Nursema, 10, a daughter of Ali Haydar Bengi, who was among the nine Turks killed during an Israeli raid on a flotilla trying to run the Gaza blockade.

By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU

Published: July 15, 2010

ISTANBUL — The Turkish charity that led the flotilla involved in a deadly Israeli raid has extensive connections with Turkey’s political elite, and the group’s efforts to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza received support at the top levels of the governing party, Turkish diplomats and government officials said.

This article was written by my good friend Robert Ellis and first appeared in the print edition of Hürriyet Daily News.

The non-admissibility decision a fortnight ago by the European Court of Human Rights was welcomed as “historic” by the Turkish press and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, but it might be premature to pop the champagne corks. In fact, it is probably former Turkish Ambassador Tulay Uluçevik who struck the right note when he described the Court’s ruling as “a Pyrrhic victory.”

Apart from the issue of security, that of property can be considered a major stumbling block for a solution to the Cyprus question, and the Annan Plan did little to assuage Greek Cypriot concerns. The right to restitution and return was effectively limited by a number of restrictions so that the majority of displaced Greek Cypriots were faced with compensation in the form of what Tassos Papadopoulos called “dubious paper.”

The Property Board that the Annan Plan envisaged, which would have settled claims from both sides, would for the most part have been funded by the Greek Cypriots, so it would have been the merchant from Kayseri who fed his donkey with its own tail all over again.

However, the Immovable Property Commission, or IPC, which the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”) established in December 2005 to deal with Greek Cypriot property claims, will in effect be funded by Turkey, as the “TRNC” has the status of “a subordinate local administration” under Turkish jurisdiction.

The legal status of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, which was proclaimed in 1983, has been a bone of contention for previous property cases appearing before the European court, but it has been established in admissibility decisions (for example, Loizidou v. Turkey in 1995 and Xenides-Arestis v. Turkey in 2005) that Turkey is the respondent state.

In the latter case, an attempt was made to avoid a judgment against Turkey by establishing an “Immovable Property Determination, Evaluation and Compensation Commission” in July 2003, so as to provide a domestic remedy that should be exhausted. Nevertheless, this only provided for compensation but not restitution, and as there were doubts about the impartiality of the Commission, the remedy was found to be neither effective nor adequate.

So, seen in those terms, the IPC must be considered an improved model as its provisions provide for restitution, exchange or compensation in return for rights over the immovable property and compensation for loss of use if claimed. Furthermore, two of the IPC’s five to seven members are independent international members, and persons who occupy Greek-Cypriot property are expressly excluded.

Consequently, on the basis of the 85 cases concluded by last November, the Court found that the IPC provides an accessible and effective framework of redress for property issues “in the current situation of occupation that it is beyond this Court’s competence to resolve.”

In view of the redress offered by the Annan Plan, it must be a disappointment for Greek Cypriots that the Court maintains its view that “it must leave the choice of implementation of redress for breaches of property rights to Contracting States” and that, from a Convention perspective, “property is a material commodity which can be valued and compensated for in monetary terms.” In fact, in more than 70 cases claimants opted for compensation.

A further bone of contention in the current talks between Dimitris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat is whether it is the legal or the current owner of the property who should decide whether redress should be in the form of restitution, exchange or compensation.

On this issue, the Court states, “It is still necessary to ensure that the redress applied to those old injuries does not create disproportionate new wrongs.” Finally, the Court concludes that this decision is not to be interpreted as requiring that applicants make use of the IPC. They may choose not to do so and await a political settlement, but in the meantime the Court’s decision provides a legal basis.

Davutoğlu believes the Court’s decision has boosted the international legitimacy of the “TRNC”, in which case he has neglected to read the small print. “The Court maintains its opinion that allowing the respondent State to correct wrongs imputable to it does not amount to an indirect legitimization of a regime unlawful under international law.”

Furthermore, “Accepting the functional reality of remedies is not tantamount to holding that Turkey wields internationally-recognized sovereignty over northern Cyprus.” The European Parliament has, in a resolution, called on Turkey to immediately start to withdraw its troops from Cyprus and address the issue of the settlement of Turkish citizens as well as enable the return of the sealed-off section of Famagusta to its lawful inhabitants.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has indicated he is willing to withdraw Turkish troops in the event of a solution, but his chief EU negotiator, Egemen Bağış, has boasted that Turkey has not withdrawn a single soldier or given away territory.

