دسته: 2016

Recently, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed a top U.S. general using words and a tone of voice that the Turkish public is familiar with when their president talks, but quite unusual for the president of any country talking about an ally, let alone a major NATO ally.

Speaking about the failed coup attempt of July 15, Erdogan picked on General Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Central Command, who had expressed concern that mass purges in the Turkish Army could weaken the NATO member’s military capacity and the ongoing fight against Islamic State (IS).

“You should be ashamed,” Erdogan said. “Do you think you are at a level to make this kind of decision [on purges]? Who are you? First, you have to know your limits! First you have to know who you are!”

Erdogan and the Turkish government have alleged that “the West,” notably the United States, was behind the coup attempt. As part of their “proof” for this claim, they point to the U.S. residency of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen whom Ankara blames for masterminding the coup. Gulen has lived in Pennsylvania since 1999.

Ankara has requested Gulen’s extradition to Turkey. In response, Washington has asked for “legitimate evidence” of Gulen’s personal involvement in order to look into that request.

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, soon came to Ankara to soothe strained Turkish-U.S. relations. He clearly and strongly condemned the coup attempt and rejected the Turkish accusation of U.S. involvement in it. He met only the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, and the Turkish chief of staff, Hulusi Akar, who tried to somehow calm the bilateral tensions. Dunford even expressed his satisfaction with the positive tone of his talks with Turkish officials, which he described as “not accusatory at all.”

Erdogan did not waste any time. Just one day after the U.S. general left Turkey, the president quickly let it be known how he viewed the situation. “Unfortunately, the West is supporting terror and standing by the coup plotters,” he said, condemning “those who we imagined to be friends”

Picking Fights

Shortly before the barrage against the United States and the West, the Turkish president had also criticized German democracy.

His remarks were triggered by the situation surrounding ethnic Turkish Erdogan supporters in Germany who had planned a demonstration in Cologne against the coup attempt and in support of Turkish democracy. The event’s organizers had invited Erdogan to address their meeting via a satellite video link.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for calm and warned that it was “unacceptable that anyone would bring internal political tensions from Turkey to Germany and intimidate people with other political beliefs.”

German police refused to grant permission for Erdogan’s televised speech because they feared it would incite tension. The Turkish government protested against the move but a German court confirmed the ban as valid.

“Bravo! The courts in Germany work very fast,” Erdogan said. “Is that the democracy you want to teach us?”

Erdogan’s ministers and loyal media followed his lead. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said: “And where is your democracy, your freedom of speech? We have no lesson to learn from the West. We can teach them democracy!”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, talking about U.S.-based Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom he calls the “mastermind” of the July 15 coup attempt against him, said: “Unfortunately, we have made serious mistakes [in the past on Gulen.] May God forgive us!”

And he added, “If you had told me that 20 years ago, 10, three, or four years ago, even I wouldn’t believe it.”

Well, he should know. In those years he was a powerful prime minister running the government himself.

Outsiders may not understand what he meant by “mistakes in the past.” Erdogan was referring to the period at least from the time he came to power in 2002 to 2013, when they were close allies fighting Turkey’s old secular, republican system with its strong military.

The peak of this dangerous and destructive alliance was when a group of newly recruited prosecutors and judges led a number of sensational, high-profile trials against more than 750 leading military officers, justice-system employees, journalists, and lawmakers. They were accused of creating a clandestine criminal group called “Ergenekon,” which in Turkey is now a synonym for Turkish-style Stalinist show trials. The defendants were accused of an armed coup attempt by the army against…, against whom? Against then-Prime Minister Erdogan and the government of his ruling Justice and Development Party.

The alleged “plotters” were mostly traditional Turkish secularists critical of the Erdogan government out of fear that it would derail the country from its secular path onto a “hidden Islamism.” Generals, prosecutors, prominent journalists, and politicians were taken away in shame, held in detention for years without any — or as it turned out — on fake and fabricated evidence.

That strongly supported Erdogan in an overwhelmingly secular government environment in the late 2000s. To some, it even guaranteed Erdogan’s hold on power when his political career was on the balance in cases raised by the country’s Constitutional Court.

But in a few years two things became clear: 1) the trials were based on fake documents and imaginary claims, and 2) the prosecutors and judges who ran the show trials were Gulen supporters implanted with the Erdogan government’s support or at least tolerance just a few years back into the judiciary and military.

Finally, in April this year, Turkey’s highest appeals court ruled that those show trials’ verdicts will be overturned since there was no “criminal group called Ergenekon” to undertake that coup attempt in the first place.

In 2010, Erdogan started himself to act against the Gulen movement’s dangerously growing power. From 2013 on, he began to clean Gulen supporters out of the government, military, and media.

Meanwhile, the strongman president of Turkey preferred not to comment on the Ergenekon show trials, its victims, and the damage done to the country’s military and state system. “The judiciary is independent in Turkey,” he used to say. “We prefer not to comment in order not to influence the courts’ decisions.”

That is why, on a different occasion, complaining again about his former ally, Erdogan said, “What did they [Gulenists] ask for that we didn’t give them?”

Today, more than two weeks since the coup attempt, it has been reported that at least 60 percent of the military’s generals and admirals have been fired for allegiance with the Gulen movement. “The Turkish military is now a broken force and it will take years for it to heal,” Aaron Stein of the Washington-based Atlantic Council told Reuters. Many of the high-ranking officers of the recent coup attempt are reported to be recruits of Gulenists in the army over the last 20 years.

Nobody knows if God will forgive Erdogan. But people will remember Gulen’s orchestrated Ergenekon trials for years to come — something that first helped Erdogan establish his unchallenged rule and then pulled the entire country into the July coup attempt.

Everybody was saying that it wouldn’t happen.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would never apologize — and he is really not the type to do so. Reconciling with Israel and Russia? Never! Erdogan is an Islamist (is he?) facing Israel — no way. And Russia, well, Turkey and Russia are too deeply involved on opposite sides in Syria. So, no!

But on June 27 we were surprised by two bits of news: first Israel and then Russia – yes — on exactly the same day and one after another. Turkey will normalize its relations seven years after the Israeli attack on the Turkish aid vessel Mavi Marmara heading to Gaza and seven months after Turks downed a Russian Su-24 fighter on the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkey wanted an apology from Israel and Russia wanted an apology from Turkey in the two incidents.

Everybody was predicting that no apologies would come. But both came, in one or another way, and it worked.

In Turkey, the opposition and critical media cried foul after the apologies with good questions that nobody can answer with certainty.

So, what was all that bragging and slogans about “brotherhood with the Palestinians” seven years ago? Why then did you shoot down the Russian fighter jet and proudly announce how tough you are with the Russians? To apologize after just seven months? Pros and cons started to argue: did Erdogan say “I am sorry” or “apologize”?

Turkish media report two versions, of him expressing “apology” or “regret,” depending on the outlet’s political standing. Apparently, Erdogan’s letter included both words.

Did he apologize to the killed Russian pilot’s family or to Russian President Vladimir Putin? One Tweet by Erdogan’s office, dated two or so years ago, went viral. There, typical for Erdogan, he was saying how strong now Turkey has become compared to the past: “Gone is now the old Turkey, a Turkey with a fallen head, a Turkey that others dictated its agenda, a Turkey that apologized.”

Questions following a deadly suicide attack in Istanbul

Two weeks ago I was sitting in a small shop in Izmir to have my watch cleaned and its battery replaced. Husnu Bey, the owner, a very professional watchmaker, was extremely pleasant to talk to and, no surprise for Turkey, he immediately came to politics — and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

I was interested in his take on Turkey’s “Kurdish issue,” now that the government is waging a tough military and security campaign against Kurdish militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and its offshoots, in both cities and villages. I wanted to hear what he had to say about the campaign itself, as well as the issue of ethnic and cultural rights for the country’s large Kurdish minority.

“Yes, I understand that they are waging a terrorist war,” I said, “both against the army and security forces and against civilians.”

“But imagine, if the government succeeds in eradicating a good portion of Kurdish militants and lowering the number and intensity of their attacks, who else will be left to talk to? In the end, there must be a political solution and military action alone will not provide it. There seems to be no Kurdish alternative to the PKK yet.”

The PKK is a militant Kurdish organization that has been waging war against Turkey for the past 32 years. It is recognized as a terrorist organization, not only by Turkey but also by the United States and most European countries.

Not surprisingly, as a dedicated Ataturkist (“Ataturkcu,”), Husnu Bey’s main criticism was directed mainly against Erdogan himself.

“The majority of our Kurdish co-citizens are against PKK terror,” he replied. “But Erdogan first decided to negotiate with the PKK without disarming them. And meanwhile the PKK amassed thousands of weapons and tons of ammunition in the basements and cellars of private homes. You don’t negotiate with somebody who is still armed. Now Erdogan is panicking and doesn’t know whom to attack where.

“You clean up the terror and take away their arms first and then tell them, ‘Now, let’s sit down and talk.’ That was previously the policy and we had just a few dozen casualties every year. Since the AKP [President Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party] came to power, we have dozens of casualties dying in terrorist attacks every week. See what they did yesterday in Istanbul.”

Deaths In Vezneciler

Indeed, the previous day, on June 7, an offshoot of the PKK attacked a police vehicle guarding a road in Vezneciler, a crowded neighborhood of Istanbul’s old Fatih district. Six policemen and six civilians were killed as a result; more than 36 were wounded, and dozens of shops and cars were damaged. Twelve families lost their loved ones and were devastated. The entire country was shocked and speechless.

The suicide attacker was Eylem Yasa, a 32-year old woman originally from Baglar, a suburb of the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, a city that Turkey’s Kurdish nationalists have declared as their “capital.”  She was reportedly trained in PKK camps in northern Iraq and later inside Turkey.

https://twitter.com/merdumgirizan/status/743320042926813185

Didn’t these Kurdish citizens know what had happened? Did they know what kind of message they were sending throughout Turkey on the country’s future, Turkish-Kurdish ethnic relations, and that Turkey’s Syrian and Iraqi border regions are becoming increasingly similar to northern Syria?

I am sure if you asked Eylem before her suicide attack, she would justify them as a “fight for freedom.” She would verbally condemn terrorism. ُShe would strongly condemn ISIS. But deep in her heart, she would probably think PKK is different. Her’s and similar attacks are “good” terrorist attacks, responding to the “state terror” as they usually say to justify it.

“Good Terrorism,” “Bad Terrorism”?

Since PKK and its off-shoots ended a fragile ceasefire in the summer of 2015, they brought out their weapons and ordered their militants such as Eylem to attack military, security as well as civilian targets – “everywhere in Turkey, in cities and towns,” their military commanders were quoted saying.

The government reacted proportionally harsh, often ruthlessly.

After months of clashes between PKK militants and the Turkish army, some southeastern cities of Turkey look today similar to Syrian cities bombed to ruins.

I don’t know if the “cemetery demonstration” in Diyarbakir is representative of most of Turkey’s Kurdish minority. I hope it is not.

Sometime later I will tell you about my encounter with Necla, a fine ethnic Kurdish hotel manager from Izmir. She is from Tunceli, another city in eastern Turkey with a sizable Kurdish minority. She was telling me that her personal goal is to make a career and to “gradually move away from whatever is close to Iraq and Syria.”

“Westward, westward,” she told me. “In the east, it smells of ammunition and hatred — religious hatred, ethnic hatred — and ignorance. I don’t need politics. I need security, education, health, and a normal life.”

But, still, I am not sure if the Turkish watchmaker’s statement about “the majority of our Kurdish co-citizens’ opposition to the PKK” offers a complete picture of Turkey today.

It is Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims worldwide. Mustafa Askar, a professor of theology at the state University of Ankara, is being interviewed live on the first channel of state TV, TRT1. The topic: “Happiness of the Ramadan.”

He talks about a conversation with his fellow teachers when they were visiting a zoo in Australia. “Why do people brag about praying and fasting?” he asked. “That’s not a good deed, that’s your obligation.”

And he got excited: Watching the animals in that zoo, he says, you realize that “humans are the only living species who pray. Obviously no animal prays. That means, let me be open, and the scripture [the Quran] says this, too: Nobody should feel offended, that means only animals don’t pray. That means those who do not pray are animals.”

Something like this would not have happened 14 years ago in Turkey, before the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power.

And nothing happened. Until people noticed it., then the video went viral. First by the “still-independent media” and later through all social networks and blogs.

The government spokesman and deputy prime minister, Nurettin Canikli, was asked about the comments by the “professor.” He didn’t condemn them or even take a position on them. He just said that he “would rather pass on this issue. I think this is being intentionally overblown. If there is anything illegal here, the prosecutors will have a look into that.”

But most probably the reaction was stronger than expected. For some reason, the “professor” finally emerged, saying he “was misunderstood” and apologizing for the misunderstanding.

What’s also sad is it’s only one case in an growing trend to make life difficult for those who do not want to follow the religious practices as understood and “strongly recommended” by the government.

During Ramadan many restaurants make special offers to break the fasting at sunset.

In an Aegean resort I was talking to a shopkeeper, expressing my appreciation that everybody seems to be free to fast or to eat openly in the restaurants. He smiled and said, “Yes, here on the beaches of the Mediterranean it’s the case, because they live from tourism.” And he added, “But go 50 kilometers inside the country and let me see how you smoke or drink water on the street.”

And somebody from the northern city of Trabzon on the Black Sea took a selfie video of himself going through the streets: “Look at Trabzon’s streets; look at people passing by. Is anybody smoking, eating, or drinking water? Democracy and such is all fine. But if you try to break your fast during the day in Trabzon, I swear to God they would dig out your eyes.”

And yet, Turkey’s beauty, compared with many of its Middle Eastern neighbors, is that there is still room for somehow saying “no” even though those ways are being increasingly closed.

In the case of the theology professor insulting those who do not pray and fast, a citizen from the Beykoz district of Istanbul filed suit against him: “I have never prayed in my life. A study from 2015 shows that 27.5 percent of Turkish people and 85 percent of the world’s population don’t pray at all. This is an insult against billions of people worldwide.”

For years, former Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s policy of “zero problems with neighboring countries” was a flagship concept of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A few years ago when a wave of protests inside Turkey started against the government and the Arab Spring began in the Middle East and northern Africa, everything went wrong. Ankara started to have problems and even serious conflict with almost all neighboring and regional countries as well as with big powers.

Today, there is almost no “country of immediate interest” for Ankara that Turkey has no problems with.

But that “zero problems” policy worked for some time. And it worked quite fine

As of 2002, when the AKP came to power, the EU and accession talks were still top of Turkey’s foreign policy agenda. The still new “Islamic-conservative” government of Erdogan was increasingly considered both in Washington and European capitals as a “model” to act as a “bridge” between Western democracies and the Muslim world of the Middle East.

There was a thaw in Ankara’s relations with Armenia and Greece. With respect to the Cyprus issue, unlike the previous, rather obstructive, approach of the northern Turkish Cypriot government, Ankara was leaning more toward EU policies aimed at the ultimate unification of the divided island.

‘Boost Trade With Everybody’

Ties with Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria were very good and even Erdogan himself had established a decent personal relationship with Assad.

With Georgia and Iran there were no major problems. Turkey even offered to mediate between Iran and the United States on the dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Russia had become a “close friend” and the increasingly cordial relations between the two maritime neighbors occasionally raised eyebrows among Turkey’s NATO allies.

Relations with Iraq were a little more complicated because a Shi’a government was sitting in Baghdad while the Turkish government consisted of devout Sunni Muslims. Also, a semi-independent Kurdish regional government was acting in a quite sovereign way across the Turkish-Iraqi border. While both Turkey and the northern Iraqi Kurdish government were interested in increased trade and investment, Ankara was still careful enough not to undermine the central Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Ankara gave every indication that the Erdogan administration was simply not interested in causing problems or interfering in other countries’ affairs.

“Boost trade with everybody” seemed to be the mantra of the Turkish government under the “moderate Islamists” of the AKP.

When speaking about all the countries he visited, Erdogan himself mainly cited increased volumes of trade with those nations and talked about major growth in business and investment involving these partners.

This continued until sometime around 2013 and then everything started to fall apart.

What Went Wrong?

Yes, something went wrong, but we cannot say what exactly.

Interestingly, however, everything started in 2013 when a group of rogue prosecutors revealed a bribery scandal and abuse of power by the AKP, involving some ministers and relatives of government officials.

Erdogan and other AKP leaders rejected the allegations although they were later reiterated by American prosecutors investigating the case of an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was accused of breaching U.S. sanctions on Iran and bribing Turkish officials.

Erdogan reacted swiftly, in his favored role as a victim.

He accused the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen of heading an “international plot” and “parallel state” that was intent on overthrowing the AKP government. His rhetoric against internal opposition and foreign countries — especially Western governments — became much sharper.

Everybody outside of the government and his AKP party was now being viewed as part of this “plot.” All allegations of wrongdoing were denied by Erdogan and the ruling AKP. And soon all prosecutors investigating the allegations were arrested themselves and the defendants were quietly acquitted.

Arab Spring

The period 2012-13 was also the time of the so-called Arab Spring movements, which erupted in Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia.

Erdogan clearly sided with the Islamic opposition movements in these countries who were trying to lead demonstrations for civil and human rights in Arab lands.

Erdogan strongly supported individual Islamic groups’ campaigns against their governments — regimes that the Turkish leader had been on good terms with for so long. However, very much to Erdogan’s dismay, the groups he backed so strongly did not succeed in Syria and they also failed in Egypt after the pro-Islamic government they established there proved to be short-lived.

Erdogan started to actively support, even with money and arms, rebel groups against neighboring governments, including Syria and Iraq. His support did not exclude backing radical, armed Islamist groups.

The increasing confrontation with Syria and Russia on the one hand and the Sunni-Shi’a confrontation in Iraq on the other, pushed Erdogan toward a more aggressive, sectarian, and pro-Sunni policy and rhetoric. This new, assertive approach alienated Turkey, both from its own Alevi minority as well as Shi’a Iran and also brought Ankara closer to its old, wealthy allies in Saudi Arabia.

Western Concerns

At the same time, Western countries became increasingly concerned about Turkey’s more radical and aggressive approach to human rights and press freedoms. They were also worried about how Erdogan began concentrating legislative and judicial powers in the hands of the government and taking a more controlling attitude toward the media and business.

Eventually, the West became openly critical of Ankara — and of Erdogan’s penchant for an oriental style of authoritarian, one-man rule, in particular.

All those years of not interfering in other countries’ internal affairs and preferring a “friendship and trade first” policy went up in smoke in just a short space of time.

Of all those neighbors and countries who were friendly in the past, one remains even closer to Turkey today than at any time previously: Saudi Arabia.

Otherwise, from Washington to Berlin and Moscow, from Tehran to Baghdad and Damascus, you can hardly find a government in Turkey’s immediate neighborhood and beyond that has “zero problems” with Ankara.

Recently, when he was asked about long-time EU applicant Turkey’s chances of joining the bloc, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the country would probably not be ready to join “until the year 3000”based on its current rate of progress.

This gave Erdogan the perfect opportunity to react and accuse Western countries of “plots.” However, the Turkish president added a new element to his “Western plot” when he claimed a day later that the West was “jealous” of Turkey and “of our dams, bridges, and metros.”

There are indications that the appointment of the new Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, will open a “new phase” in Ankara’s approach toward the “Kurdish issue.”

In this new phase, the government is said to solve the Kurdish issue without the cooperation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its “political arm,” the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is represented in the Turkish parliament. This will reportedly mean using more force against militants, adopting a tougher approach toward the HDP, and more openness toward nonviolent Kurdish groups and civilians. But it is not clear at all how the government wants to carry out such a plan in the absence of credible alternatives on the Kurdish side to talk to.

An ethnic Kurdish parliamentarian, Orhan Miroglu, himself a member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), recently told a Turkish TV channel that in this “new era” there will be no talks whatsoever with the PKK or the HDP, unlike the last two years. The “dialogue will now be with all the layers of the people and the Kurdish population,” he said.

“It is not only PKK terror that we are fighting against,” Miroglu said. The PKK has become “an organization of the Iranians, of Syrians, Europeans, Americans, and of the Assad regime and [they plot to] dismember Turkey.”

Confidential talks between the Turkish government and PKK officials broke down last summer. Unconfirmed reports from the government side indicated that the Kurdish side was raising demands that included a separate region with a separate flag and security force that, in the Turkish view, came close to de facto independence. The collapse of talks ended a cease-fire agreement between the two parties and the PKK resumed its terror attacks, with the Turkish military and security forces fiercely hitting back.

Kurdish militants increased their bombings of public and civilian targets in urban centers. According to an International Crisis Group survey, 350 Turkish police and security forces and 250 civilians have been killed in hostilities related to Kurdish militantcy since July 2015. The HDP, though publicly expressing regret about “all kinds of violence,” has demonstrated a reluctance to clearly condemn terrorist attacks, maintaining its rhetoric that such attacks are a “reaction” to the “just and suppressed” demands of the Kurdish population.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself has been clear in his recent messages, stressing that there will be no more talks with those who still use weapons against civilians and Turkish military and security forces. The Turkish parliament has already approved depriving parliamentarians of their immunity if they are suspected of being involved in terrorism or other criminal offenses. There are reportedly dozens of deputies from all political parties with pending allegations against them who could now face criminal charges.

In Ankara’s Kurdish political circles, there is no doubt that this bill primarily targets members of the HDP’s parliamentary faction. That could seriously weaken parliament’s third-biggest party or even cause its closure. Yes, it seems Ankara is formulating a “new policy” toward its armed conflict with the PKK. In the next few months, we may observe a further surge in the current armed campaign against the insurgents in order to “eliminate” a large portion of the militia organization.

The question that remains to be asked and which has found no clear answer yet is with whom the ruling AKP government would then negotiate, if not with the PKK or the HDP? It is expected that ethnic Kurdish members and officials inside the AKP, such as Miroglu, will increase their activities in an effort to gain more support for the government’s efforts. In fact, the HDP and AKP are the two main political forces in southeastern Anatolia, where large numbers of Turkey’s large Kurdish minority live. But they have always acted as “supra ethnic” and as rather national Turkish entities and not “ethnic members” of society.

The HDP and the PKK represent leftist and Kurdish nationalist thinking, while Kurdish members of AKP (or other national parties) do not limit themselves to only one issue. The PKK and its political arms (the HDP and previous parties that were disbanded) have survived 32 years of political struggle and an armed rebellion that has seen more than 35,000 people killed, around 350,000 citizens displaced, and which has caused large-scale destruction, as well as distrust and division in the population.

The PKK is labeled as a “terrorist” organization in Turkey as well as in the United States and by many nations in Europe. And, yes, it is a matter of principle not to talk to terrorists. It is comfortable and even right to say so, while taking revenge would find a lot of support in some segments of society. But the PKK and the HDP seem to be the only organizations currently speaking out about Kurdish ethnic interests in Turkey. And they have not disappeared after 32 years of often bloody confrontation.

Who is the Turkish government going to talk to if both the PKK and HDP fall out? This is an extremely difficult question to answer, especially now that calls for an independent Kurdish state are being heard more often and louder. Recently, Masud Barzani, head of the semi-independent Kurdish administration in northern Iraq, said that the “time is ripe” now for the world’s 40 to 50 million Kurds, noting that the Kurds are basically divided among four countries (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran) and that “each part has its own situation and each should find a solution with its central government.”

In Turkey, can a nonpartisan embracing of the Kurds in the southeastern regions of the country and further investments there to make people’s lives easier be enough to turn around the current state of de facto civil war?

Is the ethnic Kurdish basis of the AKP and other parties strong enough to rise to a majority voice in this community of 15 to 20 million people?

The AKP and other political parties do not seem to have any clear answer to these basic questions, which should justly be asked about any “new phase.” The “new phase” in tackling Turkey’s “Kurdish issue” seems to be a big gamble — for all sides involved.

Last weekend, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) held an extraordinary congress whose aim was to accomplish just one thing: Elect Binali Yildirim, a close friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the chairmanship of the party, thus making him the country’s new prime minister.

Former party chief and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu resigned in early May, reportedly after being critical of efforts to change the country’s governmental system from parliamentary to presidential. Former President Abdullah Gul and former parliament speaker Bulent Arinc, both also “old friends” of the current president, were swept aside in a similar manner. They have joined a new group of AKP dissidents who mildly complain but who never rebel against the current state of affairs in the country, and that is: There is one, and only one, person who decides all important government matters in Turkey.

The new prime minister, Yildirim, was candid in his remarks to the congress, saying, “AKP’s leader was and remains our esteemed president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”

According to Yildirim, the most important task now is to legalize the “de facto situation” and introduce a presidential system through a constitutional change approved in a referendum.

But it is not so much about the system itself. It is about Erdogan becoming — officially and legally — the ultimate person ruling over all powers of government in Turkey.

First, A One-Party Government

After decades of less effective coalition governments based on parliamentary mathematics, Turkey’s government has been run by a single party that has consecutively won elections with absolute majorities for the last 13 years. Obviously, it has been more effective than previous governments, but there was a problem: Gradually, it became a one-man rule. That one man has been running the government for all of this period and is planning to stay — and nobody knows for how long.

In early May, when Erdogan basically forced out the prime minister — his old friend and “brother” Ahmet Davutoglu — it was a clear signal that Turkey had already entered the era of an “executive presidential system,” with Erdogan himself at the top of it.

Erdogan has been campaigning for this change in the Turkish government system for the last decade. But to formalize that shift, he needs to change the Turkish Constitution, and that require a two-thirds’ approval in a referendum. Erdogan’s party, however, consistently had 50 percent or more of the popular vote, albeit in a slow and consistent decline. Being elected and reelected over the course of 13 years was reason to be proud of, but not enough to create a much higher, personal position and to climb to that new peak and undisputed position himself.

Turkey’s constitution requires a parliamentary system in which the president is only a formal position uniting all parties and segments of the society.

Meanwhile, the public has never shown much enthusiasm for making the switch to a presidential system, especially after thinking about the potential candidate: Erdogan.

But Erdogan, being Erdogan, could not wait.

Ministers who leave the government, and journalists and business executives who were once on good terms with the president have all said that there is almost no single important decision made in any branch of the government — in parliament, on issues of the military and security, as well as in the justice system — that is not made without Erdogan’s approval, even when he was prime minister (2002-14).

A referendum on constitutional changes in 2007 required the president to be elected by direct vote instead of being elected by parliament, as it was before. Also, the president could be reelected only once.

In 2012, a new law on the election and the authority of the president enlarged the president’s powers. Unlike the past “neutral position,” the president would chair the meetings of the cabinet of ministers and “influence” its decisions — even in the presence of the prime minister.

Erdogan was elected president in 2014.

“Our respected president” — as they call Erdogan in the vast apparatus of government as well as big business and the media — refers to his subordinates as “my minister,” “my commander,” and “my citizen.”

A De Facto One-Man System

Since then, in contrast to tradition and quite in opposition to the constitution, the president has the right to talk about everything in the country’s political, economic, social, and cultural lives and to ask his subordinates to carry them out. He can even remain the leader of his political party and campaign for that party in elections. He can pick up the telephone and order the change of an ambassador, cancel a big construction plan, direct military operations against Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq, or just instruct a TV executive to fire a talk show moderator. He can intervene and change the daily agenda of parliament. And, as seen in the latest episode around the sacking of the prime minister, he can simply get rid of the head of the government against his will without even informing parliament and start looking himself for candidates to fill that position: a premiership that is only tasked to execute the president’s wishes and decisions.

On paper, there was a prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. But all key speeches and decisions on domestic, security, foreign relations, and economic issues were not made by the head of the government, as was the norm until 2014.

“We have already entered the period of a one-man rule,” says Tarhan Erdem, a prominent opinion polls expert and analyst. “Now it is time for the creation of new political parties,” adding, “If one-man rule continues without emerging new political parties, there would be no more hope from politics and people would turn to find other ways.”

In fact, it would be nice for Erdogan to formalize everything with a referendum to legally switch to a “presidential system.” And as Prime Minister Yildirim announced last week, he has been tasked to speed up all preparations for “making legal this de facto situation.”

It will come, seemingly sometime soon. But even without that referendum, Turkey is now practically being led by one man, the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In Geographical Context

From Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Middle East and northern Africa, we could categorize all governments into two groups:

(1) Those with changes in ruling individuals, groups, and political parties. These changes are made through elections — fair and free to some extent, or not, depending on the country and tradition; and

(2) Those with one individual (interestingly, always one man!) at the top with all powers and authorities concentrated in his hands; one man who even changes laws and the constitution just to accommodate his life-long rule and possibly turns it over to his son or daughter;

This is not about ideology, political programs, or any individual’s or political party’s policy preferences. It is merely about whether or not the leader and ruling elite is ready to accept to step aside and leave the government to newcomers — not only on paper, but in practice.

Turkey was a country proudly on the first team until the 2002 parliamentary election that brought the ruling AKP — and more importantly its leader, Erdogan — to power. Until then, there were widely fair and free elections, a free media, a powerful parliament, and a government headed by a prime minister, usually based on coalitions of two or more political parties.

These governments were not always as effective and functioning or as democratic as people wanted. But the government was never a one-man shop. It was led by a prime minister and the presidency was a formal, nonpartisan position.

Since 2002, without waiting for changes to the country’s constitution, Erdogan has moved his country from the first team to the second team, along with the republics of Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran, and the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Syria.

On May 19, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) elected Transportation and Communications Minister Binali Yildirim as the candidate for the party’s chairmanship.

Traditionally, those who chair Turkey’s majority political parties in parliament are also elected as prime minister to head the government.

In this position, Yildirim will replace outgoing Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who resigned as both party chairman and prime minister earlier this month.

Yildirim graduated from the Ship Building and Maritime Sciences Department of Istanbul’s Technical University and later gained experience working in Scandinavian countries.

More recently, he switched to Istanbul’s sea-transportation sector where he burnished his reputation by improving the megacity’s sea lines.

Yildirim has been a “close friend” of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the last 22 years, since the time when the latter was mayor of Greater Istanbul. He was also one of the founders of the AKP, which Erdogan established in 2001.

Yildirim was appointed transportation minister after the AKP won an absolute majority in the 2002 general election. He has presided over a dozen transportation projects, including a new bridge on the Bosphorus. A fatal train derailment in 2004, however, prompted opposition calls for him to resign.

Yildirim and his brother-in-law were also named in connection with aninfamous bribery scandal in December 2013, when some prosecutors went rogue and opened cases against a number of AKP officials and their relatives.

After surviving this scandal, the government saw to it that the troublesome prosecutors were themselves arrested and the legal proceedings they initiated were halted. Erdogan and the AKP called the scandal a “plot” by a “parallel state” led by the exiled cleric Fathullah Gulen, who now lives in the United States.

The ‘Man Of Millions’

Calling Yildirim “the man of millions (of dollars),” the head of the social democratic opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, accused Yildirim in 2014 of doling out government tenders to raise finances for the AKP.

According to Kilicdaroglu, Yildirm was involved in the sale of a prominent TV station and newspaper that raised $630 million. Prosecutors later claimed that this money was illegally collected with a view to using it illicitly for projects managed by the ruling party and its leaders.

Erdogan and his government rejected those allegations.

These days, we are marking the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which laid the ground for the borders of the new Middle East following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Many historians, politicians, and even radical Islamist groups, such as Islamic State (IS), blame this colonial pact, which was agreed by Britain and France and accepted by Tsarist Russia, for being the main source of most of the failures of modern Arab countries.

Many analyses invariably end up speculating about developments and policies based on a world without the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

And, considering current politics and especially Islamic extremism, they argue that without the “artificial borders” for countries like today’s Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc., there wouldn’t be any (or there would be less) authoritarianism, religious extremism, scientific stagnation, backwardness, anti-Western bias, and terrorism in the Middle East today.

It’s an attractive idea, but it’s ultimately wrong.

Yes, fantasy is fun, even in science fiction, but all professional historians know how misguided it is to start speculating about “what ifs.”

We all know that the Arabs of the Middle East had no solid statehood of their own after the fall of the second Islamic caliphate of the Abbasids in the 13th century.

For 750 years, most of today’s Middle Eastern Arab world was ruled by the Ottoman and, to a lesser extent, the Iranian empires.

How could these “artificial borders” have been solely responsible for contemporary Arab states’ failures when these nations had no independent statehood experience for at least 700 years?

It is also clear that the Sykes-Picot Agreement alone did not create these “artificial borders.”

The agreement was the basis for a new map of the Middle East at a time when the region’s leading power, the Ottoman Empire, had been in decline for 300 years and was ceasing to function as a collection of ethnic, religious, and linguistic units.

This demise occurred in parallel with the rise of Europe’s Western powers. It took some three centuries for the West’s age of discovery, industry, and renaissance to overtake the last Islamic empire, which had been established based on victories achieved on horseback and traditional land grabs.

Dividing Up The Cake

Ultimately, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not just about the Arab world. It was primarily about how to dismember the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Muslim world west of Iran as well as the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. It was a way of cutting and divvying up the cake.

Ultimately, today’s modern Republic of Turkey was not created because of Sykes-Picot, but despite it.

There are two important reasons for why this is the case.

First, modern Turkey’s war of national independence was led by an exceptional military commander and charismatic leader called Mustafa Kemal Pasha, or Ataturk.

Second, events were precipitated by Russia’s October Revolution and its leader Vladimir Lenin, who decided to withdraw Russian troops from the former Ottoman lands and even supported Ataturk’s pro-independence movement.

To understand this a bit better, let’s take a look at the evolution of the Ottoman Empire, the former “overlord” of the biggest chunk of the Middle East, including today’s Arab countries.

A year before Sykes-Picot, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, “promised” the Sharif of Mecca, Hussain, a vast Arab Kingdom if Arabs would help Britain and France defeat the Ottomans.

What actually happened was different, however.

A year later, on May 16, 1916, a Briton and a Frenchman, Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, drew up a map to officially dismember the “qanimat,” or the bounty that comprised the defeated Ottoman Empire.

For a long time the Turkish government was accused of assisting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) group. These accusations were heard especially since the battle Syrian Kurds fought with ISIS over the town of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border almost a year ago.

Turkish forces avoided any action to help the local Kurdish militia to take Kobani from ISIS. This even provoked a higher suspicion that Ankara does not want to fight the brutal Islamic group.

Is Ankara really helping ISIS? There have been reports, photos, and video footage of arms and ammunition being shipped from Turkey into Syria. Some Turkish journalists are even being tried in Ankara for revealing those reports and information. Countries and groups not so sympathetic to Ankara and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been arguing that these shipments were sent to ISIS.

There has been no proof of that accusation, while we know that Ankara has been arming and training armed rebel groups other than ISIS who fight the Bashar al-Assad government — some also considered “radical Islamist” and “terrorist.”

The “hardest” proof showing the alleged support of the Turkish government for ISIS were documents showing that ISIS has sold part of the crude oil exploited in its territory to some Turkish citizens, including a few described as “Turkish government employees.” We also know that, desperate to exchange their oil for hard currency, ISIS has also been selling crude to some in the Assad government and neither of these cases is enough to prove the direct involvement of either Ankara or Damascus as an institution, or a senior Turkish or Syrian official.

Both ISIS and Kurdish militias hold territories on the Syrian side of the Turkish border.

In the last few months Turkish forces intensified their air and cross-border attacks against ISIS militants. They have been doing the same, even more aggressively, with the Kurdish militant groups that they accuse of being an extension of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has been raging a bloody war against Turkey for the last 32 years.

Turkey is a NATO ally of the West while the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq as well as Kurdish militia groups in northern Syria (along part of the Turkish border) are the most reliable armed force for the West to fight against ISIS.

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But the fact is that unlike in the West, fighting ISIS has never been and still is not Turkey’s No. 1 priority — that would be fighting PKK terror and separatism.

Kurdish militant groups also have their own agenda and priorities. But fighting ISIS is not their top priority either. They have used the Syrian civil war to take control of territories inhabited by Syria’s Kurdish minority and they are trying to expand that territory at the expense of other ethnic groups. They have even been accused of ethnic cleansing to reach their expansionist goal.

Their strategic goal seems to be to fill the gap of some 90 kilometers of the non-Kurdish part of northern Syria along the Turkish border. Ankara’s top concern is that this would mean expanding the Kurdish presence along the entire Syrian border, completing the ground for a “Greater Kurdistan” and even giving them access to the Mediterranean Sea.

Two years ago when the Iraqi city of Mosul was falling into the hands of ISIS, Iraq’s semi-independent Kurdish regional government under Masud Barzani delivered some weaponry to ISIS in order to weaken Iraq’s central government and later withdrew its troops without fighting the advancing ISIS militants. Hiwa Afandi, the head of the Kurdish region’s information-technology department, even tweeted that “Strategically, it is a huge mistake to eliminate ISIS before we are done with Hashd militiamen. They represent a much bigger danger to Iraqis.” Hashd is a collection of mainly Shi’ite militia groups that was created to support Iraq’s central government.

Add to this mix a few dozen small and big players — countries, ethnic, religious, or political groups with overlapping and contrasting interests. It seems to be a perfect Middle Eastern classic: You don’t know who is your enemy’s enemy for how long.

Meanwhile, a few nations like Iraq and Syria are dying and the wholesale conflict is threatening to spill over to so far more stable nations like Turkey.

Islamic or not, unchecked power produces corruption. For a concrete example of this, look at Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the direction it took after its charismatic and iron-fisted leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won parliamentary elections in 2002 with nearly two thirds of the seats.

The size of that electoral victory put an end to 40 years of paralyzed coalition governments, which had been unable to do anything substantial. The AKP’s success meant a one-party government could effectively take decisions and carry them out.

Inflation and the dysfunctionality of past governments were dealt with quickly and quite efficiently. The Kurdish insurgency did not end but Erdogan sent signals to Kurdish groups and the West that he was ready to reach a negotiated settlement. It was a time of confidential talks with Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK.

This organization has been named in Ankara and internationally as a terrorist grouping. Nonetheless, it is seemingly supported by many Kurds, even though it is the primary force behind the armed conflict in Turkey.

These negotiations produced an atmosphere of conciliation that created some breathing space — and optimism, which boosted stability. And all of this helped bring in increasing foreign capital and investment.

The government enacted liberal reforms. Concerns and complaints by different groups such as the Alevis and the Kurdish insurgents were considered to have been “inherited from the authoritarian past” and they were something that needed to be dealt with based on common “national interests.”

Consecutive election victories with absolute majorities have now kept the AKP and its leader Erdogan in power for more than 13 years. The party governs alone and is almost unchallenged in parliament.

Turkey has been and still is one of a handful of Muslim countries with a functioning parliament and a generally free election system. As in all democratic counties, the parliament has been a strong tool for checking, correcting, or even stopping and changing governments.

Having an absolute majority in parliament made this new, ambitious and hardworking government very effective and initially successful.

The AKP majority in parliament had only one main goal: backing the AKP government and Erdogan, who, for his part, increasingly felt emboldened to pass any law, make any appointment, adopt any policy, domestic or foreign, and govern as he wished.

Still, it generally worked nicely. For a few years…

‘Fleeing Forward’

This “air of pluralism and tolerance” probably started to disappear after the constitutional referendum in 2010 and the general elections in 2011.

The results of the national vote in 2010 on changing the constitution showed 58 percent support for the AKP and Erdogan, but also strong opposition with 42 percent voting against. Most of those who rejected the proposed changes were based in Western, more developed provinces of Turkey. The result mainly supported legal changes aimed at bringing the country closer to EU standards, but that had never been Erdogan’s “big dream.”

In the following 2011 general election the ruling AKP again won a big majority of 50 percent, enough to govern alone, but clearly showing that support for the party was continuing to decline gradually.

Erdogan understood that he could not win a new referendum to change the constitution and take Turkey from a parliamentary to an “executive presidential” system that would have him standing atop a regime that was effectively a “one-man show.”

By this time, the AKP government and Erdogan himself were heavily assisted by the strong, but hidden, hand of an unofficial ally: a large religious, half clandestine group that had formed around Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric whose many supporters had in the previous decades successfully but very quietly infiltrated the media, the military, and other branches of government, including the justice and education departments.

Gulen himself had to seek political asylum in the United States when governments before the AKP came to power suspected his group of orchestrating an overhaul of government agencies.

Erdogan, being Erdogan, probably felt that he had to consolidate his grip on the entire system — not just on the parliament and the economy.

The other hurdles that could control and limit his dreams of unchecked power were the justice system (judges and prosecutors), the military and the police, and, finally, the media, which was traditionally free and quite varied in Turkey.

The first serious cracks in this “tyranny of the majority” appeared in 2013 after the emergence of protest movements that were not as weak and toothless as before. These protests were followed by serious allegations of corruption against AKP leaders and even members of Erdogan’s family.

Seeing that his regime was in steady decline and under attack, Erdogan rather typically decided to “flee forward.”

The public tone against opposition parties and their leaders became rude and personal. They also responded in a similar “Erdoganian” manner.

The language used in discussion about foreign leaders, countries and parliaments, as well as their history and culture, became increasingly embarrassing.

Political discourse became a competition of insult and abuse, a contest of accusations and unfounded claims.

Ruled By Fear

Secular, pro-republican and critical military commanders were sent into retirement. The military, by then the major instrument in defending secularism and the country’s territorial integrity, “lost its teeth” as a retired chief of staff noted.

The government and a changed pro-Erdogan justice and security system went after anybody in the military, the police, the judiciary, political parties, the education system, and the media who was not clearly loyal to them. Military commanders, judges, university professors, and top journalists were arrested in overnight operations and brought to court based on unclear and unfounded allegations or documents that were later openly declared “fake.” Newspapers and TV channels received “midnight phone calls” on how to formulate their editorials and whom to invite on talk shows.

Government agencies, courts, the military, and the media began to be ruled by fear and the need to feign loyalty.

Erdogan and his whole party and government apparatus then turned against their allies and insiders, including the Gulen group, co-Islamists whom they accused of trying to create a “parallel state” in Turkey with their prosecutors, judges, bureaucrats, and journalists.

Media organizations were pressured and even directly instructed to fire dissident executives as well as leading journalists and columnists. The same happened with secular judges who lost their jobs or were even tried themselves by their former colleagues loyal to the AKP.

When there was nobody else left, they turned against their “brothers” from the early days of the AKP.

Most of them, including former President Abdullah Gul as well as former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (who have both been AKP leaders), have already abandoned Erdogan. Asked if the AKP is still pursuing any political ideals, Gul’s former chief adviser Ahmet Sever recently said “What ideals? What cause? Nothing is left.”

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For Erdogan and the AKP, it is now all about keeping power. Their power base is eroding and it can no longer win the support of two-thirds of the population in order to legalize a one-man regime. So, at least they can clip the wings of all institutions that could check and limit their power. Doing this helps them to stay at the helm.

That is the mixed story of the rise of the AKP and its slow — some would say sadly too slow — decline.

Their drama began at the start of the 20th century, like in many other predominantly Muslim countries. But Islamists of the former Ottoman Empire, and especially in the Republic of Turkey since 1923, have traveled a very specific road to arrive at today’s Erdogan regime.

The gradual downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Western powers, followed by the loss of vast lands of this last Islamic empire where the sultan was also the caliph of the state, was a big blow. The new Turkey was reduced to a sixth or less of its pre-17th-century size.

But not only that. The new system, a republic after the Western model, put an end to both caliphate and sultanate and declared a republican regime with state and religion not only independent from each other but with religion strictly following the state.

The alphabet was changed from Arabic-Persian to Latin. Clothing was Europeanized. Saturday and Sunday became the weekend instead of Thursday and Friday. It was forbidden for religious schools and religious courses to be outside of state control. All sheikhs and mullahs who wanted to continue teaching became state employees reporting to the government. Women were strongly encouraged to put aside Islamic clothing and to actively take part in social activities. Most religious sects and groups, as well as many mosques, were closed or became dysfunctional.

The new regime created a new “secular” elite — businesspeople, bureaucrats, the military, with a new education system and a new view of history — and looked for a new place in the world community, one that was closer to the West and further from the Islamic world.

For nearly 80 years, those who were faithful Muslims — traditional and provincial — were looked down upon, pushed into isolation and poverty by the new elite in the major cities, especially Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir — ironically called “the White Turks.”

The more they were ignored and pushed out, the more political they got.

They were mostly just the faithful in the early 20th century. They had widely become “Islamists” of different variations by 2000.

And they had dreams. Dreams to use the democracy to come to power, to put an end to the discrimination against the Muslim faithful; against women who just wanted to wear the hijab according to their beliefs without being thrown out of schools and universities; against men who wanted to wear beards and pray during work times without being laughed at.

They said they wanted peace and equal opportunities for all — regardless of their faith.

They opened schools and foundations. They increasingly found their way into the military, education, and justice systems — without making much noise about their beliefs and plans. They established television stations and newspapers. And they created political parties, which were closed and banned. Their newspapers and TV channels were also closed and banned.

But still, they kept going. They worked hard. Very hard.

People saw, enjoyed, and appreciated their work results — from city administrations to which they were first elected to the schools that they built and ran.

The more the “secular” system prevented them from growing, the more they cried foul and grew stronger.

In fact, many people outside of the Islamic sector supported them, from left-wing social democrats and Ataturkists (“Ataturkcu”) to all those “White Turks,” to secular Alevis and Kurds, to liberal and pro-republican journalists and judges.

The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was born. It was 2001.

Just a year later, in 2002, it came to power — alone, in a fair-and-free election, and unlike past elections that produced impotent coalitions of the “unwilling.”

In its first years, things were going quite smoothly. Everybody was happy and thought the past was one-sided. Now, they thought, we will have a cohesive and inclusive Turkey, a more pluralistic system, looking more like Europe.

Even the secularists felt pleasantly proven wrong. “Why were we afraid of these people?” they thought.

And Western governments followed suit. The more good things, reforms, stability measures, and economic improvements the AKP governments demonstrated, the more eager were Western governments to embrace the new, pluralistic “Muslim conservative” Turkey.

And they kept being elected by big majorities.

But things started to change. Quite soon.

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In the second part of this report: Islamic Or Not, Unchecked Power Makes You Corrupt

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has announced that he will not run again for the chairmanship of the ruling AKP party in an upcoming extraordinary party congress. This means he will resign as Turkey’s prime minister. “I have never asked for a higher position in my own academic and political life and will never do so,” he said, intimating that it was more important to maintain ties with “friends and brothers” than to risk those relationships by staying in his post.

In a public speech he made after meeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Davutoglu said he would not say a “single word” against his “brother and friend” Erdogan, whom he referred to as “our respected president.” Nonetheless, he added that his decision not to stand for reelection “was not his choice, but a necessity.”

Davutoglu had previously complained that some decisions in Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which he leads, were not coordinated with him.

But the reasons behind Davutoglu’s planned resignation may go much deeper.

Davutoglu became prime minister when the former incumbent, Erdogan, decided to run for the presidency in August 2014. Erdogan won the election but the presidency he took over is still not the institution he has publicly advocated for many years.

Erdogan has never made a secret of his plans to change the Turkish Constitution, which provides for a weak president and a prime minister elected by parliament based on democratic electoral mathematics, i.e. a parliamentary majority or a coalition.

Erdogan wants a “presidential system” controlled by one man, the president, rather than a “parliamentary system” where the president is a rather symbolic figure cutting ribbons.

That, however, would require constitutional change that can be only done in a referendum and with the approval of at least two-thirds of the electorate.

Two years ago, his “yes votes” were strong enough to give him yet another parliamentary majority after 12 consecutive years of victory, but not enough votes to change the constitution.

The public increasingly turned against the kind of presidency they fear Erdogan envisages, which is nothing like the French or American forms of government with strong and independent legislatures and judiciaries, but a one-man presidential system where he, as president, would decide on any law, as well as decisions regarding personnel appointments, banks, foreign policy, courts, and, say, the headlines of daily newspapers and who should moderate which talk show on which popular TV channel.

It is strange and it doesn’t in any way prove anything but, for some reason, ever since the AKP decided a few days ago that it would be holding an extraordinary congress on May 22, all news about the prime minister disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers.

Levent Gultekin, a new star and insider in the Turkish media community, claims he knows that the management of the “very loyal” Sabah daily was recently called at midnight and asked to remove a news item featuring Davutoglu. It was a major rebuke for the newspaper, Gultekin said, adding that “we all know what kind of consequences this could have for a newspaper’s business.”

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Actually, Erdogan has been rehearsing his version of the presidential system for some time. Although not backed by the current constitution, he has tried to intervene in every aspect of the country’s political, economic, social, and media life.

