Category: News

Mushtak Parker | Arab News

The decision on Wednesday by Turkey’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial authority, not to ban the ruling AK Party, or the Justice and Development Party, headed by Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan, came as a relief to liberal democrats the world over.

The action should never have been brought to the Constitutional Court in the first place. It would never have seen the daylight in any of the established liberal democracies. Chief Public Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcınkaya’s submission of his indictment against the AK Party to the Constitutional Court on March 14 this year on the grounds that the ruling party had to be shut down because it allegedly had become a focal point of anti-secular activity is fundamentally an anti-democratic act and should be a cause for concern for democrats, especially in Turkey. It would probably also give succor to the rejectionist chauvinists in the European Union that are actively seeking to block any accession of Turkish membership of the European liberal democratic club.

Yalcinkaya’s request for the five-year ban of 71 individuals affiliated with or members of the AK Party, including president of the republic, Abdullah Gul, an ex-member of the AK Party; Prime Minister Erdogan; eight incumbent Cabinet ministers; and 30 members of Parliament, further betrays his anti-democratic instinct, which is more akin to those who run police states such as South Africa under the successive apartheid regimes of the National Party. Then, the Nationalists had an array of legislation “legitimizing” the banning, house arrest and detention without trial of hundreds of political opponents and so-called liberals.

How ironic for a seemingly secular chief prosecutor trying to use the same tactics as a theocratic Iran, which bans certain individuals from participating in presidential or parliamentary elections; or as Burma, which is ruled by a pernicious and corrupt military junta.

Turks, especially the extremist fundamentalist “secularists,” harbor a fundamental misconception of what liberal democracy entails. And unfortunately this is pervasive in the psyche of large sections of Turkish society, most disconcertingly in that of the powerful military. The guardian of the constitution and of democracy is not the armed forces, as many Turks tend to regurgitate ad nauseum, but Parliament. This is a fundamental ethic of a liberal democracy which cannot be compromised. If it is, then the country cannot call itself a liberal democracy and should have no pretence to being one.

Political and civil liberties are the backbone of a liberal democracy and no matter what in-built judicial and other safeguards politicians conjure up from time to time, including the Blair and Brown governments in the UK and the Bush administration in the US under the clarion call of fighting “Islamic” terrorism, the actions themselves are against the spirit of the liberal democratic ethic if not against the law of the day, which indeed would have the founding fathers of liberal democracy turn in their graves. Turks should be careful not to allow the extreme fundamentalists amongst their elites to hijack the agenda of secularism, which is eminently compatible with political Islam, as the latter is with democracy. Secularism does not mean anti-religion. If it did, then the proceedings in the White House, the US Congress and US Senate, and the UK House of Commons would not start each morning with religious prayers, in this case the (Christian) Lord’s Prayer.

This case as previous others — for instance relating to the election of Abdullah Gul to the presidency — is primarily a manifestation of an ongoing undeclared war between Turkey’s traditional elites centered in the metropolitan cities of Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir, and the emerging new elites emanating from the Anatolian heartlands of Kayseri, Afyon, Malatya etc.

The religious bogey and the threat to secularism are mere smokescreens in this war. Visions of the AK Party as an Islamist Trojan horse in the body politic of Turkey is used by the military and their business supporters to undermine the rise of the new Anatolian pashas. The US and Europe rightly prefer to see the rise of the AK Party as the Islamic equivalent to their own Christian Democrat political parties. This fits in with their worldview of democracy and the Muslim world, and to certain extent gives some “legitimacy” (in their eyes) for their campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The official Turkish state mantra is that it is a bridge between Asia and Europe, between the East and West, between Islam and Christianity. Unfortunately, at home Turks continue to be polarized. Military secularism, steeped in an authoritarian “father state” ethic, is one Kemalist legacy which continues to undermine bridge-building between Turks, between the elites of Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir and the emerging ones from Anatolia. How ironic it should be the AK Party who seeks to serve and liberalize the Turkish polity with individual rights and freedoms bringing the country into the 21st Century.

The latest constitutional court drama is just one battle in this ongoing war between elites. The losers are Turkish democracy and citizens.

From the August 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal

August 2, 2008
by Zeyno Baran

This week’s verdict by Turkey’s Constitutional Court — which rejected an attempt to ban the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) for undermining the country’s secular foundations — has been hailed by the U.S. and the EU as a great step forward for democracy and rule of law. Fair enough. Banning a party that last year renewed its mandate in office with 47% of the vote would have been a huge setback for Turkey. But that doesn’t mean we should all sigh with relief and conclude that liberal democracy is flourishing under the Islamic-oriented AKP’s rule.

Zeyno Baran is a Senior Fellow and Director of Hudson’s Center for Eurasian Policy.

Reviewed by Jason Goodwin
Sunday, August 3, 2008; Page BW06

ENLIGHTENMENT

By Maureen Freely

Overlook. 398 pp. $24.95

A journalist investigates the American arrest of her former Turkish lover.

Maureen Freely is best known as the English translator of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, but visitors to Istanbul may well recognize her as the daughter of John Freely, an American academic who has lived in Istanbul since the early 1960s and has written many useful guides to the city and its Ottoman past.

That biographical detail is significant because Enlightenment is partly an autobiography. It’s also a psychological thriller, a murder story, a rumination on friendship and a political investigation. If that sounds like a lot of weight for a novel to carry, it is; and it’s a testament to Freely’s ability that the novel does, in large measure, succeed.

When the story opens, a journalist named M learns that Sinan, a left-wing filmmaker who was her lover during their student days in Istanbul, has been arrested at the U.S. border by Homeland Security; his child has been taken into foster care. Sinan’s wife, Jeannie — the woman for whom he betrayed M so many years ago — appeals to M to publicize his case. But as M begins her own investigations, she finds herself running up against unexpected doubts, obstacles and characters from her past, including the surviving members of a left-leaning student activist group from the early 1970s. Then Jeannie disappears, leaving a 53-page document for M to read.

Enlightenment is a fluent, evocative and uncomfortable read, deliberately so. Stories overlap, testimonies conflict, even the time frame is repeatedly broken and re-arranged so that it becomes difficult to know who, if anyone, is telling the truth. M and Jeannie — though formal rivals in love — are, in fact, remarkably alike. At first, I found this irritating — why two characters, when one would do? — until I began to suspect that this splitting acts as a protective disguise for Freely herself.

Indeed, the shifting ground and viewpoints of the novel represent a layered approach to the underlying subject of Freely’s narrative: the so-called “deep state” that allegedly operates behind Turkish democracy. The nature of this state-within-the-state remains unclear, but, since the cold war in the 1970s, it’s been thought to involve high-ranking officials in the Turkish government and military opposed to Islamism. M begins to suspect that “extraordinary rendition” — state kidnapping — lies behind the disappearance of Sinan and his wife.

Political opposition very often adopts the form, in shadow, of the substance it opposes. If the deep state is ambivalent, secretive and repressive, then so too are Jeannie and her friends, forging exploitative relations among themselves. Betrayals lurk like time bombs, primed to go off decades in the future, and lies beget lies. Enlightenment is a grimly ironic title for a story in which no one survives intact.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is its exploration of identity among the group of students at Robert College in Istanbul in the early 1970s. Freely examines the dislocated loyalties of these privileged young people, living between the strictures of the Turkish state and the blandishments of Western freedoms, learning to present different faces to all the people who have influence over their lives: free-thinking American professors, uptight Turkish businessmen and omniscient secret police.

When trouble explodes — in this case, with the assassination of the Israeli consul — the American students can leave, but the Turkish students become targets of the new military government, in spite of their connections with Jeannie’s father, a CIA man who emerges, curiously enough, as the most sympathetic character in the novel.

This is a story almost impossible to summarize but hard to forget. It’s remarkable for its descriptions of the city as it was in the 1970s and as it is now, after the break-up of the Soviet Union has released so much energy around the area. Freely is an almost perversely original writer, sharply observing the world she knows so well and upending all one’s suppositions and assumptions. One example I found touching: Her grown-up student radicals do not shower their youthful selves with middle-aged reproof; they still crackle with energy and purpose. Enlightenment may be too long and, at times, too opaque to win the audience it deserves, but it is a brave, unflinching work of art.