The results of the Turkish elections of Jun. 7 have put an end to the suspense that has dominated national politics in the past three months. For the first time in this Asian republic’s history, a Kurdish party has succeeded in being elected to the legislature, with an impressive 15 percent of the seats available.

The breakthrough of the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) has radically changed the political landscape of Turkey, as it has come at the expense of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002. AKP has regressed in the latest contest by nine percentage points, from 49.8 percent in the 2011 elections to 40.86 percent.

The other two main contenders, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have retained their electorate, with MHP making a small gain over the previous general elections.

Of the 54.8 million qualified voters, 47.5 million cast their ballots, representing a participation level of 86.6 percent. AKP received 40.86 percent of the votes, CHP 24.9, MHP 16.29 and HDP 13.12 percent.The ceasefire [between the PKK and the Turkish government in 2013] disposed the Turkish civil population more favourably towards the Kurds than in past decades. This gave the opportunity for the creation in 2014 of a Kurdish political party, HDP, whose aim is to enter national politics through the main door – the Parliament.

AKP remains the largest political formation, but the loss of parliamentary seats to the newcomer HDP steals its privilege of legislative majority.

The Turkish Grand General Assembly is composed of 550 deputies. Pending the final official results, due to be announced in 11 days, AKP will have 258 seats, CHP 132 and MHP and HDP 80 each.

HDP’s performance is quite remarkable, considering that it won 6.1 million votes out of an estimated 9 million total Kurdish voters.

Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey, with 15 million people out of a total of 77 million Turkish citizens. Their past, under the Turkish republic formed in 1923, has been turbulent, as they have not been recognised as a minority by the Constitution. Their attempts to obtain civic rights, including the use of their own language, were violently oppressed, intermittently, in the 1930s and from the 1970s onwards.

As a reaction, in 1978, the more combative elements of their society formed the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an activist organisation which, together with its People’s Defence Forces (HPG) paramilitary wing, engaged in armed conflict with the country’s security forces from 1984 until 2013, when a ceasefire was agreed on the basis of a negotiated peace process with the government.

The peace process has had ups and downs, but no agreement has been reached so far. Over the past 30 years, the conflict has cost 40,000 lives among security forces and PKK fighters. PKK is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

But the ceasefire disposed the Turkish civil population more favourably towards the Kurds than in past decades. This gave the opportunity for the creation in 2014 of a Kurdish political party, HDP, whose aim is to enter national politics through the main door – the Parliament.

Salahattin Demirtas, co-leader along with Figen Yüksekdağis of the Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP), set up in 2014. Credit: ©J.N. Couvas

Its co-leader along with Figen Yüksekdağis, is a 42-year-old lawyer, Salahattin Demirtas, who participated in the presidential elections of August 2014, just weeks after creation of the party.

Although he only received 9.76 percent of the votes, he won the hearts and minds not only of Kurds, but also of many of the underprivileged of the country – women, unemployed, homosexuals, artists, Yazidis,  Rom, Syriacs, Christians and Jews – and of those who have been disappointed with either the AKP or the opposition CHP.

HDP presented 268 women candidates in the elections, while AKP only listed 90.

So the clear winner of these elections is Demirtas, whom The Guardian has labelled the “Obama of Turkey”, and who has been seen in the past weeks by many as the “Tsipras of Anatolia”, in reference to the equally young and unconventional winner of the Greek elections earlier this year, Alexis Tsipras.

The verdict of the Jun. 7 polls indicates that the campaign of the ruling AKP did not convince a large part of its own electorate, because 9 percentage points lost represent an 18 percent voter decline in comparison with 2011. The absolute number of losses nears 3 million votes. These have grossed the gains of both MHP and HDP.

The campaign, which mobilised huge masses of AKP followers, considerable funds and the support of public agencies and government resources, such as state television, was led simultaneously by incumbent prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in person. Erdogan is considered the most charismatic and energetic leader modern Turkey has had since its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

In principle, such a heavy artillery should have guaranteed a resounding triumph for AKP. In his numerous rallies, Erdogan had exhorted the population to “give him 400 seats” in the parliament, an extremely optimistic expectation. But Erdogan had been elected president in the 2014 elections with 52 percent of the votes, and overconfidence prevailed within the party. This probably backfired at the last moment among moderate Islamists who resent exuberant and over-assertive leadership behaviour.

Erdogan’s objective in these elections was to secure at least 367 MPs. This would have given him a free hand to have the Constitution changed by AKP representatives alone. The line of retreat was 330 seats, which would have still enabled Erdogan to call a referendum for the change. The 258 seats now obtained fall even short of the 276 threshold for having a majority in order to run the government.

The scope of a new Constitution was to approve the adoption of an Executive Presidential regime, which would grant Erdogan full control over state affairs on a daily basis. The current Constitution, introduced after a military coup in 1980, limits the presidency to a ceremonial role.

Erdogan’s vision for a presidential system has certainly been frustrated, but a careful study of his personality leads to the belief that he will pursue his aspirations, albeit with their achievement being somewhat postponed.

AKP, having obtained the highest number of votes, will be asked to form either a coalition or a minority government, provided that at least one of the opposition parties commit to supporting it in the parliament. The only likely candidate for this is MHP, an ultra-nationalist formation with strong Islamic membership, which grants it a common denominator with AKP. But MHP has repeatedly affirmed that it will never concede to a presidential system. However, in Turkish politics ‘never’ does not always imply what it appears to mean.

An alternative to the above scenario is a coalition among CHP, MHP and HDP, totalling 292 MPs. This is rather unlikely, especially because of the anti-Kurdish ideology of MHP’s constituency. Moreover, coalitions have historically failed in Turkey, so a new one would be a recipe for instability.

In either case, the president will be the sole judge for accepting or rejecting the solution proposed by the parties. If there is no successful proposal within 45 days, a new election will be held in the following two months. If a coalition or minority government is formed, its life span will be short, considering Turkey’s present realities.

The economy is in decline, foreign direct investment and exports have dropped sharply since the beginning of the year, and foreign relations with Middle Eastern neighbours, the European Union and the United States are problematic.

The Istanbul Stock Exchange opened on Monday with a 6 percent loss, while the Turkish lira declined by 4.5 percent, bringing the total depreciation of the currency in respect to the U.S. dollar to 19 percent since January 2015 and to 45 percent in 18 months.

In spite of Sunday’s results, which came as music to the ears of 60 percent of Turks and proved a good degree of democratic maturity, no one seems to be euphoric. Officials from the different parties consulted confirmed that their respective headquarters are already working on preparations for the replay of the electoral match – to be held most likely in October.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The announcement this week of the personality chosen by Turkey’s opposition parties to run for the office of the President of the Republic has taken the majority of the Turks by surprise.

Following tight and discrete negotiations, the Republic People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have appointed the 70-year-old former Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as their joint candidate for the country’s highest political office.

Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Credit: www.kremlin.ru

With 56 Muslim member states, the OIC is the largest international organisation after the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

For the first time in the Turkish republic’s history, the presidential elections – which are scheduled for 10 August 2014, with a second ballot two weeks later in the event of a tie – will be held by direct popular vote, instead of traditional election by members of parliament.

The nomination of Ihsanoglu has finally endowed the opposition with a plausible representative to the contest. However, members of the CHP and MHP have not yet expressed enthusiasm for the choice, because Ihsanoglu’s doctrine seems to be incompatible with the parties’ historical role in local politics.

The emergence of Ihsanoglu as a challenger to their own candidate is also bad news for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had speculated that the march towards the presidential palace would have been uneventful.

The AKP had said a week earlier that the name of their nominee would be announced just before the July 3 deadline for candidate registrations. AKP’s leaders may now have to show their card earlier than they hoped.“Political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion” – Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu [presidential candidate for Turkey’s opposition parties], commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state

The general public and observers, local as well as international, were until the beginning of this week convinced that current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be the man to seek and obtain the presidential position, against a cosmetic competitor from the opposition, running for the sake of democratic practices. IPS has leaned that such certainty is now being called into question.

The CHP is the party founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established the Turkish Republic. Its followers are generally referred to as ‘Kemalists’ and aspire to a socialist, pro-western society. Ataturk is widely revered to the present day as the father of the nation.

The MHP was founded in 1965 on an ultra-nationalist and pan-Turkish doctrine, which contemplates the unification of all Turkic ethnic groups in the Caucasus and the Middle East under Ankara’s rule. It has a record of anti-leftist and anti-Kurdish activities.

Both parties support the secular state, as designed by Ataturk and his successors, although in certain periods MHP has had radical Islamists amongst its members and MPs. Ultra-nationalism and activist Islam have often coexisted in the Turkish political universe.

This is where the controversy with Ihsanoglu’s appointment begins.

Ihsanoglu’s appointment in 2003 as Secretary-General of OIC was proposed and sponsored by Erdogan’s government.  In his ten-year tenure as the organisation’s head, he has cultivated an image of a discrete, but committed, Islamist whose vision of Turkey’s future as a secular society is unknown.

In reality, most CHP voters had never heard of Ihsanoglu until this week. Those who did believe he belongs to those among the AKP followers who would like to progressively erase Ataturk’s memory from public life.

Although his manners and interpersonal skills project him as a smooth transnational diplomat with a broad world-view, his persistent lobbying for a decade of U.S. and European governments to pass legislation that would limit freedom of expression by their respective citizens in issues relating to Muslim immigrants, on the grounds of fighting ‘Islamophobia’, has made an increasing number of CHP cadres reluctant to welcome his nomination.

In a meeting with CHP executives on June 18, the party’s former chairman, Deniz Baikal, expressed his reservations on the rationality of the decision, but asked them to support any presidential candidate that the current leadership of CHP would confirm.

In an attempt to reassure his critics, in an interview with the daily Cumhurriyet on June 18, Ihsanoglu said that “Ataturk has a special place in the hearts of the Turkish nation” but that he “should neither be consecrated nor rejected.”

Commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state, he stressed that “political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion.”

In past presidential elections, the CHP and the MHP have always presented separate candidates. In the municipal elections of March 2014 they changed their electoral strategy and presented a single candidate in Ankara. The experiment was positive, with their common representative losing the contest by only a few dozen votes.

This strategy may be more rewarding in the presidential elections. Taking as a basis the national results of March, an AKP candidate is likely to receive 43 to 44 percent of the total votes in the first round, while the CHP/MHP joint ticket is likely to secure 44 to 45 percent. The winner, however, needs 50 percent plus one vote in order to claim victory.

With the two pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy (BDP) and People’s Democratic (HDP) parties also planning to present a common candidate, it is unlikely that a winner will be proclaimed after the first round. The BDP and the HDP received an aggregate of 6.28 percent of the votes in the March elections. A merger of the two formations is likely to occur later in June.

This factor confers upon the pro-Kurdish parties the power of king-makers in the second round of the elections. The AKP has understood this for some time and has tried to lure Kurdish voters through a process of political resolution of the 30-year-long armed conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the state. No tangible results have been obtained so far, however.

The BDP and the HDP are aware of their bargaining weight ahead of the elections and will try to extract a maximum of concessions from AKP and CHP/MHP. These include, but are not limited to civic freedoms for the Kurds, equal citizen rights with those enjoyed by the Turks, autonomous-region status for the south east of Turkey, amnesty for PKK fighters who live in exile, and freeing PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment and is kept in solitary confinement on Imrali island.

CHP and MHP leaders have already shown moderate support for the reconciliation process between PKK and the state, but they will have a hard time to persuade their respective members on Kurdish autonomy and Ocalan’s future status.

Still, the direction and eventual outcome of the August elections lies on one key factor only: who will be the AKP candidate?

If Erdogan puts his name forward, the game is over for all other aspirants to the throne, according to the most seasoned local analysts. The Prime Minister’s personality attracts followers by the millions, in spite of the flawed policies of his government and corruption allegations about his close entourage since December last year.

But Erdogan, who has so far not commented on Ihsanoglu’s nomination, seems to be prudently weighing all the implications of his candidacy. These are directly related to his political future and to the future of his party.

If he is elected president of his country, he will have to step down from the chair of AKP and also leave the Prime Minister’s job to someone else. Under the current Constitution, the Prime Minister is the head of the executive, while the president’s role is ceremonial.

Erdogan’s goal is to vest the presidency with full executive powers. This would require a new or revised Constitution, the process towards which will take time and face strong resistance from the other parties and even from certain MPs of AKP.

The possibility of a presidential, rather than parliamentary, regime is also likely to discourage other AKP leaders from accepting the role of prime minister, because it will consist of merely executing decisions made by Erdogan.

In the event that Erdogan announces his intention to run for president, the forthcoming elections will be no longer a contest between two men, but a vote for choosing between regime change and status quo.

Turkish media close to Hizmet, an Islamist movement formerly supporting AKP but critical of the party’s leadership since the end of 2013, have also expressed support for Ihsanoglu. The number of voters loyal to Hizmet is unknown, but estimates evaluate their influence to be 3-8 percent of the total. They come from the educated middle class, including judges and civil servants.

The CHP/MHP leadership is speculating on Erdogan’s participation. If the majority of citizens remain attached to the parliamentary regime and to the separation of powers, Ihsanoglu seems to have the right profile to represent them.

Moreover, he reassures the Islamist part of the electorate, he is not an immediate threat to the secularists, and he has the know-how and network of powerful personalities around the world to restore Turkey’s image as a balanced and neutral regional power.

While still the OIC Secretary-General, Ihsanoglu fell apart with Erdogan, with the latter and his inner circle in the government accusing the organisation as ‘incompetent’ and with a Turkish minister asking for Ihsanoglu’s resignation from the OIC.

The dispute was over OIC’s silence in respect to Egypt’s July 3, 2013 ‘revolution’ which removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

These abilities confirm Ihsanoglu as a °politically correct° future president for Washington and Riyadh, which have been increasingly concerned with Turkey’s recent foreign policy in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Kurds in Diyarbakir: a generation lost in conflict. Credit: Brian Dell/Wikipedia

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

Eighteen months after a ceasefire between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkey’s security forces took effect, clouds of trouble are gathering in the country’s south-east.

In early June, a series of violent events in the area that surrounds the key Kurdish city of Diyarbarkir gave a wake-up call to a nation, which for a year and a half was being reluctantly persuaded that its 30-year-long inter-ethnic conflict was on its way to a durable settlement.

After two weeks of unrest in regional towns, initiated by PKK supporters, the death on June 7 of a demonstrator has revived resentment towards the state.

This is an unwelcome development for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which has been trying to convince the large Kurdish minority of the country that its ethnic identity will be officially recognised, and to which, consistent with international conventions and European Union (EU) law, human rights will be conferred.The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

The recent deployment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the zone that extends from eastern Syria to north-western Iraq now provides a clear warning that the status of the Kurds in Turkey needs urgent and consistent attention by Ankara.

On January 3, 2013, the Turkish government began a series of indirect contacts with PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life imprisonment sentence for subversive activities that have so far cost the life of 40,000 Kurdish fighters, security forces and civilians.

Although behind bars in solitary confinement on an island off the coast of Istanbul since 1999, Ocalan has remained the de facto leader of PKK, an organisation that has been listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

In 2006, Ocalan entered into discrete talks with the Turkish authorities, promoting dialogue rather than violence from both sides. He also advocated an autonomous status for the Kurdish-majority populated region of Turkey’s south-east, instead of the creation of an independent state, which had been the aspiration of his movement since 1978.

But these talks went nowhere and in 2010 the dialogue stopped. PKK leaders in exile on the mounts that separate Turkey from northern Iraq resumed armed assaults against state security units. They demonstrated on a number of occasions that they had improved their warfare capabilities on a larger scale than in past operations.

The initiative in January 2013 to find a negotiated, rather than military, solution to the conflict therefore met the interests of the government and of the political branch of PKK. For the first time, ethnic Kurds who are elected members of the Turkish parliament were allowed to visit Ocalan and carry his views and recommendations back to Ankara.

The shuttling between Ankara and the island of Imrali, where Ocalan is guarded by more than 1,000 counter-terrorism troops, has resulted so far in 18 such exchanges. on April 25, 2013, the military arm of the PKK agreed to suspend harassment of the Turkish security forces and launched the withdrawal of armed PKK fighters from Turkish territory to the neighbouring Qandil mountains, which fall within the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous province of Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan seized the political opportunity to label the unofficial talks between the parties a ‘Peace Process’. The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

Similarly, the more nationalistic amongst the Kurds are suspicious of the government’s intentions, which they associate with mere quest for short-term political gain by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party ahead of the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections, in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Although the ‘Peace Process’ has generated strong activity, through round table discussions, consultative committees, and the involvement of civil society and the media in public debate, there has been no substantive progress in addressing the true issues that are core to the Kurdish grievances.

But, since August last year, the PKK commanders in exile seem to have changed their stance. Disillusioned with the lack of tangible developments, they have resumed recruiting young Kurds who may constitute an enlarged fighting force if the vision of autonomy does not take flesh.

The events since the beginning of June are deemed to be part of the manifestation of this attitude.

Observers in the past two weeks have also begun questioning the actual status of the process, and the true motives of the parties.

It is obvious that the prospect of a peaceful solution of the Kurdish problem provides a strong card to a government before impending elections, in respect to both ethnic Kurds and Turks.

The concessions to be made and rights to be granted to the Kurdish community are, on the other hand, a double-edged sword. Opinion polls have in recent months shown that the opposed parties are rather firm in their positions. Changing the status of the Kurds by decree is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Turks.

The resolution of the Kurdish problem can, therefore, only take root in a new Constitution, which should address the sensitive issues of minorities, equal citizenship and human rights.

To date, timid attempts to revise the 1980 Constitution, written under the auspices of military coup, have brought no fruits, mainly because they have approached the issue as a tinkering rather than as overhauling exercise.

A fundamentally new Charter, inspired by modern constitutional concepts, is unlikely to be attempted before the 2015 parliamentary elections. This time gap may have serious implications for the disposition and goodwill of ethnic Kurdish public opinion.

The increasingly assertive stance of KRG with respect to Baghdad’s authority, manifested a fortnight ago through oil exports via Turkey unauthorised by Iraq’s central government, and the occupation on June 12 by KRG soldiers of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, nominally within Baghdad’s jurisdiction but over which Iraq Kurds have territorial claims, may be flares fired across the bow of the Iraqi ship that mark the intention of KRG’s leadership to proceed with full independence in a not so distant future.

Signalling of such intention is likely to provide ammunition to the separatists in the neighbouring countries: Syria, Iran and Turkey, whose ethnically Kurdish inhabitants form a society of 30 to 35 million people. Turkish ethnic Kurds represent approximately one-third of this group.

KRG’s ambitions are currently enhanced by the occupation on June 10 of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by ISIS, a Sunni jihadist organisation affiliated until recently with Al Qaeda.

KRG has used ISIS’s aggression as a justification to annex Kirkuk, in order to spare it from jihadist rule. As the central Iraqi government is weak and its army in decomposition, it is unlikely that KRG will ever return Kirkuk to its former status.

According to experts in the fossil energy industry, the combined revenues from its own and Kirkuk’s oil production would endow KRG with enough financial resources to survive as an independent state. Political analysts in the region already speculate that in such a scenario, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel may eventually support the creation of a stand-alone Kurdistan, granting it legitimacy and status.

An outcome of this kind bears high probability that Turkish, Iranian and Syrian ethnic Kurds will be tempted to join their cousins of northern Iraq and get a taste of the prosperity that comes with petro-dollars, although KRG leaders will most likely temporarily dissuade such a rush to transnational independence movements in their region.

KRG needs Turkey at present, and may need Syria in the future, for its oil exports and economic viability.

The decision late Thursday by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to proceed with its first shipment of crude oil to Europe out of the port of Ceyhan in southern Turkey has received mixed reactions from all the parties concerned.

What may be seen by the Turkish government as a blessing, at a time that faith in the future of the country’s economy is wavering, may prove a political curse in Ankara’s already troubled relations with Baghdad.

Map of Kirkuk–Ceyhan oil pipeline

It took less than 24 hours for the central government of Iraq to react to the news. Late Friday afternoon the Iraqi Ministry of Oil announced that it had “filed with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris a Request for Arbitration against the Republic of Turkey and its state-owned pipeline operator Botas, seeking to stop the unauthorised transportation, storage and loading” of KRG-originating oil to one of the two Iraq-Turkey pipelines, running from Kirkuk in Iraq to Ceyhan.

In addition, Baghdad is seeking financial damages in excess of 250 million dollars from Ankara.

Under the agreement, signed in 1973 and amended several times, most recently in September 2010, Turkey and Botas undertook to reserve the entire infrastructure system for the exclusive use of the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, which retained the right to approve any and all uses of the 1,200 mile-long pipelines.

When in November 2013 Turkey announced the signature of a series of cooperation agreements with KRG, one of which contemplated the use of the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, Baghdad immediately protested that this was in violation of its agreement with Ankara.

KRG is a ‘federal region’, according to article 117 of the Iraqi Constitution of 2005 and enjoys certain autonomy in matters not falling within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government of Baghdad (Article 121, first paragraph).

International relations, including treaties, agreements and trade policy, are in the sphere of exclusive competence of Baghdad (Iraqi Constitution, Article 110, first paragraph). Moreover, Article 111 declares that “oil and gas are owned by all the people of Iraq in all the regions and governorates.”

It therefore seems that KRG and Turkey may have overlooked Iraq’s constitutional provisions in striking their oil transit and distribution deal.

In its official press release on May 24, Baghdad also accused Turkey and Botas of having violated the Mutual Friendship Treaty of 1946, which “requires Turkey to observe a strict policy of non-interference in domestic Iraqi affairs.”"What may be seen by the Turkish government as a blessing ... may prove a political curse in Ankara’s already troubled relations with Baghdad"

The crisis in the relations between the two states had been anticipated since November last year. The United States had put pressure on KRG’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to avoid antagonising further the Iraqi leadership. In February, Turkey’s Minister of Energy Taner Yildiz gave signs that exports from Ceyhan would not begin without Baghdad’s approval.

With the Syrian civil war dragging-on and domestic unrest between Sunni and Shia factions in Iraq intensifying, the U.S. administration did not want to risk further complications in the region.

Ankara’s interests also seem to support a business-like relation with Baghdad. Hours before KRG oil exports from Ceyhan began, the Energy Market Regulatory Authority of Turkey announced that in 2013 Iraq had ranked first in oil imports to Turkey, with a 32 percent share, a substantial increase from its 19 percent stake in 2012.

The overlapping of interests, however, stops there. In spite of a temporary warm-up in political relations in 2008, which led to the signature of 39 agreements, the entente between Erdogan and his Iraqi counterpart Nouri al-Maliki has turned into mistrust and bitter exchange of blame, influenced by the sectarian politics which plague the region.

The first clash occurred in 2009, when Baghdad issued an arrest warrant for its Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, who was accused of planning to assassinate Shia leaders, including Maliki. Ankara refused to extradite Hashemi and offered him political asylum.

Then came the Syrian crisis. Erdogan, a Sunni, openly and materially supported the rebels against the Alawite regime in Damascus, siding with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Alawites are a denomination of the Shia sect. Maliki, a leader of the Shia community, which represents 60 percent of the Iraqi population, did not take an open position, but got closer to Iran, an ally to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But Turkey’s chess game has two additional dimensions. The first is the Kurdish community of the country, mostly settled in southeastern Anatolia, which represents approximately 18 percent of the country’s 77 million population. Its outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been seeking independence, often through armed action, which has resulted in the death of 40,000 rebels, civilians and security forces.

In 2012, Erdogan masterminded a ‘peace process’, promising PKK freedoms that should lead to the recognition of the Kurds’ ethnic identity. PKK has retreated to the mountains in KRG territory and Barzani has been instrumental in maintaining a truce between the rebels and Ankara. Preserving the status is important for Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party in view of the Turkish presidential elections set for August.

But a good relationship between Ankara and Erbil, KRG’s capital, irritates Baghad, which considers Barzani disloyal to the federal government and suspects that KRG will, sooner or later, press for complete independence. This possibility is also of concern to Turkey, which fears renewed separatist sentiment by its own Kurds. Financial success of KRG, through oil exports, may paradoxically become an accelerator in fuelling such development.

The other dimension in Turkey’s regional plans is its ambition to become a world energy power, by establishing the country as eastern Mediterranean’s leading hub in oil and natural gas exports to Europe.

Having damaged its relations with the European Union since 2009, Turkey sees a chance to become an indispensable partner of the West, not only in theory, but also in practice. Its geographical capability to provide safe transit for oil and natural gas from Iraq and, in the near future, from Israel and Cyprus to international markets, presents a strategic window of opportunity that it cannot afford to miss.

Erdogan’s seemingly good relationship with the Russian Federation and Iran is based on realpolitik rather than affinities. In fact, Ankara would like to minimise its energy dependence on Moscow and Tehran by 2023. The countdown has already begun. Last year the share of oil imports from Iran and Russia decreased from 39 to 28 percent and from 11 to 8 percent, respectively.

Following his recent electoral victory in the Iraqi elections, in which he secured 94 out of the 328 seats in parliament, Maliki is poised to return to the driver’s seat in Baghdad. In the absence of reconciliation, Ankara may have to revise its ambitions, given that Iraq has already built alternative routes for its oil exports, through its southern ports and Israel, while in the more distant future a normalisation of the political situation in Syria will offer additional options to oil and gas exporters.

Protestors in Turkey’s Gezi Park show no signs of backing down. Credit: akli denge-Mental Balance/CC-BY-2.0

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

Now approaching its third week, the “Occupy Taksim” movement, a peaceful sit-in to save Istanbul’s Gezi Park from redevelopment, has taken on a festival-like atmosphere, with protesters organising to stand guard around the clock, provide uninterrupted food and water supplies, and carry out a self-initiated cleaning of the grounds.

As the demonstrators grow more settled, however, the government has not changed its position towards them.

Upon his return from the Maghreb at 1:40 am Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated his initial decision to demolish Gezi Park. He did not cede to public requests that he apologise for police violence used to disperse protesters and show greater respect for individual fundamental rights and freedom of expression.

“The police are doing their duty. These protests, which have turned into vandalism and utter lawlessness, must end immediately,” Erdoğan declared.

Addressing thousands gathered at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport in the early hours of Friday, he blamed terrorists, Marxists, the opposition and foreign conspirators for the unrest and its immediate economic consequences.

“No power but Allah can stop Turkey’s rise,” he said, in a speech that often referred to the importance of individual and state compliance with divine principles. “May Allah preserve our fraternity and unity.”

In a reference to the chief executive of a leading Turkish bank, who said this week that he was one of the “marauders”, a term Erdogan used to describe the demonstrators, the prime minister said, “If a general manager of a bank voices support for those organising this [Gezi] vandalism, he will find us standing against him.”

Erdogan also condemned intellectuals, saying, “Those who call themselves journalists, artists, politicians, have, in a very irresponsible way, opened the way for hatred, discrimination and provocation.”

Shared blame

Later in the morning, Turkish President Abdullah Gul sent a different message while speaking to a group of visiting foreign students on the importance of the respect of  “otherness”.

“Efforts to oppress one another become the source of many sufferings and conflicts,” Gul said.

On Thursday evening, Fetullah Gulen, a popular Turkish Islamic scholar, made a much-awaited speech on the Taksim crisis from Pennsylvania, where he has confined himself for over a decade.

Gulen urged authorities not to underestimate and overlook protests, saying, “We share blame” for the unrest. He frequently used “we” to refer to members of his movement in particular and repeatedly blamed his movement for doing too little to eliminate problems Turkish society faces, particularly on an ethical level.

Gulen supported Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) at its inception but began to distance himself from it in 2010.

Gulen’s speech fell short of admonishing the government for its handling of the crisis and seemed to support Erdogan’s stance – that elections are the only way to change the situation. Many of Gulen’s followers, who include journalists and academics, had expected a clearer position on fundamental rights.

Opposition criticism

Observers here fear that the deadlock between the prime minister and protesters will only prolong the Taksim movement.

Turkey’s political opposition has thus far abstained from adding fuel to the fire through statements or rallies, and in an exclusive interview with IPS, Faruk Logoglu, deputy chairman of the major opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and vice-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM), rebuffed Erdogan’s accusations that the opposition had instigated the Taksim demonstrations.

CHP is the country’s oldest political party, established in 1919 by Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and officially registered in 1923.

In the interview (full version available here), Logoglu also outlined the risks for the country should the government continue on its current course vis-à-vis Turkey’s secular middle class.

Logoglu believed the current minimum requirement for restoring social peace would be for Erdogan to personally apologise for the acts of the police and his ministers, governors and chiefs of security responsible for managing the conflict on the field.

He called on the prime minister to officially commit to changing state policies with respect to human rights, privacy of citizens, and freedom of expression, demonstration and choice of lifestyle.

Logoglu, a former career diplomat and ambassador to Washington, also suggested that the current discontent with a large part of the population stems from its frustration with government’s foreign policy.

Logoglu claimed that CHP proposed a detailed plan 18 months ago for a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis. “If the Prime Minister had been open to discuss[ing] the initiative,” Logoglu suggested, “Turkey would have gained recognition as a serious mediator and the Syrian population would have been spared destruction and shedding of blood.”

As protests in Turkey stretch into their second week, the precise terms and conditions that could bring the social unrest to an end are unclear, though many speculate about what would end the deadlock between the government and protesters.

In an exclusive interview with IPS correspondent Jacques N. Couvas, Faruk Logoglu, deputy chairman of the major opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), discussed the current crisis in Turkey and the conditions he believed the government would have to fulfill to end the crisis.

Faruk Logoglu, deputy chairman of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Turkey. Photo courtesy of the CHP

In the 2011 general elections, CHP received 26 percent of the vote. It is the second largest party in the Turkish parliament, with 134 of 550 seats. Logoglu is vice chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) and a former ambassador to the United States.

Q:  How do you regard Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s accusations that the opposition has been fomenting unrest?

A: This is a ridiculous claim. Demonstrators gathered of their own will and initiative. Neither the CHP nor any other political party has participated in any official capacity.

The protests were a spontaneous manifestation of discontent with the government’s domestic and foreign policies. The population staged a civic uprising to say that enough is enough.

Q: In Tunis on Thursday, the prime minister said that he would proceed with the Ottoman Artillery Barracks project. How do you see this statement as affecting the demonstrators and the crisis in general?

A: Gezi Park is a symbol of a new political dynamic in our country that says, “Either you change and respect democracy and human rights, or we will continue.” The  [ruling] Justice and Development Party AKP had better understand what is happening in Turkey before it is too late. If they take the wrong steps, everyone will pay a high price.

Things were not going so well – before and after these demonstrations – in foreign policy, society, economy and other areas. If the government uses repressive totalitarian methods, my prognosis is that unrest will continue.

Our party has no control over the demonstrators. There are certainly members of our movement who demonstrate in their capacity as private citizens, but not to our knowledge nor under the CHP banner. The same applies to other parties.

Many protesters have no party affiliation but are associated with organisations with professional and intellectual affinities, such as unions, trade associations or universities.

Q: Foreign commentators have likened the Taksim and Gezi Park demonstrations to the Arab Spring’s beginnings. How do you regard this comparison?

A: What is going on these days in Istanbul and the rest of Turkey is not the Arab Spring, the Arab Revolution or the Orange Revolution.

The main difference is that we already had democracy. CHP has underlined the existence of Turkish democracy as a system for months. We already said, before the events, that democracy could not be taken away from us.

