TURKPULSE No: 44 ..................... JULY 22nd, 2001
DERVIS’S POLITICAL CHANCES ARE BEING CLARIFIED
A place for Kemal Dervis in Turkey’s present political structure involves much more complicated questions than a simple choice of a person’s joining a political party because of superpower involvement, not to say interference in Turkey’s Government formation today and tomorrow. Below is the short background to this intriguing and eye-opening story with a prognosis for the future, a daring attempt for any political observer or analyst of such a multilateral and complicated issue.
The preoccupation of Turkish domestic politics since the beginning of this year has been the political future of the Economy Minister, Kemal Dervis, since Washington bestowed him to PM Ecevit, especially after the second Black Wednesday, February 21st, this year.
Pulse carefully refrains from commenting on Dervis’s political future, preferring to wait for the clarification of the conditions because, after careful scrutiny of the intensive disinformation activities in the Turkish media on this topic, it came to the conclusion that Washington, the only force behind Dervis, did not have much of a clue about what to do to make Kemal Dervis Turkey’s top ruler. After a few false steps on this issue, it apparently began to play it by ear and as this interim period may now be drawing to an end, some important developments began to shape last week.
Background to Dervis’s political career in Turkey
In retrospect, it is easy to see that Washington believed before the first crisis in November that the repeated financial crises in Turkey would put an end to the tripartite Ecevit coalition and bring Dervis to the forefront as the top civilian ruler of a sort of interregnum. That is why Dervis declined to accept PM Ecevit’s offer to enter the DSP, in accordance with his first deputy Devlet Bahceli’s recommendation. Both Washington and Dervis were later to be very sorry to have missed a very good opportunity as it was not long before everyone realised from the unprecedented heavy disinformation campaign in favour of Dervis in the media, that the superpower could well take over the management of the first ruling party of Turkey through Dervis, given the fact that Ecevit’s years are numbered. A few indirect soundings indicated before and after the DSP’s national convention a couple of months ago that the DSP had no intention of admitting Dervis into the party now. PM Ecevit said once again on this topic last week that Dervis had too much to do and was too busy to go into politics.
The DSP rulers were not the only ones who were alarmed by the intensity of the American campaign for Dervis. The second biggest ruling power, the MHP, was one of the first to publicly and openly clash at the expense of being the first target of the media and the quarters in Washington that guide the agents planted in the key positions of the media in Turkey. The campaign for Dervis was so overt, so brazen and so aggressive that the Americans themselves understood in a short time that they had created antibodies against Dervis in the Turkish political structure, in their attempt to create a good image for him. The “conspiracy theory” weapon was no longer working in view of their flagrant campaign. This campaign recently took a back seat, but it was already too late.
The second biggest party on the left, the CHP, held its national convention shortly after the DSP’s, but there was no room for Dervis there, even though Chairman Deniz Baykal badly needed the popularity Dervis could bring to the party. It could be a good occasion for backing up Baykal’s claim that he had taken his lessons from the heavy election defeat and changed. The over ambitious chairman of the CHP chose the path of “small, but mine” for his party.
Even the yet non-existent third movement on the left, the dissidents that left the CHP and are now trying to found a new left party under Erdal Inonu, has refrained from making Dervis an offer to join in, when its leading figures, Fikri Saglar and Mogultay opposed it. They said to Inonu and Murat Karayalcin, who is the driving force of the movement, that Kemal Dervis had been introduced to the Turkish public as too much of a pro-American and that this fact would do more harm to a new leftist party, than good.
As the words Left and Right have lost their meaning in today’s politics, not only in Turkey, but the world over, Kemal Dervis, who is claimed to be a social democrat, may well try his hand in a right-wing party, as the above leftist parties are all reluctant to admit him. And indeed that is how the course of events is now going.
