Πόσο δημοκράτης είναι ο Ερντογάν;
 | Από τις μέχρι τώρα εξελίξεις στην Τουρκία, διαπιστώθηκε ότι σε θέματα εσωτερικής και εξωτερικής πολιτικής ο Τayyip Erdoğan εφαρμόζει μια τακτική αποπροσανατολισμού των αντιπάλων του ακολουθώντας τα εξής βήματα: αρχικά, συγχρονίζεται με τα γεγονότα, στη συνέχεια αναδιπλώνεται όταν πιέζεται χωρίς να προβαίνει σε σημαντικές παραχωρήσεις και τέλος, αντεπιτίθεται όταν οι συγκυρίες το επιτρέπουν. Εξάλλου, τα μέτρα εκδημοκρατισμού που ανακοίνωσε ο Τούρκος πρωθυπουργός στις 30-9-2013, μετά από 11 χρόνια στη διακυβέρνηση της χώρας, αποτελούν ένα αντιπροσωπευτικό παράδειγμα της μεθοδολογίας του, με αποτέλεσμα πολλοί Τούρκοι να τα θεωρήσουν ως ελεημοσύνη και άλλοι ως “το | |
τέλος
του έθνους-κράτους”, δεδομένου ότι αυτά συντάχθηκαν για να
ικανοποιήσουν αποκλειστικά τις πολιτικές, πολιτιστικές και κοινωνικές
απαιτήσεις της συντηρητικής και ισλαμικής πτέρυγας του κόμματός του.....
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Χρήστος Μηνάγιας
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Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with ‘reforms’
By Amir Taher
Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan this week unveiled his
long-promised “reform package” to “chart the path of the nation” for the
next 10 years — that is, through 2023, 100 years after the founding of
Turkey as a republic.
Which is ironic, since Erdogan seems bent on abolishing that republic in all but name.
His
plan to amend the Constitution to replace the long-tested parliamentary
system with a presidential one (with himself as president and
commander-in-chief) is only part of it. He’d also undo the key
achievement of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
In
the 1920s, Ataturk created the Turkish nation from the debris of the
Ottoman Empire. Ataturk and the military and intellectual elite around
him replaced Islam as the chief bond between the land’s many ethnic
communities with Turkish nationhood.
Over
the past 90 years, this project has not had 100 percent success.
Nevertheless, it managed to create a strong sense of bonding among a
majority of the citizens.
Now Erdogan is out to undermine that in two ways.
First,
his package encourages many Turks to redefine their identities as
minorities. For example, he has discovered the Lezgin minority and
promises to allow its members to school their children in “their own
language.”
Almost
20 percent of Turkey’s population may be of Lezgin and other Caucasian
origin (among them the Charkess, Karachai, Udmurt and Dagestanis). Yet
almost all of those have long forgotten their origins and melted in the
larger pot of Turkish identity. What is the point of encouraging the
re-emergence of minority identities?
Meanwhile,
Erdogan is offering little to minorities that have managed to retain
their identity over the past nine decades. Chief among these are the
Kurds, 15 percent of the population.
Erdogan’s
Justice and Development Party, the AKP, partly owes its successive
election victories to the Kurds. Without the Kurdish vote, AKP could not
have collected more than 40 percent of the votes. Yet his package
offers Kurds very little.
They
would be allowed to use their language, but not to write it in their
own alphabet. Nor could they use “w” and other letters that don’t exist
in the Turkish-Latin alphabet but are frequent in Kurdish.
Kurdish
leaders tell me that the package grants no more than 5 percent of what
they had demanded in long negotiations with Erdogan.
Another
real minority that gets little are the Alevites, who practice a
moderate version of Islam and have acted as a chief support for
secularism in Turkey. While Erdogan uses the resources of the state to
support Sunni Islam, Alevites can’t even get building permits to
construct their own places of prayer.
Armenians, too, get nothing — not even a promise of an impartial inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915.
The
second leg of Erdogan’s strategy is to re-energize his Islamist base.
Hundreds of associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood are to
take over state-owned mosques, religious sites and endowment properties —
thus offering AKP a vast power base across Turkey.
Indirectly,
Erdogan is telling Turks to stop seeing themselves as citizens of a
secular state and, instead, as minorities living in a state dominated by
the Sunni Muslim majority. Call it neo-Ottomanism.
Erdogan
is using “Manzikert” as a slogan to sell his package. Yet this refers
to a battle between the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arsalan and the Byzantine
Emperor Romanos in 1071, the first great victory of Muslim armies
against Christians in Asia Minor. It happened centuries before the
Ottoman Turks arrived in the region.
Invoking
the battle as a victory of Islam against “the Infidel,” Erdogan
supposedly has an eye on the battle’s thousandth anniversary. Does he
mean to take Turkey back 1,000 years?
The
Ottoman system divided the sultan’s subjects according to religious
faith into dozens of “mullahs,” each allowed to enforce its own laws in
personal and private domains while paying a poll tax.
It’s
doubtful most Turks share Erdogan’s dream of recreating a mythical
Islamic state with himself as caliph, albeit under the title of
president. His effort to redefine Turkey’s republican and secular
identity may wind up revitalizing it.
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