Q: What tangible remedies does CHP propose to resolve the present conflict?

A: The demonstrations started peacefully and must end peacefully. Those responsible for turning a sit-in into a social conflict should make the first move of appeasement.

When a British solder was murdered in London, the British prime minister, David Cameron, cut short his official visit to France. He did this for a single individual. Yet when Turkey is ablaze, the prime minister went to visit Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. It doesn’t make sense.

The first order of business is for the Turkish prime minister to go on TV and apologise to the Turkish people for the brutal use of force by the police, for his insistence on razing a park in Istanbul to build a shopping centre, and to admit that he was wrong.

He should repent and ask for forgiveness by the people, but that may not be enough to restore peace. He will have to change his policies, which violate human rights in terms of freedom of speech, of media, of communication, of assembly, of demonstration, of individual privacy of life. These are part of the reality of what Turkish people want to live.

We expect that the European Parliament will give clear support to our citizens in this matter.

Q: Supporters of the demonstrators have commented that Turkey’s foreign policy and threats to Syria may have added to the discontent of the middle classes. What is CHP’s policy on foreign relations?

A: From the very start of the Syrian crisis we have taken a position of non-interference in the internal affairs of Syria. Such position aimed at encouraging both the Damascus regime and the Syrian opposition to negotiate in order to chart a peace agreement without foreign intervention.

One and a half years ago, we proposed an international conference, initiated by Turkey, to include the permanent members of the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council, the European Union, the representative of the U.N. secretary-general, the Arab neighbours of Syria, Turkey, and, of course, Iran, the Syrian opposition and the Syrian government. We proposed this not just once, but three times, in writing to the prime minister of Turkey.

Now, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov have agreed on a similar plan. We do support this initiative, but had our party been heard a year and a half ago, better results would have been achieved.

At CHP, we value Syrian people as neighbours. We regard them as relatives.  We don’t want foreign intervention and certainly not military intervention in Syria. We believe the best way out of that crisis is through a political process.

“Peace at home, peace in the world” is the official motto of the Turkish Republic. Coined in 1931 by the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, it implies a causal relationship, but the events this week in Istanbul and dozens of other cities of Turkey suggest that causality can work in reverse order, too.

With protests continuing over the past week, two years of Arab Spring and intense socioeconomic unrest in southern Europe seem to be spilling into Turkey, which until now had stayed out of trouble.

Still, the economy is strong, although not as strong as it has generally been in the past decade. As a result, the similarities Turkey shares with northern and southern Mediterranean countries that are also going through a crisis have more to do with poor leadership.

Financial success, fuelled by foreign direct investment (FDI) in luxury real estate in Istanbul and along Turkey’s Aegean coast and by massive privatisation of state enterprises, has given the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."

Since AKP’s 2011 electoral victory, this sentiment has translated into diminishing transparency and accountability by key government figures. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, AKP’s leader and the Turkish prime minister, and a handful of close collaborators have ostentatiously disregarded calls by trusted advisors to consider the average citizen’s concerns and be more inclusive of the 50 percent of Turkey’s population that has not voted for AKP.

Lack of government transparency, such as in southern Europe, and arrogance towards citizens and their fundamental freedoms, such as in the Middle East, have paved the way to an explosive manifestation of the sense that enough is enough, resulting in three deaths, over 1,000 injuries and 1,700 arrests.

Some observers claim that the crisis started with a kiss, referring to a ban in May by Ankara’s authorities of displays of affection by couples in public areas that triggered youth demonstrations in the capital. Others point to earlier signs of discontent.

In May 2012 and the following fall, Erdogan challenged women’s rights to abortion and caesarean section for giving birth, repeatedly proclaiming that women should have a minimum of three children. Women’s associations took to the streets.

More recently, the Turkish parliament, where the AKP holds 326 of 550 seats, passed legislation severely restricting the promotion and consumption of alcohol, and Erdogan has promised high taxes on alcoholic drinks.

Secularist Turks, some of whom have voted AKP in past elections because of the government’s economic performance, have begun complaining that Erdogan is interfering with people’s lifestyles in an unacceptable way.

At the same time, citizens are tired of an excessively liberal economy that has increased the income gap between the bourgeoisie and the working classes.

The decision to turn Gezi, the only green park in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall and luxury apartment complex was the trigger rather than the cause of the Gezi revolt. Cumhuriyet Avenue, adjacent to the park, has already been demolished to make way to a large complex of expensive shops, residences and shopping malls, while Taksim Square, a landmark of Istanbul, will be converted to a large mosque.

Independent research by a non-governmental organisation published in 2012 showed that Turkey, with a total population of 75 million, possesses 85,000 mosques, 17,000 of which were built in the past 10 years.

In comparison, the country has 67,000 schools, 1,220 hospitals, 6,300 health care centres and 1,435 public libraries. The annual budget of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is less than half of that of the Directorate General of Religious Affairs, which represents the Sunni Muslims of the country (80 percent of the population).

FDI that has flowed into Turkey since 2002, mostly from Qatari and Saudi investors and U.S. and Dutch pension funds, has concentrated on speculative high-end real estate projects. The number of shopping malls grew from 46 in 2000 to 300 in 2012. Istanbul alone currently has 2 million square metres of malls under construction, according to CBRE, an international consulting firm.

A series of privatisations announced this year – a railway system, the national airline, major energy state enterprises, the highways and bridges network – will provide funds for undertaking grandiose construction projects: a third bridge over the Bosporus, a third airport in Istanbul, an artificial second Bosporus that will facilitate even more premium real estate developments, and the largest mosque in the Middle East, to be built in Istanbul.

The demonstrations that began ten days ago were spontaneous and peaceful and appeared to reflect citizen frustration with aloof state governance, but the zero-tolerance attitude adopted by the police and incendiary statements by Erdogan and certain ministers have transformed them into an unexpected political crisis that has uncertain implications for Turkish democracy.

IPS has spoken with political personalities and well known journalists who have been reluctant to discuss the situation as it evolves.

The personal secretariat of Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim theologian and head of a worldwide movement promoting moderate Islam and inter-faith dialogue, told IPS that Gulen will issue a statement at the end of this week. Currently living in self-exile in the state of Pennsylvania in the United States, he is followed by millions of Muslims.

As rallies continued Wednesday and student mobilisation has been announced for Thursday, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, and the vice prime minister, Bulent Arinc, both known for political maturity and moderation, have tried to offer limited excuses for police excessive force.

The true litmus test for the evolution of Turkey’s political climate will take place upon Erdogan’s return from North Africa later this week. But statements similar to those he made before his departure, such as “I will press with the Gezi project—if you don’t want a mall I will build a mosque” or labelling the protesters “marauders”, are unlikely to restore social peace.

To old hands in Turkish politics, the current unrest is reminiscent of the hegemonic style of the Democrat Party leadership of the 1950s.

“In 1957, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and President Celal Bayar were quite confident because they had received 47 percent of the votes in the elections,” said Huseyn Ergun, a veteran politician and current chairman of the Social Democrat Party (SODEP), described.

“They had started to put sanctions on the opposition party and its deputies. They also had an investigation commission in parliament against the opposition and destroyed Istanbul landmarks. You know how all this ended.”

Indeed, their reign ended in 1960 with a military coup, history that Turks are not eager to see repeated in their lifetimes.

A PKK soldier stands in front of a crowd gathered in the Qandil mountains. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, May 13 2013 (IPS)

The peaceful withdrawal from Turkey of combatants from the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) began last Wednesday but is already at risk of being compromised following a twin car bomb explosion on Saturday afternoon. The terrorist attack in Rayhanli in the Syrian border province of Hatay caused 46 civilian deaths and at least 155 injuries.

Authorities’ initial reaction indicated a high degree of confusion, bias and lack of genuine intelligence as to the perpetrators of the explosions. No groups have claimed responsibility yet, but two Turkish deputy prime ministers and several ministers were quick to point to the Syrian regime.

However, Turkish media has favoured the possibility that the attacks were the next in a series of hostilities between Syrian refugees, the local population and Turkish security forces since the beginning of the year.

The ministry of interior has tried to dismiss this explanation, which could exacerbate tensions in the province. However, the arrest of nine Turkish citizens Sunday afternoon reinforces the likelihood of a local conflict between refugees and Hatay residents.

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Saturday night cautioned against jumping to conclusions. In a press statement, he implied that the incident may be linked with the PKK’s pulling out of Turkey.

“We have started a resolution process [of the PKK problem] in our country, and there are those who don’t accept this new era, or do not consider the air of freedom to be positive, who might have been involved in such [attacks],” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan’s mind was on the “deep state”, various clandestine nationalist organisations allegedly sponsored by loyal followers of the doctrines of Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey.

An overview of Kurdish history

The Kurds, an Indo-European ethnic and linguistic group, have long inhabited what is now south and southeastern Turkey but never created an independent state. In the sixteen century, the Kurds formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, whose administrative documents referred to vilayet-i Kurdistan (state of Kurdistan), which was composed of small emirates.

For the next 500 years, the Kurds enjoyed autonomy in the Ottoman territories, as did other minorities, particularly religious ones. Most Kurds are Sunni, but many are Alevi, a Shia Muslim denomination.

But the creation of the Turkish Republic following World War I deprived the Kurds of such autonomy. They had been loyal to Ottoman rulers, with the exception of a revolt in the late 1890s over tax collection issues, but the new government in Ankara headed by Ataturk was not prepared to let ethnic identities flourish.

During Treaty of Lausanne negotiations in 1923 between Turkey and the Allies, victors of the war, the British insisted on including Kurds in the ethnic groups that the new state would protect. The Turks, in turn, made clear that they would only accept a religion-related definition of minorities, as it had been the practise in the Ottoman Empire.

Yet the Kurdish community supported the Turkish view. Recent academic research has claimed that this position was motivated by a fear that ethic minority recognition in the Treaty would give reclaim rights to the Armenians, who had been ousted from southeastern Turkey in 1915 by the Ottoman government with help from the Kurds.

In the end, three communities were recognised in Lausanne as minorities: Armenians, Greeks and Jews. The Kurds missed their chance.

Following the adoption of Turkey’s new constitution in 1924, the Kurdish community realised that their previous autonomy and rights had been abolished. The charter recognised one national identity and one language: Turkish. At the end of that year, the Kurds began resorting to armed resistance, with varying success for the next decade.

A sustained revolt began in January 1937, but the state put an end to it in 1938, occupying and destroying Dersim, an Alevi city in eastern Turkey. The clashes resulted in 40,000 deaths on both sides, according to British intelligence estimates.

Dersim’s surviving population was forced to relocate around the country. Renamed Tunceli, the city was virtually erased from the map and a long period of relative calm followed, until a military coup in 1980, when the junta revived absolute nationalism, persecuting ethnic and religious minorities.

The Kurdistan Worker’s Party

The PKK, formed in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, launched its guerrilla warfare against the state in 1984. Because the PKK has also assassinated civilians, particularly dissident Kurds and collaborators with security forces, Turkey and other countries consider it a terrorist organisation.

Ocalan was arrested in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment, although he was indirectly involved in a process to negotiate peace between the PKK and the state, even as hostilities between the two continued, with periodical ceasefires.

From his solitary confinement on the island of Imrali, in the Aegean Sea, Ocalan agreed to cooperate and ordered his troops to pull out of Turkey. The retrieval began on May 8, with the departure of 2,000 fighters. There are still an estimated 15,000 dispersed in Turkey, who will need to find safe passages to cross the border to Kurdish Northern Iraq.

Although half of ethnic Turks are favourable to the peace process, politicians doubt how effective it will ultimately be. “Cautious optimism is essential,” Mustafa Akyol, a prominent editorialist with Hurriyet daily and a historian, told IPS.

The deal with PKK was not negotiated with the government, and public opinion is fiercely against any granting of special rights to the Kurds. Recent opinion polls indicate that 93 percent of Turks consider PKK members to be criminals. And in the absence of an official agreement, the terms around the process are opaque.

Akyol described the PKK’s expectations as major changes including “recognition of the Kurdish identity in the future Constitution, rights going beyond recent minimal gestures, such as state-controlled radio and TV stations, amnesty for PKK combatants, and commitment for the creation of a Kurdish autonomous region over time”.

Ibrahim Anli, a director of the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation, meanwhile, told IPS, “The main concern of the Turkish establishment is still a strong fear of partition of the country.”

The Iraqi government is also concerned over PKK’s withdrawal, as these fighters will join autonomous Northern Iraq, which may seek independence, during troubled times between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds. Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds total 19.5 million, with another 9.5 million living in Iran and Syria.

The atomic bomb detonated by the United States in August 1945 above Hiroshima killed 145,000. Several hundreds of thousands of other inhabitants of the city have suffered severe injuries and chronic disease in the past six decades. Credit: ICAN.

By Jacques N. Couvas
ISTANBUL, Feb 1 2013 (IPS)

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has adopted a new strategy to involve citizens and politicians more actively to push for a global ban on nuclear weapons.

The strategy was emphasised at an ICAN conference in Istanbul last week.

The new strategy by ICAN, a coalition of 286 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in 68 countries which jointly campaign against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and aim to ultimately have them banned, aims to do more to sensitise both public opinion and state authorities to the consequences of a nuclear detonation.

ICAN intends to go beyond rhetoric and propose, with the involvement of states sensitive to the issue, concrete measures to cope with a nuclear disaster event. It will be hosting an international civil society forum in Oslo on March 2-3 this year, which will be followed by an experts conference on military nuclear threats organised by the government of Norway with the support of 16 other nations.

“We are constantly told by nuclear weapons states officials that putting into effect the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is not possible, not conceivable in practical terms,” Arielle Denis, ICAN Europe, Middle East and Africa coordinator told IPS. “Our position is that there is record of international treaties which have led to the prohibition of other lethal weapons. If the international community succeeded in banning land mines and cluster bombs, it can certainly ban the ownership of nuclear arms.”

The coalition of NGOs argues that any country, even a nuclear weapons state, could be the target of a nuclear attack in the new geopolitical environment, which it says encourages the proliferation of rogue states and terrorist organisations. “Although no nuclear weapons have been used since 1945, cyber-terrorism makes today the explosion of an atomic warhead realistic,” said Denis.

Core to this strategy is the humanitarian aspect of a nuclear detonation, even of a single device. ICAN published a report in 2012 which identifies immediate and long-term damage to local populations. Blast shockwaves travelling at hundreds of kilometres an hour, are lethal to all those in the proximity of ground zero of the detonation, who often just vaporise due to the intense pressure and heat. Further away, victims suffer from oxygen shortage and carbon monoxide excess, lung and ear damage, and internal bleeding.

But the consequences due to radiation are felt even at greater distances. This affects most organs of the body with effects lasting decades and with genetic alterations suffered by the victims and their descendants.

Such claims are corroborated by studies by the U.S. government and by research institutions between the 1970s and last decade. In a scenario of a nuclear attack involving three medium power warheads against an intercontinental ballistic missiles base in the “farm belt” of the U.S., which covers primarily the northern mid-west, it was calculated that the number of dead could reach 7.5 to 15 million, with 10 to 20 million being severely injured.

The humanitarian aspect of the surviving population would be practically impossible to manage, as the presence of radioactivity would force 40 million people to relocate as far away as possible. Relocation would take from several weeks to years, it was estimated.

The “farm belt” in the U.S. is a rural area. Europe is three times more densely populated than the U.S., and a nuclear detonation would have a more catastrophic humanitarian impact on European locations.

ICAN, formed in 2007, operates through an international steering group of personalities and experts on nuclear armaments and a small staff in Geneva, which coordinates international campaigns and events. Member NGOs provide support to regional activities.

ICAN’s main argument for its activism is based on the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), signed on July 1, 1968 in New York and gradually ratified by 189 states, excluding India, Pakistan and Israel. Its validity was extended indefinitely in May 1995.

