One has to distinguish between two kinds of protests that
emerged from the Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul, Turkey: an innocent and
legitimate one that took place in the early days of the protests, and a
transmogrified version of the latter into a social engineering project to bring
down the democratically elected and widely popular government of the AKP,
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. The latter had been attempted numerous
times within the decade-long rule of the AKP.
As an excuse for the continued protests, some charge Erdogan
with becoming increasingly authoritarian by citing the recent alcohol-sales regulation law, the attempted abortion law etc. in Turkey. The curious thing
is, similar laws and discussions are common in some Western countries.
Some brazenly go even as far as likening him to Hosni
Mubarak, Gaddafi, or al-Assad. The latter were the unelected leaders of
despotic regimes. Erdogan has been a legitimately elected leader for three
consecutive times, each time winning the elections with a landslide victory.
Obviously there is something this guy and his cabinet must be doing
increasingly well that resonates with the majority of the Turkish people for
the last decade.
The US republican senator John McCain, for example, said
recently that Erdogan is acting like a “dictator.” The Economist magazine
published an article the other day tacitly blaming Erdogan to behave like a
sultan. This is a magazine that overtly pushes for a government change in Turkey
since the last couple of years. Before the 2011 elections, for example, the
Economist encouraged the Turkish people to vote for the main opposition party
instead of the AKP, which is an Islamically conservative democratic party.
Why is it that the West is not even-handed vis-à-vis the
AKP? I think one important reason is Islamophobia…There is so much Islamophobia
in the Western media that even the most reasonable person can be biased against
anything Islamic.
The West needs to distinguish between extremist and ordinary
Muslims. If they approach anything Islamic with the same, overtly or covertly,
phobia and one-sidedness then I am afraid this will only exacerbate the
situation and further the already-existing friction between the West and the
Muslim world.
Erdogan certainly has some lessons to learn from the recent
protests: to show more understanding toward the way of life and sensitivities
of those who don't support him, to tone down his sometimes harsh rhetoric, and
to really weigh his cabinets' giant projects well from the environmental and
sustainability perspective, and have them thoroughly thrashed out in public
before his government goes ahead with them.
Erdogan is no ordinary politician: he is very ambitious,
industrious, forthright, and yes sometimes a bit harsh and
intractable. He is an overachiever. People usually don’t realize
that it is this set of characters that makes him so successful in effecting
real tangible success in the political arena, and an awful lot of admirers and
some haters. A March 2013 poll done by Pew Research Center in Turkey shows that
62% of the participants viewed him favorably. I aver that his story is a daring
political success story that might even be taught at political institutions and
financial schools some day.
Erdogan’s cabinet made unprecedented reforms in Turkey
within the last decade: democratic, political, and economic reforms. Some of
these can be briefly stated as follows:
Democratic reforms that enabled a much larger segment of the
Turkish society to have a say in the governance of their country; reforms that
brought about the recognition of the reality of a Kurdish problem in Turkey;
reforms that lifted the ban on the speaking of the Kurdish language and
establishment of TV channels broadcasting in Kurdish.
Political reforms that made it virtually impossible to do
coup d’états that were all too common in the pre-AKP days, political reforms
that are close to resolving the momentous Kurdish problem. The AKP has recently
pulled off a very important ceasefire with the PKK, the leading Kurdish
guerilla group in Turkey. The latter is a very high-stake political risk
Erdogan overtook, and arguably no other political figure can and will be able
to do in the foreseeable future of the Turkish political landscape.
Economic reforms that oversaw almost quadrupling of the per
capita income, many-fold increase of Turkish exports, total payoff of the debt
to IMF, reduction of inflation from chronic two digit numbers to single digit
numbers, a mind-boggling infrastructure development such as double-lane roads,
improved hospitals and schools, and on and on.
The recent protests in Turkey might be a red herring to most
Westerners as they occur during the so-called Arab Spring, where truly
oppressed people have been rising up to their unelected, cruel and corrupt
dictators. The Gezi Park protests must be viewed against the backdrop of the
recent political history of Turkey. Confusing the Turkish case with the Arab
Spring case, and comparing Erdogan with the ruthless and unscrupulous dictators
of the relevant Arab countries is the ultimate insult to intellectual fairness
and to the tens of thousands of people, a lot of them women and children, who
have been killed and tortured till this day by the dictators of those
countries.
The now a decade-long rule of the AKP, starting in the 2002
general elections, marks a watershed in the recent history of Turkey. Turkey
has witnessed a class struggle, a local political cold war between the elite
guard of the militarist secularist regime and the hitherto oppressed and
silenced conservative-religious majority. The latter were prevented
from occupying high government, military, and bureaucratic offices: their
daughters were prevented from attending higher education institutions; their
sons prevented from rising up in the chain of command in the military; their
democratically elected politicians harassed and sometimes executed, and their
parties routinely shut down. These people waited patiently. Then came a
not-so-unexpected or uncommon financial meltdown in 2001, where Turkish economy
went virtually bankrupt overnight. Enter Erdogan and his friends to the Turkish
political scene in earnest in 2002, touching off the recent Turkish
“revolution.”
The deep secularist establishment tried every trick they
could find to stop the inevitable: they used their bureaucratic tentacles to
stop the AKP, they attempted many coups d’état; but it was to no avail. Then in
2007, it occurred to them to organize countrywide protests (the so-called
Cumhuriyet Mitingleri, i.e., the Republic Protests) with the tacit aim of
instigating a coup, as Ergenekon trials revealed later on, portraying
themselves in the process to the world as a grassroots movement. It all failed.
Now without taking away anything from the legitimacy of the
early peaceful days of the Gezi Park protests, I venture to say that the
protestors of the ongoing and violent protests are trying to accomplish what
the Republic Protests attempted to do but couldn’t, except in a violent way a
la the Arab Spring: to bring down a legitimately elected and still widely
supported government. These extended and violent protests/riots should be
viewed in that light, and not as an uprising of an oppressed people in the
sense of the oppression of the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Syria.
The Taksim Square protestors should understand that it is
unnatural of them to expect an outcome similar to what happened in some of the
above Arab countries as a result of the uprisings. This would be a big
political blunder. Turkey is a democratic country where many democratic
channels are available for political and civil action. If the opposition did
their job properly with tangible, consistent and convincing policy-making, then
they probably would not have had to go to the streets to protests some of the
policies of Erdogan. Some of these issues and “problematic” plans would have
been dealt with before they took effect or realized.
It is time for them and their parties’ leaders to look at
themselves in the mirror and get the lesson they should get from these
protests: They have done very poorly in the legitimate political arena. The
main opposition party in Turkey, CHP, the Republican People’s Party, could not
put together any viable set of policies that could counter the AKP advance for
three consecutive elections. All they did during the last decade was to oppose
by default to any proposal the AKP put forward, and every now and then call for
military intervention.
The so-called secularist segment of the Turkish society,
i.e., the “elite guard” of the Kemalist regime, boasts itself to be well "educated" and "modern," and usually they look down on the AKP base as being not as
educated and smart. Isn’t it past time for them to ask themselves how come in
spite of their “education” and “modernity,” they seem absolutely incapable of
establishing a viable democratic party with a well-thought-out set of plans and
projects that will effectively compete with the policies of the AKP and be
convincing to everyday people?
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