HURRIYET- Columnist Oktay Eksi comments on State Minister Kursat Tuzmen’s recent visit to Baghdad and an incident during his press conference with Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramazan. A summary of his column is as follows:
Americans used to have a joke, one that gently mocked their leaders but also bragged at how well their country’s system of government operates. ‘FDR proved that even a disabled man can be president’ the joke went. ‘Then Harry S Truman has showed that “the man on the street” could govern the country. Finally, of course, Dwight Eisenhower showed that to be president you didn’t need even a lick of sense.’ During Ronald Reagan’s term in office, everyone made fun of him, just as they now mock George W. Bush. Yet, through all this, the US system continues to run like clockwork.
True, if the foundations of a state’s overall system are laid down properly, individual administrative weaknesses don’t matter quite so much. In our country we, too, have our own individual administrative weaknesses, but our state’s established mechanisms chronically fail to compensate for them. A recent example was State Minister Kursat Tuzmen’s visit to Baghdad, where he faced a very unpleasant situation, much like one experienced in 1997 by Necmettin Erbakan, then prime minister and leader of the closed Welfare Party, when he was in Libya, participating in a joint press conference with Libya leader Muammar Qaddafi. At that occasion, Qaddafi publicly scolded Erbakan for some reason, yet Erbakan failed to say a single word in response. Similarly, Tuzmen and Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramazan were in the middle of a press conference when Ramazan suddenly got angry at a question posed at him and stormed out, ending the conference, and leaving Tuzmen, a minister of the Turkish state’s government, alone and in great shock. [Note from Press and Information Directorate: Ramazan cut short the press conference when asked about the issue of Turkey’s claim to oil revenues from northern Iraq’s Kirkuk and Mosul regions, currently unofficially administrated by Kurdish political parties in the area.]
Why is it always Turkish statesmen, but not US, British, French, Israeli or Greek ones who face such circumstances? Perhaps because those countries’ officials make thorough preparations well before such contacts so as to keep a tight rein on things, as they have the requisite system for this. But where does our flaw lie? Is it because we lack the necessary expertise in such systems, or because we simply don’t know how foreign affairs are conducted?”
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION