Censorship and Freedom of Speech – How does Turkey shape up?

I want to come right out and admit I haven’t read any of Paul Auster’s sixteen novels. Sadly, it seems he is not highly esteemed by critics in his native America. I checked out reviews in New Yorker and elsewhere, and the overall tone was dismissive. On the other hand, he is, apparently, much read in Europe, and interestingly, is currently climbing the best-seller lists in Turkey. So it seems a pity that he has refused to visit a potential market of 75 million eager readers.

Paul Auster depicted in The Guardian

What attracted my attention to Mr Auster was the eruption, in the press, of a minor war of words between him and the Turkish Prime Minister. Mr Tayyip Erdoğan is quoted as having said, more or less, “Do we care if he comes or doesn’t come?” Certainly there was no suggestion that Auster would be prevented from entering Turkey. The Leader of the Opposition has made it known that he has issued a personal invitation, and good on him, say I.

Still, the fact remains that Paul Auster clearly wants it on record that he is refusing to honour Turkey with a visit, and it’s a matter of principle, not merely a stunt to publicise himself and increase sales of his books (which are not banned in Turkey). The problem, it seems, is that the Turkish government has been imprisoning “journalists and writers” in numbers, depending on who is telling the story, from forty, to a hundred, to more than a thousand.

Well, I live in the country. I read local newspapers, I watch local television and I take an interest in local affairs. If the government is truly rounding up and imprisoning journalists and writers without due process, I want to know about it. Just across Turkey’s south-eastern border the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has resorted to shelling whole towns whose citizens have expressed discontent with the regime. The tiny island kingdom of Bahrain, on the Persian Gulf, linked to Saudi Arabia by a 25 km causeway, has recently suppressed its own popular uprisings with the help of tanks supplied by its equally tyrannical neighbour.

Turkey, on the other hand, has a democratically elected government. Not everyone loves the AK Party regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, however, and many of my Turkish friends, neighbours and colleagues express their dislike openly. Newspaper columnists blatantly criticise, cartoonists mock and satirise, as far as I can see, without let or hindrance. Television current affairs programmes discuss the issues of the day with seeming impunity. I have heard of no arrests or disappearances among people I know, or people known by people I know.

So who are these “writers” in custody, and why are they there? The first thing that strikes me is Auster’s claim that “nearly a hundred writers” are imprisoned in Turkey. Well, that’s a lot of writers by anyone’s count. Are they full-time journalists, I wonder? Novelists? Poets? Writers of academic textbooks? Or unpublished part-time scribblers like myself? One name that often crops up is Ragip Zarakolu, so I checked him out online, and clearly he is a man with the courage of his convictions. Turkey underwent three military coups between 1960 and 1980, and Mr Zarakolu apparently upset the generals with his challenging of censorship laws relating to human rights abuses, Kurdish nationalism and the Armenian question, among other sensitive issues. In the 1970s and early 80s, he seems to have been in and out of prison, and had his passport revoked by the government of the day. Since the accession of the current AK Party government in 2003, Ragip Bey has faced several prosecutions, but has so far managed to avoid imprisonment, despite, it seems, his continued efforts to publish books and articles on issues generally accepted as requiring careful handling in Turkey.

Two other names that are attracting some sympathy within Turkey are journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener. Unlike most of the other “writers”, these two are more or less mainstream. They seem to have been caught up in the net, along with other people associated with a TV channel, Oda TV, of two major related investigations, known as Ergenekon and Balyoz, that have been going on in Turkey for four or five years. It is extremely difficult to get a handle on exactly what these affairs are all about, but, as I understand, they seem to have something to do with the following:

• Some sectors of the population who like to consider themselves republican, secularist, Kemalist and nationalist, support the concept of a military takeover when the democratic process doesn’t seem to be producing the results they would like.
• Groups within the Turkish military have staged three-and-a-half military coups since 1960. They suppressed left-wing dissent, while encouraging ultra-nationalist sentiment and displaying, at best, an ambivalent attitude to the Muslim religion.
• There is minority but powerful organised opposition to the popularly elected AK Party government of Tayyıp Erdoğan, using overt and clandestine methods against it rather than working through the democratic process and the ballot box.
• Mr Erdoğan’s government has been working to reduce the influence of the military on the internal political affairs of the nation.
• Prior to the accession of Mr Erdoğan’s government, there had been serious concern in Turkey about a concept known as ‘Deep State’, which implied some kind of unholy alliance involving high-ranking politicians, police and military personnel, business leaders and organised crime syndicates. One manifestation of this was the so-called “Susurluk” affair, whose intricacies never seemed to be explained to public satisfaction.
• Critics from the left and right, within Turkey and without, seem to be cooperating in using issues such as Kurdish nationalism, the Armenian issue, freedom of the press and the bogey of Islamic fundamentalism to encourage opposition to the government.

