Tales of Smugglers and Indirect Taxation - The Şırnak Incident

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

Uludere Village, Şırnak Province

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If on my theme I rightly think,

There are five reasons why men drink,—

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

Or lest I should be by and by,

Or any other reason why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious Tolerance and the Armenian Question

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

Dersim and the Politics of Inclusion

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

Mel Gibson strikes a blow
for Scottish nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

2  23 November 2011

Vikings in Constantinople – Globalisation Then and Now

Globalisation is an interesting business, with positive and negative effects on all aspects of life in our contemporary world. Most of us tend to think of it as a modern phenomenon, when, in fact, the process has been going on since time immemorial. Polynesian migrants, originating in Asia, traversed thousands of kilometres of trackless Pacific Ocean, eventually finding their way to New Zealand, perhaps the last significant land mass in the world to be populated.

The territory currently occupied by modern Turkey, on the other hand, has long been at the focal point of mass migrations of humanity. Not everyone is aware, however, that Vikings, those widely wandering wayfarers, found their way down the navigable rivers of Eastern Europe to the Black Sea and the largest city of the Medieval world, establishing a presence there a thousand years before their modern descendents from Northern Europe flocked to the beach resorts of Mediterranean Turkey. I’ve always had a penchant for historical fiction. As a kid, one of my favourite writers was Henry Treece, whose 'Viking' Trilogy included a novel entitled ‘The Road to Miklagard’. Check it out! Not only did those hairy guys with the horned helmets discover America centuries before Christopher Columbus, they also had several goes at conquering Constantinople from the Byzantine Greeks, and if you can believe some sources, actually founded Russia in their spare time.

Longship in Viking Museum,
Ribe, Denmark

Like Turks, Vikings have tended to get a bad press over the years. Raping and pillaging seem to have been standard male activities for most of recorded history, so it is perhaps a little unfair to single out Vikings (and Turks) for special mention. On the plus side of the ledger, the Vikings had a pretty significant influence on much of Europe from the 8^th to the 11^th century, to the extent that that period of European history is often referred to as ‘The Viking Age’.  Certainly they propelled those distinctive dragon-prowed long-ships to some quite surprising places. Advanced shipbuilding techniques such as the development of the keel, and clinker-built construction, in conjunction with sophisticated systems of navigation, enabled them to travel regularly to Iceland, Greenland and the east coast of North America.

For sure, the Viking reputation for violent invasion of other people’s territory is not undeserved. They actually managed to lay siege to Paris for a whole year in the late 9^th century – eventually having to be bought off by a couple of French Kings, remembered by historians as Charles the Fat and Charles the Simple. You can’t help wondering who would have given kings such unflattering epithets – their own disgruntled subjects? Or perhaps a gang of triumphant Vikings at a drunken after-battle celebration. Anyway, as a result, a significant chunk of north-western France became known as Normandy (land of the Northmen) whose inhabitants famously conquered the English in 1066, and may be said to have exerted a civilising influence on the local Anglo-Saxons. Certainly their monumental Romanesque architecture, and their idiosyncratic dialect of French left lasting impressions on English cathedrals and the language of English law.

Well, Leif Ericson’s achievement in crossing the Atlantic and setting foot in North America is no longer controversial. Some modern Americans apparently go so far as to commemorate his feat on 9 October each year. Modern Russians, however, are understandably reluctant to accept that the origin of their very name is Scandinavian; still less that they owe the foundation of their nation to the Vikings. Nevertheless, there exists a persuasive argument . . . 

The name ‘Rus’ referred originally to Swedish Vikings who, in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, found their way to Eastern Europe and what is now northern Russia. Needless to say, their practice of exacting tribute did not always endear them to the locals. Nevertheless, it seems that indigenous Slavic and Finnish tribes, unable to agree amongst themselves, actually invited a certain Viking lord by the name of Rurik, to come and rule them – this around the end of the 9^th century. The result, according to some historians, was the establishment of a proto-state, Kievan Rus, which eventually evolved into modern Russia. Slavic historians, on the contrary, are not keen on this theory; and they have, on their side, an absence of signs of lasting linguistic or cultural influence remaining from the Scandinavian presence.

I have no intention of entering into the controversy, for the reasons that I’m not a historian and I don’t particularly care either way. However, it does seem to me that, from what we know of Vikings, they were not especially interested in, or temperamentally suited to, putting down roots and investing the kind of long-term energy required to enforce their language and culture on local peoples. Some small linguistic peculiarities do survive in modern English, from the time when Viking invaders made their presence felt on England’s eastern coast – but on the whole it seems that the Viking way was to move on to greener and more immediately profitable pastures. Those who remained behind tended to be assimilated into the local culture. We have already noted the Norman adoption of the French language – and it seems the Vikings who settled in what is now Russia, also adopted Slavic customs and language.

But getting back to Henry Treece, and the point of this post – the Vikings apparently referred collectively to the towns and forts they established in what is now northern Russia as Gardariki. From there, the more adventurous among them found their way down the Volga and Dnieper River systems to the Caspian and Black Seas, where they inevitably came into contact with the top dogs in that part of the world, the Byzantine Greeks. Undeterred by the size and reputation of the Byzantine Empire, the upstart Scandinavians apparently launched several attacks on the great city of Constantinople (which they called Miklagard) in the 9^th and 10^th centuries.

These attacks were unsuccessful, of course, but they did have the result of obliging the Byzantine Greeks to develop a healthy respect for these blond berserkers from the frozen north. It was around this time that the rising power of the Muslim Arabs to the south was beginning to pose a more serious threat to the Empire. With admirable pragmatism, the Emperor Theophilus began the tradition of employing Viking hatchet men in defence of his realm. Thus was founded the so-called Varangian Guard, which, in later years became the personal bodyguard of the Emperor Basil II and his successors. Evidently there was considerable too-ing and fro-ing between Scandinavia and Asia Minor, with Viking mercenaries sending at least some of their earnings home, before heading back to retire in comfort. It is said that this occupation was so enticing to young warriors that the King of Sweden felt obliged to pass a law preventing his subjects from inheriting property while working for the ‘Greek’ Emperors.

Once again, not much evidence has survived of the presence of these Norsemen in the Near East. There is, however, an interesting item of graffiti in the cathedral church of Hagia Sophia, now the Aya Sofia Museum in Istanbul. Carved into the marble balustrade of one of the galleries is a runic inscription (dated to some time in the 11^th century) recording the presence of a certain Halfdan – who, one assumes, was finding the ceremonial rites of the Orthodox Church a little tiresome. At the other end of the journey, two runestones, also dating from the 11^th century, have been found at Risbyle in Sweden. The stones bear inscriptions to the memory of Ulfr of Skolhamarr, and one of them, it seems, includes an Eastern Cross, common in the Byzantine Empire at the time. To commemorate the international connection, the local Swedish municipality has apparently included such a cross in its official coat-of-arms.

As a final twist to this story, it seems that the Varangian Guard began to lose its Viking character in the 11^th century. Around this time, the ranks of the Imperial bodyguard began increasingly to be filled by Anglo-Saxon warriors from England. Interestingly, however, the Vikings were also, albeit obliquely, responsible for this trend. Apparently the depredations of Vikings in England, and later, the conquest of the country by their kinsmen the Normans, led to considerable dispossession, redundancy and unemployment of the native English warrior class – many of whom, it is said, took their services elsewhere, namely, to the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople.

Now, if you are a follower of this blog, you will be aware that one of my major themes is the inter-connectedness of historical events. I have written elsewhere about the Crusades, and my feeling that Papal motives went beyond the normally stated objective of reclaiming the Holy Lands from the heathen Turks. As I was writing the above, it crossed my mind that there, in the 11^th century, you had significant numbers of middle and upper-middle class guys from England and other parts of western Europe getting a glimpse of the wealth of Eastern civilisation, and returning to tell tales of its splendour to the folks back home. So, when Pope Urban II made his famous call, in 1095, to Western Christendom to unite in arms and make the 3000 kilometre journey to liberate the Holy Places, there may well have been thoughts of material as much as spiritual gain in the minds of those noble knights and true. Such thoughts could conceivably have added persuasive force to the Holy Father's arguments.

