|
|
|
|
Turkey: A Nation at the Crossroads Turkey is a nation of rich history, strong aspirations and deep contradictions, situated where East and West, and past and future, meet.  By Michael Lindemann Start Date: 2/25/99 Istanbul -- The capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan by Turkish special forces on February 15, 1999 set off shock-waves around the world. It also served to highlight Turkey's strategic but troubled position in one of the world's most unsettled regions. Ocalan, regarded as a terrorist by the Turkish government, heads the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a revolutionary group intent on creating a Kurdish homeland in what is now southeastern Turkey and parts of neighboring Iraq and Iran. Ocalan and the PKK have fought a brutal shooting war with Turkish military forces for over 14 years, resulting in an estimated 37,000 deaths. Since 1990, the Turkish government has held the upper hand after mounting a prolonged and crushing offensive against the Kurds. In recent years, Ocalan himself took refuge in Turkey's southern neighbor Syria, until that nation expelled him last year on fears that Turkey would take military action. That made Ocalan a desperate man who could find no safe haven anywhere in the world until certain Greek ultra-nationalists took clandestine steps to give him sanctuary in the Greek embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. When Kenyan officials heard of Ocalan's secret entry into their country, however, they ordered his immediate departure. That gave Turkish special forces the chance they had awaited for years; they swooped in and captured the fugitive rebel as he was being hustled to the Nairobi airport. It later came to light that U.S intelligence forces had assisted in coordinating the operation, and President Clinton wasted no time in declaring his personal pleasure that Ocalan had been captured. At the same time, Israel loudly denied any involvement in the mission after a rumor caused some Kurdish activists to declare the Jewish state a prime target for future reprisals. Meanwhile, for Greece, the Ocalan affair precipitated a political crisis. Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis felt compelled to sack three of his cabinet ministers, including his openly anti-Turkish Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos, for their roles in an apparently bungled effort to protect Ocalan. In statements made since the rebel's capture, notably by newly appointed Foreign Minister George Papandreou, it is clear that Greece publicly sides with the Kurds against the Turkish government and would have preferred to see Ocalan find sanctuary as a political refugee in some European capital. "We made mistakes in our handling of the Ocalan affair, with tragic consequences," Papandreou said in an interview with Germany's Rheinische Post newspaper. "If Europe had shown more courage, this whole case could have ended differently," he said, referring to the fact that Ocalan had appealed to numerous nations for sanctuary but had been rebuffed. Papandreou has publicly warned Turkish authorities that the whole world will watch Ocalan's trial to make sure Turkey adheres to accepted Western standards of human rights. "The EU has to be extra vigilant, now that [Ocalan] is in Turkish hands. The trial has to take place according to international principles and the rules of international law," he said. Papandreou's chiding serves to highlight some of the many contradictions that burden Turkey. To begin with, military success in suppressing Kurdish rebellion, and now in capturing Ocalan, is accompanied by at least two painful side-effects. One is that Ocalan, painted as both a brutish terrorist and a groveling coward by Turkish officials, has achieved hero status among victims of political oppression the world over and has come to symbolize the national aspirations of millions of expatriot Kurds. This fact was made stunningly obvious when Kurds turned out for massive demonstrations in dozens of cities around the world on hearing of Ocalan's capture. Some of those demonstrators set themselves on fire in protest; others risked jail or death by storming Greek embassies and taking hostages (Kurds believe Greece betrayed Ocalan). Another and perhaps bigger problem for Turkey's government is that their treatment of the Kurds is regarded in many foreign capitals as a serious violation of human rights. And human rights -- or the lack thereof -- has been cited as a principal reason for rejecting Turkey's bid to join the European Union at the December 1997 Luxembourg Summit, a rejection that came as a stinging blow to Turkey's economic and political aspirations. For Turkey, the Kurdish dilemma begins with a basic problem of definitions. The Kurds consider themselves an ethnic minority; the Turks reject this concept. But the Kurds clearly have history on their side. They were already native to the region when the first Turkish people arrived from central Asia about 1,000 years ago. The Kurds have maintained their own language and cultural identity ever since, but not without difficulty. Decades ago, the Turkish government went so far as to outlaw the speaking of the Kurdish language. Only since 1991 has that ban been lifted; but it is still illegal to broadcast radio or television programming in Kurdish. And any Turkish journalist who dares to publish a newspaper interview with a Kurdish nationalist can be thrown in prison for promoting sedition. Furthermore, the Kurds can point to the fact that they were granted a homeland in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which redrew the borders of Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But the first leader of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, fought to regain the lands promised to the Kurds. Ever since, that region of southeastern Turkey has been mired in grinding poverty, its Kurdish majority treated as second-class citizens. The region seethes with revolutionary resentment and has seen many uprisings put down with brutal ferocity by the Turkish military. By Western European standards, in fact, Turkey's official handling of the Kurdish dilemma often seems grotesque. For this reason, among others, not one single member state of the European Union voted in favor of Turkey's bid for membership when it came to a vote in 1997. And therein lie clues to the greater dilemmas and deepest contradictions facing modern Turkey. Not so long ago, this strategic land was the seat of the great Ottoman Empire, embodying a rich and influential culture rooted in Islam, presided over by powerful monarchs, extended and defended by triumphant armies, resplendent in superb art and architecture, literature and science. But the land that is now Turkey was already ancient when the Ottomans came to power