Category Archives: Turkey

No Arab Spring, says US intelligence analyst

Posted on October 7, 2011 | Comments Off on No Arab Spring, says US intelligence analyst
Barçın Yinanç
ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News
Friday, October 7, 2011

The Arab Spring did not take place, according to a US-based intelligence analyst, who said there has been no regime change in the Middle East except Libya. ‘Not every bid of unrest is a revolution and every revolution is not democratic,’ says George Friedman, adding that Turkey is the leader in the region and old powers don’t like rising powers, and that though the US currently needs Turkey because it leads the region, in the long run Turkey will become more powerful and relations will sour

The Arab Spring did not happen, according to George Friedman, the head of global intelligence firm STRATFOR Institute, because there has been no regime change in the Middle East. Turkey is the leader of the Islamic world but it is still not a mature power, said the author of “The Next 100 years,” in which he predicted that Turkey will rise to be a great power. “Turkey is still very cautious and it is testing its strength,” he told the Daily News during a recent interview in Istanbul.

Q: You recently said Turkey was a power but not a mature one. How so?

A: A mature power has institutions for managing international systems. The U.S., at the outset of World War II, did not have intelligence service [and] very few trained diplomats. Turkey is more advanced than that, but it does not have a diplomatic corps that is matched to Turkey’s responsibilities in the world. It does not have Portuguese speakers, experts on Mexico; it takes a while to develop this. It takes a while to develop intelligence services. The foreign minister said Turkey has opened 21 embassies in Africa, but who mans them? Who are the Africa experts?

Q: You are warning Turkey that it is not rewarding to be a big power.

A: America is the major power. We are not loved, we are resented. It is the fate of countries that take leading roles. They will disappoint some countries, anger other countries. Turkey is not yet experienced with the sense of injustice of trying to do good but being claimed to have done badly.

Q: Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu would have objected to the comparison with the U.S. and said Turkey was out there with the best of intentions. Why shouldn’t we be liked?

A: You will be liked. But it is easy to be liked when Turkey refrains from acting. But when Turkey has to act it does not act because it decides (when) to be an aggressive power. It will be facing a crisis along its southern border, then the crisis will spill over to Turkey; that is just an example.

Q: In the next 100 years, will the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) “zero problem” policy be sustained?

A: It is a transitionary moment. I have always said that Turkey will be a great power; I did not say Turkey is already a great power. AKP has two policies: One is to be a major power in the Islamic world and simultaneously to avoid engagement. This is precisely the foreign policy it should have now. But 10 to 20 years from now, it will not be able to maintain that. Because as you send out your businessmen, you would have to have political influence to guarantee their security, their interests, etc. Soldiers are one way to interfere in a country; businessman can interfere, too. So the process will draw you into engagement. There will be a moment where Turkey’s interests will seriously diverge from those of another country and that will be the time Turkey will have to decide to act or suffer the harm. It will not happen because Turks decide to be aggressive; it will happen because they will be pursuing their interests. And that will lead to criticism; don’t forget that when you act, you make mistakes.

Q: Everyone is criticizing Turkey now for its problems.

A: Problems are not determined by whether Turkey wants to have them; it has to do with the dynamics of the region. These problems arise not because Turkey is creating them. Turkey has a policy of not creating problems.

Q: Looking at your writings, it seems that you are not changing your projections due to Arab Spring.

A: No, because the Arab spring did not happen. No regime fell except Libya and that’s because of NATO. In Egypt, one general is replaced by four generals. In Syria, Bashar al–Assad is still in power. There is tremendous excitement but there is very little action, very little outcome. Not every bit of unrest is a revolution. Every revolution does not succeed. Every revolution is not democratic, and the democratic ones can elect (rulers like) Ayatollah Khomeini. There is talk about massive democratic uprising; first of all it was not massive in Egypt – most of the country was not affected. Second, those who rose up did not have a common idea of what should come next. Third, they did not overthrow the regime. They got rid of Mubarak and that was what the army wanted, too.

Q: You have previously claimed that Turkey should leave its EU bid and lead the Islamic world. You maintain that autocratic regimes will continue in the region but Turkey has opted for democratic change.

A: Unless Turkey wishes to invade countries and impose regimes on it, it will work with the regimes that are there. Turkey would have to be insane to join the EU. It is the leader of the Islamic world. It has the largest Muslim economy, it has by far the largest military force, and its economy is so dynamic that it is creating a vortex in the region. The best thing that happened to Turkey is the fact it was not admitted to the EU.

Q: How does Turkey’s present situation fall into the realities of the Arab Spring and the call by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for secularism, for instance?

A: It told us more about Erdoğan and the AKP than the effect it made in North Africa. That he choose to make that statement was important. But there is a huge gap between voicing an opinion and taking an action and responsibility. Turkey is in a position of transitioning from the time when it was a weak power, and all it had was its opinion to offer to a time when its opinion matters because it is followed by the expectation to act.

Q: You also argue that old powers don’t like rising powers. Can we assume therefore that the U.S. doesn’t like Turkey?

A: In the long run there will be bad feelings. But in the short run, the U.S. needs Turkey as a stabilizing force in the Middle East. It no longer wants to play a role for the time being. Turkey also wants stability in the region but does not have the power yet to create that stability, it will reach out to the U.S and we will redefine the relations. But down the road as Turkey becomes more powerful, the U.S. will become more frightened and the relationship will change again.

Q: On strained relations between Israel and Turkey, is it a prelude Turkish-U.S. contention?

A: With Turkey taking on its current position, its relationship with Israel has become a liability. The level of visibility cuts against other interests. But lately we’ve seen signs that Turkey is having closer relations with the U.S. Israel is close to the U.S. therefore Turkish-Israeli relations will be more constrained.

Q: You don’t foresee a conflict between Turkey and Israel?

A: I don’t think it is possible. Turkey does not have the military to project force against Israel. It does not want to be in Syria, let alone engage Israel. And Israel does not want to engage Turkey. You are not in a situation of divorce or hostility. You are in a situation which certain relationships continue, but in which public diplomacy shifts to where Turkey can take advantage of other relationships.

Q: Is Turkey punching above its weight?

A: This government is careful not to do that. One of the reasons it doesn’t engage is because it manages its strength. Turkey is testing its strength. You see that in the case of its policy toward Libya and Syria.

Who is George Friedman?

Dr. George Friedman is the founder and chief executive officer of Stratfor, a global intelligence and forecasting company. He is the author of several books, including New York Times bestsellers, such as “The Next Decade” and “The Next 100 Years,” in which he predicts that Turkey will be a great power; as such, he has advised global players to learn Turkish.

A very popular keynote speaker, Friedman is in high demand at conferences and industry-specific events for private organizations and government agencies. He was recently in Istanbul to moderate the energy simulation of Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD) that was also attended by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.

“We have taught the same courses,” he said about Davutoğlu, adding that the latter was one of the most interesting of the many foreign ministers that he has met.

Friedman lives in Austin, Texas.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=no-arab-spring-says-us-intelligence-analyst-2011-10-07

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Posted in Egypt, Libya, Middle East Geopolitics, Syria, Turkey

Role model Turkey, secular and democratic?

Posted on October 7, 2011 | Comments Off on Role model Turkey, secular and democratic?

Thursday, October 6, 2011
YUSUF KANLI

Turkey is a democratic country. Over the past almost 90 years we could not manage to define what we understand from “secularism,” but Turkey is a country with an overwhelming Muslim population and “secular” and “democratic” governance. Turkey is the only island of “secular democracy” in the Muslim world.

With “secularism” the Turkish state, at least so far, understands controlling the practice of Islam through a state agency. That Religious Affairs Directorate or “Diyanet,” has a budget and organization bigger than six combined ministries. After all the great openings of the current Islamist government Diyanet “improved a lot,” it is reported that it will soon be elevated considerably in the state protocol as well, and has become the fundamental tool in persuading the people of this land to convert to Sunni-Hanefi, a certain sect of Sunni Islam. While Sunni-Hanefi believers are given a “more equal” status than the rest of Muslim folk, particularly of the Alevis, the minute non-Muslim sections of the society expect “equal treatment” from the state, believing that “secularism requires the state to remain at equal distance from all religions.”

