Cyprus-Forum.com

[boomerang]

With Egypt’s Islamists scoring a crushing electoral victory over their secular opponents, governments and pundits alike are considering the likely denouement of the vaunted Arab Spring in the region’s largest country, Turkey. It is therefore worth noting some very troubling recent developments in the country that the Muslim Brotherhood and many in the West consistently tout as a successful “Islamist democracy” worth emulating.

On January 5, Turkish prosecutors arrested Gen. Ilker Basbug — the commander, until 2010, of the Turkish Armed Forces appointed by prime minister Recep Erdogan’s government — for allegedly plotting terrorist activities against the state. Basbug now faces the same predicament as 300 other military officers who have languished in jail for years on dubious charges of conspiracy to overthrow the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government, without a single conviction to date.

Perhaps even more disturbing, the regime has begun a new wave of arrests of journalists, bringing their total in prison to 98, as reported by the Turkish journalists union, though this number is not exact. Few of them have been convicted of anything, even though some of them have been kept in jail for four years. Using terrorism legislation to keep suspected opponents in jail for years on trumped-up charges appears to have become the Erdogan regime’s favorite method of punishing and intimidating the opposition and stifling the press. Nor are these tactics limited to his political opponents. In a searing indictment of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the justice system under Erdogan, the Turkish Human Rights Association revealed that 42 percent of the 128,000 people currently imprisoned in Turkey have never been convicted of a crime. To find preemptive incarceration on this scale, one would have to go back to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

Not surprisingly, the AKP’s increasingly repressive policies have caused a storm of indignation among opposition parties in parliament, where the AKP has a commanding majority. The leader of the main opposition party, CHP (the Republican People’s Party), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, accused the government of engaging in a “blood feud” and of having transformed the country into an “open prison,” while another opposition-party leader blasted the AKP for “legitimizing oppression, lawlessness, and slander.”

In response, a government prosecutor has asked the Ministry of Justice to remove Kilicdaroglu’s parliamentary immunity, making it possible for him also to be indicted and thrown in jail for “attempting to influence a fair trial.” As if to confirm that the prosecutor acted with the full support of the government, Prime Minister Erdogan opined tersely that “what needed to happen has happened,” adding that the prosecutor’s action was long overdue. Should the Islamist government carry out this blatant threat to silence even the duly elected opposition, it would be difficult to argue that the AKP regime maintains even a semblance of democracy.

Which raises the question why the AKP appears to be in such a hurry, seemingly overreaching at a time when there is no visible challenge to its political dominance. The short answer is that, just below the surface, problems are brewing that may soon present a formidable threat to Turkey’s Islamists. To begin with, the grand geopolitical scheme of the AKP, known as “Neo-Ottomanism,” is in shambles. The policy was designed to re-create a Turkish Islamist sphere of influence in former Ottoman domains, based on the radicalization of Muslim minorities and a putative “zero problems with neighbors” policy, but its author, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, has little to show for his efforts. Nor has he succeeded in convincing the Balkan Christian nations long enslaved by the Ottomans that “the Ottoman centuries were a successful history” that “needs to be re-created.” Worse still, in his hysterical reaction to the new French law making the denial of Armenian genocide a crime, Davutoglu has managed to alienate the French — especially Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he compared to dictators Bashar al-Assad and Moammar Qaddafi. (He conveniently forgot that the former was a favorite Neo-Ottoman partner, while the latter dispensed the al-Qaddafi Human Rights Prize to a grateful Erdogan.) Erdogan’s anti-Israeli policy has created yet another axis of intractable conflict, and recent indications that Ankara is taking over from Tehran the role of chief sponsor of Hamas is only likely to exacerbate it.

Domestically, the AKP has aggravated the conflict with Turkey’s large Kurdish minority to such an extent that a new flare-up of widespread Kurdish anti-government violence is no longer unthinkable. Neither is the large, educated, and secular Alevi community anywhere near making its peace with the Islamists.

Perhaps most significantly, there are now clear signs that the AKP’s greatest achievement and the most important source of its popularity, a booming economy, may soon be a thing of the past. Over the past year, the Turkish stock market has lost half of its value, inflation has reached double digits, and the lira has depreciated 20 percent against the dollar. With the country importing twice as much as it exports, the trade deficit is an unsustainable 10 percent of GDP. Indeed, none of these trends is sustainable, which is why the International Monetary Fund now projects a dramatic slowdown of Turkish GDP growth — from 7.5 percent in 2011 to 2 percent in 2012.

Despite these troubling signs on all fronts, there is no evidence that the West, especially Washington, is willing to go beyond the usual apologetics for the AKP regime and admit that our NATO ally is becoming an enemy of the West and everything it stands for. If this continues, American politicians may begin having to ask, “Who lost Turkey?”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288343/turkey-nato-s-open-prison-alex-alexiev

hmmm, tough times for the turks, and one can only hope it doesn't lose momentum...

jokes aside i tend to agree with the article on the economics, if those figures quoted are correct, and have no reason to disbelieve them, tough times indeed are waiting for turkey...and maybe a revolution in the north as they will suffer plenty...maybe a catalyst to a solution...

