turkish balance
Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 01:25PM There’s been a lot in the press lately about Turkey and a possible impending political shift. Are we about to see a renaissance of the military or a political crackdown? I can’t say either, or yes or no - although I’m reminded of how well I understood Turkish politics two years ago, when I was working at the Turkish Daily News. I was there for the “headscarf issue,” the brief months when headscarves became legal in Turkish universities. I was in the office and pretty confused in a large room full of Turks chatting and watching tiny tvs scattered around for the secret Turkish invasion of Iraq to catch up with the PKK, and I was also there for the removal of information about all of that from our papers after the request of the government and probably, although I honestly don’t remember, the sly “semi-official” Anatolian News Agency. I was there for the big Ergenekon trials (the foundations of what’s come up these last few weeks), and the bombings in Istanbul that the PKK was blamed for but denied. I won’t go into the details about that then, but in an email to my family after those bombings I wrote the best political analysis summary of the situation I have ever written, and will probably ever write.
Atatürk overshadows dinner, Kadıköy, Istanbul
It’s hard for me to be interested in American politics - they’re too grand, too complicated, and probably too close to me. Turkish politics were more immediate in a different sense, to be sure, since I was working at a daily paper. But they were interesting because they were melodramatic, and because pride seemed so much more important than logic and games of pretense played in the US.
But I don’t want to write about politics. I want to write about the New York Times, and how well they have covered Turkey. I tried to comment on the NYTimes website to compliment Sebnem Arsu, who does most of the reporting from Turkey, but comments were disabled. I have long been impressed with how well she covers Kurdish issues - everything is complicated, and Turkey is in the American press infrequently enough that some background is needed in nearly every piece. Arsu consistently does a great job of setting the stage so that the key recent events can be viewed in context. She makes no accusations, in a country where blame often is being thrown wildly in all directions, it is nice to read her multiple possible truths.
I was inspired to write this in response to a recent piece of hers from 20 February, “Arrest of Prosecutor in Turkey Exposes Tensions Between Secular and Religious Turks.” There has since been a spate of arrests (this one’s from 2/22) of military officials - officers, even active ones in the most recent wave - accused of being part of the so-called Ergenekon group plotting to overthrow the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These two men frighten me; they say they want Turkey to be a free, Western country. And I believe them. But they are also incredibly unpredictable, and the apparent motivations behind their every move are elusive.
boys in Sulukule, Istanbul
This may very well be the beginning of an autocratic Turkey, the military losing its leaders to political justice. I will admit that the military was frustratingly archaic in its insistence on upholding various dated, incredibly dated, elements of Atatürk’s Constitution from the 1920s. So, I’m not married to the military nor the AKP as either progressive or traditional leading powers. But, the atmosphere I sense from the media here in the US is also familiar - so, perhaps this will all blow over and the recently arrested military leaders will be released in silence in the near future and Turkey will return to its familiar, precarious balance of modern, traditional, free, and insular.
