Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is railing. His government has 'run out of patience.'
In a speech at a meeting of his Justice and Development (AK)
Party, Erdogan struck back at criticism from the European Parliament over the
ferocity of a police crackdown and accused some international media of
exaggerated reporting.
"Our patience is at an end. I am making my warning
for the last time. I say to the mothers and fathers please take your children in
hand and bring them out ... Gezi Park does not belong to occupying forces but to
the people," he said.
A heavy-handed police crackdown on Gezi Park nearly
two weeks ago triggered an unprecedented wave of protest against Erdogan and his
AK Party - an association of centrists and conservative religious elements -
drawing in secularists, nationalists, professionals, unionists and
students.
Erdogan, who has accused foreign forces, international media
and market speculators of stoking the unrest and trying to undermine the Turkish
economy, said he would "share with the nation" at another AKP meeting on Friday
details of what he termed a "game being played with Turkey".
"It is as if
the whole of Turkey is on fire, as if the whole of Turkey is collapsing," he
said of some media coverage, describing it as "deceptive and
unethical".
Is Erdogan starting to crack?
Erdogan
met a group of academics, artists and students who support the Gezi Park
protests on Wednesday and AK Party deputy chairman Huseyin Celik said they had
discussed the possibility of a referendum on the plans to build on the
park.
The offer is one of the only concessions the authorities have
publicly floated after days of firm rhetoric from Erdogan refusing to back down.
Celik gave few details of how a referendum would be carried out, saying it could
either be held across Istanbul, or just in the district near Taksim.
The
protesters in Gezi Park, camped out in a ramshackle settlement of tents, were
sceptical.
"The people the prime minister spoke to he chose. He said they
will be the ones representing us. But they don't represent us. They have nothing
to do with what we think," said Aylin Kaplan, 24, a student who has been in the
park from the start.
"From the beginning we have said we have specific
requests, we have been clear and open. We do not need a referendum," she said,
repeating the main demand that the government abandon plans to build a replica
Ottoman-era barracks on the park.
But even the US and the EU - neither of which will do anything anyway - are expressing concern over what's going on in Istanbul. Erdogan needs to end this in a hurry. He needs to visit Gaza.
In the western port city of Izmir, protesters through fire bombs at
AK Party offices overnight and television footage showed part of the
building ablaze. Firefighters put out the fire, the Dogan news agency
reported.
Bus shelters, paving stones and street signs ripped up
by protesters to make barricades that littered a major avenue by the
Bosphorus strait in Istanbul where some of the heaviest clashes took
place overnight, and graffiti covered walls.
Roads around Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan's office in Istanbul were sealed off as police
fired teargas to push back protesters in the early hours of Monday.
In
the main street near Erdogan's office, one demonstrator drove a small
mechanical digger towards police lines as other protesters followed
behind. At a nearby mosque, medical staff including trainee doctors
treated those hurt in the clashes.
Police raided a shopping
complex in the center of the capital Ankara where they believed
demonstrators were sheltering, detaining several hundred.
Can't wait to hear what they have to say about this in the US State Department briefing later today. After all, Erdogan is President Hussein Obama's Best Friend Forever.
Marc J. Fink tells the astotunding story of efforts by Turkey's radical Islamist AKP party to infiltrate the United States' Native American population as a foothold for its revolutionary Islamist doctrine in the United States.
Turkey's government, under Islamist leadership, has developed a
remarkable but obscure tactic to make inroads into the United States.
Recently, Native American Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK, member of the Chickasaw Nation) introduced H.R. 2362, the Indian Trade and Investment Demonstration Project.
The bill singles out Turkish-owned companies for exclusive investment
preferences and special rights in Native American tribal area projects.
Congressman Cole freely admitted the following on the House floor:
There's no question that I was approached by the Turkish American Coalition [properly the Turkish Coalition of America], who have a deep interest in Turkey and American Indians.
"Deep interest" indeed. The bill was the culmination of a curious
multi-year effort by Turkey to ingratiate itself with Native American
tribes: tribal students now study in Turkey with full scholarships;
Turkish high officials regularly appear at Native American economic
summits; and dozens of tribal leaders have gone to Turkey on lavish
all-expense paid trips.
