[Media-watch] Wolfowitz Turkey, Kurds etc.

[Billy Clark]

Another round up of stories on Turkey and the kurds - as far as i can 
see there is nothing much on any of this in our media: i'll send on a 
few other things tomorrow.

billy


1.  Wolfowitz Scolds Turkey for Not Backing US, Suggests Military Failed 
to Act (AP) 05/07
2.  Wolfowitz Remarks Said to Undermine Turkish Democracy (Boston Globe) 
05/16
3.  Congressman Calls for Wolfowitz Resignation on Turkey Remarks 
(Washington Post) 05/20
4.  Rift with US Stirs Tensions: Fallout over Iraq Stokes Criticism of 
Ruling Party (Boston Globe) 05/11
5.  Turkish Leaders React to Wolfowitz Remarks: Resent Lectures by US 
(Radio Netherlands) 05/09
6.  Halden GuLalp: Turkey Stronger for Not Backing US on Iraq (Project 
Syndicate) 05/18
7.  Deborah Sontag: The Erdogan Experiment (New York Times) 05/11
8.  Erbakan Returns to Turkey Politics (Associated Press) 05/11
9.  Honeymoon Over for Turkish Government (Los Angeles Times) 05/08
10. K Gajendra Singh: Simmering Tensions in Turkish Polity (Asia Times) 
05/10
11. Headscarf Ban Still Causing Tension (Baltimore Sun) 05/09
12. Turkey Investment Takes Dive in Fortunes of War (Financial Times) 
05/12
13. Child Labor in Turkey Viewed (Christian Science Monitor) 05/08
14. Profile of Award Winning Novelist Orhan Pamuk (Financial Times) 05/09
15. Turkey Taboos Stifling Creativity (Reuters) 05/10
16. Greek, Turkish Planes in Mock Dogfights Recalling Past Tensions 
(Associated Press) 05/16
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Wolfowitz Scolds Turks Over Failure To Back U.S.
Associated Press
May 7, 2003

ANKARA, Turkey, May 6 -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz 
harshly criticized Turkey for not backing the United States in its war 
against Iraq and urged the Turks to follow Washington's line in 
relations with Iran and Syria.

Wolfowitz's sharp comments, in an interview broadcast today, underlined 
tensions that have characterized U.S.-Turkish relations since Ankara 
refused to allow the deployment of U.S. ground troops to open a northern 
front against Iraq or the use of Turkish bases for raids on Iraq.

He told private television CNN-Turk that he was particularly 
disappointed with the Turkish military. "I think for whatever reason, 
they did not play the strong leadership role . . . that we would have 
expected," he said in the interview, conducted Monday in Washington.

Turks overwhelmingly opposed the war against another Muslim country, 
saying it would destabilize the economy and the region. The parliament, 
reflecting this sentiment, refused to approve use of Turkish soil for 
launching the attack. In addition, many analysts believed Turkey's 
military did not feel Washington was taking its security concerns into 
account, including fears that the strengthening of Iraqi Kurdish groups 
could inspire Turkey's Kurdish rebels.

Wolfowitz said that turning a new page in relations depended on Turkey's 
close cooperation on Iraq policy and also on its policy toward Iran and 
Syria -- other neighbors of Turkey that Washington accuses of sponsoring 
terrorism.

-----

2) Democracy, neocon style
Boston Globe
By H.D.S. Greenway
May 16, 2003

EOCONSERVATIVES, who have risen to great power and influence within
the Bush administration, have told us of their sweeping design to 
transform
the Middle East into a model of democracy. Skeptics have demurred, but 
the
neocons have countered that the doubters lack vision. There have been 
recent
events, however, that bring into question the sincerity of these grand 
visionaries.

Take, for example, the recent remarks of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, perhaps the most influential of the right-wing conservatives 
in
government. Although the State Department got most of the blame for the
diplomatic debacle over Turkey's failure to allow US troops to transit 
en route to
Iraq, it was Wolfowitz who conducted much of the negotiations.

As it was, Turkey's new, democratically elected Parliament said no, much 
to
Washington's chagrin and to the embarrassment of the Turkish government, 
which
had urged a ''yes'' vote. Turkey was not the first government in a 
democratic state
to be rebuffed by legislators. It happens in the United States all the 
time.

But last week, in an interview with CNN, Wolfowitz lashed out at the 
Turkish
military for the failure to fall into line. ''I think for whatever 
reason, they did not play
the strong leadership role that we would have expected,'' he said.

Consider the ramifications of this statement in the Turkish context. 
Democracy in
Turkey is alive but fragile. Open elections began only in the 1950s. 
Traditionally the
Turkish military has seen itself as the guardian of the secular state 
that Kemal
Ataturk put into place following the end of the Ottoman Empire after 
World War I.

The Turkish generals have made it a habit to step in from time to time 
to dismiss
governments they do not like, returning rule to civilians only when it 
suits them. The
last time this happened was in the late 1990s, when Prime Minister 
Necmettin
Erbakan was chucked out of power by the military for being too 
anti-Western and
too Islamic.

Islam is a growing force in Turkey, especially among the rural poor now 
flooding
into cities. Turkey's armed forces and the elites are determined to keep 
the country
secular. Recent Turkish elections swept all the establishment parties 
away and
brought to power a new Parliament with a decided Islamic bent. Its 
leader, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was at first banned from 
becoming
prime minister because of a nationalistic poem with Islamic imagery that 
he had
once read aloud.

But Erdogan and his party had gone out of their way to be pro-West and
moderate, and the military kept to its barracks. Eventually, Erdogan was 
allowed to
assume the prime ministry, which he deserved, but not before he had been 
received
by President Bush in the White House.

Bush rightly decided that, far from being a threat, Erdogan's clean 
government
ticket could serve as an example of how a Middle Eastern government 
could be
Islamic, democratic, moderate, and pro-Western all at the same time.

Erdogan and his government wanted to allow US troops to use Turkish soil 
to
attack Iraq, and not just because of the huge bribe the United States 
had offered.
But the government couldn't persuade enough legislators. Many Turks felt 
the
Parliament had made a mistake, that Turkish interests had been hurt, but 
the
Parliament didn't agree, and that was that. End of story; or so it 
should have been.

One might have thought that anyone interested in true democracy would 
have been
impressed and delighted. Here was Parliament defying the government, and 
the
military didn't intervene. An American foreign policy goal is to get the 
European
Union to accept Turkey. One of the EU's legitimate complaints is that 
the EU is a
grouping of democracies and that the banana republic-like actions of the 
Turkish
military over the years indicate that Turkey's democracy is only a 
sometime thing.
But this time around, the Turkish military was not interfering.

Then up steps Paul Wolfowitz, saying that the Turkish military had not 
played ''the
strong leadership role that we would have expected.'' Does that mean 
that, in
Wolfowitz's view, there should have been a military coup? Or that the 
Turkish
generals should have threatened the Parliament? In the Turkish context 
there is
every reason to interpret the deputy secretary of defense's remarks in 
that way.

The Turks are perfectly aware of the Pentagon's creeping takeover of US 
foreign
policy. There will be some who consider Wolfowitz's remarks as 
encouragement to
boot out Erdogan as they did Erbakan. Americans have a right to ask: Do 
the
neocons really want democracy, or do they simply want to bully the 
Middle East
into a semblance of democracy that will toe the American line and further
neoconservative imperial fantasies?

-----

3) Frank Assails Wolfowitz for Remarks on Turkey
Washington Post
May 20, 2003

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) yesterday called for the resignation of 
Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, accusing the Pentagon official of
seeking to undermine Turkey's democratic government.

In a May 6 interview, Wolfowitz told CNN Turk that the Bush 
administration
was disappointed the Turkish military did not do more to convince the 
Turkish
parliament to join the coalition against Iraq. "What we think of as the
traditional strong support [in] the alliance were not as forceful in 
leading in that
direction," he said.

"For a high-ranking American official to urge the undermining of a 
democratic
decision-making by military intervention is appalling in any case," 
Frank said
on the House floor. "It is particularly disturbing in this instance." 
Frank said he
is drafting a letter that he and other lawmakers will send to President 
Bush
asking him to disavow Wolfowitz's comments.

The White House said Bush remained firmly behind Wolfowitz.

-----

4) Rift with US stirs up tensions within Turkey: Fallout over Iraq 
stoking criticism of ruling party
Boston Globe
By Jonathan Gorvett
May 11, 2003

ISTANBUL -- Fallout from Turkey's refusal to assist the United States in 
the Iraq war is fueling
tension between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's liberal 
pro-Islamist government and the
country's staunchly secular establishment, government officials and 
analysts say.

Allegations have been flying between the two traditional foes, with 
secularists saying the government
is incompetent and moving the country away from pro-Western values. 
Pro-Islamists counter that
the establishment is trying to undermine the democratically elected 
government.

The disputes are flaring as the government, elected in March, grapples 
with a faltering economy and
pressure to seek a solution over the divided island of Cyprus.

''Moves are being made and everybody can see this,'' said Duygu Sezer, a 
professor of
international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara. ''There is an 
extremely dangerous game now
going on.''

The tension is rising as the split in the US-Turkey relationship 
deepens. Comments about Turkey by
senior US officials last week further frayed the 50-year strategic 
partnership.

Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defense secretary, told Turkish TV channel 
CNN Turk in an
interview broadcast Tuesday that Ankara should publicly admit it was 
wrong not to side with the
United States on Iraq. ''Let's have a Turkey that steps up and says, `We 
made a mistake; we
should have known how bad things were in Iraq, but we do now. Let's 
figure out how we can be as
useful as possible to the Americans,' '' he said. ''I'd like to see a 
different sort of attitude.''

Wolfowitz went on to criticize the Turkish military, widely viewed in 
Turkey as the most
pro-American of Turkish institutions and one with a powerful political 
role in the country. ''They did
not play the strong leadership role and attitude that we would have 
expected,'' he said. Wolfowitz's
remarks, and strong comments later in the week by US Undersecretary of 
State Marc Grossman
and top Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, drew strong responses from 
Turkish leaders.

''From the very beginning, Turkey never made any mistakes,'' Erdogan 
said. Justice Minister Cemel
Cicek expressed more outrage, saying ''it is the US and Wolfowitz that 
should look at themselves
and ask, `Where did we make a mistake?' ''

Before the war began, Washington asked Ankara to allow the deployment of 
US troops in
southeastern Turkey, which borders northern Iraq. These forces were to 
form a ''second front'' in
the invasion. The Turkish Parliament rejected such a deployment, despite 
Erdogan's urging. A string
of other disputes flared in US-Turkish relations, including the US 
withdrawal of $6 billion in
conditional grants to cushion Turkey's economic losses from the war. The 
occupation of the
northern Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk by Iraqi Kurdish forces -- 
with US help -- then
threatened to deepen the rift, as Ankara had often repeated that it 
would not tolerate such a
situation.

''Before the Iraq affair, there had been the assumption that US and 
Turkish interests were all
convergent,'' said Ilter Turan, a professor of international relations 
at Istanbul's Bilgi University. ''It
then emerged in US-Turkish negotiations before the war that there were 
in fact major differences,
particularly over northern Iraq.''

Turkish authorities have long feared that Kurdish control of the massive 
oil fields around Kirkuk
and Mosul would make a Kurdish state in northern Iraq viable. They say 
this might embolden
Turkey's own ethnic Kurds to step up demands for autonomy, if not 
independence.

After protests, Turkish military observers were allowed into Kirkuk and 
Mosul, and the United
States made efforts to pull back Iraqi Kurdish irregulars from the two 
cities. But major doubts
remain in Ankara.

''There's definitely a feeling that Turkey is being excluded from 
everything that is happening in Iraq,''
Turan said. ''There are conflicting US statements on possible Turkish 
involvement in reshaping Iraqi
politics, but the overall impression is that decisions will simply be 
imposed on Turkey.''

All this seems a long way from the close US-Turkish cooperation of 
recent years. As recently as
last December, Washington touted Ankara to the European Union as a 
worthy prospect for
membership, while Turkish troops have served as peacekeepers in US-led 
operations from
Kosovo to Kabul, Afghanistan.

''Relations are going through difficult times,'' said Murat Mercan, 
spokesman for Erdogan's ruling
Justice and Development Party, or AKP. ''I think both parties will have 
to reassess their positions.''

How fundamental such a reassessment might be is still unclear. 
Supporters of the more pro-Islamist
wing within the AKP even see the rift as a potentially positive 
development.

''It's much better for Turkey to be excluded from what's going on in 
Iraq,'' said Fehmi Koru, a
columnist for Yeni Safak, a daily newspaper known for its close ties to 
the ruling party. ''We should
have nothing to do with the US occupation. If there is a breakup in 
relations, then it's not for Turkey
to feel bad about but for the US.''

But the deterioration in relations also has rebounded on Erdogan's 
government.

''The government has lost much credibility for being unable to handle 
this issue professionally,'' said
Sezer, the professor in Ankara. ''The government has failed abroad, 
while the economy is in trouble
and the reforms they promised have failed to materialize. Instead, 
they're bringing up issues that
divide secular and Islamist Turks to try and distract people from their 
failures.''

------

5) Turkish Leaders React to Wolfowitz Remarks: Resent Lectures by US
Radio Netherlands
by Dorian Jones
9 May 2003

Turkey's refusal to allow American soldiers to use its territory in the
US-led war against Iraq is continuing to undermine bilateral
relations. This week, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
dispensed with diplomatic niceties and said Turkey's decision was a
mistake. The remark has drawn an equally blunt response from the
Turkish government.

Displaying his irritation at Paul Wolfowitz's comments, Turkish Prime 
Minster
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had never made a mistake, but only
took steps it saw as necessary.

Justice Minister Cemil Cicek was quick to add his voice to the growing
cacophony of condemnation of Mr Wolfowitz. Mr Cicek said the US had to
look to itself for the reason for Turkey's failure in supporting the US. 
He
pointed out that in the 1990 first Gulf War, Washington had failed to
honour promises of economic support. Mr Cicek added that Turkey had
loyally supported the US for over 50 years. "There are the bodies of 400
Turkish soldiers buried in Korea, which is measure of Turkish support of 
the
US," he said.

Ties tested

Turkey sent thousands soldiers to fight with US forces during the 1990 
Gulf
war. Since then bilateral relations have been extremely close for most of
the time. Now they seem to be facing one of their toughest tests.
Speculation is growing that the Pentagon is lobbying for Turkish 
companies
to be excluded from lucrative Iraqi construction contracts.

Having a large construction industry and considerable experience of
working in the region, Turkey is expecting to do well out of the
multi-billion-dollar rebuilding bonanza. Nihat Gokyigit of the Turkish
construction company Tefken says the opportunities for his company are
enormous.

"Potentially it will be very huge because they have stopped
everything and they need everything and we are next door. It is very
important to do business with your neighbours and for my company it
may grow up to 200 million dollars turnover in various area."

US concerns

But such hopes could be dashed if US-Turkish relations continue to
deteriorate. Washington is also expressing concern about recent high 
level
ministerial visits between Turkey and its neighbours Syria and Iran, two
countries it has accused of supporting terrorism. Mr Wolfowitz is 
calling for
Ankara to change its attitude. But Turkey's Islamic-rooted government has
pledged to improve relations with all its neighbours.

For his part, Foreign Minster Abdullah Gul is trying to play down rising
tensions saying Turkey had supported the US in its war against Iraq. "We
are now looking to the future. What is important for us is the future.
Turkish-American relations will continue on a much healthier ground in 
the
future," Gul told the media on Thursday.

Turkey´s suspicions

But worryingly for supporters of US-Turkish relations, there remains 
scope
for further confrontations. Ankara continues to remain suspicious of 
Kurds
in northern Iraq, which it fears could declare a Kurdish state, leading 
to
similar demands from its own Kurdish population. Mensor Akgun of the
Turkish think-tank Tesev says while Turkey and the US remain allies, 
their
interests in the region may differ:

"Of course we are allies, but at the end of the day we are not
governed from Washington. We may have some conflicting interests
over the fate of this region."

Last month, Turkish soldiers were deported from the region after being
caught by US soldiers carrying large amounts of weapons. Mr Wolfowitz'
statement that bilateral relations would be shaped by how Turkey supports
the US in rebuilding democracy in Iraq is being interpreted in Ankara 
as a
warning to Turkey to stay out of the region. But for now at least, Ankara
appears not to be in the mood to listen to lectures or orders from
Washington.

-----

6) Turkey emerges stronger for not bowing to US
Project Syndicate
HALDUN GuLALP
May 18, 2003

Turkey's seeming fall from grace with the US may turn out to be a 
blessing in
disguise. The Iraq war and the tortured diplomacy that led up to it may 
help resolve
Turkey's conflict between its ``strategic alliance'' with America and 
its drive to join
the European Union.

The elections last November that brought the Justice and Development 
party (AKP)
to power were preceded by a dispute between the members of the 
then-ruling
coalition over enacting the reforms demanded by the EU. Some liberal 
elements of
that ``secular'' coalition resigned from the government and joined with 
the Islamists
to push the reforms through parliament.

After coming to power, the AKP's leaders, former Islamists who had 
reinvented
themselves as ``conservative democrats'', energetically engaged with the 
United
States, the EU and the United Nations on issues ranging from Cyprus to 
Iraq, from
Kurdish language rights to other human rights issues within Turkey.

Having suffered the oppressive practices of Turkey's ``secular'' state 
and recognising
that human rights must be protected across the board, the AKP emerged 
as a
credible interlocutor with the West. The US, preoccupied with the 
supposed spectre
of a ``clash of civilisations'' between Islam and the West, saw the 
AKP's modern,
Westernised face as an opportunity and urged the EU to admit Turkey.

Today, both ``conservative democrats'' and liberals advocate passing all 
the reforms
needed to gain accession to the EU, while opponents include extreme 
nationalists, of
both left and right, as well as some elements of the ``secular'' 
establishment. The
Europeans could have tipped the balance decisively in favour of the 
reformers by
finally rewarding the efforts of the pro-EU Turks at last December's 
summit of EU
leaders. Instead, the EU kept Turkey waiting yet again, putting off 
formal
negotiations that, in any case, may take years to complete.

Europe's persistent reluctance puts the Turks in a quandary. The 
Americans want full
EU membership for Turkey _ a longstanding Nato member and close American 
ally _
while Europeans complain about the Turkish military's domestic political 
role. The
paradox is that, by maintaining a political distance and thus limiting 
Turkey's options,
Europe may end up reinforcing Turkey's status as a military outpost of 
the US.

At least, that was how things were shaping up prior to the war in Iraq. 
Then, despite
massive US pressure, Turkey's parliament unexpectedly rejected the 
government's
proposal to allow US troops in Turkey to launch an invasion from Turkish 
territory.
Turkey's refusal to grant the Americans access to military bases on its 
territory
effectively ruled out a northern front in the war. The Turkish 
government even
attempted a regional initiative for a peaceful solution to the crisis, 
an effort no current
EU member could have contemplated.

Parliament's rejection of US troops powerfully refutes suggestions that 
Turkey was
primarily concerned about the size of the American aid package on offer 
as an
inducement to cooperate. Suggestions that characterised the vote as 
revealing the
government's true ``Islamic'' character ignore the fact that the only 
opposition party
in parliament, the Republican People's party _ founded by Ataturk and 
still fully
``secularist'' _ voted against the plan. Likewise, other elements of 
Turkey's secular
establishment, including the president and the military leadership, 
either opposed or
were lukewarm, at best, to the idea of war in Iraq.

Turkey's military initially remained silent on the issue, 
uncharacteristically watching
the civilian political process unfold. By contrast, the military had 
earlier publicly
criticised AKP initiatives on Cyprus.

Their silence on Iraq reflected their apprehension about unwanted 
alternatives: either
support the US plan and risk encouraging Kurdish moves towards an 
independent
state, or oppose the Americans and jeopardise a critical strategic 
relationship. They
chose to defer to the civilian leadership and to parliament which, in 
voting down the
US plan, reflected overwhelming public sentiment against the war. Only 
after the vote
did the chief of staff publicly endorse the original proposal to bring 
in American
troops.

In fact, the allegedly Islamic party had skilfully managed to negotiate 
with an
unrelenting US, consult with the Turkish military and president, and 
share all
information with the public and parliament. Walking a fine line in what 
was
essentially a lose-lose situation, the party leadership laid out the 
stakes clearly and
judiciously left the final decision to parliament. The outcome was a 
victory for
Turkish democracy and was recognised as such internationally.

After the US military action in Iraq, the tables may be turning in 
surprising ways. As
America establishes itself in Iraq, Turkey's geopolitical military 
significance may
decline. Yet the declared American aim of building a Muslim democracy in 
Iraq will
only enhance Turkey's symbolic importance as a role model.

This shift in Turkey's strategic role may also be reflected in a new 
domestic balance
between the military and the forces pushing for reform. With careful 
management,
Turkey may find itself drawing closer to Europe, while rebuilding its 
relationship with
America.

- Haldun Gulalp is professor of sociology at Bogazici University, 
Istanbul, Turkey,
and is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for 
Scholars,
Washington, DC.

----

7) The Erdogan Experiment:
New York Times
11 May 2003
by Deborah Sontag

The new prime minister of Turkey stood stiffly in his formal office in 
Ankara, his mustache pulling his mouth
into a frown. Serious pouches hung beneath his eyes as he shook hands 
briskly and positioned his lanky frame on a high-backed chair. Like a 
patient nodding to the dentist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49, signaled he 
was ready to beinterviewed. It seemed clear that he would have preferred 
to stretch out on the carpet and go to sleep.

There was no trace of Erdogan's famous charisma, of the fiery oratorical 
skills on display just the previous day in Parliament, when I found 
myself responding instinctively to his booming voice's cues, knowing,
without understanding the Turkish, when I was supposed to rise, to clap, 
to cheer. Rather,
during that evening interview last month, at several points while his 
remarks were being
translated, Erdogan's head bobbed forward and his eyelids drooped shut. 
He could be forgiven;
his party's first months in office had been grueling.

The war in neighboring Iraq was drawing to a close, much to Erdogan's 
relief. The war was
unpopular in Turkey and costly to Erdogan. Because he is a pragmatist, 
Erdogan supported
America's request to use Turkish soil as a staging ground. Yet, despite 
the fact that his party held
two-thirds of the Parliament, he failed to win legislators' approval for 
the request. It was a
significant failure, damaging his new government's relations with the 
Bush administration,
depriving Turkey of billions in loans and grants and provoking questions 
about Erdogan's
competence and control of his party.

As he also backpedaled on the ever-divisive Cyprus issue, fumbled with 
Turkey's wrecked
economy and confronted Kurdish riots in an earthquake zone it seemed 
that Erdogan was
extinguishing all too quickly the hopefulness that his fledgling party's 
emphatic win in the Nov. 3
general elections had produced. Influential Turkish columnists abandoned 
their infatuation with
the young Turk who had vanquished the old guard. One, Cengiz Candar, 
told me he had
''stopped even pronouncing Erdogan's name publicly.'' (It is pronounced 
EHR-doe-ahn, by the
way).

Such pressure would have taxed the most seasoned politician, and 
Erdogan, once a popular
mayor of Istanbul, was a novice on the national stage. Yet Erdogan was 
accustomed to proving
himself. A pious man in a country where secularism is worshiped, and 
once a kid from the wrong
side of the tracks, he had always been an outsider. And now, though he 
was tired, he was, more
precisely, annoyed. It had been only a month since he assumed the 
premiership. He clearly felt,
not unreasonably, that he deserved the benefit of the doubt.

The stakes were high, as not only his advisers but also opposition 
leaders told me. Tayyip
Erdogan was an experiment for Turkey with ramifications that went well 
beyond Turkey. As a
devout Muslim with an Islamist past who had nonetheless evolved into a 
modern, pro-Western
democrat, Erdogan had the potential to set a powerful example for the 
region. If he could ease
Turks into a less hostile separation of mosque and state, if he could 
help Turkey undertake
long-overdue democratic reforms, then perhaps one day he would exemplify 
a way in which
Islamic faith and democratic principles not only coexisted but also 
collaborated.

But first he needed to be given a chance to succeed. The transition to 
statesman after a life of
struggle with the state was not a simple one. Fingering the Turkish flag 
on his lapel, Erdogan
crossed his legs. ''Our people made us the governing party,'' he said 
defiantly. ''Those who claim
to respect democracy, why don't they respect the vote of the people?''

Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look down 
on him or do both. He
knows they can't quite believe that Erdogan is their prime minister; 
indeed, many seem
embarrassed by his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf 
that his wife wears as
an emblem of her faith. He knows they are suspicious of his claims that 
he has evolved and that
they imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the nation. 
''I have faced this all my
life,'' Erdogan said.

But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,'' Erdogan 
said. ''As a Muslim, I try to
comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to 
God, who created me,
and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to 
keep this away from my political
life, to keep it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party 
cannot have a religion. Only
individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be exploiting religion, and religion 
is so supreme that it cannot
be exploited or taken advantage of.''

To understand Erdogan's dilemma, it helps to understand the depths of 
Turkey's commitment to
secularism. It began with the very establishment of the Turkish Republic 
in 1923, and the
founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rejection of traditional Islam 
as incompatible with his
goal of establishing a modern European state. Ataturk shut the Islamic 
caliphate, dissolved
religious courts, outlawed mystic sects and secularized schools. He 
replaced the Arabic script
with Latin script. He outlawed the fez and all but imposed the homburg. 
He adopted the Swiss
civil code and granted women the vote.

As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military took on 
the role of protecting
Ataturk's legacy, which meant keeping elected officials on a leash and 
overthrowing or
undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on 
probation. Turkey's ''deep
state'' sees its duty as preventing the nation from backsliding into 
religion and ethnic, especially
Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out. While most 
Turks came to
consider themselves Turks first, they were still Muslims. And from the 
start, especially in the
heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this day, 
in what seems an arcane,
self-defeating expression of Turkey's secularism, women wearing head 
scarves are not allowed
to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister Erdogan's 
two daughters, in fact, go
to Indiana University, where they are free to cover their hair and get a 
degree at the same time.
His wife does not appear at state functions lest her designer head scarf 
provoke fears of an
imminent theocracy.

Erdogan's family comes from a devout world in the Black Sea region. His 
father, Ahmet,
migrated to Istanbul in the 1930's, settled in Kasimpasa, a rough 
working-class quarter, and
found work as a captain with a state maritime company. Kasimpasa has a 
body language all its
own, and Turks say that Erdogan retains the Kasimpasa swagger, a way of 
leading with his right
shoulder. Although the district was infamous for its gangs and 
pickpockets, Erdogan remembers
the neighborhood as an idyll, with fruit trees and fields, where kids 
could get their hands dirty. ''I
was shaped by that mud,'' he said, ''not like the poor kids of today who 
are surrounded by
asphalt.''

Near the now-ramshackle mosque where Erdogan studied the Koran as a 
child, the district
manager of Kasimpasa, Ali Riza Sivritepe, spoke of growing up with him. 
They fetched water
from the same well, flew kites and shot marbles over the irregular 
paving stones. (Erdogan,
steely in his ambition even then, always won.) ''He was a very serious 
child,'' Sivritepe said.
''Everyone respected him here and called him Big Brother.''

His father, according to a biography, was an authoritarian with a temper 
that could be tamed
best by Erdogan's kissing his shoes. Once, Erdogan's father punished him 
for using bad language
by hanging him from the ceiling by the arms. ''After that day, I never 
swore again,'' Erdogan said.

When Erdogan was 7, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes -- ''God bless his 
soul,'' Erdogan said --
was hanged. Elected in 1950 in Turkey's first free elections, Menderes 
was a secularist but
demonstrated a tolerance for religious practice that his predecessors 
had not possessed. Over
10 years in government, he faltered and became repressive, and when the 
Turkish military
overthrew him, the coup was largely welcomed. But when Menderes was sent 
to the gallows,
many Turks were horrified. ''Some are saddened by things like this, and 
they give up,'' Erdogan
said. ''In my case, this sadness turned into an attraction for 
politics.''

Part of the Erdogan lore is that in fifth grade he refused to use a 
newspaper as a prayer rug in a
religion class. It was inappropriate, he told his teacher, who took a 
special interest in him and
persuaded Erdogan's father to send him to a state-run Prayer Leaders and 
Preachers school,
which offered a secular curriculum amplified by religious instruction. 
Erdogan was particularly
good at reciting nationalist poetry. During poetry contests, Sivritepe 
recalled, Erdogan would
hide a Turkish flag inside his shirt and whip it out for dramatic effect.

Erdogan was also good at soccer, but he kept his playing secret from his 
father for years, hiding
his soccer shoes in the coal bin. His father considered soccer a 
diversion from education and
faith. In truth, politics was the real diversion. Erdogan juggled 
soccer -- playing professionally for
11 years -- political activism and school for more than a decade. He 
graduated with a degree in
management at age 27.

During that era, political Islam became a force in Turkey, and Necmettin 
Erbakan, a
German-educated engineer, emerged as its leader. Erbakan preached a 
return to religious
values, which resonated in the heartland and in the poorer urban 
neighborhoods. While
Erbakan's first party, National Order, was banned for fomenting 
fundamentalism, the authorities
later encouraged him to try again, seeing him as a counterweight to 
leftist parties. But his second
party, National Salvation, grew steadily more radical and anti-Western, 
inspired by the Islamic
revolution in neighboring Iran.

Erdogan was one of Erbakan's disciples. His political climb began when 
he was appointed
chairman of National Salvation's youth group. Young Erdogan would 
practice his fiery rhetoric
on abandoned ships, facing into the wind as he rehearsed his salutation: 
''My sacred brothers
whose hearts beat with the excitement of a big future Islamic 
conquest. . . . ''

Erdogan's future wife, Emine, belonged to an Islamist women's group, the 
Idealist Ladies
Association, and she was mesmerized by his oratory. After six months of 
chaperoned dating, the
couple became engaged and married in 1978. Two years later, National 
Salvation was dissolved
along with all other parties in another military coup. Not to be 
suppressed, National Salvation
was reborn as the Welfare Party, which is where the Islamists, some of 
whom saw an Islamic
state as their goal and some of whom aspired only to greater tolerance 
of religion, hit their
organizational stride.

Erdogan named a son after his leader, and Erbakan made him chairman of 
the Welfare Party's
Istanbul branch. They built a political machine that provided social 
services as it secured political
power, appealing to the needy and disgruntled as well as to the 
faithful. But they did not always
agree. Erdogan stopped kissing Erbakan's hand because it struck him as 
retrograde, and he
subtly pushed for greater democracy within the party and for broader 
outreach. Erdogan was
not Erbakan's first choice to be the Welfare Party candidate for mayor, 
but the older man
bowed to the will of the party. Erdogan took his campaign into pubs, 
discotheques and even
bordellos, and computerized the campaign offices. He made women the 
worker bees of his
organization and involved secular men too.

In 1994, Erdogan was elected the first Islamist-oriented mayor of 
Istanbul. His victory stunned
the country. It meant that the Islamists were succeeding in reaching 
beyond the mosque
communities. It also meant that Erdogan was a force to be contended 
with. Indeed, many found
Erdogan a more compelling package than his mentor. Whereas Erbakan was a 
flashy dresser
and and an autocratic figure, Erdogan styled himself as an authentic 
representative of the masses.
''In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and White 
Turks,'' Erdogan once said.
''Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.''

At the Hope Barbershop in Kasimpasa that Erdogan used to frequent, 
Ibrahim Azak, a barber,
called him ''the best'' at politics for just that reason. ''He was 
raised in a place like this,'' Azak
said. ''He doesn't come from a palace. When he shops, he carries the 
bags himself.''

As mayor, Erdogan adopted modern management practices and proved 
singularly adept at
delivering services, installing new water lines, cleaning up the 
streets, planting trees and improving
transportation. He opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his 
e-mail address, established
municipal hot lines. He was considered ethical and evenhanded. (One 
building-trade
professional, however, told me that the corruption endemic to Istanbul 
City Hall persisted under
Erdogan and that donations of equipment and vehicles were still 
solicited in exchange for building
permits.)

Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of Istanbul, 
Erdogan began both
provoking anxieties and recoiling from the fact that he had provoked 
them. He banned alcohol
from municipal establishments, which created concern that he would 
eliminate alcohol from
restaurants too. But he never did. He revived an elaborate project for a 
mosque complex in the
city's heart, then backed off when there were protests. He never clearly 
allayed secular
concerns, keeping them alive instead with comments like: ''Democracy is 
like a streetcar. When
you come to your stop, you get off.''

Meanwhile, the Welfare Party finished first in a close national 
election, and Erbakan became the
country's first Islamist prime minister in 1996. With his rhetorical 
cannons firing away, he
declared Turkish politics a pitiful imitation of the West and announced 
a campaign for worldwide
Muslim solidarity. He overreached. After 12 months, the military forced 
him to resign.

There had long been differences between the younger party leaders, who 
came to be known as
the modernists, and Erbakan and his men -- whom they called the 
Politburo. When Erbakan was
ousted and subsequently banned from politics, the modernists had their 
opening. But first they
had to withstand the legacy of Erbakan's radical provocations of the 
establishment, a crackdown
that would pave the way for Erdogan's rise.

In December 1997, the Welfare Party sent Erdogan to a political rally in 
southeastern Siirt, an
impoverished, religious district where his wife's family originated. On 
that day, as he had several
times before, he recited a quatrain by Ziya Gokalp, an ideologue of 
Turkish nationalism: ''The
mosques are our barracks,/the domes our helmets,/the minarets our 
bayonets,/ and the believers
our soldiers.''

Erdogan told me that the poem had been approved for textbooks by the 
education ministry, and
he added, somewhat disingenuously, I think, that it principally served 
oratorical purposes. ''It
was an attention getter,'' he said. ''It would make the people 
spirited.'' In the speech following
the poem, however, Erdogan went on to proclaim that Islam was his 
compass and that anyone
who tried to stifle prayer in Turkey would face an exploding volcano.

It was what one observer, Asla Aydintasbas, a New York-based columnist 
for the newspaper
Sabah, described as an ''Al Sharpton moment.'' Erdogan was playing to 
the crowd and prodding
the military. And the military took the bait. Erdogan was charged with 
inciting hatred on the basis
of religion, and convicted.

But this time, it was the bureaucracy that had overreached. Erdogan's 
conviction not only
enhanced his popularity among religious Turks but also disturbed many 
secular Turks. ''It's not
right what happened to him,'' said Cuneyd Zapsu, a businessman who owns 
the Azizler holding
company. ''I don't want to live in a country where someone goes to jail 
for a poem. He was
persecuted because they sensed his power, and I think it was not 
religion but a class thing. The
so-called elite has never lived in this country's reality. They've 
always been afraid of the people.
That's why all our laws are restrictions, not freedoms.''

In 1999, thousands accompanied Erdogan to the gates of the prison in 
western Thrace where he
would serve five months. Erdogan told me that when the door clanked shut 
behind him it marked
a breaking point as well as a turning point. ''Prison,'' Erdogan said, 
''matures you.''

Zapsu visited Erdogan in prison frequently. A free-spirited 46-year-old, 
Zapsu first met Erdogan
when he was running for mayor. Erdogan had been looking for a liaison to 
the business
community, and he heard that Zapsu, whose grandfather was a well-known 
Kurdish poet, was a
maverick with an open mind. '' 'I don't want your money,' '' Zapsu said 
Erdogan told him. '' 'I
want your help. Nobody from the establishment wants to talk to me.' '' 
At that time, Zapsu said,
Erdogan was more rigid. He wouldn't shake the hands of Zapsu's 
daughters; he hugs them now.
But Zapsu said there was something special about Erdogan. During 
Erdogan's incarceration,
Zapsu worked to persuade him to break with Erbakan and his anti-Western 
philosophy. It
wasn't that hard, Zapsu said. Erdogan was coming to that conclusion 
himself. And Erbakan
never visited anyway.

For the modernists in the Welfare Party, Erbakan's ouster followed by 
Erdogan's conviction
undeniably demonstrated that confrontation with the establishment wasn't 
getting them anywhere.
Fehmi Koru, columnist for an Islamic-oriented newspaper, told me: ''When 
I first started writing
about democracy, some members of the community criticized me openly, 
saying Islam and
democracy were incompatible. But they grew ready for a change.''

They decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader political 
base. They would stop
conducting politics with religious symbols and demonstrate instead how 
true belief informs
politics wisely. Metin Heper, a political scientist, said that Erdogan 
believes in the potential of
Islam to unite people around an ideal and build morality, integrity and 
drive. ''He believes in a
kind of Islamic version of the Protestant work ethic, where you work 
hard for the benefit of the
country because it is the good and right thing to do according to 
Islam,'' Heper said. A poll taken
to determine the public's chief concerns generated the party name, 
Justice and Development, and
its symbol, a glowing electric light bulb.

Justice and Development would be a party in which religious people could 
feel at home, but it
wouldn't be a religious party. Its members would be Muslim Democrats in 
the mold of Europe's
Christian Democrats. It would entice Westernized Turks from abroad, like 
Egemen Bagis, 33, a
businessman living in New Jersey until Erdogan recruited him to run for 
Parliament without, Bagis
said, ever asking whether he drank (he does) or whether his wife covered 
her hair (she doesn't).

Zapsu, a founder of the party, introduced Erdogan to Ishak Alaton, an 
industrialist who is part of
Istanbul's small Jewish community. The avuncular Alaton told me that he 
came to see Erdogan as
a ''practical man of good will'' who represents ''the forces of change'' 
in Turkey.

Just as Zapsu was Erdogan's Henry Higgins, advising him on how to deal 
with the establishment
and the West, Alaton took on introducing Erdogan to the American Jewish 
community and
helping him send signals that he would maintain Turkey's relationship 
with Israel. It required a
little re-education first. ''They had this impression that the world was 
run by Jews,'' Alaton said.

On Nov. 3 last year, Erdogan's 16-month-old political party captured the 
first single-party
majority in 15 years and the first substantial one in 50 years. It won 
34 percent of the popular
vote, which translated into a phenomenal 363 seats out of 550 seats in 
Parliament. All but one of
Turkey's established political parties -- the Republican People's, 
founded by Ataturk -- failed to
reach the 10 percent threshold needed for representation.

The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt, mismanaged 
and fragmented Turkish
political order. It was also an embrace of Erdogan personally but not of 
Islamism. On election
night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment that he 
would not be an agent of
unwanted change. In a news conference, he said that his government would 
not interfere with
anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented foreign 
policy, would abide by an
International Monetary Fund rescue plan and would continue the battle 
for admission to the
European Union. The Turkish markets soared.

Even then, many distrusted his transformation. ''He's saying all the 
right things about Europe and
moving westward,'' an American diplomat told me, ''but I fear he's like 
a wolf in sheep's
clothing.'' Those who knew him well, though, took him at his word. ''He 
wanted to change the
system, but the system changed him,'' said Rusen Cakir, one of Erdogan's 
biographers. Alaton
said he had no concerns that Erdogan was a closet fundamentalist. ''He 
came to power partly
because he had this religious platform, but he knows it's a dead end. He 
knows confrontation
with the bureaucracy on religion would break him.'' One Turkish lawyer 
put it to me more
cynically: ''He believes in profits, not prophets.''

After his victory, Erdogan had a problem: banned from politics in 1998, 
he could not become
prime minister. So Abdullah Gul, who is now the foreign minister, 
assumed the premiership
temporarily. In early December, President Bush invited Erdogan, still 
only chairman of the party,
to the White House. This caused considerable controversy in Turkey, 
since it meant the United
States was according international legitimacy to a leader considered 
illegitimate by the Turkish
military.

According to Bagis, who served as Erdogan's interpreter during the 
December meeting, Bush
raised the issue of faith that Erdogan has worked so hard to keep in the 
background. Startling
the Turks, Bush said: ''You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in 
the Almighty. That's why
we'll be great partners.'' Erdogan left Washington with Bush's backing 
for Turkey's
long-frustrated accession to the European Union and headed to Europe to 
lobby for a firm date
for talks. There he faced his first serious setback. The E.U. scheduled 
negotiations to begin in
December 2004, but only if Turkey had undertaken sufficient reforms.

Erdogan's party, meanwhile, speedily passed a reform of a more 
self-interested variety,
amending the Turkish constitution so that the ban on Erdogan could be 
lifted. Conveniently, the
results of elections in Siirt were nullified because of procedural 
irregularities, opening up a few
seats in Parliament. So Erdogan was preparing to run in by-elections 
just as the United States
was moving closer to war in Iraq.

Erdogan had been open in his disdain for Saddam Hussein and calculating 
in his backing for the
American request to base tens of thousands of troops in southern Turkey. 
The Turkish public,
however, was adamantly antiwar, and many in Erdogan's party, especially 
the more hard-line
religious members, firmly opposed him on this issue. Erdogan was quickly 
learning that his
high-wire act wasn't going to be easy to pull off. He was supposed to be 
the anti-Erbakan, so he
was not about to impose his will on his party. Critics of Erdogan's 
performance, however, say
that he should have done just that. ''Leaders have to lead,'' the 
columnist Candar said, adding
cuttingly, ''Being the darling of the simple people is not enough during 
such turbulent times.''

Erdogan's advisers said that the United States did not fully grasp the 
political risk that he was
taking and how much he needed written agreements demonstrating what 
Turkey would get in
return for cooperating. ''They were used to dealing with our generals 
and not a politician trying to
be democratic,'' Zapsu said. The Turks were insulted when the Americans 
sent a State
Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an 
agreement with them. They
acknowledge that they misjudged the United States' determination to 
launch a war, with or
without Turkey's help, and that they bargained inexpertly. They were 
thin-skinned too when
details of the financial bartering were leaked and cartoons in American 
newspapers portrayed
them as bazaar hagglers. ''There was a very ugly campaign against my 
country,'' Erdogan said.

In the end, Gul, the acting prime minister, had to go to Parliament with 
promises but no signed
guarantees from the Americans. The military establishment didn't want to 
help Erdogan, so the
generals, whose support for Turkey's participation in the war might have 
persuaded opposition
members to vote for it, kept a low profile. Parliament failed -- by 
three votes -- to authorize the
stationing of American troops in Turkey. The Americans were furious.

In early March, Erdogan was elected to Parliament and Gul prepared to 
step aside. Erdogan
told me that Bush called to congratulate him, saying he'd never known 
any politician who had
won 85 percent of the vote; Bush also asked him to try again in 
Parliament. Erdogan, however,
told the American president that he needed to wait for Parliament to 
formally approve him as
prime minister first, which his Turkish critics saw as cheeky, immature 
standing on ceremony.

By the time Erdogan was installed as prime minister, the Americans were 
asking only for the right
to fly over Turkish airspace, and they got it, Erdogan said. Luckily for 
Turkey, the war was
quick and contained. As it was drawing to a close, during that April 
interview, Erdogan insisted
that Turkey had done more for the U.S. war effort than any other country 
except England.
Turkish airspace was a singularly essential ingredient, he said. ''How 
could they feel let down by
our doing all this?'' he said defensively.

Earlier this year, when Muslim faithful were traveling to Saudi Arabia 
for the hajj, the new
Turkish authorities shrouded a billboard at the airport that featured a 
model in an itsy bitsy bikini.
Arch-secularists wrung their hands: this must be the first sign of the 
coming fundamentalism, they
cried. The swimsuit company sued the government, and secularists cheered 
it on, until one day
some realized that they were rushing to the defense of a pretty cheesy 
picture. Suddenly,
everyone got quiet. Overnight, the billboard was moved to a discreet 
location and uncovered. It
was a small, common-sensical compromise. But it raised the possibility 
of grander, more
profound ones.

Alaton argues that Erdogan should be given more time by his own people 
and more open
support from Europe and America. ''Erdogan shouldn't be punished,'' he 
said. ''Maybe people of
good faith should understand how important he is.''

And even Kemal Dervis -- a leading opposition figure and, as an elite, 
polyglot former World
Bank official, the antithesis of Erdogan -- told me he thinks the 
government's success, remote as
it seems now, would truly reverberate. ''It would send the message that 
you can be an overtly
Muslim country and part of the club of developed nations too,'' Dervis 
said. ''The significance of
that for the world at large would be incredible.''

Unfortunately for him, Erdogan has been scrambling on several fronts. 
His government rattled the
business community by advocating a pension increase, just the kind of 
populist spending measure
that Turkey didn't need. Further, while he had pledged to push a plan to 
reunify Cyprus, his
government ended up backing away from a showdown with Rauf Denktash, the 
Turkish Cypriot
leader, and the Turkish military at a critical moment. This greatly 
disappointed those who thought
he would be an agent of change. To take on the military too soon might 
be suicidal, they
acknowledged, but to defer confrontation could also render him impotent.

Slipping confidence in Erdogan, as always, has been colored by distrust 
of his intentions -- or at
least his party's intentions -- on the religion issue. But maybe that 
concern is misplaced.

Maybe Erdogan doesn't have the guts or power to push through any serious 
reforms, least of all
on religion. Or maybe Erdogan, straddling two worlds, is the perfect 
person to defuse the
tensions between secular and religious forces in Turkey.

-----

8) Erbakan returns to Turkey politics
Associated Press
May 11, 2003

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Former pro-Islamic Premier Necmettin Erbakan
was elected as chairman of a pro-Islamic party on Sunday following a
five-year ban from politics for violating the secular laws of this
predominantly Muslim nation.

The ban for Erbakan, who led Turkey's Islamic movement for three decades 
and
sparred frequently with the country's secular establishment, began in 
1998 after a
court closed down his Welfare Party for challenging the secular regime.

He was unanimously elected as head of a successor party, Felicity, at a 
party
congress in Ankara.

Erbakan's return is not likely to change the balance in Turkish 
politics. The Felicity
party failed to garner enough support to enter parliament in November 
elections.

Most of Erbakan's former dynamic and reformist lawmakers deserted 
Felicity to form
the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party which claimed a 
landslide victory
in the elections last year.

While the 76-year-old Erbakan represents the old guard, the newer 
generation of the
Islamic movement largely supports the younger, charismatic Prime 
Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan and many of the founders of his Justice and 
Development
once belonged to Erbakan's banned party.

Still, Erbakan, a skilled and an experienced politician, is expected to 
reorganize
Felicity. He is replacing Recai Kutan, a soft-spoken figure. Despite his 
ban from
politics, Erbakan has remained highly influential in Felicity.

Erbakan briefly served as prime minister until the military pressured 
him out of
power in 1997.

The secular establishment is extremely sensitive about attempts to 
increase the
profile of Islam in the country.

Erdogan insists that his party does not seek a pro-Islamic agenda.

Meanwhile, the main pro-secular oppos ition Republican People's Party 
accused the
government of trying to change the weekly holiday day from Sunday to 
Friday -- like in
many Islamic countries -- by adopting a new law, several newspapers 
reported
Sunday.

The accusation comes a week after Turkey's top civilian and military 
leaders urged
the government to protect Turkey's secular state amid signs of rising 
tension
between the secular establishment and the Islamic-rooted governing party.

The military, which considers itself the guardian of Turkey's 
secularism, has carried
out three coups since 1960.

------

9) The Honeymoon Is Over for Turkish Government
Los Angeles Times
By Amberin Zaman
May 8, 2003

ISTANBUL, Turkey  / Six months ago, voters angered by decades of 
corruption and mismanagement swept the novice Justice and Development 
Party into office, hoping that this nation's first single-party 
government
in 15 years could end a recession that had left 2 million people jobless.

Despite qualms over the party's Islamist roots, Western-oriented 
business leaders welcomed the
result. Financial markets soared, interest rates fell and this 
predominantly Muslim country of 67
million people seemed ready to rise to its economic potential.

But foreign policy setbacks and rising tensions between the new 
government and the nation's
armed forces have eroded much of that optimism.

"Today there are few signs that they can fix the economy or that they 
have even devised a policy
to do so," said Cuneyt Ulsever, a liberal economist and commentator for 
the newspaper
Hurriyet.

Friction With the West

Gloom has spread across boardrooms here in the country's financial 
capital since parliament
rejected a bill that would have enabled the United States to deploy 
combat troops in Turkey for
the attack on Iraq.

Turks opposed to the war were delighted by the March 1 vote, but 
relations with the country's
most powerful ally were badly damaged. So were Turkey's finances when 
the Bush
administration withdrew $6 billion in conditional grants that would have 
helped cushion the
effects of the war next door.

Any hope that the loss would be offset by financial help from European 
nations that also
opposed the war dimmed when the government refused in March to sign off 
on a United Nations
plan to reunite the island of Cyprus. The island is divided between 
Greek Cypriot and Turkish
Cypriot governments. European leaders saw Turkey's rebuff as an obstacle 
to its bid to join the
European Union, which has accepted Cyprus' Greek government as a member.

Turkey's isolation over Iraq and Cyprus has "limited the room for 
maneuver on the economy,"
said a senior Western diplomat in Ankara, the Turkish capital. "This has 
sharply reduced their
capacity to deliver much this year and next."

"We were counting on the [U.S.] cash to roll over our debt," said Reha 
Denemec, a Justice and
Development lawmaker and advisor to the government on economic policy. 
"Losing it was a big
blow."

Turkey's total debt stands at $200 billion. With $93.4 billion worth of 
debt repayments due this
year, "the chief worry is whether the government can continue to repay 
its debt by successfully
lowering interest rates," said Atif Cezairli, the Istanbul-based head of 
research for the Dutch
bank ING.

That, in turn, hinges on whether the government can rebuild confidence 
in the markets.

"The upside of the crisis with America is that it's forcing the 
government to learn to stand on its
own feet," said Mustafa Koc, chairman of Turkey's largest industrial 
conglomerate, Koc
Holdings.

Strapped for Cash

The government has felt obliged to abandon some populist campaign 
promises. By agreeing to
raise taxes and slash public spending, it convinced the International 
Monetary Fund late last
month to disburse a long-delayed $703-million loan that is part of a 
three-year bailout package
worth $16 billion.

And despite the chill in ties, the Bush administration has invited 
Turkey to bid for contracts to
rebuild Iraq and has secured congressional approval for a $1-billion 
grant to shore up the
Turkish economy. The funds can be used to leverage loans totaling $8 
billion.

"The Turks didn't ask for the money; we offered it," a U.S. official 
said. "We simply can't afford
to let Turkey sink at this time."

The relatively quick end of the war has boosted expectations that tens 
of thousands of Western
tourists who had canceled bookings for vacations in Turkey will come 
after all, bringing needed
foreign currency.

"Those who predicted disaster have been proven wrong," Prime Minister 
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
said recently, following news that annual interest rates had fallen back 
to a postelection low of
around 50%.

He may have spoken too soon. Latent tension between the ruling party and 
the armed forces,
self-appointed guardians of Turkey's secularist traditions, is rising to 
the surface, threatening the
kind of political instability that has plagued the country in the past.

Senior military commanders failed to show up at a recent ceremony after 
learning that the
parliament speaker's wife would be there in a traditional Muslim head 
scarf, in defiance of a ban
on such religious wear at public functions.

The armed forces have seized power directly three times in the last four 
decades and helped
force Turkey's first Islamist-led government to resign in 1997 on the 
thinly supported charge that
it was seeking to impose religious rule.

Military commanders are unswayed by Erdogan's more recent disavowal of 
his previously
outspoken Islamist beliefs. They are alarmed by the recent appointment 
of scores of his allegedly
Islamist cronies to key government posts, including the presidency of 
Turkey's largest state-run
bank.

"Another standoff between the army and the politicians may not bring 
down the government," a
European diplomat said, "but it will certainly kill any remaining hopes 
of economic recovery in
the near term."

----

10) The simmering tensions in Turkish polity
Asia Times
K Gajendra Singh
May 10, 2003

Tensions building up between Turkey's secular elite, led by its
powerful armed forces, and the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP), which has Islamic roots, ever since the latter's
electoral triumph last November, have up to now remained under
check. This was because of Turkey's preoccupation with more
important matters, such as an admission date into the Europe
Union, a United Nations-led attempt to resolve the Cyprus problem
and the United States efforts to persuade Turkey to join in the war
against Iraq.

With these issues now either resolved or in limbo, the first battle
lines between the two sides were drawn on April 23 when President
Ahmet Sezer, a former head of the Constitutional Court, and the top
military brass led by General Hilmi Ozkok, refused to attend a
reception at parliament house hosted by its speaker, Bulent Arinc
of the AKP, to mark National Sovereignty and Children's Day, as
hostess Munnever Arinc planned to wear a Muslim head scarf. The
opposition, left of the center People's Republican Party (RPP), also
boycotted the reception. A last-minute announcement that Mrs
Arinc would not attend the reception came too late.

Since the establishment of the secular republic in 1923, Ottoman
and Islamic dresses have been forbidden in public places. Many an
Islamist women has lost her job or place in university, and some
women their seats in parliament, for defying this regulation.

On April 30, a statement issued after a meeting of Turkey's National
Security Council (NSC), underlined secularism as one of the basic
pillars of the Turkish Republic. Reiterating that its "vigilant
protection cannot be over-emphasized", it urged the AKP
government to protect the secular state. The NSC is Turkey's
highest policy-making body and is composed of the chief of general
staff (CGS) of the armed forces and top military commanders, the
prime minister and his senior colleagues and is chaired by the
president of the republic. The CGS is next in protocol after the
prime minister and forms one of the three centers of power, along
with the president.

In 1997, Turkey's first-ever Islamist prime minister, Najemettin
Erbakan, then heading a coalition government with a secular party,
was made to resign by the armed forces for his failure to curb
growing Islamic fundamentalism. In 1971, the military members of
the NSC had forced premier Suleiman Demirel to resign for his
failure to implement land and other radical reforms and curb left-right
strife. The military also intervened directly in 1960 and 1980, when
politicians had brought the country to an impasse.

But after cleaning up the mess created by the politicians and
getting a new constitution in place, the armed forces, self-styled
custodians of Kemal Ataturk's legacy of secularism, as usual,
returned to the barracks. Ataturk had forged the secular republic
from the ashes of the Ottoman empire after its defeat in World War
I.

Arinc, a maverick politician, blotted his copybook earlier when, in a
defiant gesture soon after the elections, was accompanied by his
scarf-wearing wife to see the Turkish president off on a diplomatic
mission. This was noted with concern by the Pashas (as the
military brass is called in Turkey)as well as the secular elite.
Recently, another minister's turbaned wife turned out to receive the
Iranian vice president and his delegation. Then the men and the
ladies went to different reception rooms, a practice frowned on by
the Westernized secular elite. Wives of AKP leaders, like Prime
Minister Recep Tayep Erdogan (even when he was the mayor of
Istanbul) , Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and others avoid attending
state functions.

The leadership believe that women are "flowers and must find
fulfillment at home". Apart from the clash over the wearing of head
scarves and long body covering dresses, other differences that have
cropped up between the two sides are; the appointment of the
AKP's cadre with Islamic leanings to official positions, a plan to
amend the Higher Education Board law and proposed radical
changes in the constitution, even making it presidential. Recently,
the Foreign Ministry sent a circular to its embassies abroad to
"support the National View Organizations and the Fethullah Gulen
schools". These have an Islamist agenda. The AKP also wants to
consolidate and expand its vote. Its backers are upwardly mobile
conservative trading and industrial classes from central Anatolian
towns such as Kayseri, Konya and beyond, who want a share in
the economic cake. This will clash with the interests of the
established supporters of the secular establishment.

Some AKP leaders have also publicly criticized the armed forces'
annual dismissal of officers with Islamic proclivities and
connections, a practice that has been in place since the
establishment of the republic. The armed forces have enjoyed
autonomy in internal matters and are very sensitive about it. Many a
time Abdullah Gul, a moderate, has tried to smooth differences, but
the AKP's attempts to strengthen its position in the establishment,
help its supporters and challenge the established secular norms
have been carried on stealthily.

All these matters were discussed vigorously at the April 30 NSC
meeting, which lasted seven-and-half hours. Prime Minister
Erdogan, who spoke most of the time on behalf of the civilians and
President Sezer, had frank discussions on the question of army
appointments and other matters.

However, on one subject both the AKP government and the armed
forces agreed - not allowing the US to use bases for its troops in
southeast Turkey. The motion, which had the full support of the
government, but with 90 percent of Turks opposed to a war on
Muslim Iraq and huge crowds protesting outside parliament building
and elsewhere, failed to pass muster when nearly 100 AKP
deputies voted with the opposition.

Not sure of being able to garner enough support for a second vote
and even afraid that the party might split apart, Erdogan did not dare
take up the motion again in parliament, despite relentless US
pressure and an attractive economic package said to be worth over
US$30 billion. Turkey finally agreed to grant the US the use of its
airspace only, that too with some conditions.

With Iraqi defenses inexplicably collapsing so easily, many in
Turkey, especially the secular establishment, now rue the decision
not to go along fully with the US. They would have had around
40,000 troops in north Iraq, with a say in the future shape of Iraq,
notably over possible Kurdish autonomy. The Turkish armed forces,
with half a century of association with the US defense
establishment, left the decision to the politicians at the time of the
vote, but later publicly extended its full support to the government
motion.

Turkey's November 3 election results had shocked many in the
West after they delivered a quixotic two-thirds majority (365 out of
550 ) to the AKP, which had received only a third (34 percent) of the
total votes cast. The only other party to cross the 10 percent
threshold and enter parliament was the left of the center RPP,
which won nearly a third of the seats. Thus other parties remain
unrepresented, but independents, polling only 1 percent of the
votes, won eight parliamentary seats. Although the AKP was the
front runner in pre-election polls, even its leadership was surprised
by the magnitude of the windfall. A large number of new and
inexperienced AKP deputies have entered parliament, many friends
and officials when Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul.

In 1995, Necmettin Erbakan's Islamic Welfare party won 158 seats
even though it only polled 21.3 percent of the votes. With great
difficulty he formed a coalition government in 1996, which was made
to resign the following year. The veteran Erbakan established the
first "Islamist" party in Turkey in 1969. It was called the National
Order Party, hinting at Islamic order. When it was closed in 1971
after military intervention, he named its successor the National
Salvation Party ( like the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria).

When that was banned, too, along with other parties after the 1980
military takeover, Erbakan named the next party the Welfare Party
(zakat for welfare). After it was closed by law, Erbakan founded the
Virtue Party. When that was also closed and a ban put on Erbakan
himself from politics in 2001, Erdogan, Gul and other younger and
moderate leaders of the Welfare formed the conservative AKP. They
have repeatedly proclaimed that it is not a religious party. Erbakan's
rightist followers have formed the Saadet Party led by Recai Kutan,
a proxy for Erbakan (it won 2.5 percent of the votes in the recent
elections ).

The outgoing ruling coalition parties were decimated, each getting
much less than 10 percent of the votes. They were entirely
responsible for the result with their mis-governance which saw a
record 10 percent fall in Turkey's GDP in the preceding year, adding
millions more to the ranks of the unemployed. The elections also
saw the exit of the last of the dinosaurs, outgoing prime minister
Bulent Ecevit, who along with Demirel, Erbakan and Turgut Ozal, all
nearly 80 years old, had dominated Turkish political life over the
past 40 years.

The quirky election results are an excellent demonstration of the
maxim that errors tend to add up in the same direction. Turkey's
d'Hont electoral system, based on the German pattern with a very
high threshold, was selected to provide stability to governments in a
highly fragmented polity. Apart from the fond wish that each party
leader has of seeing others not crossing the 10 percent threshold,
there appears a tacit understanding not to lower it to 5 percent as
Kurdish parties, on the basis of their strength in the southeast, who
consistently manage to cross the 5 percent mark, can be kept out
of power. Kurds form over 20 percent of the population, with many
supporting left of center parties.

The Pashas were clearly unhappy with the election results. After
waiting for some time, they declared, "We will continue to protect
the republic against any threat, particularly the fundamentalist and
separatist [Kurdish] ones." Erdogan had been banned from
contesting the elections because of a 1999 conviction for reciting a
poem at a political rally which said that "Minarets are our bayonets,
domes are our helmets, mosques are our barracks, believers are
our soldiers." To begin with, both Sezer and the Pashas expressed
opposition to amending the constitution to enable Erdogan to stand
for bye-elections and take over as prime minister from Abdullah Gul.
But later they relented.

To soothe the anxiety felt in the West over the AKP's massive
victory, Erdogan and other party leaders went on a charm offensive,
reiterating that the AKP was a conservative and not an Islamic
party. Its leadership had no connection with the banned Islamic
Welfare party of which they were once members. They did not even
meet Erbakan now, they said. No changes were planned in Turkey's
secular dispensation. They redoubled their efforts to take Turkey
into the European Union (unsuccessfully) and stood by the
International Monetary Fund's program to sort out Turkey's dire
economic problems.

The West and the US were relieved to see the AKP's
English-speaking leadership in Western suits (having seen the rise
of Islamic parties in Pakistan with its fierce-looking bearded mullahs
in last year's elections while many AKP ministers are highly
educated with backgrounds in economics and management.) It
helped the AKP establish its credentials as a conservative party
with which Europe and the US could do business. Further legal
reforms that have to be carried out in Turkey to meet EU norms will
usher in greater freedom of expression, specially for the Kurds, and
improve the country's human rights record. The changes will make it
difficult for the secular establishment to ban the AKP and other
parties with Islamic inclinations or those promoting the Kurdish
cause. EU leaders have openly said that the military's role in
Turkish politics must be reduced to qualify it for membership.

Tussles between the armed forces and religious political parties are
nothing new in the Islamic world. In 1992, the Islamic Salvation
Front in Algeria, on the verge of electoral victory and bringing in
Sharia law and doing away with elections, was banned, leading to
violence that is still smoldering. There is a constant battle between
Islamist parties and the armed forces in Indonesia, Bangladesh and
Pakistan.

Since 1923 Turkey has had a laic (secular) constitution, which,
according to many, is more Jacobin than genuinely secular. The
country is a member of the Council of Europe, NATO, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and it
has a customs agreement with the European Union. But with its 67
million Muslims, Turkey is unlikely to be admitted into the EU any
time soon, which is basically a Christian club. At the Copenhagen
EU summit in December last year, France's former president Valery
Giscard d'Estaing said that admitting Turkey "would be the end of
the European Union" because Turkey has "a different culture, a
different approach, a different way of life - it is not a European
country".

Preceded by modernizing and Westernizing reforms during the last
century of the Ottoman rule and nearly 80 years after Ataturk's
sweeping reforms, Turkey's experiment in democracy goes wobbly
from time to time. Ironically, it is invariably put back on the rails by
the armed forces.

A Muslim majority state (99 percent) it is closest to a modern
secular democracy in the Muslim world. Its half a million strong
armed forces is a stabilizing factor in a turbulent region. But Turkey
is now tending to look more to the east after the runaway success
of the AKP. For stronger economic and political linkages with the
east, AKP leaders have visited Turkic-speaking states in Central
Asia, and also Iran, Syria (in spite of US frowns) and other
neighbors recently.

The US wants other Muslim countries in the region and elsewhere
to become secular democracies, so it will be keen that Turkey
serve as a good, stable example. From their viewpoint, they
certainly don't want the armed forces to have to intervene once again.

K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as
ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to
that, he served terms as a

-----

11) Politician-opposed cover-up
Secular government, fearing an Islamic uprising, bans wearing of 
religion-mandated scarves by women.
Baltimore Sun
By Stephan Faris
May 9, 2003

KONYA, Turkey - Before boarding the commuter train home to the city
center, students at Selcuk University buy their tickets at one of two
identical white, plastic booths. Even when the line gets long, only a few
head to the second one. Outfitted with a mirror, it has been converted 
into
a changing room for women prohibited by campus authorities from
wearing their Muslim head scarf.

Irem, 21, a psychology student who for fear of reprisals declines to give
her full name, steps inside and comes out with her head covered. Between
two fingers she pinches a wig, holding it away from her body as she would
a dead rat.

"When I wear this, I don't feel good," she says. "It disturbs me."

For devout women seeking an education or a government job, wearing a
wig offers a way around Turkey's ban on head scarves, a piece of fabric
Turkey's fiercely secular establishment sees as a symbol of revolt and 
the
first stumble on a slippery slope to political Islam.

Though roughly two-thirds of Turkish women are said to cover their
heads, the scarf is banned in parliament, government offices, 
universities
and secondary schools. For the devout, the edict forces a choice between
a government job and obeying Islam's edicts, between education and
faith.

In Iran, women may be fighting to bare their heads. In next-door Turkey,
they are demanding they be allowed to cover it.

In the meantime, the wig offers a compromise.

"People are trying to find a solution," says Gulten Vural, 22, a 
saleswoman
at Renaissance Peruka, a small wig store in central Istanbul. During the
peak season, before schools begin, she sells about four wigs a day, 
mostly
to women seeking a conservative appearance. Their needs are specific:
Their wigs are usually brown with bangs and always long enough to cover
the neck. As wearing someone else's hair is considered a sin, they must 
be
synthetic.

"It has to be modern," says Vural, "and at the same time not flashy."

Though Necla Nazir, a famous singer and actress who became
increasingly devout in the later stages of her career, has begun 
wearing a
wig as a substitute for her scarf, most religious women view them as a
humiliation.

Under a conservative interpretation of Islam, there is only a single way 
to
cover your head, says Zeynep Altinok, a clerk at a store selling
conservative clothing. A scarf can be tied only in a certain fashion. 
Wigs
are certainly not allowed.

"Modifying it is not Islam," Altinok says. "It's just being 
double-faced."

Indeed, not all women faced with the choice choose to wear a wig. Since
the government began enforcing the ban in universities five years ago,
about 30,000 women have dropped out of school or chosen not to take
the entrance exam, according to Mazlumder, a Turkish human rights
organization focusing on religious freedom. Countless others simply bare
their head during classes and put the scarf back on as they leave. Those
who can afford it study abroad.

"It is forbidden to drink on campus, but when I sit under the trees, I 
see
beer cans," Irem says. "But when I try to enter campus with my head
scarf, they stop me."

On the other side are women like Ayse, 26, a graduate student who
declined to give her last name for fear of being identified with such a
charged issue. Though she considers herself a devout Muslim, she wears
the head scarf only when praying. She fears the issue is being used by
religious extremists seeking to gather momentum to transform her country
into a fundamentalist state.

"I don't think that giving this liberty will result in the betterment of 
women
in Turkey," she says, referring to trying to regain the right to wear a 
scarf.
"In the long run, these 'individual liberties' could end up in a 
situation
where women who don't want to wear the head scarf have to protest in
the streets."

The debate has taken on new life since November's elections, when a
party of former Islamists clinched a dominating victory. During the
campaign, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chairman of the Justice and
Development, or AK, Party, and now prime minister, made a theme of
"human rights," which to conservative Muslims means an end to
restrictions on religion such as the head scarf ban.

The wives of many party leaders wear the scarf. Erdogan has sent both
his daughters to study in the United States so they can continue to wear
theirs. And when the new parliamentary speaker, Bulent Arinc, brought
his head-scarved wife to an official function, it caused an uproar in the
secular press.

The issue could easily worsen the AK Party's uneasy relationship with the
military, a powerful, pro-secular political force. And the party - which 
has
had its hands full with an application to the European Union, a crumbling
economy and uneasiness over the war in neighboring Iraq - has since
downplayed it. The party spokesman, Murat Mercan, did not return
phone calls for this article.

Erdogan has had to step lightly. He needed to avoid antagonizing
secularists before the special election in March, when he was elected to
parliament and became prime minister.

"It is now time for social solidarity," Erdogan told reporters during the
height of the scandal over Arinc's wife. "We have great tasks to
accomplish and there is no good in discussing such specific matters."

The scarf prohibition - which is especially unpopular in rural areas 
where
the AK Party is strongest - promises to be a challenge for the new
government.

"If they cannot solve this problem, then the Turkish people won't give
them their vote like they did last time," says Gulden Sonmez, 33, vice
president of the Istanbul branch of Mazlumder.

-----

12) Turkey takes a dive in the fortunes of war
Financial Times
By Ian Bremmer
May 12 2003

Investors looking around the world to identify who stands to gain from 
the war in Iraq
are in for some surprises. Russia looks good. Turkey doesn't.

That is different from pre-war expectations. Russia's decision to join 
France and
Germany in opposition to the war surprised many in the Bush 
administration,
rekindling Cold War voices that said "you can't trust the Russians". 
Relations between
the two countries cooled as the war unfolded, with Russian technology - 
and
technicians - facilitating some of the few losses experienced by US 
forces on the
ground. Russia's continued support for Iran's nuclear programme has made 
matters
worse. Hopes were pinned on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent 
trip to
Moscow, but President Vladimir Putin chose to focus on the so far 
undiscovered Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction and rebuffed Blair's request to abandon 
Iraqi sanctions
at the UN.

There will be no quick return to Mr Bush's ranch for Mr Putin. But US 
frustrations with
Russia are short-term. The Bush administration views foreign policy 
through a
national security lens - and in the war on terror Russia is a strategic 
partner.
Washington receives more and better counterterrorist intelligence from 
Moscow than
anywhere except Israel. The significance of this, anchored by regular 
and high-level
relations between the intelligence organisations of both countries, is 
difficult to
overestimate.

Russia is also important as NATO focuses on soft security issues and 
protection
from rogue states. Europe does not have much interest in North Korea. 
Moscow does,
and in an escalating conflict Putin will be called on by Washington to 
act.

Russia's oil is at least as important. Russia, the world's largest 
producer, is
America's first option to diversify global energy supply away from the 
Middle East - a
key policy goal of the Bush administration.

