From apology to reconciliation

Thanks to a recent petition prepared and signed by a group of intellectuals, we have found ourselves discussing the Armenian issue. It appears that not only the recognition of genocide claims but also the fact of the massacres against the Ottoman Armenians is a taboo. Those who signed the petition have been accused of treason.

Even Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who recognized the right of individuals to prepare any kind of petition, became a target of a racist assault by Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Canan Arıtman, who argued that Gül's ancestors may be of Armenian origin. This scandalous statement was, in fact, a logical outcome of the xenophobia that has grown amongst Turkey's secularist circles.

But there also exists a historical aspect of this hatred toward "foreigners." We should not forget that not only Armenian identity, but modern Turkish identity, too, has been shaped by the events of 1915. As Minister of Defense Vecdi Gönül admitted a month ago, many in Turkey believe that the forced deportation of Armenians and Greeks made it possible to establish a "Turkish nation-state" in Anatolia.

This is the bottom line: Anything that is viewed as necessary to form a state, any kind of state, which is the guarantee of the survival of the "nation," is to be justified. For this reason, ultranationalists in recent years have been calling for the need to wage "another war of independence," aware that such a state of affairs would justify anything, including a military coup. Their motto made this very clear: "If the motherland is at stake, the rest is a matter of details." So those ultranationalists were trying to build a consensus on the "essentials" of the national existence: to protect the state (whose characteristics would not matter at all) vis-à-vis the assault of global forces and their domestic collaborators.

The secularists and the "conservative democrats," including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have united in defense of what the Committee of Union and Progress did in 1915.

We do not have to, and should not, accept that the 1915 events constituted genocide, but we must stop trying to find excuses for the massacres of Ottoman citizens of Armenian origin. Otherwise, we can find excuses for the suppression of the Kurds, of Islamic dervish orders, of the girls who wear the headscarf, etc. If we allow the raison d'état to reign, then everything will be explainable and justifiable.

The debate over the apology campaign has revealed that many in Turkey, including Islamists, conservatives, leftists and even liberals, continue to think within the paradigm of the nation-state and nationalism.

The fact is that at the turn of the 19th century, all the peoples of the Balkans and Anatolia suffered at the hands of nationalists, be they Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish or Armenian nationalists. There is, therefore, no point in maintaining and reproducing the same nationalist sentimentalities today. What is needed is a process of reconciliation that does not come through by standing behind the crimes of nationalists of all kinds committed a century ago.

22 December 2008

Understanding AK Party’s Kurdish strategy

Given the electoral support the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) received from Kurds in the July 2007 elections and the party's reformist credentials, it was optimistically expected that the long-awaited solution to the Kurdish question was about to come.

Instead of developing a comprehensive approach to address the roots of the question, the AK Party developed a strategy of solving the Kurdish question "without recognizing the Kurdish ethnicity."

This is, of course, an unrealistic strategy but understandable because the party does not really have a free hand in its approach to the question and thus must act within the limits drawn by the security establishment, which claims to have the final say on the issue.

The security establishment realizes that the AK Party's popularity among Kurds is an opportunity and is pushing the party to the forefront to implement policies to buy the Kurds' loyalty. The "state" therefore wants the AK Party to ease the Kurdish question without damaging the basic characteristics of the Turkish nation-state.

What is left for the AK Party is to develop a three-tier strategy.

First up is providing people in Kurdish areas with economic and social benefits. Pumping resources into the region to complete the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) and implementing small-scale benefit projects are part and parcel of this strategy. Acting as a "social welfare state" in the region is expected to generate relative prosperity among the poverty-ridden Kurds and build a bridge to the "Turkish" state. Fighting against poverty is certainly an issue -- especially since large cities in the region are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to leave their villages. The shantytowns around Diyarbakır have made the Kurds' poverty more visible than ever. There is, therefore, a rationale behind providing these poor people with some economic benefits in return for their votes. However, this approach presumes that the Kurdish question is a matter of economic backwardness and that a more affluent Kurdish region will acquiesce to the Turkish state's denial of Kurdish identity. This is an approach that fails to understand the identity aspect of the Kurdish question and one that has been adopted many times by other political parties. Yet the AK Party is allowed to pursue such a policy precisely because it is a policy without an identity dimension.

