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Monday, March 5, 2001
TURKEY IN CRISIS:
ECHOES OF TEHERAN?
by
Srdja Trifkovic
Turkey is in the
midst of a mounting financial and political crisis, the worst since the
military coup of 1980. In the third week of February overnight interest rates
soared to 20 percent, or 7,000 percent per annum. The stock market tumbled, losing
18 percent of its value on
February 21 alone. The
government in Ankara was forced to abandon exchange rate controls and float its
currency, the lira, which lost a third of its value in a matter of days. Galloping
inflation and collapsing banks
have reportedly prompted the International Monetary Fund to extend billions of
dollars in loans.
The latest crisis was
triggered off by a very public quarrel between Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit--the
septuagenarian political veteran who presided over the
invasion of Cyprus in 1974--and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The dispute, ostensibly
over the pace and
scope of the government’s anti-corruption drive, would not have had such
consequences were it not for the structural weaknesses of Turkey’s economic and
political system. The reaction of the markets, barely recovered from a less dramatic
slide last
November, reflected widespread concern over the ability of Ecevit’s government
to tackle those weaknesses. Turkish officials
now estimate that the country will need over $25 billion in foreign loans to overcome
the immediate effects of the current crisis.
Before
the United States is dragged into another bailout of Mexican proportions it is
necessary to take a hard look at the fundamentals. Eight months ago we warned that
Turkey’s
latent tension between modernization dictated from above and religiously
expressed resistance from below is structurally similar to the strain that
proved fatal to the Shah in 1979 (“Is Turkey the Next
Iran?” News & Views, May 4, 2000). Today we can only add that, just as enormous
oil revenues could not resolve the problem in Iran, there is no reason to
believe that the proposed massive injections of foreign liquidity will do the
trick in Turkey. The Kemalist dream of
strict secularism has never penetrated beyond the military and a relatively
narrow stratum of urban elite centered in Istanbul. The rise of Islam in the
mainstream political landscape became fully apparent in June 1997, when the Turkish
army
intervened to force the resignation of Necmettin Erbakan, the democratically
elected prime minister and leader of the Islamic Refah party.
The fact that
political Islam had found such fertile ground in Turkey came as a shock to
many, revealing the ultimate dependence of the political system on the
army. The CIA’s 1997 “State Failure
Task Force” report identified Turkey as a nation in danger of collapse. The resulting
erosion of the ruling
stratum’s self-confidence has led to increased oppression. Journalists now risk
fines, imprisonment,
bans, or violent attacks if they write about “the role of Islam in politics and
society” or “the proper role of the military in government and society” (Human Rights
Watch, 1999). Turkey is a
“guided democracy” at best, with no institution, judicial or civil, truly
independent of the State, and with the military as the final guarantor of its
pro-Western, secular orientation.
The official line
from Ankara in the wake of this latest crisis--that the underlying strength of
the Turkish economy and its political institutions remain unaffected--is
reflected in its friends’ assurances that a bit of shock therapy may be just
what the country needs to become more efficient. Writing in The Wall Street
Journal (“Turkey’s Crisis Has a
Silver Lining,” March 2) Norman Stone thus asserted that “there’s a ‘crisis’
perhaps, but no reason to panic.”
Other analysts are
not so sure. Darko Tanaskovic, who
teaches Turkish studies at the University of Belgrade and who was until recently
Yugoslavia’s ambassador in Ankara, says that even many Turks would question
Stone’s assertions. He warns that the
lack of cultural rootedness of Turkey’s political elites remains as serious a
problem today as it was in Ataturk’s times, and says that in many minds the question
about the dormant Islamic volcano is not if, but when. The problem, according to
Dr. Tanaskovic, is
compounded by the Turkish elite’s own divisions. In the business community and the
academe one encounters the
proponents of a neo-Ottoman model that would supposedly better fit the post-
national, globalist paradigm. On
the other hand, the old-fashioned nationalists--notably the officer class--dislike
any notion of Turkey’s integration into the “international
community” as inherently suspect. Tanaskovic concludes that
Turkey’s economic performance over the past decade, which is even more
impressive if we take into account the unrecorded “gray economy,” has not
contributed to the emergence of a self-perpetuating political consensus.
A senior analyst with
the U.S. Senate agrees with this
assessment and notes that the present turmoil is likely to increase pressure
from the United States on the European Union to accept Turkey as a member, on
the simplistic assumption that integration into “Europe” is the best antidote
to Islam. In December 1999, Turkey was
finally recognized as an E.U. candidate, but the opening of formal negotiations was
conditional on
satisfaction of human rights criteria. The full membership is most unlikely to be
granted, however, although few Germans will openly admit that this refusal is
driven less by Turkey’s violations of democracy and its economic volatility
than by the West Europeans’ fear of the resulting migratory deluge.
What happens to
Turkey is important not only because it is a regional power of some
significance. Its population will
exceed that of Russia thirty years from now if today’s demographic trends
continue, and its foreign trade turnover--at almost $100 billion a year--is
almost at Russia’s level. Turkey’s
cultural and political influence is on the rise in its old holdings in the
Balkans, as well as throughout the former Soviet Central Asia. Its proximity to the
Caspian oil fields has
fortified its position as a key U.S. ally in the area of eastern Mediterranean and a
major recipient of
American weapons and technology, whose air base at Incirlik is regularly used
by the U.S. Air Force to bomb Iraq.
The Bush
administration will make a serious mistake if it continues putting all of its
Levantine eggs into one Turkish basket, as it may yet discover that
“democratization” of Turkey may mean its irreversible Islamization. The latest
crisis should sound alarm bells
in Washington that America needs alternative scenarios to cover such eventuality.
The first step will
be to end the perennial war with Iraq. It is absurd to insist on maintaining a no-
fly-zone in northern Iraq,
ostensibly in order to protect the Kurdish population from Saddam, while on the
other side of the border Turkey uses U.S.-made jets and helicopters to target
the same Kurdish population. Finding a
way out of the Iraqi imbroglio would also contribute to an improvement of
America’s relations with the Arab world in general, at a time when the Middle
East is more volatile than at any time since 1973. But the key to this approach
calls for
a long-term rapprochement with Russia, instead of an unnecessary and costly new
cold war. This would provide an
alternative access route to the Caspian oil fields if, one day in the not too
distant future, Turkey becomes an Islamic Republic. It may not happen, but if it
does Washington must not be caught
napping.
Copyright
2001, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
928 N. Main St., Rockford, IL 61103
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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