For the “democracy” assumption, there are of course some who still believe in the “rule by people for the people” principle. However, they are in minority. The current prime minister, for example, believed for some time, nowadays he claimed to have changed that perception, that democracy is a wagon to be traveled on and left behind on reaching the final destination [Islamic governance]. Some other politicians considered it a tool to come to power, fill the coffers of her/his political clan at all costs to the state and resign to Bosporus mansions. Some believed it was not just a word but a web of norms, values and of course rights. In the 1970s and 1980s they were imprisoned and they long have abandoned those goals and have become rich businesspeople. There are some idealists, or lunatics perhaps, who still hope that this country will eventually become a democracy.

Democracy, of course, cannot be achieved in the absence of either the principle of equality or the supremacy of law. It appears as a farce indeed to talk about a democratic country that might be a model for its neighborhood if in that there are “more equals” than others or where a prime minister can boast of having “my justice” or “my judges, my prosecutors” like “my policemen, my teachers, my civil servants” or whatsoever and a prison was converted into a gigantic concentration camp to isolate the “not so welcome critics,” potential adversaries, patriots, Kemalists and of course the retired soldiers (those active officers arrested are at a military prison) in small cells.

Turkey is a sovereign country. At least, many people, including the writer of this article, assume it as such. Yet, this sovereign country is now at a jaw-jaw stage, thank God not at a war-war affair, with a small country of the region over its arrogance, spoiled behavior and indeed barbarism over members of another nation that it has been occupying its land. The tall, bold and bald ever-angry prime minister aspiring to be an absolute ruler in this model “democracy” for the Muslim nations, has been very angry with that small neighbor. He has been rightly demanding it apologize and agree to pay compensation for an act of piracy and murder of nine Turkish citizens in international waters on the Mediterranean. Yet, when the Americans wanted to deploy a radar system – that the angry tall man originally opposed – to fend of possible Iranian missiles aimed at that small arrogant state, this country has become the host of the system protecting that arrogant neighbor. Well, this might be “real politik” but it stinks.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=role-model-turkey-2011-10-06

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Posted in Middle East Geopolitics, Turkey, Turkey-Israel

Arab Spring breeze reaching to Islamists

Posted on October 3, 2011 | Comments Off on Arab Spring breeze reaching to Islamists
ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News
Monday, October 3, 2011

Islamic movements are softening their tone to avoid scaring off potential voters, with many pointing to Turkey and PM Erdoğan’s ‘neo-

Emerging into the open following the overthrow of authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world, Islamic movements are now wrestling with the idea of how to apply Islamic precepts to societies that are demanding democracy as one of the fruits of the Arab Spring.

Many such movements, such as the Tunisian Islamist Ennahda Party, are preaching a moderate line in an effort to avoid scaring off parts of society that are wary of parties with Muslim roots.

“We are not cut off from our environment … All the values of democracy and modernity are respected by Ennahda. We are a party that can find a balance between modernity and Islam,” Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda Party, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Western powers and governments in other Arab states are watching Tunisia’s election closely, worried that democratically elected Islamists might impose strict Islamic law and turn their back on Western allies. But Ghannouchi, who returned to Tunisia from exile in Britain after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall, said Western countries and Tunisian liberals had nothing to fear from a victory for his Ennahda party.

Two issues in particular, women’s equality and liberal moral attitudes, are seen by many Tunisians as a litmus test of how tolerant Ennahda will be if it gains power.

Ghannouchi’s remarks offering a more mild form of Islam came on the same day that the former leader of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood said he wanted a “democratic” Syria, not an Islamic state to replace the regime of embattled President Bashar al-Assad, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We support the establishment of a modern, civil, democratic state,” Ali al-Bayanouni told a conference organized by the Brookings Doha center in the Qatari capital.

Before the Arab Spring hit countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, their strongman leaders defended themselves for years as the bulwark preventing their countries from sliding into Islamist hands – an approach which helped them secure baking from Washington and other Western powers wary that their countries could turn into another Iran.

Western powers, however, soon began to support the uprisings and the emergence of a new Arab world. The topic is now dominating talk in Western capitals so much that the European Council’s Parliamentarian Assembly put the Arab Spring at the top of its agenda Monday.

NATO, too, is planning to devote greater attention to the subject, announcing a special summit on the spring on May 21-22 in Chicago.

Indeed, amid growing indications that some in the West are ready to work with the Islamists, one U.S. governmental source said Washington had had limited but direct talks with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was open to working with them.

Turkey an inspiration

Many in the region are pointing toward Turkey as a model for the Islamist parties in the region. Last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is seen as a trailblazer by many Islamists in the region, staged a tour of the three North African Arab Spring states. Striking a moderate chord, Erdoğan emphasized the concept of “neo-laicism,” noting that while individuals could be religious, states should remain secular.

The comments were controversial among some older members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, but his comments were well-received elsewhere by a new generation of pious Muslims who are eager to pursue religious-based politics within a democratic, tolerant and secularist framework.

Ultimately, Islamist leaders in the region are keen to stress the varieties of Islam that could be used as a political model.

“If the Islamic spectrum goes from [assassinated al-Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden to Erdoğan, which of them is Islam?” Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic. “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?”

In the end, even the hard-line Saudi model appears to be bending under the weight of the Arab Spring. Last week, King Abdullah decreed that women would be able to participate for the first time in the next local elections in 2015, a measure likely aimed at heading off Arab dissent in the kingdom. The same week he has also overturned a court ruling sentencing a Saudi woman to be lashed 10 times for defying the kingdom’s ban on female drivers.

© 2011 Hurriyet Daily News
URL: www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=arab-spring-breeze-reaching-to-islamists-2011-10-03

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Posted in Egypt, Religion, Syria, Turkey

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to Allah

Posted on September 30, 2011 | Comments Off on Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to Allah
Friday, September 30, 2011The Libyan revolution, which put an end to Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year-long tyranny after a chaotic civil war, has an interesting motto: “There is no god but Allah, and Gadhafi is his enemy!” This is quite ironic, though, because the now-dethroned Libyan colonel had also been referring to God to justify his dictatorial rule. A mantra of his regime bluntly read: “Allah, Moammar, Libya: that’s all we need!”

The image of Allah, in other words, seems to have shifted in the minds of many Libyans from a pillar of authoritarian rule to a beacon of liberty.

A similar transformation seems to be unfolding in Syria as well, which used to have its own version of the authoritarian Arab trinity: “Allah, Syria, Bashar – that’s all we need!” But the peaceful Syrian protestors who have been raising their voice against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and co., despite all the killing and torture they face, are now using a different motto: “Allah, Syria, Freedom: that’s all we need!”

It is perfectly understandable that such religious themes within the Arab Spring are confusing, if not worrying, to Islamo-skeptic Westerners who assume that all political manifestations of Islam will lead to tyranny. However, the history of Muslim civilization shows that Islam has been understood in many different ways, and while it sometimes has been used to support tyrants, it more often than not challenged them.

In fact, one of the very early theological splits in Islam was precisely on this issue. The successive caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750 AD) promoted a theory of divine predestination, which implied that the corrupt Umayyad rule was predestined, and thus willed by God. The opposing theologians, who defended humans’ freewill, argued that rulers were responsible to both God and the people.

After a few centuries of debate, the Sunni view on this matter settled on a middle position, which valued strong rulers, but also expected them to be just and lawful. In the Ottoman Empire, the ritualistic expression of this idea was a popular slogan that common people would say to the sultans after Friday prayers: “Don’t be arrogant my sultan, God is greater than thou!”

In the modern age, however, traditional Islamic law, whose functions included constraining arbitrary power, failed to update itself, and was gradually rendered ineffective via “modernization.” As Harvard law professor Noah Feldman demonstrates in his book, “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State,” this process produced not the liberal democracy of the West, but various secular (and sometimes fiercely secularist) autocrats – such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran, or Gamal Abdal Nasser in Egypt.

Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that aspires for an “Islamic state,” was more of a reaction to this modern crisis, rather than a direct continuation of the Islamic tradition. It was also based on an export of the worst ideas of the West. One of the founders of the Islamist ideology, Pakistani thinker Sayyid Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, had openly acknowledged that his “Islamic state” would “bear a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.”

Here is the key question for today: If Mawdudi and his followers synthesized Islam with totalitarianism, can others synthesize it with liberal democracy?

The answer does not look as grim as some suspect. It’s not just the symbolic combination of “Allah” and “freedom” in the minds of the Arab masses, but the discussions among Muslim parties in Egypt and elsewhere are also raising hopes for a liberal future.

To be sure, the transformation of the Muslim mind from authoritarianism to liberalism would be a very challenging process. But was the political evolution of Christianity any easier? It certainly took a lot of effort to move from the Spanish Inquisition and the “divine right of kings” to the liberating motto of the U.S. founder Benjamin Franklin: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Islam is just no less capable of going the same distance.

© 2011 Hurriyet Daily News
URL: www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=rebellion-to-tyrants-is-obedience-to-allah-2011-09-30

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Posted in Religion, Turkey

Turkey’s Elephant in the Room: Religious Freedom.

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Turkey’s Elephant in the Room: Religious Freedom.

Osman Orsal/Reuters –

With his triumphant tour of the countries of the Arab Spring this month, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has managed to set up Turkey on the international stage as a role model for a secular democracy in a Muslim .The only trouble is that he has yet to make that happen for Turkey.

The relationship between religion and the state, ever the sore spot of Turkish identity, is one of the most explosive issues of the debate on the new constitution that Mr. Erdogan has pledged to give the country in the new legislative term that opens Saturday.

That debate will have to deal with the elephant in the room: the total control that the state exerts over Islam through its Religious Affairs Department, and the lack of a legal status for all other religions in a predominantly Sunni Muslim society.

“Turkey may look like a secular state on paper, but in terms of international law it is actually a Sunni Islamic state,” Izzettin Dogan, a leader of the country’s Alevi minority, charged at a joint press conference with leaders of several other minority faiths last week in Istanbul.

Mr. Dogan is honorary president of the Federation of Alevi Foundations, which represents many of what it claims are up to 30 million adherents of the Alevi faith, an Anatolian religion close to Sufi Islam but separate and distinct in its beliefs and practices.

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

A bureaucratic juggernaut with its own news service and a dedicated trade union, the Religious Affairs Department employs more than 106,000 civil servants, according to its latest annual report, including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzins, all of them trained, hired and fired by the state.

At the institution’s ministry-size headquarters in Ankara, state-employed astronomers calculate prayer times around the world, while state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known as fatwas.

The department writes the sermons for Friday Prayer in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks for the religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books and periodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues an iPhone app featuring Koranic verses and a prayertime alarm. The department has a monopoly on Koran courses in the country, and it organizes the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, right down to the vaccination of pilgrims.

So centralized is the department’s control that its new president, Mehmet Gormez, is considered innovative for announcing his intention to train preachers to deliver sermons in person, instead of having them piped into the mosque from the department over a public-address system.

“In Turkey, Islam does not determine politics, but politics determine Islam,” Gunter Seufert, a sociologist, concluded in a 2004 study of the department entitled “State and Islam in Turkey.”

“Run by a state agency, religion serves the nation state for the purpose of unifying the nation and Westernizing its Muslims,” he added.

With historical roots in the Ottoman Empire, where state and Islam were linked in the union of sultanate and caliphate, the Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the Turkish Republic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.

Charged by law with managing Islam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since the country’s first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relic of the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering national unity.

Ministering to Sunni Islam of the Halafi school, the department does not recognize non-Sunni communities like the Alevis or Caferis as distinct religious faiths, subsuming them under the common label of “Muslim,” the basis for the depiction of Turkey as a religiously homogenous country that describes its population as “99 percent Muslim.”

While the distribution of believers among the faiths encompassed by that term is contested, a 2007 survey by the Konda institute, a public opinion research company in Turkey, found that 82 percent of Turks describe themselves as Hanafi Sunni Muslims.

The new constitution, Mr. Dogan of the Alevi federation demanded, must do away with their privileged status. “The state must be impartial and treat all religious communities equally and maintain equal distance to all of them,” he said. “These definitions must be written into the new constitution verbatim.”

Mr. Dogan was speaking at the presentation of a report on the “Shared Problems and Demands of Turkey’s Religious Communities,” prepared by Ozge Genc and Ayhan Kaya, political scientists at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The report is based on research in the Apostolic, Catholic and Protestant Armenian communities, the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches as well as the Jewish community and Bahai, Yezidi, Shiite, Alevi, Mevlevi, Caferi and other groups.

As the report underlines, these communities all suffer from lack of legal status in Turkey, which renders it difficult for them to conduct even the most basic affairs and forces them into a shadowy existence at the mercy of political fashions and whims.

The 1,700-year-old Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, for example, has come to the brink of extinction since its seminary in Istanbul was closed down 40 years ago, drying up its source of clergymen. The Patriarchate hopes that the new constitution will “create the conditions for a reopening of the seminary,” its spokesman, Pater Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, said by e-mail this week.

This will require a redefinition of the concept of secularism in Turkey, or simply a definition of the term in the Turkish constitution, as Mustafa Akyol, author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” points out.

“The present constitution states that Turkey is laic, secular, but does not define the term,” Mr. Akyol said by telephone this week. The interpretation has been left up to the constitutional court, he said, which has traditionally defined secularism as the complete absence of religion from the public sphere, as seen in its ban on head scarves for university students. It was that ban, among other things, that triggered the current secularism debate in Islamist circles, Mr. Akyol said.

“They began to see nuances in Western secularism. They saw that religious freedoms not available to them in Turkey, like the head scarf or the freedom to join Muslim orders, were available in America and many European countries, excepting France,” he said. “They began to criticize the self-styled Turkish secularism, and to call for a redefinition of secularism.”

While the debate still rages in Turkish society, “I think Erdogan made it clear that he is sincere” in his call for secularism, Mr. Akyol said. “That is how we would like to have it defined in the new constitution,” he added, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s remark that all religions should be equal.

But the Religious Affairs Department may not be so easy to sideline. While most of the proposals for the constitution prepared by nongovernmental organizations for the debate agree that the department cannot continue in its present form, none suggests abolishing it.

Even Tesev, an independent research institute in Istanbul, argues that “dissolving the Religious Affairs Department is not considered possible under present conditions.” It suggests that other religious groups should be given equal status and privileges instead.

Other constitutional proposals suggest that the department’s reach should be extended to include other faiths, an idea unlikely to sit well with all communities.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople, while declining to comment on the proposal, has strenuously resisted previous proposals to incorporate its seminary into the theological faculty of a state university, arguing that it cannot relinquish control over its training.

While the Religious Affairs Department may face change, it is unlikely to be abolished, Mr. Akyol said. “Society is so used to it, so many people work for it,” he said. “I don’t expect it to change with the new constitution.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/europe/turkeys-elephant-in-the-room-religious-freedom.html?pagewanted=all

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Posted in Middle East Geopolitics, Religion, Turkey

‘Zero problems’ in Ankara is havoc for the neighbourhood

Posted on September 28, 2011 | Comments Off on ‘Zero problems’ in Ankara is havoc for the neighbourhood

By Michael Young –Sep 29, 2011–

Much hyperbole has been deployed in describing Turkey’s reorientation towards the Middle East. Partly, this has been the fault of the Turks themselves, who have sought to ride the wave of Ankara’s popularity in the region – primarily a result of its rift with Israel and vocal support for the Palestinian cause. But the reality is considerably more complicated, as Turkey is increasingly drawn into the treacherous byways of Arab and Iranian affairs.

In a much-discussed book he wrote before taking office, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, enunciated what he called the policy of “zero problems with neighbours”. This has shaped Ankara’s approach to the Middle East in past years. However, today the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan finds itself managing problems – open or more subtly stated – with virtually every country in its perimeter, especially those to the south and east.

This was predictable. For nearly a century Turkey has focused on Europe. Ankara’s renewed attention southwards poses a challenge to Arab states and Iran, which are little prepared to make room for what can come across as an overbearing Turkish government with a tendency to overplay its hand. Arab regimes have publicly embraced Mr Erdogan. But they have also set limits to Turkish actions involving them.

