that outlaws insulting religious belief: “Any person who openly disrespects the religious belief of a group is punished with imprisonment from six months to one year if such act causes potential risk for public peace.” Instead, he merely insulted the figure of the Turkish President. And as a result, the Turkish President could not but be outraged and voice his displeasure: “Erdoğan demanded that the German government prosecute Böhmermann under that section, while also filing a private complaint against him. On April 15, Merkel announced in a brief statement that the German government would permit Erdoğan’s action to proceed under the ‘insult’ paragraph, but that the provision would be repealed as of 2018. German media reported much disagreement within the government about Merkel’s decision,” as elaborated by the German colmumnist Alex Gorlach. The public in the West was and continues to be outraged, as the micro-managing Tayyip Erdoğan now also appears to meddle in the affairs of sovereign states in the EU. On the other hand, I would argue, the mere fact that public opinion disregards Böhmermann’s blatant Islamophobia only focusing on the Turkish President’s apparent lack of a sense of humour, indicates that xenophobia and racism have now become much more acceptable traits in the aftermath of the refugee crisis and the EU’s negotiations with the Republic of Turkey in this regard. Even such a darling of the left-leaning West like the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has recently revealed himself to be just another white man keen on protecting Fortress Europe. A Žižek apologist might very well say that the philosopher is merely “voicing bizarre and often offensive opinions on the plight of refugees seeking asylum in Europe,” but to my mind Žižek and Böhmermann are part and parcel of the same mindset. After all, we should not forget that Bill Van Auken and Adam Haig, as long ago as 2010, described the Slovenian philosopher as a “political opportunist, though crasser and ruder.”

Every year the International Humanist and Ethical Union (or IHEU) releases a report entitled Freedom of Thought, which purports to be the “only annual survey looking at the rights and treatment of the non-religious in every country in the world.” And, rather surprisingly, in last year’s edition, Germany receives the “Rating: Severe Discrimination,” which is coincidentally the same rating that Turkey got: “Rating: Severe Discrimination.” The German Chancellor Angela Merkel did call the poem “deliberately offensive,” subsequently apparently regretting having publicly voiced her personal view. As indicated by the IHEU, in Germany “[b]lasphemy’ is outlawed or criticism of religion is restricted and punishable with a prison sentence.” As a result, it seems but a matter of course that the German government acceded to a request from Ankara to prosecute Böhmermann. In fact, the CDU’s parliamentary faction leader Volker Kauder declared that “[s]atire can get away with everything, but not everything qualifies as satire,” implicitly acknowledging that the comic’s “Schmähgedicht” consisted of a personal attack consisting of Islamophobic tropes and clichés that would be covered under the heading of blasphemy. Turkey and Germany thus seem closer to one another than many would like to imagine, is seems.

The mere fact that the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has now become victim of what I would like to term “cultural racism” (known as Islamophobia today) should not detract from the fact that the “New Turkey” created by the AKP is a place where expressing humour and criticism have become valiant acts of resistance. Ample illustration can be found in the recent case of the journalist Ebru Umar, who was “detained on April 23 in the Kuşadası district of the Aegean province of Aydın for allegedly insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan via her Twitter account.” Or, in the recent court appearance of the Turkish academic and writer Murat Belge for having written an article purportedly insulting the figure of the President. The New Turkey is a country that seems to be continuously moving towards new and more restricted horizons . . .

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Now that the Brussels attacks have moved down the list of things to watch on TV and the War-on-Terror is ready to be resumed, I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on the back-story, without however necessarily reverting to conspiracy theories as touted by the ever-willing-to-do-so Sibel Edmonds.

The 21st century will stand out as the era in human history when God returned back to centre stage after religious beliefs, prejudices and superstitions had supposedly been confined to the dustbin of history following the end of World War II. In the aftermath of the fall of Communism, however, christianity made a particularly remarkable comeback, first in the previously Communist realm of Eastern Europe and Russia and then in Western Europe as well. In this way, Europe accelerated its ideological drift towards America, where great swathes of the population (inclusive of their political leadership) have traditionally been pious believers and devout Christians. But suddenly, at the very outset of the 21st century, on 11 September 2001, to be precise, christianity found itself stuck in a war with Islamist radicals… but, is it really this simple or is the current spike in so-called Muslim terrorism the outcome of rather cynical political moves and machinations set in motion during the final decades of the previous century?

Setting the Stage: Denouncing a Crusade against Islam

The Catholic theologian-acting-as-public intellectual George Weigel has described God’s return to public and private life as the “unsecularization of the world,” calling it “one of the dominant social factors of life in the late twentieth century” and arguably beyond. But this “unsecularization” has taken on an extreme urgency in the Muslim world, as evidenced by the current preponderance of Islamic terrorism all around, some would argue. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I suggested that the chickens have now finally come home to roost. And that Willy Claes’ prophetic or rather programmatic 1995 sentences have now become a deadly reality, potentially affecting each and everyone today . . . As a reminder, let me recall here that the then-NATO Secretary General literally said the following: “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security” . . . and that these Extremist Muslims oppose “the basic principles of civilization that bind North America and Western Europe.” At the time, Claes realized the potentially explosive and belligerent tone of his voice and quickly added that his declarations should not be seen as a call for “a crusade against Islam.” The NATO Secretary General made his announcements arguably fully cognizant of Brzezinski’s important groundwork in the seventies, groundwork that saw the somewhat concealed mobilization of Islam as a weapon against Communism. Liberal U.S. support and funding in conjunction with Saudi collusion and coaxing of various Islamist factions across the globe took place during the administrations of U.S. Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton — from Afghanistan over Pakistan to Turkey (and Bosnia), to name but a few salient locations.

Now that the world is burning brightly in the bonfire of what I would like to call Zbig’s vanities, it seems reasonable to wonder whether Jimmy Carter’s erstwhile National Security Adviser entertains any regrets or bad feelings. Speaking with the French Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, he retorted defiantly: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.” Before pronouncing these words, Brzezinski told his interviewer how the U.S. administration had covertly started supporting the Mujahadeen in order to provoke the Soviets to intervene militarily in Afghanistan, the proverbial “Graveyard of Empires” (according to the phrase attributed to the Afghan intellectual Mahmud Tarzi, 1865-1933). And, Zbig further reasoned, the Soviet Vietnam in the Hindu Kush led directly to the economic collapse of the USSR and the fall of Communism. Whether Zbig still feels the same today is anyone’s guess . . . back in 1998, he continued by posing this arguably rhetorical question: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Even though Zbig himself appeared to underestimate the impact of his work and was happy to talk about “[s]ome stirred-up Moslems” in reference to the fallout caused by his aggressive meddling in the world, critical minds can easily detect a somewhat straight line connecting the Mujahadeen, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. From the now-defunct Mullah Omar over the equally defunct Usamah bin Laden to the now quite active Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, these men have all enjoyed some modicum of the Free World’s support in their day, as proscribed by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser.

The War-on-Terror: Fighting a Fringe Form of Islamic Extremism

In the mid-nineties Claes was effectively swimming in the intellectual current of Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) and his Clash of Civilizations’ thesis, first proposed in 1993. At that stage, when Communism had just crumbled and many people lost their ideological and philosophical bearings, leaving them with a huge hole in their souls, Huntington put forward that “[i]n much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled ‘fundamentalist.’ Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam.” In this way, one could reason, Claes felt at ease to elaborate upon Zbig’s groundwork and in this way, the world received a new generic bogeyman, the Muslim Extremist — a blanket figure that but needed adequate personification in due course. Previously, the Cold War had provided ample ideological justification for greasing the wheels of the Military-Industrial Complex (aka Mic, as suggested by Dennis Trainor, Jr). The Cold War dominated the second half of the previous century affecting most aspects of people’s everyday lives for about fifty years. But then, the sudden disappearance of the Godless Commie left the powers-that-be of the Free World at a loss. And that is where Willy Claes came in with his declarations. And, one could argue, stating that NATO’s operations should not be understood as “a crusade against Islam” is as good as tantamount to admitting that the Alliance was actually fully intent on doing just that. The political scientist Ryan C. Hendrickson explains that “[s]ince the Soviet Union’s collapse, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has undergone tremendous change. The [A]lliance has enlarged, has adopted new roles in crisis management and peacekeeping, and has forged new relationships with its former enemies in the Warsaw Pact.” And, as Secretary General, Willy Claes was instrumental “in moving NATO’s agenda toward more aggressive military options in 1995″ and beyond. But, the Free World and NATO had to wait for six more years to receive the ultimate impetus to become really active in military terms. U.S. President George W. Bush then declared that “[t]oday our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” Bush, Jr. spoke these momentous words on 11 September 2001 at 8:30 p.m. in the Oval Office at the White House.

Nine days later President Bush took up the gauntlet for real, addressing a joint session of Congress and the nation as a whole. He presented a shadowy organization known only as “al-Qaida” (harking back to his predecessor Bill Clinton and the 1998 African Embassy bombings) and elaborated that these “terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” The new Pearl Harbor-that-was-9/11 provided Bush with a suitable stage to practice his rhetorical muscle, freely elaborating upon Claes’ words. Bush zoomed in on Islam, albeit a perverted version thereof, and then painted the scope of his ambitions: “[o]ur war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there . . . There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.” Adding that this War-on-Terror “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” In spite of the grave circumstances, keeping in mind the thousands that perished in the Twin Towers, in Washington, DC as well as in a field in Pennsylvania, Bush, Jr. sounded eerily happy when he concluded that “we have found our mission and our moment.”

Grieving the Victims and Counting the Costs

In his Neoconservative and Born-Again-Christian zeal, Bush, Jr. easily unleashed the dogs of war, first honing in on the Hindu Kush (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and in the next instance, turning his attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq (ostensibly for more personal and financial reasons). His successor, the Nobel Peace Prize-wielding Barack Obama all but continued the wars begun by Bill Clinton’s heir. And a little more than a year ago, the IPPNW, in conjunction with its German and Canadian affiliates, released a damning report presenting the effective outcome of the Bush-declared war effort. Appropriately entitled Body Count, with the telling subtitle of ‘Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror”. Iraq Afghanistan Pakistan,’ the report aims to “provide as realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war zones Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during 12 years of ‘war on terrorism’.” And, right off the bat, the compilers’ report “comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.” But then immediately adding that the “total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.” The profits accrued by the Military-Industrial Complex in the same period can only be described as astronomical. For instance, a company like UTC or United Technologies reported a profit of $6.22 billion, only for the fiscal year 2014. In the year prior to 9/11, U.S. defense budget stood at a meagre $312 billion, but a decade later, in 2011, that figure ballooned to $712 billion.

The Bush-Obama Wars thus proved highly lucrative for some yet utterly deadly for others, mainly Muslims and particularly those living in Hindu Kush (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Iraq. President Obama’s spin doctors even renamed the war effort into the Overseas Contingency Operation, in an apparent effort to downplay the fact that these U.S.-initiated wars really constitute a “crusade” against Fringe Form of Islamic Extremism. And, even though, Obama made good on his promise to bring the overt war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to an end, residual troops and other warlike enterprises all but underline that the Nobel Peace Prize-wielding U.S. President is acting like a veritable war president. A war president personally overseeing “a ‘secret kill list,’ a directory of names and photos of individuals targeted for assassination in the US drone war or deadly strike campaign carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).” In addition, Obama also utilizes the “shadowy and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)” as a means of “finding, fixing and finishing” (as expressed in military jargon) targets “selected through a secret process”. This means that President Obama has been routinely authorizing the use of lethal force against “perceived terror threats in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere,” perceived threats that always happen to consist of Muslim men (and their dependants). In this way, President Obama effectively ensures that Zbig’s “stirred-up Moslems” continually receive new recruits willing and able to carry out acts of terror, killing and maiming innocents all around. In this context, last January, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (or CFR) Micah Zenko published a most interesting blog post. Zenko namely states that last year, the U.S. dropped an “estimated total of 23,144 bombs in six countries,” And those six countries are Syria and Iraq, where the Caliph and his jolly band of IS warriors seem to constitute “legitimate” targets, but also Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as Somalia and Yemen . . . or, all countries with a predominantly Muslim population.

Blowback: From Al Qaeda to the Islamic State

Now the world is well and truly ablaze, as the appearance of the terror group formerly known as ISIS and now calling itself the Islamic State (or IS) has completely changed the game. On 13 January, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem told a press conference in New Delhi that “[w]e’re beginning to see terrorism backfiring on the states that supported it like France and the United States, and yesterday Turkey, and before that Saudi Arabia.” Muallem was in India for a 4-day visit to discuss trade and energy ties between Damascus and Delhi. Quite naturally, Syria’s not-so civil war also on the agenda. As expressed by Walid al-Muallem, the recent Paris attacks and the very recent Brussels and even Lahore bombings as well as Ankara and Istanbul assaults all but confirm my above-mentioned suggestions. The perpetrators of these acts of terror all have their adherence to a violent interpretation of Islam (or, if you will, to a Fringe Form of Islamic Extremism) in common, an allegiance that functions as a cover for a purely nihilistic ideology bent on utter and sheer destruction for its own sake.

In this way, Bush, Jr.’s 2001 words have become a self-fulfilling prophecy today, as random acts of terror continue unabated and the War-on-Terror persistently reacts accordingly. On the other hand, Willy Claes, appearing on the Dutch-language Belgian state Broadcaster VRT following the Brussels attacks, declared that these terror assaults were not “foreseeable,” as if he himself had not been party to creating the image of “Islamic militancy” as the West’s new bogeyman. In 2006, his predecessor-in-crime, Zbigniew Brzezinski, could still safely claim that “[r]adical Islam is such an anonymous phenomenon that has arisen in some countries and not in others. It has to be taken seriously, but it is still only a regional danger most prevalent in the Middle East and somewhat east of the Middle East.” But, not anymore now that the IS has clearly declared a “War-on-Kuffar,” wherever they may be, as I suggested some time ago. There is thus no end in sight . . . after all, “every terrorist group of global reach” needs to be “found, stopped and defeated.” The 2001 mission statement therefore guarantees that the present War-on-Terror (or Crusade against a Fringe Form of Islamic Extremism) will necessarily continue ad infinitum and that “[s]ome stirred-up Moslems” will always feel the need to defend the lands of Islam against the Free World and NATO encroaching, in whatever locality possible and/or feasible.