Well, the more things change, the more they remain the same, as the French say. The US government is currently working towards a withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, as Britain also seeks to cut back its military presence abroad. You might wonder, then, why so many Americans and other foreign nationals would opt voluntarily to go to Iraq and engage in the kind of activities that normally only trained soldiers would carry out. The reasons, of course, are money and adventure. In August 2010 it was estimated that there were in excess of 11,000 ‘private security contractors’ (read ‘mercenaries’) in Iraq – and analysts expect that number to rise significantly as US military withdrawal continues.

So, the Vikings went to Miklagard, the Crusaders to Jerusalem (and Constantinople), and Americans will, no doubt, continue going to Iraq. The processes of globalisation, and its handmaiden, privatisation, are timeless and irresistible. But let’s not kid ourselves that they spring from altruism and benevolence towards anyone’s fellow human beings.

Atatürk's Republic and the Wall Street Protesters

One of the peculiarities that most strikes visitors to Turkey is the pervasive presence of a political leader who died more than seventy years ago.  Every classroom in every school, every office in every government department has his picture on the wall; every public square in every village, town and city has a statue prominently placed. Our tendency is to feel that there must be an element of compulsion involved. How can a free people willingly engage in such idolatry? Certainly other nations have their founding heroes, but I can think of none who holds the place in his people’s hearts that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk holds in the hearts of the people of Turkey.

Perhaps the nearest rival is George Washington, whose pictorial place on the US dollar bill symbolises his importance as founding father of the United States. The English have two queens with particular claims to fame: Elizabeth I, the mother of England, and Victoria, of the British Empire – but nobody much hangs their pictures on the wall these days. Cross the Channel to Europe and you’ve got Napoleon Bonaparte in France. However, since he set back republican progress for the best part of a century, you might question his achievement. Prior to him, you have to go back to the 9^th century to find a French leader of much note, but who’s heard of Charlemagne these days, much less knows what he did? Germany has a more recent claimant (if we tactfully ignore Adolf Hitler). Otto von Bismarck was the driving force uniting the German nation in 1871, and you’d have to say Europe would be in much deeper trouble these days without the Germans. Peter the Great did a lot of big stuff for Russia back around 1700, but I don’t know what the Russians think of him now. Outside of Europe? Well, Gandhi in India, of course, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa; hard to find fault with them. The Chinese might suggest Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro was the public face of Cuba for most of fifty years. That’s quite a club to join, isn’t it!

But how do you rank them? What criteria would you use to determine their impact on the world? If you go for population size of their countries, Gandhi and Mao Zedong top the list. On the other hand, if you think in terms of global economic and military power today, and the lasting effects of his legacy, it’s hard to go past George Washington. When it comes to personal sacrifice and commitment to a cause, Mandela, and once again, Gandhi look pretty good. Take the business model of time and motion effectiveness and Bismarck got the job done quickly, which suggests impressive personal power and influence.

Now I’m sure many outside Turkey will ask how a Turkish leader, however idolized in his own country, can be considered fit to stand in such company. Well, leaving the idolization aside for a moment, you may not be aware that the United Nations and UNESCO declared 1981 (the centennial year of his birth) as Atatürk Year in the World, the only occasion on which they have awarded such an honour. The wording of the 1979 resolution goes like this:

The General Conference,

Convinced that eminent personalities who worked for international understanding, co-operation, and peace, should serve as an example for future generations,

Recalling that the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Mustafa Kemal Atatûrk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, will be celebrated in 1981,

Bearing in mind that he was an exceptional reformer in all the fields coming within UNESCO’s competence,

Recognizing in particular that he was the leader of one of the earliest struggles against colonialism and imperialism,

Recalling that he set an outstanding example in promoting the spirit of mutual understanding between peoples and lasting peace between the nations of the world, having advocated all his life the advent of ‘an age of harmony and co-operation in which no distinction would be made between men on account of colour, religion or race’,

1. Decides that UNESCO shall co-operate on the intellectual and technical planes with the Turkish Government for the organization in 1980, at that Government’s financial expense, of an international symposium designed to bring out various aspects of the personality and work of Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, whose action was always directed towards the promotion of peace, international understanding and respect for human rights;

