Mr. Bonner is a former foreign correspondent and television writer/ producer. He has published seven books, including three on Protestantism.
The wide and deep implications of the European Union’s decision to begin membership negotiations with Turkey are further evidence (if such be needed) that there is no end to history. In 1952, West Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Luxemburg, envisioning a postwar world of reconciliation and cooperation, formed the European Coal and Steel Union. It expanded to 12 members in 1957 and became the European Economic Community (EEC). Two years later, Turkey applied for membership, with no result. In 1992, the EEC metamorphosed into the 15-member European Union (EU), continuing a paradigm shift in the understanding of its cultures and societies. Now the shift is reaching a double fulfillment as leaders of the EU, grown to 25 members, open its door to a nation whose population is 98percent Muslim.
It is a bold act of statesmanship. At a news conference at the end of the negotiations, French President Jacques Chirac, whose voters strongly oppose the union, said: “If we take Turkey’s current history and culture as criteria, I believe that the Turkey-EU marriage will happen.” But not soon; he added that membership was not possible before 2014, at the earliest, and could stretch for 15 years.
In Denmark, where a Gallup poll showed 49 percent of those questioned opposed the union, someone draped a black burqa, which some Muslim women use to cover themselves from head to foot, over the bronze statue of a naked mermaid sitting on a rock on the seafront in downtown Copenhagen and hung a sign over the base reading: “Turkey in the EU?”
During last-minute negotiations in Brussels, the EU leaders brushed aside a demand, strongly favored by Austria, for a “privileged” partnership, somewhat less than full membership but higher than just a partnership status. They also shelved proposals to impose permanent restrictions on Turkish laborers and agricultural products. But the talks almost failed when Cyprus, which has been divided between Turkish and Greek communities since 1974, threatened to vote against Turkey.
Last April, with the strong backing of Turkey, the Turkish Cypriots voted in favor of a UN blueprint aimed at reuniting the island under a federal umbrella. Greek Cypriots voted against it but nevertheless joined the EU in May. A negative vote by Cyprus would have amounted to a decisive veto. The position of the EU leadership was clear: Turkey could not be accepted if it did not recognize all existing members, including Cyprus. Turkey had refused, arguing that the Greek Cypriots must first accept some version of the UN blueprint. The talks, chaired by the EU’s term president, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, went on far into the next morning, with Balkenende insisting that Turkey accept the Cyprus Greeks. At one point, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, raised his voice, saying to Balkenende: “You prefer 600,000 Greeks above 70 million Turks. You really do not understand us.” He added, “We cannot go on negotiating under these conditions.” He stood up and moved towards the door but was stopped by the arrival of Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. In the lobby of the Conrad Hotel, where the Turkish delegation was staying, there were rumors among waiting news people that Erdogan might leave the table at any time and had asked aides to “prepare the plane.”
His walkout threat had the desired effect. The EU delegation conferred, and Balkenende proposed that, sometime before the October 3 start of the membership negotiations, Turkey approve an enlarged customs-union agreement with the most recent ten members, one of which is Cyprus. This could be seen as either a tacit recognition of Cyprus (the Cyprus view) or a meaningless formality (the Turkish view.). The question of formal diplomatic recognition could be made part of the long years of membership negotiations. The Turks, mumbling about Cyprus blackmail, accepted the proposal and later returned to Ankara, where they were greeted with flowers and cheers by thousands of supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party.
Foreign Minister Gul was quick to answer charges by opposition leaders that the negotiation date was granted in exchange for recognition of Greek Cyprus. He explained:
Our government has acted very cautiously to prevent even an indirect recognition. The document we will be signing is a protocol documenting the Customs Union operations and its context for the EU and Turkey. This protocol will be signed with the EU commission, which will represent the 25 members of the EU. Representatives of the Greek Cypriot administration that we do not recognize will not be sitting in front of us.
In response to a question, he confirmed that the leaders of the Turkish delegation were prepared to leave if Balkenende insisted on recognition for the Greek Cypriots. He said the delegation had brought a small plane and had told the EU delegation, “We were prepared to use it.” But Gul also said, without elaboration, that “efforts to ensure that the Cyprus issue gets a lasting solution . . . were already under way.” This seemed to confirm reports in Greek Cypriot newspapers of plans for a new round of talks with the support of the EU. Reacting to these reports, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who sat in on the Brussels talks, said his good offices were available whenever the parties were ready to return to the table.1
All this temporarily overshadowed the greatest question of all: Is Turkey ready for European-style democracy? It has rival political parties and the panoply of print, radio and video media, but are its elections open to all who meet minimal qualifications? Does its parliament control taxes and spending with transparent accountability? Is there a separation of powers with limitations on the executive and the military? Does everyone have full rights of speech, religion, assembly and freedom from arbitrary arrest? Is there legal and real equality, regardless of ethnicity, creed or sex? Turkey must be given a failing grade on all these counts.
The EU is aware of the difficulties ahead. As far back as 1963, the “Ankara Agreement” that united Turkey and the then-EEC in a customs union foresaw eventual full membership. Thus, the Europeans have rubbed elbows with Turkey’s troubled past and troubled economy for more than 40 years. The experience of European, Latin American and Pacific Rim nations is that democracy sprouts from two or more failed experiments. This is also true of imported democracy. The function of outside help is not to plant democracy but to galvanize and guide latent impulses for political and economic reform.
In effect, the EU will run a school for democracy, using as a text an 80,000-page document known as the Acquis Communautaire. It consists of 31 sections:
(1) Free circulation of goods, (2) Free circulation of individuals, (3) Freedom to provide services, (4) Free circulation of capital, (5) Corporate law, (6) Competition,
(7) Agriculture, (8) Fishing, (9) Transportation policy, (10) Taxation, (11) Economic and financial union, (12) Statistics, (13) Social affairs, (14) Energy, (15) Industrial policy, (16) Small or medium-size enterprises, (17) Science and research, (18) Education and teaching, (19) Telecommunications, (20) Culture and audio-visual policy, (21) Regional policies and coordination, (22) Environment, (23) Consumer protection and health insurance, (24) Justice and internal affairs, (25) Customs union, (26) Foreign affairs, (27) Common foreign and security policy, (28) Financial control, (29) Financing and budget conditions, (30) Institutions and (31) Other matters.
First, Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner for enlargement, will prepare a framework during which Turkey and the EU will compare their views of the Acquis to identify priority areas, selecting less complicated parts, like scientific cooperation, to begin with. Meanwhile, Turkey will select a chief and team to carry out the negotiations. During the actual negotiations, teachers will be prepared to rap knuckles, since the EU retains the right to call a sudden halt should Turkey’s leaders attempt something unilaterally. Thus beginning negotiations does not guarantee membership. But there will be carrots with the stick. Benefits will flow as soon as negotiations start. For instance, later this year more than 1,000 Turkish students will begin to study abroad under the EU’s Erasmus program for student exchange. By 2010, their numbers will increase to 42,000.
These and other measures to improve health, education and communications and to modernize agriculture will be costly. This year Turkey will receive 300 million euros in aid from the EU. The amount will increase to one billion euros in 2006 as adaptation projects accelerate. By 2007, the amount will have grown to two billion euros depending on the number of projects added.2 Leadership, especially if one objective is to achieve parity with the United States, does not come cheap.
Islam and Democracy
Europe was never defined simply by geography. It began as a cultural construct of Athenian philosophy and literature and Roman frontiers and legal systems. It was reconceived during the Renaissance and Enlightenment as the home of science and rationality. Politically, however, it remained a conglomerate of warring states. What gave it unity was the ideal of Christendom as challenged by the rise and expansion of Islam. The entity was Europe-contra-Islam. The Prophet Muhammad became the incarnation of the Antichrist or God’s scourge, while Turkish hordes were depicted as burning, plundering and massacring.
Memories of the Crusades from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries faded but never disappeared. The allied landing at Gallipoli in World War I was termed a crusade. Soon after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, President George W. Bush spoke on television of a “crusade” against terrorism. His aides, realizing this implied a war against all Muslims, quickly tried to obfuscate.
Islam became the binary opposite of Western civilization. Voltaire was the first Enlightenment intellectual to “fasten on Islam as a symbol of fanaticism, anti-humanism and the will to power.”3 Hegel and Marx acknowledged that European monarchies depended upon class inequalities but insisted that they ruled in accordance with formal laws and customs while, under “Oriental” despotism, people were slaves to a monarch’s arbitrary whims.
Democracy and secularism (defined narrowly as the separation of religion from the state) were seen as impossible within Islam. Elie Kedourie, once regarded as an astute commentator on the Middle East, wrote: “There is nothing in the political
traditions of the Arab world, which are the political traditions of Islam, that might make familiar, or indeed intelligible, the organizing ideas of constitutional and representative government”4
He was wrong: The Arabs are a small part of the Muslim world and have had little political influence beyond their linguistic frontiers. The Ottoman Empire experimented with constitutional government as early as 1876 and revived the experiment in 1908. In direct imitation, Iran formed a constitutional government in 1909. That these experiments failed is beside the point. The issue is a familiarity, even a longing, for democratic government.
