Turkey
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/06/09/Tens-of-thousands-defy-turkey-pm-with-fresh-protests-.html
Tens of thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of Turkish cities
on Saturday, challenging Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s call to
end their civil uprising with a chorus of angry chants and a shower of
red flares.
The government said the protests were “under
control” even as the largest crowds yet packed every inch of Istanbul’s
Taksim Square, the epicenter of nine days of nationwide unrest.
As the sun set over Taksim, which has seen no police presence since
officers pulled out of the site last Saturday, fans from rival football
teams Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Galatasaray united in the square. They
set off red flares to loud cheers from the crowd.
“I have never experienced this friendship, this solidarity among Turks before,” said Fenerbahce supporter Rustu Ozmen.
“We have to keep coming, we can’t give up because Erdogan hasn’t quite yet,” the 29-year-old lawyer added.
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Ankara
‘Islam, politics, economics — choose two’ is a great line, said by one of my Turkish students, and it would make a good exam question. Tayyip (the name means ‘very clean’ in Arabic — cf. ritual washing) Erdogan (meaning ‘strong hawk’, a Turkish nationalist reference) came to power in 2002 with a very good press. This was to be what the world wanted — a Muslim version of German or Italian Christian Democracy — and for years he gave it that. The rival parties destroyed themselves in silly bickering and corruption, and Erdogan’s party was very successful, with reforms in health and housing that improved the lives of ordinary Turks no end. The party’s representatives were often approachable and took a joke; Zaman, the intellectual Islamic newspaper, is well edited and has columnists with varied opinions. The currency was stabilised — no more of these million notes that made foreigners titter and Turks cringe — and exports boomed. Foreign money got interested, and state property was sold off to, on the whole, general satisfaction (the old Turkey was quite socialist and even now has a five-year plan, though no one notices it). All, in other words, not unlike Christian Democrat Italy in the days when it just went on and on, to the rage of communists, who took a third of the Italian vote but who had no prospect of power beyond the localities.
This is where Erdogan departs from the Italian stage. Instead of recognising differences, and allowing dissenters to support who they choose, an Islamic absolutism has taken hold. The details are grotesque.
There are three first-rate international universities in Turkey, and they have faculty clubs where wine is drunk. A decree came out that alcohol must not be sold in universities. The faculty club is now a nuclear winter. You have to apologise to foreigners, then take them by taxi to a hotel; the academic staff have lost a friendly place and the waiters are out of a job. Other nonsensical restrictions were rushed through parliament in a vote taken at 7 a.m. with half of the government’s own supporters absent: a little cloud to be placed over wine glasses on TV and film; warnings à la cigarette packets placed on bottles of wine (at the making of which the Turks have become proficient); administrative chicanery to stop drinking even in places popular with tourists. Prime Minister Erdogan defended it all with reference to restrictions elsewhere, but everyone knows that Turkey does not have a Finnish (or English) drink problem to justify such things. Drink-driving accounts for about 1 per cent of traffic accidents, far less than speeding, let alone the fasting month of Ramadan, when drivers with low blood-sugar swerve around the road.
But the government has dug its heels in, and the silly puritanism goes on and on: injunctions in the Tube stations to ‘behave morally’, and internet censorship (if I search for Daily Mail in my internet café the word ‘forbidden’ comes up, because someone mistakes ‘Mail’ for ‘male’). There are plans for a gigantic concrete mosque on the last remaining green hill on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. It will be a universally visible eyesore, probably intended as Erdogan’s monument, rivalling the Ankara one to Turkey’s founder, Kemal Atatürk. And yet another nice earner for the construction companies who form this government’s brigade of guards.
‘I suppose I just have to accept that you’re not Daddy’s little girl any more.’
It was the proposal to put a shopping mall — Istanbul’s 93rd — over that small central park that ignited the present protests. The government overreacted absurdly, showering tear gas on to side streets and beating up harmless do-gooders. But all this concrete reflects something more: the Arab presence. Arabs have replaced Israelis in the tourist market, partly because Mr Erdogan has been very popular for adopting the Palestinian cause.
Arab money is behind the shopping malls and is underpinning the Turkish current-account deficit. The Saudis and Qatar seem to be mainly involved, and now they buy up land in Yalova, over the water from Istanbul, as well. This has delighted the foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who takes a romantic view of the Ottoman empire, and the linking of Albania to Georgia and Syria, and the thinking is not without logic and merit, but the Turkish hand has been overplayed.
Erdogan has abandoned traditional co-operation with Israel, and enjoyed being lionised by Arabs. But that policy has come badly unstuck over Syria. The Assad government has not fallen, and its spokesman has been rubbing his hands at Erdogan’s discomfort: he recently recommended Erdogan take up exile in Doha, ‘with Ali Baba and the 40 shopping malls’. Meanwhile, Turkey has some 400,000 Syrian refugees, who are far from popular — loathed, in many places.
Interviewed last Saturday, Erdogan obviously had learned nothing from his discomfiture. He began to lecture again (social media is a terrible evil, anyone who has a beer is an alcoholic etc) and said that the troubles were the work of foreign agents. He blames the print media too and has tried to control it by imprisoning journalists — 800 of them — on trumped-up charges, and by threatening their owners with punitive taxes (a tactic also tried on the most intrepid of the foreign journalists, Boris Kalnoky of Die Welt).
To Kalnoky we owe a curious fact. The present crisis in Turkey really began a month ago, when the main square of a town called Reyhanli, on the Syrian border, was badly bombed — 50 killed. No one took responsibility. The Turkish government at once blamed the Syrian one, and arrested some dozen people without obvious evidence. It then laid down a ban on reporting, and to this day what happened is not clear. It is not obviously in the Syrian government’s interest to provoke further trouble with Turkey; on the other hand, it is indeed in the rebels’ interest, since they are now losing. As it happens, a left-wing organisation called Redhack was able to read the Turkish police records, and found that Turkish intelligence knew in advance of the bomb plot and warned the local authorities, to no effect. Everyone assumes that the Erdogan government banned news reports because it wanted to conceal this. Its involvement in the Syrian civil war is very widely condemned — I have not met a single defender of it — and it has obviously gone off the tracks. What is very odd about the present demonstrations in central Istanbul is that the names of the 50 dead at Reyhanli were pinned to separate trees in the little park where the demonstrations started. Erdogan gets the blame for that bombing because of his failed Syria policy.
What next? Erdogan has eclipsed his own party, and the knives are out, no doubt discreetly encouraged by the Americans. He has lost the support of the newspaperZaman, which cancelled its contract with the government news agency because of expense and inefficiency. The President, his one-time associate Abdullah Gül, is obviously uneasy; the hot Arab money is moving out. Erdogan must have thought until quite recently that everything was going his way. But it may be Assad who will have the last laugh.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 8 June 2013
Tags: Arabs, Islamism, Istanbul protests, Syria, Turkey
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http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/What-will-happen-in-Turkey-315746
The citizens of Turkey are not willing to sit by quietly while Erdogan and
the AKP’s religious extremism take over their country. The citizens of Turkey are not willing to sit by quietly while Erdogan and
the AKP’s religious extremism take over their country.
the AKP’s religious extremism take over their country. The citizens of Turkey are not willing to sit by quietly while Erdogan and
the AKP’s religious extremism take over their country.
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Turkish PM: “No Power but Allah can Stop Turkey’s Rise”
So far Turkey’s Islamist PM Erdogan is following the typical Middle Eastern dictator playbook in response to protests.
1. Try to violently crush the protests
2. Deliver bizarre rants on television blaming social media and foreign disruptive forces
3. Claim Allah is your homie
Erdogan has now reached Stage 3. Stage 4 is using chemical weapons, which arguably Erdogan is also doing.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/turkish-pm-no-power-but-allah-can-stop-turkeys-rise/
1. Try to violently crush the protests
2. Deliver bizarre rants on television blaming social media and foreign disruptive forces
3. Claim Allah is your homie
Erdogan has now reached Stage 3. Stage 4 is using chemical weapons, which arguably Erdogan is also doing.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/turkish-pm-no-power-but-allah-can-stop-turkeys-rise/
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/05/turkey_s_secular_awakening
The protests across Istanbul aren’t about Islamism, the elite,
or even religion writ large -- they're a call for a real liberal democracy.
The protests that have been convulsing the center of
Istanbul and other Turkish cities over the last several days are more than the
comeuppance of its intolerably high-handed prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Both the diversity of the protesters and the nature of their
grievances show that Turkey has become a much more liberal society over the
decade the ruling AK Party (AKP) has been in power. Turkey has a democracy -- now
protestors are demanding a liberal democracy.
Turkey has witnessed big demonstrations before, of course --
but they've always been staged by a single group, defined by either ethnicity
or ideology. This is the first time that people from all walks of life have
joined forces to constrain the power of their country's leaders.
The changes occurring in Turkey are evident in its new,
up-and-coming middle class, whose members have formed the core of the protest
movement. A friend of mine -- let's call him Mehmet -- works near Istanbul's
Taksim Square, the center of the demonstrations. Mehmet had always been a
pretty typical yuppie, more interested in wine-tasting than politics. But since
the demonstrations erupted, he has been consumed by them and vows to carry on
until Erdogan backs down. Another friend, who teaches at a private college in
the coastal city of Izmir, says his best students, all from conservative,
prosperous families, were exhausted from their nightly clashes with police. He
tells me that taxi drivers and shopkeepers who hail from the Black Sea, like
Erdogan's family, have told him they voted for the AKP but have been turned
into the party's enemies by the brutality of the police and the prime
minister's contemptuous rhetoric.
The protests across Istanbul aren’t about Islamism, the elite,
or even religion writ large -- they're a call for a real liberal democracy.
The protests that have been convulsing the center of
Istanbul and other Turkish cities over the last several days are more than the
comeuppance of its intolerably high-handed prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Both the diversity of the protesters and the nature of their
grievances show that Turkey has become a much more liberal society over the
decade the ruling AK Party (AKP) has been in power. Turkey has a democracy -- now
protestors are demanding a liberal democracy.
Turkey has witnessed big demonstrations before, of course --
but they've always been staged by a single group, defined by either ethnicity
or ideology. This is the first time that people from all walks of life have
joined forces to constrain the power of their country's leaders.
The changes occurring in Turkey are evident in its new,
up-and-coming middle class, whose members have formed the core of the protest
movement. A friend of mine -- let's call him Mehmet -- works near Istanbul's
Taksim Square, the center of the demonstrations. Mehmet had always been a
pretty typical yuppie, more interested in wine-tasting than politics. But since
the demonstrations erupted, he has been consumed by them and vows to carry on
until Erdogan backs down. Another friend, who teaches at a private college in
the coastal city of Izmir, says his best students, all from conservative,
prosperous families, were exhausted from their nightly clashes with police. He
tells me that taxi drivers and shopkeepers who hail from the Black Sea, like
Erdogan's family, have told him they voted for the AKP but have been turned
into the party's enemies by the brutality of the police and the prime
minister's contemptuous rhetoric.
=======================================
Turkey's Putin' Faces His Toughest Challenge Yet
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Turkey's protests and Erdogan's brutal crackdown: How long can defiant Prime Minister last?
=======================================
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21579005-protests-against-recep-tayyip-erdogan-and-his-ham-fisted-response-have-shaken-his-rule-and
The new young Turks
Protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his ham-fisted
response, have shaken his rule and his country
But, contrary to Mr Erdogan’s efforts to portray the protesters
as thugs and extremists, they cut across ideological, religious and class
lines. Many are strikingly young; but there are plenty of older Turks, many
secular-minded, some overtly pious. There are gays, Armenians, anarchists and
atheists. There are also members of Turkey’s long-ostracised Alevi minority,
who practise a liberal form of Islam and complain of state discrimination in
favour of the Sunni majority. Each group added its grievances to the litany of
complaints.
What unites them is a belief that Mr Erdogan is increasingly
autocratic, and blindly determined to impose his views and social conservatism
on the country. The secularists point to a raft of restrictions on the sale of
alcohol, liberals to the number of journalists in jail, more than in any other
country. Thousands of activists of varying stripes (mainly Kurds), convicted
under Turkey’s vaguely worded anti-terror laws, are also behind bars. “This is
not about secularists versus Islamists, it’s about pluralism versus
authoritarianism,” commented one foreign diplomat.
Mr Erdogan’s peevish reaction to the tumult vindicated his
critics. He accepted that the use of tear gas had been overdone, and told
police to withdraw from Taksim Square. This let thousands gather peacefully a
day later. But as the protests gained momentum across the country he poured oil
on the flames. The national spy agency would be investigating the mischief, he
vowed. He lashed out at social media, especially Twitter. These, he said, were
“the greatest scourge to befall society” (in the city of Izmir, on the
Mediterranean coast, 29 people have been arrested on the grounds that their
tweets incited violence).
The new young Turks
Protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his ham-fisted
response, have shaken his rule and his country
But, contrary to Mr Erdogan’s efforts to portray the protesters
as thugs and extremists, they cut across ideological, religious and class
lines. Many are strikingly young; but there are plenty of older Turks, many
secular-minded, some overtly pious. There are gays, Armenians, anarchists and
atheists. There are also members of Turkey’s long-ostracised Alevi minority,
who practise a liberal form of Islam and complain of state discrimination in
favour of the Sunni majority. Each group added its grievances to the litany of
complaints.
What unites them is a belief that Mr Erdogan is increasingly
autocratic, and blindly determined to impose his views and social conservatism
on the country. The secularists point to a raft of restrictions on the sale of
alcohol, liberals to the number of journalists in jail, more than in any other
country. Thousands of activists of varying stripes (mainly Kurds), convicted
under Turkey’s vaguely worded anti-terror laws, are also behind bars. “This is
not about secularists versus Islamists, it’s about pluralism versus
authoritarianism,” commented one foreign diplomat.
Mr Erdogan’s peevish reaction to the tumult vindicated his
critics. He accepted that the use of tear gas had been overdone, and told
police to withdraw from Taksim Square. This let thousands gather peacefully a
day later. But as the protests gained momentum across the country he poured oil
on the flames. The national spy agency would be investigating the mischief, he
vowed. He lashed out at social media, especially Twitter. These, he said, were
“the greatest scourge to befall society” (in the city of Izmir, on the
Mediterranean coast, 29 people have been arrested on the grounds that their
tweets incited violence).
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