Reconciliation with Turkey should only come with a price

February 19, 2020 12:35 PM
Michael Rubin

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to fight the Syrian army directly if Syrian President Bashar Assad does not stop his assault on Idlib, the last major zone controlled by the Syrian opposition. While Erdogan imagined himself a master tactician, he is now learning that it was Russian President Vladimir Putin who played him. Erdogan discarded decades of alliance with the United States for a brief fling, only to discover Putin’s professions of love were for more limited aims.

This is not the first time Erdogan has found himself outplayed. But, after deliberately trashing Turkey’s relationship with the U.S., it is time Washington plays hardball. Those who say that Erdogan notwithstanding, Turkey is too important for the U.S. to turn its back against are likely underestimating the corrosive impact of 17 years of Erdoganism, the incitement and indoctrination broadcast over the airwaves or taught in Turkey’s schools, and demographic change.

State Propaganda Nobel Prize goes to ...

In normal countries state propaganda competes with free speech. In countries like "Turkey" state propaganda defines the limits of public discourse, punishing those that venture into the unsanctioned.

This is not an Erdoganian phenomenon. It has been true for all "Turkey"s since 1923. Turkish journalists, academics, etc. always knew their limits, knowing that careful self-censorship is a must for self preservation.

It's crucial to understand that the seemingly free opinions we read by Turks in the English language NEVER, I repeat, NEVER appear in any Turkish outlet in the Turkish language! It's in fact part of the carefully crafted state propaganda machine. The state wants foreigners to assume that what they read is also what Turks do. That is not the case. Articles written by Turkish journalists in English which offer a rosy picture of a "Turkey" that harbours all opinions are never published in the Turkish press in Turkish.

In Erdogan's "Turkey" things become even worse, as if they were not bad enough. In this new "Turkey" of his state propaganda is the sole truth. Pretenses have been dropped. Those who dare speak against the official state line, without exception, are 'eliminated' in one way or another.

In Cyprus we are victims of heinous Turkish propaganda for decades. The Turkish Cypriot minority in particular has been at its mercy, almost entirely shaping its fears, hopes, aspirations and ultimately its perception of reality.

A short video highlighting Erdogan's war on HDP

Turkey's Manipulation of Europe, Then and Now - MIDDLE EAST FORUM

A Turkish regime exploiting an international crisis to
manipulate Europeans. Sound familiar?

by Efraim Karsh, July 17, 2016

Originally published on June 24 under the title "Holding the Balance of Power: Turkey's Complicating Relationship with Europe during the First World War and Since."

It is a historical irony that, for the second time in a century, Turkey is exploiting a major international crisis to manipulate the most powerful European nation into a hugely misconceived and self-defeating policy.

Having exacerbated the Syrian civil war by allowing jihadists of all hues to cross Turkish territory to fight his friend-turned-nemesis Bashar al-Assad, then spurred a massive humanitarian crisis by allowing hundreds of thousands of Syrian refuges (and assorted Middle Eastern migrants camped in Turkey) to infiltrate Europe illegally, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan capitalized on Chancellor Merkel's recoil from her "open door" migration policy to extract substantial financial and political concessions from the European Union that, if fully implemented, will irreversibly change the EU's demographic and cultural identity.

Language Hypocrisy Extraordinaire

"Turkey" says 80.000 Turkish Cypriots (of Cyprus) must be educated exclusively in Turkish. They must not even learn Greek, the language of the land non-stop for millenniums and of the historic Christian majority. Why then in "Turkey" 20 million Kurds cannot even learn theirs, being forced instead for full exclusive education in Turkish? Why Recep? Why Ahmet? Why Mustafa? Why Espen? Why Barack?

John Oliver - Insulting Erdogan

Very true & extremely funny!

Turkey’s increasingly desperate predicament poses real dangers - Washington Post

By Liz Sly February 20 2016

ISTANBUL — Turkey is confronting what amounts to a strategic nightmare as bombs explode in its cities, its enemies encroach on its borders and its allies seemingly snub its demands.

As recently as four years ago, Turkey appeared poised to become one of the biggest winners of the Arab Spring, an ascendant power hailed by the West as a model and embraced by a region seeking new patrons and new forms of governance.

All that has evaporated since the failure of the Arab revolts, shifts in the geopolitical landscape and the trajectory of the Syrian war.

Russia, Turkey’s oldest and nearest rival, is expanding its presence around Turkey’s borders — in Syria to the south, in Crimea and Ukraine to the north, and in Armenia to the east. On Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced the deployment of a new batch of fighter jets and combat helicopters to an air base outside the Armenian capital, Yerevan, 25 miles from the Turkish border.

Could Turkey implode? | WASHINGTON POST

Internal and external forces are tearing at the nation’ seams

By Shehab Al Makahleh - - Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Turkey, an erstwhile U.S. ally long hailed as a bastion of secular democracy in the Muslim world, could be spiraling toward all-out civil war and potential dissolution as conflicts between Turkish security forces and Kurds and other ethnic minorities continue to escalate. These conflicts have been exacerbated by the catastrophic war in neighboring Syria, which has created a refugee crisis in Turkey, expanded Turkey’s bloody campaign against Kurds into Iraq and Syria, and pushed Turkish officials into a convenient collusion with the Islamic State, or ISIS.

The lurch toward a more Islamist, autocratic posture by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long worried regional and western observers, particularly his strong curbs on political speech and active political repression of the Kurds. That policy has taken a bloody turn with the repeated bombing of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds — both of whom have been anti-ISIS bulwarks — and, since July 2015, escalating crackdowns at home. The murder in November of Tahir Elci, a leading Kurdish human rights advocate and president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association in southeastern Turkey has dramatically increased tensions and violence inside Turkey and put the Kurdish issue — seemingly settled only a few years ago — back on the agenda. The killing, which Human Rights Watch called an “assassination,” demonstrated to the world how out of control the province has become.

Erdogan is on the brink of ultimate power, but Turkey is falling apart | INDEPENDENT

The biggest losers are the Turkish people, as critics and political opponents of the President's regime are labelled ‘traitors’ and ‘terrorists’

Robert Ellis Thursday 4 February 2016

Turkey's President Erdogan may hold another election to obtain the 330 seats he needs to hold a referendum on the country's constitution.

Until 2002, when the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power, Turkey was doing pretty well in following Kemal Atatürk’s dictum: “peace at home, peace abroad”. Admittedly, there were three military coups between 1960 and 1980 to keep Turkey on track, together with ‘a soft coup’ in 1997. But the country was still a respected member of NATO with prospects - however distant - of EU membership.

Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Turkey's Kurds | HUFFINGTON POST

Stefan Ihrig, Polonsky Fellow, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 01/18/2016

JERUSALEM -- The history of Erdoğan's presidency will be written as one of creeping, sometimes galloping, autocratism and of renewed violence in the Kurdish southeast. Erdoğan's new presidential palace and declarations about Muslims discovering America seemed like loony signs of a leader simply not ready to give up and slightly out of step with the rest of the world. They amused but also scared us.

The rejection of calls to recognize the Armenian Genocide during last year's 100th anniversary seemed merely like reflexes of a Turkish strongman who inserted himself not only into the republican tradition of denial but who also continually tries to connect himself back to Ottoman times. With the renewed war against the Kurds, however, we should recognize him for what he is: an autocrat in the making who will not be removed by democratic means should the Turkish people wish to do so and who is willing to sacrifice the lives and freedoms of Turkish citizens for his goals.

You can say anything as long as its ak (*)

* ak: means white in Turkish, as in AK Party or AKP. Paraphrasing the famous quote attributed to Ford of "any colour of car you like as long as it's black", in the early days when he had a single assembly line. In "Turkey" very soon we'll have a single press line. Mein Kampf implementation in the works.

Pakistanisation of Turkey | TRIBUNE

By Imtiaz Gul, October 7, 2015 - Will the Syrian crisis and two million refugees have the same impact on Turkey as the Afghan jihad and the refugee exodus from Afghanistan had on Pakistan? This question has started doing the rounds among Turk intellectuals and political analysts.

Who are you to tell me to get out?