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

News cycles have been awash with reports about the so-called “Panama Papers”, a leak revealing “approximately 11.5 million documents – more than the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks.”

The daily lives of millions or rather billions of people (around 40% of the global population, in fact) have today become totally intertwined with the internet and all kinds of technological toys and gadgets, toys and gadgets that create a constantly vibrant buzz of interconnectivity and eroding privacy. On the one hand, Big Brother in the shape the U.S. NSA, the German BND or the Turkish MİT, to name but a few security agencies active around the globe today, keep constant tabs on everyone’s deeds, actions and even thoughts (as expressed in untold internet missives and social media posts). In contrast, mostly shadowy and anonymous networks of hackers, whistleblowers, and other tech-savvy rebels-with-a-cause occasionally “leak” troves of information, thereby making public what was supposed to be hidden away from prying eyes. In this vein, on Sunday, 3 April 2016, news of the so-called Panama Papers hit the world by surprise. And, some might argue, the world will never be the same again following this “giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records,” records held by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and pertaining to numerous high-flying figures in politics and commerce around the globe. Apparently, more than a year ago an “anonymous source” (appropriately enough employing the pseudonym John Doe) got in touch with the reputable German paper the Süddeutsche Zeitung (or SZ) and in view of the magnitude of the information the Germans decided to analyze the data in conjunction with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (or ICIJ). The latter had the requisite experience, having previously also worked on Swiss Leaks (February 2015), Lux Leaks (November 2014), and before that on Offshore Leaks (April 2013). But, something does not seem quite right this time around.

Guilt by Association

The Panama Papers reveal the existence of numerous offshore companies, which are basically means used to launder or simply hide money in offshore financial centres, commonly referred to as “tax havens.” Many prominent names explicitly figure in the leaked papers, names such as those of the Prime Ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the names of the children of the president of Azerbaijan or even the name of the King of Saudi Arabia. But in the mainstream media, with the BBC and the Guardian leading the charge, the name of Russia’s President is mentioned time and again. As if the Panama Papers were primarily a leaked time-bomb about to strike the figure of Vladimir Putin hard and fast. In reality though, his name is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Papers. Instead, the ICIJ merely talks about “associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” associates such as Boris and Arkady Rotenberg and Sergi Roldugin are mentioned — the first being Russian businessmen and “oligarchs,” as the West likes to refer to Russian capitalists, and the latter a Russian businessman and cellist. The Guardian went as far as calling him “Putin’s best friend,” in view of the fact that he is Putin’s daughter Maria Putina’s godfather and apparently the one who introduced Russia’s current president to Lyudmila Shkrebneva, Putin’s wife between 1983 and 2014. Thus, it seems that the Panama Papers paint Putin guilty by association. While, Vladimir Putin and the exact nature of his arguable friendships and possible business dealings are beyond my reach, the mainstream media’s fixation with the Russian President seems strangely beholden to Obama administration policy. Bloomberg’s Alan Katz [https://twitter.com/Alanrkatz], for instance, recently pointed out that Washington is planning to scour the Panama Papers for the names of “people who may have helped companies or individuals evade sanctions related to Russia’s role in destabilizing Ukraine.” With a view towards adding these names to the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of sanctioned parties of course.

But, what about American oligarchs in the Panama Papers? On 5 April, the IB Times published this “UPDATE: 10:20 a.m. EDT — Some Americans were named in the ‘Panama Papers’ leaks, including Tina Turner and business mogul David Geffen, McClatchy’s Kevin Hall said in an interview Monday [, 4 April]. Relatively few Americans have surfaced compared to others — but Hall said more names were to appear in the coming weeks.” So, the world has now been put at ease, as none other than the reputable McClatchy network of news professionals has announced that “more” American names will follow at some stage in the hopefully near future. Others are less sanguine about these things though, as for example, Dr Tatiana Yuga, a Professor at the Plekhanov Russian Economic University, indicating that “[i]t’s clear that the Panama Leaks are part of the West’s hybrid war against Russia,” employing an expression popularised by none other than the inimitable Pepe Escobar. And now the grand-daddy of all whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has put its weight behind such allegations. On Wednesday, 6 April, this tweet appeared on the internet: “#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP [i.e. the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros,” as promulgated by the official WikiLeaks twitter account (@wikileaks). Later on the same day, this tweet followed: “#PanamaPapers: WikiLeaks’ Kristinn Hrafnsson calls for data leak to be released in full.”

Oligarchy or Democracy

As a result, one could very well pose the question whether something indeed smells rotten in the United States of America?!?? Some years ago, in early 2014 to be precise, Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin Page published an interesting study on the politico-economical realities on the ground in the United States. Using their best academese, the two political scientists put their findings like this: “[m]ultivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” Or, to put it in plain English, “the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power,” as explained by none other than the BBC, arguably a bastion of plainspeak and impartiality. Gilens and Benjamin also went ahead and translated their jargon-laced verdict into a more readily understandable form as follows: “if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” In fact, these two academics built their 2014 study of 1,779 public policy survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on the earlier analytical work by political scientists like Jeffrey Winter and Benjamin Page. These two scholars published a 2009 article which sought to illustrate that the U.S. “political system” can usefully be characterized as “oligarchic,” reasoning that a “very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas.” Still, the mainstream media, including the BBC among many others, never ever refer to this “top tenth of 1 percent” of wealthy Americans as oligarchs, which they indubitable are. Instead, mainstream media call Russian businessmen, who made their wealth in the aftermath of the fall of Communism and the introduction of Disaster Capitalism into the erstwhile Soviet world, oligarchs as a natural course. But in actual fact, the situation in the 21st century is such that oligarchy and not democracy is the new normal, or, if your will, the new status quo. This means that the early 21st century is but a mirror image of the late 19th, the proverbial “ Age of Capital,” to use the late great Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase.

The U.S. has been dominating the world ever since the end of the Cold War in political and economic terms. The EU, as its transatlantic economic counterpart, has in many ways been under Washington’s tutelage ever since the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. As a union of 28 separate nation states, the EU has over the past years been at pains to display a united front, an attempt that has failed dramatically in many ways, as amply illustrated in the bloc’s current dithering response to the ongoing refugee crisis. But, on the economic front, the (European) union is strong, with the EU lambasting on a requisite webpage that it is at present the “biggest player on the global trading scene and remains a good region to do business with.” In a recent press release, issued by the Eurostat Press Office, the bloc modestly boasts that the “euro area recorded a €6.2 bn surplus in trade in goods with the rest of the world in January 2016″ and that “[i]ntra-euro area trade remained stable at €132.5 bn in January 2016″ as well. The euro area consists of 19 nations within the 28-member Union. In fact, some would argue, the introduction of the euro (€) as a pan-European currency in 2002 was but a feeble attempt by the Europeans to compete with the almighty U.S. Dollar ($). The just-quoted press release admits that the “EU28 recorded a €11.0 bn deficit in trade in goods with the rest of the world in January 2016,” but in the next instance then boastfully adds that “[i]ntra-EU28 trade rose to €239.6 bn in January 2016, +1% compared with January 2015.” It appears to be a plain fact that economic policy, in contrast to other attempts at formulating a single united policy aims, thrives in the EU, apparently unhampered by the cacophony of divergent political opinions and popular resistance to the encroaching wannabe-superstate-that-is-the-European Union.

Exposing the Triumph of Post-Democracy

Members of the EU’s political elite thus appear to accept unquestioningly that the benefits of trade and commerce necessarily overrule democratic processes. Professor Jan Blommaert, a Belgian sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, calls this a “template,” a pattern describing how “democratic procedures and principles are suggested to be subject – inferior – to concerns of a higher order, and two such concerns stand out. One, the economic conjuncture which needs to be turned around by means of more market-less government strategies . . . Two, and as a corollary of the first one, security: threats to ‘political stability’ are presented as danger for democracy and have to be met with new forms of informal justice and radical policing, jeopardizing (or undercutting) established civil liberties in a democratic society.” Blommaert here pinpoints the two entwined major forces ruling the world today, the Economy and the War-on-Terror (as the true successor to the Cold War that provided ideological certainties and investment opportunities in the period 1945-91). Already in the year 2000, the political scientists Colin Crouch coined the phrase post-democracy to describe this increasingly stifling trend in the 21st-century capitalism. Professor Crouch published his views in book form in 2004. Crouch maintains that “virtually all the formal components of democracy survive”’ today, but that “citizens have been reduced to the role of manipulated, passive, rare participants.” The Professor concludes harshly that “politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.” Against this bleak backdrop of the ultimate victory of neoliberalism, the Panama Papers appeared on the scene reminding the world’s population that their leadership is basically at the beck and call of the wealthy few. If the Panama Papers are really to be understood as a Washington-engineered leak (to discredit Russia, among other things), then they could also be seen as an official confirmation of the fact that we are now really living in a post-democratic world order, that oligarchs all around the world dictate policy while busily hiding their ill-gotten gains and enjoying the high life. That seems to be the main message.

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

In last year’s November Surprise,

Kurds attack Ankara: TAK vs AKP

But now Kurdish suicide bombers (or terrorists, if you will) have twice struck Turkey’s capital Ankara in quick succession (on 17 February and 13 March 2016, respectively). The authorities immediately associated these two deadly attacks with the names of the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê or Kurdistan Workers’ Party), active in Turkey, and the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat or Democratic Union Party), active in Syria. In this way, the AKP-led government seemed to acknowledge the existence of a causal link between the terrorist attacks and its military operations in the South-East of the country that have been continuing for many months now. The official rationale behind these fierce military operations is the Turkish state’s desire to bring an end to the armed struggle with Kurdish separatists, a struggle whose beginnings hark back to the 1980s and that was actually in the process of a peaceful resolution when the ceasefire was brought to a sudden end following the supposedly inconclusive June 2015 elections. These operations amount to veritable exercises in collective punishment and have been described as “a vicious offensive against Kurdish citizens over the last eight months” by the West Yorkshire-based writer, poet and teacher employing the pseudonym Ed Sykes.

But rather than give the AKP-led government additional justification for continuing its “vicious offensive against Kurdish citizens,” the PKK did not claim responsibility in spite of the government’s best efforts. Instead, a little known Kurdish fraction known as TAK (the Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan or the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons) released the following statement on the internet (17 March 2016): “On the evening of March 13, a suicide attack was carried out . . . in the streets of the capital of the fascist Turkish republic. We claim this attack.” The online message also contained the following explanation: “[t]his action was carried out to avenge the 300 Kurds killed in Cizre as well as our civilians who were wounded. We would like to apologise for the civilian losses which had nothing to do with the dirty war being waged by the fascist Turkish republic.” Furthermore, the internet missive elucidated that “[o]ur unit targeted state forces in Ankara, the stronghold of fascism and barbarism, to bring the AKP government that massacred Kurds in Cizre to account on a revolutionary basis. However, the police intervention on our unit which came as it advanced toward the target, resulted in civilian casualties. We therefore voice sadness over the loss of civilians that have no connection with those pursuing this dirty war.” And, in an apparent attempt to garner some sympathy the following was added: “[i]n the atmosphere that has been created as a result of civilian losses after our action, we hope that public opinion will understand the pains suffered by the Kurdish people who are being massacred savagely, and whose bodies are burned, displayed and not given to families. Even this savagery alone is a reason for Kurdistan Freedom Falcons to seek revenge.” In fact, the TAK had earlier also claimed responsibility for the first Ankara blast (17 February), explaining that the attack had come in response to the AKP government’s military crackdown in the South-East. In view of this state terror and the concomitant terrorist reaction, some voices have already come out to say the unspeakable. Voices, such as the one belonging to Kamuran Yüksek, the co-chair of the Democratic Regions Party (or DBP), a sister-party of the nationally recognized HDP (or Peoples’ Democratic Party), led by the co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ. Already at the end of last January, Yüksek told the press that “the country could descend into a civil war,” and adding that “[w]e are already in such a situation, more or less.”

The Beyoğlu Blast: The Civil War moves West or a Caliphal Intervention?!??

And now terrorism has struck at the cultural and commercial heart of the country, as a “[s]uicide bomber kills four, wounds 36 in Istanbul shopping district,” on Saturday, 19 March 2016, as reported by the news agency Reuters. This audacious act hit the famous İstiklal Caddesi (or Independence Avenue), a pedestrian mall in the now-fashionable district of Beyoğlu, adjacent to the by now world-famous Taksim Square, and home to many brand name outlets as well as being a cultural hub in its own right, a hub where many locals and foreigners alike congregate and spend money: “Turkish media said three Israelis and one Iranian were killed, while two of the Israelis were also named by Washington as US citizens.” The fact that this suicide attack came quickly after the latest Ankara blast could lead to the conclusion that the spectre of a “civil war” in Turkey is now slowly turning into a reality, a new reality that has the country’s Kurds, or rather separatist or terrorist organizations of Kurdish provenance fight the AKP-led government of the country in an all-out guerilla campaign that takes no prisoners and kills civilians and soldiers, citizens and foreigners alike. But, as was the case with the seemingly random suicide attack on the Hippodrome in Istanbul’s tourist district of Sultanahmet last January, the authorities swiftly dismissed any Kurdish link and instead pointed the finger at Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Islamic State (or ISIS). And, as has become the Turkish norm by now, the authorities imposed a media blackout, so that journalistic investigation all but turned to speculation and conspiracy-mongering, leaving the official narrative intact and unquestioned.