The ideal choice is certainly ANAP, which is heading for its national convention on August 4th and 5th. It has a young, well established and capable leader like Mesut Yilmaz who has no reason to be afraid of competition from Kemal Dervis even with the possible all-out support of the disinformation mechanism, as he has fared well against that mechanism’s open fury mostly due to his energy policies about natural gas pipelines at home and from abroad. Besides, Mesut Yilmaz, though heading a right-wing liberal economy party, is broadminded enough to make a diehard Marxist like Prof. Mumtaz Soysal the foreign minister of Turkey.
Silent diplomacy and underhanded politics have been working in Turkey quite some time now for the shaping of this important political occurrence in domestic politics. The catalyst in these contacts is the Party’s Treasurer Sadan Tuzcu (ANAP-Istanbul). An unidentified close colleague of Mesut Yilmaz told Hurriyet (14th), “If Dervis is going in for politics there is no room for him other than ANAP. He can do politics comfortably only in ANAP. The ANAP delegates have a distinct characteristic. If he is successful they topple Mesut Yilmaz and make Dervis the party chairman.”
Indeed, the only example in Turkey of a political leader who is toppled from the party chairmanship at the national convention while he was also Prime Minister is Yildirim Akbulut (ANAP-Ankara) in 1991and the victor was Mesut Yilmaz. President Ozal’s help to Yilmaz in this unprecedented event in Turkey because of the Gulf developments is a totally different story.
Deputy PM Mesut Yilmaz has always been behind Dervis in his recent clashes with the MHP and Dervis addressed the ANAP caucus before parliament took recess to pay tribute to the economic reforms of the founder of the party. He said he had always been an admirer of the late President Turgut Ozal and his reforms.
The new State Minister for privatisation, Yilmaz Karakoyunlu (ANAP-Istanbul), said last week (17th) to Kemal Dervis’s critics at the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, “Dervis is a friend of ours who, in his endeavour for the fulfilment of government duty, has been exerting extraordinary effort, diligence and experience for leading the country to success.” He said Dervis knew the gravity of the responsibility he had undertaken and that they would give him the maximum support in order to alleviate his burden. “It is not enough” he stressed, “for the government to support him with its cadres in the State. You cannot provide the necessary support with only that. Certainly the business world has a great weight and responsibility in this regard.”
The best choice requires major changes in Washington’s stance, however
Time will show how this event will unroll. Probably the key factor in this formation in the pipeline, Washington, will wait for the forthcoming national convention of ANAP on August 4th and 5th before it gives the green light. It will first let Mesut Yilmaz prove his strength against the three rivals he is facing at the convention and then take the necessary steps.
Ambassador Marc Parris was in Ankara and Istanbul last week to make the necessary contacts with the usual clarification true to American traditions, “I’m now a pensioner. I am not representing the Bush Administration today and not carrying messages from Washington.”
His “non-message” messages were very much there, however, and a sizable part of them concerned Dervis’s political future and ANAP. The latter was ready for this cooperation as it has enough experience to know that it does not pay any politician anywhere in the world to anger Washington.
Yet Mesut Yilmaz and his second man, now backstage, Cumhur Ersumer, are very much in the Americans’ bad books with their unbelievable achievements in bringing to life the Blue Stream gas pipeline. Even though the United States has totally opposed it for understandable strategic reasons, it knows in the heart of its heart that this is a perfect project for Turkey’s long-term national interests and it has the fair play to admit it behind closed doors, if not publicly.
So we can now expect a behind-the-scenes bargaining between the two sides for the discontinuation of the American fury against Mesut Yilmaz and his colleagues, if not outright support, for a place in ANAP for Kemal Dervis. A place for Dervis in any party means the inevitable massive support of him by the disinformation mechanism and a danger for any political leader, but Mesut Yilmaz is one of the rare politicians who can competently take that risk with his experience at young age, honesty, far sight and a sound political base. From the American angle, their stance is obvious. They want to make Dervis prime minister of Turkey. This is only possible if Mesut Yilmaz vacates his position for any reason. The most logical reason seems to be what Suleyman Demirel did in the DSP in 1993 to make room for another Washington favourite to become a party chairperson and eventually prime minister, but this is too distant a political development to comment on at the moment. uras@ada.net.tr - July 22nd, 2001