Signatories to the NPT are distinguished between the nuclear weapon states and the non-nuclear weapon states. The former group is composed of Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States (U.S.), the same nations which form the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Article VI of the NPT requires signatory states to pursue “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” and towards a “treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

“Disarmament must be general and complete,” said Denis. “There was in the 1990s some ambiguity about the Treaty text in this respect, but this has been clarified in international law and all nuclear weapon states must begin negotiations for dismantling all their nuclear weapons.”

The U.S. has traditionally interpreted Article VI as having no mandatory effect on the parties. But the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an advisory opinion, dated Jul. 8, 1996 stated that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

The lack of visible willingness by nuclear weapon states to get around the negotiations table has fuelled the determination of the NGOs which form ICAN to systematically make citizens and politicians around the globe aware of the threats of maintaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Although the number of nuclear warheads was drastically reduced after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s from 60,000 to 19,000, ICAN is concerned about the continuing technology updates of such weapons by the nuclear weapon states.

Nuclear weapon spending in the U.S. reached 61.3 billion dollars in 2011, a ten percent increase over the previous year. The nine countries that are known, or suspected, to have nuclear military power increased in the same period their spending by 15 percent to 105 billion dollars. Israel has since 1958 adopted a non-confirmation, non-denial policy in respect to having a nuclear arsenal.

“This level of expenditure is a strong indication that nations which hold nuclear weapons have no intention to get rid of them any time soon,” said Denis. “The governments of such states say that they will dismantle their stocks as soon as the other nuclear weapon states do the same. It is a vicious, endless circle.”

There was a sigh of relief in Ankara as Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), on Sunday put an end to the 68-day hunger strike of 682 Kurdish prisoners and nine members of the Turkish Parliament.

The strike began on Sep. 12 among Kurds detained on terrorism charges, and quickly spread to 67 prisons around the country. In November, it was joined by MPs of the Peace and Development Party (BDP), whose constituency is in the ethnically Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

Ocalan’s decision has removed a thorn from the side of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government showed signs of division over the handling of the strike, at a time when Turkey is being criticised by the European Union for lack of progress in improving human rights in general, and those of minorities in particular.

The strikers were demanding the freedom to use their mother tongue in education and in judicial courts. They also wanted to end Ocalan’s solitary confinement.

Ocalan, 64, was sentenced in 1999 to life imprisonment for terrorism and is being held in isolation on Imrali Island, near Istanbul. He remains, however, the undisputed leader of the PKK, an autonomist movement he created in 1978, which has periodically resorted to armed rebellion since 1984. Clashes with the security forces have caused 40,000 deaths on both sides among civilians and combatants.

Although the PKK’s main objective is cultural autonomy for the Kurdish people, the state has always considered the movement as separatist, based on the interpretation of Turkey’s constitution, which forbids any threat to territorial integrity and imposes one language only, the Turkish. Ethnic Turks in their majority support this viewpoint, regardless of political affiliation, and are opposed to a Kurdish identity.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) promised certain cultural freedoms to the Kurds when it came to power in 2002. Under pressure by the nationalists and the military, and considering public opinion, it limited, however, the changes to light gestures, like the establishment of a state-run broadcasting station in Kurdish and a proposal to let universities offer courses of Kurdish as a foreign language.

Divergence of opinion among the public intensified during the strike, but politicians and journalists stayed generally out of the debate. Erdogan’s total opposition to it and his occasional scornful comments about the strikers, and the likelihood of deaths resulting from the strike, caused editorialists and opinion leaders to keep a low profile.

“The Turkish public is increasingly polarised on the Kurdish issue, but worse is around the corner,” Nazan Ustundag, a sociology associate professor at Bosphorus University, Istanbul, told IPS last week.

“The polarisation between the Kurds and pro-Kurdish democrats on one hand, and the state on the other hand will grow bigger, and the violence will increase if we witness the death of these people,” she added.

PKK’s decision to end the strike may have averted this bleak prospect, but not entirely. In his message on Sunday, Ocalan said that it was not for inmates to go on strike, but for those followers who were free. This may signal the beginning of another hunger strike, which will be more difficult for the authorities to control, as strikers could be anywhere.

This is unlikely to happen soon, though. The 68-day strike seems to have brought partial victory to the 682 inmates and their MPs. A parliamentary committee has submitted a proposal to legalise the use of the Kurdish language in trials. If it soon becomes a binding legal instrument, a ceasefire between the PKK and security forces may be reached, and hopes for a political solution of the Kurdish issue revived.

With 15 to 17 million people, the Kurds represent 20 percent of the country’s population. As their presence is concentrated in the southeast, they are also a significant electoral asset to any party that can win their loyalty.

Erdogan’s thoughtfulness for the Kurds’ grievances in the early days of his premiership was founded on realpolitik. His promises and gestures seem to have paid off, until recently. Political experts and think tanks have estimated that between five and six percentage points in AKP’s electoral victories of 2007 and 2011 were due to Kurdish votes.

There are still many votes to be had in the southeast, AKP strategists believe. The rival in the region, BDP, which is believed to be the political arm of PKK, has 36 MPs elected locally and controls 97 municipalities. This is a sizeable target. But the even larger electoral Kurdish platform is moderate and not permanently attached to a party. Both AKP and PKK would like to win such hearts and minds.

“All of the work conducted towards Kurdish language rights in Turkey, all of the steps taken towards resolving the Kurdish problem, alongside security politics, as well as the discourse on the death penalty are all an extension of these efforts towards winning over the Kurds,” explained Mumtazer Turkone, an editorial writer with Sunday’s Zaman, a newspaper close to the AKP.

“And the PKK is similarly trying to convince the Kurds through the ‘revolutionary people’s war’, by escalating violence and trying to gain moral legitimacy through hunger strikes. The PKK seems unable, however, to realise that it cannot use both vehicles hand in hand”, Turkone told IPS.

Less than six hours after the end of the hunger strike, at least five Turkish soldiers were killed by PKK rebels in clashes with the security forces in the south eastern province of Hakkari. A political solution to the Kurdish problem may not be so close, after all.

Public approval of the Turkish government’s foreign policy has reached its lowest point – a mere 18 percent – in the past decade, according to a poll released here this week that showed only 18 percent of respondents said they favoured Ankara’s handling of the escalating sectarian violence in neighbouring Syria.

The results did not come as a total surprise, as the popularity of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in steady decline all year. But the position taken by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with respect to President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime has clearly exacerbated the growing discontent.

At the beginning of Syria’s internal conflict some 19 months ago, Erdogan and his influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, opposed any foreign intervention. Both men, as well as Turkey’s intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, made numerous trips to Damascus early in the crisis to try to persuade Assad to deal with the mushrooming opposition with compromise, rather than brutal repression.

At the time, Ankara had no interest in regime change. It had taken nearly two decades to achieve a rapprochement with Damascus, an effort sealed by the signing in 2009 of 50 bilateral commercial and security accords aimed at boosting Turkey’s exports to Syria, the Arab beachhead for Davutoglu’s “Zero Problems with Neighbours” policy, to five billion dollars a year by 2012.

But by mid-2011, Erdogan had turned against Assad, demanding that he step down as part of any resolution of an increasingly violent civil conflict.

Encouraged by the U.S., as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have together invested massively in Turkey since the AKP came to power in 2002 and have pledged to invest more than 12 billion dollars more this year, Ankara began providing refuge and support to the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), organisations composed of opposition figures and defectors from the Assad regime and army.

Erdogan’s exhortations, as well as Turkey’s backing for the two rebel groups, naturally antagonised Damascus; it also cooled off Ankara’s previously good relations wth Assad’s other foreign backers, notably Iran, Iraq, Russia, and China.

Their unhappiness has been manifested in a variety of ways. Diplomatic entente with Tehran and a booming trade with Baghdad have deteriorated, while Moscow and Beijing have discreetly advised Erdogan to drop any notions he may entertain of armed intervention to overthrow Assad.

Turkey’s opposition, represented mainly by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), was initially mildly critical of the AKP’s Syria policy. Committed to Kemal Ataturk’s doctrine of “Peace at Home, Peace in the World,” it wanted Ankara to remain neutral in the conflict next door.

Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and of the CHP, believed that the country’s territorial integrity would be preserved, so long as it stayed out of international conflicts.

Events since June, notably the growing flood of refugees seeking safe haven in Turkey and the dramatic intensification of hostilities between the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), have made the Turkish opposition more assertive.

The PKK, considered a terrorist organisation by the U.S. and the European Union (EU), has been fighting the central government for most of the past 28 years. Over that time, the insurgency and Ankara’s efforts to defeat it have claimed some 40,000 lives, most of them civilians.

In the first 15 years of the conflict, at least 3,000 villages in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern part of the country were destroyed, while an estimated three million people were displaced.

With a combined population of about 30 million across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, Kurds – and their long-held dreams of self-determination – have long represented a threat to the four countries’ central governments. Of the four, Turkey has the largest Kurdish population – about half of the total.

In recent months, Erdogan and Davutoglu have accused Damascus, and to a lesser degree, Tehran, of providing refuge and material support to the PKK, although they have yet to produce hard evidence.

There is nonetheless a general suspicion, exploited by the CHP, that the PKK’s increased effectiveness – ambushes of Turkish soldiers and police have become an almost weekly occurrence, and some 700 people have been killed in the last 14 months – is directly related to the situation in Syria, including the de facto abandonment by the Assad regime of Kurdish areas along the Turkish border to local Kurdish militias, some of which have had close ties to the PKK.

According to the CHP, Erdogan’s bet on Assad’s swift demise was a strategic mistake. “The AKP’s policy on Syria has fully collapsed,” according to Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the CHP’s chief. “It is a short-sighted policy …influenced by other countries policies.”

Independent analysts say these attacks are taking their toll and may yet force in a shift by the government.

“We will probably see a change in policy in the next months, especially if Assad or his regime appears to be hanging on,” wrote Semih Idiz, diplomatic editor of Hurriyet. “It will manifest itself with more ecumenical initiatives that are more balanced and less one-sided.”

For his part, Erdogan has angrily rejected criticism of Syria policy, particularly by the CHP which he has begun labeling Turkey’s Ba’athist party, the name of Syria’s ruling party.

But, even among the AKP’s supporters, reservations about Erdogan’s policy have been growing.

“The Turkish government decided to support the opposition forces and gave up its ‘no problem with neighbours’ policy, replacing it with a ‘better relations with future neighbours’ policy, according to Kerim Balci, a prominent columnist for Zaman, Turkey’s largest circulation daily newspaper which has generally backed the AKP.

“This was a kind of gamble: if the opposition forces win in Syria, Turkey will be a big winner; but if they lose, or the chaos there continues into the winter, Turkey will lose much,” Balci went on in an email exchange with IPS.

“Turkish policy towards Syria is 100-percent legitimate but not that very well-calculated. Turkey should have kept its previous ‘on-good-term-with-all-sides-of-the-conflict’ policy towards Syrian regime and opposition groups and third parties related to the conflict.”

“On the other hand the Turkish prime minister is quite a pragmatic man. The minute he realises he is hurting his own political career, he will make a U-turn,” added Balci, who is also the editor-in-chief of Turkish Review, a foreign policy journal.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

With attacks by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) multiplying and spreading to a larger number of Turkish provinces, Ankara is under increasing pressure by nationalistic parties to take tougher measures against Kurdish activism, including a full-blown land incursion by the Turkish armed forces into northern Iraq.

Since June, the PKK has changed its operating tactics, from hit-and-run attacks against security outposts to entering urban areas in an extended geographical area. The focus is still the southeastern part of the country, where the majority of the population is composed of ethnic Kurds, but eastern and western provinces such as Van and Izmir have also been targeted.

Indicative of these tactical changes is the occupation in late July of Semdinli, a town in the Hakkari province in southeast Turkey bordering Iraq and Syria, which the PKK held for three weeks. Regular troops eventually forced the rebels to withdraw, with heavy losses on both sides.

The Arab Spring has provided a new source of inspiration for the PKK, according to Idris Bal, a member of parliament with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and an expert on domestic terrorism.

The PKK sees an opportunity to foment popular rebellion in Kurdish-dominated regions of Turkey, with a view to creating a state which it can govern, Bal said.

The occupation of Semdinli was aimed at sending a message to the world that things are spiralling out of control in Turkey, he added.

But the Kurdish insurgents’ all-out approach is not a totally new concept in this internal struggle, which began 28 years ago and has cost 40,000 lives so far. The PKK’s former leader, Abdullah Ocalan, tried it in the 1990s, with limited success.

The PKK has been declared a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU and the U.S.

Ocalan, in jail for life since 1999, still influences the PKK’s strategy. In a recent declaration, he predicted that 2012 would be the “final year” in the all-out Kurdish rebellion, which resumed in 2010, after seven years of relative calm.

Since 2003, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to find a peaceful solution to the Kurdish problem, against fierce opposition by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

A series of secret talks between Turkey’s national security agency (MIT) and PKK representatives were held in 2010 in Oslo, facilitated by the British intelligence services. But the process was abandoned as the result of a premature leak of the discussions.

The response of the state was to intensify bombing of PKK bases in northern Iraq, through air force raids. This produced some results, until the end of December, when military jets killed 34 young ethnic Kurds at Uludere, near the Turkish-Iraqi border, who were mistaken for PKK members.

The mass killing triggered nationwide indignation and inflamed anti-government sentiment in the south and east of the country.

“Parliament should have worked in fall 2011 on a package to provide basic rights and freedoms to Kurds in order to reach a democratic solution,” said Mehmet Ozcan, chairman of the Ankara Strategy Institute, a think-tank in the Turkish capital.

“The time was ripe for reform before Uludere, but now it’s the PKK that has the psychological upper hand,” said Ozcan, who believes it is not realistic to expect an end to terror unless a democratic process addressing the needs of the Kurds is put in place.

The evolution of the Syrian revolt seems, however, to be a stronger reason for concern among Turkish politicians and the military. The withdrawal of the Syrian security forces from the border regions with Turkey and Iraq has left a vacuum which is being exploited by the Syrian Kurdish minority and the PKK alike.

Although they remained initially loyal to Bashar al Assad’s regime, Syria’s Kurds have more recently unveiled aims for independence in a post-Assad scenario, through the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a sister organisation to the PKK.

The current lack of Syrian authority in the region also facilitates the mobility of PKK fighters between northern Iraq, Syria and southeastern Turkey.

Meanwhile, Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the Kurdistan Region, an autonomous province in northern Iraq bordering Turkey, has made it clear that he won’t enter into an armed clash with the PKK.

Although Barzani claims he is playing a conciliatory role between the PKK and Ankara, the KRG has become the host of Kurdish separatist movements for the region.

Large Kurdish communities live in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, totalling 30 to 38 million people, depending on whether national data or international estimates are used. Turkey accounts for half of the total. Another two million live in the diaspora, mostly in Armenia and northern Europe. The Kurds are considered to be the world’s largest ethnic minority without their own country.

The current political instability in the Middle East has revived aspirations for a Pan-Kurdish state, which could emerge as a new Muslim regional power, alongside Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

The prospect gives Ankara the jitters. Stuck with domestic unrest, a potential armed intervention in Syria, blocked for now by Washington, and deteriorating relations with Iran, Erdogan’s government is prudent but jumpy. In recent weeks, it has repeatedly accused both Damascus and Tehran of providing support to the PKK and has expressed disappointment over Barzani’s passivity.

Meanwhile, the CHP and MHP opposition parties and nationalistic public opinion are criticising the prime minister for his foreign policy and lukewarm stance towards the PKK. Last week, voices of observers close to the ruling party warned the government that contemplating military intervention in Syria, with or without American consent, was the wrong approach.

Instead, they said, launching a full-scale, deep and lasting land forces operation into northern Iraq would be a better use of resources and soldiers’ lives in order to put an end to the Kurdish separatist violence.