By means of DNA evidence the Turkish authorities have since quickly identified the Beyoğlu suicide bomber as a young man named Mehmet Öztürk, whom the media now describe as an “ISIS militant.” The security forces have now also taken Öztürk’s father and brother into custody. Turkey’s Interior Minister Efkan Ala has told the press that “[t]he available information indicates a link with the terror group [known as] Daesh [or ISIS or the IS]. Whether other links and other powers were behind [the attack] is a topic for investigation. There is no search record available on the person [in question].” In other words, the appearance of Mehmet Öztürk as a caliphal operative active in Turkey is basically a matter of conjecture. Other terror acts perpetrated by ISIS in other locations are usually followed by some kind of subsequent claim of responsibility. But in Turkey, ISIS terror tends to remain unclaimed. For instance, the spectacular Brussels attacks of 22 March, that quickly succeeded the Beyoğlu blast, were claimed in due time. This “coordinated terror attack,” claiming the lives of at least 31 victims, in addition to the two suicide bombers, was subsequently owned by the Islamic State (or ISIS/Daesh), attributing its execution to a “security group from the soldiers of the caliphate,” before issuing a severe threat: “What is coming is worse and more bitter, God permitting.” In the same way, following the Sultanahmet attack, the IS carried out an attack on the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, executed by at “least five militants.” These actions were also immediately claimed by the terror group previously known as ISIS via the services of the Amaq News Agency, which openly supports the Caliph and his IS.

Suicide Terrorism: LTTE, PKK & TAK

In contrast, both supposed IS-orchestrated Istanbul attacks (12 January and 19 March 2016) remained unclaimed, which did not stop the Turkish authorities from accusing the Caliph and his henchmen. On the other hand, the Ankara attacks have clearly shown that Kurdish terrorists are now equally capable of deploying suicide commandos though their ideological belief system does not hold the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife. Instead, the TAK is now operating on the same wavelength as the erstwhile Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (or LTTE, meaning Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). According to the Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, prepared under the direction of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the “LTTE ha[d] a suicide unit, The Black Panthers [consisting] of both men and women that direct[ed] their attacks primarily against senior government and military personnel. Between July 1987 and February 2000, the LTTE carried out approximately 168 suicide attacks in Sri Lanka and India killing and wounding thousands of innocent bystanders.” Today the LTTE have ceased to exist, as the Sri Lankan government smashed the group militarily in March 2009.

Even though the LTTE was “the most effective and brutal organization to utilize this form of terrorism,” Turkey’s PKK has in time also resorted to this tactic. The Senior Research Fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Yoram Schweitzer relates that the “PKK has carried out a total of 21 suicide attacks or attempted attacks (15 attacks were actually carried out and 6 were intercepted). Its suicide campaign started on 30 June 1996 and ceased on 5 July 1999 at the decision of its leader Abdullah Öcalan [in captivity since 15 February 1999]. This terror campaign caused relatively low casualties: 19 were killed and 138 were wounded.” But now, the TAK, as the only Kurdish group to claim publicly that it is continuing a bloody terror campaign against the Turkish state, has apparently decided to continue this relatively short-lived PKK tactic. And, it seems, the TAK is more effective in its execution of suicide missions, apparently following in the footsteps of the LTTE. And in this context, it is interesting and ominous to read in the Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century that the Tamil Tigers were “the only organization that succeeded in assassinating two heads of states. Former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi was killed in May 1991 by a female suicide bomber and Sri Lanka President Prendesa was killed in 1993 by a male suicide bomber.” The LTTE’s ideological superstructure was also based upon the principles of geographical separatism and (Tamil) nationalism, as the Tamil Tigers fought for the “oppressed Tamil people” in order to save them from the “chauvinist Sinhala regime,” in place on the island of Sri Lanka, as expressed by the Tamil extremist Fr. Emmanuel, S.J. Could these things now mean that the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons have decided to become a Turkish version of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam?? And should the Prez and Wily now start worrying seriously about their own safety??

Civil War as a Real Prospect

The Turkish state has effectively been at war in the south-eastern part of Anatolia’s territory for many months now. Even though casual observers might think that sheer and unadulterated nationalism lies behind the fighting, the reality on the ground proves quite different. It seems that the AKP leadership’s promises of continued stability induced a great majority of the voting public to cast their ballots in favour of the PM Ahmed Davutoğlu and President Erdoğan. As such, some would even argue that the sudden breakdown of the ceasefire with the PKK and the discontinuation of the Kurdish Peace Process were directly linked to the AKP’s election campaign and Erdoğan’s grand-standing, trying to prove that he alone would be able to unite and pacify the nation. That the Prez and his AKP would be able to unite and pacify the country as a nation of believers, firmly dedicated to Sunni Islam able to supersede mere ethnic or national ties and solidarity. The notorious Islamophobic director of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes rightly points out that the dynamic duo Erdogan-Davutoglu’s dangerous gamble has now brought the country “to the point that civil war has become a real prospect.” As a result, I would argue that the Turkish government has now taken compete control of the nation’s news’ media in order to propagate its own narrative. The message being driven home now is that AKP-led Ankara is doing all it can to bring peace and tranquility to the South-East, but is somehow being outsmarted by foreign players. such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his IS. And that the spectre of civil war is nothing but a chimera, a fancyful fantasy that does not fit into Turkey’s AKP narrative . . . the Prez himself has after all declared last year that “[i]f there are [people] who are expecting a civil war, then they belong to a network of treason. Treason.” And in this way, in Turkey, reality gives way to faith . . . faith in the figure of Tayyip Erdoğan and his ability to shape the Turkish narrative in his own image.

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

The Justice and Development Party (or AKP) has brought Turkey into the 21st century, and has managed to heighten significantly Turkey’s status abroad. But its authoritarian tendencies on the domestic front appear to undermine the country’s reputation amongst many foreign observers.

Lately, various events unfolding in Turkey have been the focus of a lot of frantic news coverage around the world. Ever since the Gezi unrest of 2013, the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has received his fair share of criticism. As such, his many critics and opponents accuse him of outright authoritarianism, suppressing any opposition and crushing dissent while transforming the country into “the biggest prison for journalists in Europe,” as worded by Anthony Bellanger, the International Federations of Journalists’ General Secretary.

The various YouTube and Facebook bans over the years only reinforced the impression that the country’s AKP-led government has the media on a tight leash. In fact, the majority of press and other media outlets in Turkey are either directly tied to the government or at the very least owned by businessmen sympathetic to Erdoğan’s cause and thus really nothing but “propaganda bullhorns.” At the end of last month, “Turkey’s satellite provider Turksat halted broadcasts of IMC TV at the request of an Ankara prosecutor,” indicating the extent to which the Turkish judiciary has basically become beholden to the executive. The television channel was shut down due to allegations of “spreading terrorist propaganda.” The Istanbul-based channel “devotes much of its coverage to the Kurdish conflict” in the South-East of the country, but also deals with many “social issues, such as environmental protests, or speeches by opposition politicians that other media are loath to carry.” At the moment, the channel is able to continue its broadcasts via the Hotbird satellite, as is explained in great detail on the IMC TV website.

Condemnation and Context

The independent IMC TV crackdown took place on Friday, 26 February, and exactly one week later, “[o]n Friday, March 4th, the leading opposition newspaper in Turkey, Zaman, was taken over by the Government; and on March 5th, one of the other opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet, reported that Zaman‘s separate news-service to other news-media, Cihan News Agency, has now also been disabled on the Internet.” At present, however, the Cihan website appears to be freely available, and even featuring detailed reports on the forced takeover. Particularly, the brutal way in which the police dealt with peaceful supporters of the paper and its backers received a lot of popular condemnation. Pictures of a headscarfed female Zaman supporter covered in blood after having received requisite police attention were the focus of quite a few acerbic comments written down by opponents of Tayyip Erdoğan, whose own condemnatory comments concerning an alleged attack on a headscarfed female AKP supporter in the aftermath of the Gezi protests have not been forgotten. As a result, this latest attempt by the AKP-led government to control the media was met with worldwide disgust and dismay.

The U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said curtly that “we see this as the latest in a series of troubling judicial and law enforcement actions taken by the Turkish government targeting media outlets and others critical of it.” While, the Austrian Johannes Hahn, as a senior level EU official, for his part, declared that “we are extremely worried about latest developments regarding Zaman newspaper that jeopardize progress made by Turkey in other areas.” And, remaining in the realm of Eurocracy and such, the EU Parliament President Martin Schulz tweeted that the Zaman takeover was “yet another blow to press freedom.” The words used by the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Joel Simon were of a similar grave ilk: “today’s move by the court paves the way to effectively strangle the remnants of critical journalism in Turkey.” And even the independent commentator and investigative historian Eric Zuesse echoed these sentiments, while taking his condemnation to another level all together, by means of saying that the “Turkish Government is trying to prevent the Turkish public from knowing that Turkey has been serving as the transit-route by which the U.S. government and its allied Arab oil monarchies (especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have been supplying foreign jihadists and weapons (largely U.S. but paid for with Saudi funds) into Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad from power.”

Even though the Zaman takeover is a troubling development and bodes ill for the future of Turkey’s independent press and news coverage, the above-mentioned critical voices all seems to forget one little thing. Namely that until very recently the Zaman group and its backers were in fact allied to the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the whole AKP venture. The Zaman enterprise is the media outlet of the so-called Gülen Movement, known as the Cemaat (or the Community), in Turkish, or the Hizmet Movement. The Hizmet Movement is a religious organisation led by the “cleric” Fethullah Gülen, who was been in the United States in so-called “self-imposed exile” since the year 1999. The “Hizmet Movement . . . is estimated to dispose of a membership ranging between 3 and 6 million, many households in Turkey are equally dedicated to the figure of Gülen (also called hocaefendi or ‘revered master’) without any formal affiliation however. He has been residing in the US since 1999, where he traveled for medical treatment. At the time, Turkey was governed by a coalition led by the veteran politician Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006) – a left-leaning figure with a particular distaste for religious agitation – and when video footage surfaced that showed the preacher advocating his followers to infiltrate the corridors of power in Turkey, Gülen was summarily accused of trying to undermine the supposed ‘secular’ principles of the Republic of Turkey. The tape shows the preacher literally advising his followers to ‘move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers . . . Until the conditions are ripe, [the followers] must continue like this . . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey.’ The self-proclaimed ‘secular’ elite in Turkey panicked straight away, and in 2000, Fethullah Gülen was tried in absentia by a state security court – for trying to replace Turkey’s ‘secular’ government with an Islamic one. Since then, Gülen has been residing on a large, rural estate in eastern Pennsylvania – in the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center on Mt. Eaton Road in Saylorsburg, PA.”

Fethullah Gülen as a Terrorist Leader

As Islamist groups and organizations go, the Hizmet Movement and the AKP obviously have a lot in common. But since about 2010, a certain rift started appearing, a rift that became a wide open chasm on 17 December 2014. On that day, a corruption scandal broke implicating numerous high-ranking AKP members and many of their family members. A second probe occurred on 25 December, leading AKP supporters in coming months to speak of an alleged coup attempt on 17/25 December. The charge was led by the country’s then-chief public prosecutor Zekeriya Öz, who in the past has been compared to the Italian Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro. The operations brought many improprieties out in the open, particularly poignant were the shoe-boxes filled with cash, which since then have become proverbial when referring to corrupt affairs in Turkey. In subsequent weeks and months, numerous sound recordings surfaced as well, sound recordings revealing less than savoury traits of many an AKP member. But, in the end, the AKP establishment was able to strike back and turn the tables on those prosecuting alleged corruption charges. The counter-charge was of course led by none other than the ever-so-popular Tayyip Erdoğan, who introduced a new coinage to describe his opponents. Apparently, taking his cue from Ecevit, he started referring to the Gülen Movement as a “Parallel Structure” within the Turkish state, a state-within-a-state, if you will. In the next instance, a true with-hunt ensued and individuals suspected of possessing Parallel tries became subject to prosecution and imprisonment. Zekeriya Öz and his associated Celal Kara managed to escape and have been on the run ever since. The Turkish press reported last month that both men had travelled from Armenia to Germany, before slipping into the Netherlands. Nowadays, the prosecution has elaborated upon Erdoğan’s coinage and refers to the “Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü (FETÖ),” or Fethullahist Terror Group. (arguably, a better English translation would be the Gülenist Teror Group).

Islamic Authoritarianism

The recent takeover of the Zaman group has to be understood in this context. Following his escape to Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gülen managed to construct a veritable business empire from his retreat, an empire encompassing, for instance, more than a 1,000 charter schools around the world as well as vast media apparatus that includes such popular newspapers like Zaman and Today’s Zaman, in addition to equally popular television channels like Samanyolu in Turkey and Ebru TV, serving Canada and the United States, as well as the Cihan News Agency. As a result, the AKP and its followers regard the daily Zaman and all of its affiliates as the propaganda bullhorn of the Parallel Structure, the state-within-the-state apparently aimed at undermining the integrity of the Islamist principles of Turkey’s AKP-led government. The Zaman group has indeed been highly critical of the figure of Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP-led government over the past years, but one should not lose track of the fact that the initial co-operation between Gülen and Erdoğan arguably secured the ground for the laying out of the post-Kemalist path that is currently being pursued by Turkey’s leadership.

The day prior to the government takeover, the daily Today’s Zaman issued a statement expressing concern over “Turkey’s democratic performance” and urging a “return to democracy and the rule of law.” These sentiments may very well have been disingenuous or true-and-heartfelt, but they nevertheless appear to have come just a little too late. One could argue that Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP would never have never reached their current lofty status without the Gülen Movement’s willing help and cooperation . . . As put by Şeyma Gelen, a headscarfed feminist and researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, “[n]ot everyone [in Turkey] is concerned with issues concerning freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the status of women or the concentration of power.” Both Islamist factions were happy to cooperate in previous years, and now that the happy union of yesteryear is no more, the AKP is consolidating its firm grip over the country, while its supporters welcome such actions as appropriate measures that safeguard the country and its traditions . . . or rather its one tradition of authoritarianism that has now seen its full culmination in the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the one and only politician to have successfully [re-]introduced Islam into the body politic of Turkey.

