TURKPULSE No:139..........7th, 2005
TURKEY-U.S. – ARE RELATIONS BEING BASED ON OTHER GROUNDS?
After a period of loud complaints from especially the American side about Turkey over the last few months, mutual relations are tending to take a cautious turn towards normalization on other grounds, only if Washington eventually resigns to having the Incirlik base as a very limited logistics centre renewed on a yearly basis, as the new Turkish decree calls for. In exchange for this decree, the U.S. has already dropped or rather eased its kind of embargo on modernizing the Turkish Air Force with an agreement it signed in Ankara a couple of weeks ago. Is this slight improvement in mutual relations a lasting change in substance for basing mutual relations on a new footing or is it a cosmetic and superficial effort on both sides to save face for the time being? For the answer and for an attempt to analyze the profound reasons for this never ending strife in the “strategic alliance” between Turkey and the United States for the last 60 years, please see the following article which is an analysis of the obvious problems and trends.
Turkish-American relations have taken such a strange course that no matter how much we journalists write about it and how much the political rulers, diplomats and diplomatic analysts concerned “push pencil” about it neither side really understands the other and long articles boil down to nothing else but beating about the bush.
Ankara’s and Washington’s mutual apprehensions
On the American side, there has been real apprehension, indeed alarm, in recent months that the Islamist ruling power of Turkey today is changing the course of this strategically vital country away from its Western alliance. Two columnists very close to the American Disinformation Mechanism, Cuneyt Ulsever of Hurriyet and Nazli Ilicak of Tercuman, apparently reflecting Washington’s concerns, rang alarm bells last week that the inner circle of PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political advisers, namely Omer Celik (AKP, Adana), are inducing him towards leaving NATO and dropping the EU accession efforts.
On the Turkish side, PM Erdogan has paradoxically joined President Sezer, Chief, TGS, General Hilmi Ozkok, and the Chief Justice, Mustafa Bumin, of the Constitutional Court about their reminding the West, primarily the United States, that “It is wrong to define Turkey as a moderate Islamic country; it is a secular democratic republic ruled by law.”
To be able to understand the Turkish side’s reasons and feelings in this Turkish-American dialogue, which tends to turn into a two sided monologue of the deaf, using the Americans’ case study methods will be a good instrument for Pulse to resort to.
The first case study is a former Treasury Minister, Kemal Dervis, who has recently become the Director of the UNDP, the highest position a “Turk” has ever reached in the history of the United Nations which, since the end of WW II, serves as a kind of world parliament to save peace and establish democracy in the world. Kemal Dervis is indeed a prominent Turkey-born economist who speaks fluent English and French and has a good command of international finance systems. He has an excellent record in his previous services within the UN system. Most people believe that he served very well as the Treasury Minister and was instrumental in saving Turkey from the November 2000 and February 2001 financial crises, though insiders like the then PM Bulent Ecevit has strong reservations about it. As an opposition parliamentarian he has been quite effective in explaining Turkey’s EU accession cause in the European and international legislative and economic organs and quarters.
A coincidence or not, this very flattering assignment for the Turkish nation took place shortly after the American Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, became the director of even a more important UN organization, the World Bank.
Now just imagine, in today’s world where every government member in every country is shadowed round the clock by bodyguards for security reasons, if nothing else, Wolfowitz manages to skip the CIA-FBI guards; disappears from Washington for 12 days; neither Rumsfeld, President Bush, nor the security organizations know where he is. Enquiries with all the allied countries and organizations shed no light on his whereabouts. At the end of such a long time as nearly two weeks, he suddenly reappears to take up his position in the government to go into all sorts of secret documents and cabinet meetings and what’s more he begins to campaign, despite all the warnings from his boss, that there is no other way out for the country but elections two years earlier than the proper period and eventually achieves it with the mobilization of other forces by a superpower.
Certainly such a thing has never happened concerning Wolfowitz; neither is it possible in any western democracy. But that is exactly what the former PM Bulent Ecevit complains Dervis did. Can the reader with any fair-play blame Pulse for taking the word Turk within inverted commas above in regard to Kemal Dervis under these conditions? Whether he is officially an American citizen or not (he says he is not) it is obvious that his loyalties are to the United States above and before Turkey and he was one of the main instruments in the liquidation of all the political parties from the previous parliament and the formation of the present one with this new Islamic Party occupying two-thirds of the seats and the opposition CHP one-third.
Decades old hard work of the superpower is undone overnight
It was a stunning victory (or so they thought) for the superpower to achieve this election landslide for an obscure politician like Recep Tayyip Erdogan with his only a year old political party, but there it was a fact before the eyes of the world. When a superpower risks being so audacious as to resort to scandalous events ranging from triggering off an artificial earthquake (Link to turkpulse 129 and 130) to overtly creating two financial crises using the IMF and what not, as well as the shady businesses above, such an unbelievable election landslide becomes possible.
What is important, however, is whether or not it attained the goal for the executors of this plan after decades of hard work.
A day after the 3 November 2002 general elections, chairman Tayyip Erdogan of the AKP, with the two-thirds parliamentary majority behind him, sent the following letter to Paul Wolfowitz, the then US Deputy Secretary of Defence:
“Dear Dr. Wolfowitz,
“With the hope of being able to sustain in the future too the historic partnership and friendship between our two countries, I’d like to convey to you this message through mutual friends.
“No doubt, due to your official position, you are aware that the election returns may have caused a little uneasiness in the ranks of our General Staff. I would like you to know that my party and I also share their aspirations that Turkey should be a prosperous, secular (contemporary) country which is a reliable member of the first world community (Whatever ‘the first world community’ means – V.U.) And I believe that, like in the past, (in future too) we will be able to work together to the best interests of my country which has been reunified to the degree unprecedented in the past.
“To this end, I hope to be able to hold a secret, private meeting with General Ozkok in the shortest time possible. My private phone number is 0533 7..….
Thanks a lot for this your help and the friendship that you manifested towards my country in the past.
“I am impatiently waiting for having a personal meeting with you.
“Yours truly, - Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Chairman (AKP)”
The nature of Tayyip Erdogan’s meeting with General Ozkok is not common knowledge, but its outcome is. In a nutshell, it undid the work of Washington’s still continuing efforts for the last 3-4 decades to weave a reactionary web over Turkey through the Fetullah Gulen faction of which PM Erdogan was a member.
The latest Iraq adventure of the United States has finally shed some light on why the CIA has worked so hard for so long to cause the Fetullah Gulen havoc for Turkey. Apparently it was a part of the American Neo Cons’ “Clash of Civilizations” plans which meted out the “moderate Islam” role to Turkey. It was also a device to replace Necmettin Erbakan’s anti-American Islamic parties (which used to be closed down by the judiciary one after the other) with the AKP and its leader PM Erdogan.
American interests are harmed more by their misjudged support of Gulen
Today the Americans complain, and absolutely rightly in practice, that the present Turkish Administration is moving away from the EU rules of closer cooperation with the West, primarily the EU. Indeed, an English teaching pre-school or a study group run by an English teacher in Antalya finds it much more difficult to get a work permit for some foreigners native in English, while it was not the case before the AKP period. Only the other day, PM Erdogan was publicly admonishing the fact that a big European businessman took seven months to get an answer to his work visa application. Foreigners married to Turks meet with enormous difficulties in having custody of a common child upon a divorce no matter how right they are because either the police do not cooperate with the judiciary in finding the child’s whereabouts or worse still the judge does everything in his power to refrain from handing custody to a foreigner. Why? Because they are products of the Fetullah Gulen’s “imam based” (Link to turkpulse 46) social and educational system that has been financed and supported from beyond the Atlantic for several decades now. Luckily this religious infiltration into the Turkish Administrative and governmental system has not gone down too deep and the struggle between this pervert religious mind and the Ataturkist tissue of the Turkish Republic is continuing with the frustrations of the fanatics in most cases. It is unbelievable, but a fact that a judge in Antalya defied twice the Court of Appeal’s unanimous quashing of his verdict about handing the custody of a child to the Turkish father who was sentenced to eight months in prison for violence against a divorced English wife. Why does he do that? The reason is it is a big sin to loose a Muslim to another religion or a big, good deed to convert someone into Islam. A Fetullah follower judge sees himself as a sinner and fights against it desperately to hand over the common child to the “infidel” mother and flagrantly violates all rules of law to hand him over to the “Muslim” father. The same is the case for some police chiefs. It was thanks to PM Tony Blair’s official visit to Turkey last year that such a case was frustrated when Ankara learnt that there was a juicy case to satisfy the British Government and public opinion without giving into the West’s all-out pressures to bear upon Turkey on such flash points like Iraq, Cyprus and the Caucasus. Otherwise, everyone knew where the child was, which school he was attending, but the local police were giving the father tips about the search for the child and the father used to move him away with the claim that he did not know where he was.
Of course the Turkish State with its Judiciary, Security system and Administration are fighting against this danger of religious fanaticism supported from abroad and try to frustrate the members of the present Government in their ambition to carry their wives’ ugly headgears to “public places” such as the presidential palace, parliament, schools and universities.
Do well-known columnists like Hasan Cemal, Cuneyt Ulsever, Mehmet Ali Birand not know these case studies? They do of course, but they also know that an article criticizing the Chief of the General Staff for complaining about these cases is a free ticket to the luxurious Bilderberg conferences, if nothing else.
Whether or not the “Neo-Con-guided” American Government will continue to persist in its misguided policy towards Turkey and this part of the world is for the American people to judge, but the Turkish people will not let these external engineered plans succeed here. The British people have also given PM Blair clear instructions against his tagging after the architects of these wrong policies at Thursday’s elections.
PM Erdogan’s visit to Israel last week was totally misrepresented by the Disinformation Mechanism: his attempt was to satisfy the United States so that President Bush may give him an audience in Washington when he goes to the United States for his daughter’s graduation ceremony within a few weeks, they claim. The reality is, as has been emphatically pointed out by the Prime Minister, that the visit to Israel was planned long ago and it concerns the enforcement of Turkey’s new Middle East policies despite Washington, rather than being a “figurant” (an extra) in them. Will the Erdogan Government’s ambition to base Turkey’s relations with the United States on a new footing succeed? The answer certainly requires big enough a space for another article. uras@ada.net.tr – May 7th, 2005