Over dinner late last week with a closed group of journalists in Ankara, Deputy PM Bulent Arinc said Turkey was pondering an operation in the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, where the PKK headquarters are located. The government has already obtained authorisation from parliament.

This will, however, need the approval of Washington, which still retains policy rights over Iraq, and collaboration with U.S. military and intelligence, which can provide information on PKK movements.

This may not be so simple to obtain. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had become suspicious in recent months of Turkey’s reliability as an ally. Such suspicions were borne out last week, when Arinc admitted that the national security agency, MIT, had been sharing information with the Iranian intelligence agency, SAVAK. The information had been provided by American Predators, a type of drone.

“The challenge for Turkey, however, is to conduct this sweeping operation without alienating the local population living in scattered villages in Kandil, as well as other Kurds who have nothing to do with the violence,” says Abdullah Bozkurt, a political analyst and expert on the government’s decision-making.

The Semdinli experience confirms that the PKK would not hesitate to infiltrate residential areas and use them as shields against attacks. Ankara is concerned that incidents as in Uludere, or Afghan- and Pakistan-like blunders by the American military, would seriously tarnish Turkey’s reputation as a Muslim model for democracy.

Ties between Turkey and Iran appear to be headed downward in the wake of Tehran’s statement earlier this week that it would prefer not to hold the negotiations with the P5+1 group on its nuclear programme in Istanbul, as had been announced last week by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton.

The P5+1 is a group of countries, composed of the five United Nations Security Council permanent members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, which have been seeking assurances from Tehran since 2008 that its nuclear programme is intended for civilian purposes only and is not designed to produce a nuclear weapon.

The next round of negotiations, which had been scheduled to begin next Friday after more than a year’s hiatus, is widely seen, among the group’s Western members in particular, as critical to assessing whether or not Tehran is willing to make serious concessions, including possibly transferring its growing stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium outside Iran, in exchange for easing ever-tighter economic sanctions.

Turkey has attempted on several occasions in the past to reassure the West of Tehran’s peaceful intent.

“Islam does not allow for use of weapons of mass destruction,” Erdogan told reporters last week on his return from an official visit to Iran during which he reportedly conveyed a personal message from U.S. President Barack Obama to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But, after Tehran’s suggestion that it preferred not to meet in Istanbul, Erdogan’s tone changed sharply. “We have to be honest. Because of the lack of honesty they (the Iranians) are continually losing their international prestige,” he told reporters. The head of the Iranian parliamentary committee for national security and foreign policy, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, and members of the government close to him had publicly opposed Istanbul as the venue, proposing instead Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut and Damascus.

“The offers going round at the moment, Damascus or Baghdad, are a waste of time; it means (the meeting) won’t happen, because (the Iranians) know the other side won’t come to Damascus or Baghdad,” Erdogan fumed.

While officials here who have been in touch with their Iranian counterparts have since suggested that Tehran may yet agree to have the Turks host the meeting, media analysts speculate that Erdogan’s outburst may have reflected more growing bilateral tensions over Syria, Iran’s closest Arab ally.

Once-warm relations between Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al- Assad have deteriorated steadily over the year due to Damascus’ violent crackdown against the opposition to the point that Ankara now finds itself close to Qatar and Saudi Arabia in their call for arming rebel forces, some of which are based in Turkey.

Ankara has already reportedly drawn up contingency plans for forcibly setting up refugee safe zones inside Syria, even without U.N. Security Council authorisation, if the violence, which has already taken more than 9,000 lives according to the U.N., worsens.

And last weekend, Turkey hosted the second meeting of the “Friends of Syria”, consisting mostly of Western and Arab League nations that have called for Assad to step down without delay, even as former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan, a special U.N.-Arab League envoy, tries to arrange a cease-fire between the two sides of what has effectively become a civil war.

Despite the secular nature of Assad’s regime, Iran has long been Syria’s most important regional ally, and is widely believed to be, along with Russia, its biggest source of security and military assistance during the year-long crackdown.

Their strategic alliance has been based in part on their “resistance” to Israel, but they also share, along with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the ruling coalition in Iraq, common sectarian roots in Shi’a Islam. The Assad family and the top ranks of the Syrian army and security forces are Alawis, who also make up about 13 percent of the country’s population. Alawi Islam is a Shi’a offshoot.

Sunni Islam, on the other hand, is the dominant faith in Turkey, as well as in North Africa and in all of the Arab kingdoms, except Bahrain. And while Erdogan himself has defended Turkish secularism, his AKP party is avowedly Islamist, and its leadership is predominantly Sunni.

Fanned by fears of an Iran-led “Shi’a Crescent” in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, propagated in particular by Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the Greater Middle East has found itself increasingly divided by sectarian differences both within societies and between states. Over the past year’s “Arab Spring”, those rivalries appear to have intensified.

In their own relationship, Iran and Turkey have largely avoided such conflict, even as they competed for influence after the “regime changes” that took place in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, all three with overwhelmingly Sunni populations. And even though Turkey was cited as a possible “model” for new governments to follow, the influence of both countries has been limited, in major part due to the fact that neither is Arab.

The Syrian revolt, on the other hand, appears to have changed the Turkish-Iranian entente. Turkey has joined the anti-Assad coalition, composed of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both Sunni states supported by the U.S., Britain and France.

This is apparently making Iran reconsider its foreign policy with its Western neighbour, especially at a moment when Iraq, with a majority Shi’a population, is seeking good relations with both countries and trying to position itself as a peace broker between Tehran and Washington, a position to which Ankara has been aspiring all along.

In spite of the tension, Ankara and Tehran still need each other, although to different degrees and for different reasons.

Bilateral trade last year exceeded 15 billion dollars. Not only has Iran become an important market for Turkish goods, but Iranian oil and gas account for roughly half of Turkey’s annual energy supplies. Until now, Turkey remains one of the last countries, along with India, China, Russia, and Iraq, to resist Western pressure efforts to cut economic ties.

But if political tensions worsen, that could change. Indeed, just last week, and only one day after Erdogan concluded his visit to Iran, Turkey announced it would reduce oil imports from Iran by 20 percent and intended to make up the difference with imports from Libya.

Fifteen respected academics from different Turkish universities signed a declaration in Ankara last week protesting recent state regulations restricting access to a variety of websites on ‘moral’ and ‘national integrity’ grounds.

A freedom of speech rally in Trafalgar Square in March 2006 Credit: Simon Gibbs-sjgibbs80/CC-BY-2.0

Simultaneously, thousands of angry netizens held street demonstrations in several major cities, brandishing banners proclaiming, “Hands off my Internet”.

The regulation, introduced last spring by the Information and Communications Technology Authority (BTK), was due to be implemented in August 2011 but its enactment was postponed until the end of last November following public opposition and pressure by local and international NGOs.

According to the directive, Internet service providers (ISPs) are compelled to offer users two options for filtering their web searches – “children” and “family” – in order to protect them from “objectionable content”.

Such content seems to include “separatist propaganda”, such as communications that appear friendly or sympathetic to the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and other rebel movements.

At present, 138 search terms are deemed harmful to users. These include English words like “sex”, “animal”, “mature”, or “gay”, the German word “verbot”, which means ban, and the Turkish words for “hot”, “mother-in-law”, “sister-in-law”, and “incest”. Even the Arabic-origin first name Haydar (lion), which means penis in Turkish slang, is banned. Access to sites about Darwin and evolution of the species has also been curbed.

The objectivity of BTK has been heavily criticised by human rights activists because it is comprised of representatives of the family and information ministries, which initiated the filtering project, and includes no independent specialists.

According to one of the academics who signed the petition, the filtering database and profiles are controlled and maintained exclusively by the government.

The current version of the regulation grants users the possibility of a “standard” package, which allows them to freely browse all sites. Critics of the measure are, nevertheless, skeptical, as the technical operation of the process remains obscure. Moreover, filtering criteria have been established by BTK without civil society consultation or parliamentary involvement.

Supporters of the restrictions claim they preserves traditional values and are consistent with the Turkish constitution, which “sees protection of the family as one of the fundamental missions of the state,” according to Gunseli Ocakoglu, a journalist close to the government.

But ‘protecting’ families from certain words is only part of the filtering process. Entire sites fall within the scope of the new regulation: MySpace, the video portal Vimeo and certain services provided by Google seem to be on the censors’ list.

In 2011 Blogger.com, which has 600,000 users in Turkey, was banned by a court decision after a local satellite company broadcasting sports features filed a legal complaint on the grounds that some of the site’s users had streamed clips of football matches over the Internet.

In contrast, the European Court of Justice ruled against a similar complaint brought before it by a Belgian manufacturing company last November on the basis that, although protection of intellectual property rights is necessary, filtering Internet access was a violation of fundamental human rights.

The current filtering regulation in Turkey is the sequel to the enactment on May 4, 2007 of Law No. 5651, “Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by means of Such Publication”, by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The law was a response to deep concern over defamatory online videos of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic. Over 3,700 Web sites were swiftly blacklisted and access to YouTube was banned between 2008 and 2010.

Law 5651 also paved the way for a new agency, the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB), armed with the power to issue blocking orders for judicial consideration and implement blocking decisions.

Website blocking can also be seen as an offshoot of the Anti-Terror Law 3713 or Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code on ‘denigrating Turkishness’, leading human rights activists to claim that Internet filtering goes beyond children and family protection.

Most portals dealing with the troubled southeastern region of Turkey or the online gay community – which has 225,000 netizens – have been blocked, according to an assessment by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

In a 2010 report, the OSCE’s representative on freedom of the media argued that the use of blocking orders to silence communication amounts to censorship and is a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), to which Turkey is a signatory.

“The whole thing may be presented as a service to create a more secure Internet, but in reality it (amounts to) downright censorship by the state,” Yaman Akdeniz, law professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul, told the press during the signing of the declaration.

“We are seriously concerned with the filtering packages regulation in Turkey,” Lucie Morillon, head of the new media and Internet freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told IPS over the phone Wednesday.

“(From tests implemented in) Turkey we found that the system put in place by BTK goes beyond filters for child protection to include (online) political opinions about issues sensitive to the government.”

“We are against any Internet access restrictions, no matter where they occur, and have fought attempts of administrative filtering even in France. Our advice to the Turkish authorities has been to abandon the decision,” she added.

Of the nearly 11.5 million Internet users in Turkey, 22,000 have so far opted for a filter package.

Besides Turkey, Internet filtering is widely used by the Chinese, North Korean and Saudi governments, primarily for political reasons.

Assurances to women by the winners of the Tunisian elections that they will be free not to wear the Muslim veil has come as music to the ears of Turkish secularists. It was another signpost confirming Turkey’s growing position and influence among Arab countries.

Women wearing the traditional Hijab. Winners of the Tunisian elections assure women that they will be free not to wear the Muslim veil. Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

The adoption on Oct. 29 of the policy by Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the first-ever free elections in Tunisia securing 41.47 percent of the vote, has also cheered up the leadership of the Turkish ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party.

Paradoxical as it may sound, AKP leader and Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan is credited for Ennhada’s laicity facelift. AKP has Islamic roots and its opponents have for the past 12 years predicted that its rise to power would transform the country into an Islamist Republic on the model of Iran.

Nothing of the sort has happened so far, although religious conservatism has progressively been pervading the state and parts of society. But the Arab Spring has given an opportunity to Ankara to change its image in the international arena.

On a week-long trip in early September to Northern Africa, Erdogan became the evangelist of secularism as a model of governance for the nations in the region that just rid themselves of their despots.

This triggered adverse reaction from the Muslim Brotherhood. During a TV show Sep. 13 in Cairo, he rebuffed his critics without hesitation. “To Egyptians who view secularism as removing religion from the state, or as an infidel state, I say you are mistaken. It means respect to all religions,” he said.

Tunisians were also sceptical about the Turkish model at first. But it now seems that the paradigm is attracting supporters, both among Arab liberals and moderate Islamists.

Erdogan, now a household name in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA), has concocted a recipe that skilfully blends inclusive democracy, chastising Israel’s policy towards the Palestinian territories, and hope for prosperity.

Turkey’s curtailing of the power of the military in July, breaking long-established diplomatic and defence ties with Israel in May 2010, and the country’s impressive economic growth since AKP came to power in 2002 have played well in the hands of the Turkish PM.

Meanwhile, Turkish foreign-language media and TV sitcoms, propagated from Istanbul to antennas across the Middle East and North America have built the picture of a society that lives as happily and leisurely as any Hollywood-made bourgeois neighbourhood. Turkey has become the benchmark for moderate Muslims.

The current popularity of Turkey in the Arab streets and among the business communities in Cairo, Tunisia, Beirut or Tripoli are the fruit of a long-term strategy that began in 2003, and whose objectives became apparent in 2009 with the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu to the post of minister of foreign affairs.

Davutoglu, a former political science professor in Istanbul and at the Islamic university of Malaysia, has been a close advisor to Erdogan since 2003. His book ‘Strategic Depth’ published in 2001, in which he argues Turkey’s historic and geographic destiny in a greater MENA extending from the Black Sea and Western Asia to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, has influenced recent Turkish foreign, trade and defence policy.

This new look at the region seems very similar to the ‘Greater Middle East’ term presented by former U.S. president George W. Bush at the G8 meeting in 2004, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Although Davutoglu is today taxed with Neo-Ottomanism, a term he abhors, repositioning Turkey from a marginal power to a world political player of geostrategic importance was already in the mind of the late prime minister and president Turgut Ozal in the 1990s. Ozal initiated the process of Turkey’s application for membership to the EU, which was formalised in 2005 by Erdogan.

Trade has been the main focus of such vision in the past decade. Turkey’s commercial priorities progressively have turned away from the EU and towards MENA.

Exports to the Arab world from Turkey before 2002 were stable at 3 billion dollars per year. Imports from the same region were 3.4 billion dollars. With Erdogan as PM, exports to MENA rose to 30 billion dollars in 2010, with the United Arab Emirates the largest buyer (8 billion dollars). Arab sales to Turkey, on the other hand, have varied during the period between 5 and 11 billion dollars a year.

Business diplomacy has been one of the main instruments used by Ankara. A third of all official trips abroad by the leadership of the government between 2003 and 2010 were to the Middle East, with President Abdulla Gul making 17 visits, Davutoglu 29 and Erdogan 47. Their escort systematically included 50 or more business executives and entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, exports to the EU fell from 63 billion dollars in 2008 to 47 billion dollars in 2009, although they have more than doubled annually in the previous ten years.

The emphasis of the trade effort is clearly on the neighbourhood and on countries with a similar culture. Exports to the member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) grew from 3.7 billion dollars in 2002 to 32.5 billion dollars in 2010.

The Arab Spring is, therefore, giving the jitters to Turkish exporters and contractors. Construction industry associations estimate that, in just Libya, contracts worth 25 billion dollars have been put on hold or scrapped. Most of these were signed by the fallen government or the Gaddafi family.

Days after the resignation of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, major infrastructure contracts in Egypt with Turkish enterprises were suspended or cancelled. Gul’s and Erdogan’s expeditious trips in the summer to Cairo are indicative of the pressure to Ankara by business lobbies.

While Erdogan and Davutoglu appear to have a winning streak in their campaign to win Arab hearts, minds and cheque books, immediate neighbours are spoiling the party. And the domestic climate is poised to change, as the truce between secularists and conservatives will be put to test in the forthcoming debate over the new Constitution, which is supposed to permanently remove the legacy charter, founded on Kemal Ataturk’s doctrine and shaped by subsequent military dictatorships, and replace it with a fully democratic one.

Bellicose dialectic between Turkey and Israel reached a new height last week and has precipitated the deteriorating relationship between the two former allies to new depth. But it is for the moment unclear whether Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threats to cut the Israeli navy’s perceived power and presence to size in Eastern Mediterranean represent a true tactical decision in Ankara’s strategy to expand its influence in the Middle East, or a mere coup-de- theatre for domestic and Arab consumption.