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

The New Turkey’s Dynamic Duo: Erdoğan and Davutoğlu

Even though Turkey has now been ruled by the AKP for more than a decade, the fact that the country is now well and truly advancing on a post-Kemalist path towards the establishment of a veritable authoritarian sultanate of kitsch has still not really sunk in amongst the country’s opposition and its so-called secularist urbanites. Critical opinion at home as well as abroad continues to focus on the figure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his truly outrageous statements, ignoring the fact that the AKP-led government in Ankara has slowly but surely succeeded in irrevocably changing the country’s political landscape and discourse. These important alterations to the politico-social system and the educational apparatus will also ensure the future continuation of the present course, irrespective of actual individuals steering the state’s ship. Tayyip Erdoğan and his erstwhile advisor, if not mentor, Ahmed Davutoğlu have changed the Republic of Turkey from a state somewhat ill-at-ease in its Middle Eastern context into a country that is set to become virtually indistinguishable from its Arab neighbours in the region. This dynamic duo of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu has been hard at work since 14 March 2003, with the former actively hugging the limelight and the latter laying out strategies and formulating policies behind the scenes — strategies and policies meant to undo decades of Kemalist indoctrination and what has become proverbially known as “Turkish Secularism”. Whereas, previously Kemalist social engineering and effective rewriting of national history and identity (1923-1994/2002) successfully transformed the Ottoman banner into a symbol of Turkish nationalism, adherence to the Muslim creed has nevertheless always been the common core of Turkish citizenship. This Muslim undertow of Turkish nationalism was always quietly accepted.

The division of labour between Davutoğlu and Erdoğan was somewhat changed, when the former was allowed to step out into the public eye, first as wily Foreign Minister on 1 May 2009 and next, on 28 August 2014, as the new Prime Minister when Tayyip Erdoğan became the first popularly elected President of the Turkish Republic. And both men (let’s just call them the Prez and Wily) continued their hard work of deconstructing Kemalist Turkey. So that nowadays, the mere idea of Turkish nationalism is in the process of being re-interpreted along purely religious lines, with the Prez and Wily effectively redefining “the concept of Turkish unity (or Turkish citizenship, if you will) as a God-given quality.” The continuous stream of speeches, delivered by either Erdoğan and/or Davutoğlu, spewing forth from Turkish television sets across the nation is quite literally drowning the country’s population in a sea of words, a sea of words that functions as a seductive lure persuading more and more women to give in to social pressure and cover their heads and many men to don beards and go to the mosque. At the beginning of this year, for example, on 8 Jan 2016, to be precise, Wily issued the Friday Prayer circular that allows male public servants to attend the obligatory Friday prayers (Salatul Jumu’ah) without interrupting their office hours (female believers are obviously exempt from fulfilling this religious duty, as it would lead to a mixing of the sexes at the mosque). Reflecting upon what he had achieved, Ahmed Davutoğlu subsequently let it be known that henceforward “[o]n Fridays, an environment like a holiday celebration, which will further contribute to our fraternity across Turkey, will occur.”

Tayyip Erdoğan vs Bashar al-Assad

These social and political changes have transformed Turkey into a country that now feels obliged to actively interfere in regional affairs. Syria’s not-so civil war right next door is a case in point. From the very beginning Turkey has been at the forefront of the international effort to unseat Bashar al-Assad, albeit that its role was at first limited to a backstage part. Still, Tayyip Erdoğan, always keen to hog the limelight. relished (and continues to relish) in denouncing Assad time and again. At the time the so-called Arab Spring had erupted all around, in the form of “orchestrated” uprisings meant to usher in regime change and U.S.-friendly governments in the Middle East. Against this backdrop, in November 2011, in reference to the Damascus regime’s reaction to an arguably Washington-engineered armed insurrection, Erdoğan did not shy away from threatening Assad: “[f]ighting your own people is not bravery but fear. Look at Hitler . . . look at the leader of Libya [Muammar Gaddafi], who was killed and who used the same expressions as you.” At the time, Tayyip Erdoğan compared Bashar al-Assad to Libya’s strongman who was brutally killed by members of Libya’s Islamist insurrection, liberally aided by NATO drone strikes. In this way, he unwittingly appeared to acknowledge that there was more than met the eye to the apparently spontaneous unrest in Syria. In fact there are indications that Turkey and the U.S. had been supplying “logistic aid and military training to the Syrian armed opposition” since “April-May 2011.” By means of invoking Gaddafi’s fate, Erdoğan disclosed that the West, or if you will, the NATO alliance led by Washington also had its own plans for Syria, plans that arguably involved the forced removal of Assad and the imposition of regime change. And that the Washington-led Alliance was counting on a relatively swift resolution, comparable to the Libyan affair that had been settled in exactly 8 months, one week and one day. According to that logic, the Damascus regime should have fallen and Assad killed by late November 2011, about the time that Turkey’s then-PM issued his underhand warning to Assad. Alas, Syria is not Libya in spite of the import of fighters from Misrata to overthrow (and arguably, kill) Assad.

And as a result, Syria’s not-so civil war continued unabated thereby giving Erdoğan more than ample opportunity to flex his rhetorical muscle. On 10 April 2012, for example, he said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “is continuing to kill 60, 70, 80, 100 [civilians] every day. This is the situation.” After he had stated that Assad’s soldiers “are even shooting these fleeing people from behind. They are mercilessly shooting them, regardless of whether they are children or women.” As is his wont, Tayyip Erdoğan turned the whole Syrian crisis into a personal affair, an affair that turned on the figure of Assad. In the next year, he even utilized Syria’s President as a ploy in his sparring sessions with Turkey’s opposition. On 27 August 2013, for instance, he told the leader of the opposition, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu that “[t]hose who call me a dictator are welcome to [go to] Syria. You want to see a dictator? [Bashar al-Assad] killed 100,000 people in 2½ years.”