2. Requests the Director-General to take the necessary steps for the implementation of this resolution.

Well, that would seem to take care of the question of international recognition. Nelson Mandela has been named a UN Goodwill Ambassador, and UNESCO issued a commemorative medal to mark the 125^th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth – but neither, as far as I know, has yet been accorded a ‘Year’ to himself. So let’s return to the reasons why Atatürk remains so beloved by the Turkish people, and I want to draw your particular attention to these words from the UN resolution: ‘he was an exceptional reformer in all the fields coming within UNESCO’s competence’. These fields are summarized by the letters ESC in the acronym: ‘Educational, Scientific and Cultural’. So clearly the people at the UN had other factors in mind than mere military success when they decided to honour Atatürk. Books have been written on this subject, so for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on one aspect – his achievements in the field of economics.

Undoubtedly, Mustafa Kemal’s military successes, achieved against global military powers of the day, were remarkable. Nevertheless, he himself recognized the limitations of victory gained by force of arms. The report of the Turkish Ministry of Finance for 2011 leads off with these words attributed to Atatürk:

‘The greatest political and military victory cannot last and is doomed to fade away quickly unless it is crowned by an economic victory.’

It is appropriate, then, to glance briefly at the Turkey which gained its status as an independent republic in 1923. The first thing to recognise is that the new Turkey was the rump of the old Ottoman Empire, a once proud entity that had become the plaything of European powers, and a laughing-stock for its social, cultural, technological and economic backwardness. The Anatolian heartland comprised around twenty percent of the territory of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and a minute fraction of its peak in the 17^th century. When it became the Republic of Turkey in 1923 it had been devastated by ten consecutive years of war on fronts on all its boundaries. The total population was around 13 million and productive manpower was severely depleted. Adult literacy was less than 20% and there were nearly 13,000 people for every doctor. The Republic had been achieved, but the economy was in tatters. Building a modern developed nation required a vision and a mechanism.

Mustafa Kemal’s economic mechanism was ‘statism’ (Turkish devletçilik). The essence of this is that ‘the state has a major and legitimate role in directing the economy, either directly through state-owned enterprises and other types of machinery of government, or indirectly through economic planning’ [1]. His vision was an educated population with an improved standard of living for all, and a nation free from foreign control. It was, we may say, the ‘Third Way’, so sought after (but sadly, not found) by New Labour politicians and pseudo-leftists of the Tony Blair variety – avoiding the pitfalls of Socialism/Communism on the one hand, and unfettered free market capitalism on the other. To the extent that Turkey under Atatürk vastly improved internal communications (including new and improved roads and railways), quadrupled electricity generation, and greatly increased agricultural and industrial production, we can say his policies were successful.

An interesting question, of course, is how he managed to achieve these successes. Money does not grow on trees, as we are often told – and within six years of the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the world was plunged into a catastrophic economic Depression. Now I’m not going to pretend that I know where the money came from, but I want to share with you some things I do know about that period of world history, in which Atatürk was an important and well-informed participant.

I have just been reading ‘A History of Economics’ by the eminent American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith. It’s getting little old now, since it was published back in 1987, but I think, as an observer of our world in economic terms, Galbraith pretty much hits the spot – and his predictions for the future have a ring of truth when tested against our own experience of the last decades. He explains why classical orthodox economic thought was so helpless in the face of the Great Depression. Simply put, the Depression shouldn’t have happened. In an ideal free market world, prices, wages, investment, interest, and production all balance each other out at their optimum level. Leave it to the market, and all will be fine. But it wasn’t, of course, as five or six years of the laissez-faire approach served to show. In the end, it was the English economist, John Maynard Keynes, coupled with the economic stimulus of the Second World War that got the world into the good years of the 50s and 60s. Keynes it was who sanctified deficit spending, whereby governments were permitted, nay, encouraged, to push-start their moribund economies by spending beyond their income, the gap to be bridged by private-sector borrowing. Keynes’s legacy lives on, despite the ranting of conservatives for balanced budgets. The USA is far and away the largest debtor-nation on Earth.

