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2 Turkey: Islamists pay a price for
victory By M K Bhadrakumar
Nothing can quite surprise on the Middle
East's political chessboard. This has been a week
in which the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan
visited Jerusalem jointly for the first time as
envoys of the Arab League, and claimed they heard
"many positive responses" from the Israeli
leadership.
Also diplomats from the United
States and Iran discussed an unlikely alliance to
fight Sunni insurgents in Iraq - provoking, in
turn, a furious fatwa by Saudi Arabia's
Wahhabi muftison their
followers in Iraq to go and
destroy the holy shrines of Imam Hussein and
Hazrat-e-Abbas. Qom's venerable ayatollahs, Nasser
Makarem Shirazi and Hossein Nouri Hamedani,
promptly called on the United Nations to "condemn
such a fatwa, which fans the flames of
international terrorism".
Midway through
the week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki calmly proposed that he would be willing
to "examine" an official request from Washington
to raise the level of US-Iran exchanges. The
Middle East's politics indeed cascaded - even if
one disbelieves Thursday's Ha'aretz newspaper
report that Israel is "not far from a photo-op
with the Saudis".
But it still seemed
audacious to suggest that Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Israel, Hamas, the United States and the European
Union will make bedfellows. As results of the
Turkish parliamentary election began appearing on
Monday, the Middle East's main protagonists and
Western power brokers found common ground to
congratulate the leader of the "Islamist" Justice
and Development Party (AKP), Prime Minister Recip
Tayyip Erdogan, on his magnificent victory.
Revisiting 'Orientalism' The
Turkish election cast a shadow on the geopolitics
of the Middle East. One of the region's
experienced observers, Rami Khouri, wrote in
Lebanon's Daily Star, "The lessons revolve around
three related issues: the participation of
Islamist parties in democratic transformations in
the Middle East; the relationship between
secularist nationalism enforced by the armed
forces and electoral reformism supported by much
of the citizenry; and how Western democracies
should most effectively deal with situations in
which democracy and Islamist parties rear their
heads simultaneously in the Middle East.
"The election," Khouri continued with a
Levantine flourish, "in one fell swoop telescoped
centuries of Orientalist distortions about Middle
Eastern governance and political values into a
single, clear affirmation of contemporary Turkey's
most important lesson for us all: it is, in fact,
easy to reconcile democracy, nationalism,
secularism, republicanism, constitutionalism,
stability, prosperity and Islam in a single
process. That process is inclusive, honest
democracy, in which all legitimate players take
part and the winner is allowed to govern."
But Khouri would know the equations are
never quite that straightforward in his part of
the world. The fact is that for the past two
decades or so, mainstream Islamists have shown
willingness to become part of a democratic way of
life in countries as varied as Morocco, Lebanon,
Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. But the Arab regimes
haven't felt the need to engage the Islamists. Nor
is there any compulsion felt by those pro-Western
regimes to make the transformation to credible
democracies.
All that can be hoped for is
that one day they may choose Turkey's trajectory.
Even for the Western powers backing those Arab
regimes, Turkey remains a solitary exception. In
the Middle East, they haven't seriously engaged
the Islamists. The fact of Arab Islamist
sentiments being part of the resistance to Israeli
aggression and occupation becomes the core issue.
Indeed, in Turkey itself, if the Islamists gained
power in 2002 and thereafter consolidated their
popular appeal, that has been despite the West's
often unhelpful attitudes.
No wonder the
Hamas statement on Erdogan's victory has been a
touching invocation - an ideological cry lost
among the region's pragmatic reactions. Hamas
insisted that the "Islamic nation is now convinced
that there is no future unless it treads the
Islamic path". The Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami
Abu Zuhri, said, "The victory by the AKP signals
people's leaning toward Islamic teachings. It
reflects the transformation under way in the
region, hankering for a return to Islamic ideals."
Erdogan would have been embarrassed. Saudi
Arabia, in all its accumulated wisdom, wouldn't
even venture to characterize Erdogan's victory in
the idiom of religion. It dealt with the AKP in
cautiously couched near-secular terms. The Saudi
king and the crown prince simply congratulated
Erdogan "on the occasion of the Justice and
Development Party's win". Saudi commentators
complimented Erdogan for his pragmatic,
non-confrontational style of politics that knew
perfectly well "there were lines not to be
overstepped, and that he can win within the
confines of the system", to quote from Al-Hayat
newspaper.
Conceivably, the Saudi
establishment would wish that Arab Islamists
emulate Erdogan and "play the game wisely and
within the boundaries of the possible". Erdogan is
the archetypal "enlightened Islamic leader" for
the pro-Western Arab regimes - with no propensity
toward radicalism or violence and no particular
inclination to provoke confrontations with the
established order.
Erdogan doesn't aspire
to claim Ottoman Turkey's mantle of religious
leadership in the Middle East, though in his first
term as prime minister he led Turkey back to the
center stage of the Organization of Islamic
Conference. Thus, in more ways than one, Erdogan
can be "a friend of the Arabs and can become an
ally of theirs", Al-Hayat wrote. The London-based
Saudi daily's columnist added, "Arab governments
should cooperate with it [AKP] ... I know that
countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are going in
that direction."
Old wine in new
bottles Turkey's non-Arab neighbor Iran,
on the other hand, has specific concerns. The
Iranian president and foreign minister telephoned
their Turkish counterparts and felicitated them,
but strictly confined their remarks to Iran-Turkey
relations. The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman
stressed that Turkey's elections are its internal
matter, and "Iran respects whatever decision taken
by the Turkish nation". It is difficult to be
certain whether Iran even considered the AKP as an
Islamist party anymore after its transformation as
a "rainbow coalition" on the eve of the recent
election. Certainly, Iran did not appear to view
the Turkish election as a momentous contest of
"Islam versus secularism".
What bothers
Tehran is the Erdogan government's regional
policy, which is of profound consequence to
Iranian interests. Tehran's preoccupation,
therefore, is on the foreign-policy directions of
the new government rather than on the "cultural"
aspects. But Tehran needn't expect any major
surprises. Despite Erdogan's apparent pro-West
outlook, Turkey's foreign policy may not after all
reflect such tendencies. The relatively impressive
performance of the
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