There is ample evidence in all cultures that worldly and other-worldly impulses can exist simultaneously. The political usages of Christianity during the anticolonial struggles of Ireland and Poland were not confused with the spiritual substance of Roman Catholicism. More to our point, Ireland and Poland demonstrated that, in societies suffused with religion, major political decisions must receive religious ratification to win popular acceptance. This was similarly evinced in the early American democracy that so amazed Alexis de Tocqueville.
The Arabs’ failure to develop functioning democratic governments is a reflection not of their religion but of their heritage as colonial constructs. They lack “stateness.” They are agglomerations of clans, sects and regions under autocratic governance.5 For this reason, America’s attempts to implant democracy in a severely divided Iraq, with no history of a common citizenship and no experience of universal equality, seem doomed. The same absence of stateness applies to Pakistan, the world’s fourth most populous Muslim nation. The Punjab in the north, the Sindh in the south, and Baluchistan in the west were separate states for hundreds of years until nominally joined by the British. They still speak separate languages. Further, their Sunnis and Shias constantly clash and kill. In sharp contrast, homogenous Bangladesh, once joined in a Muslim union with what was called West Pakistan, and which then struggled through the aftermath of a devastating war of independence in the 1970s, has developed into a flourishing democracy.
Indonesia is further evidence that Islam and secular democracy are not inevitably incompatible. It is the fourth most populous nation (240 million) and has the world’s largest Muslim population.
After Indonesians in 1998 broke the autocratic grip of former president Suharto, participatory democracy did not easily take root, beset by repeated separatist and religious violence. Two years ago, terrorists set off a bomb in a Bali nightclub, killing 200 people. There were further terrorist explosions, but without a loss of lives, in September and October 2004, but most of the nation remained peaceful. In that same year, the nation held its first direct presidential elections and retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono defeated incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri on a pledge to revive the economy, eradicate graft and defeat terrorists.
Robert Hefner of Boston University cites Indonesia as an example of a “civil Islam that involves autonomous individuals and democracy more than markets and the state.” He writes:
Civil Islam is an emergent and highly unfinished tradition associated with a broad assortment of social movements. One of its most consistent themes . . . is the claim that the modern ideals of equality, freedom and democracy are not uniquely Western values but modern necessities compatible with, and even required by, Muslim ideals.6
Participatory democracy did not come easily when modern Turkey arose from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. To quote Professor Dogu Ergil of Ankara University, the Republic that Kemal Ataturk and a small circle of serving and retired military officers established in 1923 “was created . . . to make the new regime national and secular, which would legitimize their position as the new ruling elite.” They believed they were “charged with the mission of breaking with the past and creating a new Western-oriented nation. In so doing they created a hegemonic … regime that, ironically, ignored Western values of legality and freedom.”7 Their putative descendants claim to be defending Ataturk’s exceptionalist legacy. He once said: “Turkey does not resemble a democracy, does not resemble socialism, and does not resemble anything! Gentlemen, we must be proud not to resemble them because we resemble ourselves.”8
He recognized two “problems.” One was Islam, which he accused of fostering backwardness. Ataturk did not to try to suppress Islam but did insist that it be kept under tight government control. The other was the Kurds. He had just fought to save Turkey from European powers that favored, among other things, the establishment of separate Kurdish and Armenian states. The Kurds (anticipating Orwellian newspeak) were reclassified as “Mountain Turks” and evidence to the contrary was to be erased. The project was pursued so vigorously that when an Australian scholar examined the Turkish translation for the Leyden Encyclopedia of Islam (meant for use in Turkish schools), he discovered that a section on Kurdish nationalism had been omitted.9
The democratic impulses that the EU might galvanize first appeared during the Tanzimat (Auspicious Reorderings) Era beginning in 1839. Elites calling themselves “New Turks” dissected Durkheim, Bergson and Comte as they visited Paris and London to study European ways and institutions. They returned with democratic concepts that became elements of a constitution proclaimed in 1876. Turkey, however, was still under an autocratic sultan, who abrogated the constitution two years later. With the sultan’s spies everywhere, many conspicuous in frock coats and fezes sought safety in Paris, where newspapers labeled them “Young Turks.” In time they metamorphosed from talkers into revolutionaries and, aided by dissident military officers such as Kemal Ataturk, seized the reins of government in 1908 and reinstated the 1876 constitution.
The first “liberated” Turkish woman was Halidé Edip (1884-1964), the daughter of a high-ranking family and a graduate of Istanbul’s American University for Women. She contributed a column on women’s affairs to the instantly successful newspaper Tanine (Dawn) and went on to become the most widely read Turkish novelist of her era. After a sharp disagreement with Ataturk, she migrated to New York, where she published the first volume of her memoirs in 1926. She recalled the days of the revolution:
The words “equality, liberty, justice, and fraternity” sounded most strange. Fraternity was added on account of the Christians. . . . On the bridge [across the Golden Horn] there was a sea of men and women all cockaded in red and white, flowing like a vast human tide from one side to the other. The tradition of centuries seemed to have lost its effect. . . . Men and women in a common wave of enthusiasm moved on, radiating something extraordinary, laughing, weeping in such intense emotion that human deficiency and ugliness were for the time completely obliterated. 10
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the struggle of Kemal Ataturk to create a new nation made autocracy inevitable. Ataturk tried to replace popular Islam with a rigid secularism. It was, according to John Esposito, “. . . based not simply on a belief in the separation of religion and the state but an anti-religious secular ideology/belief system which was as rigid, militant and intolerant as it claimed ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was.”11
Ataturk also closed the Sufi brotherhoods and limited political expression to a single political party of his making. When the ban was lifted after World War II, the Democrat party of Adnan Menderes swept to victory in 1950. Menderes restored the call to prayer in Arabic and repaired or rebuilt thousands of mosques, but the practice of democracy was amateurish.
Politicians vied for choice ministries as a source of power and profit while, on the assembly floor, they exchanged insults rather than reasoned debate. For parliamentary government to succeed, participants must recognize one another’s legitimacy and bona fides. Constant boycotts and walkouts indicated that Turkish politicians did not comprehend this.12
Triggered by the breakdown of political civility, violence spread to the streets. The military seized power in 1960 (to public and media applause) and appointed a commission that remained in power for a little more than a year while writing a new constitution. A renewal of violence on the streets was an invitation for the military to intervene again in 1971. New elections in 1973 did not bring a public consensus.
Violence increased. When, in 1980, the military intervened for the third time, the Army’s chief of staff reported that terrorism in the previous 18 months had resulted in 5,241 dead and 14,152 injured. Mayors and local councilors suspected of extremism were dismissed and political parties were closed down and later abolished.
During the next four years, 177,565 persons were arrested, 64,505 detained, 41,727 sentenced to various prison terms and 326 sentenced to death (15 were executed).13
Part of the street violence was traced to jihadists, who sprouted like weeds. In October 1991, Turkish intelligence assembled a list of such groups: Turkish Islamic Liberation Army, Turkish Islamic Liberation Front, Fighters of the Islamic Revolution, Turkish Islamic Liberation Union, World Sharia Liberation Army, Universal Brotherhood Front-Sharia Revenge Squad, Islamic Liberation Party Front, Turkish Fighters of the Universal Islamic War of Liberation, Turkish Islamic Fighters Army and Turkish Sharia Revenge Commandos.14 One of the deadliest, calling itself Islamic Jihad, did not make this list; yet, in the 1980s, it had carried out a series of assassinations of Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi diplomats and, in October 1991, took responsibility for killing an American sergeant and wounding an Egyptian diplomat to protest the Middle East peace conference in Madrid.15
It is significant that, unlike in Arab lands, this was street violence and not directed against state institutions because, by then, aspirations for religious freedom had already become part of the political system. In January 1970, Necmettin Erbakan, a civil engineer by profession, formed the National Order party as a response to Marxist challenges in the universities. When the military seized power in 1971, his party was closed down as “anti-secular,” but a year later it was reborn as the National Salvation party.
Under his leadership, from 1974 to 1977, the party joined three successive coalition governments, and several times Erbakan served as deputy prime minister.
Following the 1980 coup, Erbakan was imprisoned on the usual charge of acting against secularism. A year later, he was tried, acquitted and released but banned from politics. In 1983, his followers reorganized as the Refah (Welfare) party based on independence from the West and closer relations with the other Muslim nations. In 1987, Erbakan was allowed to assume Refah leadership, and, in general elections three years later, a coalition of Refah and two smaller parties gained enough votes to enter parliament.
Of greater importance, in local elections a year later, Refah candidates captured 28 out of 76 provincial districts, including the nation’s two most outwardly secular cities, Istanbul and Ankara, along with 29 other major cities and 400 smaller towns. This put two-thirds of the country’s population under municipal governments run by avowed Muslims. The new mayor of Istanbul was Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
For the first time in the history of the republic, the inaugural session of the Istanbul city council commenced with a reading from the Quran rather than with the Turkish national anthem. Grandly, Erdogan announced plans to build a mosque and Muslim cultural center in Taksim, the city’s gaudy Times Square of bars, theater and fairly obvious prostitution. It never happened. With greater practicality, Erdogan improved public transportation and the water supply, had flowers planted along the streets, and opened disused Ottoman palaces and their gardens for family gatherings and meals.
In elections in December 1995, Erbakan’s Welfare party gained 21 percent of the votes. When a coalition government failed (it had been formed specifically to keep him out of power), Erbakan became the first “Islamist” prime minister. He demanded that Israel withdraw from the Golan Heights and explained his opposition to joining the European Union by reasoning that Turkey would thereby become a mere province of Israel. He further reasoned that the United Nations was a Zionist organization because one of its first acts was to create the state of Israel. (And yet, he signed a landmark military cooperation agreement with Israel).16 Over a period of four months, he visited some of the most intransigent of Muslim states, including Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and Libya. In front of 50 Turkish journalists, he was condemned by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar Qadhafi, for Turkey’s association with NATO and Israel and the suppression of Kurdish rebels. The military suffered his antics for 18 months, until February 1997. Prosecutors, judges, academics, journalists, businessmen and others were called to General Staff headquarters for “briefings” on the dangers posed by Erbakan. On February 28, Erbakan was presented with a “memorandum” containing 18 demands, including
the expulsion of 141 officers regarded as holding “Islamic” sympathies and the purging of 20 others as “leftists” or favoring the Kurds. He agreed but was later dismissed from office. The military had so entrenched itself that an elected government could be sent away merely with a memorandum.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
As if to complete the process, in 1998, Tayyip Erdogan was dismissed as mayor of Istanbul on the desperate justification of “inciting religious hatred” by reading from a poem composed by the early Turkish sociologist, Zia Gokalp (1876-1924). The words appeared in many school text books: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes are our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets, and the faithful believers are our warriors.” Erdogan was tried and sentenced to prison for ten months. Think of it: Going to jail for a jejune metaphor, and one reminiscent of Christianity. Paul wrote: “Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the Gospel of peace.” He goes on to speak of the “shield of faith” and “the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:14-17).
Erdogan was born in Istanbul in 1954 but spent his early childhood at his family’s ancestral village of Rize on the Black Sea coast. After education in an Imam-Hatip school (they were originally designed to teach prayer leaders and mosque superintendents), he returned to Istanbul, where his father was a civil servant. He received a degree in management from Marmara University and there became a protégé of Necmettin Erbakan, serving on the front lines of the anti-communist street struggles of the National Salvation party during the 1970s. Upon graduation, he played semiprofessional soccer and worked for the city’s municipal transport company. He performed his mandatory military service in 1982 as a commissioned officer. In 1985, after the Salvation party was banned and metamorphosed as the Refah party, he became its chairman in Istanbul and later campaigned successfully for mayor of Istanbul on his working-class credentials, saying: “I am the voice of the silent majority. I speak for those who can’t.”
With a spirit of social equality learned in a city slum (as a boy he sold sesame buns on the streets to help his family), with an ease before huge crowds learned on the soccer fields, with the confidence gained as a successful mayor, and with his piety demonstrated by outlawing the sale of alcohol in public places and banning billboards of women in swimsuits, Erdogan became the most popular politician in modern Turkish history. When news spread of the charges against him, an estimated 5,000 supporters gathered outside his office, paralyzing the already chaotic Istanbul traffic for about two hours. When he was sentenced, many followed his transport to jail, some displaying banners on their cars that read “This Love Affair Won’t End.” Some maintained vigils outside his prison for the four months of his reduced term. Even larger crowds greeted his release.
By then, his young supporters had split with the Refah party to form the Justice and Development Party (AKP in its Turkish initials). In 2002, the party won what is termed a “sweeping” victory but on close examination was less so. With a 10percent proportional-representation hurdle (twice as high as the norm in Europe), almost 16 million votes, or about 45 percent of those cast, were tossed aside because they were for parties that fell short of the minimum. This allowed the AKP, with only one-third of the votes, to secure two-thirds of the seats in parliament.
When Erdogan, after some delay, became prime minister, he solicited interviews. In one, he rejected the term “Islamic party” saying: “We see our religion as flawless, whereas the party can make mistakes.” On another occasion, he explained that his party was not Islamic, but “pro-religious-freedom. . . . Turks of every religion must be able to exercise their faith, as well as other basic individual liberties. We are for democracy, secularism, justice and social welfare. We want to strengthen the constitutional system, not to destroy it.”
Muslims might hear these words as a repudiation of the Sharia, the unwritten and often contradictory codes designed to regulate the conduct of Muslims in their beliefs and ritual practices and also in matters of custom and law. Conversely, Erdogan was advocating governance by an elected parliament with a written constitution. Even more significant was his acceptance of secularism. Globally, generations of Muslim leaders have rejected secularism as bordering on atheism and embodying all the perceived evils of “Western” societies. Just a few years earlier, Erdogan himself had maintained, “You cannot be secular and a Muslim at the same time.” After taking office, when a reporter asked about that statement, he replied, “Islam is a religion. Secularism is just a style of management.”
There were allegations that Erdogan was intent on destroying the legacy of Kemal Ataturk. As the statues and busts of Ataturk in every park and square throughout Turkey testify (as does his picture on every denomination of the nation’s currency), the memory of Ataturk is not to be lightly tampered with. In 2004, during a panel discussion on the sixty-sixth anniversary of Ataturk’s death, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer defined secularism as “the basis of the modernization efforts and the biggest guarantor of Ataturk’s reforms, national unity and social peace.” Erdogan replied that Ataturk “never adhered to a set doctrine or ideology. His worldview was based on common sense.” Erdogan then defined secularism
as a concept with two dimensions. . . . The first dimension separates the state from religion. The second ensures that the state is neutral towards all religions and guarantees that all individuals can practice their religious freedoms. In this context, secularism is the basis of the unity of our nation.
No one should forget that concepts like national sovereignty, the state and secularism developed as democracy and the world evolved.17
The bold statement that secularism, and not Islam, forms the basis of Turkey’s unity is, in substance, revolutionary.
Civil Islam
Islam differs from Christianity mainly in the absence of a “church.” Traditionally, Islam has been led by ulema with varied functions as judges in Sharia courts, lawyers, consultants on religious law (muftis), preachers and administrators of mosques and religious trusts. While thus allowed to determine the norms of social life, the ulema had no say in foreign affairs or even in the personal relations of a ruler to his subordinates. In return for this limited recognition, the ulema gave legitimacy to the regime. As governments modernized, the ulema’s legal and judicial work was assigned to civil institutions. The ease with which this was accomplished is evidence that Islam does not need a class of “priests” but, instead, privileges self instruction. With direct access to God, Muslims may act and organize as the spirit moves them. This, and the piety of frequent prayer and unadorned mosques (except for textual excerpts on the walls), gives Islam a similarity to early Congregational Protestantism.
Turkey’s government-imposed secularism consists of a rigorous state surveillance of religion through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which dates from 1924, following the abolition of the caliphate. The directorate, generally known as Diyanet (Piety) from its name in Turkish, was given legal supervision of mosques and religious schools. It attempts to enforce a rigid Sunni version of the faith, although there are different practices in Islam just as there are divisions and sects in Christianity.
The Kemalist monopoly of religion served to justify attempts to silence and suppress Said Nursi, the most original of modern Turkish religious thinkers. “Bediuzzaman” (Wonder of the Age) Nursi, born 1877, was a Kurd of a Sufi family. He maintained that the traditional tariqa brotherhoods were unfit for a modern age. Analogous to England’s John Wesley more than a century earlier, Nursi taught the union of religion and science. Also, like the pragmatic Wesley, he taught that a realization of the Spirit could be achieved though groups meeting to share sorrows and analogous to the contemporary charismatic movement in Catholic and Protestant congregations. After Nursi died in 1960, the military smashed his tomb and transported his remains to some distant mountain for unmarked burial.
Several years later, the social movement (relatively powerless groups seeking to remedy perceived wrongs without seeking power for themselves) that Nursi’s teachings inspired coalesced around Fetullah Gulen, who began as a conservative civil-service preacher and social organizer and participated tangentially in the anti-communist activities of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But, like Nursi before him, Gulen (using his name this way grates on the ears of his followers for whom he is Efendihodja, or Respected Teacher) takes no part in politics. When asked, in November 2001, if he ever sought to bring religion into the government, he replied: “Not in the slightest and quite on the contrary; I have deemed that to be disrespectful of religion.”18
Since 1999, Gulen, who is seriously ill with blood circulation and heart problems, has lived in the United States. His teachings and the movement’s pragmatic piety are disseminated through about a dozen newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television. Despite his assertion of noninvolvement in politics, Gulen has bestowed his blessings on Tayyip Erdogan. About a year after Erdogan became prime minister, the journalist Nuriye Akman interviewed him on behalf of the Gulen movement’s newspaper, Zaman (Time). She asked him about Erdogan:
He is a straight, well-mannered man.. . . I also think he is a hardworking, courageous and decisive person. I personally praise his performance on the subject of entering the European Union. . . . He will not steal. I recently said that I do not care for politicians that embezzle, but Erdogan does not strike me as one who would engage in such an activity. I could say the same about his close friends. . . . Almighty God has given this opportunity to Mr. Tayyip.
She then asked him about the AKP, which she described as “conservative democrat.”
“Muslims were not enunciating for democracy 15 or 20 years ago,” he replied.
They now must have found the right path. . . . Their democratic efforts on that subject, God knows best, sound kind of sincere to me. . . . There are no drawbacks to blending Islamic traditions and customs with democracy. . . . Let me have the benefits of freedom of thought, freedom of learning, but let me also have another side open to eternity. . . . That means democracy requires a metaphysical dimension.19
One of the few scholarly studies on grass-roots politics in Turkey is Jenny B. White’s 2002 book, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. She defines vernacular as
. . . not simply Islamic populism, but rather a political process available to other parties and purveyors of other ideologies as well. This would require, however, that these parties acknowledge the role of cultural norms in political mobilizing, rather than simply conducting business as usual engaging in top-down campaigning and bidding for local loyalties by establishing themselves as patrons, allying themselves with local patrons who are then expected to deliver the votes of their clients.20
What is “Islamist” about this? She fudges: “What binds people together in the Islamist movement is neither ideology (be it political or religious) nor any particular type of organization. . . . Rather, the movement is rooted in local culture and interpersonal relations, while also drawing on a variety of civic political organizations and ideologies.”21 What she describes in valuable detail is a duplicate of how Tammany Democrats in the mid-1800s captured New York from a white Anglo-Saxon establishment by catering to poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Up-and-coming political parties have done the same everywhere that democracy has become a way of life.
Tayyip Erdogan and others like him captured urban Turkey, not by waving the Quran, but by promising uncorrupted government and by establishing centers to connect possible voters with social services, to find jobs and to supply such things as clothing for the most needy. By terming this “Islamist,” White perpetuates the myth that there can be no democracy in Islam similar to what is that practiced in other countries. At one point she recalled a dialogue with a Refah activist who insisted there was no democracy in Turkey:
I tried not to argue but found myself defending Turkey. “But Turkey is a democracy,” I suggested mildly.
“Being a democracy means the army is under civilian rule,” he replied.
“That isn’t the only criterion.
There are elections here, unlike in many other places in the Middle East.”22
White’s dialogue reflects the fact that, while other cultures seem to be merely copying Western forms, they do not learn how to practice democracy from books. The earliest Anglo-Saxon concepts of equality and liberty evolved through the dialectics of religious struggle. In the mid-seventeenth century, John Locke developed his treatises on the freedom of individual thought and practices in opposition to the prevailing Anglican persecution of Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians and every other form of dissent. He envisioned ethical life within a religious community, characterized by “natural benevolence” and minimal coercion.23 A century later, John Wesley sealed the victory in contests with the still-established Anglican Church. Turkey is learning the practice of democracy through an equivalent dialectical struggle.
A Military Security State
The Ottoman Empire, extending from the Atlantic Ocean to Persia, was destroyed by European colonial powers that manipulated the nationalisms aroused by the French Revolution, beginning with a handful of Greeks who gathered at Missolonghi in the Peloponnesus to proclaim a revolution in 1821. When the empire, in its usual heavy-handed manner, attempted to suppress the revolt, cries were heard protesting the “massacre” of Christians (immortalized in Delacroix’s imagined painting of the killing of Christians on the island of Chios in 1822). When Bulgarian Orthodox Christians began a revolt in 1876, the scent of blood attracted a new breed of foreign correspondent with no knowledge of the history or languages of the area but a sure grasp of how to raise a paper’s circulation. They retailed missionary estimates of as many as 15,000 Christians killed, and a competition began as to who could come up with the greater horrors. Estimates of Christians killed rose to 30,000, and even to 100,000. (The number was probably about 4,000; no one bothered to count Muslim casualties.)
William Gladstone, the Conservative British prime minister who was in an intense competition with his Liberal counterpart, Benjamin Disraeli, made Bulgaria a political issue. He hurriedly composed a tract titled, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. It was published in September 1879 and within the month sold 200,000 copies. He wrote:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves . . . one and all, bag and baggage. . . . They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view.
(The derogation of Islam draws, consciously or subconsciously, on a stock of images and phrases. Gladstone’s “broad line of blood” is one of them. Samuel Huntington first explored the topic of a “clash of civilizations” in an article in Foreign Affairs. In describing the contest, he simplified this to a neater alliteration: “Islam has bloody borders.”24)
At the end of World War I, France, England, Italy, Russia and Greece tried to seize parts of what little remained of the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks cherished the “Megali” concept of unification through the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire. In return for their entry into the war at what proved to be the last minute, they were allowed to occupy Smyrna (now Izmir). They immediately planned a wider conquest. Mustafa Kemal maneuvered to be assigned to command the under-armed forces still intact in Anatolia. Other generals joined him with their units, and every household was ordered to provide underclothing, socks and sandals; clothing shops were required to surrender their supplies, with payment to be made later. Forty percent of food and gasoline were requisitioned along with all transport vehicles and 20 percent of farm animals and carts.
Ataturk dispatched emissaries to Moscow, and military supplies were secretly sent by the Bolsheviks. Getting them to the front was another matter. Halidé Edip quoted Refet Pasha, who was charge of supplies:
We owe our success to the Anatolian peasant women. For hundreds and hundreds of miles they transported the ammunition on carts or on their backs along roadless wastes, protecting the ammunition with the scanty covers with which they covered their babies who accompanied them tied to their backs.25
The Turks stood fast, and the Greeks had to retreat. It took Ataturk a year to re-equip and train his forces. When the offensive was resumed in 1922, the Greeks fled in disorder to Smyrna. The city was liberated on August 30, 1922 (now observed as Victory Day). This was the military’s finest hour; today’s generals will let no one forget their contribution to Turkey’s freedom.
Through the careful selection of cadets for entrance to military schools and their continued indoctrination as they rise in rank, a closed, self-perpetuating caste has evolved. A 1989 survey showed that 22.2 percent of the military cadets were sons of officers, while 22.4 percent were sons of civil servants.26
Slowly ascending the hierarchy according to scheduled promotions determined by his behavior, his ideas and his marks, the Turkish officer is already deeply entrenched in a world apart, isolated from ordinary civilians, both physically and socially. While his pay differs little from the salary of a civil servant of a comparable rank, the Turkish officer . . . lives in superior housing, clean and well maintained, with gardens, guarded day and night by sentinels, for which he pays a subsidized rent (six to eight times less than normal market rates). All his life unfolds in a special setting, from the American-inspired PX supermarket offering a wide range of goods at cheap prices, to the military hospital, where officers and their families are treated totally free of charge. . . . He meets his colleagues and their families in a pleasant [house] surrounded by greenery, and again at a price defying competition. Civilians are not admitted, except for the direct members of an officer’s family. . . . It is not unusual for members of the military in a variety of countries to enjoy special privileges but the treatment of officers in Turkey is exceptional.27
No isolation can be total. In the February 1997 “coup by memorandum,” 141 officers suspected of having Muslim sympathies were dismissed. As recently as August 2004, the military fired 12 officers for similar reasons.
As seen by the selection of candidates from sons of both officers and civil servants, it is misleading to speak simply of a “military elite” or a “military seizure of power.” Bureaucratic and military elites sit comfortably side by side. When confronted by politicians or dissidents of any ilk, they stand to form a phalanx.
Dogu Ergil, who has written over 20 books on the politics and sociology of modernization, describes this as an
. . . inner state, which is the bureaucratic wing of the establishment [that] is primarily controlled by the army. It works together with the political wing to preserve the status quo. Any substantive change to the status quo must be endorsed by the inner state.
. . . When national identity is not a construct negotiated by the citizens of [a] nation, it creates problems for neglected and excluded groups that can escalate into perceived security threats by the hypersensitive state. Exaggerated security consciousness can often lead to authoritarian policies that prevent the system from becoming fully democratic and pluralistic.28
The 1960 coup taught elites that they had to devise less confrontational methods than the dismissal of an elected government. They developed the subterfuge of the National Security Council as an “advisory” on vague “security” issues. After the 1980 coup, an even stronger NSC was devised, consisting of the prime minister; the chief of the general staff; the ministers of national defense, internal affairs and foreign affairs; the commanders in chief of the army, navy and air force; and the general commander of the gendarmerie – under the chairmanship of a general secretary. It would submit “recommendations on the formulation, establishment, and implementation of the national security policy of the state” to the Council of Ministers, which “should give priority consideration” to these recommendations.29spokesman was issued saying
This involved more than issues of security. The fingerprints of the military were everywhere, including the selection of candidates for prime minister or the presidency. In April 2000, when there was a question of the next presidential candidate, the media speculated that the military did not want to get involved. A statement from an otherwise unidentified spokesman was issued sayingit was “unthinkable for the Turkish Armed Forces not to have an opinion.” The statement added: “The Armed Forces has certain thoughts on the principles and desired qualities of, for example, the person who will be president. Such thoughts are conveyed to the parties concerned when deemed necessary.”30
In mid-August 2004, a civilian, Mehmet Yigit Alpogan, was named as the NSC’s secretary-general, replacing the latest in a long line of generals who traditionally have occupied this highest post. A front-page headline in the English-language Turkish Daily News proclaimed this as the start of a “new era.” Was it? Alpogan was the son of a famous general. He had previously served
as ambassador to Greece. In fact, he had served his entire working life in the diplomatic corps, isolated from everyday society. He was a product of the military/bureaucratic caste that had ruled Turkey for more than 40 years. There will be a new era only after, under EU guidance, a new constitution is adopted to separate the military and civil administrations and to make them subject to an elected parliament.
The greatest failure of the military security state is that it has not lifted most of the people from a hand-to-mouth existence. The U.N. 2004 Human Development Report (which uses such criteria as a long and healthy life, the standard of living and education levels) ranked Turkey eighty-eighth among 177 nations. It said the bottom 10 percent of society receives 2.3 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent gets 30.7 percent. Further, it reported that 20 percent of women
are totally illiterate, with women representing only 4.4 percent of the membership of parliament and just 7 percent of the professions as a whole.
The official unemployment rate is about 10 percent, but this ignores disguised unemployment among the 35 percent of the population that depends on marginal farms of fewer than 12 acres for their subsistence. A November 2004 study by the Morgan Stanley international investment bank estimated an unofficial rate of unemployment of 19.5 percent.31 Turkey faces the additional challenge of finding jobs for the 700,000 to 800,000 who enter the workforce every year.
The Human Development Report ranked education in Turkey behind all European and a majority of Latin American and Asian countries. In the Middle East, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Palestine were listed as superior.
There is compulsory education only through the eighth grade, with an additional three years of voluntary secondary school. “Compulsory” is a misnomer. There is no enforcement, particularly for girls, so that the average period of education is about 3.3 years. That compares to an average of 11 years in the European Union.32 This is attributed, among other things, to classrooms with 50 to 60 students, locked computer rooms and teachers with no technological training.33 However, help is on the way. A statement issued by the Education Ministry in August 2004 cited a project, aided by the Intel Corporation, which has given computer training to 10,500 teachers, with a goal of establishing Internet links in 43,000 schools by the end of 2006. Already, universities have been told that elementary school teachers will not be accepted without computer certification.
There must be a caveat. A 180-page report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that “a new institutional framework for monetary and fiscal policies as well as for product, labor and financial markets, infrastructure industries . . . has opened a window of opportunity to escape the three traps of low confidence, weak governance and high informality.” The report added that everything depended on “fully implementing and completing the new policy framework.” It called on Turkey to improve spending controls, revamp its tax system and rein in a massive black market that “currently accounts for more than half of all jobs.”34
With half the nation’s payroll off the books, how believable are official statistics? That is for the EU to discover as it pokes and prods the 31 issues of the negotiating agenda. It will certainly examine Turkey’s inflated bureaucracy. The ancient city of Bodrum has the largest yacht marina on Turkey’s South Aegean coast. It was carved out of a swamp. Jefi Kamhi, the manager of the marina, told a reporter that it took seven years just to obtain permission to begin work and another three years to complete it. He said the process required the signatures of 12,208 bureaucrats in 17 ministries and related institutions.35
The Kurds
The European Union has estimated there are about 20 million Kurds in Turkey. That is high – more than one-third of the population. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty that ended World War I included a recommendation for Kurdish self-rule, but political demands for recognition of a Kurdish identity did not arise until the emergence of a college-educated generation in the mid1960s. There are two approaches to what happened next: violent and non-violent. For the sake of clarity, it is best to deal with them separately.
In 1978, Abdullah Ocalan, a 28-yearold social-sciences dropout from Ankara University, created the Kurdistan Workers Party (known by its Kurdish initials, PKK). He disappeared to avoid the wholesale arrests of the 1980 coup. He first showed his hand in August 1984, when PKK militants seized towns in eastern Turkey and proclaimed the goal of a separate state. Ocalan was not among them, remaining out of sight as their theorist and commander. Eventually, about 250,000 troops were massed against the PKK, but the primary tactic was copied from America’s war in Vietnam: extensive village clearances to deny the enemy a base. Some men were persuaded to remain as village guards and were given weapons, American Motorola radios and a salary equivalent to $250 a month, far more than they could hope to earn as farmers or shepherds.36
Between 1990 and 1997, 3,211 villages were evacuated, displacing more than three million men, women and children to cities within the southeast or hundreds of miles away in western Turkey. This was not done by some foreign power, as in Vietnam, but by a government against its own (if only nominal) citizens on its own soil – a governance that disallowed dialogue and sent to jail those few who managed to get elected to the national assembly specifically to use it as a forum for debate.
The PKK fighters were driven high into the mountains or across the borders into Greece, Iran or Syria. In March 1987, Ocalan ordered that villages be attacked and burned to “liquidate” anyone who might sympathize with the Ankara government.
He specifically identified the education system as a means to assimilate Kurds; therefore, teachers were killed and their schools burned down. Village guards were also killed along with their women and children. According to an official report, between 1984 and 1996 about 23,000 individuals had been killed in the conflict, including 13,878 PKK members, 4,310 civilians and 2,917 government soldiers.37
Although the conflict came to an end in that year, the number of casualties is now stated, without documentation, at 30,000. Ocalan’s career ended when Syria, under the threat of direct intervention by the Turkish military, signed an agreement in October 1998 to stop giving the PKK military, logistical and financial support of any kind. In early November, Ocalan was put on a plane for Moscow, where he asked for political asylum. 38 The Russians sent him to Rome, where he was held under a loose form of house arrest as the Italian government pondered his request for asylum. So great had his mystique grown that, when Turkey demanded his extradition, there were cries from almost every nation in Europe protesting that he would face the death penalty. No country was willing to take him. Sympathizers spirited him to Greece and then to Kenya, where he holed up in the Greek ambassador’s Nairobi villa. It happened that the city was crawling with American agents investigating the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi. The activity in the Greek embassy attracted their attention and the secret was out. It’s not certain how, but, in January 1999, Ocalan was persuaded to leave the sanctuary and was seized by men who poured out of waiting vehicles. He was bound, blindfolded and shuffled into a Turkish military plane to be ferried to a prison on a remote, rocky island in the Sea of Marmara.
During his trial, it became obvious that he was a smoke-and-rattles Wizard of Oz (though not harmless). He said the idea of rebellion came to him after he was turned down for a Turkish army scholarship because of his “race” and that he had spent time in prison for handing out leftist leaflets. After the formation of the PKK, he moved to safety in Syria and began recruiting men and women for battle. His orders led to the deaths of many thousands and the destruction of facilities vital to the economic recovery of the Kurdish southeast, yet he admitted that he had never seen combat in the entire 14-year struggle. He did not deny the slaughter of whole families, including children, and the targeting of Turkish schoolteachers who had volunteered for service in the southeast to bring education to the children of remote villages. When asked about the repeated accounts of the involvement of PKK supporters and agents in drug trafficking in Europe, he replied that “donations” had been received from traffickers and that some of his members were themselves involved, but he termed drug trafficking “a most serious offence.” In a damning revelation of Greece’s role in promoting rebellion in a neighboring country, Ocalan said that the PKK’s Athens representative had helped to procure most of the group’s heavy weaponry and that there were a number of PKK training camps in Greece. He also said Iran and Cyprus were transit points for PKK weapons. Finally, it became evident during the trial that he knew little Kurdish and spoke entirely in Turkish.
Now for the non-violent side. Educated Kurds were allowed to stand for political office as long as they called themselves Turks. One of them, Serafettin Elçi, was elected as a member of the Democratic Left government of Bulent Ecevit and became minister of public works in 1977.
A year later, he rose in the national assembly to declare himself a Kurd, saying there were other ethnic groups in Turkey besides the Turks. He was dismissed from the assembly but not arrested until the September 1980 coup and then spent two years in prison.
The post-coup general elections of November 1983 brought the Motherland party of Turgut Ozal to power. His grandmother was a Kurd, and he had once sought office as a member of Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation party. He also had links with the Sufi Naqshibendi brotherhood. From the NSC’s point of view, that may have weighed against him as a possible choice to lead the nation, but the country was in another of its perennial economic crises, and Ozal was an economist. As a proponent of free trade and a market economy, he ended statist, inward looking controls. The economy flourished, especially in central Anatolia, where many new entrepreneurs were pietism Muslims who subsidized networks of Muslim oriented newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV stations.
Although he was the first major politician to advocate reconciliation with the Kurds, goodwill did nothing to end the repression. Between October 1990 and October 1998, six pro-Kurdish newspapers were closed. Some that had been closed earlier reopened with new mastheads. One lasted only four months. It was the same with political parties. Kurds first entered
parliament with the Socialist People’s Party (SHP). When Serafettin Elçi came out of the closet and was dismissed, the Democracy Party (DEP) took its place. Successive banning led the creation of the Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP), People’s Labor Party (HEP), People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) and the Free Society Party (apparently, it never coined an acronym).
