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]

New Zealand and Turkey - What's the Connection?

It’s been a bad month for countries located on geological fault lines. First there was the 6.3 quake that devastated New Zealand’s second-largest city, Christchurch. More recently, a tsunami generated by an 8.9 seismic monster levelled coastal towns and cities in Japan.

I have been watching and reading about the tragic events from my home in Istanbul, and I have been struck once again by the kindness and concern of my Turkish friends and neighbours. People here were constantly approaching me and asking about events back ‘home’ - was my family ok? Luckily, they are, but another thing to strike me was how large a part luck, or fate, plays in these tragedies.

Didem Yaman was a young woman from Çanakkale in Turkey – ironically the town on the Dardanelles that Turks associate with the campaign known to New Zealanders as Gallipoli. Unfortunately there is more than one irony here. Didem was interested in the Asia Pacific region and her English was so good that she was accepted by Otago University to study for a doctorate in International Relations. Her area of interest was historical ties between Turkey and Australia and New Zealand. She had been in NZ for four years, living in Dunedin, but she made the ill-fated trip up to Christchurch to visit a friend – a Chinese friend in fact, from a country also known for its earthquakes. Didem’s family continued to hope that their daughter was alive, despite not having heard from her since the earthquake – until (irony upon irony) her body was discovered in the ruins of a health clinic, located in a collapsed shopping centre.

The main reason why Turks are so sympathetic towards people affected by earthquakes is, I guess, that Turkey itself sits astride several major fault lines, and has experienced its share of seismic disasters over the years. The most recent was the Marmara event which left at least 17,000 dead on 17 August, 1999. I wasn’t in Turkey at the time, but I remember it well because I missed it by one day. On 11 August I had been drying out on a beach after a swim in Van Lake. I was out in the east of Turkey visiting places a little off the normal tourist track, and I donned my special spectacles to watch the moon move slowly across the face of the sun – not quite 100 percent blackout, but maybe 95 percent, and quite impressive.  Less than a week later I flew to London, and woke up on the morning of 18 August to read about the 7.6 magnitude quake that had followed the solar eclipse and caused so much damage and loss of life.

The town in Turkey where Didem Yaman’s family are mourning the loss of their daughter, will, of course, be the focus of a minor migration from Australia and New Zealand next month. It is the most convenient base from which to visit the beaches, ravines and ridges which were the stage for the horrific slaughter of young men in 1915 that Turks call the Battle of Çanakkale.

On 25 April, thousands of mostly young Australians and New Zealanders will gather at dawn on the other side of the narrow strait that witnessed the spilling of so much blood and the loss of so many young lives. The day has assumed an importance in both countries out of proportion to its significance as a historical event. The eight-month campaign, which can only really be viewed as a sideshow to the main events of the Great War, and a wasteful defeat which prolonged the bloodbath in the trenches of the Western Front, has taken on a powerful symbolism for antipodeans. Two small nations whose constitutions still recognise the Queen of England as head of state, have come to see ANZAC Day as the defining moment in their search for an independent identity. Lacking an Independence Day, or a Republic Day, and with some misgivings about the traditional days inherited from their origins as outposts of empire, New Zealanders and Australians have adopted the day of the Gallipoli landings as marking the beginnings of the emergence of a national consciousness.

I say ‘the beginnings of the emergence’, because clearly the participants at the time were not suddenly struck with a Road to Damascus experience. It has been a slow, developmental process, but undoubtedly the experience of the ANZACs was pivotal. For a start there was the journey. Although the first convoy set out from Albany in Western Australia, and, passing through the Suez Canal, went only as far as Alexandria in Egypt, the sea voyage, with the benefit of steam engines, took a month. Perhaps it crossed the minds of those young men that their great grandfathers and grandmothers, 75 years earlier, had spent six months on a sailing ship to make the journey in reverse. They must have begun to realise how far removed in space they now were from the land of their ancestors.

And now they found themselves on an alien shore, served up as cannon fodder to a foe against whom they had no grievance, by officers and politicians whose aims and motives had no relevance to their own lives and experience. The survivors who made it back to their southern hemisphere homes were lauded as heroes for defending an empire they had mostly ceased to believe in – and their experiences laid the foundation for the sense of selfhood and nationhood that slowly began to emerge over the next half century or so. The distance from Europe had become spiritual as much as spatial.

In terms of written history, New Zealand and Australia are suckling babes compared to the lands that make up modern Turkey. Here rise the two rivers that bound Mesopotamia, one of the original birthplaces of civilisation. Here can be found the mountain on which Noah’s Ark is said to have grounded as the floodwaters of the deluge receded. So many more biblical events recorded in the Old and New Testaments took place here; so much of what we think of as Greek or Roman history unfolded here. The annals of history stretch back so far that the Turks, who have been here for a thousand years and more, are still looked on as newcomers and interlopers.

Therein lies another connection I want to make between Turkey and New Zealand. Here are the Turks, on the back doorstep of Europe, speaking a language no one can understand, with their roots way out in Central Asia. Show them, however, a TV channel from just across the border in Azerbaijan and most of them experience mild culture shock. As for their Turkic cousins in Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan or Tuva, they may feel some distant twinges of kinship, but there is no going back. Whatever Europeans may think, Turkey is not Asia. Its European credentials go back to Alexander the Great and beyond. For the same reason, whatever Turkish nationalists may wish to believe, the modern Turk has little or no genetic connection to the warrior horsemen that swept out of Central Asia in Europe’s darkest ages.

In much the same way, New Zealanders find themselves well settled on an island group in the South Pacific Ocean – speaking English in a region where Austronesian and Asiatic languages are the norm. Our cultural roots are half a world away, in the British Isles – but when we go there for our customary OE, or to research a family tree, we quickly realise that ‘we’ are not ‘they’, and ‘they’ are not ‘we’. For New Zealanders and Turks, the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ have more significance than mere philosophical pondering.

I want to return now briefly to that normally sleepy town on the Dardanelles. Unlike New Zealand and Australia, Turkey is a republic. Its head of state is a president elected by its own parliament. The people have their own Republic Day (29 October) on which to unite in pyrotechnic celebrations. The town of Çanakkale, however, awakes each year from its customary drowsiness on 18 March, and it can be argued that this date has more significance to the existence of modern Turkey. I have discussed elsewhere why the Turks celebrate their victory on that date, while we allies of the British prefer to think that we weren’t defeated until our final evacuation from the Gallipoli Peninsula eight months later. Be that as it may, the crucial point for Turkey is that the Battle of Çanakkale represented their one outstanding victory in an otherwise bleak war. The architect and inspiration of the success was Colonel Mustafa Kemal who went on to lead the army of national independence and become the first president of the Republic of Turkey. Most foreign visitors are puzzled and a little incredulous at the manifest signs of adulation directed towards Atatürk – but to Turks, he is the sine qua non of their existence as a nation. Turning back the invasion at Gallipoli undoubtedly earned him the credibility that powered him to his later achievements.

New Zealand is a small country with a tiny population, far from the halls, corridors and stages of geopolitical events – unlike Turkey, which is right there, on the spot and un-ignorable. For decades, Turkey was one of the major bulwarks of NATO and Europe when the former Soviet Union was vying with the USA for world domination. Hard to imagine now, but so it was, until the Soviet Russian Empire began to disintegrate in 1989. Most of us didn’t know it at the time, when the late great President Kennedy was self-righteously ordering the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba – but he and his Pentagon buddies had several bases in Turkey with their own nuclear hardware trained on the Russkies. For sure, the Russians knew, though, and had Turkey high on their list of targets for pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes. Even today, the US maintains a military base in the South East of Turkey, and George Bush Snr was happy to use it in launching his Operation Desert Storm. Western Europe has good reasons to be grateful to Turkey – yet it is unlikely they will ever welcome their big, loyal eastern cousin into their EU club. Well, these days you might think that acceptance would be a mixed blessing anyway, but still . . .

New Zealand, on the other hand, has never been of strategic importance in anyone’s plans for world domination – and thank God for that, say I! But we have played our part over the years, following, first Mother England, and later Uncle Sam, into wars which were of very peripheral concern to us: the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam . . . We even made one or two offers that weren’t taken up. But when we tried to get involved in the big boys’ games, like asking the French to please explode their experimental nuclear bombs a little closer to their own backyard, did we get any support? A gang of French ‘secret’ agents bombed a protest vessel right in the centre of our largest city. Luckily, they were so incompetent that our police caught them – but then our government was forced to bow to diplomatic pressure and let the buggers go. Thanks, friends!

Well, I’m tired of international politics, and I’m sure you are too, so let’s go back into history, where I, for one, feel a lot more comfortable. There’s a fair dollop of Scottish blood in my family tree, as there is in that of many New Zealanders. Even today, some of us are not averse to donning a kilt, if we’ve got the legs for it, skirling the pipes, or sipping a wee dram at hogmanay. Scottish history is a complex business for such a small country, not helped by the likes of Mel Gibson confusing issues here, and oversimplifying them there. However, most of us like to feel a certain kinship with those mad Gaelic highlanders who needed a wall to keep them from rustling the sassenach’s cattle.

