MUST READ: LONG LIVE TURKISH MILITARISM

Piontkovsky: Long live Turkish militarism
Commentary by Andrei Piontkovsky

Political commentators in the West have used up much ink in their search for moderate Muslims. Everybody agrees that if the terrorists who parade under the banners of Islam (but who have killed hundreds of times more Muslims than people of other faiths) are to be defeated, then this can be accomplished only within the Islamic world, in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims.

But where were the Islamic politicians, theologians, and intellectuals who were to be the leaders in this battle? Where were the moderate Muslims? The analysts and experts were perplexed.

Well, the moderate Muslims have finally appeared: one million of them in the streets of Istanbul, half a million in Ankara, and one and a half million in Izmir.

It was a splendid, festive spectacle: millions of free people full of human dignity, the open, proud faces of Islamic women not peering out of sacks, a sea of red and white national flags waving in the wind. Nobody else's flags were being burnt or stamped on, and there were none of the faces twisted with hatred which are usually in evidence at Islamic gatherings.

For some reason, however, the West did not care for these moderate Muslims. Condoleezza Rice scolded them in a severe tone for their lack of respect for the pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) which, in her words, has been “pulling Turkey west toward Europe” and “changing its laws to try to become consistent with European Union requirements.”

The AKP, which in the last elections took about one-third of the votes (mainly in rural areas), thanks to the peculiarities of the Turkish electoral system with its 10 percent barrier, and thanks also to a split between the secular parties, gained almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

Its predecessor, an Islamist party with a different name, had formed a government in 1996-1997, but after an attempt to introduce Sharia law was promptly removed by the military and declared illegal.

In accordance with the constitution and a political tradition going back to the founding of the modern state by Kemal Ataturk, the army is the guarantor of Turkey’s secular character. The president of Turkey is constitutionally the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has the right to veto laws passed by parliament and to appoint judges. In a crisis, like that which occurred in 1997, the army intervenes to preserve the secular, democratic direction of the country's development.

I emphasize democratic, and there is no contradiction here. Democracy is not only the power of the majority, or of a government elected by the majority (or, as is often the reality, by a minority). It is also a firm limitation of that power by the unshakeable guaranteeing by a constitution of the freedoms of all minorities, even of a minority consisting of a single citizen. That is all the more applicable when we are talking about half the population: women, whose rights would be trampled underfoot in the most blatant manner should the medieval norms of Sharia law be fully or partly introduced.

Every time the army has deposed a government (which it has on four occasions in modern Turkish history), the military has conducted democratic elections within a few months and returned to the barracks, not demeaning itself with abuse of power or corruption.

The government of Recep Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, mindful of the unhappy experience of its predecessors, has proceeded very cautiously. It declared that its aim was to accelerate the sluggish processing of Turkey’s application to join the European Union, which has been dragging on for more than 40 years, and passed a number of laws, primarily in the economic sphere, which really did move the Turkish legal system closer to Europe and had a beneficial effect on the Turkish economy.

I remember a speech Gul gave in Davos a few years ago. His English and his manners were impeccable, and he did not in the least resemble some kind of Hassan Nasrallah, but the European project of the Turkish Islamists is founded on the purest hypocrisy.

The negative attitude of France and Germany towards Turkish membership in the European Union is well known. I believe it is mistaken and strategically short-sighted, but that is a separate matter. The fact is that Turkey has no prospect of joining the European Union in the next ten years, so why is the AKP so stubbornly continuing negotiations which appear to be going nowhere? It is precisely because Brussels is insisting that the army should be deprived of its privileged position as the guarantor of the constitution, in order to bring Turkey closer to European practice. And that is very much in the party’s interests.

The “useful bourgeois idiots” in Brussels appear to have no inkling from their remote vantage point that it is precisely the army which is the staunchest defender of European and democratic values in Turkey, or that the Islamists, while pretending to move closer to Europe, are in fact trying to use the Brussels bureaucrats to remove this obstacle to their real program.

What that program is they have already shown clearly enough by trying to pass a law criminalizing marital infidelity. This is a complete obsession of Islamists of all times and nations. What is invariably their first priority when they succeed in seizing power by democratic or other means? They introduce Sharia law, enslaving women socially, and primarily sexually.

Having been given an unambiguous warning, the AKP backtracked on their “legislative project,” but the crisis flared up again in May when they made it clear they were aiming to take over the presidency.

The general staff of the Turkish army issued a harsh statement: “The attack on the basic values of the Republic is strengthening and becoming an outright challenge to the state. The Turkish armed forces will make their position clear if that should become necessary. Let nobody be in any doubt about that.”

The Islamists in European clothing pretend to be innocent democratic sheep. Western capitals from Brussels to Washington expostulated indignantly about the unacceptable behavior of Turkish militarism.


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Pertinent Links:

1) Piontkovsky: Long live Turkish militarism