BY Yusuf KANLI
TDN- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once again away from Turkey on Saturday. He has earned himself the title of most traveling prime minister of the country with his outstanding traveling capacity; if he is not abroad, he is visiting somewhere in the country and occasionally stops over in Ankara.
It is good of course to have a young prime minister who has the energy and will to promote Turkey and Turkish business abroad. Now, he apparently has one more goal: Playing the role of regional mediator!
His party is facing a closure case at the Constitutional Court. He is among the 71 names the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals asked the high court to ban from party politics for five years. He has been shunning all calls for dialogue with the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal, saying, "Why waste time? I know what he will say."
But, our prime minister is out to promote dialogue, to mediate between Israel and Syria and achieve a "land for peace" deal between the two countries. There are calls from Lebanon that he should indeed play a similar role between political antagonists there. Turkey acquiring the ability to contribute to regional and global peace, to have the potential as a troubleshooter in the perennially unstable Middle East, of course, must be appreciated.
Obviously, Turkey might be burdened with some baggage collected during the more than four centuries of Ottoman rule in the Middle East, but that's ancient history and we should be able to leave the past in the past. Ankara might be uniquely qualified by dint of its acceptability to key players all around. From Washington and Tehran to London, Berlin, Paris and Damascus, Turkey is widely regarded as a friend and ally. Besides, other would-be brokers have far more recent stains on their credentials as brokers.
Reports throughout the Muslim world stress that this "potential role" of Turkey was a product of several factors headed by the Islamist roots of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Erdodan, and the success of the AKP government in establishing its bona fides as an independent player by such actions as its refusal in 2003 to let U.S. forces use Turkey as a jumping-off point for the ill-advised invasion of Iraq.
Besides, according to Lebanon's respected Daily Star newspaper the Islamist-rooted AKP government has also maintained the cordial relations with Israel built up by its secularist predecessors of various orientations, while in Turkey "Erdogan has made major strides in terms of fighting corruption, streamlining the economy and expanding democratic rights and freedoms. In short, his is a responsible face of Islamist governance to which like-minded parties in other countries should aspire."
There lies the fundamental problem of AKP governance in Turkey. Turkey cannot have an Islamist governance. That's why the AKP is facing a closure case at the Constitutional Court. That is why we have polarization in society.
A neo-Ottomanist Turkey that our dear friend Professor Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief foreign policy advisor of Erdogan, might aspire to see the republic transformed into, is not a goal shared by the secularist Turks who remain committed to the republic as a modernity project.
Otherwise, all applause for Erdogan or anyone else who would work for peace.
Everything as usual on CHP front!:
The CHP had its convention over the weekend; re-elected Deniz Baykal, for the 10th time, as its leader; dashed the hopes of social democrats who were aspiring to see some change and the emergence of a potential to challenge the Islamist-conservative dominance in Turkish politics. The anti-democratic statute of the party did not allow anyone to challenge Baykal in the election for party leadership.
Apart from some lofty rhetoric and some verbal and unsubstantiated salvoes against the ruling AKP, there was almost no excitement in the Atatürk Sports Hall where the convention was held.
Though it appears as if Turkey's social democrats are committed to the CHP because of the 10 percent electoral threshold and the inability of any other party to win that much support in an election, perhaps the time has come to kick the CHP out of Parliament as well and force it to change, as the current geriatric and rather nationalist team will not abandon the party themselves.
(Yusuf Kanly can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected])