Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to tell us something
Mr Erdoğan may be a true fighter, a genuine survivor; but he is certainly not a good chess player. Every move he makes, every word he speaks these days causes shy smiles, if not loud laughter, at the enemy HQ.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the first Turkish prime minister who spoke about the “Kurdish problem.” Mr. Erdoğan is the first Turkish prime minister who granted cultural and political rights to Kurds none of his predecessors had dared to grant – rights with an EU seal i.e. rights that qualified Turkey to open membership talks with the EU. It’s bizarre – Mr. Erdoğan’s name is associated with other “first-times” in Turkish politics.
For example, anti-Americanism in Turkey has reached a dangerous peak for the first time under U.S. friendly Mr. Erdoğan’s rule (according to pollsters Infacto Research Workshop, Turks see the United States as the top security threat). Of course, the major reason for anti-American sentiment is the Iraq war rather than Mr. Erdoğan’s governance. All the same, Mr. Erdoğan’s – to put it mildly – lenience vis-à-vis what the Turks perceive as their top security threat must have added to that sentiment.
First bigwigs who need heavy security at funeral rites
Mr. Erdoğan is also the first prime minister who has good reasons to avert funeral rites for victims of PKK terror. Pity, his cabinet ministers and parliament speaker, Bulent Arınç, are the first bigwigs who need heavy security at funeral rites for soldiers. For the first time since 1984 – the beginning of PKK terror – the widow of an officer refused condolences from government ministers.
Mr. Erdoğan is the first Turkish prime minister who has ordered prosecution against protestors at the funeral rites because they had booed (and he claims insulted) his ministers. He is the first prime minister millions of Turks think, right or wrong, collaborates with foreign powers hostile to Turkey.
More ironically, he is the most reformist, most pro-EU Turkish prime minister under whose rule Turks’ support for EU membership has declined from around 75 percent to less than 50 percent. And of course he is the liberal freedom fighter who has sued a record number of writers, cartoonists and journalists; the same liberal freedom fighter whose government produced the famous Article 301 for which Hrant Dink had been prosecuted.
In 2002, three years after the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the Turks were almost forgetting about Kurdish terrorism. In 2007, as Mr. Erdoğan’s government nears the end of its fifth year in power, funerals for terror victims are almost a daily ritual. All that makes quite a discrepancy between what we are being told Mr. Erdoğan is and what he probably is; somewhere there is a missing link.
Right about incursion, wrong about motives
Most recently, Mr. Erdoğan ruled out a military incursion into Iraq, saying that the heart of the (PKK) matter was inside Turkey, not in Iraqi territory. I fully agree with Mr. Erdoğan’s judgment. I do not, however, agree with what are probably the real reasons that eventually forced him to reveal the unpopular fact. Nor do I agree with the way he justified his argument.
According to Mr. Erdoğan, “if there are 500 terrorists in Iraq, there are 5,000 in Turkey.” He said that the numbers only represented an order of magnitude. That means the prime minister of Turkey was saying that there were 10 times more PKK terrorists in Turkish territory than in Iraqi territory.
We could have respected that unless Mr. Erdoğan had to correct himself within a few hours that there were 1,500 terrorists in Turkey and 3,500 in Iraq. So, the first ratio he used to justify his retreat was a failed bluff – that his government would order an incursion if the military placed a written request – was 1/10 in favor of Turkish territory, whereas the second ratio was 1/2.3 in favor of Iraqi territory. That makes an arithmetical difference of 23 times in the words of a prime minister, and within a few hours.
Mr. Erdoğan has another explanation as to why he ruled out an incursion: a military intervention would trouble the election process! Is Mr. Erdoğan trying to sabotage himself, or is he just being the same tempered man he has always been? That sentence for the average voter would only read as “I care more about my party’s election fortunes than about the PKK terror.” Too sad, Mr. Erdoğan could have cited a hundred very good reasons why the Turkish military should not cross the Iraqi border.
Mr. Erdoğan should ask himself tough questions. For example, if the “heart of the matter” was inside Turkey rather than in Iraqi territory, why has his government asked for U.S. assistance against the PKK? Why the thousands of “classified” meetings between Turkish and American officials? Why setting up a mechanism of special envoys to fight PKK terrorism? Why was the trilateral mechanism created?
What made Mr. Erdoğan think that there were 10 times more PKK terrorists in Turkey than in Iraq, although he later had to admit that there are 2.3 times more PKK terrorists in Iraq than in Turkey? What possibly explains the huge discrepancy?
What does Mr. Erdoğan think the public will think when under his orders protestors at the funeral rites will be prosecuted whereas pro-PKK demonstrators are not prosecuted in most of their demonstrations?
Mr. Erdoğan may be a true fighter, a genuine survivor. However he is certainly not a good chess player, probably because of his temper. Every move he makes, every word he speaks these days causes shy smiles, if not loud laughter, at the enemy HQ.