The second element of the AK Party's Kurdish strategy is to appeal to "Kurdish conservatism," a strong social and political force in the region. Though the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) is a Marxist-nationalist organization, the outlawed Kurds at large are religious people who have very close connections with various religious orders and groups. The AK Party standing as a conservative party in line with the Kurdish social inclination gives the party a great advantage vis-à-vis the Marxist PKK. What is important for the Turkish security establishment is that a notion of "Muslim brotherhood" pursued by the AK Party may be effective in making Kurds loyal to the Turkish state without recognizing the Kurdish ethnicity. Thus a rhetoric employing Islam portrayed as anti-secular in the Western part of Turkey is not a problem in the Kurdish areas so long as it suppresses the Kurdish national identity.

The last element of the AK Party strategy is to develop a closer relationship with Iraqi Kurdish entities and leaders. It is important to note that this is not a unilateral AK Party policy. There is now a broad agreement among the Turkish policy actors -- including the security establishment -- on a policy of rapprochement with Iraqi Kurdish authorities. There has emerged such a consensus because cooperating with the Iraqi Kurdish entity against the PKK does not mean recognizing Iraqi Kurds' right to statehood or the ethnic identity demands of the Kurds in Turkey. Iraqi Kurds may be instrumental in containing and eliminating the PKK forces stationed in Iraqi territory.

On the part of the government, there is a political dimension as well. To recognize Iraqi Kurdish gains in post-occupation Iraq has been the desire of Turkey's Kurds. Visits by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani to Ankara and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Baghdad have revealed that Turkey is prepared to develop a dialogue with Iraqi Kurds and that it is not unhappy with the newly acquired power of its Kurdish brothers in Iraq.

Given the popularity of Iraqi Kurdish movements in Turkey among the Kurds, the government's dialogue with the Kurdish leaders is certainly welcomed by Turkey's Kurds and will create a political advantage for the AK Party government. The AK Party's opening to northern Iraq can, therefore, also be seen as political maneuvering to reach out to Turkey's Kurdish population just before vital local elections, scheduled for March, without recognizing the Kurdish ethnicity.

15 December 2008

ASAM and ‘poverty of the strategists’

An Ankara-based think tank, the Eurasian Strategic Research Center (ASAM), is being shut down after its main sponsor, Ülker Holding, declared it would cut its roughly $2 million annual contribution.

Thus the apparent reason for the closure is ASAM's inability to diversify its resources as it has continued to rely on a single entity for its income.

But the problem is much deeper: ASAM could not survive because it modeled itself according to Cold War conditions and logic despite the fact that it was established well after the end of the Cold War in 1999. The founders did not have any formal education in international relations and were incapable of accurately comprehending the developments taking place in the world. Their notion of international politics was narrow-minded and outdated, sticking merely to the old notion of power politics, in which "hard power" is treated as the sole element of global politics.

Sponsored by a private company, but standing tightly by the state, particularly the General Staff, ASAM did not mind being seen as an extension of the state. On the contrary, its representatives were proud to claim they were speaking on behalf of the state even when this was not the case. It was an organization exaggerating its connection with the state, expecting to generate power and prestige out of this connection. It was not an independent and neutral institution and was never taken as such.

Led by ultranationalists, the institution was blinded to the realities of the globalized world. Serving as a gathering place for ultranationalist ex-officers and academics, ASAM never hid its advocacy for aggressive, and in the case of northern Iraq, expansionist foreign policy. It was also a "fan club for retired officers," as put forward by a senior diplomat.

ASAM was used as an institution for "psychological operations" in both domestic and foreign affairs. Its ultimate function was to securitize issues related to Turkish domestic and foreign policy areas. As such, it justified and reproduced militarism in Turkey with an authoritarian outlook in domestic politics and a militant foreign policy.

Its first chairman, Ümit Özdağ, turned out to be a contender for the leadership of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). He repeatedly called on nationalist youth to take to the streets in a stand against Kurdish demands and the American policies in the region. He was the person whom the "deep state" wanted to see as the leader of the MHP since its current leader opposed the usage of nationalist youth in the street struggle as had occurred in the 1970s.

Another chairman of ASAM was the late Gündüz Aktan, who was the ideologue of a form of neo-nationalism known as Ulusalcılık. He even wrote that mass deportation of the Kurds, which is nearly ethnic cleansing, may be carried out if the need emerges. He was eventually elected to Parliament as an MHP deputy.

ASAM certainly set an example for the think tank community in Turkey, a bad example. It not only polluted strategic thinking in Turkey but also presented its poverty. Think tanks that try to imitate ASAM will share the same fate: being shut down.

Yes, it had resources, thanks to Ülker Holding, which provided them with millions of dollars that were used to hire researchers and monitor and report foreign developments. But all these resulted in an "information dustbin" instead of deep analytical knowledge. This was because the top executives were looking not for informed analysis but for ideologically inspired prescriptions laying the groundwork for aggressive foreign policies.

Just to display how the logic of ASAM worked over the years, it is sufficient to recall the latest prescription of its founding chairman, Özdağ, who said: "[Iraqi Kurdish leader] Massoud Barzani must be made a friend of Turkey even if it requires using force!" This is the logic, vision, wisdom and the analytical creativity on which ASAM's "reports" are mostly based.

ASAM not only polluted strategic thinking in Turkey but also presented its poverty.

They will be remembered for their so-called experts who, appearing on TV screens just before the occupation of Iraq by US forces, predicted that it would take a long time to defeat the Iraqi military and that Saddam's elite troops would put up long-term resistance. The strategists of ASAM were a joke!

08 December 2008

What ‘Mustafa’ tells us about Kemalism

A documentary on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk by Can Dündar shed light on the mindset of the Kemalists. It has become clear once more that they live in an imaginary world where historical facts and social and political realities of the country do not matter.
What is more worrisome is their ceaseless efforts to turn the country into what they have in their mind: a society homogenized and disciplined by the state apparatus controlled by a bunch of Kemalists. To enable this, they envisage a country isolated from the rest of the world -- and especially from the West.
Kemalism for them is nothing but a dogma with its myths that include a particular narrative about Atatürk. Portraying Atatürk as a normal human being, as Dündar did in his documentary, amounts to blasphemy for the "faithful." Atatürk is not a historical figure for them but a sacrosanct person, a cult figure. So a simple quest for historical facts is attacked by the Kemalists as an assault on Atatürk's personality.
What happened to the documentary "Mustafa" is a case of how ideological dogmatism blinds the Kemalists and closes any free debate about Turkey's recent history. What the Kemalists did to Dündar is an indicator that it is almost impossible to discuss Turkey's recent history. The Kemalists not only try to block Turkey's march toward democratization, Europeanization and a free market economy, but also block it from facing up to its history. They think of themselves as the ultimate veto power.
In so doing, they do not take the realities of the country into account. What a big irony, for the man they adore was a perfect example of pragmatism in politics. From the moment Mustafa Kemal arrived in Anatolia in 1919 to the end of his struggle, he pursued a policy enabling him to mobilize all segments of society and win over their support. He appealed to devout Muslims, to the Kurds, to the pro-Soviet socialists and even to the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
It is a pity that contemporary Kemalists are far more backward than their leader who lived almost a century ago.
The contemporary Kemalists are not tolerant of different ideas and identities. Even moderate Kemalists, like Dündar, have become targets of their assault, no matter what they did previously. A "deviation" from the true path of Kemalism as perceived by the vanguards deserves an incommunicado. Those who deviate from the true path are accused of heresy, not treason, because what they have on their mind as Kemalism is more than an ideology, it is a faith.
The debate over "Mustafa" once more proves that Turkey's new reactionaries are the Kemalists -- the most dogmatic political formation, unwilling to allow free debate on any issue. Their primary concern is to keep the myths of Kemalist dogma untouched, unaware that in this age such a dogma is doomed to become passé.
01 December 2008, Monday