“Who are you to tell me to get out? I have martyrs [Turkey’s 1974 invasion], I have strategic interests.” -Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey, February 2011

My note: On a people/culture level we Cypriots love the Americans & Brits. But we really do need allies against Turkish bullying/wickedness. Trojan horses won't do.

Turkish magazine raided, copies seized for mock Erdogan selfie | Reuters

Mon Sep 14, 2015 ANKARA | BY ECE TOKSABAY
Turkish police raided a magazine on Monday over a mocked-up "selfie" of a smiling President Tayyip Erdogan with the coffin of a soldier - an allusion to comments that families of soldiers killed by Kurdish rebels could be happy about their martyrdom.

Kurdish leader blasts Turkey’s president | Washington Post

By David Ignatius August 13 - Turkey’s political tensions were sharply evident Thursday, as the country’s leading Kurdish politician accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of “supporting ISIS” in the past. He said that Erdogan wants early elections as part of a strategy of “attacking the Kurdish movement” and reversing its recent political gains.

Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, made the charges in an hour-long telephone interview from Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey. He lived up to his reputation as an outspoken opponent of Erdogan and champion of Kurdish rights. His comments framed some of the big issues in the parliamentary campaign that is likely this fall.

Sibel Edmonds Explains the CIA's "Reverse Engineering" of Erdogan

Video 56 minutes - Published on Jan 21, 2014 - In this exclusive interview for the Boiling Frogs Post Eyeopener report, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds discusses her recent article, "Turkish PM Erdogan: The Speedy Transformation of an Imperial Puppet." We talk about Erdogan's falling out with Fethullah Gülen and the CIA, and how serviceable puppets are discarded by their shadow government masters when they reach their "expiration date."

The Guardian view on Turkey and the Kurds: putting peace at risk | The Guardian

Protesters in Brussels denounce
attacks on Kurds in Turkey and Iraq  

Friday 31 July 2015 - Turkey has ended its tentative reconciliation with the Kurds. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political ambitions could be the key. | Ankara’s decision to throw away years of negotiations with the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey is both irresponsible and perverse. It seems likely to add to the dangers and uncertainties that the collapse of state authority in Syria and Iraq have brought to the wider region and it could have ominous implications for Turkey’s internal politics. Since the emergence of the modern state after the first world war, the relations between the ethnic Turkish majority and the Kurds, the country’s largest minority, have been the single largest problem faced by the country. Ankara originally tried to solve it by suppression and compulsory assimilation, hoping that in time Kurds would become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. The predictable result was resistance, in the early years in the form of sporadic revolts and, in the late 1970s, in the form of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, an armed separatist movement.

Will Recep Erdoğan’s Turkish Election Defeat Save Democracy? | Commentary

Michael Rubin, 06.08.2015 - President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man who brokers no dissent, went into
Sunday’s elections hoping to win enough of a majority so that he could ram through a new constitution that would enhance the power of the president, now largely symbolic, over that of the prime minister and parliament. He was disappointed. But Westerners hoping that this signals an end to Erdoğan’s anti-democratic rule may also be disappointed.

Can Turkey Survive Erdoğan? | Graham E. Fuller (grahamefuller.com)

June 1, 2015 - On 7 June Turkey’s democratic system will be deeply tested in a fateful parliamentary election; at stake is preservation of rule of law and liberal democracy against an increasingly authoritarian-minded President.

Bottom line: if President Erdoğan’s AKP party is able to win big, the entire system of separation of powers in Turkey will likely reach breaking point. Erdoğan will have gained the carte blanche he seeks to mold, shape and steer the state any direction he wants in a semi-legal form of one man rule. And this comes at a time when his presidency has become ever more erratic, arbitrary, error-prone, corrupt, vengeful and out of touch.

Will Turkey Go the Way of Weimar Germany? | The Gatestone Institute

Historian Geoff Eley

May 2, 2015, by Burak Bekdil - "That [Turkey] sounds to me like the late Weimar Republic. So I would have no difficulty at all in agreeing that the logics of certain possibilities are being put together in ways that seem very reminiscent of the broader context of right-wing thought in Weimar Republic, especially after 1930." Thus commented last month Geoff Eley, a British-born historian whose early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany, and, in Italy, fascism.