Comment: I am writing this to Frodo42 . First of all, please dont act like you are giving us something pro bono. We dont need your endowment, your desire towards our EU join at all. Dont be deluded that our public craves to enter EU, opinion polls here are the same as yours. I am sure that if Turkey joins EU someday, it will be just because of the high interests of EU, not an instant sentimental decision of your diplomats you dont like. And in my opinion, if your diplomats would act according to your people???s desires, you would be somewhere else in the GDP scale. The Europe which I think is splitted in 2 or 3 must give an approval or disapproval decision for us anymore. It is not fair to be suspended for years and to be asked much more than other candidate members. We need to draw our line too.
You are talking about the censorship of YouTube, the invasion of Iraq etc. in order to display our current situation. It is ludicrous to cite all these while many of our citizens are being burned alive in the midst of contemporary Europe. It is another paralogism to name a cross-border operation towards terrorists as an invasion, since we are having that operation on the strength of UN treaties. It is the salvation of a public from a longstanding anguish, not occupation of Cyprus. We have many people who seek protection there. Sorry but we dont need to ask anyone to proect our public from a carnage. And there is also no country recognized or an official place called Kurdistan. If you accept that name and the view of a terrorist group with ease then you are said to have tolerance for any terrorist movement anywhere and also you must be ready to admit a new independent region in your country requested by a terrorist group in future.
If the democratic legitimacy of the EU is bound up with our join, then you better do something quickly for your union. You are using so many assertive statements most of which I can assure are totally wrong, and I think it is a pity such a wrong-informed guy can write comments to a magazine like Newsweek. I feel irritated about your prejudice and for your age, I would expect you to be more hip when commenting about a foreign country.
The True Turkish Believer
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
Adding to this political awakening was an economic crisis in 2000 and 2001. The Turkish lira had lost two thirds of its value after the collapse of a series of corrupt banks and the flight of foreign capital. Erdogan, and the newly formed AKP, blamed the economic difficulties on rampant political cronyism, runaway populist spending and government incompetence.
The simplest way of fixing it was by integrating Turkey into Europe—a widely popular goal at the time, with 80 percent approval. It quickly became a catchall for bold reforms the AKP could never have dared attempt without the support of Brussels, such as reducing the power of the military-dominated National Security Council. "Europe is the instrument which can help us put our own house in order," Erdogan told NEWSWEEK before coming to power in November 2002. "Our central goal is to put Turkey on the road to Europe."
Ever since, Erdogan has tried to steer an extraordinarily narrow path between the EU, his party's own conservative, religious roots, and the small but powerful ultrasecularists in the military, judiciary and bureaucracy. For instance, Erdogan has tackled some of the most repressive aspects of Turkey's police state head-on, allowing Kurds some cultural rights, scrapping a few (but by no means all) of the laws restricting free speech, and cutting the powers of the military-dominated National Security Council. Through it all, Erdogan has been dogged by accusations that his Islamist-rooted AKP's real goal is to foist a more conservative Islamic rule over the secular state of Turkey. In his critics' view, the most important thing for Erdogan and his allies is not to join Europe but to use the prospect of joining as a convenient front to push a religious agenda. As evidence, they say, Erdogan's first move in the constitutional overhaul was not to scrap the anti-free-speech laws—such as the infamous Article 301, which punishes "insulting Turkishness"—as Brussels has repeatedly demanded, but to call for an end to the longstanding ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in universities.
Erdogan presented it as a liberal move, a step on the path to the EU and a victory for human rights. "Why," he asked, "should wearing the headscarf be a crime?" But by focusing on the issue, he touched one of the rawest nerves in Turkey's ongoing culture wars. For many of Turkey's elite, keepers of the ultra-secular traditions of the nation's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, allowing headscarves at university is the thin edge of a dangerous wedge. Akdeniz University rector Mustafa Akaydin fears that the AKP's ultimate goal is to "destroy Ataturk's reforms" and that soon "Turkey will resemble an Arab country or Iran." He warns there could be "confrontation and chaos" on university campuses as a result. Indeed while the repeal of the ban is enormously popular—the latest polls show voters favor scrapping it by 64 percent to 27 percent—more than 120,000 people marched last week in Ankara to protest the decision and demonstrate their commitment to secularism.
Erdogan's critics note that the EU considers the headscarf to be an internal issue—and certainly not part of the Copenhagen criteria. Moreover, several European countries—including France—restrict the wearing of religious symbols in public schools. "Erdogan and his government are more interested in Islamicizing Turkey than democratizing it," says Cengiz Aktar, a specialist on EU affairs at Bahcesehir University. A true liberal, critics say, would have used his vast political capital on more-pressing human-rights concerns, which could turn out to be far more damaging to Turkey's EU bid than repealing a ban on headscarves. There is, for instance, no civilian alternative to compulsory military service, as there is in other countries. Conscientious objectors are regularly jailed. At the same time, speech remains far from free. Last month a newspaper editor was given a three-year suspended sentence for the crime of "insulting Ataturk." Moreover, a report by Human Rights Watch last year cites a rise in reports of police brutality and an increase in the number of people prosecuted and convicted for violations of speech laws. They say the state's intolerance of dissent "has created an environment in which there have been instances of violence against minority groups." In January 2007, Hrant Dink, the editor of a Turkish-Armenian newspaper was assassinated by a teenage gunman.
Clearly, in the face of a hostile secular military and its overheated rhetoric, and an EU that is ambivalent about Turkey at best, Erdogan will have to continue to prove his Western bona fides. There are a number of benchmarks that could determine whether Erdogan is still serious about the EU. Most important, Brussels urgently wants the AKP to scrap Article 301. Second, Europe will want Erdogan to show that he cares about the religious freedoms of non-Muslims, too—for instance by liberalizing the laws on non-Muslim charitable foundations and by reopening the world-renowned Orthodox seminary on the island of Helybeliada, near Istanbul. It has been closed since 1971.
Discuss