Why the intense interest in business and cultural ties with Native
American tribes only now, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) have taken
Turkey down a path of aggressive and dangerous Islamism?
Evidence from Uzbekistan points to a possible nefarious motive:
Infiltration and Islamization. The government of Uzbekistan is claiming
that private Turkish business interests in the Central Asian country
have been acting as a front for banned Islamist extremists. According to Agence France-Presse:
[The Uzbek government is] accusing Turkish companies of
creating a shadow economy, using double accounting and propagating
nationalistic and extremist ideology. ... Long wary of the influence of
Islamic fundamentalism ... secular authorities appear to be linking
Turkish private business to the activities of the Nurcus, an Islamic
group that is banned in the country. [Nurcus is also banned in Russia].
Is it really in America's national security interests to have
thousands of Turkish contractors and their families flooding into
America's heartland and settling in semi-autonomous zones out of the
reach of American authorities? Especially if their intent is to form
intimate business and social ties with a long-aggrieved minority group?
The fact that 220(!) members of the US House of Representatives voted in favor of H.R. 2362 may be the most astounding thing in the entire article. In fact, it was 222 and most of them were Republicans. Full roll call at the link. What were these people thinking?
The ruling party has been boycotting Israel for the past few years and excluded Syria from the guest list this year due to tension between Damascus and Ankara over the uprising in the country and Syria’s recent downing of a Turkish plane.
All country's ambassadors except Israel and Syria were invited to the fast-breaking dinner at which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is expected to give a speech.
The dinner will be held at the AKP's headquarters in Ankara and famous musicians will take the stage, the reports said.
I'm sure the Israeli ambassador will be happy to have the night off. At least it won't matter if they make it this Saturday night.
Breaking: Blast near AKP headquarters wounds 10 (with video)
I apologize at the outset - there's a video at the bottom of this post, and after way too much time I cannot figure out how to configure it not to go on automatically (I don't think the CNN Turk media player allows you to do that), so scroll down and shut it off until you are ready to watch it.
Istanbul police chief Huseyin Capkin said the device was placed on a motorcycle and set off by remote control as a police vehicle drove past, near the AK Party building and the offices of a conservative business association.
“As a police vehicle carrying 21 officers was passing by, a remote control bomb on a motorcycle exploded. Our teams are carrying out the investigation. Ten policemen were wounded, but none of them are in critical condition,” Capkin told reporters.
Kurdish separatists, far left groups, far right groups and Islamist militants, including al Qaeda, have all carried out bomb attacks in Turkey in the past.
“There are wounded people, many ambulances are coming here after the explosion,” a witness told Reuters.
“It was a very strong explosion like an earthquake,” another witness told CNN Turk television.
And from the second link....
Television footage showed a wrecked light commercial vehicle, and a witness told Dogan news agency it had exploded as a police vehicle passed by.
Television footage also showed a fire engine and police vehicles surrounding the area, and shattered glass from nearby buildings littering the street after the explosion in Istanbul's Sutluce district.
JPost quotes an unnamed Turkish blogger who says that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has colorectal cancer.
But a Turkish blogger said a physician with ties to the Turkish executive branch told him Erdogan is suffering from colorectal cancer and is under close examination to determine its severity. On the condition of anonymity, the blogger said a respected authority in academia had told him the prime minister was expected to start chemotherapy last month.
The blogger said Turkish media have reported almost nothing about Erdogan’s condition, leaving most Turks totally unaware anything might be wrong. Still, he said, it’s an “open secret” in the Turkish medical community that Erdogan has been diagnosed with cancer.
Last month the Jerusalem-based intelligence website DEBKAfile quoted “Western intelligence sources” as saying Erdogan had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer, also known as colon cancer.
Official Turkish sources have remained tight-lipped. Following Erdogan’s surgery the AKP’s English- language website ran a three-sentence news item headlined “Premier Erdogan says he is fine,” quoting the premier as saying only, “I’m fine and I will be better.”
There might be hope for saving Turkey if Erdogan is forced to resign.
Four senior AKP figures – Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, Economy Minister Ali Babacan and Gul himself – have been named as possible successors.
