August 13, 2007
Turkish Political Crisis In Works Yet Again
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has again nominated Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to be president, in a direct challenge to millions of his countrymen and the military, AP reports. Gul is a member of the ruling AK party, which is viewed by critics as advocating political Islam.
Erdogan's decision will likely reignite a tense confrontation between his government and Turkey's fiercely secularist military. In the spring, when Erdogan first announced he wanted outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a secularist, to be succeeded by Gul, more than a million Turks took to the streets and the military threatened a coup.
Parliamentary elections were moved up to last month to help resolve the crisis. To most observers' surprise, voters decisively sided with the AK party in that vote.
Soon after, the AK tried to smooth things over by offering to pick a non-Islamist for the speakership. But Erdogan wouldn't say whether he would settle on a compromise candidate.
Today's announcement indicates Erdogan believes Gul can win and that the military is bluffing. One factor that is very much out of his control is how the population reacts. Turks are hungrily eyeing assimilation into the EU for their quickly modernizing nation. Europe, on the other hand, views the overwhelmingly Muslim country with skepticism. Turks eager to cleave their identities from more radical Islamist countries may take to the streets in protest again.
Meanwhile, last month's vote shows that political Islam seems to be catching on in Turkey. The war in Iraq is a likely factor; studies show it's had a radicalizing effect in Muslim nations.
What Washington will do about another spurt of unrest is far from clear. The White House counts Erdogan as an ally on the war on terror, despite some bad blood over Ankara's having refused to play staging ground in the run-up to the Iraq war. Like most world leaders, Erdogan has inched away from President Bush, whose unpopularity went global long ago.
Turkey also has a somewhat legitimate beef with the White House over its failure to lend a hand against PKK terrorists after promising to do so. The State Department reported that more than 500 people had been killed in cross-border skirmishes with the militant Kurdish group last year. On July 30, columnist Robert Novak reported that U.S. special forces and the Turkish military were engaged in a secret operation. That may have been the Bush administration's way of averting a full-on military response against Iraqi Kurds after Turkish tanks began amassing along the border earlier this summer.
Though Washington would probably prefer to see Turkey remain the prosperous secular Muslim democracy it is today, don't expect to hear much criticism of Erdogan from the White House. Ankara has indicated its cooperation in the Iraq war comes with a price.
The latest example concerns the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century. Washington lobbyists and lawmakers are duking it out over a congressional resolution condemning Turkey for denying the genocide ever happened. Guess which side the White House is on?
Posted at 6:13 PM
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Bush Administration, Congress, EU, Europe, Turkey
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