The most important was the DEP, led by Leyla Zana, who had worked for a human-rights association in Diyarbakir (considered the Kurdish capital). She had also been a correspondent for a Kurdish newspaper and had been arrested and tortured in 1988. The DEP won four parliamentary seats in the 1991 general elections. At the inauguration ceremonies, Ms. Zana wore a neck cloth with the traditional colors of the PKK; three male deputies, Orhan Dogan, Hatip Dicle and Selim Sadak, wore pocket handkerchiefs of the same colors. After the mass oath taking ceremony in Turkish, Leyla Zana added in Kurdish, “I have completed this formality under duress. I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish peoples may live peacefully together in a democratic framework.” There was an uproar. The four deputies were rushed to the assembly garden and from there to prison. Their parliamentary immunities were lifted, but the matter rested until Ozal’s sudden death in 1993.
In a government reshuffle, Ozal was succeeded by Tansu Çiller, Turkey’s first woman prime minister, who promoted herself as the heir to the legacy of Ataturk.39 Preoccupied with an unprecedented inflation that rose to 150 percent in 1995, wiping out savings and causing untold misery for working people, Çiller allowed the military a free hand to deal with the Kurdish “problem.” By the end of 1993, 54 journalists and human-rights activists were in jail on charges of aiding the PKK. That was just the start. In March 1994, the DEP was banned as an alleged front for the PKK, and trials began for Leyla Zana and the three men. They were sentenced to a horrendous 15 years in prison for just a few spoken words.
Next, journalists were targeted. A popular TV anchorman, along with a reporter and cameraman, was arrested for broadcasting interviews with Turkish soldiers without permission. Another television crew was charged with airing a program that “damaged” the army’s image.” By the end of the year, the number of newsmen and political (often Marxist) activists in prison for violating the nation’s anti-terror law had risen to 120.40 As a result, the war was unspoken and unphotographed. Foreign correspondents were tailed even when they walked a peaceful city street in the Kurdish regions. No taxi driver would dare take them close enough even to hear the far-off sound of guns. Further, there are no mass cemeteries to memorialize soldiers who died in battle. PKK combatants were generally “found dead.”
Leyla Zana came to epitomize everything that the EU Parliament felt was wrong about Turkey. In 1996, she was awarded the EU’s prestigious Sakharov human-rights prize. Two years later, with the help of Amnesty International and Kurdish institutes in Washington and Paris, she published Writings from Prison, described by a reviewer as a protest against “a relentless oppressor, an implacable patriarchy that brutally suppresses any voice that dares to diverge from the dominant discourse.”41
The scenario changed when the AKP came to power. The national assembly passed law after law to meet the criteria for acceptance as an EU candidate.
Judicial attitudes also began to change. A lower court ruled there were errors in the convictions of Ms. Zana and the three other DEP deputies. There were difficulties, but eventually they were released after serving 10 years of their 15-year sentences.
With the passing of a series of constitutional amendments to curry favor with the EU, Kurds may now freely speak in their dialects, and there are Kurdish programs on TV and radio. There are also a few schools teaching the Kurdish language, though one organizer has complained there are not enough paying students to offset the costs. This says a lot about the nature of Kurdish complaints.
The language has no value except as a family patois or in song. It will never get anyone a job outside of the Kurdish region. Still, memories rankle and terrorism remains. After Ocalan’s capture in 1999, a PKK remnant lurking in a mountainous corner of the Iraq-Iran frontier announced a cease-fire but, claiming Ocalan was too confined to be consulted, true-believing remnants have resumed action. Leyla Zana and the other released DEP deputies constantly tour the region calling for peace. On the occasion of World Peace Day, September 1, 2004, they held a joint press conference. Zana read a statement: “It is time to say ‘enough’ to the pain, tears, and lamentation. It is of crucial importance that we immediately eliminate the battle grounds . . . and silence our weapons.”42
But who was listening? Earlier in that same week, two family members were killed and five others injured when their truck drove over a mine. Two days later, a freight train was derailed by a PKK mine. On the same day elsewhere, ten soldiers were wounded when their vehicle struck a mine. And just the day before the meeting, eleven PKK members and two soldiers were killed in a clash near the city of Hakkari where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet.
The Kurds desperately need peace and work. For that, they must speak Turkish (with some English or German) to integrate within urban society, especially in Istanbul or Ankara or along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, which throb with tourists. The industry provides service jobs (at subsistence wages) that require little education or skills. Kurdish civil society can find a male or female “cousin” to supply a place to sleep while looking for work; another might provide a job lead.
Tourism is one of the few shining facets of the economy. Turkey attracted 17 million foreign tourists during the 2004 season, with revenues estimated at $13 billion. It supports 15,000 jobs. Antalya, the main attraction on the Mediterranean, has a 50,000-bed capacity and few high-season vacancies. In addition to the normal flow of vacationers, thousands of kidney patients arrive from Europe, the United States and the Far East to combine a few weeks in the sun with dialysis treatment. Patients are accepted only by reservations, which are fully booked six months in advance. Furthermore, with the Adriatic devastated by algae and the Spanish coasts filthy, 300,000 Germans have settled along the Mediterranean coast in Alanya, and 13,000 British have herded to Iskenderun (ancient Alexandretta). A Turkish builder there says: “Houses between $500,000 and $800,000 are sold easily.” Of course the natives complain: “Foreigners are grabbing the most beautiful areas of our country.”
But finding far-off jobs is not enough.
Under pressure from the EU, whose members insist on some form of reparations to justify admission to the EU, the government has instituted “Project Return” to help Kurds go back to their villages. As of August 2004, about 1,000 villages had been reoccupied, at least in part.
In early September 2004, the EU commissioner for enlargement, Guenter Verheugen, visited the village of Tuzla in the Diyarbakir region, saying he wanted to know if the government had helped the displaced and had compensated them for damages. A local administrator said the village was seized in 1995: “The security forces gathered us all in the square and burnt the village. They gave us three days to evacuate. We moved to Adana and Diyarbakir. So far, 30 families have returned home.”
The most poignant tale concerns Syrian Christians who still use Turyo, an Aramaic dialect that was the language of Jesus Christ, in their liturgy and conversation. As recently as 40 years ago, there were an estimated 150,000 Syrian Christians in Turkey. Fewer than 2,000 remain. Most fled to Europe when the Turkish army began its village clearances. Some want to return to the soil that nurtured their ancestors for thousands of years, even before they became Christians.
After the Syrian Christians left, their homes in one village were given to Muslim Kurds as village guards. They brought their families and agreed to give up the homes when the owners returned. When they resisted, their electricity and water were cut off. The governor of the region offered alternative sites and materials to build new homes, and they eventually moved away, leaving behind a rudimentary mosque that will undoubtedly take longer to demolish.
On a nearby desolate hill is the Mor Gabriel Monastery, established by Saints Samuel and Simeon in AD 397. Saint Gabriel, for whom the monastery is named, is buried in the basement. In the sixth century, Theodora, the wife of Byzantine Emperor Justinian, had it rebuilt, adding a huge dome whose exposed interior shows the intricate brickwork. The monastery has been rebuilt and is now a modern building with many rooms for monks and nuns. They are mostly empty. The monastery, known as Tur Abdin (The Mountain of the Servants of God), is the seat of archbishop Timotheos Samuel Aktas. He has two remaining monks. The Archbishop, dressed in a full length red robe, greets a visitor in excellent English, which he learned at New York University in Greenwich Village. His most vivid memory of New York appears to be the drunks on the streets.43
There were a half dozen or so young men sitting nearby. When the visitor asked if the monastery was a school, he was told no: Under Turkey’s secularism, opening a school, even one to teach the spoken word of Jesus Christ, is forbidden. But that may change. The EU is pressing for freedom of religion, and there is talk of classifying historic non-Muslim churches and schools as “cultural” assets. Should this become possible, there are sufficient facilities to transform Tur Abdin into a center for the study of the earliest forms of Christianity, even going back before Christianity to the eighth century BC, when Aramaic adopted the simplified Phoenician alphabet, thereby replacing cuneiform script to become the Semitic lingua franca of the ancient world.
A Multiplex World
After more than 15 years of intense negotiations, last-minute bargaining will probably involve demographics. In ten or fifteen years, Germany and Turkey will have about
the same number of people, so that a voting alliance between them would dominate all EU institutions. France, for one, vehemently opposes this. The dispute could go on for years, perhaps as when Charles de Gaulle vetoed Great Britain’s accession in 1963 and 1967; it was not until 1972 that the British were accepted. A resolution might be found in a two-tier structure, with a core shaped around the founding six nations and a peripheral level with a looser integration in the EU power structure. Turkey’s leaders would undoubtedly object, and it would come down to
last-minute bargaining. If it came to “this or nothing,” they might reluctantly accept in the sure belief that ten or so years further down the road, when the familiarity of years of cooperation in foreign policy eases ancient prejudices, Turkey might be admitted to the core.