Assad and Baghdadi

And the hostilities continued next door, while the situation in Turkey remained the same with the exception of the above-mentioned switcheroo that transformed Erdoğan into the Prez living in his custom-made over-the-top palace boasting more than a 1,000 rooms and Wily moving into the Çankaya Palace, previously reserved for the figurehead presidents of the constitutional Republic of Turkey. Public opinion at home as well as abroad was aghast at the much-debated palace in Beştepe (the Ankara neighborhood inside Atatürk Forest Farm where the Prez’s so-called White Palace is located), an architectural declaration of Erdoğan’s personal endorsement of what I have earlier described as the AKP decision to erect a real estate Sultanate of Kitsch as a visual marker of its policy of an Ottoman revival or Ottomanitas (as a shorthand for an Islamic Réveil). Unperturbed by any kind of public outcry, both men continued with their mission, the mission of building the New Turkey (contingent upon a strong degree of Ottomanitas). At the same time, the Prez continued his habit of travelling the country to throw speeches. Speaking at the Marmara University in Istanbul in October 2014, for instance, President Erdoğan declared that the “Assad regime should be the target for a real solution in Syria,” and then adding that “Turkey is the only country that can provide peace in the region. Turkey is the hope of Middle Eastern people. Turkey can remove the barriers between Middle Easterners, not by changing physical borders, but by instilling hope and trust.” The spectacular appearance of the Islamic State (or IS) on 29 June previously had suddenly given a renewed urgency to the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of yesteryear (exposed by the Bolshevik government on 23 November 1917). The terror group previously known as ISIS/ISIL (or Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant) had carved out its own geo-body in territories belonging to the states of Syria and Iraq and in doing so, declared its intention to smash “these borders, the borders of Sykes-Picot.” These words spoken in an online video by the IS operative Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani disclose that the stakes had now been altered. The U.S.-engineered Arab Spring intended to introduce regime change all around, yet fearfully beholden to preserving the status quo, that had directly led to Syria’s not-so civil war to unseat Assad had now come to a grinding halt. Islamist and Jihadi factions that had been inserted as pawns had now clearly appropriated the narrative and the status quo was no longer safe. In response, the Prez assured his home audience and the wider world that AKP-led Turkey would safeguard the Middle East yet create a new cohesion, “not by changing physical borders” but by means of projecting Ottomanitas and fostering a greater sense of Islamic unity and solidarity in the shape of “hope and trust.”

But, Assad would still have to go. In order to drive home this point, Ankara started releasing curiouser and curiouser messages. In early December last year, the wily PM’s press secretary Osman Sert said the following to the journalist Sarantis Michalopoulos: “[t]he reason for the ISIS problem is Assad himself so we cannot and must not cooperate with Assad’s regime which is responsible for thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions more”. And in the next instance, Sert disclosed the extent to which the dynamic duo is still working hand in glove, saying “[a]nd we have intelligence that Assad is cooperating with ISIS. Sometimes Assad’s regime fights opposition groups and then the ISIS militants go to this place. Assad’s regime is the reason for Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS/ISIL].” Next, the Prez himself came out and declared that “[i]t is the Assad regime that fosters and grows DAESH and the PYD [the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, allied to the PKK] in Syria.” By means of pronouncing this short phrase Tayyip Erdoğan managed to have his cake and eat it, as he implied that the war theatre in Syria’s not-so civil war contains but one enemy that combines the three threats to the security of AKP-led Turkey (and possibly the Capitalist world): the Iran-allied Baath regime in Damascus, the new Islamist bogeyman Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his terror outfit as well as separatist Kurdish factions striving for self-determination and espousing socialist and communalist ideas and ideals.

Authoritarianism & Megalomania in Turkey

In the meantime, the Syria crisis drags on, with many thousands fleeing the violence and seeking refuge in neighbouring countries, or further afield. And, as always seems to be the case, in this context too, AKP-led Turkey charges ahead, hosting nearly three million Syrian individuals according to data collected by the UNHCR. These huge numbers of refugees have now also influenced Turkey’s relations with the EU, as more and more desperate Syrians and Iraqis plunge into the Mediterranean from Turkish shores in frantic attempts to land on Greek soil, with the hope of subsequently venturing deeper into the European heartland. These tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free and secure are now constituting a new threat to Fortress Europe, as expressed by the intrepid Pepe Escobar, “the EU crumbles under the strain of a massive refugee crisis,” crumbles under a “tsunami of Muslims,” seeking entry into Frau Merkel’s promised land. The UNHCR indicates that between January 1 and February 29, 2016, 131,724 migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean Sea, of whom 122,637 landed on Greek soil. Given that Turkey is hosting nearly three million victims of the “Western-engineered wars” in the Middle East, the EU has pledged €3bn to Turkey.

And the dynamic duo of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu have since been parading around the country presenting this EU pledge as a personal victory. But their work is far from over, as they are still in need of forging a new constitution that would accommodate their desire to replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a presidential one, a system that would truly transform the as now somewhat constrained Recep Tayyip Erdoğan into “Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan,” to use Escobar’s idiosyncratic phraseology. As such, Erdoğan’s recent spat with Turkey’s Constitutional Court indicates that the dynamic duo is all but ready to enact their coup that would reinstate a purely authoritarian system in the erstwhile Ottoman heartland. Under the AKP news gathering has become an increasingly dangerous trade, with more than ten journalists in prison at the end of last year and at least seven more Kurdish journalists under arrest since December 2015. In this context, the case of Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet stands out. The Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) put it as follows: Dündar and Gül “spent 92 days in pre-trial detention, [and they] still face multiple life sentences if convicted of exposing state secrets, espionage, and aiding a terrorist group for publishing reports alleging Turkey tried to smuggle weapons to Islamists in Syria.” And now they have been conditionally released in the early hours of Friday, 26 February 2016 due to the intervention of the Constitutional Court. The country’s top court namely ruled that the journalists’ “[i]ndividual rights as well the freedom of the press and expression have been violated.” Upon their release, the Prez, who was on his way to Africa when the news broke, erupted in a fighting mood, unabashedly declaring that “[t]he Constitutional Court may have reached such a verdict. I will remain silent. I am not in a position to accept it. I do not obey it nor do I respect it.”

These words have now upset Turkey’s pubic opinion, as such a statement would appear to indicate that Tayyip Erdoğan is already acting as if he were “Turkey’s Sultan.” The Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş came to his boss’ aid, declaring that “Mr. President expressed his personal opinion on the Constitutional Court’s decision.” But rather than calming the waters, these conciliatory words only led to even stronger outbursts, this time voiced by one of the Prez’s key advisors, a man called Mustafa Akış, who tweeted that “[t]he fact that our president criticized the Constitutional Court decision is not ‘putting up a personal position’ but a statement in the capacity of ‘the head of the state and government’.” The advisor thereby all but reinforced the impression that Tayyip Erdoğan is now already in the habit of acting as “Turkey’s Sultan,” even before the necessary change in Turkey’s Constitution. In contrast, Erdoğan has remained silent in view of the recent acquittal of Salih Mirzabeyoğlu, the leader of Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front (İBDA-C). Following his initial pardon in 2014, Tayyip Erdoğan even met with the Islamist leader. At the time he was arguably also acting “in the capacity of ‘the head of the state and government’.” Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian tendencies and his propensity to micro-manage Turkey’s affairs have been the subject of many complaints in the past. This has led to many people in Turkey voicing their displeasure in public, which in turn has led to the opening of about 2,000 legal cases in the past 18 months: “Mocking the president carries a maximum of four years in jail with schoolchildren and journalists amongst those arrested.”

On the other hand, it is a plain fact that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan remains incredibly popular amongst the wider population of Turkey. The ordinary man and woman in the street love the figure of the President. These voters have made Erdoğan what he is today, a politician at the height of his power and influence poised to become Turkey’s strongman, Turkey’s authoritarian leader who will lead the country further down the post-Kemalist path to its final destination. The dynamic duo of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu has painstakingly prepared the way, and now the former is on the brink of instituting a systemic change that is meant to lead to a succession of strongmen in Turkey’s future — strongmen overseeing an authoritarian sultanate of kitsch that has already taken the place of the Kemalist Republic of yesteryear.

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, , especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”