In fact, it’s way too much for most Turkish citizens to understand, never mind a foreigner with a limited grasp of the language. However, it’s hard to live in the country for any length of time without forming some kind of opinion on these matters, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

Democracy is a fragile flower that needs careful nurturing. The first genuinely democratic election in Turkey was held in 1950. As has been noted, the democratic process was usurped by three military coups between 1960 and 1980. Ostensibly, government was handed back to the Turkish people in 1983, but some are of the opinion that the newly elected government was engineered by the military leaders.  If you measure democracy by the ability of a country’s citizens to freely elect their government, it could be argued that democracy in Turkey dates from 1997, the last time the Turkish military interfered to depose an elected government.  

Fifteen years is not a long time. The United States Declaration of Independence, promulgated in 1776, asserted, among other things:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “

At that time in US history, “the People” were “men”. It would be 164 years before women were given the constitutional right “to alter or abolish” governments. African Americans were definitely not “People”, since the practice of slavery continued until the 13^th Amendment abolished it in 1865. I’m not even going to mention the Native Americans’ situation, but it must be fair to say that legal and socially sanctioned racial segregation continued for much of the 20^th century.

Clearly, democracy is a controversial term in itself. How do you measure it? Elsewhere I have noted the tendency of undemocratic regimes to make liberal use of the term. The right to vote is generally cited as an important cornerstone of the democratic process, but how much power does that really give us? Emma Goldman, once described as ‘the most dangerous woman in America’, is reputed to have said: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”. Cynical, you’d have to say, especially since she lived from 1869 to1940. But sometimes you wonder, don’t you? I can’t find who first came up with the pithy aphorism: “America has the best democracy money can buy”, but look at the facts. Lobbying is a multi-million dollar industry in the US. Wall St and the financial industry spent hundreds of million of dollars on lobbyists influencing lawmakers to deregulate their industry so that they could fleece investors, fill their own pockets and undermine the entire US economy. Elected representatives move out of Congress and into highly paid jobs using their ‘insider’ knowledge and contacts on behalf of wealthy clients in the lobbying industry. In short, if you can’t afford to lobby, forget democracy.

I don’t want to go into the matter here – anyway, I have touched on it in an earlier post – but it could be argued that, at least beyond their own shores, governments in the United States tend to prefer autocratic, dictatorial regimes. On the whole, it is easier and more straightforward to deal with governments that don’t have to take into account the fickle opinions of an enfranchised electorate.

But I’m getting away from Turkey here, and the issue we started with, which is freedom of speech, or more specifically freedom of the press. Ideally it’s desirable that writers should be free to express themselves, politically or artistically, without fear of harassment or imprisonment. Undoubtedly, in Turkey, that is not always the case, while the US situation has apparently improved since the “Dubya” Bush administration passed into history. However, it’s not a clear-cut issue. Obviously there are areas where other factors take precedence over freedom of speech: incitement to crime, child pornography, defamation, and national security, to name a few. Turks, for example, have fallen victim to curtailment of freedom with the French Government’s recent decision to prevent them from defending themselves against accusations of genocide against Armenians.

As we noted above, democratic freedoms in Turkey are not as well-established as in most Western democracies. Turkey as a nation came into being in 1923 after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. It’s founding principle, Turkish nationalism, was a new concept that had to be introduced and established in order to create a viable state. In the cauldron of war and political and economic upheaval, undoubtedly myths were invented and half-truths disseminated. Minority rights were overlooked or shelved, as in all national struggles, in the interests of unity. It is only in recent years, perhaps the last decade, that Turks have come to feel confident enough in their own identity that they can permit discussion of issues such as, for example, the Kurdish question, and the place of religion in a secular state. That these issues can now be discussed openly is a measure of an increasing maturity of Turkish society.

Paul Auster is, of course, entitled to his opinion about Turkey – though one might have hoped that an open-minded writer would want to visit the country and form his own opinions, rather than rely on those of others. He refers, for example, to the international organization PEN, formed in 1921 “to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere”. When you check their website, you can’t escape the feeling that literary aims have taken a back seat these days to a political agenda. That’s their right, too, certainly, and their aims may be very worthy, but perhaps they should consider changing their name so that it gives a more honest indication of their raison d’etre.

One similar organization which does that, is Reporters Without Borders (RSF). They publish an index each year indicating how they rate countries in terms of journalistic freedom. They are unabashedly a political organization, though, again, their name is a little deceptive. Clearly it was intended to reflect a similarity of purpose to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), whose members give assistance to people in countries whose own governments, for whatever reason, are unable to do so. While the very presence of MSF doctors in a country may imply failures on the part of that country’s government, for the most part, they seem to refrain from making political judgments.

Still, the world of art is in a different universe, and artists are jealous of their freedom to express. Another writer who has been in trouble in Turkish courts is the novelist Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, though he is not well-loved, nor, as far as I can learn, much read in his own country (at least in the books that won him the big prize). I worked my way through one-and-a-half novels from his prize-winning canon, albeit in translation, and I have to confess I found them barely readable – though that may not always be a disadvantage when it comes to winning literary awards. A more positive advantage may be the expressing of political views that do not endear the writer to his own government. Pamuk was charged under Turkish Law with insulting the Turkish Republic, for suggesting that Turks were responsible for the mass killing of Kurds and Armenians. Interestingly, the charges were subsequently dropped, and the lawyer instrumental in instigating the case, has been arrested as a player in the Ergenekon investigation discussed above.