None of the candidates, however, match Erdogan’s popular appeal: A recent poll conducted by an independent US-based NGO found one-third of Turks would “definitely not” vote for AKP if it were run by anyone other than Erdogan.
“From an electability perspective, there is no one who can replace Erdogan,” the blogger said.
AKP should account for dead Turks before demanding an apology from Israel
Turkish writer Emin Colasan asks Turks to imagine what would happen if an Israeli ship tried to aid Kurdistan (something that has been suggested a number of times over the last year) and then comes up with this (Hat Tip: Simone B):
We can't know whether Israel will apologize or not. However nine were killed on that ship, and they were declared "martyrs" by the Islamists.
Martyrs or not, who is accountable for those nine lives?
The AKP government has not yet provided an answer to this question. It is unlikely that they will do so now.
The AKP government was the ones that sent the Mavi Marmara to Gaza. How could a ship this size leave a Turkish port to sail in the Mediterranean without the blessing and the permission of the government? How can the 400 people board a ship loaded with humanitarian aid material that no one knows how it was paid for?
That ship meant to attack a port of a foreign country. Exactly like the Israeli ship trying to reach Iskenderun as in the example above. If we were subject to the same belligerence in our country we would rightfully raise hell, and we could even sink that pirate ship in the Mediterranean.
AKP bears the responsibility of the Mavi Marmara. More importantly AKP bears the responsibility of those nine lives. Those men were sent openly to a certain death. They knew for sure that Israel would intervene. The only thing that they didn’t know was the number of casualties.
The AKP government should first account for the deaths to the Turkish people, and only then expect an apology from Israel.
You will recall that at the end of the Turkish elections, Recep Tayipp Erdogan and his AKP were five votes short of being able to establish their Muslim Caliphate. Now, through the courts which are beholden to them, they are trying to steal those votes. The Kurds, at least, are quite upset about it.
Reactions were harsh from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) after the Supreme Election Board (YSK) voted unanimously on Tuesday night to strip Hatip Dicle, who was elected to Parliament as an independent candidate last Sunday, of his deputyship.
Ahmet Türk, the co-chairman of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which convened on Wednesday to evaluate the YSK decision, said the decision is neither moral nor legal. “This is a decision to drag Turkey into a state of chaos,” he said. Noting that democratic politics are being blocked, he added, “The nation will hold this mentality, which blocks efforts for democracy, accountable.”
...
...
Dicle was endorsed by the BDP from Diyarbakır, a predominantly Kurdish province in the Southeast, after the pro-Kurdish party decided to enter the June 12 general elections with independent candidates, fearing that it would fail to exceed the 10 percent election threshold if it entered the elections as a party. He was convicted of “disseminating the propaganda of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party [PKK]” in 2009 by the Ankara 11th High Criminal Court, and the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the decision in March of this year. The court sentenced Dicle to one year, eight months in prison on terrorism charges.
Dicle is also currently on trial in the 6th Diyarbakır High Criminal Court as a suspect in a separate investigation into the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK). He was detained in December 2009 as part of the KCK probe and has been in custody since. Dicle's lawyers appealed to the 11th Ankara High Criminal Court to cut the prison term he had served as a detainee during the KCK investigation from his earlier conviction of 20 months on charges of “disseminating the propaganda of the PKK.” As the Supreme Court of Appeals only recently upheld the 2009 decision by the 11th Ankara High Criminal Court, Dicle was in custody not because of his 2009 conviction but as part of the investigation into the KCK.
Last week, the Ankara court decided to cut 453 days, the period he had served as a detainee during the KCK probe, from the sentence he originally received in 2009. The YSK convened on Tuesday to discuss Dicle’s deputyship. The board decided that Dicle does not qualify to become a deputy in accordance with Article 76 of the Constitution. According to the Constitution, persons who have been convicted of dishonorable offenses such as involvement in acts or terrorism or incitement and encouragement of such activities shall not be elected deputies even if they have been pardoned.
After the cancellation of Dicle’s deputyship, Oya Eronat, a Diyarbakır candidate for deputy from the AK Party, won a parliamentary seat. Eronat came second to Dicle in Diyarbakır in the elections. She obtained her official deputyship certification on Wednesday afternoon. The BDP seats in Parliament have dropped to 35, while those of the AK Party have risen to 327.
Reader Joshua I reports by email that the AKP is challenging a total of eleven seats, including Dicle's (Dicle is apparently one of six from the KCK probe):
6 seats Prosecutors call for rejection of jailed KCK deputies’ demand for release: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-248248-prosecutors-call-for-rejection-of-jailed-kck-deputies-demand-for-release.html
1 seat Youngest deputy in Parliament after vote count at Customs gates: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-248060-youngest-deputy-in-parliament-after-vote-count-at-customs-gates.html
1 seat AK Party candidate gets seat after YSK rules to disbar Kurdish deputy: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-248164-ak-party-candidate-gets-seat-after-ysk-rules-to-disbar-kurdish-deputy-.html
University professors have accused the government of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan of blocking academic freedom at the nation's institutions of higher education. They said Erdogan, re-elected on June 12, has ordered the Interior Ministry and security forces to raid universities suspected of un-Islamic behavior.
"Erdogan is turning out the light — not all at once, but very slowly," Bedri Baykam, a leading Turkish artist, said. "He is dimming it until one day it will be completely dark."
In January, Turkish security forces raided Istanbul's Bilgi University amid reports that a student had produced a pornographic film for his dissertation. At least three university lecturers were dismissed amid pressure by Turkish prosecutors.
Critics said Erdogan has launched a crackdown on university freedom as well as the arts. In a recent visit to the Armenian border, the prime minister called for the destruction of a monument that depicted friendship between Ankara and Yerevan.
So far, authorities have not released any evidence that the student film was pornographic. The 53-year-old Baykam said this marked the latest evidence of official harassment of non-Islamic university professors and students.
"Our government is trying, step by step, to turn our community inside out," Baykam told the German weekly Der Spiegel. "Professors are being intimidated, and university rectors are being brought into line ideologically. Things that ostensibly do not fit with Islam are being eradicated."
And here I was pleased with the results of the Turkish election because the AKP did not win enough seats to pass a new constitution or to call a referendum by themselves. But Michael Rubin calls it disastrous.
Turks voted for Recep Erdogan for three reasons: At least half of his support (or 25 percent of the country) seek Islamism and an end to Turkish secularism. Perhaps half the remainder is the business elite who credit Erdogan for Turkey’s economic boom. The AKP certainly deserves credit for this, although much of Turkey’s boom is predicated on illicit Green Money and a willingness to incur huge debt. Much of the rest embrace Erdogan’s shameless anti-Semitic and anti-American populism.
Alas, Erdogan’s re-election may be the final nail in the coffin of Turkish democracy. During the next months, Erdogan will seek to re-write Turkey’s constitution; push ahead with show trials of his political opponents; and unravel the remaining checks-and-balances which have for decades guaranteed Turkey’s secularism. Diplomats have long described a Turkish model in which an overwhelmingly Muslim population could embrace democracy. Alas, Erdogan has given new meaning to the Turkish model. He has launched a step-by-step process to unravel secularism and, all the while, given new fodder to those who say the Muslim Brotherhood is inimical to democracy.
Of course, I don't think anyone really expected otherwise, but perhaps what Rubin is saying is that my expectation that the opposition will slow down the AKP is unrealistic.
With nearly all of the votes counted in Turkey, here are the key results:
1. Erdogan, Davutoglu and Gull's AKP won its third straight election, this time with just under 50% of the vote.
2. Both major opposition parties exceeded the 10% threshold.
3. AKP got 326 seats in the legislature, which is not enough to change the constitution by themselves nor even enough to call for a referendum on the question by themselves.
The AK Party won 49.9 percent of the vote, up 4 percent from the last elections, but this translates into 326 seats in Parliament, meaning it will be more than 40 seats short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the country's constitution unilaterally and about four seats short of the 330 seats needed to refer a Constitutional reform to a public vote.
According to results from 99.8 percent of the total vote, the AK Party won 49.9 percent of the vote, up by 4 percent from the previous elections, followed by the Republican People's Party (CHP) with 25.9 percent, up by 5 percent from the previous election, and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) with 13 percent of the vote. According to this vote distribution, the AK Party won 326 seats, the CHP won 135 seats and the MHP, which was expected by some pollsters to drop out of Parliament, falling below Turkey's 10 percent vote threshold, had 53 seats.
The Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), a Kurdish party accused by officials of links to the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), fielded independent candidates in order to work around requirements for the 10 percent vote threshold. The independents in total won about 6.6 percent of the vote, as expected. Most of them are BDP endorsed independents who will join the BDP and form a parliamentary group, the quorum for which is 20 deputies. The BDP independents won 36 seats in total.
Now if this were Israel, you would worry about some rogue deputy being bribed with a red Mitsubishi to vote in favor of the referendum. But that may not be a concern here.
Alas, the polls do not look good. Here are five. The AKP is the Islamist party, the CHP is the center-left secularist opposition, the MHP is the nationalist party, and the independents are mainly Kurds. It certainly looks like the AKP won't have much trouble getting re-elected. The question is whether the MHP will break the 10 percent threshold. The way the Turkish system works, every party must get above 10 percent to win seats in parliament. If they get less than 10 percent, their seats are re-allocated in a way that benefits the largest party. That's why back in 2002, the AKP was about to win 32 percent of the vote, but win an overwhelming majority in parliament. If the MHP doesn't make it, and if the CHP underperforms, there will be no stopping the AKP from cementing its transformation of Turkey.
There are elections in Turkey on Sunday, and barring a last minute miracle, they're a disaster in the making. The AKP party seems poised to ride to victory and continue the Islamization of Turkey and the repression of dissent. Barry Rubin explains.
If the regime gets a big enough majority it will rewrite the Turkish constitution. Turkey, as we have known it, a secular democratic state since the 1920s, will no longer exist. Of course, not everything will be obvious and happen overnight, but the repression we have already seen will increase. The courts, the armed forces, and other institutions will be taken over by this Islamist government.
It will be a disaster for Western interests. And coupled with the same thing happening in Egypt, these events will catapult the region back a half-century or more into strife.
Meanwhile, the West snores on. Western media coverage of the Turkish regime is glowing. Yet if one actually looks at what’s happening in the country, reading the Turkish-language media and talking to the many Turks horrified by these developments, the picture is horrifying.
Here is an example of life in contemporary Turkey. The town of Hopa received a visit from Prime Minister Erdogan. Opposition banners are removed by the police. When local people resisted, the police attacked. A retired teacher who had been trying to negotiate with the police died.
Scores of journalists have been arrested and thrown into jail. One-third of the media has been bought up by the regime; much of the rest intimidated. Military officers, college professors, union leaders, activists, and peaceful critics of every description are thrown into jail on trumped up charges and kept there for months, years. The waiting time for a trial during which people are jailed is now three years. Yes, three years without proof of any wrongdoing.
A respected investigative journalist is arrested and accused of terrorism. His crime? Writing a critical book on Fathi Gulen, Turkey’s leading Islamist cleric. All of the copies of the manuscript are confiscated. Gulen controls the police.
Two other journalists are arrested. Their crime? Saying that they were about to publish documentation showing that the government’s claims of conspiracy, used to arrest so many, are bogus. Gareth Jenkins, a serious scholar, has gone through thousands of pages of court documents and shown that the hundreds of people imprisoned have not even been accused of any specific act. I know of a half-dozen journalists fired for daring to criticize the government. There are many more.
How to intimidate the media? Tax officials arrive and take over offices, going through all of the documents trying to find some technicality on which to bring charges. The largest media group in Turkey, the Dogan Group, was told that it owed $2.5 billion in penalties. That is not a typographical error. It is several times the worth of the entire company. The government demanded that they pay the fines first and then if they wanted they could go to court. To provide a partial payment and bank guarantees, the Dogan Group had to sell two newspapers.
People feel that they are watched, wire-tapped, and spied on. Turkey was never a perfect democracy. Yet this atmosphere is closer to that of a country under Communism than the Turkey they have known all their lives.
In a reaction which would be a parody if it weren’t sadly true, Erdoğan has blown a gasket. It’s not just the Economist’s fault, the prime minister explained. In reality, it’s a plot by world Jewry. “These calls have been well-timed, because they show that we are on the right track. They cannot make any decisions concerning Turkey,” Erdoğan said. “This international media, as they are supported by Israel, would not be happy with the continuation of the AKP government,” he continued.
Michael Rubin notes that The Economist has gotten it right, but it's probably too late anyway.
Writing in Turkey's Daily Hurriyet, Burak Bekdil rips the hypocrisy of the Turkish ruling party's stance on Israel (Hat Tip: Joshua I).
Wisdom would ask Mr Davutoğlu to perhaps encourage the İHH to send a flotilla to Latakia to break the blockade on protestors and stop the Syrian police killing them. The Syrian death count is already over 1,000, or 111 times bigger than the death toll on the Mavi Marmara, excluding over 10,000 missing or detained for torture and future death.
Alternatively, if the foreign minister is so keen on the idea of freedom flotillas against illegal blockades, he can think of Varosha in Cyprus, which has remained a ghost town after the Turkish army fenced it off in 1974. But Mr Davutoğlu has other, preferred, responsibilities.
For example, the foreign minister often talks about his dream to “pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestinian [Muslim] Jerusalem.” He does not hide his ambition to see Jerusalem as the capital of a free Palestinian state. One wonders, though, if he would have kept his sympathetic smile if a foreign minister spoke of his dream to visit Diyarbakır as the capital of Kurdistan. I think we can guess. But he is not the only Islamist who habitually boasts multiple standards of indecent choice, all for the advance of political Islam.
Last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed a local crowd in Diyarbakır, saying that: “We are the grandchildren of Saladin Ayyubi’s army [soldiers] that conquered Jerusalem.” So, says the prime minister, the ancient capital of Judaism had been conquered by Muslims.
But, then, why would something taken by force from someone else belong to its occupier? Why is Jerusalem Palestinian if it had been conquered from its ancient possessors? And why should we be proud to be the grandchildren of someone whose army conquered other people’s territories?
A few days earlier, Mr Erdoğan, this time in Trabzon, reminded his party’s supporters that on May 29 “We proudly celebrated the 558th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul.” And, he said, without the conquest of Trabzon, the conquest of Anatolia would have been incomplete.
It is not a coincidence that Fatih (conqueror) is a very common male name in Turkish. The Turks are proud to be the evlad-i fatihan (the descendants of conquerors). They are too happy to be living in the territories that once belonged to other nations. But all that is understandable since they are not the only nation which does so, with or without the others naming their children “conqueror.” All the same, there is a problem with the Turkish/Islamist case.
If we are talking about universal justice and legality, why are the conquests of Istanbul, Trabzon and Anatolia by the Turks, and of Jerusalem by Ayyubi good; but the repatriation of Jerusalem to Israel by re-conquest bad? Especially when the re-conquest was the result of self-defense in the face of eight enemy armies who attack to annihilate a legitimate state.
AKP platform ignores Israel, blames Armenia for impasse
The platform of the AKP, Turkey's ruling party, for the upcoming elections, ignores Israel and blames Armenia for an impasse that has been reached in negotiations for Turkey and Armenia to reconcile their century-long differences.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose party is expected to win a third term in the upcoming June 12 elections, unveiled the manifesto, which Erdoğan called the AK Party's manifesto for 2023, on Saturday. The document summarizes strategy with respect to countries both in its neighborhood and beyond. But the document neglects to mention relations with Israel and ways to restore strained ties with the Jewish state. Relations between Turkey and Israel hit the lowest point ever last year after a lethal Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza to break Israel's naval blockade.
Eight Turks and one Turkish-American were killed by Israeli commandos during the raid. Turkey requests an official apology and compensation for families of the victims. Israel says its commandos acted in self-defense. The party’s manifesto, which includes its foreign policy vision, attaches importance to its growing relations with Middle Eastern countries and stresses ties with the US among its primary priorities, while failing to mention Israel.
So much for those who believe that the upcoming elections indicate that the AKP is moderating. As to Armenia, the Turks continue to eschew any responsibility for the genocide their great grandparents carried out nearly a century ago.
“Our position with respect to the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem and genocide allegations is clear. The AK Party will not allow any solution not based on fairness and justice to be imposed on Turkey. With regard to reciprocal and simultaneous steps for a solution, Turkey will not refrain from doing what it needs to do,” the document notes.