Something you won’t find in such histories of economics is reference to a debate that shook the world of finance in the 1920s and 30s, and continued in some countries well into the 50s and 60s. This was the question of where money actually comes from. As Galbraith says, and everyone knows who pauses to think for a moment, ‘money’ is not an easy concept to tie down. Clearly the notes and coins in our wallets are a small part of it. There are the bank deposits that we may or may not choose to call on with our chequebooks and ATM cards. There are the credit cards with their generous limits that we may or may not choose to make use of. There are the personal loans for cars, houses and holidays that my bank often offers me, of which I may or may not avail myself. Some economic thinkers and politicians after the First World War were of the opinion that what they called the ‘nation’s credit’ should be under the sole control of the state.

John A Lee -
my favourite New Zealander

I want to inject a little New Zealand history here, since that is what I am most familiar with. At the height of the Great Depression, in 1935, New Zealanders, in desperation, elected their first ever Labour Government. The leader of that government, Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, is undoubtedly the nearest thing we have to an ‘Atatürk’ in our history. Twenty and even thirty years later, pictures of that saintly man were still to be found hanging in the houses of grateful citizens. A large mausoleum stands to his memory in a park in one of Auckland’s most beautiful locations. Savage’s fame rests primarily on one achievement: the building of a large store of state houses. The project employed thousands of New Zealanders at a time when unemployment was at a disastrous level; stimulated industrial production at a time when there was no money for investment; and provided low-rental, good quality accommodation for previously impoverished and ill-housed citizens. In the eyes of ordinary New Zealanders, Savage was a worthy candidate for beatification!

The thing is, it wasn’t really Savage who did it. The mostly forgotten architect of the scheme was a First World War hero, charismatic orator and self-educated economics whiz-kid by the name of John A Lee. Despite being a major factor in the Labour Government’s electoral success, he was overlooked for ministerial appointment, and thrown the under-secretaryship of housing as a consolation. Seizing his chance, Lee persuaded his cabinet colleagues to authorize the provision of Reserve Bank credit (ie new money) at minimal interest to finance the housing project. It was the one and only time such a measure was used. NZ’s Finance minister was summoned to London, where it is thought he was told by political and financial leaders to toe the orthodox line in future. Lee, who refused to cooperate, was expelled from the Labour Party – and subsequent Labour Governments have fallen into the accepted borrow-and-hope mould.

But it wasn’t just an isolated incident. Canadians especially liked the Social Credit (as it became known) financial concept, and public pressure forced the government to set up a Royal Commission on Banking and Currency in 1933. Continuing electoral support for the idea obliged the New Zealand Government to follow a similar course in 1955. Both Royal Commissions acknowledged that money creation is, in fact, a function of the private banking system, rather than the sovereign right of the state, as most people naively continue to believe. It has been suggested that Keynesian deficit financing was a direct response to, and an attempt to destroy the momentum of the monetary reformists. If so, it was largely successful. ‘Money is power’ [2], and these days, the idea has pretty much disappeared from sight or public interest. Present-day US citizens attempting to invade Wall Street, and like-minded souls protesting in cities throughout the world against the immorality and social destructiveness of the activities of the financial sector know what they are angry about – but unfortunately have no rallying philosophy or mechanism to offer as an alternative.

That’s another reason why we need to take another look at Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his generation of thinkers from the 1920s and 30s. Atatürk must have had almost unlimited opportunity to amass a personal fortune and establish a political or financial dynasty – but he didn’t do it. He divorced his only wife, sired no children (as far as we know), and his surname died with him. I would like to leave you with three quotations from the store of wisdom the man left to us:

•        Social status is of no use to the nation – service is the thing. Whoever serves the nation has the highest status.
•        Educators, what our republic needs from you is young people who can think, know right from wrong, and have open minds.
•        War can only be just or justified if it is fought out of sheer necessity or for reasons of national defence, or pursued by a people awaiting their sovereignty, their very lives depending on it.

Further Reading (if you would like to follow up some of these ideas on economics and alternative financing):

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6870

http://www.interest.co.nz/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Lee

http://publiccreditorbust.blog.com/

http://spontaneousgenerations.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations/article/viewFile/978/1106

http://douglassocialcredit.com/resources/resources/contemporaryrelevance.pdf

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[1] Wikipedia quoting the Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy

[2] A quote attributed to Russell H. Conwell, Baptist minister and founder of Temple University, Philedelphia