By then, the oneness of Europe and Turkey might be a literal fact. Last September, the European Investment Bank signed an agreement with Turkey for a 200-million euro loan to begin planning for a deep railroad and highway tunnel under the Bosporus, which separates Europe from Asia. In addition to connecting rail and road links from Britain to Iran and the South Caucasus, the tunnel will unite the mass-transport systems for Istanbul’s 11 million residents, now dependent on slow ferries across the Bosporus.
Acceptance must happen, if for no other reason than what rejection would imply. Hiding from the world’s problems while sinking back to a Christian Club? Pushing away Muslims, who make up 22 percent of the world’s population? Societies that do not renew themselves become second or third rate, a prospect that no European leader will accept, especially if it means surrendering the stage to the United States.
The eventual double fulfillment of the paradigm shift may be visualized as a world of three economic and technological communities centered on an enlarged European Union, China and the United States. As they compete in trade and technologies, they will come to resemble one another in their ambitions and approaches to life. Yet it will not be some bland Utopian look-alike world but a multiplex of religions and cultures. The EU’s growth to a 25-nation entity did not entail a surrender of individualities, cultures, languages, foods and general quirkiness. With threats of war and rebellions ended, nations will be more willing to allow sub-ethnicities to express themselves. This is already evident in the acceptance of greater freedom for Catalan sub-nationalism in Spain. There is evidence in Turkey too. Under “harmonization,” to conform to the wishes of the EU, Turkey’s Radio and Television Corporation has begun broadcasts not only in Kurdish but also Circassian (population estimated at three million) and Bosnian (one million).
Of greater political significance, Leyla Zana has announced plans to establish a political party to “support Turkey’s European process . . . to achieve a peaceful and democratic solution” for Kurdish cultural and political rights. Leaders of the outlawed Democratic People’s Party, Free Socialist Party, People’s Democratic Party and the Free Society Party say they will join her in a “Democratic Society Movement.” 44 Other Kurdish aspirants will undoubtedly form their own parties. It will be a scramble. Recall that Erdogan’s AKP, with a 10-percent vote hurdle, was able to win two-thirds of the seats in parliament with only one-third of the votes. The EU will probably demand that the hurdle be lowered to the EU standard of 5 percent, clearing the field for dozens of small parties of all hues and regions. Democracy will become noisy and confusing at a time when the EU will need the help of a strong political leadership in Turkey.
For now, it must depend on Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, fortunately for Brussels, in the short space of three years has demonstrated his skill in soothing sores. Greece and Turkey nearly came to war in 1974 because of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in retaliation for a Greek coup. In the 1980s, Greece sheltered Abdullah Ocalan and provided bases for his PKK fighters. In 1987, there was belligerent talk and the low buzzing of fighter planes when Turkey sent an oil-drilling ship into the disputed areas of the Aegean Sea. There was more belligerency in 1996 over a disputed uninhabited islet in the Aegean.
Erdogan wooed Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis. In 2003, he was invited as a guest of honor at an AKP congress in Ankara. They met again in Switzerland to discuss the Annan plan to solve the Cyprus dispute. The epitome came in May 2004, when Erdogan, accompanied by his headscarf-wearing wife Ermine, paid a state visit to Greece. In July 2004, Karamanlis was one of the guests of honor (with Jordanian King Abdullah, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Romanian Prime Minister Adriana Nastasse) at a lavish, 7,000-guest Istanbul reception for the marriage of Erdogan’s daughter Esra to a newspaper correspondent. Not an occasion was missed. When, two months later, Greece won the soccer world cup, a victory party was held in Istanbul.
Syria was the base where Ocalan garnered sympathy and material support. Under Erdogan, political and trade delegations shuttled back and forth; then, in December 2004, a free-trade agreement was signed. In an interview with Abdulahmid Bilici, the foreign-news editor for the newspaper Zaman, Syrian Prime Minister Naji Al Otari described the agreement as part of a relationship that “predicts mutual, regional and international cooperation in all areas including politics, economics and culture. . . . This is a step that will contribute to the development of peace and stability for all nations in the region, not just for two nations.”45
When there was a forest fire in the Lazkiye region of Syria, Erdogan called to offer help and then sent a fire engine over from Hatay in Turkey.
In July 2004, when Erdogan began a three-day visit to Tehran, Iranian President Muhammad Khatami welcomed him at a dinner at the Shahabad Presidential Palace. “It’s your home” he said, adding they were of the same civilization, “just like two branches of a tree.” What a change! They had been sheltering and arming guerrilla forces against one another from the start of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979 until as recently as 2002. Erdogan’s main aim was an extension of trade. One of the most difficult and politically sensitive issues was the purchase, and perhaps the transfer to other markets, of excess Iranian gas.
Erdogan had hardly set foot on Iranian soil when a spokesman for the American embassy in Ankara warned: “Do not carry your relations forward with Iran. Do not be a mediator for the transfer of Iranian gas to Europe.” He cited the U.S. embargo on companies doing business with Iran in excess of $20 million.46
He needn’t have gotten so excited. There was intensive haggling over the price of Iranian gas with no agreement. As for pipeline transmission elsewhere, there are no existing facilities, and it would take billions of dollars of risky investments to build new lines or upgrade existing ones.
When reporters asked him about the warning, Erdogan replied: “Just as all other countries in the world develop relations with their neighbors, so too will Turkey develop its relations with its neighbors. It is determined about this.”
Peering into the future, a democratic Turkey within the European Union could be the inspiration needed for a generation of Iranians who have no memory of the deposed shah and all-too-recent experiences of clerical rule. Here, we must go back to Ali Shariati (1933-77), who was sent to France on a state scholarship in 1960 and remained for five years, reading Sartre, Franz Fanon and assorted Marxists. When he returned after taking his doctorate, the shah’s regime put him in prison for several months. In the ten years that followed, he emerged as the voice of Iranian Muslim modernism, naively seeking to unite the diametrically opposed ideals of reconstructing Shiism as an ideology of protest against Western hegemony while ending clerical obscurantist autocracy.
He was arrested in 1972, kept in jail for about three years and put under house arrest for another two. He was granted permission to leave Iran in 1977 but soon died in London of a massive heart attack. (His followers attribute his death to Savak, the Pahlavi secret police.) He was denied a burial at home lest his grave become the rallying ground for the discontented.
Instead, his body was interred at a Shia shrine on the outskirts of Damascus. As with the externment and hiding of Said Nursi’s body by the military in Turkey, this did not diminish the memory of Shariati.
When the shah was overthrown, students carried his portrait along with those of Ayatollah Khomeini (who soon hijacked the revolution and imposed the very clerical rule Shariati so vigorously opposed).
On June 19, 2002, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shariati’s death, Hashem Aghajari, a popular university history lecturer whose right leg had been amputated at the knee as a result of the Iran Iraq War, delivered a memorial speech at Hamadan in western Iran. He condensed Shariati’s teachings into a belief that Islam needed a reformation similar to what Christianity went through beginning with Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. He called this “Islamic Protestantism,” meaning a believer’s right to direct access to God and the Quran and an end to clerical rule:
To understand Islam today and in every generation, one must consider himself the direct Recipient of the Holy Book, a Recipient of God’s [message] and the prophets’. . . . For years the youth were discouraged from reading the Quran. They were told that understanding the Quran requires 101 levels of thinking not available to commoners. Shariati however told his students to read the Koran themselves and to develop scientific methods for the study and scholarly interpretations. . . . The clergy, carrying tons of ancient baggage, cannot compete in this arena. Therefore, students engaging in discovery and developing their own understanding are committing major crimes, as their activities may be bad for the gentlemen’s business. . . .
People are not circus monkeys to mimic without understanding. A student must comprehend and practice and strive to increase his understanding until he is independent of his teacher. . . . The Islam we encounter is not the traditional Islam but a fundamentalist one. In contrast, Islamic Protestantism is intellectual, practical and humane and as such is a progressive religion.47
In November 2002, Aghajari was arrested for apostasy, found guilty in a closed-door trial and sentenced to be hanged. Tens of thousands of students took to the streets in protest (there was no coverage in the local press). The ruling clerical elite let loose hundreds of armed thugs who invaded campuses, beating and injuring the students, some severely. The students were not defeated, and in June 2004, the death sentence was dropped. A court later convicted Aghajari on lesser charges of insulting sacred Islamic tenets, and he was released on the payment of a fine.
In an effort to curb dissent, the judiciary in recent years has shut down more than 100 pro-democracy newspapers and journals. Those thirsty for information have turned instead to cyberspace. The number of Internet users has soared in the last four years to 4.8 million from 250,000. In addition, there are as many as 100,000 Weblogs. The government has blocked hundreds of openly political sites and blogs and is drafting a law to punish “anyone who disseminates information aimed at disturbing the public mind through computer systems.”48
Should democracy bloom in Iran (with inspiration from the EU’s democratization of Turkey), it can be assumed that entrepreneurs will be willing to build or upgrade oil and gas lines extending from Iran and the Caspian through Turkey and on to Greece and Bulgaria, and through the Balkans to Austria. Turkey wants it to happen both for revenues and to reduce oil-tanker traffic through the narrow, winding Bosporus.