Take Mr Erdogan’s recent visit to Egypt. Although it was hailed as a success, Egypt regards Turkish involvement on the Palestinian front, particularly in the Gaza Strip, as an irritant. Cairo views itself as the interlocutor of choice with the Palestinians, and President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster has not changed that. Anything that strengthens Hamas could have damaging repercussions for Egyptian internal security. The military leadership in Cairo is also watching carefully how the mildly Islamist government in Ankara inspires elements of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which the generals mistrust.

Turkish spokesmen erred in announcing before the Egypt trip that Mr Erdogan might enter Gaza. Neither Egypt nor the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, relished such a prospect, and ultimately the Turkish prime minister backtracked. Here was a classic example of Mr Erdogan going too far. Mr Abbas opposed a move that would have legitimised Hamas at his expense. The military council in Cairo surely agreed, seeing no reason to hand Turkey a new wedge to insert itself politically on Egypt’s eastern border.

Mr Erdogan justifiably expressed outrage with Israel after its soldiers killed Turkish protesters trying to breach the Gaza blockade in May 2010. Israel’s government refused to apologise, leading Turkey recently to downgrade diplomatic ties. Early on, the Turkish prime minister caught the mood of exasperation with Israel for its intransigence toward the Palestinians, which he has used to his advantage to garner Arab approval.

However, once the indignation is used up, does Turkey really gain from having undermined the mediation role it once could play between Arabs and Israelis? Did Mr Erdogan need to go as far as he did? He has made an apology and the lifting of the blockade of Gaza conditions for the resumption of normal relations with Israel. The first demand is defensible, but is Gaza enough of a Turkish national priority to justify the prime minister’s second, tougher stipulation?

Mr Erdogan’s ability to exploit regional transformations has been neutralised by his outspokenness. A resumption of Arab-Israeli, even Palestinian-Israeli, negotiations is, admittedly, unlikely in the foreseeable future. However, Turkey could have seriously aspired to play a key role in a revived peace process. But today, Israeli ill-feeling against Mr Erdogan, the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to see their position undercut by the prime minister’s demagogical instincts, and international recognition that Turkey is now more a part of the problem than the solution, have effectively sidelined Ankara.

In Syria, Turkey has broken with President Bashar Al Assad’s regime. That was to be expected. But Syria is tricky for the Turks. If the country collapses into civil war, this might not only push Syria’s Kurds, who have no affection for Ankara, to seek autonomy. It might also drive Arab Alawites in Turkey’s Hatay province to assist their Syrian brethren.

At the same time, Mr Erdogan cannot afford to do nothing. The prime minister heads a Sunni Islamist party, a substantial part of whose appeal is that it can build bridges to Arab Islamists. To allow Mr Al Assad to pursue his slaughter of peaceful protesters, many of whom happen to be Sunnis, represents a humanitarian and religious affront to the values Mr Erdogan claims to espouse. More cynically, as the uprising in Syria takes on an overtly sectarian colouring, thanks principally to the brutality of Alawite-dominated security services and military units, Ankara does not want to be on the losing side.

That Mr Erdogan has turned against Mr Al Assad is to his credit. Yet Turkey’s worsening ties with Syria have also heightened tension with Damascus’s ally Iran – which lately has also opposed Turkey’s decision to host a Nato early-warning radar system. Iran and Turkey are vying for regional influence, so they are destined to clash many more times. Not surprisingly, this rivalry has affected Lebanon, where Turkey has invested in predominantly poor Sunni areas. Earlier this year Mr Davutoglu helped Qatar mediate in the Lebanese political crisis. Their efforts were thwarted by Hizbollah and Syria.

As Turkey gets caught up in the Middle East’s contradictions, it can no longer seriously portray itself as being above the fray, on friendly terms with all. Words are cheap, and when Mr Erdogan hears praise he should be wary. No one will give Ankara a free ride in a region that cheerfully grinds down the self-assured.

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Posted in Middle East Geopolitics, Turkey, Turkey-Syria

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