Considering that not only the future of Cyprus but also Turkey’s prospects of EU membership hang in the balance, that kind of attitude is singularly unhelpful.

Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish and international press.

The AKP government has used its six years in power to create a new elite centred around Istanbul, Ankara and industrial cities like Konya, Kayseri and Gaziantep in Anatolia. At the same time the party has replaced the top echelons inside state administration, education, the judiciary and independent boards with supporterswho share the government’s conservative, Islamic values.

By Robert Ellis

For example, last October 600 leading staff from TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) were transferred to posts as “researchers” as part of a process of “restructuring”. And the March edition of the prestigious journal “Bilim ve Teknik” (Science and Technology) was subject to censorship. There was a picture of Darwin on the cover and a 16-page article celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. But TÜBITAK (Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council) intervened and the cover picture, article and editor were removed.

The editor of Bilim ve Teknik, Dr. Cigdem Atakuman, and the offending cover
Darwin’s theory of evolution is at odds with creationism, which the government supports and which has been introduced into school textbooks. According to Riza Türmen, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, this move indicates that what the Turkish government is attempting to achieve is “social engineering, a radical transformation of society”. Incidentally, Riza Türmen’s appointment at the Human Rights Court was not renewed, as he upheld the headscarf ban at Turkish universities in the landmark legal decision in Sahin v. Turkey in 2005.

The secret of the AKP’s success as a political party is that it is a grassroots movement built up on a local level, and therefore a convincing victory on March 29 will mean a consolidation of the AKP’s power base. The fact that now only 19 out of Turkey’s 81 provinces do not have an ban on alcohol consumption at municipal and public restaurants is a good example of how extensive the AKP’s influence is.

Davos
Some days before Israel’s invasion of Gaza the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confided to Israeli premier Ehud Olmert that he needed a high-profile international diplomatic success to deflect domestic criticism and gain legitimacy from Turkey’s secular opposition. For that reason Erdogan set as a precondition for his participation in the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos that there was to be a panel discussion on Gaza, preferably where Israeli president Shimon Peres would be present.

Seen in this light, Erdogan’s outburst at Peres appears to be a well-planned PR stunt calculated at legitimizing his government on the home front and establishing Turkey as a regional power in the Middle East. The reaction was not long coming. At Istanbul airport Erdogan was greeted as “the conqueror of Davos” and the Lebanese newspaper Dar Al-Hayat suggested that Erdogan should restore the Ottoman empire and be the Caliph of all Muslims. Considering that Turkish foreign policy under the AKP has been dubbed “neo-Ottoman” and that one of Erdogan’s nicknames is “The Imam of Istanbul”, this proposal must have tied in with Erdogan’s ambitions.

But his outburst has also backfired. According to a senior Israeli diplomatic official Erdogan has with his support of Hamas “lost all credibility as an honest broker in peace discussions”. And the official added: “As long as he is the prime minister of the country, Turkey has no place in peace negotiations or discussions. It is not a trustworthy diplomatic partner anymore.”

At the same time Erdogan has painted himself into a corner. His defence of Hamas as a legitimate political party hardly fits in with the ongoing closure case against the Kurdish political party DTP (Democratic Society Party) because of alleged connections with the PKK. The Kurdish vote is decisive for the AKP’s control of eastern and southeastern Turkey, where the party won over half the votes in 2007.

Financial crisis
Erdogan’s heroic status after Davos is, of course, a vote catcher, but the AKP has also resorted to other methods. Local authorities receive most of their funding from the central government, and the Minister of Justice has threatened voters that if they vote for the opposition, it is unlikely those municipalities will receive government help in the future.

In Tunceli province in southeastern Turkey, where the mayor of Tunceli, Ms. Songül Erol Abdi, is from the DTP, the state social aid and solidarity fund (the “Fak-Fuk Fon”) has distributed household appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers, and even computers to the local population. The only problem is that some of the villages are without electricity or running water. The Supreme Election Board has ruled against the distribution of aid but the provincial governor has continued with Prime Minister Erdogan’s support.

Turkey has also been hit by the global financial crisis and there has been a marked rise in unemployment. This year Turkish public and private institutions will need $100 billion in external funding, which is why a new accord with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is imperative. However, as the IMF has demanded cuts in public spending, talks have been suspended until after the March 29 local elections.

Another sensitive issue in connection with the local elections is the underrepresentation of women among the candidates. There are at present 18 female mayors out of 3,225 in Turkey and only 834 out of 34,477 local administrators are women. No significant change can be expected, as there are only 400 women out of 14,000 nominated for local office.

Women constitute 26 percent of the labour force, but last July the AKP passed a social security law which cut maternity leave from six months to one . On Wednesday Economy Minister Mehmet Simsek, who himself comes from a poor Kurdish family, also blamed the rising unemployment rate on housewives looking for jobs.

Columnist Burak Bekdil has criticized Turkey’s new elite for their conspicuous consumption and called them “display Muslims”. Nevertheless, many Turks link their hopes for a better future to the rise of the AK party. As they say in Turkish: Keci can derdinde, kasap et derdinde. The goat fears for its life and the butcher fears for his meat.

Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and from 2005 to 2008 he was a frequent contributor to Turkish Daily News. However, after a critical article on the AKP in the Los Angeles Times last March, he was informed by the American editor-in-chief of TDN (now Hürriyet Daily News) he was persona non grata.

This post first appeared on PoliGazette

The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan

By Robert Ellis

Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, is not a man who brooks being contradicted and a panel debate on the Gaza war at the World Economic Forum was no exception. What was hoped to be a bridge-building exercise to ameliorate Erdogan’s harsh criticisms of Israel’s incursion into Gaza and support for Hamas has turned out to be a public relations disaster.

Erdogan delivered his own presentation in a forceful tone, calling for Hamas to be included in the solution and expressing Turkey’s willingness to be included in the process. However, after Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, had made his presentation, Erdogan responded with a tirade against Peres but was reminded by the moderator of a time limit. Erdogan pushed the moderator away, rose to his feet and left the stage, declaring he did not think he would be coming back to Davos, because he had not been allowed to speak.

The reaction has not been long coming. This morning AJC, the American Jewish Committee, issued a statement calling Tayyip Erdogan’s attack “a public disgrace” and “gasoline on the fire of surging anti-Semitism”. Furthermore, last week AJC and four other American Jewish organizations sent a letter to Erdogan, expressing concern over the current wave of anti-Semitism in Turkey, and Erdogan’s outburst has done nothing to allay these fears.

Unfortunately the Turkish prime mnister has a track record of shooting himself in the foot, which, if the sport became an Olympic discipline, would guarantee him a number of gold medals.

At the EU summit in Copenhagen in December, 2002, when Turkey tried to press the EU to fix a date for starting accession talks, European leaders were shocked by Turkey’s “blackmail campaign”, and one prime minister called Erdogan’s behaviour “very counter-productive”. The French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a representative of Old Europe, told a summit dinner: “It’s not enough to respect European law, you also have to be polite and civilized”.

At the EU summit two years later, when Turkey was finally given a starting date, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, declared “We were gobsmacked”, when at the end of the summit Erdogan suddenly refused to recognize Cyprus. The summit was almost derailed, and Erdogan’s volte-face caused Asselborn to remark: “We are not carpet dealers here in Europe.”

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, also experienced the Turkish leader’s abrasive style when Erdogan paid an official visit to Denmark in November 2005. After lunch there should have been a joint press conference, but when Erdogan learned that there would be a representative of the Kurdish tv station, Roj-tv, present, he immediately left for the airport, leaving Fogh Rasmussen to stand alone on the podium like an abandoned bride at the altar.

A fortnight ago Tayyip Erdogan paid his first visit to Brussels since the EU summit in December 2004 to revive Turkey’s flagging hopes of EU membership, but he immediately started off on the wrong foot. In a thinly veiled threat he informed the European Commission that he would review his support for the Nabucco gas pipeline if Cyprus continued to block the opening of the energy chapter of its accession talks. José Manuel Barroso, the EU Commission’s president, dismissed any connection between the two issues, and Erdogan, backtracking, declared that the project had enjoyed Turkey’s full support “all the time”.

At the same time Erdogan used his Brussels visit to express his support for Hamas, and called on Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the whole world to respect the election results as the will of the people “so that democracy could win in the Palestinian Autonomy and not to satisfy Mahmoud Abbas”.

Tayyip Erdogan’s latest outburst could threaten his ambition to be the Middle East mediator, and as he outlined in his presentation at Davos, Turkey has hosted five rounds of talks in the Israel-Syria question as a prelude to direct talks. There could be other fallout too. Turkey’s efforts to block the Armenian genocide resolution in Congress are contingent on the support of the Jewish lobby, and these efforts could come unstuck if President Obama keeps his pre-election pledge to recognize
the events of 1915 as genocide.

There could be another form of backlash. If Israel compares its struggle with Hamas to Turkey’s efforts to combat the PKK, and if the Jewish lobby in the USA seconds this motion, Turkey’s efforts to maintain its territorial integrity could be undermined.

There is also the shadow side of the humanitarian concern Tayyip Erdogan emphasized in his presentation. When the Turkish prime minister visited Khartoum in 2006, he declared that no genocide had been committed in Darfur, and Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir has twice been cordially received in Ankara. This raises the question of the sincerity of Mr Erdogan’s commitment and whether this is colored by his preoccupation with Islam.

Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and was also a frequent contributor to Turkish Daily News.

The PKK is deemed a terrorist organization by, among others, Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Iraq’s central government had promised several times in the last couple of years to do something about the PKK presence in the northern part of the country, but has yet to take significant action.

“The sole target of a possible cross-border operation will be the terrorist organisation,” Erdogan told lawmakers from his ruling party the AK Parti (or Justice and Development Party).

“Turkey is in a position of self-defence when it comes to terrorism. Everyone should understand this,” he said. “The best choice for the regional administration of northern Iraq is to cooperate with us against terrorist elements because the terrorist organisation is a cause of regional unrest and tension.”

Iraq and Turkey have been at odds with each other for years over this issue. Turkey believes that Baghdad is not doing enough against the PKK, forcing Turkey to do take matter into its own hands, while Baghdad says there is not much it can do because the PKK hides in regions difficult to enter for government forces, and argues that cross border operations by Turkey are unacceptable, because Turkey would not be allowed to act in breach with Iraq’s territorial integrity.

The United States, meanwhile, is caught in the middle because it has fought a war against terrorism for quite some years itself, and has invaded two countries in order to destroy terrorist organizations (both Afghanistan and arguably Iraq). This means that it is difficult if not impossible for the U.S. to criticize Turkey when it goes into Iraq, occupies a significant part of its ‘Kurdistan’ part, and withdraws weeks, perhaps months, later.

On the other hand, Iraq’s government is not willing to let Turkey deal with problems too big for itself to handle, and calls on Turkey to withdraw immediately whenever it takes military action against PKK target in Iraq. The U.S. has to, of course, stand with Iraq, also because more than 100,000 of its troops are stationed in this country. Furthermore, the U.S. fears that a Turkish incursion will destabilize one of the historically most stable parts of Iraq.

Turkish Daily Hurriyet quoted Bin Laden as saying: “When the Soviet Union invaded Kabul, I was residing in Turkey, having left the kingdom because of some differences, which I don’t like to mention now. I was working in trade.”

“During my stay in Istanbul, I got acquainted with many Iranian merchants who had escaped from Iran at the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war. During that time, Arab mujahidin started going to Afghanistan with the help of the U.S. CIA, which set up a transit camp in Istanbul. Volunteers stayed in the camp and were then dispatched to Afghanistan,” he added.

He also explained what his ‘charity’ organizations were doing, and where they operated. They had, he said, offices in 13 countries: “The Bin Ladin Establishment’s aid covers 13 countries, including Albania, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Britain, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and some Gulf countries that there is no need to mention. This aid comes in particular from the Human Concern International Society, which was founded in Afghanistan in 1982,” he said during the interview.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in Pakistan now. He fled Afghanistan after the war in 2001, which came in response to his terrorist organization’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The goal of it was to make their opposition to the approval of the region’s municipality to Moslems to build a mosque, clear.

Thousands of left-wing protesters heard about the upcoming protest and traveled to Cologne, where they started a counter-protest. They argued that the right-wing protest was racist in nature. Police felt forced to interfene after the left-wing protesters started using violence and it had become clear that if the right-wing protest would proceed as schedulled all hell would break loose.

The far right group Pro Koeln had organized the protest, but it was supported by right-wingers from across Europe. They went to Cologne to protest the ‘Islamification’ of Western Europe, and to celebrate the continent’s “shared, 1,000-year history of Western values and Christian traditions.”

Germany is home to three million Moslems, who form 4% of the German population. Many of them are not well integrated, which increases anti-Moslem feelings. Many others, however, are integrated and function in German society like any other ‘born’ German.

Sadly, the anti-immigration feeling is rapidly developing into an anti-Moslem feeling in Germany and in other European countries. This anti-Moslem attitude is becoming increasingly clear. The result of this will not be that Moslem immigrants and their children will integrate better, of course; it will be that Germany will be divided among ethnic and religious lines, with both groups distrusting the other.

Immigrants and authentic Germans both play a role in this process. Both, it seems, refuse to take responsibility for the situation, and for the problems they have caused. Immigrants pretend that all problems are caused by racism – not true – born Germans all too often claim that immigrants are the root of all major problems – not true either. Both sides have to take responsibility. If they refuse, the problems will continue to exist.

PoliGazette » Police Break Up Mosque Protest in Germany.

Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on September 5, 2008 @ 3:17 pm CEST

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Additionally, I was greatly impressed by the size of Istanbul. For Dutch standards, Izmir is gigantic with its four million inhabitants. Istanbul, however, is so big that the Dutch nor English language have words to describe the feeling a Dutchman gets when he walks in Istanbul for the first time. The amount of people – from all races, classes, religions, backgrounds – is breathtaking. People and cars are everywhere. Crossing the street is an adventure; it could literally be your death if you do not run. One gets the impression that all 15 million inhabitants of the city want to get to work at the same time.

As said, that was not the only difference I noticed between the two cities. Izmir is truly a secular city. One sees almost no women wearing a headscarf. The women in Izmir are emancipated and modern.

In Istanbul the situation was different back in 2007. One did, of course, not see any burqas, for Turks tend to greatly dislike those customs, but headscarves were everywhere. Where only 5% or so of the female population of Izmir covers her head, it is not hard to imagine this number to be somewhere around 50% in Istanbul.

This year the situation in Istanbul has become worse. The step from a secular (Baku, Azerbaijan) city in a Moslem country to a religious city in a different Moslem country was gigantic. In Baku, like in Izmir, you can see just about no woman cover herself. In Istanbul, however, the situation has not merely remained the same, it has become worse.

One gets the impression that the political power of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is transforming this city in rather rapidly. Whenever I walk to a shop, even if it is only 500 meters (yards) away I can see at least one, mostly more, women completely dressed in black (something I did not see – often – last year). All too often the only thing you see is the women’s eyes. The rest is covered.

Many of these women are not Turks. They are mostly from Iran. Television in Iran is strictly censured. There is no chance whatsoever of Iranian women seeing things the religious leaders of that country do not want them to see. They mostly do not import TV shows. Many of the shows they do import, however, are from fellow Moslem countries. Especially Turkish TV shows are, I have been told, fairly popular in Iran.

Since Iranian men have to work and women often stay at home, or at least enjoy watching said shows, they get acquainted with Turkey, and especially with Istanbul. Most Turkish TV shows take place in this major city. They become curious and want to see it with their own eyes.

So, they convince their husband to book a trip to Istanbul, put their burqas in their suitcases, get in a plane and… before you know, you see them walking here.

Those women are not, however, the only ones dressed completely in black. Increasingly more Turkish women cover themselves completely as well. They talk like Turks, they walk like Turks… but they are dressed like Iranians and Saudis. They radically change the landscape; unlike the other Turkish women they are not laughing, nor talking loudly with each other. They are silent and follow their husband. They look at women who do not dress like them with an arrogance hard to imagine; one has to see the look to understand just how ‘dirty’ it is.

And so, the landscape in Istanbul is changing. One wonders whether it has reached an extreme and will become less in the coming years, whether it will remain the same or, and this is what I fear, it will become worse.