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US sees no evil in Turkey's
elections
By Ian Urbina
In
its war against terrorism, the US has trumpeted its
intentions to spread democracy in a region where there
is little. Many around the globe remain skeptical about
whether toppling leaders is an effective method for
cultivating a respect for the rule of law and a
liberalization of the political process. However, there
is one place where, with minimal diplomatic pressure,
the US could radically bolster prospects for democracy.
To the scandal of its own people as well as the
international community, longtime US ally Turkey has
rigged its upcoming elections. But the real scandal is
that the US has nothing to say about it.
Despite
leading handily in the polls, former Istanbul mayor
Recep Tayyip Erdogan will not be on the ballot when
Turkish voters go to the booths on November 3. His
Justice and Development Party still has a good chance of
sweeping enough seats in the assembly to form a
government without coalition partners, an unusual event
in Turkey. Unfortunately, the national Supreme Election
Board has banned the country’s most popular politician.
His stated crime: reading poetry. In 1997,
Erdogan gave a political speech in which he quoted from
a poem of one of the country’s nationalist patriarchs,
Ziya Gkalp. The poem also happens to be among the
education ministry’s recommended reading for middle
school students. However, due to the poem’s religious
undertones, Erdogan was removed from office, sentenced
to 10 months in prison, and served four.
His
real crime: being a practicing Muslim. Turkey is an
institutionally secular country for which the military
nervously, some might say over-zealously, polices
against any encroachment of Islam in society and
government. However, this military watch-dogging has
occasionally come at the direct expense of democracy.
Three times in the past four decades, the Turkish
military has seized power, often on the pretext of
anti-Islamist preemption. In 1997, the military
instigated a bloodless coup along these lines to remove
the republic’s democratically elected and first
Islamist-led government.
This is also by no
means the first time that the US has turned a blind eye
to its ally’s misbehavior. For years, the State
Department has kept its mouth shut concerning Turkey’s
deplorable treatment of its Kurdish population. Since
1984, Turkey has been at war with the Kurds, both within
and across its borders, leaving some 40,000 mostly
Kurdish casualties and more than 3,000 Kurdish villages
destroyed. The fighting has displaced as many as 2
million civilians.
On an almost yearly basis,
Turkey is cited by international human rights
organizations for a laundry list of atrocities.
Virtually all of the attack helicopters used by Turkey
in this military effort are US-sold. The prime
motivation for Turkey’s fight is a near-pathological
fear of the possibility of an autonomous or independent
Kurdish state being established by the 20 million Kurds
in the southern part of the country.
Why the
closely guarded silence on the part of the US? In a
word: Incirlik. The US doggedly covets its access to
this prime airbase located in southwestern Turkey. The
value of this base is particularly high these days as
the US aims to hit Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The most
militarily viable road to Baghdad runs from southern
Turkey, and the air cover provided by the more than 50
US fighter jets waiting at the base will be essential,
much as it was during the Gulf War in 1991.
Furthermore, if the Pentagon wants to arm and
train the Kurds in northern Iraq as a proxy force, it
will need a green light from Ankara, which keeps the
Kurdish population firmly under its thumb. Also, as a
member of NATO, Turkey is diplomatically important,
representing the geographic and cultural gateway between
the West and the Islamic world. All this adds up to a
troubling divide between the rhetoric and reality of US
intentions to promote democracy when it comes to Turkey.
Back home, the US can explain away its double
standards as realpolitik necessities: short term
compromises for long term goals. But these duplicities
may not be as easily swallowed on the streets of Ankara,
and particularly among the majority of Turkish voters
who otherwise would have planted their faith in the
democratic process as the proper means for putting their
leader - poet, practicing Muslim or otherwise - into
power.
Ian Urbina is based at the
Middle East Research and Information Project in
Washington DC.
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