Art for God's Sake - Gentrification in Istanbul

There has been a lot of doomsday talk in and about Turkey recently, particularly in the lead-up to, and as a result of the recent referendum on the constitution. The essence of the talk seems to be that Turkey is lurching inexorably back into the Islamic world, and eighty-seven years of secular, Western-oriented progress, instigated by the revered founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is being systematically unravelled. The most recent evidence of this retrogression, so the doom-sayers tell us, is the violence that took place in the inner-city district of Tophane, where a gang of thugs, armed with clubs, knives and pepper-spray (an interestingly modern addition to traditional armament) set upon citizens peacefully attending the opening of several art galleries in the area.

Well, let me say at the outset that I do not, in any way, condone this kind of street violence. It is unconscionable that citizens attending such an event, folks you would normally expect to be peaceful, intellectual, even a little other-worldly, should end up in hospital with knife wounds and concussion while going about their lawful business. Art gallery owners, victims, and their friends and families are rightfully angry about what happened on 21 September.

I must admit, there are times when I despair of the world, and feel that the end of civilisation as I have known it, is assuredly at hand. Usually, however, the feeling passes, I get matters back into some kind of perspective, and remember that life, on the whole, is pretty comfortable for me, and others in the circles I generally move in. So let’s step back from the events of that Tuesday night, and try to take a broader view.

First, then, there is the matter of street violence. Of course it’s a nasty matter, and, for those immediately affected, extremely traumatising. However, a scrap which sees five people treated at hospital for relatively minor injuries, and seven taken into police custody, hardly qualifies as an apocalyptic event. In fact, on the microcosmic level, if two of the injured had not been foreign citizens, and those set upon had not been well-heeled attendees of an art gallery opening, the fracas would very likely have received no media attention at all, and certainly not have made international news. Worse things happen, I’m sure, on a pretty regular basis, in any major Western city - and Istanbul has a population of more than twelve million.

On another level, however, there is an important insight into Turkish society provided by this event. Ten years ago, in April 2000, hundreds of supporters of the English Football club, Leeds United, arrived in Istanbul to attend the UEFA Cup match with the local side Galatasaray. Prior to the match, a group of Leeds fans managed to get themselves into an altercation with some natives, with the tragic result that one Englishman was stabbed to death, and another ended up in hospital with a serious knife wound.

Again, you cannot condone the violence, but as a visitor to Turkey, you should take the trouble to look into the local character. Turks are famed for their friendliness and hospitality to visitors. They are generally slow to anger, as anyone knows who has witnessed the anarchy on the roads of Istanbul, and the relatively few incidences of road-rage. On the other hand, it is well known that, once a fight does break out, there is no backing down. Carrying an offensive weapon is not uncommon, and bloodshed is a predictable result. Every year I go to the main police security HQ in Istanbul to renew my residence and work permit. As we enter the premises, of course, we are x-rayed and searched. An interesting variant on what I was used to, however, is the desk to which you can surrender your firearm, where it will be looked after until you have completed your business. For this reason, local bystanders tend to do all they can to prevent an argument escalating to violence. As a general rule, it’s better to avoid getting into a fight with a Turk if you can do so with honour preserved on both sides.

Which brings me to the next level of my analysis: the reasons for the conflict in Tophane. I read an article some months ago in the Turkish Airlines in-flight magazine ‘Skylife’, commenting on the transformation taking place in the historic area of Tophane. Gentrification is a relatively recent phenomenon in Istanbul, but it has long been common elsewhere, and the stages of the process are well known. The writer of the article describes how the gentrification process spread from the fringes of the neighbouring, already developed districts of Cihangir and Beyoğlu. The arty middle-classes were lured by the opening of a large new city art gallery, Istanbul Modern, in a huge old warehouse on the Bosporus shore. They began to see the potential of an area characterised by run-down, but attractive 19^th century buildings with low rents or price tags. A new kind of resident moved in; art galleries, antique shops and up-market charcuteries opened, local small businesses found their incomes increasing, and rents began to skyrocket. The city council sees urban renewal taking place at someone else’s expense, and at the same time, the potential to increase property taxes. It happens everywhere, and everyone’s a winner, right?

Unfortunately, wrong. The inevitable corollary of an influx of new residents is the displacement of the old. The old residents, needless to say, are mostly poor with no voice to make themselves heard in the corridors of power. And anyway, what is their argument? You can’t hold back progress. Money talks. If you can’t pay the new rents, you’ll just have to move somewhere cheaper – generally to some soulless outer suburb where services, facilities and public transport are scarce. Add to that, the Turkish concept of ‘mahalle’: the inner-city neighbourhood with an identity created by inhabitants whose families have lived there perhaps for generations; whose children have attended local schools; whose small businessmen mostly live in the area, are on first name terms with their customers and have a vested interest in supporting the local economy. Residents of the mahalle know each other, and know when a stranger turns up. They help bring up each other’s children, are jealous of the reputation of their neighbourhood and for the most part, police themselves. Well, it’s not just a Turkish thing, of course. The same spirit existed in Western cities too, in the past, until it was largely swept away by urban renewal and gentrification.

This, of course, is the point I want to make here. ‘Tophaneliler’ (old residents of Tophane) see their neighbourhood being invaded en masse by new breed of neighbour who cares little, if at all, for the old ways. They feel themselves being pushed out, and perhaps feel some natural resentment. The resentment can easily turn to violence when sparked by an insult, real or imagined: wealthy new-comers drinking and socialising loudly on streets where formerly this was not the done thing; a word of appreciation directed at pretty young neighbourhood lass . . . It’s not hard to imagine a likely scenario. We can acknowledge the logic of it, at the same time as we condemn the violence.

The thing about Turkey is that these processes that we have observed elsewhere, are vastly complicated by the sheer age and complexity of the society that exists here. A little uphill, and west of the Tophane district stands one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks – Galata Tower. The tower was built in 1348 as part of the fortifications of the Genoese citadel of Galata. The Genoese had been granted special rights by the grateful Byzantine Emperor after helping to win back Constantinople from the Latin invaders who had set up shop there after the forces of the 4^th Crusade, supported by Genoa’s rivals the Venetians, had besieged and conquered the city.

When the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet I decided it was time finally to add Constantinople to his dominions, Tophane was one of the places he chose to site cannons with which to bombard the city walls. The name Tophane, in fact, means ‘cannon foundry’, and the old Ottoman foundry remains one of the distinctive buildings in the area today; though it now serves a more peaceful purpose as the Culture and Arts Centre of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. The foreshore of Tophane was the place where cargo ships and passenger liners berthed; and before that, had for centuries been docking for warships of the Ottoman Navy. We can imagine the kind of activities that existed in streets back from the waterfront.

Two other historic buildings on the foreshore of Tophane are the Nüsretiye Mosque, and the mosque of Kiliç Ali Pasha. Interestingly, the former, built in 1826, was designed by the architect Krikor Balyan, of a well-known Armenian Istanbul family, members of which served as Imperial Architects to six Ottoman Sultans. The older of these two buildings was designed by Mimar Sinan (the Ottoman ‘Christopher Wren’) and built in 1580 by a gentleman known as Kiliç Ali Pasha. Despite being an Admiral of the Ottoman Navy, he was apparently born in Italy and went originally by the name of Giovanni Dionigi Galeni. Captured by the Ottomans in 1536, he was put to work as a galley slave, before converting to Islam, and rising through the ranks to end his career as Admiral of the Fleet.

Why am I telling you this, you may ask. Merely to illustrate the fact that getting a handle on what’s going on in this part of the world is a complex business. Everyone knows the Ottomans were Turks and they slaughtered Armenians – yet here we have a family of Armenians designing some of the most important imperial buildings (including mosques) and, one must assume, being well rewarded for their time and trouble with money and status well into the 19^th century. And the Ottoman Navy, scourge of Christian Europe in the 16^th century, commanded by an Italian, who must surely have had ample opportunities to escape long before reaching the lofty rank of admiral.

Events in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries irreparably altered the fabric of society in Istanbul, and Turkey as a whole. What was formerly a polyglot mix of peoples, with large populations of Jews, Armenians and Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, European businessmen and diplomats, has ostensibly become a much more homogeneous community of Turkish Muslims. Yet this apparent homogeneity is misleading. Turkishness itself is an elusive concept, imposed on a diverse and divided population in the 1920s to save what remained of the Ottoman heartland.

The Turkish republic, founded in 1923, was a pre-industrial, largely rural state with a shattered economy and a population of around 13 million. By 1950 this had grown to 20 million, of which 75% still lived in small villages. In the 60 years since then, the population has grown to 75 million, and the ratio of rural to urban-dwellers has almost exactly reversed. Two inevitable concomitants of this growth have been: a huge influx of rural poor into the cities, especially Istanbul; and the rapid appearance of a large urban middle class. 

Returning, then, to the point whence we began our odyssey here, the events in Tophane on 21 September this year can be seen as symptomatic of the tectonic changes taking place in the society of modern Turkey. There is a dynamism evident for all to see, in the mushrooming of modern shopping complexes, the spectacular development of transport infrastructure: motorways, airports, underground rail; and the rapid growth of the private health and education sectors, especially universities. At the same time, conservative elements from villages and small towns are more in evidence in the large urban centres; denizens of traditional inner city neighbourhoods are coming into contact with the new middle classes; and inevitably there will be conflicts of interest.

Governing a country as internally diverse as Turkey is no easy task – as the CHP Party is finding, in its attempts to become a credible opposition. To be Republican is one thing; to be a party of the People, quite another. Every democratically elected government of Turkey since the first free election in 1946 has had to compromise between the secular ideals of the Atatürk revolution, and the religious beliefs of the majority of voters. Compromise, however, is the essence of politics – and the ability to compromise on issues of national importance, the mark of a mature democracy. It’s been thirty years since Turkey had its last military coup, and the likelihood of another seems increasingly remote. That has to be a healthy sign.

The Turks are Coming! Another force in world rugby?

I come from a rugby-mad country. New Zealanders love sport in general. We are lucky to be born in a country where nature is kind – the weather is mild and there is plenty of open space. Children have the opportunity to choose from an unlimited range of physical activities, but the Number One choice is, and always has been, rugby football.

When I was a kid at primary school, there were two choices for a boy: play rugby, or be a ‘poofter’ (if you don’t know the word, look it up). These days, there are far more options available, and NZ has produced champions in almost every kind of sport, from lawn bowls to boxing; from speedway racing to yachting; from field hockey to middle distance running, rowing, kayaking and putting the shot. The NZ men’s soccer team competed in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, finishing unbeaten in their group, ahead of Italy. The men’s basketball team performed creditably in the recent World Basketball Championships in Turkey.

However, NZ has a small population, and it is not possible to compete consistently with the top countries in the world in every sport. From time to time a world-beating player or team appears, but we may have to wait many years to achieve the same success again. This is true in every sport – except rugby. Rugby is king of sports in New Zealand, and the honour of the nation is carried on the broad shoulders of our national rugby team, the All Blacks. When the All Blacks play against another country, it is far more than a mere sporting event – the result may be the cause of nationwide rejoicing or mourning.



Bleeding for his country -
and the William Webb Ellis Trophy

But not all matches are of equal importance. Apart from New Zealand, there is one other country for which rugby is the number one sport. And I use the word ‘sport’ here advisedly. The other country is South Africa, and the rivalry between these two countries can be compared to the televised bouts of ‘World Wrestling Entertainment’, except rather more serious and infinitely less theatrical. When the All Blacks emerged victorious from their most recent match with the South African Springboks, the NZ coach, Graham Henry, had this to say about his team: ‘These are the guys I would want to have beside me in a war!’ And I’m sure he wasn’t joking. When it comes to smiling, Henry would make the Turkish football coach, Fatih Terim, look like a stand-up comic.



Speaking of the ‘Imperator’ and the Turkish national football team brings me, in fact to the point of this blog. I read an article in my Turkish newspaper the other day, in which the president of the Youth and Sports Development Council announced that they were intending to introduce rugby to Turkish youth – and my heart skipped a beat. The rugby-playing nations of the world have managed to keep their game out of the hands of the Turks – until now! It could be the beginning of the end. My pick is that, if the Turks really get into the game, they’ll have a fair chance of getting their name on that William Webb Ellis trophy by 2019. ‘Yeah, sure!’ I hear you say. But listen up . . .

If there’s one nation on Earth that knows about war, it’s the Turks. If you had to choose a group of guys to have on your side in the event of one, you could do a lot worse than pick a bunch of Turks. Look at a list of the largest empires in world history. The Ottoman Empire comes in at No. 5. If you’re prepared to relax your definition of ‘Turk’ a little to include the Mongols, they’re actually at No. 2; and pretty obviously you don’t build an empire of that size without doing a fair amount of fighting. In fact, if it hadn’t been for some pretty desperate resistance by Hapsburg forces in 1529 and 1683, the Ottomans might well have conquered Vienna and made major inroads into the heartland of Europe.

A glance back further into history reveals that this Ottoman threat to Europe was no surprise. Before the Turkish emir Osman founded the Ottoman dynasty in 1299, Turks had been fighting as hired warriors in the armies of most major regional powers for several centuries. The Persians, Egyptians, Byzantines, Venetians, and even, interestingly (and, of course, more recently), the United States of America, have all availed themselves of Turkish mercenaries at one time or another.

In the 70 years from 1853 to 1923, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and finally disintegrated, its people fought no fewer than seven major wars, beginning with the Crimean War, and ending with the War of Independence, out of which emerged the modern republic of Turkey. Of course, apart from the last named war, there weren’t a lot of successes for the Turks to boast of in that period – but for sure, they weren’t short of fighting practice. If the British hadn’t swallowed their own rhetoric in the 19^th Century about the Ottoman Empire being the ’Sick Man of Europe’, they might have been a little less sanguine about their chances of success in the Gallipoli invasion of 1915. The Turks may have been short of technology, but they remained dangerous foes when backed into a corner.

Coming up to the present day, there is still universal compulsory military service for all male citizens of Turkey. Furthermore, it is not a mere token training. The majority of young men serve fifteen months in the armed forces, and many of them see action in the east of the country in the on-going struggle with Kurdish insurgents.

However, Graham Henry’s remarks notwithstanding, rugby is a sport – a fact attested to by the intention of the International Olympic Committee to include it in the Games from 2016. So let me return to my other reasons for thinking that Turkey may well become a force to be reckoned with.

Turks love football. In fact, the word ‘love’ doesn’t really do justice to the emotions that football arouses in the Turkish breast. It’s my opinion that the rivalries between supporters of Turkish football clubs have their roots in the factional riots originating in the chariot races of Ancient Rome, which periodically laid waste the city of Constantinople (old Istanbul, of course). Not only do the supporters of competing Turkish clubs not mingle during a match, but large numbers of uniformed, seriously armed police stand guard to ensure they do not come to blows, or worse.

However, the football that inspires this fanaticism is not rugby. It is, of course, the ‘poofter’ variety played with a round ball, indulged in by the misguided majority of the world’s nations, in which players hurl themselves to the turf in paroxysms of agony when an opponent approaches within spitting distance. Turks are, actually, quite good at this pansy version of football, though their results on the world stage tend to be somewhat erratic. It’s my opinion that one of the chief reasons for this is that Turks are not very good at feigning injury, and are more likely to stoically refrain from showing weakness in competitive situations.

Nevertheless, the Turkish national soccer/football team did finish 3^rd in the 2002 FIFA World Cup – a creditable performance which put them in the same company as international powerhouses, Brazil and Germany. According to that newspaper article I mentioned earlier, the Turkish Sports Development people have recognised the need for large skilful athletes in fielding a rugby team. Wrestling and handball are two important sports in Turkey, and they suggest that similar talents are useful in rugby too. Further, they are focusing on the recruitment of players two metres in height, 110 kg in weight, capable of running 100 metres in around 13 seconds.

One thing that struck me when I first came to Turkey was how many short men there were. However, in a country of 70 million people, there is a wide range of body shapes and sizes, and a Turk by the name of Sultan Kösen recently entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s tallest man. In the World Basketball Championships (a sport unsympathetic to normal-sized human beings), held last month, the Turkish Men’s team finished runners-up to the USA. We may safely assume that they won’t have a problem finding fifteen guys large enough to foot it with the man-monsters of the other rugby-playing nations.

I want to finish with a brief anecdote from my early days in Turkey. When I first came to this country, I took up a position teaching English in a high school in a suburb of Istanbul. My students were of no great intellectual stature, but they were cheerful, outgoing and enthusiastic, keen to initiate a ‘green’ foreigner into the intricacies of Turkish culture. One morning, after our lesson ended and we broke for lunch, a group of 16 year-old lads offered to demonstrate for me a popular playground game known as ‘Long Donkey’. Later, of course, I understood that this ‘game’ is totally off-limits in Turkish schools, but at the time I was keen to learn about local customs, and reluctant to hurt the feelings of my pupils. So the lads proceeded to clear a space in the classroom by moving the desks and chairs around, and the game began.

Let me explain how ‘Long Donkey’ is played. Two teams are chosen. The numbers don’t really matter, but let’s say, on this particular day, there were seven a-side. A coin is tossed and one team becomes the ‘donkey’. The leader of the team braces himself in a standing position facing a wall, and the rest of his team bend over and grasp the player in front in a long, scrum-like formation. The other team, meanwhile, withdraw themselves as far away from the ‘donkey’ as possible, and conduct themselves as follows: the first player takes a running jump, aiming to land himself, with as much force as possible, on the back of the ‘donkey’. The object, as you may guess, is to collapse the ‘donkey’, or, failing that, to remain on its back so that, when the next player follows, the combined weight is increased. 

All players in the jumping team take their turn, and, if the ‘donkey’ is collapsed, a point is scored, or not, as the case may be. Team roles are then reversed, and the game continues until the players tire of it, someone is seriously injured, or the police are called, whichever comes first.

Well, luckily I was able to put a stop to my first experience of 'Long Donkey' before we went that far – and, fortunately, before any of my Turkish teaching colleagues came on the scene. But ever since that day, I have been wondering what would happen when and if Turks were able to combine their love of football with their enthusiasm for ‘Long Donkey’. It seems that the rugby world is about to find out.

Cruelty and Mercy - Righting the Wrongs of History

I was doing a little shopping in my local area of Istanbul the other day and I dropped into a small hardware shop. There was an elderly chap behind the counter, and I guess he doesn’t get a lot of customers, so he was keen to chat. As usual, I was picked as a non-native as soon as I walked in the door, and he wanted to know where I was from. Like most Turks I have met, he was happy to come across a foreigner, especially one who knew enough Turkish to hold up the other end of a conversation.

Something I have started doing recently in these situations, after exchanging a few pleasantries, is to ask my new acquaintance where he is from. Turks get around a lot, and you can’t assume everyone you meet originates from Istanbul. Even if he was born there, a Turk will probably still identify strongly with his ‘memleket’, the place where his family came from.

Well, it turned out that the gentleman was from Bulgaria, as are quite a number of Turks you will meet. It seemed a good opportunity to ask when and why he had come to Turkey. In response, he held out his left hand and directed my gaze to the thumbnail – or the place where you would normally expect to see a thumbnail. ‘They pulled it out,’ he said simply. ‘This too, ‘he said, indicating a large rough scar on his forehead. He didn’t take off his shoe, but he added that the big toe of his left foot had been crudely amputated with an axe. ‘They wanted us to change our names,’ he explained, ‘and I am proud of my Turkish name.’

So he’d come to Turkey, along with more than 300,000 other Bulgarian Turks who fled anti-Muslim persecution in the late 1980s, leaving behind houses and most worldly possessions.

Now I want to make it clear here that he wasn’t complaining, and his tone wasn’t bitter. He had made a new life for himself and his family in Turkey, and he seemed content. He was merely responding matter-of-factly to my questions. I did a little subsequent reading on the subject, and, to be fair, this persecution of Turkish Muslims took place under the old Communist regime, which was overthrown not long after. The new government restored rights and freedoms to Muslim Bulgarians, and many of the refugees chose to return from Turkey. I visited Sofia briefly in 2004, and saw a historic mosque in a prominent location. An important landmark on the shores of the Golden Horn in Istanbul is a 120 year-old Bulgarian Orthodox church, so these must be good signs.

I saw another good sign in my Turkish newspaper a day or two later. Two hundred members of an extended ‘Süryani’ family were celebrating a reunion in their ‘memleket’, the south-east Turkish town of Mardin, whence they had fled to various countries because of terror and violence.  At a colourful traditional ceremony, they reopened the doors of the 700 year-old mansion they had inherited from their forebears.

Well, of course, such an event begs several questions, among them: What actually happened to make these people leave in the first place? And shouldn’t someone be held accountable for that?

Maybe someone should – but unfortunately, it’s not always easy to find a person, or government that can be persuaded, or forced, to shoulder the blame. The present government of Russia is understandably reluctant to accept responsibility for atrocities carried out by Imperial Czarist Russia. Republican Turkey regrets events that took place under the Ottoman Sultans, but shares this reluctance to assume guilt. Perhaps, if the United Kingdom became a ‘United Republic’, they might be able to distance themselves from some of the worst excesses carried out in the name of the British Empire.  You can’t help feeing a little sorry for the modern Brit sometimes.

But I know these are not matters to be treated lightly. Historical wounds leave deep scars, and national pride thrives on the memory of past injustices. We New Zealanders know how difficult it is, with the best intentions, to right the wrongs of history. Historical facts themselves can be elusive will-o’-the-wisps, even when the history is less than 200 years old. How much more difficult, then, in a land which witnessed the dawn of history itself!

You can commonly see, in Turkey today, agricultural implements and conveyances that hark back to the very earliest days of civilisation. They are not much used nowadays. Mostly they are to be seen on display in gardens or antique shops: ancient stone olive presses, primitive sleds and the spoke-less wheels attached to a revolving axle as in the picture. Such wheels were introduced in the third millennium BCE prior to the invention of spokes, but have been in use in Turkey within living memory.

Did you get that? Let me just run that by you again: the third millennium BCE! We’re talking four to five thousand years ago here, long before any Turk set foot in the region now known as Anatolia. And, we could also add, for that matter, quite some time before any Greek. History goes back a long way in this part of the world – the practice of writing is generally accepted as having emerged simultaneously around 3000 BCE in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Check out the table on the left, a list of civilisations that succeeded each other over a period of 4000 years until the Ottomans hammered the last nail in the Byzantine coffin with their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Spare a little sympathy for the Turkish school boy or girl, tasked with memorising all that - and, in fact, I left out much of the finer detail.

Historians and archeologists are not always 100% certain where these various peoples came from before they established their kingdoms and empires in this ancient land. The period of 600 years after 1300 BCE, here labelled the ‘Ionian Collusion’, you will find elsewhere referred to as the ‘Anatolian Dark Age’, marked by invasions and conquests of the mysterious ‘Sea People’. Nevertheless, we can be fairly sure of two things. First, human nature being what it is, there would have been a fair amount of bloodshed and slaughter of the vanquished by the victors. Second, the nature of invasions being what it is, there would also have been a considerable amount of assimilation and accommodation taking place in the aftermath, such that elements of the earlier culture would have mixed with elements of the new to produce a new synthesis.

Well, we can find plenty of examples of the bloodshed and slaughter, and I have touched on some of the more recent ones here and elsewhere, so it is not this on which I wish to focus. Rather, I want to speculate a little on the assimilations and accommodations that must have taken place.

One fact historians do agree on is 1071 CE as the date of the battle which saw the beginning of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia. The Byzantine army was defeated, the Emperor taken captive, and the Turkification / Islamicisation of Anatolia begun. But how many Turks actually entered Anatolia at this time, and what percentage did this represent of the total population of the area? What happened to those predominantly Christian, Greek-speaking local inhabitants? Were they slaughtered? Did they move en masse to friendlier lands? Were they forcibly converted, along the lines of later Christian inquisitorial methods? Or did the majority of them survive, gradually adopting the customs and practices of their new overlords, while intermarrying with them and passing on some of their own ways and traditions?

I make no claim to expertise in this complex area. To this day, Turks and Greeks squabble over who invented baklava, dolma (dolmadhes), döner kebab (souvlaki) and Turkish (Greek) coffee. Nevertheless, it’s easier to imagine the Turkish bath having developed from its Roman predecessor, rather than having been dismantled and carried on horseback from the steppes of Central Asia. It is undeniable that the imperial mosques of Ottoman Istanbul derived their architectural inspiration from the soaring dome of Hagia Sophia. The rakı and fish which characterise a Turkish night on the town clearly owe more to Mediterranean than Mongolian geography.

But what of that Byzantine Empire overrun by marauding Turks in the late Middle Ages? The name ‘Byzantine’ itself, as I have pointed out before, was never used by those imperial people to describe themselves. In their eyes they were Roman, direct descendants of the founding twins nourished by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber. The Turks themselves recognise this in the word they use (Rum) to refer to the Greek-speaking peoples of Anatolia. But there’s the rub, you see. The prevailing opinion in Western Europe was that real Romans spoke Latin; and for sure they weren’t Christian. Once the Pope started trying to resurrect the Roman Empire in the West, albeit in holy guise, there was no room for another competing one in the East. The Eastern Romans suffered in the eyes of the West because they had adopted too much of the local culture, despite, of course, having conquered (and maybe even having killed some of) whoever had been there before them.

Then there is the matter of Christianity which, simplistic Western views notwithstanding, was born and raised in the Middle East and Anatolia. Evangelism is a tricky business, made easier if you can find ways of melding your new religion with the culture and traditions of the prospective converts. I remember seeing a mural in a small Roman Catholic church in the backblocks of northern New Zealand. The depiction of the Saviour was noticeably brown and Polynesian in appearance. No doubt those early missionaries were able to draw an analogy with the Maori demi-god Maui, son of an earthly mother and the immortal guardian of the underworld, whose rebellious streak and supernatural powers brought great benefits to the lives of the mortals with whom he lived.

Christian visitors to Turkey often visit a humble building near the modern town of Selçuk, said to mark the spot where Jesus’s mother lived, having been brought there by the apostle John after the traumatising death of her son. Hard to know for sure, of course, though the Pope himself, on more than one occasion, has given credence to the story by visiting and praying at the site. More verifiable, however, is the long tradition of mother goddesses in the Aegean region of Anatolia. The Phrygian goddess Cybele mated with another semi-deity, Attis, who later reportedly cut off his own genitals, inspiring a cult of eunuch priests (a more certain way of enforcing celibacy rather than merely relying on self-restraint – perhaps the RCs should be looking into that). Cybele seems to have morphed into the popular Greek goddess Artemis, with connections to the moon goddess Selene, the Roman goddess Diana, and the Carian goddess Hecate. Who’s to say those early Christian evangelists didn’t find going with the local flow sometimes mutually beneficial?

What I’m suggesting here is that the twin processes of conquest and assimilation have been going on in this part of the world for millennia, and it’s an impossible task to separate and isolate the individual components of the culture and people that exist in Turkey today.

Take as another example the archeological excavations at Kültepe, some 20 kilometres from the modern Turkish city of Kayseri. The site is also known by its ancient name of Karum Kanesh, where Kanesh was a city inhabited by local Hittites from around 2000 BCE, and Karum, a satellite trading outpost of Assyrian merchants from Mesopotamia. Clearly the two peoples learnt each others’ tongues, and the visitors even taught their hosts the cuneiform alphabet in which have been preserved the earliest surviving inscriptions in the Hittite language.

This practice of allowing traders to set up a permanent trading base adjacent to a major city evidently continued until recent times. The city of Constantinople / Istanbul was enclosed within the ancient city walls until little more than a century ago. Across the Golden Horn, the settlement of Galata / Pera was the home of Genoese and Venetians in the Middle Ages, and later, of European Levantines; and where the embassies of foreign powers were located until the new Turkish Republic chose to site its capital in Ankara. The Christian districts of Pera and Kadıköy (Chalcedon) on the Asian shore of the Bosporus retain a more open attitude to alcohol consumption and related entertainments than is customary among Muslim communities.

We seem to have travelled a long way from my local ironmonger from Bulgaria, and I confess I have led you on a rather labyrinthine journey: to Mardin and Russia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, Selçuk and Kayseri, before returning at last to Istanbul. Was there a point to it all? It’s easy to imagine the violent loss of a thumbnail and a toe arousing anger and even hatred against the perpetrator of the action, especially if the violence could be associated with matters of nationalism, religion and ethnic identity. The line separating anger and hatred from bomb-throwing and vicious revenge is easily crossed, and escape from the accumulative circular spiral of grievance and vengeance is difficult. Unscrupulous seekers of power know this and use it for their own ends. In the final analysis, as the poet William Blake said, cruelty and mercy both have a human heart, and what use to make of that heart is ours to choose.

Genocide, and the Procession of History

There was an interesting exhibition in Istanbul recently – a collection of paintings by an artist called Faruk Kutlu. Not that the works themselves are likely to turn the art world on its head, but the title caught my eye: ‘Kafkasya’dan Sürgün’ – in English, ‘Deportation (or Exile) from the Caucasus’. It interested me because I’d recently visited Sakarya, a small city not far from Istanbul, and people there told me that their ancestors had come from the Caucasus region. I’m irresistibly fascinated by these little historical mysteries, so I had to check it out.

It turns out that representatives of the Adygeyans (which is apparently what the Circassian people of the Caucasus call themselves in their own language) have, for some time, been lobbying the Russian Government seeking an apology for an alleged genocide that took place in the 1860s. ‘Dammit,’ I hear you say. ‘This word genocide is going to lose its meaning if it gets bandied around so frequently and lightly’ – but I have to say’ this one is definitely worth a look.

The Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, was heir to the domain of the Russian Empire, officially dated from 1721. By the second half of the 19^th century, under Tsar Alexander II, Russia had built the third largest empire in the history of the world, and as we all know, its religion was Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Well, like most generalisations, that’s only part of the truth. In fact the expansion of the Russian border to the south was largely at the expense of central Asian and Caucasian states, which, at the time, were overwhelmingly Muslim.

The policy of successive Russian monarchs had been to ‘discourage’ the Muslim religion in the interests of civilisation, Christianisation and Russification. Perversely, the Muslim inhabitants of the Caucasus chose to reject the invitation to become part of this Orthodox Russian civilisation, and their resistance lasted from 1817 to 1864. The intervening struggle is variously known as the Caucasian War, the Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, and, apparently, the local Muslim population even had the temerity to call it the Holy War! But in the end, the result was pretty much as you would expect: the big guys beat the little guys, and the price exacted from the little guys was in proportion to the time and inconvenience they had put the big guys to.

What actually happened at this point is, of course, not easy to ascertain. Circassian sources claim that 400,000 of their people were killed and around 500,000 were forced to leave their homes and seek resettlement in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, many of these refugees dying on the journey, or later in the crowded, insanitary conditions in which they were obliged to live on arrival. Russian sources are understandably less specific on details, but the matter of mass deportation is beyond dispute, as is the fact that Muslim populations within the expanded Russian Empire became minorities in areas where they had previously been the majority.

At this point, I want to turn my attention from the micro- to the macro-, and to introduce a political concept known as ‘The Great Game’. You are probably aware that the 19^th century saw the beginning of a period in history often referred to as the Age of Imperialism. The major European nations (including Russia) were engaged in the process of empire-building, just as some formerly powerful empires were in the process of disintegration. Key aspects of the imperialism business were: maintaining the balance of power while seeking to grab as much territory as possible for your own empire, and at the same time, limiting the growth of the others.

No doubt you are also aware that India was the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the British Empress, Victoria; and of course, Vicki and her ministers were not amused to see that jewel threatened by the southward expansion of the Russians. ‘The Great Game’ is the name given to the conflict and rivalry between the British and Russian Empires for control in Central Asia. The ‘game’ became increasingly serious from the 1850s, when oil began to assume major importance as an economic resource. Political ‘game’ it may have been considered by some, but in reality, it was played at great expense in money and human life. Take as example the three Anglo-Afghan wars fought between 1839 and 1919. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the Afghans. But that’s another story.

Running parallel to, and occasionally overlapping this ‘game’ were the power plays related to ‘The Eastern Question’. This was another driving force in the policies of the European Great Powers during the 19^th century and up to the end of the First World War. Essentially, the question can be put thus: When will the Ottoman Empire finally disintegrate, and who will get all the good bits when it does? As noted above, all the European empire-builders were keen to benefit from the Ottoman collapse; but at the same time they were equally keen that their rivals should not.

Once you grasp these relatively simple principles, a lot of the otherwise confusing activities of the European empire states, not to mention events unfolding in apparently distant unrelated places, become more intelligible.

Take, for example, the Crimean War. The Charge of the Light Brigade was no doubt a marvellous example of the incomparable bravery and discipline of the British fighting man. But what on earth were they doing over there fighting a war on Russia’s back doorstep for nearly three years? Well, in fact, they were part of a British strategy to keep Russia iced up in its frozen wastes and prevent it from gaining access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. In the 1850s, this strategy required bolstering up the Ottomans and helping them defend their realm.

Go back, however, a mere 26 years to 1827, and you would find the warships of Britain, France and Russia fighting together to destroy the Ottoman navy off the coast of southern Greece. At that time, it suited the European powers to encourage and then support Orthodox Christians to unite in a nationalist struggle and declare the independence of the Greek peninsula. We can guess that the British were keen to have a compliant puppet state in the eastern Mediterranean, but what was in it for the Russians? Most likely there was some deal going on – you help us out here and we’ll try to work something out for you over there. Turn a blind eye to what you’re doing to the Muslims in central Asia, for example? Incidentally, you might want to ask how those Russians got their ships into the Mediterranean to participate in the battle. That’s the trouble with history – you answer one puzzling question and it raises several equally troubling new ones.

But I refuse to be sidetracked. Our subject is genocide, and its euphemistic little sibling, ethnic cleansing. The Greek peninsula had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, and its population had large Muslim and Jewish elements. In fact, at this point, it will be worth our while to take a look at the composition of the Empire. The Ottomans were a ruling elite, for sure with their origins in the Turkish migrations from central Asia, but, by reason of conquest, long residence and inter-marriage, considering themselves cosmopolitan, and even (dare I say it?) European. They regarded themselves, with some justification, as the legitimate heirs of the Byzantine Roman Empire; the Sultan’s mother would almost certainly have been a Byzantine princess, or Bulgarian, or Russian, but assuredly not Turkish. Their language, although based on Turkish, had a large admixture of Persian and Arabic. Their empire included a wide range of ethnic groupings, religions and languages, and interestingly, they didn’t really try to impose uniformity.

The Ottomans recognised four millets (nations) within their boundaries, based primarily on religion. Muslim was the state religion, but this group included Arabs and others, as well as Turks. Christians and Jews were ‘people of the book’, so they were permitted to retain their religious practices and languages, especially the local varieties of Christianity, Greek Orthodox and Armenian. They, with the Jews and the Muslims, made up the four millets of the empire.

What happened at the time of the Greek ‘War of Independence’ was a forerunner of what was to follow as the Ottoman Empire fell apart. We could say that the repercussions have continued to be felt into our own times. For their own ends, the European powers encouraged nationalist sentiments among the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. They then presented themselves as protectors of the Christian minorities when Ottoman authorities, not unreasonably, came down hard on separatist movements within their borders. One side effect of the Greek War of Independence was the killing of rather a lot of Muslim civilians, whose families had been living on the Greek peninsula for centuries.

Similar scenarios were played out in Bulgaria and other parts of the Balkans in the later years of the 19^th century, as Russia and the geriatric Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire encouraged, also for their own purposes, (Christian) nationalist movements to rise up and throw off the chains of Ottoman hegemony. In fact, Muslims were still being slaughtered in the Balkans, and refugees streaming from Bulgaria into Turkey long after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, right up to the 1980s.

The fledgling state of Greece also took the opportunity to expand its territory at the expense of the beleaguered Ottomans. The important trading city of Selanik, birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and reputedly home to the largest Jewish population in Europe, was taken by the Greeks in 1912. Not long after, a catastrophic fire wiped out most of the Jewish and Muslim parts of town, and you will look hard to find a mosque or a synagogue in the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki.

When the First World War ended, the victorious vultures descended in force on the body of the dying Ottomans. It has been argued that the punitive damages imposed on Germany at that time contributed to the rise of Hitler and thence to the Second World War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Sevres, the Ottoman Empire was not merely to be punished; it was to be dismantled and the pieces given into the hands of outsiders. For the purposes of this article, the most significant event was the landing of a Greek army on the Aegean coast of Anatolia backed by the guns of warships from the European victors of the ‘Great War’.

What ensued was a three-year war, during which Christian inhabitants of the region at first welcomed their ‘liberators’ and many Muslims were killed, followed by a successful counter-attack by the newly formed Turkish nationalist forces. Needless to say, some revenge was undoubtedly exacted by the now victorious Muslims. The end result was a forced population exchange in which Muslims and Christians, who had existed side by side in relative harmony for centuries, were forcibly relocated: the Christians of Anatolia being sent to mainland Greece to be replaced by Muslims going the other way.

It’s a sorry tale, isn’t it! But history is history, and you can’t turn back its relentless tide, however much you may wish to. Before we finish, however, let’s return to the other theatre of conflict we were discussing earlier – the expanding southern borders of Russia. Of course, as the British well knew, the Great Bear would not be content with merely adding a few central Asian state-lets to its empire. A major goal was always access to the Mediterranean. Clearly the Bosporus Straits would be ever problematic, so another option was to drive a channel though eastern Anatolia, again, at the expense of the moribund Ottomans. Fortunately a pretext was available in the form of the Christian Armenians, who could be incited to rebellion, then offered ‘protection’ in the form of a Russian invasion to help them set up a nationalist state from which any inconvenient Muslims could be ethnically cleansed (though the term was not invented till later, of course). Again, we may suspect that Armenian independence would have been short-lived, or nominal.

However it was, Armenian nationalists in eastern Anatolia were enthusiastic about Russian support, and ready to create ‘incidents’ which would encourage Russian intervention on their behalf. The Ottoman government, for their part, had a clear example, in the Caucasus, of what was likely to happen in the event of the Russians gaining control. Whatever happened to the Armenian millet in 1915, and undoubtedly it was a tragic event, it needs to be remembered that, as always, there are at least two sides to the story. The Ottoman Empire was fighting for its life in a major war on at least three fronts. And, in an analogous situation, as the present-day Russian government has pointed out with respect to the Caucasus deaths, the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire was a different entity.

There is a short story, ‘The Whale’, penned by the New Zealand author, Witi Ihimaera, which ends with an elderly Maori leader weeping over the bodies of a pod of beached whales. The whales can be seen as symbolising the old culture and traditions of his people, the indigenous race of New Zealand, whose way of life has been irretrievably lost. ‘No wai te he?’ the old man cries. ‘Who is to blame?’

Understanding Turkish Politics

Recently a full-page advertisement appeared in several major Turkish daily newspapers. The ad featured three Turkish Prime Ministers, past and present, under the banner heading: ‘Demokrasinin Yıldizları’ -  ‘Stars of Democracy’.

Well, Turkey is a democratic country – and democracy requires that citizens can, within reason, say, and even publish full-page newspaper ads about, pretty much anything they want. However, the fact that someone (or a group of ‘someones’) felt the need to fund such an ad suggests that democracy itself, and those who uphold it, are not outside the realm of debate in this country. The matter of who these ‘someones’ are, is a question I will return to later.

Turkey is a young democracy. In 2010 it is celebrating its 87^th year. Not so young in terms of a human lifespan perhaps, but short enough in relation to the span of human history. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, and the first open national election was held in 1946. In 1950 a rival party was elected to power for the first time. There will be people in their 70s and 80s in Turkey today who may have seen Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the flesh – and the occasional nonagenarian who was around at the actual foundation of the Republic.

Compare the time-frame with that of France, for example, or the United States, great early leaders in the establishment of republican democracy. A five-year-old French child who witnessed the storming of the Bastille would have turned 100 in 1889 – when Atatürk himself was only eight years old. An American five-year-old present at the funeral of George Washington would have celebrated her 100^th birthday in 1894.

85 years after the US Declaration of Independence, the young republic fought a terrible civil war in which 620,000 combatants and an unknown number of civilians lost their lives. Its territorial borders were still expanding, in theory, until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were added to the list of States. In practice, the US Government was still adding to its territory by means of war against foreign nations until 1898, or perhaps even 1945 if you count territories seized from the Japanese after World War II. The Philippines never actually achieved State-hood, but, in fact, only gained independence from the US in 1946. Slavery was finally abolished nearly 70 years after the Constitution set out to ‘establish justice . . . and promote the general Welfare’, but institutionalized segregation and disenfranchisement continued into the second half of the twentieth century, accompanied by exploitation of, and violence against African Americans.

Check out the record of France in the years after the foundation of the Republic. A scant twelve years on, Napoleon had overthrown it and declared himself Emperor. After the rest of Europe ganged up and got rid of him in 1814, the French decided to restore their monarchy. That lasted, in one form or another, until it was thrown out in favour of the Second Republic in 1848. French partiality for absolutism and guys called Napoleon Bonaparte resulted in a Second Empire, which lasted from 1852 until the disastrous war with Prussia in 1870. The Third Republic seems to have come into being at this point largely by default, for want of a monarch willing to be restored, rather than from any major desire in France for democratic government. The French are currently into their Fourth Republic, which came into being after the dubious doings of the wartime Vichy regime.

Clearly getting a modern-style democracy up and running is not an easy matter, despite the simplistic beliefs of guys called George Bush (even well-established democracies seem to have a hankering for dynasties, have you noticed?). Turkey’s founder, Atatürk, himself recognized that force of arms might create a nation, but consolidating, developing and maintaining it was a more difficult and ongoing task. Perhaps farsightedly, he avoided siring any children who might have been a temptation to Turkish dynasticists.

Anyway, to return to the advertisement that began this article. The first matter that aroused controversy in Turkey was the fact that the third member of the democratic triumvirate was the current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – a man who served prison time a few years ago for supposedly threatening the Kemalist nature of Turkey; whose wife infuriates secular Turks for her insistence on wearing a head-scarf; and who is often suspected of harbouring a secret agenda to return the country to a state of Islamic Sheriat rule.

Well, I’m not party to the machinations of high-level Turkish politicians - but I have been around long enough to be able to make certain observations. From 1995 to January 1999, Turkey had no fewer than five Prime Ministers who were either pretty corrupt, pretty self-seeking or pretty old (or some combination of the three). When RT Erdoğan’s party took the reins of power in November 2002, the Turkish Lira was valued at around 1,500,000 to the US dollar, down from a high of 1.7 million in 2001. One consolation for investors for the 80%+ inflation rate was that interest rates on bank term deposits were that much or higher. Within two years, the rate of inflation had fallen to manageable single figures, allowing Erdoğan’s government to delete six zeroes from the Turkish Lira, which is currently hovering around a respectable 1.50 to the US dollar.

In March 2003, GW Bush led an anti-terrorist alliance into Iraq, to unearth weapons of mass destruction that the United Nations, in their namby-pamby, liberal wetness, had been unable to find. Leaders of the Western world, for the most part, threw their various weights behind him. ‘Crusade’ was a word Bush used early on, but realizing his mistake, he became extremely eager to have Turkey’s 99% Muslim population with him. There was talk of an $18 billion aid package to reward such loyalty and support. In the end, the Turks didn’t go – and there are no doubt many patriotic citizens of the UK who would wish that their own PM at the time had been of such an independent mind.

But what about the other PMs in the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad? The gentleman on the left of the picture is Adnan Menderes, who became, arguably, the first genuinely elected Prime Minister of Turkey, when his Democrat party won power in 1950. You might say it was a watershed event in the progress of democracy in Turkey – but was the nation ready? The Republic had been founded on principles of secularism. The Muslim religion had been seen as a hindrance to progress and modernization, as a force for reaction – and Atatürk had done his best to pull its teeth and limit its power. The great man, however, had one major advantage over those who followed him into the seat of Turkish power: he didn’t have to win elections.

Aspiring political leaders in the post-1946 era of Turkish politics have had to come to terms with the need to win the support of an overwhelmingly Muslim electorate. As a result, many of the measures instituted by Atatürk in the name of secularization, have been undone, or undermined, by subsequent governments. For example, the use of Turkish in religious ceremonies was substituted or encouraged in place of Arabic in the new republic. The stated reason was the general move towards a pure Turkish language to replace the hybrid Ottoman of the imperial elite. It may be, however, that reformers recognized that general unintelligibility, and arcane knowledge limited to those-in-the-know, are powerful factors in the maintenance of a mass religion. As an aside, it would be an interesting exercise to trace the correlation between increasing use of vernacular languages in worship, and the decline of Christianity in the West.

Whatever the reason, Menderes’s Democrat Party reinstituted the Arabic call to prayer that sounds five times a day from minarets on Turkish mosques. His government also set up special secondary schools, called İmam Hatip, for the training of imams and preachers. Apart from these sops to the religious faithful however, the Menderes Government presided over a period of rapid mechanisation, industrialisation and economic growth, and remains the only administration in Turkey to have won three consecutive elections. It’s a little surprising, then, to learn that the end came as a result of a coup by army officers in 1960; and not content with unseating the poor guy, the military leaders actually had him hanged, along with two of his ministers.

I guess it is small consolation for his family (and the man himself, wherever he may be) but his reputation was subsequently restored to such an extent that there are now city streets and parks named after ex-PM Menderes, and even the international airport in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest metropolis. It’s possible that the soldiers who staged the coup felt they were justified, since it is widely believed in Turkey that the army has the final responsibility for upholding the secular democratic republic. However, there were two further military takeovers at ten year intervals after the first. Following the last one, in 1980, the junta actually used religion to counter the perceived threat of socialists and increased the construction of Imam Hatip high schools. Turkish politics is a complex business.

The other figure in the advertisement, the guy in the middle, is Turgut Özal. Mr Özal himself was apparently quite a strong Muslim, from a pretty orthodox background. In the 1970s, he had actually stood for parliament (albeit unsuccessfully) as a candidate for the National Salvation Party, an overtly Islamicist party, led by Necmettin Erbakan (who was later ousted from the Prime Ministership, and banned from politics, by covert military intervention). Surprising, then, that Mr Özal was one of the few politicians favoured by the military leaders of the 1980 coup, despite also having been undersecretary to the deposed PM, Süleiman Demirel. He served as deputy PM to General Kenan Evren, the leader of the coup, then became PM when his Motherland party won a majority after democracy was restored in 1983. For better or worse, Özal is credited with having brought capitalism to Turkey. Under his leadership, the country was opened to a flood of imports, the process of privatisation of state assets was begun, and a 30 year period of hyper-inflation got off to a flying start - the Turkish Lira depreciated by 1400 % against the US dollar from 1980 to 1988. A chequered career, to say the least!

As all good Christians know, there are sins of commission, and sins of omission, so perhaps it may be interesting to consider which Turkish political figures are absent from the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad. Clearly the salient absentee is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Well, perhaps it could be argued that, whatever his credentials as military leader, reformer and statesman, he isn’t especially notable for his commitment to democratic elections, so let’s leave him aside. However, it’s also noticeable that no other leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) got into the picture either, despite its being recognised as the heir to the Atatürk legacy. But maybe that’s debatable. The military leaders of the 1980 coup, who also saw themselves as upholders of the Atatürk ‘Way’, actually banned the CHP from participating in politics – and it stayed that way until 1992. Since its re-emergence on the political scene, CHP has been conspicuously unsuccessful – this lack of electoral success finally resulting in the internal ousting just last month, of its leader of 18 years, Deniz Baykal.

In the end, then, dazed and confused by the apparent impossibility of making sense of all this, I decided the only smart thing to do was to check out who had actually funded the insertion of that full-page ad in the Turkish dailies. Well, there at the bottom of the page was the acronym SDP, and a web address, so I checked it out. That was a month or so ago, and the website was covered with ads for various Islamic institutions and events – clearly, you’d have to think, the public face of an organization with major religious interests. Then, as I was finishing this blog, I decided to check the site again, and behold . . . not an ad to be seen, nor the slightest hint of anything religious. Weird, man! Why would you suddenly clean off all the paying ads from your website? Unless, perhaps, you were concerned that curious people like myself might think you had a secret agenda.

Well, who knows? Democracy is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was not particularly noted for upholding the freedom and rights of its citizens. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) where the Second Congo War has been raging for twelve years, 5.4 million people have allegedly died, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. The occurrence of rape and other sexual violence has been described as the worst in the world, and the DRC’s people have the world’s lowest per capita GDP, according to the IMF.

I have no intention of comparing Turkey to either of the foregoing manifestly undemocratic regimes. There is no doubt in my mind that Turkey’s present government, like most of its predecessors of the past 60 years, was democratically elected. But democracy is a fragile flower. It needs nurturing – and it can be easily poisoned. I have seen, in my own country, organizations funded by wealthy individuals, or small groups thereof, hiding behind a façade of democratic good intentions in order to push their own agenda of self-interest. Again, I have no quarrel with the choice of those three worthy gentlemen as ‘Stars of Democracy’. But something about that full-page ad made me nervous at the time – and the feeling hasn’t gone away.