The crisis began ten days ago, following the publication on Sep. 2 of the Palmer Report by the United Nations (UN), which qualified Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip as legal under international law. Israel imposed the blockade in 2007 after Hamas took control of this Palestinian territory from Fatah, a rival revolutionary faction. Egypt also reacted adversely to this change by closing the border with Gaza. The decision was recently repealed, to allow cross-border circulation by individuals only.

Hamas, founded in 1987 in Syria, is a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian religious militant movement. It is considered by the United States, the European Union, Israel and a few other states a terrorist group.

Relations between Ankara and Jerusalem became sour at the end of May 2010, when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) boarded a Turkish vessel, Mavi Marmara, which was the flagship of a flotilla attempting to break the blockade and deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip. Encountering resistance by some of the passengers, IDF commandos opened fire, killing nine Turkish citizens.

Turkey has insisted on receiving an official apology from Israel, compensation for the victims, and lifting of the blockade. Israel has so far offered to express regret for the loss of life due to “operational mishaps” and to provide limited monetary damages to the families of the deceased. U.S. State Secretary Hilary Clinton has in the past 15 months tried to reconcile the positions of the Israeli and Turkish PMs, but the release of the Palmer Report triggered Erdogan’s ire to a level unexpected, in all evidence, by Washington.

The conclusions of the UN investigation committee on the incident were due for publication early this year, but their communication was delayed, first on the request of Turkey, which was heading to national elections last June, then by Israel, whose prime minister is facing serious domestic unrest because of the country’s housing shortages and rising cost of living. But it proved difficult for the United Nations to hold on to it any longer.

The Palmer Report grants legitimacy to the naval blockade of Gaza by Israel and reprimands IDF for excessive use of force against civilians. Turkey has reacted by rejecting the validity of the verdict and threatening to take the matter against Israel to the International Court of Justice, though this got confused with the ICC, which is the International Criminal Court.

The threat last week from Turkish President Abdullah Gul speaking to Arab TV, may genuinely reflect Ankara’s wish, but has very little legal foundation, according to international law experts here and in Washington consulted by IPS. The ICC does not operate like a regular court, before which one can file a complaint and initiate a trial. It is at the discretion of its prosecutor to determine whether an investigation can be opened against a party, based on information obtained from another party.

A prerequisite for this is that the accusations concern a war crime, crimes against humanity, or genocide. Moreover, there is doubt as to the court’s jurisdiction, as Israel has not ratified the treaty creating the ICC.

Turkish officials were quick to point that there had been a translation error in the declaration and that Gul had meant the International Court of Justice (ICJ), not ICC. This avenue still presents legal standing problems, as neither Turkey nor Israel accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court.

As soon as the Palmer Report was released Turkey downgraded diplomatic relations among the states to the level of second secretary. Ankara had recalled its ambassador to Jerusalem last year.

Last week Erdogan announced that all trade between the countries was suspended, a decision rephrased soon thereafter to limit the sanction to military purchases only. Israel is a major supplier of defence solutions to Turkey. Ankara also cancelled all military cooperation agreements with IDF, many of which go back to the 1980s.

Friday of last week saw additional escalation, with Erdogan accusing Israel of abusing its naval power and announcing that the Turkish navy had been instructed to escort any maritime convoys, flying the country’s flag, attempting to break the blockade and deliver supplies to the Palestinians in Gaza. He reportedly added that Turkish warships would be routinely present in Eastern Mediterranean in order to ensure free navigation in the region.

Later in the day government officials corrected the meaning of the declaration, taken by foreign diplomats and observers as intent by Turkey to police international waters, as inaccurate translation of the prime minister’s interviews with different media consolidated and used out of context by press agencies.

Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak downplayed the Turkish missives, preferring to opt for a cooler attitude. Netanyahu, however, reassured his constituents that the Israeli navy is “a long and powerful arm” of the country.

The majority of the Turkish public seem to be taking a distance from all this. Trade with Israel remained high in 2010, in spite of the Mavi Marmara incident, at 2.7 billion dollars, although the travel and hospitality industries were negatively impacted, with tens of thousands of Israelis booked to visit Turkey changing their destination.

Despite the rhetoric, prospects of an armed conflict between Turkey and Israel are slim. The organisers of the 2010 flotilla said over the weekend that they had no plans to mount another humanitarian expedition in the foreseeable future. Palestinian groups might, of course, charter Turkish flagships and send them to Gaza, in which case Ankara’s threat would be put to test. But the U.S. Sixth Fleet, dedicated to the Mediterranean, would certainly act as a buffer to avoid any direct contact between the Israeli and Turkish navies.

Mission not accomplished. This is in three words what more than 200 eminent speakers and panelists from over 70 participating countries in effect told their peers, the media and delegates who attended the U.N. Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Fourth Conference May 9-13 in Istanbul.

The summit, code-named UN-LDC IV, attracted an unprecedented – for a development conference – crowd of 11,000, including heads of state, politicians, diplomats, technocrats, business executives, and journalists in Turkey’s economic capital, according to Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul, who inaugurated the meeting.

Although the event was praised as a great success by the keynote speakers at the closing ceremony Friday, the final outcome has not been as convincing as hoped by many of the stakeholders.

Common characteristics of the 48 least developed countries are their lowest per capita incomes (less than 745 dollars per person per year) and the highest population growth rates (2.8 percent). These states are also totally off-track in the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals, and at the bottom of the Human Development Index rankings. Lack of sound governance, adequate institutions, and endemic corruption seem to form a common denominator for most of the LDCs.

In spite of strong financial commitment, the international community, embodied in governments of developing and developed countries, or development partners in U.N. jargon, has not produced the results expected, as evidence-based appraisal shows.

Following the resolutions adopted in the last LDC meet in Brussels ten years ago, aid to LDCs was initially set at 14 billion dollars a year for 2001. By 2009 it had climbed to 39.9 billion dollars annually, and the 2010 amount is anticipated to be around 43 billion dollars, according to U.N. estimates.

The return on this investment has, however, been disappointing. Although the overarching goal of the Brussels Programme of Action (BPoA) was “to make substantial progress towards halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and suffering from hunger by 2015”, the number of LDCs practically doubled in the BPoA’s lifetime, from 27 to 48 countries. That is, 21 more countries became poorer than a decade earlier.

Poverty is determined by the percentage of the population that lives below 1.25 dollar a day on purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, which results in the poverty headcount ratio. Cape Verde and Maldives graduated out of the LDC league in 2007 and 2011 respectively. From the remaining lot, Gambia and Mauritania only have shown sufficient progress to achieve the goal of halving the ratio by 2015.

By April 2010, a total of ten LDCs were in a situation of debt distress, that is, insolvency for all practical purposes, and another ten were at high risk of debt distress, according to United States Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD) 2010 report on LDCs.

At the Istanbul intergovernmental meetings and the side debates among non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Intellectuals Forum and the Academics Council, arrows of blame flew in all directions.

The developed countries came under fire for their change of attitude towards committing more funds for LDCs. Their solidarity position has visibly changed since the BPoA, following concerns about terrorism after 9/11 2001, the war in Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008, and subsequent social discontent at home.

They demanded better governance and accountability for the use of the funds disbursed to the respective LDCs. Their inclination in Istanbul was to pass the torch to the private sector. Public Private Initiatives (PPI), more intensive commerce with LDCs, regionalisation of the development effort through South-South relations, foreign direct investment, and fair trade were put forward as alternatives, or complements, to financing programmes by state development partners.

NGOs protested that transferring responsibility from the state to the business sector was hardcore liberalism and exploitation of the LDCs’ natural and human resources. They were, in turn, blamed for lack of rational management and control of the aid raised and distributed by them.

LDCs were, obviously, in the seat of the victim and culprit at the same time. Several among them experienced strong economic advancement since 2001, with an average annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 7 percent. Afghanistan, for instance, topped at 18.79 percent real GDP growth, but did not manage to find its way out of the LDC group. In 2008, Afghanistan received the largest official development assistance (ODA), 4.9 billion dollars.

Tanzania has been receiving over a billion dollars a year since 2001, but 89 percent of its 42 million population was living on less than 1.25 dollar a day (PPP) in 2008.

African LDCs received the lion’s share in foreign direct investment: 22 billion dollars out of a total of 27 billion in ten years. Progress in living conditions in Africa has, nevertheless, been marginal, with undernourishment percentages of the population ranging between two to three times higher than Asian LDCs.

Another weak spot in the LDCs commitment to move out of pariah status has been the lack of fulfillment of agreed obligations toward the international community by many amongst them. Out of 48, only 35 states submitted a progress report to the U.N. on the compliance requirements of BPoA.

Western donors have been asking, where is the ODA money going? Afghanistan lies at the very bottom group of the 2010 corruption index published by Transparency International (TI). Tanzania is in the group just above. Most of the LDCs are in the last two groups of the TI classification.

Corruption and kleptocracy seem to be, for most development partners, the evils that keep LDCs away from development. The U.N., on the other hand, appears to be looking at the bright side of information. In a report last year it cited Yemen among LDCs that had shown progress in governance, because of its 2006 presidential elections.

The supporters of the Istanbul Programme of Action claim it addresses this disease with drastic medicine. A first reading of the final draft approved by the UN LDC IV Conference is, however, not convincing in this respect. It does not propose substantial measures to deal with the problem, just soft recommendations for better behaviour.

A new week, a new campaign for Ankara’s diplomacy. After a victorious arm-twisting on Saturday with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to divert the leadership of the aerial war against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from France to NATO, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has turned his attention to trouble closer to home, Syria.

Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had daily phone calls during the weekend, and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu followed up with a teleconference with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moualem to offer Turkey’s assistance in the event of a reform process towards a democratic regime.

The head of Turkish National Intelligence (MIT), Hakan Fidan, was dispatched on Sunday to Damascus to express his government’s concerns about spreading social unrest from Daraa, in Syria’s southwest, to larger cities such as Latakia, a Mediterranean port nearer the Turkish border.

Close to 100 demonstrators have died and hundreds have been wounded in the clashes with the Syrian security and military forces since the rallies began two weeks ago.

Domestic problems in Syria are of particular sensitivity to Turkey. Although the two countries still have open territorial issues, upheaval in one may result in destabilisation in the other. Their 800 km common border provides safe passage to political activists.

A major concern for Turkey is the Kurdish population in Syria of 1.4 million, which, in case of collapse of Assad’s regime could collude with the estimated 15 million or more ethnic Kurds in Turkey, seven million Iranian Kurds, and six million Northern Iraqi Kurds to claim an independent state.

In anticipation of such an eventuality, Ankara and Damascus formed in 2009 a High Level Strategic Cooperation Council (HSCC) and held their first joint military exercises in April 2010.

Since 1978, Turkey has been in armed conflict with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a separatist organisation classified as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and the U.S.

The hostilities have caused the death of at least 40,000 Turkish soldiers and gendarmes, PKK guerrillas, and civilians, while the number of wounded has exceeded 30,000, and that of the missing is estimated at 17,000.

A study in 1998 by Brunswick University in the U.S. reported that at least three million people had by that time been displaced in south-eastern Turkey and the area bordering Iraq, for war operational reasons, while 3,000 villages were totally or partially destroyed.

Kurdish autonomy is a sensitive issue in public opinion in Turkey, Iran and Syria alike, where territorial integrity has ranked at the top of these countries’ priorities since their respective independence from Western rule.

The current regimes in Tehran and Damascus are intransigent on Kurdish freedoms, while Erdogan’s government, in power since 2002, has begun a dialogue process with the Turkish ethnic Kurds to enable cultural autonomy, which, after this year’s national elections, might evolve into devolution of some governance powers to the local administrations.

The main opposition, nationalist parties and the military are, however, implacable in their hostility to such a perspective.

Turkey’s unease about the Syrian domestic situation is also influenced by economic and geopolitical concerns. After a long period of cool relations, with occasional threats of armed confrontation, Assad and Erdogan have crossed the fence to develop a cosy relationship, building on the settlement in 1998 of old political disputes.

On the strategic plane, both countries see cooperation as being instrumental to maintain the geopolitical status quo of Iraq’s territorial integrity, frustrate Pan-Kurdish aspirations, and to keep Israel’s and Iran’s testosterone on check.

The Turkish premier, speaking on Monday to journalists, confirmed he had urged the Syrian president over the weekend to adopt a conciliatory spirit with his people.

“We advised Mr. Assad that responding to the people’s years-old demands positively, with a reformist approach, would help Syria overcome the problems more easily,” said Erdogan. “I did not get a ‘No’ answer,” he commented, adding that he expected reforms to be announced by Damascus this week.

Syria has a long record of iron-fist governance style, aimed at securing the survival of the ruling Ba’ath party. Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president and leader of the coup which installed it in power in 1963, immediately imposed an emergency law, which suspended practically all civil liberties and is still in force today.

The Ba’ath party, dominated by Allawis, a tolerant religious Shia Muslem denomination, has been at odds with the Sunni movement in Syria. Hafez al-Assad in 1982 violently crushed a Sunni Islamist Brotherhood revolt, killing 20,000 rebels. Tolerance and appetite for power did, obviously, not coexist.

Amnesty International has repeatedly ranked Syria as the country with the most repressive laws in the Middle East. In an attempt to calm spirits, Bashar al-Assad offered last week to amend the emergency law and allow for new parties to be formed. The gesture was turned down by the demonstrators, who insist on full democratisation of thy system.

Turkish business executives and political observers have been recommending that Erdogan include in his prescription to al-Assad to also work on reducing corruption, clientelism and cronyism, which are endemic in the Syrian economy and sources of poverty for the population. They hamper foreign direct investment from Turkey to Syria.

But Turkey — a majority Sunni state with religious minorities that were “tamed” by the military in the 20th century — feels uncomfortable giving lessons to its neighbour, an increasingly important trading partner.

With ongoing domestic unrest next door, but also in Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Morocco, Ankara’s Middle Eastern and Northern African ambitious plans are poised to return to the drawing board.

Turkey’s volte-face Thursday evening to make a sizeable military contribution to NATO’s intervention in the Libyan crisis, after two weeks of fierce opposition to the Alliance’s mingling with Arab affairs, has further blurred Ankara’s position in the North African conflict.

The Turkish Grand General Assembly voted in a closed-door session Thursday in favour of the country’s military participation in NATO’s plans to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which calls for the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya, and other measures aiming at restraining the activities of Muammar Gaddafi’s forces fighting anti-government rebels in the country.

The Turkish maritime contribution, proposed by the government in Ankara, will consist of four frigates, one support vessel and one submarine. Five other countries have already committed one ship each, making Turkey’s contribution rather substantial. The NATO naval force’s mission, under Italian command, will be to prevent weapons and ammunition destined for Gaddafi’s army from reaching the Libyan coast.

In another surprise move on Friday, Ankara offered NATO its air force infrastructure in Izmir to host the Alliance’s operations headquarters for creating the no-fly zone.

Several hundreds of demonstrators, mostly from opposition parties and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), gathered during Thursday’s vote outside parliament and the U.S. Embassy shouting slogans against Turkish involvement and the presence in Ankara of NATO’s top military commander, U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, who was having meetings with Turkish senior officers about the crisis in the Middle East.

The Security Council passed Resolution 1973 on Mar. 17 with 10 votes in favor and 5 abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia) in a 55-minute session. The resolution falls short of authorising regime change, a move that China and Russia might have blocked through the use of their right of veto at the Security Council.

Turkey has sought since the break out of the civil war in Libya to influence western powers to stay out of the conflict, fearing a backlash of Arab public opinion against Europe and the U.S.

In an effort to dissuade a vote by the Security Council, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had on Mar. 14 said that “Any NATO military operation in Libya would be unhelpful and fraught with risk,” a stance he continued to take in subsequent speeches, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Libya and saying he opposed foreign military intervention, including a no-fly zone operation.

