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.

Gathering for the first time here in Washington, representatives of the newly established human rights commission of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stated Thursday that they plan to start their substantive work by the end of the month.

The commission’s priority areas will include women’s and children’s issues, political and minority rights, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

“In recent months we have outlined a series of priority issues, and we now plan to start our work to highlight those issues in working groups later this month in Jeddah,” the commission’s chair, Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin, told journalists in Washington on Thursday.

“In particular, this commission is expected to work on removing misperceptions over the issue of perceived incompatibility between Islam and universal principles of human rights.”

On this latter point, she and others involved with the new body are emphasising that the commission’s mandate is to deal with civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in the context of universal application – that the commission will not be attempting to apply any hybrid understanding of human rights as filtered through Islam. They also reiterate that the OIC itself is a political, not a religious, body.

Founded in 1969 and representing 56 countries and the Palestinian Authority, the OIC is the second-largest intergovernmental organisation in existence, after the United Nations. The idea of creating an OIC-wide body on human rights first officially surfaced in 2005, when the member states agreed to a new 10-year plan that included the commission’s formation.

That 10-year plan was also a broad attempt to redefine the nature of the OIC, moulded around ideas of moderation and modernisation. In mid-2011, the OIC formally established the new Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission and elected its 18 commissioners, to operate in an advisory role to the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers.

Those members are made up of lawyers, activists, academics and diplomats, and also comprise four women, including the commission’s chair, an Indonesian sociology scholar. Each of the OIC’s three main areas – Asia, Africa and the Arab world – will be allotted six commissioners.

On Thursday, Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin reported that the commission had spent the past year formulating its terms of reference and rules of procedure. An important part of that process has been to agree on priority areas, which will include women’s and children’s issues, political and minority rights, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Over the four decades of the OIC’s tenure, this latter topic has been a defining one for the body, now described as a standing agenda item.

“This will not be from a political point of view, however, but rather from the human rights perspective,” she noted. “For instance, how the conflict affects the lives of people, of women and children in particular, in their right to development, their right to peace, security and education.”

Advisory capacity

Beyond these broad areas, relatively little detail has yet been decided upon regarding the processes by which the commissioners choose which issues to focus upon. Rizwan Sheikh, the executive director of the commission’s interim secretariat in Jeddah, told IPS that the commission will receive agenda items from above and below, meaning from the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers and from grassroots concerns.

The commission’s autonomy and independence have clearly been a defining concern for those engaged in the new body, as they remain for many outside observers. As currently mandated, each commissioner will be nominated by his or her home country and then voted upon, through a secret ballot, by the Council of Foreign Ministers.

But Sheikh emphasises that it would be up to the commission’s collective discretion to decide on how and when to proceed with its agenda.

“The governing statute provides the commission with a degree of independence that has never been seen in the OIC’s work over the last four decades – for the first time in its history, the OIC has created a body of independent experts,” Sheikh says.

“Independence is further ensured by the fact that the nature of the body is of an advisory capacity. Had this not been the case, there would have been certain political considerations that could have crept into the work of this commission. But the very fact that it’s an advisory body emboldens the commission … to act in a very candid and unvarnished fashion in rendering its opinions.”

Once it starts work in late December, some of the issues on which the commission could presumably be offering such opinions, Sheikh suggests, could include violence against women, child labour, children in armed conflict, and more sensitive topics such as early marriage, right to education and the like.

At the two preliminary sessions held by the commission this year, the recent violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s west, the bloodshed in Syria and the Quran-burning in Afghanistan were each noted as especially urgent.

So too was a recent OIC-sponsored U.N. resolution against religious intolerance, though the latter action sparked initial concern among human rights groups when the OIC pushed for a global ban on “blasphemy”, a stance it later reversed.

Wait and watch

For now, the commissioners have decided that one of their first moves will be to request each OIC member state to forward all relevant national legislation touching on the commission’s priority areas, so the commission can begin to examine and rank current practice.

Still, the body’s budget – to be provided by OIC member states – is not yet publicly known, and much of the commission’s efficacy will undoubtedly hinge on this single piece of information, which will also offer insight into just how active the member states are willing to allow the commission to be.

“We very much hope this body will be both independent and able to have the means to speak out to OIC governments and reaffirm universal human rights,” Joelle Fiss, a senior associate with Human Rights First, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

Like Fiss, many observers are withholding judgement on the prospects of the new commission.

“Any time you have a well-respected international body like the OIC taking up these issues, it is significant,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the United States’ largest Muslim civil liberties group, told IPS.