Turkey and Armenia signed twin protocols in 2009 in Zurich to bury a century of hostilities, which also included opening of borders between Turkey and Armenia if their parliaments ratified the protocols. Faced with Azerbaijan’s fierce opposition, Turkey said Armenia needs to display a constructive position on Nagorno-Karabakh peace talks and pegged the ratification of the protocols to a possible breakthrough in the Nagorno-Karabakh peace talks.
Armenia suspended the process on April 22 last year and blamed Turkey for blocking the process.
Turkey is sounding more Islamist by the minute. After all, the Arab Muslim states are always pushing for 'just' solutions as a means for covering up their continued desire to wipe Israel out. What could go wrong?
Will the Arab spring be followed by a Kurdish summer in Turkey and other countries that include parts of Kurdistan? If Turkey continues to make dumb moves like this one (Hat Tip: Joshua I), I'd bet on it.
Turkey’s High Election Board ruled yesterday that the 12 Kurdish candidates were ineligible to run in the June 12 election due to previous criminal convictions. The ruling meant the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party may boycott the vote, party official Selahattin Demirtas said, according to the state- run Anatolia news agency.
A boycott would raise the probability that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party may win a two-thirds majority in parliament at the election, allowing it to pass legislation including constitutional amendments unopposed, Inan Demir, chief economist at Istanbul-based Finansbank AS, said in an e-mailed report today.
...
The election board’s decision “will lead to heightened tensions in the long-troubled southeastern region, with a likely end to a ceasefire” by militant Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Demir said.
Peace and Democracy is the only serious challenger to the governing party in the mainly-Kurdish southeast, Erdogan said in an interview, Milliyet newspaper reported yesterday.
Parliament speaker and ruling party member Mehmet Ali Sahin said today that the election board’s ruling “weakens parliament’s mission” and should be reviewed, Anatolia reported.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, called for an emergency session in parliament to find a solution and to debate the 10 percent vote threshold for parties to win seats in parliament, according to televised comments from Ankara.
The banned politicians, who are allied to Peace and Democracy, were running as independent candidates to circumvent the 10 percent threshold.
The politicians won’t be able to name substitutes, Hasan Gerceker, head of Turkey’s Supreme Court, told Anatolia.
“If they were running for a party, then maybe they could run a new candidate,” he said. “Because they’re running as independents, I don’t think that’s possible.”
We see that the “Arab Spring” has begun to affect Turkey indirectly.
Discussions over “a Turkey/AKP model for Arabs” due to the “Arab Spring” have put Turkish democracy into an X-ray machine, and made more visible the weaknesses, discrepancies, but more importantly, the course of events leading in the direction of authoritarianism.
After all, if many in the West say, “A country where journalists are arrested and where press freedom is spirited off cannot be presented as a model to Arab countries,” it is not Arabs but Turkey that loses.
What’s more important, however, is the historic overlapping between “masses in the Middle East turning into actors,” and “popularization of the Kurdish question.” Plus, any kind of cause and demands defended by the popularization in consequence of the “Arab Spring” in the region become legitimate in the eye of the world.
Popularization has now become a machine of legitimacy.
Fierce struggles between those who skillfully use this machine and those who stand against it wait for the Middle East.
Expected victory of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in the June 12 elections will not change the fact that the Kurdish question is the “Achilles’ heel” of Turkey.
Even more so, the Kurdish question has become more sensitive “Achilles’ heel” of Turkey because of the “Arab Spring.”
The first hopeful sign I've seen out of Turkey in two years
This is the first hopeful sign I've seen out of Turkey in two years. Really. The sign? The IHH is 'postponing' its participation in the flotilla until after the Turkish elections in June.
According to the report, the group will wait to see if Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan will be reelected during the June elections before it decides to send the Mavi Marmara ship to Gaza.
This means that having their collective faces rubbed in the flotilla would cause Turks to vote against Prime Minister Erdogan. And that is the most hopeful thing I've seen coming out of Turkey in two years. It means that (at least the IHH is afraid that) many Turks don't support the flotilla attack on Israel.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