Forests, mountains and fast rivers
in the Turkish Black Sea region

Imagine my surprise, nay, disbelief, when, on a journey into the remote mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea coast, I followed a strange melodious wailing in the village I was visiting, and came upon a young man playing . . . a bagpipe! Sure enough! They call it tulum in those parts, and it’s a more primitive instrument, lacking the drones of its Scottish relative – but a relative nonetheless. No one really seems to know where those Celts and Gaels came from, though some suggest a Circassian or Central Asian origin. From there they spread all over Europe and, yes, Anatolia. Their name is immortalised in the comic strip hero, Asterix the Gaul, and in the country Wales, which Turks, interestingly, call Galler. The New Testament evangelist Paul, renowned for his epistles, wrote one to the Galatians, inhabitants of the region around modern Ankara, whose name again preserves their Gaelic heritage. Even in Istanbul itself, the area beside the Golden Horn where Europeans set up their trade and diplomatic posts is known as Galata, and some say this name has its origins in those early Scottish ancestors!

I want to conclude this discussion of the similarities between Turkey and New Zealand with a nod in the direction of my hippy flower power youth, and a return to nature. Everyone in the world surely knows that New Zealand is the cleanest, greenest country on earth, even if we ourselves know that we are continually doing our best to screw up the beauty God gave us. We are proud that our country was the most authentic place to shoot the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies. Most of us appreciate the chance we still have to tramp through primeval forests and dive into crystal clear pools beneath pristine cascades of snow melt rivers flowing from majestic alpine peaks. We identify strongly with our flightless avian symbol, the kiwi, and take pride in the fact that this word from the language of our indigenous Maori race has found its way into most of the languages of the civilised world. We are less proud of the fact that 277 species of our native flora and fauna are listed as endangered, but we care, we really do.

Everyone in the world may be less aware that Turkey has 167 species on that same list – nothing much to be proud of, until you consider that, at least those species still exist in Turkey, when they have been pretty much wiped out from the rest of Europe and the Middle East. The closest thing I have seen to the forests of West Coast New Zealand is the Black Sea region of Turkey, where a snow-capped 4000 metre mountain range plunges down through rain-forested slopes to the coast, sending fast-flowing rivers through precipitous gorges to the sea. Turkey has huge biogeographic diversity, and is a key location for many species of migratory birds. The largest remaining stands of Lebanese cedar are here, as well as breeding places for the Mediterranean monk seal and the caretta caretta turtle. Contrary to popularly spread rumours, the first episode of ‘Star Wars’ was not filmed in Cappadocia, but it might have been, if George Lucas had got his way – in which case, it could well have been an even more spectacular film.

I confess, there are times when I feel a long way from home – and, measured in kilometres, it’s a major trip, for sure. But most of the time I feel remarkably at home in Turkey, largely because the people are hospitable, just like us.

Who Killed the Armenians?

There is currently a resolution before the United States Congress to give official recognition to the event in 1915 often referred to as ‘The Armenian Genocide’, and to incorporate this recognition into US foreign policy. For the sake of brevity, this resolution is referred to as H.Res.252, and it was introduced in March 2009. Barack Obama, prior to his election as President, made it clear that he fully supported such official recognition. It is a measure, then, of the controversial nature of the issue that, two years on, the resolution has not been passed, and very likely never will be. Mr Obama, for his part, seems to have cooled off on the issue.

I doubt that any of my readers are ignorant of the claims underlying this resolution, but, to be fair, let’s hear them from the Armenian National Institute:

‘The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and horribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. After only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenians were subjected to further massacres and expulsions . . . It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923.’

Sounds bad, for sure, and not something that can be easily dismissed. However, no event in history can be isolated from what preceded it, so I plan to take you on a trip back in time. Before departure, though, I want to draw your attention to a small but significant detail in the first sentence of the ANI statement above: the genocide was planned and administered by the Turkish government between the years of 1915-1918. Admittedly there is a reference, later in the same sentence, to the Ottoman Empire, but I am sure the distortion is deliberate. In fact, there was no Turkish Government until it was established when the Republic of Turkey came into being in 1923, just as there was no United States Government until independence from Britain was declared in 1776.

I am not, at this stage, taking issue with anything else in the ANI’s statement – merely clearing the way for our journey back to an earlier and arguably happier time in the Ottoman Empire, whose government should more correctly stand accused. Generally dated from 1299, it was one of the longer-lasting empires in world history, and one of its features, little-known but deserving of recognition, was the ‘millet’ system of government. A ‘millet’ was a community of faith whose members formed a relatively autonomous group within the empire. They had their own leader, administered their own laws at a local level, collected and disbursed taxes, practised their own religion, educated their children, spoke their own language – and lived alongside members of the other millets in comparative harmony.

There were five millets in the Ottoman Empire: Muslims (not just Turks, by the way), Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews, and later, Syriac Orthodox Christians. It was a system based on religion rather than race or nationality, because that’s the way the world was in those days. No doubt as a system of government it had its imperfections, but set it alongside what existed in Europe at the same time and it looks like a beacon of tolerance and open-mindedness. Take Spain, for example, as Roman Catholicism established itself in the Iberian Peninsula to the accompaniment of Inquisitorial torture, burnings and forced conversions of Muslims and Jews. Many of those Jews accepted the invitation of Sultan Beyazit to settle in the Ottoman Empire, and their descendants can be found in Istanbul today, worshipping in their medieval Spanish dialect.

Recently restored Armenian church,
Lake Van, Turkey

So maybe the question arises in your mind, as it did in mine: if the Ottomans were so tolerant and open-minded, why did they suddenly decide to commit genocide on those poor, harmless, law-abiding Armenians? The roots of the answer lie in the growth of the major European powers during the 18^th century, the ideas of the Enlightenment and the associated forces of Romantic Nationalism and Imperialism. The Ottomans had been a (if not the) major European power until the end of the 17^th century, but times were a-changing. In particular, the imperial ambitions of its northern neighbour Russia were threatening its territorial integrity. Russia was expanding in all directions, but its southern march posed the greatest threat to the Ottomans. As they moved towards the Black Sea, into the Crimea and the Caucasus, the Russians pursued a policy of Russification, killing and displacing the majority Muslim inhabitants of those lands and replacing them with Christian Russians, Slavs and if necessary, Armenians.

As well as loss of territory, another negative result of this for the Ottomans was an enormous influx of penniless refugees who had to be fed, housed and settled – a huge financial drain on an empire that was already struggling economically. The Russian advance into Ottoman territory continued right into the First World War, and the Armenian population became an increasingly important tool in their expansion. It suited the Russian cause to encourage Armenian nationalism with promises of support for the creation of an independent state in return for assistance against their Ottoman overlords. The Ottoman government and its Muslim subjects, for their part, became increasingly intolerant of Armenian acts of insurrection and terrorism within their borders. It is interesting to note that, when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed at the end of the Great War, far from supporting their independence, the new Communist Government swallowed the Armenians into their Soviet maw in 1921, after a scant three years of national sovereignty.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself here. There was one positive outcome for the Ottomans, at least in the short term, from the emergence of the Russian threat. The other European powers, in particular Britain and France, began to take an interest in the unfolding events. For a start, they were determined to prevent the Russians from achieving their ambition of controlling the Istanbul straits and gaining free access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. One of the key issues in the foreign policy of all the European powers in the 19^th century was what became known as ‘The Eastern Question’, the essence of which was: When will the ailing Ottoman Empire finally collapse, and which of us will get what parts of it when it does? The corollary of wanting to get the best bits for yourself, of course, was, naturally, ensuring that your rivals didn’t get them.

In practice, this involved encouraging national consciousness among the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire in order to hasten its fragmentation and demise. Needless to say, it is not to be thought that the European powers concerned had any great love of nationalism as a philosophy per se. If you have any doubts about this, ask the Irish or the Indians, or the Algerians, or the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. The first ‘nation’ to benefit, however, was the Greeks, the success of whose struggle for independence was ensured by the intervention of the British, French and Russian navies, which combined to destroy the Ottoman fleet in 1827. A little publicized side effect of Greek independence was the massacre and displacement of thousands of Muslims whose families had lived there for centuries.

The original Greek state established at this time was perhaps only 40% of its present area. Over the next century, successive governments took advantage of the weakening and embattled Ottomans to expand their domains northwards and eastwards into Macedonia, the Balkans and the Aegean Islands. As they advanced, non-Christian minorities were slaughtered or driven out. An interesting example is the city of Salonika, which fell to the Greeks in 1912. At that time the second city of the Ottoman Empire, Selanik had the largest Jewish population of any city in Europe. Fifty percent of its inhabitants were Jewish, twenty-five percent Muslim and the remainder, mostly Orthodox Christian. In 1917, a mysterious fire broke out destroying most of the Jewish and Muslim parts of town. Subsequently most of the Jews and Muslims, prevented from rebuilding their homes and businesses, departed. There were still, however, a large number of Jews in Salonika when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941. As far as I know, there is no suggestion that the Greeks conspired with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews – but they certainly benefited from the destruction of the large historic Jewish cemetery, where the city’s university is now located.

Interestingly, if you visit Istanbul and make inquiries, you will be shown numerous Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish churches, synagogues and cemeteries occupying large and prominent sites in very expensive parts of the city. The land they stand on must be almost priceless – yet they remain, respected and untouched in this nation of Muslims. In contrast, Athens is, I'm told, one of the few European capital cities which lacks a functioning mosque, despite the existence of half a million Muslim residents.

Which brings me back to the Armenians – whom I am sure you were beginning to think I had forgotten. I mentioned, above, that the Russian Empire massacred and expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Tatars, Circassians and Abhazis as it expanded into the Crimea from the 1770s, and the Caucasus from the 1790s. An article in a recent Time magazine[5] discussing the January terrorist attack at the Moscow airport, alleges a link to Chechen activists, and blames the situation on 200 years of Russian oppression. As occupied territories were cleared of their Muslim inhabitants, they were systematically resettled by Christians, more likely to be supportive of their co-religionist overlords. Among the groups used as pawns in this game of Russification were the Armenians, many of whom were invited to occupy the homes and farms of the dispossessed Muslims. Undoubtedly the Muslim refugees who flooded into Ottoman Anatolia would have harboured some resentment against the peoples who were seen to be profiting from their tragedy, and we need look no further for the roots of the sectarian hatred that began to build through the 19^th century.

As an interesting aside, there are attempts internationally to have present-day Russia acknowledge a ‘Circassian Genocide’ that allegedly took place in the second half of the 19^th century. The Putin government, of course, rejects responsibility for events that took place under the Czarist regime – yet, according to the Time article [1] cited below, similar policies continue to be implemented against Muslims in the area to this day.

What happened in Anatolia during the 19^th century, then, was increasing encroachment on Ottoman territory by the Russians, and increasing desperation in the Ottoman Empire as their boundaries retreated, impoverished refugees flooded in with tales of horror, and the Armenian ‘millet’ (see above), encouraged by the Russians, increasingly resorted to terrorist attacks and insurgency.

But let’s not pick on Russia alone. I recently came across writings of a gentleman by the name of Edward J Erickson. Apparently he is a retired regular US Army officer at the Marine Corps University in Virginia, recognized as an authority on the Ottoman Army during the First World War. He writes of the activities of the Royal Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean from December 1914. In particular he refers to an RN cruiser, HMS Doris, commanded by a Captain Frank Larkin, which conducted operations around the Ottoman port of Iskenderun (Alexandretta), shelling shore installations and gathering intelligence from local Armenians. Erickson suggests that the Ottoman high command expected an allied invasion. They did not know where it would take place (with hindsight, we know it was directed at Gallipoli and the Dardanelles), but the rail links near Iskenderun were of enormous strategic importance to the Ottoman forces, and at the same time, very vulnerable to a sea-launched attack. Erickson suggests that the activities of Captain Larkin and the Doris, as well as the military incursions and machinations of the Russians, were instrumental in the decision to ‘relocate’ Armenians later in 1915.

In fact, ‘relocate’ is Dr Erickson’s word, not mine. Undoubtedly, Armenian people in the east of Anatolia suffered a terrible tragedy. I do not have the space here to discuss the extent to which the present Republic of Turkey should be held responsible for the sins of the Ottoman Empire; nor whether there was actually an official government decision, and if so, what its aims were. I do not intend to get involved in the discussion of how many Armenians died (also apparently a highly debatable issue), nor to question why so many Armenians remained in Istanbul, the seat of Ottoman Government, retaining their property, churches and cemeteries to the present day. My aim has been solely to suggest that whatever happened in that part of the world in 1915 needs to be seen in terms of events leading up to it in the previous 130 years. To compare what happened with the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire to the Nazi German extermination of the Jewish people is not only a distortion of historical evidence, but a grave injustice to the victims of the Nazi holocaust.

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[1] Putin’s Terrorist Problem, Time European Edition, February 7, 2011