Turkey’s historical heritage - Drop a spade into the ground

Gümüşlük, on the Bodrum peninsula of Turkey’s south Aegean Coast, is our getaway retreat of choice for the hot summer months. My morning routine is to cycle four or five kilometres to the village bakery to get simits for breakfast. In case you didn’t know, simits are one of the reasons people choose to live in Turkey – and one of the things Turks miss most when they are away from home. A simit is a bagel-shaped bread roll, whose crispy crust is coated with sesame seeds, the perfect accompaniment for a Turkish breakfast of feta cheese, honey, olives, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.

Cycling as a post-modern lifestyle choice is still not a big thing in Turkey, and a guy of my age sweating and grunting around country roads is something of a curiosity. I used to greet the sentry at the gate of the local gendarmerie, and we would exchange a brief word of mutual appreciation for the demanding tasks we were undertaking . . . until this year. Now there is no sentry, and the white double-storey building that used to house him and his military colleagues stands empty.

The Bodrum peninsula is an Aegean paradise of white stucco houses, crimson bougainvillea, azure sea and never-ending sunshine . . . but there is, of course, a downside. Currently, our household water is trucked in and rationed out from a central reservoir at certain hours of the day. We, and most of our neighbours, have circumvented this inconvenience by installing our own tank with a pump that allows us the luxury of a 24/7 water supply. Now, however, in response to demand, the local council is working on a pipeline that will connect us to the town water supply system, and herein, in case I had left you wondering, can be found the reason for the disappearing gendarmes. But before I solve that mystery for you, I want to digress a little into the mists of prehistory.

Church in Gümüşlük

There is an exhibition currently showing at the Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, entitled, simply, ‘Across’ (Karşıdan Karşıya’ in Turkish). The exhibition contains artefacts from the civilisation that existed in the Cycladic Islands around 3000 BCE. These people, among the first to turn pottery on a wheel and smelt metal for tools and weapons, interacted and cross-fertilised with similar groups on the south Aegean coast of Anatolia, where lies our little village of Gümüşlük. Its geographical advantages have long been recognised, among them, a natural harbour with a circular bay almost enclosed by a narrow peninsula sheltering it from the prevailing winds. Today, tourists are given sketchy information about the ancient city of Myndos that grew around the shores of this bay. Indeed, the observant visitor will notice finely dressed black stones reused in modern buildings, fragments of marble columns lying in the fields, and door posts and architraves, clearly from an earlier time, garnishing the deconsecrated village church.

Like many ancient sites in Turkey, Myndos has yet to be excavated by archaeologists, and surprisingly little is known about its history. However, excavations of another kind are currently progressing, with the aim of laying the pipeline that will carry the town water supply I mentioned earlier. Apparently, workmen tunnelling beneath the gendarme base near Gümüşlük stumbled upon the remains of an ancient necropolis. Luckily for historians and archaeologists, there was at least one person in the construction crew capable of recognising the find for what it was, and the gendarmes have had to move their operations to an empty school building in the vicinity.

Who knows what will come to light once experts start to uncover the long-hidden secrets of Myndos? Ancient Greek writers attributed the origins of the city to the Leleges, generally assumed to have been the aboriginal inhabitants of Anatolia. When Alexander the Great arrived on the scene in 334 BCE, it was part of the kingdom of Caria, owing allegiance to the Persian Empire. The capital of this kingdom was Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), famous for the wondrous funerary edifice erected by Queen Artemisia on the death of her brother (and husband) King Mausolus, from whose name we derive our word mausoleum. That was nearly two and a half millennia ago, and the site has been continuously inhabited since, passing from Hellenic hands, through classical Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman to modern times. The church I mentioned earlier, lost its primary purpose after the population exchanges following the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s. These days it comes to life again in the summer months when it hosts well-attended concerts of classical music.

By now you have probably guessed the reason for the title of this piece. If you drop a spade into the ground pretty much anywhere in modern Turkey, you stand a good chance of unearthing astounding evidence of an earlier civilisation. I feel sorry for Turkish school kids for many reasons – but one in particular is the amount of history they have to learn. If you, like me, struggled with the Tudors and Stuarts, the causes and course of the Hundred Years War, or the incomprehensible entities historians refer to as the Holy Roman and Hapsburg Empires, spare a tear of sympathy for the Turkish child, required to come to grips with a mind-numbing assortment of sequential and overlapping societies and civilisations extending back to Palaeolithic times.

The Museum of Ancient Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara recognises the need for ten further sections after the Neolithic Age ended in Anatolia around 5500 BCE. The Çatalhöyük site near Konya is recognised as one of the earliest urban conglomerations. Then follow:

• The Chalcolithic (copper/stone) Age (5500-3000 BCE), eg Alacahöyük.
• The Early Bronze Age (3000-1950 BCE), dominated by the Hatti tribes.
• Assyrian Trade Colonies (1950-1750 BCE), such as Kültepe which I mentioned in an earlier post.
• Hittite Period (1750-1200 BCE), whose capital was Hattusa (modern Boğazköy).
• Phrygian Period (1200-700 BC), which produced the legendary King Midas.
• Late Hittite Period (1200-700 BC), whose best known site is Carcemish.
• Urartian Period (1200-600 BCE), with sites in Eastern Anatolia, especially around Lake Van.
• Lydian Period (1200-600BCE), with another famous king, Croesus (the rich one).
• The Classical Period.

If that list is not enough to addle your brain, consider that the Carians and the Leleges are merely subsets, and the Classical Period, which lasted around a thousand years, encompasses all of Ancient Greek and Roman times. Then you have the Byzantines, generally considered to have had an Early, Middle and Late period in their own thousand-year history. Somewhere in that Late period, the Turks appeared on the scene and proceeded to establish two major empires, the Seljuks and the Ottomans, not to mention a confusing array of beyliks and fiefdoms.

In recent years, quite a number of spades have been dropped into the ground in Istanbul as a result of the Marmaray Project. ‘Marmaray’ is a massive rail transit project aimed at linking the European and Asian sides of the city via a submarine tube under the Bosporus Straits. Several huge underground stations on the opposite shores will feed passengers into a network of lines fanning out all over the metropolis. The project was originally scheduled for completion around 2008 – but current expectations are for the first stage to be opened in 2012. ‘Why?’ you may ask. Are Turks really that disorganised and inefficient? The fact is that construction work has been constantly interrupted by the need to allow teams of archaeologists into the excavations to sift through the latest stupendous find.

Just to put this business in some kind of context, I would like to share with you brief excerpts from two books I came across recently. The first is entitled ‘The World Beneath Istanbul’ by Ersin Kalkan.  It’s not awfully well written (at least the English version), and it’s rather anecdotal than scholarly. However, it does open a fascinating subject. In his introduction, the author quotes Dr Johannes Cramer, of Berlin Technical University’s Institute of Architecture: ‘Did you know,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘that the underground city of Istanbul is eight times bigger than that of Rome?’ I didn’t, and I don’t know how he arrived at that figure, but even allowing for some exaggeration and a generous margin for error, it’s food for thought, isn’t it! The second book is ‘Walking Through Byzantium’ by Jan Kostenec, If you can’t find the book, the website is definitely worth a peek. Here’s what Kostenec has to say in his introduction: ‘Unlike other ancient capitals, modern Istanbul has witnessed virtually no urban archaeology, and basic elements of the Byzantine city, such as the street system, public spaces, and housing, remain all but unknown.’

So, you can imagine hordes of drooling archaeologists lurking around the various Marmaray construction sites, trowels and wheelbarrows at the ready, waiting for the first glimpse of a marble fragment or a shard of pottery. As it turned out, the finds have been rather more spectacular, and provided sufficient material for an earlier exhibition at Sabancı Museum, entitled '8000 Years of a Capital.’ In fact, finds dating back to 6000 BCE have considerably extended the time frame in which the site of Istanbul is known to have been continuously inhabited. Discoveries from more recent times include remains of the original city wall built by Constantine the Great in 330 CE, and the main harbour of the city he founded, the 4^th century Port of Theodosius. The most spectacular find to date has been an almost intact medieval Byzantine galley, complete with all its cargo of amphorae and other goods.

The Marmaray project, clearly, has provided a rare opportunity for archaeologists to delve beneath the surface of the modern city of Istanbul. At the same time, it provides an illustration of the tension between the existence of a living city, and of the layers of history that lie beneath it. There can be few places on earth where this pressure is as great as in Istanbul, where the history is as long, and the pace of metropolitan growth so rapid.

A lesser-known example is the 9^th century Christian Satyros Monastery recently unearthed at Küçükyalı on the Asian side of the city. Küçükyalı is well within the urban sprawl of modern Istanbul, with its estimated population of 15 million – but perhaps twenty kilometres beyond the walls of medieval Constantinople. Needless to say, excavations have necessitated some disruption to the local community, including the removal of a section of asphalt road and a children’s playground, and have so far brought to light the large central monastery building and a water cistern with associated pipes and channels.

What we learn from this is that the archaeological riches of Turkey are not confined to contemporary population centres or sites mentioned in the visitors’ guides. Anywhere in the country, an unsuspecting spade may suddenly turn up a Bronze Age figurine, a Roman villa or a Greek theatre. In fact, for my last example, I want to take you to a small city in the western Black Sea region of Turkey. Zonguldak is a very new city by Turkish standards, having been founded in 1849 as the port for shipping coal from the mines of Ereğli. Nizamettin Oral, a 65 year-old farmer living in a nearby village, was excavating in his garden with the aim of building a greenhouse. What he found was the mosaic floor of a 3^rd century Roman villa, which has led to two years of work by archaeologists from Ereğli Museum. More mosaics and frescos have been unearthed, and it has been suggested that the finds are part of a larger classical Roman settlement.

I haven’t been able to learn what has happened to Nizamettin Bey, his farm, and the progress on his greenhouse. I would guess that agricultural activities have pretty much ceased in the vicinity. I hope that he has been well compensated by the government as an incentive to other citizens who may stumble upon similar discoveries. Clearly, another message that comes out of all this is that preserving the past is an expensive business – and for a country like Turkey, with an embarrassment of historical riches and an economy struggling to join the developed world, the money is not always easy to find. Imagine the cost overrun of that Marmaray project and its four-year delay! The 16^th century Süleymaniye Mosque, flagship achievement of Ottoman master architect Sinan, was recently renovated at a cost of nearly USD 15 million.

In London, I remember seeing a small section of the ancient city wall in a glassed-off area of the Barbican Centre. I understand that other similar sections can be seen elsewhere by determined explorers. In Istanbul I have actually walked around the walls of the ancient city of Constantinopolis. It’s relatively easy, in the sense that most of them are still standing – but difficult in another way. They are approximately twenty-two kilometres in circumference, and it took me three trips on separate days to complete the circuit. Restoration work is in progress. But at least they’re above ground, and you won’t need a spade to find them.

Gay Rights and Syrian refugees

There was a big Gay Pride march in Istanbul last week. I have to tell you right out that I didn’t participate. In fact, to my shame, I didn’t even take a lot of interest in the event, so what I’m about to share with you was gleaned from a retrospective reading of the CNN report:

‘Activists say the annual Turkish Gay Pride Parade, now in its ninth year, is the only march of its kind in a majority-Muslim country. Several thousand supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights carried signs and rainbow flags as they made their way down one of Istanbul's busiest pedestrian thoroughfares.

Gay Pride marchers in Istanbul

Now the reason I’m telling you this is that I read a news item last week summarising a report released by the human rights group, Amnesty International. The headline read ‘Amnesty report condemns Turkey’s gay rights laws.’ Well, I didn’t know much about the details of Turkey’s laws in this area, so the article inspired me to do a little research, and here are some of my findings:

• Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in the following countries: Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Samoa, Jamaica, Barbados, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Morocco.
• It is legal for women, but illegal for males, in Singapore, the Cook Islands and Tonga.
• In Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Dubai), offenders can be punished by fines, a prison sentence, or whipping. Practising gays in Jamaica can be sentenced to ten years imprisonment with hard labour.
• In Turkey, on the other hand, it has been legal since 1858. By comparison, it was legalised for males in New Zealand in 1986, and in Australia, as recently as 1994.

I was curious to know what the Amnesty International report had to say about these other countries, some of which are on friendly trading and sporting terms with progressive and enlightened Western nations. Accordingly I googled ‘amnesty international gay rights report’ and was interested to find that most of the results referred to the report’s censuring of Turkey, and none of them even hinted that there might be countries with worse records.

As the CNN report above pointed out, the Istanbul Gay Pride parade is the ‘only march of its kind in a majority-Muslim country’. Still, the marchers could have been (and some of them apparently were) protesting about the treatment of gays in Turkey. It’s perhaps worth noting, then, that demonstrators from a nearby pro-Kurdish gathering, fleeing from police teargas, found sanctuary among the ranks of the proud gays, who apparently were allowed to proceed with their activities unmolested. Turkish police are not noted for their soft approach to undesirable demonstrations, yet the gay marchers were permitted to exhibit their pride without let or hindrance.

Still, you will say, turning a blind eye to one brief march on one day of the year doesn’t necessarily prove that the Turkish authorities show the same tolerance all year round, and I agree with you – so I looked further. I checked out the tourist scene, and I turned up a website calling itself ‘Pink News’. Under a header announcing ‘Turkish Delights’, the travel writer had this to say: ‘Fancy a break that offers more than a week in an average hotel or a whirlwind city guidebook tour of your destination? If you’re looking for a holiday that’s far from the madding crowd or something with a slightly different twist, then travel company Journey Anatolia might just have the ideal options for you. Oh, and did we mention that they’re all in Turkey? So, chances are you’ll need to pack the sunscreen for some beautiful weather.' Positively gushing, and no mention of whippings or hard labour.

For a second opinion, I turned to my trusty ‘Lonely Planet Turkey’[1]. ‘The gay scene in Istanbul,’ they said, ‘has been characterized as homely rather than raunchy . . . There are an increasing number of openly gay bars and nightclubs in the city . . . Hamams (Turkish baths) are a gay fave . . .’ Outside of Istanbul, ‘attitudes are changing . . .  but there are sporadic reports of violence towards gays – the message is discretion.’

Aha! ‘Violence towards gays!’ There it is! However, it seems that such violence is more likely to occur within families than as a result of institutional brutality. Undoubtedly, in certain parts of Turkey, among uneducated villagers, there is still a culture that sees killing as a way of cleansing a family’s honour – and this violence is as likely to be directed towards wayward heterosexual young women, as against gays. Of course it is wrong, and Turkey needs to extend civilization and education to all parts of the country before it can expect to be welcomed into the European Union. However, I would like to balance the ledger by offering two points for your consideration.

First, there is a big, wild world out there, and not all of it is exactly as we well-brought up, well educated, open-minded, tolerant, humanitarian fortunates from developed nations might wish it to be. We do well to remember this when we go a-traveling in foreign climes. As Lonely Planet clearly warns, ‘the message is discretion’. I read just last week about a countryman of mine, visiting Papua New Guinea, who was filled full of arrows and nearly killed by a local tribesman who apparently had taken a fancy to his French girlfriend. I’m not saying I don’t sympathise with the poor guy, and his girlfriend, who was reportedly raped at the same time. However, we know that Papua New Guinea is one of the last paradises on Earth for anthropologists keen to see how our less civilised relatives eke out an existence – and the flipside of this is very likely to be a certain unpredictability on the part of natives who may be unaware of the niceties of courting rituals in more civilised circles.

Another compatriot achieved international fame as a yachtsman a few years ago. Sir Peter Blake was knighted by the New Zealand government after setting a circumnavigation record in the Whitbread Round-the-World race, and winning (and defending) the coveted America’s Cup in the 1990s. After retiring from yacht racing, Sir Peter was being spoken of as a possible successor to the legendary Jacques Cousteau. Tragically, his boat was attacked, and he was killed, by pirates at the mouth of the Amazon delta while on an environmental exploration trip gathering data for the United Nations. Once again, I’m not intending to show a lack of human sympathy here. I merely want to point out the obvious – that it probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d stayed at home in Bayswater, Auckland. Peter Blake knew that too, of course, and he chose to go, knowing the risks.

My second point relates to what some might consider a more immediate human rights issue. During the first weeks of June, refugees were fleeing across the border from Syria into southeast Turkey to escape the violent suppression of protests against President Bashar al-Ashad’s regime. Some 15,000 Syrians reportedly crossed into Turkey before Syrian forces closed the border towards the end of the month. Since then, reports say, several thousand have returned to Syria. The reasons are not totally clear, but it seems men may have brought their families to the sanctuary of Turkey before returning to continue the fight on their own soil. The plight of these refugees was recently given more media attention in the West as a result of a visit by UN goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie.

Well, as I think I acknowledged above, Turkey, cannot claim a lily-white record on human rights across the board. On the other hand, if the truth be told, few countries can. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a balanced picture, showing our strengths as well as our weaknesses.

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[1] 2007 edition

Neo-Ottomanism: A new direction for Turkey?

Once upon a time I dabbled a little in politics, to the extent that I actually tried twice to get myself elected as a Member of Parliament. It was a great experience and I’m glad I did it. I guess my main motivation was to preserve my right to criticize. People would say, ‘Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you do something constructive to change things?’ I wasn’t successful, of course, and I’m equally glad, in retrospect, that I wasn’t. To get elected on a party ticket you have to juggle the dictates of the party itself, the fickle winds of public opinion, the oppressive power of the media circus, your own desire for power, and your private beliefs and personal integrity. All too often, the still small voice of the latter is drowned by the insistent bellowing of the former.

All politicians know this, of course, and choose to pay the price for success, so you can’t feel too sorry for them. Barack Obama should have known (if he truly didn’t) before swearing the presidential oath, that the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to shut down Guantanamo and stop the torture; that adhering to the demands of the Armenian diaspora would run him into difficulties with the Turkish Government; and that the too-big-to-fail US banking sector would force him to help them out of their self-dug hole with a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded handout. Democracy is the machinery that allows us to call politicians to account when they stray too far from the path we want them to follow. Never fear, America, here comes Sarah Palin to the rescue!

I guess have a longish history as a political sceptic, but I do feel a certain sympathy for those charged with the responsibility of forming Turkey’s foreign policy these days. Neo-Ottomanism is a word I hear bandied around a lot. The implication seems to be that Turkey is moving away from the Western orientation it has followed since the founding of the republic, turning instead towards the Central Asian and Middle Eastern regions associated with its Turkic and Ottoman origins. The argument clearly has appeal for those, abroad and at home, wishing to label Turkey as eastern, Islamic, uncivilized and ‘other’; and the present government as all those things, plus backward-looking and anti-democratic. What do I think? Let me share my thoughts . . .

The Turkish Republic had its birth in a land devastated by decades of war – and it has often been said that the first casualty of war is truth. The Ottoman Empire had been reduced by a century of nationalist splintering from within, and imperialist manipulation from without, to a shrunken rump on the verge of collapse. The last nationalist movement to emerge was Turkish nationalism, forced into self-awareness by the threat of imminent destruction. In order to foster this national identity, the leaders of the republican independence movement were obliged to create an identity of Turkishness, to decimate the elitist Ottoman language and exalt its poor Turkish relation; to develop myths of a legendary Turkish past, and sever ties to the Islamic Empire which had finally been brought to its knees by Western European power.

Osman Gazi,
founder of the Ottoman dynasty

The new Republic had, from its inception, an uncomfortable relationship with the Ottoman Empire from which it sprang. Osman Gazi, the founder of the Ottoman state, was a 13^th century Turkish warlord. The Ottoman Sultans, for centuries, claimed, largely by dint of military might, the title of Caliph, or leader of the Muslim ‘nation’. Nevertheless, though officially Muslim, the empire contained relatively autonomous populations of Jews and Christians, as well as the various Islamic communities. The Ottomans did not regard themselves as ‘Turkish’. Turks were the warriors and tillers of the soil. The basis of the Ottoman language may have been Turkish, but it had substantial overlays of Arabic and Persian, incorporating three distinct language families[1]. The Ottomans were a ruling elite intermarrying with Russian and Greek princesses, and happily mingling with maidens fair from the conquered lands of Europe. In its declining years, however, their Empire had become a virtual puppet of the European Great Powers, accepting support and indignities from all and sundry to eke out its existence a little longer. When the armed forces of France and Britain occupied Istanbul at the end of the First World War, the ‘virtual puppet’ status became reality. The Sultan and his ministers were compelled to sign at Sevres a treaty that would have dismembered the once mighty empire. The final insult must have been the Entente-sponsored invasion of Anatolia by the army of Greece, intent on re-establishing its ancient Byzantine glory.

In short, we can say that the founders of the Turkish Republic had to split from and deny pretty much everything that the Ottoman Empire had represented. The fostering of a Turkish national identity required a rejection of all things Ottoman, even religion – yet the new state, unlike its predecessor, was now almost exclusively Muslim. Contradictions abounded, so, of necessity, there was some rewriting of history, some adjusting of reality, some myth-creation in order to ensure the survival of a nation that, like Hans Andersen’s ugly duckling, no one else in the world really wanted.

It is only recently that Turks have started to become comfortable with their Ottoman heritage. Sufficient time has passed that they can begin to feel pride in the achievements of ancestors whose existence cannot be denied. Most of the excesses of early republican nationalism and secularism are being quietly put away on high shelves. Atatürk himself insisted that the ezan, the Muslim call to prayer, should be intoned in Turkish. Now that is a dead issue. Even the most ardent Kemalists seem content to hear Arabic broadcast at high volume five times (or more) a day from a forest of increasingly lofty minarets. One of the most popular drama series on television these days is “Muhteşem Yüzyıl” (“The Magnificent Century”), set in the 1500s, during the reign of Sultan Süleyman, generally acknowledged to have presided over the Ottoman Empire at the zenith of its power. Modern Turkey is achieving a synthesis, as its middle class multiplies and the process of urbanization accelerates, of modernity, economic consumption, globalization, secular democratic government, Islamic traditions and Turkishness. That is as it should be. The government may try to direct these processes but it cannot control them.

So far, then, I have been looking at the domestic situation in Turkey, but of course, there is another aspect to the label of Neo-Ottomanism. When the Turkish Republic came into being, its founders resolved to turn towards the West in the search for a new direction. The founding principles included democratic republicanism, separation of religion and government, state-sponsored economic development, and reforms of alphabet, language, clothing and religious practices. Europe represented the goals of the new republic, and all things Western and European became desirable. Although remaining neutral during the Second World War, Turkey sent armed forces to the Korean conflict, and was a major military contributor to NATO defences during the Cold War. I have recently learned that, when President JF Kennedy was indignantly ordering the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba, the United States had bases in Turkey with missiles trained on the USSR. I suspect the Soviets knew about these, were not too happy about them, and very likely had Turkish locations pretty high on their list of targets to hit, should the need arise. It was a risk the Turkish Government took, one assumes out of a desire for friendship with the West.

At this point, I would like to quote from Wikipedia on the subject of Turkey’s attempts to gain admission to the European Union. I am aware that some people disparage Wikipedia as a source, but on this one I’m prepared to trust them. You can check the facts elsewhere if you have the time and the inclination:

“Turkey's application to accede to the European Union was made on 14 April 1987. Turkey has been an associate member of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors since 1963. After the ten founding members, Turkey was one of the first countries to become a member of the Council of Europe in 1949, and was also a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1973. The country has also been an associate member of the Western European Union since 1992, and is a part of the "Western Europe" branch of the Western European and Others Group (WEOG) at the United Nations. Turkey signed a Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995 and was officially recognised as a candidate for full membership on 12 December 1999, at the Helsinki summit of the European Council. Negotiations were started on 3 October 2005, and the process, should it be in Turkey's favour, is likely to take at least a decade to complete. The membership bid has become a major controversy of the ongoing enlargement of the European Union.”

It looks to me as though Turkey has been pretty determined, one might say patient, in its efforts to be accepted into the European fold. I am well aware of the arguments against acceptance, however, spoken and unspoken, and (just between you and me) I suspect that a blue moon will rise over a cold day in hell when the EU finally welcomes Turkey aboard as a full member. So what are the Turks to do in the mean time?

The key issue that makes Europeans shy away from inviting Turkey into their club, namely religion, is the very factor that gives Turks an advantage when it comes to dealing with nations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslims have felt marginalized by Western societies for a long time now, and the accelerating speed of modernization has served to accentuate the sense of superiority in the West, and corresponding sense of exclusion in the rest of the world. Turkey, with its unique combination of secular democracy and traditional Islamic viewpoint, coupled with the detachment that its Turkishness brings to the mix, finds itself in a position to play a mediating role in an area that remains a mystery to most in the West. Central Asian Turkic republics, freeing themselves from decades of oppression by Russian and Soviet conquerors, see Turkey as the big brother that has trodden the difficult path they themselves aspire to follow. Middle Eastern states have a more problematic relationship with their liberal neighbour, but still, Turkey stands as an example of a country that has managed to achieve impressive political, social and economic freedoms while retaining its Islamic identity.

Is it any wonder, then, that the government of Turkey, and the private sector of its own accord, have been working to build bridges with neighbouring states in their immediate vicinity and further to the east? Can Western nations continue dangling carrots while holding Turkey at arm's length, and at the same time, seriously expect the Turks to forego all other international contact in the hopes of future acceptance? The United States at least, has a pragmatic approach – unlike France for example, they refrain from grandstanding to special interest groups at home who have a historical axe to grind. They encourage EU members to adopt a more positive approach to Turkey’s membership application – even if only because of Turkey’s strategic geo-political significance. Britain also pushes Turkey’s case from time to time – though a cynic might suggest this stems more from its desire to maintain a Euro-sceptic position than from any great love for Turks as a race.

In the mean time, we see Turkish construction companies working in partnership with locals in Kazakhstan and Libya, and Turkish educational foundations building schools. We have seen the Turkish government (in league with Brazil) trying its own approach to ease international tensions over Iran’s nuclear development programme. We are seeing tent cities established near the southeast border to accept thousands of refugees fleeing violence and oppression in neighbouring Syria. Students from 130 nations are currently in Ankara to participate in the 9^th International Turkish Language Festival.

In 2010 Istanbul was chosen as one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture, and, major projects were carried out all over the city to showcase its historical riches. Twenty-one million Turkish Liras were spent on a three-year restoration of the 16^th century Süleymaniye Mosque, simply the best of many architectural treasures built during the reign of that ‘Magnificent’ sultan. But it is not merely Istanbul and Ottoman treasures that demand huge sums for historical restoration and preservation. A farmer near the Black Sea city of Zonguldak, better known for its coal mines, recently uncovered, while digging foundations for a hothouse on his property, the perfectly preserved mosaic floor of a 3^rd century Roman villa.

Then there are the Ottoman heritage buildings beyond the boundaries of modern Turkey. The international community recognises the debt owed to the civilisations of Ancient Greece and Rome, and there is no difficulty in raising money to restore and preserve classical remains, wherever they may be located today. The British Empire left its architectural footprint all over the world, from Sydney to Kolkata, Istanbul to Shanghai. Most of those cities are in countries that have long-since thrown off the colonial yoke, yet they are happy to find new uses for the buildings. The Ottoman heritage is a different matter. In the Balkans and Greece, emergent Christian states couldn’t wait to erase all traces of their Muslim Ottoman past. In Central Asia, a century or two of Russian and Soviet hegemony, and economies with little surplus for luxuries, have combined to the detriment of important historical sites. Recently the Turkish Government has been involving itself in the restoration of their historical heritage in neighbouring nations. There are critics who see this as yet another aspect of emerging Neo-Ottomanism. Yet imagine the outcry if Turkey allowed, never mind contributed to, the decay and destruction of a 15^th century church or cathedral within its borders. Without Turkish Government involvement, the six-century-old Fethiye Mosque in Athens would continue its descent into rubble; the Orhun inscriptions in Mongolia, the oldest known written documents of Turkic history, would meet the same fate, as would, probably, the madrasah where Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi was born in Afghanistan.

As I said in my opening paragraphs, I don’t generally have much sympathy for politicians. Dealing with criticism is part of their job, as are making unfulfillable promises and obfuscating the truth. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that the present Turkish government gets more than its fair share of unreasonable criticism. Can they really be in the United States’ pocket, and at the same time, have a shariah and Neo-Ottoman expansionist agenda? Should they spend tax-payer money restoring and caring for their historic buildings, or leave them to rot and decay – and if restoration is the decision, who should decide which ones and where? Should Turkey cut itself off from contact with its Muslim and Central Asian neighbours in the hopes of currying favour with Europe? The path of political success is a minefield, and I’m pleased, when I look back, that New Zealand voters kept me from it.

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[1] English, in comparison, though indebted to several major sources, is pretty pure Indo-European.

The Price of Progress - Turkey's Economic Miracle

Turkey’s economy is booming. Reputable sources (the World Bank, the IMF and the CIA) rank Turkey as the 15^th or 16^th largest in the world by GDP, with an annual growth rate of 6 to 8%, putting it up there with China and India. The Spanish newspaper ‘El Pais’ ran an article recently on the Turkish ‘Economic Miracle’, citing as its chief symbol, the Istanbul Sapphire Tower, currently, at 261 metres, the tallest building in Europe.

In 1973, the Bosporus was spanned by an impressive suspension bridge. In 1988, a second was opened to keep pace with Istanbul’s growth. Last year, the go-ahead was given for a third bridge; a rail tube/tunnel is due to open in 2013, linking the Asian and European sides of the city – and plans are currently afoot for a road tunnel. There are 38 universities listed in Istanbul alone, and 74 modern shopping malls, with ten new ones scheduled to open in the next two years.

Last month, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announced the grandest project yet – a proposed 50-kilometre canal linking the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, allowing much of the tanker and container ship traffic that currently passes through the centre of the city, to bypass the Bosporus Strait. PM Erdoğan has attracted a fair amount of flak locally for his ‘crazy and magnificent’ scheme, but, in fact, it looks like a modest proposal when measured against the Grand Canal of China, completed in 609 CE, and reputed to measure 1794 kilometres in length! Nevertheless, if it comes to fruition, the Istanbul canal will not be much inferior in scale to the Suez or Panama waterways.

This exponential growth is not confined to Istanbul alone. The former imperial capital is, of course, by far the country’s largest urban area, with an estimated population of over 13 million. However, there are at least eight other cities exceeding the one million mark. A month or so ago, I was in Konya for a conference. I had been there twelve years previously when it was a rather sleepy central Anatolian city best known for its Seljuk architecture and as a place of pilgrimage for those visiting the tomb of Mevlana Rumi. On my latest visit, the view from my hotel window was dominated by a 42-storey office tower rising from the opposite side of the street – this in Turkey’s seventh largest city.

Number 8 on the list is Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast, which I also had the pleasure of visiting recently. Antalya, the ancient Greek city of Attalia, is one of the jewels on what is sometimes referred to as the Turkish Riviera. We EFL teachers were treated to three nights at the Vogue Avantgarde, a 5-star establishment near the village of Göynük. A sign at reception announced the price of a single room as $450, with a reduction to $660 if you could find someone to share a double. I doubt if any of the guests, us or the Russian tourists, were actually paying that much, but it was a pretty nice place, with multi-lingual staff, its own beach plus several swimming pools, entertainment on tap, and food that wouldn’t have disappointed the guests at Kate and William’s wedding.

Now I couldn’t begin to guess how many similar palaces of hospitality line Turkey’s 4300 km of Mediterranean and Aegean coastline – and no doubt it must still be possible to find a relatively unspoiled beach. Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly difficult, and this entry in a recent edition of ‘Lonely Planet Turkey’ for the resort of Ölüdeniz is representative: ‘Unfortunately, the paradise that many past travellers fondly recall has all but been ruined by the tightly packed belt of hotels behind the beach. [This] used to be one of the highlights of independent travel in Turkey but the development of identical air-conditioned hotels, loud bars and over-priced restaurants has hardly bolstered its appeal.’

Some friends of mine from Istanbul moved down south to Antalya a few years ago to build their dream house in a village somewhere out of town amidst the orange groves, with views of the Taurus mountains. Most of us have dreams, but not many of us get to fulfil them, so I hope Andy and Burcu (not their real names) will forgive my mentioning them here. They have a beautiful place to live, and we denizens of megalopolitan Istanbul can only envy them, and hope that the urban sprawl of Antalya will leave them in peace.



