generalspeaking

An Emerging Reality

For much of the 20th Century Turkey represented as the link between the West and the countries of the Middle East. This was the Turkey that rejected its Ottoman Empire past and learned to embrace the visionary Kamal Ataturk's determination to bring his country into the orbit of enlightened progressive thought for its social and economic future. His desire was to draw Turkey away from the rigid confines of religion, to effectively separate religion from the state.

In the many years following his death the Turkish military took up his vigil, ensuring that Islam would not return as the defining ideological-religious force behind Turkey's future. A slow-rising tide of Islamism began its inexorable ebb into the Muslim world, with Islamic clerics, scholars and some political figures veering toward increasing the role of fundamentalist Islam as the primary force behind the state.

Saudi Arabia brought its Wahaabist Sunni salafist ideology to the fore, and began exporting it to the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. The Ayatollah Khomeini brought his fanatical Shia Islamism back to Iran. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood had long expressed its determination to bring traditional Islam back to the fore. And the rulers and tyrants of the Middle East nervously eyed the extreme Islamist tide.

In Turkey the last several decades were years when the new Islamist party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once outlawed like the Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's brand of Twelvers Islam, gained a foothold as a legitimate political party, and then advanced that foothold to a stranglehold, effectively managing to emasculate the power of the once-politically-dominant Turkish military. Accusing the military of planning a coup, he arrested their purported leaders.

And now Prime Minister Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is in the ascendancy. Turkey, long a member of NATO, with one of its largest standing armies, has been a trusted ally of the West. Its previous administrations had chosen to distance themselves and the country from their Arab and Muslim brethren, making a companionable pact with Israel, instead, as a trusted American ally.

And energetically posing itself as prepared to join the European Union, which kept insisting that Turkey must demonstrate its dedication to justice and human rights before it would be accepted. Many within the EU rejected Turkey's potential as a member, as representing odd man out as an Islamic country, much to the chagrin of Turkey.

Turkey's treatment of its Armenian minority and its slaughter of Armenians in an early 20th Century ethnic cleansing atrocity of immense proportions sullied its reputation. As has its ongoing treatment of its sizeable Kurdish minority whose desire it is to have a land of its own.

The Kurds represent the largest ethnic group (with populations in neighbouring Syria, Turkey, Iraq, as well as Turkey) without a country of their own. They have nationhood without geography of entitlement. And Turkey is involved in brutally putting down their search for fulfillment, unwilling like the others countries involved, to hand over any of their land officially to the Kurds.

These are background issues. The larger looming issue is the direction in which Erdogan and his AKP has taken the country. Far, quite far, from its position as a secular democracy on the Ataturk model. And Erdogan's more recent exploits in edging closer to Iran, to Syria, to Lebanon, his warming relations with the new post-Arab-Spring Egypt, his sensitive accord with Hamas, and his decisive split with Israel have all brought Turkey to a new reality.

Turkey sees itself as powerful, and particularly in the geography it inhabits, it is. Its economic growth and ongoing modernization marks it as a model for the presumed emergence in the wake of the struggles of the Middle East nations to free themselves from the shackles of exploitative dictators, and to attain social and political freedom. Which might, they hope, result in economic growth, in job-creation.

Turkey has established its credentials with the West, and was in the home stretch of accomplishing what Ataturk had set out to do when he rejected a continued limiting theocracy for his country and adopted the Western model in an insightful desire to bring his country out of its stultifying state of religious stupor.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, through a combination of good luck and careful planning, has established himself and his party as the new face and reality of Turkey. A Turkey whose people have become compliant to his new direction because of growing prosperity, and a return to respect within the Islamic World. At the same time, Erdogan and Turkey have turned away from many of the social and political values of the West.

His, and his country's rejection of ongoing co-operation with the only other democracy in the region is unfortunate. His vituperative slander of Israel and ongoing attempts to further isolate the country place it in ever greater danger of rejection by its erstwhile peace partners. Sensing an advantage that had eluded them for decades, Middle East countries that had once accommodated themselves to a version of peace with Israel have become restive.

With Erdogan leading the way, the isolation of Israel is proceeding apace, as a cordon of hostility grows and begins to tighten the screws.

Labels: Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Political Realities, Turkey

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, September 20, 2011