generalspeaking

Turkey's Transformation

Turkey appears to be going through some hard times. Their prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once pointed with pride to the firm economic position he had led his country into, now oversees an economy with a number of hiccoughs. The Turkish currency is falling, foreign investment in the country has come to a bit of a standstill. Perhaps there is some international skittishness in a country whose prime minister has revealed himself as a bad-tempered autocrat.

One who has garnered the reputation of stifling and arresting more journalists than almost any other country. A man who has seen fit to describe Turkish citizens as riff-raff and worse, because they have been protesting in public parks over what they see as a deterioration of their social and natural environment. And the Freedom and Justice party now in power which claimed to be incorruptible has been revealed as quite corrupted.

Turkey's long-held bid for membership in the European Union seems of late to have edged a little further away from eventual-if-ever-acceptance, since the EU has expressed its alarm and distaste over the government's arrest of hundreds of police, and its suspension of justices and the arrest of magistrates it feels present a threat to the reputation of the government.

That Turkey's military has now, finally, found within itself the resources to protest that the government's arrest, charges of treason, and trials on trumped-up charges resulting in senior military personnel  being sent away to serve long, very long prison sentences, represents yet another inconvenient upset for Prime Minister Erdogan.

He has expressed his disdain for Egypt, for removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power. And he has gone to great lengths to consolidate his support for and friendship for the Islamic Republic of Iran, to the point where Turkey surreptitiously bypassed sanctions to provide gold for oil through the corrupt ministers of the Freedom and Justice Party.

That Mr. Erdogan's son was one of the beneficiaries of that corruption has not sat very well with Turks who find the increasingly Islamist slant of their country disturbing, and quite nontraditional, a course steered far from their Ataturk legacy of a secular government in a religious society. On the good news front, Turkey's parliament has approved a plan to reform their top judicial body.


And the rapprochement exercise leading to a reconciliation agreement between Turkey and Israel purportedly over the after-effects of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara whose Islamist thugs, preparing to break the internationally legal Israeli blockade of Gaza were killed when they attacked Israeli naval commandos boarding the ship, is off. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rendered the requisite "apology", an agreement was made to pay restitution to the families of those killed.

But the last and final demand by Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Israel lift the blockade and effectively thereby allow itself to be violently obliterated by a well-armed and jihad-determined Hamas, whom Mr. Erdogan so strenuously admires as a responsible 'government', was turned down by Israel.

"In fact, it is not a new demand. At the same time, not everything that Erdogan says is really Turkish foreign policy", explained Ceren Kenar, colmnist for the Turkish daily Turkiyye.

Ms. Kenar's opinion is that Israel and Turkey will eventually sign that reconciliation agreement. In part, she averred, since Turkey is interested in buying $15-billion in natural gas from Israel, which it can then forward by pipeline to Europe.

She may be quite correct, but it isn't likely that this will occur any time soon; certainly not until this government has been replaced by another, perhaps less Islamist one, and certainly headed by a prime minister who is not a devoted anti-Semite.

Labels: Conflict, Economy, Iran, Islamism, Israel, Rapprochement, Turkey

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 15, 2014