What Turkey teaches about
democracy By M K Bhadrakumar
Last Saturday night, Orange Blossom, the
rising star of European dance music, gave an
open-air concert in Istanbul, the city of heart's
desires. The French band, which played a mix of
European electro-beat, West African polyrhythm,
haunting Arabic and Middle Eastern melodies and
all-stops-out rock, underscored that it knew no
borders.
Orange Blossom was on a European
tour presenting its latest album, Everything
must change. Turks were dazzled.
Only
a few hours earlier the Turkish capital of Ankara had
witnessed a historic public
rally attended by anywhere up to half a million
people from all walks of life. Like Orange
Blossom, it, too, was "multicultural", comprising
political forces of the left and right, including
the ultra-right, nationalistic "Grey Wolves".
But, unlike the French band, it called for
status quo in Turkish political life. The rally
demanded that the borders of the Turkish state
system and its unique political culture remain
immutable and sacrosanct. Nothing must change. The
rallyists chanted, "We do not want an imam in
Cankaya [the presidential palace]." At times, they
struck a strident anti-Western, anti-globalization
tone, calling for a "national awakening".
They chanted, "Don't be silent, or you'll
lose your homeland." They exhorted the nation to
nip in the bud the possibility that the incumbent
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, might be
edging closer to announcing his candidacy for
Turkey's forthcoming presidential election.
Erdogan, they alleged, represented the "looming
Islamic threat" to the secular state of Turkey.
Erdogan and the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP) calmly reacted to the
political affront. He complimented the rally for
its peaceful nature, and appreciated that sections
of Turkish opinion were "just using their
democratic right". He could have contended that
the bottom line in any functioning democracy lay
in the will of a lawfully elected Parliament
representing the collective aspirations of the
Turkish people. But the Islamist leader decided
that discretion was the better part of valor.
No sooner had the dust settled in Ankara
than he flew to Berlin for a summit meeting with
German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Erdogan was on a
tough mission to try to resuscitate the moribund
accession talks between Turkey and the European
Union (whose rotating presidency currently lies
with Germany). Erdogan made it very clear in
Berlin that Turkey had no option but to be part of
the European family, no matter how long its EU
accession was delayed.
Kemal Mustafa
"Ataturk" would have been pleased with the
Islamist leader's tenacity in pressing the case
for Turkey's destiny in Europe. On his return to
Ankara on Wednesday, Erdogan proposes to meet some
of the opposition political parties, chair a
cabinet meeting, and then address the AKP's
central decision-making executive committee
regarding the party's candidate for the
presidency. It is conceivable that Erdogan may be
the AKP's candidate for the presidency. Or, a
fallback could be that he might nominate a
candidate from the AKP. Erdogan, in essence, will
make his choice keeping in view the imperative of
the AKP's cohesion as the country's largest
political party.
The 85-year-old Turkish
state finds itself at a crossroads. But the
implications of Erdogan's final choice go far
beyond Turkey's borders. Turkey's standing as a
regional powerhouse, its strategic location as a
bridge between Europe and the Middle East, its
historical and cultural heritage in the Muslim
world - all these are bound to come into play in
the coming months. Meanwhile, Turkey is working
itself into a state of frenzy. Commenting on
Saturday's rally, the establishment newspaper
Turkish Daily News threatened that even if Erdogan
was elected president, he wouldn't be allowed to
govern in peace.
The daily posed in
strident rhetoric, "It was vividly demonstrated
[on Saturday] that the silent masses of this
country did not want someone incompatible with the
secularist principle of the republic in the
presidential palace. It was underlined in all
clarity that even if someone who does not
necessarily represent the "full independence
spirit" of the Kemalist doctrine; who may not
defend adequately the "honor of the nation"; who
rather than science considers theology as his
guide; who rather than carrying Turkey to the
level of advanced democracies aspires for the
re-introduction of sheikhs, brotherhoods and the
sharia order is elected as the president of this
country, he will not be able to sit comfortably on
the presidential seat."
In blunt terms,
the daily warned the prime minister and the ruling
party, "Having a majority in Parliament does not
necessarily empower them to stage whatever they
want in whatever fashion they want in this country
... if somehow because of the parliamentary
conjecture, someone who is incompatible with the
norms of a modern secular democratic republic is
to become the new tenant of the presidential
mansion ... Turks will gather again in Ankara and
force a civilian transfer of the seat of the
founder of modern Turkey to someone eligible for
that position."
But, in fairness, not all
Turkish commentators sounded so arrogant. Some
have also pointed out that the self-styled
"Kemalist" stance belies logic and fair play. They
have pointed out that what passes currently as the
current Kemalist contention is contrary to the
democratic spirit, and asked how Turkey could
consider itself a modern state unless democracy
remained as sacrosanct as Turkey's secularist
principles.
How, they asked, could
democracy and secularism be separated from each
other? They pointed a finger at the contradiction
of the rallyists on Saturday maintaining an
"anti-Western" stance while forgetting that the
right of a woman not to wear a headscarf was a
Western trait, and that the concepts of democracy
and secularism that the rallyists claimed to
uphold were essentially Western ideologies.
The present logjam in Turkish politics
arises out of various factors. In the good old
days, any semblance of an "Islamist awakening" in
Turkey would have provided the excuse for a
military takeover. But in present-day Turkey, an
outright military coup is unthinkable. All that is
possible is what the Turks themselves
light-heartedly call a "post-modern coup". That
is, an arrogation of power by the Kemalists in
league with the country's establishment, riding a
wave of Turkish nationalism.
Without
doubt, Turkish nationalism has been on the
ascendancy in the recent period on account of
various factors - the EU's perceived snub of
Turkey's claim to membership; war in neighboring
Iraq and resultant regional instability; the
deteriorating security situation in the east
stemming from Kurdish militancy; and so on.
But at the same time, even though the
ruling AKP is an Islamist party, it enjoys a
substantial political base and commands an
unassailable two-third parliamentary majority. The
other political parties find themselves in varying
degrees of disrepute and are lacking in
credibility as a viable alternative to the AKP.
Besides, the AKP government has met with
considerable success in stabilizing the country's
economy by sustaining a steady high level of
growth while keeping inflation under check. The
economic policies have been generally responsive
to the needs of different segments such as
business, farmers, pensioners and government
employees.
Above all, with the experience
of running the government the AKP has also gained
mastery to an extent over the working of Turkey's
state system - its formidable bureaucracy, its
enigmatic judiciary and its brawny security
agencies.
It is natural that the Kemalists
are beginning to harbor a sense of frustration
that time is running out, and beyond a point, the
genie of democratization in Turkey cannot be
squeezed back into the bottle. All the same, an
outright military coup being inconceivable,
holding out the threat of extra-constitutional
methods of political agitation is the only way out
for the Kemalists in the emergent scenario - a
variant of the phenomenon of "color revolution"
endemic to the transition countries of the former
Soviet Union.
But, unlike the case with
Eurasia, the Kemalists in Turkey need to take note
that the AKP government enjoys broad support from
Washington. Of course, the Erdogan government's
equations with the US can nosedive if Turkish
military intervention against the Kurds in
northern Iraq takes place. But, here, too, Erodgan
has been careful so far not to walk into the
Kemalist trap, while painstakingly deflecting the
criticism that he is soft on Kurdish militancy.
The Kemalists are no doubt bracing for a
showdown if Erdogan insists on himself or someone
from his party claiming the presidency. It is not
that Erdogan lacks the capacity to rally a million
supporters of his own from all over the country on
the streets of Ankara. He is a tough leader. He is
a charismatic figure and has a huge popular
following. But that is precisely the kind of
confrontation that he has sought to avoid with the
Kemalist establishment. During his years in power
since 2002, he has kept a low profile and has
avoided any clash with the powerful military.
There is much irony in the fact that it
was the consistent decimation of a traditional
left in Turkish political life by the country's
establishment (through the instrument of
ultra-right nationalist forces) in the Cold War
setting that ultimately paved the way for the rise
of political Islam. Thousands of leftist cadres
were eliminated in brutal state-sponsored violence
in the early 1970s.
The Islamists have
striven to fill the resulting political vacuum
that would have been a secular opposition's due
claim. They have shrewdly exploited the discredit
that the self-styled Kemalists have invited on
themselves over recent decades through
misgovernance, rampant corruption, cronyism and
political arbitrariness. The Islamists have
convinced popular opinion that they are a
responsive, accountable, clean and efficient
political alternative.
The paradox is that
even though the emerging pattern of Islamic
pluralistic politics is at variance with the
West's brand of secular liberal democracy, the AKP
has genuinely endeavored to advance social,
economic and political reforms in Turkey in
accordance with the Copenhagen criteria for EU
membership. Looking back, there cannot be any two
opinions that the AKP's years in power have seen a
phenomenal transformation of Turkey as a country
eligible for EU accession.
The country is
hardly recognizable today in comparison with five
years ago. The AKP ought to have received due
acknowledgement from the EU for its sustained
reform program aimed at strengthening the rule of
law in the country. Arguably, Europe should have
lent encouragement to the Turkish Islamist forces
in their readiness to eschew apocalyptic
strategies and instead resort to democratic
politics and evolve as a centrist party. But for a
variety for reasons, the EU is in no mood to
"expand", and it will perforce have to go slow on
Turkey's accession.
The move by Turkey's
Islamists towards political participation has
nothing to do with US President George W Bush's
democracy project in the Middle East, either. Yet,
in a curious way, it has everything to do with the
democratization of the Middle East region as a
whole.
Capitals such as Cairo, Amman and
Riyadh will certainly watch with anxiety how their
raging masses may draw the conclusion that Islamic
democracy can be an alternative to Arab secular
autocracy. More importantly, these Arab regimes
will have cause to worry that as time passes, the
West, especially the US, may begin to realize from
the Turkish experience that, after all, the
delicate equation between political Islam and a
representative form of government doesn't have to
be regarded as a zero-sum game.
Out of
such a realization, a new paradigm of regime
change in the Arab world may ensue. The autocratic
rulers in the region will be uneasy that the
Turkish experience further corroborates the
reasonableness of the "historic compromise" with
the Islamists in Morocco, and of the national
unity government in Palestine.
The crucial
importance of what is unfolding in Turkey lies in
that, to quote former Israeli foreign minister
Shlomo Ben-Ami in a recent article, "Engaging
political Islam will need to be the central part
of any successful strategy for the Middle East.
Instead of sticking to doomsday prophecies of
categorical perspectives that prevent an
understanding of the complex fabric of Islamic
movements, the West needs to keep the pressure on
the incumbent regimes to stop circumventing
political reform."
Ben-Ami concluded, "The
challenge is not to destroy Islamic movements, but
how to turn them away from revolutionary to
reformist politics by granting them legitimate
political space."
Equally, political Islam
is not a leviathan. It is amorphous and sort of
"multicultural" - like Orange Blossom, which has
Carlos Robles Arenas on drums and sampler,
vocalist Leila Bounous, Pierre-Jean Chabot on
violin and percussionist Mathias Vaguenez.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
over 29 years, with postings including India's
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
(Copyright 2007 Asia
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