Well, that’s a good sign, for sure. Whatever you may think about Pamuk as a giant of literature, you can’t say he really deserves to be locked up. And if the aforesaid lawyer turns out to have been an ultra-nationalist right-wing fanatic making death threats against well-meaning novelists, then justice in Turkey may have turned the corner. On the other hand, there are those in the country who hold that Ergenekon is a fictitious creation of the AK Party government to silence opposition. Another journalist, Tuncay Özkan, arrested in the round-up, recently appealed against his arrest to the European Court of Human Rights. Perhaps surprisingly, the European Court rejected Özkan’s complaint, and defined Ergenekon as a “terrorist organization attempting to topple the government by the use of force.”

So, what do you make of all that? As that great comic genius Spike Milligan used to say, “It’s all rather confusing, really.” As an outsider, I am not really competent to make a definitive statement, but what I can say is this. Unlike Paul Auster, I came to Turkey. I live here, and have formed my own opinions about the country and its people. If Mr Auster comes, I can take him to easily accessible bookshops where he can purchase reading matter on all the controversial issues, from Kurdish nationalism to the Assyrian ‘genocide’. I can show him ample evidence of a healthy press sounding off against the ruling government, seemingly without fear of imprisonment and torture. He can watch (with a little assistance) current affairs programmes on several television channels discussing all the questions of the day. And no doubt he’ll be happy to see his own novels climbing the local best-seller lists.

Turkey and New Zealand - Border Monuments

Regular readers may remember a piece I wrote a year or so ago about the Turkish dessert, ashure. My short essay won a competition on the website 'Changing Turkey in  Changing World'.  I attempted to retain my title in their second 'Big Idea' competition, but this time I could only manage runner-up.  The topic was:

Border monuments are often designed to celebrate mobility and interconnectedness. According to the architect Cecil Balmond, “A border offers identity but one that is enriched by neighbours, so that it’s not so much a line of separation as a local set of interconnected values.”

We are seeking short essays (max. 1,500 words) on any European border monument. Entries are invited on these or any other border monuments located in Europe. We are particularly interested in learning why those monuments were built in the first place and how they contribute to the connection between two separate communities.

And here's my response . . . 

Preamble

The question calls for a European border monument, so I should briefly explain why I am focussing on four – two of which are far from Europe. In doing so, I have in mind questions of my own: If borders are lines drawn to keep people apart, is their real existence on a map, or in the human mind? Do values connect on the ground, or in the mind? Does the uniting of people take place in a physical location – or in the mind?

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My home these days is in Istanbul, but I come from a country about as far from Turkey as it is possible to get. My hometown, Auckland, New Zealand, is 17,000 kilometres away. Carry on a little further, you’ll cross the International Dateline into yesterday, and be on your way back. When my father’s ancestors left the old country, Scotland, in June, 1842, they endured a four-month sea voyage. When I board my Airbus 340-600 on 13 January, I’ll be looking at a trip of 31 hours and 20 minutes. I will check out with Turkish Police at Atatürk Airport, and get a going-over from the NZ border people when I arrive in Auckland. In between, I will fly over half the world, mostly at an altitude of around 10,000 metres.



It is self-evident that borders these days are not as straightforward as they used to be. Turkey has an almost 10,000 kilometre-long border on land and sea – but where do customs officers do most of their business? Airports, I guess. New Zealand has 15,000 kilometres of coastline, and no border with another country – yet we are one of the world’s most peripatetic people, constantly crossing international borders, especially to destinations in Europe, where most of us have our roots.



Not many New Zealanders have roots in Turkey. However, a surprisingly large number visit the country each year – many of them on a pilgrimage that has become an annual event towards the end of April. They flock to the town of Çanakkale, attend a solemn dawn parade with politicians and neighbours from Australia, and visit the cemeteries and killing-fields of that long-ago exercise in military futility, the Gallipoli invasion.

The first time I visited that desolate landscape was with a group from the Turkish school where I had begun working as a teacher of English. The date was 18 March, a few weeks before the latter-day Anzacs would arrive, but the day on which Turks commemorate their victory. The highlight for me was ascending to the ridge overlooking the peninsula, known to Turks as Conk Bayırı, and in Anzac legend as Chunuk Bair. This narrow strip of land was the key to the campaign, and the objective of a twelve-day battle in August 1915. Reports tell us that it was the only Allied success of the entire Gallipoli invasion – sad when you consider that a small force of New Zealanders fought their way up and held the ridge for a mere 48 hours, suffering horrendous losses, before being driven off by the Ottoman counter-attack.



The positive thing, from a New Zealand point-of-view is that there, on that ridge of ghosts, stand two memorials. The larger one commemorates the hero of the Ottoman defence, Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who went on to become the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Alongside is a second shrine, to the memory of the young men from New Zealand who fought and died on that lonely ridge, so far from home and family. It is this latter monument on which I will focus, and to which we will return.

Atatürk Memorial,
Wellington, NZ

Seventeen thousand kilometres away, on a hillside near Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, a site chosen for its remarkable similarity to the terrain of Gallipoli, stands another monument, this one to the memory of that same Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk). There is no line on any map linking or separating the two countries. The distance between them is as great as possible between two places on planet Earth – yet these two monuments so far apart, represent an interconnectedness, a sharing of history and values, that transcend mere physical distance.

Young men from New Zealand and Australia, loyal citizens of the British Empire, spent a month travelling by ship to Europe, to fight for King and Country in the Great War.  Thousands of them never returned, but left their remains on foreign fields. One might expect that Turks, at least, would harbour some ill-feeling against people who travelled so far with aggressive intent – but it is not so. Inscribed on that monument near Wellington are the magnanimous words of the Turkish leader:

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives . . . You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours . . . You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

It was in recognition of this great-heartedness, that the government of New Zealand raised a memorial to Atatürk on the ridge above Tarakena Bay, and in acknowledgment of the Turkish government’s allowing the building of the NZ shrine at Chunuk Bair – commemorating the 850 Kiwi ‘Johnnies’ who ‘lie in the bosom’ of the Turkish Republic. These two monuments link the hearts and minds of two nations whose birth pangs can be traced to those bloody months on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. The words of a Turkish poet, Necmettin Halil Onan, are inscribed in huge letters on a hillside overlooking the Dardanelle Straits, and the lines could be as true for New Zealand as for Turkey:

Traveler, pause. An era ended

Where you heedless tread. Listen

And hear, in the silence of this

Mound, a nation’s beating heart. [1]

But there is more to this connection. A few years ago I was wandering along Raglan Beach, on the West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island, when I chanced upon three carved wooden sculptures, unmistakably Maori: a traditional tattooed male figure, a bird and a dolphin, all silver-grey and weathered by the winds and salt spray sweeping in from two thousand kilometres of one of the world’s wildest seas.

Aotearoa, as the indigenous Maori people call New Zealand, is a lonely, isolated land, bordered on all sides by vast oceans, and, it goes without saying, no contiguous neighbours. Anthropologists tell us that these islands were the last habitable landmass to be populated by humans, who made their landing less than a thousand years ago. Those first arrivals, the Maori, maintained their splendid isolation for perhaps five centuries before Europeans began to arrive from the late 1700s. For the next hundred years, immigrants from Europe faced a journey of four months on a sailing ship. And there we are to this day, descendants of those intrepid pioneers, inhabiting a cluster of islands in the South Pacific Ocean, far from our roots in the British Isles, speaking a language whose closest relations are half a world away. The carved figures are not of European origin, yet they speak eloquently of our isolation, and search for identity.

I have seen a lot of Turkey, but there is a line I have yet to travel – east from the capital Ankara through the Anatolian cities of Sivas, Erzincan and Erzurum, to Kars and the Armenian border. Out there, 1174 kilometres, and a universe away from the European metropolis of Istanbul, lies the town of Manzikert (Malazgirt in Turkish) in the province of Muş. As every Turkish school child will tell you, this was the site of a battle in 1071 CE, when the forces of the Seljuk Turkish Sultan Alparslan defeated the army of the Byzantine Emperor, Romanus Diogenes. His victory opened the way for Turks to sweep into Anatolia, where they remain today – in defiance of the feelings of many Western Europeans, who wish they would return to whence they came.

My fourth monument is there, in that remote East Anatolian town – erected in 1989 to commemorate a long ago battle. It may be debatable whether this edifice is in Europe, but the Turks indisputably are, as out of place with their language and traditions as we white New Zealanders are down there in the South Pacific. It’s a strange world we live in, and sources of conflict are easy to find. The borders we draw, on the ground and in our minds, are often lines of defence. Crossing them to make connections requires imagination and breadth of vision. My four monuments can be seen as unconnected and irrelevant – or as pointers to a new world where we seek the values we share, rather than the differences that divide us.

Word count (including Preamble) = 1495

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1 My translation

Tales of Smugglers and Indirect Taxation - The Şırnak Incident

No doubt you’ve seen recent news coverage of the deaths of 35 villagers in south-eastern Turkey. According to reports, a convoy of young Kurdish smugglers was making its way by night towards the Turkish border leading donkeys laden with contraband petrol and cigarettes from neighbouring Iraq. Their presence was detected by military drones and thermal cameras, and they were taken for Kurdish insurgents belonging to the outlawed PKK, who apparently often use that border crossing to launch strikes against Turkish police and military targets from their bases in the mountains of Iraq. In a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the smugglers were strafed and bombed by Turkish warplanes. Reports say most of the dead were young men around 17 to 20 years old.

Uludere Village, Şırnak Province

The incident is a major embarrassment for the Turkish government, who have been pursuing a dual policy of hitting ‘terrorists’ hard, while trying to defuse the separatist issue by allowing discussion on the use of the Kurdish language and the practising of the Alevi religion. Political opponents, needless to say, have seen a golden opportunity to attack the government, making comparisons to the killing of dissidents by beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad in neighbouring Syria.

I made a journey into that south-eastern part of Turkey back in the summer of 1999. In retrospect, I was fortunate because, at that time, there was a brief window of relative peace following the arrest and imprisonment of PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, and before George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s invasion of Iraq stirred up Kurdish activists again. I didn’t get right down to that distant corner of Anatolia, to Hakkari and Şırnak, where the latest incident took place, but I did make my way deep into parts of the country with Kurdish majority populations: Malatya, Diyarbakır, Mardin and Van. Despite the relative calm, we faced regular stoppages at checkpoints, with tanks and other serious-looking military hardware very much in evidence.

There were very few tourists – I met a group of young back-packers from Poland in Doğubeyazit, way out on the border with Iran, but saw no others. I was able to make a small contribution to international goodwill in that remote town, purchasing a New Zealand twenty-dollar note from a taxi driver who would have waited a long time for another such opportunity. Since hostilities resumed after 2003, I imagine the tourist trade has, if anything, declined. Certainly the New Zealand Embassy in Ankara sends out emails to ex-pat citizens and tourists warning us to avoid those parts of the country.

These hostilities are another instance of what we have come to know as asymmetrical warfare – where a professional national military machine combats groups of irregular guerrillas. We have read much about the post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting US servicemen returning from tours of duty in Iraq. One major cause of this stress, no doubt, is that, in such asymmetrical conflicts, the professional soldiers suffer from the disadvantage of having to wear a uniform, making them clearly identifiable targets. On the other hand, local guerrillas are not easily distinguished from harmless civilians, especially when you don’t speak the local language. As a result, the professionals are in a state of constant fear and uncertainty, and not infrequently kill or wound non-combatant citizens going about their lawful business.

Well, I’m not excusing the Turkish military for what they did down there in Uludere, in Şırnak province. However, the situation is, you’d have to say, somewhat complex. For a start, the victims of the air-strike were Turkish citizens intending to re-cross an international border, having, we must assume, previously left the country without notifying the proper authorities, for a purpose which could hardly be called lawful business, and this in the dead of night. Moreover, the path they were on is apparently used by PKK insurgents making guerrilla raids into Turkey from bases across the border in Iraq. Certainly those guys were too young to die, and the price they paid was disproportionate to their crime – but they were surely old enough to know the risk they were taking.

However, that’s not much consolation for those families in Uludere who have lost the flower of their local manhood – and it is certainly creating extra unpleasantness for the Turkish government in relations with their Kurdish citizens, even if they do fulfil their promise to pay substantial reparations. Still, ascribing blame is always a difficult task, and knee-jerk responses rarely address the underlying causes of a conflict, so let’s take a step back . . .

The Turkish Republic has one of the world’s booming economies these days. The middle class is expanding rapidly, the retail sector is on a roll, private sector commercial and residential construction is changing the urban skyline, and the government is proceeding with numerous large-scale public projects. They do, however, have some difficulties in collecting taxation. No one likes paying tax, of course, but not paying it is a way of life in Turkey. Collecting income tax from wage and salary earners is relatively straightforward – but what if the company doesn’t declare its employees? And getting tax out of the wealthy is notoriously problematic, even in countries with more reliable bureaucratic infrastructure.

One widely employed solution is indirect taxation. Everybody does it these days: GST, VAT, KDV . . . a nettle by any other name would sting as sharp. And then there are the special purpose taxes. Who can argue with extra duties on cigarettes and alcohol? If people want to drink and smoke themselves to death, why should I pay for their health care with my taxes? And petrol . . . well, drivers should contribute to the cost of roads and motorways and whatnot, it’s only fair and reasonable.

Turkey, however, is a special case. I read that Americans got upset when the price of gasoline reached $4 a gallon. Imagine the screams of outrage if they had to pay $8.50, as Turkish motorists do! They’d never get the protesters out of the parks! And if the US Federal Government tried to take 70% of the price in tax, the Tea Party would likely be organising airstrikes on the White House.

Then there’s the cigarette tax. There was a time when ‘to smoke like a Turk’ was axiomatic. Now I’m starting to feel sorry for Turkish smokers, who currently pay nine Turkish liras or more for a packet of smokes, of which 7.50 TL goes to the government. Unlike smoking, however, drinking is not such a big thing in Turkey. In tea consumption, Turks are right up there with the English – but Islam has traditionally frowned on alcohol. The land that probably invented wine production, allowed the art to die out until the last decade or so saw some kind of revival.

The exception to this abstemiousness has been rakı, the grape-based, aniseed flavoured spirit resembling Greek ouzo, which is a popular accompaniment to a Turkish night on the town. Perhaps I should have said ‘was’, since a litre bottle of the cheapest Yeni Rakı now retails for 61 TL, of which 62% disappears into government coffers.

So what’s the connection, you’re saying. The Turkish military kills 35 poor young villagers out east, and I’m blethering on about the price of grog and cigarettes. But don’t be hasty. It’s pretty clear that those kids were smuggling cigarettes and petrol. Of course it’s illegal, but when people take such risks to do it, you can safely bet that they are addressing a need, and that there is money to be made. Economic niches will be filled, by fair means or foul - Americans learned that lesson back in the 1920s when the Federal Government attempted to ban the consumption of alcohol. During the thirteen years the Volstead Act was in force, an unlooked for side-effect was the emergence of ‘rampant underground, organised and widespread criminal activity’.

People will drink, people will smoke tobacco, and people will drive around in vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, until satisfactory substitutes are found. That is the principle on which indirect taxation is founded, whatever alternative rationalisations are put forward. A 17^th century English poet, Henry Aldrich, wrote:

If on my theme I rightly think,

There are five reasons why men drink,—

Good wine, a friend, because I ’m dry,

Or lest I should be by and by,

Or any other reason why.

Substitute ‘smoke’ or ‘drive cars’ for the underlined word, make one or two other necessary amendments, and the resulting epigram will be equally true. Governments know this, and see a bottomless source of revenue. Unfortunately, as with other forms of taxation, the burden tends to fall disproportionately on those at the middle and lower ends of the income spectrum. The wealthy find ways to circumvent the annoyance: company expense accounts, legal forms of tax avoidance, duty-free purchases while traveling abroad – or if the worst comes to the worst, most have plenty of slack in their disposable incomes.

In countries like Turkey, the problems are exacerbated by poverty. Turks, as has been noted, pay more than double the price for petrol that US drivers do, yet their per capita GDP is less than one quarter of that in the USA (IMF 2010 figures). And, of course, such figures represent a national average, and disguise the fact that 50% of the population have incomes substantially below the national average.

The bottom line, to use a phrase much beloved of businessmen and economists, is that indirect taxes hit hardest the poorest sections of the population. So what are they to do? For the most part, they won’t stop drinking and smoking (even paupers need some small pleasures in life), though they may be obliged to do without private cars. Human nature being what it is, then, we can expect the following results:

- Some enterprising souls will find ways to manufacture alcoholic beverages. In Turkey, there have recently been reports of deaths related to the consumption of illegally distilled spirits. In fact last summer there was a minor scandal caused by the deaths of some Russian tourists.

- Smuggling. ‘Kaçak’ is an important word in Turkish, with a multitude of meanings, but, in the case of cigarettes, for example, it has the connotation of ‘unofficially duty-free’.

- The involvement of organized crime syndicates. Some reports on the deaths in Şırnak province suggest that, at the very least, PKK insurgents are taking a commission from smugglers to allow safe passage.

So, coming back to where we began, and the question of blame for the deaths of the young men from Uludere, I would suggest that inequality of income and opportunity lie at the root of the tragedy. The New Year edition of Time magazine has chosen ‘The Protester’ as Person of the Year for 2011 – the protester to be found in Zucotti Park, New York and Tahrir Square, Cairo; in Syntagma Square, Athens, and the streets of London. Common factors in all these protests are lack of central leadership, frustration with the inability of governments to deal with manifest injustice, and a willingness to endure pain, suffering, even death, to make their message heard. One further factor is the participation of a more educated, middle class species of protester. The less educated, lower classes are likely to turn to more direct action, such as mugging and smuggling. In the end, if the privileged classes fail to address the valid grievances of their fellow citizens, they will find increasing need for draconian security measures, and not only in China and Syria.

Religious Tolerance and the Armenian Question

Readers of this blog may remember that, in my February post, I referred to H. Res. 306, a resolution before the US Congress which would give official recognition to the events often referred to as 'The Armenian Genocide'. It appears that Congress, in its collective wisdom, has seen fit to pass the resolution. At this stage, I have other matters in hand, and I don't propose to comment. However, in the interests of giving both sides a fair hearing, you may like to check out the website of the Turkish Coalition of America.

Dersim and the Politics of Inclusion

I first came to Turkey just after Mel Gibson and his team won five Oscars for their 1995 cinematic hit, ‘Braveheart’. For some reason that romanticised tale of kilted Scots fighting manfully but futilely against their powerful southern neighbour struck a chord or two with Turkish audiences. The film ran for three years in Istanbul cinemas without a break. ‘Titanic’ didn’t come close in this part of the world!

Mel Gibson strikes a blow
for Scottish nationalism

I’m sure you remember the final stomach-churning scenes of the film, where the defeated but unrepentant William Wallace is hanged, drawn and quartered by his English conquerors as an example to others who might seek to emulate his troublesome ways. Wallace’s tormentor gives him the option of a quick death on condition of swearing allegiance to His Majesty, the King of England. However, the Scots hero draws strength to undergo the agony ahead from a small boy in the crowd, who will clearly carry on the fight if Gibson (sorry, Wallace) shows the necessary fortitude.

Scotland was an independent nation in those days – we’re talking about the early 14^th century – so it was perhaps a bit rough to treat Wallace as a traitor. Nevertheless, that gruesome punishment remained in force in the United Kingdom for the crime of high treason into comparatively modern times. The Crowns and Parliaments of Scotland had been well united by the time Prince Charlie led his ill-fated rebellion against King George II in 1745. It was only 60 years since his grandfather, James II, had allowed Judge Jeffreys to butcher survivors of the Monmouth Rebellion, so the Bonny Prince knew what to expect if he was caught. He wasn’t, luckily for him (speeding off to the Isle of Skye on his bonny boat, as the old song has it, and thence to a life of exile in France), but the Scots Highlanders who had supported him were not so fortunate. The Battle of Culloden lasted just over an hour, say the records. However, the aftermath of the English victory was not only a massacre of the wounded, but a prolonged killing or displacement of the clansmen, their women, children and the elderly. It was a systematic programme, more or less successful, to civilise the highlands, bring them under the rule of law, and to suppress the Gaelic language and tribal culture.

Hanging drawing and quartering was apparently not considered a seemly punishment for women, for whom burning was the favoured punishment in those times. The last burning in England took place in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution (‘Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood’, you remember!). The more anatomically specific alternative for males remained in force rather longer. The last man in England to suffer the fate of William Wallace was hanged and beheaded in 1817. Several more fortunate rebels actually faced the penalty in 1839 – but their sentence was commuted to transportation, and butchering as a punishment was finally removed from British law in 1870.

Well, that’s all very interesting, I hear you say, but what relevance does it have for the post-modern world. Even Turkey, with its reputation for human rights abuses, could not possibly condone such treatment of political prisoners or even terrorists. And you'd be right. Capital punishment itself was abolished completely in Turkey in 2004.

Nevertheless, an event in 20^th century Turkish history has recently seen the light of day, and warrants a little examination. Dersim, now known as Tunceli, is an area in eastern central Anatolia, traditionally home to Alevi, Zaza and Kurdish people. According to one source I came across[1], this was the last area within the Turkish Republic to be brought under government control. It is not easy to come to a clear understanding of who these people are. Kurds are an ancient race, of Iranian origin, speaking a language with Indo-European roots. Many of them espouse the Alevi branch of Islam, held to spring from the Shi’a sect (not of much consequence in Sunni majority Turkey), but with connections to earlier religions and much older folk traditions. Zazas, it seems, generally incline to Alevism, but there is scholarly debate about whether their language is related to Kurdish, or distinct from it.

Be that as it may, it seems that the inhabitants of Dersim/Tunceli had been resisting all attempts to bring them into the fold of civilisation for some time before the watershed events of 1937-38. According to van Bruinessen 1,

‘the only law they recognized was traditional tribal law. Tribal chieftains and religious leaders wielded great authority over the commoners, whom they often exploited economically. They were not opposed to government as such, as long as it did not interfere too much in their affairs . . . There was a tradition of refusing to pay taxes — but then there was little that could be taxed, as the district was desperately poor. Young men evaded military service when they could . . .’

Undoubtedly there was a certain amount of brigandage and banditry, and government attempts to impose the rule of law may have met with actual physical discouragement. We may think that the situation was similar to that of the Scottish Highland clans prior to the final solution discussed above, with one major difference: we are talking about the 20^th century here, rather than the 18^th. The Turkish Republic was a mere fourteen years old, and in a pretty parlous state. Republican reformers, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, were attempting to forge a nation from the ashes of the defeated, divided and defunct Ottoman Empire. They were trying to create an identity based on the hitherto unpopular concept of Turkish nationalism; to establish a modern, secular democracy in a land whose tradition was Islamic, monarchic and borderline medieval. Their eyes were fixed on European models of civilisation, most of whose representatives had long since suppressed and/or civilized their last remnants of nomadic or pastoral tribalism.

Furthermore, we are talking about the 1930s, not a period much renowned for the tolerant treatment of troublesome and undesirable minorities. So what happened in Dersim? It seems the government of the day made attempts to assimilate the Alevi Zazas into their brave new secular civilized Turkish Republic - and the local tribes objected, to the point of open rebellion. The government, needless to say, had recourse to military coercion. Many died, villages were destroyed, local people were displaced, martial law was established, there was a general ban on the Kurdish language, dress, folklore and names, and, as one would expect, a good deal of anger and enmity continued to seethe underground. Well, you can’t make a civilisation omelet without breaking a few eggs, it seems.

So what’s the solution? The present day government of New Zealand is not about to hand Aotearoa back to its indigenous Maori inhabitants; just as the British government continues to resist attempts by Scottish nationalists to cede from the Union and go it alone. No Turkish government will ever accept the handing over of its eastern provinces to an independent Kurdistan, even if the majority of ‘Kurds’ wanted it – something which is by no means certain. However, the Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Erdoğan, recently apologized publically [2] for the events known collectively as the 'Dersim Massacre'.

It’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it! You can’t ever right the wrongs of history. History itself is a progression of successive societies, chieftains, monarchs, invaders and whatnot, asserting their pre-eminence, and imposing their will on others by the right of might – irrespective of whether the ‘others’ may have had a prior and better claim to the territory in question. Nevertheless, smart leaders of the victorious party tend to apply the principle of enlightened self-interest. The new nation you seek to establish, the new civilisation whose superiority you assert, will have a better chance of long-term success if you give the conquered people a share of its fruits.

Nelson Mandela understood this when he became the first democratically elected President of the Republic of South Africa in 1994. Mandela had spent 27 years of his life in prison, a victim of the apartheid political system that allowed white people, making up 10% of the population, to rule and oppress the non-white 90%. It would have been understandable if he had taken the opportunity to exact revenge from his persecutors, now that he was in power – but he didn’t. He encouraged his people to work on a process of reconciliation, to heal the wounds of the past and take the reborn nation forward.

The Ottoman Empire, for all its failings, survived for more than six centuries, and one reason for its longevity may have been the millet system, whereby it granted freedom of religion, use of language and practising of traditions to the disparate groups within its borders: Orthodox Greeks, Armenians and Jews, as well as Muslims of all shades. The British Empire may have been geographically the largest the world has known, but even the most generous historian would not grant it a span of much more than 300 years. More realistically, the 19^th century and twenty or thirty years either side of it would encompass its actual period of dominant power. Interestingly, the British one was probably the only Empire that never had an Emperor. Its subjects owed fealty to the King (or Queen) of England – a rather remote concept for most of them, and the requirement to accept a homogeneity of language and culture may have hastened the empire’s demise.

But I’m not here to criticize the Brits. My purpose is to congratulate Mr Tayyip Erdoğan for his efforts in reaching out to the unhappy Kurds and Zazas among the citizens of Turkey. Admittedly, his motives have been called into question by some. He has been accused of taking advantage of a sensitive issue to score points against his main political rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, whose family apparently has Kurdish/Alevi origins in the Tunceli/Dersim area. Well, it’s an unusual politician who does not avail himself of an opportunity to make political capital, and I’m not going into that matter either. Mr Erdoğan’s words will be measured against his actions in the future. Any apology for past wrongs will be hollow without governmental measures to extend financial support to Turkey’s impoverished and disadvantaged citizens in the east, many of whom are Kurdish. Schools and hospitals are needed, and industrial development to provide employment opportunities. Poverty and deprivation are the soil in which rebellion and terrorism flourish. Alleviating these conditions will not make all the malcontents disappear overnight – but it will at least deprive them of a receptive audience.

In February 2008, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the aboriginal people for more than a century of cruelty, oppression and marginalization inflicted on them by successive governments. It’s too early to say whether Mr Rudd’s words will result in action to reduce the dreadful rates of infant mortality, educational failure and unemployment, alcoholism and drug abuse, petty crime and imprisonment, among Australia’s indigenous people – but certainly, without recognition and apology, nothing can change.

I want to make two points here. The first is that, unfortunately, no civilized society can tolerate outlaws, despite their traditional romantic appeal. Pretty much every modern civilized society you care to examine has, somewhere in its history, an event or two where it felt obliged to use force to suppress a group whose continued existence was perceived as a serious threat to its own integrity and stability. We’ve mentioned the United Kingdom and Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. We could go on to look at the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, or its catastrophic Civil War, fought to prevent a division into Union and Confederacy – but you get the gist. My second point is that such use of force can, however, only be justified in the long-term if the result is a stable civilized inclusive state, the benefits of which extend to the vast majority of its citizens.

The Republic of Turkey has, since its inception, looked to the West as a model of cultural and economic development, of democracy and civilisation. The West, for its part, has often chosen to judge and belittle Turkey for its perceived backwardness and barbarity. It is important, then, for Western nations, if they are to maintain the moral high ground, that their civilized democratic institutions demonstrate a capacity for inclusion. Unfortunately, recent events seem to suggest that they do not. ‘Occupy Wall St’ protests have spread to major cities all over the developed world, suggesting a ‘Capitalist Spring’ (or ‘Autumn’) that has elicited outbursts of government force to suppress it. One of the rallying cries has been ‘We are the 99%’ – the supposed proportion of society held in economic servitude to the 1% elite.

I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips, but I have to say that I feel a 99:1 split may be exaggerating the situation a little. However, one statistic I did come across in the last week gave cause for alarm. A General Election was held in New Zealand the weekend before last, and reports are saying that voter turnout was, at 65%, the lowest in more than a century. Certainly, the implication that 35% of the voting-age population are so disaffected that they do not bother to exercise their democratic right is disturbing. General Elections in the UK in recent years have produced a similar ominous trend. Figures in the USA are even more striking. Statistics show that the proportion of eligible voters turning out to choose a new President hovers around 50 to 55%. If you look at mid-term Congressional elections the percentage drops below 40!

Well, it would require more exhaustive research than I have time for, to demonstrate a clear correlation between these voting patterns and the August riots in UK cities, the Wall St protestors, the general increase in terrorist activity around the globe, and the huge popularity of movies with anti-establishment heroes like William Wallace. All I can say for certain is that I applaud Tayyip Erdoğan for extending a hand of apology and reconciliation to the victims of the Dersim rebellion  - and I fervently hope that his words translate into actions which will achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth in his rapidly developing nation.

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1 ‘The Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion in Turkey (1937-38)’, Martin van Bruinessen

2  23 November 2011