As for Iraq, the crucial issue for Turkey is the emergence of a protonational entity for the estimated five million Kurds of Iraq. Thirteen years ago, the United States and Britain agreed to a no fly zone to restrain the atrocities of Saddam Hussein. This allowed a pair of once-antagonistic Iraqi Kurds, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, to create a federation in three northern provinces. The Kurdish leaders frequently visit Ankara for talks, principally involving their demand to control the oil-rich city and region of Kirkuk. Almost everyone opposes this: Americans, because it would intensify clashes with Turkmens and Arabs, who also demand Kirkuk; and Turkey, because an economically strong Kurdish nation in Iraq would encourage separatism among their own Kurds.
Then there is the perplexity of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which were part of the Soviet Union from 1920 to1991. In mid-August 2004, Erdogan paid a two-day visit to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to meet its new president, Mikhail Saakashvili.
Erdogan’s interest was not solely as a good neighbor. The British oil giant BP is constructing a million-barrels-a-day pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to a terminal at Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The first tanker is expected to load in the second half of 2005. Turkey needs the revenues.
The most acute problem involves Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Russians created the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the middle of Azerbaijan but did nothing to foster harmony. In 1994, the Armenians “liberated” Nagorno-Karabakh and then swarmed over a large part of Azerbaijan in battles that claimed 30,000 lives and displaced upward of one million Azeris. Turkey, siding with its Azeri linguistic relatives, closed its long border with Armenia. With no other outlet except a tenuous route through Iran, trade has been stifled. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said the border will be opened only if the Armenians evacuate Azerbaijani territory.
With the scheduled accession of Bulgaria and Romania and the intensive negotiations with Turkey, the western and southern coastlines of the Black Sea will, in effect, be a frontier of the EU. European diplomats have little acquaintance with the Black Sea region, but Turkey knows it well. In the early 1990s, it initiated what became the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization, with its headquarters in Istanbul, and later the Black Sea Naval Cooperation Task Group (Blackseafor), consisting of Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.
Perhaps the entire Black Sea may later fall within an expanded European Union.
Speculation that the Ukraine may someday be up for consideration for admission into the EU increased late last year, when European officials intervened on behalf of Ukraine’s disputed presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. However, the prospect of membership is far distant. While other former Communist states that have been admitted to the EU have had some prior experiments with democracy, the Ukraine has had none. It would have to begin, on its own, to reform its institutions. That is, it would be accepted as a candidate only after its good faith had been demonstrated. Then would come the hard part: the development of a new breed of politician willing to accede to a minute examination by foreigners of all facets of the nation’s history, economy and politics.
Finally, there are the imponderables of Israel. Turkey, recalling the 500 years of Ottoman rule over the Holy Land, was one of the first nations to recognize its formation, but later close ties were a product of the Turkish military’s search for weapons and training and, equally, of Israel’s desire to drive a wedge between Turkey and “fundamentalist” Islam. Erdogan, it should be recalled, began as a protégé of the fiercely anti-Israeli Necmettin Erbakan.
During an unofficial visit to Jerusalem last June, Erdogan repeatedly characterized Israel’s actions in Gaza as state terrorism and even likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Jews at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.49 His denunciation had wide support. When the Hamas leader Sheik Ahmad Yassin was killed in March 2004 by an Israeli missile, 2,000 gathered at the historic Beyazit mosque in Istanbul for prayers in his memory.50
But attitudes appear to be softening. Shortly after the New Year, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, in his first official visit, told Israeli President Moshe Katsav that he sensed “a positive atmosphere in the region.” According to unofficial reports, Gul stressed that Turkey was ready to give whatever support it could toward peace.
He also said Prime Minister Erdogan would later pay an official visit. Gul and his wife prayed at Al-Haram Al-Sharif and later visited Israel’s genocide monument.51
And what of relations with the United States? At the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul in June 2004, President Bush announced a project to protect the Greater Middle East (defined as the Arab states, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan) from terrorism and biological threats. Berdal Aral, the head of the Department of International Relations of Fatih University in Istanbul, commented:
Not surprisingly, the . . . project has rung alarm bells. . . . [It] suggests that NATO has become an offensive pact that poses and indeed acts as the world policeman. . . . Under the guise of “Islamic terrorists” and “Muslim fundamentalists,” Muslims worldwide are demonized as the main threat to Western security, meaning “international security” in the jargon of international politics. . . . The project does not address the “Palestinian problem” as the single greatest obstacle to peace and prosperity in the Middle East. . . . Who can guarantee that the U.S. will not abuse treaties, resolutions or declarations of which it is a part to make an unsubstantiated and even arbitrary interpretation of such texts that goes against their ordinary meaning only to justify its direct and indirect aggression in the Middle East? 52
For more than 40 years Turks looked upon the United States as their best friend and strongest supporter. It has now lost almost all creditability.
1 Zaman, December 17-20, 2004.
2 Ibid., November 1, 2004.
3 Hechem Djait, Europe and Islam: Cultures and Modernity (1985), pp. 21-22.
4 “Democracy and Arab Political Culture,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992, p.15.
5 For assistance in clarifying these concepts, I thank Gokhan Bacik of Fatih University in Istanbul.
6 “Public Islam and the Problem of Democratization,” Sociology of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 4, 2001, pp. 491514; also see Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (2000).
7 Dogu Ergil, “Identity Crises and Political Instability in Turkey,” Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2000, pp. 43-62.
8 Muhittin Ataman, “Ozal Leadership and Restructuring of Turkish Ethnic Policy in the 1980s.” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2002, pp. 123-142.
9 Christopher Houston, “Profane Institutions: Kurdish Diaspora in the Turkish City (Istanbul).” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2001, pp. 15-31.
10 Halidé Edib, Memoirs of Halidé Edib (1926), p. 258.
11 John L. Esposito and Azzam Tamini, eds, Islam and Secularism in the Middle East (2000), p. 7.
12 Nikki R. Keddie, Politics in the Middle East (1992), p. 152.
13 Ibid., pp. 138-42.
14 Ely Karmon, “Radical Islamic Political Groups in Turkey,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1997, citing: Cumhuriyet, October 30, 1991.
15 Ibid., citing U.S. Department of State, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” 1991, p. 14.
16 Whit Mason, “The Future of Political Islam in Turkey,” World Policy Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2000, pp. 56-67.
17 Turkish Daily News, November 12, 2004.
18 For a detailed study of Gulen Nursi and analogies with John Wesley, see Arthur Bonner, “An Islamic Transformation in Turkey,” Middle East Policy, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2004, pp. 84-97.
19 Zaman, March 24, 2004.
20 Jenny White, Islamic Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (2002), p. 28.
21 Ibid., p. 6.
22 Ibid., p. 11.
23 Nader Hashemi, “The Relevance of John Locke to Social Change in the Muslim World: A Comparison with Iran,” Journal of Church and State, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2004, pp. 39-53.
24 Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 22-49.
25 Halidé Edib, The Turkish Ordeal, Being the Further Memoirs of Halidé Edib (1928), p. 293.
26 James Brown, “The Military and Society: The Turkish Case,” Middle Eastern Affairs, Vol. 25, 1989, pp. 399-400.
27 Chris Kutschera, “Abdullah Ocalan: The End of a Myth,” The Middle East, No. 298, February 1, 2000.
28 Dogu Ergil, op. cit.
29 Ali L. Karaosmanoglu, “The Evolution of the National Security Culture and the Military in Turkey,”
Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2000, pp. 199-216.
30 Susan Fraser, “Turkey’s Military Discusses Election,” Associated Press Online, February 14, 2000.
31 Zaman, November 5, 2004.
32 Ali Carkoglu, “Religiosity: Support for Shariat and Evaluations of Secularist Public Policies in Turkey,”
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2004, pp. 111-136.
33 Turkish Daily News, July 29, 2004.
34 Ibid., October 22, 2004.
35 Zaman, August 31, 2004.
36 Kevin McKiernan, “Turkey’s War on the Kurds.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 55, No. 2, 1999, pp. 26-37.
37 “Violations of Free Expression in Turkey,” Human Rights Watch, February 1999.
38 Drawn from newspaper and magazine reports in several countries from November 1998 through June 2003.
39 Ann Louise Bardach, “Tansu Ciller’s Manipulative Rise to Power,” The New Republic, July 7, 1997.
40 Susan Sachs, “Talk of Kurds a Crime in Turkey,” Newsday, December 20, 1994.
41 Helena Karlsson, “Politics, Gender, and Genre – The Kurds and ‘the West’: Writings from Prison by Leyla Zana,” Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 15, No. 3, 2003, pp. 158-160.
42 Zaman, September 2, 2004.
43 Interview, September 22, 2004.
44 Zaman, October 22 and November 11, 2004.
45 Ibid., December 28, 2004.
46 Ibid., July 7, 2004.
47 Severely condensed from The Washington Post, August 8, 2002.
48 Fathi Nazila, “Iran Jails More Journalists and Blocks Web Sites,” The New York Times, November 8, 2004.
49 Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2004.
50 Associated Press, March 26, 2004.
51 Zaman, January 5, 2005.
52 Ibid., “New Ambitions, New Anomalies: NATO and the Broader Middle East,” October 7, 2004.
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