But the French initiative, backed by Britain, to begin bombing Libya two days after the U.N. resolution was passed, seems to have played a role in Ankara’s change of strategy.

The formation of an ad hoc coalition by a small number of Western powers, including Britain, Canada and France, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision for his country to assume a vital role, at least temporarily, has changed the lay-out on the chess board.

Turkey’s foreign policy has been, since the Israeli Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 against Hamas in Gaza, to assume a regional political power role in the Middle East, tapping on the privileged relations of Ankara with the Muslim world. This has led to severing military ties with the Jewish state and diplomatic cold war between the two countries, which has resulted in boosting Erdogan’s popularity in the Middle East.

Turkey’s new regional agenda, labeled by political observers Neo-Ottomanist, has guided Ankara’s moderate and conciliatory position in the events in the Arab world since last December. Erdogan and Turkish President Abdullah Gul have been very active in trying to advise national leaders in revolt-torn countries, including Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, to show restraint and move towards democratic reforms.

Ideology is the façade of such diplomatic fever. Turkey’s economic interests in the Arab world are paramount to the government’s credibility less than three months before the next national elections.

Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party won — for Turkey — an unprecedented victory in the 2007 contest with 47 percent of the vote, mostly because of the country’s growing prosperity, fuelled by strong exports to the Middle East, which have increased by 600 percent to 30 billion U.S. dollars since the AKP came to power in 2002 and which represent one-third of the country’s total exports. Turkish foreign direct investment in Libya alone exceeds 15 billion dollar.

It is, therefore, easy to understand Ankara’s anxiety in the application of the Security Council resolution. Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, does not want to be seen as assuming an imperialistic role in the Middle East, a region that was part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 500 years, until 1918.

On the other hand, Turkey cannot pursue its Pax Ottomana agenda by being a mere spectator of the events in the region. Being active in NATO’s activities gives Ankara access to local intelligence and to the intentions and decision-making process of the alliance.

Erdogan, speaking Thursday night in Istanbul, questioned the motives of the hastily formed Anglo-French coalition and warned that the imposition of a no-fly zone or any other military action aiming at seizing Libya’s natural resources would be intolerable.

“I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in that direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on,” said Erdogan, visibly irritated by an earlier indirect allusion by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe to a modern “crusade”.

France has been a firm opponent of Turkey’s application to join the European Union, creating periodic tensions between the two countries. French President Nicolas Sarkozy kept Turkey out of the Mar. 19 Paris conference on the implementation of resolution 1973.

The Turkish dialectic seems, however, to be two-pronged. On the one hand, it appeals to the anti-western sentiment of the Turkish conservative population and to the Arab street, serving primarily electoral campaign needs and the image of the Muslim democratic model Turkey wants to project in the region.

At the same time, Ankara wants to be part of the club of the powerful in order to reinforce its new-found identity of a catalyser in the Middle East. Its sustained effort to influence hearts and minds there has perhaps prompted the Anglo-French military intervention, in a positioning race in the new Arab world.

Britain, France and Italy — which replaced the Ottomans after 1918 as colonial powers — now apparently see a window of opportunity to return. The dispute is on whether they should be carrying guns or olive branches.

Turkey’s foreign policy is undergoing an acid test as the political turmoil continues in the Arab World. The fragile situation in Tripoli, in particular, is giving the jitters to government and businesses alike, with billions of dollars of Turkish investment and trade at risk.

The massive exodus of immigrants from Libya has reminded the Turkish public opinion how vulnerable their country may be as it has become increasingly dependent on the Middle East and Africa for its economic development.

It is estimated that 25,000 Turkish workers and businessmen were residing in Libya at the end of January. More than 3,000 have already been repatriated by air and sea, and the waiting list for a passage out is long.

Turkish investment in Libya currently exceeds 15 billion dollars, with many Turkish companies having lucrative contracts with the Gaddafi administration and family.

“If Muammar (Gaddafi) falls, our contracts are worth less than tapestry paper,” Murat Can, an Istanbul-based construction entrepreneur, told IPS.

The business lobby in Ankara, through its powerful associations and clubs, has been the driving force behind the government’s reluctance to be vocal towards Tripoli, and for Turkey’s official opposition to U.N. sanctions against Libya.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged the U.N. Security Council not to impose sanctions, warning that the Libyan people, rather than Gaddafi’s government, would suffer most. “We call on the international community to act with conscience, justice, laws, and universal human values – not out of oil concerns,” he pleaded. Many believe, however, that this position against international determination to coerce Gaddafi to resign, or to open up to democratic dialogue with his own people, was motivated by economic concerns of major Turkish exporters and investors, a convincing argument in a year of parliamentary elections.

The business community has decisively supported Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party in winning the 2002 and 2007 elections and the constitutional reforms referendum of September 2010.

The Security Council on Saturday voted sanctions 15-0 on arms sales to Libya and on Gaddafi and his immediate family. Several countries, including the U.S. and Switzerland, have announced they would be freezing the family’s assets in their respective jurisdictions.

Turkey appears to have been as unprepared as any other country in the wake of the Arab revolt, but the consequences for it, politically and economically, are likely to take different dimensions from its western allies.

Prior to the regional crisis, trade and diplomatic relations with nations in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) had been cordial and solid.

Exports to MENA have exploded from 5 billion dollars in 2002 to 30 billion dollars in 2010, a 600 percent increase. In contrast, outbound commerce with the EU has grown 2.5 times only, to 52.7 billion dollars over the same period, but in reality declined last year by almost 20 percent in comparison to 2007 and 2008.

The shift in focus towards MENA is the result of a combination of business and political factors. New opportunities have surfaced in the MENA emerging markets, mostly in construction, agriculture, processed foods, manufacturing, and defence.

This has given Ankara political and diplomatic ammunition to further its agenda for soft hegemony in the region, a doctrine introduced by Ahmet Davutoglu, the man who has been in command of Turkish foreign affairs since 2009.

Davutoglu, 52, who joined the government in 2002 as foreign policy advisor, spent the longest part of his career as an academic in Istanbul and, more recently, with the Islamic University of Malaysia. He has developed a vision of Turkey as a regional power, whose roots and destiny lie in the Middle East, the Eurasian Turkic states and the Balkans – geographical areas that for nearly 500 years were part of the Ottoman Empire until it was dissolved in 1918.

The West, particularly the United Sates, initially welcomed the initiative, on the belief that Turkey could become a model for democratising the Middle East and the former Soviet Union Turkic states in line with western policy. But they soon labelled Davutoglu a neo-Ottomanist, a term that he rejects, preferring the attribute “Pax Ottomana” to qualify his project.

This self-confidence was manifested in Ankara’s closer ties with Tehran and its defiance last June of the Security Council of the U.N., of which Turkey was a non-permanent member until the end of last year. Turkey voted against new sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear programme, alienating its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies, as well as China and Russia.

Humanitarian reasons and political moderation were cited to explain the vote. Economic reasons are, however, more plausible as the basis of the decision. Turkey has signed a 25-year agreement allowing the country’s national oil company to exploit three natural gas fields in Iran and to distribute to Europe 30 billion cubic metres annually of Iranian and Turkmen gas. Annual bilateral trade is currently estimated to exceed 10 billion dollars.

Convinced of its vocation as regional power, Turkey has intensified its support to the Palestinian cause, leading in May 2010 to an open confrontation with Israel and the freezing of its diplomatic relations and military cooperation with the Jewish state. The ensuing popularity of Erdogan in the Arab streets was seen by the main statesmen in the region as domestic interference.

The demise of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, consequently, did not upset Ankara. Egypt has been a rival in jockeying for regional supremacy since the 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel.

But the rapid pace of events now has led Turkish diplomacy to miscalculations. Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s visit in February to Tehran coincided with large demonstrations by the Iranian opposition, which led to brutal crackdown by the Revolutionary Guards.

Erdogan’s acceptance last year of Gaddafi’s International Human Rights Prize and his stance so far to stop international sanctions against Libya is another message that seems to be confusing Arab freedom seekers. The new government in Egypt last week cancelled a major infrastructure project with Turkey.

Meanwhile, Ankara has changed its tactics in respect to Turkey’s membership to the EU. In the past few weeks the government has hardened its position on the Cyprus issue and postponed indefinitely the transposition of Community acquis to Turkish law. This may be pre-electoral bravado, or a manoeuvre to obtain new concessions from Brussels.

The strained diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel since June have unveiled intensive jockeying between regional powers for influence in the Middle East peace process.

In the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara incident, Turkey demanded an official apology by Israel, the opening of an international inquiry and damages to the victims and their families, under threat of sanctions. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) had on May 31 raided the Turkish flagship, which was attempting to break the naval blockade of the Palestinian Port of Gaza, causing the death of nine Turks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brushed aside the demands, and Turkey has already implemented some of its threats, closing its airspace to Israeli military aircraft, putting a halt joint military exercises, and recalling its ambassador from Jerusalem.

The rift between the two countries has brought to the front Turkey’s emerging strategy to become the regional power of the day, filling the vacuum left by Iraq’s collapse in 2003.

In many public speeches, as well as in his book Strategic Depth, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a former professor at Marmara University, Istanbul, and the International Islamic University of Malaysia, has propagated his vision for Turkey to become the main political player and catalyst in the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia.

The implementation plan of the strategy includes a “zero-problem with the neighbors” doctrine, formulated and already put in place by Davutoglu, a close and long-standing advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and to President Abdullah Gul. Relations with historical enemies Greece, Syria, and rival Iran have been restored to friendships.

Turkey’s focus, however, is, for now, the Middle East. Ankara has seized two opportunities in this respect: mediation between Israel and Syria in the peace process; and brokerage of a deal with Iran for swapping nuclear fuel in order to stave off Iran the fury of Washington and its western allies.

The agreement with Tehran, which was signed jointly with Brazil, was not to the liking of the U.S., which in June successfully pressed for severe sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council. Turkey and Brazil, both members of the Council, voted against the U.S.-proposed resolution.

This vote has prompted Washington’s insistence on Ankara to leave the Iranian affair to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, also known as P5+1.

U.S. President Obama, at a brief encounter at the end of June in Toronto, urged Erdogan to find ways to reconcile with Israel. Despite a meeting in early July in Brussels between Davutoglu and an envoy by Netanyahu, no progress was made.

The Turkish foreign minister’s roll-out of his plans for leadership of the Muslim world has, as a result, been put on hold. The privileged relationship with Israel, which Turkey had enjoyed since the 1996 military cooperation agreement between the two countries, gave Ankara the weight it sought in order to influence the balance of power between the Hebrew state and the Muslim states in the region, including Iran. Turkey was respected by the Arab capitals and Tehran, and was the only friend Israel had in the region.

The chemistry between Ankara and Jerusalem had, however, deteriorated since the 22-day Operation Cast Lead, launched at the end of December 2008 by IDF against Hamas-controlled Gaza, which ended Turkey’s role as mediator in the peace process. Erdogan did not forgive Netanyahu for not informing him of the impending attack.

Mutual frustration between the allies escalated when Erdogan walked off on Israeli President Shimon Peres at a televised debate during the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The PM’s wife, Emine Erdogan, discussing last Saturday the incident in an interview with a Palestinian newspaper, said that “Peres was uttering a chain of lies in front of the world” and someone had to stop him.

After the recent break in diplomatic relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, neither Iran nor Syria seem to see much value in Turkey’s political efforts in the Middle East. Ankara’s ability to have the ear of Netanyahu and Obama has declined. According to political analysts in the region, the rulers of the other Muslim states are becoming annoyed by Erdogan’s recent initiatives, which have increased his and Turkey’s popularity in the Arab street.Egypt and Saudi Arabia are keen to be seen as the chief defenders of the Palestinian cause.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, speaking Jul. 5 at a press conference in Madrid, signaled that he would like to resume negotiations with Israel, but implied that it would be harder for Turkey to play a role, in view of its quarrel with the Jewish state. International observers speculate that Damascus will opt for a Western mediator.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has indicated that he plans to appoint a former French ambassador who served in Damascus to coordinate talks between Israel and Syria. This seems to be the solution preferred by Netanyahu, who dispatched last week the chief of the general staff, Gen. Gaby Ashkenazy to France and Italy to discuss military cooperation, a role fulfilled until May by Turkey.

Last week, however, Al-Assad, in a volte-face, praised Turkey as the mediator Syria could trust. This was followed Monday by an impromptu visit by Davutoglu to Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal in an effort to reconcile the organisation with the rival Palestinian Authority (PA).

Meanwhile, in this race for regional influence, another contender has surfaced. Muammar Al-Gaddafi, Libyan ruler and Chairman of the 53-nation African Union, has indicated that he does not want to leave to Turkey the leadership of the Muslims, according to Arab commentators. The failed attempt to break the Gaza blockade by a ship commissioned by one of his sons could be the beginning of a series of initiatives to coerce Israel into concessions to Hamas and to conquer the Palestinians’ hearts and minds.

With Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas hesitating to begin direct negotiations with Netanyahu, Turkey may now have a better chance to come back to the scene as a viable mediator in the peace process. Ankara’s rhetoric on the Gaza blockade remains, however, an obstacle to Jerusalem’s assent.

The annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ended Wednesday in Istanbul in a climate of cautious hope for the economy and with a mixed bag of opportunities and challenges for the two institutions.

Throughout the event, which lasted one week, including plenary sessions, committee meetings and side conferences, the mantra, first pronounced by World Bank president Robert Zoellick, that “it is too early to declare success”, resounded in the halls of the Istanbul Congress Centre.

The IMF revised before the meeting its forecast on the future of the worldwide economy to 1.1 percent shrinkage this year and 3.1 percent growth next year. Its July forecast had been 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points lower respectively.

But growth will not be equally shared by all countries. China and emerging Asian economies are likely to expand by 9.2 and 7.8 percent respectively by the fourth quarter of 2010, while high-income nations are forecast to achieve 1.7 percent expansion only.

Although 1.6 billion people, living quasi exclusively in poorer countries, are directly exposed, emerging economies seem to be less vulnerable to the crisis than developed ones, in relative terms.

In spite of positive outlooks, the number of people reaching levels of poverty is bound to increase by 90 million next year, while at least 59 million workers are estimated to join the ranks of the unemployed, according to Zoellick, in his speech opening the World Bank’s annual meeting.

“The post-crisis era is on the horizon, but the recovery will be a jobless one,” Philippe Le Houerou, World Bank vice-president for Europe and Central Asia told media.

The Central Asian region looks particularly weak in this respect. The impoverished population – those earning less than 2.50 dollars a day, will rise to 35 million, and the vulnerable population, earning less than five dollars a day, will jump to 150 million by the end of this year.

Job losses seem to affect more the middle-income households than the poorer ones. Unemployment in Turkey has doubled in 2009 in comparison with 2008, according to the Bank’s data.

The Turkish government’s statistics are less pessimistic on the subject, putting current unemployment at 14.8 percent, as compared with 11 percent nine months ago. Opposition parties, however, estimate that actual jobless rates in the country are closer to 18 or even 20 percent.

This uncertainty about the future of the economy and the nature of the true dangers has raised questions about the role of the Brentwood institutions – the World Bank and the IMF. But the tide is changing. From initial criticism, at the outbreak of the crisis in September 2008, for the institutions’ failure to foresee and prevent the downturn, both the World Bank and the IMF have emerged as the potential saviours of humanity from future economic disasters.

Dominique Straus-Kahn, IMF managing director, better known in the financial and political circles as DSK, has been quick to seize the opportunity for the Fund to play a broader role in coordinating and influencing the international economy.

In preparation this week for the annual meeting of the Fund’s 186 members, the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), which acts as the IMF’s policy steering committee, asked for the delegates to address four key reform areas for the institution: the IMF’s mandate, its financing role, multilateral surveillance, and governance.