Finally, unlike Mr Schroeder and Mr Chirac, Putin has a functional 
relationship with Mr
Bush. Through the worst of their troubles, the two spoke regularly. Next 
month's
summit in St Petersburg will bring the two presidents together again, and
expectations for the meeting deserve to be high.

Last year Turkey seemed in a secure position. As the sole member of NATO 
in the
region and a strong US ally, the pending war in Iraq only enhanced 
Turkey's
importance to the US. Times have changed. An irony of the war on Iraq is 
that the
most democratic of Islamic states caused the greatest trouble for 
Washington.
Washington relied on the strength of its relations with Turkey's most 
anti-democratic
(and secular) institution, the Turkish military. That was before the 
fateful vote on March
1, when the Turkish parliament rejected the US request to use Turkish 
bases for the
war on Iraq. Turkey's initial request to the US Treasury department for 
$90bn to secure
its full co-operation (40 per cent of annual Turkish gross domestic 
product) hardly
smoothed the way.

Unfortunately, the problems of Turkey have as much to do with changing 
geopolitics of
the region as with Prime Minister Erdogan and his party's unwillingness 
to go along
with US strategy. Despite the Kurdish issue in the north, Iraqi 
stability plays against
Turkey's importance to the US. The more smoothly the state-building 
process
proceeds in a new Iraq with a large US military presence, pro-Western 
emigres at the
helm and a pro-Israel foreign policy, the less weight Turkey carries as 
a strategic ally
of the United States. And with Saddam Hussein no longer a threat, the US 
military
presence in Turkey will diminish. This, together with the reduction of 
US troops in
Germany and Saudi Arabia, makes likely an announcement on force 
reductions in
Turkey in coming months. It is hard to imagine America's reliance on 
Turkey
remaining intact.

To make matters worse, tense relations between the US and "old Europe" 
have
raised a question over those aspiring European Union member states that 
played a
supportive role in the war. Anyone who believed Turkey's EU accession 
was on a
smooth path had to revise his position by the time the second UN 
resolution was shot
down and Mr Chirac wagged a finger at the "irresponsible" East 
Europeans. Turkey
was always a stretch to be considered a member of Europe proper. 
Seemingly
benefiting from both NATO and the EU, Turkey is now positioned to fall 
foul of both.

As for Turkey's immediate payments schedule, the government can ride a 
small
post-war euphoric trend and should not fail to fulfil its obligations 
over the coming
months. But if Turkey's external balances are to benefit from its 
expanded scope for
trade with Iraq in the near term, its relationship with the US will have 
to improve. That, I
fear, is not on the cards.

The author is president of Eurasia Group and senior fellow at the World 
Policy Institute

-----

13) In Turkey, childhoods vanish in weary harvests
Desire to join Europe could spur Turkey's efforts to reduce ranks of its 
1.6 million child laborers.
By Richard Mertens
Christian Science Monitor
May 08, 2003

REYHANLI, TURKEY - Eleven-year-old Zara Cigay exudes weary determination 
as she works her way down a row of cotton plants on a hot morning in 
Turkey's Amuq Valley. Hands blackened from the plant oils, the 
pony-tailed girl pushes through the waist-high foliage, ripping white 
tufts from their husks and stuffing them into the cloth sack she trails 
behind her.

Two brothers, aged 6 and 7, work nearby. Around the field, other 
children, barely visible in the sea of green, toil alongside their 
parents.

Each year, migrant families pour into the Amuq Valley, in southern 
Turkey, to pick cotton. They pitch their canvas tents all over the wide, 
flat expanse and spend up to two months laboring from dawn to dusk. When 
the harvest is over, some go home, but many move on to other work, 
taking their children with them. "Wherever there is a job, we do it," 
says Huseyin Cigay, Zara's great-uncle, speaking for about 60 people 
from the same village who work together. "The children work with us 
everywhere."

The Turkish government says that 1.6 million children aged from 6 to 17 
perform wage labor, two thirds of
them in rural areas.

But Turkey's desire to become part of Europe could spur ongoing 
initiatives to move these children from
workplaces to the classroom. Ankara's efforts to join the European 
Union - which has voiced concern about Turkey's human rights record - 
include a commitment to reduce child labor. (The EU could decide in 
December 2004 whether Turkey is ready to start membership negotiations.)

The children picking cotton in the Amuq are part of a vast problem 
afflicting mainly poor and developing
countries. The International Labor Organization in Geneva estimates that 
246 million children labor
worldwide, 110 million of them younger than 12. Most work in 
agriculture. Although 132 countries, including Turkey, have signed an 
international convention to eliminate child labor, experts say the use 
of minor workers is increasing as international trade expands and 
countries compete to produce inexpensive
products for global markets.

"It's very much related to the world economy and to the education and 
attitudes of parents," says Sule
Caglar, a Turkish national who works for the ILO on child-labor issues. 
"Poverty is a major reason, but not
the only reason. Another problem is a lack of educational facilities and 
quality teachers. In most of the world we don't have education 
facilities that attract and retain children.

Most of the cotton pickers in the Amuq Valley are Kurds and Arabs from 
poor mountain villages in eastern Turkey. They come out of desperation, 
they say, travelling hundreds of miles by bus and truck. "We have no 
other opportunity for earning money," says Mahmut Kurt, who came with 
seven members of his family.

Everyone works who can. Mothers carry infants into the fields on their 
backs, and children are expected to lend a hand by the time they are 6. 
Children like Kurt's 7-year-old son, Adalet, can pick only a fraction of 
what an adult can, but every little bit helps, his father says.

The pay is meager by Western standards. A typical adult picks about 220 
pounds a day, filling a
refrigerator-sized burlap bag and earning between $4.50 and $6.25. With 
everyone working, many families
expect to leave the Amuq with about $600 - enough, they say, to pay the 
debts they have accumulated
back home and to keep them coming back year after year. Many adults have 
been coming to the Amuq
since they were children themselves.

Their work, and the work of others like them, is indispensable to the 
Turkish economy. Cheap labor enables Turkey's huge textile industry to 
sell clothing abroad at low prices. Landowners, too, need the migrants.

"The workers in the towns around here are not enough," says Esref 
Karaca, who grows cotton on 2,000
acres. The children worry him, however. "If there is an accident in the 
field, breaking legs or arms, I have to deal with that problem myself," 
he says.

Experts do not object to all child labor. The ILO's conventions allow 
children to work on family farms, for
example. But experts say commercial agriculture harms children because 
it forces them to work long hours, exposes them to pesticides and 
dangerous machinery, and keeps them out of school.

Turkish law requires children to attend school until they are 14. But 
many children picking cotton go to
school only two months a year, usually in winter when there are no crops 
to plant or pick. Their principal
education is in the back-breaking work of the fields.

Hanum Kuzu, a freckle-faced 9-year-old, is picking for her third season. 
"It's very hard work, and I am very
small," she says shyly, a shock of hair falling across her sunburned 
face.

Seeing her pause, an older brother two rows away rebukes her, and she 
plunges back into her work. "When she doesn't work, I'm hitting her," 
explains her father, Hasan Kuzu, smiling genially. "I hit her just five 
minutes ago."

Turkey has had some success in reducing child labor simply by increasing 
the number of years of
compulsory schooling. It also has worked with nongovernmental 
organizations on small projects aimed at
getting urban children off the streets and into schools.

But rural children have been relatively neglected. Turkish law forbids 
children under 15 to work, but exempts agriculture. The Turkish Ministry 
of Labor has drafted a law that would forbid child labor on farms, but 
it is not clear when parliament will begin deliberations on it.

The government is considering raising again the number of years of 
compulsory education.

But no one expects legislation alone to solve the deeper problems, like 
poverty, that underlie child labor.
"The causes of child labor are very difficult," says Erhan Batur, head 
of the Child Labor Unit in the Ministry of Labor and Social Services in 
Ankara. "We think it will take some time to find solutions to the 
problem."

The Labor Ministry and nongovernmental organizations plan to launch a 
joint project in the fall near Adana to reduce the number of migrant 
children working in that Mediterranean region by, among other things, 
offering mobile schools.

For many children, the Amuq is only one stop on a yearly round that can 
include digging sugar beets in
central Turkey and picking hazelnuts at the Black Sea.

"I hate this work," says Ahmet Cigay, straightening and squinting across 
the sun-drenched cotton field. His daughter Zara, picking nearby, does 
not stop and says nothing.

----

14) Orhan Pamuk: To have and have not
Financial Times
By Robert Cottrell
May 9 2003

The view from the terrace offers a vision of earthly riches so sweeping 
and extravagant
that if the Devil were trying again to tempt Christ after 40 days in the 
wilderness, I
would recommend his doing it in Istanbul. The city seethes and glitters 
for miles on
all sides, its hills laden with palaces and mosques and gilded domes. 
Its lights
dance, reflected on the dark waters of the Bosporus below. Hong Kong or 
San
Francisco may be as picturesque, but neither can rival Istanbul for 
sheer drama. Here
two continents begin and end. On the near side of the Bosporus lies 
Europe. On the
far side lies Asia. And Turkey straddles the space between them, 
geographically,
historically and intellectually.

The terrace, not far from Taksim Square in the heart of the city, 
belongs to Orhan
Pamuk, widely considered Turkey's greatest living novelist. The view is 
one great
delight of this flat that he keeps for writing. The other is the mass of 
books lining the
walls, thousands of them, roughly arranged by topics from Japanese 
fiction to French
philosophy. I think for a moment that Pamuk has all my favourite books, 
then I realise
he probably has everybody's favourite books.

He is a tall man, a fit-looking 50, dressed casually in the American 
fashion,
soft-spoken and courteous. His grandfather made a fortune early last 
century building
railways for the Ataturk regime. His father, who died just a few months 
ago, spent the
fortune living well, investing badly, and translating French poetry - a 
lifestyle choice
that Pamuk clearly admires, even though it left him less rich than he 
might have been.
John Updike, the American novelist, has compared him with Proust. The 
analogy is
one that Pamuk himself also makes, a little wistfully, as we talk.

Western readers know Pamuk best for My Name is Red, an intricate and 
seductive
murder mystery set among 16th-century Ottoman miniaturist painters, 
which was
published in English in 2001. The plot is a fine weave of theological 
disputes, court
etiquette and miniaturist techniques, shot through with sex and 
violence. The critic
Maureen Freely called the book "almost perfect... All it needs now is 
the Nobel prize".

He is working on a book about Istanbul that will be part-memoir and 
part-meditation.
He wants to test his own sense of the city, where he was born and grew 
up, against
the Istanbul that others have remembered and imagined down the 
centuries. After that
he has a novel planned, "about the idea of museums, collections, the 
attachment to
objects and the loss of love".

But if all this sounds a little abstract, a little bookish, there is 
another side to Pamuk, a
political engagement. He made headlines in 1999, and risked prosecution, 
when he
signed an international petition urging the Turkish government to give 
members of the
country's Kurdish minority "constitutional guarantees" of their rights, 
and so rescue
Turkey from the "shame" of past repressive policies. In the last five 
years, says
Pamuk, he has become "more and more political". Attacks on his liberal 
views in the
Turkish press have only made him "more angry and more involved", he 
says. "It is a
son-of-a-bitch kind of anger and it turns out to be part of your life."

An article of his which sticks in my mind is one he wrote in September 
2001 soon
after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. He describes 
meeting a
neighbour on the street, an elderly man, who says to him: "Sir, have you 
seen, they
have bombed America? They did the right thing!" Pamuk muses on what 
could prompt
an old man in Istanbul to condone terror in New York, or a Palestinian 
to admire the
Taliban, and he arrives at a formulation that does not quite blame the 
west, but which
assigns it a contributory negligence. The basic problem, he says, is 
"not Islam, nor
what is idiotically described as the clash between east and west, nor 
poverty itself. It
is the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation, the failure to be 
understood,
and the inability of such people to make their voices heard." The west 
has not tried
enough "to understand the damned of the world".

Pamuk, who professes no religion, has made his own bid since then to 
understand
Islamic fundamentalism by writing a political novel about its place in 
provincial Turkey
today. His aim, he says, was to "understand what a fundamentalist is, in 
his own
terms. Not why he is so right, but why he is so angry." The subject is a 
highly sensitive
one for Turkey, which has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, but has 
proclaimed
itself a secular state since 1923. The government allows freedom of 
worship, but
keeps a close eye on it through a Directorate of Religious Affairs, and 
clamps down
smartly on what it regards as signs of fundamentalism - such as the 
wearing of
headscarves by women, which is forbidden in official buildings.

This latest novel, called Snow, has sold 140,000 copies at home since 
publication
last year, and is now being translated into English. It made him enemies 
on two
fronts. First were "the ultra-secularists, who were not pleased to see 
me going into
the inner [thoughts] of religious fundamentalists," he says. "They did 
not want to see
Islamists as human beings, they wanted to see them as fanatics, midway to
barbarians." Then there were the Islamists, angered that he gave his 
religious
characters an active sexual life. "They said, 'How can an Islamist, a 
true believer, have
sex outside marriage?'" The Islamists, like Marxists before them, 
"wanted writers to
portray an idealised version of people".

Pamuk accepts cheerfully enough that he makes an easy target for 
critics. "I have my
subscriptions to the TLS and The New Yorker," he says, "while other 
people are more
limited here. My name is on the billboards. I am from the spoiled upper 
class. People
are very resentful."

But when it comes to the war in Iraq, at its height when we talk, Pamuk 
is very much in
tune with the popular mood. He thought it a dangerous mistake, as did 
everybody else
I met in Turkey, from a bus driver in Ankara to a professor of economics 
in Istanbul.
They saw the war as a foolish adventure promoted by a wilful US 
president, a US
government wanting Iraqi oil, and a US industrial sector hungry to 
profit from
reconstructing the country once the war was over. Saddam may be a bad 
man, they
say, but that did not give the US any right to depose him.

So far, so familiar. The same sort of criticisms could be heard almost 
everywhere in
the world at the time. But in Turkey they were voiced with a special 
anxiety. The
country's border with Iraq made it a front-line state in the war, 
exposed to stray bombs
and refugees. Ninety per cent of the public was appalled, according to 
Pamuk, when
the Turkish government seemed ready to join the US war effort in 
exchange for a big
enough package of US aid - many billions of dollars - which Turkey 
desperately
needed. That plan was scuppered unexpectedly by the parliament in 
Ankara, which
voted against letting US combat troops invade northern Iraq from Turkish 
soil.

Pamuk compares the US intervention in Iraq to a strong person "slapping" 
or
"insulting" a weak one: bad behaviour even when the strong person 
believes he has
been provoked. The US can do such a thing, he says, partly because it 
believes
Muslims are "lesser people, backward, stupid, lazy orientals who don't 
know about
things, who torment women. You have the feeling that one American life 
is more
important than thousands of these people. The justification of the war 
starts with
these things."

Reading my notes of the conversation later, I have to remind myself that 
Pamuk is an
outspoken admirer of western values, western culture, western democracy. 
He
welcomes globalisation, and Amazon.com cartons litter his floor. He 
believes the US
is a highly successful social and economic model. What he objects to is 
the manner
of exporting it. The US is becoming "fanatical" too, he believes. If the 
Americans would
only "take all the money they have spent on this war, and spend it like 
Soros has done
on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have 
wonderful
results."

He sees the divide widening between what he calls "this relentless 
civilisation of the
west, superior in arts, science, education" on one side, and "85 per 
cent of the human
race, with much lesser, disintegrating, unsuccessful civilisations" on 
the other. But he
dismisses the idea that the divide is mainly a religious one, even 
between the US and
Arab countries. "The Koran is a small part of it. It is not a text that 
makes this history, it
is history itself: the people, the land, the climate, the geography. The 
fact that there is
less democracy in the Middle East, that the Middle East is poor, these 
are things
shaped not by the Koran but by layers of history and of interaction with 
the west."

The real gulf, he says, is the material one, between wealth and poverty. 
The real
question is why it should have become such an acute problem now. The 
answer he
comes to is that global media have become so successful, so universal in 
projecting
images of western wealth, that the picture is getting "impossible to 
accept,
impossible to come to terms with" in poor countries. The poor have no 
comparable
means of celebrating their own culture, their own way of life, which 
might otherwise
give them solace.

They are left only with "material envy", says Pamuk, "it is inevitable, 
they want the
things the Americans have." So long as they lack those things, he feels, 
"the only
consolation for such a time is nationalism, past glories, the enjoyment 
of this or that
terrorist attack. They may know that ethically, morally, this is not 
right, but secretly they
enjoy it."

In an ideal world, I say, we might debate this, try to understand that 
envy of the east
and moderate the stereotypes of the west. But in the case of Iraq, the 
rich part of the
world believed the angry part of the world was posing a direct threat to 
it, and was
acting to block that threat. Not so, says Pamuk. In Iraq it is "the rich 
part of the world
making a direct, violent attack on the poor, disorganised part of the 
world". The west
may or may not be right to worry about dangers from "ruthless dictators" 
in the Middle
East, he says, but right now it is part of the west that is controlled 
by "a vulgar and
brutal and not very sophisticated ruler, Bush."

The other big Turkish worry about the war concerned the Kurds, whose 
communities
straddle the borderlands between eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The 
Turks feared
the war might lead to a Kurdish state in northern Iraq, and with it a 
new spur to
Kurdish separatism in eastern Turkey. Only four years have passed since 
the last
wave of guerrilla warfare subsided with the arrest of the Kurdish 
separatist leader
Abdullah Ocalan and the collapse of his movement, the Kurdistan Workers' 
Party, or
the PKK. The separatist campaign, and Turkey's brutal suppression of it, 
cost 30,000
lives, most of them Kurdish. It cast a long shadow over civil liberties 
and human
rights. It soured relations with the European Union so badly as to set 
back Turkey's
hopes of joining the EU by at least a decade. Nobody in Turkey, liberal 
or conservative,
wants to go back to those days.

Alternatively, there is Pamuk's approach, which has the merit of 
simplicity. "Kurds in
northern Iraq should have every right to decide for themselves what they 
want to do,"
he says, "and if they want to have a state that is their business." If 
Turkey fears a
contagion of separatism among its own Kurds, it should treat them more 
kindly and
so make them less restive. Besides, he adds, Turkey is a fragile country
economically, and "the geopolitics of a fragile country should be: 'I am 
polite to my
neighbours'."

I imagine Pamuk (pictured below) is polite to his neighbours too, even 
when they
applaud the knocking down of the World Trade Center. He loves Istanbul 
and
everything in it. While researching his new book he has studied 
engravings of the city,
and finds them full of "nationalistic and nostalgic sentiments", above 
all "the feeling of
melancholy that comes from loss of empire". He feels an echo there "of 
the decay of
my family, as it disintegrates from a big family with uncles and 
grandmothers to just
the four of us, parents and children, moving from big house to apartment 
building,
then on our different ways." The big house he knew as a baby was home to 
an
extended family of 12 or 14 people. Now, after a recent divorce, he 
lives alone.

We talk more about melancholy, and I begin to sense how he can admire 
the US so
much, while criticising it so strongly. "Countries without much history, 
or without much
sad history, are more naive," he says. "But in their naivety they are 
realists, they can
see their problems easily. Here we have lots of melancholy which blurs 
the vision and
which saps the energy to invent, to invest, to create."

Robert Cottrell has recently completed a spell as the FT's Moscow bureau 
chief

Orhan Pamuk's novels:

The White Castle
The Black Book
The New Life

(all three published in Faber's Threebies series at £12.99)

My Name is Red (Faber £7.99)
Snow (will appear in the UK in January 2004)

-----

15) Are Turkey's taboos stifling its creativity?
Reuters
By Nick Holdsworth
May 10, 2003

Istanbul - Turkey's biggest taboo - the latent threat of Islamic 
fundamentalism that
lurks behind its secular political face - is one that no local 
film-maker is willing to
address.

Talk to critics, directors and industry insiders and the issue is 
swiftly swept aside
either directly or euphemistically.

"This is an absolute taboo - no film-maker will touch this, it would be 
the kiss of
death," says one close observer of the scene.

A film-maker at a recent guest-only party thrown by the
Istanbul International Film Festival - where for the second
straight year a film touching upon Turkey's other forbidden
topic, Kurdish separatism, was cancelled after a culture ministry 
banning order -
says she is planning a project looking 20 or 30 years forward to a Turkey
transformed by Islamism. But in this environment - a terrace restaurant 
overlooking
the startling blue waters of the Bosporus - Islamic dogma seems a 
million miles
away.

A couple of days later, when approached for an interview in a more sober 
moment,
the director doesn't want to talk, dismissing questions with a terse: 
"I'll issue a press
release about it when I am ready."

The uneasy and difficult political balancing act the Turkish republic 
has performed
since its founding more than 80 years ago remains one sensitive to the 
slightest tilt.

The war in neighbouring Iraq, and the subsequent race by leading Islamic 
clerics for
the establishment of a religious government, has brought Turkey's latent 
tensions to
the fore. Indeed, Turkey's strategic position straddling Europe and 
Asia - secularism
and Islamism - has never been more important than now.

Alin Tasciyan, one of Turkey's leading film critics, herself a member of 
Turkey's
minority Christian Armenians, agrees that religion is a taboo for 
film-makers, but
thinks it has more to do with commercial realities than artistic or 
political
sensibilities.

"There have been films dealing with Islamic subjects," she
says over a cup of coffee at the city's famous old Egyptian
Bazaar. "Religious film-makers known as the 'white cinema'
have in the past made a number of very didactic films with
titles like How You Killed Us. These are really bad films in which the 
idea is to make
a point, not tell a story."

Those she says do work and successfully touch upon an issue that has a 
long
history are period pieces like Ziya Oztan's Abdulhamid Duserken (When 
Abdulhamid
Is Falling), which looks at the 1909 Islamic Fundamentalist uprising in 
Istanbul that
was brutally put down by the Turkish military.

The film's popularity is reflected in its box office figures - more than 
135 000
admissions in the past two weeks at 50 theatres across Turkey.

"This is a subtle approach, based on a well-known novel, and works 
because it
doesn't take a direct approach," says Tasciyan.

------

16) Greek, Turkish Planes Have Mock Dogfights
By THEODORA TONGAS
Associated Press
May 16, 2003

ATHENS, Greece -- Mock dogfights have erupted this week between Greek 
and Turkish jets in
disputed airspace over the Aegean Sea, undermining efforts between the 
two NATO allies to overcome
long-standing differences over air and sea boundaries and the divided 
island of Cyprus.

The dogfights occurred during a Greek air force exercise in the northern 
Aegean, though none of the planes opened fire. Turkey's military claimed 
Greek warplanes had harassed its jets on maneuvers in international 
airspace.

Greece on Thursday warned that the Turkish military's powerful influence 
could hurt its chances of eventually joining the European Union.

"(Turkey) must change the role of its armed forces and get away from its 
influence and its direct and indirect involvement in political issues," 
Foreign Minister George Papandreou said.

Greece -- the current president of the European Union -- on Wednesday 
lodged written complaints to NATO and the EU. Papandreou met in Brussels 
on Thursday with Turkish Foreign Abdullah Gul.

Turkey is seeking to start entry membership talks with the European 
Union in 2005 but has faced EU warnings that it must first carry out 
promises of political reform and improve its human rights record.

Greece has backed Turkey's bid, hoping to end decades of tension.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 111212 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.stir.ac.uk/pipermail/media-watch/attachments/20030606/760d0555/attachment.bin