What's happening in Turkey

Having been to Turkey now 4 or 5 times over the last 15 years, what's been happening there in the past week or so comes as no surprise. Tyap Erdogan has been the head of state for over 10 years and during that period of time Turkey has turned abruptly from a Western leaning country to an anti-Israel, anti rule-of-law Democracy toward a single party Islamist model.  The population, particularly in Istanbul, the crown jewel city in the Middle East, has been alarmed and now is in open revolt over the policies of the Erdogan regime. And it appears the revolt has spread to other cities in Turkey, including Ankara, the Capital.  What follows is a succinct summary of  what's happening, from NRO online.

Erdogan’s Agenda | National Review Online

Later today, President Barack Obama will sit down with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office. It will be a friendly reunion. Obama has said Erdogan is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “friendships and the bonds of trust.” Speaking to the Turkish parliament four years ago, on his first trip abroad as president, Obama declared, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together — and work together — to overcome the challenges of our time.” These challenges are many — among them, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

While Turkey and America partnered for the greater good throughout the Cold War, no amount of White House praise can hide the fact that Turkey today is less a bridge between the West and the Islamic world and, increasingly, a force undermining trust and cooperation.

Erdogan, who is now in his second decade of power and quite openly plotting for his third, has transformed Turkey from an imperfect democracy based on rule of law into an increasingly dictatorial state rooted in religion. By tweaking university admission formulas, he privilegedstudents from religious high schools, who had long been denied acceptance because they lacked a solid liberal-arts foundation. In order to help these unqualified graduates enter the civil service, Erdogan imposed a new interview process, transforming a meritorious civil service into a mechanism for political — and religious — patronage.

The Turkish military, once the envy of the Middle East, is now a shadow of its former self. Despite the recent peace accord with the leaders of the Kurdish insurgency, the Turkish military has trouble controlling large swaths of the southeast. And the Turkish air force continues to lose planes — the latest earlier this week — along the Syrian border when, in contrast, Israel has run high-risk missions without any casualties. The reason is simple: Like Josef Stalin, who gutted the Soviet military in the years prior to the Nazi invasion, or Ayatollah Khomeini, who did likewise to the Iranian military in the months before the Iraqi invasion, Erdogan has done his best to destroy his country’s military. One in five Turkish generals rots in prison, many on dubious charges and most without even a court date.

American diplomats initially cheered the reforms that excised the military’s role in politics — after all, ending military influence over politics is a noble goal. But since Erdogan’s government did not construct any alternative system of checks and balances, excising the military allowed him to pursue his agenda without regard for rule of law. He and his aides were not shy about seizing the opportunity. In response to judicial vetoes of the prime minister’s religious and social initiatives, Bulent Arinc, then speaker of the parliament and now Erdogan’s chief deputy, threatened to dissolve the constitutional court if it continued to find the ruling party’s legislation unconstitutional. More recently, in a fit of pique, Erdogan told parliament, “We want to raise a religious youth.”

Women and minorities have suffered disproportionately. Erdogan has forced Turkey’s minority Alevis to attend Sunni religious classes, and he has flushedwomen from top levels of the state bureaucracy, advising them that instead of pursuing a career they should have at least three babies and ideally more. And Turkish women today find not just their careers at risk, but their lives. In 2011, Turkey’s justice minister reported to parliament that, between 2002 and 2009, the number of women murdered each year had increased 1,400 percent. Some of that is the result of better reporting, but the bulk appears to be due to a sharp rise in the number of honor killings: Would-be perpetrators are no longer deterred by fear of prosecution, as the increasingly conservative police forces sympathize with the Islamist notion of honor. Obama once quipped that he had turned to Erdogan for advice on raising teen daughters. Perhaps for the sake of his two girls, he had better find a new role model.

In most democracies, the press holds the government accountable. That is no longer so in Turkey. Erdogan’s security forces arrest journalists with impunity; in ten years, according to Reporters without Frontiers, Erdogan has transformed his country into “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.” After first stacking once-independent banking boards with functionaries trained exclusively in Saudi Arabia, Erdogan has used their financial pronouncements to justify seizure of opposition newspapers. Turkey now ranks below even Russia, Palestine, and Venezuela in press freedom. When career American diplomats like Daniel Frieddescribe Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party as “a kind of Muslim version of a Christian Democratic Party,” they appear so wrapped in the bubble of political correctness that they have become detached from reality.

American policymakers might shrug off Turkey’s domestic turn away from rule of law if it did not presage a transformation of Turkish foreign policy. Erdogan’s agenda has more to do with the promotion of Islamic solidarity than a fight against terrorism or dictatorship. The days of Turkey’s being “a vital and strategic partner of the United States,” as Condoleezza Rice once described it, are over.