in the fifteenth century. The first great empire in the region was that of the Hittites, dating back as far as 1800 BC. A succession of wars led to the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, and later to absorption by Rome in the first century BC. As a Roman territory, the land played uneasy host to the wanderings of a Jew named Saul of Tarsus -- a city now in modern Turkey, a man now known as Paul -- as he laid the foundations of the Christian religion. And then, an emperor named Constantine, in 324 AD, turned the city of Constantinople into the capital of the Roman Empire as well as the center of his newly adopted religion, Christianity. In that city -- now called Istanbul -- Roman Christians completed in 537 AD a stupendous church, now called Hagia Sophia, which would be the largest enclosed space in the entire world for 1,000 years. Turks came storming out of Central Asia and conquered Baghdad in 1055. After decades of war with invading Mongols, the Turks regrouped in what is now Turkey and founded what came to be called the Ottoman Empire. They captured Constantinople in 1453, turning that Christian city into the Islamic metropolis that it is today. For some 400 years, the Ottoman Empire was the greatest power in the Mediterranean region. And then, like every empire, the Ottoman Empire declined and fell. Now, in 1999, Turkey celebrates the 75th anniversary of its rebirth as a modern republic. But it remains caught between the past and the future, seeking to preserve its unique and ancient cultural heritage even as it seeks to embrace the material dynamism of Europe. And just as surely, Turkey is caught between East and West, literally divided between Europe and Asia. Istanbul, a sprawling city of some 12 million inhabitants, sits atop the divide, comprised of European and Asian sectors. Turkey is bordered on the south by Syria, on the southeast by Iraq, on the east by Iran and Armenia, and on the northeast by Georgia. On the west, it shares borders with Bulgaria and Greece. To the north, it forms the southern shore of the Black Sea; as such, Turkey during the Cold Was was the first line of defense against the prodigious Soviet Black Sea fleet. Turkey's strategic proximity to the former Soviet Union made it an undeniable candidate for NATO membership; and today, its NATO air base at Incirlik is the staging area for bombing runs over Iraq's northern no-fly zone. With a huge and capable standing army and additional NATO assets always at the ready, Turkey looms over its Mid-East neighbors like Theodore Roosevelt's proverbial big stick. Having shouldered the responsibility as NATO's front line to the troubled East, Turkey openly aspires to become more fully integrated into the economic and cultural dynamism of the West. But here, perhaps most of all, contradictions abound. A recent special report from the respected British journal The Economist, titled "The World in 1999," lists Turkey among the nations of Western Europe. In so doing, the editors of The Economist follow a common convention, but one that makes little sense. For example, Turkey lies east of Bulgaria, which is always considered part of Eastern Europe. Moreover, as previously noted, much of Turkey is technically part of Asia. And, unlike any nation of Western Europe, Turkey's population is predominantly Muslim. Economically, Turkey bears little resemblance to any other Western European nation. Its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 was the equivalent of $3,159, according to The Economist. By comparison, the GDP of its neighbor Greece, while lower than any other Western European nation, is $11, 739 -- nearly four times as high -- and the average per capita GDP for sixteen nations of Western Europe, excluding Turkey, is about $25,000. Similarly for inflation: In recent years, Turkey's rate of inflation has run at a scandalous 70% or more per year. By comparison, in other nations of Western Europe, inflation in 1998 ranged from a low of less than 1% in Switzerland to a high of only 4% in Greece, according to The Economist. Turkey's currency, the Turkish lira, is trading in mid-February, 1999, at about 350,000 to one U.S. dollar. With numbers like these, Turkey hardly seems qualified to join the elite economic club of the European Union. But there are other contradictions as well, none more obvious than religion. Alone among "western" nations, Turkey is strongly Islamic in history and practice. Countless slender minarets pierce the skyline of Istanbul, each one marking a neighborhood mosque. Hagia Sophia itself was converted to a mosque, with minarets added, by the Ottoman Turks. Today many in Turkey openly abhor the trappings of Western Christianity, particularly the common practice of adorning Christian churches with unclothed figures of Jesus and the apostles. "It is horrifying for a Muslim to see a holy place, a church, full of frescoes and paintings of naked men and women. It is beyond sacrilegious," writes a journalist in Istanbul's English-language daily, the Turkish Daily News. But Islam in Turkey is not like Islam in the neighboring states of the Mid-East. In bustling Istanbul, Muslim clerics still call the faithful to prayer five times a day, but the roar of traffic muffles the call, and few citizens break their busy routines. Most notable, however, is the status of Turkish women. Although, outside the cities, devout women still cover themselves head to toe in traditional Muslim fashion, downtown Istanbul teems with elegantly coifed, impeccably dressed business women who would seem entirely at home in Rome or New York. And the difference is more than looks. In Turkey, Islamic practice has had to adjust to the idea that women and men are equal before the law and in family life. In most other Islamic nations, this concept is virtually unimaginable. And so, Turkey finds itself caught between dichotomies of every kind. It is Islamic in a non-Islamic way; Western in a non-Western way; struggling for a place in the world that befits its historical greatness and strategic significance, yet at odds with most of its immediate neighbors, and even many of its own citizens, for one reason or another. The fact remains that Turkey is far too important to take for granted in the equation of global affairs. It literally is, and should be recognized, as a bridge between disparate realms of history and culture and geography -- an important bridge in an uneasy world desperate for more bridges. There are many lessons to be learned from the difficult Turkish experience, and much promise in the role Turkey can play in the emerging world of the 21st century. [The author has just returned from a conference in Istanbul, Turkey.]
Built by Frontier on a Macintosh on 6/17/00; 11:59:41 AM. Web Comments  -
Produced by Larry LoweServed 2718 times since 2/25/99. |
|