Given Davutoglu’s burgeoning reputation outside of Turkey and his recent prominence on the Turkish political scene, as well as his “little efforts” to appoint people from his own circle to both mid-level and higher positions, it may have occurred to his “friend and brother” Erdogan that the prime minister may start to emerge as a challenge to him personally, becoming in Gultekin’s words “a second-man alternative” and posing a threat to the constitutional referendum that is planned for the fall of 2016.

Meanwhile, Erdogan and the people still around him are doing whatever they can to sweeten a “yes vote” in the upcoming referendum. This has included promoting the view that removing Turkish nationalist notions and concepts from the current constitution is not possible without a “strong leader” and without making changes to the Anayasa, or the “Mother Law,” as the constitution is known in Turkey. This initiative has mobilized nationalists, liberals, and pro-Kurdish groups.

Strangely, one of the two minority parties in the parliament, the nationalist National Movement Party (MHP) has all of a sudden started to split into factions. And suddenly you are also hearing voices saying that Turkey’s suppurating “Kurdish issue” will be impossible to solve unless Erdogan’s “super authority” is formalized and made legal.

Visiting Washington, D.C., Selahattin Demirtas, co-chairman of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Unity of Peoples’ Party (HDP), felt it difficult to clearly answer the question he was asked when opening the Kurdish Policy Research Center. “Is there a risk of a Turkish-Kurdish [armed] conflict?”

Demirtas passed. “I try to speak very carefully on this issue; making statements and assessments on this subject is very sensitive,” he replied.

No “yes,” no “no.”

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Then, in an interview with The Washington Post, Demirtas was a bit more open and even threatening: “Many Turks and Kurds could die and this could trigger a civil war.”

Unofficially, the HDP is the main political arm of Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has waged a bloody war against the Turkish state and army for the last 32 years. Recent suicide attacks by Kurdish militants have killed hundreds of civilians in major Turkish cities, with the Turkish Army pummeling suspected PKK targets both inside Turkey and in northern Iraq.

Similarly, this has created tension between Turks and Kurds in general, including occasional attacks on shops or gatherings of either community by assailants leaving graffiti behind, blaming “the Turks” or “the Kurds” (in plural).

Recently dozens of shops owned by both Kurds or Turks were set  on fire and destroyed in different cities including the central Turkish city of Kirsehir, where both communities have been living peacefully for centuries. Local authorities blamed the attacks on “provocateurs” and both Turkish and Kurdish shop owners blamed “outsiders who infiltrated our city to draw a rift between us.”

Many Kurdish activists and columnists accuse past and present Turkish governments of being “racist” and “fascist,” while nationalist-leaning Turkish analysts see each and every demand for improvement of ethnic rights as a “hidden attempt” of separatism and “plans for a Greater Kurdistan.”

Meanwhile, bias and resentment keep spreading wider with each death on either side, regardless of whether the victim is a soldier, guerrilla, or civilian.

So, still no answer to the clear question whether there will be a civil war, an ethnic confrontation, or an all-out massacre between the Turkish majority and the Kurdish minority of an estimated 20 million people out of a total population of 78 million?

What Happened?

Until a hundred years ago, there was no big distinction between Turks and Kurds in political and social life. In the Ottoman Empire as in other Muslim states like Iran, “nation” was determined on the basis of religion and not ethnicity or language. Inside the empire, there were the nations (“millet”) of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism who lived side by side, even under their own religious laws and regulations, though in distinct city districts or villages. They had to pay additional taxes on property and income (“jizye”). But they were widely free, especially compared to, say Jewish communities in France or Spain.

Turks and Kurds, however, were and still are mostly Muslims. Moreover, they were and still are of the same, Sunni, school of Islam.

So, it’s not about religion or confession.

And it’s not even about ethnicity and race. Yes, history tells us that in the early 11th century Turkic tribes invaded the then-Byzantine Empire and gradually took over the entire empire, including its capital, Constantinople, in 1453 that became Istanbul under Turkish rule. But history also tells us that the Turkish newcomers’ numbers were less than that of the locals, who were primarily Greek, Aramaic, Armenian, or Iranian speakers.

To adapt to new rulers and their rule, most of the locals gradually and in the course of centuries changed their religion to Islam, their language to Turkish and even their names. Today, almost all anthropological studies find that more than 90 percent of the ancestors of today’s Turkish population are Mediterranean or Southwest Asian like their Greek, Caucasian, Iranian and Middle Eastern neighbors. Only around 5-6 percent of the current Turkish population’s genetic code is Central Asian, going back to the migrants of the post-Byzantine period.

To sum up: the vast majority of Turkish and Kurdish speakers in today’s Turkey have a very similar set of genes.

Two Different Languages

But yes, sure, the language. Turkish and Kurdish are two different, though very connected languages. Turkish arrived in Anatolia 1,000 years ago with the migration of Turkic tribes. It originates from Central Asia and is a branch of the Altaic language group, like Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, or Mongolian. But well before Turkish, languages of three different groups, Indo-European, an old Anatolian, and Semitic groups were spoken in eastern Anatolia, such as Hittite, Urartian, Greek, Armenian, Median, Pahlavi, as well as Aramaic.

Kurdish is one of the descendants of Western Iranian languages.

Contemporary Turkish and Kurdish/Iranian Persian have heavily influenced each other in the course of the last 10 centuries.

The Last 90 Years

Most probably, something went wrong after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

Emerging from the ruins of the empire that had lost much of its lands as a result of World War I, Ataturk’s young republic tried to define itself as a new, modern, Western-oriented nation-state. Following its heavy defeat in the war, the young republican regime needed a strongly confident nation looking ahead as a member of the Western community.

Doing so, it fell into the trap of the extreme, even occasionally racist, and simply false imagination of the “pure Turkishness” of the new nation — ethnically, linguistically, and historically. “A Turk equals the whole world” was the early Turkish government’s slogan and “Turkish culture and language is the origin of all the world’s languages and civilizations.”

Not only was learning Kurdish banned, but even reading Kurdish books could be punished, as was identifying yourself as a Kurd with Kurdish as your mother tongue.

Soon, though, that euphoria of the first years left room for a state ideology of a “Turkish identity based on Turkish citizenship only” — and not race, language, or religion. But many laws and especially practices of the past remained intact. And it was apparently too late. Many members of ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities rejected identifying themselves as “Turks,” even if that was just supposed to mean citizenship.

Add to all that the imbalance between the western, quite developed part of Turkey and the more backward, eastern provinces of the country that were the original geography of Turkey’s Kurdish community, bordering Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

And add to that the repressive military coups that came time and again to power in Turkey, interrupting the country’s civilian governance and bringing “order” to the occasional “chaos of democracy,” using methods such as banning political freedoms, state terror, and torture.

This was the ideal moment for the PKK, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization that combined far-left ideology with Kurdish nationalism. Founded in 1984, it started a war against the Turkish state and army, hitting and retreating to northern Iraq and provoking harsh attacks by the Turkish Army.

In the last 10-20 years, some practices were relaxed. You can now buy songs and books in Kurdish and there are newspapers and even a government-owned Kurdish TV channel. But for many Kurdish militias and activists the Turkish government’s plans to “solve the Kurdish issue” are not honest and too slow. Some even believe they have achieved these “little steps” only because of actions publicly condemned as “terrorist attacks.”

The PKK is branded a “terrorist organization” by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union. But that is not the issue, at least not a key to open the door for peace and reconciliation before it’s too late.

Call it a “struggle,” as does the PKK, or a “war on terror,” as does the Turkish government and army. Since the war started 32 years ago, it became a “de facto civil war” that expanded to western regions of the country through attacks on military and civilian targets and killed about 40,000-45,000 people and cost billions of dollars.

Forget about “they started first, we are just responding to them.” Forget about “NATO’s strongest army” that is fighting PKK, forget about Turkey’s majority and minority, and forget about PKK’s hope of support from the Kurdish hinterland and militias in northern Iraq and Syria.

The question is whether both parties genuinely believe that they can emerge victorious from this vicious circle of violence, destruction, and national divide. And if they genuinely believe they can reach a solution alone and without the other side of the conflict.

The thing that divides Turkey first and foremost is not religion. It is the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, an ethnic-military confrontation that has been going on for more than 32 years.

But there is one major religious disparity between two large sections of Turkish society, which creates tensions and potentially threatens to aggravate the ethnic conflict and emerge as an acute threat to the country’s stability: a row between the Sunni and Alevi followers of Islam.

This almost sounds like the 17th-century wars in Europe between Catholics and Protestants.

Well, yes, though not exactly. The Sunni-Alevi conflict started 500 years ago. In the early 1500s, the Alevis of the Ottoman Empire sided with the country’s neighbor to the east, the Safavids of Iran, who were fierce Shi’ite believers and made Shi’a the official school of Islam in Iran.

During the wars between these two regional “superpowers” of the time, Turkish Alevis strongly supported the Iranians and helped the Safavid clan rise to power. They were ideologically and militarily trained by Iran and sent back to the Ottoman lands to incite social upheaval. The Ottoman Army and regional tribal forces killed and deported the rebellious Alevis for being “heretic agents of Shi’a Iran.” Tens of thousands of them immigrated to Iran while large groups of Iranian Kurds found refuge and support in the Ottoman Empire.

This was the first and largest Sunni-Shi’a/Alevi confrontation in history and its “aftershocks” would be felt for centuries to come.

A Bit  Of History

Alevis are Sufi or mystical Shi’ite Muslims who are NOT Sunnis like the majority of Turks. They are followers of Imam Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad in ruling the Muslim world. Unlike the Sunnis who recognize all four caliphs, the Alevis believe that the first three caliphs “usurped” their power from the “rightful” Ali, the prophet’s cousin, and his descendants. That is why they call themselves Alevis or “followers of Ali” a group inside “Twelver Shi’a Islam” whose adherents believe in the divinely ordained leadership of Ali and his 11 successors.

Syrian Alevis are usually known as “Alawites” in the Western world.

Sunnis account for around 85 percent of the world’s Muslim population of some 1.6 billion people, while the Shi’a make up about 15 percent of that number. Iran is the country with the biggest Shi’ite population.

There are estimated to be around 15-20 million Alevis in Turkey out of a total population of 78 million.

Initially, the Alevis mostly lived in rural areas. Originating in Central Asia, centuries before they settled in what is now Turkey, parts of Iran, the Caucasus, Iraq, and Syria, they lived mainly as Turkic tribal groups and were the last to urbanize and integrate with their new social and political environments.

In the Ottoman Empire, the confrontation with Safavid Iran pushed the Alevis further into poverty as well as into political and social isolation.

Both Alevis and Shi’a are followers of the Twelver Shi’a branch of Islam. But there are major differences between them.

Unlike the Shi’a in Iran and Iraq, Alevis do not pray — as tradition prescribes in both the Sunni and Shi’ite beliefs. Nor do they fast the same way in the month of Ramadan. They also don’t go to mosques to pray or to Mecca for pilgrimage. Alcohol is not forbidden in the Alevi faith, and women don’t have to wear Islamic clothing or the head scarf known as the “hijab.”

Many scholars believe Alevis have mixed their Islam with heavily mystical or Sufi approaches, which they adopted from the pre-Islamic, Shamanist traditions of Central Asia prior to their migrations westward a few centuries later, as well as from Iranian mysticism.

In the first centuries of Islamic expansion in Central Asia, mainly Iranian and not Arab thinkers and sheikhs taught and guided Turkic tribes to convert to Islam.

While converting to Islam and migrating to Iran and Turkey, Alevis took the essence and dropped the form of their new religion. In daily life, many political observers consider Alevis to be far more secular and “liberal” than most other schools of Islam — Shi’a or Sunni.

In the last few decades many historians and researchers have argued that, after the Islamization and Turkification of Byzantine Anatolia, thousands of formerly Greek, Armenian, Aramaic, and Iranian-speaking members of the indigenous population had to change their first language to Turkish and convert to Islam.

These scholars also claim that, with respect to religion, a large portion of the converts chose the Alevi faith since it was easier for them to adapt to. For decades if not centuries, they say, these converts have lived as “genuine Muslims and Turks” although their origins once used to be Greek, Armenian, Aramaic, and Kurdish.

This is the essence of a potential split in Turkish society – if the players choose to play with it. And they have — at least partly — done so given the rising religious and ethnic tension in the wider Middle Eastern region.

In the next edition of this report, we will take a look at the sociopolitical implications of this religious tension in modern Turkey and the potential threats it poses.

In today’s Turkey, there is not one, not two, but at least three major areas that deeply cut society into occasionally quite antagonistic fronts: politics, religion, and, more importantly, ethnicity, which is being translated into terror. All of them intertwine.

The first deep divide is about politics.

In Izmir, there are two grocery shops (markets or “bakkal,” as they are called in Turkish) just a few steps from our home in a middle-class neighborhood where hundreds of government employees also live. These two markets are divided along political lines.

One shop owner is a tough, secular, pro-Ataturk retiree who does not miss any opportunity to criticize the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The other shop owner has a portrait of the president hanging in his store and every small manner of his speaking and behavior suggests that he is a devout Muslim.

The first shop owner greets you in a traditional Turkish manner with “gunaydin” (“nice day”) and the second in a traditional, Islamic way: “Selamun-Aleykum.”

Finally, the second shop owner sells no alcoholic drinks whatsoever, not even beer, in a city that has traditionally been quite secular. The first shop owner used to sell any sort of alcoholic drink in the past, especially the Turks’ favored raki (Greek ouzo). But with increasing pressure, direct or indirect, by the Islamic-leaning government of Erdogan, our secular “bakkal” started to cover the shelves holding “undesired” drinks. No law (yet) bans the sale of alcohol and the secular bakkal keeps selling it. But the shop owner doesn’t want to incur the protests of loyal government employees, either.

Depending on your political point of view and to which party or personality you lean toward (and that can vary,) you don’t trust parliamentarians a word, nor TV moderators, nor in fact TV channels, or newspapers, or neighbors and co-workers considered to be supportive of the other side.

The deepest political divide is between seculars, who think of themselves as true followers of principles of laicism and a democratic republic introduced in 1923 by Ataturk, on the one side, and those who claim to be faithful and committed to Islam and tradition, on the other.

The second group is far more conservative and primarily religious in all aspects of life, from women wearing Islamic clothing to men publicly going to mosque to pray during work hours.

The seculars are in fact more “democratic-minded” in some sense of Western standards. Not only do they not pressure women to wear head scarves, but they even encourage them not to do so, although their mothers or at least grandmothers usually went out with their heads covered in the traditional way (different from the “political” hijab that became fashionable among the Islamic movements of the Erdogan era.)

The seculars usually don’t pray but still fast during the month of Ramadan. Also, drinking beer or raki, and more recently the more fashionable wine, is a normal thing for them. Family relations are more liberal but still very traditional. They are oversensitive to any criticism of Ataturk and the Turkish Army and history. They usually don’t like the Ottoman sultans, especially the last ones before the founding of the republic, and believe most of them had become puppets of Western colonial powers in the early 20th century.

But ironically their understanding of democracy is usually very anti-Western and generally overwhelmed by diverse and occasionally incomprehensible conspiracy theories that are impossible to prove, although sometimes difficult to deny. All bad that has come upon Turkish society was and still is from the West, as well as Israel and Armenia. All the world is plotting against the Turks and now the West is helping the Kurdish groups in Iraq, Syria, and inside Turkey to split their country, as they did with Iraq and Syria. Their political representation is mostly in the main opposition “social democratic” party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), but also in the main nationalist party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

In many aspects, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Unity Party (HDP) also shares a lot of these political concepts. Probably they are more areligious, called secular, and more liberal toward women, at least in urban and politically rather leftist circles. But before anything else, they are heavily ethnicity-focused — with the Kurdish community in Turkey and neighboring countries as their guiding compass.

Many of the conspiracy theories enthusiastically defended by seculars and the Kurdish groups, and more, and in different variations, are shared by the conservative/religious group that is politically represented by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The outbursts by Erdogan that we regularly hear and read in local media are partly played for political consumption, but are generally genuine, though embarrassing. They are, in essence, Islamic-minded with a quite strong, though not MHP-like, nationalism that borders on racism.

This brings us to the second factor, the religion dividing the Turkish nation, before we talk about the main divisive cut through society: the Kurdish issue and the ethnicity problem.

Stay tuned.