[boomerang]

Davutoglu and the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood

18-01-2012


Al-Akhbar:

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gives the impression that he is supremely confident about how the Syrian crisis will unfold. But he is actually concerned with other matters.

Davutoglu’s view is that the Arab world is not only going through a period of political change at present. He also explains that the region is witnessing the ascendancy of the Islamist group that most closely reflects both his own thinking and the historic concept of the Islamic state.

He tries to portray these new Islamists as modern, contrasting them with the jihadi groups that emerged in recent decades, which the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey opposes.

Davutoglu acts as though the political influence wielded by some Arab and Western governments in Egypt and other countries in North Africa will not endure: it applies only to the immediate aftermath of the revolutions there, and won’t leave a fundamental ideological mark.

The role played by the Gulf states in these countries does not seem to seriously trouble him. He does not make much of a distinction in this regard between the activities of the Qataris and the Saudis, although he notes divergences which reflect their political rivalry. But he sees both as promoting a political/ideological doctrine with which Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood are at odds.

And he does worry to some extent about the reckless adoption by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with powerful sponsors in Kuwait and the UAE, of Salafist groups, who the Brotherhood regards as ideologically incapable of leading the Islamic world.

From this perspective, Davutoglu acts based on the assumption that change is coming to Syria – either now, or in one or a few years’ time – and that the current regime in Damascus is doomed. Naturally, he does not want to demoralize his supporters and others eager to see the downfall of the regime in Syria. But he also wants these groups to bide their time, pending broader changes that will shake up the region as a whole.

In the meantime, he is seeking to persuade everyone he can to subscribe to his regional concept. This is based on the notion that the Sunni Islamist majority is prepared at this juncture, while still in the ascendancy stage, to conclude a deal with the region’s powerful Shia minority. He very much wants that deal to be struck primarily with Iran, in order to enable him to deal more easily with Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

This goes beyond immediate political realities. Turkey is indeed hoping for the collapse of President Bashar Assad’s rule. It is doing what it can politically, economically, in terms of security, and through the use of propaganda, to bring about a new government in Damascus. But it also knows full well that hopes alone do not determine facts on the ground.

Davutoglu is seen as the brains of the Muslim Brotherhood’s governing party in Turkey. That helps him convey the message candidly, where possible, and with appropriate diplomatic and intellectual tact, when necessary. His message is that Arabs and Muslims, whatever their religious, political, or intellectual persuasions, must get used to the idea that the course of history in the Arab and Islamic worlds is at present being led by the Sunni Islamist current.

He is urging the others – meaning everyone not belonging to this current – to come out of denial, and signal their acceptance of this historic fact. That would make possible the aformentioned deal, under that same currents’ auspices, providing those others with the assurances they need to allow them to live in this part of the world.

Davutoglu, of course, has nothing to offer here other than the Turkish model of citizenship. Many believe that Turkey has succeeded in establishing social and political norms that enable political pluralism to function satisfactorily, and allow the freedoms necessary for political, intellectual, and social interaction.

That is at best. Yet Davutoglu cannot be all that sanguine about the ability of fragmented Arab societies to generate similar models. This applies to big countries like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, and even small and rich states, like the emirates of the Arab Gulf.

He knows, moreover, that countries characterized by religious, sectarian, and cultural pluralism, which have a tradition of freedom and multi-party politics – such as Lebanon – face unprecedented challenges on the coexistence front. This can be seen clearly in Lebanon, while a small country with genuine political pluralism such as Tunisia is currently suffering the pangs of transition from dictatorship to a multi-party state.

The other thing Davutoglu ignores relates to the major issues that the people of this region consider important. True, the revolutions and the uprisings demonstrated, compellingly, the strength of people’s yearning for individual freedom and lives of dignity. But they also showed, just as compellingly, that the source of the problem lies in the regimes’ subservience to the colonial West, which is intent on sustaining Israel and its security.

Davutoglu knows too that the most compelling development over the past three decades has been the success of resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as in Iraq. This underlines the importance of standing up to Israel in practice, and not sufficing with the gains to be made from fleeting verbal confrontations that soon fade from the public mind, as in the case of Turkey.

If Davutoglu thinks that he can attract the Arab world to a civic or more sophisticated model of Islamist rule, as exists in Turkey today, it is a mystery why he ignores the most vital aspiration related to the national identity of Arabs and Muslims – to be free of the colonial West, and rid of its direct proxy, Israel.

He is therefore deluded if he thinks he can use the Arab revolutions and the successes of the Islamist current to urge everyone else to accept a new political status quo. If what Turkey seeks is to have any moral, political, or even religious legitimacy, Ankara would first have to renounce Israel and sever ties with it in addition to redefining its relations with the colonial West accordingly.

If it is incapable of doing that, it is incapable of envisaging changes – unless it opts to adopt the view that Davutoglu is a good intellectual theoretician but a failure as a practical politician.

Ibrahim al-Amin is editor-in-chief of Al-Akhbar.

This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.
http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/news/news.php?article=21522

wow now coming directly from the arabs...