“These ‘Istanbul decisions’ will be a focal point of our activities for the coming year”, Straus-Kahn said at the conclusion of the annual meeting.

The decisions include a plan to review IMF’s mandate to allow the body to be more active in formulating and monitoring macro-economic and financial sector policies that affect global stability. They are also aimed at boosting the success of the Flexible Credit Line programme. IMF’s ambition is to become the leading provider of insurance to countries and the “lender of last resort”.

One of the main challenges for Straus-Kahn in his drive to give the IMF new clout and aura will be convincing countries, which self-insure themselves by building up large reserves, to rely on the Fund for their protection, recovery and growth needs. Reserves accumulation creates imbalances among economies.

But the Fund will have to work hard to secure acceptance by members of its legitimacy in the role it contemplates. The Group of the 20 largest economies (G20) at its recent meeting at Pittsburgh expressed its intention to exert stricter control over IMF’s expanded role. It also requested a wide range of reforms in respect to the governance of the Fund, in order to create a more equitable influence between the developed and developing economies on decision-making.

Straus-Kahn applauded on several occasions in Istanbul the expansion of the G7 into G20, and took the opportunity to say that the Fund’s membership was composed of 186 countries, representing all levels of the world’s economy. This is actually where the contention between the central management of the IMF and its constituency lies. The smaller and poorer states among the latter are unhappy with the extent of power of the former.

With an aim by the G20 of one trillion dollars to be granted to the IMF in 2010 in order for it to create a central fund in view of balancing the economy, the least developed countries are eager to have access to decision-making and overseeing of the distribution of the money.

This has led to a movement among emerging economies to demand greater voting power on the Washington-based institution’s board, which is at present dominated by well developed, mostly western, economies. As an example, Germany has 5.9 percent of the votes at the IMF, while China has 3.7 percent, although its GDP is approximately 20 percent higher than Germany’s.

This has prompted the G20 and the IMFC to recommend that the Fund revise its governance rules and convince its more developed members to transfer 5 percent of their quotas, in terms of voting rights, to emerging economies.

Both the issues of reserves reduction and power-transfer are likely to be met with resistance from members.

Opposition to reserves reduction comes from developing, rather than developed economies. Brazilian central bank governor Henrique Meilelles said this week that “self insurance works better.”

China and India are also likely to have concerns over relinquishing their rights to currency reserves. Nearly 60 percent of the growth of global GDP was attributed to these countries alone, even before the crisis. This year almost the entire growth will come from developing markets.

Such sustained relative growth in the emerging economies has raised the expectations for a better balance of controls among south and north. U.S. President Barack Obama is favourable to empowering developing nations in the Fund’s governance, but many of his G20 partners have so far displayed skepticism. Mexican central bank governor Guillermo Ortiz said Monday in Istanbul he was concerned that “(IMF) legitimacy is not likely to happen anytime soon.”

“The IMF is accountable to its shareholders and that is going to be an issue (for Strauss-Kahn),” Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told the media Monday in Istanbul. “Some countries will want to return to business as usual as the crisis passes.” While Strauss-Khan is doing a very good job, he said, “it will be hard for him to take charge of such a complex institution and navigate it through change.”

The official opening of the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is scheduled for Oct. 6, but political activities and tension have already taken control of the daily life of Istanbul.

Turkey’s largest city, with 12 million inhabitants, is under police siege. The area surrounding the brand new Congress Centre at Harbiye, inaugurated two weeks ago in view of this event, is barricaded, while over a thousand security staff stand by in side streets.

Several rallies of anti-globalisation groups have been held since Wednesday, and their number and intensity is bound to increase once international officials start flowing into the city. Large corporations and institutions have issued internal communications warning their personnel of possible violence and of the sites and times to avoid in their movements.

But Istanbul is not Pittsburgh. The Turkish government wants to maintain order without disrupting the event, on whose prestige it counts to reinforce the country’s image. So it is rather unlikely that Taksim square will be turned into an anti-tank training field, as the venue for the last G20 did.

More invasive than the forces of order are the hertz waves. Local radio and TV stations broadcast in loop interviews with the two institutions’ top officials, Turkish ministers, academics, and commentators. “I am getting depressed,” says Mitthat, a middle-aged taxi driver. “We know the economy is no good, why do they keep repeating it to us?”

Keeping public opinion aware of the potential longevity of the crisis was what Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, had in mind when he spoke to the media Friday morning.

At a pre-opening press conference, he admonished the Bank’s member states to use caution while they rebuild their economies. “It is too early,” he said, “to declare success in ending the crisis.”

Zoellick’s main concern seems to be premature optimism by certain governments, which could lead to lowering regulatory vigilance, ending in a crisis relapse. According to the World Bank, such recidivism could be fatal.

Rich countries, in Zoellick’s rationale, must maintain and even increase their commitment to bail poorer countries out of the financial crisis by making available additional funds. But sceptics ask whether they could do so were the United States to exercise its veto against such plans.

Zoellick counts on the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) to move smoothly towards the achievement of such aims. Since its inception in 1944, IBRD’s role is to reduce poverty in middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries by promoting sustainable development through loans, guarantees, risk management products, and analytical and advisory services.

It is structured like a cooperative that is owned and operated for the benefit of its 186 member states – “the G186”, as Zoellick put it to the journalists.

IBRD raises most of its funds on the world’s financial markets, and has become one of the most established borrowers since issuing its first bond in 1947. The income that IBRD has generated over the years has allowed it to fund development activities and to ensure its financial strength, which enables it to borrow at low cost and offer clients good borrowing terms.

“The IBRD is very well capitalised,” confirmed the Bank’s chief. “It had at its disposal 33 billion dollars for the fiscal year 2008-2009 and is projecting to use 40 billion dollars in 2009-2010.

“We anticipate that in some countries there will be debate over the use of these resources, as at the U.S. Congress, which expects to see reforms on our part,” he added. “The World Bank will have to make its case. The Bank’s institutions will have to change.”

Referring to the concerns of low-income African countries, whose food supplies have dropped following decline in exports, Robert Zoellick confirmed that the World Bank increased its aid to poorer nations in the continent, such as Liberia, by 25 percent this year.

He admitted, however, that there is stil rigidity in using funds to address urgent issues, because of existing covenants regulating country-specific aid. “The Bank, as well as the G20, will have to find ways to reallocate funds more rapidly and flexibly,” said Zoellick.

Speaking of the major challenges the economy will face in 2010, the head of the World Bank cautioned governments against slipping back to recession. This could result from slow recovery, large and uncontrolled unemployment, and imbalance in the nature of recovery – such as different speeds in different sectors, and large discrepancies among countries.

In response to the concerns on growing unemployment, Zoellick believes that helping private companies restructure their debt, and the creation of a safety net to support the parts of the population most vulnerable to the downturn, should minimise the risk of facing social unrest and misery. The World Bank allocated 4.9 billion dollars in 2008-2009 toward these efforts, which aimed at stimulating internal markets to develop.

Speaking Friday afternoon in a televised debate, Robert Zoellick expressed the belief that the dollar will remain the refuge currency for the foreseeable future. Although the euro should gain trust in the short term, the Chinese yuan will eventually attract investments for reserve creation. “Countries will have to adapt in order to constitute balanced reserve portfolios,” he suggested.

Tension between the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party and the high command of the Armed Forces (TSK) has escalated to new heights after a series of political coups and counter-coups.

An Istanbul court ordered the arrest of a navy colonel Jun. 30 following AKP’s subterfuge to pass a law giving civilian courts the authority to prosecute military personnel accused of crimes such as threats to national security, constitutional violations, the organising of armed groups, and attempts to topple the government.

The following day, a civilian public prosecutor ordered the release of the officer, against whom there was no criminal evidence. Col. Dursun Cicek, a psychological warfare specialist at TSK, had the previous week been accused by AKP of drafting an “action plan to fight (Islamist) fundamentalism” to overthrow the government through civil unrest, media manipulation, and heating of nationalistic feelings against neighbouring countries and minorities.

The ‘plan’ dated Apr. 6 was revealed by Turkish newspaper Taraf in mid-June. It included actions against a moderate Islamist movement close to AKP, led by cleric Fethullah Gulen.

The evidence claimed against Col. Cicek was a photocopy revealing the plan, allegedly signed by him. This is an allegation he has denied. The police have made no conclusion whether the signature was genuine or forged.

An investigation by the military cleared the colonel. This most likely prompted the swift adoption of the new law by the AKP-dominated house of representatives.

The opposition parties, who voted for the law, later complained they were given just half an hour to study the text.

Armed with the new law, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confronted the military top brass at a meeting of the Security Council (MKG) Jun. 30. The MKG, comprising senior TSK officers and government officials meets periodically to coordinate defence and foreign policy.

President Abdullah Gul is believed to have exerted his authority on both sides in order to avoid a serious crisis.

The positions of the civilian government and the military have, however, remained unchanged. The PM is determined to press for constitutional and legislative reforms in order to size down the powers and authority of the TSK in the country’s political life.

The release of Col. Cicek by a civil court has handed the initiative to TSK. Chief of General Staff Ilker Basbug reiterated last week that the ‘action plan’, if indeed it existed, was not prepared in any official capacity or on the high command’s orders.

Senior military officials, in a statement sent to the President’s office Sunday, have vigorously objected to the new law. They cited Article 145 of the Constitution, which defines the jurisdiction and powers of military courts.

One of the main arguments of the TSK against involvement of civil courts in prosecuting military personnel is that it would violate the immunity and security of the army, politicise officers, and break down the command hierarchy.

A closer look at Article 145, however, leaves room for doubt about its interpretation. The article refers to military courts’ “jurisdiction to try military personnel for military offences, for offences committed by them against other military personnel or in military places, or for offences connected with military service and duties” and “to try non-military persons for military offences specified in the special law; and for offences committed while performing their duties specified by law, or against military personnel on military places specified by law.”

In the new law, the government is clearly interested in limiting to the civil judiciary the right to try officers involved in political crimes. Its supporters base their claims on Article 90 of the Constitution, which deals with international treaties and the primacy of their provisions over national laws that may be in conflict with them.

It is debatable, however, whether the EU acquis specifically covers the respective jurisdictions of the military and civil judiciary, as situations differ among member states. The only clear reference to the role of TSK in Turkish politics is in the EU Council decision of Mar. 8, 2001 setting forth the requirements for Turkish membership to the Union: the objective to “align the constitutional role of the National Security Council as an advisory body to the Government in accordance with the practice of EU member states”. Compliance with this has already begun, reducing the MKG little by little to a consultative organ.

The increasing tension is now dividing the country. Many see this as a clash between secularism, the foundation doctrine of the Republic, and creeping Islamist fundamentalism.

Recent polls show that the AKP has retained its popularity at around 47 percent. But 83 percent say in a recent poll that the armed forces remain the most trusted institution of the nation. It is difficult to predict where this crisis could lead.

Less than two years after its discreet sealing, the truce between ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party and the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) seems to have ended.

The publication Jun. 12 of an article in Taraf, a liberal newspaper, of an alleged plan by army officers to overthrow the government and incriminate Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader and founder of the country’s largest Muslim brotherhood, revived the polemic over the role of the military in the governance of the nation.

Although Taraf’s scoop stirred indignation among politicians from all sides, the spirits remained calm for the past two weeks. But the verdict last Wednesday of the General Staff military prosecutor that the plan revealed was not prepared at TSK headquarters, and his decision not to file charges against the plan’s purported author, Col. Dursun Cicek, an officer serving in the army’s psychological warfare unit, triggered the ire of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the weekend, senior ministers disclosed that Erdogan would bring additional evidence on the plan and its authors before TSK’s leadership at the National Security Council (MGK) meeting scheduled for this Tuesday. This high-level confrontation is expected to test the limits of the entente between the heads of the state and army.

The plan, according to the accusations by Taraf and AKP, contemplates mobilising agents controlled within AK to discredit the party through their actions and words. It also envisages planting of weapons in the homes of members of Gulen’s movement, in order to make a convincing case that its members are “terrorists” with links to separatist Kurdish PKK rebels.

Manipulation of the media for igniting nationalistic and anti-Greek and Armenian feelings among the public is another milestone in the plan.

Military coups are a periodical occurrence in Turkish politics. Since the end of World War II, there have been three dictatorships, in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and a “post-modern” coup, when on Feb. 28, 1997 the MGK demanded that “the forces of reaction should be confronted”, precipitating the collapse of the government and its replacement by a secularist coalition.

The “forces of reaction” in the event was a reference to the Welfare Party (RP), the first Islamist political movement to have won legislative elections in the country. Its leadership, including Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, was banned from politics for several years. Erdogan also served prison as a result of this crisis. After the victory of the newly formed AKP, successor to RP, in the 2002 national elections, and especially after the return in 2003 to politics of Erdogan and his appointment to premiership, senior army officers became again more vigilant.

When, in April 2007, Abdullah Gul, a leader within AKP, remained the sole candidate to the presidency of the state, the Chief of the General Staff, at that time Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, issued a warning against the appointment of an Islamist at the top office of the republic, implying that the armed forces might intervene. An arm-wrestling contest began, which ended in August at a confidential meeting between the PM and Buyukanit.

No spectacular incidents have been observed since. On Aug. 28, 2007, Gul was elected President by the AKP-dominated parliament. His swearing-in ceremony, held the same day, was not attended by the Chief of the General Staff. Tradition, supported by certain articles of the Constitution, calls for the army’s allegiance to the principles defended by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a resolute secularist.

Gul is the first head of the state to have an Islamist background. He served between 1983 and 1991 at the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia, where his wife Hayrunnisa completed her university studies. The First Lady wears the Islamic scarf in all her appearances. The President is a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, who is resident in the U.S..

Following the appeasement in the AKP-TSK relations, the Turkish parliament voted overwhelmingly in August 2007 in favour of the invasion of northern Iraq to hunt down armed insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). PKK is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the U.S. and the E.U.

The TSK had previously been asked to refrain from such expedition, on the insistence of the U.S. In the end, however, the Turkish army entered north Iraq in February 2008.

Political life took its normal course. On the surface only, however, because in the meantime the government had started legal proceedings to bring to justice 89 politicians, journalists, and retired military officers, suspected to have conspired to overthrow the government. Their trial began last October, on the basis of a 2,500-page indictment, but 39 new arrests, including active officers, were added earlier this year.

The trial has been stretching the nerves of the officers at all levels. Most at TSK believe that the plot is a set-up to discredit the armed forces.

The government claim that the ‘action plan’ to fight Islamic fundamentalism, revealed by Tafar, was masterminded at TSK headquarters could be the drop that will make the vase overflow.

Prime Minister Erdogan and Gen. Iker Basbug, the Chief of General Staff, met at the end of last week privately for over an hour. Their respective positions seem to have remained unchanged.

Gen. Basbug has backed the decision of the military prosecutor, and insisted that the document was not produced at his headquarters. Erdogan remained convinced that the plan is an official army document, and declared that the quest for culprits will be pursued unrelentingly.

This clash may just be the top of the iceberg. Public opinion, which, according to polls, considers the armed forces the most trusted institution of the country, has shown since 2007 that military juntas are no longer in fashion. A plan for a coup could therefore only be the work of an isolated group of officers.

What may be more likely as the cause of the crisis is the diverging agendas of the government and the military on a number of issues, including Cyprus, the Kurdish issue, the recent rapprochement with Armenia, the low-key but systematic introduction of laws that favour Islamist practices in everyday life, the dosed purge of 300 TSK officers this decade so far, and the new constitution intended by AKP which will aim at clipping the wings of the military in order to prove Turkey’s adherence to the process for accessing the European Union.

As the economy is still away from recovery, in spite of daily assurances of local pundits, and the regional situation increasingly unstable, the protagonists of this new version of AKP-TSK performance are stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma.