TURKPULSE No:133..........DECEMBER 20th, 2004
THE EU ACCESSION EMERGES FROM THE LONG TUNNEL…
…of candidacy only to enter in ten months another long tunnel of final negotiations for full membership. The EU has declared the intention of not ending the negotiations before 10 or even 15 years. Ankara, on the other hand, is determined to terminate the negotiations as soon as possible, never exceeding the ten-year limit and has made a realistic plan in all detail to achieve this. Of the 31 chapters or big files to be negotiated in this process, more than 20 have already been finalized within the Customs Union process that has been going on since the beginning of 1996. What are the consequences of the EU’s historic decision on Friday (17th) and the chances of success of either side in carrying out their intentions? Please read the article below for a comprehensive analysis as it appears from Turkey.
For the last few weeks world media has been preoccupied with Turkey on the occasion of the process ending at the EU summit’s final decision on 17 December about starting the negotiations on 3 October 2005 with Turkey for full membership to the European Integration.
The accession is a deadly blow to the “Clash of Civilizations”
This worldwide keen interest in Turkey’s accession was certainly due to its impact on the future of world events, primarily the Bush team’s Broader Middle East project which most people believe is based on the notorious “Clash of Civilizations” advocated by an American analyst, Samuel P. Huntington.
When Turkey becomes a full member of the European Integration, hopefully much sooner than the alleged 10-15 years, the world will become a much better place than what the sinister scenarios such as the clash of civilizations foresee.
It is not because Turkey is one of the strongest economies of the world. Neither is it because the Turkish Armed Forces are the mightiest military power of the world, but because no other nation has been on both sides of these forces which Huntington expects to clash, and no other nation has diagnosed the challenges and ordeals involved as well as the Turks have.
Once again the Ataturk example is the best way to explain this. In 1912-1913 Colonel Mustafa Kemal was the Turkish military attaché in Sofia. Turkey lost the Balkan war in these years. His prognosis of this defeat was very peculiar, but exceedingly interesting and absolutely true when what he meant is analyzed correctly. He said to his friends on the eve of World War One, “We lost the Balkan War because they had an Opera House and we didn’t.” Mustafa Kemal had a Bulgarian girl friend in Sofia who was an opera artist and he used to frequent these performances.
I vividly remember my primary school days when President Inonu persistently used to have classical music played over Radio Ankara, the only mass media available at that time, and my father used to switch it off angrily remarking about the President, “This deaf man’s ears only hear this noisy music.” My father was not an uneducated man. He was an architect, but as a product of war years (the Balkan War, World War and Independence War periods) he had had no opportunity of having Ataturk’s and Inonu’s appreciation of classical music and opera. Classical music and even the masterpieces of Beethoven and Mozart were “noise” to him. Today I deliver my best broadsides against President Bush’s unwise foreign policy adventures when I have Vivaldi or other classical music in the background while I am writing my articles. My children and grandchildren simply cannot live without classical music.
This is only one side of the coin, however. There is also the other side which makes the Bush adventures doomed to fail because his guide is Samuel Huntington’s nonsense based on lack of in-depth knowledge of Islam and this part of the world.
The same Mustafa Kemal, who profoundly appreciated the power of science, technology and western culture and values, was also fully aware of the formidable might of moral forces and Islamic faith. That was what made him the victorious commander of the Gallipoli war against the invincible armadas of the world a couple of years after the Balkan War defeat. When the Turkish soldiers faced the huge landing enemy forces and started withdrawing from the hillside on the beach because they had run out of ammunition, he ordered, “lie down and fix your bayonets. I’m ordering you to fight to death.” When they obeyed, the chasing hostile forces also lay down and the invaluable hours thus gained ended up in the invasion forces’ defeat. Ataturk explains in his famous “Speech” how close the trenches with the enemy forces were in Gallipoli (7-8 meters) and how the Turkish soldiers used to calmly move to the front lines to face certain death by murmuring prayers from the Koran. Which tremendous missile can defeat such a force?
Would President Bush or his troops in Iraq understand this side of the story? At the latest Falluja battle a few weeks ago a Turkish fighter died among the Iraqi “insurgents”. His father, who is an imam in a village in Turkey, recently told the Turkish press (Milliyet and Hurriyet) that they urged him on the phone to return home. His answer was, “I am living through the happiest days of my life. I want to die here.”
When there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world ready to be a “martyr” in Iraq in this battle what chance of success does President Bush have to win what his adviser Huntington calls “clash of civilizations”? By taking advantage of their centuries of experience in democracy President Bush and PM Blair may have succeeded in bringing to power their man, Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan. But this puppet president has no more powers than the mayor of Kabul. I am not saying this. It is a quote from the Canadian press. Eric Margolis of the Toronto Star describes President Karzai as the world’s most expensive president. He says, “President Karzai who only governs in Kabul is protected by 200 American guards and 17,000 soldiers. To keep Karzai going costs the United States $1.7 billion a year. It will never be possible to keep Karzai’s puppet regime on its feet if it had not been for the bayonets of the foreigners.”
The Chirac regime was perplexed about what to do when the Americans demanded help for a crusader movement against the Islamic world with the claim that the twin towers tragedy in New York on Nine Eleven was carried out by “Islamic terrorism.” Paris was relieved to hear, according to official French sources, the voice rising from Ankara where PM Ecevit’s was saying, “There’s no such thing as religious or Islamic terrorism. Terrorism is terrorism and it should be fought against by the whole world without discrimination.”
The same was the case with the Muslim women’s headscarves. The French people were fed up with the Muslim girls coming to school with these horrible headscarves now that there are millions of mostly North African origin Muslim French nationals in France as well as many Muslim women of mostly Pakistan origin in the UK and mostly Turkish origin ones in Germany. All these west European democracies were intensely disturbed by these headscarves in schools and government departments, but their sense of democracy was preventing them from taking measures against a non violent practice.
The French Government was relaxed to learn the Turkish Judiciary’s reason for banning headscarves in Turkish schools – “these headscarves are a demonstration of religion in schools and other public offices and consequently against the principle of secularism of the Turkish Constitution.” They followed suit and banned headscarves in French, German and even English schools.
Of course, the CIA-invented Tayyip Erdogan Government does not agree with these moves and restrictions to anti-secular moves, but they will stay in power as long as they do good things as they did last week and will be frustrated when they defend archaic things such as their wives’ horrible headgears, inhumane punishment of adultery or slaughtering animals in the streets on sacrifice holidays or other occasions.
It is not Islam, but the misinterpretation of Islam that is guilty
Once it is understood in the world what the Turkish nation understood long ago in its nearly two centuries of westernization efforts that it is not Islam, but its misinterpretation and malpractice that is guilty for all these disturbances, Hunting’s Clash of Civilizations theory will collapse and along with it, President Bush’s practices based on this wrong theory.
The EU Summit’s 17 December historic decision on the Turkish accession was certainly a big stride in the direction of this appreciation and consequently a serious blow to the international developments ahead on the basis of Huntington’s forecasts.
The Turkish accession will not take 10-15 years as claimed by some European hardliners, because otherwise Turkey’s comprehensive cooperation with Russia and its strategic partners will surpass Turkey’s EU based policies. The latest Ukraine affair was proof of how far Russia has gone on the path of democracy after the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989. No other country, democratic or totalitarian, would have tolerated weeks of invasion of government offices by the pro-western “oranges”, but the really economically strong, pro-Russian “blues” wisely put up with it and thus avoided a bloodbath probably fouling years of preparations of the enemies of Russia and Ukraine. What will the 26 December elections, run for the third time, bring to the Ukraine people? It is not at all important, because even if the “oranges” win, Moscow is the real winner by avoiding bloodshed, as no Ukraine Government can possibly survive without the cheap Russian energy supply and the industrial installations in eastern Ukraine of the “blues”.
The successful end of the Ukrainian event is partly the outcome of the Turkish-Russian cooperation and exchange of their experiences of recent decades’ ASALA, PKK and Chechen events. After President Putin’s State visit to Ankara shortly before the 17 December EU resolution, this cooperation is bound to be fortified with inevitable results of bringing Turkey and Russia closer to European democracy, especially the French-German dominated “Old Europe”. In other words, the Turkish accession is not only a simple expansion of the European integration, but is also an important Eurasian event with far-reaching consequences for the BME (Broader Middle East) centered American policies for this region. Time will show how instrumental this development will be in expediting the downfall of the BME policies. uras@ada.net.tr – December 20th, 2004