Nuclear power comes with a cost

Some 300 kilometres to the east of Antalya, citizens of another important Turkish city are bracing for the approach of a different aspect of modernity. Mersin is another urban centre approaching the magic 1 million population, Turkey’s largest port, and proud possessor of a 52-story tower, the nation’s tallest when it was built in 1987. A hundred kilometres down the road from Mersin is the town of Akkuyu, where Turkey’s first nuclear power plant for the generation of electricity will be built by the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom. Some folks may find it a little strange that Turkey, a notoriously seismically unstable land, is going ahead with a nuclear power station at a time when Japan is struggling to contain the fallout from its crippled plant at Fukushima, damaged by the tsunami in the aftermath of the March earthquake. Nevertheless, Akkuyu is only one of two sites which the Turkish government has earmarked for nuclear-powered electricity generation – the second being at Sinop on the Black Sea coast.

Some may also question Turkey’s wisdom in entrusting the building of these facilities to a Russian company. 1986 is fading from living memory, and becoming ancient history, but Turks have good cause to remember the Soviet-era nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in nearby Ukraine. Perhaps the effects of the radiation leakage are less immediate these days. However, the Russian government is currently engaged in building a huge concrete shield to cover the still threatening Chernobyl plant. An expert was asked how long the site would remain a danger. His answer? Around 20,000 years!

Well, Turkey needs energy, there’s no questioning that. The country’s GDP may exceed that of Saudi Arabia, but it does not possess the oil riches that bless (or curse) its neighbouring guardian of the holy cities of Islam. Turkey is rich in water, a resource arguably more beneficial in the long-term than oil. The GAP project, harnessing the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers includes the world’s fourth largest dam. However, the rising waters will soon cover the ancient city of Zeugma, location of some of the most magnificent mosaics of the ancient world. Highlighting the paradoxical truth that a blessing can also be a curse, Turkey’s treasury of historical riches adds hugely to the cost of every development project. The Istanbul Metro system is several years behind schedule, and no doubt considerably over budget because excavations constantly turn up remains of Greek and Roman temples, harbours, churches and cemeteries, which demand the attentions of armies of archeologists before construction can continue. A bridge which will carry the Metro trains over the Golden Horn has had to be redesigned several times to comply with UNESCO demands that it must not blight the domed and minaretted skyline of ancient Istanbul with incongruous modernity.

So that brings us back to nuclear power stations. Nobody wants to live next door to one, but what can you do? George Bush the Elder Is notorious for his refusal to accept the recommendations of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 with the immortal line: ‘The American way of life is non-negotiable.’ Back then, perhaps, the danger we face as a planet was not so clear, at least not to the GOP and its supporters. Now that China, with its 1.3 billion population, has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy, we are starting to get it. What happens when those rising Chinese middle classes are able to afford the ‘American way of life’ to which they probably aspire? And then there’s India, picked to succeed China as the most populous nation by 2025. I don’t know their figures, but I can extrapolate from what I know about Turkey, with its comparatively miniscule population of 75 million. Anyone who lives in Istanbul will tell you about the nightmare of traffic in the city  - yet the ratio of motor vehicles per capita in Turkey is less than 25%. What will happen when that figure approaches the Western norm of 70 to 80%? Then do the maths for India and China. Then give some thought to installing a solar water heater and a wind-powered generator on your rooftop.

Turkey's Foreign Policy - Alone on the World Stage

I read an interesting article in a recent issue of ‘Time’ magazine. It was entitled ‘How Syria and Libya got to be Turkey’s Headaches’. It interested me on two counts - first, because it seemed to contradict my own feelings about how events in the Arab world would affect Turkey; and second, because it was written by a Turk who seemed to be portraying her country in an unnecessarily pessimistic light in an international news magazine.

The writer, Pelin Turgut, began by announcing that, with the current crisis in Syria, the ‘Arab Spring [had] arrived on Turkey’s doorstep.’ What do you take from that? It seemed to me an unfortunate statement, pandering, as it does, to misinformed Western stereotypes of Turkey. Turks are not Arabs. Unlike the Arab nations experiencing popular unrest, Turkey has a democratically elected parliament and government. Further, there has been no sign of the kind of grass roots protests that have racked neighbouring states. Ms Turgut knows these things, yet she seemed to be implying something different.

In her article, Ms Turgut seems to have compiled a litany of innuendo aimed at discrediting the Turkish Government, with little solid foundation. She calls the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ‘Islamic-rooted’. What does that mean? Turkey’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, and any government that does not at least pay lip service to that fact has no chance of success at the polls. For nine years I have heard ‘secular’ Turks claim that Mr Erdoğan’s party has a secret agenda to dismantle the secular state and introduce shariah law. If that is the case, they are showing remarkable stealth and patience.

Ms Turgut goes on to suggest, with weasel words, that the Turkish government has forsaken attempts to join the European Union, and instead, moved closer to Islamic Arab states. She highlights Mr Erdoğan’s criticism of Israel, and seems to imply that his government’s bridge-building with Syria and Libya were in some way, a bad thing. In fact, as I read it, world opinion has been shifting against Israel’s intransigence in the West Bank. It is Israel who is defying the United Nations, not the Turkish government. Similarly, it is the European Union that, rightly or wrongly, has been rejecting Turkey’s attempts to gain membership for fifty years – not the other way around. It is hard to imagine that anyone in the USA or Europe would have been happy to see Turkey and Syria go to war – yet Pelin Turgut seems to be implying some kind of hypocrisy in Turkey’s peaceful overtures under Mr Erdoğan’s leadership.

Similarly, she criticizes what she seems to see as inconsistency in Turkey’s attitude to neighbours experiencing the ‘Arab Spring.’ She notes that the Turkish PM ‘denounced’ Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, while remaining silent on Libya and Syria - ignoring the fact that the Turkish PM got it right with Egypt, and the jury is still out on Libya. Turks have to live in this part of the world. They don’t have the luxury of 2000 km of Europe and 5000 km of Atlantic Ocean buffering them against the realities of the Middle East, so it’s hardly surprising that they are less than enthusiastic about charging into neigbouring nations with guns blazing.

Ms Turgut enlists the support of a couple of ‘Turkey experts’, Soli Ozel, ‘international relations professor at Bilgi University and a political columnist’, and Henri Barkey who apparently wrote ‘an article for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace’. With all due respect to these gentlemen, despite Turkey’s increasing interest in playing a peace-keeping and mediating role in the Middle East, it has no power to, and probably no desire to coerce neighbours to follow its wishes. The ‘neo-Ottoman’ label may have a catchy ring to Turkey’s detractors, but on examination, it is a largely meaningless tag. The Ottomans were a religion-centred, autocratic, monarchic empire. The modern Turkish republic is none of these things. However, should a lack of power to enforce its wishes prevent Turkey from attempting a moderating role in the region? Surely no one with a genuine interest in world peace would argue so.

As an example of failed policies, Pelin Turgut cites the presence of Turkish construction companies and workers in Libya. Admittedly, the Turkish government has had to evacuate large numbers of its citizens from that troubled nation – but one could argue that sending builders to construct projects is preferable to sending bombers and cruise missiles to destroy them. How many soldiers does the US have in Iraq and Afghanistan? And has their presence there been more successful than the Turkish presence in Libya? Henri Barkey is quoted as criticizing Turkey for having become ‘a status quo power’ in the region. That may be a little unfair, given Erdoğan’s reprimands of Israel and Egypt’s Mubarak, and the United States’s record arms sale to Saudi Arabia and its major financial contributions to Mubarak’s military machine. In the end, a nation’s foreign policy is its own affair – and who is to say that Turkey’s foreign policy is any more self-serving than that of the United States or France?

Soli Özel, the international relations expert from Bilgi University asserts, almost gleefully, that "Turkey now finds itself very alone on the world stage." It may be so, but who is to blame? Turkey will never be truly accepted by the Arab Islamic countries, because Turks are not Arabs, and they espouse secular democratic ideals. By its very existence, Turkey is a threat to its autocratic Arab neighbours. On the other hand, it will (most likely) never be fully accepted as one of the Western democracies because it is a Muslim country. Being alone on the world stage is nothing new for Turks. Nevertheless, United Sates foreign policy-makers at least, recognize Turkey’s value as a key player on the spot in the volatile but vital Middle East. And Turks themselves, in my opinion, should recognize their need to work together in their isolation.

Islamic Dominoes in the Arab Spring – Will Turkey be next?

It looks like a crusading Republican president’s ultimate fantasy come true! Populist uprisings sweeping fundamentalist dictators from power throughout the Islamic world, bringing democracy to the oppressed and opening new markets for Coca Cola and Subway. Pity it had to happen while a Democrat was in the White House; and pity for the Democrats that it had to be their man who launched the next military strike on an asymmetrical foe. Nevertheless, when things at home are not looking so rosy, it’s a positive sign for the American Way that its greatest threat is seen to be succumbing to the rising power of democracy from within.

Unfortunately, global events are rarely so simple. The reality on the ground is rather more complex. I want to take a quick look at what seems to be happening in Muslim lands in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean from the point of view of one living in such a land. First of all, then, a brief round-up of the main locations:

• The recent unrest kicked off in Tunisia back in December last year when a young man set himself on fire in protest at the repressive policies of Zine el Abidine ben Ali, president for the past 24 years. At first the military tried to suppress the resulting riots, but later changed tack and removed President ben Ali. It has been subsequently reported that huge quantities of jewellery and cash in various foreign currencies have been found in the former presidential palace.
• Protests in Algeria have so far been less successful, having been ‘quelled’ by riot police operating under the state of emergency which has, apparently, been in force since 1992! The country has been ruled for 11 years by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, ‘elected’ in 1999 with the aid of the military and a fraudulent vote.
• Jordan was pretty much a British puppet until after the Second World War. Since then it has remained a fairly unconstitutional monarchy with a strong military financed by the US, the UK and France. Recent protests in February and March were forcibly dispersed, and protestors severely beaten, if we are to believe reports.
• Oman’s head of state is a hereditary sultan, currently Qaboos bin Said al Said, who has led the country since overthrowing his father in 1970 (interesting interpretation of ‘hereditary’). Ministers are appointed by the sultan.  There have been popular protests this year, but recently they have been broken up with increasing violence.
• Yemen has been ruled by President Ali Abdullah Saleh for 32 years since he more or less assumed power after the assassination of the previous president, Ahmed bin Hussein al-Ghashmi. According to Wikipedia (quoting other sources), ‘almost half of the population of Yemen live on $2 or less a day, and one-third suffer from chronic hunger. Yemen ranks 146th in the Transparency International 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, and 15th in the 2010 Failed States Index’. Protests have continued through February and March and pro-Saleh forces have been using increasing force to suppress them.
• Hosni Mubarak, essentially a dictator installed in 1981 after a military assassination of Anwar el Sadat, ruled Egypt for thirty years until obliged to resign after the armed forces decided to stop supporting him in the face of a popular uprising. According to a recent Time article,  ‘US taxpayers [had been] spending $3.5 million a day on the Egyptian military, buying it everything from F-16 jets to M-1 tanks’ – helping to make it the world’s 10^th largest military. Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly whose side we’re on.
• Problems in Lebanon seem to come down to religion rather than popular unrest. Since the French moved out at the end of World War Two, the country has been governed by an interesting system of power-sharing among the Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shi’i Muslims. It’s not easy to understand exactly what’s going on in Lebanon these days except that the Shia militant Hezbollah group have been steadily gaining power, and are suspected of having had a hand in the assassination of the Western-backed Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005.
• Kuwait is said to have the world’s fifth largest oil reserves, and to be its 11^th richest country, on a per capita basis. It claims to be a constitutional monarchy, but the ‘constitution’ seems to consider the hereditary emir to have pretty much absolute power over his subjects. There have been street protests recently, but not much outside support is likely. You may remember George Bush Snr disinterestedly stepping in to rescue little old Kuwait from that big bully, Saddam, back in 1991.
• Lucky little Bahrain, with a total population of just over one million, has the good (or bad) fortune to be rich in oil and pearls. Since 1970, when the British moved out, it has been an absolute monarchy. The present King, Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, has been on the throne for eleven years. Recent street protests demanding rights and freedoms have been ‘brutally’ put down. Again, we’re unlikely to see much Western assistance for the down-trodden masses, given that the incumbent monarch very kindly allows the United States Fifth Fleet to operate from his nation’s waters.
• Well, Libya, of course, is another matter. Muammar Gaddafi has been president since leading a military coup in 1969 to oust the monarch, King Idris. You wouldn’t expect to find him on any Western leader’s list of people to invite to his/her birthday party. President Reagan sent in the US Air Force in 1986, in an unsuccessful attempt to take Gaddafi out. Twenty-five years later, we have a similar scenario, though the US have been hanging back a little and allowing the French to lead the way with their Mirages. Libya, incidentally, has the world’s 10^th largest proven oil reserves. Interestingly, France and Italy (another participant in the bombing) are its two biggest customers.
• Morocco is another ‘constitutional’ monarchy whose king, Mohammed VI has wielded fairly all-encompassing powers since ascending the throne in 1956. Parliamentary elections are periodically held, but clearly the public don’t feel very represented. Recent protests have been snuffed out by firm police action.
• Pro-democracy campaigners in Saudi Arabia have been largely discouraged from venting their rage by shows of strength from security forces. King Abdullah is not known as the most enlightened of monarchs, and Amnesty International regularly express serious concerns about his commitment to upholding human rights. The CIA website[3] has this to say: ‘Saudi Arabia is a destination country for workers from South and Southeast Asia who are subjected to conditions that constitute involuntary servitude including being subjected to physical and sexual abuse, non-payment of wages, confinement, and withholding of passports as a restriction on their movement; domestic workers are particularly vulnerable because some are confined to the house in which they work unable to seek help; Saudi Arabia is also a destination country for Nigerian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Afghan, Somali, Malian, and Sudanese children trafficked for forced begging and involuntary servitude as street vendors; some Nigerian women were reportedly trafficked into Saudi Arabia for commercial sexual exploitation.’

Clearly, you are less likely to be held internationally accountable for such activities if you have the world’s largest oil reserves. One might be more likely to accept President Obama’s concern for human welfare in Libya if his government hadn’t recently agreed to sell $60 billion worth of high tech weaponry to the Saudis – the largest arms deal in history. Interestingly, 23% of Saudi Arabia’s population consists of foreign nationals, yet no one seems to be advising or assisting them to leave.

Gaddafi and Sarkozy - hand in hand

So what do you get from all that? I’m not sure that I want to draw any sweeping conclusions, except to note that, as I suggested above, the situation is deeply complicated. It is probably safe to say, however, that support for the rise of democracy and the recognition of human rights in the Islamic world are not the major priorities of governments in the United States and the European Union.

‘But what about Turkey?’ I have been asked. ‘Aren’t you worried that this revolutionary fervour may spread in that direction?’ Well, frankly, I’m not, and I’d like to tell you why.

Let’s begin with the nature of government in Turkey in comparison with those countries listed above. The modern Republic of Turkey was born in 1923 from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The last hereditary Ottoman sultan had, the previous year, seen the writing on the wall and allowed himself to be whisked away to safety on a British battleship, HMS Malaya. At that time, Istanbul had been occupied by the British and their Allies since the end of the First World War, and Sultan Mehmet VI Vahdettin had become their puppet. Turkey was not yet a democracy, but it had definitely asserted its independence, in the face of Allied attempts to subdue and dismember it – and the monarchy had become a relic of the past.

The first true multiparty election was held in Turkey in 1950. It seemed to pass largely unheralded, as far as I am aware, but 2010 marked the 60^th anniversary of that moderately significant event. Why it went uncelebrated is open to conjecture. I can think of two possible reasons. The first is that Turks were probably reluctant to accept that the father of their Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had ruled as head of state for 15 years without troubling himself to hold an election. The second reason may be that, in 1960, 1971 and 1980, the Turkish military intervened in civilian politics and ousted elected governments, so the 60-year period has not been without its hiccups. Nevertheless, those periods of military government were brief, and the reins of power were quickly passed back into elected civilian hands.

Sixty years is quite a significant time span, in global terms, as is the 87 years that have elapsed since the founding of the republic. France is currently into its fifth republic, and had hosted one revolution, two empires, one restoration of the monarchy and the establishment of an alternative monarchy within its first 60 years. The United States republic was still enslaving a large portion of its population eighty years after its foundation, fought a vicious and bloody civil war after ninety years, and was still committing ethnic cleansing on its indigenous peoples after a hundred.

When considering the state of democracy in Turkey, it tends to be forgotten that several important members of the European Union have worse records. Spain, for example, was ruled by a military dictatorship for most of the years from 1923 to 1975, and did not become a democracy until 1978. Portugal managed the feat two years earlier in 1976, after a left-wing military coup in 1974 had ousted the right-wing dictatorship that had been trying to maintain the anachronistic colonial empire. Greece’s seven-year military dictatorship collapsed in 1974, interestingly, in the face of a threat of war with Turkey. The junta strongman, Brigadier Ioannides had sponsored the military coup in Cyprus that led to Turkish intervention on the island, and his supporters deserted him as a result. So it could be argued that Greeks should thank Turkey for the re-establishment of democracy in the land which claims it as its home.

Of course, mature democracies understandably view military coups as undesirable, and inconsistent with the ideal of government of, by and for the people. Clearly it didn’t do Turkey’s claims for international recognition much good to have three such events in the space of twenty years. What those mature democracies may fail to understand is that (paradox though it may seem) the military in Turkey was constitutionally entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining democracy. The threat of militant Islam is very real in this part of the world, and fear of it, very deep-seated in the hearts of secular republicans. The present government in Turkey has been gradually working to curb the power of the military to interfere in political affairs – and has come under a deal of criticism for so doing.

Another positive development in recent years has been the phenomenon known in Turkish as ‘açılım’, or ‘opening-up’. Turkey has long been criticised by Europe for human rights abuses, mistreatment of minorities, and curbing the freedom of the press and the right to protest. Few would argue that Scandinavian levels of personal freedom have been attained – but at least the ‘opening-up’ has allowed discussion to begin on issues such as the Kurdish situation and relations with Armenians. The Turkish film industry has flourished in the past fifteen years and formerly taboo subjects such as the on-going war in the east, the treatment of villagers, and civil rights abuses under the military regimes, have begun to reach the mass market.

In the end, of course, there’s nothing like money to stop people complaining about their lot in life – and clearly much of the unhappiness in those North African and Middle Eastern states is related to perceived disparities in wealth and opportunity. Certainly, Turkey is no paradigm for egalitarian wealth distribution, but average incomes are on the rise, and there is a rapidly growing middle class with real discretionary purchasing power. Per capita GDP increased by 34% in the first decade of this century, while inflation fell from an astronomical and chronic 70% to an acceptable 7%. The process of urbanisation is continuing, and this, combined with rapid population growth, has, of course, created problems. Both rates are now decreasing, however, and this should lead to greater stability and rising standards of living across the board.

Ironically, it may be said that one of Turkey’s blessings is a lack of indigenous fossil fuel resources. If a generalisation can be drawn from its neighbours in the region, oil riches can bring disadvantages. Too much wealth can attract unwelcome attention from outsiders, and have a negative affect on the character of its possessors. Despite its lack of oil, Turkey has a larger and more healthily diverse economy than any of its Muslim brother states. Lists compiled by the IMF, the World Bank and the CIA give it a global ranking of 17^th, ahead of Indonesia (with four times the population) and the oil-rich Saudis.

Undoubtedly there will be those who say I am painting an unduly rosy picture of a state that still has some way to go to reach the living standards and personal freedoms of the best of the Western nations. There are social and economic injustices in Turkey, and a crying need for more equitable access to education. Turkey has the misfortune to be emerging from its sometimes murky past at a time when Western nations themselves are struggling to maintain the living standards, freedoms and equality they may once have taken for granted. Nevertheless, these days you are less likely to hear Turkey ranked with the Islamic states of the world, and more likely to hear it mentioned in the same sentence as China, India and Brazil.

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[1] Time Magazine, 14 Feb 2011

[2] [3]