“We’ll see where it goes from here, but for now it deserves to be encouraged by U.S. government officials and others. Eventually, of course, we will need to evaluate the commission’s work to see that it’s addressing issues of particular concern to the Muslim world.”

On Nov. 29, 138 member states of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of giving Palestine “non-member observer state” status. Only nine voted no, 41 abstained. Beyond Middle East politics, the vote also mirrors the limits of the U.S. global, and the Israeli regional, empires: 138 defy their grip and favour change, 41+9=50 do not for various reasons. Who wants what?

Johan Galtung

First: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) did not yield to U.S.-Israel in spite of the efforts against the Arab awakening. Israel is alone in the region: Greece-Turkey-Cyprus all voted yes.

Second: more than half of the states not in favour of the move were Eastern Europe (16) and the Pacific (10 – nine mini-states, and Australia). Add seven from Latin America, five from Africa, three from Asia (not Japan) and we get 41.

Third: Western Europe-NATO was divided. The Nordic European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) were in favour, as well as Austria, France and GIPSI (Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland), the indebted EU periphery. Not in favour: UK, Germany, Netherlands; three mini-states; and the hard core, U.S.-Israel-Canada, making 50, only a quarter of the U.N. members.

The General Assembly is the closest we have to world democracy: no Security Council ‘big power’ veto. Israel has no regional support and the U.S. only little, shaky, insignificant, world support. U.S. clout does not even reach Afghanistan-Iraq-Libya, recently bombed-invaded-occupied. The UK remains at heel, like poodle to master.

Read the vote in terms of a world regionalisation process: Green light for OIC; some political leadership is needed in the Latin America-Caribbean, Africa and Asia regions. The Nordic-EFTA moral light is intact, and the new Third World, GIPSI, is joining the old.

The U.S. is out of touch. Stop droning, killing; make a beautiful North America with Mexico and Canada.

But empires also crumble from within through demoralisation. With political demoralisation, world clout is disappearing. Also watch the “fiscal cliff” for doubts about the U.S. political process: two parties, at loggerheads. No cancelling of mortgage debts, no lifting of the bottom 16 percent – many not knowing where the next meal comes from – into the economy, increasing domestic demand.

With economic demoralisation: the West is outcompeted. And the financial crisis and Great Recession scared the wits out of most Americans –cautious, risk-averse and defensive- spending less and saving more. Not a single person was imprisoned for exorbitant commissions and bonuses, secret deals and obscure derivatives; but Wall Street continues to lobby against new legislation.

With military demoralisation: the U.S.-NATO is losing. And consider the lifestyle and affair of a top U.S. Army official in Afghanistan and director of the CIA, killing machines: general David Petraeus. Imagine the effect on soldiers risking their lives for an unwinnable and dubious war while the top fools around.

With cultural demoralisation: faith in U.S. exceptionalism is decreasing. Public figures ignore what happens in the real world. Truth will soon dawn upon them.

With social demoralisation: the U.S. birthrate plummets to the lowest level since the 1920s. This may imply a decline in the U.S. population and in tax revenue, as in much of the West.

Add it all up: the fall of the U.S. empire is on track.

How about Israel? Heading for a cliff of its own making.

The United Nations vote was on the 65th anniversary of the U.N. two-state resolution 181. Shortly after the adoption of the resolution, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte was murdered by the Zionist group Lehi. Then the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948. The problem is not Zionism but hard, revisionist Expansion-Occupation-Siege (E-O-S) Zionism driving to the cliff.

The U.N. vote legitimised Palestine and delegitimised that kind of Israel.

Direct negotiations lead nowhere: the Oslo process left security, Jerusalem, refugees, Israeli settlements, boundaries, for “later”.

But Israel had to react to the rockets! Yes, by dropping E-O-S for ‘2-6-20+’: two States in a six-state community with Arab neighbors in a 20+ states Organisation for Security and Cooperation with a nuclear free zone. But Israel delegitimised itself by choosing violence. Israel also reacts to nonviolence-boycott, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, with violence, as it did against boats trying to break the siege. And delegitimises itself even further.

Together with mainstream U.S., Israel tries to control the discourse by branding all critics as anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. A non-starter in democracies. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, to mention some recently branded that way, are neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israel, but use transparency and dialogue – the hallmarks of democracy – constructively. Stifle that, and we get two elites listening only to themselves.

Travel these roads: delegitimise yourself, meet violence with violence, meet nonviolence with violence, control discourse, and down the road, very close to the cliff, the South African scenario is waiting. The U.S. decides one day that Israel is more of a liability than an asset.

Israel is out of touch. A regime change from within is needed. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of ‘The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?’, published by the TRANSCEND University Press.